Dr Mahboob A. Khawaja
“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man’s nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in the position of power the vulgar and base.” (C.E.M Joad: Guide to Modern Wickedness, 1936)
WHAT if Arab-Muslim leaders were intelligent and honest?
Are the Arab-Muslim leaders deaf or have a dead conscience not to see what is happening on the ground across Gaza and other parts of Palestine? Their portrait of deception, vice and treachery to the expectations of the masses is exhibited worldwide. Every authoritarian leader, every prince, every king is a despot in his heart and an enemy of the human race as history reveals.
The Arab Summit (Cairo) should have known and determined the agenda and issues facing the helpless people of Gaza for their security and survival. How to undo the Israeli occupation and restore normal life to the people of Gaza was the top issue to be considered and resolved. Not so, they wanted to fly high to rebuild Gaza even though it is occupied and targeted daily to disrupt the civilian lives trying to imagine some consolence in an unthinkable world of tomorrow. Their absurd proposition to rebuild Gaza under continuous Israeli occupation is nothing more than a joke to the common sense. Most modern Arab states are managed by secret police and the masses live in fear and hatred of the rulers. Wherever people cannot think freely and reason the unreason, consequently human progress is stalled and anarchy and insanity become the rule of the land.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved his ambitions to destroy Gaza for vengeance and to destabilise the Arab World for futuristic domination. and The Arab League and the OIC do not represent the Muslim masses except they are the oligarch entities to mislead the people. The Hamas-Israel ceasefire deal was shaky, fluid and unpredictable from the very beginning as Israel and America just wanted their hostages freed and keep the occupation of Gaza intact without Israeli IDF withdrawal. Most of the leading Arab leaders were complicit in making the Gaza war happen and catastrophic destruction of the infrastructures and killings were happening on their television screens and witnessed by the concerned global community. They were silent spectators as some have heavy financial investments in Israel and American corporate entities producing AI, surveillance technology and other industrial setups.
If logic, honesty and a sense of moral-political responsibility were implied, a collaborative will and action was deemed necessary to check the Israeli intransigence and warfare against the 2.5 million innocent civilian population of Gaza and offer some leadership security and protection to the beleaguered masses. Please see: “Israel Lost the War and America Betrayed Humanity in Gaza.”
Ironically, Arab-Muslim leaders talk in public discourse but lack prompt action to offer any tangible help to the victims of war. They lost the path of reality and truth and just pretended to be concerned about the Israel onslaught of the Gaza masses. The deaths and destruction are unparalleled in modern times as if it was another chapter of a Third World War against the Arab and Muslim World. The affluent oil-producing Arab leaders breathe oxygen away in seclusion and comforts of palaces guarded by foreign mercenaries and do not live with people to know the reality of the on-going pains and horrors of killings imposed on the people of Palestine.
Leaders Live in Palaces, Not with People
The Arab World lives in a conflicting time zone and its stance does not match the reason and aggressiveness of the Israeli war plans for ‘Greater Israel’ supported by the US and more so by the Donald Trump presidency. Does reason not know how to protect the Islamic interests? Now, American and Israeli unreason appears as a dominant brute force to destroy the Muslim masses and put a finished answer on the Palestinian identity and movement for an independent State of Palestine. The UN and global systems of peace and security are broken, dysfunctional and would never act to safeguard the interests of the Arab-Muslim World, simply because the Arab-Muslim leadership is composed of dummies, inept and egoistic former agents of European imperialism and have no moral or intellectual capacity to respond to situations of urgency for the people of Islamic World.
Their cowardly unreason and unthinking of Islamic interests is causing catastrophic outcomes for the besieged people of Gaza and across Palestine. The Arab-Muslim leaders are more like a cult working together to replace the Islamic values and principles of accountability with technology, entertainment and diversion of morality – this could well be witnessed in the Arab gulf states enjoining good times and sports while the people in Gaza are bombed and massacred. The Divine warning of the Quran is self-explanatory: “We have revealed for you (O men!) a book in which is a message for you: Will ye not then understand?” (21: 10). And it warns: “Then the Apostle will say: O My Lord! My people took this Qur’an for just foolish nonsense.” (25:30), “Does Man not see; It is God Who created him from sperm. Yet behold! he (stands forth) as an open adversary.” (36:77).
A Fake Trajectory of Escape
The Arab League Summit in Cairo last week was publicised to address the focal issue of peace and security of the much-ravaged and destroyed strip of Gaza by Israel-American war on the innocent people who had nothing to do with alleged terrorism claimed by Israeli think tanks. Across the globe, concerned people were watching if the Arab leaders would use knowledge, courage, and sense of honesty to help the besieged masses of Gaza – the new killing ground of Israeli experiments to displace the inhabitants for a Greater Israel concurred by the US new President Trump – an enthusiastic supporter of likeminded Netanyahu – who is in desperate search of settling his mental microscope for a different powerful future by ignoring and rejecting the Israel masses call of peace, normalization of relationships and safe return of the hostages.
The crises facing the Muslim Ummah needed urgent critical thinking for a navigational change and expert consultations (‘Shura’ in Quranic term) to foster conflict management, change, security and peace with other nations. But the emerging crises clearly indicate the Western policies and practices goals to incapacitate the Arab intellectual hub into unthinking of the present or future. There seems to be no escape from the current volatile political crises when Arab leaders act as if they had no knowledge of what massive deaths and destruction mean to contemporary rational thinkers. Temptation and compulsion of evil embedded in psychological factors of sectarian rivalries operate across many Arabian Gulf regions to perpetuate in-house fear, death and destruction.
Recently, Gaza and West Bank Palestinians witnessed the forcible massive displacement of people from their homes under false pretext of terrorism, and continuing atrocities in other parts of Palestine. Who will deal with the restoration of peace, normalcy and conflict management? Do the Arab-Muslim leaders have any moral and intellectual capacity to extend security and a sense of protection to the helpless people of Palestine? Rationality is replaced by a perpetuated insanity. Time and history are not on the side of the Arab kings and princes doomed to be replaced by those friendly to the Western powers and new political imagination of the people seeking societal change as was the aim of Arab Spring, 2011.
As it stands now, Arab leaders have no other thought and priority except to check the depleted oil prices, and count the dead bodies – soon they could be part of abstract statistics debated and defined by the American and Israeli warriors as to how the Arabs lost their national freedom, human dignity and oil pumping economic happiness. To reverse the naïve blunders for accidental change and to strike a rational outlook for the future, this author (“Arab Leaders: Waiting to Count the Dead Bodies.” Opinion Maker:) and “Arab Leaders Count Dead Bodies but Peacemaking is not the Aim.” Uncommon Thought Journal, USA), offered the following insight and reminder to all concerned in the Arab-Muslim World:
Once the Arabs were leaders in knowledge, creativity, science and human manifestation, progress and future-making – the Islamic civilisation lasting for 800 years in Al-Andalusia, Spain. But when they replaced Islam – the power and core value of their advancements with petro-dollar transitory economic prosperity, they failed to think intelligently and fell in disgrace and lost what was gained over the centuries. They relied on Western mythologies of change and materialistic development which resulted in their self-geared anarchy, corruption, military defeats and disconnected authoritarianism. The Western strategists ran planned scams of economic prosperity to destroy the Arab culture with their own oil and their own money turning them redundant for the 21st century world and beyond. Today, the Arab-Muslim leaders are so irrational and cruel that they reject all voices of reason and honesty from Muslim scholars for political change, public institution building and human development only to bring more deaths and destruction to their societies.
Prof John Esposito, (Unholy War and What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, 2nd ed. 2011), a reputable scholar of Western-Islamic culture and history at Georgetown University, offers a lesson in a rational context:
“An important lesson of history is that rulers and nations do rise and fall. Unforeseen circumstances can bring up unanticipated change. Few expected the breakup of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe to occur when they did ……now is the time for those in all walks of life (political, economic, military, media and academic) who wish to see a new order not to be silenced but to speak out, organise, vote and be willing when necessary to make sacrifices in promoting a new global order.”
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Dr Mahboob A. Khawaja specialises in international affairs — global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilisations.
