A call to fellow Arabs: Stop supporting the killing of the Lebanese people!

WASHINGTON - Rola Abdul Latif

January/February 2006

A much contested poll on Al Jazeera website in December posed the following question: “Do you think Syria is involved in the killings in Lebanon?”  The results came out quite surprising: 73 percent voted No [Syria is not involved in the Lebanon killings] and the rest voted Yes.

It doesn’t take one to be an expert on Lebanese affairs to realize that Syria is at least “involved” in the Lebanese killings. Any Lebanese, even if opposed to the March 14 Independence Intifada, knows this very well. The bulk of these votes, however, came from users in other Arab countries who are frequent viewers of Al Jazeera TV and who visit its website regularly.

So what is the implication of this poll? Are most Arab people deliberately taking a political stance against Lebanon or is it merely their utter ignorance of Lebanese politics? The answer probably combines both realities.

In all of the online polls Al Jazeera conducted in the last few months, none has drawn as many votes as this one. Other political polls would gather somewhere between 1,000 and 55,000 votes. This one has garnered more than half a million (528,935) votes in total! Clearly, many people feel strongly about the topic and were trying to tilt the result in their favor.

However, if this is the outcome of Arab people’s concerns about the Lebanon-Syria situation, then many Lebanese would agree that better for them to stay indifferent than become harmfully emotional about the topic.

It has become ever more evident that the way mainstream-thinking Arabs judge political crises in the region is by linking them automatically to “hidden imperialist agendas” aimed to “subjugate the region” in order to “benefit Israeli interests” and “control oil resources.”

As such, a simple and straightforward explanation blaming Syria for the killings is not “clever” enough to satisfy these disillusioned minds. The more “logical” scenario for them is one where Israel or the US have conspired to kill anti-Syrian Lebanese figures in order to “provoke internal instability and international condemnation against Syria to justify a future US-led strike on Syria.”

Add to this that biased Arab media outlets such as Al Jazeera refer to the situation as “the crisis facing Syria.” But wait, Syria is not the country undergoing a crisis; it is not Syrian journalists or Syrian prime ministers and lawmakers who are being assassinated, it is Syria who is killing Lebanese officials one by one, at least according to the Lebanese popular hunch.

Besides, if other Arabs truly care about their Syrian brethren, they should fully support the international community in diplomatically pressuring the Syrian regime. The Syrian regime is the Syrian people’s first enemy. Perhaps this is a rare chance for Syrians to truly gain their liberty and freedom from oppression.

I urge fellow Arabs to try consulting newspapers other than those controlled by their own governments, or try to switch the channel away from Al Jazeera, which has become the mouthpiece of the Syrian Baathist regime (after serving the Iraqi one before it).

Seriously, if you want to be involved in regional politics, you should try to forget about conspiracy theories and see things more simply. Do not overanalyze.

If you have been following Lebanese news objectively you would have realized that all the Lebanese individuals who were murdered or survived assassination attempts have been implicitly or explicitly opposed to the Syrian regime’s domination of Lebanon. They have all received death threats from the Syrian regime or its Lebanese agents. Also recall that the first assassination attempt targeting MP Marwan Hamadeh came as a response to UN resolution 1559. This resolution, backed by the United States and France, called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops and intelligence forces from Lebanon to end Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs.

And you ask “How could Syria be working so obviously against its own interests by challenging the international community and committing these atrocities?” You should not be so surprised since the very political and social impotence that created the phenomenon of suicide bombers can lead to entire regimes becoming self-destructive by the same logic (or lack of it).

Rola Abdul Latif is a Washington-based researcher. She wrote this piece for Alternative