Arab youth flee injustice

Like most Arab political groups, the ruling National Party in Egypt is facing a severe problem: Its aging leadership. But from time to time, such aging and outdated parties promote new policies that aim at installing new and young leadership.

Yet this only happens when the aging leader feels to old to sustain his leadership some half a century after he (of course there are no she in Arab leaderships) first usurped power.

In the case of Egypt, the ruling party suddenly started adopting slogans promoting the “role of the youth” in leading both the party and the country. This only happened when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak started looking into ways, to put it the Arab way, to “prepare his son to succeed him.”

All kinds of praise went to the new policy of promoting the young in the presumed republic of Egypt. Even young people found themselves compelled to express their admiration of Hosni’s eldest son, Gamal, who without holding any official position in the state, tours the world and meets the political leadership in decision-making capitals.

Then Egyptians start to convince themselves of the worthiness of Gamal: “He is well-educated.” Of the 60 million living Egyptians, the National Party could not find someone educated enough to succeed Hosni Mubarak but his son Gamal. Since Gamal happens to be young, a whole campaign promoting the role of the youth was launched.

In other Arab countries, such as Lebanon for instance, a handful of young males were either elected or selected to public positions. These presumably represent the aspirations of the young. Yet taking a closer look at these young representatives, an observer would notice in no time that while one of these representatives is the son of the president, the other one is the son of the former president and the third comes from one of the most known tribal families and so on.

In 2002, the United Nations Development Program found in its report on Sustainable Human Arab Development that more than half of the young Arabs, both males and females, preferred leaving their countries and traveling to destinations such as Europe and the US.

Reasons behind the exodus of these young people varied between lack of freedom of expression, political repression, poverty and social pressure.

Some of these frustrated young people who emigrated were even picked up by fanatic Muslim factions that groomed them and convinced them that the way to spiritual salvation was to crash airplanes into civilian buildings causing irreversible tragedies to innocent citizens. These citizens were perceived as belonging to an evil state that supported the aging Arab leadership and its young successors who, in the first place, unfairly seized power and controlled all kinds of business.

In order to avoid another 9/11, dismantling terror groups in Afghanistan was one step toward a safer world but certainly not the only one. The civilized world must look into other reasons that furnished fanaticism with the core of its young elements: despair of the young mostly caused by a dictatorship supported by America and other civilized nations themselves.

Several American thinkers have looking for the roots of 9/11, but they should never look far. The reasons are right under their nose, they only have to calm down and address them.