by Ghassan Kadi
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has finally had it its way. A meeting held last month of GCC and other Arab Foreign Ministers has condemned Iran for the attack on the Saudi Embassy incident, and the Lebanese Foreign Minister Basil; from the 8th of March Coalition pro-Hezbollah camp, abstained from voting. As a result, Lebanon was punished by Saudi Arabia as the latter decided to renege on the $4bn aid promise to the Lebanese Army and Internal Security.
And then just a few weeks later, the Arab Interior Ministers convened in Tunis and declared Lebanon’s Hezbollah a terror organization (1&2). Lebanon’s Interior Minister Mashnouk, a 14th of March Hariri man, also abstained from voting.
The debauched Saudi royals, the same lazy criminals who die from obesity and self-inflicted diabetes whilst they are starving and bombing Yemen, the same people who poured billions upon billions of dollars to kill Syrians in an attempt to create an Islamic state in lieu of its secular government, that scourge of a family that rules with an iron fist wreaking havoc and creating wars between Arabs and Muslims and never once fired a single bullet at Israel, they actually had the audacity to call the shots and had Hezbollah declared as a terrorist organization. Strange days indeed.
What is of significance here is the almost utter silence about this development in Western media. Try to Google this milestone event using any key words, and you will not find any references in the well-established highly-read mainstream Western news agencies. Interesting indeed.
What is even more interesting here as an observer is that quite often Western media go abuzz with what they believe is taking the Arab World by storm, but in reality, no one in the Arab World would be talking about it or least concerned.
The issues of Saudi military land intervention in Syria and their alleged ownership of nuclear weapons for example, are hardly ever discussed in the Levant and the whole Middle East. They are seen as some kind of bad-taste jokes. Such topics seem to only make news headlines in the West.
Back to the Tunis decision. The Arab states that did not vote in favour of the motion are Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria and Iraq. I wonder if the readers are missing something here….Palestine, as represented by Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA), has in fact voted for declaring Hezbollah as a terror organization.
Whilst Hamas is not acknowledged as a representative of the Palestinian people, Ismail Haniyye, who is entirely in Qatar’s pocket, would probably also vote in favour had he been asked to vote. Mahmoud Zahhar, a prominent Hamas leader, has however condemned the decision. This is not surprising given that Zahar went against his rank when Hamas leaders went cahoots with Qatar against Syria. Zahhar had always been the voice of reason in Hamas. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and the PFLP General Command have also condemned the decision, but Mahmoud Abbas is quite silent. He is probably feeling too sheepish to make any comments. Even if his heart is with Hezbollah, he cannot go against the Saudi dictates.
The Palestinian position is not taking keen observers by surprise. After all, earlier on, Hezbollah pioneered the tunnel technology and passed on the information to Hamas leaders in order to help with their fight against the Israelis in Gaza. When the “War On Syria” started and Hamas decided to align itself with Qatar against Syria and her people, Hamas passed on this technology to the terrorists. All the tunnels around greater Damascus, and especially in the Jobar region, were built by technology and information that was passed on to the terrorists by Hamas. So for Hamas a would-be vote against Hezbollah is not impossible to imagine.
Hezbollah is receiving quite a bit of support from progressive Arab parties, especially, and whilst its officials made quite a few verbal responses to the Saudis, it seems that Hezbollah is not trying to escalate the situation with the PA. In an Arabic article published on Al-Manar of the 3rd of March 2016 (3) and titled: “The Palestinian Authority And The “Terrorist” Decision Against Hezbollah), the author (Islam Al-Rawashda) opens his article by saying that it is not surprising to see the Saudis go after Hezbollah. In his next paragraph however, he is questioning how did the PA allow itself to join the “gang” and endorsed the decision against Hezbollah. Isn’t Hezbollah engaged in fighting Israel? Did it not liberate Arab land from occupation? Does is not support Palestine? These are the kind of questions he asked. But the official Hezbollah spokespeople seem to unwilling to engage in making anti-PA statements. Clearly, they don’t want to give their adversaries more ammunition and do not want to be seen standing against Palestinians; not even their corrupt pro-Saudi authority.
The schism inside the Arab World is reaching unprecedented levels. The pro-Western camp represented by Saudi Arabia and its followers has stooped to levels previously seen as unimaginable.
Even as Saudi Arabia is down on its knees financially, bogged down in a war it cannot win in Yemen and losing all control over the “War On Syria”, it still has a few billions stashed here and there to draw from and use to continue to buy friends.
And whilst it continues to spend billions on its terror campaigns and on destabilizing the region, whilst it is supporting all the fundamentalist Madrasas all over the globe, it withheld its promised gift to the Lebanese Army under the pretext that the Lebanese Government and Lebanese Army have become tools in the hand of Hezbollah and Iran.
As the Arab Saudi camp is becoming more audacious, audacious enough for the PA to vote against Hezbollah; the only army that disturbs Israel’s security, the only Arab organization that has taken back land from Israel militarily, the only Arab army that has actually threatened the depth of Israel, then no one should expect any good from other Arab pro-Saudi states that are distant geographically from Palestine. If the Palestinians themselves do not know who their enemies and friends are in standing up against Israel, why should the Moroccans?
And if the Palestinian people did not like what their government has done, why did they not take to the streets in protest? There are some reports of minor dissent, but nothing serious.
There is one word to describe the Palestinian reaction, and the word is “disgusting”, but in this literary context, I shall stick to the word “appalling”.
If we wind the clock back a bit, just a few years earlier, we can clearly remember how both the PA and Hamas have sided against the Syrian government. Here we ought to remember that had it not been for the Syrian government and its support to the different Palestinian organizations in the 1970’s onwards, they would have vanished. After all, the official Hamas HQ was actually in Damascus for many years, and it was in Syria where Khaled Mashaal operated until he moved to the Five Star Hotels of Qatar and Istanbul.
Palestinians have a great cause, but for a major part, their leaders have been nothing but rascals, ungrateful rascals. And how can we forget what happened to Lebanon?
It was because virtually half of the Lebanese have supported the Palestinian cause that the already existing political/religious division in Lebanon expanded and took the country to Civil War in 1975. The Palestinians played a huge part in pouring oil over fire, and their only objectives were what they could get out of it, and did not give a damn about the destruction that was inflicted upon Lebanon as a result.
And the whole breakdown between Arafat and Assad father in 1976 onwards was based on Arafat’s insistence on the so-called “Palestinian Decision”. Assad tried in vain to convince him that the Arab-Israeli conflict is much bigger than what the Palestinians can handle. He tried to convince him that this matter is as important for Syria as it is for Palestine. He reminded him that Palestine is the southern region of Syria, but to no avail. Arafat wanted to be the master of his decisions even if this screwed up the entire Arab World around him.
Half a century or so later, Palestinian leaders are not so much as dogmatic and indoctrinated as Arafat was. They are simply up for sale. The PA leaders have grown to love Saudi and other oil money, and Hamas leaders are up for sale and rent by any Sunni Muslim money. There is no difference between the two.
But as the Arab Saudi camp continues to stoop lower and lower, the resistance camp is growing more organized, more powerful, more successful and closer to victory.
Which day in history has marked the biggest day of shame for the Arabs? Arguably, it has always been said that Arab states reached their lowest point in history on June the 5th 1967 during the Six-Days War. The 3rd of March 2016 decree of the Arab interior ministers in Tunis is by far a much lower point, and one wonders if they are poised to stoop even lower. Shame on them.
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