The Arab masses have been suckered out of the political process by power-hoarding leaders and desensitized to inhumanity such as that perpetrated by the Muslim regime in Sudan, writes Rami G. Khouri, executive editor of the Lebanon-based Daily Star.

The Arab silence on...Darfur (and) Sudan...reflects a wider malaise that has long plagued our region: Arab governments tend to stay out of each other's way when any one of them is accused of wrongdoing, and most Arab citizens have been numbed into helplessness in the face of public atrocities or criminal activity in their societies.

The modern history of the Arab world over the past 50 years has been defined by two broad trajectories that are intimately related: the concentration of economic and military power in the hands of small numbers of people who form the governing power elites, and that governing elite's steady provision of basic services and job opportunities to the citizenry.

...This basic governing contract explains much of the silence and acquiescence by otherwise decent Arabs in the face of atrocities or criminal activity carried out by fellow citizens, or even by their own government. Darfur in Sudan is only the latest in a string of violent domestic episodes within Arab countries that have been largely ignored by other Arab countries. The long and depressing list includes rebellions, civil wars, repression and other forms of violence in key Arab countries like Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt and Libya.

The more troubling consequence is that small groups of bombers and terrorists have exploited this state of Arab helplessness, seeking public support for their militancy. Thus large numbers of ordinary, decent Arab citizens instinctively reject the atrocities against fellow Arabs in Darfur, but do not speak out or act to stop them; and equally large numbers of Arabs - majorities in troubled lands, the polls tell us - similarly do not speak out when Arab terrorists bomb Arab, American or other targets.

A troubled Arab citizenry's silent acquiescence in violence and passivity in the face of homegrown atrocity, is today the single most important, widespread symptom of the malaise that plagues this region...a troubling sign of Arab mass dehumanization and political pacification at the public level, which are largely our own fault due to our acceptance of poor governance and distorted Arab power structures over a period of decades.

Herein lie the economic and moral failures of Islam, and the roots of terrorism. To think that this weekend, over champagne and canapes at a reception for an emerging local artist, I was listening to an unreconstructed old Jewish Marxist ascribe terrorism to rapacious American capitalists and the CIA.

And he was from Manhattan, not Seattle!

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 11, 2004 04:30 PM

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