Brown man's burden
By Salah Issa *
By describing national resistance to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon as "terrorism", the French prime minister abolished the principles of the French Revolution and annihilated the glorious history of French resistance to Nazi occupation. In a single word, Jospin reduced De Gaulle, the leader of the "liberation", to a "terrorist", and placed a wreath of flowers on Pétain's grave. In a single word, he lost the prominent position his country occupied in the hearts and minds of Arabs, earned by its policy in the Middle East conflict since 1967.
Such arrogance and condescension from a Western official is not new to the Arabs. We have grown accustomed to Westerners telling us we are less civilised, less developed, less democratic and less free than we should be. After all, Napoleon Bonaparte murdered seventeen Egyptians (whom he called "terrorists") for having resisted his occupation of their country in 1799. President Roosevelt expressed approval of British occupation of Egypt in 1910, and his successor, President Wilson, who had promised to defend Egypt's right to self-determination, encouraged the foreign occupation of Egypt and of other Arab countries. On the other hand, we never heard a "free, civilised or humane" Western official describe Begin's bombing of the King David Hotel, or the plot to assassinate Lord Moine on the streets of Cairo, as terrorism.
It seems that, as Arabs, our duty is to fight -- but not only to liberate our land from occupiers, or to exercise our human right to self-determination. We must also fight to rouse the conscience of the West, to heal that part of the world of its racism and double standards so that the West may acquire a human face, exercise liberalism and recall the principles it is continuously betraying. It is our fate; we shall shoulder the burden.
* This week's Soapbox speaker is a veteran journalist and political analyst.
