Forget about football?

No way, reports Dina Ezzat. It's the World Cup over discourse, no matter how sophisticated the discussion

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"Should we be made to believe the saying that argues that Arabs resigned from history the day Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the last to hoist the banner of the Arab dream, passed away? And if the answer is yes, should we then be arguing that Arabs are now about to resign from geography too and that they are practically absent from that part of the world that was for long, and until quite recently, called the Arab world -- before the introduction of such names like the Near East or the Greater Middle East?" prominent Lebanese commentator Ghassan Salama wrote in An-Nahar of Monday.

Salama's argument was no mere exercise in sheer intellectualism. Rather, it was a subtle way of criticising the attempts of Syria to forge close ties with some non-Arab Middle Eastern players at a time when it has failed to establish a healthy and "normal" relationship with Lebanon. For Salama, who wrote this week under the headline, "The Arab dream is a better strategy than the Greater Middle East", what Arab countries, and certainly Arab people, could benefit most from (not to mention need most) closer Arab ties.

Also on Monday, according to Adnan Hussein, a Lebanese professor of political science and regular commentator of the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai Al-Aam, it is this lack of coordinated (forget about integrated) Arab ties that has been causing the Arab world to sustain undue difficulties for long. For Hussein, however, this unfortunate disassociation with the Arab dream is subsequent to the diluted sense of national identity. "The Arab citizen has become a mere subject of the ruler, and his/her human rights are now subject to innumerable violations", Hussein wrote, and as a result "there is not much sense of national identity left" for the Arab nation to dwell on in its desire to overcome the many hurdles it has been encountering for decades.

And it is not just the Arab governments to blame, some intellectuals argued in an impressive exercise of self-criticism. In an interview with the London-based daily Al-Hayat, printed on Monday, Egyptian feminist (controversial as she is always referred to), Nawal El-Saadawi argued that the pale input of Arab intellectuals during the past few decades have been an embarrassment and a disadvantage in a nation where very few are willing to stand up for their right to argue and disagree and at a crucially challenging time of globalisation.

A day earlier, also in Al-Hayat, Hussein Abdul-Aziz, a Syrian writer, put the blame at the doorstep of the Arab media that, he wrote, is far too busy attacking the US for its autocratic exercise of foreign policy instead of doing its job of taking Arab governments to task for their failure to take the path of democracy the way they should have a long time ago. Abdul-Aziz argued, "there is no such thing as exercising democracy when conducting foreign relations. This is a myth. It is better for the Arab media to stop forging facts and tampering with the Arab consciousness. The Arab media need to ask the real question about the sad Arab reality and to looks for ways to take the Arab world from the path of backwardness onto the path of modernity."

However, no amount of profound or simplified intellect, and indeed no amount of bad news (endless as those might be) or good news (precious as they are) could have significantly diverted the attention of the Arab reader from following the news of the World Cup. Certainly, not with so many papers dedicating special pages and producing endless timetables and forecasts on the games. Along with their declaration of the upcoming all-inclusive national Palestinian dialogue, the Palestinian papers were announcing the results of the games of the World Cup, with special attention being paid to the performance of the teams of Iran, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. And while busy covering the debate between the many Lebanese factions on the future of Lebanon, the Lebanese dailies were keenly front-paging some World Cup results, especially those related to the second drawn match of its former coloniser France with South Korea. Even Iraqi papers who carried images of horror from the allegedly liberated US country, still made an effort to include news of the world's biggest and most watched football competition.

The only serious competition to the World Cup news in the Arab press this week were those endless stories coming from across the Arab world about the arrests of political activists and journalists who begged to differ. Still, despite their importance, such news was unlikely to attract enough attention of an already depressed Arab reader.