Mr. Bush, Your Arab League Summit is Convened

“But if they have treacherous designs against you, they have already been in treason against Allah, and so has He given you power over them.”

— Qur’an: 8:71

Your Highnesses and Presidents of the Arab League: “Beware the Ides of March”

— The treachery and backstabbing of the alleged “Liberators” of the Arabs who seek hegemony over you, your lands, and resources.

Oh, how history repeats itself in the Arab world. For over a century the Arabs have failed miserably in their analytical assessment and response to the colonial ambitions of the British, French, Soviets, Americans, and today’s dominant power– Israel

Common to Arab leaders is their intellectual illiteracy, dishonesty, greed, and preservation of power, their confused ideological attachments to foreign powers for stability of their rule, and their propensity for inter-Arab and civil wars. Much of these conflicts revolve around the economic disparities between the rich and poor. Additionally, their distrust of each other and of their own people leads them to the enormous hysterical purchases of military weapons. They even distrust their own government’s financial institutions thereby investing their wealth in western banks, governmental bonds, and Disneyland. As for the Arab people, let them eat lies and bombs.

The convening of this nineteenth annual Arab League Summit, a spectacle of embarrassment and continued concessions, is being held under the auspices of His Royal Highness King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. As with all Summits between the brotherly Arab leaders, the Arab peoples have learned to live with the failed impotence of their leaders and never expect any tangible change or improvement in their lives or their freedoms, either from internal oppression or external occupation. The Arab League since its inception in 1945 has failed to resolve a single Arab-Arab conflict much less confront the power of Israel and its control of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Today, five Arab civil wars are raging in the region—-Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine, and Somalia, while the Arab League is meeting to resolve Israel’s concerns on King Abdullah’s 2002 Peace Initiative.

Conspicuously absent from the Saudi Declaration is the welfare of the millions of Palestinian refugees living in deplorable squalor for decades under the watchful neglect of the Arab regimes and the entire world.

The Saudi Peace Declaration is akin to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 whereby it “views with favor” Israel’s concerns at the expense of a contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a return or compensation of Palestinian refugees.

Israel has rejected all Palestinian leaders to avoid peace and instead demanded a total capitulation of the Arab world, ergo the Saudi Declaration. Like Lord Balfour the Saudi Declaration “does not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country (the unmentionable Palestinians)”.

The agenda for this summit was not hidden as usual but made public with much fanfare. U.S. Secretary Condoleezza Rice spent a few days in the region, prior to the Summit, to develop its agenda by meeting with the “moderate” Arab Quartet’s Foreign Ministers and Intelligence Chiefs of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.

Rice also met with the beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a man barely surviving politically, to co-develop the Summit’s agenda that addresses Israel’s concerns regarding King Abdullah’s Peace Initiative which offers Israel everything without clearly spelling out Arab demands other than a general withdrawal of Israel to its 1967 borders. Despite 60 years experience with Israel’s firm rejection of all peace proposals, including American proposals, do the Arab leaders truly expect Israel to simply abandon its hundreds of settlements, its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, tear down the Apartheid Wall that has incorporated large settlements into Israel proper, its military zones along the Jordan River, its theft of Arab water, release of thousands of prisoners, abandon its goal of a Greater Israel, and its design on the Litani River–”if so, then one needs to test the water in Riyadh.

Why this diplomatic flurry on the newly re-discovered Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002? It’s obvious that Bush, Israel, and the Arabs need something, anything, to cover and distract from their respective and devastating failures in the region.

Like Bush, Olmert needs this political theatre of a peace initiative to distract from his failed devastating invasion of Lebanon this past summer. Only Israel can describe its total siege and carpet bombing of Lebanon as a “failure”. Nevertheless, Olmert successfully thwarted Rice from announcing any proposal toward a final solution.

Bush is under enormous domestic pressure on his failed invasion of Iraq, so as is customary for the U.S., when all else fails in the region, it re-discovers the Israeli Palestinian issue to placate the Arabs and distract Americans from the daily carnage in Iraq. Bush has two years to save his crusadic military legacy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and incredibly, perhaps Iran, and thus to believe that Bush is finally awakening to the fact that Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinians is the root cause of Muslim rage at America is to believe he can walk on water.

How desperate and simplistic are the Arabs, who themselves adopted the 2002 peace plan as a lip service du jour, to re-adopt the same plan Bush and Israel previously rejected, although this time Bush is the “decider”.

These leaders know well that neither Bush nor Olmert have any residual political strength to negotiate peace, neither with the Arabs nor with the Palestinians, whose very government is persona non grata. They also know that no American President, with the exception of President Eisenhower in 1956, has ever courageously confronted Israel and its powerful lobby, although every American administration has publicly stated principles for peace in the Middle East only to retract them under heavy domestic pressure, principally by American Jewish groups

The deceptive pattern of an American Negotiator or Secretary of State to meet with Arab “moderates” to impose Israel’s agenda is not new, but in actuality began in 1949 during the Lausanne Conference where Israel defied, snubbed, and dared President Truman to change an iota of its belligerent policies toward the Palestinians and its refusal to accept the return of any Palestinian refugee despite U.N. Resolutions. At the time, David Ben Gurion, called the ethnically cleansed Palestinian Refugees the “aggressors”.

This pattern recurred on November 15, 1967 when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg (a Zionist), met with officials from Iraq, Lebanon,, and Morocco to assure them that the U.S. does not accept any territorial map changes to the 1967 borders after the Six Day War.

The Arabs have never understood nor matched Israel’s brilliant diplomacy, public relations, and media blitz that ensures constant fuzzy language in U.N. Resolutions and U.S. foreign policy statements. In fact, the Arabs, despite their wealth, are totally absent in terms of presenting their case to western audiences.

What should the Arab and Muslim peoples expect from this Rice driven Arab Summit? Nothing.

While the Arabs capitulate to America and Israel, Palestinian freedom, hunger, thirst, death from overflowing sewage, and lack of health care continue unabated. Western, not Arab, streets are filled with protestors supporting the Palestinians.

These leaders dishonor Islam and Arab dignity. They’ve placed their future in America’s hands despite American bombs killing Arab Christians and Muslims.

This is not a summit of leaders but a trough of corrupt cowardly dictators whose self interest is above all considerations of faith, humanity, and service to their people.

But don’t blame them; blame the populace who in their ignorance develop a subservient following to their leaders, who fear change of power, who fill the streets with shouts of “With blood, with our souls, we sacrifice ourselves to you”. Unlike people around the world who took to the streets to liberate themselves from dictators, the Arabs faithfully accept their lot in life.

“Verily, Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.”

— Qur’an 13:11

In the movie “Lawrence of Arabia”, T. E. Lawrence said:

“As the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel.”