BEIRUT — Following day-to-day events in the Middle East is a trying experience, as grown men and women ignore the pain they inflict on so many others. Yet we cannot ignore what is happening all around us, because 400 million Arabs cannot all emigrate to new and peaceful lands; 400 million Arabs cannot escape the death and destruction made by their own national, tribal, sectarian or ethnic leaders and their foreign allies, by finding shelter in gated communities with high-speed internet and 24-hour home-delivered sushi meals in the suburbs of Cairo and Amman, the foothills of Lebanon’s mountains, the coastal plains of Morocco and Algeria, or the hundreds of dazzling towers across the cities and city-states of the Gulf region.

Yemen — the forgotten war, abandoned land, and forsaken community of the Arabs — is the high point of this horror show. Overshadowed recently by brutality in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, Yemen has now poked its skinny neck and weary head above the landscape of Arab moral devastation. It warns us that it may soon make the shift from simply experiencing a wasteful and painful war to being a great moral and political crime whose damages will reach many other countries soon. This is because virtually the entire country may be plunged into famine if the port of Hodeida in the north is attacked by the Saudi Arabian-led war machine that is supported by Arab allies, the United States, UK, and others in the world who are eager to offer mercenary troops-for-pay. (The most recent offer reportedly is 40,000 troops from Egypt, which, if true, would add trans-generational amnesia, incompetence, and irresponsibility to Egyptian decision-making, given Egypt’s loss of some 26,000 of its troops while fighting in the 1962-70 civil war in Yemen).

Documentation this month by the United Nations, the respected International Crisis Group (ICG), and others warns that Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and Nigeria are on the brink of famine that could impact 20 million people. Yemen alone already suffers the world’s largest food crisis, as 17 million people cannot get enough basic food and need humanitarian assistance simply to stay alive and healthy. Unicef says 460,000 children suffer from severe acute malnutrition.

The deeper tragedy is that Yemen’s situation is totally man-made, reflecting policy decisions in Saudi Arabia, Arab allies, the United States, UK, France and other governments — including some UN Security Council members, ICG reminds us — that have weaponized the economy, shattered Central Bank operations that have almost stopped salary payments and other routine economic transactions, and reduced imports into a country that gets 90 percent of its basic commodities from abroad.

Millions of families that have sold belongings and borrowed to the limits of their abilities will soon reach a point of collapse where they have to decide who in the family gets food or not, who receives medical care or not, who lives for another few weeks or not. It is particularly cruel that Yemen’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens bear the brunt of the current fighting. When I contacted Yemen scholar Sheila Carapico at the University of Richmond to seek her analysis of a country she has known and researched for decades, this is what she told me: Contrary to the Saudi accounts of their aerial bombing to fight Shi’a militia allied with Iran (Houthi rebels who are members of the Zaydi denomination of Shi`a Islam), “The casualties of the Saudi-led assault — the dead or dying from trauma injuries or neglect (starvation or deprivation of basic medicines) and those displaced by fighting — are disproportionately Afro-Yemeni, dark-skinned, poverty-stricken, Red Sea coastal people who belong to the Shafa`i denomination of Sunni Islam. They were already the least privileged members of a poor society.”

These helpless victims largely inhabit the westernmost Red Sea coastal plain, the Tihama, that includes all of Hodeida province and parts of the provinces of Taiz and Hajjah. They and the rest of the country will suffer new mass ravages if Hodeida is attacked, basic commodity imports decline even further, and war continues throughout the country. Ongoing, deliberate warfare has left millions of Yemenis destitute and desperate. They will join the growing pool of tens of millions of once ordinary Arabs whose lives and futures have been destroyed.

Another three or four million children could drop out of school — adding to the 25 million or so Arab children already in that condition. Millions more will suffer acute malnutrition. This desperate, helpless, hungry underclass — without rights or any escape from a guaranteed life of poverty for generations to come — will do anything just to survive, and retaliate against their tormentors who robbed them of their citizenship and their humanity. They might support any extremist or terrorist group that employs their sons as foot soldiers for $200 a month, join any criminal gang that offers them illicit income, or set out on a frantic refugee trail to seek another week, perhaps a month, even half a year of continued life, somewhere, anywhere, but not in their own ancestral land where they are doomed due to no fault of their own.

Syria, Libya, and Iraq have shown us unambiguously how desperate, dehumanized people will behave in such situations. Yemen will be next if we let the war drag on, the assault of Hodeida occur, and our sense of conscience and collective peace-making remain frozen in the face of a criminal war of choice whose vulgar acts on all sides will one day prod an army of starving and orphaned Arab kids to scale the walls of the mightiest walled sushi palace. Most of the world’s news media, including many Arab media, will not cover the assault on Hodeida. So the poor who were invisible in life will also remain invisible in death. Only their ghosts will come back to haunt us one day. There is nothing in the world more frightening than the ghost of a starved child seeking retribution.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 18 April 2017
Word Count: 982
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

President Trump seems to have a foreign policy that is constantly changing. Many analysts have documented how he says one thing on a twitter post and says or does another thing a few hours later.

This repeated uncertainty about what he thinks or intends to do has been deeply disconcerting to almost everyone. Within the United States, his own major appointees seem to take positions that are different from his. And in any case, they are often not forewarned about shifts in line. Even some of his most faithful popular supporters find the changes confusing (although they may not find it a reason to cease supporting him).

Outside the United States, presidents, prime ministers, and diplomats seem disturbed by the unpredictability or lack of clarity of Trump’s views. This is often stated in the following fashion: We now know x, but this is a tactical position. What is Trump’s long-range vision, or does he have one?

If one puts oneself in Trump’s shoes, the picture might be very different. First of all, if I Trump am unpredictable, I have some extra strength in my position, since the others may try to accommodate in advance what they think is my position.

In addition the incoherence of my position is a way of gauging what is the position that will best serve my interests, which is to increase my power within and outside the United States. Maintaining my personal position and secondarily that of the United States is my primary goal. I do not have and do not want to have a “vision” or long-term commitment. I am not an ideologue but a person who seeks a position of dominance.

Now let us shift to the perspective of that of the majority of the world’s population who are not Trump supporters. Indeed, the majority fear Trump’s “incoherence” since, as president of the United States, he controls the U.S. military and its terrible weaponry. We, the majority, fear that he is not in control of himself. We fear that he is egoistic and very thin-skinned, and may launch irreversible actions in a moment of pique.

For this reason, we would be relatively happier if he did have a long-term vision and therefore a commitment to certain activities that would override moments of pique. In short we want him to be coherent. We want him to be committed to something, whether that something is human rights or immigration control. We want greater certainty.

So there we have it. Almost everyone dislikes the lack of long-term vision. Almost everyone thinks it would be better from their point of view if he had one. Almost everyone wants him to be an ideologue. The principal dissident from this hope is Trump himself.

I personally think this whole mode of analysis is upside down. I think it would be worse, not better, if he had a vision, a commitment, an ideology. Let me explain. It has to do with what can minimize the damage that Trump can do to the United States and to the world in his double capacity as (1) uncontested leader of a worldwide social movement and (2) the elected U.S. president plus leader of the Republican Party.

I am interested in what we all can do to affect his actual decisions. There are now resistance campaigns in the United States and elsewhere. There are major world powers (I think particularly of China, Russia, and Iran) that seek to force him to modify his positions.

As far as I can tell, both the resistance campaigns and the efforts of other major world powers have indeed had an effect, and have led him at various points to modify his position. I think they have a fair chance of keeping the United States from too much involvement in the Middle Eastern quagmire. Too much is not zero. But reducing the involvement is better than nothing at all.

The reason that these efforts may force a modification of his position is precisely because he does not have a firm commitment to anything. His unpredictability is the sole weapon the rest of us have against Trump the warrior. To make him less unpredictable means to make him less open to change. In a way, it would doom us.

What we should keep our eyes on in the coming months is further arrangements with China. The recent meeting of President Xi of China and Trump was a good start and is evidence for the position I took a short while ago that the two countries will move closer and not further apart. We should watch whether anything really serious is done to “punish” Russia, or to break the improved relations with Iran.

I suspect that Trump may turn out to be the great “undecider.” This will of course weaken his position. But doing anything else will weaken his position even more. Hurrah for unpredictability!

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 15 April 2017
Word Count: 814
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

BEIRUT — Among the many reports and studies that emerge weekly on the dire conditions in our region and what must be done to repair them, I want to mention one report that merits much wider reading and appreciation — the Arab Human Development Report 2016 that was published a few months ago by the United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau of Arab States. It is entitled “Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality” (see its executive summary or full report on-line at http://www.arab-hdr.org/).

The report received a flurry of publicity for a few weeks, mostly due to some of its dramatic infographics that showed how the 5% Arab share of world population accounts for 45% of world terror attacks, 57% of refugees, 68% of battle-related deaths, 17.6% of conflicts, and 47% of internally displaced people. We know all this from many other sources. Anyone concerned about trends in the Arab region should read this report, though, because it captures the nuances, complexities, and interrelationships among many different sectors of life that together shape the tough conditions in which all Arabs live today, not just the young.

It avoids the trap of the easy answer or single magic bullet that repairs our damage. It tells us, in fact, the multiple angles of the deep mess we have created for ourselves. The report recalls that two-thirds of the roughly 400 million Arabs today are below the age of 30; that’s some 260 million young people, and about 100 million of them are in the 15-29-year-old age group.

This should force us to snap out of the mythology that most Arab elites peddle about youth representing our future, and that causes us twice a year to grab a bunch of young people and put them on television with a caring official or other adult in order to hear their views for 45 minutes — before we send them back to school, home, and work where they have no voice, no rights, no freedoms, and no real opportunity to develop their total human faculties in fields like rational and creative thinking, cultural diversity, artistic talent, political and civic engagement, community development, economic growth, social justice, and the other dimensions of life that most young Arabs are denied.

Well, not really just young Arabs. In fact all Arabs to some extent are not able to develop these fundamental faculties that differentiate us from sheep and snakes — even though most Arab citizens tend to act like sheep because that it what their political culture taught them to do, and many in the elite act like snakes because that is what their political culture allowed them to do.

This report forces us to see that there are few meaningful differences between young and adult Arabs. They share basically the same concerns, values, and aspirations. The young are the biggest group in our societies, and they have already revolted against their elites three times in the past few decades — first, by emigrating in the hundreds of thousands to lands of more opportunity and freedom; second, by creating their own parallel world on the web and in the mall, mosque and playground where they can do what they are not allowed to do in their actual everyday lives; and third, by launching the 2011 Arab uprisings that have rocked our region ever since. What will they do next, these feisty youngsters?

One thing is certain. Giving young people more basketball courts or cartoon channels on television is not going to solve our problems. Fixing our societies and offering 260 million young Arabs a serious chance at living a normal life requires serious policy reforms and power-sharing in a very wide range of fields. These include political power, social activism, economic development, cultural life, education and health services, environmental protection, accountability, and many others. This is how marginalized, pauperized, and militarized young people shed these burdens, and dare to live a normal life.

This is the moment — when we know from new research that 78% of Arabs live in ‘hardship’ or ‘in need’; that the 20% Arab unemployment rate is the highest in the world; that the 22% Arab female labor force participation rate is the lowest in the world; that about half of mid-primary and mid-secondary school Arab students do not meet basic learning levels, in rich as well as poor countries, that perhaps over half all Arab labor is in the informal sector — this is the moment when we have to ask a very basic question: Are launching new wars, imposing new emergency laws, sending people to prison for expressing their views on social media, or spending another several trillion dollars on foreign arms purchases the best way to move towards a decent future? Or are these actually the failed ways of our recent past that have brought us to our current calamity?

Our power elites may not wish to ponder this question. Someone should whisper in their ear that their own children are asking this, in those worlds they created in the malls, mosques, playgrounds, and websites, where they seek to enter the realm of total humanity, and forever leave behind the frightening landscape of sheep and snakes.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 13 April 2017
Word Count: 863
—————-

BEIRUT — The limited news from Washington, D.C. Monday about the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Egyptian Field Marshal-turned-President Abdel Fattah Sisi has been widely described as marking a historic turning point in United States-Egypt relations, following the coolness in ties during the Obama years. That strikes me as a pretty inaccurate assessment; rather I would see the warm expression of mutual admiration and close political-military ties between the two leaders as merely perpetuating and affirming the close American-Egyptian relations that have existed for decades.

Those relations have been called “strategic,” but for those willing to embrace reality they can also be called ineffective and counter-productive. Egypt is passing through a very difficult and delicate moment in its modern history, which has been manifested in multiple dimensions. Egypt is one of the very few Arab countries that do, indeed, have multiple dimensions — rather than the rule of one-dimensional lands characterized by simplistic economies, cultures, and capabilities.

For a century or so Egypt has been seen by foreign powers as a key to their Middle Eastern policies, interests, and relationships, due to the many genuinely strategic dimensions of Egypt. These include geography, economic bulk, military power, political impact and initiative, cultural and intellectual leadership of the Arab world, and the sort of national self-confidence that only emanates from a genuine nation-state’s assets, actions, and attitudes. For some half-a-century or so, nobody else in the Arab world could get close to Egypt in these realms, yet its dilemma today is that in every one of these realms Egypt has been steadily regressing. It continues to become more dependent on handouts from others, and is shedding those traits that make it a genuinely important and strategic partner for others.

Ever since President Sadat some 35 years ago forged close strategic ties with Washington, both sides have benefited in various ways, and the momentum of the recent past has continuously shaped the policies of leaders in the West, who would not pressure Egypt too much on its terrible human rights record and autocratic ways, or push hard to help Egypt institute genuine domestic economic, social, and political reforms.

The result has been Egypt’s steady decline over the past four decades, as almost all of its key national institutions, other than the military and security services, have been hollowed out in stunning and shocking testament to why military leaders should not run countries with total abandon and a lack of accountability to their citizens. The return of military rule to Egypt, with Sisi’s ouster of the elected President Mohammad Morsi in July 2013, reflected a combination of forces in society that all deserved serious reappraisal by Egyptians, including the quality of their constitutional democracy, the performance of the Morsi government, and the emotional-political sentiments of the citizenry.

The option to bring the military back to power was genuinely appealing to many Egyptians, but it was the worst option. We can see the results of that today as the country desperately looks around to see which partner, friend, or neighbor can offer it two, five or ten billion dollars for the coming years, just to get it through the economic constraints that are a result of its own poor management of the economy and the state over many decades.

The main reason I say that U.S. policies towards Egypt have been a failure and counter-productive is that Egypt’s trajectory is likely to fuel new episodes of extremism, instability, and political violence, which already see homegrown extremist forces link up with partners in terror and crime across the region, such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS). The most dangerous and systematic dynamic that creates an environment that in turn promotes extremism and terrorism is precisely what Egyptians have suffered for some years now — economic and political pressures, combined with poor education and social services standards, low job prospects, and a limited government capability to redress these, make it inevitable that some ordinary and poor Egyptians will slowly experience frustration, anger, helplessness, desperation, and, ultimately, radicalization. As hundreds of thousands or perhaps some millions of men and women, especially young people with no hope of a decent life, join forces with similarly dehumanized men and women across the Arab region, the result will be more of the same political violence, terrorism, and state fragmentation that we have witnessed in the past 20 years.

This is what happens when the world’s strongest power works closely with Arab authoritarian and autocratic leaderships for decades on end, while they ignore the conditions within Arab states that generate instability, dehumanization, and terrorism, and instead mutually praise each other’s courage and leadership in fighting terrorism and promoting national development. What happened at the White House Monday between Trump and Sisi, is a tragic and catastrophic harbinger of terrible days ahead for Egypt and much of the Arab world, where Egypt’s impact remains immense.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 04 April 2017
Word Count: 811
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

Feminist and women’s rights movements draw their strength and their ideological arguments from one simple observation. Throughout the world and throughout very long historical time, women have been oppressed in multiple ways. There is now an enormous literature presenting a very large gamut of views both about what explains this and what ought to be done about it.

I would simply like to explore here what are the major unresolved tactical issues that feminism as movement and feminism as ideology pose for all of us in the global struggle that is the central feature of the structural crisis of the modern world-system.

Given that we are all located in a whirlwind of constantly shifting situations that we call chaos, there are two different time horizons about which we must make decisions about alliances.

In the short run (up to three years), it is imperative that we defend ourselves against attempts to worsen the immediate situation. For example, there are constant attacks on the rights of women to control their own bodies or to reverse gains in the access of women to occupations that were once closed to them.

Fighting against these attacks on acquired gains will not end patriarchy or end inequalities. But it is very important to do what we can in the short run to minimize the pain. In this short-run struggle, whatever alliances we can build constitute a plus that we cannot disdain.

These short-term alliances however do not make it more likely to win the middle-run struggle to replace a doomed capitalist system with one that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian. And here we must be very careful that we are building alliances based on common objectives. To do that we need to discuss further what should be our objectives and what we can do now to move in the direction of tilting the balance between us and those who wish to replace capitalism with a system that is at least as bad, if not worse, for all of us, of course including all women.

Feminists and women’s rights groups have been divided on a number of major questions: What is the long-term relation of feminist goals and movements based on race, class, sexuality, and/or social “minorities”? What should be the role of men, if any, in the struggle to achieve complete gender equality? How can we achieve a transformation of historic subordination of women in all the major religious traditions of the world?

How we answer these questions depends in large part on our epistemologies. We are perhaps past the point when our guiding epistemology is a binary one of universalisms versus particularisms. However, merely endorsing the rights of all groups to pursue their own particularisms does not answer the question.

The end product of a totally particularist vision of social life can only be a total disintegration of social life. We need to think through how we can meaningfully combine the practice of particularist values with a global movement that is politically on the left. If we fail to do this, we shall fall prey to the capture of our forces by those who would, in di Lampedusa’s words, “change everything in order that nothing change.”

We have twenty to forty years to hone a practice that would resolve this dilemma. That is the great challenge of feminism and women’s rights movements to all of us. The oppression of women is probably the longest-lasting social reality we have known. It therefore provides the soundest basis for intelligent reflection, moral choice, and political wisdom.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 01 April 2017
Word Count: 590
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

BEIRUT — Few people in the Arab world or abroad will take seriously the regular Arab Summit meeting of heads of state in Jordan this week, which is a tragedy for all concerned. Pan-Arab joint action could have generated worldwide respect for the views and policies of sovereign Arab states, and could have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of men, women and children across our region, who now gravitate steadily towards lives of chronic vulnerability and suffering.

These two positive trends broadly did happen in the initial half-century of Arab independence and modern statehood, between the 1920s and 1970s, when total Arab population grew from 60 million to 150 million people. That trajectory reversed itself in the past 50 years, as Arab sovereignty, self-determination, and independence have all frayed visibly at the edges, while the living conditions and future wellbeing of the 400 million Arabs today have deteriorated steadily for at least half the population.

One reason for this is that Arab leaders have become more distant from their own citizens. They rarely if ever feel the daily pain and discomfort that ordinary families experience when electricity is cut off for six or ten hours a day, fresh water taps emit saline water from over-exploited aquifers, or children aged 8 or 12 come home from school reporting that they have graduated to the next class, while testing results show that almost half these same students effectively cannot read, write or do basic maths.

Arab summitry has always had an element of pageantry, usually with sincere intentions. Yet the problem remains — even worsens every year, as Syria, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, and Somalia remind us daily — that pageantry and sincerity are not acceptable substitutes for responsible policy-making and genuine, structural improvements in people’s living conditions.

It is unlikely to happen, but I suggest that some of the Arab leaders meeting along the Dead Sea shore in a sparkling conference center should sneak out once or twice and visit neighboring villages in the Jordan Valley and Wadi Araba, like Karamah or Ghor el-Safi. Perhaps on their way back to the airport they could visit settlements like Sahab, Jiza, Umm al-Basateen, or any of the many other smaller villages and towns on both sides of the main highway. A swing through southern and eastern Greater Amman would offer many insights into the realities of the lives of perhaps a majority of Arab citizens, especially in places like Zarqa and Ruseifeh.

The following few numbers reflect realities in our Arab region, and should spark some lively discussions among the gathered heads of state and their officials in charge of national development policies.

78% is the percentage of Arab families living in ‘hardship’ or ‘in need’ in 2016, according to the Arab Opinion Index survey by the Doha Center for Research and Policy Studies).

20% is the unemployment rate in the Arab world, which is the highest in the entire world — and it has not budged much in decades.

30% is the percentage of youth unemployment, also the highest in the world.

22% is the female labor force participation rate in the Arab world, which is the lowest in the world.

95% is the percentage of start-ups in the Arab world that, five years later, had remained small start-ups or had closed, mainly due to the stranglehold on the economy by larger, older companies that enjoyed monopoly power and were connected with political elites.

32% is the average rate of absenteeism of doctors in public sector clinics in Egypt (32), Morocco (27) and Yemen (37), because they were making more money running their private clinics during their working hours. Similar absenteeism patterns hold for many public school teachers, who make more money tutoring students after class instead of teaching them in class.

0.9% was the real GDP growth rate of the entire Arab region in 2014, and 1.6% and 6.4% were the rate of contraction of Maghreb economies in 2015 and 2014, signaling that most Arab family-level indicators (job opportunities, income, social services, etc.) would continue to decline because economic growth was well below population growth.

56% is the average percent of primary students in school who are not meeting basic learning levels (from 33 percent of children in Bahrain to 91 percent of children in Yemen).

48% is the average percent of lower secondary school students who are not meeting basic learning levels (from 26% in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, to nearly two-thirds of students in Morocco).

40% is a rough estimate of the labor force in Arab countries engaged in the informal sector, without meaningful legal protections, social safety nets, or future prospects.

These are the realities that define perhaps half the total Arab population’s stressful lives, maybe as many as 200 million people, while the other half gets along comfortably. If I were a summiteering leader, and I learned of these realities, I would expect this to be the first item of action on the agenda, because it is how just leaders govern, and also because it may be the most serious security threat they will ever face.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 28 March 2017
Word Count: 851
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

BEIRUT — Just as I left New York City a few days ago to return to Beirut, I read in the New York TimesDan Barry’s powerful obituary of the late Jimmy Breslin, a New York City columnist and book author. Breslin achieved his initial fame in the 1960s, when I was a journalism student in the United States, by writing about the views and conditions of ordinary men and women — the “poor and disenfranchised,” in Barry’s words — who were otherwise mostly ignored by the elite mainstream media.

The “new journalism” that Breslin and many others developed explored how political power impacted the lives of ordinary men and women, especially low- and middle-income citizens. It made it more difficult for corrupt politicians or uncaring corporate leaders to get away with their misdoings. That was half a century ago, and Breslin’s death warranted a page one and full-page obituary in the New York Times because the story was not about the passing of a single scribe; it was and remains about how power is exercised unjustly in societies where, broadly, those who are not rich, white, male, and politically connected suffer throughout most of their lives. Breslin and his many daring colleagues broke through the political screens and the media/information barriers that had relegated stories of the needy and weak in society to marginal and special interest media.

Why do I mention this in my column that is mainly about events in the Arab world and the wider Middle East? I do so because the hidden suffering of millions of Americans half a century ago is replicated today in the lives of hundreds of millions of Arab men, women and children across the Middle East, whose condition, sentiments, and rights are largely off the mass media agendas in our region. The critical and dangerous difference between the United States in the 1960s and the Arab world today is that governments and media organizations linked to the ruling power elite actively work to prevent serious dissent or alternative views from appearing in the public sphere, while configuring political governance systems in a manner that guarantees perpetual dominance of the decision-making mechanisms by the ruling power elite.

I estimate that about 200 million of the 400 million Arabs today live on the edge — in conditions defined by constant, structural pain, helplessness, and vulnerability. They usually lack decent pay, formal contracts, medical insurance, retirement plans, minimum safety and working hours, and other important elements of an advanced, wage labor-based, commercial economy. The 200 million other half of the Arab world live more comfortably, but they do not see that the chronic hopelessness of their poorer compatriots in such large numbers represents a massive source of vulnerability for them also.

The most troubling aspect of this situation is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, sometimes even dangerous, for journalists, poets, creative people, activists, or others to speak out in public and point out the catastrophe that await our region, as hundreds of millions of people who once lived relatively decent middle class lives quietly slip into poverty and desperation. The uprisings of 2010-11 were a massive wake-up call that our governments — and the foreign governments that support them — totally ignored.

Our power elites continue to stifle serious dissent, even when it is simply loyal citizens saying they deserve to live in societies where political and economic decisions — like spending hundreds of billions of dollars to buy advanced weapons — should be made on the basis of wider citizen participation and greater government accountability. Tens of thousands are now in jail in countries like Egypt, Turkey, Iran and others, mainly for their political views, rather than for committing criminal acts. Israel, with the support of the United States, refuses to allow any discussion of peaceful political, economic, social, or sports boycotts and sanctions against Israel because of its repeatedly verified criminal actions in occupied Arab lands. Foreign supporters of such peaceful protest, that was central to the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle against South African Apartheid in which many Jews were pivotal participants, now will be forbidden entry to Israel, and Washington may withdraw funds from international organizations that dare to discuss Israeli policies. Some Arab governments now even prosecute their own citizens for making political criticisms of other Arab governments.

As Arab, Israeli, Turkish, Iranian, Russian, American, British, and other power elites continue to pursue some illegal, irresponsible, exploitative, and uncaring actions, public protest against them has become criminalized, and will become rarer. The story must be told of ordinary men and women in the Middle East who are caught in this terrifying cycle that sees them relinquish their humanity. Many journalists and artists across the Middle East are doing precisely this, but mostly on internet outlets, out of sight of the mainstream public sphere. Jimmy Breslin’s memory should remind us why freedom of expression and press are so important to a wholesome society, whether in America half a century ago or in the Middle East today.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 22 March 2017
Word Count: 832
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

People do not always behave the way we think they ought to behave. We often perceive others as behaving in ways we think is contrary to their self-interest. This seems crazy or foolish. We then accuse these persons of “false consciousness.”

The term itself was invented by Friedrich Engels in the late nineteenth century to explain why workers (or at least some workers) didn’t support workers’ parties at the polls or didn’t support strikes called by a union. The answer for Engels was that, for some reason, these workers misperceived their self-interest, suffering from “false consciousness.”

The remedy was twofold: Those with the approved level of “class consciousness” should seek to educate those whose “class consciousness” was deficient. At the same time, they should pursue as far as possible the political actions that are dictated by class-conscious individuals and organizations.

This mode of remedy had two advantages: First, it justified the legitimation of whatever action “class-conscious” organizations pursued. Secondly, it allowed them to condescend to those accused of “false consciousness.”

The concept of “false consciousness” (although the term is not used today) and the remedy it suggests has its parallel in the widely-shared analysis that is currently made by well-educated professionals about the behavior of persons with less education. Large numbers of workers have been supporting Donald Trump and so-called far rightwing organizations (as have similar groups in other countries supporting figures similar to Trump). Many well-educated opponents of Trump perceive his support by poorer persons as an irrational failure to perceive that supporting Trump is not in their interest.

The remedy is also parallel: They seek to educate the misguided supporters of Trump. They also continue to try to impose their own solution to contemporary political problems, ignoring the weak level of support from the lower strata of the population. Their scarcely-veiled scorn for the misguided poorer strata comforts them in their own actions. They at least are not falsely conscious.

They understand what Trump’s real program is, and understand that it is in no one’s interest apart from that of a small minority of the population, the 1 percent. Paul Krugman expresses this view regularly in his column in The New York Times. This is what Hillary Clinton meant when she made the maladroit statement about half of Trump’s supporters coming from the “basket of deplorables.”

It never aids anyone in analyzing the real world to presume that others do not act in their self-interest. It is far more useful to try to discern how these others envisage for themselves what is their self-interest. Why do workers vote for rightwing (even far rightwing) parties? Why do those whose standard of living has been declining or who live in rural areas with weak infrastructure support a man and a program based on decreased taxes for the wealthy and reduced safety nets for themselves?

If one reads the statements they make on the internet or in answers to queries from news reporters, the answer seems clear if complex. They know they have been doing badly in terms of income and benefits in the regimes led by more traditionally Establishment presidents over the previous twenty years. They assert that they see no reason to presume that continuing the previous policies will improve their situation. They think it is not unreasonable to assume that they might do better with a candidate who promises to govern in a completely different fashion. Is this so implausible?

They believe that the slightly redistributive promises of the previous regimes have not helped them. When they hear these same regimes boast of (and vastly overstate) the social progress they have made in aiding “minorities” to be better integrated into governmental programs or social rights, it is easy to understand they associate redistribution and minorities, and therefore conclude that others are advancing at their expense. This is in my view and that of most opponents of the Trump regime a very incorrect conclusion to draw. But is it a better one to believe that a Hillary Clinton regime would serve them better?

Above all, Trump listened to them, or at least pretended to listen to them. Clinton scorned them. I am not discussing here what kind of social program the left should offer now, or should have offered during the last election. I am merely suggesting that the language about false consciousness is a way of hiding from ourselves the fact that everyone pursues their self-interest, including the “deplorables.” We have no right to condescend. We need to understand. Understanding the motives of others does not mean legitimating their motives or even negotiating with them. It means we should pursue social transformation realistically without blaming others for not supporting us by arguing that they are making errors of judgment.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 15 March 2017
Word Count: 791
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

NEW YORK — The problematic contrast between how Arabs see themselves and how they are generally perceived in the U.S. public sphere of media and politics jolted me again this week, as I followed American mainstream mass media that mostly mentions Arab countries in the context of war, terrorism, refugees, collapsing states, or security threats. I simultaneously read through the results of the new Arab Opinion Index poll published by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies that provided multiple insights into the actual identities, values, and policy views of Arabs across our region. The contrast between the Arab reality and its perception in the U.S. was stark, and troubling.

The latest poll (the fifth since 2011) interviewed 18,310 individuals in 12 Arab countries, with an overall margin of error of +/- 2 percent. Several significant findings deserve greater appreciation in the U.S. and other Western lands that still largely deal with an imagined, rather than the actual, Arab world.

Arab citizens’ attitudes towards the “Islamic State” (ISIS) indicate that religiosity does not play as big a role in people’s actions as often perceived abroad. Eighty-nine percent of respondents opposed ISIS, while just 2 percent had a “very positive” and 3 percent had a “positive to some extent” view of ISIS. This reconfirms the overwhelming rejection of ISIS in Arab societies, though it is also worrying that 5 percent, or 20 million Arabs, had positive views of it.

More interestingly, Arab views of ISIS are not correlated with religiosity, the survey found, as positive and negative views were expressed equally frequently by people who self-identify as “very religious,” “religious” and “not religious.” Other questions on individual religiosity, views of ISIS, and the role of religion in public life indicate that attitudes towards ISIS are defined by political considerations, rather than by religious beliefs.

While the prevalent preference among Americans to deal with ISIS seems to be ongoing military action or promoting “moderate Islam,” just seventeen percent of Arabs suggest military action as their first option. The other first options among the majority of respondents included “ending foreign intervention,” “supporting Arab democratic transition,” “resolving the Palestinian cause,” and ending the Syrian conflict in a manner which meets the aspirations of the Syrian people.”

In other words, the survey analysts said, “In broad terms, the Arab public supports taking a comprehensive set of political, economic, social and military measures to confront terrorism.”

The Arab focus on political factors that exacerbate many of our problems was also reflected in increasing public disenchantment with the policies of Arab and foreign powers towards Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Strong majorities negatively viewed the foreign policies of Russia, Iran, and the United States (from 66 to 75 percent). Arabs widely also saw the United States as the greatest single threat to collective Arab security — 67 percent of Arabs said both the U.S. or Israel pose the greatest threat to collective Arab security (ten percent said Iran). Majorities of Arabs (from 59 to 89 percent) saw Israel, the United States, Russia, Iran, and France as threatening the region’s stability.

It was fascinating to see that while the U.S government and Israel are seeking a mythological alliance of Arabs and Israel against Iran, the survey found that the overwhelming majority of Arabs (86 percent) reject official recognition of Israel by their governments. This reflected widespread perceptions of Israel’s colonialist policies towards the Palestinians and its expansionist threat to other Arab countries. Dr. Mohammad Almasri, Coordinator of the Arab Opinion Index, explained this Arab animosity towards Israel as reflecting political actions, rather than being framed in cultural or religious terms.

Perhaps the most troubling finding of the poll was about the material condition of Arab families, and their views of the biggest problems they faced. The single most pressing problem facing respondents’ country was economic conditions (44 percent), followed by priorities related to governmental performance (20 percent), the stalled democratic transition, deficiencies in public services, and the spread of financial and administrative corruption.

Not surprisingly, the survey also identified widespread and total lack of satisfaction with people’s financial circumstances. Nearly half (49 percent) said their household incomes were sufficient to cover necessary expenditures, but they could not make any savings (designated as living “in hardship”). Another 29 percent of Arab citizens cannot cover their basic family expenses, and thus live “in need.”

In other words, nearly 4 out of 5 Arabs live in precarious family situations where they do not have enough money, savings, or social safety net mechanisms to handle critical human needs in daily life or in an emergency.

These findings cry out for a better grasp of the linkages between this crushing and precarious reality at family level, the sustained autocratic and increasingly incompetent policies of Arab governments that are supported by foreign powers, and the impacts of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war-making politics of regional Arab and non-Arab powers — precisely the biggest issues for ordinary Arabs that almost never appear in the U.S. public sphere.

(The survey results are available on-line at http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/Get/d3e8a41a-661d-44f0-9e02-6d237cb91869)

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 15 March 2017
Word Count: 841
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-

BEIRUT — It is refreshing to read a report once in a while that accurately captures the multiple reasons and mechanisms that lead some young people in the Arab world to pursue a path of radical action, including joining movements like Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda. This is the case with a concise study that was published this week by an Amman-based think tank named WANA (West Asia-North Africa) Institute that was launched a few years ago by Jordan’s Prince El-Hassan bin Talal to promote “authentic” research, analysis, and policy recommendations by the people of this region.

The 32-page study entitled “Trapped between Destructive Choices: Radicalisation Drivers Affecting Youth in Jordan,” (available at www.wanainstitute.org) is based on focus group sessions with 52 youth in Jordan, including 16 Syrian refugees, in four cities that have experienced occasional radicalization and violence in recent years: namely Salt, Ma’an, Irbid, and Rusayfeh. While this is by no means a nationally representative sample, the methodical research is valuable because it succinctly captures the multiple factors in young people’s lives that intersect to drive some men and women to join militant groups and join “the jihad” in Syria, as they explain it.

These many factors in people’s lives are rarely acknowledged in an integrated manner in the masses of research and public policy materials that I have examined from the rest of the world. Especially in the Western world, most analyses of the drivers of radicalisation emphasize one or two factors, often exaggerating the role of religion while downplaying political and socio-economic factors

The simplistic, superficial, deficient, and usually useless analyses that dominate both the Western world and Arab officialdom could be the result of several factors: ignorance, laziness, ideologically-driven bias, or simply that Arab and Western elites simply do not want to see the many causes of radicalisation, because they would find that they are often to blame for some of them.

This WANA Institute report is refreshing and valuable because it clarifies the wider range of factors to blame for radicalization of our youth, and the relationships among those factors. It says that a combination of economic, social, family, psychological, and ideological push and pull factors combine in various combinations, and at various junctures in young people’s lives, to create tensions in those lives, and to drive a relatively small number of them over the edge and into the hands of sophisticated ISIS and other recruiters who are very aware of these dynamics.

Among the important contributors to youth radicalisation, the study found, are economic pressures (especially unemployment and poverty) that leave youth frustrated and powerless to produce change in their own societies. These can combine with deep political grievances about corruption, injustices, marginalization, nepotism, and unequal application of the rule of law, which cause some young men and women to seek alternatives to their vulnerability, humiliation, and helplessness.

These “public” factors can combine with personal, psychological, or family conditions that aggravate a young person’s sense of hopelessness and of “being trapped in a network of lost opportunity and injustice,” which can then trigger a psychological search for meaning and purpose in life. Such a search is usually part of the growing up process of any human being; it becomes lethally urgent when it combines with the negative conditions in some young people’s economic, political, social, and family lives.

So who answers the call for a new life in which marginalized, hopeless young men and women can instantly become powerful and heroic, part of a community of like-minded dynamic actors who wipe away corruption and exploitation, restore dignity and equity to the world, and avenge injustices against their fellow (Sunni) Muslims? ISIS and others who claim to carry out divinely-mandated jihad answer the call.

Many other dimensions of this process have been identified in this and some other research, including gender-, sexuality-, and refugee-related dynamics. The authors of this study — Dr. Neven Bondokji, Kim Wilkinson, and Leen Aghabi — have provided important insights and some fresh verifications related to how we and the world fully understand why relatively few people in our societies become radicalised and join groups that engage in terrorism and savagery in a sustained manner.

The report also includes intriguing policy recommendations, and valuable suggestions for further research that are both firmly anchored in the realities of our societies’ dynamics at government, economic, social, psychological, and family levels — rather than the fantasy analyses we often get from foreign quarters or most of our own Arab political elites who still refuse to grasp why and how terrorists suddenly emerged from our own homes and schools in recent decades.

Rami G. Khouri is a senior fellow at the American University of Beirut and the Harvard Kennedy School, and can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

—————-
Released: 08 March 2017
Word Count: 764
—————-

For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
—————-