Arab League impotence continues & What a mess the Arab world is in
Qatar gambled on supporting the Muslim Brotherhood to give substance to its ambition to rival and possibly outbid Saudi Arabia in terms of regional and international influence, and lost.
Saudi Arabia is gambling on supporting former General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt (where the next Arab League Summit is to be held) to help keep change away from its own doorstep. Only the future will tell us if Saudi Arabia backed the wrong horse, too.
My thoughts about the Arab League’s apparent willingness to allow the slaughter and destruction in Syria go on and on and on cannot be expressed in printable words.
As I write I find myself wondering if future historians – I mean honest historians – will conclude that George Habash was right and Arafat was wrong. About what?
Habash was the founder and leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) until ill health forced him to resign in 2000. Until the Arab defeat and humiliation of June 1967, he was a supporter of Egypt’s President Nasser and looked to him to lead the struggle to liberate Palestine, all of it. After the Six Days War Habash changed his mind. He said to Arafat (in a coffee shop in Damascus) that the key to liberating Palestine was the overthrow of the corrupt and impotent regimes of the then existing Arab Order and that PLO should lead the revolution to make it happen. Habash argued that it could happen because the Palestinian cause was alive and well in the hearts and minds of the Arab masses everywhere and more and more Arabs were becoming aware that their regimes had betrayed the cause.
Arafat said that would be a wrong policy and that under his leadership the PLO would never interfere in the internal affairs of Arab states.
For the record… The Israeli and American version of history which asserts that Arafat sought to overthrow King Hussein and take over Jordan in Black September 1970 is nonsense. As I documented in detail in my book Arafat -Terrorist or Peacemaker?, Arafat was working WITH Hussein to try to prevent Habash’s PFLP and other Palestinian fringe groups provoking a confrontation with the Jordanian army. This was confirmed to me by King Hussein himself.
Israel and America would not have been able to misrepresent what happened if Arafat had used Fatah’s superior forces to disarm the PFLP and crush it if necessary. I asked him why he did not do so. He said that if he had triggered a Palestinian civil war, Israeli and other agents would have used it as a cover to assassinate many Fatah and other Palestinian leaders. That made sense to me.
The whole story about what really happened and why in Jordan in September 1970 (I was there for the BBC’s Panorama programme) includes the fact that King Hussein did not want to move against the PLO. So why did he?
Some years later I got the truth during a remarkably frank, private conversation with him. I said that in September 1970 an excellent source (actually it was the British ambassador) told me that His Majesty only gave his generals the order to move against the PLO after some of them, led by his uncle and in response to an instruction from Henry Kissinger, had called on him at the palace and said, “If you don’t give us the order to go, we’ll lock you in the toilet and get on with it.”
I asked Hussein if that was true. He smiled sadly, very sadly, and said, “It wasn’t the toilet they were going to lock me in.”
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Rehmat:
March 29th, 2014 at 1:43 am
Arab League like the United Nations, is a showcase of western imperialism.
I never expected anything good coming out of the 25th charade – which consumed most of its time arguing over Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. However, two thing really surprised me. The 21-member body saluted the Lebanese Islamic Resistance Hizbullah in foiling Israeli aggressions in Lebanon and Syria. It also, on a second thought, canceled its invitation to the US-funded Syrian National Coalition (SNC) to represent Syria at the summit.
http://rehmat1.com/2014/03/27/arab-summit-2014-salutes-hizbullah/
Haitham Sabbah:
March 29th, 2014 at 10:14 am
Trust me, in the Arab world, since very very long, Arab League means nothing to Arab. No body knows when/where/what/why it exist or doing, except “some” of the people forced to take alternative roads (far from the meeting) in the country where it is held, to discover later that there was a Arab League meeting!!!
If there wasn’t corporate media, no one would have heard of it
Fatimetou:
March 29th, 2014 at 6:13 pm
Israel draws its strength from the weakness of his opponent in particular of their corruption. The only opponents that this rogue state respects are Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah because these two organizations are inscrutable.