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Are Christian Arabs an endangered species?

bit.ly/16rzkZT

National Times, 22 October 2013

Are Christian Arabs an endangered species?

From the onset of the Arab Spring in Syria, I was advocating a third way: unarmed dialogue, rather than the status quo advocated by the pro-Assad rallies or the forced regime change advocated by the armed rebels.

The more I listened to stories from those living in Syria, the more I suspected that the Arab Spring foliage was hiding some foreign seeds and foreign weeds. There was a disconnect between the factual testimonies and the fictitious tale. Many minorities, especially Christians, feared that a crude form of democracy would prevail: majority rules with no constitutional protection for the most vulnerable citizens.

But it was an uphill battle for me to find media space to question the Arab Spring goodies and baddies. “Sorry, we have no space” became shorthand for “sorry, we have no space for counter narratives”. If the Christians were declared an “endangered species” of animal, rather than the indigenous people, there would have been greater global outrage.

After all, the fishing bait that I was feeding to the media may have been bitter to swallow and my fishing hook was upside down in the shape of a question mark.

More than a decade after George W Bush’s divisive ultimatum, “Either you are with us with us, or you are with the terrorists”, it appeared that some still chose to watch a colour television in black and white.

Then I happened to be grounded at the airport. My plane had “something missing from its checklist” and could not take off. As I gazed out of the plane’s window, I had an epiphany that something else was grounded – me. After more than 20 years with more than 500 published opinion pieces, why was I still grounded at the same intersection?

A former editor once sniggered: “When will you stop beating the same racism drum?”
I replied: “When you stop beating the racist drum. When you stop, I stop.”

I looked at the wings of the plane and thought about the wings of my advocacy. Those who walked with me in the 1991 Gulf War had moved on. Those who walked with me in the 2001 War on Terror had moved on.

Many became disillusioned with this unpaid work. Some were fed up with being “fire extinguishers” that were rolled out every time Arabs behaved badly. Others became armchair advocates for the advocates, tweeting and emailing from their “clearing house” of articles by advocates. Many pursued creative paths by writing plays, writing poetry, writing musicals, writing PhDs or writing speeches.

I understood them, but still stood there. The perils of criticising fellow Christians when they are “Islamophobic” and criticising fellow Arabs when they are “anti-Semitic” come at a personal price.

But with the rise of so-called “Christianophobia” in Muslim majority countries, as warned by peace-activist Mother Agnes Mariam and British historian Rupert Shortt, it will be inspiring to see the rise of Muslim advocates defending the Christian “endangered species”. Just as many of those speaking out against Islamophobia were fellow Christians.

For too long, some sections of our media treated Arabs as a wild species to be contained and scrutinised in a test tube. But the irony was that some of us advocates were treating media editors like a school of fish without realising it. I wanted to inhabit their habitat and understand their feeding patterns so I could offer the right bait to catch the coveted “column”. But their feeding habits kept changing.

In the shadows of the Arab revolutions, there was an advocacy evolution. In the main streams of yesteryear, the bait had to be a proven “head” of a proven organisation with proven representation. But with global warming, the media mountains were melting and little islands were breaking away and sinking. The fish were migrating. They were more interested in immediacy than legitimacy.

Their food was literally “online” and they could feed from anywhere. As a free floater, my catch could no longer be fetched by casting one rod to one fish at a time. I needed to cast my net out wide.

After staring at each other through the barrel of the test tube for too long, editors and writers learnt that we swam the same turbulent ocean like little dots on a global page. We never said something so simple. “Let’s have a coffee” was code for let’s have a conversation. After all, coffee and conversation start with C which is an open circle, while Other starts with O which is a ‘closed circle.’

Joseph Wakim is the founder of the Australian Arabic Council and a former multicultural affairs commissioner. This is an edited excerpt from his forthcoming book Sorry we have no space to be released this month.

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Christian Minorities an endangered species

http://bit.ly/12UGBmd

9 July 2013
ABC The Drum
CHRISTIAN MINORITIES AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Emerging democracies in the ‘Arab Spring’ may have claimed an innocent casualty: Christian minorities.

If the crudest consequence of elections is ‘majority rules’, then minorities need protection. Westerners who laud the ‘Arab Spring’ cannot have it both ways, waving the carrot of democracy with one hand while waving a big stick with the other hand if Islamic values prevail. While a constitution may enshrine safeguards, this depends on who constitutes the majority.

As protestor Dalia Youssef declared from Tahrir Square after the recent en masse toppling of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, “the voice of the majority of people in any country is democracy.”

The consequences of ‘majority rules’ haunts the original Middle East Christians since the crucifixion itself. When Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked the assembled masses to choose between two prisoners, the majority ruled that Barabbas be released and Jesus be crucified. Despite the injustice and the manipulations, the man on the throne merely washed his hands and turned away. The besieged Christians of the Middle East fear that this history may be repeating itself.

Those who live in majority Muslim nations are facing unprecedented fear and exodus as their churches and clergy are attacked. As a Maronite Catholic who was born in Lebanon, it astounds me that the birthplace of Christianity and the indigenous descendants of the first Christians are not afforded better protection, compared with Saudi Arabia and Israel. I have even been asked “are there still Christians in the Middle East?” It would be a tragedy if this was no longer an ignorant question but a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The statistics are staggering: A century ago, one in five Arabs were Christian, whereas now they number one in 20.

The sectarian war in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion has halved the Christian population to less than 400,000.

In October 2006, Orthodox priest Fr Boulos Iskander was kidnapped, held to ransom, then beheaded in Mosul. Another 17 priests and 2 bishops have been kidnapped since then. The terror has culminated in the Al Qaeda-linked attack of Our Lady of Salvation Chaldean Catholic Church in Karrada in November 2010, killing more than 50 parishioners and two priests during a Sunday sermon. Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael declared that this attack was “an attempt to force Iraqi Christians to leave Iraq and to empty Iraq of Christians.”

In Egypt, Al Qiddissine (Two Saints) Coptic Church in Alexandria was attacked by suicide bombers as parishioners were leaving the midnight mass on January 1, 2011, killing 23 people. Another 13 Copts were killed in violent clashes after Shahedin Church was burnt south of Cairo in March 2011.
On September 30, 2011, the dome and bell of St George Coptic Church in Edfu were burnt to the ground. Hence, the 8 million Coptic Christians in Egypt have a litany of reasons to feel more vulnerable than ever in their own homeland.

The anti-Christian embers spread across the border to Libya, where a Coptic church was bombed near Misrata on December 30, 2012. Another Coptic church was attacked by armed Muslim militants in Benghazi on 28 February 2013.

In Syria, over 300,000 Christians have already fled in fear as foreign jihadists terrorise the ‘infidels’ in pursuit of a Salafist state. Saudi sheiks subsidise these salafists even though this US-ally has no churches to bomb as they are prohibited.

On April 22, 2013, two Orthodox bishops were kidnapped by armed men from Kafr Dael, a rebel-controlled area in Syria. Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church and Bishop Boulos Yazigi, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, remain missing. During her first visit to Australia last October, peace activist Mother Agnes Mariam declared that that the foreign infiltration of Syria harbors a “a hidden will to empty the Middle East of its Christian presence.” The sectarian strife is now spilling over from Syria into Lebanon, where Christians are already a shrinking minority of about 34 per cent compared with the last census in 1932 when they constituted half the population.

In his timely book ‘Christianophobia’, British journalist Rupert Shortt highlighted the plight of Christian minorities in seven Muslim-majority countries. He warns that the eradication of Christians from their biblical heartland may be a ‘blind spot’ for those who are distracted by the ‘Arab Spring.’ He posits that their persecution is magnified by anti-Americanism and the false belief that Christianity is a ‘Western creed’

Indeed, Christian minorities may have become scapegoats and held to ransom for the ‘crusade’ declared by US president George W Bush during the ‘war on terror.’ Many of the anti-Christian attacks in Arab lands have been ‘justified’ as revenge for anti-Muslim attacks by Christians in the West, such as Florida pastor Terry Jones who burnt the Koran in 2011.

It is the height of arrogance to laud Arab societies for ‘importing’ western ideologies of democracy, when in fact the new generation of Arabs have their own aspirations and ideologies. Ironically, it is the importing of ideologies of theocracy from US-allied Gulf states that has hijacked the pro-democracy uprisings, but rarely registered on the Western radar. Indeed, it is these ideologies of sectarian supremacy, rather than Islam or Muslims per se, that pose the biggest threat of extinction to the indigenous Christians.

If the Christian Arabs were an endangered species of whales, there would be collective outrage, rescue efforts and intervention by the International Court of Justice.

Joseph established the Streetwork Project for exploited children in Adelaide in 1986, was appointed Victorian Multicultural Affairs Commissioner in 1991, and founded the Australian Arabic Council in 1992.

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http://bit.ly/LPcHWO
27 June 2012

Arab Spring model not a Syrian reality
Published in The Drum, ABC On Line, 28 June 2012

Foreign Minister Bob Carr has adopted a pre-emptive and partisan position on the Syrian situation.

This may not reflect the will of the majority of Syrian citizens, nor the good will of the UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan, nor indeed the majority of Australian citizens of Syrian descent.
Rather than being peacemakers in a polarized situation, Carr has cornered Australia into a position of a provocateur.

After the al Houla infanticide on May 29, he jumped the gun and expelled the Syrian diplomats, long before the UN investigated the facts. This week, he has ramped up the anti-Syrian sanctions, which are largely tokenistic given the minimal trade between the two countries.

He challenges Russian president Vladimir Putin to put ‘pressure on Assad to walk off the stage’. Knowing that Russia supplies arms to Syria, why not also put pressure on the US-Saudi-Qatar axis to stop supplying arms to the fractured opposition groups? This way, his efforts to demilitarise the conflict and help bring the parties to the UN negotiating table can be taken more seriously.

On March 21, 2001, the Syrian revolution was heralded with graffiti by unarmed teenagers in Dara’a, ‘the people want the regime to fall’, a copycat mantra inspired by the Arab Spring in North Africa. This ember that drifted into Syria was swiftly snuffed by the local authoritarian guard and the youth were imprisoned. The Syrian president squandered a historic opportunity to listen to the grievances of these sons of Syria. He could have orchestrated a political evolution instead of a bloody revolution. He could have morally disarmed the opposition, both exiled and resident.

President Assad misread all the writing on the wall, and believed that he was immune from this social tsunami sweeping across the Arab region. Two months before this trigger, he declared that ‘Syria is stable’ because he was ‘very closely linked to the beliefs of the people’. In his March 30 speech to parliament, he could have opened serious dialogue to harness the angst rather than peddling conspiracy theories. Instead, he wrote off dissenting voices as terrorists which has ironically become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By his own admission, ‘Syria is geographically and politically in the middle of the Middle East’, sharing borders with Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Israel, so he should have been ultra cautious about Syria’s vulnerability.

The unarmed teenage message has been usurped by the militant Syrian National Council (SNC), who make the teenagers look like kittens.

Today, even the voices of the SNC have been hijacked by the Salafist Sheikhs proclaiming Fatwas and jihads against all the pro-Assad infidels. The jihadists do not take man-made orders from the SNC in Istanbul. They take divine orders direct from Saudi Arabia.

Their rants are viral on YouTube and they make the fractured SNC sound like pussy cats in a lion’s den. The neat Arab Spring template of goodies and baddies fails to fit the reality on the ground in Syria.

On one hand, Assad is sanctioned for failing to exercise restraint against the armed opposition groups.

On the other hand, his citizens criticise him for failing to defend them against the invading jihadists.

It is exactly one year since Sheikh Adnan Arour declared that ‘for those [Alawites] who violated all that is sacred, by Allah the Great, we shall mince them in meat grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs’.

Similarly Sheikh Muhammad al Zughbey proclaimed that ‘your jihad against this infidel criminal and his people is a religious duty’ and that Alawites are ‘more infidel than the Jews and Christians’. It is no surprise that original teenage slogan has been replaced with a sectarian one ‘Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave’.

The Arab adage ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ creates bizarre bed fellows. Last May, we celebrated when the Al Qaeda leader was buried at sea, yet now we collaborate with them as they embark upon ethnic cleansing.

The Salafists taint the reputation of the Sunni ‘guardians’ in Saudi Arabia, with their threats of hell for Assad loyalists and promises of a (promiscuous) paradise for martyrs.

With the Fatwas ‘on tap’ making mockery of his country, Sheikh Ali al-Hikmi of the Saudi Council of
Senior Scholars deployed an anti-ballistic missile with his counter-fatwa forbidding all jihad in Syria.
On February 7, Dr Yusuf al Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, issued another ‘damage control’ fatwa, co-signed by 107 other Muslim scholars, declaring the ‘need to protect the ethnic and religious minorities which have lived for more than a thousand years as part of the Syrian people’.

Ironically, the more the Salafists terrorise Syria, the more the Syrians cling to Bashar al Assad as their saviour, which feeds directly into the Salafist claim that these infidels worship Assad above Allah.
However, these jihadist calls continue to echo in Australia through the social media with impunity and their followers have sought to terrorise Australian Alawis with petrol bombs, vilifying graffiti and death threats. The targeted citizens believe that Mr Carr’s anti-Assad stance has validated and unleashed the anti-Alawi sentiments, which he needs to untangle and condemn.

There is nothing civil about the war in Syria – it is a proxy war to protect Israel from a nuclear Iran. This was confirmed when Israel’s defence minister Ehud Barak declared that toppling Assad ‘will be a major blow to the radical axis [Iran] … It’s the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world … and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza’.

President Assad should have treated the writing on the wall as a sectarian inscribed prophecy, not as secular erasable graffiti. Even if another UN monitored election voted Assad back into presidency. Even if a UN supervised political negotiation is brokered, where the exiled opposition can table their demands, many of which have already been met. His enemies have already written the next chapter of history, where he has been written off.

It is the height of arrogance to assume that we know the will of Syrian citizens, who are increasingly demanding stability over democracy. We cannot be hell bent on regime change and peace brokers at the same time.

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This isn’t a civil war

http://newmatilda.com/2012/06/14/this-isnt-a-civil-war

Published in New Matilda, 14 June 2012

This Isn’t A Civil War

UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous refers to the “civil war” in Syria, but the Assad government insists it’s “an armed conflict to uproot terrorism”. I know from the “civil war” in my birthplace Lebanon that there was nothing civil about it. The conflict was militarised by a cocktail of foreign influences peddling their own agendas. Syria is less like Libya and becoming more like war-time Lebanon.

When Foreign Minister Bob Carr expelled Syria’s diplomats from Canberra on 29 May, he was singing his small solo in a well orchestrated international chorus demanding foreign intervention in Syria. The US squarely blamed the Syrian government for the al-Houla atrocity, even before it was revealed that fewer than 20 deaths resulted from shelling.

After the massacre at Mazraat al-Qubair, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton reiterated her alternative to the Annan peace plan in her call for a “post Assad transition strategy, including Assad’s full transfer of power … [to a] fully representative and inclusive interim government which leads to free and fair elections, a ceasefire to be observed by all”. Contrast this with the UN Observer Mission heads who were cautious in criticising “everyone with a gun”.

Despite the presence of al Qaeda terrorists, Libyan rebels and trained mercenaries in Syria, the US alliance was adamant that only the Syrian government would have been capable committing or commissioning the massacre. Regardless of serious claims that these atrocities were engineered to incriminate the Assad government, Clinton is insistent: The international community cannot sit idly by, and we won’t.

Noting the US position on the pro-democracy movements in other Arab states such as Yemen and occupied Palestine, cynicism towards US compassion for Arab human rights is understandable.
The US “transition strategy” is a euphemism for unauthorised military intervention. It abandons UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan’s six point peace plan, which calls for a “Syrian-led political process” and “cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties”, not only by the Syrian government, but by “the opposition and all relevant elements”.

These elements are not only Russia and Iran, who supply arms to Syria, but also the US, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Turkey, Libya, Israel and al Qaeda who aid and abet the armed opposition groups.
The US has provided “non lethal assistance” and “communications equipment” alongside its oil-rich sheikdom allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar who committed $100 million of weapons and cash after the Syrian National Council “repeatedly called for the arming of the Free Syrian Army”.

Like the Syrian National Council who vowed “we will never sit and talk [with] Butcher Bashar”, this fits neatly into the US “transition strategy” which opposes negotiation and supports militarisation. This effectively sabotages the doomed Annan plan, as US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice sings propagates the case for acting outside the UN Security Council’s authority once again.
Hence the recent 48 hour ultimatum to abandon the ceasefire by the Free Syrian Army’s Colonel Qassim Saadeddine was a cynical stunt. The rebels threaten civil war if the Syrian army dishonors the ceasefire they themselves have never kept.

Since the Annan ceasefire was declared on 10 April, overall casualties have decreased by 36 percent, but risen for Syrian government personnel and army troops with human rights groups estimating over 1000 Syrian soldiers killed since the theoretical ceasefire.

Clinton’s rhetoric about “free and fair elections” turns a blind eye to the 7 May Syrian elections which reformed the constitution to allow for political pluralism. 7200 candidates, including 710 women, competed for 250 seats across 15 electoral constituencies. She ignores the citizens threatened by armed opposition groups who demanded that the elections be boycotted.

The Free Syrian Army prefers a NATO-style intervention (UNSC resolution 1973) with “all necessary means” and a “no fly zone”, but the US knows that the armed opposition groups are “weak and divided”, with no territorial base, and prefers the Yemeni model; a stable and autocratic regime to control the diverse masses.
Replacing Assad with a puppet would suit the agenda of their their Saudi-Israeli sponsors, who both fear a nuclear Shi’te Iran. This wrongly assumes that Assad is the obstacle to peace, rather than the Baath party that preceded and propped him up.

The most plausible explanation for the US led call for military intervention on humanitarian grounds comes from former US Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin. In his analysis, the US led alliance is about targeting Iran to protect Israel.

Damascus is merely the bridge and missing link between Tehran and Tel Aviv. As Israel fears losing its nuclear monopoly, toppling Assad would mean that “Iran would no longer have a Mediterranean foothold from which to threaten Israel”.

This was confirmed when Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak recently declared that toppling Assad “will be a major blow to the radical axis [Iran] … It’s the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world … and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza”.

Hence threats of looming foreign military intervention are hollow. With or without the Security Council’s blessing, proxy wars hijacked the unarmed pro-democracy movement long ago.

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Lesson in Sage lines borrowed by Kennedy


http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/lesson-in-sage-lines-borrowed-by-kennedy-20111228-1pcvm.html

Lesson in sage lines borrowed by Kennedy
December 29, 2011

Sydney Morning Herald

A Lebanese-American poet wrote wise words for Arab states, writes Joseph Wakim.

‘A sk not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

These words were made famous by United States President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech. He should have said, ”In the words of Kahlil Gibran … ”, referring to the Lebanese-American poet and artist who lived from 1883 to 1931.

But Gibran never intended these words to be addressed by a president to his people. He was writing an open letter, in Arabic, to Lebanese parliamentarians in 1925, during the fall of the Ottoman Empire. His letter was titled ”The New Frontier”, which gives a completely different meaning and context. ”Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?” he wrote. ”If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.”

JFK even used the new frontier idea in his convention acceptance speech, a few months earlier, and later made it a theme of his administration, saying: ”We stand today on the edge of a new frontier – the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.”

As we reflect on the year of the Arab Spring, Gibran’s words apply to aspiring Arab leaders today in precisely the way he intended nearly a century ago.

Gibran’s letter could pertain easily to this year’s bloody revolutions that have been led by the younger generation and claimed many martyrs. He wrote: ”In the fields of the Middle East, which has been a large burial ground, stand the youth of Spring calling the occupants of the sepulchres to rise and march toward the new frontiers … There is on the horizon of the Middle East a new awakening; it is growing and expanding.”

The literary genius, famous for his timeless masterpiece The Prophet, was ironically prophetic about the young majority expelling the old guard, also writing: ”In the Middle East, there are two processions: one procession is of old people waling with bent backs, supported with bent canes … the other is a procession of young men, running as if on winged feet.”

This accurately depicts the generational divide of the Arab Spring. The youth who have led the uprisings are the majority of the citizens. In the region, 63 per cent of the population is under 29, and 30 per cent is between the ages of 15 and 29. As for their rulers and regimes, many like Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Gaddafi were not their parent’s generation, but their grandparent’s generation.

One of the resonating legacies of Gibran was a spiritual revolution for universal human rights to emancipate women, build bridges of understanding between religions, close the gap between rich and poor and curb all forms of exclusivism. Such themes were manifest in the placards of the protesters who sought their rights.

Gibran was a Christian who embraced Islam, an easterner who lived in the West, and therefore a living example of the spiritual revolutionary. With elections in Tunisia and Egypt, the candidates are being asked what they can do for their country.

This is a great time to focus on the visions of this great revolutionary of the Arab world. Syrian American film producer Malek Akkad, son of the late Moustapha Akkad, is preparing for the world’s first Hollywood movie about Gibran.

By coincidence, Lebanese Australian filmmaker Glen Kalem is also ready to produce the world’s first feature length documentary on Gibran, after 14 years of retracing his footsteps across four continents.

Gibran’s spiritual revolution is deeply rooted in the Arab culture and transcends the three monotheistic faiths, as he promotes the unity of being. The concept of a united unarmed uprising cannot be dismissed as Arab jealousy of modern Western democracies.

The armed tribal battles in Arab history have overshadowed the centuries of mass movements and sacrificial martyrs for human rights, long before Facebook aided protests.

The visions of Gibran have inspired a bastion of democracy and the Arab Spring. But his spiritual revolution grew from inner peace. If the newly elected Arab leaders emerge as conciliatory rather than power hungry, then Gibran’s message would have been heard: ”The wisdom of the many is your shield against tyranny. For when we turn to one another for counsel we reduce the number of our enemies.”

If JFK was inspired by Gibran for his successful political platform 50 years ago, surely we can all gain insights from Gibran by reading ”The New Frontier”. Elections and democracy do not necessarily lead to peace and rights.