All Arabs and Muslims are bound to feel anger, sorrow and discomfort when they witness the devastation caused by the brutal war against the Iraqi people. Children are being killed, families left homeless and hungry and men detained for obscure reasons — all by American and British soldiers coming from democratic countries. Suspicious of everyone and every move, the soldiers point their guns at whomever they encounter, frisk them, and if they are lucky, the victims are allowed to go.

We read and hear about the crimes committed during the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, about the horses of his soldiers storming and desecrating Al-Azhar and going about behaving as they wished and taking the law into their own hands. We have also read of how British troops raided an Egyptian village in search of someone who had allegedly fired at them. They caught the man and hanged him in front of the terrified villagers. The judge who tried him — a Mr. Boutros — later had a grandson who would become secretary-general of the United Nations.

We Arabs were naive and simple-minded and believed that such acts had been consigned to history and would never be repeated — until we were jolted back to reality by the pictures of horror coming out of Iraq.

We remember the brave and proud Libyan national hero, Omar Al-Mukhtar, who stood proudly before the gallows, waiting to be hanged by Italian colonial forces. Many of his fellow mujahideen also met the same fate.

I remember when I was a student at the Shariah College in Madinah how we used to ask our Algerian colleagues why they had left their country. They said it was the French who had forced them to leave and seek education elsewhere because there was no place for them to study at home. I still remember many of them, some of whom played for the city’s leading football clubs.

I thought the era of colonization had ended and with it the days of brutality, highhandedness and arrogance. Four decades later and with my hair turning gray, I am faced with yet another brutal example of colonialism. The war against the Iraqi people — who have suffered untold misery at the hands of their rulers and who now suffer similar miseries from those seeking to control the country’s resources — reminds us of that tragic past. The only difference is that the new colonialists have Apache helicopters and cluster bombs that they use on the very people they claim they have come to liberate.

Arab News From the Local Press 9 April 2003