America has high hopes for the Middle East, and “Hi” will tell young Arabs about them.
Its uninspired name notwithstanding, “Hi” is a sprightly new magazine, with a $4 million annual budget, published in Arabic and funded by the State Department, aimed at reaching Arabs aged 18 to 35 in well over a dozen Arab countries. The glossy, full-color 72-page monthly — which came out with its premiere issue in July — is a “lifestyle magazine” that “doesn’t touch politics,” since, according to Christopher W. Ross, often identified as America’s ambassador to the “Arab street,” it is “in a very subtle way, a vehicle for American values.”
A publication funded by the State Department, edited in the American capital, and produced by the Magazine Group, a Washington-based company that puts out innocuous publications, including Concrete Masonry, the magazine of the National Concrete Masonry Association, is hardly a challenge to Arab culture and the established order.
But the United States does indeed have high hopes for the Middle East. It wants to promote the “spread of democracy and free markets” there through an ambitious though vaguely defined project whose terminus is the transformation of the Arab states into vibrant little Californias, sans election recalls, of course.
In a major speech to the National Association of Black journalists in Dallas last week, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called the development of freedom in the Arab world “the security challenge and the moral mission of our time,” and asked American allies to commit themselves to helping Middle Easterners “who live under oppressive and often corrupt governments.” Later, in an op-ed article in the Washington Post, she followed up on that theme by saying that the administration intends to work with prominent figures in the region who “seek progress on tolerance and prosperity.” She added that “patience and perseverance will be required,” and the long-range commitment will not be “primarily military,” but diplomatic, economic and cultural.
What a relief!
But, folks, do we, not just in the Arab world but elsewhere in the Third World, trust the United States’ professed altruism here, the very US that for the last half century had installed and then underwritten the survival of two-bit dictators all the way from Iran to Chile, Nicaragua to Vietnam, the Congo to Uruguay? Or trust an administration that spends $4 billion a month to bring down a regime and create freedom in Iraq, but does not have the spine to bring down a wall-of-hate and create independence in Palestine?
Without America’s military, economic and diplomatic support, Israel could not and would not have gotten away with what it has been able to get away with since 1967: the settlements, the checkpoints, the curfews, the assassinations, the demolitions, and the pauperization of a whole community of people who have lived under the rule of the gun, in the last colonial outpost in modern history, for the last 35 years.
You can ooh and aah over President Bush’s pledge to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in 2005, and see as benign Washington’s plan to work with Arabs in order to bring democracy, freedom and prosperity to their world. But I for one hold a different view: The whole enterprise perfectly illustrates the paternalism of a big power, whose intentions in our region do not pass the smell test. For Arabs, you see, the touchstone is Palestine.
Condoleezza Rice may have hit the nail on the head, albeit unwittingly, in the speech she delivered to her fellow African Americans in Dallas last week when she reminded them that it is condescending to say that Arabs, presumably including Palestinian Arabs, are not ready for freedom. “The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham,” she said, “and it is wrong in 2003.” She bemoaned the fact that so many Palestinians choose to become suicide bombers instead of pursuing “a university education, a career or family.” And finally: “We need to address the source of the problem.”
I hear you, Condi. I hear you loud and clear. So let’s go for it, and then we’ll talk turkey about democracy and free markets in the Arab world.
- Arab News Opinion 14 August 2003
