Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Azmi Bisharah on Al-Jazeera. I watched `Azmi Bisharah on AlJazeera TV. I was rather disappointed. He made good criticisms of US and Israel but he went too far in his praise of the Qatari ruling dynasty. He also exaggerated the extent to which the US allows its puppets and clients room for maneuver. Let us face it: If the US did not really want the Doha conference to proceed, it would have been able to pressure Qatar to not hold it. Let us not forget that Doha saved the Hariri camp in some respect. I also did not like `Azmi's (odd) praise for Fu'ad Sanyurah. He said that Sanyurah does not use sectarian language. Now this got me thinking: it reminds me of some Nazis in the Nuremberg trial who told the court that they never spoke in anti-Semitic language. In fact, Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, would always assert in his books and in interviews that he never said nasty things about the Jewish people. But it did not matter because he was part of the Nazi regime. Similarly, it does not really matter whether Sanyruah uses or does not use blatantly sectarian language, because he sat atop one of the most sectarian governments since the sinister regime of Amin Gemayyel. Sanyurah took sectarian mobilization to a new level when he invited the Sunni Mufti to the Serail to pray with him: no prime minister ever engaged in that kind of religio-sectarian demagoguery before. Sanyurah should not be merely judged on which words he uses: he should be judged on the Hariri movement to which he belongs. Furthermore, sectarian language is often spoken in codes in Lebanon. So when Sanyurah or his advisers or his ministers speak about "the humiliation of Beirut" the audience knows what they are referring to.