Arabism, Islamism, and Iranian Hegemony
The so-called Arab Spring was supposed to topple the Arab post-colonial regimes and replace them with regimes adapted to the reality of the 21st century, regimes with a social appeal, with an Arab and Islamic identity, and definitely anti-Western.MEMRI: Stalingrad Of The Arabs
This transformation did not occur. Instead, Arab regimes were confronted with two main threats: radical Islam and Iranian hegemony. In the struggle against Islamic radicalism, some Arab regimes did not hesitate to call for assistance from foreign powers (Russia, China, or the United States) which had no colonial past in the area. Some even turned to former colonial powers such as France and the UK in order to survive the surging wave of radical Islam.
Some went as far as calling for neighboring Arab powers (Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain) and peripheral powers in the Middle East (Turkey and Iran) to assist them in blocking the assault on their defenses by Islamic radicals associated with al- Qaeda, the Islamic State (Daesh) and the Muslim Brotherhood.
A decade later, Libya is the only Arab country whose regime did not survive. It transformed into a failed state, divided between rival factions, and whose south is controlled mainly by radical Islamists.
Libya is not the only failed state. Lebanon also descended into that status for different reasons and joined the dubious club. It is struggling to survive as a nation.
The main reasons for Libya’s disintegration are the struggle between its two main geographical divisions – Tripolitania and Cyrenaica – over the control of the state, and a struggle between competing tribes in which foreign powers try to impose their influence. Lebanon, on the other hand, is the victim of its ill-born confessional and sectarian body politic mixed with corruption, mismanagement, and the inability to confront external state subversion.
The Islamic State (Daesh) as a state was defeated by a multinational coalition which included archenemies and sworn rivals such as Iran, the United States, and Turkey. However, Daesh is still present in the region, fed and nurtured by the historical schism between Sunnis and Shiites. This applies in particular to Syria and Iraq, where Daesh still enjoys a safe haven among the Sunni population and the previous political elite who refuse to surrender to being ruled by Shiite/Iranian-oriented regimes.
In deep correlation with the Sunni reaction to the change of regime in Iraq that was the catalyst to creating Daesh, the Arab world sought the dismantling of the Muslim Brotherhood, the champions of political Islam. The Brotherhood was considered a dominant force, even regarded by the Obama administration as worthy of inheriting vacillating and corrupt Arab regimes, together with fringe radical Sunni movements linked to al-Qaeda or to Daesh. The Arab regimes rose to overcome the radical Islamic wave and maintain their traditional rule except for the U.S.-imposed regime in Iraq and the disintegration of Libya under the strike forces led by the West and mainly by France.
These factions were able to flourish to a certain extent, as parasites on a host, for years in Lebanon. Not only did the PLO (Arafat's Fatah) have its own "state within a state" in Lebanon, but so did the other principal Palestinian factions such as the PFLP and DFLP, funded by regimes like Qaddafi's Libya, have their own mini-entities with armies, propaganda outlets, and diplomatic offices. Israel failed to achieve its ambitious goals to remake Lebanon, but the PLO would mostly move on as part of a process that would in the end allow it to return to Palestinian territory as part of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993. The great return was not in spite of Israel; it was because of Israel.PMW: Why is Germany still funding the PA and PLO?
There are still Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and, of course, Palestinian fighters in them, but summer 1982 would be the end of one phase and the beginning of another. After having been defeated by King Hussein in Jordan in Black September 1970, the PLO had recovered in Beirut and increasingly made it their own. Initially hesitant to get involved in internal Lebanese issues, such is the Palestinian narrative, that would change in time. In 1978 Arafat had reviewed his forces during a four-hour military parade held in Beirut's municipal sports stadium to celebrate the PLO's 13th anniversary. Beirut became the "Palestinian Hanoi" because Lebanon was weak and could not prevent it, according to PLO leader Shafiq Al-Hout. It should have been Damascus but the Assad regime was not going to give the Palestinians "the decision-making power of war and peace."[4]
Arafat's departure from Beirut in August 1982 is a convenient segue from the Palestinian phase of Lebanon's conflicts to what would eventually become its Syrian/Iranian/Hezbollah phase. The date is more symbolic than anything else, Arafat attempted to re-establish himself in the Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli in 1983[5] and in 1984 pro-Syrian Shia militiamen fought against pro-Arafat PLO fighters in the brutal, so-called "War of the Camps."[6] Unlike the 1982 siege of Beirut, these sordid sieges would not be romanticized.
The PLO had provided safe haven for Iranian revolutionaries in Lebanon and trained some of the first Lebanese Shia fighters. One year after Arafat's departure, it would be a joint operation by Iranian and Syrian intelligence under the guise of "Islamic Jihad" that would strike at American and French peacekeepers in Beirut. The key figure in this organization – a cutout for what would become Hezbollah – and in the bombing of the U.S. Marines and French paratroopers was young Imad Mughniyeh, the Lebanese Shia who joined Arafat's Fatah as a teenager and served in Force 17, Arafat's own elite security force.[7] Mughniyeh had also fought in the defense of West Beirut against the Israelis in 1982 and was behind the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983, among other notorious attacks.[8]
The "Stalingrad of the Arabs" concept, the idea that anything is worth sacrificing for the sake of the Palestinian Revolution is a hardy perennial in Arab and Islamic politics. Not only was King Hussein's Jordan supposed to be sacrificed to the cause, so was Lebanon. The Paris of the East was to become the Arab Hanoi, the pulsing heart of a revolution. In the eyes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Assad, Qaddafi, and the Palestinians, Beirut was eminently "expendable" for the great Arab Nationalist cause.
By 2016, with Syria experiencing its own Civil War, Omran Al-Zoubi, Information Minister in the Assad regime, would describe Syria itself as the "Stalingrad of the Arabs," supposedly fighting in the rubble against "Nazism, fascism and against the new Wahhabism of this age."[9] Today, despite several Arab peace deals with Israel, there are several candidates for the next Arab Stalingrad against the Israelis, the next sacrificial victim to be offered up as legendary urban battlefields for the great Revolution.[10] They are to be found in the so-called "Axis of Resistance": in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and, of course, in Gaza, all in conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran working through its proxies.[11] The list of expendable places and people has grown.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was quick to condemn the statement of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who accused Israel of “committing 50 holocausts.” But if Scholz is truly disgusted by Holocaust distortion, he should immediately announce that Germany will cease all its aid to the Palestinians until they publicly commit to eradicating all forms of Holocaust distortion and misappropriation.
As Palestinian Media Watch has conclusively shown, Abbas and other PA, PLO, and Fatah leaders regularly distort the Holocaust, accuse Jews and Israel of acting like the Nazis, and invoke Nazi terminology to describe the alleged actions of Israelis towards the Palestinians.
Abbas’ Fatah Movement even made an antisemitic educational documentary depicting the Holocaust, in which they claim that the Jews placed themselves in ghettos “out of arrogance and disgust for non-Jews,” and that in these ghettos they “schemed to exploit the others' material and human resources.” The Jews, according to Abbas’ Fatah, were hated “because of their racism and their filthy behavior.” Fatah added that during the Holocaust the rich Jews “led the project to enslave humanity and exploit it, while trading in the blood of their own people, enjoying their weakness, and creating ties with those [Nazis] who burned them, in order to turn them into a tool of production and to accumulate wealth.”
Narrator: "In Europe, the [Jewish] tribe established camps and residential areas, crowded ghettos in order to separate from other people out of arrogance and disgust for non-Jews, who do not reach their status, and who according to their [Jews’] worldview are snakes and sons of snakes. There [in the ghettos] they schemed to exploit the others' material and human resources... The people of the world began to hate the [Jewish] tribe’s ghettos and the warehouses for export of hate and exploitation. [The Jews] were hated because of their racism and their filthy behavior ... Zionism was born from the womb of exploitation, while taking advantage of this hatred [towards the Jews] and turning it once again into a colonialist tool. The rich people of the [Jewish] tribe led the project to enslave humanity and exploit it, while trading in the blood of their own people, enjoying their weakness, and creating ties with those [Nazis] who burned them, in order to turn them into a tool of production and to accumulate wealth... Seventy years have passed since the artificial state’s [Israel’s] establishment, and all the theories of modernization and development have not removed the idea of superiority, the idea of [racial] purity, and the idea of enslaving the peoples from the [Jewish] tribe’s mind. They [the Jews] have not removed from their consciousness the view of the other as inferior and the right to spill the blood of the nations… They again swear to themselves: 'There is no law and no order. There is no equality and no justice. We [Jews] are a nation that is above the [other] nations. We are the people that was chosen by God - we use holy violence. Only we are people, and all the others are our animals.'”
[Official Fatah Facebook page, July 15, 2019]
A small sample of the scores of instances documented by PMW in which the PA/PLO/Fatah or their leaders misappropriated, distorted, and invoked the Holocaust to attack Israel can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Despite the multiple similar “outrageous remarks” made by the PA/PLO/Fatah organizations and their leaders in the past, Germany is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, donors of aid to the PA/PLO.
According to the EU aid tracker, from 2011 through 2020 Germany was the biggest EU donor country to the Palestinians, donating over 1.3 billion euros.
In fact, according to the EU, annual German aid to the Palestinians via the EU mechanisms grew from 83.44 million euros in 2015 to 197.6 million euros in 2020.
And the German aid to the PA/PLO/Fatah and the Palestinians keeps flowing.