Enemies of the Arabs Hold a Summit

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Arab rulers are about to gather for their annual summit in order to deliberate, as they put it, on the concerns of the nation, agree on solutions, and confront the challenges before them. There are media outlets on high alert, relaying to people news of the feuding leaders, the rivals, and the sulking ones, some of them already shedding tears over a lost fellowship among the assembled, and over a certain failure that a feeble closing statement will only crown.

If these rulers truly wish to discuss the concerns of the Arab nation and devise solutions for it, they must first admit that they themselves are the nation’s foremost concern, its foremost enemy, and its greatest calamity, and that there is no solution to the other problems facing the nation as long as they remain on the thrones of power. They are exactly this, because:

First: they are the ones who abase the nation before its external enemies, the Zionists and the Americans, and who allow the people of the West to occupy Arab land in the east and the west; they are the ones allied with Israel and America, offering both of them every manner of facility for dominating and occupying Arab lands and humiliating their inhabitants. These rulers are an aid to the enemies against the nation, against the nation’s homeland, its honor, its sacred sites, its history, its civilization, and its culture. They normalize relations with Israel, they provide everything required to enable the American occupation of Iraq, and they bring in foreign forces to desecrate Arab soil.

Second: these rulers subjugate Arab citizens, repress them, hound them, suppress their freedoms, throw them into prisons, torture them, kill them, and deprive them of their daily bread. These rulers work to enslave the Arab individual, exploit him, break his neck, squander his dignity, and humiliate him. They are the fiercest enemies of the Arab citizen who yearns for freedom, and they harness their security services, foremost among them their vile, degenerate intelligence agencies, to kill the pride within him and crush his dreams and hopes of being the son of a great, free homeland.

Third: these rulers are the ones who plunder the nation’s wealth and squander it on their own appetites and personal whims, and on the whims of their family members, their intimates, and the loyalists who go to great lengths in their flattery. Our nation possesses abundant goodness and no small share of wealth, yet these rulers make a profession of theft and plunder, looting in broad daylight, in the name of the people and the nation, and sometimes under religious pretexts.

Fourth: these rulers throw open the nation’s treasuries to the nation’s enemies, showing utter contempt for the nation’s ownership of its own wealth. The nation’s riches lie open for its enemies to exploit, and the nation’s money sits stored away in their banks.

Fifth: the Arab rulers place the nation’s daily bread in the hands of others, importing roughly 75% of the nation’s food needs from abroad. There is land perfectly suited to investment and cultivation, yet they insist on keeping the nation a food hostage in foreign hands.

Sixth: the Arab rulers use the Islamic religion to justify their odious, benighted, black rule. They use the Noble Qur’an to cover up their corruption, their moral rot, and their defilement.

Eighth: these rulers are professionals in lying, charlatanism, and deception, and they use their media outlets and the sycophants who run them to lie to the people and turn the truth on its head. They portray themselves in their own media as the great, wise men who safeguard and protect the nation. They portray to their peoples the notion that the nation’s very existence is bound up with their own, and that were they to disappear, the nation itself would go extinct.

…These thieves prosecute the poor wretch who steals a single dirham, while stealing millions is perfectly permissible. They operate through connections, favoritism, and stupid, bigoted tribal logic, and they respect neither God’s covenant nor their own conscience. They have taught the people theft, lying, hypocrisy, cowardice, resignation, suspicion, deception, absence, and fleeing from the face of the oppressor, and so on. They have corrupted the nation.

Tenth: the Arab rulers are the greatest obstacle to the nation’s unity, and they are the foremost cause of the fragmentation of the Arab homeland.

Eleventh: the Arab rulers insist on keeping the nation weak, and they turn it into a mount for anyone who wishes to ride it, and an easy target for anyone seeking to achieve a military victory.

Twelfth: the rulers now convening at this summit are the cause of social, economic, scientific, and technological backwardness. Nations elsewhere advance at tremendous speed, while the Arab rulers still amuse themselves with childish nonsense — parades, birthday celebrations, or the wedding of a dog or a cat. Such backward men can never be leaders of change or progress; they are fit for nothing but a museum of human deformities.

The list goes on and on, and were the nation truly alive, it would seize every one of these rulers by the forelock and bind him tight in chains of iron

and secure his bonds fast, and put him on display before all to see, as a lesson to every base, vile man.

This is a nation that can never be set right so long as these rulers remain in place. There are those who defend these rulers, but I ask them: what exactly must the Arab rulers do before they change their minds about them? There is no ugly deed the Arab rulers have failed to commit, no flaw that could still be held against them that they have left untried, and they have kept themselves as far as possible from courage, wisdom, zeal, gentleness, good example, honor, dignity, and virtuous character. They have made the nation a doormat for every covetous transgressor. And, strangely enough, the media are now preoccupied with the level of state representation at the Damascus summit. What difference does it make whether a porter represents his state, or a king, or a president does so instead? I apologize here to porters and stevedores everywhere, since I am confident they are men of honor.

The first task incumbent on the Arab citizen is to overthrow these rulers. The nation will never be able to confront the Zionists and the Americans with rulers such as these. With them in place, it can never achieve scientific leaps or technological development, nor recover its honor, its dignity, its land, or its sacred sites. Whoever truly wishes the nation well must roll up his sleeves and resolve to sacrifice in order to save the nation from these reckless, corrupt, renegade men. Revolution against these tyrants is the essential first step toward establishing justice and recovering our rights.

Every nation on earth has risen up against its sinful tyrants — except the Arab nation. The nations of the world look upon us with astonishment, their unspoken sentiment being that we Arabs are simply in love with abasement and humiliation. Israel has defeated us time and again, the Americans are invading our land in Iraq, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, the Spanish hold on to Ceuta and Melilla, Sudan is subjected to every kind of conspiracy, backwardness has defeated us and left us trailing behind the nations in every field, and despite all of this we remain asleep. We must rise up, and without the courage to stand up to the tyrants, we can never be delivered from this degrading humiliation.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “أعداء العرب يعقدون قمة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.