Fighting for Defeat

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

It is not easy for a person to achieve defeat; rather, he must toil and tire himself for it — though a toil and a tiredness of a special kind. A man must possess a high capacity for idleness, laziness, and dependence on others, and must be marked by a skill in stalling and endless stretching-out (the word comes from the earthworm we call “Abu Mughayt”). He must be corrupt and corrupting, and must possess a talent for dividing people and manufacturing enmities among them, so as to be certain the people become like a broken string of prayer beads, its beads wandering loose without direction or purpose. He must be capable of stealing people’s money and squandering it, of swelling the ranks of employees who have no work to do but draw a salary, of conscripting thousands into security services whose only concern is to watch people, threaten them, and extort them, and of using conspiratorial, clientelist administrative methods that serve personal loyalty at the expense of belonging to the people and the homeland.

Not everyone is capable of enjoying these dreadful qualities, or of developing these unique capacities. Each of them is an art that demands enormous, almost superhuman energy to master, and requires sleepless nights and constant thought devoted to the best means and methods of tearing apart, fragmenting, weakening, humiliating, subjugating, and cowing. Just as great leaders who achieve victories must be marked by special qualities, leaders of defeat are marked by a distinction all their own. The leader of defeat is a master of moral collapse, possessed of a base soul, arrogance, vulgarity, and opportunism. He divides rather than unites, squanders rather than saves, oppresses rather than does justice, destroys rather than builds, keeps people ignorant rather than educates them, harbors malice rather than love, stabs in the back rather than confronts, conspires rather than plans, corrupts rather than composes, makes claims rather than demonstrates, is reckless rather than careful, lies rather than tells the truth, betrays rather than can be trusted; he is a help to enemies and a sword over the necks of friends. The leader of defeat is immersed in baseness and vileness; he loves the darkness and a life lived forever among the pits, and the higher a boot rises above his neck, the more anxiously he searches for some further way to bow.

…-worm. He goes beyond the limits of human capacity, surrendering entirely to the appetite boiling within him.

Such are most of the Arab rulers, who chose their own appetites over themselves, and clung to abasement as a substitute for life. They have led the nation from one defeat to the next, from one humiliation to another, from one calamity into tragedies and pains. They have rubbed the nation’s face in the dust, and delighted as the sandals of the Zionists trampled its sanctities, its homes, and its necks; they extended their hands to them in handshakes and embraces. They opened the doors of the homeland to every aggressor, and stood off in a corner, lusting.

The leaders of defeat have now moved into the phase of defending defeat itself, after popular signs of emancipation began to appear. Hezbollah won its victory in 2000, the Palestinian resistance began to develop its means and methods, organizations emerged that pose a painfully real challenge, such as al-Qaeda, Iran rose as a regional power growing and flourishing, and the Iraqi resistance proved its ability to confront the Americans. Accordingly, Israel fled southern Lebanon, Israeli leaders began to change their thinking on the Palestinian question, and the Israelis realized that the fire with which they had branded the Palestinians had begun to brand them in turn, and that agreements with their state would not protect them from the flames of a rising resistance. The Americans were struck in their own backyard, and now their forces in Iraq are being routed. And now elections are bringing to power forces that hold fast to the nation’s identity. Iran is rising, and with it Arab forces whose capacity to stand firm and answer aggression should not be underestimated. And if Israel and America are to be routed before this advancing tide toward victory, what then will become of the Arab rulers and those who allied themselves with them?

The Arab rulers take refuge in a dreadful silence in the face of the Palestinian resistance, and in the face of Hezbollah and the statements of Ahmadinejad, al-Zawahiri, and the Iraqi resistance. They know that praise does not sit well with their souls, and that condemnation brings them nothing but more feelings of vengeance. Now they demand that Israel offer concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to improve its image before the public, and demand that donor states be generous with their funds so as to enable the Authority to attract popular support. Their tongues say that the alternative is extremism and the dominance of the resistance factions, foremost among them Hamas. And they demand that the United States respond to the resolutions of the Arab summit conferences, implement the roadmap, and remove the settlements — not out of love for Palestine, so much as an attempt to escape the predicament posed by a flourishing search, among their own peoples, for victory, dignity, and honor.

The Arab leaders tremble before the onset of defeat, because it means their own demise. They will mobilize resources, gather allies, and incite America and Israel to hunt down the rebels. These are leaders who can be admonished neither by the Qur’an, nor by hadith, nor by sermons and philosophies, nor by the histories of those who fell before them; they have mortgaged themselves to appetites and whims to which honor refuses to lead. They will defend their taverns with all the tyranny and force at their disposal — but the word of your Lord shall come to pass upon them, God willing.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “القتال من أجل الهزيمة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.