The Culture of Condemnation and Denunciation

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

It seems that we Arabs, at least at the official Arab levels, have grown entirely comfortable with condemning and denouncing every act of aggression committed against us, every insult we are subjected to, and it does not seem we have anything better in our arsenal. There appears to be a ready-made template for denunciation, prepared in haste for the sake of clearing one’s conscience and shirking responsibility. We content ourselves with describing enemies and aggressors as spiteful, lurking criminals, and then return to our beds to rest from the exhausting labor of spreading denunciation and shouting condemnation.

The recent American attack on Syria was shameful for the nation as a whole, and made many Arabs think of themselves as mere deformities disfiguring the face of human history. As one intellectual told me: “I felt ashamed of myself as I heard the news through the media.” American soldiers disembark from their helicopters in an Arab country that is supposed to be in a state of military and security alert, killing and destroying without a single bullet being fired at them. We might have found an excuse, or the Arab might not have to hang his head in shame, had Arab soldiers at least opened fire and engaged, even without inflicting a single casualty on the American side.

Golda Meir said, after the burning of Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, that she could not sleep, believing Arabs and Muslims would rise up against Israel the day after the fire, but her nerves settled when she found that Arabs were skilled at nothing but condemnation and denunciation. It seems the nations of the world have settled on the view that Arabs are an emasculated nation that does not defend itself, and so they have begun to encroach upon them without restraint. Eritrea occupied Yemeni islands, and Arabs had nothing but denunciation and complaint; Ethiopia, whose own children starve, occupied Somalia without even an Arab denunciation. Nations encroach upon us, flexing their muscles in our faces, and we are like hollow idols that collapse at the first blow.

It is clear that denunciation has become part of our Arab culture: the official finds nothing to hide behind except condemnation, denunciation, and threats that next time will be harsh on the aggressors, while the citizen mocks the official and ridicules his cowardly positions. We are comfortable this way: the official shirks responsibility, and the citizen preserves his own apathy. This is now an acceptable culture among Arabs, and its practice causes no tension, provokes no nerves, and most of us are content with defeat. The culture of denunciation is an internalized culture of defeat, and life has become difficult without it. It is not strange, under this culture, that we always turn our defeats into victories, and turn the victory achieved by Hezbollah into a defeat. It is very difficult to find, in our modern history, a defeat that was not victorious — all our defeats are victories.

In the flow of life, events and acts occur that a person and states denounce, but Arabs are an exception to the norm in that they surrender to aggression and insult, contenting themselves with verbal reactions that have become stale to the Arab street, expressing nothing but incapacity, weakness, and submission to others. France sometimes denounces certain things, and so do Japan, the Central African Republic, and Guatemala, and so on, but states do not build their future and the future of their generations on merely expressing displeasure at the insults and humiliation they are subjected to.

The Arab culture of condemnation and denunciation is extremely dangerous for the generations, because they grow up in an atmosphere of cowardice, lowliness, and disgrace, coming to believe that this is simply how life is, and that there is no shame in bowing one’s cheeks and submitting to belittlement and contempt. Generations of this kind lack important educational elements related to chivalry, pride, courage, preparation and readiness, dignity, and insistence on honor. They are generations that carry the legacy of fathers characterized by faintheartedness, passing it on in an even more faint-hearted form to the generations that follow.

The Arab regimes are regimes concerned with nothing but preserving themselves, always prepared to bargain away the nation, its homeland, its wealth, and its honor in order to remain in power. Nearly sixty years have passed with these regimes spending vast sums of money on security apparatuses in order to pursue the citizen, reassured that he is a cripple incapable of standing firm and defying. These regimes have stayed awake through long nights so that the Arab citizen would remain humiliated, trampled under the sandals of people East and West. It is no wonder, in the end, that no anger takes hold of the Arab citizen when he sees defeat being covered up with a denunciation more trivial than the defeat itself.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “ثقافة الشجب والاستنكار” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.