These are all personal observations, selected from a much longer personal list:
--The
Palestinian Christian man is desperate. Can I help him get out of the
country? He’s scared of the Islamists. Can I help him get his son to
university in America? The situation is intolerable. Something is worked
out with a little help from me.
--The
Druze woman is desperate. She has a boyfriend her family doesn’t
approve of. With help from some Israelis she is smuggled to a safe
place.
--The letter from the Syrian Christian tells of his desperation to get out of the country before the Islamists take over.
--The Egyptian Christian has obtained an apartment abroad and is getting out of the country to America .
--The
Syrian Kurdish refugee is stuck in southern Turkey. No Western country
will consider offering political asylum because for policy reasons they
want the refugees to go back to Syria after it is "liberated," albeit
the liberation will be done by radical, repressive Islamists. He is
desperately desiring to live in what he calls a "free, secular society."
--The
Turkish liberals write about how they are afraid to speak out in
public, of
continual arrests, of media outlets being blackmailed by the
government. To curry favor with the Islamists a well-known, ambitious
Turkish academic launches a failed take over bid of an academic journal
edited by an Israeli professor.
--The
Israeli observer describes how he watched Egyptian soldiers beat the
Sudanese refugees who try to get across the Sinai to Israel. He can hear
the women screaming, perhaps they are being raped.
--The
EU insists on its ability to stop weapons from being smuggled into the
Gaza Strip. Israel agrees. Two officers from EU member states’ armies
are assigned to each shift. They sit in chairs, watch people and goods
go by and never check anything.
--The
United States and UN promises Israel to keep weapons from being
smuggled to Hizballah into Lebanon and promises to keep Hizballah from
returning to build military fortifications in southern Lebanon. They
fail at both. Hizballah threatens them; mysterious gunmen
attack or rob the soldiers. The UN forces commander praises Hizballah.
Meanwhile, the promise to Israel is violated.
--A
young Israeli who has just left the army describes how his first job in
the army was to register guns given to the Palestinian forces to
maintain security and prevent terrorism. His last duty before leaving is
capturing Palestinian terrorists and sometimes recognizing—by checking
the serial numbers—the guns he helped issue to the Palestinian police a
couple of years earlier.
--The
U.S. government announces that weapons it helps smuggle into Syria for
the rebels will be kept out of the hands of al-Qaida. Then, You-Tube
videos appear showing those same weapons in the hands of al-Qaida.
--The
Palestinian terrorist from the West Bank admits, after being captured,
that his sister has just had free medical treatment in an Israeli
hospital.
--The
editorial meeting of an Ivy League university college press that
rejects a project by an author after one member remarks that they can't
have Israelis writing about Arab politics.
--The
Turkish television host, after he makes sure the door is closed,
relates how the government has harassed him and how people are afraid
they will say the wrong thing and get arrested or
persecuted.
--The
American journalist is told by the Palestinian guide that some
structures in Bethlehem are torture chambers put up for use by Israel’s
army to question Palestinians. On inspection, they turn out to be
portable toilets.
--The Lebanese leader tells a delegation that Israel should make
concessions to the Palestinian Authority and then, off the record, he adds that he would never trust them himself.
--The
left-wing American peace activist lectures the Fatah man, who has told
the American honestly that he wants to wipe out Israel and replace it
with a Palestinian state, on how he must sound more moderate in order to
gain Western support.
--The
Palestinian doctor tells a journalist that Yasir Arafat is in great
health and after the journalist leaves admits to a colleague that Arafat
is very ill. (This, of course, relates to the claims that Arafat
suddenly died, thus trying to imply he was poisoned by Israel.)
--The
Iranian journalist who viciously attacks an Israeli counterpart
publicly at a conference, then privately admits to him afterward that
she didn’t believe anything she said but had to do it because people
from the Iranian embassy were present.
--The
Turkish officials who privately speak of their fear and hatred for the
Islamist rulers who they angrily blame for ruining their country.
--The Iranian official who at a secret conference lays into the Arabs there and calls them “a bunch of tribes.”
--The numerous Arabs, Iranians, and Turks who decry the Obama Administration as selling them out to the Islamists or Iran.
--The
future Palestinian Authority foreign minister who at dinner berates
Yasir Arafat and Palestinian strategy as too radical, then the next day
at the conference blames Israel exclusively for the failure to achieve
peace.
--The
Lebanese Christians who now support Hizballah because they are afraid
of that Shia Muslim terrorist group but seek its perfection because they
are even more afraid of Sunni Muslim Islamists.
--The
charming Saudi prince, appearing to be the very image of the late actor
Peter Ustinov, expresses at a private, personal meeting his pleasure
about meeting an Israeli for the first time.
Later, after reading a specific mendacious Western mass media article,
he says that it is terrible such evil people can exist.
--The
Egyptian writers who (credibly) explain privately that they don’t have
anything against Israel but must be militantly full of hate in public in
order to protect themselves.
--The
top PLO leader who asserts that Israel has a secret map in its
parliament claiming most of the Arab world. Then, when that claim is
ridiculed, shrugs and smiles. Oh well, no harm in trying.
--The
satisfied expressions of Islamists or PLO officials or radical
nationalists on getting hold of a credulous Western academic or
journalist who actually believes the nonsense they dish out. At times,
they are amazed at what they can purvey in this fashion.
--The
well-known Palestinian intellectual (no, not who you think) who says
that the Palestinians will only achieve a state when Palestinian
intellectuals denounce terrorism. Then goes on for the rest of his life
supporting Palestinian terrorist groups.
--The
American college students who heckle a Palestinian moderate and tell
him that he doesn’t really understand the Middle East and how evil
Israel is.
--The
Western journalists covering Israel who privately admit to shocking
anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudices in conversations or at parties.
--The Western diplomats who do the same.
--The
Western activists who pretend to be moderate and supporters of a
two-state solution who suddenly forget themselves and make it clear that
only Israel’s total destruction would satisfy them.
--The
North American student who recounts that when she opposed female
genital mutilation in her college class only to be told that she was a
privileged imperialist. And that was by the teacher.
--The
Lebanese, Palestinians, Turks, and Iranians who come up to an Israeli
speaker after a lecture and complain that the West supports the
Islamists who are taking over campus groups and intimidating everyone
else.
This
is the real Middle East. Not the imagined place of Obama and Kerry, the
UN and EU, the classrooms of the West or the columns of the mass
media.
These are all things that I’ve personally witnessed or known the person
who did. Unless one understands this reality one understands nothing.
And
having experienced these and many other things, I simply cannot go
along with the clichés and falsehoods of the Western “expert” herd no
matter how popular that would make me nor how profitable that may be.
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--------------------
Barry Rubin is director of the
Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the
Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His next book, Nazis, Islamists and the
Making of the Modern Middle East, written with Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, will be
published by Yale University Press in January 2014. His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, also published
by Yale. Thirteen
of his books can be read and downloaded for free at the website of
the GLORIA Center including The Arab States and the Palestine
Conflict, The
Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East and The Truth About Syria. His blog is Rubin
Reports. His original
articles are published at PJMedia.Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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