[Marxism] [re-post] "A Call to Mahmud Darwish" - Joseph Mas'ad

[Sukant Chandan]

Someone tells me the link didn't work, so here is the full article.

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"A Call to Mahmud Darwish"

Joseph Mas'ad, a professor of Arab Thought and Politics in the
University of Columbia in New York, wrote in the independent pro-
opposition newspaper Al Akhbar:

"The terms of the new American era are built on dual synonyms starting
with the duality of civilization and barbarity and extending to the
duality of "moderates" and "extremists". This categorizing philosophy
is not new to the American century as we still remember the
distinction on which Ronald Reagan and his ideologues insisted as
between the "authoritarian" dictatorships allied with America and the
"totalitarian" dictatorships opposed to it. The struggle as viewed by
America is not between democracy and dictatorship but between
dictatorships loyal to American interests and dictatorships and
democracies opposed to it.

"The dominant cults of Arab intellectuals, who claim to be secular,
employ these dualities in their service and borrow from America its
philosophizing strategies to defeat the arguments of their enemies.
We, according to those intellectuals, are not facing a national
struggle in the Arab countries between those calling for democracy and
those supporting dictatorships. No, according to them, our decisive
struggle is between the "secularists" and the "Islamists". For here is
the secular poet of Palestine Mahmud Darwish, who never uttered a
single word against the atrocities committed by Fatah against the
Palestinian people under the leadership of Yasser Arafat and his
successors, serenading us with poem on the first pages of the Saudi
owned Al Hayat newspaper in which he likens the Palestinian Prime
Minister Isma'il Haniyah to Abi Sufyan [an Arab leader who opposed the
prophet Muhammad], as if the Fatah leadership now represents the
prophet himself.

"Darwish condemns the Arab Islamic culture, in which science was
distributed across the ages in the courtyards of the mosques because,
it didn't distinguish between the "mosque and the university". He
gives us Europe's "secular" history as an example which he wants us to
follow, emphasizing the renaissance period and forgetting that this
enlightenment gave birth to racism and European colonialism and that
secularism was always coupled by Christian imperialist thought which
transformed Christianity into a secular cult itself and divested it of
all the elements of religion while insisting on keeping Islam and
Judaism as the opposites of this secular Christianity. Gaza and the
West Bank were not in "dark dungeons" under Israeli occupation and the
rule of its agents but Gaza now, under the democratic reign of Hamas,
is in a dark dungeon.

"Our great poet forgot to notice that the "dark" Islamic forces are
the ones defending Palestinian democracy, at least in its practical
sense, while Fatah and its alleged secularism is sinking us further in
the darkness of its dictatorship allied with the occupation in theory
and practice. What contradiction is this in which a secular poet
defends the reign of the agents of occupation while condemning those
who defend democracy! According to our hallowed poet, the current
struggle is not a struggle for liberation from the occupation or a
struggle of democracy against dictatorship. No, it is the struggle of
the dictatorial light of Fatah against the democratic darkness of
Hamas. What angers our poet is not the Islamic extremists "for they
are believers in their own way, but what annoys me is their secular
and atheist supporters"

"O respected poet, we don't want to annoy you at all for the
supporters of Hamas, whether believers or atheists or secularists or
Islamists, are the supporters of the real Palestinian democracy
because Hamas's struggle is a struggle against dictatorial traitors
(under the legal definition of treason). But those secularists who
support dictators and colonizers are mainly interested in living the
good life provided to them by the treason of Fatah and its corruption
and its theft of the money of the Palestinian people to pamper its
leaders and intellectuals. We call on our great poet and his secular
supporters who are spread all over the Arab media, which claims to be
secular while being funded by Salafis, to return to what they used to
be before the Oslo surrender: intellectuals against oppression, not
intellectuals defending oppression. For the struggle is a struggle of
democratic liberation against the darkness of occupation and dictators
serving American interests. Are you with us?" - Al Akhbar Lebanon,
Lebanon