November
19, 2004
Journalist
Rami Khouri Addresses American Dilemma in Middle East
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On Tuesday, November 16, internationally renowned journalist
Rami Khouri addressed an enthusiastic crowd in Gamble Auditorium on the subject
of “Iraq and the Wider American Dilemma in the Middle East.”
Khouri, a Palestinian-Jordanian who was born in New York City and educated at
Syracuse University, has worked as a journalist in Jordan and Lebanon for more
than 30 years. He is executive editor of the Daily Star, an English-language
newspaper based in Beirut, Lebanon, that is published in conjunction with the
International Herald Tribune and widely read throughout the Middle East. He is
spending the week at Mount Holyoke as the first scholar-in-residence of the College’s
new Center for Global Initiatives, meeting with Mount Holyoke students, Five
College faculty, and local media.
Khouri began his talk by asserting that a convergence of recent events, including
the reelection of President Bush, upcoming elections in Iraq, and the death of
Yasir Arafat, mark “the threshold of a new era for change.” But,
he cautioned, whether the change would be for the better or worse would depend
on the quality of leadership in the Arab world, the U.S., and Israel. He devoted
the remainder of his remarks to analyzing the recent leadership of those three
powers and the cycle of violence and terror they have spawned.
Drawing on his comprehensive knowledge of Middle Eastern history, Khouri noted
that this opportunity for change comes at the end of a century in which basic
issues facing the Middle East have remained unresolved. “It is stunning
that my children should be addressing the same problems as my grandparents,” he
said. These include concepts of statehood; personal, collective, and national
identities; citizen’s rights and the rule of law; economic development;
and the relationship between Zionism and Arabism.
Khouri criticized U.S. foreign policy in the wake of September 11, 2001, as misguided,
counterproductive, and “peculiarly un-American.” He said that most
of the world—not just Arab countries—view the U.S. as a “rogue
state,” outside globally accepted moral and legal bounds. Putting recent
terrorism against the U.S. in a larger historical context, he pointed out that
the Middle East has suffered repeated invasions by Western powers since Alexander
the Great. He reminded the audience that Osama Bin Laden’s attacks against
U.S. installations in the Middle East in the early 1990s were in protest over
U.S. military presence in the area, and asserted that the U.S. occupation of
Iraq provides additional impetus for anti-American sentiment and terrorism. He
noted that although the war on terror has succeeded in taking out some key players,
it has also given rise to a more diffused and pernicious brand of terrorism all
over the world. He observed that we have moved “from episodic terrorist
acts to a globalized cycle of attack and counterattack.”
While Khouri was harsh in his assessment of recent U.S. policy in the Middle
East, he stressed that there was “plenty of blame to go around.” He
described Middle Eastern leadership as “mediocre,” criticizing those
countries for failing to address serious social and economic problems that feed
frustration among young Arabs and create an environment in which terrorism thrives.
He expressed dismay that the vast majority of Arabs have failed to condemn recent
acts of terrorist barbarism, saying that it signaled “the degradation of
fundamental moral values and the decency of those who now watch television to
see whose head was cut off today.”
Khouri also commented on the escalating violence between the Palestinians and
Israelis. “They are engaged in all-out, existential warfare, with a severity
and ferocity that is unprecedented. Both sides feel that one side will be completely
wiped out.”
Khouri suggested that if the cycle of violence and terror continues, “it
will only be a matter of time before terrorists get their hands on chemical weapons” and
lodge a large-scale attack that could possibly trigger a nuclear counterattack
somewhere.
Khouri offset this dire prediction with a more hopeful message that the U.S.,
Israel, and Arab countries have the power to reject military force as a solution
and instead to invoke our cultures’ shared sense of justice, dignity, the
rule of law and habeas corpus, and other “defining principles.” He
cited the peaceful resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict as a guiding example. “We
are at the moment of potential change,” he concluded. “People need
to stand up and speak out, to tell the emperor he’s wearing no clothes,
when he is wearing no clothes.”
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