Abu Zaid Criticizes Arab Liberals’ Reaction To Crisis In Lebanon

Dr. Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, prominent Egyptian thinker, fiercely criticized Arab liberals for their position towards the crisis in Lebanon when they blamed Hizbullah for its abduction of the two Israeli soldiers to exchange them with Arab prisoners.  He also lashed out at liberals for their hostility towards their political opponents who differe with them in their views. In particular, he recalls the Muslim Brotherhood experience in Egypt and Jordan when the group decided to stand for the election and join the democratic game according to the rules available and amid extrajudicial and freedom restricting laws. He adds that this hostility on the part of the liberals toward those democratic religious groups evolved into madness when the MB in Egypt won 88 seats in Parliament, in spite of hooliganism and vote rigging….etc.

He also reminds us of the experience of Hamas in Palestine, when the latter decided to join the democratic political experiment and reaped  the majority of Palestinians’ votes, saying that the liberals didn’t stand the shock, opposing this democracy which brought those people to power, while they want a tailor made democracy with its rules only applying to them. He laments that those liberals want a democracy which brings them to power without they playing a societal or public role or without presence with the masses and sensing their problems and agonies.

Abu Zeid delves into the minds of the Arab liberals and comes out with a fact that they try to climb to the economic and cultural globalization through renunciations of their modern history entirely: they see  Orabi’s movement as a popular one which led to the occupation of Egypt, Nasserite as adventure which led to defeat, while seeing Hizullah as one that seeks to reestablish the rule of the mullahs of Iran and implicate Lebanon in a turmoil, and Hamas as the cause of starvation and disasters befalling the Palestinian people.

He lashes out at such liberals who set aside their history and wash their hands of the disgrace of any resistance even the legitimate one, while implicitly regarding the US and Israel as the countries which have the right to defend their interests and security in confrontation of terrorism. As a liberal believing in freedom and democracy and human rights, he sees it incumbent on him “to speak up my mind and expose this deliberate exclusion of our history and culture and positions”. While he doesn’t oppose criticism of the nation’s history and culture and positions, he strongly opposes what he depicts as the one eyed criticism which looks at the facts and matters with one eye, a position which he says excludes the Other’s ideology and their way of thinking.

He expressly announces that he disavows the Arab liberals for their one sided positions toward the nation’s issues, saying that in spite of the pathetic positions of the Arab regimes towards resistance and their subordination to the West topped by the US administration, he sees the position of the liberals toward the issues of the nation and their shortsighted analysis to the developments on the Arab and Muslim arena as most pathetic and most fatal.

Dr. Abu zeid reminds the Arab liberals of another paradoxical position, mainly that they are against Hamas, Hizbullah and Muslim Brotherhood owing to their religious ideology and fear that they further strengthen into establishing a religious state” while you ignore a state based actually not only on religious grounds but rather a racist state which accepts Jews only and excludes others. He expresses his astonishment at the liberals’ fears of the religious Islamic state while they rest assured of the religious Jewish one, depicting their way of thinking as a devastating one taken from American pragmatic way of thinking which sees the material, immediate interest as the only criteria in handling any issues . “ Oh, liberals, you are afraid of the Islamic option rather than political Islam” he says, adding that the Arab voters chose the Islamists out of their despair of their regimes which have always been regarded by their peoples as corrupts in political and economic and social aspects .

Dr. Abu Zeid also exposes  the double standard way of thinking, saying that if the liberals hate the Ikhwan in Egypt and Jordan and Hamas in Palestine for their religious affiliation, the position of  Hezbollah is that different, since it is an organization which was born only for resisting the occupier and has never aimed its gun at any Lebanese of Arab person and even throughout its history it has never targeted the Israeli citizens except after the recent  all out war launched by Israel to uproot all that is Lebanese.

He teaches the liberals a lesson by saying that the reasoned discourse does not mean to uproot all national constants around one, calling on them to stop predominating their personal interests over the future of the nation for fear of their fragile social or political prestigious statuses. ” Damns your rationalism and down with your liberalism, and victory for the resistance”, he concluded.