This article was forwarded to me by Ebrima Sall. I thought I could share it with as there is apparently slow traffic on the L. Enjoy another authoritative and respectable voice against the saber-rattling against Iraq:

Sidibeh 
 
Subject: [CCS-l] Fwd: Edward Said: Will the last person to leave please
 turn out thelights
 
 
 Edward Said in last week's Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo newspaper):
 
 
 "Will the last one to leave please turn out the lights?"
 
 ***********
 
 One opens The New York Times on a daily basis to read the most recent
 article about the preparations for war that are taking place in the
 United States. Another battalion, one more set of aircraft carriers
 and  cruisers, an ever-increasing number of aircraft, new contingents of
 officers are being moved to the Persian Gulf area. 62,000 more
 soldiers  were transferred to the Gulf last weekend. An enormous, deliberately
 intimidating force is being built up by America overseas, while inside
 the country, economic and social bad news multiply with a joint
 relentlessness. The huge capitalist machine seems to be faltering,
 even  as it grinds down the vast majority of citizens. Nonetheless, George
 Bush proposes another large tax cut for the one per cent of the
 population that is comparatively rich. The public education system is
 in  a major crisis, and health insurance for 50 million Americans simply
 does not exist. Israel asks for 15 billion dollars in additional loan
 guarantees and military aid. And the unemployment rates in the US
 mount  inexorably, as more jobs are lost every day.
 
 Nevertheless, preparations for an unimaginably costly war continue and
 continue without either public approval or dramatically noticeable
 disapproval. A generalised indifference (which may conceal great
 over-all fear, ignorance and apprehension) has greeted the
 administration's war- mongering and its strangely ineffective response
 to the challenge forced on it recently by North Korea. In the case of
 Iraq, with no weapons of mass destruction to speak of, the US plans a
 war; in the case of North Korea, it offers that country economic and
 energy aid. What a humiliating difference between contempt for the
 Arabs  and respect for North Korea, an equally grim, and cruel dictatorship.
 
 In the Arab and Muslim worlds, the situation appears more peculiar.
 For  almost a year American politicians, regional experts, administration
 officials, journalists have repeated the charges that have become
 standard fare so far as Islam and the Arabs are concerned. Most of
 this  chorus pre- dates 11 September, as I have shown in my books
 Orientalism  and Covering Islam. To today's practically unanimous chorus has been
 added the authority of the United Nation's Human Development Report on
 the Arab world which certified that Arabs dramatically lag behind the
 rest of the world in democracy, knowledge, and women's rights.
 Everyone  says (with some justification, of course) that Islam needs reform and
 that the Arab educational system is a disaster, in effect, a school
 for  religious fanatics and suicide bombers funded not just by crazy imams
 and their wealthy followers (like Osama Bin Laden) but also by
 governments who are supposed allies of the United States. The only
 "good" Arabs are those who appear in the media decrying modern Arab
 culture and society without reservation. I recall the lifeless
 cadences  of their sentences for, with nothing positive to say about themselves
 or  their people and language, they simply regurgitate the tired American
 formulas already flooding the airwaves and pages of print. We lack
 democracy, they say, we haven't challenged Islam enough, we need to do
 more about driving away the specter of Arab nationalism and the credo
 of  Arab unity. That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what
 we,  and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam -- vague
 re- cycled Orientalist clichés of the kind repeated by a tireless
 mediocrity  like Bernard Lewis -- is true. The rest isn't realistic or pragmatic

enough. "We" need to join modernity, modernity in effect being
 Western,  globalised, free- marketed, democratic -- whatever those words might
 be  taken to mean. (If I had the time, there would be an essay to be
 written  about the prose style of people like Ajami, Gerges, Makiya, Talhami,
 Fandy et. al., academics whose very language reeks of subservience,
 inauthenticity and a hopelessly stilted mimicry that has been thrust
 upon them). 
 
 The clash of civilisations that George Bush and his minions are trying
 to fabricate as a cover for a preemptive oil and hegemony war against
 Iraq is supposed to result in a triumph of democratic nation-building,
 regime change and forcible modernisation à l'américaine. Never mind
 the  bombs and the ravages of the sanctions which are unmentioned. This
 will be a purifying war whose goal is to throw out Saddam and his men and
 replace them with a re-drawn map of the whole region. New Sykes Picot.
 New Balfour. New Wilsonian 14 points. New world altogether. Iraqis, we
 are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and
 perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.
 
 Meanwhile, the soul-and-body destroying situation in Palestine worsens
 all the time. There seems no force capable of stopping Sharon and
 Mofaz,  who bellow their defiance to the whole world. We forbid, we punish, we
 ban, we break, we destroy. The torrent of unbroken violence against an
 entire people continues. As I write these lines, I am sent an
 announcement that the entire village of Al-Daba' in the Qalqilya area
 of  the West Bank is about to be wiped out by 60- ton American-made
 Israeli  bulldozers: 250 Palestinians will lose their 42 houses, 700 dunums of
 agricultural land, a mosque, and an elementary school for 132
 children.  The United Nations stands by, looking on as its resolutions are
 flouted  on an hourly basis. Typically, alas, George Bush identifies with
 Sharon,  not with the 16-year-old Palestinian kid who is used as a human shield
 by Israeli soldiers.
 
 Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority offers a return to peacemaking,
 and presumably, to Oslo. Having been burned for 10 years the first
 time,  Arafat seems inexplicably to want to have another go at it. His
 faithful  lieutenants make declarations and write opinion pieces for the press,
 suggesting their willingness to accept anything, more or less.
 Remarkably though, the great mass of this heroic people seems willing
 to  go on, without peace and without respite, bleeding, going hungry,
 dying  day by day. They have too much dignity and confidence in the justice
 of  their cause to submit shamefully to Israel, as their leaders have
 done.  What could be more discouraging for the average Gazan who goes on
 resisting Israeli occupation than to see his or her leaders kneel as
 supplicants before the Americans?
 
 In this entire panorama of desolation, what catches the eye is the
 utter passivity and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole. The
 American government and its servants issue statement after statement
 of  purpose, they move troops and material, they transport tanks and
 destroyers, but the Arabs individually and collectively can barely
 muster a bland refusal (at most they say, no, you cannot use military
 bases in our territory) only to reverse themselves a few days later.
 
 Why is there such silence and such astounding helplessness?
 
 The largest power in history is about to launch and is unremittingly
 reiterating its intention to launch a war against a sovereign Arab
 country now ruled by a dreadful regime, a war the clear purpose of
 which  is not only to destroy the Baathi regime but to re-design the entire
 region. The Pentagon has made no secret that its plans are to re-draw
 the map of the whole Arab world, perhaps changing other regimes and
 many  borders in the process. No one can be shielded from the cataclysm when
 it comes (if it comes, which is not yet a complete certainty). And
 yet,  there is only long silence followed by a few vague bleats of polite
 demurral in response. After all, millions of people will be affected.
 America contemptuously plans for their future without consulting them.
 Do we reserve such racist derision?
 
 This is not only unacceptable: it is impossible to believe. How can a
 region of almost 300 million Arabs wait passively for the blows to
 fall  without attempting a collective roar of resistance and a loud
 proclamation of an alternative view? Has the Arab will completely
 dissolved? Even a prisoner about to be executed usually has some last
 words to pronounce. Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of
 history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed
 utterly,  to a society that despite its drawbacks and weaknesses nevertheless
 goes  on functioning. Arab babies are born every hour, children go to
 school,  men and women marry and work and have children, they play, and laugh
 and  eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and
 companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and
 misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the
 business  of living despite everything. This is the fact that both the Arab
 leaders and the United States simply ignore when they fling empty
 gestures at the so-called "Arab street" invented by mediocre
 Orientalists. 

 But who is now asking the existential questions about our future as a
 people? The task cannot be left to a cacophony of religious fanatics
 and  submissive, fatalistic sheep. But that seems to be the case. The Arab
 governments -- no, most of the Arab countries from top to bottom --
 sit  back in their seats and just wait as America postures, lines up,
 threatens and ships out more soldiers and F-16's to deliver the punch.
 The silence is deafening. 

 Years of sacrifice and struggle, of bones broken in hundreds of
 prisons  and torture chambers from the Atlantic to the Gulf, families
 destroyed,  endless poverty and suffering. Huge, expensive armies. For what?
 
 This is not a matter of party or ideology or faction: it's a matter of
 what the great theologian Paul Tillich used to call ultimate
 seriousness. Technology, modernisation and certainly globalisation are
 not the answer for what threatens us as a people now. We have in our
 tradition an entire body of secular and religious discourse that
 treats  of beginnings and endings, of life and death, of love and anger, of
 society and history. This is there, but no voice, no individual with
 great vision and moral authority seems able now to tap into that, and
 bring it to attention. We are on the eve of a catastrophe that our
 political, moral and religious leaders can only just denounce a little
 bit while, behind whispers and winks and closed doors, they make plans
 somehow to ride out the storm. They think of survival, and perhaps of
 heaven. But who is in charge of the present, the worldly, the land,
 the  water, the air and the lives dependent on each other for existence? No
 one seems to be in charge. There is a wonderful colloquial expression
 in  English that very precisely and ironically catches our unacceptable
 helplessness, our passivity and inability to help ourselves now when
 our  strength is most needed. The expression is: will the last person to
 leave please turn out the lights? We are that close to a kind of
 upheaval that will leave very little standing and perilously little
 left  even to record, except for the last injunction that begs for
 extinction.
 
 
 Hasn't the time come for us collectively to demand and try to
 formulate  a genuinely Arab alternative to the wreckage about to engulf our
 world?
 This is not only a trivial matter of regime change, although God knows
 that we can do with quite a bit of that. Surely it can't be a return
 to  Oslo, another offer to Israel to please accept our existence and let
 us  live in peace, another cringing crawling inaudible plea for mercy.
 Will  no one come out into the light of day to express a vision for our
 future  that isn't based on a script written by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
 Wolfowitz, those two symbols of vacant power and overweening
 arrogance?  I hope someone is listening.
 
  ***********

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