Iraqi Writer Criticizes Arab Intellectuals Supporting Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Forces and Iraqis



Attacks on coalition soldiers and Iraqi citizens elicited criticism from some Arab journalists.

One such critic is Mustafa Al-Qara Daghi, an Iraqi citizen of Kurdish origin, who publishes a column in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa and on the liberal website Elaph.com. [1] The following are excerpts from his September 27, 2003 article which was published on the website:

'Arab Intellectuals Who Support the Filthy Terrorist Operations in Iraq Do Not Want its Independence'

"Each day, the press and satellite television channels, bring us the tidings… of criminal terrorist acts… which some of our hallucinating [Arab] intellectualslike to call 'resistance aspiring for Iraq's independence'… Do these intellectuals ask themselves who the elements are that make up the 'resistance to the occupation'? What are their true motives and what is their political platform once the occupation ends…? It seems that the answers to these questions are that those intellectuals don't have a clue. What is important to some of our sick elites and Arab intellectuals is that there is someone who is resisting the U.S. and colonialism, and is ready to die… But how, for what, and at whose expense? Such questions are trivial and are not discussed by our noble intellectuals!

"Those who carry out such filthy operations do not want Iraq's independence… [They want] to return Iraq to the abhorred despotism era, and [they want] to control Iraq and the Iraqis again with iron and fire. Otherwise, what is preventing them from disclosing their political platform? Since the ugly truth is different [than what they portray it to be], we see them implementing their operations in a perfidious manner using methods of savage murderers. They appear on TV screens masked and covered from head to toe… because they are afraid that if their wretched truth is uncovered they will be duly punished and will be swept into history's garbage can…"

'The Arab Street that Supports the Resistance Suffers from an Inferiority Complex'

"What kind of national resistance blows up UN headquarters, water and oil pipelines, power stations, printing houses and buses and disgraces itself by murdering the best in its country, the likes of Muhammad Baqir Al-Hakim, Aqila Al-Hashimi, and the nation's devoted friends like… Sergio de Mello? What kind of noble resistance is one that targets the national police force… which gives the Iraqis the feeling that its members [are there] to serve the people and to defend them [and not]… to be the whip that controls them.

"Any decent observer… can conclude… that the armed resistance option… is not the popular choice of a large segment of the Iraqi people… Surveys, done almost daily, of public opinion [confirm] that there is a growing mass within the silent majority in Iraq… that wants the Coalition force's presence in Iraq to continue, until security and stability are achieved, and until the country takes its first strides towards democracy…

"The option [of armed resistance] is adopted and marketed by Arab nationalists who infiltrate into the country, by leftist socialists, and by all the media writers who sold out to Saddam, such as Abd Al-Bari 'Dollar' [2] who, a few days ago, published… a manifest promising to continue the resistance and expand it… In their miserable columns… these bookish mercenaries have been trying to plant this rotted option in the minds of Arabs and Iraqis. They succeeded in deceiving the Arab street, which suffers from [an] inferiority complex vis-à-vis the U.S., the same street that hailed the destruction of the Twin Towers, [and rejoiced] a few days ago when several American diplomats serving in Tel-Aviv were murdered. Those bookish mercenaries were able to convince a large segment of the Arab street that the option [of armed resistance] is appropriate and inevitable, which explains the influx of filthy herds and mercenaries into Iraq to resist the American occupation… or to die the death of martyrs, as they imagine…"

'Who are the Panderers to the Iraqi Resistance?'

"The mercenaries nicknamed 'Arab volunteers' came to Iraq to fight the Americans and the Iraqi people as one, and to defend their leader Saddam, 'the hero of the Arab nation and the defender of the Eastern Gates.' What drives them towards such death are the abhorred Arab dreams that the panderers to Arab and Islamic resistance… such as Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi, Ma'an Bashour, Abd Al-Halim Qindeel and others have been brainwashing them with… Those panderers, who were among the invited guests of Saddam's regime, and who used to go on pilgrimages to Iraq under the pretext of solidarity with the Iraqi people, hailed the despot and profited financially.

"Before the start of the war, and [still] now, some of them established brokerage agencies to send volunteers [to Iraq]… [T]hey sent to Iraq many Arab youngsters for the commission [that they get] for each one of these uninformed heads, whom we see excitedly running amok trying to carry out the fervent Arab plan to destroy Iraq… This is the truth of the shameful situation in the Arab nation, where many of its sons have become mercenaries who kill their Iraqi brothers in cold blood and defend their executioners… The Iraqis consider them foreign mercenaries who came to destroy their country and to kill them. This is what most of the Iraqis are saying, when we see them chanting from the TV screens: 'Get the Arabs out of Iraq.'"

'The Iraqis Who Participate in These Terrorist Attacks Are Traitors to Their Country and People'

"A few days ago, Al-Qa'ida called the attack on the Baghdad Hotel 'operation no. 9'… meaning that the organization had carried out eight prior operations… The significance [of all this] is that there is no Iraqi opposition to the occupation and that most of Al-Qa'ida's attacks were carried out by the same hot-headed Arabs who came to Iraq uninvited and without the authority to act on behalf of the Iraqi people… If there are among them a few Iraqis, they are representing themselves and their sick and calcified minds… and in addition to being mercenaries they are traitors to their country and people…

"It is impossible not… to mention that those heroes emerged from the remnants of the [human] refuse and from the members of Saddam's repressive criminal institutions, whose hands are stained with their people's blood… with the mass-graves that fill up Iraqi cities… [Members] of these institutions - the personal body-guards, the emergency forces, the intelligence [services] and Saddam's Fedayeen – are still the enemies of the Iraqi people. They sold their souls to their former master… and chose him over their relatives. And instead of admitting their sins and asking the forgiveness of the Iraqi people for the afflictions that they brought over it, they are trying their hardest to mar the joy [of liberation], to hinder the progress of building a new and free Iraq and to murder anyone who had anything to do with this liberation, be it an Iraqi or a member of the Coalition forces…

"It is their only skill… [A skill] that Saddam Hussein spent millions [on] in order to teach it to them and to train them with it. [Additionally] he brainwashed others, filled their stomachs and stuffed their pockets with money that he stole from the poor Iraqis… These desert rats, the remnants of Saddam's refuse, who [publish] manifestos, make videotapes about themselves in their burrows, and [give] clandestine interviews to certain journalists – they are the ones who are responsible [for], plan, and carry out most of these terror acts… which harm Iraqis and Coalition soldiers.

"These debased individuals succeed in deceiving [others]… by growing beards and mumbling a few verses of Koran about Jihad and echo the worn out slogans of honor and glory that Saddam had marketed in order to remain in power…"

'The So-Called Heroic National Iraqi Resistance is a Mix of Mercenaries, Released Criminals, Islamists, Ba'athists, and Terrorists'

"It is no secret that a few days before the war, Saddam's regime released tens of thousands of criminals… They took an active part in the looting following the arrival of the Coalition forces in Baghdad. Today, these same people are the long arm of Saddam's ghost regime in the terror acts… they are ready to do anything for money. Everyday we hear about the arrest of individuals who were on their way to carry out sabotage… who had been paid large sums of money by the active remnants of Saddam's regime to blow up water pipes, oil terminals, power stations, and other infrastructure elements."

"This is the plain truth about what you [the Arab intellectuals] call the heroic national Iraqi resistance, which is in fact a mix of mercenaries, criminals, Islamists and the remnants of the barbaric dictatorship, who are linked together in a Satanic covenant of forces of darkness, racism, Fascism, and terrorism. Their purpose is to bring about the demise of Iraq, to deprive it of liberty… to undermine American plans to implement democracy in the region and to rid it of the dictatorships and chauvinism that control the fate of all its peoples."

'They Do Not Represent the Iraqi People'

"Do these people represent the aspirations of the Iraqi people and its yearning for freedom? Certainly not. All the [political] parties in Iraq have platforms that are visible to all… and they are all represented in the transitional administration, which chose in an educated manner to… carry out a dialogue with the Coalition forces, which [in turn] never claimed to have come to Iraq to occupy it… Even the national [Iraqi] forces, which are not represented in the transitional administration, never announced the adoption of armed resistance, because they don't want to drown the country once more in a blood bath. "It is not fair [for the Arabs] to ignore all the parties represented in the transitional [Iraqi] Governing Council… while considering such elements as 'Muhammad's Army,' 'The Jihad Legions,' 'The Death Squads,' 'The Young Muslims,' 'Islam's Martyrs,' mercenaries, criminals, and bearers of anonymous titles… as representatives of the Iraqi people…"

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[1] "The Dirty Truth About the So-Called Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation," September, 27, 2003, www.elaph.com.

[2] Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, was nicknamed Abd Al-Bari Dollar due to his ardent support of Saddam.

 

Is it too early to adopt a revisionist view of the US war in Iraq and for this column to admit its mistake in having vehemently opposed it from the outset?

At issue here is whether the Iraqi people have benefited from the overthrow of the Baathist regime and whether the American occupation will eventually benefit their country even more. I’m convinced — and berate me here from your patriotic bleachers, if you must — that what we have seen in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates in recent months may turn out to be the most serendipitous event in its modern history.

One need offer no apology for saying that the supreme virtue of this war is that Saddam Hussein was gotten rid of. Period. The very man who had established arguably the closest approximation of a genuine fascist state in the Arab world, that sustained itself on fear, repression, genocide, cult of personality and wanton murder — a state whose law was that those who rule are the law.

One doesn’t become a revisionist in a vacuum. I pore over material from various media sources about the mass graves unearthed all over Iraq, particularly those discovered in uncounted pits in the south, where Saddam had crushed a rebellion there in 1991 with genocidal ferocity, and I turn away in nauseated disbelief. Then there’s the UN Special Rapporteur’s September 2001 report about the execution of 4,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib’s prison in 1984, and 3,000 others at the Mahjar prison between 1993 and 1998. And you ask how a regime could become so monstrous, so whisked clean of human decency.

Last Saturday, the Washington Post’s Peter Finn filed a gut-wrenching report about Baghdad’s Kadimiyah High School, where during the 1990s kids were being dragged off for questioning by members of the Mokhabarat for writing boyish anti-Saddam graffiti on their walls, such as “Down with Saddam” — and never returned home. Only now are their families, like other families of the “disappeared” speaking up, asking questions and demanding to know how and why their children were killed and where they are buried. One of the ancillary byproducts of the US invasion of Iraq was the ouster of Saddam and the obliteration, clearly forever, of the totalitarian dungeon that he had turned his country into.

That, in my book, is enough to warrant extending my support for that invasion and for Washington’s projected plans to rebuild the country.

Washington may not succeed in turning Iraq into a “beacon of democracy” but it will succeed, after all is said and done, in turning it into a society of laws and institutions where citizens, along with high-school kids, are protected against arbitrary arrest, incarceration, torture and execution.

Look, I have no illusions about the shenanigans and hypocrisies of a big power like the US, including its neocon ideologues, who are more cons than neos. Lest we forget, at the height of Saddam’s bloody reach in the 1980s, which saw the Halabja atrocities, Washington not only uttered nary a word of criticism of the Iraqi leader, let alone called for his overthrow, but provided him with political, military and economic assistance that, in effect, underwrote his survival and made possible the very repression that American officials now claim they want to banish forever from the land.

All true. Yet, the US may, just may, end up doing in Iraq what it did in war-ravaged European countries under the Marshall Plan. And if it doesn’t, well, what would Iraqis have lost other than the ritual terror of life under a dictator who had splintered their society into raw fragments of fear, hysteria and self-denial — a man who insisted that third graders learn songs whose lyrics lauded him with lines such as “when he passes near, the roses celebrate.”

No, I don’t believe that by going to war, America had dark designs on Iraq’s oil or pursued an equally dark conspiracy to “help Israel.” I believe that the US, perhaps willy-nilly, will end up helping Iraqis regain their human sanity, their social composure and the national will to rebuild their devastated nation.

And no, it’s not too early to adopt a revisionist view of the US war in Iraq, or too late for a columnist to say he was wrong all along.

Are these two Arabs, who understand Iraqis far better than you ever will, correct?

Or are they "paid shills"?

Are they working for the JOOOOS?

Or will you admit that your entire view of the war is false?

How 'bout it, la-imc?

I would like for both of these pseudo-spokespeople for the Iraqis, one being a Kurd, so we know the guy is gonna be against Saddam whole-heartedly, to mention the word sanctions in their defense of American imperialism.

Yeah, I've heard all the stuff about what an atrocious dictator Saddam was, and nobody in the left wants to bring him back, thats a misunderstanding of the anti-war movement promoted by idiots like the people above who are actually supporting Saddam even more by continuing the occupation and making the people more cynical and appreciative of whatever society they did have under him.

But neither of these poseurs, and I do question their legitimacy regardless of whatever they think they know or of whoever posted them thinks about how "Arab" they are, the ventriloquist trick here is not so amazing.

Do the words U.S. sactions, 50,000 dead from lack of food supplies, no-fly zone bombings, and depleted uranium mean

anything to these men who have such a reductive definition of

freedom that they're willing to hand over their people to

imperialists.

Oh, and one other irony they fail to mention, Iraq also had religious tolerance for Jews under Saddam, who protected synagogues and temples from Muslims extremists who never wanted to have anything to do with his secularist regime.

That always null and voided the so-called Iraq-Al Qaeda connection which never existed.

Funny how these pieces are coming out at the U.S. invasion is turning into an armpit and US public sentiment is changing.

51% of Americans are starting to question Bush's handling of Iraq.

Oh, and so what if the fighters are mercenaries. Please you sound like Bremer. When the Aztecs fought back against the Spanish invaders, were they to be considered "terrorists."

Get a clue, and to the U.S., Get the fuck out of Iraq!

Bring the Troops Home!

By the way, the second article above that also ambivalently supports the U.S. occupation of Iraq (without mentioning the sanctions or the fact that actually most of the resistance is coming from with the country, not outside as most U.S. and misguided arab pundits would have us believe) is from the

website ARAB NEWS, which is a pro-Saudi Arabia websight. It also includes a peculiar article on King Fahd that has the nerve to talk about democracy in that country.

Yeah, sure, a really objective opinion on Iraq, about as

objective as Bill O'Reilly.

Trusting those two would be about as wise as trusting Leval and Petain for an analysis of Vichy France during World War II.

"What kind of national resistance blows up UN headquarters, water and oil pipelines, power stations, printing houses and buses and disgraces itself by murdering the best in its country, the likes of Muhammad Baqir Al-Hakim, Aqila Al-Hashimi, and the nation's devoted friends like… Sergio de Mello? What kind of noble resistance is one that targets the national police force… which gives the Iraqis the feeling that its members [are there] to serve the people and to defend them [and not]… to be the whip that controls them"

don't it?_________any bias in that paragraph!?

...and then you said this:

"... the people above who are actually supporting Saddam even more by continuing the occupation and making the people more cynical and appreciative of whatever society they did have under him."

This makes no sense. Care to rephrase it? Or scrap it entirely?

The Iraqis HAD no society under Saddam....unless you count rape squads, torture, murder, mass graves and constant fear as society. And the only people who are nostaligic for that are the people who were raping, torturing, and killing -- not your average Yosef Schmosef.

Further, you question the writers' legitimacy solely because of their pro-liberation views. Had they instead vehemently denounced the invasion and occupation, and called for more attacks on coalition forces, you would have proudly trumpeted these articles as vindication of your own views.

In which case you would have indeed called their opinions "objective".

mediawatcher, like many here, aren't interested in the truth. We all know that. If these writers had written and published these two articles for a Pro-Palestinain magazine, we would have heard another excuse from these people as to why these articles simply can't be true.

There is a brilliant research study that was done some years ago on a religious sect that was predicting the end of the world on a specific date.

The point of the study was to interview the sect members to learn what happens when the world ending date comes and goes but the world is still here. The study was published in academic journals and eventually made into a book titled, "When Prophecy Fails," that's been used as a psych textbook in college courses ever since.

What's relevant here is that the sect members bought into the prophecy via group psychology. That is, they associated with other sect members who were making public statements that the world would end on a certain date. The sect members wanted to interact with each other and shunned input from outsiders (sound familiar?).

When the date the world was suppose to end came and went, the sect members became defensive and provided explanations. They were right all along, you see, but god changed his mind. In other words, they went into complete denial of the facts.

That's so much like these left wing radicals who post here. They're simply not interested in reports like those at the top of this thread. If they were more honest, and not so self deluded, the Mediawatcher and Hex would simply post, "I'm in denial. Don't present me with any facts because I'll deny all."

They're so much like those sect members in When Prophecy Fails.

I've been saying the exact same thing for a long time. These IMC collectives are nothing more than cults.

Many of the officers of Saddam's secret police were trained by Palestinians affilliated with Fatah and the PFLP.

Saddam cultivated a following among Palestinians and invited them to live in Iraq in "subsidized" housing. Many of these were people who had been working in Kuwait during the Iraqui invasion of Kuwait. The Palestinians in Kuwait acted as a 5th column for the invading Iraquis and helped Saddam's secret police locate anyone who might be part of the resistance to Saddam - of course they could also take out grudges on former employers, the families of women who had spurned their advances, business competitors, etc. Any Palestinian who envied the possessions of a Kuwaiti could "inform" on the Kuwaiti, whether or not there was any substance to what they told the Iraqui mukbharat (secret police).

The Kuwaiti person would have their properties seized when they were arrested and a portion of these properties went to the Palestinian who informed on them. This was not unlike a German informing on a Jew during WW2, in order to be rewarded with some percentage of the Jew's properties.

Now do you understand why the Kuwaitis did not want the Palestinians in their country after Saddam was forced out? And why the Saudis threw out all the Palestinians living and working in Saudi Arabia - as did the other gulf countries?

The Palestinians have their own agenda which is contrary to the agenda of most other Arabs in the Middle East. Note that Palestinians are not permitted work visas in any Arab country except for Jordan and Iraq. Their behaviour in Kuwait during the First Gulf War enraged others in the Arab world. Even Palestinian students are monitored (in Egypt for example).

Many Palestinians in Bagdhad lived in "subsidized" housing . That is, Saddam forced the landlords of many buildings to rent to the Palestinians for next to nothing. Now the rents are being raised to fair market value and the Palestinians are being booted out. Many Iraquis loathe them as agents of Saddam or agents of various Islamic extremist factions.

Comments are invited. Of course I expect to see some Palestinian Americans and their supporters denounce me for telling you what everyone in the Middle East knows already.

Thanks for the first-hand account.

Yes, you will be insulted. Your information will be regarded as "Zionist propaganda".

Don't worry about it. Those who will treat you thus are only interested in dead Jews, and have allied themselves with evil.

Pay 'em no mind.