Insult to injury
Rime Allaf, June 23, 2009
Anti-regime protests in Tehran, 2009.
It has practically become the norm for Arab people and the regimes that rule over them to have different reactions to big events happening in the region. This is also the case with Iran, but in very different ways.
For the most part, unelected regimes first watched, with unmistakable satisfaction, the self-claimed righteousness of their hated rival disintegrate in full view of their people and the world. Having always branded itself as being more democratic, popular and especially more legitimate than any Arab regime could ever be, the founders of the Islamic Republic were now openly challenged and exposed as frauds.
This schadenfreude comes to a tentative halt, however, with the regimes’ collective allergy to popular movements demanding freedom, especially peaceful ones in which every move and every cry is instantly transmitted in this era of digital communication. In each Arab country, people and regimes are surely wondering: Could this happen here? Is the courage of these young Iranians an incentive to follow, or does the Islamic regime’s repression curb enthusiasm for freedom?
Images like the distressing video immortalizing Neda Agha-Soltan as she lay dying in Tehran, inexplicably murdered, have also triggered conflicting emotions and sad questions on whether she died in vain. With so many people not actively espousing the position of any side, reluctant to shake a status quo, which, for all its problems, remains safer than the alternatives seen from Iraq to Afghanistan, the burden of experience is heavy. Dissent of any kind — even mild civil disobedience — has been brutally repressed throughout the Arab world replete with its own religious rulings, kangaroo courts and sham elections.
To add insult to injury, not only has people’s self-determination never received the backing of the international community, it has also been suppressed with the blessing of the world’s superpowers, eager to keep friendly regimes in power.
This is perhaps why Arab reactions to Iranians’ turmoil have been somewhat subdued. If the Iranians are so strongly supported in their quest for freedom, they wonder, why have Arabs’ own struggles been ignored, their own suffering been dismissed and their own Nedas been nameless? Why were Arabs’ own cries invoking God incessantly reported, in English, as calls to “Allah” in a perceived attempt to further alienate them, as if they believed in a different god, while Iranian cries of “Allahu akbar” have been correctly translated as “God is great” and repeated in unison by twitterers around the world?
With the wounds of Israel’s war on Gaza still open, many Arabs are particularly stunned that the indifference with which Palestinians deaths were received has turned into an international solidarity campaign for Iranians throwing rocks at their oppressors and shouting “we have become Palestine.”
For all the similarities joining the fate of Arab and Iranian people, the general occidental approach, including by mainstream news media and now by social media outlets, has been to differentiate between them. But if anyone can empathize with Iran’s frustrated youth, it is those who continue to live nearby with broken dreams, stifled by oppressive regimes that, with minor exceptions, need not worry about international condemnation. While the Arab and Iranian people continue to share aspirations, some regimes remain more equal than others.
Rime Allaf is a Syrian writer, an international consultant and an associate fellow at Chatham House in London. She blogs at Mosaics.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/the-arab-world-reacts-or-doesnt/
