To: JohnM who wrote (64648) | 1/6/2003 2:26:37 PM | From: Nadine Carroll | | | Why am I not surprised there is another view!! Of course.
Of course indeed. Let me know if it shows up in the op-ed pages of the NY Times, will you? I'm not holding my breath. |
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To: FaultLine who started this subject | 1/6/2003 2:27:41 PM | From: carranza2 | | | Tarek Heggy is an Egyptian businessman and scholar who has written some interesting things. I found this bit of linguistic analysis fascinating. According to Heggy, no comparable word to the words "compromise" or "integrity" exist in Arabic. Very interesting read.
mideastweb.org
Our need for "A Culture of Compromise" by Tarek Heggy
A few years ago, I discovered that there is no equivalent in the Arabic ýlanguage, classical or colloquial, for the English word "compromise", which ýis most commonly translated into Arabic in the form of two words, literally ýmeaning ‘halfway solution’. I went through all the old and new ýdictionaries and lexicons I could lay my hands on in a futile search for an ýArabic word corresponding to this common English word, which exists, ýwith minor variations in spelling, in all European languages, whether of the ýLatin, Germanic, Hellenic or Slavic families. The same is true of several ýother words, such as ‘integrity’, which has come to be widely used in the ýdiscourse of Europe and North America in the last few decades and for ýwhich no single word exists in the Arabic language. As language is not ýmerely a tool of communication but the depositary of a society’s cultural ýheritage, reflecting its way of thinking and the spirit in which it deals with ýthings and with others, as well as the cultural trends which have shaped it, I ýrealized that we were here before a phenomenon with cultural (and, ýconsequently, political, economic and social) implications. ý
For nearly twenty years, I had the opportunity to work closely with ýpeople drawn from over fifty different nationalities in a global economic ýestablishment which remains, after a long history stretching back to the ýnineteenth century, one of the five largest establishments in the world. What ýI noticed over the years is that people with a west European background use ýthe word ‘compromise’ more often than those coming from an eastern ýcultural tradition. As the study of cultures is one of my hobbies, particularly ýwhen it comes to comparing the Arab, Latin and Anglo-Saxon minds, I ýcould not help noticing that just as those with an Arab mind-set use the word ýcompromise less than those with a Latin mind-set, so too do the latter use it ýless than those with an Anglo-Saxon mind-set. There is a simple explanation ýfor this. If one’s way of thinking is based on a set of philosophical/religious ýprinciples, then it is normal that people raised in an Arab culture should be ýless inclined to use the word compromise than those whose minds were ýconditioned in a Latin context, where, although the philosophical ýdimension looms large, the religious dimension figures less prominently ýthan it does in the Arab mind-set. It is also normal that Latin societies use ýthe word less than societies with an Anglo-Saxon cultural formation. The ýAnglo-Saxon way of thinking, which has come to dominate the world in a ýmanner unprecedented in history, is based on an altogether different set of ýrules.ý
ý One of the principal influences on the reforming thought of the ýnineteenth century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), ýbelieved all systems, laws, institutions and ideas should be based on the ýprinciple of utility (utilitarianism). The United States, for its part, produced ýtwo renowned philosophers, William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey ýý(1859-1952), whose works reflected Bentham’s ideas but with modifications ýdictated by the passage of time and the unfolding of events and under the ýdifferent name of pragmatism. The notion of compromise spilled beyond the ýAnglo-Saxon world into societies belonging to different cultural traditions. ýIn Asia, for example, people of Chinese, Japanese and Indian stock ýmanaged, while jealously guarding their cultural specificity, to learn the ýmeaning of the English word compromise before they learned its linguistic ýform, tending in all their dealings to find solutions based on compromise. ýEven the Latin countries adopted the notion before the word became part of ýtheir political lexicon, as anyone following political discourse in the Latin ýcountries can see. Today it is not unusual to tune in to one of the French ýsatellite channels and find a prominent economist speaking in English, ýwhich would have been unheard of as recently as three decades ago, ýpresenting ideas based on the notion of compromise.ý
Moving to our region of the world, we find many people, even educated ýpeople, associating the word compromise with such negative terms as ýý‘submission’, ‘retreat’, ‘capitulation’, ‘weakness’ and ‘defeat’. These are ýterms that do not occur to a westerner when he uses the word compromise, ýbecause whatever his educational formation, whether it is in the field of ýscience, humanities or liberal arts, he knows that all ideas are in their ýessence nothing but compromises. Indeed, he is taught early on, during his ýschool years, that most natural phenomena are also compromises. Moreover, ýthe cultures of merchant nations (of which Britain is perhaps the most ýnotable example in human history) have instilled the idea of compromise in ýall spheres of life, intellectual, political, economic, cultural and social, even ýin human dealings. Thus while our popular sayings reflect a negative picture ýof the term compromise, hundreds of popular sayings in Britain do just the ýopposite.ý
Although Islamic scripture is totally compatible with a culture ýcharacterized by compromise, Muslim history (especially its Arab chapter) ýhas proceeded in a spirit that is antithetical to the notion of compromise. ýOur recent history is made up largely of losses which could have been ýavoided had we had not persistently rejected the notion of compromise as ýtantamount to submission, retreat, surrender, capitulation and even, as some ýof our more fiery orators put it, as a form of bondage to the will of others.ý
This all-or-nothing mentality is self-defeating. Any dispute or conflict is, ýby definition, a struggle between people or nations with different views and ýat different levels of power. It follows that any resolution of their ýdifferences that is not based on a compromise is impossible, because it ýwould entail the total subjugation of the will, interests and power of one of ýthe parties to those of the other. Such a conflict-resolution approach is ýdoomed to fail because it runs counter to the laws of science, nature and life ýitself. Some prominent Egyptian intellectuals, like Dr. Milad Hanna, who ýhas tirelessly expounded his theory on the need to accept the Other, and Dr. ýMurad Wahba, who has written extensively on the theme that nobody can ýclaim to hold a monopoly on absolute truth, are making a valuable and ýnoble contribution to the process of instilling the rules and culture of ýcompromise in our society. ý
I do not claim to be the first Egyptian writer who has addressed this ýissue. In the mid-fifties, the late Tewfik el-Hakim touched on it in his book, ýAl-Ta’aduleya (Equivalence). But on the one hand he was living in a time ývery different from the one we are living in today, which was reflected in ýthe final product he presented, and, on the other -and I hate to say this ýbecause I have the highest esteem for el-Hakim’s genius- he did not ýaddress the issue in sufficient depth. Perhaps the culture prevailing in Egypt ýat the time was an objective constraint preventing him from delving as ýdeeply into the subject as he would otherwise have done, not to mention the ýfact that the word ‘equivalence’ is very different in meaning and ýconnotations from the word ‘compromise’.ý
I believe the spread of a religious culture based on strict orthodoxy, or ýthe textual reading of scripture, was one of the reasons for the failure of the ýconcept of compromise to catch on in our culture. If we were to talk to Ibn ýRushd or Al-Gaheth (a renowned Mu’tazalite literary figure), we would find ýit easy to explain to them and they would find it easy to grasp the notion that ýall thinking, all dealings, must be characterized by a spirit of compromise, ýwith all its implications. That would not be the case if we spoke with ýproponents of the orthodox school, strict textualists like Ahmed bin Hambal, ýIbn Taymeya, Ibn Qiyam al-Juzeya, Mohamed bin Abdel Wahab or with the ýdozens of their contemporary counterparts who preach a dogmatic ýadherence to the letter rather than the spirit of religion, slamming the doors ýshut in the face of rationality. Attempting to explain the notion of ýcompromise to members of this school would be as much of a lost cause as ýIbn Rushd’s vigorous defense of the primacy of reason eight centuries ago. ýActually, it would be even more of a lost cause because, although Ibn Rushd ýwas vanquished by the textualists in the Arab/Islamic civilization, his ideas ýtook root in the Christian culture. There is no doubt that the ideas of this ýgreat Islamic philosopher prevailed over those of Thomas Aquinas in the ýthirteenth century, thanks to his many disciples in the University of Paris at ýthe time and the so-called Latin Averroists. Perhaps history will one day ýadmit that an Arab Muslim was behind the victory of reason over dogma at ýa time the prevailing culture in Europe was inimical to intellectual initiative ýand freedom of thought. Had the outcome of the battle for the hearts and ýminds of the Europeans favoured the other camp, Europe today would have ýbeen at the same stage of development and enlightenment as Africa.ý
A similar battle is now underway in our country, a battle whose outcome ýis uncertain. If we want reason to prevail over obscurantist thinking, we ýmust take immediate action. For a start, a team of intellectuals with a ýcultural formation made up of a synthesis of Arab, Islamic and other ýhumanistic cultures should come together and lay down a charter to instill ýthe rationale of compromise in the minds of the young people of Egypt ýthrough educational curricula and by promoting the idea that compromise ýis the strongest product of nature, life and the march of civilizations and ýcultures, while a rigid refusal to consider the merits of anyone else’s opinion ýand to insist on obtaining all one’s demands runs counter to the logic of ýscience, nature, humanity, culture and civilization.ý
In view of the fact that I was unable to find one Arabic word that ýcorresponds to the English word compromise, I have been forced to do two ýthings in this article that I would have preferred to avoid. One was to write ýthe word compromise in Latin letters throughout the article, the other was to ýuse the common translation of the word, the unwieldy ‘halfway solution’, in ýthe title. But because I am a great believer in compromise, and because I ýalso believe in the popular saying that “who cannot obtain all does not give ýup all”, I decided to write the article anyway. ý
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The Arabic version of this article was published at Al-Ahram on 29th September, 2002.
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Dr. Tarek Heggy combines academic, cultural and economic dimensions. He is the author of 17 books, a visiting professor at Princeton, Columbia and the University of California Berkeley. One of the world's top petroleum strategists, he was the Chairman of a major international oil company for ten years until July, 1996. Tarek Heggy's books advocate the values of progress as a human product, modernity, acceptance of the other, cultural tolerance, universality of science/knowledge, democracy and civil society. Beside his major areas of interest: the intellectual domain and modern management, he is the member of the board of some 30 prominent organizations, faculties and universities.. Selected works are online at heggy.org. |
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To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (64588) | 1/6/2003 2:33:24 PM | From: david | | | I rather not give my opinion on Europe's behavior. regarding the blame on USA I can not do that, but as much as like and respect Kennedy, he was a human being and he did some mistakes.
I am against any authoritarian regime, Castro will burn in hell just like Pinochet, but there is a subtle difference between a Military Dictatorship and a Communist one.
The military one will go down in less than a generation without destroying the Economy , The communist one usually goes down after a few generations and leaves behind economic and standard of living devastation... BUT BOTH ARE EVIL |
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To: paul_philp who wrote (64649) | 1/6/2003 2:34:35 PM | From: JohnM | | | We've about run this topic out, Paul. We are down to typing the same things at one another and, evidently, still managing to misunderstand one another. I'm not typing that it's only about oil. Rather I'm typing that it's fundamentally about oil. Very, very important distinction.
I gather the distinction you wish to make is that, while oil is an ingredient, it's no longer the most important. If so, you can see I disagree. But we've now said that pretty clearly.
It is all about oil is too simplistic to be useful. Saying the US is aiming at Iraq with the intent to manage oil prices is equally simplistic. It may well have been the foreign policy calculus a few decades back but it sure is not the case today. They are attacking American's at home now. If you cannot see how that changes the calculation, then there is no point continuing the conversation.
I suspect that the "they" in those sentences is the other place we have serious disagreements. I understand the "they" to be Al Qaeda and its affilitates. I don't understand it to be the world of Islam, the Arabs, nor even Iraq. By generalizing the attack out of Al Qaeda, the Bush folk run the very real risk of permitting Al Qaeda to define the conflict as a civilizational one rather than one against a group of terrorists. |
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To: LindyBill who wrote (64654) | 1/6/2003 2:40:06 PM | From: Nadine Carroll | | | Good article by Max Boot. Has anyone seen anything about the Ginossar scandal in the US or European press?
Exploiting the Palestinians Everyone's doing it. by Max Boot 01/13/2003, Volume 008, Issue 17
IN AN INTERVIEW LAST MONTH with Britain's Sunday Times, Yasser Arafat rebuked Osama bin Laden for seeking to exploit the Palestinians' cause for his own ends. "Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now? . . . He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests," Arafat was quoted as saying. "I'm telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause."
Good advice, but it's doubtful bin Laden will take it. Just about everyone else exploits the Palestinian cause--Arafat first and foremost, but also, according to the latest reports, some of his Israeli "peace partners"--so why shouldn't old fur face?
Whenever the serious issues of the Middle East are raised, from oppression in Saudi Arabia to nuclear weapons development in Iran, the answer one hears from Europeans, Arabs, United Nations functionaries, all sorts of supposedly serious people, is invariably the same: The real issue is the Palestinians. Until we resolve their horrible plight, peace will never come to the Middle East. This is an absurd argument since even if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, this would not affect in the slightest the tensions between Islamic fundamentalists and secularists, between rich Gulf kingdoms and their poor cousins, between Shiites and Sunnis, between democrats and dictators, or the countless other San Andreas-sized fault lines that run through the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam). It is helpful to remember that all of the dead in the Arab-Israeli wars of the past half century amount to only a tiny fraction of the million killed during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the 100,000 killed in Algeria's civil war since 1992, or the 100,000 killed in Lebanon's civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Surely anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the Middle East knows that the plight of the Palestinians isn't "the" issue. So why do so many people insist that it is? Let us count the reasons.
For the Europeans, championing the Palestinian cause allows them to assuage lingering colonial guilt by championing the aspirations of a Third World people who claim to be oppressed by Western imperialists--in this case, Israelis. It also allows Europeans to trumpet their moral superiority over pro-Israel Americans. And, last but not least, it allows them to curry favor with both oil-rich Arab states and their own growing Muslim minorities. Europeans hope that Arabs will show their gratitude by doing business with them and not targeting them for terrorism. All of this comes at a price, though: The E.U. is one of the Palestinian Authority's main non-Arab bankrollers, to the tune of $10 million a month.
For Middle Eastern states, championing the Palestinian cause is even more vital because doing so provides an important pillar of legitimacy for their manifestly illegitimate governments. Naturally the Arab states' interest is in preserving "the struggle," not in succoring the Palestinian people who (along with the Israelis) are its chief victims. There are almost 4 million Palestinians and most live in conditions of unrelieved squalor; large swaths of the West Bank and Gaza Strip make the South Bronx look like Club Med by comparison. The only Arab state that has granted citizenship to Palestinians is Jordan; the others prefer to keep them as an unassimilated, militant minority.
More than 1.1 million Palestinians are jammed into 59 refugee camps whose support comes mainly from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and other international bodies. As former U.S. ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg points out, all the Arab states combined donate less than $7 million to UNRWA, just 2.4 percent of its $290 million budget. (Kuwait, Egypt, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates collectively contribute a grand total of zero.) By contrast, the Great Satan forks over $110 million, or 38 percent of UNRWA's budget. The Arabs prefer to spend their money to support Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein alone has paid an estimated $20 million over the past two years to "martyrs'" families. The Saudis held a telethon to raise millions more. The Arab League as a whole contributes $55 million a month to Arafat's tyrannical Palestinian Authority, which keeps the suicide bombings coming.
Many Palestinians are privately appalled at these "martyrdom operations," which are killing their youth, destroying their economy, and empowering their religious fanatics. But Arab states are delighted. What are a few dead Palestinian teenagers in return for hurting Israel and its backers in America?
Much the same calculus seems to govern Yasser Arafat's thinking. He is, you might say, the chief exploiter of the Palestinians, followed closely by his senior goons. They reap the adulation of useful idiots abroad who celebrate them as "freedom fighters," but senior PA officials aren't the ones strapping dynamite to their chests and blowing up Israeli buses. Arafat's wife Suha has generously said that there would be "no greater honor" than to sacrifice her son as a martyr. But she doesn't have a son. She has a daughter and they live in Paris. Even though some suicide bombings have been conducted by teenage girls, it's doubtful that seven-year-old Zahawa Arafat will be blowing up an El Al office on the way to her école. Her life, and her mother's, are far removed, literally and figuratively, from those of ordinary Palestinians.
Anyone who visits the West Bank and Gaza Strip is struck by the contrast between the general conditions of abysmal poverty and a few glittering villas that wouldn't be out of place on the French Riviera. Who owns these palazzos? Arafat's men, of course. Since the Palestinian Authority keeps a ruthless grip not only on politics but also on the economy, anyone who gets rich within PA jurisdiction, by definition, must be one of Arafat's apparatchiks.
The pervasive corruption of the PA has long been known and resented by ordinary Palestinians, but it seldom comes out into the open, since Arafat doesn't allow freedom of the press. Revelations in the Israeli press during the past month have lifted the veil of secrecy a bit, revealing a circle of exploitation that includes not only Arafat but also some of his Israeli negotiating partners.
On December 2, the Tel Aviv daily newspaper Ma'ariv printed a fascinating interview with a businessman and former military intelligence officer named Ozrad Lev. He claimed that he and his former business partner, Yossi Ginossar, had undertaken extensive and lucrative dealings with Muhammad Rashid, Arafat's chief financial adviser. In return for fat management fees, they set up Swiss bank accounts into which Rashid transferred more than $300 million of PA money, with Arafat's apparent authorization. Lev said he decided to go public after $65 million mysteriously disappeared. "This money could have been used for personal needs, to form a shelter [to hide the money] for Arafat and senior Palestinian officials, to pay salaries, or even, and I really hope not, for illegal activities," said Lev.
Who is Yossi Ginossar? A former agent of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, who in the 1990s acted as an informal envoy to the Palestinians on behalf of prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak. Ginossar is a leading "dove" who sits on the executive board of the Peres Center for Peace, the think tank that is to the Israeli left approximately what the Heritage Foundation is to the American right. He also hobnobs with the American think tanker Stephen P. Cohen, another incorrigible peace advocate (the website of his employer, the Israel Policy Forum, recently featured a report claiming "Oslo didn't fail"), who, Ma'ariv reports, profited from the Ginossar-Rashid business deals. (Cohen told me he was involved in some deals with Ginossar, but doesn't know anything about Swiss bank accounts.)
Ginossar's position as envoy to the Palestinians allowed him privileged access to the highest councils of power. He participated in the 2000 Camp David talks, where he pushed Barak to make greater concessions. And, according to the Jerusalem Post, when the Gaza Strip was declared a military zone and closed to Israeli travelers, Ginossar was chauffeured to Arafat's office in Shin Bet armored cars.
Israel's attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, is now investigating this case, which has become a huge scandal in Israel, though it's gone largely unnoticed in the United States. Both Rashid and Ginossar deny any wrongdoing. Ginossar told Ma'ariv, "I was guided exclusively by boundless loyalty to the [Israeli] state," a claim that has been met with snorts of derision in Israel's rambunctious press. But there is perhaps an element of truth in what he says.
The Israeli governments of the 1990s wanted to encourage closer economic cooperation with the Palestinians in the hope that this would give their enemies a stake in peace. Unfortunately, instead of creating small businesses that could be the building blocks of Palestinian civil society, what developed was the kind of crony capitalism that is endemic to places like Russia. Arafat's confidants--not only Rashid but Muhammad Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and others--were the big beneficiaries. Along, it now seems, with some select Israeli friends.
The Palestinian people and the cause of long-term peace were of course not helped by any of it. Instead these "business" dealings helped foster a gangster state more interested in war-making than economic development. It is striking that at the same time that news of Rashid's $300 million slush fund leaked out, the PA claimed it had no money to pay 100,000 civil servants. But the PA's transgressions, no matter how glaring, have long been overlooked by professional doves like Ginossar. Indeed, Lev says that he and Ginossar continued managing the $300 million fund for the Palestinians until at least August 2001--almost a year after the Al Aksa Intifada had begun.
So to the list of those exploiting the Palestinian cause add leading "peace" advocates. The good news is that the people of the Middle East are increasingly hip to this tiresome con game.
The Iranian government has recently tried to deflect the student demonstrations over the death sentence handed down to a history professor who dared to suggest that Muslims not "blindly follow religious leaders." Instead of protesting Seyyed Hashem Aghajari's fate, President Mohammad Khatami urged students to demonstrate for International Qods Day, a holiday invented by the late Ayatollah Khomeini to protest Israel's supposedly unlawful occupation of Qods (Jerusalem). The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran threw this demand back into Khatami's face. In a statement translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the students said, "Observing the 'Day of Qods' in support of violence is a lunacy that is neither advantageous to the Palestinian nation nor does it coincide with the national interests of the people of Iran."
Pretty smart, those Iranian students. They aren't fooled by pro-Palestinian rhetoric. But there is at least one group left that takes seriously the protestations that no progress can be made in the Middle East until the Palestinian issue is settled. You can find them in Foggy Bottom.
Max Boot is the Olin Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. weeklystandard.com |
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To: LindyBill who wrote (64654) | 1/6/2003 2:48:25 PM | From: kumar | | | OT: watch it Bill, your 'grass shack' might get hit by one of those China Airlines jumbos pretty soon... :-) :-) |
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To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (64658) | 1/6/2003 2:49:55 PM | From: carranza2 | | | The road to Jerusalem by way of Baghdad should require a brief stop at Geneva to allow some of those filched funds to get back to where they belong.
I had not heard of the Ginessar scandal. I admit I'm not surprised, however. Big sums, regardless of provenance, inevitably get the crooks's attention. |
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