Black Wednesday: An Orgy of Violence

Less than three hundred yards from Madinat al-Malahi, across the street from the corniche where MP Eido, his son and eight other people were murdered in a car bomb today, is my brother's apartment. Fortunately, aside from shattered kitchen windows, he and his family are unharmed.

There is nothing like a personal connection to bring such an event into sharp focus in your mind's eye, to make you feel its impact. I will not pretend to understand the reasons behind this act or try to assign blame; there are plenty of pundits who have ready answers and theories.

What sickens, angers and depresses me even more than the immediate impact of this event is the wider context. The whole region seems to be unraveling in a crescendo of violence. Where shall I begin? On this very same day in Iraq, al-Qaida types, trying to inflame sectarian passions even more, saw fit to destroy the minarets of a Samarra Shia mosque that they had previously attacked. In Gaza, thirty Palestinians died at the hands of other Palestinians as Fatah and Hamas go at each other without mercy and without regard for lives of the civilians that they claim to represent and protect from Israel. In Nahr el-Bared, Fateh el-Islam, ensconced among innocent Palestinian civilians, vows to fight to the last man even it means destruction of the whole camp.

What is wrong with us? by us, I mean us Arabs, collectively. Why is it that violence seems to be the only alternative that we can come up with for conflict resolution. It would be half as bad if the violence was directed, purposeful rather than vindictive, senseless, and ultimately self destructive. Is is false pride and a distorted sense of honor that drives this behavior? Is it unthinking fanaticism? Is it all the other -isms (sectarianism, Arabism, nationalism) pushed to the extreme that have us mired in our self-made quicksand? Why haven't we learned to turn our swords into ploughshares? Are Western critics of Arab society right in their glib assessment that we don't do much that is right, that our warts by far outweigh our beauty spots?

All these are rhetorical questions; most don't have simple answers. All the contentions, however, contain a least a grain -some, a truckload- of truth. In this discourse, I am not discounting Western malfeasance, past and present, in molding our region. However, one has to draw the line somewhere and start taking responsibility for ones own failures. Neither colonialism, nor imperialism, nor, for that matter, Zionism, made Fatah and Hamas start behaving like thugs toward each other in an all out grab for power and influence.

If my approach seems on-sided, it is because I am responding with anger at today's events. I fully realize that there are many nuanced expalantions for the different conflicts. However, there are also disturbing similarities of purpose and methods across the region especially among fanatic fundamentalists that promises further senseless conflict.