The battle unleashed among the Arab gut, heart, and bone saw

Do you get angrier and angrier with every lie and cover-up on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, its Arab allies and paid foreign propagandists, and the American president? If you do, I suspect this is because Khashoggi achieved in his life and death something that nobody else in modern history has been able to achieve: Ordinary people, media figures, and politicians throughout the world now appreciate how it feels to be treated like a helpless idiot by an Arab power elite that believes it can manage its citizens with brutality and disdain, without any accountability or consequences.

The intense and escalating political anger around the world about the Khashoggi assassination and cover-up reflects something far more profound than routine lying by public figures. I believe this is because the reaction is really about ourselves — all of us, everywhere — and our feeling of being  insulted, humiliated and dehumanized by power elites that treat us and their own citizens like cattle, idiots who have no rights. We can take a lie, but we cannot take being taken for total, helpless fools.

It is profoundly significant that people around the world now understand a little better what ordinary Arab men and women have endured for the past half a century: the daily, numbing feelings of helplessness, voicelessness, and hopelessness, in almost every walk of life, in the face of power elites that monopolize wealth, rights, and opportunities, and also use violence against anyone who dares to defy them.

It is even worse than this, though, and this captures what Jamal Khashoggi and thousands of other brave Arab men and women have struggled for unsuccessfully in the past 50 years, since security and military officers fully captured power in Arab states around 1970-75: The ghastly reality of modern Arab governance is that the power elites not only want to define what we citizens are allowed to do; they also want to control what we think, feel, and speak. The modern Arab security state has disfigured the dignity and ancient nobility of Arab-Islamic culture by giving incompetent, uncaring thought control colonels the authority to attempt to re-wire our brains, restrict our minds, dictate our identities, and turn us all into servile, mindless, heartless robots. We can handle their taking our money, but we cannot handle their taking our humanity.

Perhaps the intense anger against the Saudi and American leaderships for their grotesque cover-up and lies about the Khashoggi killing mirrors the similar reactions across the Arab region to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in southwestern Tunisia some eight years ago, which sparked a pan-Arab uprising of citizens who demanded their human dignity along with their citizenship. Now millions around the world understand how, why, and when something in that inviolable sacred space between our gut and our heart that makes us fully human refuses to be totally silenced, whether by the foolishness of ministers of information, the ignominy of unqualified presidents, or the macabre handiwork of bone saw operators.

Our gruesome, painful legacy of foreign-backed, long-running Arab authoritarianism must be shattered and buried. It is clear now that only a combination of Arab public activism with allied international solidarity will get this job done. Interested observers therefore might ponder the four critical dimensions of the Khashoggi situation.

First is the attitude of the Saudi Arabian government to deal with its citizens with brutality, disdain and lies, and cover up its crimes with lying propaganda and commercial inducements — all of which reflects a wider Arab problem that has reached breaking point. Second is the terrifying specter of alliances among governments like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and the Trumpian United States to camouflage criminality and emasculation of the citizenry by appeals to unproven “security” imperatives and commercial gain. Third — the nightmare for the 400 million Arabs who will continue to suffer these agonies well after the West loses interest — is the confirmation yet again of the combination of authoritarianism, militarism, cruelty, and utter, sustained, incompetence that defines the governance legacy of most Arab power elites and governments. Fourth is that these destructive hereditary Arab autocracies are explicitly supported by Western, Asian, and non-Arab Middle Eastern governments that value arms sales and strategic transit routes for their imperial interests above anything else, including the 400 million mangled, mind-shriveled Arabs who refuse to cede their humanity to the rule of the bone saw.

Millions of people and many officials around the world, for the first time ever, now feel in their bones these same sentiments that have turned many Arab societies into dysfunctional, dilapidated wrecks — where 260 million of the 400 million Arabs live in poverty and vulnerability, unable to buy essential survival goods for their families that are doomed to chronic poverty and marginalization for generations to come. Jamal Khashoggi would be pleased to learn one day that his life and death might have sparked that global coalition of sensible people who can work together to transform the Arab region into stable, prosperous, and decent societies — ones that could be freed once and forever of the symbols of the bone saw, the torture rooms, the jailed tweeters, the disappeared human rights activists, and the mind-control colonels who manage these gut-wrenching new symbols of Arab mis-governance that pierce that inviolable space between our gut and our heart, whose agonies are now heard and shared around the world.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global