Arab Nationalism, Pan-Arabism Quotes
Ataturk wrote this manual personally. Religious Turks took violent offense to Ataturk’s proclamation that Turks were great without Islam.
Few non-Arab Muslims would publicly admit this historical truth, and at the time this view was shocking to the most religious men in Turkey. However it resonated with many of the average citizens. The entire Arab world had been subject to and controlled by Turkey, and amongst the Turks, the backward Arabs, were not very popular and were historically seen as underdeveloped colonial subjects.
The neo-conservative expectation of the American invasion of Iraq almost a century later was essentially the same, and the false expectation led to the same kind of failure as the George W. Bush debacle of the early 21st century.
The Arabs have a long history of arrogant and disdainful treatment by others given the British Colonial history in the Middle East, the French (who invaded Egypt under Napoleon), the Islamic Ottoman Empire which controlled the Middle East before that, and others. Along with the arrogance that usually comes with empire, Western support of the only democracy and modern state in the Middle East—Israel—was even more resented by the Arabs. Historically, there was a general feeling by much of the world that if the Arabs had no oil, no one would pay much attention to them. The Arabs naturally resented these attitudes. It was not until Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sedat, came to government in Egypt and King Hussein reformed Jordan, that Western attitudes began to change towards the Arab nations. The Western change was not because of any Arab “lesson” but the result of new, exceptionally capable leaders who have been reforming the Arab nations.
This quotation illustrates the derogatory and disrespectful attitude that many high level American officials then had towards Arab leaders. No one objected to or reprimanded Symmes for his use of the word “mongrels”. And he was the State Departments leading expert on the Middle East and Arab Cultures. In the photo, Symmes is the gentlemen on the right.
Two years later, In August 1990, Iraq invaded and conquered Kuwait. This quotation was used in the 1990 Iraq crisis by President George W. Bush in his television speech to the Iraqi people.
This Proclamation was issued upon arrival of the British occupying imperial army in present day Iraq. The English policy makers like the Bush administration almost a century later were expecting a more welcoming reaction. See {585250}.
The Germans allied themselves with the Islamic insurgency of the day as a strategic maneuver. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem broadcast propaganda from Nazi radio in Berlin and was dispatched to organize Muslim fighters in Iraq. Fascism was introduced into the Middle East and the Arabs and Persians saw it as a natural extension of their authoritarian and highly prescriptive forms of religious and civil government. 60 years later, there would be Islamic Fascists throughout the Middle East in control or vying for control of many of the countries.
This quotation not only has historical significance by showing that there was a female involvement in Pan-Arab politics in the 1920s, but has political significance today and it ironically is quoted more by Israeli Defenders than by the opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. Most modern Arab politicians find it not in their political interest to seem to approve of an independent woman having leadership in the Middle East. The Israeli defenders quote it to refute 3 arguments that many political enemies of Israel make: There were no significant number of Jews in Israel until after the Holocaust when the UN decided that they could have Arab land. The land in Israel was seized by the Zionists or ceded to them by the UN and Jews had no legitimate right to any land in the Palestinian area; and that there was no hostility to the Jews until they established a Jewish State in the area. The most damaging fact to the Arab extremist argument. There were so many Jews buying land that there was a movement to try and persuade Arabs not to sell land to Jews and to buy land from Jews.
