This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Arab lackeys fail to take on imperialism:

www.alsahafa.us

"Al-Sahafa: Ohio's Monthly Middle Eastern Newspaper"
April 2007

Every Arab newspaper in the united $tates is more interesting than the U.$. mainstream press. The Arab bourgeoisie just cannot exactly see things the same way as the U.$. imperialists. "Al-Sahafa" is the official correspondent of Al Jazeera for Ohio. So far, of the Arab papers we have seen, "Al-Sahafa" is the most apt to be considered a lackey paper.

The front cover and some inside pages are "His Majesty King Abdallah II of Jordan." The title of the article is "U.S. Must Lead the Peace Process in the Middle East." The audience of the article is what is wrong with the paper as a whole. It's about begging the U.$. imperialists, not mobilizing Arab people and their allies.

Sure enough, the CIA is running a full-page recruiting ad in the paper. It says that the image of CIA agents driving cars with machine guns in the exhaust pipes is false. CIA would just like to collect some intelligence the ad says.

The article on the Jordanian king and other articles presume the Middle East conflict is one of rationality, so that if the Jordanian king speaks well, he will contribute to a solution. Lebanese-Amerikan Fatina Salaheddine runs the paper with an open appeal to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike as "all God's children." Her article calls the United $tates, "the world's most powerful, most visible democracy."

To say that before the invasion of Iraq meant one thing. To say that now is an unambiguous endorsement of the carnage in Iraq. Here is how "Al-Sahafa" soft-pedals the Iraq question by way of publishing imperialist member of the Democratic National Committee's Executive Committee and Arab-Amerikan James Zogby, brother of pollster John Zogby:

"Iraq is of course a critical issue, but it is not, King Abdullah noted, the core issue that roils the region. 'The wellspring of regional division,' he observed, 'the cause of resentment and frustration far beyond, is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine.'"
Thus the imperialists are dampening down the Arab people in both the Republican and Democratic parties. The Republicans promised Arabs to be gone from Iraq after the 2004 election and did not deliver. The Democrats soft-pedal. "Al-Sahafa" itself shows website readers a cover of issues questioning Bush's rush to war in Iraq, but it does not make the old issues available for readers to scrutinize.

"Al-Sahafa" is a paper that paints the conflicts of the Middle East as not those of an imperialist system, but one of U.S. policy that can be reasoned away. Naivete along these lines includes an article about various meetings for Mideast peace.

Each issue apparently contains fashion advice. This one has the Mideast's entertainers, "What to Wear to Work" and "Scent of a Woman." A Palestinian Christian receives advice on how to marry his Latina girlfriend of 8 years--not by eloping but by trying to win his Palestinian parents over.

Another article celebrates former Lebanese Prime Minister Shaikh Rafiq Al-Hariri as a close political associate of French president Jacques Chirac. Other aspects of bourgeois pride--Halliburton is moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai.

The last article is from George Soros, the billionaire financier. He explains why the Bush administration bungled its Mideast policy, and though he comes from Jewish background himself, he blames the lobbying group called "American Israel Public Affairs Committee," (AIPAC) for the policy problems of the united $tates.

Though MIM agrees that AIPAC is an oppressor organization, the relentless discussion of AIPAC and other Zionist lobbying is an example of the flabbiness of the Arab bourgeoisie and depoliticization common in other quarters as well. The fact that this Soros article declaiming AIPAC appears in a CIA lackey publication proves MIM's point.

Attacking AIPAC is not considered so radical and that is why the CIA is happy to run ads in this newspaper. The most radical statement in the paper is actually the one raising the geopolitical flip of the Saudi rulers since the U.$. elections in 2006. Now the Saudi rulers call the Iraqi invasion an "illegal occupation" by the United $tates. Some more discussion could have gone into that and the real motivations for why the Saudis did that.

Many of the supposed "Left," including James Petras fall for pluralist theory that puts the focus on AIPAC and other Zionist lobbying organizations. There are many social forces conspiring to see the I$rael problem via a bourgeois "policy" angle instead of seeing the problem of the outward flow of U.$. imperialist influence into the Middle East via I$rael. The Arab bourgeoisie sees the question as one of convincing the U.$. imperialists of a more "rational" policy, a more "even-handed" or "objective" policy. We followers of Lenin see the problem as one of a system, not dependent on the smarts of leaders. For us, leaders are only cogs in a machine. One can put smarter leaders into the machine, but that only makes the machine run more smoothly.

The obvious response to having AIPAC rubbed in one's Arab face is to set up Arab lobbying, a perfectly Liberal activity. And while MIM sees nothing wrong with saying Zionists have money and spend it on public opinion, so Arabs should too, fundamentally, the problem with this approach is theoretical.

Pluralist theory says that there is no imperialist class dominating everything the way MIM says. Instead, pluralist theory says that varying lobbying groups push and make alliances. Sometimes they come out on top and sometimes they do not. Meanwhile, MIM says we can just look at the prisons to know that pluralist theory is not true, even in the supposedly Liberal democratic United $tates. The prisons are filled with people from a certain class and also the oppressed nationalities. When we look globally, we see the united $tates dominating countries in a consistent imperialist pattern.

I$rael lobbies imperialists. Yet the oppressed cannot lobby the imperialists. They must defeat them. That is what is wrong with the Arab bourgeoisie. The audience for this publication is pro-Amerikkkan lackeys and the U.$. imperialists themselves. It does not stir up the social forces needed to bring down imperialism.

If there were no Zionist lobby, the u.$. imperialists would still be in Iraq. Arabs need a global perspective to see that U.$.-installed regimes as in Iraq and Afghanistan are not that unusual. There are 30,000 U.$. troops in Korea still; Puerto Rico is still a colony of the united $tates; Haiti again had an Amerikan installed president recently after a coup against an elected president. The list goes on and on for U.$. interventions. It is the imperialists who benefit from regional approaches or "area studies," so that oppressed peoples never learn the global patterns.

Soros is fretting about Iran in this paper. For that matter, "Al-Sahafa" goes so far as to say Iraq is not the principal focus of the Middle East: Palestine still is. Within the Palestine question, "Al-Sahafa" says that over 90% of Arabs do favor a "two-state solution," which implies acceptance of I$rael.

Someone concerned about Iraq and Palestine would be looking at whoever can distract and defeat U.$. and I$raeli forces. Iran is not a threat to Arabs as Soros would like to say. Iran is drawing off U.$. forces. Likewise, instead of begging the imperialists, Al-Sahafa should take a look around the world to see other national liberation forces with an interest in defeating U.$. imperialism. Then "Al- Sahafa" would see that unjust occupations are not caused by lobbying organizations.