Sunday, September 20, 2009

Desecration of Arab history

The Reuters Global News Blog reports that the tomb of Michel Aflaq, one of the pioneering figures of Arab nationalism and a founding father of the Baath party, is now being used by the US military as a shopping mall.

I honestly don't know what disgusts me more: that the US military would be so clueless about a monument to a man so important in the history not only of Iraq, but the Middle East; or that the current prime minister of Iraq, a religious Shii who is now trying to sell himself as an Iraqi nationalist, would knowingly permit such a desecration.  Yes, Saddam was a Baathist, as are some of those currently in both Iraq and Syria who are trying to pull him down.  But first and foremost, Aflaq was a pioneer of secular Arab nationalism, one of the central principles of which was resistance to the colonial/imperial policies of the West in the Middle East.



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