BartBlog

I recently spent four hours hanging out at the newly-renovated Cairo international airport, and then eight hours more sleeping on a lounge chair at the airport in Doha — so does this brief-but-intense experience now make me an expert on the entire Middle East? Sure.

If you don’t count the Crusades, the Middle East’s most deadly encounter with the West’s political and economic chessboard began way back in 1918 — after the Turkish empire crumbled, after the heroic times of Lawrence of Arabia and after the Great War. That’s when a deadly and brutal Arab Holocaust originally began.

After World War I ended, Palestine was cut into pieces by the European powers, Egypt was denied the independence that it had been promised by the Brits, the despotic Saudis tightened their grip on the Arabian peninsula, various heavy-handed but Western-friendly emirates and potentates sprang up, colonialism grew apace, France put the thumbscrews on Algeria, etc.

And one gigantic shadow also loomed menacingly over all this frantic neo-colonial scramble for the Middle East: The automobile. Oil.

Then came World War II and, after Rommel the Desert Fox was ousted by the Allies, times got even tougher in the Middle East in the late 1940s and 1950s — as Palestine was violently seized by European neo-colonials, the CIA invaded Iran and Iraq’s nascent democracies, puppet dictators were established by American and Israeli neo-colonial interests, and local non-puppet dictators and democracies alike were bloodily deposed.

By the 1960s, all the seeds for an Arab Holocaust that had been eagerly planted and watered earlier by greedy Western political and corporate chess masters began to really start to grow — and suddenly the Arab Holocaust was truly well under way.

In the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the Arab Holocaust tree began to blossom profusely and bear strange fruit as American corporate chess players continued demanding a larger and larger piece of the pie — with the seizure of Sinai and the West Bank, the betrayal of the USS Liberty, the occupation of Gaza, Reagan’s bloody eight-year surrogate war that took over a million lives in Iran and Iraq, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed an additional 250,000 men, women and children.

And all this vigorous military activity in the Middle East looked just fine on the chessboards of European, Israeli and American war rooms — but what did its reality on the ground look like? A human holocaust. The Arab Holocaust.

Whenever corporate-owned America moved a pawn on its Middle East chessboard in Washington and set up the Shah in Iran and Saddam Hussein in Iraq and helped unleash Moshe Dayan onto Palestine, to them it looked merely like pawns being knocked over — or pieces of paper changing hands.

But those pieces of paper were also death warrants for hundreds of thousands of Arabs all across the entire Middle East.

Then along came Charlie Wilson’s War — when the U.S. happily armed bin Ladin and Al Qaeda. And we all know how that went: The Taliban came to power and untold thousands of Afghans ended up dead (not to mention an additional 5,000 Americans).

Then when Bush Senior and Bush Junior decided to invade Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq and also pay for the cruel napalming of Gaza, at least a million more people died. And when Obama continued to fund the occupation of Afghanistan and Palestine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_dk-1nYSJU&feature=youtu.be and NATO invaded Libya and Syria, and Arabia’s and Yemen’s and Bahrain’s bids for democracy were brutally suppressed, more Arabs died. Many many more.

And now we have entered the age of the drone — and the Arab Holocaust continues.

And according to Middle East expert Pepe Escobar, Israel and the CIA have just happily hopped into bed with Al Qaeda once again — in order to kill as many Syrians as they possibly can. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NH03Ak04.html

For almost a century now, the Middle East has lived under a man-made Holocaust hurricane that has brutally killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Arab women and children as well as men — and killed them with enthusiasm and ease.

And when will this vicious and uncivilized Arab Holocaust finally ever end? After every single Arab in the Middle East has been killed? Or when they have finally run out of oil over there.

PS: I am using the term “Arab” loosely here. Within the eclectic mix of over a million dead bodies that have been piled up in the Middle East in the last many decades by callous acts of Western neo-colonialism, you will find not only “Arab” corpses per se — but also corpses that spoke Farsi, Urdu and Pashtu, Muslim corpses, Sunni corpses, Shia corpses, Christian corpses, Jewish corpses, Druze corpses and even Zoroastrian corpses — all equitably rotting away in the bright Middle East sun.

As far as I can tell, the only two actual components that human beings seem to require in order to be included in the West’s neo-colonial list of possible “Arab Holocaust” victims are to have the same skin tones as Jesus and to live in the Middle East.

PPS: I just saw a program on TV that discussed how former Nazis who participated in the WWII Jewish Holocaust are still being hunted down and punished even now. So WHEN will the war criminals of the Arab Holocaust start to be brought to justice as well? Or are we just hypocrites.

PPPS: Having survived my odyssey through the Rome, Cairo, Entebbe and Doha airports in one piece, I am now ready, willing and able to tackle the Singapore airport next. Wish me luck.