Sunday, November 25, 2007

Emad Hajjaj on Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq

Compared to Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, or much of the rest of the Middle East for that matter, Iran is at least a coherent nation, fractious as the Iranian people are. . . .


by Emad Hajjaj

The US client states and the media -- sometimes even decent ones like the Al-Ahram Weekly -- in the Arab Middle East have been prompting the Arab populaces to blame the problem illustrated by Emad Hajjaj's cartoon above on Iran rather than the US-led multinational empire, seeking to have them mistake the secondary contradiction (contradictory short-term interests of the power elites of the states in the Middle East) for the primary one (the peoples of the Middle East vs. the ruling classes of the US-led multinational empire). Stacking these contradictions in the correct order is the foremost task of anti-imperialists in the Middle East. The Istanbul Al-Quds International Forum was helpful, but the nature of the forum didn't allow discussion of any complex and difficult problem like this. The Cairo International Conference and Liberation Forum on 27-30 March 2008 will be a good place to begin to tackle it.

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