(NEW YORK) MintPress – The mood at the start of this year’s U.N. General Assembly in New York is markedly different than it was in 2011, when democratic uprisings across the Arab world sparked excitement and hope. Now, unrest across the Middle East is set to dominate the discussions among the more than 120 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs who are gathered here.
In his opening address, President Barack Obama urged global leaders to rally against violence and extremism as he referred to the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya and the wave of anti-American protests that spread across two dozen Muslim countries, ostensibly caused by the U.S.-made film “The Innocence of Muslims” that mocks the prophet Mohammed.
Obama also went to great lengths to distance American people and officials from the film, calling it “a crude and disgusting video” and emphasizing, “Now, I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.”
The problem, however, is that the film merely triggered outrage against the West that was already building up in much of the Muslim world.
As James Petras, a former professor of sociology at Binghamton University in New York and co-author of “Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century” recently wrote in Global Research, “Death and destruction is rampant, poverty and misery has multiplied, law and order has broken down … living standards have plunged, cities are devastated and commerce is paralyzed. And presiding over this ‘Arab Winter’ are the Western powers, the U.S. and EU.”
As true as that might be, the roots of the violent uprisings go deeper still. In an exclusive interview with MintPress News, Dr. Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, an academic-turned-parliamentarian for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt, said, “What you see is the confrontation with history.”
Deep seated resentment
“Many of those people who demonstrated violently, a good portion of them at some time went to the Embassy and wanted to get a visa to visit a friend, or someone they know in Western countries and were denied or had something happen that made them feel humiliated, and that accumulated through the years,” he explained.
“And when they see the killings in Syria and the U.S. not doing enough to save the lives of people there, or when they see the situation in Palestine, where people are still under siege, and what they saw during the Iraq war and how the U.S. killed hundreds of thousands, this accumulates into their psyche.”
Dardery continues, “Unfortunately, there aren’t enough channels where they can express their anger, and they do not have space where they can even communicate with the people living in America or Europe to understand why their governments were silent about the violations of human rights in that part of the world for years, for decades.”
Dardery echoes the sentiments of Egyptian leader Mohamed Morsi, who recently told the New York Times that the United States had earned its bad reputation in the Middle East by backing generations of military dictatorships and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. “Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said.
Political battleground
Even that is not the full picture, maintains Dardery, at least when it comes to Egypt. “We are still in transition,” he contends. “And the candidate who lost the election still has lots of followers, and the Mubarak regime still has followers, and they want to cause trouble for Morsi’s government.”
Morsi won Egypt’s presidential runoff against Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister under Mubarak, in June 2012. According to official results, Morsi took 51.7 percent of the vote while Shafik received 48.3. Morsi is the first civilian to hold the office.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the tug of war for power may be taking place at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
“More broadly,” said Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author in a New York Times op-ed column, “this is less about offensive videos than about a political car unfolding in the Muslim world. Extremist Muslims like Salafis see themselves as unfairly marginalized, and they hope to exploit this issue to embarrass their governments and win public support.”
“This is a political struggle, not just a religious battle — and we’re pawns,” he added.
Public minority
Whatever the roots of the rebellion, those behind it do not seem to represent the population at large.
“Those extremists are very small in number, very small, but they feed into one another,” maintains Dardery. “I think the majority of people are not with this group.”
Prominent blogger and essayist Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, agrees. “In fact, the crowd that attacked the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was just 2,000 or so people, tiny by Egyptian standards,” he pointed out in a recent “Informed Comment” column. “A demonstration that only attracted 2,000 people would usually be considered a dismal failure in Cairo.
“Likewise, for all its horror and destructiveness, the crowd that assaulted the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was very small, a few hundred people. Many of them have now been chased out of town by outraged Libyans disturbed at this affront to their city’s reputation as a cradle of a revolution made for the sake of human rights,” he continued.
“A careful comparison in percentage terms of the size of the crowds that protested Mubarak’s rule in Cairo (hundreds of thousands) with the size of those who protested the so-called film attacking the Prophet Muhammad, shows that the latter is hardly worth mentioning.”
Maybe so, but Egyptian MP Dardery suggests there are lessons to be learned. “I think there are cultural differences, but. I am very much for an exchange of ideas, for a critical understanding of one another, not for causing damage to one another.”
For now, says Kristof, “My bet is that we’ll see more turbulence in the Arab world, but that countries like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya won’t fall over a cliff. A revolution isn’t an event, but a process.”