Give me a debate, over Osama and Dick

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http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=21592&poll=vote

By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff
Saturday, January 21, 2006

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Their faces flashed across my television screen at home in Beirut Thursday evening like multiple choice answers to a quiz show question: "Which of these three images best personifies the future values you want to define the Arab world?"

First, there was Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, releasing another audiotape addressed to the American people. He repeated the same ideas and rationales he had offered the world many times before, threatened more violence against the United States, but also offered a long-term truce. Then came U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking again about the American-led "global war on terror." He also repeated why the U.S. had to track down and kill terrorists around the world before they invaded America and destroyed Western civilization.

It was something of a political anthropology overload to witness, on the same day, Osama the moral troglodyte emerging from his cave, and Dick the collector of indictments emerging from his bunker, to deliver ideological sermons. Neither one was very convincing, or appealing. Their deadly, supposedly divinely sanctioned, combination of arrogance and violence has elicited the rejection and active political resistance of virtually the entire world. And in any case, both these guys are already in some trouble with the law.

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Here's where the Osama and Dick Horror Show comes in. A new pragmatic center is starting to take shape in many Arab lands. It articulates the sensible aspirations and solid values of ordinary citizens who reject Osama- and Dick-style political extremism, intemperance, and sustained violence. These two represent dark political underworlds inhabited by frightened people who spend much of their time hiding in caves and bunkers, deprived of natural light, unaware of the moral and political trajectory of normal human beings. Give me a televised political debate from Rafah any time.

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No one is listening to the people of the Middle East. No one is asking what they want, what they believe. It's time for people in American and Europe to get off their arrogant high-horses and remember that these people have a civilization a lot older than our own.