The future of the Middle East

America will see to it that the elections to be held in January in Iraq will be won by those favored by them.

The United States will also see to it that Iran will be "tamed" i.e. suspend all its nuclear activities, before Mr. Bush leaves the White House.

Now, the fact that Mr. Arafat has passed away — we do not yet know why or how he died, only that he died in a hospital in France, certainly a neighborly country for Palestine — it is now possible for the U.S. to push for peace between Israel and Palestine.

We, as the people of the Middle East, may like or dislike what the United States will push for in the area.

But, we must put our hands on our hearts and with our pure conscience, analyze what kind of a political, social and economic climate we have created in the Middle East.

The only country that may compare itself with the level of "Western culture" is certainly Turkey.

Turkey has been long discussed in these columns and as a Turk I want to ignore mentioning the problems Turkey faces for the sake of this article.

I will dwell on other countries in this article.

Let us begin with three basics that represent all Middle East countries.

1- Capita per income is not too low in Middle-East countries. It is quite high in oil-rich countries. But income distribution is very unbalanced, compared to the Western norms.

2- The average length of the educational year is very short.

3- There is barely any political trace of democracy in the area.

The only way to justify these three weaknesses is to blame it on the "puppets of Western imperialism."

I may understand that "the Western imperialists may not want people’s governments," but why should the Western world care about the distribution of income and the level of education?

I want to re-report the two incidents we all witnessed during the funeral ceremony of late Arafat and then after.

The religious ceremony was held in Cairo, one of the established states of the Arab world.

The chaos during the ceremony was incomprehensible in terms of Western thinking.

For instance, the Turkish Prime minister and the Foreign Minister could not leave the plane at the airport to participate in the ceremony because of this chaos.

They just flew back to Turkey.

Certainly, the Western world had nothing to do with this ceremony!

To remind you, it was a ceremony for a historical leader who was loved by everyone in the Middle East.

It was even worse in Ramallah. The way the Palestinians handled their "holy funeral" only reminded me the way the Iranian buried their beloved Grand Khomeini, years ago.

The ceremony was not a stately-ceremony but can best be called a tribal-ceremony.

Thanks to Allah, nothing happened to the corpse!

What happened only two days after the funeral ceremony?

The new chief of the PLO Mr. Mahmoud Abbas was attacked by an identified sect of the PLO with guns and two people were killed!

Thanks again to Allah; nothing happened to Mr. Abbas at least this time!

There are Turkish sayings:

Before sticking a packing needle — a big one — into somebody else, stick a smaller one into yourself!

We must clean our own front yard first before accusing somebody else of dirtying the streets!