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Who Will Win the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Arab Street: Turkey or Iran?
(Institute for Contemporary Affairs-Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Harold Rhode - Shiite Iran is appealing to the Arab Sunni street by trying to co-opt the agenda of the Sunni masses - the existence of Israel and the sanctity of Jerusalem - neither of which are traditional Shiite issues. In doing so, Iran seeks to undermine the existing Arab Sunni regimes by going over the heads of their leaders. That is why almost all of the regimes in the region hate the Iranian regime more than they hate Israel. Jerusalem does not matter for traditional Shiites. They see the city's sanctification as a Sunni innovation and therefore summarily reject it. In the late 680s CE, 55 years after Muhammad's death, the Sunni Umayyad rulers of Damascus built a dome over the Rock on the Temple Mount as a way to help smother a local revolt in Mecca. The Umayyads were afraid that people who made the pilgrimage to Mecca would join the rebels' cause, so they blocked pilgrims from going to Mecca and turned the Temple Mount into an alternative pilgrimage site. Some Shiite Grand Ayatollahs even have argued that Jerusalem was given to the children of Isaac, while Ishmael, Abraham's older son, received Najaf, which is in Iraq. In other words, from a Shiite perspective, Jerusalem is a Sunni heresy. It appears that the Saudis and the present Turkish government are both interested in reestablishing the Caliphate - certainly culturally and probably eventually politically - most likely in the capital of the last great Sunni empire in modern times: Istanbul. The Turkish government claims that there is no Wahhabi money going into Turkey. Maybe so, but gorgeous, expensive mosques are being built in Turkey's poor, small villages. The locals obviously do not have the money for this. While many Turks supported the Gaza flotilla terrorists, many others wonder why Arab Egypt - which also blockades Hamas-controlled Gaza - and the oil-rich Arab countries with limitless financial resources have not taken care of the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza. Why should Turkey, they reason, be more concerned about the Arabs than the Arabs themselves? Dr. Harold Rhode joined the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 1982 as an advisor on Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. From 1994 until his recent retirement, he served in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.