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The Crisis of Arab Intellectuals
(An-Nahar-Lebanon) Hussein Abdul Hussein - The deep intellectual culture still prevalent among today's Arabs, including Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Copts, and Druze, requires adopting the beliefs of the sect as it is, without any modification or alteration. Whoever contradicts any idea departs from the consensus, and consequently is expelled from the group and acquires the characteristics of an outsider, an apostate, or a defector. The intellectuals often rewrite history. In Iraq, for example, it is rare to find a Shiite intellectual who says that the U.S. was the one that overthrew Saddam Hussein, and that America led a coalition and launched thousands of airstrikes to defeat ISIS. Iraqi Shiite intellectuals avoid mentioning America, and repeat that the Popular Mobilization militias were the ones that defeated ISIS. The freedom that America granted to the Iraqis by uprooting Saddam did not change the Iraqi general culture, nor the Arab one, as there is no distinction between identity and opinion. The opinion follows the identity, and the identity emerges from the group, so the individual's opinion becomes identical to the group's opinion, and departure from the group's opinion becomes a departure from the group itself and betrayal. Because the majority of Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians and Lebanese do not understand the meaning of freedom and opinion independent of identity and group, freedom will not spread among these peoples. In the absence of freedom, democracy is impossible to establish, and the voting process in periodic elections becomes a means of measuring the size of each group in order to determine its shares in the state. The writer is a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.