Vatican Spring? Don’t bet the basilica on it.
The Arabs, I was once informed by an orotund Christian Zionist, belong to a culture of shame. To the extent crime is stigmatized in Arab lands, it is more for the dishonor it imposes on family or tribe than the immorality of the crime itself. The west, by contrast, is a culture of guilt, where justice is defined and meted out under codes and systems that evolved from the Enlightenment. As cultures of shame and guilt are irreconcilable, I was told, there will never be peace until one side prevails.
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If nothing else, last week’s Senate hearings on Chuck Hagel’s fitness to run the US Defense Department exposed the deep divide that separates Washington’s world from the real one. At one point in the marathon session, for example, Republican Ted Cruz aired clips from an Al-Jazeera interview on a large video screen in which Hagel, according to Cruz, allowed that Israel had committed wartime atrocities. As the footage was all but inaudible, Cruz demanded of Hagel directly: “Do you think the nation of Israel has committed war crimes?”
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The Majalla 2012-28-12
Mazen Kalab arrives an hour late for his interview with me, a Western journalist. He twitches nervously as he settles into his chair at the café of the hotel in Istanbul where he has been living on and off since August, when he gathered his family and fled his home in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo.
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