A whale-shark – at twelve metres plus in length it's the biggest fish in the world. ibid.
Dubai – home to more skyscrapers per square mile than anywhere else on Earth. ibid.
Dubai is home to the world’s largest shopping mall. ibid.
Green [sea] turtles prefer a vegetarian diet. ibid.
A dugong – closest relative the elephant. ibid.
For many Arabs falconry remains a passion bordering on obsession. ibid.
Dubai is home to the world’s largest shopping mall. ibid.
Arabia is addicted to water. ibid.
The Empty Quarter – spanning over two hundred and fifty thousand square miles across the Arabia Peninsula, it’s the largest expanse of sand in the world. Ben and James versus the Arabian Desert I, BBC 2013
Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too ‘Western’. It was very noticeable among the Palestinians that the most demonstrably ‘extreme’ nationalists – and Marxists – were often from Christian backgrounds. George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh used to be celebrated examples of this phenomenon, long before anyone had heard of the cadres of Hamas, or Islamic Jihad. There was an element of overcompensation involved, or so I came to suspect. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The times of Arab nationalism and unity are gone forever. These ideas which mobilized the masses are only a worthless currency. Libya has had to put up with too much from the Arabs for whom it has poured forth both blood and money. Muammar al-Gaddafi
I came to declare that I am a friend to Arabs, at a time when it is not easy to be friend to Arabs, because nowadays those who have ambitions and interests would not befriend Arabs. George Galloway
The revolutions of the Arab Spring happened because people realized they were the power. Mohammed Morsi
The story of modern Syria starts with the great global conflagration: the First World War. A History of Syria with Dan Snow, BBC 2013
An act of breath-taking imperialism. The French landed in Syria and crushed Prince Faisal’s Arab nationalists. ibid.
Sunni Muslim Arabs account for two thirds of the population. ibid.
(a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued availability of that oil on favourable terms and for sterling; and to maintain suitable arrangements for the investment of the surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism in the area and subsequently beyond; and, as a pre-condition of this, to defend the area against the brand of Arab nationalism under cover of which the Soviet Government at present prefers to advance. Selwyn Lloyd, foreign secretary’s telegram to prime minister
Hatred for the United States in the Arab world was noted, but without any serious analysis of why it should exist. The standard reflex is to attribute the antagonism to the emotional problems of people who have been bypassed by the march of history because of their own inadequacies. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
The democratic uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication and commitment. Noam Chomsky, lecture 2011 Rickman Godlee lecture, ‘Contours of Global Order’, Youtube 1.39.23
The US supports dictatorship and blocks democracy and development … George W Bush’s plaintive plea that they hate our freedoms, and they NSC] concluded that no, they don’t hate our freedoms, they hate our policies and with good reason, the same reason they did in the 1950s. ibid.
So far the threat of the Arab Spring has been pretty much contained; in the oil dictatorships which are the most important ones for the West every effort to join the Arab Spring has just been crushed by force … The threat of democracy would be smashed in the most important places. Noam Chomsky, lecture University of Massachusetts at Amherst 27 September 2012, ‘Who Owns the World? Resistance and Ways Forward’
Sources in Washington speak of the American government’s increasing concern of developments in the Gulf. The banned Islamic Gulf movement … stepping up its activities on the oil-rich island of Alwai. Deadline 1988 starring John Hurt & Imogen Stubbs & Robert McBain & Greg Hicks & Bargach Abdelrahim & Julian Curry & David Conville & Roshan Seth et al, director Richard Shroud
We foisted kings upon the Arabs – we engineered a 96 per cent referendum in favour of the Hashemite King Faisal in Iraq in 1922 – and then provided them with generals and dictators. The people of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt – which had been invaded by the British in the 19th century – were subsequently blessed with mendacious governments, brutal policemen, lying newspapers and fake elections. Mubarak even scored Faisal’s epic 96 per cent election victory all over again. For the Arabs, ‘democracy’ did not mean freedom of speech and freedom to elect their own leaders; it referred to the ‘democratic’ Western nations that continued to support the cruel dictators who oppressed them.
Thus the Arab revolutions that consumed the Middle East in 2011 – forget the ‘Arab Spring’, a creature of Hollywood origin – did not demand democracy. The posters on the streets of Cairo and Tunis and Damascus and Yemen called for dignity and justice, two commodities that we had definitely not sought for the Arabs. Justice for the Palestinians – or for the Kurds, or for that matter for the destroyed Armenians of 1915, or for all the suffering Arab peoples – was not something that commended itself to us. But I think we should have gone much further in our investigation of the titanic changes of 2011.
In my own reporting of the uprisings, I attributed them to increased education and travel by the Arab communities throughout the Middle East. While acknowledging the power of social media and the internet, something deeper was at work. The Arabs had woken from a deep sleep. They had refused any longer to be the ‘children’ of the patriarchal father figure – the Nassers and the Sadats and the Mubaraks and the Assads and the Gaddafis and, in earlier years, the Saddams. They awoke to find that it was their own governments that were composed of children, one of whom – Mubarak – was 83 years old. The Arabs wanted to own their towns and cities. They wanted to own the place in which they lived, which comprised much of the Middle East.
But I think now that I was wrong. In retrospect, I woefully misunderstood what these revolutions represented. One clue, perhaps, lay in the importance of trade union movements. Where trade unions, with their transnational socialism and anti-colonial credentials, were strong – in Egypt and Tunisia – the revolutionary bloodshed was far less than in the nations that had either banned trade unionism altogether – Libya, for example – or concretised the trade union movement into the regime, which had long ago happened in Syria and Yemen. Socialism crossed borders. Yet even this does not account for the events of 2011.
What really manifested itself that year, I now believe, was a much more deeply held Arab conviction; that the very institutions that we in the West had built for these people 100 years ago were worthless, that the statehood which we had later awarded to artificial nations within equally artificial borders was meaningless. They were rejecting the whole construct that we had foisted upon them. That Egypt regressed back into military patriarchy – and the subsequent and utterly predictable Western acquiescence in this – after a brief period of elected Muslim Brotherhood government, does not change this equation. While the revolutions largely stayed within national boundaries – at least at the start – the borders began to lose their meaning.
Hamas in Gaza and the Brotherhood became one, the Sinai-Gaza frontier began to crumble. Then the collapse of Libya rendered Gaddafi's former borders open – and thus non-existent. His weapons – including chemical shells – were sold to rebels in Egypt and Syria. Tunisia, which is now supposed to be the darling of our Western hearts for its adhesion to ‘democracy’, is now in danger of implosion because its own borders with Libya and Algeria are open to arms trans-shipments to Islamist groups. Isis’s grasp of these frontierless entities means that its own transnational existence is assured, from Fallujah in Iraq to the edge of Syrian Aleppo, from Nigeria to Niger and Chad.
It can thus degrade the economy of each country it moves through, blowing up a Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh, attacking the Bardo museum in Tunis or the beaches of Sousse. There was a time – when Islamists attacked the Jewish synagogue on Djerba island in Tunisia in 2002, for example, killing 19 people – when tourism could continue. But that was when Libya still existed. In those days, Ben Ali’s security police were able to control the internal security of Tunisia; the army was left weak so that it could not stage a coup. So today, of course, the near-impotent army of Tunisia cannot defend its frontiers.
Isis’s understanding of this new phenomenon preceded our own. But Isis’s realisation that frontiers were essentially defenceless in the modern age coincided with the popular Arab disillusion with their own invented nations. Most of the millions of Syrian and Afghan refugees who have flooded into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and then north into Europe do not intend to return – ever – to states that have failed them as surely as they no longer – in the minds of the refugees – exist. These are not ‘failed states’ so much as imaginary nations that no longer have any purpose.