Of course, the concept of honor cannot be defined by the military power you possess, or by an arsenal of weapons about which you are not able to make a decision; nor is honor to be tied to a human power like yourself that has its own aims. Honor is to be honorable through the decision you possess, which springs from the depth of your faith; and honor is to be tied to the source of honor, as He, the Exalted, said: “Yet all might belongs to Allah and His Apostle and the faithful, but the hypocrites do not know” (Qurʾan 63:8). .
The Arabs lost the concept of honor before, and invented for themselves an outward honor, embodied in the glitter of the West and the civilization of those who do not believe in Allah and His Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad (s), and his Ahl al-Bayt. The Arab politicians are among “those who take the faithless for allies instead of the faithful. Do they seek honour with them? [If so,] indeed all honour belongs to Allah” (Qurʾan 4:139).
For this reason the Arabs lost the compass of honor and fell into permanent humiliation, their slogan being (Far be honor from us!), unlike the statement of faith that the believers who have followed the path of Imam al-Husayn took as their slogan of honor: (Far be humiliation from us!).
What counts is not the military arsenal, nor the arms race to which governments allocate the highest shares of their budgets. Unless they possess the strength of the abstinent (those who own things and are not owned by them), they are humiliated and abject, led by their weapons—that is, led by those who manufactured them for them.
In the brutal aggressive scene of violations that Israel is carrying out against our Palestinian brothers, and in Gaza specifically, there is no kind of violation left that Israel has not committed against human beings: the child has been killed, and killed many times over; women have been killed and displaced; homes have been demolished and the peaceful brutalized; and every civilian target has been attacked—schools, hospitals and even international and humanitarian centers have received their share of the shells of the arrogant Zionist aggression.
No veil remains behind which Israel can hide after what has happened. Although it was like this before as well, what happened in the bombardment of Gaza gathered every heading under it and embodied all the violations in the clearest image and the most eloquent expression—to the extent that Israel, which went to great lengths in seizing control of the media platforms in the Western world and closed every crossing that could carry the voice of the Palestinians to the world, polishing what admits no luster at all... to the extent that the collar of this control was broken and some crossings opened for many peoples who had been misled by the media. Indeed, some Jews mounted those very platforms to denounce and condemn Israel’s action against the Palestinians in Gaza, and placards were raised in Israel itself (I am a Jew and not a Zionist), and two non-Arab countries expelled Israel’s ambassador in protest at the massacres. All of that happened because the extent of tyranny reached a degree that admits no justification.
We have known that Israel is arrogant, and we need not enumerate its vices; and we have known Arab humiliation under many headings. But how are we to understand this kind of humiliation, which makes (Hamas), the resistance against the occupation, too ashamed to demand much of the Arab bloc, and content itself with extracting from them a demand for the immediate halt of the aggression, the opening of the crossings, the delivery of aid and the like?!
Hamas knows that the Arab rulers know no meaning of honor, and so it did not demand much of them. It is clear that the age of taking courageous decisions has passed: the last war the Arabs entered was in 1973 CE, and now they are capable of nothing but buying weapons; as for the decision to use them, it is only ever against their own peoples and subjects who demand their rights.
The option of war is difficult and thorny, but if its conditions and causes are present, it is a necessity in order to repel injustice and ward off crime. Many Arab politicians plead that wars are no longer of any use and are unacceptable in the age of international alliances and the existence of the international community—while at the same time we see that unilateral decisions of war have not passed away for America: it has waged war on Afghanistan and on Iraq, and it threatens and menaces many countries that it claims threaten its security. So what of one who openly violates your security and kills everything that breathes in your land, publicly, night and day?!
The justification for war exists, but its standard-bearer is missing. The deputy secretary-general of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Shaykh Naʿim Qasim, has demanded that a decision be taken by the Arab states to supply the resistance in Gaza with weapons, openly and clearly. Yes, this matter is of the breath of honor and of its paths.
They claim to be in Arab solidarity; but what is the benefit of that solidarity if there is no cooperation among them in peace and war, in prosperity and adversity? If Israel surpasses the Arab states in military power and armament, it does not surpass them when they are united as a bloc: against the nine and a half billion that Israel spends on military expenditure, the Arab states spend fifty-two billion. Statistics indicate that Israel’s human resources capable of waging war increase annually by 53 thousand persons, whereas the increase for the Arab states exceeds 3 million persons, given the difference in population of the Arab states combined. As for the military arsenal, Israel manufactures many of the types it uses, whereas the situation of the Arabs is different: they buy everything they have, from the United States of America and Britain in particular.
But those weapons and instruments of war are conditional, and here lies the humiliation, for (the declassified American, British and French documents have revealed that these countries used to place conditions on arms deals with the Arab states.
These conditions consist in installing missile launchers in places from which they cannot reach Israel: in the eighties of the past century, the West asked Saudi Arabia to install the Chinese missiles in places from which their range would not reach Israel.
They also consist in not selling the weapons or granting them to a third party. Some British documents stated that what was required was the use of these weapons in inter-Arab conflicts—this when discussing the deal for Phantom aircraft between the United States and Saudi Arabia)[1].
These facts and their like make the Arab peoples distrust their heads of state; yet the arrogance and love of status of some—among them court scholars and the intellectuals of the regime—keep them still surrounding those heads of state and polishing their decisions, and gambling with them on the future of their children, a future that can scarcely see any light of honor except from outside those frameworks.
In this context, whenever semi-intellectuals rise up with their black pens in the yellow press, and court scholars from atop pulpits of evil in mosques of harm, striving to disparage the leaders who have followed the path of Imam al-Husayn (a) in their honor—such as the men of the resistance in Lebanon and the godly scholars among the jurists who possess Quranic insights—time proves to them the opposite of what they claim and conjecture, the magic turns on the magician, and reality informs them that honor still has its people and that men still raise its banner, so that the peoples may grasp these facts, benefit from the trials they pass through, and discover through them the true mettle of men.
Gaza today is a witness to the bitter reality of the community; perhaps it will make us see the points of failure in our intellectual choices and in our political stances toward those who ascend to power in these lands.
18/1/2009 CE
