Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010

World

Prince El Hassan bin Talal (left) and Jordanian royal advisor Akel Biltaji (right).

November 4th, 2009
By Rick DelVecchio

Amman, Jordan – An appeal to common moral roots can break the “hatred industry” that sows trouble in the Middle East and threatens worse to come, Jordan’s Prince El Hassan bin Talal told journalists.

Replace one-on-one parrying over narrow national differences with a regional perspective based on human dignity, and long-term peace may win out, the prince said in an interview at the royal palace with 20 Christian journalists visiting Jordan on an ecumenical press tour sponsored by the Jordan tourism board.

The answer is in Matthew 7:12 and in similar love-thy-neighbor commands that appear in a dozen other faith traditions, the prince said.

The costs of continuing business as usual, with its “engineered polarity” and stress on a militant view of security, could be high indeed, the prince said. What he called a “human dignity deficit” is growing as the population of unemployed Arabs rises to a predicted 55 million in 2050, he warned.

“If we just sit back and allow this to happen, we are actually hothousing, as we speak, with our ineffectual politics, the hatred that we claim we fear and we genuinely fear,” he said.

Prince Hassan traced the region’s troubles to pre-World War I European colonial policies that intentionally created division and poverty in the Eastern Mediterranean. At about the same time oil replaced coal to fuel warships.

“The hubris of the use of this new development meant that the industrial machine was powered by basic resources coming from this region with no consideration of the people living next to the pipelines,” he said.

But the prince was not only critical of outsiders.

“If I were to stand on a soapbox in a refugee camp and say, ‘What do you want?’, they would say the right of return or throwing Israel into the sea. But if I were to go to their individual homes, as I have done, 60 percent of our youth want to migrate. A university education is the leverage for migration. There is no chance of progressing in a merit-based system. There is no merit-based system. Colonialism is rife in this region. Corruption is rife in this region. We have to be self-critical.”

Prince Hassan, 62, served as his late brother King Hussein’s closest adviser and is known as a voice for dialogue and humanitarianism in the region. In his 1995 book “Christianity in the Arab World,” he praised Arab Christians’ historic role in promoting knowledge in the Muslim world and ties to the West.

Those ties are strained today, and the prince openly wondered whether nations want to stabilize the North-South line that runs through the region or are content to accept the region’s hybrid nature and the warfare that results from it.

The prince thinks the Middle East has become almost a brand signifying political division and believes the name should be set aside and replaced with Southwest Asia. Let the nations of Southwest Asia form a new regional identity and learn to talk to each other in a new way as they work on security and economic problems on a regional basis, he said.

“One cannot continue to look ad hoc today at the Palestinians and the Israelis, Iraq the day after that, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen,” the prince said. “The whole region is in turmoil, partly because of the breakdown of governance, which I call good bedside manner, knowing how to talk to people, knowing how to listen to people, knowing how to interact with people and their different psychological and linguistic traditions, and trying to develop a more human understanding of security.”

The prince offered a small example of how linguistic differences can blow out of proportion to the actual differences between people. In France, the term “secular” means the right of free speech and free belief. In the Arab world, it means irreligious.

An international perspective could help nations rise above these surface differences, the prince proposed. He recounted an exchange he had with the Israelis, who told him they could never have complete peace with the Arabs because of Iran. He recalled his answer: “I said, ‘Well, I can see where you’re coming from because anything that lands on you, as in the Saddam era, affects us directly. But is it for you to talk about Iran today, and Pakistan tomorrow, and India the day after, or is it for the international community?’”

The prince decried the lack of an economic-social council where Mideast nations can work together.

“The hypocrisy is that we meet with the Israelis under the umbrella of the U.N. in Geneva and New York, but we do not yet discuss supra-national issues which took the Franco-Prussian War and the first war and the second war for the Europeans to discuss in terms of the oil and steel community. So why cannot we discuss a water and energy community for the human environment?”

Prince Hassan called for a new perspective on Jerusalem, the divided city on the edge of violence over claims to more than 200 Jewish, Christian and Muslim sacred sites. For the prince, Noah is the most fitting symbol for the new Jerusalem.

“Noah created an ark for the salvation of humanity,” the prince said. “Can we create an ark for the salvation of our common humanity?”

A “Jerusalem consciousness fund” to promote the civil state and elevate religion above politics may be a step forward, he said.

“My hope in terms of aesthetic uplift and spiritual uplift,” the prince said, “is one day to see a combination of Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew and Gregorian cultures celebrating creation, celebrating our Lord.”

Journalists heard another perspective on Mideast politics from a second high-ranking Jordanian civic leader, Senator Akel E. Biltaji. The Gaza-born Biltaji serves as King Abdullah II’s adviser on tourism promotion, foreign direct investment and country branding.

Biltaji echoed an earlier Jordanian king, the first King Abdullah, who addressed an essay to the American people on the eve of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The king wrote that the admission of Jews into Palestine portended “the most frightful consequences in bloody chaos,” and he pleaded for fairness in judging the Palestine question.

Biltaji said he does not see the question being resolved peacefully today. He lamented that on both sides a divisive patriotism is taking the place of the prophecies and piety that believers in the region once shared.

“Religion’s hijacked,” he said. “We come down to Earth and say, ‘Where’s Moses in all this? Where’s Jesus? Where’s Mohammed?’ When we look at the Ten Commandments, which are the basis of the three religions, where are all the values of these stories? So this is where are now.” He concluded: “Patriotism and politics have killed not only the piety but also the prophecy that is in our hearts.”

This is the second in an occasional series. The first installment of “Jordan: Voices of Peace,” interviews with two Arab Catholic leaders, appeared in the Oct. 16 issue of Catholic San Francisco.