Winter thoughts

A few years ago I found myself in a cafe in a whitewashed coastal town in Morocco (where Europeans owned the best traditional houses), surrounded by local men watching an American tv movie while drinking the famous sugary mint tea in large glasses. I was there with a couple of locals who were 'hosting' me.

The movie was already into its second act,if I remember correctly, and was dubbed into Spanish with Arabic subtitles.

The film was a drama about a neo-nazi group in Los Angeles who are attempting to shanghai the broadcast of a Holocaust remembrance ceremony where an important Jewish Nazi-hunter was receiving an award. I think the plan was to assassinate the Nazi-hunter while broadcasting a speech by the Holocaust-denying neo-nazi leader, using the hijacked tv station that was filming the ceremony.

Morocco is a kingdom where polical expression is tightly controlled, especially in two areas: the ruling monarchy and Islam.

It was a bit like watching a prison-revolt drama from inside the day-room of a jail (which I've also done). I kept wondering just who these Moroccans were thinking of as the villains in this cheap tv drama. The film ended with the neo-nazis getting caught and the Jewish human rights defender being saved, just as we all knew it would in an American film featuring murderous antisemites, the memory of the Holocaust, and Jewish targets. We all know how that script goes - all of us - Arabs and Spaniards and Canucks and Malaysians, anybody. Its the successful confluence of history, Western media and Western morality since World War Two.

As the credits rolled, one guy said something in Arabic to the general agreement of the others. I asked what he had said and was told, "He said that the Americans try to fool us Moroccans with their propaganda but we are not fooled by them". That was all that was said on the subject and we left.

This was the winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of 2004, the vicious targeting and killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (who made an incendiary film criticizing women's place in Islam, and was shot and stabbed to death in the street in Amsterdam with a note left in his body explaining why, and also the bombing of a Casablanca synagogue the year before that left many dead). The point is that in all cases the killers were Islamists of Moroccan origin. Times were a bit tense.

That subject had already come up over tea in the house of my hosts and I had rhymed off all of the above, minus the synagogue bombings (I'm now forgetting yet another European incident of the time that really cemented the 'low-ebb' of Euro-Moroccan relations in the whole context of Arabs-vs-the-West crisis we're living in these days), and was met with much nervous laughter and embarrassed smiling, in particular by the older brother, a failed gambler who'd married a Danish woman and then given up his life there having lost a custody battle over his daughter. He hated Denmark.

The Moroccans saw the film simply as the propaganda of the imperialist, who re-writes history to reinforce his agenda, in this case sympathy for the Jews to justify and reinforce the state of Israel, that perpetual insult and humiliation to the whole Arab nation. In Morocco and in all the Arab world, America is seen as a "Jewish country", dominated completely by Israel with a 100% pro-Jewish, anti-Arab bias in the mass media, Congress, and of course the White House. The political use of the Holocaust by Israel to justify a) its creation and b) its defense has manifested the inevitable: an equally politicized Arab rejection of the historical reality of the Holocaust as an imperialist Jewish lie.

I guess at this point all this is common knowledge, and yet I'm pointing it out. Something about that two weeks or so trip to Morocco still sticks in my craw, a trip only taken because it was an easy ferry-ride away from where I was staying in the south of Spain, a bit of utterly gratuitous Westerner-in-the-east backpacking slid into at the casual invite of a couple of young Aussies.

Of course my town hosts were in the process of attempting to rip me off through an bit of extra-billing at the end of my little stay with them. The trick being that the price of the bed, meals, etc. was a non-issue until payment time, with a huge outburst of rage and shock when I politely refused their price. I had fallen for their game but wasn't going to fall all the way, as I'd traveled in enough Arab countries before to know how outrageous their whole ploy was. It was an ugly ending, but the law of the land was completely on my side and while they tried to pretend otherwise everyone knew it, and finally the three of them faded away, having boarded my bus for Tangiers, after following me through the streets determined to get their rip-off price no matter what.

It all left the open question of just what the hell I was doing in a poor, Muslim country that faced onto rich Europe directly, where scores of young men calling themselves "guides" attach themselves to tourists, relentlessly determined to scam themselves into a few hundred diram for an hour of hustling the said ignoramus of the pink-skinned variety around town. Got to make a living somehow.

It was pretty hard to argue with Moroccans when they made the point: the world's hyper-power is of course 1000% pro-Israel, and so are the other western countries despite whatever gloss of criticism a France or Italy might make whenever Israel starts another invasion of Gaza or Lebanon or the West Bank. In every corner of the Arab world people watch Al Jazeera each night and see Israeli tanks and warplanes ripping the army-less Palestinians apart, and have been watching all of it helplessly since June, 1967 and even before. Even without mentioning the parallel American occupation of Iraq its totally obvious to Arab eyes just who the West loves, and who the West despises. Its as though the sickening, bloody history of the Crusades has taught us nothing.

A wintry veil indeed hangs over us all, in this age of carbon-fuel induced world-warming. This 'new year' won't hold so much new-ness I think, but only so much more of the same.