Florida University Professor, Walid Fares: The Arabs should not Blame Everything on Israel and the US

Walid Fares, a professor at Florida University appeared on Abu Dhabi TV and criticized Arab elites for blaming Israel and the US for all the problems of the Arabs. Following are excerpts from his comments:

There is clear violence in the region. It existed before the creation of Israel and before the US intervention. This does not mean that the US does not make mistakes; it has committed grave mistakes in recent decades.

But if we invent this philosophy that everything is great in the Middle East and that the violence began only because of US policies, it means that we don't understand what happened, for example, in Iraq, when the Ba'ath dictatorship killed half a million people. We don't understand the civil war in Algiers, we don't understand the blind violence in Sudan, and there are more examples.

The problem in the Middle East is that the political elites, whether from within the governments or from the opposition, refrain from admitting that there are deep civil problems. They blame everything on the Arab-Israeli conflict or the US. I say that we must deal with these two issues, but we must not evade our very difficult reality in this world.