Arab workers sense of pride is boosted by the revolutions in the Middle East. Arabs throughout the region and the world are watching this on Al Jazeera and the Internet

Here in Northern California, I spent about an hour and a half at a car dealership yesterday because my car needed a replacement part. I had my grandson for the afternoon so he was with me.

So we headed down there with our laptops because he has some homework to do as well. It turned out that we couldn’t get online while we were waiting for the part to be put on so we just made the best of it. Right next to us was a free Internet service provided by the dealership for waiting customers and some guy was on it. It never occurred to me why the service was working for him, but not for me; I simply accepted the word of the sales dept employee. It turned out he was wrong but as I never tried to get online I never figured that out until I left.

But that is neither here nor there. The guy at the free computer was looking at Arabic websites so I asked, “Hey man, are you reading Arabic?”

He said he was and it turned out he was from Yemen. There are a fair few Yemeni’s in my community. I immediately started talking with him about the situation in North Africa and the Middle East including Yemen. At first, I shared with him my experiences when I took the train from Istanbul to Baghdad and from there a bus to Basra. I told him how I loved the Hamam and the food and the way the Arab people treated me.

Then he went to a website that had pictures of Yemeni cities and their ancient buildings. He showed me a picture of what is supposed to be the Queen of Sheba’s temple.

“Do you believe in the Queen of Sheba?” he asked me.

"I’ve heard of her from the bible” I replied. "But I really don’t know much else."
I told him how astonished I was on that train going through towns like Babylon. I wasn’t religious at that point in my life but these places were so famous and so ingrained in my mind growing up in the Christian religion.

He showed me more pictures of ancient sites in Yemen and how this or that city was 5000 years old.

We eventually talked about the situation in the Middle East and he was really excited about it, as I was. I could see the sense of pride he had that the Arabs  were suddenly cast in to the international spotlight and for what he considered the right reasons as opposed to suicide bombings.

“Mubarak, Gaddafi, Ben Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh (Yemen’s president) have been there too long. They stay in power for years” he tells me, “What is happening in the Middle East is a good thing?

I agreed and then we got on to the subject of Israel, but not before I asked him how Muslims become Muslims. “In the religion I was raised in” I said, “They have this ritual where they pour water over you and make you a Christian.” “My son is a Jew though” I continued, “Because with Jews, they go through the mother, you are a Jew if your mother is a Jew.”

“Is it the same with Muslims?” I asked. He said that you are just a Muslim if your parents are Muslims and that settled that question.

We talked about Israel and I made the point that all the rotten regimes in the Middle East from the secular dictators like Mubarak to the Saudi’s, the Mullahs of Iran and the Zionists will find some common ground to unite on in the face of a united worker’s movement. Threats to the market, to capitalism is what they fear most, not Islamic fundamentalism. In Egypt, Christian and Muslim Egyptians were out in the streets together. He said he had no problem with Israel but it was the extremism he objected to.   Zionism is never portrayed as an extremist philosophy in the western mass media, or rarely.

I talked a little about the formation of Israel and the plans of British imperialism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The first British governor of Jerusalem referred to a Jewish state in the area as being British Imperialism’s “Loyal little Ulster in the Middle East",  referring to the occupied 6 counties of Ulster in Northern Ireland. (Three of Ulster’s counties are in the Republic of Ireland)

But what struck me was how the uprisings in the Middle East had affected his sense of self worth. For Muslims, especially Arabs living in the US, it is a difficult time. I have not much time for any organized religion but there is a massive bias against Islam here. I always tell people who echo the mass media’s propaganda that Jews and Muslims can’t get along that historically Jews got along a lot better in the Muslim world than in Christian Europe. Jews and Muslims are the same, both Semitic peoples. It wasn’t the Palestinians that waged a genocidal war against the Jews, it was European governments and the Christian church, especially Catholicism

I am enthused and excited enough about the developments in the Middle East not simply because the working class are kicking out thugs and dictators and fighting for democratic rights but also because the process confirms what so many of us, socialists especially, say about the revolutionary potential of the working class. The events also discredit the views of the capitalists and their liberal allies as well as some, what I used to call, petty bourgeois socialists, that claim workers will not fight and don't see that workers are the force that can build a new world as I wrote in an earlier blog.

As I listened to my young Arab friend I thought about Al Jazeera. I read Al Jazeera English and think it is one of the better news services for information about this part of the world. But millions of Arab workers tune in to Al Jazeera Arabic. It began to dawn on me what affect these reports on Egypt and Tunisia, Jordan and Yemen, must be having among the Arab workers throughout the region. It’s no wonder Egypt shut them down, the US has also demonized them and Al Jazeera’s journalists have been killed by “friendly fire” before.

The Chinese dictatorship knows the dangers; they removed the word “Egypt” from Internet search engines so terrified they are of their own working class. We cannot yet grasp the extent of the affect these developments will have on the Arab working class and the Jewish workers in Israel.  The influence of US imperialism in a significant part of the region is significantly weakened that's for sure.  No Arab workers are fooled by the empty phrases coming for Obama and Clinton and the US government about democracy and rights.  The role of US capitalism in supporting and arming the dictators in the region is clearly understood.  It is allies among the Egyptian capitalist class, including religious leaders, that the US will hitch its wagon to.  This is what the Arab workers have to prevent.

One thing is certain; things will never be the same.