Dear Log,
«Injured dignity lies at the heart of all rebellions. Throughout history human beings have revealed an enormous capacity to bear, and cope with the harshest forms of oppression and exploitation. It is only when they perceive these as "injustice", however; when the implicit or explicit compact between oppressor and oppressed appears to have been shattered and violated by the oppressors; when the exercise of power appears lawless and arbitrary - it is then that people rise up.Having a regal sense of ethnic-religious entitlement must be such a burden. But ya gotta have a hobby!Yet for the Arabs, as galling and bitter as the sense of injured dignity has been and continues to be, it has also been disabling, creating a situation and mindset in which their choices seemed to be limited to either suicidal vengeance or abject and bitter hopelessness. It remains to be seen whether the war in Iraq will put the Arab masses on a new trajectory, one in which they fight to win, rather than just to die while maintaining some sense of their basic human dignity. But whatever the course of the war in the coming days or weeks, for the moment the Arab masses have two things going for them: They are not mice, and they are not alone.»
--"We are all Iraqis now": The unexpectedly stiff resistance mounted by Iraqi troops has rolled back decades of Arab humiliation, says distinguished Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah
