From the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi to the immolation of Syria; from the euphoric scenes of Cairo's Tahrir Square to the ungodly sight of a sword-wielding 12-year-old kid beheading bound captives. One must ask: how did we get to here? From the brave protesters storming the Israeli embassy in Cairo and taking down its flag, to Mossad agents and Israeli TV reporters infiltrating Syria with the help of Free Syrian Army (FSA) insurgents, freely roaming “liberated” areas to their hearts' content. From Christian protesters forming a human shield to protect fellow Muslim demonstrators performing Friday prayers in Tahrir Square, to Syrian “revolutionaries” burning down a Shia mosque in Idlib province, systematically witch-hunting Alawites in Homs, Hama and Aleppo, and threatening to use chemical weapons against the “infidel Nusayris” and Shabiha. How did it come to this? It would be a fool's hope to think that what's transpiring now in Syria, which has become an incubator for wars-by-proxy, is just the natural progression from that moment in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzeid that sparked this volatile season of Arab uprisings. It has been a beautiful show indeed: we've finally managed to move away from the tyranny of autocratic regimes into the waiting arms of the tyranny of the Muslim Brotherhood at best, and into civil wars and endless internal bloodletting at worst, if not a toxic combination of both. Now the true reality of it all is solemnly bared for all to see on the streets of Tripoli and Sirte and in the burning alleyways of Cairo and Alexandria where the great Egyptian revolution is bleeding out on its own pavements. Of course, in Sanaa America's drone warfare grinds ever onward, nonchalantly bombing the living daylights out of the civilian population on a daily basis with the blessings (and guidance) of the Saudi military and under the watchful eye of Yemen's first “freely-elected president”. He, by the way, won in a weird, Saudi-concocted mockery of presidential elections, in which the former tyrant's vice-president was the only candidate on the ballot. You could not make this nonsense up even if you tried, and this is just the tip of the absurdist iceberg. In an ironic, albeit tragic, twist of fate, war-torn Iraq, of all places, has become a safe haven for Syrian refugees seeking a semblance of shelter from an even more war-torn Syria where death has become so compelling that being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the “wrong” religious/political affiliation can considerably shorten one's life expectancy. This can happen in a violent way that could involve decapitation, summary execution, sniper-shots, booby-trapped micro-vans and random mass-bombardments of entire neighbourhoods. Aleppo, the commercial heart of Syria, has become a place where no one runs out of bullets, but a loaf of bread is nowhere to be found. The city's entire industrial sector has been dismantled, packed up and sold as spare parts in Turkey, and the city's streets have been transformed into a miniature replica of Saudi Arabia, with “vice police” running rampant and enforcing Sharia law on the hapless population in what can only be described as a time capsule from the Dark Ages. Living in the Arab world today sure feels a lot like living in some sort of alternative warped universe, where everything seems upside-down and backwards, a place where the carcass of a once great Arab nation is practically itching for yet another Sykes-Picot moment, and where further divisions and partitioning of our resource-rich region along ethnic and sectarian lines seem so inevitable and imminent that the only thing we can do is pray that it will be bloodless this time around. It is a place where the trend of “administratively autonomous regions” — nothing but a bleak euphemism for the complete dismemberment of entire countries into bickering colonies and mini-statelets like South Sudan and to a certain extent Iraqi Kurdistan — is becoming appealing and virtually sought after in Libya, Yemen, Algeria and Syria. It is a place where the sorry, jerky entity that is the Arab League has — on its ever-constant downward spiral — mutated into a mere vehicle for the Gulf Cooperation Council, which, in turn, is nothing more than a monthly club of illiterate dictators (with “honorary doctorates” nonetheless) whose sole purpose is to settle personal scores amongst each other while simultaneously prolonging the Dark Ages in their own countries one brutal rule at a time. It is a place where personalities like Qatar's Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim can pose as a paragon of virtue and altruism working overtime to bring democracy and human rights to the rest of us — when he's not busy cruising in his $250 million yacht Al-Miqrab, or pondering which British football club he's going to buy next — without eliciting a wave of mad laughter in response. Only in the Arab world do we get enraged by a low-budget, hateful anti-Islam Internet video when we're not even the slightest bit bothered anymore by the continuing silent siege of Gaza and Jerusalem, or the cancerous growth of Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank. Only in the Arab world does Lebanese Salafi lunatic Ahmed Al-Asir get more media coverage than Palestinian hunger striker Samer Al-Issawi. Only in the Arab world do overzealous Islamic preachers and religious nut-jobs have no qualms about preaching “holy jihad” in Syria on a semi-daily basis, but when it comes to Israel raining death and destruction on Gaza they hastily swallow their own words and choke on their hypocrisy. Only in the Arab world do you wake up to find that the criminal and colonial collective that is the United States, France and Britain is boasting of its “friendship” for the Syrian people, and that Turkey, apparently bitten by the Ottoman nostalgia bug, has appointed a Turkish “guardian” for Syrian refugees as well as “liberated” Syrian territories. There is an almost “Alice in Wonderland” feel to all this, and the cavernous rabbit hole goes deeper. Did you know that Samir Geagea, a bona fide killer who cut his teeth butchering Palestinian refugees and Syrian workers during the years of civil war in Lebanon, is now a big-time humanist and champion of the Syrian people? Or that the Bahraini king has been hailed as the top “humanitarian personality” in the Arab world, according to a poll conducted and published by Kuwait's Al-Sharq newspaper? Well that's what you get when labeling “dictators” becomes a matter of opportunistic convenience and nothing else. Trying to get your head around any of this may prove to be an exercise in both futility and befuddlement. It's as if the beleaguered Arab world is helplessly locked into a twilight zone, where bizarre role-reversals, irreconcilable contradictions, sheer hypocrisy and double standards abound in heaped-up portions; a world where Iran is the undisputed “existential” threat and “Israel” is a dependable ally; a world where our priorities have been gravely reconfigured and re-aligned to best suit America's needs and imperial interests in our region; and a world where our collective moral authority seems to be attached only to barrels of oil and the diktats of their producers. It is a world where the compass of global “jihad” has been set on Syria, and before it Libya and way before both Afghanistan, while not even once has it found its way towards occupied Palestine. It is a world where, lamentably, Saleh Al-Machnouk, a sleazy Lebanese politician and also the son of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri advisor Nouhad al-Machnouk, has threatened (on his Facebook page, of course) to “go after” Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah after “finishing off” Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Then again, one might excuse this guy his newly-found revolutionary “macho” rhetoric.” He has just got back from a brief visit to Syria, where he presumably helped deliver some of those shipments of “blankets” and “infants milk” his fellow 14 March Alliance mate Uqab Saqr helped score for the rebels there. Indeed, nothing makes sense in the Arab world anymore, unless put in a sectarian bracket. Only then can you reconcile yourself to the alarming fact that the torture-loving, backward tyrannies of the Gulf are spearheading a democracy-spreading crusade in Syria (and now in Iraq?), while comfortably sitting on silenced revolutions in their own feudalistic sheikhdoms. Only then can you begin to understand why the vulgar Saudi-financed media would go into throes of rapture over the latest speech by Ezzat Al-Douri, the former vice president of the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the House of Saud's former arch-enemy, for the sole reason that it carried — in typical Iraqi Baath Party fashion — heavy criticisms of farsi Iran. Only then will you be able to decipher the intricacies of this warped, unholy alliance between Al-Qaeda fighters, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Qatari and Saudi ruling monarchies, the clumsy politicians of the 14 March bloc in Lebanon and a host of western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, seeking violent regime change in Syria. Only then will you know why the Bahraini revolution has barely been a blip on the radar of the mainstream media outlets, and only then will you begin to fathom why the renowned Islamic TV preacher Youssef Al-Qaradawi would be willing to trade in his stature as an acclaimed Muslim scholar to become a mere stooge of the Qatari royal family, customising fatwas from his platform on Al-Jazeera in order to lend a religious cover to his deep-pocketed employers' acrid policies in the region. The last of these was when Al-Qaradawi bizarrely urged Muslims to wish ill upon the people of Iran during last year's hajj season. Unfortunately, this sectarian logic has become so pervasive that it's no longer confined within the walls of the Gulf-funded mainstream media outlets or among the ranks of their hired yes men who pose as intellectual elites and opinion-shapers. This divisive rhetoric has already seeped through into the public discourse of everyday life, and the collective consciousness of our society is quickly becoming what it's feeding upon. What with this unrelenting cavalcade of blatant indoctrination and steadfast sectarian incitement we get every time we turn on the TV or surf the Internet, it's hardly surprising anymore when you hear political arguments among ordinary people veer instantly towards an irrelevant, Al-Jazeera-influenced tirade against Shiism and the sinister threat of Iran. This is not to mention Internet forums and Facebook pages where a fully-fledged virtual war, oozing all manner of vile, bigoted language from both sides of the Sunni/Shia divide, is raging on, especially when it comes to the Syrian conflict. Going through these forums is quite disheartening and exhausting, but mostly it's just plain disgusting, and you come away with the conclusion that nothing matches the level of sectarianism and vulgarity of some of the online activists and supporters of the Syrian revolution, except the level of utter idiocy and disconnection from reality that many of the Syrian regime's supporters suffer from. The Arab Spring did bring us a fleeting glimpse of hope, but now the revolutionary spirit is fading, and it has been lost and stamped on. This dream-like utopia of change, ridding our region of every single dictator, has become stuck halfway into the quicksand of the raging religious fundamentalism springing up in every nook and cranny of the Middle East, along with the parasitic West's inglorious exploitation of the legitimate aspirations of the people. The short-lived days of civic movements, mass protests and non-violence seem like a distant, fragmentary memory. We are stuck instead with this hideous orgy of sectarianism, and our daily dose of “reality television” of atrocities and counter-atrocities from both sides of the conflict in Syria. Apparently, we should have read the fine print of it all first. The writer is a Jordanian columnist based in Amman.
