President Barack Obama traveled to the Middle East this week to make a long-anticipated address to the Muslim world from CairoUniversity, after having made a stop along the way in Riyadh to call on the octogenarian Saudi monarch, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud. While the reasons for selecting Egypt as the venue for the president’s speech are pretty obvious – not only do the country’s 83 million people make it the demographic giant of the Middle East, but it has been the a center of Arabic literature and Sunni Muslim religious scholarship since at least the foundation in 975 of Al-Azhar University, one of the co-sponsors of the presidential event – the choice is not without its downside.
The leader of an Arab Muslim nation recently made some remarkable statements about the Holocaust - remarkable for their courage and respect for historical truth. In a largely unreported speech at the Royal Palace in Fez, Morocco's King Mohammed VI called the Holocaust "one of the blots, one of the most tragic chapters in modern history." The king added, "Amnesia has no bearing on my perception of the Holocaust, or on that of my people."
Prominent DFL fundraiser the U.S. ambassador to Morocco
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Sylvia and Sam Kaplan, at the Minnesota delegation breakfast during Democratic National Convention in 2004 in Boston, are prominent benefactors and power players at the national level.
Minneapolis attorney Sam Kaplan, a prominent DFL fundraiser, is in line to become the U.S. ambassador to the North African kingdom of Morocco, according to four well-placed Democratic sources with direct knowledge of the appointment.
The Sovereign will not attend either the extraordinary Arab Summit called by Qatar or that called by Kuwait.
This stance by Morocco accords well with the feelings of the Moroccan people and Arab citizens in general in view of the incompetence, incoherence and fatuity of a great number of Arab rulers.
For three weeks Israel has bombed, attacked and massacred the people of Gaza without eliciting any reaction worthy of the name.
It is only now that a few Arab states have woken up, not in order to take action but in order to hold a summit meeting, at the contradictory instigation moreover of Qatar and Kuwait, which are virtually American protectorates!
For a long time now, Arab summits have served as window-dressing, only succeeding in throwing dust in the eyes of their people.Those days are gone.It doesn’t work any more.Morocco is right to no longer want to enter into this hypocritical game.
Citizens of Arab states are becoming more and more clear-sighted.They know that the problem between Israel and Palestine is, first and foremost, a power struggle between the Arab world and the USA.
They also know that a great many Arab states are wholly dependent on Washington and have no freedom of action either internally or in relation to the conflict in the Middle East.
Not only that but, it has to be said, a good number of Arab states share, objectively, the same interests as Israel regionally, as was shown during the last two Gulf Wars with Iraq:indeed they were Arab countries that served as rearguard bases for American troops.
Moreover, inter-Arab conflicts are numerous:Syria versus Lebanon, Yemen versus Saudi Arabia, Algeria versus Morocco and Libya versus everyone...How can you imagine that these nations put together can come to any meaningful conclusion other than vague declarations of intent that no-one has the will to implement and that will only be of interest to the cameras of official TV networks?
Abdelmounaïm DILAMI - translated for Morocco Newsline
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Morocco's Water Programmes: A Regional ModelTuesday, 08 June 2010The arid Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region faces imminent water challenges due to climate change and demographic pressure, but some countries, such as Morocco, have begun the task of aggressively securing future water supplies.