We Are All WikiLeaks

It is impossible to predict how extensively the arrest of Julian Assange will affect the outpouring of secret American information and documents. What has already been released is only a very small part of what the site possesses in abundance.

WikiLeaks has become the center of the world’s interest and of governments’ concern, and everyone is waiting for the secrets it will expose. As yet, however, no top-secret documents sent by American ambassadors to their departments have been revealed.

Arabs, as usual when it comes to scandals, have unfortunately had the largest share, although what has so far been revealed does not at all equal the large scandals to be expected if the documents had been released in full. Nevertheless what is displayed do constitute “scandals” about Arab governments and politicians, who have mastered two languages: the first to the public, reflecting false positions which the Americans know not to be true; and the second is the true private language, which they pour out to American officials and diplomats. A portion of the latter is what WikiLeaks has been releasing in batches.

In truth, we are all WikiLeaks. To a degree these documents revealed that we Arabs specifically have a cultural, political and social fragility, that we speak with more than one language and that we present no opposition to the challenges and questions that beset us and our societies. Instead, we abandon our interests and acquiesce to disaster and calamity.

We care a great deal about what others say about us and what their picture of us is, but never do we first attempt to learn the truth of what we say about ourselves and how we picture our reality. So we sit and wait for Western reports and we react to them as though they were a major discovery for us, even though nothing in these reports exceeds — even by a little bit — what we chatter on about to Western researchers, media, diplomats and politicians, albeit in closed meetings and on completely different terms from the discourse which takes place in public.

There has been great debate over the contents of a cable released by WikiLeaks from the American embassy in Amman about the match between the soccer teams Faisali and Wahadat, a portion of which my colleague Bayan Malkawi published on the site Ammon News. What is quoted in that report would not be worrisome or dangerous or cause us embarrassment if we stood, as detached as possible, before that cable, and if we had the necessary courage and rationality to discuss our domestic issues and critical crises, putting everything on the table and discussing things openly instead of keeping our heads buried in the sand.

What would happen if WikiLeaks was reversed, if the cables that Arab embassies had sent from Washington to their governments with their reports of meetings with American politicians or their observations of internal phenomena (if we permit ourselves to imagine that there are any embassies that do this!) were released? What would the result be and how would America react?

Of course, this affair could not fail to be absurd. It wouldn’t even be very entertaining for the simple reason that there is nothing that American politicians or society hide from themselves. There they discuss all phenomena and topics, and everything is subject to studies, media scrutiny and in-depth political debate. Official diplomatic and political secrets are not the subject of chatter.

Real political reform, an integrated, pluralistic system, basic freedoms and real internal political debate, which allows for what we say in private to be said in public – these are the things that can cure the fragility we have developed, and change the stereotypical (but true) picture of us held by the West!