BIRDS OF A FEATHER:

The Solution for Peace in the Middle East? (Jamie Glazov, 1/24/2008, FrontPageMagazine.com)

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John Myhill, a linguist in the English Department at the University of Haifa. He has been living in Israel since 1995. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (1984) and has written extensively on the connection between language and nationalism. His two most recent books are Language in Jewish Society (Multilingual Matters 2004) and Language, Religion, and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East (John Benjamins 2006).

FP: You are one of the proponents of the idea that only self-determination can save the Middle East. Tell us what this concept is about and how realistic it is in terms of bringing peace to the region.

Myhill: Thanks Jamie.

The general point, and the common sense point, is that groups of people who have a lot in common in terms of how they speak and their religion should be together; groups who are radically different in these terms and can't get along with each other should be separated by borders. That's why we have peace in Europe now. How do we do this in the Middle East?

Take Iraq as an example. It needs to be divided into three states. Now. For sure keep protecting the Kurds—they want the U.S. there. Then divide up the Sunnis and Shiites into separate states. If they don’t like it, let them fight it out for exclusive control until they figure out neither side can win, and then they’ll do it themselves.

A separate state is needed for the Maronites on Mt. Lebanon. They can’t live with Muslims, it’s obvious. If someone like the Americans will just impose this militarily, no problem. If the Americans don't want to do this (probably not), support the Maronites in their efforts to revive Syriac—that’s their sacred language— as a spoken language like the Jews revived Hebrew, and the result will be a separate Maronite state in a generation or two, because everyone will recognize that they aren't Arabs and need their own state.

Sudan needs to be partitioned -- by force. Now. Get the Arabs and the non-Arabs apart. They’ve been fighting for 50 years with more than 2 million dead already.

Writing Classical Arabic—the language of the Koran—is a big big problem. It’s totally different from how people speak, it’s created this idea that there’s an 'Arab people’ stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, it’s giving legitimization to religious fanaticism, it’s terrible. Make up standard written versions of the 6 or 7 different spoken dialects, call them different languages, Levantine, Yemenite, Egyptian, Maghrebi, Sudanese, whatever you want, just not 'Arabic.’ Each of these will be a nationality with their own written language, they’ll have their own states, they’ll stop interfering in each other’s business, and they stop following each others’ religious fanatics. That’s how people turned Latin into French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese—they just started writing the way they spoke. Put writing in these new languages—newspapers, essays, translations of books, everything—onto the internet, that’s where everyone’s reading and writing these days, and this trend is only going to get stronger.

People will read in these new languages and write in these new languages, because it’s much easier than Classical Arabic. After a generation or so, they’ll start to forget about this silly idea that they’re 'Arabs’—because the only reason they have for thinking that they’re Arabs is because of Classical Arabic—and they’ll want to divide up into different nationalities according to how they speak and write these new languages, like Europeans have.

Then we have the Alawites in Syria, who’ve managed to take control of the government and have to support all these radical movements so that people forget that they aren’t Muslims. Tell them they can have their own state in the homeland in northwestern Syria. The US will protect them there until the Muslims accept it. That'll stop all the trouble coming out of Syria.

To a remarkable extent we're just trying to correct the retardation we caused by foolishly intervening in WWI and then pushing for the least American of the Fourteen Points -- the transnational League of Nations -- while abandoning the ones that mattered, chiefly self-determination.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2008 12:02 PM