Courtiers in kufiyas: The grotesque spectacle of Arab “scholars” subjugation before Israeli power

There is something nauseating, indeed obscene, about watching Arab dignitaries such as Hassen Chalhoumi, the state sponsored Imam in France and others in tailored thobes and expensive drapes extend obsequious courtesies to the very figurehead of a regime that has unleashed genocidal fury on Gaza. To witness the Israeli President, whose government has presided over the calculated immolation of a civilian population, being serenaded by platitudes about “shared humanity” by men who claim to speak for the Arab and Muslim world, is to see political servility masquerading as diplomacy.

This is not mere cowardice. It is something far worse. It is the performance of colonized minds and hand-picked scholars, men who, for a few pieces of silver, have so thoroughly internalized the supremacy of their colonial masters and Zionist occupiers that they now genuflect with enthusiasm. Their words drip with moral vacuity, waxing poetic about peace and coexistence while their Israeli guest who advocated for genocide and presides over a state apparatus that razes hospitals, bombs refugee camps, and blocks humanitarian aid with calculated indifference.

These so-called scholars and hand-picked elites are not modernisers, nor are they pragmatists. They are tokens of imperialism and collaborators of the most loathsome variety, polished, perfumed, and profoundly unmoored from the moral pulse of the majority of Muslims and indeed the world. 

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In the American context, Malcolm X once drew the distinction between the field Negro and the house Negro. But even that binary, biting as it was, fails to capture the sycophantic theatre now on display. These are not simply house Negroes. They are the architects of the plantation, reassuring the master that the burning of Gaza is an exercise in civilisational hygiene.

There is no realpolitik here, no strategic calculus that justifies such craven behaviour. Only the monetary self-preservation of hand-picked imams in European states;  or hand picked puppets picked by hereditary Arab regimes whose legitimacy is brittle, whose rule is propped up not by the will of the people but by foreign patronage and militarised repression. Their embrace of Israeli power is not a peace offering. It is a confession: that they see no future for their rule without the blessing of Washington and Tel Aviv. That they have given up on history and seek only to survive it.

What is being buried alongside the children of Gaza is not just Palestinian sovereignty but Arab dignity itself. And those doing the burial are not merely the Israelis, but the Arab collaborators who provide the shovels, offer the prayers, and then turn to shake hands with the executioner.

There is a word for this: treason. Not only against Palestine, but against the very idea of justice. Against memory. Against honour. Against the Quranic injunction that God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves. If these elites are what remain within, then the condition of the Ummah will remain one of degradation. Fortunately, the majority of humanity recognise these stooges in robes for what they represent.

History will not forget. Nor should it forgive.

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