Something must be in their food. Or maybe it’s the heat. Who knows?
I was always fascinated as to why Arabs and the rest of the Middle East pack can’t take an occasional chill pill. This summer I decided to bring about world peace by trying to find what causes Arabs to spend their free time protesting and rioting.
See, the summer heat in South Florida is similar to that of Baghdad and Cairo. So using the age-old technique of isolating the outlying variable, I hypothesized that their ethnic disposition to violence must stem from Arab cuisine.
Fortunately, more and more Lebanese joints are opening up in Miami Beach, so I had no excuse to stop my investigation. Now, this is where it gets weird.
After I finished a two-week-long diet of garlic roasted falafel with extra hummus and shawarma (lamb pita) topped with generous amounts of tahini and pickled turnips, there was no noticeable increase in my frustration toward horrible Major League Baseball umpiring. So, their food isn’t what causes Arabs to get so angry.
I had hoped I could discover what made Middle Easterners ticked off so much before another wave of Middle East unrest. By the time my food study conclusively failed, all hell broke loose in Egypt.
The Egyptian military imprisoned the country’s democratically elected prime minister and instituted martial law overnight. Hundreds of civilian protesters were massacred by the military daily. Facebook posts mentioned blood flowing in the streets and staining the carpets of mosques in Cairo. Human Rights Watch reported that the Egyptian police’s “rapid and massive use of lethal force” — sanctioned by the military generals — “led to the most serious incident of mass unlawful killings in modern Egyptian history.”
I wondered why the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Barack Obama, refused to call the military takeover of a democratic Egyptian government a “coup”? Per federal law, if the White House acknowledges a “coup” took place in Egypt, we have to immediately suspend all military aid to the coup leaders. With the White House refusing to condemn the Egyptian army’s violent overthrowal, Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called President Obama’s “lexicographic trick” a rare instance of “when a coup is not a coup.”
Around the same time, something interesting happened in Washington, D.C., last week. The CIA admitted to secretly using the Iranian military to crush Iran’s first democracy, back in 1953. It took the U.S. 60 years of fermented guilt to confess to a historical wrong.
Back to our story in Egypt: How did the Egyptian army and police slaughter about 1,000 civilians in a week? Who paid for the bullets that penetrated the bodies of innocent Egyptians? The country certainly couldn’t have done so — more than 14 million Egyptians live on less than $1 a day.
This is where it gets creepy. A congressional study from June estimated that Americans supply 80 percent of Egyptian military weapon costs. And the deeper I dug, the more blood I found on our hands. The Egyptian army is the third-leading recipient of all U.S. military aid. Did I mention that these are the same Egyptian military rulers who overthrew the only democracy the country has ever had?
So the desert heat doesn’t cause Arab violence, nor does their food. It has to do with us. At least, 80 percent of it.
Here’s to hoping we don’t have to wait till 2073 to admit to Egyptians our complicity the way we waited 60 years in the case of the 1953 Iranian military coup.
Zulkar Khan is a UF microbiology senior. His column appears on Wednesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 8/28/2013 under the headline "Could Arab food be source of Middle Eastern violence?"
