New America Media, News Report, Yoichi Shimatsu, Posted: Aug 23, 2011

Rushing into the center of Tripoli, jubilant Libyan rebels shouted: "We've got kinky head!" The slur was directed at Seif Al-Islam, the dark-complexioned son of strongman Muammar Gaddafi, who as it turns out had evaded capture. Since the start of the rebellion in February, the Arab militants of the Benghazi-headquartered National Transitional Council (NTC) have repeatedly perpetrated overt acts of racial violence, including mob lynching and physical mutilation of unarmed black Libyans, indigenous Berbers and Tuareg nomads among them.

The NATO-led multinational intervention force, known as Operation Unified Protector, has tolerated heinous race crimes that would be severely prosecuted and punished if they had occurred in Paris, London, Washington D.C. and Ottawa. The unwillingness of NATO to stop or even acknowledge the racist terror tactics puts into question the underlying strategic objective behind the intervention - a geopolitical project known as the Mediterranean Union (MU).

The hate crimes bring an uneasy and practically unspeakable issue to the world's attention - Arab racism. It is simplistic and historically incorrect to attribute this variant of racism to Arab slave trading, even though most of the raiding groups who captured African villagers for colonial plantations in the Americas were comprised of Arabs. Europeans and white Americans were also enslaved by North African pirates, a practice that provoked the United States to wage the two Barbary Wars in the early 1800s. In contrast to the race-conscious European and American plantation owners, the Arab world then perceived bondage as simply a category of human capital, irregardless of the captives’ race.

At the level of household and community, intermarriage with persons of African ancestry has not been a major problem throughout most of the Arab world, so long as the spouse belongs to the Islamic faith and follows the customary rites and habits. Sharply contrasting with America's discriminatory segregation policy during his lifetime, this is the Islamic multi-racialism that Malcolm X observed in Mecca.

The Race Card

Arab racial attitudes, therefore, cannot be simplistically reduced to skin tone but are more an issue related to culture, especially the residual beliefs and customs of so-called "kaffir" or pagans. Ever since the Umayyad invasion that swept across North Africa in the 7th century, the Arabs encountered, subdued and incorporated an array of tribes in the Saharan region, or Magreb. Black Africans who adopted the totality of Arabic cultural behavior integrated with relative ease into the dominant society, many ascending to high rank. Those who stubbornly held to their "superstitious" beliefs in native deities and matriarchal customs, including many Berbers and the majority of the Tuareg, were deemed Africans and not Arabs.

These ill-defined racial divisions helped European colonizers promote institutional discrimination during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The biases of French, Italian and British colonial administrators were imposed on the Semitic peoples - Arabs and Jews of North Africa and the Levant. The stress on skin tone - white standing for civilization and black for savagery - was already well-established in Europe and North America. Color-based images were deeply ingrained, for example, in a long-haired Nordic Jesus of Nazareth, as opposed to the "kinky head" that he was likelier to have been, versus swarthy despots and tanned Saracen pirates. European scholars, writers and artists recast the history of North Africa into racial stereotypes, portraying light-skinned pharaohs when, in fact, most ancient statues reveal African facial and physical features.

Skin tone affected a Semitic individual’s chances of employment and career promotion under European colonialism. The lingering sense of insecurity is still reflected, for instance, when some - not all - of my Arab friends try to pass themselves off as whites inside posh lounges in Berlin or even Dubai, an understandable guise in our present context of the war on terrorism. Prejudices of the master are adopted by the servants, and "second-class whites" can often be more vicious and vulgar in their racism. Extreme examples can be seen in the propaganda posters of the Maronite Christian militias of Lebanon, presenting themselves as lily-white crusaders against the dark hordes.

Son of Africa

More than any other leader in the region, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi challenged this deplorable legacy of European colonialism and Arab conquest. Proudly adopting sub-Saharan- style robes and turbans and embracing the indigenous cultures of the continent of his birth, he declared Libya to be an inseparable part of Africa. The Libyan leader took the identity issue a giant step further, financing and arming Africans to fight European supremacy and, in Nimery's Sudan, against domination by the Gulf states.

If there is one thing that the second-tier "white" of Arab or Israeli descent disdains more than a black African it is, of course, the "kaffir lover," a charge often leveled against Gaddafi. The race hatred is so intense that even American diplomats have had to warn the Benghazi rebels against committing massacres. The warning is being scoffed at by the gathered clan of special-forces commandos, warships and air forces from 19 European, North American and Mideast nations, which are launching indiscriminate attacks on Libyan cities.

Re-colonization of North Africa

The race factor sheds a harsh light on the Mediterranean Union, being promoted by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The super-regional group, formed in 2008, includes most European nations, with the notable exclusion of Serbia, and all the Mediterranean nations except for Libya. On a 2007 visit to Morocco, Sarkozy described the MU as "the lynchpin of Eurafrica." This new hybrid sounds very much like the Old Africa, this time around with Arab corporate raiders depriving the southern continent of its oil, strategic minerals, uranium, diamonds and other natural resources for the benefit of the idle Europeans.

Following his banishment from the international community after the Lockerbie crash, Gaddafi was offered a seat in the MU but he never accepted full membership, settling for observer status. His father's generation had struggled against fascist Italian occupation under the Mussolini regime, which promoted the notion of Mare Nostrum, or the Mediterranean as "our sea," an inheritance from the Romans and the Hellenistic Greeks. The view from the North African shore offers quite a different perspective, of a glorious ancient Carthage burned to the ground by vengeful Roman legions, its surviving population chained and forced en masse into slavery.

In Sarkozy's words: "It is in the Mediterranean that Europe will secure its prosperity, ensure its security… While Europe's future is in the South, Africa's is in the North." His comment is not an endorsement of multiculturalism, considering his anti-immigrant record; rather, it represents a call for selective assimilation of North African Arabs willing to convert themselves into Europeans - as opposed to non-assimilable Asiatic Turks and black Africans.

The Libyan intervention was sold to Americans as a democratic Jasmine Revolution of peaceful protesters. Soon thereafter, it became clear that the vanguard fighters were fanatic militants allied with Al Qaeda and the rebellion's leaders were stooges of European intelligence agencies. In continuing to support the thinly disguised invasion of Libya, Washington has abandoned the principle of self-determination. Most tragically, this brutal violation of an African nation's sovereignty is happening under the watch of a president whose paternal origins are in Kenya.

Two competing visions are at war in Tripoli - Sarkozy's Eurafrica versus Qadhafi's Africa. Whatever the fate of the Libyan leader, his legacy can be summed up as: Africa is the Motherland of humankind and a son's duty is to defend her.