Sayyed Fadlullah: We have to make every effort to confront this American project, starting by devising our own reform project before the one that is coming from the outside can sweep the region with plans ideas, and practices that promote their own interests.

Asked in his weekly seminar the following question: The Arab and Muslim World is apparently the region whose wealth and potentials are dominated By America and the West in general more than any other region. Its political decisions are also being confiscated.
Taking such a reality into account, could we say that the Arab and Muslim world is ruled from the inside? 

The Religious Authority Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah said:

It has become common knowledge that the Arab and Muslim world has turned into a stage where the various international political projects compete, as well as the economic and even social plots…

It has also turned into a theater for the military operations that confiscate the land and those living on it in the name of democracy.

But it goes well beyond that…

We believe that there is a very dangerous arrogant plot that aims at reformulating and restructuring this world. The American Administration not only plans to prepare the political agenda for this world but even to change what the students learn and how the society thinks. A time might come when they would want to change the making of the Arab and Islamic novel to conform with the American interests and the Israeli subjection plans.

Political circles in the Arab and Muslim world have abandoned their previous assertion that the American Administration is not an honest broker, and replaced it with a talk about the need for a complete American formulation for the solution of the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. They claim that the facts on the ground following Nine-Eleven compel us to recognize the new situation that is characterized by the weakness of the Arabs and Muslims to the extent that we have to accept not only the American right to propose reform projects for the Broader Middle East, but even to change structural laws and concrete facts.

There are also there who claim that America is the actual leader of the EU, or at least the generator of many of its resolutions including those that have to do with the region, like considering Hamas a terrorist organization, or the actions of the Quartet Committee that is no more than an American front whose ultimate decisions are taken by the Americans. Therefore, according to these people, it is better to submit and side with the Americans.

But we have seen that America has failed in its attempt to run the world. It is stumbling in the Arab and Islamic region. Moreover, it was unable to cancel the European identity with its promising inspirations and its opening upon our region. Despite all the American pressures in this field, Europe still has a somewhat different position towards Iran, Iraq and especially Palestine.

We fully appreciate the potential dangerous consequences of the American Congress endorsement of the letter of Guarantees Bush sent to Sharon especially that it is binding to the coming administrations. We know that America, being under the influence of the Zionist lobby, will try to do anything for Israel in the coming stage which is marked by the instability of the Arab and Islamic world as well as the choice of most regimes to ride the American train that is driven by the neo-conservatives towards carrying out the Zionist projects.

But the issue is what can we do, as Arab and Muslims, inside the Western societies including the American one, and how we can stop our regimes from being that much dominated by America, and how we can visualize our own ideas that are not merely a reaction to those of the others. If the West settles its accounts with us on the basis of Western values, we too have to deal with the arrogant powers on the basis of our own values.

What the Americans are doing and preparing for goes far beyond merely turning a political issue in Palestine into a security one. It is an attempt to forge history by legitimizing injustice, for America's and Israel's ultimate aim is to occupy the whole region with the help of certain Muslim and Arab rulers who find such excuses as frustration and imbalance of power… etc.

Faced with such a grand project that could amount to a new Sykes-Pico agreement, we have to make every effort to confront this American project, starting by devising our own reform project before the one that is coming from the outside can sweep the region with plans, ideas, and practices that promote their own interests.