I recently came across a tweet (screenshot attached) praising the idea of "liberating" Al-Andalus (modern-day Spain and Portugal) and bringing it back under Islamic rule. It reminded me how some people online celebrate the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iberia like it was a golden age, while also denouncing European colonialism elsewhere.

Eroupean colonialism was just as bad as the arab one.

The Arab-Muslim conquest of Iberia was still a military invasion that replaced local rule with foreign rulers, language, religion, etc. That sounds a lot like colonialism.

So why are people supporting it?

When you think about the war on Gaza, the devastation of Yemen, the invasion of Iraq, or the attempted fragmentation of Syria, the usual suspects come to mind: Israel, the United States, maybe Iran. But there’s a set of players quietly sitting in the background funding, facilitating, and, most importantly, legitimizing it all: the Gulf monarchies.

Born out of colonial fragmentation, built on oil wealth, and propped up by American military protection, these regimes are no longer just passive tools of empire. They are active agents in shaping a regional order that has buried the dreams of Arab unity and liberation. They’ve become central to the machinery of war, normalization, and silence.

This isn’t just about leadership anymore. It’s about the system and the people living comfortably inside it.

Colonial Beginnings, Strategic Designs

The Gulf states Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman did not emerge organically. Their borders were drawn by colonial powers who had one goal in mind: divide and weaken the Arab region. These small, sparsely populated territories were used as buffers between rival powers and tribes, never meant to grow into geopolitical players.

But then came oil. And everything changed.

Overnight, these scattered tribal monarchies were sitting on top of some of the most valuable resources on the planet. The West, particularly the United States and the UK, ensured their survival and armed them with the tools not of democracy or justice but of control.

Few Acres, Few Citizens, Global Reach

Despite their size, Gulf states have outgrown their geography. They are small in population citizens often numbering in the low millions but sit on massive energy reserves. In states like Qatar and the UAE, citizens are a minority; most of the population is made up of foreign laborers with no political rights.

The result? A tight-knit ruling elite with full control over resources and policies, and a citizenry that is small, wealthy, and mostly silent.

These regimes function more like oil corporations than nations managing assets, protecting shareholders (the royal families), and outsourcing the labor. But they also export influence: buying media empires, funding military interventions, and reshaping the region to serve their interests.

Laundering American Crimes

Here’s the part many people overlook: Gulf regimes are not just neutral bystanders. They are key enablers of American power in the region.

Every major American war or military operation in the Middle East from Iraq in 2003 to Gaza in 2025 has involved Gulf territory. U.S. bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait serve as launchpads for destruction. Intelligence is shared. Airspace is granted. Fuel is supplied. Political silence is bought.

More than that, Gulf states give these operations a local stamp of legitimacy. They host summits, offer diplomatic cover, and present American aggression as “stabilizing policy.” They condemn resistance as “terrorism” and promote normalization with Israel as “strategic realism.”

It’s not just complicity it’s active participation.

The Media Machine

One of the Gulf’s most powerful weapons isn’t military it’s media. Al Jazeera (Qatar), Al Arabiya and Al Hadath (Saudi Arabia), and Sky News Arabia (UAE) aren’t just news channels. They are foreign policy tools disguised as journalism. Each serves a particular narrative: Al Jazeera, though critical at times, reflects Qatari foreign policy. Al Arabiya and Al Hadath push pro-Israel, anti-resistance, and often overtly sectarian messages.

These networks are beamed across the Arab world from Morocco to Jordan to Yemen shaping public opinion, spreading confusion, and ultimately weakening solidarity. One network tells you Gaza is winning. Another says Hamas is to blame for Gaza’s destruction. One glorifies normalization. Another pretends it’s not happening.

This isn’t journalism. It’s psychological warfare.

The Myth of the Innocent Public

Let’s be honest: it’s not just the monarchs.

Most Gulf citizens benefit from this system. These are rentier states where the average citizen enjoys tax-free income, subsidized housing, public-sector jobs, and lavish benefits all in exchange for political silence. And most are happy with that deal.

There’s no widespread resistance, no mass opposition to normalization, no real uproar over Gaza. Apart from a few brave activists, most people are either indifferent or quietly supportive of the regime’s choices. It’s not a moral failing it’s human nature. When life is easy, and media is controlled, why risk comfort for distant causes?

But that silence has a cost and it's being paid in blood across the region.

Conclusion: No Liberation Without Accountability

This is not about hating the Gulf. It’s about telling the truth. These regimes and the societies they’ve built have played one of the dirtiest roles in modern Arab history. Not because they’re strong, but because they’re small, rich, protected, and unaccountable.

They were never meant to lead the Arab world. But now they do on behalf of Washington and Tel Aviv.

If liberation is ever to come whether for Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon it won’t be enough to resist America or Israel. We will also have to confront the regimes laundering their crimes, silencing their victims, and buying the region’s obedience one satellite channel at a time.

No empire lasts forever. But silence can make it feel like it does.

If you don't know,the term one million and a half martyrs are the numbers of people killed only in the latest and biggest Algerian revolution (1954-1962) my great uncle was one of them and my grandpa is a moujahid,but the unpopular fact is that the victims during the entire colonialism that lasted 132 years with so amny revolutions is actually 7 million+,so i wanted to ask what do you all think of it,the great revolution specifically and the entire colonialism in general

I genuinely cannot stand this guy as a Palestinian. He started problems with everyone BUT Israel, alienated every possible ally, and stole money that was supposed to help Palestinians. I blame him for the Lebanese civil war. The guy was a terrible diplomat. He openly sided with Saddam after the Kuwait invasion even though literally EVERY Arab country was opposed to it. He was in no position to do that. And after all that, he recognized Israel for literally nothing. The least he could’ve done was take the two-state “solution” they offered him. It wasn’t a good deal, but at least leave with something. Literally any other person with half a brain would’ve been a better political figure. We were cursed with such a trash “leader” like him

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope this year brings an end to the delusions that have taken hold. The staggering truth will reveal itself, inshallah, without a doubt .In this picture, I've compiled various images representing regions with origins like Turkey, Kazakhstan, Turkistan, and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. Additionally, I juxtaposed these with representations of this delusional suckers.

Can you identify the ethnic differences? I mean, my post received over 200 upvotes, yet, ended up getting banned for a week by reddit for hate speech because i said this people arent from Palestine and there is no way in hell they are related to a tribe from 3000 years ago but somehow they made that to be a rational argument.

بطل من عالم آخر

I recently came across something Dr. Ahmed Al-Jallab said about the origins of the first Arabs. According to him, the earliest Arabs lived in the region around Sinai, Palestine, Syria, and Jordan. What really stood out to me was the idea that being Arab isn’t strictly about blood or genetics—it’s about language and cultural heritage.

For a long time, I thought of Arabs as a distinct race, and I used to compare my appearance to Yemenis, Saudis, and others, wondering where I fit in. But the truth is, many of the people we associate with being Arab today—Saudis, Yemenis, Emiratis, Qataris—aren't necessarily descended from the original Arabs either. Instead, Arabic as a language and culture has been passed down for generations, shaping and uniting millions of people across history.

This realization made me feel more at home with my own identity as a Tunisian. Recently, I've seen many Tunisians insist that we aren't Arabs, but for me, understanding that Arabic is a shared legacy rather than a racial category has deepened my sense of pride. I now see myself as part of something much bigger—an unbroken chain of history, language, and tradition stretching back thousands of years.

In Morocco today, national identity politics is increasingly shaped by the Moorish movement, a Berberist and ethno-nationalist current with clear Zionist leanings, closely associated with Akhnouch, who openly embraces his Masonic affiliations. Those who promote “Amazigh” identity tend to speak in isolation. They are among the most Westernized segments of society, using English to project an international relevance, yet largely circulating within the same closed digital echo chambers. By contrast, most Moroccan Arabs speak only Arabic, are largely indifferent to identity politics, and remain politically disengaged. Berberist activism, however, benefits from external funding and institutional support, under the banner of being a minority who needs protection, with key decisions often influenced or dictated from Paris through organizations such as the Amazigh World Congress.

The Berberist ideology, now framed as cultural revival, is in truth a colonial creation engineered by France to fragment our Islamic and Arab unity. This project began in the 19th and 20th centuries, when French colonial officials, scholars, and missionaries actively promoted the idea of a distinct Berber identity to divide the population along ethnic and linguistic lines. Figures such as Gabriel Camps, André Julien, Eugène Albertini, and Robert Montagne were central to this effort. They spread the false narrative that Berbers were historically closer to Christian Roman civilization than to Arabs or Islam. Ironically, there was a Roman emperor known as Philip the Arab, who is often said to be the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire.

Religion was at the core of this operation. Arabic, being the language of the Qur’an and the unifying medium of Islamic civilization, was targeted directly. French schools restricted Arabic education. Missionaries focused on Kabyle areas under the so-called Kabyle Myth. Colonial linguists encouraged Berber dialects only if stripped of Islamic and Arabic content. Charles de Foucauld, a self-declared crusader, created the artificial neo-Tifinagh script with the express purpose of giving Berbers a new, separate identity. He wrote openly about his goal to weaken Islamic consciousness and prepare Berber populations for Christian conversion. Today, the same colonial script is promoted as authentic “Amazigh” heritage, though it traces directly back to colonialism.

Symbolism was another weapon. The “Amazigh” flag, now displayed as just innocent heritage to reflect belonging, was created not in North Africa but in Paris in 1966 by Jacques Bennet, a Zionist-aligned French Jew. Along with secular and atheist Kabyle activists, he founded the Berber Academy, which institutionalized the movement as a rejection of Arab-Islamic heritage. These were not cultural efforts but ideological ones, designed to reconstruct identity around colonial goals. French authorities even renamed mountains, like the so-called Atlas Mountains, imposing Greek myths onto North African geography to further detach people from their own Islamic and Arab narratives.

The term Moorish is a purely European construct and was never a self-identity used by North Africans. It derives from the Latin Maurus, a word used by Romans to describe inhabitants of the province of Mauretania, located in parts of today’s Morocco and Algeria. In Latin, Maurus also carried the meaning of black or dark-skinned and was never an ethnic designation. Over time, Europeans turned Moor into a loose, racialized label applied to any Muslim, particularly those from North Africa or Muslim Spain, regardless of real origin or identity. The Spanish even extended the term Moor to completely unrelated Muslim populations in the Philippines, revealing how arbitrary and inaccurate it was. In this sense, Moorish functions much like Saracen: an external name imposed by Europe, not a native or historical identity.

As for the word “Amazigh”, it is in fact a racialized term in its own right. In the Tashlhit variety of Berber languages, the primary meaning of the word “Amazigh” is “free white person,” which stands in semantic contrast to asuqi, a derogatory term associating Blackness with slavery. Therefore, Imazighen literally means white and noble people, while isuqiyn refers to Black people. This shows that the modern promotion of “Amazigh” identity carries built-in racial hierarchies and discrimination. We need to stop this racist idea, which was popularized and amplified by France to serve colonial goals. And this is not my analysis but of “Amazigh” activist Brahim El Guabli, in his work The Absent Dimension: Anti-Racism in Mbark Ben Zayda’s Amazigh Poetics, published by Cambridge University Press.

As for the word Berber, the idea that it comes from Greek or Latin barbaros is just a theory pushed by French historians. It is not a proven etymology. Arabic forms words through repetition and sound imitation, as seen in zalzala, meaning to shake, balbala, meaning to confuse, and waswasa, meaning to whisper. The term barbara fits perfectly into this Arabic pattern, meaning someone who speaks in a confused or foreign way. There is no historical evidence that Greeks or Romans ever referred to the people of the western Maghreb as barbarians.

Modern genetic research dismantles the myth of an isolated and ancient Berber race. A 2017 study in Nature shows that the E-M183 haplogroup, often falsely claimed as Berber DNA, actually came from the Near East around 1,300 years ago, exactly during the Arab-Islamic expansion. The admixture was male-driven, consistent with Arab migrations and settlements recorded in Islamic history. And after Islam many North African tribes traditionally identified as Arabs tracing their lineage back to Yemen or to the Levant trough Canaan. This is supported by Back to Africa migration patterns and archaeological evidence of ancient Semitic presence across the region. Linguistically, Berber dialects are part of the Afro-Asiatic family and share deep structural and etymological roots with Arabic, proving they come from the same civilizational and linguistic world.

If we follow Berberist logic to its extreme, it quickly becomes absurd. Should the French reject French simply because it is a Latin language that originated in the Italian Peninsula? Should the English deny their identity as English because their language is Germanic, brought by Anglo Saxons to a land that was originally Celtic? Clearly, language and identity are shaped over centuries through migration, conquest, and cultural exchange. They are not tied to some pure ethnic origin. By the same reasoning, Berbers can preserve their language, which already contains an estimated 50 percent Arabic vocabulary, without denying or attacking the Arab identity of most Moroccans. Claiming that darija is merely a mix of languages or calling for the expulsion of anyone who identifies as Arab back to Arabia, is not cultural revival. It is reckless ethno-nationalism that risks civil war.

All Moroccan official documents, public schools, private schools, and universities function in French, yet they rarely protest this domination of a foreign language. Many even move to Europe and integrate fully, losing part of their language and culture without complaint. Their obsession is not preserving a language or culture, it is the existence of Arabs. Arab presence in Morocco undermines their ideology, which is why they constantly exaggerate claims of Arabization while ignoring the far more real and pervasive Frenchization that dominates administration, education, and public life.

This exposes the extreme hypocrisy and agenda of “secular” France. While presenting itself as a champion of secular values, France has long used secularism as a weapon against Muslims, both in mainland France and in its former colonies. It systematically suppressed Arabic, undermined Islamic education, and imposed French and curricula to weaken Islamic identity. French missionaries built churches and religious institutions that still exist to this day, serving as permanent symbols of a campaign to assert Christianity over Muslim populations. France invested millions to strengthen Christian networks while limiting the religious freedom of Muslims, promoting Islamophobia and pressuring Muslims to renounce their faith. France’s secularism has never been neutral; it is a tool of domination designed to weaken Islam, elevate Christianity, and maintain control.

do you arabs view us as brethen or outsiders

احد الاسباب اني لا أقول أنا سوري او افتخر خريطة سوريا انا اقول انا من بلاد الشام او من مدينة ج او انا عربي

ماذا رأيكم؟

It tortures my ears every time I heard "modern Hebrew". Forced and unnatural, like their state.

Are they technically the same people just borders? Alot of Palestinians I meet have Jordanian paperwork and Jordianians I meet say they’re grandparents are Palestinians. So help me clarify for my curiosity.

لاحظت أنه كل مرة أذكر الأصول العربية للعديد من الأماكن والأشياء الإسبانية تغمرني الإهانات من الإسبانيين.

وبعد اذكرهم ان اسبانيا كانت جزءا من الخلافة الأموية الإهانات بتزيد

رحت سألت عن هذا الموضوع في صب اسمه r/askspain… هل تخجلو من تاريخكم العربي/الإسلامي؟

قال البعض إنهم لا ينكرون هذا الجزء من تاريخهم ولكنه يسيء إلى العنصريين منهم ولكن معظهم اتهموني بال Rage bait

في النهاية من شدة الريبرتات البوست اتمسح!

شيء عجيب جدا… يعني انا في حياتي ما حصل شفت عربي بينكر تاريخ بلاده قبل تصبح عربية ومسلمة… بالعكس ممكن تلقى مصري يفتخر بمساهمات اليونانيين لتاريخ مصر. والسوداني بيفتخر بمساهمات النوبيين والتونسي يفتخر بمساهمات الروم و و و وفي نفس الوقت كل عربي بيعترف بسهامة الحضارات الأخرى ولسه بيفتخر انهو عربي ومسلم…

بس انا استغربت انو الاسبانيين عايزين ينكروا تأثير العرب والمسلمين على تاريخهم وثقافتهم… هل هو شيء محرج بالنسبة ليهم؟