That is exactly why yesterday’s news shocked the Arabs more than the rest of the world. It shocked the Arabs from the utmost east in Kuwait to the utmost west in Morocco, and in all the cities in between.

This is where the people had not been sleeping because of the demonstrations that were taking place continuously, led by people thinking that they were defending the Iraqi people whereas in fact they were defending Saddam himself.

The news shocked the people of Cairo, where the fundamentalists, nationalists, leftists and the deceived headed numerous campaigns to declare their preparedness to defend Saddam’s Iraq.

But by yesterday morning, the TV stations — including that advocated the campaign to defend Saddam and his regime — didn’t succeed in hiding the images of the happy people celebrating in the capital.

That’s why yesterdays’ images, in which the people of Baghdad tore down their dictator’s pictures and pissed on them, overthrew the biggest lie in the contemporary history of the Arabic world.

And I say with confidence that the collapse of Saddam and his regime was not an important event itself, because it was bound to fall sooner or later, caused either by the Americans and British missiles or by the Iraqis’ swords; but the real event was challenging Arab political and cultural certainties. This was one of the rare times that they were examined and then disappeared into thin air. The same media succeeded in ignoring what had happened in Basra and had described the rejoicing there as a matter of depredation.

However, the picture was much bigger in the capital and it was not possible to conceal the truth, which was apparent to the whole world.

The populist rejoicing in the capital over Saddam’s overthrow ridiculed the Arab regimes, which have been lying in the name of the people for 50 or more years.

Until the last minute last night, the Arabic media kept whipping up stories about invading forces going after the Iraqis, the Arabs and even Arabic journalists. One of the correspondents there shouted saying that the American Army was targeting the Arab journalists to silence them after the killing of one of the TV journalists in Palestine Hotel. Apart from the fact that it was a sad story, its cause was incomplete for the Arab viewers. They were not told that only one Arabic journalist was killed but that 10 other Western journalists were also killed, some of them belonging to the countries of the coalition forces.

This war divided the Arabs into two categories.

The first pretended that the war was a battle of sovereignty, dignity and conspiracy. The other remained silent, especially the Iraqis themselves.