1 - To put things in the right perspective, and not in defense of brother Muhammad Al-Sager, for what he said provoked some came in the context of responding to the provocative and accusatory question from the questioner about the fact that the merchants, or some of them, are corrupt, and that the Chamber’s board of directors makes the political decision. His response is clarification, no more, no less. This is in contrast to what some sick people believe that merchants have been behind every calamity.

2 - The objection by some to what Muhammad Al-Sager said, and considering it racist, supremacist and classist, funny and sad at the same time; this feeling of class and difference, ethnic, religious, sectarian and tribal is rooted in the souls for religious, social, cultural and economic reasons, even within the same family, in which a brother sometimes does not honor his brother because he married someone who belongs to someone other than their class. We find something similar to that even in socialist societies such as China and in ancient democracies such as England.

Consequently, those who criticized Al-Sager’s statements should ask themselves before giving themselves the right to denounce his statements. Do they hold the same feelings of superiority towards those who believe that they are inferior to them “communally, doctrinally and financially”?

Why does a group have the right to practice racism and supremacy in secret, and publicly deny it to others? Are we all free from racism, assuming that what Muhammad Al-Saqer said is racist and has nothing to do with the facts of history?

The answer is mostly “no,” and there is no need to give examples. Once Jesus Christ (PBUH) said, ‘Let any one of you who is without sin cast the stone first.’ He said this when a woman was caught committing adultery and produced before him.

3 - Few of the deputies fought fiercely to expose and condemn those behind the thefts  in the Kuwait Oil Tankers case, and the former MP Muhammad Al-Sager was the most fierce and powerful, and the most risking his interests at the time and perhaps the time has come for him to pay the price, even if it was by provoking others against him and discrediting him.

4 - No class in any society has a preference over its other classes. This is an admitted fact, but the other fact is that groupsof society have a greater political, lgal and economic role than others, by virtue of the nature of things. The leading and educated elite, who may not necessarily be wealthy are those who developed the world’s constitutions and social contracts, and who drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and stood with the liberation of human beings from the yoke of slavery, after injustice and slavery that lasted for thousands of years with religious and status laws that were not easy to abandon. It was not possible or expected of people with simple professions to leave their only source of livelihood and devote themselves to drafting constitutions and liberating people.

5 - The merchants of Kuwait, in the stage of establishing the state, played an undeniable role and no one demanded that the nation remain indebted to them, and there is no need to reduce or glorify that role as it was a stage in history and ended with the establishment of the civil state governed by the constitution, or so supposedly.

In the 1980s, I was a small employee, a senior manager in one of the most important banks and I witnessed for twenty years and much before that, the decisive role played by the national merchant class in dozens of vital initiatives which no other team responded to, and I wrote this down in many articles.

To be continued

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By Ahmad alsarraf