ATTACK - Was it really because of the Palestinian problem?

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WashTimes

EDITORIAL • October 21, 2001

The U.S. and the Muslim world

This week, the Middle East exploded in violence again. On Wednesday, radical Palestinians gruesomely assassinated Israeli Minister of Housing Rehavam Zeevi, causing a very understandable retaliation from the Israeli government. This came as the Israeli and Palestinian leadership had been taking tentative steps towards each other as the world was bracing for the fight against terrorism. Though not directly connected with the war on terrorism now being fought in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the assassination is part of the bigger picture.

However, even without the Palestinian-Israeli struggle, the Islamic world would still be a seething cauldron of anti-Americanism. It has become quite fashionable in recent days to attribute the anti-American sentiment that seems so pervasive among the Islamic nations of the Middle East and South Asia to America's failure to explain its policies through public diplomacy. Unfortunately, such an explanation does little to identify the real sources of the profound anti-Americanism in that part of the world; rather, it is just another variation of the "blame-America-first" ideology.

In fact, the United States is routinely pilloried in the government-controlled media throughout the Islamic Middle East because of its special relationship with Israel. Since the collapse of the Camp David peace talks in July 2000, instant historical revisionism, holds the United States responsible for the failure to make progress in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process." This is patently absurd. The pressure that Bill Clinton placed on then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David produced unilateral Israeli concessions so far-reaching that they were unimaginable before they were offered.

Despite the fact that Iraq has been permitted since the mid-1990s to sell oil in sufficient quantities to enable it to purchase all the food and medicine its civilians need, it is the United States that is blamed by Arab nations and Osama bin Laden for the dreadful plight of Iraqi children, whom Saddam mercilessly uses as pawns. Indeed, the capacity for self-delusion is so entrenched in the Arab world that much of it believes that Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, was responsible for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Gratitude? Forget it. Fouad Ajami, an Arab-American who grew up in Lebanon as a Muslim and who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is exceptional for his courage to say what virtually no Arab government will acknowledge. "Where was Islamist gratitude for America's role in preventing Muslims from being slaughtered in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999?" Mr. Ajami rhetorically asked, the New York Times recently reported. Adding Kuwait to the mix, Mr. Ajami continued, "American power was used three times between 1990 and 2000 to rescue Muslims from ruin, but no Islamist has ever thanked them."

Indeed, so rare is gratitude that the Times deemed it newsworthy when Kuwait's former oil and information minister assailed his government for its "shameful" betrayal of the United States through Kuwait's "hesitant and timid" support for America's war on terrorism. Indicative of Kuwait's lack of gratitude for America's Mideast peacemaking role at Camp David were the comments of Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheik Sabah in the wake of the June suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv disco that killed 22 young Israelis. "The Palestinian suicide bombing was legitimate," Sheik Sabah asserted, explaining, "This is a struggle, and struggle is legitimate." Just another misunderstanding between "friends" that can be resolved by public diplomacy? Not likely.

-- Anonymous, October 21, 2001

Answers

Mubarak: Bin Laden never talked of Palestinians before WTC By Jerusalem Post Staff and Ap

JERUSALEM (October 21) - "Osama bin Laden made his explosions and then started talking about the Palestinians. He never talked about them before," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says in an interview with Newsweek magazine in the issue to be published tomorrow.

In the interview, Mubarak also tells Newsweek's Lally Weymouth that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat "has some terrible people around him, like [Tanzim leader Marwan] Barghouti."

"Let us be realistic," says Mubarak, "I don't care about Arafat. I care about stability. I care about the fact that terrorism, though it can't be stopped, could be lessened if peace moved forward. Time will prove that I am right."

Mubarak also criticizes Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Egypt is a country that sacrified for peace," the Egyptian leader says. "I have been criticized for making contact with Israelis. I've had three promises from Sharon, but not one was implemented.

"After he took office he sent a special envoy to me who said Sharon wants to end his career by making peace. He was going to make a peace plan within two weeks and meet with me. Then I received another message telling me he was ready to negotiate if the violence went down. The violence went down, but nothing happened."

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has warned of a danger of continuing Israeli attacks on the Palestinians, calling in a letter delivered to Mubarak yesterday for a halt in hostilities and the resumption of peace talks.

Saudi King Fahd, in the letter carried by his foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, warned of the "dangerous situation in Palestine, the continuity of the Israeli aggression on the Palestinian people and the necessity of working to stop such practices so that peace talks could resume," according to Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian foreign minister.

Maher said Mubarak and al-Faisal also discussed the importance of international cooperation in battling terrorism, adding that Mubarak sent his message to the Saudi king and the crown prince. He did not reveal its content.

Also yesterday, Mubarak met with Austrian President Thomas Klestil, who is touring the region to add his voice to calls for an end to the violence.

Austrian Ambassador Ferdinand Trauttmansdorf said that his country believes that finding a solution to the Middle East conflict is crucial for the fight against terrorism to succeed.

He said Austria wants to play a more active role in the fight against terrorism and to cooperate with its Arab friends to avoid any confrontation between Arabs and the West.

The Egyptian and Austrian presidents did not make statements.

Klestil has already visited Saudi Arabia and Syria and was headed for Jordan today.

-- Anonymous, October 21, 2001


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