The problem is two fold. It lies in the meaning of "justice for the Palestinians." And it lies in the nature of the "root causes" of Islamic hostility toward the U.S. The so-called moderate Arabs are not moderate at all when it comes to Israel. Take Egypt, in U.S. mythology the lynchpin of Arab moderation, whom we reward with $2 billion a year for supposedly exercising moderation. Egypt was the prime mover in the Arab assault on Israel at the UN conference on racism in Durban. The Jerusalem Post (September 5, 2001) reported that it was Egypt that torpedoed a Norwegian compromise that would have enabled Israel and the U.S. to remain at the conference. Amr Moussa, former Egyptian Foreign Minister and now head of the Arab League, succeeded in getting the Arab countries to reject the Norwegian proposal and, says the Post, "tried to drag the whole conference into an open meeting on the Middle East, in an attempt to get on the record anti-Israel statements from as many countries as possible." Egypt's current Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher refused to speak to Israeli journalists in Durban and even publicly shrieked at U.S. delegation head Michael Southwick that the U.S. "was doing nothing for the Palestinians."

The Arab states, "moderate" and "radical" alike, want the same thing: they want Israel, not peace with Israel. In their lexicon, justice for the Palestinians means the abolition of Israel. Had peace with Israel been the target, they would have encouraged Arafat (Egypt did the reverse) to accept Barak's offer essentially to return to the 1949 borders, to redivide Jerusalem, even to accept a significant number of Arab "refugees." Barak's increasingly desperate offers resulted in his being nicknamed "the lemon" by the Arabs--he was so easy to squeeze.

Second, Israel is a symbol, not a "root cause" of the Islamic attitude toward the West, above all the United States, as its most powerful representative. The so-called moderate Arab states are only moderately moderate when it comes to the United States. Again, to focus on Egypt, Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has documented the extent to which the Egyptian government has encouraged the propaganda of Islamic radicals against the United States as well as Israel (the Washington Post even ran a series of editorials on the subject in October). To take only a couple of examples, an October 20 editorial in the Egyptian official government paper Al-Ahram claimed American planes over Afghanistan dropped "genetically treated food" into areas full of land mines in order both to impair the population's health and kill and maim those so hungry they risked gathering the food. When the Western press picked up on this, Al Ahram's editor-in-chief responded on November 1: "These reports are drawn from the announcements of the Taliban heads themselves who know best what is happening in their land." Just two weeks before September 11, an article in the government-controlled Al-Akhbar stated: "The Statue of Liberty, in New York harbor, must be destroyed because of following the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind fanaticism...the age of the American collapse has begun."

The response of the United States administration to such discomforting realities is to shut its eyes. Confronted with Senator John McCain's observation that countries like Egypt "are going to have to make a choice and regain the airwaves away from extremists that seem to dominate the dialogue in their own countries," Secretary of State Powell actually tried to put a positive spin on the attacks. Said Powell: "I think if we want them to be the kind of nations and lands that we preach about, we have to expect that if there is another point of view within that country that differs from the official point of view of the government, you have to give it the opportunity to be expressed." But attributing such rhetoric to supposed Egyptian democratic freedoms overlooks the fact that the lies and anti-U.S. incitement come from government controlled papers--the opposition papers are even more redolent of hatred for the U.S. For example, on September 29, a writer in the opposition paper Al-Ahrar declared: "If Osama bin Laden is proven to be involved in the attacks on the U.S., I will make a statue of him and set it in my home."

Egypt was the prime mover in the Arab assault on Israel at the UN conference on racism in Durban.

When it comes to Israel, the United States cannot bring itself to endorse Arab goals or to acknowledge that its policies further them. And so the administration takes refuge in outright fantasy, joining Shimon Peres in a warm and fuzzy but strictly out-of-space-and-time New Middle East. In his speech of November 19, Powell declared: "We have a vision of a region where two states--Israel and Palestine--live side by side within secure and recognized borders" and "where all people worship God in a spirit of tolerance and understanding."

Never mind that in Palestinian school texts Israel (nine years into the supposed peace process) does not even exist. A just-published analysis by the Center for Monitoring Impact of Peace (CMIP), a non-profit organization seeking to encourage a climate of tolerance between peoples, found that in 58 new textbooks and two teachers' guides published in the past two years by the Palestinian Authority every map marks the entire area of Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza as Palestine. The Oslo peace process (without which the Palestinian Authority would not exist) is scarcely mentioned and nowhere is the idea of peace with Israel promoted. CMIP's vice-chairman declared: "The PA curriculum does not teach the acceptance of Israel's existence and instead of working to erase hateful stereotypes, it is instiling them-

Outpost               - 6 -               December 2001