From the Editor

So in hope that the web site folks who are immortalizing the media briefings of al-Sahaf (and providing T-shirts, mugs etc. in his honor) will expand their horizons, we offer up just a couple of gems from the Pioneer of Unreality. "Today we declare that the conflict is over." (May 4, 1994) "What was sown in Oslo cannot be erased. It began a new chapter, a chapter of hope, a chapter of security, a chapter of good neighbors, a chapter of peace." (September 17, 2001) "I believe it is fitting that the [Nobel] Prize has been awarded to Yasir Arafat." (December 10, 1994) "By the year 2000, we will overcome Hamas, Islamic Jihad and terrorism. By then we will bring a comprehensive peace to the Middle East. By then we will establish a just society, with a national income greater than that of England, and greater than that of France. You all know that everything that we say we will do, we will do." (March 25, 1996)

Bring on the Shimon mugs and T-shirts. Baghdad Bob is a reality-hugger compared to Slippery Shimon.  

Arab Solidarity

One myth buried by the Iraq war is that Arabs care for each other's welfare. This false notion is of course the basis for the entire Middle East policy of Western countries, including the United States -- the belief that the entire Arab world cares passionately for the fate of the Arabs of Palestine. It is typified by headlines such as that in the Los Angeles Times of March 17: "Palestine is Everything to the Arabs." The corollary the West draws is that once the need for self-determination of Palestinian Arabs has been met, Arab hostility toward the West will melt away.

Attitudes in the Arab world toward Iraqi Arabs should serve as a wake-up call (although academic and political elites are unlikely to shed their dogmatic beliefs). The Arab media and Arab "street," with exceptions distinguished for their rarity, identified with Saddam against the United States. And when the regime collapsed and crowds in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere poured out to celebrate and topple the symbols of the hated tyrant, the rest of the Arab world mourned. If the Arab world identified with their fellow Arabs in Iraq, why should they not celebrate their deliverance with them? The Arab world cared nothing for the suffering of Arabs under Saddam: they rejoiced in Saddam because he spit in the eye of the West. The attitudes were typified by a young man who ran after the reporter for the London Times (as reported on April 10) and told him "We will support anyone who hates Israel and America." It is hatred of the West that animates the Arab world, expressed by fundamentalists in their identification with Osama bin Laden and the more secular in identification with Saddam.

If the Arabs gave a fig for the welfare of Palestinian Arabs they would long ago have integrated them in their societies as Israel integrated the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Palestinian Arabs are a convenient tool through which to express hatred of the West and Israel, its symbol in their midst. They are not the cause of the hatred and if the West forces a Palestinian state into being, it will do nothing to eliminate that hatredindeed it will feed Arab hatred by feeding fantasies of Arab power.  

CNN's Mea Culpa

In a surprising op ed in the New York Times (April 11) Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, describes how CNN covered up its knowledge of the depravity of Saddam's regime in order to retain its "access" in Baghdad. Eason reports that he made 13 trips to Baghdad over a period of 12 years to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews, each time becoming, as he puts it, "more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff." What Jordan learned was indeed awful -- one of CNN's Iraqi cameramen was abducted and tortured for weeks in the basement of secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm what Jordan calls their "ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief."

Jordan knew in advance that Uday Hussein planned to assassinate his two brothers-in-law if they could be inveigled into returning to Iraq -- Uday told him so. He knew Saddam Hussein -- Jordan's words -- "was a maniac who had to be removed." Jordan spoke to one official who was forced to write a letter of congratulations to Saddam for executing his brother and another who had no front teeth because Saddam's henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and warned him never to wear dentures. Jordan describes the fate of a Kuwaiti woman captured by the Iraqi secret police in 1990, who was beaten daily for two months while her father was forced to watch and on the eve of the American offensive, was torn apart limb from limb, her body parts left in a plastic bag on the doorstep of the family home.

Jordan's emotion in his Times op-ed is relief -- now finally he can say what he had bottled up for years. But many who have commented on the article have a

May 2003               - 11 -               Outpost