By Jon Pattee
Senior English Editor
The following is an attempt to answer questions about several aspects of last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
Q. Generally speaking, how are Arab Muslims reacting to the terrorist attacks in the US?
A. Based on eyewitness evidence from Egypt and Jordan, most ordinary people seem to take no pleasure from the attacks.
Many Jordanians and Egyptians, in personal conversations, express regret and are quick to condemn the terrorists. Even among the extremely small minority that expresses satisfaction with the blow suffered by the world’s superpower, the sense is that the individual victims did not “deserve what they got.”
Fifty top Muslim spiritual leaders this week confirmed the majority sentiment that the attackers violated fundamental Islamic principles. Like the leaders of every Arab country, they issued a statement condemning the tragedy as terrorism.
Meanwhile, in the days since the attack, there has been no palpable increase in aggressiveness towards individual Americans on the streets of Egypt or Jordan.
In fact, people in this battered region seem hard to shock by now, and events like those in Washington and New York appear to be chapters in a far longer story of tragedy and bloodshed.
The Arab world, for example, is this week preoccupied with the 19th anniverary of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, in which the Christian Phalangist militia – Israeli allies during the latter’s invasion of Lebanon – went on a three-day rampage of rape, knifing and murder in Palestinian refugee camps, killing at least 1,800 men, women and children.
Looking to the future, Jordanians and Egyptians express deep worry that the US will lash out with great military force and provoke an even wider wave of revenge attacks and retaliations.
Q. Did Muslim fanaticism lead to Tuesday’s terrorist attacks against mostly ordinary, civilian Americans?
A. If the official story turns out to be true, the attackers did indeed claim to be acting on behalf of Islam. At first glance, this makes Islam a root cause of the slaughter.
But a closer examination reveals that the attackers misrepresented themselves. Claiming to act on behalf of a cause, and actually representing mainstream doctrine and practice, can be different, even opposite, things. This is illustrated by America’s pro-life movement, whose largely nonviolent advocates are burdened by the waiting-room murders and sniper attacks of a lunatic fringe that claims to share their Christian inspiration.
Actually, as a doctrine – and as practiced by most Muslims – Islam flatly forbids attacks on civilians, and has carefully reasoned rules on avoiding harm to noncombatants such as women, children and the elderly.
The terrorists’ claimed motivations thus directly contradict Islam’s principles for conducting a just war. As such, the World Trade Center terrorists can no more be mistaken for sane Muslims than a pro-life sniper can be mistaken for a sane Christian.
Q. Apart from their supposed Muslim beliefs, what political causes likely inspired the killers?
A. In the same way that the attackers may have claimed to be Muslim, they may also have seen themselves as taking revenge for the 627 Palestinians, including over 100 children, killed in recent months by Israeli soldiers armed with US weapons.
However, the Palestinians themselves have disowned the attackers, and all of their various factions – Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian Authority – have been at pains to distinguish their own war of independence from what they consider wanton violence.
What is unquestionable, however, is that American support for Israel’s 34-year occupation of Palestinian land has been the major incubator for popular anti-US sentiment, and that fringe groups like the New York and Washington attackers have thrived on this sentiment.
Ordinary Arabs cannot help but see that for the last 12 months, Israel has been using US-provided Apache attack helicopters and sophisticated American tanks to kill Palestinians - nearly four of them, mostly civilians, for every Israeli loss.
People in Egypt and Jordan say the crime of the Palestinians has been to rebel against three decades of Israeli occupation of land lying beyond its original UN mandate – all land seized from Palestinian owners in 1967. The Palestinians had been living on that land for hundreds of years, but now it is being forcibly “settled” by tens of thousands of Israelis in direct violation of the 1993 Oslo peace accords and international law.
The Israeli justification for the occupation of the conquered land, which further outrages the Arabs, is a blend of “might makes right” ideology and Jewish fundamentalists’ claims to be retaking, after several centuries, a God-given “Greater Israel.”
In this context, there is little doubt that a major factor leading to the attacks in Washington and New York was widespread outrage over American willingness to support this occupation with such imaginatively named weapons as “Hellfire” missiles, along with $1.8 billion in military aid this year.
Q.Given the clear rise in anti-American sentiment that has accompanied massive US military aid to Israel, especially in recent months, why have successive administrations been willing to risk the attendant likelihood of terrorist attacks on American civilians?
A. Three main factors appear to have been at play.
The first, the Cold War, is infinitely less relevant than when the US began its massive aid to Israel. After World War II, Israel was considered a vital part of America’s anti-Soviet coalition, and accordingly received tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars. Israel primarily served as a counterweight to pro-Soviet Arab nations.
But the Cold War is essentially over, and the ongoing massive US aid is in some ways simply momentum carried over from those years.
This moves a second factor, control over oil supplies, to the top of the list. Oil is a staggeringly huge business, on par with narcotics and the arms trade, and the US economy – and many American politicians – are in one way or another addicted to it.
Even before last week’s events, a vast array of American troops and weaponry was already deployed in the Arab world, primarily to back up the friendly regimes of oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Israel also benefits, being perceived as a crucial part of defending the oil pipeline.
It is worth noting that the US would consider this kind of military buildup an act of war if it took place in its own hemisphere. Many Arabs define the US as the aggressor, since American troops have traveled thousands of miles to arrive at their doorstep. Looking at it in reverse, one finds that there has never been a single soldier from an Arab or Muslim country officially stationed anywhere near the United States.
The US pro-Israel lobby is a third factor. This May, Fortune magazine once again ranked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee among the top five in its annual Power 25 survey of premier lobbying groups. AIPAC, according to the mass-circulation business magazine, is the number one foreign policy lobby for the fourth consecutive year.
“AIPAC's job is to shape opinion favorable to Israel," according to Toby Dershowitz, an organization spokesperson, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. “The main goal is enhancing US-Israeli relations."
When former Senator Charles Percy (R-IL), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted in 1981 in favor of President Reagan's ultimately successful plan to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia, AIPAC successfully targeted him for defeat in his next election, according to the Report.
Also according to the journal, Tom Dine, executive director of AIPAC, later told guests at a fundraising dinner in Toronto that “All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy…And the American politicians those who hold public positions now and those who aspire to – got the message.”
This kind of clout on Capitol Hill translates into arms sales and massive military aid, as well as a blind eye to the military occupation of Palestinian land conquered in 1967.
Q. What is the most feasible way to guarantee that the horror of Black Tuesday is never repeated?
A. Let us assume, for the moment, that terrorists claiming Muslim motivations pose the major terrorist threat to the US – although, as the Oklahoma City bombing demonstrated, this may not always be the case.
It would be overly simplistic to say that an end to US military support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine would definitively halt Muslim fundamentalism and terrorist acts against Americans.
However, the prospect of a complete Israeli pullout from the Arab land it conquered in 1967 – especially Jerusalem – would go a long way toward relieving the Muslim world’s sense that America controls and abuses it through the acts of Israel. The stage would be set for moderate Arab leaders like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah to calm tempers, rebuild shattered economies, and undercut the growing power of fanatics.
In short, if America had the political will to pressure Israeli into respecting international law and completely withdrawing from all the Palestinian land occupied in 1967 – not just the patches and pieces offered up until now – a major source of Arab and Muslim humiliation would be eliminated. This, in turn, would rob terrorist recruiters of their most dangerous ammunition – popular frustration.
In contrast, there are already indications that US President Bush’s plans to launch a militarily assault on the Muslim nation of Afghanistan will build up more outrage and frustration. This will provide terrorists with more innocent martyrs to point to, as well as more bitter recruits, and could ultimately reproduce the tragedy of Black Tuesday.
If the US lacks the political will to deal with the root causes of terrorism, and instead compounds its problems by choosing “solutions” that only strengthen fanatics, Americans can look forward to several long, dark decades of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and more terrorism.
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
