Filling in the fundamentalist blanks

By Abdel-Azim Hammad

Before discussing the motives and objectives of the campaign further, let us examine this hypothesis that the campaign is launched by an emergent but well-organised entity. The endeavours of Senator Frank Wolf to classify Egypt among states exercising religious discrimination have failed. They were not jettisoned because of Clinton's threat to veto the bill if Egypt was unjustly included among countries practicing religious discrimination, but rather because the senator and his supporters proved incapable of obtaining a Congressional majority's approval of the bill as they had envisaged it. On the other hand, with the exception of Wolf's visit to Cairo last spring in response to an invitation by the Egyptian government, minutes of meetings between Egyptian officials and US administration officials or members of Congress show no evidence that religious discrimination was ever a topic of discussion, let alone controversy, nor that it ever came up in any communications between Egypt and Britain, with one minor exception. In the media, only the Sunday Telegraph in Britain and the Washington Post in the US, as well as one television network, dwelt on the issue.

The motives for attacking Egypt on charges of religious persecution may be explained on several levels. President Mubarak explained that the charges were first raised by Netanyahu, and wondered whether Israel was behind the campaign. Actually, there are three facts which may be considered proof of Israel's complicity. First, the Washington Post is owned by a prominent representative of the Republican Party, himself a Christian immigrant from South Korea and the head of the Unification Church (a movement known for its Zionist sympathies and, more importantly, for its strong backing of the Likud elements in the Jewish lobby). In addition, the Republican Party is a pillar of the American fundamentalist Christian alliance, which perceives in present-day Israel the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy, where the second coming of Christ will take place to herald the millennium. Unconditional support for Israel is an invention of American fundamentalist churches and is not shared by other US churches.

Secondly, Senator Arlen Specter, who shares with Senator Wolf the dubious honour of having drafted the bill on the persecution of Christians, submitted a bill to the Senate the day after the Declaration of Principles was signed by the Palestinians and Israelis in the White House on 13 September 1993, to prevent the US administration from honouring its pledge to provide financial assistance to the nascent Palestinian Authority. Specter was being more royal than the king, since Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister, who had signed the DOP, had requested the US to provide such assistance, a fact which Specter brushed aside, explaining that he was opposed to Rabin and supported the Likud.

Third, the Daily Telegraph published a report on these "events" in its Sunday edition. The report was not the result of a journalistic investigation, but had been written in London, and was clearly prompted by motives that did not quite meet the standards of objectivity so loudly vaunted by the Western media. Surprisingly, the Sunday Telegraph was the only British paper to publish the alleged events, with the expression of the extremely pro-Israeli Jewish Chronicle. The latter newspaper, it must be recalled, never mentioned the Palestinian Intifada when the uprising was making headlines all over the world. It was also the only newspaper to attack the minister of foreign affairs under Margaret Thatcher when he lashed out, in front of television cameras, at Israeli soldiers who were breaking the arms and legs of Palestinian children in Gaza early in 1988.

This evidence seems to indicate that some link exists between the report by the Israeli prime minister about alleged religious persecution in Egypt, and the story reported by a biased media in Britain and the US.

The objectives of an alliance between the Jewish American lobby and conservative circles in Britain and the US deserve further investigation. Thanks to the Washington Times, however, we need not speculate. That paper postulated a link between the alleged persecution of Copts and the credibility of Egypt's role in the peace process. Thus, in its editorial of 4 November, it called upon President Clinton to reconsider President Mubarak's role in peace endeavours. It then urged Congress to use US aid as a weapon to bring pressure to bear on the Egyptian regime in order to halt its persecution of Copts.

Even if we admit for the sake of argument that Copts are indeed discriminated against in Egypt, what is the link between such alleged discrimination and the credibility of Egypt's role in the peace process? No logical relation can be perceived, but perhaps the newspaper that raised the issue could provide us with some insight. So far, however, it has failed to come up with anything to this effect. The only thing it has succeeded in proving is that this campaign was launched to undermine Egypt's role by raising issues aimed at depriving Palestinian negotiators of their principal source of support at this critical stage of the peace process, during which the groundwork for final status negotiations is being prepared.

Israeli pressure on Egyptian diplomacy, however, is not restricted to allegations of religious discrimination. Israel acts in various contexts to achieve independent objectives. One of its strategies has been the manipulation of fundamentalist right-wing movements in Western countries, particularly in Britain and the US. Such movements have evinced marked hostility to Egypt since the Urabi Revolution took place in 1882, and have often accused Egypt of persecuting Copts as a pretext for interference in Egypt's domestic affairs.

Nor is it possible to forget the excuses fabricated by Britain for the bombardment of Alexandria. Hostilities had erupted between Egyptians and the Maltese community when an Egyptian was killed by a Maltese. The murder was prompted by a sense of racial superiority instigated by British propaganda against the Urabi movement. Similarly, no Egyptian can forget the four qualifications spelled out in the notorious declaration of 28 February 1922, abolishing British protection of Egypt, but reserving for the British the right to protect minorities in Egypt.

Egyptians know, too, that the earliest endeavours to establish an independent Coptic political structure known as the "Coptic Movement" were instigated by the British occupation authority. The endeavour, launched at the turn of the century, was doomed to failure -- because the Copts themselves had decided to boycott it.

Today, as radical contradictions between Egyptian nationalism and the West are assumed to have been eliminated (with the end of traditional colonialism), and as the Arabs and Israelis work toward a lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East (supported by the West), it is hard to believe that right-wing fundamentalists are braced to revive such obsolete tactics.

This is not so surprising, however, when one recalls that the objective of the fundamentalist right wing in the West is the dismemberment of the Middle East, from Iran and Turkey to Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Algeria and Morocco, into a cluster of petty states. Plans to fragment the region would certainly eliminate all chances for pan-Arab national or Islamic unity or integration in the region. Anyone who doubts that this is an explicit objective among Christian fundamentalist and Zionist groups is advised to read Bernard Lewis, a major source of American-Zionist political thought. The most urgent task for the West, he claims, is to introduce a pluralistic culture of diverse sources and identities to replace Arab and Islamic culture in the region. This piece of advice must be perceived as what it is -- in other words, as the official perspective of the Christian fundamentalist alliance in the West, and of extreme right-wing Zionism in the Middle East.