Issue No. 604
Opinion
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19 - 25 September 2002 Issue No. 604 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Explaining the enmity
Despite Washington's acute bias towards Israel Arab regimes continue to preserve conciliatory relations with the US administration. Yet feelings of enmity towards the US have for long been growing among Arab peoples, especially the young and students. Across the region US institutions and symbols have become the focus of demonstrations. And there reigns an unshakable conviction that US foreign policy is responsible for the Israeli invasion of the West Bank, and that Washington's backing has allowed Israel to continue to evade any just and comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, to evade long- standing demands that it cease to infringe on the rights of the Palestinian people that have been endlessly restated in the terms of international agreements and conventions.
Washington has, in short, lost a vast amount of its credibility with Arab and Muslim peoples, and US press campaigns against the Muslim world have served only to broaden the fissure, to make it ever wider. The notion that these campaigns rest on religious grounds is deserving of no credit: as Pope Shenouda stated, the so-called "Zionist Christianity" it comprises cannot sensibly be seen as anything more than an American invention, and one which every legitimate Christian sect in the world will openly oppose. Nor does Washington's blind bias for Israel count as a credible political justification.
The most shocking aspect of the enmity, as it plays out among a younger generation of Arabs profoundly disillusioned with the discrepancy between Washington's practices and the values of freedom, equality, human rights and democracy for which America claims it stands, and which its leaders readily espouse, is, perhaps, the punitive measures that, in the wake of 11 September, Arabs who study at American schools and universities have been facing. The educational authorities have even imposed restrictions on the kind of courses for which foreign students are eligible, especially in the field of technology. Arab students are excluded from applying to a whole range of technical institutes on the pretext that they might use knowledge acquired there to perpetrate terrorist attacks. This happens even as the majority of terrorist operations taking place within America -- the mailbox bomb phenomenon that has come to be associated with southern and middle states -- are the work of young white Americans.
Washington has, moreover, issued severe entry restrictions on the nationals of several countries, including four Arab states. Thus is it that Washington, without justification, generates an atmosphere of hostility towards Arabs and Muslims, encouraging, rather than discouraging, Arab enmity towards it. And even within Arab countries American pressures to hunt down suspected Al-Qa'eda affiliates have had a significant, and negative, impact on inter-Arab relations. It is only to be expected that the spread of such phenomena places American interests at risk. The only regional beneficia ry is Israel. America, by contrast, enjoys less and less sympathy.
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