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Arab Reaction to the Terrorist Attacks on
New York and Washington
The United
States Should Re-Examine its Policies First
Dr. Fayiz Rasheed, Al-Hayat Al-Jadedah (government-owned),
East Jerusalem, Palestinian National Authority, Sept. 19, 2001.
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| Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat (R) gives blood at Shifa hospital in Gaza
City, Sept. 12, 2001. Palestinians have been donating blood
in support of the victims killed in Sept. 11's terror attacks
in New York and Washington (Photo: AFP). |
Some
American and Western media outlets have launched a feverish and deliberate
campaign to disfigure and misrepresent the general Arab sentiment
about what happened in the United States [on Sept. 11, 2001]. This
despite the thousands of displays of horror and disapproval throughout
the Arab nations immediately following the terrorist attacks in New
York and Washington—whether these displays were at the official
or popular level. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, Arab
political parties denounced the terrorist attacks in the United States.
Palestinians demonstrated their sadness for the innocent blood that
flowed in New York and Washington, beginning with a gathering of children
in front of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem just a few short hours
after the attacks. Arabs streamed to support blood drive campaigns.
Millions of Palestinian students stood for a moment of silence to
commemorate the victims. Yet from among all these touching images,
the American media chose to show the dastardly image of rejoicing
demonstrators in a few corners of the Arab world, and so reinforced
Western notions of Arabs.
Despite the fact that the governor of Nablus [where Palestinians cheered
the news of the attacks in front of TV cameras] condemned the celebrations
of a few dozen youths, despite the fact that he explained that they
had been protesting Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the majority
of Western media outlets continued to discuss these isolated incidents,
without mentioning that they were not indicative of the response throughout
the Arab world.
These media outlets continued focusing on a few isolated and miniscule
incidents as if they were expressions of the general reaction of Arabs
and Muslims to the attacks. And so, in their over-simplified treatment
of Arab reaction, the Western news media connected terrorism, inhumanity,
and the backwardness of Arabs. U.S. television stations re-broadcasted
images of Arab youths celebrating several times a day for days at
end. This type of repetition plays into patterns made familiar by
movies, television, and the press, the final goal of which is to produce
a social and political guarantee that America will defend the Israelis
from such people. The American news media immediately assumed that
Arabs participated in these latest acts of terrorism in America, and
extended this assumption to posit that all Arabs are guilty. And so
the acts that Arabs and Muslims supposedly committed against Americans
were made to serve to strengthen the old enmity some Americans already
felt towards Arabs. It is easy to see how such reporting could lead
to the assumption that all Arab and Islamic organizations in America
are guilty for what happened in Washington and New York City.
What does this type of media manipulation do but put the long-held
view that Arabs and Muslims are terrorists in the center of the American
mind, while bolstering this view with claims that it had been impartially
investigated and discovered? The mere occurrence of the attacks in
America alone caused the media to hasten to a discussion of people
with "Middle-Eastern features" in an effort to indict, by
way of conjecture, Arabs and Muslims. And despite the lack of clear
evidence tying Osama Bin Laden and his organization al-Qaeda—yet,
that is—the media was quick to jump to the conclusion, within
minutes of the explosions, that Arabs and Muslims had been responsible.
Some commentators even went so far as to add that it was a distinct
possibility that Palestinian organizations were likely behind the
attacks—exactly as they had immediately following the 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing [in which 168 people died in an attack on the Alfred
Murrah Federal Building].
And let us not forget that during the 1980s, Washington counted Bin
Laden as an ally in the Islamic and Afghani resistance to Soviet armed
forces in Afghanistan. Let us not forget that the U.S. Treasury paid
millions of dollars to movements such as Bin Laden's during the United
States' long war against the Soviet Union. And let us not forget the
abrupt reversal of this policy as soon as U.S. goals had been reached
and how it inconvenienced the U.S. government that Bin Laden did not
deign to acquiesce to his "former master," but instead adopted as
his new conflict the disruption of American foreign policies… This
has created a new enemy… to be the new policy threat for the near
future.
With this in mind, we must inevitably consider other relevant issues:
First, it is a fact that there is not a formal or inherently hostile
view of the United States in the Arab mentality. Nor do Arab criticisms
of the United States reflect an inherently hostile view of the United
States. Arab criticisms are aimed at the policies of the U.S. administration
in general, and their Middle Eastern policies in particular. And to
prove that what I am saying is true, please remember both the official
and popular acceptance of the American position in 1956, which demanded
the withdrawal of the forces of Britain, France, and Israel from Egypt
after they had unjustly invaded it [In 1956, the United States refused
to intervene on its European allies' behalf after former Egyptian
president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal]. Arabs still
remember the U.S. position on this occasion today, demonstrating that
Arabs have always distinguished between the progressive, peaceful
aspects of U.S. policy on one hand, and the more common tendency in
U.S. foreign policy to avoid taking a strong stance on issues which
don't necessarily have a direct relation to U.S. domestic politics.
Second, since President Bush II [U.S. President George W. Bush] came
to office, the new U.S. policy on the Middle East has been characterized
by a blind endorsement of Israel. The Bush administration's policies
supposedly include the perspectives of Arabs and Palestinians, yet
they have shrunk from putting any pressure on the Israelis to limit
their military strikes or to stick to the agreements that form the
sum of the "peace process." Despite the active involvement
of the previous American administration, the current administration
has failed to enforce even the recommendations of President Bush himself,
[CIA Director George Tenet], or the report of the international committee
led by Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. Instead, the United States
has offered only timid criticisms of Israeli methods towards the Palestinians,
including the assassination of Palestinian leaders, the reoccupation
of Palestinian cities, and a host of other heavy-handed tactics. Bush's
administration even gave the Israelis the green light to use American
weapons, including F-16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters,
in strikes that targeted cities and killed Palestinian civilians.
All the while, the United States has threatened to veto any resolutions
of the U.N. Security Council it deems unfavorable to Israel.
The last American administration, despite its complete bias in favor
of the Israeli side, cultivated an atmosphere conducive to more balanced
diplomatic relations between the Arabs and Israel. The current administration
quit any efforts to balance the situation, relying instead on lofty
diplomatic rhetoric. As Dr. Muhammad Husayn Haykal concluded in his
article "A Summer of Danger in the Middle East," American
foreign policy toward the Middle East under the current administration
has been built upon the research and recommendations of American military
and political analysts who are reacting against the approach of the
former administration—which included the president's direct involvement—and
have influenced President Bush not to continue Clinton's approach.
Lastly, the United States' complete support of the Israeli viewpoint
at the U.N. Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, which resulted
in the withdrawal of both countries from the conference, is another
example of poor policy. The U.S. stance begs two questions: "If
Zionism is innocent of the charges laid against it, why does the U.S.
dread having a discussion about it? If the Israeli practices towards
Palestinians aren't discriminatory and racist, why does the United
States dread the treatment of this issue?" Despite the United
States' fear of entanglement, 3,000 non-government organizations felt
there was enough reason to criticize Zionism and Israeli practices.
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