By silence betrayed

When the bombing started in Afghanistan October 7, the response from Saudi Arabia was–silence. The response from Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak was silence for two days; he finally indicated lukewarm support for the airstrikes on October 9. The response from the Palestinian Authority was still more silence. Most Americans' first response will be: Good. Better silence than the denunciations that came from Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

But silence is not enough. One reason "why they hate us" (as one magazine's cover put it) is that in the Arab and Muslim worlds the propagandists of hate have had a near monopoly of the public

dialogue. This is true not only in states that sponsor terrorism–Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Taliban's Afghanistan–but also in so-called moderate Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis subsidize the spread of Wahhabi Islam–the 18th-century fundamentalism subscribed to by the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden. The message they spread is one of condemnation of the American way of life. Egypt's government-run press, as Jeffrey Goldberg reported in the October 8 New Yorker, prints reams of vile anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic propaganda. Prominent Egyptian journalists claim that the World Trade Center tower attacks were the work of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Egyptian media reprint as authentic the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a forgery by czarist Russia's secret police that was definitively debunked in the 1920s.

This is dangerous stuff. Saudi and Egyptian leaders have often whispered to Americans that they don't believe any of it but that they allow the propagation of such hateful messages because it gives their dissidents a way to vent their anger. These regimes make a deal: Intellectuals can attack the United States and Israel as long as they leave the local government alone. But ideas have consequences. The saturation of such messages over Arab and some Muslim media has made many believers. They, like the masses in Hitler's rallies or the fanatics of imperial Japan, really believe this stuff. Hence the crowds in Yassir Arafat's Palestine cheering at the news of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.

Friendly persuasion. One of our aims in this war against terrorism must be to change the public dialogue in the Arab and Muslim world. Someone needs to make the case for freedom and democracy. Some of that can be done by an Arab version of the old Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. But much must be done by Arab and Muslim regimes themselves. Old Middle East hands will reply that that is impossible: Leaders like Mubarak, Arafat, and the Saudi royal family will risk their lives if they rein in the radicals. But that could have been said four weeks ago about Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf. Now, having concluded he must enlist in our war against terrorism, Musharraf is making the case against the hatred propaganda too. He must know he is targeted by Islamic radicals; so he will use the brutality and cunning that got him where he is to stay there.

It will be said as well that people's ideas cannot be changed. But that is plainly wrong. People's ideas were changed in Germany and Japan after 1945 by regimes installed by the United States. Countries that seethed with hatred and fanaticism have become peaceful, free, competent democracies. Another example is Mexico. From 1930 through the 1980s Mexico's PRI governments subsidized its intellectuals with cushy jobs and ambassadorships and encouraged them to produce anti-Yanqui propaganda; Mexico's diplomats took an unflinching anti-U.S. line in foreign policy. Sophisticated Mexicans would whisper to Americans that this policy let its intellectuals vent and kept them happy with the regime. But since 1988, Mexico's Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ernesto Zedillo, and Vicente Fox have taken an increasingly pro-U.S. line. They endorsed NAFTA and shook up Mexico's subsidized industries and bureaucracies; the television network Televisa switched from promoting a pro-government, anti-Yanqui line to presenting more evenhanded news, with competition from TV Azteca and cable. The result: Not only Mexico's leaders but most of the Mexican people as measured in a Reforma poll have taken pro-U.S. positions since September 11.

The initiative for change in Mexico was taken by Mexicans. In the Middle East, it will have to be taken by the United States. We must let Mubarak and Arafat and the Saudis know–perhaps we have done this already–that their media must change, and that this is very important to us. And we must get them to take public stands in favor of our policy, despite the political risk, as Musharraf has. Silence is no longer enough. We need lip service, too.

. The response from the Palestinian Authority was still more silence.

Nah:

We all saw how Yassir Arafat - THE father of world terrorism, spoke about how bad he felt over the greatest terror attack in the history of humanity - but we also saw how his people, the Palestinains, drunk on their "victory" in Durban, South Africa, went dancing in the streets, giving out sweets, and shooting in the air, to show how happy they were.

The Palestinains wern't alone, as the article we bring below from Egypt tells us...

On the other hand - reports in the Israeli media tell us of threats that were receievd by the foreign press agencies to destroy any and all pictures and videos taken of these celebrations. That is why you will only see pictures from East Jerusalem and Lebanon below.

GAMLA will do it's best to bring more of these picture from the other cities, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, Tul Karem and more of the huge celebrations that went on there last night.

CLICK PICTURE TO ENLARGE	Celebrations in East Jerusalem


Celebrations in Lebanon

See: The Man to Really Fear. About "...not bin Laden but his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri."

"The Great Satan is not bin Laden at all — but the man often described as his No 2, the Egyptian-born physician Ayman Mohammed Rabie Zawahiri."

"Long before most people had ever of bin Laden or al-Qaeda, the Egyptians were warning Britain and America that the real danger to the security of the West was the benign-looking, middle-aged paediatrician with impeccable manners from Cairo. "

"In 1991 intelligence chiefs in Cairo were appalled to learn that Zawahiri was on a fund-raising tour of the US. "

"The white beard was shaved off, the hair dyed, and he was wearing dark-rimmed spectacles as he visited mosques and community centres in Texas, California and in the shadow of the World Trade Centre in New York, collecting many thousands of dollars for widows and orphans in Afghanistan. "

"He shook hands at dinner parties with Arab millionaires who willingly opened their chequebooks, after which he slipped back to his office in Peshawar where he was already amassing the personnel he needed to carry out his design for an all-out holy war. "

i would like to offer an alternate explanation.

actually, two of them, though they are related in some ways.

the first is that we are held in contempt in the middle east, because by middle eastern standards we have proved unreliable. we proved that we could defeat saddam hussein, but we didnlt actually defeat him. we are thought curled-pinkie wimps by countries there, including kuwait. believe me -- i heard it when i was there following the gulf war.

second, we have proved untrustworthy. this is connected with the first point, as anyone in the government of south vietnam would quickly recognize. we have, since world war II, lacked resolve. yes, we'll stay in haiti forever -- big poop. but we have demonstrated, especially during the clinton administration, that we'll say one thing and do something else. meanwhile, the saudi royal family is going to have to live with the effects of its actions. so is mubarak.

meanwhile, we're proving that we're vulnerable in the most elementary fashion to the most elementary kind of psychological war: let's say that you had a pinch of anthrax, a book of stamps, a box of envelopes, and a five-pound bag of gold medal flour. did you know that you could, with just these things, co-opt the entire american news media, cause the government to spend millions of dollars, spread its entire anti-biowar resources thin, and further worry an already tired and anguished populace? well, our emenies know this, and they're acting on it. they're betting our resolve will fail us. and history demonstrates that we just might.

so there's no surprise that people who actually have the most to gain from our success might not be tremendously eager to sign on whole heartedly right off the bat. they may well be foursquare behind us, but there's strong evidence, from where they sit, that we're ready to make any sacrifice, so long as it's theirs.

we need to overcome some misadventures, alas, before we are trusted. fortunately, we are led by the one man who can do it.

dep

Here's a sample of some of the hate found in the Islamic Press.

Radio Islam is working to promote better relations between the West and the Muslim World. Radio Islam is against racism of all forms, against all kinds of discrimination of people based on their colour of skin, faith or ethnical bakground. Consequently, Radio Islam is against Jewish racism towards non-Jews. World Jewish Zionism, today, constitutes the last racist ideology still surviving and the Zionist's state of Israel, the last outpost of "Apartheid" in the World. Israel constitutes by its mere existence a complete defiance to all international laws, rules and principles, and the open racism manifested in the Jewish State is a violation of all ethics and morals known to Man.

What did we hear from Ireland in WW2? Silence; What did we hear from Switzerland in WW2? Silence; What did we hear from Sweden in WW2? Silence; What did we hear from Mexico in WW2? Silence; What did we hear from Spain in WW2? Silence; From most of central America? Silence; From most of South America? Silence; From the USSR regarding Japan's war on its ally the USA? Silence.

Nothing new. Besides Muslim/Arabs, as surely you must know, hate our unjust policy of tilting for Israel. Shame on you if it comes as a surprise that Arab/Muslim countries probably could care less if we got our comeuppance. We have our domestic political forces that act as an engine for our behavior, and they have theirs, too. Noboby cares about the violence visited upon Palestinian victims and I'm sure our buildings-go- boom problems are a big nothing to them, too.

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CLICK PICTURE TO ENLARGE

Celebrations in East Jerusalem

Celebrations in Lebanon