A further reaction to President Bush s speech, by James Zogby

I am writing on my return from an eight-day visit to the Arab world. It was a difficult time to be in the region. President George W. Bush’s strange and disturbing speech of June 24 had been received like a blow to the system. As a result, every political conversation was punctuated with frustration and, in many cases, fury.

Arab moderates, in particular, feel betrayed, and with good reason. For more than a decade now, especially since the end of the Gulf War, they have ceded to the United States the role of exclusive Middle East peacemaker. Wanting desperately to put the Arab-Israeli conflict to rest, so as to enable the region to move forward politically and economically, they embraced the promise of Madrid and the US role as “honest broker.” When, in the 1990s peace efforts faltered due to Israeli resistance, Arabs looked to the United States as a restraining force. At times, the United States delivered. It was US pressure that undid Shamir in 1992 and Netanyahu in 1996.

With the election of Sharon and the worsening of the situation between Israel and the Palestinians, Arabs remained convinced that, at the appropriate time, the US would apply the needed restraint and restore peace-making efforts.

This was especially true in recent months as the situation spun out of control. While Arabs criticized President Bush’s April 4th speech, they found some hope in his call for an “immediate” pullback. When Sharon refused and Bush responded by calling him a “man of peace” Arab leaders were troubled. Many of them traveled to the United States seeking to press the Administration back to a more balanced peace-making role. They waited for the “big speech,” hoping to see in it the fruits of their labor.

In this context, the Bush speech was a slap in the face. Whatever its origins in US domestic policies and its overall lack of coherence, what the speech did clearly establish was the harsh reality that the US was not going to act to stop Sharon’s near obsessive desire to destroy the Palestinian Authority.

Another deeply troubling aspect of the speech was its rudely dismissive treatment of Palestinian aspirations for democracy.

By ignoring the real Palestinian situation on the ground; a destroyed economy; a devastated infrastructure, a near complete military reoccupation, and, with all of this, heightened anger and despair — the call for a “multi-party democracy” came off more like a cruel taunt than a promise.

For much of the last century the US stood before the world as a beacon of democracy and self-determination. Now, for many in the Arab world, the beacon has been all but extinguished.

I, too, have been deeply affected, and not only by the Israeli onslaught, the US’s failure to provide leadership and the Arab reaction to this distressing situation. I am, after all, an Arab American.

For 30 years now I have been working full-time on these issues and traveling to the Middle East. I have strong family ties and deeply rooted friendships in all parts of the Arab world. The despair and anger I encounter concerns me.

Because I am an American, I am also deeply troubled by the disaffection I see toward my country.

Let me be brutally blunt. We are, all of us, in a hell of a mess. Those of us who care both about the US-Arab relationship and providing all of our people with a better future based on international cooperation, economic progress and an expansion of rights and opportunity, need to take a long hard look at where we are and where we need to go.

If the post-Sept. 11 world exposed anything to us all, it was the profound gap in understanding that exists between the United States and the Arab world, and the dangers that extremist ideologies pose to both worlds. Both of our worlds are confronted by forces that seek to provoke a clash of “civilizations.” You have your extremists and fundamentalists and we have ours. Both feed off of each other and reinforce each other.

If left unchecked, the corrosive force they represent will only further erode the structure of relationships that have shaped our world.

In the face of the challenge these forces pose, a collective effort must be made to confront them.

For our part, in the United States, we must challenge the dangerous drift of US foreign policy toward unilateralism and confrontation.

We must build a broadly based coalition of those who will be most affected by the world the ideologues seek to create.

The elements of such a coalition include: Racial and ethnic communities, liberal religious groups, democrats and civil libertarians and the US business community that needs international cooperation not confrontation in order to expand and prosper.

We must engage in a struggle to restore diplomacy to international relations and to secure democracy and political rights in domestic affairs.

Arabs too must face this challenge. It is no longer possible to wait for an external agent of change. Extremist ideologies must be confronted and exposed as bankrupt and incapable of providing real political solutions.

Basing themselves on anger and despair they provide nothing but a future based on conflict. Arab society must be pressed from within to make more progress toward openness and opportunity.

And we, both of us, must engage each other for mutual reinforcement. As the extremists feed off of each other for reinforcement of their vision of a clash of civilizations, Arab and American moderates must work together to change the current dynamic that is leading us toward confrontation.

We need more efforts like the Baker Institute-sponsored US-Syrian dialogue and the promised GCC and Arab League proposed public information campaign.

But what we do not need is an American television channel talking at the Arabs, or an Arab television channel talking at the Americans. What we need is a sustained campaign where we talk to each other and listen to learn from each other. Americans, for example, need to meet and get to know Arabs as they really are. The conversations I had during my recent visit with anguished Arab moderates need to be heard by hundreds of thousands of Americans. We need more, not less interaction.

This is so important because, in fact, most Americans do not know Arabs, have never had conversations with them and, therefore, do not know their concerns and their aspirations.

No doubt, the current state of affairs is a mess. But there is a way forward. It is to engage and to work for change within our societies and between our two worlds.

It will not be easy. But to surrender to despair and cynicism will only allow the extremists to win.

Biography of Dr. James J. Zogby

Dr. James J. Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. Through voter registration, education and mobilization, AAI has moved Arab Americans into the political mainstream.

For the past two decades, Dr. Zogby has been involved in a full range of Arab American issues. A co-founder and chairman of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the late 1970s, he later co-founded and served as the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In 1982, he co-founded Save Lebanon, Inc., a private non-profit, humanitarian and non-sectarian relief organization which funds health care for Palestinian and Lebanese victims of war, and other social welfare projects in Lebanon. In 1985, Zogby founded AAI.

In 1993, following the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in Washington, he was asked by Vice President Al Gore to lead Builders for Peace, a private sector committee to promote U.S. business investment in the West Bank and Gaza. In his capacity as co-president of Builders, Zogby frequently traveled to the Middle East with delegations led by Vice President Gore and late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. In 1994, with former U.S. Congressman Mel Levine, his colleague as co-president of Builders, Zogby led a U.S. delegation to the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Cairo. Zogby also chaired a forum on the Palestinian economy at the Casablanca Economic Summit in 1994. After 1994, through Builders, Zogby worked with a number of US agencies to promote and support Palestinian economic development, including AID, OPIC, USTDA, and the Departments of State and Commerce.

He is a remarkable voice for calm and clarity. - Bill Clinton

Dr. Zogby has also been personally active in U.S. politics for many years. Most recently, in 1995 Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Don Fowler appointed Zogby as co-convener of the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Committee (NDECC), an umbrella organization of Democratic Party leaders of European and Mediterranean descent. On September 24, 1999, the NDECC elected Dr. James Zogby as its representative to the DNC's Executive Committee.

A lecturer and scholar on Middle East issues, U.S.-Arab relations, and the history of the Arab American community, Dr. Zogby appears frequently on television and radio. He has appeared as a regular guest on all the major network news programs. After hosting the popular "A Capital View" on the Arab Network of America for several years, he now hosts "Viewpoint with James Zogby" on Abu Dhabi Television, which can be seen Friday afternoons from 2:00-3:00pm EST. Since 1992, Dr. Zogby has also written a weekly column on U.S. politics for the major newspapers of the Arab world. His column, Washington Watch, currently is published in 14 Arab countries.

Dr. Zogby has testified before U.S. House and Senate committees, has been guest speaker on a number of occasions in the Secretary's Open Forum at the U.S. Department of State, and has addressed the United Nations and other international forums. He recently received a Distinguished Public Service Award from the U.S. Department of State "in recognition of outstanding contributions to national and international affairs."

Dr. Zogby is also active professionally beyond his involvement with the Arab American community. He is a board member of the human rights organization Middle East Watchand currently serves as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In January 2001, he was selected by the President to be a member of the Central Asian-American Enterprise Fund and serves on its Board of Directors. Additionally, he recently attained a position with polling firm Zogby International as Senior Analyst.

In 1975, Dr. Zogby received his doctorate from Temple University's Department of Religion, where he studied under the Islamic scholar, Dr. Ismail al-Faruqi. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow at Princeton University in 1976, and on several occasions was awarded grants for research and writing by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Defense Education Act and the Mellon Foundation. Dr. Zogby received a Bachelor of Arts from Le Moyne College. In 1995, Le Moyne awarded Zogby an honorary doctoral of laws degree and in 1997, named him the college's outstanding alumnus.

Thank you for this post. Depressing.

E-mail to Mr. Zogby

Dear Mr. Zogby:

I read your piece in the Arab News of 7/10 with considerable interest. I must agree that we are, '...in an h*** of a mess."

It is curious that you are able to decry Bush's 'strange & disturbing speech...' and not decry the Palestinian's strange and disturbing murder of babies by their own brainwashed youth, the strange and disturbing murder of 3,000 Americans, the strange and disturbing pan-Arab support for such murders.

In short, Mr. Zogby, you and your fellow-travelers are strange and disturbing. Mr. Bush has it exactly right. The failure to condemn the murderous Islamic mindset is tautologically equal to supporting it.

What you and all Arabs must recognize is this. Much as the murderous Japanese of 1937 in Nanking were not amenable to any form of reason, so it is with much of the Islamic world. While most Americans would be glad to reason with a reasonable opponent, we will not, cannot bargain with the unreasoning murderers, the Arafats of the world.

Until we see that the Arabs "love their own children more than they hate Israel" (Golda Meir), until we see condemnation of Arab rejoicing at blood-soaked innocents, until we see you, Mr. Zogby, cease the hand wringing over a clear-minded address by our President combatting this evil...until then, we recognize that the Islamic murderers and their supporters will of necessity be treated the way their oriental analogues were six decades ago.

Like the Japanese militarists, the Islamic militants are underestimating us and overestimating themselves. In short, they are digging a lot of graves. You really want something to wring your hands about? Try this: An America truly awakened to the nature of the unreasoning militant Islamic mind.

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