A rchive Date
[ 23-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Egypt ]
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[http://msnbc.com/news/644444.asp
Cairo can’t hide contempt for U.S.
‘Terrorism’ is a relative term in the home of ‘stealth’ Islam
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
By Michael Goldfarb
MSNBC
CAIRO, Oct. 18 - You couldn’t make this up. I arrived in Cairo just after midnight. A colleague from London who was born in Egypt was on the plane and was staying at the same hotel. We sat outside in the warm night air to have a beer and a history lesson. My colleague, Adel Darwish, was saying the thing he notices most in Cairo now is “Islamization by stealth.” Just then the waiter came up to take our order. They chatted for a moment in Arabic. When they finished I asked, ‘What was that about?’ It turns out the waiter was refusing to serve him alcohol because Adel was Egyptian and the weekend was a religious festival. “Islamization by stealth,” indeed.
IT WAS JUST a small example in how Islam co-exists with the secular in Cairo, widely regarded as the true cultural and political capital of the Arab world.
This is a mega-metropolis of 16 million plus souls, and almost as many cars. It is a place where you can eat the air as well as breathe it. Chaos is normal here. The crisis that has the U.S. gripped in fear hasn’t interrupted life here. There aren’t wild demonstrations against America. You don’t see posters of Osama bin Laden on the wall or blood-curdling anti-Western graffiti.
This is partially because the internal security services of President Hosni Mubarak keep its Islamic radicals on a tight leash. But on the issue of America’s “war on terrorism,” there really is no need to rein in Islamic radicals. Radical Islamic opinion and mainstream opinion, from the top of Egyptian society to the bottom, is remarkably uniform. You can summarize it this way: America is right to seek justice, but there still isn’t enough proof to justify the attacks. And, anyway, what does a “war on terrorism” really mean?
LOST CAUSE?
Despite anything the Bush administration or Britain may be doing, the propaganda battle here was lost before it started. Tony Blair, British prime minister and official alliance ambassador for hearts and minds, breezed through town last weekend, Koran packed in his luggage, repeating over and over the message: “This is not a war on Islam, this is a war on terrorism.”
There is no more sincere messenger on this topic than Blair. Yet even he ran into some problems with Mubarak. If this is a real war on terrorism, Mubarak is reported to have demanded, why doesn’t Britain extradite Egyptian Islamic terrorist suspects back to Cairo? Egypt has around 13,000 Islamists in prisons arrested under terrorism laws, and Amnesty International and other human rights groups strain their every muscle to monitor their abuse at the hands of local authorities. Mubarak’s retort might be seen as a response to that kind of Western criticism, which over the years has branded his government as repressive but given him little credit for crushing several violent Islamic militant groups, including some with ties to Osama bin Laden, that rocked the country in the mid-1990s.
SINS OF OMISSION
At the Al-Akhram Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank associated with the official government newspaper, Dr. Deia Ashwan, wonders if President Bush thinks he’s fooling anyone by saying America is waging a war on terrorism. “Bush names the 22 most wanted international terrorists,” says Ashwan. ” I didn’t see one Irish name. There was no one from Corsica. No Colombians. All 22 were Arabs.” Ashwan adds, “Thirty-nine terrorist bank accounts frozen - all from Muslim countries.” Ashwan is wrong, of course. The Real IRA, an Irish Republican Army splinter group that rejects the peace process there, is on the list. So, too, are many groups fighting outside the Islamic world in places ranging from Colombia to Sri Lanka to Greece.
But for Ashwan it’s clear that this is a war against Islam. If it was a war on terrorism, the first place the United States should strike is Israel, because Israel is a terrorist state, according to Ashwan.
Indeed, the word terrorism here in Cairo and throughout the Muslim world is synonymous with Israel in the same way that the word terrorism is now synonymous with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in the United States. Very few people here are prepared to accept just yet that bin Laden is guilty of masterminding the Sept. 11 atrocities. And you can hear some wild theories about who did it if you hang out on the street.
IN THE BIZARRE
The Khan al-Khalili market is a place for the impoverished of the Arab world to shop and for tourists to come and get a bit of local color - and maybe buy a souvenir. There aren’t many tourists or out-of-town shoppers in Cairo at the moment. Seated in his shop on Ataba Street, a narrow side street in the massive bazaar, Mohammed Ali Abeb and his son Mustafa have plenty of time these days to talk about terrorism, Afghanistan and the attack on the World Trade Center. Mohammed Ali Abeb complains that his customers from Sudan and Libya aren’t traveling to Cairo any more. He is suffering economically from the aftermath of the New York attack.
But he is certainly not interested in supporting the “war on terrorism.” Who is the terrorist, he wants to know, who attacked New York? His son is quite sure: It was all a plan by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, seeking to foment war between the United States and the Arabs. Did I know that all the Jews who worked in the World Trade Center had been warned in advance to leave the building? So the Israelis are the real terrorists.
It doesn’t take long in Cairo to reach the conclusion that it was never going to be possible to win hearts and minds by arguing for a war on “terrorism.” You wonder whether in this crisis there are any words that mean the same to people here and the phrasemakers in the Bush administration trying to reach them. The original name of the military action in Afghanistan was Operation Infinite Justice. That was changed to accommodate Muslim sensibilities, Allah being the only source of infinite justice. Now it is called Operation Enduring Freedom. But it won’t be long before someone here asks “where is the freedom for the Afghan people?”
Sitting with another colleague over another beer, I ask what fine word can I use to explain to Egyptians why the U.S. is in action in Afghanistan? Justice, freedom, truth? We go through them one by one and reach this conclusion: The meaning of each of these words is relative. The only absolute certainty is that none of them will convince the average Egyptian that America’s actions are right.
Michael Goldfarb, a special correspondent for WBUR in Boston, is on assignment in the Middle East
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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