JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Around the Arab world

By Uriel Heilman · April 23, 2009

A roundup of news from the Arab world.

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The impetus for conservative Islam

By Uriel Heilman · December 24, 2008

How do Arab students rebel? They embrace conservative Islam. Thirst for political change and social justice are driving young people to conservative Islam, The New York Times finds in a piece from Jordan.

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Sending the Lebanese a message

By Uriel Heilman · October 28, 2008

As Israel floats the idea of a non-aggression pact with Lebanon, Commentary magazine’s Michael Totten writes that even if the pact doesn’t work, it would do well to send a message to the Lebanese people that Israel isn’t interested in fighting them. That’s a message surprising number of people in Lebanon – probably the least anti-Israel of all Arab countries – don’t get to hear, Totten writes.

Israel is hardly well-liked in Lebanon, but neither is Hezbollah, and neither is Syria. Even though a non-aggression pact is likely to go nowhere right now, suggesting one to Lebanese may help clarify something: most Lebanese don’t actually know that Israelis prefer peace to war. They should, but they don’t. They’ve been soaked with so much disinformation and propaganda for so long, and there’s still a great deal of anger left over from Israel’s invasions in 1982 and 2006. Most of Hezbollah’s less fanatical supporters are drawn from the ranks of those who sincerely believe Israel is a threat to them and that Hezbollah is their only defense. This is nonsense on stilts – Israel wouldn’t have invaded Lebanon at all in 2006 if Hezbollah had not first attacked. But this perception persists nevertheless…

This should be obvious to most Lebanese, but I know from conversations with people across the political spectrum that it isn’t. Many don’t know whether they should support the Hezbollah-led “March 8” bloc in next year’s election, or whether they should support the “March 14” bloc led by those who kicked out the Syrians in 2005. The Syrian regime is currently pretending to be more benign that it really is by offering, for the first time ever, to establish diplomatic relations with Lebanon. Israelis are smart to signal, at the same time, that they sincerely do not mean Lebanese harm. No one in the Lebanese government or media will explain that to them. The “March 14” bloc is already sensitive to the near-constant accusation that it’s a “Zionist hand.” Israelis need to get that message out by themselves.

Public opinion on the idea of a peace treaty with Israel is mixed. Some want a peace treaty now. Some even want an alliance with Israel, although they tend to keep quiet about that and are far more likely to share that opinion off-the-record with me than they are with their fellow Lebanese. Others don’t want a peace treaty until outstanding issues–the supposed occupation of the Shebaa Farms, and the hundreds of thousands of unwanted and dangerous Palestinian refugees–are resolved. Even some otherwise sensible Lebanese I know wallow in conspiracy theories and believe Israelis want to conquer South Lebanon and steal water from the Litani River. Hezbollah’s hard-core supporters don’t ever want a peace treaty with Israel. But a non-aggression pact? An agreement that we’ll leave you alone if you leave us alone? Put that on a ballot in a popular referendum and it would pass overwhelmingly.

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Anti-Semitism—still

By Lisa Hostein · September 18, 2008

The latest Pew Research Center survey of global attitudes on religion is out and the news is not good for Jews – or Muslims.

Anti-Jewish attitudes are up in most major European countries, with the highest numbers in Spain, Poland and Russia. Only British attitudes have remained constant in recent years. But the same is true about attitudes toward Muslims. And according to Pew, “there is a clear relationship between anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim attitudes: publics that view Jews unfavorably also tend to see Muslims in a negative light.”

But none of this comes as a big surprise. Similar studies in recent years have come up with similar numbers, give or take a few percentage points. A major report last year by Human Rights First went beyond the numbers to chide European countries for not doing more to halt the trend. See JTA’s analysis of that report.

But while anti-Jewish sentiments appear a constant (so what else is new in Jewish history?), some other troubling – though not necessarily surprising – findings have garnered less attention:

• The deepest anti-Jewish sentiments exist outside of Europe, especially in predominantly Muslim nations. The percentage of Turks, Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Pakistanis with favorable (my emphasis) opinions of Jews is in the single digits.
  
• A majority in people in Jordan express a positive view of Hamas. But views of Hamas tend to be negative in Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt.
• Views of the militant Lebanese Shi’ite organization Hezbollah are overwhelmingly negative in Turkey, while slim majorities in Egypt and Jordan express positive views of Hezbollah. In Lebanon itself, Hezbollah is almost unanimously popular among the country’s Shia community, but is overwhelmingly unpopular among Sunnis and Christians.
• Most Muslims continue to worry about the rise of Islamic extremism, both at home and abroad. Majorities in Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria say they are concerned about extremism in their own country and in other countries around the world.
  



Perhaps, in these troubled times, we should take comfort in this, though it’s hard to believe given the daily headlines:

* Since 2002, the percentage saying that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are justified to defend Islam from its enemies has declined in most predominantly Muslim countries surveyed.

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9/11 conspiracy

By Uriel Heilman · September 9, 2008

Western media – and many Western governments – largely have ignored the pernicious smears that have proliferated in the last eight years in the Arab world about 9/11 (calling them “conspiracy theories” gives them more credence than they deserve). Prime among them are that the Jews and Israelis knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in advance, did not show up to their jobs that day at the World Trade Center, and even perpetrated or orchestrated the attacks.

So it was interesting to see The New York Times take up the subject in a piece Tuesday by Michael Slackman about what in Cairo has become “conventional wisdom” about the attacks. After briefly reviewing the lies, Slackman writes:

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

It goes beyond that, however. Smears and conspiracy theories about the West long preceded the 9/11 attacks, and they have followed on unrelated and more recent subjects. Arabs commonly believe Israel infected Egyptian children with AIDS, that the two bars on the Israeli flag represent the goal of Jewish dominion over all the land between the Nile and Euphrates rivers, and that Jewish interest in the genocide in Darfur is part of a plan to occupy Sudan and, eventually, the entire Arab world.

It’s important not to let such attitudes go unheeded, because they are a sign of how disconnected from reality much of the Arab world is and how much needs to be done in order to lay the groundwork for peace, particular between the Arab world and Israel. Pretending such attitudes do not exist only set the peacemakers up for failure, partly by ignoring the factors that drive so many Arabs to embrace the radical and rejectionist ideologies of Hamas, Hezbollah and others.

On a semi-related note, here’s what Jeffrey Goldberg is thinking about 9/11: The next mega-attack in America will be a dirty bomb, and Barack Obama and John McCain had better focus much more attention on deterring this nuclear attack.

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary.

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