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eye of the beholder:
terrosrism east/terrorism west

by Greg Barrett; Photos by Gannett News Service/Heather Martin Morrissey

The Palestinian mother with the poignant smile and bloodshot mahogany eyes wants so very badly for you to understand. You must know the awful truth about your country because if you knew then you surely would stop it. This is the way Sayeda Ali Talat is thinking, so maybe that’s why she exaggerates by referring to her son as a martyr. A martyr because Israeli tanks surrounded his West Bank apartment building for three days and it was not safe for him to return home. A martyr because he spoke to his wife on his cell phone and she was trapped and hungry and his three children were crying in the background. A martyr because the cupboards were bare. A martyr because when Israeli soldiers shot him seven times in the chest in the early morning on March 14, 2002, he was 10 minutes from home in Jenin and he knew his children were hungry. When the ambulance that ferried his corpse to a Gaza graveyard was later stopped, Israeli soldiers opened the casket, right there beside the road. In front of his wife and children and his older brother Ehab, the soldiers searched the clothes of the dead man and gave their final rites: They shaved off the mustache of Sayeda Ali Talat’s youngest son, Mohamed, a 27-year-old with a quick wit, a crooner’s voice, and a dream of one day becoming an Arabic pop singer. It wasn’t enough to kill him, Talat says, the Israelis had to insult him.

For this, all of this, Talat blames us. America. We arm Israel. Our sophisticated weapons and tanks and gunships—our $2.1 billion in military aid funneled to Israel every year—give the Jewish state the muscle it needs to survive in hostile Muslim land. Is that so wrong? But Talat’s baby boy died from my American-bought bullets, she says, looking suddenly apologetic for fear of insulting me.

“Don’t feel angry at me because you are American and what I am saying about your government,” she asks the interpreter to tell me. She looks over and smiles weakly, as if to pardon me, the American taxpayer and dutiful voter.

This difficult retelling of a son’s death took place in a bare office of the Palestinian hospital in a suburb of Cairo, the hometown of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, according to some biographers (Arafat claims the political pawn of Jerusalem as his birthplace), and the home today of his younger brother Fathi Arafat, a founder of dozens of hospitals such as this one. The interview was arranged by Fathi’s assistant, a Palestinian mother who said Talat’s story was not unusual for the Palestinians today. Sayeda recalls her son’s last words to her, spoken on his cell phone two and a half hours before he was killed (“We have to defend our country; we are not cowards…”), and she succumbs to the grief. Tears streak her face. Her features are round and gentle and grandmotherly, and with her head wrapped tightly in a pure white hijab, she appears delicate. But she has told the story without halting, driving through each emotional storm like a runner reaching for that second wind, like a mother determined. Finally, she takes a deep breath and reaches for a box of tissue, and for a photo of her beloved Mohamed.
If only her story ended here it would be uncluttered. No ambiguities. If only the Middle East were that simple. For Mohamed’s wife Assmahan (named for a famous Arabic singer) and children, Donia, 5, Diana, 3, and Feras, 1, it makes it no less tragic that Mohamed was firing back when fired upon. Or that he had been a soldier in Iraq for the Palestinian Liberation Organization during the onset of the Gulf War. Or that he was a member of Yasser Arafat’s security forces when he died. All of which makes him a target, perhaps even a legitimate one.
For Sayeda Ali Talat none of that matters. Her son died a martyr. It’s that simple. For America, it’s far more complicated now that we know firsthand that what explodes in the Middle East can ricochet from Jenin to Jerusalem to Kabul to New York to Washington, dc to a crater of disintegrated wreckage in rural Pennsylvania.

Self-Inflicted Wound?
Like many, Americans I was at first appalled by Susan Sontag’s cold assessment of September 11, a 470-word invective in the September 24 The New Yorker that said, in effect, our wound was self-inflicted. In the immediate and smoldering aftermath, this liberal author living the fast transatlantic life in Paris and Manhattan wielded a pen like a box cutter and attacked her native land, even as the corpse was still warm.
Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?…If the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky…

Our engine was running hot during those heady days of autumn, so Sontag was blistered by our renewed patriotic fever: Hate mail, death threats, and demands for her us citizenship. How dare she suggest that America’s foreign relations weren’t all apple pie and Peace Corps. Especially at a time like this. Then, as if to prove her point, President Bush made America sound like a superhero instead of a superpower. He declared America “the good” in the war against evil and began making noise about preemptive strikes on sovereign nations, with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in his crosshairs.

Sontag had asked how many Americans were aware of the ongoing bombing of Iraq? Many months following September 11—after emotion succumbed to reality and a reporting trip to Egypt sobered my anger—I wondered how many Americans were aware that our un-endorsed sanctions of Iraq had spread like shrapnel and killed hundreds of thousands of children. By bombing civilian power grids and crippling Iraq’s water-treatment plants during the Gulf War, then by blocking Iraq’s importation of chlorine and other water-purifying staples, our great democracy had engaged in reverse chemical warfare: On civilians. How is that different than plowing commercial jetliners into skyscrapers? unicef reports that this ongoing collateral damage of the Gulf War has contributed to more than one million deaths, half of which were children under age five.

In her missive, Sontag admonished us all. Who doubts America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

The paradoxes of this friendly giant from the West are complex indeed.
World Islamic Conference

At the crest of the polished tile walk leading to the five-star Cairo Marriott are 12 flags hung smartly, fitting for a place that was a 19th-century palace built specifically for the opening of the Suez Canal. The hotel, with its lavish courtyard and casino and three-tiered pool deck, is popular with locals and tourists alike. There are palm trees and patios and much reprieve from Egypt’s fierce sun. Dusk gives rise to lively music in the courtyard and the rigorous smoking of dried fruit from sheesha pipes, which are tall cumbersome contraptions with an inviting similarity to the bongs of my youth. The property is on the downtown island called Gezira, a gilded swatch set apart from the slums and crazed congestion of Greater Cairo and home to some of the most cosmopolitan of Egyptian life. Statesmen, foreign dignitaries, and, at least when I was there in the spring, the revered participants of the 14th annual World Islamic Conference—a meeting of ministers and scholars from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East—converge on this posh American hotel overlooking the River Nile. The highest ranking of the clerics and their entourages arrived in May in dark sedans and were flanked by bodyguards whose jackets bulged from unseen paraphernalia strapped underneath. The Muslim leaders emerged like royalty in patches of shadow cast by the hotel’s row of esteemed flags, which seemed appropriate since they would be discussing urgent matters of the West and the Middle East:
Palestinians and Israelis, America and Iraq. The banners of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were hung there, of course. As were those of Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Britain. Conspicuously absent, however, was Old Glory. By order of the Maryland-based hotel conglomerate, the American flag had long ago been lowered in the Middle East, folded and stored in the back of some one dozen Marriotts.

Money for Nothing
This is what it has come to in the Middle East, and even in Cairo, the capital of a us ally fully clothed in the franchises of the West. Hardee’s, McDonald’s, kfc, Radio Shack, Gold’s Gym, Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesars are all here. But today in Egypt, a country widely considered the rogue region’s center of gravity and rational thought, an American brand name like the Marriott cowers from flying the American flag. Never mind that us taxpayers will send $1.9 billion to Egypt in 2003, adding to Egypt’s accumulating pile of us military and economic aid that totals about $50 billion since 1975. But you can’t buy love. Or respect.

It’s a point lost on some of our lawmakers, obscured perhaps by the rationale behind our free economy. In a foreign operations budget meeting in April, Senator Arlen Specter, a 73-year-old Republican from Philadelphia, sounded baffled by anti-American propaganda in Egypt’s mainstream media. At one point last year there had been a report in Cairo that food packages dropped on Afghanistan by the United States were intended to injure or sicken the Afghans. For a faux democracy reputed to shackle its journalists, Specter was puzzled by the freedom Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was granting his press. Speaking to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was on Capitol Hill that day to testify before this subcommittee, Specter said Congress expected more from Egypt in general and Mubarak in particular.

Powell readily agreed, and he assured Specter that President Mubarak had been spoken to about the inaccuracies of Egyptian journalists.
“I have been disturbed with some of the statements that are made in the Egyptian press from time to time, and (especially) some characterizations of me. And I’ve taken this up directly with the Egyptian authorities and directly with President Mubarak,” Powell said. “I think they should not have a government-controlled press, and I believe in freedom of the press. But when the press is under some government control, and that freedom is abused with the most scurrilous kinds of falsehoods, it’s not for the purpose of informing but for the purpose of inciting. Then we should call it to the attention of the Egyptian government, and we do.”

Later in the same meeting, a relatively jovial affair for post-9/11 Washington (testimony was interrupted by wisecracks and laughter nine times), Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell echoed Specter’s frustration. All of Congress, he told Powell, is contemplatin g this question of Egypt: “What are we getting for our money?”

The Fine Surface of Civilization
It’s a question that Ali Salem had feared. In the noontime din of the Marriott lobby lounge, Salem, a 66-year-old Egyptian playwright of considerable note and controversy, predicted that 9/11 would turn and bite his homeland. On September 10 there were protests in Cairo against us imperialism and Zionism—an inseparable coupling in the minds of Arabs. On September 12 there were reports of Egyptians delighted by the attacks on America. In the days since, the tenor of Egyptian protests against America has grown louder and more aggressive.

“We don’t want your shitty food. We don’t want your globalization,” retired Egyptian professor and activist Ashraf El-Bayoumi told me one day prior to my meeting with Ali Salem. El-Bayoumi motioned toward an Egyptian McDonald’s across the street. He is a founding member of an ad hoc group formed last year called the General Committee for the Boycott of American and Zionist Goods and Companies, which targets us icons such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Marlboro.

“We don’t want your politics or your aid. Please take your money and leave,” he shouted. “To hell with the aid money.”

Hearing these quotes, and others that are just as clear in their derision, Salem shakes his head. He is sipping sweet Turkish coffee and chain-smoking Marlboros, and when he speaks his voice carries the baritone authority of actor James Earl Jones.

“We are still living the world before the downfall of the Berlin Wall; our intellectuals are still having these fervent revolutionary idiom and conceptions of that past, from the ‘60s. We are still living the Cold War phase; there are good guys and there are bad guys. The bad guys are the West—America—and the good guys are the Soviet Union and its satellites.… But they don’t know that all the good guys have been buried under the Berlin Wall and there are no good guys and bad guys. The guys will be bad when they are attacked or violated or when they feel their backs to the walls, and they will be good if you understand them, if you exchange thoughts and goods with them.”

The Middle East has today lifted the curtain for these old revolutionaries and for their portrayal of America as the common enemy of the Arabs, says Salem, who is ostracized by some Arabs because he advocates peaceful relations with the Jewish state. He was barred last year from the Egyptian Writer’s Union, but if it bothers him it doesn’t show. These days he is more consumed by the Middle East peace he seeks, but which never seems to come. He’s worried, too, that Egypt could be sliding backward, out of the grasp of the West.

“I know very well that the man of the forest is still inside us waiting for any chance to come out.… This surface of civilization is very fine.”
About $24 billion in economic aid from America has gone toward Egypt’s infrastructure; roads, sewers, dams, telephone lines. When people such as El-Bayoumi shout insults at America and attempt to rationalize the terror of 9/11, Salem believes that more us lawmakers will begin asking questions like McConnell’s. He fears that the us aid—and the global credit it provides Egypt—could dry up.
“They say today America is against all,” Salem says of the Arab intellectuals. “America killed the Red Indian. America also destroyed Egypt. America destroyed the whole world. Americans are ignorant. There are many [intellectuals] who have destroyed whole generations of students…talking about the imperialistic ways of America.”
Salem, a bear of a man, bows his head into his large hands. In Arabic he recites advice he says is Egyptian, but clearly it is global: “Lau maendaksh haga kuwayessa te’olha, khaleek saket ahssan.”
He looks up and pauses for effect, then translates. “If you don’t have something nice to say, then shut up.”
The Rattling Lid

America’s money has yoked Egypt to a tentative and awkward peace agreement with Israel and has kept a tight leash on half a million Egyptian soldiers, without whom there can be no all-out Arab assault on Israel or the West. But such strings of benevolence are fueling suspicion and contempt in the Arab streets where President Mubarak is increasingly viewed as the autocratic head of a marginalized puppet state. In well-attended protests in downtown Cairo the flags of America and Israel are burned together. A McDonald’s was pelted with rocks in March. A kfc near Cairo University was ransacked and closed in April.
The Egyptian government, loath to sanction demonstrations against its wealthy benefactor, finally endorsed one in the spring. Protest organizers saw it as Mubarak’s attempt to still the rattling lid of this boiling pot. So in Midan Tahrir Square in front of the Mogamma building, a gargantuan Stalin-era government complex bloated with thousands of Egyptian bureaucrats, America and Israel occupied the same placards and slogans, all of which connected them as the “Real and Only Axis of Evil.” My Egyptian “fixer”—a local who gets you into interviews and out of jams—raced his Jeep Cherokee toward the protest at about the same time as a young protestor named Ibrahim was being arrested and summarily beaten by riot police. From my passenger-side window I could hear the dull thuds of punishment and see the contorted and terrified expression on Ibrahim’s face.

The fixer parked and rushed up to the bullring of some 300 police that surrounded the demonstrators. The police stood motionless in black riot gear. Their sheer numbers were intimidating. Within seconds a thin seam formed in the double-rimmed circle and the fixer invited me into the fire. One of the guards, with the shield of his riot helmet flipped up, stared at me and grinned. I couldn’t tell if he was being friendly or was just amused by my naiveté.

Fathi Arafat
Egypt used to be romanticized in the West as a benign world elder who at age 5,100 is the world’s first nation-state. Baby Moses is said to have escaped certain death by floating in a straw basket in the River Nile. The Bible says Jesus Christ once escaped persecution by fleeing here. Prior to the overthrow of British rule in 1952 and the socialism of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, there were less than two dozen Islamic high schools and colleges in Egypt. Today there are thousands. Cairo has become a carrel of Islamic learning and its 16 million residents are awakened daily by the amplified cries of muezzins summoning the public to prayers.

Abandoned synagogues in Egypt are protected by Muslim guards carrying automatic weapons. The few Jews who remain are elderly and don’t get out much. On a spring Sabbath at the stately Ben-Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, only a calico cat wandered the dusty pews. The Muslim guard who escorted me walked with the light step of respect, but was lighthearted enough to make a joke.

“Shalom,” he said laughing, having exhausted his Hebrew vocabulary.
Egypt long ago changed. The world was placed on notice in 1981 when President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamists who believed Sadat had betrayed the Muslim faith by forging friendships and business with the West. As if that memory had faded, a band of militant Muslims gave us a stark reminder in 1997: Fifty-eight foreigners on two tour buses were slaughtered in a single attack near Luxor, Egypt.

When my fixer stopped at the Nile Hilton to ask directions to the Israeli embassy in Cairo, an Egyptian doorman peered into the car at my photographer and me, blond Caucasians. In a tone of concern he asked the driver: “Do they have security? Are you armed?”

This is the contemporary Middle East. So when Fathi Arafat agreed to meet with me in his office at the Palestinian hospital, I expected to be frisked. I expected heavy security. He is the honorary president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and his brother, the Palestinian leader, had recently been held captive by Israel in the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Arafat’s status was shaky even as I was driving out to meet Fathi Arafat, a 65-year-old pediatrician with homes in Cairo, Gaza, and the West Bank.

The Palestinian hospital in Cairo is an aging stone building painted the color of cantaloupe, and Fathi Arafat’s office is unadorned, save for the flags of the Red Crescent Society and the Palestinians. His assistant escorted me into his office with only her notepad and pencil. There were no armed guards that I saw. When I expressed my surprise, the brother of the man ultimately blamed for dozens of Palestinian suicide bombings opened his beige windbreaker and laughed. He carried no gun. No weapons of any sort. “I am struggling against Israel 54 years and I never carry a gun. I don’t know how to use a gun,” Fathi Arafat said.
At one point during our two-hour interview, which nearly turned into a filibuster on the Palestinian plight, Arafat leaned toward me aggressively, like he was struggling to contain his temper. He waved his finger.

“Is America controlling Israel or is Israel controlling America?” he asked, as if I alone might hold the answer.

He waited for a response. I had none.

“This is a big question in our area,” he said, finally, fixing me with a stare. “Believe me, this is a big question.”
“They Hate Our Freedoms”

In the frightful weeks after September 11, America sought to reassure itself. It looked at its reflection and saw something splendid and moral. During an emotional interview with David Letterman on September 17, cbs news anchor Dan Rather said, “They hate us for who and what we are.”

He wasn’t talking about the dead children in Iraq or Israel’s Apache gunships or the American assaults that would later veer off target and kill children in Afghanistan.

President Bush told the nation on September 20, “They hate our freedoms; our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

The stark black cover of the National Review on October 1 echoed the American mantra: “The United States is a target because we are powerful, rich, and good. We are resented for our power, envied for our wealth, and hated for our liberty….”

The America flag flew at half-staff initially, out of respect for the murdered of 9/11. Then it was raised high, as were our heads; a proud nation rising from the rubble.

Several years ago during a lecture at Alexandria University, named for the quaint and sophisticated city where it resides on Egypt’s northern coast, Professor Ashraf El-Bayoumi invited a devout Muslim student to the microphone.

“Tell us why the hijab is so important,” he said, delving into the politics and philosophy behind the headscarves worn by Muslim women.
“Piety,” the student answered.

“Islam teaches so many other things,” the professor responded. “Truth. Doing well in school. Liberating your country. Participating in society. How many do you count?”

“One hundred,” the student answered.

“Then why is this one percent, piety, so dominant?” the professor asked.

The student thought about it but had no good answer. He promised to check later at his mosque. But the clerics there gave him no reason that was satisfying. After much thought, he returned to class the next week and volunteered this revelation:
“The hijab is like a flag, a political flag to designate the power of that group.”

It is the flexing of power. It shows the authority Islam commands in society. The professor was pleased.
“You see, Bush is using the American flag just like the hijab,” El-Bayoumi told me, sounding pleased with his epiphany. “Bush is using the same tactics by raising the flag these d ays to rally support. It’s exactly the same as the hijab. Exactly.”

Pathological Love of America
Near the raucous center of the protest in Midan Tahrir Square, I noticed a woman standing eerily still. In her hands were several placards the size of traffic signs. She shuffled them slowly, like TV cue cards. “Sharon + Bush = Real & Only Axis of Evil,” read one that, like the others, linked Israel to America. “Go to Hell Enemies Forever,” read another. I approached her cautiously. She smiled. “We do not have anything against Americans; what we have is against Bush’s administration,” Iman Badawi said, extending her hand. She later exchanged e-mail addresses with me and within two months of my return to Washington, dc, Badawi, a 40-year-old mother of two and a teacher of English, had politely copied me 36 e-mails scornful of the United States. One of her last was a copy of a letter she had sent to President Bush soon after Bush demanded a replacement for Yasser Arafat. “Mr. Emperor, how dare you tell us what to do…. Can we also tell you what to do, or is it OK for you and forbidden for us?” Badawi wrote. “Poor America, what have you brought yourself!”

Ali Salem, sipping coffee in the Cairo Marriott, struggled to make sense of such sentiment. He ran a hand over his face and finally arrived at this: America is the target of a “very severe pathological love,” he said. It’s analogous to a wife who says she doesn’t love her husband, yet she can’t stand to be away from him. “Open the door to America and all these [people] will go to submit a request to go to America, these same people who are ready to demonstrate in the streets against America,” Salem said, smiling as though he had solved the riddle.

Arriving back in the United States, I phoned the Marriott headquarters outside of Washington, dc to inquire about the missing us flag in Cairo. At first, a spokeswoman named June Farrell denied responsibility for the lowering of the American flag in Cairo. She said it was a local decision made by the independent hotel franchise owners. But after Cairo Marriott’s local management denied responsibility, Farrell confessed. Perhaps as far back as the early 1990s, during the Gulf War, all Marriott hotels in the Middle East were told to lower the us flag.
Farrell felt no need to explain.

“For obvious reasons,” she said.