How interesting. I never thought about it like this really.

I will tell you an interesting story though, when I was at my lab, some people from the UAE were talking about why it was taking Arafat so long to die and they joked "because the angel of death is afraid he'll try to kiss him" (refering to Arafat's later life tendency to kiss everyone and blow kisses to the world.) Everyone laughed. There was no sorrow, outrage, or anything...just jokes like this one. What if this guy is right?

I'll let the author speak for himself:


Eye of the Storm: What if it's not Israel they loathe?
By AMIR TAHERI

In his recent foray into Ramallah, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
identified the Palestine-Israel conflict as the most important issue between
the West and the Muslim world. Straw was echoing the conventional wisdom
according to which a solution to that problem would transform relations
between Islam and the West from what is almost a clash of civilizations to
one of cuddly camaraderie.

But what if conventional wisdom got it wrong?

I have just spent the whole fasting month of Ramadan in several Arab
countries, where long nights are spent eating, drinking coffee and, of
course, discussing politics.

There are no free elections or reliable opinion polls in the Arab world. So
no one knows what the silent majority really thinks. The best one can do is
rely on anecdotal evidence. On that basis, I came to believe that the
Palestine-Israel issue was low down on the list of priorities for the man in
the street but something approaching an obsession for the political,
business, and intellectual elites.

When it came to ordinary people, almost no one ever mentioned the Palestine
issue, even on days when Yasser Arafat's death dominated the headlines. When
I asked them about issues that most preoccupied them, farmers, shopkeepers,
taxi drivers and office workers never mentioned Palestine.

But when I talked to princes and princesses, business tycoons, high
officials, and the glitterati of Arab academia, Palestine was the ur-issue.

The reason why the elites fake passion about this issue is that it is the
only one on which they agree. In many cases, it is also the only political
issue that people can discuss without running into trouble with the secret
services.

More importantly, perhaps, it is the one issue on which the elites feel they
have the sympathy of the outside world. For example, I found almost no one
who, speaking in private, had any esteem for Arafat. But all felt obliged to
hide their thoughts because Arafat had been honored by French President
Jacques Chirac.

When some Arab newspapers ran articles on Arafat's alleged corruption and
despotism, other Arab media attacked them for being disrespectful to a man
who had been treated like "a hero of humanity" by Chirac.

Conventional wisdom also insists that the US is hated by Muslims because it
is pro-Israel. That view is shared by most American officials posted to the
Arab capitals. But is it not possible that the reverse is true - that Israel
is hated because it is pro-American?

When I raised that possibility in Ramadan-night debates, I was at first
greeted with deafening silence. Soon, however, some interlocutors admitted
that my suggestion was, perhaps, not quite fanciful.

Let us consider some facts.

If Muslims hate the US because it backs Israel which, in turn, is oppressing
Muslims in Palestine, then why don't other oppressed Muslims benefit from
the same degree of solidarity from their co-religionists?

During Ramadan, news came that more than 500 Muslims had been killed in
clashes with the police in southern Thailand. At least 80 were suffocated to
death in police buses under suspicious circumstances.

The Arab and the Iranian press, however, either ignored the event or
relegated it to inside pages. To my knowledge, only one Muslim newspaper
devoted an editorial to it. And only two newspapers mentioned that Thailand
was building a wall to cordon off almost two million Muslims in southern
Thailand - a wall higher and longer than the controversial "security fence"
Israel is building.

Muslim states have never supported Pakistan on Kashmir because most were
close to India in the so-called nonaligned movement while Pakistan was a US
ally in CENTO and SEATO.

When Hindu nationalists demolished the Ayodhya Mosque, no one thought it
necessary to inflame Muslim passions.

Nor has a single Muslim nation recognized the republic set up by Muslim
Turks in northern Cyprus. The reason? Greece has always sided with the Arabs
on Palestine and plays occasional anti-American music while Turkey is a US
ally.

When the Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica 10 years
ago, not a ripple disturbed the serene calm of Muslim opinion. At that time,
the mullahs of Teheran and Col. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya were in cahoots
with Slobodan Milosevic, supplying him with oil and money because Yugoslavia
held the presidency of the so-called nonaligned movement. Belgrade was the
only European capital to be graced with a state visit by Ali Khamenehi, the
mullah who is now the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic.

And what about Chechnya which is, by any standard, the Muslim nation that
has most suffered in the past two centuries? Last October the Muslim summit
in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, gave a hero's welcome to Vladimir
Putin, the man who has presided over the massacre of more Chechens than
anyone in any other period in Russian history.

Right now there are 22 active conflicts across the globe in which Muslims
are involved. Most Muslims have not even heard of most of them because those
conflicts do not provide excuses for fomenting hatred against the United
States.

Next time you hear someone say the US was in trouble in the Muslim world
because of Israel, remember that things may not be that simple.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pag...d=1101874928275

I do not disagree with the suggestion, but it suggests a "what came first the chicken or the egg" type philosophical discussion.
President Arafat remained an arab icon, but in the last three years of his life he was no longer the dominant figure for the Palestine independence cause internationally for several reasons: 1) corruption charges 2) his isolation and exile in ramallah enforced by Isreal 3) inability to deliver groups like hezbullah and hamas in a potential settlement with Israel (vis a vis... his seemed willingness to compromise on items like 'right of return' that some would not accept) 4) his alleged or real loyalty to Saddam Hussein.
I am speaking from an internationalist's point of view.
If one takes a cynical view of western motives in the Mid-East, western support of an Palestinian-Israeli settlement which creates full independence for Palestine could be seen as an appeasement to the arab world.
I support a fair settlement in the I-P conflict which formalizes Palestinian independence and insures security for Israel. This means to me full or nearly full withdrawal of Israeli settlements in Gaza and west bank.
The argument seems in some places to swing on the motives of western governments in calling for a settlement between I & P. To me it is a means to three specific ends. Recognition of both Israel and palestine as nations with clearly assigned and agreed to borders and the removal of the issue once and for all as a wedge between quote-unquote eastern and western global alliances.
No settlement between I & P can address completely each parties concerns without compromise on each side.
As i have pointed out online to individuals in the Israeli community, without a final settlement with Palestinians, Israel will always have an unfriendly neighbour on its border and Palestinians: without compromise will have conflict and occupation and a fight for recognition for its formal recognition as a state.
For other individual arab nations, it is a matter of how important the issue of Palestian independence is to them. With the current status quo, perhaps though Palestine does not have formal independence, there is a "place" for Palestinians, allegedly ending their status as a 'refugee' people, though they do not have full autonomy.
With a glimmer of hope that progress can be made towards a settlement that can bring peace, I do not go into specific matters at question between the two parties.
Even at my low level I do not want to say anything that could be seen as making the discussion of these important issues more difficult.

There is a broader issue that may help explain this, and that is that most people need an enemy. People and organizations, which of course are made up of people, define themselves at least to some extent by their struggles and by what they are not. It gives them meaning. In the 1990s, much of America was casting about trying to decide who America's great enemy would be in the post Soviet era. Would it be China? Would it be North Korea? Would it be Latin American drug lords? Or would it be Islamic extremists (as actually turned out to be the case)? And for the American far-right, when there was no great "evil" force outside the US that could replace the Soviet Union, they looked within. Hence the Oklahoma City bombing and the militia movement. The CIA seemed to be coming apart at the seams during the 1990s since, without the USSR, it seemed to have no purpose. And if we can ask where the CIA would be without the USSR (although Islamic extremists have given it new life), then we can also ask where the likes of Noam Chomsky and Jello Biafra would be without the CIA, and where Jerry Falwell would be without Larry Flint, and where Tom would be without Jerry, and so on.

Turning back to the Middle East, I don't think that it's the case that the Arab on the street opposes Israel because they are pro-US, I think that it's simply a question of who has a greater impact on their lives. It may be that the Arab population to a man supports the Palestinian cause, and many Arab and Muslim governments thoughout the world have used this conflict to gain support from their populations. But who has military bases all over the world? Who's banks operate in virtually every country in the world? Who's resource extraction has brought them to every corner of the world? Is an Arab more likely to have a kosher restaurant or a McDonalds on their block?

Despite the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is truly localized, Arabs and Muslims around the world have taken an interest in it; however, America does a much better job of filling the role of "The Great Satan" for the Muslim people.

Take a look at the history of the Palestinian - Israel issue. It's to the advantage of the Arab governments to to continuet to inflame their people against Israel on this issue; they focus on the poor Palestinians oppressed by Israel's existence and ignore the fact that the rest of the land in the 2-state British mandate was to be Palestine but was co-opted by other Arab nations. This also is propaganda to keep the attention on how they are oppressed & how their leadership lives "high on the hog" (pardon the pun) and squanders their countries resources instead of using them to take care of the countries and people themselves.

Considering the dictatorial nature of these countries, it makes perfect sense that while in public/on the record the people would play the Israel is the problem and lay blame on anti-American sentiments on US-Israeli relations and that the leadership of these countries would foster this belief to the outside world.

Within the US, we saw in our most recent elections the pandering of the republican party to the Jewish vote based on support of Israel (pandering that was seen through by most Jewish Americans, but not all) and playing the same game with Israel.

There's a lot of money and power to be had in maintaining this sort of conflict, who do you really think keeps it alive?

It's true that many Arab governments and governments in other Muslim countries have used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to distract their citizens from or give an explanation for their problems, and that these governments have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or inciting further conflict. There is no arguement there. But I think that what heart is saying, and I'm inclined to agree, is that despite this, the Muslim world still reserves its most bitter hatred for America. And I think that this is because our reach is much further than that of Israel. Our military, our corporations and our cultural institutions have spread themselves throughout the Arab world, the Muslim world and the world as a whole, and consequently, our impact on the common Arab is much greater than that of Israel.

Oh, I know that's what she's saying, I thought I'd addressed my agreement in the last 2 paragraphs (I guess not). I think the anti-Americanism increases in the Muslim world (as well as in Europe) with the increased power and loud voices of the "Baseball-Apple pie-Chevrolet-American Way or the Highway" mentality of the right wing here. I take it as a compliment when my European colleagues ask why a Canadian like me is working in the US and are shocked when I say that I was born and raised here.

it is worth considering just where taheri's sentiments generally reside. i've read his articles a number of times and notice a good fit, along with others at benador associates, with the neoCON perspective. in fact, having richard perle on staff is a blackmark, not a bonus, in my ledger!

makiya is the one, i believe, who has secreted many of the captured iraq documents from which our previous involvement in iraq could be discerned:

http://www.benadorassociates.com/about.php



yikes, took a deeper look and benador associates is neoCON central!:

http://www.benadorassociates.com/experts.php






for more of taheri's work:

http://www.benadorassociates.com/taheri.php