Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Al-Zayyat himself, a heavy featured, bearded man, was friendly, but, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, he was evasive. At a press conference in Cairo earlier this year, he had warned, “The U.S. will reap a bitter harvest if it continues humiliating Dr. Omar”—Sheikh Rahman. “The continuation of the Sheikh’s abuse may result in an explosion of events targeted against U.S. interests. Sheikh Omar has many followers.” That night, he said that his threats were not to be taken literally. “I’m very sorry for what happened in New York,” he said.

  Although Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt have been less visible since President Mubarak ordered a crackdown in the mid-nineties, they have been especially discreet over the last two weeks. The Gama’a al-Islamiya declared a ceasefire in 1999, but thousands of its members remain in jail. Like its rival, the ideologically similar Islamic Jihad, the Gama’a grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which for decades has been advocating the Islamization of Egyptian society. Unlike the Gama’a, which is illegal, the Muslim brothers exist in an ambiguous political state described to me by one government official as “illegal but tolerated.”

  The Egyptian Islamic Jihad is also illegal, and in any case seems to have transferred its operations to Afghanistan and merged with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, with the help of Jihad’s Ayman al-Zawahiri. Though they represent rival organizations, al-Zayyat considers al-Zawahiri a friend.

  “He’s a very sensible man, a very quiet man,” al-Zayyat said, when I asked him to describe al-Zawahiri. “When he speaks, you listen to him carefully.”

  I asked al-Zayyat what might have driven al-Zawahiri to help organize the American attacks. He replied that he had no knowledge of the attacks, and also said, “I’m not going to be a witness against my friend.”

  I had a final question: What is it about America that incites the fury of so many Islamists? I suggested that it is American values, especially as they relate to sex and the role of women in society, which Islamic conservatives abhor. “We have sex in Egypt,” al-Zayyat said, laughing. Then he went on, “We don’t have feelings of hatred toward the people of the U.S., but feelings of hatred toward the government of the U.S. have developed because you support Israel so blindly.” At that moment, Montasser al-Zayyat’s views seemed inseparable from those of Mubarak’s spokesmen.

  One evening, I met a friend, a member of the small Egyptian upper class, for drinks in a hotel by the Nile. Cairo isn’t Islamabad: Muslims are free to drink alcohol, and there are movie theaters and belly dancing, although the percentage of women wearing traditional headscarves seems to have increased dramatically since I first visited, ten years ago. What people aren’t encouraged to do is express interest in democratic reform. My friend asked that I not name him in anything I might write; he believes that the soft despotism of the Mubarak government is hardening, and he wants to stay out of jail. Earlier this year, a prominent sociologist and democracy advocate, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor on trumped-up charges, and, like the Egyptian peace camp, the number of those who support true democracy is purposefully shrinking from view.

  We spoke about the Egyptian preoccupation with Israel. He is no friend of Israel—“I’m an Arab, how can I have warm feelings for such a place?” he said—but he believes that hatred of Israel, and, to a lesser extent, hatred of America, is fomented by the Mubarak regime as a diversion; as long as Egyptians think about Palestinians, they aren’t thinking about themselves. “Egyptians live in just appalling conditions today,” he said.

  Per-capita income in Egypt is less than the per-capita income on the West Bank. Cairo is a tumultuous, decaying city with a wealthy élite and great masses of the destitute and the near-destitute. The universities are turning out thousands of graduates each year for whom there are no jobs. “The gap between rich and poor is widening, and what does the government give us? Hatred of the peace process.” He ascribes to Mubarak’s circle the ability to turn on and off anti-Western rhetoric.

  All of this, he went on, is indirectly the fault of America, which gives Egypt two billion dollars a year in aid but demands little in return. “You allow them to manipulate you. Every time anti-American feelings appear here, Mubarak says, ‘Support me or else you see what you’ll get.’ But the suppression and the corruption and the anti-democratic behavior will create much worse fundamentalism over time. Washington never stands up to them.” He cited the imprisonment of the democracy advocate Saad Ibrahim, and said, “Look what they just did on the Queen Boat.”

  The boat in question, a well-known disco that allegedly attracted a gay clientele, was anchored a short distance from where we sat. (“Queen” is thought to refer to the wife of the deposed King Farouk.) Following a police raid of the vessel in May, fifty-three men were arrested for presumed homosexuality; these men are now on trial in Cairo. Two weeks ago, the first sentence was handed down: a seventeen-year-old received three years’ hard labor.

  “What does the U.S. do about this? Nothing,” my friend said. The only prescription is the robust export of democratic values. “There’s no Cold War anymore. You can’t drive him into an alliance with the Soviets.”

  There are few Egyptian intellectuals who still argue publicly in favor of normalization with Jerusalem. They are despised, and for the most part quiet. One of them is Ali Salem, a play-wright recently expelled from the Egyptian Writers’ Union for making frequent visits to Israel and for assuming a pro-normalization stance.

  I wanted to ask Salem, who is sixty-five years old and looks like the literary critic Harold Bloom, what had happened, but he said that he was interested in talking about “something deeper than that.” We sat in a cafeteria not far from the Mahmoud mosque. Salem drank coffee and chain-smoked Marlboros. “History is cruel,” he said. “It is trying to drag America backward. But I think in this case history is right.”

  He explained, “We here need to be more progressive, but you need to take a step back. If the bureaucrats in your airports were just a little more paranoid, like us, it would be a different world. Really, America is a beautiful place: no one even asked why all these guys wanted flying lessons. You should learn to be suspicious. A little backwardness would be healthy.”

  I asked him to identify the cause of the attacks on America.

  “People say that Americans are arrogant, but it’s not true,” he said. “Americans enjoy life and they are proud of their lives, and they are boastful of their wonderful inventions that have made life so much easier and more convenient. It’s very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms. These are people who are afraid of America, afraid of life itself. . . . These are people who are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out. But modernism is frightening. It means we have to compete. It means we can’t explain everything away with conspiracy theories.”

  Ali Salem paused to order another cup of coffee.

  “Bernard Shaw said it best, you know. In the preface to St. Joan, he said Joan of Arc was burned not for any reason except that she was talented. Talent gives rise to jealousy in the hearts of the untalented.”

  Soon after seeing Ali Salem, I ran into Muhammad Atta’s father, Muhammad al-Amir Atta, outside a downtown Cairo hotel. He was agitated, alternately aggressive and disconsolate. He had spent much of the week defending himself to reporters and defending his son. I asked him the same question: What, in his mind, lay behind the attack on the World Trade Center?

  “The Mossad kidnapped my son and stole his papers,” he told me. “Then they spread those papers out at the World Trade Center in order to make it seem like he did it.”

  BERNARD LEWIS

  Muslim Anti-Semitism

  [Published in June 1998]

  WHAT HAS COME to be known as the peace process—the developing dialogue between the state of Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians and some Arab governments
on the other—raised hopes that it would lead to a lessening of hostility and more specifically of anti-Semitism. In some quarters this did indeed occur. But in others the peace process itself has aroused a new Arab hostility to Jews, among both those frustrated by its slowness and those alarmed by its rapidity. As a result, anti-Semitism in recent years has conquered new territory and risen to a new intensity.

  EUROPEAN INFLUENCE

  European anti-Semitism, in both its theological and racist versions, was essentially alien to Islamic traditions, culture, and modes of thought. But to an astonishing degree, the ideas, the literature, even the crudest inventions of the Nazis and their predecessors have been internalized and Islamized. The major themes—poisoning the wells, the invented Talmud quotations, ritual murder, the hatred of mankind, the Masonic and other conspiracy theories, taking over the world—remain; but with an Islamic, even a Qur’anic twist.

  The classical Islamic accusation, that the Old and New Testaments are superseded because Jews and Christians falsified the revelations vouchsafed to them, is given a new slant: the Bible in its present form is not authentic but a version distorted and corrupted by the Jews to show that they are God’s chosen people and that Palestine belongs to them. 1 Various current news items—the scandal over Swiss banks accepting Nazi gold stolen from Jews, the appointment of Madeleine Albright as secretary of state, even the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)—are given an anti-Semitic slant. Jewish world plots—against mankind in general, against Islam, against the Arabs—have become commonplace.

  One of the crimes of Israel and of the Zionists in these writings is that they are a bridgehead or instrument of American or, more generally, of Western penetration. For such, America is the Great Satan, Israel the Little Satan; Israel is dangerous as a spearhead of Western corruption. The more consistent European-type anti-Semites offer an alternative view: that America is the tool of Israel, rather than the reverse, an argument backed by a good deal of Nazi-style or original Nazi documentation. In much of the literature produced by the Islamic organizations, the enemy is no longer defined as the Israeli or the Zionist; he is simply the Jew, and his evil is innate and genetic, going back to remote antiquity. A preacher from Al-Azhar University explains in an Egyptian newspaper that he hates the Jews because they are the worst enemies of the Muslims and have no moral standards, but have chosen evil and villainy. He concludes: “I hate the Jews so as to earn a reward from God.”2

  The argument that “we cannot be anti-Semitic because we ourselves are Semites” may still occasionally be heard in Arab countries, though of course not in Turkey or Iran. But some of the more sophisticated spokesmen have become aware that to most outsiders this argument sounds silly or disingenuous. Some writers make a serious effort to maintain the distinction between hostility to Israel and Zionism and hostility to Jews as such. But not all. President Khatami of Iran, in his interview on CNN, pointed out—correctly—that “anti-Semitism is indeed a Western phenomenon. It has no precedents in Islam or in the East. Jews and Muslims have lived harmoniously together for centuries.” A newspaper known to express the views of the “Supreme Guide” Khamenei rejected this statement as untrue: “The history of the beginnings of Islam is full of Jewish plots against the Prophet Muhammad and of murderous attacks by Jews . . . unequivocal verses in the Qur’an speak of the hatred and hostility of the Jewish people against Muslims. One must indeed distinguish between the Jews and the Zionist regime, but to speak in the manner we heard was exaggerated and there was no need for such a presentation.” 3 The Egyptian director of a film about President Nasser reports a similar complaint by the late president’s daughter. She objected to a passage in his film indicating that “Nasser was not against the Jews, but against Zionism, because she wanted to portray her father as a hero of the anti-Jewish struggle.”4

  Spokesmen of the government of Iran usually disclaim antiSemitism; they refrain from overtly anti-Semitic phraseology and proclaim their readiness to tolerate Jews—of course within the limits prescribed by the Shari’a (Islamic law). This however does not prevent them from embracing the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the hundred-year-old Russian forgery alleging a Jewish plot to take over the world. These are frequently reprinted in Iran in book form and were even serialized in a daily newspaper “as a reminder to the reader.”5 Iranian networks also distribute copies of the “Protocols” internationally in various languages. In Egypt the “Protocols” formed the basis of an interview published in a popular Egyptian magazine with Patriarch Shenouda, head of the Coptic church.6 The interviewer starts by introducing the Protocols as an authentic historical record and questions the patriarch, whose comments on Jews and Judaism seem to be based on the information supplied to him by the interviewer, and derived from the “Protocols” and another popular anti-Semitic forgery, the pseudo-Talmud.

  ARAB OPPOSITION

  Arab opposition to the peace process as such, or to the manner in which it is being conducted, is of three major types: political, economic, and Islamic.

  I. Political

  The first is basically a continuance of what went before— ideological polemic against Zionism and political warfare against the state of Israel. Ideological or political opposition as such is not based on prejudice, but it affects and is affected by prejudice.

  This kind of opposition and the prejudice associated with it continue to flourish and even to spread in spite of, and in some quarters because of, the peace process. It has been aggravated by some of the actions of the new Israeli government and still more by the utterances of some of its followers. Israeli extremists cannot really be blamed for the anti-Semitic propaganda in the Egyptian and other Arab media, which had already reached high levels of scurrility before the change of government and policy in Israel in June 1996; they have, however, undermined the efforts of well-meaning Arabs to counter these campaigns.

  An example of reporting and comments on the news may be seen in reports of the suicide bombing in Ramat Gan on July 24, 1995. This act was disclaimed, even denounced, by responsible Palestinian and other Arab leaders. It was acclaimed by many others, from the center and the left as well as in the fundamentalist Islamic press. A leading article in a Jordanian leftist weekly by its editor, Fahd ar-Rimawi, acclaims the heroism of the Hamas bomber who “sent seven Zionist settlers to hell and thirty others to the casualty wards” and goes on to denounce those who had condemned the attack as hypocrites or worse.7 That Ramat Gan is near Tel Aviv, part of Israel since the foundation of the state, makes the description of its inhabitants as “Zionist settlers” the more noteworthy. The Jordanian fundamentalist Ziyad Abu Ghanima rails against those who “shed torrents of tears in mourning for filthy Jewish blood while sparing their tears when Palestinian or Lebanese blood is shed by the hands of the Jews, may God curse them.” 8

  II. Economic

  More dangerous than this old-guard resistance is a new active opposition to the peace process that arises from the process itself, from a fear that the prowess which the Israelis had demonstrated in the battlefield would be equaled or even exceeded in activities with which Jews are more traditionally associated—in the factory, the counting house, and the marketplace. A certain Israeli brashness and lack of understanding of the courtesies and sensitivities of Middle Eastern society have often exacerbated such fears.

  According to this perception, Israel has changed its tactics. It has now switched from warlike to peaceful methods to pursue its nefarious design of penetrating and dominating the Arab world. Some see dark menace in every Israeli attempt at communication and cooperation. The expansion of trade links means economic exploitation and subjugation; the development of cultural links means the subversion and destruction of Arab-Islamic culture; the quest for political relations is a prelude to imperial domination. These fantasies, absurd as they may seem to the outsider or indeed to any rational observer, nevertheless command wide support in the Arab media and particularly in Egypt.

  For
exponents of this view, European anti-Semitism provides a rich reservoir of themes and motifs, of literature and iconography, on which to draw and elaborate. Shimon Peres’s book, The New Middle East,9 with its somewhat idyllic view of future peaceful cooperation between Israel and the Arab states for economic improvement and cultural advancement, has appeared in several Arabic translations. The purpose of these translations is indicated in the blurb of one of them, published in Egypt:

  When the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were discovered about two hundred years ago [sic] by a Frenchwoman [sic] and disseminated in many languages including Arabic, the international Zionist establishment tried its best to deny the plan. They even claimed that it was fabricated and sought to acquire all the copies in the market in order to prevent them from being read. And now, it is precisely Shimon Peres who brings the decisive proof of their authenticity. His book confirms in so clear a way that it cannot be denied that the Protocols were true indeed. Peres’s book is the last but one step in the execution of these dangerous designs.10

  The “Protocols” remain a staple, not just of propaganda, but even of academic scholarship. Thus, according to an article in an Egyptian weekly,11 the University of Alexandria accorded the degree of master of arts to the writer of an important “scientific treatise” dealing with the economic role of the Jews in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. The description of this dissertation makes it clear that its author relied very heavily on the “Protocols” and on the methodology of research that they provided.

  A campaign attacking Israeli agricultural techniques and products—the one area in which there has been real cooperation with Egypt—accuses the Israelis of selling hormonally altered fruit that kills men’s sperm. (They also supposedly supply Egyptian women with hyper-aphrodisiac chewing gum that drives them into a frenzy of sexual desire.) Other stories accuse the Israelis (or simply “the Jews”) of supplying Egyptian farmers with poisoned seeds and disease-bearing poultry “like time bombs”;12 of deliberately spreading cancer among the Egyptians and other Arabs by devising and distributing carcinogenic cucumbers and shampoos; of promoting drug consumption and devil worship; and of organizing a campaign to legalize homosexuality to undermine Egyptian society. A Syrian paper even claims that Arafat made peace because he himself is a Jew. 13