MEDIA REACTION ON U.S. POLICY IN MIDDLE EAST

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SUBJECT: MEDIA REACTION ON U.S. POLICY IN MIDDLE EAST

Summary

-- Lead story in all papers today, February 12,
focuses on an earthquake that hit the region,
including Jordan, yesterday morning. Lead stories
also address continued violence in both the
Palestinian Territories and Iraq.

Editorial Commentary

-- "The democracy of killing and racism"

Daily columnist Khaled Mahadin opines on the op-ed
page of semi-official, influential Arabic daily Al-Rai
(02/12): "The latest ingenuity of the alliance of the
racist Zionism and the racist American Christian right-
wing is the encroachment of American democracy upon
us. This invasion is part of a new American war, that
uses not the blind American war machine, but rather
thoughts and ideas, as declared by Rumsfeld and
Powell.. Over more than sixty years, the United
States was the greatest supporter of fascist, military
and totalitarian regimes in the Arab and Muslim world,
in Asia, and South America. Because of this support,
millions of people were killed here and there,
nationalist liberation movements were aborted in
dozens of countries, and the United States provided
full protection for tens of dictators and murderers.
This is why America's talk of invading the Arab world,
the Middle East and the Muslim world with what
Washington calls democracy is amusing. The first step
was Afghanistan and the second step was Iraq. We do
not think that any sane person in our world could even
take America's new call seriously, simply because
Washington knows that democracy in the Arab and Muslim
world will yield the real enemy of America's interests
and plans. Real democracy will not bring into power
regimes and leaderships that accept to work under the
American umbrella, or take its orders, or even allow
it to wreath corruption, conspiracy and racism against
Islam, real Christianity and Arab nationalism.. The
American democracy that Washington is calling for as
being in our best interest is another form of the
destructive invasion that is targeting the Arab
homeland and the Muslim world to benefit the Zionist
enemy and the Christian right-wing.. The American
animosity towards Arabism, Arabs, Islam and Muslims
makes this call for democracy another lie in the
mountain-worth of American lies."

-- "A large Middle East!"

Daily columnist Tarek Masarweh writes on the back page
of semi-official, influential Arabic daily Al-Rai
(02/12): "The most significant presence that
Washington has managed to achieve in the region to
date is its military presence, not democracy, not
human rights. The changes in the region that
Washington likes to pride itself of are nothing but
changes on the surface resulting from fear,
degradation and bribery.. Democracy cannot be
established in this region without real peace that
stops Israel - and the United States - from military
occupation and invasion, threatening, and stealing the
Arab fortunes. As for terrorism that Washington is
waving its arms about, it is the making of Washington
itself. It is the incubator and it pushes for it with
the desperation, frustration and humiliation that it
invokes in the region. Looking for the roots of
terrorism is this region's religion is but another
humiliation that pushes people even more towards that
type of violence. The Americans and their allies
would do well to leave freedom, democracy and human
rights to grow in this part of the world, without
their military boots and their hamburgers and without
the moral degradation."

-- "The American public diplomacy hoax: why do they
keep insulting us?"

Opinion writer Rami Khouri writes on the op-ed page of
centrist, influential among the elite English daily
Jordan Times (02/11): "The serious controversy over
Washington's use or misuse of intelligence on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction program is not an isolated
phenomenon. It reflects a much deeper weakness in how
the United States interacts with cultures such as
those of the Middle East. We can watch this clash of
cultures taking place before our eyes in other fields,
such as the U.S. government's use of broadcasting and
print media to influence attitude vis--vis the U.S.
in the Arab Islamic world.. Arabs and Americans are
like ships passing in the night, sounding their horns,
firing their guns, making known their views, but
having no impact on the other. The epitome of this is
the widening gap between Arabs' perceptions of the
U.S. and many Americans' flawed interpretations of
those Arab perceptions.

Khouri continues: "The American president's
intellectual terror (`they hate our freedom') is
simplistic, wrong and dangerous and an inappropriate
and ineffective retort to the world views of the
criminals who have terrorized and killed thousands of
Americans and other nationals. Scores of public
opinion polls, focus groups and others have confirmed
a thousand times over that most Arabs and Muslims
admire basic American values, but are angered
primarily by American foreign policies and, to a
lesser extent, the arrogant manner in which the U.S.
presents its views and dictates policy to the world.
A common intellectual, cultural and political response
to this in the United States is that something is
deeply wrong in Arab and Islamic societies, and must
be fixed, including education curricula, governance
systems, economic trends, women's conditions and the
mass media.. If the U.S. really wanted to make the
Middle East a better place and the U.S. a safer place,
it should start by examining the impact of its own and
Israel's policies on the Arab-Islamic world, as well
as exploring faults within Arab-Islamic societies..
At many levels today - Palestine/Israel, Iraq, the war
against terror, mass media, public diplomacy,
democratic reform, religion and secularism - Americans
and Arabs are interacting, but not communicating.

Khouri concludes: "The Middle East is a mess, America
has been attacked, and anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli
sentiments are at an all-time high in the region and
the world. By arguing that our region is troubled and
violent because Arabs and Muslims hate American
values, and then attempting to correct this by
launching television, radio and magazine efforts in
Arabic, the U.S. government perpetuates a fatal
combination of political blindness and cultural
misperception that is only going to exacerbate the gap
between Americans and Arabs, rather than close it..
Al-Hurra [the U.S. Arabic-language satellite TV
channel], like the U.S. government's Radio Sawa and Hi
magazine before it, will be an entertaining, expensive
and irrelevant hoax. Where do they get this stuff?
Why do they keep insulting us like this?"
GNEHM