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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Even in moderate Arab states like Egypt, anti-Americanism burns so hot that the U.S. can do no right.
Sep 13, 2002 | The American University in Cairo, a green oasis in this dusty metropolis, is probably the last bastion of pro-American sentiment in Egypt. Only here, in the shade of a palm tree or in the long corridors of the old buildings, can one find Egyptians who still unreservedly defend the U.S.'s war on terrorism or support a possible strike against Iraq. Even in the McDonald's across the road, the moderately well-off professionals who can afford to eat there denounce U.S. policy towards their country and the region over a hamburger and a cup of coke.
"The Americans just want the whole world to do as they say, they don't want to listen to anybody. They say to hell with all Arabs -- if we want to attack Iraq, we will attack Iraq," says Mohammed Fuad, a young computer engineer who is enjoying his lunchtime hamburger together with his fiancée, Njarmeen Othman, an English teacher. Under her headscarf she nods vigorously at her boyfriend's words. "The Americans make so much noise about the people killed in New York and Washington, but people get killed in violence everywhere," says Othman. "They are the same as the Israelis: Palestinians get killed all the time, but when an Israeli dies it's a disaster, as if their lives are worth more than those of other people."
Sooner or later in every discussion about how Egyptians feel about the U.S., the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes up. American bias towards Israel is perceived to have grown dramatically after the Sept. 11 attacks: Egyptians cite the Bush administration's almost unqualified support for Israel's hard-line policy toward the Palestinians and its plans to invade Iraq, which many see as being driven by Israeli concerns. Yet the Palestinian issue is by no means the only, or even always the first and the most important thing, that people mention. The Egyptian rancor against the U.S. is deep and has many causes -- some of them understandable, some of them self-contradictory. If the reaction of the Arab street, and the fate of the ruling regimes in America's two key allies in the Middle East, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are key elements in America's decision whether to invade Iraq, the deep anti-Americanism in Egypt cannot be ignored.
One year after the attacks, sympathy for the United States is hard to find in Egypt. Americans are not seen as victims but as aggressors. Throughout Egyptian society a deep-seated feeling prevails that the U.S. has unjustly blamed the Arab and Muslim world for the attacks, which many Egyptians don't think were carried out by Arabs or Muslims at all, and that certainly Egypt, as a loyal ally of the U.S., does not deserve America's hostility. The government and its supporters are offended by the new wind of distrust and unilateralism in the Middle East blowing out of Washington. Senior advisors complain that their access to senior U.S. officials has been curtailed in the post-Sept. 11 climate. On the other hand, critics of the government of President Hosni Mubarak, and democracy- and human-rights activists feel that the Bush administration has given the regime the green light to crack down even harder on its opponents and that civil liberties are being made secondary to Egypt's acquiescence in the "war on terror."
Sept. 11 and the American response to it clearly exacerbated tensions between the two nations. But on closer examination, most of the Egyptian complaints about the U.S. predate the attacks: they involve longstanding antagonisms over culture, religion, economics and power, and the complexities and contradictions of a relationship between allies who came together in a vanished Cold War era and whose goals and interests do not always coincide.
People like Fuad and Othman may still eat their hamburgers at McDonald's, but others wrecked a nearby outlet and a Kentucky Fried Chicken during riots last year. "We think most of the money from this restaurant goes to local people, otherwise we wouldn't eat here," says Fuad. They are not averse to American cultural products such as movies and music, but don't want their values to be affected by these consumer choices -- and fear that if the U.S. has its way, they will be. There exists a strong conviction in Egypt and the wider Arab world that the U.S. is out for world hegemony. "They are using the 11th of September to do what they always wanted to do," says Othman.
Hussein Amin, chairman of the department of mass communication at the AUC, holds rare unreservedly pro-American views. "It is incredible how people don't look at what is best for Egypt but let themselves be influenced by extremist propaganda," says Amin. Intellectuals and moderate forces in the country have for too long ignored the growing anti-American feelings, he says, making it essential that that discussion now be joined. "After the 11th of September many subjects that used to be kind of taboo have come up for discussion. For example, people often ask me why the U.S. is anti-Muslim and I try to explain that that isn't so." Amin, who went to college in the U.S., now hosts a weekly program on Egypt's satellite station, Nile-TV, in which he tries to "bridge the gap" between Americans and Arabs.
Amin seems to be the exception, though. Even among the intellectuals whom he considers still pro-Western, anti-Americanism is flaring up. "The United States hasn't learned anything from the attacks on Washington and New York. U.S. policies under Bush have only become blunter," says Mohammed Salmawi, author, playwright and editor of the weekly French version of the pro-government Al-Ahram newspaper. His curriculum vitae bristles with honorary titles that Western institutions have bestowed on him, but his cultural sympathy does not extend to the "arrogant" Americans, whom he regards as having only themselves to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. "The lesson that the U.S. should have learned is that it is responsible for a lot of the injustice in the world," he says. Instead, he sees the list of American misdeeds growing: the increased bias toward Israel, the "massacres" in Afghanistan and the threat to attack Iraq, among others.
The United States is so unpopular right now, says Salmawi, that it's not surprising that even the Egyptian government is starting to distance itself from the Bush administration, particularly where the possibility of an attack on Iraq is concerned. "The United States is looking at every issue in the Middle East through the prism of terrorism now," says Abdel Monem Said, director of the Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. "This has affected the close strategic relationship that used to exist between the U.S. and Egypt and Saudi Arabia."
Monem Said, who has close ties to the government, has the impression that the U.S. administration is considerably less willing to take Egypt's point of view into serious consideration after Sept. 11 -- despite the fact that Egypt has more than a decade of experience in fighting its own Muslim fundamentalists. Some within the Egyptian government resent U.S. positions, taking an "I told you so" attitude: They are quick to recall that both the U.S. and the Europeans were unwilling to act against Egyptian fundamentalists who had sought asylum abroad. Although some of the people whose extradition had been demanded by the authorities have now been handed over, the Americans do not really want to cooperate with the Arab countries, Monem Said says.
"There are certain problems with the American attitude after Sept. 11. There was no self-evaluation, no saying, 'Well, we were wrong, we need to look at this as a common threat and we have to face this together.' Instead there was finger-pointing -- 'your societies are to blame, your culture is to blame.'" Monem Said warns of the dangers of the U.S. creating an atmosphere in which Arabs and Muslims are seen as the enemy. Many Egyptians and other Arabs firmly believe that America has already accepted this view.
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