Call it a nice coincidence or journalistic prescience, the day the Word Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington fell victims to the terrorist attacks, New York Times carried an op-ed piece by Thomas L. Friedman about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The main thrust of the article was that the present situation in the occupied territories was tolerable for US President Bush, because as long as there was no peace process he did not have to pressure Israel to compromise, which would hurt him with American Jewish voters leading to the loss of the GOP majority in the Senate.
In his first ever prime-time press conference on Thursday —the day New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in a fit of pique, rejected Prince Alwaleed’s $10 million donation — US President George W. Bush devoted considerable attention to the Middle East, underlining the link between the troubled region and the US-led war on terrorism.
Friedman might have penned his article on Sept. 10 without any inkling of the horror the world would wake up to the next morning. Almost every commentary and editorial on the Sept. 11 attacks in the world press have found the burning embers of the Middle East in the wreckage of the twin towers. Some even suggested that the death and destruction witnessed in New York were different only in degree to what has been going on in the occupied territories. All this should show how irrational the New York mayor has been in reacting to the prince’s criticism the way he did. The prince did not include the statement about the Israeli-Arab conflict when he presented the check to the mayor. He just expressed his condolences. As for the political statement issued by his office, the prince said he thought that the point of view of the Arab world should be explained.
This is exactly what seems to have ruffled the mayoral feathers. Giuliani who always wants to make a distinction "between democracy (read Israel) and terrorist states" (read Arab states) is peeved that the press release the Saudi prince issued after he spoke to him "had never been cleared with me and I didn’t know about it." So here we have a new interpretation of the freedom of expression and plurality of views which the Americans so cherish. Arabs can’t express their views freely even on a subject they feel so strongly about without a nod from the mayor of New York. "Not only are those statements (made by Prince Alwaleed) wrong, they are part of the problem," said Giuliani at a news conference.
No, Mr. Giuliani, those statements are part of the solution. Otherwise President Bush would not have taken great pains to show how a just settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict was central to the success of his war on terrorism. What irritates Giuliani and Israel’s friends in the American politics and media is that Bush has, though belatedly, acknowledged a simple truth about the anti-American sentiments sweeping thorough the Arab and Islamic world. Prince Alwaleed deserves our thanks for saying things which badly needed saying, and saying it forcefully and sticking to his guns.
Giuliani may have acted without grace but not without political astuteness. He knows the checks that really matter are those that will come when he runs for a political office and he also knows where they will come from.
