CAIRO/RAMALLAH, 9 November 2003 — A state-owned Egyptian newspaper yesterday said US President George W. Bush’s drive for democracy in the Middle East was an Israeli-inspired idea aimed against countries hostile to Israel.
Al-Akhbar El-Yom’s chairman and chief editor Ibrahim Saada, a man close to President Hosni Mubarak, said in an opinion piece covering the entire front page that Bush’s message was also an attempt to divert Americans’ attention from the Iraqi “swamp.”
“I don’t rule out that the Israelis were the ones to have advised President Bush to announce this important discovery, that is democracy, and his invitation for implementing it in the Arab world and Iran as well as other countries hostile to both the United States and Israel,” wrote Saada.
“I also do not rule out that the US Jewish lobby stands behind this invitation that contains attacks against Arab governments with which it (Washington) has old ties,” in order to damage those relations, he said. “I tend, indeed, to believe ... that the content of Bush’s speech is an attempt to divert the attention of his people away from the tragedy of the attrition swamp in which the US soldiers have fallen in occupied Iraq.
“But it will he a failed attempt. Nobody’s attention will be diverted and it will only lead to more Arab hatred toward the United States and its government,” he added.
Bush, in a speech Thursday, urged Middle East leaders to embrace democracy, and repudiated 60 years of US help for illiberal regimes that “did nothing to make us safe” from terrorism.
Saada responded to this argument, writing: “We, in turn, say that our policy toward the United States over the past half a century was a failure because we, Arabs, have given our trust to somebody who does not deserve it ... somebody who covers all the wrongdoings of Israel, at the expenses of the rights and humanity of the Palestinian people.”
Syria’s official press slammed Bush’s, saying freedom could not be imposed by force and that Arabs did not need lessons on democracy. In a front-page editorial, Syria’s daily Al-Thawra newspaper accused Washington of trying to act as a regional guardian.
“The American administration is practicing the role of guardian over sovereign states. Threatening to impose democracy by force kills democracy and assassinates freedom,” it said. “The people of the region are not in need of lessons in democracy and freedom.”
Meanwhile, Israeli troops yesterday killed four people in persistent violence in the territories. Two of the dead were teenagers killed around the northern West Bank town of Jenin, as a large Israeli search operation conducted under military curfew met resistance from stone throwers in both the town and its surrounding villages.
The two Palestinian youths were killed in separate clashes in Jenin’s refugee camp and the nearby village of Birkin, Palestinian security and medical sources said. Another four youngsters were wounded in the two incidents, one of them a 10-year-old boy, they said.
The Israeli Army maintained its curfew on both Jenin and nearby villages yesterday as it conducted house-to-house searches. Ten people were detained in the hamlet of Al-Yamun, residents said.
The army launched the operation Friday, swooping on Amjad Al-Obeidi, 36, an Islamic Jihad leader accused by Israel of masterminding a suicide bombing which killed 21 people in the northern port of Haifa last month.
Overnight, troops demolished the house where Obeidi had been hiding in the latest use of the army’s controversial policy of collective deterrence. Palestinian sources said five homes had been destroyed in the dynamiting, leaving 40 people homeless.
Another two Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers overnight near the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanun, close to the fence separating Gaza from Israel, Palestinian and Israeli sources said.
An army spokesman said troops had “spotted during the night two suspects crawling toward the fence, in a prohibited zone that has been the scene of numerous attacks. “The soldiers opened fired and the two bodies were recovered Saturday morning,” the source said, without saying whether arms or explosives had been found on them.
Meanwhile, officials from Fatah faction denied yesterday that the Palestinian Authority paid members of an armed group inside Fatah in a bid to stop them attacking Israelis. The BBC quoted former Palestinian minister without portfolio Abdul Fattah Hamayel as saying the Authority sends $50,000 a month to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades members as living expenses to try to stop them carrying out attacks in a three-year-old uprising.
“Some people in these groups had been chosen to work for the security services, so they were getting salaries and still are doing so,” Hamayel, a minister until prime minister Mahmoud Abbas resigned in September, said in excerpts of an interview released on a BBC Website ahead of planned broadcast today.
“The amount sent to them is very small — at most, it is not more than $250 per person.” Waves of bombings by the Brigades and other militants groups prompted Israel to accuse Arafat of fomenting violence. Arafat, who harbored 20 Brigades fugitives in his West Bank headquarters until last August, denies the charge.
Palestinian officials describe the Brigades as a renegade group which is only nominally loyal to Arafat. “The Fatah Central Committee does not recognize them and tried time and again to dismantle the group,” said senior faction official Hatem Abdel-Qader. “The Finance Ministry has no mandate to give the Brigades money and nor does Fatah. “What Abdul Fattah Hamayel is claiming is baseless and untrue. Perhaps he was misquoted.”
Brigades attacks in recent months have helped batter a US-backed “road map” to peace. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei is under pressure to form a stable government after a dispute with Arafat over security reforms key to the plan, which aims to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by 2005.
