CAIRO, 25 May 2004 — As an admittedly dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, I’m often heard saying “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Over the years this has worked for me, but now we seem to have woken up to a new Hobbesian reality; a world run by a political snake — its head in America, its tail in the Middle East — which has unilaterally changed right and wrong to suit its own skewed ideological ambitions. To be a good citizen we must believe what they say and ignore the pleas of our own hearts.

The peaceful fellow, leader of the region’s only democracy which shares America’s values, is busy emulating his US counterparts in Iraq and with its “Operation Rainbow” creating as much blood and gore as possible in this gruesome contest. Once more there are the obscene pictures of ashen babies and children shot through the head and the heart. Once more the small hospital, which caters for refugees at Rafah is awash with bodies and blood while the poignant screams of victims’ mothers, fathers and children echo through its halls. Once more we are told those children were “terrorists”. Israel is fighting terror.

Its slimy front-men, pulled out of the hat like rabbits after each attack, fail to explain how demolishing homes — you know, those places where people eat, sleep, cuddle their loved ones; tiny dwellings for which a family might have worked to build throughout most of their lives — is fighting terrorism. They’ve got tunnels, which cross into Egypt, say the Israelis, neglecting to mention what this has to do with their attacks on even zoo animals. They use them for smuggling weapons they say, ignoring the fact Palestinian militants appear on Arabic networks brandishing “Made in Israel’ weapons, which they say they bought from — no, not Egyptians — but Israeli soldiers.

It’s got so bad that Holocaust survivor Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Yosef Lapid was driven to say: “On TV I saw an old woman rummaging through the ruins of her house looking for her medication, and it reminded me of my grandmother who was thrown out of her house during the Holocaust”, adding, “We look like monsters in the eyes of the world. This makes me sick.” It makes me sick too Mr. Lapid.

Meanwhile in Iraq, tiny babies with holes in their chests or their heads blown off after coming under helicopter fire are “terrorists” as its tin-pot military honchos told us when defending their actions over an Iraqi village near the Syrian border. Our screens fill with images of a terrible carnage; women strewn around in pieces, young men minus limbs and scores of tearful witnesses come forward with heart-wrenching tales of how a wedding party was decimated. However, the US occupying power brushes all this aside as totally inconsequential, still sticking to its ridiculous insurgency story.

Rather than express sorrow for the budding lives it wiped out and for all the hopes and dreams it buried, it demands the name of the Al-Arabiya cameraman who exposed the crime.

Never before have we been given such a clear message: The messenger himself is the problem. If the messenger didn’t exist, the crimes never happened. And we can all return to our Pollyannaish comfort level.

But what happens when the messenger is one of America’s own? When that messenger or messengers deliver photographs so ugly, so despicable, so nauseating and so pornographic, the media hesitates in showing them? Then we get apologies galore. Apologies from the top to bottom with nobody culpable, except for a handful of what America refers to as “trailer trash”.

We didn’t know about this and we didn’t approve such interrogation methods, is the litany from Bush, Rumsfeld, Centcom’s commander Gen. John Abi Zaid and his sidekicks Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Gen. Geoffrey Millar. A congressional committee investigates with senators spending most of their time congratulating the latter for a job well done, thanking them for their superb service to the nation. Senators tried to make light of men being made to contort themselves into painful stress positions for hours, being made to wear ladies’ underwear, to bark like a dog on all fours, to have their religion and their manhood insulted. One brought up the decapitation of Nick Berg, in an attempt to portray his suffering as far worse, although it seems to me that there is a moral equivalence between being beaten to death, as several prisoners allegedly were at the hands of US soldiers, and Berg’s demise.

There was just one commissioner, who obviously hadn’t cottoned on to the new “everything our lot does is wonderful” reality — Sen. Robert Byrd. He was the only commissioner who put Abi Zaid in an awkward spotlight by demanding to know who approved such unorthodox interrogation methods further up the civilian chain of command, the Pentagon. Abi Zaid tried to play with semantics, saying it wasn’t required that anyone further up approve those guidelines. Byrd wasn’t having any of it. He repeated his question. Did Donald Rumsfeld have sight of those new rules? Abi Zaid looked confused; he looked lost; he cast around for help. Enough said.

Gen. Sanchez has recently been implicated by a Washington Post article as being embroiled in approving the torture at Abu Ghraib, which, of course, he denies.

And just when you think you are attuned to the planet a la 2004, and you may have managed to convince yourself that a convicted bank embezzler, a man who lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction for his own ends, and a close buddy of said Rumsfeld may just be the right person to lead the new “free and democratic’ Iraq, the rules change. All of a sudden, America’s poster child Ahmad Chalabi, who hoped to enter Iraq like Spartacus, is auditioning for a remake of the Ten Commandments and pleading with his former benefactors to “Let my people go” — after his US cash cow came a cropper and a gun was put to his head while his home was ransacked courtesy of pal Rumsfeld’s boys.

Do I sound angry? Do I sound incensed? Well good! All the words in the world can’t express just how distressed I really am. This is wrong; so terribly wrong. The UN and the Arab League are ineffective. The Arab world feels powerless. Europe’s condemnations are mere lip service. China and Russia are taking care of the No. 1. Does nobody have the courage to stop this madness?

— Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs and can be contacted at [email protected]