During a month-long stay in the US, Gamal Essam El-Din is intrigued by the American perspective on the Middle East While the US anticipates the fifth anniversary of 9/ 11 and Bush's "war on terror", the good news for Americans is that nothing similar has yet occurred. Still, the American political elite has yet to answer the question, "Why do they hate us," they denoting either the Middle East or the Arab-Muslim world. Welcome as it was, the opportunity to visit five American cities over one month -- Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, Memphis and Philadelphia -- revealed to what extent the why-do- they-hate-us discourse remains central to American life, especially now that war is raging not only in Iraq but Lebanon. Sponsored by the US State Department and administered by the Meridian International Centre, the visit afforded plenty of opportunity for contact with politicians and ordinary citizens alike. On arrival in Washington, a debate was raging over the role of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other components of the pro-Israel lobby in shaping US Middle East policy. Two direct developments had given rise to an unprecedented discussion of this previously taboo topic: the espionage indictments of two former CIA staff members who shared classified documents with representatives of the Israeli embassy; and a paper written by two prominent academics in Harvard and Chicago universities, arguing that pressure from the Israeli lobby often causes the US to forgo its own security interests in favour of the interests of Israel. The debate was the principal theme of the July issue of the respected monthly Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Many writers thought America's blind support for Israel -- Israel hijacking US Middle East policy, as some put it -- is the answer to the ubiquitous question and the reason why Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda targets the US. "Why do they hate us" was also the topic of two meetings in Washington, the first with Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and prominent member of the so called neo-conservative movement which many equate with the voice of Israel. Muravchik believes it is not only wrong but irresponsible to argue that the US grants Israel unconditional support. "America did its best during the Bill Clinton years to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but it is the latter that rejected peace," he says, referring to the 1999, Clinton-brokered Camp David negotiations. "For this reason, the American people sympathise with Israel and believe that the roots of anti- American terrorism go rather to America's support of 'tyrannical friends' in the Middle East." The author of numerous books and articles in support of the Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour, Muravchik believes that America tolerating lack of democracy, especially in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, is the key reason behind the hatred at stake. It is an idea that recurred with surprising consistency among policy makers and politicians in all five of the cities visited -- that it is tyranny in the Middle East that generates hatred for America, and that America propping up the Mubarak, Abdullah and Musharraf regimes in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan helps sustain such hatred. The second meeting, with former chief of staff of the State Department Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson -- also a regular writer on foreign policy and national security -- uncovered different sentiments, with Wilkerson conceding that America's blind support for Israel over more than 50 years now has always generated anti-Americanism in the Middle East: "Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War, but it is a strategic burden in the war on terror and the broader US effort to deal with rogue states." According to Wilkerson, "every year, the US gives Israel alone support that far exceeds what it provides to all other states" combined. He argued that although Israel is now an industrial power with a per capita GDP roughly equal to that of Spain or South Africa, "it receives about $3 billion in US aid each year -- that is, roughly $500 per Israeli citizen." Still, Wilkerson with Muravchik that "friendly tyrannical regimes" in the Middle East are doing the US rather more harm than good. In a meeting at the Congress with Evan Baehr, congressional fellow and aide to representative Frank Wolf, democracy in the Middle East was, once again, the core of the discussion. Baehr believes the Congress to be more serious than Bush about advancing democracy in the Middle East; he recounted how the Congress tried to cut annual aid to Egypt by $250 million -- an effort blocked by State Department officials, whose attitude was, "No way, we will never let this happen with Egypt." The view of the Middle East as a hotbed for tyrannical regimes echoed through all other meetings in Washington, including those with officials from Human Rights Watch, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). In atmosphere reminiscent of Cairo in terms of ethnic and cultural variety and abundance of press outlets -- the New York Times, the New Yorker, Newsday -- as well as popular international news channels like CNN, the New York round focussed on human rights, with officials from Human Rights Watch (HRW), the United Nations' newly established Human Rights Council and Columbia University Law School's Human Rights Institute decrying not so much repressive regimes as human rights violations. According to George Packer, deputy editor of New Yorker, it is the rampant repression of secular and liberal politicians and journalists in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Jordan and Syria, that results in people hating America by, among other means, giving way to radical Islamism, thus serving Al-Qaeda's interests. Hosting numerous anti-Bush left-wing organisations -- the Green Party, Global Exchange, United Religions Initiative and the Human Rights Commission -- San Francisco, famous for its annual Pride Parades, viewpoints ranged from the simplistic to the mature. While the Green Party, for example, feels that America should concentrate on its own problems and forget all about the Middle East, Global Exchange believes Bush's claim of democratising the Middle East are a mere "continuation of the US policy of bullying Arab nations in the region to advance Israel's strategic interests". Global Exchange also thinks that the US treats Arabs and Muslims as pawns whose lives are worth sacrificing in the effort to satisfy Israeli interests and secure oil supplies. Moving onto the conservative American West, however, the mood changed again, with Memphis's 64- percent black population stressing a different range of concerns. In the city where Martin Luther King delivered the last sermon before his assassination in 1968, human rights activist Vivian Berry Hill, founder of the National Coalition of Pastors' Spouses (NDP), spoke passionately about discrimination against black Americans in education and jobs. To her, Bush's call for democratising the Middle East is but "a big lie". She added, "Instead of speaking about the inequality and tyranny in the Middle East, let them speak first about discrimination against African Americans." Flanked by the Mississippi, Memphis -- the word is ancient Egyptian for "land of good stay" -- is in some ways reminiscent of the Nile Delta, with Egyptian-like hospitality; so thought the early explorers on first seeing it. Yet it was shocking to realise that its residents knew nothing at all of what was going on outside the US. One citizen even remarked, "All I can do about what you said is to send a letter to the city's congressman, conveying your viewpoint to him." In the historical city of Philadelphia, in a meeting, Harvey Sicherman, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, emphasised the American view of the Middle East as a region dominated by Islamist radicalism and tyrannical rulers. With the remarkably hospitable Jewish family of Mark and Tobey Dichter, on the other hand, together with a politician from Iraq, I was asked to explain the situation in the Middle East on the anniversary day of the fourth of July (Independence Day). While harshly criticising Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians and Egypt's hectic attempts to achieve peace, it was interesting to realise that even the Ditchers shared a similar opinion to Sicherman's, expressing hopes that extremists on both sides will not prevail.
