Amira Howeidy wonders why the Arabs have rallied around Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 The controversial Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has finally arrived in our movie theatres. After the film was banned in several Arab countries, few expected the Egyptian authorities would approve the anti-Bush, anti-war diatribe which focusses a significant part of its contempt on the Saudi royal family. But they did. Moreover, the release has been accompanied by an advertising campaign on an unprecedented scale for a foreign film. Huge promotional Fahrenheit 9/11 billboards have been strategically placed at the length of Cairo's main 6th of October bridge, while the impressive trailer was recently aired on Egyptian TV. Of course, Moore is not just any documentary film-maker. The controversy over his famous "Shame on you, Bush!" speech at last year's Oscars instantly won him many fans in the Arab world. Gloating at the rare sight of an anti-Bush activist let loose in America's cultural and commercial heartland, countless Egyptian and Arab newspapers went front page with his picture, while the captions focussed on the political content of his tirade, and made only fleeting mention of Bowling for Columbine, the film for which he had won his Oscar. Even Al-Ahram Weekly has not been immune to Moore fever: and when he carried off the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May for Fahrenheit 9/ 11, we celebrated by publishing a front-page photo of his fans holding aloft a placard which read: "Moore for president" ( Al-Ahram Weekly, 20-26 May). Nor is Moore just a film-maker. He first came to the notice of the Arab world when his book, Stupid White Men (which accuses Bush of committing fraud to claim the 2000 presidential victory) was translated and serialised in the Arab press two years ago. Today, Stupid White Men can be seen, alongside his latest book, Dude, where is my country?, prominently displayed in Cairo's hippest bookstore Diwan, strategically positioned to ensure that no customer can miss them. But it is his anti-war cry that has won the hearts and minds of many people in this region. And the more he has been booed by the American right, the more he is admired here. No wonder, then, that the controversy surrounding his latest work, the difficulties Moore faced in finding a distributor in the US, the White House's criticism of the documentary, and the decision to ban the film in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have made Fahrenheit 9/11 a must-see for many Arabs, who feel so directly concerned by the war that Moore passionately criticises. Now that the film is finally showing here, however, one might wonder whether all the publicity which preceded its arrival will not turn out to have been a double-edged sword. We cheered Moore, because others attacked him and censored him for his opposition to the Bush administration. That is why a foreign documentary is showing in our movie theatres, with a treatment which most Hollywood blockbusters cannot even aspire to. But the main result of all the furore was to raise our expectations. And that is why so many of us have been disappointed when we finally got past the image of Moore the poster boy for America's internal resistance, and were able to hear what he has to say. Fahrenheit 9/11 centres around one argument: If it wasn't for Bush, 9/11 probably would not have happened. Iraq would not have been invaded, and the US military could have continued to play its traditional role as a protector of freedom. Moore argues that it was the Bush administration's shared business interests with the Saudis which led the administration to compromise the wider interests of the American people. "Is it rude to ask if, when the Bushes wake up in the morning, they are more likely to think of the Saudis than of the American people?" Moore muses at one point. And he goes on to point out that Bush continued to have dinner with Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the US, throughout the crisis and beyond, "even though" Bin Laden was Saudi, 9/11 was funded by Saudi money, and a majority of the hijackers themselves were Saudis. Moore derides what he portrays as unjustified Saudi influence in the US. He marvels at the administration's ability to spirit any number of Saudi nationals, including members of the Bin Laden family, out of the country in the days following the 9/11 attacks, despite the country's airspace being officially closed to all traffic. And he calls up a former FBI officer to argue that the standard police practice would not have been to "deport" the Saudis in private jets, but to keep them on hand at least long enough to ask them a few basic questions. The implication is clear: certain Saudi citizens received privileged treatment from the Bush White House, despite their potential connections to a major and ongoing security threat, because their country happens to own seven per cent of the US economy. And to make sure that this last piece of information does not go unnoticed, Moore delivers it to us while standing opposite the Saudi Embassy in Washington, where he soon attracts the attention of two members of the Secret Services, who "suddenly" appear to question the film-maker about what he is doing. Very few in the Arab world, least of all Egyptians, feel any great sympathy or admiration for the Saudi petro-dollar culture. Nor is the Saudi royal family particularly popular either inside or outside the kingdom. But Moore's claim that the Saudi's exercise an extraordinary and disproportionate influence over the world's sole super power can only seem highly exaggerated, if not slightly racist. "I found the fuss about the size of the Saudi Embassy and the two Secret Service men rather disturbing," Salma Arafa, a software engineer who lived and studied in the US, told me. "Does Moore realise how many security personnel are deployed to protect the US Embassy in Cairo, and how the streets leading to the embassy have been sealed off? I just couldn't digest his argument." During his research on US-Saudi interests, Moore must have come across ample evidence of how it was US influence over the Saudis that guaranteed America's interests in the region -- and even outside of it -- for decades. It is no secret that the US used the Saudis to topple regimes in Latin America and Africa, as well as to control oil prices. Since the issue of external influence on US foreign policy is so central to the film, the question also needs to be raised as to why the power of the pro-Zionist lobby is never addressed. Moore fails to mention the fact that the CIA funded Bin Laden during the Cold War and actively encouraged the recruitment of Muslim mujahidin in Afghanistan. Yet we hear him ask matter-of-factly why a Taliban official was allowed to visit Texas to "improve his country's image" in 1997 when Bush was governor (although it was Bill Clinton who was president), even though the US knew that Afghanistan was hosting Bin Laden at the time. His argument thus leads to the war on Afghanistan, which Moore seems to suggest was mainly about securing a pipeline route to bring gas from the Caspian Basin to the sea. This might explain why the US wasn't really interested in hunting down Bin Laden or liquidating Al- Qaeda. The documentary closes this chapter by claiming that the Taliban and Bin Laden were allowed to escape. Yet more glaring than these "revelations", is the sequence's silences. There is no mention of Afghani civilian casualties, estimated at 3,500. Nor does Moore address the huge controversy over the detention of thousands of Al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, where they have been stripped of their POW status in order to deprive them of their rights under international law. He mocks Bush for describing himself as a "war president" when, in Moore's view, he didn't do much warring in Afghanistan. The film argues correctly that the Bush administration had in fact launched a war against the American people themselves, in which their main weapon was fear. Moore is at his best when he relates the paranoia of the Macarthy era to the present administration's determination to terrorise their own people. Thus we see how one American mother was forced to drink her own breastmilk which she had bottled for her baby because security on an internal flight suspected the milk was something else. We also meet a man who casually described Bush as a "terrorist" to friends in a public gym, only to find the FBI knocking at his door to interrogate him about his political views. These are fascinating examples indeed. But what is truly shocking is how Moore has chosen to completely overlook the real victims of the Patriot Act and the anti-terrorism bills: all those people of Middle Eastern descent who just happened to be in the US at the time, along with the Arab-American community itself. For a long time following the 11 September attacks, thousands of Arabs suffered detention, interrogation, suspicion, hate, and racial and ethnic "profiling". They lived in a climate where the fear was real, not imaginary. As the leaders of the Arab and Muslim community complained at the time, the US was swept by a wave of anti-Muslim bigotry. The volume of attacks against Arabs and Muslims in the West was quite phenomenal. Knowing all this, as we do, it is impossible for us to understand just how it could have escaped Moore's attention. It is not clear if Moore deliberately neglected these glaring realities, because his anti-Saudi sentiments are just part of an overall anti-Arab stand, or whether the omissions are simply the result of ignorance. Indeed, many of Moore's critics argue that his strength lies in his skill in handling local issues, but his background on foreign policy is no greater than that of the average American. One might argue that Fahrenheit 9/11 was made with an American public in mind and that we should not necessarily expect Americans to oppose the war for the same reasons we do. This is a valid argument, except that it overlooks one crucial fact: the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, together with Israel's occupation of Palestine (ignored by the documentary), are primarily about us, the Arabs. It is here that innocent lives were lost and blood was shed by American military hardware to secure American interests. This kind of violence is not the exclusive prerogative of George Bush Jr, but Moore behaves throughout as though it was. He fails to mention that the entire neo-con team within the present administration had been planning the war on Iraq ever since the end of the first Gulf war. He also ignores decades of US support for despotic regimes throughout the Arab world, and most importantly, for Israel. This does not mean that Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a witty, captivating and extremely interesting documentary. But now we have seen it, we know that the Arabs and Moore are against Bush for very different reasons.
