How to Turn a Criminal to a Hero

The U.S. strikes against Osama bin Laden have unleashed a backlash among moderate Arabs already fearful that "globalization" is another word for U.S. imperialism.

Jonathan BRODER

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the U.S. cruise-missile attacks against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and Sudan, a predictable wave of anti-American fervor is sweeping the Middle East and the Muslim world. What is unusual is that the anger is coming from political moderates who loathe bin Laden and his brand of violent Islamic fundamentalism as much as the United States does.

Behind the images of angry mobs burning effigies of President Clinton is a vast hinterland of outrage and reluctant sympathy for bin Laden, populated not only by the poor and disenfranchised but also by articulate middle-class Arabs and Muslims who have the most to lose from the challenges posed by the wealthy Saudi-turned-Islamic warrior.

Railing for the removal of American forces from the Persian Gulf and a return by Middle Eastern governments to strict Islamic law and values, fundamentalists like bin Laden are widely regarded by Arab moderates as threats to the stability of their societies. To illustrate the consequences of bin Laden's vision, moderates point to the civil war in Algeria, where fighting between militant Muslims and government troops over the past five years has left at least 80,000 dead. In Egypt, where Islamic militants have attacked tourists and intellectuals and tried to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak, there is broad support among middle-class Egyptians for the government's crackdown on violent fundamentalist groups.

Yet in response to the American attacks on bin Laden, Sanaa Al Said, a columnist for the Egyptian newspaper Al Wafd, wrote: "Overnight, the man has been transformed from an outlawed criminal on the run into a national hero standing against a hated superpower ... which has come to our region and wreaked its own havoc here ... Changes are on the way. U.S. hegemony will, one day, come to an end, and then the world will breathe more freely."

Moderate Arab governments, many of them U.S. allies with terrorist problems of their own, have studiously kept quiet about the attack. But in their silence, other Arab commentators have echoed the same themes as Al Said: America's clumsiness in dealing with bin Laden, its double standard when dealing with Israeli violence and its tendency to use force and embargoes when dealing with Arabs and Muslims. While such sentiments have long formed the core of Arab intellectual thought, the American attack has brought this anger to the surface, where it is likely to influence government leaders -- and future U.S. policy.

PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals.

Salon News