BLAMING ISRAEL FOR EVERYTHING IN THE ARAB WORLD
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/ http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20101227/main6.htm
Israel-bashing always on the Arab mind!
Shyam Bhatia in Sharm el-Sheikh
In the Arab world, there is an age-old tradition of blaming Israel for almost everything that goes wrong. Some Arabs do it out of a genuine conviction that Israel is capable of spoiling or destroying anything it wants. Others blame Israel as a way of diverting attention from real problems at home.
| The Israel Effect…
n EgyptiAns believe that Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, had dispatched a shark to Sharm el-Sheikh with the aim of damaging the country’s tourism industry |
But the Egyptians are currently ahead of the rest of the Arab world when it comes to holding Israel responsible for many regional ills. In fact the Egyptians are now so obsessed with Israel that many believe the Jewish state was behind a recent shark attack that killed a female tourist in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
An Egyptian government official was the first to announce that he did not rule out the possibility that Mossad, Israel’s famous secret intelligence service, had dispatched the shark to Sharm el-Sheikh with the aim of damaging his country’s tourism industry.
Subsequently, a number of Egyptian media outlets endorsed the allegation, telling the Egyptian public that there was good reason to believe that the shark attack was indeed part of a “Zionist conspiracy.”
Although it was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, Egypt has maintained a calculated distance away from the Jewish state. Many Egyptians still don’t seem to accept the peace treaty and remain fiercely opposed to any form of normalisation with Israel.
Now the future of the peace agreement is wrapped in uncertainty as 82-year-old President Hosni Mubarak appears to be facing health problems. Mubarak, who has been in power for nearly three decades, has never named a successor. Nor has he appointed a deputy president who could fill the vacuum upon his departure.
Some Egyptians believe that Mubarak would love to see his son, Gamal, succeed him as president. However, many Egyptians publicly express their opposition to such a move, noting that their country is a republic and not a kingdom. And in what is seen as an attempt to rally his countrymen behind him, Mubarak has been doing his utmost to remind fellow Egyptians that the threat from outside remains as big as ever. And this threat, of course, is Israel and its “dirty hands.”
The allegation about the link between the shark attack and Mossad was followed by an announcement in Cairo that Egyptian security services had cracked an Israeli espionage cell.
According to the Egyptians, a number of local businessmen have been arrested for allegedly assisting Israel in intercepting international phone calls made by senior government officials in Cairo.
“The spies were trained by two top Mossad officers,” said Mustapha Bakri, editor-in-chief of the weekly Al-Usbu magazine. “They managed to record many phone calls, especially ones between senior Egyptian government officials and their counterparts in Arab and Western countries.”
Earlier, Mubarak’s government responded to allegations of massive voting fraud in the recent parliamentary election by holding Israel responsible. Egyptian opposition figures, journalists and human rights organisations had all accused the government of stealing the vote. Even the US Administration voiced concern over the way the Mubarak government handled the election.
But these charges did not stop the Egyptian government from blaming Israel for the chaos and violence that disrupted voting in many places. The government never provided any evidence to back up its charges, yet that did not prevent many Egyptians from endorsing them as true.
Indeed anti-Israel sentiments in Egypt have been running so high that a female candidate who ran in the parliamentary election is believed to have failed simply because her father’s name is Israel.
The woman, Suad Israel, is a Coptic Christian who ran in the parliamentary election as a candidate for the ruling National Party. “My rivals exploited my father’s name to discredit me and scare voters,” she complained. “Add to this the fact that I’m a woman and a Christian. My friends advised me before the election not to run and I think I made a mistake that I didn’t listen to them.”
Arab dictators often blame Israel [and Jews] for the miseries of their people to deflect attention from rampant corruption and bad government. Israel has been accused, for example, of spreading AIDS in the Arab world through prostitutes working for Mossad. Another time Israel was accused of flooding Arab markets with chewing gum that arouses men and women sexually. The goal: to spread “moral corruption” in Arab countries.
Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are no different from the rest of the Arab world in this regard. They too often prefer to blame Israel for almost any disaster that befalls them.
A few years ago the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, which is controlled by the office of the Palestinian president, claimed that Israel had released poison-resistant rats in the Old City of Jerusalem with the purpose of driving Arab families out of the holy city.
What the agency forgot to mention was how the rats managed to distinguish between Arabs and Jews, who also happen to live in the Old City of Jerusalem.
More recently, Palestinian newspapers carried reports that also accused Israel of releasing wild boars in the West Bank to destroy agricultural crops and drive farmers out of their lands.
Levels of illiteracy are high in the Arab world is illiterate, which makes it much easier for Arab leaders and their governments to sell their people even the most ridiculous story, such as the ones about the Israeli sharks and rats.
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