THE PSYCHOSIS WE WON'T NAME: I read today that a Newsweek poll in Pakistan found that 48 percent of Pakistanis believe that Israel was behind the September 11 massacre. Reports from around the Middle East also show this to be a widespread belief among Arabs and Muslims. It is also echoed by the defeatist factions on the far left and the far right in this country. Prince Alaweed responded yesterday to Rudy Giuliani's heroic return of the Saudi prince's blood money in these words: "The whole issue is that I spoke about their position [on the Middle East conflict] and they didn't like it because there are Jewish pressures and they were afraid of them." This quote was to the newspaper Okaz, according to the New York Post. Alaweed knew exactly how to explain the affront to his native audience. There is only one word for this sickness and it is anti-Semitism. Somehow, we have not yet named the psychosis that affects large numbers of Muslims. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, whatever Tony Blair naively believes. The overwhelming majority of Arab Muslims do not want an accommodation with Israel. They want its obliteration and the expulsion or murder of every Jew that lives there. This anti-Semitism is openly fostered and fomented by many of the "moderate" Arab regimes we are now busy cozying up to. It is widely believed across the Muslim world - from the Philippines to Morocco to the denizens of our own native Muslim, Mr. Farrakhan. One of our greatest mistakes in the past few years has been to avoid calling this what it is: a sickness that only half a century ago was responsible for the greatest crime in the history of mankind. Why, one wonders, have no Western leaders confronted this ugly truth and condemned it? What hasn't the Pope? The rhetoric of bin Laden is not simply fundamentalist. In its structure and paranoia, it is not so different from the doctrines propagated by Hitler. These bin Laden-supporting Muslims want non-Muslims expelled from a wide swathe of Arab territory. They want Lebensraum, and the primary victim of such Lebensraum will once again be the Jews. Israel may not be the first cause cited by bin Laden but it surely is a critical one. It seems to me that our squeamishness in naming and recognizing this phenomenon is blunting our ability to confront it. Once again, we are faced with an expansionist, terrorist ideology that uses the demonization of Jews as one of its major rallying cries. What more do we need to know?

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2001

Answers

Personally I would happily depart the middle East and never darken their doorstep again and we could if we hadn't hit the snooze alarm in the seventies during the first OPEC oil embargo. Nationally we all jumped on the energy conservation bandwagon back then. We were promoting renewable energy, solar energy, ethanol etc then along came Ronny-"I have no recall"-Regan ripping the hot water panels off the White House as a symbolic gesture, announcing the return to business as usual---big business that is.

Now here we are, twenty years later, responsible for successfully mobilizing some fanatical, implaccable enemies from the middle East because we lacked the political and economic will to wean our selves from middle Eastern oil, thus neccessitating our ongoing presence in the middle east.

Had we stayed on the path to national energy independence I really wonder how they'd be feeling about us now while they were begging us to buy their oil.

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2001

Our solar panels are kaput for the moment because the closest repair person is in the mountains and charges a hefty amount for travel time. Imagine--we're in central North Carolina, plenty of sunshine! And no solar folks!

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2001