Arab Forum Assails Jews, 9/11 ‘Propaganda’

CAIRO —  A think tank affiliated with the Arab League, the 22-nation group that seeks to forge a unified voice among its members, ended a two-day conference on “Semitism” this week at which participants labeled Jews “enemies of all nations,” challenged the Jewish claim to Israel and cast doubt on the U.S. account of who was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Arab League, an important regional player that this year promoted a pan-Arab initiative for peace that held out the promise of normal relations with Israel, said it did not directly organize the event. However, it participated with an official representative, whose speech focused on the idea that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites.

Jewish groups in the United States condemned the league’s participation, saying it amounted to “a stamp of approval.”

“Do such gatherings in any way further the cause of peace and tolerance?” wrote Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles in a letter to league Secretary-General Amr Moussa. “Or are they merely another ominous marker on the slippery slope of hate, confrontation and war?”

The Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, said in a statement on its Web site that it organized the conference “under the umbrella of the Arab League” specifically to “expose the fallacious claims and concocted legends of the Zionists and to counter their nefarious propaganda against Arabs and Muslims after Sept. 11.”

In his opening remarks at the conference, the center’s executive director, Mohammed Khalifa Murar, said in part: “Jews claim to be God’s most preferred people, but the truth is they are the enemies of all nations. Most philosophers ... consider Jews as cheaters whose greed knows no bounds. Today, after having controlled the print and electronic media, they distort facts to suit their objectives.”

He also said Jews “hide” elements of their history that prove they are not Semites and therefore “have nothing to do with Semitism or Palestine.”

His comments were reported on the group’s Web site, www. zccf.org.ae, and in two English-language newspapers in the Emirates.

Such harsh sentiments are certainly not new in a region where Jews and Muslims have clashed since the earliest days of Islam about 1,400 years ago, when Jewish communities on the Arabian Peninsula rejected the prophet Muhammad’s message. But this week’s meeting seems to represent lost ground in Arab-Jewish relations. While such extreme comments have been discouraged, at least officially, by moderate Arab leaders, they have increasingly become part of acceptable everyday discourse, a reality underscored by the Arab League’s participation in the conference this week.

Moderate Arab leaders had warned for months that the raging conflict between Palestinians and Israelis threatened to undermine whatever advances have been made since Israel was founded in 1948, which for many meant a reluctant acceptance that the Jewish state is here to stay.

Now the Zayed Center, a respected regional forum, is not only promoting revisionist historical ideas aimed at redefining Jewish identity but has dropped the distinction between Jews and Zionists. That qualification had been relied on by many intellectuals and leaders in the Arab world to distinguish between being anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.

“I think this is an unfortunate development,” said Sharif Musa, head of the Middle East studies department at American University in Cairo, regarding the regional rise in anti-Jewish feelings. “But it is just like in the U.S., where there are a few Muslim terrorists but there is a campaign against Islam itself among Christian fundamentalists who now think Islam is a religion of violence. It is pretty bad everywhere. We live in a poisonous atmosphere, here and there.”

The Arab League declined several requests to comment. A spokesman acknowledged that the Zayed Center is affiliated with the league but said he could not comment until receiving a report on the event.

The Zayed Center refused to comment on the telephone and did not respond to a written request for comment sent via fax.

The conference evoked a heated response from Jewish groups in the United States.

“What you are seeing and witnessing is the extension of the big lie, denying Jewish history, denying the Holocaust,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, referring in part to publications by the Zayed Center that dispute historical accounts of Nazi atrocities.

“It is part of a major effort to de-legitimize Israel and the Jewish people,” Foxman said. “If you undermine and remove the Jewish history, then this is all a myth and the poor Arabs are victimized by a fantasy.”

The Arab League’s participation added “a level of legitimacy to this garbage that wasn’t there before,” he said.

The deep hostility and anger at Israel and Jews springs from an environment roiled by two years of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians, by talk of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and by regional domestic concerns such as high unemployment. It grows also from frustration at the perceived impotence of Arab leaders to deal with the regional concerns.

The emotional dynamic was further complicated by the events of Sept. 11, which left many Arabs feeling victimized and under siege. Many people on the street in the Arab world have clung to the idea that the U.S. government fabricated the case against Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind last year’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and similar thoughts were expressed by a leading Egyptian academic at the conference.

The events of Sept. 11 were “concocted, because we still do not possess concrete evidence of the real perpetrators and their objectives,” Mohammed Khalifa Hassan, director of the Center of Oriental Studies at Cairo University, said in response to a question at the seminar. “Those explosions have complicated the Arab-Israeli conflict and labeled Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, and instead of treating the Palestinian problem as a political issue, it reduced it to an issue of terrorism.”

Hassan did not respond to two calls for comment.

Indeed, the feelings of victimization are now so woven into the fabric of everyday thought that the in-flight magazine of Egypt’s state-owned airline picked up the thread.

“It is obvious that Jewish rule in Jerusalem was an ancient and transient episode in the history of the city which cannot justify its seizure and annexation 30 centuries later,” concludes one article in a magazine distributed to all passengers of Egypt Air. The article says Israel’s claim to Jerusalem is “spurious in fact and in law.”

The arguments are not new. But their presence in this type of magazine is, and that is a sign of the change in the public psyche, according to political observers such as Taher Masri, a former Jordanian representative to the Arab League.

“There is a lot of anger with what’s going on in Palestine, and many people--not all of them, but the majority--feel that the effort that has been made by many Arabs, including the Palestinians, to build an acceptable peace with Israel, including real recognition, has been aborted by Israel itself through what it is doing to the Palestinians for more than two years,” Masri said.

When the conference opened Wednesday, Murar, the Zayed Center’s executive director, said that “any discourse about Jews’ history will remain incomplete if it doesn’t shed light on that aspect of Jews that they always try to hide, i.e., their non-Semite origin.” He then offered an account that strips most Jews of their Semitic roots.

It was an account that Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center called “hogwash” in his letter to Moussa, adding it is “at the cornerstone of [Palestinian Authority President] Yasser Arafat’s big-lie tactics designed to teach generations of Palestinian children that their Israeli neighbors are no more than lying usurpers of the Holy Land.”

The Arab League’s representative at the meeting, Ahmad Saleem Jarad, head of Israeli affairs for the group, made comments that seemed to endorse Murar’s view.

“If the phrase ‘anti-Semitism’ is taken literally, it means hostility toward Semites or members of the Semitic race whose majority is comprised of Arabs,” he was quoted as saying in the English-language Gulf News. “Only a few Jews can genuinely claim to be Semites.”

According to its Web site, the Zayed Center was created “in cognizance of the principles and objectives of the League of Arab States ... which would endeavor to highlight the concept of Arab solidarity in the political, economic, cultural, social and inter-Arab relations,” among other goals.

One of the center’s most recent studies, published last month, is titled “Role of the Jews in Distorting the Arab Image in Western Culture.”