Frank Viviano Writes   Many battles at hand will take place on fields of perception Young Arabs say the U.S. is bringing tragedy upon itself Zarqa, Jordan -- Several hundred young men, most under 25, gathered in a tight circle around the fiery speaker at Zarqa University, on the edge of the great desert vastness that stretches east toward Saudi Arabia and Iraq. "Those who commit suicide to kill the enemy are the only tools we have to achieve some balance with Phantom jets and Apache helicopters!" thundered the speaker. "They are our bullets," the crowd chanted in reply. Their words illustrate the enormous gulf in perception between most people in the West and young Arabs surrounding the events of Sept. 11, a perception the U.S.-led coalition must take into account if its war on terrorism is to succeed. And the perception of the young people from a dozen Arab nations at the sun- parched campus 18 miles outside the Jordanian capital of Amman is this: The United States is determined to annihilate their world, and they, the students, must be willing to employ any means to defend it. "In the name of a so-called war on terrorism, " said one of the student leaders, "the Americans are about to act on their historic hatred for all Muslims." President Bush, while stitching together a global coalition that includes Islamic countries, has been at pains to assert that America is at war with terrorism, not with the Muslim world. The Palestinian Authority, desperate to separate its cause from the rising tide of violence against civilians, has condemned the Sept. 11 attacks and attempted to distance itself from fundamentalist organizations operating in Israeli-occupied territories. But their words have not swayed the perceptions of the Arab young -- the most fertile recruiting ground of extremist organizations such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.   A RADICALIZED GENERATION In demonstrations across the Arab crescent, a radicalized generation continues to take to the streets, expressing ever fiercer levels of anti- Americanism. From a Western point of view, this anger turns on its head the meaning of a horrific event in which thousands of Americans were the victims. But for the students in Jordan, Sept. 11 was a result of that "historic hatred," a perceived accumulation of tragedies, humiliations and double standards that has pushed growing numbers beyond the limits of reason. "Yes, what happened on September 11 is evil, one of many instances of evil today," said Abdul Latif Arabiyat, secretary-general of the Islamic Action Front, a Jordanian political party, and chairman of the board of trustees at Zarqa University. "Another is that 80 percent of all the refugees on Earth currently are Muslims, and the United States doesn't seem prepared to notice them, much less go to war on their behalf." The roots of this deep-seated resentment are noted in the landmark work, "The Clash of Civilizations," by Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington. Muslims, he wrote, are "convinced of the superiority of their culture and obsessed with the inferiority of their power." The conflicting themes are sounded repeatedly in interviews with Arab Muslim leaders, caught between assertions of Islam's moral integrity on the one hand and the violent frustration and radicalization of the younger generation on the other. "We see ourselves as reformers, not revolutionaries," said Arabiyat. "Islam is the best source of ideas for social reform, in our view, because it is the last message of God to humanity, incorporating the most important principles of both Judaism and Christianity."   TEACHINGS START EARLY From an early age, Muslims are taught that Islamic moral integrity is unimpeachable. One consequence is that many find it impossible to believe the West's version of the Sept. 11 attacks. "A Muslim is not allowed to kill innocent people, even in a war," Arabiyat says flatly. That may explain why Arab newspapers, broadcast talk shows and Internet chat rooms are flooded with "proof" that the Mossad, Israel's secret service, engineered the murderous attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that 4,000 Jews employed at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day, all to discredit Islam. Apart from trying to pin the atrocity on others, the nature of the conspiracy theories reflects another core element in the perception gap: an abiding sense that the West fails to recognize the Middle East's own "ground zero" -- the plight of 750,000 Palestinians and the favoritism displayed toward Israel. "'America supports Israel by all the means at its disposal. It's the major purpose of U.S. vetoes at the United Nations," charged Tariq Al-Tell, a U.S.- educated economics professor at Zarqa University. "Even for Arabs who find much to admire in the United States, how is this to be explained?" To talk with Arab intellectuals, or listen to the Arab media, is to be bombarded with statistics measuring the perceived injustice. In proportion to population size, the Palestinian death toll of 700 in the past year's conflict with Israel "is equivalent to nine times the number killed in the terrorist attack in the United States," said Mustafa Barghouthi, president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees. The majority of the dead, he asserts, were innocent civilians -- like those at the World Trade Center -- "killed when going about their daily business: at home, at work, at school, walking the streets, in their cars." Whether the comparisons are valid or not is beside the point. The fact is, they are widely and deeply felt. A genuine war on terrorism will have to take the perceptions into account. Otherwise, warns Arabiyat, nonviolent, reformist Islam will lose its own battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation of Arabs. "Extremists," he says, "don't have patience. They don't believe in our evolutionary methodology of seeking justice." Outside, on the university plaza, the young men chanted. "We are ready to sacrifice ourselves, our blood, for the struggle." back to index page     back to