-Caveat Lector- Israeli Arabs Fear War on Islam 'We Are on the Verge of the Abyss,' Says Physician at Muslim Festival By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, September 15, 2001; Page A08 UMM EL-FAHM, Israel, Sept. 14 -- In Washington, the determination to retaliate for Tuesday's attacks on the United States is viewed as a campaign against terrorism. But many residents of Umm el-Fahm read it as a war on Islam. Umm el-Fahm, an Arab hill town in central Israel with 36,000 residents, offers only a tiny slice of Islamic opinion within the global sea of a billion Muslims. Yet many of the complaints lodged here against the United States, as well as the belief that Islam is under assault, are sentiments that can be heard in countries the United States wants on its side in the anti-terrorism campaign, from Egypt to Jordan to Pakistan. "The attacks were a reaction to the way the United States has hit the Muslim world in general. Now they want to hit more," said Hamad Jabarin, a prayer leader at an Umm el-Fahm mosque. "It was a heroic act," a teenager named Ismail Adnan said. Militant Islamic groups in the Gaza Strip and in Egypt also made statements backing Afghanistan, one of the possible targets of U.S. military action. The Islamic Resistance Movement, a Palestinian armed group known as Hamas, urged Muslims to come together. "I join the cause for Muslims to be united in order to deter the United States from launching war against Muslims in Afghanistan," said Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader. In a Gaza Strip refugee camp, about 1,500 Palestinians, many of them Hamas supporters, marched, burning Israeli flags and carrying a large poster of Osama bin Laden, who has been named as a key suspect in the terror attacks, the Associated Press reported. After the rally, plainclothes Palestinian policemen questioned several journalists and confiscated videotape and film, as well as camera equipment. An AP photographer was warned not to publish pictures of the bin Laden poster. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's biggest fundamentalist group, said the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan are correct to pledge retaliation in case of an American attack. "What else can they say when the United States is threatening to bomb them?" Mamoun Hudaibi, a Brotherhood spokesman, said in a news service dispatch from Cairo. Here in Umm el-Fahm, where thousands attended a festival to honor efforts to preserve al-Aqsa mosque, negative feelings toward a possible U.S.-led war are accented by the Palestinian independence struggle being waged only a few miles east, in the West Bank, and to the south in the Gaza Strip. Israeli Arabs, the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslim, are Palestinians who remained in their towns when Israel was created in 1948. Thousands of other Palestinians fled or were driven out, becoming the refugees who populate camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. Although they are Israeli citizens, the residents of Umm el-Fahm said they resent U.S. support for Israel. In addition to sympathizing with the Palestinian struggle, they said they are fed up with years of second-class status in an officially Jewish state. Last fall, at the beginning of the current Palestinian conflict, Israeli police shot and killed 13 unarmed Israeli Arab protesters, many of them youths supporting Palestinian demands. But the focus today in Umm el-Fahm was on a global divide. Beneath the green flags that are emblematic of their religion, Muslim spectators and town residents regarded the declarations from Washington as prelude to a titanic struggle. "We are on the verge of the abyss," said Mustafa Simmi, a physician from the Arab hamlet of Maqreb. "It is unfair to lay the responsibility with Muslims." Simmi looked at U.S. foreign policy through an Islamic prism, and saw nothing but assaults on the Muslim world: a decade of bombing Iraq, indifference at best to the Palestinians, support for corrupt dictatorships throughout the Middle East. "The world doesn't know Islam," he said. "Israel puts us up as the enemy. This makes a dangerous situation." Sheik Raed Salah, the head of Umm el-Fahm's Islamic Movement, was more diplomatic, but the sum of sentiment was the same. "We are against the killing of civilians," he said of the attacks in New York and Washington. "It was a reaction against U.S. policy. In all this, Islam is in danger." In the past decade, Umm el-Fahm has emerged as a center of Muslim activism in Israel. Its citizens volunteered work and material to refurbish al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam's holiest shrines. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's visit to the esplanade in front of the mosque last September, when he was leader of the Israeli opposition to peace talks, ignited rioting that kicked off the Palestinian uprising. Today was al-Aqsa Day in Umm el-Fahm. The annual event is dedicated to preservation of the mosque and battling campaigns by Jewish groups to replace it with a temple to replace the Second Temple that was destroyed by the Romans 2,000 years ago. The tone of the official speeches was conciliatory. But Saladin, the Muslim warrior who expelled the Crusaders from the Holy Land, looked down from a giant poster depicting al-Aqsa. © 2001 The Washington Post Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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