"Hours after the Arab peace initiative was issued... Israel replied with a barbaric war and a flagrant and brutal aggression," said Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. The Israeli action "confirmed once again that Israel is a terrorist state that rejects peace."
Seems like it was also hours after a barbaric attack by Palestinians on Israelis civilians.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher called the offensive "foolish, illegal and a message of war and aggression to the Arabs as a response to their message of peace." Maher said he spoke with Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, asking for help to stop Israeli attacks.
That's what the Palestinian campaign is designed to make him do: Do something intolerable, call the retaliation intolerable, and try and shame somebody into throwing his weight onto the Palestinian side.
Several hundred worshippers at Cairo's Al-Azhar Mosque called on Arab leaders to reject normalization of relations with the Jewish state. "Our leaders, open the door to jihad (holy war)!" they shouted.
Has a day gone by in the past 100 years without some idiot declaring "jihad" on somebody? That's the second objective, to get the "Arab Street" fired up and maybe get a few International Brigades going.
Essam Al-Eryan, a leading member of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, criticized Arab leaders as ineffectual, saying they were watching Arafat "under direct threat and they can't do anything about it."
Maybe they wouldn't want to do anything about it, even if they could.
Qatar, current chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, called for an emergency U.N. Security Council session to discuss the situation.
If it'd have been that important to them, they'd have been working contructively toward putting together a mutually acceptable agreement, wouldn't they?
In Jordan, Palestinian refugees in two camps near Amman, called for jihad, or holy war, and for the removal of the Israeli ambassador from the country. In the heart of the capital, heavy police presence confined anti-Israeli protests to the mosques.
More jihadis, more hollering...
In Iraq, President Saddam Hussein's deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, called the Israeli assault "a Zionist reaction to the Arab unity in the summit."
Either that, or an understandable reaction to barbarism. An Iraqi party hack wouldn't be able to understand that, though. |