Please take a minute to thank Daily Mail regular columnist Andrew Alexander for an excellent piece today (22 June 2007) entitled "Delving inside the mind of a suicide bomber."
Arab Media Watch has not chosen this item because of the topic of suicide bombings, but because Alexander provides legitimate criticism of Israeli, US and British policy vis-a-vis Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Arab world in general. He also highlights the plight of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees (the former in particular receiving hardly any media attention).
Incidentally, Alexander is a speaker at AMW's fundraising dinner on 8 September - all the more reason to write in!
http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/PressReleases/tabid/77/newsid391/3854/Arab-Media-Watch-annual-fundraising-dinner-8-September-2007/Default.aspx
Write to letters@dailymail.co.uk and andrew.alexander@dailymail.co.uk. Please be concise, polite and factual, and BCC letters to info@arabmediawatch.com. If you want your letter to be published in the newspaper, indicate this in the subject line of your email (do not copy and paste the subject or content of this Action Alert) and provide your full name, address and contact details. The quicker you write in, the more likely your chances of getting your letter published. Letter-writing tips can be found at:
http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/MediaLobbying/LetterWritingTips/tabid/134/Default.aspx
Alexander's article is available at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=463570&in_page_id=1770
Following are extracts:
"I was surprised to find Charles Moore in The Spectator arguing that if you went back ten years - long before the Iraq war - you would find that the leader of the 7/7 bombers had already been converted to extremism. Ten years? Oh, Charles! That is historically but the blink of an eye. Try 100 years. For it is nearly a century ago that Britain initiated the policy of providing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, though predominantly occupied by Arabs. Unsurprisingly, they bitterly resented it. After a quarter of a century of violence, Britain handed the Palestine problem to the United Nations which established the state of Israel, theoretically half-Arab and half-Jewish - despite Arabs constituting about two-thirds of designated area. After beating back a combined attack by the neighbouring Arab states in 1948, Israel expanded to cover nearly four-fifths of Palestine. Three more wars followed, leaving Israel in control of the West Bank (once part of Jordan) and the Arab holy site of East Jerusalem. A tragic consequence of this and - crucially - what we did later has been a refugee problem almost without parallel."
"The UN estimates that there are more than four million Palestinian refugees, including those who had to flee their homes but not the country. More than one million are still living in the wretched camps where the UN assists with the basic services, mainly in the Gaza Strip, the most overcrowded territory in the world - now plunged into violent fratricide. Families have been three generations in the camps. Some young men have grown up knowing only the camps and the tales of their parents and grandparents being dispossessed…Both Arab and Israeli politicians have been guilty of exploiting the refugee problem at various times. But that does not make it any less grim…Of course, it would be foolish to pretend that any solution is easy, least of all over the refugees whose number is now so large."
"…in the West Bank, scores of Israeli checkpoints make it difficult for the Arab inhabitants to earn a living or families to meet."
"After the West's sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, with their shocking humanitarian consequences, came the 2003 invasion - like throwing a match on gunpowder. A conservative estimate is that well over a million Iraqis fled to neighbouring countries. An estimated 1.7 million 'internally displaced' Iraqis have also fled their own homes and towns because of sectarian violence."
"There have been numerous attempts to achieve peace between Israel and her Arab neighbours, but they have regularly foundered on Israeli or Arab intransigence - usually the former in recent years."
"Hope flickered when the Arab League in 2002 offered to normalise relations with Israel if she would accept a sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and a settlement of the refugee problem. But that went up in smoke with the invasion of Iraq."
"Egypt may once more be attempting the role of peacemaker. But as all Arabs know, the key to real progress lies in Washington which can impose settlement terms on Israel if it chooses to. It does not."
"Even Israel, politically so much more advanced than its neighbours, periodically elects extremist governments - like the one that invaded Lebanon last year with such brutal consequences."
"'It is sweet and proper to die for one's country,' wrote Horace…This once much quoted motto still adorns many of our war memorials. Why should we think this romantic appeal is only for us or the Romans? Why not for Arabs too?"