maher's humiliation

Dec. 24, 2003
Maher's humiliation

If a picture is worth a thousand words, unedited video footage is far more telling yet. This was demonstrated Monday as the entire world watched Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher humiliated, jostled, and pelted with shoes, until physically lifted off his feet and carried away from his frenzied attackers. His eyes betrayed vivid panic.

Nothing could have more forcefully expressed what he had just experienced, when he attempted to pray at the Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount, than the terror writ large on his face as the 68-year-old statesman struggled to regain his breath.

The fanaticism and hooliganism that greeted him at a hallowed place of worship could not be covered up by Egyptian attempts to play down the entire incident and ascribe it to a minuscule rabble. The visual record belies the spin from President Hosni Mubarak's bureau, as well as Maher's own pronouncements upon returning to Egypt, when he belittled the onslaught.

To sweep under the rug the hostility Maher encountered on Temple Mount is to distort the very reality which has so far frustrated all efforts to reach even minimal accommodation with the Palestinians – not only to end their terror war against Israelis, but also to ease their own self-imposed hardships. It's a reality which defies self-interest and logic, but this makes it no less of a reality.

When Maher was violently accosted and branded a traitor, he came face to face with the frightening aspect of Palestinian intransigence and extremism.

Those who continue to murder Israelis even if they thereby damage their own cause, are also those who assaulted Maher. They are not a marginal minority. They embody the situation Israel is up against.

Israel is pressured to make concessions – by no self-appointed mediator more than by Egypt. Yet these same brokers refuse to own up to the implacable hate which Israel endures and which is bound to undo any compromise under consideration.

Maher was attacked because of his "Israeli connection," because he dared conduct talks with the leaders of the reviled Jewish state. If this is how Palestinians treat ostensible mediators, what can the Jews themselves expect? And if this is how Palestinians manhandle their boosters and comrades, what would they do to their Israeli enemies? If this is what's meted out to their fellow Muslim faithful, what would happen to Jews who attempt to pray at the Western Wall if the Temple Mount were turned over to Palestinian Authority control, as the Arabs, Egypt included, routinely demand?

For Egypt to pooh-pooh the episode is to display hypocrisy which calls into question its claim to honest-broker status. For Israel to paper over this ugly reality is to take existential gambles which may lead to national suicide.

What Maher met on the Temple Mount isn't the exception to the rule, it's only the tip of greater virulence. A recent poll among Palestinians revealed that 58 percent oppose even the Geneva Accord's formulations, dangerous though they are for Israel's continued existence. This extremism impelled the terrorists to rebuff Mubarak's cease-fire scheme. This extremism is born of unbridled incitement which Egypt regularly tolerates.

Its state media screens Arab versions of ancient blood libels and Jewish cabal calumnies. Egypt's policy is to bait Israel at any international forum (hence it continues to harp on the supposed nuclear threat from democratic Israel). Egypt makes no visible effort to close the tunnels from its territory through which weapons are smuggled to the terrorists it ostensibly opposes, in direct violation of its commitments made to US President George W. Bush at the Sharm e-Sheikh summit a few months ago.

Egypt hinders Israeli exports and jails an innocent Israeli citizen, Azzam Azzam. Egypt withdrew its ambassador from Israel three years ago, thereby violating the peace agreement, which explicitly stipulates that ties between the two states do not hinge on the nature of Israel's relations with its other Arab neighbors.

As the Maher incident shows, all these bows to Islamic radicalism did not inoculate Egypt against attack, just as similar kowtowing did not protect Riyadh.

The lesson is that Egypt must stop throwing bones and granting victories to the radicals and stand more squarely on the side of peace. The more Egypt lets itself be intimidated by the radicals, the more it will be attacked.

If Mubarak and Maher are genuinely interested in peace, they should campaign against such peace-impeding fanaticism. If instead they propose to abet, excuse, and cover it up, while redoubling their efforts to elicit concessions from Israel, they disqualify themselves as mediators.