Syria was still uneasy about the recent apprehension there of the serial sniper who terrorized Damascus for weeks, Ali Jehovah — who purportedly had connections to Christian groups while on a student visa in Fresno. Meanwhile, Pakistan pressed the United States for assurances that its nationals would not be gunned down in American mosques by Christian renegades. "This is quite intolerable," President Musharraf dryly noted, "and it comes on top of reports that the United States is sending nuclear material secretly to India that may well be used against us."
Moreover, the Texas millionaire-terrorist Ornery Bud Latham, the so-called mastermind of the "Wild Bunch," the fundamentalist organization that has also gunned down hundreds of foreigners in America, is still at large in west Texas, purportedly drawing on the cattle baron's vast cash reserves. President Bush assured President Musharraf that authorities were doing all they could to apprehend OBL, but "Texas is so darn big and some of those cowboy communities are still sort of wild with strong views. OBL is a hero to some of these folks in frontier towns. We've tried to shut down his training ranches, but new ones crop up out there on the prairie all the time." In response, Pakistan offered to send the United States some $5 billion in aid to assist in the investigation.
In further news on the domestic front, CBS was roundly condemned in the Arab world for showing a video of the gleeful beheading of an Islamic journalist. The Arab League alleged that a voice in the video could be heard asking, "Confess that you are a Muslim" shortly before the journalist was executed. Al-Jazeera executives formally protested the airing of the CBS tape — and suggested that such sensationalism could only "inflame" the situation. The protest came on the heels of reports that CBS was facilitating the folk image of OBL by broadcasting his periodic so-called "Lepanto communiqués" demanding Texas-style justice for the attacks on Poitiers, the fall of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman assault on Vienna.
The Arab League also noted that more than 2,800 Westerners residing in Arab countries had been arrested since the Mecca bombings and charged with planning still further murders. A circumspect Egyptian spokesman warned, "It is almost as if young Western sleeper crusaders come to our countries to destroy the very culture they wish to embrace. At some point, be prepared for a backlash and a change in our hospitality. Given all these unprovoked incidents, a visitor from Mars might conjecture that the so-called West is at war with us across the globe."
Tensions rose further when thousands of Christians rioted in Montana and stormed mosques on rumors that a Muslim journalist had suggested that Jesus would like to date a contestant in a Miss Missoula beauty pageant. In response, Christian evangelicals immediately complained that they had been profiled by Muslim groups objecting to the riots and thus unfairly stereotyped. "We are not condoning these deplorable acts of violence, but mullahs and imams must realize that when people are daily insulted and oppressed they strike out in strange ways."
In other related news, Indonesia issued a strong protest to Washington that the recent explosion at Disneyland that killed 200 Muslim tourists was "no accident" and that it expected stern measures to find the perpetrators of this "foul" deed. In response, press secretary Ari Fleischer denied rumors that a member of the White House staff, in an unauthorized interview, had suggested that "Indonesia should first look inward to discover why so many Westerners spontaneously wish to act out against Islamic visitors."
Adel al-Jubeir, policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, expressed similar concern about growing intolerance toward Saudi citizens in America and predicted, "Just imagine: If America continues with this bias, pretty soon it will be illegal for a Muslim to set up a mosque or proselytize in America. And then, in effect, you will have created a monotheistic state, run by fundamentalists and the religious laws of the Old Testament. A monotheistic state no less!"
BRIDGING THE GAP?
In contrast, a group of Islamic academics recently met at a conference in Cairo entitled "Why do they hate us?" The symposium sought to examine Muslim culpability for the latest outbreak of Western terrorism against Islam.
"One could argue that we simply asked for it," the chairperson of the American Studies Department of Cairo University remarked. "I can envision a scenario in which we deserve all we get from America. In some sense, I'm ashamed to be from the Middle East. It is humiliating really. And unless we go to the root causes of Western hostility, there may well never be peace. We should examine very carefully our construction of the Western "other," and our culpability for the attendant frustration and sense of helplessness that drives an angry young L.A. surfer dude, a Texas ranch-hand, or a bare-naveled Miami skateboarder to blow themselves up along with Middle Easterners across the globe — and then rethink what the Egyptian or Saudi regime really stands for in the world today. They see our gender apartheid, our religious discrimination, our racial castes, tribalism, and autocracy — and then all that sexism, racism, and homophobia just overwhelms these idealistic-but-impotent American kids, causing them to strap on some bombs and strike a blow in anguish, as it were, against the patriarchy of imams, mullahs, and sheiks."