MEF Book Reviews

[Mediocrates]

Brief Reviews

Middle East Quarterly

Fall 2005

http://www.meforum.org/article/787

Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups and the Next Generation of Terror. By Jonathan Schanzer. New York: Specialist Press, 2004. 222 pp. $17.95, paper.

Al-Qaeda's Armies, in which this reviewer is thanked in the acknowledgments, surveys the most notorious affiliates of Al-Qaeda in the Middle East by which Schanzer means "homegrown, organic Islamist terror groups with nationalist objectives" that have been trained by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Additionally, affiliates "communicate with Al-Qaeda's command structure … share Al-Qaeda's ascetic and militant approach to the implementation of Islamic law, and their shared goal of world Islamic dominance."

Following September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda metastasized from a hierarchal and centralized organization into a decentralized movement; Schanzer explains how it adjusted to this new reality by relying to a large degree on the infrastructure of surviving affiliate groups. These affiliates, Schanzer argues, represent the next generation of the global terrorist threat or stated differently, Al-Qaeda 2.0. Schanzer predicts that "affiliates will increasingly constitute Al-Qaeda's outer perimeter and the pools from which new terrorists can be drawn."

He provides exceptional perspective on affiliates in Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, and northern Iraq. Additionally, the book includes information on their evolution, their activities, and offers a convincing strategy for the United States and its allies to deal with this menace. Often overlooked because of their small size and because they operate in areas outside the reach of state authority, the affiliates' activities should sound alarm bells in Western capitals. To defeat Al-Qaeda requires a two-pronged approach: hunting the central leadership and the affiliates.

Undertaking a strategy of combating affiliates would certainly yield much needed victories against Al-Qaeda. With troops in two theatres of war—Afghanistan and Iraq—the United States ought to consider small-scale operations against affiliates, which "may prove a less complicated, less time consuming, and less expensive mode of fighting terrorism," Schanzer argues. By their nature, these operations would require the support of Muslim governments. Convincing these—an unlikely prospect under the best of circumstances—would demonstrate to Al-Qaeda and other jihadis that the West and the Muslim world alike consider them pariahs. Schanzer also posits that this would begin the real battle: the battle between moderate Islam and radicals.

Avi Jorisch

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World. By Katharine Scarfe Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 276 pp. $65.

Beckett studies the nearly five centuries from the rise of an Islamic policy (A.D. 622) to the first Crusade (A.D. 1096), looking in detail at the wisps and traces of English knowledge of, contact with, and attitudes toward Muslims. The results are highly interesting.

Who knew that Bishop Georgius of Ostia, a papal legate to England, reported in 786 to the pope on two synods he had attended and included this decree: "That no ecclesiastic shall dare to consume foodstuffs in secret, unless on account of very great illness, since it is hypocrisy and a Saracen practice"? Or that Offa, the king of Mercia (a region of the Midlands, north of London) during the years 757-96 had a gold piece struck in his name, now available for view at the British Museum, which bore, as Beckett puts it, "a somewhat bungled Arabic inscription on obverse and reverse in imitation of an Islamic dinar"?

In fleshing out Dark Ages' reactions to the new faith, Beckett very usefully establishes the primitive base from which the English-speaking peoples even today ultimately draw their views. She tells about the unique English traveler's account to the Middle East dating from this era (that of Arculf); tallies the dinars found in such places as Eastborne, St. Leonards-on-Sea, London, Oxford, Croydon, and Bridgnorth; and totes up the Middle Eastern imports, such as pepper, incense, and bronze bowls. She finds that a "continuing network of trade and diplomatic links" connected western Christendom to the Muslim countries.

As for attitudes, they were not just uninformed but static. Beckett notes that initial responses to Islam were shaped by pre-Islamic writings, especially those of St. Jerome (c. A.D. 340-420), on Arabs, Saracens, Ismaelites, and other easterners. This prolonged influence resulted from a pronounced lack of curiosity on the part of Anglo-Saxons and most other Europeans.

To end on a jarringly contemporary note: dismayingly, the influence of Edward Said has reached the point that his theories about Western views of Muslims now reach even to the early medieval period; Beckett devotes page after page to dealing with his theories. Happily, she has the confidence and integrity (in her words) "to some extent" to dispute those theories.

Daniel Pipes

Building a Successful Palestinian State. By The Rand Palestinian State Study Team. 407 pp. $35, paper. The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State. By Doug Suisman, Steven N. Simon, and Glenn E. Robinson. 93 pp. plus DVD. $32.50, paper. Helping a Palestinian State Succeed: Key Findings. By RAND. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2005. 33 pp. in English, 34 pp. in Arabic. $12.00, paper.

Planners and development experts suffer from a deserved reputation for technocratic top-downism that ignores the wishes of people and sociocultural context; they are also known for utopian visions disconnected from practical reality. Seldom has that stereotype been more fully fulfilled than in the three complementary RAND studies about a Palestinian state.

Most striking is how the study treats Palestinians as subjects to be studied rather than as actors to participate in the creation of their own state. Blissfully divorced from any discussion about Palestinian social history or the kinds of communities its people have created, the authors happily catalogue advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to developing Palestinian cities. The education chapter, to be fair, does provide a decent account of the existing system, how it evolved, and what Palestinians want, but it is the exception that proves the rule.

The analysis also has a head-in-the-clouds character. Chapter after chapter run through the authors' thoughts to create their model society for Palestinians without betraying the slightest hint of awareness that fifty years' experience with international aid has shown the disastrous effect of such an approach. The report makes only a slight passing references to the extraordinary amounts of aid pumped into the Palestinian territories after the 1993 Oslo accords—aid that led to corruption and social distortions which undermined the Palestinian Authority's ability to function effectively. The RAND authors would exacerbate the central problem of Palestinian society—a refusal to take responsibility for itself but instead blaming outsiders for all problems and expecting foreigners to rescue them. Also, a-Cadillac-rather-than-Chevy-approach pervades the study. The authors' point of reference seems to be the infrastructure and facilities characteristic of Europe and North America, not those of low-income, developing countries.

Finally, the three volumes share the central organizing image of an "arc" formed by a high-speed railroad linking the major population areas of Gaza and the West Bank. There is the minor problem, as the authors note in passing, that roads rather than rail would be used for most freight shipments, for emergency services, and for those who can afford cars (including tourists, dignitaries, and the growing middle class the study envisages). A good road would connect the Palestinian urban areas at a much more modest cost than the billions the authors propose to pour into a railroad, which could quickly turn into a money-losing inefficient public enterprise of the kind which plagues many developing countries.

Patrick Clawson

Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict. By Samir Khalaf. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 368 pp. $18.50, paper.

[Mediocrates]

Khalaf, a sociologist at the American University of Beirut, has drawn upon primary and secondary sources to write a fascinating history of conflict in Lebanon since the early nineteenth century. He is at his best on what he calls the Golden/Gilded Age of 1943-75, describing the art, the music, and the intellectual life of Beirut and its role as a center of enlightenment. The author relates how Igor Moiseyev of the Bolshoi Folk Dance Ensemble helped the Lebanese Folk Dancers in the mid-1950s transform their indigenous folk dances into art. He discusses how Le Cenacle Libanais, founded in 1946, became a forum for philosophers, historians, writers, poets, and politicians with the towering figure of Michel Chiha who envisioned the Lebanese national identity as both Middle Eastern and Mediterranean. Khalaf also provides the reader with considerable sociological data based on archives and empirical surveys.

The weakness of Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon lies in some of the author's political analysis. Although Khalaf knows full well how the Ta'if accord of October 1989 stripped the Christian president of almost all his prerogatives and made him a figurehead, he regards it as positive because it was reached by "elected parliamentarians, and not warlords"— somehow failing to note that the accord was imposed by force. While the Lebanese parliamentarians were convening in the Saudi Arabian city of Al-Ta'if, Syrian guns were blasting Christian east Beirut and its hinterland. Is it surprising that the Ta'if accord forced upon the Christians of Lebanon by Syria, a leading terrorist state, and sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which lacks both political and religious freedom, transformed the Lebanese Christians into dhimmis subservient to their Muslim compatriots?

Marius Deeb

Johns Hopkins University

The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life. By Lawrence Rosen. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 230 pp. $24 ($17, paper).

Drawing upon his experiences as an anthropologist in Morocco, Rosen analyzes several facets of modern Muslim society. The elusive thesis of his essays collected here would seem to be that all politics in the Middle East is personal. Power may grow out of the barrel of a gun but is only deemed legitimate when the leader takes into account the primacy of social relationships, especially tribal units.

The chapter on tribes might have been worthwhile reading for U.S. military commanders heading to Iraq in 2003, in that Rosen rejects the idea that tribes are but a stage in political evolution and contends that they can coexist within other types of political systems. While one might find reason for optimism for democracy in Iraq from his view that Middle Eastern rulers are "more like paramount chieftainships than like states" because they "get their power from below—from other chiefs," Rosen also argues that "each leader is by definition legitimate if he succeeds in … grasp[ing] the reins of power." Might, in other words, does make right.

In this vein, Rosen holds that Daniel Pipes was wrong to assert in his 1983 book, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power that Islamic expectations for good governance are set so high that no Muslim government is ever truly legitimate.[1] Instead, Rosen sticks to his assertion, acquired in Morocco, that simply seizing power legitimates a ruler.

Rosen's interests take some essays in the direction of strictly cultural issues, such as Moroccans' view of corruption and mixed marriages (a chapter better suited to a legal textbook). Other of his chapters look more broadly at current issues, such as his views on the continuing relevance of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses for having allowed a kernel of doubt to nose its way under the smugly righteous ideological tents of ulema and mullahs. Rosen's optimism about a kinder, gentler Islam developing in Europe seems anachronistic after the 2004 Madrid explosions, the ritualistic murder of Theo Van Gogh, and the 2005 London attacks. His contention that "deep cultural change is not going on" in the Islamic world remains to be seen, but it stands out for counter-intuitive boldness. Overall, while The Culture of Islam contains thought-provoking nuggets, finding them amidst the opaque dust of anthropological verbiage makes it often more trouble than it is worth.

Timothy R. Furnish

Georgia Perimeter College

Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam. By Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Saeed. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. 227 pp. $99.95 ($29.95, paper).

The apostate is a Muslim who leaves Islam—or who is accused of being an enemy of Islam. The rights and wrongs of this punishment are the subject of the Saeeds' book. What had once been just an internal issue has become an international one since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's edict in 1989 declaring Salman Rushdie, then living in London, an apostate. That said, the issue still has its center in the majority-Muslim countries. For example, Muslim intellectuals accused of apostasy in Egypt alone include Farag Fuda (murdered in 1992), Nagib Mahfouz (stabbed in the neck in 1994), Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid (ordered to divorce his wife in 1995), the feminist leader Nawal al-Saadawy, who has received death threats—and this author, who was fired from his position at Al-Azhar University in 1987 and briefly jailed.

Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam superficially reviews the debate on apostasy in Muslim history. It takes up such matters as the contradiction between apostasy laws and the freedom of belief; apostasy and Muslim thinkers; apostasy law and its potential for misuse; reasons for apostasy; understanding the fear of apostasy among Muslims; and the need to rethink apostasy laws.

Unfortunately, the authors ignored the major books written on apostasy in Islam, the ones that explore its historical roots. These include Murder in the Name of Allah by Hazrat Mizra Tahir Ahmed[2]; Killing the Apostate, a Crime Forbidden in Islam, in Arabic, by the Syrian writer Muhammad Muneer Adelby; and my own Penalty of Apostasy, Historical and Fundamental Study,[3] in Arabic and English.

Another problem: 9-11 dangerously spread the issue of apostasy by providing great support to the fanatic elements in Muslim society. This development implies a need to focus on the role of the Saudi state and its Wahhabi dogma in activating and supporting the punishment for apostasy and its role in the Islamist war against the West and against Muslim freethinkers. This means looking at such topics as the role of on-line websites in urging the punishment of apostates and discussing ways to end the application of this penalty as a core religious reform. But the Saeeds do not take up these vitally important topics.

Ahmed Subhy Mansour

Alexandria, Va.

[Mediocrates]

Jealous Gods and Chosen People: The Mythology of the Middle East. By David Leeming. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. $22.

Leeming, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut, is best noted for his biography of James Baldwin.[4] He has also produced a stream of books on world mythology.

As usual, the ancient Near East carries a heavy burden since "the events and stories under consideration here cannot be reasonably separated from the recent history." The mythological past is the political present, especially for "nationalized religious traditions, particularly Israeli Jew and Arab Muslim (with significant Western Christian participation)." But Leeming's goal is ecumenical to say the least; "with nonexclusionary vision, other people's religious narratives can be seen as tribe-defining cultural dreams and as significant metaphors that can speak truthfully to people across cultural and sectarian boundaries." In his view only "fundamentalists" feel otherwise.

The volume provides highly schematic and often poorly informed background chapters on prehistory, the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and "Jews, Christians and Muslims." These are followed by individual chapters on the mythology of prehistory, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, the western Semites, and Arabia and the Muslims. Some of the primary gods and mythological cycles are introduced, particularly heroes and creation myths. These hardly exhaust, or begin to describe, the vast range of mythological motifs, their interaction and significance, across some ten thousand years.

The volume is produced entirely from secondary sources without command of the many languages in question. This is not an impossible obstacle, of course, provided there is sensitivity to the material and its complexities. A prerequisite is consulting editio princeps of the many texts cited, or collections such as the classic Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament and its modern descendents. Sadly, Leeming relies to an unreasonable degree on general articles in the Eliade-edited Encyclopedia of Religion, and non-experts such as Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong, rather than far more authoritative monographic syntheses.

There have been numerous books dealing with Near Eastern mythology from the standpoint of individual cultures and in comparative terms by estimable scholars past such as Sabatino Moscati and Samuel Noah Kramer, and more recently Stephanie Dalley and Gwendolyn Leick, to name but a few. They are still to be recommended.

Alexander H. Joffe

Middle East Forum

The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America. By Kenneth M. Pollack. New York: Random House, 2004. 539 pp. $26.95.

The standoff with the Islamic Republic of Iran has frustrated each of the last five U.S. presidents, going back to Jimmy Carter, as one U.S. initiative after another has failed. One recurring problem has been that Washington's reaching out to Iranian figures thought of as moderates or pragmatists then boomerangs. This pattern surfaced when national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski met in November 1980 with Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, which days later led to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the Iran-contra affair offers another example.

Pollack presents a fascinating 130-page account of this same U.S. effort to reach out to reputed Iranian moderates, but during the Clinton administration, when he worked on Iran at the National Security Council. After a detailed description of these efforts, he concludes, "I was wrong in [the] assessment ... that we had come very close to making a major breakthrough ... [E]verything that truly mattered was in the hand of people who were not ready or interested in improving ties with the United States."

Unfortunately, Pollack buries his interesting material about Clinton's Iran policy at the end of 245 forgettable pages on Iranian history drawn almost entirely from U.S. sources, ignoring excellent materials available from other Western scholars (including some in English) as well as a rich historiography in Persian. His account, therefore, reflects the strengths and weaknesses of American scholarship on Iranian history—exaggerating the sins of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, for instance, while overlooking his accomplishments. Thus does Pollack write at length about the failures of the Iranian economy under the shah when in fact Iran's economic growth in 1953-78 was the fastest in the world.

In his final fifty pages, Pollack makes recommendations for future U.S policy toward Iran, most of which can be described as the triumph of hope over experience: once again, he says, Washington should reach out to Iranian pragmatists and try to arrive at a bargain. If Tehran continues with its nuclear program, he does propose to prepare to take firmer action against Iran, including, in the extreme, taking a "hard look" at military action. Unfortunately, he devotes little attention to helping democratic tendencies inside Iran although the country's transformation away from an Islamic dictatorship offers the only means to ensure good and lasting U.S.-Iran relations.

Patrick Clawson

Politics in Israel: The Second Republic (second ed.). By Asher Arian. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2005. 447 pp. $35.95, paper.

Many academics focus upon Israel only in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arian, a political science professor at Haifa University, goes far beyond, describing in-depth the functioning of the Israeli political system with emphasis, in this second edition of Politics in Israel, on the five years since Israel's repeal of direct prime ministerial elections.

Arian is not clear about the parameters of the "second republic," but it appears to refer to the period following the 1967 war when a national unity government allowed former Irgun leader Menachim Begin to re-enter mainstream Israeli politics, an event which would help break Labor's monopoly. The background he provides on Israeli political machinations makes Politics in Israel essential reading.

Politics in Israel offers an exhaustive picture of Israeli society, providing statistical analyses of the country's economy and population, tracing the evolution of its political parties, and discussing the relationship between Judaism and Israeli politics. Further, Arian has structured his study for ease of use. Rather than chronicle Israel politics from their start, he divided Politics in Israel into chapters on the political elite, political parties, electoral behavior, public policy, administration, and local government. Statistical tables detail everything from basic election results, to previous professions of the Knesset (parliament) members, to public perceptions of each party's commitment to major issues.

Rather than obfuscate with detail, Arian reveals the idiosyncrasies of the Israeli political system often unnoticed by journalists and ordinary citizens, such as how party politics functions in a system of government built around multiparty coalitions. He uses comparison with the U.S. Congress to explain different perceptions of lobbying and the unique role of Israel's military in its political society. He shows how the Knesset often operates with little transparency, suggesting that Israeli politics are best considered as "being of the closet and not of the caucus."

Suzanne Gershowitz

American Enterprise Institute

Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East. By Jeremy Bowen. Thomas Dunne Books: St. Martin's Press, 2005. 420 pp. $29.95.

It is easy to be annoyed at this flawed attempt at a comprehensive account of the Six-Day war. But the book does carry the reader along and can serve as an introduction for those unfamiliar with that landmark event and, also, as a reminder for those who have forgotten.

The absence of a preface in which Bowen, a BBC journalist, should have spelled out what he was attempting to achieve and how he intended to go about it is an immediate warning of a lack of weightiness. Another sign is the absence of maps, except for two unhelpful regional maps.

To his credit, Bowen appears to have read dozens of the books written on the war, including the most recent, as well as relevant government archives, particularly of the United States and United Kingdom. He has also interviewed military and civilian personnel on both sides although he does not indicate how many. But his account remains that of a journalist making notes from the sidelines, not of a researcher who has immersed himself in the heart of the matter, who can make informed assessments, and has original insights to offer. He misses central elements in the story, such as the fascinating objections in the Israeli cabinet to the capture of Jerusalem's Old City—and the Western Wall—by ministers from the National Religious Party, who maintained that it was too politically and ideologically hot to handle; this from a party that would soon after spearhead Israeli settlement efforts.

The battle descriptions are incomprehensible, and Bowen, in searching for the illuminating detail or pregnant quote, more often ends up with banality and schmaltz. Nevertheless, there are interesting glimpses of the players, particularly in the Egyptian camp. Bowen's description of how Egypt and the Arab world worked their way up with ever expanding rhetoric into war fever despite their near-total lack of preparation remains, even four decades later, an astonishment.

Abraham Rabinovich

author of The Yom Kippur War:

The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East

[Mediocrates]

Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: Representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish Society. By Daniel Bar-Tal and Yona Teichman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 483 pp. $68.

If you think stereotypes dictate and determine all human achievement and conflict; if you believe psychobabble offers the most promising way out of the Middle East conflict—then this tedious book is for you.

The authors, both professors of psychology at Tel Aviv University who have long worked on studying stereotypes, cite the enormous literature on stereotyping in general and in textbooks and the media in particular in a list of references nearly fifty pages long. Their thesis goes something like this: whatever the past causes of the Middle East conflict, today the violence and conflict are being perpetuated by the fact that stereotypes of the "other" are common, inculcated by the schools and the media.

What evidence do the authors provide? Mainly studies of drawings of Arabs made by very young Jewish children, plus some tendentious parsing of the Israeli media. This points to the real problem of Stereotypes and Prejudice in Conflict: it has a thinly-disguised political agenda and bias shows up everywhere.

Bar-Tal and Teichman offer no evidence that stereotypes affect economic achievement and success. While citing negative stereotypes about Chinese held by Americans, they omit reference to the phenomenal educational and economic success by Chinese Americans, who out-earn whites. They offer no evidence that those "reverse stereotypes" found in politically-corrected textbooks about women lumberjacks, Jewish hockey players, and Cherokee nuclear scientists have had any impact on social mobility.

The authors consider stereotypes as racist and as evidence of intolerance, never mind if they are true. That nearly all Palestinians endorse suicide bombers should not be regarded as legitimate empirical grounds for Israelis drawing conclusions about Palestinians. That almost all Israeli Arabs vote for anti-Zionist political parties with Marxist orientations should not serve as empirical evidence. The authors use "prejudice" and "stereotypes" interchangeably, but what happens when an ethnic group actually exhibits certain traits?

Far from looking at both sides, the only stereotypes that matter to these professors, citing Edward Said, are those held by Jews concerning Arabs. Discussions in the Palestinian media of Jews drinking blood for Passover, poisoning Palestinian food, spreading AIDS, etc., do not interest the authors. Not a single cartoon drawn by a Palestinian child of a Jew is included in the book. It is only Jewish stereotyping of Arabs that is an obstacle to peace, not Palestinian text books and radio stations calling for genocide of Jews. And the fact that preschoolers might hold stereotypical images about everything in their toddler world, from teachers to tricycles, has not occurred to the authors, who never examine any preschooler drawings about anything besides Arabs.

And while the learned duo parse Israeli media (which is under the near-hegemony of Israel's far-Left, by the way) and schoolbooks, they just never got around to examining which other stereotypes are inculcated there, such as those about Orthodox Jews, Jewish settlers, kibbutzniks, homosexuals, environmentalists, etc.

Most of the "findings" in the book are old hat. Other previous studies making essentially the same arguments about Israeli schoolbooks include Adir Cohen's An Ugly Face in the Mirror, articles and books by Hebrew University's Eli Podeh,[5] the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace,[6] and quite a few earlier articles by Bar-Tal or Teichman themselves.

The authors' bias is not surprising. While Teichman seems to be uninvolved politically, Bar-Tal is smack in the center of Israel's far Left. He joined the anti-Zionist fringe by signing his name to a political petition calling for international armed intervention to impose a settlement on Israel.[7] He has justified Palestinian terrorism,[8] and his work is cited as "evidence" that Israelis are racists, including by the U.N.'s anti-Zionist report on racism and xenophobia.[9] Another indication of this study's bias: the PLO's official website sings its praises for proving how racist Israelis are.[10]

Steven Plaut

University of Haifa

[1] New York: Basic Books, 1983, p. 55-63.

[2] Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1989.

[3] Weston, Ont.: International Publishing and Distribution Co., 1998.

[4] James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1995).

[5] Elie Podeh, How Israeli Textbooks Portray the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-2000 (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 2001).

[6]" Analysis of Israeli Textbooks," Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, accessed June 24, 2005.

[7] "Israeli Citizens for International Intervention, List of Endorsements," Oznik.com, Apr. 27, 2001.

[8] Daniel Bar-Tal, "Is There a Way Out? Occupation, Terror and Understanding," Counterpunch, Apr. 22, 2002.

[9] "Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and All Forms of Discrimination," Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, U.N. Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/2002/NGO/152, Feb. 18, 2002.

[10] "Israeli Textbooks and Children's Literature Promote Racism and Hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs," Palestinian National Authority website, accessed July 11, 2005.

To unsubscribe from the MEF News list, go to http://www.meforum.org/unsubscribe.php

To subscribe to the MEF News list, go to http://www.meforum.org/subscribe.php

To receive alerts of MEF staff media appearances, please sign up for the MEF Alerts mailing list at: http://www.meforum.org/subscribe.php

You may freely forward this information, but on condition that you send the text as an integral whole along with complete information about its author, date, and source.