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Juan Cole has a really important and extremely disturbing article in Salon, that persuades that the links between the recent insurgency the US is facing in Iraq and the one that the Sharon government has helped escalate by the excesses of its occupation and its assassination policies, are far more direct, and far less metaphorical, than I realized.
Indeed, Cole says that the four American military contractors killed and burned in Falluja were killed in direct retaliation for Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, which is pretty startling assertion in and of itself. As Cole writes:
Hamas is a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist party, deriving from the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. Sheikh Yassin's extremist writings are widely read among fundamentalists, including those in Iraq. His murder provoked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. Some of them determined to take revenge on the closest ally of the Israelis, the Americans who were occupying them...
The group that killed the four American civilian security guards in Sunni Arab Fallujah on March 31 identified itself as "Phalanges of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin," calling the grisly killings a "gift to the Palestinian people."
Cole describes the growing perception of almost total equivalency between the US and Israel in the Arab mind:
Combined with the American military assault on Fallujah, Bush's embrace of Sharon's position succeeded in making America, in Arab eyes, virtually indistinguishable from Israel. The Egyptian daily al-Jumhuriyyah spoke for many Arabs when it observed in the wake of the Bush-Sharon accord, "the victims being killed daily in Palestine and Iraq are due to the continuation of the occupation ... Violence and extremism have increased as a natural response to the brutality of the occupation."
Before Bush endorsed Sharon's plan, much of the Arab press and popular opinion had stopped short of such an equation. Many, even those opposed to the U.S. invasion and critical of the occupation, were prepared to acknowledge that not all of those fighting the Americans were noble freedom fighters. Now, the rhetoric and sentiment are swinging the other way.
How horrifying. Do Americans really want to live with the consequences of a foreign policy being led by an administration that so totally embraces the suicidally destructive policies of Ariel Sharon? A world of endless horror, indeed. We've got to get rid of these utterly insane people. I mean, this is exactly what the Likudnik wing of the neocons has always wanted, and indeed, they've made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[And, by the way, could the Bush administration be more obviously fishing for the Jewish vote with this?]