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February 3, 2003
Bitter Strife in Mideast Clouds Talk of Shuttle
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
AIRO, Feb. 2 ? In the Middle East, where the hand of God is never believed to be too far off the tiller of daily events, one explanation for the shuttle disaster quickly gained widespread currency today: divine retribution.
The average cafe denizen, not to mention the odd newspaper columnist, looked no further than the Israeli colonel on board the space shuttle Columbia and reports that it apparently began crumbling over Palestine, Tex., to conclude that God was sending the United States a message that its entire Middle East policy is misguided.
"It was definitely a divine retribution against America for its ongoing preparation for war against Iraq," said Marwa Abdel Wahab, 29, an administrator for a multinational oil company, walking in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek.
"It did not make me feel happy, though," she said. "I sympathized with those scientists because they are, after all, human beings. An Egyptian might have been among them."
As word of the disaster spread, Arabs braced for what they viewed as the inevitable accusations that follow tragedy in the United States these days.
"Most people thought it was an accident, but thought the Americans would blame it on Al Qaeda or Arabs or Muslims," said Khaled M. Batarfi, the managing editor of Al Madina newspaper in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. "They were bracing themselves for the worst. It was kind of a relief that it was not an act of terrorism."
A Jordanian columnist even wrote a wry column on the subject.
"We believe that the theories emerging from Columbia will again be related to terrorism, especially that a U.S. astronaut among the crew was of Indian descent," wrote Bassem Sakkijha, a columnist in the Jordanian daily Al Dustour, referring to Kalpana Chawla, one of the two women aboard. "We fear that the Americans will declare her Muslim and say that she relied on God and thus destroyed Columbia."
He was harkening back to the October 1999 crash of an EgyptAir flight off the United States, which investigators attributed to a despondent co-pilot who they believed deliberately crashed the plane as he kept repeating, "I rely on God."
Mr. Sakkijha said he hoped the disaster would push Americans to reflect about what they were doing in the Middle East every day, about the destruction and death visited by American-made munitions.
That was a common sentiment on the streets, too.
"Is the situation on the West Bank or in Iraq easy?" asked Abu Issam, making sandwiches at a stall in Amman, Jordan.
Rasha Mohsen Muhammad, a 21-year-old student at Helwan University in Egypt, said: "When I was coming in the bus, people were talking about it. Many people were saying that they were happy because this would distract the Americans from Iraq and make them rethink their policies."
The bitterness in the state of Arab-Israeli relations, especially given the bloodshed of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute since September 2000, inevitably spilled over into this event.
Hero is hardly the first word that springs to mind when Arabs think of an Israeli air force pilot, and the widespread use of that word on American television networks to describe Col. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut, irked some Arabs.
"The fact that one Israeli died is a good news," said Muhammad el-Guindi, a 29-year-old Egyptian interior designer. "Also to have some American dead is good news because of what they are doing to us. God cannot forgive unfairness. When one Israeli or American dog dies, the world turns upside down, but if 500 Palestinians die, it's O.K. They even blame the Palestinians."
But some in the scientific community mourned the loss outright.
"The incident was very sad because it's a scientific activity and totally unrelated to politics," said Moneef Zoubi, director general of the Islamic Academy of Sciences, a government-financed research organization in Amman. "It's a loss of scientists and experiments that benefit humanity, no matter what their nationality was."
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