Israel Matzav

Bassam, my dejected Iraqi friend

LIKE SO many Arabs, Bassam's present is so bleak he lives only for his future. He has completely shut out the violent world around him, feeding instead on inner strength.

"I will keep fighting for my aim even if it takes 20 years. I'll knock [on] every door, I'll ask lay and wise persons, and I will do it, not for me but for my entity," Bassam wrote last month.

To hasten his hike up the hill, at his family's urging Bassam escaped Baghdad's bloodshed for Beirut's beachside beauty.

That was late May, but the violence he fled has caught up with him. Just before Hizbullah's self-aggrandizing attack against Israel, Bassam was especially enthusiastic.

"I don't know where to start from. The beautiful city [I] am working in (Beirut), the home that my family has been compelled to leave it (Dora), the GRE [and] TOEFL tests… or the combination of felling [sic] lonely and safe in same time," he said in an unusually upbeat tone.

Now that Hizbullah has again dragged Israel into open warfare, Bassam's attitude has soured tremendously. He did not perform as well as hoped on the GRE and TOEFL exams, so he registered to take them again in August. But with Beirut under attack, the tests - a major impediment to studying in America - have been postponed indefinitely, he said.

BASSAM'S IRE is not directed toward Israel, but Hizbullah.

"Damn them and their stupid ideology," he said, recounting an incident where he was threatened for browsing Web sites depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

"I bet if Muslims here smelled a Jewish person a mile away, they'll pursue him till taking him a prisoner or killing him…. The matter for liberals would be similar if one opened his mouth saying his mind," he wrote bitterly.

...

FOR AS PAINFUL as Islamic terrorism is for its non-Muslim targets, it is the Muslim world that truly suffers. The war between "Islam and the West" - as it is so often labeled - pales in comparison to Islam's intra-cultural conflict. Terrorists cannot bring down democratic societies; we are too strong and they are too weak. But terrorists are wrecking havoc on the very people they feign to protect.

When the smoke finally clears from this mini-war both sides will bury their dead, but Israel will continue in prosperity while the Arabs will continue in misery. Why? Because Israel wants peace but does not need it, while the Arabs - inasmuch as those dictating Arab politics - need it but do not want it.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:14 PM