However, it should be made known to Washington, that those hands extended to build bridges of cooperation and friendship are neither frail nor weak. Nor do the posters raised to protest the US military campaign against Iraq imply an Arab desire for a confrontation. We know that it is the selfishness of two leaders, of US President Clinton and of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, which has induced the strike. Each seeks to save his own skin, so to speak. The international balance shakes as the Iraqi people are made to suffer even more, while the world culls the favor of Israel, a country whose crimes count for a great deal more than those committed by Saddam.
Israeli history is the story of terrorizing people, and of usurping their rights and their lands.
Israeli leaders are masterminds of terrorist crimes, with their hands stained with Arab blood for as long as over 50 years back. Although Saddam is both a despot and a dictator who has offered nothing to his people but detention camps, poverty, starvation and humiliation, and although he deserves to be punished, striking Iraq is illegal. It is the people, the innocent Iraqis who are bound to suffer further from that strike. But we see the US pampering Israel, and swallowing Israeli leaders' insults. But, to the US, Iraq is a different case, a case which calls for a strike that undermines international legality and that renders anxious all Arabs and Muslims who welcome the overthrow of Saddam but who reject either the humiliation of the Iraqis or the partitioning of Iraq.