Tiny Minority of Extremists Update: “Islamists assail U.S. and its ‘puppets,'” from the New Duranty Times, aka the New York Times, via IHT, with thanks to DFS:
DAMASCUS The main weekly prayer sermons in mosques from Mecca to Marrakesh, Morocco, on Friday underscored the sharp contrast between the swelling David-versus-Goliath glamour Arabs associate with Hezbollah’s fight and the utter antipathy toward the United States and its regional allies for doing so little to stop yet another Arab country from collapsing into bloodshed.
“Our brothers are being killed in Lebanon and no one is responding to their cries for help,” said Sheik Hazza’a al-Maswari, an Islamist member of Parliament, in his Friday sermon at the Mujahid mosque in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. “Where are the Arab leaders? Do they have any skill other than begging for a fake peace outside the White House? We don’t want leaders who bow to the White House.”
The tone of the sermons underscored how the lack of a cease-fire in Lebanon is both further tarnishing the image of the United States in the Arab world as being solely concerned with Israel’s welfare and making its allied regimes look increasingly like puppets.
“What is creating radicalism in the region is not authoritarian regimes, mainly it is American policy in the region – survey after survey shows that,” said Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, whose polls have charted the steady decline of America’s image among Arabs.
This view is ahistorical, taking no account of the general constancy of the jihad ideology across the ages, whatever the pretext of the moment may have been.