Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1999, page 138

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Before Each Issue of This Magazine...

We spend three weeks in total immersion—reading everything sent in by writers—regulars and irregulars—selecting, editing and copy reading texts, selecting photos, cutting everything to fit the space available, proofreading, and doing some writing ourselves. The only television programs we watch ordinarily are the news shows, but as deadlines approach even these get whittled down. We also stop reading fluff in the newspapers and confine ourselves to the serious stuff, and have less and less time even for that. Three weeks, including two weekends and parts of a third, totally disappear.

Then, Ta Da!

On a Monday we work all night to get the last pages to the printer on Tuesday morning. (Big globs have been going throughout the previous week.) Then we all go home to sleep. Wednesday we have a last chance to catch glitches or make minor changes at the printing plant. Thursday it’s on the presses and on Friday the magazine goes into the mail to you. But since Wednesday night of that week we’ve gone back to reading fluff again along with the serious stuff.

Ever Since Binyamin Netanyahu…

Visited Washington in January 1998 for his first serious confrontation with President Bill Clinton—which mysteriously coincided with the first Monica Lewinsky revelations—we’d been looking at Monica Lewinsky’s photo daily during our fluff-reading intervals. Then, roughly a year later when impeachment fizzled, she pretty much vanished. We gathered that when she resurfaced for a comic turn on Saturday Night Live this spring, she did a good job with the acting but was looking a bit more matronly since the end of her 14 months of fame. After putting out our June issue we could hardly wait to get back to the fluff pages to see how…

Matronly Monica Looked.

But the only puffy-faced person we could find on the fluff pages, day after day, was Slobodan Milosevic. Bill Clinton’s key role in helping Milosevic lose his fourth war in eight years—and thus restoring Milosevic’s credibility with his people, who have a thing for martyrs—has also done almost as much to restore Clinton’s political credibility as his fling with Monica did to lose it. If only he would show the same political courage in starting to restore the Palestinians to their homeland, or ending the embargo that is not hurting Saddam Hussain but is killing his people. That combined with Kosovo would give Clinton a real foreign policy legacy. But, at most, presidents only have eight years to leave the world in better shape than they found it. And Bill Clinton frittered away six of his eight years on affairs that weren’t foreign.

So It’s Still Up to Us.

All of us who are activists in the cause of an even-handed American Middle East policy. And though things in the Middle East may be getting worse, things in the U.S. are getting better. Read some of our coverage of the May 1999 convention of the American Muslim Council (AMC), starting on p. 104 of this issue. Note first that people who a few years ago were still debating whether it was Islamic to participate in a non-Islamic political system at all are now debating the best way to harness their political potential to make that system clean, just and moral or—as they would put it—Islamic. And note also that leaders of all the national Islamic groups participate in the conventions of each of them. They’ve barely begun to organize politically and already they appear to have overcome the kind of disunity that plagued the Arab American groups for more than 15 years.

In the Next Issue We’ll Describe…

The June 1999 convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) which was just as inspiring, but was still in session as we completed this issue. Participants, many of them the same people who participated in the AMC convention, came to this year’s convention much better informed than a few years ago (and we think we played the major role in that) and went away at least as inspired and enthusiastic as ever before. The separate AMC and ADC days on Capitol Hill also concentrated on the same issues, such as opposition to the use of secret evidence by the Justice Department and the INS, opposition to moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, lifting sanctions on Iraq, opposition to airport profiling, and advocacy for tying U.S. foreign aid to an even-handed U.S. Middle East policy.

We’ll Also Tell You About Coordination...

Between the American Muslim Political Coordination Council (AMPCC) and the Council of Presidents of Arab American Organizations. Not only have most of the Muslim groups and most of the Arab-American groups got their acts together, the two roof organizations are coordinated as well. And that has the other side very worried. With unity, the two communities can beat the Israel lobby at its own game. Maybe very soon we’ll tell you a bit about what Israel, not just its U.S. lobby, is doing to try to fracture both communities. The pieces are falling into place very rapidly. But we figure if our readers are informed and on guard, the conspiracy—and it’s a big one involving collaborators in the U.S. government—won’t work. We’d tell you now but we want to separate the dupes from the doers before we name names.

So There’s Work to Be Done.

Please help make sure that we’re still here to play our role in helping to keep the ethnic, religious, and other Middle East peace activists informed and working together. The first of our two annual funding appeals will probably have arrived at your home just about two weeks before you read this. If you haven’t responded already, please do so now. Although everyone praises the Washington Report, talk is cheap and…

Its Finances Are Precarious as Ever.

Please use the envelope you’ve already received, or the postage-paid one in this issue, to join our Choir of Angels in time to get your name into next month’s listing. Or, if you can’t give that much, send as much as you possibly can and…

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