U.S. Partly to Blame, Arabs Say

The suicide bombing attacks in the Saudi capital of Riyadh this week left many Arabs appalled at the death toll and frustrated that the United States seems blind to the anger triggered by its Mideast policies.

People on the street, policy experts and major newspapers alike expressed a mix of sympathy for the victims and exasperation with U.S. leaders. Many Arabs believe that the U.S. adheres to a double standard, unleashing its fury against Muslim Iraq but ignoring transgressions by other countries.

At the same time, the perpetrators of the car bomb attacks -- which killed 34, including at least seven Americans -- found few defenders. The fact that the attack claimed the lives of civilians and fellow Arabs didn’t play well in the region.

To some experts, the act smacked of desperation.

“You have a war going on against terror, and the terrorists feel they are losing,” said Abdel Moneim Said, director of Egypt’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “They haven’t found a big popular response to the war in Iraq, and they want to revitalize that kind of spirit against the U.S. and foreigners. They look like random killers. I know people are angry, but that does not translate into support for killing civilians.”

The sophistication of the terrorist attack triggered speculation that it might have been years in the making, planned long before the Iraq war began.

“I think even without Iraq this attack would have taken place,” said Farid Khazen, head of the political science department at American University in Beirut. “Their motivation is religious -- they want a war against the infidels. There is a great deal of anti-Americanism these days, but it’s one thing to be anti-American and another to see people killed.”

Commentator Hazem Abdel Rahman was among those who, while condemning the attacks, linked them to U.S. actions.

“Even though they were criminal, suicidal acts, the explosions that took place in Riyadh shows that American policy reaps what it sows,” he wrote in Egypt’s leading newspaper, Al Ahram.

Ahmad, a Lebanese student who declined to give his full name, said the bombing should force a closer examination of U.S. policy in the Mideast.

“These attacks are going to keep happening, because each time the U.S. does things to humiliate the Arabs and Muslims, it is encouraging these fundamentalists,” he said.

But hatred and resentment are no excuse for murder, said Syrian merchant Amin Rammal.

“God did not say go kill people and bomb them even if they were bastards,” he said. “I hate what my neighbor does to me, but I will not torch his house. On the contrary, I visit him when he is sick -- this is what God wants us to do.”

The attacks also drew condemnation from Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, who has been frozen out by Washington for allegedly failing to rein in militants, and from Arab League chief Amr Moussa.

Arab League spokesman Hisham Youssef said extremism is fed by U.S. favoritism toward Israel and by unilateral military actions against nations such as Iraq.

“The American policy is not conducive to defeating terrorism, whether in the occupied territories or in Iraq. What we are seeing now are repercussions of that policy,” Youssef said.

Palestinian newspaper columnist Adli Sadek wrote in the Al Hayat al Jadeeda daily that the U.S. could not uproot terrorism unless it “adopted clean and just policies, quit its greedy ambitions in Iraq, ended its bias toward the killers in the occupied Palestinian land and stopped threatening others.”

Others think that the attackers were targeting Saudi Arabia more than the United States.

“These specific explosions were prepared two to three years ago, I think,” said Abdulaziz bin Salamah, a journalist and professor of communications at King Saud University in Riyadh. “There is distrust of the U.S. about Iraq, because it wasn’t done under law.... But it was a disagreement, not to the point of anger. It would never get to the point where society accepts actions like this.”

Reuters was used in compiling this report.