The Bus Attack in Egypt: A Case Study in Middle East Mythmaking

By Kurt Holden

(After a half century of Israeli deception, the best-informed Americans are likely to be the most misinformed about the Middle East. It's the result of continuous exposure to what anti-Zionist writer Alfred Lilienthal calls "mythinformation" in the US media.)

When nine Israeli tourists were killed and several seriously wounded by terrorists while traveling in a bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo Feb. 4, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately blamed Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. Netanyahu's purpose was to build a case to force the US to break off its dialogue with the PLO.

The Reagan administration initiated the dialogue in December, 1988, on the understanding that no acts of terrorism would be committed "by the PLO or any of its factions," and that the PLO chairman would both condemn any act of anti-Israeli terrorism that occurred, and discipline anyone in his organization involved.

Spreading the Lie

Netanyahu was using an unchanging Israeli technique to create his dialogue-breaking myth. As an official of the Israeli government, he first told a bald-faced lie. Then he confidently waited for it to be picked up, and elaborated, particularly in the United States, by friends of Israel in the media.

Of course there were denials, including some by honest Israeli journalists. David Makovsky of the Jerusalem Post reported in an article reprinted Feb. 16 in the Jewish Week of Queens, NY:

There is no evidence that the Palestine Liberation Organization was involved in the recent attack in Egypt on a bus carrying Israeli tourists, intelligence officials reportedly have told members of the inner cabinet. The intelligence assessment would seem to contradict remarks made by Deputy Foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the foreign press that Yasir Arafat's Fatah group is linked to the Amman-based Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack.

Instead of arguing the case, however, Israeli government officials from the top down were already promulgating a second lie. Arafat, according to this new myth, did not condemn the terrorist act. This, too, would be grounds for Israel to insist that the US break off the dialogue.

In fact, Said Kamel, the PLO representative in Cairo, immediately condemned the attack, telling the Jerusalem Post: "The PLO, which is against all types of terrorism and the loss of lives of innocent citizens, denounces [the attack], which serves only the enemies of a just peace.

Netanyahu's purpose was to build a case to force the US to break off its dialogue with the PLO.

In East Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, an Arafat relative who is regularly accused by the Israeli government of speaking for the PLO in Israeli-occupied Palestine, stated that Palestinians "condemn this act, no matter who committed it. We, as Palestinians who are suffering every day, whose children are being killed by the occupation army, cannot accept in any way the killing of innocent civilians."

The most important denunciation came directly from Arafat's headquarters. As Gil Sedan and Hugh Oergel reported it in the Washington Jewish Week of Feb. 8:

The PLO issued a statement from its Tunis headquarters condemning the bus attack and disclaiming all responsibility for it. According to the PLO, the incident underlined the need for quicker progress toward a peace settlement in the Middle East.

Such quick statements, from Cairo, East Jerusalem and Tunis, should have put the second lie to rest. However, only days later, William Safire, one of the trickiest Israel firsters in US journalism, referred in his Feb. 12 New York Times column to "the PLO, which condoned last week's slaughter of Israeli tourists in Egypt."

Then correspondent Jackson Diehl reported from Jerusalem in the Feb. 21 issue of the Washington Post that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had charged "the PLO failed to fulfil" requirements for continuing the dialogue with the US and instead "encouraged and lauded these attacks even in the midst of the dialogue." Inexplicably, Diehl's article continued:

The issue has become particularly sensitive in the wake of a terrorist attack this month on a tour bus outside Cairo in which nine Israelis died. Although the PLO is not suspected of involvement in the incident, it failed to condemn it.

Diehl's article is a typical example of the carelessness or deceit that characterizes "balanced" mainstream media reporting from the Middle East. When two top Israeli officials told two different lies, Diehl shot down one, but gave credence to the other. Through such American media "even handedness," Middle East myths are created.

One for Good Measure

Nor is the myth that the PLO failed to condemn the shooting the last lie to emerge from the tragedy. Only hours after the attack, right-wing Israeli newspapers reported that no Egyptian motorist stopped at the scene of the attack to render aid.

More conscientious Israeli journalists reported otherwise. Here's an example by Ben Lynfield, of the Jerusalem Post:

Several hundred Egyptians have phoned to congratulate Dr. Mahmoud Yasir Ramadan, the Egyptian chemist who rushed five Israelis to a hospital following the recent terrorist attack on a tour bus. 'I thank God that those five people are alive,' Ramadan said in a phone interview ... Ramadan said his one regret was that he did not have a bigger car so that 'I could have taken more people to the hospital.'

The terrorists were still shooting when Ramadan stopped at the scene. He scooped up as many survivors as he could, raced to the nearest Egyptian police station to report the attack, and then continued on to the hospital with his wounded passengers. They, in turn, told newsmen that, as they were pulling away from the scene, they could see other Egyptian motorists stopping to help.

In the next few weeks, watch the columns of such celebrated US myth makers as George Will, Jeane Kirkpatrick, A.M Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer and the ubiquitous Safire to see which myths from the Egyptian tragedy they slip into their columns. Those myths, in turn, will become part of the "history" upon which US media comments on the Middle East are based.

Kurt Holden is an author and retired filmmaker from California who divides his time between the United States and the Middle East.