In light of the vital importance of the Middle East to American interests, it is curious that our media have chosen not to report Arab reactions, which have been uniformly negative, to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s vice-presidential candidacy. From America’s friends in the Persian Gulf and Egypt to its foes in the Levant and North Africa, commentators have stressed that even the pretense of U.S. impartiality in Middle Eastern affairs would be impossible should Gore win. The Syrian government-owned daily Al-Thawra expressed the general sentiment in an op-ed column (August 13):

Al Gore’s choice of Lieberman . . . cannot be reconciled with America’s role as an honest, objective and neutral mediator in the peace process . . . U.S. policy . . . is submissive to Israeli policies. There is no pure American policy. There is only Israel’s policy as carried out by the United States.

Such views prevail even among America’s Middle Eastern allies. Galal Dowidar, editor-in-chief of the pro-government Cairo daily Al Akhbar, did not mince his words (August 9):

Although the control of the Jewish lobby over U.S. affairs has reached its peak, nobody could imagine that matters would reach this level . . . [Gore’s] decision reveals his ugly face and completes the series of surrenders that Clinton started when he appointed Jewish Americans to strategic positions. With this decision, he declared that he has sold himself to Israel and the Jewish lobby.

Syria’s state-owned Al-Ba’th (August 10) even suggested that Gore’s life could be in danger because of Lieberman’s appointment:

If Gore dies, Lieberman becomes the first Jewish president in U.S. history. . . . This makes Gore the target of Jewish extremists who will not hesitate to do anything to put a Jew in the White House.

In Kuwait, the independent Al-Qabas warned on August 15 that Lieberman would inevitably have dual loyalties and that a Gore administration would forfeit the role of an honest broker in the Middle East. But the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal (August 11) stated that Gore’s decision to choose Lieberman was not surprising since the current secretary of state, secretary of defense, and the head of the National Security Council are all Jewish. “What is strange is this Arab amazement,” the paper concludes. The Beirut daily As-Safir agreed (August 10):

Whatever the result of the American presidential election . . . American positions on Arab issues will not be different. . . . The issue is the United States itself and its policies towards the region and the Arabs. The issue is not Clinton, Gore, or even Lieberman himself.

The same point was made in Al-Ba’th (August 9):

There will be no difference between the Democrat, Al Gore, who chose an extreme Zionist as his running mate, and the Republican, George Bush, who does not hide his bias toward Israel and his blind commitment to its demands.

On this point, informed Israelis agree with their Arab neighbors. The Jerusalem Post (August 14) smugly noted that Lieberman’s Jewishness is not important since the Middle Eastern policies of the two major parties are indistinguishable:

Nowadays, Israel does not have to be concerned about damage from good US-Arab or even US-Palestinian relations. Such links can aid the peace process and give Washington leverage toward lowering antagonism toward Israel. Of course, the fact that Israel has so little to worry about is perhaps the most important point in viewing this American election from Jerusalem. Even without the presence of Lieberman on the ticket, this would probably still be true.

Sticking to the Middle East, it seems that sanctions will remain in place against Iraq regardless of who wins the White House. An editorial in the Jordan Times (September 1) warned of the Arab “sense of outrage at the suffering being inflicted on the Iraqi people”:

The sanctions on Iraq are imposed notably by the US, the main broker in peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, and the US, for its own unfathomable reasons, wishes to prolong the suffering of the Iraqi people. Woe betide anyone who dares to cross it.

In Europe, however, there is growing opposition to the embargo, and the tenth anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has renewed the debate on maintaining sanctions. Le Monde Diplomatique, a respected French monthly, published an article entitled “The Endless War on Iraq.” An editorialist in the Irish Times (August 4) stressed that the sanctions only undermine the Iraqi people’s desire to topple Saddam from power:

A broken people is unable to resist the regime . . . If the Iraqi people are to confront the regime they must be given the chance to do so through recovering their self-confidence by rebuilding their infrastructure and resources.

The Irish Times also had harsh words for U.S. policy in another conflict-ridden part of the world. The leading Dublin daily warned that, far from bringing peace, Clinton’s “war on drugs” will drag Colombia deeper into bloodshed (August 23):

Ironically, with Clinton keen to enhance the image of his presidency, Plan Colombia may leave a stain on his legacy and present a poisoned chalice for his successor. It also poses a problem for his European allies who will need to unite if they are not to be dragged into the Colombian quagmire. Far from helping Colombia to “strengthen its democracy,” Clinton’s policies have done the opposite. The Pentagon has formed an alliance with an army that refuses to disengage from drug trafficking and from the notorious “paramilitaries.”

“This is not Vietnam; neither is it Yankee imperialism,” Clinton said of his $1.3 billion aid package. “Colombia’s democracy is under attack,” he told Colombians in a televised address, assuring them that U.S. aid would be used to promote economic and judicial reform and provide training and equipment for the country’s military in its war on drug traffickers. But most of the aid will go to the Colombian military and police, both notorious for their “human rights” abuses. “[O]nly $240 million of the $1.3 billion is actually going to economic and judicial reform,” the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant—among others—pointed out on September 1. This view was shared by the Independent (September 3):

This most shameless of US presidents will be out of office in four months, leaving someone else to sort out the mess. Opinion polls have suggested that the electorate is worried about drugs, and that the Democrats are seen as soft on the issue. Mr. Clinton is doing Al Gore a favor, at no political cost to himself, while also delighting US arms manufacturers with substantial orders, not least the companies whose helicopters will be part of the aid package. You do not have to be a cynic to guess, correctly, that they also happen to be important donors . . . to the Democratic Party.

El Coireo, a Spanish daily, concluded (September 1) that Colombia differs from Vietnam in this respect: The goal is not to liberate a people from the thieat of communism, but “to liberate the North American drug market from its natural sources.” This is precisely why the war on drugs in Colombia will fail, and why Clinton is involved in “one of the most immoral American interventions of modem times,” as Simon Jenkins wrote in the Times of London (September 1). Jenkins argues that the drug trade should be legalized so that countries can regulate and tax it. Without such reform,

gangsters will stay rich, the poor will stay poor, the addicts [will] stay addicted . . . [and] half of Latin America will be politically enslaved to the new American imperialism.

The other half of Latin America may take revenge by enslaving the United States. “North America Doesn’t Need Borders,” the Wall Street Journal proclaimed on August 29, while a week earlier the Financial Times opined that

The best way to deal with [illegal immigration] is to legitimize labor flows and ensure that Mexican workers in the US enjoy the same legal rights and protections as their local counterparts.

The business community welcomed the demand of Mexico’s new president, Vicente Fox, that the United States allow millions more Mexicans to immigrate and work here. His desire is natural: Both Fox and his defeated PRI predecessors belong to Mexico’s white power elite and, thus, wish to unload many of their desolate and uneducated mestizos and Indians on the United States. The short-term result will be the lowering of America’s material, cultural, and civilizational standards. But the ultimate price of unlimited immigration is the destruction of the Western world. On September 3, the Guardian—a left-liberal paper if there ever was one— published a special report on demographic trends entitled “The last days of a white world.” Analyzing demographic trends in the United States, the article provides a glimpse of what is in store for the West:

The shifting sands of the US reflect wider-and highly controversial—changes elsewhere in the world. It is an area in which few demographers dare to tread for fear of being accused of racism.

According to the Guardian, 98 percent of the growth in the world’s population by 2025 will take place in the Third World. A century ago, Europe had a quarter of the world’s population, and three times that of Africa; by 2050, it will account for just seven percent of the world’s population—and have only a third that of Africa:

The ageing and declining populations of predominantly white nations have prompted calls for more immigration: Edmund Stoiber, the premier of Bavaria in southern Germany, called on Germans to have more babies as an alternative to more immigrants. . . . [A] demographer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of being called racist, said: “It’s a matter of pure arithmetic that, if nothing else happens, non-Europeans will become a majority and whites a minority in the UK. That would probably be the first time an indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority in its historic homeland.”

The paper quotes British National Party chairman Nick Griffin, who sees a major cause for alarm in this trend:

Every people under the sun have a right to their place under the sun, and the right to survive. If people predicted that Indians would be a minority in India in 2100, everyone would be calling it genocide.

Such views, of course, remain unfit to print in America’s “mainstream” press. At this rate, we’ll soon wish we could trade places with spotted owls and sperm whales.