CAIRO -- Whether he's in his 18th-floor office in Cairo's World Trade Center, or at his villa near the Pyramids, lawyer and law professor A. Kamal Aboulmagd moves in very different circles than most Egyptians. In his long and distinguished career, he has held ministerial posts in the Egyptian government, served as an adviser to the crown prince of Kuwait, held innumerable positions on panels and advisory committees, and devoted himself to human rights issues. He has lived in America and waxes poetic about the color of the leaves in autumn.
But his opinion of the United States today is not far removed from that of Egyptians of much more modest resources.
The recurring image of Palestinian children throwing stones at Israeli tanks and the way such images are viewed in the United States is a major source of anti-Americanism in Egypt, left, and the rest of the Arab world.
(Osama Silwadi -- Reuters)
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"He deserves to be in the Guinness Book of World Records," Aboulmagd says of President Bush. "He has changed the minds of the most people, about America, in the shortest period of time. Five years ago, they would say they like America, that it is an open society."
But not today, according to Aboulmagd, who bemoans the historically low esteem in which America is held in the Arab world. In Egypt, according to a highly regarded Pew Research Center poll two years ago, only 6 percent of people held a positive view of the United States.
And if a Zogby International poll in June, commissioned by the Arab American Institute, is to be believed, in the past two years unfavorable views of America among Egyptians rose from 76 percent to a whopping 98 percent. That makes Egypt the most anti-American of the six Arab countries polled by Zogby (3,300 Arabs living in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt were questioned).
Perhaps most ominous is yet another Pew poll, released in March, which found that Osama bin Laden's numbers were far better than Bush's in several Muslim countries.
Whether all of this represents momentary frustration and venting, or the settling in of a deeper loathing, cannot be determined now. But talk to people in this part of the world, and it's clear that they feel themselves part of a new and implacably anti-American worldview.
It hasn't always been this way.
Hani Shukrallah, the liberal editor of the English-language Al-Ahram weekly in Cairo, remembers that Richard Nixon was received as a hero, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands, when he visited Cairo in 1974.
"To see the shift in 30 years, it is really quite amazing," says Shukrallah, who traces the beginnings of the current, more strident anti-Americanism to 2000, when Palestinians rose up against Israel in the second intifada. "It isn't just a matter of intensity. Before the second intifada and all that followed, there was an ambivalence in people's sense of the U.S. It's arrogant, yes, and it's imperial, but it's a democracy. Now, anything from the U.S. is seen as part of a design to bring us down, to humiliate us."
The discourse of anti-Americanism in this part of the world comes with some predictable patterns. First, an apology. The speaker says he or she really hates to say this, and please don't take offense, but what on Earth has happened to America? Then he situates himself as standing apart from other, less temperate haters of America. Strong words carry an implicit "If I feel this way, imagine what other, less enlightened souls must feel." And so he says, for instance, that he has lived in the United States, or has children who study there, or normally doesn't hold strong political views, but . . .
And then he lets fly, torrents of frustration about the perceived idiocy of current American policy, the gross unfairness of how the United States deals with the Palestinians, the hypocrisy of supporting dictators who have oil while preaching about democracy. One might, perhaps, have heard each of these individual complaints before; but now they are woven together into a universal theory of how America works and why it behaves as it does.
And in that, it resembles nothing so much as the ever-more refined theories that spouses develop about each other in a marriage gone horribly wrong. It seems the kind of resentment typical of someone who has settled into a well-practiced, thoroughgoing, never-get-divorced life of hatred with another person. It is about the trigger words that set off old tempests, and the conviction that every action of the other person is part of a methodical, devious effort to find and stab the Achilles' heel.
One of those trigger words is "crusade" -- which recalls another era of religious strife when Christianity was militant and Europe was hungry for the blood and the land of "infidels." When President Bush used it, in answer to a question at a Sept. 16, 2001, exchange with reporters at the White House, it was considered by some in this country as an ill-advised, clumsy but probably spontaneous choice of words.
