Word: abdelal
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This capacity for denial even in the face of manifest evidence may strike Westerners as absurd, but it is deeply rooted in the Arab psyche's mixture of bravado, rhetoric and religious conviction. Arabs denied Israel's existence for decades and believed that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had a trick up his sleeve when his air force was destroyed in the first hours of the 1967 war. Fouad Subhi, a butcher at the Baqa'a refugee camp near Amman, still puts his faith in Saddam: "After he rebuilds Iraq, he will try to liberate Palestine again...
...center of this rival crisis stood Egypt's charismatic President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had seized power in 1952 and had vowed to unite the Arab world under his leadership. The Soviets encouraged him with arms and money. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles retaliated by canceling his promise to help finance the Aswan High Dam, which Nasser hoped would harness the Nile. Nasser struck back in July 1956 by seizing the Suez Canal, still legally owned by the Franco-British Suez Canal...
Saddam also fancies himself as an Arab version of Otto von Bismarck. In ! Europe more than 100 years ago, the Iron Chancellor fused German-speaking principalities into one mighty nation. Saddam remembers as well his patron Gamel Abdel Nasser, who organized Arab pride and resentment against Western hegemony. Saddam's ambition has been to use Iraqi muscle and achievement to unite the Arabs and thereby re-create the vast Abbasid Empire, which lasted 500 years. In that sense, the war in the gulf is transpiring in a time warp. It is a retrospective vision...
...world might actually rise. After all, he would be expected to lose a fight with a superpower, but he might well gain respect for standing up to the U.S. hard and long. In both the U.S. State Department and the Middle East, experts note apprehensively that Egyptian Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956 and Anwar Sadat in 1973 suffered severe military beatings yet gained heavily in prestige -- Nasser so much so that he became the predominant leader of the Arab world. True, the analogies are very far from perfect. The U.N. and U.S. in effect reversed Nasser's 1956 defeat...
...protect them from furious members of the mutawain, the country's religious police, who demanded that the women be jailed immediately. King Fahd deftly defused the dispute by declaring that a committee of religious scholars should investigate before any action was taken. The governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman Bin Abdel-Aziz, assembled a commission that rapidly decided that the women hadn't actually committed a crime. The committee found there was no specific prohibition in the Koran on driving. In fact, during the time of the Prophet, women regularly led camels across the desert. Even now, Bedouin women have regularly...