Word: bashir
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...support from around the country. In the streets of Cairo, in restaurants and hotels, Egyptians speak openly and warmly about his quest for peace. Sadat's mission is popular, and he knows it. The President, moreover, remains convinced that other Arab leaders will see the light. Tahsin Bashir, Egyptian Ambassador to the Arab League, last week told an audience at the American University in Cairo: 'Other forces in the Arab world will gradually, perhaps reluctantly, also take risks to free themselves from dogma. What he [Sadat] has done is irreversible...
Sadat's press campaign had been carefully choreographed by Tahsin Bashir, 50, a moonfaced, cigar-smoking intellectual who had served as Egypt's spokesman at the United Nations and as Arab League information officer before Sadat last year named him presidential press adviser. Bashir's first step was to abandon the censorship and tone down the anti-Zionist rhetoric that used to dominate Egyptian press policy. "If anybody photographed a camel in our streets," he says of the xenophobic old days, "it was considered treason...
...easing access to Sadat and giving journalists almost daily nuggets of news about his Middle East peace efforts, Bashir has been trying to project Sadat as a paradigm of moderation. When that image was threatened by the breakdown of talks at Aswan last March, Bashir lined up interviews for his boss with U.S. news organizations to explain Egypt's position. Bashir was a key figure behind the extensive sightseeing tours for Henry Kissinger during his Middle East peace shuttles, tours that turned evening news programs round the world into virtual travelogues for Egypt...
...cosmopolitan concord among the city's Arabs, Jews and Europeans. As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1950s, he debated with a number of young Jews who are now helping run Israel. "They were simply human beings with whom I happened to disagree," he says. Bashir has not always got along with everybody, however. He temporarily lost his government scholarship to Harvard for criticizing the nascent Nasser government, and he was fired from a foreign ministry job in 1972 for opposing the Soviet Union. "If the price of speaking freely is getting sacked now and then," says Bashir...
That candor was much in evidence last week when Bashir assisted his U.S. counterpart, Ron Nessen, at a White House press briefing. Nessen first tried to ban microphones and film crews from the session, but Bashir objected. And when Nessen got into a shouting match with a reporter over a question about Saudi Arabian antiSemitism, Bashir interrupted with a polite answer: "We don't indulge in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia or the United States." Said one White House press corps veteran: "He could teach Nessen a thing...