Failure and Credibility

...Ethiopian Copts are again being harassed in Egypt—not by the authorities but by militants of the Moslem Brotherhood...

...Even though it failed, the rescue mission has strengthened America's moral credibility...

...Apparently not...

...Elbowed aside by the bigger, more influential Churches, priests of the ancient Coptic Church have been reduced since Ottoman times to squatting on the roof where they have built a tiny chapel...

...The apparent unwillingness of the U.S...

...Let us have done with you...

...in fact, it is an ecclesiastical forum, carved up between competing Churches that watch each other's privileges jealously...

...This was alarming: American technology was one of the few things one had felt one could rely on in a deranged world...

...The Copts' ancestors built the pyramids and the Sphinx...

...Then, in April, a "semi-official" source said that they would have liked to protect Libyan exiles in London against assassins hired by Colonel Qaddafi for fear that a dispute with Libya might lose Britain "hundreds of millions of pounds' worth of export orders...

...Cannot North Sea oil fuel a more positive policy...

...We're in hock, economically and diplomatically, and all we can do is pretend we like it...

...Alone Forty years ago, as the Nazis set about their conquest of Europe, and Neville Chamberlain's Conservative government dithered in London, a Conservative member of the House of Commons named L. S. Amery rose and addressed the Prime Minister in the words Oliver Cromwell used to the Rump Parliament in April 1653: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing...

...It is arguable that only partition of Lebanon into Moslem and Christian states can save its Christians from extinction as a community...

...Yet in the three months preceding April 25, America's military credibility was plummeting— in Europe and the Middle East—precisely because Washington had so far failed to try to rescue the hostages...

...But had not Queen Elizabeth been obliged to accept the indignity of being declared an "honorary man" last year so that she might visit Arabia's oil-rulers...

...Failure and Credibility My wife has never lacked courage —she has carried a gun in her handbag for me in more than one troublespot— but she ran from the room when the BBC World Service told us of the failure of the American rescue mission in Iran...

...Persecution of the Copts is as outrageous as the attempts that have been made from time to time by Moslem extremists to crush the Lebanese Christians and "push the Jews into the sea...

...But since then, while Sadat has grown in stature, Begin has shrunk...

...But first someone will have to stand up in the Knesset and say: "Thanks for the peace treaty...

...If the Arabs pulled their money out of London the pound would soon be dancing sambas with the cruzeiro...

...There would be fewer problems in the Near East today if Arab governments had treated their non-Arab subjects—the Kurds and Jews of Iraq, the blacks of Sudan, as well as Copts and Berbers—in a less colonialist manner...

...A British official said the other day: "Oil is now less of a worry than financial pressure...

...The Berbers have their own language and culture (Saint Augustine was a Berber), but both have generally been denigrated by the Arabs...

...Already, back in the Middle Ages, the Berber philosopher Ibn Khaldun was complaining of the "domineering spirit" of the Sunni Arabs—and they didn't have oil in those days...

...The Lebanese Christians trace their history back to the men who supplied Solomon with timber and were (according to Herodotus) the first to sail around Africa...

...After the grief came the shock of realizing that the mission was aborted, incredibly, by sloppy logistics—a degree of inadequacy that amounted to virtual sabotage...

...Comical was the indignant howl of Marxists and "non-aligned" spokesmen against Carter's "military electioneering": Their own favorite regimes do not, of course, permit electioneering of that kind—or any other...

...Meanwhile, over in the Maghreb, Algeria's indigenous Berber community has been reacting with cautious demonstrations and strikes against discrimination by the authoritarian Arab-dominated Algerian government...

...Egyptian Copts were persecuted during Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser's dictatorship, and many had to emigrate...

...The Egyptian and Lebanese Christians are descendants of their countries' original pre-Islamic inhabitants...

...And his talent for losing Israel friends and alienating its sympathizers is amazing...

...Far from helping Sadat to cultivate friendship for Israel in Egypt—a development Egypt's emotional public was ready for on the morrow of the peace treaty—he has revived Egyptian hostility...

...Much criticism has come from Gaul-lists and other Rightwingers who profess to doubt America's willingness to risk all to save Europe...

...Under Palestinian and local Sunni pressure, Christians have recently been pouring out of Lebanon and seeking asylum in Western Europe, Australia and America...

...Jerusalem's successive rulers have sometimes had to employ Moslems to clean its windows and carry out repairs rather than risk the violent dispute that might be provoked by hiring Christians of the wrong denomination...

...Britons were more appalled by their own government's abjection than by the film...

...Abject A British Foreign Office man said he thought me "a little unkind" to make a character in a recently-published novel observe: "The FO would put its entire female staff up for auction in Mecca tomorrow if it thought that would win it six months of Arab goodwill...

...Criticism of President Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has ranged from the useful to the comical...

...Certainly not the Western powers, obsessed with their energy problems...

...It needs a Prime Minister who can shake hands with Egyptians and Palestinians and look as if he means it...

...Need Britain's posture in the Mideast be quite so supine...

...But who cares...

...When, speaking of the PLO, he says, "We will not negotiate with terrorists," he evokes sardonic laughter, not understanding...

...Carrington has no self-respect," said a Labor member of Parliament...

...Israel is now almost as lonely as Britain was in 1940, and its present government appears as unrealistic and uninspiring as Chamberlain's was...

...but now, in the name of God, go...

...His appointment of a former leader of the terrorist Stern gang as his Foreign Minister could not have been more badly timed...

...In fairness to the Arabs, it must be admitted that European imperialists, too, sometimes trampled on the cultures of the "natives" whose territories they occupied, and that white settlers in the Americas did not always respect the rights of Indians and blacks...

...The Jewish state needs to recover that enlightened image which once won it worldwide sympathy...

...There are now few countries outside North America and Western Europe (and not many in Western Europe) where both media and courts enjoy that much independence...

...Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin earned a paragraph in history by signing the peace treaty with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat...

...I am happy," the Egyptian told me, "to think that somewhere in the Holy Land there may be two or three chickens bought with my money...

...One would hesitate to criticize Arab states on this account if not for the fact that many Arab spokesmen—particularly the envoys of governments notorious for flouting human rights—are inclined to pose at the UN and elsewhere as ardent anticolonialists...

...In the name of God, go...

...That was before the news that Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, had been obliged to grovel before Saudi Arabia's rulers and apologize for that famous TV film on the execution of an adulterous Saudi princess and her lover...

...And, during the winter, Margaret Thatcher had written a humble letter of apology to the Prime Minister of North Yemen, Abdel-Ghani, and sent a junior minister to softsoap him, because a British firm with a claim against North Yemen for breach of contract had obtained an injunction against a Yemen Airways Boeing 727 and had it impounded in a London airport...

...The Israeli was a good player and put his winnings in a blue-and-white collecting-box for Jewish agricultural settlements...

...Instead of encouraging the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza to form autonomous institutions that would have lessened the influence of the PLO hardliners in Lebanon, he has acted like a PLO recruiting agent...

...Shortly afterward Chamberlain resigned and was succeeded by Winston Churchill...

...Britons can at least congratulate themselves that their government was unable to prevent the screening of the TV film or to persuade the courts to release the Boeing before the North Yemenis had lodged a bond in partial settlement of the British firm's claim...

...The next Copt I spoke to was sitting on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem...

...It ought to be the world's most moving Christian shrine...

...Israel has not lost its heroic aura, but heroism alone has never been a guarantee of survival...

...Useful was the Pakistani government's declaration of its solidarity with Iran "in the face of American aggression": We shall now, presumably, hear less from the map-gazers who favor wasting resources in an effort to make General Zia's regime a bulwark of the free world...

...Too many of Begin's decisions are based on dogma rather than common sense (of course Jews have a right to live in Hebron, but the issue is not worth starting a fight or undermining a peace treaty for...

...Several Churches—though not the Anglicans, Lutherans and other Protestants—believe that the Holy Sepulchre marks the site of the Crucifixion and houses the tomb of Jesus...

...Colonial The first Copt I ever knew was a minor Egyptian diplomat who played bridge from time to time with his Israeli opposite number...

...to take risks to save its own people inevitably cast doubts on its readiness to help others...

...Thousands of us here in Europe shared something of the anguish most Americans must have felt on hearing of the debacle...

...The priest I spoke to up there showed me a beautiful old Bible and spoke of the problems facing Christians in an increasingly intolerant Middle East...