By Lawrence Henry on 10.12.06 @ 12:07AM
In praise of Anwar Sadat, martyred 25 years ago.
Salim Mansur wrote a column Saturday, October 7 in the Toronto
Sun in which he reflected that our present Islamist troubles
began 25 years ago, when, on "Oct. 6, 1981, Anwar Sadat, president
of Egypt, was gunned down while attending a military parade
commemorating the Yom Kippur War (also known as the Ramadan War) of
October 1973 between Arabs and Israelis."
As Mansur pointed out, "Sadat's murderers belonged to the
extreme fanatical sect, Takfir wal-Hijra (translation:
excommunication and flight) -- an offshoot of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the main fundamentalist party in Egypt."
In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini's radical Shiite movement had
ousted the Shah of Iran and taken over the Persian government, as
well as capturing 52 American hostages from our embassy. Sadat's
murder was of a piece with that movement.
The reason for Sadat's assassination? He had decided to make
peace with Israel, and had reached out to Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin, who responded to his overtures. Sadat traveled to
Israel, and later signed the Camp David Accords of 1978. I remember
Sadat and Begin paraded before the cameras by President Jimmy
Carter, who forced the two into a three-way two-hand handshake of
solidarity, which Carter would not let go. Sadat, a pipe smoker,
had his pipe in his mouth, and was beginning to drool by the time
the grinning Carter finally allowed the six-hand shake to be
released.
HOW DIFFERENT IT WAS BACK THEN. We in the United States identified
Israel's enemies simply as "Arabs," and saw no real distinction of
motive. We had not begun to understand Islamic fundamentalism.
There were simply episodes in the ongoing Israel-Arab conflict,
which sometimes broke into outright war, in which the Israelis
kicked the Arabs' butts. Interspersed were horrifying incidents of
what we then called terrorism, which involved kidnappings, machine
gun murders, and the like -- the 1972 kidnapping and slaughter of
the Israeli Olympic team at Munich being an archetypical
example.
I had been married once, and divorced, and had moved to
California. Many of my former in-laws were Israelis. I had
identified with the conflict.
On the day the newspapers headlined, "Sadat Says, 'No More
War,'" I sat down on the curb next to the news box near the Santa
Monica library and I cried.
SADAT'S ASSASSINATION ITSELF was theatrically horrible. He was
sitting in a grandstand erected alongside a wide empty piece of
tarmac at an airfield, reviewing a procession of tanks and troops.
Suddenly, from those ranks of disciplined Egyptian soldiers, a band
of assassins -- in uniform -- bearing machine guns ran toward the
reviewing stand, stood in front and at the corners of the seats,
and hosed the reviewing party with bullets.
It was said that, when Sadat realized his fate, he stood up to
take the bullets in his chest.
Now, how different was it right here, in the United States? One
of our most popular television programs was Saturday Night
Live, which occupied a position of informal political
influence and expression similar to The Daily Show now.
The Saturday after Sadat's death, the SNL troupe put on a silent
skit, all solemn, where a camera followed the wreckage in a
grandstand, and a hand was seen picking up first one trademark of
Sadat, then another: a pair of broken horn-rimmed glasses, a
pipe.
Today, our mainstream media seems to have no sympathy, other
than that programmed by political correctness. We made fun of
President Carter regularly, but not meanly. Television could
express genuine sorrow -- recall Jim McKay's grief-laden, "They're
all gone" from Munich in 1972 -- and not just the smirk of the
smart aleck.
"In his memoir, Search of Identity, Sadat explained his
motive," Mansur wrote. "He awoke to the reality, as he described
it, that peace in the region required scaling the walls that
enclosed Arabs and Israelis in a relationship of mutual distrust,
fear and hate. He had waged war boldly for Arab honour, he said,
and would strive for peace for the children of Arabs and Jews with
no less courage."
How different it was.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
topics:
Trade, Mainstream Media, Television, Islam, Law, Military, Iran, Israel
