Excerpts from an article titled "Suicidal Ignorance", written by Edward Said, published in the Cairo based Al-Ahram Weekly Online (15-21 November)

Both George Bush and Tony Blair have realised that indeed something needs to be done about Palestine, even though I believe there is no serious intention of changing US foreign policy to accommodate what is going to be done. In order for that to happen, the US must look at its own history ....

No, we are told over and over, American history is about freedom and democracy, and only those: no mistakes can be admitted, or radical reconsiderations announced. Everyone else must change their ways; America remains as it is. Then Bush declares that the US favours a Palestinian state with recognised boundaries next to Israel and adds that this has to be done according to UN resolutions, without specifying which ones, and while refusing to meet Yasser Arafat personally.

This may seem like a contradictory step also, but in fact it isn't. For the past six weeks there has been an astonishingly unrelenting and minutely organised media campaign in the US more or less pressing the Israeli vision of the world on the American reading and watching public, with practically nothing to counter it. Its main themes are that Islam and the Arabs are the true causes of terrorism, Israel has been facing such terrorism all its life, Arafat and Bin Laden are basically the same thing, most of the US's Arab allies (especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia) have played a clear negative role in sponsoring anti-Americanism, supporting terrorism, and maintaining corrupt, undemocratic societies. Underlying the campaign has been the (at best) dubious thesis that anti-Semitism is on the rise.

All of this adds up to a near-promise that anything to do with Palestinian (or Lebanese) resistance to Israeli practices - never more brutal, never more dehumanising and illegal than today - has to be destroyed after (or perhaps while) the Taliban and Bin Laden have been destroyed. That this also happens to mean, as the Pentagon hawks and their right-wing media machine keep reminding Americans relentlessly, that Iraq must be attacked next, and indeed that all the enemies of Israel in the region along with Iraq must totally be brought low, is lost on no one. So brazenly has the Zionist propaganda apparatus performed in the weeks since 11 September that very little opposition to these views is encountered.

Lost in this extraordinary farrago of lies, bloodthirsty hatred, and arrogant triumphalism is the simple reality that America is not Israel, and Bin Laden not the Arabs or Islam.

This concentrated pro-Israeli campaign, over which Bush and his people have little real political control, has kept the US administration from anything like a real re-assessment of US policies towards Israel and the Palestinians. Even during the opening rounds of the American counter-propaganda campaign directed to the Muslim and Arab world, there has been a remarkable unwillingness to treat the Arabs as seriously as all other peoplesÔ