By Daniel Sobelman, Ha'aretz Correspondent Newspapers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia - two states from which, according to reports in the U.S., some of the individuals who carried out the terror attacks in New York and the Pentagon hailed - recently assertively condemned the terror acts. Egypt, which has been calling for the convening an emergency international conference against terror, has itself been the victim of fundamentalist Islamic terror in the past. The peak of such attacks was the assassination of President Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981, and the murder of hundreds of people, including tourists, senior government officials and police, by soldiers from the Jihad movement and the Jama'a al-Islamiya, which began in the middle of 1992. Egyptian newspapers began retrieving President Hosni Mubarak's warnings from their archives Thursday - warnings he has made several times in recent months to the effect that terror is "far more horrendous" than war. Egypt, as well as Saudi Arabia, warned the United States that the continuing tension in the Middle East, which has at its core the Palestinian issue, and the perception on the Arab street of complete U.S. bias in favor of Israel - would eventually come to harm American interests. During his August 18 visit to the U.S., this year, Mubarak's political adviser Osama al-Baz warned that "the voices of reason" are fading in the Middle East, and are being replaced by "extremist, fundamentalist and radical voices." Extremist voices can also be heard in Egypt. Three weeks ago, for example, Sif al-Islam Hassan al-Bana, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and head of an Egyptian legal firm, threatened to harm American interests. In a speech delivered at Al Azhar University in Cairo, he threatened to establish a secret cell that would harm American interests in the region. It appears that Egyptian public opinion is boiling, as it has been throughout the Arab world in recent months. A writer for the Jordan Times, a Jordanian daily, reported Thursday how passersby in Cairo congratulated one another after the greatest terror attack in history. A taxi driver told the paper's reporter that, "This is the best thing that has happened since the war of October [the 1973 Yom Kippur War which Egyptians view as a victory]." Nevertheless, senior Egyptian government officials had tried in recent months to make a distinction between calls for a boycott of Israeli goods and a boycott of American goods. Paradoxically, the two states whose names have been mentioned in recent days in connection with the attacks in the U.S. - Egypt and Saudi Arabia - are the two Arab states closest to Washington (the perpetrators of the attacks, it should be said, are opposition elements). These two states are also now a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Arab world. Osama bin Laden, who is considered to be the prime suspect behind the unprecedented terror attacks, is himself Saudi in origin. Bin Laden, 46, and his family, made their fortune in the construction business in Saudi Arabia, thanks to the close relations between the father of the family and the royal Saudi family. Bin Laden sees the close ties between the Saudi government and the U.S. as a heretical deed by the royal family, which revoked his Saudi citizenship in April 1994 as a result of U.S. pressure, and even tried to kill him. Because of his connections with different fundamentalist organizations, bin Laden's name has been connected with almost every terror attack that takes place. In 1979, following the invasion of the former Soviet Union into Afghanistan, the phenomenon of "the Arab Afghans," of which bin Laden is one of the central figures, emerged. This is the phenomenon of the recruiting of thousands of "holy warriors" (mujahadeen) from all parts of the Arab world - except for Jordan - to fight the foreign invader. Bin Laden was among the main recruiters and financiers of the jihad warriors. They received training and financial assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, since America at the time viewed them as a means of fighting the Soviets. On their return to their land after about a decade - following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan - the "Afghan Arabs" began to spread their Jihad doctrine in the Arab world. In practice, this was the start of their fight against the Arab regimes. Bin Laden said in an interview he once gave, that on his return to Saudi Arabia from the "Jihad war," he saw American soldiers walking around the streets and thus making them "impure." In August 1995, he called on King Fahd in an open letter to expel the American presence from the country. Terror attacks were carried out against American targets in Riyadh and Tehran in November 1995 and June 1996. As usual, the name of bin Laden was linked to the attacks, as was the name of the immediate suspect, Iran. In the meantime, starting in 1996, significant improvement began in relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two even signed an agreement this year for internal security cooperation. This after years of Iranian subversion in Saudi Arabia.
