The Arab View

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"Every Arab is watching this closely," says an Egyptian attorney who, like his neighbors, has been glued to the television in horror watching the Israeli military offensive in the Palestinian territories. "It may be worse for us even than Sept. 11 was for you - because it goes on and on," he says. "Every time you turn on the television, it's as though you were watching someone beat you." According to the New York Times, the story's impact in the Muslim world is comparable "to the way television news reports from the Vietnam War shook Americans in the 1960s. While the scale of the violence in the West Bank might not rank with that of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 or Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the current Israeli offensive is, for the first time, playing out live in Arab living rooms." The non-stop media coverage has deepened Arab outrage at Israel and its supporters, especially the United States. According to Hussein Y. Amin, an expert on the Arab media at the American University in Cairo, "It is on the national media, the local media and the satellite media. Every second, there is a new report, and there is only one message: solidarity with the Palestinians."