The Big Lie

At one time Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser commended himself to the world as a strongman of reason, more concerned to put his impoverished country on its feet than to stir trouble in the Middle East. But Nasser has increasingly resorted to the incendiary propaganda of the totalitarian dictator, has persistently used his radio Voice of the Arabs to incite the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, who brood in bitter idleness over their lost lands across the border in Israel.

As the economic consequences of his adventurism have piled up round him, Nasser has leaped as recklessly as Hitler for the big lie. Last July, linking Israel, the U.S. and Jordan together, the Cairo Voice screamed: "Brethren in Palestine, imagine that the intention is to solve the Palestine problem. Imagine that the government of Jordan, which is serving American imperialism, wants to sell the Palestinian refugees and to remove them to Iraq . . . hand you over to your American enemy to annihilate you."

Last week, in a refinement that included names, time and places, Nasser's Voice of the Arabs began broadcasting a story that Jordan's Foreign Minister Samir Rifai had met secretly last September with Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Golda Meir near the Jordanian town of Nablus, and with King Hussein's full approval arranged to resettle Jordan's 500,000 refugees in return for $30 million that the U.S. would make available through Israel. "They will annihilate him," shrilled the Voice of the Arabs, and Cairo's newspaper ; Al Shaab urged the Palestinian Arabs to deal with Hussein as they had with his grandfather Abdullah, who was assassinated in 1951. Mrs. Meir had been on a ship in midMediterranean on her way to Marseilles and Paris the time of the alleged meeting. But the Voice's unlettered and excitable listeners in Jordan could be counted on not to know that.

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