PARIS, March 24: Jordan’s Prince Hassan, the younger brother of King Hussein and uncle of King Abdallah II, says that as far as he’s concerned what is presently happening in the Middle East is in large part the fault of the European powers that be who, for much too long, have stuck their heads in the sand and effectively shirked their responsibilities.

The 55-year old prince has been in Paris for the launch of his new book — Islam Explained to Everybody. The book is evidently scheduled to become a major literary success, not only because the subject is quite timely, but also because its publishers Editions Robert Laffont have a knack at turning out runaway best-sellers.

For his part, the usually tight-lipped prince, all the while clamouring his refusal to comment on political matters of the day, did manage to place a few remarks, often of a peremptory nature, that undoubtedly shed more light on what is going on today in the world than the repeated comments of some of his more voluble but less pertinent contemporaries.

For example, the questions that his book attempts to answer, the problems that it attempts to solve, are not necessarily linked to the events of last Sept 11th. No, says Prince Hassan, the thought expressed goes back much further, to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“It’s perhaps back then that my reflection (on the world) more or less got started. The day that the Berlin Wall fell. The day when the West forgot that the periphery of its world was rather in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.”

With regard to European complaints about the United States and the autocratic nature of its power - complaints of which he’s apparently had his fill during his recent peregrinations on the Continent, Prince Hassan let it be known loud and clear that it’s perhaps necessary for Europe to put its bite where its bark is.

That is, to use an expression recently evoked by his nephew King Abdallah, if there’s a part of the world that shouldn’t try to bite and chew at the same time, it’s not necessarily America, the object of Abdallah’s complaint, but more so Europe, which is at the centre of Prince Abdallah’s concerns these days, especially as he attempts to convince his European listeners and readers to lift their heads out of the sand and take a good look at what is going on in their own part of the world.

With regard to the young Palestinian suicide bombers who, in spite of their university studies, prefer to blow themselves up rather than to integrate themselves into a society, that of the West, of which they’re often the product, Prince Hassan pointed to his student days in France, where he says he took part in the “revolution” of May-June 1968.

He noted — in his impeccable French - that there too “it seemed at the time paradoxical that the same well-brought-up, well-educated young Europeans, would suddenly plunge into revolutionary causes, indeed decide to go and support Fidel Castro. I know better than most how the young of the world can often become anti-establishment, revolutionary, indeed nihilistic.”

Above all, though, what seems to trouble him the most about today’s world concerns the European view of the Middle East. He makes reference to what he characterises as “this sense of apathy that seems to have taken Europe by storm. It’s as if they secretly wished that the Palestinians and the Israelis would battle each other to death, or until they are both worn out from exhaustion.”

Europe’s seeming inability to get anything done, just about anywhere, extends to Europe itself, says Prince Hassan, who says he perceives in the Balkans a European “domino-like sense of logic” which, he fears, “is in the process of bringing about a progressive balkanisation of an important part of the world.”

The solution to all of this, in the estimation of Prince Hassan, is more dialogue - among men, and women, also a coming together of peoples, and naturally a true willingness to bring about peace in the world.