There’s something about Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” that seems to have caught the imagination not only of the judges at Cannes, but of the American people. Some of this is merely a clever marketing campaign; there was another publicity stunt to promote the movie yesterday in New York. It would be a mistake to overstate the significance of this. The movie’s receipts for the opening weekend were strong for a documentary but nothing extraordinary for a commercial release. We detect in the Fahrenheit Phenomenon echoes of the Howard Dean campaign — press attention that mistakenly interprets a small but intensely passionate phenomenon as a mass movement.

Still, to whatever extent that the “Fahrenheit 9/11” phenomenon has crossed over beyond the usual suspects of Dean, Kucinich, Nader, and Chirac supporters to touch a chord with the broader public, our own guess is that it has something to do with the movie’s depiction of President Bush as being too soft on the Saudis. No doubt it is one of the few things upon which we and Mr. Moore can agree. Indeed, hostility toward Saudi Arabia — which operates its petroleum industry as part of a price-fixing cartel, where women are not allowed to drive, where religious freedom does not exist — isn’t a fringe sentiment in America, but a mainstream one.

Not that President Clinton is immune from accusations similar to those made against Mr. Bush. We somehow don’t recall a major initiative — or any initiative for that matter — during the Clinton administration to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia or to press the kingdom for women’s rights or religious freedom. The Saudis gave the University of Arkansas $20 million as Mr. Clinton rose to national prominence. Last we checked, donors to the Clinton presidential library weren’t being disclosed.

It’s an underappreciated fact, though, that Mr. Moore himself is actually closer to the Saudis on the substantive issues than is either Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush. Here is Mr. Moore in his 2003 book “Dude, Where’s My Country?”: “If you want real security, I suggest you consider my ideas that will definitely make America a safer country….It might be good to find out why hundreds of millions of people on three continents…are so pissed off about Israel.”

Mr. Moore writes, “Now I’m not just talking about your everyday anti-Semites. No, I’m talking about a perceived notion that we Americans are supporting Israel in its oppression of the Palestinian people. Now where did those Arabs come up with an idea like that? Maybe it was when that Palestinian child looked up in the air and saw an American Apache helicopter firing a missile into his baby sister’s bedroom just before she was blown into a hundred bits….Of course many Israeli children had died too, at the hands of the Palestinians. You would think that would make every Israeli want to wipe out the Arab world. But the average Israeli does not have that response. Why? Because in their hearts, they know they are wrong, and they know they would be doing just what the Palestinians are doing if the sandal were on the other foot.”

His conclusion: “Hey, here’s a way to stop the suicide bombings — give the Palestinians a bunch of missile-firing Apache helicopters and let them and the Israelis go at each other head to head. Four billion dollars a year to Israel, four billion a year to the Palestinians — they can just blow each other up and leave the rest of us the hell alone.”

The Saudis don’t have billions to give away — they might if they worked instead of just sitting around atop their oil fields. But they have funneled hundreds of millions to anti-Israel terrorist groups and to the families of Palestinian Arab terrorists, as Dore Gold documented in his 2003 book “Hatred’s Kingdom,” excerpted in The New York Sun. All in all, the Moore plan for the Arab-Israeli conflict sounds suspiciously like what the Saudis are already doing — a good reason to be wary of Mr. Moore.