Middle Eastern Misogyny's Western Roots

Anyone who knows me or who has been reading my blog knows I have little (read no) tolerance for simplistic arguments pinning blame for the world's ills on religion and belief systems.   Yes, religion is a player in the complex systems of life and society and can have positive and negative impacts, but it is one player among many and in most cases where people try to pin the blame on religion I see little more than brainless reductionism.  That's why I put Bill Maher Religulous-type ranting in the same category as Salafist and Puritan and Kach-type extremism.  It's a reflection of blindness to complexity, an unwillingness to even try to understand difficult issues in favor of dumbing things down.  Yes, sometimes we need to cut through the fog and call a spade a spade, but it turns out that most of the world really is grey and we are far too eager to declare things black and white than reality would dictate.

So, along those lines, I get sick of hearing people blame the misogyny and oppression of women in the Middle East on religion.  I could go into how almost identical modes of oppression can be found in many non-Muslim societies in the Mediterranean (Egyptian Coptic Christian or Serbian Christian "honor" killings of women for example).  But without going into all the modalities of the present, I've been reading a very good book about early Christianity that has a section discussing the role of women in the ancient Mediterranean that is very enlightening.  While right-wing kooks who rage against "Islamofascists" (without knowing pretty much anything about either Islam or fascism) talk about Islam supposedly being the source of many of the misogynistic problems they rail against (only among Muslims of course, they are pretty much blind to the presence of the severe violence against women that still exists in their own societies), the author of this book shows quite clearly how many of these practices really have their roots in ancient antiquity.  And not even in ancient Middle Eastern societies like Persia or Mesopotamia, but in traditional Greco-Roman western societies of antiquity and in Mediterranean Jewish society (which lets remember had an extensive presence throughout the Roman world and not just in the lands of ancient Israel).

Enough of my rantings, now for the extensive quotations.  The book is called "Introducing Early Christianity: A Topical Survey of Its Life, Beliefs & Practices" by Laurie Guy who is a "lecturer in church history at Carey Baptist College, Auckland, New Zealand, and he is lecturer with the School of Theology at the University of Auckland."  The parts I am quoting are only in regards to this topic of the ancient western and Judaic roots of misogyny, but if you are interested in the broader topic of the first centuries of Christianity, I heartily recommend the book as a good introduction.  He clearly takes an apologist's view towards his version of Christianity, but his scholarship is honest, making frequent reference to primary sources and he makes it easy enough to distinguish his interpretory (is that a word?) conclusions from his good attempts to review and present the broad topic.

Read on and note the many misogynistic practices which long pre-date Islam.  And for anyone who wants to say "oh but we wonderful westerners have overcome all that unlike those backwards Middle Easterners", I'll invite you to [1] go look up the statistics on domestic violence and murder of women in your own countries, or count the ratio of male to female political and business leaders in your countries, and [2] start reading up on Middle Eastern feminist thought and history and compare the pace at which those trends have been developing compared to the pace it took them to develop in your own countries.  In any case, I think you'll find the following discussion all the more fascinating in that it shows practices that sound familiar today in parts of the world, but were issues in Muhammad's time, Christ's time, and Julius Caesar's time.  Regardless of religion - pagan, Christian, or Muslim.  The source of the problems lie elsewhere beyond religion (even if religion does then often jump into the mix and become part of it), as do most of the solutions.

*****

[From Pages 166-169]

Women in Greco-Roman society.  Marked diversity appears within this category.  One legacy of classical Greece largely kept Eastern women veiled and in the home, without formal education.  The tendency for women to remain in the home had become much more relaxed, however, by the time of the early church.  Many women remained veiled, but many others, especially from the upper class, were starting to go about unveiled.  In some ways, rural and lower class women were freer in their movements than urban and upper class women, for example, in drawing water and trading in the marketplace.  On the other hand, high-status women, Greek and Roman alike, might sometimes transcend gender in determination of social role.  So occasionally, women owned brick factories, became philosophers and acted as barristers.  A few achieved public prominence, but they seldom filled roles that would require their speaking in public.

The Roman world restricted women's movements within the wider society less than did Hellenistic society, and wealthier women had access to education up to age twelve or so.  At the same time, women might sometimes hold public office in the East, Cleopatra being an obvious example.  This was not so in the Roman West, where they could not vote or hold public office; at most they could act as the power behind the throne.

Though variations existed, the overall structure of society was patriarchal.  Men dominated.  Apart from exceptions such as the Vestal virgins and Sibylline prophetesses, women basically had no leadership roles in Greco-Roman religion.  A sharp distinction between the public and the private spheres of life enforced the separate roles: the man's sphere was the public space, the woman's the private place.  Women were created for domesticity.

With regard to marriage, until recently historians agreed that women in the Mediterranean would normally enter marriage somewhere around ages twelve to fifteen.  More recently B. D. Shaw has persuasively argued that this conclusion comes from faulty interpretation of the data and that women in both halves of the empire typically married in their late teens.  Shaw's perspective still indicates, however, that women married at a young age, a factor that would encourage submission to their older husbands.  Moreover, even if a majority of women married in their late teens, quite a number married earlier.  In the Christian community, Melania the Elder was married at fourteen, Melania the Younger at twelve, and Macrina was engaged at age eleven.

Roman culture (though not Greek culture) viewed women as under the tutelage of men.  The father held unlimited power over his household, even that of life and death.  At marriage the daughter usually passed from the hand (manus) of her father to that of her husband.  This practice reinforced a sense of women's inferior nature.  Devaluing of women can also be seen in the common practice of infanticide, which typically meant the exposure of female infants.  This was justified on the basis of an alleged law stemming from Romulus, requiring a father to raise all male children, but only the first-born daughter.  This resulted in a great gender imbalance, with perhaps one-third more men than women.  A study of 600 families based on inscriptions at Delphi has shown that only six of these families had raised more than one daughter.

The hierarchical nature of Roman society and the low status it gave to women is likely evident in Trajan's food distribution programs for children in Italy in the early second century.  According to inscriptions at Veleia (Elea), a town in southern Italy, the monthly allowance was sixteen sesterces for boys, twelve for girls, twelve for illegitimate boys and ten for illegitimate girls.  Of the 300 recipients only 36 were girls.  This sort of data points to a perception of women as inferior, of less value, subject to a dominant man, and with no public role in life.  Exceptions occasionally occurred--through wealth, through connections, through outstanding strength of personality--but they were exceptions.  It was fundamentally a man's world.

Women in Judaism.  Though details differed, the lot of Jewish women overall was not unlike that of their Gentile neighbors.  They had no public role.  As the first-century Jewish writer Philo explained:

• Market places, and council chambers, and courts of justice, and large companies and assemblies of numerous crowds, and a life in the open air of actions relating to war and peace, are suited to men; but taking care of the house and remaining at home are the proper duties of women; the virgins having their apartments in the centre of the house within the innermost doors, and the full-grown women not going beyond the vestibule and outer courts; for there are two kinds of states, the greater and the smaller.  And the larger ones are really called cities; but the smaller ones are called houses.  And the superintendence and the management of these is allotted to the two sexes separately; the men having the government of the greater, which government is called a polity; and the women that of the smaller, which is called oeconomy [household management].
  

Along with the rest of the Mediterranean world, Jewish girls married in their teenage years.  Marriage may have had greater honor among Jews, but divorce was not uncommon.  In addition, in contrast to Roman law, Jewish law vested the right of divorce in men only.

Women had no significant role in public worship.  While women were subject to the negative commands of the law (the "thou shalt nots" in the Torah), they were not subject to its positive commands (keeping the festivals, reciting the Shema, prayers at meals, etc.).  Most pronouncements on the matter asserted that women were not to be taught the Torah (though other statements indicated that it did happen--rhetoric and reality often differed in relation to women).  About A.D. 90, Rabbi Eliezer asserted, "If a man gives his daughter a knowledge of the law, it is as though he taught her obscenity."  In praising God for the opportunity to learn the law, a male pray-er in Rabbinic Judaism expressed the sorry plight of women: "Praised be God that he has not made me a gentile; praised be God that he has not made me a woman; praised be God that he has not created me an ignorant man."

Regulations concerning access to the great temple at Jerusalem limited women to the Gentiles' court and the women's court.  Their insignificance in worship is indicated in the fact that they could not be counted as part of the quorum of ten necessary to form a worshipping synagogue congregation.

Pervasive negativity toward women can also be seen in the way Jewish sources regularly viewed the birth of a daughter as a disappointment.  Several Talmudic sayings mark this perspective: "It is well for those whose children are male, but ill for those whose children are female"; "at the birth of a boy all are joyful, but at the birth of a girl all are sad"; "when a boy comes into the world, peace comes into the world; when a girl comes, nothing comes."  The diminished value of women stands out starkly in the fact that they were commonly not acceptable witnesses in court proceedings.  Josephus urged, "Let not the testimony of women be admitted because of the levity and boldness of their sex."  Jewish women shared the low status of women generally in the pervasively patriarchal Mediterranean world.  Within such a world Christianity began.

More Israeli "Democracy" - Banning Memorials of Dead Politicians

Yet another example of how it is a lie to call Israel a democracy.  Israel is only a "democracy" in the sense that Apartheid South Africa was a "democracy" - i.e., if you are of the ruling class' race, you have full rights, if you are not, your rights can and will be curtailed at any time depending on the degree of "danger" the ruling race sees in your actions.  Here we see how even a memorial to a dead secular politician is considered "dangerous" enough to ban.  If I haven't used enough scare quotes, just let me know, I have plenty more available :)

Just keep this in mind, Israel's problem has never been about "security" or "terrorism", it is and always has been from the core about denying the notion that Palestinians are human beings with the same rights to freedom and resistance to oppression that every other person on earth has.  If they have to ban free speech or throw people in jail or exile them or outright murder them, they will use whatever measure of force necessary in order to shut them up and deny them their rights.  This is just another minor example.  Once again I repeat: the only just, equitable, and durable solution is the South African model.  One state for all citizens of the country regardless of religion or ethnicity, the right of return for those previously ethnically cleansed, and equality for all under the law with full democracy and civil rights for all.  If a much smaller Afrikaner minority could do it, Israeli Jews can do it too.

My rough, quick translation of a news item posted below in its original Arabic (Tarboush-tip: KABOBfest's Delicious feed) about Israeli police banning their own Arab citizens from memorializing George Habash's death a year ago:

*****

http://www.abnaa-elbalad.org/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=614

30 Jan 2009: The [Israeli] Police Publish an Order Closing the Midan Theater Tomorrow with the Goal of Preventing the Tribute to Doctor George Habash

The [Israeli] police in the northern brigade announce just recently that the leader of the police Dudi Cohen had published an order banning any action that could be interpreted to actually mean support for an organization accused of being terrorist, and therefore published an order ordering the closure of the Midan Theater tomorrow, Saturday, and threatened to close any theater or any place that in which such an action might happen.

In addition our correspondent learned that it had been decided to hold a festival in the Midan Theater in which Dr. George Habash would be memorialized.

In a conversation with Muhammad Canaan, Secretary General of the Sons of the Country Movement, he said: We have not been formally informed of this matter, one of our cadres has only learned of it and he was asked to be present at the police headquarters.  Canaan added: This is a normal thing from the Israeli Police and doing anything else wouldn't be the Police which we know, as Israel's Police are known for their barbarian undemocratic methods, and there's no doubt that this decision is contrary to the right to organize which is among the foundations of democracy.

Canaan added: The decision of the police will not prevent us from memorializing and remembering the leader George Habash, even if we don't memorialize him in a festival he will remain in our hearts and minds.  On the contrary, we are more insistent today on memorializing him.

30/1/2009: الشرطة تصدر امر بإغلاق مسرح الميدان غداًبهدف منع تأبين د.جورج حبش 

علنت الشرطة في لواء الشمال قبل قليل ان قائد الشرطة دودي كوهين كان قد اصدر امرا بمنع اي فعالية من الممكن ان يستدل منها انها فعلية دعم لمنظمة إرهابية وعلية فقد أصدر أمر بإغلاق مسرح الميدان يوم غد، السبت، والتهديد بإغلاق اي مسرح او اي مكان من الممكن ان تكون فيه مثل هذه الفعالية.

هذا ووعلم مراسلنا ان كان من المقرر ان يتم مهرجان في مسرح الميدان يتم من خلاله إحياء ذكرى د. جورج حبش. 

هذا وفي حديث مع محمد كنعان، أمين عام حركة أبناء البلد، قال: نحن لم نبلغ رسميا في هذا الامر، وفقط أعلم أحد الكوادر به وطلب منه ان يتواجد في مقر الشرطة. واضاف كناعنة: هذا شيء معتاد من شرطة اسرائيل وغير ذلك فهي ليست الشرطة التي نعرفها، فشرطة إسرائيل معروفة بأساليبها البربرية غير الديموقراطية، فلا شك هذا قرار هو ينافي حق التنظيم وهو من أسس الديموقراطية. 

وأضاف كناعنة: قرار الشرطة هذا لن يمنعنا من أن نحي ونستذكر القائد جورج حبش حتى ولو لم نحيه في مهرجان فهو باقي في قلوبنا وعقولنا، على العكس نحن أكثر اصرار اليوم على إحياء الذكرى.

Notes from Obama's New State Department

Spoke with a contact at the State Departments Near Eastern Affairs division just recently.  He is someone I deeply respect, has long experience, is an uber-realist, and has no illusions about anyone Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, American, Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian or whatever.  Which also means his upward career path is ultimately limited because he won't pay blind obeisance to the Israelis, insisting on (how novel) representing what he believes is best for American and broader human interests.  Still his work is of such high quality analytically and managerially that nobody can (thankfully) get rid of him.  Nothing in-depth, but a few notes from our conversation as I tried to get a sense of how things are looking at State in these first days of the Obama Administration:

• He felt it was a mistake to send George Mitchell straight to the region before any policy had been formulated just for a "listening tour" as the Palestinians and Arabs generally hate this kind of lip-service which to them is just more of "listening" while the Israelis go ahead establishing facts on the ground.  He felt like a policy should have been formulated first and then you get moving, that this will actually be harmful to building diplomatic momentum.
• So far he doesn't sense any real change from the old standard Washington everything-Israel-wants-it-gets line.  He pointed specifically to Obama's speech when announcing Mitchell as Mideast envoy saying it could have been written by the Bush Administration, with all the key language and buzzwords everyone knows means blind right-wing support for Israel.
• That said, he was cautiously...I wouldn't say optimistic, but perhaps distantly hopeful that at least this Administration aren't raw ideologues like the Bushies were and might actually be capable of learning.  And that at least Mitchell as a Mideast envoy choice is more independent, and in his view established some credibility in his 2001 report on the causes of the Intifada.  In that report, despite everyone telling him that he couldn't say that so-called "natural growth" in settlements had to stop, he did.  In real terms stating that may not amount to a hill of beans that the Israelis would do anything about, but in Washington terms it showed a willingness to cross a Zionist redline and showed a bit of spine.  So my friend hopes that between perhaps Mitchell being more independent and the Obama team being less ideological, that perhaps they'll actually learn lessons for the better instead of just entrenching themselves deeper in failure like the Bushies did.  But he said he feared even if that does happen (far from certain, he pointed to Powell whom everyone there thought would understand that the Palestinian point of view was different and firm from his experiences in Vietnam dealing with the North Vietnamese, but ended up disappointing with his unwillingness to see the other side), it's going to take a good chunk of time.
• He expressed worries about the new generation of Foreign Service Officers who have now spent the better part of their young careers entirely under the Bush Administration and don't understand how abnormal that whole period was.  The Israel-is-always-right mentality he says is more than ever almost wall-to-wall at State as elsewhere in the US government and the new FSOs are a key part of that.  The few realists who've been around longer are more easily than ever dismissed as "Arab lovers" and not taken seriously.
• Dennis Ross shot himself in the foot pre-announcing his supposed new role as Obama's Mideast envoy and now it's not clear if he'll get any major position at all.  My friend did not think Rob Satloff was the one advertising Ross to try and undermine him, he thinks he did it himself.  Still, even if he looks down now, he had a great description of him that made me laugh, calling Ross the "Teflon a**hole." :)  For the record, I've never met anyone at State who thought Ross was anything other than useless at best and usually far less charitable descriptions (see prior sentence).
• My friend also thought that if Ross gets appointed to anything remotely responsible for Iran policy, that would be a clear sign of the Obama Admin taking a "lots of stick, and maybe a few tiny carrots way off in the distance" approach to Iran.  In other words, not a healthy approach.
  

Despite the general pessimism that any realist has to have about US Mideast policy though, my friend's final take was to try and put on a smiley face and say that at least the tone is somewhat different from the Obama team so far (somewhat...see earlier comments about his speech announcing Mitchell), and that's gotta count for something.  We'll see if it does, far from clear.  Obama himself in his writings is the first to say he's not the Messiah and that he's a new enough face on the scene that people often graft their own beliefs onto his image and set themselves up for disappointment.  Given the structural bias in favor of Israeli racism that is built into the US system, it shouldn't be too surprising that Obama is more showing simply a different slightly softer version of it rather than repudiating it.  We'll see if he can make the necessary leap, but I and my friend certainly have our skeptical eyes open.

"Occupation 101" - Essential Viewing

I always struggle to know where to point people who just want a basic background on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  I have reams and reams of books, websites, articles and such I can point them to, but they're either too complex, too over-simplified, too specialized, too de-personalized, assume too much knowledge, or otherwise don't really do the "101" job of explaining things with the right balance of providing sufficient information while not overwhelming.

Well, I think I finally found a good one.  An hour-and-a-half documentary, apparently around a year old, called Occupation 101.  Click that link for the film's website and if you want to order DVDs (I'm going to have to order one).  But somebody (for now at least) has also put it up on YouTube, broken up into 11 roughly 8 minute chunks.

It is not an attempt to split the baby between Israelis and Palestinians.  It is a film that puts the facts together more or less correctly to identify what the real problems are.  It has a point of view, and a basically correct one with the facts to back it up.  It's got a wealth of basic key facts, interviews a good variety of Palestinian, Israeli, Arab, American, and other personalities (including at least one person I spent a bit of time with on the ground a decade ago).  I have little criticisms of it here and there (they should have interviewed more Palestinian academics/politicians, they should have spent more time showing how deeply engrained racism and ethnic cleansing is in mainstream Israeli society/education/government/politics/etc., they should have spent more time focusing on the 4+ million Palestinian refugees outside of Palestine, they should have showed more of the very very large number of Israeli deliberate massacres of civilians from 1948 to the present, they should have shown how almost every terrorist tactic used in the conflict was first introduced by Zionist terrorist gangs, etc.), but overwhelmingly it's a great film that I highly recommend for both those who need a 101 starting point, and for those who know the topic better but want a single film that can put together a bunch of the key history, facts, imagery, and context.  I am going to post it here, hopefully it stays up on YouTube.  Either way, support these folks and order a DVD from them as well:

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbjAanvUqs

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV8N9J9gJ9c&feature=related

Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM1ruYCS6JY&feature=related

Part 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg0ql9tA1-I&feature=related

Part 5:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-ZHRPHrOsI&feature=related

Part 6:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agn1dHqQlzY&feature=related

Part 7:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErOsqvO-qsQ&feature=related

Part 8:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIh8Kky541g&feature=related

Part 9:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdwkmLIDfg&feature=related

Part 10:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv8mA4yGwIk&feature=related

Part 11:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqXwX9Fy9Uw&feature=related

Family-cide, the true face of Israel

One of the things that has been inescapable has been the manner in which Palestinians are referring to the victims murdered by Israel in Gaza not just as statistics or individual names (though they are doing that too), but by families.  Israel was not just content to murder a person here or a person there, but in the process of carrying out Israeli researcher Arnon Sofer's claims that Israel "will have to kill and kill and kill.  All day, every day" in Gaza, they have been wiping out entire families in one fell swoop.

Al-Jazeera's website has put together a page with pictures and stories of Palestinian families who were either entirely murdered by Israel or had large numbers of their family murdered by Israel.  A warning, there are many graphic images of murdered and wounded children.  It is in Arabic, but even if you don't read the language, you can click through the Arabic numbers at the bottom of the text boxes (remember, right to left in Arabic):

http://www.aljazeera.net/nr/exeres/8387fb46-bb6e-484f-8420-d7833360b0e6.htm

I'm not sure if all the pictures match precisely to each family/incident or not, though they are certainly representative.  And, so as to put names to them for those of you who don't read Arabic, here is a brief synopsis of each of these murdered families which I made based on the info on the Jazeera page (this is my own synopsis and language, not a trasnslation).  The families in order from 1 to 13 are:

1. The al-Daya family: The 65 year-old family Patriarch al-Hajj Fayiz Masabih al-Daya fearing for his family's safety - who as is often the case in extended Arab families lived in a single building built for them to live together - gathered them all onto the ground floor of the family building during Israel's rampage in Hayy al-Zaytoun. But the Israelis bombed the entire building and flattened it on top of them, killing 25 members of the family together in one swoop, ranging from the elderly family patriarch to 16 grandchildren, the youngest of whom was a six-month old baby.
2. The Ba'alusha family: Sleeping one night in the Jabalya refugee camp - one of the most densely populated pieces of land on earth - Israel decided that it wanted to bomb the neighborhood and specifically target the house of worship right next door to the Ba'alusha's. The father Anwar survived after the house collapsed on top of them, only to discover the murdered bodies of 5 of his daughters in the rubble as neighbors helped him dig to find them.
3. The al-Abasi family: Father Ziyad al-Abasi reports they were sleeping in their house in the Yabna refugee camp in Rafah when a missile hit their single-level house.  The house and its asbestos roof collapsed on them.  Israel murdered three of his children.  Sidq (4 years old), Ahmad (12), and Mohammad (14).  His three other children, his wife, and himself were wounded.  He insisted on getting out of the hospital early despite his wounds in order to attend his children's funeral where he cried out asking what they had done to deserve Israel taking this revenge on them?
4. The Kashku family: The Israeli military targeted their home in Hayy al-Zaytoun in Eastern Gaza city, wounding 13 members of the family and murdering the daughter of family patriarch Abdullah Kashku, 8 year old Ibtihal.  Also murdered was the wife of one of his sons, Miysa' aged 22.
5. The al-Samuni family: One of the most visible deliberate murders of civilians befell the al-Samuni family and was reported on widely even in the western press.  Here Na'ib al-Samuni who survived tells how Israeli forces gathered the entire extended family into a single 2000 square foot house, and then proceeded to shell them for 10 minutes non-stop, turning the house into in his words "a well of blood", and then deliberately block Red Crescent ambulances from reaching them for 24 hours during which several family members struggled to hang on and finally bled to death.  The numbers of dead and wounded in various reports have varied amidst the chaos, here Al-Jazeera reports that at least one 7-member branch of the family was entirely wiped out.  Na'ib's wife Hanan was murdered by Israeli executioners along with his daughter Hoda, his 60 year old mother Rizqa, and most of his brothers, cousins, and cousins' children.
6. The Rayan family: Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan lived in the middle of the Jabalya refugee camp.  Not content with just killing him, Israel decided to drop massive munitions on the entire neighborhood, murdering Rayyan's 4 wives and 15 of his children and destroying 10 other homes in the process.
7. The Abed Rabbo family: 8 family members including a toddler girl found with only her head peaking above the rubble murdered by Israel which bombed their home from US-supplied fighter jets.
8. The Abu Aisha family: Father, mother, and 7 children murdered by Israel via missiles and bombs fired from US-supplied fighter jets onto their home.
9. The al-Kahlut family: Father Khalid al-Kahlut needed to get some bread to feed his starving family.  He made the mistake of believing Israeli lies that there was a 3-hour ceasefire for humanitarian purposes and took 3 of his children (15-year old Mohammad, 12-year old Habib, and 10-year old Tawfiq) and his 20-year old cousin Hasan Khalil al-Kahlut in the car to get some food.  As they got back close to home in Beit Lahiya with the supposed 3-hour ceasefire still supposedly in effect, a US-supplied Israeli fighter jet fired a missile at them and murdered them all before they could get the food back to their family.
10. The Abed Rabbo family: A different Abed Rabbo family, this time US-supplied Israeli planes fired missiles on their home in Jabalya, murdering three sisters (Amal age 2, Su'aad age 4, and Samar age 6 ).  It took neighbors and rescue crews hours just to pull their bodies out of the rubble the Israeli terrorist executioners left behind.
11. The Ulaywa family: Salim Ulaywa says he wishes he had never left his house that day.  He had gone out to try to get his family some food, but when he came back and turned onto his street he found his house had disappeared into a pile of rubble with neighbors desperately trying to rescue his family.  But it was no use, they were all found dead covered in dust and blood and he was left alone in the world as the piece says, his wife and 5 children murdered by having their house blown up on top of them with no warning (an old Zionist favorite tactic going back to the days of the Sa'sa massacre in Galilee in 1948 at least.)
12. The Deeb family: 25 minutes before the end of the supposed 3-hour humanitarian ceasefire, Israeli tanks and US-supplied fighter jets sent 4 missiles and rounds into the Jabalya refugee camp, one of which landed in the courtyard of the house of 43-year old Samir Shafiq Deeb who was instantly murdered.  His 70 year old mother and three of his children (12 year old Esam, 23 year old Mohammad, and 20 year old Fatima) were murdred as well, plus 5 of the children of his brother including 2 year old Noor, 19 year old Ala, and two other women in the family (34 year old Amal Matar Deeb and 41 year old Khudra Abdulaziz Deeb).  Another family virtually wiped out in an Israeli mass murder.
13. The Saliha family: 6 members of the family murdered in their home by Israeli executioners in Beit Lahiya.

I wish it weren't true, but even this is only a partial list of the families Israel has murdered the past few weeks, let alone the past 60 years.  Let the deaths of these innocent families - not even individuals, entire families targeted by Israel's Zionist death squads - stand as a reminder.  That while there must be reconciliation between Arabs and Jews and a united country with equal rights for all, that such reconciliation can only come by standing firm against Zionist Israel just as the world stood firm against Apartheid South Africa.  Zionism is racism, period, and it must be confronted just as Jim Crow and Apartheid had to be confronted.  May these families rest in peace and may we build a better world of equality so that Israeli racism will no longer be able to take innocent lives.

A Few Righteous Among the Israelis

Jews around the world often refer to the Righteous Among the Nations, those good people who stood up for humanity and saved the lives of many Jews during the Holocaust. I count at least one of my European relatives among them, a man who in my childhood I remember proudly displaying the items he'd stolen from Nazi soldiers (a helmet, a radio, a boot - he didn't have it anymore, but even a motorcycle) and telling how he had helped Jewish citizens of his country escape to safety during the occupation years. These righteous may have been relatively few in a time of sheer madness, but their goodness and their sacrifice is worthily remembered today.

Palestinians and Arabs often realize as well that while their numbers may be few, there are Israeli and other Jews around the world who acknowledge the crimes of 1948 and subsequent ethnic cleansing by Israel, and who are working very hard as well for acknowledgement of the past and justice and reconciliation for the future including the Right of Return.  Now, I think we need to be clear who we're talking about.  I'm not talking about the Israelis who mindlessly participate in their massacres and then wake up feeling a twinge of remorse 20 years later and spend most of their time worrying about how slaughtering innocent people is bad for their own feelings.  These folks I'm sure help shrinks grow their practices a lot, but frankly such attitudes are all too little too late and if anything simply are another tool to perpetuate Zionist ethnic cleansing by spreading the false myth that somehow Zionism has a humanitarian angle in its roots.  It doesn't, and a handful of people engaged in what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls "shoot and cry" doesn't change that fact.  No, the people we are talking about are people who go much deeper, who realize that the founding sin of Israel is its open declaration that one group of people has rights based on ethnicity and all others have none, which is then enforced on pain of death or exile.  These people acknowledge this reality and are willing to say so even in the midst of the brainwashed, unnaturally-militarized Sparta society that Israel is.  These people get the root of the problem, and not just its latest manifestations in the headlines, and they are working to overcome it.

Of course, there is deep deep anger in the Arab world at Israel's decades of crimes and these few righteous often are forgotten in the heat of the moment (a heat that Israel's ongoing crimes ensures stays high most of the time), but just yesterday as Israel's latest Gaza massacres of civilians continue, Al-Jazeera was running a documentary featuring several of these Israeli Jews of conscience dissecting the anatomy of the occupation fact by fact.  Palestinian authors have for decades included in their writings characters of nuance and conscience among Israelis, and it fairly common for non-Zionist Jews (ranging from the Orthodox Neturei Karta folks to secular academics such as Ilan Pappe to crusading journalists and activists such as Meron Benvinisti) to be pointed to in Arab media and discourse as examples of conscience that show that Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. It is these bridges that give hope for the future of a united country (call it what you want, Israel-Palestine, Canaan, Holy-Landistan, Kiryat Hummus, whatever) where people of all ethnicities will be able to live under a common set of laws and where people will be (to get MLKish heading into the long holiday weekend) judged according to the content of their character and not their creed.

Anyhow, I'm rambling on about this because I came across via the Palestine Remembered website an organization in Israel I hadn't been aware of called Zochrot that falls firmly in this category of Righteous Among the Israelis. They work hard to raise awareness of the Nakba among an overwhelmingly Nakba-denying Israeli populace, and to call for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees as a necessary requirement of peace. Zochrot's website is here: http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?lang=english

Here is a brief two minute video of some of the great work Zochrot does, leading a tour of Israelis and Palestinians of the ethnically cleansed village of al-Malha to raise awareness of what really happened (including a brief encounter with an Israeli who tries to deny to the face of a survivor of the Nakba that the local Jewish school was built on top of the Arab cemetery):



Good stuff, you can find more videos on their website.  Keep it up Zochrot and all people of conscience.

Let's talk about Sderot...or is it Najd?

So let's talk about Sderot, that town in Israel that the Israelis claim as the main symbol justifying starving 1.5 million dirt-poor civilian refugees in Gaza, murdering almost 1000 now (by the time I'm done typing maybe we'll be over that number) and wounding thousands more innocents while flattening entire neighborhoods and massacring entire families.  Sderot is a symbol for the Israelis, the poor innocent town getting rocketed for supposedly no reason.  But here's the thing: Israel wants us to believe that its cities and towns have no history before they supposedly showed up and made the desert bloom.  Well, allow me to disabuse that notion.

You see, Sderot isn't really Sderot.  Sderot is Najd (نجد), a village of Palestinian farmers.  In 1948, it was a farming village of 719 people.  The village and its agricultural lands occupied 3355 acres, 93.3% Arab owned, 3.6% Jewish owned (there were several Zionist collective farms in the area that were said to be on friendly terms with Najd and other area villages, though there was no one Jewish in Najd), and 3% public land.  Walid Khalidi in his seminal book "All That Remains" gives some historical background on page 128:

"The village stood on an elevated spot on the southern coastal plain, and overlooked the agricultural lands aroud it. Several secondary roads linked it to the coastal highway at points between al-Majdal and Gaza, as well as to the villages in the vicinity. Its name meant "elevated ground" in Arabic. In 1596, Najd was a village in the nahiya of Gaza (liwa' of Gaza), with a population of 215. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, and fruit, as well as on other types of produce and property such as goats, beehives, and vineyards. [Hut. and Abd.:144]

Edward Robinson, an American biblical scholar who travelled in the area in 1838, noted that Najd lay south of a wadi. He observed the villagers winnowing barley by throwing it into the air against the wind with wooden forks. [Robinson (1841) II:371] In the late nineteenth century, Najd was a small village with a well and a pond [NAA Note: see the remains of the irrigation pool here and here]. [SWP (1881) III:260] As its population grew during the mandate period, it expanded northwestward. The village population was Muslim, and children attended school in the village of Simsim (see Simsim, Gaza District), 2 km to the northeast. The residents of Najd worked primarily in agriculture and animal husbandry. Fields of grain and fruit trees surrounded Najd on all sides. Fruit trees were concentrated on the north and northeastern sides--where irrigation water was available from wells--and in the beds of the wadis that crossed the lands. In 1944/45 a total of 10 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 11,916 dunums were allocated to cereals; 511 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. Khirbat Najd was located south of the village and contained rough, stone foundations of ancient buildings, vaults, and cisterns.

So Najd was a thriving little agricultural village that had been around for hundreds of years, even if its education for the kids was sub-standard, but then that was a direct effect of the British authorities conscious decision to keep the native Palestinians poorly educated by under-funding their school system (read Ilan Pappe's "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" for more on that).  So what happened to Najd, why does no one hear of Najd in the headlines today, where did Sderot come from?  Let's turn to Khalidi (referencing the infamously racist advocate of more ethnic cleansing, but still meticulous, Benny Morris) and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who describe the ethnic cleansing of Najd and the surrounding areas.  First Khalidi, again page 128:

The villagers of Najd were expelled on 13 May 1948, just before the establishment of the state of Israel. Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the inhabitants of nearby Simsim were expelled at the same time by the Palmach's Negev Brigade.

And Pappe on page 146-7 of his "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine":

By the beginning of June, the list of villages obliterated included many that had until then been protected by nearby kibbutzim. This was the fate of several villages in the Gaza district: Najd [NAA's emphasis] Burayr, Simsim, Kawfakha, Muharraqa and Huj. Their destruction appeared to have come as a genuine shock to nearby kibbutzim when they learned how these friendly villages had been savagely assaulted, their houses destroyed and all their people expelled.  On the land of Huj, Ariel Sharon built his private residence, Havat Hashikmim, a ranch that covers 5000 dunams of the village's fields.

Despite the ongoing negotiations by the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte [NAA Note: later assassinated - because he insisted on trying to return Palestine's innocent refugees to their stolen lands - by Zionist 'Lehi' terrorists with the explicit approval of future Israeli terrorist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir], to broker a truce, the ethnic cleansing moved on unhindered.  With obvious satisfaction Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary on 5 June 1948, 'We occupied today Yibneh (there was no serious resistance) and Qaqun. Here the cleansing [tihur] operation continues; have not heard from the other fronts.' Indeed, by the end of May his diary had reflected a renewed interest in ethnic cleansing. With the help of Yossef Weitz, he compiled a list of the names of the villages taken, the size of their lands and the number of people expelled, which he meticulously entered in his diary. The language is no longer guarded: 'This is the list of the occupied and evicted [mefunim] villages.' Two days later, he convened a meeting in his own house to assess how much money had meanwhile been looted from the banks of the 'Arabs', and how many citrus groves and other assets had been confiscated. Eliezer Kaplan, his minister of finance, persuaded him to authorise the confiscation of all Palestinian properties already taken in order to prevent the frenzied wrangling that was already threatening to break out between the predators who were waiting to swoop down on the spoils.

And so it went, ethnically cleansed villages, lands, and properties were being divided up by the mafia don and arch-terrorist David Ben Gurion.  Among which were the lands of Najd.  Back to Khalidi telling the fate of Najd, page 128 again:

Two settlements were established on village lands: Sderot (110103), founded in 1951 to the south of the site; and Or ha-Ner (112107), founded in  1957 closer to the site, to the northeast...The surrounding lands are cultivated by Israeli farmers.

And so it was, Najd was ethnically cleansed, its lands stolen by other farmers, the Israeli kibbutzim who were so sympathetic doing nothing to demand their former neighbors be allowed back, instead the Israelis divvied up the stolen property for themselves like the thieves they were.

But you say it was so long ago, its ancient history, we have enough problems now, why bring this up on top of it all?  Because friend, the Israelis may have tried to erase Najd with Sderot, they may have tried to pretend it never existed and get on enjoying their stolen property pretending it wasn't stolen, but...you see the people of Najd didn't cease to exist. Those 719 villagers from 1948 had had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and as of 1998 they numbered an estimated 4400.  And in fact, the people of Najd are closer than you think to today's headlines.  The village elder (or Mukhtar in Arabic meaning "chosen") was Hajj Muhammad Ahmad Mahmud Jasir (you can see his picture here) and he was pushed out at gunpoint with his family by the Palmach terrorist gangs to the Gaza Strip, where impoverished and penniless they settled in the Jabalya refugee camp.  Jabalya, does that sound familiar?  It should, Jabalya refugee camp, a dirt-poor pit of Zionist-created misery in northern Gaza is now under non-stop Israeli bombardment and was the site of the latest infamous Israeli massacre of dozens of civilians at UN school that had been designated a safe site (after the Israelis dropped leaflets everywhere saying they intended to flatten these people's neighborhoods and refugee camps) and which the Israelis had specifically been given the coordinates of:

This is not just an irony of history, that the Israeli/Zionist terrorists first ethnically cleansed these people, stole their lands for themselves, pushed these people into squalid refugee camps just a few miles away, and now have begun to bombard these same poor people with the most advanced weapons on earth for the crime of resisting their oppressors.  It is not mere irony.  It is the key to the solution.  The Israelis you see feel stuck too.  They don't have a problem shedding the blood of Palestinians over and over and over.  And they don't have a problem ethnically cleansing people.  But the problem is, they've now pushed 1.5 million innocent people (including the few thousand of Najd) into a tiny little box, from which they don't know what to do with them.  They can't push them into Egypt because they have a Quisling collaborator there (Mubarak) whose rule they don't want to de-stabilize, and in any case they know the Egyptians who have a real military (even if pitiful compared to Israel's) would really fight back if they tried to do that.  No one else in the world will take these people in and in any case these Palestinians keep up with this stubborn notion that they want to stay in Palestine, even Gaza!

So they can't ethnically cleanse them again from the last little corner of Palestine they've held onto, and they don't quite feel up to the task of simply slaughtering all 1.5 million in one swoop because it wouldn't allow them to maintain (either to themselves or to others) the myth of their moral purity.  So instead, what do they do?  They just keep provoking the people in Gaza.  They cut them off from the sea and fishing livelihood, they cut off their fuel and electricity, they cut off their food, they cut off their medicine.  And then, facing starvation at the hands of Zionism and with the full acquiescence of the world who aids the Zionists, the Palestinians desperately fight back.  Which the Zionists then use as their excuse to kill more Palestinians.  If they can't kill them all at once, they can at least kill more than they used to.  And maybe just maybe the Israelis hope, they'll magically disappear.  They don't care how, die under US-supplied missiles or emigrate or just...somehow disappear.  For now, just kill as many as you can and claim the moral high ground of Sderot.  Which was never Najd you see.  And the people of Najd don't live in Jabalya you see, almost within eyesight of Najd.  Where the people of Sderot who stole their lands live claiming victimhood.

Madness isn't it?  Zionist lunacy to live in such a violent, hate-filled world of stealing from the poor and killing them because they aren't of your religion.  It's insane.

But I said in the name of the village of Najd and Sderot built on top of it there is the solution.  And there is.  An insanely simple one.  Easy to do.  If one simple mental barrier is broken down.  A mental barrier.  Let the people of Najd...walk home.  It'll probably take a couple of hours granted.  And the people who call the place Sderot today, well they'll have to learn to share.  And accept that they live in a place that for hundreds of years was called Najd, and that its people today still call Najd.  And once they do that, the solution is there.  The rockets stop.  The people of Najd don't want to launch rockets at their own home town.  Nor do they want to kill anyone.  They just want to live.  They don't want to starve, they don't want to be bombed, they want to live, in the only homes they have.  In Najd.

You see, the solution is simple.  Treat everyone as an equal human being, and share.  It's a simple lesson I try to teach my kids every day.  Yo Israel, think you can teach your people that?  Or would you rather just go on murdering and starving innocent people and watching rockets fall on your people who now live in Najd?

Frustrated Musicians for Gaza (and against Quislings)

As in most rounds of Israeli massacres of Palestinians, Arab musicians are coming out singing for the victims and decrying the brutality, and - crucially - the impotence and acquiescence of the Arab rulers. There is a long tradition of Arab musicians decrying their leaders betrayal of the Palestinian people. Um Kalthoum (probably the single most famous Arab singer of all time for those not familiar with her) famously hosted some of the Egyptian officers that the British stooge King Farouk had sent into Palestine with broken rusty rifles and insufficient numbers, as a deliberate show of disdain for the rulers.

One can read this artistic impulse in a number of ways. On the one hand, the musicians tend to be far more reflective of popular sentiment. They show the disdain of their rulers, their anger at Israeli brutality, and above all their tears for the innocent victims of Palestine and sympathy with their struggle for freedom. They reflect the people far more than anything any Arab ruler or government does. On the other hand, they also reflect the impotence of the Arab people in their desires to help the Palestinians and stop the massacres and ethnic cleansing. The Quisling rulers often tolerate this sort of expression seeing it as a harmless relief valve that doesn't directly threaten their rule. Sort of like King Abdullah or Hosni Mubarak is saying "let them pour all their energy into making songs and banging their head against the walls, let them tire themselves out with that while we suppress with our secret police any real manifestations of dissent that threaten our own dictatorial powers". So you get these huge outpourings of public sympathy that artists reflect, but no ability to channel that sympathy into real action.

Here is one recent example, Egyptian singer Tamer Hosny sings for Gaza with a clip showing scenes from the latest events. The song and video clips are full of scenes not just of Israel's barbarous actions and Gaza's scores of innocent victims, but also of Arab leaders meeting and doing nothing, protestors around the Arab world saying "we have only ourselves" (i.e., why aren't we helping our brethren?), and a heart-rending cry from a man in Gaza shouting out in desperation "wayn al-'arab?!" ("Where are the Arabs?!"). Indeed, the title of the song itself (I believe it's the title of the song, it's at least an oft-repeated phrase in it) tells of this popular frustration in the inability to actually help - "ana mish a'arif a'amal Haaga" - "I don't know what to do". Worth watching for the imagery and emotion even if you don't speak Arabic:



One other clip I found via Laila Al-Haddad's "A Mother From Gaza" blog actually comes from our side of the blog. A guy named Michael Heart who looks like your typical struggling young musician in California, made a song and video for the people of Gaza called "We will not go down". The song artistically I think is forced lyrically, but the imagery and heart strike as genuine. I point it out because I think it is emblematic of something that US opinion polls consistently show: that despite politicians and media who are stacked up entirely on Zionism's side in the US, there actually is far more understanding out there than you'd think. I am reminded of some old friends of mine, a Mormon couple who I ran into a few years after our initial friendship again by chance. They were as conservative as Mormons come, old Iowa farmer types, super-conservative, and real just wonderful salt-of-the-earth people who anyone would want for grandparents. The second Intifada had broken out, they were watching headlines with that sort of vague notion that something tragic and scary was happening halfway around the world, but they knew I was interested and knew a lot about this stuff, so they asked me what I thought about what was going on. The wife, who was a young lady at the time of WW2 and so remembered it as a real event and not just the stereotyped "Greatest Generation" Tom Brokaw image we've since adopted (don't get me wrong, totally agree it was a necessary war and that right was on the Allies' side, but even a just war is full of ugliness), when I commented about how Israeli troops were not the lily-clean "most moral army in the world" they claimed, piped in about how disappointed she and others had been in WW2 about the sexual escapades of US soldiers abroad. The husband's response (the one this run-on paragraph is really about) I think reflected an attitude that many more Americans on the right than is commonly acknowledged feel but doesn't really get air time - he said he sympathized with the Palestinians because "if somebody parked a tank in my living room, you better believe I'd shoot back!" Now, there may be massive numbers of Americans who think the Bible means Israel can do no wrong, but this conservative man's attitude, the one that is reflected in the New Hampshire state motto "Live Free or Die!" and which he essentially called upon in saying he could understand Palestinian motivations, is also widespread if little publicized in the media in the US. Seeing Michael Heart's video is very much a reflection of this view. Those widespread feelings may not be enough to overcome AIPAC and the Christian right if they can't be translated into lobbying, grassroots action, and campaign fund-raising in the US system, but they are real feelings which remain far more widespread than I think many realize or acknowledge. Here's Michael Heart's video for Gaza:

Live Blogging Al-Jazeera (Arabic) Coverage of Israel's Land Massacres/Invasion of Gaza

My  attempt to give some sense of what the Arabic Al-Jazeera coverage of Israel's brutal massacres/invasion of Gaza.  All times using US eastern time basis:

10:17pm) Been watching for 15 minutes or so, they had Abdul Lateef al-Qanoo3 on the phone, Hamas' spokesman in northern Gaza.  He was spending a lot of time talking in general terms about how heavy and brutal the invasion was and making a call to recognize that viewers and especially Arab governments were now either for or against the Palestinian people.  He claimed there were heavy losses in the Hayy al-Zaytoon area among the Israelis.  He claimed there were many wounded Palestinians in houses who were not able to reach medical help.

Now they've cut to one of Al-Jazeera's correspondents on the ground, he's running through the various locations in Gaza and talking about sites that Israel has been hitting.  Sorry, was busy typing and missed most of them.  The channel has been showing heavy black smoke and fire in the middle of a densely populated residential district.  I think the correspondent was saying that was a fuel depot attached to Voice of al-Aqsa Radio.

Correspondent saying as of 2 hours ago, saying at least 2 dead at Shifa Hospital from eastern Gaza recently, and latest totals are 477 dead and 2300 wounded at least.  Saying lots of fresh wounded and numbers rising quickly.  Catching bits and pieces as I try to type here, generally sounds like a chaotic situation and really no idea at this point how many really murdered and wounded by Israel.  At least 3 medical workers killed as they tried to rescue people in Jabalya refugee camp.

They've got a constant live camera feed panning around Gaza City and there's lots of explosions going off now.  Correspondent saying several of these are Apache missile hits (my note: if I were an Apache Indian, I would be suing the US and Israeli governments for defaming the honor of my tribe for naming a tool of so much murder after them).

Talking about Voice of Al-Aqsa Radio now, saying the fuel depot that was blown up for them was held their because the lack of electricity Israel has caused meant they had to store fuel to keep power to the station.  Says it is a Hamas-affiliated radio station Israel has accused of broadcasting terrorism, hate, etc.  Says the fuel depot fairly small.  Reiterates everyone has had to try and store fuel because of the lack of electricity.

Correspondent talking about how Israel's target list as steadily expanded from government sites to civilian sites.  He was far more detailed than that, but having to summarize here.

Showing an ambulance now, anchor asking correspondent about it, correspondent saying it appears to be heading from one of the heavily targeted areas towards al-Shifa Hospital.  Saying something about how hospital needed to get out 100 patients to Egypt and get in medical supplies, but I missed if he was saying they managed to actually do so or needed to and haven't been able to.

They just showed an Apache missile as it arced across the sky and hit somewhere in Gaza City.  There's another one from an Apache.  Saying more than 6 now from an Apache towards northern Gaza.

10:34pm) Now going to Beirut and interviewing Abbas Zaki, PLO representative there.  He's starting out encouraging everyone working in Gaza including the Jazeera and media correspondents and condemning Israel's crimes in Gaza.  Condemning the attacks on civilians and failure of Arab governments to provide arms.  But encouraging the citizens of Gaza to stand firm.  Saying if this was a fight between two equal armies would be one thing, but saying this is a wide-ranging attack by Israel on a civilian area.

Zaki asked by anchor what he thinks of the deterioration of the military and humanitarian situation.  Zaki says its not normal the way the Arab nations are reacting.  Now he's rambling on about Sarkozy and how the Israelis call their army a "Defense" force even as it attacks.  Really incoherent.  (Though he's not taking the standard Fatah Quisling line, the Fatah guys must really be feeling the heat and realizing they have to talk tough now as their grassroots aren't happy with them for supporting Israel's barbarity in Gaza.)

Ok, Zaki really rambling.  Jazeera cameras continue to pan over Gaza, missiles falling and bombs going off all over the place, fires and smoke everywhere.  Apocalyptic scene.  Anchor finally cut off Zaki, thank goodness.

Back to correspond Tamir something or other.  Asking if any updates/developments.  Saying more explosions in northern Gaza, more explosions heard eastern Gaza as he turns the panorama cameras that way.

Headline on bottom of screen (been up several times now) saying Washington refuses the Arab ceasefire proposal at the Security Council.

Geez, you keep seeing these bombs and missiles the Israelis are firing and they're going straight into what look like densely built up areas.

Correspondent saying Israeli tanks entered via the agricultural area near where Israeli settlement of Dugit (sp?) used to be and progressing slowly from there.

Saying it's almost morning, 6:45 am, toughest night yet for the Palestinians.  Saying worst incident so far worst incident was Israelis bombing a mosque (I think in Beit Lahiya) that killed 13 people.  Saying the resistance is fighting the Israeli tanks with missiles.  Saying Gaza from the far north to far south facing non-stop bombardment (the pictures and sounds of explosions on the screen certainly back that up).

10:49pm) Dawn breaking it looks like, light on the horizon.  Safwat Ziyad (sp?) on the phone now, a military expert, anchor asking his view of what's happening.  Safwat saying Israeli forces may have made some progress on the ground overnight it appears, but doesn't appear they've been able to stop the resistance from launching Qassam missiles yet, 5 of which went into the Negev overnight.  Anchor asking Safwat (who from dialect is clearly Egyptian) what the destructive power of Qassam's is.  He says they're small, 5-15 kilograms of explosives, goal is to basically show Israelis can't stop them.

Headline on bottom now saying Security Council ended an emergency meeting on Gaza without reaching any agreement or official announcement.

Safwat still speaking, keeps talking about how resistance keeps sending message their capabilities still intact as they continue to launch missiles and Israelis haven't achieved their ability to stop it.  This guy's boring, keeps saying the same thing over and over.  Now he's drifting into politics of ceasefire terms.

Anchor cuts him off (thank you!) and asking correspondent Tamir for any updates on the ground.  Tamir not responding, silence.  Oh, here he is.  Saying bombardment getting more violent now.  Says seeing morning light now and appears to be corresponding with an escalation.  Saying Israeli forces in northern, eastern, and southern Gaza.  Saying slow progress by Israeli tanks.  They appear to be taking firmer control of agricultural areas and stepping up their bombing of residential areas from there.  Heavy machine gun fire being opened up by Israelis to try to cover their tanks advance.

Argh, back to Safwat az-Zayad in Cairo (mis-spelled name first time).  Talking about how Israel doesn't have any system against Palestinian missiles.  He's talking about Israel's "Iron Dome" anti-missile system and how it hasn't worked to date.  Did he just say "lil-asif ash-shadeed" (unfortunately) about that?  Ok, he remains boring, not sure if he's whining about the poor Israelis or if I just misunderstood.

No going to New York and correspondent Khalid Dawoud to ask about the Security Council meeting.  Boom, another explosion in background.  Saying very simple statement out of Security Council asking everyone to stop shooting and minor request to Israel to respect humanitarian law.  Saying US rep specifically didn't want any formal council statement to come out, that they don't want "a return to the situation before things got worse" and that they want the PA (my note: i.e., the Palestinian traitors and American/Israeli puppets) to be back in charge of the border crossings in Gaza again.  Says as usual US is key player and they ended after a 4 hour meeting with nothing.

Says the Arab ambassadors exited meeting very clearly showing disappointment on their faces.  Saying US is ultimately the last word at the UN Security Council and that lack of any statement shows lack of effectiveness of it.  Dawoud spending some time talking about how security council works, how permanent members and US in particular really have last word and any hope of getting international law and international humanitarian law basically impossible there.  He put it in less charged terms than that, more technical, but that's what I got out of it with half of my attention on it.

Ok, need to go to bed soon, but hopefully this gives some sense of how the coverage goes.  It's comprehensive, wall-to-wall coverage.  Correspondents in all the key locations.  Pictures of what's happening on the ground along with people on the ground describing.  Interviews with spokesman from the combatants (no Israelis on in the past hour or so I've been typing, but they've had a lot of them on in general past few days, so both sides putting out their messages).  Good night.

UPDATE: Oooh, just add this one juicy final tidbit.  Khalid Dawoud in NY continuing to talk about efforts at UN, talking about disarray of Arab ambassadors, their failure to achieve anything, but juiciest bit is besides for talking about their divisions, mentions that some of them "probably don't want an immediate ceasefire".  Oh, and talking about how it took 4, 5 days for them to even meet using excuse of New Year holidays, but appears it may well have been a deliberate green light from the Security Council members and the PA to allow the attacks to go forward and have time.  Making comparisons to 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon on that.

Al-Jazeera report miscellani

I was just listening to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak on Al-Jazeera trying to justify his inhumane participation in the Israeli siege of Gaza by refusing to allow the opening of the Rafah border crossing. His words translated (going from memory about a half hour ago here, but this is about right): 'stuff in, stuff out, but its occupied so the occupier controls the crossing'. He's claiming that the other side of the Rafah border crossing is "occupied" because Palestine is occupied. Basically Mubarak hates Hamas because they have close ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood who in turn are the key (most popular) opposition to his dictatorial regime. So he wants to see Hamas smashed to protect his own rear, even though the vast majority of Egyptians are united in supporting the opening of the crossings for humanitarian aid and defensive arms to the Palestinians. As usual, a tinpot Arab dictator with US support is standing against his people.

At the same time, Egyptians are coming out in increasing numbers to protest the government's actions and demand the border crossings be opened. Mubarak's stooges are teargassing them, beating them, arresting them, and blocking them from reaching protest sites. Nor is this limited to Egypt. Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Jordan reported on what he called possibly the largest demonstrations in Jordanian history as political factions from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Communists to the Trade Unions all are united in condemning Israel and Egypt. As protestors approached the Egyptian and Israeli embassies in Amman, they were fired on by tear gas and beaten.

But the worst suppression of protests was by the Israelis in the West Bank (if we leave Gaza out of it anyways), where at at least 3 demonstration sites at Qalandiya, Jayyous, and Hussan (near Bethlehem), Israeli forces opened fire with *live ammunition* on *unarmed* protestors. One shouldn't be shocked at this though, it has become standard Israeli procedure and unarmed demonstrators are regularly shot dead by Israeli troops. Today at least one AFP reporter was hit and sent to hospital.

In Pakistan Al-Jazeera's Islamabad correspondent reported not just the anger among extremist Salafi types, but the Pakistani Senate also explicitly condemned the hypocritical double-standard of western governments in saying that Pakistan had to fight terrorism while they support Israeli terrorism. Unmentioned, but what US observers (especially in Washington) should take note of is that if they want the Pakistanis to fight the Taliban for them, the fact that the Pakistani Senate is raising formal protests saying that the US is selective in its choice of what terrorism it condemns, then their willingness to commit Pakistani resources and lives to fight US enemies is going to shrink.

Jazeera also reported on widespread protests around the world including ones they showed in Turkey, Sudan, the Philippines, Kenya, Australia, and India (past days have shown protests in many other spots around the world). Most of these protests condemned Arab leaders' complicity in the massacres just as strongly as the Israelis committing them.

All this on top of the reporting directly from Gaza where several more children were reported killed today, the bombing continues non-stop, flour/bread which people already had to wait hours in line for (give great credit to the brave and patient Gazans who are always shown waiting patiently and neighborly in line despite the chaos being visited on them) has now reportedly begun to run out, the funerals are growing, and the firmness of the people is clearly holding strong.

By the numbers

So I have compiled some statistics, (entirely from Israeli sources by the way – from the right info on rocket/mortar fire from The Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center, and from the left info on Israeli and Palestinian casualties from B’Tselem). A claim has been made that the rocket attacks never stopped, therefore Israelis can’t trust Hamas. Of course that narrative simply assumes that Palestinians started things, that Palestinians are apparently occupying the Israelis and not vice versa, that Palestinians have a starvation siege on over a million Israelis and not vice versa. Whatever, that blatantly erroneous assumption aside, let’s look at some numbers.

Ok, see the chart and table below. I’ve excluded the deaths from December on both sides from the first chart, but the second below it shows them with scales adjusted to keep proportionality the same (those deaths skew the chart and hide the story of the end of the ceasefire because Israel has murdered so many people in such a short timeframe). Notice a few key points:

• Israeli deaths are miniscule, they barely even show on the chart. Forget traffic accidents, more Israelis probably die in knitting accidents. Which is not to say every life isn't precious (every life *is* precious), but Palestinian deaths overwhelm the chart and Israelis and Americans treat them as nothing but sheep to be slaughtered and ignored, their hundreds of deaths simply don't count when put up against a single Israeli death. There is not any proportionality, even before accounting for the starvation siege of 1.5 million Palestinian civilians.
• Regarding the claim that rocketfire never stopped: Given the densely populated chaos that is Gaza, statistically speaking they were all but zero and the chart clearly shows it. As the chart clearly shows once Hamas said it would enforce the ceasefire, it did. One also needs to remember that of the tiny handful that were fired, virtually all were either launched by non-Hamas factions (whom Hamas still managed to work into a near total ceasefire by persuasion and coercion) and/or in response to an Israeli murder of a Palestinian first. The result: Israeli deaths went to zero for four straight months (and only 1 in all 6 months of the ceasefire). But critically, from July onwards the Israelis murdered 27 Palestinians. And that is *only* counting those directly killed by Israeli weaponry, it ignores those who died because of the starvation siege, preventing medical care, blocking medicines, etc which would take that number of Palestinians murdered by Israel up during the ceasefire substantially. So it is very clear: Hamas overwhelmingly lived up to its terms of the ceasefire, exercising all its powers to enforce no rocket/mortar fire, they were (by the numbers) 98% effective in doing so, if we compare total rocket/mortar launches in 3Q 2008 to those in 1Q 2008. Israeli killings of Palestinians went down 97% as well, while Palestinian killings of Israelis went down 100%. But there were 2 sets of terms to the ceasefire – stopping the fire from both sides which through October largely occurred, and Israel stopping the starvation siege. Israel *deliberately* broke that stipulation. Both sides mostly lived up to their military obligations, but then Israel went on and purposely starved and denied medical care and fuel to 1.5 million civilians. In such a situation, it is quite clear, Israel broke the ceasefire by targeting civilians, even Hamas lived up to their end of it in spite of that broken pledge.
• Regarding the end of the ceasefire: the November numbers are key. Yes Gaza rocketfire went up, but *only* in response to Israeli ratcheting up of murders of Palestinians. The timing is not coincidental, the Israelis were publicly announcing in the press that they were preparing for a fight and they deliberately began assaulting Palestinians again. Each time they claimed it was “only a limited operation” basically claiming they had a right to unilaterally break the ceasefire and the Palestinians had no right to respond. Hamas insisted the terms applied both ways (even though they continued to largely let Israel get away with the starvation siege still at that point), and only increased rocketfire in November in response to Israel’s killings. Then in December as the ceasefire expired and Israel continued its starvation siege, Hamas made it clear they remained open to a ceasefire, but only on terms of ending the starvation of 1.5 million civilians. Israel refused, and Hamas declared the ceasefire over. Israel had (and still has) the choice to renew the ceasefire, but they refuse to accept the terms of stopping the starvation of 1.5 million civilians, and are instead deliberately, willfully, and with full control of the power imbalance are choosing to kill and bomb instead of accept the fair Palestinian terms for a ceasefire. Israel is the overwhelmingly responsible party.

Those are the numbers and the story behind them.

[UPDATE: Raphael in the comments section mentioned he'd like to see the source of these stats linked to directly, so I added those at the start of the post.]

Random thoughts

Some random thoughts that have come up lately:

• Israelis and Palestinians are heading to a single state.  They should both get used to the thought.
• The Palestinians are far more prepared for that, they have their family members who managed to cling on in 1948 as guides.
• Israelis remain stuck in their bunker mentality (and their American supporters with them).  They need to give up the ridiculous notion that they're dead if they're a minority.  Afrikaners are fine, and they will be too, they'll just have to give up privilege and settle for equality.
• The Mubarak regime's complicity in the siege of Gaza is not just disgusting, it's ridiculous.  The linguistic acrobatics they're employing to try to defend the indefensible is utterly transparent.
• The Obama admin so far is showing every sign of being every bit as pro-Israeli-Apartheid as every other US administration.  Given that with the exception of George Bush Sr. (and him only slightly), every single US administration has been more pro-gun-Zionist than the last, and given the standard-fare-pro-Israeli-Apartheid statements that Obama and his team have made to date, they are guilty until proven innocent.
• Arabs48.com is a great news source on Gaza events and Palestinian events in general for those of you who read Arabic.  A site by and for Palestinian citizens of Israel.  Among other things, its many articles help show how the Islamic movement inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories are closely related.  They still see and live one unified Palestine even if many others try to ignore it.  And BTW, that's ultimately good for Israelis and Palestinians.  In the single state to come, there will be not just secular parties, but religious Islamic and religious Jewish parties in a single parliament, and they're going to have to learn how to work with each other.

Random thoughts.

Gaza: Whose Side, A Practical Guide

In the latest events in Gaza, the confusion over whose side anyone is on is more confusing than ever as inter-Arab disputes, Israeli electoral politics, regime vs people divisions, and many other factors all seem to have converged. So, here is Non-Arab Arab's attempt at a quick guide to whose side everyone is on. Many have multiple checks reflecting either mixed motives or (in the case of populations) divided views among themselves. Obviously there's some division everywhere, I'm going with where I see overwhelmingly clear majorities. Also, clearly there are parties who would sell their soul and flip sides. This is less meant as a guide to the hearts and deep thoughts of each party as it is meant as a practical guide that will let you interpret comments and sources when you read about what's going on and decide how many grains of salt you should take it with. I started trying to write something descriptive but found myself getting too wordy for a quick guide (the meaning of being for one side or the other or for "themselves" can be a very nuanced tale), so if you disagree, fire away in the comments section. And feel free to ask if you'd like to see others added to the list, these are just the ones I rattled off the top of my head. Oh, and sorry for the ugly formatting, no table feature on blogger and I had to tinker with this numerous ways. Not pretty, but I think readable now at least.

[UPDATE: Was having way too much trouble trying to hand-format text, so I made a table in Excel and uploaded as an image. You can click on it to see in full size if it's too fuzzy. I also added a few more categories.]

Restaurant Review: Tanoreen (Brooklyn)

Some good friends with little prior Arab culinary experience yesterday wanted to eat Middle Eastern while we were in the city. I've only ever found one really good place in NY. Admittedly I haven't tried nearly everything available (please do send recommendations if you have them! -- I see an excellently reviewed place in Astoria for example I've never tried) and I've found several ok places in Manhattan, but the only really fantastic place I found before was the excellent Taj al-Mulouk in the East Village which unfortunately closed down. But went poking around to find something for our friends and came across Tanoreen (http://tanoreen.com/) in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Bit of a trek out there, but we had a car and decided to go for it.

Now, in advance, I am not a foodie.  I have admittedly plain tastes in most instances, I don't know my culinary terms well, and no doubt any good food critic could rip what I'm about to write to shreds.  Whatever, fine, I admit I'm no expert, I'm just writing what I tasted and thought, so take it or leave it!

Tanoreen: Fantastic!  Chef is a Palestinian lady from Nazareth (or at least her mother was, don't know if she's 2nd gen American) who personally runs the place and checks in on the customers. You can read more about her and the restaurant's history on the website. Not a super-fancy place, certainly nothing you'd plan on for an expensive romantic evening, but no total hole in the wall either.  An open kitchen from the smallish dining room and crowded while we were there (and you can see why below) with simple tables and simple decor with Fayrouz and 50s-era Arab crooners and dames singing in the background.  Mid-afternoon on Saturday it was packed, we had to wait for a party to clear (first of 2 parties while we were there) to get a table.

For the staples, the Hummus was fantastic, lovely slightly creamy but still substantive texture, a real but not overwhelming tang (all my friends who are fans of Israeli "kchu-moose" are going to get an earful and sent to Tanoreen next time they try to rope me into some more of that butter-cream rubbish).  Combined with a nice selection of breads (including a fantastic crispy Mina'ish!), the Hummus was the perfect start to a great meal.  Noting as well that the just-right "tang" of the Hummus was a flavor sensation that seemed to get hit on the perfect note on a number of dishes ranging from salads to Mina'ish to grilled chicken.

The Tabboule was some of the best I've ever had.  Somewhat less finely chopped greens gave it added texture, the lemon and onion flavor was pleasantly strong but not overwhelming, the tomatoes red and juicy and perfectly sized and quantified.  Visually, the Tabbouleh was colorful and appetizing coming in a heaping deep green pile with nice chunks of moderately-sized deep red tomato cubes, and the taste confirmed all my best expectations.

Kibbeh which I like but am almost always left somewhat disappointed in was a real treat, coming out not just well spiced and flavored, but crucially, not dry.  The meat and whole thing was properly but not overly moist while the bulghur, pine nuts, meat, and spices all combined gave it a strong but not overwhelming savory flavor.

I'm not a huge grape leaf fan, but my wife is and went for the warm ones stuffed with ground lamb, rice, and spices which she proclaimed a hit.  She liked that they had more substance and flavor, as she has generally been disappointed by a lack of both with little more than rice often the only effort put into them at other places.  One of our friends who had never tried dug in as well and judging by the number he ate, agreed with the judgement.

And last on the mezze list, we ordered a heaping pile of Fattoush (some of which is sitting in my fridge right now calling out to me), which once again hit the nail on the head.  Tangy, perfect fresh ingredients, nice bit of sumac blended in.  And unlike other places I've been where the toasted pita seems an afterthought of huge wedges tossed on the side, here they were sized right and blended throughout to give an occasional pleasing crunch.  My one complaint on the Fattoush is the addition of shreds of iceberg lettuce.  Felt like a very unnatural addition.  It didn't ruin it by any means, it just seemed like a very plain, out-of-place addition in an otherwise flavorful and nicely textured salad.  More of a distraction than a detraction, it would have been better without, but it was still great Fattoush.

For the main dishes (all of which were wonderfully presented and visually appetizing), we ordered a daily seafood special known as Sayyadiyeh ("Fisherman's special" or something like that translated guess you could call it), mixed grill, some extra chicken kabob, and the shrimp platter.  The Sayyadiyeh was a big hit with the ladies (including my wife who is always a big seafood fan), being a spiced, grilled Tilapia filet, along with a slightly sweet and strongly flavored darkened rice full of nuts and topped by a couple shrimp.  Personally I found the Tilapia fine enough but nothing overwhelming, but the ladies were a huge fan declaring the spices and flavor their favorite entree of the night.  The rice on this one I found creative and flavorful though, with a nice mix of nuts with a bit of crunch, and a sweet-ish, raisin-like flavor that was unexpected and quite pleasant.  The shrimp on top though tasted like the afterthought they were, definitely on the dry side.

The mixed grill and the chicken kabob (which both came with another heaping salad which was similarly wonderful as the Fattoush, though lacking in toasted pita or sumac - and thankfully lacking in the iceberg lettuce) was another set of winners, though I thought both should have had a more meat and less rice quantity-wise.  The rice on these was a more standard fare middle eastern white rice with vermicelli, definitely tasty and a nice side complement, but nothing out of the ordinary.  The chicken kabob one of our friends found ordinary, but I thought was really excellent.  A strong lemon flavor infused the (too small) chunks of meat which were cooked well, meaning not too raw and not too dry, just right.  The lamb kabob (also too small) in the mixed grill could have had stronger flavors, but it was good with at least some spice that gave a nice taste beyond just the meat, and cooked just right for our somewhat discombobulated preferences.  While I prefer a bit of pink, my wife can't stand any, so we ordered well done which normally just ruins things for texture, but they managed even removing all the pink to produce a tender meat.  I can only presume as others at the place have said, that ordered with a bit less cooking it would be melt-in-your-mouth, but even with our imperfect order I found it pleasant.  On the Kofta, this was the one thing which I found their cooking to have made a little too much on the dry side.  Not majorly so, just a bit much.  But the spice and the flavor, the spice and the flavor!!  Oh, more than made up for the not quite perfect cooking.  Again, as with Kibbeh I like it but am not generally a huge fan of Kofta, but this stuff was wonderful.  You could see little green flecks of spice and the flavors just danced in my mouth.  Highly recommended.

Finally on the entrees (actually it was the first to arrive) was the shrimp.  Plainly described on their menu as "Sauteed with garlic, olive oil, and lemon", me and one of our guests decided it was hands down the best entree of the evening in flavor.  If that's all the sauce it was cooked in really was, you could have fooled us.  The sauce was slightly brownish, just a little on the sweet side, but mildly spiced as well, giving the whole thing a bit more flavor kick than you might expect from those simple components.  Really wonderful.  Only problem was, nowhere near enough!  If the grills didn't give quite enough meat, this one had little more than an appetizer's-worth around a big pile of the ordinary white rice with vermicelli.  6 small-to-medium sized shrimp was all.  You can't make something that good and only tease people with a few of them!

Desserts were ok.  The Baklava I thought was a nice balance, neither dripping with syrup to the point of losing the pastry or lacking to the point of being dry (though dryer on outside, more syrup-infused inside).  We tried the Harissa which I'd never had before, so when I say I found it plain, I think that's more my judgement on what it is than how they cooked it.  All the others at the table really liked it and declared it their favorite dessert.  And finally the Sahlab, which was again a first try (I've seen Sahlab served up as a drink at Cairo 'ahwas, hadn't ever seen it as a caramel-pudding-consistency-like dessert before, but maybe that's just my inexperience in such things).  The ladies declared it tasted like Tide detergent, but our friend from Uruguay said that while he agreed, it brought back happy memories from childhood -- of eating detergent as a kid?! :) -- and he loved it.  They had a selection of teas and coffees for those of you into such things.  I asked if they had Karkaday but unfortunately not that day at least (they did have mint tea though if you like that), so we called it a very full quits at that point, leaving more than satisfied with a few bags of leftovers and big smiles on our faces.

So there you have it.  Maybe a few details here and there fell short, but I'd give the food a 9 out of 10 and the service an 8.  Atmosphere perhaps a bit short, call it a 6.  But when the people are friendly and food is fantastic, you better believe I become a huge fan.  If you can make your way to Brooklyn, eat at Tanoreen.

For other reviews around the web, see the following:

http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/tanoreen-caterers/

http://events.nytimes.com/gst/nycguide.html?detail=restaurants&id=1081241480504

Quick note on Obama victory and Mideast

Been watching Al-Jazeera coverage along with all the US networks as well (should have been watching Al-Arabiya too come to think of it, but only so many channels my brain can absorb! - Angry Arab claimed this week that Al-Arabiya had been backing McCain to the hilt until just recently when they flipped to Obama). Jazeera (Arabic version I'm referencing here) pretty much mimicking US-style coverage with touch screen maps, in-studio pundits, correspondents out in key states, at the campaign headquarters, etc.

Sense I've gotten all along is that (1) people in the Mideast recognize that Obama won't necessarily automatically be "pro-Arab" given all his pandering to Israeli lobby and the belief in the Mideast that Israel basically controls US policy in the region, but (2) despite it a sense of cautious hope/optimism that Obama having family who are Muslim and from the third world, and being a more sensible person generally who is clearly an ideological break from Bush and the Republicans, will somehow be better for them. Let's remember that decisions made in Washington all too frequently have more impact on people's lives in the Mideast than decisions taken by their own (unelected and often unwanted) leaders in their own capitals. US elections in many ways are choices of leaders that impact their lives as well, and people are hopeful Obama will be better and more sensible.

My suggestion for Obama's first, low-cost, high-impact move to win over hearts and minds in the Mideast: shut down Gitmo as soon as he takes office. The amount of goodwill that will generate in the Mideast (presuming it's done right) is hard to overestimate and will give him political capital for the tough foreign policy choices he has to make in the Mideast in the years ahead that is hard to overestimate. Will he do it? I don't know. Now we will see what the substance behind the man will really be.

The world is changing: the Middle East and the next American President

So I'm going to come out of the deep freeze at least momentarily because I think there's a big picture worth talking about that I haven't really seen anyone put the dots together on yet.

Wow, a lot of really seismic shifts have occurred in the world and the Middle East over the past few months.  I wouldn't say the fact that any one of them has occurred has shocked me, though the fact that so many have occurred so quickly certainly ranks as a big surprise.  And the thing is, as I watch the US presidential election (which is looking more and more likely that Obama will win), I don't see either candidate as particularly well prepared for the world and the Middle East and the US position in both.  Some of that will probably work out for the best for the peoples of the Middle East, world, and even ultimately the US ("ultimately" being a very long term phrase meant to convey that Americans aren't likely going to like the way it feels at first, but in the end will probably wake them up to the new realities of the world and help them find their place in it).

So what's changed?  Let's put these things into two categories which are closely intertwined: (1) Global strategic shifts impacting the position of the United States, and (2) changes in the Middle Eastern landscape.  And let's start with items in category 1 first:

• The collapse of the US financial system: A lot of the world is half smugly declaring "I told you so" that the US was going to run into financial trouble.  Some of it was stupid meaningless blather such as what comes from Bin Ladenite and salafi bozos who still think the world is flat, but the more serious part of it was from a group of second- and third-tier strategic competitors such as Russia (second-tier), Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and their ilk (all third-tier).  The China's, India's, Gulf OPEC states, and Brazil's of the world are to busy hoping that the flu doesn't spread to their own economies (though Brazil has good reason to be less worried than the rest even if they are not totally immune thanks to not only the commodity boom but also massive new hydrocarbon discoveries in previously inaccessible sub-salt regions), but ultimately this plays to their benefit even if the short- to medium-term could turn very painful for them.  Why do I bring it up?  Because this isn't just an ordinary recession, it marks a true turning of the global economic and financial order.  The US has been jacked up on financial steroids for well over a decade now (plenty of blame to go around here starting with the Clinton era right alongside all the Bush mismanagement, to say nothing of Congress and Greenspan/the Fed) with massive amounts of cheap money, lax lending standards, and generally far too much destruction of the necessary modest amounts of regulation that are needed for a capitalist system to function effectively without imploding.  Well, it's imploding as we speak.  Do I think it's the next Great Depression?  Probably not, probably more like a very long, very deep, very painful recession (where exactly the line between that and a depression is I don't precisely know, but I guess I'm saying I don't envision 25% unemployment and dust bowls in the US, or at least I hope there won't be).  But strategically it comes at a time where we have already set up the global economic balance into a position where not only are the EU and Japan virtual economic power equals with the US already, but for the past decade to half decade the resource exporters of the world have been receiving one of the most massive transfers of wealth in human history.  Russia has been revitalized (though more fragilely than China's more substantial growth), China has turned itself into the cheap goods factory of the US and the world (building that factory has been the single most important factor in driving up energy, agriculture, base metals, and commodities generally which produced the giant transfer of wealth to the resource exporters), India is rising solidly if haphazardly, the Gulf OPEC countries have become one of the key emerging markets with cities that look more modern than anything the US or Europe has to offer (if you ignore the virtual slave labor building them - but hey, no different than how most big cities get built I suppose), and Brazil is quietly but steadily prepping to become a major force in the world and on and on.  The US has kept itself on top strategically and militarily, but economically was ripe for reaching a position where alternative players would start to be in a position to dictate terms.  And that is what is happening.  All of a sudden the US' complaints about sovereign wealth funds have dried up and Wall Street and the Fed are hoping and praying the dollars can flow in from Abu Dhabi and Singapore to prevent the failure of more major institutions.  We're going to hear more and more of this.  And of course the Chinese are in a major position of power holding a trillion dollars of US debt.  They are as always prudent and cautious about that power knowing that an aggressive misuse of it will just shoot themselves in the foot, but they are in a position to dictate more terms instead of being dictated too.  And while strategically no one can touch US military spending yet and hence all remain militarily inferior, the trajectories are pretty clear with Russian and Chinese military spending advancing rapidly each year and each seeking to step by step assert a more global presence (India too, but as with their economy, in more fits and starts).  These are little things right now which compared to US military might look laughable (Russia in South Ossettia and conducting maneuvers in Venezuela, China deploying peacekeepers to Darfur, etc.), but I assert they are clearly the start of a trend of expanding military presence by these powers around the globe while the US' increasingly expensive and economically unsustainable wars (in the face of a declining tax revenue base and massively ballooning national debt/deficits) mean the start of a reduced US presence around the world very much akin to the decline of the European empires post-WWII (though it will likely be more gradual as at present there is no one else to step into the vacuum with the EU still having no coordinated military and foreign policy and China/India/Russia still not having effective enough militaries with the necessary transport capabilities to have a truly global reach).  Bottom line: the collapse of the US economic system was overdue, will be long lived, and will reduce US strategic (not just economic) influence around the world even as that of an array of competitors rises.

I guess I ended up throwing all the "global strategic issues" into that one bullet :)  Ok, so on to section 2, shifts in the Middle Eastern landscape that an increasingly constrained US is going to face:

• Not quite the Middle East (guess it depends whose map you're looking at), but nobody seems to have really noticed that the US is now at war in Pakistan.  Didn't notice it did you?  There's no getting around it, we now regularly attack Pakistan, the Taliban had already made the Northwest Frontier Province a major base for their Afghan insurgency and the Pakistani Taliban had grown increasingly assertive and violent inside Pakistan.  I've long said I have no idea what you really do to right Pakistan, but geez, it's really turning into a direct mess for the US right now.  Obama thinks he's really smart on Pakistan and will carry on or even deepen the current military action despite the obvious intractability of the situation.  McCain is a trigger-happy nutzoid who I'm sure will take whatever is not working and double down having taken all the wrong lessons from the current comparative calm in Iraq (hint: the "surge" wasn't the key at all to what happened there).  Ultimately it's about finding as graceful an exit as possible, but with the US now backing a clearly failed Karzai in Afghanistan and the single most corrupt politician in Pakistan who has become president with US support (along with the thousands of people Zardari bribed), the US is neck-deep in blame for everything going wrong and it will be even tougher to find that graceful exit than it is in Iraq because you can only leave if there is a coalition of forces somehow sharing power in these regions who consider Al-Qaeda an enemy (which btw, is what has happened in Iraq, the politicians just don't seem capable of acknowledging they still despise the US).  I don't envy the next President, they're coming in with poor options and a lousy deteriorating situation which is nowhere near peak.
• Phantom Iraqi calm.  Admittedly the biggest surprise to me in the past year in Iraq has been the collapse of Sadrist power.  Well, I shouldn't take that too far, the man is nowhere near from gone or able to be written off.  I wrote a couple years ago I think about how at some point the Sadrists might morph into the kind of disciplined force that Hizbullah has become in Lebanon.  What we've seen was that the hotheaded young Sadr was unable to contain the people acting in his name from their orgy of violence.  The possibility of a broad-based nationalist coalition of forces never came together, Sadr was being increasingly discredited on the streets because of his thugs violence (especially once the ethnic cleansing which took place under buffoon-like American supervision was basically completed), and he finally had to admit to himself he had to clean house.  I'm sure there were all sorts of back-room conversations, threats, cajolings, and deals as well with Tehran, the Americans, ISCI, Fadhila, etc. as well, but bottom line was that Sadr's path as it was fell apart.  The question for him is, what comes next?  His name continues to carry great weight, his organizations have been largely purged it would seem of those not under his control, so what is he planning next and what are his constraints?  I presume his constraints include a much reduced organization now that people really do have to take orders, ISCI/Fadhila/other Shi'a sectarian rivals having had the purse strings and reins of power locally and nationally for a while giving them an incumbents bribery and familiarity advantage, and likely Tehran telling him to keep his jets cool still for a while.  On the other hand, I would presume that those still with him are receiving more disciplined, advanced military training and armaments should he so choose to unleash them and that politically he could still garner a large enough bloc of votes to quell pure ISCI power plays.  Anyway, Sadr is one leg and the point is he is down but not out and highly likely to come back as a violent key player against the Americans at some point.  At the same time, the former Sunni-dominated insurgency fighters in the west of the country and Baghdad grow increasingly uppity with their lack of inclusion in the new power structures of the state Maliki is trying to build and control.  Their distrust and hatred of the Americans never went away, it just took a temporary back seat to their distrust and hatred of Al-Qaeda who tried to rule them like Taliban and at which they violently and successfully balked.  Then of course there's the eternal question of the Kirkuk tinderbox, but more importantly as a potential flashpoint is that the entire border of Kurdistan is now and open and sore question with the Peshmerga having taken chunks of land they did not have pre-invasion and loathe to give them up even as the Maliki state seeks to get them to back off.  Bottom line to all of this: while violence is down for now (notice I use the relative "down", it's still incredibly bad if you're an Iraqi, you or I wouldn't want to live there), there are not just potential sources of fresh flames, there are many that the gas is already turned up to high on even as we never know when someone will light the next match.
• The collapse of the two-state Palestinian-Israeli peace option and the imploding contradictions of Israeli society.  The "peace process" has been a dead letter for some time now.  To truly bring peace requires either complete Palestinian surrender to Bantustans (won't happen) or an Israeli willingness to literally dismantle or abandon the entire first-world road, power, water, communications, sewer, housing and other physical infrastructure of a population of settlers bigger than that of about 1/3 of the countries in the world (i.e., about 1/3 of the countries in the world each individually have fewer people in them than the number of illegal Israeli colonizers living on stolen Palestinian land in the 1967-Occupied Territories).  And that's without even touching on the biggest but most important issue, the Palestinian right of return for their ethnically cleansed refugees of 60+ years (an issue the US and Israelis keep naively hoping they can wish away as they have done since 1948 especially after the Israelis assassinated Swedish diplomat and UN mediator Folke Bernadotte for having tried to get the Israelis in practical terms to live up to their promise and obligation to let the refugees back home instead of shooting them dead as "infiltrators" when they tried to go back home or even just briefly tend to their farms).  But that's not what's new, everyone serious involved in those diplomatic processes (which btw includes neither Bush, Rice, Ross, Olmert, Livni, or Abbas) has known the peace process is dead as Carolina roadkill (and less tasty) for a long time and just kept around to make it look like something is happening to cover the top politicians political rears.  What is new are two trends, one each from the Palestinian and Israeli sides.  On the Palestinian side the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada I would argue while expressing on one level hopeless but justified rage at the Israeli occupation, was still ultimately aimed for most folks at the hope/possibility of getting a real two-state solution.  But somewhere along the line, or metamorphosis has begun to occur.   A lot of ordinary Palestinians around the world and in Palestine itself are starting to really first demand a genuine right of return and rightly spit in Abbas' and Dahlan's faces when they tell them they're going to have to give that up.  They're finally standing up and saying it is their inalienable right in a louder more organized voice, I would argue largely because the Israelis have shown they have no interest in a two-state peace.  That of necessity will entail considering a one-state solution.  While not a lot of folks in Palestine have fully thought this through and its practical implications, the wheels of motion are starting to churn.  While Abbas-and-Dahlan-bootlickers join Olmert-the-anti-Arab-racist in bringing it up more as a threat ("oh no, oh no, if you don't give Abbas enough crumbs to stay in power and call it a final peace deal, Palestinianss will have to be treated as equal human beings with the same guaranteed rights as Israelis and *that* would be a disaster!" the proponents say), more parties are starting to think in practical terms of what it would mean.  The growing solidarity between Palestinian citizens of Israel and their cousins in the 1967-Occupied Territories is a positive trend in this sense as they are a population that understands (even if in a discriminated-against manner) what such co-existence will entail on a more practical level, though obviously a genuine solution will require far great equality than Palestinian citizens of Israel currently receive.  That's the Palestinian side, on the Israeli side, the long train of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Hamas takeover of Gaza (especially with its exposure of Abbas and Dahlan increasingly as Palestinian Quislings for Israel) is finally starting to have an effect exposing the contradictions of the Israeli system's notion of a "Jewish democracy".  While most mainstream Israelis have long felt you can have both, the reality that this is impossible without another mass Palestinian ethnic cleansing is becoming more and more obvious.  The fault line it is showing up on most obviously is the increasingly violent (as if they weren't incredibly violent to begin with, but they have gotten noticeably worse) behavior of the Israeli settlers.  Even mainstream Israelis who have an attitude remarkably similar to old-school South African Afrikaner racists (no, I don't think all South African Afrikaners are racists, but obviously there was a pretty hefty core who were and who kept that system going for so long before it collapsed under its own contradictions just as Israeli Apartheid is going to) that permits a huge amount of anti-Palestinian official violence, are increasingly put off by the actions of Israeli settlers who are burning Palestinian olive groves in greater numbers, beating Palestinians senseless in greater numbers for no reason, and generally violently rioting while the Israeli Army stands by and does nothing (as a reference point, non-armed peaceful Palestinian demonstrators are regularly fired upon with live ammunition, rubber-coated steel musket balls, and a broad array of other lab-experiment supposedly-but-by-no-means-always non-lethal weapons).  Suddenly Israelis who had convinced themselves for over a decade that a two-state solution could exist with them stealing most of the prime land from the already tiny 1967-Occupied Territories (chopping it up into isolated bits by grabbing a key strategic 1% here and 1% there) and with them denying Palestinians their fundamental human right of return to their homes, are realizing that the settlers whose state-subsidized job it is to create those conditions, are increasingly running amok of even the racist laws set up in their favor.  Moreover, those settlers themselves are talking very clearly about being above any secular law of the state (something most Israelis think however naively is a real bedrock principle of Israel) and some are even talking about creating their own state.  More than a few shades of the Colones in Algeria here in their dying days.   I won't draw that parallel too far as the outcome here will clearly take a different form.  Bottom line: Israelis are starting to realize that something is starting to not work in their plan to try and steal maximum Palestinian land without the Palestinians.  Olmert said it flat out when he stated his "fear" that Palestinians would start a civil rights movement to demand equal rights in one state, and the increased settler rioting is at least showing most Israelis that something they can't quite identify yet (but which in reality is the fact that the settlements have inextricably and permanently tied the entire country into one contiguous Israeli-Palestinian state already de facto just not de jure) is not sustainable in the way things are going.  Somehow sending fanatical settlers who think they are God's law incarnate (and that oddly they think God's law is to steal and murder...did these guys never read the 10 commandments?) is not meshing with the notion of producing a sufficiently ethnically-pure Israel that can claim to be a "democracy" by controlling Palestinian population levels.  They're not willing to admit how disgustingly racist the notion has been all along yet, but they're realizing that somehow it's not working because the settlers are embarrassing their notions of themselves and how civilized they thought they were (even as they quietly and systematically have carried out incredibly inhumane, uncivilized brutality for decades but managed to convince themselves it was ok because they institutionalized the brutality which they thought made it acceptable).

I'm not even getting into Iran, that's an ongoing story.  Maybe Ahmadinejad will be booted out in the next Presidential elections there and more sensible face of the regime will show up, maybe the nuclear issue will worsen or improve, I don't know, but that one at present doesn't change the basic dynamics of the region much from what we already know.

What am I saying with all this?  While each story is fascinating in its own right the big picture point I am trying to make is that the next US President is facing the imminent end of the US' brief-lived (only about 2 decades) sole-superpower-status and that this will have huge implications for the Middle East as well as the fact that US-overzealousness in multiple Middle East issues has been part of the factors which have weakened the US.  Is it imminent collapse and replacement by China in a year?  No, of course not.  But the pace of the shift to a multi-polar world has picked up subsantially from what I would have expected a year ago.  China and the developing world will have to whether this US economic slowdown too, but with multiple no-end-in-sight and ultimately-pointless-but-we're-too-fearful-of-the-world-and-insularly-stubborn-to-admit-it wars draining US coffers and influence, the process is in full swing and shows no signs of abating even if there will be plenty of bumps in the road.

The question for the US is this in the years ahead: can the country find itself a new role as one of the many key players in a more balanced multipolar world, or will it bury itself in insularity, fear, and claims of eternal righteousness until it is literally a third rate power in a couple of decades?  I would think that the US system has enough flexibility in it to end up in the more positive former scenario after it takes a few lumps, but heaven help the poor innocents who are going to lose their lives and livelihoods in the process.

And then there's the Middle East (and virtually every region of the globe) where declining US power is going to have all sorts of localized effects.  What does Israel do if US power (both direct and indirect through munitions shipments) can't stop Iran getting nukes?  I don't forecast Armageddon, I forecast a very changed regional strategic balance (this is assuming we don't have a merged single state by then in which case a regional nuclear-free zone becomes much easier to achieve).  And in the near term a more assertive Russia is already changing Israel's strategic balance as it's more effective anti-tank weapons and even intelligence finds its way via third party channels to Israel's most effective foe in Hizbullah, plus Syria's military gets an upgrade and implicit protection from the now official more frequent Russian Navy usage of the Syrian port of Tartous.  Iran gets more willing fat on economic rents to play an assertive role.  All things already happening to one degree or another and changing calculations.  And what happens if the US and NATO are forced to withdraw from Afghanistan and Pakistan?  More realistically in the next President's term, how bad do things get before the US and NATO start trying to figure out how they get out of there?  And more immediately, what does Iraq look like post-pullout?  Who fills the vacuum?  Are Maliki and ISCI strong enough with Iranian support to survive?  How much regional competition gets funneled into Iraq?  Does a new round of the Civil War ignite ala Lebanon's on-again-off-again 15 years of fighting?

More questions than answers, but sensible answers have to start with knowing the right questions first.  Something utterly lacking in the past 8 years of "no questions, I'm busy shooting" US policy.

2 if by sea...

A partial reprieve from my self-imposed timeout. Not to talk though, just to translate this article currently up on the frontpage of Arabs48.com (one of the leading Arabic websites for Palestinian citizens of Israel). My rough and ready translation and Arabic article below. My only comment: these are brave people willing to do the right thing against all odds, and I pray for their success in at least a PR sense even if Israel's brutality makes physical success unlikely at the moment.

*****

The Siege-breaking Ship To Take off from Cyprus on its Set Date, Coming 5th of August
(Arabs48/Written by Haddad and Rafat al-Kilani)


Picture from Archives

The "Free Gaza" movement which intends to send off a ship from Cyprus to the Gaza Strip soon in an effort to break the Israeli siege imposed on the strip, certified that the ship will take off on its set date of 5 August 2008. It said this in a phone call with the President of the Popular Council for Confronting the Siege, Representative Jamal al-Khadari.

Doctor Paul Lourdeh (sp?), the coordinator of the Free Gaza movement, announced that those undertaking "the ship project" completed their preparations and will bring the ship at the set date, sailing from Cyprus to Gaza to break the Israeli siege of Gaza.

A team of rights activists of multiple nationalities is preparing to undertake a sea journey to Gaza via a boat they managed to buy via donations, in an effort of theirs to break the siege.

For his part, Representative al-Khadari who is the President of the Popular Council for Confronting the Siege, certified that the coming of the siege-breaking ship is one of the rights of the Palestinian people to receive their guests who will travel across their waters without any interference from Israel or any other party.

He emphasized the necessity of seeking to establish a seaport in a Palestinian effort to break the siege by way of the sea, and of using all means to confront the siege and the complete Israeli closure.

He demanded citizens and the sons of the Palestinian people participate with all siege-breaking events and activities, go out in demonstrations, and organize events which reject the siege of Gaza, calling for an escalation of the popular effort around the world against the siege of Gaza.

The Free Gaza movment had sent a letter recently to Representative Jamal al-Khadari President of the Popular Council for Confronting the Siege, which called for him and the members of the Council to participate in their project, by going out with the ship from Cyprus to Gaza, or by meeting it in Gaza.

The ship will carry around 45 individuals, among them Richard Folk (sp?) (the next UN envoy to Palestine), members of the European Parliament, and artists, in addition to setting aside just five seats for reports and journalists.

*****

http://www.arabs48.com/display.x?cid=6&sid=7&id=55655

سفينة كسر الحصار تقلع من قبرص في موعدها المحدد في الخامس من آب/ أغسطس القادم..

عــ48ـرب/ ألفت حداد ورأفت الكيلاني

19/07/2008 12:31

صورة من الأرشيف

أكدت حركة "غزة الحرة" التي تنوي تسيير سفينة من قبرص إلى قطاع غزة قريباً في محاولة لكسر الحصار الإسرائيلي المفروض علي القطاع، أن السفينة ستنطلق في موعدها المحدد بتاريخ 5-8-2008، وذلك في اتصال هاتفي مع رئيس اللجنة الشعبية لمواجهة الحصار النائب جمال الخضري.

وبين الدكتور "بول لورديه" منسق حركة غزة الحرة، أن القائمين على "مشروع السفينة" أتموا استعداداتهم وسيحضرون بالسفينة حسب الموعد المحدد مبحرين من قبرص إلى غزة لكسر الحصار الإسرائيلي على قطاع غزة.

ويستعد فريق من الناشطين والحقوقيين من جنسيات مختلفة، للقيام برحلة بحرية إلى غزة بواسطة قارب تمكنوا من شرائه من خلال تبرعات، في محاولة منهم لكسر الحصار.

من جهته، أكد النائب الخضري ورئيس اللجنة الشعبية لمواجهة الحصار، على أن قدوم سفينة كسر الحصار هو حق من حقوق الشعب الفلسطيني، في استقبال ضيوفهم، الذين سيسافرون عبر مياههم دون تدخل من قبل إسرائيل أو أي طرف آخر.

وتمنى، أن تكون هذه الأيام (وصول السفينة) أيام كسر الحصار عن مليون ونصف المليون فلسطيني الذين يعانون الإغلاق والموت والفقر في القطاع.

وشدد على ضرورة السعي لإنشاء ميناء بحري في محاولة فلسطينية لكسر الحصار عن طريق البحر، واستخدام كل الوسائل لمواجهة الحصار والإغلاق الإسرائيلي الشامل.

وطالب المواطنين وأبناء الشعب الفلسطيني للتفاعل مع كافة فعاليات وأنشطة كسر الحصار، والخروج في مسيرات وتنظيم الفعاليات الرافضة لحصار غزة، داعيا لتصعيد الجهد الشعبي في العالم ضد حصار غزة.

وكانت حركة غزة الحرة، وجهت رسالة إلى النائب جمال الخضري رئيس اللجنة الشعبية لمواجه الحصار، مؤخراً، ودعته للمشاركة وأعضاء اللجنة في مشروعهم، بالخروج مع السفينة من قبرص وصولاً إلى غزة أو استقبالها في غزة.

وستضم السفينة قرابة 45 شخصاً، من بينهم ريتشارد فولك، (مبعوث الأمم المتحدة القادم إلى فلسطين)، وأعضاء برلمان أوروبيون، وفنانون"، إضافة إلى تخصيص خمسة مقاعد فقط لإعلاميين وصحفيين.

Foot in mouth disease

Seems any time I open my mouth (or blog comments) lately I say something stupid and offensive.  Need a reminder to not be offensive even where (or perhaps especially where) I think I'm right.  So, Non-Arab Arab is grounding himself from blogging and commenting for a little while.

"The Myth of the Expert"

I'm reading a great book on trading right now by Curtis M. Faith (great surname for a trader, no?) called "Way of the Turtle".  Check the link for more detail on Faith's background in trading, but basically he was the product of a bet between two successful traders who wanted to see if they could train anyone to be a good trader - if trading skill was innate or learned (apparent answer: a bit of both, but probably not in the ways one would presume).  I'm about halfway through and found this great quote which applies not just to trading, but to really any field of knowledge and very much so to Mideast politics, in particular as expounded upon in the US post-9/11.  Here's the quote from pages 134-135:

Unfortunately, in most fields the number of people who really understand what's going on is very limited. For every true expert, there are scores of pseudo-experts who are able to perform in the field, have assembled loads of knowledge, and in the eyes of those who are not experts are indistinguishable from the true experts. These pseudo-experts can function but do not really understand the area in which they claim expertise.

True experts do not have rigid rules; they understand what's going on, and so they do not need rigid rules.

Pseudo-experts, however, don't understand, and so they tend to look at what the experts are doing and copy it. They know what to do but not why it should be done. Therefore, they listen to the true experts and create rigid rules where none were intended.

One sure sign of a pseudo-expert is writing that is unclear and difficult to follow. Unclear writing comes from unclear thinking. A true expert will be able to explain complicated ideas in ways that are clear and easy to understand. [Non-Arab Arab interjection: I would argue that the reverse is also true, that pseudo-experts often take genuinely complex realities and - not understanding or deliberately avoiding that complexity - they dumb down reality to produce a result they wish were true or want to make true.]

Another common characteristic of pseudo-experts is that they know how to apply complex processes and techniques and have been well trained but do not understand the limits of those techniques. [Witness for example the folks who started the Iraq war who understood the incredible killing power of the US military but had no understanding of the inability of that killing power to convince people that occupation is good for them.  Or the Zionist Israelis who think that more death, more occupation, more siege, more brutality, etc. will succeed in cowing the Palestinians.  I am reminded of an interview 60 Minutes did years ago with some Israeli soldier who was heavily involved in the search for Hizbullah military ops man Imad Mughniyeh (assassinated not too long ago by unknown hands in Damascus).  The Israeli was talking all about the snippets they knew about his life, recounting a typical tale of Palestinian suffering at Israel's hands from his family's ethnic cleansing in 1948, the misery of the refugee camps, etc.  When they asked this Israeli after all that what made Mughniyeh so determined to fight Israel, he just threw his hands up and said "it's unfathomable, we have no idea, he's just crazy".  I mean, the idiotic bald-faced nature of his stupidity was incredible.  He just recounted all the brutality Israel visited on this man, and then had the temerity (or stupidity driven by belief in his own Zionist propaganda) to claim that there was no fathomable human reason for Mughniyeh's rage.  Classic example of knowledge, but no understanding.  This is one of the bedrocks of Zionism, US Middle East policy, and Imperialist policy towards those they colonize generally.]

In trading, a good example would be someone who can perform complex statistical analyses of trades, runs a simulation that generates 1,000 trades, and then assumes that she can draw conclusions from those trades without regard for the fact that they might have been drawn from only two weeks of short-term data. These people can do the math but do not understand that the math does not matter if next week is radically different from the last two weeks. [To use an example closer to the heart of this blog, all the pseudo-experts who think that looking at militant movements in the Middle East since Sep 11, 2001 ("9/11 changed everything" rubbish) or perhaps go back a couple decades at most somehow makes them qualified to talk about or worse yet make US policy for the Middle East.  You can often easily spot these quacks because they will talk about "anti-Americanism" as if it were a unified ideology rather than a diverse array of symptoms in reaction to a diverse array of bad policies and actions.]

Don't confuse experience with expertise or knowledge with wisdom.

Amen.

On Inequality

Abdur-Rahman  al-Kawakibi, a Muslim revivalist and Sayyid (claimant of lineage descended from the Prophet) from Aleppo, Syria of the late 19th century affectionately known as Abu Du'afa or "Father of the Weak" for his arguments on behalf of the downtrodden (quoted from Hanna Batatu's seminal work "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq", p. 368):

Human beings share the hardships of life in an unjust way...for men of politics and religion and their hangers-on--and their number does not exceed one percent--enjoy half or more of what congeals from the blood of humanity, and squander it in self-indulgent luxury...And those who trade in precious and luxurious commodities and the avaricious merchants and the monopolists and the like of this class, and they number also around one percent, live each of them as live tens, or hundreds, or thousands of workers and peasants...It is not a question of equating...the active and enterprising with the indolent and the sluggard, but justice requires other than that inequality, and humaneness imposes that the elevated should take the lowly by his hand and bring him close to his rank and mode of life.

That last bold emphasis is my own, and extreme laissez faire, Adam-Smith-invisible-hand advocates should take note (be they western or eastern).  Let's face it, the poor tend to work much harder than the rich, they simply don't have the money and power to aggrandize and praise themselves for it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the real issue in the Middle East is nothing to do with this stupid "moderates" versus "extremists" talk.  Anytime that framework pops up it is either a gross misunderstanding of symptoms versus causes or else a deliberate smokescreen by the powers that be in Washington and Middle Eastern capitals.  The real issue is the needs of the people for ma'kal, malbas, and maskan (food, clothing, and shelter), personal safety and dignity, and free expression -- against the elites who want to hoard those things for themselves.  It is no different than the struggles in many other countries.  The attempts to suppress those demands are what produce the warped economic circumstances, repressive political systems, and twisted ideologies of rulers and rebels.  Seek to honestly address the basic issues al-Kawakibi pointed to over a century ago, and open up the public space for all to have their say in dealing with those issues, and only then will you start to see solutions emerge.  Preferably through gradualism (honest, not fake as despots and elites usually trick people into), or otherwise Thomas Jefferson's quote rings true enough anywhere in the world where the circumstances become too dire: "A little revolution now and then is a good thing; the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Cairo Poverty Out-takes

Ok, latest book I'm reading is "Planet of Slums" by Mike Davis.  While he's not so good at suggesting solutions, merely delineating the problem in broad outlines easily fills a 200+ page book.  The scope of global poverty, exploitation of the poor, patterns of similar abuse of the poor around the globe, the growth of slums, the destruction of even earlier-existent public services within the slums, etc, etc. are laid out in amazing starkness.  People living on and in piles of excrement, slavery, destruction of slums (which them re-emerge elsewhere with an even harder life for the residents who survive), International Financial Insitutions (IFI's) further impoverishing them, I mean the list is just never-ending and the death toll to say nothing of the abject misery that occurs under our noses every day is simply staggering.  To that end, below I've copied a few bits from the book specifically referring to some of these problems in Cairo, a city I love but which breaks my heart and always has in so many ways.  Keep in mind, that Cairo, for any of the problems I lay out below and as horrendous as they are, isn't even at the bottom of the global rung (and to be fair, as bad as his Cairo out-takes are, they're not as bad sounding as some of the realities of city life there are for the poor - just the challenge of writing a global survey on such a big topic I suppose).  Places like Dhaka or Uttar Pradesh in India or Kinshasa or...well, let's just say that most of the poor of Cairo are greatly abused in a way you and I can scarcely imagine, but even their abuse as a whole pales in comparison to others around the globe.

*****

p. 190: Cairo's slums have also been mined in recent years for human body parts. "Most clients in these procedures," explains Jeffrey Nedoroscik, "are wealthy Persian Gulf Arabs. Whereas there are other countries in the Middle East that have transplant centers, few of them have the enormous numbers of poor who are willing to sell their organs. In the past, laboratories would send recruiters into Cairo's slums and poor areas such as the City of the Dead to enlist potential donors."

p. 33-34: The most unusual example of an inherited housing supply is undoubtedly Cairo's City of the Dead, where one million poor people use Mameluke tombs as prefabricated housing components. The huge graveyard, the burial site of generations of sultans and emirs, is a walled urban island surrounded by congested motorways. The original residents, in the eighteenth century, were tombkeepers for rich Cairene families, followed by quarry workers, and then, in the modern era, by refugees uprooted from Sinai and Suez during the 1967 war. "The invaders," observes Jeffrey Nedoroscik, a researcher at the American University in Cairo, "have adapted the tombs in creative ways to meet the needs of the living. Cenotaphs and grave markers are used as desks, headboards, tables, and shelves. String is hung between gravestones to set laundry to dry." Elsewhere in Cairo (formerly a city with 29 synagogues), smaller groups of squatters have taken over abandoned Jewish cemeteries. "On a visit in the 1980s," writes journalist Max Rodenbeck, "I found a young couple with four children cozily installed in a particularly splendid neopharaonic vault. The tomb dwellers had unsealed the columbarium inside, finding it made a convenient built-in shelving for clothes, cooking pots, and a color TV set."

pp. 186-187: In Cairo and other Egyptian cities, children under twelve are perhaps 7 percent of the workforce; this includes the thousands of street children who gather and resell cigarette butts (a pack a day otherwise costs half of a poor man's monthly salary).

pp. 110-111: In Egypt, the decade of the 1970s was also an era of fierce state repression directed against "subversive" urban neighborhoods. A famous example was the aftermath of the January 1977 IMF riots in Cairo. The failed neoliberal policies of Sadat's Infitah had produced a huge deficit that both Jimmy Carter and the IMF pressed the Egyptian president to correct. "To close this gap," writes journalist Geneive Abdo, "Sadat was forced either to end the subsidies or bleed the well-to-do by imposing high taxes on personal income. The bourgeoisie, a key constituency, was too important to Sadat, so the state opted to cut in half subsidies [for staple foods of the poor]." Furious Cairenes, in turn, attacked such in-their-face symbols of the Infitah's luxury lifestyles as five-star hotels, casinos, nightclubs, and department stores, as well as police stations. Eighty people were killed during the uprising and almost 1000 injured.

After filling the jails with Leftists (a repression that had the side effect of benefiting the rise of Egypt's radical Islamists), Sadat focused his rage on the Ishash al-Turguman slum in the Bulaq district, close to Cairo's center, as the fount of what he denounced as a "Communist-led uprising of thieves." He told foreign journalists that the area was a literal nest of subversion, where Communists hid "where it was impossible to reach them, since narrow streets prevented the use of police cars." Anthropologist Farha Ghannam says that Sadat, like Napoleon III in his day, wanted "the city center to be replanned to allow more effective control and policing." The stigmatized inhabitants of Ishash al-Turguman were divided into two groups and expelled to different parts of the periphery, while their old neighborhood became a parking lot. Ghannam argues that the purge of Bulaq was the first step in a hugely ambitious visions - which Sadat had neither time nor resources to actually implement - of rebuilding Cairo "using Los Angeles and Houston as models."

p. 86: Even as metro Cairo has doubled its area in five years and new suburbs sprawl westward into the desert, the housing crisis remains acute: new housing is too expensive for the poor, and much of it is unoccupied because the owner is away working in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf. "Upwards of a million apartments," writes Jeffrey Nedoroscik, "stand empty ... there is no housing shortage per se. In fact, Cairo is filled with buildings that are half-empty."

pp. 35-36: Some impoverished inner-city-dwellers live in the air. One out of ten inhabitants of Phnom Penh sleeps on a roof, as do an incredible 1.5 million Cairenes and 200,000 Alexandrians. It is cooler in Cairo's so-called "second city" than inside the tenements, but roof-dwellers are more exposed to air pollution from traffic and cement plants, as well as dust from the desert.

p. 165: In Egypt, despite five years of economic growth, 1999 World Bank data showed no decrease in household poverty (defined as an income of $610 or less per year) but did register a fall in per capita consumption.

pp. 132-133: Nor does the snail's pace of traffic in most poor cities reduce it's lethality. Although cars and buses crawl through Cairo at average speeds of less than 10 kiometers per hour, the Egyptian capital still manages an accident rate of 8 deaths and 60 injuries per 1000 automobiles per year.

Some notes on Al-Jazeera these days

So, I don’t get to watch much TV these days, but I do try to tune into Al-Jazeera every once in a while. There has been a lot of talk about the Saudi-Qatari political rapprochement and how this has supposedly led the channel to be less critical of both the Saudis and the Americans. Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark thinks there’s not much to that argument, As’ad Abu Khalil of Angry Arab fame is convinced it is true. Personally in my snippets of watching, I tend to believe it is true, but that the thesis' applicability is only in certain spheres. They are much more circumspect in their Iraq coverage, tending to give more credence to Iraqi government and American officials and not as much to the various armed and unarmed opposition as they used to, and seem to be neutering their language/word-choice to American sensibilities. This is not absolute by any means, they did a groundbreaking interview with Muqtada al-Sadr just recently, but it does seem to me to be a trend that stands out. Removing the Sami al-Hajj irritant seen in this light could very well be an American olive branch attempting to get Al-Jazeera to be that much more compliant now that they sense the propaganda winds blowing in their direction.

I guess the more I think of it, the more it seems the point mostly is about Jazeera's Iraq, Saudi and American coverage. Outside of that (granted, those are big important topics not to be lightly dismissed), I don’t sense any backing down on topics such as Hizbullah, Hamas, Iran, and resistance to the Israelis or further American “projects” in the region (though their coverage of the deployment of American-trained Fatah security forces to Jenin today was more than a little irksome and uncritical). The broader Palestinian issue is particularly noteworthy. The 60th anniversary of the Nakba (“disaster” in Arabic, referring to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and Israel’s independence) is being covered prominently with lots of historical notes on events of those times, interviews with the few surviving old men and women refugees, coverage of anniversary conferences (one today in Denmark of European Palestinians seeking their right of return to their homeland), and general discussion of Palestinians’ and their right to return home. Indeed, they are playing a very positive role in helping I think to refocus the Arab world’s attention on the key issue – that right of return. Americans, Israelis, and Abbas & co. are at best willing to talk about borders, settlements, etc., but they’re all perfectly willing to leave the 6 million refugees out in the cold and ignore their most fundamental human rights. That in many ways is what caused the collapse of peace talks in 2000 – the Americans and Israelis considered the topic forbidden to even bring up, Palestinians when push came to shove insisted their basic humanity represented in the right of return was the core issue and not for sale. Al-Jazeera is certainly reminding people of that basic human right these days and deserve a lot of credit for that since Arab regimes are so in cahoots with the Israelis and Americans in trying to bury it.

Anyhow, I am admittedly only an occasional viewer of Al-Jazeera these days, so if others are watching it more and disagree, feel free to chime in. That is my take from my limited sample these days.

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention something else I've noticed lately around the time of the Saudi-Qatari rapproachment. Suddenly Al-Jazeera's broadcast and website have more advertising than before. See, the Saudis being ticked at the Qataris for so long were able to basically enforce an advertising ban on the channel. Saudi Arabia is the biggest advertising market in the region, so anyone who put commercials on Jazeera would get blackballed in Saudi, so they didn't. The result was you typically only saw ads from Qatari state-owned companies. I mean, Rasgas and Qapco are cool and all in their own way, but let's face it, not many Egyptians or Moroccans or Palestinians are making dire household consumer choices over where the plastic in their kids toys comes from, and none of the above has ever likely consumed a drop of Qatari LNG. No offense, but in the face of the Saudi advert blackout, those were just Qatari state subsidies to the channel. Anyhow, it wasn't for lack of eyeballs, Jazeera obviously in a truly free market has the ability to capture huge advertising revenue. Well, now suddenly one does see international companies starting to advertise more and even Saudi and UAE (the Saudi's bestest buddies) events and companies a bit. The blacklisting is thawing along with relations, while meanwhile the coverage on some key issues (see above) is geting dumbed down.]

Israeli Mythbuster 1: Rape

So I've been doing more of that dangerous activity of reading. This time a recent book by Israeli academic Ilan Pappe entitled "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine". Excellent book, I really can't praise it enough for giving a carefully documented (from Israeli, Palestinian, and other sources) blow-by-blow account of exactly how the Israelis did in fact carry out a brutal, carefully planned ethnic cleansing in 1948 (which continues in more subtle forms to this day). You really cannot understand the conflict unless you properly understand the attrocities Israel committed in 1948 and how the Palestinians suffered then and since. The only fault I have with the book is that it should have more of the personal accounts of Palestinians so as to really bring home the trauma from their perspective. But these are not totally absent and certainly Pappe spends a lot of time using multiple sources that only corroborate Palestinian accounts that much more, and in any case one book cannot do everything.

So, what I would like to do in a series of posts is quote directly from the book in order to shatter some of the myths and lies Israelis tell others and believe about themselves. Education on history in Israel (both in schools and throughout the public sphere including aimed at tourists and outsiders) is a gigantic myth and sham, an exercise in propaganda, not truth-telling. Israelis are constantly harping on about supposed Palestinian brainwashing in their schools, when the truth is that while there are things that aren't good in Palestinian education, as usual they pale in comparison to Israeli lies and are in fact 99% reaction to what Israel has done and which Israel denies. While the scale of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 (known as the Nakba in Arabic) is certainly not at all comparable to the Holocaust, it was nonetheless a monstrous crime (all the more so considering that its perpetrators abused the sacred memory of the victims of the Holocaust - and in some cases even the Holocaust survivors themselves - in order to commit it) on the scale of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or Kosovo in more recent times and David Ben Gurion is proven through his own record-keeping to have been no hero like George Washington but in reality a monster akin to Slobodan Milosovic.

But ok, ok, you're listening to the rant, so I need to show some evidence. That's what the quotes from Pappe's book will be for. Hopefully I'm within fair use limits even with these long quotes, but if not I would imagine and hope that Pappe would just be pleased to see people learning more of what he has uncovered and systematically organized along with a generation of scholars willing to honestly examine the evidence of the founding sins that define Israel as the racist state it is.

Today's mythbuster topic: Rape. Israelis and their supporters recoil with horrified denial and may well accuse you of anti-Semitism if you suggest that Israeli soldier-heroes of their war of independence routinely engaged in the rape of innocent women. On pages 208-211 of his book, Pappe does away with this myth and shows that even with the efforts made to deny it and cover it up, it occurred and occurred regularly with David Ben Gurion himself keeping a running tally. The only thing I won't be able to reproduce here are all the footnotes, for that buy the book. Generally speaking his sources include Israeli military and archival records, journals of Ben Gurion and other Israeli leaders/war criminals, letters between the participants in the crimes, journalist accounts from the era (usually unreliable in their conclusions but often containing important details or hints at what was or wasn't actually going on), eyewitness accounts both Israeli and Palestinian, international organization documents from the era, and secondary citing of other academics who have also been instrumental in searching out primary sources. Any of my own comments are added in blue italicized brackets [].

Two general notes regarding rape. First, notice the way that several of the sources refer to it in an almost casual "oh and by the way about those rapes" manner. They are a strong sign of just how common they were, but unlike the carefully planned and documented demolition of Palestinian villages and homes, rape (and other crimes like looting, torture, beatings, murder of random innocents) were not specifically documented in most cases because they were both part of the general and not specific havoc which the Israeli leadership unleashed, and because they preferred that those dirty details be allowed to occur so that Palestinians would see and fear, but not promoted loud enough that an international audience's ears would perk up. And second regarding the relative paucity of rape survivors' testimonies: rape is always a crime that carries a huge amount of stigma with it. Even in the US most rapes go unreported. In Palestine 60 years ago (and especially rural Palestine), a society where female chastity was very important (overly so certainly to our modern feminist viewpoints), it was even more so. The Israelis certainly knew this just as war criminals in many wars have known it and as such it is that much more of an effective weapon. Rape in this context also becomes sexual blackmail of the extremely-violent variety which makes the victims and their relatives want to forget and hide all the more. It is a means of trying to silence the victims who were not outright murdered.

All of this means that the full scale of rape committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian women is not fully known. Comments indicating how unsurprising these cases are clearly show it was common and commonly known, but the murder of some victims and the silence of others living in fear and shame even 60 years later means we will likely never know the full scale of these attrocities, especially in a world where Israel and the United States have so completely and criminally sought to silence the voices of the victims.

*****

We have three kinds of sources that report on rape, and thus know that severe cases of rape did take place. It remains more difficult to form an idea of how many women and young girls were victimised by Jewish trops in this way. Our first source is the international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross. They never submitted a collective report, but we do have short and concise accounts of individual cases. Thus, for instance, very soon after Jaffa was taken, a Red Cross official, de Meuron, reported how Jewish soldiers had raped a girl and killed her brother. He remarked in general that as Palestinian men were taken away as prisoners [it was standard operating procedure as Pappe documents in many instances that when Hagana/Israeli soldiers took over an Arab village they would gather all boys and men between 10 and 50, execute on the spot those they deemed guilty of "crimes" such as belonging to a political party or having resisted Jewish takeover, and then throw the rest into open-air pens and prison camps. Note that age at the youngest: 10. The women, children, and elderly were thus left utterly defenseless and were sent walking with only what they could carry into exile], their women were left at the mercy of the Israelis. Yitzhak Chizik wrote to Kaplan in the letter mentioned above: 'And about the rapes, Sir, you probably have already heard.' In an earlier letter to Ben-Gurion, Chizik reported how 'a group of soldiers [had] burst into a house, killed the father, injured the mother and raped the daughter.'

We know of course more about cases in places where outside observers were present, but this does not mean women were not raped elsewhere. Another Red Cross report tells of a horrific incident that began on 9 December 1948 when two Jewish soldiers burst into the house of al-Hajj Suleiman Daud, who had been expelled with his family to Shaqara. The soldiers hit his wife and kidnapped his eighteen-year-old daughter. Seventeen days later the father was able to get hold of an Israeli lieutenant to whom he protested. The rapists appeared to belong to Brigade SEven. It is impossible to know what exactly happened in those seventeen days before the girl was set free; the worst may be presumed.

The second source is the Israeli archives, which only cover cases in which the rapists were brought to trial. David Ben-Gurion seems to have been informed about each case and entered them into his diary. Every few days he has a sub-section: 'Rape Cases'. One of these records the incident Chizik had reported to him: 'a case in Acre where soldiers wanted to rape a girl. They killed the father and wounded the mother, and the officers covered for them. At least one soldier raped the girl.'

Jaffa seems to have been a hothouse for the cruelty and war crimes of the Israeli troops. One particular battalon, Battalion 3 - commanded by the same person who had been in charge when its soldiers committed massacres in Khisas and Sa'sa [a massacre where Israeli soldiers dynamited houses with families still sleeping in them, murdering dozens of innocent men, women, and children], and cleansed Safad and its environs - was so savage in its behaviour that its soldiers were suspected of being involved in most of the rape cases in the city, and the High Command decided it best to withdraw them from the town [note: not punish, not bring to trial, not execute...just relocate. Shades of the Catholic pedophile priests, only with mass murder and ethnic cleansing thrown in for good measure]. However, other units were no less guilty of molesting women in the first three to four months of the occupation. The worst period was towards the end of the first truce (July 8) when even Ben-Gurion became so apprehensive about the pattern of behavior that emerged among the soldiers in the occupied cities, especially the private looting and the rape cases, that he decided not to allow certain army units to enter Nazareth after his troops had taken the town during the 'ten-day' war.

Our third source is the oral history we have from both the victimisers and the victims. It is very difficult to get the facts in the former case and almost impossible, of course, in the latter. But their storieshave already helped shed light on some of the most appalling and inhuman crimes in the war that Israel waged against the Palestinian people.

The perpetrators can only talk, it seems, shielded by the safe distance of years. This is how a particularly appalling case came to light just recently. On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today's Gaza Strip, captured a twelve-year-old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon's sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors [note a minor discrepancy here in Pappe's prior assumption: he mentioned earlier he thought Ben Gurion's diary only mentioned rape cases that were brought to trial at the time, this one was clearly not as can be seen next]. On 29 October 2003, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz publicised the story based on the testimonies of the rapists: twenty-two soldiers had taken part in the barbaric torture and execution of the girl. When they were then brought to trial, the severest punishment the court handed down was a prison term of two years for the soldier who had done the actual killing [note the similarity to US attrocities in Vietnam and Iraq such as the My Lai and Haditha massacres where at best a slap on the wrist and generally no punishments were meted out. The lives of the victims are seen as worthless compared to those of the criminals when "our" soldiers are involved no matter which army "our" represents].

Oral recollection also exposed cases of rape throughout the occupation of Palestine's villages: from the village of Tantura [where a major massacre of civilians was committed] in May, through the village of Qula in June, and ending with one story after another of abuse and rape in the villages seized during Operation Hiram [a major series of ethnic cleansing operations in the north of the country late in the war]. Many of the cases were corroborated by UN officials who interviewed a number of women from the villages who were willing to come forward and talk about their experiences. When, many years later, some of these people were interviewed, it was obvious how difficult it still proved for the men and women from the village to talk about nams and details in these cases, and the interviewers came away with the impression that they all knew more than they wished or were able to tell.

Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewelry [note that in traditional societies in many places around the world of which Palestine and especially rural Palestine 60 years ago was very much one, a woman's entire life savings is often held in her jewelry. Stealing that jewelry is not only stealing precious memories, it is in fact robbing her of her life savings and any hope of independence should she be widowed or divorced. Israeli soldiers did not care, greed and a desire to humiliate were all they cared about], to the very last item. The same women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape. Here is how Najiah Ayyub described it: 'I saw that the troops who encircled us tried to touch the women but were rejected by them. When they saw that the women would not surrender, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and tried to undress them, claiming they had to search the bodies.'

Tradition, shame, and trauma are the cultural and psychological barriers that prevent us from gaining the fuller picture of the rape of Palestinian women within the general plunder Jewish troops wreaked with such ferocity in both rural and urban Palestine during 1948 and 1949. Perhaps in the fulness of time someone will be able to complete this chapter of the chronicle of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

CIA In the Mideast from "Legacy of Ashes"

Haven't really been applying myself to writing much of real value-added for a while on the blog as you can tell. That said, it turns out if one turns off the computer and opens up some of those wild pre-industrial inventions known as "books", one often finds interesting things not available online. In the hopes of bringing a bit of that to you, I want to give some outtakes from Tim Weiner's book on the history of the CIA "Legacy of Ashes". Suffice it to say, while I've known many of the stories on some less-detailed level for a long time, it is rather breathtaking to see the sheer scale of screwups, illegalities, murders, lack of intelligence, and such that are the backbone of the CIA's history (not the fringe, the backbone, the core). I'm only up to the Kennedy Administration in my reading so far, but chapter 14 gave a brief review of some of the early CIA dirty work in the Middle East (beyond the coup that overthrew Mossadeqh in Iran and brought the Shah to power, that got a chapter of its own). I thought I'd reprint a few excerpts here. So without further ado and with my own comments in [] brackets.

*****

"If you go and live with these Arabs," President Eisenhower told Allen Dulles and the assembled members of the National Security Council, "you will find that they simply cannot understand our ideas of freedom and human dignity. They have lived so long under dictatorships of one kind or another, how can we expect them to run sucessfully a free government?"

[Ah, nice to know that even in the 50s the same old racist canards we have about Arabs today were alive in the upper reaches of American government and the same utter ignorance of the realities of the Arab world pervaded US decision-making.]

The CIA set out to answer that question by trying to convert, coerce, or control governments throughout Asia and teh Middle East. It saw itself wrestling with Moscow for the loyalties of millions of people, grappling to gain political and economic sway over the nations that geological accident had given billions of barrels of oil. The new battle line was a great crescent reaching from Indonesia across the Indian Ocean, through the deserts of Iran and Iraq, to the ancient capitals of the Middle East.

The agency saw every Muslim political chief who would not pledge allegiance to the United States as "a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action," said Archie Roosevelt, the chief of station in Turkey and a cousin to Kim Roosevelt, the CIA's Near East czar. Many of the most powerful men in the Islamic world took the CIA's cash and counsel. The agency swayed them when it could. But few CIA officers spoke the language, knew the customs, or understood the people they sought to support or suborn.

The president said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. [So, it wasn't just in Afghanistan in the 80s that a US administration *liked* the idea of promoting jihad...seems there is a bit more American history, no?] "We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect," he said at a September 1957 White House meeting attended by Frank Wisner, Foster Dulles, assistant secretary of state for the Near East William Rountree, and members of the Joint Chiefs. Foster Dulles proposed "a secret task force," under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.

[Read more about King Saud in Robert Vitalis' "America's Kingdom". Today he is considered a lunatic who the Saudi royal family quickly bumped aside, but Vitalis points out he was held up as a great American ally who was put on the cover of Time magazine (or was it Life? I forget, read the book) but then fell out of American graces and was showed aside for being politically inconvenient. King Hussein and the Jordanian Hashemites have of course long been conspirators in league with the Brits, Israelis, and Americans by the admission of all parties concerned. Camille Chamoun, an attempt to split Christians and Muslims in the typical fashion of foreign parties meddling in Lebanon and internal parties of all sects gladly willing to be used by foreigners to try and get a domestic leg up. And Nuri Said - who was Prime Minister, not President of Iraq - was once an Arab nationalist in Ottoman army ranks who went on to have a long career as a British and American stooge under the Iraqi monarchy before finally being toppled along with the monarchy in the 1958 coup that brought Abdul Karim Qassem to power.]

"These four mongrels were supposed to be our defense against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the MIddle east," said Harrison Symmes, who worked closely with the CIA as Rountree's right-hand man and later served as ambassador to Jordan. The only lasting legacy of the "secret task force" was the fulfillment of Frank Wisner's proposal to put King Hussein of Jordan on the CIA's payroll. The agency created a Jordanian intelligence service, which lives today as its liaison to much of the Arab world. ["liaison" meaning not just source of intelligence, but "friends" willing to brutally torture "renditioned" people the CIA illegally kidnaps to this day around the world, including totally-innocent Canadian citizen Maher Arar who was kidnapped by the US government at JFK airport in transit home to Canada from his in-laws in Tunisia, and sent first to Jordan on a CIA plane and then to Syria by road under Jordanian mukhabarat custody being tortured the whole way.] The king received a secret subsidy for the next twenty years.

If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA's secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. If it could help create an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands, Foster was all for it. [John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State and worked hand-in-hand with his brother Allan Dulles who was the head of the CIA.] "let's put it this way," said Ambassador Symmes. "John Foster Dulles had taken the view that anything we can do to bring down these neutralists--anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, extreme nationalist regimes--should be done. [hmmm...conflating a natural desire of oppressed peoples to be free of oppression with the (communist) boogeyman of the day and then lumping them in with the bad guys when they insist on hewing an independent path instead of becoming an American lapdog (or sometimes rejecting their pleas for American help at first, and then treating them as enemies when they went to somebody else for their legitimately and badly needed help). Just a few parallels to today methinks.]

"He had given a mandate to Allen Dulles to do this....And, of course, Allen Dulles just unleashed people." As a result, "we were caught out in attempted coups, ham-handed operations of all kinds." He and his fellow diplomats tried "to keep track of some of these dirty tricks that were being planned in the Middle East so that if they were just utterly impossible, we'd get them killed before they got any further. And we succeeded in doing that in some cases. But we couldn't get all of them killed."

*****

That's just the intro to the chapter, there's then a few pages getting into a decade of CIA coup-mongering in Syria and the dirty CIA tricks in Iraq that brought the Ba'ath party to power. I'll include that final little quote from Iraq here too:

*****

"We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Ba'ath Party interior minister in the 1960s. One of the passengers on that train was an up-and-coming assassin named Saddam Hussein.

Video: Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose discusses Iraq

Watch this, Sinan Antoon is one of the best Iraqi commentators on his own countries travails (not just since 2003), the meaning of it all for Iraqis, Americans, and humanity. Ali Fadhil makes a couple decent points, but he's clearly not as deeply versed as Sinan, though he shares some good personal experiences.



And here's another link if the embedded video above doesn't work for some reason:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/03/19/2/continued-discussion-about-the-war-in-iraq

Palestinian Voices: No Israeli mercy for a Bethlehem mother

Another experience from Rana, written 21st January 2008 about an experience at the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The settlement of "Har Homa" that she refers to was stuck on a hill known as Jabal Abu Ghneim just outside of Bethlehem back in the 90s. The site it was built on was deliberately preserved by the Palestinians as a sort of nature preserve, the Israelis as usual stole it and devastated it with concrete to fill it up with colonists. I observed close hand how the US government disingenuously would protest to the Israelis for a week when the building hit international headlines, then would deliberately and callously turn their backs and wink at the Israelis as the construction resumed as soon as the press heat was off. A few years later, the checkpoint mentioned below was built.

*****

Sometimes I think that I should write a book just to cover the stories that I see everyday while crossing the checkpoint on my way from home to work. Thinking about it now, I have been doing this journey for over 11 years!!!

Being away in Amman last week – a much needed break from the checkpoint- I was curious about how the checkpoint crossing was in my absence. Before I even asked, everyone in the car was complaining about how hard it has been the whole past week, how they would stand for hours and no one would be allowed in, etc. etc.

Sure enough, as we got to the checkpoint, one could hear the noise of the crowds from outside. There were no less than 300 people waiting to cross, the inside hall was full, and people started piling up outside. I worked my way in, watching as the usual fights started, about who is not standing in line, who is taking the other's turn, and so on. Being a woman is sometimes a blessing, as some men would allow me to go in front of them, not wanting women to wait. I passed through the metal detectors and bags x-ray and reached the ID check, where the lines were so long, you can't see the end.

In between two lines, a young couple with a little baby boy stood, looking distressed. Shortly after, a soldier came from the other side and started telling them that "it was not possible" that there was "no way" he could let them in. The couple started pleading with him to no avail. A little while after, the female soldier behind the window in the line I was standing in, called on them. It seems she was curious at what their story was. So, I got to hear the man repeat his story to her. Their baby is sick and needs to go to the hospital in Jerusalem, the father has a permit, but the mother's permit expired and the new one is delayed (for some reason), and they had an appointment this morning with his doctor. She made a few calls, checked his papers, but like the others, she said that he can pass with the baby, but not the mom.

Different soldiers would come and go and inquire about the case, but neither would let the mother in. She would plead and explain; how her baby is just a couple of months old, that he is not used to being separated from her, that the doctors in Hebron told her they had no cure for him, and he had to be taken to Jerusalem, that she is the one who has been following up on his case with the doctor and the father wouldn't know how to answer his questions. But, no, no one would listen. She had to go back home alone and let her husband take the baby. Finally, they gave up trying. The dad took the baby and crossed over, and as I watched, the mom, her eyes filled with tears, handed her husband a diaper from behind the gate… my heart broke.

It seems Palestinian babies have to start suffering from a very early age, to learn that they should grow up fast and be independent from their mothers, and grow up to be people with no rights, just like their mothers and fathers.

There was a lump in my throat as I walked out, with the image of the crying mom in my mind. As usual there were tens of people waiting for a ride, and there was no bus. Not being allowed to drive our cars to Jerusalem, we all depend totally on one single bus company that operates mini busses to and from the checkpoint.

The first bus came and in a blink of an eye was soon filled up with double its capacity, the second bus came, and I thought I should try and take my chance. I managed to get in, but had no seat, so I had to stand in the little space between the seats, carrying my bag and my files. We stopped at the traffic light, and I watched the Israeli settlers coming from "Har Homa" settlement; what used to be our town's "green hill", where we would go for picnics as children and enjoy the beautiful nature. This hill is now a big settlement, with lots of buildings and no trees. Settlers living on this stolen land, drive their cars to their work, while we stand crowded in a mini bus. Their children sit in car seats in their parents cars, when they take them to the hospitals, ours have to let go of mom, because she has no permit to accompany them. Did the world forget what Justice means? Would there ever be "Peace". I guess I will keep wondering.

Comparing Suffering

"I think that foreigners tend to show all too comparable pity towards people who have suffered misfortunes not at all comparable, as if the pity were more important than the misfortune." -- Marie Louise Kagoyire. Genocide survivor. Nyamata, Rwanda. Quoted from Jean Hatzfeld's "Into the Quick of Life, The Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak"

Ms. Kagoyire was referring to foreigners who saw the Hutu refugees fleeing to the camps of Goma following the genocide and had lots of pity and provided lots of aid for them, but who didn't seem to have much pity and certainly very little aid to the surviving victims of the genocide. There were innocents among the Hutus certainly, and there was horrible suffering in the camps, but the camps were run by genocidaires, much of the aid went to the genocidaires in one fashion or another, and the world seemed to think that somehow aiding those whom the perpetrators had pushed into camps (and in many instances the perpetrators themselves!) absolved them of guilt towards the actual victims.

The same imbalance of pity applies to Palestinians and Israelis and Americans and Iraqis. Palestinians suffer far more, yet the west's pity goes overwhelmingly to the Israelis. Westerners act like at best these are two equal sides with equal suffering when the reality is that while there is suffering on both sides, Palestinians suffer 100 fold or more worse. Likewise Americans worry about their loved ones in the US military in Iraq and yet somehow fail to care 1/100th as much about the 100 times or more number of Iraqi victims they have created. At best there is token acknowledgement of Iraqi suffering, but where billions are spent to protect Americans sent to occupy Iraq or to aid injured soldiers, Americans fail to even acknowledge our overwhelming responsibility for the mass graves of Iraqis we have filled (more than Saddam now - think of that) and we don't pour hundreds of billions into aiding Iraqi victims of the violence we brought them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want Israelis or Americans to suffer, all human beings are equal - but that's the point, 1 Israeli is of equal value as 1 Palestinian, but somehow westerners fail to acknowledge that the suffering of 100 Palestinians IS greater suffering (simple math folks) than the suffering of 1 Israeli. Americans and Israelis overwhelmingly refuse to acknowledge the vastly greater suffering they create on the other side of the fence and they most certainly refuse to expend the same amount of resources to ease the suffering they have created (they're usually too busy spending resources to cause more suffering). This is why those suffering turn to increasingly desperate measures, they know no one cares about them, so they grasp at straws for anything to try and pull them out of the hole they've been thrust down into.

Palestinian Voices: Five year olds and Israel's security

I recently asked a Palestinian friend if there were any stories folks in their community would like to share with the outside world. I have no illusions of getting more than the occasional hit and read here, but I figure why not, the more places information like this is posted, the better to educate. So, I have a collection of them and will be posting them from time to time. These aren't all stories of torture and assassination and starvation. Those stories are real and serious. But it is also important to understand that occupation, like slavery, works as an institution by creating everyday humiliation of the oppressed by the oppressor. Ask yourself as you read not the silly questions news commentators or political ideologues tend to go for, but the very simple and humane question of "what if I had to go through this every day, with no end ever in sight except that the humiliation will almost certainly get worse?"

So without further commentary, here is a first such story. More to come in the future, this is from a woman who wishes to be identified only as "Rana", thank you to her.

*****

May 8th, 2006

This morning, as I reached the fourth stage of inspection on my daily terminal crossing to get to Jerusalem from Bethlehem, I saw a little boy (about 5 years old) with his school bag on his back, standing behind the closed door, and in tears. He was denied entry to Jerusalem to get to his school by the Israeli soldier in charge of ID check this morning! I tried to understand what the problem was, and the soldier told me -in Hebrew—which I barely understood- that he was sending him back home because he wasn't carrying his birth certificate with him!!

I might understand, if it was a 15 year old, who needed a birth certificate to prove that he is not yet 16 (the age at which you get an ID and you would need a permit to cross over to Jerusalem), but he wasn't even 6, I swear! I told the soldier in English that he was "Just a baby!" but he wouldn't listen. Some of the people crossing started pleading with the soldier too, saying that he is missing his school and that he is too young to go back home by himself, his mom must have dropped him off at the checkpoint and left, but to no avail. The boy's eyes were filled with tears, and he kept repeating one sentence over and over again "mom didn't give it to me" (referring to his birth certificate). I told him to try and use the other lane, as the female soldier at that lane might have a kinder heart than this soldier and would let him pass, but he was terrified. He kept looking at the soldier with deep fear in his eyes, scared to not abide by his orders to go back. Unfortunately, I had to get going, so I left while still encouraging him to go to the other lane. A few minutes later, the boy came out. I asked him how he finally made it, he said he took my advice and used the other lane. One has to really wonder, how this five-year old might be a threat to the security of the mighty state of Israel.

We will keep working for a future that is "traumatize-free" for everyone in this troubled country.

Brief Thoughts On Iraq

I was in a meeting today with an old friend who has spent many years in the Gulf and Washington. He is a private citizen, always has been, i.e., not part of the power structures in either place. But he knows and is privy to the thoughts of many of the power brokers. I have respected him as an individual and an analyst for many years, he is far less hot-headed than I am and is always deeply insightful.

He was asked by someone in the meeting his views on current state of Iraq. In a nutshell his view can be summarized as:

• The Saudi-US relationship is badly soured, they have lost respect for the United States as a nation deeply in debt to China (i.e., squandering global influence to the rising new power), and for having deliberately harmed the Palestinians and now the Iraqis with the invasion that the Saudis openly warned them would be a disaster.
• The Saudis want the US out of Iraq, they’re just making a mess of it, but they want the Americans out on their terms.
• The Iranians feel almost exactly the same – they want the US out, but on their terms.
• So the Saudis and Iranians have found common ground and have more or less struck a deal to help calm Iraq so that the Americans can “claim victory” and get out. The Saudis and Iranians are meeting regularly behind the scenes and closely coordinating their efforts.
• So the Saudis are funneling huge support to anti-Al-Qaeda Sunni elements to tamp those hotheads down, and the Iranians have used their influence to calm down Sadr. So each side is calming down their respective sectors.
• They are perfectly happy to let the Americans pretend the “surge” is what has caused the recent calming as it will let Americans feel good about themselves then skidaddle quicker.
• Nobody in Washington has a clue what’s really going on on the ground. He thinks Petraeus and a few others likely do, but of course it serves their interests to pretend and let Washington think that they brought about the success instead of other actors beyond their control.

So, realist power politics in the Gulf, and yet more incompetence in Washington.

Baghdad Wall Pics

[click on images to see larger versions]

Walls are becoming fashionable now in countries where the US, Israel or its allies are involved. The Israelis are almost done building one, the US wants to build a bigger one on the Mexican border, the Saudis are building one on their Iraqi border, and now inside Baghdad the US is putting one up to block off predominantly Sunni Adhamiya from surrounding Shi'a neighborhoods. No comment from me this time, but a friend in Iraq in the US Army was kind enough to send along the photos above - thanks, you know who you are - and a couple of his own comments which I copy unedited below with his view:

I'm sending you two pics of the wall. They were the best i could do this week. It was hard to get over to that part of the city this week for some reason. Anyhow. In one of the pics you can see two different walls running top left to bottom right, the one further in the distance is the western wall that runs north south that entraps the entire area, the other wall that is in the foreground is just a local wall keeping neighborhoods seperate. There are crazy events that still are happening in these neighborhoods, but the statistics have proven it a much safer place than before.

[Correction: An Iraqi friend emailed to point out I had mistakenly said these pictures were of Adhamiya. His comments - "Thanks a lot for these photos. These are from Dora, not Adhamiya. I didn't even know they built a wall over there. The empty street blocked by the wall in the northern wall photo was the place of a vast outdoors market, and you can see the Chaldean and Nestorian churches of St. John the Baptist and Mar Georges in the background and a mosque farther south. Sad."]

Arabic Disney DVDs in the US

As many of my friends are aware I am a huge fan of Disney’s Arabic dubbing of their films. Sorry for supporting a big many-tentacled international corporate monster, but there’s just no getting around the high quality job they do and the fact that they are one of the few companies with the resources to do such a good job. While I haven’t used them as often or as effectively as I would have hoped in teaching my kids Arabic, over the years I’ve built up a collection of Disney DVDs in Arabic. Disney Character Voices International does an AMAZING job of dubbing these things into Arabic, most of the time in Egyptian dialect (though I recently got the first one I’ve seen by them in Fusha – Mickey in The Three Musketeers). Really, you could totally think these were originally done in Arabic, including the songs which are just fantastic and a great way of translating/localizing jokes which a straight translation would typically render meaningless. They also manage to get big stars – Muhammad Hineidy is Mike Wazowski (Marid Wishwishni in Arabic) in Monsters Inc. for example and Abla Kamel is Dori in Finding Nemo (where Boutros Boutros Ghali even has a side role). One of my favorites is “Brother Bear” which I think comes across far better in Arabic than even the English (I could watch it in Arabic a dozen times and never get tired, but the English just doesn’t thrill me) and has a really cool catchy song called “Ana 3at-Tareeq” (“I’m on the way”).

Anyhow, I have tried for years and years to try and get a hold of these things in the US to no avail. I’ve been forced to rely on a relative in the Gulf (that source just dried up with his move back to the US) and the occasional lucky shot on an overseas website that usually sells a foreign Disney DVD that by chance also includes the Arabic track (that’s how I got Hunchback of Notre Dame from a German DVD - http://www.wor.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=3398 - and Mulan from an Australian website). Of course (1) this is an expensive route to be forced to go, and (2) getting these foreign versions means you have to get a region code-free DVD player. The good news on that is that most of the cheap-o $20 DVD players you can pick up at Wal-Mart and the like are easily hackable to become region-free. DVDs it turns out don’t have any inherent regional differences in them the way videotapes do, so it is the DVD player manufacturers that have to cripple the players to block other-region DVDs from working. Big companies like Sony put a lot of effort into doing so and hacking them is difficult to impossible, but pick up a cheap-o player and the region protection is only barely there generally only requiring punching in a few numbers worth of secret code to get the thing to work. To get the codes, I’ve found this website where people post the codes they find - http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks. They don’t always work for various reasons, but I’ve found if I search out a DVD player that has lots of comments posted with most showing people having success with the same 1 or 2 codes, that it has almost always worked. And if it doesn’t, given that the DVD player half the time costs less than getting one of these overseas DVDs, not such a big deal cost-wise. Oh, and the quality on these cheap-o DVD players has always been fine for me, even on larger screen HDTVs. Cartoons are very forgiving quality-wise on HDTVs and even live action films aren’t that bad with these players provided you use the red-blue-green component cables.

The Middle Eastern distributor used to be a company called Stallions Home Video (http://www.stallionshomevideo.com) but they only seem to physically sell the DVDs locally in the Gulf and there was no way for me to order in the US off their website. I actually called and talked to their manager in Dubai once (a French guy if I recall right), but he didn’t have any idea who I could talk to about getting them in the US. Disney stores, trying to call or email Disney (consumer or business sides) directly or Buena Vista all turned up dead ends. In short, it was literally impossible to get Arabic Disney DVDs in the US. [As a side note, the Gulf is the only place I’ve been able to find the original DVDs anywhere in the Middle East even. While knockoffs can be found in limited quantities elsewhere (including some websites which I was quite displeased to have paid full price to plus international shipping only to get a knockoff in the mail), I am presuming Disney decided they only trusted the upper-income economies of the Gulf enough to put them on the market locally without massive pirating. Even though they’re in Egyptian dialect, the only one I ever found in Egypt was a cheap Monsters Inc. knockoff. I’m sure more knockoffs could have been found, but that’s all I turned up in my several-day search of the standard Egyptian DVD souqs a few years ago. If anyone has more info than my admittedly limited experience on availability, I’d love to hear it.]

However, I just got a few fresh final DVDs from my relative before his return stateside and I noticed the Stallions Home Video logo on the back was gone and in its place was the Rotana logo. Rotana is the Saudi Alwaleed Bin Talal-owned entertainment megalopoly (is that a word?) of the Middle East. Did a quick Google search and found the article you can see below from last November. Apparently Rotana has signed up to be the new Disney distributor for the Middle East. I checked the Rotana website (http://www.rotana.net) and while they have some DVD titles apparently for sale listed on their front page, (A) none showing yet are Disney, and (B) if you click on any of them you only get a message saying “coming soon”. The Rotana Europe website doesn’t have anything on DVDs. I am hoping however that all this means that it will soon be possible to pick these DVDs up via the Rotana website as they come out. Even if its still overseas shipping and Region 2 coded, there may at least be a straightforward way to obtain the latest stuff as it gets dubbed and released. The Incredibles is now dubbed into Arabic (very well done as always), and hopefully it won’t be long before Cars is available too.

For those of you learning spoken Arabic or teaching it (to kids or adults), I can’t emphasize enough what a great tool these are. They’re fun to watch, very professionally done, and have a wide range of vocabulary for usage (Egyptian anyways). Want to learn ocean terms? Finding Nemo. Family terminology? The Incredibles or Lilo and Stitch. Animals? Lion King or Brother Bear. Manners? Cinderella 2 (haven’t gotten/seen the original yet). Fairy Tales? Snow White and the 7 Dwarves or Sleeping Beauty. Lots more as well. If anyone is interested in the catalog I’ve built up which I think contains every major Disney film that is available in Arabic, let me know, I can send you a list. Disney actually translates far more than it releases on DVD, mostly regular Disney cartoons but also a few films that never make it to DVD in Arabic (I think for example that The Little Mermaid falls into this category). Most of the work (as I was told by an Egyptian opera singer who did the voice of Mickey Mouse and Ursula the sea witch) is done for the Disney Channel’s Middle East iteration and never goes all the way to DVD. But if you can get the DVDs that are out there, I highly recommend it. Wonderful resource and kudos to Disney for doing this. I believe they do this in dozens of languages worldwide too, so presumably whether you’re from Thailand or Iceland, you can get a similar quality product if you’re able to hunt it down. My only complaint to Disney is to stop being such corporate control freaks on your distribution! You've got a great niche product with these Arabized (and other local language) DVDs, you've got lots of little niche markets in diaspora communities around the world, you should make these things easily available to people wherever they are. You can keep it in your own distribution network still, just make them available for direct sale on your main DVD sales website(s) in whatever language people want to pick them up in.


http://www.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUSL0638470520061107

Saudi's Rotana to bring Walt Disney to Middle East
Mon Nov 6, 2006 8:51am EST

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi-owned Arab entertainment company Rotana Audio Visual Co. will distribute Walt Disney products across the Middle East and North Africa, the company said on Monday.

Rotana, which is wholly owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, signed a three-year deal to sell video cassettes and DVDs produced by Walt Disney Studios, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures in the region, the company said in a statement on Monday.

Rotana did not reveal the value of the deal, which could also include other Buena Vista Home Entertainment products.

"The deal complements (al-Waleed's) international business interests, including The Walt Disney Company and a stake in Euro Disney, France," Rotana President Salem al-Hindi said in the statement.

The first releases will hit the market before the end of the year, the statement said.
Rotana, which will likely sell shares in an initial public offering in 2007, is expanding its operations in movies, radio and music, pushing aggressively into the entertainment market, which caters to nearly 300 million Arabs in the region as well as those living abroad.
Last year, the company signed an agreement with British firm Virgin for the online sale of music by Rotana's artists in France.

Rotana Home Entertainment, a new company based in Dubai, will be in charge of distributing the Disney films, Hindi said.

Rotana plans to list on one of the three United Arab Emirates stock exchanges rather than in conservative Saudi Arabia, where cinemas are not allowed.

Kingdom Hotel Investments, controlled by Alwaleed, is listed on the Dubai International Financial Exchange.