A Non-Arab Arab / عربي غير عربي

Two pieces on El-Baradei

2010-02-26T09:16:00.002-05:00

Two articles, one from Egypt's Socialist movement (in Arabic at the bottom) criticizing the rapid adoption by the opposition of a vague Baradei rather than actually building up more grassroots action, and criticizing Baradei's policy similarities to Mubarak (especially with regards to wealth disparities in Egypt and support for Egyptian participation in crimes against the Palestinians). And the second (in English above) with a quite different take from Baheyya, one of my favorite Egyptian bloggers. She doesn't seem to see Baradei as vague at all but rather as supportive of many of the opposition's long-standing policy aims and a potentially very strong force for at least opening up the system and forcing Mubarak and the NDP cronies into a tough, embarrassing spot. Dunno, hard to say where this all lands. I have no doubt Mubarak and cronies will ensure he can't be President through combinations of smears, violence, and twisting of the law. And I agree with the Socialist critiques of Baradei's cowardice vis a vis the Israelis and US, and that the opposition is just grabbing onto a personality and that they're still neglecting grass-roots action despite the fact that the increasing dis-satisfaction of many sectors with life in Egypt has proven that it is possible (the numerous strikes over the past few years and even the seemingly impossible success in setting up a union truly independent from the regime). But on the other hand, somehow the various disparate opposition movements keep surviving and each event (Kifaya, pro-Palestinian marches, worker strikes, 2005 elections, judicial independence movements, etc.) seems to revive the apparently dead corpse and breathe some life into it. Perhaps in this sense, for all Baradei's many shortcomings, there's enough going for him as a political actor and symbol to accomplish some real good. It will be interesting to watch. And of course, through it all the US will keep the guns and money flowing to Mubarak as reward for helping to starve the Palestinians in Gaza, so don't expect any real help from Washington on this front. Though I would expect at some point Clinton will feel the pressure to provide some rhetorical postive words for Baradei. Words that will probably be clumsy, easily and accurately dismissed as insincere, and probably used by Mubarak to smear the opposition with.

http://baheyya.blogspot.com/2010/02/wildcard_25.html

http://www.e-socialists.net/node/5604

All 3 Monotheisms Have Had "Conversion by the Sword", Including Judaism

2010-01-18T10:50:00.003-05:00

Anti-Islamic xenophobia has once again brought into vogue the accusations that Islam is spread by the sword and inherently violent and blah blah blah. The quick rejoinder from Muslims is "hey boys, Christianity has plenty of experience in spreading by the sword too". From Middle Age Crusaders eating the flesh of Muslims in Syria and Palestine, to Reconquista baptism-death-or-exile choices (or sometimes a combination) in Iberia, to the only slightly more subtle attempts to weld modern colonialism and mostly Protestant evangelizing in the 19th and 20th centuries, Christianity ain't free from the charge either. Truth is, one can point to episodes of both violent and peaceful spread of Islam and Christianity over the centuries, and in speaking in the broadest possible definitions of those religions, neither has a clean record. Both have examples of people of the most vile persuasions and other people of the purest hearts spreading their faiths.

Largely left out of this discussion however is Judaism. The assumption most have is that Judaism is not and never has been a proselytizing faith therefore any discussion of whether it is/was spread by the sword is moot. I'll admit, this was always my back of the mind assumption as well. However, I've been back to reading and finding all sorts of juicy tidbits as books often do. This time, a friend has persuaded me to read Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People". A book I had heard about but frankly somewhat dismissed and never intended to read because the hypothesis inherent in its title struck me as over the top even if the author was an Israeli and not some non-Jewish anti-Jewish racist. I'm a bit over halfway through right now and the book has its strong and weak points, but fundamentally it does what a good book should: it makes the reader really think.

So, I'm not doing a full book review here, but I want to address this question of spreading religion "by the sword", which Sand shows actually has happened in Judaism as well. One might argue that with the secular religion of nationalism (in Israel's case Zionism, but one might apply similar arguments to any virulently nationalistic society) having in many ways replaced traditional religion, perhaps Israel is still engaged in this with its wars aimed at getting neighboring countries/societies to accept ethnic nationalism (with all its inherent racism) as an acceptable basis for regional states despite the fact that the era of such has long since passed in most even moderately successful and stable countries of the world. However, that's far too esoteric and problematic a debate to get into here, and instead what Sand shows is that there are direct examples of spreading Judaism by the sword in the "traditional" manner. Nor are we speaking of the Biblical accounts of Joshua's destruction and occupation of Canaan by the Hebrews (which Sand in any case doubts ever happened based on his reading of the archaeological and textual history). That would perhaps be something more comparable to the Crusades and less to the Reconquista. Rather, we're speaking of the era of the Hasmonean Judean kingdom.

Sand goes into a discussion of the mixture of Hellenistic and monotheistic influences in the era, arguing that the two were much more symbiotic and not nearly as antagonistic towards each other as Zionist historiography has since tried to claim. That in turn leads him to a discussion of (1) how the era marked a major growth in the numbers of Jewish converts throughout the eastern mediterranean, far outnumbering the inhabitants of Judea and any diaspora communities of Judeans, and (2) how spreading the size of the Hasmonean realm involved conquering and forcibly converting neighboring kingdoms to their beliefs.

From here, I'll let a few pages of Sand's book speak for itself, and just close with this reminder: when people start arguing that this or that religion is inherently more or less violent than another, you can know they are standing on thin ice. Virtually every religious or cultural group that gains a position of power, has had experiences of abuse of that power, as well as the peaceful spread of influence and ideas. Certainly that is the case for Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (if I knew more about the eastern religions I'm sure we could start adding lengthy examples there as well). It is *not* the religion - its doctrines or culture - that creates problems or solutions, it is what people choose to do with it. The Bible is full of ideas which - even if one believes they are divine in origin - if carried out today would be nothing short of murderous. If a Christian wants to accuse the Qur'an of having such, then that Christian needs to stare the Bible full in the face and acknowledge it as well. And the same goes for Judaism obviously with the shared Torah/Old Testament heritage as Christianity, and as shall be shown below, a historical period - in Sand's argument, the most important historical period in all of Judaism in terms of ensuring that the number of Jews in the world to this day numbers in the millions and not the mere hundreds or thousands such as the few remaining Samaritans - in which spreading the religion by the Hasmonean sword was considered ordinary and acceptable alongside the more peaceful spread of the religion in places like Egypt and Syria.

Anyhow, I blabber on yet again, here's the text from Sand (pp. 157 - 160). Apologies for the lack of footnotes which in many cases actually add some very good corroborating evidence, sources, quotes, and anecdotes, for that you'll have to read the book yourself:

*****

In 125 BCD Yohanan Hyrcanus conquered Edom, the country that spread south of Beth-zur and Ein Gedi as far as Beersheba, and Judaized its inhabitants by force. Josephus described it in Antiquities of the Jews:

Hyrcanus took also Dora and Marissa, cities of Idumea, and subdued all the Idumeans; and permitted them to stay in that country, if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews; and they were so desirous of living in the country of their forefathers, that they submitted to the use of circumcision, and of the rest of the Jewish ways of living, at which time therefore this befell them, that they were hereafter no other than the Jews.

Thus did the ruling Hasmonean high priest annex an entire people not only to his kingdom but also to his Jewish religion. Henceforth, the Edomite people would be seen as an integral part of the Jewish people. At that time, joining the religion of another group was regarded as joining its people--its cult community. But it was only the progress of monotheism that made attachment to the faith as important as the traditional association with origin. This was the beginning of the slide from what we might call Judeanity--a cultural-linguistic-geographic entity--towards Judaism, a term denoting a broader kind of religion-civilization. This process would evolve till it reached its height in the second century CE.

Who were the Edomites? There are several sources. The important Greek geographer Strabo, who lived at the time of Augustus, erroneously stated, "The Idumaeans are Nabataeans. When driven from their country by sedition, they passed over to the Jews, and adopted their customs." Ptolemaeus, an obscure historian from Ascalon, was probably more accurate when he stated, "The Idumaeans, on the other hand, were not originally Jews, but Phoenicians and Syrians; having been subjugated by the Jews and having been forced to undergo circumcision, so as to be counted among the Jewish nation, and to keep the same customs, they were called Jews." Their number is not known, but it could not have been insignificant, since their territory was about half the size of the kingdom of Judea. Needless to say, the Edomite peasants and shepherds probably did not all become good monotheists overnight. Nor, presumably, did all the Judean farmers. But it is almost certain that the higher and middle strata adopted the Mosaic religion and became an organic part of Judea. The converted Jews of Edomite origin intermarried with the Judeans and gave Hebrew names to their children, some of whom would play important roles in the history of the Judean kingdom. Not only Herod came from among them; some of the disciples of the strict Rabbi Shammai and the most extreme Zealots in the great revolt were also of Edomite descent.

Jewish historiography has always been ill at ease about the forced conversion and assimilation practiced by the Hasmoneans. Graetz condemned the acts of Hyrcanus, asserting that they were catastrophic for the Jewish people. Dubnow, in his gentle way, sought to soften the history and depicted the Edomites as "tending to cultural assimilation with the Jews," and Baron remained laconic in his treatment of the "problematic" issue. Zionist and Israeli historiography was divided. Klausner, the proud nationalist, saw the conquest of Edom and the conversion of its inhabitants as righting an old injustice, since the Negev had been part of the kingdom of Judah during the First Temple period. One of the later historians of the Hasmonean kingdom, Aryeh Kasher, went out of his way to show that the mass conversion of the Edomites was voluntary, not imposed by force. He argued that the Edomites had been circumcised before the conversion--and that everyone knows Jewish tradition has always opposed forced conversion.

Urban Edomites had long been under Hellenistic influence and were probably uncircumcised. Moreover, though the rabbinical tradition did in fact renounce any attempt to force people to change religion, it only did so much later--after the Zealot uprising in the first century CE, when forced conversions to Judaism were no longer feasible. Under the Hasmonean rulers of the late first century BCE, it was a regular feature of Jewish policy, and Hyrcanus was not the only one who implemented it. In 104-103 BCE his son Judas Aristobulus annexed the Galilee to Judea and forced its Iturean inhabitants, who populated the northern region, to convert to Judaism. According to Josephus, "He was called a lover of the Grecians; and had conferred many benefits on his own country, and made war against Iturea, and added a great part of it to Judea, and compelled the inhabitants, if they would continue in that country, to be circumcised, and to live according to the Jewish laws." In support, he quotes Strabo, who wrote, "This man was a person of candor, and very serviceable to the Jews, for he added a country to them, and obtained a part of the nation of the Itureans for them, and bound them to them by the bond of the circumcision of the genitals."

Judeans probably lived in the Galilee earlier, but it was populated and governed predominantly by the Itureans, the center of whose kingdom was in Chalcis in Lebanon. Their origin is obscure--probably Phoenician and possibly tribal Arab. The territory annexed by Aristobulus stretched from Bet She'an (Scythopolis) in the south to beyond Giscala in the north--that is, most of today's Galilee minus the coast. Masses of Itureans, the original inhabitants of the Galilee, assimilated into the expanding Judean population, and many became devout Jews. One of Herod's associates was Sohemus the Iturean. It is not known if John (Yohanan) of Giscala, a Zealot leader in the great revolt, was of convert origin like his comrade and rival, Simon Bar Giora.

Aristobulus's brother and successor, Alexander Jannaeus, also sought to convert the people he conquered, but he conducted wars mainly against the Hellenistic trading coastal along the borders of Judea, and was less successful in converting their inhabitants. The Hellenists, who were proud of tehir culture, might have been willing to convert to Judaism of their own free will, as indeed some of them did in the countries around the Mediterranean. But it appears that they were not willing to accept the forced Hasmonean conversion, which would have meant losing the political and economic privileges granted to them by the poleis--the city-states. According to Josephus, Alexander destroyed the city of Pella in Transjordan "because its inhabitants would not bear to change their religious rites for those peculiar to the Jews." We know that he totally destroyed other Hellenistic cities: Samaria, Gaza, Gederah and many more.

Judas Aristobulus's father, Hyrcanus, had to deal with a complicated problem of conversion. When he conquered the region of Samara in 111 (or 108) BCE, he could not forcibly convert the Samaritans, who were in part descendants of the ancient Israelites. They were already monomtheists--they avoided pagan customs, observed the Sabbath and practiced circumcision. Unfortunately, it was forbidden to marry them, their liturgy was slightly different, and, moreover, they insisted on holding their ceremonies in their own temple. Hyrcanus therefore destroyed Shechem (Nablus), the main Samaritan city, and obliterated the temple on Mount Gerizim.

A long Jewish tradition marks the twenty-first day of the month of Kislev, the day when the Samaritan temple was destroyed, as a propitious day in the Hebrew calendar, on which it is forbidden to fast or mourn the dead (see the Tractate Ta'anith). The national memory, too, honors the figure of Yohanan Hyrcanus, the Jewish Titus, destroyer of the Samaritan temple. Today in Israel, many streets proudly bear the name of this victorious Hasmonean priest.

Middle Eastern Misogyny's Western Roots

2009-03-24T09:23:00.008-05:00

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

2009-02-01T22:43:00.008-05:00

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

2009-01-29T22:24:00.009-05:00

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

2009-01-25T18:51:00.006-05:00

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

2009-01-19T15:01:00.009-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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

2009-01-16T21:55:00.004-05:00

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?

2009-01-11T22:00:00.003-05:00

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)

2009-01-10T15:09:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-03T22:16:00.016-05:00

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

2009-01-02T13:00:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-01T15:39:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-31T21:49:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-30T20:24:00.014-05:00

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)

2008-12-28T07:47:00.005-05:00

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

2008-11-05T00:12:00.001-05:00

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

2008-10-05T12:01:00.007-05:00

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...

2008-07-19T16:30:00.002-05:00

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

2008-07-06T19:22:00.002-05:00

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"

2008-06-07T18:08:00.005-05:00

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

2008-05-31T08:45:00.004-05:00

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

2008-05-28T11:37:00.006-05:00

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

2008-05-03T22:35:00.003-05:00

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

2008-04-30T18:51:00.003-05:00

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"

2008-04-13T19:12:00.004-05:00

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

2008-03-21T10:01:00.001-05:00

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

2008-03-21T09:46:00.002-05:00

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

2008-01-26T16:04:00.002-05:00

"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

2008-01-21T21:49:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-20T21:47:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-12T20:42:00.000-05:00

[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

2007-09-30T12:58:00.000-05:00

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.

سبت حتة من قلبي في مصر

2007-03-17T19:43:00.000-05:00

Translation of post title: "I left a piece of my heart in Egypt". Which I genuinely did after spending a lovely piece of my life there. I really love the fact that Egyptian blogging has really taken off as well the last few years, in Arabic and English. And especially now that there is good representation from the younger generation of Muslim Brothers, it's good to say that the Egyptian blogosphere is not merely a reflection of some tiny English-speaking minority but actually does have representatives from a decent cross section of at least the younger generation of the country.

All of which makes it all the more disconcerting that the current Mubarak regime crackdown on all forms of political opposition is being utterly ignored in the Western press. Al-Jazeera has been covering it intensely in Arabic and English, Egyptian bloggers have been covering it intensely, the Egyptian independent press has been covering it intensely. There's no excuse to say there is no info out there for even the laziest of correspondents or bureau chiefs to tap into.

I won't go into the details here, click on some of the links to see in-depth (others are writing in great depth on the topic), but in a nutshell: Mubarak is trying to ammend the Constitution to further entrench the power of his corrupt NDP party by making the registration of other parties totally subject to their whims for approval and not allowing independent candidates (so no Muslim Brothers running anymore despite their impressive electoral performance and subsequent parliamentry performance), limit the independence of the judiciary, entrench draconian security laws, and apparently ease the way for Hosni's son Gamal to be the next President. A "referendum" is supposed to take place in April - yet another fixed referendum by an Arab dictator, whoopee. Virtually every single independent political voice outside of the entrenched cronies of the regime - from leftists to Islamists - is united in opposition, including even many of the generally toothless "official opposition". With the US having completely stopped raising criticism of the Mubarak regime at the top levels of government (Congressionally-mandated annual human rights report don't count, they can be and are ignored both by the White House and the Mubarak regime) because of the Bush regime's decisions to try and inflame Sunni-Shi'a tension in the region and to get an alliance of corrupt regimes to ally with Israel (Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi primarily) against Iran, Mubarak is fully deploying his goons of domestic repression knowing Washington won't say a thing.

Unprecedented numbers of leftists, secularists (including bloggers which has caught a little bit of western press attention), independent opposition voices, and Islamists are being arrested. Indeed, while the Muslim Brothers have by in large continued to try and remain non-confrontational (more so than the Kefaya movement), the regime is cracking down harder than ever arresting large numbers of their members and leaders reaching up to the top levels of their leadership. Torture continues apace at police stations despite all the unprecedent public revelations that have been aired and one of the most notorious torturers - Islam Nabih - has had his trial delayed while the victim he tortured finds himself in jail for 3 months for "resisting authorities".

As Baheyya so elegantly points out in her writing, Egypt has a long, distinguished history of political activism that often gets buried and forgotten by many outside the country. The present period is shaping up as one of the most fateful in a long time. I have high hopes that Egypt has some of the best chances of coming out of this with a government that is more genuinely representative of the people's will (i.e., more genuinely democratic with an independent judiciary and a rejection of American and Israeli schemes for the region). But the entrenched powers that be will fight like lions. I hope at the end of the day they'll just follow Farouk's footsteps and take a free ride out of the country, but I also hope that "revolutionary" convulsions can be avoided. I think people are well aware of the pain of revolution and the need for peaceful change, but the more extreme the current regime is in holding on to power at all costs (and the more extreme the US is in aiding and abetting the regime) and denying genuine democratic change and judicial independence, the more likely they will make the changes unnecessarily painful.

One addition, I've translated an article below from al-Masri al-Youm on the most recent Kefaya calls for a boycott of the constitutional ammendment referendum. I found the comparison to Mauritania (which has likewise been receiving wide coverage in the Arab Press) quite interesting as well: a military coup against a long-entrenched dictator followed by the writing of a widely-accepted Constitution which limits the president to two five year terms, and now a set of elections broadly considered to have been fair and transparent, including an upcoming runoff after the top two presidential candidates each garnered only about a quarter or less of the vote. I won't go into the ins and outs of Mauritanian politics which I'm not really qualified to comment on anyhow, but on the surface at least, a fine example for the Egyptian opposition to point to and undoubtedly one that terrifies both Mubarak and Bush as they know full well that a genuinely representative legislature, executive, and judiciary in Egypt would throw both the bums and their cronies out of power and influence in the country.

*****
[Non-Arab Arab's translation of «كفاية» تدعو إلي «مقاطعة الاستفتاء» ومطالب بتطبيق «التجربة الموريتانية»]

By Magdi Sam'aan and Muhammad Azzam

3/17/2007

"Kefaya" Calls For "Boycotting the Referendum" And Demands Implementation of "The Mauritanian Experiment"

The Egyptian Movement for Change "Kefaya" called for boycotting the referendum on constitutional ammendments which is expected to take place the first week of this coming April on the 2nd. The movement renewed its rejection of the constitutional ammendments and threatened more demonstrations opposing it. They demanded the release of 33 of its members which security forces arrested in a demonstration which the movement organized in downtown Cairo the day before yesterday.

Doctor Abdulwahab al-Maseeri the General Coordinator of the Kefaya Movement accused the security forces of dealing barbarically with him and his wife in the movement's demonstration rejecting the constitutional ammendments. In a press conference Kefaya held yesterday, al-Maseeri said that he had received a phone call from senior officials in the interior ministry warning him against organizing a demonstration the day before yesterday. Al-Maseeri said "The governing regime doesn't get that the country is in need of peaceful change, avoiding a popular explosion which would bring things no one knows or wants".

Security forces pursued a strategy of "drying up the wells" to abort any demonstration the day before yesterday. They prevented any gathering of citizens in Tahrir Square and closed the side streets and some of the coffee shops in which political activists gather. About 20 protestors were able to form a bloc in the sidestreet next to the headquarters of the Tagammua Party and keep on chanting against the constitutional ammendments and poltical reforms in the midst of an intense security siege.

In their chants, the demonstrators drew a connection between what they called the bogus political reforms in Egypt and the democratic changes that are happening in Mauritania. The chants rang out: "Mauritania O Mauritania, Egypt is with you second by second" [note: it rhymes in Arabic - Mauritania ya Mauritania, Masr ma'aki sania bi-sania]. They also got into a verbal altercation with the leaders of the Nasserist Party who were holding their annual conference in the Tagammua Party headquarters [note: both are "official" - i.e., defanged - leftist "opposition" parties] because of their loud chants. Dozens of members of the Labor Party [note: a small Islamist party] organized a demonstration after Friday prayers in Al-Azhar Mosque yesterday protesting the constitutional ammendments, demanding the necessity of implementing the Mauritanian democratic experiment in Egypt.

Bou Inania Medersa - Fez, Morocco

2007-02-18T23:18:00.000-05:00

[The Minaret of the Bou Inania Medersa rises above its courtyard in Fes, Morocco]

Morocco is one of the few majority-Muslim countries in the world where non-Muslims are consistently not allowed into mosques. Folks there will tell you this is an Islamic religious stricture, and they genuinely believe it. However, the historical reality is that the restriction stems from the French colonial period. The French came in and built Ville Nouvelles (new cities) alongside the existing Moroccan towns and then generally kept French and Moroccan populations separate. Part of that separation was to codify a rule that non-Muslims could not enter mosques. The rule has lasted until the present day. [UPDATE: Commentor taamarbuuta states that I am incorrect and that this is actually a religious prohibition under the Maliki school of law. Given that I am pretty unfamiliar with this school of law which predominates in the Maghrib, I could well be off on this. If anyone would like to chime in with further details, please do.]

Because of the restriction, non-Muslim foreigners are generally not able to see a great deal of the wonderful Islamic art, architecture and scholarly history of the country (the inability to enter the millenium-old Karaouyine mosque and university stands in marked contrast to the ability to go see the similarly-aged and resplendent Al-Azhar in Cairo for example).

There are a few exceptions though. One is the modern Hasan II Mosque in Casablanca: a giant, ridiculously expensive project which every citizen got a pound of financial flesh extracted to build, but which is nonetheless a point of national pride -- expensive yes, but also the largest mosque in the Islamic west (and one of the largest in the world) and a display case for some of the finest modern examples of Islamic craftsmanship (especially in tilework and geometry) in the world. Another example are the Riad's, generally older upper middle class homes centered around an open courtyard which have been restored to their artistic and architectural glory and often serve as bed and breakfast type guesthouses. The other main examples are the Medersa's (francophone transliteration - Madrasa's in an anglicized version) or Islamic religious schools. Most are no longer in use, many had fallen into a dilapidated state, but the government has stepped in to restore some major ones and has done a beautiful job in some cases. My recent trip to Fes was my first time in Morocco and we were on a very tight schedule, so I was only able to go see one Medersa, but it is reportedly one of the best: The Bou Inania Medersa.

So, the following description of this Medersa is taken from the Morocco Blue Guide (Fourth Edition, 2002, pp. 204-205), with my corresponding pictures taken last year. Bracketed [] comments are my own additions. Click on any picture to see a larger version.

You will soon come to an impressive entrance (on your right), which is the way into the Bou Inania Medersa. This was built as a lodging-house for students of the Karaouyine by the Merinide sultan Abou Inan in 1355. Generally considered to be the finest of all Moroccan medersas, this beautifully restored example of Islamic architecture at its best should not be missed. You go through a small entrance-hall, with its own splended stalactitic (muqarnas) dome, into the glory of the building, which is the court. The walls are quite breathtaking; it seems that not a centimetre has been left undecorated, and yet because the colours are so muted and the proportions so near perfect the overall effect is not confusing. The whole is framed from above by a layer of finely carved cedarwood, while below is a terrace of delicate stucco. Stuccowork like fine threads of lace outlines the simple openings of the tiny, cell-like students' rooms. These were still in use by students until 1956, but are now seriously decayed. (It is worth climbing one of the flights of stairs, which ascend from the entrance hall to the terrace, for an exceptional view of the court and nearby buildings.) Below the stucco on three sides of the court is a horizontal band of black Kufic script painted on wood. The columns beneath it are covered with minutely worked zelliges, which form the only point of colour, other than browns and creams, in the whole complex structure. Between the columns are elegant wooden grilles, and behind these are the rooms which would have served as lecture halls.

In the centre of the court is the small ablutions fountain, fed by waters from the river Fes, a spot of perfect peace in its natural surround of plain flagstones, an acceptable contrast to the contrived perfection around it. At the far end of the court, opposite the finely proportioned dor through which you entered, is the oratory, with its delicately sculpted mihrab, where the imam stands facing Mecca to lead the prayers. This part of the medersa is still in use and, depending on the good nature of your guide, it may or may not be possible to peer in. The green-tiled minaret is one of the most elegant in Fes.

[Entrance to the Medersa including large brass doors]

[Detail of Zellige tilework from the medersa's courtyard.]

[The Bouinania's minaret is one of the most beautiful and distinctive in Fes.]

[Courtyard of the Medersa, showing the ablution fountain and in the background the oratory area which is still used as a mosque.]

[The Mihrab - prayer niche pointing towards Mecca - within the oratory.]

[Detail of stuccowork from walls of the medersa's courtyard.]

[Medieval graffiti? :) The name of the Sultan who had the Medersa built, "Sultan Abi Annan"]

[Archway stucco Muqarnas work.]

"...when the Arabs will love their children..."

2007-02-16T23:23:00.000-05:00

Golda Meir stands out as one of the more blatantly racist of Israel's leaders over the years (a contest in which she has stiff competition to this day). One of her more famous quotes was that "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us". Because you see, clearly anyone who fights for their very survival after and while being ethnically cleansed simply has misplaced blind rage towards some innocent other and doesn't truly love their children. No really, it's true, why don't you believe me? I mean look at all those Bosnians, making all their lame excuses about being upset over being ethnically cleansed, starved, raped, gunned down in mass graves. Everyone knows the *real* problem was that they just hated Serbs and didn't love their children. And the blacks in South Africa, they could have brought peace so much easier if they would have just given in to their benevolent, loving Apartheid overlords. But noooooooo, they just clearly hated Afrikaners more than they loved their own children.

Which is why the following is so perplexing...a letter...from a Palestinian father to his children in 1938...expressing what appears to genuine, heartfelt love for his children. Almost 20 years *before* Golda Meir showed the world that Arabs had not yet learned to love their children like the rest of us! How can this be?! An Arab, loving his children??? "Impossible!" the Israeli government informs us, "they FORCE us to shoot their unarmed children and destroy their houses over their heads and torture their fathers and rip up the olive groves that feed their families and steal the water that is supposed to nourish their babies. Clearly THEY don't love their children when they force US to do these things to them." (Really, it's true, Israeli soldiers never shoot innocent civilians of their own free will and choice, there is always an invisible Palestinian who sneaks up behind Israeli soldiers, pulls his finger down to the trigger and as the Israeli soldier screams "no, no, don't make me shoot that terrorist baby" the invisible Palestinian forces the Israeli soldier to pull the trigger against his will. It's true, ask any Israeli soldier, they will all tell you between their tears how pained and anguished they are by it and how they need billions of dollars in annual American aid to pay for psychological treatment and ammunition resupply.)

I don't understand, it is so perplexing, can someone please explain this apparently loving letter from an Arab (gasp!) father to his children me? It must be a forgery right? It can't possibly be the Golda Meir was promoting racist ideas that Arabs are sub-humans who don't love their children like everyone else...can it?

[Click image to see in detail: May 1938 letter by Fuad Saba, member of the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine, to his children from British-imposed exile in the Seychelles.]

[Fuad Saba pictured with other members of the Arab Higher Committee, he is standing top right. Background: by the late 1930s the Arab population of Palestine had seen the writing on the wall that the Zionist movement was determined to colonize and steal their country and had not come to live in peace as neighbors as the native Jewish population of the Holy Land had done for millenia before the overwhelmingly-European Zionists arrived. The British occupiers were ineptly maneuvering back and forth trying to please one side then the other and in the process bungling everything but ultimately allowing Zionist plans to march forward and disposses the native inhabitants of their homeland. An Arab uprising broke out which the British brutally crushed, flattening entire neighborhoods, arresting anyone even suspected of any political activity whatsoever, and exiling many Palestinian leaders. Fuad Saba, as a member of the Arab Higher Committee whose goal was independence and putting a stop to foreign plans to colonize his country, was exiled to the Seychelles from where he wrote the letter above to his children.]

On Anti-Shi'a Prejudices

2007-01-18T21:53:00.000-05:00

Anti-Shi'a sentiment in many parts of the Islamic world has been around since...well, Ali. I've seen some of it amongst my own relatives. But it would be a mistake in my view to pretend the current upswell was something waiting to happen. There's plenty of subtle and not so subtle prejudices in the US, but its when people stoke them up that problems develop. Same thing in this case. The generic "those Shi'a aren't real Muslims" that somebody might mutter under their breath (especially in a place like Saudi Arabia where the real problem is widespread - though certainly not total - distrust of anything other than one narrow puritan-like worldview) having never met a Shi'ite, is the sort of minor annoyance that general political, social, and economic development alleviates with time and a few civil rights type struggles.

What we are seeing here instead is a set of regimes (Egypt, Jordan, Saudis, Siniora gov in Lebanon, Abbas in Palestine - what I call the Middle Eastern "paleocons") who sense threats to the prevailing order. Their order. The threat is not Shi'a, the threat is genuinely popular movements who are achieving popular legitimacy from the ground up, rather than by doling out cash (and power) received from some source to which they are not accountable (oil rents) or else a source they feel they can manage and placate (the US primarily). Hizbullah for standing up to Israel, Hamas for standing up to Israel and winning a popular election rather than being annointed in some backroom deal, and to a lesser extent the popular forces in Egypt (Muslim Brotherhood, the independent judiciary, Kefaya, Ayman Nour, etc.). Those are the real targets here: any movement that shows an independent streak with street credibility.

Where do Iran, Syria, and the new Iraqi pseudo-state fit here? The Iranian and Syrian governments are certainly not populist movements with the democratic and populist legitimacy of Hamas and Hizbullah (though Iran's rulers can claim some democratic legitimacy, albeit modest given the nature of the elections that brought Ahmadinejad to the presidency), but as their strong allies and patrons, they have lined themselves up against the Middle East's paleocons. They may not represent an upswelling of populist movement in their own countries, but they are aiding it in Lebanon and Palestine and as such are the paleocons' enemies even though in some ways they are cut from the same cloth. They have broken ranks though and are seen as dangerous by the paleocons for supporting populist forces in the region rather than the old archaic order (at least outside their own borders). One might wonder why entrenched conservative forces like Bashar's Syria and Ahmadinejad's Iran would be breaking with the detente that had prevailed in the region since at least the late 90s: that's a big topic which involves getting deep into the domestic politics of Iran and Syria. In a nutshell I'd just say that Bashar and the neoconservative movement in Iran that Ahmadinejad represents, each for their own reasons (Syria's related more to domestic politics, Lebanon and Iraq; Iran's related more to domestic politics and the US's encircling of the country) saw the benefits of cooperation with the paleocon governments withering and the potential advantages of aligning with populist issues (resistance to Israel, nuclear program, etc.) more to their liking.

The Iraqi government stands somewhere in the middle. As it has gone through various incarnations, it's very newness has made it a curiousity. One which at first the region's paleocons likely thought/hoped they could bring into their club. As time has gone by and Islamist Shi'a parties with strong ties to Iran and its anti-paleocon tendencies have arisen, I think that possibility is severely weakening. If they can co-opt the current government to at least tow a middle line, they'll probably deal with it. If Iraq breaks down completely (and it's 3/4 of the way there already), then Nawaf Obaid's analysis of the Saudis taking sides in an Iraqi civil war will hold - his firing for writing the article notwithstanding.

Anyhow, my point again is that this is fundamentally about the region's paleocon rulers defending their order and system and not about anti-Shi'a prejudice. A corrupt, non-responsive, and generally economically undynamic system. A system that can offer people bribes (sometimes enough bribes to keep most people happy) when the cash is available, but not much else. Certainly not much in the way of human development. I'm not saying a wave of revolutions or outside interventions is the answer - in fact I think that's the worst possible outcome, something that the Iranian electorate for example I think is painfully aware of having been through a painful revolution - but that a genuine opening and transformation of the existing systems into something better is the way and that this requires opening up to voices outside the regimes and a restructuring of the politico-economic system so that the governments are primarily dependent on the people and not the other way around.

However, in order for the paleocons to defend their system, they need to distract people. And they've hit upon anti-Shi'a prejudice as the tool. It lies there, mostly dormant and under the surface, something which in a well-developing society would gradually fade away or face its Waterloo. But now it is being stoked. The paleocons realize that the composition of the forces opposed to their order now can all fall under the umbrella of either being Shi'a or being allied to majority Shi'a Iran. It's not that they are Shi'a that is the issue to the two Abdullahs, Mubarak, Siniora, and Abbas - it's that they can be painted as such and that the image of Shi'ites and Iran can then be denigrated in the crudest racist and xenophobic fashions to stir people up. Make people think that "the Shi'a" and "Iran" are the real enemies instead of the real bums at home.

And there's an added bonus for the paleocons! All of these ruling cliques are dependent upon the United States as a pillar of their rule. Mubarak gets guns, money, Israel kept at arms' length, diplomatic cover, etc. from the Americans. Abdullah Playstation (of Jordan that is) gets cash, guns, military training, diplomatic cover, etc. from the Americans and the Saudis. Don't-cry-for-me-Siniora the same. And of course Abdullah of Saudi Arabia much the same. In return, these rulers give the Americans what they want: military bases, intelligence, oil policy that doesn't cross the US too much (and sometimes has been downright generous to the detriment of their own countries), and the latest: torture-by-proxy for prisoners the Americans kidnap around the world and "rendition" to them. Everybody (over 400 lbs wearing rolexes and Armani suits or robes anyways) is happy!

This though makes them vulnerable against a populace that despises the Americans for the way they manipulate their countries and the region and who oppress the Palestinians via Israel and occupy Iraq. But...if "the Shi'a" and "Iran" can be labelled the "real" bigger threat, then voila! Doing a deal with the devil (the Bush Administration and the Israelis) suddenly seems a lesser evil. And of course to make such an unsavory prospect as working with the Americans to whack other Muslims appeal to their populaces, the paleocons have to stir up the crudest, ugliest, most racist, and most xenophobic rhetoric they can. They got particularly scared when they saw the incredible popularity of Hizbullah throughout the region and the entire Islamic world for standing up to the Israelis this summer. Indeed, that in and of itself is exhibit A showing this is not about people fundamentally having blind hatred throughout the region towards Shi'a -- a fact Hizbullah has worked hard over the years to do, i.e., creating an image of what one might call "patriotic" Arab nationalist Shi'a in Lebanon.

Where do the Americans stand in this? Well, there's the basic longstanding deal I outlined two paragraphs above. In the more immediate context though, I believe this is also about prepping for military strikes on Iran. I'm more worried about this than I know some others are, but I'm increasingly convinced it's a matter of how and when, and less and less about if. With Iraq it was always clear: there was no if, only when. With Iran it started out as if, but now I sense the if fading and the when growing. The Bush Administration has to first figure out how though, and that's where their role comes in here. As usual the Americans don't know jack about the region, so when they hear people talking about "thousands of years" of Sunni-Shi'a strife, they buy it. Then they consider how much they hate Iran (Republicans and Democrats agree on that if nothing else), how now it is supposedly Iran and it's "meddling" that is messing up Iraq (now that takes chutzpah!), and they listen to Arab rulers saying all this terrible stuff about Shi'a, and they listen to American neocons (and Arab-American neocons) talking about Shi'a minorities around the Gulf and now a supposed (though really non-existent) "Shi'a Crescent" ready to explode and threaten world peace and hold all the fuzzy pink bunnies in the world hostage. And they buy it all.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Americans hear this stuff and they buy it because it seems to be getting fulfilled right in front of their eyes (and it sadly is). Why? Because first the bloodshed that has been unleashed in Iraq has turned sectarian due primarily to America's bloody and clownish behavior there. So there are mutilated bodies and pictures of bodies for everyone in the region to see to use as exhibits to convince Sunnis that Shi'a are evil and Shi'a that Sunnis are evil. And then right alongside it you have the Middle Eastern paleocons, fearful for their own survival in the face of populist movements elsewhere (don't worry, Iraq is not a genuine "democratic experiment" they fear), stirring up their own populations to hate Shi'a and having plenty of fodder to do it with because of the bright neon pro-sectarianism sign that America has created in Iraq. And the hate builds, and the hate grows, and ignorant American officials blame it on Iraqis and Arabs and "thousands of years" of BS while totally ignoring their role in prepping, igniting, and fanning the flames of the fire. Then when the time comes that the Americans want to bomb Iran, they hope that most of the Arab world will smile with them when the bombs rain down and thus lessen the blowback. There may be more people satisfied to see Iran hit, but you better believe the blowback will be severe.

This is sad, very sad and very, very dangerous. The Arab world is in a precarious state and the US, Israeli, Saudi, Jordanian, Lebanese, PA, and Ethiopian governments among others are all complicit in seeking the destruction of genuine democracy in their pursuit of selfish interests. Neither history nor God will judge them kindly if they keep marching down this path. The Bush Administration is destroying the possibility for positive evolution and making another round of painful revolutions on the scale of the 1950s and 1960s inevitable again. Only this time, I fear they will be more painful, more bloody, and take more time for any long-term gains to be achieved therefrom.

Rashid Husain on first loyalties

2007-01-15T22:08:00.000-05:00

Palestinian poet Rashid Husain (b. 1936) was from a village near Haifa and died in poverty in a fire in his New York City apartment in 1977. His writings reflected his concerns and experience of Palestinian life under siege both within Israel and in the diaspora. He was also a translator, translating selections from Hayyim Bialik from Hebrew to Arabic, and Palestinian folks songs from Arabic to Hebrew. Translation below by May Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from their "Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature".

*****

From the play "The Interrogation"

Interrogator: In this poem you are clearly saying that my wife loves you.

The Poet: I am speaking of my land, I say I was there
before you, and she will always think of me first.
Be her husband-so what!
I loved her before you did
and have first place in her heart.
Even if you buy her perfume,
purchase her the finest clothes...
it's for me she will wear them.
I smoked on her lap long ago,
startling her with my earliest cigarettes.
I'll even enter your bed
on your wedding night, and come between you...
though you are her bridgroom
she will embrace me, desiring me most.
I will always be between you-
I'm sorry-but I was first.

Blast from the not-so-distant past

2007-01-14T22:58:00.000-05:00

A letter written to elected officials on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Not a perfect prophecy, but who was more accurate - humble American citizen X, or Bush Cheney & co with their billions of dollars of spy equipment and thousands of men and women working for them?

*****

March 17, 2003

Dear *****,

My name is ***** and I am one of your constituents in *****. I am writing to voice my opinion about the coming war in Iraq. While at this point there is no stopping the President’s decision to initiate an unprovoked war, I feel constrained by my conscience to at least state my position as a citizen. I do this in many ways with a heavy heart, having a ***** who is likely to serve on the front lines in this war. I feel his idealism and beliefs in American values are being abused by our President to further immoral geo-strategic and political goals.

I believe that the coming war on and military occupation of Iraq is a disaster in the making which is being planned by a group of Bush administration officials who know virtually nothing about the Middle East. I say that with some knowledge because (1) *****, (2) *****, and (3) ***** I ***** know ***** Paul Wolfowitz who, despite being a pleasant individual, clearly knew very little about the Middle East (as exemplified by his recent non-sensical statement that there is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq). Added to the administration’s lack of knowledge has come a right-wing agenda that is exemplified in the recently release National Security Strategy’s statement that the US will engage in pre-emptive wars not when the US is threatened, but merely to prevent anyone from even having the possibility of challenging our superiority. There is a simple term for this – “hegemony” – and it is an un-American principle. Beyond this big-picture issue, I am opposed to the war for several reasons:

· The attack on Iraq will increase terrorism against the United States. President Bush claims the attack on Iraq is part of the war on terrorism when the reality is that the war will radicalize thousands of people into terrorist groups that otherwise never would have. Considering that Osama Bin Laden managed to recruit large numbers of people to his twisted cause with a false claim that America is occupying Saudi Arabia, how many more will he and others gain when there is a very real occupation of Iraq?
· Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are no threat to the United States. It is now clear that Iraq’s nuclear program has been entirely dismantled. While Saddam Hussein is undoubtedly lying about not possessing any chemical or biological weapons, the fact remains that he would never attack the United States with them or allow them into the hands of terrorist groups to use against the United States. With the eyes of the world now permanently fixed on Saddam, the instant such an attack occurred he would be immediately blamed and would then justifiably be taken down by US military action as the Taliban were for supporting Al-Qaeda. Saddam knows this, and as a survivor would never do it. The proof is in the last decade: he has had these weapons and had every motivation according to the right-wing hawks to use them, but has not. However, if attacked, then as CIA director George Tenet has said, only then does it seem realistic he might feel forced into using them. We should not be provoking such action.
· Occupation of Iraq undermines American principles of freedom and democracy. The people of Iraq remember well the last foreign occupation they were under by the British in the first half of the 20th century. Like the United States today, the British came in claiming to liberate the people and proclaiming a desire to involve Iraqis in their own affairs. The Iraqis didn’t buy it then, and they will not buy it now. While we may see scenes of people dancing in the streets and thanking America for killing Saddam, a few months later when the US troops haven’t left and an American military governor is running things, the welcome mat will wear out very quickly and our troops lives will be in danger. Democracy cannot be spread by gunpoint, and forcing a pro-American administration on Iraq will be no more successful than the attempts to force a pro-Israel administration on Lebanon were in the 1980s. To even attempt to do so is un-American and un-democratic.
· The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a much more serious problem. This administration more than any other in history has tilted to the extreme right of Israeli politics in supporting Ariel Sharon. The Arab world sees this and is incredibly (and justifiably) angry at the US position. We make a mockery of our claims to standing on principle when we refuse to enforce 50+ year-old resolutions requiring Israel to allow back or compensate refugees and unconditionally end the occupation of Palestinian lands, while simultaneously saying that Iraq must meet UN demands immediately. The fact remains that most in the Arab world feel Saddam is a contained threat, while the belligerency of Ariel Sharon’s government and its rampant human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are a living and constant threat being fed by the Bush administration. Attacking Iraq under these circumstances will inflame Arab public opinion further against the United States and fuel desires to harm Israel rather than make peace. Furthermore, Ariel Sharon’s government will be further emboldened to engage in settlement building and violence against Palestinian civilians knowing that there are no external checks on his power.
· There is a very real possibility of provoking a bloody Iraqi civil or even regional war that will kill far more people than even Saddam has done. An invasion of Iraq has a strong possibility of setting off a series of blood reprisals against former supporters of the Ba’ath regime. This in turn could lead to a never-ending series of Hatfield and McCoy-style blood feuds that could quickly take on a dangerous sectarian slant with Shi’a, Sunni, Kurd, Turkmen, Assyrian, and an endless array of tribal actors killing each other wantonly. The only way to try to stop this would be for US troops to take sides, an action that would place us in the dangerous position of being on one side or the other in a civil war. That got is into terrible trouble in Lebanon in the early 1980s and in Somalia in the early 1990s, and it remains a no-win situation in Iraq. Also as in Lebanon, we risk inviting regional actors with a stake in Iraq to worsen the situation. Already we see the Turks and Kurds threatening to engage in armed conflict, and we could soon see Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan or even others playing off and supporting different parties in a civil war. Having foolishly failed to warn Israel to stay completely out of this conflict as we wisely did in 1991, we also risk provoking a regional war involving Israel if Saddam is provoked into lashing out at Israel in a last-ditch attempt to bring the house crashing down on everyone.

I could actually list many more reasons, but I have said enough to make the point. This war will undermine our values and our position in the world. Saddam Hussein can be easily contained and muscular pinpoint pressure can be applied in ways that never were in the 1990s to force him to give up his chemical and biological weapons and even to loosen his tyrannical grip on the country. The Atlantic alliances of the past half century and more are being destroyed by this war and the Bush administration’s reckless dedication to a non-sensical ideology driven primarily by fear and ignorance.

I urge you to stand up against this war so that even if it cannot be avoided, its negative consequences can be mitigated and ultimately reversed through our nation’s democratic process in 2004 and beyond. As my elected representative and as a leader, I hold you responsible to live up to this charge and pray you will act with wisdom for the future of our nation and the world.

Sincerely,

*****

Unrepentant

2007-01-14T15:20:00.000-05:00

"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision, in my judgment," he said. "We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find, or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability." [And the Middle East is more stable now?!]

"Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude," he said. [This from a man whose war has filled Iraqi mass graves at a pace faster -literally - than Saddam himself? Now that takes chutzpah to say.]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq14jan14,0,1743313.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Tunisian Humor

2007-01-13T22:14:00.000-05:00

Via Salamander (with my translation). Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Bush speaking.

Bush: Congratulations to you on the execution of your former colleague the illegal dictator Saddam Hussein.

Zine El Abidine: God Bless you...I'm a dictator as you know, but a legal one for which I have you to thank.

It works just as well replacing Mr. Tunis with wish-this-eid-were-said-and-not-Mubarak, Abdullah Playstation, Don't-cry-for-me-Siniora, Anything-you-say-Mr-Olmert Abbas, etc.

Dedicated to a new generation of refugees...

2007-01-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

900 years ago a king was sent into exile. His might and his lust for the pleasures of the world were crushed. His children were reduced to poverty and he was broken in body and spirit. He was also a poet, the great Poet-King al-Mu'atamid of Seville and he died an exiled prisoner of the Almoravids in Morocco. While I am only rehashing ancient words, I dedicate them to a generation of Iraqis and generations of Palestinians who (like al-Mu'atamid) were powerless to stop their adversaries - domestic and foreign - and now can only look back to their struggling homeland and weep. May their endings be happier than those of the Poet-King and of Al-Andalus, and may their memories of happier days live on as bright and beautiful as those of the Andalusians to this day.

The Prisoner in Aghmat Speaks to His Chains

I say to my chains,
don't you understand?
I have surrendered to you.
Why, then, have you no pity,
no tenderness?

You drank my blood.
You ate my flesh.
Don't crush my bones.

My son Abu Hasim sees me
fettered by you and turns away
his heart made sore.

Have pity on an innocent boy
who never knew fear
and must now come begging to you.

Have pity on his sisters
innocent like him
who have had to swallow poison
and eat bitter fruit.

Some of them are old enough
to understand and I fear
they will go blind from weeping.

The others are now too young
to take it in and open their mouths
only to nurse.

[Translation of Cola Franzen in "Poems of Arab Andalusia"]

Early Arab Nationalism

2007-01-01T15:04:00.000-05:00

From a 1915 Manifesto of the Arab Revolutionary Committee: "Arabs of the Christian and Jewish faith, join ranks with your Moslem brethren. Do not listen to those who say that they prefer the Turks without religion to Arabs of different beliefs; they are ignorant people who have no understanding of the vital interests of the [Arab] race."

Successes and failures of such cooperation occurred subsequently in the 20th century. Today's fight in Iraq and the Arab world more generally really is a question of whether broader visions of identity (as the early example above) will succeed, be followed on by models of political and economic power-sharing, and allow genuinely positive development to occur. Or if the rentier-state model married with the abuse of ethnic, religious and other prejudices (encouraged by the current rulers of the Americans, Israelis, Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, etc.) will be allowed to win out and ensure continued division and stagnation.

Democratic Devolution

2007-01-01T00:45:00.000-05:00

Short, admittedly grossly-oversimplified sketch of my view of the theoretical underpinnings of what it takes to reach the level of a healthy democracy, and then where Iraq has stood in that process from its founding to the present. Short version: the American occupation did not start Iraq on the path to democracy, it actually set the country back to zero. Iraq was not a place with "no hope of ever changing". Yes, it was a fine mess, but underneath that mess it had a few things going for it which a deft international community and Iraqis could have slowly worked to their advantage to emerge from the darkness of Saddam's years. Wouldn't have been easy or quick, but possible over time. Instead the siren song of rapid change from outside came along for Iraqi exiles and Bush and what little had been achieved fell apart leaving the very existence of Iraq in question and democracy further off than ever. You don't know what you've got until its gone I suppose.

I'm happy to hear critiques and discussion, I can stare at my sketches and already see ambiguities in my very simple attempted model that could raise fierce objections that I'd have to (and feel I can) address if raised, but hopefully this can provide a decent theoretical starting point. You can click on the pictures to see larger/clearer versions.

Killing Saddam

2006-12-30T21:19:00.000-05:00

I thought I would write in depth about this, but having poked around in Arabic and English, there is really nothing I can add to what's out there. The man got what he deserved, the way it was done was 100% botched. Those who don't care at all that it was done wrong are dangerous partisans, those who think he should never have been executed are also dangerous partisans. To the honest Iraqis of all sects who understand and are living the existing mess that just keeps getting worse, God grant you a better future than the hellishness Saddam, Bush, Hakim, Zarqawi, Sadr, Chalabi, Wolfowitz, Netanyahu and so many other selfish animals have delivered you.

A Modern Convivencia?

2006-12-29T20:47:00.000-05:00

The Great Mosque of Cordoba / Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin

We were just in Cordoba a few weeks ago and went to see the "Mezquita-Cathedral" as they call it and were of course duly impressed. What a gem. It was the center of the Golden Age of the Islamic Caliphate of Spain and as a good friend and expert on the era pointed out to me was a symbol of a unique strain and period of Islam. "Umayyad Islam [in Spain] was much stronger than most people realize" he said, speaking of the era before the break up of the Caliphate and the division and eventual destruction of Islamic Spain. Muslims in the western Islamic world in the era up to the 11th century who couldn't make it to Mecca would actually come on pilgrimages to Cordoba where they would make Tawaf (i.e., circumbabulate) the Qur'an at the Great Mosque. It was at the Great Mosque (today's Cathedral) that Abdul Rahman III actually had himself proclaimed Caliph, directly breaking from and challenging the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. In this Mosque the masses of the Muslim community of gathered in fact to hear all the important news and events of the day proclaimed and the Mosque grew as the population, wealth, and prestige of Al-Andalus itself grew (or on occasion, as the megalomania of its rulers grew).

All that is in the past today of course, but Cordobans even after the Christian Reconquista recognized they had gained control of a truly unique gem. The city declares itself on signs leading into it the "Patrimony of Humanity". The Christian city leaders (the Muslims all having been expelled) in the centuries following the reconquista actually banned anybody from changing the structure of the Mosque which they only allowed minor alterations to (such as the raising of a few crosses and what not). At one point, the Christian city fathers even banned such changes on pain of death! However, the Christian King Carlos V who had not been there thought he should do more to christianize the place and hearing of the plans of another non-Cordoban to construct a large gothic Cathedral in the midst of the Mosque, gave his approval. A few years later when he showed up to inspect the work, he is said to have remorsefully remarked words to the effect of "You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something unique in the world". Having been there, I agree. The Cathedral, while on its own might have been a decent enough building, generally ruins the ascetic of the original building (though I do think the external dome and shape of the Cathedral actually works reasonably well if it were taken in isolation -- however the internal damage of the edifice is severe).

Spaniards are unsurprisingly mixed on the issue. The great revival of interest in Al-Andalus of the past few decades has certainly fueled greater sympathy for and interest in things Islamic. But like most European countries, anti-Muslim-immigrant feelings also run strong. When one goes to the Cathedral-Mosque today, that dichotomy of viewpoints is plainly evident. The beauty of the mosque including the gorgeous (heavily-Byzantine-influenced) Mihrab are on full display along with the sea of Moorish horseshoe arches in the alternating red and white patterns so typical of Islamic and particularly Caliphal Spain. But the Cathedral stands out in the middle of it all, and the official literature the Cathedral fathers hand out is unapologetic in its historical view that the Muslims were outside invaders, that they had 'corrected' the errors that the Mosque represents, and that this must above all be a Catholic/Christian place...even as the Arab architecture, language, and even the Arab tourists abound.

That said, I paused outside in the courtyard (the original Mosque courtyard filled with orange trees and gorgeous Islamic brickwork) and remarked to my wife that this is a new era, and wouldn't it be wonderful if - now that the historical tensions that tore Spain apart in those centuries past is ancient history - there could be a revived Islamic community who prayed alongside the Christians in this shared building. And a revived Jewish community as well filling the streets of the Juderia which Maimonides once frequented. The modern tensions stare one in the face unfortunately: the knee-jerk opposition to such ideas on the wave of anti-immigrant fervor, the swastika some dirty brute had spray-painted on the statue of the great Maimonides, and from the other end even the language of this Jazeera article that (though more balanced further on) says that Muslims have written to the Vatican to "demand" the right to pray at the Mosque-Cathedral. These are essentially modern grievances and problems being aired even if plenty of links to the past exist. I would be the first to cheer if they could be overcome such as the manner in which the modern Mezquita Mayor De Granada where public opposition was quelled by an open door policy to the public and the construction of an edifice (the first new purpose-built mosque in Granada in over 500 years) which is truly a gem all Granadans of all faiths can be proud of. Unlike a location such as say Hebron in the West Bank where deep ongoing military and political conflict is an ugly present reality which makes genuine religious co-existence virtually impossible, Spain really can be a standout example of how time has healed wounds and reconciliation and a thoroughly modern "Convivencia" can be brought to pass. But these things don't just happen, it takes work and faith in our common humanity.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/500C29E7-2234-4ED9-BA97-C15D29454392.htm

Muslims ask to worship at Cordoba

Spanish Muslims have written to the Vatican to demand the right to worship at Cordoba Cathedral.

Spain's Islamic Board wrote to Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, calling on him to grant them permission to worship in the cathedral, parts of which were built as a mosque during Spain's period of Islamic rule.

The group said in their letter: "What we wanted was not to take over that holy place, but to create in it, together with you and other faiths, an ecumenical space unique in the world which would have been of great significance in bringing peace to humanity."

They said that senior Spanish Catholic clergy had earlier rejected requests for Muslims to be allowed to prostrate themselves inside the Cathedral.

Mansur Escudero, the board's secretary general, said security guards often stop Muslim worshipers from praying at the old mosque.

He said: "There are reactionary elements within the Catholic Church, and when they hear about the construction of a mosque, or Muslim teachings in state schools, or about veils, they see it as a sign we are growing and they oppose it."

Mansur said Muslims came from around the world to see Cordoba's Cathedral, which is still commonly known as the Cathedral-Mosque.

Complex history

The Roman Catholic cathedral had originally been a mosque but was converted into a cathedral in the 13th century.

The mosque itself was built on the site of the earlier cathedral of St Vincent which was demolished by Cordoba's Muslim rulers following the Islamic invasion and occupation of parts of southern Spain in the eight century.

In December, Spain's Catholic Bishops Conference released a statement, quoted by newspaper ABC, saying it "did not recommend" Muslims prayed at the Cathedral and was not prepared to negotiate the building's shared use with other faiths.

Spain's last Muslim territory fell with the conquest of Granada in 1492 after almost eight centuries of Muslim rule.

Today, more than a million of Spain's 44 million people are Muslims, many of them recently arrived immigrants from North Africa.

Sowing Somali Seeds Of Bitterness

2006-12-26T21:23:00.000-05:00

A post on a topic that is admittedly a bit beyond my realm of regional expertise but definitely tied in to broader events throughout the Arab world: Somalia.

I wouldn't pretend to have all the details right on Somalia and freely invite more informed voices to speak up if I have anything wrong here. What follows is my attempt to describe what is going on, and then (where I feel a bit more comfortable) tie it in to what it means for the Arab and Islamic worlds and their relationship with the US more generally.

The current Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is receiving big attention in the Arab press as has the tension leading up to it. The big two media giants (Jazeera and Arabiya) on their websites are taking predictable angles: Jazeera (Arabic at least) is playing up the fact that the US government is supporting Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia (i.e., "the westerners are ganging up on the Muslims again"), while Arabiya is leading with the Transitional Somali Government's revelations of the dark "secret world" of the Islamic Courts Union (i.e., "yes, we at Arabiya are America's proud propaganda voice in the Middle East yet again since the failure of al-Hurra"). Don't have a lot of time to troll the Arabic websites right now, I presume everyone is taking their stereotypical positions. But the point is, this is receiving big coverage in the Middle East, most folks in the Arab world are convinced the west is out to get Muslims, and the actions of the US and Ethiopia mean this is yet another story that will play right into that belief regardless of any attempts by US-allied media in the region to say otherwise (i.e., actions still matter more than words).

Somalia has of course been in more or less a state of warlord-dominated anarchy for over a decade and a half. Most famous to Americans for the 1993 mission creep that led to the "Blackhawk Down" incident, but an ongoing open wound in East Africa much more critical than just that one incident.
Over the past few years, a set of localized attempts to bring some order and recreate a modicum of justice took the shape of Sharia (Islamic law) courts forming to adjudicate disputes, crimes, etc. and attached to those came enforcement officers, or if one wants to be more pejorative I suppose one could say these courts got their own local militias in order to enforce those judgements.
Those courts (which seem to represent a fairly diverse and non-homogenous set of interests in Somali society) did manage to coalesce into a new, unified force in Somalia. In those areas where they gained enough strength, they steadily began to take over from the warlords and create a semblance of order and rule of law in the south of Somalia for the first time in many years.
The perception I have following the Arab and English press on the courts (sorry, don't speak any Somali, my only experience being speaking to Arabic and English speaking Somalis over the years, overhearing Somali conversations which sound a lot like Arabic except that other than a few bits of vocabulary its totally incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker, oh and a cute Hijabed Somali girl on the bus speaking Arabic about myself and a friend many years ago (before I was married of course) thinking we couldn't understand and then blushing when we got off the bus and shot her a wink to show we heard and understood her) is that the reaction to the courts by the populace was as always with such things mixed, but tentatively willing to give them a chance since they seemed to be bringing order and justice so that people could live their lives (opening some ports and controlling piracy for the first time in many years for example).
The application of Shariah law by the courts appears to have been mixed as well. Stories of going to cultural extremes (banning world cup soccer match viewing), but also stories of top courts leaders denying this was their style and punishing those who did such things. The impression I got from this was that the Courts Union was again a non-homogenous group, that paleo-conservatives and modernists mix, and that this could be both a weakness and a strength. In any case, when not under external pressure and expanding their zones of control, the areas that fell under their control appeared to be generally seeing a revival of economic fortunes.
But those are big caveats: early on local, regional, and US actors have been part of the mix and the Islamic Courts Union does not appear to have had any time to enjoy genuinely unfettered control. There are multiple levels of rivalries going on here: [1] A few years ago the UN made yet another attempt to bring local actors together to create a transitional Somali government that could hopefully re-establish order. It had to meet outside Somalia for a long time and as of a few weeks ago was based in and only controlled the town of Baidoa. Weak, but internationally recognized. As it watched the rise of the Courts, of course its legitimacy was being undermined. The Courts, sensing their popular strength, actually called for democratic elections, knowing their people stood a strong chance of beating out the characters fromt the UN recognized government and in fact the leaders of the Courts could plug into that power structure now through legitimate democratic means. The leaders of the transitional government were having none of that and instead began labelling the Courts Al-Qaeda harborers and the like, aimed at manipulating and strengthening their support from the US, western countries, and the UN. They appear to have succeeded. [2] A proxy battleground for Ethiopia and Eritrea. The two have a long-running set of grievances and have gone to war more than once, and now the Courts and Transitional Government are providing the proxies necessary to go to war again, this time in Somalia. Traditionally Christian Ethiopia (although today it's population is about half Muslim) is backing the Transitional Government and sees in the Courts a potential revival of Somali threats to their territory in the ethnic Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia which past Somali states have sought to claim sovereignty over. Ethiopia is also going all out accusing the Courts of harboring Al-Qaeda, foreign fighters, etc, etc. (somebody even started circulating a ridiculous report in intelligence circles a while back that Somali Courts fighters aided Lebanon's Hizbullah in their summer war against Israel, though that could have been westerners creating boogeymen and not necessarily Ethiopia). Eritrea is supporting the courts, though I don't have a good sense other than a few troops of what that support actually consists of. [3] The Bush Administration once again lining up against Islamists as the great boogeymen. Falling right in line with Dick Cheney's "One percent doctrine" of blowing any bit of paranoia massively out of proportion (i.e., trying to kill that mosquito on your forehead with a shotgun blast), they've willingly bought into every story of potential Al-Qaeda harboring or sympathy amongst the courts. Now, I'm not going to go overboard and say there couldn't be some kernels of truth in there - as I said, the Courts seem to be a pretty motley crew - but the top leaders seem to have taken a lesson from the Taliban and recognized they can't try to become Taliban Afghanistan or else they're finished and stated about as much in not-too-subtle public language. Words are one thing, the point from the US is that for some time now, labelling the Courts as Qaeda-proxies, the CIA has been arming Somali warlords to fight the Courts. Didn't do much good, the Courts have been getting weapons and have more motivated fighters and have managed to take town after town under their control. In any case, the reports I've read seem to suggest that folks inside the USG recognized that what they were doing in Somalia was a pretty ad hoc and potentially dangerous affair, but they've been marching down the path regardless. [4] A melding of 2 and 3 now appears to be going on. The Courts were winning the battle, the US' allies lost over and over and appeared headed towards inexorable defeat on the battlefield (since the ballot box option was not allowed despite the Courts' suggestion) absent some outside intervention. Enter Ethiopian troops defending the Transitional Government's one base at Baidoa. These outsiders are not folks most Somalis would take kindly too, but there they were, at first only called "advisers". Now in the past week it's come to direct war as the Ethiopians decided they weren't going to allow the Courts to win and betting that they had such overwhelming firepower they could bring the Transitional Government victory. So far the main war appears to be going just that way.

Now is where things get more dangerous and start to blow into bigger proportions. As Abu Aardvark likes to frequently say, Bin Laden and co these days are less about being an organization out to carry out direct attacks (though that still persists) as they are about changing the world view of as many Muslims as possible into believing the "Christian Crusaders" are out to destroy Islam. That, I believe, is a far more important battle than any bullets, smart bombs, suicide bombs, or phantom- or real-WMDs. It is also the essence of why the Bush Administration is such a set of royal screw-ups, why things keep getting worse everywhere Bush and co stick their noses in the Islamic and Arab worlds, and why Somalia is poised to become yet another disaster for US foreign policy (and yet again putting the focus on what it means to the US while the rest of the world more or less ignores the humanitarian, economic, political, and social disasters it will create locally and regionally for Somalia and the Horn of Africa). Uh...what was my point after that run-on sentence...oh yes, this is going to be yet another Bushie disaster because the important thing in the long run for creating peace, stability, freedom fries (something for American lefties, righties, and realists in there) is to not allow Salafi Jihadists (who have zero chance of ever winning power militarily or at the ballot box) to "win" by letting their "clash of civilizations" worldview become the guiding worldview of the majority of Muslims and Arabs. The actions of the US and its allies in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, etc. all are massive examples of which give credence to this worldview. US support for secular dictators throughout the Islamic world is another. Now it looks like Somalia will be added to the list (and once again, the US public will be sleeping as it happens and left ignorantly pondering "why do they hate us" the next time something nasty happens as a result).

Look at it from the point of view of your average dude on the streets of Cairo, Casablanca, Damascus, Karachi, Jakarta, or wherever else. You don't have to agree with this view (I for one don't), but this is how it looks to them today:

Shariah is considered a positive ideal for how law and order should be administered.
Somalia was in anarchy until recently some religious Somalis banded together to implement Shariah. In so doing they brought back peace, stability, and justice where they had power.
The US saw the rise of "true Muslims" and wouldn't tolerate it.
The US first tried to stop these Muslims from doing their good by re-arming thugs and warlords, but that failed.
When that failed, the US turned to Christian foreigners (Ethiopia) and aided them in a war to wipe out the good Muslims who were just trying to bring back peace and justice to their country.
Bin Laden had been saying for years that the "Crusaders" were out to harm Islam in Somalia, and suddenly it looks like his warning was right all along and coming to open fruition.

Even though this version of events is frought with error and over-simplicity, it has enough truth, and the Bush Administration's policies are so genuinely dangerous and aggressive, that one has to ask, what in the world could they possibly say to turn the tide of public opinion in the Islamic world to their side of things? Answer: nothing. Once again, actions matter more than words, and US actions here are just plain wrong. That's not to say the other actors are pure and right (they're not), but it means that the sheer stubborn-headed automatic resort to the ugliest uses of force (direct or proxy) by the US and its allies instead of recognizing that there are genuine non-Qaeda interests and issues at play that need to be worked with in a complex manner -- that therein lies the real problem. Bush's "gut" and Cheney's "one percent" self-induced-fear-mongering are the real sources of the problem here.

In Somalia, I would presume (again, welcoming input from those who know more) that events are likely to take a course something akin to the US in Afghanistan but with Ethiopia playing the role of the US and the Courts Union the role of the Taliban. Ethiopia may win hands down at first, but then the real action starts to build up in a guerilla war that has implications beyond just the borders of Somalia. A Christians-attacking-Muslims dynamic will be an easy propaganda drive for the Courts and attract foreign fighters with fresh and nasty skills acquired from Iraq and Afghanistan though local Somali fighters will undoubtedly be the bulk of the troops. An Ethiopian and Somali Transitional Government "support us because we're fighting the terrorists here so you don't have to in Iowa" call should ensure easy continued US support, while the Transitional Government's de jure recognition by the UN should ensure broader international support, regardless of any lack of on-the-ground legitimacy they have in Somalia, especially now that they've openly shown they can't survive without Ethiopian assistance.

Folks, the point is simple: the Bush doctrine creates conflict and war everywhere it goes that convinces people in the Muslim world that Americans are out to get them. That in turn fuels conflict (for you Americans: that means it makes you less safe, not more safe) and makes the world a worse place. Somalia is about to become the next totally unnecessary-but-tragic example of this. And Americans are barely even watching. Get ready for another bit of blowback, as if we didn't have enough on our hands already.

Little help for Palestine at the Mall

2006-12-24T18:47:00.000-05:00

Those of you who frequent US malls may have noticed in the past few years in December there have been carts selling Bethlehem Olive Wood, usually presided over by an owner actually from the Bethlehem (Palestine, not Pennsylvania) area. They have multiplied in recent years, and it's not been a random occurrence. Bethlehem has been and remains under an inhumane Israeli semi-starvation siege for over half a decade now. The town is heavily dependent upon tourists for its economic livelihood. Because the Israelis have deliberately choked the tourist flow off almost entirely, the many olive wood vendors from Beit Lahem (Bethlehem), Beit Jala (half of whose land or more was stolen to build the illegal Israeli settlement of Gilo), and Beit Sahour (traditional site of the "Shepherd's Field" where the abiders-in-the-field were visited by the angel who told them to visit the new baby Jesus) have turned to both internet sales and annual trips to the US at Christmas to sell their wares in malls. The Christians of the Bethlehem area frequently have relatives living abroad (Israeli wars and sieges over the past 60 years have led many to emmigrate in larger numbers than Muslims because their connections to Christian churches and diaspora communities abroad - especially in Latin America and the US - along with their generally higher levels of wealth gave them greater opportunity to escape Israeli oppression than many Muslims had) including in the US, so they have been able to get visas to go spend some time trying to get at least one month of decent sales every year. They generally show up after Thanksgiving (frequently relatives will rotate coming to the US from year to year) and work at the malls long days from open to close trying to sell a bundle of inventory they've brought.

Those sales are very important to their livelihood, they put food on the plates of entire extended families. If you see one of those carts or kiosks in a mall in the US and think the prices are a bit high, I would just say (1) the level of craftsmanship is high, (2) almost as if you were in the Middle East, you definitely can bargain, (3) the wood is almost always from some of the tens of thousands of olive trees the Israeli militarily has wantonly ripped up in childish but devastating punitive acts [the trees themselves are key sources of family income that take many years to mature and yield fruit - anytime somebody tries to sell you the lie of Israel acting "defensively" or for "security" purposes, ask them why they have deliberately destroyed tens of thousands of olive trees, were they "terrorist olives"?] and so this is at least one final good use a resource that otherwise would have been wasted can go to, (4) in purchasing from them you are helping to support entire extended families, hundreds of poorer workers and craftsman, and (5) you are helping a last dwindling Christian community in the very birthplace of Christ to stay economically alive in the face of Israeli assault.

The last point is I believe vital -- the Middle East just a century, even a half century ago was a much more diverse and vibrant place with a much broader mix of ethnicities and religions. The Jewish, Christian, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Druze, Sabean, and other minority communities were much stronger, vibrant and involved in the everyday political, social, and economic life of society. While I have no desire to exonerate the corrupt Arab and other Middle Eastern rulers whose responsibility for their decline is huge, Colonialism and Israel's actions have been the key triggers and underlying causes (in Israel's case, generally also a direct cause) of the destruction of many of these communities. The result has been a region that is far more ethnically monolithic and hence far less tolerant of diversity and varied opinions and outlooks on life. There are a few remaining but still reasonably sizeable Christian minorities (other minorities too, but just speaking of Christians here) whose preservation I believe is important for the whole region, including and especially for the vast majority of the populations who are Muslim. As human beings, we need to be reminded that we're not all the same, that we need to respect those who are different. This is a value that Israel's founding ideology has no respect for and which many other Middle Eastern countries have come to have insufficient respect for (and yes, true enough, we are suffering from an increasingly similar malaise in the US). Buy an Olive Wood Nativity set from the Bethlehemite at the mall, help support a poor family suffering under the Israeli occupation, help support the struggling Christian community of Palestine and the religious diversity Palestinians of all faiths have traditionally valued, and you'll be contributing to more good than you know.

Oh, and take a moment to chat with these folks as well. Everyone I've met is very nice and loves to tell you about life for them back home.

Connecting The Dots: Whacking Sadr, Round 3

2006-12-22T23:08:00.000-05:00

There are three events going on right now which I am quite surprised that few people are connecting the dots on:

The Bush Administration's backing of an attempt to form a new Iraqi governing political coalition consisting primarily of the Shi'ite Islamist SCIRI, the Sunni Islamist Iraqi Islamic Party, and the Kurdish parties. This is being presented as a supposedly multi-ethnic "moderate" coalition aimed at isolating "extremists" and being the political part of a new path forward.
The debate over a temporary boost of 15,000-30,000 additional US troops primarily into Baghdad. The public debate currently is between those who say a small number like this can't make any real difference and those who say "we've got to try something".
Muqtada as-Sadr's supporters rejoining the Iraqi government after a boycott of several weeks. On the surface this looks like Sadr's boys just threw a temper tantrum when Maliki met Bush in Jordan a few weeks back and now they're returning to work as they always planned.

I believe these interpretations are wrong and these aren't isolated events. This is a concerted and yet-again quixotic effort by the Bush Administration to try to destroy Muqtada as-Sadr's power in the political and military arenas in the next few months. Even if they boot Sadr from the political arena (heck, even if they kill him and badly bloody his foot soldiers), it is going to fail as both the 2004 attempts to crush his movement failed, and it is going to result in yet more major blowback. In a nutshell, this is what I believe is really going on:

The supposedly "new" political coalition is really an old coalition of exile parties. More to the point, these are blatantly sectarian parties who thrive on feeding ethnic divisions in the country and from manipulating US politicians into believing the false "3 Iraqs - Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish" framework and then grabbing for power and resources as the US tries to distribute them. They're at it again as the Bush Administration desperately flails around looking for a political way out of the ma2zaq they're in. Their goal is to press for the further decentralization of power (i.e., weakening of the central government in Baghdad) so that they can each try to grab power and resources in the regions of Iraq where their political power is relatively stronger. Obviously the Kurds have solid control of their region, but they are always seeking further loosening of ties from Baghdad. SCIRI as always is seeking means to grab power in the south, in particular away from the Sadrists. And while I haven't followed Hashimi and the Iraqi Islamic Party as closely, I can only presume given their history pre-war and their overt sectarian bent today they are hoping to pick up the "Sunni" spoils of this divisive policy (anyone with deeper knowledge of Hashimi and the IIP, please comment).
Sadr is once again being presented by Washington as the extremist who is causing the real problems and that "solving" the Sadr problem will help things move forward. From Washington's perspective it seems obvious: his Jaysh al-Mahdi death squads are a big part of the sectarian killings going on, and politically he makes an easy scapegoat as the guy whose parliamentary supporters supposedly are blocking PM Maliki from Da'wa from doing the job he supposedly wants to but can't because of political dependence on Sadr. The raids on Sadr City a few months ago which Maliki demanded be called off (eventually successfully, though it took a little while) were emblematic -- Washington couldn't go after the sectarian killers because they had the political power to get the raids called off. So now the thinking from Washington is: form an alternative political coalition where Sadr doesn't have a say, then send the US army into Sadr City (boosted by the temporary surge of 15,000 to 30,000 troops) to clean out the Mahdi Army death squads and cut Sadr down to size militarily and hence politically.
As usual, a bad misreading of what's really going on, resulting in a terrible idea that is going to cause a lot more damage than any short-term gains (if they even get those). For starters, even if the US, SCIRI, IIP, and KDP/PUK can put together a working coalition, what will really have been formed? The Bush Administration is touting it as a "moderate" (watch out, if Washington calls anyone around the world "moderate" these days, odds are they are ugly thugs who simply accept a US paycheck instead of somebody else's) multi-ethnic group which will supposedly allow the various ethnicities to then sit down at the table and find a way to share power. Not true. What you will get is a coalition of the same forces who rode the US into power almost 4 years ago and who are seeking a division of spoils to their benefit first and foremost, not a central state able to secure and govern the country. So even if Sadr is weakened momentarily, the powerful undercurrents feeding the sectarian and political violence will be strengthened.
Militarily, the two Sadrist uprisings in 2004 show clearly the limits of attempts to crush Sadr -- they can be bloodied, but as a mass populist movement in a country the US does not have the ability to control militarily or even provide rudimentary personal security in, they cannot be destroyed. Any attempt to do so will only produce increased bitterness and anger. More Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters will go deeper underground and engage in more attacks similar in style to the Sunni insurgents.
Politically, Sadr will receive a huge boost as well as the guy standing up to two very unpopular forces among most Iraqis: (1) US troops, and (2) decentralization forces. The unpopularity of US occupation forces - especially when they engage in major operations where they kill even more innocent civilians - I don't think needs any further explanation. But by the forces of decentralization, I refer in particular to SCIRI's regionalization push which I believe is highly unpopular except among Kurds and a small minority of SCIRI patrons who would personally benefit. I believe the vast majority of Arab Iraqis - Sadr's core supporters very much among them, but a huge cross section cutting across sectarian lines - believe the decentralization SCIRI is pushing is essentially the destruction of Iraq.
Another immediate bit of blowback: the southern feeder lines to the Basrah Oil Terminal which carry roughly 80% of Iraq's oil exports remain highly vulnerable to attack. Despite the relatively short distance that the main trunklines are exposed (particularly on the Fao Peninsula), they were easily struck multiple times back in 2004. The fact that they have not been struck again since is not a reflection of significantly improved security, merely of the fact that the political forces in the region are aligned such that it is not in the interest of the key power brokers to see the lines shut. You cut Sadr's (huge) powerbase out of the official power structure and make it clear that the billions of revenue are going to flow instead to SCIRI who is trying to take over power at the local level where Sadr is strong and more broadly is trying to devolve power in a way many consider the destruction of Iraq -- well, there will suddenly be a huge group of powerful people who have an interest in stopping the flow of oil revenue to SCIRI. Sadrists in Basrah have made threats (how "official" they were is unclear to me) in the past to shut down the oil, I believe if there is a full scale political and military assault on them, they will renew and make good on those threats.
For the global oil market this would have two important effects: (1) if the outages last for a significant period of time (worries start after a week, by 2-3 weeks its getting serious, a month or longer and its a major problem) then expect the flat price of crude to start spiking again and new highs to return to the gasoline pump before long, and (2) more importantly for the longer term, an actual major supply outage like this will drive up the front end of the futures price curve, possibly back into backwardation after the past few years of contango. This in turn will disincentive the holding of inventories by commercial oil companies and drive down oil stocks. That could help return the market to the sort of tightness that helped fuel the 2002-2006 price runup. Now, I don't want to be too alarmist, it would take a significant, long outage for Iraq to be able to structurally shift the market after the structural weakness in the curve and levelling off of the flat price in the last year. My point is just that if the US goes for broke on this trying to seriously crush Sadr, this now becomes a very real possibility.
Finally, and it seems a bit of a minor point now, this I think explains the Sadrists rejoining the government. They're not eager for a knock down fight like this and would prefer to simply try to maintain their position. So rejoining the government and trying to keep the current political coalition in place will be their priority for the moment. The Bush Administration is pretty desperate though and SCIRI is always looking for a way to get the upper hand in the civil war. The political pressure is a full court press, and if we see the troop levels actually surge (as I expect) in the next couple months, I think this is going to happen.

So keep an eye out next few weeks and months, we'll see if I got this one right, but it seems clear enough to me.

UPDATE: One commenter points out that today Sistani is said to have rejected supporting the proposed SCIRI-IIP-PUK/KDP coalition. If so, it certainly puts a serious roadblock in the attempt, though we'll have to wait and see if it is a fatal blow to the political or military plans.

UPDATE 2: Seems I wasn't the first to point out the surge was to take on Sadr.

Sadrists and Sunni Insurgents United for Peace and Love?

2006-12-16T22:47:00.000-05:00

Badger over at Arablinks asks me the following:

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Non-arab, I guess what that comes down to is that this would be a not-implausible combination: Islamist-tinged Sunni nationalism with Sadrist nationalism ?

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I did tangentially address this in my previous post "On SCIRI vs Sadrists". No deep insights, but to briefly lay out my views on this:

The Sadrists (and the plural is important, there are numerous splinter groups and even the "official" Sadrist movement under Moqtada is pretty loosely controlled) broadly speaking represent rural southerners including the masses who have moved to urban areas (think Sadr City / Madinat ath-Thawra in particular) but kept strong tribal links to the countryside. Unlike the shrine city clerical and commercial classes (Najaf and Karbala primarily) who have strong direct ties to Iran through business (in particular catering to pilgrims and the burial trade at Wadi al-Salam) and theological dealings, these "Easterners" as they are traditionally called in Iraq feel less close to Iran. They are Arab in not just their primary language and outlook on life, but (while not without academic dispute) are also said to largely have converted to Shi'ism relatively recently, perhaps in the past two centuries. Don't want take that point too far since it is a matter of some dispute, but the point is that these folks outlook is both Arab, distrusting of foreigners, and hence very Iraqi nationalist (in the middle ages Iraq generally referred roughly speaking to today's predominantly Shi'a areas of Iraq Baghdad and south).
It should be said too that in the early days of the Ba'ath, the party itself was more diverse. While always a smaller party compared to some of its bigger rivals (primarily the Iraqi Communist Party - ICP) in the turbulent era of the post-monarchy revolutions in the 50s and 60s, it was by no means seen as an ethnic party. Indeed, none of the great ideological parties of that era were (some tried to paint the ICP as a Shi'a resistance movement, but Hanna Batatu's research into the party's membership and leadership showed it to be a much bigger tent).
Following the 50s and 60s and the eventual victory of the Ba'ath (or really "last man standing" victory after an exhausting series of coups, counter-coups, and bloody purges -- the Ba'athi purges/executions of Communists having been aided by CIA-provided lists of enemies to liquidate), one could still see a sense of Iraqi nationhood emerging. King Faisal and his successors and stooge-ministers like Nouri Said, for all their faults, did through successes and mistakes help begin to forge a sense of nationhood (mistakes and popular revolt against them often helping to forge unity as well or better than successes). The shared experience under British Colonialism, the joint 1920 Sunni-Shi'a uprising, the founding of ideological parties that cut across traditional fault lines, the toppling of the monarchy, the rule of Abdul Karim Qassim, the turbulent 50s and 60s, the discovery and beginnings of exploitation of oil and the development it brought (Iraq in the 50s had a very enlightened oil revenue distribution system that put the money largely into physical capital investment), and the broader connection to Arab Nationalism (both for and against) all brought people into new forms of identity.
Under the Ba'ath party and then specifically under Saddam, there was added at first two other common elements: (1) the well-known in the west fear of living under what did come to be one of the most totalitarian of the Arab dictatorships, but also (2) genuine economic development in the 70s in particular and again briefly in the late 80s after the 1st Gulf War [Arabs refer to the Iran-Iraq War as the 1st Gulf War, 1990-91 as the 2nd, and 2003 onwards as the 3rd]. By the late 70s Iraq had one of the best educational, medical, and transportation systems in the entire Arab world and people came from far away to participate in these systems despite the Ba'ath dictatorship.
With the 1st and 2nd Gulf Wars and the period of sanctions, a third element of common suffering was added: besides for suffering under Saddam's rule, people felt a commonality of suffering through the wars and sanctions together. The wars may have been known quietly to most folks as severe folly even if they couldn't state so openly, but they got through the hardships together. And even if Saddam was seen as foolish, it didn't change the fact that most Iraqis (southern Shi'a included) had an intense distrust of Iran, believed that Kuwait was historically a piece of Iraq, and that the Americans were out to get them. The notion of Iraq's Shi'a siding with Iran never gained any foothold, and when the regime really got on the ropes they knew it was key to provide some sort of tangible benefit to people to keep them going as an entire society and not just stitched-together bits and pieces.
So much for the unity. Those were important building blocks and very real, but of course the Fitna ("troubles" loosely translated I guess one could say in a Northern Island sort of usage for the word) we see today had its roots too. When the great ideological era of Middle Eastern politics wound down by the 70s and the Ba'ath were the only ones left standing, people in the entire Middle East and Iraq stood disillusioned and unsure. Saddam (as with other Middle Eastern dictators) started grabbing piecemeal bits of ideology here and there to justify his rule. Sometimes he was a socialist, other times an Arab nationalist, other times an Islamist, etc, etc, etc. This could win brownie points for sure - oil nationalization and putting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest) on the flag were respectively wildly popular and something nobody could really object to. But people could see there was no driving ideological force any more. It was about the party staying in power.
With time it wasn't even just about the party staying in power, it was about Saddam staying in power. Pure carrot and stick patronage politics and political persecution were the name of the game. Enemies were punished through the state's security services, and friends were rewarded through the state's income. This was of course overwhelmingly oil income as the state became yet another rentier oil state (i.e., dependent fiscally on oil "rents" that required no consent of the people to collect and could then be distributed as those at the top of the system saw fit to buy political support). The enlightened capital investment program of the 50s having long since given way to oil income in the service of regime survival. Sometimes regime survival brought enlightened purposes -- with no ideology and a thin political support base in the 70s, the Ba'ath were smart enough then to realize that developing the country while keeping a tight rein on folks could work in a way which in some ways is pretty similar to what the Chinese have done far more successfully since.
The wars and sanctions eras though meant that Saddam had to rely on a smaller and smaller power base. With a few notable meager exceptions (subsidized oil, occasionally brief fits of peace and economic growth), he could no longer buy the entire populace prosperity. Social services deteriorated across the board and people grew restless. However, there were no great ideological movements left to articulate a new or different vision for protest, and in any case the political space was sealed shut on pain of death. The Arab Nationalists were discredited after the death of Nasser and despondent after Sadat's betrayal, the ICP Communists were broken as a mass movement. Into this space, Islamist movements began moving in. Over time the Sadrists under Moqtada's father Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq as-Sadr for example became a major albeit necessarily quiet force in establishing a Shi'a Islamist ideology and (more practically) set of social services in the Shi'a community where the state had broken down. Groups such as SCIRI who actually did run off to Iran's side in the war (note this was not a mass defection of Shi'a to Iran, but one group well-connected to the more unique shrine city interest groups) also formed.
Note a few key elements here: (1) secular ideologies were discredited or broken and only Islamists emerged - cautiously - to fill the gap. (2) With Shi'a the largest religious grouping in Iraq, Shi'a Islamist movements emerged the biggest and strongest. This meant that Saddam, intolerable of *any* regime opponents had his biggest targets among the Shi'a. There were no movements of size that would have him equally attacking the south and center of the country. Since his core supporters tended to come from his immediate tribe/clan/family and thence dispensed their patronage to the areas they came from (the upper euphrates and tigris valleys or "Sunni Triangle" as western journalists have since dubbed it), this in essence is really where today's major Sunni-Shi'a split came from. Secular opposition cutting across sectarian boundaries had been eliminated, leaving only sectarian opposition parties. Sectarian opposition was overwhelmingly from the Shi'a side where clerics had more organization in any case (look to the revolution in Iran as an example of the power of a more organized clerical class) and where Saddam did not have as many relatives in his increasingly narrow patronage network. Boom - the "Shi'a" become the targets, not so much as design against the Shi'a, as by the fact that the regime's narrow power base brought it down on them through the process outlined above.
The unity outlined earlier worked against necessarily seeing things in pure Sunni-Shi'a terms, people believed in the notion of Iraq. But as time went on, and especially after the 1991 uprisings (where again, the Shi'a resistance had stronger organization to call upon and hence got more brutally crushed), it was also easier as an Iraqi Shi'a to see this as a purely anti-Shi'a drive, especially for those who went to the Islamist organizations for an ideological framework for life and resistance.
Without going into the entire dynamic of massive US flubs that blew wide open these schisms in Iraqi society (they didn't have to, but the US bears the primary blame for it having happened both because of the invasion and the post-invasion emphasis on sectarian identity), it will suffice to say that the Shi'a Islamist parties emerged the strongest following the US occupation. A huge secular underlying force still existed in Iraq on day 1 of the occupation, people didn't want to break up into sectarian squabbling, but the seeds of it were there.
So now to come back to the Sadrists. As stated early on, they represent a group that is very Arabist in its outlook, but also very much a strong Shi'a Islamist party. While the differences to Lebanon's Hizbullah are huge (they are not as disciplined, they do not have as experienced a leadership, they are nowhere near as adept at wooing inter-sectarian alliances, and - oh yeah - they have out of control death squads unlike Hizbullah's quite professional and disciplined military apparatus), the similarities are also big at least on the surface: a Shi'a Islamist grouping with a social services network participating in the political system as a strong non-majority force and carrying a banner of anti-occupation (anti-Israeli, anti-American, etc.) resistance.
In Lebanon, Hizbullah has been able to win allies outside of its own Shi'a community (the Aounist Christians primarily) by emphasizing the resistance angle which others can agree on, by not seeking a state ruled on their interpretation of religious law, and by *not* terrorizing those of other sects but seeking to allay such fears where possible (not always possible granted, Lebanon remains a tinderbox, but they've certainly convinced a sizeable number).
The Sadrists have a wee bit of a problem though: their militia (the Mahdi Army) is wildly out of control and is slaughtering members of other sects. Big problem for inter-sect cooperation. Yes, the Arab or Iraqi nationalist and resistance angles give space for cooperation, but Iraq is just entering it's civil war and the Sadrists and Mahdi Army are young and undisciplined whereas Lebanon already went through a civil war (hopefully there's not another coming) and Hizbullah is a well-established and disciplined force. Even if Moqtada says the right things, it's hard to win friends on the basis of nice anti-occupation words when he can't control his foot soldiers and those foot soldiers are staging mass kidnappings of folks from other sects and dumping their drill-hole ridden bodies on rubbish tips.
Of course it's not just a matter of "well then why don't they just stop it?" Fact is emotions for the constituency Sadr represents are incredibly raw. They suffered immensely for the past century (they were always the poorest of the poor and being targeted under Saddam for supporting Islamists made it that much worse), and now from their perspective they're being targetted again. The Sunni resistance to the occupation has several strikes against it for winning Sadrist trust: (1) lots of ex- or current-Baathists who the Sadrists in many instances rightly know were the guys who used to torture and kill their people, (2) the Al-Qaeda type minority in the Sunni resistance is blatantly sectarian anti-Shi'a with all the infamous beheadings and car bombs in marketplaces and what not, and (3) the presence of those forces makes it really hard to trust anybody who works with them including what one might term "honest" nationalist resistance fighters. Think about it, if you're some guy who's grown up in Madinat ath-Thawra / Sadr City your whole life, walking through sewage, your dad and uncle disappearing or getting tortured for years for being a member of Da'wa, and then suddenly the Ba'ath falls and the guys who you tried to make nice with at first from over in Aadhamiya (Sunni part of Baghdad) to fight the Americans together are now seen as allies of the folks who are sending car bombs to the fruit market -- well, it's not hard to see why there's a lack of trust.
The flip side also holds true: if you're a Sunni opposition fighter or sympathizer whose primary goal is to rid the country of US occupiers and at first you saw great hope in all those joint Sunni-Shi'a prayers and Sadrist aid convoys to Fallujah in April 2004, but now you see the Mahdi Army mortaring your living room and torturing and killing people in the streets and in secret for having the wrong name...well, kinda hard to trust them too eh?
2nd Fallujah (November 2004 flattening of the city by the marines) was a real watershed in this regard. The Sadrists sent aid to Fallujah in April, but when it turned into Al-Qaeda central for beheadings of Shi'a and assembling carbombs meant for Sadr City, most of the south of Iraq sat back with some satisfaction seeing the city flattened. They felt betrayed and thought Fallujah got what it deserved. On the Sunni side what was viewed as yet another American ugly crime seemed to have now had a Shi'a blessing. The sectarianism of it all was growing and a rift clearly exposed.
So, even though Sunni nationalists (minus Al Qaeda) tend to say the right things about national unity and common opposition to the US occupation, and even though Sadrist leaders tend to say much the same stuff, the reality is that dead fathers and raped sisters tend to have a bigger impact on people's feelings. And those feelings are raw. I'm afraid at this point that the scab has been ripped off and every day more salt is being poured into the wound.

Perhaps something could happen eventually to heal the rift, but its tough to see now in my eyes for a very, very long time. Not impossible eventually, Hizbullah once was a much cruder, angrier, less-disciplined lot in Lebanon. But Lebanon and the Lebanese Shi'a had to go through a lot before it got to where it is today. Iraq is a much bigger and more explosive place with bigger stakes. The raw material for cooperation between these major consituencies in Iraq exists, but how you get past this bad blood of the past few years is beyond me at the moment.

What Are You Going to Do Now, Israel?

2006-12-16T18:31:00.000-05:00

http://www.counterpunch.com/tilley12152006.html

When There's No One Left to Blame
What Are You Going to Do Now, Israel?
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
Johannesburg, South Africa
What are you going to do now, Israel?
Now that three small boys have been killed by assassins' bullets, and a Hamas judge dragged from his car and murdered, perhaps you are pleased. The Palestinians are finally succumbing to your plots, you think. The long-planned bottle has finally been sealed, in which the "drunken cockroaches" can only crawl around, shooting each other.
Maybe you are sitting back in your national chair, rubbing your hands together in triumph, watching the Palestinians finally turn on each other, slowly becoming what you always claimed they were. Maybe you are repelled, secure in your sense of superiority.
But have you thought about what you are you going to do, if Palestinian leadership you despise finally disintegrates?

You have brought them to this pass, of course. You worked for decades to achieve exactly this. You bribed, terrorized, expelled, maimed or killed their leadership, banned or killed their visionaries and philosophers, fanned and funded Hamas against Fatah or Fatah against Hamas, trashed their democracy, stole their money, walled them in, put them on a "diet", derided their claims, and lied about their history to the world and to yourself.

But what are you going to do, Israel, if five million Palestinians are finally living leaderless under your sovereignty? What will you do, when they lose their capacity to negotiate with you? Have you thought that, within the territory you control, they are as many as you? And that now you are destroying their unified voice? Have you thought about what will happen to you if they truly lose that voice?
Maybe you really believe that, if you only feed Fatah money and guns, Fatah will reclaim power from the Hamas and restore the craven puppet Palestinian government of your dreams. Maybe you actually believe that Fatah can revive the wreck of Oslo, step out of the rubble of PA offices, and reclaim the driver's seat of the Palestinian nation as before. Maybe you are telling yourself that, with just a few more inter-factional scuffles and assassinations and little more starvation, the entire Palestinian people will turn on Hamas and eject it from power in favor of grinning Mr. Abbas.

But why would you believe all this, when the only other test-case, Iraq, is in ruins and the US and UK are desperately trying to flee?

Do you really still live so deeply in your own fantasies that you believe Palestinian resistance is just the product of bad or obdurate leadership? That no collective memory of expulsion and dispossession sustains the spirit of collective resistance that will always and inevitably transcend that leadership? Do you really believe that, if only you can crush or co-opt Hamas and Fatah, five million people will simply disappear forever from your world--trail off across the Jordanian or Egyptian borders into the endless desert, clutching clothes, kids, and tarnished mementos, in some great reprise of 1948?
Do you actually think that, if the international community finally lets you off the hook of negotiating with the people you have dispossessed and discredited, you will somehow walk free at last, your crimes against them forgotten?
We know you are still pursuing the old, fatal, futile fantasy: finally to redeem the Zionist dream by demolishing Palestinian nationalism. To break Palestinian national unity on the rocks of occupation. To reduce the Palestinians to Indians on reservations who decline into despair, alcoholism and emigration. To make them irrelevant to you.
But here is news for you, Israel. The Native Americans haven't given up to this day. Damaged and reduced as they are, they know their history and remember their grievances. They are marginal only because they are one percent of the US population. The Palestinians are five-million strong, equal to you in numbers. And they live within your borders. When their leadership ruins itself, bashing each other like rams fighting to the death, they will finally turn their five million pairs of burning eyes on you, for you will be the only power left over them. And you will be defenseless, because your paper shelter - your Fatah or PA quislings - will be damaged goods, cracked vessels, discredited, gone. And it will then be you and those you have disenfranchised - you and the Palestinians, in one state, with no Oslo or Road Map myth to protect you. And by then, they will truly hate you.
Then perhaps it will dawn on you what you have done, when the disintegration of Palestinian national unity spreads out like a tsunami through the Middle East, meeting up with the tsunami spreading out from Iraq, to lay the region waste and rebound on you.
Watching you create this catastrophe for yourself, we think you are simply suicidal. We could just watch, but your road to ruin promises too much suffering to too many people. Still, to avert your unilateral suicide pact with the Palestinians, to whom can we turn?
We could appeal to Hamas at last to mobilize the rank and file, who alone have the capacity to launch civil disobedience on the mass scale necessary to paralyse Israel's iron fist, but Hamas has no experience with this method, and now its statesmen are cornered by the guns you gave to Fatah thugs.
We could appeal to the leader of the Fatah thugs, Mr. Abbas, shuffling at the feet of Israeli power, to find some spine. Or to the ubiquitous Mr. Erekat, who never had a political vision in his life, to develop one overnight.
We could appeal to the Fatah thugs to reject Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat and the fat cement contracts you gave them to build the Wall that imprisons them, and seek a high road they have never glimpsed.
We could appeal to the microscopic PFLP and DFLP, clutching their old programs too stale to chew and consumed by their acrid, decades-old bitterness and rivalry with Fatah, to lift their heads at long last beyond the old and new grievances.
We could appeal to the US, but no one bothers to do that.
We could appeal to the EU, but no one bothers to do that, either.
We could appeal to the world, but it only stands aghast.
We could appeal to the world media, but it is frozen with its a** in the air.
We can only appeal to you, Israel. To think what you are doing, if not to care.
For you are crafting your own destruction.
You have been so effective in this great national project because you work from experience. Even the most courageous, principled, and sensible people, as you learned, cannot withstand a concentration camp indefinitely. At some point, as the Holocaust historians have tracked with such pathos, humanity breaks down. Individual heroism may survive as memoirs, but order, humanity, and finally human feeling decays into factional squabbles and man's inhumanity to man. You learned all too well and bitterly how this cauldron can melt down the very fabric of a society and shatter people. The lesson is burned, literally, into your national memory. And you are bringing those lessons to bear, attempting to purge Zionism's tragedy by bringing Gaza to ruin.
But if you actually reap the chaos you are crafting for the Palestinians, you will find that no one else is responsible for these five million civilians except you.
So what will you do, Israel, with five million people living under your rule, when you can no longer pretend to the world that you intend to negotiate with them? What will you do with people you detest, and who finally utterly detest you, when visions of coexistence have finally failed? You will be the only sovereign power over them. You will be able neither to digest them nor to vomit them out. And they will stare at you.
And we will stare at you, too.

Because there will be no one left to blame, and no one to take care of them, except you.
Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.

Iraqi Refugees

2006-12-15T07:32:00.000-05:00

Good piece in LA Times Thursday on the generation of Iraqi refugees created by the US occupation and descent into fitna / civil war. (Apologize for the poor formatting, click on the link to get a more readable version).

In 1948 the Israelis created the Palestinian refugee nightmare supported by the United States (not just diplomatically, US authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to US partisans of the early Israeli ethnic cleansing effort who were running illegal weapons and terrorist-guerilla smuggling operations from US shores -- check our the Inner Harbor Memorial in Baltimore someday for one example of a much bally-hooed example of Israeli human trafficking). From 2003 onwards the US created the Iraqi refugee nightmare supported by Israel (though once again Palestinians got another short end of the stick as US forcess and Iraqi militiamen of various stripes have persecuted Palestinian refugees in Iraq). Iraqi refugees are already feeling much of the hostility that Palestinian refugees have. No doubt US and Israeli propagandists will use this to claim that "Arabs don't really care about Iraq".

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http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-refugees14dec14,1,1762515.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Iraqis flee war, run into hostility
As their numbers grow, refugees find that prejudice is growing and compassion is fading.By Jeffrey Fleishman and Qaisar AhmedSpecial to The TimesDecember 14, 2006CAIRO — Strolling the alleys and boulevards of this city, Raaid Lafta sometimes thinks he glimpses his old country: in the barber's face, in the baker's oven, in the way the restaurant chef serves the spiced dishes he's known since boyhood.Like him, the barber, baker and chef are Iraqis adrift in war. Escaping their battered homeland in crowded cars and lopsided buses, boarding planes and walking stretches of desert, Iraqi refugees are a growing diaspora in Cairo, Damascus, Amman and other Arab cities. With children in tow and life savings hidden in pots and suitcases, they are another precarious burden for the Middle East."I see everyone speaking in an Iraq accent," Lafta said. "Iraqi men singing Iraqi songs in the streets, Iraqi cafes, Iraqi shops…. I was opening a bank account here, so when the banker asked for my address, I replied that I live in Cairo's 6th of October neighborhood. He smiled and said, 'You Iraqis have invaded October.' "An estimated 100,000 Iraqis leave their country each month, including many of Iraq's best educated professionals, part of the more than 1.6 million who have fled since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The Syrian government said Wednesday that it had taken in more than 800,000 Iraqis so far. Jordan has about 700,000, with tens of thousands more scattered across the Arab world. They have carried Iraq's civil strife into the incendiary politics of a region that is also navigating Iran's nuclear aspirations and turmoil in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.Iraqi refugees are accumulating much like the millions of displaced Palestinians who have flowed across the region for decades. Iraqis began trickling out during Saddam Hussein's regime, but their numbers steadily increased as their nation tumbled into civil war. The newest refugees are finding that compassion is fraying, prejudice growing and host countries, such as Jordan, are less welcoming.A recent report by Human Rights Watch criticized Jordan for being slow in renewing visas for Iraqis who live "in the shadows, fearful and subject to exploitation." The report credited Jordan's past tolerance but it also said the country was now ignoring "the existence of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, does not address their needs for protection, and has not asked for international assistance on their behalf. It is a policy that can best be characterized as 'the silent treatment.' "The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees put it more starkly in a recent assessment: "Iraq is hemorrhaging. The humanitarian crisis which the international community had feared is now unfolding." Including those who have fled their homes but remained in the country, more than 10% of Iraq's prewar population of 26 million has been displaced.*'I'm … ashamed'The violence has been escalating for so long that it's difficult for refugees, most of whom are Sunni Arab Muslims, to pinpoint the exact horror that sent them rushing across borders. For many, like Khadem Salih, a 70-year-old retired lawyer, it was a numbing diary of suicide bombings, sectarian militia attacks and dusk-to-dawn bloodshed. Salih appeared at a Jordanian checkpoint two months ago. Interviewed at length by officials, he was granted only a one-month visa."I'm very much ashamed I left," said Salih, who lives in Amman, Jordan's capital. "Now, I'm struggling to get residency here, which will cost me at least $150,000. I am miserable to be forced to finally leave my country at the end stage of my life."That misery reverberates like a relentless echo out of Iraq. Consider the fate of Laith Youssef, a shopkeeper who also ended up in Amman. An Iraqi gang threatened to kidnap his three children if he did not pay $40,000. Weeks later, a grenade exploded outside his shop, speckling his leg with shrapnel. Then he was jailed for 15 days for offending the Al Mahdi army, a Shiite militia. While he was imprisoned, his wife was attacked for not wearing strict Islamic dress in public.Youssef and his family fled to Jordan, but even there, without the bombs and the beheadings, life is tough. Nearly half of Jordan's population consists of displaced Palestinians. The added influx of Iraqis, many of whom are educated and affluent, is straining a weak job market and raising the possibility of terrorist strikes in the kingdom."We're not stable," Youssef said. "I have no job because the law doesn't allow me to work, and if the police catch me working, they'll send me back to the Iraqi border. My wife takes care of elderly people, and sometimes we get aid from churches."He added: "I don't deal with people here because I know if any problem happens I will be blamed. This is not my country. Jordan was kind enough to allow us in, but the number of Iraqis has increased more than this country can endure. Some Jordanians deal with us normally, but some, when they hear our Iraqi accent, look at us in a weird way."Alliah Talib also has been stung by the eyes of her hosts. The director of an Iraqi organization for a free press, Talib, a Shiite, arrived in Cairo four months ago after militants accused her of working with foreign intelligence services.This city is crowded, and sometimes she feels guilty about taking a seat on a bus, knowing that an Egyptian will have to stand. Such are the subconscious calculations of a nomad: a woman who prays that her money won't run out before her nation's cycle of killing has finished."I only watch Iraqi satellite TV channels here, so I can cry some more," she said. "I know that my friends and relatives are suffering in Iraq. I watch the news here to suffer with them…. When I go out and see Iraqis in [Cairo's] streets, I feel more secure. There is a common reason that made us all escape Iraq. Seeing that many others are participating or sharing the same lifestyle as you reduces the feeling of loneliness."*'Just give me security'May Abassi knew it was time to leave Iraq when she began to think wistfully of the days of Hussein's rule. She and her husband and two young children fled through the smoke and funerals to Cairo. She has found that Egyptians are not like Iraqis. She said she planned to send her son to an English-language school so he would not pick up an Egyptian accent or play with boys she deemed too rough."I don't have anything against Egyptians," Abassi said. "They are good and welcoming, but we just can't mix with them…. If I feel the security in Baghdad improves, I will go back immediately. I don't want anything except security — even electricity and water are not important — just give me security, and I will go back. I feel a pain inside my heart when I see Baghdad burning."Some of the refugees have begun new enterprises in new lands. Amid the camaraderie of the dispossessed, Raaid Lafta opened Studio Happy Time. A photographer who graduated with a fine arts degree from Baghdad University, Lafta left Iraq 14 months ago and landed in a Cairo neighborhood teeming with fellow Iraqis. Business is not so good, he said, but we "are out of harm's way.""We formed an Iraqi company as investors, and we own this shop," he said. "Only a few Egyptians come in here. But … Iraqis visit us a lot."He will not stay here forever; a man belongs in the country where he drew his first breath, he said. But for now, the accent he hears in these alleys is the lilt of home; the faces are the people he knows. An Iraqi barber cuts his hair, an Iraqi baker bakes his bread. There are Iraqi Internet cafes; there are stories only Iraqis would know, or believe."To be honest with you," he said, "as I walk down the street of this city, I see all the Iraqi families spending time with their children. It really disappoints and annoys me because I wonder what made us and all these respectful families flee our homeland to live here as strangers."Others, including Youssef, the shopkeeper in Amman, are preparing to be strangers for the rest of their lives. Youssef doesn't expect he'll see his old shop back on Nidhal Street or drive past the date palms in the now murderous Dora neighborhood in Baghdad. He recently applied for a visa to Australia."I doubt Iraq will ever be safe again," he said.*
jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.comTimes staff writer Fleishman reported from Berlin and special correspondent Ahmed from Cairo. Special correspondent Nadia Fallas in Amman contributed to this report.*(INFOBOX BELOW)Iraqis seeking refugeA recent U.N. report estimates more than 1.6 million Iraqis have fled their homeland since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The November report says 100,000 are leaving every month.Estimated displaced IraqisIraq* : 1.6 millionSyria: 800,000Jordan: 700,000Egypt: 100,000Iran: 54,000Lebanon: 20,000 to 40,000*Internal refugees--Sources: Associated Press, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Times reporting

What isn't being reported on in the US

2006-12-12T06:44:00.000-05:00

There are a number of extremely momentous events occurring in the Middle East receiving little coverage in the western media for various reasons:

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries are announcing quite loudly that they want nuclear energy. This is the direct result of Iran wanting nukes which is the direct result of Israel actually having nukes. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert came out yesterday with an apparent slip of the tongue admitting Israel has nukes ( http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1164881872535&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter -- as if it were a big secret, Mordechai Vanunu's actual pictures of the nukes were published two decades ago for the world to see). Congrats US politicians left and right, your blind support of Israeli abuse of power is now getting you an entire Middle East - friends and foes alike - who want to be armed to the teeth with nukes, brilliant.
The opposition protests in Beirut are absolutely massive, far bigger than the vaunted "Cedar Revolution" protests of not so long ago which the Bush Administration hailed. Suddenly now though, the exact same peaceful tactics when employed by political parties the Bush Administration and the West doesn't like, are "an attempted coup" or some other hogwash. Bald-faced open hypocrisy which proves that Arabs are right when they say Bush is a liar when he claims to want democracy. He wants only pro-US stooges, if they can get there via democratic means then great for the propaganda, but if they need to be kept in power via undemocratic means then the propaganda needs to be flipped in their service.
Dual Civil War watch: However, the Lebanese protests, despite the efforts to avoid it, are taking on a major sectarian overtone, thanks in heavy part to the government of Fouad Siniora who - lacking all other legitimacy - is turning more and more overtly racist in its rhetoric. Hizbullah and Michel Aoun's al-Tayyar al-Watani al-Hurr are trying to take the high road, but their supporters are pretty narrowly sectarian too. Tension is rising, and egged on by the US, this could go to civil war though everyone hopes not and is trying to avoid. Meanwhile in Gaza the murder yesterday of three innocent children who were the children of a major anti-Hamas Fatah militant has aroused intense passions. Al-Jazeera which is normally more than happy to give Hamas a fair hearing was just as willing to show the sorrow of children from the Fatah side who broke down in tears when talking of their schoolmates being killed. Tension was already high with US-stooge Abbas and Dahlan looking for ways to topple the Hamas government with Israeli and US assistance, but the street tensions are high and only rising. Hamas condemned the killings and say it wasn't their men who carried them out (apparently a botched assassination attempt on the boys' father), and to be honest it could be any number of perpetrators. But the reality is that tensions are high and just as government supporters in Lebanon automatically blame Syria, so too Fatah supporters will automatically blame Hamas. Could be true, could be someone else, but that's pretty much irrelevant in the current atmosphere.

Musings on Al-Andalus

2006-12-06T21:15:00.000-05:00

I have just come back from a remarkable vacation in southern Spain and Morocco. Sometimes for vacation I just want to relax, get away from it all on a beach or in the countryside. But other times, I want to indulge my mind, experience another piece of the world. That's what I decided to do this time, so I spent the last few months more or less giving myself a mini-phd in the history of Al-Andalus (medieval Islamic Spain). I read a half a dozen or more wonderful books so that I would know what I was going to see and try to really understand the historical background of it all. I was not disappointed and will try to post some pictures. But I thought I would post just a few random thoughts on some of the surprising things I learned as I studied and visited places. In no particular order:

I've never really understood much about the Maghreb (Islamic North Africa west of Egypt or west of Libya depending on where you want to draw the line). I always assumed Morocco was the heart from which Islamic culture and arts spread into Al-Andalus. What I found was quite the opposite. While the armies and some of the rulers did pass from Morocco (or points further east) into Spain, Morocco for the first few centuries was not as developed a civilization or culture. It took a couple centuries after the initial conquest of Spain in 711 for high culture to really start developing in Al-Andalus, but once it did, the civilization of Spain far outstripped that of the relatively rough-and-tumble life of Morocco. As Al-Andalus steadily fell to the Castilians and the Portugese in the Reconquista, that Andalusian culture then fed back into Morocco. The wonderful culture and arts of Morocco are thus heavily in the debt of the Andalusians. I don't want to take the point too far, the Moroccan dynasties and cities certainly built much of their own high culture, but the contribution of Al-Andalus did in many instances precede that of Morocco and greatly enriched it.
One of the great romantic notions of medieval Spain is that of the Convivencia or supposed peaceful coexistence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. There is a great degree of truth to this, but the more I read and the more I saw, the less I am convinced of the truthfulness of the idealized myth. One cannot of course ignore the many beautiful fruits of the mixing of cultures and the many examples of coexistence and cross-polination in the arts and other forms of high culture. Mudajar and Mozarabic architecture and art, the theological and scientific achievements of men like Maimonides and Averroes, the poetic achievements in Hebrew and Arabic, and on and on all bear witness. But at the same time, deep undercurrents of intolerance were always present and perhaps made the ethnic cleansing first of the Jews and then of the Muslims eventually inevitable. When Jews were seen as having become too powerful (such as following the years of the poet-warrior Samuel Ha-Nagid in Granada), they became easy scapegoats when things went wrong and anti-Jewish riots, executions, and crucifixions did occur (though it should be noted that crucifixion remained a not uncommon form of execution for folks of all religions). The great Maimonides himself eventually had to flee to Egypt because of persecution (where he fared quite well as the personal physician of Saladin it should be added). Christian priests and Muslim Fuqaha alike encouraged emmigration from lands where they did not rule (though they were not entirely obeyed, they were certainly seen by most as at least correct in principle). The Alcazar of Peter the Cruel in Seville/Ishbiliya is certainly one of the finest examples of Islamic-style art in the world right alongside the Alhambra, but it also provided easy propaganda fodder to his rivals for power who accused him of being a Moor-lover and thus played a part in his eventual downfall and murder by his half brother (who stabbed him in the face). On the whole, Christians did fare better under Muslim rule than Muslims eventually did under Christian rule, but in both cases examples and periods of discrimination were common through various forms of taxation or limitations on religious practice. Certainly something remarkable and beatiful was created, but problems between religions and cultures were also prevalent and eventually culminated in the Christians ethnically cleansing all the Jews and Muslims from Spain. The Muslims would not likely have ever done such a thing to the Christians or Jews, but they certainly were not sinless in those times and places they ruled either. The idealized myth is useful and not totally false in order to present a vision of what might be, but we shouldn't pretend it represented the full reality. Mutual respect and tolerance existed on one level, but it was also fragile and not always upheld.
Al-Andalus (by which I mean Muslim-ruled Spain) strikes me as a place whose existence was always more fragile than it was likely perceived to be at the time by it's inhabitants. The initial conquest of roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the Iberian Peninsula was largely the result of Visigothic weakness. The Arab and Berber armies were surprised in many ways at their success, but rapidly consolidated their gains and took posession of the lands, setting about creating an Arab and Berber country in the process which was to be quite unique. But in failing to conquer the entire peninsula, they created the seeds of their own eventual defeat. They were at the fringes of the Islamic world and had failed to fully take over their land and as such to become the sole inheritors of the prior Roman/Visigothic legacy of Spain. In Egypt, Iran and other countries the Islamic ruling classes became the new possessors of the old order and set about constructing their new cultural and political edifice on the foundation of the old. In Spain they started to do the same, but a competing narrative survived in the northwest and the foothills of the Pyrenees -- a narrative which was deeply aggrieved and felt as if it were the true original inhabitants who had been unjustly pushed into a cold, dark corner of the land by foreign usurpers who were of an infidel faith in their eyes. If the Amirs, Caliphs, and Kings had gone on to complete the conquest of the peninsula, then those original inhabitants would as in Egypt and elsewhere steadily have become part of the new culture -- unique in some ways as a minority, but ultimately a part of a shared social fabric. Instead two opposing forces were set up. Demography clearly was big here: Islamic settlement of the lands of the Center, North, and West ceased to expand while Christian populations grew and settlement expanded. There are too many reasons for that to get into here, but needless to say, a static or shrinking population country is at a disadvantage versus a country with an expanding population. Societal organization also played a role: The Castilians and other Christian kingdoms as time went by were able to field large armies made up of a large segment of their adult male population. But in Al-Andalus the rulers came to rely heavily on professional militaries of foreign Berbers. Native Andalusis (who originally may have come from Arab, Iberian convert, or Berber stock but then settled down to become "locals") certainly played a military role, but again, they were professionals who were a relatively small piece of the population. When the survival of cities, kingdoms, and ultimately Al-Andalus itself was on the line, the natives may have been full of zeal to defend their lives, families, homes, and freedom of worship, but they had virtually no weapons or military skills to do it with. Those things had been delegated to professional armies who were extremely divided internally and then divided further by an increasingly unstable and incapable political ruling class. At times when the political class was strong and capable (such as the golden eras between the Caliph Abdal Rahman III and Al-Mansur or the Granadan kings Yusuf I and Muhammad V), the professional militaries were generally up to the job, but when (as inevitably happened) the politics broke down or the divided military elements became unmanageable, defeat at the hands of the Christians could be sudden and disastrous. Of course the Christian kingdoms had plenty of their own internal schisms, but as time went on, they solved them better and had greater unity and greater ability to call on effective outside resources, while Muslim unity steadily disintegrated along with the availability of reliable Muslim allies from North Africa or further afield. Finally, agriculture and the economic base. Al-Andalus had an enviable and effective agricultural system and a diverse economic base with good irrigated land for a variety of crops which produced surplus wealth which in turn allowed the development of other industries. Exporting goods to the wider Islamic world (and later to Europe) brought wealth and prosperity, as did the gold trade from Sub-Saharan Africa. But as political divisions and military disasters grew over time, and as demographic stasis and eventually drains took hold, agriculture and economic activity suffered and went into terminal decline. Crops and farmland were destroyed, the population dwindled and couldn't get it back running again in many cases (The rich farmlands around Cordoba may well have been more intensively and effectively utilized in the 10th century than they are even today). Then the Christian kings extortion of wealth, while it greatly enriched them and even other parts of Western Europe to which the gold flowed, drained away more and more of the economic surplus. At the end of the day, all of these pressures - demographic, military, political, economic, and others - combined to mean that perhaps Al-Andalus was always meant to be a flower that would bloom in great glory, but eventually wilt away. It didn't necessarily have to be that way, but the choices and mistakes made meant that is what happened.
The sadness of the fall of Al-Andalus in stages and then in a final tragic episode with the fall of Gharnata/Granada is hard to over-estimate. It was a sobering (though magical) moment to read the story of the fall of Granada from the top tower of the Alcazaba in the Alhambra, the very place the cross and flags of Castille were raised in January 1492. But perhaps even more sobering was to read of the fall of Malaga a few years before. The last viable major port city of the kingdom of Granada which could have served as a lifeline for the city of Granada fell in an epic battle which truly could have been something out of the Lord of the Rings or any great medieval epic which I had always thought of as trumped up modern fantasies. In Malaga the Andalusis and their Berber allies from North Africa who had come to defend the faith fought valiantly in a massive fortress for their lives, families, homes, and religion. Siege towers, cavalry, knights, early cannons, crossbows, sapping tunnels, holy men, warriors, foot soldiers, ordinary citizens, kings, clerics and other elements all participated. Starvation ran rampant in the city, assasinations were attempted, bodies were hacked to pieces, city walls crumbled, a valiant last defense was made. But in the end the sad tale was that the Christian attackers not only defeated the natives of Malaga, and not only did they dispossess them of their homes, but they sold them into slavery for resisting. And from that moment on, it was clear, Granada was doomed, and with it the last jewel in the crown of Al-Andalus. For the Christians, the sacred mission to retake that which they felt had been usurped in 711 was nearly at hand almost 800 years later. A zero sum game.
In reality, it was not entirely zero sum. The Christians defeated the Muslims, the Jews and then the Muslims were forcibly expelled from all of Spain, but despite the best efforts to bury it, something survived and is bearing fruits again today. After the Reconquista and the ethnic cleansing was completed, a cultural legacy remained. It was buried and ignored for centuries, but piece by piece, it has begun to come to light again. The art and architecture never fully disappeared, nor did the tales of the past. The poetry has begun to come to light again to Spaniards, and even the religion of Islam has begun to gain a new foothold, aided by the modern Spanish Constiution which establishes freedom of religion in a way which neither Catholics or Muslims of medieval Spain or Al-Andalus would have dreamed of. Immigrants from North Africa are again coming (where the cultural legacy of Al-Andalus greatly enriched the local cultures which now feed back in some measure to Spain), but also significantly, some Spaniards are themselves converting to Islam. Even those who do not increasingly recognize the rich Islamic past and have internalized a part of it, such as the poets of the generation of 27 who were inspired in part by a collection of re-discovered great Islamic poets of Al-Andalus who had been translated into Spanish in the early part of the 20th century.

My musings for tonight. I have many other thoughts on these topics, in particular the linkages and what-ifs between Islamic Spain and the European discovery of the Americas (it is not so inconceivable with a slight twist of history that there could have been Arabic or Turkish speaking Muslim countries in the Americas), on the experience of Muslims under Christian rule in medieval Spain and the theological and legal implications for today's world, and general lessons to be learned for the modern world's politics and cultures. But no more time tonight, maybe another time.

Fernandez Comeback?

2006-11-21T19:19:00.000-05:00

Looks like Alberto Fernandez may well make a comeback for the US State Deparment:

http://www.kimandrewelliott.com/index.php?id=646

http://www.kimandrewelliott.com/index.php?id=575

While I in no way remain a fan of USFP or trying to sell such rubbish, as a bureaucratic battle, looks like the relative good guys may well win this time around.

Cautiously though. Nahar-Net is what As'ad Abu Khalil would refer to as a right-wing fascist Lebanonese (i.e., totally friendly territory for a US diplomat defending Bush policy) web site.

Al-Jazeera English is live

2006-11-15T22:23:00.000-05:00

Check them out, their English website is updated (looks notably better). I wasn’t able to connect at the launch at 7am eastern time because the website was overwhelmed. They’re only broadcast 12 hours per day for now and no major US cable or satellite systems have agreed to carry them yet (let’s be blunt, they’ve been unfairly slandered), but you can watch them via RealPlayer and a few other online options. They are hoping first and foremost to carry the global (i.e., non-US) English-speaking audience which numbers in the tens of millions, establish their credibility, and then hopefully the US systems will start to carry them as well. I’ve been watching a few clips now, and I must say, their first outing looks fairly impressive. Certainly glitches – Muhammad Hassanein Haykal’s ramblings are absolutely intolerable to listen to in Arabic, why in the world they stuck him on speaking stilted English instead of with a translator (probably his own stubborn insistence that his lousy English is great) is even more horrendous – but overall it looks a fairly slick blend of BBC World and Jazeera’s own identity. I can see it become a main news source I would follow. Their English website also looks improved, I was never very impressed by the last one or the quality of the reporting, hopefully the facelift is more than skin deep.

I would highly recommend getting on the site now or shortly as the first 12 hour broadcast is over and if you click on the link to watch live via RealPlayer you’ll get a decent little 15 minute sampling of the types of things they were broadcasting today.

http://english.aljazeera.net/

Click through on the Programmes link as well and you can see the types of shows they’re doing and see some of the journalists. One glaring omission is at least a show or two that directly utilizes some of their best Arab journalists. I wish they could have Faisal al-Qasem for example doing an English version of al-Ittijah al-Mu’akis (the Opposite Direction), he is so much better than anything Crossfire or any US network show has ever produced in the “heated debate” genre. Maybe yet to come (fingers crossed). They have an extremely large network of bureaus around the world with a very international cast of journalists. They state their goal is to provide a view of the world from the perspective of countries who are more frequently spoken about than from, and they certainly seem to have assembled the resources to do so. After numerous false starts, it’s go-time now and they have to prove they can do it. Based on their first outing, I certainly wish them luck, the English speaking world certainly needs news from a developing world perspective.

Az-Zaman Web Poll

2006-11-14T21:37:00.000-05:00

As I've said before, I like to keep an eye on Arab media site web polls. Not because they're scientific, but because of what they reveal about generally like-minded readerships of various publications. Az-Zaman is one of Iraq's most popular papers. Founded in London by Saad al-Bazzaz, a former senior Ba'ath party media official who had a falling out with Saddam, the paper then moved to Iraq after the American invasion. The paper (Arabic version here http://www.azzaman.com/, shorter English version here http://www.azzaman.com/english/) and his Ash-Sharqiya television station (http://www.alsharqiyatv.com/) are some of the most popular media in Iraq. More importantly, they are respected as independent and non-sectarian, by far the most important of the country's large media outlets to be such (most media is now connected to political parties or the government). This is part of the reason why the government recently threatened to shut them down -- they weren't sufficiently partisan to satisfy some. Anyhow, they're running the following web poll right now which based on the background I've given as I understand it, I will invite you to draw your own conclusions from:

What will happen to Iraq if the federalism law [note: literally "law of the regions"] is implemented?

Iraqi stability - 24.9%
The end of violence - 4.5%
The breakup of Iraq - 48.1%
The collapse of secuirty - 22.5%

Votes: 4481

"My Name Is Rachel Corrie"

2006-11-12T22:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.mynameisrachelcorrie.com/

Play at Minetta Lane Theater in New York. Saw it this weekend. You should too. Has its flaws, but ultimately very powerful (as raw first-person witness often is). Everyone should see it. Will write more later.

http://www.rachelcorriefoundation.org/