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Friday, August 31, 2007

Update

I'm not dead, I've just been really busy lately. I should be done with the project I'm working on soon enough, though, and spending a couple of weeks in Paris.

Hopefully, blogging will resume in a matter of days.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Prominent genocide deniers

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pulling the ladder up

(Via Neil/Ezra) I wonder if Mark Krikorian recognizes the irony of an Armenian-American arguing against offering asylum to a people that's being targeted in a genocide. Had all countries followed his lead a hundred years ago, his family probably would have died in the deserts of Syria at the hands of the Young Turks:

Zionism Is Not a Suicide Pact   [Mark Krikorian]

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state. But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

There's nothing like pulling the ladder up once you and yours have made it to safety.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Terrorism and resistance

Over the last few days, I've debated the actions of revolutionary groups, particularly those in the Levant, during the 70s, with some friends of mine. I've taken the stance that no matter how just their cause might be or how injust the actions of their enemies, the deliberate targeting of civilians is beyond the pale.

Following the brutal and inexcusable attacks against Kurdish Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Economist has a wonderful little piece about not confusing terrorism with resistance

Even in the hell of Iraq, however, it is important to look at some things straight. And one of those things is that not all kinds of killing are equal. Some are less acceptable than others. This is not a callous or nit-picking legal point: it concerns a vital distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that has long been spelled out under the laws and moral requirements of war and must not be fudged.

George Bush is rightly criticised for lumping together as “terrorists” anyone who takes up arms against America or its allies. This is a simplistic formula that blurs necessary distinctions and makes for clumsy policy. Yet some opponents of the superpower's occupation of Iraq make an equal mistake when they lump together—and condone—as “resistance” all of the violent acts committed by America's foes in Iraq.

No excuses

This is profoundly mistaken. Military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can certainly be classified as resistance, whether you think such resistance justified or not. But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. The most lethal atrocities are those carried out by suicide-bombers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, who have imbibed some version of the al-Qaeda idea of war to the end against the unbelievers, who in their minds include Iraq's Shia Muslims. Many Iraqi Sunnis have in their turn been killed—for revenge or as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing—by Iraqi Shias, sometimes acting alone and sometimes at the bidding of organised militias, often with links to a political party or to Iraq's government.

Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too) the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purpose is just a crime. This remains true regardless of the justice of the cause, and whether the killing is done by states, armies, groups or individuals. The world should never tire of condemning such deeds.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Darfur mortality rates: A debate

Eric Reeves has taken down a recent op-ed piece by Time's Sam Dealey. The Reeves rebuttal is detailed and lengthy, so there aren't any really pithy quotes to add here. In other words, read the whole thing.

Stones and glass houses: or pots and kettles

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
(1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.


If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How to live without a solution

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, who served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, has an excellent piece on Palestine and Israel in LRB, "The Middle East Peace Process Scam."

He comes out and says that the impediment to peace is Israeli stalling while slowly chipping away at Palestinian land with the wall, roads and settlements, while the international "peace process" gives it cover. He says that Palestinian statehood has been put in formaldehyde, which is to say that it is given the appearance of still being alive while not allowed to visibly decompose.

Siegman quotes Moshe Dayan, who says "The question is not 'What is the solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" He then goes on to quote Geoffrey Aronson,who has this to say:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

He opens with this sober and depressing assessment of the peace process, which he calls a scam and a spectacular deception:

In [Bush's] view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

These days, it's hard to find a piece about the peace process as a whole that has anything new to say, and this one is no exception. What is different, however, is that more and more American and Israeli Jews (Burg, for example) are asking hard questions of Israel and its brutal occupation and making piercing observations about the situation as a whole, including international complicity. These are not questions and observations that went unasked and unobserved before by Arabs and Europeans; they're just gaining credibility in the international discourse because it's hard to paint the former head of the American Jewish Congress as an anti-Semite for asking them.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Arming Libya

Most of the coverage about the arms deal between France and Libya has focused on the quid pro quo (officially denied) of offering arms for the release of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. One aspect of the piece that's been overlooked is the fact that offering arms to Tripoli might be at odds with the stated policy of France and the UK in Darfur. Libya has a long history of arming the "Arab" side of the region's racial war, which has involved Darfur and Chad, in hopes of creating a united pan-Arab state in the region.

So although its author doesn't seem terribly familiar the region's decades-long war, I was glad to see this article in the Guardian on the possibility of a conflict arising from the arms deal between their policy in Libya and their policies in Darfur and Chad.

This is an important question, and those who wish to read about the conflict in the Sahara and Sahel would do well to check out the new and updated edition of Burr's and Collins's book on the subject.

Daily Star gossip

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Election choices

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Tous les jours, c'est kebab party!

I got a link from a friend of mine to a new music video done by a Turkish kebab waiter, Lil'Maaz, at a kebab shop in my favorite neighborhood in Paris. The song is called....wait for it.... "Mange du Kebab" (Eat Kebab). It's pretty fun, so much so, in fact, that after hearing him rap while working, some regular customers who work in a production studio decided to help him make a video. It seems be a big hit, so go check out his website (in French). In the meantime, watch the video:

 

Tsunami weapon strikes again!

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

Solidere's "illegal expansion"

The Daily Star has a relatively lengthy piece about Solidere and some of its legal battles with former downtown property owners, most of whose property rights are now owned by Solidere. The issue is a fairly complicated one, and I don't pretend to fully understand it, although this latest suit seems to have been sparked by Solidere's decision to start expanding into Dubai whereas most of its work downtown remains unfinished.

In any case, the article is worth a read, and it'd be nice to see more of such substantive reporting being done by the Star. If anyone else has any links to more information about the Hariri empire and downtown property rights, I'd love to see it.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Super Hajja

My friends over at Grey Mog here in Beirut sent me a link for the first scene teaser for the upcoming movie Super Hajja. Their website should be up and running in a few days, so keep an eye on that. Otherwise, I can't find the original short film that they did for Super Hajja during the war, but if I find a link to it, I'll be sure to post it.

In any case, and without any further ado, here is the opening scene to the upcoming Super Hajja:

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Politics and the Diaspora

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar dies

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Metn Parliamentary by-elections

Last night, after going to the cinema and having some dinner in Sassine with my roommate, we decided to go check out what was going on at our local Aounist headquarters. While we were having our dinner and 'arguileh, supporters of Hariri's Sunni-based Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangist party kept driving by honking their horns and waving party flags. Sassine, which is mostly Christian and next to the ABC Achrifieh mall is mostly for Geagea and Gemayel. This is why we decided that it would be interesting to go see what was happening in the Aoun camp.

The headquarters were blocked off by the Army to prevent any political street fighting. I was given an orange Free Patriotic Movement t-shirt and a bottle of water with an orange cap, as well as a cup of coffee, which was about the only non-orange thing there. Everyone was outside watching the results on Orange TV, the FPM's unofficial television channel. There were more orange wigs, shirts, shoes, socks and pants than at a faculty meeting at an American elementary school on Halloween.

The Parliamentary by-election in the Metn region was called by the government (and opposed by the opposition, which makes Aoun's participation contradictory if perhaps also cunning) in order to replace MP Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated earlier this year. The election is an important one, since it acts as a bellwether for Christian support, which will be helpful for predicting who the next president will be. Former president and father of Pierre, Amin Gemayel ran against Aoun-backed and lesser-known Kamil Khoury.

Orange TV announced Khoury's victory relatively early in the evening, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw more definitive accounts of the results. When Orange TV made the call, the Aounists immediately started cheering, with more than a few heaving a large sigh of relief. Large and loud fireworks soon followed, at which point I took my leave. As I was leaving the headquarters, the Aounists told me that I should put the t-shirt they gave me in a bag, fearing that I might get harassed on my back home since the neighborhood was so fiercely pro-government.

According to CNN, the Ministry of the Interior officially called Khoury the winner by 418 votes in an election with some 80,000 ballots cast. In every account I've read so far, it seems that the deciding vote was what LBC is calling "the Armenian Voice." No one I talked to last night could tell me how many votes had been cast so far, but everyone could quote how many Armenian votes their side had received. As is usual in Lebanon, allegations of voter fraud are coming from both sides, and as is also usual, they're both probably right.

The run-up to this election has been interesting to me, because it's been marked by two very anti-democratic forces. On the one hand, the only reason the election is happening at all is because there was a political assassination. On the other hand, supporters of the Gemayel family and the Phalangist and Lebanese Forces parties have had a a worrisome attitude of entitlement about the whole affair. According to many of them, the Parliament seat belongs to the Gemayel clan, and it's just bad form for Aoun to contest it. Others, including Michael Young and the Maronite Patriarch, have been arguing (undemocratically, I needn't add) that Gemayel should run unopposed, because a real election would split the Christians (as if they weren't already split).

In any case, one thing that seems certain is that this has put the last nail in the Gemayel clan's coffin. If the former president couldn't beat a little-known Khoury, then the Gemayels have finally gone the way of the Chamoun clan. Overall, I think it's a good thing when a political dynasty ends in a country like Lebanon (by non-violent means, that is), but if Lebanese history is much of an indicator, the political (and physical) death of a clan doesn't necessarily imply the fall of feudal politics, but rather the rise of another political clan in this country of the Godfather where things are run by various tribes with flags.

Shi'a fatwa against honor killings

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

African Polls

The Times has an interesting and interactive map (I'm a sucker for these) showing the results of a poll taken on attitudes in several sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

Some of the results are obvious, and others are not. The poll covers national issues, the economy and personal well-being, as well as international views. The most pressing national concerns seem to be "HIV/AIDS and other diseases," "corrupt political leaders," "crime" and "illegal drugs." Ethnic/religious conflict was seen as a problem by more than half of those polled in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, with the latter polling particularly high.

Despite this, those polled seemed fairly optimistic, and those polled in every country overwhelmingly thought things would be better for their children than they have been for them.

Opinions vary pretty widely on the UN, US and AU, depending on the country, with Ethiopia unsurprisingly showing the most support for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and the EU scoring particularly low overall for Africans' confidence that it can "help solve Africa's problems." 

In would have been interesting to have added more countries with one foot in "Arab Africa" and the other foot in "black Africa," particularly Sudan, Chad and Mauritania. Out of all the countries polled, the only two where the majority don't think that "Arabs and blacks in North Africa can live peacefully together" were Uganda and Tanzania.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Tancredo: Attack Mecca and Medina

This is so incredible that I don't think I can even comment on it. I'll let Tancredo speak for himself:

WASHINGTON: Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.

The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in the state of Iowa that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

Listen here.

UNIFIL and Hezbollah

There have been rumors circulating since last Spring that UNIFIL had met with Hezbollah in order to get the latter's cooperation for protecting international troops in the south. Blanford confirms that with a recent article in the CS Monitor:

The growing threat of attack by Sunni radicals apparently spurred the leading European troop-contributing states to seek the Shiite Hizbullah's cooperation. According to UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hizbullah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were "escorted" on some of their patrols by Hizbullah members in civilian vehicles, the UNIFIL sources say.

A day after the six peacekeepers were killed last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Manucher Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, Hizbullah's main patron. According to a Hizbullah official in south Lebanon, there has been at least one meeting between the Shiite party and Spanish UNIFIL officers since the bombing.

UNIFIL has long had quiet channels of communication with Hizbullah stretching back to the late 1980s, a recognition of the Shiite group's clout in the south. But UNIFIL commander General Graziano says that although troop-contributing governments may talk to Hizbullah, the peacekeeping battalions are only authorized to liaise with the Lebanese Army. Contacts with Hizbullah or any other Lebanese political party is not permitted, he says.

"I highly forbid any relation that is not authorized by this headquarters for any contingent that is dressed in the blue beret to have contact with any party without my authorization," he says.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Fallout from Israeli "journalists" in Lebanon

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Darfur: Peacekeepers and mortality figures

The UN Security Council has finally approved a Chapter 7 resolution for Darfur. I'm curious to see how long it actually takes to gather enough troops and get them out there. Apparently most of them are supposed to be African, so I'd like to know who all has agreed to send troops.

The resolution now calls for a peacekeeping mission to begin no later than October, and cites Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, under which the Security Council is permitted to authorize the use of force to carry out the mandate.

Most of the peacekeepers are supposed to be drawn from African nations, and would include a beleaguered force of some 7,000 soldiers already in Darfur from the African Union, placing it under a unified command and control with the United Nations force.

The resolution authorizes a maximum of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 civilian police officers. It does not spell out what role would be played by major powers, including the United States.

 On a related note, I find it really curious that the number that keeps being brandied around (and has been cited for the last year or two) is 200,000 dead in Darfur. The numbers went, all of a sudden, from "tens of thousands" to 200,000, which I think is a lot closer to the reality, but which is still a conservative, and strangely static, estimation.

Eric Reeves, for example, argued back in the Spring of 2006 that the death count (included in this are those who have died of disease and malnutrition in addition to violence) was around 450,000. And the US State Department put out an estimate in early 2005 that the excess death toll was 98,000 and 181,000. Regardless of the estimate, though, it seems strange for the media to continue citing the same number over the course of a couple of years.

A Lexis Nexis search of Darfur coverage in the Times, for example, shows that the 200,000 figure was used as far back as November 7, 2005 ("Surge in Violence in Sudan Erodes Hope"). In that report, we are informed of "the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Darfur," whereas in today's report, we are told that "some 200,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict." Are we really to believe that the numbers have remained unchanged for nearly two years?

While death counts in remote conflict zones are by their nature difficult to discern and in cases like this one usually controversial, there is no excuse for major media outlets, once having made the decision to use a figure, to continue using it unchanged for nearly two years. The readership of the Times could be forgiven for thinking that there had been no new deaths in Darfur since November, 2005. This is obviously untrue, and they should either update their figures or if they insist on continuing to use 200,000, they should stress that this number is two years old.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Update

I'm not dead, I've just been really busy lately. I should be done with the project I'm working on soon enough, though, and spending a couple of weeks in Paris.

Hopefully, blogging will resume in a matter of days.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Prominent genocide deniers

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pulling the ladder up

(Via Neil/Ezra) I wonder if Mark Krikorian recognizes the irony of an Armenian-American arguing against offering asylum to a people that's being targeted in a genocide. Had all countries followed his lead a hundred years ago, his family probably would have died in the deserts of Syria at the hands of the Young Turks:

Zionism Is Not a Suicide Pact   [Mark Krikorian]

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state. But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

There's nothing like pulling the ladder up once you and yours have made it to safety.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Terrorism and resistance

Over the last few days, I've debated the actions of revolutionary groups, particularly those in the Levant, during the 70s, with some friends of mine. I've taken the stance that no matter how just their cause might be or how injust the actions of their enemies, the deliberate targeting of civilians is beyond the pale.

Following the brutal and inexcusable attacks against Kurdish Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Economist has a wonderful little piece about not confusing terrorism with resistance

Even in the hell of Iraq, however, it is important to look at some things straight. And one of those things is that not all kinds of killing are equal. Some are less acceptable than others. This is not a callous or nit-picking legal point: it concerns a vital distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that has long been spelled out under the laws and moral requirements of war and must not be fudged.

George Bush is rightly criticised for lumping together as “terrorists” anyone who takes up arms against America or its allies. This is a simplistic formula that blurs necessary distinctions and makes for clumsy policy. Yet some opponents of the superpower's occupation of Iraq make an equal mistake when they lump together—and condone—as “resistance” all of the violent acts committed by America's foes in Iraq.

No excuses

This is profoundly mistaken. Military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can certainly be classified as resistance, whether you think such resistance justified or not. But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. The most lethal atrocities are those carried out by suicide-bombers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, who have imbibed some version of the al-Qaeda idea of war to the end against the unbelievers, who in their minds include Iraq's Shia Muslims. Many Iraqi Sunnis have in their turn been killed—for revenge or as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing—by Iraqi Shias, sometimes acting alone and sometimes at the bidding of organised militias, often with links to a political party or to Iraq's government.

Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too) the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purpose is just a crime. This remains true regardless of the justice of the cause, and whether the killing is done by states, armies, groups or individuals. The world should never tire of condemning such deeds.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Darfur mortality rates: A debate

Eric Reeves has taken down a recent op-ed piece by Time's Sam Dealey. The Reeves rebuttal is detailed and lengthy, so there aren't any really pithy quotes to add here. In other words, read the whole thing.

Stones and glass houses: or pots and kettles

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
(1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.


If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How to live without a solution

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, who served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, has an excellent piece on Palestine and Israel in LRB, "The Middle East Peace Process Scam."

He comes out and says that the impediment to peace is Israeli stalling while slowly chipping away at Palestinian land with the wall, roads and settlements, while the international "peace process" gives it cover. He says that Palestinian statehood has been put in formaldehyde, which is to say that it is given the appearance of still being alive while not allowed to visibly decompose.

Siegman quotes Moshe Dayan, who says "The question is not 'What is the solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" He then goes on to quote Geoffrey Aronson,who has this to say:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

He opens with this sober and depressing assessment of the peace process, which he calls a scam and a spectacular deception:

In [Bush's] view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

These days, it's hard to find a piece about the peace process as a whole that has anything new to say, and this one is no exception. What is different, however, is that more and more American and Israeli Jews (Burg, for example) are asking hard questions of Israel and its brutal occupation and making piercing observations about the situation as a whole, including international complicity. These are not questions and observations that went unasked and unobserved before by Arabs and Europeans; they're just gaining credibility in the international discourse because it's hard to paint the former head of the American Jewish Congress as an anti-Semite for asking them.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Arming Libya

Most of the coverage about the arms deal between France and Libya has focused on the quid pro quo (officially denied) of offering arms for the release of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. One aspect of the piece that's been overlooked is the fact that offering arms to Tripoli might be at odds with the stated policy of France and the UK in Darfur. Libya has a long history of arming the "Arab" side of the region's racial war, which has involved Darfur and Chad, in hopes of creating a united pan-Arab state in the region.

So although its author doesn't seem terribly familiar the region's decades-long war, I was glad to see this article in the Guardian on the possibility of a conflict arising from the arms deal between their policy in Libya and their policies in Darfur and Chad.

This is an important question, and those who wish to read about the conflict in the Sahara and Sahel would do well to check out the new and updated edition of Burr's and Collins's book on the subject.

Daily Star gossip

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Election choices

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Tous les jours, c'est kebab party!

I got a link from a friend of mine to a new music video done by a Turkish kebab waiter, Lil'Maaz, at a kebab shop in my favorite neighborhood in Paris. The song is called....wait for it.... "Mange du Kebab" (Eat Kebab). It's pretty fun, so much so, in fact, that after hearing him rap while working, some regular customers who work in a production studio decided to help him make a video. It seems be a big hit, so go check out his website (in French). In the meantime, watch the video:

 

Tsunami weapon strikes again!

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

Solidere's "illegal expansion"

The Daily Star has a relatively lengthy piece about Solidere and some of its legal battles with former downtown property owners, most of whose property rights are now owned by Solidere. The issue is a fairly complicated one, and I don't pretend to fully understand it, although this latest suit seems to have been sparked by Solidere's decision to start expanding into Dubai whereas most of its work downtown remains unfinished.

In any case, the article is worth a read, and it'd be nice to see more of such substantive reporting being done by the Star. If anyone else has any links to more information about the Hariri empire and downtown property rights, I'd love to see it.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Super Hajja

My friends over at Grey Mog here in Beirut sent me a link for the first scene teaser for the upcoming movie Super Hajja. Their website should be up and running in a few days, so keep an eye on that. Otherwise, I can't find the original short film that they did for Super Hajja during the war, but if I find a link to it, I'll be sure to post it.

In any case, and without any further ado, here is the opening scene to the upcoming Super Hajja:

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Politics and the Diaspora

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar dies

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Metn Parliamentary by-elections

Last night, after going to the cinema and having some dinner in Sassine with my roommate, we decided to go check out what was going on at our local Aounist headquarters. While we were having our dinner and 'arguileh, supporters of Hariri's Sunni-based Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangist party kept driving by honking their horns and waving party flags. Sassine, which is mostly Christian and next to the ABC Achrifieh mall is mostly for Geagea and Gemayel. This is why we decided that it would be interesting to go see what was happening in the Aoun camp.

The headquarters were blocked off by the Army to prevent any political street fighting. I was given an orange Free Patriotic Movement t-shirt and a bottle of water with an orange cap, as well as a cup of coffee, which was about the only non-orange thing there. Everyone was outside watching the results on Orange TV, the FPM's unofficial television channel. There were more orange wigs, shirts, shoes, socks and pants than at a faculty meeting at an American elementary school on Halloween.

The Parliamentary by-election in the Metn region was called by the government (and opposed by the opposition, which makes Aoun's participation contradictory if perhaps also cunning) in order to replace MP Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated earlier this year. The election is an important one, since it acts as a bellwether for Christian support, which will be helpful for predicting who the next president will be. Former president and father of Pierre, Amin Gemayel ran against Aoun-backed and lesser-known Kamil Khoury.

Orange TV announced Khoury's victory relatively early in the evening, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw more definitive accounts of the results. When Orange TV made the call, the Aounists immediately started cheering, with more than a few heaving a large sigh of relief. Large and loud fireworks soon followed, at which point I took my leave. As I was leaving the headquarters, the Aounists told me that I should put the t-shirt they gave me in a bag, fearing that I might get harassed on my back home since the neighborhood was so fiercely pro-government.

According to CNN, the Ministry of the Interior officially called Khoury the winner by 418 votes in an election with some 80,000 ballots cast. In every account I've read so far, it seems that the deciding vote was what LBC is calling "the Armenian Voice." No one I talked to last night could tell me how many votes had been cast so far, but everyone could quote how many Armenian votes their side had received. As is usual in Lebanon, allegations of voter fraud are coming from both sides, and as is also usual, they're both probably right.

The run-up to this election has been interesting to me, because it's been marked by two very anti-democratic forces. On the one hand, the only reason the election is happening at all is because there was a political assassination. On the other hand, supporters of the Gemayel family and the Phalangist and Lebanese Forces parties have had a a worrisome attitude of entitlement about the whole affair. According to many of them, the Parliament seat belongs to the Gemayel clan, and it's just bad form for Aoun to contest it. Others, including Michael Young and the Maronite Patriarch, have been arguing (undemocratically, I needn't add) that Gemayel should run unopposed, because a real election would split the Christians (as if they weren't already split).

In any case, one thing that seems certain is that this has put the last nail in the Gemayel clan's coffin. If the former president couldn't beat a little-known Khoury, then the Gemayels have finally gone the way of the Chamoun clan. Overall, I think it's a good thing when a political dynasty ends in a country like Lebanon (by non-violent means, that is), but if Lebanese history is much of an indicator, the political (and physical) death of a clan doesn't necessarily imply the fall of feudal politics, but rather the rise of another political clan in this country of the Godfather where things are run by various tribes with flags.

Shi'a fatwa against honor killings

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

African Polls

The Times has an interesting and interactive map (I'm a sucker for these) showing the results of a poll taken on attitudes in several sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

Some of the results are obvious, and others are not. The poll covers national issues, the economy and personal well-being, as well as international views. The most pressing national concerns seem to be "HIV/AIDS and other diseases," "corrupt political leaders," "crime" and "illegal drugs." Ethnic/religious conflict was seen as a problem by more than half of those polled in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, with the latter polling particularly high.

Despite this, those polled seemed fairly optimistic, and those polled in every country overwhelmingly thought things would be better for their children than they have been for them.

Opinions vary pretty widely on the UN, US and AU, depending on the country, with Ethiopia unsurprisingly showing the most support for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and the EU scoring particularly low overall for Africans' confidence that it can "help solve Africa's problems." 

In would have been interesting to have added more countries with one foot in "Arab Africa" and the other foot in "black Africa," particularly Sudan, Chad and Mauritania. Out of all the countries polled, the only two where the majority don't think that "Arabs and blacks in North Africa can live peacefully together" were Uganda and Tanzania.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Tancredo: Attack Mecca and Medina

This is so incredible that I don't think I can even comment on it. I'll let Tancredo speak for himself:

WASHINGTON: Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.

The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in the state of Iowa that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

Listen here.

UNIFIL and Hezbollah

There have been rumors circulating since last Spring that UNIFIL had met with Hezbollah in order to get the latter's cooperation for protecting international troops in the south. Blanford confirms that with a recent article in the CS Monitor:

The growing threat of attack by Sunni radicals apparently spurred the leading European troop-contributing states to seek the Shiite Hizbullah's cooperation. According to UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hizbullah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were "escorted" on some of their patrols by Hizbullah members in civilian vehicles, the UNIFIL sources say.

A day after the six peacekeepers were killed last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Manucher Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, Hizbullah's main patron. According to a Hizbullah official in south Lebanon, there has been at least one meeting between the Shiite party and Spanish UNIFIL officers since the bombing.

UNIFIL has long had quiet channels of communication with Hizbullah stretching back to the late 1980s, a recognition of the Shiite group's clout in the south. But UNIFIL commander General Graziano says that although troop-contributing governments may talk to Hizbullah, the peacekeeping battalions are only authorized to liaise with the Lebanese Army. Contacts with Hizbullah or any other Lebanese political party is not permitted, he says.

"I highly forbid any relation that is not authorized by this headquarters for any contingent that is dressed in the blue beret to have contact with any party without my authorization," he says.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Fallout from Israeli "journalists" in Lebanon

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Darfur: Peacekeepers and mortality figures

The UN Security Council has finally approved a Chapter 7 resolution for Darfur. I'm curious to see how long it actually takes to gather enough troops and get them out there. Apparently most of them are supposed to be African, so I'd like to know who all has agreed to send troops.

The resolution now calls for a peacekeeping mission to begin no later than October, and cites Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, under which the Security Council is permitted to authorize the use of force to carry out the mandate.

Most of the peacekeepers are supposed to be drawn from African nations, and would include a beleaguered force of some 7,000 soldiers already in Darfur from the African Union, placing it under a unified command and control with the United Nations force.

The resolution authorizes a maximum of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 civilian police officers. It does not spell out what role would be played by major powers, including the United States.

 On a related note, I find it really curious that the number that keeps being brandied around (and has been cited for the last year or two) is 200,000 dead in Darfur. The numbers went, all of a sudden, from "tens of thousands" to 200,000, which I think is a lot closer to the reality, but which is still a conservative, and strangely static, estimation.

Eric Reeves, for example, argued back in the Spring of 2006 that the death count (included in this are those who have died of disease and malnutrition in addition to violence) was around 450,000. And the US State Department put out an estimate in early 2005 that the excess death toll was 98,000 and 181,000. Regardless of the estimate, though, it seems strange for the media to continue citing the same number over the course of a couple of years.

A Lexis Nexis search of Darfur coverage in the Times, for example, shows that the 200,000 figure was used as far back as November 7, 2005 ("Surge in Violence in Sudan Erodes Hope"). In that report, we are informed of "the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Darfur," whereas in today's report, we are told that "some 200,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict." Are we really to believe that the numbers have remained unchanged for nearly two years?

While death counts in remote conflict zones are by their nature difficult to discern and in cases like this one usually controversial, there is no excuse for major media outlets, once having made the decision to use a figure, to continue using it unchanged for nearly two years. The readership of the Times could be forgiven for thinking that there had been no new deaths in Darfur since November, 2005. This is obviously untrue, and they should either update their figures or if they insist on continuing to use 200,000, they should stress that this number is two years old.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Update

I'm not dead, I've just been really busy lately. I should be done with the project I'm working on soon enough, though, and spending a couple of weeks in Paris.

Hopefully, blogging will resume in a matter of days.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Prominent genocide deniers

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pulling the ladder up

(Via Neil/Ezra) I wonder if Mark Krikorian recognizes the irony of an Armenian-American arguing against offering asylum to a people that's being targeted in a genocide. Had all countries followed his lead a hundred years ago, his family probably would have died in the deserts of Syria at the hands of the Young Turks:

Zionism Is Not a Suicide Pact   [Mark Krikorian]

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state. But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

There's nothing like pulling the ladder up once you and yours have made it to safety.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Terrorism and resistance

Over the last few days, I've debated the actions of revolutionary groups, particularly those in the Levant, during the 70s, with some friends of mine. I've taken the stance that no matter how just their cause might be or how injust the actions of their enemies, the deliberate targeting of civilians is beyond the pale.

Following the brutal and inexcusable attacks against Kurdish Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Economist has a wonderful little piece about not confusing terrorism with resistance

Even in the hell of Iraq, however, it is important to look at some things straight. And one of those things is that not all kinds of killing are equal. Some are less acceptable than others. This is not a callous or nit-picking legal point: it concerns a vital distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that has long been spelled out under the laws and moral requirements of war and must not be fudged.

George Bush is rightly criticised for lumping together as “terrorists” anyone who takes up arms against America or its allies. This is a simplistic formula that blurs necessary distinctions and makes for clumsy policy. Yet some opponents of the superpower's occupation of Iraq make an equal mistake when they lump together—and condone—as “resistance” all of the violent acts committed by America's foes in Iraq.

No excuses

This is profoundly mistaken. Military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can certainly be classified as resistance, whether you think such resistance justified or not. But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. The most lethal atrocities are those carried out by suicide-bombers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, who have imbibed some version of the al-Qaeda idea of war to the end against the unbelievers, who in their minds include Iraq's Shia Muslims. Many Iraqi Sunnis have in their turn been killed—for revenge or as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing—by Iraqi Shias, sometimes acting alone and sometimes at the bidding of organised militias, often with links to a political party or to Iraq's government.

Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too) the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purpose is just a crime. This remains true regardless of the justice of the cause, and whether the killing is done by states, armies, groups or individuals. The world should never tire of condemning such deeds.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Darfur mortality rates: A debate

Eric Reeves has taken down a recent op-ed piece by Time's Sam Dealey. The Reeves rebuttal is detailed and lengthy, so there aren't any really pithy quotes to add here. In other words, read the whole thing.

Stones and glass houses: or pots and kettles

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
(1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.


If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How to live without a solution

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, who served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, has an excellent piece on Palestine and Israel in LRB, "The Middle East Peace Process Scam."

He comes out and says that the impediment to peace is Israeli stalling while slowly chipping away at Palestinian land with the wall, roads and settlements, while the international "peace process" gives it cover. He says that Palestinian statehood has been put in formaldehyde, which is to say that it is given the appearance of still being alive while not allowed to visibly decompose.

Siegman quotes Moshe Dayan, who says "The question is not 'What is the solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" He then goes on to quote Geoffrey Aronson,who has this to say:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

He opens with this sober and depressing assessment of the peace process, which he calls a scam and a spectacular deception:

In [Bush's] view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

These days, it's hard to find a piece about the peace process as a whole that has anything new to say, and this one is no exception. What is different, however, is that more and more American and Israeli Jews (Burg, for example) are asking hard questions of Israel and its brutal occupation and making piercing observations about the situation as a whole, including international complicity. These are not questions and observations that went unasked and unobserved before by Arabs and Europeans; they're just gaining credibility in the international discourse because it's hard to paint the former head of the American Jewish Congress as an anti-Semite for asking them.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Arming Libya

Most of the coverage about the arms deal between France and Libya has focused on the quid pro quo (officially denied) of offering arms for the release of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. One aspect of the piece that's been overlooked is the fact that offering arms to Tripoli might be at odds with the stated policy of France and the UK in Darfur. Libya has a long history of arming the "Arab" side of the region's racial war, which has involved Darfur and Chad, in hopes of creating a united pan-Arab state in the region.

So although its author doesn't seem terribly familiar the region's decades-long war, I was glad to see this article in the Guardian on the possibility of a conflict arising from the arms deal between their policy in Libya and their policies in Darfur and Chad.

This is an important question, and those who wish to read about the conflict in the Sahara and Sahel would do well to check out the new and updated edition of Burr's and Collins's book on the subject.

Daily Star gossip

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Election choices

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Tous les jours, c'est kebab party!

I got a link from a friend of mine to a new music video done by a Turkish kebab waiter, Lil'Maaz, at a kebab shop in my favorite neighborhood in Paris. The song is called....wait for it.... "Mange du Kebab" (Eat Kebab). It's pretty fun, so much so, in fact, that after hearing him rap while working, some regular customers who work in a production studio decided to help him make a video. It seems be a big hit, so go check out his website (in French). In the meantime, watch the video:

 

Tsunami weapon strikes again!

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

Solidere's "illegal expansion"

The Daily Star has a relatively lengthy piece about Solidere and some of its legal battles with former downtown property owners, most of whose property rights are now owned by Solidere. The issue is a fairly complicated one, and I don't pretend to fully understand it, although this latest suit seems to have been sparked by Solidere's decision to start expanding into Dubai whereas most of its work downtown remains unfinished.

In any case, the article is worth a read, and it'd be nice to see more of such substantive reporting being done by the Star. If anyone else has any links to more information about the Hariri empire and downtown property rights, I'd love to see it.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Super Hajja

My friends over at Grey Mog here in Beirut sent me a link for the first scene teaser for the upcoming movie Super Hajja. Their website should be up and running in a few days, so keep an eye on that. Otherwise, I can't find the original short film that they did for Super Hajja during the war, but if I find a link to it, I'll be sure to post it.

In any case, and without any further ado, here is the opening scene to the upcoming Super Hajja:

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Politics and the Diaspora

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar dies

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Metn Parliamentary by-elections

Last night, after going to the cinema and having some dinner in Sassine with my roommate, we decided to go check out what was going on at our local Aounist headquarters. While we were having our dinner and 'arguileh, supporters of Hariri's Sunni-based Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangist party kept driving by honking their horns and waving party flags. Sassine, which is mostly Christian and next to the ABC Achrifieh mall is mostly for Geagea and Gemayel. This is why we decided that it would be interesting to go see what was happening in the Aoun camp.

The headquarters were blocked off by the Army to prevent any political street fighting. I was given an orange Free Patriotic Movement t-shirt and a bottle of water with an orange cap, as well as a cup of coffee, which was about the only non-orange thing there. Everyone was outside watching the results on Orange TV, the FPM's unofficial television channel. There were more orange wigs, shirts, shoes, socks and pants than at a faculty meeting at an American elementary school on Halloween.

The Parliamentary by-election in the Metn region was called by the government (and opposed by the opposition, which makes Aoun's participation contradictory if perhaps also cunning) in order to replace MP Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated earlier this year. The election is an important one, since it acts as a bellwether for Christian support, which will be helpful for predicting who the next president will be. Former president and father of Pierre, Amin Gemayel ran against Aoun-backed and lesser-known Kamil Khoury.

Orange TV announced Khoury's victory relatively early in the evening, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw more definitive accounts of the results. When Orange TV made the call, the Aounists immediately started cheering, with more than a few heaving a large sigh of relief. Large and loud fireworks soon followed, at which point I took my leave. As I was leaving the headquarters, the Aounists told me that I should put the t-shirt they gave me in a bag, fearing that I might get harassed on my back home since the neighborhood was so fiercely pro-government.

According to CNN, the Ministry of the Interior officially called Khoury the winner by 418 votes in an election with some 80,000 ballots cast. In every account I've read so far, it seems that the deciding vote was what LBC is calling "the Armenian Voice." No one I talked to last night could tell me how many votes had been cast so far, but everyone could quote how many Armenian votes their side had received. As is usual in Lebanon, allegations of voter fraud are coming from both sides, and as is also usual, they're both probably right.

The run-up to this election has been interesting to me, because it's been marked by two very anti-democratic forces. On the one hand, the only reason the election is happening at all is because there was a political assassination. On the other hand, supporters of the Gemayel family and the Phalangist and Lebanese Forces parties have had a a worrisome attitude of entitlement about the whole affair. According to many of them, the Parliament seat belongs to the Gemayel clan, and it's just bad form for Aoun to contest it. Others, including Michael Young and the Maronite Patriarch, have been arguing (undemocratically, I needn't add) that Gemayel should run unopposed, because a real election would split the Christians (as if they weren't already split).

In any case, one thing that seems certain is that this has put the last nail in the Gemayel clan's coffin. If the former president couldn't beat a little-known Khoury, then the Gemayels have finally gone the way of the Chamoun clan. Overall, I think it's a good thing when a political dynasty ends in a country like Lebanon (by non-violent means, that is), but if Lebanese history is much of an indicator, the political (and physical) death of a clan doesn't necessarily imply the fall of feudal politics, but rather the rise of another political clan in this country of the Godfather where things are run by various tribes with flags.

Shi'a fatwa against honor killings

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

African Polls

The Times has an interesting and interactive map (I'm a sucker for these) showing the results of a poll taken on attitudes in several sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

Some of the results are obvious, and others are not. The poll covers national issues, the economy and personal well-being, as well as international views. The most pressing national concerns seem to be "HIV/AIDS and other diseases," "corrupt political leaders," "crime" and "illegal drugs." Ethnic/religious conflict was seen as a problem by more than half of those polled in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, with the latter polling particularly high.

Despite this, those polled seemed fairly optimistic, and those polled in every country overwhelmingly thought things would be better for their children than they have been for them.

Opinions vary pretty widely on the UN, US and AU, depending on the country, with Ethiopia unsurprisingly showing the most support for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and the EU scoring particularly low overall for Africans' confidence that it can "help solve Africa's problems." 

In would have been interesting to have added more countries with one foot in "Arab Africa" and the other foot in "black Africa," particularly Sudan, Chad and Mauritania. Out of all the countries polled, the only two where the majority don't think that "Arabs and blacks in North Africa can live peacefully together" were Uganda and Tanzania.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Tancredo: Attack Mecca and Medina

This is so incredible that I don't think I can even comment on it. I'll let Tancredo speak for himself:

WASHINGTON: Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.

The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in the state of Iowa that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

Listen here.

UNIFIL and Hezbollah

There have been rumors circulating since last Spring that UNIFIL had met with Hezbollah in order to get the latter's cooperation for protecting international troops in the south. Blanford confirms that with a recent article in the CS Monitor:

The growing threat of attack by Sunni radicals apparently spurred the leading European troop-contributing states to seek the Shiite Hizbullah's cooperation. According to UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hizbullah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were "escorted" on some of their patrols by Hizbullah members in civilian vehicles, the UNIFIL sources say.

A day after the six peacekeepers were killed last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Manucher Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, Hizbullah's main patron. According to a Hizbullah official in south Lebanon, there has been at least one meeting between the Shiite party and Spanish UNIFIL officers since the bombing.

UNIFIL has long had quiet channels of communication with Hizbullah stretching back to the late 1980s, a recognition of the Shiite group's clout in the south. But UNIFIL commander General Graziano says that although troop-contributing governments may talk to Hizbullah, the peacekeeping battalions are only authorized to liaise with the Lebanese Army. Contacts with Hizbullah or any other Lebanese political party is not permitted, he says.

"I highly forbid any relation that is not authorized by this headquarters for any contingent that is dressed in the blue beret to have contact with any party without my authorization," he says.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Fallout from Israeli "journalists" in Lebanon

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Darfur: Peacekeepers and mortality figures

The UN Security Council has finally approved a Chapter 7 resolution for Darfur. I'm curious to see how long it actually takes to gather enough troops and get them out there. Apparently most of them are supposed to be African, so I'd like to know who all has agreed to send troops.

The resolution now calls for a peacekeeping mission to begin no later than October, and cites Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, under which the Security Council is permitted to authorize the use of force to carry out the mandate.

Most of the peacekeepers are supposed to be drawn from African nations, and would include a beleaguered force of some 7,000 soldiers already in Darfur from the African Union, placing it under a unified command and control with the United Nations force.

The resolution authorizes a maximum of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 civilian police officers. It does not spell out what role would be played by major powers, including the United States.

 On a related note, I find it really curious that the number that keeps being brandied around (and has been cited for the last year or two) is 200,000 dead in Darfur. The numbers went, all of a sudden, from "tens of thousands" to 200,000, which I think is a lot closer to the reality, but which is still a conservative, and strangely static, estimation.

Eric Reeves, for example, argued back in the Spring of 2006 that the death count (included in this are those who have died of disease and malnutrition in addition to violence) was around 450,000. And the US State Department put out an estimate in early 2005 that the excess death toll was 98,000 and 181,000. Regardless of the estimate, though, it seems strange for the media to continue citing the same number over the course of a couple of years.

A Lexis Nexis search of Darfur coverage in the Times, for example, shows that the 200,000 figure was used as far back as November 7, 2005 ("Surge in Violence in Sudan Erodes Hope"). In that report, we are informed of "the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Darfur," whereas in today's report, we are told that "some 200,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict." Are we really to believe that the numbers have remained unchanged for nearly two years?

While death counts in remote conflict zones are by their nature difficult to discern and in cases like this one usually controversial, there is no excuse for major media outlets, once having made the decision to use a figure, to continue using it unchanged for nearly two years. The readership of the Times could be forgiven for thinking that there had been no new deaths in Darfur since November, 2005. This is obviously untrue, and they should either update their figures or if they insist on continuing to use 200,000, they should stress that this number is two years old.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Update

I'm not dead, I've just been really busy lately. I should be done with the project I'm working on soon enough, though, and spending a couple of weeks in Paris.

Hopefully, blogging will resume in a matter of days.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Prominent genocide deniers

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pulling the ladder up

(Via Neil/Ezra) I wonder if Mark Krikorian recognizes the irony of an Armenian-American arguing against offering asylum to a people that's being targeted in a genocide. Had all countries followed his lead a hundred years ago, his family probably would have died in the deserts of Syria at the hands of the Young Turks:

Zionism Is Not a Suicide Pact   [Mark Krikorian]

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state. But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

There's nothing like pulling the ladder up once you and yours have made it to safety.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Terrorism and resistance

Over the last few days, I've debated the actions of revolutionary groups, particularly those in the Levant, during the 70s, with some friends of mine. I've taken the stance that no matter how just their cause might be or how injust the actions of their enemies, the deliberate targeting of civilians is beyond the pale.

Following the brutal and inexcusable attacks against Kurdish Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Economist has a wonderful little piece about not confusing terrorism with resistance

Even in the hell of Iraq, however, it is important to look at some things straight. And one of those things is that not all kinds of killing are equal. Some are less acceptable than others. This is not a callous or nit-picking legal point: it concerns a vital distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that has long been spelled out under the laws and moral requirements of war and must not be fudged.

George Bush is rightly criticised for lumping together as “terrorists” anyone who takes up arms against America or its allies. This is a simplistic formula that blurs necessary distinctions and makes for clumsy policy. Yet some opponents of the superpower's occupation of Iraq make an equal mistake when they lump together—and condone—as “resistance” all of the violent acts committed by America's foes in Iraq.

No excuses

This is profoundly mistaken. Military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can certainly be classified as resistance, whether you think such resistance justified or not. But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. The most lethal atrocities are those carried out by suicide-bombers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, who have imbibed some version of the al-Qaeda idea of war to the end against the unbelievers, who in their minds include Iraq's Shia Muslims. Many Iraqi Sunnis have in their turn been killed—for revenge or as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing—by Iraqi Shias, sometimes acting alone and sometimes at the bidding of organised militias, often with links to a political party or to Iraq's government.

Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too) the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purpose is just a crime. This remains true regardless of the justice of the cause, and whether the killing is done by states, armies, groups or individuals. The world should never tire of condemning such deeds.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Darfur mortality rates: A debate

Eric Reeves has taken down a recent op-ed piece by Time's Sam Dealey. The Reeves rebuttal is detailed and lengthy, so there aren't any really pithy quotes to add here. In other words, read the whole thing.

Stones and glass houses: or pots and kettles

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
(1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.


If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How to live without a solution

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, who served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, has an excellent piece on Palestine and Israel in LRB, "The Middle East Peace Process Scam."

He comes out and says that the impediment to peace is Israeli stalling while slowly chipping away at Palestinian land with the wall, roads and settlements, while the international "peace process" gives it cover. He says that Palestinian statehood has been put in formaldehyde, which is to say that it is given the appearance of still being alive while not allowed to visibly decompose.

Siegman quotes Moshe Dayan, who says "The question is not 'What is the solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" He then goes on to quote Geoffrey Aronson,who has this to say:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

He opens with this sober and depressing assessment of the peace process, which he calls a scam and a spectacular deception:

In [Bush's] view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

These days, it's hard to find a piece about the peace process as a whole that has anything new to say, and this one is no exception. What is different, however, is that more and more American and Israeli Jews (Burg, for example) are asking hard questions of Israel and its brutal occupation and making piercing observations about the situation as a whole, including international complicity. These are not questions and observations that went unasked and unobserved before by Arabs and Europeans; they're just gaining credibility in the international discourse because it's hard to paint the former head of the American Jewish Congress as an anti-Semite for asking them.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Arming Libya

Most of the coverage about the arms deal between France and Libya has focused on the quid pro quo (officially denied) of offering arms for the release of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. One aspect of the piece that's been overlooked is the fact that offering arms to Tripoli might be at odds with the stated policy of France and the UK in Darfur. Libya has a long history of arming the "Arab" side of the region's racial war, which has involved Darfur and Chad, in hopes of creating a united pan-Arab state in the region.

So although its author doesn't seem terribly familiar the region's decades-long war, I was glad to see this article in the Guardian on the possibility of a conflict arising from the arms deal between their policy in Libya and their policies in Darfur and Chad.

This is an important question, and those who wish to read about the conflict in the Sahara and Sahel would do well to check out the new and updated edition of Burr's and Collins's book on the subject.

Daily Star gossip

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Election choices

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Tous les jours, c'est kebab party!

I got a link from a friend of mine to a new music video done by a Turkish kebab waiter, Lil'Maaz, at a kebab shop in my favorite neighborhood in Paris. The song is called....wait for it.... "Mange du Kebab" (Eat Kebab). It's pretty fun, so much so, in fact, that after hearing him rap while working, some regular customers who work in a production studio decided to help him make a video. It seems be a big hit, so go check out his website (in French). In the meantime, watch the video:

 

Tsunami weapon strikes again!

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

Solidere's "illegal expansion"

The Daily Star has a relatively lengthy piece about Solidere and some of its legal battles with former downtown property owners, most of whose property rights are now owned by Solidere. The issue is a fairly complicated one, and I don't pretend to fully understand it, although this latest suit seems to have been sparked by Solidere's decision to start expanding into Dubai whereas most of its work downtown remains unfinished.

In any case, the article is worth a read, and it'd be nice to see more of such substantive reporting being done by the Star. If anyone else has any links to more information about the Hariri empire and downtown property rights, I'd love to see it.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Super Hajja

My friends over at Grey Mog here in Beirut sent me a link for the first scene teaser for the upcoming movie Super Hajja. Their website should be up and running in a few days, so keep an eye on that. Otherwise, I can't find the original short film that they did for Super Hajja during the war, but if I find a link to it, I'll be sure to post it.

In any case, and without any further ado, here is the opening scene to the upcoming Super Hajja:

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Politics and the Diaspora

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar dies

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Metn Parliamentary by-elections

Last night, after going to the cinema and having some dinner in Sassine with my roommate, we decided to go check out what was going on at our local Aounist headquarters. While we were having our dinner and 'arguileh, supporters of Hariri's Sunni-based Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangist party kept driving by honking their horns and waving party flags. Sassine, which is mostly Christian and next to the ABC Achrifieh mall is mostly for Geagea and Gemayel. This is why we decided that it would be interesting to go see what was happening in the Aoun camp.

The headquarters were blocked off by the Army to prevent any political street fighting. I was given an orange Free Patriotic Movement t-shirt and a bottle of water with an orange cap, as well as a cup of coffee, which was about the only non-orange thing there. Everyone was outside watching the results on Orange TV, the FPM's unofficial television channel. There were more orange wigs, shirts, shoes, socks and pants than at a faculty meeting at an American elementary school on Halloween.

The Parliamentary by-election in the Metn region was called by the government (and opposed by the opposition, which makes Aoun's participation contradictory if perhaps also cunning) in order to replace MP Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated earlier this year. The election is an important one, since it acts as a bellwether for Christian support, which will be helpful for predicting who the next president will be. Former president and father of Pierre, Amin Gemayel ran against Aoun-backed and lesser-known Kamil Khoury.

Orange TV announced Khoury's victory relatively early in the evening, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw more definitive accounts of the results. When Orange TV made the call, the Aounists immediately started cheering, with more than a few heaving a large sigh of relief. Large and loud fireworks soon followed, at which point I took my leave. As I was leaving the headquarters, the Aounists told me that I should put the t-shirt they gave me in a bag, fearing that I might get harassed on my back home since the neighborhood was so fiercely pro-government.

According to CNN, the Ministry of the Interior officially called Khoury the winner by 418 votes in an election with some 80,000 ballots cast. In every account I've read so far, it seems that the deciding vote was what LBC is calling "the Armenian Voice." No one I talked to last night could tell me how many votes had been cast so far, but everyone could quote how many Armenian votes their side had received. As is usual in Lebanon, allegations of voter fraud are coming from both sides, and as is also usual, they're both probably right.

The run-up to this election has been interesting to me, because it's been marked by two very anti-democratic forces. On the one hand, the only reason the election is happening at all is because there was a political assassination. On the other hand, supporters of the Gemayel family and the Phalangist and Lebanese Forces parties have had a a worrisome attitude of entitlement about the whole affair. According to many of them, the Parliament seat belongs to the Gemayel clan, and it's just bad form for Aoun to contest it. Others, including Michael Young and the Maronite Patriarch, have been arguing (undemocratically, I needn't add) that Gemayel should run unopposed, because a real election would split the Christians (as if they weren't already split).

In any case, one thing that seems certain is that this has put the last nail in the Gemayel clan's coffin. If the former president couldn't beat a little-known Khoury, then the Gemayels have finally gone the way of the Chamoun clan. Overall, I think it's a good thing when a political dynasty ends in a country like Lebanon (by non-violent means, that is), but if Lebanese history is much of an indicator, the political (and physical) death of a clan doesn't necessarily imply the fall of feudal politics, but rather the rise of another political clan in this country of the Godfather where things are run by various tribes with flags.

Shi'a fatwa against honor killings

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

African Polls

The Times has an interesting and interactive map (I'm a sucker for these) showing the results of a poll taken on attitudes in several sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

Some of the results are obvious, and others are not. The poll covers national issues, the economy and personal well-being, as well as international views. The most pressing national concerns seem to be "HIV/AIDS and other diseases," "corrupt political leaders," "crime" and "illegal drugs." Ethnic/religious conflict was seen as a problem by more than half of those polled in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, with the latter polling particularly high.

Despite this, those polled seemed fairly optimistic, and those polled in every country overwhelmingly thought things would be better for their children than they have been for them.

Opinions vary pretty widely on the UN, US and AU, depending on the country, with Ethiopia unsurprisingly showing the most support for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and the EU scoring particularly low overall for Africans' confidence that it can "help solve Africa's problems." 

In would have been interesting to have added more countries with one foot in "Arab Africa" and the other foot in "black Africa," particularly Sudan, Chad and Mauritania. Out of all the countries polled, the only two where the majority don't think that "Arabs and blacks in North Africa can live peacefully together" were Uganda and Tanzania.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Tancredo: Attack Mecca and Medina

This is so incredible that I don't think I can even comment on it. I'll let Tancredo speak for himself:

WASHINGTON: Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.

The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in the state of Iowa that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

Listen here.

UNIFIL and Hezbollah

There have been rumors circulating since last Spring that UNIFIL had met with Hezbollah in order to get the latter's cooperation for protecting international troops in the south. Blanford confirms that with a recent article in the CS Monitor:

The growing threat of attack by Sunni radicals apparently spurred the leading European troop-contributing states to seek the Shiite Hizbullah's cooperation. According to UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hizbullah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were "escorted" on some of their patrols by Hizbullah members in civilian vehicles, the UNIFIL sources say.

A day after the six peacekeepers were killed last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Manucher Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, Hizbullah's main patron. According to a Hizbullah official in south Lebanon, there has been at least one meeting between the Shiite party and Spanish UNIFIL officers since the bombing.

UNIFIL has long had quiet channels of communication with Hizbullah stretching back to the late 1980s, a recognition of the Shiite group's clout in the south. But UNIFIL commander General Graziano says that although troop-contributing governments may talk to Hizbullah, the peacekeeping battalions are only authorized to liaise with the Lebanese Army. Contacts with Hizbullah or any other Lebanese political party is not permitted, he says.

"I highly forbid any relation that is not authorized by this headquarters for any contingent that is dressed in the blue beret to have contact with any party without my authorization," he says.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Fallout from Israeli "journalists" in Lebanon

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Darfur: Peacekeepers and mortality figures

The UN Security Council has finally approved a Chapter 7 resolution for Darfur. I'm curious to see how long it actually takes to gather enough troops and get them out there. Apparently most of them are supposed to be African, so I'd like to know who all has agreed to send troops.

The resolution now calls for a peacekeeping mission to begin no later than October, and cites Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, under which the Security Council is permitted to authorize the use of force to carry out the mandate.

Most of the peacekeepers are supposed to be drawn from African nations, and would include a beleaguered force of some 7,000 soldiers already in Darfur from the African Union, placing it under a unified command and control with the United Nations force.

The resolution authorizes a maximum of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 civilian police officers. It does not spell out what role would be played by major powers, including the United States.

 On a related note, I find it really curious that the number that keeps being brandied around (and has been cited for the last year or two) is 200,000 dead in Darfur. The numbers went, all of a sudden, from "tens of thousands" to 200,000, which I think is a lot closer to the reality, but which is still a conservative, and strangely static, estimation.

Eric Reeves, for example, argued back in the Spring of 2006 that the death count (included in this are those who have died of disease and malnutrition in addition to violence) was around 450,000. And the US State Department put out an estimate in early 2005 that the excess death toll was 98,000 and 181,000. Regardless of the estimate, though, it seems strange for the media to continue citing the same number over the course of a couple of years.

A Lexis Nexis search of Darfur coverage in the Times, for example, shows that the 200,000 figure was used as far back as November 7, 2005 ("Surge in Violence in Sudan Erodes Hope"). In that report, we are informed of "the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Darfur," whereas in today's report, we are told that "some 200,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict." Are we really to believe that the numbers have remained unchanged for nearly two years?

While death counts in remote conflict zones are by their nature difficult to discern and in cases like this one usually controversial, there is no excuse for major media outlets, once having made the decision to use a figure, to continue using it unchanged for nearly two years. The readership of the Times could be forgiven for thinking that there had been no new deaths in Darfur since November, 2005. This is obviously untrue, and they should either update their figures or if they insist on continuing to use 200,000, they should stress that this number is two years old.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Update

I'm not dead, I've just been really busy lately. I should be done with the project I'm working on soon enough, though, and spending a couple of weeks in Paris.

Hopefully, blogging will resume in a matter of days.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Prominent genocide deniers

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pulling the ladder up

(Via Neil/Ezra) I wonder if Mark Krikorian recognizes the irony of an Armenian-American arguing against offering asylum to a people that's being targeted in a genocide. Had all countries followed his lead a hundred years ago, his family probably would have died in the deserts of Syria at the hands of the Young Turks:

Zionism Is Not a Suicide Pact   [Mark Krikorian]

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state. But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

There's nothing like pulling the ladder up once you and yours have made it to safety.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Terrorism and resistance

Over the last few days, I've debated the actions of revolutionary groups, particularly those in the Levant, during the 70s, with some friends of mine. I've taken the stance that no matter how just their cause might be or how injust the actions of their enemies, the deliberate targeting of civilians is beyond the pale.

Following the brutal and inexcusable attacks against Kurdish Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Economist has a wonderful little piece about not confusing terrorism with resistance

Even in the hell of Iraq, however, it is important to look at some things straight. And one of those things is that not all kinds of killing are equal. Some are less acceptable than others. This is not a callous or nit-picking legal point: it concerns a vital distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that has long been spelled out under the laws and moral requirements of war and must not be fudged.

George Bush is rightly criticised for lumping together as “terrorists” anyone who takes up arms against America or its allies. This is a simplistic formula that blurs necessary distinctions and makes for clumsy policy. Yet some opponents of the superpower's occupation of Iraq make an equal mistake when they lump together—and condone—as “resistance” all of the violent acts committed by America's foes in Iraq.

No excuses

This is profoundly mistaken. Military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can certainly be classified as resistance, whether you think such resistance justified or not. But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. The most lethal atrocities are those carried out by suicide-bombers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, who have imbibed some version of the al-Qaeda idea of war to the end against the unbelievers, who in their minds include Iraq's Shia Muslims. Many Iraqi Sunnis have in their turn been killed—for revenge or as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing—by Iraqi Shias, sometimes acting alone and sometimes at the bidding of organised militias, often with links to a political party or to Iraq's government.

Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too) the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purpose is just a crime. This remains true regardless of the justice of the cause, and whether the killing is done by states, armies, groups or individuals. The world should never tire of condemning such deeds.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Darfur mortality rates: A debate

Eric Reeves has taken down a recent op-ed piece by Time's Sam Dealey. The Reeves rebuttal is detailed and lengthy, so there aren't any really pithy quotes to add here. In other words, read the whole thing.

Stones and glass houses: or pots and kettles

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
(1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.


If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How to live without a solution

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, who served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, has an excellent piece on Palestine and Israel in LRB, "The Middle East Peace Process Scam."

He comes out and says that the impediment to peace is Israeli stalling while slowly chipping away at Palestinian land with the wall, roads and settlements, while the international "peace process" gives it cover. He says that Palestinian statehood has been put in formaldehyde, which is to say that it is given the appearance of still being alive while not allowed to visibly decompose.

Siegman quotes Moshe Dayan, who says "The question is not 'What is the solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" He then goes on to quote Geoffrey Aronson,who has this to say:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

He opens with this sober and depressing assessment of the peace process, which he calls a scam and a spectacular deception:

In [Bush's] view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

These days, it's hard to find a piece about the peace process as a whole that has anything new to say, and this one is no exception. What is different, however, is that more and more American and Israeli Jews (Burg, for example) are asking hard questions of Israel and its brutal occupation and making piercing observations about the situation as a whole, including international complicity. These are not questions and observations that went unasked and unobserved before by Arabs and Europeans; they're just gaining credibility in the international discourse because it's hard to paint the former head of the American Jewish Congress as an anti-Semite for asking them.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Arming Libya

Most of the coverage about the arms deal between France and Libya has focused on the quid pro quo (officially denied) of offering arms for the release of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. One aspect of the piece that's been overlooked is the fact that offering arms to Tripoli might be at odds with the stated policy of France and the UK in Darfur. Libya has a long history of arming the "Arab" side of the region's racial war, which has involved Darfur and Chad, in hopes of creating a united pan-Arab state in the region.

So although its author doesn't seem terribly familiar the region's decades-long war, I was glad to see this article in the Guardian on the possibility of a conflict arising from the arms deal between their policy in Libya and their policies in Darfur and Chad.

This is an important question, and those who wish to read about the conflict in the Sahara and Sahel would do well to check out the new and updated edition of Burr's and Collins's book on the subject.

Daily Star gossip

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Election choices

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Tous les jours, c'est kebab party!

I got a link from a friend of mine to a new music video done by a Turkish kebab waiter, Lil'Maaz, at a kebab shop in my favorite neighborhood in Paris. The song is called....wait for it.... "Mange du Kebab" (Eat Kebab). It's pretty fun, so much so, in fact, that after hearing him rap while working, some regular customers who work in a production studio decided to help him make a video. It seems be a big hit, so go check out his website (in French). In the meantime, watch the video:

 

Tsunami weapon strikes again!

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

Solidere's "illegal expansion"

The Daily Star has a relatively lengthy piece about Solidere and some of its legal battles with former downtown property owners, most of whose property rights are now owned by Solidere. The issue is a fairly complicated one, and I don't pretend to fully understand it, although this latest suit seems to have been sparked by Solidere's decision to start expanding into Dubai whereas most of its work downtown remains unfinished.

In any case, the article is worth a read, and it'd be nice to see more of such substantive reporting being done by the Star. If anyone else has any links to more information about the Hariri empire and downtown property rights, I'd love to see it.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Super Hajja

My friends over at Grey Mog here in Beirut sent me a link for the first scene teaser for the upcoming movie Super Hajja. Their website should be up and running in a few days, so keep an eye on that. Otherwise, I can't find the original short film that they did for Super Hajja during the war, but if I find a link to it, I'll be sure to post it.

In any case, and without any further ado, here is the opening scene to the upcoming Super Hajja:

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Politics and the Diaspora

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar dies

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Metn Parliamentary by-elections

Last night, after going to the cinema and having some dinner in Sassine with my roommate, we decided to go check out what was going on at our local Aounist headquarters. While we were having our dinner and 'arguileh, supporters of Hariri's Sunni-based Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangist party kept driving by honking their horns and waving party flags. Sassine, which is mostly Christian and next to the ABC Achrifieh mall is mostly for Geagea and Gemayel. This is why we decided that it would be interesting to go see what was happening in the Aoun camp.

The headquarters were blocked off by the Army to prevent any political street fighting. I was given an orange Free Patriotic Movement t-shirt and a bottle of water with an orange cap, as well as a cup of coffee, which was about the only non-orange thing there. Everyone was outside watching the results on Orange TV, the FPM's unofficial television channel. There were more orange wigs, shirts, shoes, socks and pants than at a faculty meeting at an American elementary school on Halloween.

The Parliamentary by-election in the Metn region was called by the government (and opposed by the opposition, which makes Aoun's participation contradictory if perhaps also cunning) in order to replace MP Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated earlier this year. The election is an important one, since it acts as a bellwether for Christian support, which will be helpful for predicting who the next president will be. Former president and father of Pierre, Amin Gemayel ran against Aoun-backed and lesser-known Kamil Khoury.

Orange TV announced Khoury's victory relatively early in the evening, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw more definitive accounts of the results. When Orange TV made the call, the Aounists immediately started cheering, with more than a few heaving a large sigh of relief. Large and loud fireworks soon followed, at which point I took my leave. As I was leaving the headquarters, the Aounists told me that I should put the t-shirt they gave me in a bag, fearing that I might get harassed on my back home since the neighborhood was so fiercely pro-government.

According to CNN, the Ministry of the Interior officially called Khoury the winner by 418 votes in an election with some 80,000 ballots cast. In every account I've read so far, it seems that the deciding vote was what LBC is calling "the Armenian Voice." No one I talked to last night could tell me how many votes had been cast so far, but everyone could quote how many Armenian votes their side had received. As is usual in Lebanon, allegations of voter fraud are coming from both sides, and as is also usual, they're both probably right.

The run-up to this election has been interesting to me, because it's been marked by two very anti-democratic forces. On the one hand, the only reason the election is happening at all is because there was a political assassination. On the other hand, supporters of the Gemayel family and the Phalangist and Lebanese Forces parties have had a a worrisome attitude of entitlement about the whole affair. According to many of them, the Parliament seat belongs to the Gemayel clan, and it's just bad form for Aoun to contest it. Others, including Michael Young and the Maronite Patriarch, have been arguing (undemocratically, I needn't add) that Gemayel should run unopposed, because a real election would split the Christians (as if they weren't already split).

In any case, one thing that seems certain is that this has put the last nail in the Gemayel clan's coffin. If the former president couldn't beat a little-known Khoury, then the Gemayels have finally gone the way of the Chamoun clan. Overall, I think it's a good thing when a political dynasty ends in a country like Lebanon (by non-violent means, that is), but if Lebanese history is much of an indicator, the political (and physical) death of a clan doesn't necessarily imply the fall of feudal politics, but rather the rise of another political clan in this country of the Godfather where things are run by various tribes with flags.

Shi'a fatwa against honor killings

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

African Polls

The Times has an interesting and interactive map (I'm a sucker for these) showing the results of a poll taken on attitudes in several sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

Some of the results are obvious, and others are not. The poll covers national issues, the economy and personal well-being, as well as international views. The most pressing national concerns seem to be "HIV/AIDS and other diseases," "corrupt political leaders," "crime" and "illegal drugs." Ethnic/religious conflict was seen as a problem by more than half of those polled in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, with the latter polling particularly high.

Despite this, those polled seemed fairly optimistic, and those polled in every country overwhelmingly thought things would be better for their children than they have been for them.

Opinions vary pretty widely on the UN, US and AU, depending on the country, with Ethiopia unsurprisingly showing the most support for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and the EU scoring particularly low overall for Africans' confidence that it can "help solve Africa's problems." 

In would have been interesting to have added more countries with one foot in "Arab Africa" and the other foot in "black Africa," particularly Sudan, Chad and Mauritania. Out of all the countries polled, the only two where the majority don't think that "Arabs and blacks in North Africa can live peacefully together" were Uganda and Tanzania.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Tancredo: Attack Mecca and Medina

This is so incredible that I don't think I can even comment on it. I'll let Tancredo speak for himself:

WASHINGTON: Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.

The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in the state of Iowa that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

Listen here.

UNIFIL and Hezbollah

There have been rumors circulating since last Spring that UNIFIL had met with Hezbollah in order to get the latter's cooperation for protecting international troops in the south. Blanford confirms that with a recent article in the CS Monitor:

The growing threat of attack by Sunni radicals apparently spurred the leading European troop-contributing states to seek the Shiite Hizbullah's cooperation. According to UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hizbullah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were "escorted" on some of their patrols by Hizbullah members in civilian vehicles, the UNIFIL sources say.

A day after the six peacekeepers were killed last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Manucher Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, Hizbullah's main patron. According to a Hizbullah official in south Lebanon, there has been at least one meeting between the Shiite party and Spanish UNIFIL officers since the bombing.

UNIFIL has long had quiet channels of communication with Hizbullah stretching back to the late 1980s, a recognition of the Shiite group's clout in the south. But UNIFIL commander General Graziano says that although troop-contributing governments may talk to Hizbullah, the peacekeeping battalions are only authorized to liaise with the Lebanese Army. Contacts with Hizbullah or any other Lebanese political party is not permitted, he says.

"I highly forbid any relation that is not authorized by this headquarters for any contingent that is dressed in the blue beret to have contact with any party without my authorization," he says.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Fallout from Israeli "journalists" in Lebanon

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Darfur: Peacekeepers and mortality figures

The UN Security Council has finally approved a Chapter 7 resolution for Darfur. I'm curious to see how long it actually takes to gather enough troops and get them out there. Apparently most of them are supposed to be African, so I'd like to know who all has agreed to send troops.

The resolution now calls for a peacekeeping mission to begin no later than October, and cites Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, under which the Security Council is permitted to authorize the use of force to carry out the mandate.

Most of the peacekeepers are supposed to be drawn from African nations, and would include a beleaguered force of some 7,000 soldiers already in Darfur from the African Union, placing it under a unified command and control with the United Nations force.

The resolution authorizes a maximum of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 civilian police officers. It does not spell out what role would be played by major powers, including the United States.

 On a related note, I find it really curious that the number that keeps being brandied around (and has been cited for the last year or two) is 200,000 dead in Darfur. The numbers went, all of a sudden, from "tens of thousands" to 200,000, which I think is a lot closer to the reality, but which is still a conservative, and strangely static, estimation.

Eric Reeves, for example, argued back in the Spring of 2006 that the death count (included in this are those who have died of disease and malnutrition in addition to violence) was around 450,000. And the US State Department put out an estimate in early 2005 that the excess death toll was 98,000 and 181,000. Regardless of the estimate, though, it seems strange for the media to continue citing the same number over the course of a couple of years.

A Lexis Nexis search of Darfur coverage in the Times, for example, shows that the 200,000 figure was used as far back as November 7, 2005 ("Surge in Violence in Sudan Erodes Hope"). In that report, we are informed of "the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Darfur," whereas in today's report, we are told that "some 200,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict." Are we really to believe that the numbers have remained unchanged for nearly two years?

While death counts in remote conflict zones are by their nature difficult to discern and in cases like this one usually controversial, there is no excuse for major media outlets, once having made the decision to use a figure, to continue using it unchanged for nearly two years. The readership of the Times could be forgiven for thinking that there had been no new deaths in Darfur since November, 2005. This is obviously untrue, and they should either update their figures or if they insist on continuing to use 200,000, they should stress that this number is two years old.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Update

I'm not dead, I've just been really busy lately. I should be done with the project I'm working on soon enough, though, and spending a couple of weeks in Paris.

Hopefully, blogging will resume in a matter of days.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Prominent genocide deniers

It's already unfortunate that the ADL had to be shamed into calling the Armenian Genocide by its proper name (and this only in a qualified and circuitous fashion). And I also find it disconcerting that what is ostensibly an American anti-racism organization should cite Turkey's status as a "staunch friend of Israel" as a reason why not to recognize the Armenian genocide. (The open letter that states this has since been removed from the ADL website and replaced with the new open letter that uses the word genocide. It can, however, be found in Google's cache.):

We believe that legislative efforts outside of Turkey are counterproductive to the goal of having Turkey itself come to grips with its past. We take no position on what action Congress should take on House Resolution 106. The Jewish community in Turkey has clearly expressed to us and other major American Jewish organizations its concerns about the impact of Congressional action on them, and we cannot ignore those concerns. We are also keenly aware that Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel, and that in the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.

But I'm somehow even more disappointed that people billed as serious historians of the Middle East like Michael Rubin, using rhetoric that is strikingly similar to Ankara's, have taken to reducing the historical reality of the Armenian genocide to "the narrative of Diaspora communities," giving the impression that the latter is at odds with the accounts of respected historians.

The Anti-Defamation League has decided to label the events surrounding the deaths of Armenians during World War I as 'genocide.'

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. 

It is a shame that Abraham Foxman has made such a decision on political rather than historical grounds.

It's then particularly ironic that Rubin laments that Foxman has made this decision on "political rather than historical grounds," when the stated reasons that Foxman originally gave for opposing the label were explicitly political in the first place.

Why is there no backlash from genocide scholars against people like Rubin? He has a prominent perch at the American Enterprise Institute and as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, which is published by Pipes's Middle East Forum. He should be publicly outed as a negationist, in the way that he would likely do to anyone who denied the Jewish genocide.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Pulling the ladder up

(Via Neil/Ezra) I wonder if Mark Krikorian recognizes the irony of an Armenian-American arguing against offering asylum to a people that's being targeted in a genocide. Had all countries followed his lead a hundred years ago, his family probably would have died in the deserts of Syria at the hands of the Young Turks:

Zionism Is Not a Suicide Pact   [Mark Krikorian]

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state. But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

There's nothing like pulling the ladder up once you and yours have made it to safety.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Terrorism and resistance

Over the last few days, I've debated the actions of revolutionary groups, particularly those in the Levant, during the 70s, with some friends of mine. I've taken the stance that no matter how just their cause might be or how injust the actions of their enemies, the deliberate targeting of civilians is beyond the pale.

Following the brutal and inexcusable attacks against Kurdish Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Economist has a wonderful little piece about not confusing terrorism with resistance

Even in the hell of Iraq, however, it is important to look at some things straight. And one of those things is that not all kinds of killing are equal. Some are less acceptable than others. This is not a callous or nit-picking legal point: it concerns a vital distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that has long been spelled out under the laws and moral requirements of war and must not be fudged.

George Bush is rightly criticised for lumping together as “terrorists” anyone who takes up arms against America or its allies. This is a simplistic formula that blurs necessary distinctions and makes for clumsy policy. Yet some opponents of the superpower's occupation of Iraq make an equal mistake when they lump together—and condone—as “resistance” all of the violent acts committed by America's foes in Iraq.

No excuses

This is profoundly mistaken. Military attacks against foreign soldiers who have come uninvited into your country can certainly be classified as resistance, whether you think such resistance justified or not. But the mass murder of Iraqi civilians can make no such dignified claim. The most lethal atrocities are those carried out by suicide-bombers, most of them from Saudi Arabia, who have imbibed some version of the al-Qaeda idea of war to the end against the unbelievers, who in their minds include Iraq's Shia Muslims. Many Iraqi Sunnis have in their turn been killed—for revenge or as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing—by Iraqi Shias, sometimes acting alone and sometimes at the bidding of organised militias, often with links to a political party or to Iraq's government.

Under all established norms and laws of war (and by most accounts under Islamic law, too) the deliberate targeting of civilians for no direct military purpose is just a crime. This remains true regardless of the justice of the cause, and whether the killing is done by states, armies, groups or individuals. The world should never tire of condemning such deeds.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Darfur mortality rates: A debate

Eric Reeves has taken down a recent op-ed piece by Time's Sam Dealey. The Reeves rebuttal is detailed and lengthy, so there aren't any really pithy quotes to add here. In other words, read the whole thing.

Stones and glass houses: or pots and kettles

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
(1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that -
(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended -
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.


If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Sunday, August 12, 2007

How to live without a solution

Henry Siegman, the director of the US/ Middle East Project, who served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006, and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, has an excellent piece on Palestine and Israel in LRB, "The Middle East Peace Process Scam."

He comes out and says that the impediment to peace is Israeli stalling while slowly chipping away at Palestinian land with the wall, roads and settlements, while the international "peace process" gives it cover. He says that Palestinian statehood has been put in formaldehyde, which is to say that it is given the appearance of still being alive while not allowed to visibly decompose.

Siegman quotes Moshe Dayan, who says "The question is not 'What is the solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" He then goes on to quote Geoffrey Aronson,who has this to say:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

He opens with this sober and depressing assessment of the peace process, which he calls a scam and a spectacular deception:

In [Bush's] view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

These days, it's hard to find a piece about the peace process as a whole that has anything new to say, and this one is no exception. What is different, however, is that more and more American and Israeli Jews (Burg, for example) are asking hard questions of Israel and its brutal occupation and making piercing observations about the situation as a whole, including international complicity. These are not questions and observations that went unasked and unobserved before by Arabs and Europeans; they're just gaining credibility in the international discourse because it's hard to paint the former head of the American Jewish Congress as an anti-Semite for asking them.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Arming Libya

Most of the coverage about the arms deal between France and Libya has focused on the quid pro quo (officially denied) of offering arms for the release of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. One aspect of the piece that's been overlooked is the fact that offering arms to Tripoli might be at odds with the stated policy of France and the UK in Darfur. Libya has a long history of arming the "Arab" side of the region's racial war, which has involved Darfur and Chad, in hopes of creating a united pan-Arab state in the region.

So although its author doesn't seem terribly familiar the region's decades-long war, I was glad to see this article in the Guardian on the possibility of a conflict arising from the arms deal between their policy in Libya and their policies in Darfur and Chad.

This is an important question, and those who wish to read about the conflict in the Sahara and Sahel would do well to check out the new and updated edition of Burr's and Collins's book on the subject.

Daily Star gossip

Following the Solidere story in the Daily Star, there has been some gossip, most notably from the Angry Arab (here and here), that the US Government was very unhappy with the piece and pressured to print a full rebuttal. He says that the Examiner section of the paper, which is for investigative journalism, is funded by USAID in order to promote transparency and accountability in the Arab media.

I have no idea whether or not the accusations are accurate or not, but it makes for interesting gossip, nonetheless. Maybe I'll ask around to some friends and acquaintances who work at the Star.

Election choices

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Tous les jours, c'est kebab party!

I got a link from a friend of mine to a new music video done by a Turkish kebab waiter, Lil'Maaz, at a kebab shop in my favorite neighborhood in Paris. The song is called....wait for it.... "Mange du Kebab" (Eat Kebab). It's pretty fun, so much so, in fact, that after hearing him rap while working, some regular customers who work in a production studio decided to help him make a video. It seems be a big hit, so go check out his website (in French). In the meantime, watch the video:

 

Tsunami weapon strikes again!

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

Solidere's "illegal expansion"

The Daily Star has a relatively lengthy piece about Solidere and some of its legal battles with former downtown property owners, most of whose property rights are now owned by Solidere. The issue is a fairly complicated one, and I don't pretend to fully understand it, although this latest suit seems to have been sparked by Solidere's decision to start expanding into Dubai whereas most of its work downtown remains unfinished.

In any case, the article is worth a read, and it'd be nice to see more of such substantive reporting being done by the Star. If anyone else has any links to more information about the Hariri empire and downtown property rights, I'd love to see it.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Super Hajja

My friends over at Grey Mog here in Beirut sent me a link for the first scene teaser for the upcoming movie Super Hajja. Their website should be up and running in a few days, so keep an eye on that. Otherwise, I can't find the original short film that they did for Super Hajja during the war, but if I find a link to it, I'll be sure to post it.

In any case, and without any further ado, here is the opening scene to the upcoming Super Hajja:

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Politics and the Diaspora

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

Preeminent Holocaust scholar dies

Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest Holocaust scholars, has died. Genocide scholars the world around are indebted to his tireless work.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Metn Parliamentary by-elections

Last night, after going to the cinema and having some dinner in Sassine with my roommate, we decided to go check out what was going on at our local Aounist headquarters. While we were having our dinner and 'arguileh, supporters of Hariri's Sunni-based Future Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalangist party kept driving by honking their horns and waving party flags. Sassine, which is mostly Christian and next to the ABC Achrifieh mall is mostly for Geagea and Gemayel. This is why we decided that it would be interesting to go see what was happening in the Aoun camp.

The headquarters were blocked off by the Army to prevent any political street fighting. I was given an orange Free Patriotic Movement t-shirt and a bottle of water with an orange cap, as well as a cup of coffee, which was about the only non-orange thing there. Everyone was outside watching the results on Orange TV, the FPM's unofficial television channel. There were more orange wigs, shirts, shoes, socks and pants than at a faculty meeting at an American elementary school on Halloween.

The Parliamentary by-election in the Metn region was called by the government (and opposed by the opposition, which makes Aoun's participation contradictory if perhaps also cunning) in order to replace MP Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated earlier this year. The election is an important one, since it acts as a bellwether for Christian support, which will be helpful for predicting who the next president will be. Former president and father of Pierre, Amin Gemayel ran against Aoun-backed and lesser-known Kamil Khoury.

Orange TV announced Khoury's victory relatively early in the evening, but it wasn't until this morning that I saw more definitive accounts of the results. When Orange TV made the call, the Aounists immediately started cheering, with more than a few heaving a large sigh of relief. Large and loud fireworks soon followed, at which point I took my leave. As I was leaving the headquarters, the Aounists told me that I should put the t-shirt they gave me in a bag, fearing that I might get harassed on my back home since the neighborhood was so fiercely pro-government.

According to CNN, the Ministry of the Interior officially called Khoury the winner by 418 votes in an election with some 80,000 ballots cast. In every account I've read so far, it seems that the deciding vote was what LBC is calling "the Armenian Voice." No one I talked to last night could tell me how many votes had been cast so far, but everyone could quote how many Armenian votes their side had received. As is usual in Lebanon, allegations of voter fraud are coming from both sides, and as is also usual, they're both probably right.

The run-up to this election has been interesting to me, because it's been marked by two very anti-democratic forces. On the one hand, the only reason the election is happening at all is because there was a political assassination. On the other hand, supporters of the Gemayel family and the Phalangist and Lebanese Forces parties have had a a worrisome attitude of entitlement about the whole affair. According to many of them, the Parliament seat belongs to the Gemayel clan, and it's just bad form for Aoun to contest it. Others, including Michael Young and the Maronite Patriarch, have been arguing (undemocratically, I needn't add) that Gemayel should run unopposed, because a real election would split the Christians (as if they weren't already split).

In any case, one thing that seems certain is that this has put the last nail in the Gemayel clan's coffin. If the former president couldn't beat a little-known Khoury, then the Gemayels have finally gone the way of the Chamoun clan. Overall, I think it's a good thing when a political dynasty ends in a country like Lebanon (by non-violent means, that is), but if Lebanese history is much of an indicator, the political (and physical) death of a clan doesn't necessarily imply the fall of feudal politics, but rather the rise of another political clan in this country of the Godfather where things are run by various tribes with flags.

Shi'a fatwa against honor killings

Last week, Lebanese Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning honor killings, or honor crimes as he is calling them:

Lebanon's most senior Shiite Muslim cleric issued Thursday a fatwa, or religious edict, banning honor killings, calling the custom of murdering a female relative for sexual misconduct "a repulsive act."

The fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was a rare condemnation by a prominent cleric of the practice. Fadlallah's office said he issued the statement in alarm over reports on an increase in honor killings.

"I view an honor crime as a repulsive act condemned and prohibited by religion," Fadlallah, the most revered religious authority for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shiites, said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press.

"In so-called honor crimes, some men kill their daughters, sisters, wives or female relatives on the pretext that they committed acts that harm chastity and honor," said Fadlallah, warning that the practice was on the rise in region.

"These crimes are committed without any religious evidence, and mostly on the basis of suspicions," added Fadlallah.

This, and Egypt's recent hymen fatwa, are the kinds of religious edicts that I like to see.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

African Polls

The Times has an interesting and interactive map (I'm a sucker for these) showing the results of a poll taken on attitudes in several sub-Saharan countries: Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.

Some of the results are obvious, and others are not. The poll covers national issues, the economy and personal well-being, as well as international views. The most pressing national concerns seem to be "HIV/AIDS and other diseases," "corrupt political leaders," "crime" and "illegal drugs." Ethnic/religious conflict was seen as a problem by more than half of those polled in Kenya, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, with the latter polling particularly high.

Despite this, those polled seemed fairly optimistic, and those polled in every country overwhelmingly thought things would be better for their children than they have been for them.

Opinions vary pretty widely on the UN, US and AU, depending on the country, with Ethiopia unsurprisingly showing the most support for the AU, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa and the EU scoring particularly low overall for Africans' confidence that it can "help solve Africa's problems." 

In would have been interesting to have added more countries with one foot in "Arab Africa" and the other foot in "black Africa," particularly Sudan, Chad and Mauritania. Out of all the countries polled, the only two where the majority don't think that "Arabs and blacks in North Africa can live peacefully together" were Uganda and Tanzania.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Tancredo: Attack Mecca and Medina

This is so incredible that I don't think I can even comment on it. I'll let Tancredo speak for himself:

WASHINGTON: Republican presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo says the best way he can think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. is to threaten to retaliate by bombing Islamic holy sites.

The Colorado congressman on Tuesday told about 30 people at a town hall meeting in the state of Iowa that he believes such a terrorist attack could be imminent and that the U.S. needs to hurry up and think of a way to stop it.

"If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said at the Family Table restaurant. "Because that's the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they otherwise might do."

Listen here.

UNIFIL and Hezbollah

There have been rumors circulating since last Spring that UNIFIL had met with Hezbollah in order to get the latter's cooperation for protecting international troops in the south. Blanford confirms that with a recent article in the CS Monitor:

The growing threat of attack by Sunni radicals apparently spurred the leading European troop-contributing states to seek the Shiite Hizbullah's cooperation. According to UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hizbullah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were "escorted" on some of their patrols by Hizbullah members in civilian vehicles, the UNIFIL sources say.

A day after the six peacekeepers were killed last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos spoke with Manucher Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, Hizbullah's main patron. According to a Hizbullah official in south Lebanon, there has been at least one meeting between the Shiite party and Spanish UNIFIL officers since the bombing.

UNIFIL has long had quiet channels of communication with Hizbullah stretching back to the late 1980s, a recognition of the Shiite group's clout in the south. But UNIFIL commander General Graziano says that although troop-contributing governments may talk to Hizbullah, the peacekeeping battalions are only authorized to liaise with the Lebanese Army. Contacts with Hizbullah or any other Lebanese political party is not permitted, he says.

"I highly forbid any relation that is not authorized by this headquarters for any contingent that is dressed in the blue beret to have contact with any party without my authorization," he says.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Fallout from Israeli "journalists" in Lebanon

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Darfur: Peacekeepers and mortality figures

The UN Security Council has finally approved a Chapter 7 resolution for Darfur. I'm curious to see how long it actually takes to gather enough troops and get them out there. Apparently most of them are supposed to be African, so I'd like to know who all has agreed to send troops.

The resolution now calls for a peacekeeping mission to begin no later than October, and cites Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, under which the Security Council is permitted to authorize the use of force to carry out the mandate.

Most of the peacekeepers are supposed to be drawn from African nations, and would include a beleaguered force of some 7,000 soldiers already in Darfur from the African Union, placing it under a unified command and control with the United Nations force.

The resolution authorizes a maximum of 19,555 military personnel and 6,432 civilian police officers. It does not spell out what role would be played by major powers, including the United States.

 On a related note, I find it really curious that the number that keeps being brandied around (and has been cited for the last year or two) is 200,000 dead in Darfur. The numbers went, all of a sudden, from "tens of thousands" to 200,000, which I think is a lot closer to the reality, but which is still a conservative, and strangely static, estimation.

Eric Reeves, for example, argued back in the Spring of 2006 that the death count (included in this are those who have died of disease and malnutrition in addition to violence) was around 450,000. And the US State Department put out an estimate in early 2005 that the excess death toll was 98,000 and 181,000. Regardless of the estimate, though, it seems strange for the media to continue citing the same number over the course of a couple of years.

A Lexis Nexis search of Darfur coverage in the Times, for example, shows that the 200,000 figure was used as far back as November 7, 2005 ("Surge in Violence in Sudan Erodes Hope"). In that report, we are informed of "the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Darfur," whereas in today's report, we are told that "some 200,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict." Are we really to believe that the numbers have remained unchanged for nearly two years?

While death counts in remote conflict zones are by their nature difficult to discern and in cases like this one usually controversial, there is no excuse for major media outlets, once having made the decision to use a figure, to continue using it unchanged for nearly two years. The readership of the Times could be forgiven for thinking that there had been no new deaths in Darfur since November, 2005. This is obviously untrue, and they should either update their figures or if they insist on continuing to use 200,000, they should stress that this number is two years old.