the human province

This site has moved

2008-10-06T09:23:00.002+02:00

I'm not sure why, but overnight, my internet connection stopped allowing me to connect to blogspot/blogger sites. I can connect from friends' houses and from work, but I can't seem to figure out why I can’t connect from home. This is decidedly inconvenient for updating my blog, which I haven't been so good about lately anyway. So I've decided to change my host from blogspot to wordpress, which means that I won't be updating this site anymore. I think I was able to import all the old posts and comments without a hitch, but if anyone notices any problems with anything, please let me know.

Otherwise, I've taken advantage of the move to change the layout, which has always been pretty bare bones due to my limited skills in web design.

So please come over to the new site and update your bookmarks. Ahlan wa sahlan.

History as a political tool

2008-09-29T16:48:00.002+02:00

Jeffrey Goldberg has a dishonest account of Tom Segev's review of a book on Haj Amin al-Husseini up. He makes it sound like Segev is only down on the book because it emphasizes Arab extremism, whereas his problems with the book are much more substantial:

The lack of solid evidence is the main problem throughout the book. While the authors do cite prominent scholars like Martin Gilbert, Bernard Wasserstein and Rashid Khalidi, some of the most outrageous quotations come from quite arguable sources. Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (“The Jews are yours”) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs. But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.

Then Goldberg makes it sound like Segev is comparing Jewish extremism in mandate Palestine with Husseini's support of Nazi Germany:

Segev compares the Mufti's behavior to that of Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister of Israel who was once a terrorist with the Stern Gang, and he criticizes the authors for neglecting to mention Jewish extremism in the time of the Mufti. I'm not sure why a book about pro-Nazi sympathies among certain Arabs need include this...

Actually, what Segev does is remind us, as we can read in his excellent book The Seventh Million that Husseini was not the only anti-British nationalist to make overtures to Nazi Germany for the purpose of throwing off the yoke of British imperialism:

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany definitely demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only chauvinists in Palestine looking to make a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, a small Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, seeking support for its struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister. The authors fail to mention this episode.

So while it's true that a book on Arabs seeking German support against the British and the Jewish colonialism needn't mention the terrorism of the Irgun or the Stern Gang, it seems dishonest not to include the fact that some of Husseini's local Jewish enemies also sought the support of Nazi Germany.

But that's the whole problem here. The importance accorded to Husseini is meant to conflate anti-Zionism and Arabs with anti-Semitism and Nazis. During World War II, there were many subjects of British imperialism from Ireland to Egypt and beyond who saw the time as ripe to back another European power, not because they were Nazis or anti-Semites, but because they were anti-British and saw Germany as means to the end of breaking British rule over their lands.

We've seen politically expedient but strange bedfellows time and time again, like how many exiled Iraqis supported an American invasion -- not because they were particularly pro-American, but rather because they were anti-Saddam. To argue that the the two are necessarily the same is either obtuse or dishonest.

On the seam

2008-09-11T14:57:00.006+02:00

Last night I saw a collection of Israeli and Palestinian short films about Jerusalem, one of which (made by an Israeli) took a look at the Museum on the Seam. The museum describes itself like this:

The Museum is committed to examining the social reality within our regional conflict, to advancing dialogue in the face of discord and to encouraging social responsibility that is based on what we all have in common rather than what keeps us apart.

And it describes its location like this:

The Museum is situated in a building constructed in 1932 by the Arab-Christian architect, Anton Baramki.

While Jerusalem was divided (1948-1967), the building served as a military outpost (the Turjeman Post) which stood on the seam line between Israel and Jordan across from Mandelbaum Gate, the only crossing point between the two sides of the divided city.

The Museum on the Seam was established in 1999 with the generous support of the von Holtzbrinck family of Germany, through the Jerusalem Foundation and by the initiative of the designer and curator of the Museum, Raphie Etgar.

What it fails to mention is that Baramki and his family lived in the house until they were displaced during the war in 1948 and that ever since 1967 the Baramki family has tried in vain to reclaim their house. The museum has refused to give them their property back, relying on the Israeli law of "absentee" landowners that has allowed the Jewish state to confiscate Palestinian land.

Social responsibility indeed.

More of the hack you love to hate

2008-09-02T16:42:00.001+02:00

It seems that Michael Totten's hackery isn't limited to Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world. Take a look here for an amusing take down of his recent reporting on Georgia.

Orwell: Dear diary -- hot again!

2008-08-29T16:27:00.003+02:00

I've just stumbled across an online version of George Orwell's diaries.

I've only scratched the surface, but considering how much Orwell talks about the weather and crops, I feel somehow a little less pathetic for not being able to talk for five minutes without making a comment on the hot and sticky weather that greeted me upon my return from Africa back to Beirut. Who'da thunk I'd be pining for Congolese weather? It's not much, but I suppose Goma's got at least one thing going for it this time of year.

American Palestine

2008-08-29T14:36:00.003+02:00

For reasons I won't go into, I was at the American embassy a couple of times earlier this week. Draconian security measures notwithstanding (you're not allowed to bring a phone or bag onto the premises), the place seemed more Lebanese than American, with Lebanese security guards, Lebanese employees and Lebanese-Americans queued up in the consular section.

Another touch was a world map in the consular section. It is a map with political boundaries, and while I was in the consular waiting room, I took a look at it while trying to recover from the disgusting humidity that all of Beirut's been suffering from this summer. The map is in Arabic, and like most maps in the region, Israel is nowhere to be found. Instead, the map shows Palestine. This wouldn't be surprising, except that it's in the American embassy.

Back from the bush

2008-08-26T15:52:00.001+02:00

I've been really, really terrible about keeping the site updated. And for that I apologize. Before, I could blame the state of African telecommunications, but since I'm back home where I have the internet at home and work, I've got no such excuses.

While I was away, I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Wizard of the Crow on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It was really wonderful, a mixture of Rushdie and Gunther Grass, but à l'africaine. Then, to keep with the theme of African dictatorships and as suggested by another friend, I read Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, which is also a great read. There are so many passages that stood out on the page, but this is one of my favorites:

[A] genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy.

Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners. In the grand finale of things there will be a mansion also for them where they will be received and lodged in comfort by the single-minded demigods of their devotion.

My trip was incredibly interesting. I traveled from Kenya to Zanzibar to Tanzania proper to Rwanda and Congo then through Uganda back to Kenya before leaving. It was tiresome to be on the move so much, so I was happy to come home to Beirut.

That being said, given our excruciatingly humid heat here, I miss the cool evenings of East and Central Africa. I also miss the smell of smoke that always seemed to fill the night sky. The latter, by the way, is completely different in the southern hemisphere. The stars are much more numerous and fill constellations that I'd never before seen. It's amazing to think that something so fundamental to our lives as the sky can change upon crossing an imaginary line in the African dirt.

On crowds and Tanzanian trains

2008-07-24T08:39:00.004+02:00

I was expecting a leisurely train ride through the inland to Lake Victoria from Dar-es-Salaam. That's not at all what I got. The train was scheduled to leave Dar-es-Salaam at 5 on Tuesday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised when we left on time. The Tanzanian scenery was beautiful and the couchette not that uncomfortable.

I awoke to a couple of sudden jolts, and then we stopped for a while. Finally, we started back up again and I fell asleep. The only thing that woke me up was a Tanzanian cabin mate who decided that 1 am would be the perfect time to listen to his telephone's radio at full blast, despite the fact that there were five people trying to sleep in the same tiny cabin.

I finally fell back asleep and then woke up in the early light of the morning to see a train platform. We must be in Dodoma, I thought, and then went back to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later to see that we hadn't moved, so I decided to get out and see what the problem was. I asked where we were, to which someone responded: Dar-es-Salaam. Thinking that he’d misunderstood my question, I mimed that yes, of course, we'd left Dar-es-Salaam, but where were we now? He shrugged and repeated: Dar-es-Salaam.

It was only then that I recognized the buildings around us. I'd just spent 14 hours to end up in the exact same place I'd left. After some investigation, it seems that the jolts had been two of the train cars being derailed, but fortunately no one was hurt. We were told that the tracks would be repaired and that we were expected to leave again at 5 in the evening, but that we should stay close to the train anyway, just in case. So I spent the day lounging in the sun watching as an African village sprung up on the train platform.

Men lounged and ate oranges, while women washed clothes and children. Wet laundry soon adorned the rusty tracks and open train windows. This, I assume, is how shantytowns are born. To my surprise, mothers led their children to defecate mere feet away from the water spigots, which left human shit in disconcerting proximity to drying laundry and dishes. It also made the whole place smell like a public toilet. All in all, I was surprised by the fact that no one seemed particularly upset about the inconvenience of the situation. Everyone was taking it in stride.

After being told that I couldn't get my money back for the train ticket, I left our new village for some fresh air and Indian food, passing an enormous line of people waiting to get a two-dollar food allowance from the rail company. By the time I got back, it was nearly time to leave. Or so I thought. The departure time of 5 pm came and went without so much as a train whistle. We were then told that we’d be leaving at 9, so I settled in to read with the last of the sunlight. I fell asleep in my couchette and only woke up at around 9:30 to loud music and a crowd of people obviously upset about something.

It seems that they were mad, and understandably so, about not getting a refund for their ticket. Every once in a while, the crowd's singing and chanting would take on a nasty edge, and rocks and Swahili curses would be hurled. After a bit of this and three pops that sounded like firecrackers and which were explained to me to be local bombs (made by the police or the crowd, I couldn't tell), I decided that it is decidedly unwise to be different in a crowd of angry people who want their money back. And especially unwise when that difference, in my case that of skin color, is seen mainly as a financial difference. I was worried that the leap from "give us our money back" to let's take the mzungu's money" could be quick and unforgiving. So I left. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to make it to Kigali by tomorrow.

Apparently the local press has written up the story, but with no mention of the rioting.

African pics

2008-07-23T13:44:00.002+02:00

Here are a couple of pictures I've taken so far:

Giraffe on the road between Nairobi and Masai Mara

Great Rift Valley

Zebras in Masai Mara

Sunset in Masai Mara

Lioness feeding on zebra

Lions lounging in Masai Mara

Somali Camel on beach in Mombasa

Masai kids at school

Zanzibar beach

Market in Zanzibar

Homemade lipstick in Zanzibar

Train wreck in Tanzania

2008-07-23T13:31:00.002+02:00

I left Dar-es-Salaam last night and thought I was well on my way to Lake Victoria, but then I fell asleep and woke up this morning to find myself in.... Dar-es-Salaam. It seems that part of our train derailed last night (which must have been the couple of jolts I felt), so we turned around and came back. Shortly after arriving, the passengers set-up a makeshift village on tracks, with women washing clothes and children while the men mostly sat around chatting and eating oranges.

I looked into a plane ticket to Kigali from Dar, but it is an astounding $440, so it looks like I will be giving the train another try this evening. They said that the tracks are being repaired, but I don't know how much I trust that. In either case, by the time I'd figured out what was going on, it was too late to catch a bus to Mwanza, and I still haven't heard back from Rwandair, so it looks like I'll be on the train.

Otherwise, Mwanza was the film featured in the documentary film Darwin's Nightmare about the Perch Nile in Lake Victoria. It was poorly received here, and even non-Tanzanian friend who live here can't stand it. Personally, I really liked the film when I saw it, but I'd never been to Tanzania before, so if I finally make it to Mwanza, I suppose I'll be able to see if the film was fair or not.

Zanzibar

2008-07-17T16:13:00.002+02:00

This is just a quick note to let my few but faithful readers know that I've not been killed in a matatu accidend on the roads of East Africa. I'm alive and well in Zanzibar, after having been through Nairobi, Masai Mara, Mombasa, Tanga and Pemba. I'll be heading to Dar-es-Salaam next and then taking a train crosscountry to Lake Victoria from where I'll launch into Rwanda.

I've got a fair amount to write about, but little time in which to do so.

More later, insh'allah.

Leaving for East Africa

2008-07-06T23:26:00.001+02:00

I'm about to leave for a five-week trip seeing East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda), but I wanted to post a link to an execrable op-ed about learning Arabic in the Washington Post by Joel Pollak.

I sent out a hasty letter to the editor, which reads as follows:

Joel Pollak complains that there isn’t enough of an Israeli perspective in Arabic language classes. He then goes on to describe “West Beirut,” a gem of Lebanese cinema that recounts a love story between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, as a film that casts Christians as “the prime bad guys in Lebanon’s civil war.” Obviously Pollak’s Arabic has not progressed far enough to have understood the movie.
He then assures us that he refused to talk about Abdel Nassar in class. In French courses, one learns about Napoleon as a grand statesman, not a brutal imperial dictator. Likewise in Arabic classes, as well as in much of the third world, Nasser was seen as a hero.
One of the points of language courses is to better understand the culture of the speakers of that language. Since Pollak would obviously prefer to learn about Israeli and Jewish history, one can only assume that mistakenly signed up for Arabic lessons when he was actually looking to learn Hebrew.

In other news, there's this nasty piece calling for collective punishment. I'd have more to say about this last one, except that I'm in a hurry.

I don't know what the internet situation is going to be like in any of the places where I'll be over the next month or so, but I can't imagine that posting will be any slower than it has been in the last month or two. Which means that I'll do my best to step it up considerably.

Mugabe's "do or die" campaign

2008-06-23T09:11:00.001+02:00

Zimbabwe's opposition party, MDC (Movement for Democracy and Change) announced yesterday that it will not be contesting the election on Friday, since it was nothing but a violent illegitimate sham anyway. Dozens of opposition partisans (and their families) have been killed in the last few months. PBS's Frontline has an excellent piece on Mugabe's "do or die" campaign to hold on to power in Harare:

I pose as a member of a Roman Catholic church from Harare in order to visit the local hospital. There I meet Thabita Chingaya*, a 42-year-old widow and leader of the local MDC women's league. Thabita is being treated for massive injuries to her vagina, uterus and womb. A discharge constantly oozes from between her legs. Tabitha says that she was coming home from drawing water from the river the week before when she came upon seven young men she knew who happened to be Zanu-PF party members. They blocked her path saying she would learn a lesson for being "Morgan Tsvangirai's prostitute."
She was knocked down by blows to her face and kicked with booted feet. But then suddenly the beatings stopped, she says. One man called "Max," who seemed to be the gang leader, ordered the others to stop. He removed his trousers and raped her. All the others followed suit, taking turns to hold her down. When they were done, Max took a log and began poking her vagina until she bled. She says the other six laughed and left her for dead.

Sea and Desert

2008-06-19T08:37:00.001+02:00

So I'm back. I finished grading and braved the torrents of students begging for grades. I also read Kapuscinsky's Travels with Herodotus. While speaking of the coup against Ben Bella in Algeria, he brings up a schism in Islam that I'd been thinking about even before having him articulate it. He speaks of a

conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical -- I would even say "Mediterranean" -- current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

Algiers, which at its beginnings, in Herodotus's time, was a fishing village, and later a port for Phoenician and Greek ships, faces the sea. But right behind the city, on its other side, lies a vast desert province that is called "the bled" here, a territory claimed by peoples professing allegiance to the laws of an old, rigidly introverted Islam. In Algiers one speaks simply of the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Under colonialism, both these strains of Islam were united by a common enemy; but alter they collided.

I don't know enough about Algeria to know if Ben Bella is really a good specimen of the sea variety or Boumedienne an example of the Islam of the desert. I do know though, despite its simplicity, this is a distinction that's been forming in my consciousness for a while now. It's certainly one way of explaining the differences between Islam in, say, Saudi Arabia and the Islams of Lebanon.

Three years later

2008-06-11T09:11:00.005+02:00

Sometimes when I'm bored (or should be grading papers), I take a look at my stats to see how the few people who read this blog got here. I often feel a mixture of fear and pride when I see that people from the State Department or the Senate or the Pentagon have made their way here. Other times, I wonder what someone was doing googling Hezbollah and skinnydipping.

Every once in a while, I come across someone who's seemingly been caught googling himself. In this case, it looks like UCSD's Bill Decker came across a post about Guantánamo Bay after doing a Google search to see if anyone was talking about a letter to the editor he wrote three years ago.

It must not be very often that this physics professor finds talk about him online that's unrelated to bifurcations in natural convection, much less remarks that compare him with a Soviet Chief State Prosecutor. If you've come back, Bill, welcome. Please feel free to continue patting the US on the back for only imprisoning people at Guantánamo Bay instead of having them summarily executed.

Brazil in Beirut

2008-06-05T11:16:00.002+02:00

In Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil one of the characters (Tuttle played by De Niro) is walking when a newspaper is blown against him just to cling to him while another does the same. More and more papers are thrust against him until he's a walking mass of paper. Finally, all the papers are blown away to reveal that the man is no longer there.

That's pretty much how I feel at this time of the year, when the semester is over, and I'm flooded with a mass of papers to grade. When the wind blows hard enough, and grades are turned in, I'll be back.

Israel blocks fulbright scholars

2008-05-30T09:03:00.003+02:00

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

Shake and Bake, or MacBeth

2008-05-29T10:04:00.003+02:00

A good friend of mine, A, sent me a link to an article about Scott McClellan's new memoir to see if I could spot the reference to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Needless to say, I laughed out loud when I saw that McClellan calls Dick Cheney "The Magic Man" in his new book:

[McClellan] accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Somewhere in this book has to be an anecdote about Bush "El Diablo" and Cheney "The Magic Man" bumping chests and yelling, "shake and bake, baby!"

Surely, it is no coincidence that Will Ferrell has played Bush in the past:

But on a more serious note, I find it disgusting how people like McClellan go along with horrible, dishonest policies and then expect that all will be well after a memoir. Someone should tell Scott "the lady" McClellan that a critical memoir isn't enough to wash the blood of hundreds of thousands of people from his hands. I'm afraid a little water isn't enough to clear you of this deed and that here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Democracy and economy

2008-05-29T09:54:00.002+02:00

It's the end of the semester, and most of my students are giving final presentations. Two of my students have been working on the economic consequences of the sit-in, on a micro-level, by interviewing business owners and protesters. At the end of their presentation, the conclusion they came to (fueled by the "Dubai model," I might add) was that in the Middle East, a country needs to choose between democracy and economic livelihood. They seemed torn as to which should be Lebanon's priority, but they agreed that in this neck of the woods, aiming for an economically successful democracy was the same thing as wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

Sometimes this country depresses me more than I can muster the strength to convey...

New President in Lebanon

2008-05-25T16:50:00.001+02:00

Even if I didn't have cable, I'd be able to tell that the new president had just been ~~appointed~~ elected by the gunfire that we can all hear throughout Beirut.

There's one thing that I've noticed since the Doha agreement was reached: both sides seem to feel like they've won. Part of me (the realist or pessimistic part of me) thinks that this is another example of the Lebanese "lick-and-stick" philosophy that is equally present in the domains of plumbing and politics. This philosophy states that it's much easier to make a minor, temporary adjustment than to fix something properly. This means that my electric wire that used to run from the meter through the walls to my apartment now comes in through the window in the corridor.

The other part of me thinks that maybe, just maybe, if both sides think they've won, then maybe that means that we're in a win-win situation.

More overheard in Beirut

2008-05-20T10:22:00.002+02:00

One high school or young college student to another in the back of a cab:

Student 1: "All I need is a night away from my parents."
Student 2: "Yeah, but you'll need some proof."
Student 1: "What, like her panties? Or what about pictures?"

Still alive

2008-05-16T10:55:00.000+02:00

Thanks to those who have sent messages wondering if I was all right and where I was. I took a trip up to the Chouf on Tuesday and spent the night in a village in the mountain. I visited some of the Druze shebab to see how things were and how they were feeling after their unexpected victory over Hezbollah in Barouk.

When I got back to Beirut, what I thought was just a long electricity cut turned out to be several days without power (that's getting fixed while I type, insh'allah). So I've been out of the loop, news and otherwise, and will need some time to wrap my head around things before posting any comments about the situation.

There's also the fact that during the last week, I've not really wanted to do much except sleep. As a result, I didn't get any work done and am now swamped with things that have been left undone up to now.

Hezbollah coup

2008-05-12T00:36:00.001+02:00

This seems to be shaping up to be a full-scale coup d'état by Hezbollah with the support of the army. It looks like they're going piece by piece. Future was first, now the PSP is being taken in the Chouf, and I imagine the Lebanese Forces in the Christian sectors will be next.

The rest of the Lebanese parties were no match for Hezbollah, but when you throw in the army, what can you expect? Hariri and Joumblatt seem to have agreed not to fight, probably to save the bloodshed that would not have stopped the coup in any case. So they've agreed to go quietly in exchange for there not being a battle to which Future and PSP partisans would have gone like lambs to the slaughter.

The army seems to have cut a deal with Hezbollah, but it's hard to say what they could have done in any case, since they're so much weaker than the Party of God. So the current government will most likely be forced to resign, Suleiman will be appointed as president, and someone pliable will be appointed to be Prime Minister. Things will be like before 2005, except that instead of taking marching orders from Damascus, the new government will answer to Harat Hreik.

Niagara Falls

2008-05-11T18:15:00.001+02:00

by John Barth

She paused amid the kitchen to drink a glass of water; at that instant, losing a grip of fifty years, the next-room-ceiling-plaster crashed. Or he merely say in an empty study, in March-day glare, listening to the universe rustle in his head, when suddenly the five-foot shelf let go. For ages the fault creeps secret through the rock; in a second, ledge and railings, tourists and turbines all thunder over Niagara. Which snowflake triggers the avalanche? A house explodes; a star. In your spouse, so apparently resigned, murder twitches like a fetus. At some trifling new assessment, all the colonies rebel.

The centre cannot hold

2008-05-11T16:55:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, I spent a good part of the day in Hamra, where SSNP thugs were still armed and around. They broke up a group of unarmed neighborhood residents (most of whom were with Future) by shooting in the air and shouting. The night before a 16-year-old boy had been killed while delivering a narguileh for the shop he worked for. When they finally had a hard time getting the group of the boy's friends, family and neighbors to go inside despite plenty of shooting, they left. Shortly afterward, the Army finally showed up. The SSNP gunmen were going around Hamra without any challenge from the Army.

Today, things seem to be much better in West Beirut (although I haven't been there today), but fighting has spread all over the country, with Hezbollah apparently shelling a Druze village and opposition Druze forces fighting the PSP in Aley. Clashes are also going on in in Shweifat.

Add this to the fighting in Tripoli, and the death toll is nearly 40 now. In the words of Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Television and traitors

2008-05-09T20:59:00.001+02:00

Another thing that's been bothering me is the fact that Mostaqbal's media outlets were shut down. I won't pretend that part of me doesn't feel a little tinge of delight at the idea of the Mostaqbal thugs getting some comeuppance. But punishing neighborhood thugs who fancy themselves militiamen is one thing, while shutting down media outlets is another. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah was (rightfully, to my mind) outraged by Israel's targeting of their television station, al-Manar. So why is it acceptable to have shut down Future TV?

I'm watching Kalam an-Nass right now, while the head of Future TV is being interviewed. According to him, a Lebanese soldier, in uniform, told them that they had to open the gates or else they'd be killed by Hezbollah militiamen. This is, of course, disconcerting on several levels. First of all, this would mean that a member of the ostensibly neutral Lebanese Army would have helped Hezbollah shut down the media outlet of a competing political party. But regardless of whether or not a soldier helped Hezbollah shut the station down, the latter certainly did disconnect Future TV. This is scandalous, and Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself.

A woman presenter, whose name I can't recall, just came on and gave Hezbollah a piece of her mind. She said that she's spent the last year and a half doing reports on the lot of the people of the south and how they've suffered during the war of 2006 and after. Then she explained how al-Manar reported that the staff of Future TV "fled" the premises, like thieves or criminals, when in fact they were told to leave if they didn't want to die. She said that forgetting the parties and forgetting politics, this kind of treatment and the occupation of Beirut has made regular people, people like her, hate Hezbollah. She said that after people like her who did their best to take in refugees after the war in 2006 are treated like this and accused of being traitors, Hezbollah should be ashamed of itself. Of course a presenter on Future TV isn't exactly representative of the man on the street, but her point is well taken.

I can say, however, that the opposition has lost the sympathy of people who have supported the principles of the resistance, even if they had really ambivalent feelings about the religious and authoritarian form it's taken. And the traitor rhetoric is really hurtful and disgusting to people who support resistance against Israel but don't want to live in a country where the interests of the resistance trump those of the state. Calling people traitors like this smacks of Bush's rhetoric in the "war on terror," where you're either "with us or against us," and doesn't sit well with many Lebanese.

Legitimacy and Mercutio in Lebanon

2008-05-09T20:24:00.001+02:00

I never thought I'd say this, but there was part of Samir Geagea's speech this afternoon that I agree with. He said that the use of Hezbollah's weapons has delegitimized their very existence. I tend to agree with this idea, because Hezbollah has decided to use its weapons in an internal dispute between Lebanese actors. (Here, it's important to remember that the myth that Hezbollah has never been part of inter-Lebanese fighting fails to include when Amal and Hezbollah fought each the during the civil war.) What has happened is that the March 14 government made a decision that Hezbollah disagreed with, and in reaction to this, they took up arms and occupied half of Beirut. This means that the weapons whose sole purpose is supposed to deter Israeli aggression and defend Lebanon has been used as a blunt political tool to try to force the government to resign, or at the very least, send it a far-from-subtle message.

The line being taken by the opposition now (at least as far as the talking heads of al-Manar are concerned) is that Hezbollah has helped the state put down militias (namely Mustaqbal, or the Future movement). This position fails to take into consideration, for example, the fact that there are still armed militia members of Amal and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party walking around West Beirut.

Either armed militias are illegal or they aren't. What's happened is that the Army seems to have passively taken the side of Hezbollah, which means that their legitimacy will be decreased or destroyed in the eyes of other Lebanese communities, especially the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli. It has also sent the message that the most effective political tool is military force. I imagine, then, that the Sunnis in Saida and Tripoli, the pro-government Christians and the Druze loyal to Walid Jumblatt have likely decided that they can no longer count on the Army to be an impartial arbiter for the state. This will surely lead to increased militia training and arming. It wouldn't surprise me if the lesson that the Lebanese Forces and the PSP have taken from the defeat of Mustaqbal (probably the weakest of the pro-government parties/militias, if one of the nastier ones on a local neighborhood level) is that they should be prepared for more of the same in the not-so-distant future.

So where does this leave us? Despite rumors earlier today, it doesn't look like Saniora, or anyone else, will resign from the government. So what? There's still no president, and the fundamental dysfunction of the Lebanese state has only been highlighted, not solved. If this all ends with Hezbollah and its allied militias pulling back to their territory in the next day or so, leaving a humiliating message for the other parties and their militias, we'll be back to where we started. Back to where we started, except a big part of the population will have lost faith in the idea that Hezbollah and its allies can be dealt with within the norms of a democratic system.

Since there is no way that any of these groups can compete with Hezbollah's military forces, look for them to embrace proxies. This might include the Sunnis accepting al-Qaeda militants and other groups hoping for more Israeli intervention. I'm sure that after the disaster that was the war in 2006, the Israeli establishment wouldn't mind taking advantage of the situation for rematch. In any case, what this situation hasn't done is foster an atmosphere where either side feels like it can compromise. If anything, this whole situation has pushed March 14 further into its corner and inflated the arrogance and confidence of Hezbollah and its allies in the country and abroad. Neither of which bodes well for peace or stability in Lebanon.

Amin Gemayel, whom I can't stand, called Hezbollah's victory a Pyrrhic one (actually, he said it in French, the snooty bastard). I tend to think that, on a national level and in the long term, he's probably right. In any case, it's enough to turn some Lebanese into bitter Mercutios.

Some thoughts on the aftermath of this war

2008-05-09T14:23:00.001+02:00

The rumor I've been hearing now, to the glee of some Aounist Christians in my neighborhood, is that Prime Minister Saniora has resigned. I can't confirm this, but it really begs the question of what he would resign from. Premiership of what? There is no government. The military is sitting around doing absolutely nothing, which may be best for the lives of the soldiers but is disastrous for the life of the state. I walked down to the eastern side of the bridge that connects east and west Beirut, and it was being guarded by a couple of tanks and APCs and some soldiers. The latter were sitting around shooting the shit and listening to the radio. One was sleeping in the shadow of his APC. I've also seen it reported that Jumblatt was forced to flee his home in Clemenceau under the protection of the Army.

Despite the fact that the army is much weaker than Hezbollah and would have lost any real shooting match, I keep wondering to myself if one of the reasons the Army is staying out is because of the head of the Army, Michel Suleiman. He had been put forward as a compromise candidate for president. Now that Hezbollah is calling the shots, it will be interesting to see who they put forward as the president, or if they appoint anyone at all.

It obviously won't be Aoun, which means that he's pretty much outlived his usefulness to the opposition cum ruling party, due to the fact that he was only helpful to them so long as they were working within the system. Now that they have taken matters into their own hands, they really don't need him anymore. I don't think that Hezbollah would even try to put someone Franjieh into the presidential palace, so that pretty much only leaves Suleiman. Maybe he cut a deal with Hezbollah to stay out of the fighting in exchange for the presidency.

But even the question of who will be the president may be putting the cart before the horse. It isn't clear at all now what Hezbollah will do. Will there be a fight between the pro-Government Christian militias (Lebanese Forces and Phalangists) and Hezbollah? Will Hezbollah install a new government of its choosing based on the old system? Will they install a government composed purely of Hezbollah members? Will they call for new elections? Your guess is as good as mine.

What's sure though, is this: those who may have have been somewhat sympathetic to the underlying principles of "the Resistance" and Hezbollah's part in that movement despite (being uncomfortable with the idea of an explicitly religious party) are likely to be turned off by the last few days' events. The chorus has always been the Hezbollah would never turn its weapons inward, but it has done that now. At the end of the day, Hezbollah went outside of the rules of the game. That game may have been frustrating and often paralyzing, but at least it was nominally democratic. Now, even if they call for new elections, Hezbollah has broken the rules of the game by resorting to violence to achieve a political goal. A lot of people won't forgive or forget this, and there will be even more people who will never be able to trust the party of God to follow the rules of the (at least nominally) democratic system, because they have, for all intents and purposes, overthrown the government by force.

UPDATE: I just saw Aoun on television assuring viewers that no one would be persecuted. Maybe he didn't get the memo, but Hezbollah seized power without him or his help. He looks more like a remora sucking with all his might to be pulled along with Hezbollah, feasting on what's left of the already feeble Lebanese state.

So what now?

2008-05-09T09:34:00.001+02:00

The war is continuing, but my neighborhood looks like it's any other Saturday morning. The upscale carft shop, L'Artisan du Liban, is apparently open; there is a couple walking a dog; traffic is coming through; and Ethiopian maids are beating carpets and washing windows.

Meanwhile, in Hamra, Hezbollah took all of one night to defeat the Mostaqbal (Future, the pro-government Sunni militia) and take over the area. There are now (much more professional) Hezbollah militiamen running the areas. The Future movement's television channel was shut down, along with its newspaper and radio station. According to my friends, the army and Internal Security Forces (the latter trained by the US and loyal to Future's Hariri) are nowhere to be found.

There had been rumors about Mustaqbal training in the last year or two. I suppose we can put that notion to rest, because it only took a night for them to get their asses handed to them by Hezbollah.

So what now? Jumblatt made this point yesterday, saying that Hezbollah could easily occupy all of Beirut, but then what? I'm wondering what's going to happen to East Beirut. Are the Christians going to (or going to be allowed to) stay out of it all together? Will Hezbollah wait until Mustaqbal has been completely routed and then aim their sites at Christian Lebanese Forces and Phalangists? Will Hezbollah use its new-found posiiton of power to negotiate, or will it just be the government now?

For the moment, I can't tell that we're in a civil war by looking out the window, but had I left work an hour later yesterday, I'd probably be holed up in my office or at friends' watching street fighting all across the neighborhood that has traditionally been the safest place in Beirut.

UPDATE: Artisan du Liban isn't actually open, but the building it's in is. Besides grocery stores, though, the Mana'eesh places are open, as are the hair salon, antique shop and carpet repair shop by my place.

Also, it's been pointed out to me that it's Friday today, which goes to show you how much it feels like a Saturday today here.

You might be in a civil war if...

2008-05-08T21:08:00.001+02:00

The garbage men stop coming:

The 8 o'clock news is presented in a flack jacket:

I don't have a picture for this one, but another way you might know that you're in a civil war if there's no more bread at your local stores...

Civil war

2008-05-08T16:51:00.001+02:00

I'm watching Hassan Nasrallah's speech right now on television, and it's very contradictory. One moment he says that this is war and that the government's decision to get rid of their man at the airport and to declare the Party of God's newly discovered independent telecommunications network illegal was a declaration of war. He says that Hezbollah's weapons will never be turned inward, but then he says that he will cut that hand off that tries to touch those weapons. (Here it's important to remember that the telecommunication network has been newly classified as a resistance weapon.) I never thought I'd say this, but Nasrallah kind of reminded me of Rumsfeld today.

Sometimes I wonder if in 1975, people knew that they were in a civil war. I have a feeling that long after the day that we now recognize as the start of the war, many people didn't know they were in one. Everyone's talking about whether or not this means war. Somehow I've got the feeling that we're already in a civil war, but we just haven't realized it yet.

UPDATE: There's something decidedly disconcerting about hearing the RPG explode in the distance right before you hear it on the television. MY neighborhood is calm right now; the opposing Christian factions have so far kept their distance from the fighting, but I can hear automatic gun fire and RPGs in the distance. 1840, 1958, 1975, 2008? Plus ça change...

Overheard in Beirut

2008-05-08T13:02:00.003+02:00

In the vein of the NYC version, this was overheard in the halls of a prestigious private university here in Beirut:

Young woman on cell phone: Yeah, I would, biss ma'aoul racism? You're college educated! Come on, I'm so disappointed!

Pictures from strike, protest and clashes

2008-05-08T09:12:00.002+02:00

The LA Times has a good slide show of a few pictures from yesterday's bullshit.

An armed supporter of the Shiite Amal movement walks past smoldering cars in Beirut during a general strike that turned into a confrontation between rival political factions.

Strike turns into street fighting

2008-05-07T13:49:00.001+02:00

What was supposed to be a general strike over the minimum wage (the demonstration for which was finally canceled) has turned in to street clashes between Sunni and Shi'a. As usual. I crossed over to West Beirut this morning and back just now by the port road, and besides the empty streets and smoke in the air from burnt tires up by the tent city, nothing was out of the ordinary. Watching the news, however, I can see that at one point the highway was blocked with burned out tires.

My friend S, on the other hand, lives in Corniche el-Mazra'a, where there has been fighting most of the day. She just told me that they haven't seen any army troops in over an hour, just militiamen from Amal and Mostaqbal (Future Movement) carrying guns and RPG launchers. They don't have any electricity and have had to leave the living room, because the windows are too big. There have been other clashes in the usual places: Cola, Museitbeh, Tariq el-Jadida, Tayounneh and Ras el-Naba'a, amongst others.

It's really depressing to me how even an issue like raising the minimum wage, which should have appeal across sectarian lines, inevitably turns into an excuse for thugs from vying political parties to fight in the street.

Put yourself in her shoes

2008-05-05T21:17:00.001+02:00

I'm a little late for Labor Day, but Human Rights Watch here in Lebanon has begun an awareness campaign for rights of domestic workers entitled Put Yourself in Her Shoes:

The condition of (predominantly women) domestic workers in the Middle East is atrocious. Apparently, the problem is as bad in Israel as it is in Lebanon and even worse in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. According to HRW:

The most common complaints made by domestic workers to embassies and nongovernmental organizations include non-payment or delayed payment of their wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as physical, abuse. According to a 2006 survey conducted by Dr. Ray Jureidini of 600 migrant domestic workers, 56 percent said they work more than 12 hours a day and 34 percent have no regular time off. In some cases, workers have died while attempting to escape these conditions, some by jumping from balconies.

...The Lebanese authorities have failed to curb abuses committed by employers and agencies. Lebanese labor laws specifically exclude domestic workers from rights guaranteed to other workers, such as a weekly day of rest, limits on work hours, paid holidays, and workers’ compensation. Immigration sponsorship laws restrict domestic workers’ ability to change employers, even in cases of abuse. An official steering committee created in early 2006 and led by the Ministry of Labor to improve the legal situation of migrant workers in Lebanon has yet to deliver any concrete reforms. This includes a long-discussed standard contract to outline minimum standards for domestic workers’ employment.
Human Rights Watch called upon the Ministry of Labor and other relevant authorities to amend the labor law to extend equal protection for domestic workers and to sign and ratify the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.

A few years ago, the Times did a story about Sri Lankan women who go to the Middle East to work as domestic servants. This picture is of a 20-year-old woman named Thangarasa Jeyanthi who was severely abused in Lebanon. In Lebanese Arabic, the common word for a domestic worker is "Sri Lankan." At one point, I remember hearing a joke about an NGO that was fostering multiculturalism by doing presentations with people from all over world invited to introduce themselves to the audience. The Egyptian man comes and says he works as a concierge. The Syrian says that he's a field hand. And then comes the Ethiopian who introduces herself but forgets to say what her profession is. When reminded that everyone has to say what they do, she replies, "I'm a Sri Lankan."

In the case of Sri Lankan women, the conditions that they live and work in criminally miserable, and their government is actually complicit. There are training programs that teach the women some Arabic and how to do what is expected of them without receiving the beatings that are so common. The government encourages women to go to the Middle East, they provide remittances that help keep the Sri Lankan economy afloat.

An Ethiopian friend of mine here used to work for a big hotel in town, but she wasn't allowed to be hired directly even though she has all of her papers in order. The hotel insists on going through a middle man, who garnishes half of the wages of the foreign women working at the hotel. A salary of $450 is reasonable (and more than twice the pitiful minimum wage), but when some sleazy profiteer gets to pocket half of your salary, it's difficult to survive, especially with the increasing price of living (many food items have nearly doubled in price in the last 9 months).

In contrast with Colombo's policy of encouraging the migration, Ethiopia's government has taken the decision to ban its citizens from coming to Lebanon in search of employment:

ADDIS ABABA: On the occasion of Labor Day, Ethiopia has officially banned its citizens from traveling to Beirut in search of jobs, the African country's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has disclosed. Ethiopia passed the bill after it probed the human right violations and domestic violence Ethiopian migrants face behind closed doors in Beirut while employed as maids.
"Suspending work travel to Beirut was the only solution to minimizing the human rights abuses and dangers facing our citizens," said Zenebu Tadesse, deputy minister of state for labor and social affairs.
During the past few years, a number of Ethiopians have died in Lebanon in questionable circumstances.
According to a report published by Ethiopia's official news agency, past human right records show that 67 Ethiopian women have died between 1997 and 1999 alone while working in Beirut.
The ministry said it would take strong action against any employment agency trying to send workers directly to Beirut or through a third country.

So for Labor Day this year, I'd like to remind everyone that Sri Lankan is a nationality, not a profession. And I'd like to remind the Lebanese, many of whom go off to Europe, North America and the Gulf in search of work, that they should have a little solidarity with domestic workers here who are hoping to make so money to create a better life for themselves. As my friend Nadim from HRW says about their media campaign: "Many Lebanese themselves have been forced by wars and hardships to emigrate looking for a better life. We hope that they will see the parallels with the experience of these migrants that came from far away to care for Lebanese families."

Carter gets what he deserves

2008-05-05T18:13:00.001+02:00

(Via my friend A) Carter to be tried for peace crimes, according to The Onion:

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—An international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.
"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."

I knew it was only a matter of time before the international community succeeded in bringing his gentle reign of peace-mongering to an end!

One man's terrorist

2008-05-05T15:57:00.001+02:00

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch.

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

Nakba use in the Times

2008-05-05T10:50:00.001+02:00

The previous post got me to wondering how often the word Nakba had been used in American newspapers and when, so I did a Lexis Nexis search, which showed that the Times has only printed the word in 34 articles, the first of which appeared in 1998 in an article about Israel's 50th anniversary. A double check of the NYT online archives, however, showed two other articles that didn't appear in the Lexis Nexis search (they seem to only have abstracts for pre-1981 articles): one from 1973 on Sadat and another from 1970 on occupied Ramallah.

Here's a quickly drawn up chart that tracks the use of the word in coverage by the New York Times:

This shows that up until the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, the Times had referred to it but twice. I have a feeling that before the year is over, 2008 will beat out 2007 for the number of times the term is employed.

It's unclear to me what exactly has caused the general tide of public opinion to start moving (slowly but surely) away from Israeli occupation in the US. (Or perhaps I'm being optimistic and am projecting?) But I get the feeling that there's a shift happening in American public opinion that will hopefully be reflected by more fair-minded media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Nakba denial

2008-05-05T09:51:00.001+02:00

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”
Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.
...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.
...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.
I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...

2008-05-01T19:09:00.001+02:00

...yearning to breathe free, so we can pour water down their throats.

For all of our grandstanding rhetoric about freedom agendas and human rights and liberty and justice for all, I can't help but wonder what it says about us as a country that Amnesty International feels that this commercial is necessary:

Iran in Iraq

2008-05-01T16:17:00.001+02:00

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Feith no more

2008-04-29T18:13:00.001+02:00

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.
The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

2008-04-28T21:39:00.001+02:00

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.
"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.
Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

2008-04-28T11:47:00.001+02:00

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here.

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

2008-04-25T16:49:00.001+02:00

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Zambia steps up

2008-04-23T10:15:00.001+02:00

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.
“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

2008-04-22T08:44:00.001+02:00

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Science and war

2008-04-21T19:27:00.001+02:00

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.
...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

2008-04-21T16:58:00.001+02:00

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.) One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.
To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.
It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?
The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.
...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

2008-04-21T12:51:00.001+02:00

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

2008-04-21T12:48:00.001+02:00

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

2008-04-21T10:43:00.001+02:00

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Something's the matter with something

2008-04-17T20:36:00.001+02:00

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.
In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

2008-04-17T10:16:00.007+02:00

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:

[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."

J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:

Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:

I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.

He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:

It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

2008-04-17T06:58:00.001+02:00

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Special reports on Israel

2008-04-16T22:14:00.001+02:00

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Israel's designated driver

2008-04-15T06:37:00.001+02:00

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

In the country of men

2008-04-14T08:04:00.001+02:00

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Lord of War

2008-04-11T08:53:00.001+02:00

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

"Allah" vs. "God"

2008-04-07T11:24:00.001+02:00

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).
It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Expelling Arabs, again

2008-04-06T08:30:00.001+02:00

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.
As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.
"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.
Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.
Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.
About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.
"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."
The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.
The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.
"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

The Ministry of Foresight

2008-03-26T10:48:00.006+01:00

When I worked at a certain UN organization, I used to make fun of the fact that one of its sections had been renamed the Division of Foresight. But the more time I spend in Beirut, the more I think that the idea isn't such a bad one. After all, there are always ideas about expanding the number of ministerial portfolios, and I think that what Lebanon really needs is a Minister of Foresight.

One can see the lack of long-term vision on a daily basis. The cab driver would rather insist on a double fare and not pick anyone up than take regular fares and fill his car. The landlord would rather have a building full of high-priced empty apartments than a building full of tenants who pay a fair rent. The shopkeeper would rather overcharge a customer once than have his business over the long term. And this extends to all spheres of Lebanese life, political and social. There seems to be an idea that the only way to get ahead is by fucking someone else over. The Lebanese have yet to learn that while you can shear a sheep many times, you can only skin it once.

My landlord, while trying to get out of paying to repair the hot water heater told me this today: "I am Lebanese. You know what this mean? It mean, I know everything." And in a way he's right, because this country is full of people who think they're smarter than everyone else and who want to prove it by screwing everyone else over. You see it in the driving, in business, in social interactions and in everything else.

And while one might argue that the country's instability is responsible for such short-sighted thinking, I'm not so sure it isn't the other way around.

Seeing Israel in Paris

2008-03-20T13:00:00.001+01:00

I'm in Paris this week to surprise my good friend for his birthday and see others whom I've been missing lately, the city herself my friend's unborn baby girl. I was glad to see that while I was going to be here, I could see Amos Oz and David Grossman at the Centre Pompidou.

It wasn't until I arrived that I realized that the reason Grossman and Oz were in Paris in the first place was the Salon du Livre and the fact that this year, Israel was showcased as the guest of honor. I then found out from some Franco-Algerian friends, who accompanied me to the Pompidou event, that there had been a bomb threat and a boycott. (For a good summary in English of the whole thing, check out Lauren Elkin's account.)

The Oz and Grossman event wasn't at all what I was expecting. I knew that it was ostensibly about their literature but assumed that since both authors are politically active, there would be a fair amount of politics involved also. I was looking forward to this, not least because the only books I've read by either author are political non-fiction. There was a fog of politics that floated above the evening but never settled. Since there was no opportunity for questions, the young swooning moderator, who sounded more like a groupie than a literary critic or writer, and the writers themselves were able to keep to the topic of writing and literature.

One effect of this was that the Holocaust was very much present in the talk, but the Palestinians almost not at all. This was a little disappointing to me, because it's hard for me to imagine Palestinian writing (and this may be the fault of wonderful Mourid Barghouti and Mahmoud Darwish) without a heavy Israeli presence. Also, Oz and Grossman seemed very distant and foreign to me, because of the linguistic barrier. For some reason, I was expecting them to speak in English, but instead they spoke in Hebrew, which was translated into French by one of the best interpreters I've had the pleasure of listening to. His voice was soft and exact, and I felt cradled by his cadence. David Grossman was fairly spontaneous but sometimes a little rambling, whereas Oz spoke like a robot but had more interesting things to say. (It's only fair to mention that a lot of Oz's discourse was canned, as I'd already read close to a third of it in various of his books, interviews and articles.)

It was interesting for me to see Israel in this light: as a state like another. Because in Lebanon, Israel is not only not like other states, it's violent and dangerous. We're waiting for the next war, which will likely be even worse than the last one, so it's difficult to empathize with Israel and its people, even if many of them (like Grossman and Oz) have opinions similar to mine. This reminds me of my trip to the West Bank at the end of the war in 2006. Only rarely did I cross over to Jewish Jerusalem or interact with Israelis. I felt shaken by the bombing of Lebanon and almost afraid to see where those bombs were coming from. I now regret not exploring Tel Aviv or visiting Yad Vashem, which I've wanted to see for a long time. But July 2006 was not the time for that kind of a trip; hopefully I'll have another occasion to go in the not-so-distant future. Or even better, perhaps one day I'll be able to make the short drive to the beach in Tel Aviv from Beirut.

Otherwise, and as per usual, I've taken advantage of Paris to do some book shopping. It seems that Avraham Burg's book, which won't be out in English until October, has been released in French already. I'd like to be able to share it with my Anglophone friends in Beirut, but when I saw it used at Gilbert Joseph, I couldn't pass it up. Otherwise, I also found a used copy of Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall at my favorite English book store here. Other, non-Israel-related, books include Nerval's Voyage en Orient, Paul Morand's New York (a present from Sebastien) and George Corm's L'Europe et l'Orient. I won't be happy until I find used copies of Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth and Jean Hatzfeld's Stratégie des Antilopes.

The world in maps

2008-03-12T09:46:00.002+01:00

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard blog sometimes publishes some really ridiculous stuff that ought not be taken seriously by anyone. But every once in a while, the administrators of the blog (whose identities remain unknown, to me at least) put something up that's really helpful. This time, it's two maps of the West Bank. To my mind, this one is particularly helpful in understanding why the two-state solution is probably no longer viable (click on image to get larger pdf version):

We often hear about how impossible a one-state solution would be, but maps like this show how close Palestine and Israel already are to being a single state. In any case, what's left of Palestine and is on offer as a Palestinian state isn't much and could never function as an independent state. The quicker we realize this and start working towards peace accordingly, the quicker the violence will end and the quicker we (Jews and Arabs alike) can get to making the Middle East a good place to live again.

Retired US General speaks out against "Israel's crimes"

2008-03-11T22:41:00.001+01:00

Via Weiss, the conservative Washington Times surprisingly prints a letter by a retired Army general in Georgia on why the US should stop funding Israel:

At least 20 Palestinians, including four children playing soccer, were killed by the Israeli military in a one-day missile barrage ("Israeli air strikes kill 20," World, Feb. 29). These deaths resulted when Israel retaliated for the death of one Israeli college student from Palestinian rocket fire outside Sderot, Israel, the day before — after Israeli missiles had killed 12 Palestinians on the previous day.
It seems that this seesaw retaliation will never end, not as long as Israel continues its brutal and illegal occupation.
The Senate and House Appropriations subcommittees on state, foreign operations and related programs are preparing to vote on President Bush's $30 billion increase in military aid to Israel, which currently receives approximately $3.3 billion in annual federal aid.
Mr. Bush promised in his State of the Union address that he will end the spending of taxpayer money on "wasteful or bloated" programs. Not only is this additional foreign aid to Israel a "wasteful and bloated" program, but it also is illegal and immoral. It's illegal because Israel uses this military aid in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and Foreign Assistance Act to violate the human rights of Palestinians through its brutal military occupation and siege of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. It's immoral because the Israeli siege and occupation of Palestinians — and the humanitarian crises they are causing — are enforced with U.S. weapons, making every U.S. taxpayer an accessory to Israel's crimes.
We don't have the money to fix falling bridges in America, but it seems we always have enough money when it comes to Israel.
BRIG. GEN. JAMES J. DAVID
Army (retired)

Paris breaks political impasse in Lebanon

2008-03-10T12:40:00.006+01:00

I'd like to offer a solution to the political impasse as presented by a friend of mine in Paris. I've translated it into English for the Anglophone audience, but the original can be found in the comments of the previous post:

The example of Lebanon inspires new political choices for me which consist of fighting to eliminate the presidential office. The revolution did not finish the job; it was necessary to cut off the head of the state; the only president of this country will remain a cheese.

I also think that since Lebanon can't find itself a capable man to rally all the parties behind him, it's making a recruiting error, for because this man doesn't exist, it's necessary to widen the recruitment to other species: animals, vegetables or maybe an object, a machine, something that symbolizes Lebanon, a new totem.

The list is long. What do you think about an octopus, a cedar, a Mercedes, a 4x4, a fork, a chick pea or a lubbia?

I know that N has a preference for donkeys, and maybe that isn't such a bad idea. It's a hardy animal that can carry heavy loads upon its shoulders without ever complaining.

I think you guys need a donkey. It's a noble animal that we must reclaim. Furthermore, that would allow the beginning of a new collection of stickers for parties and colors. I'll trade you my Hezbollah donkey for your Lebanese Forces carrot.

I don't know if my modest contribution will allow the country to get out of this crisis, but if you think it's useful, spread the word, because we never know, the world's going crazy, so let's take it at its word and enjoy it.

Classy Saudis

2008-03-08T10:05:00.001+01:00

Thursday night there was a peaceful protest in solidarity with Gazans on the beach in West Beirut. The events included poetry reading, live music (traditional and hib hob), a painting, candle lighting and finally a traditional Palestinian debke dance performance. The crowd wasn't enormous, but it was a good gathering nonetheless.

Now, I've never known the Lebanese government to be punctual about anything, and especially not about electing a president. But the protest's permit was for until 8 pm, and when the second hand hit 12, the army came down like clockwork to tell the protesters that they had to leave. It seems that the Saudi ambassador, whose apartment is among those lining the overpriced and unlit towers that line the sea, was responsible for such punctuality. I was wondering if he was acting as a member of the rich Gulf residents of Ramlet al-Bayda annoyed with debke music wafting in from the sea or as the Saudi representative who's hostile to Gaza because of Iran's sponsorship of Hamas. I can't say for sure, but I have a feeling that it's probably a bit of both.

A reminder

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

The conservative blogosphere is full of armchair quarterbacks and Middle East "experts" (see comments) who are fond of telling us about Arab propaganda and accusing the "MSM" of toeing the "terrorist" line. So from time to time, it's a good idea to drop in on the Israeli side of the beat:

Today's memo from the Israel Defense Forces censorship office:
1. Real-time reports on the exact locations of rocket hits are strictly prohibited. Reports, on delayed-time, of exact locations must always be approved by the IDF Censor.
2. The IDF Censor will not authorize reports of rocket hits at IDF bases and/or strategic installations.
3. The IDF Censor will not authorize reporting on rockets that fell into the Mediterranean Sea.
4. The IDF Censor will not authorize photographs of rockets with identifying marks.
5. The IDF Censor will not authorize reports regarding visits by senior Israel Government officials and IDF officer in southern Israel.
6. The IDF Censor will not authorize information on exploded terrorist ordinance or any other malfunctioning ordinance.
7. Panoramic, wide-angle, etc. photographs of rocket hits are strictly prohibited.
Please ensure that all staff members are aware of the foregoing.
The foregoing does not obviate the obligation to submit to the IDF Censor – prior to publication – of any news item regarding rocket hits or any other subject that must be approved by the IDF Censor.

When complaining about a militant guerilla organization's restrictions on reporting, I think it's only fair to recall that the other side actually has a censorship office.

The danger of precedent

2008-03-05T09:19:00.001+01:00

I'm sure someone else has noticed it, but I think it's important to note the dangerous precedent set by the Bush doctrine of preventative war and the ensuing "war on terror." American allies in Turkey and Colombia have taken advantage of this precedent to conduct their own cross-border attacks into Iraq and Ecuador, respectively.

One can empathize with the tough situation that Ankara and Bogotá are in with the PKK and FARC without accepting the idea that they can invade neighboring countries. This is a problem that's endemic in Africa, where terrorist and rebel groups are tools of statecraft used by neighboring regimes to weaken their enemies. So in Khartoum, Chadian and Ugandan rebels are supplied. Addis Ababa supports rebels in Darfur, Asmara supports Somali rebellions in Ogaden, and Kampala returns the Sudanese favor by supporting the South and Darfur against the center in Khartoum. And let's not even bring up central Africa.

Let's hope that South America doesn't break into the same dirty pattern. Although Colombian accusations that Chávez has been supporting FARC and his response that he'd invade Colombia if Bogotá tried the same thing on the Venezuelan border as just happened on the Ecuadorian side are bad news for stability in the region:

[Colombian ambassador] Mr. Ospina said that, in addition to the alleged payment by Mr. Chavez, the information found on the laptops that Colombian troops seized indicated that President Rafael Correa’s government had met several times with the FARC and allowed them to set up permanent bases in Ecuadorean territory. He said Colombia would seek charges against President Chávez at the International Criminal Court.
“There is not the least doubt that the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador have been negotiating with terrorists,” Mr. Ospina said. “Allowing terrorist groups to keep camps on their territory border for the planning and execution of terrorist acts is a crime and a clear violation of international treaties.” Television in Venezuela also broadcast images of tank battalions heading to the border, following a threat by Mr. Chávez on Sunday that Colombia would be inviting war if it carried out an incursion in Venezuela similar to the one on Saturday in a remote Amazonian province of Ecuador that killed 21 guerrillas.
Mr. Chávez’s threat, which included a taunt that Venezuela would use its Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets to attack Colombia, has been interpreted here as a sign that Mr. Chávez stands ready to defend the FARC, a group classified as terrorists in the United States and Europe that is reported to operate without hindrance along Venezuela’s porous 1,300-mile border with Colombia.
Contrasting the FARC’s image in Colombia as a group that finances itself through cocaine trafficking and abductions and still plants land mines in rural areas, documentaries on state television here in Venezuela portray the FARC as an insurgency born out of efforts to combat Colombia’s moneyed elite.
On his Sunday television program, Mr. Chávez went further by calling for a minute of silence to mourn for Mr. Reyes, the fallen guerrilla leader whose real name was Luis Édgar Devia.

If we add to the Colombian and Turkish examples, the Ethiopians in Somalia, a clear pattern of US allies taking advantage of the doctrine of preventative war becomes clear. So while it's important to note that cross border raids are not new by any means, due to the American invasion of Iraq they've probably become more common and more defensible by US allies the world over.

I love you when you're not here

2008-03-04T18:38:00.001+01:00

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Israel threatens Gazans with a "shoah"

2008-03-01T09:29:00.001+01:00

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.
The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."
Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings."

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

My saber's bigger than yours

2008-02-29T16:49:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I forget that I live by the sea. It's easy enough to do, what with Beirut traffic, honking horns and the city's urban brown and grey. Usually, I'm reminded by a glimpse of the Mediterranean from Ras Beirut, which sometimes prompts me to take a stroll on the corniche to smell the water.

Today, however, I was reminded by a taxi driver talking about the USS Cole, the US carrier that was attacked in Yemen and has now been deployed off the coast of Lebanon. No one I talked to today thought that the ship would actually do anything. Everyone seemed to agree that it was just a show of force by the US.

One Hezbollah partisan from Saida told me that if there were a war and the USS Cole was involved, it would be sunk. Then again, he also told me that he thought the Party of God would not only defeat Israel again this summer but also destroy the Jewish state. (I had to stop myself from laughing when he spoke of Hezbollah's 1 million troops, which would make up one in every four Lebanese citizens.)

In any case, no one seemed excited about the ship's presence in the area. A colleague of mine, an American-Lebanese Christian mother of four who supports March 14, also told me that she thought it was a bad idea.

At the end of the day, I think we've already got enough saber rattling here, and adding the noise of an additional and enormous American saber to the mix is probably the last thing we need here. Ironically, however, the US Navy's stated rationale for the deployment is stability.

Obama and Israel

2008-02-28T09:47:00.001+01:00

I've been thinking about why I like Obama so much lately and why, for the first time in my life, I'm actually excited about a presidential candidate. One of the reasons is that Samantha Power, for whom I have enormous respect as a scholar of genocide, is part of his foreign policy team. Another reason is that, perhaps naively, I feel like Obama would do his best to push the US toward being a more even-handed moderator in the Middle East.

Here's an excerpt from an event in Ohio where he talked to Cleveland's Jewish community. There's a lot of gentle reassuring about how he's a friend to Israel and even some talk about keeping Israel a Jewish state and continuing to arm it, two things that I disagree with vehemently. There are a lot of fundamental points in his position that I don't agree with, but these days it's hard to find anyone, much less a serious contender for the White House, who agrees with me on the one-state solution. Obama's views on Israel seem to me to be the least insane of all the candidates -- and even borderline reasonable. It's important to me that he has the balls to say, publicly and in front of a Jewish audience no less, that there's a difference between being a friend to Israel and toeing the Likud line:

OBAMA: There is a spectrum of views in terms of how the US and Israel should be interacting. It has evolved over time. It means that somebody like Brzezinski who, when he was national security advisor would be considered not outside of the mainstream in terms of his perspective on these issues, is now considered by many in the Jewish Community anathema. I know Brzezinski he's not one of my key advisors. I've had lunch with him once, I've exchanged emails with him maybe 3 times. He came to Iowa to introduce for a speech on Iraq. He and I agree that Iraq was an enormous strategic blunder and that input from him has been useful in assessing Iraq, as well as Pakistan, where actually, traditionally, if you will recall he was considered a hawk. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party was very suspicious of Brzezinski precisely because he was so tough on many of these issues. I do not share his views with respect to Israel. I have said so clearly and unequivocally. The others that you refer to are former members of the Clinton administration. Somebody like a Tony Lake, the former National Security Adviser, or Susan Rice - these are not anti-Israel individuals. These are people who strongly believe in Israel's right to exist. Strongly believe in a two state solution. Strongly believe that the Palestinians have been irresponsible and have been strongly critical of them. Share my view that Israel has to remain a Jewish state, that the US has a special relationship with the Jewish state. There's no inkling that there has been anything in anything that they've written that would suggest they're not stalwart friends of Israel.
This is where I get to be honest and I hope I'm not out of school here. I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have a honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress. And frankly some of the commentary that I've seen which suggests guilt by association or the notion that unless we are never ever going to ask any difficult questions about how we move peace forward or secure Israel that is non military or non belligerent or doesn't talk about just crushing the opposition that that somehow is being soft or anti-Israel, I think we're going to have problems moving forward. And that I think is something we have to have an honest dialogue about. None of these emails talk about the fact that on the other side, members of my national finance committee, like Lester Crown, are considered about has hawkish and tough when it comes to Israel as anybody in the country. So, there's got to be some balance here. I've got a range of perspectives and a range of advisors who approach this issue. They would all be considered well within the mainstream of that bipartisan consensus that I raised or that we talked about in terms of being pro-Israel. There's never been any of my advisors who questioned the need for us to provide Israel with security, with military aid, with economic aid. That there has to be a two state solution, that Israel has to remain a Jewish state. None of my advisors would suggest that, so I think its important to keep some of these things in perspective. I understand people's concern with Brzezinski given how much offense the Israeli lobby raised, but he's not one of my central advisors. There is an article in Newsweek, not to make this overly political, this issue that shows that there has been a fairly systemic effort on the part of some of my opponent's supporters, I wont say it was sanctioned from the top, to constantly feed this suspicion, and I want people to take my words and my track record of years on this issue to heart. I got to admit this one is a plan.

As for Clinton, Tony Karon brings up an interesting, and depressing, comment by someone in the Clinton campaign:

I love this line from one of Hillary’s campaign organizers in response to Obama being quoted as saying he wanted “an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows between Muslims and the West” — Daphna Ziman, a friend of Clinton’s who has organized campaign events for her, responded, “I am horrified at Mr. Obama’s point of view.” Enough said.

I don't think that things are going to magically become hunky dory between the US and the Middle East if Obama is elected president, but I feel that they'll get significantly better. I'm unsure, however, of how much of that is tied to the idea that in these dark times it's hard to imagine how things could get much worse (but they can always get worse).

A monopoly on violence

2008-02-23T18:11:00.001+01:00

Hassan Nasrallah spoke this week, making this disconcerting remark:

I tell the shallow minds in Lebanon, who speak about war and peace decisions, that Israel is the only side that has been taking the decision of war or peace. The decision that we take is our legitimate, moral, humane and natural right in order to defend our people, land and country at a time of negligence by the government and the world.

While this is true to a limited extent, there are times when it takes two to tango, and now is one of those times. We know that the assassination of Mughniyeh was an escalation in the region, but we also know that there's a very high chance that if/when Hezbollah retaliates against Israel, Israel will attack Lebanon again.

Many Hezbollah partisans argue that it's their "right" to retaliate and generally agree that Israel would react to an assassinated ambassador, for example, with an attack on Lebanon. They have a tougher time, however, answering my question as to whether or not exercising their "right" to retaliate is worth plunging the country into another war.

Likewise, when I ask whether the rest of the country (as opposed to just the cadres of Hezbollah) ought not have a say in such a decision, these partisans generally insist (with an obstinate attitude that certainly is representative of Lebanese politics) that they do represent the whole country.

During the July war, one could still plausibly say that the brutal Israeli reaction was unexpected. In 2008, however, almost no one seems to doubt what the consequences of retaliation against Israel would mean for Lebanon. Regardless of whether or not another Israeli war would be legitimate, it certainly won't be unexpected. And I haven't been able to find anyone who's willing to come out and say that avenging the assassination of Mughniyeh is worth the lives of another thousand Lebanese people.

The ubiquitous man

2008-02-23T17:47:00.001+01:00

In another bid to see who can talk up Imad Mughniyeh the most as super terrorist extraordinaire (which was, until recently, mainly a contest between Hezbollah and Israel), an-Nahar's English-language site is now claiming that he was, in fact, responsible for the founding of the Mehdi Army in Iraq. While I'm no expert on the Mehdi Army, this claim seems more than a little over the top to me.

I'm just waiting to hear the news that Mughniyeh was also responsible for Pearl Harbor and all those bombings in Corsica and Spanish Basque country.

For a much more sober, and informed, view of the situation, I recommend this Newshour interview with Mohamad Bazzi and Robert Baer.

Kisumu, indeed

2008-02-23T17:29:00.001+01:00

Kristof has a disturbing op-ed in the Times about violence in Kenya. It's hard to know if things are getting better or worse there, and a brief talk with a European journalist friend who just got back from Nairobi doesn't clear matters up much. When I was in Ethiopia, I didn't hear much anything about Kenya, although that's really neither here nor there, since the family I was staying with didn't seem very preoccupied with foreign affairs, with the exception of Eritrea (the mother was originally from Asmara).

In any case, Kristof recounts some pretty gruesome stuff (which honestly sounds a little sensationalist), including the decapitation of infants and forced circumcision with a machete:

Until he was circumcised with a machete in front of a jeering mob and then dragged off to be beheaded, Robert Ochieng had been a symbol of modern, post-tribal harmony in Kenya.
A member of the Luo ethnic group, 16-year-old Robert had played and studied with members of another ethnic group, the Kikuyu. They were friends. And then Kenya erupted in rioting after a rigged election, and suddenly Luos were chasing and killing Kikuyus, and a mob of Kikuyus was running down Robert.
He claimed that he was Kikuyu as well, but the suspicious mob stripped him naked and noted that he was not circumcised, meaning that he could not be Kikuyu. That’s when his attackers held him down — smashing his arm when he tried to protect himself — and performed the grotesque surgery in the street to loud cheers from a huge throng.
The crowd shouted war cries and was preparing to decapitate Robert with a machete when the police arrived and rescued him.

The main thrust of his column though isn't just to describe the violence there but rather to bring attention to the idea that US acquiescence "in election irregularities in countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria, inadvertently signal[ed] that Mr. Kibaki could get away with stealing re-election."

He likens Kibaki to an African Musharraf, and while his tone in the column sounds a little too Manichaean for my taste, it is true that the US has a bad habit of supporting undemocratic leaders when it suits its immediate needs without much foresight when it comes to the consequences of that undemocratic rule.

By the by, ICG has a new report out about the situation that's worth reading.

Car bombs, protests and earthquakes for 200, please

2008-02-15T09:54:00.006+01:00

I've been missing in action for a while, even after my trip to Ethiopia, which I'll have a lot more on later.

Since I've been back, however, a lot has happened. Imad Mughniya was killed in a car bomb in Damascus (shortly after Michael Totten said I was one of the "notorious leftists who endlessly excuses Hezbollah" and accused me of spreading propaganda when I mentioned that car bombs were used by the American side as well in the comments here). Yesterday was the third anniversary of Hariri's assassination. And finally, there was just a small earthquake (more of a tremor, really) here in Beirut.

I don't have much to say about the first topic, but I will say that I always feel uncomfortable with any kind of extra-judicial killing and assassination, no matter whom it's done by. Also, this seems to be either a very serious breach of Syrian security or evidence that Damascus gave the Israelis or Americans the ok to carry out the attack as part of a larger deal. In any case, it signals an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's an external (outside of Lebanon and Israel) attack against Israeli (or even American) interests. After all, the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing in Argentina was retaliation for the assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Abbas al-Musawi, who was replaced by Nasrallah. Such escalation is always a bad thing for all parties involved.

As for the February 14 event, I went downtown to give it a look as Geagea was speaking, and it wasn't too big, although I didn't show up until about noon. One big reason for this was that it was rainy and cold. I was a bit worried about clashes arising last night between mourners of Hariri and Mughniya, but the cold rain was probably a blessing in disguise in that it's hard to get riled up to go out looking for trouble when you're soaking wet.

Finally, the earthquake: I didn't feel it, but I heard a rumble. All of my colleagues seem to have felt it, which might just mean that I'm insensitive, so to speak.

It's just occurred to me that there aren't very many places in the world where I could post about an earthquake, a car bomb and a protest against an assassination in the same piece. How's that for potpourri, Alex Trebek?

Some brief reflections on Yemen

2008-01-31T08:18:00.000+01:00

Now that I've spent two nights in Sana'a, I'm disappointed that I don't have more time in this wonderful country. It's somehow now what I expected, although it's really hard to say exactly what I expeceted.

A few months ago, the major cities of Yemen were made gun free. Apparently, before that, the city was full of gun toting Yemenis. In the space of two months or so though, the government set up checkpoints at the entrance of cities people can leave their guns and then pick them back up again on the way out. I'm not really sure what the policy is inside the cities, whether people's guns were confiscated or just have to be left at home, but I haven't seen a single person in the street carrying a firearm.

Those in Lebanon will be unhappy to hear that there are no electricity cuts in Yemen's capital and DSL internet is already available in Sana'a for much less than one pays for a much slower connection in Beirut. The taxis are also much newer, and many of them even have meters. So while there are men walking around in dishdashas carrying curved daggers on their belt, some things in Sana'a are closer to western standards than they are in Lebanon.

I went to a couple of parties last night, and the first had one of the strangest mixtures of people I've ever seen in my life. It was the birthday party of an American girl studying Arabic here, and I went with another American living here, an American-Yemeni basketball player and a Norwegian researcher. Before getting to the party, we went to a Chinese restaurant where an Ethiopian guy sold contraband alcohol, so we picket up a bottle of vodka for the occassion, which cost us about $25. When we arrived, I met a guy from Madagascar who spoke with me in French. But then when he heard that the Yemeni basketball player was from Brooklyn, he shouted, "Fo real!? Nigga, I'm from Jersey City!" in a New York accent. Then there was James/Mohamad, the former white Crip from Florida who converted to Islam in jail when he was a teenager and told me a story about having almost shot a Black Muslim in Atlanta, because he had called him a "devil" when James refused to respond to his as-salam aleikum. He moved to Sada to study Islam seven years ago but is now living in Sana'a, doing what I was afraid to ask.

After that, we went to a dance party at the US embassy, where our Yemeni-American friend was amazingly allowed to enter without any identification. It was some sort of semi-regular dance party that was frequented by westerners who were working in NGOs, UN gigs, private companies and probably other embassies. There were also a fair amount of western expats, some girls from Djibouti and ethiopia who may or may not have been prostitutes, and some young hip Yemenis. After that, we went to a Russian club and then a Lebanese one, where we were accosted by a young woman who looked like she was out in Monot dancing with her cleavage open and her midrift showing. It turned out that she wasn't Lebanese at all, but rather totally Yemeni. It wasn't until after a bit of naively receiving her very forward attention that I realized she was a prostitute. After she asked me for $200, I told her that in Beirut where I live, all the women were as pretty as she was, but you didn't have to pay them to go out with you. She, of course, lost interest in me almost immediately. The place seemed to be full of foreigners studying Arabic and prostitues from Yemen, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

I'll have to post later about chewing qat. But so far, I'll just say that I don't really like it. It's more or less bitter, depending on the type of leaf, and honestly just feels like chewing a mouthful of leaves. I left it in for a couple of hours but didn't feel anything, which is apparently common the first few times you try it. I'm sure I'll have the occasion to try some more in Ethiopia, and I suppose I will, but so far, keeping such a big wad of cud in my mouth seems more like a chore than anything else.

Téléphone cassé: another bomb in Beirut

2008-01-25T09:47:00.000+01:00

I was just watching OTV, and they showed footage of the latest explosion in the Chevrolet neighborhood just north of Beirut. It was a huge explosion, and I saw at least 3 or 4 mangled bodies, some still in cars, others with their gory limbs strewn about on the ground.

Naharnet has an updating banner that says that the target was an Internal Security Forces (ISF) vehicle and that "a senior security officer was targeted." Now they're being more precise and saying that it was Captain Wissam Eid, who has a high-ish position in the darak (security forces). It's also being said that there was an unnamed judicial official among the victims.

Everyone always speaks of a "message" that's being relayed by this bomb or that. Perhaps I'm just daft, but I don't know what these messages are, to whom they're addressed or from whom they're postmarked. It's like playing the telephone game (téléphone cassé, if you're from Lebanon) where a message gets sent down a chain of whispering kids until it's unintelligible at the end. The only difference is that instead of whispers and kids, it's car bombs and mangled corpses.

If the Naharnet count is right, we can chalk up ten dead people today in the game of téléphone cassé.

Travel plans

2008-01-24T12:07:00.000+01:00

I'll be leaving on Sunday for Yemen and then Ethiopia. I've been pretty lax about posting lately due to my enormous workload, but I'm almost over the hump. I'm not sure what the internet connections will look like in Sana'a and Addis Ababa, but provided that I can get access to the internet, I'll do my best to post while I'm away.

American target attacked: another Beirut car bomb

2008-01-15T21:12:00.001+01:00

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

The suffering Kenyan grass

2008-01-14T20:11:00.001+01:00

I've seen a lot of stories about the violence in Kenya, and most have been lacking in depth and context. I was relieved, then, to find that PBS's Frontline has a dispatch from the Kenyan journalist, Edwin Okong'o on the tribal politics of Kenya and the violence that has ensued over the recent contested election. There isn't really a money quote; the issues Okong'o recounts don't lend themselves to blog-bytes. Read the whole thing.

Hitler and his "socialism"

2008-01-14T16:49:00.001+01:00

While doing some light reading this afternoon in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I came across another reference that might be useful in thinking about Jonah Goldberg's new book, in which he argues, grosso modo, that since Nazis were called "National Socialists," fascism was and always has been a leftist affair.

Shirer, in the section entitled "The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich" in his first definitive history of Nazi Germany has this to say about Hitler's economic plans (pp. 93-4 in the Folio edition):

On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler's ideas in Mein Kampf are less consise [than his ideas on the German Volk's expansion]. He made it clear enough that there would be no 'democratic nonsense' and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the Fuehreprinzip, the leadership principle -- that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against 'interest slavery'.

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

The state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development ... The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization ... The inner strength of a state coincides only in the rarest cases with so-called economic prosperity; the latter, in innumerable cases, seems to indicate the state's approaching decline ... Prussia demonstrates with marvelous sharpness that not material qualities but ideal virtues alone make possible the formation of a state. Only under their protection can economic life flourish. Always when in Germany there was an upsurge of political power the economic conditions began to improve; but always when economics became the sole content of our people's life, stifling the ideal virtues, the state collapsed and in a short time drew economic life with it ... Never yet has a state been founded by peaceful economic means ...

Therefore, as Hutler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, 'no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power'. Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in Mein Kampf to 'economic parliament' which 'would keep the national economy functioning', Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as 'socialist', Hitler was even more vague on the kind of 'socialism' he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a defintion of a 'socialist' which he gave in a speech on July 29, 1922:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood out great national anthem, 'Deutschland ueber Alles', to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land -- that man is a Socialist.

So according to Shiher, Hitler, for all intents and purposes, didn't think much at all about an economic policy and hoped the issue "could somehow sort itself out." Further, when he talked of National Socialism, he seemed to be talking much more about nationalism than about socialism, so much so, in fact, that his own idea of what a socialist is was equivalent to being a German nationalist.

While these sentiments are certainly totalitarian, they don't seem to have much in common with liberalism or the left.

Later on, Shiher makes an interesting point that bolsters my third point from yesterday (p. 94):

The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, [Hitler] states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that 'marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.'

Again, as noted by one of Jonah's readers, as well as myself, if one were to insist on tying this rhetoric to either the left or the right in contemporary American politics, it would be much closer to the right. But that's just the point: pace Goldberg, pushing for the Healthy Marriage Initiative doesn't make the Bush administration or its Republican supporters in Congress fascist.

Jonah Goldberg: "I know you are, but what am I?"

2008-01-14T08:21:00.001+01:00

Because I am apparently incapable of letting lying dogs lie, I wrote to Jonah Goldberg last night, enumerating some of my problems with what I understand to be the main points of his book. He wrote back in "a somewhat snarky note" (his words, not mine) saying that my message was an "absurdly long email with lots of throat clearing and name-dropping."

It's ironic to me how Jonah seem to confuse "name-dropping" with reference. In the academic world, that's how research works, by referencing relevant scholarship. Incidentally, I mentioned Walter Laqueur, Michael Mann and Roger Griffin, because I was quoting from their definitions of fascism, as well as Hannah Arendt, because her understanding of totalitarianism is important and relevant to Jonah's confused argument. If he'd like to know what name dropping sounds like, he should take a look a little closer to home (interestingly enough, I had to subscribe to his blog's feed to find that link, because the archives seem to be closed, at least to my IP address):

There are lots of quotes from historians and intellectuals I could have used to back up my various arguments, particularly from Gregor, J.P. Diggins, Michael Ledeen, Friedrich Hayek, Gene Edward Veith, Ludwig von Mises and, perhaps most of all, Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn. That I didn't discuss their ideas and arguments at length should not be mistaken for a lack of influence on my thinking.

When you use a scholar's work and give him or her credit, that's called research. When you quite literally write a list of people's names without saying anything about their ideas, that's name dropping.

In his message, and later on his blog, Jonah insists that I suggest that "it's right to call American conservatives fascists," which just isn't true. That's a straw man; unlike Jonah, I haven't called anyone a fascist. It just so happens that my academic field is ethnic cleansing and genocide, so I really don't appreciate the misuse of terms like fascism and genocide, a phenomenon that Jonah purports to be combating with a book that mirrors that misuse. It just so happens that in his appearance on C-Span, in a moment of intellectual honesty and good faith, he had the following to say about his book:

One of the points of the book is this revisionist history, basically, not to put too an un-intellectual point on it, is to say, "I know you are but what am I?" I mean there is some of that, I will grant you, because I'm sick of being called a fascist.

Really, I'm not making that money quote up. That's actually what he says, verbatim, and you can check the video (about 1:24 in) for yourself (via Crooks and Liars).

I'll respond later to his substantial charges, but in the meantime, his response is here and my original message reads as follows:

Dear Jonah,

You've mentioned that you'd appreciate constructive criticism and thoughtful engagement from liberals, so I decided that I'd drop you a note. I've got a few points (some more important than others) that I'd like to make:

1. On your blog, you often disparage comments by liberals who haven't yet read your book in its entirety; however, you've put up several positive notes from presumably conservative correspondents who have also not read the book. Doesn't this seem a little contradictory to you?

2. Your book isn't on sale in Beirut, where I live, so I can't give it a look. This means that in order to give your argument a fair shake, I'm limited to your blog, the Salon interview, the book's jacket and your Heritage talk. I suppose in order for me to fully understand your book, I'd have to know, at a bare minimum, exactly how you define fascism and liberalism. This is an important point, and perhaps if you were to explicitly state the definitions you're basing your argument off of, people would have a better time engaging it. As it is, the way you talk about liberalism and fascism seems fairly fuzzy. (You might just say, "read the book," and fair enough, but if you're truly interested in engaging people who may not have the time or inclination to read 500 pages of your argument, this might be a good way to get the ball rolling.)

3. In the Salon interview, you state, "you have environmental groups giving out kits and instructions about how to have environmentally conscious sex. You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in. That kind of thing doesn't really go on." This seems exactly backwards to me. I've never heard of any liberal groups in the US trying to codify sexual behavior. On the contrary, the liberal position has been that the government should stay out of the bedroom. On the other hand, conservative groups, particularly religious ones, have traditionally supported laws like the anti-sodomy law that was ruled unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas.

4. I listened to your Heritage talk, and your comment near the beginning struck me: "Except for the murder, bigotry and genocide, what is it exactly that you don't like about Nazism?" I think that this is the heart of the issue, but perhaps not in the way you might believe it is. What made the Nazis terrible wasn't their views on animal rights, vegetarianism or even economic policy; it was precisely the "murder, bigotry and genocide." Unless you're arguing for a causal relationship between things like vegetarianism and genocide, I'm not really sure I understand why it's important that Hitler didn't eat meat. The things you mention in your talk and Salon interview, and presumably in your book, seem to me to be neither here nor there. Consequently, due to their (at most) tangential relationship to what makes fascism historically important, none of these things is mentioned in the definitions of fascism that I'm familiar with.

For example, Walter Laqueur, in his book Fascism (p. 22), states, "Fascism was, above all, nationalist, elitist, and antiliberal. It was militarist, and whenever the country it occupied was sufficiently strong, it advocated imperialism and territorial expansion." Earlier, he says it would be hard to improve on Roger Griffon's definition, which states that fascism is a "genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of popular ultra nationalism." In his books Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann, for his part, defines fascism as "essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramiliary and state violence to 'knock both their heads [labor and capital] together.'" None of these conceptions of the fundamental essence of fascism include views on animal rights or whole foods. That's because, ideologically, vegetarianism was not a very important part of Nazi doctrine. On the other hand, Mann finds four essential features of fascism: a cleansing form of nationalism, statism, a class transcendence, and paramileratism. The second and fourth features can apply to nearly any ideology (in the case of statism, depending on what sphere is controlled by the state: economic, social, personal, etc.) of the right or left, whereas the third is diametrically opposed to socialist thinking. Finally, the first (and arguably most important) feature is markedly absent from liberal thought but usually a large part of contemporary conservative thought.

5. If, as Arendt has shown, both the left and right can lead to different incarnations of totalitarianism, it seems disingenuous to imply that all instances of state control are equal, and equally totalitarian. I don't think you'd argue that banning the use of iPods while crossing the street is as pernicious as, say, suspending habeas corpus and reserving the right of the executive branch to use "coercive interrogation techniques" on people being indefinitely detained without access to a court of law. All state interventions into the lives of the citizenship are not equivalent.

6. Finally, you make it a point of stressing that you're not accusing liberals of being fascists; but if that's not what you're doing, then I suppose I don't really understand what the point of your book is. If someone lists the points that I have in common with a serial killer, it's not really important unless those traits lead to killing people. If Jeffrey Dahmer and I both enjoyed chocolate ice cream and preferred spy novels to period fiction, it doesn't hold that I would share, in any way shape or form, the features that make Dahmer exceptional: being a cannibalistic murderer. To list our shared interests, then, is either to imply that I might share in his murderous tendency or to merely make a list of useless trivia. Neither seems very intellectually serious or interesting to me.

Looking forward to your response,
Sean

Geese in the Middle East

2008-01-10T14:31:00.000+01:00

Back July 2006, Israel was "just defending itself" while laying waste to Lebanon after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. However Israel is mystified when two rockets are fired from the South of Lebanon into Israeli territory this week. To hear Haaretz tell it, those rockets just came out of the blue for no good reason:

Earlier Tuesday, Israel filed a severe complaint with the United Nations Security Council and with Ban over the Katyusha firing.

The rockets struck the western Galilee town of Shlomi early Tuesday morning, causing no injuries. One of the rockets lightly damaged a house, and the second hit a street in the twon. Army Radio reported that the second rocket damaged an electricity pole.

The complaint called the rocket fire a severe violation of Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the Second Lebanon War to an end.

According to the complaint, the rocket fire was additional evidence the resolution has yet to be fully implemented and therefore there is still a threat to Israel...

In the whole article there isn't a single mention of the shepherd Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal, who was kidnapped the day before by the IDF:

The Israeli military said it had detained a man crossing the border with Lebanon.
"During an IDF (Israeli army) activity a suspect was identified crossing the Blue Line into Israel. He was arrested inside Israel and has been taken in for questioning," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.
She declined to give the suspect's nationality but said he was not Israeli.
However, a Lebanese security source told AFP the Israeli soldiers had abducted a man they named as Fadi Ahmad Abdel Aal inside Lebanon and "brought him inside Israel with them.
"The soldiers made an incursion of 100 metres (yards) to reach agricultural land where they found the shepherd," the source said on condition of anonymity.
The UN peacekeeping force said it had been informed of the incident by the Israeli military.
"UNIFIL has been informed by the IDF that they have apprehended a Lebanese citizen and we are in contact with them in order to resolve the situation as soon as possible," UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane told AFP.
Israeli forces have in the past seized Lebanese shepherds along the border and taken them for questioning over possible links with Hezbollah militants. They are usually released after questioning.

So let's just recap here: in 2006, two Israeli soldiers are captured by Hezbollah, and that warrants a month-long spasm of bombs that killed over 1,000 civilians. This week, a Lebanese shepherd is "detained" (not to say kidnapped) by the IDF, and when two rockets are fired into Israel resulting in no casualties, this is "evidence" that "there is still a threat to Israel."

When it comes to Israel, what's good for the goose, it seems, is not good for the gander.

Kenya and Rwanda

2008-01-05T20:44:00.001+01:00

Every time I've seen Kenya coverage on CNN over the last few days, they've played a snippet of video that shows a man with a machete scraping it along the ground while chaos looms behind him. These images, and especially the machete, have become familiar to viewers from recent representations of the Rwandan genocide. Intentionally or not, these images broadcast by CNN have drawn a parallel between the political cum ethnic violence in Kenya and the genocide in Rwanda. I too was shocked when I saw the footage for the first time the other day.

But it's important to remember that Kenya isn't Rwanda, and Ruxin, via Kristof's Times blog, reminds us of the differences:

The weakness of Kenya’s political institutions means that those from whom the election was stolen have zero confidence in the willingness of the courts to intervene to protect a democratic process in the face of self-interested tampering by those in power. Accordingly, the result has been predictable but misdirected violence, literally shutting down the country and leading to tribal massacres eerily reminiscent of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. Luos and Kalenjins have attacked Kikuyus, sometimes demanding identification documents at roadblocks to establish ethnicity. The ramifications of this disastrous turn of events demonstrate that where neither democracy nor economic development are adequately advanced, nations and regions can fall into devastating conflict in a matter of hours.
... Kenya has long been regarded as stable and safe (though deeply corrupt). It’s been a tourist destination for decades, giving millions every year a gorgeous glimpse of African wildlife. The country has been open to investment for decades, and many Kenyan businesses are flourishing. Because of that veneer of stability, foreign news correspondents seem unable to analyze the deteriorating situation in context. Some are seeing, with alarm, a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Even the opposition candidate Odinga, exhibiting a keen instinct for calming the situation, declared that the violence amounts to “genocide on a grand scale.”
That kind of blithe comparison obscures more than it clarifies. If you rely on the foreign press, the parallels with Rwanda may appear striking: violence committed by one tribe against another (in this case, multiple groups against one); rioting characterized by intense brutality and seemingly indiscriminate murder; most horrifically, hundreds of sanctuary seekers burned to death in a locked church. But there, the similarities abruptly end. What is happening now is terrible and horrifying, but it is not the 1994 Rwandan genocide; something else is occurring, a failure to accompany economic development with a concomitant strengthening of the institutions of political democracy.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it is vitally important that we understand the distinctions. In recognizing the differences between Kenya today and Rwanda in 1994, we can understand why this is happening and can begin to fight this particular kind of madness.
And we need to fight it. Rwanda’s genocide was fostered over decades, beginning with the identity cards that Belgian authorities forced the public to carry - cards that identified each citizen as Hutu or Tutsi. The hatred that recognition brought about was only one manifestation of a state-sponsored attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group. This was genocide by government policy, and the directive was carried out with zeal.
However, Kenya’s disaster seems to have hit like a tornado out of thin air. Although it too has roots in the past (including British colonial favoritism of the Kikuyu), it is not controlled or sponsored by the government, which is trying to stop the killing, not promote it. We’re seeing the images of Kenyan police in riot gear, lining Nairobi’s streets and patrolling rural townships to suppress rioters. The government doesn’t benefit at all from rioting largely aimed at it and its allies. Therein lies the reason for the fighting. Even though CNN and other networks called the violence “ethnic cleansing” this morning, what we’re seeing here is not genocide, it is the disenfranchised acting out in the only way they can now that democratic elections have been stolen from them.

For a good background of the end of British Colonialism, both the LRB and NYRB reviewed two books that recently came out about the Mau Mau insurgency, British emergency rule, and colonial concentration camps in Kenya as recently as the 1960s.

Finally

2008-01-04T16:06:00.000+01:00

The last seven years have provided few reasons to be proud of America. Last night, however, is one of the big ones. I can't think of another country in the world where the black son of a Kenyan goat herder can become president. For that, my heart swells a little, over and beyond the Mediterranean until the coasts of the Atlantic.

If you don't want to watch the whole speech, check out the last 3 minutes or so.

The Kenya explosion

2008-01-04T13:36:00.000+01:00

I know very little about Kenya, so I'm not going to open my mouth about what's going on there, except to say that it's been disappointing and surprising to me.

I've mentioned the McClatchey blogs before, but if you haven't already, you should go look at the Africa one, which is based in Nairobi.

In other Africa news, I may go to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks at the end of the of the month, so I've been trying to read up a bit and will hopefully be blogging while there.

Allah is not a trademark

2008-01-02T10:48:00.001+01:00

I've been thinking a fair amount lately about the role that the western media has in breaking down or furthering the misunderstandings and stereotypes held by the "East" and the "West." It goes without saying that sites like MEMRI strengthen the Orientalist view of Arabs, but I've noticed another, perhaps smaller, thing in English language reporting on the Arab world. Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

It seems, however, that this will to linguistically sever the Muslim and Christian god isn't only limited to Westerners or Christians. In this bizarre article the BBC reports that Malaysian Christians are being forbidden to use the word "Allah," despite the fact that in the Malay language, as in Arabic, Allah means God (or the God):

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.
In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.
Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.
[...]
The Sabah Evangelical Church of Borneo has also taken legal action after a government ministry moved to ban the import of religious children's books containing the word.
In a statement given to Reuters news agency, the church said the translation of the bible in which the word Allah appears has been used by Christians since the earliest days of the church.
There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".
"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

This, of course, is ridiculous, and I wonder what Malay word the Malaysian government proposes Christians use instead of Allah.

Fabulist quits NRO

2007-12-24T08:08:00.001+01:00

Via Chris, NRO fabulist W. Thomas Smith Jr. quits doing freelance work for NRO. Kathryn Jean Lopez has this to say in an editor's note.

This is what I had to say about the affair earlier this month when it broke.

Good riddance, I say.

Rosen on Palestinians in Lebanon

2007-12-22T11:21:00.001+01:00

Nir Rosen has a piece on Palestinians in Lebanon in the Post. It doesn't mention the economic discrimination against Palestinians here, who make up around 10% of the population in Lebanon. Nor does it go much into the politics of the camps (NGOs, PLO, Damascus and jihadi groups). But it does give a good overview of Palestinian scapegoating, which reminds me of a conversation with a friend during the Nahr el-Bared fighting when we wondered why it is that whenever Lebanon wants to come together as a country, it's usually at the expense of the Palestinians.

Recent lectures

2007-12-22T09:31:00.001+01:00

In the last week or two, I've seen talks given by Juan Cole and Bernard Rougier. I wasn't sure what to expect from either, because of the sometimes shrill tone of the former and the sensationalist title of the latter's book. (I've got an aversion to books with the word "Jihad" in them.)

In both instances, I was pleasantly surprised. Cole was well spoken and interesting. And although the first part of his talk, which was just a recapping of the last 6 years, was pretty dry and unnecessary for a Middle Eastern audience, his comments during the Q&A were worth listening to the first part of the lecture. One point kind of bugged me, though. He made a point of pointing out Egypt's success in combating Islamist terrorist groups, even going so far as to imply that authoritarian governments might be as good as democratic ones at fighting terrorism. I'm not sure how I feel about that idea, except that my gut instinct is that while authoritarian governments might have more success at crushing these groups due to their freedom of action (not being tied down by human rights concerns, for example), I'm convinced that authoritarian rule is one of the causes of terrorism in the first place. So Egypt's "success" might be only short-term and might end up biting Cairo in the ass later.

As for Rougier, I found his participation on a panel about Palestinian identity and citizenship very interesting. He was accused of being an orientalist and of ignoring who was obviously to blame in the Nahr el-Bared conflict. (It's hard to know what to say when someone tells you that neither Fatah al-Islam nor the Lebanese Army were to blame for Nahr el-Bared, but that rather it was the Americans' fault. Incidentally, this was a comment made by a participant in the talk, not a random crank who'd wandered in because he heard there'd be food.) In any case, Rougier convinced me to go out and buy his book, despite the horrible weakness of the dollar and thus the Lebanese pound compared to the mighty euro. I'll be reading it as soon as I finish the books that are currently on my plate.

Ceci n'est pas un pays

2007-12-19T11:18:00.001+01:00

Roger Cohen has an interesting little piece on Belgium in the Times:

In their grumpy way, Belgians — a majority Dutch-speaking, many French-speaking and a few German-speaking — have been posing a delicate question: does postmodern Europe, where even tiny states feel secure, really need a medium-small nation cobbled together in 1830 whose various communities dislike one another?

Moreover, does a country whose economy is largely run by European central bankers in control of the euro really need a government?
Gerrit Six, a teacher, suggested Belgian obsolescence when he put the country, complete with its busy king and ballooning debt, up for sale on eBay. It drew bids of close to $15 million. That was on day 100 of the political crisis. Belgium is now close to day 200. Italian politics suddenly look stable.
Little Belgium has become too conflicted to rule. It has three regions, three language communities that are not congruent with the regions, a smattering of local parliaments, a mainly French-speaking capital (Brussels) lodged in Dutch-speaking Flanders, a strong current of Flemish nationalism and an uneasy history.

Dutch-speakers, long underdogs in a country without a Flemish university until 1922, are tired of subsidizing their now poorer French-speaking cousins. A successful anti-immigrant and separatist party, Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), is the odious expression of a wider desire to go it alone.
Flemish demands for greater decentralization and control (most recently over French-speaking schools in the Brussels periphery) have raised distrust to a poisonous level. “I am pretty sure Belgium will split eventually,” Caroline Sagesser, a political scientist, told me.
If it holds together, it will be because Brussels, with 10 percent of the population and 20 percent of gross domestic product, is too mixed to unravel. Like Baghdad, like Sarajevo, the capital is improbable but unyielding glue. Unlike them, it has avoided bloodshed. It also houses a modern marvel, the E.U. — and there’s the nub.

I often look at Lebanon and think, in the style of the Belgian surrealist: "this is not a country." Or state or nation, for that matter. Belgium has been without a government for almost 200 days, and Lebanon has been without a president since late last month. But who needs a government anyway?

The Axis of Evil in Beirut

2007-12-06T09:24:00.000+01:00

Last night I went to the Casino du Liban to see Showtime's Middle Eastern-American comedy tour, the Axis of Evil.

The venue was packed, and from what I've heard, it also did very well in Jordan. According to Ahmad Ahmad, even King Abdullah went to see the show in Amman. I'd never been to a comedy show before, so the only point of reference I had was what I'd seen on television, and it was pretty much like that. The jokes ranged from average to hilarious and seemed catered to a westernized Middle Eastern crowd. I'm not sure how many people were familiar with Bob Barker, and I'm sure that jokes on the debkeh would have been lost on much of an American audience. Those who were int he position of being familiar with both cultures were able to laugh at both American and Middle Eastern jokes.

Some of the Bush jokes seemed a little bit like pandering and a little hackneyed for an American audience. And some of the Lebanese jokes were pretty facile (bargaining, driving, "hi keefak, ça va," etc.), but people never seem to get tired of that sort of thing here. The message was, overall, a good one: Arabs are normal people who are capable of poking fun of themselves. For the most part, there was also a nice ecumenical message that welcomed Muslims, Christians and Jews. A nice example of this was the half-Palestinian comedian Aron/Haroun who made it a point of pointing out the similarities of Jews and Arabs, saying that "we're pretty much the same fucking people." (There was one disappointing moment, however, that made me cringe. At one point, Egyptian-American Ahmad Ahmad said that Arabs should be doing more in the entertainment business and that Hollywood was run by... Here he paused to let the audience yell in unison: "Jews!" Unfortunately, it didn't seem to be a joke making fun of people who believe in Jews-run-the-world conspiracies.)

Overall, it was a really good time, and I'm glad I went. The Middle East could use some more comedy, and if my hunch is right, this is the sort of thing that's likely start a stand-up fad in Beirut. Let's hope it's funny.

Not knowing Shi'ite from Shinola

2007-12-05T01:03:00.001+01:00

I generally try to stay away from the National Review. This explains why I didn't see the inane and meretricious "reporting" done by W. Thomas Smith Jr. until today. I've commented here before on ridiculous and sensationalist accounts of Lebanon, but this guy really takes the cake. Smith wrote last September:

Hezbollah is rehearsing for something big here. Not sure what or when. But a few days ago, between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling “show of force,” positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city.

It just so happens that I live on the East side of town in one of the "Christian areas of Beirut," and I can guarantee that Smith's account is laughably untrue. On the day that Smith says Hezbollah "deployed" to East Beirut, I was doing some shopping. I live on the border of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mkhail and went to Sassine and ABC that day (all of which are Christian neighborhoods), and rest assured, there were no Hezbollah militants, much less armed ones, to be seen anywhere. Had what he described been true, there would most likely have been a civil war, or at the very least isolated street fighting. As it was, not only was there no fighting, but not a single journalist in Beirut, foreign or Lebanese, picked up on Hezbollah's alleged "show of force." There's a very simple reason for this: it never happened. If Hezbollah were to deploy a dozen armed militants to Achrafieh, that would be crossing one of Lebanon's red lines. Saying that there were 4,000-5,000 gunmen here is beyond farfetched; it's in the realm of the outlandishly comic.

I've had neither the time, nor the stomach, to wade through all of this guy's Lebanon "coverage," but the few pieces I've opened are risible in their ridiculousness. Here's another example:

Hezbollah are not the only terrorists operating here in Lebanon: There are also Al Qaeda affiliates like Fatah Al Islam (they were not totally wiped out at Nahr al Bared), as well as Jund al Sham (Soldiers of Damascus), Jundallah, Hamas, and — though few Americans are aware of this — operating elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the Lebanese side of the Lebanese-Syrian border. These are just a few of the problem groups here: All operating under the auspices of Hezbollah.

Despite his mistranslation of "Sham," which in this context means Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) and not Damascus, this little excerpt is absurd in that it explicitly says that all of the al-Qaeda-affiliated groups operating in the Palestinian camps, as well as Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are "operating under the auspices of Hezbollah." First of all, no one knows who is connected to the various groups operating in the Palestinian camps. And second of all, anyone who believes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is "under the auspices" of Hezbollah, and not the other way around, obviously knows nothing about either organization.

Smith's scattergun approach to various armed groups in Lebanon is symptomatic of a larger, mostly American, approach to the Middle East, where al-Qaeda equals Hezbollah equals Hamas equals al Qaeda in Iraq equals Jund al-Sham ,etc. This is the kind of thinking that led most Americans to believe that Baghdad had something to do with 9/11 and leaves the defenders of the free world (see also: Reyes and Sarkozy) incapable of distinguishing between Sunnis and Shi'a.

Another fun read is this post, in which Smith brags about doing "reconnaissance" in the Dahiye, the suburbs where Hezbollah is based in Beirut. Or rather this would be funny if it were a satire and I were reading it to friends in Beirut. This guy seems to think that he's in a Chuck Norris movie, which would be fine except for a couple of things. First, this "journalism," in which Smith writes about spying on Hezbollah for pro-Government groups not only makes him sound like a macho asshole, it also casts a shadow of doubt on legitimate journalism done by actual reporters in a country where foreign correspondents are already viewed with an air of suspicion. Second, it makes Beirut sound like a war zone, which it's clearly not.

And then there's this gem. According to Smith, there were "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen — positioned between the parliament and the Serail." As it happens, I've spent a fair amount of time downtown, and this is not the first time I've written about Americans talking about the sit-in protest without knowing what they're talking about. For the last few months, it's been hard to find more than a couple of dozen people at the protest, much less hundreds of armed militants. I have never, I repeat: never, seen any Hezbollah weapons downtown. They may have them down there, but if they do, they're hidden so well that someone who regularly strolls through the camp would not see them. To suggest that he surprised 200 armed militants out in the open while driving over the bridge that connects East and West Beirut is ridiculous.

Finally, ~~Jack Bauer~~ -- I mean W. Thomas Smith Jr. -- gives us a post from an "undisclosed neighborhood":

Lebanon is extremely dangerous for Americans right now. In fact, some top officials within the 1559 Committee (essentially the heart and soul of the Cedars Revolution ... for a free Lebanon) believe some sort of dramatic terrorist event is going to take place here in Lebanon between now and mid-October. This is not a gut feeling, but a calculation based on intelligence analysis and chatter from the street.

Tony Nissi, the 1559 Committee chief here in Beirut (whom you'll recall from previous entries), has reason to believe Hezbollah knows who I am. So I am deliberately not staying in hotels: Instead, I'm spending nights in friends' houses — safe houses if you will — and always with bodyguards.

This one is the funniest of the bunch. If there are only half of the number of Americans in Lebanon now as there were during the July war, there'd still be over 10,000 Americans here, myself included. Beirut is decidedly not unsafe for Americans, unless of course they decide to go play G.I. Joe by arming themselves and doing "reconnaissance." But even if Smith were to get picked up by Hezbollah or the Army for spying (which is basically what he claims he's doing), they'd immediately recognize him for the buffoon that he plainly is. He sounds more like a hapless character out of a Harry Mathews novel than an actual spy, or, God forbid, a journalist.

I could go on for pages about the factual inaccuracy of Smith's reports, but it would just be more of the same. It's amazing to me that NRO published any of Smith's "reports." They are so obviously bullshit that someone must have been asleep at the wheel over there. One of my pet peeves is the writing of partisan hacks who only travel for rhetorical flair, and Smith seems to be more of the same. The difference is that his case is so egregious that he's getting called out on it. There are well respected journalists here in Lebanon and elsewhere who not only know the country intimately but are good writers to boot. Anthony Shadid, Annia Ciezadlo and Mohamad Bazzi are only a few of the names that come to mind. So why is there a need to send Chuck Norris wannabe hacks like Smith who evidently don't know anything about the countries they're ostensibly covering? If NRO wants coverage of Lebanon, there's no dearth of talent already here in Beirut. Insisting on publishing Smith's fabrications in order to toe an ideological line that pays no heed of Lebanon's complex politics only makes NRO look stupid and dishonest.

If you're interested in NRO's response to similar allegations, you can see that here and here.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez, online editor of the National Review has another statement up about Smith (emphasis mine):

With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw.

...the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn't always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas." While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him. That's why we're revisiting the posts in question and warning readers to take them with a grain of salt.

So let me get this straight. Lopez publishes Smith's ridiculous posts that betray a fundamental ignorance of Lebanon and the political situation here, posts which were either made up entirely or fed to him by pro-Government forces, and the problem here is the "Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate."

Wow. I almost don't even know where to start with this one. Maybe she should just throw in another couple of lines about America's mission civilisatrice and the white man's burden and be done with it.

In any case, someone should send her message to Tom Harb, a rabid March 14 supporter in the US, who's supporting Smith wholeheartedly (from Florida, no less) and accusing all of the journalists who have contradicted Smith of being on the Hezbollah payroll. Someone should remind him that his neo-conservative comrades in arms at NRO and elsewhere are fair weather friends to whom, at the end of the day, a wog is a wog, regardless of his political usefulness.

Weekend in the Chouf

2007-12-04T18:30:00.001+01:00

I spent this past weekend in the Chouf mountain, otherwise known as the personal fiefdom of Walid Jumblatt. I was looking forward to visiting the Moukhtara and its beautiful castle, and given the tense situation, I was surprised when my friend told me that conforming to Druze tradition, I could go have tea with and briefly meet Jumblatt -- or even ask him for something. Saturday morning is the time when the Moukhtara is open, and all are given tea while they wait for an audience with Walid Bek.

My timing was off, though, because it seems that US ambassador to Lebanon, Jeffrey Feltman, was due to arrive shortly for a lunch with Jumblatt and no amount of wasta with Jumblatt's private security detail was going to get us in.

One thing that bothers me about Lebanon is the checkpoints. They're a hassle, but given the situation, they seem necessary. What really gets to me though are those run by militias. Any journalist covering the south or Bekaa, or even parts of the Dahiye, are familiar with Hezbollah's stops, although I've never personally had to show my ID to anyone from Hezbollah, and despite my frequent trips to and through the sit-in downtown, I've never seen a member of the party armed.

Now March 14 and its allies are fond of complaining about the "state within a state" that is Hezbollah, but what you hear less about are their own states within a state. (Incidentally, I'm not fond of the expression, because in order for it to be true, there'd have to be a state within which to have a state -- something that just isn't true here.) While there are army checkpoints all around the Moukhtara, the guys with machine guns at the gate are PSP militia. They've got neither badge nor uniform -- their gun and the confidence of Walid being their only license for checking my ID. But these are the higher ranked guards, down the street, working at the local mechanic and sitting in a little booth are kids with walkie talkies.

When we decided to take a walk around the Moukhtara, we were immediately stopped by a kid who couldn't have been over 20 years old. I think he was intimidated by us, so when we refused to show any ID and only gave our first names, he called someone else as we were walking away. The second guy was only a little older and looked like he should be working second spatula at a saj stand. But there he was, asking for our ID. My friend looked him in the eye, immediately getting angry, and asked him where his ID was. After some prompting, the young and round boy opened his wallet and flashed a normal ID without letting us take it out or look at it too long. When we asked what gave him the authority to stop us, he lifted his shirt and showed us his walkie talkie. The Chouf, it seems, isn't so different from the south after all.

The rest of my trip, barring an embarrassing run-in with the way-too-friendly (and touchy!) tour guide at Beiteddine, was a welcome change from the city. Like true mountain men, we ate heartily and shot guns, and the clean air cleared my persistent cold right up.

Also, the Cedar reserve reminded me of something out of a fairy tale:

Shobbing in Damascus

2007-11-29T20:09:00.001+01:00

I was in Damascus last week for a long weekend of shopping, and the trip gave me the chance to talk to some Syrians about the political situation in Lebanon. Not a single person I spoke to believed that Syria was responsible for killing Hariri. They all thought it was a plot hatched by Israel and the US in order to kick the Syrians out and use Lebanon as knife in Damascus's heart. Many Syrians asked why the Lebanese hated them and seemed generally supportive of Syrian policies overall. Of course during such a short trip it's hard to truly judge Syrian opinion, since although things have gotten better since Hafez died, the average Syrian is still somewhat hesitant to criticize the government to a stranger in public.

Another thing that I noticed this time, was that Damascus is like an oriental Prague: a beautiful and impressively old city in the center surrounded by the hideously drab and gray monstrosities that only the people's architecture is capable of constructing.

Otherwise, Damascus is full of Iraqis, and the rise in prices is noticeable, even in comparison to just a year ago. The Syrian capital now has an Aishti in addition to the United Colors of Benetton stores that are sprinkled throughout the city. Overall, there's been a lot of progress since the last time I was in the Arab Republic a year ago.

I love Syria, but it's got a long way to go, and as the taxi crossed the border back into Lebanon, I remember sighing a breath of relief and feeling glad to be back home.

Confusing Musharraf and the people

2007-11-08T17:09:00.001+01:00

Ezra seems to be confusing Musharraf with the people of Pakistan:

If we flip from Musharraf and begin supporting other candidates, Musharraf will flip on us. If we stick with Musharraf and he's ousted in a revolution, we will be identified as allies of the dictator. This isn't a situation where we must pick the best of two bad options. Rather, it's a situation where we should show some humility, let the Pakistanis make their own decisions, and pledge to deal openly with whomever emerges. This isn't a situation where we must pick the best of two bad options. Rather, it's a situation where we should show some humility, let the Pakistanis make their own decisions, and pledge to deal openly with whomever emerges.

This suggests first, that the US isn't already actively supporting a dog in the Pakistani fight and second, that "the Pakistanis" as a people will be in a position to make any sort of a decision. First, Musharraf is already propped up by financial and military aid from the US, and second, when he indefinitely postponed elections, he squashed any possibility the Pakistanis had of making their own decisions.

Perhaps the US shouldn't explicitly support the opposition, but it should support the process of democracy, even if that just means making elections a condition for continued US military and financial aid.

Ezra quotes Ignatious in order to draw a parallel between US support for the opposition in Iran (a policy that has seemed to have backfired on the US, not least because there is a credible threat that the US might attack Iran) and US support for the Pakistani opposition.

Vali Nasr, on the other hand, makes a more astute comparison of the two countries:

Musharraf's interests are no longer those of his military, and the two are now on a collision course. Generals can still end this crisis by going back to the deal Washington brokered with Ms. Bhutto, but only if it does not include Musharraf. Removing Musharraf will send demonstrators home and the Army to its barracks.
The longer Musharraf stays in power the more Pakistan will look like Iran in 1979: an isolated and unpopular ruler hanging on to power only to inflame passions and bring together his Islamic and pro-democracy opposition into a dangerous alliance.
A disastrous outcome in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state with weak institutions and rife with extremist ideologies, violence, and deep ethnic and social divisions, will be far worse than what followed the Iranian revolution.
The West cannot afford to let this political crisis spiral out of control. Western leaders must keep the pressure on Musharraf, reach out to the Pakistani Army, and seriously plan for a post-Musharraf Pakistan.

Bush's "freedom agenda"

2007-11-07T13:25:00.000+01:00

This week has made it clear to the world that the US isn't too terribly interested in democracy in Pakistan. There has been a lot of talk about Bush's retreat from talk of liberty and freedom and a lot of frowning on the administration's decision to continue supporting Musharraf financially and militarily while he trades prisoners with the Taliban and jails lawyers and judges, ostensibly as part of the "war on terror." Journalists and pundits are quick to show the gap between Bush's actions and his rhetoric.

Sure, this may be the case, but where have these people been? Is this actually news to anyone? One has to look at Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Thailand or Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to see how serious this administration ever was about the "freedom agenda."

Pakistan is just the most recent, if not the most egregious, example of how lip service to democracy and human rights is little more than so much hot air. Let's not be naive here. The Bush administration talks the talk about democracy when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan -- and maybe applies some sanctions when it's not inconvenient, like in Burma -- but at the end of the day, the freedom agenda obviously comes in second place when fossil fuels are concerned.

A nuclear Middle East

2007-11-06T20:39:00.001+01:00

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.