the human province

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

Lil'Maaz - "Mange du kebab"
Uploaded by LilMaaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

Lil'Maaz - "Mange du kebab"
Uploaded by LilMaaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

Lil'Maaz - "Mange du kebab"
Uploaded by LilMaaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

Lil'Maaz - "Mange du kebab"
Uploaded by LilMaaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

Lil'Maaz - "Mange du kebab"
Uploaded by LilMaaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

 

Lil'Maaz - "Mange du kebab"
Uploaded by LilMaaz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

According to Stratfor and the Jerusalem Post, Israel's Army Radio reported that Chirac urged Israel to expand its war against Lebanon this summer to include an attack on Syria to overthrow Assad:

Israel's Army Radio claimed March 18 that French President Jacques Chirac pledged support for an Israeli assault on Syria during the outbreak of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in 2006. Chirac allegedly suggested that Israel overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime and viewed Syria as responsible for giving orders to Hezbollah to attack and for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of Chirac. The report claims that France backed off of its calls for aggression against Syria after the government deemed its stance might lead to Syrian attacks on French troops.

I haven't been able to find anything about this in Libération or Le Monde. So far, I've been able to come up with stuff on Naharnet and Al Jazeera Magazine (which is not affiliated and should not to be confused with Al Jazeera the television channel).

So I'm not really sure what to think about this, because I haven't heard the Army Radio segment, nor can I read the Maariv article (in Hebrew).

Hopefully, this will become a bigger issue, forcing the French press to get on the story.