Friday ended as a grim and depressing day. Not that I doubt Saddam guilt's for one second. He was clearly guilty of the crimes he was convicted of and for much, much more. By all accounts, he was a crude, sadistic and brutal megalomaniac rivaling some of the worst dictators the world has ever seen. He was responsible for the deaths in Dujail but also for the thousands of deaths and disappearances among Iraqis of all ethnicities and sects. He is also guilty of the starting the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait. What made yesterday grim and depressing is the was the way Saddam's execution was handled and its timing.
It was not supposed to happen this way. His prosecution, trial and conviction should have been an open and transparent process. It should have set a precedent for the region and for the world that such tyranny and brutality is unacceptable. Saddam needs to be remembered for all his misdeeds and held accountable for all of them. All Iraqis needed to see what happened during his reign. For those brutalized by his regime, it would be a cathartic process, a legitimization of their grief, a sense that justice is prevailing and the start of the healing process. For those Iraqis still under his spell, it would have been a rude and necessary awakening.
Instead, Saddam's trial was at times farcical and at times tragic and according to independent organizations, one that was not fair and transparent. Many questions are left unanswered. Why were the crimes committed at Dujail the first ones for which he was put on trial and not the more significant crimes against the Kurds? Why the rush to carry out his sentence? There are several possible explanations all of them having to do with politics rather than the pursuit of justice. The Shia dominated government set the tone and course of Saddam's trial to cater to the will of their Shia constituency. Perhaps the government thought that by getting rid of Saddam as a symbol, parts of the insurgency may become easier to control. Or could it be that exposing Saddam's misdeeds from the 1980's may raise uncomfortable questions about what role the U.S. government played in propping up his regime -recall the image of the friendly Rumsfeld Saddam handshake.
What is also disturbing about this whole episode is that the utter American failure in the conduct of the war in Iraq and its aftermath, the thousands of civilian deaths and the descent into civil war threaten to overshadow in many Iraqi minds memories of Saddam's brutality for they are dealing with the grim reality of today. So Saddam will be quickly forgotten by many, and lionized by a few. The bigger question is whether the people of Iraq and the Middle East will have learned a lesson from his reign of terror or whether we are condemned of have history repeat itself.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Levantine Dreamhouse is One Year Old
Yes, yet another one year blog anniversary. Indulge me... It helps to step back and take stock of one's work.
I wrote my first blog post in mid December of last year, saved it, but did not publish it until early January of 2006 because I was uncertain if I wanted get into blogging. I did not know if I had the desire, the commitment or the stamina to do it. Would there be enough to write about? Would anybody read it or would anybody care? After all, there are numerous examples of abandoned blogs floating in the ether of world wide web.
I started because I wanted to add my voice to a discussion that I followed with interest, one that was developing among bloggers from within and outside Syria. It was a discussion about change, evolution and advancement of a country that was in a state of near arrested development for over forty years. It was also a chance to “talk” about subjects that I felt passionate about, a chance I rarely got here in apolitical middle America, where politics is rarely the subject of polite conversation. Telling someone that you are from Syria usually invoked a blank unknowing stare and you move on to talk about the weather or sports.
The key to sustainable blogging is finding your balance. This balance is achieved by defining what your expectations are of the blog, and how much time you can devote to it. In the end, it has to reflect who you are, if not it feels and sounds contrived. I set out to write about politics, culture and religion in Syria and the region, subjects that are closely intertwined and of crucial importance to the future of the region. Not having professional training in any of the three disciplines, I could never pretend to have inside information or insights that no one else had. Whatever I write reflects my own –hopefully educated- opinions based on personal experience and what I read; I cannot pretend otherwise. Blogging has been an intellectual outlet for me regardless of how few or how many people read what I write. The exercise of trying to put one’s thoughts in writing forces you to organize your thoughts so that they are logical and reasoned. This is especially true in discussions of politics. Shrill postings full of clever put downs may bring you cheers of approval from those who share you opinion and indignant rebuttals from those don’t but it will never generate thoughtful consideration of what is being said. The same rule applies to comments left in response to a post. Comments ought to be measured and reasonable or they will unavoidably degenerate into shouting matches. Being civil will cost you traffic on your blog as the general blogging public prefers virtual fistfights to civil discourse. Don’t get me wrong, I too enjoy an occasional verbal fistfight, but I prefer to watch it on someone else’s blog.
What surprised me about blogging is how intimately acquainted with other bloggers one can become. Personalities are revealed in great detail by the content and the tenor of what is written. One particular post from an inimitable Tartousi was particularly revealing to me. This post, about tolerance and respect of other faiths should be required reading for all in the region from Lebanon to Iraq. Another surprise is how in this infinitely vast blogosphere, old acquaintances can connect by pure chance. Fate had it that the Syrian Brit and I launched our blogs within days of each other last January. As we read each other’s posts, it became clear that we had much in common and it then became clear that our paths did indeed cross some twenty four years ago.
Having found my balance I can continue to blog with little effort (Um Kareem may disagree on that last point). More importantly, I will continue to blog because of the positive feedback and encouragement I get from other bloggers for whom I have deep respect. If the Syrian blogs I have frequented are in a any way representative of the Syrian people as a whole, then I am very optimistic about our future. I am proud of the company I keep.
I wrote my first blog post in mid December of last year, saved it, but did not publish it until early January of 2006 because I was uncertain if I wanted get into blogging. I did not know if I had the desire, the commitment or the stamina to do it. Would there be enough to write about? Would anybody read it or would anybody care? After all, there are numerous examples of abandoned blogs floating in the ether of world wide web.
I started because I wanted to add my voice to a discussion that I followed with interest, one that was developing among bloggers from within and outside Syria. It was a discussion about change, evolution and advancement of a country that was in a state of near arrested development for over forty years. It was also a chance to “talk” about subjects that I felt passionate about, a chance I rarely got here in apolitical middle America, where politics is rarely the subject of polite conversation. Telling someone that you are from Syria usually invoked a blank unknowing stare and you move on to talk about the weather or sports.
The key to sustainable blogging is finding your balance. This balance is achieved by defining what your expectations are of the blog, and how much time you can devote to it. In the end, it has to reflect who you are, if not it feels and sounds contrived. I set out to write about politics, culture and religion in Syria and the region, subjects that are closely intertwined and of crucial importance to the future of the region. Not having professional training in any of the three disciplines, I could never pretend to have inside information or insights that no one else had. Whatever I write reflects my own –hopefully educated- opinions based on personal experience and what I read; I cannot pretend otherwise. Blogging has been an intellectual outlet for me regardless of how few or how many people read what I write. The exercise of trying to put one’s thoughts in writing forces you to organize your thoughts so that they are logical and reasoned. This is especially true in discussions of politics. Shrill postings full of clever put downs may bring you cheers of approval from those who share you opinion and indignant rebuttals from those don’t but it will never generate thoughtful consideration of what is being said. The same rule applies to comments left in response to a post. Comments ought to be measured and reasonable or they will unavoidably degenerate into shouting matches. Being civil will cost you traffic on your blog as the general blogging public prefers virtual fistfights to civil discourse. Don’t get me wrong, I too enjoy an occasional verbal fistfight, but I prefer to watch it on someone else’s blog.
What surprised me about blogging is how intimately acquainted with other bloggers one can become. Personalities are revealed in great detail by the content and the tenor of what is written. One particular post from an inimitable Tartousi was particularly revealing to me. This post, about tolerance and respect of other faiths should be required reading for all in the region from Lebanon to Iraq. Another surprise is how in this infinitely vast blogosphere, old acquaintances can connect by pure chance. Fate had it that the Syrian Brit and I launched our blogs within days of each other last January. As we read each other’s posts, it became clear that we had much in common and it then became clear that our paths did indeed cross some twenty four years ago.
Having found my balance I can continue to blog with little effort (Um Kareem may disagree on that last point). More importantly, I will continue to blog because of the positive feedback and encouragement I get from other bloggers for whom I have deep respect. If the Syrian blogs I have frequented are in a any way representative of the Syrian people as a whole, then I am very optimistic about our future. I am proud of the company I keep.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Why I Like Obama for President
Barack Obama is perhaps the most intriguing of the "undeclared" candidates for the 2008 US presidential race. He was first propelled into the national spotlight after his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. It was by far the best speech at that convention. It was smart, it was genuine and showed a sense of balance that was lacking in Kerry's contrived speech. It was certainly better than the idiotic bluster coming from the sitting president of the United States.
I, like many others who listened to his speech took an instant liking to the man. I loved the whole speech but what I loved most is a single sentence: "If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties." Here is a man with principles, I thought, unwilling to fall victim to the post 9/11 Arabophobic and Islamophobic hysteria. This was a sincere statement; he was not pandering to a particular constituency.
What is not to like about Obama? He is a self-made man, eloquent, sincere, compassionate and reasoned; in other words not your average politician. His father was Kenyan and his mother, white American. His father returned to Kenya when Barack was very young and he was raised mostly by his mother in the United States and later, when she remarried, in Indonesia. He was raised as a Christian by his mother though his father was Muslim. He attended Columbia University and then Harvard Law School. He worked as a community activist in Chicago before eventually entering politics and being elected Senator from Illinois. His first book, Dreams from my Father, is a very revealing account of his life and his journey to Kenya in search of his father and his identity. You cannot but develop an affinity for the man by the end of the book.
He is quintessentially American but is also someone who, because of his background, will have much broader perspectives on issues of national and international interest. What a change that would be to the parochial tunnel vision of GW Bush.
Because of the American public's thirst for change, Obama has aroused the interest of disgrunteled democratic voters. His primary rival is Hillary Clinton who is seen by many as a political opportunist who changes her position according to the prevailing winds. That became first evident to me with her about face about the Palestinian issue when it came time to run for the Senate in New York. She was also a hawk on Iraq when it suited her and is now changing her tune. Obama's charisma and appeal seems to cross over conventional political boundaries as his speech to an evangelical church last week demonstrated. That worries some conservative pundits, who in typical form, are in process of unleashing their xenophobic dirty tricks. One commentator called him Barack Osama before correcting himself. This was at best a Freudian slip and at worst a deliberate act of subliminal subversion. More recently, some commentators have pointed out that his middle name is Hussein. Never mind that he was raised Christian, the fact that he was born Muslim somehow taints him for life; as if he has some incurable disease or an unshakable genetic defect. Such drivel will not phase most reasonable people; unfortunately in the post 9/11 paranoia many will still buy into such nonsense.
But despite all the current interest in Obama, does he stand a chance in 2008? Frankly, no. And it has nothing with his political inexperience. He can easily make up for that with his intelligence and his insight. But I think what it will come down to is color and name. Americans in 2008 may be willing to consider a mocha-colored candidate with a name like Colin Powell for the presidency, but a black man named Barack Hussein Obama? I doubt it.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Lebanon: How to Pull Back From the Brink
Most people on either side of the fault line tend to simplify the current impasse in Lebanon to suite their preconcieved notions and political biases. The truth is that it is a multilayered and complex problem that defies simple-minded classification. Broadly, there is the external factor: Syria-Iran vs the US, but there are also the multiple internal fault lines: rich vs poor (Muslim & Christian), Christian-Sunni-Druze vs Shia, city vs countryside, pan-Arabists vs Lebanon first, secular vs religious to name a few.
The current impasse has made me reconsider my attitudes. I still have major misgivings about Hizbullah's ultimate aims, it Iran connection and the fact that it has an army at its disposal which is independent from the standing government. But I also realize that the Hizbollah-FPM alliance represents a large percentage of Lebanese who feel that they do not get proper representation and that they have missed out on the economic development of the post war years. Their rights as citizens and their vision of what Lebanon is and should be cannot be ignored.
I have long believed that much of Lebanon's current problem is the result of unresolved conflicts and issues dating back to the civil war. Many of these issues were shoved out of site instead of being resolved in a frank and open manner at the end of the war. Yes, the meddling of Syria, Iran and the US are important factors but it is basically a Lebanese problem that has to be resolved by Lebanese.
The New York Time Op-Ed piece (below) about Lebanon is one of the most insightful and on the mark that I have seen in a long time. This all the more surprising coming from a former CIA director of counterintelligence. He certainly was not at the helm when the United States played cheerleader to Israel during last summer's war.
If You Love Lebanon, Set It Free
By ROBERT GRENIER
Published: December 17, 2006
Washington
ONCE more, Lebanon is in political crisis. This time, we are told, it pits “Syrian- and Iranian-backed” Shiite parties (Hezbollah and Amal) and the Christian faction led by Michel Aoun against the “Western-backed” Christian, Sunni and Druze groups that support the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.
These very descriptions — citing one external backer or another as a mark of political identification — illustrate the fundamental problem Lebanon must overcome. Call it the Lebanese Disease: rather than sorting out their differences internally and addressing the fundamental injustices at the heart of their disputes, the Lebanese constantly look to outsiders to gain an advantage over their rivals.
Naturally, any advantages thus gained are short-lived, for both the Lebanese and their foreign backers. In the end, the only result is greater popular suffering and instability in Lebanon and the entire Middle East.
Only the Lebanese can cure themselves of this disease, but a bit of enlightened self-interest on the part of the “Western backers” — primarily the United States and France — would greatly help. It may seem counterintuitive, but the best hope for American interests in the Middle East is not to isolate and minimize Hezbollah, but to further integrate it politically, socially and militarily into the Lebanese state.
Let’s dial back half a year, to the start of this latest crisis. The immediate reaction of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel to the cross-border attack by Hezbollah on Israeli troops was his most honest. This was not, he said, an act of terrorism — it was an act of war. And, issues of proportionality aside, it was quite justifiable to hold the Lebanese government to account.
The honesty of that initial reaction, however, was quickly replaced by the old formula to which Israel has resorted since 1978. Israel did not intend to attack Lebanon, its spokesmen insisted, but was just trying to help the Lebanese by attacking Iran-controlled Hezbollah. This was a polite way of saying to Mr. Siniora: We’re going to rid ourselves — and you — of Hezbollah, for which you should be grateful, and you’d better make sure they don’t rise again.
Now let’s try to view this from the perspective of a Lebanese nationalist. To acquiesce to the American-Israeli formula for Lebanon would be to accept that one’s nation should be entirely supine before a neighbor; that any time the Israelis decided to react to a limited provocation or threat, the only defense one could mount would be the tearful pleas of a powerless prime minister.
Thus it should not be surprising that many Lebanese, including Mr. Siniora, at least temporarily put aside their factional mistrust and embraced Hezbollah as the sole available means of national resistance. This, along with Hezbollah’s surprisingly successful resistance, has permanently changed the political calculus of the nation.
For one thing, it is harder today to suggest to Lebanese nationalists that Hezbollah is simply a mindless proxy for the Iranians. Throughout the Middle East, religious extremism and Arab nationalism are becoming identical, with the former becoming the only effective means of pursuing the latter. This is true of the Sunni extremists in Iraq and throughout the Arab world, as well as of the Shiite extremists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, whose resistance to the Israelis, clearly motivated at least in part by a desire to support the Sunni Palestinians, has paradoxically made them a hero of the Sunni Arab street.
Likewise, Hezbollah’s support of the Syrian presence in Lebanon — which should be anathema to any Lebanese nationalist — should be seen less as obeisance to a neighbor than as the cynical price the group must pay to ensure its logistical link with Iran.
As Hezbollah becomes more enmeshed in Lebanese politics, however, domestic political considerations will become increasingly influential in its calculations — a tendency that should be encouraged. Indeed, the closing stages of last summer’s war provided a fleeting opportunity for the Beirut government to gain a greater measure of state control over Hezbollah. (Continued Here)
The current impasse has made me reconsider my attitudes. I still have major misgivings about Hizbullah's ultimate aims, it Iran connection and the fact that it has an army at its disposal which is independent from the standing government. But I also realize that the Hizbollah-FPM alliance represents a large percentage of Lebanese who feel that they do not get proper representation and that they have missed out on the economic development of the post war years. Their rights as citizens and their vision of what Lebanon is and should be cannot be ignored.
I have long believed that much of Lebanon's current problem is the result of unresolved conflicts and issues dating back to the civil war. Many of these issues were shoved out of site instead of being resolved in a frank and open manner at the end of the war. Yes, the meddling of Syria, Iran and the US are important factors but it is basically a Lebanese problem that has to be resolved by Lebanese.
The New York Time Op-Ed piece (below) about Lebanon is one of the most insightful and on the mark that I have seen in a long time. This all the more surprising coming from a former CIA director of counterintelligence. He certainly was not at the helm when the United States played cheerleader to Israel during last summer's war.
If You Love Lebanon, Set It Free
By ROBERT GRENIER
Published: December 17, 2006
Washington
ONCE more, Lebanon is in political crisis. This time, we are told, it pits “Syrian- and Iranian-backed” Shiite parties (Hezbollah and Amal) and the Christian faction led by Michel Aoun against the “Western-backed” Christian, Sunni and Druze groups that support the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.
These very descriptions — citing one external backer or another as a mark of political identification — illustrate the fundamental problem Lebanon must overcome. Call it the Lebanese Disease: rather than sorting out their differences internally and addressing the fundamental injustices at the heart of their disputes, the Lebanese constantly look to outsiders to gain an advantage over their rivals.
Naturally, any advantages thus gained are short-lived, for both the Lebanese and their foreign backers. In the end, the only result is greater popular suffering and instability in Lebanon and the entire Middle East.
Only the Lebanese can cure themselves of this disease, but a bit of enlightened self-interest on the part of the “Western backers” — primarily the United States and France — would greatly help. It may seem counterintuitive, but the best hope for American interests in the Middle East is not to isolate and minimize Hezbollah, but to further integrate it politically, socially and militarily into the Lebanese state.
Let’s dial back half a year, to the start of this latest crisis. The immediate reaction of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel to the cross-border attack by Hezbollah on Israeli troops was his most honest. This was not, he said, an act of terrorism — it was an act of war. And, issues of proportionality aside, it was quite justifiable to hold the Lebanese government to account.
The honesty of that initial reaction, however, was quickly replaced by the old formula to which Israel has resorted since 1978. Israel did not intend to attack Lebanon, its spokesmen insisted, but was just trying to help the Lebanese by attacking Iran-controlled Hezbollah. This was a polite way of saying to Mr. Siniora: We’re going to rid ourselves — and you — of Hezbollah, for which you should be grateful, and you’d better make sure they don’t rise again.
Now let’s try to view this from the perspective of a Lebanese nationalist. To acquiesce to the American-Israeli formula for Lebanon would be to accept that one’s nation should be entirely supine before a neighbor; that any time the Israelis decided to react to a limited provocation or threat, the only defense one could mount would be the tearful pleas of a powerless prime minister.
Thus it should not be surprising that many Lebanese, including Mr. Siniora, at least temporarily put aside their factional mistrust and embraced Hezbollah as the sole available means of national resistance. This, along with Hezbollah’s surprisingly successful resistance, has permanently changed the political calculus of the nation.
For one thing, it is harder today to suggest to Lebanese nationalists that Hezbollah is simply a mindless proxy for the Iranians. Throughout the Middle East, religious extremism and Arab nationalism are becoming identical, with the former becoming the only effective means of pursuing the latter. This is true of the Sunni extremists in Iraq and throughout the Arab world, as well as of the Shiite extremists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, whose resistance to the Israelis, clearly motivated at least in part by a desire to support the Sunni Palestinians, has paradoxically made them a hero of the Sunni Arab street.
Likewise, Hezbollah’s support of the Syrian presence in Lebanon — which should be anathema to any Lebanese nationalist — should be seen less as obeisance to a neighbor than as the cynical price the group must pay to ensure its logistical link with Iran.
As Hezbollah becomes more enmeshed in Lebanese politics, however, domestic political considerations will become increasingly influential in its calculations — a tendency that should be encouraged. Indeed, the closing stages of last summer’s war provided a fleeting opportunity for the Beirut government to gain a greater measure of state control over Hezbollah. (Continued Here)
Friday, December 15, 2006
“Why do you go to Syria?”
A good friend recently visited Syria with her brother. When she told me that she was going, I was extremely envious as I too wanted to go badly. I had to settle instead for her impressions and the lovely photographs she brought back. Here, she writes about why she went in the first place and about her impressions.
"Why do you go to Syria?"
"Let He who tries to distance himself from a country where life has become impossible: Pray to one day live in Aleppo, for there you shall find Bab el Faraj, the gateway to freedom ".
As I was planning my trip to Syria this fall, I was encountering the blank stare of many educated people asking me: "Why do you go to Syria?"
I go to places to get away from the boredom of living in a comfortable, clean, rich place such as the USA. I go to places to see things from a different point of view, to remind myself of the bigger picture, to let go of the day by day preoccupations with unimportant things. I have been fortunate to grow up with an older brother with a passion for archeology since he was a young child and a cardiologist father who loved traveling more than his career. Memories of driving in an old Citroen in Turkey to see impossible ruins stayed in my heart as one of the loveliest memory of my father, having lunch at the house of our guide on the Bosphorus, playing with his children who were my age, my father letting me drink Raki (Arak)...
Traveling is essential to my happiness. The farther the place, the better I feel. We were planning to go to Niger but something happened there. I always wanted to be in Damascus, may be out of my romantic infatuation with Lawrence of Arabia or may be because of the poetry of Qabbani. Syria seems an “easier” destination with more archeological sites for my brother, may be less exotic than Niger for me with my passion for the desert, but with the enormous attraction of having the oldest inhabited city in the world, “the rival of heaven”. Even for an Italian acquainted with the middle- east, Syria turned out to be a spectacular jewel, a well-kept secret, a really magical place.
I love places with no tourists. We found no tourists in Syria; a blessing for us, but a bit sad for the people there. “Even the French do not come anymore since the Hariri assassination” people told us. Spanish and Italian are the most common tourists there.
People were very friendly: friendly in a genuine way, no hidden agenda. They seem a bit resigned to the fact that we were not there to shop (like most Italians do) but to visit. They still liked to talk and find out what we thought about Syria:” So, did you like Damascus best or Aleppo?”
The family of a Syrian friend in the USA took us out one night in Damascus- wife and three children- and drove us to the Kassioun mountain to see the spectacular view of Damascus at night. This was during rush hour with crazy traffic, and in the middle of the week with the kids having to wake up early next morning for school. They were just so happy and proud of taking us around Damascus. The warmest smiles, jam-packed in a small car, speaking no common language: all this for perfect strangers.
We stayed at the Zenobia Hotel right in the middle of Palmyra’s archeological sites, a now rundown place once visited by archeologists from all over the world; Aghata Christie and Lindberg stayed there. A man working there told us about his imminent wedding, about how much money he needed to save in order to provide for his widow mother and to get married. He was dreaming one day of moving to Greece where people in the hotel industry get paid better. He needed to get enough money in an account in Syria, so that the government would let him get out of Syria without being too suspicious. He asked me if I have kids. We wished each other good luck.
A guide at the temple of Bell told us about the time when he took Catherine Deneuve around Palmyra, got two kisses on his cheek from her, but unfortunately she declined to kiss him on his lips! People seem happy even in these hard times of poor economy and no tourism.
It felt like a very isolated place, isolated from tourists: a man in the Aleppo souk told us they have never seen American tourists, but even Europeans are less common now. Italian and Spanish are still coming. He offered me a Gauloise. We had a smoke together after I bought a beautiful Syrian (“not Egyptian” he insisted) backgammon tawla. The rain was pouring down, the traffic in the old streets was unreal, and we paused in front of the illuminated citadel, admiring it: what an amazing place!
Pictures of Bashar Al-Assad, frequently together with his father and Nasrallah, were everywhere: on every car, bus, wall and building. This was particularly spooky in the center of Hama. We called the young Bashar “Signor Rossi”. He was a constant presence.
How can places like Apamea, Crack de Chevaliers or Sergiopolis be completely empty in October? Syria’s treasures could easily make the tourism industry one of the main economic resources. What is wrong in this picture?
The big Cham Palace Hotel in Palmyra was surreal: we went there for a drink one night. The power going off every 15 minutes; one group of Japanese tourist, that’s it: a big empty place.
My brother was in Syria in the eighties. He drove from Turkey. He remembers the Aleppo citadel been closed to tourists as it was a military zone then. But he was almost in tears seeing the conditions of places such as the Archeological Museum in Aleppo (no lights, electrical cables hanging in dust over unprotected statues from Ebla) or the small museum in Apamea with mosaics out of this world laying in the dark, covered in dust and without any light for us to see. I have seen better kept Museums in Khartoum.
He could not believe the poor conditions of these incredible treasures: “This is much worse than what I remember in the eighties”. We could tell that tourism was once prosperous here. What happened? Is this thanks to Signor Rossi and his gang?
Why did I go to Syria?
To see the moon reflected in the Euphrates, to drink fresh pomegranate juice in the streets of Damascus, to hear the doves flying in the court of the Ommayadd Mosque, to smell the jasmine flowers while the darwishes dance, to eat the sweetest figs in Ma’lula, and to sit in silence in the desert of Palmyra looking at the sun rising.
Tell me: how do you explain this to someone who has never been there and thinks Syria is a dangerous place?
(Photograph by E.C.)
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Cooking for Love and the Love of Cooking
To some cooking is a mundane but necessary chore, to others it is a skill to be honed and perfected. To my wife, however, cooking is a selfless and seemingly effortless act of love.
These acts started early in our relationship as she plied me with her delicious tarte aux fraises (excuse my French, but she is Lebanese after all!). You may say that getting to a man’s heart through his stomach is the oldest trick in the book, but as much as my taste buds were seduced by the tartes, it is the love that went into making them that got to me. After all, Beirut is full of excellent patisseries and she could have just as easily bought me something. That our relationship dates back to 1982 is testimony that it was more than about strawberry pie. That is not to say that, in our Syrian-Lebanese marriage, we have not had our differences ... about food. Some of those differences were substantive, like whether the Lebanese or Syrian way of preparing mloukieh was better, but most have been semantic. She calls stuffed grapes leaves warak enab and I call it warak dawali; watermelon was battiskh ahmar for her and jabass for me.
Few people are as particular about their food as are Levantines, but no one I know beats my mother-in-law's fussiness with food. The rice has to have that perfect sheen, the tart crust has to crunch just so and only home-made roub rummane (pomegranate concentrate) will do. It is because of this finicky lineage that our house overflows with some thirty cookbooks in different languages, several notebooks of handwritten recipes and twelve years' worth of cooking magazines. Medical journals in our house are discarded a couple of days after they are received but I dare not suggest that we discard a single copy of her old cooking magazines.
So my wife can cook with the best of them from the most intricate nouvelle cuisine to the humblest Middle Eastern dishes. It is the latter though, that give her the most satisfaction. These are the dishes that trigger the deepest of memories, extracting from the brain's limbic system not only smells and tastes of home but also remembrances of particular times and places. With these memories come feelings of warmth, of nostalgia; for a few moments, she is again in the protective embrace of childhood. These emotions are all the more acute because of the distance that separates her from family and homeland. When she cooks for our children, it is not only a labor of love, but also of building memories. She is not only passing on a personal heritage but also a cultural heritage to children born far from the land of our birth. The recipes of traditional Middle Eastern dishes are the product of the collective memory of a people and its ingredients a reflection of the land.
Friends and new acquaintances are also recipients of her culinary generosity. Some of it is just ingrained Arab hospitality, but it is also more than that. The more she likes you, the more she’ll cook for you. When our close friends adopted a one year old girl, my wife went into overdrive. Horrified at the prospect that this infant may be eating bland commercial baby food, she cooked up several batches of tasty homemade baby food for her. To this day, she will drop everything to spend some time with this girl, now three, and cook for her.
One may get the impression from all of what I said that my wife is a frumpy, plump, "tante" tinkering around the kitchen all day long. Far from it, she is a hard-working physician, a very good one at that, but she is never happier than when, after preparing a meal of mujaddarah and fattoush our kids tell her how delicious it was.
These acts started early in our relationship as she plied me with her delicious tarte aux fraises (excuse my French, but she is Lebanese after all!). You may say that getting to a man’s heart through his stomach is the oldest trick in the book, but as much as my taste buds were seduced by the tartes, it is the love that went into making them that got to me. After all, Beirut is full of excellent patisseries and she could have just as easily bought me something. That our relationship dates back to 1982 is testimony that it was more than about strawberry pie. That is not to say that, in our Syrian-Lebanese marriage, we have not had our differences ... about food. Some of those differences were substantive, like whether the Lebanese or Syrian way of preparing mloukieh was better, but most have been semantic. She calls stuffed grapes leaves warak enab and I call it warak dawali; watermelon was battiskh ahmar for her and jabass for me.
Few people are as particular about their food as are Levantines, but no one I know beats my mother-in-law's fussiness with food. The rice has to have that perfect sheen, the tart crust has to crunch just so and only home-made roub rummane (pomegranate concentrate) will do. It is because of this finicky lineage that our house overflows with some thirty cookbooks in different languages, several notebooks of handwritten recipes and twelve years' worth of cooking magazines. Medical journals in our house are discarded a couple of days after they are received but I dare not suggest that we discard a single copy of her old cooking magazines.
So my wife can cook with the best of them from the most intricate nouvelle cuisine to the humblest Middle Eastern dishes. It is the latter though, that give her the most satisfaction. These are the dishes that trigger the deepest of memories, extracting from the brain's limbic system not only smells and tastes of home but also remembrances of particular times and places. With these memories come feelings of warmth, of nostalgia; for a few moments, she is again in the protective embrace of childhood. These emotions are all the more acute because of the distance that separates her from family and homeland. When she cooks for our children, it is not only a labor of love, but also of building memories. She is not only passing on a personal heritage but also a cultural heritage to children born far from the land of our birth. The recipes of traditional Middle Eastern dishes are the product of the collective memory of a people and its ingredients a reflection of the land.
Friends and new acquaintances are also recipients of her culinary generosity. Some of it is just ingrained Arab hospitality, but it is also more than that. The more she likes you, the more she’ll cook for you. When our close friends adopted a one year old girl, my wife went into overdrive. Horrified at the prospect that this infant may be eating bland commercial baby food, she cooked up several batches of tasty homemade baby food for her. To this day, she will drop everything to spend some time with this girl, now three, and cook for her.
One may get the impression from all of what I said that my wife is a frumpy, plump, "tante" tinkering around the kitchen all day long. Far from it, she is a hard-working physician, a very good one at that, but she is never happier than when, after preparing a meal of mujaddarah and fattoush our kids tell her how delicious it was.
(Photo: borrowed picture, photoshop enhanced by AK)
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Circumventing Web Censorship
Authoritarian regimes around the globe -Including Syria- periodically censor access to the web. The given reasons include protection of national security or protection of public morality. The real reason is to stifle dissent by limiting free access to information other than that sanctioned by the government. Below is an article about the cat and mouse game between government censors and activists seeking to circumvent web censorship.
There are several methods to evade censorship as outlined below including this recently released free software, Psiphon. The aim of this software as stated by its developers is as follows: psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.
Techniques to evade censorship of internet traffic are improving, to the chagrin of authoritarian regimes Economist December 2-8,2006
FOR a website lashed together in a week by a college student, Anonymouse.org is not to be sniffed at. Alexander Pircher, a computer-science student in Darmstadt, Germany, created the site in 1997. Users simply type a web address into a box on the Anonymouse home page and click a button, and the Anonymouse server (rather than the user's own computer) fetches the page and displays it. To many people this might seem pointless: rerouting data through another server makes for slower surfing, fonts and graphics are sometimes slightly skewed and video may not work properly.
But for many others the manoeuvre is anything but pointless, for this redirection allows them to surf the web anonymously. It enables people living under repressive regimes to visit censored websites because, technically speaking, they are only visiting Anonymouse.org. More than 3m people access the web through Anonymouse.org every day and Mr Pircher, who now upgrades his software with help from friends, says he receives plenty of thank-you messages from censorship-dodgers in countries like Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. “We're bringing people the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he says, referring to Article 19 of the United Nations document, which says freedom of information is a fundamental right.
Anonymouse.org is not alone. It is part of a large and growing constellation of similar computer servers, known as proxies, put online for the most part by activists living in free countries. These proxy servers play a central role in the global struggle to outsmart censors working to protect undemocratic regimes from political and social dissent. Mokhtar Yahyaoui, a lawyer in Tunisia, says that in his country proxies “are pretty much the only way to get information that's not official government information”.
But censors have an effective countermeasure. Once they identify a proxy, they can block access to it, just as they block access to other sites. The difficult part is finding the proxies, but the software used by censors, called censorware, is getting better at it. China's censors are leading the way. The estimated 30,000 government censors behind the world's most elaborate censorship programme—known as the Great Firewall of China by detractors, and as the Golden Shield by the Communist Party—work hard to hunt down proxies and prevent them from relaying data into the country.
The anti-censorship community is developing new ways to evade censors in response. For example, when China blocks a proxy (Anonymouse.org's fate in that country), internet users can find a replacement by consulting a growing number of websites that compile and post lists of working proxies. E-mailed newsletters that provide links to proxy servers are also available. Some anti-censorship organisations spread the word via instant-messaging services: people looking for a proxy simply send an instant message to one of these groups and immediately receive an automated reply with a recently updated list of proxies.
These methods work because it usually takes censors a little while to identify and block new proxies. China's censors are probably the fastest to react, but even then some proxies survive for a week or more, in part because the firewall is maintained by a complex network of private and state-controlled telecommunications operators, and national, provincial and municipal government agencies that don't always act in concert. Lesser-known proxies handling small amounts of traffic generally go undetected the longest, sometimes for months. “It's a game called cat and rat,” says Mao Xianghui, a partner in an investment firm in Shanghai. His blog provided advice on using proxies to sidestep censorship, until authorities shut it down last year.
An American non-profit group called Tor operates one of the most robust anti-censorship systems. Using money provided by America's Naval Research Laboratory and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech advocacy group, Tor developed free software that can be downloaded from many websites. The software works in conjunction with a web browser (the developers recommend Firefox) to encrypt traffic and route it through three proxy servers chosen at random from a network of around 1,000 proxies run by Tor volunteers worldwide. This makes it difficult for censors to determine what information is being sent, where it came from, and who received it. A Tor spokeswoman says many human-rights groups advise their activists in authoritarian countries to use the software to avoid government snooping.
This is not the only tool available to activists. In June of last year Huang Qi, an outspoken human-rights activist from Chengdu, China, was released after serving five years in prison on charges of subversion. He promptly downloaded a free “circumvention” programme that had been developed during his detention. Now, when Mr Huang opens his browser, the software, called Wujie, automatically searches the internet until it locates a functioning proxy server through which to connect. “It opens the doors to the world,” he says.
Censorship firewalls rely heavily on keyword-blocking software, which can catch and block e-mails and instant messages containing words and phrases deemed dangerous. Bill Xia, a Chinese dissident living in North Carolina, employs a number of tricks to sneak words past censors. He is the founder of Dynamic Internet Technology, a company paid by the American government's International Broadcasting Bureau to e-mail more than 2m pro-democracy Voice of America and Radio Free Asia newsletters into China and Vietnam every day. To foil keyword filters, Mr Xia replaces sensitive words such as “freedom” and “elections” with uncommon or approximate synonyms, or descriptive phrases. He inserts random characters, such as asterisks, between Vietnamese letters or the ideograms that make up Chinese words. Other techniques include writing words in a mixture of several fonts, replacing parts of words with syllables that sound similar, and replacing words with pictures of those words.
Employing such ruses makes for tedious writing and choppy reading. And having to bother with proxy servers to surf the web can be a hassle. But for those who are victims of censorship, the increasingly elaborate efforts required to outmanoeuvre censors are liberating, empowering and well worth the effort.
There are several methods to evade censorship as outlined below including this recently released free software, Psiphon. The aim of this software as stated by its developers is as follows: psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.
Techniques to evade censorship of internet traffic are improving, to the chagrin of authoritarian regimes Economist December 2-8,2006
FOR a website lashed together in a week by a college student, Anonymouse.org is not to be sniffed at. Alexander Pircher, a computer-science student in Darmstadt, Germany, created the site in 1997. Users simply type a web address into a box on the Anonymouse home page and click a button, and the Anonymouse server (rather than the user's own computer) fetches the page and displays it. To many people this might seem pointless: rerouting data through another server makes for slower surfing, fonts and graphics are sometimes slightly skewed and video may not work properly.
But for many others the manoeuvre is anything but pointless, for this redirection allows them to surf the web anonymously. It enables people living under repressive regimes to visit censored websites because, technically speaking, they are only visiting Anonymouse.org. More than 3m people access the web through Anonymouse.org every day and Mr Pircher, who now upgrades his software with help from friends, says he receives plenty of thank-you messages from censorship-dodgers in countries like Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. “We're bringing people the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he says, referring to Article 19 of the United Nations document, which says freedom of information is a fundamental right.
Anonymouse.org is not alone. It is part of a large and growing constellation of similar computer servers, known as proxies, put online for the most part by activists living in free countries. These proxy servers play a central role in the global struggle to outsmart censors working to protect undemocratic regimes from political and social dissent. Mokhtar Yahyaoui, a lawyer in Tunisia, says that in his country proxies “are pretty much the only way to get information that's not official government information”.
But censors have an effective countermeasure. Once they identify a proxy, they can block access to it, just as they block access to other sites. The difficult part is finding the proxies, but the software used by censors, called censorware, is getting better at it. China's censors are leading the way. The estimated 30,000 government censors behind the world's most elaborate censorship programme—known as the Great Firewall of China by detractors, and as the Golden Shield by the Communist Party—work hard to hunt down proxies and prevent them from relaying data into the country.
The anti-censorship community is developing new ways to evade censors in response. For example, when China blocks a proxy (Anonymouse.org's fate in that country), internet users can find a replacement by consulting a growing number of websites that compile and post lists of working proxies. E-mailed newsletters that provide links to proxy servers are also available. Some anti-censorship organisations spread the word via instant-messaging services: people looking for a proxy simply send an instant message to one of these groups and immediately receive an automated reply with a recently updated list of proxies.
These methods work because it usually takes censors a little while to identify and block new proxies. China's censors are probably the fastest to react, but even then some proxies survive for a week or more, in part because the firewall is maintained by a complex network of private and state-controlled telecommunications operators, and national, provincial and municipal government agencies that don't always act in concert. Lesser-known proxies handling small amounts of traffic generally go undetected the longest, sometimes for months. “It's a game called cat and rat,” says Mao Xianghui, a partner in an investment firm in Shanghai. His blog provided advice on using proxies to sidestep censorship, until authorities shut it down last year.
An American non-profit group called Tor operates one of the most robust anti-censorship systems. Using money provided by America's Naval Research Laboratory and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a free-speech advocacy group, Tor developed free software that can be downloaded from many websites. The software works in conjunction with a web browser (the developers recommend Firefox) to encrypt traffic and route it through three proxy servers chosen at random from a network of around 1,000 proxies run by Tor volunteers worldwide. This makes it difficult for censors to determine what information is being sent, where it came from, and who received it. A Tor spokeswoman says many human-rights groups advise their activists in authoritarian countries to use the software to avoid government snooping.
This is not the only tool available to activists. In June of last year Huang Qi, an outspoken human-rights activist from Chengdu, China, was released after serving five years in prison on charges of subversion. He promptly downloaded a free “circumvention” programme that had been developed during his detention. Now, when Mr Huang opens his browser, the software, called Wujie, automatically searches the internet until it locates a functioning proxy server through which to connect. “It opens the doors to the world,” he says.
Censorship firewalls rely heavily on keyword-blocking software, which can catch and block e-mails and instant messages containing words and phrases deemed dangerous. Bill Xia, a Chinese dissident living in North Carolina, employs a number of tricks to sneak words past censors. He is the founder of Dynamic Internet Technology, a company paid by the American government's International Broadcasting Bureau to e-mail more than 2m pro-democracy Voice of America and Radio Free Asia newsletters into China and Vietnam every day. To foil keyword filters, Mr Xia replaces sensitive words such as “freedom” and “elections” with uncommon or approximate synonyms, or descriptive phrases. He inserts random characters, such as asterisks, between Vietnamese letters or the ideograms that make up Chinese words. Other techniques include writing words in a mixture of several fonts, replacing parts of words with syllables that sound similar, and replacing words with pictures of those words.
Employing such ruses makes for tedious writing and choppy reading. And having to bother with proxy servers to surf the web can be a hassle. But for those who are victims of censorship, the increasingly elaborate efforts required to outmanoeuvre censors are liberating, empowering and well worth the effort.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Where to, Lebanon?
The peaceful and measured way the Hizbullah-FPM-Amal axis demonstrations have gone for the past several days have confirmed the optimism I expressed in my previous post. While the sectarian factions in Iraq are heading recklessly into the precipice, some in Lebanon are taking a step back. Could it be? could it really be possible that leaders from our Middle East have learned the lessons of the past. It is not that the political high-stakes game has abated, it is just that civil strife is no longer a looming danger (never say never).
The large, one million (give or take), demonstration on Friday has clearly shown that the opposition is a popular force to reckon with. It makes the shrill mantra of the March 14 alliance that Hizbullah is nothing but a tool of Iran and Syrian interest seem more than a little silly. The oppisition alliance has to be reckoned with politically as they represent a significant percentage of the population (at least 25% judging form the size of the demonstration). Hizbullah has played its hand very shrewdly in this confrontation and giving the March 14 people a taste of its own medicine. Yet, I don't know that a solution of this political crisis is any closer unless backroom deals are being struck at this very moment.
Stay tuned!
The large, one million (give or take), demonstration on Friday has clearly shown that the opposition is a popular force to reckon with. It makes the shrill mantra of the March 14 alliance that Hizbullah is nothing but a tool of Iran and Syrian interest seem more than a little silly. The oppisition alliance has to be reckoned with politically as they represent a significant percentage of the population (at least 25% judging form the size of the demonstration). Hizbullah has played its hand very shrewdly in this confrontation and giving the March 14 people a taste of its own medicine. Yet, I don't know that a solution of this political crisis is any closer unless backroom deals are being struck at this very moment.
Stay tuned!
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
The Syrian Regime Defends the Nation Against Mortal Threats
The ever vigilant Baathist regime is keeping its citizens safe from all mortal threats aimed at the heart of the nation. Apparently, concerned students seeking to find ways to move their stagnant country forward represent such a threat. Josh Landis at Syria Comment reports on the plight of 8 students jailed for the past 9 months for trying to set up discussion groups dealing with cultural and political issues. The regime's paranoia and stupidity appears to have no bounds. These young people are the hope and the future of Syria. Instead of harnassing their idealism and energy to catapult the country out of its forty years of stagnation, they are treated like common criminals.
Below is information about the eight young men copied from Syria Comment:
1. Husam Mulhim: 22 years old, second year student at the Faculty of Law at the University of Damascus. He is also a poet and organized poetry readings and lectures at the university.
2. Omar Al Abdullah: 21 years old, young writer and second year student of philosophy at the University of Damascus. He was first arrested for discussion youth issues in 2004 with a group of young students and held for 11 days. He is the son of activist and writer Ali Al Abdullah, a former prisoner of conscience in Syria.
3. Ali Nazir Ali: 22 years old, young writer and second year business student at the University of Damascus.
4. Allam Atieh Fakhour: 27 years old, graduate of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Damascus. Current graduate student of art and sculpture.
5. Aiham Muhhamad Sakr: 30 years old, writer.
6. Tarek Ghorani: 21 years old, associate engineer and writer.
7. Maher Esper: 26 years old, writer.
8. Diab Surrieh: 21 years old, student and writer.
The report on Syria Comment originated from a group called Syrian Youth for Justice, a recent (at least judging from its web presence) addition to the list of Syrian human and civil rights groups.
Below is information about the eight young men copied from Syria Comment:
1. Husam Mulhim: 22 years old, second year student at the Faculty of Law at the University of Damascus. He is also a poet and organized poetry readings and lectures at the university.
2. Omar Al Abdullah: 21 years old, young writer and second year student of philosophy at the University of Damascus. He was first arrested for discussion youth issues in 2004 with a group of young students and held for 11 days. He is the son of activist and writer Ali Al Abdullah, a former prisoner of conscience in Syria.
3. Ali Nazir Ali: 22 years old, young writer and second year business student at the University of Damascus.
4. Allam Atieh Fakhour: 27 years old, graduate of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Damascus. Current graduate student of art and sculpture.
5. Aiham Muhhamad Sakr: 30 years old, writer.
6. Tarek Ghorani: 21 years old, associate engineer and writer.
7. Maher Esper: 26 years old, writer.
8. Diab Surrieh: 21 years old, student and writer.
The report on Syria Comment originated from a group called Syrian Youth for Justice, a recent (at least judging from its web presence) addition to the list of Syrian human and civil rights groups.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Muslim scholars Join Anti-female Circumcision Summit. IT'S ABOUT TIME!!!!!
Better late than never! It is telling -and depressing- that it took a German human rights group to organize the meeting.
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 17:07 22/11/2006
Muslim scholars join rare summit on anti-female circumcision in Cairo
By The Associated PressCAIRO - Prominent Muslim scholars from around the world, including conservative religious leaders from Egypt and Africa, met Wednesday to speak out against female genital mutilation at a rare high-level conference on the age-old practice.The meeting was organized by a German human rights group and held under the patronage of Dar Al-Iftaa, Egypt's main religious-edicts organization. It was held at the conference center of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Islamic institution in the world.Al Azhar's grand sheik, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, attended as well as Egypt's Grand Mufti, Ali Goma'a, whose fatwas are considered binding religious edicts.It is rare for such religious figures in Egypt to attend such a conference on an issue that remains sensitive and controversial here. An estimated 50 percent of schoolgirls in Egypt are thought to undergo the procedure, according to government statistics.At the conference, Tantawi said circumcision, another name for the practice, was not mentioned in the Islamic holy book, the Quran, or in Islam's Sunna - which are sayings and deeds of the prophet Mohammed. Those are the two main religious texts followed by Sunni Islam."In Islam, circumcision is for men only," he told the conference. "From a religious point of view, I don't find anything that says that circumcision is a must [for women]."Female genital mutilation usually involves removal of the clitoris. Those who practice it believe it lowers a girl's sexual desires and thus helps maintain her honor. With age-old cultural roots, it is practiced today in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt and other parts of the Arab world such as Yemen and Oman.Laws against the practice exist in many of the regions where it is practiced, but poor enforcement and publicity can hinder the laws, some human rights groups and women activists say. They say laws aren't effective unless those practicing the tradition are first made aware of its physical and mental damage.In Egypt, there is no law that specifically bans the practice, although it can be prosecuted under other laws related to assault and bodily harm.Senior clerics from Africa and as far afield as Russia also were invited to the conference by the German human rights group, TARGET, founded in 2000. The group contends that practitioners in Africa and elsewhere often use the Quran to justify the practice.UNICEF says an estimated 3 million women and girls undergo female genital mutilation each year and that the age at which it is carried out is getting lower in some countries. A survey conducted in 2000 in Ethiopia indicated 80 percent of women between 15-49 years of age there had been circumcised.In Egypt, a recent study of schoolgirls by the Ministry of Health and Population found 50 percent of girls ages 10-18 had been circumcised."Our mission today is not easy, because we're fighting against rumors and habits and traditions and ideas that have been established for long centuries," said Moushira Khattab, secretary general of Egypt's National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, which is headed by the wife of Egypt's president, Suzanne Mubarak.Egypt is sensitive to outsiders intervening in controversial religious and cultural issues and the conference was expected to raise some dissent.
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 17:07 22/11/2006
Muslim scholars join rare summit on anti-female circumcision in Cairo
By The Associated PressCAIRO - Prominent Muslim scholars from around the world, including conservative religious leaders from Egypt and Africa, met Wednesday to speak out against female genital mutilation at a rare high-level conference on the age-old practice.The meeting was organized by a German human rights group and held under the patronage of Dar Al-Iftaa, Egypt's main religious-edicts organization. It was held at the conference center of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Islamic institution in the world.Al Azhar's grand sheik, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, attended as well as Egypt's Grand Mufti, Ali Goma'a, whose fatwas are considered binding religious edicts.It is rare for such religious figures in Egypt to attend such a conference on an issue that remains sensitive and controversial here. An estimated 50 percent of schoolgirls in Egypt are thought to undergo the procedure, according to government statistics.At the conference, Tantawi said circumcision, another name for the practice, was not mentioned in the Islamic holy book, the Quran, or in Islam's Sunna - which are sayings and deeds of the prophet Mohammed. Those are the two main religious texts followed by Sunni Islam."In Islam, circumcision is for men only," he told the conference. "From a religious point of view, I don't find anything that says that circumcision is a must [for women]."Female genital mutilation usually involves removal of the clitoris. Those who practice it believe it lowers a girl's sexual desires and thus helps maintain her honor. With age-old cultural roots, it is practiced today in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt and other parts of the Arab world such as Yemen and Oman.Laws against the practice exist in many of the regions where it is practiced, but poor enforcement and publicity can hinder the laws, some human rights groups and women activists say. They say laws aren't effective unless those practicing the tradition are first made aware of its physical and mental damage.In Egypt, there is no law that specifically bans the practice, although it can be prosecuted under other laws related to assault and bodily harm.Senior clerics from Africa and as far afield as Russia also were invited to the conference by the German human rights group, TARGET, founded in 2000. The group contends that practitioners in Africa and elsewhere often use the Quran to justify the practice.UNICEF says an estimated 3 million women and girls undergo female genital mutilation each year and that the age at which it is carried out is getting lower in some countries. A survey conducted in 2000 in Ethiopia indicated 80 percent of women between 15-49 years of age there had been circumcised.In Egypt, a recent study of schoolgirls by the Ministry of Health and Population found 50 percent of girls ages 10-18 had been circumcised."Our mission today is not easy, because we're fighting against rumors and habits and traditions and ideas that have been established for long centuries," said Moushira Khattab, secretary general of Egypt's National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, which is headed by the wife of Egypt's president, Suzanne Mubarak.Egypt is sensitive to outsiders intervening in controversial religious and cultural issues and the conference was expected to raise some dissent.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Gemayel Assassination and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Many people who care about Lebanon, were collectively holding their breath over the last several weeks expecting trouble. The political jockeying was reaching a climax and it was unclear if this maneuvering would break down into violence. Little did I suspect, though, that the trouble will come in the form of resumption of political assassinations. The story and the pictures are nauseatingly familiar. I knew little of Gemayel or his politics but that is beside the point. I have little sympathy for the Lebanese Forces of old but I will not saddle Pierre Gemayel with the sins of his predecessors. As far as I am concerned he is a Lebanese politician, part of legitimate and democratically elected government –warts and all- who was trying to serve his country. He was also, sadly, a young man at 34 and a new father at that.
Logic would dictate that the assassins are either directly or indirectly connected to the Syrian government. There is, however, at this point proof of that despite the certainty with which many pundits and bloggers are pointing fingers. I could say that we ought to wait for the evidence but we know from past experience that such investigations in Lebanon rarely yield much. Of the hundreds (thousands?) of political assassination in Lebanon over the past 30 years, only a handful have ever been solved. But beyond the personal tragedy though, the big question is what next?
If this assassination was meant to intimidate the Sanioura government and the March 14 group, it may backfire. It was popular outrage at the wanton destruction caused by the Israeli military machine this summer and Hizbullah’s response to it that catapulted the party into its present position of power. Ironically it may be popular outrage at the murder and Hizbullah’s close ties with the prime suspect that may suddenly change Hizbullah’s fortunes. The measured, yet arrogant rhetoric of Hizbullah over the past few days reflected the party’s sense that their day had come. They will have to tone it down in light of the present assassination or risk being associated with the culprits.
The size of the turnout at Gemayel’s funeral on Thursday will be a measure of whether popular outrage outweighs popular fears and sense of desperation. Additionally the next few days will also test the Lebanese people’s political maturity by their ability to resist attempts at inciting civil strife.
I, for one, am hopeful. Can one afford to be otherwise?
Logic would dictate that the assassins are either directly or indirectly connected to the Syrian government. There is, however, at this point proof of that despite the certainty with which many pundits and bloggers are pointing fingers. I could say that we ought to wait for the evidence but we know from past experience that such investigations in Lebanon rarely yield much. Of the hundreds (thousands?) of political assassination in Lebanon over the past 30 years, only a handful have ever been solved. But beyond the personal tragedy though, the big question is what next?
If this assassination was meant to intimidate the Sanioura government and the March 14 group, it may backfire. It was popular outrage at the wanton destruction caused by the Israeli military machine this summer and Hizbullah’s response to it that catapulted the party into its present position of power. Ironically it may be popular outrage at the murder and Hizbullah’s close ties with the prime suspect that may suddenly change Hizbullah’s fortunes. The measured, yet arrogant rhetoric of Hizbullah over the past few days reflected the party’s sense that their day had come. They will have to tone it down in light of the present assassination or risk being associated with the culprits.
The size of the turnout at Gemayel’s funeral on Thursday will be a measure of whether popular outrage outweighs popular fears and sense of desperation. Additionally the next few days will also test the Lebanese people’s political maturity by their ability to resist attempts at inciting civil strife.
I, for one, am hopeful. Can one afford to be otherwise?
Thursday, November 16, 2006
English AlJazeera is Good Thing
The vast difference in the world view between the Arab world and the West (especially the US) has come into focus again with the recent announcement that AlJazeera is inaugurating its English language news channel. I have watched with amusement over the past two days at the almost uniformly negative (or at best tepid) response in the various broadcast and written media in the U.S. at this announcement. Even liberal journalists treated the news with reservation and suspicion. The major cable providers indignantly refused to offer it to their viewers. It was after the all the channel that showed dead Iraqi civilians and dead American soldiers. Imagine that, showing the real consequences of war! You'd think from the way it is represented that it is the mouthpiece of al-Qaida. It becomes clear by what is being said, that most of the journalists who write about AlJazeera had never bothered to watch it or listen to what was is actually being said.
I don't get it. I don't necessarily like all of what AlJazeera puts out but its establishment in 1997 was a watershed event in broadcast journalism in the Middle East where TV stations were almost uniformly propaganda outlets for the various autocratic governments. Logically, anyone interested in democracy in the Middle East should helping to spawn more AlJazeeras.
English AlJazeera is good thing and should be widely availabe to viewers in the U.S. It would certainly broaden the world view of the general American public. It would only be fair. Afterall, all American networks (yes, even FoxNews) are widely available in the Middle East.
Below is a good article from Foreign Policy refuting the common criticisms leveled at AlJazeera in the Western media.
Think Again: Al Jazeera
By Hugh Miles
Page 1 of 3
July/August 2006
It is vilified as a propaganda machine and Osama bin Laden’s mouthpiece. In truth, though, Al Jazeera is as hated in the palaces of Riyadh as it is in the White House. But, as millions of loyal viewers already know, Al Jazeera promotes a level of free speech and dissent rarely seen in the Arab world. With plans to go global, it might just become your network of choice.
“Al Jazeera Supports Terrorism” : False, though the network makes little attempt to disassociate itself from those who do. This claim is one of the loudest arguments that Western critics have levied against the Arabic-language news channel since its inception 10 years ago, when the Doha, Qatar-based network pledged to present all viewpoints. Just as it describes in its motto, “The opinion and the other opinion,” Al Jazeera has lent airtime even to hated political figures and extremists, including prominent members of al Qaeda. It’s this willingness to present terrorists as legitimate political commentators that has prompted outspoken critics such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to refer to Al Jazeera’s coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as “inaccurate and inexcusable.”
After all, when Al Jazeera offers its estimated 50 million viewers exclusive interviews of Osama bin Laden, it’s easy to confuse access with endorsement. And when a journalist who conducts those interviews is jailed for collaboration with al Qaeda, as Tayssir Alouni was in a Spanish court last year, the line between impartial observer and impassioned supporter is certainly blurred. In addition, al Qaeda is not the only terrorist group that reaches out to Al Jazeera. Besides the infamous bin Laden tapes—at least six of which the network has still never aired—Al Jazeera has also received tapes from insurgent groups in Iraq, renegade Afghan warlords, and the London suicide bombers.
But the network has never supported violence against the United States. Not once have its correspondents praised attacks on coalition forces in Iraq. The network has never captured an attack on the coalition “live,” and there’s no evidence Al Jazeera has known about any attack beforehand. Despite claims to the contrary, the network has never aired footage of a beheading. As for Alouni’s case, conclusive evidence has yet to be presented to the public. And there is nothing to suggest that the network’s funding is illegitimate. Allegations of supporting terrorism remain just that—allegations.
“Al Jazeera Is Anti-Semitic”: Wrong. Just as Al Jazeera has proven willing to present al Qaeda’s “perspective,” it has also devoted airtime to and welcomed another regional pariah—Israel. The network was the first Arab channel to allow Israelis to present their case in their own words, in Hebrew, English, or Arabic. This move was a major departure from past practices and truly shocked the Arab public. Until Al Jazeera arrived, most Arabs had never even heard an Israeli’s voice. Al Jazeera regularly airs clips of Israeli officials within news bulletins and conducts live interviews with six to 10 Israelis each month. The network covers Israeli affairs extensively and is widely watched in Israel. In fact, Al Jazeera gives more airtime to Israeli issues than any other channel outside Israel itself.
Although Israel has accused Al Jazeera of bias and anti-Semitism (and some of the network’s guests have certainly fit that bill), the network’s coverage has occasionally been of concrete benefit to the Israelis. When Israel invaded Jenin in the spring of 2002, Al Jazeera’s exclusive television reports from within the besieged city thoroughly dispelled rumors of a “massacre,” leading to a U.N. special investigating committee appointed by the secretary-general being unceremoniously disbanded.
Many Israelis even regard Al Jazeera as an important new force for change in the Arab world. Gideon Ezra, former deputy head of the Israeli General Security Service, once remarked that he wished “all Arab media were like Al-Jazeera.” Not all Arabs would agree. Although many Westerners think Al Jazeera has a pro-Arab bias, many Arabs believe exactly the opposite. It is widely held in the Arab world that Al Jazeera is financed and run by Mossad, MI5, or the CIA, so as to undermine Arab unity. Just as Bahrain banned Al Jazeera from reporting from inside the country because of a perceived Zionist bias in 2002, Al Jazeera’s bureaus in Arab countries have often been closed down, accused of besmirching the Palestinians or disseminating other kinds of imperialistic anti-Arab propaganda.
“Al Jazeera Is Spreading Political Freedom”: Wishful thinking. It’s true that Al Jazeera established the tradition of investigative reporting in the Arab world and rolled back the boundaries of debate within Arab families, breaking all kinds of taboos about what could be discussed on television. Improving upon the sycophantic Arab news channels that existed prior to 1996, Al Jazeera better informs the Arab public about their leadership and provides Arabs with a forum through which they can more easily ask of their rulers, “Why are we in this mess?”
In fact, Al Jazeera’s programs about Western politics have done more to inform Arabs about democracy than any nation or station. After 9/11, Al Jazeera’s Washington bureau started two weekly talk shows to illuminate American democracy for a foreign audience: From Washington, in which the bureau chief interviewed U.S. politicians, including members of the Bush administration; and U.S. Presidential Race, which covered the U.S. elections in great depth, including most of the major primaries. (Continued Here)
I don't get it. I don't necessarily like all of what AlJazeera puts out but its establishment in 1997 was a watershed event in broadcast journalism in the Middle East where TV stations were almost uniformly propaganda outlets for the various autocratic governments. Logically, anyone interested in democracy in the Middle East should helping to spawn more AlJazeeras.
English AlJazeera is good thing and should be widely availabe to viewers in the U.S. It would certainly broaden the world view of the general American public. It would only be fair. Afterall, all American networks (yes, even FoxNews) are widely available in the Middle East.
Below is a good article from Foreign Policy refuting the common criticisms leveled at AlJazeera in the Western media.
Think Again: Al Jazeera
By Hugh Miles
Page 1 of 3
July/August 2006
It is vilified as a propaganda machine and Osama bin Laden’s mouthpiece. In truth, though, Al Jazeera is as hated in the palaces of Riyadh as it is in the White House. But, as millions of loyal viewers already know, Al Jazeera promotes a level of free speech and dissent rarely seen in the Arab world. With plans to go global, it might just become your network of choice.
“Al Jazeera Supports Terrorism” : False, though the network makes little attempt to disassociate itself from those who do. This claim is one of the loudest arguments that Western critics have levied against the Arabic-language news channel since its inception 10 years ago, when the Doha, Qatar-based network pledged to present all viewpoints. Just as it describes in its motto, “The opinion and the other opinion,” Al Jazeera has lent airtime even to hated political figures and extremists, including prominent members of al Qaeda. It’s this willingness to present terrorists as legitimate political commentators that has prompted outspoken critics such as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to refer to Al Jazeera’s coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as “inaccurate and inexcusable.”
After all, when Al Jazeera offers its estimated 50 million viewers exclusive interviews of Osama bin Laden, it’s easy to confuse access with endorsement. And when a journalist who conducts those interviews is jailed for collaboration with al Qaeda, as Tayssir Alouni was in a Spanish court last year, the line between impartial observer and impassioned supporter is certainly blurred. In addition, al Qaeda is not the only terrorist group that reaches out to Al Jazeera. Besides the infamous bin Laden tapes—at least six of which the network has still never aired—Al Jazeera has also received tapes from insurgent groups in Iraq, renegade Afghan warlords, and the London suicide bombers.
But the network has never supported violence against the United States. Not once have its correspondents praised attacks on coalition forces in Iraq. The network has never captured an attack on the coalition “live,” and there’s no evidence Al Jazeera has known about any attack beforehand. Despite claims to the contrary, the network has never aired footage of a beheading. As for Alouni’s case, conclusive evidence has yet to be presented to the public. And there is nothing to suggest that the network’s funding is illegitimate. Allegations of supporting terrorism remain just that—allegations.
“Al Jazeera Is Anti-Semitic”: Wrong. Just as Al Jazeera has proven willing to present al Qaeda’s “perspective,” it has also devoted airtime to and welcomed another regional pariah—Israel. The network was the first Arab channel to allow Israelis to present their case in their own words, in Hebrew, English, or Arabic. This move was a major departure from past practices and truly shocked the Arab public. Until Al Jazeera arrived, most Arabs had never even heard an Israeli’s voice. Al Jazeera regularly airs clips of Israeli officials within news bulletins and conducts live interviews with six to 10 Israelis each month. The network covers Israeli affairs extensively and is widely watched in Israel. In fact, Al Jazeera gives more airtime to Israeli issues than any other channel outside Israel itself.
Although Israel has accused Al Jazeera of bias and anti-Semitism (and some of the network’s guests have certainly fit that bill), the network’s coverage has occasionally been of concrete benefit to the Israelis. When Israel invaded Jenin in the spring of 2002, Al Jazeera’s exclusive television reports from within the besieged city thoroughly dispelled rumors of a “massacre,” leading to a U.N. special investigating committee appointed by the secretary-general being unceremoniously disbanded.
Many Israelis even regard Al Jazeera as an important new force for change in the Arab world. Gideon Ezra, former deputy head of the Israeli General Security Service, once remarked that he wished “all Arab media were like Al-Jazeera.” Not all Arabs would agree. Although many Westerners think Al Jazeera has a pro-Arab bias, many Arabs believe exactly the opposite. It is widely held in the Arab world that Al Jazeera is financed and run by Mossad, MI5, or the CIA, so as to undermine Arab unity. Just as Bahrain banned Al Jazeera from reporting from inside the country because of a perceived Zionist bias in 2002, Al Jazeera’s bureaus in Arab countries have often been closed down, accused of besmirching the Palestinians or disseminating other kinds of imperialistic anti-Arab propaganda.
“Al Jazeera Is Spreading Political Freedom”: Wishful thinking. It’s true that Al Jazeera established the tradition of investigative reporting in the Arab world and rolled back the boundaries of debate within Arab families, breaking all kinds of taboos about what could be discussed on television. Improving upon the sycophantic Arab news channels that existed prior to 1996, Al Jazeera better informs the Arab public about their leadership and provides Arabs with a forum through which they can more easily ask of their rulers, “Why are we in this mess?”
In fact, Al Jazeera’s programs about Western politics have done more to inform Arabs about democracy than any nation or station. After 9/11, Al Jazeera’s Washington bureau started two weekly talk shows to illuminate American democracy for a foreign audience: From Washington, in which the bureau chief interviewed U.S. politicians, including members of the Bush administration; and U.S. Presidential Race, which covered the U.S. elections in great depth, including most of the major primaries. (Continued Here)
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Why America Failed in Iraq
It is true that hindsight is 20/20 but the reasons for the United States’ failures in Iraq could have been foreseen by a blind man. It was a war waged under false pretenses in an unstable region by a superpower that had little credibility among the people it claimed to want to help. If that is not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is. It was not that the outcome of the military enterprise was in any doubt, the concern was about the morning after. American foreign policy is shortsighted. It is good at showy –Shock and Awe- intervention but is lousy on prevention or long term commitments. There was no reason to expect that the intervention in Iraq was going to be any different. The only difference here was the neocon’s expressed interest in long term change, beyond the removal of Saddam, in bringing democratic change to the Middle East. It was a seductive proposition for many in the Middle East who thought that the status quo was untenable. But the true intentions of the neocons, was, at best, suspect and I for one, believed that even if the intentions were pure, that this “gift” would come at an unacceptable price. After all, there are many conflicting interests: Oil, war on terrorism, the Christian right agenda and Israel, all of whom rank much higher on the priority list than the goal of achieving Arab freedom and democracy. Nevertheless, when war started, I really hoped that I would be proven wrong.
It was wishful thinking as it became clear that the United States’ bungling started early on. Baghdad was allowed to be looted, the Iraqi army was dissolved and the bureaucrats that ran the country were let go. The American civilian administration AND the new Iraqi government barricaded themselves in the Green Zone – so much for freedom and independence. Contracts for rebuilding the country were handed out to American companies. The U.S. forces alienated Iraqi civilians by their harsh treatment that only worsened as the U.S. forces became increasingly targeted. Long before the iconic images of Abu Ghraib became public, an image from early in the war stuck with me and foretold much of what was to follow. It was the photograph of an Iraqi man sitting in the dirt behind barbed wire, his hand tied behind his back, a hood on his head and his infant son crying in his lap. The photograph said much about the whole American approach: paranoid, arrogant, condescending and ignorant all at the same time. This is not to say that many civilian administrators and military officers were not sincerely trying to help Iraq and the Iraqis, it is just that overall heavy-handed approach of the administration conspired to render such individual valiant efforts useless.
Beyond all the mistakes and missteps, there is one basic reason why the whole Iraq project was doomed from the beginning. Two incompatible reasons were given for going to war. The American public was told the reason for war was to protect the United States from terrorism. The Iraqis were told, on the other hand, that the war was necessary to liberate them from a dictatorship and to establish democracy. But how can you promise a nation freedom and democracy if this very freedom and democracy is subservient to your interests as a superpower? This is especially true when the United States, after ridding Iraq of its dictator, hangs around for three years looking more and more like occupier than liberator. The longer Americans stayed, the more ordinary Iraqis resented them, the more fuel was provided for the native insurgency and, even more dangerously, the more Zarqawi-inspired foreign jihadists were able to establish roots in Iraq. So now the war that was falsely sold as part of the “war on terror” has become part of the war on terror which the United States says that it cannot afford to lose. Does that mean that they are willing to fight to the last Iraqi rather than leave Iraq and risk being perceived as losers? Again, American short term interests trump Iraqi freedom and democracy.
The best and sincerest approach after the fall of Baghdad would have been to replace all the high ranking Iraqi army officers, replace the ministers and senior civilian administrators, redeploy the Iraqi army and phase out the U.S. forces within months of arrival. Sure it would have been a very a risky proposition but would it have been much worse than it is today? The quick exit of American military would have quickly taken the wind out of the insurgency, especially the jihadists. It would also have prevented the build up of resentment by Iraqis against their onetime liberators and now tormentors. But most importantly, it would put the onus on the Iraqis to take ownership of their own destiny and showed the world –especially the Arab world- that the U.S. is not interested in occupation and hegemony but in bringing about real, positive change for the people of the region.
It was wishful thinking as it became clear that the United States’ bungling started early on. Baghdad was allowed to be looted, the Iraqi army was dissolved and the bureaucrats that ran the country were let go. The American civilian administration AND the new Iraqi government barricaded themselves in the Green Zone – so much for freedom and independence. Contracts for rebuilding the country were handed out to American companies. The U.S. forces alienated Iraqi civilians by their harsh treatment that only worsened as the U.S. forces became increasingly targeted. Long before the iconic images of Abu Ghraib became public, an image from early in the war stuck with me and foretold much of what was to follow. It was the photograph of an Iraqi man sitting in the dirt behind barbed wire, his hand tied behind his back, a hood on his head and his infant son crying in his lap. The photograph said much about the whole American approach: paranoid, arrogant, condescending and ignorant all at the same time. This is not to say that many civilian administrators and military officers were not sincerely trying to help Iraq and the Iraqis, it is just that overall heavy-handed approach of the administration conspired to render such individual valiant efforts useless.
Beyond all the mistakes and missteps, there is one basic reason why the whole Iraq project was doomed from the beginning. Two incompatible reasons were given for going to war. The American public was told the reason for war was to protect the United States from terrorism. The Iraqis were told, on the other hand, that the war was necessary to liberate them from a dictatorship and to establish democracy. But how can you promise a nation freedom and democracy if this very freedom and democracy is subservient to your interests as a superpower? This is especially true when the United States, after ridding Iraq of its dictator, hangs around for three years looking more and more like occupier than liberator. The longer Americans stayed, the more ordinary Iraqis resented them, the more fuel was provided for the native insurgency and, even more dangerously, the more Zarqawi-inspired foreign jihadists were able to establish roots in Iraq. So now the war that was falsely sold as part of the “war on terror” has become part of the war on terror which the United States says that it cannot afford to lose. Does that mean that they are willing to fight to the last Iraqi rather than leave Iraq and risk being perceived as losers? Again, American short term interests trump Iraqi freedom and democracy.
The best and sincerest approach after the fall of Baghdad would have been to replace all the high ranking Iraqi army officers, replace the ministers and senior civilian administrators, redeploy the Iraqi army and phase out the U.S. forces within months of arrival. Sure it would have been a very a risky proposition but would it have been much worse than it is today? The quick exit of American military would have quickly taken the wind out of the insurgency, especially the jihadists. It would also have prevented the build up of resentment by Iraqis against their onetime liberators and now tormentors. But most importantly, it would put the onus on the Iraqis to take ownership of their own destiny and showed the world –especially the Arab world- that the U.S. is not interested in occupation and hegemony but in bringing about real, positive change for the people of the region.
Photo: A.K. + Photoshop, Faluga on the Nile
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Paradise Deferred
With the never-ending daily toll of death and destruction in Iraq occupying the headlines, Israel has had a free hand, away from the limelight of the world media, to continue to savagely pummel Gaza. Yes, one can say much about the Palestinians' own culpability for their current predicament, but the fact remains that it is ultimately Israel that has complete control over every facet of Palestinian existence. The homemade rockets are no match for the savagery and destructive power of the Israeli military machine. And as if that is not enough, Israel's economic stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank is making the lives of ordinary Palestinians miserable.It is with these events unfolding that I finally watched Paradise Now the 2005 film by Hany Abu-Assad about two childhood friends recruited to become suicide bombers. It is an emotionally intense film that examines the issue of suicide bombing in an unflinchingly direct and objective way; all without resorting to a single scene of violence. The movie provides no easy answers. It is not that the director tries to justify or glorify suicide bombing. To be sure, the viewer is left with the distinct impression that the impending act is horrific and repugnant both for the victims and the perpetrators. Let me say that I too find suicide bombing immoral and that the vacuous excuses made in support of such acts by some is completely unacceptable. If all Israelis are fair game then we (Arabs) cannot complain when the Israeli army uses the same guilt-by-association reasoning to justify the targeting of civilians. It is in fact this mind set on both sides that has contributed to the unending cycles of senseless violence. What Abu-Assad does best in this film is to provide the context in which these acts become possible. He manages to convey the sheer misery of Palestinian existence under Israeli occupation. It is a claustrophobic, humiliating and ultimately dehumanizing existence. This is felt all the more acutely as the scene shift from the misery of the occupied Palestinian territories to the immaculate appearance of an Israeli city, literally minutes away.
I often wonder what the Israeli endgame in Gaza and the West Bank is. The stated short term goal is to get rid of Hamas, but then what? Do they really think that after brutally punishing every Palestinian man, woman and child that they will find someone more amenable to their vision of a peaceful solution?
Though the neocons and their supporters here and in the Middle East want to shift attention away from the festering Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it remains the greatest threat to regional stability as it radicalizes public opinion, empowers extremists, and helps keep autocratic rulers in place. I wonder what the Middle East would look like today had the United States after 9/11, instead of invading Iraq, spent its considerable resources and influence into finding a permanent solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is not an insurmountable problem, what constitutes a fair and just solution is known to all. What is lacking is the political will to push for such a solution.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
A Brief Taste of Prison
In 1986, fresh out of my medical internship, I headed to the Beirut airport to catch my flight to the United States to start my residency training. I was looking forward for a change. The civil war was bogged down in recurring cycles of violence with no end in sight. Besides, as a Syrian citizen, I had little long term prospects for a medical career in Lebanon. I checked in at the ticket counter and proceeded through the Lebanese immigration counter. As I turned the corner to descend to the departure lounge, I saw two men at the bottom of the stairway and my heart skipped a beat.
The men were short, scrawny, in ill-fitting suites and looking out of place. I knew immediately what they were. They might as well have had neon lights on their forehead flashing mukhabarat. After a momentary hesitation, I proceeded down the stairs with an air of confidence hoping that I would pass without harassment. I was wrong. I handed over my passport to one of the men. He opened my passport then looked up at me with disdain and asked where I was going. After I told him, the dreaded question came up: “Wein daftar al askarieh?”-where is you military service booklet. I told him that I did not do my military service but that my family had left Syria when I was five years old. He frowned and fell silent. His friend whispered to him: “He’s a doctor just going to specialize, why don’t you let him go?” But he had other ideas. They both walked off to their officer who was sitting in the middle of the departure lounge looking like he owned the place.
I suddenly spotted a familiar face among the crowd of passengers. He was a family friend of my fiancé (and now wife of 18 years), a businessman who appeared to be well connected. I inched over to him and told him that I needed his help. He looked back at me sheepishly and told me that you can’t mess with these people. With a casual wave of his hand, the officer summoned me. Looking bored, he proceeded to lecture me for the next five minutes about how it was my patriotic duty to liberate the Golan Heights. When he was done, he waved to his men to take me away.
I was driven to the mukhabarat headquarters in Ramlet el-Baida. On the sixth floor office, I was relieved of the contents of my pockets including my wallet and was asked to surrender my belt. I was told that when the senior officers returned later in the afternoon, they will interrogate me. I then followed one of the officers to the basement of the building. He opened the metal door, let me in and locked the door behind me.
When my eyes accommodated to the darkness, I made out the outlines of my prison. It was a long narrow space, dank from the water covering almost half of the floor on the right. Lining the left side of the cell, some sitting on blankets others standing, were about fifteen other prisoners. Some walked up to me to console me as I stood shocked and dazed. They were a mix of Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians, in this predicament for various reasons. Some had been in for almost three months. I spent the next hours feeling like my life was being sucked out of me. Just hours ago, I was hopeful and happy looking forward to a new and promising start. Now, I was in prison, not knowing what will happen to me or even whether anyone knew where I was.
Late that afternoon, the officer who booked me showed up at the cell door looking annoyed and called me over. He let me out and as I stood there soaked in sweat and disheveled, he told me to tuck in my shirt. We took the elevator back to the sixth floor offices. I feared the worst. As I exited the elevator, two neatly dressed young men introduced themselves as bodyguards of Assem Kanso, the head of the Lebanese Baath party. They told me to look out the window across a couple of empty blocks to a building. They told that my fiancé and her mother were waiting for me there.
Unbeknown to me, the businessman had managed to give a Lebanese immigration officer the phone number of my fiance’s family home and told him to call to tell them what happened. When the call was made, my future mother in law sprung to action. A friend of a friend knew someone who knew the wife of Assem Kanso. Calls were made. The bodyguards collected my suitcases, and had the officer return my wallet. I was driven to Mr. Kanso’s home for a tearful reunion.
When I returned several days later to the airport, it was in Mr. Kanso’s Range Rover with two armed men sitting in the back. I felt like the prototypical Lebanese warlord that I loathed so much. At the airport, the hypocritical bastard who lectured me about patriotism was now apologizing profusely. He called his minions to carry my suitcases. One of Kanso’s men walked me down to the departure lounge and bid me farewell. I asked him not to leave until I am on the plane but he told me not to worry, that everything was “taken care of”. I felt relieved only when my plane was in the air. I did not return to Lebanon for another ten years and then only with a different passport.
I hesitated for several months before writing this piece. On the one hand I did not want to over-inflate the magnitude of what happened to me. After all, I was lucky enough to come out of it unscathed. On the other hand, it is more than just a good story, it is emblematic of what goes on in routinely in Syria and to a variable extent in other Middle Eastern Mukhabaratocracies.
What angers me most about what happened is its complete randomness. Your life, as a citizen, is completely dependent on the whims of single, all powerful individual. If the mukhabarat officer woke up that morning with an annoying itchy rash on his backside, then consider yourself screwed. If, on the other hand, his wife was good to him the night before, he may feel generous on that particular day. You as a citizen have no rights and the law is what THEY tell you it is.
I cannot claim, because of this event, that I know what Michel Kilo and other political prisoners feel during their long incarcerations. I do know, however, how it feels in the first few hours: the sudden and unpredictable loss of your freedom, the shock, the desperation and the fear of what is to come. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies… I take that back, I DO wish it on that mukhabarat officer in the departure lounge and I want to be the one sealing his fate with a flick of my hand.
The men were short, scrawny, in ill-fitting suites and looking out of place. I knew immediately what they were. They might as well have had neon lights on their forehead flashing mukhabarat. After a momentary hesitation, I proceeded down the stairs with an air of confidence hoping that I would pass without harassment. I was wrong. I handed over my passport to one of the men. He opened my passport then looked up at me with disdain and asked where I was going. After I told him, the dreaded question came up: “Wein daftar al askarieh?”-where is you military service booklet. I told him that I did not do my military service but that my family had left Syria when I was five years old. He frowned and fell silent. His friend whispered to him: “He’s a doctor just going to specialize, why don’t you let him go?” But he had other ideas. They both walked off to their officer who was sitting in the middle of the departure lounge looking like he owned the place.
I suddenly spotted a familiar face among the crowd of passengers. He was a family friend of my fiancé (and now wife of 18 years), a businessman who appeared to be well connected. I inched over to him and told him that I needed his help. He looked back at me sheepishly and told me that you can’t mess with these people. With a casual wave of his hand, the officer summoned me. Looking bored, he proceeded to lecture me for the next five minutes about how it was my patriotic duty to liberate the Golan Heights. When he was done, he waved to his men to take me away.
I was driven to the mukhabarat headquarters in Ramlet el-Baida. On the sixth floor office, I was relieved of the contents of my pockets including my wallet and was asked to surrender my belt. I was told that when the senior officers returned later in the afternoon, they will interrogate me. I then followed one of the officers to the basement of the building. He opened the metal door, let me in and locked the door behind me.
When my eyes accommodated to the darkness, I made out the outlines of my prison. It was a long narrow space, dank from the water covering almost half of the floor on the right. Lining the left side of the cell, some sitting on blankets others standing, were about fifteen other prisoners. Some walked up to me to console me as I stood shocked and dazed. They were a mix of Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians, in this predicament for various reasons. Some had been in for almost three months. I spent the next hours feeling like my life was being sucked out of me. Just hours ago, I was hopeful and happy looking forward to a new and promising start. Now, I was in prison, not knowing what will happen to me or even whether anyone knew where I was.
Late that afternoon, the officer who booked me showed up at the cell door looking annoyed and called me over. He let me out and as I stood there soaked in sweat and disheveled, he told me to tuck in my shirt. We took the elevator back to the sixth floor offices. I feared the worst. As I exited the elevator, two neatly dressed young men introduced themselves as bodyguards of Assem Kanso, the head of the Lebanese Baath party. They told me to look out the window across a couple of empty blocks to a building. They told that my fiancé and her mother were waiting for me there.
Unbeknown to me, the businessman had managed to give a Lebanese immigration officer the phone number of my fiance’s family home and told him to call to tell them what happened. When the call was made, my future mother in law sprung to action. A friend of a friend knew someone who knew the wife of Assem Kanso. Calls were made. The bodyguards collected my suitcases, and had the officer return my wallet. I was driven to Mr. Kanso’s home for a tearful reunion.
When I returned several days later to the airport, it was in Mr. Kanso’s Range Rover with two armed men sitting in the back. I felt like the prototypical Lebanese warlord that I loathed so much. At the airport, the hypocritical bastard who lectured me about patriotism was now apologizing profusely. He called his minions to carry my suitcases. One of Kanso’s men walked me down to the departure lounge and bid me farewell. I asked him not to leave until I am on the plane but he told me not to worry, that everything was “taken care of”. I felt relieved only when my plane was in the air. I did not return to Lebanon for another ten years and then only with a different passport.
I hesitated for several months before writing this piece. On the one hand I did not want to over-inflate the magnitude of what happened to me. After all, I was lucky enough to come out of it unscathed. On the other hand, it is more than just a good story, it is emblematic of what goes on in routinely in Syria and to a variable extent in other Middle Eastern Mukhabaratocracies.
What angers me most about what happened is its complete randomness. Your life, as a citizen, is completely dependent on the whims of single, all powerful individual. If the mukhabarat officer woke up that morning with an annoying itchy rash on his backside, then consider yourself screwed. If, on the other hand, his wife was good to him the night before, he may feel generous on that particular day. You as a citizen have no rights and the law is what THEY tell you it is.
I cannot claim, because of this event, that I know what Michel Kilo and other political prisoners feel during their long incarcerations. I do know, however, how it feels in the first few hours: the sudden and unpredictable loss of your freedom, the shock, the desperation and the fear of what is to come. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies… I take that back, I DO wish it on that mukhabarat officer in the departure lounge and I want to be the one sealing his fate with a flick of my hand.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Looking at Iraq and Fearing for Syria
The steady stream of impersonal bad news from Iraq has tended to desensitize me to the magnitude of the horror facing ordinary Iraqis. That changed when I heard on the radio the story of one Baghdadi family's plight. They are a Sunni family of limited means forced to leave their apartment in a Shia dominated neighborhood under threat to seek refuge in the Western, Sunni dominated areas. Their Shia neighbors don't want them to leave but are unable to protect them. They used up all of their modest savings on this move.
This is happening all over Baghdad in Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. The city is becoming polarized and divided. Anyone with enough means is leaving the country. In addition to the indignation of having to forcefully leave one's home, violence threatens everyone. Dozens of mutilated bodies are found everyday in Baghdad. Suicide bombers strike at will. The depravity of the violence facing Iraqis is mind-numbing. Nothing is sacred; not mosques, not churches, not funerals and not weddings. The average citizen has no one to turn to for protection. The Iraqi police are infiltrated with sectarian killers and the American troops often act like paranoid, trigger happy vigilante. A recent report has put the death toll in Iraq since 2003 at over 600,000!
This IS a civil war, make no mistake about it. The sectarian killings remind me of the Katl al hawiyeh of the worst episodes of the Lebanese civil war, only magnified several fold.
I vehemently opposed the American invasion of Iraq. I hated Saddam and all that he stood for but I also knew the Americans had no idea what they were getting into. They were driven by ideology and not reason. The pretexts given for the invasion were fabricated and self-serving. Yet, how can you not rejoice when a despicable tyrant such as Saddam is deposed. I hoped against all odds that the Iraqis could pull it off but a combination of massive American incompetence, self-serving sectarian interests and nihilistic jihadists have conspired to turn Iraq into its present state.
The story of this family has left me with a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt sad for the Iraqis but also fearful for Syria. Is this what awaits Syria should the Baathist regime crumble? How different Syria from Iraq? The Saddam regime was much more brutal than the Asad dynasty ever was and the sectarian divides are not as raw in Syria -though no one really knows what will happen once the tight lid of the regime comes off. It is not surprising then that the average Syrian feels besieged and fearful of change. This is the reason why many Syrians, even those who want change, minimize the regime's misdeeds; peace and safety first, democracy can wait. Some feel that the autocratic police state is a necessary evil keeping anarchy and chaos at bay. Because of these sentiments some in Syria are angered by Syrian expatriates, sitting in the safety of exile, agitating loudly for change. What these people fail to realize is that Syria's present predicament is the result of the Baathist regime's utter failure to build a viable state after 43 years in power.
This is happening all over Baghdad in Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. The city is becoming polarized and divided. Anyone with enough means is leaving the country. In addition to the indignation of having to forcefully leave one's home, violence threatens everyone. Dozens of mutilated bodies are found everyday in Baghdad. Suicide bombers strike at will. The depravity of the violence facing Iraqis is mind-numbing. Nothing is sacred; not mosques, not churches, not funerals and not weddings. The average citizen has no one to turn to for protection. The Iraqi police are infiltrated with sectarian killers and the American troops often act like paranoid, trigger happy vigilante. A recent report has put the death toll in Iraq since 2003 at over 600,000!
This IS a civil war, make no mistake about it. The sectarian killings remind me of the Katl al hawiyeh of the worst episodes of the Lebanese civil war, only magnified several fold.
I vehemently opposed the American invasion of Iraq. I hated Saddam and all that he stood for but I also knew the Americans had no idea what they were getting into. They were driven by ideology and not reason. The pretexts given for the invasion were fabricated and self-serving. Yet, how can you not rejoice when a despicable tyrant such as Saddam is deposed. I hoped against all odds that the Iraqis could pull it off but a combination of massive American incompetence, self-serving sectarian interests and nihilistic jihadists have conspired to turn Iraq into its present state.
The story of this family has left me with a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt sad for the Iraqis but also fearful for Syria. Is this what awaits Syria should the Baathist regime crumble? How different Syria from Iraq? The Saddam regime was much more brutal than the Asad dynasty ever was and the sectarian divides are not as raw in Syria -though no one really knows what will happen once the tight lid of the regime comes off. It is not surprising then that the average Syrian feels besieged and fearful of change. This is the reason why many Syrians, even those who want change, minimize the regime's misdeeds; peace and safety first, democracy can wait. Some feel that the autocratic police state is a necessary evil keeping anarchy and chaos at bay. Because of these sentiments some in Syria are angered by Syrian expatriates, sitting in the safety of exile, agitating loudly for change. What these people fail to realize is that Syria's present predicament is the result of the Baathist regime's utter failure to build a viable state after 43 years in power.
Yet these are particularly volatile times and, as Iraq clearly shows, a sudden forceful change in the absence of a viable opposition movement with popular support, will be disastrous.
So what has the story of the Iraqi family taught me? Well, it has reinforced my feeling that change has to come from within with help from Syrians on the outside but without foreign interference. The other necessary components are that the Syrian people have to be invested in change and that within the vast corrupt Baathist machine, their are few honest souls who will allow some reforms to start materializing.
I realize that there are many "ifs" in my equation for change and the process will be long and tedious, as my friend SB has pointed out, but the alternative, an Iraqi-type quagmire, is too painful to contemplate.
I realize that there are many "ifs" in my equation for change and the process will be long and tedious, as my friend SB has pointed out, but the alternative, an Iraqi-type quagmire, is too painful to contemplate.
(Photo by AK, Texas hills)
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Redefining "Resistance"
When Arabs talk of about Al-mukawamah (resistance), they refer to a just struggle against anyone who breaches the sanctity of Arab land. It is a logical, justifiable and understandable nationalistic response to free occupied land. It is an idea that has instant mass appeal. Resistance, however, was always too narrowly -and negatively- defined as armed struggle, which often became an end in itself. Some leaders of resistance movements exploited the mass appeal of resistance to justify all of their actions and silence critics. Moreover, the idea of resistance was often commandeered by entrenched regimes to deflect attention from their own shortcomings; that explains the sudden fervor of the Syrian government for creating a "resistance" movement akin the Hizbullah in the Golan heights shortly after the July war in Lebanon.
It is time for us to redefine the idea of resistance both in relation to the methods and the targets of such resistance. First, we need to ditch the idea that resistance=armed struggle. My own experiences have taught me to abhor violence both on moral but also on pragmatic grounds. Armed resistance has a role when there are well-defined and achievable goals. Otherwise, it becomes self-destructive for the resistance movement itself and the people it claims to be working for. Second, we need to broaden the targets of resistance to include our own, corrupt and autocratic governments.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not advocating the creation of dissident guerilla movements. The last thing I, or most Syrians for that matter, want to see is Syria turned into another Iraq.
What I am advocating for is a form of civil resistance. A skeptic would say that its precisely what the leaders of the Damascus Spring and other dissidents have done and that has gotten them nowhere. The problem is that these leaders lack the visible support of the common citizen; even autocratic regimes are mindful of the will of the people -provided that will is expressed. The reason as we all know is that most Syrian citizens are politically disenfranchised and fearful of airing their political views. Yet, despite the tight government control on the media, Syria is not as closed a society as it was in the 70s and 80s. Many Syrians have traveled abroad and have access to information that the government does not control. They know and have seen alternatives to the autocratic system that they have to endure. Moreover, Syrian civil society has shown that it is capable of acting independently of the government. Witness the admirable Syrian civil society response to help displaced Lebanese. Some of it, to be sure, was government propaganda. Most, however, was the coordinated effort of common citizens, unions, professional groups and private businesses.
I am not expecting or imagining mass anti-government demonstrations to suddenly materialize in Syria. Yet, the Syrian people can no longer afford to wait for the halting pace of "reform" that the regime espouses. What is needed is coordinated civil action for change. It should start far from hot-button political issues but with issues that the government itself claims it is working to change such as corruption, economic reform and issues of social justice.
Is this all wishful thinking? Perhaps. An organized, activist civil society on its own may not be capable of affecting the type of change that is needed. Nevertheless, civil society groups working independently of the government are still critical for the long term health of Syria and are essential to mitigate the effects of a sudden (regime) change that would cause the instant disintegration of the centralized government.
(Illustration: Picasso's dove of peace)
Friday, September 29, 2006
Political Prisoners in Syria: The Perpetual Revolving Door
The current state of affairs in Syria reminds me of this line from an Egyptian movie from long ago : "every time we take a step forward, we take two steps back"(its sounds better sung repeatedly in Egyptian-accented Arabic). Just as Bashar allows the release of some of the signatories of the Beirut-Damascus declaration, Josh Landis reports on Syria Comment that eight young pro-democracy activists arrested earlier this year have had their trial postponed. They have been held without access to legal counsel or visitation rights. In the meantime Mohammed al- Abdallah, son of journalist Ali al-Abdallah continues his hunger strike and is joined in solidarity by five other jailed political prisoners. Additionally, two Palestinian human rights activists from the Yarmouk camp are arrested for belonging to a banned organization. They are: Sahar Ali al-Saleh and Samer Yousef Bakour.
So here you have it, Bashar's Syria 2006 looking very much like Hafez's Syria circa 1976 or 1986. Some may dispute that and say that the scale and severity of the crackdown on dissent has lessened. Perhaps, but a small improvement from a horrible state of affairs is still horrible. The problem is that things are getting worse not better. When it comes to the state of human rights in Syria, following the timid step forward in early 2001, we have taken ten steps back.
Names of imprisoned activists (link to petition for their release):
So here you have it, Bashar's Syria 2006 looking very much like Hafez's Syria circa 1976 or 1986. Some may dispute that and say that the scale and severity of the crackdown on dissent has lessened. Perhaps, but a small improvement from a horrible state of affairs is still horrible. The problem is that things are getting worse not better. When it comes to the state of human rights in Syria, following the timid step forward in early 2001, we have taken ten steps back.
Names of imprisoned activists (link to petition for their release):
- Ali Nizar Ali
- Husam Ali Mulhim
- Tarek Ghorani
- Maher Ibrahim
- Ayham Saqr
- Alam Fakhour
- Omar Ali al-Abdullah
- Diab Sirieyeh.
Monday, September 25, 2006
History and the Pope's Speech
This is a late post on the much discussed Pope speech but I could not ignore this editorial that appeared in the Jewish progressive newspaper, Forward. My view on this is pretty much the same as on the cartoon fiasco. I believe that the Pope intended what he said but regardless of that I am embarrassed by the response of my co-religionists. I could go on but it has all been said before so I will not belabor the point. I do like the historical perspective presented in this article though. The West often chides us Middle Easterners for having too long a historical memory, but perhaps many in the West have too short a historical memory; or maybe it is just selective amnesia.
The Pope, Islam and History
Fri. Sep 22, 2006
In the fall of 1776, as the newly independent American colonies set about drafting their individual state constitutions, a furious debate erupted over the rights of religious minorities. Preachers and populists warned that letting non-Protestants vote and hold public office, as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were urging, could result in "Jews, Turks and Infidels" taking over America. The cry was taken up in state after state and became a national movement. The association between Jews and "Turks" was a natural one for Americans of that era. Judaism and Islam were linked in the popular mind as kindred Middle Eastern cultures. The few Jews who had settled in America were mostly Sephardim, Portuguese Marranos who preserved the melodies, the recipes and even the ceremonial dress of their lost golden age in Muslim Spain.The association continued long after Jews won their rights. For nearly a century and a half after independence, American Jews who received senior diplomatic postings overseas usually got sent to Muslim capitals, where it was assumed that they would readily find a common language. That custom came to a sudden halt only in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration inaugurated a century of Muslim-Jewish hostility. No American Jew was appointed chief of mission in a Muslim country again until 1993, after the signing of the Oslo Accords.That history is worth recalling this week as we consider the furor touched off by a recent speech of Pope Benedict XVI, in which he seemed to suggest that Islam contains an innate streak of violent evil. His words have touched off a wave of violent protests across the Muslim world, reminiscent of last winter's Cartoon Jihad and similar incidents going back to the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Whether or not the pope actually meant to say what the protesters think they heard - that Islam harbors violence and evil - the protests seem ironically to have proved the point.Even more ironic, it's not at all clear that Benedict actually meant to say that. His speech was a learned discourse, before a college audience, on the importance of dialogue and the supremacy of reason. The address included a brief quote from a 14th-century Byzantine Christian prince, complaining to a Muslim - "with a startling brusqueness," the pope noted - of Islam's "evil" tendency to "spread by the sword."The words come from a distant time. Christianity had swept Europe, in large part by the sword, but then lost a two-century holy war to capture Jerusalem. The prince, the future Emperor Manuel II of Byzantium, was waging a lifelong, losing struggle to defend what remained of his own Christian empire from Muslim conquest. In a struggle for world domination between two competing empires, harsh words may be used. Such moments don't necessarily produce useful philosophical dialogue. That's partly what the pope was driving at.None of that has stopped a small army of Western commentators and editorialists from rallying behind the papal message that the Muslim protesters thought they heard. Benedict was right, these pundits say, to call Islam a violent faith. Muslims, they say, are conditioned by their religious tradition to neglect economic growth and good governance and to blame the parlous state of their societies on the West, Jews and anyone else they can find. Their religion teaches intolerance and celebrates violence, they say, and it's about time that somebody had the guts to stand up and say it. Nowhere is this sentiment more keenly felt than in some quarters of the Jewish community, where fears for Israel's survival in the face of Muslim rage have reached a fever pitch of late. In such circles, it's considered the height of wisdom to stand tall and speak truth to Islam - and to press at every opportunity for a confrontational Western response to Muslim provocation. Their hope is that the enlightened forces of Christendom, the Jews' natural and historic ally, may yet knock some sense into the benighted faithful of the Umma, and in the process, they reason, make Israel safe.But bad history makes for bad policy. The violent convulsions wracking the Muslim world today are no more inherent to Islam than the Crusades or the pogroms were essential to Christianity. As for the current confrontation between Islam and Judaism, it is, in the broad sweep of history, a mere blip, compared to the two-millennium nightmare of Christian persecution.History teaches that there are times to confront evil and times for dialogue. The ravings of an Ahmadinejad in Iran leave little room for useful exchange. Bin Laden and his ilk can only be hunted down, not wooed. But the Muslim world also includes major leaders, from the Egyptian, Pakistani and Palestinian presidents to the kings of Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, who want to end this sorry chapter in history and open a new one. It's important to know when - and how - to talk.Popes like to speak in enigmas. It's an old tradition, a way to help preserve their mystique. But there are times when clarity is what's called for. Benedict himself lectured a group of Muslim scholars last year on the importance of using words carefully. "Words are highly influential in the education of the mind," he said at the time. He was right; words have consequences. He's learning that all over again this week. We'd all do well to pay heed.
The Pope, Islam and History
Fri. Sep 22, 2006
In the fall of 1776, as the newly independent American colonies set about drafting their individual state constitutions, a furious debate erupted over the rights of religious minorities. Preachers and populists warned that letting non-Protestants vote and hold public office, as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were urging, could result in "Jews, Turks and Infidels" taking over America. The cry was taken up in state after state and became a national movement. The association between Jews and "Turks" was a natural one for Americans of that era. Judaism and Islam were linked in the popular mind as kindred Middle Eastern cultures. The few Jews who had settled in America were mostly Sephardim, Portuguese Marranos who preserved the melodies, the recipes and even the ceremonial dress of their lost golden age in Muslim Spain.The association continued long after Jews won their rights. For nearly a century and a half after independence, American Jews who received senior diplomatic postings overseas usually got sent to Muslim capitals, where it was assumed that they would readily find a common language. That custom came to a sudden halt only in 1917, when the Balfour Declaration inaugurated a century of Muslim-Jewish hostility. No American Jew was appointed chief of mission in a Muslim country again until 1993, after the signing of the Oslo Accords.That history is worth recalling this week as we consider the furor touched off by a recent speech of Pope Benedict XVI, in which he seemed to suggest that Islam contains an innate streak of violent evil. His words have touched off a wave of violent protests across the Muslim world, reminiscent of last winter's Cartoon Jihad and similar incidents going back to the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Whether or not the pope actually meant to say what the protesters think they heard - that Islam harbors violence and evil - the protests seem ironically to have proved the point.Even more ironic, it's not at all clear that Benedict actually meant to say that. His speech was a learned discourse, before a college audience, on the importance of dialogue and the supremacy of reason. The address included a brief quote from a 14th-century Byzantine Christian prince, complaining to a Muslim - "with a startling brusqueness," the pope noted - of Islam's "evil" tendency to "spread by the sword."The words come from a distant time. Christianity had swept Europe, in large part by the sword, but then lost a two-century holy war to capture Jerusalem. The prince, the future Emperor Manuel II of Byzantium, was waging a lifelong, losing struggle to defend what remained of his own Christian empire from Muslim conquest. In a struggle for world domination between two competing empires, harsh words may be used. Such moments don't necessarily produce useful philosophical dialogue. That's partly what the pope was driving at.None of that has stopped a small army of Western commentators and editorialists from rallying behind the papal message that the Muslim protesters thought they heard. Benedict was right, these pundits say, to call Islam a violent faith. Muslims, they say, are conditioned by their religious tradition to neglect economic growth and good governance and to blame the parlous state of their societies on the West, Jews and anyone else they can find. Their religion teaches intolerance and celebrates violence, they say, and it's about time that somebody had the guts to stand up and say it. Nowhere is this sentiment more keenly felt than in some quarters of the Jewish community, where fears for Israel's survival in the face of Muslim rage have reached a fever pitch of late. In such circles, it's considered the height of wisdom to stand tall and speak truth to Islam - and to press at every opportunity for a confrontational Western response to Muslim provocation. Their hope is that the enlightened forces of Christendom, the Jews' natural and historic ally, may yet knock some sense into the benighted faithful of the Umma, and in the process, they reason, make Israel safe.But bad history makes for bad policy. The violent convulsions wracking the Muslim world today are no more inherent to Islam than the Crusades or the pogroms were essential to Christianity. As for the current confrontation between Islam and Judaism, it is, in the broad sweep of history, a mere blip, compared to the two-millennium nightmare of Christian persecution.History teaches that there are times to confront evil and times for dialogue. The ravings of an Ahmadinejad in Iran leave little room for useful exchange. Bin Laden and his ilk can only be hunted down, not wooed. But the Muslim world also includes major leaders, from the Egyptian, Pakistani and Palestinian presidents to the kings of Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, who want to end this sorry chapter in history and open a new one. It's important to know when - and how - to talk.Popes like to speak in enigmas. It's an old tradition, a way to help preserve their mystique. But there are times when clarity is what's called for. Benedict himself lectured a group of Muslim scholars last year on the importance of using words carefully. "Words are highly influential in the education of the mind," he said at the time. He was right; words have consequences. He's learning that all over again this week. We'd all do well to pay heed.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Syrians Refuse to be Silenced
The following appeal was posted by Fares:
The updated high profile Syrian prisoners list include Mahmoud Issa, Michel Kilo, Khalil Hasan, Anwar el Bunni, Suleiman al-Shamar, Ali Abdallah, Mohammed Ali Abdallah, Kamal Labwani, Fateh Jamous, Habib Saleh and Aref Dalila.
It is easy to become complacent and resign oneself to the fact it all seems hopeless. But, at least, in honor of those few who believed that it is NOT hopeless, that this country has a better future beyond corruption and dogma.
We owe it to these prisoners of conscience and we owe it to the future of our country to keep pushing for their release.
We are all Free Syrians and We deserve a fair justice system, free speech and better policies.
I fully support Fares' statement and urge other Syrian bloggers to post this statement of support on their blogs. These prisoners are not criminals and they are not terrorists. These are true patriots concerned about the future of their country and with the courage to demand change from the disastrous course the country is currently on. They are asking for reform: for freedom of expression, a representative government accountable to its citizens, an end to corruption and the rule of law. Without these changes the full potential of Syria and the Syrian people will never be realized.
The updated high profile Syrian prisoners list include Mahmoud Issa, Michel Kilo, Khalil Hasan, Anwar el Bunni, Suleiman al-Shamar, Ali Abdallah, Mohammed Ali Abdallah, Kamal Labwani, Fateh Jamous, Habib Saleh and Aref Dalila.
It is easy to become complacent and resign oneself to the fact it all seems hopeless. But, at least, in honor of those few who believed that it is NOT hopeless, that this country has a better future beyond corruption and dogma.
We owe it to these prisoners of conscience and we owe it to the future of our country to keep pushing for their release.
We are all Free Syrians and We deserve a fair justice system, free speech and better policies.
I fully support Fares' statement and urge other Syrian bloggers to post this statement of support on their blogs. These prisoners are not criminals and they are not terrorists. These are true patriots concerned about the future of their country and with the courage to demand change from the disastrous course the country is currently on. They are asking for reform: for freedom of expression, a representative government accountable to its citizens, an end to corruption and the rule of law. Without these changes the full potential of Syria and the Syrian people will never be realized.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Differing Visions of Islam
Despite the descriptor under my blog banner, I have yet to explicitely discuss religion in any of my posts. The reason is that, to me, faith and spirituality are intensely personal endeavors. It is also an ongoing journey, in which, as a sentient human being, I will question any interpretation of my faith that I cannot reconcile with my basic sense of right and wrong. To some, that attitude makes me a bad Muslim or not a Muslim at all; I could say that it is their problem not mine, but in fact it is both of our problems.
Long before 9/11 inaugurated the East-West civilizational clash, Islam had been at war with itself. The reasons for that struggle are many and beyond the scope of this post. What is undeniable is that the outcome will determine the future of many regions of the world including Syria and the rest of the Levant. Most reasonable Muslims now clearly understand that there is a need for reform, tajdid wa islah, not in the direction of fanaticism but in the opposite direction.
The article below is the story of one such reformer, the Sudanese mystic Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. It is a long, well researched article that is worth reading. One of the conclusions of this article, is that progressive reform will come from the periphery of the Muslim world and not from its overheated Middle Eastern core. I would add that such ideas will come from even farther afield from Muslims living in the West. One such example is the Swiss-born scholar, Tariq Ramadan, who is, interestingly, the grandson of the Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Whether the ideas of such thinkers, can flow back and inflence the wider Muslim world remains to be seen.
THE MODERATE MARTYR
A radically peaceful vision of Islam.
by GEORGE PACKER
New Yorker: Issue of 2006-09-11Posted 2006-09-04
In 1967, a law student at the University of Khartoum named Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim was looking for a way to spend a summer evening in his home town, a railway junction on the banks of the Nile in northern Sudan. No good movies were showing at the local cinemas, so he went with a friend to hear a public lecture by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, an unorthodox Sudanese mystic with a small but ardent following. Taha’s subject, “An Islamic Constitution: Yes and No,” tantalized Naim. In the years after Sudan became independent, in 1956, the role of Islam in the state was fiercely debated by traditional Sufists, secular Marxists, and the increasingly powerful Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, who, at the time, were led in Sudan by Hasan al-Turabi, a legal scholar. Politically, Naim was drifting toward the left, but his upbringing in a conservative Muslim home had formed him. “I was very torn,” Naim recently recalled. “I am a Muslim, but I couldn’t accept Sharia”—Islamic law. “I studied Sharia and I knew what it said. I couldn’t see how Sudan could be viable without women being full citizens and without non-Muslims being full citizens. I’m a Muslim, but I couldn’t live with this view of Islam.”
Naim’s quandary over Islam was an intensely personal conflict—he called it a “deadlock.” What he heard at Taha’s lecture resolved it. Taha said that the Sudanese constitution needed to be reformed, in order to reconcile “the individual’s need for absolute freedom with the community’s need for total social justice.” This political ideal, he argued, could be best achieved not through Marxism or liberalism but through Islam—that is, Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status. As Naim listened, a profound sense of peace washed over him; he joined Taha’s movement, which came to be known as the Republican Brothers, and the night that had begun so idly changed his life. (Click here for the rest of the article)
Long before 9/11 inaugurated the East-West civilizational clash, Islam had been at war with itself. The reasons for that struggle are many and beyond the scope of this post. What is undeniable is that the outcome will determine the future of many regions of the world including Syria and the rest of the Levant. Most reasonable Muslims now clearly understand that there is a need for reform, tajdid wa islah, not in the direction of fanaticism but in the opposite direction.
The article below is the story of one such reformer, the Sudanese mystic Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. It is a long, well researched article that is worth reading. One of the conclusions of this article, is that progressive reform will come from the periphery of the Muslim world and not from its overheated Middle Eastern core. I would add that such ideas will come from even farther afield from Muslims living in the West. One such example is the Swiss-born scholar, Tariq Ramadan, who is, interestingly, the grandson of the Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Whether the ideas of such thinkers, can flow back and inflence the wider Muslim world remains to be seen.
THE MODERATE MARTYR
A radically peaceful vision of Islam.
by GEORGE PACKER
New Yorker: Issue of 2006-09-11Posted 2006-09-04
In 1967, a law student at the University of Khartoum named Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim was looking for a way to spend a summer evening in his home town, a railway junction on the banks of the Nile in northern Sudan. No good movies were showing at the local cinemas, so he went with a friend to hear a public lecture by Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, an unorthodox Sudanese mystic with a small but ardent following. Taha’s subject, “An Islamic Constitution: Yes and No,” tantalized Naim. In the years after Sudan became independent, in 1956, the role of Islam in the state was fiercely debated by traditional Sufists, secular Marxists, and the increasingly powerful Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, who, at the time, were led in Sudan by Hasan al-Turabi, a legal scholar. Politically, Naim was drifting toward the left, but his upbringing in a conservative Muslim home had formed him. “I was very torn,” Naim recently recalled. “I am a Muslim, but I couldn’t accept Sharia”—Islamic law. “I studied Sharia and I knew what it said. I couldn’t see how Sudan could be viable without women being full citizens and without non-Muslims being full citizens. I’m a Muslim, but I couldn’t live with this view of Islam.”
Naim’s quandary over Islam was an intensely personal conflict—he called it a “deadlock.” What he heard at Taha’s lecture resolved it. Taha said that the Sudanese constitution needed to be reformed, in order to reconcile “the individual’s need for absolute freedom with the community’s need for total social justice.” This political ideal, he argued, could be best achieved not through Marxism or liberalism but through Islam—that is, Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status. As Naim listened, a profound sense of peace washed over him; he joined Taha’s movement, which came to be known as the Republican Brothers, and the night that had begun so idly changed his life. (Click here for the rest of the article)
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