The Skeptic الشكاك

1044 Echoes of Mahalla… in Tunisia

Completely slammed with work and suffering from crippling IT problems, but wanted to flag 10 quick items:

1. I highly recommend Doshka ya Doshka, an excellent blog from Gaza by “a startled Anglo-Arab woman.” I have just subscribed to the RSS feed.

2. The case against editors and journalists from Al-Wafd and Al-Masry al-Youm for reporting on Egyptian real-estate developer Talaat Mostafa’s murder trial despite a gag order has been referred to trial. According to Al-Masry al-Youm, prosecutors have taken no action on another case, against editors and journalists from the government-owned Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and Gomhuriya newspapers, for reporting on the trial.

3. Al-Masry al-Youm and Al-Wafd are also under fire from Amr Bargisi, who, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, called them “Jew haters.” The following day, Al-Masry al-Youm ran a summary of his story.

4. Patrick Swayze is, alas, not dead yet.

5. The Muslim Brotherhood has promised to endorse Gamal Mubarak, the son, if President Hosni Mubarak, the father, resigns. Surely a bit tongue in cheek, but over the years I have heard from many people that they would forget their complaints about the president if he were to resign.

6. Speaking of the Brothers, another 28 were arrested in Marsa Matrouh and Alexandria last Saturday. The Press Syndicate’s Freedoms Committee is sponsoring a conference on behalf of Mohammed Adil and Mohammed Khairy, two Gaza solidarity activists with Brotherhood ties detained in a separate roundup last month. Both maintain blogs.

7. Echoes of Mahalla: Amnesty International is calling on the Tunisian government to investigate allegations that security forces tortured labor activists after demonstrations spread through Tunisia’s southeastern Gafsa region last summer:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC STATEMENT
3 December 2008
Tunisia: Urgent investigation needed into alleged human rights violations in the Gafsa region

Amnesty International today called on the Tunisian government to order an independent investigation into allegations of torture and other abuses by security forces when quelling protests earlier this year in the Gafsa region on the eve of the trial of a local trade union leader and 37 others accused of fomenting the unrest. Adnan Hajji, Secretary General of local office of the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) in Redeyef, and his co-accused are due to go on trial on 4 December 2008 on charges including “forming a criminal group with the aim of destroying public and private property”. They could face up to more than ten years of imprisonment if convicted. At least six of 38 accused are to be tried in their absence.

In a letter to Tunisia’s Minister of Justice and Human Rights Béchir Tekkari, Amnesty International called for the authorities to disclose the outcome of an official investigation which they said had been set up after police opened fire on demonstrators on 6 June 2008, killing one man and injuring others, sparking allegations that police had used excessive force. The letter also detailed cases in which people suspected of organizing or participating in protests are reported to have been detained and tortured by police who forced them to sign incriminating statements that could be used against them at trial and falsified their arrest dates in official records.

BACKGROUND
The phosphate-rich Gafsa region, in south-east Tunisia, was wracked by a wave of popular protests in the first half of this year. They began in the town of Redeyef after the region’s major employer, the Gafsa Phosphate Company, announced the results of a recruitment competition. These were denounced as fraudulent by those who were unsuccessful and others, including the UGTT, and the protests, which developed into a more general protest about high unemployment and rising living costs, then spread to other towns as the authorities deployed large numbers of police and other security forces into the region. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and more than 140 have been charged with offences, some of whom have been convicted and sentenced to jail terms.

For the continuing repercussions of labor unrest in Mahalla, see 3arabawy.

8. Jordan is threatening to jail smokers.

9. Peter Lagerquist has an excellent article in MERIP about the riots in Acre last October. Who can resist an article with such headings as “hummus and demography?”

10. Where (not very) particular people congregate: An online map of bars in downtown Cairo, including such helpful information as how much a Stella costs and whether shisha is also available.

1033 Riots, Detentions, Harassment, and Hashish

Busy with work, but wanted to flag a few items from the past few days:

* Two thousand people rioted in Aswan after police mistakenly killed a bird-seller in the southern Egyptian city.

* Egyptian activists yesterday staged protests to call for the release of 16 people detained in the southern city of Samalout in mid-October. Police used tear gas and batons to disperse an angry crowd that gathered when police killed a pregnant woman on October 8 as they searched her house.

* The protesters also called for the release of two activists, Mohammed Adil and Mohammed Khairy, suspected of trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza. State Security officers raided Mohammed Adil’s home in the early hours of November 21. State Security officers have detained Mohammed Khairy twice since October, and prosecutors have twice ordered his release, yet the latest reports I’ve seen indicate he is still in custody. Both are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, and both maintain blogs. Noha Atef is doing a great job covering this for Global Voices.

* An Iranian reader wrote in to chastise me for writing about Hossein Derakhshan’s possible detention while ignoring two less ambiguous detentions. I am much ashamed.

* Egyptian police announced last Wednesday that they had arrested 550 boys in Cairo on suspicion of sexually harassing schoolgirls. The police reportedly focused their raids on Internet cafes near schools.

This drives me nuts. If there is an appropriate security response to sexual harassment, it is ensuring that women and girls feel comfortable reporting incidents and ensuring that police follow up on the reports. Rounding up boys by the hundreds for using the Internet is not the answer. Educating them from an early age to treat women with respect is.

* By the hash-o-meter, Barack Obama may be the most popular foreign leader in Egypt since Saddam Hussein. Wael Abbas reports that dealers are selling Obama-brand hashish in the Mediterranean town of Marsa Matrouh. 3arabawy recalls that “in 2003, a quite popular brand of hash that appeared in Cairo was named ‘Saddam’ coz it was ‘stronger than chemical weapons.’ “

1014 Where’s Hoder?

Where’s Hoder? If the Iranian government has detained him, they should say so. If he is free, he should say so.

A few days ago, Jahan News reported that Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, better known on the Internet as Hoder, had been arrested soon after his return to Iran, and that he had confessed to spying for Israel. On November 17, the official Islamic Republic News Agency ran the first part in a series of “confessions” from a “Hossein D, one of the people misled by the reformist movement.” (Global Voices has helpfully translated the full IRNA item. It should sound familiar to anyone who has seen previous propaganda “confessions“).

To date, there has been no independent confirmation of Hossein’s arrest, and I understand that his family and friends have not appealed for help. Jahan news, the only source for the story, has been described as “close to Iranian intelligence” and “not a reliable source of information.”

Rancor and Rumor
What we have, then, is a single, alarming rumor from a Web site of dubious reliability. But reaction to the rumor has brought into focus the Iranian-Israeli confrontation and the fault lines within the paranoid, sometimes poisonous world of Iranian diaspora politics. Rumor and paranoia are natural companions, and the original rumor has already multiplied many times over, into more rumors, insinuations, and hints of schadenfreude.

Look at the comments readers left on Brian Whitaker’s report. There’s the usual huffing and puffing that accompanies talk of Iran, Israel, and especially the two together. There’s a distracting thread about Mordechai Vanunu. There are suggestions that this whole thing is just an attention-grabbing stunt. And I’ve heard worse insinuated. How to account for the rancor and the rumor?

Hossein moved to Canada in 2000 and began blogging in 2001. He figured out how to use unicode on blogger to write in Farsi and published a how-to guide for the benefit of others. The Iranian blogosphere quickly ballooned, and Hossein became a well-known proponent of the Internet as an engine for free speech. Journalists called him the “Blogfather.” This sparked resentment from some Iranian bloggers, who felt he took too much credit.

In 2006, Hossein went to Israel on his Canadian passport on an invitation from Lisa Goldman. He explained:

I’ve publicly come to Israel to break a big taboo and to be a bridge between Iranian and Israeli people who are manipulated by their own governments’ and media’s dehumanizing attitude, especially now that the possibility of some sort of violent clash is higher than ever.

Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post loved it, and The New York Times published an op-ed of his with a Tel Aviv byline. Iranian bloggers, Hossein admitted to the Post, were less enthused. Nationalists reacted as anyone would expect. Critics of the government feared guilt by association.

Considering that he had been briefly detained on his last trip to Iran and forced to sign an apology for his writings, and considering that visiting Israel is a crime in Iran, Hossein knew that he would likely face some repercussions if he attempted to return to Iran. But he was already talking about going back one day.

Hossein had always argued online a lot: on blogs, on listservs, in articles. He made accusations and alienated a lot of people. In some cases, his attacks could have put activists in danger.

Over the course of 2006, as U.S. policy on Iran became more bellicose, Hossein became more defensive of the Iranian government. In September 2006 he argued that Iranian-Canadian academic Ramin Jahanbegloo’s “recantation” after four months in an Iranian prison had been sincere, that Jahanbegloo regretted that his work had “indirectly help[ed] the Bush administration in its plans for regime change in Iran through fomenting internal unrest and instability,” and that Iran’s government had “moved beyond state terror.” Some received the article with “bewilderement and outrage,” others as “a slap across the face.”

Around this time, Don Butler wrote in The Ottawa Citizen, “Interview requests from western-based Iranian media… dried up, as [did] invitations to ex-pat events and panel discussions.”

Undeterred, Hossein argued that “The Islamic Republic is worth defending. Even at its worst, it is way better than anything the US or anyone else can bring to Iran,” and added that he “would definitely support Iran if it one day decided it would start making [nuclear] weapons.”

It was also around this time that Hossein officially pulled the plug on stop.censoring.us, where he had formerly monitored Internet censorship in Iran. “Internet censorship exists in Iran,” he wrote, “As it does in many other parts of the world, especially in the Middle East.

But it has recently become another pretext for the United States and its allies to further demonise and delegitimise the government of Iran.

Despite all problems and challenges, I believe that Islamic Republic is a legitimate, sovereign and democratic system and I reject any attempts to participate in such nasty demonising campaigns, which ultimately try to justify the Western intervention.

I believe that Internet censorship is an internal problem and the only way to solve it should also come and develop from within. Taking such efforts beyond Iran and into the international scene will benefit the American politicians more than the Iranian internet users.

Therefore, although this website has not been updated for almost a year, I now officially shut it down.

In October 2007, Mohammed Mehdi Khalaji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, sued him for $2 million, alleging that he had defamed him in a series of blog posts beginning in 2005. In response to the lawsuit, Hossein’s hosting company asked him to remove the posts. He refused, and, after an exchange of emails, the hosting company eventually canceled his account. Ethan Zuckerman, who has long experience with Hossein, defended him on principle, but had to admit “that Derakhshan can be abrasive and difficult.”

Where’s Hoder?
None of this answers the question, “Where is Hoder?” But it does help explain some of the rancor.

So where, indeed, is Hoder? It’s been days now since this rumor started. If he were near a phone line, you would think that he would have noticed the noise and written to say he’s alright. This is a man who monitors Technorati links to his op-eds. Hossein’s family and friends have not come forward to ask for help, but before he returned to Iran this last time, Hossein asked people not to campaign on his behalf if he were detained in Iran because he expected he would not be held long, and that nothing serious would happen to him. I sincerely hope he is hiking in the mountains of Iran, blissfully unaware of the brouhaha.

To those who believe Hossein should be given the same consideration he showed previous detainees, consider these words from H.L. Mencken: “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

If the Iranian government does have him (and pardon me for saying so, Hossein), it should say so and release him. Given Hossein’s high profile and his expressed views, he’d make a funny kind of an Israeli spy.

Disclosure: I first met Hossein Derakhshan at a 2004 conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spoke about blogs and censorship in Iran. We have crossed paths at least once a year since, each time in a different city. I last saw him in June, in Budapest, where we had a cordial argument about whether international human rights organizations were pawns for Dick Cheney and the Israel Lobby (I argued against).

1011 ‘The Way You Mecca Me Feel’

London’s Sun and the slightly more reputable Telegraph report that Michael Jackson has converted to Islam. Both papers run photos of Jackson out and about in Bahrain, dressed in drag.

I think Run CMD said it best over email: “It’s obviously all part of a devious American plan to destroy Islam from within. Michael Jackson is working for Dick Cheney. It all makes sense now.”

992 Kilcullen’s Afghanistan Brief

David Kilcullen gives the New Yorker‘s George Packer what must be one of the best, most concise briefs on Afghanistan available from a Western perspective:

Well, we need to be more effective in what we are doing, but we also need to do some different things, as well, with the focus on security and governance. The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:

(1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people. That is, we have failed to deliver them a well-founded feeling of security. Our failing lies as much in providing human security—economic and social wellbeing, law and order, trust in institutions and hope for the future—as in protection from the Taliban, narco-traffickers, and terrorists. In particular, we have spent too much effort chasing and attacking an elusive enemy who has nothing he needs to defend—and so can always run away to fight another day—and too little effort in securing the people where they sleep. (And doing this would not take nearly as many extra troops as some people think, but rather a different focus of operations).

(2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary that forms the political base and operational support system for the Taliban, and which creates a protective cocoon (abetted by the fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan) around senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

(3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local level—with the emphasis on good governance. In some areas, we have left a vacuum that the Taliban has filled, in other areas some of the Afghan government’s own representatives have been seen as inefficient, corrupt, or exploitative.

(4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things (secure the people, deal with the safe haven, and govern legitimately and well at the local level)—partly because of poor coalition management, partly because of the strategic distraction and resource scarcity caused by Iraq, and partly because, to date, we have given only episodic attention to the war.

So, bottom line—we need to do better, but we also need a rethink in some key areas starting with security and governance. [More…]

Via Abu Muqawama and SWJ.

988 Muslim Scholar Concludes Prophet Mohammed Never Existed

Andrew Higgens for the Wall Street Journal:

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn’t like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.

So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed. [More…]

966 Bedouin Affairs

• First, on a very serious note, an Egyptian security official has said that Bedouin shot and wounded an Egyptian policeman in Sinai today. The news follows days of unrest sparked by the alleged killing of a Bedou man by police. It’s hard to imagine the security forces will leave it at that, though they can still opt for a negotiated resolution as the quickest means of restoring calm. Establishing stability will take longer.
• On a much lighter note (and there’s no way to make this transition without its being jarring and tasteless), from The Times of London via Kafr al-Hanadwa, a Bedou sheikh is sure Obama is his cousin. You must see the video attached to this article:
  

  He has a host of relatives in exotic locations from Hawaii to Kenya, and during his run for the American presidency he discovered that he had an aunt living in Boston.

  Now Barack Obama is being claimed by not one but as many as 8,000 Beduin tribesmen in northern Israel.

  Although the spokesman for the lost tribe of Obama has yet to reveal the documentary evidence that he says he possesses to support his claim, people are flocking from across the region to pay their respects to the “Bedu Obama”, whose social standing has gone through the roof.

  “We knew about it years ago but we were afraid to talk about it because we didn’t want to influence the election,” Abdul Rahman Sheikh Abdullah, a 53-year-old local council member, told The Times in the small Beduin village of Bir al-Maksour in the Israeli region of Galilee. “We wrote a letter to him explaining the family connection.”

  Mr Obama’s team have not responded to the letter so far but that has not dampened Sheikh Abdullah’s festivities.

  He has been handing out sweets and huge dishes of baklava traditional honey-sweetened pastries to all and sundry, and plans to hold a large party next week at which he will slaughter a dozen goats to feed the village.

  It was his 95-year-old mother who first spotted the connection, he says. Seeing the charismatic senator on television, she noted a striking resemblance to one of the African migrant workers who used to be employed by rich sheikhs in the fertile north of British Mandate Palestine in the 1930s.

  The Africans would sometimes marry local Beduin girls and start families, though, like many migrant workers, would just as frequently return home after several years. [Continues…]

• Also via Kafr al-Hanadwa, and only tangentially related to Bedouin affairs, a photograph from Al-Watan that crams all of my stereotypes about Saudi Arabia into one image. (And I know this is stretching it the Bedouin connection: Egyptians like to scoff at Saudis as Bedouin, but no one would suggest the people of Jeddah were Bedouin.) You must see this large to fully appreciate it. Unfortunately, Al-Watan doesn’t credit its photographers. If you’re reading, sir, I would like to talk to you. You deserve a prize.

921 Shabola on Obama

The Arab world could ask for no cuddlier a spokesman than its most esteemed political philosopher and McDonald’s jingle-writer, Shabola.

Shabola, remember, was an early Obama supporter. But his thoughts on Obama’s victory now rhyme:

Bush, curse him, made us vomit and wasted us for years, but people think Obama will be Salah ud-Din.

Talk about high expectations… Saladin now. The self-appointed Voice of the Arab Street is equating the next U.S. president with Saladin. [More of Shabola’s thoughts on Obama, Hariri, and Sheikh Yassin here]

The reactions I’ve heard from guys in grocery stores and in cafes have been more muted, but still celebratory. People are just glad Bush is gone, and that the American people didn’t vote for four more years.

The day Obama takes office will be a fragile moment of opportunity for the United States in the Middle East. I guess my message to the new U.S. president would be: Please don’t waste it. It won’t come back again soon.

898 Son of Irgun!

Obama may not “pal around with terrorists,” but his first act as president elect (after giving a rousing speech) was to ask the son of one to be his chief of staff.

Ha’aretz reports that Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, the inspiration for the character Josh on “The West Wing,” and a former advisor to President Clinton, is also the son of an Irgun member.

The paper also calls Emanuel an Israeli. I would be surprised to learn that dual-nationals can serve as congressmen, but I’ve been surprised before. Or perhaps Ha’aretz just got carried away, and meant “son of an Israeli.” Perhaps they will change the headline.

I have no doubt Emanuel is an intelligent and competent man, however many passports he holds. I assume he has the respect of at least the Clinton people Obama will choose to staff the White House. And Emanuel’s father’s mistakes may not reflect his own beliefs.

Regardless, the appointment of the son of an Irgun militant to such an important office will confirm many Arabs’ worst suspicions about the United States before the ink has dried on the headlines announcing Obama’s historic victory.

(Incidentally, if what the BBC’s correspondent says is true, Emanuel’s appointment would also confirm Republicans’ suspicions that Obama’s talk of bipartisanship is hollow.)

Obama never said he would change U.S. policy with regard to Israel and Palestine, and he did say he would appoint Clinton advisors. And presumably the U.S. policy of condemning the deliberate killing of civilians for any reason, including “national liberation” struggles, is not one of the things the Obama administration hopes to change.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be necessary, given that Emanuel was never a member of Irgun, nor could he have been at his age. Perhaps it’s unfair, perhaps Emanuel has no love for the Irgun, Hamas, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or any other group that seeks an independent state by killing innocent people. In which case it should be easy for Emanuel to denounce Irgun’s tactics.

Alternatively, he could contribute to the future President Obama’s efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by declining the job. I’m sure there are other qualified candidates.

[Update: Well, he took the job. Now he needs to tell his dad to shut up and stop talking to the press.]

860 Lost

I thought this blog post, from the New York Times‘ Stephen Farrell in Baghdad, was excellent:

BAGHDAD — So, a couple of weeks ago I met a guy on a highway near Abu Ghraib.

An American contractor, who somehow drove the wrong way through the Looking Glass and ended up lost in the real Iraq. A real land full of real Iraqis who would really have killed him had he gone much farther out of the I..Z. (International/Green Zone). Or B.I.A.P. (Baghdad International Airport). Or V.C.B. (Camp Victory).

Wherever he was coming from. Some acronym for some Comfort Zone, somewhere, anyway.

Military acronyms are everywhere in Iraq. Some of them don’t make much sense unless you jump all the way through the mirror and embrace the thinking as well as the language.

They are created in a world where 1,000-year-old Iraqi towns barely exist in reality, only as grid references or satellite coordinates, where real people are dismissed cursorily as ‘Hajjis,’ and where the two helpful guys at the back of the Green Zone’s Oakley sunglasses-Oreos-and-Slasher Videos emporium are known as “The Iraqi Shop.” Because there’s only one, in this world.

Anyway I called this lost Abu Ghraib contractor Lost. Because he was. Because I didn’t know his name. Because it was mildly funny. And because he was a living, breathing metaphor who was even wearing an I.Z. tee shirt.

I shouldn’t have.

I met the real ‘Lost’ a few days ago, another guy entirely. And there was nothing funny about him. His American military boots were walking across particles of dead human flesh, which wasn’t his fault. And his mouth was uttering banalities of callousness. Which was.

There had just been a bomb. There has always just been a bomb in Iraq, still. They are smaller now, so the deaths are in single or double figures, not triple. They are less frequent, so overall casualty charts have spiked down. For which we are all grateful.
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