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.

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.

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.]

826 This International Incident Has Been Brought to You by the Letter ‘H’

Thank you, France! Comic relief is rare in the Israeli-Iranian nuclear showdown:

JERUSALEM (AFP) – French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday he was misquoted by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper which reported him as saying Israel would “eat” Iran before Tehran developed a nuclear bomb.

“During the interview in English with journalists from Haaretz, (I) used the word “hit” and not “eat” about a possible Israeli response with regard to Iran,” the visiting minister said in a statement.

Kouchner however said he did “indeed evoke the possibility of Israeli strikes to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon”.

A spokeswoman for Haaretz would not immediately comment on the incident.

In its print edition, the Haaretz quoted Kouchner as saying in English: “I honestly don’t believe (a nuclear weapon) will give any immunity to Iran. First, because you will eat them before. And this is the danger.”

The statement from Kouchner, who is on a two-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, said he regretted any “phonetic confusion”.

” ‘it them! I said, ‘ ‘it them!’ Not ‘ ‘it them!’ ”

Speaking of nukes in the Middle East, here is an Egyptian initiative at the international level I can support: a nuclear-free region, policed, by agreement of all the countries, by the IAEA. Al-Masry al-Youm has translated their article of a few days ago here. Scroll down to the bottom of the article for highlights from the scrapped draft.

710 An Arab Force for Gaza?

Al-Hayat quotes Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit as saying the possibility of an Arab peacekeeping force for Gaza “should be seriously considered” in order to put an end to the violence there:

And with everything else going on to the North, it was easy to miss that former General Security Gen. Jamil Sayyed, currently in custody for alleged complicity in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, has brought charges in France against Detlev Mehlis. A few days late to record this, but I want to remember it.

653 A 9/11 Carpetbagger Speaks

After September 2001, foreigners in Egypt, as a group, began to change. They used to be a motley collection of scholarly oddballs with an interest in Medieval weaponry, hieroglyphics, or Ottoman bureaucracy, scam artists with an interest in getting rich on oil or USAID contracts, or Marines with an interest in getting the hell out of here, and, if possible, getting drunk and laid in the meantime. I liked the scholarly oddballs and the Marines best.

International flotsam and jetsam of the kind you find the world over—criminals, pill-freaks, pot-heads, freeloaders, misfits, adventurers, fallen priests—would also drift in and out of town. Let’s call them “Flo” and “Sam” for short. Flo and Sam used to (and perhaps still do) congregate at the fleabitten Hotel al-Shams, which had a decent cafe where local parasites thronged to take advantage of them. I went once to find my old roommate, a shifty felucca captain with a criminal record and a good heart, after he disappeared with some of my girlfriend’s money. I watched the little symbiotic ecosystem in that cafe for hours and wasn’t once bored.

Flo and Sam would also drift into Bab al-Luq’s landmark Cafeteria al-Hurreya, where they would rub shoulders with artists, revolutionaries, real-estate agents, informers, human-rights lawyers, small-time crooks, slow suicides, journalists, and other undesirables with a shared interest in beer.

To be fair, Hurreya also catered to chess players and distinguished gentlemen such as the one who once graced the masthead of this blog. And to be fair, Flo and Sam sometimes stopped drifting, got serious and got respectable jobs: Even the former U.S. ambassador sometimes recalled his days as a shaggy-haired backpacker in Egypt, and I genuinely believe those days gave him an affinity for the country that few of his predecessors shared.

Other times, Flo and Sam got motorcycles and set off on the road to South Africa, often without any inkling that it would end somewhere in the violent and pestilential swamps of southern Sudan or, for them, at a checkpoint somewhere outside of Assiut.

Stupid, yes, naive, OK—but also adventuresome and interesting! The past few times I’ve been to Hurreya myself, I’ve been driven off by huge groups of straight-laced arriviste interns from Virginia. The kind of kids voted “most likely to run for student office, again.” Resume-padding, self-promoting bounders.

In Cairo, the boys sometimes wear beards and sandals to look more Muslimy, as if passersby will not see their blue eyes and rich-boy smirks, their mall-bought clothes, their straight, white teeth, or their glowing, pink, oxygen-fed complexions. Bent over Al-Kitab in Starbucks back in Washington or New York, sustained through dreary hours of memorizing conjugation tables by lattes and glamorous dreams of being a CIA agent or testifying to Congress, they lose the beards and the sandals in favor of outfits from Banana Republic™ or Urban Outfitters™. They remind me of Gary Johnston on his daring trip to Cairo.

I admire their sense of purpose and their discipline, but I don’t trust this new crop of Americans learning Arabic. Many of them seem to be learning Arabic because they want jobs with the CIA or with outfits that cherry-pick the worst of Arab writing to bolster the case for Israel. I met one such Israeli-American at a student party here once. I wasted five minutes listening to him telling me how genetically rotten Egyptians were and how glad he was to be going back to Israel before I was able to extricate myself from the conversation.

It’s great that Americans, including wannabe CIA agents, are learning Arabic. It’s too bad it took a terrorist attack to inspire them. But America needs honest reporters. The Israelis already supply information on the Arab world with an Israeli agenda. No need to duplicate their efforts.

Maybe all this stored-up irritation is why this Washington Post op-ed written by Alan Dershowitz‘s research assistant, Joel Pollak, has been irritating me like sand in my swimsuit over the past few weeks.

While I don’t love Al-Kitab (I blame that book for my premature hairloss), Pollak’s assertions about it don’t hold water. Where Pollak finds totalitarian propaganda, most everyone else who has used the book finds only anodyne language exercises. Pollak tells us how he, like the ancient Israelites refusing to bow to Caesar, heroically refused to read a passage about Nasser to practice his pronunciation because it was propaganda. Here’s the passage as translated by a commenter on Matthew Yglesias’ blog:

Gamal Abdel Nasser was born in Egypt in 1918 and spent his childhood in Alexandria where his father worked in the post office. When his mother died, his father sent him to his uncle in Cairo. After his graduation from high school, he joined the Egyptian army and became an officer. He and a group of young officers called the ‘Free Officers’ ejected King Faruq from Egypt on 23 July 1952 and thus Egypt became a republic. In 1954 Abdel Nasser became the first president of Egypt, and remained president until his death in 1970. Afterwards, Anwar al-Sadat assumed the presidency of Egypt. Nasser’s most noted achievements included the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the United Arabic Republic, and the High Dam in Aswan.

Dangerous, downright un-American stuff.

In fact, Pollak’s article is thin on what he finds objectionable in Al-Kitab. His teacher showed a movie (apparently unrelated to Al-Kitab) on the life of (12th Century Andalusian Aristotle scholar) Averroes. Pollak was upset the movie didn’t mention that Jews translated Averroes’ writings into Latin. An interesting fact, and another important contribution the Jews have given to Western civilization, but hardly a fact that is essential to comprehending irregular Arabic verbs. By Pollak’s logic, Al-Kitab should also include at least a footnote in the section on reading menus that explains that Israelis also call felafel “Israeli cuisine.”

Pollak complains that Al-Kitab introduces students to Arab culture through a central character, Maha (“Maha Muhammed Abulaal, [Note the scary Muslim name!] to be precise”), whose fictional life he finds depressing. Maha is comically morose, it’s true. But so what? And if Pollak finds Maha’s life straddling New York and restaurants on the banks of the Nile depressing, he should try the life of the millions who don’t have mothers working at the United Nations and who can’t afford visas and plane tickets to New York.

He complains that the book is full of pre-September 11 biases. I’m not sure what this means. Perhaps it should be updated: Maha could dream of coming to the United States, spend months begging family members for the requisite funds to deposit in her bank account to get a visa, be denied that visa after the first attempt, succeed on a third attempt after enduring hours of rudeness and interminable waits at the U.S. Embassy, then be fingerprinted, photographed, and interrogated for hours in the “Muslim Room” at JFK. Then she could be briefly detained on a TIP for “talking Middle Eastern” on Atlantic Avenue. Are these the post-September 11 biases a language textbook should reflect?

One rather suspects that Pollak is studying Arabic so he can find the worst things written or said in that language. In starting with his textbook even before he’s finished learning, he has ejaculated prematurely. My advice to him would be, “Sit tight. As you continue to read Arabic, you will find plenty of ignorant, racist, or otherwise offensive garbage—as you will in English—and plenty of bonafide propaganda for dictatorships. Patience, young Israel-firster. Your career is assured by Dr. Dershowitz.”

Pollak’s slight of hand has been dissected elsewhere (here, here, here, and here), and his piece has been satirized here. I’ve been gratified by the response from other students of Arabic (see especially this wonderfully nerdy discussion of Al-Kitab‘s pedagogical shortcomings). It has reassured me that not all the students I see turning a venerable Cairo cafe into a dormitory mess hall are wannabe MEMRI translators.

For them, the honest ones who nonetheless are studying Arabic for careerist purposes, I have one word of advice: Mandarin.

643 Obama on the Nile (and just West of it)

Recently I visited Cairo and ate a sumptuous dinner by the Nile with some American-educated guys the government sent my way because they can “talk the talk,” and everyone knows the Americans eat that shit up. There was also a rich businessman with good political connections, likely a member of the American Chamber of Commerce. Knowing that I’m a columnist at a Democrat newspaper, they seemed excited at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

I met with an Embassy guy who privately liked Obama. He told me about many similar dinners with similar people, but I also met with our local bureau chief, who told me about an encounter he’d had with an ordinary person once. I talked to a few people who complained about Obama’s stance on Israel, on his casually asserting that Jerusalem is the “eternal, undivided” capital of Israel. They complained about America’s policy on Israel in general, but we won’t get in to that. What I really want to talk about is how we can all give ourselves a pat on the back for letting a black man get this far.

Come to think of it, this is boring. Let’s talk about Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi instead. He’s predictably zany and insulting. I’m just predictable.

If we’re going to talk about North African views on Obama, let’s hear from a (albeit eccentric) North African. According to Brother Leader, “our Kenyan brother’s” comments on Jerusalem were either a lie to help him get elected or stemmed from insecurity about the color of his skin.

“We tell him to be proud of himself as a black and to feel that all of Africa is behind him,” Brother Leader said.

I’m still chuckling. For the sake of harmony between nations, I hope Obama is too.

640 ‘The Lobby’ in the News

Two items:

• Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, barred from speaking at many American universities, are going to Israel to talk about the Israel lobby.
• Sen. Barack Obama’s nauseating performance at AIPAC, in which he gave away occupied East Jerusalem with one careless line in exchange for votes and campaign contributions he probably already had. Disappointing because he set a policy on Jerusalem that will come back to haunt him and the Arab residents of East Jerusalem should he become president. Disappointing because after all his talk about standing up to the poisonous influence of lobbies in Washington, Obama paid obeisance to one of the most poisonous, only hours after clinching the Democratic nomination. I suppose he was talking about the evil clean-air lobby, the sinister no-nuke lobby, and those fifth-columnists, American farmers.
  The remarks were noticed in the Egyptian press.

636 Quick Reads

A few quick items while I catch up on work missed while on the road:

• Disappeared Libyan political prisoner released: Jumaa Boufayed, disappeared for 15 months, is free.
• Muslim Brotherhood MP backs FGM, Again: Mohammed Al-Omda trots out his wife and his daughters to oppose provisions of Egypt’s proposed Law on the Child that would ban female genital cutting.
• Copts Protest Kidnapping, ‘Torture’ of Monks: Firefight over expansion of monastery leaves at least two monks injured, one Muslim dead.
• Israel Plans More Settler Homes: Israel announces plans for 900 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem.
• The Livni File: London’s Sunday Times says Israeli Foreign Minister (and possible prime minister) Tzipi Livni was a Mossad agent in Paris, and insinuates that she shared responsibility for assassinating Palestinians in Europe.
• How to Get Rich—And Notorious: Business Week profiles Felix Dennis, publisher of Maxim, The Week, and a bunch of computer advertising rags. If this sounds boring, consider that Dennis boasts of crack addiction and murder.
• Horny Qutb: ‘Aqoul highlights Sayyid Qutb’s rhapsody on the seductive charms of American women.
• Abu Muqawama is dead. Long live Abu Muqawama: Friend Andrew Exum outs himself and bows out of the blog on counterinsurgency he started. The blog continues, maintained by three/four contributors.

634 Angry Arab, Are You Listening?

From Al-Dustur. I don’t know any other way of getting this to Angry Arab, who loves potatoes and Palestinians, than to post it.

Oh yeah, and while I was away, Egypt renewed the Emergency Law, despite repeated promises not to do so. And Lebanon finally got a president.

I'm Reading: