The Skeptic الشكاك

18 Pity The Nation

This ad filled the entire back page of a recent edition of the The Nation. You can tell the editors what you think about the ad here. Note that this is numbered (I), as though there are others to follow.

Arabian Fables (I)
How the Arabs soften up world opinion with fanciful myths.

Josef Goebbels, the infamous propaganda minister of the Nazis, had it right. Just tell people big lies often enough and they will believe them. The Arabs have learned that lesson well. They have swayed world opinion by endlessly repeating myths and lies that have no basis in fact.

What are some of these myths?

The “Palestinians.” That is the fundamental myth. The reality is that the concept of ?Palestinians? is one that did not exist until about 1948, when the Arab inhabitants of what until then was Palestine, wished to differentiate themselves from the Jews. Until then, the Jews were the Palestinians. There was the Palestinian Brigade of Jewish volunteers in the British World War II Army (at a time when the Palestinian Arabs were in Berlin hatching plans with Adolf Hitler for world conquest and how to kill all the Jews); there was the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra (all Jews, of course); there was The Palestine Post, and so much more.

The Arabs, who now call themselves ?Palestinians,? do so in order to persuade a misinformed world that they are a distinct nationality and that ?Palestine? is their ancestral homeland. But, of course, they are no distinct nationality at all. They are entirely the same ? in language, customs, and tribal ties ? as the Arabs of Syria, Jordan, and beyond. There is no more difference between the ?Palestinians? and the other Arabs of those countries than there is between, say, the citizens of Minnesota and of Wisconsin.

What’s more, many of the ?Palestinians,? or their immediate ancestors, came to the area attracted by the prosperity created by the Jews, in what previously had been pretty much of a wasteland.

The nationhood of the ?Palestinians? is a myth.

The “West Bank.” Again, this is a concept that did not exist until 1948, when the army of the Kingdom of Transjordan, together with five other Arab armies, invaded the Jewish state of Israel, on the very day of its creation.

In what can almost be described as a Biblical miracle, the ragtag Jewish forces defeated the combined Arab might. But Transjordan stayed in possession of the territories of Judea and Samaria and part of the city of Jerusalem. The Jordanians promptly expelled all Jews from the area that they occupied, destroyed all Jewish institutions and houses of worship, used Jewish cemetery headstones to build military latrines, and renamed as ?West Bank? what had been Judea and Samaria since time immemorial.

The attempt, quite successful, was to persuade an uninformed world that these territories were ancestral parts of the Jordanian Arab Kingdom (itself a very recent creation of British power diplomacy). Even after the total rout of the Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War, in which the Jordanians were driven out of Judea/Samaria and of Jerusalem, they and the world continued to call this territory the ?West Bank?, a geographical concept that cannot be found on any except the most recent maps.

The concept of the ?West Bank? is a myth.

The “Occupied Territories.” After the victorious Six-Day War, during which the Israeli army defeated the same cabal of Arabs that had invaded the country in 1948, Israel remained in possession of Judea/Samaria (now renamed ?West Bank?), which the Jordanians had illegally occupied for 19 years; of the Gaza strip, which had been occupied by the Egyptians but which (hundreds of miles from Egypt proper) had never been part of their country; and of the Golan Heights, a plateau of about 400 square miles, which, though originally part of Palestine, had been ceded to Syria by British-French agreement.

The last sovereign in Judea/Samaria and in Gaza was the British mandatory power ? and before it was the Ottoman Empire. All of Palestine, including what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, was, by the Balfour Declaration, destined to be the Jewish National Home. How then could the Israelis be ?occupiers? in their own territory? Who would be the sovereign and who the rightful inhabitants?

The concept of “occupied territories” in reference to Judea/Samaria and Gaza is a myth created by Arab propaganda.

Unable so far to destroy Israel on the battlefield ? though they are feverishly preparing for their next assault ? the Arabs are now trying to overcome and destroy Israel by their acknowledged ?policy of stages?. That policy is to get as much land as possible carved out of Israel ?by peaceful and diplomatic? means, so as to make Israel indefensible and softened up for the final assault. The web of lies and myths that the Arab propaganda machine has created plays an important role in the unrelenting quest to destroy the State of Israel. What a shame that the world has accepted most of it!

This ad has been published and paid for by

Facts and Logic About the Middle East
P.O. Box 590359
San Francisco, CA 94159

Gerardo Joffe, President

17 20 Sudanese Refugees Killed in Cairo

I stepped off a plane from Jordan this morning (photos), turned on my mobile at the Cairo airport, and got a string of increasingly distressing text messages saying State Security had finally moved to clear the Sudanese migrants from the square in front of Mostafa Mahmoud mosque (and the UNHCR’s Cairo offices) in Mohandisseen, Cairo. They had been camped there for month to protest UNHCR’s decision to stop processing them as refugees.

After a standoff, some 20 would-be refugees were killed, including a small girl. An unknown number, easily hundreds, have been carted off to jail. Manal and Alaa have posted photos and accounts.

I’d spent a lot of time talking to the refugees. (I posted a few photos of them last month, for those interested). I know them. So my immediate reaction was purely emotional. This is a terrible end to a terrible story. These people have left awful situations in Sudan to come to an awful situation in Cairo and now to an awful end. They deserve better.

My second reaction was guilt. They have been expecting this situation for a long time. I should have been there when this happened. I should have spent more time recording their life stories. Now they’ll be impossible to find, impossible to talk to.

I’ve also had some private conversations with UNHCR people about the situation. It is complicated. I won’t say more now because there is a slim chance I may have to work on this.

Jordan

Everythinge else seems frivolous. Particularly my couple days’ holiday in Jordan. Interested to note the extent to which Jordanians seem to resent the Iraqis who have come pouring into the country after the war…particularly after the Amman bombings. I was there with my wife and mother-in-law, so I was intentionally shying away from any kind of heavy conversations, but almost everyone I talked to brought up the Iraqis. They were, I was told again and again, driving up prices, increasing the crime rate. They were helping only belly-dancers, nightclub owners, and construction workers. They were stealing cars. They were, it was rumored, kidnapping children. Parents were no longer letting their kids play in the streets of Amman unsupervised.

After the arrest of three Iraqis for the Amman bombings was announced, Iraqis changed their license plates.

A few guys told me only half jokingly that they missed Saddam Hussein. He gave Jordan oil almost free of charge. He built the highway linking Amman to Aqaba. And he kept Iraqis locked up in their country, out of Jordan.

I had failed to register that the suspects accused of the Amman bombings were all Iraqis. And now “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” has claimed responsibility for the Katyusha rocket attacks against Israel that prompted Israel to bomb southern Lebanon (see AP story).

Reminds me of a time, oh, maybe six months before Gulf War II. I was in New York. A German-Israeli-American coworker brought me a Wall Street Journal opinion piece to read. It was the first time I’d seen the argument that a war in Iraq would unleash a domino effect of democratization on liberation across the Middle East articulated. I was amazed that any intelligent person (and the writer sounded like he knew what he was talking about) could argue this with a straight face. Surely anyone who’s spent a minute in the Middle East (outside Israel, I guess I should stipulate) would know this was bunk? That the war was far more likely to destabilize the region and prompt more terrorist attacks in the Middle East and on U.S. soil?

So now we’ve seen years of anarchy and bloodshed in Iraq. We’ve seen Iraqis launch a large-scale attack in Jordan, previously (and still) a miraculous island of peace and stability wedged between Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon. If this report is true—and that’s a very big “if”—then we’ll also have seen Iraqis attacking Israel and prompting Israel to bomb southern Lebanon just as things are getting really ugly again in the Gaza Strip (See BBC and B’tselem).

So where has this democratic flowering taken hold in the Middle East? Lebanon? No, the crowds came out in response to a bombing, not the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Egypt? Have you read anything about the elections here? And the Kifayah movement took hold first with the Palestinian solidarity committees and gained strength with the antiwar protests in 2003.

The New Egyptian Cabinet

People seem happy with the preliminary lists of new Cabinet appointees published in the government newspapers. The appointees are big businessmen. The “reformers” kept their posts. The rich consolidate their economic power and informal influence with political power and formal influence. Nazif has, probably wisely, catered to big business already, cutting corporate taxes, reviving the privatization program, lowering trade barriers, floating the pound… Hurrah, it could have been worse.

Who are they?

• Fin. Min. Yousef Boutros-Ghali gets the Social Insurance portfolio as well.
• Foreign Trade and Industry Minister Rachid Mohammed Rachid, a former Unilever exec who negotiated closer trade deals with the United States and Israel, gets internal trade as an additional portfolio.
• Ahmed al-Maghrabi, an exec with a French hotel chain, muscled out an old-guard stalwart with 12 years’ experience as a powerbroker to become tourism minister.
• Mohammed Loutfy Mansour, who is chairman of Royal and Sun Insurance and whose family owns the Egyptian franchises for McDonalds, GM, and Caterpillar (a company that builds armored bulldozers used to demolish homes in Gaza and Jenin), gets the transportation portfolio.
• Amin Abaza, chairman of Arabia Cotton Gininning, and a former president of the Alexandria Cotton Exporters Association, steps into the space left by the spectacularly and lethally corrupt Yousef Wali, now officially banished from the Hizb al-Watani’s good graces after losing the Al-Fayoum district he owns as a personal fiefdom, as minister of agriculture.
• Hatem al-Gabali, who runs an elite, private hospital, will be minister of health and population.
• The economic liberalizer Mahmoud Mohieldin will keep his job as investment minister.
• Old-Guard powerbroker extraordinaire and Minister of State for People’s Assembly Affairs Kamel al-Shazli was not on the lists.

On a totally unrelated note, two neighboring families in the southern Egyptian town of Ezbet Shams al-Din have been found murdered, disembowled, and castrated. These grizzly stories sometimes appear in the Egyptian press and turn out not to be true. More often than not, however, they check out. So if this is true, what the hell is going on down there?

[tags]Egypt, Sudanese Refugees, Jordan, Iraq[/tags]

16 Palestinian “Gunmen” Storm Election Offices

This just in from the BBC:

Palestinian gunmen have stormed election offices in the Gaza town of Khan Younis ahead of the January parliamentary poll, witnesses say.

Gunmen are also said to have surrounded a poll office in the town of Rafah.

A dispute within the ruling Palestinian party, Fatah, has led to a rival faction submitting its own list of candidates for the parliamentary poll.

Meanwhile, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has appealed to militant groups to halt rocket attacks on Israel.

He made the plea at a meeting of armed groups in Gaza, ahead of the 25 January poll.

The election will be only the second since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1995.

Chaos fears

Tensions within Fatah turned to violence earlier this month when three people were injured in clashes at the party headquarters in Gaza.

The clashes began after gunmen from Fatah’s new guard stormed the building and demanded the party’s primary results be respected.

Correspondents say the so-called old and new guard have disagreed for some time over the direction the party should take.

There are fears that the infighting could throw Palestinian politics into chaos and could even threaten the election process itself, they say.

Fatah is expected to face a strong challenge in January’s poll from the militant Islamist group, Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israeli planes have attacked what the IDF says was a Palestinian military installation in Lebanon. What would any other country’s response be if any other country bombed their soil?

[tags]Israel, Palestine, Palestinian, Elections, Lebanon[/tags]

15 Dwarf Gods and Syrian Prisons

I’m rushing out the door on my way to Jordan (so no posts for a few days), but this story caught my eye amid the morning news’ usual sad fare (anarchy in Somalia, missile strikes in Gaza, 40 dead in DR Congo clashes)…

Those in the mood for more serious reading shouldn’t miss (as I did for a month) Hugh MacCleod’s Dec. 1 interview with veteran Syrian critic and former PLO member Ali Abdullah for Syria Report. I couldn’t find the article on Syria Report‘s site, but Josh Landis has it:

In 2002 I published an article on the future of political Islam in Al Mustaqbal, owned by Rafik al-Hariri. I said we have to give room for middle ground Islamic figures to work in order to prevent radical Islamists. An armed patrol came to my house. They arrested me and took all my books on Islamic issues and my old articles and my research on Islam. They put a Kalashnikov in my face and put me in the car. It was 10.30pm at night on February 14, again. A general from the military questioned me.

He asked me three questions. What?s you opinion on the use of Islam in politics? I told them Islam is a political religion. They asked my about my loyalty to Arafat. I said, yes I support Yasser Arafat. They asked me about my stance on the Syrian regime and why I am in opposition. I said that we had to explain the weak points in Syrian policy, why wrongs had been committed.

Full interview

[tags]Ancient Egypt, Syria, PLO, Ali Abdullah[/tags]

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[tags]Egypt, Internet, Human Rights, ?????[/tags]

8 Chad “in a State of War” with Sudan

This is one of those important stories that don’t get enough coverage:

On Friday, Chad said it was in a “state of war” with Sudan after 100 died in an attack on the border town of Adre…Chad says that Sudan is backing rebel groups which have recently sprung up in the east of the country and which are blamed for the attack on Adre, which borders Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. It also accuses Sudanese militia of making daily incursions into Chad, stealing cattle, killing innocent people and burning villages on the Chadian border. Friday’s statement asked Chadians to form a patriotic front against what it called “the common enemy of the nation”. Sudanese officials say Khartoum has never supported Chadian rebel groups. They accuse N’djamena of deploying planes and troops on Sudanese territory.

Sudanese-sponsored janjaweed have also attacked villages on the Chadian side of the border in Darfur. It wasn’t long ago that Chadian President Idriss Idriss Déby, himself a Zaghawa of the Bideyat clan (one of the groups against which the janjaweed, with the support of the Sudanese government, have conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur) accused Sudanese President Al-Bashar of seeking to “destabilize our country and to export the war in Darfur to Chad” (d?stabiliser notre pays (?) et exporter la guerre du Darfour au Tchad, voil? le dessein que nourrit le pr?sident el-B?chir).

Granted, this is a bit rich coming from Déby, who came to power in 1990 after a Darfur-based, Khartoum-supported insurgency that overthrew ex-president Hiss?ne Habr?. And it is true that Darfur’s two main rebel groups were initially dominated by the Zaghawa and received support from Chadian Zaghawa communities, and, unofficially, Zaghawa officers whom Déby brought into the Chadian military. But this is a dangerous escalation in old tensions. Good for the OIC for taking notice. More people should.

[tags]Sudan, Chad, Darfur[/tags]

7 The Neocon and the Soldier

It was a lovely and a strange Christmas Eve. Lovely for the feast Petroushka cooked. Strange for the conversation. A friend who served in the U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq only to get out and very publicly criticize the Bush administration came in from Beirut, where he’s been learning Arabic and French in preparation for a diplomatic career. A journalist for a neocon, Zionist paper dropped by because he was having a rough day. It was the first time I’d really met him. Surprisingly, I like Neocon very well. He’s a clever guy and has a fantastic deadpan sense of humor. And it’s probably good for me to talk to smart people I disagree with as often as possible.

One conversation, inspired by Spielberg’s upcoming movie “Munich,” stands out in my memory. Soldier made a point about the importance of bearing in mind at what point the response to terrorism becomes immoral and the dangers of believing that because you’re fighting against bad people, you’re good… or worse, that because you must be good, they’re bad. Neocon said he thought ultimately the U.S. troops were fighting for the good cause: peace and democracy in the Middle East, whereas the guys blowing up cars outside job lines were fighting for the return of a brutal dictator or the continued destabilization of the country.

Soldier told a story about a mission he went on in Baghdad in which his platoon was told to take out a top-secret installation based on two-week-old intelligence. On the way to the target, they saw two guys with machine guns duck into a building. The platoon followed. An intense, indoor gunfight ensued. The neighborhood got involved (“Decided it was ‘Kill an American Day,'” as Soldier put it). It was the among the hottest gun battles Soldier had seen in his military career. There was a generator in the building, it was loud, there were two guys with machine guns shooting at them from behind a steel door. At the end of the fight, the two guys with machine guns were dead. Soldier didn’t feel badly about this because they had been trying to kill him and his platoon. But he discovered afterwards that the generator in that building had been supplying the neighborhood with power and that these guys had been guarding it against what they saw as a pernicious, vindictive attack.

And you know what? Revealingly, Neocon stuck to his guns. So to speak.

[tags]Neocon, Iraq, Terrorism, Christmas[/tags]

6 Ayman Nour Sentenced

So Ayman Nour was finally sentenced to five years in prison today for falsifying signatures to register the Ghad Party. Most of my friends went to the trial. I pled work commitments and stayed away. Really, the only reason for me to go would have been sheer voyeurism. Shoot, the Washington Post called me today looking for a comment on the trial I was contractually bound not to give.

Just as well. I don’t like giving statements. I feel creepy taking an official line at the expense of what I really think just to get my name in the paper. So what do I really think? First, some coincidence Nour was sentenced on Christmas Eve, eh? More evidence the Egyptian government is getting more media savvy. It didn’t stop the U.S. government from noticing, of course, and Scott McClellan issued a very strong statement soon after the sentence was passed.

Second, I’m not too worried about Nour and his hunger strike. He’ll be well treated in prison and be released after a year or so. Then he can go the route of Saad Eddin Ibrahim and live off the New York and Washington think-tank lecture circuit, maybe even lose whatever local credibility he has and join Benador Associates. It would be a fitting third act to the “American candidate’s” career. Nour never had much popular support here outside his neighborhood. And he lost a lot of support even in his neighborhood after his payola dried up.

His entire platform seemed calculated to appeal to the Americans, and in that he was useful to the government for a time. His program would have been a disaster and disastrously unpopular if implemented. Drastic privatization, closer ties with Israel (this last point was never part of the public platform, granted, but it was part of the platform a senior member of his circle outlined to me after six or seven glasses of ouzo at a downtown restaurant one night): This all sounds very good in Washington. And probably at the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But consider that government bloat is what keeps much of the country’s urban population from starving to death or revolting. Consider that most of this country would go to war with Israel tomorrow if they thought they could win (or even if they didn’t, but had a leader who’d let them). Suddenly the program makes a lot less sense.

For the Hizb al-Watani, the Nour banners hanging around town and the Kifaya activists chanting in the streets lent the necessary trappings of democracy needed to satisfy American pressure. He and his wife Gamila were adept at working the western media. Now that the election is over, he’s no longer useful—except perhaps as an example to any other rich, secular, opposition figure who might think about running an independent presidential campaign. The same western journalists who write “on message” stories about Nour roll their eyes at Gamila’s overblown text messages while getting drunk and talking about who’ll be the first to seduce her while Ayman’s away.

It’s almost as vile as the blackmail and state media character assassination campaigns carried out against him over the past few months.

Poor guy. First he falls off the podium, literally and figuratively, then crying on national TV backfires, and now this. Shoot, he deserves the cushy lecture circuit.

Right, enough on that for now. It’s Christmas.

[tags]Ayman Nour, Egypt[/tags]

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