The Skeptic الشكاك

481 Wael Abbas’ Account to Be Restored

Wael al-Qahira: I understand that YouTube should be reinstating Wael Abbas’ account soon. That’s excellent news. At last check it was still down, but watch this space…

483 Bumpersticker Unity

“One God, one dream, one destiny, one people”

479 Repent, Recant!

A few quick links:

• Mango Girl digs up a truly bizarre ’80s pop song about the Lebanese Civil War. Repent, ye earnest ’80s Lebanese rockers! Worst part is, I bet the ’80s are back with a vengeance in Beirut. I mean the fashion, not the sectarianism, though perhaps there’s a connection. Strange fashion and a millenarian mood seem to go together.
• Marc Lynch has an interesting and link-rich post about the recantation of Dr. Fadl (Sayid Imam Sharif) of Islamic Jihad notoriety, and on the recanting-old-Islamist phenomenon in general. He stops short of getting into the freedom-for-confession-and-recantation “rehabilitation” program, and (I suspect) has to pull the punches on his skepticism as a result, but I have the feeling this won’t be his last word on the subject.
• Ken Silverstein at Harper‘s holds Roger Cohen’s feet to the fire for a horrible column he wrote about Mubarak some months ago. Rightly so. Full takedown here: “Roger Cohen: Viva Mubarak, Fuera Chavez!” Cohen should take a tip from Dr. Fadl and recant, lest he spend All Eternity listening to himself read that column. Or just come back to Cairo and take a look around. The weather’s lovely this time of year.

478 Flogging a Dead Teddy Bear, Hiding Dead Iraqis

On this, I have nothing to add to the great post at ‘Aqoul, from a writer who attended the school in question:

I was hoping this would go away and that I therefore would not have to withdraw my head from the sand and confront the farce that is the Mohammed teddy bear story. Almost no aspect of this saga can be taken seriously in that I actually marvel at how newsreaders can keep a straight face when using the words ‘teddy bear’ and ‘flogging’ in the same breath. That said however, it is indeed gravely serious. I have no doubt the teacher in question will not be subjected to the full barbaric punishment (only because Sudan’s version of Sharia law is so cosmetic and floggings, amputations and stonings rarely, if ever take place) but what is worrying is how far the Sudanese local authorities are willing to go to flex some muscle.

Reactions have been typical, ranging from the ‘what do you expect from Muslim savages’, to the exaggeratedly tolerant ‘we have to respect their culture’ but there are a couple of issues of note which have not been sufficiently covered. Firstly, having had the dubious honour of attending the said institution (the choice of ‘well heeled’ Sudanese and expat children) for some time due to one of my father’s random diplomatic postings, I am aware that there has always existed an uneasy truce between the highly Westernised elite that chose to send their children to the school and local government authorities who resented the very existence of such an elite and their access to the admittedly exceptional education the school offered. Were it not for the ironic fact that high ranking government officials mostly sent their children to the school, the co-existence would have been much more challenging. [Read on…]

On a more serious note, Salon.com has an interesting article on the differences between the body-counts the U.S. military and Iraqis put forward after operations in Iraq. Here’s a taste:

From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, airstrikes and attacks by the U.S. military have only killed “militants,” “criminals,” “suspected insurgents,” “IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,” “anti-American fighters,” “terrorists,” “military age males,” “armed men,” “extremists” or “al-Qaida.”

The pattern for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the early years of the occupation to today. Take a helicopter attack on Oct. 23 of this year near the village of Djila, north of Samarra. The U.S. military claimed it had killed 11 among “a group of men planting a roadside bomb.” Only later did a military spokesperson acknowledge that at least six of the dead were civilians. Local residents claimed that those killed were farmers, that there were children among them, and that the number of dead was greater than 11.

Here is part of the statement released by U.S. military spokeswoman in northern Iraq, Maj. Peggy Kageleiry:

“A suspected insurgent and improvised explosive device cell member was identified among the killed in an engagement between Coalition Forces and suspected IED emplacers just north of Samarra … During the engagement, insurgents used a nearby house as a safe haven to re-engage coalition aircraft. A known member of an IED cell was among the 11 killed during the multiple engagements. We send condolences to the families of those victims and we regret any loss of life.”

As usual, the version offered by locals was vastly different. Abdul al-Rahman Iyadeh, a relative of some of the victims, revealed that the “group of men” attacked were actually three farmers who had left their homes at 4:30 a.m. to irrigate their fields. Two were killed in the initial helicopter attack and the survivor ran back to his home where other residents gathered. The second airstrike, he claimed, destroyed the house killing 14 people. Another witness told reporters that four separate houses were hit by the helicopter. A local Iraqi policeman, Capt. Abdullah al-Isawi, put the death toll at 16 — seven men, six women and three children, with another 14 wounded. [Full story]

477 Seven Years for Murder

Close on the heels of the conviction of the men who tortured `Imad al-Kabir, a court in Mansoura has sentenced four police officers to prison for slamming Nasr Abdallah’s head into the wall until he died. Abdallah was a carpenter. The police were trying to get him to tell them where his brother, a suspect in a drug case, was hiding.

The sentence was the most severe imposed on a policeman for torture in 10 years. Three cops will serve seven years. Another will serve four. For torturing a man to death.

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In other cheerful, human-rights-related news from Egypt, police arrested 24 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in al-Fayum, 90 minutes southwest of Cairo, the night of Nov. 27-28. The detentions have become so commonplace that not many people noticed.

476 Surprise Us

Hisham Baradi, 35, was fatally shot today when Palestinian police, enforcing a ban on all Annapolis-related activity in the West Bank, broke up a demonstration against the summit.

The ban on Annapolis-related activity highlights Mahmoud Abbas’ credibility problem. What’s he worried about? That “the activity” will highlight the fact that it’s not clear on whose behalf he’s negotiating?

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh today expressed dismay that Arab countries had sent representatives to the meeting. “We are sure that the Annapolis conference will not change the reality of history and geography,” he said. “The Arab masses will reject … any concessions to the Zionist enemy.”

The thousands of people who turned out in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah suggest that is true of the Palestinian masses, at least. That Abbas’ political survival may depend on his being able to surprise the world by wringing out real concessions should put the Israelis and the Americans in a more conciliatory mood. Surely they must be worried about the alternative.

McClatchy correspondent Hannah Allam does a nice job of summarizing local cynicism about the summit (interestingly, in Israel and the rest of the region) in her joint-byline story and on her excellent blog. Her blog lists press reactions:

“[The host is] Bush, who is stuck in Iraq, embarrassed inside and outside [his nation], who is forced to make a grand theatrical gesture that saves his international standing and gives him the honor of being the seeker of peace in the world, and saves face for the United States after a series of failures. The ‘international summit’ dwarfed with time into a mere get-together.”
Erfan Nizam al Din, al Hayat Newspaper

“It is vital here to state to all parties that the danger in the Annapolis conference lies in raising the level of expectation and not anticipating what should happen after, particularly if the conference is unable to achieve concrete results — and that is what we truly fear the most.”
Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of Al Sharq al Awsat newspaper

“Vigilance of the Palestinian nation, which is tied to that of the Muslim Ummah, especially the great Iranian nation, will prevent materialization of the sinister objectives of the U.S. administration holding the conference.”
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, IRNA, Iranian state news agency

“Those attending the meeting and giving concessions to the Zionist occupiers will not be remembered in history with good reputation.”
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, IRNA news agency

“The Annapolis conference is of no use, and any decisions taken at the conference are not binding on the Palestinian people, but only binding on those who signed them.”
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, al Jazeera television

“After the conference’s three days pass, we will not find a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but we’ll find a new round of political and diplomatic clashes, and this round can go on like previous rounds without reaching a solution.”
Abdel Moneim Saied, Ahram newspaper

“Syria will participate in the conference without any illusions of what will take place, and out of a conviction that Israel doesn’t want peace, and that it’s the one responsible for stalling the peace process. Syria’s participation in this conference is to test the seriousness of the American administration to work for peace this time.”
Ezzeldin Darwish, the Syrian newspaper Teshreen

“It’s an important step. I cannot say it’s a breakthrough, especially when I don’t know yet what will come out of it, but we need to give it a chance.”
Hossam Zaki, Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman, interview

475 Making Arms Sanctions Work

A new, 57-page study from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Uppsala University has found that arms sanctions have caused target governments to change their behavior only 25 percent of the time, but that if UN peacekeepers were also in place, that rate of effectiveness went up to 47 percent. The reports’ authors include the following recommendations to the UN Security Council:

• Ensure clarity of coverage, scope and demands in UN arms embargo resolutions. Conduct regular reviews to assess compliance with UN arms embargo demands.
• Increase the authority and expertise of UN sanctions committees, panels of experts and monitoring teams.
• Establish a ‘clearing house’ for UN sanctions committees, panels of experts and monitoring teams.
• Assess and strengthen the capacity of member states to implement arms embar- goes.
• Target governmental and non-governmental actors that assist in the violation of a UN arms embargo.
• Promote the adoption of national legislation criminalizing UN arms embargo violations.
• Improve international harmonization of efforts to limit arms brokers’ violations of UN arms embargoes.
• Clearly define ‘conflict goods’ and measures for embargoing their export in combination with UN arms embargoes.

The full report is available as a PDF here.

474 Coptic Journalist Interviews Brotherhood Leader

…for the first time, apparently. From the Nov. 24 edition of al-Misry al-Youm:

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More…

473 A Billion Pounds of Foul

Egyptians eat more than 1 billion pounds of foul a year. I’m trying to imagine what 1 billion pounds of foul would look like. If you spread it an inch thick, how much of the country would that cover? OK, time for lunch.

Horrible news from AFP:

Foul times ahead for Egypt’s bean staple
Cairo -Egypt’s staple bean dish – known as foul – is under threat because of the rising cost of imports and a reduction in domestic production.

Agricultural expert Mohamed al-Borei raised the alarm in Sunday’s press, saying the government should start requisitioning land to produce more fava beans.

The cost on the street of the popular foul mesdames sandwich, made with bean stew, salad and spices inside a piece of shami bread, has risen by 25 percent to reach one Egyptian pound (about R1,23).

The rising cost of wheat on the world market has already significantly raised the cost of bread, of which at 400g a day Egyptians are the world’s biggest per-capita consumers.

Egypt, for a long time self-sufficient in bean production and even an exporter of the commodity, now imports half of its annual requirement of 550 000 tons of foul that is needed to satisfy the nation’s most needy.

Agriculture ministry employee Mohammed al-Nahrawy told the Egyptian Gazette that “we grow 240 000 tons, but most Egyptian farmers have given up cultivating foul because of the diseases that afflicted the crop in the early 1990s”.

Borei blamed government policy which promotes wheat and cotton cultivation at the expense of beans.

The deputy chairman of the importers section of the Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce blames multinationals.

“These companies export the beans to Egypt at inflated prices. This is sheer monopoly and, this time, small traders are not guilty of upping prices,” he said, calling for government action to stabilise prices.

472 Sudanese Migrants Face State Security Court

As careful readers of the Egyptian press will know, eight Sudanese men will soon stand trial before a State Security court, whose verdicts may not be appealed, in connection with a fatal stabbing last June. The evidence against them seems slender at best, and those who know them say what evidence exists has been manufactured.

I’m not in a position to evaluate the evidence, but that’s not the issue. There’s absolutely no reason this case should be heard before a State Security court. This is an ordinary criminal case, and the ordinary criminal courts are perfectly competent to decide on the matter. There was no reason for the government to invoke the Emergency Law and transfer the accused to a special court. The defendants deserve their full due-process rights, particularly given the seriousness of the charges and the possibility they might face the death penalty.

More information—including the full background, scanned copies of the legal documents, and contact information for people familiar with the case—is available at auc8.blogspot.com.

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