The Skeptic الشكاك

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)

574 The Charter for Muzzling Al-Jazeera

Arab Media and Society‘s special feature on the Arab League Satellite Broadcasting Charter is well worth the detour. AMS has done the world a great service in posting and translating the original document alongside three solid essays about it:

• Hussein Amin, director of the American University in Cairo’s journalism program and one of the document’s primary authors, defends his work:
  

  The context of Arab society is important. While the Charter is based on principles of broadcast regulations common to most countries that have regulation structures, it also reflects the values and culture of Arab society. What fits one society does not necessarily fit or reflect the will of another. What is acceptable in Europe is not necessarily acceptable to U.S. audiences and what is acceptable in the U.S. is not necessarily acceptable to Arab audiences. Again, this is a principle that governments around the world have adopted for terrestrial broadcasters. As audiences shift to satellite broadcasters, does this principle no longer have any value?

  Arab culture is generally not as open as Western society. Islamic society in general, and Arab society in particular, are notably defensive of their traditions and values, which are generally seen as under attack from a post-modern Western society. This view is shared by many non-Arabs as well, in others segments of society in both the West and the East. The Charter recognizes this and contains an article calling, for example, for regulation of content that would offend not only the adherents of Islam but also other religions as well. This call was given urgency following satellite broadcasts from the Arab region that featured digital fatwas, satellite sheiks, and the promotion of superstition bordering on black magic. While in the West, the impact of this kind of programming might be limited, it is not difficult to imagine the impact of this kind of content on relatively uneducated and unsophisticated Arab audiences who receive most of their entertainment and information from television. [Read on…]

• Monroe Price of the Annenberg Center takes a careful look at the contents:
  

  Is the Charter, as its critics charge, censorial, overbroad and harshly restrictive? The document is encyclopedic in its listing of areas of potential program control. Here are some examples that would keep broadcasters (and their investors) up at night: under the Charter, crime should not be depicted in a tempting way, nor criminals rendered heroic; leaders should not be insulted; sovereignty should not be undermined; Arab identity must be nourished against modernization; religions and religious officials should not be offended; gender and race and color must be treated gingerly; incitement to terror and violence is prohibited (though there is an exception for encouraging resistance to “occupiers”).

  As an ethical matter, each ground for regulation or ethical limits is, of course, an area where broadcasters and the public should be in discourse. But when all of these are wrapped into issues of licensing and access to satellites, the measures prescribed can be toxic. The document is utopian in terms of its desire for harmony but dystopian in its potential for noxious interference in day-to-day programming decisions. [Read on…]

• Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, now at Princeton, opposes the document, echoing press-freedom watchdogs that have expressed concern:
  

  The charter violates international laws and treaties signed by most of the Arab states, foremost of which is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For example almost all the information ministers signing the charter are themselves (in their position as ultimate CEO of their national television networks) daily violating it by not abiding by its call on all the stations to adhere to honesty and objectivity in reporting.

  He also quixotically takes on the one aspect of the charter unlikely to find very many enemies, the one affirming “the Arab citizen’s right to view the major national, regional and international events including national figures or teams through a free to air or encrypted signals regardless of the ownership of these sports events rights, whether inclusive or exclusive.” Here’s Kuttab:

  By banning encrypted broadcasts of soccer games, for example, the charter infringes on the rights of corporations who dished out millions to obtain the exclusive rights to show programming including the Spanish Football League and World Cup. [Read on…]

573 Chief of Tehran Police ‘Spitzered’

SIX!? Gov. Spitzer should be ashamed that he didn’t go out with more of a bang:

Iran: Tehran police chief arrested in brothel with six prostitutes

Tehran, 10 March (AKI) – Tehran’s police chief, Reza Zarei, has been arrested after he was found nude in a local brothel with six naked prostitutes, according to report on the Iranian Farda News.

Farda News is a website said to be close to the mayor of Tehran and former chief of the police forces, Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf.

Following the raid, Zarei stepped down from his post as police chief. The news of his arrest however was not reported by any official Iranian news agency.

According to a popular Iranian website Gooya, the order to raid the brothel was given directly by Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, chief of the judicial authorities.

Before he was arrested, Zarei was in charge of the programme for the ‘moralisation of the city’.

It is alleged that in the past six months, hundreds of young people have been arrested in Iran for not respecting the Islamic code of behaviour.

Posted with apologies for the bad pun, and the usual caveats: This is a single-source story for the moment, and so should be looked at with a healthy dose of skepticism. I’m emailing journalist friends currently in Iran to find out if they have more information. (thanks, SP)

Update: I’m hearing from friends either in Iran or watching it closely from afar that this story is flying around like crazy, but that the details of the Oriental orgy a la 300 are still rumor. In the meantime, Blake at the FP Passport blog picked this up, and Pajamas Media apparently ripped the story off him.

572 The Tale of the Weeping State Security Officer

I was struck by this detail from Liam Stack’s powerful interview with Zahara al-Shatir, whose husband and father are both facing a military trial, despite having been acquitted by an ordinary criminal court:

The officers pulled him out of the car in a very violent way. My children were screaming: “They are trying to kill my father! No, don’t kill him!” One of the officers was crying as he did it. (Afterwards, many of them asked me to forgive them. They said that they were just following orders. They went and bought sweets for my children.) [Read the full story in The Guardian Weekly.]

When I was researching Brotherhood detentions last year, I heard so many similar stories from families of the detainees. My boss and I ultimately decided not to include most of them because we feared it would sound like Brotherhood propaganda. But the interviews with the wives and the children of the detainees always left me feeling the most emotionally drained. If the detainees themselves were angry or upset at their treatment, they didn’t show it. Rashad al-Bayumi, a member of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council, smiled throughout his long description of the torture he suffered in Nasser’s prisons, as if to erase the sickened expression from my face.

I’ve been thinking about them as the pre-election arrest campaign against the Brotherhood escalates (more than 600 are now in jail). Periodically, as “the Muslim Brotherhood story” comes back into fashion in the Western press, foreign journalists come to Cairo, buy me coffee, and ask for phone numbers. Lately it’s been tough to help. I scroll through my phone’s address book and mutter, “Well, he’d have been good, but he’s in jail. This guy helped me set up a lot of interviews… too bad he’s in jail. I think Mohammed’s still free, but I’m not sure. He doesn’t speak any English, though. Is that OK?”

When friends here asked me to campaign on behalf of Khaled Hamza, the imprisoned editor of the Brotherhood’s English-language Web site, I first thought of his intelligent smile (I also thought of a blogger friend of mine who joked that he was going to make a fortune buying up domain names according to the formula “Free + Arab-Sounding-Name”). And I thought of the dozens of other Brotherhood members I’d met who are now in jail. I asked myself, “Why him, in particular? Or why Ahmed Ezz-ad-Din? Because I met them, and they’re nice guys? What about the nameless guy in Fayum or Sharqiyya?” And so I didn’t say anything for a while, caught between the churlishness of not writing a simple blog post about Khaled Hamza and the selfishness of neglecting the boys in Fayum because I’d never met them. I’m saying something now because it bothers me that hundreds of people are being arrested on blatantly political grounds and it’s so routine now that we barely notice.

Let me be clear: I don’t support the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m fundamentally opposed to their platform, and I distrust their new discourse of freedom and democracy. Even its most vocal proponents, impressive people like Abd al-Moneim Mahmud, see it as a means to an end. It’s embarrassing watching a Brother, even one from the “moderate, reformist” trend, trying to wiggle out of a direct question about Shia Muslims, Copts in positions of power, women, or gays. But I’m equally opposed to the government’s treatment of them on moral and practical grounds.

I also keep coming back to this detail of the weeping State Security officer bringing sweets for Khairat al-Shatir’s grandchildren. It’s things like this that make Egypt’s autocracy more livable than Tunisia’s, say, or Syria’s. I’m reminded of the prosecutor who joked with a young Brotherhood-affiliated student picked up at a 2006 protest in support of judicial independence when the student denied having insulted the president.

“Ya Mohammed,” he asked, telling the clerk to stop writing, “When you’re sitting with your friends, you don’t insult the president?”
“OK, yeah, I do.”
“Me too,” he laughed, and told the clerk to start taking notes again.

I’m reminded of a friend of mine whose leftist parents were so often detained in State Security raids that the State Security officer assigned to the case almost became a part of the family. My friend, now a leading human rights advocate, still calls this guy “Uncle So-and-So.”

I’m reminded of the cop who, when called to arrest a pair of non-Egyptian Arabs and their hours-old baby from the hospital because they didn’t have papers, reprimanded the doctors who’d turned them in, asking, “Is there no mercy left in this country? These two have just had a baby and you call me to arrest them? For shame!”

I’m reminded of the hapless Central Security conscripts forced to stand in 45-degree (Celsius) heat in heavy black uniforms and patiently endure the ugly slurs and shoves the young Fabians hurl at them, then forced to run and fetch the basha tea.

I’m reminded of the hundreds of human interactions and shared jokes between police and unarmed Egyptians I see on a daily basis. I’m reminded of the impressive courage and honesty of the prosecutor who delivered a ringing and succinct indictment of two police sadists in the “Imad al-Kabir” trial before a room full of highly connected mafiosi. Aside from Imad himself, that prosecutor was the biggest hero in the room: not the human-rights lawyers playing to the cameras, not the journalists who tracked the victim down, and not even the bloggers who posted the damning cellphone video online (though they all played a vital role).

And I’m reminded of the faces of the State Security officers and the informers I see around town. Sometimes you can tell them from their clothes: the bad leather jackets, the sunglasses. But mostly you can tell them from the expression on their faces. No one else seems as cynical, as angry, or as contemptuous. (The informers also seem cynical and angry, though more scared than contemptuous.) These guys were once young boys with bright smiles. What kind of toll does a job like that take on a man?

I’m afraid of State Security. My throat constricts whenever I pass by their dungeons in Nasr City. I’m afraid of writing this. But I also wonder what it must be like to be one of them. Did they take the job to catch terrorists and save lives? To catch Zionist spies? Because in this country there’s no safer place to be than cruising through Lazoghly Square behind the wheel of a black Peugeot with black plates, wearing black sunglasses? What’s it like to be asked to do something awful when you know it has nothing to do with the security of the state, and to know that you have no choice?

If there’s hope for this country, it’s as much in the humanity you can find within the much-maligned “apparatus of repression” as it is in the much-vaunted “courageous reformers.” Advocates of democracy, human rights, reform, revolution, or whatever—and their opponents—too often paint their pictures in black and white: as a simple clash between good guys and bad guys, oppressors and courageous reformers, patriots and saboteurs. Fact is, there are assholes on both sides. There are corrupt profiteers on both sides. There are good people on both sides. And they’re all stuck in the same nightmare.

570 In Praise of the Tok-Tok

The problem with traffic in Cairo isn’t the tok-tok or the color of the license plates. It’s cars.

While Gaza bleeds, Lebanon bites her manicured nails, and Egypt’s Muslim Brothers go back to jail, I’m obsessing over the tok-tok.

About 50 tok-tok owners in al-Matariyya yesterday demonstrated against a crackdown on their vehicles, Al-Misry al-Youm reports.

I can understand why the government wants to crack down on them. Anyone who has been in a slum knows the vehicles are a menace. If Cairo drivers casually discard traffic regulations in the best of circumstances, tok-tok drivers, often stoned teenagers, make a total mockery of them, careening into multiple lanes of oncoming traffic, boldly driving down the center lane of a major thoroughfare on the left-hand side (we drive on the right here), leaning on their horns for security. The vehicles are subject to no emissions standards, I’d be surprised if half the drivers had a license, and by nature they’re a good deal less safe than cars in the event of an accident.

The confiscation of tok-toks coincides with the Interior Ministry’s announcement that it will introduce new license plates for Egyptian vehicles starting in August. While the new license-plate system has obvious advantages, my problem with both plans is that they’re tinkering around the edges of the worsening problem of traffic in the capital. Buried at the end of that Al-Ahram Weekly article is perhaps the most interesting detail: “Between 80,000 to 90,000 new cars are licensed in Cairo every year.”

Briefly, the problem with traffic in Cairo is not the tok-tok or the color of the license plates. It’s cars.

Spending two hours, most of it with the engine off, to get from one end of central Cairo to the other is not just frustrating; it cripples productivity. It slows police, ambulance and fire emergency response times. To hell with the ambulance: If I ever chop my hand off in the kitchen, I’m calling KFC for delivery and getting a ride on the back of the delivery guy’s moped to the hospital.

Banning tok-toks or changing the color of license plates won’t help me to get from Doqqi to downtown any faster. In fact, I’d argue that we need more tok-toks and mopeds, and fewer cars. Maybe my dream of an extensive, airconditioned monorail system for Cairo is asking too much. In lieu of that, though, perhaps we could encourage smaller vehicles: the more vehicles and people you can cram into the space of a car, the less traffic.

Of course, either solution (smaller vehicles, better public transport) would require the millions of middle-class bashawat to get over themselves and their obsession with Brestige. If you can’t convince someone that taking a taxi isn’t below her excellency’s inflated view of herself, how can you convince her that getting on a train, a tok-tok, or a moped isn’t either?

The Misry al-Youm article follows:

568 In your nerves and in your bed…

…coming down around your head.

The evergreens:

• There’s a tense political stalemate in Lebanon.
  • The Arabs are divided.
• Israeli military strikes are killing Palestinians in Gaza.
  • Al-Jazeera is all dead babies and grieving grandmothers.

What’s really new:

• The Israeli strikes are killing more Palestinians than usual: 112 since Thursday, Al-Jazeera reports (incidentally, the Wall Street Journal agrees). An Israeli official threatened Gazans with a “holocaust.”
  • This time the strikes hit the offices of (Hamas) Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. (Fatah) President Mahmoud Abbas at last felt compelled to leave the peace talks. People the world over were surprised to hear the peace talks were still in progress in the first place.
• A small Turkish force raided PKK positions in northern Iraq.
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become the first Iranian president to visit Iraq.
• The United States announced it has warships off the coast of Lebanon. (Can someone please explain to me why? What possible good can come of this? An unnamed U.S. official told news agencies the USS Cole is there as “a show of support for regional stability,” but I’m still baffled. What stability? Or rather, how will the warships establish regional stability?)

565 The Future Looks Like Egypt

My first memory of New York City is of looking out a car window on the Cross-Bronx Expressway as a small boy: every patch of ground covered in asphalt, spires clad in thousands of brilliant white lights in the distance, the graceful sweep of suspension bridges twinkling like sci-fi spiderwebs. “This,” I thought, “Is what the future looks like. This is where we’re all heading. Eventually everything will look like this.”

I still feel that exhilaration in New York sometimes. Seen from the FDR late at night, it’s a city of humanist hubris, full of hope and terror. Terror because no one knows where it’s going, and it’s going very fast. Terror because some part of me knows it can’t last, that eventually this precious, precarious city will fall. Hope because I hope it won’t, because millions of people from around the world have pinned their hopes on something new.

But I no longer think the future will look like New York, Tokyo, or Dubai. It will look like Cairo, like a snarled, soot-stained, malignant tumor spreading across the land, full of people fighting with each other to scratch out a living in the dust of monuments to past civilizations.

If you want to know the future of humanity, don’t look someplace new. Look someplace old: someplace where dynasties and empires have risen and fallen for thousands of years, someplace where scant land has sustained swelling populations for millennia. Look to Egypt. Look to Iraq.

And if you want to see how humans can survive, look to the way Egyptians do: by humor, kindness and patience, by thrift and by grift.

</cheesy sentimentality>. Regularly scheduled programming will now resume.

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