The Skeptic الشكاك

1041 A ‘Pattern of Reckless Policing’

From Amnesty, via email (Arabic after the break):

Egypt: Amnesty International voices concern over pattern of reckless policing

Against the backdrop of recent killings during police operations, Amnesty International deplores the increasing use of excessive force by police and security forces in Egypt when carrying out search operations, seeking to disperse protestors or patrolling the Egyptian borders, which have often led to deaths. The organization fears that this pattern of killings and excessive use of force will continue unless those responsible are brought to justice and clear instruction and adequate training is given to police and security forces.

The call by Amnesty International is made after two recent incidents demonstrated the reckless policing by Egyptian security forces. On 23 November, security forces killed a migrant as he attempted to cross the Egyptian border into Israel, bringing to the number of those killed at the border with Israel in 2008 to at least 26. On the same day, in Aswan, a police officer from the anti-drug squad shot and killed Abdel Wahad Abdel Razeq at his home when the officer and two colleagues tried to search the house during a drug trafficking inquiry. Police officers came to the house of Abdel Wahab Abdel Razeq searching for a drug dealer suspected of being at his home. Reportedly unarmed, Abdel Wahab Abdel Razeq asked the police officers to show him the search warrant. The officers failed to produce the warrant, broke into the house and reportedly shot the owner of the house in the chest. On 24 November, the Aswan prosecution charged the three officers with “murder” for the death of Abdel Wahab Abdel Razeq and “house breaking”, which they denied. The prosecution also ordered the detention of the police officer who allegedly killed Abdel Wahab Abdel Razeq for four days pending further investigations. The other two police officers were released on bail.

After the shooting, the police officers took Abdel Wahab Abdel Razeq to Aswan hospital but he died on his way. Angry protesters from his family and neighbours later gathered to call for those responsible for his death to be brought to justice. Protesters chanted slogans against the Minister of Interior and threw stones at the riot police and at hospital, smashing windows. Riot police fired rubber bullets and tear gas and used sticks in order to disperse hundreds of protestors. Yehya Abdel Megid Maghrabi, an elderly man in his sixties who lived nearby and who suffered from respiratory problems, died at his home as a result of inhaling tear gas, according to a medical report by a private doctor. No investigation into his death is known to have been ordered. Many protestors were injured and about 50 were arrested and detained at Shallal central security forces camp near Aswan, where they were reportedly beaten. On 24 November, 27 of them were presented before the Aswan prosecution and charged with “gathering”, “rioting” and “damaging public property”. Five of them face the charge of “attempted murder” of a riot police officer. The others were released without charge.
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1033 Riots, Detentions, Harassment, and Hashish

Busy with work, but wanted to flag a few items from the past few days:

* Two thousand people rioted in Aswan after police mistakenly killed a bird-seller in the southern Egyptian city.

* Egyptian activists yesterday staged protests to call for the release of 16 people detained in the southern city of Samalout in mid-October. Police used tear gas and batons to disperse an angry crowd that gathered when police killed a pregnant woman on October 8 as they searched her house.

* The protesters also called for the release of two activists, Mohammed Adil and Mohammed Khairy, suspected of trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza. State Security officers raided Mohammed Adil’s home in the early hours of November 21. State Security officers have detained Mohammed Khairy twice since October, and prosecutors have twice ordered his release, yet the latest reports I’ve seen indicate he is still in custody. Both are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, and both maintain blogs. Noha Atef is doing a great job covering this for Global Voices.

* An Iranian reader wrote in to chastise me for writing about Hossein Derakhshan’s possible detention while ignoring two less ambiguous detentions. I am much ashamed.

* Egyptian police announced last Wednesday that they had arrested 550 boys in Cairo on suspicion of sexually harassing schoolgirls. The police reportedly focused their raids on Internet cafes near schools.

This drives me nuts. If there is an appropriate security response to sexual harassment, it is ensuring that women and girls feel comfortable reporting incidents and ensuring that police follow up on the reports. Rounding up boys by the hundreds for using the Internet is not the answer. Educating them from an early age to treat women with respect is.

* By the hash-o-meter, Barack Obama may be the most popular foreign leader in Egypt since Saddam Hussein. Wael Abbas reports that dealers are selling Obama-brand hashish in the Mediterranean town of Marsa Matrouh. 3arabawy recalls that “in 2003, a quite popular brand of hash that appeared in Cairo was named ‘Saddam’ coz it was ‘stronger than chemical weapons.’ “

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).

1011 ‘The Way You Mecca Me Feel’

London’s Sun and the slightly more reputable Telegraph report that Michael Jackson has converted to Islam. Both papers run photos of Jackson out and about in Bahrain, dressed in drag.

I think Run CMD said it best over email: “It’s obviously all part of a devious American plan to destroy Islam from within. Michael Jackson is working for Dick Cheney. It all makes sense now.”

1008 Police, Sex and Crime

From Amr Ezzat:

[Read on…]

1005 And Now, for Something Completely Different…

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a long, long time. Well worth the long download time.

(And the more I think about it, the more in keeping with the spirit of the original it seems.)

1003 Police Get Three Years for Manslaughter

AFP via 3arabawy:

Cairo – A court in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag sentenced two policemen to three years in jail on Saturday for dragging a man to his death behind a car, the state news agency MENA reported.

The officers were charged with manslaughter as they were not accused of killing the man deliberately.

The victim, fruit-seller Emad Tayi, had clung to the police vehicle in protest at the arrest of a relative, who was being driven away to a station for questioning.

Tayi, 48, was dragged some 500m, resulting in his death, MENA reported.

The two officers, Mahmud Sadawi and Anwar Mohammed Omran, were released on bail pending appeal.

It’s not the callousness of the policemen, who were able to continue driving for a half a kilometer while a man held on to the back of their car, that grieves me. It’s the love and loyalty that Emad Tayi showed by hanging on to the car until he died. The next time I meet someone from Sohag and say “ahsan nas” (the best people), I will think of Emad, and I will really mean it.

999 ‘Our People Don’t Like Food, They Like Beans’

Excerpts from Alexandra Sandel’s staggering interview with Osama Saraya, editor of the government’s flagship daily Al-Ahram:

I can say one morning: ‘If you find white people walking in the street, they are spies for Israel and are Americans…’ and the people will go after them capture them, throw them in prison and kill them. […]

The political system is a hundred times more civilized than the street. The street is much more radical than the political system. So don’t believe the words of those idiots… they are idiots… those who say that we are interacting with the West this way, the pressure, that we’re afraid [of the West]… Why should I be afraid of the West? The West doesn’t feed me. I have food here. If I close off Egypt, there’s a lot of food. We don’t have a food problem… Our people don’t like food, they like beans. […]

Don’t believe those who sit in cafés and forums and work with the West. Don’t believe that they know Egypt. They don’t know anything. Hosni Mubarak knows Egypt better than them. He has the army, he has a very strong army, he has a security apparatus that manages the whole of Egypt, he has the ministry of education and health and all of this is his… So why would he be afraid of the West? The West is afraid of Hosni Mubarak. I’m serious, I’m being frank. The West is afraid of Hosni Mubarak. Why? Because Hosni Mubarak is useful to the West.

More startling revelations, including that Ibrahim Eissa is now with the Muslim Brotherhood, can be found in the full interview.

With friends like that, the government does not need enemies.

994 The Future Is Bright

This is very well done. I particularly like the ad for American Apparel. And “The End of Experts,” by Thomas Friedman.

992 Kilcullen’s Afghanistan Brief

David Kilcullen gives the New Yorker‘s George Packer what must be one of the best, most concise briefs on Afghanistan available from a Western perspective:

Well, we need to be more effective in what we are doing, but we also need to do some different things, as well, with the focus on security and governance. The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:

(1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people. That is, we have failed to deliver them a well-founded feeling of security. Our failing lies as much in providing human security—economic and social wellbeing, law and order, trust in institutions and hope for the future—as in protection from the Taliban, narco-traffickers, and terrorists. In particular, we have spent too much effort chasing and attacking an elusive enemy who has nothing he needs to defend—and so can always run away to fight another day—and too little effort in securing the people where they sleep. (And doing this would not take nearly as many extra troops as some people think, but rather a different focus of operations).

(2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary that forms the political base and operational support system for the Taliban, and which creates a protective cocoon (abetted by the fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan) around senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

(3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local level—with the emphasis on good governance. In some areas, we have left a vacuum that the Taliban has filled, in other areas some of the Afghan government’s own representatives have been seen as inefficient, corrupt, or exploitative.

(4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things (secure the people, deal with the safe haven, and govern legitimately and well at the local level)—partly because of poor coalition management, partly because of the strategic distraction and resource scarcity caused by Iraq, and partly because, to date, we have given only episodic attention to the war.

So, bottom line—we need to do better, but we also need a rethink in some key areas starting with security and governance. [More…]

Via Abu Muqawama and SWJ.

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