* No remorse from The London School of Economics (LSE) which agreed to take millions from Gaddafi
* Only 11 weeks ago, Gaddafi himself was invited to address LSE students via video link, with the help of a leading London PR firm
* Leading New York law firm White & Case took $1000 an hour to lobby for Gaddafi
* Among others who have written soft propaganda pieces for Gaddafi and his son in the Western media in recent months: Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of Human Rights Watch’s Mideast division (the same woman who has helped run the HRW delegtimization campaign against Israel), and Stephen Walt (author of the best-selling conspiracy theory “The Israel Lobby”), and writers for The New York Times and Financial Times.
This dispatch concerns the situation in Libya.
CONTENTS
1. Libya’s $1000 an hour lobbyists
2. Leaked footage of Gaddafi’s thugs at work in Benghazi prior to freedom
3. From a source whose identity needs to be protected
4. Murder at Birka
5. Burning Gaddafi’s Green Book
6. No surprise, as the UN Human Rights Council turns a blind eye
7. A pathetic statement from the London School of Economics
8. The Western media’s idiotic flirtation with Gaddafi’s son
9. Walt soft peddles Gaddafi
10. An interactive map of protests across Libya
11. Just in case they claim they didn’t know
12. “Make Libya a no fly zone” (By Joshua Muravchik, World Affairs Journal, Feb. 22, 2011)
13. “Is the Obama administration soft on Gaddafi?” (Washington Post, Feb. 22, 2011)
14. “Abbas proves he prefers posturing to a peace process” (Washington Post, Feb. 18, 2011)
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
LIBYA’S $1000 AN HOUR LOBBYISTS
As massacres and execution-style killings by the Libyan government continue and the White House condemns the “appalling” violence in the country, can someone ask the leading American law firm White & Case whether they’re still lobbying for Gaddafi at $1000 an hour?
I am told that Brown, Lloyd, James, have been heavily involved in promoting the image of Gaddafi’s murderous son, Saif al-Islam. (For more about his son, please see below.)
Victims of Libyan terrorism, including relatives of those who died in the Lockerbie bombing, have notified White & Case, Blank & Rome, the Livingston Group and Westerners who have benefitted from the Libyan regime, that their assets may be used to fund compensation for victims of terrorist attacks.
Another firm active in lobbying on behalf of the Libyan regime is this one.
And these are the people they are representing:
LEAKED FOOTAGE OF GADDAFI’S THUGS AT WORK IN BENGHAZI PRIOR TO FREEDOM
Hundreds of peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders have been deliberately shot and killed by government snipers. Artillery and helicopter gunships have been used against crowds. Gunmen have fired on mourners in funeral processions for protesters the regime previously killed. Thugs armed with hammers and swords have attacked families in their homes. Women and children in the city of Benghazi were seen jumping off a bridge to escape.
FROM A SOURCE WHOSE IDENTITY NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED
This source is usually reliable. He writes:
“Civilians are being rounded up in Tripoli – anyone found not to be a Gaddafi supporter – and being taken to the Aziziya Base which is Gaddafi’s headquarters. Gaddafi is at that base – he is creating a human shield with these civilians. Crimes against Humanity have already begun, and Libyans are totally unaware of any international pressure being placed on Gaddafi and his regime. In Benghazi, the dead bodies found at the Birka base were soldiers, executed for not following orders to attack civilians.”
MURDER AT BIRKA
Here is a video of some of those murdered on Gaddafi’s orders at Birka:
BURNING GADDAFI’S GREEN BOOK
Here is a remarkable video from the town of Tobruk showing young Libyans burning down one of the country’s many centers for the study of Gaddafi’s infamous “Green Book.”
Libya is an extremely repressive country (not that you would know that by reading UN reports) and you have to be very brave to do this.
NO SURPRISE, AS THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL TURNS A BLIND EYE
I have consistently criticized the appallingly misnamed UN Human Rights Council for its covering up for dictators.
So it is hardly worth asking why the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council isn’t convening a special session on the situation in Libya.
Gaddafi’s security forces have killed and injured thousands of innocent people, including children, in cold blood in Tripoli, Benghazi, Misurata, Al-Baida, and other Libyan towns and cities. Why isn’t the UN attempting to fly in even the most basic medical care for the wounded?
A PATHETIC STATEMENT FROM THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS
The London School of Economics (LSE) which, like the UN Human Rights Council, has done its fair share of denigrating the Middle East’s only democracy, Israel, has finally and belatedly decided to cut its ties with the Libyan regime. (For years I have criticized the LSE for cozying up to Gaddafi and accepting huge sums of money from him. They have continued to do this even after his hanging of students at Libyan universities, his torture of pro-democracy campaigners at home and his terrorism abroad.)
But the LSE’s statement (copied below, in case they retroactively change it online later) is feeble and evasive and there is very little remorse about their collaboration with one of the world’s nastiest dictators.
Statement on Libya by LSE (February 21, 2011):
www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2011/02/libya_funding.aspx
The School has had a number of links with Libya in recent years. In view of the highly distressing news from Libya over the weekend of 19-20 February, the School has reconsidered those links as a matter of urgency.
LSE Enterprise has delivered executive education programmes to Libyan officials, principally from the Economic Development Board, and managers. That programme has been completed, and no further courses are in preparation. We have also received scholarship funding in respect of advice given to the Libyan Investment Authority in London. No further receipts are anticipated.
LSE Global Governance - a research centre at the School - accepted, with the approval of the School’s Council, a grant from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, chaired by Saif-al-Islam, one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons and an LSE graduate. This note| from LSE Global Governance explains how that money has been used to date, on a North African programme of study, principally involving civil society issues. In current difficult circumstances across the region, the School has decided to stop new activities under that programme. The Council of the School will keep the position under review.
The School intends to continue its work on democratisation in North Africa funded from other sources unrelated to the Libyan authorities.
***
Tom Gross adds:
Last December, Colonel Gaddafi himself addressed LSE students via a video conference. (Report here from the London Daily Mail.)
In the meantime, the LSE, like several other leading British, American and Canadian universities, have run “Israeli apartheid” campaigns on campus.
We haven’t seen such disgrace at the LSE since Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who founded the LSE, wrote that there was much to admire in Stalinist Russia. “Stalin is now universally considered to have justified his leadership by success,” they wrote in 1942 after Stalin had already murdered many millions of his citizens.
THE WESTERN MEDIA’S IDIOTIC FLIRTATION WITH GADDAFI’S SON
For years, “expert commentators” in the liberal Western media have touted Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, as a democrat and a reformer. I have barely ever read an article portraying him as anything else.
On Sunday night, Saif al-Islam vowed on Libyan TV that his father and security forces would “fight to the last minute, until the last bullet.” Within minutes of his speech, he ordered snipers to open fire on crowds in Tripoli’s main square, and Gaddafi supporters then sped through in vehicles, shooting and running over protesters.
Here, for example, is Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of Human Rights Watch’s Mideast division, writing in 2009 in the influential Washington magazine, “Foreign Policy”:
“But the real impetus for the transformation rests squarely with a quasi-governmental organization, the Gaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development. With Saif al-Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons, as its chairman, and university professor Yousef Sawani as its director, the organization has been outspoken on the need to improve the country’s human rights record. It has had a number of showdowns with the Internal Security Ministry, with whom relations remain frosty. Saif al-Islam is also responsible for the establishment of the country’s two semi private newspapers, Oea and Quryna… it is impossible to underestimate the importance of the efforts made so far.”
www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/05/28/tripoli-spring
***
The two private newspapers. Run by the dictator’s son?
Sarah Leah Whitson is the anti-Israeli activist who runs the Human Rights Watch section charged with assessing the human rights records of countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
***
Among other “useful idiots” in the Western media taken in by the regime’s propaganda:
* CNN’s Becky Anderson: Saif is an “open advocate of democracy”
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1005/26/ctw.01.html
* The New York Times’ Landon Thomas Jr: Saif is a “symbol of [Libya's] hopes for reform and openness.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/world/middleeast/01libya.htm
* The Financial Times’ Heba Saleh: Saif is “reform-minded… a defender of liberty.”
www.ft.com/cms/s/a6af1a42-4e28-11df-b48d-00144feab49a.html
***
In 2009, Gaddafi bought his son a £10m ($16m) neo-Georgian eight-bedroom mansion in north London, complete with his own swimming pool, sauna room, whirlpool bath and suede-lined cinema room. Gaddafi’s son socialized with among others, the Queen’s son, Prince Andrew, and then played a leading role in talks that led to the 2009 release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in which 270 people died. While flying Megrahi home to Libya on a private jet, Gaddafi Jr gave a television interview in which he said the release had been linked to lucrative business deals with the British government.
***
Saif’s younger brother Mutassim Gaddafi is the Libyan regime’s national security adviser, with a strong role in the military and security forces, and another brother Khamis Gaddafi heads the army’s 32nd Brigade, which is the regime’s best trained and best equipped force.
***
UPDATE: Today Human Rights Watch did a belated about turn on Gaddafi, issuing the following statement:
“Anyone, including Muammar Gaddafi, ordering or carrying out atrocities should know they will be held individually accountable for their actions, including unlawful killings of protesters,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “We fear the death toll will rise much higher unless Gaddafi ends his bloody attempts to suppress dissent. He should call his forces including mercenaries off immediately.”
www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/02/22/libya-commanders-should-face-justice-killings
WALT SOFT PEDDLES GADDAFI
Here is the foolish (but much admired) Stephen Walt (author of the best-selling conspiracy theory “The Israel Lobby”) downplaying the evils of Gaddafi in Foreign Policy magazine last month, while he was visiting Libya:
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/18/the_shores_of_tripoli
Walt: “Libya doesn’t feel like other police states that I have visited. I caught no whiff of an omnipresent security service … The Libyans with whom I spoke were open and candid and gave no sign of being worried about being overheard or reported or anything like that … I tried visiting various political websites from my hotel room and had no problems, although other human rights groups report that Libya does engage in selective filtering of some political websites critical of the regime… Libya appears to be more open than contemporary Iran or China and the overall atmosphere seemed far less oppressive than most places I visited in the old Warsaw Pact…
The remarkable improvement in U.S.-Libyan relations reminds us that deep political conflicts can sometimes be resolved without recourse to preventive war or “regime change.” One hopes that the United States and Libya continue to nurture and build a constructive relationship, and that economic and political reform continues there. (I wouldn’t mind seeing more dramatic political reform -- of a different sort -- here too).”
***
The need for political reform in Libya is parallel to the need in the United States?
***
One can compare Walt’s view with that of a more reliable commentator, Michael Totten. (Totten is a subscriber to this email list.) He writes:
“I managed to finagle a visa for myself just after Libyan-American relations defrosted in 2004, and the U.S. government lifted the travel ban. I was one of the first Americans to legally visit the country in decades, and what I saw there was appalling. The capital looks and feels gruesomely communist, which wasn’t surprising, considering that Qaddafi’s ‘Green Book,’ where he fleshes out his lunatic ideology, is a bizarre mixture of the Communist Manifesto and the Koran (though references to Islam are stripped out). What did surprise me was how much terror he instilled in the hearts and minds of his people. No one I met said they liked him. No one would even speak of him unless there were no other Libyans present. Some were even afraid to utter his name, as though saying it out loud might conjure him. ‘We hate that fucking bastard, we have nothing to do with him,’ one shopkeeper told me when we were alone. ‘We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.’
“The system he runs is basically Stalinist and one of the last total surveillance police states in the world. Freedom House ranks Libya near North Korea and Turkmenistan, the most oppressive countries by far, in its utter dearth of human and political rights. I believe it. Obvious intelligence agents worked my hotel lobby, staring at and listening to everyone, and the U.S. State Department warned Americans at the time that even hotel rooms for foreigners likely were bugged.”
AN INTERACTIVE MAP OF PROTESTS ACROSS LIBYA
You can track the latest events inside Libya here.
Here is a helpful interactive map of protests across Libya.
JUST IN CASE THEY CLAIM THEY DIDN’T KNOW
Just in case Stephen Walt, Sarah Leah Whitson, the London School of Economics and others claim that until last weekend they didn’t know what Gaddafi was like, here is a video from 1984:
***
I attach three articles below. The writers of all three articles are subscribers to this list.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
FULL ARTICLES
MAKE LIBYA A NO FLY ZONE
Make Libya a no fly zone
By Joshua Muravchik
World Affairs Journal
February 22, 2011
Moammar Gadhafi is willing to fight to the last Libyan to cling to power. The stakes in this mounting battle are bigger than Libya itself.
One of the tragic realities of politics is that while dictators do get overthrown, it is usually only the more moderate ones. Outright tyrants are harder to topple.
Yes, Mubarak’s rule rested on force and intimidation (and corruption). But Mubarak had little Egyptian blood on his hands, and in the end he went peacefully (although not of his own free will). Tunisia’s Ben Ali was more repressive, and perhaps he would have shed blood. But the army switched sides at the get-go, so this was never tested. Sadly, however, those regimes that are insouciant about killing their own citizens often prevail. “A whiff of grapeshot,” as Carlyle characterized Napoleon’s actions against rebels in Paris, usually works.
The ouster of Ceaucescu was one of the glorious exceptions to this rule. But the outcomes of Iran in June 2009 and Tiananmen Square in 1989 are more typical. Fascist and Communist regimes have been brought down, but usually by outside force (e.g., Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany) or by a change of heart from within (Gorbachev in the USSR), and very rarely by a revolt from below.
The Baathist regimes of Syria and Iraq did not cavil about mowing down tens of thousands to fend off challenges.Gadhafi is cut from similar cloth. Nonetheless, he totters, and his fall, if it happens, will be consequential out of all proportion to the importance of his small country.
The lesson will inevitably be factored into the thinking of other dictatorships and their populations. Such regimes always rest on a calculus of fear (even though some may be popular at the outset). People who are groaning under autocraticrule are nonetheless unlikely to risk death or harm in a hopeless cause. They are more likely to take risks if they believe that their side will triumph. While a victory by the Libyan people over Gadhafi would embolden the oppressed elsewhere, at the same time, it will make rulers think twice before resorting to extreme brutality, knowing it may fail and only fan the hatred for themselves.
For this reason, it would be best if Gadhafi ends as the “martyr” he claims he wishes to be — although he would be a martyr not to Allah but to his own megalomania — with his body dragged through the streets or hung by the ankles like Mussolini’s. Conversely, although it is easy to understand Egyptians’ desires for a settling of accounts with Mubarak, it will be best if he is allowed to live out his days unmolested in Sharm el Sheikh. Then, the message would go forth to dictators everywhere: step down without a fight and you will be allowed a gentle retirement; shed blood and you will die ignominiously.
The fall of Gadhafi, despite the terrible tactics he has used these last days, would mean that no dictator in the region, and perhaps beyond, is safe. In particular, it would bring new pressure on the Syrian regime. Nasser in Egypt, the Baathists of Syria and Iraq, and Gadhafi were the avatars of the pan-Arab, Arab socialist era in Middle East thinking. If Gadhafi falls, Bashar al-Assad will be the cheese that stands alone.
The Obama administration should do all in its power to make sure that happens. A simple measure would be to declare Libya a no-fly zone, as we did to in northern and southern Iraq in the 1990s to protect the Kurds and Shia. Gadhafi is using planes and helicopters against his own civilians. It would be an easy matter for the US to prevent this. He has other heavy weapons that he has thrown into the fray, but were the US to deny him the skies, this would likely prove to be the straw that breaks his back. It would not entail the placement of a single US soldier and would be widely applauded by Libyans and probably by public opinion throughout the region, albeit not by all governments.
The leading goal of Obama’s foreign policy has been to improve America’s image in the Muslim world. Here is something concrete he can do right now that would achieve that goal and do a lot of other good as well.
IS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SOFT ON GADDAFI?
Is the Obama administration soft on Gaddafi?
By Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
February 22, 2011
For the Obama administration, Libya ought to be the easy case in the Middle East’s turmoil. Dictator Moammar Gaddafi, aptly labeled a “mad dog” by Ronald Reagan 25 years ago, is no friend of the United States, unlike Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. And he has launched a shocking war against his own people, killing at least hundreds and probably thousands in attacks by warplanes and foreign mercenaries. On Tuesday he gave a bloodcurdling speech in which he vowed to fight to the last drop of blood and cited the Tiananmen square massacre as an example.
Yet the administration so far has declined to directly condemn Gaddafi, call for his ouster, or threaten sanctions. Instead, it has repeated the same bland language about restraint and “universal rights” that it has used to respond to the uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries with pro-U.S. regimes.
Hours after Gaddafi spoke on Tuesday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was asked at his regular briefing for reporters about the dictator’s demented vow “to stay and to die a martyr and never give up.”
“Again, you know, this ultimately and fundamentally an issue between, you know, the Libyan government, its leader, and the Libyan people,” Crowley replied. Noting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had expressed “grave concerns about the Libyan response to these protesters,” he added, “We want to see universal rights respected and we want to see the government respond to the aspirations of its people.”
Really? Given that massacres on the scale of Tiananmen may well be taking place in Tripoli and other cities, this response was flabbergasting. Does the United States really believe that crimes against humanity are “an issue between the Libyan government...and the Libyan people?” Does it seriously believe that Gaddafi will respond to “the aspiration of [the] people” after his chilling rant?
Reporters at the State Department were quick to ask these questions. “P.J., this is essentially, you know, a bloodbath that is going on there,” came the first. “And it seems when you were talking about this that it’s a very calm approach...Is there a sense of urgency?”
“Of course,” Crowley replied. But then he said that the U.S. response would come through the U.N. Security Council, which is meeting Tuesday afternoon -- and where Russia and China are likely to oppose meaningful action.
Question: “P.J., how can you frame the debate as it’s internal things between the Libyan people and government when some reports talked about thousands of people dead...Isn’t surely the responsibility of the United States to stand up against thousands of people killed?”
Crowley: “Well, and the secretary of state said, you know, very clearly and very compellingly in her statement yesterday that the bloodshed needs to stop.” She did not, however, threaten sanctions, call for Gaddafi’s departure or even directly blame him for the killing.
Question: “Well, P.J., part of the problem is that here you’ve been talking about...how this has to be resolved through an internal debate in Libya. You want to see the government engage the protesters. And the problem with that is that the debate so far has been anti-aircraft guns and bullets and, you know, fighter jets bombing the people. That’s the government side of the debate.”
All too true. Crowley’s answer: “We are going to respond as an international community. We’ll have a response through the Security Council.”
What could explain this weak response? Is the administration worried about U.S. energy companies that recently began operating in Libya, or the safety of American citizens it is now seeking to evacuate? Does it imagine that it needs to preserve a relationship with Gaddafi, in case he kills enough of his people to survive?
Whatever the reason, the administration’s response to the Libyan bloodshed lacks a sense of morality as well as common sense. If Gaddafi continues to strafe and slaughter civilians in the streets of Tripoli, Crowley’s words could come back to haunt him.
UPDATE: Clinton said later Tuesday that the safety of U.S. citizens in Libya, including embassy employees awaiting evacuation, is the “highest priority” for the Obama administration--which, as I suggested above, may explain the mild rhetoric so far. “Now, as always, the safety and wellbeing of Americans has to be our highest priority,” Clinton told reporters at the State Department in Washington. She added that the U.S. joins the international community in “strongly condemning” the crackdown.
THE WASHINGTON POST CONDEMNS THE PA’S STUBBORNNESS
This is the strongest lead editorial I have seen in many years from a mainstream liberal-leaning publication, sharply condemning the Palestinian leadership for its “spectacularly self-defeating stubbornness” and seeming lack of interest in wanting to reach a peace deal with Israel.
-- Tom Gross
***
Abbas proves he prefers posturing to a peace process
Lead editorial
The Washington Post
February 18, 2011
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/18/AR2011021806420.html
PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas claims to be interested in negotiating a two-state peace settlement with Israel. For two years he has enjoyed the support of a U.S. president more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than most, if not all, of his predecessors. Yet Mr. Abbas has mostly refused to participate in the direct peace talks that Barack Obama made one of his top foreign policy priorities - and now he has shown himself to be bent on embarrassing and antagonizing the U.S. administration.
Rejecting direct appeals from both Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Abbas chose to persist on Friday with a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution that called on Israel to cease settlement construction in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Though the administration supports this position - and has counterproductively pressed it at the expense of its larger diplomatic aims - it vetoed the resolution, as Mr. Abbas knew it would do. For a number of good reasons, including its hope of preserving the chance of peace negotiations, the Obama administration could not allow a one-sided U.N. condemnation of Israel.
The only effect of the Palestinian initiative will be to embarrass the Obama administration at a delicate moment, when popular uprisings around the Middle East already are challenging pro-American leaders. It will have no impact on Israeli settlement construction, and it will deal a further blow to the prospects for peace talks. It will bolster the right-wing Israeli government. Conceivably, it could cause Arab protests now focused on autocratic rule to take an ugly anti-American turn.
Mr. Abbas has known all of this all along. Yet he refused to set aside the resolution even when the administration offered a generous compromise - a proposed “presidential statement” from the Security Council criticizing Israeli settlements as well as the firing of rockets at Israel from Gaza. Mr. Obama is taking considerable heat from Congress just for proposing this outcome - and yet in a 50-minute phone call Thursday, he was unable to win the Palestinian president’s assent.
Mr. Abbas’s stubbornness might seem spectacularly self-defeating - but only if one assumes that he is genuinely interested in a peace deal. In fact, the U.N. gambit allows him to posture as a champion of the Palestinian cause without having to consider any of the hard choices that would be needed to found a Palestinian state. It enables him to deflect criticism from the rival Hamas movement about his friendly relations with the United States. It might even allow him to head off a popular Palestinian rebellion against his own autocratic behavior - Mr. Abbas has failed to schedule overdue elections, including for his own post as president.
The Obama administration has all along insisted that Mr. Abbas is willing and able to make peace with Israel - despite considerable evidence to the contrary. If the U.N. resolution veto has one good effect, perhaps it will be to prompt a reevaluation of a leader who has repeatedly proved both weak and intransigent.
* Iranian regime thugs rough up couples for celebrating Valentine’s Day
* Malaysian government also enter hotels, removes Valentine couples, including non-Muslims
* Now banned in Iran: unauthorized mingling of the sexes, laughter in hospital corridors, rock music, women playing in bands, too-bright nail polish, and the mention of foreign food recipes in state media
* Huffington Post’s latest stupidity: “The pro-democracy protest in Egypt is driven in large measure by [The Guardian’s anti-Israel] Palestine Papers”
CONTENTS
1. Jordanian government minister: Killer of Israeli schoolgirls is a hero
2. Outlawing romance and laughter
3. Will rock music bring down Middle East dictatorships?
4. Sharp rise in “official” executions of pro-democracy campaigners
5. A genuine human rights gathering
6. … as opposed to the UN and Human Rights Watch
7. Five years in prison for handing out leaflets
8. UK allows misleading Palestine ad, but bans Israeli one
9. In a very rare move, The Guardian apologizes for a story about Israel
10. Most idiotic comment of the day
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
JORDANIAN GOVERNMENT MINISTER: KILLER OF ISRAELI SCHOOLGIRLS IS A HERO
Agence France Presse reports that Jordan’s justice minister yesterday described a Jordanian soldier serving a life sentence for killing seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997 as a “hero”.
“I support the demonstrators’ demand to free Ahmad Dakamseh. He’s a hero. He does not deserve prison,” said Hussein Mujalli, who was appointed a government minister last week in response to demands of “pro-democracy” demonstrators in Amman.
Mujalli, a leading Jordanian lawyer, is a former president of the Jordan Bar Association.
Releasing Dakamseh would be a “top priority” for the new government, he added, according to the state-run Petra news agency.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry responded by saying that “Israel is shocked and recoils from these comments in revulsion. This call is all the more serious as it came from the minister in charge of law and order. Israel has demanded clarifications from Jordan and has made it known very strongly that the murderer must serve the sentence handed down by the Jordanian court.”
Jordan is the only Arab nation besides Egypt to have signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state.
In March 1997, Dakamseh approached the border fence with Israel and sprayed bullets into a group of Israeli schoolgirls on the Israeli side of the border, near the Sea of Galilee, killing seven and wounding five others as well as their teacher.
King Hussein (the father of the present Jordanian monarch) cut short a visit to Europe and rushed home to condemn the attack. He later travelled to Israel and “sat shiva” (offered his condolences) to the families of the murdered schoolgirls.
Maisara Malas, who heads the Islamist-allied trade unions’ committee, said yesterday: “We cannot imagine that a great fighter like Dakamseh is in jail instead of reaping the rewards of his achievement.”
OUTLAWING ROMANCE AND LAUGHTER
In addition to the political violence yesterday in which the Iranian regime’s secret police severely beat Egyptian-inspired pro-democracy demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, and several more people were “disappeared” perhaps never to be seen again (as was the case following the demonstrations in 2009), the regime also cracked down on young couples attempting to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
In the run up to Valentine’s Day, Iranian state media had announced that “Symbols of hearts, half-hearts, red roses, and any activities promoting this day are banned. Authorities will take legal action against those who ignore the ban.”
Iranian militia patrolled restaurants in Iran last night looking for any signs of affection between couples, and several people were reportedly manhandled and taken away for questioning.
The Islamic government in Iran (so admired by certain apologists on the editorial pages of The New York Times) has already outlawed (among other things) unauthorized mingling of the sexes, laughter in hospital corridors, rock music, women playing in bands, too-bright nail polish, and the mention of foreign food recipes in state media.
WILL ROCK MUSIC BRING DOWN MIDDLE EAST DICTATORSHIPS?
As exiled Iranian writer Melik Kaylan pointed out recently:
“In the play ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ [which is set in Communist Czechoslovakia] playwright Tom Stoppard proposes that rock music more than anything else – the arms race, dissident intellectuals, economic decay – brought down the communist system because it came from an unanticipated source for which the politburo theorists had no answer.
“Their enforcers could counter explicit resistance, but their ideologues never prepared defenses against the onslaught of pure fun. No one in charge knew how to neutralize this entirely new category of opting out through the delirium of music. In the play, the rigid communist edifice crumbles in the face of a mysteriously apolitical impulse to freedom embodied by young folk who simply ‘don’t care about anything but the music.’”
Kaylan noted that the mullahs “can offer no specific dogma against the widespread underground rock scene in the suburbs of Tehran and elsewhere. They often arrest those at basement shows or garage performances with improvised expedients – for the blasphemous nature of their gyrations, or for illicit socializing between the sexes.”
***
The Iranian-supported Hamas regime in Gaza has also violently broken up western rock concerts among Palestinian youth.
In 2009, Hamas’s “morality police” in Gaza banned Palestinian women from swimming unless they are covered from top to bottom, and forbade women from entering coffee shops, restaurants, and other public places unless they are escorted by male relatives.
SHARP RISE IN “OFFICIAL” EXECUTIONS OF PRO-DEMOCRACY CAMPAIGNERS
At least 66 people were executed in Iran in January alone according to official Iranian statistics. These included several pro-democracy campaigners, made an example by the regime as a warning to others. (These figures don’t include all those “unofficially” killed in Iranian prisons.)
Last week, the Dutch government recalled its ambassador from Tehran in protest against the hanging of a woman who held dual Dutch-Iranian citizenship.
Sahra Bahrami was originally arrested for her participation in anti-government rallies. Once Bahrami was incarcerated, drug smuggling charges against her were added (a measure typically used by the regime to smear dissidents) and became the basis upon which she was hanged on January 29 without prior notice to her family or to the Dutch government.
The latest point of contention is that Iranian officials buried her body a considerable distance from Tehran and failed to give her family notice and the opportunity to be present. The Dutch government recalled its ambassador for consultations – a traditional form of protest between governments – but he is expected to return to Tehran soon, according to Dutch media reports. (Here is a photo of Sahra Bahrami and a report before she was hanged.)
Meanwhile the Turkish government cozies up to the Iranian regime more and more by the day, while Iranian MPs today called for the execution of opposition leaders.
A GENUINE HUMAN RIGHTS GATHERING
As opposed to the human rights organizations that are largely phony (such as the UN Human Rights Commission) or politically biased against Western democracies (such as the George Soros and Saudi-funded New York-based organization Human Rights Watch), a group of genuine human rights organizations that have been excluded by the despots that run the UN Human Rights Commission will be holding a conference next month in Geneva.
(As I have already pointed out in these dispatches, both Tunisia and Egypt were elected members of the UN Human Rights Commission. In its reports, the commission complimented both regimes: Tunisia was praised for building “a legal and constitutional framework for the promotion and protection of human rights,” and Egypt was lauded for initiatives “taken in recent years as regards human rights, in particular the creation of human rights divisions within the ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs.”)
The Geneva Summit will bring together many dissidents and plans to propose draft resolutions promoting democracy in an effort to persuade the UN Human Rights Commission to stop covering up for dictatorships.
Under the chairmanship of writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, participating groups include:
Darfur Peace and Development Center
Directorio Democratico Cubano
Initiatives for China
Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children
Stop Child Executions
Tibetan Women’s Association
Uighur American Congress
Viet Tan
Speakers will include former political prisoners, including those from Roam Uganda, a gay rights organization based in Kampala; Luis Enrique Ferrer Garcia, who was jailed for 28 years for calling for democracy in Cuba; North Korean dissident Guang-il Jung, who was tortured and escaped from a labor camp; Caspian Makan of Iran, the fiancé of slain Iranian icon Neda Agha Soltan; Bo Kyi of Burma; and leading Turkmenistan human rights activist Farid Tukhbatullin.
Among other speakers who the organizers have yet to officially announce: Dalia Ziada from Egypt; Mohamad Mostafei, the recently-escaped Iranian lawyer who defended Sakineh, the woman condemned to death by stoning; and John Dau, a refugee from South Sudan, now building hospitals in his war-torn homeland.
Last year’s summit was praised by papers such as The Wall Street Journal and Italy’s La Stampa, but all but ignored by papers such as The New York Times and The Guardian.
Admission to the March 15 conference is free: www.genevasummit.org.
… AS OPPOSED TO THE UN AND HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Meanwhile, the U.N.’s 47-nation Human Rights Council – ever mute on Egypt, on Iran, and on pretty much every other country with major human rights violations – will open its main annual session next month. On the agenda: the Goldstone Report attacking Israel; the Flotilla Report attacking Israel; Professor Richard Falk’s new report calling for a new World Court advisory opinion on so-called Israeli Apartheid; and then some five new resolutions on the “gross abuses in the occupied territories,” including Jerusalem.
And as for Human Rights Watch, like Amnesty International, it often engages in good work. But this doesn’t excuse much of their political activity which has nothing to do with human rights or social well-being, and everything to do with supporting the aims of Hamas, the Iranian regime and other human rights abusers.
Among past dispatches on Human Rights Watch, please see:
* Nazi scandal engulfs Human Rights Watch (March 28, 2010)
* The liars, crooks and tyrants who run the UN (May 16, 2010)
Last year, Human Rights Watch apologized for “inappropriate, disparaging, inaccurate, condemnatory, intemperate personal attacks” on gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, after Tatchell criticized Islamic treatment of gays. Israel is still waiting for an apology from Human Rights Watch for the catalogue of lies they told about Israel, which lead to HRW board member Richard Goldstone to write the defamatory Goldstone Report accusing Israel of “possible crimes against humanity,” a term usually associated with Nazi Germany.
FIVE YEARS IN PRISON FOR HANDING OUT LEAFLETS
The following is a report you might not have seen elsewhere, from the world’s most populous Muslim nation, which is often hailed as a model Islamic democracy:
The Wall Street Journal (Asian edition) reports, February 8, 2011:
Blasphemy Sentence Sparks Riot in Indonesia
JAKARTA – Hundreds of protesters burned churches and attacked a courthouse in central Indonesia Tuesday after a Christian convicted of blasphemy against Islam was given what they considered a lenient sentence. The rioting was the latest in a string of incidents that’s raising fears about the influence of radical Islamic groups in a country aggressively trying to position itself as one of the world’s fastest-growing – and most stable – emerging markets.
Antonius Richmond Bawengan, 58, was sentenced to five years in prison for handing out leaflets and books that “spread hatred about Islam.” Many of the Islamic hardliners who had gathered near the Temanggung District Court in central Java for the verdict wanted the death penalty, though five years is the maximum sentence.
After angry protesters tried to grab Mr. Bawengan as he was taken from court, the police fired warning shots into the air. The crowd then spread through the neighborhood, setting fire to two churches and a police vehicle and throwing rocks at a third church.
UK ALLOWS MISLEADING PALESTINE AD, BUT BANS ISRAELI ONE
A group of British lawyers have made a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (which is an official British government body) about advertisements in British media that state that “Palestine” lies between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River (i.e. encompasses all of Israel).
The ASA have yet to respond even though last year they banned adverts in Britain by the Israeli Tourist Board that suggested the Western Wall and Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter were in Israel.
According to the complainant, the Palestine advert is “misleading.”
The complaint stated:
It gives the following false impressions:
- that Palestine is a country
- that Palestine has a long history
- that Jerusalem is part of Palestine
- that Palestine extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan
- that Palestine is comfortable, stylish and fabulous (not what we have been led to believe by the BBC / Guardian and others)
***
For background, please see the dispatch last year titled: UK bans Israeli Western Wall tourism advert.
And you can see a picture of the banned Israeli advert here.
IN A VERY RARE MOVE, THE GUARDIAN APOLOGIZES FOR A STORY ABOUT ISRAEL
The Guardian has admitted misleading its readers with a quote attributed to Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni.
The paper acknowledged that the way it presented a quote from Livni about settlement policy was “cut in a way that may have given a misleading impression.”
In a box as part of its Palestine papers “exclusive” on January 26, which The Guardian titled “What they said,” The Guardian quoted Livni as saying:
“The Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that it is impossible, we already have the land and cannot create the state.”
In fact, in the full quote (not carried by The Guardian) Livni makes clear she is against settlement expansion in West Bank territories likely to form part of a future Palestinian state.
The Guardian has yet to correct the misquote in which they alleged that Livni stated she was “against international law”.
I commented on the story about Livni on the day it appeared, here: Al-Jazeera and The Guardian team up in apparent attempt to thwart two-state solution (Jan. 26, 2011).
MOST IDIOTIC COMMENT OF THE DAY
Naomi Wolf in The Huffington Post (the world’s second most read news website):
“Now that Egypt is in the throes of pro-democracy protest driven in large measure by WikiLeaks’ revelation in the [Guardian’s] Palestine Papers about U.S. manipulation of Palestine, surely one would expect key U.S. news organizations and journalists to rally prominently to the defense of the right to publish that that site represents.”
* Egyptian woman: Mossad used me to topple Mubarak regime
CONTENTS
1. “Mubarak supporters target journalists as ‘Jews’” (JTA news agency, Feb. 4, 2011)
2. Long list of international journalists who have been threatened, attacked or detained in Egypt
3. “ABC News Reporter Brian Hartman threatened with beheading” (ABC news, Feb. 3, 2011)
4. Egyptian woman: Mossad used me to topple Mubarak regime (Ynet, Feb. 3, 2011)
5. “Gaza feeds hungry Egyptian troops in role reversal” (Reuters, Feb. 4, 2011)
6. “Journalists forced to pledge abstention from Gaza rallies” (Palestinian Maan news agency, Feb. 2, 2011)
[Note by Tom Gross]
Attached below are a number of further items on Egypt, this time concerning the media.
The title of the article below by Reuters – “Gaza feeds hungry Egyptian troops in role reversal” – is very misleading since in fact Gazans have never been hungry in any kind of collective way in modern times. In spite of media miscoverage, the living standards of the average Gazan have been consistently higher than that of many people in other Arab states. I have documented this in various articles and dispatches, for example, here.)
Four other recent dispatches on the situation in Egypt can be seen here:
* The woman who helped start a revolution (& Video of rocket attack on Israeli wedding)
* A troublesome ally (& “What Bush learned about Egyptian democratization”)
* Mubarak’s regime may prove more brittle than Tunisia’s
* So Israel wasn’t the central source of Arab concern after all?
FULL ARTICLES
MUBARAK SUPPORTERS TARGET JOURNALISTS AS “JEWS”
Mubarak supporters target journalists as “Jews”
JTA news agency
February 4, 2011
(JTA) -- Pro-Egyptian government counter-protesters in Cairo are screaming “Jew!” at foreign journalists, apparently spurred by Egyptian state TV accusations that Israeli spies are behind the protests.
“Egyptian state television has actively tried to foment the unrest by reporting that ‘Israeli spies’ have infiltrated the city, which explains why many of the gangs who attack reporters shout ‘yehudi!,’ “ Al Jazeera said in a report on its website.
The report documented increasing attacks on foreign journalists.
The Obama administration has condemned such attacks and called on the Mubarak regime to rein them in.
EGYPTIAN WOMAN: MOSSAD USED ME TO TOPPLE MUBARAK REGIME
Tom Gross adds: I sent the news report below to some subscribers to this list on the day it appeared. According to the report, Mubarak is claiming that he is not a tool of the Zionist Entity – it is the protesters who are. Apparently those devious Zionists manipulated the U.S. against Egypt and then farmed out the work to Qatar, which is why Al Jazeera is insulting Egypt daily on TV.
***
Egyptian woman: Mossad used me to topple Mubarak regime
Ynet
February 3, 2011
Egyptian Pro-government TV channel interviews woman who claims she was sent to Qatar by US organization, trained by ‘Israelis and Jews’. Why confess? Mubarak ‘was like father to me’, she says.
‘Israeli connection’ to Egypt riots? A young Egyptian woman claims that the Mossad trained her to assist in bringing down Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. In an interview with Egypt’s Al Mehwar network the woman, who noted that her facebook page was extremely popular, said that she was sent by an American organization to be specially trained “by Israelis and Jews” in Qatar.
The woman remained anonymous and was interviewed with her voice distorted and her face blurred. She told of her training and financial support from an American organization called Freedom House. She claims that her trainers were Jews and Israelis whose main job was recruiting “young and unexperienced” students from universities.
The organization is well known, and its website states that its purpose is to “support the expansion of freedom around the world” and that it was founded by “prominent Americans concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy”.
According to the young woman, after her initial recruitment, she was sent to Doha in Qatar with a group of other young people for the next stage in the process. “We received intensive training for four days. The trainers had different citizenships but a predominant number among them were Israelis,” she said.
At the end of the interview the woman was asked what led her to confess her secret activities. At this point, she burst into tears and answered that President Mubarak was “like a father to me,” which is why she decided to share what happened to her.
Protests in Cairo escalated to violence after Mubarak’s supporters started to confront the opposition supporters in al-Tahrir Square. At least five people were killed and according to doctors’ reports, the number of those injured at the square reached 1,500. Mubarak announced that he would not be running for another term in office in the next elections, but protestors are demanding his immediate resignation.
(LONG) LIST OF JOURNALISTS WHO HAVE BEEN THREATENED, ATTACKED OR DETAINED WHILE REPORTING IN EGYPT
For the references to “links” and “wires” in the item below, see here (and please note that ABC News can’t spell “agressively”).
(As of February 4, 2010)
APTN had their satellite dish agressively dismantled, leaving them and many other journalists who rely on their feed point no way to feed material.
ABC News international correspondent Christiane Amanpour said that on Wednesday her car was surrounded by men banging on the sides and windows, and a rock was thrown through the windshield, shattering glass on the occupants. They escaped without injury/ (wires)
Another CNN reporter, Hala Gorani, said she was shoved against a fence when demonstrators rode in on horses and camels, and feared she was going to get trampled/ (wires)
A group of angry Egyptian men carjacked an ABC News crew and threatened to behead them on Thursday in the latest and most menacing attack on foreign reporters trying to cover the anti-government uprising. Producer Brian Hartman, cameraman Akram Abi-hanna and two other ABC News employees / (link)
ABC/Bloomberg’s Lara Setrakian also attacked by protesters
CNN’s Anderson Cooper said he, a producer and camera operator were set upon by people who began punching them and trying to break their camera. Cooper and team were targeted again on Thursday. “Situation on ground in Egypt very tense,” Cooper tweeted Thursday. “Vehicle I was in attacked. My window smashed. All OK.” / (wires)
A photojournalist for CNN-IBN, Rajesh Bhardwaj, was detained in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the site of bloody clashes between supporters and opponents of President Hosni Mubarak. He was taken away by the Egyptian Army and later released, but only after his identification card and tapes were destroyed / (link)
Fox Business Network’s Ashley Webster reported that security officials burst into a room where he and a camera operator were observing the demonstration from a balcony. They forced the camera inside the room. He called the situation “very unnerving” and said via Twitter that he was trying to lay low / (wires)
Fox News Channel’s foreign correspondent Greg Palkot and producer Olaf Wiig were hospitalized in Cairo after being attacked by protestors.
CBS News’ Katie Couric harassed by protesters (link)
CBS newsman Mark Strassman said he and a camera operator were attacked as they attempted to get close to the rock-throwing and take pictures. The camera operator, who he would not name, was punched repeatedly and hit in the face with Mace. / (wires)
CBS News’ Lara Logan, was detained along with her crew by Egyptian police outside Cairo’s Israeli embassy. / (link)
Two New York Times journalists have been arrested. (A Times spokeswoman said that the two journalists were “detained by military police overnight in Cairo and are now free.” ) (link)
Washington Post foreign editor Douglas Jehl wrote Thursday that witnesses say Leila Fadel, the paper’s Cairo bureau chief, and photographer Linda Davidson “were among two dozen journalists arrested this morning by the Egyptian Military Police. They were later released.” / (link)
Wall Street Journal photographer Peter van Agtmael said he was attacked Wednesday by a group of supporters of Mr. Mubarak near Tahrir Square, where several clashes have broken between backers of the regime and protesters demanding Mr. Mubarak’s resignation after nearly 30 years in power / (link)
BBC’s Jerome Boehm also targeted by protesters / (link)
BBC also reported their correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes’ car was forced off the road in Cairo “by a group of angry men.” He has detained by the men, who handed him off to secret police agents who handcuffed and blindfolded him and an unnamed colleague and took them to an interrogation room. They were released after three hours. / (link)
BBC reporter Wyre Davies in Alexandria – Attacked and driven off by locals several times in the past few days / (link)
BBC foreign editor Jon Williams said via Twitter that security forces seized the network’s equipment in a Cairo Hilton hotel in an attempt to stop it broadcasting / (link)
Two days ago, a Bloomberg News reporter (Bloomberg is not disclosing the name of the individual) was held by Egyptian authorities for 12 hours and then released Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London said she was approached by a gang of men with knives in Imbaba, a poor neighborhood of Cairo. Another group of men, who also were strangers to her, pushed her into a store and locked it to protect her, she said/ (link)
Joan Roura, a correspondent for TV3, a Catalan public television station, was attacked by men who tried to steal his mobile phone while he was conducting a live broadcast for the 24 hours news channel. Assaults were also reported against Sal Emergui, a correspondent for Catalan radio RAC1; Gemma Saura, a correspondent for the newspaper La Vanguardia; and Mikel Ayestaran, a correspondent for the newspaper Vocento / (link)
Reporter Jean-Francois Lepine of Canada’s CBC all-French RDI network said that he and a cameraman were surrounded by a mob that began hitting them, until they were rescued by the Egyptian army / (wires)
CBC Radio’s Margaret Evans was on air Thursday morning reporting that her crew’s camera equipment had been seized by police and that they were stuck in their hotel, reporting from a balcony that overlooked Tahrir Square / (link)
The Toronto Globe and Mail said on its website that reporter Sonia Verma and Patrick Martin said the military had “commandeered us and our car” in Cairo. / (link)
Two Associated Press correspondents were also roughed up. AP’s Nasser Gamil mentioned in one article (unclear if he was one of the original 2 mentioned) / wires and (link)
Reuters’ Simon Hanna tweeted today that a “gang of thugs” stormed the news organization’s Cairo office and smashed windows / (link)
Voice Of America reporters in the capital were surrounded by several people who prevented them from traveling to Tahrir Square / (link)
Vice magazine’s Cairo correspondent Rachel Pollock gets roughed up trying to cover the protests / (link)
David Degner, a Cairo-based photographer, said five of his journalist friends has been “beaten and had their equipment confiscated” as clashes between the two groups escalated
The AP reports that Ahmed Mohammed Mahmoud, 36, an Egyptian journalist has died. Mahmoud was taking photographs of fighting between protesters and security forces from the balcony of his home when he was shot Jan. 28, state-run newspaper Al-Ahram said on its website. (Link)
The head of Al Jazeera Arabic’s bureau in Cairo and another AJA journalist were detained in the Egyptian capital on Friday the 4th.
Andrew Burton, a photographer on assignment, wrote this account of being engulfed and beaten by a pro-Mubarak crowd yesterday. “I dont know a single journalist heading out on the ground today,” he says / (link)
The website of Belgium’s Le Soir newspaper said Belgian reporter Serge Dumont, whose real name is Maurice Sarfatti, was beaten Wednesday / (wires)
Jon Bjorgvinsson, a correspondent for RUV, Iceland’s national broadcaster, but on assignment for Swiss television in Cairo, was attacked on Tuesday as he and a crew were filming/ (link)
Danish media reported that Danish senior Middle East Correspondent Steffen Jensen was beaten today by pro-Mubarak supporters with clubs while reporting live on the phone to Danish TV2 News from Cairo / (link)
Two Japanese freelance photographers were attacked while covering the protests in Cairo, and one of them was slightly injured, the Kyodo News agency reported/ (link)
Two Swedish reporters (from Aftonbladet tabloid) / (link)
epa photojournalist; German ZDF; German ARD / (link)
A reporter for Turkey’s Fox TV, his Egyptian cameraman and their driver were abducted by men with knives while filming protests Wednesday, but Egyptian police later rescued them, said Anatolia, a Turkish news agency / (link)
Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT, said its Egypt correspondent, Metin Turan, was beaten / (link)
Several Turkish journalists were attacked by Mubarak supporters, according to news reports. Cumali Önal of Cihan News Agency and Doğan Ertuğrul of the Turkish Star Daily were attacked and beaten by pro-Mubarak supporters on Wednesday. Both were in stable condition today / (link)
The Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini said one of its reporters, Petros Papaconstantinou, was beaten by protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Papaconstantinou was clubbed in the head with a baton and stabbed in the foot, either with a knife or a screwdriver / (link)
A Greek freelance photographer punched in the face by a group of men who stopped him on the street near Tahrir Square and smashed some of his equipment / (wires)
In addition, five Chinese journalists were briefly detained after authorities found bullet proof vests in their luggage, along with more than 20 walkie-talkies and satellite phones, the officials said. They were allowed to leave after the equipment was confiscated. / (wires)
RT TV crew injured (link)
A correspondent and a cameraman working for Russia’s Zvezda television channel were detained by men in plainclothes and held overnight Tuesday, Anastasiya Popova of Vesti state television and radio said on air from Cairo / (link)
French international news channel France 24 said three of its journalists had been detained while covering protests in Egypt and were being held by “military intelligence services”. (link)
French photojournalist from SIPA Press agency Alfred Yaghobzadeh is being treated by anti-government protestors after being wounded during clashes between pro-government supporters and anti-government protestors / (link)
Police arrested four Israeli journalists for allegedly violating the curfew in Cairo and for entering the country on tourist visas, according to news reports. / (link)
Al Jazeera reported Thursday that two of its reporters were attacked en route to Cairo airport, along with cameraman being assaulted near Tahrir Square / (link)
al Arabiya’s Ahmed Abdullah (and station was stormed) / (link)
ALSO - Al-Arabiya correspondent, Ahmed Bajano, in Cairo, was beaten while covering a pro-Mubarak demonstration. Another unidentified correspondent was also attacked. Another network reporter said on the air that her colleague Ahmad Abdel Hadi was seized by what appeared to be pro-Mubarak supporters near Tahrir Square, forced in a car, and driven away. / (link)
Men in plainclothes surrounded the office of Sawsan Abu Hussein, deputy editor of the Egyptian magazine October after she called in to a television program to report on violence against protesters (link)
A group of men described as “plainclothes police” attacked the headquarters of the independent daily Al-Shorouk in Cairo today, the paper reported. Reporter Mohamed Khayal and photographer Magdi Ibrahim were injured/ (link)
Bloggers, too, have become targets: The popular Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey has reportedly been arrested (it’s unclear by whom) / (link)
Corban Costa of Brazilian Radio Nacional and cameraman Gilvan Rocha of TV Brasil were detained, blindfolded, and had their passports and equipment seized. The two were reportedly held overnight without water in a windowless room in a Cairo police station.
Polish TVP’s two-man camera crew and producer were apprehended and driven away in a van by unidentified assailants. They were beaten up inside the van, driven out of town and released. Their gear was confiscated. A reporter and a photographer for a Polish weekly were arrested near Tahrir Square. They were tied up and kept in a van in front of a police station most of the day. Their camera gear was destroyed. At 11pm they were put on a bus along with some twenty other journalists and driven back to their hotel / (Tomek Rolski)
Polish state television TVP said that five journalists working in two crews—Krzysztof Kołosionek and Piotr Bugalski; and Michał Jankowski, Piotr Górecki, and Paweł Rolak--were detained in Cairo and that one of their cameras was smashed.
Three Romanian TV crews were detained Wednesday and Thursday in Cairo. On Wednesday, Adelin Petrisor, a reporter for the state-owned broadcaster TVR, and an unnamed cameraman were detained by Cairo police, searched, and later released. On Thursday, police detained Realitatea TV reporter Cristian Zarescu and his unidentified cameraman. Authorities confiscated their tapes before releasing them. Also on Thursday, Antena 3 reporter Carmen Avram and cameraman Cristian Tamas, were stopped by police. The men sent a text message late today saying they were being held for questioning.
Rachel Beth Anderson, a freelance videographer in Cairo, tweeted that “cameras & phones disappearing from journo hotel rooms in the Semiramis hotel! We’re locked inside by staff who says its orders from outside.
The Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported that its correspondent in Egypt, Bert Sundström, is recovering from stab wounds to the stomach in a Cairo hospital
Margaret Warner, a senior correspondent for the U.S.-based “PBS Newshour,” had her camera confiscated. Warner tweeted today: “PBS NewsHour arrives Cairo. Camera gear inspected & confiscated. 2 hours & we’re still haggling.”
Wally Nell, a photographer for the California-based Zuma Press agency, was wounded under the 6th October Bridge at the Corniche on the Nile in downtown Cairo, according to accounts posted by family and friends. Those accounts described Zell as having suffered multiple pellet wounds after being fired upon by police.
At least four contributors to Demotix, a U.K.-based citizen journalism website and photo agency, were also attacked, Turi Munthe, Demotix CEO, told CPJ in an e-mail. The four included Nour El Refai and Mohamed Elmaymony.
NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro was also attacked. She has this report. (www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133469105/npr-reporter-other-media-targeted-in-egypt)
ABC NEWS REPORTER BRIAN HARTMAN THREATENED WITH BEHEADING
ABC News Reporter Brian Hartman Threatened With Beheading
Attacks on Foreign Press Growing During Egyptian Uprising
By Mark Mooney
ABC News
February 3, 2011
A group of angry Egyptian men carjacked an ABC News crew and threatened to behead them today in the latest and most menacing attack on foreign reporters trying to cover the anti-government uprising.
Correspondent Brian Hartman, cameraman Akram Abi-hanna and two other ABC News employees were surrounded on a crowded road that leads from Cairo’s airport to the city’s downtown area.
While ABC News and other press agencies had been taking precautions to avoid volatile situations, the road to the airport had been a secure route until today. One of their two vehicles was carrying cameras and transmission equipment strapped to the roof, indicating they were foreign journalists.
Hartman says it was only through the appeal of Abi-hanna, who is Lebanese and a veteran ABC cameraman, that they were saved from being killed or severely beaten.
“We thought we were goners,” Hartman said later. “We absolutely thought we were doomed.”
Word of their harrowing ordeal came in a Twitter message from Hartman that stated, “Just escaped after being carjacked at a checkpoint and driven to a compound where men surrounded the car and threatened to behead us.”
“The men released us only after our camera man appealed to the generous spirit of the Egyptian people, hugging and kissing an elder,” he added in a subsequent tweet.
Minutes after receiving news that Hartman had been safely released, ABC News anchor Christiane Amanpour and her team were surrounded and interrogated by a threatening crowd in Cairo.
The alarm was sent back to ABC News headquarters in Cairo in a series of quick comments during a phone call. “We’re in trouble on the bridge,” was all that was initially said. The bridge is on the same road where Hartman and Abi-hanna were carjacked.
Moments later, the ABC News staffer said, “They’re surrounding us.”
Then cryptically, “We have to go.”
Amanpour and her team were allowed to proceed, but it was the second time in two days that her team has been targeted by groups of men angry with foreign coverage of the demonstrations that are demanding President Hosni Mubarak end his 30-year rule by stepping down immediately.
Foreign news reporters have increasingly become targets of the attacks in Cairo as the Mubarak government teeters and dozens of reporters including CNN’s Anderson Cooper and CBS anchor Katie Couric have been menaced, forced off the road, shoved against fences, and physically assaulted. A Greek reporter was stabbed in the leg.
The growing fury was noted by Hartman in his tweets before his confrontation.
“Getting reports of journalists being attacked all over Cairo,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Hartman and Abi-hanna headed for the airport today to collect equipment that had been impounded upon their arrival Tuesday. After collecting their gear, Hartman tweeted, “Cairo Airport security had to hold back a spitting mad man who was shouting at one of my colleagues about media bias against the govt.”
In today’s incident, Hartman said the two-car convoy was stopped at one of the many makeshift checkpoints that have sprung up around Cairo, most of them created by neighborhood groups to protect themselves from looters.
Their drivers were forced into the back seats and one man tried to snatch a camera from the car, but it was grabbed back. Men from the checkpoint drove them down “a dusty, beat up street where some people opened up the dinged-up barricades and drove us down to a dingy little cul de sac,” Hartman said.
A large banner of Mubarak hung over the street and dozens of men were standing around, Hartman said.
“Then they directed our driver to take us down a dark, narrow alleyway. A man sitting next to me with a cigarette dropping ashes on my shoulder... No way, we can’t go down this alley, I told our driver, and he turned off the car.”
The two vehicles were quickly engulfed by men who poured out of the alley. “It gradually escalated, the tension and anger in their voice... It was pretty clear we were in a threatening situation. People were making gestures and putting their fingers under my throat” and making a slitting motion, he said.
“A man in police uniform came up to me and said, ‘So help me God... I am going to cut off your head,’” Hartman recalled.
One man was yelling, “Cut their necks now, cut their necks now,” and another pointed an imaginary machine gun at Hartman and made shooting noises.
“I couldn’t see outside the windows except angry faces and the gestures. I thought we were absolutely doomed,” Hartman said.
They were saved, he said, when Abi-hanna “lunged forward and gave a great big bear hug” to a man who appeared to be an elder of the neighborhood. “He gave him a kiss on each cheek and told the man referring to me, ‘He is my guest. He is your guest in this country. Egyptian people are better than this.”
Hartman said the cameraman appealed to the “renowned generosity of the Egyptian people.”
Abi-hanna’s words “seemed to calm the tensions down” enough for them to get the cars in gear and escape, despite the efforts of some to stop them.
Hartman said that through it all, none of their equipment was stolen and they were not punched or physically abused.
Reporters for other news outlets, including NBC, BBC and FOX, have reported that their hotel rooms have been ransacked.
Some men charged onto the roof of the Ramses Hilton Hotel where APTN maintains a satellite dish that networks, including ABC News, use to transmit their stories. They broke apart the dish and APTN technicians had to jump from the roof to another roof two floors below.
Security personnel at the Marriot Hotel warned news outlets today to take their transmission gear off of the balconies because suspicious people were looking up at the balconies, possibly trying to identify the rooms of journalists.
Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News, said, “We are assessing the security situation literally on a minute to minute basis. Our priority is to ensure the safety of all of our staff in the field.”
GAZA FEEDS HUNGRY EGYPTIAN TROOPS IN ROLE REVERSAL
Gaza feeds hungry Egyptian troops in role reversal
By Reuters news agency
February 4, 2011
Egyptian soldiers isolated on the Gaza border by 10 days of internal upheaval are getting bread, canned goods and other food supplies from the enclave, which is usually on the receiving end of food aid.
A source in the border town of Rafah said security forces of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which rules Gaza, had been providing the troops with supplies for the past three days.
Israel has blockaded Gaza for over three years with the assistance of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government, and half the population depends on handouts of staples from the United Nations.
With mass protests demanding Mubarak should quit, sources in Rafah said north Sinai was tense. Angry Bedouins were in control of many roads following armed clashes with Egyptian police.
The sources said Palestinian merchants in Gaza have also been smuggling vegetables, eggs and other staples into Egypt, where store owners have run out of stock because normal supplies are cut off by the unrest – reversing the usual flow of goods.
Hamas security forces had beefed up their presence along the border and in the area of Gaza’s honeycomb of smuggling tunnels to prevent any breach of the border line. No photography or television images were allowed.
JOURNALISTS FORCED TO PLEDGE ABSTENTION FROM GAZA RALLIES
Journalists forced to pledge abstention from Gaza rallies
Palestinian Maan news agency
February 2, 2011
www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=356572
RAMALLAH (Ma’an) -- Gaza government police ordered detained journalists to sign a paper pledging to “abide by law, order and conventions” following their arrest at a sit-in protest Monday showing support for Egypt rallies.
Member of the Palestinian Journalists Union General Secretariat Tahseen Al-Astal said the journalists and others who were detained refused to sign the paper, saying they broke no laws, but added that the group was eventually compelled to sign a paper promising to abstain from taking part in unlicensed protests.
Six journalists were also assaulted by Gaza government police during Monday’s sit-in protest, the officials said.
Al-Astal quoted testimony Wednesday from Al-Ayyam reporter Asma Al-Ghoul, who said she was hit on the head and face, and that police had pulled her by her hair when they attempted to break up the rally.
Freelancer Fares Al-Ghoul was briefly detained, Al-Astal said, while writer and film director Razan Al-Madhoun who won the golden award in Gaza documentary film festival was also attacked, alongside TV presenter Rami Murad.
Blogger Neda Dhulfaqar and journalist Nazek Abu Rahmeh also said they were beaten, Al-Astal said.
Following the protest, Al-Astal said, Gaza government police ordered the journalists to sign a paper pledging to “abide by law, order and conventions.”
Al-Astal said the journalists and others who were detained refused to sign the paper, saying they broke no laws. The group was eventually compelled to sign a paper promising to abstain from taking part in unlicensed protests.
* “Both Tunisia and Egypt were elected members of that circus known as the UN Human Rights Commission. In its reports, the commission complimented both regimes: Tunisia was praised for building ‘a legal and constitutional framework for the promotion and protection of human rights,’ and Egypt was lauded for initiatives ‘taken in recent years as regards human rights, in particular the creation of human rights divisions within the ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs.’”
* “Israelis want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares. But instead, the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power.”
* The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 peace treaty if it comes into power. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with Egypt. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world is about to close.
***
This is a follow-up to the two dispatches earlier this week on Egypt. Today’s dispatch is again divided into two for space reasons. The other part can be read here: A troublesome ally (& “What Bush learned about Egyptian democratization”).
For previous dispatches on Egypt, please see:
* Mubarak’s regime may prove more brittle than Tunisia’s
* So Israel wasn’t the central source of Arab concern after all?
CONTENTS
1. Video: A close call as Hamas rocket narrowly misses wedding in Israel
2. Senators reject call to cut Israel aid
3. The woman who helped start a revolution
4. Quote of the day
5. “Israel, alone again?” (By Yossi Klein Halevi, New York Times, Feb. 1, 2011)
6. “Surprise! Mubarak is a dictator” (By Amnon Rubinstein, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 2, 2011)
7. ‘Burning Bush” (By Lee Smith, Tablet magazine, Jan. 31, 2011)
8. “Lessons on Egypt from Carter and the Shah” (By Ronen Bergman, Wall St J, Feb. 1, 2011)
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
VIDEO: A CLOSE CALL AS HAMAS ROCKET NARROWLY MISSES ISRAELI WEDDING
This video shows security camera footage of a Grad rocket narrowly missing a wedding reception in Netivot, Israel. This was one of two longer-range Grad rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza at southern Israeli towns on Monday night.
Wedding guests (including children) celebrating in this residential neighborhood of Netivot can be seen running for cover.
Although 48 hours have now passed since the attack, needless to say, almost the entire international media still hasn’t reported on it.
SENATORS REJECT CALL TO CUT ISRAEL AID
Six Senate Democrats are rejecting a proposal by new Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky to cut U.S. aid to Israel.
In a letter yesterday to the top House Republicans on the Appropriations and Budget committees, they said aid to Israel, the only democratic nation in the Middle East, is imperative.
Those signing the letter were Sens. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Ben Cardin (Md.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Robert Casey (Pa.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.).
THE WOMAN WHO HELPED START A REVOLUTION
This is the video, originally posted on January 18th, that first called on Egyptians to come to Tahrir Square on January 25, thus sparking the current round of demonstrations.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Tom Friedman in The New York Times:
“I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. As I take my seat, he begins the conversation with: ‘Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.””
***
I attach four articles below. All four writers are subscribers to this email list.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
ISRAEL, ALONE AGAIN?
Israel, Alone Again?
By Yossi Klein Halevi
New York Times
February 1, 2011
ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world’s 1989 moment. Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East’s ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.
But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.
Either result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.
The Brotherhood and its offshoots have been the main purveyors of the Muslim world’s widespread conspiracy theories about the Jews, from blaming the Israeli intelligence service for 9/11 to accusing Zionists of inventing the Holocaust to blackmail the West.
Others argue that the responsibilities of governance would moderate the Brotherhood, but here that is dismissed as Western naïveté: the same prediction, after all, was made about the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The fear of an Islamist encirclement has reminded Israelis of their predicament in the Middle East. In its relationship with the Palestinians, Israel is Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel remains David.
Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from the Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran and Turkey. Peace with Israel’s immediate neighbors would wait.
That doctrine began to be reversed in 1979, when the Israeli-Iranian alliance collapsed and was in effect replaced by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty that same year. The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the Arab world without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional war fought by Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur.
Since then all of Israel’s military conflicts – from the first Lebanon war in 1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 – have been asymmetrical confrontations against terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with strategic, diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential threat from the Arab world.
For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with Egypt – for all its limitations, it is the only successful model of a land-for-peace agreement.
Above all, though, Israeli optimism has been sustained by the memory of the improbable partnership between President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin. Only four years before flying to Tel Aviv on his peace mission, Sadat had attacked Israel on its holiest day. Begin, Israel’s most hawkish prime minister until that time, withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, an area more than three times the size of Israel.
Though Egypt failed to deliver the normalization in relations Israelis craved, the thousands of Israeli tourists who have filled the beaches of the Sinai coast experienced something of the promise of real peace. At least in one corner of the Arab Middle East, they felt welcomed. A demilitarized Sinai proved that Israel could forfeit strategic depth and still feel reasonably secure.
The Sinai boundary is the only one of Israel’s borders that hasn’t been fenced off. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world is about to close.
SURPRISE, SUPRISE
Surprise, Suprise: Mubarak is a dictator
By Amnon Rubinstein
The Jerusalem Post
February 2, 2011
What we should learn from all this is that we know nothing of what truly happens in non-democratic regimes.
The revolutionary events in Tunisia and Egypt descended on the “international community” like a lightening bolt. The two unpopular regimes, although undemocratic, were not notorious for their brutal repression. On the contrary, Tunisia was known as a mildly pro-Western regime in which both polygamy and the veil were outlawed. Egypt was similarly regarded as a mild autocracy, and President Hosni Mubarak was considered a moderate, peace-seeking pro- Western stalwart. True, there were complaints from human rights NGOs, but in comparison with the permanent anti-Israeli barrage, these were mere twitterings.
Both Tunisia and Egypt were elected members of that circus known as the UN Human Rights Commission. In its reports, along with mild criticism, the commission complimented both regimes: Tunisia was praised for building “a legal and constitutional framework for the promotion and protection of human rights,” and Egypt was lauded for initiatives “taken in recent years as regards human rights, in particular the creation of human rights divisions within the ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs.” (Reading these excerpts, one may be forgiven for thinking that the true demonstration should take place in Geneva, seat of the Human Rights Commission.)
And, needless to say, nothing we have read or seen in the world media prepared us for the horrific street scenes and anti-regime accusations which burst out of our TV screens; the idea that Mubarak is a dictator came as a shock to Western audiences.
What we should learn from all this is that we know nothing of what truly happens in non-democratic regimes. Just as in the 1930s, Western journalists touring the Ukraine did not see the massive death by forced starvation around them, so contemporary media do not fathom what truly lies under an ostensibly mild non-democracy.
The world of news and NGO reports is slanted. It has a tendency to find fault with open societies and is misled by repressive regimes in which there are no free media or independent courts. Thus a paradox is established: The more democratic and open a country is, the more exposed it will be to allegations of human rights abuses.
This is true of both Egypt and Tunisia. The regimes there were not more repressive than other Middle Eastern regimes: Certainly their abuses were mild in comparison with Iranian and Syrian brutality.
Indeed, because both countries were subject to Western influence and pressure, they could not resort to the unbridled brutality with which the Teheran regime met its pro-democracy opponents in 2009.
The truth is even harder to digest: There is no substitute for democracy, even when flawed. But in the Middle East, free elections – an essential part of democracy – may lead to an Islamic Iranian-type regime which will stifle any sign of true democracy.
We’ll have to wait a long time before we see a reversal of this trend.
(The writer, a legal scholar, is the former Israeli minister of education.)
THE LATEST TEST OF GEORGE W. BUSH’S FREEDOM AGENDA
Burning Bush
The mass uprising in Egypt that seems set to overthrow the Mubarak regime is the latest test of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda. The U.S. and Israel are hoping it works out better than the previous three.
By Lee Smith
Tablet magazine
January 31, 2011
Administrations are overtaken by events all the time. And so President Barack Obama may be forgiven for his strange press conference on Egypt last week, in which he didn’t seem to know whether to praise Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Washington’s longtime ally, or side with the masses whom the U.S. president has been courting since his 2009 Cairo speech. And yet the fact remains that the Obama Administration has no strategy to deal with events still unfolding in Egypt, nor even a worldview on which to base one. His predecessor, for all his flaws, did have a strategy. What we’ve been watching on the streets of Egypt this past week is the fourth test of George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda.
The Bush White House believed that the problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East was in the nature of repressive Arab regimes: In this view, Sept. 11 was the product of a political culture that had been strangled by its rulers, allowing their people no form of political expression except extremism. Deposing these regimes would unleash the native political energies of Arab peoples, went the argument, who would turn their attention away from anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments to the thoughtful participatory governance of their own societies. Accordingly, promoting democracy in the region was not only good for the Arabs, but also in America’s national interest. The first test for this Freedom Agenda was Iraq, followed by Lebanon and then the Palestinian Authority. Egypt is the fourth test – and the most consequential yet, for Cairo is the linchpin of Washington’s Middle East strategy.
Egypt was once commonly referred to as leader of the Arab world – an honorific denoting Egypt’s leadership in the arts, intellectual life, and media, as well as its enormous population of 80 million. And unlike other Arab states – Syria, say, or Saudi Arabia – Egypt has a real history and identity dating back thousands of years. Primarily, however, “leader of the Arab world” referred to Cairo’s political status, specifically its role in the wars against Israel.
When Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, was in office, all his political capital rested on the fact that Egypt, unlike U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, clamored for war with the Zionist entity. When Anwar Sadat, his successor, brought Egypt from the Soviet to the American side after the 1973 war, it represented a Cold War victory for Washington that paid huge strategic dividends. However, it is one of the paradoxes of U.S. Middle East policy that by signing a peace treaty with Jerusalem, Sadat took Cairo out of the front-line camp and thereby weakened the regional prestige of a key American ally. Of course that treaty also put Sadat in the crosshairs of the Islamists, who killed him at Cairo stadium in 1981, with Mubarak beside him on the reviewing stand.
That peace has not only been good for the United States, securing our hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also of course for Israel. It is that treaty with Cairo that allows Israel the relative luxury to worry primarily about a Persian adversary far from its borders and two terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. The prospect of Egypt, with a large U.S.-trained and equipped army, air force, and navy, once again becoming “leader of the Arab world” is a nightmare for Israel’s leaders.
The U.S.-backed order in the Middle East is founded entirely on Cairo’s position as an ally – and on keeping the peace, as Mubarak has. If Egypt moves out of the American fold, it might well align itself with Iran. Mubarak has known well enough to fear the Islamic Republic – a street in Tehran is named after Sadat’s assassin. Or perhaps it would challenge the Iranians, in the way regional competition has worked since 1948 – by seeing who can pose the greatest threat to Israel. Therefore, this fourth test of the freedom agenda could not be more important.
***
Unfortunately, after the first three runs, it’s hard to be optimistic this time. What we’ve seen so far is that the political energies unleashed by the Freedom Agenda are not democratic but tribal, sectarian, and violent. In Gaza, the Palestinian electorate voted for Hamas. In Lebanon, while the majority voted for the pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hezbollah still won power in government even as it embarked on a bloody campaign culminating last week in the party’s takeover of the state. After U.S. forces brought down Saddam Hussein, Iraqis turned on each other, fueled by more than a thousand years of a sectarian rage that was further aggravated by Saddam as Sunnis and Shiites shed blood at a clip typically associated with the grislier sectors of central Africa.
It is true that Egypt is not Iraq. And yet as many seem to have forgotten, only a month ago Islamist militants attacked a church in Alexandria, killing 23 Coptic Christians. To be sure, many Muslims rallied to defend their Christian neighbors, and today there are Christians in the street alongside the Muslim majority, but anyone who thinks sectarian tensions are simply the fault of “extremists,” or the Mubarak regime’s inability to protect Christians, is missing the point: The execution of minorities strongly suggests that a society might not be ready for democracy.
The relevant minority here are the liberals and democrats, for they do indeed exist and Egypt is the historical capital of Arab liberalism, from the novelist Taha Hussein to the journalist Farag Foda. Today there are a number of bloggers, intellectuals, and journalists, like the playwright Ali Salem and Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Dimoqratiya (Democracy), who keep the liberal flame alive. The former wrote a book about his trip to Israel and the latter met with the Israeli ambassador, and both were punished for it and ostracized by their colleagues. This is an indication not only of their lack of popularity but also the temperament of Egyptian intellectual culture: illiberal and populist – in other words, undemocratic.
There is some truth to the idea that Mubarak has choked off his liberal opposition, leaving only the Muslim Brotherhood to challenge him, but arguably the Egyptian liberal movement came to an end with the 1926 publication of Taha Hussein’s work on pre-Islamic poetry, which dealt with the historical and literary foundations of Islam. Under pressure from the religious authorities and death threats from Islamists, Hussein removed the passages deemed offensive, and the precedent was set: Men with guns make the rules, which liberals must abide by or be killed. Nonetheless, more than half a century later, Foda challenged the Islamists, and they reminded him how precarious liberalism is in Egypt by gunning him down in a Cairo street in 1992.
The Islamists, represented now by the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, are one of only two political institutions that would survive Mubarak’s downfall; the other is the military. Indeed, Egypt has been run by military rulers more often than not – from the Muslim conqueror of Egypt Amr ibn al-’As to the Albanian soldier Mohamed Ali, whose dynasty fell to Nasser’s Free Officers in a 1952 coup. Mubarak’s son Gamal’s presidency would have represented something like a coup d’etat against the military, which is why they got him out and chief of military intelligence Omar Suleiman was named vice president, making him Mubarak’s official successor. The awful irony is that Gamal and his gang of young financiers and businessmen probably represented Egypt’s best chance to move away from military rule. At least this is what much of the Washington policy establishment believed, with the hope of getting Gamal to pick up the pace of political reform to match the country’s notable economic reform. If Mubarak goes down, the security forces, the military and the Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, will fight each other, or cut a deal, or both.
***
Consider the other options. The United States wants national dialogue, which seems to include Mohamed ElBaradei. By virtue of his name recognition alone, the former IAEA head has been hailed by the Western press as one of the leaders of the democratic opposition. However, at the IAEA this so-called reformer distorted his inspectors’ reports on Iran and effectively paved the way for the Islamic Republic’s march toward a nuclear bomb. Now the Muslim Brotherhood has named him as their interlocutor. In other words, ElBaradei is nothing other than a shill for Islamists.
There’s also Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) party, who finished third in the last presidential elections before he was jailed on trumped-up charges. Then there’s Saad Eddine Ibrahim, the Arab world’s most famous democratic-rights activist, who was also imprisoned by Mubarak and is now living abroad in the United States. During Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Ibrahim came down on the side of the Lebanese militia. Ibrahim’s posture was hardly surprising given that his onetime jailer despised Hezbollah. But it is odd that a democratic advocate should applaud war with Israel, a country with whom Cairo has had a peace treaty for more than 30 years.
Maybe this should be one of the tests for Egypt’s democrats in the streets: Where do you stand on Israel? If they are really democrats, or just pragmatists, the young among them protesting for higher pay would answer that warmer relations with an advanced, European-style economy – like, say, Israel’s – would provide jobs for the millions of Egypt’s unemployed. Of course that is not the answer you’re going to get from the young men now filling the streets of Cairo. Or forget about Israel and ask them instead about Hezbollah. Do they support the Islamic resistance? Of course they do, because Egypt’s most famous democrat Saad Eddine Ibrahim supports Hezbollah, the outfit that has turned the remnants of Lebanese democracy on its head while killing its opponents.
No doubt there are real liberals and democrats in Egypt, and some may even be in the streets today, but they are not going to come out on top. In part that is because the United States is not going to help them. Indeed, Washington showed how seriously it takes Arab liberals and democrats two weeks ago when it watched silently from the sidelines as Hezbollah toppled Saad Hariri’s government. Plenty of Arabs hoping for a democratic Lebanon died over the last five years since the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and it is important to note that the million-plus Lebanese who went to the streets on March 14, 2005 demonstrated peacefully, unlike the Egyptians, and all the destruction and violence was caused by Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies.
That the United States will not come to the aid of its liberal allies, or strengthen the moderate Muslims against the extremists, is one reason why the Freedom Agenda is not going to work, at least not right now. The underlying reason then is Arab political culture, where real democrats and genuine liberals do not stand a chance against the men with guns.
REMEMBER 1979?
Lessons on Egypt from Carter and the Shah
The fate of Iran after the U.S. abandoned its ally shows where events this week could lead.
By Ronen Bergman
The Wall Street Journal
February 1, 2010
The White House’s reaction to the rioting in Egypt is shortsighted – and typical of what is wrong with the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. Only days ago, President Hosni Mubarak was a longstanding and valued ally of the U.S. His regime was the beneficiary of a $2 billion annual American aid package (the second largest after Israel). And the White House and the State Department tread carefully when broaching the issue of human rights with Mr. Mubarak.
But after not even a week of protests, official U.S. statements regarding Egypt have suddenly made human rights and democracy all the rage. There’s also been talk of terminating U.S. aid.
The U.S. has played this game with dictatorial regimes in the Middle East for decades. The dilemma it faces is difficult, but it certainly isn’t new: Support a distasteful regime because it is a strategic ally, or disavow the dictatorship because it betrays fundamental American values like freedom and democracy.
The first option gives the U.S. immediate practical benefits, not the least of which is increased regional stability. But there is a price for this pact with the devil: The U.S. image is tarnished by association, and the citizens who suffer under the dictator’s yoke are not likely to forget American support for the abuses.
With the second option, U.S. short-term interests will likely suffer as other players rush in to fill the void. Image-wise, the U.S. shines. And the hope is that in the long run, the country – and others – will remember this principled stand and the U.S. will gain some practical benefit from it.
The most difficult maneuver to execute is switching from one option to the other midstream. In fact, the U.S. has never accomplished this maneuver successfully in the Middle East, and all indications are that it is unlikely to succeed now.
The most obvious example of this failure was President Jimmy Carter’s catastrophic mishandling of the events in Iran in 1978-79. The Shah had flouted Iranians’ basic freedoms for decades, yet this hadn’t prevented the U.S. from striking oil and arms deals with him.
In New Year’s Eve 1977, President Carter called the Shah “an island of stability” in the region. Yet as Iranians protested the Shah’s reign beginning in the fall of 1978, Mr. Carter began to insist on democratic reform and human rights – to the exclusion of practically everything else. To the extent that this criticism contributed to the Shah’s downfall, it was spectacularly counterproductive.
It certainly did not satisfy the masses of protestors – a hodgepodge of left-wing and right-wing activists and religious extremists – who continued to fill the streets. As they did, the high command of the military (then 800,000 strong, the sixth-biggest in the world) waited impatiently for a visit from Mr. Carter’s emissary, the deputy commander of American forces in Europe, Gen. Robert E. Huyser, who came on Jan. 8, 1979. They wanted to know one thing: If they took over, would the U.S. prevent a Russian invasion of Iran? That is all. They could have handled everything else by themselves.
But the White House believed that a military intervention would be the worst move possible. Huyser came to Tehran in order to relay the message that President Carter had sent him to ensure a democratic Iran.
When Huyser left Tehran, ties between the generals and Ayatollah Khomeini, who had emerged as the leader of the opposition, had strengthened. The army interpreted Huyser’s message as a form of abandonment. Gen. Abbas Gharabaghi, chief of staff of the army, promised Khomeini, who returned from exile to cheering crowds on Feb. 1, that the army would not leave its bases. (Yesterday, the Egyptian army promised it would not open fire on the protestors.)
On Jan. 16, the Shah, ailing and debilitated, decided that without American backing he had best pack up and leave. He flew to Egypt with his wife and a handful of aides. There he was welcomed as a head of state by his friends, President Anwar Sadat and Vice President Hosni Mubarak.
We are all familiar with what happened next. First, a bloody campaign waged against all dissent against Iran’s new clerical rulers. Then the establishment of an Islamic regime in Tehran that has been no friend to the U.S. For the past 30 years, Iran has attempted to undermine the stability of the Middle East. It has been worse in terms of human rights abuses than the regime it replaced, and it now threatens the entire region with its nuclear program.
Also consider what happened in Gaza. In 2006, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice applied considerable pressure on the Israeli government to permit the participation of Hamas in the elections of the newly independent Gaza. This plan to create instant democracy was based on a heavy dose of wishful thinking, including the unfounded belief that Hamas would win only 30% of the vote and thus not pose a real threat. In the end, Hamas won 70% of the vote and ultimately gained total control of the Strip. Along the way, it killed many of its Fatah opponents, ending any hope of true democracy there for years to come.
Human rights and democracy are not causes that can be turned on and off at will, like a tap of water. To suddenly demand respect for human rights when the survival of the Egyptian regime is in the balance – a scenario that could soon be repeated in Jordan and elsewhere – is cheap, feel-good populism, and evidence of a short-sighted approach that risks creating a long-term human rights disaster zone.
Past experience suggests that if Mr. Mubarak’s regime is toppled, not only will American interests suffer, but the cause of freedom in Egypt could be set back dramatically. And the U.S. will have contributed to a Middle East that is less stable and more dangerous than it is today.
* Mubarak was far from being an ally the West could admire. Although he did try to advance Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and he crushed Gamaa al Islamiya (the Islamist group responsible for murdering hundreds), he also turned a blind eye to the rabid anti-Semitism that pollutes Egypt’s state-controlled news media and mosques.
* Last year Egyptian cleric Hussam Fawzi Jabar said “Hitler was right to do what he did to the Jews.” This is one of many such examples by Egypt government-employed clerics.
* Reuters admits some Egyptians have reservations about ElBaradei for his overly warm approach to Ahmadinejad’s regime, when he worked as a UN nuclear inspector. Reuters quotes one as saying: “ElBaradei’s positions toward Iran and North Korea were not neutral. So I don’t find him very acceptable.”
* This is a follow-up to the two dispatches earlier this week on Egypt. Today’s dispatch is again divided into two for space reasons. The other part can be read here: The woman who helped start a revolution (& Video of rocket attack on Israeli wedding)
CONTENTS
1. Western TV stations forced to admit some prefer Mubarak to other alternatives
2. Well fancy that
3. “We don’t care about Israel”
4. Demonstrators prepare for mass rally in Syria
5. Synagogue set ablaze in Tunisia
6. Muslim leaders make historic visit to Auschwitz
7. Holocaust Memorial Day in Turkey, with official participation
8. “Hosni Mubarak, troublesome ally” (By Max Boot, Wall St. Journal, Feb. 1, 2011)
9. “What Pres. Bush learned about Egyptian democratization” (By Eli Lake, TNR, Feb. 1, 2011)
10. “Egyptians have reservations about ElBaradei” (By Jonathan Wright, Reuters, Jan. 31, 2011)
11. “Hoenlein: ElBaradei a ‘stooge’ for Iran” (By Ron Kampeas, JTA, Jan. 30, 2011)
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
WESTERN TV STATIONS FORCED TO ADMIT SOME PREFER MUBARAK TO OTHER ALTERNATIVES
I noted in the dispatch written on Sunday:
“I am told that a considerable number of Egyptians support the Mubarak government, especially older ones who remember how much worse things were under Nasser. But Western TV journalists don’t seem particularly interested in interviewing Mubarak’s supporters.”
With the clashes today in Cairo between pro- and anti-Mubarak supporters, the international media has finally been forced to suddenly admit that many Egyptians support Mubarak. After all, he may be bad, but he is no Saddam or Nasser or Assad or Ahmadinejad, and the leadership that follows him may be much worse.
Other broadcasters have in the last hour criticized the BBC for saying that “all the pro-Mubarak supporters” were merely police in plain clothes. “This is simply not true,” said one leading British journalist who has been in the square speaking to a broad range of Mubarak supporters all day.
It seems that contrary to the expectations of some pundits, Mubarak and other senior figures in his regime are not going to go that easily. (For more, see Mubarak’s regime may prove more brittle than Tunisia’s.)
WELL FANCY THAT
One of the headlines in today’s Ha’aretz:
Hamas worried upheaval in Arab world will spill into Gaza
www.haaretz.com/news/international/hamas-worried-upheaval-in-arab-world-will-spill-into-gaza-1.340690
Ha’aretz notes that “Several thousand people in Gaza have joined the Facebook group calling for a protest against Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip. Another Facebook group is calling for protests against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.”
Contrary to the false impression given by most of the international media over the last two years, Gaza is not nearly as poor as many other places in the world, and among other things has a relatively high percentage of people using computers and the internet.
For example, I noted in a dispatch last July that one Arab expert commented that “Gaza’s Internet services are vastly superior to the pitiful Internet services in Syria.”
“WE DON’T CARE ABOUT ISRAEL”
Heard at 1.10 pm Cairo time February 1, 2011:
Senior Sky News foreign affairs correspondent Stuart Ramsay, located in Cairo’s central square, was asked by the studio anchor in London if he had heard any anti-Israeli slogans
He replied: “A few anti-American and anti-British slogans. Nothing anti-Israel.”
(For more on this, please see So Israel wasn’t the central source of Arab concern after all?)
(Tom Gross adds: of course, the situation can change…)
DEMONSTRATORS PREPARE FOR MASS RALLY IN SYRIA
Syrians are preparing to rally on Saturday against the regime of President Bashar Assad.
Assad presides over one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships (but in spite of this is frequently treated with the utmost respect by West European governments, most notably France). Syria has been under “emergency law” since 1963, and has suspended a wide range of rights, including freedom of assembly.
The last political demonstration in Damascus of any size was four years ago when 200 people gathered to protest the emergency law. They were brutally attacked by plain clothes police.
Saturday is the 29th anniversary of the Hama Massacre, in which Syrian forces killed tens of thousands of civilians while quelling a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Syrian regime has been considerably more repressive than the Egyptian or Tunisian ones. Most Syrian dissidents are held as political prisoners or have been killed.
Yet the situation in Syria has been largely ignored by both the Western and pan-Arabic media. One dissident, Ahed al-Hendi, noted this week: “For Al Jazeera, there are two types of dictatorships – pro-American ones and pro-Iranian ones. If you’re a pro-American dictatorship, they go after you. They leave the pro-Iranian ones, like Syria, alone.”
And here are three notes not directly connected to Egypt…
SYNAGOGUE SET ABLAZE IN TUNISIA
Arsonists have set fire to a synagogue in the southern Gabes region of Tunisia.
“Someone set fire to the synagogue on Monday night and the Torah scrolls were burned,” the synagogue’s caretaker Trabelsi Perez told Agence France Presse.
Perez criticized the lack of action by the security services to stop the attack. “What astonished me was that there were police not far from the synagogue,” said Perez, who also looks after the Ghriba synagogue on the island of Djerba, the oldest synagogue in Africa.
MUSLIM LEADERS MAKE HISTORIC VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ
Muslim representatives from Morocco, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, yesterday joined rabbis, Holocaust survivors and Christian representatives in a historic first trip to Auschwitz by Muslim dignitaries to pay tribute to the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
“Muslims have to stand up with Jewish friends because in Europe, anti-Semitism is rising – and where there is anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is not far away,” said British Mufti Abduljalil Sajid.
Sajid said he knew of the Holocaust from books and movies but that it was his first visit to Auschwitz. “I wanted to see it with my own eyes – and teach others about the evil of hate,” he told the Associated Press. “This should never happen again, to anybody.”
Among those attending was Karim Lahidji, the head of the Iranian League of Human Rights and a former top lawyer in Tehran, who noted that he wanted to show that not all Iranians supported the ugly anti-Semitism of the regime.
Among the Jews accompanying them was the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Meir Lau, who is himself a Holocaust survivor.
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY IN TURKEY, WITH OFFICIAL PARTICIPATION
Despite the government in Turkey cozying up to the Holocaust-denying government of Iran, and despite the fact that the Turkish government has helped fund a number of anti-Semitic TV programs recently, the government sent officials to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day last week:
www.turkyahudileri.com/content/view/1010/279/
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I attach four articles below. The authors of the first two are subscribers to this list.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
DRIVING MANY EGYPTIANS INTO THE ARMS OF THE RADICALS
Hosni Mubarak, Troublesome Ally
It is no coincidence that al Qaeda started essentially as an Egyptian-Saudi organization run by citizens of two of our closest and most repressive allies.
By Max Boot
Wall Street Journal
February 1, 2011
As Hosni Mubarak teeters on the brink, a lot of wishful thinking is emanating from the West – both from those who want him gone and those who don’t. But it does scant justice to the complexity of the situation to claim that Mr. Mubarak was a superb ally, or to imagine that we can manage an easy transition to a post-Mubarak regime.
The best that can be said for Mr. Mubarak is that he has been easy for the West to deal with. He is always ready to spur along Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and to stage military exercises with the United States. He is certainly a dedicated foe of Gamaa al Islamiya and other Islamist terrorist organizations that threatened his rule. Above all, he did not renounce the peace treaty with Israel that had gotten his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, killed. Behind the scenes, Mr. Mubarak and Omar Suleiman, formerly his intelligence chief and now his vice president, have had close relations with a succession of Israeli prime ministers and American presidents.
But let’s not romanticize the soon-to-be-departed dictator. He presided over a very cold peace with Israel. Even as he was negotiating with Israeli leaders, he was turning a blind eye to the rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism that polluted Egypt’s state-controlled news media and mosques. The Middle East Media Research Institute has an invaluable archive of these revolting statements. Last year an Egyptian cleric, Hussam Fawzi Jabar, was quoted as saying, “Hitler was right to say what he said and to do what he did to the Jews.” Keep in mind that in Egypt most clerics are state employees whose pronouncements are carefully monitored by the secret police. That Mr. Jabar is able to say such things in public means that Mr. Mubarak doesn’t object.
Consider the two-part essay, “The Lie About the Burning of the Jews,” that appeared in 2004 in Al Liwaa Al-Islami (The Islamic Banner), an official journal of Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The article is a statement of Holocaust denial, claiming that Hitler’s genocide was invented by the Zionists to justify the creation of the Jewish state. At least the editor-in-chief of Al Liwaa Al-Islami was fired after that incident, under heavy American pressure.
By contrast, no one in Egyptian state television has been disciplined for its 41-part series “A Knight Without a Horse,” which ran in 2002 and dramatized that old canard of anti-Semitism, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” That cinematic masterpiece was produced in cooperation with Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television, which suggests that Mr. Mubarak is hardly an inveterate foe of all things Islamist.
Indeed he often did little to stop the massive smuggling of supplies into Hamas-controlled Gaza. His attitude has seemed to be that Hamas can arm itself against Israel as long as it doesn’t cooperate with its Egyptian Islamist brethren against him.
Like other secular Middle Eastern dictators (e.g., the Assads in Syria or Saddam Hussein in Iraq), Mr. Mubarak played a canny double game with the Islamists, ruthlessly repressing their domestic attacks but turning a blind eye to their organizing and export of jihadism abroad.
Thus while Egypt’s security services cracked down hard on Islamist terrorism in the 1990s when it was threatening the lucrative tourist trade, Mr. Mubarak has allowed the Muslim Brotherhood – the mother of all Islamist organizations – to become the main opposition party. This has made him, as he well knows, the indispensable man to the West – the only thing supposedly standing in the way of an Islamist power grab.
Yet Mr. Mubarak’s police state actually drove many Egyptians into the arms of the radicals. It is no coincidence that al Qaeda started as primarily an Egyptian-Saudi organization run by citizens of two of our closest and most repressive allies. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s No. 2, was radicalized as a boy in Egypt and then all the more so after spending three years being tortured in Mr. Mubarak’s dungeons in the 1980s.
Mr. Mubarak’s downfall could well be a good thing in the long run if it opens up Egypt’s closed political and economic systems to greater dynamism and debate, so that in the future frustrated young Egyptians can find peaceful expression rather than strapping on a suicide vest. Yet we should be realistic about the short-term costs of a new regime in a country that has been subjected to decades of anti-Western and anti-Israeli propaganda by Mr. Mubarak – and where many blame us (with some justification) for inflicting Mr. Mubarak on them. A government that better reflects the will of the people will be less willing to cut deals with the U.S. or Israel.
Mohammed ElBaradei, the former U.N. atomic agency head who has emerged as the leader of the opposition, made clear his anti-Israel sentiments in an interview last summer with the German magazine Der Spiegel. He called the Gaza Strip “the world’s largest prison” and declared that it was imperative to “open the borders, end the blockade.”
Mr. ElBaradei also spoke glowingly of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has assailed Israel in harsh terms and voted against United Nations sanctions on Iran. Mr. ElBaradei said: “Turkey is a member of NATO and partner of the West and Israel. And yet Prime Minister Erdogan has no qualms about supporting an aid flotilla for Gaza that was supposed to breach Israel’s sea blockade. The people of the Arab world are celebrating him. Erdogan’s photo can be seen everywhere.”
That is probably what we can expect from a post-Mubarak Egypt. It is doubtful that Mr. ElBaradei would terminate Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel – a move that would cost Egypt more than a billion dollars annually in American aid. But it is probable that, like Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey, Mr. ElBaradei’s Egypt would be less cooperative with Israel and more friendly to its enemies. In the Muslim world, this is actually a moderate position compared to the jihadism of the Islamists. But from the standpoint of the U.S. or Israel it is obviously far from ideal.
Yet what choice have we? Mr. Mubarak’s day is done. It’s only a question of time before he slinks out of office. The best the U.S. and our allies can do at this point is try to make the transition as fast and painless as possible.
IN PRAISE OF AYMAN NOUR
Déjà Vu in Cairo
What President Bush learned about Egyptian democratization.
By Eli Lake
The New Republic
February 1, 2011
Everyone now understands that President Obama faces a set of difficult choices in Egypt. Cut Mubarak loose, and risk a revolt from the other American clients in the region while potentially empowering the Muslim Brotherhood. Support Mubarak, and earn the enmity of Arabs and Muslims across the Middle East who correctly see the United States working in tandem with the autocrats who repress them.
What has largely gone undiscussed, however, is that the United States faced a very similar dilemma in Egypt once before. Back in 2005, the Bush administration had to make more or less the same calculation. It’s worth revisiting that episode now, if only because it illustrates how difficult a time America has had arriving at an Egypt policy that is coherent, wise, and principled.
In his second inaugural address in January 2005, President Bush declared that America would no longer “tolerate oppression for the sake of stability.” Mubarak responded nine days later by charging the country’s leading opposition figure, Ayman Nour, with forgery. But, at least initially, the Bush administration did not blink. On June 30, Condoleezza Rice traveled to the American University in Cairo and delivered a speech outlining Bush’s freedom agenda. “The Egyptian Government must fulfill the promise it has made to its people – and to the entire world – by giving its citizens the freedom to choose,” she said. “Egypt’s elections, including the parliamentary elections, must meet objective standards that define every free election.”
A few months later, in September, Mubarak waltzed to victory over Nour in a sham presidential election. But everyone had known, and accepted, that the presidential election was going to be a sham. Instead, it was the parliamentary elections, scheduled for November, that both Egyptian reformers and American democracy promoters pinned their hopes to. Because these elections would not result in Mubarak’s ouster, they offered a low-risk way for Egypt to begin to cultivate a civil and competitive politics.
During the run-up to these elections, Egypt’s constellation of opposition parties took the promise that had been made by the United States seriously – and a culture of democratic politics began to develop where none had existed before. I lived in Cairo in 2005 and 2006 and attended political rallies where socialists, Islamists, and more democratic reformers distributed leaflets and gave speeches. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, not exactly a pro-western organization, was grateful to America. “When Secretary Rice delivered her speech saying it was for too long they have been helping dictators, well, that was a good thing,” Mohammed Habib, the organization’s political director, told me at the time. “This recognition was good for us.” Not surprisingly, the Brotherhood fared well once the voting got underway.
The first round of the elections was relatively free, but in the second and third rounds, the national police ambushed ballot stations and used tear gas on crowds of voters. Some supporters of opposition candidates took to climbing on ladders to the second floor of polling stations because the police had blocked the entrance on the first floor. In the face of this repression, the response from Washington was muted. The State Department spokesman at the time, Sean McCormack, said he had “seen the reports” of voter intimidation, but did not condemn the regime directly.
Meanwhile, Ayman Nour – who had run against Mubarak and lost in the bogus presidential election in September – was jailed on December 5 and later convicted. To get a sense of how craven the Bush administration was becoming on the issue of Egyptian democratization, consider a March 2006 event attended by Frank Ricciardone, then the U.S. ambassador to Cairo. The event was a “model American Congress,” where Egyptian students pretended to participate in the kind of meaningful legislature that was not offered in their own country.
At the end of the event, Ricciardone was asked for his and the administration’s opinion of the imprisonment of Ayman Nour. His rambling response shows just how unwilling the administration was, by this point, to criticize Mubarak in any way: “Do you know I would actually like to ask all of you in this room that question? Because I bet if there are a hundred people, I bet I’d get a hundred different answers,” he said.
“And I am genuinely interested in what Egyptians think, because at the end of the day, I think the important question is not what do Americans think about this and what it means for Egyptian democracy, but what do Egyptians think? What do Egyptians think that this means for the independence of the judiciary? When someone with a controversial personal history in politics and in journalism runs for public office, comes in second, and then is tried on charges and gets five years for forgery of documents. You know, if Egyptians are not sure what to make of this, then I hope you will forgive Americans for not understanding the complexity of this case.” (Ricciardone, by the way, was later appointed by Obama to become ambassador to Turkey.)
Meanwhile, when some independent judges tried to conduct an audit and write a report about charges of voter fraud and intimidation in the elections, the two judges leading the effort – Hisham Bastawisi and Mahmoud Mekki – were disbarred. The plight of the judges stirred protests in Cairo in May 2006. “All the people have lost trust in the intentions of the American administration,” Bastawisi told me that month, adding, “They give long speeches on reform in the region; they are backing the very regimes that are standing in the way of these reforms. Mainly we are depending on the Egyptian people.”
This past weekend, I spoke to two former Bush officials who were involved in setting Middle East policy at the time. Scott Carpenter, who in 2005 and 2006 was a deputy assistant secretary of state in charge of President Bush’s freedom agenda for the Middle East, said that, after the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in the first round of voting, “a combination of factors led us to blink” in the later rounds.
Elliott Abrams, who oversaw the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council, put it this way: “I do agree that, after the high water mark in 2005, the Bush administration backed away from pressing Mubarak hard enough on democratic reforms and human rights. I think this was mostly due to the mirage of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Once you fixate on that, the nation of Egypt disappears and all that matters is Mubarak and his diplomacy.”
Mubarak would go on to cancel local elections scheduled for 2006. In 2007, he amended Egypt’s constitution in such a way that the only viable candidate for the presidential elections scheduled this year would be either himself or his son. When Mubarak did these things, the response from the United States was again muted.
“Mubarak knew where we stood on his regime and it’s no accident that he did not visit the U.S. in the Bush second term, not once – for Bush’s backing of democracy in Egypt offended him,” says Abrams. “But we did not use the public pressure we should have once we started thinking about what became Annapolis” – that is, the Bush administration’s attempt to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, for which it needed Mubarak as an ally.
Of course, it’s understandable why the Bush administration had second thoughts about pushing forward with democratization in Egypt. Like Obama now, Bush was relying on despots across the Middle East to fight a war on terror. How could Bush simultaneously ask for favors from these leaders in the fight against Al Qaeda while also undermining them with his freedom agenda?
What’s more, in January 2006, Hamas won parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories, with disastrous results. What if free and fair elections in Egypt had ended with the Muslim Brotherhood in control of parliament? This would not exactly been a welcome outcome. And yet, has six more years of completely authoritarian rule by Mubarak benefited either average Egyptians or, for that matter, the United States? Clearly not.
RESERVATIONS ABOUT ELBARADEI
Egyptians have reservations about ElBaradei
By Jonathan Wright
Reuters news wire
January 31, 2011
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptians on the streets of Cairo said on Monday they had reservations about opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, who has offered to act as transitional leader to prepare Egypt for democratic elections.
ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), returned to Egypt on the eve of the protests which swept the country on Friday, when tens of thousands of people called for the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the IAEA, ElBaradei and the powerful Muslim Brotherhood said on Sunday he had a mandate from opposition groups to make contact with the army and negotiate a government of national unity.
At least one opposition party, the Arab nationalist Karama Party of Hamdin Sabahi, has rejected ElBaradei outright as a transitional figure, saying he was trying to jump on the bandwagon of the popular uprising.
ElBaradei joined protesters at the hub of anti-Mubarak protests in central Cairo on Sunday.
ElBaradei, 68, began overt opposition to Mubarak on his return to Egypt in February 2010 and won a widespread following among the young and the middle classes.
But the Egyptian authorities harassed his supporters and ElBaradei lost much credibility through his long absences abroad. The official media tried to ridicule him, saying he knew nothing about Egypt and had no political experience.
Some elements of the government’s campaign appear to have stuck. “ElBaradei won’t do. He doesn’t have the experience here and he’s a little weak,” said Khaled Ezzat, 34, an information technology engineer who had joined the evening vigil in Tahrir Square.
“NOT NEUTRAL” ON IRAN
Omar Mahdi, a sales manager, said: “I’m not convinced by ElBaradei, even as a transitional figure, he hasn’t really been present in the country.”
Some of the protesters objected to ElBaradei on the grounds that he was too close to the United States, despite the frictions between him and the U.S. administration over the Iranian and Israeli nuclear programs when he was head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog body.
“ElBaradei’s positions toward other Arab countries, and toward Iran and North Korea, were not neutral... So I don’t find him very acceptable,” said Walid Abdel-Mit’aal, 36, who works for a public sector company.
“He would follow Mubarak in the same policies and would take U.S. aid,” he added, reflecting an anti-American strand which was largely absent in the first four days of protests.
ElBaradei’s cosmopolitanism – he lived abroad for years and speaks fluent English – may be an advantage among some Egyptians but it is also a source of suspicion among others.
The protesters in Tahrir Square suggested several alternatives to ElBaradei as transitional leader, including Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, a popular former foreign minister, the president of the constitutional court or the president of the supreme administrative court.
Others said they were open-minded and what mattered was changing the constitution to ensure that no one man clings to power as long as Mubarak, who took office in 1981.
“ElBaradei is a very acceptable option because he will not stay,” said Islam Ashraf, 24, a quality operations coordinator. “But we’re not really interested in faces. What matters to us is having another system,” he said.
ELBARADEI A “STOOGE” FOR IRAN
Hoenlein: ElBaradei a “stooge’ for Iran
By Ron Kampeas
JTA
January 30, 2011
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The director of the U.S. Jewish foreign policy umbrella called Mohammed ElBaradei, the opposition leader emerging from the Egyptian ferment, a “stooge of Iran.”
Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, accused ElBaradei of covering up Iran’s true nuclear weaponization capacities while he directed the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
“He is a stooge of Iran, and I don’t use the term lightly,” Hoenlein said in an online recorded interview with Yeshiva World News on the Egyptian crisis. “He fronted for them, he distorted the reports.”
ElBaradei, who directed the IAEA from 1997 to 2009, returned to Egypt following his third term. Soon he was touted as a possible challenger to the 30-year autocracy led by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Since protests were launched last week, ElBaradei has emerged as a consensus candidate of various opposition groups for transitional leader.
In addition to slamming ElBaradei, Hoenlein criticized the successive U.S. administrations for failing to achieve an orderly transition to democracy in Egypt. The Bush administration’s democracy initiative was ineffective and then the Obama administration essentially abandoned the cause, Hoenlein said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has adopted a policy of not commenting on the breaking developments, not wanting to be seen as siding with any player in the Egyptian unrest. Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt is the cornerstone of its defense and foreign policies.
During his term as IAEA chief, ElBaradei said Iran was further away from a nuclear weapon than many in the West claimed and castigated Western powers, including Israel, for suggesting that a military option against Iran was increasingly possible.
ElBaradei made it clear in those statements that his posture stemmed from the U.S. failure to heed warnings from him and other weapons experts that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons capacity. Despite the warnings, the United States attacked Iraq.
He criticized Iran for not cooperating with IAEA inspectors, but also argued that the likeliest means of increasing inspections was to engage with Iran.
His outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq and increased pressure on Iran earned him the enmity of some Bush administration officials. U.S. agencies reportedly monitored his communications to see if he was colluding with Iran but came up with nothing.
[This dispatch was written and posted on Jan. 30, but because of a computer glitch, is dated Feb. 1 on site.]
* Iranian commentator Abbas Milani: “For Egyptians, the history of the Iranian Revolution should serve as a warning. In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini hid his true intentions – namely the creation of a despotic rule of the clerics – behind the mantle of democracy. More than once he promised that not a single cleric would hold a position of power in the future government. But once in power, he created the current clerical despotism. And when, in June 2009, three million people took to the streets of Tehran to protest decades of oppression, they were brutally suppressed.”
* Morris and McGann: “The U.S. has enormous leverage in Egypt – far more than it had in Iran in 2009. In the 1950s, the accusation ‘who lost China’ resonated throughout American politics and led to the defeat of the Democratic Party in the presidential elections of 1952. Unless President Obama reverses field and strongly opposes letting the Muslim brotherhood take over Egypt, he will be hit with the modern equivalent of the 1952 question: Who Lost Egypt?”
* “Egypt, with 85 million people, is the largest country in the Middle East or North Africa. Combined with Iran’s 75 million (the second largest) they have 160 million people. We must not let the two most populous and powerful nations in the region fall under the sway of Muslim extremism.”
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This dispatch on the events in Egypt is divided into two for space reasons. The other part can be read here: So Israel wasn’t the central source of Arab concern after all?
CONTENTS
1. A moving video
2. Egypt deploys troops along Gaza border
3. Israel hopes Suleiman can maintain control
4. Jordan potentially “even bigger threat” to Israel
5. Abbas calls Mubarak to express support
6. “Who lost Egypt?” (By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, Jan. 29, 2011)
7. “What are the protests really about?” (By Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, Jan. 27, 2011)
8. “A note of warning and encouragement” (By Abbas Milani, New Republic, Jan. 30, 2011)
A MOVING VIDEO
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
In some respects events in recent days in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan and elsewhere in the Arab world (and events in Iran in 2009) prove that the neo-cons were right all along: people in the Middle East want freedom and democracy as much as people anywhere else do.
It is not in their “culture” to want to live under authoritarian rule – as so many of President Bush’s fiercest opponents in the Western media, and people who wished to see Saddam and other despots stay in power, have claimed.
Here is a short and moving interview with Waseem Wagdi, an Egyptian protesting outside the Egyptian Embassy in London on Saturday, who expresses the views of many Arabs yearning for freedom in the Arab world just as we enjoy it in the West.
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At the end, when Wagdi switches to Arabic, he quotes a well-known poem. The translation of the full poem is (according to one reader):
My tragedy of my life / Is my share of your tragedies / I call on you / I press your hands / I kiss the ground under your feet / and I say: I sacrifice myself for you / I did not humiliate myself in my homeland / and I did not lower my shoulders / I stood facing my oppressors / orphaned, naked, and bare foot/ I call on you.
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UPDATE
Here is a less positive video. At the end of the 52 second clip, a member of the Muslim brotherhood in Cairo tells CNN:
“Because we know, if Hosni Mubarak fell, we are, the whole people in Egypt, we’re going to be free, we’re going to be free. If the people are free in Egypt, we’re going to destroy Israel!”
EGYPT DEPLOYS TROOPS ALONG GAZA BORDER
Egyptian security forces stepped up their presence along Egypt’s border with Gaza yesterday in a bid to stop Hamas militants from crossing between the two territories. They are concerned that Gaza-based groups will take advantage of the chaos in Egypt to launch terror attacks against Egypt and Israel.
On Sunday, a number of Hamas operatives, including the group’s commander for Khan Younis, escaped from a jail in Egypt and were believed to be making their way back to the Gaza Strip.
Two weeks ago, the Egyptian authorities accused a Palestinian radical group based in Gaza of being behind the New Year’s Eve suicide bombing in a church in Alexandria that killed more than 20 Christians. (For more on that attack, please see the dispatch Jan. 4, 2011: Iran and others blame Jews for New Year’s church massacre in Egypt.)
Were the Muslim Brotherhood to take control of Egypt, Israel would face an enemy with one of the largest and strongest militaries in the world, and one that has some of America’s most advanced equipment. Egypt’s military has up to one million men and is ranked 10th in the world in size. It has more than 300 U.S.-built warplanes, modern American Abrams tanks, and many attack helicopters.
ISRAEL HOPES SULEIMAN CAN MAINTAIN CONTROL
The appointment by President Hosni Mubarak over the weekend of Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman as Egypt’s vice president has been quietly welcomed in Israel.
Suleiman is a firm secularist who opposes the threat of Hamas and the Muslim brotherhood, as well as rising Iranian influence in the Arab world.
“This may be the end of Hosni Mubarak’s role as president, but the situation could be brought under control by Suleiman, who has the confidence of the Egyptian military,” one Israeli official said.
Suleiman, 74, is much more popular than Mubarak among Egyptians, having avoided the corruption associated with other senior figures in the regime.
Suleiman was born in southern Egypt and enrolled at the country’s Military Academy at age 18. He rose through the ranks, and fought in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War against Israel. But he then embraced President Sadat’s 1978 peace treaty with Israel.
In 1993, Sadat’s successor Mubarak appointed him to head Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate. He fought a concerted campaign to crush the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya terrorist organization, which had killed hundreds of members of the Egyptian security forces and foreign tourists in a series of attacks in the 1990s.
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Incidentally, I am told that a considerable number of Egyptians support the Mubarak government, especially older ones who remember how much worse things were under Nasser. But Western TV journalists don’t seem particularly interested in interviewing Mubarak’s supporters.
JORDAN POTENTIALLY “EVEN BIGGER THREAT” TO ISRAEL
Israel’s concerns are not limited to Egypt. One former intelligence official said that Israel needed to be even more concerned with a potential revolution spreading to Jordan. “In Egypt, Israel has Sinai as a major buffer zone,” that person said. “This is not the case in Jordan, where there is a massive Palestinian population that could directly threaten Israel through the West Bank.”
Jordanian authorities have put security forces and police on red alert during the past two weeks since the revolution in Tunisia which toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The army, gendarmerie and other police units have been banned from leaving their bases as concern grows that ripples of Tunisia’s political earthquake (or “Tunisuami”) could reach the kingdom.
ABBAS CALLS MUBARAK TO EXPRESS SUPPORT
Palestinian Authority officials seem to have expressed as much concern about the events in Egypt as Israeli ones have. They note that Mubarak’s government has been very supportive of the PA and of Fatah in its struggle with Hamas.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas phoned President Mubarak over the weekend to express his strong support.
Abbas visited Cairo last week, where he met with Mubarak and General Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman, who was appointed vice president on Saturday.
The PA has banned Palestinians on the West Bank from demonstrating in support of the Egyptian demonstrators, who are demanding Mubarak’s removal from power.
By contrast, a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip voiced hope that the “revolution” in Egypt would lead to the downfall of Mubarak’s regime. Relations between Hamas and Egypt have been poor for a number of years, especially because of Cairo’s refusal to reopen the Rafah border crossing to mass arms smuggling by Hamas into Gaza.
Last week, thousands of Hamas-supporting Gazans protested against the Palestinian Authority and burned an effigy of President Abbas.
Abbas was one of the few Arab leaders to phone ousted Tunisian President Zine el- Abidine bin Ali shortly before he fled to Saudi Arabia.
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I attach three articles of interest, below.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
WHO LOST CHINA? WHO LOST EGYPT?
Who lost Egypt?
By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
January 29, 2011
In the 1950s, the accusation “who lost China “resonated throughout American politics and led to the defeat of the Democratic Party in the presidential elections of 1952. Unless President Obama reverses field and strongly opposes letting the Muslim brotherhood take over Egypt, he will be hit with the modern equivalent of the 1952 question: Who Lost Egypt?
The Iranian government is waiting for Egypt to fall into its lap. The Muslim Brotherhood, dominated by Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, will doubtless emerge as the winner should the government of Egypt fall. The Obama Administration, in failing to throw its weight against an Islamic takeover, is guilty of the same mistake that led President Carter to fail to support the Shah, opening the door for the Ayatollah Khomeini to take over Iran.
The United States has enormous leverage in Egypt – far more than it had in Iran. We provide Egypt with upwards of $2 billion a year in foreign aid under the provisos of the Camp David Accords orchestrated by Carter. The Egyptian military, in particular, receives $1.3 billion of this money. The United States, as the pay master, needs to send a signal to the military that it will be supportive of its efforts to keep Egypt out of the hands of the Islamic fundamentalists. Instead, Obama has put our military aid to Egypt “under review” to pressure Mubarak to mute his response to the demonstrators and has given top priority to “preventing the loss of human life.”
President Obama should say that Egypt has always been a friend of the United States. He should point out that it was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel. He should recall that President Sadat, who signed the peace accords, paid for doing so with his life and that President Mubarak has carried on in his footsteps. He should condemn the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood extremists to take over the country and indicate that America stands by her longtime ally. He should address the need for reform and urge Mubarak to enact needed changes. But his emphasis should be on standing with our ally.
The return of Nobel laureate Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has to Egypt as the presumptive heir to Mubarak tells us where this revolution is headed. Carolyn Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, explains how dangerous ElBaradei is. “As IAEA head,” she writes, “Elbaradei shielded Iran ‘s nuclear weapons program from the Security Council. He [has] continued to lobby against significant UN Security Council sanctions or other actions against Iran… Last week, he dismissed the threat of a nuclear armed Iran [saying] ‘there is a lot of hype in this debate’.”
As for the Muslim Brotherhood, Glick notes that “it forms the largest and best organized opposition to the Mubarak regime and [is] the progenitor of Hamas and al Qaidi. It seeks Egypt’s transformation into an Islamic regime that will stand at the forefront of the global jihad.”
Now is the time for Americans to start asking the question: Who is losing Egypt? We need to debunk the starry eyed idealistic yearning for reform and the fantasy that a liberal democracy will come from these demonstrations. It won’t. Iranian domination will.
Egypt, with 80 million people, is the largest country in the Middle East or North Africa. Combined with Iran’s 75 million (the second largest) they have 155 million people. By contrast the entire rest of the region -- Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar combined -- have only 200 million.
We must not let the two most populous and powerful nations in the region fall under the sway of Muslim extremism, the one through the weakness of Jimmy Carter and the other through the weakness of Barack Obama.
THE BATTLE FOR THE SUCCESSION
Protests in Egypt: What are they really about?
By Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
January 27, 2011
[Tom Gross adds: please note this article was published four days ago, and events have moved quickly since then.]
Egyptian sources are dismissing reports that Gamal Mubarak and his family have left Cairo for London. If those earlier accounts were not outright propaganda, they seem to have been based more on wishful thinking than reality. The Mubarak regime is not as brittle as that of Tunisia’s erstwhile president-for-life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and right now seems to be in little danger of falling. However, it does seem to be the case that the protests erupting throughout Egypt’s major cities are less about President Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year-long reign than they are about the succession of the man who seems to be his chosen heir, his 47-year-old son Gamal.
The test of an Arab dictator is not the virtue of his rule, but the length of it, and to be followed by his progeny extends his name further into the future. In this regard Arab presidents are no different from Arab monarchs – Bashar al-Assad inherited the presidential palace from his father Hafez; Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam will rule Libya once his father is gone; and Saddam’s boys would have shared his father’s spoils until one had figured out how to murder the other. Hosni Mubarak would seem to be an exception insofar as it is rumored that it is his wife Suzanne who most wants Gamal to be the next ruler of Egypt. If the president himself is less enthusiastic that is perhaps because he understands that the nature of the regime and the career of his son are not an ideal fit.
To the IMF and the World Bank, a few European capitals, and even certain sectors of Washington, Gamal looks like the future of the Arab world: a Western-educated, pro-business technocrat who worked as a banker in London and has surrounded himself with a cadre of young businessmen responsible for liberal reforms that have grown the Egyptian economy for more than half a decade. Never mind that little of this has trickled down to the Egyptian masses, 60 percent of which live on less than $2 a day. The real question is how much of this money will it take to ensure the loyalty of the military and security officials who are responsible for the day-to-day operations, and security, of the Egyptian government.
It seems that Ben Ali lost Tunisia because his wife’s family had a hand in every business in the country, including those that the military was accustomed to profiting from. Thus last week the Tunisian army made the only logical decision when it chose not to fire on civilians: perhaps they would shed the blood of innocents to protect their own interests, but certainly not to secure the stake of precisely those people who are taking money out of their wallets. What we are seeing in the streets of Egypt is perhaps something similar. Cairo’s military and security apparatus is using the demonstrations as leverage in order to improve its position; the men who run Egypt are deciding whether or not they want Gamal to be the next president, and if so what it will cost him.
If Gamal goes, the likely successor will be intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, the man rumored to be the young Mubarak’s chief rival, or alternately, the future power behind Gamal’s throne. Gamal’s problem is that he has no military experience whatsoever, a liability for the prospective head of a regime whose coherence and internal legitimacy is based on nothing other than its symbiotic relationship with the military. Nonetheless, even if Gamal really were to leave for London and even if his father stepped down, or just decided not to run for president later this year, the Mubarak regime would not fall because in reality there is no Mubarak regime as such.
Rather, it is a Free Officers regime, one that has lasted almost half a century, or dating back to the 1952 coup that deposed King Farouk. During that period, the regime has survived 3 wars with Israel and another in Yemen. And that’s not all: almost as bad as Gamal abd-el Nasser’s public humiliation after losing the six-day war in 1967 was the regional isolation imposed on Cairo after Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Jerusalem. But the regime survived both, as well as Sadat’s assassination and a subsequent civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s with armed Islamists, many of whom went on to form the leadership of al Qaeda. A regime that has been tested under that kind of fire is unlikely to fold in the face of 50,000 protesters throwing rocks.
For all the excitement surrounding the demonstrations, it’s worth remembering that the nominally docile Egyptian masses take to the streets with some regularity, especially when it involves food prices and living wages. More to the point, it is an unfortunate fact of modern Egyptian history that its people are often susceptible to ideological politics. For instance, Nasser led the country to disaster and yet compared to Sadat the peacemaker or Mubarak the stolid pharaoh who has kept the country stable, if static, it is Nasser who owns the affections of the Egyptian masses. That is to say, we don’t know exactly what the protestors want. There are those who hate the regime because it jails and tortures bloggers and those who hate it because it won’t make war on Israel. No doubt some of the young are just fed up they have never known another Egyptian ruler in their lifetimes. Some of the youth are democrats and others are decidedly not.
It is not always a good thing when people go to the streets; indeed the history of revolutionary action shows that people go to the streets to shed blood more often than they do to demand democratic reforms. Perhaps it is an appetite for activist politics that explains why so many Western observers are now captured by the moment.
Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why it seems as if no one had learned from the failures of the Bush administration’s freedom agenda – namely the Palestinian Authority elections that empowered Hamas – or could remember its successes. The Iraqis and Lebanese went to the streets, too, and our allies there are under pressure and ignored not only by the Obama administration, but also by a press corps and intelligentsia that mostly seems just fascinated by the spectacle of Arabs throwing themselves against a wall, regardless of the outcome.
A NOTE OF WARNING AND ENCOURAGEMENT FOR EGYPTIANS
A Note of Warning and Encouragement for Egyptians
From an Iranian writer who lived through the 1979 Revolution
By Abbas Milani
The New Republic
January 30, 2011
After days of unrest, after declaring martial law in some of the country’s main cities, the authoritarian leader gave a much anticipated television speech. His tone was repentant. He promised change and reform. The people wanted democracy and he promised to bend to their wishes.
For a long time, the United States had been advising him to open his political system – but had been seen publicly as his chief supporter. The U.S. president had given lofty and elegant speeches defending democracy and human rights, assuring the people of the Middle East that the United States supported their democratic demands. But both the leader and his American supporters were caught off-guard by the size of the demonstrations. American officials began trying to walk a dangerous tight-rope: offering support for the beleaguered leader but also establishing ties and credibility with the opposition.
When the leader tried to use the force of his military to calm the situation, the United States issued ambiguous statements, indicating support for the leader’s desire to establish law and order on the one hand while at the same time insisting that the march of democracy must continue, and that the use of force could not be a solution to the country’s problems. Benefiting from the subsequent chaos, radical Islamists, posing as democrats, used the chance to seize power and deracinate the democratic movement in favor of tradition and theocracy.
The country I am speaking of is not Egypt in 2011 but Iran in 1979. The leader is the Shah, not Hosni Mubarak. Yet, as this history makes clear, the parallels between then and now are numerous. And they offer some key lessons for Americans and Egyptians alike.
For U.S. policymakers, the Iranian Revolution illustrates the perils of vacillating between defending an old regime and establishing ties with new democrats. President Obama must use all of his persuasive power to demand that Hosni Mubarak immediately declare that he will not seek reelection. The Egyptian dictator must be persuaded to appoint a caretaker government that will handle the daily affairs of the state, headed by a moderate member of the opposition like Mohammed ElBaradei. This might be the last chance to arrange an orderly transition to democracy, one wherein anti-democratic forces in any guise – religious, military, secular, or theocratic – cannot derail the democratic process.
For Egyptians, the history of the Iranian Revolution should serve as a warning. In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini hid his true intentions – namely the creation of a despotic rule of the clerics – behind the mantle of democracy. More than once he promised that not a single cleric would hold a position of power in the future government. But once in power, he created the current clerical despotism. And when, in June 2009, three million people took to the streets of Tehran to protest decades of oppression, they were brutally suppressed.
With this history in mind, Egyptian democrats must not be fooled by the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. If and when Mubarak falls, they simply cannot allow the most radical and brutal forces to win in the ensuing chaos. If these forces are allowed to claim power using the rhetoric of democracy, Egyptians will find themselves decades from now needing another uprising, which is precisely the current situation of the Iranian people.
The propaganda machine for the clerical regime in Tehran has been gloating about the similarities between the events of Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and developments in Egypt now. It shamelessly claims that today’s uprising in Egypt is but an aftershock of the revolution in Iran. The Egyptian people must prove them wrong.
And not just for the sake of Egypt. For over a century, Egypt, like Iran, has been a bellwether state for the entire region. The arrival of freedom to Egypt would therefore put the Iranian mullahs on the defensive. Far from a repeat of 1979, the Egyptian uprising might begin to seem like a close cousin of 2009 – a true democratic revolt. This would give confidence to democrats across the Middle East. It would suggest that the tectonic plates in the region really are shifting away from despotism and dogma, toward democracy and reason. Inshallah!
[This dispatch was written and posted on Jan. 30, but because of a computer glitch, is dated Feb. 1 on site.]
* Everyone from Obama to Sarkozy to Cameron (not to mention those so-called human rights groups, expert academics, and virtually the entire world media) got it wrong: the Israeli-Palestinian issue is not the main source of concern for the peoples of the Middle East.
* Ha’aretz: Western intelligence in general and Israeli intelligence in particular, did not foresee the scope of change in Egypt, which may require a reorganization of the IDF. Almost all of the Western media analysts and academic experts also got it wrong.
* How Ariel Sharon regarded Egypt as potentially a bigger threat than Iran.
***
This dispatch on the events in Egypt is divided into two for space reasons. The other part can be read here: Mubarak’s regime may prove more brittle than Tunisia’s
CONTENTS
1. They were all wrong
2. A pivotal moment in Egypt with potentially enormous international repercussions
3. Most hypocritical statement of the day
4. Egyptian authorities close Al-Jazeera offices
5. “Egypt riots are an intelligence chief’s nightmare” (By Amos Harel, Ha’aretz, Jan. 30, 2011)
6. “Israel fears radical takeover in Egypt” (By Hanan Greenberg, Yediot Ahronot, Jan. 30, 2011)
7. “Egypt according to Sharon” (Editorial, New York Sun, Jan. 29, 2011)
8. “How Arab satellite stations show the unrest in the Arab world” (INN, Jan. 30, 2011)
[Notes below by Tom Gross]
THEY WERE ALL WRONG
They were all agreed. Everyone from U.S. President Barack Obama to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, from France’s President Sarkozy and Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron to the UN Security-Council (not to mention those so-called human rights groups, expert academics, and virtually the entire world media), they have all been saying it for years: the Israeli-Palestinian issue is the main source of concern for the peoples of the Middle East.
Yet the hundreds of thousands of protestors that have taken to the streets in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan and elsewhere in the Arab world in recent days have barely mentioned Israel or the Palestinians, if they have mentioned them at all. (This is despite that some Western journalists have desperately tried to find one or two Egyptians to denounce Israel, even though almost everyone they asked wanted to speak about their own Egyptian concerns.)
Despite what the editorials in The New York Times and elsewhere tell us on a predictably regular basis, the tens of millions of oppressed people of Egypt don’t actually seem to care too much whether Jews can live in the Gilo neighborhood of south-western Jerusalem, despite the fact that only last month senior British and American officials insisted this was a matter of paramount concern for the entire Arab world.
There have been no burning of Israeli flags in Cairo in recent days, no cries of “death to Israel,” no signs to “lift the siege” of Gaza.
As Herb Keinon, a leading journalist at The Jerusalem Post, points out: “Let’s imagine that two years ago Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had accepted with open arms Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of a Palestinian state on nearly 95 percent of the land, with a land swap for the rest, half of Jerusalem and an international consortium in control of the ‘Holy Basin,’ would Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia not have set himself on fire, would rivers of people not be marching now in Egypt against Mubarak’s autocratic regime?”
This doesn’t mean, of course, that Israel and the Palestinians shouldn’t do their utmost to solve their conflict in a way that brings peace, prosperity and security to both peoples. But let’s stop pretending, once and for all, that the Jewish state is the source of all the ills of the Middle East.
A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN EGYPT WITH POTENTIALLY ENORMOUS INTERNATIONAL REPERCUSSIONS
[This was written and posted on January 29 and sent to some members of this list at that time.]
A pivotal moment in Egypt with potentially enormous international repercussions
By Tom Gross
I attach an article below published early this morning on the website of Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, giving the Israeli perspective on the unrest in Egypt.
I would add that while most of us support the ideal of liberal democracy in the Arab Middle East, and hope that Egypt could prove to be a beacon in the region, unlike in Tunisia, where Islamists have no significant power base, there is a distinct possibility that any revolution in Egypt (even one that begins with more secular elements) will be taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Just as over the course of many months, the extremists eventually seized control of the Iranian revolution in 1979 (demonstrations against the Shah began in January 1978, he fled in January 1979, but it wasn’t until December 1979 that the Khomeinists consolidated control) and the Russian one in 1917 (the Bolsheviks slaughtered the Mensheviks, as the February revolution gave way to the October one), so this may also prove to be the case in Egypt. I hope that the Obama administration knows its history.
They need only ask some of the Iranian liberals who led the revolution against the Shah in 1979 only to find that many of their anti-regime comrades (both on the theocratic right and the communist left) had no intention whatsoever of installing a genuine democracy in the Shah’s place.
I also hope that the “realists” in Washington and Europe (and their cheerleaders in the Western media) who have consistently argued that the U.S. should end or downgrade its alliance with Israel, might now recognize that Israel may well be the only genuinely stable and reliable ally of the U.S. and the West in the Middle East.
***
Here is a more optimistic view from The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl:
“Mubarak should step down and be replaced by a transitional government, headed by El Baradei and including representatives of all pro-democracy forces. That government could then spend six months to a year rewriting the constitution, allowing political parties to freely organize and preparing for genuinely democratic elections. Given time to establish themselves, secular forces backed by Egypt’s growing middle class are likely to rise to the top in those elections – not the Islamists that Mubarak portrays as the only alternative.”
Diehl also points out that: “The Obama administration often speaks as if it does not recognize the existence of an Arab reform movement. Bush’s frequently articulated argument that political and social liberalization offer the best antidote to Islamic extremism appears absent from this administration’s thinking.”
***
Abu Mundhir Al-Shinqiti, a leading Salafi-jihadist cleric, has issued a fatwa calling on men to participate in the protests in Egypt in order to bring down the current government. Analysts say that al-Shinqiti’s fatwa shows that Jihadists have high expectations regarding the outcome of the current uprising.
MOST HYPOCRITICAL STATEMENT OF THE DAY
The following is a report from Press TV, the Iranian government’s English language channel widely available in Europe:
Iran asks Egypt to meet public demands
January 29, 2011 9:29AM
Press TV
www.presstv.ir/detail/162528.html
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast has called on political leaders in Egypt to follow the “rightful demands” of their people.
“Iran expects Egyptian officials to listen to the voice of their Muslim people, respond to their rightful demands and refrain from exerting violence by security forces and police against an Islamic wave of awareness that has spread through the country in form of a popular movement,” Mehmanparast said Saturday.
He further pointed out that Tehran attaches great importance to the fulfillment of public demands in Egypt and added, “Iran regards demonstrations by the Muslim people of this country as a justice-seeking movement in line with their national-religious demands.”
EGYPTIAN AUTHORITIES CLOSE AL-JAZEERA OFFICES
Egyptian authorities yesterday closed down Al-Jazeera’s offices in Cairo in protest at the network’s nonstop “live stream” coverage on both TV and the internet of the protests against Mubarak. It canceled the network’s broadcast license and said it was withdrawing accreditation from all its staff in Egypt with immediate effect.
However, Al-Jazeera said in a statement that it would keep covering events, assuring “its audiences in Egypt and across the world that it will continue its in-depth and comprehensive reporting on the events unfolding in Egypt.”
Al-Jazeera said yesterday that its live stream on the internet “has been viewed for 26 million minutes in the last 12 hours.”
Last week, following the release of the so-called “Palestine Papers”, a senior Palestinian Authority official announced that Al-Jazeera had “declared war on the Palestinian Authority.”
The network was banned in the West Bank in 2009, a decision that was rescinded shortly after.
Al-Jazeera is banned in Morocco and Kuwait and faces restrictions in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. By contrast, Israel lets Al-Jazeera broadcast with the same freedoms as it does any other media.
(For more on Al-Jazeera, please see the article below titled “How Arab satellite stations show the unrest in the Arab world”.)
***
I attach four articles of interest on the situation, below.
– Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
POTENTIALLY MASSIVE NEGATIVE EFFECTS FOR ISRAEL, THE WEST
Egypt riots are an intelligence chief’s nightmare
By Amos Harel
Ha’aretz
January 30, 2011
The events of the last few days in Egypt – apparently the most important regional development since the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal of 1979 – are also an expression of the decision-makers’ nightmare, the planners and intelligence agents in Israel.
While in other countries many are watching with satisfaction at what looks to be possibly the imminent toppling of a regime that denied its citizens their basic rights, the Israeli point of view is completely different.
The collapse of the old regime in Cairo, if it takes place, will have a massive effect, mainly negative, on Israel’s position in the region. In the long run, it could put the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan in danger, the largest strategic assets after the support of the United States.
The changes could even lead to changes in the IDF and cast a dark cloud over the economy.
Western intelligence in general and Israeli intelligence in particular did not foresee the scope of change in Egypt (the eventual descriptor “revolution” will apparently have to wait a little longer). Likewise, almost all of the media analysis and academic experts got it wrong.
In the possible scenarios that Israeli intelligence envisioned, they admittedly posited 2011 as a year of possible regime change – with a lot question marks – in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but a popular uprising like this was completely unexpected.
More than this, in his first appearance at a meeting last Wednesday of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee the new head of military intelligence Major General Aviv Kochavi said to member of Knesset, “There are currently no doubts about the stability of the regime in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood is not organized enough to take over, they haven’t managed to consolidate their efforts in a significant direction.”
If the Mubarak regime is toppled, the quiet coordination of security between Israel and Egypt will quickly be negatively affected. It will affect relations between Cairo’s relationship with the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, it will harm the international forces stationed in Sinai.
It will mean the refusal of Egypt to continue to allow the movement of Israeli ships carrying missiles through the Suez canal, which was permitted for the last two years, according to reports in the foreign press, in order to combat weapons smuggling from Sudan to Gaza. In the long run, Egypt’s already-cold peace treaty with Israel will get even colder.
From the perspective of the IDF, the events are going to demand a complete reorganization. For the last 20 years, the IDF has not included a serious threat from Egypt in its operational plan.
In the last several decades, peace with Cairo has allowed the gradual thinning out of forces, the lowering of maximum age for reserve duty and the diversion of massive amounts of resources to social and economic projects.
The IDF military exercises focused on conflict with Hezbollah and Hamas, at most in collusion with Syria. No one prepared with any seriousness for a scenario in which an Egyptian division would enter Sinai, for example.
If the Egyptian regime falls in the end, a possibility that seemed unbelievable only two or three days ago, the riots could easily spill over to Jordan and threaten the Hashemite regime. On Israel’s two long peaceful borders there will then prevail a completely different reality.
ISRAEL FEARS RADICAL TAKEOVER IN EGYPT
Israel fears radical takeover in Egypt
Extremist takeover in Egypt would put Israel in ‘wholly different position,’ security official warns
By Hanan Greenberg
January 29, 2011
Yediot Ahronot / Ynet
A fundamental change of government in Egypt may lead to a “revolution in Israel’s security doctrine,” a defense official said Friday night, as protests against President Hosni Mubarak’s rule continued to intensify.
The security official made it clear that Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt constitutes an important strategic asset, “which enables the IDF to focus on other theaters.” The defense source said that the IDF would have to dedicate major resources in order to devote any attention to the Egyptian front as well.
“It is no secret that the IDF focuses on certain theaters and earmarks most resources to them,” the official said. “The Egyptians are only addressed on the margins. We are holding discussions, including updates relevant to recent years, yet without a doubt Egypt is not considered a theater that requires attention.”
Should a revolution indeed take place in Egypt, the rules of play will not necessarily change at once, the source added. “It won’t mean, heaven forbid, that Egypt would immediately turn into an enemy country, yet our attention would most certainly have to shift.”
ADVANCED EGYPTIAN ARMY A THREAT?
Defense officials are closely monitoring developments in Israel’s southern neighbor, considered the “heart of the Arab world.” The immediate Israeli concern has to do with possible developments on the Egypt-Gaza border, where Egyptian forces have been working intensely as of late to curb weapons smuggling. According to security officials, the riots currently raging across Egypt may have negative implications on its Gaza border.
Another concern voiced within Israel’s defense establishment has to do with Egypt’s advanced army, which includes thousands of tanks, hundreds of fighter jets, and dozens of vessels.
“This is a Western army in every way and it enjoys US aid,” one security official said. “There is no doubt that should we see an extremist regime over there controlling such army, this will place Israel in a wholly different position.”
“There is no doubt that in the coming days, many eyes have to be monitoring Egypt. Later we’ll make all the calculations as to the implications,” the official said.
Earlier, an Israeli minister told Time Magazine that officials in Jerusalem believe President Hosni Mubarak will survive the current upheaval.
The cabinet member, who asked to remain anonymous, characterized recent events as an “earthquake” in the Middle East. His comments were made ahead of Friday’s escalating riots and before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his ministers to refrain from addressing the situation in Egypt.
HOW ARIEL SHARON SAW EGYPT AS POTENTIALLY A BIGGER THREAT THAN IRAN
Egypt According to Sharon
Editorial
The New York Sun
January 29, 2011
As the Egyptians mount their challenge to the regime of Hosni Mubarak the man we keep thinking of is Ariel Sharon. He was the guest at the first editorial dinner of The New York Sun, held jointly with the editors of the Wall Street Journal. The date was November 2000, shortly before Mr. Sharon, in an election triumph at the start of the following year, acceded to the prime minister’s office at Jerusalem. At one point, one of the editors asked the general which country in the Middle East, or anywhere else, he considered the most hostile to the Jewish state. Suddenly Mr. Sharon fell silent and so did the rest of the table. We remember thinking to ourselves: Iraq? . . . Iran? . . . Syria? . . . the Sudan? But when the general finally spoke the country he named was Egypt.
Some murmurs of surprise were heard. In theory, after all, Egypt and Israel had been at peace since Camp David. But the man who was about to become prime minister of Israel said that not only was Egypt the most hostile but it was also the most dangerous. It was the most populous Middle East country; it was influential in the Arab world. Egypt had something like 12 divisions in its Army alone, one of the 10 largest air forces in the world, and millions of males of military age. In recent years, it had been armed and trained by America. That worried him. He didn’t belittle the fact that some Egyptians were prepared to gamble on peace. But the gamble had cost President Sadat his life, and the peace had been cold. In the order of battle, the great strategist had his eye on Egypt.
As Egypt is engulfed in flames, we can’t help thinking of Ariel Sharon’s warning. He was prepared to treat with Mr. Mubarak, and did on a number of occasions, but he never had illusions about him. He was well aware of Mr. Mubarak’s machinations against Israel in the United Nations, of his agitation against Israel’s nuclear capacity, of the fact that if Egypt really wanted to stop the arms smuggling into Gaza it would have. At the prospect of Mr. Mubarak’s being toppled, his eyes would have been dry. The Israeli premier was anything but indifferent to the idea of democracy; he was a tribune of the idea that war rarely, if ever, erupts between democratic countries. And as a politician and founder of political parties, he was one of democracy’s most seasoned, even wiliest, practitioners.
All the more skeptical was he of the idea of rushing democracy, all the more aware of how democracy could be taken advantage of. It was an alleged democracy, if a false one, that Hamas manipulated to seize Gaza; it is of democracy that Hezbollah is seeking to take advantage in snuffing out the embers of freedom at Lebanon. Democracy can be defeated from within, as we witnessed in Iran. Mr. Sharon understood the difference between real democracies – America’s, say, or Israel’s, with their free press, honest vote counts, and open ballots – and false ones, like that which returned Mubarak to power in September 2005 with 86% of the vote. “Egyptian Mirage” was the headline we put over our editorial at the time, which characterized the election as a “farce” and warning of what we called “misguided American policy toward Egypt.”
Our sense is that Mr. Sharon enjoyed, even on occasion thrilled to (as this newspaper has), President Bush’s pro-democracy agenda and the kind of rhetoric he unleashed when, say, he sent Secretary Rice to Cairo. He supported the war against Saddam Hussein and the campaign to liberate Iraq. But he was a man without illusions. He would not have stood silent about the murders of Christians in Egypt, a silence our Youssef Ibrahim has been covering; Mr. Sharon would have comprehended those killings as a harbinger of greater trouble. In Egypt today Mr. Sharon would be watching intently for any realignment of forces or movement of Egyptian military units and armor. He’d have had his eye on the Suez Canal, any crossing of which by even small, incremental units – single tanks, say – would have riveted his attention.
For one of the things Ariel Sharon understood is that there is no logic for Egypt to be maintaining a military machine as large as the one it has built up in the past decade and a half, with American money and help. It is not required for intra-Arab struggles. Its only use other than to suppress Egyptians themselves, he would have understood, would be the one it has trained for, an eventual war against the Jewish state with which Cairo has maintained a peace that has been so strangely cold. He would have understood that America’s bargain with Mr. Mubarak failed to extinguish anti-Semitism in Egypt. He understood the implications in the fact that the old hatred has been allowed to infect a press that is controlled by the state. He would have understood above all else that the failure to act in the face of threats in any part of the Middle East invites attack from all sides, including from the colossus on the Nile.
THE BATTLE FOR THE AIRWAVES
How Arab satellite stations show the unrest in the Arab world
By David Lev
Israel National News
January 30, 2011
With no fewer than five major areas of unrest/revolutions/regime changes going on in the Arab world, Arab satellite television, one of the mainstays of information dissemination in the Middle East, has been playing a major role in communicating news – or attempting, if not to suppress it, then at least to spin it.
For most Westerners, “satellite TV,” like cable TV, means a mix of entertainment and news stations – mostly entertainment. And with the decline of terrestrial TV in most parts of the world, families and individuals who want to watch television usually take out a subscription to a cable or direct satellite service.
In the Arab world, however, where government control – or at least domination – of the local media is the rule, most householders have a satellite dish, to pick up the hundreds of free-to-air (fta) television stations broadcasting around the Arab world. Many of these stations are sponsored by governments, and make no attempt to present a balanced picture. There are many religious-oriented stations, as one would expect, with both Sunni and Shi’ite stations crowding the TV dial. For religious minorities in overwhelmingly Muslim countries, satellite TV broadcasts are often one of the few links to their religious brethren.
Not only do Arab governments use satellite TV to reach the Arab masses; the United States operates several stations in Arabic and Farsi, and has a whole TV station, Al-Hurra, dedicated to explaining its side of the story in Iraq. Many other countries, including Korea, China, France, Britain, and even Holland have their own satellite stations. Besides foreign, official and religious broadcasts, there are also dozens of independent stations broadcasting news, sports, and entertainment, in Arabic – and there are even a surprisingly large number of stations that broadcast movies and TV series originating in the United States.
With unrest, regime changes, or heavy protests threatening regime changes, taking place in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan, a survey of the fta Arab satellite stations broadcasting on the two main satellites that serve the Middle East (Nilesat and Arabsat) yields what many viewers would expect – along with some interesting surprises – in the way the protests and uprisings are being reported. Here are some examples:
Tunisia: During the first days of Tunisia’s “Jasmine revolution,” the country’s broadcasting company, which had been tightly controlled by the government of deposed leader Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, all but halted broadcasting. Before Ben-Ali’s departure, Tunisia’s national TV (which had three channels) broadcast its usual diet of sports and entertainment shows, as did the country’s private Hannibal TV channel. After Ben-Ali left the country, the national stations went off the air – while Hannibal continued to broadcast, urging Tunisians to recant their decision to overthrow the government. After the revolution, Hannibal TV owner Larbi Nasra was arrested for treason, but was freed several days later when an opposition minister in the new government intervened on his behalf.
All the Tunisian stations are now back on the air, but all the channels – including Hannibal – are broadcasting the same thing, an ongoing “open studio” with newsmakers, “man on the street” interviews, and accounts of the ongoing protests.
Yemen: Yemen’s national TV station acknowledged that there were protests in the country Thursday – pro-government protests, that is. Yemen TV gave extensive coverage to what appeared to be a large group of pro-government demonstrators in Sa’ana, the capital of the country. People carried signs with pictures of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, with slogans on signs that expressed support for him, decorated with a dusty pink insignia – which is apparently the color the government chose as its own, to differentiate it from the sky blue the opposition seems to have chosen to represent them.
If the tens of thousands of Yemenis who attended anti-government protests wanted to see themselves on TV, they would have had to tune in to broadcasts of Aden Live, an opposition station broadcasting from the United Kingdom directed at Yemenis. Here one could see the masses of government opponents demonstrating at several locations around the country, burning pictures of Saleh, and hoisting the opposition flag – which features the Yemen flag’s red, black and white fields, with the addition of a sky blue triangle (but without a red star in that triangle, to differentiate the flag from that of the defunct People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen).
Egypt: The most populous country in the Middle East also has the most diverse array of television broadcasts, ranging from government-run networks to independent news and entertainment channels.
On the government-owned Nilesat network, it was business as usual, as the stations continued to broadcast their usual diet of movies, cooking shows, kids’ programs, and sports matches. The same was true on the government-owned Masr stations, although one of them, Modern Masr, went off the air. The Nile News channel devoted a few minutes at the top of its news hour to the protests, while devoting at least two hours Thursday to showing Israeli troops “persecuting” what appeared to be residents of a refugee camp. The English-language Nile TV station did not mention the protests against the government at all.
One Egyptian station that did break the mold was OTV, which is privately owned by businessman Naguib Sawiris, chairman of the board of Egypt’s largest private employer, Orascom Telecom, the company with the largest market capitalization on the Cairo & Alexandria Stock Exchange. OTV’s news channel broadcast lengthy reports on the protests and held discussions with various officials (not necessarily from the government); the network’s financial featured worried-looking anchors and guests, discussing the freefall in the country’s stock exchange in the wake of the protests.
Besides OTV, Egyptians could watch the protests on pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, which devoted long stretches of time to on-the-spot reports by correspondents, as well as lengthy analyses on the situation.
A number of people in Egypt accused the network of fanning the flames with its broadcasts, and indeed, Al Jazeera, on one of its channels, broadcast footage of the violence, along with Facebook posts from protesters as they were posted on the internet. While protests had calmed by Thursday afternoon, broadcasters – as well as the authorities – were bracing themselves for what many believed would be a stormy Friday in Egypt.