* A “Who’s Who” of Arab dictators are invited to tomorrow’s British royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, at the advice of the British Foreign office. But Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are not invited -- many believe because the Queen disapproved of the Iraq War, and the ousting by force of Arab dictator Saddam Hussein.
* Invitation to Syrian ambassador “borders on the grotesque”
Bahrain’s Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, with Prince Charles in 2004
Update, April 28, 2011
The invitation to the Syrian ambassador has been withdrawn – the first time in living memory that an invitation to a royal wedding has been withdrawn the day before the wedding. However, the fact that he was invited is still a source of shame, and the points in the dispatch below remain relevant, in my view.
Update 2:
It has been revealed that the former chief of Bahrain’s “torture service” will be attending the royal wedding. Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa, who is now the Bahraini ambassador to London, is a former head of Bahrain’s National Security Agency accused of electric shocks and beatings. Other detainees were raped.
INVITATION “BORDERS ON THE GROTESQUE”
By Tom Gross
The revelation this evening that the Syrian ambassador to London, Dr Sami Khiyami, has been invited to the British royal wedding the day after tomorrow, while former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been excluded from the guest list, “borders on the grotesque,” said a number of British MPs.
Other former British prime ministers, including John Major and Margaret Thatcher, have been invited, as has David Cameron. (All surviving former prime ministers attended Prince Charles’s marriage to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.)
St Andrews, the Scottish university where Prince William met his bride-to-be Kate Middleton, has been given large donations by the Syrian regime.
Seven more royal tyrants or their envoys from around the world are on tomorrow’s royal guest list despite their records of repression and torture.
Among them are Prince Mohamed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, Sayyid Haitham bin Tariq Al Said of Oman, and Bahrain’s crown prince, Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.
All three leaders have overseen the shooting dead of pro-democracy campaigners in their countries in recent weeks, and the Saudi leader has sent paramilitary units into neighboring Bahrain to help round up and torture pro-democracy campaigners there.
ANOTHER BAHRAINI BLOGGER DIES IN POLICE CUSTODY
Last week another Bahraini blogger was beaten to death in police custody. This morning four more democracy activists in Bahrain were sentenced to death.
(It seems that Bahrain’s crown prince is too busy overseeing the continuing repression at home to attend. This week he informed the British royal family that he doesn’t have time to go to the wedding.)
Other despots invited tomorrow include Sheikh Ahmad Hmoud Al-Sabah of Kuwait and the Emir of Qatar.
Meanwhile, one of the few countries in the world that the British Queen has refused to visit during her almost 60 year reign is Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy. Her royal advisers, including those at the Britain foreign office, have persuaded her not to.
You may wish to draw your own conclusions as to why they won’t let a British Monarch visit a Jewish country.
I attach an article below on the royal wedding by Christopher Hitchens, who is a subscriber to this email. I realize that not everyone will agree with what he has to say.
-- Tom Gross
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast, Jonah Goldberg at The National Review, Abby Schachter at The New York Post, and all the others who linked to this dispatch.
A version of the above article also appears on The Commentator here.
Among past recent dispatches on Syria, please see:
* Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Syria’s Assad is worse than Gaddafi in many ways
Prince William and Kate Middleton
BEWARE THE IN-LAWS
Does Kate Middleton really want to marry into a family like this?
By Christopher Hitchens
Slate
April 18, 2011
A hereditary monarch, observed Thomas Paine, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician. But try pointing this out when everybody is seemingly moist with excitement about the cake plans and gown schemes of the constitutional absurdity’s designated mother-to-be. You don’t seem to be uttering common sense. You sound like a Scrooge. I suppose this must be the monarchical “magic” of which we hear so much: By some mystic alchemy, the breeding imperatives for a dynasty become the stuff of romance, even “fairy tale.” The usually contemptuous words fairy tale were certainly coldly accurate about the romance quotient of the last two major royal couplings, which brought the vapid disco-princesses Diana and Sarah (I decline to call her “Fergie”) within range of demolishing the entire mystique. And, even if the current match looks a lot more wholesome and genuine, its principal function is still to restore a patina of glamour that has been all but irretrievably lost.
The British monarchy doesn’t depend entirely on glamour, as the long, long reign of Queen Elizabeth II continues to demonstrate. Her unflinching dutifulness and reliability have conferred something beyond charm upon the institution, associating it with stoicism and a certain integrity. Republicanism is infinitely more widespread than it was when she was first crowned, but it’s very rare indeed to hear the Sovereign Lady herself being criticized, and even most anti-royalists hasten to express themselves admiringly where she is concerned.
I am not sure how deserved this immunity really is. The queen took two major decisions quite early in her reign, neither of which was forced upon her. She refused to allow her younger sister Margaret to marry the man she loved and had chosen, and she let her authoritarian husband have charge of the education of her eldest son. The first decision was taken to appease the most conservative leaders of the Church of England (a church of which she is, absurdly, the head), who could not approve the marriage of Margaret to a divorced man. The second was taken for reasons less clear.
The harvest was equally gruesome in both cases: Princess Margaret later married and divorced a man she did not love and then had years to waste as the model of the bone-idle, cigarette-holdered, gin-sipping socialite, surrounded with third-rate gossips and charmers and as unhappy as the day was long. (She also produced some extra royal children, for whom something to do had to be found.) Prince Charles, subjected to a regime of fierce paternal harangues and penitential cold-shower boarding schools, withdrew into himself, was eventually talked into a calamitous marriage with someone he didn’t love or respect, and is now the morose, balding, New Age crank and licensed busybody that we flinch from today. He has also apparently found belated contentment with the former wife of a brother-officer.
Together, Margaret and Charles set the tone for the dowdy, feckless, can’t-stay-married shower of titled descendants with whose names, let alone doings, it is near-impossible to keep up. There are so many of them! And things always have to be found for them to do.
For Prince William at least it was decided on the day of his birth what he should do: Find a presentable wife, father a male heir (and preferably a male “spare” as well), and keep the show on the road. By yet another exercise of that notorious “magic,” it is now doubly and triply important that he does this simple thing right, because only his supposed charisma can save the country from what monarchists dread and republicans ought to hope for: King Charles III. (Monarchy, you see, is a hereditary disease that can only be cured by fresh outbreaks of itself.) An even longer life for the present queen is generally hoped for: failing that a palace maneuver that skips a generation and saves the British from a man who – like the fruit of the medlar – went rotten before he turned ripe.
Convinced republican that I am, and foe of the prince who talks to plants and wants to be crowned “head of all faiths” as well as the etiolated Church of England, I find myself pierced by a pang of sympathy. Not much of a life, is it, growing old and stale with no real job except waiting for the news of Mummy’s death? Some British people claim actually to “love” their rather dumpy Hanoverian ruling house. This love takes the macabre form of demanding a regular human sacrifice whereby unexceptional people are condemned to lead wholly artificial and strained existences, and then punished or humiliated when they crack up.
The last few weeks brought tidings of the latest grotesqueries involving Prince Andrew, Charles’ brother. If I haven’t forgotten anything, he had just recovered from tidings involving overwarm relations with the Qaddafi clan when his ex-wife was found to have scrounged a loan from a wealthy American friend whose record, alas, was disfigured by a conviction for sexual relations with the underage. The loan would have defrayed part of the unending wasteful expenditure that is required to keep the Ferguson girl staggering between scandals and sponsorships. I mean, the whole thing is just so painfully and absolutely vulgar. And, among the queen’s many children and grandchildren, not by any means exceptional behavior either ….
This is why I laughed so loud when the Old Guard began snickering about the pedigree of young Ms. Middleton. Her parents, it appeared, were not quite out of the top drawer. The mother had been an air hostess or something with an unfashionable airline, and the family had been overheard using lethally wrong expressions, such as serviette for napkin, settee for sofa, and – I can barely bring myself to type the shameful letters – toilet for lavatory. Ah, so that’s what constitutes vulgarity! People who would never dare risk a public criticism of the royal family, even in its daytime-soap incarnation, prefer to take a surreptitious revenge on a young woman of modest background. For shame.
Myself, I wish her well and also wish I could whisper to her: If you really love him, honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too. Many of us don’t want or need another sacrificial lamb to water the dried bones and veins of a dessicated system. Do yourself a favor and save what you can: Leave the throne to the awful next incumbent that the hereditary principle has mandated for it.
This is the sixth in a series of “Video dispatches”.
(Update note, 2017: This dispatch was written and posted a month after the peaceful Syrian pro-democracy protests had began, long before the Islamic State came into existence, and is a reminder that from start to finish the Syrian war has primarily been a result of the genocidal-like brutality of the Assad family and the Iranian government to which he answers. They have done the overwhelming majority of the killing and torture throughout, whatever the BBC and New York Times might tell us in their “fake news”-like manner.)
MASSACRING THEIR OWN PEOPLE
By Tom Gross
This dispatch is a follow-up to my recent article on Syria.
Because some in the international media are still not covering the six-week-old Syrian uprising properly, and indeed certain journalists are still taking Assad regime propaganda at face value, I attach four videos below.
(As recently as yesterday, the correspondent for The New York Times, for example, was still referring to Bashar Assad as though he was some kind of moderate reformer who may have little or nothing to do with the current crackdown in Syria, much in the same way that for years other writers at The New York Times made excuses for Yasser Arafat, deluding themselves that Arafat had nothing to do with the terrorism which he was in fact initiating.)
Bashar Assad, even more than his father, has formed an ever closer alliance with the regime in Tehran, hence U.S.President Obama’s reference yesterday to the role of Iranian advisors in the present massacre of Syrians.
Israel is on high alert in case Assad and his partners in Tehran create a crisis in Lebanon or Gaza. We should not forget that the cause of the crisis that led to the 1967 Six-Day War was Syrian instability, and the willingness of Syria’s Alawite rulers to act against Israel in order to maintain their rule.
Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family, of course. They have been aiding and abetting terrorism against Israelis, Lebanese, Kurds, Iraqis and others for decades.
Al Jazeera is carrying interviews with witnesses in the city of Daraa, and in the Damascus suburb of Duma, saying that after Syrian security forces have shot unarmed demonstrators, they have then executed many of the injured, and shot anyone trying to help them. The authorities have turned off water and electricity in the area, so the injured can’t be treated properly in hospitals in any case.
Meanwhile, Syria is still in line to become the newest member of the (cruelly misnamed) U.N. Human Rights Council when a vote takes place on May 20 at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Be warned, this first video (filmed over the weekend) is one of the most graphic I have ever posted. (The other two videos after that are not nearly as gruesome. In particular I recommend watching the second video. There are some other notes after the three videos.)
-- Tom Gross
Update: Please also see the following dispatch: As Syria slaughters hundreds, its ambassador gets British royal wedding invite denied to Blair and Brown
WITHOUT MERCY
SYRIA'S CYBER REVOLUTION
This is an interesting interview with a Syrian, Rami Nakhle, who has fled to Beirut where he is helping post videos from Syria online, despite threats by Assad’s secret police operating in Lebanon.
THE GOOD FRIDAY MASSACRE
Video courtesy of Al Jazeera English:
MESSAGE FROM AN ORDINARY MAN IN BANIAS
AND FROM THE OFFICIAL SYRIAN MEDIA…
Meanwhile, I have been monitoring the Syrian government news agency SANA every day.
Here is an example of SANA’s propaganda, from their English-langauge newswire:
http://www.sana.sy/eng/21/2011/03/25/338441.htm
Syrian Governorates, (SANA) -- Tens of thousands of Syrians from all Syria’s 14 Governorates flooded into the streets in mass popular rallies voicing their satisfaction and joy over President Bashar al-Assad’s decrees and decisions.
AND ANOTHER EXAMPLE...
President al-Assad receives calls from King of Bahrain, Emirs of Kuwait and Qatar, Iraqi President, supporting Syria in face of conspiracy
March 27, 2011
http://www.sana.sy/eng/21/2011/03/27/338834.htm
DAMASCUS, (SANA) -- President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday received phone calls from King of Bahrain Hamad bin Issa al- Khalifa, the Emir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, President Jalal al-Talabani of Iraq , Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
King of Bahrain, Emirs of Kuwait and Qatar, Iraq’s President expressed their countries’ standing by Syria in the face of conspiracy to which it is exposed, targeting its security and stability.
They underlined confidence in Syria’s capability, as leadership and people, to foil that conspiracy.
AND ANOTHER…
Turkey: We Will Not Accept Any Attempt at Destabilizing Syria
April 3, 2011
http://www.sana.sy/eng/22/2011/04/03/339641.htm
Ankara, (SANA) -- Turkey stressed that it cares for the security, stability and prosperity of the Syrian people as much as it does for its own people.
Spokesman of the Turkish Foreign Ministry on Saturday said in a statement, “Turkey can in no way accept, at this critical and sensitive time, any attempt that may lead to destabilizing Syria or harm the will of reforms in this friendly and brotherly country.”
The statement continued, “In Turkey, we firmly believe in the attention that the Syrian state and leadership accord to fulfilling the demands of people.”
The spokesman reiterated Ankara’s full and strong support to what President Bashar al-Assad has offered in terms of the political, social and economic reforms, expressing full confidence that the Syrian leadership has a pioneering role in this regard.
“It is evident that Syria will set the reforms in motion soon to meet the aspirations of the Syrian people,” the statement said.
“WHERE IS YOUR SYRIAN HUMANITARIAN FLOTILLA, ERDOGAN?”
Tom Gross adds:
Farid Ghadry, the exiled leader of the Reform Party of Syria (who is a subscriber to this mail list) sent out a mass email yesterday titled, “Where is your Syrian Humanitarian Flotilla, Erdogan?” in reference to the Turkish leader who is again organizing a flotilla full of Hamas sympathizers, set to sail soon for Gaza.
Ghadry writes:
“Are Gazans better people than Syrians? Is Assad too dear a friend for you to bother? And where are the Hamas Palestinians who seem to forget everyone else’s tragedy except their own? Where are their voices? Never expect Syrians to come to your aid again.
“And where is King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? What kind of leader is governing over Makah and Medina who is afraid of his own shadow?
“Where are all the Arab leaders and the Arab League? The cowards hosting dinners to celebrate their fat bank accounts while our people die in front of their eyes?”
***
Update: This article in The Washington Post helps explain the lack of any serious action by the Obama administration.
Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:
* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6
* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad
* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)
* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”
* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal
* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Supporting Bin Laden in London)
* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (Not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”
* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology
* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...
* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)
* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”
* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”
* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”
* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?
* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?
* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.
* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon
* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring
* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict
* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)
* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)
* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill
* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)
Judge Goldstone changes his tune: Cartoons from the Arab world
By Tom Gross
I attach a selection of cartoons (below) from the Arab world relating to Judge Goldstone’s retraction of his own UN Goldstone report. Unsurprisingly, given the widespread (but woefully underreported) anti-Semitism in the Arab world, almost all these cartoons are blatantly anti-Semitic.
Please note that many of these cartoons come from countries which prominent Western media often portray as moderate and which receive financial, military and other help from the U.S.
As you can see from these cartoons, these publications have no qualms about insulting the Jewish symbol the Star of David, whereas if a European draws a cartoon which Muslims find insulting this can result in death threats being issued against the cartoonist and random “infidels” being beheaded in retaliation, as was the case last week in Afghanistan.
Given the nature of the cartoons below, it seems Israeli Jews are the victims twice over, first of Goldstone’s blood libels against them, and then of the Arab reaction to Goldstone as a Jew.
Over the last 18 months, hundreds of thousands of articles have appeared in dozens of languages reiterating the lies of the Goldstone report. Some papers, such as The Guardian, continue to push the libelous report even after it has been thoroughly discredited.
OLMERT: WE CANNOT FORGIVE GOLDSTONE
In his first reaction to Goldstone’s retraction, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this weekend called Goldstone’s April 1st Washington Post op-ed “a poor attempt by Goldstone to cleanse his conscience. There can be no forgiveness for Goldstone for the vicious damage he has done to the State of Israel. Goldstone strengthened terrorist groups, weakened moderates and thereby exacerbated the suffering of civilians on both sides.”
U.S. SENATE TO UN: RESCIND GOLDSTONE
The U.S. Senate has passed a unanimous resolution calling on the UN to officially rescind the Goldstone Report and to reform the discredited UN Human Rights Council.
Whereas The New York Times (on both its news and comment pages) appears to be trying to belittle the importance of Goldstone’s retraction, The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial last week that “Mr. Goldstone should now have the decency to retire from public life.”
And though several European Union states, including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, joined the United States and others in opposing the Goldstone report from the beginning, we have yet to hear an apology from the governments of France and Britain which – disgracefully – joined the likes of the regimes in Libya, Iran, Syria and Burma in voting for the Goldstone report at the U.N. General Assembly.
-- Tom Gross
(There is also an update to the previous dispatch -- The New York Times “Goldstones” Israel again -- here.)
From the Saudi paper Al-Watan, April 7, 2011
From the Palestinian paper, Filastin, April 5, 2011. The “Jew” cuts Goldstone’s tongue out.
From the Jordanian paper, Ad-Dustur, April 7, 2011. (The writing in Arabic reads “Goldstone Report”.)
From the Arabic-language website of the Qatari-based TV netowrk Al-Jazeera, April 7, 2011
From the Qatari paper, Ar-Raya, April 6, 2011
From the UAE paper, Al-Bayan, April 6, 2011
From the UAE publication, Al-Imarat Al-Yawm, April 6, 2011
From the Arabic-language website of the Qatari-based TV network Al-Jazeera, April 7, 2011
As nasty as these cartoons are, they are not as repulsive as these ones following last year’s flotilla incident, or these ones.
(With thanks to the ADL, the senior staff of which subscribe to this email list, for research in compiling the Goldstone cartoons.)
DOING A GOLDSTONE
[Note by Tom Gross]
There is a verb now increasingly prevalent among writers and commentators in Israel – “To Goldstone” – i.e. to make stuff up in order to defame Israel.
But perhaps the verb should be “To do a New York Times” or “To BBC”.
If you want to know why Judge Goldstone could have been so misled about Israel, you need look no further than The New York Times and BBC, two “highly respected” media that simply invent misinformation about the Jewish state on a daily basis.
Lenny Ben-David comments on today’s New York Times misinformation about Israel as follows:
In the middle of an article (April 13) about Justin Bieber’s visit to Israel, a New York Times’ Jerusalem correspondent reports that “an anti-tank missile fired by Hamas militants at a school bus in Gaza...triggered days of intense exchanges of fire, during which 18 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, were killed.”
So how much is “about half” of 18? 8? 9? 10?
Actually, the real number of civilians killed is 5, and, according to Arab sources, 4 were in close proximity to terrorists firing missiles at Israel and Israel clearly hit the terrorists accurately.
[And of course the school bus was hit in Israel. It was not in Gaza as The New York Times printed.]
A list of the 18 dead can be found below and on the site of Muslim News. Next to the names, Lenny Ben-David identified them as “fighters” or “civilians.” That determination is based on linked articles in the Muslim News, the Palestinian Maan News Agency or Human Rights Watch.
1. Mahmoud Al Manasra, 50, Al Shijaeyya. Civilian
2. Mohammad Al Mahmoum, 25, Rafah. Fighter
3. Mosab Al Sufi, 18, Rafah. Fighter
4. Saleh Al Tarabeen, 38, Rafah. Fighter
5. Khaled Ad-Dabary, 23, Rafah. Fighter
6. Mo’taz Abu Jame’, Khan Younis. Fighter
7. Abdullah Al Qarra, Khan Younis. Fighter
8. Nidal Qdeih, 21, Khan Younis. Civilian
9. Najah Qdeih, 48, Khan Younis. Civilian
10. Talal Abu Taha, 55, Khan Younis. Civilian
11. Raed Shihada, 27, northern Gaza. Fighter
12. Bilal Al ‘Ar’ir, 23, Al Shijaeyya. Fighter
13. Mahmoud Al Jaro, 10, Al Shijaeyya. Civilian
14. Ahmad Ghorab, northern Gaza. Fighter
15. Mohammad Awaja, Rafah. Fighter
16. Taiseer Abu Sneima, Rafah. Fighter
17. Ahmad Al Zeitouniyya, northern Gaza. Fighter
18. Zuheir Al Bir, Al Zeitoun neighborhood – Gaza. Fighter
According to Human Rights Watch, “Kamal al-Manasra, a relative of Mahmoud Al Mansara (number 1), who lives next door, and Sami Harazen, said that about 3 p.m. they heard what sounded like a small rocket being launched from somewhere in or near the neighborhood.... ‘Two minutes after the rocket, I heard a shell hit my uncle’s [Mahmoud’s] house,’ said Kamal al-Manasra. ‘My uncle and his son and brother went over to check on the house, and while they were returning another shell fell on my uncle and killed him.’ Harazen gave a similar account, though he believed the Israeli response occurred less than one minute after the rocket launch.”
In the case of Nidal (8) and Najah (9) Qdeih, Nidal’s uncle Fayez Qdeiah told Human Rights Watch that “he heard three mortars fired by Palestinian armed groups from somewhere nearby.”
Human Rights Watch also places another civilian next to a rocket-launching terrorist. “Residents of Shajaiya told Human Rights Watch that members of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad fired mortar rounds from a cemetery in the middle of the neighborhood.... Shortly after the mortar attack, at around 7 p.m., an Israeli strike hit the cemetery but caused no casualties, residents said. About 10 to 15 children from the area ran into the cemetery to look at the strike site. Five minutes later, residents said, a second strike hit the area, killing one of the children, Mahmoud Wael al-Jaro (13), and a member of Islamic Jihad named Bilal al-Areer (12).
UPDATES (April 18, 2011)
Since I sent the above dispatch to a number of key people in the media (including the editor and owner of The New York Times), The New York Times has corrected itself online and no longer claims that the Israeli school bus – referred to below – was hit while travelling inside Gaza, or that “about half” of the Palestinian rocket launching crews and other militants targeted by Israel were civilians.
***
Daniel Viflic – the 16-year-old boy whose Israeli school bus was targeted by a laser guided Russian-made missile fired by Hamas – has been laid to rest after fighting for his life for the past 10 days. He died of his injuries yesterday afternoon. Hundreds of well wishers attended his funeral last night on the outskirts of the town of Beit Shemesh where he lived, including Israeli President Shimon Peres and several Israeli-Arabs and Bedouins.
Hamas – with help from their collaborators in Turkey, Europe and elsewhere – have managed to smuggle increasingly sophisticated rockets into Gaza after forcing Israel to relax its border policy last year.
14-year-old Odelia Nechama of Jerusalem remains on life-support in Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital following the Jerusalem bomb attack last month, an attack dismissed by The New York Times as a “small” incident.
-- Tom Gross
***
For more on The New York Times, please see:
* Leading African-American student group takes out full page ads in college newspapers calling on anti-Israel activists to stop abusing the term “apartheid”. “Life in the West Bank bares no relation to the terrible way blacks were treated in South Africa.”
* Israeli-built Iron Dome makes world history by successfully intercepting terrorist rockets.
* Israelis and Iranians work side by side in Japan.
* Condition of 16-year-old boy targeted by Hamas in his school bus last week deteriorates rapidly today; he is said to be near death.
* Egyptian military court sentences a blogger to three years in prison for criticizing the country’s military rulers, sending panic waves through Egypt’s pro-democracy community.
* Norwegian Foreign Minister warns those participating in a new Gaza flotilla not to go. “Everything you are bringing, they have already in the shops in Gaza,” he says.
CONTENTS
1. Black students group slams “Israel Apartheid Week” abuse
2. Reuters admits Palestinian economy is buoyant in West Bank
3. Odelia Nechama, 14, of Jerusalem
4. European Jews express dismay over Ashton’s latest biased remarks
5. Photos of schoolboy victim of Hamas rocket attack on Israeli school bus
6. In world first, Israeli-produced iron dome intercepts rockets
7. Hamas tries to explain why it hit a school bus
8. Israel tries to avoid new flotilla confrontation
9. Attack on “Hamas arms vehicle” in Sudan
10. Israelis, Iranians working side by side in Japan
11. Iran says it might wipe zeros off its currency in effort to curb inflation
12. Washington quietly halts arms deliveries to Lebanon
13. U.S. lawyers to sue Goldstone over Gaza report reversal
14. Egyptian army vows that Egypt won’t succumb to Islamic rule
15. “How would the left have reacted had Juliano been murdered by Jews?” (By Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz, April 7, 2011)
16. “Israel and the UN” (Editorial, Chicago Tribune, April 4, 2011)
17. “Israeli field hospital carries on inspiring work in Japan” (By Catherine Porter, Toronto Star, April 4, 2011)
18. “The shameful Arab silence on Syria’ (By Michael Young, Beirut Daily Star, April 7, 2011)
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
BLACK STUDENTS GROUP SLAMS “ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK” ABUSE
A leading African-American students group has placed advertisements in college newspapers strongly criticizing the organizers of “Israel Apartheid week” for their abuse of the term “apartheid”.
In a full page advert titled “Words Matter,” which appeared in newspapers on April 7, the Vanguard Leadership Group, a leadership development academy for top African-American students, accused “Students for Justice in Palestine” of a “false and deeply offensive” characterization of Israel.
“SJP has chosen to manipulate rather than inform with this illegitimate analogy,” states the ad, which was signed by students at a number of historically African-American colleges. “We request that you immediately stop referring to Israel as an apartheid society… decency, justice and hope compel us to demand immediate cessation to this deliberate misappropriation of words.”
The ad appeared in newspapers on campuses that witnessed “Israel Apartheid Week” activity last month, including Brown University, the University of California-Los Angeles, Columbia University and the University of Maryland.
The group added that many of their leaders had visited Israel and the situation bore no comparison with the horrors of apartheid South Africa and to suggest that it did was propaganda.
Vanguard President Michael Hayes said: “Additionally, this rhetoric does absolutely nothing to help Israel-Palestine negotiations or relations. We feel this type of action serves to hinder the peace process domestically and abroad, and have made it our priority to take a stand to shift the tide of understanding.”
He added that “Students for Justice in Palestine’s campaign against Israel is spreading misinformation about its policies, fostering bias in the media and jeopardizing prospects for a timely resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such irresponsibility is a blemish on your efforts.”
* Among recent past dispatches discussing “Israel Apartheid Week,” please see this one.
REUTERS ADMITS: PALESTINIAN ECONOMY IS BUOYANT IN WEST BANK
For years, I have been reporting that major Western media have misled their audience (including Western politicians) by talking of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the West Bank. I am glad to report that last week, Reuters, the world’s second biggest news agency, reported on the economic boom in Ramallah, West Bank’s de facto capital, as follows:
www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/us-palestinians-restaurant-idUSTRE7352UZ20110406
Cafe culture blooms in West Bank’s Ramallah
By Mohammed Assadi
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - While Paris’s Left Bank is famous for its fine restaurants and bustling cafes, Palestine’s West Bank is not. But that might be about to change.
The hilly city of Ramallah, which lies just to the north of Jerusalem, has undergone a massive boom in recent years on the back of Western donor support, with new smart eateries and bars mushrooming alongside a plethora of pristine office blocks.
Latest data says Ramallah and the adjacent town of Al-Bireh that it has utterly engulfed have more than 120 coffee shops and some 300 restaurants, with 50 new diners opening in 2010 alone.
“When I started, I was competing with three to four other places, now I compete with many,” said Peter Nasir, who turned an abandoned family house into a bustling restaurant in 2007, which draws around 150 customers a day.
“Restaurants are good business,” said Nasir, whose popular Azure restaurant lies close to the city center.
Until recently a small town in the occupied West Bank, Ramallah has seen its population double in the last decade to around 100,000, and plays host to a growing army of NGO workers, diplomats and an increasingly wealthy, middle-class elite.
“These people need food, need to sit down and talk, need to hold receptions. This explains the increase in restaurants,” said Mohammad Amin, head of Ramallah Chamber of Commerce…
ODELIA NECHAMA, 14, OF JERUSALEM
The New York Times, misleading its readers as it so often does when it comes to international affairs, described the Jerusalem bus bomb three weeks ago, as a “small bomb” in the opening words in its story. What they, and the rest of the media, haven’t told their readers is that several Israeli children remain injured as a result of the Palestinian attack.
I would like to draw attention to one of them in particular – 14-year-old Odelia Nechama of Jerusalem – because a subscriber to this email list (who is herself a survivor of a coma) knows Odelia and is visiting her and her mother in Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital.
Odelia remains in a critical condition, in a coma, blinded in both eyes, and with horrendous burns all over her body. Odelia was a loving and happy girl who happened to be walking next to the bus on her way home from school when the bomb exploded.
As far as I can see, not only has Odelia not been mentioned once in any international newspaper, but the Israeli media has also not written about her.
Among others who were injured in that attack were: Natan Daniel, aged 17, who suffered massive internal injuries and has had a number of internal organs removed; Leah Bracha, 19, who suffered burns to her legs and arms; Shilo ben Ofra, who is 15, and suffered burns and fractures to his legs and lower abdomen; Netanel ben Shlomit, aged 18, who has had surgery for injuries to his abdomen; Elhanan Ovadia, who is 14, and suffered serious injuries to his feet and may not be able to walk again; Daniel ben Nurit, who is 13 years old, and suffered lacerations and shrapnel injuries to his feet and legs; Sasson ben Shulamit, who suffered lower body injuries – this is the second time Sasson has been injured in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem; and several other people.
As I wrote last month, among those injured in the “small” bomb were six Americans, and a British woman was killed – but neither the American nor British media seem interested in mentioning them.
***
Israeli police search for clues in the aftermath of a Palestinian terror attack
Among my past articles about the forgotten survivors of terror attacks, please see this article in The Wall Street Journal.
EUROPEAN JEWS EXPRESS DISMAY OVER ASHTON’S LATEST BIASED REMARKS
A senior European Jewish leader has expressed dismay at what he called the latest “partisan and ignorant outburst” by EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Catherine Ashton of Britain, after she condemned Israeli counter-terrorism measures against Hamas rocket crews firing missiles at Israeli civilians, but did not properly condemn Hamas for launching waves of missiles at southern Israel in recent days.
“We are dismayed by the choice of words chosen by the European Union after the attacks against Israeli civilians and, in particular by the fact that the statement (by Ashton) omits any mention of the firing of an antitank missile on a school bus in southern Israel by Hamas,” one French Jewish leader said.
PHOTOS OF SCHOOL BOY VICTIM OF HAMAS ROCKET ATTACK ON ISRAELI SCHOOL BUS
[I sent this note to some people on the day it happened]
Since many foreign media have declined to print this, here are photos of the school bus hit by a Hamas rocket last Thursday (referred to at the end of the note above).
A 16-year-old boy, Daniel Viflic, was seriously wounded and remains on life support in intensive care. Luckily most of the schoolchildren had already got off the bus at previous stops by the time it was hit.
At least 55 other shells and rockets were fired into southern Israel from Gaza in a three hour period that afternoon, some targeting the ambulance crew who had come to try and save Daniel Viflic. During last weekend over 120 rockets were fired at civilians in Israel and tens of thousands of Israelis sought refuge in bomb shelters.
Some Palestinian rockets into Israel reached as far as the major southern city of Beersheba.
Today, Daniel Viflic’s condition worsened considerably and his status was upgraded to extremely critical at Beersheba hospital. Viflic suffered severe head wounds. He was en route to visit his grandmother when Hamas targeted him.
An Israeli spokesperson said that “the Kornet missile used by Hamas in the attack has a warhead capable of penetrating the armor of a modern tank. A school bus stood no chance against this advanced weapon. Though it hit the rear of the bus, it injured the driver and young passenger in the front. It was a miracle that the dozens of other children who had disembarked only minutes before were not killed, in what could have been the worst large-scale massacre of Israeli schoolchildren in years.
“The deliberate targeting of the school bus constitutes a war crime, one that should be condemned by the international community.”
Tom Gross adds: The Kornet is an advanced laser-guided anti-tank missile which can easily hit the specific target chosen by its operator. The bright yellow school bus, which travels the same route in Israel every day, was an easy target for Hamas.
IN WORLD FIRST, ISRAELI-PRODUCED IRON DOME INTERCEPTS ROCKETS
For the first time, some of the rockets from Gaza in recent days were intercepted by the new Israeli missile defense system known as the “Iron Dome”. Other countries around the world now say they wish to study the Israeli-produced Iron Dome.
The Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported over the weekend that WikiLeaks-revealed cables sent between Israeli and American intelligence officials estimate that in the next war between Israel and Hamas as many as 36,000 rockets will be fired at Israel, about 6,000 of which will be aimed at Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city.
***
A poll of 1,270 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem last week revealed that one-third of Palestinians supported the Itamar massacre last month in which an Israeli couple and their three young children had their throats slit, the Associated Press reports.
HAMAS TRIES TO EXPLAIN WHY IT HIT A SCHOOL BUS
In this Military Communiqué (from its slick European-funded, English language website), Hamas claims (wrongly) that all those injured by its various rockets attacks into southern Israel in recent days were “settlers”:
www.qassam.ps/news-4388-Resistance_hit_back_injures_two_Israeli_settlers.html
In fact none of those Israeli injured were settlers (and just in case any readers think Hamas is telling the truth on its website, “the Zionist entity” did not “target ambulance crews, press, mosques” last weekend, as claimed by Hamas).
ISRAEL TRIES TO AVOID NEW FLOTILLA CONFRONTATION
In spite of Israeli efforts to stop weapons’ smuggling into Gaza, huge amounts of arms continue to flow in, mainly from Egypt. There are also attempts to smuggle in missiles by sea, often in the guise of so-called humanitarian flotillas.
“Hamas weapons capability increased four-fold over last five years,” Ha’aretz reported last week, both in terms of numbers of rockets and their range.
A major new “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” hopes to reach the Hamas-controlled territory next month, but the Israeli navy is likely to intercept and search it to stop weapons from reaching Palestinian militants.
On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and asked that he try to stop the planned flotilla. The flotilla is being organized by “extremist Islamic elements whose aim is to create a provocation and bring about a conflagration,” Netanyahu told Ban.
Organizers of the flotilla said participants are expected from Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Philippines, Turkey, the U.S., Canada, Switzerland, the U.K., Italy, France, and Ireland, sailing on approximately 15 boats from a number of ports.
In the past Norway has been quite anti-Israel, but yesterday Norway’s foreign minister warned those thinking of joining next month’s planned Gaza flotilla “not to be exploited.” Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told the newspaper VG Nett that “everyone should be aware that” goods carried aboard the ship are already available in Gaza and will likely wind up in the hands of Hamas leadership. He said those interested in participating in the May flotilla are “in risk of being exploited by groups with different interests.”
ATTACK ON “HAMAS ARMS VEHICLE” IN SUDAN KILLS TWO
Two people were killed in an air attack on a car near Sudan’s main port last week. Israel is believed to be responsible although there has been no comment from Jerusalem.
The car was carrying sophisticated weaponry, believed to be destined for Hamas in Gaza.
Sudanese police said a missile fired from the sea struck the moving vehicle in a precise hit, destroying the arsenal of weapons inside and killing the two occupants. The Arabic TV station Al Arabiya reported that one of the occupants was a top Hamas commander.
In 2009, a 23-truck convoy of arms smugglers was hit by unidentified aircraft in Sudan, a strike that some reports alleged was carried out by Israel. (For more on that, please see the dispatch titled “Israel’s Sudan strike targeted weapons capable of hitting Tel Aviv and Dimona”.)
Last month, Egyptian forces blocked a five-vehicle weapons convoy trying to cross the border from Sudan.
ISRAELIS, IRANIANS WORKING SIDE BY SIDE IN JAPAN
Israel was one of the first and most active countries in coming to the assistance of victims of last month’s devastating Tsunami and earthquake in Japan, as reported in the article in The Toronto Star (below). (Within 24 hours of the tsunami Israel had sent more than 50 doctors, 32 tons of equipment, and 18 tons of humanitarian aid, including 10,000 coats, 6,000 gloves and 150 portable toilets.)
But one underreported oddity is that one of the teams of Israeli medical volunteers helping uncover bodies in the Japanese coast found themselves working together with a group from Iran.
“It was only while we were working that we noticed the Iranian flag flying over the food station,” said Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, the head of the delegation made up of ZAKA volunteers from Israel. “After the initial embarrassment on both sides, we all put our political views to the side in order to carry out our shared humanitarian effort.”
Iran has armed and funded the Islamic militia Hamas and Hizbullah that have repeatedly carried out terror attacks on Israeli civilians, and the Iranian president has called for the destruction of Israel.
IRAN SAYS IT MIGHT WIPE ZEROS OFF ITS CURRENCY IN EFFORT TO CURB INFLATION
In an attempt to bring down the appearance of inflation without actually stabilizing or lowering prices, Iran’s finance minister, Shamseddin Hoseini, told the state-run IRNA news agency that the rial will soon lose three or even four of its zeros. He said the change would simplify business transactions.
The U.S. dollar currently buys about 10,000 Iranian rials, so even small purchases now cost thousands of rials.
WASHINGTON QUIETLY HALTS ARMS DELIVERIES TO LEBANON
The U.S. has quietly frozen weapon shipments to Lebanon’s armed forces following the collapse of the country’s pro-Western government in January. The Obama administration seems to be seriously concerned about the increasing role of the Iranian proxy militia Hizbullah in Lebanon. It fears that Hizbullah is becoming so powerful it may even take over the Lebanese armed forces.
Hizbullah, which is also backed by the Assad regime in Syria, is classified by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.
The Daily Star in Beirut reported that the arms freeze has been approved by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, but the decision hasn’t been publicly announced because of concerns the disclosure could interfere with delicate internal negotiations in Lebanon over a new government’s makeup and policies.
Defense officials said the U.S. is continuing to provide training and nonlethal assistance to the Lebanese military, describing the ties that are active as “robust.”
Since 2006, the U.S. has provided more than $720 million in support to the Lebanese military, including equipment and advanced training.
U.S. LAWYERS TO SUE GOLDSTONE OVER GAZA REPORT REVERSAL
A group of U.S. lawyers has announced plans to sue Judge Richard Goldstone following his acknowledgment that Israel had not intentionally targeted civilians during Operation Cast Lead, nearly two years after he claimed they had done so in a report that became a media and political sensation around the world.
The civil lawsuit, to be filed in a Manhattan court, will call on the South African judge to make a public apology to Israel for the allegations, as well as pay a symbolic amount in damages for causing a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.
Judge Goldstone said last week in The Washington Post that he no longer stood by central claims of his controversial report into IDF conduct in Gaza.
* For background, please see last week’s dispatch: Goldstone’s remarkable about-face (& Jeremy Bowen: Mugged by reality)
EGYPTIAN ARMY VOWS THAT EGYPT WON’T SUCCUMB TO ISLAMIC RULE
The Egyptian army won’t allow the country to be ruled by Islamists, it said in a statement. “Egypt will not be governed by another Khomeini,” the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces said.
Egyptian liberal and secular groups, as well as Western powers, are concerned about the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and other more extreme Islamic groups in Egypt.
The military, which controls the transitional government now in power, reiterated its commitment to transfer power to civilian rule after legislative and presidential elections this fall, and to respect freedom of expression.
However, they have been cracking downs on protestors in recent days. On Saturday, the army beat to death two pro-democracy activists in central Cairo who had called on corrupt Egyptian generals to be investigated for wrongdoings.
And yesterday, an Egyptian military court sentenced a blogger, Maikel Nabil, to three years in prison for criticizing the country’s military rulers. The verdict is sending panic waves through Egypt’s blogging community, many of whom had expected the army-led transitional government to usher in a new era of freedom.
* For background, please see last week’s dispatch: Egypt: The Hangover begins (& Egypt Air wipes Israel off the map)
***
I attach four pieces below. The final one is by Michael Young (the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star), who is a subscriber to this email list. Young writes on “The shameful Arab silence on Syria”. I published a piece last week on the shameful Western silence on Syria, which I sent to some people but not to the full list. It can be read here.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
FULL ARTICLES
ISRAEL’S LEFT NEEDS TO WISE UP TO MIDDLE EAST REALITY
Israel’s left needs to wise up to Middle East reality
How would the left have reacted had Juliano Mer-Khamis been murdered by Jews?
By Ari Shavit
Ha’aretz
April 7, 2011
It is not hard to imagine what would have happened had Juliano Mer-Khamis been murdered by Jews. The murder would receive a huge headline in Ha’aretz. Under the headline, five furious analyses would appear – one of them mine.
The writers would harshly denounce the Jewish murderousness and urge a culture war against Jewish fanaticism. Others would demand not to repeat the mistake made after Baruch Goldstein’s murderous rampage and to evacuate the settlements immediately. Others would demand to look into the goings on in the Hesder yeshivas, which offer Torah studies alongside military service, and the state-run religious education system.
Selected racist quotes would be pulled out of primitive rabbis’ writings, historic comparisons would be made to Emil Gruenzweig’s murder and Yitzhak Rabin’s murder and Martin Luther King’s murder.
Within a day Mer-Khamis would become an icon. On Saturday night thousands would gather holding torches to mourn the peace hero and rise up against the powers of darkness. Mer-Khamis’ murder at the hands of Jews would rebuild the left, reunite it and send it to a new battle against murderous Jewish fascism.
But Juliano Mer-Khamis was not murdered by Jews. So instead of a huge headline he got a story below the fold. Instead of five angry essays, he received only one (beautiful) eulogy.
Nobody talked about racism, fanaticism and fascism. Nobody spoke of education systems spreading hatred and about primitive clergy. Mer-Khamis did not become an icon and thousands of people did not demonstrate.
Mer’s murder raised neither protest nor outrage nor holy rage. The Israeli left, which knows exactly what to do with a murder by Jews, does not know what to do with murder by Palestinians.
The murder of a peace hero by Palestinians has no place on the left’s emotional and ideological map. The murder of a freedom hero by Palestinians is a dogma-undermining, paradigm-subverting event for the left. Mer-Khamis’ murder by Palestinians is a murder doomed for repression.
This is a deep, broad issue that goes beyond just the Israeli left. One of the outstanding characteristics of Western enlightenment in the 21st century is its inability to denounce forces of evil in the Arab-Muslim world. Western enlightenment likes to criticize the West. It especially likes to criticize the West’s allies in the East. But when it runs into evil originating in the East, it falls silent.
It does not know how to deal with it. It is easy to come out against pro-Western Hosni Mubarak, but hard to come out against the Muslim Brotherhood. It is easy to come out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but hard to come out against Bashar Assad. The enlightened West is incapable of fighting Iran’s Ahmadinejad as it fought against America’s Bushes, South Africa’s Botha or Serbia’s Milosevic.
The result is a long line of distortions. The blood of the Marmara flotilla fatalities is thicker than the blood of those who were murdered and hung in Iran. The blood of the people killed in Gaza is thicker than the blood of those killed in Damascus and Dara’a.
A post-colonial complex makes Western enlightenment systematically ignore injustices caused by anti-Western forces. Thus it loses the ability to see historic reality as a whole, in all its complexity. It also makes it act unfairly and unjustly.
It discriminates between different kinds of evil, different kinds of blood and different kinds of victims. It treats third-world societies as though they are not subject to universal moral norms.
It is not yet clear yet who murdered Mer-Khamis. The motive could have been financial, personal, religious or cultural. But it is clear he was not murdered for being an occupier, or an oppressor or a settler. Mer was murdered because he was a free man, who spread freedom in a society that is not free.
This is the hard truth we must deal with. This is the hard truth we must look at straight in the eye. The Western enlightenment and the Israeli left cannot continue to ignore the dark side of Middle Eastern reality.
SO WHERE DOES A NATION GO TO GET ITS REPUTATION BACK?
Israel and the UN
Editorial
Chicago Tribune
April 4, 2011
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-goldstone-20110404,0,5871957.story
In 2009, a United Nations panel led by Richard Goldstone issued a 575-page bombshell of a report. It accused Israel of committing war crimes against the Palestinians in a three-week Gaza invasion. The Goldstone report was a diplomatic bonanza for Israel’s enemies around the world. The report was so damning that some Israeli officials stopped traveling abroad for fear they’d be arrested for war crimes.
On Friday, Goldstone wrote an op-ed about his report in The Washington Post that can be summarized in two words: Never mind.
“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document,” he wrote. Goldstone said he no longer believed one of the report’s most incendiary charges: that Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians during its invasion of Gaza.
So where does a nation go to get its reputation back?
Israeli leaders have complained for years that the UN is biased against the Jewish state, that it judges almost every action of Israel through a Palestinian prism.
And now … evidence. Not just a disastrously wrong report. But evidence that the entire enterprise was skewed against Israel from the start.
Skewed is not our word. It’s Goldstone’s. He writes that he “insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel.”
He writes that he “had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the UN Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”
That should surprise no one. Israel has hardly been blameless in the decades of Middle East strife, but the UN human rights panel has overlooked slaughter and genocide in places around the world and focused almost exclusively, year after year, on Israel’s alleged misdeeds. The human rights panel once elevated Libya to leadership and coddled the worst human rights abusers around the globe, including Iran and Sudan.
Goldstone was supposed to be the exception: He wasn’t believed to be reflexively anti-Israel.
How did he get it so wrong? Goldstone regrets that his panel didn’t have “Israeli evidence that has emerged” since the report’s publication “explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.”
So absent facts, the Goldstone panel reached the conclusion that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians, a sensational accusation. We hope Goldstone continues to elaborate on whatever pressures or politics led to the conclusion.
So what do we know?
Israel didn’t target civilians. Hamas did. It sent hundreds of rockets into Israeli towns.
The report called on Israel and Hamas to investigate their soldiers’ actions. Israel did. Hamas didn’t. A Hamas official told The New York Times that there was nothing to investigate because firing rockets to kill civilians in Israel is “a right of self-defense…”
The UN should formally retract the Goldstone report. But it can’t stop there. The UN needs to acknowledge that it has not been an honest broker in the Middle East. It needs to acknowledge that its human rights panel continues to be an embarrassment that greatly undermines the standing of the world body.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the UN may vote this fall to recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The UN would declare the boundaries —and that would put Israel in the position of occupying land belonging to a sovereign state and member of the UN.
The UN does not have the moral authority for such a declaration. It has not been an honest broker. Not even close.
“FORTY COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD APPROACHED JAPAN AND OFFERED THEIR ASSISTANCE. WE WERE THE ONLY ONES TO COME”
Israeli field hospital carries on inspiring work in Japan
By Catherine Porter
Toronto Star
April 4, 2011
www.thestar.com/news/world/article/969049--porter-israeli-field-hospital-carries-on-inspiring-work-in-japan
Three days after the earthquake levelled Port-au-Prince last year, a foreign medical team set up a hospital in a soccer field with equipment and supplies unheard of in the rest of the broken city – an X-ray machine, a blood lab, an ultrasound and two incubators for babies who were born prematurely to traumatized mothers.
Now, at the cusp of Japan’s ground zero, where a whole village was dragged out to sea, the same foreign team has erected seven medical buildings. Equipped with many of the same supplies used by the team in Haiti, they are helping hundreds of survivors.
Your guess: the medical team comes from the United States? France? Canada?
No.
Israel.
“Forty countries around the world approached Japan and offered their (medical) assistance. We were the only ones to come,” Dr. Ofer Merin told me by phone from the remains of Minami-Sanriku, seven hours north of Tokyo. “It’s a real privilege.”
Merin is a cardiac surgeon at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zadek hospital. He is also the chief of the field hospital for the Israeli Defense Force’s reserve unit. The field hospital, he told me, is on call for national emergencies and since 1979, has travelled internationally on emergency humanitarian missions.
Japan is their 12th mission.
“If you drop our group in the middle of a desert we can work,” says Merin, who spent two years in Toronto a decade ago, working at Sunnybrook hospital.
I heard about the Israeli hospital in Port-au-Prince, but never saw it. It was mythical — while around most of the city, local and foreign doctors were reduced to civil war-era surgeries, cutting off infected legs with razor blades and no anesthetic, the Israelis offered their patents respirators and blood transfusions in specialized tent wards. A CBS reporter called it “the Rolls-Royce of emergency medical care.”
It was the first foreign field hospital on the ground — landing in the middle of the night three days after the Jan. 12 quake, and operating six hours later. Over the next 10 days, the medical team treated 1,100 patients and conducted 242 surgeries.
The situation is very different in Japan, Merin said. Arriving a couple weeks after a four-storey wall of water swept away more than half of Minami-Sanriku’s 16,000 people, the 50-member medical team isn’t dealing with emergencies.
Instead they’ve set up a clinic with expertise not easily found in rural Japan — gynecology, urology, pediatrics, ophthalmology. Given the gasoline shortage, an obstetrical team has been visiting pregnant women in the scattered emergency shelters, ultrasound in hand.
One of Merin’s colleagues, Dr. David Raveh, writes movingly in his blog about the director of the town’s old-age home who appeared at the clinic with her Japanese doctor, two weeks after the receding wave sucked at her legs.
“What strength she had, to overcome the wild shearing force of waves, holding onto a pole,” he writes.
She thought nothing of the cuts on her legs, tending instead to the elderly residents. Now her jaw and neck were tense, her doctor told him.
“I cut him short after his second sentence, my eyes widening. Tetanus, I said decisively to her doctor.”
To each of these patients, the Israelis’ presence must offer some solace. But the greater work being done is diplomatic, Merin says.
“There was a law in Japan that stated non-Japanese people were not allowed to treat the Japanese on their ground,” Merin says. “Hopefully, this will open their minds, that countries should assist one another.”
The Israeli mission follows the Jewish concept of tikkun olam — to repair the world. But Merin has his own personal reasons for helping. In 1942, the Nazis entered a Polish village and loaded the Jews onto boxcars bound for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Sensing their impending doom, one couple slipped their 8-year-old son off the train. A Catholic woman living in one village over hid him in her cupboard for 18 months.
“Once the war ended, he got out and eventually went to Israel. He got married and had three sons. I’m the second,” said Merin, 50, who has four children of his own now.
“In the Talmud it says, if you save one life, it’s like saving the entire world.”
THE SHAMEFUL ARAB SILENCE ON SYRIA
The shameful Arab silence on Syria
By Michael Young
Beirut Daily Star
April 7, 2011
Many publicists have excitedly described the liberating promise of Arab satellite stations. However, the stations’ utterly inadequate coverage of the current upheaval in Syria, particularly the Syrian regime’s ruthless suppression of peaceful demonstrations, belies that optimistic view. Their failing can be measured in human lives.
Why have the major satellite stations, Al-Jazeera but also Al-Arabiya, been so profoundly reluctant to highlight the Syrian protests? Why have stations like Al-Hurra and the BBC Arabic channel been so much more imaginative, thorough, and professional in pursuing the story? By way of an answer you might hear that the Syrian authorities control journalists very tightly; that there is no independent footage to broadcast; that those opposed to the regime risk arrest when they are interviewed; and so on. Perhaps, but that’s not convincing.
Take last Friday, when Syrian protesters had called for a “day of the martyrs,” in honor of those gunned down by the Syrian security forces in Deraa and elsewhere. The demonstrations were to begin after noon prayers, at around 1:30 p.m. Yet for two good hours, both Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya relegated the Syria story to a brief and distant third in their broadcasts, focusing instead on Yemen and Libya. And when the day was over and the bodies had been counted, Syria was still not a priority. Al-Jazeera’s nightly news satisfied itself with showing telephone videos from the protests, with little commentary.
Since then things have only gotten worse. It has become a rule of thumb for the stations that when they speak to someone opposed to the Syrian regime, invariably off camera, they must also talk to a pro-regime propagandist, usually some member of Parliament or a political analyst. In journalistic terms, hearing both sides of a story is reasonable. Yet how little that rule was applied in Egypt by the same stations during the movement against Hosni Mubarak. And if the Syrian authorities are imposing that stations contact their devotees, interviewers should at least make this known to viewers.
In his speech last week before the Syrian Parliament, Bashar Assad bluntly accused the Arab satellite stations of inciting the rallies against his regime. But what the Syrian president was really doing was sending a message to the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Qatar principally, informing them that if they really wanted him to stay in office, they were better off keeping a lid on their satellite journalists. That warning, or threat, appears to have had an impact. Despite purported disagreements within Al-Jazeera (and, I suspect, similar debates at Al-Arabiya) over how to handle Syria, what is going on in the country continues to be treated with troubling reserve.
Nothing prevents these stations from borrowing much more from social media to strengthen their anemic reporting. Twitter is an invaluable resource for keeping pace with the hourly specifics of the Syrian revolt. Facebook is even more essential for the protesters themselves, as they plan their next move. Not surprisingly, quite a few Syrians posting on the site have expressed outrage with the way the satellite stations, Al-Jazeera in particular, have ignored their plight.
Showing telephone videos of people marching, or being shot at, is useful. However, without a context, without an informed explanation of what is going on and what viewers are seeing; without playing these videos on air to Syrian officials and demanding that they explain the murder of unarmed civilians expressing themselves peacefully, the power of media is stunted. One gets a nagging sense that the coverage on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya is an outcome of political compromises, but also, in Al-Jazeera’s case, of the station’s ideological agenda.
To toss Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya into the same basket is entirely justified here, because both Saudi Arabia and Qatar share a desire to avert a breakdown in Syria, fearing that chaos might ensue. Their views are echoed by a majority of Gulf states, whose leaders have called Assad lately to express their backing. Nor is there any quarrel with this in Washington, where the Obama administration has been baldly two-faced – praising itself for preventing human rights abuses by the Gadhafi regime in Libya while offering only pro forma criticism of the shocking number of deaths in Syria.
The hypocrisy of Al-Jazeera, the most popular Arab satellite station, is especially worthy of mention. In Egypt, Libya or Yemen, for instance, the station devotes, or has devoted, long segments allowing viewers to call in and express disapproval of their leaders alongside their high hopes for the success of the revolution. In Syria, nothing.
The reality is that the political allegiances and the self-image of Al-Jazeera make this thorny. Syria is part of the “resistance axis,” and the downfall of its regime would only harm Hezbollah and Hamas. The same lack of enthusiasm characterized the station’s coverage of Lebanon’s Independence Intifada against Syria in 2005. It is easy to undermine Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi, and Hosni Mubarak, each of whom in his own way is or was a renegade to the Arabs. But to go after Bashar Assad means reversing years of Al-Jazeera coverage sympathetic to the Syrian leader. Rather conveniently, refusing to do so dovetails with the consensus in the Arab political leadership.
So the Syrians find themselves largely abandoned today, their struggle not enjoying the customary Al-Jazeera treatment – high in emotion and electric in the slogans of mobilization. The televised Arab narrative of liberty has not quite avoided Syria, but nor has it integrated the Syrians’ cause. As the Arab stations weigh what to do next, they may still hope that the Syrian story will disappear soon, and their duplicity with it. Shame on them.
Anti-government protesters march in Banias, Syria. The Arabic banner at center reads: "All of us would die for our country.”
The following comment piece appears in The National Post (Canada), The Australian and The Commentator (UK). It has also been picked up on several leading Lebanese websites, such as The Beirut Spring and Ya Libnan, and American ones including Hot Air, Topix and elsewhere.
THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS?
Syria’s Assad deserves the Gaddafi treatment
By Tom Gross
The National Post (Canada) / The Australian / The Commentator (UK)
April 3, 2011
Of all the uprisings sweeping the Arab world this year, the most surprising so far is the one in Syria. Surprising because, with Saddam Hussein now gone, Syria is the Arab world’s most ruthless and brutal dictatorship.
You have to be very brave indeed to stand up to the regime. (It is also one of the world’s most racist, denying millions of Syrian Kurds citizenship). Only if a serious uprising were to break out among Sunni Muslims in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, would that prove an even greater surprise.
Following mass protests in over a dozen other Arab countries in the last three months, the fear factor in Syria has finally been broken too, with thousands of ordinary Syrians taking to the streets in recent weeks calling for democratic elections and an end to Syria’s emergency law which has now been in place for 48 dark years.
Last Friday at least another 10 Syrian civilians were killed by regime snipers taking aim at them from rooftops. And, according to the BBC, other Syrian civilians were beaten to death by security forces in two mosques that same day. This follows other protestors who had sought refuge in a mosque in another part of Syria being killed there two weeks earlier.
Al Jazeera and other media report that in the past month hundreds of Syrian civilians have now been shot dead in cold blood. And an Arabic-language page on Facebook titled “Syrian Revolution Against Bashar al-Assad” has attracted more than 120,000 supporters.
Hafez Assad enjoys a chuckle with Gaddafi in 1977
With the situation deteriorating there by the day, and with the West showing a new resolve against another Arab dictator they had cozied up to in recent years -- Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi -- one might have expected a tough dose of realism from Western leaders.
So it was amazing -- and depressing -- to hear U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week again describe President Bashar al-Assad as a “reformer”. A “murderer” would be a more appropriate description.
Clinton might want to take a look at the findings of her own state department’s most recent (2009) report on Syria. It says the Syrian government and security forces “committed numerous serious human rights abuses, and the human rights situation worsened.” It speaks of “arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life” and “enforced disappearances” and the vanishing of “an estimated 17,000 persons.”
The State Department report describes the methods of torture inflicted on those unfortunate to find themselves in Syria’s prisons. Among them: “electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim was suspended from the ceiling; other times on the soles of the feet.”
In defending Assad, Hillary Clinton has put herself in the same camp as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who last week called Assad his “brother” and a “humanist.” (Chavez has also come to the defense of Gaddafi.)
The media have hardly been any better. On CNN last week, I heard Assad being described as “attractive”. And in a radio panel discussion on the BBC World Service, all three participants suggested Assad wasn’t that bad. Last month’s Vogue profile about Assad’s wife was titled “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert”. Previously the Huffington Post ran a spread on “Our favorite Asma looks.”
Of course, praising the Syrian dictator and his family is nothing new. Three years ago, at a lunch I attended in London, William Hague, who is now Britain’s Foreign Secretary (foreign minister), went out of his way to praise Assad. (This is the same Britain that Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, a tireless campaigner for a two state solution, can’t visit for fear of being arrested on trumped-up “war crimes” charges.)
A year earlier, Hague had criticized Israel for using “disproportionate force” as rockets were raining down on Israel from Lebanon. But in the past month, I haven’t heard Hague say much about “disproportionate force” in Syria.
Indeed this might be a good time for the British government to acknowledge Israeli restraint. In recent weeks Israel has been the victim of a series of terror attacks, including bombings, stabbings and dozens of rockets fired at towns and villages throughout southern Israel. In the face of this onslaught, however, the Israeli government has shown considerable restraint, keen to avoid damaging peace prospects. Perhaps it is time for the British and other governments to show Israel a measure of sympathy, rather than stick up for the Syrian regime.
Were the Assad regime to be replaced by a more responsible one, this would be a big gain for the West, for ordinary Syrians and for the whole Arab world. Syria is the Iranian regime’s most important Arab ally. It has also been a key force in destabilizing neighbouring Lebanon as well as promoting the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza.
And unlike Libya of recent years, Syria has been actively working against Western interests. So why the reluctance to unambiguously denounce Assad by Western leaders? It's time we had an answer.
Tom Gross is the former Middle East correspondent for the (London) Sunday Telegraph.
VIDEOS AND REPORTS FROM THE SYRIAN UPRISING OF 2011
For videos from the Syrian uprising, please see:
* Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (Not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
And among other dispatches on the Syrian uprising:
* Syria: Where massacre is a family tradition
* They couldn’t even muster a press statement (& The Syria Lobby)
* As Syria slaughters hundreds, its ambassador gets wedding invite denied to Blair and Brown
* Peres tells Arab media “Assad must go,” and Netanyahu again hints at it too
* Is Richard Goldstone one of history’s biggest fools?
* Every foreign correspondent who subscribes to this list should try and make time to read Nick Cohen’s column, below.
CONTENTS
1. Goldstone: I was wrong to accuse Israel of intentionally killing civilians
2. NY Times today: “Head of U.N. Panel Regrets Saying Israel Intentionally Killed Gazans”
3. Is Richard Goldstone history’s biggest fool?
4. What is Goldstone talking about?
5. “HRW, other NGOs, must now consider their role in Goldstone’s wrongs”
6. Will J Street apologize too?
7. Update: BBC on Goldstone
8. Interesting tidbit of the week
9. “They missed the story” (By Nick Cohen, Standpoint magazine, April 2011)
GOLDSTONE: I WAS WRONG TO ACCUSE ISRAEL OF INTENTIONALLY KILLING CIVILIANS
By Tom Gross
For those who haven’t heard yet (and that probably means the thousands of subscribers to this list in Europe, where the media consistently refuses to run corrections when slanders they report about Israel are later proven to be fabrications), in an op-ed published yesterday in The Washington Post, Judge Richard Goldstone retracted his 2009 claims made in an official report on behalf of the UN, that Israel had committed “war crimes and possible crimes against humanity”.
At least The New York Times (to its credit) published a news story about Goldstone’s incredible about face in today’s edition (though on page 10, not on the front page, where Goldstone’s false allegations had been featured several times in the past). But don’t hold your breath for other prominent international media to inform their audience that they have been telling a pack of lies about Israel for the last two years. The BBC alone has referred to Goldstone literally thousands of times on its 24 hour radio and TV news channels in what appears to be an incessant campaign to smear Israel.
Judge Richard Goldstone
NY TIMES: HEAD OF U.N. PANEL REGRETS SAYING ISRAEL INTENTIONALLY KILLED GAZANS
Today’s New York Times story begins as follows:
Head of U.N. Panel Regrets Saying Israel Intentionally Killed Gazans
By Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner
The New York Times
April 3, 2011
www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/middleeast/03goldstone.html
JERUSALEM – The leader of a United Nations panel that investigated Israel’s invasion of Gaza two years ago has retracted the central and most explosive assertion of its report – that Israel intentionally killed Palestinian civilians there.
Richard Goldstone, an esteemed South African jurist who led the panel of experts that spent months examining the Gaza war, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Post that Israeli investigations into the conflict “indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”
“If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
His article, which was posted on The Post’s Web site on Friday night, follows a report submitted two weeks ago by a committee of independent experts led by Mary McGowan Davis, a former New York judge, that said that Hamas had not conducted any internal investigations of its own but that Israel had devoted considerable resources in looking into more than 400 accusations of misconduct.
Mr. Goldstone’s article fell like a bomb in Israel, where many people considered the 2009 publication of the Goldstone report as one of the most harmful events in recent years. It was viewed as offering spurious justification for damaging accusations, which Israelis considered to be part of a campaign to delegitimize the state and label it as a war criminal.
“We face three major strategic challenges,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last year, “the Iranian nuclear program, rockets aimed at our citizens and Goldstone.”
On Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu called on the United Nations to retract the entire Goldstone report. “Everything we said has proven to be true,” he said. “Israel did not intentionally harm civilians. Its institutions and investigative bodies are worthy, while Hamas intentionally fired upon innocent civilians and did not examine anything.”
“The fact that Goldstone backtracked,” Mr. Netanyahu added, “must lead to the shelving of this report once and for all.” The Goldstone report documented numerous examples of the mistreatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers, and he did not back away from those findings in his article in The Washington Post.
Efforts to reach Mr. Goldstone by telephone and e-mail on Saturday were unsuccessful. Farhan Haq, a deputy spokesman for the United Nations, said it was up to member nations to decide whether to re-evaluate the report.
IS RICHARD GOLDSTONE HISTORY’S BIGGEST FOOL?
Goldstone writing in The Washington Post, said:
“Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. ... In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise.”
As David Frum commented yesterday: “Ya think?”
WHAT IS GOLDSTONE TALKING ABOUT?
Goldstone in The Washington Post yesterday:
“We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
Tom Gross adds: For Goldstone to now suggest there is some new information or reasoning that made him retract accusations in his report, is disingenuous to say the least.
There is nothing that has been revealed since the publication of the report that wasn’t already known and well documented at the time.
“HRW, OTHER NGOS, MUST NOW CONSIDER THEIR ROLE IN GOLDSTONE’S WRONGS”
As past dispatches on this list have explained, in drafting his report, Goldstone relied heavily on partisan and highly selective information supplied by the George Soros-funded anti-Israel group, Human Rights Watch, and by the far leftist Israeli NGO, B’Tselem.
Today, in a press release, Professor Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, called on “the NGOs that were Goldstone’s main sources to withdraw and revise their discredited claims. NGO Monitor also notes that the Goldstone Report, published under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council in September 2009, has been used to justify a widespread campaign of demonizing Israel with false accusations of ‘war crimes’ and demands for BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions).
“Goldstone was misled by an orchestrated campaign led by powerful NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and Al Haq. As NGO Monitor demonstrated when the report was released, the so-called ‘evidence’ provided by these groups was at the core of the political war against Israel. Goldstone was taken in by crude manipulation.
“Goldstone’s reversal is further evidence of the central role played by Human Rights Watch in the exploitation of human rights and in promoting the bogus conclusions of the Goldstone Report. HRW employed Marc Garlasco, an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia, as its ‘senior military analyst’ on the Gaza war. Officials also held a fundraiser with Saudi elites in Riyadh – not to expose the daily human rights violations in Saudi Arabia – but to bolster Garlasco’s ‘findings’ on the conflict. Similarly, HRW embraced the Gaddafi regime and its supposed ‘Tripoli spring.’
“HRW has been at the forefront of demonization and distortions since the infamous 2001 Durban conference, and used its influence to promote Goldstone, who was on HRW’s board. The leaders of this organization’s Middle East division have a long history of involvement in hard-core anti-Israel advocacy. This immoral behavior led HRW’s founder, Robert Bernstein, to denounce his own organization, presaging Richard Goldstone’s reconsideration.
“Israeli NGOs funded by European governments and the New Israel Fund have also played a central role in advancing the one-sided agenda of repressive regimes at the UN Human Rights Council. They have continued to lobby at the U.S. Congress, European Parliament, and the Knesset. Goldstone’s Washington Post article has exposed these campaigns as nothing more than anti-Israel propaganda.”
***
(By way of full disclosure, I serve on the advisory board of NGO monitor.)
WILL J STREET APOLOGIZE TOO?
Tom Gross adds: It will be interesting to see whether the left wing American lobby group J Street – which did so much to promote the fabrications of the Goldstone Report among members of the U.S. Congress and in the American media – might also want to now consider apologizing for trying to mislead so many people.
It will also be interesting to see what others who have been using the Goldstone report to smear Israel, such as Peter Beinart, will now have to say.
So far, the founder of Human Rights Watch has denounced his organization for spreading falsehoods about Israeli actions in the Gaza war, and the author of the UN report condemning Israel has now condemned his own work. Will J Street and others follow?
***
The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv today termed Goldstone “a despicable and shameful” person.
And as Jeffrey Goldberg says of Goldstone in The Atlantic magazine: “Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.”
***
Among many previous dispatches on this weblist on the Goldstone report, please see:
Dachau survivor asks Goldstone: How dare you? (& Peres: Goldstone “legitimized terrorism”) (Sept. 21, 2009)
UPDATE: BBC ON GOLDSTONE
The BBC have now reported on their website about Goldstone’s retraction but they have used their new story to link back to their old coverage of his now discredited accusations against Israel: providing a link to an article on its “key findings” in order to re-promote what have now been admitted to be lies. Perhaps a new article with the same information recontextualized might have been more reasonable for the BBC, which styles itself as “the world’s largest news-gathering organization”.
INTERESTING TIDBIT OF THE WEEK
Yoram Cohen, the new head of Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, is an Afghan Jew.
The Shin Bet, also known as the Shabak, is one of three principal organizations of the Israeli Intelligence Community, alongside Aman (the military intelligence of the IDF) and the Mossad (responsible for overseas intelligence work).
“THEY MISSED THE STORY”
I attach the television column from this month’s Standpoint magazine in London. It should be required reading for everyone interested in the way the Western media covers and miscovers the Middle East.
(Incidentally, for those interested, the main editorial in this month’s Standpoint is about my father. )
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
Mugged by reality: Jeremy Bowen meets Colonel Gaddafi on an escorted press tour of Tripoli last month
They Missed the Story
By Nick Cohen
Television column
Standpoint magazine
April 2011
The former US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan composed an aphorism as he watched dictatorships pile opprobrium on democracies: “The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there.” Journalists, lawyers, academics and opposition politicians can investigate the injustices of democracies, and because they can investigate, injustice is kept in check. They cannot expose the greater atrocities of dictatorships because there is no freedom to report, and hence their greater crimes pass unnoticed.
I have my doubts about the universal jurisdiction of Moynihan’s Law – America was responsible for many great crimes while he was its good and faithful servant. But his insight explains why Jeremy Bowen is blinking at his cameraman in Tripoli, like some startled, uncomprehending mammal who has been shaken by the convulsions around him from a hibernation that has lasted for most of his career.
The BBC’s Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan. In journalistic language, it is showing they had committed the greatest blunder a reporter can commit: they missed the story. They thought that the problems of the Middle East were at root the fault of democratic Israel or more broadly the democratic West. They did not see and did not want to see that while Israelis are certainly the Palestinians’ problem – and vice versa – the problem of the subject millions of the Arab world was the tyranny, cruelty, corruption and inequality the Arab dictators enforced.
Put this starkly, it sounds as if the charges of double standards and anti-Semitism habitually directed at liberal Westerners are justified. But liberal prejudice – “anti-liberal prejudice” is a more accurate description – is a process as well as an ideology. Dictatorial states and movements shepherded liberal opinion into a one-way street by exploiting the logistics of news-gathering.
No news organisation in the West could base their main Middle Eastern bureau anywhere other than Israel, for the simple reason that it was the only free country with a free press, an independent judiciary and a constitution. Researchers and diplomats, as well as reporters, could phone or visit Palestinians in the occupied territories, as indeed could anyone else. Crucially, in an age dominated by images, television crews could get pictures. I am not saying that the authorities do not harass foreign or Israeli correspondents trying to report the undoubted violations of Palestinian rights, simply that they can report from Jerusalem but cannot from Damascus or Riyadh.
Even if the Baathists or Wahaabis let journalists in, they would place them under constant surveillance. Meanwhile any local invited to go on air to criticise his or her rulers would refuse because they knew that they would be running a terrible risk. Moynihan’s Law explains why you never hear a BBC or Sky anchor announce, “We are going live to hear our Saudi Arabian editor on the oppression of women in Mecca,” although if we are very lucky maybe we will soon.
At some level Westerners ought to have registered that millions of people must bite their tongues in the Middle East, and tempered their judgments accordingly. They mistook silence for compliance for a reason the late Fred Halliday, who never shirked from confronting the ugliness of the region, identified when he tried to stop his asinine colleagues at the London School of Economics endorsing the Libyan tyranny. Naturally, Saif Gaddafi could appear suave and at ease in Western circles after having unlimited amounts of stolen money lavished on his education. But, said Halliday, Westerners must realise that the function of plausible and well-groomed men from Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia was to impress foreigners by making “compromises with internal hardliners that serve to lessen external pressure”. Keep executions and police interrogations off YouTube and the prudent tyrant will be delighted by the readiness of Westerners to dismiss informed criticisms of his regime as neocon propaganda.
Instead of listening to Halliday, Anthony Giddens flew to meet Gaddafi and uttered the only remark anyone is likely to remember him for. Libya’s future was as a “Norway of North Africa: prosperous, democratic and free”. How the sight of the Saharan Scandinavians slaughtering their own civilians must perplex him.
Gaddafi was hardly an exception. From the moment he took power in Syria on the sole ground that he was his father’s son, Bashir al-Assad has heard politicians insist that he is a Baathist they can do business with. Only last month, Anna Wintour, a fashion magazine editor who could be a tenured LSE professor, allowed her Vogue staff to simper that Bashir’s wife was “the most magnetic of first ladies”. For all the Western fawning, the denial of Syrian liberty continued undiminished, but it could only be brought to the world by talking to exiles or explaining the totalitarian nature of the Baath Party, neither of which would have made good television.
Mohammed al-Jahmi, brother of the tortured Libyan dissident Fathi al-Jahmi, offered further explanation of fellow-travelling, after Human Rights Watch unctuously declared that Libya was advancing towards liberty under Gaddafi. Foreigners want access, he said, but the regime makes them wait for months for visas. When Human Rights Watch did gain entry, its emissaries were honoured guests, visiting an exotic country other journalists and campaigners could not enter. They were grateful, and psychologically dependent on their hosts. Everyone they met reinforced the regime’s message that life was good and getting better. “Somewhere along the way,” Mohammed said, “a fundamental truth gets lost: these dictators don’t change overnight.”
Logistics as much as infantile leftism produced the ideology of Middle Eastern commentary. Israel was the only story in the region journalists could cover daily. Rather than stop pretending to be omniscient and admit their limitations to the viewer, rather than show common human feeling and think of the silenced millions, journalists pretended that Israel was the region’s only story because it was the source of the region’s ills. The effect was anti-Semitic because the Jew once again was depicted as a supernatural figure with the diabolic power to create suffering on an epic scale. That narrow, prejudiced world of Middle Eastern commentary went up in flames when the Arab revolutionaries threw their first Molotovs. Whatever happens next, its loss will be no loss at all.
Please see also here.
This dispatch concerns Syria. It is a follow-up to previous dispatches about Syria.
* Jeff Jacoby: “If the U.S. has good reason to support the popular revolt in Libya – and Obama argued Monday night that there is ‘an important strategic interest in preventing Gaddafi from overrunning those who oppose him’ – it has considerably more reason to do so in Syria. If it made sense to speed the departure of Egypt’s Mubarak, accelerating the fall of Syria’s Assad should be an even higher priority. If North Africa was improved when the people of Tunisia threw off their dictator, the entire Arab world would be a healthier place if a Syrian uprising toppled Assad.”
* Charles Krauthammer: “Few things said by the Obama administration in its two years can match this one [Hillary Clinton’s description this week of Assad as a “reformer”] for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility… If John Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country. But Clinton speaks for the nation.”
* Tom Gross: Assad is no reformer. “Murderer” would be a more appropriate term. Yesterday at least another 10 Syrian civilians were killed by plainclothes snipers taking aim at them from rooftops. According to the BBC, other Syrian civilians were beaten to death by regime security forces in two Syrian mosques yesterday. Assad’s police state, which has one of the highest numbers of political prisoners in the world, and by the State Department’s own admission uses “electrical shocks, pulls out fingernails, burns genitalia, and forces objects into the rectum” of political prisoners, has gunned down hundreds of civilians in the last month. But CNN this week called Assad “attractive”.
* Jeff Jacoby: “Why has there been no White House denunciation of the murder of protesters by Syrian security forces? Why haven’t U.S. officials publicly exhorted the Security Council and the Arab League to take as strong a stand against Assad as they did against Gaddafi? Why hasn’t Obama ordered the new U.S. ambassador to Syria to demonstrate American solidarity with the demonstrators by traveling to Daraa, where dozens of them have been killed, and demanding an international investigation?”
* Claudia Rosett: “Long ago and far away, when the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos fell in the Philippines, the dictator’s wife, Imelda (pictured above), became an object of global ridicule for her extravagant wardrobe – especially her shoes. She had 2,700 pairs. When the Marcoses fled Manila for refuge in Hawaii in 1986, Imelda left her shoes. They ended up on display in Malacanang Palace, symbols of the excess with which dictators live the high life while beggaring their people. Which brings us to Syria, where today’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, has also become famous for her shoes. Asma and her shoes turned up in 2009 in a Huffington Post spread on ‘Our favorite Asma looks.’ The shoes were demurely hinted at in last month’s Vogue profile on ‘Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert’ – along with her simple necklace of Chanel agates, and her Louboutin silk handbag.”
* Michael Singh: “One of the key departures Obama made [from Bush] was in his approach toward Syria. Rather than continuing to pressure the regime, he returned to the policy of engaging Syria practiced by past administrations. After two years, this approach has not only been unsuccessful, it was flawed in its conception. There is little reason to believe that Assad is truly interested in a Syrian-Israeli peace; Syria’s state of war with Israel provides his justification for permanent ‘emergency laws,’ and the relations with Iran and Hizbullah which he would need to sacrifice to make a deal profit his regime greatly. A more creative approach is needed, which should include reinvigorated economic and political pressure using sanctions and support for Syrian democracy activists.”
CONTENTS
1. Assad is no reformer
2. Maybe Clinton wants to read her own state department’s annual report on Syria?
3. “Electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia”
4. Praising the Syrian dictator is nothing new for British officials
5. Thanks to Syria, Hizbullah has 1,000 military facilities in southern Lebanon
6. Video: Protesters in Syria chanting “No to Hizbullah, no to Iran!”
7. “Syria’s Reformer?” (By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, April 1, 2011)
8. “Shaking the house that Assad built” (By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, March 30, 2011)
9. “What should Asma wear to the revolution?” (By Claudia Rosett, Pajamas Media, March 31)
10. “A White House divided on Syria” (By Michael Singh, Foreign Policy, March 31, 2011)
ASSAD IS NO REFORMER
By Tom Gross
Of all the uprisings sweeping the Arab world so far this year, the most surprising is that in Syria. In spite of the foolish remarks made by American, British and French officials over the last two years praising the Assad family, Syria is one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships (and also one of the most racist, denying millions of Syrian Kurds citizenship, as I have noted in past dispatches).
According to Al Jazeera and other media, hundreds of Syrian civilians have now been shot dead in cold blood in the past month. Yesterday, at least another 10 peaceful protestors were killed by plainclothes snipers taking aim at them from rooftops.
An Arabic-language page on Facebook titled “Syrian Revolution Against Bashar al-Assad” has well over 100,000 supporters. Yet, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again gave Assad her seal of approval last week, calling him a “reformer.” A murderer would be a more appropriate description.
MAYBE CLINTON WANTS TO READ HER OWN STATE DEPARTMENT’S ANNUAL REPORT ON SYRIA?
In defending Assad, Hillary Clinton has put herself in the same camp as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who this week called Assad his “brother” and a “humanist.” (Chavez has also come to the defense of Gaddafi.)
Clinton might want to take a look at the findings of her own state department’s most recent annual report on human rights in Syria. It says the Syrian government and members of its security forces “committed numerous serious human rights abuses, and the human rights situation worsened.” It speaks of “arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life” and “enforced disappearances” and the vanishing of “an estimated 17,000 persons.”
“ELECTRICAL SHOCKS; PULLING OUT FINGERNAILS; BURNING GENITALIA”
The 2009 State Department report describes the methods of torture inflicted on the inmates of Syria’s prisons. Among them: “electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim was suspended from the ceiling; other times on the soles of the feet.”
Syria’s emergency law has now lasted for 48 brutal years. And unlike Libya of recent years, Syria is actively and currently working against Western interests: building nuclear reactors, supporting Hizbullah and Hamas, helping Iran, choking Lebanon, and so on.
PRAISING THE SYRIAN DICTATOR IS NOTHING NEW FOR BRITISH OFFICIALS
Three years ago, at a lunch I attended in London, William Hague, who is now Britain’s Foreign Secretary (minister), went out of his way to praise Bashar al-Assad. (This is the same Britain that Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, a tireless campaigner for a two state solution, can’t visit for fear of being arrested on trumped-up “war crimes” charges.)
A year earlier Hague had criticized Israel for using “disproportionate force” as rockets were raining down on Israel from Lebanon. But in the past month, I haven’t heard Hague say Syria has used “disproportionate force.”
Indeed this might be a good time for the British government to acknowledge Israeli restraint. In recent weeks Israel has been the victim of a series of attacks, including bombings, stabbings and dozens of rockets fired at towns and villages throughout southern Israel. In the face of this onslaught, however, the Israeli government has shown considerable restraint, keen to avoid damaging peace prospects. Perhaps it is time for the British and other governments to show Israel a measure of sympathy.
THANKS TO SYRIA, HIZBULLAH HAS 1,000 MILITARY FACILITIES IN SOUTHERN LEBANON
Two days ago the Israeli authorities published maps showing over 1,000 Hizbullah military installations (including 550 underground bunkers) in southern Lebanon, hundreds of which were in built-up civilian areas, including inside schools.
Most of these weapons have been supplied with the aid of Syria and Iran.
Thanks to Syria and Iran, Hizbullah now has over 40,000 rockets and missiles, including several hundred long-range missiles that can hit Tel Aviv.
PROTESTERS IN SYRIA CHANTING “NO TO HIZBULLAH, NO TO IRAN!”
***
I attach four articles below. The writers of all four (Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, Claudia Rosett and Michael Singh) are longtime subscribers to this list.
[All notes above by Tom Gross]
* See also: “Harvard, too, teams up with the dictator’s wife” (March 9, 2011)
ARTICLES
“FEW CAN MATCH THIS REMARK FOR MORAL BANKRUPTCY”
Syria’s “Reformer”?
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
April 1, 2011
Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.
– Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27
Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.
First, it’s demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father’s dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment – the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he’d been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.
Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.
Second, it’s morally reprehensible. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform – and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line – “We are all reformers,” Assad told parliament – and undermining the demonstrators’ cause.
Third, it’s strategically incomprehensible. Sometimes you cover for a repressive ally because you need it for U.S. national security. Hence our muted words about Bahrain. Hence our slow response on Egypt. But there are rare times when strategic interest and moral imperative coincide completely. Syria is one such – a monstrous police state whose regime consistently works to thwart U.S. interests in the region.
During the worst days of the Iraq War, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hizbullah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.
Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.
And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind them. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them.
Why? Because Obama wanted to remain “engaged” with the mullahs – so that he could talk them out of their nuclear weapons. We know how that went.
The same conceit animates his Syria policy – keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hizbullah.
Another abject failure. Syria has contemptuously rejected Obama’s blandishments – obsequious visits from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and the return of the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since the killing of Hariri. Assad’s response? An even tighter and more ostentatious alliance with Hizbullah and Iran.
Our ambassador in Damascus should demand to meet the demonstrators and visit the wounded. If refused, he should be recalled to Washington. And rather than “deplore the crackdown,” as did Clinton in her walk-back, we should be denouncing it in forceful language and every available forum, including the U.N. Security Council.
No one is asking for a Libya-style rescue. Just simple truth-telling. If Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country. But Clinton speaks for the nation.
“SO WHY DOESN’T WASHINGTON SAY SO?”
Shaking the house that Assad built
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
March 30, 2011
If the United States has good reason to support the popular revolt in Libya – and President Obama argued Monday night that there is “an important strategic interest in preventing [Moammar] Gaddafi from overrunning those who oppose him” – it has considerably more reason to do so in Syria. If it made sense to speed the departure of Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak, accelerating the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad should be an even higher priority. If North Africa was improved when the people of Tunisia threw off their dictator, the entire Arab world would be a healthier place if a Syrian uprising toppled Assad.
So why doesn’t Washington say so?
Of all the waves of protest to wash over the Middle East in recent months, none has come as a greater surprise – and none should be more welcome – than the turbulence in Syria. Forty years under the fearsome rule of the Assad clan were supposed to have crushed the Syrians’ will to resist. Though Bashar’s brutality has not yet exceeded that of his father – in 1982 Hafez al-Assad annihilated some 25,000 civilians in the city of Hama, then literally paved over their remains – his own reign has nevertheless been a horror-show of repression, torture, assassination, disappearances, and the near-total denial of civil and political liberties.
The result of all this was said to be a population too intimidated to make trouble. “Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt,” explained an article in Foreign Affairs this month, “the regime and its loyal forces have been able to deter all but the most resolute and fearless oppositional activists.” Consequently, the current upwelling of protest would “largely pass Syria by.”
That essay, “The Sturdy House That Assad Built,” appeared on March 7. Yet in the weeks since, thousands of Syrians have taken to the streets – from Daraa in the south to the Latakia on the Mediterranean, and even in Damascus and Aleppo – to cry out for freedom and reform. The dictator’s troops have killed scores of protesters – more than 150, according to some accounts. In the town of Sanamin, witnesses told Al Jazeera of seeing 20 peaceful demonstrators gunned down in under 15 minutes.
Far from stifling dissent, however, the regime’s thuggishness has only aroused more of it. On Facebook, an Arabic-language page titled “Syrian Revolution Against Bashar al-Assad” has drawn nearly 100,000 supporters. Yesterday, the Syrian cabinet resigned. The House That Assad Built may not be so sturdy after all.
At a moment like this, the Obama administration should be taking every reasonable step to encourage the Syrian uprising and undermine the regime. In his remarks on Libya the other night, the president cheered “the fact that history is on the move in the Middle East and North Africa,” and promised (in words reminiscent of his predecessor) that “wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States.”
If Obama is serious, why has there been no White House denunciation of the murder of protesters by Syrian security forces? Why haven’t U.S. officials publicly exhorted the Security Council and the Arab League to take as strong a stand against Assad as they did against Gaddafi? Why hasn’t the president ordered Ambassador Robert Ford, the new U.S. envoy to Syria, to demonstrate American solidarity with the demonstrators by traveling to Daraa, where dozens of them have been killed, and demanding an international investigation?
Bashar al-Assad can accurately be called many things, but “reformer” is not one of them.
Rather than intensify the pressure on a regime that is every bit as odious as Gaddafi’s, and that arguably has more American blood on its hands that any other government in the Arab world, the Obama administration is bending over backward to reassure Assad. On the Sunday talk shows, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actually gave Assad her seal of approval. “Members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” she said. Reformer! Her characterization would be hilarious if it weren’t so sickeningly perverse.
Assad is no reformer. He is a totalitarian criminal and an enemy of the United States, and his downfall should be an explicit American aim. Surely we owe the tens of thousands of Syrians bravely confronting their vicious government at least the same encouragement we gave Mubarak’s opponents in Egypt. All Americans, from the White House down, should be cheering as Syria’s people shake the House That Assad Built. Nothing could be more salutary than to see that awful, bloodstained dungeon come tumbling down at last.
LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY
What should Asma al-Assad wear to the Syrian Revolution?
By Claudia Rosett
Pajamas Media
March 31, 2011
Long ago and far away, when the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos fell in the Philippines, the dictator’s wife, Imelda, became an object of global ridicule for her extravagant wardrobe – especially her shoes. She had 2,700 pairs of shoes [1]. When the Marcoses fled Manila for refuge in Hawaii, in February of 1986, Imelda left her shoes. They ended up on display in Malacanang Palace, symbols of the excess with which dictators live the high life while beggaring their people.
Back then, I was working for a newspaper out of Hong Kong, and during a trip to Manila I paid a visit to the Imelda shoe display. It was indeed staggering for its profligacy, but what also made an impression was Imelda’s gaudy taste. An ex-beauty queen, she went for the frothy, flashy, and overdone. A lot of it was the kind of stuff that wouldn’t have passed muster in the salons of the world’s intellectual and cultured jet set. One of the trophy exhibits in the collection was a pair of light-up disco heels. Critics perusing the collection did not spend time praising her taste. They focused on the ruinous rule behind the extravagance.
Which brings us to Syria, where today’s first lady, Asma al-Assad, has also become famous for her shoes. Her style, however, is very different from Imelda’s. Asma is cosmopolitan, born and schooled in London, a study in understated yet costly elegance. She’s young, she’s slender and for her footwear she favors shoes by French designer Christian Louboutin. Asma and her shoes turned up in 2009 in a Huffington Post spread on “Our favorite Asma looks.” The shoes were demurely hinted at in last month’s Vogue profile on “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert” – along with her simple necklace of Chanel agates, and her Louboutin silk handbag.
Plus, in at least four languages she’s capable of producing an endless stream of multicultural psychobabble about art, culture, politics, society, and her dedication to cultivating a sustainable future for Syrian youth. Look around on YouTube, and you can see her speaking in Paris [2], switching between English and French to discuss the role of the museum in the city; or tastefully dressed down for an outing in Syria among the common folk. On March 18, as Tom Gross revealed, she was the patroness and keynote speaker at a conference in Damascus of the Harvard Arab Alumni Association [3]. And it would appear she has anonymous fans so devoted that they maintain and neatly update a Facebook page [4] for her, where someone has taken the trouble to ensure that the current carnage in Syria does not intrude on the posts – dedicated exclusively in recent days to such matters as water projects and honoring the mothers of Syria (though reality does seem to seeping in by way of some of the comments).
But please – given a choice between Imelda Marcos and Asma al-Assad, I’d take Imelda any day. Bad as it was, the Marcos dictatorship was a puny affair compared to the 40-year totalitarian depravities of Syria’s terror-sponsoring Assads. Asma al-Assad has chosen a form of excess that is all the more awful for masquerading as taste and class. It’s not simply the cost of those luxuriously simple outfits – though in Syria’s vat of repression and corruption, it’s worth asking where she thinks the money comes from for her Vogue lifestyle and well-clad patronage of all those common folk who live with none of the freedoms that would allow them to help themselves.
The real excess here is that of the Big Lie. This is the devil’s deal of providing a chic face for a regime of terror – the Syrian regime dolled up with fashion shoots, lectures in Paris, and a Facebook page. With her many languages, London education, continental travels, and modern tastes, does she ever go online to sift through the human rights reports on the atrocities and disappearances that are routine under her husband’s regime? Does she find it odd that in hallmark totalitarian style, Syrians are obliged to live among endless statues and pictures of her husband and his father? Did she find it peculiar that in 2007 her husband was “reelected” with an official 98% of the vote? Has she worked out a philosophy in which even the classiest of first ladies must sometimes put up with having a husband who butchers fellow citizens so that he and his family may continue enjoying his palace? As Syrians prepare for a Day of Rage on Friday, has Asma picked out just the right chunky Chanel necklace and pair of Louboutins for the occasion? What does a fashion-plate of the totalitarian world wear to the revolution?
[1] Of shoes: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,961002,00.html
[2] In Paris: www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7bSsvnykG8&feature=related
[3] Harvard Arab Alumni Association: http://www.harvardarabalumni.org/ via www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001176.html
[4] Facebook page: www.facebook.com/pages/Asma-al-Assad/27123810587?sk=wall
“IT WAS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS THAT PAUL SAW THE LIGHT AND CHANGED HIS WAYS”
A White House divided on Syria
By Michael Singh
Foreign Policy magazine
March 31, 2011
More so than the conflicts in Tunisia, Libya, and Bahrain, and perhaps even more than the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the recent violence in Syria has posed a challenge to the Obama administration’s strategy in the Middle East. The conflicting impulses within the administration can be seen in recent statements made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; days ago, she described Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a “reformer”; in London on March 29, she issued a “strong condemnation of the Syrian government’s brutal repression of demonstrators.” Which view of Assad prevails, and how the United States responds to events in Syria, will go a long way toward determining how deeply U.S. policy in the Middle East is altered by the recent turmoil there.
One of the key departures President Obama made from his predecessor’s policy in the Middle East was in his approach toward Syria. Rather than continuing to heap pressure on the Syrian regime, the Obama Administration returned to the policy of engaging Syria practiced by past administrations. The reasons behind this shift were manifold: the pressure policy was perceived as not working and engagement with hostile regimes broadly was seen as holding diplomatic promise.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Syria was seen as key to making progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace. Damascus not only hosted the headquarters of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and therefore in theory held leverage over these groups, but its own negotiations with Israel were essential to achieving the “comprehensive peace” that the administration sought.
After two years, this approach to Syria has borne no fruit. Syria has not increased its compliance with the IAEA investigation into its clandestine nuclear activities, decreased its cooperation with Iran and Hizbullah, or reduced its interference in Lebanon or increased its cooperation with the Hariri Tribunal. On the domestic front, far from being a reformer, Assad oversees a regime rated worse for political rights than was Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. And there has been no progress on the Syrian-Israeli track, nor has Syria played a role in the frozen Israeli-Palestinian talks (though granted, those talks have faltered for reasons quite independent of Syrian policies).
But the current US policy toward Syria has not only been unsuccessful in its outcomes -- it was flawed in its conception. US interests and values demand that we support freedom and sovereignty for Palestinians; those same values, however, preclude us from trading the liberty of the Syrian and Lebanese people for Palestinian statehood. Likewise, there is little reason to believe that Bashar al-Assad is truly interested in a Syrian-Israeli peace; Syria’s state of war with Israel provides his justification for permanent “emergency laws,” and the relations with Iran and Hizbullah which he would need to sacrifice to make a deal profit his regime greatly. We may foresee a peace dividend, but Assad uses a different accounting.
There are signs that some within the Obama administration recognize the need to change course on Syria. An unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times on March 26 that “Whatever credibility the [Syrian] government had, they shot it today -- literally... it’s definitely in our interest to pursue an agreement, but you can’t do it with a government that has no credibility with its population.” Some will argue that the problem is not Assad, but his father’s “old guard” which surrounds him. But Assad’s own statements and policies belie such wishful thinking.
Courting Assad in pursuit of regional goals while neglecting what happens inside Syria is not realpolitik; it may satisfy the politik by smoothing bilateral relations, but it falls short on the real by underemphasizing the impact of political and economic stagnation in the region for US interests. A more creative, less one-dimensional, and more promising approach is needed, which should include reinvigorated economic and political pressure using sanctions and support for Syrian democracy activists. The Assad regime is economically vulnerable -- it lacks its neighbors’ natural resources, and there are signs that previous rounds of economic pressure were beginning to stress the regime. It is also politically vulnerable, with a restive population, the urge for reform sweeping the region, and the loss of a Western ally in France, whose foreign minister Alain Juppe recently signaled a major change in French policy toward Syria. In his speech Monday night regarding Libya, President Obama said that “wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States.” He can follow through on this pledge by galvanizing an international coalition to exert pressure on the Assad regime.
One can’t help but see shades of St. Paul in the Obama Administration’s struggle to decide on its approach toward Assad. It was on the road to Damascus that Paul saw the light and changed his ways; perhaps it will be on the diplomatic road to Damascus that President Obama realizes the need to reorient US policy toward Syria and the region beyond.