Israel has started pondering a question that can’t be avoided for long, and whose strategic significance is not in doubt: How much American money should Israel ask for?
Read all of it, very instructive.
Vous êtes rentré en Tunisie le 21 octobre 2006 après cinq ans d’exil en France. Pourquoi?
Moncef Marzouki : J’ai quitté la Tunisie en 2001 pour des raisons alimentaires. J’avais accepté la prison, une tentative de meurtre et la diffamation mais quand on m’a chassé de l’université et de l’hôpital où je travaillais, je me suis retrouvé sans ressources. Je suis venu en France car on m’avait proposé un poste de professeur en médecine à la faculté de Bobigny. En octobre 2006, j’ai lancé un appel à la désobéissance civile en Tunisie sur Al Jazeera. Je ne pouvais donc plus laisser les autres affronter seuls le régime de Ben Ali et me devais de donner l’exemple en rentrant.
Comment s’est passé votre retour ?
J’ai été de facto mis en résidence surveillée pendant deux mois et le régime a usé de nouvelles techniques de répression à mon égard. J’ai été agressé dans la rue à quatre reprises par des voyous qui m’ont craché dessus et insulté. A deux reprises, en pleine rue, des femmes se sont jetées sur moi en hurlant que j’avais tenté de les violer. Pour éviter d’être agressé, je sortais en permanence accompagné d’amis. Une fois, j’ai voulu soutenir un prisonnier politique en lui rendant visite en compagnie de trois autres personnes. Notre voiture a été prise d’assaut par une centaine de voyous qui m’ont encore insulté et craché dessus. L’attaque a été si violente que le véhicule dans lequel nous étions tanguait. Pendant ce temps, la police politique filmait la scène. Une autre fois, je me suis rendu à un enterrement et l’on a jeté des œufs pourris sur la voiture dans laquelle j’étais.
I find the Tunisian regime an interesting one for some of the parallels it has with Egypt — I often think of the current situation in Egypt as analogous in some respects to Tunisia in the mid-1980s.
Update: This is really not a cheap shot, I just came across it soon after putting up this post — an interview with the new US Ambassador in Tunis that appeared in the Tunisian magazine Réalités, which is legal and therefore completely under security control:
Quelles sont vos premières impressions sur la Tunisie ?
Elles sont très positives. Le peuple tunisien est très chaleureux. Le pays est très beau, son histoire est magnifique, je trouve que la Tunisie est un modèle pour les autres pays de la région
And a bit later in the interview:
Je voudrais ici insister sur l’idéal humaniste de notre politique étrangère pour aider d’autres à réaliser les valeurs universelles auxquelles nous aspirons tous : la liberté, la prospérité et la sécurité.
“Western Muslims and the Future of Islam” throws some light on Ramadan’s idea of “Islamic socialism,” an ideology, combining religious principles with anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics, that goes back to the time of the Russian Revolution. (Libya’s strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is one who claims to rule according to these principles.) The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan’s book, is “the northern model of development,” which means that “a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive.” For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the “abode of war” (alam al-harb), for “when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance.”
To be a sworn enemy of capitalism does not mean you are a communist, a fascist, a religious fundamentalist or indeed an anti-Semite, but it is something these otherwise disparate groups frequently have in common. Advocating a revolt against Western materialism on the basis of superior spiritual values is an old project, which has had many fathers but has never been particularly friendly to liberal democracy. Ramadan’s brand of Islamic socialism, promoted with such media-friendly vitality, in conferences, interviews, books, talks, sermons and lectures, has won him a variety of new friends, especially in Britain and France.
★ WaPo profiles anti-Wahhabi Saudi thinker Khaled al-Dakhil.
★ Amira Hass makes lists of the prohibitions faced by Palestinians.
★ In Britney vs. The Terrorists, Robert Reilly highlights, once again, the disaster of US public diplomacy and the decision to downgrade the serious reporting of Voice of America in favor of the MTV-style content of Radio Sawa.
★ The Forward reports on Hillary Clinton’s speech to AIPAC, in which she made attendees squirm in their seat by calling for tough engagement with Syria and Iran. But read her actual speech and you can tell she is a radical on Iran, not a moderate, and called it a threat to virtually everything in the world. She also says this:
Israel is a beacon of what’s right in a neighborhood overshadowed by the wrongs of radicalism, extremism, despotism and terrorism. We need only look to one of Israel’s greatest threats: namely, Iran. Make no mistake, Iran poses a threat not only to Israel, but to the entire Middle East and beyond, including the U.S. I don’t need to remind this group that about a month ago the Iranian government hosted a conference in Tehran whose sole purpose was to deny the Holocaust.
That’s funny. Iran is a threat because it might one day get nuclear weapons and its politicians engage in hate speech. Israel has nuclear weapons (tons), attacks and threatens countries around it all the time, and its politicians also regularly engage in hate speech.
★ The Economist on Russia’s re-emergence as a player on the regional scene. The late Yevgeni Primakov (probably among the greatest Arabist spy/diplomat of the 20th century) would be proud. And it’s a bit scary to think this is probably a positive development.
★ Eric Fair, a former US interrogator/torturer in Iraq, writes an op-ed in the WaPo about what he did.
★ A poll finds that despite government agit-prop, Arabs are not that worried about Iran:
WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (IPS) – U.S. and Israeli hopes of forging of a Sunni Arab alliance to contain Iran and its regional allies may be misplaced, at least at the popular level, according to a major survey of six Arab countries released here Thursday.
The face-to-face survey of a total of 3,850 respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates found that close to 80 percent of Arabs consider Israel and the United States the two biggest external threats to their security. Only six percent cited Iran.
★ A new blog on military issues, counter-insurgency in the Middle East and more: Abu Muqawama.
★ A report on Hizbullah’s identity crisis by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb and Marina Ottaway.
★ A rare op-ed in support of Jimmy Carter by former US Congressman Paul Findley, himself the victim of AIPAC campaigns in the 1980s.
★ May Yamani is uncharacteristically outspoken about the “moderate mainstream” monicker in a piece titled These moderates are in fact fanatics, torturers and killers.
★ Independent Jewish Voices is a new British group protesting the takeover of mainstream Jewish organizations by rabid pro-Israel right-wingers and their campaign against British Jews who are critical of Israel. This week, they took out ads in several prominent newspapers and had a series of op-eds in the Guardian. Of course Israelis are not happy about this.
★ Speaking of Jewish groups silencing Jews they don’t agree with, our friend Joel Beinin had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle describing how a talk he was scheduled to give was cancelled after pressure by local California groups.
★ If you follow Fr
ench intellectual politics, last week’s endorsement of Nicolas Sarkozy by former Maoist-turned-neocon André Glucksmann has caused some reflection on the rise of French neo-conservatism, notably among prominent once-lefty Jewish intellectuals. Worth looking at, though, is how L’Arche, the main French Jewish publication, has over the years morphed into the Gallic version of Commentary.
JEBALIYA REFUGEE CAMP Gaza Strip–The two al-Ottol brothers are recovering in separate rooms of their house, wounded in the latest round of fighting between rival Hamas and Fatah militias one on each side.
Hamada al-Ottol, 19, was wounded while fighting for Fatah, the movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He wants revenge. His brother, Tahseen, 22, of Hamas, hopes a summit underway in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, can stop the internal conflict before the rift between them becomes irreconcilable.
In astonishing step that reflects the ruthless nature of the Egyptian regime; the Military ruler of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, ordered Khayrat el Shater, Second Deputy Chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a number of its leaders to be tried by a military tribunal!
It is a sad day for freedom and human rights when patriotic civilians who did not commit any crimes are being tried in a military tribunal only because of their political views and for daring to oppose a corrupt government.
It is time now for President Bush to decide either to go with freedom and democracy as a principle claimed by his administration and lectured to the egyptians by Mrs. Rice, his Secretary of state, or to continue supporting despotic regimes by turning a blind eye to their oppressive actions. In either case the consequences are expected to go beyond Egypt leaving ample room for all extremists to reinforce their claims against democratic reformers who renounce violence like MB.
They’ve been reading the Washington Post too much. Also checked the Arabic site, no similar argument that I can see. (And by the way, when will people stop reporting that the Ikhwan sites have been shut down? It’s just not true.)
More seriously, MEMRI / FrontPageMag (my Ziotrolls’ favorite publication, as we’ve established) has a media analysis of the regime vs. the ikhwan that’s actually fairly thorough in covering the mainstream media debate, albeit with the usual slant. And this Jerusalem Post writer really, really cares about Egypt:
Egypt’s security is Israel’s security.
If the Brotherhood does come to power, it might spell disaster for all progressive-minded Egyptians, for Egypt’s allies, and for Israel. In spite of the regrettable but inevitable restrictions on human rights that Mubarak’s crackdown entails, perhaps the West would be wise to let the Egyptian rais do what is necessary, without undue criticism.
The article is titled “Long live Egypt’s ‘rais’.” Nice to see Israelis care so much about “progressive-minded Egyptians.”
Back to the issue of the MB: if Khairat al-Shatir (#3 of the group, alleged key financier) and his pals are sent to a military court, they are going to be convicted. Military courts don’t find people not guilty. And we already know from past experience that putting mid-level and senior cadres in jail might be a setback, it won’t shut down the organization, which has plenty of able and willing people who can step in.
Well apparently she has withdrawn her complaint under pressure from relatives of the police officers in question.
Since we were fairly negative about the earlier reports of the Mufti’s fatwa, I’m reproducing the statement for Dar al-Iftaa below, after the jump.
[Thanks, Paul]
Update: Apparently the Mufti considers the Organization of the Islamic Conference to be the contemporary equivalent of the Caliphate, as opposed to the Salafi/MB “imperial” vision of a modern Caliphate. It’s an interesting argument, within the confines of Islamic (ist?) discourse.
Continue reading Mufti not against women presidents after all?
But how threatening, we may wonder, can a handful of bloggers be–and how much of a threat could they be to the twenty-five-year-and-running rule of a leader like Mubarak? After all, many of them are simply tech-savvy twentysomethings recently out of university. And besides, how big a role can bloggers play in a country in which they number just over 3,000–a mere fraction of whom write political content?
Hossam el-Hamalawy runs arabawy.org, a blog that has been central to documenting what he has dubbed Egypt’s very own Videogate. “We’re exploding,” he tells me. “The government didn’t see it coming, and it’s creating a domino effect. You read bloggers in Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and they take pride in the Egyptian gains. Once you get this far, there’s no going back. You can’t take the plug out.” As recently as January 2005, there were only about thirty blogs in the country. “My dream is that one day there will be a blogger with a digital camera in every street in Egypt.”
Exploding or not, this sort of electronic activism defies facile definitions. No longer simply an upper- or middle-class phenomenon, blogging has become an outlet for expression among a broad spectrum of people. Some bloggers post exclusively from Internet cafes (those without PCs), some are without a university education, many are women. Today there is a blogger in every urban center in Egypt–from the stark Sinai Peninsula to Mansoura in the Nile Delta. Most write in Arabic. Recently one blogger went so far as to set up a site devoted to bringing attention to police brutalities taking place in the Sinai following bouts of terrorism (hundreds, even thousands of Bedouins have been disappeared by state security, often locked away and abused with impunity). Other blogs broach the sensitive subject of how the country’s religious minorities are treated–particularly the Copts, who make up Egypt’s Christian community. Blogs have also been a crucial space for engaging such uncomfortable topics as sexuality, race and beyond. Suddenly, the (improvised) Arabic word mudawena, signifying a blogger, has found its way into the lexicon.
Read it all. One small criticism: quoted stats about print media are not accurate, independent newspapers now play a much bigger role and state press figures are believed to be over-inflated. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of the feedback loop between the new dailies with websites such as al-Masri al-Youm and bloggers.