Month: August 2006

Canada’s pro-Israel stance backfires on Harper

Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is paying the price for his support of Israel in the current war. The 250,000-strong -Lebanese-Canadian community is furious with his description of Israel’s strikes as a “moderate response” to Hizbullah’s activities. Polls now indicate that 77% of Canadians want to remain neutral on this war while 61% of people in Quebec, where Harper’s conservatives were hoping for a breakthrough, are resolutely against supporting Israel. A coalition of 60 NGOs will be protesting on Sunday against the government’s position. As many as 50,000 Lebanese-Canadian were believed to be in Lebanon when the war started, and several have already been killed by Israel strikes.

Also see this Le Monde article [$].

The talk of the town

A conversation I had last night about Cairo’s private schools:

Me: When does school start again?
Kid: In September.
Me: Will it be mostly the same people who were in your class last year?
Kid: No some people have left.
Mother: [Interjecting] Actually there’s a rather suspicious number of people who have switched to the Cairo American College (the biggest American school in Cairo.)
Me: How come?
Mother: Because Hosni Mubarak’s grandson is going there.
Me: Alaa’s son?
Mother: Yes.
Me: And people are moving to CAC to make sure their children get to know him?
Mother: Looks like it.
Me: [Perplexed] So basically it means that these people, the country’s elite, still think that in 15-20 years time it might still be an advantage to be close to the Mubarak family?
Mother: Well, yes — look at the elite today, they all went to school with each other.
Me: [Excitedly] But that probably means they think Gamal Mubarak will be the next president!
Mother: Well…

Nasrallah calls for avoiding civilian targets

Hassan Nasrallah has called for avoiding civilian targets on both sides:

BEIRUT: Hizbullah’s leader offered Thursday to stop pounding Israel’s “northern settlements” if the Jewish state refrained from bombarding Lebanon’s “cities and civilians.” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah also issued a warning, however, in a televised speech: “Let my words be clear, any attack on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, will result in Hizbullah bombarding the Zionist entity’s capital, Tel Aviv.”

In an almost immediate response aired on Israeli public television, a senior military official said Israel would destroy all of Lebanon’s infrastructure if Tel Aviv were hit.

“We are ready to keep the whole thing restricted to a military fight with the Israeli Army,” Nasrallah said, “on the ground, fighters to fighters.”

I’m not sure how to interpret this except as an attempt to make Israel look bad and reinforce its image of an army that targets civilians, since Hizbullah would be in fact probably unwilling to fight a direct “battlefield” war rather than a guerrilla one, which it has proved relatively effective at doing. Anyway, the rest of the article is interesting — and I’m surprised to see the Daily Star describe Hizbullah as “the resistance.”

Bush didn’t know about Muslim sects

Absolutely nothing surprising about this:

Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.

In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam–to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”

I bet he thought the word “Shiite” was pretty funny, too.

Economic losses in Lebanon

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung’s excellent Cairo correspondent Kristina Bergmann today writes on the economic losses to Lebanon as a result of the current war.

She refers to a report by Lebanon’s state-run Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) which argues that today’s losses are much more substantial then those the country suffered during its civil war as the Israeli air-force has systematically targeted Lebanon’s infrastructure, while the civil war was characterized by small-scale wars between different groups. CDR puts losses at $2.5bn, while damages to infrastructure have reached $785mn, according to CDR.

I’m also translating some paragraphs of Bergmann’s article:

When Siniora became Prime Minister in June 2005, public debt stood at $36bn and the trade deficit reached $2bn. Lebanon’s new government realized that reform was inevitable. A plan “revival of the economy� was drafted. It aimed at privatizing the state’s power station and its telecom, at raising taxes and at increasing control over funds – more precisely: the fight against corruption. With the beginning of the war, the plan was without further ado dubbed “plan for reconstruction�. Translated, this meant that corruption in trade in industry will flourish again, Lebanon’s former Minister of Finance Georges Corm recently said.

When in fall 2001 Arab capital feared being frozen in the US, Lebanon became the favourite place for Arab financiers. Now, however, Golf Arabs are withdrawing their money discreetly but very quickly. To where will they transfer their capital which has been increased by the explosion of oil prices? One destination are “stable� and economically open countries of the region such as Egypt, Morocco and Turkey, financial experts say. Is this arguably the reason, why those countries are reluctant in criticising Israel’s campaign?

The Muslim Brothers’ “support” for Lebanon

Brave talk from the head of the Muslim Brotherhood:

“I am ready to send immediately 10,000 mujahedeen to fight the Zionists alongside Hezbollah,” Mohammed Mehdi Akef told AFP.

He admitted though that the chances were more than slim that any volunteers from Egypt would ever reach Lebanon.

“There are enough people but you would need Arab regimes to authorise their deployment or at least turn a blind eye on their departure,” Akef said.

In other words, he really wants to help but feels he should ask permission first from the regime that currently incarcerates over 600 of its members. Hmmm. Mahdi Akef, like many supreme guides before him, just doesn’t seem that bright of a man. On the one hand he is happy to bash Arab regimes for their stance on Hizbullah and reap the rewards of public discontent, but on the other he’s not willing to really do anything serious about it. Maybe on some level, despite their easily-given pledges of support, Sunni Islamists aren’t happy about the Shia Islamists hogging the spotlight. Hizbullah, for better or for worse, doesn’t feel it needs to ask permission for its actions, does it?

The cost of wanting to be white

A crave for skin-lightening cosmetics in Sudan is causing a rise of women with skin problems:

Millions of women throughout Africa use creams and soaps containing chemicals, like hydroquinone, to lighten the color of their skin. But the creams can cause long-term damage.

Dermatologists say prolonged use of hydroquinone and mercury-based products, also found in some creams, destroys the skin’s protective outer layer. Eventually the skin starts to burn, itch or blister, becomes extremely sensitive to sunlight and then turns even blacker than before.

Prolonged use can damage the nerves or even lead to kidney failure or skin cancer and so prove fatal.

“It’s a very bad problem here. It sometimes kills the patient … It’s bad, bad news,” said a doctor at a Khartoum hospital. He said the number of women coming to the dermatology department with problems caused by skin-whitening treatments had grown to at least one in four of all dermatology patients.

This attitude about skin color is common everywhere from Morocco to India, as far as I can tell. Probably beyond.

Hizbullah’s strategy

The always excellent Anthony Shadid writes of Hizbullah’s doctrine and tactics:

Three weeks into its war with Israel, Hezbollah has retained its presence in southern Lebanon, often the sole authority in devastated towns along the Israeli border. The militia is elusive, with few logistics, little hierarchy and less visibility. Even residents often say they don’t know how the militiamen operate or are organized. Communication is by walkie-talkie, always in code, and sometimes messages are delivered by motorcycle. Weapons seem to be already in place across a terrain that fighters say they know intimately.

“On the ground, face to face, we’re better fighters than the Israelis,” said Hajj Abu Mohammed, a bearded, 44-year-old militiaman in the small village of Srifa, whose walkie-talkie crackled and cellphone rang with a Hezbollah anthem.

Israel has claimed to have destroyed Hezbollah’s infrastructure in a 22-day campaign that has driven hundreds of thousands of civilians from their homes and wrecked village after village along valleys sometimes charred by fires.

Hezbollah admits to having suffered losses, but in the fighting so far, it has demonstrated its detailed planning since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation. Fighters appear to exercise a great deal of autonomy, a flexibility evident along the region’s back roads: ammunition loaded in cars, trucks in camouflage, rocket launchers tucked in banana plantations.

Analysts say the militia could probably hold out a month without serious resupply. Fighters and supporters suggest that time is their advantage in a war that most suspect won’t have a conclusive end. In conversations in southern Lebanon, the militia’s supporters seem most adamant in trying to deprive either Israel or the United States of political gains from the military campaign.

“We’ll never submit to oppression, whatever the force applied, whatever the time it takes,” one of the group gathered in Jwayya said Tuesday. “You won’t find any difference between 21 days and 121 days. The difference is solely a matter of time.”

Just the read the whole thing. Meanwhile in Israel (whose overwhelming power may have made it delusional as well as utterly amoral):

Despite the number of attacks yesterday, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Hizbullah had been disarmed “to a large degree”. “The infrastructure of Hizbullah has been entirely destroyed,” he said.

I think I know who to believe. Besides, Hizbullah fighters would probably continue fighting Israeli occupiers with their bare hands if they have to.

This is perverse

Sometimes the juxtaposition of headlines in a newsreader is just perverse. I found these next to each other:

Israeli Warplanes Pound Southern Beirut
Hezbollah Continues Rocket Fire Amid Ongoing Israeli Ground Offensive

KIRYAT SHEMONA, Israel, Aug. 3 — Israeli warplanes pounded the southern suburbs of Beirut Thursday morning for the first time in eight days, while Hezbollah militants and thousands of Israeli ground troops continued to engage in fierce ground fighting in Lebanese border towns and villages.

And:

Israelis work to save abandoned pets
By DELPHINE MATTHIEUSSENT, Associated Press Writer Thu Aug 3, 5:59 AM ET

MAALOT, Israel – A dozen youngsters carrying water and dog food ventured into the deserted streets of northern Israel, taking advantage of the nighttime lull, when Hezbollah usually stops firing rockets.

A government official says up to a few thousand pets may need to be fed or rescued, in part because hundreds of thousands of Israelis have fled northern Israel over the past three weeks.