“The Arabist establishment”

The latest idiocy from Lee Smith: this one really has it all, including a cameo by his intellectual mentor Martin Kramer, blanket attacks on Western experts on the Middle East in general and Hizbullah in particular, and paranoid rantings about Arab genocidal ambitions.

My favorite paragraph:

My Jerusalem hotel is filled with refugees: Jews, Druze, and Israeli Arabs, from the north, who can afford to pay for the respite from the ongoing Hezbollah rocket attacks. Right around the corner is the American Colony, one of the best-known hotels in the region, famous not just for its beauty and elegance, but also its guests: U.N. employees, journalists, academics, NGO workers, civil society officials. In other words, the Arabist establishment. Some of them are truly anti-Semitic, like the one Arab who explained to me how Jews ruin everything around the world. This, he continued, is why the French put them on reservations back in the 1880s. However, most of the Arabists do not wish to see Israel disappear; they do not hate Jews or even Israelis.

So basically everyone who is not Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Bernard Lewis or Lee Smith is “the Arabist establishment.” Unreal. He then proceeds to smear them with a broad brush with accusations of anti-Semitism before retracting again (the damage having already been done by association.)

I won’t even mention his conclusion about how Israel is fighting on two pre-1967 borders, which is completely dishonest after four decades of occupation and an ongoing land grab in the West Bank and Golan Heights. What I find really worrying is that Smith and the likes of him find such easy support among influential people like Kramer and Pipes, publications like the Weekly Standard, and institutions like the Hudson Institute. For any youngish writer or commentator on the Middle East, there is an enormous incentive to follow the Likudnik line when one can find gainful employment so easily by being pro-Israel (especially if you’re Arab, actually — these organizations have approached tons of up-and-coming Arab liberal intellectuals I know.) They are creating a vast intellectual straight-jacket in US thinking about the Middle East that accepts mediocre thinking as long as it toes the line. And the result is the kind rubbish quoted above.

Report: Muslim Brothers coup attempt foiled

This is what is being said in the more cooky corners of the internet:

JERUSALEM – Egypt has arrested a leader of a major domestic opposition group who allegedly confessed to plotting the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, an Egyptian official told the Galil Report.

The suspect, identified as Abed al-Munemhem Abu al-Futuh of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, allegedly admitted during interrogation to planning the coup. Cairo is withholding details.

Egyptian officials told the Galil Report investigators are focusing on a series of conversations al-Futuh had with Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Syria.

The plot was halted just days after Mahdi Akif, leader of the Brotherhood in Egypt, announced his group would train members in military tactics to fight alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon and to join Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip, which borders the Egyptian Sinai desert.

This must have started with some grain of truth (e.g. concern about Egyptian MB discussions with Syrian MB) but otherwise sounds completely preposterous. Especially since Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a leading “moderate” among the MB, has not been reported as arrested, unlike many of his colleagues.

Debate among Lebanese Shia about Hizbullah

Interesting story in the Boston Globe about a Shia intellectual who has sparked a storm with an essay denouncing Hizbullah. If anyone has the link to her original essay, please share.

Meanwhile, here in Cairo, last night I walked past a car that had a poster of Hassan Nasrallah on its side window. I looked closer at the poster, which described Nasrallah as “the man who vanquished Israel,” I saw it was from the liberal-ish weekly Al Destour. Al Destour is edited by Ibrahim Eissa, one of the most vibrant voices against the Mubarak regime and a self-described liberal. Somehow all the paradox of why most Arabs cheered Hizbullah is there: even if people don’t like Hizbullah’s ideology, they’re always going to cheer for it when it is responding to attacks that tried to destroy an entire country.

Update: Praktike has photos.

Islamist detainees

I bumped tonight into an Islamist lawyer I know who is a former member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. We chatted about several issues including Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri’s latest video, current political situation, and more importantly (for me) the issue of Islamist political detainees–those terror suspects who’ve been languishing in Egypt’s Gulags since the 1990s without trial.
The Egyptian Interior Ministry never gave figures for the number of prisoners and detainees. The figures for detainees in the 1990s, put by rights watchdogs, have drastically varied. EOHR puts it at 22,000. I heard other figures that went up to 40,000.

Last March, EOHR put the number of detainees at something between 16,000 and 18,000, due to the release of thousands of Gamaa Islamiya detainees with their renunciation of violence.

The Islamist lawyer I met tonight said there are currently from 5,000 to 6,000 Islamist detainees in prisons. According to him, the Gamaa’s detainees are roughly 600 only, while those of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad number 2,000, and the rest are a mixture of salafis, Sinai bombers’ suspects and a random bunch.

Of course I have no means to verify this independently.

Recommended Book:
Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam

The liquid explosives plot

Being rather busy with work, I have paid rather scant attention to the “liquid explosives” airplane plot except to figure out how to carry all the expensive electronics I usually carry with me when I travel. I did hear, notably from people in Lebanon, many people express a fear that this is a diversionary tactic from the war on Lebanon and thus an invented plot. I have no idea about this, but when you get someone like Craig Murray, the courageous former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who revealed British collaboration with the rather nasty regime of Islam Karimov. What he has to say is quite revealing. (See also this MSNBC report.) I mean, none of the alleged terrorists had bought plane tickets and some of them didn’t even have passports! And it seems the US pressured the UK to arrest the suspects sooner rather than keep them under surveillance.

Nasrallah’s speech: full text

I thought Arabist readers would be interested in reading a translation of Hassan Nasrallah’s recent “victory speech.” It’s reproduced below (from BBC Monitoring). I found the passage about where he condemned some of the statements of parts of the political elite particularly interesting: they express both a great deal of anger at unnamed politicians (Jumblatt etc.) and a concern not to inflame an already fragile situation. You have to wonder which sentiment will prevail.

I commend myself to God’s protection from the Evil one, the Rejected. [Koranic verse]

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Merciful. Praise be to God the Lord of the universe. Praise be to God alone, who fulfilled His promise, supported His servant, and alone defeated the parties.

Peace and blessings be on the last prophet, our master Muhammad; his chaste household; virtuous companions; and all prophets and messengers.

God’s peace, mercy and blessings be upon you.

On this great and revered day on which our honourable and chaste people return to their villages, towns, houses and neighbourhoods, I address my message to you. I would like to emphasize some issues and matters in this message.

First of all, I do not want to assess or discuss in detail what we are currently witnessing, but I want to say briefly and without exaggeration that we stand before a strategic and historical victory for Lebanon – all of Lebanon, for the resistance, and for the whole nation.
Continue reading Nasrallah’s speech: full text

Building dissent

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at Beirut’s Lebanese Arab University, got in a good sound bite in the New York Times today. Denying that Hizballah is a state within a state, she characterized the organization instead as “a state within a non-state.�

The piece reports on Hizballah’s rebuilding activities in the south, casting it as some kind of Iranian outreach program. Saad-Ghorayeb provides some balance, noting that Hezballah’s message is “We’re going to reconstruct. This has happened before. We will deliver,� but signally fails to note the content of her comment: that it has happened before, and that Hizballah did deliver (during and after the IDF / SLA’s occupation of the south).

Hizballah’s political organization is built on the provision of services (from schools to clinics to national defense) that were either not there in the first place or that the IAF and the IDF destroyed and that the Lebanese government failed to replace, and from this flows the political weight and staying power that no short term “torrent of money from oil-rich Iran� (as some NYT editor put it) could buy.

This has direct relevance to Maria Golia’s piece below on “new formulas for peaceful dissent.�

Large-scale peaceful protests aren’t going to happen spontaneously. Small demos may be an important showcase for state brutality, but they do not in themselves seem to be leading to anything bigger.

Providing services, however, is one way forward. Filling in as and where the state crumbles into non-state by providing clean water or a clinic or whatever (there is no shortage of areas in which this state fails its citizens), means developing administrative and communication capacity and building credibility and legitimacy. It also means building a constituency and opening up the kinds of opportunities to mobilize and to educate that will be required if the current demos are not only to grow, but to grow without becoming mobs.