Month: January 2007

South Africa moves towards Israel boycott

Great news from a country whose majority suffered greatly from Israeli support for apartheid:

JOHANNESBURG, Jan 26 (IPS) – A call from a South African trade unionist for national supermarket chains to stop importing avocado from Israel could ultimately lead to the banning of all imports from the Jewish state, if unions and human rights activists have their way.

Katishi Masemola, secretary general of the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (FAWU), told South Africa’s supermarket chains earlier this week that Israel produces avocado under “slave-type conditions”. He says the International Labour Organisation (ILO) forbids the use of child labour which, he claims, Israel is employing on avocado farms.

I don’t think the necessity of a worldwide Israeli boycott has ever been as clear as it is today, especially as the parallels with between Israel’s current apartheid regime and the white regime in South Africa become more well-known.

How the world works

How does this:

Israel May Have Violated Arms Pact, U.S. Says

By DAVID S. CLOUD and GREG MYRE
Published: January 28, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 — The Bush administration will inform Congress on Monday that Israel may have violated agreements with the United States when it fired American-supplied cluster munitions into southern Lebanon during its fight with Hezbollah last summer, the State Department said Saturday.

The finding, though preliminary, has prompted a contentious debate within the administration over whether the United States should penalize Israel for its use of cluster munitions against towns and villages where Hezbollah had placed its rocket launchers.

Square with this:

Israel to purchase U.S.-made smart bomb kits for $100 million

JERUSALEM: The Israeli air force has decided to buy smart munitions kits from the Seattle-based Boeing aerospace company for an estimated $100 million (€77 million), Israeli defense officials said Monday.

Europe is ours

Ours, I tell you! Dirka dirka Muhammad Jihad! Muahahahahahahaha!!!!

Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.

The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent’s Jews, he responded, “The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.” Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe’s future would be, “Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?” The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.

I wonder if this prediction will be as accurate as Lewis’ last one. Read more for Bernie’s take on the Persian threat. When will some kind soul put him out of his misery?

Baheyya on new books

Don’t miss Baheyya’s reviews of new books at this year’s Cairo International Book Fair: Sonallah Ibrahim’s “Sneaking,” Khaled al-Khamissi’s “Taxi” (which I got a chance to take a look at the other day) and of course Alaa al-Aswani’s “Chicago,” which we mentioned earlier here. I haven’t gone to the fair yet this year, but I really recommend it to anyone, even if you don’t read Arabic. I am particularly interested in the latest in religious books and anything that might explain the recent increase of munaqabat (women wearing the full-face veil) in Cairo.

Rodenbeck on Oren

Max Rodenbeck reviews Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present,” finding it full of interesting anecdotes and well-researched but subtly biased in favor of both Israel and “America’s self-image as an innocent among Middle Eastern sharks.”

Some readers may remember that Oren, who holds Israeli citizenship and has served in the Israeli military, has been the subject of some controversy in US academic circles not only for being pro-Israel but also its vocal defender in the public arena. His previous book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” was lambasted by Norman Finkelstein for its apologetics.

Harpers on the new Baghdad CIA chief

The CIA station chief in Baghdad is a man who championed the rendition of Islamists to Egypt and other countries for torture, says Harpers:

Given the desperate situation in Iraq, whoever runs the CIA’s Baghdad station will need to be an extraordinary manager who can marshal the agency’s forces and work closely with the U.S. armed forces. Unfortunately, several sources have informed me that the man the CIA is preparing to dispatch to fill the position is widely criticized within the agency and seen as ill-fitted to the role. Furthermore, the new station chief is said to be closely identified with detainee abuses, especially those involving “renditions”—the practice by which terrorist suspects are covertly delivered to foreign intelligence agencies to be interrogated.

Read the rest for details.

Pfaff argues for “non-interventionism”

“Isolationist” is a term used derisively in American foreign policy circles, but one with which I increasingly identify. Non-Americans increasingly feel that way too: leave us the hell alone, America, they say. William Pfaff explores this argument in this NYRB piece:

It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new administration in two years’ time might change direction seems the relevant question.

Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.

The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.

The rest of the article posits a non-interventionist policy I wish could be embraced — and it took the Bush administration to make me realize that.

The Maadi stabber

Those of you who live in Egypt will know that over the past week there has been much brouhaha over a series of stabbings in the well-heeled neighborhood of Maadi, land of expats, embassy housing and fine pork products. The press has been having a field day with this, as it has over past “serial killer” affairs, and Rose al-Youssef has taken to accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being behind the mysterious stabbings — because lately, for Rose al-Youssef, anything bad happening in Egypt is the fault of the MB.

Amidst all this hand-wringing, a courageous reader of the Egyptian Gazette has suggested a solution to snare the evildoer. It was published in Thursday’s paper (right next to a column where Tarek Heggy surpasses himself in pomposity by listing every Islamic thinker he has heard about), and proves yet again that the Gazette is essential reading for crime-fighters.

Maadistabber