9000 to 1

Recent editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post (among others) about how the Palestinians are getting their come-uppance in the current bombing of Gaza are so far removed from any semblance of reality and attempt at neutrality you have to wonder whether these newspapers don’t live in an alternate reality. They’re not even worth linking to, but this is:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert lost no time in exploiting Hamas’ capture of an Israeli soldier to justify Israel’s long-planned re-occupation of the Gaza Strip and mass arrest of the Hamas leadership. In his haste, he has inadvertently achieved a rare thing. He has managed to reduce the absurdity of Israel’s position to a known ratio: 9000 to 1.

Nine thousand captured Palestinians languish in Israel’s notorious “security prisons”, including 380 children and 115 women. Every day Israeli troops and Border Police kidnap, interrogate, torture and imprison Palestinians, often by the dozen. The arrest raids never stop, regardless of summits, truces, or cease-fires. It is estimated that 650,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel since the current occupation began in 1967.

Arrest and incarceration is such a common experience that it has become a virtual rite of passage for Palestinian boys; men go to prison. In the past year we’ve read several reports of pre-teen boys, some as young as 8, approaching Israeli soldiers and asking, even begging, to be arrested.

But God forbid that even one of Israel’s tender teen warriors should be captured in battle, as young Gilat Shalit was. That would be going too far. That would justify blowing up key bridges and destroying the electricity source of two-thirds of the Gaza Strip. Columns of invading tanks and scores of US-supplied jet fighters and combat helicopters would be required to hunt for the missing soldier, and attack the Palestinian Interior Ministry. From top to bottom, little Gaza would be subjected to yet another round of fierce shelling from land, air, and sea. All in a day’s hunt.

I hear that now, after bridges and power stations, they’ve started bombing a university.

Egypt vs. Lebanon vs. Morocco

Elijah wonders about Lebanon and Egypt, a comparison I’ve often made myself:

Coming from Egypt, all this Lebanese success actually annoyed me. If Lebanon—a few years after a 15-year civil war, and with no natural resources to speak of—can do so well, why is Egypt so screwed up? OK, there are only something like 4 million people in all of Lebanon, or about the population of Shobra and Bulaq. But is population all there is to it? Egypt borders two seas, it has the Suez Canal, natural gas reserves, unparalleled tourist destinations, and it hasn’t just emerged from a long civil war. You’d think that’d be enough to outweigh the population differences. So why is Lebanon so nice?

Indeed, it’s sometimes mind-boggling.

Continue reading Egypt vs. Lebanon vs. Morocco

“Quantifying” democracy

Although I appreciate the intention of wanting to quantify something as abstract as democratization to be able to compare countries, in the end I find such arbitrary assignment of “scores” to countries for various criteria rather useless and uninformative. This is particularly the case with the scale used by the likes of Freedom House, which go from 0 to 2 (“not free,” “partly free,” “free”), which say very little. This is why this article in the pro-Isrearl think tank rag Middle East Quarterly completely misses the mark. It says that, according to its scaling system, in 1999 Morocco was the freest of Arab countries but in 2005 it’s beaten by Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen — I would only consider Egypt as possibly equally free as Morocco (or rather, unfree in different ways), and certainly Tunisia should never be anywhere near the top of the list. The main reason for the change in ranking is the drop in media and economic freedom over the last few years — even though Morocco still has more press freedom than many Arab countries, it gets ranked on that criteria at the same level as Libya! That’s just plain ridiculous.
Continue reading “Quantifying” democracy

Back to “serving the people”

I don’t know when, but it was likely sometime during the 1990s Dirty War that the Egyptian Interior Ministry decided to change its motto, usually printed on dusty signs that top police stations’ entrances, from “The Police is in Service of the People,� to “The People and the Police are in Service of the Nation.�
Whenever I came across those signs while driving or walking by a police station, or during a demo where I’m getting my share of beatings on the hands of the CSF, I always wondered what “nation� exactly was the Interior Ministry’s motto referring to, that we, the people, together with our brave police officers should protect? Mubarak’s posters were usually present somewhere near the signs, and that always gave me a quick answer to my naïve question.
Well, it seems an Egyptian lawyer by the name Nabih el-Wahsh has been a bit upset with the Interior’s motto too, so he filed a lawsuit against it, demanding the return to the old motto. I had no clue about the case, till I came across this Wafd report. The lawyer has won the case (don’t know when?), and scored another triumph yesterday with the Higher Administrative Court rejecting the Interior’s appeal, and ordering the ministry to lift off the new motto from police stations and security directorates in all provinces, as it was deemed “unconstitutional.�
Thus, now our Interior Ministry is to return to be “in service of the people.” So fellow Egyptians, cheer up… you will be served… yes, served awi awi..

For Western Union, “Every Mohammed is a terrorist now?”

Arabist reader and dear friend SP sent me this report on Western Union…

Western Union profiles Muslim names
AP Jul. 2, 2006
Money transfer agencies like Western Union have delayed or blocked thousands of cash deliveries on suspicion of terrorist connections simply because senders or recipients have names like Mohammed or Ahmed, company officials said.
In one example, an Indian driver here said Western Union prevented him from sending US$120 to a friend at home this month because the recipient’s name was Mohammed. Continue reading For Western Union, “Every Mohammed is a terrorist now?”

The Bush doctrine and Egypt

Amr Hamzawy, a prolific Egyptian analyst at the Carnegie Endowment, and someone else I don’t know called Michael McFaul (a professor at Stanford) have penned an editorial wondering what happened to the Bush doctrine and Egypt. Cutting down to the bottom line:

The major challenge facing the United States in this region is how to help democratize Arab polities and in so doing giving peace, stability, and moderation a chance in the struggle against dictatorship and violence. So it is downright mysterious why American aid to Egypt should continue to flow with no political strings attached.
America could make the linkage very explicit, by putting forward clear benchmarks and timelines on political reform. At a minimum, if Bush were serious about his liberty doctrine, U.S. aid could be restructured to give less to the Egyptian military and more to domestic civil society and to American nongovernmental organizations involved in democracy promotion. Yet, ironically, these organizations are now under siege in Egypt.
Bush’s retreat on democracy promotion has implications well beyond Cairo. Autocrats throughout the Middle East are watching. To date, the lesson is obvious: Do a few minor reforms to appease the Americans when they are paying most attention during elections, then roll these reforms back after the vote.
In retrospect, it may have been a better strategy for Bush to not have delivered his second inaugural speech about liberty, but instead quietly pushed for incremental reforms. At this stage, however, the words have already been spoken. Bush must now back them up with real policies that show his commitment to freedom. If he fails in Egypt, he fails throughout the Middle East.

Too bad Hamzawy wasn’t making the expert testimonies (almost all against cutting or changing aid) at the recent congressional hearing on the matter. His conclusions are definitely spot on. Whether you care about democracy in the Arab world or not, as an American foreign policy maker you can’t afford to just abandon a “doctrine” like that. It’ll discredit you in the region and elsewhere. I mean, the Monroe Doctrine (originally America’s refusal to let Europeans colonize Latin America, later the perpetuation of America’s dominance over Latin America that Chavez is now prying apart) lasted about 180 years before it started falling apart under Bush’s guard. His own doctrine — at least the part about democratizing the Middle East, since the part about unilateralism seems to have already died — never even got off the ground.

Marxism 2006

I received the following message from my friend Ahmad Zahran in London.

Hello All,
The Marxism conference will start in London this Thursday the 7th of July and will last till the 10th. There will be two very important workshops in the conference that will tackle Egypt, one of them will about Nasser (by Anne Alexander) and the other one about The Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Ghassan Makarem, Salah Ayyad and Egyptian activist from Centre for Socialist Studies, Cairo). It will be very important for all those in the UK to try and attend those 2 workshops as it will give a very good background about the situation in Egypt for those who do not know about it. Continue reading Marxism 2006

Wafa Sultan = Ann Coulter?

Wafa Sultan is pilloried by an American rabbi in this LA Times column, in which he calls her “Islam’s Ann Coulter”, after hearing her at a pro-Israel Jewish conference. Incidentally, while Sultan can speak wherever she wants, I find it a bit weird that, when American Jews get together to support Israel, they want to hear someone attack Islam. It’s a bit as if Israel Shahak (an equally controversial, but altogether more respectable figure than Sultan) was the keynote speaker at the Organization of the Islamic Conference. But the column asks the right question about Sultan’s warped world-view:

The more Sultan talked, the more evident it became that progress in the Muslim world was not her interest. Even more troubling, it was not what the Jewish audience wanted to hear about. Applause, even cheers, interrupted her calumnies.

Continue reading Wafa Sultan = Ann Coulter?