Daily Archives: July 17, 2009

Iran – 7/17

Rafsanjani backs tolerance, dialogue
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2009

Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s premier power broker and a force behind opposition figurehead Mir-Hossein Mousavi, took the podium for Friday prayers today for the first time in eight weeks, urging tolerance and dialogue but acknowledging that the disputed election results had “created bitter conditions” for the country.

Tens of thousands of supporters of Mousavi crammed into downtown Tehran early this afternoon, some with emblematic green ribbons wrapped around their fingers, to attend the sermon by Rafsanjani that could herald a new stage in the political drama that has followed the marred June 12 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We could have taken our best step in the history of the Islamic revolution had the election not faced problems,” he told worshipers. “We are in doubt today. Today, we are living bitter conditions due to what happened after the announcement of the election result. All of us have suffered. We need unity more than anytime else.” [continued…]

Something profound has changed. Iranians are losing their fear and mock the official line
By “Dadbeh Gudarzi”, The Independent, July 17, 2009

Until recently, it was almost unheard of to utter criticism and the name of the Supreme Leader in the same breath. But now, even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei does not escape, and I don’t mean just in conversations between trusted friends. My own father, seriously mistrustful of talking about anything meaningful on the telephone, has given up observing his own cautious rules after almost three decades.

The people who are now daring to speak out like my father are not all intellectuals from north Tehran. Nor are they organised resistance. They are fed up with their salaries being eaten by inflation, or that their university-educated children have no prospect of a job. And they seethe at the unimaginable gap between them and loyal members of the Revolutionary Guard who have recently enjoyed salary rises. [continued…]

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US-Middle East – 7/17

Obama, Foxman and Israel’s purpose
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, July 16, 2009

Abe Foxman, President of the Anti-Defamation League and a stalwart cheerleader for Israel in Washington, has been worried about President Barack Obama ever since the new Administration took office. When Obama named Senator George Mitchell as his Mideast envoy, Foxman actually complained that the problem with Mitchell was “meticulously fair and even handed,” which he insisted was not a desirable approach for the U.S. to take to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ever since Obama’s Cairo speech, Foxman’s concerns have become more pronounced. It’s not that the Anti Defamation League president didn’t take heart from Obama’s insistence that Israel’s security is sacrosanct; or that “he made strong statements against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.” No, his concern — among others — was that Obama should have “made clear that Israel’s right to statehood is not a result of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”

He’s not the only one who argues this, of course; many on the Zionist right have long insisted that the movement claimed sovereignty in Palestine not on the basis of the Holocauast, but claiming to represent the continuity of the Hebrews of Judea thousands of years ago. [continued…]

Obama meets the Lobby
By Stephan Walt, Foreign Policy, July 16, 2009

This past Monday, President Obama met with the heads of a number of prominent Jewish groups, to talk about the state of U.S.-Israeli relations and the future direction of U.S. Middle East policy. Virtually all the news reports I’ve seen suggest that the attendees had a cordial and candid discussion. After reading through various accounts, I have three comments.

First, although a few individuals in the Israel lobby continue to downplay its influence, the very fact that this meeting was held is additional testimony to its important role in shaping U.S. Middle East policy. Why was Barack Obama taking time from his busy schedule to meet with the heads of groups like AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, J Street, Hadassah, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (among others)? Simple: he knows that these groups have a lot of political power. He also knows that the success of his Middle East policy depends in large part on getting significant support from them. In a political system like ours, where well-organized interest groups routinely wield disproportionate influence over the issues they care about, holding a White House sit-down with these key leaders was smart politics.

Second, the meeting also makes it clear that there have been significant changes within the lobby over the past several years, and that there is an evident rift between those who think the United States should continue to the same “special relationship” with Israel, and those who believe that it would be in Israel and America’s interest if Washington adopted a more candid and nuanced policy toward the Jewish state. It is noteworthy that the invitees included representatives from both J Street and Americans for Peace Now — groups that openly favor a two-state solution and have been backing Obama’s campaign to halt all construction in the settlements. Maybe even more noteworthy, the more hard-line groups were remarkably restrained in defending the settlement enterprise. [continued…]

Israeli author’s Zionist novel creates controversy
By Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol, Washington Post, July 15, 2009

The idea for Israeli author Alon Hilu’s latest novel, “The House of Dajani,” came to him one day in a Tel Aviv cafe when he began mentally stripping the city to its roots.

Where he ended was with an Arab boy in the 1890s, at his family farm near what would become the Jewish metropolis, hallucinating about a future in which an army invades and builds skyscrapers over the land.

The novel based on Hilu’s ruminations has now embroiled him in an intense discussion of Israeli letters and the identity of the Jewish state. Critics have labeled the book anti-Semitic, lambasted what they call its loose use of historical details and branded Hilu’s unflattering portrayal of early Zionist immigrants as an effort to undermine the state. Admirers awarded the book Israel’s richest literary prize, only to have their decision reversed over conflict-of-interest allegations. [continued…]

Palestinian Authority closes down Al Jazeera offices
By Marc Lynch, Foreign Policy, July 16, 2009

The other day I mentioned the explosive allegations made by PLO political section head Farouq Qaddoumi that Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan had conspired with Israel and the U.S. to have Yasir Arafat killed. Abbas has called Qaddoumi’s statement “lies” and threatened punishment, and rumors are that Qaddoumi will soon be expelled from his position in the PLO; Qaddoumi has presented documents that he claims prove his contention. His comments to a group of Jordanian journalists have led to a minor diplomatic crisis between the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That will pass. But they have also led a defensive Mahmoud Abbas to order the closure of the Al Jazeera offices in the West Bank.

That’s a major mistake, and all too typical of the way the Palestinian Authority and most other Arab governments have approached critical media over the years. Shutting down critical media outlets represents the bad habit of the official Arab order, which has never adjusted to the contentious new media (whether Al Jazeera or political blogs). [continued…]

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Iraq – 7/17

Kurdish leaders warn of strains with Maliki
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, July 17, 2009

Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region and the Iraqi government are closer to war than at any time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the Kurdish prime minister said Thursday, in a bleak measure of the tension that has risen along what U.S. officials consider the country’s most combustible fault line.

In separate interviews, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani and the region’s president, Massoud Barzani, described a stalemate in attempts to resolve long-standing disputes with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s emboldened government. Had it not been for the presence of the U.S. military in northern Iraq, Nechirvan Barzani said, fighting might have started in the most volatile regions.

The conflict is one of many that still beset Iraq, even as violence subsides and the U.S. military begins a year-long withdrawal of most combat troops from the country. There remains an active sectarian conflict, exacerbated by insurgent groups that seem bent on reigniting Sunni-Shiite carnage. There is also a contest underway in Baghdad to determine the political coalition that will rule the country after next year’s elections. But for months, U.S. officials have warned that the ethnic conflict pitting Kurds against Arabs, or more precisely the Kurdish regional government against Maliki’s federal government in Baghdad, poses the greatest threat to Iraq’s stability and could persist for years. [continued…]

A Shiite schism on clerical rule
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, July 17, 2009

As Iran simmers over its disputed presidential election, Shiite clerics in Iraq are looking across the border with a sense of satisfaction that they have figured out a more durable answer to a question that has beset Shiite Islam for centuries: What role should religion play in politics?

No one in this city, which stands as the world’s most venerable seat of Shiite scholarship, is boasting. Nor is there any swagger among the most senior clerics and their retinue of turbaned students and advisers. Befitting the ways of the tradition-bound Shiite seminary, points are made in whispers and hints, through allegories and metaphor.

But three decades after the Iranian revolution brought to power one notion of clerical rule — and six years after the fall of Saddam Hussein helped enshrine another version of religious authority here — the relationship between religion and the state in Iraq, clerics here say, seems more enduring than the alternative in neighboring Iran. [continued…]

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Afghanistan – 7/17

Everything that happens in Afghanistan is based on lies or illusions
By Ann Jones, TomDispatch, July 16, 2009

I‘ve come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.

The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos — giant, grey sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They’re stacked against the walls of government buildings, U.N. agencies, embassies, NGO offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) — and they only seem to grow and multiply. A friend called just the other day from a U.N. building, distressed that the view from her office window was vanishing behind yet another row of Hescos. Urban life as Kabulis knew it in this once graceful city has been lost to the security needs of strangers.

The creation of Hescostan in the middle of Kabul is both an effect of, and a cause of, war: an effect because it seems to arise in response to devious enemy tactics that are still relatively new to Afghanistan, such as the use of roadside bombs (IEDs) and suicide bombers (though there has actually been no attack in Kabul for six months now); a cause because it is so clearly a projection, an externalization of the fears of men out of their depth. It is a paradox of such “force protection” that the more you have, the more you feel you need. What’s called security generates fear. Now comes a documentary that projects that fear onto the screen. [continued…]

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