BBC — Inside Assad’s Syria
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Journalism and the politics of hunger
Dan Hind writes:
There are ways of talking about famine that don’t rely so heavily on emotional appeals and that instead relate the immediacy of human suffering to political and economic structures. News professionals are apt to insist that they have to focus on the emotive and the dramatic if they are to stand any chance of engaging their audiences. But, as Tom Mills of the New Left Project notes, there are grounds for thinking that the professionals have this one wrong. In 2002 Greg Philo summarised three major studies by the Glasgow Media Group that explored UK media coverage and public understanding of the developing world.
Philo noted “a widespread belief in broadcasting that audiences are not interested in factual programming about the developing world”. But though this view was widespread, there was little to support it. The Glasgow Media Group’s studies showed that audiences became much more engaged in stories about conflict in the Third World once they were able to situate what was happening in a broader explanatory context. As long as foreign news stories were presented as a series of disasters far away that had no connection with events at home, people’s interest was weak. Not only that, Philo’s interviewees would often say that the problems were down to the failure of people in poor countries to manage their affairs competently. Once it was pointed out that Western diamond and oil companies were helping to drive conflict in Angola, for example, people became much more engaged. The problems of ordinary people far away became more, not less, interesting as viewers were offered a structural account. Conflict is inexplicable without reference to resources and to the unaccountable financial infrastructure used to hide the spoils. Without an explanation that makes sense audiences will, not unreasonably, look elsewhere.
Like conflicts, famines are not inevitable and they do not happen in isolation from the rest of the world. A drought is a natural event. Mass starvation is not. It is political, insofar as it is the consequence of human decision-making. Under British rule millions of Indians starved to death as a result of food shortages. These famines, the British were sure, could not be avoided. They insisted they were the fault of the lazy and too numerous natives. Since independence the country has prevented famine from returning. Political will, not food, was the crucial thing missing in British India.
The BBC’s Andrew Harding reports that the current famine in Somalia is taking place in the midst of a longstanding conflict. Al-Shabab, a collection of Islamist groups, rules much of the country while the official government controls only part of the capital city. Though much of the region has experienced drought, the impact on human life has been far greater in Somalia. And the confrontation between various armed groups in Somalia is itself part of a struggle for resources and control throughout the Horn of Africa, in which America and other powers are deeply involved. Adequate coverage of the famine in Somalia, and the pattern of action and inaction that made it possible, must take into account the dynamics of this foreign intervention. And that in turn requires that journalists look steadily at the crackpot logic of the War on Terror.
Evidence of massacres in Tripoli
The New York Times reports:
As the fighting died down in Tripoli on Friday, the scope and savagery of the violence during the nearly weeklong battle for control of the capital began to come into sharper focus.
Amnesty International said Friday that it had evidence that forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had killed rebels who had been held in custody in two camps. In one camp, it said, guards killed five detainees held in solitary confinement, and in another they opened the gates, telling the rebels they were free to go, then tossed grenades and fired on the men as they tried to run for freedom.
The report, based on accounts from escaped prisoners, cited no death toll, but said that of the 160 detainees attacked, only 23 were known to have escaped.
On Thursday, there were reports that the bullet-riddled bodies of more than 30 pro-Qaddafi fighters had been found at a military encampment in central Tripoli. At least two were bound with plastic handcuffs, suggesting that they had been executed, and five of the dead were found at a field hospital.
More bodies turned up in the streets on Friday, where occasional volleys of gunfire were heard. Near Colonel Qaddafi’s abandoned citadel, Bab al-Aziziya, rebels began hauling away nine bloated bodies. The face of one was so badly decayed it appeared charred.
Maggots crawled over the torso of another.
“Only a butcher could commit a massacre like this,” said Sami Omar, a rebel.
Six were dumped near a trash receptacle, two left under a stairwell and one thrown in a large ditch, his hands apparently cuffed.
Rebels said Qaddafi loyalists had killed them as they celebrated his fall. But one resident said they were his fighters, slain by rebels.
As he spoke, a rebel approached him, saying he was not authorized to speak.
In a sign of the intensity of the fighting this week in the capital, 40 bodies, many in advanced states of decomposition, were piled up in an abandoned hospital in the Abu Salim neighborhood, until Friday the preserve of the Qaddafi forces. Most of the fighters were darker skinned than most Libyans, a sign, rebels there said, that they may have been recruited from sub-Saharan Africa. The rebels have frequently accused the Qaddafi government of using mercenaries but have not offered convincing proof.
The halls of the hospital were a chaos of beds and unplugged machines, and its floors were painted with blood. A medical technician said that three doctors had been on duty during the fighting in recent days, and that they had been unable to cope.
It was difficult to ascertain the fates of the dead men, who were lying on gurneys nested by maggots in a hospital room and the morgue. The relatives of one victim, Abdul Raouf Al Rashdi, a 33-year-old police officer, said he had been killed by a sniper several days earlier in the Hay Andalus neighborhood.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Libyan rebels pushed Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s forces out of the last residential neighborhood in Tripoli overnight Friday, but the rebel military gains were overshadowed by rapidly deteriorating living conditions in the capital of about two million people.
The challenges of restoring life to Tripoli grow more daunting by the day. Streets are buried under a mix of trash, waste and, in several places, corpses. Water and electricity have been cut throughout much of the city.
But the rebels’ victory in the Abu Salim neighborhood has made the area safe enough for city residents and journalists to visit its notorious Abu Salim prison for the first time.
A 1996 inmate massacre at the prison has fired up Libya’s opposition for years. A protest on Feb. 15 in Benghazi by families of victims of that massacre, and their lawyers, kicked off the countrywide protests that launched six months of fighting that this week unseated Col. Gadhafi.
The rebels’ national governing body, the National Transitional Council, is just beginning to relocate from its eastern base in Benghazi to Tripoli. Opposition leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil will remain in Benghazi until the capital is deemed secure.
Tripoli was cloaked in darkness Friday night, the first time it has been largely without power since rebels stormed into the capital Sunday. City faucets were dry for a second straight day.
In hospital morgues, bodies are piled on top of each other on available floor space. As rebels claim corpses of their own ranks, bodies of what appear to be pro-Gadhafi fighters are left on the streets in the summer heat. In some places, the smell suffocates whole blocks.
Luke Harding reports:
Libya’s opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) gave its first press conference in Tripoli on Thursday evening. It was a chaotic late-night affair; so far nobody has had much of a chance to sketch out a new political system. On Friday, however, the marchers [in new Libya’s first political march] agreed that after 42 years of dictatorship and iron-fisted personalist rule the country should become a European-style democracy.
“I want to live in a democratic country. It’s the most important thing for me and my children,” Naser al-Shahawi said, emerging from the [Jamal Abdul Nasser] mosque. “This is what the people want. We also want an Islamic country. But I don’t think that democracy is an enemy of Islam.”
The 48-year-old international lawyer said he wasn’t greatly impressed by the NTC – pointing out that several of its leaders “had been with Gaddafi”.
Who, then, did he think could be Libya’s new prime minister? “Maybe me,” he replied. “Now is the first time that anybody can be prime minister, or president.” Then he admitted: “I have never voted in my life.”
Shahawi, who had spent a year and half living in Cardiff, said he was studying for a PhD in international law. Asked what should happen to Gaddafi when justice eventually caught up with him, he was brutally succinct.
“He should die,” he said, then insisted that the former dictator should be tried inside the country, rather than extradited to the international criminal court, where a heap of indictments await.
A group of fighters then expressed their feelings in verbal form: “Fuck you Gaddafi,” they shouted.
Meanwhile, The Guardian reported:
Rebel units were massing for an attack on Sirte, Muammar Gaddafi’s birthplace, on Friday after Nato warplanes conducted intensive bombing raids to weaken one of the last major redoubts controlled by the ousted regime.
On the road to Sirte from Misrata, tanks, heavy artillery and rocket launchers abandoned by fleeing government forces were being assembled for the attack.
Rebels said a British and French special forces team was helping co-ordinate the assault, in which Misrata-based units will push eastwards to meet forces from Benghazi fighting their way westwards.
Israel’s faux revolutionaries
Israel’s July 14 social justice movement is really like a campaign in support of sunshine. Who’s going to oppose it? The supporters of social injustice?
To the extent that Israelis were inspired by the example of the Egyptian revolution, this seems to have gone no further than sharing in the empowering experience of being among thousands of people who have taken to the streets, joined by a sense of solidarity. But solidarity around what?
The difference between J14 and the Egyptian revolution is the difference between asking for a pay raise or telling your boss, “You’re fired!”
As Ami Kaufman wrote recently, “Although the protesters are demanding ‘social justice,’ what they’re really asking for is ‘more money!’”
Joseph Dana and Max Blumenthal explain how easy it has been for Israelis to call for social justice while ignoring the occupation.
The decision to exclude the occupation from the grievances of the July 14 movement was entirely organic. No hired gun consultant advised movement activists to avoid the hot button issue in order to broaden the appeal of the demonstrations. The mainstream of the Jewish public decided on its own, and without much internal reflection, that social justice could exist alongside a system of ethnic exclusivism. Thus, while the July 14 movement proceeded through cities across Israel bellowing out cries for dignity and rights, Palestinians remained safely tucked away behind an elaborate matrix of control — the Iron Wall. Ten years of separation had not only rendered the Palestinians invisible in a physical sense. It had erased them from the Israeli conscience.
“It’s very strange to see a social justice protest without mentioning occupation,” Gidi Grinstein, a confidant of Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who heads the Reut Institute, a government-linked Israeli think tank remarked. “But most people in Israel don’t even believe there is an occupation anymore. They see the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and think there is a functioning government. They hear about the Palestinian statehood resolution at the UN in September, and they think Palestine is a real state. So there is this cognitive dissonance among Israelis.”
For years Israel’s tiny but intensely motivated left-wing tried to mobilize mass protests against the occupation, hoping they could shake Israeli society out of its slumber. But the settlements grew, and the occupation became more and more entrenched. Suddenly, with hundreds of thousands of their compatriots in the streets demonstrating against the most right-wing government in their country’s history, some leftists began conjuring visions of a revolution.
“We have failed to end the occupation by confronting it head on but the boundary-breaking, de-segregating movement could, conceivably, undermine it,” wrote Dimi Reider. Reider claimed the demonstrations could achieve dramatic change because they “may challenge something even deeper than the occupation.” Hagai Mattar, a veteran anti-occupation activist and widely read journalist, echoed Reider’s unbridled enthusiasm. “For the first time in decades, perhaps, we are witnessing the impossible becoming possible,” Mattar wrote on the popular Hebrew website MySay. “What appeared to be a mere fantasy half a year ago… has become a vivid reality.”
Many members of the Israeli left have suffered for their activism. Some have been injured by Israeli soldiers during protests in the West Bank, where they routinely dodge rubber bullets and high-velocity teargas projectiles. Others have served months in prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli Army. With a suite of anti-democratic laws passed by the Knesset, they fear a coming crackdown. But perhaps the greatest source of suffering for Israeli leftists is having been cast out of one of the most tribalistic societies in the world. Many are turned down for housing and employment on the grounds that they refused military service. The very word “leftist,” or smolini, has become an insult in the Hebrew language. Hoping to replace the communal bond their society had denied them, the radical leftists who have not escaped to the squats of Berlin or Barcelona formed a tribe within the tribe.
As the July 14 protests gathered momentum and manpower, members of the radical left bolstered the movement with their tactical experience and fearlessness in the face of police intimidation. On July 23, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Israeli police forces arrested 43 demonstrators. Most of them were leftists who attempted to block a major intersection. The most prominent among them was Matar. Normally, the arrests of left-wingers at anti-occupation protests go unreported. In this instance, however, the arrests were broadcast to a national audience during the prime time news. After being released from their jail cells, the demonstrators were greeted by their fellow Israelis not as traitors but as heroic leaders.
“The radical left is no longer an outsider, but forms an important part of the mainstream,” Matar wrote recently in an article celebrating the protests. If this new movement welcomed leftists, and upheld them as its vanguard, how could it not be revolutionary?
The roots of the Islamophobia network in America
MJ Rosenberg writes:
It has been just about a decade since Islamophobia exploded in this country. That was of moment that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by al Qaeda terrorists. It existed prior to 9/11, but the losses that day and the general terror it inflicted upon this country made many, many Americans much more wary of Arabs and, fairly quickly, fearful of the religion the terrorists professed.
The first sign that 9/11 would be exploited to advance various agendas came from Binyamin Netanyahu, who was quoted in the New York Times as saying the attacks would be good for Israel:
Asked tonight [September 11, 2001] what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ”It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He predicted that the attack would ”strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
Netanyahu subsequently reiterated his views about 9/11, quoted here in Haaretz.
And, of course, ever since 9/11 the “pro-Israel” lobby has successfully used it to build support for right-wing Israeli policies in the United States.
But the lobby isn’t alone.
It is just one of the components of an orchestrated and well-financed effort to make Americans fear and hate Muslims and Arabs.
I have to admit, however, that until I read a report published today by the Center for American Progress (CAP), I had no idea just how orchestrated and well-financed this movement was.
The report, “Fear Inc: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” demonstrates that a small group of self-proclaimed experts (Frank Gaffney, David Yerushalmi, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Steve Emerson) backed by a host of foundations and donors (many of which also fund the lobby) have put Islamophobia on the map.
To put it simply, without these “experts,” their donors, and Fox News (their media mouthpiece) you would never have heard that a Muslim community center (the “Ground Zero Mosque”) was being constructed in New York City. And the center certainly would not have become a major news story. Nor would Republican (and even a few Democratic) candidates for president, Congress, and even village councils be called upon to condemn Islam and “Sharia Law” or face being labeled a supporter of terrorism. Nor would Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum have made hatred of American Muslims such an integral part of their campaigns.
Fear, Inc. — The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America. This report from the Center for American Progress begins:
On July 22, a man planted a bomb in an Oslo government building that killed eight people. A few hours after the explosion, he shot and killed 68 people, mostly teenagers, at a Labor Party youth camp on Norway’s Utoya Island.
By midday, pundits were speculating as to who had perpetrated the greatest massacre in Norwegian history since World War II. Numerous mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, speculated about an Al Qaeda connection and a “jihadist” motivation behind the attacks. But by the next morning it was clear that the attacker was a 32-year-old, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed Norwegian named Anders Breivik. He was not a Muslim, but rather a self-described Christian conservative.
According to his attorney, Breivik claimed responsibility for his self-described “gruesome but necessary” actions. On July 26, Breivik told the court that violence was “necessary” to save Europe from Marxism and “Muslimization.” In his 1,500-page manifesto, which meticulously details his attack methods and aims to inspire others to extremist violence, Breivik vows “brutal and breathtaking operations which will result in casualties” to fight the alleged “ongoing Islamic Colonization of Europe.”
Breivik’s manifesto contains numerous footnotes and in-text citations to American bloggers and pundits, quoting them as experts on Islam’s “war against the West.” This small group of anti-Muslim organizations and individuals in our nation is obscure to most Americans but wields great influence in shaping the national and international political debate. Their names are heralded within communities that are actively organizing against Islam and targeting Muslims in the United States.
Breivik, for example, cited Robert Spencer, one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars we profile in this report, and his blog, Jihad Watch, 162 times in his manifesto. Spencer’s website, which “tracks the attempts of radical Islam to subvert Western culture,” boasts another member of this Islamophobia network in America, David Horowitz, on his Freedom Center website. Pamela Geller, Spencer’s frequent collaborator, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs, was mentioned 12 times.
Geller and Spencer co-founded the organization Stop Islamization of America, a group whose actions and rhetoric the Anti-Defamation League concluded “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy “American values.” Based on Breivik’s sheer number of citations and references to the writings of these individuals, it is clear that he read and relied on the hateful, anti-Muslim ideology of a number of men and women detailed in this report&a select handful of scholars and activists who work together to create and promote misinformation about Muslims.
While these bloggers and pundits were not responsible for Breivik’s deadly attacks, their writings on Islam and multiculturalism appear to have helped create a world view, held by this lone Norwegian gunman, that sees Islam as at war with the West and the West needing to be defended. According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,” the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are “the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.” Sageman adds that their rhetoric “is not cost-free.”
These pundits and bloggers, however, are not the only members of the Islamophobia infrastructure. Breivik’s manifesto also cites think tanks, such as the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum and the Investigative Project on Terrorism—three other organizations we profile in this report. Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of “creeping Sharia,” Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran.
This network of hate is not a new presence in the United States. Indeed, its ability to organize, coordinate, and disseminate its ideology through grassroots organizations increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Furthermore, its ability to influence politicians’ talking points and wedge issues for the upcoming 2012 elections has mainstreamed what was once considered fringe, extremist rhetoric.
And it all starts with the money flowing from a select group of foundations. A small group of foundations and wealthy donors are the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America, providing critical funding to a clutch of right-wing think tanks that peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam—in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points that anti-Islam grassroots organizations and some right-wing religious groups use as propaganda for their constituency.
Some of these foundations and wealthy donors also provide direct funding to anti-Islam grassroots groups. According to our extensive analysis, here are the top seven contributors to promoting Islamophobia in our country:
- Donors Capital Fund
- Richard Mellon Scaife foundations
- Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
- Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust
- Russell Berrie Foundation
- Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund
- Fairbrook Foundation
Altogether, these seven charitable groups provided $42.6 million to Islamophobia think tanks between 2001 and 2009—funding that supports the scholars and experts that are the subject of our next chapter as well as some of the grassroots groups that are the subject of Chapter 3 of our report.
And what does this money fund? Well, here’s one of many cases in point: Last July, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned a conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute that the Islamic practice of Sharia was “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” Gingrich went on to claim that “Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world.”
Sharia, or Muslim religious code, includes practices such as charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism. But Gingrich and other conservatives promote alarmist notions about a nearly 1,500-year-old religion for a variety of sinister political, financial, and ideological motives. In his remarks that day, Gingrich mimicked the language of conservative analyst Andrew McCarthy, who co-wrote a report calling Sharia “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time.” Such similarities in language are no accident. Look no further than the organization that released McCarthy’s anti-Sharia report: the aforementioned Center for Security Policy, which is a central hub of the anti-Muslim network and an active promoter of anti- Sharia messaging and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
In fact, CSP is a key source for right-wing politicians, pundits, and grassroots organizations, providing them with a steady stream of reports mischaracterizing Islam and warnings about the dangers of Islam and American Muslims. Operating under the leadership of Frank Gaffney, the organization is funded by a small number of foundations and donors with a deep understanding of how to influence U.S. politics by promoting highly alarming threats to our national security. CSP is joined by other anti-Muslim organizations in this lucrative business, such as Stop Islamization of America and the Society of Americans for National Existence. Many of the leaders of these organizations are well-schooled in the art of getting attention in the press, particularly Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, The Washington Times, and a variety of right-wing websites and radio outlets.
Misinformation experts such as Gaffney consult and work with such right-wing grassroots organizations as ACT! for America and the Eagle Forum, as well as religious right groups such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition and American Family Association, to spread their message. Speaking at their conferences, writing on their websites, and appearing on their radio shows, these experts rail against Islam and cast suspicion on American Muslims. Much of their propaganda gets churned into fundraising appeals by grassroots and religious right groups. The money they raise then enters the political process and helps fund ads supporting politicians who echo alarmist warnings and sponsor anti-Muslim attacks.
These efforts recall some of the darkest episodes in American history, in which religious, ethnic, and racial minorities were discriminated against and persecuted. From Catholics, Mormons, Japanese Americans, European immigrants, Jews, and African Americans, the story of America is one of struggle to achieve in practice our founding ideals. Unfortunately, American Muslims and Islam are the latest chapter in a long American struggle against scapegoating based on religion, race, or creed.
Due in part to the relentless efforts of this small group of individuals and organizations, Islam is now the most negatively viewed religion in America. Only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Islam: the lowest favorability rating since 2001, according to a 2010 ABC News/Washington Post poll. According to a 2010 Time magazine poll, 28 percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, and nearly one-third of the country thinks followers of Islam should be barred from running for president.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 alone did not drive Americans’ perceptions of Muslims and Islam. President George W. Bush reflected the general opinion of the American public at the time when he went to great lengths to make clear that Islam and Muslims are not the enemy. Speaking to a roundtable of Arab and Muslim American leaders at the Afghanistan embassy in 2002, for example, President Bush said, “All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true faith—face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate.”
Unfortunately, President Bush’s words were soon eclipsed by an organized escalation of hateful statements about Muslims and Islam from the members of the Islamophobia network profiled in this report. This is as sad as it is dangerous. It is enormously important to understand that alienating the Muslim American community not only threatens our fundamental promise of religious freedom, it also hurts our efforts to combat terrorism. Since 9/11, the Muslim American community has helped security and law enforcement officials prevent more than 40 percent of Al Qaeda terrorist plots threatening America. The largest single source of initial information to authorities about the few Muslim American plots has come from the Muslim American community.
Around the world, there are people killing people in the name of Islam, with which most Muslims disagree. Indeed, in most cases of radicalized neighbors, family members, or friends, the Muslim American community is as baffled, disturbed, and surprised by their appearance as the general public. Treating Muslim American citizens and neighbors as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution, is not only offensive to America’s core values, it is utterly ineffective in combating terrorism and violent extremism.
The White House recently released the national strategy for combating violent extremism, “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” One of the top focal points of the effort is to “counter al-Qa’ida’s propaganda that the United States is somehow at war with Islam.” Yet orchestrated efforts by the individuals and organizations detailed in this report make it easy for al-Qa’ida to assert that America hates Muslims and that Muslims around the world are persecuted for the simple crime of being Muslims and practicing their religion.
Sadly, the current isolation of American Muslims echoes past witch hunts in our history—from the divisive McCarthyite purges of the 1950s to the sometimes violent anti-immigrant campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has compared the fear-mongering of Muslims with anti-Catholic sentiment of the past. In response to the fabricated “Ground Zero mosque” controversy in New York last summer, Mayor Bloomberg said:
In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center. … We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.
This report shines a light on the Islamophobia network of so-called experts, academics, institutions, grassroots organizations, media outlets, and donors who manufacture, produce, distribute, and mainstream an irrational fear of Islam and Muslims. Let us learn the proper lesson from the past, and rise above fear-mongering to public awareness, acceptance, and respect for our fellow Americans. In doing so, let us prevent hatred from infecting and endangering our country again.
In the pages that follow, we profile the small number of funders, organizations, and individuals who have contributed to the discourse on Islamophobia in this country. We begin with the money trail in Chapter 1—our analysis of the funding streams that support anti-Muslim activities. Chapter 2 identifies the intellectual nexus of the Islamophobia network. Chapter 3 highlights the key grassroots players and organizations that help spread the messages of hate. Chapter 4 aggregates the key media amplifiers of Islamophobia. And Chapter 5 brings attention to the elected officials who frequently support the causes of anti- Muslim organizing.
Before we begin, a word about the term “Islamophobia.” We don’t use this term lightly. We define it as an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.
It is our view that in order to safeguard our national security and uphold America’s core values, we must return to a fact-based civil discourse regarding the challenges we face as a nation and world. This discourse must be frank and honest, but also consistent with American values of religious liberty, equal justice under the law, and respect for pluralism. A first step toward the goal of honest, civil discourse is to expose—and marginalize—the influence of the individuals and groups who make up the Islamophobia network in America by actively working to divide Americans against one another through misinformation.
Download this report (pdf)
Download individual chapters of the report (pdf):
- Introduction and summary
- Chapter 1: Donors to the Islamophobia network
- Chapter 2: The Islamophobia misinformation experts
- Chapter 3: The grassroots organizations and the religious right
- Chapter 4: The right-wing media enablers of anti-Islam propaganda
- Chapter 5: The political players
- Conclusion
Video: Ask the Expert: Faiz Shakir on the Group Behind Islamophobia
The muted impact of the Arab Awakening on Israel
Daniel Levy writes:
After decades of near-hegemonic Israeli strategic supremacy in the Middle East, the ground is shifting. For Israel’s leaders, the Arab Awakening and the removal of Mubarak represents the collapse of a key support structure in the edifice that maintains Israel’s regional posture. That edifice had been fraying for some time. Yet with Israel unwilling or unable to relinquish its control over and occupation of Palestine, it was a system of conflict management that had proven to be remarkably resilient. Undemocratic Egypt was that system’s linchpin. In fact, only an undemocratic Egypt could play this role, indifferent and dismissive as the regime was toward public opinion and able to pursue policies, both at home and abroad, widely perceived as being an affront to Egyptian dignity.
Every country needs a strategy for managing its external relations, especially in the near abroad. Israel’s predicament in this respect is especially challenging. Born as an unusual movement combining religious and historical claims to land with modern aspirations of state-building and communal preservation, Zionism was initially branded by most in the region as a colonial project, a sense that Israel has fed with its expansionist and expulsionist approach to the indigenous population. Unfortunately for Israel, that indigenous population has ethnic and religious ties to a large population throughout the surrounding region. Nevertheless, Israel managed to adapt, pursuing whatever great power or regional alliances were available, making itself useful to the United States as a cold war ally.
Long after it became clear that the Oslo peace process would not deliver Palestinian freedom, rights or sovereignty, the structures established by it and the opportunities they have forged for Israel have endured. They were kept afloat by donor assistance, by the difficulties entailed in dismantling the Palestinian Authority and, crucially, by the stamp of legitimacy that only Egypt could confer. The impact of the Arab Awakening on Israel’s leaders must be understood first and foremost against this backdrop.
But here’s the key statement Levy makes which defined Israel’s view of the region well before the Arab Awakening erupted:
Israel has erected a separation barrier between itself and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, is proceeding to do the same on the Egyptian border and has long had closed and militarily fortified borders with Lebanon and Syria. Trade with all of its Middle East neighbors, in fact, amounts to less than 5 percent of its total. Israelis rarely visit even those Arab countries it is possible to enter, and the Arab community inside Israel is treated as a fifth column rather than as a bridge to regional relations. Of course, this is a two-way street. Yet when the physical barriers are combined with what is often a striking lack of intellectual, cultural and social curiosity, Israel is in danger of being fundamentally incapable of interpreting developments in its immediate surroundings.
This incapacity is not just an impediment — it actually defines the core of Zionism.
Israel defines itself as a state by its desire to underline the otherness of the non-Jew and emphasize the necessity for Jewish solidarity and self-reliance. On this basis, how would it be possible to foster dynamic and creative relations between Jews and Arabs when the prevailing attitude among Israeli Jews is that they have little or no interest in having any relations with Arabs?
Revolt without revolution
Slavoj Žižek writes:
Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.
We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?
Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.
There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.
The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?
The Arab Awakening
Rami G. Khouri writes:
When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in rural Tunisia on December 17, 2010, he set in motion a dynamic that goes far beyond the overthrow of individual dictators. We are witnessing nothing less than the awakening, throughout the Arab world, of several phenomena that are critical for stable statehood: the citizen, the citizenry, legitimacy of authority, a commitment to social justice, genuine politics, national self-determination and, ultimately, true sovereignty. It took hundreds of years for the United States and Western Europe to develop governance and civil society systems that affirmed those principles, even if incompletely or erratically, so we should be realistic in our expectations of how long it will take Arab societies to do so.
The countries where citizens are more actively agitating or fighting for their rights—Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen are the most advanced to date—have very different local conditions and forms of governance, with ruling elites displaying a wide range of legitimacy in the eyes of their people. Governments have responded to the challenge in a variety of ways, from the flight of the Tunisian and Egyptian leaderships to violent military repression in Syria, Libya and Bahrain, to the attempt to negotiate limited constitutional transformations in Jordan, Morocco and Oman. A few countries that have not experienced major demonstrations—Algeria and Sudan are the most significant—are likely to experience domestic effervescence in due course. Only the handful of wealthy oil producers (like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) seem largely exempt, for now, from this wave of citizen demands.
Two words capture every important dimension of the Arab Awakening: “humiliation” and “legitimacy.” They explain why the Arab region is erupting, and what needs to be done to satisfy popular demands. The typical Arab citizen, with few exceptions, has felt humiliated in recent decades by his or her government. Hundreds of millions of Arabs feel they have been denied both their human rights and their citizenship rights, the result of decades of socioeconomic stresses and political deprivations. These include petty and large-scale corruption; police brutality; abuse of power; favoritism; unemployment; poor wages; unequal opportunities; inefficient or nonexistent public services; lack of freedom of expression and association; state control of media, culture and education; and many other dimensions of the modern Arab security state. At the same time, ordinary men and women in countries across the region have seen small groups of families in the ruling elite grow fabulously rich simply because of their connections.
The dead end of globalisation looms before our youth
Pankaj Mishra writes:
In India, tens of thousands of middle-class people respond to a quasi-Gandhian activist’s call for a second freedom struggle – this time, against the country’s venal “brown masters”, as one protester told the Wall Street Journal. Middle-class Israelis demanding “social justice” turn out for their country’s first major demonstrations in years. In China, the state broadcaster CCTV unprecedentedly joins millions of cyber-critics in blaming a government that placed wealth creation above social welfare for the fatal high-speed train crash in Wenzhou last month.
Add to this the uprisings against kleptocracies in Egypt and Tunisia, the street protests in Greece and Spain earlier this year, and you are looking at a fresh political awakening. The specific contexts may seem very different, ranging from authoritarian China to democratic America (where Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man, publicly denounced a “billionaire-friendly Congress” last fortnight). And the grievances may be diversely phrased. But public anger derives from the same source: extreme and seemingly insurmountable inequality.
As Forbes magazine, that well-known socialist tool, describes it, protesters everywhere are driven by “the conviction that the power structure, corporate and government, work together to screw the broad middle class” (and the working class too, whose distress is not usually examined in Forbes).
Certainly, the strident promoters of globalisation – politicians, big businessmen, and journalists – will have to work much harder now to bamboozle their audiences.
For years now, the mantra of “economic growth” justified government interventions on behalf of big business and investors with generous tax breaks (and, in the west, the rescue of criminally reckless investors and speculators with massive bailouts at the taxpayer’s expense). The fact that a few people get very rich while a majority remains poor seemed of little importance as long as the GDP figures looked impressive.
In heavily populated countries like India, even a small number of people moving into the middle class made for an awe-inspiring spectacle. Helped by an entertainment-obsessed and “patriotic” corporate media, you could easily ignore the bad news – the suicides, for instance, of hundreds of thousands of farmers in the last decade. However, the carefully maintained illusions of globalisation shattered when even its putative beneficiaries – the educated and aspiring classes – began to hurt from high inflation, decreasing access to education and other opportunities for upward mobility.
Libya conflict: Evidence emerges of executions by both sides
The Guardian reports:
Dozens of bodies have been found in Tripoli with signs of executions carried out by both sides in the civil war.
Reuters news agency reported discovering 30 bullet-riddled bodies of fighters loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, of which two had been bound with plastic handcuffs, and one was on an ambulance stretcher with an intravenous drip still in his arms. They were in the remains of a pro-Gaddafi encampment strewn with caps and pictures of the ousted leader.
Elsewhere in the city, a medical aid worker at a Tripoli hospital said she had seen 17 bodies, believed to be civilians killed by government forces, which had been found when rebel fighters stormed the Gaddafi stronghold of Bab al-Aziziya.
“Yesterday a truck arrived at the hospital with 17 dead bodies,” Kirsty Campbell of the International Medical Corps told Reuters at Mitiga hospital. “These guys were rounded up 10 days ago. They were found in Bab al-Aziziya when the guys went in. These guys were shot in an execution there,” she said.
The wounds were not battlefield injuries, she said. She added there had been reports of more bodies.
Israel agrees to joint investigation with Egypt on Eilat attacks
An Israel Army Radio report said that Israel’s domestic intelligence service, Shin Bet, recommended a preemptive attack against members of the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, prior to the attacks by gunmen near Eilat in southern Israel last week. The report said that the request was turned down by senior defense officials and political leaders.
In response, the IDF Spokesman’s Office said that “the report suffers from substantive factual inaccuracies, and due to operational and intelligence reasons we cannot elaborate on the matter.”
The Shin Bet declined to comment on the report.
Meanwhile, Haaretz reports:
[T]wo days after telling Army Radio that Israeli and Egyptian officers would not carry out a joint investigation into the attack in the south [near Eilat last week], National Security Adviser Ya’akov Amidror has changed his stance. In a special announcement Thursday afternoon, he said a joint investigation would indeed take place.
The reason for the change probably stems from the anger that his statements to Army Radio have stirred in Egypt’s Supreme Military Council. During the Tuesday morning interview, Amidror said no joint probe involving Israeli and Egyptian officers would take place into the incident near Eilat. But he said the two sides would carry out separate investigations and then compare their findings.
Amidror made the statement even though Barak had announced on Saturday that Israel sought to hold a joint investigation with Egypt into the incident. Earlier this week, the head of the Planning Directorate at the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, traveled to Cairo to discuss with the Egyptians ways of carrying out the joint probe.
The statements by the national security adviser were followed by a report Wednesday in the Egyptian daily Al-Masri Al-Yaum, which was highly critical.
“The Israeli side has not responded so far to our demand for a joint investigation and did not announce a timetable for the completion of the investigation,” the daily quoted a senior Egyptian government official as saying.
“If there is no joint investigation we will recall our ambassador from Tel Aviv.”
Thursday afternoon the Prime Minister’s Bureau issued an unusual statement in Amidror’s name. The national security adviser stressed that “Israel agrees to hold a joint investigation with Egypt on the events of the terrorist incident on the way to Eilat that took place last week.”
Amidror added that the details would be determined between the militaries of the two countries.
Explaining the reason for the two versions, the Prime Minister’s Bureau said that only during the past 24 hours had a final decision been made on a joint investigation.
How Israelis (and many others) shirk moral responsibility for their actions
It’s a clever maneuver and it’s used again and again.
They are attacking me not because of what I did. They are attacking me because of who I am.
Not only does this put the self-declared victim in an invulnerable position — no one can change or should need defend their simple identity — but this also deflects criticism by insinuating that it springs from bigotry or blind hatred.
A few months after the Israeli Defense Forces had slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians — men, women and children — in Gaza in 2009, Israel’s ambassador to Turkey, Gaby Levy, spoke to the US ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey, and expressed his concern about deteriorating Israeli-Turkish relations.
Levy’s explanation, with which Jeffrey concurred, was that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hates Israel. “He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously,” Levy claimed.
Jeffrey commented: “Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm Levy’s thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel.”
In other words, Erdoğan’s attitude towards Israel had nothing to do with his reaction to Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians. It was the product of simple hatred — the implication thus being that there would be nothing that poor little Israel could do in order to make amends.
Erdoğan has been in office since 2003. In early 2006, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described relations with Turkey as “perfect.” In 2007, Israel’s President Shimon Peres was honored by being invited to address the Turkish parliament — it was the first time an Israeli president had addressed the parliament of a Muslim-majority country.
In 2008, right up until Israel launched the war on Gaza, Turkey was helping mediate indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria.
Turkey mediated five rounds of talks between Israeli and Syrian officials. Toward the end of Olmert’s term the two sides were on the verge of resuming direct negotiations.
At the last meeting between Olmert and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish leader called Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and relayed messages to and from Olmert. But after Operation Cast Lead began in December 2008 and the freeze in negotiations with Syria, Erdoğan said Olmert had stabbed him in the back.
In 2010, while Israel was refusing to allow Turkey to serve as a mediator with Syria, former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Omert said during a conference at Tel Aviv University:
We can reach an understanding with the Syrians which would change the map in the Middle East. A decision on this issue must be made. It’s too easy being angry at Erdogan, but it would be wise to reconcile with him. He is a fair mediator. We need negotiations with Turkish mediation.
Now we learn from Wikileaks that during this period in which Turkey, under Erdogan’s leadership, had made unprecedented efforts to serve as a peace-broker between Israel and its neighbors, key Israeli and American diplomats were in collusion with each other, reinforcing their shared and counter-productive view of Turkey’s prime minister.
Levy and Jeffrey were not looking at a real obstacle to diplomacy. They were revealing their own incompetence as diplomats by playing the game: it’s not what we do; it’s who we are.
This is the cable:
C O N F I D E N T I A L ANKARA 001549
SIPDIS
DEPARTMENT FOR EUR/SE
E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/26/2019
TAGS: PREL PGOV TU IS
SUBJECT: ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TRACES HIS PROBLEMS TO ERDOGANREF: ANKARA 1532
Classified By: AMB James F. Jeffrey, for reasons 1.4(b,d)
¶1. (C) During an October 26 call on the Ambassador, Israeli Ambassador Gabby Levy registered concern over the recent deterioration in his country’s bilateral relations with Turkey and the conviction that the relationship’s decline is attributable exclusively to Prime Minister Erdogan. Levy said Foreign Minister Davutoglu had relayed a message to him through the visiting Czech foreign minister that “things will get better.” He had also fielded messages from senior civil servants, xxxxx urging him to weather quietly Erdogan’s harsh public criticisms of Israel. The latter claimed Erdogan’s repeated angry references to the humanitarian situation in Gaza are for “domestic political consumption” only.
¶2. (C) Levy dismissed political calculation as a motivator for Erdogan’s hostility, arguing the prime minister’s party had not gained a single point in the polls from his bashing of Israel. Instead, Levy attributed Erdogan’s harshness to deep-seated emotion: “He’s a fundamentalist. He hates us religiously” and his hatred is spreading. Levy cited a perceived anti-Israeli shift in Turkish foreign policy, including the GoT’s recent elevation of its relations with Syria and its quest for observer status in the Arab League.
¶3. (C) Comment: Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government on Turkey’s deteriorating relations with Israel tend to confirm Levy’s thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel. xxxxx discusses contributing reasons for Erdogan’s tilt on Iran/Middle East isues, but antipathy towards Israel is a factor.
JEFFREY
173 Israeli investigations in the wake of the killing of 5,518 Palestinians
Gideon Levy writes:
Firas Qasqas was a gardener. Thirty-two years old and the father of three daughters, he came from his village with his family to visit his brother-in-law, who had moved to a new home in Ramallah. After an especially rainy, stormy night they woke up to a glorious sunny day and decided to go for a hike in the gorgeous valley of olives opposite the house. Yes, there are also Palestinians who love nature.
They were three hikers – Firas and his two brothers-in-law – when they saw a herd of deer fleeing down the slope. They knew that behind the herd there would also be people coming but it did not occur to them that on the heels of the deer would come hunters – in this case, people hunters. Very soon they saw a group of soldiers coming down to the valley. A few minutes later the soldiers started firing two or three rounds at them, from a very long range. Firas fell, bleeding to death. He managed to reassure his brothers in law and tell them everything was fine, they shouldn’t worry. But not long after that he started to gurgle and foam covered his mouth. At the hospital in Ramallah the young gardener expired.
That was in the winter of 2007, a relatively quiet winter. A few days after the killing I came to the valley of olive trees with his brother-in-law Jamil Mator, who was with Firas when he died. Hundreds of meters had separated the shooters and their victim. Far from there, at the dead man’s home in the village of Battir, I met the black-garbed young widow Majida and the three little orphaned girls. As her daughters blew soap bubbles inside the small room, Majida asked simply: “I want to know why he was killed because I don’t know.” And the bubbles (and the tears ) filled the room.
I too wanted to know why Firas was killed. The Israel Defense Forces Spokesman, as usual, said everything was in order. The soldiers discerned “suspicious behavior,” the three Palestinians were seen “doing something with the ground,” before the shooting they were “properly warned,” the incident was investigated “at all levels,” the conclusions have been “implemented” and the material has been sent “for review by the military prosecution.”
Four years have elapsed since then and Firas’ death has been forgotten. Since then I have reported on dozens more cases of killing in the West Bank, nearly all of which of course were sent for review by the military prosecution, which is usually the decisive phase on the way to burying the material of investigation of the truth in the IDF.
And now my colleague Haim Levinson published an astonishing piece of news in yesterday’s Haaretz. The military prosecution has decided to try the commander of a company in the reserves, Shahar Mor, “a well-known educator in the religious Zionist community,” who shot Firas in the back from a great distance and killed him.
It took the prosecution nearly four years to investigate such a clear case, the details of which cried out from the soil of the valley where the shooting of an unarmed person from an illegal distance occurred, without any danger to the soldiers, without any justification. Even this indictment would not have happened had not B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories intervened again and again, demanding the shooter be brought to trial. And this is such a rare occurrence. Data from Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights show that only 8 percent of the investigations that were opened in the dark years of 2002-2009 culminated in an indictment. Only 14 people have been tried and there have been only 173 investigations in the wake of the killing of 5,518 individuals.
This is how the law enforcement mechanism of the IDF looks, with its army of investigators, prosecutors and judges, which is nothing but a ridiculous simulacrum of a justice system. In the four years that have elapsed dozens more Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, not counting the Gaza Strip, some of them not guilty of anything. In Haaretz I documented the death of a paralyzed bean seller in Nablus, a 71-year-old accountant in Balata, a 19-year-old student in Tekoa, a woman demonstrator in Bil’in, a Palestinian policeman from Bethlehem, a laborer from the Far’a refugee camp, a laborer from the village of Sa’ir and a driver from Jerusalem who was going to pick up his family for a vacation in Eilat and was killed by scandalous shooting at his car. All of them were guilty of nothing and were killed for no reason. All of these cases are under investigation by the military prosecution, strenuous investigation that will be completed four years from now, or maybe in 40. During this time the educator, Company Commander Mor, went about teaching his students. No doubt he taught them “values,” love of the land and Jewish morality, as only religious Zionism can do. At the same time, one can guess, his conscience did not bother him much about the criminal killing of Qasqas the gardener.
Cheney reveals he was right about everything
The New York Times reports:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.
“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding the secrecy of internal deliberations a hallmark of his time in office, divulges a number of conflicts with others in the inner circle.
Pastor Beck preaches in Jerusalem
The Guardian reports:
The temperature may have dropped a little in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, but it was more than compensated for by the heat produced by Glenn Beck as he brought his “Restoring Courage” rally to the Old City.
The former Fox News presenter and devout Mormon stood at a podium beneath the gunmetal grey of the dome of the al-Aqsa mosque to direct a tirade of invective at governments, human rights organisations, the United Nations, Europe and Arab states – and sometimes just “them”, whoever they are.
Despite a strangely subdued start, the rightwing polemicist finally roused his audience to whoops and cheers after a strangely subdued initial response with his trademark preacher’s inflection. But all the while, the distant noise of anti-Beck protests provided a backdrop to a 90-minute programme of declamation, music and presentations.
Dressed as though attending a funeral, Beck stood in sharp contrast to the casual attire of his overwhelmingly white American Christian audience, many of whose baseball caps and T-shirts denoted their state of origin, their church or their adherence to the US Tea Party movement.
But the surprising number of empty seats belied the organisers’ claims that demand for tickets had outstripped availability at the 2,000-capacity Davidson Centre.
Ami Kaufman writes:
After months of preparations, hours of television and radio talk all geared up for the big day, tons of merchandise manufactured, Glenn Beck could just about muster over a thousand people at his “Restoring Courage” last night in Jerusalem.
I can’t help but think that this flop might be a lethal blow for this guy. After getting kicked out of FOX and then his decision to veer even farther to the right by partnering up with the likes of Pastor John Hagee, Beck seems to have lost any chance whatsoever to get back into mainstream America like he was just months ago.
Even the event a few days earlier in Caesarea had more umph in it than this one. In fact, he barely even cried in this one. I think he might have been shedding the real tears back stage.
Egypt’s #Flagman is honored
Al-Masry Al-Youm reports:
The governor of Zagazig on Tuesday honored Ahmed al-Shahat, the young man who pulled down the Israeli flag from the Israel Embassy and replaced it with the Egyptian flag during anti-Israel protests on Saturday.
Protesters have been staging demonstrations before the Israeli Embassy in Giza since last week, following the death of five Egyptian soldiers at the hands of Israeli forces.
Residents of the city cheered Shahat upon his arrival and held a big celebration for him.
“I did it to please millions of Egyptians and Arabs,” Shahat said.
How the rebels took Tripoli
Associated Press reports:
They called it Operation Mermaid Dawn, a stealth plan coordinated by sleeper cells, Libyan rebels, and NATO to snatch the capital from the Moammar Gadhafi’s regime’s hands.
It began three months ago when groups of young men left their homes in Tripoli and traveled to train in Benghazi with ex-military soldiers.
After training in Benghazi, the men would return to Tripoli either through the sea disguised as fishermen or through the western mountains.
“They went back to Tripoli and waited; they became sleeper cells,” said military spokesman Fadlallah Haroun, who helped organize the operation.
He said that many of the trained fighters also stayed in the cities west of Tripoli, including Zintan and Zawiya, and waited for the day to come to push into the capital.
Operation Mermaid Dawn began on the night of August 21 and took the world by surprise as the rebels sped into the capital and celebrated in Green Square with almost no resistance from pro-Gadhafi forces.
Haroun said about 150 men rose up from inside Tripoli, blocking streets, engaging in armed street fights with Gadhafi brigades, and taking over their streets with check points.
He said another 200 men from Misrata.
But why did the armed Gadhafi troops melt away when the rebels drove through?
Fathi Baja, head of the rebel leadership’s political committee, said it was all thanks to a deal cut with the head of the batallion in charge of protecting Tripoli’s gates, the Mohammed Megrayef Brigade.
His name was Mohammed Eshkal and he was very close to Gadhafi and his family. Baja said Gadhafi had ordered the death of his cousin twenty years ago.
“Eshkal carried a grudge in his heart against Gadhafi for 20 years, and he made a deal with the NTC — when the zero hour approached he would hand the city over to the rebels,” said Haroun.
“Eshkal didn’t care much about the revolution,” said Haroun. “He wanted to take a personal revenge from Gadhafi and when he saw a chance that he will fall, he just let it happen.”
But Haroun said he still didn’t trust Eshkal or the men who defected so late in the game.
Haroun said that he didn’t trust any of the defectors who left Gadhafi’s side so close to August 20.
“They lived knew his days were numbered so they defected, but in their hearts they will always fear Gadhafi and give him a regard,” he said.
Haroun said NATO was in contact with the rebel leadership in Benghazi and were aware of the date of Operation Mermaid Dawn.
“Honestly, NATO played a very big role in liberating Tripoli — they bombed all the main locations that we couldn’t handle with our light weapons,” said Harouin.
As one group of journalists is released, another four are abducted
Reuters reports:
Four Italian journalists were abducted by gunmen near Zawiyah in western Libya as they traveled toward Tripoli on Wednesday, Italian officials said.
The four, who worked for Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera, La Stampa and Avvenire, are being held in an apartment in Tripoli, said Guido de Sanctis, the Italian consul in Benghazi, who was able to speak to one of the journalists by phone.
“They are fine, even if everything happened in a very difficult atmosphere,” de Sanctis told Reuters.
“They have been allowed to call Italy and they have been allowed to get calls from us. They were given food to eat when the Ramadan fast was broken.”
The four were seized near Zawiyah, on the coastal highway 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli by armed men who killed their driver, de Sanctis said. The journalists were then handed to others, presumably Muammar Gaddafi loyalists, he said.
The journalists believe the apartment they are being held in Tripoli is close to the Rixos hotel where foreign journalists who were trapped for five days left unharmed earlier on Wednesday, de Sanctis said.
The journalist at Avvenire, the Italian bishops’ newspaper, was also allowed to call the newspaper and said they were well, Italian media said.
Italy’s government said it was closely monitoring the situation.