Magdi Abdelhadi writes: Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, has lived up to the worst expectations of him. He may be an experienced old cadre in the Muslim Brotherhood and a dogged parliamentarian, but his choice of prime minister confirms what many suspected: he lacks imagination and flare.
Worse still, he did not seem to have the guts to make a clean break with the old establishment. Perhaps he couldn’t. He has picked a minister from the outgoing cabinet for the post. This being the same cabinet he and his Islamist Justice and Freedom party campaigned against for months, but failed to force from office through a vote of no confidence.
If this is the best he could come up with after weeks of consultations, there’s little reason to get excited about who the new prime minister might select for his cabinet in what was supposed to be Egypt’s first “revolutionary government”.
One way in which Hisham Kandil has made history is by being the youngest man to hold the position of prime minister in the history of Egypt. Another first is that he sports a salafi beard. His facial hair has sparked speculation over whether he is in fact a closet Muslim Brother. But those who harbour such fears forget that the Brothers’ conservative ideology, along with the beard, had become mainstream in Egypt long before the revolution.
Kandil has already said he will keep some ministers from the outgoing government. Few believe it is actually him calling the shots. It’s out of the question that he will choose a new defence minister for example. That post will most likely be kept by the septuagenarian Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who has been the not-so-much-behind-the scenes effective ruler of the country since the overthrow of Mubarak last year.
Many will be watching who gets picked to lead the second branch of the coercive machinery of the state, the interior ministry. If Kandil recycles an old police general, then Egypt will be firmly on track to reproduce the old policies that failed to solve its myriad problems, when they weren’t directly contributing to them. [Continue reading…]
Have tens of thousands of Syrians sacrificed their lives rising up against Bashar al Assad just so that the U.S. and its allies can have a say in who might replace him? I don’t think so.
There is, the Wall Street Journal reports, a “relative lack of Western options” for Assad’s replacement.
A relative lack? Why should there be any Western options in a choice that belongs to the Syrian people alone?
The Obama administration and officials of some Arab and Western nations are discussing ways to place Syria’s highest-ranking military defector at the center of a political transition in the Arab state, according to U.S. and Middle East officials.
The focus on Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a childhood friend of President Bashar al-Assad, is increasing as hopes fade for prospects that an umbrella resistance group, the Syrian National Council, can galvanize the opposition, the officials said.
Efforts to find a transitional figure who is palatable to the Assad regime’s Russian backers and leading Arab states, as well as to the opposition, have taken on added urgency as rebel fighters make gains in major Syrian cities and more high-level officials defect, the officials said.
The officials said Gen. Tlass is one of the few figures in opposition to the regime who could potentially help restore order in Damascus and secure Syria’s vast chemical-weapons stockpile.
Gen. Tlass was a commander in Syria’s elite Republican Guard before his July 6 defection, and his father served as defense minister under Mr. Assad’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, for 30 years.
He is also, unlike the Assad clan, a Sunni Muslim—which Western officials hope could make him acceptable as a transitional figure to the country’s rebel fighters and opposition leaders, who are also largely from the Sunni sect of Islam.
“It’s too early to say if Tlass will stand the strain and pick up traction or just fade away,” a senior U.S. defense official said. “The next week or two will reveal his credentials and attractiveness to the various components internally and internationally.”
But the focus on Gen. Tlass also underscores the dearth of figures who can present a viable alternative to Mr. Assad. Many in the opposition consider Gen. Tlass and his family too closely tied to the Assads’ repression and corruption to be acceptable to Syrians. They also question his ability to win over members of Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect, which makes up 12% of Syria’s population and appears largely unified behind the regime.
“Someone like Tlass is difficult to sell to the Syrian people,” said Ammar Abdulhamid, an anti-Assad activist based in Washington. “He certainly can’t play any leading role in a transition.”
The relative lack of Western options became clear this week, when the European Union’s foreign ministers shifted from its longtime support of the Syrian National Council, a largely émigré group that Brussels had made an official interlocutor in early 2012. On Monday, EU foreign ministers dropped all reference to the group in its statement on Syria.
A turning point came at the Paris meeting of the Friends of Syria on July 6, a senior European diplomat said, when the SNC seemed to have no response to the EU’s calls for it to broaden its political base. They “just don’t seem to be making progress on this,” the diplomat said.
Gen. Tlass’s flight to Paris this month was cheered in Washington and Brussels as the clearest sign of cracks inside Damascus’s ruling elite. The majority of Syria’s officer corps hails from Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Gen. Tlass’s defection has been viewed as a potential rallying cry for the Syrian armed forces’ Sunni base to switch sides.
On Tuesday, Gen. Tlass went on television and pledged to facilitate change in his country and promote religious and racial harmony. He spoke from Saudi Arabia, looking slightly ill at ease in an open-neck shirt on the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya network.
“I speak to you not as an official, but as one of the sons of Syria….One of the sons of the Syrian Arab army that rejects the criminal path of this corrupt regime,” he said.
Arab officials said his appearance in Saudi Arabia showed how the ruling al-Saud family is seeking a role for the Syrian officer. Saudi Arabia is the leading Sunni state backing Syria’s rebels against Mr. Assad, along with Qatar and Turkey.
A senior Arab official said Gen. Tlass’s trip to Saudi Arabia was arranged by the country’s new head of intelligence, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. Diplomats at Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington weren’t available for comment.
The website of the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya reporting on Tlass’s appearance on its own TV channel said: “The former general was believed to be speaking from Paris.” They also reported: “French officials later confirmed that he was in France.”
Since Tlass was speaking into an Al Arabiya microphone and filmed by an Al Arabiya camera, I’ll assume that Al Arabiya‘s own staff did not need to consult French officials in order to determine whether they were located in Paris or Riyadh. In other words, Al Arabiya knows exactly where Tlass gave the interview, it is only others who believed he was speaking from Paris and the French officials merely confirmed that he was in France prior to giving the interview.
I’m inclined to trust the WSJ‘s sources on the rather significant detail of Tlass’s location.
Here is Tlass making his statement in Arabic. The report below includes quotations:
Al Arabiya reports: Defected Syrian Brigadier-General Manaf Tlas called on Syrians to unite and look towards a post-revolutionary Syria, in a statement broadcast exclusively on Al Arabiya late Tuesday.
“I speak to you as a defected member of the Syrian army, who refuses criminal violence … I speak to you as one of the sons of Syria,” Tlas said, dressed in a light blue shirt with an open collar, his gray hair tussled.
The former general was believed to be speaking from Paris.
“Honorable Syrian army officers do not accept the criminal acts in Syria … Allow me to serve Syria after [President Bashar] al-Assad’s era.
“We must all unite to serve Syria and promote stability in the country, rebuilding a free and democratic Syria.”
“Allow me to call on a united Syria,” Tlas added.
Tlass said the “new Syria … should not be built on revenge, exclusion or monopoly.”
He said he did not blame those troops who have not defected, adding that “whatever mistakes made by some members of the Syrian Arab Army … those honorable troops who have not partaken in the killing … are the extension of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army.”
It was his first public appearance since he left Syria earlier this month. French officials later confirmed that he was in France.
His long silence raised questions about whether he had joined the anti-Assad uprising or merely fled the civil war.
Maybe Tlass could have a role in unifying Syria, but I doubt that his chances of doing so will be enhanced by getting the endorsement of Saudi Arabia’s autocratic rulers.
Commenting on Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s appointment as Saudi Arabia’s new intelligence chief, Simon Henderson writes: Bandar used to be one of Saudi Arabia’s flashiest diplomats, a longtime ambassador to the United States renowned for manipulating people and policy in the kingdom’s favor, and sometimes also in favor of the U.S. government. At the very least, his appointment is a reflection of King Abdullah’s concerns about developments in the Middle East, particularly Syria, and the limited talent pool in the House of Saud to meet the challenges. Frankly, it suggests panic in Riyadh.
Where does one start? Bandar certainly used to be a firm pair of hands, but recently that grasp has been shakier. Although Bandar endeared himself to successive U.S. administrations for being able to get things done — as well as the sumptuous parties he hosted at his official residence in Virginia overlooking the Potomac — the prevailing story about him recently has been about his mental state. William Sampson, a (friendly) biographer, noted that Bandar’s “first period of full-blown depression” came in the mid-1990s. Another biographer, David Ottaway, described Bandar as a “more than occasional drinker,” and most conversations about him seemed to revolve around, only partly mischievously, whether he had finished detoxification or not.
In October 2010, the Saudi Press Agency announced that Bandar had returned to the kingdom “from abroad,” to be met at the airport by a bevy of princes. This development prompted me to write a Foreign Policy article making the case that “Bandar is back.”
To my slight embarrassment, Bandar then disappeared from sight. But I wasn’t wholly surprised about last week’s announcement because Bandar has recently reemerged. In June, when his uncle Crown Prince Nayef died, the Saudi Press Agency published a photo of Bandar, saying he offered his condolences. A week ago, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited Jeddah, Bandar was also listed as attending his audience with King Abdullah.
Although the kingdom’s main obsession is Iran, its immediate pre-occupation is Syria. On that issue, Bandar may indeed be the man for the moment. Over the years, he has acquired a reputation for discreet diplomacy and intrigue in both Syria and Lebanon. According to a source close to the ruling family, King Abdullah regards Bandar, who bad-mouthed the then crown prince during his tenure as ambassador to the United States, with caution. At one point, Abdullah went so far as to take Bandar to the side and tell him: “I know you do not represent me in Washington.”
But Abdullah still recognizes Bandar’s talents. Although Abdullah is often depicted as a Syriaphile, the monarch changed his attitude, especially after the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad castigated his fellow Arab leaders as “half-men” for their failure to support Hezbollah.
Another more recent example of Saudi willingness to play in Syrian politics was the welcome that Bashar’s uncle, Rifaat, received in Riyadh when coming to pay his respects last month after Nayef’s death. Rifaat has lived in Paris since 1984, having tried and failed to stage a coup after President Hafez al-Assad, his brother and Bashar’s father, fell ill. Rifaat is related to King Abdullah by marriage — one of Rifaat’s wives was a sister of one of Abdullah’s wives, the mother of deputy foreign minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah. The closeness between Rifaat and Abdullah is more than just kinship: They worked together in the early 1980s when Rifaat was leading the Defense Companies, Syria’s praetorian guard, and Abdullah was commander of the Saudi Arabian national guard.
However the kingdom may be adjusting its Syria policy, there is no denying that the General Intelligence Directorate (GID), the Saudi CIA, is badly in need of a shakeup. Its recent record is, to say the least, mixed: Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the kingdom’s chief interlocutor with the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan, “was relieved of the post at his [own] request.” In Ghost Wars, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the CIA and Osama bin Laden, Steve Coll wrote: “Turki’s vast personal riches . . . bothered some of his rivals in the royal family. They felt the Saudi intelligence department had become a financial black hole. . . . Turki’s rivals clamored for accountability at the [General Intelligence Department].”
Both Muqrin and Nawaf, the men who served as Saudi intelligence chiefs between Turki and Bandar, lacked flair. Muqrin, who has now been shunted into an undefined advisory role, trained as a fighter pilot, like Bandar. But his primary credential for the job was that he was loyal to King Abdullah. His other qualification was that, like the king, he was not a Sudairi — the largest group of seven full brothers who have dominated Saudi royal politics for decades and still do, despite the passing of three of them. Nawaf, who took over from Turki, was even more of an Abdullah yes-man. The fiction that he was leading Saudi foreign intelligence was unsustainable after he suffered a stroke during the 2002 Beirut Arab summit. He is still alive, but confined to a wheelchair.
Even if Bandar has regained some of his previous form, the troubles of the Middle East, from a Saudi perspective, are surely more than can be handled by one man. In Syria, Riyadh wants Bashar out but does not want the contagion to spread to Jordan. To Riyadh’s fury, it also finds itself competing for influence in Syria with tiny Qatar, which appears to be just as generous with money and weapons but much far more nimble in responding to events on the ground. [Continue reading…]
The Palestinian intellectual and former member of Israel’s Knesset, Azmi Bishara, writes: 1) After a legendary show of resistance in the face of an unprecedented onslaught of savagery, the Syrian revolutionaries can now almost touch their main aim: a change of regime. As I have said elsewhere, a lack of wisdom at this stage could lead to a complete destruction of the very country of Syria.
2) This progress would not have been made without the sacrifices of millions of Syrians, and tens of thousands of the armed rebels. Yet it must be said that some of the members of these armed groups used the opportunity to carry out personal vendettas, and others are clearly infiltrators into the Syrian cause. It is patently clear that foreign operatives have exploited the revolutionaries’ needs for financial and logistical support, not to mention their understandable grievances against the regime, to try and effect the course of events. In this regard, the assassinations of six Syrian scientists (including a missile expert) is a threatening development. The same can be said of the attempts of Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani to try and control some of the Kurdish-populated areas of Syria; bear in mind that the Syrian Kurds’ National Council is now well armed, whilst not having taken part in the revolution itself. We cannot assume that the Israelis and the CIA will stand backk and just watch. (Put another way: was the removal of the former head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service a mere coincidence?) The recent statements made by Israeli and American statesmen on the question of Syria’s chemical weapons is to be taken seriously: their efforts are already underway. Anybody who doesn’t understand this point, clearly does not understand the way in which world powers and their regional counterparts attempt to achieve their aims, and does not understand the reality of the enmity [between the Israelis and the other countries in the region], nor does that person understand the strategic significance of Syria.
3) The Syrian revolutionaries are true patriots, and this is reflected in their movement. This truth does not change another fact, however: that there is no single, unified, country-wide military chain of command for the armed wing of the Syrian revolution. Added to this is the very real danger of sectarian bloodletting along the country’s fault lines. [Continue reading…]
The Kurdish site Rudaw reports: Syrian governmental forces have retreated from the Kurdish regions of Syria without a fight; the liberated cities are now being ruled evenly by the People’s Council of Syrian Kurdistan (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC).
According to the information obtained by Rudaw, the Kurdish cities of Kobane, Derek, Amoude, Efrin and Sari Kani have fallen under the control of Syrian Kurdish forces.
The city of Kobane was the first Kurdish city to be liberated last Thursday, 17 months after the revolution against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began.
The KNC and PYD agreed to jointly control the liberated Kurdish cities in a deal made in Erbil on July 11, under the supervision of Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani.
“According to the treaty of Erbil which was signed by the KNC and PYD, any administrative vacuum in the Kurdish cities of Syria will be occupied evenly — 50/50 — by these two signatories. These two groups will continue ruling the Kurdish regions until an election is carried out,” said Nuri Brimo, a spokesperson of the Democratic Kurdish Party of Syria.
The national flag of Kurdistan and the flag of the PKK – which the PYD is affiliated with — are now being raised over the majority of government and public buildings.
There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.
“These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”
The broadcast includes images from Hedges’ collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.”
A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.
The Guardian reports: The first systematic look at the New York police department’s response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.
In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.
The study, published on Wednesday, found evidence that police made violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments, obstructed independent legal monitors and was opaque about its policies.
The NYPD report is the first of a series to look at how police authorities in five US cities, including Oakland and Boston, have treated the Occupy movement since it began in September 2011. The research concludes that there now is a systematic effort by authorities to suppress protests, even when these are lawful and pose no threat to the public.
Sarah Knuckey, a professor of law at NYU, said: “All the case studies we collected show the police are violating basic rights consistently, and the level of impunity is shocking”.
To be launched over the coming months, the reports are being done under the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, a national consortium of law school clinics addressing America’s response to Occupy Wall Street.
The NYPD appears to be the worst offender, in large part because it has made little attempt – unlike Oakland, for example – to reassess its practices or open itself up to dialogue or review. [Continue reading…]
Chris Hedges writes: The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.
Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.
These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” [Continue reading…]
James North writes: The 73 million human beings who live here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue to struggle through one of the greatest humanitarian disasters on the planet since the end of the Second World War. By one estimate, more than 5 million people have died since the Second Congo War broke out in 1998. Fighting has just started up again in eastern Congo; hundreds are already dead, and there may already be more than 200,000 refugees, adding to the 2 million Congolese already displaced by war. Doctors Without Borders has just warned that the renewed violence is blocking efforts to control an outbreak of cholera.
Far more people have died in Congo over the years than in Syria or Libya, but the mainstream Western press is barely paying attention to the resurgent fighting—and it has mostly ignored other dangerous developments, like the botched presidential election last November and the possible theft of billions of dollars from the country’s mining industry.
The DR Congo’s future depends greatly on what happens here, in southeastern Katanga province. Katanga has tremendous reserves of copper and cobalt, which Belgian colonialists began exploiting nearly a century ago. Then, after independence, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko seized power. He turned out to be a vicious and incompetent kleptomaniac, but he was supported for decades by the United States, other Western countries, Citibank and the International Monetary Fund. Mobutu looted the mining industry, which had all but collapsed by the time he finally fled, in 1997.
Now, foreign mining companies are coming back to Congo. If the Congolese people can force the mining giants to pay their government fairly, this country has a chance. The government has no other significant source of potential revenue. With the rising earnings from mining, it could slowly but steadily create a professional army to replace the current bands of unpaid uniformed looters who rape and kill civilians with impunity. The government could invest in education and health. It could reduce the 70 percent rate of undernourishment. It could start to raise a potentially rich country, in which there is no shortage of intelligent, hard-working people, from last place—187 out of 187—in the Human Development Index.
Here in Katanga, despite a few signs of hope, the outlook is still grim. President Joseph Kabila has repeatedly promised both the international community and his own people that his government will make public the amount of money the mining companies are paying it. But Kabila continues to stall, even as information has surfaced of a shocking new deal that may have cheated the Congolese people out of more than $5 billion—a lot of money anywhere, but a stupendous amount in a country with an annual budget of only $7.2 billion, half of which is international aid. And there is every depressing indication that the international community will not call the government’s bluff, just as it has already let Kabila get away with fraud in the November 2011 elections. [Continue reading…]
David Dobbs writes: We don’t know what led Holmes to do this, whether he was, to use David Eagleman’s distinction, psychotic or psychopathic or something else altogether. But unlike Anthony Lane and many other commenters, I don’t think we can give the movies a free ride here by saying they had nothing to do with it and just provided a stage. They gave this actor his lines and stage directions.
I’m not saying the movies made Holmes crazy or psychopathic or some such. But the movies are a enormous, constant, heavily influential part of an American culture that fetishizes violence and glamorizes, to the point of ten-year wars, a militarized, let-it-rain approach to conflict resolution. And culture shapes the expression of mental dysfunction — just as it does other traits. This is why, say, relatively ‘simple’ schizophrenia — not the paranoid sort — takes very different forms in Western and some Eastern cultures. On an even simpler level, this is why competitive athleticism is more likely to express itself as football (the real kind) in Britain but as basketball in the U.S. Culture shapes the expression of behavioral traits. The traits don’t rise inherent as an urge to play basketball or a plan to shoot up a Batman movie. A long conversation between the trait and the surrounding culture shape those expressions. Culture gives the impulse form and direction.
Doug Saunders writes: The attacks on two of the most prominent Muslims in American public life last week seemed to have come out of the blue. It appeared as if five Republican Representatives had arbitrarily chosen this moment to lash out at Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Representative Keith Ellison for no reason other than their religion, in a bid to discredit the entire concept of Muslims taking part in national politics and government.
A sequence of letters and public denunciations, led by Rep. Michele Bachman and backed by four other Representatives, accused the two of being somehow indirectly affiliated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The charges were so devoid of substance that senior Republican leaders and many members of Congress were quick to condemn them as bizarre and inappropriate. Still, even though they came from a marginal corner of Congress (albeit one representing millions of Americans), the language of the attacks was drawn from an increasingly mainstream set of claims about Muslims in the West. The letters from the Representatives argued that Muslims in the U.S. government are part of a wide plot involving numerous ordinary Muslim-Americans to “impose shariah worldwide,” to “undermine the U.S. Constitution,” and to advocate “that Muslims not integrate into the cultures of non-Muslim countries.” For a surprising number of Americans, these phrases represent commonsense thought about the Muslims in their midst.
These myths are strikingly similar to the set of charges that were commonly directed toward Roman Catholic and East European Jewish immigrants between the 1890s and the 1960s – that these groups are disloyal, supportive of violence, unwilling to integrate into Western values, driven by a religion that is actually an ideology of conquest, and poised to swamp our society through high reproduction rates. The people who hold these ideas, then as now, are not simply racists or xenophobes but often liberals who have come to believe – – based on misleading or distorted information – – that religious-minority outsiders are a threat to their freedoms and liberties.
In the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, these ideas came to be applied to Muslims in the West in a sequence of bestselling books, YouTube videos, websites, op-eds and activist campaigns organized by a small circle of anti-immigration authors and activists, increasingly often with funding from conservative foundations. The notion of a “Muslim tide” penetrated the American imagination. The millions of people who bought their books and watched their videos may not have subscribed to the movement’s full idea of an Islamic plot to take over Western civilization through immigration. In many cases they were simply trying to understand the different and sometimes strange-looking newcomers in their midst, and the simultaneous emergence of Islamic terrorism – – but the effect has been to popularize an interlocking set of myths about Muslim immigration.
In my book The Myth of the Muslim Tide, I explain the history of these ideas and trace their emergence in twenty-first century popular and political thought, and provide a detailed, research-based examination of the realities behind them. Luckily, the past five years have seen a number of very large-scale international studies and surveys that have revolutionized our understanding of the beliefs, views, behaviours and loyalties of Muslim immigrants and their offspring. What emerges is a picture of a set of communities undergoing the classic experience of immigration and integration – – with the same difficulties and challenges experienced by poor Catholics and Jews in their time – but burdened with a set of popular myths that are leading them increasingly to be rejected and marginalized by the wider population.
I have identified three nested groups of myths that together have created a widespread misunderstanding of Muslims in the West and poisoned our political environment. [Continue reading…]
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports: According to the rebels, a month of fierce fighting and artillery bombardment in Deir el-Zour city has seen hundreds of civilians, rebel fighters and loyalist soldiers killed, and 86 tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed.
But even as the civil war has moved into Damascus, the regime’s security forces have continued to fight on this far edge of the country. In the past week government forces managed to take over two major intersections in the city, occupying them with tanks and establishing sniper positions. Many of the rebels are close to exhaustion. Food is served once a day to the fighters and supplies have dwindled to a trickle. They take four hours to travel a gruelling route through government lines.
The soldiers fare better than the civilians, however, as smuggled food comes with smuggled ammunition. The civilians are reduced to begging food from the fighters. One day during a week-long stay, a woman approached us.
“We need food. I have four kids and nothing to feed them,” she said. “I will send you some tins later,” said the fighter, sounding tired. “I have asked three units before and no one gave me anything,” the woman retorted, before walking away.
The ragtag army can fight a war of attrition with the government, but with no leadership and no command structure, they are unable to organise a concentrated attack on its bases.
Opposition forces in Deir el-Zour are organised into around 20 battalions. The fighters consist of secularists and salafis, townspeople and tribesmen from the country, civilians and defected soldiers. They frequently bicker among themselves and accuse each other of hoarding weapons.
Some units have lost 70% of their men through casualties and desertion, and ammunition in some cases is so low that soldiers go to battle with one magazine. Others, however, hold stockpiles of brand new RPGs, Austrian-made machine guns and hand grenades, part of a shipment that the fighters say was bought with private money from Syrian donors and delivered by Turkish military intelligence over the border.
There are more weapons and men in the countryside, but many commanders prefer to protect their villages than send their men and weapons to fight in the city.
Meanwhile, the civilians who still make up most of the fighting force and who have carried the burden of fighting for the past 16 months look at officers who have defected recently with suspicion and resentment.
Khalil al-Burdany is a former English teacher who leads one of the main battalions in the town. The morning the Guardian met him, a column of pro-Assad tanks and soldiers had tried to get into the sector held by his battalion in the Umal area to the south of the city. A hundred rebels were scrambled and moved towards the front to help Khalil’s small unit, but when government soldiers started firing mortars and tank rounds, half the men retreated. Only 15 of the reinforcements reached the front, where they stood behind a corner for an hour awaiting orders and then withdrew.
Khalil said: “Some of the battalions are just sitting eating and drinking and others are fighting. I had 50 men in this sector, now I have 23. The rest are dead.
“For 30 days I fought and I lost men every day.” Khalil pointed to a burly major sitting in front of him who had defected a week earlier and continued in English: “This officer, he comes now and wants to become the supreme commander. They still have the Bashar [Assad] mentality and they only defected because they realised that we are winning.” [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: Syrian warplanes bombed the nation’s largest city Tuesday, activists said, a dramatic escalation in the 16-month uprising and a stark sign of the government’s growing desperation as it tries to reverse the recent momentum of rebel forces.
Aleppo, like Damascus, the Syrian capital, had long been seen as a stronghold of support for President Bashar al-Assad. But the unrest has spread to the city, Syria’s commercial capital, in recent days, adding to a sense that the regime is losing control after the assassinations last week of four of its top security officials in a bombing.
Tuesday’s aerial bombing of Aleppo, the first of its kind in the conflict, was part of a coordinated assault by government forces that included heavy artillery shelling and rockets launched from military helicopters. The attacks targeted Tariq Bab, a residential area east of Aleppo, as well as the neighborhoods of Sakhour and Masaken Hanano in Aleppo, according to the Local Coordination Committees, an activist network.
Although helicopter gunships have been used in the past, the government’s decision to deploy fixed-wing aircraft appeared to be an effort to intimidate the rebel forces by signaling that the regime had yet to use its full military arsenal. Syria has one of the largest air forces in the Middle East, and its use in battling the rebels could give the government a critical advantage over a rebel force that has struggled to acquire heavy weapons.
The BBC’s Ian Pannell, reporting from Aleppo confirms that the Syrian air force is now bombing Syria’s largest city:
Helicopter gunships spun through the skies throughout the day, firing bullets and rockets to the ground. Sustained artillery and mortar rounds pounded restive neighbourhoods.
But it was what happened late in the afternoon that underlined the grave risk to the government of losing ground in what is Syria’s largest city and its economic capital.
First came an unmistakeable sound that has so far been absent in this conflict – the roar of fighter jets.
What appeared to be Russian-made MiG planes arced through the sky. We watched as they dropped in, bombing and strafing rebel positions.
Dead and wounded civilians and fighters were taken to hospitals and makeshift clinics as the human cost of this conflict continues to grow.
The stakes for both sides here could not be higher and it is now clear that neither side is prepared to give way.
The Los Angeles Times reports: A major impediment to determining who is who is that CIA officers largely have avoided entering Syria or traveling to the battle zones since February, when the U.S. Embassy in Damascus was shuttered for security reasons after threats by groups allied with the Assad government. Closing the embassy left the agency without a secure base from which to operate, and CIA personnel left the country, the [unnamed current and former] officials said.
Critics say the CIA’s absence from Syria is a missed opportunity to influence the fractured rebel movement.
“We should be on the ground with bucket loads of money renting the opposition groups that we need to steer this in the direction that benefits the United States,” said a former CIA officer who spent years in the Middle East. “We’re not, and good officers are extremely frustrated.”
The CIA declined to comment. When asked about statements that the CIA lacks a presence in Syria, U.S. officials notably do not dispute the idea, talking, instead, about other ways of finding out what is taking place.
“We know a lot more than we did about the Syrian opposition a month ago and much more than we knew six months ago. That’s because of increased contacts diplomatically and through a variety of other means that I’m not going to discuss,” an Obama administration official said.
A variety of other means? Come on, own up: CIA analysts are spending a lot of time following Twitter.
In contrast with this view that the U.S. government is still struggling to understand what is happening inside Syria, we have the Assad regime’s assertions that the war is being steered by outside forces. This view is summarized here in a report from Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency:
Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country.
Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes.
The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.
In October, calm was eventually restored in the Arab state after President Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but Israel, the US and its Arab allies are seeking hard to bring the country into chaos through any possible means. Tel Aviv, Washington and some Arab capitals have been staging various plots in the hope of increasing unrests in Syria.
One can either believe that the hand-wringing going on in Washington is a charade whose purpose is to disguise imperial power actively shaping events inside Syria, or, see that there is now a wide and widening gap between America’s imperial mindset and its ever shrinking imperial capabilities.
Retired CIA officers can get wheeled into Congress and repeat the catechism that money is all powerful, but if that really was true then Iraq and Afghanistan should provide gleaming examples of how American money can be relied on to shape the world in accordance with American interests.
In Yarmouk camp in Damascus on Saturday, July 14, Palestinians denounced Bashar al Assad and Kofi Annan.
Budour Hassan writes: On July 14, thousands of Palestinian refugees marched in a funeral procession for 11 unarmed protesters shot dead by Syrian security forces in the al-Yarmouk refugee camp. Raucous and seething with rage, mourners chanted for Syria and Palestine, called for the downfall of Bashar Assad’s regime, and sang for freedom.
Whether this burgeoning civil disobedience movement will grow into an open, durable rebellion remains to be seen, but the significance and the potential influence of the latest wave of protests that has swept Syria’s largest Palestinian camp cannot be overlooked.
As the Syrian uprising gathered momentum and the Syrian regime escalated its repression against what started out as a peaceful revolt, concerns have emerged about the impact of the uprising on Palestinian refugees in Syria, who make up just over 2 percent of Syria’s total population.
The Palestinian political elite in Syria have been divided. Some factions have desperately attempted to appear neutral, distancing themselves from the unrest. Others, such as Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-GC, Fatah al-Intifada, and the Palestinian-Baathist militia al-Sa’iqa, have actively supported the regime, bolstering its propaganda campaigns and crushing civil dissent inside the camps.
In stark contrast to the moribund, aging political leadership, Palestinian-Syrian youth activists, who prior to the eruption of the uprising had focused their activism on Palestine, have participated in the uprising since the very beginning as demonstrators; organizers of aid and relief work for wounded and internally-displaced Syrians; or as citizen journalists, photographers and media activists. The hub of their activism, however, remained outside the camps for most of the uprising.
Never were the tensions among Syria’s Palestinians as discernible as during the aftermath of last year’s Naksa Day protests on June 5, when dozens of unarmed Palestinians were killed by the Israeli occupation army in the occupied Golan Heights border area. Yarmouk inhabitants and martyrs’ families set the PFLP-GC building ablaze in a strong denunciation of the faction’s role in mobilizing to instigate the youths to march back home without any protection despite the anticipated deadly reaction by the Israeli army.
The faction engaged in a pathetically naked attempt to deflect attention from the regime’s crackdown. Several Palestinians were killed in the clashes that ensued between Yarmouk residents and armed PFLP-GC gunmen following the funeral. However, with the exception of the Syrian navy’s attack on the al-Raml refugee camp last summer and the occasional Syrian army shelling on refugee camps in Daraa, Hama and Homs, the situation in the refugee camps remained cautiously quiet.
Since February, the al-Yarmouk camp has regularly held protests in solidarity with the besieged Syrian cities and towns. It participated in the Damascus general strike on May 29, 2012. The protests would normally pass quietly without being attacked by Syrian security forces.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the abduction and then killing of 13 Palestinian Liberation Army fighters from the Nayrab refugee camp in Aleppo. Though the identity of the killers is unknown, the killings sparked a large protest in Yarmouk on July 12, and an even larger protest the next day. Buoyant chants of “God bless the Free Syrian Army”, “From Syria to Palestine, one people not two”, and “Long live Syria and down with Assad” echoed in the camp’s streets. The Syrian army opened fire at protesters and for the first time, clashes between the regime army and the FSA broke out inside the camp, marking a significant tipping point. The Local Coordination Committee of Yarmouk camp called for mass protests and a general strike to protest the killings. [Continue reading…]
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