Syrian import ban threatens trade with Turkey

CNN reports:

Turkish companies are reeling from a recent Syrian government decision to ban the import of products that have a customs tax of more than 5%. Meanwhile, the Turkish government is considering whether or not to slap punitive policies, such as possible economic sanctions, against its eastern neighbor and former close political ally.

The Syrian government announced on September 22 that it would suspend imports of high-tariff goods.

Last week, Syria’s minister of economy and trade described the partial import ban as “temporary and precautionary.” According to the Syrian state news agency SANA, Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar said the ban was aimed at preserving dwindling foreign currency reserves.

According to a list published by the Turkish Ministry of Economy, the products Syria has banned include mobile phones, contact lens fluid, and vehicles ranging from passenger buses and vans to ambulances and trucks used for construction.

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Tony Blair’s nexus of Middle East conflicts of interest

“It’s easy enough to see what Tony Blair has got out of the Middle East peace process: introductions to Arab rulers; a nice address in Jerusalem; a continued presence on the world stage. What’s more difficult to see is what the Middle East peace process has got out of Tony Blair.”

The Associated Press reports:

Since stepping down as Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair has built up a formidable work portfolio: He’s an international peacemaker, a consultant for investment bank JP Morgan, a pricey public speaker and a philanthropist.

He’s so many things to so many people that it’s starting to cause him trouble — with human rights groups, the Palestinian Authority, and even current British Prime Minister David Cameron, who described Blair’s deals with Moammar Gadhafi’s regime as “dodgy deals in the desert.”

Rights workers who have tried to track his activities find it’s sometimes unclear which job he is doing — or who is paying him to do it. Crucially, when he’s in the Arab world as the Middle East Quartet’s peace envoy some of the very parties he’s meant to be negotiating with aren’t sure whose interests he’s representing.

“The problem is a lack of transparency over how Tony Blair has organized his business affairs,” said Robert Palmer, a campaigner at pressure group Global Witness. “If former leaders are appearing on a public stage, it’s important that they do all they can to make sure they are seen to be open and clear over what they are doing.”

Blair’s effectiveness and impartiality in the Middle East are under attack from the Palestinian Authority, which accuses him of acting “like an Israeli diplomat” after he refused to support their decision to sidestep negotiations and to ask the Security Council for admission to the United Nations as a state. At the same time, the collapse of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya has led to the discovery of documents that show that Blair maintained ties to the Libyan leader even after he left office.

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Secret memo on Obama’s right to kill Americans

David Shipler writes:

The Obama administration should release the secret Justice Department memo justifying the placement of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, on the CIA’s kill list. The legal questions are far from clearcut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion. A good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department—rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example—had gone out the door along with the Bush administration.

But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution’s restraint on executive power, and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers’ arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine. Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet on the “insolence of office” comes to mind.

The questions are legion. If U.S. government officials are being accurate and truthful in both their attributed and anonymous statements, Awlaki was placed on the list only in April 2010, after he had “gone operational” and had crossed the line between speech and action. Did the lawyers think that the First Amendment protected even his fiery rhetoric, easily available to potential jihadists by Internet, which had inflamed a few wannabe terrorists? Did they require that he actually take a hand in some planning before he could be considered worthy of the drone strike that killed him in Yemen? Hours after his death, President Obama awarded him a posthumous promotion, calling him for the first time “the leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

What is the basis for this grand title? There is no doubt about his words—anybody can still hear and read them—but the picture of his actions is sketchy, derived from unverified intelligence. Given how wrong the CIA was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is it really sufficient to base a death warrant on intelligence operatives’ untested assertions? How can their accuracy be checked? Does the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process extend to Americans overseas? Due process, after all, was the Framers’ effort to enhance the accuracy of the criminal justice system. Is there another way that an independent review can be done before a missile is sent in the direction of some named person who is not on a battlefield? Isn’t it strange that under Obama’s reasoning, the president can’t order torture but can order death, that he needs a judge’s authorization to listen to an American’s phone overseas but needs no such judicial approval to end the citizen’s life?

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Jailed Egyptian blogger on hunger strike nears death

The Daily News Egypt reports:

Maikel Nabil, a blogger and activist imprisoned by a military court since late March, has entered day 41 of his open-ended hunger strike.

“Death is better than living in an oppressive country,” Maikel told his brother Mark the last time he saw him on his 26th birthday on Saturday.

Fearing that Maikel might die as his health deteriorates, Mark told Daily News Egypt his older brother might not live to make it to his court appeal on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

After being sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting” the army and “spreading lies” about Egypt’s armed forces, Maikel has refused food and is only drinking water.

Mark said Maikel went from weighing 60 kilograms to 47 since he went on hunger strike.

Currently approaching kidney failure, Maikel is having trouble speaking and walking. He has also vowed to stop drinking water if his upcoming court appeal does not go in his favor.

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Congress blocking aid to the Palestinians: the facts and what they mean

Lara Friedman from Americans for Peace Now writes:

This past weekend there were press reports (original story in the Independent, with further reporting in the Israeli press) that Congress was blocking $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). As is often the case when it comes to the rather arcane world of Congress and appropriations, the press reports were partly correct and partly incorrect, and also missed some rather important points.

The Facts

  • U.S. direct assistance to the PA for FY2011, which amounted to $200 million, is already out the door. Congress can’t do anything to block funding that has already been spent, although some members of Congress are threatening to cut off this funding in 2012 to punish the Palestinian Authority for going to the UN.
  • Congress is blocking $192 million in funds for U.S. humanitarian programs for Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza. This funding is being blocked by Republicans on two House committees: the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Appropriations Committee’s Foreign Operations Subcommittee. These funds are for programs funded through USAID and carried out by non-governmental organizations. It should be emphasized that the West Bank/Gaza assistance program is completely distinct from U.S. aid to the PA. U.S. humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people has long been kept hermetically sealed off from PA aid – specifically to enable it to continue, even, for example, when concerns over corruption led Congress to prohibit all aid to the PA (a prohibition that still is law today, but a law that the President has the authority to waive, with conditions), and even after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. The U.S. program for the West Bank and Gaza, it should be emphasized, is probably the most congressionally restricted, conditioned, vetted and overseen U.S. assistance program in the world – all to ensure that not a dollar benefits the PA and that not a dollar serves any purpose but to address humanitarian concerns and promote U.S. policy objectives.
  • Congress is also blocking $150 million in funding for security assistance to the PA (aid that comes under the title of “international narcotics control and law enforcement programs – INCLE”). This block – which so far has not been reported in the media – does target the PA and will be very problematic for the PA. These funds are being blocked by Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and possibly also by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (this could not be confirmed as of this writing). Some members of Congress have also threatened to cut these funds in 2012 to punish the Palestinian Authority for going to the UN.

The press has not been clear on how Congress is blocking funds that have been previously approved, so to clarify: Congress keeps a very tight hold on the purse strings when it comes to foreign aid in general, and assistance for the Palestinians and the PA in particular. One way it does this is by (as part of the law providing the funds) requiring the Administration to notify/consult with relevant committees (House and Senate) before actually spending money. The relevant committees are the committees with jurisdiction over foreign assistance – the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Foreign Operations Subcommittees of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. As part of this notification process, a committee member or members can place a hold on a given expenditure – in theory in order to get more information/justification from the Administration.

That is what is happening here with the holds on the $192 million for USAID funding for the Palestinians, and the hold on the $150 million for security assistance – although of course while some members might legitimately want more information (including information about how USAID might be adapting to new circumstances that could be relevant to a these aid programs), for others this could easily be a handy pretext for just blocking the funding for political reasons. [Continue reading…]

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The Palestinians’ next move

Rashid Khalidi writes:

As the dust settles after last week’s “showdown” at the United Nations over the Palestinian application for membership, several initial conclusions can be drawn.

First, the United States now is thoroughly out of touch with most of the international community when it comes to Palestine and Israel. It has positioned itself to the right of the most right-wing, pro-settler government in Israeli history. This was reflected in the joyful reception of President Obama’s speech by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and his right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as well as in the Israel lobby’s satisfied response to Obama’s caving in to Israeli demands all along the line.

In an almost surreal display of pandering, Republican presidential candidates—notably Texas governor Rick Perry—disparaged the president for “appeasing” the Palestinians and thereby betraying Israel. This rhetoric came despite the fact that Obama single-handedly sabotaged the Palestinians’ UN bid while publicly lecturing them and the entire General Assembly on the suffering of Israelis without so much as a word acknowledging Israeli occupation, violence and settlements—not to mention the Palestinian suffering caused by these American-supported policies. Obama’s domestic electioneering in the face of a historic demand by the long-suffering Palestinians was not lost on the world. Taken in the context of the Arab Spring and its wave of popular demands for human and political rights, it means that the United States has lost all credibility as an honest broker in this conflict.

The second conclusion to be drawn is that after two decades of the U.S. behaving as “Israel’s lawyer,” the two-state solution is now dead. It has been buried by forty-four years of unceasing Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem under the benevolent gaze of nine successive U.S. administrations. The most recent in a long line of boastful Israeli announcements of further settlement construction in occupied Arab East Jerusalem last week is a perfect illustration of this truth. Despite the usual expression of “disappointment” from the White House and the State Department, the United States has, in fact, again acquiesced to the illegal colonization of more occupied Palestinian territory. This served as a ceremonial last nail in the coffin of the disastrous American-led process that since the beginning of peace negotiations in Madrid in 1991 oversaw and facilitated the near tripling of the illegal Israeli settler population to well over half a million and the imposition of severe restrictions on the movement of over 4 million Palestinians. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports:

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned on Sunday that Israel was becoming increasingly isolated in the Middle East, and said Israeli leaders must restart negotiations with the Palestinians and work to restore relations with Egypt and Turkey.

Mr. Panetta told reporters traveling with him that while Israel is still the most powerful state in the region, “Is it enough to maintain a military edge if you’re isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena?” He continued, “Real security can only be achieved by both a strong diplomatic effort as well as a strong effort to project your military strength.”

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Ethan Bronner and the art of owning up without paying a price

The newspaper that wasn’t willing to fire Judith Miller — even though she played a key role in propagating bogus information that led to the war in Iraq — can hardly be expected to give harsh treatment to Ethan Bronner, its Jerusalem bureau chief, just because of a few pesky conflicts of interest.

But then again, I imagine Bronner got blindsided when he saw the letters about him that just appeared in the paper (reprinted below).

Direct communication is not the forte of the New York Times, so I guess it’s possible that both the paper and its much rebuked reporter could still attempt to weather this storm.

Keep in mind that in these readers’ comments, criticism is being leveled just as much at the public editor as it is at Bronner. As two experts on the subject point out, Arthur Brisbane needs a lesson on how to identify conflicts of interest.

The fact that the public editor engages in a mea culpe of kinds by allowing readers to educate him about how he needs to do his own job, suggests that in a circuitous way both Brisbane and Bronner may be attempting to perform a ritual of accountability in the form through which accountability has in recent years become stripped of meaning: the art of owning up without paying any price.

Conflicts and Appearances
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

Re “Tangled Relationships in Jerusalem” (Sept. 25):

“Conflict of interest” is not the issue at stake here. The basic question is: How can your readers take anything that Ethan Bronner writes on the Middle East seriously, given his associations with a right-wing Israeli public relations firm and his son’s service in the Israel Defense Forces?

I, for one, will automatically assume a bias, conscious or unconscious, in his articles, and discount them accordingly.

FRANK RETTENBERG
San Rafael, Calif.

•

Reporters should not have a business relationship with any third party that could figure, directly or indirectly, in their reporting. This is a simple, clear standard, and Mr. Bronner violated it. Every time such relationships are rationalized, the credibility of the reporter and the newspaper suffers.

BRAD SWANSON
Vienna, Va.

•

It’s obviously past time for Mr. Bronner’s reassignment. The only thing keeping him there — I hope — is management’s stubborn disinclination to be seen to be reacting to public pressure.

Oversights, misreading of guidelines, appearances of conflicts of interest, etc. At this point, The Times itself, not just Mr. Bronner, has a credibility problem.

MARTIN DALY
Wappingers Falls, N.Y.

•

When I consider the balanced and informative articles from Mr. Bronner and the rest of the Jerusalem bureau, I have to wonder at the constant targeting of them by the right, the left, the Jews, the Palestinians, and, it seems, everyone else. The reporting from that quarter is superb and more than the equal of the best that The New York Times has to offer. Let’s give this one a rest.

ALAN POSNER
East Lansing, Mich.

•

Your distinction between an actual conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict is wrong. The appearance is the actual conflict.

Compare judges. If a judge previously received a free vacation from a litigant, we say she has an actual conflict that undermines public trust in her ruling, not the appearance of one. If the trip does in fact influence the judge’s ruling, it’s no longer a conflict, but a crime.

So with journalists. If the public reasonably believes that a reporter’s independence is compromised by a personal interest, he has an actual conflict. If the reporter in fact changes a story because of his personal interest, it’s no longer a conflict, but a breach of trust.

STEPHEN GILLERS
Manhattan

The writer teaches legal ethics at New York University School of Law.

•

Your otherwise thoughtful column perpetuates the confused and mischievous distinction between the appearance of a conflict of interest and an actual conflict. You give aid and comfort to those like Mr. Bronner who try to defend themselves against the charge of a conflict of interest by claiming that they are not actually influenced by the financial gain. That is beside the point.

The purpose of conflict-of-interest rules is precisely to avoid an inquiry into the motives of individual reporters (and other professionals). The rules are meant to maintain the trust of readers, who are not in a position to investigate the motives of reporters.

The rules in effect tell reporters to avoid circumstances that we know from experience create a substantial risk that professional judgment may be unduly influenced by improper considerations like financial gain. It is about the circumstances, not about the individual. To say that a reporter has violated the rule is not to say anything about his actual motives. It is to say that he has failed to respect the reasonable expectations of his readers and the public. That is a serious offense, but it is not the same offense as biased reporting.

When a reporter’s judgment is actually distorted by gifts, payments, promise of speaking engagements and the like, the violation is no longer simply a conflict of interests but emphatically the victory of the wrong interest.

DENNIS F. THOMPSON
Cambridge, Mass.

The writer teaches government at Harvard.

•

However ideologically biased he may be vis-à-vis Ethan Bronner, Max Blumenthal has performed a public service by exposing Mr. Bronner’s questionable business relationship with the pro-Zionist Lone Star Communications.

Having already ignited an ethical firestorm over his son’s enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces, Mr. Bronner behaved maladroitly in accepting paid speaking engagements with a public relations firm whose head agitates against the Palestinian cause.

The dispossession of the Palestinian people cannot be divorced from the security of the Jewish state. But neither issue will receive a fair hearing in the paper of record if an avoidable perception of impropriety hardens into a bedrock belief.

ROSARIO A. IACONIS
Mineola, N.Y.

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Key Syrian city spirals toward civil war

The New York Times reports:

The semblance of a civil war has erupted in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, where armed protesters now call themselves revolutionaries, gun battles erupt as often as every few hours, security forces and opponents carry out assassinations, and rifles costing as much as $2,000 apiece flood the city from abroad, residents say.

Since the start of the uprising in March, Homs has stood as one of Syria’s most contested cities, its youth among the best organized and most tenacious. But across the political spectrum, residents speak of a decisive shift in past weeks, as a largely peaceful uprising gives way to a grinding struggle that has made Homs violent, fearful and determined.

Analysts caution that the strife in Homs is still specific to the city itself, and many in the opposition reject violence because they fear it will serve as a pretext for the government’s brutal crackdown.

But in the targeted killings, the rival security checkpoints and the hardening of sectarian sentiments, the city offers a dark vision that could foretell the future of Syria’s uprising as both the government and the opposition ready themselves for a protracted struggle over the endurance of a four-decade dictatorship.

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Arab world indifferent about death of unknown American cleric

But the headline says: “As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death, the Mideast Shrugs.”

The New York Times, forever the trumpet of institutional power, apparently sees no need to draw a distinction between the White House and the West — even though most people in the West, like those in the Middle East, wouldn’t, until a few days ago, have been able name Anwar al-Awlaki, identify his photo or say anything about him.

The report itself is more clear-eyed:

Until about two years ago, few in Yemen or the Arab world had heard of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Islamic radicalism whose death President Obama celebrated as a major blow against Al Qaeda.

“A dime-a-dozen cleric” was one response, by Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton professor who studies Yemen. Another: “I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam at Notre Dame University.

While Western officials and commentators saw the end of Mr. Awlaki as another serious loss for Al Qaeda, a very different reception in the Middle East was the latest reminder of the disconnect between American aims and Arab perceptions. In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Mr. Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance.

“I don’t think this will really get people’s interest, I can’t imagine why it would,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center. “It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki.”

It is a remarkable feature in the Arab world these days how little Al Qaeda actually comes up in conversations. Even before the eruption of revolts and revolutions, a group that bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Iraq was losing its significance. When Osama bin Laden died, his killing seemed more an epitaph for another era. As is often remarked, the events of Sept. 11 seem a historical note to much of an Arab population where three in five are younger than 30.

In that atmosphere, many saw Mr. Awlaki’s death as an essentially American story: here was a man that American attention helped create, and its Hellfire missiles killed, in a campaign born out of American fears of homegrown militancy. What distinguished Mr. Awlaki was not his ideas or influence but his American upbringing, passport and perfectly idiomatic English.

“When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore,” Mr. Johnsen said, referring to the group’s Yemeni branch. “They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that.”

Another analyst, Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, echoed the idea that Mr. Awlaki’s fluency in English generated more interest about him. “The U.S. focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention.”

Mr. Hanna said that was even more the case with the Arab world having plunged into what he described as “this transformational juncture.”

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Obama’s take-no-prisoners approach to terrorism

After Barack Obama began his presidency by deciding to close Guantanamo and ban torture, Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU said:

These executive orders represent a giant step forward. Putting an end to Guantanamo, torture and secret prisons is a civil liberties trifecta, and President Obama should be highly commended for this bold and decisive action so early in his administration on an issue so critical to restoring an America we can be proud of again.

What later became apparent was that Obama had less interest in civil liberties than he has in resolving the legal complications of dealing with terrorist suspects.

Should suspected terrorists be tried in civilian or military courts?

Should they be detained inside or outside the United States?

What kind of legal protections do they deserve when being interrogated?

What constitute legal interrogation methods?

For Obama, all of these questions have a simple answer: whenever possible, terrorist suspects should be killed rather than taken into detention.

He will never articulate his policy in such brutal and simple terms, but by this point the policy of the US government should be clear.

What has become apparent over the last two and a half years is that George Bush and Dick Cheney would have faced little or no criticism if there had been just one subtle difference in their approach to governance: had they been Democrats they could have avoided the political messiness of using torture and instead been global vigilante purists and said America will kill its enemies whenever and wherever we find them.

So, as Dick Cheney now applauds Obama, he does so with an apparent sense of envy and resentment.

But note also, Cheney is still promoting an old-school approach when he says: “I think you’ve got to go through the process internally, making certain it’s reviewed by the appropriate people in the Justice Department — that they take a good careful look at it — but I think they [the Obama administration] did all that in this case.”

Well, from what we know at this point, that careful review process was either not applied to Samir Khan, or, if it was applied, concluded he could not be targeted — but he got assassinated in any case.

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Why Israel can’t be a ‘Jewish State’

Sari Nusseibeh writes:

The Israeli government’s current mantra is that the Palestinians must recognise a “Jewish State”. Of course, the Palestinians have clearly and repeatedly recognised the State of Israel as such in the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were based on an Israeli promise to establish a Palestinian state within five years – a promise now shattered) and many times since. Recently, however, Israeli leaders have dramatically and unilaterally moved the goal-posts and are now clamouring that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a “Jewish State”.

In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry concluded that the demand for a “Jewish State” was not part of the obligations of the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate. Even in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, when Zionists sought to “establish a home for the Jewish people”, there was no reference of a “Jewish State”. The Zionist Organisation preferred at first to use the description “Jewish homeland” or “Jewish Commonwealth”. Many pioneering Zionist leaders, such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber also avoided the clear and explicit term “Jewish State” for their project of a homeland for Jews, and preferred instead the concept of a democratic bi-national state.

Today, however, demands for a “Jewish State” from Israeli politicians are growing without giving thought to what this might mean, and its supporters claim that it would be as natural as calling France a French State. However, if we consider the subject dispassionately, the idea of a “Jewish State” is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications. The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people – and most Israeli citizens, we trust – will not accept these implications.

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Convicted Bahraini doctors, nurses urge U.N. to investigate their protest-linked jail sentences

The Associated Press reports:

Bahraini doctors and nurses convicted of links to anti-government protests and sentenced to long prison terms appealed to the U.N. chief Saturday to investigate their claims of abuse and judicial violations in the trial.

The medical professionals — whose sentences range from five to 15 years — are appealing the security court’s ruling and speaking out against the wider crackdown by the Gulf kingdom’s Sunni rulers against protests for greater rights by the Shiite majority.

The trial has been closely watched by rights groups that have criticized Bahrain’s prosecution of civilians at the special security court, which was set up under martial law-style rule that was lifted in June. The U.N. human rights office and the U.S. State Department are among those questioning the use of the court, which has military prosecutors and both civilian and military judges.

The doctors and nurses worked at the state-run Salmaniya Medical Center close to the capital’s Pearl Square, which became the epicenter of Bahrain’s uprising, inspired by other revolts across the Arab world. The authorities saw the hospital’s mostly Shiite staff — some of whom participated in pro-democracy street marches — as protest sympathizers, although the medics claimed they treated all who needed care.

“During the times of unrest in Bahrain, we honored our medical oath to treat the wounded and save lives. And as a result, we are being rewarded with unjust and harsh sentences,” said a statement released by the medics after the court’s ruling.

The group was convicted Thursday on charges that include attempting to topple the Gulf kingdom’s rulers and spreading “fabricated” stories. In a separate trial, the security court sentenced a protester to death for the killing of a police officer during the clashes that began in February.

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The resignation of Wadah Khanfar and the future of Al Jazeera

Philip Seib writes:

The resignation last week of Wadah Khanfar as managing director of Al Jazeera has provoked speculation that scandal lurks beneath his departure. Many have pointed to a WikiLeaks cable stating that Khanfar had succumbed to pressure from the U.S. in 2005 and played down civilian casualties in some of the network’s coverage of the Iraq War. Others have argued that larger political matters related to its coverage of the Arab Spring — especially its unrestrained, albeit selective, endorsement of democratic reforms — forced Khanfar’s ouster.

Both suggestions contain more fancy than substance: it is hard to believe that Doha did not already know about Khanfar’s talking to the U.S. ambassador or that pro-democracy strands in Al Jazeera’s programming would end his career. (Khanfar regularly ruffled feathers during his tenure.) A far likelier explanation is that, after eight stressful years, Khanfar simply decided that he had contributed all he could to the network. Indeed, his contributions have been transformative.

The more intriguing question is what comes next for Al Jazeera. On one level, the network is doing well. It has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding in 1996. Al Jazeera English’s reputation for solid journalism continues to improve, as evidenced by its surge in popularity in the United States during this year’s Arab uprisings. The network is developing franchises in sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, and the Balkans. There is even talk of Al Jazeera Urdu. But despite its expanding global reach, the Arab world’s flagship 24-hour satellite news channel must now face the fact that Arabs’ dependence on it is decreasing. As more and more of the region gains access to the Internet, a proliferation of information providers is eroding Al Jazeera’s dominance. Meanwhile, the revolutions that the network helped drive have unleashed a cascade of largely local news outlets, which provide more direct competition. There is no doubt that Al Jazeera will remain a major force in the region for years to come, but its singular role as a unique provider of open, honest content may already be a thing of the past.

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Google knows

In the London Review of Books, Daniel Soar writes:

This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless. Together, Schmidt’s four companies are worth more than half a trillion dollars. The technology sector isn’t as big as, say, oil, but it’s growing, as more and more traditional industries – advertising, travel, real estate, used cars, new cars, porn, television, film, music, publishing, news – are subsumed into the digital economy. Schmidt, who as the ex-CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation had learned to take the long view, warned that not all four of his disruptive gang could survive. So – as they all converge from their various beginnings to compete in the same area, the place usually referred to as ‘the cloud’, a place where everything that matters is online – the question is: who will be the first to blink?

If the company that falters is Google, it won’t be because it didn’t see the future coming. Of Schmidt’s four technology juggernauts, Google has always been the most ambitious, and the most committed to getting everything possible onto the internet, its mission being ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Its ubiquitous search box has changed the way information can be got at to such an extent that ten years after most people first learned of its existence you wouldn’t think of trying to find out anything without typing it into Google first. Searching on Google is automatic, a reflex, just part of what we do. But an insufficiently thought-about fact is that in order to organise the world’s information Google first has to get hold of the stuff. And in the long run ‘the world’s information’ means much more than anyone would ever have imagined it could. It means, of course, the totality of the information contained on the World Wide Web, or the contents of more than a trillion webpages (it was a trillion at the last count, in 2008; now, such a number would be meaningless). But that much goes without saying, since indexing and ranking webpages is where Google began when it got going as a research project at Stanford in 1996, just five years after the web itself was invented. It means – or would mean, if lawyers let Google have its way – the complete contents of every one of the more than 33 million books in the Library of Congress or, if you include slightly varying editions and pamphlets and other ephemera, the contents of the approximately 129,864,880 books published in every recorded language since printing was invented. It means every video uploaded to the public internet, a quantity – if you take the Google-owned YouTube alone – that is increasing at the rate of nearly an hour of video every second.

It means the location of businesses, religious institutions, schools, libraries, community centres and hospitals worldwide – a global Yellow Pages. It means the inventories of shops, the archives of newspapers, the minute by minute performance of the stock market. It means, or will mean, if Google keeps going, the exact look of every street corner and roadside on the planet, photographed in high resolution and kept as up to date as possible: the logic, if not yet the practice, of Google Street View, means that city streets should be under ever more regular photographic surveillance, since the fresher and more complete the imagery the more useful people will find it, and the more they will therefore use it. If it doesn’t already have a piece of data, you can be sure that Google is pursuing a way of getting it, of gathering and sorting every kind of public information there is.

But all this is just the stuff that Google makes publicly searchable, or ‘universally accessible’. It’s only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4.33 p.m. I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on. If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.

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Libyan Jew returns home after 44-year exile

Reuters reports:

In the walled old city of Tripoli, Libya’s independence flag pokes through crumbling buildings and a gang of children wielding toy pistols tear through dusty alleyways.

In these run-down streets stands the empty, faded peach-colored Dar Bishi synagogue.

The interior can only be seen by climbing up the rubble of a collapsed house and the ark, which would normally shelter the sacred Torah scroll, is instead stuffed with a mattress.

The Hebrew inscription above it “Hear, O Israel” is barely perceptible from wear, and empty paint cans are strewn across the floor. The site of the Mikve baths, used once for ritual cleansing, is now a trash dump where stray cats scour for food next to a discarded washing machine as veiled women look on.

Libyan Jewish exile David Gerbi said he has dreamed of restoring this synagogue for 10 years, when smoke from New York’s burning twin towers evoked one of the most powerful memories of his Libyan childhood.

The 12-year-old Gerbi and his family fled Tripoli in 1967 when an Arab-Israeli war stoked anger against the Jewish state and led to attacks on Jews in his neighborhood.

Gaddafi expelled the rest of Libya’s 38,000 Jews two years later and confiscated their assets. Most Tripoli synagogues have since been destroyed or converted to mosques. Jewish cemeteries have been razed to make way for office blocks on the coast.

Gerbi says he is the first Jew to return to Libya since the revolt that ousted Muammar Gaddafi in August.

He said he knows this because he negotiated the extraction of the last one — his aged, dying aunt who stayed behind to protect the family treasures — from a hospice in 2002.

Now that Gaddafi is gone, Gerbi wants to help interim Libyan leaders rebuild the lost Libya of his childhood and foster the type of religious tolerance between Jews and Muslims that exists in other parts of the Maghreb such as Morocco.

And he wants the Dar Bishi synagogue to be the symbol of reconciliation between Jewish and Muslim Libyans.

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Anti-Gaddafi fighters are accused of torture

The New York Times reports:

First there were the blindfold, the wrist-scarring handcuffs and the death threats. Then came beatings and electric shocks. In the fog of pain, the detainee, who said he had done nothing wrong, would have confessed to anything, he later recalled.

The techniques were familiar to Libyans, but the perpetrators were not: they were former rebels, according to the detainee, a 36-year-old man who said he had worked in military intelligence for the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

The man, who requested that his name not be published because he feared retribution from his former captors, said he was arrested by armed former rebels almost two weeks ago, held in a building for four days and tortured.

His story was impossible to immediately verify, but he displayed what he said was evidence of the torture: huge bruises and welts on his legs, stripes of black and blue across the back of his thighs, and scars on his feet and ankles that he said marked the spots where his captors attached electrical wires.

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