Arrested

April 11, 2007

By Dr. June Scorza Terpstra

On Thursday evening, March 8, International Women’s Day, I was arrested by Evanston police. This occurrence came on the heels of a controversial article I wrote for which I received hate mail and death threats. I was made to step out of my car; my hands were cuffed behind my back as I stood in the dark street with three young, piggish male officers. I was asked if I had one hundred dollars cash. Cars with people stopped at the nearest cross light were staring at me. My person, my car and my purse were searched. I was asked if I had anything up my crotch. I was placed in the suffocating back seat of a squad car and taken to the Evanston police station. As I was commandeered into a holding area, my hands cuffed behind my back, I remembered this police station. Twenty years ago I was the founder of a women’s shelter and a women’s university program in Evanston and had occasion to work with police in that building who knew little to nothing and cared less about victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

I was questioned as to whether I take drugs. I consciously kept my dignity and said, no, do you? I was told I thought I was "above the law" by a boy given deadly toys to protect his master’s money and rules playing king of the traffic violations hill. For further intimidation I was threatened with a strip search and a jail cell. My husband bailed me out.

What was my crime? I had failed to pay a speeding ticket in Kansas about a year ago and unknown to me my license was suspended. There I was, a woman who had founded programs for women and children in Evanston and has been teaching social justice at universities and colleges for over 20 years in the USA, with three uniformed robo-boys bereft of minds and hearts as they rummaged through my car stocked with baby seats for grandkids and kid's toys for my weekend birthday party with my grandchildren. They put me in the back of the police car, my wrists burning from the handcuffs, with my blood pressure soaring, unable to breathe for the first minutes, struck down powerless against boys with guns and handcuffs who said that they were only "following procedure". I was instantly criminalized because I had lost a ticket a year ago and had never received notice in my move from one state to another. If I had been arrested for practicing my constitutional right to dissolve this present government, I could have understood the situation, but this arrest was for the capitalist crime of not paying $150.00 for driving my car too fast across this infernal country. Debtor’s prisons are now one of the features of a police state in which 2.5 million people are presently in the prison system of the USA with over 60% of the people imprisoned for non-violent offenses.

In this instant what I teach became very real. My understanding of how each and every one of us is criminalized in the USA increased ten fold. I hear my Black, Arab, Muslim, Red and Brown students tell me they are stopped, harassed, shoved up and searched against cars by the police on a routine basis in their neighborhoods. I remember the battered woman and rape victim victimized by the police. I see the political prisoners such as Dr. Sami al-Arian, Leonard Peltier and Jose Padilla, tortured and tormented by their captors. I see the Arab men with brown bags over their heads that are forced out of their homes, disappeared and sexually humiliated as I remember the boy cop looking me in the eyes and sneeringly say, "Do you have anything up your crotch?"

The image of the Mexican woman struggling across the border violently caught and marched off and then raped in holding pens is in my mind as this arresting "officer of the law" threatens to have me strip-searched and put in a cell. I recall the three Arab women sitting in an Iraqi cell waiting to be killed by men trained by US mercenaries and militaries, the people from New Orleans still held captive in FEMA camps for the crime of being homeless after a flood, the Canadian student arrested and strip-searched and held in a US prison just this week for the crime of failing to stop at a stop sign, the Palestinian teen waiting to cross an Israeli checkpoint and winds up rotting in an Israeli jail.

I recall all of these and more as I recall the empty eyes of the police as they tell me I am under arrest. I realize yet again that I am the arrested and the imprisoned and that they are me. I always have been them and they have always been me.

In Solidarity for the Liberation of the Oppressed,

Dr. June Scorza Terpstra


June Scorza Terpstra, Ph.D. is an activist educator and university lecturer in Justice Studies and Criminal Justice. She is presently teaching courses on Law and Terrorism, Social Justice and Resistance. She was the founding director of the Evanston Northshore YWCA Shelter for Battered Women and the Northwestern University Women’s Center. She is a former Community Research Fellow and graduate of Loyola University Chicago.

The April Issue of The Independent Monitor is out!

The National Newspaper of Arab Americans

We are pleased to report that the April issue of The Independent Monitor is out.

Read in this issue:

http://www.theindependentmonitor.com/Issues/TIMApril2007.pdf


You Have More Power Than You Think, The Publisher.

NAAP Leadership Conference Hosted by ACCESS Detroit, Lara Shbeyr Maxey.

Learning From Janet Nguyen’s Close Victory, Rashad Al-Dabbagh.

How Barak Obama Learned to Love Israel, Ali Abunimeh.

Does the Israeli Tail Wag the American Dog? Kathleen and Bill Christison.

PAWA Celebrates the Palestinian Woman, Abrahim Appel and Iman Al-Dabbagh.
Carter’s Apartheid Charges Ring True, Saree Makdisi.

NAAP-OC Meet the Professional Dinner, Abrahim Appel and Iman Al-Dabbagh.

Israel Guilty of Occupation, Apartheid and Colonialism, John Dugard.

A Child Dies at Checkpoint While Soldiers Examine ID Cards, Anna Baltzer.

The Media is Heading Where? Julian Do.

Mainstream American Journalists Exclude Arabs in “diversity” Debate, Ray Hanania.

Will Omnibus Research Study Help Fix California’s Broken Education System, Hassina Leelarathna.

Cultural Briefings, Al Jadid Staff


And MUCH more …

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ARAB CHRISTIANS HEAD FOR EXITS

By ROBERT D. NOVAK

April 9, 2007 -- BETHLEHEM, WEST BANK

HANI Hayek, an accountant who is the Christian mayor of the tiny Christian-majority Palestinian vil lage of Beit Sahour, was angry last week driving me along the Israeli security wall.

"They are taking our communal lands," he said, pointing to the massive Israeli settlement of Har Homa. "They don't want us to live here. They want us to leave."

Har Homa, dwarfing nearby dwellings of Beit Sahour, seemed larger than when I saw it at Holy Week a year ago. It is. The Israeli government has steadily enlarged settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Nearing the 40th anniversary of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, the territory has been so fragmented that a Palestinian state and a "two-state solution" seem more difficult.

The security wall has led to virtual elimination of suicide bombings and short-term peace. But life is hard for Palestinians, whose deaths due to conflict increased 272 percent in 2006 while Israeli casualties declined. In a minor incident of the type that goes unnoticed internationally, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troopers last week killed a Palestinian man accused of illegally entering a firing zone while collecting metal scraps to sell.

Palestinians argue things have gotten worse because of pervasive feelings of hopelessness. Students at Bethlehem University (run by the Catholic Brothers of De La Salle with an enrollment 70 percent Muslim) sounded more pessimistic and radicalized than a year ago. Ahmad Al Issa, a fourth-year journalism student, was imprisoned for a year in Israel on charges of throwing stones at Israeli troops. Now he has bought into the libel that Jewish employees at the World Trade Center were warned in advance of the 9/11 attacks.

The U.S.-backed boycott following the election victory of the extremist Hamas in early 2006 has made the Palestinian Authority (PA) destitute, crippling government services. Deprived of help from the PA with the economy in a shambles, city governments are bankrupt. Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh has a special problem because tourists and pilgrims no longer stay overnight in the city of Christ's birth. Out of money and credit, he is ready to lay off the city's 165 staffers.

Batarseh, a U.S. citizen who practiced thoracic surgery in Sacramento, Calif., is pinned down in Bethlehem. A Christian and political independent who calls himself a private-enterprise democrat, Batarseh is on the Israeli blacklist because he contributed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a State Department-designated terrorist organization). Denied permits for Jerusalem, the mayor must drive to Amman, Jordan, to get to meetings in Europe.

Contact with the PFLP is not a requirement for being holed up by the IDF. Bethlehem University students can't get to Jerusalem, a few minutes' drive away, unless they sneak in illegally. The university's students from the separated Gaza enclave have to take classes from Bethlehem via the Internet.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) was at the university the same day I was, and Bethlehem faculty members could hardly believe a real live member of the U.S. Congress was there. Smith later was given a tour of Jerusalem to see with his own eyes that the separation barrier in most places is a big, ugly and intimidating wall and not merely a fence.

Smith, an active Catholic layman, was drawn here because of the rapid emigration of the Holy Land's Christians. They leave more quickly than Muslims because contacts on the outside make them more mobile. Catholic Brother Peter Corlano of Bethlehem University told Smith and me: "We live the same life [as Muslims]. We are Palestinians."

Concerned by the disappearance of Christians in the land of Christianity's birthplace, Smith could also become (as I did) concerned by the plight of all Palestinians. If so, he will find precious little company in Congress.

Rand Corporation's new recipe to handle the Muslim World

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Al-Jazeerah, April 2, 2007

The semi-official U.S. think tank, Rand Corporation, suggests creation of networks of the so-called moderate Muslims to promote US policy objectives in the Muslim World.

In its latest report, titled “Building Moderate Muslim Networks” the Rand Corp advocates that the building of moderate Muslim networks needs to become an explicit goal of the U.S. government policy, with an international database of partners and a well-designed plan.

Just as it fought the spread of Communism during the Cold War, the United States must do more to develop and support networks of moderate Muslims who are too often silenced by violent radical Islamists, according to the Rand Corporation report issued on March 26, 2007. Lead writer of the report Angel Rabasa says that the United States has a critical role to play in aiding moderate Muslims, and can learn much from the way it addressed the spread of Communism during the Cold War. “The efforts of the United States and its allies to build free and democratic networks and institutions provided an organizational and ideological counter force to Communist groups seeking to come to power through political groups, labor unions, youth and student organizations and other groups.”

The report defines a moderate as a Muslim who supports democracy, gender equality, freedom of worship and opposition to terrorism. This looks an amplification on its two previous reports - “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies” (March 2004) and “US strategy in the Muslim World after 9/11” (December 2004) - which also suggested supporting moderate Muslims and exploitation of inter-Muslim religious differences. Interestingly, a novelist turned research scholar, Cheryl Benard is the author of “Civil Democratic Islam” and co-author of Dec. 2004 and March 2007 reports.

In the December 2004 study Rabasa had suggested to exploit Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides to promote the US policy objectives in the Muslim world. Echoing this theme, the latest report recommends reaching out to Muslim activists, leaders and intellectuals in non-Arab countries such as Turkey as well as in Southeast Asia and Europe. The report recommends targeting five groups as potential building blocks for networks: liberal and secular Muslim academics and intellectuals; young moderate religious scholars; community activists; women’s groups engaged in gender equality campaigns; and moderate journalists and scholars.

The report warned that moderate groups can lose credibility – and therefore, effectiveness – if U.S. support is too obvious. Effective tactics that worked during the Cold War include having the groups led by credible individuals and having the United States maintain some distance from the organizations it supports. “This was done by not micro-managing the groups, but by giving them enough autonomy,” Rabasa said. “As long as certain guidelines were met, they were free to pursue their own activities.”

To help start this initiative, the report recommends working toward an international conference modeled in the Cold War-era Congress of Cultural Freedom, and then developing a standing organization to combat what it called radical Islamism.

The recent summit of "Secular Islam Conference" in St. Petersburg, Florida, almost coincided with the release of the latest Rand Report. A small group of self-proclaimed secular Muslims from North America and elsewhere gathered in St. Petersburg for what they billed as a new global movement to correct the assumed wrongs of Islam and call for an “Islamic Reformation.”

The St. Petersburg conference, held on the sideline of the Intelligence Summit, was carried live on (Islamophobe) Glenn Beck's CNN show. Some of the organizers and speakers at the convention were well known thanks to the media spotlight: Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble With Islam," and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian and author of "Infidel," were but a few there claiming to have suffered personally at the hands of "radical" Islam. One participant, Wafa Sultan, declared on Glenn Beck's show that she doesn't "see any difference between radical Islam and regular Islam." Other participants were the now public ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq and self-proclaimed ex-terrorist Tawfiq Hamid.

Surely, the “moderate” Muslim agenda is promoted because these ideas reflect a Western vision for the future of Islam. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, everyone from high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to anti-Islam authors have prescribed a preferred remedy for Islam: Reform the faith.

The Rand Reports about Islam appear to be part of a grand strategy to “change the face of Islam” as revealed by the US News and World Report on April 15, 2005. The report entitled - Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions...To Change the Very Face of Islam - reads: “From military psychological-operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself.”

According to the well planned leaks to the US News and World Report, this strategy for the first time stated that the United States has a national security interest in influencing what happens within Islam. The report also confirmed that it is, in fact, the US which has been funding an American version of Islam, called “Moderate Islam.”

The Rand reports try to create a fictitious vision of Muslims and of Islam, where it is antihuman, uncreative, authoritarian, and intrinsically against Western societies. It is an ethnocentric view of Islam that dominates current representations of Islam that are reductive, predominantly negative, and encouraging a culture of Islamophobia.

The complexities of the so-called fundamentalism and extremism in the past 100 years or so, whether it be Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim, need to be understood in the context of modernization, the process of secularization, the changing nature of religious institutions, the post-colonial experience in developing countries, globalization, the divide between wealthy and poor, contesting political power, and the impact of totalitarian regimes on civil society.

What is not mentioned in the RAND reports is that the reason for the alienation of Muslims from the West, is the issue of "double standards" the West so brazenly practices when dealing with Muslim nations. America already has a very tarnished image in the Islamic world. It has already alienated a great majority of Muslims throughout the world through its misguided foreign policy. Who in the right mind will believe that this asinine assault on Islam and Muslims will win America friends in the Islamic world?

Now a word about the Washington-based semi-official think tank – the RAND Corporation. Among other government departments, the Rand Corp conducts studies for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Commands, the defense agencies, the Department of the Navy and the U.S. intelligence community. Obviously, writers of the three under discussion reports on Islam may be considered as neo-Orientalists with clear intention to belittle Islam.

When the European nations began their long campaign to colonize and conquer the rest of the world for their own benefit, they brought their academic and missionary resources to help them with their task. Orientalists and missionaries, whose ranks often overlapped, were the servants of an imperialist government who was using their services as a way to subdue or weaken an enemy. The academic study of the Oriental East by the Occidental West was often motivated and often co-operated hand-in-hand with the imperialistic aims of the European colonial powers. The foundations of Orientalism were in the maxim "Know thy enemy". This equally applies to the modern day Orientalists of such semi-official think tanks as the Rand Corporation.

Racist Mob Goes After UK Star

Racist Mob Goes After UK Star Amir Khan

Posted by: Mark Vester on 04-02-2007.

By Mark Vester

The Daily Record reports that 19-year-old Olympic silver medallist Amir Khan was forced to flee an amateur tournament after being racially abused and threatened with violence by a mob of fans. He was present at the event to watch his brother Haroon in the North West Amateur Boxing Association finals in Liverpool.

Khan's manager Asif Vali told the paper that the ordeal began after Haroon controversially lost his bout with local fighter James Deakin. Soon after, a mob of around 20 fans began to taunt Khan, some with racial slurs, and intimidate him.

"It was horrible and in my mind somewhat racist. Apart from the horrible insults, they were goading him saying things like, 'Come on, have a go with us' and 'Come on if you fancy yourself'. It was very intimidating. I had specifically decided that we shouldn't take any security with us because, after all, it was an amateur event," Vali said. "Thankfully, we escaped without being hurt. Who knows what could have happened if they had attacked us?"

Arab tribe in Darfur reports 62 killed, 21 wounded in attack

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Monday, April 02, 2007

KHARTOUM: At least 62 people were killed and 21 wounded in an attack on an Arab tribe in the war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan, according to the victims' relatives on Sunday.

"Two new bodies were left at the hospital in Nyala," the south Darfur provincial seat, Abdel Rahman Hasaballah of the targeted Torjam tribe told AFP by telephone.

Tribal chief Mohammad Hammad Jalali initially told AFP that 60 people were killed by gunmen riding camels and donkeys who swooped down on villages to steal livestock.

"We buried 23 people on Saturday," he said at the time, with the rest still at the morgue.

Thirteen wounded villagers are being treated in the provincial capital of Nyala and another eight in the nearby town of Kas, he said.

Families initially refused to collect the bodies from the hospital in protest.

They finally agreed to do so after setting three conditions for the authorities - an impartial investigation to identify the perpetrators, better protection and compensation for the victims' families.

The Torjam are blaming the attack on the government-backed Janjaweed militia, often used by the Sudanese authorities to suppress a rebellion raging in the region for the past four years.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

But local officials quoted by the press blamed the killings on a rival Arab tribe in the region, the Rzigat Aballa - which in the past had provided recruits for the Janjaweed.

"We think the Rzigat Aballa is responsible for the attack because it occurred in the area of recent clashes between the two tribes," said Mohammad al-Ajeb, adding that some 500 heads of cattle had been seized and driven northwest. The authorities negotiated a truce between the two tribes in February after earlier confrontations.

United Nations and African Union envoys on recent visits to Khartoum bidding to find a peaceful solution to the Darfur crisis warned against tribal rivalries complicating the search for peace.

Since the outbreak of hostilities in the vast Darfur region in 2003, some 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in the fighting, according to UN estimates. Some sources say the death toll is much higher.

A 2006 peace agreement with one rebel faction has failed to halt the fighting. - AFP

This Land is Theirs

03/29/07

eileen fleming

Photo, weekly.ahram.org

This March 30th marks the 31st year Palestinians throughout the world remember Land Day or 'Youm al-Ard' in Arabic. On March 30, 1976, in the Galilee, during a peaceful protest, six unarmed Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army and police, who also injured 96 others and arrested over 300.

[More:]

The demonstration was prompted after Israeli authorities announced the confiscation of a total of 5,500 acres of land from Palestinian villages in the Galilee , and classified them as "closed military zones."

On March 25, 2006 , while in Jerusalem, this reporter connected just after dawn with a wide awake group of Israeli Jews to travel north to the lower Galilee municipality of Sakhnin, an Arab village whose land continues to be grabbed and colonized by Israel .

Ronnie, a Canadian moved to Israel with the desire to help build a civil society. She is a co-founder of Women in Black and active with Machsom Watch/women at the checkpoints who watch for and report on human rights abuse.

We both laughed when she told me, "A friend told me that I am so Left that if I ever gets to heaven I will probably argue with God that those in hell just didn't get a fair deal…Religion is used as a cover, but it's all about the land! It's convenient to claim one is doing something for God but the laws are made to take the land. We don't have settlers in Israel -the common name for illegal colonists in the West Bank-we just take it! First it is claimed to be for military reasons then it'll become a park or agricultural land that the state has confiscated.

"The Palestinians who did not leave in '48 but remained here still have lost their land. They can't get permits to build... I am opposed to the occupation and as an Israeli Jew I want to see justice for all...and I refuse to be enemies with anyone."

We traveled three hours from Jerusalem to be in solidarity with over 100 progressive Israeli's, Arab Christians, Muslims, atheists and communists who attended a tour of the area and conference coordinated by Batshalom's and The Women's Coalition for Peace and Justice.

This reporter was informed that not only had Israel confiscated acres of the most fertile of Palestinian land they had also placed land mines on the land. Many farmers and other innocent ones had lost their lives or legs, so people had quit caring for their groves and the Israeli government declared the village of Sakhnin a military zone.

A few years prior, the President of Israel had declared that the people of Sakhnin, a municipality deserved to have their land back. But the Israeli county of Misgav, abetted by the Israeli Land Authority continues to collect taxes from them but still have not returned any land nor have they issued any permits for Palestinians to build.

Israeli peace activist's commented, "In 2000 during Land Day, hundred's of nonviolent protesters were arrested and we were hit with tear gas and rubber bullets. Name it and we have had it!"

"I am an Israeli Jew and I am responsible to change something about this situation. We all need to do this together."

The speakers all spoke in Arabic or Hebrew, and my interpreter was Aliyah [Hebrew for "Go Up"], who was born in St. Louis, grew up in Cleveland and moved to Israel in 1948.

"My Father was born in Jerusalem and I was a Zionist, but now I am not so sure. I still want the Jewish people to have a state but it must be honest and moral, I don't want a piranha state! Before 1967 I was euphoric! My husband and I began to learn that there were Israelis who you could call prophets, who said we must return the land and make peace. Then a fundamentalist Jewish group, The Gush Emunim began erecting the settlements in the newly possessed land.

"When Israel went into Lebanon I was infuriated! I demonstrated against the massacres at Shatila and Shabra. Eighteen years of Israel in Lebanon is what built up the Hezbollah! The Israelis supported the group at first because they hoped the Hezbollah would be against the Palestinian refugees in South Lebanon."

I inquired, "Isn't that what Israel did with Hamas? Didn't they originally support Hamas to be a wedge against the PLO?"

Aliyah replied, "Yes, stupidity repeats itself!"

In the Northern part of Israel 53% of the population are Jews who control 80% of the land. Palestinians are 47% of the population with only 20% of the land.

Sakhnin has 25,000 people and less than 10,000 dunums of land but they only control half of that. In 1948 they owned and controlled 170,000 dunums.

A Defense Industry and Army base complex a few miles from where we stood has a most mysterious warehouse. Aliyah remarked, "No one knows what is going on inside, but it may be a nuclear reactor. The municipality asked the army to develop in another direction for there is a school over there too. The Israelis are allowed to expand anywhere, but the people of Sakhnin are not allowed permits to builds on their own land.

"I really became aware of what was going on in the '80's. I had been invited to a meeting of The Bridge for Peace and Coexistence, which is a group of Arab and Jewish activists. A man asked me where I was living and when I answered Bneitz-ion. He calmly and politely told me "That is my Uncle's land."

Since 1967 Israel has confiscated more than 750,000 acres of land from the 1.5 million acres comprising the West Bank and Gaza. Most of the land has been confiscated to make space for illegal settlement expansions, and bypass roads that are for the exclusive use of the Israeli colonists. Since 1948, Israel has confiscated nearly 85 percent of the territory within the Green Line from Palestinians. Most of this land was taken from the 800,000 Palestinian refugees, who were evicted or fled for fear of massacres during the 1948 war.

Israel's illegal settlement expansion and land confiscation has continued unabated and the ongoing construction of the Israeli separation wall, which has been described by a UN report as a "creeping annexation", involves the confiscation of the most fertile of Palestinian land and water sources.

The Israeli Knesset (Israeli parliament) has passed dozens of laws in defiance of U.N. Resolutions and International Law, such as the The Absentee Property law and the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law.

This law, which in Arabic is called 'Qanoon Elhader/Gayeb', was adopted in March 1950, and classified anyone who was a citizen or resident of one of the Arab states or a Palestinian citizen on November 29, 1947, but had left his place of residence, even to take refuge within Palestine , as an 'absentee'. Absentee property was vested in the Custodian of Absentee Property who then 'sold' it to the Development Authority. This effectively authorized the theft of the property of a million Arabs, seized by Israel in 1948.

Adopted in July 1950, this law was devised as a legal ploy to shield the Israeli government from the accusation that it had confiscated abandoned property. The Development Authority is an independent body empowered to sell, buy, lease, exchange, repair, build, develop and cultivate Palestinian property. None of these transactions could take place except with a Jew or a Jewish entity!

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 clearly asserts that the "occupying power cannot move segments of its own population to parts of the land it occupies," or make any demographic or territorial changes that are not in the interest of the occupied. Furthermore, provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention have unquestionably condemned Israel's settlement activities and demanded the ceasing of "all" settlement expansion by Israel.

UN Security Council Resolution 681 (1990) confirmed that the Forth Geneva Convention is applicable to the Occupied Territories and thus Israel's compliance is mandatory.

Yet, since 1992, settlement activity has increased 50% while the U.S.A. government has turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the cries for justice from the occupied and oppressed people of the Holy Land.

Hope lies in the international communities resolve to seek justice and compel Israel to abide by UN Security Council Resolutions and International Law, for the inalienable rights of a people have been denied for far too long, and:

"Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law... Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."- PREAMBLE to the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

On May 14, 1948 The Declaration of the establishment of Israel affirmed:

"On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations."

Might Israel and America remember those words on Land Day 2007.

Source:

http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=3410&CategoryId=4

-###-

March 29, 2007 © Copyright March 28, 2007 Eileen Fleming. Permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media if this credit is attached and the title remains unchanged. WAWA@WeAreWideAwake.org

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 5 dated 8 March 2007 | Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.

The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.

As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.

Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.

The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:

Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.

By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: ‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’

At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list named 51 individuals.

The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’.

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but ‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’

The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.’

The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?

In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur?

Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.

‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.

The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.

To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?

Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: ‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?

It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.[*]

Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’

If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.” But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.’

With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.

What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.

The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.

The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.

The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Footnotes

* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.

Denounced, but Jewish dissent grows

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Antony Loewenstein
February 6, 2007

In a recent essay published by the American Jewish Committee, reflecting widely shared attitudes, Jews who criticised Israel and its policies were accused of stirring anti-Semitism. The executive director of the committee said "those who oppose Israel's basic right to exist, whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted".

It is clear, however, that a growing number of concerned Jews in the United States and Britain are no longer staying silent in the face of Israeli policies in Palestine and Lebanon.

A new organisation has just been launched in Britain giving voice to such Jews, for example. Independent Jewish Voices includes prominent British figures such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm and the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Hobsbawn told the Independent: "It is important for non-Jews to know that there are Jews who do not agree with the apparent consensus within the Jewish community that the only good Jew is one who supports Israel."

For too long, Jews in many Western nations have shunned and intimidated fellow Jews who speak out against the illegal settlements or the cruelty of the 40-year occupation. However, uncritical allegiance to Israel by its "supporters" is arguably a greater cause of anti-Semitism than the dissent they seek to suppress.

The recent release of a book by the former US president Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, has ignited similar debates in the US. He says occupied Palestine is comparable to apartheid South Africa. Carter told Newsweek "the plight of the Palestinians - the confiscation of their land, that they're being suppressed against voicing their disapproval of what's happening, the building of the wall that intrudes deep within their territory, and the complete separation of Israelis from the Palestinians" - is a guarantee of further bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinians.

His book, a bestseller, generated fierce discussion in the US. Carter wrote in the Los Angeles Times that for the past 30 years "I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints of any free and balanced discussion of the facts". He blamed the Zionist lobby for its success in bullying politicians and the media into obedience.

Since the book's release, David Horowitz has called Carter a "Jew-hater, genocide-enabler and liar". Alan Dershowitz calls the book "biased" and "indecent". Deborah Lipstadt says Carter is giving comfort to anti-Semites. Some Jewish members of the Carter Centre's advisory board have resigned and rabbis of America's largest synagogue cancelled a scheduled appearance at the centre.

More measured responses have appeared from Israelis, such as the Knesset member Yossi Beilin who wrote in the newspaper Forward that Carter's words "are simply not as jarring to Israeli ears, which have grown used to such language, especially in respect to the occupation". Although he rejects Carter's claims of racism against the occupation - it is "rather a nationalist drive for the acquisition of land" - Beilin says Israel's path almost guarantees turning the Jewish state into an international "pariah". Indeed, soon after the conclusion of the recent Lebanon war, Ha'aretz admitted the existence of an "apartheid regime" in the territories.

Despite Israel's denials of expansionist policy, the Israeli peace group Peace Now says about 40 per cent of settlements have been built on private Palestinian land. Such moves are illegal and do not provide more security as claimed. Furthermore, in towns such as Hebron, hundreds of fundamentalist Jews are allowed to live freely while tens of thousands of Palestinians suffer daily indignities.

The controversy surrounding Carter's book is designed to avoid discussion of such matters. The smears against Carter are similar to the reception of two US academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who released a paper, The Israel Lobby, which was critical of that lobby in the US. It sparked a furore. The Zionist lobby has not realised playing the man no longer works.

While the settlements continue to expand, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert - who recently praised the Iraq war as bringing "stability" to the Middle East - has appointed a far-right extremist as deputy prime minister. Avigdor Lieberman has called for the bombing of Iran and Egypt and the murder of Arab Knesset members who talk to Hamas.

How can a democracy in the heart of the Middle East support a man who campaigns for the forced separation of Jews and Arab in Israel proper and the occupied territories?

Now that a growing number of concerned Jews are raising their voices publicly despite their community's pressure, there is a hopeful sign for more dialogue and thereby wider public understanding.


Antony Loewenstein is the author of My Israel Question, published by Melbourne University Publishing.
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Antony Loewenstein » Welcome. This is the website of Antony Loewenstein, a Sydney-based journalist, author and blogger.

Can Sunni Arab States Get a Real State for the Palestinians, Peace for Israel, and Peace for Iraq all at Once?

Monday, January 15, 2007

Juan Cole

Iraq for Land: Can Jordan, Egypt and other Sunni Arab States Get a Real State for the Palestinians, Peace for Israel, and Peace for Iraq all at Once? Will Bush even let them Try?

Bush admitted that he needs the help of the governments of Sunni Arab states neighboring or in the vicinity of Iraq in stabilizing that country. They have concluded that since Bush wants something from them, he should give them something they want. The governments of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. have been being destabilized by the continued expropriation of the Palestinians by rightwing Israeli governments. The publics of those countries see the injustices daily-- the Israeli theft of Palestinian land, the unemployment, the malnutrition of Palestinian children under military occupation, the web of checkpoints that prevent people from getting to a hospital, the bloody reprisal attacks on civilians for the actions of a handful of terrorists. See John Berger on the situation.

And, they want to know why their supposedly Arab Muslim governments just lie down and let it happen. So now Mubarak and the Abdullahs want Bush to pressure Olmert to come back to the bargaining table in earnest and pick up where things were left off in 2000.

It isn't a bad offer, and if they really could get a settlement in Palestine and help resolve the crisis in Iraq, we would all be much better off. By "all," I mean the United States, the Israelis, and the Arabs. The Israelis are stuck in a dead end by their contradictory policies toward the Palestinians, and their occupation of another people is turning Israel increasingly toward ugly attitudes like those of Avigdor Lieberman, now legitimized by being in the Israeli cabinet. The Israelis are becoming increasingly isolated in the world and a little pressure for their own good to get them to go back to something close to 1967 borders and let the Palestinians alone would be all to the good.

The problem is that Bush at some point (around November or December of 2001, I think) sold his soul to the wealthiest and most rightwing elements of the Israel lobby in the US. He put Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams in control of Middle East policy in his National Security Council.

So, "Iraq for Land" is likely to go nowhere fast, despite the obvious consideration that it would do the United States a world of good and be the single most effective policy that could be adopted to reduce the threat of terrorism against this country.

I urge readers to take a moment and send a message to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee urging them to support Hosni Mubarak and Abdullah II's "Iraq for Peace" initiative. Those two governments have a peace treaty with Israel and if Olmert had any sense he would listen to them.

Beyond Orwell and Kafka

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

By Gabriele Zamparini

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died this week. He won’t be missed.

Now imagine Augusto Pinochet visiting the United States while he was carrying out torture and mass murdering in Chile. Imagine the “largest coalition of peace and justice organizations in the U.S.” welcoming the ruthless murderer, “it is our pleasure to welcome you in the United States”.

This is what indeed happened this past summer when United for Peace and Justice’s National Coordinator Leslie Cagan wrote an open letter to puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki.

Dear Prime Minister Al-Maliki,

On behalf of United for Peace and Justice, the largest coalition of peace and justice organizations in the U.S., which includes more than 1,400 national and local groups united in opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, it is our pleasure to welcome you in the United States.

Of course it would be wrong and ungenerous the comparison; next to Al-Maliki and his sectarian death squads government, Pinochet would seem a boy scout.

Intellectuals and activists of the Imperial anti-war movement started immediately after the invasion to legitimize the “supreme international crime” by supporting the so-called “political process”, a Trojan horse studied to destroy Iraq and force its people into a civil war. Those notorious sectarian Iraqi elections, based on religion and ethnicity, far from being forced on the US by the non-violent resistance of some clerics, were part of the plan to install a quisling government, getting the approval of the vultures and hyenas of the international community and preparing the bases for the eventual partition of the country.

Finally democracy has landed on Iraq; too bad for those 655,000 deaths who didn’t wait to enjoy the apocalypse. The slaughtering is going on with hundreds of people killed every day, ethnic cleansing, tortures, collective punishment, millions of Iraqis displaced and a country waiting to be wiped off the map. God bless America.

The Imperial Democrats got back the Imperial Congress. On Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 Michael Moore published on his website LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

Friends,

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate. This was done because the American people wanted to make two things crystal clear: End this war, and stop Mr. Bush from doing any more damage to this country we love. That is what this election was about. Nothing else. Just that. And it's a message that has sent shock waves throughout Washington -- and a note of hope around this troubled world. (…)

The Washington Post clearly illustrated the “note of hope” a few days later. Democratic Senator Harry M. Reid, who was just elected Senate majority leader, “said, one of the first acts of the new Democratic Congress will be a $75 billion boost to the military budget to try to get the Army's diminished units back into combat shape.”

Michael Moore goes on:

“But let's take a day to rejoice and revel in a rare victory for our side -- the side that doesn't believe in unprovoked invasions of other countries. This is your day, my friends. You have worked hard for it. I can't tell you how proud I am to count all of you as part of the greater American mainstream we now occupy.”

The “side that doesn't believe in unprovoked invasions of other countries” would be the Democratic Party? History, from Vietnam to Yugoslavia and Iraq, really didn’t teach anything to the United States of Amnesia. “A woman, for the first time in our history, will be Speaker of the House”, the hero of the Imperial anti-war movement continues. One wonders if that should be read as good news. The woman is Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat from the liberal San Francisco. Back in 2005 Joshua Frank gave a fair portrait of the “Granite Lady”, as her website describes Pelosi

"There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza," Pelosi said as she rallied AIPAC loyalists. "This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist." (…) "One thing, however is unchanged," Pelosi added. "America's commitment to the safety and security of the state of Israel is unwavering. America and Israel share an unbreakable bond: in peace and war; and in prosperity and in hardship."

In spite of an Imperial anti-war movement in denial (at best, when not actively cooperating or even part of the Jewish Lobby) on the reasons that brought the American troops to invade and occupy Iraq, the winners of this shameful scandal have always been before our eyes, only could we look at the Middle East geopolitical panorama with an honest open mind. Remember what happened on 7 June 1981?

On November 20, 2006, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported:

On his way home from Los Angeles, the prime minister [Israeli PM Ehud Olmert] "calmed" the reporters - and perhaps even himself - by saying there is no danger of U.S. President George W. Bush accepting the expected recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton panel, and attempting to move Syria out of the axis of evil and into a coalition to extricate America from Iraq. The prime minister hopes the Jewish lobby can rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any diversion from the status quo on the Palestinians.

“No blood for oil” doesn’t tell the whole story; how much more blood for the old Zionist project of Greater Israel?

While its two neighbors have been invaded and occupied by the Empire, Iran’s regime is holding an international conference questioning the Holocaust of Jews during WWII.

Using an unspeakable tragedy like the genocide of Jews (when will we also remember the others? Roma People, homosexuals, etc?) by the Nazi and their collaborators for political ends is always abominable, both when it comes from Israel and the Jewish lobby around the world and when it comes - like in this case - from Iran, a country that claims to fight the Israeli influence in the Middle East.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been using inflammatory language against Israel and the United States to win over the Arab public opinion and the international left. In reality, Iran – a non-Arab country – has been spreading its influence in the Middle East for years. But both the Arab public opinion and the international left should take a closer look at Iran’s regime, both at home and its role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

While its propaganda has given ammunitions to Israel and the United States, Iran has been having a central role in the apocalypse inflicted to Iraq, supporting the American installed sectarian, quisling Iraqi government and its militias responsible for mass murdering and ethnic cleansing. And don’t let fool yourself on the “support” of the Palestinian cause by the Iranian regime. The Iranian supported sectarian militias operating in Iraq have been persecuting and killing many members of the Palestinian community in Iraq since the occupation started in 2003.

As I wrote somewhere else, four hyenas, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and Iran have destroyed a country that could have been a power in the region and a model for the Arab world. The vultures of the international community have been cooperating and watching the bloodbath waiting to share the rich carcass. The control of the energy resources is just part of the whole picture; Iraq had to be destroyed to allow the so-called reshaping of the Middle East. The notorious “political process” has been a formidable Trojan horse that forced the Iraqi People into a civil war. Far from being a failure, the main mission of this bloody project has been accomplished. Iraq as we knew it has gone, probably forever.

The supreme international crime, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a defenseless country that had never attacked the United States, that did not have any weapons of mass destruction, that did not have any ties to al-Qaida, that had no connection to the September 11 attacks, is the major scandal of our times, a scandal that would need an epic poet to be told. But since we live beyond Orwell and Kafka’s times, let’s read what Philip Martin, a 21-year-old US marine who spent 7 months in the al-Anbar province of Iraq has to tell us:

Saddam was convicted and sentenced to death for killing 143 Shiites who conspired to assassinate him. (I know all you "patriotic" Americans would be calling for the heads of anyone who conspired to assassinate supreme leader Bush). And yet we spend upwards of 1 trillion dollars and nearing 3,000 lives to help these Iraqis when they don't even want us there. Not to mention we don't have the legal justification to be there. I guess we should wait around for the omnipotent W Bush to decide who we should use our superpowerdom to help next. It's about time to throw him and the rest of the fascists out. Moreover it's about time to start educating Americans about their past and history, and letting them know that imperialistic leaders are not what the founders of this great country wanted.

Is the Iraq War Linked to the Arab-Israeli Conflict?

by Patrick Seale

Released: 14 Dec 2006

---

America is confronted in Iraq with one of its gravest crises since the Second World War. It has lost control of the situation. It is haemorrhaging men and treasure. It is facing if not defeat then utter failure. There is a sense in the United States of an impending national catastrophe, reflected in President George W. Bush’s collapsing approval ratings.

How can America extricate itself from a disastrous war which has strained its armed forces, sapped its finances and squandered its moral authority?

The prescription offered by the high-level Iraq Study Group in its recent report is that U.S. combat brigades should be withdrawn by early 2008 and that the United States should engage in direct talks with Iran and Syria to secure their help in stabilising Iraq.

Above all, the underlying premise of the report is that the Iraq problem cannot be solved in isolation. It is linked, one way or another, to other major conflicts in the region -- with at their heart, the unresolved problem of Israel’s relations with its neighbours. A comprehensive strategy is required.

This is what James Baker and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group, meant when they wrote that "The U.S. will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the U.S. deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict."

This central conclusion of the report has aroused the fury of the pro-Israeli right-wing in the United States and has been rejected by the Israeli government. Rarely has a group of distinguished U.S. public servants been so smeared and vilified as in the campaign now being mounted against James Baker, the former Secretary of State and his colleagues.

Richard Perle, a keen advocate of the Iraq war and a former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, called the report a "misadventure" which should be ignored. The conservative Wall Street Journal condemned it as a "strategic muddle," while Rush Limbaugh, the influential host of a right-wing radio talk show, dismissed the authors of the report as "out-of-touch weaklings." The New York Post called them "surrender monkeys."

In the United States, the report has sparked a huge national debate -- indeed a battle royal -- between America’s old foreign policy establishment led by James Baker on the one hand and, on the other, the pro-Israeli neo-cons, backed by the Jewish lobby and right-wing think-tanks -- the very fanatics who captured America’s Middle East policy under George W. Bush’s administration and were largely responsible for taking America into war.

This neo-con camp rejects any notion of linkage between the savage war in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is because the one thing it fears is that the United States might pressure Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian occupied territories and from Syria’s Golan Heights in the context of a peace settlement.

And yet, the evidence of linkage between the various Middle East’s conflicts is overwhelming. Would Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad have even conceived of staging this week’s absurd and provocative conference questioning the Holocaust were it not for Israel’s cruel oppression of the Palestinians? Would Ahmadinejad have a platform for his obnoxious ideas and wide support among Muslims were it not for Israel’s destruction of what remains of Palestinian society by its targeted killings, expanding settlements, separation wall, bypass roads, checkpoints and all the inhuman machinery of military occupation?

Would Iran be so determined to master the uranium fuel cycle were it not for Israel’s formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons, estimated by most experts to contain between 80 and 200 warheads? And are not Israel and its friends pressing the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Does linkage between Israel and the war in Iraq still need proving? Has it not been shown beyond dispute that it was concern for Israel’s security -- the wish to remove any threat to Israel from the east and the ambition to reshape the entire region in Israel’s favour -- that impelled deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his colleague Douglas Feith to press ardently for war in Iraq?

For these pro-Israeli ideologues, invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was not enough. The country and its army had to be smashed beyond repair. In his latest book, State of Denial: Bush at War, Bob Woodward, the celebrated U.S. investigative journalist, makes clear that Paul Bremer took two momentous decisions on his first full day as chief administrator in Baghdad. The first was to order the De-Baathification of Iraqi Society, followed a day later by his Order Number 2, disbanding the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam’s bodyguard and special paramilitary organisations.

Who instructed Bremer to make these disastrous decisions, which have been largely responsible for the subsequent mess? The answer is Wolfowitz and Feith. Their instructions were given to Bremer without, it appears, the knowledge of the White House, the National Security Council or the State Department, and without General Myers, the principal military adviser to President Bush, being consulted. (See Mark Danner’s review of recent books by Bob Woodward and others in the December 21 issue of The New York Review of Books, under the title Iraq: Bush’s Fantasy War.) Indeed, it was Feith’s Office of Special Plans that, in conjunction with Ahmad Chalabi, faked the intelligence that led to war in the first place.

What about the crisis in Lebanon? Has Israel nothing to do with it? Hizbullah, the Shia resistance movement, was created as a result of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its occupation of the south for the next 18 years. Without the invasion and occupation -- without Israel’s constant pressure on Lebanon since the 1960s and its repeated incursions -- there would have been no militant Shia resurgence, no Hizbullah, and no challenge to Lebanon’s delicate inter-confessional balance.

The present trial of strength in Lebanon between the Siniora government and pro-Syrian forces is largely to do with Syria’s concern to retain a measure of influence in Beirut. But why is Syria so concerned with Lebanon? The two neighbours are, in any event, bound together by innumerable ties of family, of commerce and finance, of shared history, culture, language and ethnicity.

But there is another over-riding factor. It lies in the Arab-Israeli conflict of which Lebanon is a battleground. Syria needs to retain influence in Lebanon to prevent Israel, or any other hostile power, gaining a foothold there and mounting hostile operations against Syria from Lebanese soil.

These are among the reasons why observers of the Middle East scene point to the obvious linkages between the various conflicts and insist that the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict is the poison which has infected the whole region and ruined America’s relations with Arabs and Muslims.

In recognition of this obvious fact, James Baker and his colleagues called for "renewed and sustained commitment [by the United States] to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts." Does the case still need to be argued?

President Bush should heed James Baker’s advice in order to rescue his presidency and his own place in history. He should embrace the comprehensive strategy advocated by the Iraq Study Group. It is the only way, in the words of the report, "to restore America’s standing and credibility in that part of the world."

Israel, too, should reflect on the damage the unresolved conflict is doing to its image in the world, to the health of its citizens and to its long-term security. According to most polls, some 65 per cent of Israelis -- two thirds of the population -- are ready for peace with the Arabs on the basis of the land-for-peace formula enshrined in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

What is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert waiting for? The way to disprove Ahmadinejad’s prediction that Israel is heading for extinction is to make peace with the region -- and with the Palestinians in the first place -- not to resort to force, and still less to reach for the nuclear button.


Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Copyright © 2006 Patrick Seale

Arab Winter

The failure of last year's so-called Arab Spring underscores the broader failure of U.S. policy in the Mid-East.

By Matthew Yglesias

Web Exclusive: 11.21.06

Remember the Arab Spring?

"Just recently we have had the Lebanese revolution, the Egyptian announcement about electoral changes, the Iraqi elections, the Afghan elections," wrote Charles Krauthammer in the spring of 2005. "Kuwait has just extended suffrage to women, and Syria has announced, however disingenuously, that they are moving toward legalizing political parties, purging the ruling Baath Party, sponsoring free municipal elections in 2007, and formally endorsing a market economy." He concluded: "What we have seen in the last six months has been simply astonishing -- well, astonishing to the critics."

Now, to be clear, Krauthammer is very possibly the worst journalist working in America today, a relentlessly pernicious force, never right about anything, who feels his commentary should not be shackled by the small-minded bonds of accuracy or logic. He was, however, hardly alone in his unabashed enthusiasm for Bush's Arab Spring. "There is a pathology, a historical pathology," explained New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, "that [Bush] has attacked with unprecedented vigor and with unprecedented success." That pathology was "the political culture of the Middle East, which the president may actually have changed."

And, indeed, things have changed. As Sabrina Tavernise reported in Monday's New York Times about the centerpiece of the U.S.-orchestrated Mid-East transformation, "after months of apparently random sectarian violence the pattern has become one of attack and counterattack, with Sunni militants staging what commanders call 'spectacular' strikes and Shiite militias retaliating with abductions and murders of Sunnis."

Welcome to the long, dark Arab winter.

It's hard to believe that so recently, the American mainstream's enthusiasm for the "successes" of Bush's democracy-promotion endeavor was so intense that liberals were overwhelmingly cowed into silence. What the successes were, exactly, was always hard to say. Iraq was, at the time, already being torn asunder by violent sectarian divisions that were merely re-inscribed by an election in which everyone voted for a sectarian party. Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution," meanwhile, didn't actually change the country's electoral system at all. Reforms in the pro-American Arab states proved to be chimerical -- Kuwait let women as well as men vote in elections for powerless offices, Saudi Arabia let people vote for powerless offices, and Mubarak promised to hold a fair election but then didn't, you know, hold one. Cruelest of all, however, was the treatment of the long-suffering Palestinians. For years, Bush had informed them that no pressure would be brought to bear on their Israeli occupiers to settle the territorial issue until the Palestinian Authority reformed its internal procedures and ended the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the Fatah Movement. Eventually, Yasser Arafat died, elections were held, and the main Palestinian opposition movement, Hamas, won. Palestinians were then informed that there would be no negotiations. Having been ordered to vote, you see, they voted for the wrong party.

Then last summer, Lebanese Arabs found that the United States' enthusiasm for their new government didn't extend to protecting it from wide-ranging Israeli military strikes on their civilian infrastructure or efforts to strangle their economy. Lebanon, it seems, faced a mandate not only to restore democracy, but to initiate a new round of civil war by somehow disarming Hezbollah. Meanwhile, about Iraq itself, of course, in many ways the less said the better.
But still, something must be said. Indeed, the editors of The New Republic have convened a "special issue" dedicated to pondering that sad country. It features, among other things, an unsigned editorial observing that "at this point, it seems almost beside the point to say this: The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war." And, well, so do I regret my support for it. But what is one to do to make up for it? Mostly, nothing can be done. At least, however, when surveying a fiasco one can attempt to learn something about what went wrong and change one's thinking in the future. Such a change in thinking is precisely why I, at least, having fallen for the Iraq boondoggle one time, was not seduced by the siren song of the Arab Spring. Those of us who chose not to get fooled again were, of course, heartily condemned by a March 2005 TNR editorial that espied a "certain grudging quality" to liberal takes on events in Lebanon. "So far," they sniffed, Daily Kos "has featured only two short posts on Lebanon's equally stirring Cedar Revolution -- and both were notable mostly for their pessimism." This was, perhaps, the measured version of the April 11, 2005, take offered by the magazine's owner and editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. He analyzed "The Politics of Churlishness" in a cover story dedicated to the proposition that "if George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others." And, about sixteen months later, of course, these voices so eager to condemn liberals for not celebrating the new freedom of the Lebanese were the loudest in clamoring for Lebanese blood.

"As we pore over the lessons of this misadventure" in Iraq, explained the magazine in last week's reassessment, "we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of 'realism.'" Given what else is said in the editorial and in the special issue, it's fair to interpret this as meaning that, in surveying the scene, they conclude nothing in particular. For my part, at a minimum I've concluded that it's a mistake to entrust the cause of American idealism and Arab reform to a movement led by people who plainly loathe Arabs (Palestinians "behave like lemmings" wrote Peretz two weeks ago before observing last week that Iraqis now lack "even the bare rudiments of civilizations") and couldn't care less about their well-being except insofar as pretense to caring is a useful club with which to batter domestic political opponents.

As an approach to intra-punditocracy one-upsmanship this seems to work out okay, but as an approach to foreign policy it's moronic. In that realm, what actual foreigners actually think actually does matter, whether or not you care about them or agree with their opinions. And what Muslims think about the United States is that we don't give a damn about their interests or welfare. They are, therefore, very skeptical of schemes that involve giving the United States more control over the fate of the Muslims -- be it conquering Iraq, strong-arming Arab regimes with economic pressure, or efforts to maintain the principle that the Non-Proliferation Treaty is sacrosanct when Iran wants to break it but not when the United States or Israel or India wants to.
Under these circumstances, democratization -- the shared passion of many Republicans and Democrats alike -- is doomed to fail. Any political opening will only bring to power forces we don't like and will try to bat down, further increasing resentment of the United States and only ensuring things will be even worse the next time around. This is not to say that we should be blithely unconcerned with internal political developments elsewhere. Rather, the point is that, whatever we hope to accomplish, the only way we can do anything constructive is to begin draining from the American approach to the Middle East the overwhelming stench of imperialism that's surrounded it for decades. We need to operate through legitimate mechanisms, establish rules of the road that we and our allies will actually follow and, most of all, operate with a sensitivity to the actual desires and priorities of people who live in the region. Faced with a disaster the scale of our current policies, saying "sorry" and then trying the same thing over again isn't good enough.

Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12254