Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Sami Abdel-Shafi, Divided and voiceless, Guardian Unlimited, September 27, 2007

Today we are imprisoned from all sides, including the sea, our vast symbol of freedom and opportunity that Israel stopped us sailing on long ago. Within the prison walls Gazans cannot escape the foul smell of burning rubbish that frequently fills the streets; many are forced to eat bread made of flour mixed with “feed wheat” - only suitable for animals - to compensate for flour shortages.

The appearance of leaders of both Hamas and Fatah, side by side on Tuesday at the funeral of my uncle, Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the co-founder of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was welcome. The suffering of ordinary Palestinians and the presence of Israel as an occupying force - whose military policies have bred division among Palestinians - can only be remedied by further expressions of unity between the parties, and a move to dialogue based on an unambiguous platform of pursuing peace with Israel.

It is urgent because Palestinians are drowning in half-truths. While internal security improved in the eyes of many Gazans with the change of power, some innocents were tortured by Hamas. The impact of yet another siege, and the collapse of whatever remains of an economy, health system or connection with the outside world, create profound instability in ordinary people’s lives.

The deplorable conditions here only make it easier for Hamas to commit mistakes and violations. Improved internal security in Gaza and Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections cannot continue to be Hamas’s only bargaining chips.

The PA’s promise that, despite its physical distance, it would not forget Gaza’s citizens, is not holding up well. Palestinian official ability to challenge the continuing military policies of Israel has been gravely corroded, as events on the ground illustrate. Many in Gaza perceive that Fatah provoked June’s seizure of power by Hamas, and their suspicions are hardened by a sense that officials in the West Bank are looking the other way while life in Gaza loses any sense of dignity. In effect, Gaza is forgotten. Gaza is left voiceless.

It came as little surprise, therefore, to see how easily the Israeli cabinet was able to declare the Gaza Strip an “enemy entity” last week, legitimising the deliberate, and disproportionate, punishment of Gazans through disruption of electricity and fuel supplies. The move came in response to Palestinian home-made rockets targeting southern Israel, which Gazans widely oppose. Israel’s declaration warns of a self-afforded licence to continue hammering the Gaza Strip, with barely any accountability.

Against this backdrop, Israeli and PA officials are drafting an agreement on principles ahead of the US-sponsored peace conference scheduled for November. But Palestinian division and the degeneration of 1.5 million Gazans into a humanitarian case - or an “enemy” humanitarian case - only diminish the Palestinian negotiating position. It also allows Israel’s hawks to dismiss legitimate Palestinian demands for a just peace.

The resilience of Gazans is not so great that it will enable them to endure the consequences of Palestinian division on top of the continuing military incarceration from Israel. The real victims in the battle between Hamas and the PA are the people of Gaza. Here, ordinary lives are crippled, with access to medical care, municipal services and utilities brutally halted.

Opinion - Leila Fadel: Iraqi death toll: Number’s elusive, but people’s fears are inescapable - sacbee.com, September 23, 2007

In 2006 the medical journal The Lancet estimated that excess deaths in Iraq due to the war were 654,965, or 2.5 percent of the population. Iraq Body Count, which tracks civilian deaths, puts the number of documented deaths between 72,596 and 79,187….

This week a poll by the British market research company, Opinion Research Business, put the number at 1,220,580 deaths that were not natural causes, since the 2003 invasion.

Ganji: “Difficult Days” for Iranian Democracy Activists - The Middle East Blog - TIME, September 24, 2007

Ganji, a journalist who spent six years in prison for criticizing state repression, starts out with a strong rebuke of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran spanning the last 50 years. Writing “we categorically reject a military attack on Iran,” Ganji blasts Bush’s democracy funding and talk of attacking Iran for actually undercutting the credibility and work of Iranian democracy activists. He complains that Iran’s dispute with the West has deflected the U.N.’s attention from Iran’s internal repression and asks the world to condemn the regime’s human rights violations.

Like Gideon Levy, Amira Hass is not simply a great journalist. She is a great human being.

Amira Hass, Disrupting the separation policy, Haaretz, September 25, 2007

Last Friday morning, the eve of Yom Kippur, Machsom Watch activists had to spend hours making frantic telephone calls and using their connections with high-ranking officials to enable three sick people to traverse the Qalandiyah checkpoint and reach Jerusalem for urgent treatment. Media reports had promised that despite the hermetic closure, humanitarian cases would be allowed through the checkpoints, but by noon, most of those cases had given up and returned home.

In other cases, Machsom Watch’s female volunteers try to alert commanders when soldiers are harassing people passing through the checkpoints. Months of correspondence and requests, reports in Haaretz and monitoring by B’Tselem resulted in two commanders being removed from the Taysir checkpoint. This did not stop a soldier from harassing people at that checkpoint a few months later, nor did it prevent similar abusive conduct at other checkpoints.

It is important to recognize the anti-imperialist dimension of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric and the way it resonates in the Muslim world–among Sunnis as well as Shiites. But this does not entail ignoring his attempts to deny or downplay the Holocaust and his nonsensical attempt to divert attention from the persecution of homosexuals in Iran by saying that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

Ahmadinejad hailed in Middle East - Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2007

CAIRO — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flinty populist in a zip-up jacket whose scathing rhetoric and defiance of Washington are often caricatured in the Western media, has transcended national and religious divides to become a folk hero across the Middle East.

The diminutive, at times inscrutable, president is a wellspring of stinging sound-bites and swagger for Muslims who complain that their leaders are too beholden to or frightened of the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday ahead of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, is an easily marketable commodity:a streetwise politician with nuclear ambitions and an open microphone.

“I like him a lot,” said Mahmoud Ali, a medical student in Cairo. “He’s trying to protect himself and his nation from the dangers around him. He makes me feel proud. He’s a symbol of Islam. He seems the only person capable of taking a stand against Israel and the West. Unfortunately, Egypt has gotten too comfortable with Washington.”

Ahmadinejad’s appeal is especially strong in Egypt, where he is compared to the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose bold, yet doomed vision of pan-Arabism in the 1950s was also aimed at stemming Western influence. In the minds of many Egyptians, Iran’s quest to expand its nuclear program despite United Nations sanctions is similar to Nasser’s confrontation with the British and French over nationalizing the Suez Canal.

No matter how misguided those who advocate “regime change” in Iran may be, it must be acknowledged that President Ahmadinejad is vile.

Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles - New York Times, September 25, 2007

He said that there were no homosexuals in Iran — not one — and that the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews should not be treated as fact, but theory, and therefore open to debate and more research.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, aired those and other bewildering thoughts in a two-hour verbal contest at Columbia University yesterday, providing some ammunition to people who said there was no point in inviting him to speak. Yet his appearance also offered evidence of why he is widely admired in the developing world for his defiance toward Western, especially American, power.In repeated clashes with his hosts, Mr. Ahmadinejad accused the United States of supporting terrorist groups, and characterized as hypocritical American and European efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Leading Israeli authors, intellectuals call for truce with Hamas - Haaretz, September 24, 2007

A long list of prominent intellectuals recently signed a petition calling for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas.

The signatories of the petition - which was organized by the sponsors of the Geneva Initiative and will be published today - include the novelists Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Meir Shalev, Judith Katzir, Eli Amir, Savyon Liebrecht, Yehoshua Sobol and Dorit Rabinyan.

The petition, titled “Agreement with [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud] Abbas, cease-fire with Hamas,” reads: “Israel has in the past negotiated with its worst enemies … Now, the appropriate course of action is to negotiate with Hamas to reach a general cease-fire to prevent further suffering for both sides.”

Danny Rubinstein, How many were arrested last night? - Haaretz, September 24, 2007

Shortly before his death three years ago, the sociologist Gadi Yatziv wrote that in the IDF struggle against terrorism, victory is part of failure. It is impossible to win because every raid, assassination, arrest and roadblock stir[s] rage and hatred and broaden[s] the pool of conscripts for terrorist cells. But it is also impossible to fail because the spokesmen of the Israeli security establishment will always claim that without these raids and roadblocks, terrorism will be much worse. It is an argument that cannot be refuted.

Divine politics | Salon, September 24, 2007

Westerners now talk blithely about the need for a “reformation” in Islam, apparently oblivious to how bloody and traumatic the Christian Reformation actually was. Lilla finds this situation perilous. As long as we refuse to acknowledge the madness of the religious wars and persecutions of the 16th century, he argues, we remain in danger of loosening our grip on “the Great Separation” (of church and state) that resulted from it. By not understanding how easily any politics infused with any religion can drift in the direction of fanaticism and terror, we put ourselves at risk of drifting that way ourselves.

US Holocaust Museum, Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi leadership at the camp, Picture 10, Nazi officers and “female auxiliaries”

Levy, Puppet leader - Haaretz, September 23, 2007

Mahmoud Abbas has to stay home. As things stand right now, he must not go to Washington. Even his meetings with Ehud Olmert are gradually turning into a disgrace and have become a humiliation for his people. Nothing good will come of them. It has become impossible to bear the spectacle of the Palestinian leader’s jolly visits in Jerusalem, bussing the cheek of the wife of the very prime minister who is meanwhile threatening to blockade a million and a half of his people, condemning them to darkness and hunger.

If Abu Mazen were a genuine national leader instead of a petty retailer, he would refuse to participate in the summit and any other meetings until the blockade of Gaza is lifted. If he were a man of truly historic stature he would add that no conference can be held without Ismail Haniyeh, another crucial Palestinian representative. And if Israel really wanted peace, not only an “agreement of principles” with a puppet-leader that will lead nowhere, it should respect Abbas’ demand. Israel should aspire for Abu Mazen to be considered a leader in the eyes of his people, not only a marionette whose strings are pulled by Israel and the United States, or affected by other short-term power plays.

070221_british_basra.pdf (application/pdf Object), Feb. 2007

The British won some tactical clashes in Maysan and Basra in May-November 2004, but Operation Telic’s tactical victories over the Sadrists did not stop Islamists from taking
steadily more local political power and controlling security at the neighborhood level when British troops were not present.

As Michael Knight and Ed Williams point out in an excellent recent analysis for WINEP, SCIRI, Sadrists, Dawa and other Shi’ite Islamists won 38 out of 41 seats in the provincial
elections in Basra in January 2005, and 35 out of 41 seats in Maysan….

The British decisively lost the south - which produces over 90% of government revenues and has over 70% of Iraq’s proven oil reserves — more than two years ago.

…the British - which had lost at the political level in early 2005 - were defeated at the military level and confronted with “no go” zones in many areas from the fall of 2005 onwards.

The Captain’s Journal » The British Flight from Basra, August 20, 2007

In Calamity in Basra and British Rules of Engagement, we pointed out that the British had essentially been militarily defeated in Basra.

Richard Beeston, diplomatic editor of The Times of London recently returned from a visit to Basra, his first since 2003. He says in 2003, British soldiers were on foot patrol, drove through town in unarmored vehicles and fished in the waters of the Shaat al Arab on their days off. He says the changes he saw four years later are enormous.

“Nowadays all troop movement in and out of the city are conducted at night by helicopter because it’s been deemed too dangerous to go on the road and its dangerous to fly choppers during the day,” he says.

Beeston says during his latest visit, he noticed a map of the city in one of the military briefing rooms. About half of the city was marked as no-go areas.

British headquarters are mortared and rocketed almost every night.

In this article we cited Anthony Cordesman (Center for Strategic and International Studies) who began openly discussing the situation by calling it a defeat in a white paper entitled The British Defeat in the South and the Uncertain Bush Strategy in Iraq. In response to Cordesman there is a row in Britain over the idea that there has been a defeat.

British Commander Defends Basra Pullout - washingtonpost.com, September 22, 2007

LONDON, Sept. 21 — The commander of the British army said Friday that the recent withdrawal of British forces from downtown Basra was part of a “successful” strategic plan for Iraq and not the result of pressure from Shiite militias.

“To say that we were bombed out of Basra is just completely wrong,” Gen. Richard Dannatt said during a talk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a research center in central London.

“We have been successful in southern Iraq,” Dannatt said. “Three of the four provinces that we were responsible for we have handed over to Iraqi control. That was always the plan. The optics of us drawing down and repositioning at the same time that the Americans were surging upwards — the optics, inevitably, were awkward.”

American and Iraqi Forces Control Half of Baghdad - New York Times, September 22, 2007

American and Iraqi forces control a little more than half of Baghdad’s neighborhoods but 8 percent are “free of enemy influence” and are being secured primarily by Iraqi units, according to a senior American commander.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil Jr., the American commander in Baghdad, told reporters in a video briefing at the Pentagon that in around 38 of Baghdad’s 474 neighborhoods American forces were playing mainly a supporting role to Iraqis, and that violence was at minimal levels. That represents only a slight increase in Iraqi control since June.