Israel Matzav: Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler

Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Friday, December 2.

1) Ever hear of Mohamed Abumuailek?

Paul Martin wrote about him this past June:
I returned to this tiny strip of Mediterranean coast after the war between Israel and Hamas ended in January 2009. As I sipped coffee in a Gaza City café, Mohamed the rocket-firer recognized me. "How was your war?" I asked him. "I didn't fight," he told me. He had changed his mind about the use of rockets. It was counterproductive and wrong, he said.
Mohamed is now 26 and in his third year of imprisonment, charged by the Hamas authorities with spying for Israel. In my documentary film "Rocket Man Under Fire," he is shown in early 2009 standing on a hilltop from which his group used to fire rockets into Israel and predicting (accurately): "They will say that I am a collaborator, and I don't care much...because these are the basics of a real Muslim: to tell the truth and be a peaceful man—whether it kills him or gives him more life."
In my 30 years of war reporting, I had never met a young militant who threw away the gun, decided to follow the path of peace, and was willing to risk his life to speak about it. "I want to go public," he told me, "because someone has to speak out against this self-destructive madness."
The film mentioned is Rocket Man Under Fire from Paul Martin on Vimeo.:
As you can tell, dissent isn't much tolerated in Gaza. The good news is that Joshua Mitnick is now reporting Gaza Dissident Is Free, but Fearful. The "free" part is good; the "fearful" part isn't.
After a two-year trial, more than a dozen appearances in a Hamas military court and an international campaign on his behalf, Mr. Abumuailek was brought before a judge in early October for a verdict—and walked free.
Human-rights activists say it was the first case of an accused collaborator being acquitted since Hamas took control of the coastal strip in 2007.
A defendant who faced the judge alongside Mr. Abumuailek, also on security-related charges, was sentenced to death.
The article credits Amnesty International, Archbishop Tutu, the BBC and the Wall Street Journal (the publication in which both these articles appeared) with publicizing Mohammend's case.

If groups like Peace Now or B'tselem have taken up Mohammed's case it isn't clear. I couldn't find his name at either organizations' website. A recent Washington Post editorial described these groups (emphasis mine):
There is, however, nothing nefarious about public organizations in a democratic country receiving support from other democracies. The NGO funders are not enemies of Israel, and the groups themselves are not trying to subvert the state — only to correct what they see as its flaws. In the case of the illegal settlement construction often reported by Peace Now, or the human rights abuses by the Israeli army chronicled by B’Tselem, the government would be better off responding to rather than suppressing the criticism.
Except given the exclusive attention these organizations pay to Israel, publicizing sins real and imagined to an international audience, it's pretty clear that their agenda is less benign than just correcting flaws. But this also leads to a question why they don't hold the Palestinians to any real standards?

Championing Mohamed Abumuailek would give them the chance to point out the flaws of Hamas. It would give them a chance to fight for a Palestinian who wants peace, even against his own interests. B'tselem, though, appears headed in the opposite direction.

On last point: what does it say about the political climate in Gaza that unrepentant terrorists are celebrities and those who eschew violence must live in fear?

2) Early returns

Early returns from the Egyptian election, show that the Muslim Brotherhood will do well. Jackson Diehl expresses his frustration, Egypt’s democratic pioneers still face official persecution:
Nour and Abdel Fattah have something in common besides their history of fighting the Mubarak regime. Both are committed secularists and supporters of liberal democracy in Egypt. That makes them more, not less, of a target for the ruling military council. Like Mubarak, the generals who replaced him are willing to cut deals with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups — while seeking to marginalize secular alternatives they do not control.
The goal is to present Egyptians — and Western allies such as the United States — with a stark choice: rule by Muslim fundamentalists or continued reliance on the military. The initial results of the parliamentary elections will likely reinforce that strategy. Islamist parties are winning more than 60 percent of the vote so far, which could give them a commanding position in the new parliament.
...
The generals “are playing with the Brotherhood and sending the message to the United States that it is us or them,” Nour said. “We as liberals pay the price. It is exactly the same strategy that Mubarak pursued. Only this time no one understands we have a problem, because supposedly all the problems have been fixed by the revolution.”
Barry Rubin doesn't see the problem primarily being the military council, but the voters:
So the Islamists won and the election was fair. Should we feel good that democracy has functioned and that the people are getting what they want?
Or should we feel bad that the people want a repressive dictatorship, the repression of women, the suppression of Christians, conflict with Israel, hatred of the West, and the freezing of Egyptian society into a straitjacket that can only lead to continued poverty and increasing suffering?
As the vote count becomes clearer, I’ll be refining my analysis, but now we know: this is what (Egyptian) democracy looks like.
In contrast to the Washington Post, he blames the secular parties for failing to organize an effective campaign.

The New York Times features a video, Tahrir's candidate, about Zyad Elelaimy one of Egypt's "Facebook revolutionaries." The video gives a sense of what the voting is like. At one point Elelaimy complains that the Muslim Brotherhood's people are physically pushing people to vote for them.

One other item of note: Washington Post editorial board member Jackson Diehl has been invested in Egypt's reform movement for years. (He did not just parachute into Tahrir Square when it was popular to do so earlier this year; he has been writing the reformers for a while now.) Yet today he writes, Conciliatory tones from Egypt’s Islamist leaders:
My conversation with him and several other Islamist political leaders this week pointed to the risks of Egypt’s ongoing democratic revolution — but also to the reasons that the ascendance of parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood should not be as alarming as many in the West suppose. An Egypt dominated by these groups would be a difficult partner for the West, and a menace to secular Egyptians. But the challenge would more closely resemble that of Turkey’s democratically elected Islamist government than that of Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The biggest reason for this is that the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the more fundamentalist parties to its right have renounced violence. Apart from a few militants embedded in Bedouin tribes of the Sinai Peninsula, there are no armed Islamists in Egypt. Senior Brotherhood spokesmen such as Essam al-Erian, who met with me after this week’s first round of parliamentary elections gave his movement more than 40 percent of the vote, have been repeating for years that the group favors, as he put it, “alternation of power through regular elections.”
However, Dore Gold observes in Israel Hayom, (h/t Martin Kramer) someone else isn't so comfortable with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood - the Saudis.
In fact, the Saudis made a connection between the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and growth of international terrorism. In 2005, a former Kuwaiti Education Minister, Dr. Ahmad Al-Rab'i, argued in the Saudi-owned newspaper, a-Sharq al-Awsat, that the founders of most modern terrorist groups in the Middle East emerged from "the mantle" of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two years later, Hussein Shobokshi, a regular columnist in a-Sharq al-Awsat wrote that "to this day" the Muslim Brotherhood "has brought nothing but fanaticism, divisions, and extremism, and in some cases bloodshed and killings." The Saudi media were directly blaming the Muslim Brotherhood for the new Islamic terrorism that the world was facing.
Mishari al-Zaydi, a Saudi journalist and the opinion editor of a-Sharq al-Awsat, decided on Nov. 5 to rename the "Arab Spring" the "Muslim Brotherhood Spring." Given the Saudi attitude over the last few years, it is no wonder that they have been the leading opponents of the upheavals in the Arab world. They have given refuge to the toppled leader of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and refused to extradite him for a Mubarak-style trial. The Saudis are undoubtedly aware of Iranian efforts to exercise influence over the Muslim Brotherhood.
Saudi Arabia has to be careful about the rise of a revolutionary regime in Egypt. Historically, Egypt was the country that invaded the Arabian Peninsula and threatened the Saudi patrimony. In the 19th century, during the regime of Muhamad Ali, an earlier Saudi state was destroyed by Egyptian troops and its leader was sent to the Ottoman Sultan for execution in Istanbul. In the early 1960s, Nasserist Egypt intervened in the Yemen Civil War and deployed Russian bombers there that the Egyptians used to bomb Saudi towns. An activist Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt might well challenge the legitimacy of Saudi rule, as part of its anti-Western policy, in general.
That's a divergence I wouldn't have expected.

3) Here lies ...

It's been noted that Major General Hassan Moqaddam had chosen his epitaph prior to dying in an explosion outside Tehran. According to reports in Iran, he wanted to be known as the "man who wanted to destroy Israel." A few people have made mockups of the headstone (in English not Farsi).

I know that there are those who have dismissed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to wipe Israel off the map, dismissing it as a figurative expression or meaningless rhetorical flourish. But Michael Rubin writes:
In 1990, policymakers dismissed Saddam’s threats against Kuwait as merely rhetorical flourish. With Iran apparently experimenting with nuclear technology that has nothing to do with energy production, and with statements such as Moghadam’s, perhaps it’s time to take Iran at its word when it comes to its leadership’s genocidal intent.
Put a different way: here was someone whose aspirations matched his nefarious job description; isn't this reason to pay attention and take the Iran's belligerence seriously?