Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace
In the entire history of humankind,
this one has to rank right up there as one of the most boneheaded articles ever written. The subject, as you may have figured out from the picture, was Osama Bin Laden. The date was December 6, 1993. The newspaper was London's
Daily Independent. And the columnist who wrote once of the least prescient articles in history was none other than Robert Fisk.
Outside Sudan, Mr Bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high
esteem. The Egyptian press claims he brought hundreds of former Arab
fighters back to Sudan from Afghanistan, while the Western embassy
circuit in Khartoum has suggested that some of the 'Afghans' whom this
Saudi entrepreneur flew to Sudan are now busy training for further jihad
wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Mr Bin Laden is well aware of this.
'The rubbish of the media and the embassies,' he calls it. 'I am a
construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps
here in Sudan, I couldn't possibly do this job.'
And 'this job' is certainly an ambitious one: a brand-new highway
stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of
1,200km (745 miles) on the old road, now shortened to 800km by the new
Bin Laden route that will turn the coastal run from the capital into a
mere day's journey. Into a country that is despised by Saudi Arabia for
its support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war almost as much as it is
condemned by the United States, Mr Bin Laden has brought the very
construction equipment that he used only five years ago to build the
guerrilla trails of Afghanistan.
Read the whole thing.
Fiskie has yet to find a terrorist whose butt he wouldn't kiss.
Labels: al-Qaeda, Islamic terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, Robert Fisk
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Monday, March 26.
1) The Perils of Lara
When we last found Lara Friedman, the Director of Policy and Government Relations of Americans for Peace Now, she was in Doha Qatar attending the International Conference on Jerusalem at the end of February. This was an Arab League event dedicated to fighting the "Judaization" of Jerusalem.
Her first day at the conference was an eye opener. As she wrote in the Forward at the time.
Speakers at Sunday’s opening session, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, one after another laid out laundry lists of criticisms of Israel — many of them regrettably marked with exaggerations. All also spoke a great deal about Muslim and Christian attachments to Jerusalem and the importance of defending the holy sites and communities associated with both religions. However, only one speaker, Michel Sabbah, formerly the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, mentioned any Jewish connection to the city. This is a serious problem. If President Abbas cannot acknowledge Jewish claims in Jerusalem, even as he asserts Palestinian claims (a problem Yasser Arafat suffered from), he should not be surprised if it is more difficult for Israelis and Jews, wherever they are, to believe that he can be trusted in a peace agreement that leaves Jerusalem sites precious to Jews under Palestinian control.
If representatives of the organization that sponsored the Arab Peace Initiative cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish equities in Jerusalem, they should know that they discredit their own professed interest in peace. Their framing of the future of Jerusalem as a zero-sum game only makes it more likely that Israel will continue asserting its current power over East Jerusalem to hinder the vision of two states living in peace with a Jerusalem as a shared capital.
All throughout the day, it was unfortunately the same story. Participants talked about Jerusalem as if Jewish history did not exist or was a fraud — as if all Jewish claims in the city were just a tactic to dispossess Palestinians. Here I do need to acknowledged the one person the entire day who I heard speak in a serious, credible way on this matter: veteran Palestinian diplomat Afif Safieh. In closing one of the afternoon sessions, Safieh emphasized the international consensus around the idea that in Jerusalem it is necessary to reconcile two national narratives — Israeli and Palestinian — and three religious narratives, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Safieh made clear that he thought this was still possible with a two state solution with two capitals in Jerusalem, an Israeli capital in the west and a Palestinian capital in the east.
Note the tone. It is not one of anger but of disappointment. Never mind that she had just heard the President of the Palestinian Authority effectively violate the agreements the PA had signed with Israel.
The next day she felt better, though.
There were four committees that met and delivered final reports at the conference. The Civil Society committee was the only one of the four that mentioned anything like this. And while I didn't agree with every word of the entire report, I think this report's framing is thoughtful, constructive and pro-peace -- framing anchored in tolerance and recognition of the equities of all parties in Jerusalem.
I can't say for sure how the report of this committee would have come out if I had not been there and had not spoken up. I am confident that it would not have looked like this. For those who demand that we refuse to engage with people who hold different points of view, my experience in Doha is a powerful reminder of how small-minded such an approach is.
This is the her great victory. She got her working group to issue a statement that didn't totally deny Jewish history! Wow! I challenge you to find any reference to this declaration at the conference's website. The website's only acknowledged statement is called the "Doha declaration." Here's how it starts:
International Conference for the Defense of Jerusalem has praised the proposal of HH the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani calling for approaching the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution on forming an international commission to investigate all the actions taken by Israel since the 1967 occupation in Arab Jerusalem, in order to erase its Islamic and Arabic identity.
Friedman's been very clear. She went as a private individual, not as a representative of APN. APN said that they had nothing to do with the conference. But it's very clear that she was invited to Doha because of her affiliation which is listed at the conference's website. She was used by the Arab League to be a token "Zionist" at the conference. That her views were ignored and that the views expressed were antithetical to peace did not bother her too much.
Yesterday, Lara Friedman took to the JTA, to tell us the real problem with the Middle East with Stop the excuses, boycott the settlements (via Daled Amos):
Dayenu. Enough with the handwringing and self-righteous declarations that boycotting fellow Jews is wrong. If the Jewish community is looking for a kosher stamp on a settlement boycott, it should look directly at Israel and follow the lead of engaged, unapologetically patriotic Israelis who are taking a stand by boycotting settlements, including prominent academics and artists and Peace Now, which last year launched its campaign: So sue me, I'm boycotting settlement products.
These Israelis know that settlements are an existential threat to Israel. They're fed up waiting for Israeli leaders to come to their senses and end this suicidal policy. They’ve given up hoping that the international community will pressure Israel on this issue. They're voting with their feet -- and their pocketbooks -- against settlements.
For those who argue that boycotting settlements won’t make any difference politically or economically, the Israeli right’s reaction to boycott efforts says otherwise. Indeed, the pro-settler lobby and its Knesset partisans are terrified of settlement boycotts -- so much so that they passed an openly undemocratic law criminalizing them. As a result, in Israel today it's legal to boycott everything but settlements.
First of all note the tone. It's not disappointment, but outrage with, perhaps, at little hatred thrown in for good measure. Oh, and she uses a Hebrew word.
It's interesting that Friedman calls Israelis who agree with her view of settlements to be patriotic. I believe that election results show that maybe 20% of the electorate (including Arabs) would be patriotic by her standards.
Really, I'm not bothered by her boycotting settlements. I am much more bothered by her giving cover to Israel's enemies and pretending that there was some noble purpose in doing so. Friedman's outrage directed at Israelis who disagree with her contrasts sharply with the seeming understanding she extends to Israel's enemies. How she calls herself a "Zionist" is beyond me. Over this past month, Friedman has thoroughly discredited herself. APN must take the next step now and cut all ties to her.
2) Fisking Fisk
In the blogging age the term to "fisk" has come to be defined as "pointing out the factual mistakes in a reporter's work." The term derives from Robert Fisk, an anti-Israel, anti-Western writer who "reports" for The Independent. Now it appears that Fisk has received the ultimate fisking.
3) The baby libel
For a while now, Gaza has been suffering from power outages due to a dispute between Hamas and Egypt. It has gotten precious little press, presumably because Israel could in no way be blamed for it. Elder of Ziyon has been covering this ongoing story and noted last week that Hamas was blaming everyone else, but Gazans were catching on.
Hamas used the energy crisis to blame Israel for the death of a baby, but the AP caught on. Anti-Israel writer, M. J. Rosenberg (defended by J J Goldberg as someone who loves Israel) has also blamed Israel for the baby's death. The New York Times has finally seen fit to report on Gaza's energy crisis:.
At the request of the Palestinian Authority, which has no access to Gaza, Israel allowed some 450,000 liters of fuel to be trucked through its Kerem Shalom border crossing on Friday, when it is usually closed. Maj. Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli authority responsible for the crossings, said that amount would be enough for no more than two days..
Over the last year, Hamas stopped paying the Palestinian Authority for Israeli-supplied fuel and relied on cheaper fuel smuggled through tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egypt border. In recent months Egypt has tried to end the practice and to have Gaza import fuel from Egypt legally, also via the Israeli border crossing, a request that Hamas refused. Hamas wants the fuel to arrive directly from Egypt to Gaza.
Question: If Israel could have been blamed for the gas shortage, would the New York Times have waited so long to report on it?
Labels: Gaza, Gaza electricity supply, Gaza plenty, Middle East Media Sampler, Peace Now, Qatar, Robert Fisk, Soccer Dad
Fisk defends the Assads
And you thought
Fiskie couldn't sink any lower....
On Syrian television this week, I made the point that Gaddafi was insane and that – whatever else you thought of him – Assad was not. This was met (naturally) by vigorous agreement from the presenter. But wait. I promised to tell readers what happened to the programme. Well, two days ago, quite by chance, I bumped into the journalist who had interviewed me. Alas, he said, he thought the translation and subtitles wouldn't be ready for Saturday night's broadcast. Maybe we could do another interview later. Back to that old saw, I guess: we shall see.
In any event, I was made very much aware by her own personal assistant how "deeply hurt" Bashar al-Assad's wife Asma was at a report in The Independent a couple of weeks ago which suggested that she was indifferent to the plight of civilian opponents of the regime killed by the security forces. The story – not by me – quoted an aid official in Damascus who was present at a meeting with the First Lady, saying that – when asked about the casualties – "there was no reaction".
Needless to say, this report was gobbled up by the Arab media, including al-Jazeera, Assad's most hated TV station. Now Asma al-Assad's assistant has just given me the Syrian Arab Red Crescent's own official Arabic-language account of the meeting. It makes interesting reading. SARC volunteers told the president's wife that they received better treatment from the army "which has a clear leadership" than they did from the intelligence services at the checkpoints across Syria – they said the "muhabarrat" intelligence "enjoys no leadership or clear principles, at least from our point of view" – and that vehicles from the Ministry of Health are sometimes misused by "parties without control and this has created a situation of fear among citizens". Mrs Assad was told how difficult it was for the SARC to work in dangerous areas and to move the wounded.
"Mrs Asma [sic] showed her understanding of the difficulties our volunteers are going through," the SARC report says, "and expressed her deep admiration for their efforts in serving humanity and individual people ... and promised to convey some of their demands to the authorities." Mrs Assad's visit was "informal" and the discussions "friendly".
In the days that followed, the SARC report continued, the behaviour of "security checkpoints" towards their volunteers improved. A subsequent report in the weekly Syria Today quotes Mrs Assad as telling the Red Crescent volunteers that they "must remain neutral and independent during this time, focusing solely on humanitarian needs".
I'm sure he's quite popular in Britain....
Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Robert Fisk, Syrian uprising
'Obama has shown himself to be weak in his dealings with the MIddle East' says....
... would you believe
Robert Fisk?
While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America's new role in the region. It was pathetic. "What is this 'role' thing?" an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. "Do they still believe we care about what they think?"
And it is true. Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab "spring", save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain's cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions.
I wouldn't say he went on his knees before Israel. I would say he was outclassed by a real statesman. But it's true that Obama's Middle East policy is incoherent and that's because he refuses to lead like an American President should.
Amid all these vast and epic events – Yemen itself may yet prove to be the biggest bloodbath of all, while the number of Syria's "martyrs" have now exceeded the victims of Mubarak's death squads five months ago – is it any surprise that the frolics of Messrs Netanyahu and Obama appear so irrelevant? Indeed, Obama's policy towards the Middle East – whatever it is – sometimes appears so muddled that it is scarcely worthy of study. He supports, of course, democracy – then admits that this may conflict with America's interests. In that wonderful democracy called Saudi Arabia, the US is now pushing ahead with a £40 billion arms deal and helping the Saudis to develop a new "elite" force to protect the kingdom's oil and future nuclear sites. Hence Obama's fear of upsetting Saudi Arabia, two of whose three leading brothers are now so incapacitated that they can no longer make sane decisions – unfortunately, one of these two happens to be King Abdullah – and his willingness to allow the Assad family's atrocity-prone regime to survive. Of course, the Israelis would far prefer the "stability" of the Syrian dictatorship to continue; better the dark caliphate you know than the hateful Islamists who might emerge from the ruins. But is this argument really good enough for Obama to support when the people of Syria are dying in the streets for the kind of democracy that the US president says he wants to see in the region?
I don't believe that Obama's policies are being driven by support for Israel. But I do believe that he is spending far too much time on the 'Palestinians' (whose support he believes to be a sufficient for an entire foreign policy, let alone for the Middle East) in light of other events in the region. I also don't believe that the Israeli government is so enamored of Bashar al-Assad.
But isn't Fiskie the guy who thinks that supporting the 'Palestinians' is the most urgent item on the agenda? After all, the rest of his column is all about the 'Palestinians' and denigrating Israel.
Labels: Arab spring, Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Middle East peace process, Robert Fisk
