Romney's frightening fundamentalism

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

I’ve watched this five times now, and I think what shocks me more than the Mormon beliefs themselves (which, though certainly crazy, are not much more ridiculous than “ordinary” Christianity) is the aggressive, almost thuggish manner in which Romney defends them when they’re challenged. The furious glare; the belligerent lurch forward; the rapid rise in speech volume and speed: all the classic symptoms of a quick-tempered confrontational character are on display. And to what end?

Clearing up the details of how Christ, when he returns, will divide his time between Jerusalem and the State of Missouri.

Interesting, and very useful, to know what matters most to the potential future commander-in-chief.

Will the Sassine bomb sway the Christian vote?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

When a car bomb laden with over 60 kilograms of TNT gutted the sleepy residential impasse of Ibrahim al-Munzer St. on October 19, it did not merely kill an intelligence chief, his driver and a luckless bystander. Situated scarcely a hundred meters from the bustling Sassine Square—where dozens of glass panes were instantaneously shattered—the blast also drove chaos and terror into the symbolic heart of Beirut’s Christian community.

Seated on the crown of the Ashrafieh hill and orbited by offices, cafés, schools, churches and a mall, Sassine Square is the social and commercial hub of the district. In terms of political orientation, while a large monument to slain President-elect Bashir Gemayel of the Lebanese Forces (now the leading March 14 Christian party) stands in the Square’s center, it is also often adorned with flags of the rival March 8-aligned Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). Indeed, in the most recent parliamentary elections of 2009, March 14 pipped March 8 to victory in Ashrafieh by fewer than 3,000 votes out of a total of 91,000 registered voters.

Such close competition raises the question of what, if any, will be the effects of the bomb on Christian voters in next year’s elections. Assuming the electoral law used closely resembles the 2009 law, as analysts expect it will, then Ashrafieh (technically called “Beirut I”) will once again be a key “swing” district, one of a handful upon which the entire outcome hinges. That the other “swing” districts—chiefly Metn, Zahle and Koura—are also predominantly Christian underscores the paramount importance of Christian voting in determining the overall winner.

For some analysts, the clear loser in this regard following the bomb is March 8. “It is definitely going to realign voting practices among the Christian community, especially concerning [FPM leader Michel] Aoun,” said Charles Chartouni, professor of politics at Université Saint Joseph and the Lebanese University. “I’m not saying voters will necessarily go toward March 14 candidates, but Aoun will definitely lose some voters,” he told NOW Lebanon.

This, Chartouni believes, is due to a perception among Christians that the blast was orchestrated by Aoun’s major allies. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people in Ashrafieh lately, and they are in no doubt that a kind of joint venture between Hezbollah and Syria is behind the assassination. What has hurt people most is that the criminals responsible didn’t care about the fact that these people are living in dense areas and thus the damage can be devastating. If intelligence services want to fight among each other, in a country like ours and in a situation like ours, it’s somewhat understandable, but to forget about civilians and the welfare of people in the neighborhood is considered insulting and disrespectful.”

Key March 14 Christians such as LF leader Samir Geagea and Kataeb chief Amin Gemayel have indeed explicitly accused Hezbollah and Syria of carrying out the bombing. Aoun, on the other hand, has declined to make any accusations, saying,“I will wait for the result of the investigation.”

However, a perusal of the Orange Room, an FPM-affiliated online forum, suggests Aoun’s supporters believe March 14’s reaction to the bomb will in fact work in March 8’s favor. “[March 14] shot themselves in the foot,” said one user in reference to the clashes between March 14 partisans and security forces following the October 21 funeral of the bomb’s target, Internal Security Forces Information Branch head Wissam al-Hassan. “[March 14] Christians are [going to] lose a lot of support,” agreed another. “Islamic flags in [Ashrafieh and Free Syrian Army] flags over [Martyrs Square] is [sic] a big no-no.”

In a similar vein, FPM-aligned Metn MP Ghassan Moukheiber compared the funeral scrap and the subsequent violence in Tripoli and Tariq al-Jdeideh to Hezbollah’s “black shirts” demonstration in 2011. “Storming the Serail and the presence of armed men the day after added ‘black shirts’ of a certain political party confronting ‘black shirts’ of another party. Therefore, there is an equality in the rhetoric of ‘black shirts’,” he told NOW.

However, Antoine Haddad, leader of the March 14-aligned Tajaddod Movement, rejects this equivalence. “The attack on the Serail was a spontaneous one. I’m not reducing its importance here, but it’s not on par with the assassination itself, and it will not have an effect on elections, whereas the link between the assassination and the [Michel] Samaha case will,” he told NOW, referring to the senior Damascus ally who pleaded guilty in August to plotting terror attacks in Lebanon in coordination with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Many Lebanese have speculated that Hassan’s assassination was revenge by Syria for the intelligence chief ordering Samaha’s arrest.

As regards the Islamic flags mentioned on the Orange Room, Chartouni isn’t convinced these will cost March 14. “There is no doubt that Christians are very apprehensive about Islamic militancy. But at the same time this won’t outweigh the fact that assassinations have been committed for seven years now, mostly in Christian areas, in which the victims were always on one side of the divide [i.e. March 14]. And the involvement of Michel Samaha has further confirmed the connection with a Syria-Hezbollah joint venture.”

Of course, this may all prove academic, given that no electoral law has yet been approved for 2013. With tensions already high and the war in neighboring Syria showing little sign of abating, much can change in the next few months. As Haddad put it, “there is a long time yet before the elections.”

Agnes Helou and Amani Hamad contributed reporting.

American "leftists" whitewash Nasrallah

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Eager as they ever are to believe that no enemy of Israel can go far wrong, two prominent figures on the American “left” have penned a righteous critique of what they call a “disastrous” and “embarrassing” New York Times op-ed that portrays Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as anti-Semitic.

Not the easiest blemish to brush off, one might have thought, but then such people are well-practiced in furnishing bigots with excuses they haven’t and wouldn’t make for themselves. After claiming the particular “supposedly anti-Jewish” quote attributed to Nasrallah in the Times is “in all likelihood a fabrication,” Phil Weiss and Max Blumenthal proceed to paste a lengthy tract by “widely-published Marxist thinker” Louis Proyect, who has concluded after “assiduous” research that there isn’t a scrap of evidence—anywhere—implicating Nasrallah in any kind of funny business on the Jewish question.

Now, the Times article certainly wasn’t fantastic, and I happen to share Weiss’ and Blumenthal’s distaste for the manner in which Israel’s defenders cry “pogrom” at the mildest political criticism. Yet as a secularist who actually lives in Lebanon, I’ve long wearied of reading hagiographies of the “Party of God” from pseudo-dissidents and laptop-Leninists 7,000 miles away.

Weiss and Blumenthal are probably right that the quote (“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli”) comes from Amal Saad-Ghorayeb’s Hizbullah: Politics & Religion. Though it purports to quote Nasrallah, the footnote in fact cites an interview with Hezbollah MP Muhammad Fneish on August 15, 1997.

Thereafter, however, the writers quickly wade far out of their depth. Put aside the fact that Nicholas Noe, editor of the party-approved Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah says the quote is genuine after all. Even if it were a fake, what Weiss and Blumenthal damningly omit to mention—presumably because they haven’t actually read her book—is that Saad-Ghorayeb also produces a number of further statements, directly attributed to Nasrallah, that are—how to put it?—difficult to read as philo-Semitic. These include:

· That Jews are “renowned for breaching covenants and promises, even with God and the prophets” (p. 171 in the 2002 Pluto Press paperback version; citing Nasrallah in Amiru’l-Zakira, February 23, 1992, p. 139).

· That Jews are “the enemies of God [and] humankind” (p. 175; citing a Nasrallah speech in Beirut’s southern suburbs on August 8, 1997).

· That God “imprinted blasphemy” on the Jews’ hearts (p. 176; citing Nasrallah, August 8, 1997).

· That the Jews fabricated the Holocaust in order to advance their plot to control the world (pp. 181-2; citing a Nasrallah speech in Beirut’s southern suburbs on “Jerusalem Day,” January 24, 1998).

When I pointed this out to Blumenthal on Monday morning, he replied, “I do not consider [Saad-Ghorayeb] reliable, though I don’t doubt Nasrallah has used some f’ed up rhetoric.” Regarding the first half of that statement, one might direct his attention to, say, this video from 2006, in which Nasrallah begins by lamenting that Salman Rushdie hasn’t been murdered yet, and then goes on to say the following:

“A few years ago, a great French philosopher, Roger Garaudy, wrote a scientific book […] in which he discussed the alleged Jewish Holocaust in Germany. He proved that this Holocaust is a myth. The great French philosopher Roger Garaudy was put [on] trial […] Why? Because freedom of expression extends [only] to the Jews.”

Regarding the second half, if Blumenthal was already in no doubt that Nasrallah was an anti-Semite, why did he contribute to an article strongly suggesting the very opposite might be the case? A curious undertaking for any “leftist,” let alone one who so piously accused Christopher Hitchens of “enabling Holocaust-deniers” (echoing—hilariously enough—Henry Kissinger, who quickly shut up after Hitchens’ lawyers threatened a libel suit). Curious also that the argument the authors set out to disprove—namely, that certain elements on the “left” are too ready to give the benefit of the doubt to Jew-baiters—is ultimately the one they succeed in advancing.

White March

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

My Lebanese friends were in foul moods when I found them at the demonstration in Martyrs Square last Saturday, the first one to take place in the iconic space after Friday’s horror. In the hours immediately following the blast, amid the fright and anguish unleashed, it seemed there was also another, different energy in the air; a sort of quietly rousing exhilaration, as though a moment might have arrived great enough to wake the country out of a dangerous slumber. (It’s interesting to consider the etymological link between the Arabic infijar, “explosion”, and fijr, “dawn”.)

Those hopes had evidently vanished by the following evening, when I found my friends – proud veterans of the 2005 Cedar Revolution – standing on the fringes of the March 14 protest with weary faces. “It’s all party flags,” shouted one into my ear over the crowd’s exuberant chants of za’eem [chieftain] surnames. When I failed to find him and the others half an hour later, I realized they had all gone home.

It must be something similar to this disappointment that has led twenty young activists to organize tonight’s so-called White March from Martyrs Square to Sassine Square in memory of the victims of the bomb and all subsequent violence throughout the country. In the event’s Facebook description, they make a point of rejecting the sectarianism and partisanship of Saturday’s demonstration, asking attendees to wear white and dispense with party flags or slogans:

“We will walk silent to respect the souls of the dead. We will walk silent to say loudly that all the voices we have been hearing in the streets and via the media recently strengthen our will to work for realistic alternatives and means to do politics beyond confessional belongings, seeking justice and social solidarity.”

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Join us there tonight at 6pm.

No hope until Assad falls

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

The presence of "Free Syria" flags at Wissam al-Hassan's funeral on Sunday was no coincidence (AP)

On the streets of Tariq Jadideh Monday, only one flag challenged the prominence of the Future Movement’s blue-and-white sunrise emblem: the green, white, black and red stars and stripes of “Free Syria”. The intermittent gun battles that resumed here and, more violently, in Tripoli over the weekend are often described as “sectarian”. They are sectarian – “We are Sunnis and they are Alawites […] Yes, it’s all sectarian,” was how a Tripoli fighter put it to NOW’s Ana Maria Luca in August – but, as the flags illustrate, inseparable from and intrinsic to this religious battle is the political one underway in Syria.

This is true not just figuratively but literally. Having cut their teeth fighting the Alawites of Jabal Mohsen, some Sunnis in Tripoli have graduated to taking on Bashar al-Assad’s forces alongside the Free Syria Army in Homs and Qusayr. To call this “spillover” is to miss the point that the two battles are one and the same for them – not least because they’re firmly convinced that Jabal Mohsen’s militants (along with Hezbollah’s) are also in Syria, fighting for the other side.

The Lebanese army has done a good job of quelling the bloodshed for the moment, but there is no hope of a lasting truce as long as the Syrian war is in stalemate. Lebanon’s pro- and anti-Assad militiamen kill each other because they both truly believe history is on their side. Why make peace when you know you’re going to win?

One of two things has to happen, then, before any kind of negotiation or deal between the factions becomes thinkable: the Free Syria Army surrenders or is utterly exterminated; or the Assad regime is defeated. The first is all but impossible. If Lebanon’s leaders wish to stave off the second with the (incidentally failed) policy of “dissociation”, that’s their prerogative, but we might at least stop saying that delaying the inevitable is a safeguard of “stability”. Friday’s tragedy, if nothing else, should have taught us that much.

Blood brothers: NOW meets a Lebanese FSA fighter

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon, with Nadine Elali]

In a sparsely-furnished room just off Tripoli’s central Nour Square, Abu Huraira grins as he hands us his phone. On the screen is a video of him perched on the turret of what appears to be a Syrian army tank. Cutting a menacing figure in full mujahid gear—black robe, black headband bearing the shahada, Kalashnikov on shoulder—he is loudly and inventively cursing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In a moment of elation, proudly patting the thick gun barrel, he shouts, “I’m taking this to Jabal Mohsen!”

The clip was filmed during his three-month stint with the Free Syria Army over the summer; the glory days for 26-year-old Huraira, who also eagerly shows us a clip of him and 30 others preparing to ambush a regime checkpoint. Unusually—as his allusion to the pro-Assad Tripoli neighborhood suggests—Huraira is not Syrian but Lebanese; one of an estimated 300 to have taken up arms against the regime next door. “We hadn’t planned to fight initially,” he told NOW. “But when we discovered the regime was being assisted by Hezbollah and the Iranians and the Iraqi Dawaa Party, we felt it was a duty.” Hezbollah and Iran deny sending any troops to Syria.

Thus in May Huraira joined Liwa Ahrar al-Aasi (“Banner of the Free Orontes”), a 1,500-strong brigade falling under the umbrella of the Free Syria Army, chiefly comprising Syrian army defectors. The brigade fights mainly in Homs and Qusayr, the town between Homs and the Lebanese border in which Huraira says the video of him on the tank was taken.

Militarily, Huraira claims the brigade has been quite successful. “We have taken out 30 regime checkpoints in Qusayr. We have captured seven tanks, as well as much armor and weaponry, including anti-aircraft guns. We also liberated some 300 civilians held in bunkers by the regime—many of them wives of FSA fighters kept as hostages.” Though it is impossible to verify these claims, a number of online videos appear to show Liwa Ahrar al-Aasi fighters in Qusayr next to defeated regime tanks; in one case towing one away. Another clip purports to show them repelling an attack by Hezbollah fighters.

Crucial to the brigade’s success, says Huraira, is covert assistance provided by soldiers within the regime’s ranks. “Whenever we attack a checkpoint, we time it based on a signal received from an army soldier.” One reason army defections are lower than many had anticipated, he says, is that the FSA encourages would-be defectors to stay on the inside for this reason. “They’re often much more useful to us that way.”

Ideologically, Huraira is not straightforward to define. On the one hand, he freely describes himself as a Salafist, and certainly looks the part with his thick beard and shaved moustache (although he wears Western clothing). He recalls being discharged from his mandatory Lebanese military service for refusing to shave and disobeying other regulations pertaining to religious observance. Moreover, he says the Liwa Ahrar al-Aasi brigade deals with prisoners of war “in accordance with Islamic law,” declining to answer whether or not that meant they were executed.

On the other hand, Huraira insists that he wants a non-sectarian, democratic government in Syria. “The social fabric of Syria is very much like Lebanon,” he explains. “There are many sects, and that’s why it’s better to be democratic.” He also says that of the 1,500 fighters in the brigade, around 50 are Alawites—that is, members of the same sect as Assad. “I didn’t go to Syria to fight the Alawites. My aim was to cleanse the country of shabiha [pro-Assad militiamen], whether Alawite or Sunni.”

At this point in our conversation Huraira’s friend, a muscle-bound man of around 30 with even more prominent facial hair, butts in for the first time. “You know, we’re not extremists or terrorists just because we have beards. If we were terrorists, we wouldn’t even be talking with you. We’re not forcing our beliefs on anyone. One of my good friends is a Communist. My own sisters don’t wear the veil.”

“Yeah, one of my brothers is a women’s hairdresser, God help him,” adds Huraira with a loud laugh.

“We don’t like weapons or war. We’re young men and want to live our lives like anyone else,” insists the friend, who declines to give a name. “We want job opportunities. But the security situation is so bad [in Tripoli] that instead of spending money on vacations or going out, I’m buying weapons. If I can’t have a life, then I have nothing to lose.” Both men, it transpires, took part in the recent sporadic clashes between the mostly Sunni, anti-Assad Bab al-Tabbaneh neighborhood and its chiefly Alawite, pro-Assad Jabal Mohsen rival.

The friend has not yet fought in Syria, though, and says he has no immediate plans to do so. Huraira, however, is itching to be back.

“As soon as I’m able to go, I’ll go.”

“Abu Huraira” is a pseudonym.

Doctor one day, jihadist the next

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

The most ossified reactionary on the Cretaceous fringes of the Tory backbench couldn’t have imagined the British National Health Service had come to this. In what is certainly an inventive interpretation of the Hippocratic oath, it appears a public sector doctor in London has recently taken some time off – to kill the enemies of Allah in Syria.

Readers may remember the case of the fantastically-named British journalist, John Cantlie, who was abducted along with a Dutch colleague, Jeroen Oerlemans, by British and other foreign Islamists in northern Syria in July, and who described upon his FSA-assisted escape how he ran “for his life, barefoot and handcuffed, while British jihadists – young men with South London accents – shot to kill”.

It now transpires that one of his captors may be Shajul Islam, a 26-year-old NHS doctor who was arrested upon arrival at Heathrow last week and charged Tuesday with Cantlie’s kidnapping under the Terrorism Act 2000. According to the Guardian, Cantlie recalled that one kidnapper claimed to be an NHS doctor, and indeed used NHS-labelled saline drips. “I asked for his help as we were both from London,” Cantlie later told the Daily Mail, “but he refused to even send a text to my girlfriend to say we were alive”.

What exactly are we to make of this whole episode? It would be easy to throw our hands in the air, say Syria is obviously too complicated and too dangerous and the sensible policy is to stay the hell away. This increasingly seems to be the thinking in Washington nowadays, and has of course been the line of Guardianistas and related “anti-war” types from the beginning. But such a half-baked pseudo-analysis ignores the crucial positive in the story: Cantlie and Oerlemans were freed not by accident but by a deliberate and courageous effort on the part of the FSA, a brigade of which also reportedly killed the leader of an al-Qaeda-linked group near the Turkish border last month. There are factions on the ground, in other words, that are fighting both the regime’s death squads and the benighted soldiers of the Caliphate. This is not something to which the “international community” ought to be indifferent.