I spoke on the BBC World Service's 'World Have Your Say' programme last night, on the topic: 'Can supplying weapons [in Syria] lead to peace?' You can listen here (I come on at around 40:40).
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Friday, May 10, 2013
BBC peddles the Assad line
[Originally posted at NOW]
As much as people like As’ad AbuKhalil want (and need) to believe that “Western media” are leagued in a barely-concealed conspiracy to indoctrinate the masses with anti-Assad propaganda, to any neutral observer it’s become increasingly apparent that the “line,” to the extent that there ever was one, is drifting markedly in the opposite direction.
Today’s diatribe in the BBC is a sterling example. Paul Danahar is a journalist I have often read and admired. During Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza last November, he was on the ground, courageously challenging the government line, exposing injustice and generally, as they say, ‘speaking truth to power.’
In his dispatch from Damascus today, however, Danahar has taken something of a reverse approach. When I read via Twitter yesterday of the “lots of meetings with lots of government officials in Damascus” he had lined up for the day, I trusted he would proceed with the hard-nosed skepticism expected of a BBC Middle East bureau chief. Instead, the muck flung at the wall by his companions seems largely to have stayed in place, and congealed.
The alarm bell first rings when he refers sarcastically to those who “[try] to boil it down to good versus evil: the FSA versus President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.” To imagine there is any moral difference between the rebels and the regime, you see, is deeply mistaken. “The situation in Syria,” he explains, is far too “complicated” for such infantile reductions.
So what’s really going on? Who’s truly responsible for the more than 70,000 killed? Well, “the regime has played its part,” he concedes. But no less dangerous; indeed the true cause of the enduring misery; is the “meddling” of Saudi Arabia and Qatar – two “sorely undemocratic states […] the cavalry from the very un-free Gulf […] not champions of democracy either at home or abroad.”
Of course! What fools we were to think that regime air strikes, SCUD missiles, cluster bombs, helicopters, tank units, death squads, and maybe now even chemical weapons were primarily to blame for the conflict being so damned “intractable.” All this time, it was bastard “Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia [which] hates Shiite Iran [and] is using the war in Syria to try and weaken it.”
There’s no need to mention, evidently, that Iran also “hates” Saudi Arabia, and has sent untold numbers of its own military personnel to Syria to optimize the regime’s killing machine. And why bring up Hezbollah, the foreign Islamist militia for whose military assistance Assad expressed his “great gratitude” today? Surely no reader needs to know that Russia, which maintains an entire naval base in the country, has supplied the regime with over a billion dollars’ worth of arms since the uprising began? And, really, who cares about the massacre of entire families, including toddlers, in al-Bayda and Baniyas last week when a Salafist once told some Christian women to cover their hair?
It’s one thing to quote the claims of a blood-drenched dictatorship that SCUD-missiles its own people, but quite another to actually believe them. Danahar’s extraordinary credulity in the face of one of the most reprehensible regimes in modern Arab history does the BBC’s readers an enormous disservice. Much more importantly, though, it insults the memories of that regime’s literally innumerable innocent victims, and shields the killers of those continuing to perish at this very moment.
As much as people like As’ad AbuKhalil want (and need) to believe that “Western media” are leagued in a barely-concealed conspiracy to indoctrinate the masses with anti-Assad propaganda, to any neutral observer it’s become increasingly apparent that the “line,” to the extent that there ever was one, is drifting markedly in the opposite direction.
Today’s diatribe in the BBC is a sterling example. Paul Danahar is a journalist I have often read and admired. During Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza last November, he was on the ground, courageously challenging the government line, exposing injustice and generally, as they say, ‘speaking truth to power.’
In his dispatch from Damascus today, however, Danahar has taken something of a reverse approach. When I read via Twitter yesterday of the “lots of meetings with lots of government officials in Damascus” he had lined up for the day, I trusted he would proceed with the hard-nosed skepticism expected of a BBC Middle East bureau chief. Instead, the muck flung at the wall by his companions seems largely to have stayed in place, and congealed.
The alarm bell first rings when he refers sarcastically to those who “[try] to boil it down to good versus evil: the FSA versus President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.” To imagine there is any moral difference between the rebels and the regime, you see, is deeply mistaken. “The situation in Syria,” he explains, is far too “complicated” for such infantile reductions.
So what’s really going on? Who’s truly responsible for the more than 70,000 killed? Well, “the regime has played its part,” he concedes. But no less dangerous; indeed the true cause of the enduring misery; is the “meddling” of Saudi Arabia and Qatar – two “sorely undemocratic states […] the cavalry from the very un-free Gulf […] not champions of democracy either at home or abroad.”
Of course! What fools we were to think that regime air strikes, SCUD missiles, cluster bombs, helicopters, tank units, death squads, and maybe now even chemical weapons were primarily to blame for the conflict being so damned “intractable.” All this time, it was bastard “Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia [which] hates Shiite Iran [and] is using the war in Syria to try and weaken it.”
There’s no need to mention, evidently, that Iran also “hates” Saudi Arabia, and has sent untold numbers of its own military personnel to Syria to optimize the regime’s killing machine. And why bring up Hezbollah, the foreign Islamist militia for whose military assistance Assad expressed his “great gratitude” today? Surely no reader needs to know that Russia, which maintains an entire naval base in the country, has supplied the regime with over a billion dollars’ worth of arms since the uprising began? And, really, who cares about the massacre of entire families, including toddlers, in al-Bayda and Baniyas last week when a Salafist once told some Christian women to cover their hair?
It’s one thing to quote the claims of a blood-drenched dictatorship that SCUD-missiles its own people, but quite another to actually believe them. Danahar’s extraordinary credulity in the face of one of the most reprehensible regimes in modern Arab history does the BBC’s readers an enormous disservice. Much more importantly, though, it insults the memories of that regime’s literally innumerable innocent victims, and shields the killers of those continuing to perish at this very moment.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Iran steps up harassment against BBC journalists
[Originally posted at NOW]
Marg bar Ingilis! – “Death to Britain!” – is the exuberant chant said to customarily interrupt the Friday prayers at Tehran University campus; the concluding line in a triumvirate that also includes two other villains whose names will surprise no one. As a Brit, I’ve never known whether to be embarrassed or proud to see my dilapidated second-rate nation elevated to the high table of evil in this way – most Islamists tend to overlook our contributions to the global conspiracy against God. Yet in Iran, the Supreme Leader continues to insist that it is the Cameron cabal, more so than the Obama oligarchy and even the Netanyahu nexus, that really runs the show – a paranoid anachronism that was already being satirized by Iranian writers before the 1979 revolution.
The latest iteration of this sheer lunacy is the campaign of physical intimidation and hysterical libel waged by the theocracy against the family members of people accused of working for the BBC. The Persian arm of the British state media outlet is banned in Iran, having been accused of everything from hosting spies and Iranian dissidents to trafficking drugs to converting staff members to Christianity and Baha’ism to manufacturing the ‘Green Movement’ protests that followed the disputed elections of 2009.
Accordingly, the BBC states it has no staff inside the country; its Persian service being operated from London.
Nonetheless, the Iranians have this week arrested a number of alleged BBC staffers. A clue to the more likely identity of the detained lies in a report from BBC director Mark Thompson on Friday that the sister of an expatriate BBC employee was arrested and held in solitary confinement last week, one in a series of recent abuses against family members of BBC Persian journalists.
Needless to say, the mullahs’ intentions in doing all this, with parliamentary elections just a month away, are not particularly difficult to divine. All one can do is salute the extraordinary courage of all Iranian journalists who continue to speak precious truth to their regime’s dreadful power.
Marg bar Ingilis! – “Death to Britain!” – is the exuberant chant said to customarily interrupt the Friday prayers at Tehran University campus; the concluding line in a triumvirate that also includes two other villains whose names will surprise no one. As a Brit, I’ve never known whether to be embarrassed or proud to see my dilapidated second-rate nation elevated to the high table of evil in this way – most Islamists tend to overlook our contributions to the global conspiracy against God. Yet in Iran, the Supreme Leader continues to insist that it is the Cameron cabal, more so than the Obama oligarchy and even the Netanyahu nexus, that really runs the show – a paranoid anachronism that was already being satirized by Iranian writers before the 1979 revolution.
The latest iteration of this sheer lunacy is the campaign of physical intimidation and hysterical libel waged by the theocracy against the family members of people accused of working for the BBC. The Persian arm of the British state media outlet is banned in Iran, having been accused of everything from hosting spies and Iranian dissidents to trafficking drugs to converting staff members to Christianity and Baha’ism to manufacturing the ‘Green Movement’ protests that followed the disputed elections of 2009.
Accordingly, the BBC states it has no staff inside the country; its Persian service being operated from London.
Nonetheless, the Iranians have this week arrested a number of alleged BBC staffers. A clue to the more likely identity of the detained lies in a report from BBC director Mark Thompson on Friday that the sister of an expatriate BBC employee was arrested and held in solitary confinement last week, one in a series of recent abuses against family members of BBC Persian journalists.
Needless to say, the mullahs’ intentions in doing all this, with parliamentary elections just a month away, are not particularly difficult to divine. All one can do is salute the extraordinary courage of all Iranian journalists who continue to speak precious truth to their regime’s dreadful power.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
BBC: Does Israel walk a thin line with West Bank oil drill?
[My first piece for the BBC]
RANTIS, WEST BANK - While the search for oil beneath Israel has been going on for years, the most recently drilled well in the Meged oil field, on the edge of the West Bank, is raising concern that it might draw from untapped Palestinian reserves.
After a 10-minute uphill hike through the rocky fields of the West Bank village of Rantis, we reach a summit where we rest, panting in the 40-degree heat.
A hundred metres (330ft) in front of us lie the wired fence and gravel track of the Green Line - the perimeter of the West Bank and Israel.
To our left lies Ben Gurion airport; beyond that, Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean. But it is for a different view that we have come here.
"It hasn't been on for the last few days," says Bilal, a Rantis local and student at Bir Zeit University.
"And you can't see too much in the daytime anyway. But at night - boof!" He gestures as though throwing a fistful of confetti into the air.
He is referring to the large black pipe inserted vertically into the earth, not more than 500 metres away, out of which a steady, blazing flame has been periodically sighted for about a year now.
It is in fact a gas flare, part of the Meged-5 oil well, owned and operated by Givot Olam Oil Ltd, currently the sole player in Israel's tiny onshore oil and gas production sector.
"I happened to be driving past when all of a sudden I saw this huge flare on the Green Line," recalls Hafez Barghouti, editor of the Palestinian al-Hayat al-Jadeedah, who first broke the story in Ramallah.
"I was sure it must be gas. So I called the mayor of Rantis and he said, 'Yes, the Israelis are drilling oil and gas.'"'No man's land'
While this may seem uncontroversial on the face of it- the flare is, after all, within Israel proper - its proximity to the Green Line raises ethical questions.
"Geology doesn't follow geography," explains Dr Samer Naboulsi, a veteran petroleum engineer at a leading oil firm in Dubai.
"Looking at the site of the flare, and the shape of the overall field, it's clear that this extends into the West Bank. And even when extracting from the Israeli side, it'll be draining Palestinian reserves.
"This is why the international convention is to establish a 'no man's land' - typically many kilometres wide - along national borders in which neither party may extract without the other's consent."
Dr Walid Khadduri, a former director at the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) and editor-in-chief of the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES), also criticises Israel's unilateral approach.
"Ordinarily in such a situation, both parties would reach a mutual agreement to divide the field and the associated revenues and costs in an equitable manner.
"This was the case between the UK and Norway, for example. Without such an agreement, things can get messy - look at Iraq and Kuwait," he says, referring to Iraq's 1990 invasion of its southern neighbour following a dispute over the transnational Rumaila field.
Moreover, the drilling would seem to contravene the Oslo Accords, which call for "co-operation in the field of energy, including an energy development programme, which will provide for the exploitation of oil and gas [and] will encourage further joint exploration of other energy resources".
Givot Olam refused to comment, but an Israeli government official dismissed the claims as "yet another attempt to politicise everything".
"We are engaging in exploratory digging within Israel. While we are hopeful, there is at present no conclusive indication as to whether commercially viable quantities will be found, or precisely where," the unnamed official told the BBC.
"The commercial implications, including over the Green Line, are unknown. It is surprising that a Petroleum Engineer in Dubai already knows more than the people on the ground at this early stage."'Highly profitable'
The Palestinian Authority (PA) meanwhile has shown little interest in pursuing what is potentially a substantial strategic and economic opportunity for the West Bank.
A technical report issued by the UK-based consultant Greensand Associates in 2010 concluded that "the Meged Core Area has robust economics... and could be a highly profitable venture if the predicted well production volumes prove to be achievable and sustainable."
The reserves of the Meged-5 well alone have been estimated by Givot Olam at over 1.5bn barrels - not a huge find but certainly enough to make a difference for the chronically energy-poor West Bankers (the UK, by comparison, has around 3bn barrels of proven reserves). The company says it extracted 800 barrels a day during a test period last year.
Yet there appears to be neither the will nor the ability on the Palestinian side to take action.
"I met [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas shortly after discovering the flare and told him about it," says Mr Barghouti. "He shrugged. He wasn't interested at all."
A report in the Chinese state media, however, quoted PA official Abdullah Abdullah as condemning the drilling, saying the organisation "will not stay cross-handed. We will take urgent procedures that may include suing Israel in international courts."
Even so, Mr Khadduri points out the considerable practical obstacles to an effective Palestinian initiative. "An obvious problem is that they simply don't have the expertise.
"Historically, there has never been a Palestinian oil industry. This is all very new."
And there is also the more fundamental question of whether Israel would recognise the Palestinians' right to any part of the field in the first place.
"They regard that entire section of the West Bank as Israeli territory," says Mr Barghouti. "Including Rantis. They refer to it as the 'Kfar Sava area'."
Mr Khadduri also says Israel has repeatedly derailed Palestinian efforts to extract gas from the sizeable fields off the coast of Gaza.
All of which suggests that a rare opportunity for mutually beneficial Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is likely to be missed.
RANTIS, WEST BANK - While the search for oil beneath Israel has been going on for years, the most recently drilled well in the Meged oil field, on the edge of the West Bank, is raising concern that it might draw from untapped Palestinian reserves.
After a 10-minute uphill hike through the rocky fields of the West Bank village of Rantis, we reach a summit where we rest, panting in the 40-degree heat.
A hundred metres (330ft) in front of us lie the wired fence and gravel track of the Green Line - the perimeter of the West Bank and Israel.
To our left lies Ben Gurion airport; beyond that, Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean. But it is for a different view that we have come here.
"It hasn't been on for the last few days," says Bilal, a Rantis local and student at Bir Zeit University.
"And you can't see too much in the daytime anyway. But at night - boof!" He gestures as though throwing a fistful of confetti into the air.
He is referring to the large black pipe inserted vertically into the earth, not more than 500 metres away, out of which a steady, blazing flame has been periodically sighted for about a year now.
It is in fact a gas flare, part of the Meged-5 oil well, owned and operated by Givot Olam Oil Ltd, currently the sole player in Israel's tiny onshore oil and gas production sector.
"I happened to be driving past when all of a sudden I saw this huge flare on the Green Line," recalls Hafez Barghouti, editor of the Palestinian al-Hayat al-Jadeedah, who first broke the story in Ramallah.
"I was sure it must be gas. So I called the mayor of Rantis and he said, 'Yes, the Israelis are drilling oil and gas.'"'No man's land'
While this may seem uncontroversial on the face of it- the flare is, after all, within Israel proper - its proximity to the Green Line raises ethical questions.
"Geology doesn't follow geography," explains Dr Samer Naboulsi, a veteran petroleum engineer at a leading oil firm in Dubai.
 |
| Graphic created by BBC |
"This is why the international convention is to establish a 'no man's land' - typically many kilometres wide - along national borders in which neither party may extract without the other's consent."
Dr Walid Khadduri, a former director at the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) and editor-in-chief of the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES), also criticises Israel's unilateral approach.
"Ordinarily in such a situation, both parties would reach a mutual agreement to divide the field and the associated revenues and costs in an equitable manner.
"This was the case between the UK and Norway, for example. Without such an agreement, things can get messy - look at Iraq and Kuwait," he says, referring to Iraq's 1990 invasion of its southern neighbour following a dispute over the transnational Rumaila field.
Moreover, the drilling would seem to contravene the Oslo Accords, which call for "co-operation in the field of energy, including an energy development programme, which will provide for the exploitation of oil and gas [and] will encourage further joint exploration of other energy resources".
Givot Olam refused to comment, but an Israeli government official dismissed the claims as "yet another attempt to politicise everything".
"We are engaging in exploratory digging within Israel. While we are hopeful, there is at present no conclusive indication as to whether commercially viable quantities will be found, or precisely where," the unnamed official told the BBC.
"The commercial implications, including over the Green Line, are unknown. It is surprising that a Petroleum Engineer in Dubai already knows more than the people on the ground at this early stage."'Highly profitable'
The Palestinian Authority (PA) meanwhile has shown little interest in pursuing what is potentially a substantial strategic and economic opportunity for the West Bank.
A technical report issued by the UK-based consultant Greensand Associates in 2010 concluded that "the Meged Core Area has robust economics... and could be a highly profitable venture if the predicted well production volumes prove to be achievable and sustainable."
The reserves of the Meged-5 well alone have been estimated by Givot Olam at over 1.5bn barrels - not a huge find but certainly enough to make a difference for the chronically energy-poor West Bankers (the UK, by comparison, has around 3bn barrels of proven reserves). The company says it extracted 800 barrels a day during a test period last year.
Yet there appears to be neither the will nor the ability on the Palestinian side to take action.
"I met [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas shortly after discovering the flare and told him about it," says Mr Barghouti. "He shrugged. He wasn't interested at all."
A report in the Chinese state media, however, quoted PA official Abdullah Abdullah as condemning the drilling, saying the organisation "will not stay cross-handed. We will take urgent procedures that may include suing Israel in international courts."
Even so, Mr Khadduri points out the considerable practical obstacles to an effective Palestinian initiative. "An obvious problem is that they simply don't have the expertise.
"Historically, there has never been a Palestinian oil industry. This is all very new."
And there is also the more fundamental question of whether Israel would recognise the Palestinians' right to any part of the field in the first place.
"They regard that entire section of the West Bank as Israeli territory," says Mr Barghouti. "Including Rantis. They refer to it as the 'Kfar Sava area'."
Mr Khadduri also says Israel has repeatedly derailed Palestinian efforts to extract gas from the sizeable fields off the coast of Gaza.
All of which suggests that a rare opportunity for mutually beneficial Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is likely to be missed.
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