Arab rulers meet Obama, declare "solidarity" against Ferguson "plot"

[Originally posted at NOW Blog]

As US President Barack Obama scrambled Wednesday to contain domestic unrest that has seen multiple killings of civilians by police, mass arrests, the firing of tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets at demonstrators, and the establishment of military checkpoints in the streets, the commander-in-chief received a surprise show of support from a perhaps unlikely source. In a rare display of unity, the leaders of the Arab world set aside their political differences, economic rivalries, and murderous sectarian proxy wars to travel to Washington, DC, to personally deliver to the president what they called a “message of full solidarity in the face of the global criminal conspiracy.”

“I know better than anyone what it’s like for a great, free nation to come under attack from thousands of terrorists in its own streets,” said Egyptian President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, kicking off the proceedings at the White House reception in a pair of dark sunglasses. “Indeed, as of this week, it’s been exactly one year since the patriots of the Egyptian army finally liberated our capital from the insurgents’ grip, in what was the most glorious milestone yet in what your honorable Secretary of State, Mr Kerry, has described as our ‘restoring democracy.’ President Obama, like myself, is a leader for all his people. And I praise his iron determination, but also his humane restraint, in confronting the enemies of his people, whether they be armed gangsters or journalists.”

“Barack and I haven’t seen entirely eye to eye in recent years,” joked Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after taking the podium, drawing laughs and a round of delighted applause as a grinning Obama mimed an ‘oops’ gesture with his hand. “But today we face a common danger, a cancer that threatens us both equally. There can be no reasoning, no negotiating, with cancer. One can only exterminate it.”

“And Lord knows I know a thing or two about extermination,” he added with a wink, earning another eruption of laughter and even, according to one aide present, a standing ovation from Obama.

Following Assad was the Bahraini ruler, King Sheikh Hamad al-Khalifa. “The American police have rightly identified the groups assaulting them – who pose as so-called reformists and shed crocodile tears about equality – as dangerous ‘agitators’ and ‘criminals.’ We in Bahrain know the dirty tricks of such provocateurs very well. And I think I speak for everyone here when I say it’s a source of great personal pride to me that the tactics – not to mention the munitions themselves – used by your brave security forces in resisting these traitors were first used in my own country against precisely the same enemy.” A concert of sober applause broke out, and a suddenly serious Obama placed his palm on his heart and nodded in appreciation.

After several more speeches along similar lines, including an assurance from Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim al-Thani that coverage of the events on Al Jazeera America would exclude anything “disrespectful” toward the Obama government, the president himself took to the podium to accept a Cartier diamond-encrusted golden dagger from the ruler of the United Arab Emirates.

Asked to say a few words, Obama began with a deadpan rejoinder to the Syrian president: “It’s always a gas when Bashar’s around.”

“Seriously, though, it’s good to see you guys,” he continued, scanning the faces of the Omanis, Yemenis, Sudanese, and Kuwaitis. “I had kind of forgotten half of you existed.” After a jumbled, seemingly distracted thirty second pronouncement on “freedom,” he excused himself, explaining a helicopter was waiting to return him to his vacation home in Martha’s Vineyard. “Tee-off’s in an hour,” he said to confused frowns. “That bastard Biden’s probably already on the range.”

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel had already made its own statement of support to the Ferguson police force’s crackdown. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had hoped to join the delegation in D.C. but was unable to obtain travel permits. Lebanon, currently having no head of state, was absent, though as one diplomat who preferred to remain anonymous quipped, “With Syria and Saudi attending, you could say the Lebanese government was already amply represented.”

Qatari funding of Al-Jadeed confirmed?

[Originally posted at NOW]

It’s never been an especially well-kept secret that Lebanon’s Al-Jadeed (“New”) TV station, renowned for its attacks on the Saudi-backed Hariri dynasty, benefits from the pecuniary resources of Saudi’s neighbor and rival, Qatar.

And yet, as with all such “it-is-knowns,” it was something that had never been definitively proven. As I reported in 2012, Al-Jadeed’s owner Tahseen Khayyat would vaguely acknowledge having ties with the Gulf promontory, and his business conglomerate does have offices in Doha, but beyond these one could establish very little about Qatar’s involvement in Al-Jadeed specifically.

Until now, apparently. An audio clip circulating online purports to be a leaked phone call between former Qatari ruler Hamad al-Thani and the late Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, in which al-Thani talks of “creating” a TV station called Al-Hiwar in London and funding (he literally says “feeding”) Al-Jadeed in Lebanon. Later, the man supposed to be al-Thani adds that these two stations could be used to promote Saad al-Faqih, a Saudi opposition figure.

Assuming the leak is genuine, it may help explain the comparatively neutral – or, rather, incoherent – editorial line adopted by Al-Jadeed toward Syria (the killing of its cameraman, Ali Shaaban, by the regime in 2012 was presumably a factor too). Access to Qatari petrodollars is also likely to be appreciated given the station has just been summoned by a United Nations tribunal for contempt and obstruction of justice – charges that carry a potential fine of up to 100,000€ ($139,000), not to mention seven years in jail for Khayyat’s daughter, Karma, the deputy head of news.

Lebanese, Syrian Brotherhoods unlikely to feel effects of "terror" designation

[Originally posted at NOW]

Saudi’s designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as “terrorist” organization is unlikely to have tangible effects in the Levant.

While much attention has been paid to the deepening rifts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims across the Arab world in recent years, it is the internal battle for the political and ideological soul of Sunni Islam that has seen the fiercest inflammation in the last few days.

In an unprecedented escalation, on 7 March the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia designated as a “terrorist” organization the Muslim Brotherhood, the Qatar-backed movement that advocates an alternative form of Islamic rule to the Wahhabi-Salafist strain established in Riyadh. The move came two days after Saudi, along with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, recalled their ambassadors from Doha; the culmination of months of tensions deriving from Qatar’s continuing support for the Brotherhood.

While the “terrorist” label applies, in theory, to all Brotherhood members worldwide, NOW learned that in practice it is expected to target only those active within Gulf states, and in Egypt, where the new Saudi-backed military government has waged a violent crackdown on the movement since the July 2013 overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood-linked President Muhammad Morsi, going as far as to jail journalists working for Qatar’s Al Jazeera network. Specifically, Brotherhood affiliates in Lebanon and Syria – where they make up a significant minority of the opposition Syrian National Coalition – told NOW they did not anticipate feeling any tangible effects.

“I don’t think there will be any effect on us from the Saudi decision,” said Bassam Hammoud, head for the South region of the Brotherhood-linked al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah party. “It’s clear that this decision started with the bloody coup in Egypt [which Saudi supported] because they were afraid for their chairs and their positions, because the project Muhammad Morsi proposed is one of reformation and change.”

The mood appears to be similar among Brotherhood members in Syria, where questions had initially been raised about the fate of the opposition’s Syrian National Coalition, which is backed by Saudi yet also contains many Brotherhood members who will now be deemed “terrorists” by Riyadh. (As one analyst noted, it’s still unclear whether Brotherhood-affiliated members can even attend the upcoming Coalition general assembly in Cairo, where they are also now legally considered “terrorists”.) Muhammad Sarmini, a Brotherhood partisan and member of the Syrian National Council – which withdrew from the umbrella Coalition in January over disagreements about the Geneva peace talks – told NOW he expected ties with Saudi to remain essentially cordial.

“Even after [the Saudi] decision, there is no change in the relationship between us. The decision doesn’t touch the Syrian Brotherhood directly,” Sarmini told NOW.

One reason for this, according to sources familiar with the Saudi leadership’s thinking, is that Riyadh doesn’t deem the Syrian Brotherhood a security threat in the way it does the Egyptian branch.

“I do not think the decision will adversely affect Saudi allies such as the Coalition because the decision addresses terrorists from the Brotherhood and [especially] Egypt’s Brotherhood,” said Dr. Anwar Eshki, a former Saudi army general and head of the Jeddah-based Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies. The Brotherhood denies accusations of involvement in terrorism.

“The Kingdom deals with the Syrian Brotherhood and respects the Tunisian Brotherhood because they are engaged in political work and have not practiced terrorism […] The Kingdom gives aid to the Syrian Brotherhood for spending on refugees and the needy among the Syrian people,” Eshki told NOW.

Indeed, Sarmini told NOW the Syrian branch of the Brotherhood in particular had long enjoyed warm ties with Riyadh – another factor making an abrupt breach unlikely.

“The relationship between Saudi and the Syrian Brotherhood was a good, positive one, and even a historical one. Saudi embraced members of the Brotherhood in the 1980s and opened the door for them. Even until now […] we appreciate their position and their support toward the Syrian revolution.”

Nevertheless, Sarmini and Hammoud still voiced strong objections to the Saudi decision. “Without a doubt, we consider this position to be one that needs to be reviewed […] We appreciate that Saudi is confronting terrorism, but this is not reconcilable with describing moderate organizations as terrorists,” Sarmini told NOW.

Hammoud was blunter: “This is a reprehensible decision.”

And the move has also faced criticism in certain Arab media, such as the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, whose editorial Sunday said the decision benefits the Iranian, Syrian, and Iraqi leaderships, and “identifies Saudi, objectively, with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.” Indeed, NOW asked Dr. Eshki why he thought Saudi had designated the Brotherhood as “terrorists” before doing the same to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant party often considered Riyadh’s preeminent foe in the Levant. He declined to answer directly, telling NOW instead:

“From the womb of the Brotherhood came al-Qaeda, and from the womb of the Brotherhood occurred most of the terrorist acts in the Kingdom.”

Ana Maria Luca and Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

Arab leaders courageously tackle region's biggest problem: blasphemy

[Originally posted at NOW]

It’s no secret that the Middle East is a troubled region. What with the first use of chemical weapons since the 1980s adding to the apocalyptic carnage of Syria; full-throttle sectarian slaughter underway in Iraq; a murderous military coup in Egypt; and the unceasing Israeli colonization of the remains of Palestine, the Arab world certainly has no shortage of things to be worrying about.

But while the naïve observer might deem the expression of unorthodox hypotheses about the nature of the Universe to be a matter of rather less urgency than the above examples, a number of Arab governments have astutely identified that the reverse is the case, and are working as we speak on a draft law to tackle that most menacing of all Middle Eastern ills: blasphemy.

Encouragingly, the officials preparing the law will improve on prior efforts to tackle this fons et origo of Arab woes by expanding it to all of their nations’ blasphemers, wherever they are in the world.

“All penal laws in Arab countries criminalize defamation of religions but there are no specific sanctions when an abuser is outside the country,” explained Qatari Justice Ministry official Ebrahim Mousa Al Hitmi. The ingenious twist of this latest initiative – expected to generate incalculable improvements in security, education, and economic performance region-wide – is that “it gives every state the right to put on trial those who abuse and hold in contempt religions even if they are outside the country.” [Emphasis added.]

The forward-looking move has already inspired change beyond the GCC peninsula. Authorities here in Lebanon, which has now been without a government for over six months and has witnessed a spate of horrific car bombs in recent weeks, have taken it upon themselves to exclude from an upcoming film festival two works that might very easily have slipped through the net of less vigilant censors. Had the films – one dealing with homosexual love, the other with temporary marriage in Islam – been screened, God only knows what the consequences for infrastructure development, legal reform, and meeting the challenges of the Syrian refugee influx might have been.

Among the believers

[Originally posted at NOW]

NOW talks to Nada Abdelsamad, whose new documentary looks at Lebanon’s increasingly violent Salafist movement

While many foreigners might readily associate Lebanese Islamism with Hezbollah – the Shiite militia-cum-party’s “military wing” was designated a terror organization by the European Union last month – the past year has seen an unprecedented surge in violence from Sunni Islamist groups, many of whom draw on a militant interpretation of a theological school known as Salafism. Representing a marginal fringe of Lebanon’s Sunni community, historically Salafists were mostly confined to the northern city of Tripoli.

However, in June, Salafist fighters waged a bloody two-day battle with the Lebanese army in Sidon, killing over a dozen soldiers. And on Thursday, an obscure Sunni extremist group claimed responsibility for a car bomb in Dahiyeh that took thirty civilian lives – the deadliest car bomb since the 1975-90 civil war and the most violent ever attack by Sunni militants against the Lebanese Shiite community.

In an attempt to shine a light on the often murky methods and motivations of these Salafists, journalist and author Nada Abdelsamad recently produced a video documentary (see above link) based on extensive interviews with the movement’s leading figures and their devotees. NOW spoke with Abdelsamad about her findings and where the Salafists’ future might be heading.

NOW: Clearly, Lebanon has seen a marked rise in Salafism-related violence in recent weeks. What do you think are the relations between the people you met and the ones carrying out these attacks?

Nada Abdelsamad: Those that I met were clear about their target: they want a khilafa [caliphate, or Islamic state] in Lebanon. We can’t say if there’s a link between those I met and those who are targeting Shiite areas because we still don’t know who is doing this. Is it even a Lebanese faction? We don’t know.

NOW: So you don’t know who the group calling itself the ‘Brigades of Aisha, Mother of the Believers,’ that claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack in south Beirut, could be?

Abdelsamad: No, the groups I met were well-known in Tripoli. They are not hiding behind group names.

NOW: Do Salafists differ in terms of their willingness to use violence (i.e. are some jihadist and others non-jihadist)?

Abdelsamad: This is what the film tried to answer, this was one of my main questions. They said there is no difference between Salafists. They might be jihadists if they were obliged to be, but the only jihadist faction now is the one led by a guy who doesn’t like to be in the media and nobody knows about him, called Hossam Sabbagh. He’s the only jihadist, although [Sheikh Dai al-Islam] al-Shahhal said he has been trying to build an armed faction after what happened in Beirut in May 2008. This is not only what al-Shahhal said but what [Sheikh Salem] al-Rafei said too.

NOW: Regarding Sabbagh, you mention in the documentary that he previously fought in Afghanistan. Is the war in Syria today likely to produce a future generation of Lebanese jihadists like him?

Abdelsamad: They said that only five people [from among Lebanon’s Salafists] have been killed in Syria. Do you think a huge number of young people from Tripoli are fighting in Syria? If there is involvement, it’s not on a big scale.

NOW: Just two weeks ago there were reports that two brothers from Tripoli had blown themselves up in a suicide bombing in Homs.

Abdelsamad: Yes. You have to add those two to three before. So in total there are only five. They are not hiding their call to fight in Syria, but are people going there? I’m not sure.

It’s different from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an organized party, but Salafists are not so clearly organized. They can call on people to go and fight in Syria, but people can decide whether they want to go or not. This is unlike Hezbollah, whose leader made a political decision [to intervene in Syria].

NOW: One interesting moment was when you visited the studio of the Irtiqaa (“upgrading”) radio station. How significant are things like this in spreading the Salafist message?

Abdelsamad: It’s important because now they have institutions, radios, schools, universities, and they’re becoming more complete parties and this is what they want. As I told you, their main target is to impose a khilafa, and they think a khilafa is coming.

NOW: What other media do they make use of?

Abdelsamad: Every sheikh has his website, and you have all the prayers, all the Friday sermons online, in video and print. They are well-organized.

NOW: It was also fascinating to see women taking on activist roles, even giving speeches to fellow women promoting the cause.

Abdelsamad: I think we didn’t know about them a lot, but the women in the Salafist movement are prominent. One of them I interviewed, Umm Hudaifa, gives sermons in one of the mosques, and many people attend every week. These women are part of Lebanese society now.

NOW: Some argue that Salafist militants in, for example, Bab al-Tabbaneh are not truly motivated by religion, but instead are poor people who fight primarily because they get paid to do so. You’ve seen these people up close: do you think this is the case, or are they sincere believers in the ideology?

Abdelsamad: We have to look at the Salafist movement away from the ongoing fight in Tripoli. Salafism is not growing because of the fight with Jabal Mohsen, the movement is growing in the whole region because you have an Islamist Spring, you have the fighting in Syria and Hezbollah’s involvement there. They think Hezbollah is killing Sunnis. This is the main point.

NOW: Some also argue that Salafist ideology is foreign to Lebanon and has only spread due to financial inducements from the Gulf countries. What do you say to that?

Abdelsamad: They don’t hide it. If you ask them who is paying for these schools and movements, they say that they have direct money from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar, from NGOs in Kuwait. The Ministry of Awqaf [“financial endowments”] in Saudi Arabia is paying these schools. It’s not something they hide.

NOW: Finally, is Salafism a long-term threat to Lebanon’s democracy and security, or is it something the country can coexist with?

Abdelsamad: I cannot predict but it’s clear that the Salafists do not believe in Lebanon’s constitution. That’s why they don’t run in elections. They don’t seem to want to impose their khilafa by force, because they know that Lebanon is different. But, still, the khilafa is their aim.

Humbled Qatar may curb Lebanon extremists

[Originally posted at NOW]

As Saudi Arabia elbows aside Qatar’s influence across the region, militant Islamists in Lebanon may feel the squeeze.

The dramatic ouster of Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi last Wednesday has been quickly interpreted by analysts as a significant setback for the foreign policy of Qatar, the Gulf state which had asserted itself as the prime supporter and financier of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated government since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Having poured $8bn into the country under Morsi, the argument goes, Qatar had placed its biggest bet yet on the Islamist movement of which it is the key global patron, and with the fall of Morsi this has turned out to be a blunder. The revelation Tuesday that Qatar’s rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have collectively pledged $8bn in aid to the post-Morsi government – exactly matching the sum offered by Qatar previously – appeared to further signify the Gulf state’s loss of influence.

Egypt is not the only country in which Qatar appears to have lost ground to the Saudis. Last month, NOW reported the Kingdom was seeking to monopolize control of the political opposition in Syria, which has long been criticized as too heavily weighted toward the Brotherhood. The subsequent selection of Saudi-backed Ahmad Jarba as head of the Syrian National Coalition, quickly followed by the resignation of Qatar-backed Ghassan Hitto from the post of rebel prime minister, have been seen as the successful fruits of these efforts.

Not all analysts, however, see such developments as straightforward losses for Qatar. “It’s not really that clear,” said Andrew Hammond, recent author of The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia, currently based in Doha. “The Qataris in recent months have obviously been involved in a process of succession… so I think they’ve been happy to be out of the picture to a certain degree and [to be] acceding to these pressures of the Saudis muscling in on the scene,” he told NOW, referring to the recent replacement of Emir Hamad al-Thani by his son, Sheikh Tamim, as head of state. “I think they’ve bought themselves time by having this shift in who’s in charge officially here. I don’t think it necessarily means they’re not going to come back.”

Nor, argues Hammond, is Qatar likely to drop its historical alliance with the Brotherhood. “The Brotherhood’s representatives in Qatar have been here for a long time. [Prominent pro-Brotherhood cleric Sheikh Yusuf] Al-Qaradawi is just as close to the new emir as he was to the father. So, it would be a lot to imagine that they would suddenly shift in one go when they’ve had a relationship with these people for a long time.” Indeed this relationship, adds Hammond, while partly based on self-interest, is also “more nuanced.… there is a certain sympathy [Qatar] has for [the Brotherhood]. They do genuinely see them as being in the middle of the Arab political spectrum.”

In any case, to the extent that Saudi has gained at Qatar’s expense, the effects could be beneficial for Lebanon, according to former MP Mosbah al-Ahdab of the Democratic Renewal (Tajaddod) Movement. Ahdab told NOW that while Saudi chiefly sponsors the non-Islamist Future Movement, Qatari funds in recent years have been primarily directed at Islamist factions, including the majority of militant groups in his native city of Tripoli.

“It would be very reassuring if the Saudis started taking an interest in Lebanon again, because for some time we have been in the hands of Qataris who have been throwing money left and right, radicalizing the whole situation, and creating fighters who have no coordination and no goal. It’s been very dangerous.”

Future MP Mustafa Alloush agreed, adding to NOW that the unwinding of Qatari influence in Lebanon is already underway, as evidenced by the recent crushing of the armed movement of Sidon-based cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir, often rumored to be a Qatari client.

“Qatar played some dangerous games by financing radical and extremist movements in an attempt to counter the Saudi influence on moderates. What happened [to Assir] and the [limited] reactions proves that these movements are weaker now. So in Lebanon, we will see empowerment of the moderate movements, and weakening of the extremist ones.”

Hammond, however, argues that Lebanon may not necessarily benefit from an ascendant Saudi Arabia.

“My impression is that it won’t necessarily make the situation more peaceable in Lebanon because the Saudis have their people there, and they’re going to push them, and that’s going to lead to more conflict with Hezbollah. From their perspective, they just want to fight Hezbollah, to push their influence back, and whether that in the short term leads to a calmer situation in Lebanon is another question entirely.”

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

What's really wrong with Aaron David Miller?

[Originally posted at NOW]

Last week, readers of Foreign Policy were treated to another installment of the “distinguished scholar[ship]” of Aaron David Miller (he of the recent ‘Tribes With Flags’ notoriety), this time entitled, ‘What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East?’ 

So breezily are the facts distorted, so woefully are the points missed, and so cheerfully are the region’s more than three hundred million people insulted that it prompts the arresting question: What’s really wrong with Aaron David Miller?

The piece comprises Miller’s diagnosis of the “top five” reasons for the “jumble of violence, sectarianism, and incompetence” that have been the real fruits of an Arab Spring that was supposed to be the “big transformative moment.” These are, in order: the mistreatment of women, the lack of secularism, excessive conspiracy theorizing, “narcissism” (yes), and lack of leadership.

In addition to the many generic, or what might be called orthodox, ways in which the overall argument is wrong-headed, there are some particularly egregious bits of mendacity and nastiness that are worth highlighting.

First is his callous jab at the Lebanese, all of whom (in their narcissism) “think what happens in Beirut is on the minds of U.S. policymakers from morning till night.” Perhaps I’m ill-trained in the hard-nosed, cut-the-crap school of “realism” in which Miller affects to excel, but I feel those Lebanese who have taken serious risks (and paid serious prices) to stand against the menaces of Syrian Baathist totalitarianism and its murderous proxies deserve something better than the scorn of those they were led to believe were their friends.

Second, and speaking of the Damascene dictatorship, it’s simply contemptible of Miller to pretend that “America’s loss and lack of credibility” is what prevents it from providing meaningful assistance to the Syrian opposition (who also, evidently, have an inflated impression of how much attention is paid to their sacrifices in Washington). Instead, it’s perfectly obvious that it is the Americans’ failure to lift a finger in defense of the revolution that is eroding what was left of their credibility – as the cartoonists of Kafranbel have been trying to tell everyone for two years now.

Things only get worse when he turns to the Holy Land dispute, complaining of being “really tired of Israeli peaceniks […] and of Arabs” asking America to work toward peace (his patience for Israeli hawks, apparently, has not yet waned). His message for these irritating supplicants is as crass as it is dishonest:

“Here's a news flash: the cavalry isn't coming. Maybe if this sinks in, the locals will do more for themselves. But I doubt it.”

A pretty straightforward reason why this won’t “sink in” is because, for one party, the cavalry in fact arrived a very long time ago, and is showing no signs of disappearing soon (indeed, its ranks grow with each passing year). An administration that has used its veto power to protect Israel at the UN Security Council, upped the annual military aid package to an unprecedented $4bn a year for ten years, while throwing hundreds of millions of additional dollars at programs like the Iron Dome and David’s Sling missile defense systems can hardly be said to have washed its hands of the Middle East quite yet.

Nor has the “cavalry” exactly neglected other areas of the region. Miller is, of course, perfectly right that many of the Arab world’s greatest villains are fellow Arabs, but when the young men and women of Bahrain took to the streets in 2011 to peacefully challenge their despot, it was with American-made bullets and tear gas canisters that their efforts were quite literally shot down. Since then, while Martin Luther King-quoting human rights activists have been rounded up and tortured before being sentenced to life imprisonment, Obama has responded by selling the Khalifa regime $53 million in arms.

Which is why it isn’t at all “ironic,” as Miller claims, that the “authoritarian monarchs” of Jordan and the Gulf have proved to be “the most durable.” Their durability, while partly sustained by popular will, is also quite openly guaranteed by American policy, with Bahrain being merely the most brazen example. It isn’t just the massive weapons sales to Islamist autocrats across the Gulf, including an eye-watering $60bn consignment of fighter jets, attack helicopters and missiles to Saudi Arabia. Whether it’s bloggers in the UAE and Jordan, poets in Qatar, or clerics belonging to the wrong sect in Saudi, Gulf regimes crush every conceivable form of dissent without ever incurring tangible reproach from Washington.

Indeed, if I were to propose a real irony, it would be that the poorest performers of all Arab nations on Miller’s criteria of women’s rights, secularism, and religious fundamentalism are precisely the US’ most cherished allies and business partners.

When resistances collide

[Originally posted at NOW]

While reports last week of Hamas members in Lebanon being ordered by Hezbollah security officials to leave the country have since proven false, they have nonetheless revived questions about the state of relations between the Palestinian Sunni Islamist militia-cum-party and its Lebanese Shiite Islamist counterpart.

Having both firmly sided with opposing camps in the Syrian conflict raging next door, the two nominal allies appear to be straining to preserve what they can of a relationship increasingly challenged by political and sectarian differences.

The official line was summed up by former Hezbollah MP Hassan Hoballah, who said Friday that, “What brings us together, in terms of our hostility towards the Zionist entity, is greater than a dispute over the […] situation in Syria.” This was echoed by Hamas’ spokesperson in Lebanon, Ali Baraka, in a phone call to NOW.

However, Baraka also admitted to NOW that, “Of course, relations are not like they were in previous years.” Moreover, he explicitly condemned Hezbollah’s now-publicly acknowledged military intervention in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime, saying, “We are against [it], just as we are against any foreign intervention in the Syrian conflict.”

That includes intervention by Hamas, Baraka added, responding to allegations that the group is training and even fighting alongside the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Damascus and Aleppo. While no hard evidence has surfaced to support the accusations, they appear to be believed by some Hezbollah fighters themselves. Upon returning from the recent battle for Qusayr in Homs province, one such militant told a newspaper, “There’s a kind of irritating familiarity [in the rebels’ tactics]. Hezbollah taught Hamas all those tactics to fight the Israelis. Hamas apparently decided to transfer their experience to takfiri groups [Hezbollah parlance for the FSA].”

Whether true or not, there are certainly other indications of a deepening divorce between Hamas and its fellow members of the so-called ‘Resistance Axis’ – Hezbollah, and the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The London Telegraph reported last Friday that Iran has almost entirely ceased its financial support to Hamas – said to total some £15m ($23m USD) per month – as well as all military cooperation, in retaliation for the latter’s opposition to the Assad regime. (A subsequent article denying this was in turn denied by Hamas’ official website, a website which, significantly, describes the Syrian uprising as a “revolution” and has issued condemnations of regime “massacres” of Palestinian refugees.)

Such developments follow the broader pattern that has emerged since the Syrian uprising began. One month after Hamas’ politburo chairman Khaled Mashaal quietly left his Damascus headquarters in January 2012, the group’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah “saluted” the Syrian opposition in a Cairo speech. Mashaal has since based himself in Qatar, whose Emir Hamad al-Thani later paid a visit to Gaza in what was widely interpreted as a message that the Gulf state would henceforth be Hamas’s primary patron.

This new bond with Qatar – which is also among the most forthright sponsors of the Syrian opposition – is likely one reason why Hamas’ relations with the ‘Resistance Axis’ continue to deterioriate, according to Dr. Yezid Sayigh, senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center and former negotiator with Palestinian delegations in peace talks with Israel in the 1990s.

“Clearly Qatar has pledged lots of assistance [to Hamas],” Sayigh told NOW. “It’s possible that there’s been some sort of quid pro quo.”

However, Sayigh said equally significant are domestic pressures on the group in Gaza from friends and rivals alike, most of whom have welcomed the Syrian uprising.

“Having supported the Arab Spring in other countries, especially Egypt, I guess [Hamas] just found it awkward to be supporting the Assad regime, [especially] given that they’re trying to meet challenges in Gaza from people like the Salafists who are more openly supportive of the rebels in Syria.”

Ultimately, beyond Syria, perhaps the larger question is what will become of the ‘Resistance Axis’ now that it appears to have fragmented along political and sectarian lines.

“It’s certainly been weakened,” said Sayigh. “And it’ll be weakened further if the perception grows that this is basically a Shiite axis, or Shiite crescent, connecting the Shiites of Lebanon, Iraq and Iran with the Alawite regime in Syria. If Hamas is the odd one out, that would be very uncomfortable, because they really can’t afford anything that would undermine their [alliances,] with Egypt in particular, but also with the Saudis, who are [still] upset about their takeover of Gaza in 2007. I guess they just don’t have the choice of staying in the Axis of Resistance when almost everyone else sees that in a sectarian way.”

Or, as Dr. Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at Chatham House, put it to NOW more bluntly:

“Without Hamas, the Axis of Resistance is reduced to a mere sectarian alliance.”

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

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.

Boris eulogizes poet-jailing Qatar

[Originally posted at NOW]

No day is a good day to pen a thousand words of uncritical praise for a violently repressive theocracy, but London mayor Boris Johnson’s decision to do just that in yesterday’s Telegraph was timed even worse than it might otherwise have been. Scarcely had the ink of his parodically rose-tinted tribute dried than a Qatari court sentenced another luckless soul to medieval punishment for crimes against the Almighty; in this case 40 lashes for imbibing the illicit Dionysian harvest. One wonders whether – as with Salam Fayyad’s resignation and the Obama visit – the authorities were putting off the announcement until his plane had safely left the tarmac.

Boris, of course, has his own history of moral policing on the alcohol question, but he’s convinced there’s far more common ground to be found than that. “There is so much we can offer [to Qatar], so many ways to build on this partnership,” he tells us. “We have more friends than we sometimes imagine.”

Which is certainly more than could be said by, e.g., Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, the Qatari poet sentenced to life imprisonment last November (later reduced to 15 years) for a poem deemed an act of incitement against the regime (it expressed admiration for the Tunisian revolution), who might conceivably expect some support from a nation claiming to value democracy and free speech.

Johnson – tipped, don’t forget, as a possible future prime minister – might also consider his “partnership” (or lack thereof) with the Arab world’s liberals and secularists, who at every turn are seeing their courageous efforts at combating tyranny knocked back by the Doha-sponsored Muslim Brotherhood, if not (as in Bahrain) by the thugs of the al-Thani regime itself. Women, too, deserve better than to have the barbaric practice of (often forced) polygamy shrugged off as a mere “traditional” eccentricity, as harmless as falconing and camel racing.

Of course, Johnson’s dilemma is obvious: Britain is poor; Qatar is the richest country on earth. The man is simply in no position to lecture what is already one of his city’s largest investors. His article is ultimately, then, a testament not to the endearing qualities of the “natives” (a word he actually uses) but rather to Britain’s frightening subservience to them, and the profoundly troubling consequences of their transformation from colonial protectorate to imperial potentate.

The Arab League plan could rip Lebanon apart

The dreadful collapse of a scandalously neglected apartment block in Beirut’s Ashrafieh district last weekend that tragically took 27 lives has, not without reason, revived fears in Lebanon about the major earthquake fault-line upon which the capital city rests. But it’s with seismological concerns of quite another sort that I address my dear reader today.

On Saturday, the Qatari emir Hamad al-Thani, who has suddenly gone from being a provincial businessman and petro-monarch to a swaggering, headline-hungry regional statesman of apparently grand geopolitical ambition – and whose pearls of wisdom in recent weeks have included his advising Western nations to embrace Islamism – announced a proposal to send Arab League troops to Syria to “stop the killing” of civilians. While I am, as I’ve said before, not opposed to military intervention under certain conditions, Qatar is among the very last nations I would nominate to undertake the course of action (whether robed with an official Arab League mandate or not). This is for the very simple reason that, by taking the brazenly fascist step of sending its troops to Bahrain to help crush the protests there, Qatar has made clear that its motives in Syria may be anything except humanitarian and democratic. Indeed, that both the Bahraini regime and the majority of the Syrian opposition share a common religious denomination with al-Thani invites one to speculate about a rather different dynamic altogether. 

It’s with this in mind that one ought to consider Saad Hariri’s endorsement of the Arab League proposal on Twitter. As the son of the assassinated Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, as well as an ex-PM himself and the current head of the Future Movement, Saad is one of the preeminent zu’ama, or chieftains, of the Lebanese Sunni community. The Lebanese Shia, on the other hand, are to a large extent represented by Hizbullah, a party which has by no means been reticent on the question of Bahrain, describing it as a “special injustice” and openly accusing the regime and its allies (such as Qatar) of sectarian bigotry (as I wrote here, this accusation is by no means unfounded). Lebanon is of course a tremendously fragmented society at the best of times, and though inter-communal coexistence of a sort does persist, its frayed and ragged fabric is always threatening to tear further: the recent past has seen the Salafi cleric Ahmad Al-Assir accuse the Shia of “insulting” the Prophet’s wife Aisha, while the Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah gave an overtly sectarian speech on Ashura, in which he compared the party’s enemies to the Umayyads who killed the Prophet’s grandson Hussein in the Battle of Karbala (the event which triggered the whole Sunni-Shia split to begin with). 

Now, of course, the root cause of sectarianism is the very existence of sects in the first place, and all attempts to evade or deny this simple truth are doomed to fail from the outset. But I think it’s equally plain that what’s behind this recent fouling of the air is the question of Syria. It’s become very unfashionable to so much as mention religion in the same breath as the ‘Arab Spring’ – before you start, yes, thank you, I know that some of the regime’s bravest critics are Shia, while some of its most craven apologists are Sunni – but I for one find a few things difficult to ignore: the burning of Assad pictures and Hizbullah flags at a rally of thousands in the Lebanese Sunni stronghold of Tripoli (the only major city in the country to have witnessed such a spectacle); the vocal presence of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood on the front lines of the uprising; the sensationalist comparison of Assad to Hitler by the Sunni Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan; the lugubrious groans in support of the uprising from other sinister characters like the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi (who naturally had rather different things to say about the protests in Bahrain); and the withdrawal by the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (also known as Hamas) of administrative staff from its headquarters in Damascus. The regime probably has not targeted Sunnis in particular, but Syrian demographics are such that indiscriminate killing will by definition hit the Sunnis hardest, and this has dragged some of the more scrofulous elements of the Sunni world to the Syrian opposition, of which the Qatari dictator is only one example among many. 

So what has Hariri done by signing his name to this plan? He has managed to undermine legitimate and democratic channels such as the UN while siding at the same time with the perpetrators of rabid and naked sectarianism and tribalism. He has also left Lebanon’s Sunnis at the mercy of a Hizbullah that is being squeezed as never before. History tells us that Hizbullah doesn’t much like being squeezed: recall, for example, their storming of Beirut in 2008 with guns and grenade launchers blazing – a bloody tremor that had many Lebanese fearing a return to the darkest of days. That time, the provocation was comparatively minor: an attempt by the Hariri government to shut down part of Hizbullah’s private telecommunication network. This time, with the party’s chief arms supplier at stake, the threat is almost existential (don’t forget that Burhan Ghalioun, the leader of the Syrian National Council, said explicitly last month that if he replaced Bashar al-Assad he would end the relationship with Hizbullah). Combine these unprecedented political stakes with the sectarian metastasis outlined above, and the meeting of Qatari boots with Syrian soil could rip Lebanon apart. If this is to be averted, serious re-thinks of priorities and friendships will be required of both Hariri and Nasrallah.