Israel's shameless trashing of the futile 'peace process'

[Originally posted at NOW]

One of the surest ways, it seems, to increase the rate of Israeli colonization of Palestinian land is for a senior White House official to declare a new round of attempts to resolve – or, at least, attempts to agree to attempt to resolve – the modern Middle East’s oldest and most exasperating quarrel.

It happened in 2010 when the comparatively high hopes of Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to the Holy Land were summarily quashed by news from Tel Aviv that 1,600 new Jewish-only homes were to be constructed in the Arab half of Jerusalem.

And it’s happened again this week when, less than a month after Secretary of State John Kerry put American credibility (and four billion dollars) on the line in his own trip to the region – in which he warned explicitly against “changes on the ground,” i.e., another Israeli construction spree – the Israelis apparently just couldn’t help themselves, and filed plans for more than 500 new homes in the ultra-religious settlement of Itamar, 28 kilometers east of the Green Line by the city of Nablus, right in the heart of the West Bank.

Intriguingly, unlike the 2010 humiliation, there wasn’t even a show of contrition from Tel Aviv this time. Nor should anyone have expected one, when just Tuesday Prime Minister Netanyahu assured his nation that, “Construction in communities in Judea and Samaria [Bible-speak for Palestine] will continue, and is continuing still today.”

Dismissing the idea that this broad-daylight land theft could conceivably complicate Kerry’s task, Netanyahu asserted that, “The real question is whether there is or isn’t a willingness [among the Palestinians] to accept a Jewish state” – which is an odd thing to say, considering the PLO has publicly advocated a two-state solution since 1988.

As though to remove any lingering doubt about the mendacity of his argument, Netanyahu went on to complain about the intolerability of Palestinian pre-conditions for negotiations (chief of which is a mere halt, not even a reversal, of the settlement frenzy), before demanding that any hypothetical future Palestinian state would be fully demilitarized, entrusting the security of its population to the very army that is currently confiscating its land. You can’t make this stuff up.

This round of the ‘peace process’ will fail, and when it does, Kerry and Obama will shrug, and tell the world they tried. Meanwhile, American taxpayers will continue to subsidize the creation and expansion of theocratic colonies built to hasten the advent of the Messiah, as well as the paramilitary equipment that settles any disputes that may arise with the natives. It will be a wholly fitting legacy for an administration whose only discernable policy for the Arab world has been one of uniform, perfect indifference to its suffering.

Apologies in advance, from a Brit to Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon, with my original italics restored]

Starting tomorrow, the United Kingdom will embark on no fewer than four days of state-imposed, taxpayer-funded celebration of the country’s hereditary dictatorship. Her Majesty Elizabeth II (to use a much-abbreviated version of her official title) has now held the throne for sixty years – comfortably surpassing the reigns of Bashar and Hafez al-Assad combined – a fact for which millions of her subjects will be gathering over the course of the compulsory holiday to express their delight and gratitude.

The BBC – whose journalistic integrity on matters monarchical approximates that of a Stalinist propaganda rag – has a fawning promotional guide to the events, which are almost comically tedious: a barge flotilla on the Thames here; a lawn picnic there; a Gary Barlow concert over there. There’s even going to be a “service of thanksgiving” at St Paul’s Cathedral, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, for which a “special prayer” has been drafted “at The Queen’s direction”. One line “thanks and praises” the Almighty for “blessing” Britain with “ELIZABETH [sic], our beloved and glorious Queen”, thus reaffirming the nakedly theocratic notion – popular with despots since time immemorial – that the sovereign has been personally hand-picked by God.

This festival of dictator worship would be regrettable enough were it merely confined to British soil. But it appears there are mortifying plans to export the hysteria to Lebanon, in what is being billed as ‘Britweek’. One might have thought that in the current regional upheavals, the representatives of leader-for-life autocracies might keep something of a lower profile – none more so than Liz, who was spotted last month lunching cozily with the sanguinary King of Bahrain, among other tyrants.

But then, keeping a low profile in the Middle East has never exactly been a British specialty. For what it’s worth, some of us – this Brit included – have at least some sense of shame, and of contrition. Sorry, Lebanon.

NB: If you’re in Britain and would like to demonstrate against the celebrations, see here for details of the official Jubilee Protest, organised by the fine people at Republic.

Lebanon's clergy finds new common ground on need for more censorship

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

A taxing problem of satirizing the religious is that they so often do a better job all by themselves.

How is one to improve, for example, on the name of the ‘Committee for the Conservation of Values’, Lebanon’s brand-new cross-sectarian censorship board? Not since Saudi Arabia’s ‘Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’ has Orwell’s 1984 been so faithfully reconstructed.

As the Samir Kassir eyes [SKeyes] website reveals, this first-of-its-kind collaboration between the official Sunni, Shia, Druze and Christian clergy aims to combat the “moral decadence”, “social corruption” and “threats to the Lebanese family” arising from the grave “abuses” of media freedom in recent times. As a charming afterthought, it even “invites” media outlets to “conduct self-monitoring”, in order to lighten the workload and streamline the overall purification process.

I telephoned SKeyes’ Ayman Mhanna, who had evidently guessed why I was calling when he picked up, laughing, with the words, “It’s not a joke.” He explained the unwritten gentleman’s code by which the mosque and the church – which are not formally invested with legal power to censor – enforce their will upon the state. “Whenever the censorship bureau sees anything at all related to religion, they take it upon themselves to forward the movie, the play, the script, or whatever, to the religious group that could be offended, and they wait for their response, and usually they respect their response and censor accordingly.” He pointed to the recent case of Tannoura Maxi, which had to be pulled from cinemas for a second round of censorship when initial cuts were found to have insufficiently satisfied the church. “No matter what the law says about freedom, in de facto terms [the religious leaders] hold the real authority.”

All of this makes me rather fed up. I’m fed up, in general, of the religious everywhere whining about “militant” and “oppressive” secularism while having things entirely their own way, all the time. I’m also fed up of hearing from otherwise liberal friends that the confessional system is the protector of freedom in Lebanon. Has it ever been more obvious that the country is not merely a theocracy, but a polytheocracy, and that the only thing God’s terrestrial deputies are able to agree on is the imperative of strangling and suffocating liberty?

Rowan Williams' worthless career showed exactly why religion must stay out of politics

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Anglican Christians around the world – including Lebanon’s own few thousand – can pour themselves a hearty slug of London dry tonight in celebration of the news that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘spiritual leader’ of England’s official state religion, is resigning.

Being the head of an increasingly irrelevant organization in an increasingly irrelevant country, Williams is often seen as a likeable and harmless enough character – an endearing relic, along with the Queen, the Tower of London and the Eton wall game, of what England used to be. The reality, unfortunately, is not quite so cuddly.

Here is a man, after all, who preferred to forbid the ordination of openly gay clergy than to lose the friendship of brazenly homophobic colleagues. Here is a man who took reactionary positions on such non-trivial matters as abortion and euthanasia, while never being able to give a straight answer on the question of creationism. Worst of all, here is a man who argued for the incorporation of the shari’a in the UK on the grounds that Orthodox Jews, too, had parallel courts of their own (when David Cameron cooed that he “sought to unite different communities”, he got it exactly backwards). In other words, since the system is already part-broken, there’s little harm in savaging it further. He went as far as to describe as “dangerous” the idea that “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said”. But then, the principles of liberal democracy would naturally be anathema to a man whose unelected power and privilege are paid for by the taxpayer.

In summary, here is a man whose example tells us exactly why men of religion need to be permanently kept away from politics.