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Ed Webb

In Iran's elections, the hard-liners lost. What comes next? - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The uncertainty and high stakes involved in the election confirms the importance of genuine electoral competition within the bounds of the Iranian political system and the serious role given to popular input and participation — as opposed to other Muslim states in the Middle East.
  • The degree of mobilization, campaigning, investment and consensus-building within the conservative camp was unprecedented in the past two decades
  • While Rouhani had relied on the reformists since his 2013 election, he adopted their rhetoric in the final stretch of the campaign to a degree above and beyond his prior bounds.
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  • The conservatives’ strategy aimed to create unity among the faithful in the face of Rouhani’s encroaching influence and instigate a factional realignment against the sitting president. It is the tenability and success of this conservative alliance that will significantly impact the future path that Iran takes — not simply the current reelection of Rouhani to the presidency
  • If Rouhani successfully amalgamates reformists, moderates and conservatives into one cohesive whole, a broad elite consensus with a soft ideological vision and desire for global integration could dominate the state — in stark opposition to the revolutionary anti-imperialist ideology of the supreme leader and hard-liners.
  • this election highlights a growing secularization and non-revolutionary, pro-Western trend in Iran — in part a result of the very success of the Islamic Republic to modernize society. The greater empowerment of voices that are sympathetic to increased interactions with the West — valuing secular academic education and emphasizing a liberal women’s rights discourse — all fly against the ideals of the Islamic revolution that pushed for an indigenous cultural movement and was the flag-bearer for anti-imperialism.
  • This election demonstrated that the conservatives will fight to preserve their base, provoke polarization and make sure they are not enveloped by shades of gray where moderates can act as revolutionaries and reformists at the same time.
Ed Webb

Theresa May Takes Her Darkest, Most Desperate Turn Yet | Vanity Fair - 0 views

  • the United Kingdom’s messy divorce from Europe, sold as an effort to reclaim parliamentary sovereignty, has instead delivered its opposite. Last Monday, the House of Commons voted in the early stages of the European Union Withdrawal Bill to give the government sweeping powers to make laws without parliamentary scrutin
  • If the withdrawal bill is passed as it stands, May will be able to make laws by decree and reverse and adapt primary legislation without consulting Parliament. It is the greatest attack on the British constitution in at least a century. Parliamentary sovereignty—the very thing that Brexiteers said they were voting for in leaving the E.U.—may be about to be vastly reduced by a cabal of right-wing Conservatives who say they are obeying the people’s will. Such power grabs, of course, are always done in the name of the people.
  • even more alarming is that there is so little concern expressed by the majority of the press and the generally acquiescent BBC. The point is that after the referendum last year, and despite the poor result in the General Election, the right-wing of the Conservative Party has continued traveling in an increasingly undemocratic direction and has, so far, swept all before it. The normally rather sober Hansard Society, an organization dedicated to promoting and strengthening democracy, has called the “broad scope of the powers in the Bill, the inadequate constraints placed on them, and the shortcoming in the proposed parliamentary control of them” a “toxic mix” that will undermine Parliament’s ability to hold May to account or to meliorate the most damaging policies arising from Brexit.
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  • included seven members of the Labor opposition, who astonishingly defied their party, which has just begun to soften its line on Brexit so as to accommodate increasing worries about the economy, employment and workers’ rights. These seven Labor members—Ronnie Campbell (age 74), Frank Field (75), Kate Hoey (71), Kelvin Hopkins (76), John Mann (57), Dennis Skinner (85) and Graham Stringer (67) have an average age of 72, which underlines a truth about the Brexit vote and the lurch to the right in Britain. They are the product of something profound going on among an older generation, even among some left-wingers. These people yearn for a past that does not exist and they do not give one solitary damn for the future of young people who will be forced to inherit the economic mess.
  • Naturally, there are older politicians on both sides of the House who warn about the dangers to democracy contained in the bill, one being the veteran Conservative Kenneth Clark, but at base the great divide in Britain is between generations.
  • question is how much damage the older generation does before being replaced by younger people who are generally more accepting of immigration, do not revere Britain’s “heroic” past, and are part of a connected world that views national borders as less and less important
  • MPs mutter about waiting for the right moment to oppose the government, but the truth is that the energy is all with the anti-democratic side, the one that keeps citing the People’s will but wants to remove power from the People’s representatives. The whole of the Executive is now focused on diminishing the role of MPs and taking the country out of the European Union, come what may, in 18 months’ time. There is literally nothing else of note being debated in Parliament. Brexit sits like a massive weather system over the United Kingdom, draining energy from its national life and politics.
  • Britain already has control of its borders, while the myths about Britain being overrun by foreigners are slowly being exposed by leaks. Two weeks ago, a leaked report showed that the vast majority of students (97 percent) and those who visit Britain on work and visitor visas return home when their time is up. It is shameful that this was not published before the referendum and probably gives as good a reading of May’s true political instincts as anything else. Her government is sitting on 50 separate Brexit impact studies, which it refuses to allow the public to see before Britain leaves the E.U.
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    Authoritarianism can erode democratic institutions even where they are erroneously believed to be strong.
Ed Webb

Iran's Next Supreme Leader Is Dead - Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Outside the years 1999 to 2009, when he headed the judiciary, Shahroudi served from 1995 until his death as member of the Guardian Council, the powerful conservative watchdog that ensures the Islamic consistency and compatibility of parliamentary legislation and electoral candidates alike. He was likewise in the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that selects the supreme leader’s successor, and a member of the Expediency Council, created toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War to adjudicate disagreements between parliament and the Guardian Council; this council subsequently also began advising the supreme leader on the broad contours of policy and strategy. After the 2017 death of its chairman—Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a highly influential former president—Khamenei tapped Shahroudi as his replacement. Shahroudi was therefore clearly a figure Khamenei could rely on, a figure the supreme leader recently eulogized as a “faithful executor in the Islamic Republic’s most important institutions.”
  • Shahroudi presided over a witch hunt against reformist parliamentarians and newspapers, students and intellectuals, human rights activists and, at the end of his tenure, the pro-reformist Green Movement protesting against the fraudulent elections that handed Ahmadinejad a second term
  • Shahroudi is reported to have overseen, directly or indirectly, some 2,000 executions, including of minors
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  • also credited with introducing some reforms, including reinstituting the separation between judges and prosecutors abolished by his predecessor Mohammad Yazdi, suspending stoning as capital punishment, and proposing a bill granting more legal protection to minors
  • If Shahroudi was seen as an outsider with his Iraqi provenance and Semitic-laced Persian, neither quite Iranian nor fully Iraqi, his background at least held out some possibility of appealing to Twelver Shiite communities beyond Iran’s borders, and most critically in Iraq, where Shiites have tended to give velayat-e faqih short shrift. Ever since Saddam’s toppling in 2003, Iraq’s Shiite-majority government has gravitated closer toward Iran, but it continues to maintain a political autonomy at times grating to Tehran.
  • Shahroudi maintained reasonably good ties with all four of Iran’s existing factions: conservatives, neoconservatives, moderate conservatives, and reformists
  • his unique selling point as potential supreme leader lay as much in his cross-factional appeal among the Iranian establishment as in the continuity he represented—two assets critical to Iran’s future political stability
  • Shahroudi was also the only Shiite cleric in the rarefied pantheon of possible successors, or even anywhere, doubly rumored to have been angling for leadership of Iraq’s Shiites. Back in 2012, reports surfaced of Shahroudi building up a patronage network inside Iran’s western neighbor and specifically Najaf, greased by the levy of religious taxes and Iranian state funds. As things appeared, Shahroudi sought to undermine or even replace the aging Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s and therefore Twelver Shiites’ premier spiritual authority. Tehran had a good reason, too: the Iranian-born Sistani—a mirror image of Shahroudi—quietly opposed Iran’s political system based on the supreme leader’s rule, velayat-e faqih.
  • Iran’s internal stability and regime longevity—increasingly challenged by spontaneous protests countrywide over the past year—depend on the political class collectively accepting a supreme leader capable of forging consensus and balancing competing interests. Shahroudi’s unique ability to span the divides of the Iranian political and clerical establishment was one reason his name was repeatedly floated as Khamenei’s eventual successor. He was also both theologically and managerially qualified and among the few relatively nonelderly clerics viewed as politically reliable by Iran’s ruling establishment.
  • the hard-liners’ longtime stranglehold on the key levers of military, judicial, media, and clerical power will now leave little room for Iran’s reformists and moderates, among them current President Hassan Rouhani, to weigh in on the succession process
  • With the first generation of Iran’s revolutionary clerics fast fading out, Shahroudi’s relatively early death at 70 eliminates what is perhaps the most serious and qualified succession candidate so far floated in Tehran’s corridors of power
  • Iran’s acrimonious elite infighting may be normal and not necessarily a sign of regime weakness, but this requires a supreme leader generally accepted by all to adjudicate differences
Ed Webb

The Death of Syria's Mystery Woman - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

  • since the early 2000s, when Bashar al-Assad came to power and loosened the country’s restrictions on private schools and colleges, educational institutions run or influenced by the Qubaysiyat have become ubiquitous in Syria
  • franchises across the Middle East and even as far afield as Europe and the Americas
  • family members who have watched wives, mothers, sisters or daughters burrow deeper into the organization do occasionally complain openly about the group’s peculiar ideas and practices
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  • hybrid hierarchical structure
  • By the early 1980s, just before members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-government Islamist groups went into exile following a failed uprising against then-President Hafez al-Assad, it was commonly said that almost every conservative woman in Damascus was either a disciple of the Qubaysiyat, attended their classes occasionally or at the very least admired them. The group had sunk deeper roots into Syrian society than many who had chosen to challenge the regime directly. Today, the knotted veil and loose dress of the Qubaysiyat have become symbolic of urban Damascene culture as a whole.“When my 20-something-year-old daughter comes home one day wearing the hijab, and slowly grows more religious, how can I, her mother, not wear a hijab also?” recalled one Damascene whose entire family converted from secularists to observant Muslims after their daughter joined the Qubaysiyat.
  • For many supporters of the Syrian revolution, the group was tarnished by the decision in the early years of the uprising by leaders of the Qubaysiyat to be photographed meeting with Assad. The organization itself has exhibited fractures amid the pressure of a conflict that has impacted every sector of Syrian society, with divisions emerging among rank-and-file members over how to respond to the cataclysm of the war and their own leaders’ pragmatic relationship with the Syrian regime.
  • Al-Qubaysi never made public appearances or spoke directly to the press
  • unusually for women in a deeply conservative society, al-Qubaysi (like many of her group’s leadership) never married — devoting her entire life instead to the cause of women’s education.
  • its abandonment of politics led the movement toward other avenues of influence over Syrian society. The organization would come to influence the social scene in Damascus through a network of affordable private schools that offered high-quality education to young women, many of whom were drawn from the city’s conservative upper class. The growth of the movement reflected al-Qubaysi’s own organizational genius, employing tools like strategic marriages with elite figures, well-placed gifts and the acquisition and refurbishment of old properties to serve as schools. At its peak, nearly 40% of private girls’ schools and tutoring services in Damascus are believed to have been run by the organization.
  • the group was divided between leaders who sought to accommodate the regime and rank-and-file members who often sympathized with the opposition. In December 2012, leaders from the group were forced to break their public silence on the uprising to attend a meeting with Assad, where, implicitly, they projected support for the regime by appearing with its leader. A few days later, a protest video by ostensible Qubaysiyat disciples was uploaded to YouTube titled, “Free Women of Damascus Defect from the Qubaysiyat” — a complaint against what many saw as collaboration with an increasingly murderous dictatorship.
  • In 2014, Salma Ayyash, a leader in the group, was appointed as assistant to Mohammed Abdul Sattar al-Sayed, the Syrian government’s minister of endowments. There was no public protest against this appointment from within the movement. More changes would soon follow. In 2018, the same ministry announced the nationalization of the Qubaysiyat and its activities, a development that signaled to many the end of the movement as an independent entity. Since then, the Qubaysiyat has come under the umbrella of a government that has, in the wake of the conflict, sought to extend its influence into every remaining corner of Syrian society.
Ed Webb

How Western Urban Planning Fueled War in the Middle East | The American Conservative - 0 views

  • Architecture has been part of that work. The unspoken assumption was that houses should fit together along alleys and streets, that no private house should be so ostentatious as to stand higher than the mosque or the church, and that the city should be a compact and unified place, built with local materials according to a shared vocabulary of forms. Thick walls of stone created interiors that would be cool in summer and warm in winter with the minimum use of energy. The souk was conceived as a public place, embellished appropriately so as to represent the heart of the city, the place where the free trade of goods expressed the free mingling of the communities.
  • The old souk of Aleppo, tragically destroyed in the current Syrian conflict, was a perfect example of this, the delicate and life-affirming center of a city that has been in continuous habitation for a longer time than any other. That city rose to eminence as the final station on the Silk Road, the place where treasures were unloaded from the backs of camels coming from Mesopotamia onto the carts that would take them to the Mediterranean ports. The fate of this city, which has, in the 21st century, faced destruction for the first time in 5,000 years, is a fitting emblem of what is happening to the Middle East today.
  • it is not only civil conflict that has threatened the ancient cities of the Middle East. Long before the current crisis there arrived new ways of building, which showed scant respect for the old experience of settlement and disregarded the unwritten law of the Arab city that no building should reach higher than the mosque, it being the first need of the visitor to spy out the minaret, and so to find the place of prayer. These new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric
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  • new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric
  • As in Russia and Germany, the arrival of the totalitarian state was prefaced by the arrival of totalitarian architecture
  • a modern city, another piece of anywhere
  • Architectural modernism fed into the Arab inferiority complex: concrete high rises, plazas, geometrical patterns, energy-intensive fenestration, sometimes with a mihrab or a dome stuck on in deference to a history that is no longer really believed in—all these have become part of the new vernacular of a hasty urbanization. The basic idea has been to abandon the great tradition of the Ottoman city, with its many communities in their tents of stone, and to “catch up” with the West
  • architect Marwa al-Sabouni, whose book, The Battle for Home, tells the story of how the conflict in Syria has overwhelmed her own city of Homs. She shows that you cannot destroy the serene and unostentatious forms of the Levantine city without also jeopardizing the peace that they symbolized and which to a measure they also protected
  • The old rabbit-warren city of the Middle East was a conflict-defusing device, a continuous affirmation of neighborhood and settlement. The new city of jerry-built concrete towers is a conflict-enhancing device, a continuous “stand-off” between competing communities on the edge of a place that does not belong to them and to which they in turn cannot belong.
  • Rarely, in any of this, however, has provision been made for the migrants from the villages, who have been compelled to survive in unplanned and unregulated structures, heaped up around the cities with no thought for how they look or for the character of the public spaces beneath them
  • We should remember that the idea of replacing the organic city of customary styles with cleared spaces and blocks of concrete, while it originated among European intellectuals, was first tried out in the Arab world. Le Corbusier, who had attempted in vain to persuade the city council of Paris to adopt his plan to tear down the entire city north of the Seine and replace it with an assemblage of glass towers, turned his attention to the North African city of Algiers instead, which was at the time under French colonial administration. As architectural advisor to the French Vichy government during the war he was able to overrule the elected mayor of Algiers and impose his will upon the city—though the Allied victory abruptly put an end to his plans.
  • Le Corbusier’s scheme is still studied and even treated with reverence in modern schools of architecture. It involved erasing the old city from the map, replacing it with great square blocks that negate the Mediterranean coastline and the contours of the landscape, and surmounting the whole with streets along which automobiles fly above the population. No church or mosque has a part in the plan; there are no alleyways or secret corners. All is blank, expressionless, and cold. It is an act of vengeance by the new world against the old: not a project for settling a place, but a project for destroying it, so that nothing of the place remains
  • the glitzy restaurant style of Dubai, in which vast gadgets, belonging to no known architectural language but looking like kitchen tools discarded by some gigantic celebrity chef, lie scattered among ribbons of motorway
  • Care for one’s place is the first move towards accepting the others who reside there. The thoughts “this is our home,” and “we belong here” are peacemaking thoughts. If the “we” is underpinned only by religious faith, and faith defined so as to exclude its historical rivals, then we have a problem. If, however, a resident of Homs can identify himself by the place that he shares with his fellow residents, rather than the faith that distinguishes him, then we are already on the path away from civil war.
  • decisions are made by officials, and officials belong to the great system of Mafia-like corruption that is the true cause of the Syrian conflict, and which has encouraged the Syrian political elite in recent times to look to Russia as its natural ally
  • Capitalism’s “creative destruction” is the anti-conservative claim that nothing that exists could not be improved easily in a short time by fast, profitable and “efficient” total replacement.
  • in the 1990s there were many popular Syrian TV drama series about how people lived and interacted with each other in the neighborhoods of the old cities in Syria during the late 19th and early 20th century. They depicted the days when the Levant society as it existed in its centuries-old Ottoman era make-up, just prior to the transition into colonial and post-colonial modernity and showed how rich and poor lived together in the same neighborhood, it showed the old houses, the shops & the markets.
  • Roger Scruton is romanticizing. He therefore completely misunderstands the expressive functional reality of ordinary homes and security by focusing on public architecture, which everywhere expresses elite ideals instead of common ones. Take Florence and the Italian Republics. Frequent wars and not infrequently with Muslim empires meant homes had to be defensible and closed off from streets. Only later, briefly, and elsewhere later like in Britain and the US were isolated farm villages open to welcome trade, or US farm homes isolated away from the necessity of group protections because genuine threats had become to rare to proactively defend against them. Similarly, the divide in the Muslim world is between open plans in port cities secured through trade by larger powers that could ensure protection, versus homes way from ports, deliberately closed off against strangers so as to be defensible against frequent invaders. Most of the Islamic world remains like unstable and insecure early Florence. And homes throughout MENA reflect their isolation and insecurity through closed plans, just as much as Spanish ones from Moorish times do, even in the New World.
Ed Webb

The Mainstreaming of Tunisia's Islamists | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Ennahda’s decision to jettison “political Islam” has far less to do with Islam than it does with politics. Judging by its program, its actions, and the people who run it, Ghannouchi’s party remains a conservative Islamic party. That hasn’t really changed. What Ennahda’s carefully orchestrated rebranding demonstrates, however, is just how skillfully its leaders continue to adapt to the changing landscape of Tunisian electoral politics.
  • Ennahda’s leaders had to take into account the fact that a large part of Tunisian society remained devoted to the secularist values aired by the old regime’s leading politicians and that they regarded the new ruling party and its aims with suspicion
  • opponents of political Islam continue to dominate the political scene
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  • The rise of the Islamic State, which continues to boast a startling number of Tunisians in its ranks, compounded the perception that Ennahda had been too lax about security and further undermined the public reputation of political Islam. These developments confronted party leaders with the realization that, no matter how “moderate” Ennahda appeared, entire swathes of the Tunisian electorate would reject its participation in politics point-blank.
  • A large segment of Tunisia’s population, especially outside the relatively cosmopolitan capital, still yearns to see a government infused with Islamic values. Ennahda’s followers in the poorer and more conservative interior continue to view it as a political force that represents them, regardless of its careful ideological recalibrations. When Ghannouchi announced the move away from traditional Islamism, he also proclaimed a separation of the party’s political and religious activities
  • By some accounts, Ennahda is already far more engaged in preparations for the municipal elections set for next spring than any other political party — raising the possibility that it could end up dominating grassroots politics while its competitors remain focused on maneuverings in the capital
  • Ennahda has kept up with the turbulence of Tunisia’s post-revolutionary era by showing a remarkable capacity for pragmatism
Ed Webb

Jordan Protesters Dream of Shift to Prince Hamzah - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Supporters of King Abdullah argue that the attention paid to Prince Hamzah is evidence that, in contrast to the other Arab Spring movements, the protests here are essentially conservative. The wave of demonstrations that broke out last week was set off not by any expressed yearning for freedom, they say, but by the end of fuel subsidies that threatened to bankrupt the country. His loyalists also say that at its base the protest movement is driven by opposition to King Abdullah’s program of economic liberalization and privatization, a sharp break with King Hussein.
  • The opposition movement has directed special hatred toward King Abdullah’s glamorous Palestinian wife, Queen Rania, whose influence the organizers have cited as one of their top complaints. Tensions between East Bank natives and Palestinian immigrants, who make up about half of Jordan’s population, are the major fissure in Jordanian politics. And while East Bank natives have dominated the public sector, Palestinians have flourished in the private sector and stand to gain from liberalization.
  • “When the people choose their government, they will accept the government’s decisions — even a price hike — because then it is a decision of the people, too,” said Obada al-Ali, 22, a medical student at a rally in Irbid, Jordan’s second-largest city. “It is not just a matter of money. It is about the will of the people.”
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  • privatization and economic liberalization shook up an old elite and drew allegations of corruption
Ed Webb

Egypt blames media for plot to topple Morsi - www.thenational.ae - Readability - 0 views

  • the media has become a weapon in the war over Egypt's future, diminishing the possibility of reaching any political accommodation
  • Islamist-run newspapers and broadcasters, along with Muslim Brotherhood government officials, allege that secularist media moguls have put in motion a plot to topple the country's first democratically elected president
  • Meanwhile, privately owned media organisations controlled by more secular Egyptians intimate that the Brotherhood is secretly infiltrating all branches of the state in a bid to force conservative values on Egypt's 84 million people
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  • Saleh Abdel Maqsoud
  • In an interview with The National on Monday, the veteran Muslim Brotherhood1 journalist insisted that he had transformed the ministry's small empire of state-run television channels and radio stations from being a mouthpiece for the president into an honest broker and non-partisan "voice of the people".
  • "Of course there is a conspiracy," he said in his office at the Maspero building on the Nile in downtown Cairo. "All you have to do is turn on the television and watch some of the private channels. They call a few dozen protesters a 'demonstration'. They call for toppling the regime." "Some powers don't want to use the democratic tools, the ballot box," he said. "They want to use violence and rally protesters."
  • After taking office last year, he replaced many executives who served during the Mubarak era and told staff that they should include all perspectives in their coverage. He also removed a rule preventing women who wear a headscarf from appearing as presenters and focused on reducing expenditures to tackle more than 20 billion Egyptian pounds (Dh10.8bn) of debt held by the state media
  • The main rule for his presenters and journalists was to accept the president as a legitimately elected leader and not call for his resignation. "But we interview people who say the president should resign," he said. "We don't censor. All views are welcome."
  • His claim "is simply laughable and can be refuted with 15 minutes of exposure to a newscast or commentary show", said Adel Iskandar, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Washington and an expert on Arab media. "For the most part, the news and political component of state media remains predominantly government public relations as it has always been … In three years, the institution basically switched bosses from Mubarak to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to the Brotherhood."
  • For decades, the red lines for journalists were clear. Criticising Mubarak's policies was permissible in Egypt before the 2011 uprising that ended his reign, but few dared to directly condemn the president. After the uprising, the rules all but vanished, leaving a host of divisive commentators from across the political spectrum to regularly accuse their rivals of secret plots.
  • "The nobility in the Egyptian media has disappeared. No one knows what to trust because it feels like everyone has an agenda, including Islamist shows, secular shows and the state media."
  • Egypt had no independent regulator for the media. Such an institution could create a legal framework for the media and establish a code of conduct, but the dissolution of the parliament last summer has put new laws on hold.
Ed Webb

The Jordanian State Buys Itself Time | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

  • the elections have afforded the regime room to breathe
  • For the moment, the state seems confident that it commands the loyalty of the silent majority. For years, polls have found that most Jordanians are politically conservative, holding positive impressions of the king and royal family and darker views of political parties -- including the Islamists. Jordan has long been regarded as an oasis of stability compared to its neighbors who have faced invasion, foreign occupation and insurrection. Polls and interviews indicate that Jordanians put a high premium on a sense of security, the maintenance of which is of course a mainstay of regime rhetoric.
  • The opposition, on the other hand, draws its strength primarily from concerns about the economy and complaints about corruption in the cabinet and Parliament. Many in the opposition also note the state’s well-documented history of using “political reform” as a sop to critics. [3] In tough times, the regime pledges to open up the political system, but then offers changes that do little to alter the established power structure.
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  • holding an election that is pronounced clean and successful may be of less value to the state than is now apparent. As the year progresses, the public is likely to evaluate the new parliament and government by their ability to address popular concerns
  • High turnout and good reviews of election day are the foundations of the state’s claim to have a new mandate. But election monitors in Jordan have made the same point time and time again: An election is much more than the casting of ballots, and a successful poll does not equate to the advent of democracy.
  • monitors were also unanimous in their assessment that the system underpinning the vote falls considerably short of ideal. Their criticism centers on the distorted representation inherent in the election law and the political culture that gerrymandering promotes. Jordan’s voting system boosts the fortunes of candidates whose support base lies in large tribes or localities, while handicapping political parties and unaffiliated candidates who have national agendas. In Jordan’s last five parliamentary elections, most of the seats have gone to such independent or “tribal” candidates. Once elected, the MPs have little ability to shape national policy in any event, since the king appoints all other branches of government.
  • The incentives created are perverse. Voters may feel pushed to back the candidate who returns home bearing spoils from the treasury, rather than the one who represents their vision for the nation. Indeed, deputies in past assemblies have been lambasted for passing out rewards to supporters while ignoring national issues -- one voter, on election day, derided previous parliaments as “service departments.” Polls have found that large portions of the public see parliamentarians as highly corrupt. It is easy to see how this system becomes self-reinforcing. Voters feel that their vote means little on the national stage, while candidates for office seek to become local patrons while feathering their own nests. The result can be vote buying and coercive campaigning.
  • the “tribal” bias of the election system boosts turnout, since the groups that benefit directly from the parliamentary spoils system show up to keep the spoils coming
  • ambient mistrust
  • According to a July 2012 poll by the International Republican Institute, more Jordanians think the country is going in the wrong direction than the right one and many feel deep discontent with the weak economy and perceived government corruption. The same poll found Jordanians taking a dim view of politicians in general, and parliamentarians in particular, who despite being elected appear less popular than royally appointed officials. And in a September 2012 CSS survey, a big portion of the public said the state's reforms had been insufficient -- though large majorities still said it was better to change the system through political action than through street protest.
  • There are indications that the new parliament is more representative -- or at least more diverse -- than the old one. Candidates from al-Wasat al-Islami, a centrist Islamist party, came away with 16 seats, a substantial increase in their representation. Leftists also picked up around a dozen seats (depending on who is counting). Whether either of these groups will be credible to the protesters in the streets is an open question: In the past, many leftist and Islamist MPs have been characterized as “safe,” regime-aligned candidates rather than a genuine opposition. Palestinian Jordanians likewise seem to have gained ground, now holding roughly 35 seats as opposed to 20 or so in the last parliament. Women’s representation also increased slightly, with women taking two national list seats and two district seats, in addition to 15 seats from the 10 percent quota they are allotted under the election law.
  • If Parliament is unable to make serious progress toward improving the economy, an item which usually tops the list of the public’s grievances, that will also have consequences. The first challenge the new deputies will face, the yearly budget, will be doubly critical, establishing both the MPs’ economic credentials and their ability to have a serious debate
  • What the state has won is time, which it may use to carry out a reform program, to appease its core constituents or to do a bit of both. In the past, Jordan’s electoral exercises have generally been preludes to consolidations of regime power. But history is not destiny. The state may travel down the path of reform it has laid out, toward parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy, even at the cost of upsetting its traditional clients. Or it may attempt to delay reform again, using the same bait-and-switch it has employed for decades
  • The unfolding disaster in neighboring Syria will likely keep security high on the local agenda; on the other hand, the state faces another moment of potential crisis, as sometime early in 2013, probably April, conditions of Jordan's IMF loan agreements will require the state to engage in another round of subsidy removal like the one that triggered the November 2012 unrest
Ed Webb

The myth of the Islamist winter - www.newstatesman.com - Readability - 0 views

  • In Tunisia, as in Egypt, the Islamists who came to power through the ballot box are seeing their popularity erode and are tempted to hold on to power by recourse to authoritarian measures. But they have to deal with the legacy of the Arab spring. They face a new political culture: now, one where people who disagree with the government take to the streets; where there is no reverence for established power and the army and the police no longer inspire fear.
  • consider the precise nature of this authoritarian turn because it bears little resemblance to the “Islamic revolution” often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Nahda, the Renaissance Party, in Tunisia. It is, on the contrary, a conservative and paradoxically pro-western “counter-revolution”
  • The electoral and social base of the Egyptian regime is not revolutionary. Instead of trying to reach a compromise with the principal actors of the Arab spring, Morsi is attempting to get all the supporters of the new order on his side. The coalition he is building is based on business, the army, the Salafists and those elements of the “people” that are supposedly tired of anarchy
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  • economic model is neoliberal
  • Morsi has accepted the outlook of the IMF, not because he has been forced to do so, but because it is an approach he shares. This will bring further privatisation and competition. And because the price paid by swaths of the population will be severe, the government will need a functioning apparatus of repression and to break the trade unions. It will also have to gain the acquiescence of the army, in exchange for immunity and the right to regulate its own affairs, particularly in the economic sphere
  • Time is against Morsi, because the economic measures that he wants to introduce will make the government increasingly unpopular. And, on the other hand, continued popular protest will require him to call on the army, which will support him, but at a price – the political and economic autonomy that the military is asking for runs counter to the Brotherhood’s programme of economic liberalisation
  • the other battleground for the Muslim Brotherhood is control of the religious sphere. Like al- Nahda in Tunisia, it has discovered that this is considerably more diverse than it had thought. Moreover, figures who had previously been relatively docile where the state was concerned, such as Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, have reasserted the autonomy that they were granted by the Arab spring. This means that the only way for the government to wrest back control of the religious sphere is to place it under the authority of the state (specifically, to submit the mosques to the diktat of the ministry of religious affairs)
  • if there were a credible and unified opposition, it could beat al-Nahda in the elections. Consequently, Tunisia’s chances of staying democratic are better than Egypt’s
  • State control of religion would in fact go beyond institutions and extend to religious orthodoxy, leading to limitations being placed on Sufi practices and theological discussions. Even if the Muslim Brothers succeed in the first part of the operation – nationalising faith institutions – the price they will have to pay for it will be high, because the imams won’t appreciate being turned into civil servants. They also run the risk of destroying the religious dynamic of their movement: if the state controls religion, what use is a religious “brotherhood”? And if religion is identified with the state, there is a grave risk that the unpopularity of the government will affect faith institutions in turn, as has happened in Iran
  • Religion is becoming just one instrument of control among others – rather than a social, economic and ideological alternative. This is, in short, the failure of political Islam
  • Al- Nahda is neither as strong nor as deeply rooted as the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement is more diverse, with a branch that is, if not more liberal, then at least more realistic. And because of their commitment to violence, the Tunisian Salafists are not credible allies
  • Al-Nahda is coming into conflict with the unions, either for the same reasons as in Egypt (a fascination with the free market) or for reasons more specific to Tunisia (it wants allies on its left but cannot bear to compete with a truly popular movement of grass-roots activists)
  • As in Egypt, al-Nahda proposes to use its own ministry of religious affairs to control the religious sphere, although this statism could rebound against the movement
  • a politics more redolent of Pinochet in Chile than of Khomeini in Iran
  • The Islamists are succeeding neither in delivering the goods in economic and social terms nor in giving the impression that they are architects of an authentic social project that goes beyond the stamping of “Islamic markers” on a society over which they have increasingly little control
  • To get through the period of austerity and the economic difficulties that go with it, they should have done more to secure a “historic compromise” with the liberals. The alternative to such an alliance is not “Islamic revolution”, however. What is taking shape instead is a coalition that is con - servative in politics and morals but neoliberal in economics, and thus open to the west
Ed Webb

A Betrayed Revolution?: On the Tunisian Uprising and the Democratic Transition - 0 views

  • it appears that if there was "betrayal" of the revolution, it is not necessarily in the opposition between "religious conservatives" and "secular progressives." The partisan tactic of pitting these two camps against one another masks the difficulty of the entire political class to meet the popular demands for social justice.
  • the voices of social resistance are never killed: they occupied sites in the capital until the month of March, they occupied factories, besieged the ministries, and, more recently, occupied the streets of Sidi Bouzid in the summer of 2012. They no longer oppose and harass Ben Ali’s regime, but instead, shift their frustration toward the provisionary government led by the Ennahda party. They were reunited under a simple slogan, that of the revolution before the final “Dégage”: “Work, freedom and national dignity,” similar to the winter variety heard sometimes as “Bread, Water, No to Ben Ali!”
  • The consideration of social fractures shows to what extent the confrontation between the "secularists" and "religious," given so much scope in the French newspapers, is not a central concern. There is no denying that there were certainly demonstrations to protect the status of Tunisian women, and there is equally an obvious presence of radicalized young Islamists in the streets of Tunisia who intend to impose a puritan and orthodox rule. Yet, the reading of social tensions in Tunisia in terms of identity imposed both by the defenders of secularism (Tunisian specificity, Bourguibist inheritance) and by the Islamists (who, in this way, mask their inability to meet the social demand for justice) is an illusion. After the elections of October 2011 the Islamists, who had strongly emphasized their religiosity and the persecutions they had suffered under the former regime – deemed, in particular, to distance them from corruption – have suddenly lost their subversive potential. After being persecuted, after presenting themselves as "pure," they are now in power.
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  • the Revolution did not bring the Islamists to power, rather they seized power in the context of the elections that followed. Notably, it is by shifting debates into the field of identity that they could win these elections, while parties, notably the left, failed to build a single and audible speech in the confusion that reigned
  • the revolution did not take place in a “fallow” social field or a tabula rasa. The national movement and the struggle for independence contributed to the formation of political and administrative elites. Bourguiba's long reign was not only terror and could not prevent the development of a strong trade union movement, or of a feminist movement still active despite its appropriation under the Bourguibist regime, who built an image of liberating the country and its women,[3] and then under the Ben Ali dictatorship, who used it as an excuse to earn its stripes of modernist despotism, fighting against the Islamist threat. This wealth of mobilization and the social movements’ vigor has had a paradoxical fate: they have produced highly recognized characteristics of modern Tunisia (notably secularism and the status of women), while being the victims of a repression
  • the extent of the crackdown on leftist movements from 1968 to 1978, under the Bourguiban power, which eventually struck the Islamists, led to the implementation of a "selective" education of contemporary history in primary and high schools, and the Benalist propaganda simply replacing that of Bourguiba
  • the constitution of the party led by former Interim Prime Minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, Nida Tounès. Such an agglomeration of political forces would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. Indeed, this party brings together many of the former partisans of Ben Ali’s regime - and Bourguiba’s – and, like Essebsi himself, a fraction of the post-communist left under the banner of the struggle against the Islamists and for Tunisia’s modern identity. There are those who have been adversaries for a long time, employing a platform that takes great care to remain on the side of national identity (especially vis-à-vis the outside world), of "progressivism," and of modernity, to avoid social and ideological issues. He stands in front of Ennahda as its mirror image. The emergence of such a force, unknown in terms of electoral score and what this might represent, shows the effect of "retrospective treason" produced by the passage from a revolutionary situation to a new context of electoral democracy. Meanwhile, it gave neither the time nor the effort to develop social positions establishing democracy. The press is weak and most often simply amplifies the voices of political actors without deepening the issues. Associations are quite present but very few of them have taken up the question of democracy, with the possible exception of those who were involved during the campaign
  • The union has also reaffirmed its independence and willingness to engage itself "alongside civil society and the Tunisian people in its diversity to defend not only the working masses, but also and above all, the Republic and its institutions.[6]” It is not surprising that the UGTT is the only prevailing force. It relies on its 517,000 members, its territorial coverage, and its history.
  • Here, there seems to be a form of necessary betrayal of the "democratic revolution”—difficult to perceive and to decrypt, bitter to those who experience it, but which certainly does not amount to one party’s representative takeover over the rest.
Ed Webb

BBC News - Chokri Belaid death: Tense Tunisia to bury slain leader - 1 views

  • The death of Mr Belaid, a leading critic of the governing party has proved to Tunisians what they already feared, says our correspondent, and Friday's funeral is certain to be an emotional and highly charged event. Government critics say that in recent months, Ennahda has allowed ultra-conservative Muslim groups to impose their will and opinions on what was always regarded as a bastion of Arab secularism.
  • four opposition groups - including Mr Belaid's Popular Front - announced that they were pulling out of the country's constituent assembly in protest
Ed Webb

Donald Trump's Media Attacks Should Be Viewed as Brilliant | Time.com - 0 views

  • the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
  • the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with
  • a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business
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  • Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
  • “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.We are not a nation of logicians.
  • The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument
  • This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
  • Truth is what you can get away with.
  • The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
  • If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
  • explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification
  • Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.
  • it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
  • we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
  • Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.
  • anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days
  • In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
  • I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
  • George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
  • Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.
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    Helpful in thinking about how people adapt to authoritarian regimes and societies, or don't
Ed Webb

Erdogan accuses TUSIAD chairman of treason - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

  • Erdogan responded the next day by accusing Yilmaz of “treason against the country.” He said: “The TUSIAD chair cannot say, ‘Global capital won’t come to such a country.’ If he said that, then that is treason against this country. After you said that, with what nerve are you going to invite the ministers of this government to TUSIAD? With what nerve you will come to this prime minister and his government to solve your problems regarding your investments?"
  • Yilmaz’s warnings should be taken seriously. He and TUSIAD are not known for being highly politicized
  • It is also not a coincidence that TUSIAD’s warnings were voiced following the Dec. 17 bribery and graft investigation that led to a dramatic escalation in the AKP-Fethullah Gulen Movement war. The government’s tendency to use its financial auditing powers to influence capital groups and opposition politicians it doesn’t like gained momentum after that date. The latest example came on Jan. 17, when the bank accounts and assets of Mustafa Sarigul, a candidate for mayor of metropolitan Istanbul and a member of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party, were impounded by the Saving Deposits Insurance Fund (TMSF) 73 days before the local elections on grounds of a $3.5 million credit debt from 16 years ago. 
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  • The way for Turkey to achieve a sustainable growth rate by financing its current deficit is to make the country attractive for direct foreign investment. That in turn requires Turkey to have a properly functioning legal system, properly and justly operating independent institutions, good governance, a stable democracy and a free market — in short, to be predictable. Authoritarian and arbitrarily governed countries first lose their predictability.
  • The same situation has emerged concerning the Koc Group, which has been subjected to one tax penalty after another. The Koc Group, the largest capital group of Turkey, attracted the ire of Erdogan during the June 2013 Gezi Park protests when the nearby Divan Hotel it owns opened its doors to those escaping the pepper gas and brutality of the police. Erdogan perceived that as a challenge and accused the Koc Group of being accomplices to the protesters. Alluding to the group June 17, he actually said, "We know those who cooperate with terrorists and accommodate them in their hotels. We will settle accounts on this. Now we have an interest lobby emerging.” We all discovered how that account was be settled when tax audit teams from the Ministry of Finance accompanied by police raided the Koc companies.
  • Mustafa Boydak, the president of the Chamber of Industry of the Anatolian industrial city of Kayseri and a well-known conservative industrialist, denounced the tax audit of the Koc Group and called on the government "not to become party to the business world and not to treat the companies that carry Turkey as an enemy.” The government clearly didn’t appreciate Boydak’s call and responded with a tax audit of the Boydak Holding group of companies.
  • Some public corporations led by Turkish Airlines and private companies with ties to the government withdrew 900 million lira ($391 million) of deposits from Bank Asya, recognized as the Gulen movement's bank, on the same day without waiting for the deposits to mature, and put the bank in a tough bind. Bank Asya was saved from going under when companies and businessmen affiliated with Gulen deposited the same amount of money.
  • The first allegations of the AKP government using tax penalties as a political weapon came out in 2008, when the Dogan Media Group was openly targeted by Erdogan and fined $1.6 billion
Ed Webb

'Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen dusman' or, Why Erdogan Remains so Popular - 0 views

  • a poster held aloft at the Bakırköy rally: Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen düşman. “Those who know you are your followers, those who don’t are your enemies.” What struck me about this slogan was that it perfectly summed up the strength of the political message Erdoğan is espousing. It is a mantra that encompasses both support and resistance; it presupposes, even requires, opposition, while simultaneously dismissing that opposition as illegitimate
  • his narrative becomes even stronger the more he is seen to be under attack by his “enemies.”
  • Erdoğan’s slogan of the “national will”—a concept that sounds deeply creepy concept to many people—is far more compelling and less nebulous to many Turks than notions such as “the separation of powers” and “the rule of law,” particularly given that law itself has been tainted by the motives of the Gülenists.
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  • Opponents of the government view these accomplishments with a jaundiced eye. To them, physical buildings seem insignificant when compared to fundamental rights that are denied or threatened: a woman’s right over her body, for instance, which Erdoğan constantly contests with his threats against abortion and his oppressive glorification of motherhood. There is a large portion of the population, however—and in general a poorer segment of the population—to whom the AKP’s concrete achievements are far more substantial than a series of concepts, which, when they do impact their lives (a conservative girl forced to have a backstreet abortion, for instance), tend to not to be view in politicized terms: as part of fate, or the will of God, or the way of the society.
  • the AKP is performing—unlike many of its predecessors—the basic functions of a government. Without drawing attention away from the corruption, lack of consultation, and environmental destruction underlying much of its development (though the latter issue lacks popular traction in Turkey), the opposition should acknowledge clearly and unequivocally the massive material progress of the last decade, and the AKP’s role in it
  • Unlike in Gezi, where the government’s “coup” allegations were patently ridiculous to outsiders, no one really disputes that Erdoğan is correct when he claims the graft probe is an attempt to overthrow him. In the eyes of many Turks, it is this fact, rather than the truth or falsehood of the allegations themselves, which resonates most strongly, tying the graft probe into a long-established and deeply emotive historical and political narrative.
  • Drawing on the idea that he is facing a coup-like attack, Erdoğan repeatedly seeks to channel the spirit of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, another charismatic populist who took an authoritarian swerve in his later years and was ultimately deposed in a military coup ın 1960 and hanged following a show trial. “What they did to Menderes, they want to do to me,”
  • whatever the veracity of the corruption allegations, they have undoubtedly been raised as a calculated attempt either to eject Erdoğan from office, or to weaken him as much as possible at the polls
  • Just as Turkey’s opposition misapprehend the solidity of government support and the deep resonance of Erdoğan’s message, so his own camp misapprehends the significance of the still-fractured opposition ranged against him. This misapprehension issues from Erdoğan’s narrative itself (and the endemic divisiveness of Turkish politics), namely the claim that he and his supporters are synonymous with the concept of democracy. It is this belief that allows him to claim with a straight face that winning 49.9 percent of the vote in the last general elections allows him to claim ownership of “the national will,” even though more than half of the electorate voted for someone else
  • What is missed here is that the success of the AKP in its first decade, and the reason Turkey was viewed with such high regard by much of the outside world during this time, was that it was a democracy operating with the consent of almost all its people. Even those who despised the AKP acknowledged its right to govern. Erdoğan, of course, still has a very strong democratic mandate in the basic sense, and he may hold on to it in upcoming elections. But he will no longer be able to have stability unless he is willing to enact drastically repressive measures, and that will cost Turkey its democracy.
  • the rising perception that given the extent of the government’s alleged corruption and the high stakes (Erdoğan could end up in prison if he ultimately loses power), the elections may be rigged
  • Erdoğan may be deeply alienated from half of the population, but he absolutely has his finger on the pulse of the other half, and he knows it.
Ed Webb

Middle East Report Online: Dead-Enders on the Potomac by From the Editors - 0 views

  • Arab populations have heard a variation on Washington’s long-standing theme: “The Obama administration seeks to encourage political reforms without destabilizing the region.” That sentence, taken from the National Security Network’s January 27 press release, says it all: Democracy is great in theory, but if it will cause any disruption to business as usual, Washington prefers dictatorship.
  • The reasons for this stance have changed little over the decades since the US became the superpower in the Middle East. Strategic interest number one is the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the world economy, unimpeded by a rival hegemon or a regional upstart that might raise prices dramatically or deploy the oil weapon to extract political concessions from the West. Number two is the security of Israel. But third -- not to be confused with tertiary -- is the stability of satrapies that Washington can trust to safeguard its other interests and initiatives, whether the US-sponsored “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians (and the blockade upon Hamas that Egypt helps to enforce) or the campaign to curtail Islamist movements for which Tunisia’s Ben Ali so eagerly signed up. The US rewards its clients with cash and copious armaments, with scant regard for their records on democratization or human rights. After the Yemeni regime canceled elections in 2009, its aid package was quintupled. There have always been numerous dissenters within the US foreign policy apparatus who know the damage that is being done, but they are resolutely kept out of positions of real authority.
  • Amidst the hand wringing in the mainstream media over Obama’s “limited options” in Egypt, through whose Suez Canal cruise oil tankers and the warships of the US Fifth Fleet, the truth is that the entire debate over democracy promotion in the Arab world and greater Middle East has been one long, bitterly unfunny joke. The issue has never been whether the US should promote democracy; it has been when the US will stop trying to suppress it. The bargains with tyrants lay a “commitment trap” for Washington, which must solemnly swear allegiance to each strongman lest others in the club have second thoughts about holding up their end. The despots, in turn, assume that the Marines or their equivalents will swoop in to the rescue if need be. Most, like Ben Ali, are mistaken, if nothing else because an ambitious underling is often waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, just as Iranians have not forgotten the Carter administration’s eleventh-hour loyalty to the Shah some 32 years later, neither will Pakistanis soon forgive the US for standing by Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
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  • When it comes to the aspirations of ordinary Arabs for genuinely participatory politics and true self-determination, those vaunted American values are suspended, even when “special relationships” and hydrocarbon riches are not directly at issue. And the anti-democratic sentiment is bipartisan: On this question, there is less than a dime’s worth of difference between “progressive” Democrats and Republican xenophobes, between pinstriped State Department Arabists and flannel-clad Christian fundamentalists, between oil-first “realists” and Israel-first neo-conservatives. There is none.
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    Harsh. Possibly fair.
Ed Webb

Sisi channels Salazar…whoever he was - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Second, as opposed to their more famous totalitarian cousins, these authoritarian rulers did not rely on political mobilization. While some leaders, like Salazar and Franco, distrusted mass politics and actively promoted public apathy, others, like Dollfuss and Metaxas, tried and failed to accumulate a mass following. Others, including Vargas, approached political mobilization cautiously. Despite some populist tendencies, including a healthy dose of regime propaganda, Vargas never formed a political party or mass movement and even went so far as to ban all organized political activity in Brazil in 1937.
  • power was located in the dreary upper reaches of the bureaucracy (sometimes joined by the security apparatus) rather than in any political party
  • Sisi appears to take charge of an Egyptian state that has pulled leading institutions (army, religious apparatus and so on) together. While he may direct national policy in a broad sense, he seems to lack the tools or the interest to build a system in which all of these bodies answer directly and constantly to him.
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  • the cautious nature of Sisi’s political actions and pronouncements is especially marked. Not only has he aligned his country (for a hefty reward) with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but he has also spoken respectfully of Egypt’s relationship with the United States (to no obvious domestic benefit – almost everybody else in Egypt has adopted a hysterical tone about the United States). Sisi seems quite comfortable with the conservative tone Egyptian foreign policy has maintained since the era of former president Anwar Sadat even while he allows his followers to stoke memories of a more assertive Egypt.
Ed Webb

Arab Media & Society - 0 views

  • tool in the hands of Arab states
  • a subversive force was seen in the 1970s, when cassette tapes of preachers denouncing governments for tyranny and corruption spread in Egypt and Iran
  • Arabic satellite news and entertainment media established by Gulf Arab states
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  • “new Arab public sphere”
  • two distinct political positions that characterized Arab politics in the period up to the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010-11: an approach on Al Jazeera sympathetic to Islamist groups across the region and more conservative pro-Western approach in Saudi controlled media
  • The Arab uprisings came at the moment of a third stage in the development of modern Arab media: that of social media
  • bitterly contested conflicts between youth-driven protest movements and governments who were caught absolutely unawares due to a variety of factors: close cooperation with Western governments, elaborate security apparatus and the arrogance that comes with being in power unchallenged for so long
  • Media in the post-Spring Arab world currently has been targeted by the forces of the state in their counter-revolutionary pushback
  • Gulf governments have focused on social media in particular
  • Since the military coup that removed the elected post-uprising government, the Egyptian government has used traditional preferred instruments of television and print media for propaganda and control
  • Another important feature of Arab media is how it has become an arena for the Sunni-Shia sectarian schism
  • media has been revamped and brought back into action as one element of a multi-faceted campaign involving the law, religion, surveillance and forces of coercion to face a range of internal and external enemies seen as challenging the very survival of governing elites. New media were momentarily a weapon against these entrenched systems of rule; for now, the rulers have mastered the new array of technologies and are back in command
Ed Webb

Can dry hotels boost Tunisia's ailing tourism sector? - 0 views

  • The Sandra Club Hotel in Hammamet, a popular coastal town in the north of Tunis, aims to position itself as a “family hotel,” and thus serves no alcohol, has segregated spas and massage rooms, and religious entertainment shows throughout Ramadan.Inaugurated by the head of the Islamic Ennahda movement Rachid Ghannouchi on June 2, it is the second alcohol-free hotel in this touristic town, following Azur Plaza, which opened four years ago. There are about 10 similar establishments in Tunisia.
  • a controversy about the concept of “halal tourism” in the country. While Ministry of Tourism officials are reluctant to use the term, let alone encourage it, many people in the sector consider it a new measure that could boost Tunisia’s declining tourism sector. The sector, once one of the economic engines of the country, received a heavy blow following an attack by the Islamic State on a hotel three years ago that killed 39 people and wounded 40 others; the victims were mostly British
  • “This hotel, with a capacity of 500 guests, had been closed since 2015 and all its staff was laid off,” Saffar told Al-Monitor. “In 2018, I rented it and rehired the old employees. I introduced some reforms and advertised it as [an alcohol-free] hotel to attract Tunisians and Algerians as well as other Arab tourists.”
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  • The Ministry of Tourism rejects the term “halal tourism” or “Islamic tourism.” Seif al-Shaalali, media adviser to the tourism minister, said that it was the hotel owner's prerogative to decide whether to serve alcohol, but he added that the ministry does not use the label "halal hotels" as an official description. 
  • “Azur Plaza in Hammamet was the country’s first experience in the family tourism sector back in August 2014. This initiative was launched at the prodding of our conservative friends and families, including veiled sisters who are banned from entering swimming pools because of their burkinis. The trend started with one small hotel and now there are now many of this type across the Tunisian governorates.” Qaydara stressed that this type of tourism has saved several businesses from bankruptcy and created hundreds of jobs in the tourism sector.
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