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Ed Webb

Tunisia's amnesty law accused of protecting Ben Ali-era corruption - Africa - RFI - 0 views

  • A law granting amnesty to thousands of people linked to former President Zinedine Ben Ali has sparked outrage with critics saying it whitewashes corruption. But, despite protests in parliament and on the streets, the ruling coalition is sticking to its guns.
  • President Beji Caid Essebsi's ruling party has been pushing the reconciliation law since 2015, arguing it will improve the investment climate and help reviveTunisia's ailing economy. "I don't understand what all the fuss is about," says Labidi, arguing that it fills a legal loophole in Tunisia's 2013 Transitional Justice Law.
  • many civil society leaders fear the law will whitewash the entrenched corruption that fuelled the public anger behind the 2011 Arab Spring. "This reconciliation bill is a set back to freedom and liberty in Tunisia," Amine Allouche, a member of parliamentary watchdog Bawsala told RFI.
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  • Faced with widespread resistance when the law was first proposed two years ago, the government has had to amend it to exclude businessmen from the amnesty proposal. In the final version, pardons will only be granted to those who followed orders from corrupt leaders but did not benefit personally, essentially just public officials.
  • "They were all working for the corrupt dictator Ben Ali. So they could potentially all argue that they were simply taking orders and that they were all victims of a corrupt judicial system. So how is it possible to hold anyone to account?"
  • "The reconciliation law was proposed with the explicit goal of undermining the transitional justice law and setting up a parallel mechanism whose end goal was amnesty for the corrupt."
Ed Webb

Why Tunisia just passed controversial laws on corruption and women's right to marry - T... - 0 views

  • an old script used by Tunisian rulers since the country’s independence in 1956 that pits identity against class, cultural modernization against social justice. Women’s rights — rather than gender equality or sexual freedom — historically played a central role in Tunisian government’s effort to showcase the country as modern and forward-looking. But women’s rights have always been left to the president’s discretion. State-led feminism has contributed to the stifling of grass-roots women’s movements. And women engaging in associations that did not fall in the rubric of good secular state feminism were harassed and tortured.
  • the law is widely perceived as a means for Essebi’s political party, Nida Tounes, to “pay back” the business leaders that supported its campaign in 2014
  • Another important site where the identity and class divide is made obsolete is civil society itself. The social movement Manich Msamah (I will not forgive) — which mobilized and organized against the various drafts of the amnesty bill since 2015 — is composed of young Tunisians who share a common interest in social justice, but hold very different attitudes toward religion and marked by significant political disagreements. However, movements like Manich Msamah and civil society organizations have successfully turned into platforms for reciprocal learning, where calls for dignity, social justice and rule of law take precedence over the old narrative opposing class and identity.
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  • The repeal of the directive that banned Muslim women from marrying non-Muslim men comes a month after Essebsi announced his intention to change laws about gender inequality in inheritance. This proposal was lauded as bringing about a necessary legislative reform, but also criticized as an attempt at revivifying the modernist-secularist divide in the country. But the Islamist party Ennahda didn’t take the bait. It refrained from publicly opposing the reform of inheritance law and the repeal of the 1973 marriage law. Whether or not the president’s objective in proposing these changes was to force Ennahda to take a stance against “progress” and gender equality, this strategy did not work. Ennahda has refrained from opposing any of these so-called modernist projects.
  • while it is true that the nexus of corrupt business elite, police and government media is winning back significant power, the vote of the amnesty law has also triggered a unique display of protest and resistance that was utterly unimaginable under Ben Ali
  • while the old regime tactics remain active in Tunisia, the collective public energy of the 2011 revolution is still alive
Ed Webb

Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws | WIRED - 0 views

  • After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.
  • Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”
  • Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.
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  • Decades ago, Iranian law required women to take off headscarves in line with modernization plans, with police sometimes forcing women to do so. But hijab wearing became compulsory in 1979 when the country became a theocracy.
  • Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.
  • Some face recognition in use in Iran today comes from Chinese camera and artificial intelligence company Tiandy. Its dealings in Iran were featured in a December 2021 report from IPVM, a company that tracks the surveillance and security industry.
  • US Department of Commerce placed sanctions on Tiandy, citing its role in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China and the provision of technology originating in the US to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The company previously used components from Intel, but the US chipmaker told NBC last month that it had ceased working with the Chinese company.
  • When Steven Feldstein, a former US State Department surveillance expert, surveyed 179 countries between 2012 and 2020, he found that 77 now use some form of AI-driven surveillance. Face recognition is used in 61 countries, more than any other form of digital surveillance technology, he says.
Ed Webb

An Uncertain Future for Jordanian Youth - POMED - 0 views

  • Jordan’s strategic relationships and regional importance continue to win it unmatched financial support from the international community. And as a result, the government has felt little urgency or pressure to undertake real reform or respond to the legitimate demands of its youth. With trust between the youth and the regime low and the perception of corruption high, however, remaining complacent carries grave risks for the country’s stability.
  • “Economic optimism is scant, particularly among the youth,” the Arab Barometer found, adding that the economic crisis was “leading many to consider migration despite global travel restrictions.”
  • the rate of suicide in Jordan has also increased over the past few years amid the dire economic conditions. In 2020, the rate was the highest in 10 years and 45 percent higher than the year before, with one suicide on average every other day. After university graduates threatened earlier this year to commit mass suicide over widespread unemployment, Jordan’s parliament passed legislation criminalizing suicide and attempts to commit suicide in a public place, doubling the fine if it is a mass suicide attempt.
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  • There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis
  • Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.
  • Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist. 
  • Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.
  • we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank
  • organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.
  • the attitudes of ruling elites and public officials toward youth are dismissive
  • the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation
Ed Webb

Shura Council discusses laws 'to control protests and confront thuggery' - Politics - E... - 0 views

  • The government of Prime Minister Hisham Qandil is currently in the process of drafting two new laws aimed at regulating the right of street protest and combating the proliferation of thuggery
  • the Committee on National Defence launched scathing attack against private TV satellite television channels, taking them to task for alledgely inciting protesters to launch violent attacks on several state buildings in recent days, notably Al-Ittihadiya presidential palace in Cairo's district of Heliopolis on 1 February
  • The 26-article law also makes it obligatory that the interior ministry be notified of any given protest or demonstration's date, objective and site. The notification request must be submitted to the ministry five days in advance of the date of the demonstration. The interior ministry reserves the right to forbid "demonstrations" or "public gatherings and meetings" if they risk "disrupting public peace and security."
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  • the draft law prohibits protesters and demonstrators from chanting slogans that "might sow the seeds of sedition," or wearing black face coverings
  • Responding to a question about the negative impact of repressive laws on the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, Saleh insisted that "the popularity of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have skyrocketed in recent days." "We were not defeated as the opposition claims, and President Morsi will continue fighting violence and corruption," he added.
Ed Webb

Torture in Bahrain Becomes Routine With Help From Nokia Siemens - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them
  • “The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.
  • Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.
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  • “We are very aware that communications technology can be used for good and ill,” NSN spokesman Roome says. The elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-center business, and the company has since established a human rights policy and due diligence program, he says. “Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions,” he says.
  • Besides Bahrain, several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year -- including Egypt, Syria and Yemen -- also purchased monitoring centers from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor. Trovicor equipment plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.
  • Uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain have drawn strength from technologies such as social-networking sites and mobile-phone videos. Yet, the flip side of the technology that played a part in this year’s “Facebook revolutions” may be far more forceful. Rulers fought back, exploiting their citizens’ digital connections with increasingly intrusive tools. They’ve tapped a market that’s worth more than $3 billion a year, according to Jerry Lucas, president of McLean, Virginia- based TeleStrategies Inc., organizer of the ISS World trade shows for intelligence and lawful interception businesses. He derives that estimate by applying per-employee revenue figures from publicly traded Verint’s lawful intercept business across the mostly privately held industry.
  • The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and other human rights activists have blamed Nokia Siemens for aiding government repression. In 2009, the company disclosed that it sold a monitoring center to Iran, prompting hearings in the European Parliament, proposals for tighter restrictions on U.S. trade with Iran, and an international “No to Nokia” boycott campaign. While there have been credible reports the gear may have been used to crack down on Iranian dissidents, those claims have never been substantiated, NSN spokesman Roome says. In Bahrain, officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He says he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.
  • During the Arab spring, it was easy to spot the company’s fingerprints, says Gyamlani. Tuning in to Germany’s N24 news channel at his home in Munich, he immediately suspected that governments were abusing systems he’d installed. Failed uprisings stood out to him because of the way the authorities quashed unrest before it spread
  • Schaake says surveillance systems involving information and communications technology should join military items such as missile parts on lists of restricted exports. Schaake helped to sponsor a parliamentary resolution in February 2010 that called for the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, to ban exports of such technology to regimes that could abuse it. The commission hasn’t implemented the nonbinding resolution. The U.S. Congress passed a law in 2010 barring federal contracts with any businesses that sold monitoring gear to Iran. An investigation ordered by Congress and completed in June by the Government Accountability Office was unable to identify any companies supplying the technology to Iran, partly because the business is so secretive, the agency reported.
Ed Webb

Libya bans Gadhafi-era officials from state posts - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • Under pressure from armed militias, Libya's parliament passed a sweeping law Sunday that bans anyone who served as a senior official under Moammar Gadhafi during his 42 year-long rule from working in government.
  • likely to further stall the country's already rocky transition to democracy by ousting elected lawmakers
  • critics say that the law was passed at gunpoint. Militias had surrounded several government buildings in Tripoli last week barring officials from work. Their vehicles mounted with rocket-propelled grenades kept watch on the street during the vote
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  • Human Rights Watch said that while Libyans have a right to see officials who abused their positions under Gadhafi or committed crimes be removed from office, the law is too sweeping. "This law is far too vague - potentially barring anyone who ever worked for the authorities during the four decades of Gaddafi's rule,"
  • Parliamentary spokesman Omar Humeidan said after a live broadcast of the vote that a committee will be formed to see how the new law will be implemented. The committee will be comprised of judges and rights activists already serving on an "integrity commission" that vetted ministers for Gadhafi-era ties. That body will be dissolved. A new clause, though, requires members of the new vetting body to be at least 35 years old and have a degree in Islamic law
Ed Webb

Will Morocco's new law protect women from violence? | Sexual assault | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • In a bill approved by parliament on February 14 after years of debate among political parties, civil and women's rights groups, the new law defines violence against women as "any act based on gender discrimination that entails physical, psychological, sexual, or economic harm to a woman. It also criminalises cyber harassment and forced marriage". The new law imposes tougher penalties on perpetrators, including prison terms ranging from one month to five years and fines from $200 to $1,000. The law, however, does not explicitly outlaw marital rape or spousal violence and does not provide a precise definition of domestic violence.
  • "When a man harasses you, he knows you can do nothing about it. Because you will be afraid of those people who are around who will think that you are the reason because you attracted him. "The problem is always you. This is why there are many places where I can't wear whatever I want, especially if I am alone,"
Ed Webb

Why Muslim-majority countries need secular citizenship and law-making | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • once a political system is based on a religion, it is almost impossible to define the citizens who do not follow that religion as “first class.” In Iran and Iraq, rising legal and political influence of Shiism has led the discrimination against Sunni citizens, and in Pakistan and Egypt the opposite has happened, to a certain extent. Moreover, several Christian and non-Muslim minorities have faced discrimination by various means, including apostasy and blasphemy laws, in Sudan and Malaysia, among other cases.
  • Truly maintaining equal citizenship to all regardless of their religious identities is crucial for Muslim-majority countries to achieve democratization, consolidate the rule of law, and end sectarian and religious tensions.
  • equal citizenship in Muslim-majority countries will empower those who defend rights of Muslim minorities facing persecution and even ethnic cleansing in such cases as China, India, and Myanmar, and experiencing Islamophobia in western countries. By maintaining the rights of their own minorities, Muslim-majority countries may gain stronger moral and legal grounds to defend rights of Muslim minorities at the global level.
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  • Islamic jurisprudence inherently contradicts democratic politics
  • In the twentieth century, secularist rulers adopted secular legal systems in Turkey, Iraq, Tunisia, and several other Muslim-majority cases. These assertive secularist regimes were mostly authoritarian. Therefore, they did not allow the law-making processes to be truly participatory. Secularism appears to be necessary but not sufficient for participatory legislation, too.
  • As my new book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison explains, there existed a certain level of separation between religious and political authorities in the first four centuries of Islamic history.That is why the first systematic book about “Islamic” politics was written as late as the mid-eleventh century. It was Mawardi’s The Ordinances of Government. The book argues that an Islamic government is based on a caliph (an Arab man from the Quraish tribe) to rule all Muslims. The caliph holds the entire political and legal authority and stays in power for life. The caliph delegates his legitimate authority to sultans, governors, and judges.The second book, which systematically defines an Islamic political system, was written in the early fourteenth century. It is Ibn Taymiyya’s Sharia-based Governance in Reforming Both the Ruler and His Flock. Instead of the one-man rule of a caliph, this book emphasizes the alliance between the ulema and the state authorities. Ibn Taymiyya interprets the only phrase in the Quran about authority, “uli’l-amr” (4:59), as referring to the ulema and the rulers (though other scholars have interpreted it differently).
  • To implement Mawardi’s idea of caliphate today would imply to establish an extreme autocracy. Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas are not helpful to solve modern political problems either. In fact, the ulema-state alliance is the source of various problems in many Muslim-majority countries.
  • To maintain a certain level of separation between Islam and legal systems may limit the exploitation of Islam for political purposes.
  • recent Islamization (at the political, legal and ideological levels) has weakened secular fundamentals of citizenship and law-making in many Muslim-majority countries.
Ed Webb

Jordan: Alarm raised over 'vague and repressive' cybercrime draft law | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • A proposed cybercrime law in Jordan has been met with criticism from activists, journalists and human rights campaigners, who say that the legislation will curtail freedom of speech and expression. The bill, which was proposed earlier this week, outlines a number of restrictions which could result in imprisonment or heavy fines. The bill targets the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), devices that allow users to circumvent restrictions and disguise their identities, use of which could see people serving up to six months in prison.
  • criminal charges for behaviour such as “undermining national unity” and “online character assassination”, terms that critics argue are dangerously vague.
  • The new law is intended to replace Jordan’s 2015 cybercrime laws.
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  • “Internet users will no longer be able to know if their online conduct will be considered a crime or not, resulting in even more online censorship.”
  • he law is paving the way to further issues, such as webpage admins being held responsible for comments posted by others. “The scope of the text is so broad it can be applied to admins of WhatsApp groups too, making normal users potential censors of free speech.”
  • Around a dozen rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, have urged the Jordanian government to withdraw the bill.  “The draft legislation will jeopardise digital rights, including freedom of expression and the right to information, and will ultimately fail in achieving the Jordanian government’s stated goals of tackling 'disinformation', 'hate speech' and 'online defamation',” their joint statement said
  • there will be consequences for offences such as “provoking strife”, “promoting, instigating, aiding or inciting morality” and “contempt for religions”.
  • Earlier this month, Jordan blocked the popular satirical news site AlHudood, in a move denounced as censorship and an attack on freedom of expression.
Ed Webb

Why do Egyptian courts say the darndest things? - 0 views

  • the judiciary does have incomplete but real institutional guarantees of independence: It has a long history; a sense of mission to the rule of law; an impressive and well-developed legal framework; considerable autonomy in personnel and budgetary matters; constitutional guarantees of independence and due process; and rulers who routinely pledge fealty to the rule of law. But six problems have been on full display in recent years – and while the first three are likely to get slowly better, the other three might even get a bit worse.
  • Perhaps the most important official was the prosecutor general – responsible for deciding whom to investigate and prosecute and whom to ignore. (For that reason, much of the judicial tussling among various political forces after the 2011 uprising has focused on this post.)
  • the judges generally have a very strong sense of loyalty to the Egyptian state and supporters of political and social order. As suspicious as they may sometimes be of executive influence, Egyptian judges tend not to behave as freestanding actors mediating between the state and the society or among various social actors, but as enforcers of the law and interests of the state, standing above and guiding the society in what they see as a principled fashion
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  • I have certainly found some judges who are already troubled by the enthusiasm displayed by some of their colleagues for the counterrevolution (my term, definitely not theirs!)
  • what I have referred to as the “Balkanization” of the Egyptian “wide state,” a phenomenon that renders the judiciary overly isolated from the entire society rather than just walled off from executive interference and partisan politics
  • Egypt’s legal framework, the one that judges take such pride in upholding, is deeply authoritarian ­– since all of its lawmakers have been authoritarian. Laws governing civil society, political life, the press, states of emergency, local government, religion, education, or virtually any feature of Egyptian life have been written in a way that augments state authority and undermines or bypasses accountability to democratic mechanisms. And this has often been done in a manner sufficiently vague as to turn many citizens into potential criminals when they undertake what they might see as normal activities
  • Egypt’s judicial system is dependent not only on its own integrity and judgment but also on the evidence gathered and presented by the security apparatus – an apparatus that has shown little sign of integrity and judgment in recent decades. Cases are investigated and prosecuted by the public prosecution, to be sure, and the public prosecution is a judicial body. But when various security forces turn over cases involving outlandish plots – such as the one implicating Emad Shahin – the public prosecution seems at least so far to go along with the game. And I do not see any sign of any political desire to rein in the security services now.
Ed Webb

Three Decades After his Death, Kahane's Message of Hate is More Popular Than Ever - MERIP - 0 views

  • on November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York City, a seminal event in the annals of American and Israeli history. Years after his death, Kahane’s killing is considered the first terror attack of the group that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda.
  • Kahane had spent the previous 22 years calling for Israel’s parliament to be dissolved and replaced with rabbinic rule over a Jewish theocracy, based on the strictest interpretations of the Torah and Talmud. He openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity, but an act of worship.[1] His ideology continues to resonate: In the September 2019 elections to Israel’s parliament the explicitly Kahanist Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit) got 83,609 votes, putting it in tenth place in a crowded field of over 30 parties.
  • The victims of JDL-linked terrorist attacks in the United States were usually innocent bystanders: the drummer in a rock band who lost a leg when a bomb blew up the Long Island home of an alleged Nazi war criminal; the Boston cop who was seriously injured during his attempt to dispose of another bomb intended for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the elderly lady who died of smoke inhalation in her Brooklyn flat above a Lebanese restaurant torched after its owners were accused of sympathies with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the young Jewish secretary who was asphyxiated when another fire burned through the Manhattan office of a talent agency that promoted performances of Soviet ballet troupes.
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  • Kahanists are the FBI’s prime suspects in the 1985 assassination of popular Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh who died in a bombing outside Los Angeles because he called for a two-state solution (which became the official policy of the US government less than a decade later).[2] Odeh’s murder had far-reaching implications, scaring off a generation of Arab-American activists from advocating on behalf of Palestinians.
  • even many sectors of the Israeli right were embarrassed by Kahane’s shameless racism, and by the end of his first term in 1988 he was banned from running again.
  • Six years later, in 1994, the Israeli government, then led by the Labor Party, declared his Kach party a terrorist organization. But by that point, the Kahane movement had already been active for over a quarter of a century, leaving a wake of destruction. To date it has produced more than 20 killers and taken the lives of over 60 people, most of them Palestinians.[3] Credible allegations put the death toll at well over double that number, but even the lower confirmed figure yields a higher body count than any other Jewish faction in the modern era.
  • For decades, Kahanists—as followers of Kahane are called in Israel—have repeatedly attempted to leverage their violence to trigger a wider war and bog Israel down in perpetual armed conflict with its neighbors. And once Israel’s military might is truly unassailable, Kahanists say, Jewish armies must march across the Middle East and beyond, destroying churches and mosques and forcing their Christian and Muslim worshippers to abandon their beliefs or die at the sword.
  • Just months after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, DC on the White House lawn, a former candidate for Knesset in Kahane’s Kach party, Baruch Goldstein, committed the largest mass murder by a single person in Israeli history, shooting dead 29 Palestinians and wounding over 100 more at a mosque in Hebron. During the protests that followed, the Israeli Defense Forces killed perhaps two dozen more Palestinians. Exactly 40 days later, at the end of the traditional Muslim mourning period, Hamas began its retaliatory campaign of suicide bombings. Over the next three years this campaign would claim over 100 Israeli lives and harden many Jewish hearts against the prospect of peace with Palestinians. Today, Kahanists can convincingly claim credit for crippling the fragile peace process while it was still in its infancy.
  • In Hebron in 1983, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, Kahanist Israel Fuchs sprayed a passing Palestinian car with bullets. In response, Israel’s defense minister ordered Fuchs’s Kahanist settlement razed to the ground. A decade later in 1994, when Goldstein carried out his massacre, also on Purim, Israel’s defense minister put Hebron’s Palestinian residents under curfew and ordered the local Palestinian commercial district locked and bolted. The market has been shuttered ever since. Last year, Israel’s defense minister announced that the market would be refurbished and repopulated—by Jewish residents. On the same day, the state renovated nearby Kahane Park, where Goldstein is entombed, and where Kahanists gather every year to celebrate Purim and the carnage Goldstein wrought.
  • Many of Kahane’s American acolytes followed him to Israel, including top JDL fundraiser and Yeshiva University provost Emanuel Rackman, who took over as rector, and then chancellor, of Israel’s Bar Ilan University. Under Rackman’s tutelage, Bar Ilan’s Law School became an incubator for the Israeli far-right. The most infamous of these students was Yigal Amir. Inspired by the Goldstein massacre, Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, dealing a death blow to Israel’s liberal Zionist camp. Amir carried out the murder on the five-year anniversary of Kahane’s killing.
  • Both American-born followers of Kahane, Leitner and Ben Yosef went from armed attacks against Palestinians to court room advocates for their fellow religious extremists. Both enlisted at Bar Ilan Law School after serving short prison sentences. Together with his wife Nitzana Darshan, who he met there, Leitner established the highly profitable Israel-based lawfare group Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center (ILC). After Ben Yosef earned his law degree at Bar Ilan, his American allies founded the Association Center for Civil Justice (ACCJ), a US-based lawfare group that has earned millions of dollars and has for years funneled significant sums to Fuchs, Ben Yosef and other Kahanists.
  • After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, his Labor-led government was replaced by the secular right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who promptly appointed ex-Kahanists Tzahi HaNegbi and Avigdor Liberman to cabinet positions. But that did not satisfy the appetite of the Kahanists, who resolved to coax the Likud even further to the right. Founded by longtime Kahane supporter Shmuel Sackett, the Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction succeeded in catapulting its candidate Moshe Feiglin into the role of deputy speaker of the Knesset where he called on the government to “concentrate” the civilian population of Gaza into “tent camps” until they could be forcefully relocated.
  • Today, prior membership in the Kahanist camp no longer carries any stigma within the Likud.
  • the original Kach core group has rebranded itself to sidestep Israeli law, now calling itself Jewish Power, and are consistently courted by the rest of the Israeli right
  • Kahanists have had even greater success penetrating the halls of power at the local level where their representatives on Jerusalem city council have been included in the governing coalition since 2013. In 2014, Kahanist Councillor Aryeh King—now deputy mayor—used widely-understood religious references to incite an assembly of religious Jews to kill Palestinians. Later that very night, a group of religious Jews did exactly that, kidnapping and beating Palestinian teen Mohammad Abu Khdeir, forcing gasoline down his throat and torching him to death from the inside out.
  • After Kahane’s death, top Chabad rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, also an American immigrant to Israel, inherited Kahane’s position as the most unapologetically racist rabbi in the country. In 2010 Ginsburgh helped publish an influential and vicious religious tract authored by one of his leading disciples called The King’s Torah, which sanctions organ harvesting from non-Jews and infanticide (if a Jew suspects that the child will one day constitute a threat).[9] Ginsburgh’s frequent tributes to Kahane’s memory, including repeated proclamations that “Kahane was right” have cemented the loyalty of third-generation Kahanists, including the latter’s namesake grandson, settler youth leader Meir Ettinger.
  • Thirty years ago, even if Israeli rabbis thought like Kahane and Ginsburgh they would not dare to speak these sentiments out loud, much less publish and promote them. Under Netanyahu’s rule, however, such sentiments are routinely supported financially and politically by the institutions of the Israeli state. In 2019, Israel’s education minister presented Ginsburgh with the Torah Creativity award at an annual event sponsored by his ministry.
  • The principles that Rabbi Meir Kahane popularized—that liberal democracy is an undesirable alien idea and that non-Jews must be driven down, and preferably out of Greater Israel altogether—have seeped deep into mainstream Israeli society.
Ed Webb

Elon Musk: Good for MENA Twitter? - by Marc Lynch - 0 views

  • The MENA online ecosystem is not a good place for freedoms or civil debate right now, to say the least. The Digital Authoritarianism collection I edited last year makes for grim reading. Many MENA states have set in place legal frameworks criminalizing online dissent (and a lot more than just dissent). The pervasive use of Israeli-designed digital surveillance tools has turbocharged the ability of autocratic regimes to spy on their citizens (or on anyone else). Online discourse is plagued by armies of bots and trolls. And the suppression of Palestinian activist content shows how social media platforms have proven an uneven playing field when it comes to content moderation. Apocalyptic takes on what Musk might do really do need to grapple with how terrible things already are.
  • Musk explained his approach to free speech in a recent tweet: “By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.” That may sound good to some people in an American context, I suppose. But in the MENA, it would play directly into the hands of authoritarian regimes which have spent years constructing elaborate legal and normative frameworks to criminalize online dissent. Those laws don’t just ban violent hate speech, but range from political dissent, criticism of royal family members or the military, human rights monitoring, even dancing on TikTok. Following these cybercrime laws as a guide to content moderation would entail censoring a wide range of legitimate political speech - the opposite, presumably, of what an avowed free speech advocate would want to see.
  • If new Twitter policies drawn from the right wing understanding of the American online arena were applied consistently in the MENA context, it could potentially ease the suppression of Palestinian voices. I mean, that wouldn’t be the intention and it probably wouldn’t, but it’s worth thinking about.
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  • if he really means requiring users to authenticate their identity with some form of legal ID, that would mean a world of trouble for users in highly repressive MENA states. Many activists and dissidents face extreme consequences should their identities be discovered. So do many LGBTQ, atheist, or other users from marginalized or even criminalized communities
  • The bot armies really are annoying, and if Musk could figure out a way to remove them then the MENA region would benefit greatly. Disinformation, harrassment and abuse (especially of women), polluting hashtags to make conversation impossible, obnoxious trolling, intimidation… all of these have contributed to making MENA Twitter at worst almost unusable, and at best a highly distorted reflection of reality. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran are among the worst offenders among states, but the problem is endemic
  • Sure, if Musk actually does end up taking over and running Twitter (big ifs, still), he probably wouldn’t actually have those positive effects, at least not intentionally. But it’s still tempting to read some real significance into his intriguing little public spat with Waleed bin Talal, where he asked “What are the Kingdom’s views on journalistic freedom of speech?”
Ed Webb

Kuwait overturns law criminalising 'imitation of opposite sex' - 0 views

  • Kuwait's constitutional court Wednesday overturned a law that criminalises "imitation of the opposite sex" in a move Amnesty International said was a breakthrough for transgender rights in the region.  Kuwaiti lawyer Ali al-Aryan, who filed a lawsuit to overturn Article 198 of the penal code two years ago, confirmed that the law had been overturned, saying it violated personal freedoms, which are stipulated in the constitution. 
Ed Webb

How Tunisia dealt with the 'Islamic question' - Amanpour - CNN.com Blogs - 0 views

  • “There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 
  • there will be no sharia or anti-blasphemy laws in the Tunisian constitution
  • Rabbi Benjamin Hatab leads Tunisia’s main synagogue and said that Ghannouchi had reached out to the country’s Jewish community. "He declared that the country would not change and that the only difference would be that it would be more democratic than Ben Ali's Tunisia,” the Jewish leader told Ynet.
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  • constitutions are built on what's agreed upon
  • “I wanted to tell the Salafists that they must be - they must work under the law because the law will give them all the ability to form political parties, to work in societies, to work in mosques,” he said about the video. “What I wanted to do is to convince them to become part of the legal system, like other countries like us, like leftists or like radical groups in Germany or in Italy and Ireland, which left - which abandoned violence and now work under the law.”
  • Tunisian society is a Muslim society, but a moderate one. That's why there is no hope for any radical group to control the Tunisian society, because it's a society which went through a revolution against dictatorship and will not allow any group like that, even in the name of a religion
Ed Webb

Tunisia: Parliament Shouldn't Undercut Transitional Justice | Human Rights Watch - 0 views

  • “Tunisian authorities have already hampered the work of the Truth and Dignity Commission by refusing to fully cooperate with it and by adopting a controversial law on administrative reconciliation,” said Amna Guellali, Tunisia director at Human Rights Watch. “By voting ‘no’ to extending the commission’s work, parliament would be voting ‘yes’ for impunity.”
  • known by its French initials IVD
  • It said an extension was necessary in light of the numerous hurdles it had encountered, including the government’s lack of cooperation, and difficulties in accessing government archives and military court case files.
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  • mandated to investigate all human rights violations from 1955, shortly before Tunisia’s independence from France, to 2013
  • transferring cases of egregious human rights violations to specialized courts, which the transitional justice law and subsequent implementing legislation established but which have not begun hearing cases
  • a dozen more hearings covering various human rights violations during the presidencies of Habib Bourguiba from 1956 to 1987 and Ben Ali, from 1987 to 2011, such as torture, abuses against union rights, sexual violence against women imprisoned for political reasons, and violations of economic rights
  • 62,000 complaints
  • Tunisian authorities have not investigated or held anyone accountable for the vast majority of torture cases, including notorious cases resulting in death in custody
  • parliament’s approval, on September 13, 2017, of a law on “reconciliation in the administrative field,” which offers blanket impunity for civil servants implicated in corruption and embezzlement who did not benefit personally
Ed Webb

Under Sisi, firms owned by Egypt's military have flourished - 0 views

  • Maadi is one of dozens of military-owned companies that have flourished since Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former armed forces chief, became president in 2014, a year after leading the military in ousting Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.
  • In interviews conducted over the course of a year, the chairmen of nine military-owned firms described how their businesses are expanding and discussed their plans for future growth. Figures from the Ministry of Military Production - one of three main bodies that oversee military firms - show that revenues at its firms are rising sharply. The ministry’s figures and the chairmen’s accounts give rare insight into the way the military is growing in economic influence.
  • Some Egyptian businessmen and foreign investors say they are unsettled by the military’s push into civilian activities and complain about tax and other advantages granted to military-owned firms
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  • In 2016, the military and other security institutions were given exemptions in a new value-added tax (VAT) law enacted as part of IMF-inspired reforms. The law states that the military does not have to pay VAT on goods, equipment, machinery, services and raw materials needed for the purposes of armament, defense and national security.The Ministry of Defense has the right to decide which goods and services qualify. Civilian businessmen complain that this can leave the system open to abuse. Receipts for a cup of coffee at private sector hotels, for example, add 14 percent VAT. Receipts at military hotels do not. Employees at the military-owned Al-Masah Hotel in Cairo told Reuters that no VAT was charged when renting venues for weddings and conferences.
  • The Ministry of Military Production is projecting that operating revenues from its 20 firms will reach 15 billion Egyptian pounds in 2018/2019, five times higher than in 2013/2014, according to a ministry chart. The ministry does not disclose what happens to the revenues. The chairmen of two of the firms said profits go to the ministry or are reinvested in the business.
  • “I don’t want to be a local shop. I want to be a company that has the capacity to export and compete internationally.”
  • The chairmen of two military engineering companies, Abu Zaabal Engineering Industries Co and Helwan Engineering Industries Co, said in recent years it had become much easier to access financing through the Ministry of Military Production.
  • Military companies receive an exemption from import tariffs under a 1986 law and from income taxes under a 2005 law. Cargoes sent to military companies do not have to be inspected.
  • The Ministry of Military Production signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s GCL Group last week to build a solar panel factory worth up to $2 billion. The military has taken over much of the construction of intercity roads from the Ministry of Transport and now controls the toll stations along most major highways.
  • Economists and investors say reforms tied to a $12 billion three-year IMF program signed in Nov. 2016 should lay the ground for economic expansion. But foreign investors are still shying away from Egypt, apart from those focusing on the more resilient energy sector. Non-oil foreign direct investment fell to about $3 billion in 2017 from $4.7 billion in 2016, according to Reuters calculations based on central bank statistics.  
  • foreign investors were reluctant to invest in sectors where the military is expanding or in one they might enter, worried that competing against the military with its special privileges could expose their investment to risk. If an investor had a business dispute with the military, the commercial officer said, there was no point in taking it to arbitration. “You just leave the country,” he said.
  • Egypt’s military, the biggest in the Arab world, has advantages.It enjoys financial support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, staunch supporters of Sisi since he toppled the group they see as a threat to the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood. Western powers see Cairo as a bulwark against Islamist militancy. Egypt receives $1.3 billion in military aid annually from the United States alone.
  • In 2015, the defense minister issued a decree exempting nearly 600 hotels, resorts and other properties owned by the military from real estate taxes
  • Among projects the Ministry of Military Production announced in 2017 was a plan to plant 20 million palm trees with an Emirati company and build a factory to make sugar from their dates. It agreed with a Saudi company to jointly manufacture elevators. The military inaugurated the Middle East’s biggest fish farm on the Nile Delta east of Alexandria.
  • At bustling Cairo squares, people line up to buy subsidized meat and other food handed out from trucks sponsored by the military. Sisi said he had instructed the military to enter the market “to supply more chicken to push down prices.”Some disagree with such measures on the grounds the military’s mission is to protect the country from external threats.“We have reached a point where they are competing even with street vendors,”
Ed Webb

Tunisia's Authoritarians Learn to Love Liberalism - Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Despite Tunisia’s history of worker militancy under the more than 70-year-old Tunisian General Labor Union, Interior Ministry laws from prerevolution Tunisia read that police and other internal security services—which fall under the authority of the Interior Ministry—are not allowed to form professional unions, nor to strike. So as the post-Ben Ali era witnessed a blossoming of civil society, the creation of countless nongovernmental organizations, and the spread of public debate, internal security employees took advantage of the newfound opening to create unions
  • “The regimes [prior to and after the revolution] used us. They want to put all the blame for abuses on us,” he said. “Before, it was oppression. Anyone of us could be fired for any reason. The station chief could say, ‘Hand me your badge and pistol and get out.’ So we demanded union rights, and we demanded that our colleagues who’d been dismissed for technical reasons—of course not those who stole or kidnapped—are brought back.”
  • Many Tunisians, from ordinary citizens to politicians to human rights workers, say that the security unions often protect the interests of the security state embodied in the Interior Ministry and protect their members from accountability for past and ongoing abuses, including murder. The portrait that emerges is of a security sector that has managed to precisely use Tunisia’s newfound liberal freedoms to entrench its own authoritarian power—to turn the power of the Tunisian revolution against itself.
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  • the unions’ most dangerous intervention has been their advocacy for the “Prosecution of Abuses Against the Armed Forces” draft law. In 2015, after the passage of a counterterrorism law, police unions began pushing for the Ministry of the Interior-drafted bill, which would, according to an Amnesty International report, “authorize security forces to use lethal force to protect property even when it is not strictly necessary to protect life, contrary to international standards.” It would also outlaw the “denigration” of the security forces and criminalize the unauthorized publication of “national security” information—a vague law posing an obvious threat to journalists.
  • Yassine Ayari, a rebellious Tunisian MP, is one of the country’s youngest, at 37. He’s also the only MP to have called for the dissolution of a security union. In a clamorous cafe in the basement of Tunisia’s parliament, he said that at several critical junctures since the revolution, the unions have intervened to protect those in the security apparatuses caught up in cases of torture or murder—citing the unions’ 2011 besieging of a military court that was trying officers accused of killing protesters, their call for members not to attend hearings by Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, and their storming of a courthouse to stop a trial and release five colleagues accused of torture
  • When police units have been accused of torture, they have responded with vicious defensiveness
  • the police unions aren’t just hostile to individuals claiming police abuse. They also oppose post-revolutionary institutions aimed at reckoning with the past and achieving a semblance of accountability. Hammami said, “Police unions have also been very hostile to the IVD (the French acronym used for Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission, charged with carrying out investigations of almost 60 years of abuses, whose mandate ended in December of last year). The IVD summons officers that might be involved in cases they’re investigating. [The unions] have encouraged their members not to cooperate. They issue statements publicly on Facebook. They put out the message to their members that they don’t have to cooperate with the IVD. Sometimes it’s even more aggressive, saying, ‘Don’t go.’”
  • Truth and Dignity Commission President Sihem Bensedrine said that she believes the security unions are one of the parties most responsible for the undermining of transitional justice in Tunisia. “One of the strongest anti-justice groups are the police unions,” she said. “We have in our final report published their communiqués where they call for police not to testify before the IVD, and where they say they will not assure the security of the courts judging the police officers.”
  • the old regime elements in government need the security forces if they want to maintain power and return Tunisia to the way it was before the revolution. “The old powers want to come back,” she said. “They’re trying to use the police unions to do this. They’re organizing themselves to repress our free voices and protect themselves from accountability,”
Ed Webb

Calls in Egypt for censored social media after arrests of TikTok star, belly dancer - R... - 0 views

  • Egyptian lawmakers have called for stricter surveillance of women on video sharing apps after the arrests of a popular social media influencer and a well-known belly dancer on charges of debauchery and inciting immorality.
  • Instagram and TikTok influencer Haneen Hossam, 20, is under 15 days detention for a post encouraging women to broadcast videos in exchange for money, while dancer Sama el-Masry faces 15 days detention for posting “indecent” photos and videos.
  • “Because of a lack of surveillance some people are exploiting these apps in a manner that violates public morals and Egypt’s customs and traditions,”
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  • Hossam denied any wrongdoing but Cairo University - where she is studying archaeology - said it would enforce maximum penalties against her which could include expulsion.
  • Several women in Egypt have previously been accused of “inciting debauchery” by challenging the country’s conservative social norms, including actress Rania Youssef after critics took against her choice of dress for the Cairo Film Festival in 2018.
  • In 2018 Egypt adopted a cyber crime law that grants the government full authority to censor the internet and exercise communication surveillance. A media regulation law also allows authorities to block individual social media accounts.
  • Egyptian women’s rights campaigner Ghadeer Ahmed blamed the arrests on rising social pressures on women and “corrupt laws”. “[These laws] condemn people for their behaviour that may not conform to imagined social standards for how to be a ‘good citizen’ and a respectful woman,” she wrote in a Tweet.
Ed Webb

A Verdict on Change | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Any democracy worthy of the label requires (among other things) a relatively efficient and impartial judiciary. Yet today, more than five years after the regime of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled, attempts to reform the judiciary (which encompasses some 16,000 employees) are proceeding slowly at best.
  • “If you go to a working-class cafe, you might run into someone you passed judgment on,” he tells me. “You have an image to maintain in society. You have to give a positive example.” (In Tunisia, it would seem, the upper classes don’t often find themselves in court.)
  • The old autocrats — Ben Ali and his predecessor Habib Bourguiba — habitually regarded the courts as an extension of their own executive power, and used them to crack down on their political opponents and bolster their allies. Judges who resisted would get reassigned to backwater postings.
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  • “You can feel that the priority of the state isn’t to create an independent judiciary,” he says, noting that the government isn’t taking seriously the advice and suggestions of judges for how to approach reform.
  • Corruption is a particularly sensitive issue. In a 2013 survey by Transparency International, more than half of Tunisian respondents said they perceived the judiciary to be corrupt or extremely corrupt. And the fact that there have been very few prosecutions of old regime figures — despite considerable evidence of their involvement in systemic malfeasance — has helped to tar the image of the entire justice system.
  • relations between judges and the police, who cozily coexisted under the old regime, are now experiencing serious friction as the interests of the two sides diverge
  • Judges who enjoyed relative freedom from criticism in the old days now find themselves under newfound attacks from human rights advocates, who accuse the judiciary (and the police) of using the country’s harsh anti-drug laws to harass government critics. Zammit says that virtually all judges are in agreement that the law is overly strict, which is why they routinely issue only the mandatory minimum sentence to drug offenders. “If you don’t think someone should be prosecuted for marijuana, don’t criticize the police or judges,” Zammit says. “Change the law.” And that’s the job of elected lawmakers, not judges.
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