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Terri Soifer

Israel's options after Mubarak - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 2 views

  • Some have suggested that Israeli concern is focused on avoiding a revocation of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. It is not. Insisting on Egyptian adherence to the peace treaty with Israel is a legitimate position, has international support, and also accords with both Israeli and Egyptian interests.
  • There were a set of regional policies pursued by the Mubarak regime which lacked popular legitimacy. These included the closure imposed on Gaza, support for the Iraq war and for heightened bellicosity toward Iran, and playing ceremonial chaperone to an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that became farcical and discredited.
  • he second approach advocates an urgent return to the peace process. Neither will work. The first will exacerbate Israel's predicament, and the second is too little too late.
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  • t would be perhaps Israel's best and last chance for a two-state solution. While it would involve cutting Israel’s losses, it would also have the potential of unleashing huge benefits - economic, security and more, for an Israel accepted as part of the tapestry of a democratic Middle East.
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    Thanks for sharing this Terri! I really liked the article. Though the third option would require a lot of optimism, I think it seems like the most promising hope for future peace in the country.
Ed Webb

Annals of National Security: Syria Calling: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Assad said in an e-mail to me that although Israel was “doing everything possible to undermine the prospects for peace,” he was still very interested in closing the deal. “We have to wait a little while to see how things will evolve and how the situation will change,” Assad said. “We still believe that we need to conclude a serious dialogue to lead us to peace.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      Back-channel diplomacy, one of the occasional functions of journalists.
  • “Syria is eager to engage with the West,” he said, “an eagerness that was never perceived by the Bush White House. Anything is possible, as long as peace is being pursued.”
  • Iran is a crucial factor motivating each side.
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  • “Of course, Syria will not suddenly move against Iran,” Kerry said. “But the Syrians will act in their best interest, as they did in their indirect negotiations with Israel with Turkey’s assistance—and over the objections of Iran.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      For what it's worth, I concur with Sen Kerry's judgment here - the Syrian regime is very pragmatic.
  • In his e-mail after the Gaza war, Assad emphasized that it was more than ever “essential that the United States play a prominent and active role in the peace process.” What he needed, Assad said, was direct contact with Obama. A conference would not be enough: “It is most natural to want a meeting with President Obama.”
  • “Barak’s appointment does not change the fundamental dynamics of the coalition, but it means that Bibi [Netanyahu] has a Defense Minister who will be on board for dealing with Syria, who wants to deal with Syria—and who also will be on board for doing it in secret.”
  • “The key point is that the signing of an agreement is just the beginning—and third parties are needed to reinforce the agreement.”
  • In mid-November, David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, distressed the White House by flying to Damascus for a meeting with Assad. They agreed that Britain and Syria would establish a high-level exchange of intelligence. Vice-President Dick Cheney viewed the move by Britain—“perfidious Albion,” as he put it—as “a stab in the back,” according to a former senior intelligence official.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Jeez, Dick, grow up.
  • Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a “pro-Palestinian,” who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would “never make it in the major leagues”).
  • The senior Syrian official said that an opening to the West would bring the country increased tourism, trade, and investment, and a higher standard of living—progress that would eventually make it less reliant on Iran. If Israel then attacked Iran, he asked, “what will Syria do?” His answer was that Syria wouldn’t do more than condemn the attack. “What else could we do?”
  • the new Administration should not assume that Bashar Assad could be separated easily from Iran, or persuaded to give up support for Hamas and Hezbollah. “Bashar now has enormous standing in the Arab world, and it comes from these pillars—he was among the first to oppose the American war in Iraq and his continued support for Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas,” Crooke said. “He cannot trade the Golan Heights for peace with Israel, and cut off his allies. What Syria can do is offer its good standing and credentials to lead a comprehensive regional settlement.”
  • “They also believe their relationship with Iran could be of help to the Obama Administration. They believe they could be a bridge between Washington and Tehran.”
  • the Assad family does not believe in taking chances—they’re very hard bargainers.
Ed Webb

Middle East press on the settlements: What the Middle East papers say | The Economist - 0 views

  • commentary in the Arab and Israeli media showed little optimism for the future of negotiations
  • Opposition to settlement building is widespread in opinion columns, with a prominent exception in Michael Freund's "Rev Up the Bulldozers," published on Arutz Sheva, a right-wing news site. Mr Freund, expressing a view widely held by settlement supporters, argues that:...settlements are not the obstacle to peace. They never have been. The true obstacle to peace remains what it has always been: the Palestinian refusal to accept a permanent and sovereign Jewish presence in the land of Israel. In the right-of-the-centre Jerusalem Post, however, David Newman argues that as the settlements grow, evacuating them as part of a two-state solution becomes increasingly difficult, writing that "every additional house, family and road make a peace agreement less plausible." He continues, condemning Netanyahu's decision:Israel is the stronger side in this ongoing conflict and, as such, is the one able to make the critical concessions and lead the way. They should be seen as concessions from a position of strength and not, as the right wing argues, a sign of surrender. [...] Back to square one. No settlement freeze, no significant peace talks. All of us, Israelis and Palestinians alike, will suffer the consequences.
  • To read full translations and further commentary, please go to Meedan.net
Ed Webb

US media talks a lot about Palestinians - just without Palestinians - +972 Magazine - 0 views

  • many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.
  • I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”
  • It is unsurprising, then, that most readers of the mainstream U.S. press would not understand that Rabin only recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people,” but did not recognize Palestinians’ right to establish a state along the 1967 lines. They would not know that illegal Israeli settlements continued to expand under Rabin’s watch.
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  • In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.
  • While three of Said’s op-eds discussing Palestinians ran in the New York Times in the 1980s, from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords until his death in 2003, the newspaper ran only a single letter to the editor authored by him in January 1997, in which Said criticized the Oslo framework. During that time, Said’s opinion pieces explaining Oslo’s fatal flaws appeared in The Guardian, al-Ahram Weekly, and even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Yet readers of America’s “newspaper of record” were not able to hear from one of the country’s most eloquent and prescient Palestinian critics of the “peace process” narrative.
  • During the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote 33 columns discussing Palestinians; William Safire wrote 24, Anthony Lewis wrote 39, and A.M. Rosenthal penned 56. While they differed on various aspects of Oslo, none of them questioned the framing that “peace” was the ultimate goal, that Rabin was “a man of peace,” and that Palestinians who opposed Oslo were in fact opponents of peace.
  • I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.
  • a month before his assassination, Rabin reassured fellow Knesset members that the state Palestinians desired would be “an entity which is less than a state.” And they would not know that, in those same remarks, Rabin made clear that Israel’s borders would be “beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War,” along with a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev [West Bank settlements], as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” This is the Rabin that Palestinians know all too well.
  • in 1999, Said wrote that the Oslo process “required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past.”
  • In 2020 so far, the New York Times has run 39 opinion pieces in its print and online platforms that discuss Palestinians; only three were actually penned by Palestinians
  • It is not just Palestinians: Black, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian American, and other people of color face ongoing racism in the newsroom, making it more difficult for alternative perspectives to make their way into these influential pages
  • Alternative news outlets (including +972 Magazine), along with many Palestinians on Twitter and other social media sites, are providing fresh perspectives that we can follow, engage with, and share. The avalanche of tweets and comments highlighting Rabin’s violent legacy is just one example of this. And as more Americans receive their news from social media (including politicians), those wanting Palestinian perspectives now have a much easier time getting them.
Ed Webb

My first take on The Speech | Marc Lynch - 0 views

  • the rollout of the speech already stands as one of the most successful public diplomacy and strategic communications campaigns I can ever remember -- and hopefully a harbinger of what is to come.  This wasn't a one-off Presidential speech.  The succession of statements (al-Arabiya interview, Turkish Parliament, message to the Iranians) and the engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian policy front set the stage.  Then the White House unleashed the full spectrum of new media engagement for this speech -- SMS and Twitter updates, online video, and online chatroom environment, and more.  This will likely be followed up upon to put substance on the notion of this as a "conversation" rather than an "address" -- which along with concrete policy progress will be the key to its long-term impact, if any. 
  • It's not like Bush left a legacy of active democratization which Obama is supposedly abandoning.  Rather than repeat the old buzzwords to please those invested in the democracy promotion industry, Obama did something more important by addressing head on some of the most vexing issues which have plagued American thinking about democracy in the region. This, to my eye, was the key statement:  America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments - provided they govern with respect for all their people.  As I noted yesterday, that suggests clearly that the U.S. will accept the democratic participation of peaceful Islamist movements as long as they abstain from violence --and respect their electoral victories provided that they commit to the democratic process.  He made a passionate defense of that latter point, that victors must demonstrate tolerance and respect for minorities and that elections alone are not enough.  But he clearly did not prejudge participants in the electoral game -- the old canard about Islamists wanting "one man, one vote, one time" thankfully, and significantly, did not appear.
michelle benevento

New Israeli PM says 'extremist Islam' trying to destroy his country - CNN.com - 0 views

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    Interesting article concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which possibly foreshawdows a future of peace.
Ed Webb

The IPI Text | The Israeli Peace Initiative - 0 views

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    Spot the typo!
Ed Webb

The Psychology of the Intractable Israel-Palestine Conflict - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

  • reinforcing the entrenched identities, hardened by trauma, which have contributed to the intractability of this conflict. Many researchers have been pointing out for years that societies are becoming more polarized, meaning that more people are reaching a point of complete identification with a single group, leading to demonization and, in extreme cases, dehumanization of those outside their group, and a corresponding inability to communicate with those outside of their community. Polarization essentially describes a situation where a middle ground, vital for dialogue, has been lost.
  • Emotions drive behavior, and extreme psychological states drive extreme behavior, including violence. The question becomes what to do with these insights, when violent responses to violence produce ever stronger emotional states stemming from fear and rage. The long history of this particular conflict ensures that there are now generations of traumatic memories to reinforce large-group identities based on shared feelings of vulnerability and victimization, creating an intractable cycle.
  • most of us gain our sense of belonging through a variety of groups we interact with on a daily or weekly basis — our families, friends, colleagues, sports teams or groups based around other hobbies and interests. But in addition to these groups that we experience in person through shared activities, we all have larger-group affiliations, which can vary in strength from one person to another. These can include our country of birth or residence, a political party, a wider religious group that includes people from other countries and cultures, an ethnicity, a language group or an identity based on shared passions, such as being a music or sports fan. There are many parts to a typical identity, but sometimes, if rarely, one comes to dominate above all others, leading to specific psychological states and associated behaviors, including violence.
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  • Whitehouse and Swann describe the fully fused state, when commitment to one group dominates over all others, as a “form of alignment with groups that entails a visceral feeling of oneness with the group. This feeling is associated with unusually porous, highly permeable borders between the personal and social self.” In other words, an insult, a compliment or an injury to the group or another member of the group is perceived as an insult, a compliment or an injury to the self, as most people can recognize when someone from outside the family insults a family member.
  • In Jordan, no one I interviewed ever put their nationality in the top three, but rather chose family, tribe or region, religion or “Arabness.” (There was one exception, and it turned out he was working for the security services.)
  • Extreme states of belonging to a single group have enabled the most extreme violence seen throughout history and around the world, from suicide bombings to kamikaze attacks during times of war.
  • once an individual is fully fused to an identity, all positive and negative experiences serve to reinforce that single identity, with ever more rigid policing of the boundaries of “us” and “them,” and ever-shrinking spaces for communicating with the “other.”
  • they have come to feel that no one is coming to their rescue, a feeling reinforced by the example of Syria: Not only did the world not act to prevent Syrian deaths, but the world — including Arabs — also ignored President Bashar al-Assad’s brutality against his own Palestinian population.
  • Israel’s occupation causes daily, ongoing fear and humiliation among the Palestinian population, as well as challenges to everyday existence that dampen the energy to act. But, as Fromm writes, “Young people may succumb to apathy temporarily but a return to rage is always a possibility, in part as a vitalizing alternative to helplessness or despair.” That is, the violence we have witnessed from Palestinians is a natural response to Israel’s occupations when framed in terms of psychology; as an Israeli colleague of mine put it back in 2019, “There is no chance for peace without first ending the occupation.”
  • “The Holocaust for Israelis and the Nakba for Palestinians condense into two words a multitude of horrific experiences suffered by millions of people,” he wrote, describing a trauma not only for those who experienced them directly but also for their descendants; both are just within living memory. “When members of the victimized group are unable to bear the humiliation, reverse their helplessness, or mourn their losses, they pass on to their children powerful, emotionally charged images of their injured selves.”
  • For these people, Hamas’ actions symbolized a reassertion of dignity and pride in an Arab identity against an unjust oppressor. This single massacre, which included whole families shot in their beds, has prompted more demonstrations of support for the Palestinian cause than any other occasion in the past few decades. In Jordan, pro-Palestinian protesters only dispersed from the Israeli border after the Jordanian army used tear gas.
  • “apocalyptic mindset,”
  • classic asymmetric warfare, laid out in an al Qaeda manual taken up by the Islamic State, “The Management of Savagery,” which advocates baiting the enemy’s military into wars they cannot afford and depleting them — as was achieved by 9/11 at a financial cost of mere hundreds of thousands of dollars, compared to the trillions spent on the subsequent 20-year “war on terror.”
  • In times of low stress, even a hardened identity does not fear the other and can exhibit curiosity, or at least a lack of animosity, toward an out-group. But this retreat isn’t available to groups whose security is at risk. Fully fused large-group identities, with psychological boundaries hardened by both inherited trauma and daily fear, have another damaging implication for the prospects of peace. This is the perceived threat of reaching across the divide, including gestures of reconciliation. It is felt as betrayal to build bridges with the other and is experienced as a psychological wound.
  • We are now seeing mass hardening of psychological barriers in the region and globally, with many unable to see faults on their side or, conversely, laudable elements on the other. And it is not just rhetoric
  • there is a shrinking space for empathy and dialogue
  • Conflict resolution in such a situation seems meaningless: Neither side wants nor can even conceive of a relationship with the other, so what is the possible basis for negotiation, let alone peaceful coexistence?
  • all around the world people have told me a version of “No one has suffered as we have suffered.” Victimhood limits our ability to see others also as victims, to everyone’s detriment, for violence is then justifiable, and this is what fuels ongoing wars. It is unclear who can address the intergenerational wounds of the past, but without that work, nothing can improve.
Ed Webb

Why more Israelis are shying away from interaction with Palestinians - Al-Monitor: the ... - 1 views

  • The Peace Index for March 2016, published by the Israel Democracy Institute, shows that a sizable majority of the Jewish public rejects the distinction between global terrorism, nurtured by radical Islam, and Palestinian terrorism, nurtured by the desire to shake off the Israeli occupation. Of those polled, 64% said they agree with the idea espoused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that global terrorism and Palestinian terrorism are one and the same.
  • Israelis are in no rush to change the status quo
  • Some 78% think Israel should not take into consideration international demands to refrain from “targeted killings” (as the Israel Defense Forces calls the killing of wanted Palestinians), demolitions of family homes of Palestinians involved in attacks on Israelis and other questionable means used by the Israeli defense establishment in the fight against terrorism.
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  • the younger a person's age, the greater his or her resistance to a diplomatic process to end the conflict with the Palestinians. Those younger than 34 tend, more than older adults, to rule out compromise on core issues
  • “The problem is that they are busy chasing an electorate that is running to the right.”
  • The belief in Israeli society that there is no Palestinian partner for peace has taken hold and refuses to let go.
  • On the Israeli side, there is no entity like the one established by the Palestine Liberation Organization to maintain interaction with Israeli society. Abbas appointed his close associate Mohammed al-Madani to head this committee. In a conversation with Al-Monitor in fluent Hebrew, the deputy head of the committee, Elias Zananiri, said that he has no beef with the Israeli public running away from contact with the Palestinians. “Of course I’m frustrated with our lack of success in breaching the walls of Israeli fear and loathing, but I’m not completely surprised,” said Zananiri. “What do you expect of Jewish citizens whose leader questions the basic democratic rights of Israel’s Arab citizens?”
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    Ugh - don't read the comments
Ed Webb

Bitterlemons-international - 0 views

  • We are ceasing publication for reasons involving fatigue--on a number of fronts. First, there is donor fatigue. Why, donors ask, should we continue to support a Middle East dialogue project that not only has not made peace, but cannot "prove" to our satisfaction--especially at a time of revolution and violence throughout the region--that it has indeed raised the level of civilized discussion? Why fight the Israeli right-wing campaign against European and American state funding and the Palestinian campaign against "normalization"? These last two negative developments also reflect local fatigue. There is no peace process and no prospect of one. Informal "track II" dialogue--bitterlemons might be described as a "virtual" track II--is declining. Here and there, writers from the region who used to favor us with their ideas and articles are now begging off, undoubtedly deterred by the revolutionary rise of intolerant political forces in their countries or neighborhood. Then there is the global economic slowdown. Even countries and philanthropic institutions not suffering from donor fatigue still have to deal with declining budgets for promoting activities like ours. Obviously, the donors have every right to do with their limited funds as they see fit. But they are nearly all tightening their supervision and review procedures to a point where the weight of bureaucracy simply overwhelms efforts to maintain even a totally transparent project like bitterlemons and to solicit additional funds.
Ed Webb

Free Arabs - Palestine. When All Lived in Peace - 1 views

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    So many layers to analyse here - the original filming, the later narration, the excerpting and presentation on this site...
Ed Webb

Forces Rout Protesters From Bahrain Square - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • There is little evidence that the Shiite-led protests here have an Iranian sponsor or flavor. In fact, they are at least as much about demands for a democratic government as about sectarianism.
    • Ed Webb
       
      A welcome clarification from NYT, which has tended to frame the protests in sectarian terms.
  • in the village of Sitra, a center of antimonarchy activism where the two men were killed, the mood was entirely different on Tuesday. Hundreds of young men, many armed with sticks, dominated the intersections and sought to confront dozens of policemen. Several truck drivers had placed their trucks in the middle of the main road to block the police who mostly stayed on the outskirts shooting tear gas canisters.
  • the day after your defense minister came here, the Saudi troops came in. What is the United States doing to end this situation?
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  • The demonstrators still chant “peaceful, peaceful” but some now also carry sticks of wood and steel
Ed Webb

National Intelligence Examiner: Censored: Jewish professor wins Arab 'Nobel Peace Prize' - 0 views

  • no major media in Europe or the U.S. picked up the Reuters article or even mentioned this historic event at all. Israel's respected Haaretz was one of the few major media publications in the world to discuss the significance of Saudi Arabia for the first time in the award's 30 years choosing a Jew as the recipient.
Ed Webb

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iraq's academy of peace and politeness - 0 views

  • the Academy of Peace through Art, a school created under the umbrella of Iraq's national Symphony Orchestra.
  • dozens of teenagers with different backgrounds learn that boys should open doors for girls and the art of dinner party conversation.
  • "To some people it may seem irrelevant now, because there are so many problems - but we need people who care about beauty, and I am convinced that the day will come when everyone will realise it,"
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  • Their next class is civil interaction, in other words, how to have a conversation without turning it into a confrontation.
Ed Webb

This Magazine: Libya: Is it me you're looking for? - 0 views

  • a preview of Poplak’s upcoming The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World (Penguin, 2009).
  • I thus broached the fact that I was in the country on false pretences with no small amount of trepidation. My reasons for being there sounded silly when I said them out loud, so I wasn’t sure how I’d explain that I’d travelled to Libya to confirm the story of a music video reenactment that had occurred in the Tripoli medina. But told him I did, bracing myself for a blow that never came. It was, in fact, remarkably easy convincing my chiselled praetorian to forgo the usual itinerary for some investigative work. “So, you don’t want to go with the Germans on a walking tour of the ruins?” asked Eder. “No,” I said. “I sort of lied about that on the visa application form.” “You want to find out about this music video?” “Yes. That’s why I’m here.” Eder shook his head. “Man, people come here and ask the weirdest shit. But what you are asking—this is not to fuck little boys or such.” I agreed. Vigorously. “But I warn you,” he said, presaging the fact that working in Libya was the journalistic equivalent of sculpting quicksilver, “the tour group will only allow you so much freedom before you make people suspicious. And people here don’t like to give information. They’re afraid, and maybe they should be.”
  • Eder felt more allegiance to East coast hip hop than he did to Middle-Eastern Arab culture. American popular culture was his popular culture.
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  • The Tripolitan shore is, after all, where America’s centuries-long relationship with the Muslim world properly began. Operation El Dorado Canyon was but another in a long line of American military engagements with the variegated rulers of Libya, a legacy that dates back over 200 years. Within the DNA of those dusty, forgotten battles lies the code of enmity that continues unabated. But this concomitant history also hints at a lengthy cultural involvement— a mutual fascination that was tinged with both revulsion and wonder.
  • The stage darkens. Lights swing back and forth, illuminating the Hanna House. Then all goes quiet. An icon of the 1980s— onetime member of R’n’B supergroup the Commodores, 90 million solo records sold, over a dozen Top 10 singles on the Billboard charts—stalks up to the spotlight, a smile on his face, the velvety Mediterranean breeze fluttering his navy-blue shirt. He then belts out five of his most beloved hits in front of the enraptured guests, culminating in a rousing sing-along, accompanied by 40 angel-costumed children typical to this sort of proceeding, of the “We Are the World” anthem he co-wrote with Michael Jackson. “Hanna will be honoured tonight because of the fact that you’ve attached peace to her name,” Lionel Richie tells the crowd. “I love you Libya! I’ll be back.” Yes, but how did he come to be there in the first place?
  • Did hundreds of young Libyan children really have the “Hello” video downloaded onto their cognitive hard drives the same way a Westerner born of the 1980s did? In no way did I think that GQ or Lionel Richie had willfully fabricated these details. I just wondered if something had become garbled in the translation. I had to find out if that video reenactment had happened. Mr. Corsello put it perfectly: “We … have a strategic, even moral, obligation to know: What is the freakin’ deal with Lionel Richie?”
  • popular culture as a binding force. Hundreds of millions of people in over a 100 countries know Lionel Richie’s music, and adore it. According to the GQ article, anti-Ba’athist residents of Baghdad had blasted “All Night Long” as the Shock ’n’ Awe™ commenced. “The only thing Shiite and Sunni now share, aside from their hatred of each other and their worship of Allah and his prophet, is their abiding love for Lionel Brockman Richie Jr.,” wrote Mr. Corsello.
  • The take-home message was that the man who wrote “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a greater nuncio for peace—or at least common ground—than any number of official envoys, roadmaps or summit meetings. But there was one item in the story that made me choke up, Beaches style. I played it again—just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then I made my way through the blustery autumnal day to the newsstand to purchase a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. In print, the story hit me with a wallop I usually associate with passages from great literature (or first-edition comic books). Richie told GQ that when he visited the Tripoli medina, a contingent of Libyan children had massed around him, closed their eyes, made wavy gesticulations with their hands, and moaned “Hello.” This was not a séance, but rather a passable rendition of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in the station’s early years, and a landmark moment in the history of the music video), in which a gorgeous blind woman, who knows Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage. “What’s going on here? How do you know?” begged Lionel Richie of the Libyan children. “How do you know?” How did they know? Lionel Richie’s videos are prominent in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans; a friend once described Richie’s “All Night Long” clip as “a profound piece of eschatological imagination.” Indeed, to a scion of the 1980s, the Richie oeuvre carries an almost oneiric weight. Like “All Night Long,” the “Hello” video was an indelible piece of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory now flung into the quandary of the Muslim world.
  • The Libyans I’d met so far were polite but reticent. “Such questions!” they’d remark, sounding like so many Peter Lorres in Casablanca. “Behind the questions, what do you hope to find, Mr. Richard? There is only darkness.” Indeed, it was impossible to get a peripheral sense of what was going on in Libya: I felt out of my depth, immersed in an ostensibly bright world that was defined by brutality. Securing an interview felt like pinning live butterfly specimens. I kept in mind the recent case of five Bulgarian nurses, sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of injecting the AIDS virus into poor Libyan children. They had been horribly mistreated; it took some filthy dealing on the part of European governments to secure their freedom. And I knew that any locals implicated in my quest could expect much worse.
  • maybe you think we’re backwards here
  • we spent our evenings haunting stores that sold bootleg DVDs of titles that had yet to be released stateside
  • in the vanguard of a new Libyan generation, surfing the demographic wave of a massive Middle Eastern birthrate, pulled west by the accident of his tribal affiliations, plugged in because of an unprecedented technological sea-change in how media were disseminated. And that put him as much at odds with the Libyan mainstream as I was.
  • One thing I was slowly learning in the Muslim world: There is no Muslim world. There is no monolithic, stand-alone Other.
  • Cultural critic Greil Marcus once described early rock and pop as “music that affirmed meaninglessness and in that affirmation contained every conceivable kind of meaning.” This stands as a testament to what popular culture does best: unite us in an indefinable, unrefined moment of merriment, sadness, sentiment, titillation. There are two great equalizers: Death and pop culture. That’s what Lionel Richie meant by his story. And that’s why his story meant so much.
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    Essential reading.
Tom Trewinnard

On U.S Middle East Policy and Amateurism | TPMCafe - 0 views

  • This was not a good week for the Obama administration's Middle East peace efforts. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem last Saturday, Secretary Clinton seemed to be praising the distinctively partial limitations that Israel was willing to implement on settlement non-expansion. During the following days in Morocco and Cairo, she walked those remarks back, but the damage had been done.
  • On the positive side, I think the administration folks are themselves aware that this is not going swimmingly. The overall administration scorecard on Middle East peace is slipping into the red.
  • My own preference would have been for option two, and indeed, the administration could reasonably be perceived to have laid the ground deftly for such a pivot. Unfortunately, they went for option three, and it all came crashing down around their feet this week.
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  • The Obama team is perfectly capable of charting a course from a bad week to a game-changing success, but more of the same won't get them there.
Ed Webb

Egypt: Forcibly disappeared transgender woman at risk of sexual violence and torture | ... - 0 views

  • Fears are growing for the safety and wellbeing of Malak al-Kashef, a transgender woman seized during a police raid from her home in Giza in the early hours of 6 March and who has not been heard from since, Amnesty International said. Malak al-Kashef was taken by police to an undisclosed location. Her lawyers have not been able to locate her and police stations have denied she is in their custody.
  • Egyptian authorities have a horrific track record of persecuting people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity
  • Amnesty International believes that Malak’s arrest relates to her calls for peaceful protests following a major train crash in Cairo’s central train station on 27 February that killed at least 25 people. “Malak al-Kashef appears to have been detained solely for peacefully exercising her rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly
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  • Due to her gender identity, Malak is at increased risk of torture by the police, including rape and sexual violence, as well as assault by other detainees
  • Malak al-Kashef is a transgender woman who is undergoing gender affirming surgery. However, she has not yet managed to have her gender identity officially recognized and is therefore registered as male in official documents
Ed Webb

Secret Alliance: Israel Carries Out Airstrikes in Egypt, With Cairo's O.K. - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • For more than two years, unmarked Israeli drones, helicopters and jets have carried out a covert air campaign, conducting more than 100 airstrikes inside Egypt, frequently more than once a week — and all with the approval of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.The remarkable cooperation marks a new stage in the evolution of their singularly fraught relationship. Once enemies in three wars, then antagonists in an uneasy peace, Egypt and Israel are now secret allies in a covert war against a common foe.
  • Their collaboration in the North Sinai is the most dramatic evidence yet of a quiet reconfiguration of the politics of the region. Shared enemies like ISIS, Iran and political Islam have quietly brought the leaders of several Arab states into growing alignment with Israel — even as their officials and news media continue to vilify the Jewish state in public.
  • Both neighbors have sought to conceal Israel’s role in the airstrikes for fear of a backlash inside Egypt, where government officials and the state-controlled media continue to discuss Israel as a nemesis and pledge fidelity to the Palestinian cause.
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  • Israeli drones are unmarked, and the Israeli jets and helicopters cover up their markings. Some fly circuitous routes to create the impression that they are based in the Egyptian mainland
  • In Israel, military censors restrict public reports of the airstrikes
  • They moved into hitting softer targets like Christians in Sinai, churches in the Nile Valley or other Muslims they view as heretics. In November 2017, the militants killed 311 worshipers at a Sufi mosque in the North Sinai.
  • Mr. Sisi, then the defense minister, ousted Mr. Morsi in a military takeover. Israel welcomed the change in government, and urged Washington to accept it. That solidified the partnership between the generals on both sides of the border
  • In November, 2014, Ansar Beit al Maqdis formally declared itself the Sinai Province branch of the Islamic State. On July 1, 2015, the militants briefly captured control of a North Sinai town, Sheikh Zuwaid, and retreated only after Egyptian jets and helicopters struck the town, state news agencies said. Then, at the end of October, the militants brought down the Russian charter jet, killing all 224 people on board. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was around the time of those ominous milestones, in late 2015, that Israel began its wave of airstrikes, the American officials said, which they credit with killing a long roster of militant leaders.
  • The Egyptian government has declared the North Sinai a closed military zone, barring journalists from gathering information there
  • Zack Gold, a researcher specializing in the North Sinai who has worked in Israel, compared the airstrikes to Israel’s nuclear weapons program — also an open secret.“The Israeli strikes inside of Egypt are almost at the same level, he said. “Every time anyone says anything about the nuclear program, they have to jokingly add ‘according to the foreign press.’ Israel’s main strategic interest in Egypt is stability, and they believe that open disclosure would threaten that stability.”
Ed Webb

Qatari Foreign Policy: The Changing Dynamics of an Outsize Role-Carnegie Middle East Ce... - 0 views

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    A sympathetic account of Qatar's policies before and during the regional uprisings.
Ed Webb

Narrating the Arab spring from within | openDemocracy - 1 views

  • Many were too immersed in the daily struggles to tolerate criticism or contradictory points of view. Many others welcomed observations and comments coming from participants who were able to make connections with other historical moments, and to discern patterns or conjunctions that helped to shed light on current events. Enthusiasm, rigorous analysis, heightened emotions, tears, serious reflections, and “a feel of the revolutionary spirit,” in the words of one participant, permeated the proceedings.
  • Amongst the objections voiced was that it was Euro-centric because it framed the protests with reference to a European precedent, the Prague spring; it implied Arab stasis preceding the coming of spring; it predicted imminent decline as spring is bound to be followed by autumn. Debates over the phrase “Arab spring” encapsulate the overriding theme of the conference: the conflicting narratives of and about the Arab revolutions and the geopolitics of these narratives were put at the centre of debates and analysis.
  • “Peacefulness” is fetishised reinforcing the premise that the state is the sole legitimate entity entitled to the use of violence, a premise challenged by the revolutionary project.
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  • poor and the dispossessed presented as unruly
  • Pro-revolution writers and public figures  challenge on a daily basis the demonization of the revolution and the assault on the symbolism of Tahrir square. Young men and women cover the walls and buildings in downtown Tahrir with graffiti that ridicules official media campaigns against protesters
  • The issue of who tells the story, who has ownership of the narrative of revolution was at the centre of many debates
  • how can we recognize the inspirational effect of Tahrir Square on the Occupy Wall Street movement for example, and still acknowledge the differences in the demands and contexts, without suggesting that one protest movement is more genuine or more original than the other?
  • The Iraq story of a backlash against women’s rights dressed up in the robes of traditional culture was all too familiar to Egyptian and Tunisian feminist activists and researchers
  • In a panel introducing the mosireen ↑ group, members of the group, Lobna Darwish, Omar Robert Hamilton, Yasmine Metwally and Philip Rizq, showed video clips ↑ which documented violence perpetrated by the military against civilians.  The group met in Tahrir square and organized to expose the stories untold in the official media:  “We think of ourselves as a propaganda machine for the revolution… we are not neutral… we give space to people without a voice.”
  • to bear witness as a means of resistance against official media campaigns aiming to discredit protesters and protest movements. The media mantra about objective and distanced reporting is replaced by emphasis on the personal, the immediate, the fragment as an antidote to official dominant narratives, or counter-revolutionary narratives
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