Arab News Blog

“The Gaza Flotilla Massacre: An Eyewitness Account” from pan-Arab London daily, The Middle East (Al-Sharq al-Awsat):

‘ Haneen Zoabi, who is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel and an MP for the National Democratic Assembly or Balad party, was on board the Mavi Marmara when it was stormed by Israeli commandos in international waters. She told Asharq Al-Awsat that … “”the operation began at around 11.30 pm on Sunday…we saw the lights of vessels far away. At around 1.30 am, these ships approached our ship, and at around 4 am there were around 13 ships and dinghies surrounding our ship…and as they approached they began to fire machine guns [at the ship], and then suddenly there were helicopters with commandos disembarking [onto our ship] whilst firing weapons, and firing a water cannon onto the deck of our ship.”…

“We were expecting an intercept and inspection mission, with the ship then being escorted to the Port of Ashdod, but we did not expect this to take place with such military intensity, and utilizing such weapons. This was a terrible attack on 600 activists, who are civilians, parliamentarians, and peace activist, and Israel has described them in a negative manner since the flotilla left port as being ‘terrorists’ and this is in order to justify aggression against them.” … MP Zoabi also indicated that another aim of this Israeli aggression was to intimidate and deter anybody from participating in future attempts to break the Gaza blockade. …

… “there were no plans for resistance, this came as a natural response in self-defense, and this is something that could have happened at any time or place…for when somebody finds themselves under attack they find themselves in a natural manner trying to defend their lives by all available means.”

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Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that it has gotten hold of an American intelligence document detailing undue Iranian influence in Iraq and in the Iraqi elections. The document says that Ahmad Chalabi and Ali al-Lami, influential members of the ‘Jusice and Accountability Committee’ in charge of purging Baathists from public life, met repeatedly with Iranian officials last fall. Among those they met were Qasim Sulaimani, head of the special forces Jerusalem (Quds) Brigade and the Iranian foreign minister. US Commanding Gen. in iraq, Ray Odierno, charged that Iran was behind the campaign to disqualify over 500 alleged Baathists from running in Iraq’s March 7 parliamentary, and this document seems to lend some credence to the allegation.

Anxiety among US officials about Iran’s influence, especially via militias such as the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, is underlined by WaPo today.

AP alleges that Iran is responsible behind the scenes for getting the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Sadr Movement form a coalition, the National Iraqi Alliance.

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks if Iraq is really a democracy, and comes up with a resounding ‘No!’ She gives as evidence the repeated arbitrary arrests of a Sunni Arab young man who served as a whistle-blower on Shiite militia ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in his neighborhood. She also quotes Ali Allawi on the lack of effective checks and balances.

Early voting begins today in Iraq for members of the armed services, hospital patients, and others who are prevented from getting to the polls on Sunday. Nearly a million persons are expected to cast a ballot on Thursday.

Some newspapers are asking whether the Sunni Arabs will flex their muscles in this election.. They may, but only if they do not vote on a sectarian basis. If Sunnis can make themselves an indispensable constituent of secular parties supported by Shiite urban middle classes, they can get some leverage. Otherwise, Iraq’s parliament at the moment has only one chamber, and electing explicitly Sunni Arab slates dooms them to insignificance, since they will only have a fifth of seats in parliament. Sunni Arabs in Iraq’s parliament will always be outvoted on an issue of national significance.

In something less than a resounding vote of confidence in the electoral progress, the Shiite grand ayatollahs said Tuesday that they are genuinely afraid of ballot fraud in the March 7 parliamentary elections.

The Iraqi government is now saying that the appearance of the name of Muqtada al-Sadr on an arrest list was an error, and that no attempt will in fact be make to take him into custody. (Sadr is now studing in seminary in Qom, Iran.]

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An interesting Saudi study written up on Al-Sharq al-Awsat’s English website: some 68% of young Saudi women do not use their real family names on Facebook, while only 4% of males don’t use their real name. Also, some 60% of male students polled use a real picture of themselves, compared to only 5% of females. (Others use no picture, or a famous person, or even a male family member.) Read the whole thing; I leave it to the reader to draw conclusions.

The article notes that Internet access has now reached 36% of the Saudi population. For so rich a country that seems strikingly low; perhaps the fact that the Saudi Internet filterers receive between 700 and 1000 requests a day to block websites might have something to do with it. That article of course says the vast majority (93%) of websites blocked are pornographic. It’s the other 7% they never clearly explain. (One could also remark that the Saudis may have a very, very broad definition of pornographic.)

It will be interesting to see if the recent decision by ICANN to expand URLs to include non-Western alphabets will increase access; Facebook has long permitted posting in Arabic script, however, and the study linked above found that among university students, 45% of posted comments are in English, 40% in Arabic (script), and 12% in “Anglicized Arabic” (transliteration). By contrast, among secondary school students, 54% of comments are in English, 40% in transliterated Arabic, and only 6% are in Arabic script. That suggests to me that secondary school students don’t write very good literary Arabic, compared to their university counterparts. (Transliterated Arabic posts usually are rather colloquial as opposed to formal Arabic.)

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In case his constant television appearances don’t satisfy your all-Zahi-Hawass-all-the-time needs, here he is writing an interesting piece in Al-Sharq al-Awsat’s English website on “The Great Treasure Delusion.”

Oh, and from drhawass.com, an article with major name-dropping in the lead sentence:

I travelled recently with Omar Sharif to the Dominican Republic by personal invitation of the president, Leonel Fernandez. I was invited to receive an honorary doctorate degree from the Catholic University in Santo Domingo, as well as to give a public lecture.

Like him or hate him, he’s one of a kind.

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As the disqualification of some 500 leading Iraqi politicians on the grounds of alleged ties to the Baath Party is continuing to roil Iraqi politics, Arab papers today report that both U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Vice President Joseph Biden have been intervening with Iraqi officials in an attempt to find a way to walk back the disastrous decision — perhaps by postponing the implementation of the committee’s decisions until after the election.  The commission in turn is complaining about foreign interference, while Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki broke his silence by calling to "not politicize" the process (a bit late for that, no?) and some Iraqi outlets are screaming about alleged American threats.  There is still a chance that the appeals process could provide an exit strategy, but this doesn’t seem hugely likely at this point; the final list of those disqualified is set to be released tomorrow.  

Iraqi politicians, especially those associated with Mutlak’s bloc such
as Ayad Allawi and Tareq al-Hashemi, have been loudly complaining about alleged conflict of interest and abuse of power behind the moves.  The indefatigable Norwegian researcher Reider Visser deserves credit for unearthing that Ali Faysal al-Lami, who spent about a year in a U.S.-run prison on charges of complicity with attacks by Shia militias and runs the Parliamentary committee responsible for the disqualifications, is actually standing for election on Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress list.    Visser, like a number of Iraqi analysts, argue that they are using their official positions to stack the deck in their own favor:  "It is they who effectively control the vetting process for the entire elections process. They enjoy full support in this from Iran; meanwhile  their leaders are being feted in Washington, where Adil Abd al-Mahdi has just been visiting."   The committee’s defenders claim that it is simply enforcing the law.   Finally, the editor of the Saudi al-Sharq al-Awsat complains that Iran’s allies in Iraq are using their control of the mechanisms of Iraqi democracy to seize power for themselves on behalf of Iran — and the similarity between the DeBaath "vetting" of candidates and Iran’s Guardians Council’s vettting of candidates has been noted. 

This is a potential fiasco in the  making, but shouldn’t come as such a great shock even if it is unusually brazen. There’s nothing new about the unresolved sectarian conflicts in Iraq, the ongoing failure to institutionalize Sunni integration into the Shia-dominated  political system, the failure to implement political accommodation agreements, or the ways the institutional levers of the state were being used by "the powers that be" to maintain their dominance.  The combination of improved security, the self-interest of a wide range of Iraqi groups and politicians, and the clear U.S. commitment to drawing down its military forces have generated some real positive progress but the unresolved institutional and political conflicts remain clearly evident.   This current tempest increases the prospects that the March elections will not deliver the legitimacy or the resolution of deep underlying conflicts which so many people have counted upon — which was the reason for my skepticism about pegging the U.S. drawdown to the elections in the first place.  

It would be far better if Iraqis could reach agreement on issues like the election law and this current frenzy without intense American involvement.  But since the U.S. did decide to peg its military drawdown to the
election there’s little choice now but for Biden and Hill and others to get as involved as they have been over the last few days to try to find
a solution.  But under no circumstances should this become an excuse to delay the military drawdown, which would simply remove the only incentive Iraqi politicians have to make political accommodations, infuriate Iraqi public opinion, and trap the U.S. there indefinitely.   There’s no contradiction between insisting on maintaining a clear and firm commitment to military drawdown and calling for close attention to Iraqi politics.   Indeed, more attention to politics and less focus on the military dimension is exactly what has been called for all along — and hopefully this crisis will be worked out and the right lessons learned on all sides.

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Marc Lynch makes a good point about the Arab media not giving much coverage to the attempted plane bombing in Amreeka, and its possible al-Qaeda connections: people don’t really care.

In most of the Arab newspapers which I follow on a daily basis, the failed airplane plot didn’t even make the front page — or, at best, got a small and vague story. Gaza dominates the headlines, as it often does. Yemen continues to command considerable attention because of the ongoing clashes between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi movement, something which has been of far more consistent interest to the Arab public than to the American. Iran’s protests are covered heavily. Most of the better papers also focus on local political issues. One of the only papers to cover the story prominently is the deeply anti-AQ Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, which leads with “passengers save America from a terrorist catastrophe.” It’s the same on the major pan-Arab TV stations. On the al-Jazeera webpage, the story doesn’t even appear on the Arab news page, while a bland story about the airplane incident is only the sixth story on the international page (the same place it held in the broadcast news roundup; yesterday it was the third story in the news roundup, with the killing of 6 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the lead). It does not crack the top 6 stories on the al-Arabiya website today.

The Arab media’s indifference to the story speaks to a vitally important trend. Al-Qaeda’s attempted acts of terrorism simply no longer carry the kind of persuasive political force with mass Arab or Muslim publics which they may have commanded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Even as the microscopically small radicalized and mobilized base continues to plot and even to thrive in its isolated pockets, it has largely lost its ability to break out into mainstream public appeal. I doubt this would have been any different even had the plot been successful — more attention and coverage, to be sure, but not sympathy or translation into political support. It is just too far gone to resonate with Arab or Muslim publics at this point.

The downgrading of al-Qaeda and the “War on Terror” by the Obama administration helps this trend along, even if the dynamics which produced it were largely local and internal to the Arab and Muslim worlds. The failure of the failed plot to capture even a modicum of mainstream Arab public interest speaks volumes to the robustness of this trend… though the frankly disturbing enthusiasm for the story in some quarters in the U.S. suggests that not everybody is happy to see al-Qaeda recede.

I don’t think there ever was much support for al-Qaeda among the Arab public, or any chance that al-Qaeda turning into a leading shaper of public opinion. That was even less likely as the Baader Meinhof gang and Red Brigades becoming leading shapers of European opinion. There may have been some misplaced and insensitive “chickens coming home to roost” reaction to 9/11, but I don’t ever believe that a Bin Laden moment would be lasting. This is a crucial point missed by some in the West, partly because of the spin and focus the Arab reaction stories were given after 9/11, which represented shadenfreude as the leading Arab reaction. This in turn led to the moronic “why do they hate us” meme, which survives to this day largely through the efforts of Thomas Friedman and his wish for “an Arab civil war” (a notion that implicitly puts al-Qaeda as a serious contender in the “battle for Arab minds”).

In other words, the Arabs have gotten over (never fell for?) the mystification and fetishization of al-Qaeda. Their governments now concentrate on its security element, which ultimately is partly a policing matter, partly about preventing failed states and lawless areas in the region, and in the case of Saudi Arabia about curbing tolerance for jihadism within the regime. When will the Americans follow suit? This is not to underplay the threat of al-Qaeda inspired terrorism (as the recent arrests suggests it is all too real), but rather to take the grand teleological meaning it is ascribed by so many.

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I don’t know what kind of contacts the failed airplane bomber did or didn’t have with Al-Qaeda Central or Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and neither does anybody else who has commented since it happened.  The extent of such contacts will be mildly interesting, but it surprises nobody working on CT issues that there are still people swimming in the AQ milieu who want to hit the United States, whether on their own or with support from some AQ affiliates.   One of the real stories here, which has gone largely unremarked in the coverage I’ve seen, is that  the Arab media generally couldn’t care less. Today’s news and opinion is dominated by Gaza — an issue which commands far more popular outrage, anger, and politically mobilized attention than does anything to do with al-Qaeda. 

In most of the Arab newspapers which I follow on a daily basis, the failed airplane plot didn’t even make the front page — or, at best, got a small and vague story.    Gaza dominates the headlines, as it often does.   Yemen continues to command considerable attention because of the ongoing clashes between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi movement, something which has been of far more consistent interest to the Arab public than to the American.  Iran’s protests are covered heavily.  Most of the better papers also focus on local political issues. One of the only papers to cover the story prominently is the deeply anti-AQ Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, which leads with "passengers save America from a terrorist catastrophe."  It’s the same on the major pan-Arab TV stations. On the al-Jazeera webpage, the story doesn’t even appear on the Arab news page, while a bland story about the airplane incident is only the sixth story on the international page (the same place it held in the broadcast news roundup;  yesterday it was the third story in the news roundup, with the killing of 6 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the lead).  It does not crack the top 6 stories on the al-Arabiya website today. 

The Arab media’s indifference to the story speaks to a vitally important trend. Al-Qaeda’s attempted acts of terrorism simply no longer carry the kind of persuasive political force with mass Arab or Muslim publics which they may have commanded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.   Even as the microscopically small radicalized and mobilized base continues to plot and even to thrive in its isolated pockets, it has largely lost its ability to break out into mainstream public appeal.  I doubt this would have been any different even had the plot been successful — more attention and coverage, to be sure, but not sympathy or translation into political support.  It is just too far gone to resonate with Arab or Muslim publics at this point.  

The downgrading of al-Qaeda and the "War on Terror" by the Obama administration helps this trend along, even if the dynamics which produced it were largely local and internal to the Arab and Muslim worlds.   The failure of the failed plot to capture even a modicum of mainstream Arab public interest speaks volumes to the robustness of this trend… though the frankly disturbing enthusiasm for the story in some quarters in the U.S. suggests that not everybody is happy to see al-Qaeda recede.   

UPDATE:  according to  Kandahar-based Alex Strick van Lin, nobody in Kandahar or the Afghan media care either. 

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Five large bombs were detonated throughout Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 127 persons and wounding 500, and damaging important government buildings. Three of the five were suicide bombs.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the bombings targeted the ministries of the interior and of finance, as well as a popular market and a court house. They hit on either side of Karkh and Rusafa districts. The first bombing struck at the gates of a Technical Institute in Dora, about 10:05 am, and then a courthouse in Karkh. The final bombing occurred in the Western Sunni district of Mansur, striking near a federal police building and a publicity office of the US military. The Ministry of Finance building hit on the edge of a market was the one employees moved into when the original Finance offices were destroyed by a massive bombing in October. Over-all, many of the dead were police or officers.

The streets were eerily empty in the aftermath of the attacks, and American helicopters hovered above the sites that had been bombed, according to al-Zaman. Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that security at checkpoints was redoubled after the bombings.

Parliament’s Security Committee announced that it would question security-related cabinet ministers on December 17 as to how this serious lapse in security occurred. Hadi al-Amiri, chair of that committee, is head of the Badr Organization, a Shiite paramilitary related to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a pro-Iran, fundamentalist Shiite party. ISCI took a bath in last January’s parliamentary elections, facing a strong challenge in Baghdad and Basra from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa or Islamic Mission Party. Some of the outrage directed at the government is probably related to the upcoming parliamentary elections, in which attempts will be made to depict al-Maliki and Dawa as ineffective in providing security. Al-Zaman, reporting in Arabic, says that Baha’ al-A’raji, a Sadrist MP, also slammed the government for failing to stop the bombings.

What I remember is that bombings were a feature of Baghdad life when the US was actively patrolling

Aljazeera English reports on the dilemma created for Washington by the security challenge in Baghdad.

Aljazeera notes that some US media outlets did not bother to cover these attacks in Iraq, and wonders if the story will return. I think the answer depends on the journalistic integrity of the outlet. For many, the answer will be no. Many US media are nationalist media, and cover stories having to do with US national projects. Americans have already decided that Iraq was a mistake, and they know the US military is leaving, and so what happens there is not “news” as much of the corporate media defines it (i.e. a story that generates profits because of wide public interest in it).

CBS, to its credit, did cover the story:

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Liz Sly reports from Baghdad on the three bombings that shook Ramadi, capital of al-Anbar Province, to its core on Sunday and left at least 26 dead and a hundred wounded. The first two bombings occurred outside the Governor’s mansion where delegates from the Shiite-dominated government of PM Nuri al-Maliki were meeting with Sunni tribal leaders of the Awakening Council, which had turned against Sunni Muslim radicals and cooperated with US forces. Al-Zaman writing in Arabic says that the second bomb was timed to go off just as rescue workers arrived to deal with the victims of the first one, though another official said there were only 7 minutes between the blasts. A suicide bomber hit the hospital, perhaps timing his attack with the arrival of victims of the first two, though al-Zaman says that he initially tried to bring a truck bomb close to the hospital and was stopped by alert guards. He then came to the hospital wearing a suicide belt bomb and killed two persons when he detonated his payload.

According to al-Sharq al-Awsat, Ali al-Hatim, the paramount tribal leader or sheikh of the Dulaim tribe traded accusations with Gen. Tariq al-Asal, the head of al-Anbar’s police force, over who was responsible for the lax security that allowed the bombings. Sheikh Hatim accused Gen. al-Asal of bearing responsibility for the bombings, and demanded his resignation. He said he has been buttering up PM al-Maliki by joining the Awakening Council to the central government, but that the cost of this policy was borne by ordinary residents of al-Anbar. Gen. al-Asal in turn accused al-Anbar’s tribal leaders of maintaining secret ties to militants and to Syria, and blamed the bombings on Sheikh Hatim. Al-Zaman maintains that violence is back in the Sunni Arab areas, and that the lessened death toll of 2007-2008 has now been reversed by and that deaths are back up in Sunni Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the northern Sunni Arab center of Mosul (pop. 1.8 mn.), Iraqi security forces have recently made dozens of arrests, according to al-Hayah [Life]. Those taken into custody include many shopkeepers, and Sunni Arabs are accusing the government of taking a shotgun approach, arbitrarily rounding up people on the bsis of profiling, etc. A demonstration was mounted against the arrests.

As Liz Sly points out, the renewed violence comes on the backdrop of wrangling over Iraq’s upcoming elections. In fact, presumably al-Maliki was trying to get Arab-Americans to join in his command. There are so many US troops in Iraq (130,000 or so) because it is thought they will be needed to close down the country for the elections. But parliament has still not passed an electoral law. It is thus unknown whether Iraqis will vote for individual candidates or for a whole party list. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is lobbying for an open system.

As Sly says, the US withdrawal timetable is premised upon there being elections in January, which may or may not happen. Or may or may not go smoothly.

The US media and public have taken their eyes off this ball. But if Iraq’s elections don’t go well, there could still be a lot of violence ahead.

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Marc Lynch, in FP, here

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