Antony Loewenstein

And nowhere is that clearer in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, as vile as it often is, is not the same as Al-Qaeda (or Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran). Our political and media classes have largely failed post 9/11 to even try to understand Islamism or resistance:

Considering how closely tied their histories have been, the Taliban in Afghanistan have yet to release a statement on the death of Osama bin Laden. The group isn’t being uncommunicative; it just doesn’t quite know what to say for now. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told TIME: “We have not received any word from our leadership on Osama’s death. I can’t confirm that he is dead or alive. Because of some security problems, the Taliban has not had much contact with Osama bin Laden for the past 10 years.” In a striking show of the divisions that had crept up between the Taliban and bin Laden’s organization, Mujahid added that, “The activity of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was unimportant. All activities were and continue to be conducted by the Taliban.”

…

But even if he is still alive, Bin Laden has ceased to be relevant. “In the last two or three years the media in Afghanistan and around the world were not talking about Osama bin Laden,” Masoom, a single-named local resident, told TIME in the courtyard of the Etifaq mosque. “He was not important for al-Qaeda. He was not important for the Taliban. He was the leader, but al-Qaeda is not just Osama. They have other leaders and they will continue their activities.” However Afghans may differ on bin Laden’s fate, they agree on one thing: one man’s death will not bring peace to their country.

Time.com’s Tony Karon, one of the most perceptive journalists in the American mainstream, writes that the US killing of Osama Bin Laden is all about symbolism and will do nothing to help the Western position in the Arab world:

Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editor asked me to prepare an obituary for Osama bin Laden for TIME.com on the assumption that he might well be killed in Afghanistan while I was on the beach in Cape Town. Almost ten years later there was finally a reason to call up the old file: President Barack Obama said late Sunday that the al-Qaeda leader had been killed in a U.S. raid in the Pakistani city of Amadabad, and that the U.S. was in possession of his body.

But where killing or capturing Bin Laden might once have been imagined to be a decisive turning point in a struggle between the U.S. and its challengers in the Muslim world, today, the death of America’s erstwhile nemesis is little more than an historical footnote — a settling of accounts for a spree of ugly crimes and the elimination of a symbol of global jihadist nihilism, perhaps, offering justice and closure for the victims of 9/11 and other atrocities. But it does little to alter the challenges facing the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan or any other major country in the Muslim world. That’s because much to his chagrin, Bin Laden and his movement have achieved only marginal  relevance to power struggles throughout the Muslim world. The strategy of spectacular acts of a terror had briefly allowed a band of a few hundred desperadoes to dominate America’s headlines and its nightmares, but on the ground in the Muslim world al-Qaeda had largely been a sideshow.

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The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq put it in conflict with nationalist insurgencies in which al-Qaeda had a limited, if any role. By the middle of the past decade, already, the U.S. was talking of its prime adversary in the region as being an “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and comprising Syria and non-state but nonetheless popular nationalist actors such as Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. And that “resistance” front had little time for al-Qaeda, while Bin Laden’s spokesmen reserved some of their most venomous rhetoric for Iran, Hizballah and Hamas.

Those groups remain far more powerful than al-Qaeda ever was because they’re rooted in national movements and conditions, and have built popular support bases over many years.  Just as Lenin’s Comintern proved an unworkable model for global revolution, so did al-Qaeda prove to be a chimera. The center of gravity of opposition to the U.S. and its allies in the Muslim world  remains with nationally-based movements who are confronting a specific enemy around a clear set of grievances and goals that are at least conceivably attainable. Hamas or Hezbollah are not much interested in restoring a Caliphate to rule from Spain to Indonesia; their goals are far more specific and localized. And in the end, while Bin Laden’s movement could blow things up, it failed to ignite any sustainable forms of struggle – like Che Guevara (also remembered more as a T-shirt icon of rebellion than for his rather unfortunate ideas of how it should be pursued), Bin Laden found that simply taking spectacular military action against even a hated foe would not necessarily rally the masses to join him in struggle or confront their own local tyrants. (Indeed, as much as they hated the U.S., many Arabs seemed unable to “own” 9/11, instead blaming it on the CIA or the Mossad, insisting that “Arabs could not have done this.”)

No decent people will grieve at Bin Laden’s passing. But nor will his elimination alter the challenges facing Washington in an Arab world that has found its own ways — quite different from Bin Laden’s — for challenging the writ of the U.S. and its allies in the Muslim world. Bin Laden may have desperately sought the mantle of champion of Muslim resistance to the West, and a traumatized American media culture may have briefly granted him that role in the months that followed the horror of 9/11, but where it mattered most, among his own people, Bin Laden was an epic failure.

This has been the week of Sydney’s Marrickville council putting Palestine on the national and global map by daring to support Palestine (though sadly giving in to bullying and rescind BDS). At this week’s fiery public meeting, it was clear how many Zionists have vested interests in not acknowledging the devastating effects of Israel’s occupation on Palestinian lands. Far better to talk about Hamas, Hizbollah, terrorism, “democracy” etc.

In today’s Sydney Morning Herald, reporter Jo Tovey gives voice to those who rarely receive it in the corporate press:

Accusations of one-sided media coverage of the issue were also rife at Tuesday’s meeting. The academic Peter Slezak, of Independent Australian Jewish Voices, said Jewish critics of Israel and supporters of the BDS campaign had not been heard, particularly in the Jewish media.

Samah Sabawi, a Palestinian-Australian, said their voice had been lost. ”I don’t feel we were able to discuss and debate the issue rationally and I don’t feel the door was open for Palestinian voices to discuss what the BDS was about.”

Wikileaks shows us more:

Mohammed Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s ruling generals, was an obstacle to Israeli efforts to stop arms smuggling within the Gaza strip, according to Israeli security forces. The assessment was privately delivered to US diplomats, alongside praise for former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman’s efforts to stop weapons trafficking, according to the WikiLeaks embassy cables.

The revelations come in a tranche of the most militarily sensitive cables from the US embassy in Tel Aviv. They have been handed over to Israeli newspapers by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Hebrew-language paper Yediot this week announced a deal under which it will print an interview with Assange, who has recently had to defend WikiLeaks from accusations of antisemitism.

The cables show intimate co-operation between US and Israeli intelligence organisations. Israel’s preoccupation with Iranian nuclear ambitions is well known and the US cables detail the battering on the subject that diplomats repeatedly receive from Tel Aviv.

They also shed detailed and sometimes unexpected light on Israel’s military analyses of its other enemies and friends in the region.

Egypt is the primary route for weapons and munitions into the Gaza strip, and the US has been facilitating co-operation between Israel and Egypt to tackle this for several years.

On arms smuggling across the Egyptian border to Hamas in Gaza, Israeli intelligence chiefs described as “supportive” Omar Suleiman, who was Egypt’s intelligence minister, but said defence minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi was “an obstacle” in a November 2009 cable.

…

The cables also shed light on Israel’s assessment of Hezbollah’s mounting capability to strike directly at Tel Aviv with an arsenal of more than 20,000 missiles.

Israeli intelligence chiefs briefed their US counterparts during a regular Joint Political Military Group (JPMG) session on 18 November 2009 about the scale of potential Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon.

Washington was told: “Hezbollah possesses over 20,000 rockets … Hezbollah was preparing for a long conflict with Israel in which it hopes to launch a massive number of rockets at Israel per day. A Mossad official estimated that Hezbollah will try to launch 400-600 rockets and missiles at Israel per day – 100 of which will be aimed at Tel Aviv. He noted that Hezbollah is looking to sustain such launches for at least two months.”

Other cables detail regular secret talks between the US and Yuval Diskin, head of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Beth, over the role of Hamas in Gaza. On 12 November 2009 the embassy reported the views of the general responsible for Gaza and southern Israel, Major General Yoav Galant, that Hamas needed to be “strong enough to enforce a ceasefire”.

He told the Americans: “Israel’s political leadership has not yet made the necessary policy choices among competing priorities: a short-term priority of wanting Hamas to be strong enough to enforce the de facto ceasefire and prevent the firing of rockets and mortars into Israel; a medium priority of preventing Hamas from consolidating its hold on Gaza; and a longer-term priority of avoiding a return of Israeli control of Gaza and full responsibility for the wellbeing of Gaza’s civilian population.”

Galant was to be made Israel’s chief of defence staff earlier this year but the appointment was cancelled due to scandal.

Why is it acceptable for Australians to donate money (and receive tax deductions) to illegal settlements in the West Bank but the Australian government isn’t able to openly provide aid to citizens living under the rule of Hamas and Hizbollah? The corruption of international aid by politics. Here’s an interesting report on PressTV and my interview:

The Arab world is exploding against its dictators but Vogue is seemingly oblivious. Here’s a nauseating profile of Syria’s First Lady Asma al-Assad. Somebody should tell the “journalist” that Syria is a brutal police state that tortures its own citizens. But not to worry, she lets her children play with Lego:

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.

Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.

“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad.

…

The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”

The following article by Kate Ausburn appears in Green Left Weekly:

Popular uprisings in the Arab world have challenged a political landscape dominated by undemocratic regimes and fronted by dictators, a panel of academics and journalists said at a Sydney University forum on February 15.

Speakers discussed the regional and international ramifications of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as part of the forum on people’s power and change in the Arab world.

During the uprising in Egypt the secular nature of the protests was noted and praised in much of the international coverage. Less acknowledged, but similarly noteworthy, was the role women played in the demonstrations.

Women are “not new in [Egypt's] political arena”, but the treatment of women taking part in demonstrations is certainly improving, said Dr Lucia Sorbera from the University of Sydney.

Dr Sorbera specifically pointed to last year’s International Women’s Day demonstrations in Cairo where many women were “beaten and harassed”. However, “today they feel safe, free to be there and they claim the right to feel safe in the public arena”.

“A lot of young women will tell you, for the first time they feel they are not objectified as sexual objects in this space, this is the first time in a very long time that women have been in the streets without any danger of harassment,” she said.

Tahrir Square in Cairo has become “synonymous with freedom, emancipation and liberty”, said Farid Farid from the University of Western Sydney.

Farid spoke about the response of the people of Egypt to living under the Mubarak dictatorship: “After 30 years of repression you develop a sense of humour, a sense of mockery — it’s the only form of resistance.”

This repression was supported by foreign governments who assisted in sustaining regimes like Muburak’s — now widely considered to be corrupt, said Farid.

“Agitation for democracy has always been tangled with the politics of empires.

“Remember the last leader to meet with Mubarak was Netanyahu, but before that it was Kevin Rudd — in terms of Australian politics and trade relations, they are heavily entangled.

“Let’s not discount Australia’s role.”

University of Sydney academic Tara Povey said: “This intimate relationship between Hosni Mubarak and the US has meant an active policy of demobilising and repressing movements for change in the Arab world.”

Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein similarly noted the financial complicity of foreign governments: “The US sends to Egypt $1.2 billion annually.”

Loewenstein also pointed out the role of multinationals in assisting regimes, particularly with media and communications censorship.

“The reality is that much of the infrastructure that these regimes are using to censor the internet is coming from the West,” he said.

“In Iran for example, it emerged very soon after the uprising in June 2009 that Nokia sold Tehran — six months before the uprising — a very sophisticated monitoring system to be able to determine phone calls, internet, text messages.

“In Egypt, Vodafone, who many of us use, were involved with the Egyptian regime in censoring mobile phone messages and setting up propaganda for the regime when the phone system came back on.”

Speaking on the Western media’s representation of the uprisings in the Arab world, and pointing to a number of areas given undue legitimacy outside of Egypt, Loewenstein pointed out: “One of the other things that comes up is the fear of political Islam.

“The idea that we shouldn’t engage with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Brotherhood etc … They represent a lot of people, and may not be a majority, say the Brotherhood, how much support it has in Egypt is unsure, 10%, 20%, whatever, that’s still 20%.

“It’s vital to understand the idea that political Islam is not by definition a threat. Not all political Islam is Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan.

Acknowledging laughter from the audience, he continued: “People laugh when I say that, but if you look at much of the American mainstream coverage in the last three weeks, that is exactly how it is framed.”

Loewenstein said too that the weight given by much Western media to the future of peace treaty negotiations with Israel, which he said was redundant, as “there actually is no peace process”.

“One of the things that also comes has been a mantra of many in the Western press over the last three weeks is what’s Cairo going to do with the peace treaty with Israel … as if that’s the main concern on the streets of Cairo,” he said.

“A peace process is a term that has been used and abused by many in the press, the political elite, to give the impression of negotiations, when in fact all that is happening is the colonisation of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The siege on Gaza continues.”

Loewenstein concluded: “What the West and Israel fear is not Islam, but independence.”

The forum offered an insight into the social forces and strategic political relationships at play in the Arab world as people continue to rise up against dictatorial regimes throughout the region.

They are calling for democracy and radically changing the face of the Middle East and North African social and political sphere.

Sure, British Prime Minister David Cameron is traveling the Middle East selling weapons of death and yet he’s also giving this curious speech about allegedly backing democracy. So I presume he’ll be calling for immediate engagement with Hamas and Hizbollah, then?

Britain has been guilty of a prejudice bordering on racism for believing that Muslims cannot manage democracy, David Cameronforeign policy in light of protests across the Arab world. will say as he recasts

In a speech at the national assembly in Kuwait, the prime minister will abandon decades of so-called “camel corps” diplomacy by saying Britain was wrong to prop up “highly controlling regimes” as a way of ensuring stability.

Cameron – who is facing anger in the UK for placing defence exports at the heart of his long-planned visit to the Gulf – will use the speech to show that Britain is promoting political reform in the region.

The prime minister, who attended a ceremony in Kuwait with Sir John Major to mark the 20th anniversary of the first Gulf war, said: “Now, once again, this region is the epicentre of momentous changes, but pursued in a very different way. History is sweeping through your neighbourhood.”

Cameron, who on Monday visited the scene of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, said the protests had highlighted a hunger for freedom across the Middle East.

He depicted the protests as “movements of the people” that were not ideological or extremist.

But he indicated that the demonstrations presented a challenge for Britain as he dismissed as a “false choice” the old calculation that authoritarian regimes needed to be supported as the price of ensuring stability.

“For decades, some have argued that stability required controlling regimes and that reform and openness would put that stability at risk,” Cameron said.

“So, the argument went, countries like Britain faced a choice between our interests and our values. And to be honest, we should acknowledge that sometimes we have made such calculations in the past.”

He added: “But I say that is a false choice. As recent events have confirmed, denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability – rather, the reverse.”

The prime minister said Britain and other western countries cannot impose any democratic model on the Arab world, but stressed: “That’s not an excuse, as some would argue, to claim that Arabs or Muslims can’t do democracy – the so-called Arab exception.

“For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism. It’s offensive and wrong and it’s simply not true.”

Cameron’s speech has been designed to lay to rest decades of British foreign policy which held that authoritarian regimes in the Gulf must be supported to guarantee stability. The strongest example is Britain’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The prime minister will not be visiting Saudi Arabia during his three-day tour of the Gulf. This is because King Abdullah is in poor health and not because Cameron wants to distance the UK from the kingdom.

He is also distancing himself from US neocons who believe democracy can be imposed.

Cameron outlined his thinking on this issue on Monday in Cairo, when he said: “Democracy is an important part of our foreign policy.

“But I am not a naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000ft or that, simply by holding an election, you have satisfied the needs of democracy. You have had plenty of elections in Egypt, but that does not mean you have had a functioning democracy.”

Israeli writer Etgar Keret has a way with words:

Perhaps this is the time to mention that the title of “most moral army in the world” is, to my ears, akin to being lauded as “man with least facial hair in the Hezbollah leadership.” Because, after all, an army’s purpose is not to feed the hungry or act as a crutch for the crippled and maimed but rather to fight and exact casualties from its enemies. Still, a myth is a myth. The IDF’s image as a scrupulous and unfailingly just military has always been Israel’s sacred cow, and it refuses to die no matter how many times you take a slaughterer’s knife to its neck.

Wikileaks cables released this week show the real relationship between Washington and Cairo, a toxic brew of money, slight pressure, fear of Islamism and reliability.

Who needed whom more?

US diplomats and their masters never imagined a different Egypt because they never wanted it to happen. It suited America just fine. The real rights of the Egyptian people were almost irrelevant. Who knows where things are going but people power has already made history:

It was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first meeting as secretary of state with President Hosni Mubarak, in March 2009, and the Egyptians had an odd request: Mrs. Clinton should not thank Mr. Mubarak for releasing an opposition leader from prison because he was ill.

In fact, a confidential diplomatic cable signed by the American ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, advised Mrs. Clinton to avoid even mentioning the name of the man, Ayman Nour, even though his imprisonment in 2005 had been condemned worldwide, not least by the Bush administration.

The cable is among a trove of dispatches made public by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks that paint a vivid picture of the delicate dealings between the United States and Egypt, its staunchest Arab ally. They show in detail how diplomats repeatedly raised concerns with Egyptian officials about jailed dissidents and bloggers, and kept tabs on reports of torture by the police.

But they also reveal that relations with Mr. Mubarak warmed up because President Obama played down the public “name and shame” approach of the Bush administration. A cable prepared for a visit by Gen. David H. Petraeus in 2009 said the United States, while blunt in private, now avoided “the public confrontations that had become routine over the past several years.”

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The cables, which cover the first year of the Obama presidency, leave little doubt about how valuable an ally Mr. Mubarak has been, detailing how he backed the United States in its confrontation with Iran, played mediator between Israel and the Palestinians and supported Iraq’s fledgling government, despite his opposition to the American-led war.

…

Like other Arab leaders, Mr. Mubarak is depicted in the cables as obsessed with Iran, which he told American diplomats was extending its tentacles from “the Gulf to Morocco” through proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. He views these groups — particularly Hamas, a “brother” of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood — as a direct threat to his own rule.

In a meeting with General Petraeus on June 29, 2009, Mr. Mubarak said the Iranian government wanted to establish “pockets” of influence inside Egypt, according to a cable. General Petraeus told him the United States was responding to similar fears among Persian Gulf states by deploying more Patriot missiles and upgrading its F-16 fighter jets stationed in the region.

Despite obvious American sympathy for Mr. Mubarak’s security concerns, there is little evidence that the diplomats believed the president, now 82, was at risk of losing his grip on power. The May 2009 cable noted that riots over bread prices had broken out in Egypt in 2008 for the first time since 1977. And it said the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood had prompted the government to resort to “heavy-handed tactics against individuals and groups.”

But the cable, again signed by Ambassador Scobey, portrayed Mr. Mubarak as the ultimate survivor, a “tried and true realist” who would rather “let a few individuals suffer than risk chaos for society as a whole.”

“During his 28-year rule,” the cable said, “he survived at least three assassination attempts, maintained peace with Israel, weathered two wars in Iraq and post-2003 regional instability, intermittent economic downturns, and a manageable but chronic internal terrorist threat.”

Another cable, dated March 2009, offered a pessimistic analysis of the prospects for the “April 6 Movement,” a Facebook-based group of mostly young Egyptians that has received wide attention for its lively political debate and helped mobilize the protests that have swept Egypt in the last two days. Leaders of the group had been jailed and tortured by the police. There were also signs of internal divisions between secular and Islamist factions, it said.

The United States has defended bloggers with little success. When Ambassador Scobey raised several arrests with the interior minister, he replied that Egypt did not infringe on freedom of the press, but that it must respond when “people are offended by blogs.” An aide to the minister told the ambassador that The New York Times, which has reported on the treatment of bloggers in Egypt, was “exaggerating the blogger issue,” according to the cable.

Juan Cole brings news of yet more Wikileaks cables that show the threat Israel poses to world peace:

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that

“The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of time, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.”

The paper says that US cables quote Ashkenazi telling the US congressmen, “I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite.”

The general’s plans are driven by fear of growing stockpiles of rockets in Hamas-controlled Gaza and in Hizbullah-controlled Southern Lebanon, the likely theaters of the planned major new war. Ashkenazi does not seem capable of considering that, given a number of Israeli invasions and occupations of those regions, the rockets may be primarily defensive.

…

The memos reveal that none of the goals of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and its 2008-9 war on little Gaza were achieved, and that both Hamas and Hizbullah have effectively re-armed. What makes Ashkenazi think things would be different this time? Israel hawks have doomed themselves to the particular hell of Sisyphus, forced to roll the same stone up the hill over and over again with no hope of ever balancing it on the summit.

The Jerusalem Post has the story but misses the lead:

In another cable released Monday, it was revealed that during a 2007 June 12 meeting with US Ambassador to Israel Richard H. Jones, then-head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin said that Gaza was “number four” on his list of threats, preceded by Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah in that order.

The actual cable is more revealing, outlining the ideal Zionist position; demonise and isolate Palestinians in the name of gathering global support. How’s the love for Israel coming along?

Although not necessarily reflecting a GOI consensus view, Yadlin said Israel would be “happy” if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state. He dismissed the significance of an Iranian role in a Hamas-controlled Gaza “as long as they don’t have a port.”