Antony Loewenstein

But, as Robert Fisk writes, Zionism only wants “democracy” for itself, screw the Arab masses:

Israel, which has been so skewed and immature in its response to the Arab awakening – why on earth did its leaders not welcome the Egyptian revolution, opening their arms to a people who showed they wanted the democracy which Israel always boasts of, instead of shooting dead five Egyptian soldiers in the latest Gaza shoot-out? – has much to ponder.

Ben Ali gone, Mubarak gone, Saleh more or less gone, Gaddafi overthrown, Assad in danger, Abdullah of Jordan still facing opposition, Bahrain’s minority Sunni monarchy still suicidally hoping to rule for eternity. These are massive historical events to which the Israelis have responded with a kind of appalled, hostile apathy. At the very moment when Israel might be able to claim that its Arab neighbours are only seeking the freedoms that Israelis already possess – that there is a brotherhood of democracy that might go beyond frontiers – it sulks and builds more colonies on Arab land and continues to delegitimise itself while accusing the world of trying to destroy it.

Indeed:

Obama roars. World trembles. If only.

Obama says Assad must “step aside”. Do we really think Damascus trembles? Or is going to? Indeed, the titan of the White House only dared to go this far after condemnation of Bashar al-Assad by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, the EU and Uncle Tom Cobley and all (except, of course, Israel – another story). The terrible triplets – Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel – did their mimicking act a few minutes later.

But truly, are new sanctions against Assad “and his cronies” – I enjoyed the “cronies” bit, a good old 1665 word as I’m sure Madame Clinton realised, although she was principally referring to Bashar’s businessman cousin Rami Makhlouf – anything more than the usual Obama hogwash? If “strong economic sanctions” mean a mere freeze on petroleum products of Syrian origin, the fact remains that Syria can scarcely produce enough oil for itself, let alone for export. A Swedish government agency recently concluded that Syria was largely unaffected by the world economic crisis – because it didn’t really have an economy.

Of course, in the fantasy of Damascus – where Bashar appears to live in the same “sea of quietness” in which the Egyptian writer Mohamed Heikel believes all dictators breathe – the world goes on as usual. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – another earth-trembler if ever there was one – no sooner demands an “immediate” end to “all military operations and mass arrests”, than dear old Bashar tells him that “military and police action” has stopped.

Well, blow me down, as the Syrian population must now be saying. So what were all those reports coming in yesterday from Syria, of widespread gunfire in Latakia, of troops looting private property in the city, of a man arrested in his hospital bed in Zabadani, of snipers still on the rooftops of government buildings in Deir el-Zour? Crimes against humanity? Needless to say, the Syrian government knows nothing about this.

…

The real fear for Bashar is not oil sanctions but banks – especially the £12bn in foreign reserves that existed in Syria’s Central Bank in February, a sum which is now being depleted by around £50m a week. In May, Syria’s foreign minister – the mighty (physically) Walid Moallem – asked Baghdad for cheap Iraqi oil. Nearly 10 per cent of Syria’s banking deposits disappeared in the first four months of 2011; £1.8bn was withdrawn, some of it ending up in Lebanese banks.

Mmm:

Saudi Arabia’s interior minister yesterday accepted undisclosed damages from a British newspaper for a false story claiming that he had ordered police chiefs in the kingdom “to shoot and kill unarmed demonstrators without mercy”.

The Independent newspaper and its Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, offered “sincere apologies” at the high court in London to Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud.

It was announced in court that the “substantial” damages being paid to Prince Nayef would be handed over to charities.

Rupert Earle, the prince’s barrister, told Justice Nicola Davies that the bogus claim arose from internet stories in March about Shiite activists in Saudi Arabia trying to organise a protest march.

Several websites, said Mr Earle, claimed that Prince Nayef had told police chiefs in each of Saudi Arabia’s provinces that demonstrators “should be shown no mercy, should be struck with iron fists, and that it was permitted for all officers and personnel to use live rounds”. Although there was no truth in the claim, the barrister said, The Independent repeated it in an article in April in which Mr Fisk suggested that Prince Nayef was “worthy of investigation by the International Criminal Court at The Hague”.

Prince Nayef had not been given an opportunity to deny issuing the order and the article was reproduced on various websites and paraphrased in numerous stories carried by leading Arabic-language media, Mr Earle said.

Robert Fisk has the story:

Secret meetings between Palestinian intermediaries, Egyptian intelligence officials, the Turkish foreign minister, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal – the latter requiring a covert journey to Damascus with a detour round the rebellious city of Deraa – brought about the Palestinian unity which has so disturbed both Israelis and the American government. Fatah and Hamas ended four years of conflict in May with an agreement that is crucial to the Paslestinian demand for a state.

A series of detailed letters, accepted by all sides, of which The Independent has copies, show just how complex the negotiations were; Hamas also sought – and received – the support of Syrian President Bachar al-Assad, the country’s vice president Farouk al-Sharaa and its foreign minister, Walid Moallem. Among the results was an agreement by Meshaal to end Hamas rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza – since resistance would be the right only of the state – and agreement that a future Palestinian state be based on Israel’s 1967 borders.

“Without the goodwill of all sides, the help of the Egyptians and the acceptance of the Syrians – and the desire of the Palestinians to unite after the start of the Arab Spring, we could not have done this,” one of the principal intermediaries, 75-year old Munib Masri, told me. It was Masri who helped to set up a ‘Palestinian Forum’ of independents after the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas originally split after Hamas won an extraordinary election victory in 2006. “I thought the divisions that had opened up could be a catastrophe and we went for four years back and forth between the various parties,” Masri said. “Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) asked me several times to mediate. We opened meetings in the West Bank. We had people from Gaza. Everyone participated. We had a lot of capability.”

Robert Fisk writes:

I went to see Munib Masri in his Beirut hospital bed yesterday morning.

He is part of the Arab revolution, although he doesn’t see it that way. He looked in pain – he was in pain – with a drip in his right arm, a fever, and the fearful wounds caused by an Israeli 5.56mm bullet that hit his arm. Yes, an Israeli bullet – because Munib was one of thousands of young and unarmed Palestinians and Lebanese who stood in their thousands in front of the Israeli army’s live fire two weeks ago on the very border of the land they call “Palestine”.

“I was angry, mad – I’d just seen a small child hit by the Israelis,” Munib said to me. “I walked nearer the border fence. The Israelis were shooting so many people. When I got hit, I was paralysed. My legs gave way. Then I realised what had happened. My friends carried me away.” I asked Munib if he thought he was part of the Arab Spring. No, he said, he was just protesting at the loss of his land. “I liked what happened to Egypt and Tunisia. I am glad I went to the Lebanese border, but I also regret it.”

Which is not surprising. More than 100 unarmed protesters were wounded in the Palestinian-Lebanese demonstration to mark the 1948 expulsion and exodus of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in Mandate Palestine – six were killed – and among the youngest of those hit by bullets were two little girls. One was six, the other eight. More targets of Israel’s “war on terror”, I suppose, although the bullet that hit Munib, a 22-year old geology student at the American University of Beirut, did awful damage. It penetrated his side, cut through his kidney, hit his spleen and then broke up in his spine. I held the bullet in my hand yesterday, three sparkling pieces of brown metal that had shattered inside Munib’s body. He is, of course, lucky to be alive.

And I guess lucky to be an American citizen, much good did it do him. The US embassy sent a female diplomat to see his parents at the hospital, Munib’s mother Mouna told me. “I am devastated, sad, angry – and I don’t wish this to happen to any Israeli mother. The American diplomats came here to the hospital and I explained the situation of Munib. I said: ‘I would like you to give a message to your government – to put pressure on them to change their policies here. If this had happened to an Israeli mother, the world would have gone upside down.’ But she said to me: ‘I’m not here to discuss politics. We’re here for social support, to evacuate you if you want, to help with payments.’ I said that I don’t need any of these things – I need you to explain the situation.”

Any US diplomat is free to pass on a citizen’s views to the American government but this woman’s response was all too familiar. Munib, though an American, had been hit by the wrong sort of bullet. Not a Syrian bullet or an Egyptian bullet but an Israeli bullet, a bad kind to discuss, certainly the wrong kind to persuade an American diplomat to do anything about it. After all, when Benjamin Netanyahu gets 55 ovations in Congress – more than the average Baath party congress in Damascus – why should Munib’s government care about him?

Robert Fisk on the oh-so-predictable speech by Barack Obama to inject the US back into relevance in the Arab world. It should fail, as Muslims there know full well what America’s role has always been; repression:

It was the same old story. Palestinians can have a “viable” state, Israel a “secure” one. Israel cannot be de-legitimised. The Palestinians must not attempt to ask the UN for statehood in September. No peace can be imposed on either party. Sometimes yesterday, you could have turned this into Obama’s forthcoming speech to pro-Israeli lobbyists this weekend. Oh yes, and the Palestinian state must have no weapons to defend itself. So that’s what “viable” means!

It was a kind of Second Coming, I suppose, Cairo re-pledged, another crack at the Middle East, as boring and as unfair as all the other ones, with lots of rhetoric about the Arab revolutions which Obama did nothing to help. Some of it was positively delusional. “We have broken the Taliban’s momentum,” the great speechifier said. What? Does he really – really – think that?

Spot on:

OK, so here’s what President Barack Obama should say today about the Middle East. We will leave Afghanistan tomorrow. We will leave Iraq tomorrow. We will stop giving unconditional, craven support to Israel. Americans will force the Israelis – and the European Union – to end their siege of Gaza. We will withhold all future funding for Israel unless it ends, totally and unconditionally, its building of colonies on Arab land that does not belong to it. We will cease all co-operation and business deals with the vicious dictators of the Arab world – whether they be Saudi or Syrian or Libyan – and we will support democracy even in those countries where we have massive business interests. Oh yes, and we will talk to Hamas.

Of course, President Barack Obama will not say this. A vain and cowardly man, he will talk about the West’s “friends” in the Middle East, about the security of Israel – security not being a word he has ever devoted to Palestinians – and he will waffle on and on about the Arab Spring as if he ever supported it (until, of course, the dictators were on the run), as if – when they desperately needed his support – he had given his moral authority to the people of Egypt; and, no doubt, we will hear him say what a great religion Islam is (but not too great, or Republicans will start recalling the Barack Hussein Obama birth certificate again) and we will be asked – oh, I fear we will – to turn our backs on the Bin Laden past, to seek “closure” and “move on” (which I’m afraid the Taliban don’t quite agree with).

Mr Obama and his equally gutless Secretary of State have no idea what they are facing in the Middle East. The Arabs are no longer afraid. They are tired of our “friends” and sick of our enemies. Very soon, the Palestinians of Gaza will march to the border of Israel and demand to “go home”.

…

What Mr Obama doesn’t understand however – and, of course, Mrs Clinton has not the slightest idea – is that, in the new Arab world, there can be no more reliance on dictator-toadies, no more flattery. The CIA may have its cash funds to hand but I suspect few Arabs will want to touch them. The Egyptians will not tolerate the siege of Gaza. Nor, I think, will the Palestinians. Nor the Lebanese, for that matter; and nor the Syrians when they have got rid of the clansmen who rule them. The Europeans will work that out quicker than the Americans – we are, after all, rather closer to the Arab world – and we will not forever let our lives be guided by America’s fawning indifference to Israeli theft of property.

Robert Fisk paints a troubling picture of a nation that needs fundamental reform:

According to historian Farouk Mardam-Bey, for example, Syria is “a tribal regime, which by being a kind of mafia clan and by exercising the cult of personality, can be compared to the Libyan regime”, which can never reform itself because reform will bring about the collapse of the Baath party which will always ferociously defend itself. “It has placed itself – politically and juridically – upon a war footing,” Mardam-Bey says of its struggle with Israel, “without the slightest intention of actually going to war.”

Burhan Ghalioun makes the point that “the existence of the regime is like an invasion of the state, a colonisation of society” where “hundreds of intellectuals are forbidden to travel, 150,000 have gone into exile and 17,000 have either disappeared or been imprisoned for expressing their opinion… It is impossible (for President Bashar al-Assad) to say (like Mubarak and Ben Ali) ‘I will not prolong or renew my mandate’ like other presidents have pretended to do – because Syria is, for Assad, his private family property, the word ‘country’ is not part of the vocabulary.”

Robert Fisk is right:

Bin Laden got his just deserts – those who live by the sword tend to die by the sword – but did he get the “justice” that President Obama talked about? Many Arabs – and this theme was taken up by the Arab press, which spoke of his “execution” – thought he should have been captured, taken to the international court in The Hague and tried.

Of course there will always be those who do and will believe he was a brave martyr ignominiously murdered by the proxy arm of “Zionism”. Islamist groups in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and many ulema in south-west Asia have said as much already. In reality, needless to say, he was a has-been. His promises of overthrowing the pro-American or non-Islamic Arab dictators were fulfilled by the people of Egypt and Tunisia – and perhaps soon by Libyans and Syrians – not by al-Qa’ida and its violence.

The real problem, however, is that the West, which has constantly preached to the Arab world that legality and non-violence was the way forward in the Middle East, has taught a different lesson to the people of the region: that executing your opponents is perfectly acceptable.

While parts of Libya begin to imagine a life without Gaddafi – wonderful quote in this typically incisive Anthony Shadid piece in the New York Times: “There is no call for the overthrow of the government; only Colonel Qaddafi is mentioned, as lackey, tyrant and the man with really bad hair” – Western powers are scrambling.

Robert Fisk on Washington asking its brutal buddies to lend a hand (anybody still wondering why nobody in the Arab world seriously believes America when it talks about democracy?):

Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.

Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin – also funded and armed the Taliban.

But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya. Their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain – even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.

More Wikileaks cables seem to suggest that the US once feared (rightly or wrongly?) Islamists in the ranks of anti-Gaffafi rebels:

Leaked diplomatic cables obtained by the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph disclose fears that eastern Libya is being overrun by extremists intent on overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi’s regime.

Former jihadi fighters who underwent “religious and ideological training” in Afghanistan, Lebanon and the West Bank in the 1980s have returned to eastern towns in Libya such as Benghazi and Derna to propagate their Islamist beliefs, the cables warn.

Derna has become a particular stronghold for the former fighters and conservative imams who have shut down “un-Islamic” social and cultural organisations such as sports leagues, theatres and youth clubs, the cables report.

Local sources blame deliberate government efforts to “keep the east poor” for growing extremism in towns such as Derna.

One cable sent to Washington in February 2008 reports a conversation with a local businessman who described the increasingly incendiary rhetoric at backstreet mosques in Derna, where coded talk of “martyrdom operations” had become commonplace.

My following article appears today on ABC’s The Drum:

The latest BBC interview with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, situated in a fancy restaurant on the Mediterranean, was painful to watch. Clearly delusional and blaming drug-addled youth and al-Qaeda for the ongoing revolution in his country (which he claimed he didn’t lead, the “masses” were in charge), the Western media have labelled him “mad” and “dangerous to know”.

This is not a defence of Gaddafi or the countless crimes against his own people or outsiders. He should be held to account for all violations of international law. The crimes are multiple and must be punished.

Events in Libya are moving fast and I won’t try to cover all the latest developments here. Al-Jazeera English’s daily Libya blog is one of the best places to read all the news.

But it’s remarkable to watch how quickly Western leaders and commentators, many of whom have celebrated the increasing ties between them and Gaddafi, are suddenly calling for his departure.

It was seemingly only yesterday that a newfound, supposedly reliable ally in the “war on terror” had come in from the cold, rejected terrorism, ditched a nuclear program, given information about Pakistan’s covert nuclear program under AQ Khan and perhaps most importantly opened up Libya for Western businesses. The EU was only recently so keen to sell arms to Tripoli.

In the last years the West embraced Gaddafi and his children because he was the kind of dictator we could deal with. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has visited Libya a number of times as an employee of J.P. Morgan, who pays him millions of pounds annually, to push for banking opportunities.

Newly released documents indicate the Blair government wanted to provide weapons to Tripoli and train some of its military.

The current British government of David Cameron has at least acknowledged the moral bankruptcy of backing autocrats in the Middle East and not believing Arabs can rule themselves freely but his message was contradicted by travelling across the Middle East with arms dealers in tow to sell weapons to “democratic” Kuwait.

Why am I bringing all this sordid history up now? Because it shows the hypocrisy at the heart of Western political and media elites and how language is abused and selectively applied to the “good” and “evil”.

Gaddafi is clearly “mad” while western presidents or prime ministers, who have caused far worse carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Palestine, are still given respectful interviews in our media. It is inconceivable that an ABC or Murdoch journalist would openly call Tony Blair, Barack Obama, David Cameron or Nicholas Sarkozy a “war criminal”, even after they leave office. “We” are always better than “them”, a spurious democratic imprimatur that protects officialdom in our system. Killing literally hundreds of thousands of civilians – far in excess of anything Gaddafi could imagine – is ignored to maintain access to the powerful.

I’m reminded of the former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan in January. Aside from a few questions about the Iraq war, the two laughed about Condi’s piano playing. There was nothing about her authorising torture against terror suspects after 9/11 or the huge civilian death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Western commentators will show respect to a person such as Rice because she seems reasonable, calm and doesn’t dress in overly colourful garb like Gaddafi. This elaborate dance, an old tradition to protect a fellow powerful figure you’re likely to see at a cocktail party or media event in the weeks or month ahead, is what allows Rice to escape scrutiny, mockery or justice while somebody like Gaddafi is thrown to the wolves when he’s no longer useful. Piers Morgan is unlikely to catch him in Hollywood anytime soon.

This is despite the fact that she has unarguably caused far greater trauma to far more people than Gaddafi or Mubarak. Journalism all too often reflects and defends the government line because reporters inhabit a world where that is their only logical perspective.

As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald recently wrote:

“…’The American press’ generally and ‘senior American national security journalists’ in particular operate with a glaring, overwhelming bias that determines what they do and do not report:  namely, the desire to advance U.S. interests… America’s “establishment media” is properly described as such precisely because their overarching objective is to promote and defend establishment interests in what they report to – and conceal from – their readers.”

When it comes to Libya, how many Western media services even irregularly published voices from inside the country – bloggers, dissidents etc – that questioned how ordinary Libyans felt about the ever-increasing Western largesse being showered on Tripoli? US foreign policy, post the 2003 Iraq war, dictated a friendlier face towards “mad dog” Gaddafi and many Western writers bought this spin and transmitted it to their readers and viewers (“Gaddafi has a terrible record but in a remarkable transformation has ditched his nuclear program and embraced Tony Blair…”).

While the situation on the ground in Libya is dire and the border with Tunisia, reports Robert Fisk from the scene, is a seething mass of bodies, it seems everybody is now an expert on Libya. Foreign military intervention is being openly discussed, despite many Libyans being openly opposed to it and The Los Angeles Times editorialising against imposing a no-fly zone.

It’s time to put Libya into some perspective. Gaddafi may be a brute and autocrat but this didn’t suddenly occur in the last weeks. Good journalism has a responsibility to treat its subjects equally, not to the whims of US foreign policy (and therefore Australian foreign policy). Unfortunately, too many in the West view our behaviour as central to any radical change in the world; independence is unimagined.

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman wrote this week that the Arab revolutionaries were inspired by Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009. The “Arab” youth in his head said:

“Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.”

Even though he was in Cairo during the uprising against Mubarak, Friedman clearly missed the deep anger at Washington’s funding and backing of the Egyptian dictator. Friedman is a “serious” writer, regularly re-published in the Fairfax press here, who argued Israel, the Beijing Olympics, Google Earth and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad were the main causes of the Arab protests. Seriously.

Finally, some ground rules for decent journalism in the Middle East in the midst of the new Arab world:

1)     Not every story is about Israel and its “security” (do Palestinians not have security concerns, too?). Base yourself somewhere other than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Try the West Bank, Beirut, Cairo or Tunis.

2)     “Moderate” Arab regimes are anything but so don’t simply repeat State Department lines about “stability” in the region.

3)     Libya’s Gaddafi is a delusional thug but he’s an easy target. So is Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Don’t ignore such regimes but remember our own responsibility for backing Arab autocrats in the name of “stability”.

4)     Locate and cultivate local sources in multiple countries that send reliable information, therefore reducing the need to send in white correspondents for a few days, with no real knowledge of a nation, on the frontline of a battle they don’t really understand.

5)     Don’t fear everybody who talks about Islamic democracy or democracy with an Islamic hue.

6)     Don’t continually quote or interview Western officials who have spent a lifetime implementing failed and Israel-centric policies in the Middle East and frame them as “experts”. I’m talking about people such as neo-conservative, former George W Bush official and Barack Obama adviser Elliot Abrams and former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk. Their time has past. Move on.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

Robert Fisk has just left Tripoli:

While dark humour has never been a strong quality in Libyans, there was one moment at Tripoli airport yesterday which proved it does exist. An incoming passenger from a Libyan Arab Airlines flight at the front of an immigration queue bellowed out: “And long life to our great leader Muammar Gaddafi.” Then he burst into laughter – and the immigration officers did the same.