rolling middle east 2013 thread

That is sinister as heck. What the hell do a Sunni Arab politician and a Persian Shia military officer have in common that must be said in secret?

http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/tehran-wants-get-closer-cairo-says-iran-foreign-minister

been in Morocco for a few weeks meeting with people about "social issues" & it's been eye-opening...everyone reminds me that Morocco was the First Nation to acknowledge the independence of the USA as if that should matter today

also it's interesting to see Moroccan license plates that feature a map of the nation including the Western Sahara. Apparently locals believe that a GOP presidency might have helped Morocco finally win that battle with the UN

Hundreds of Egyptians demonstrated on Wednesday Jan. 2 in Safenex Square in Cairo to commemorate the 521st anniversary of the fall of Granada.

The demonstration was called by The Free Movement (Harakat Ahrar).

The protesters organized a human chain around the square and held signs that said: "Obligatory return","We have not forgotten Al Andalus" and "Of course we will return" ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/world/middleeast/as-academy-snubs-affleck-for-argo-iran-plans-own-movie.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20986428

To many, this is a historic moment, the closest Saudi women have ever come to public participation in politics. But to critics of the Saudi system, appointing women to the Shura Council is a largely symbolic measure.

The council can advise the king and question ministers, but it has no power to make or veto legislation and its members are appointed by the king.

Yet even this move will have entailed lengthy debate between the Royal Court and the "ulama", the country's ultra-conservative clergy, who once opposed female education and even television.

To allay their fears, special gates are being incorporated into the Shura Council building so that women can enter and leave by a different entrance from the men. There will be a separate seating area for them and an earlier announcement spoke of screens and internal communications to prevent any mingling of the sexes, which is forbidden by the country's strict interpretation of Islamic law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/world/africa/a-trail-of-bullet-casings-leads-from-africas-wars-to-iran.html

i guess this is a thing now, i keep seeing coverage of it:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbehar/2013/01/11/news-flash-jews-are-apes-and-pigs-so-why-is-egypts-morsi-the-elephant-in-americas-newsrooms/

genuinely curious -- is "apes and pigs" a standard trope of anti-semitism?

i have to admit i didn't know about this from morsi. but i did kind of figure most the ikhwan was basically anti-semitic even if the upper echelon tried to finesse it on camera, as it were.

however:

Commentary magazine, American Thinker and Breitbart thoughtfully weighed in on the subject. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Jewish Talk Radio, and the Christian Broadcasting Network also saw value in covering it. So did – of all things — a prominent national stock-picking and finance newspaper, Investor’s Business Daily. Fox News entertainer Sean Hannity has been pouncing on it — no surprise there. (Do I really have to tune in to that unpleasant loudmouth if I want to be sure not to miss such newsworthy information?)

i really don't like when writers play dumb like this. "thoughtfully weighed in on the subject"? yeah i'll bet

there is no group of humans less pig like than the jews

didn't art spiegelman get some grief for portraying the Poles as pigs in MAUS?

this might actually convince me to buy a haaretz sub:

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genuinely curious -- is "apes and pigs" a standard trope of anti-semitism?

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=786

In three instances (Surahs 2, 5, and 7), the Quran tells of Muhammad turning Jews into apes and/or pigs. For instance, Surah 5:60 states, “Those (Jews) who incurred the curse of Allah and his Wrath, and those of whom (some) He transformed into apes and swine.” Another section of the Quran compares the Jews to donkeys. There are two differing traditions in Islam regarding what happened to the Jews who were turned into pigs. One view maintains that all pigs alive today are descendants of the Jews who were turned into pigs by Allah. The other view holds that all the Jews who were turned into pigs by Allah died out without reproducing, and therefore there is no relationship between today’s pigs and Jews:

“There are two opinions among the Ulama [Islamic scholars] in this regard: The first is that the Jews, whom Allah transformed and turned into pigs, remained in that state until they died, without producing descendants. The other opinion is that the Jews who turned into pigs multiplied and produced descendants, and their line continues to this day.
Sheikh Othman [Ahmed Ali Othman, supervisor of the Da'awa (Islamic Indoctrination) of the Egyptian Waqf Islamic Holy places]: "I personally tend towards the view that the pigs that exist now have their origins with the Jews, and therefore their consumption is forbidden in the words of Allah: 'A carcass, and blood, and the flesh of a pig are forbidden to you....' Moreover, our master Jesus, peace be unto him - one of the tasks that he will fulfill when he descends to earth is the killing of the pigs, and this is proof that their source is Jewish. Sheikh Othman said that whoever eats pig, it's as if he ate meat of an impure person…
Sheikh Ali Abu Al-Hassan, head of the Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar [Sunni Islamic university], said that the first view is accurate, because when Allah punishes a group of people he punishes only them. When Allah grew angry with the nation of Moses, He turned them into pigs and apes as an extraordinary punishment... but they died out without leaving descendants."
[Al-Moheet Arab News Network, May 10, 2009, Al-Hakika al-Dawliya, May 9, 2009]

PA religious representatives on numerous occasions have used this tradition to malign Jews, calling them “apes and pigs” in sermons and programs broadcast on Palestinian Authority television.

http://www.rescue.org/sites/default/files/resource-file/IRCReportMidEast20130114.pdf

Should the flow of refugees continue at its current pace, the u.n. estimates that the syrian refugee population could grow to one million in the next six months. The refugee influx is straining the already limited resources of the neighboring countries. In particular, the health, water, education and sanitation systems of host communities are increasingly struggling to cope and the cost of rent and commodities is rising. as tensions grow, the welcome mat is beginning to wear thin.

Syrian President Bashar Assad and his family have been living on a warship, with security provided by Russia, intelligence sources told a Saudi newspaper.

An Al-Watan report Monday says the family and Assad aides are residing on the ship in the Mediterranean Sea and that he travels to Syria by helicopter to attend official meetings and receptions.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/01/14/Report-says-Assad-residing-on-warship/UPI-95401358162184/#ixzz2HyDhdzsJ

I guess Russian abandonment of Assad has been overstated.

Give Russia another client state in the Mediterranean to replace their naval base at Tartus, and they'd drop Syria fairly promptly. They have enough problems with enraged Sunnis (like the FSA) as it is.

You have one in mind?

Curiously, none of the warships of the Syrian Navy have a helicopter deck, so if Al-Watan isn't propagandizing here, that would mean he's likely on a Russian vessel.

A different theory for why Russia supports Assad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/opinion/why-russia-supports-assad.html

xp Mordy - it would have to be Lebanon, as pretty much every other Mediterranean country has strong military ties with the West, either NATO members, Bosnia (NATO protected since 1995), or non-aligned North Africans that get most of their arms from the West. Russia's been trying not to get bottled up in the Black Sea for centuries, they lost that geopolitical battle after the Cold War.

I suspect the Tartus naval base is overstated as Russia's reason for supporting Assad.

I should've called this rolling greater middle east 2013 so I could chat about Mali here.

It's minor, yes, but Russia has a dwindling number of "client" states. Only Belarus, Bolivia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Ecuador, Iran, Nicaragua, Russian, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe voted against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Syria. Even Sri Lanka (which faced its own bloody revolt), Vietnam and Myanmar (both had pretty strong ties with Syria) abstained. I can see where a retaining some foothold in the Levant would be seen as pretty vital to Moscow's longer-term geopolitical game. Probably will blowback against them, but geopolitical games have that tendency.

re: Mali

Music, long at the center of Malian culture (it also happens to be very good), is now banned.

Oops, maybe not. Their vocalist was just arrested by the Ansar Dine.

If the casual brutality in Paul Bowles books are anything to go by, the Malian Islamists would likely be the cruelest Islamists worldwide.

That's terrible... almost everything I know about Mali I know from their music scene. There was an article a little bit ago about fatoumata diawara (iirc) being threatened with death if she returned to Mali. It's really tragic. I couldn't help but be a little heartened by some French intervention, tho at this point it's probably more about containing the mess than actually putting the fires out.

It was Khaïra Arby -- and they threatened to cut her tongue out.

Like the Taliban, the Ansar Dine have already started destroying UNESCO sites, not sure if this is the tomb of a Sufi saint ransacked by them, or just stock photography of a Timbuktu site used (repeatedly) for illustration.

http://whc.unesco.org/uploads/thumbs/site_0119_0001-500-375-20120701081522.jpg

A useful map for the Malian conflict, somewhat dated:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G0TJ7yvZWZY/UEiBZCQKMtI/AAAAAAAAAuc/5LpXB1BzQ0w/s1600/mali_rebellion_2012-9-6.png

In the past days a Malian outpost in Dibaly (177km roughly due-North of Segou) was overrun by the Ansar Dine, and the French Embassy in Bamako ordered the evacuation of all French nationals from Segou, so things are going pretty poorly for the government.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/bennett-will-be-key-partner-in-government-say-top-likud-officials-1.494006

nyt covers morsi video, says "his previous statements has now trapped him in a political bind"

i don't know if i'd take paul bowles novels into consideration re: malian islamists

Not so much Islamists per se, but the Touareg and other semi-nomads of the deep Sahara have historically been the local caravan raiders and slave traders, feared for their cruelty (& and subsequently oppressed) by both "local" and colonial regimes. Michael Asher wrote a great travelogue of his camel trek across the Sahara in the early 80s, and there were some groups like the black turbaned Touareg that he feared encountering with very good reason. I seem to recall them also featuring as the local boogiemen in Isabelle Eberhardt's missives from the turn of the last century. And now, Salafists largely drawn from the Touareg are getting home-rule over an area the size of France, and they have a lot of good reasons for resenting both the Bamako government and Western ways.

Just saying, if the Taliban were desert raiders united by an Islamist ideology rather than isolationist mountain valley farmers united by an Islamist ideology, things might be even worse.

And that should be indigo turbans, not black...

French commit more troops to Mali:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/world/africa/france-mali-intervention.html

x-post -The Tuaregs have gotten pushed out of the way in the North by the fundamentalist Ansar Dine and AQUIM

My understanding is that while the MLNA is the nationalist Tuareg movement fighting for an independent Azawad, the victorious Islamist Ansar Dine is a multi-racial coalition led by Iyad Ag Ghaly, leader of the 1990s Tuareg rebellions. So it isn't exactly true that the Tuaregs as a whole have lost, just that the nationalist Tuaregs lost out to the Islamist Tuaregs.

Pigs-&-Apes-gate update:

The White House on Tuesday strongly condemned comments that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was reported to have made in 2010 when he was a Muslim Brotherhood leader and which were widely regarded as anti-Semitic in nature.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that the language Morsi had used was "deeply offensive" and that US officials raised concerns with the Egyptian government on the matter.

Syria update:

A series of devastating explosions struck the Aleppo University campus in Syria on Tuesday, antigovernment activists and Syrian state television reported, in what appeared to be a major expansion of the violent struggle for control of the largest city in the nearly two-year-old Syrian conflict. Each side blamed the other for the blasts, and the activists said more than 50 people were killed.

xp:

And its also worth noting that the multi-racial makeup of the Ansar Dine has been a problem for Bamako government troops. There was an attack reported in the past few days in which a civilian bus of black/Sahelian Ansar Dine fighters was waved through an initial checkpoint only to wipe out a second checkpoint, so clearly the government troops thought they were fighting a Berber/Tuareg rebellion until just a few days ago.

Ghaly is a Tuareg true, but it is my understanding that the longtime nationalist Tuareg movement wanted independence for north Mali but not fundamentalist Islam; and it is not clear to me how many members of Ghaly's Ansar Dine are Tuareg (and how many are Algerian or from elsewhere). Many north Malian musicians were identified as Tuareg over the years, yet the Ansar Dine have been outlawing music. There has not been as far as I know a long tradition of fundamentalist Islam in Mali which is why music and Sufi Islam art and culture has existed for quite some time in north Mali, and historic items have only been destroyed now.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/06/20126295148565734.html

The Tuareg have demanded a secular independent state, but have increasingly been pushed aside by the Islamist fighters.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/mass-grave-found-in-aleppo-amid-fierce-fighting/

I wonder to what extent anxiety about how they are perceived as a world power played into france's decision to intercede in mali. i feel like they need to prove to the world that they're a global player, not just another greece.

According to report in Foreign Policy, a secret American investigation reveals Assad forces used a poisonous gas against his own people in Homs on December 23, 2012.

Stumbled across the U.S. State Department's Arabic YouTube propaganda channel while looking for videos of Ansar Dine. Some (a lot) of it is laughably poor compared to some jihadist videos I've seen in music and editing. Definitely no Goebbels on the payroll. Worth sampling for those curious about their tax dollars at work.

xp: having viewed a couple videos taken in ERs after the Dec 23 Homs gas attack, my guess is low dose phosgene which is odorless, no skin blistering, no convulsions, mostly causing difficulty breathing, and in higher concentrations, suffocation. Responsible for 80% of WWI gas deaths, mostly because of the slow onset of symptoms from a colorless/odorless gas.

It's interesting how little Obama wants to get involved in Syria. Partially I'm sure it's because of Russia but if he really wanted to go in he could play up the 12/23 gas attack.

Non-interventionists fished their wish on Syria but I can't help but think the Syrians would prefer they hadn't.

French bodies are now on the ground:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/world/africa/france-mali-intervention.html