Cairo massacre: What Muslim will ever trust the ballot box again?

Robert Fisk                                 Independent/UK                           14 August 2013

The Egyptian crucible has broken. The “unity” of Egypt – that all-embracing, patriotic, essential glue that has bound the nation together since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and the rule of Nasser – has melted amid the massacres, gun battles and fury of yesterday’s suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. A hundred dead – 200, 300 “martyrs” – makes no difference: for millions of Egyptians, the path of democracy has been torn up amid live fire and brutality. What Muslim seeking a state based on his or her religion will ever trust the ballot box again?

 This is not Brotherhood vs army, though that is how our Western statesmen will try to portray this tragedy. Today’s violence has created a cruel division within Egyptian society that will take years to heal; between leftists and secularists and Christian Copts and Sunni Muslim villagers, between people and police, between Brotherhood and army. The burning of churches was an inevitable corollary of this terrible business.

In Algeria in 1992, in Cairo in 2013 – and who knows what happens in Tunisia in the coming weeks and months? – Muslims who won power, fairly and democratically through the common vote, have been hurled from power. And who can forget our vicious siege of Gaza when Palestinians voted – again democratically – for Hamas? No matter how many mistakes the Brotherhood made in Egypt – no matter how promiscuous or fatuous their rule – the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi was overthrown by the army. It was a coup.

The Brotherhood, of course, should long ago have curbed its amour propre and tried to keep within the shell of the pseudo-democracy that the army permitted in Egypt – not because it was fair or acceptable or just, but because the alternative was bound to be a return to clandestinity, to midnight arrests and torture and martyrdom. This has been the historical role of the Brotherhood – with periods of shameful collaboration with British occupiers and Egyptian military dictators – and a return to the darkness suggests only two outcomes: that the Brotherhood will be extinguished in violence, or will succeed at some far distant date – heaven spare Egypt such a fate – in creating an Islamist autocracy.

The pundits went about their poisonous work today before the first corpse was in its grave. Can Egypt avoid a civil war? Will the “terrorist” Brotherhood be wiped out by the loyal army? What about those who demonstrated before Morsi’s overthrow? Every violent incident in Sinai, every gun in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood will now be used to persuade the world that the organisation  was the right arm of al-Qa’ida. Al-Sisi will come under much scrutiny in the coming days.. And many of the middle-class intellectuals who have thrown their support behind the army will have to squeeze their consciences into a bottle to accommodate future events.

What expired today was the idea that Egypt regarded all her people as her children. For the Brotherhood victims today – along with the police and pro-government supporters – were also children of Egypt. And no one said so. They had become the “terrorists”, the enemy of the people. That is Egypt’s new heritage.      [Abridged]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/cairo-massacre-after-today-what-muslim-will-ever-trust-the-ballot-box-

Devilish compromises of fighting ‘evil’ played out on stage

Robert Fisk                   Independent/UK               11 August,  2013                                   Shaw's 1907 play about a weapons manufacturer is now more relevant than ever

And so to Major Barbara at the Abbey. Every Western arms salesman I have met – usually at arms “fairs” in the Gulf – knows Andrew Undershaft, the grotesque, brilliant, intellectual weapons manufacturer in George BernardShaw’s 1907 play who abides by the faith of the armourer: “To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to… all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.”

Shaw had an ambiguous relationship with post-independence Ireland – he did not believe in the Celtic ideal or the neo-Gaelic movement – and incredibly this is the Dublin Abbey Theatre’s first performance of Shaw’s most socialist of plays. As director Annabelle Comyn remarked, Major Barbara’s themes – of poverty, welfare, the labour market advocating for better conditions – are relevant today in Ireland as well as Britain. But it still contains a painful message to the Middle East, and not just because it is set during the Balkan wars; the character of Adolphus Cusins, a professor of Greek soon to inherit Undershaft’s magnificent, oh-so-clean, labour-intensive, pseudo-socialist Middlesex weapons plant, admits that he gave a revolver to a student to fight for Greece. “The blood of every Turk he shot … is on my head as well as Undershaft’s.” That’s all the Muslims get in Major Barbara.

But in the past in the Middle East, it was very easy to sympathise with Major Barbara herself, the Salvation Army daughter of Undershaft – and fiancée of Cusins – who saves souls in the East End of London. “There are neither good men nor scoundrels,” she pompously informs her father. “There are just children of one Father … I know them. I’ve had scores of them through my hands: scoundrels, criminals, infidels, philanthropists, missionaries, county councillors … They’re all just the same sort of sinner; and there’s the same salvation ready for them all.” 

The play’s contrived but still relevant hinge creaks when the Salvation Army is forced to accept money from both Undershaft and a whiskey magnate – the destroyers of people, if not souls – in order to remain active.

But this devilish compromise is now more relevant than ever; not becauseTony Blair abandoned a criminal inquiry into bribery by a British arms manufacturer in Saudi Arabia to protect “the national interest”, nor because the late Robin Cook’s mission statement on weapons sales – only to sell to the good guys – fell to pieces, but because Major Barbara herself, along with her ruthless father, have today become one.

Barbara’s self-denial, her craving after salvation and God, have been echoed to the letter by George W Bush and Blair and now by Barack Obama. True, they all believe(d) in good and bad – or “evil” – but they all held God close to their heart. They all preached, especially Blair and Obama, with salvationist obsession. Barbara is undoubtedly “faith-based”, like our Tony. Obama likes making speeches – like Barbara, but also like Undershaft. You can listen to Barbara admit to a dockland bully that her father was “a Secularist”, just as Obama told his audience in Cairo that he came from a family which included “generations of Muslims”. And when Barbara asks her father to define his faith – and he replies: “Well, my dear, I am a millionaire. That is my religion” – you can almost hear Blair breathing.

There’s a wonderful moment at the arms foundry when Undershaft arrives with a telegram to tell his family of “good news from Manchuria”. Another Japanese victory, he is asked? “Oh, I don’t know,” he replies. “Which side wins does not concern us here. No: the good news is that the aerial battleship is a tremendous success. At the first trial it has wiped out a fort with three hundred soldiers in it.” These are not dummy soldiers blown to bits, he assures his family. It’s “the real thing”.

Undershaft’s “aerial battleship” – elsewhere an “aerial torpedo” – is, of course, our drone.  Just as this weekend we were asked to celebrate the killing of six al-Qa’ida members in Yemen and five insurgents in the Sinai, northern Egypt – most assuredly “the real thing” by “aerial battleships” belonging to Messrs Obama and Netanyahu – so Undershaft produces these wonder-weapons in a squeaky-clean armaments factory whose workers worship at brand new churches and live in comfortable houses in the safety of Middlesex.  The drone commanders of today, like Undershaft’s men, work from equally squeaky-clean computer consoles. 

Put bluntly, our leaders speak in the language of Major Barbara – of salvation and human rights – while producing the weapons to obliterate fellow men. At least Undershaft implies that the innocent also die under his guns. Barbara speaks of “the power to burn women’s houses down and … tear their husbands to pieces” – Shaw would have made endless play of “collateral damage” – but Syria is providing countless opportunities for Russian and Western arms-makers; giving to Alawite and Sunni, to “all causes and all crimes”.

At the end of the play, Cusins agrees to inherit Undershaft’s factory so that he can “make war on war”. How that would appeal to Bush, Blair and Obama. Finally, Cusins announces that he wants “a power simple enough for common men to use, yet strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good.” No Labour election manifesto should be without this line.

Buzzwords flourish in brave new world of the Gulf   

Arab autocrats cling to their thrones with the complicity of secret policemen, but the Gulf states are fighting off the revolutionary winds with cliches.  In a recent energy conference in Doha, delegates exchanged cynical glances when a Qatari official repeatedly spoke about his country’s “strategic vision”.  Not just a vision, mark you, but a ‘strategic’ vision.  As the Algerian journalist Akram Belkaid points out, Anglo-Saxon advisers have sold the ‘vision’ idea to rival monarchs whose skyscrapers (Qatar/Kuwait), new cities (Saudi Arabia) , ports (Oman), economic diversification (Dubai/Abu Dhabi), airlines (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways), metros and museums are now an Arab Hadrian’s Wall against insurgent barbarism.

All talk is now of “projects” – worth billions rather than millions – which are “world class” in standard, sprouting amid “emerging markets” which constitute new “hubs” in the region.  Belkaid inevitably identifies the language of these “global” hubs – whose local royal flunkies dub themselves “global press officer” on their visiting cards – as English (the language of higher education and journalism in the Gulf);  thus international finance will understand how well the Gulf States nurture a “strong economy” with “sustainable development” and “human capital”.

Women in the region are to be “empowered” – though not to the point of emancipation in a patriarchal society – while “labour nationalisation” will put an end to foreign workers (who may be subject to “deportation”, a less pleasant and thus less useful word).  “Leisure” is, by the same token, a happier word than “luxury” – ‘leisure’ can be “enjoyed” – and “cultural heritage” must replace “modernity”.  It’s all about “nation building”.  This may be hard to accept amid the blood of Syrians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans – even Algerians – but who believes now that the Gulf is really part of the Middle East? 

The US View of Yemen as Al-Qaida Hotbed

is a Travesty of the Truth    Yemen is a real place where people are demanding social justice and democracy. Their cause is harmed by the US

by Brian Whitaker                      Guardian/UK                         August 8, 2013

Citizens of Yemen's capital are not accustomed to drones – strikes usually happen in more remote parts of the country – but the white object circling overhead, harmlessly as it turned out, gave them a small taste of what it's like to be on the receiving end.  "If this is how much fear, terror, and anger what just sounds to be a drone makes in Yemen's capital, imagine what it does in areas it actually bombs," activist Farea al-Muslimi tweeted.

In fact, it wasn't a drone on this occasion. Whether or not the plane gleaned any useful intelligence, there is little doubt that the buzzing of the capital, together with the closure of embassies, the sudden evacuation of foreigners and the latest reported drone attack in Shabwa, are as much about psychological warfare as they are about conventional anti-terrorism operations.  Some of the psychology is obvious. The message to al-Qaida's militants is that their plans have been rumbled and they are being watched. If that makes them lie low for a while, the US will claim that its ploy has worked.   

But two other messages from this spectacle are more troubling. One is what it says to Yemenis, and the other is what it says to Americans.  The desire to protect embassies and their staff is understandable. Domestically, he has little to lose by over-reacting to the current threat. The trouble, though, is that this also reinforces American perceptions that Yemen is about al-Qaida and very little else. Viewed from Washington, Yemen is not a real place where people are demanding social justice and democracy so much as a theatre of operations in Saudi Arabia's backyard.

Among ordinary Yemenis, meanwhile, the latest al-Qaida drama has been greeted with scepticism and even some derision. Al-Qaida is often viewed as an American obsession while millions of Yemenis have more basic things to worry about – like obtaining their next meal. They also point out that more people die on Yemen's treacherous mountain roads, or in fights over scarce water resources, than at the hands of al-Qaida.

There is now widespread recognition that drone strikes in Yemen have been counter-productive. Whatever benefits they brought in terms of killing militants who posed a serious threat have been cancelled out by the killing of others who posed no threat at all, and the anger this has aroused among the population at large.

Some of that resentment is now being directed against President Hadi, who was installed by the Gulf states (with western blessing) as Saleh's successor. Hadi had no real power base in Yemen and without strong international backing – especially from the US – he would be unlikely to survive for long. That leaves him in no position to resist American demands and at the same time it further damages his support at home. In effect, the US is propping him up with one hand and dragging him down with the other.                 [Abridged]

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Brian Whitaker is a former Middle East editor of the Guardian.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/08-1

Seeking asylum from Australian pollies

The ongoing backlash against asylum seekers is about votes, votes and more votes. Meanwhile, where do the rest of us go to seek asylum from our politicians?

George Negus                             Guardian/UK                  29 July 2013

As the last federal election loomed in 2010, you might have just been able to get a cigarette paper between a muddled Julia Gillard and “turn-back” Tony Abbott on the nation’s embarrassing asylum seeker carry-on.

Name a solution, any solution – Nauru, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Pacific, poor old Christmas Island, whatever out-of-sight, out-of mind local location you could think of – and now, of course, the inhumane and unprecedented Manus Island PNG wing-and-a-prayer, buck-passing solution. Whether or not any of them make sense, they all meet the ultimate cop-out: the “not-in-my-bloody backyard solution.”

You don’t have to be a political genius to work out that this current bout of fear and loathing has precious little to do with individuals from some remote foreign starting point prepared to risk everything – including death – to get to our cherished continent. 

It’s about votes, votes and more votes. And for the rest of us out here in voter-land, it’s an invidious choice between the lesser of evils.

At least we know Rudd and Abbott agree on one thing. Neither of them has an honourably workable clue how to get the nation out of the quagmire it’s been in for decades on this sorry issue. Motivated by domestic politics, they are battering each other to convince us that once elected, they will stop those nasty people smugglers and their leaky boats. As a result, fewer would-be refugees, will die and our borders will be more secure.

In other words, an over-night miracle achieved, that will be touted as Australia’s contribution to tackling the worsening humanitarian calamity of 45 million displaced men, women and children around the globe – as distinct from the measly half of one percent of them causing us political apoplexy here in Australia.

Meanwhile, the dragged out, politically amoral duck-shoving on the issue must surely have damaged this country’s reputation as a “good global citizen.” Or maybe that doesn’t bother us?

Don’t ask foreign minister, Bob Carr. Amazingly, Carr has decided to write off most asylum seekers as unacceptable economic refugees. As for Scott Morrison, Abbott’s shadow immigration spruiker, he spends his waking hours befuddling us with double-speak about pushing, towing or turning the boats back to somewhere – anywhere, so long as it’s not Australia!

Respected experts counsel that this country’s bi-partisan failure to implement widely-accepted international human rights standards on asylum seekers is at odds with its moral and legal obligations under theUN convention on the status of refugees, the very raison d’être for having a UN high commissioner for refugees, the law of the sea, let alone our own migration act.

James Hathaway, an expert on international refugee law and professorial fellow at Melbourne University, points out that Rudd’s PNG deal is without international precedent. “This plan is without question the most bizarre overreaction I have seen in more than 30 years of working on refugee law,” he recently told Radio National Breakfast:

It makes no sense. The only mandatory deportation to PNG is going to be so-called boat arrivals. Does the prime minister think that every refugee should arrive with a Qantas first class ticket in order to be real?

Hathaway says the UN convention decrees that a country cannot penalise refugees “for arriving without authorisation.” This, and the Rudd plan to dump them on PNG are both an illegal and discriminatory penalty.

Hathaway goes even further, asserting that Australia’s refugee crisis “doesn't really exist compared to other developed countries,” pointing out that our annual in-take of around 30,000 refugees is “a totally average, absolutely manageable number.” 

What Hathaway found “striking” was that unlike any developed nation he had experienced, Australia has been attracting genuine refugees as boat arrivals almost exclusively. Yet it was these so-called “boat people” who have attracted Rudd and Abbott’s mutual ire. “It’s the most extraordinarily bizarre singling out of the very group that ought to be the one we should care about the most.” 

Given Australia’s politically expedient bi-partisan obsession with so-called “boat people,” in the run-up to the 2010 Federal Election, the author interviewed Sydney University professor Mary Crock, an international migration law expert. Her take amounted to an intriguing “psycho-political” explanation.

“I think Australians have a deep historical fear of invasion by the sea,” she told me. “We’re not unique in that respect. Many countries around the world overreact when people come by boat to seek asylum.” I asked whether she was suggesting that because until quite recently countries were invaded by boats, Australians are more worried by refugees trying to get here by boat? “There are certainly historic precedents for that,” she said.

The salient fact is that most potential refugees come to Australia by plane, rather than by boat, claim refugee status, and more often than not, get it. “Yes, we don’t get concerned by that,” Crock told me. “People who come by plane are at least processed. They present their passports at the airport to get into the country, whereas people who come by boat often come without any documentation of any kind – no health or character checking at all.”

Hence, the government retains its tendency to view “boat people” as purely illegal immigrants who’ve jumped the queue. Nevertheless, as has been pointed out ad nauseum in an inconclusive debate, it is not illegal to seek asylum.

As I write, Rudd’s latest off-shore solution, Manus Island, has been condemned as a “hell-hole” and a “gulag” and Abbott’s spanking new Colonel Blimp plan is to turn the waters off the West Australian coast into a virtual war zone by sending in the troops.

Meanwhile, where do the rest of us go to seek asylum from Australian politicians? 

America's Legacy of Nuclear Terrorism

A statement of peace, or an epitaph

Robert Scheer                       Pub. by TruthDig.com                        August 6, 2013

August 6 marks 68 years since the United States committed what is arguably the single gravest act of terrorism that the world has ever known. Terrorism means the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, and targeted they were,

“That fateful summer, 8:15,” the mayor of Hiroshima recalled at a memorial service in 2007, “the roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky.  Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies. Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead. Within the year, 140,000 had died.”

It was followed three days later by the “Fat Man” bomb leveling Nagasaki, with a comparable disastrous impact on a largely civilian population that had no effective control over the decisions of the emperor who initiated the war. Nagasaki was a last- minute substitute for Kyoto, which Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson ordered spared because he had fond memories of his honeymoon in that two decades earlier. The devastation of those two cities was so gruesome that our government banned the showing of film footage depicting the carnage we had caused.

We have never been very good at challenging our nation’s own reprehensible behavior, but if we don’t take proper measure of the immense extermination wrought by two small and primitive nuclear weapons as compared with today’s arsenals, we lose the point as to why they must be banned. We are the country that designed and exploded these weapons that are inherently implements of terrorism in that, as the nuking of Japan amply demonstrated, they cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant. 

For those who believe that honorable ends absolve a nation of evil means, there is the argument that the bombings shortened the war, although the preponderance of more recent evidence would hold that the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan two days after Hiroshima was a more decisive factor.  But the basic assumption of universal opposition to terrorism is a rejection of the notion that even noble means justify ignoble ends, and a consistent opposition to the proliferation, let alone use of nuclear weapons, must insist that they are inherently anti-civilian and therefore immoral.

Why, then, on this anniversary, do we not acknowledge our responsibility as the nation that first created these weapons, has been the only country to use them, and is still in possession of the biggest repository of such weapons of mass destruction on earth? Is it not unwise, as well as wrong, for Aug. 6 to pass, as it generally does, without any widespread discussion of our culpability for the vast death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 

Indeed, in Santa Monica, Calif., home of one of the rare reminders of the catastrophe we unleashed, a sculpture of a mushroom cloud, designed by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Conrad, is slated for destruction.  That sculpture, called “Chain Reaction,” was given to the city in 1991 thanks to the beneficence of Joan Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald’s, who used her fortune to advance the cause of public enlightenment. It is a grim warning that the best educated can commit the most heinous of crimes.  Conrad, world famous as the editorial cartoonist for The Denver Post and Los Angeles Times for four decades, was himself a veteran of the war in the Pacific, one of those whose life the bomb was ostensibly designed to save. Conrad joined the Army in 1942 and participated in the invasions of Guam and Okinawa, where he was stationed at the time of the Hiroshima bombing. 

His sentiment about that horrific event is inscribed on his powerful sculpture: “This is a statement of peace. May it never become an epitaph.”  Conrad’s critically important sculpture might soon be gone. As a nation, we excel at obliterating reminders of our own failings.      [Abbrev.]     http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/06-1

© 2013 TruthDig.com