A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

People of Gaza celebrate freedom next door

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 04:07 PM PST

Damn you, ever-reliable US client state

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:56 PM PST

Clearly paying billions of dollars in annual aid isn’t enough for complete loyalty:

Sources tell ABC News that after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak spoke last night, handing over powers to his vice president but not stepping down, the White House and Obama administration in general conveyed to Egyptian government –at all levels – that his message was not enough for the demonstrators, whom they needed to satisfy or the crisis would continue and get worse.

On Thursday White House and administration officials had been told by Mubarak advisers that he was planning to step down — but no one was certain what he would do. Members of Mubarak’s own Cabinet thought he was stepping down. But Mubarak has proven himself mercurial and quite reluctant to give up power or be seen as having been chased out of office – so the White House hedged its bets.

The president give an optimistic statement earlier in the day, talking about bearing witness to history and praising the young generation marching in the streets of Cairo. But he didn’t get ahead of Mubarak. The White House has been surprised by his actions and there was no upside in trying to predict what a most unpredictable man would do.

Ultimately even Mubarak aides didn’t know what he would say. Was U.S. intelligence bad? “We have good intelligence,” an official told ABC News. “But we can’t get inside someone’s head.”

Thus President Obama didn’t know what Mubarak was going to say until he said it. And once the US saw that the reaction in the streets of Cairo was one of disappointment and anger, they pushed for more.

“Not to satisfy us,” one official tells ABC News, “to satisfy them,” the official said, pointing to mass protests in Tahrir Square.

Mubarak, your time was over 30 years ago

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:35 PM PST

So that’s what being a good Western ally means

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 04:40 AM PST

This is what bribing allies does for you; false promises that can’t be kept and undermining democracy (which is, of course, exactly what Israel wants):

Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman promised Israel in 2005 that he would prevent Hamas from gaining control over Gaza, according to a US diplomatic cable released on Friday.

According to the cable, which was leaked to WikiLeaks and published by Norweigan newspaper Aftenposten, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry’s Diplomatic-Security Bureau, secretly visited Suleiman, then the head of Egyptian intelligence, in September 2005. Gilad then reported on the visit to US diplomats in Tel Aviv.

Gilad and Suleiman discussed their common fear of Hamas winning the Palestinian elections set for January 2006.

Suleiman said to Gilad: “There will be no elections in January. We will take care of it.”

Suleiman did not elaborate as to how Egypt would stop the elections.

The US embassy in Tel Aviv wrote that Suleiman opposes Hamas because of fears that Islamic leadership in Gaza will strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Zionist lobbyist wants us to believe Suleiman could reform

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 04:11 AM PST

Seriously, when Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk – who loves to preach to Arabs that America cares deeply about democracy, as long as Zionism is helped along the way – says things like this, in today’s New York Times, you have to wonder why he continues being quoted:

“The administration had been looking toward Suleiman to handle the orderly part of the orderly transition,” said Martin S. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “But this week, he raised doubts about whether he had made the conversion to a democrat. And now Mubarak has dragged Suleiman down with him, in the eyes of the protesters.”

Suleiman could be a democrat? Yes, I’m sure his torturing past has been totally repented.

What online culture has brought to Egypt (and didn’t start yesterday)

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 03:36 AM PST

The internet has certainly played a role in bringing Egypt to this moment. It started years ago – something I documented in my bookThe Blogging Revolution – and hasn’t just appeared in the last two weeks. Instant Facebook Revolution, indeed.

I like this:

As one secularist blogger put it in commenting on the protocols of online engagement: “The atheists reign in their contempt for religion, while the religious bloggers—who would not even accept the existence of non-believers in the first place—can now see some shared values.”

Photographic coverage of Egyptian revolution

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 01:17 AM PST

Matthew Cassel on foreign reporting in Cairo.

Suleiman adds another victim to his list

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 11:21 PM PST

Australian Mamdouh Habib was tortured by the US and Israeli favourite and now information of another poor soul:

Omar Suleiman – spymaster, CIA ally and heir apparent to Egypt’s throne – has been accused in the interrogation of a Canadian citizen tortured overseas.

The allegation appears in the federal findings from a former Canadian Supreme Court judge, who faulted Canadian intelligence practices for setting into motion a snowballing series of global investigations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

This led to a huge U.S. interest in pursuing Arab-Canadian citizens who had been branded as al-Qaeda suspects, Mr. Justice Frank Iacobucci found. And that, in turn, led to brutal jailings in the Middle East.

The most famous case remains that of Maher Arar, the exonerated engineer since awarded $10-million in compensation by Ottawa.

But the first Canadian held overseas in such circumstances was a Toronto truck driver named Ahmad Abou El Maati. He had spent years fighting with Afghan guerrillas before getting a job driving rigs across the Canada-U.S. border.

Arrested in the Middle East two months after 9/11, Mr. El Maati spent the next two years being passed from interrogator to interrogator. Canadian judges have found his accounts of beatings and electric shocks to be credible.

One of his inquisitors may have been Egypt’s top spy. “Mr. El Maati thought that he recognized his interrogator from the news and that he might be Omar Soleiman, the head of Egyptian intelligence,” the Iacobucci report says, using an alternate spelling of the Egyptian Vice-President’s name.

Unlike other interrogations, that session in the spring of 2003 did not involve violence. “A man in plain clothes sat across the desk from Mr. El Maati, asking him questions … the interrogator had a pile of papers in front of him and wrote down the answers Mr. El Maati gave.”

At the time, the Canadian prisoner had a sense that others were watching through a one-way window. The Iacobucci findings revealed that Western intelligence agencies – including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service – were closely monitoring what the Egyptians were doing, even passing along questions.

A little taste of what kind of democracy Egypt deserves

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 08:49 PM PST

My following analysis appears on ABC Unleashed/The Drum today:

An Egyptian blogger displayed characteristic humour when news broke overnight that president Hosni Mubarak would not be stepping down:

Mubarak (n.): a psychotic ex-girlfriend who fails 2 understand it’s over.

If Mubarak and his new deputy Omar Suleiman thought their speeches would placate the protesters, they were sorely mistaken. Local bloggers and activists reacted with anger and determination.

Indeed, one wonders, with recent WikiLeaks revelations about the close relationship between Israel, America and Suleiman if their announcements weren’t coordinated with Washington.

The Obama administration is seemingly incapable of categorically siding with the protestors because America’s matrix of repression across the Middle East requires dictatorships to remain in place. Arab democracy has been a contradiction in terms for the US and Zionism for decades.

Tel Aviv and Washington have long seen Suleiman as a steady pair of hands, a brute all-too-keen to allegedly keep the Islamist beast at bay, suppress Hamas, manage the border with Gaza and maintain the siege and torture “terror” suspects brought from America, Europe or the Middle East.

Indeed, Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, who spoke exclusively to me last night, knows this reality well.

While in Egypt in 2001 he was personally visited by Suleiman, threatened and physically abused. Habib’s book, My Story, goes into detail about the kinds of psychological and physical pressure applied to him. The Australian Government recently implicitly acknowledged the validity of his claims by paying him an undisclosed amount of compensation.

Habib told me that he wanted the Australian government to assist bringing Suleiman to trial in an international court.

The Egyptian people will not go back to the past, something even acknowledged by president Obama’s latest statement. And yet a democratic façade, with Mubarak and/or Suleiman leading the country, is no change at all.

Sober analysis therefore brings only one conclusion; the Arab street is expendable so long as Israel and its Zionist backers are satisfied. Inside the US itself, there is little diplomatic pressure on Washington to encourage democratic change in Egypt but there is massive paranoia from Tel Aviv that freedom would challenges its “Middle East’s Only Democracy” tag.

This comment in last week’s New York Times, by former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy, is symptomatic of the problem:

The Israelis are saying, après Mubarak, le deluge…It really can be distilled down to one thing, and that’s Israel.

Mubarak may have been inspired by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s snubbing of America when calling for a settlement freeze in the West Bank. The tactics were clear. Rally American domestic support against the move. Claim that relinquishing land would bring chaos, instability and a rise in Islamist terror. Talk about a belief in the peace process. Deepen and harden your position. Watch America never threaten the billions of dollars in annual aid. Remain a trusted client state.

Netanyahu and Mubarak are both playing America very skilfully though the Obama administration is well aware of the game.

Many in the Western press are suddenly fascinated with the Muslim Brotherhood, asking simplistic questions about inspiration from the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tragically, 10 years after September 11, 2001, Islamist politics are routinely misunderstood in the West, often wilfully so. For many pundits, Islamism means Al Qaeda or Wahabi fanaticism. In reality, there are millions of Islamists across the Middle East who don’t loathe the West for its values; they often just want freedom from our meddling.

In fact, as Noam Chomsky correctly states, Western elites aren’t worried about Islamism; independence from the Western axis is the real threat:

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

Talking about a truly independent Middle East requires an imagination solely lacking in establishment political circles.

Latin America in the last 10 years is analogous as far as seeing how the US reacts when countries chose to reject the Washington consensus. WikiLeaks has shown the tactics by which successive American administrations tried to tackle Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a task ably assisted by many in the US media. Human rights concerns were an irrelevance; nationalising key resources was the perceived problem.

The protesters being beaten and tortured in Egypt are unlikely to receive tangible solidarity from Western governments. Instead, anybody across the world can provide solidarity and backing for the disparate masses longing for the kind of freedoms that we can take for granted. Without the huge uprisings in the last weeks across the Arab world, Canberra, London and Washington would have been very happy to continue business as usual.

That tells us all we need to know about who are the real democrats in the 21st century.

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

The complex chaos for some Afghan women

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 08:33 PM PST

Mother Jones magazine:

For Afghan women, self-immolation has become a way to externalize private injustice, to push hidden pain into the public square. They are expressing a demand for human rights in a culture that does not allow them to articulate that wish.