Traditional political assumptions cannot be applied to an opposition movement going through a chaotic – and joyful – birth There was a moment last week in Cairo that gave me pause for thought. I was talking to Mohamed Negahid, a 30-year-old quality manager, at a pro-Mubarak demonstration outside the state television station. Egypt, he told me, was not like Tunisia, where I had been barely two weeks before, covering the Jasmine Revolution that deposed Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Nor is Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, like Ben Ali. He was right, of course. All revolutions have their own trajectories and fault lines. But something else struck me. Used to a certain kind of politics in our own countries, we have been looking to find the same in these upheavals in the Arab world. And not finding it, we have declared the process unfocused or unsatisfactory. The truth is that what we have been witnessing in this past month has been as much about the psychological processes involved in the birth of opposition movements in two autocratic states as it has been about the actual politics of them, which are still in the process of being defined. I saw it in the little groups outside the Casbah in Tunis who had gathered to debate, and in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, among people engaging in confrontations sometimes intense, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes even aggressive. They were engaged in a conversation that is still being thrashed out, whose resolution is hampered by the sheer novelty of open debate. Many have struggled to interpret what is happening. In Tunisia and Egypt, the media and others have tried to impose their own simplistic narrative by promoting opposition figures who are easy to identify – like Rachid Ghannouchi and Mohamed ElBaradei – and by proposing scenarios that only partly reflect reality. Ironically, many commentators frame their questions around assumptions that for decades have been put forward by both Mubarak and Ben Ali to rationalise their grip on power – promoting the threat posed by Islamist politics in the shape of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ennahdha movement in Tunisia. In other words, we are still asking questions defined by tyrants. The reality is that we do not know what will be the role of Islamist parties or of the figures only now emerging as a new generation of leaders. We cannot even know the terms of the negotiations between the different actors – and what will arise from them. So we have tended to ignore what should be obvious. That is that whatever happens, either in Tunisia or Egypt, a barrier has been broken. A threshold of fear has been crossed. For what has happened in both countries is that the structures of a police state have been challenged and found, to the surprise of many, to be weaker than imagined. In Egypt, President Mubarak on three occasions in the last fortnight attempted to break the burgeoning new opposition. His riot police were beaten back and defeated on the Friday that was called the Day of Fury. His army, which tried, subtly and not so subtly, to squeeze the opposition has been found out. Tanks and soldiers not prepared to fire on civilians have a limited utility for a police state. And when Mubarak unleashed his gangs of thugs on Wednesday to attack the square, they, too, were defeated. Which has left him ever more powerless. And even if Mubarak continues to hang on, what is clear is that a transition of power is already under way. It is not, however, one defined by negotiations between parties or the behind-the-scenes diplomacy at the behest of the US and the EU. Instead the shift taking place is a leaching of power from existing elites in both states’ authoritarian centres. They have been forced, in Tunis, into the effective purging of Ben Ali loyalists, and in Cairo Mubarak’s state has had to offer ever more concessions. And suddenly the small, brave worlds of activists in both countries have been embraced by a wider population no longer afraid to speak or to assemble. I was struck by this in Tahrir Square last week, a place with the energy of a rock festival, where there were no speeches or events, no real agenda, simply the thrilling fact of the thing itself: a celebration of assembly and freedom of expression. Where it was possible at last for Egyptians to stand side by side and say what was previously unsayable. It is this that has changed in the Arab world in these few weeks, a contagion of bravery and optimism that cannot, I hope, be easily undone. Egypt Hosni Mubarak Tunisia Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali Middle East Peter Beaumont guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Politicians and civil servants have been too willing to treat with religious bigots Not the least of the pleasures the North African revolutions are bringing is the look of astonishment on the face of the foreign policy establishment. The world has become a constant source of surprise for diplomats and ministers, as each news bulletins lands a fresh blow on their crumbling certainties. “Tunisia, who knew?” “Egypt? Egypt! WTF?” So lost has Whitehall become, Alistair Burt, the Middle East minister, admits that the Foreign Office no longer understood foreign affairs. “The tide is turning very strongly,” he sighed. “It’s not for us to sit here in London and work out where that tide is going to go.” We are witnessing a diplomatic failure as great as the failure to predict the collapse of Soviet communism. Revolts in the Arab world are coming in a manner and from a quarter the experts never expected. With luck, we are also seeing the end of one of the most discreditable episodes in British diplomacy since Chamberlain and Halifax appeased the European fascists in the 1930s. Like America and France, Britain has sought to charm the Arab dictators and not only in Cairo and Riyadh. WikiLeaks tells us that in the interests of “realism” and “stability”, the Foreign Office also embraced the unhinged Muammar Gaddafi and briefed the old despot’s courtiers on how they could secure the release of the Lockerbie bomber, before the courts had acquitted him of responsibility for the worst murder in recent British history. What set the Foreign Office apart from other cynical western chancelleries was that it was not content with appeasing today’s secular dictators. It went on to embrace the theocrats of the Muslim Brotherhood it expected to become the religious dictators of the future. At no time did it seek to promote the interests of those in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and elsewhere who do not wish to live under dictatorship in any of its forms. Appeasement is a slippery tactic. Diplomats convince themselves they are “engaging” with repulsive movements because the national interest demands it. But the longer they engage the more willing they become to take the side of their partners and find excuses for their life-denying ideologies. A series of leaks to the Observer from a brave Foreign Office civil servant called Derek Pasquill showed that Britain never spent a moment worrying about what Muslim Brotherhood rule would mean for the Christian and Bahá’í religious minorities, or for Egypt’s democrats, liberals, trade unionists, women and homosexuals. Typical of Whitehall’s casuistry was a briefing by Mockbul Ali , a graduate of the religious right, the Foreign Office hired as an adviser. He told ministers that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the Brotherhood’s favourite theologians, was a mainstream figure Britain should do business with. He neglected to mention the cleric’s endorsement of wife-beating and female genital mutilation and of the murder of gays, Jews and Muslim “apostates”. The careers of Foreign Office diplomats provide a measure of how compromised Whitehall became. Frances Guy, the head of the Engaging with the Islamic World Group , which led the drive to support radical Islam, give it aid money and involve the Brotherhood in British foreign policy, is now our ambassador to Lebanon, from where she writes sinister blog posts announcing her admiration for the leaders of Hezbollah . Derek Pasquill lost his job, his home and his marriage for blowing the whistle. Such was the price of defending liberal values in “liberal” Britain. There is an old and by no means disreputable leftwing argument that the British establishment retains a colonialist mentality. It wants to be friends with the Islamist right in case its adherents gain control of oil fields, and does not believe that Arabs or Muslims deserve democracy because Johnny Arab cannot handle basic freedoms. You can find echoes of the old prejudice in the BBC’s attempts to portray the Muslim Brothers as moderates, as if they were the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Anglican Communion, or in the willingness of the Home Office and Metropolitan Police as well as the Foreign Office to treat the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami as the sole legitimate voices of Muslim Britain. (If you cannot see what is wrong with that manoeuvre, imagine how you would feel if officialdom treated the BNP as the legitimate voice of white Britain and the BBC praised Nick Griffin’s moderation.) As anyone with eyes to see must know by now, those who say they are the British establishment’s sworn enemies are no better than the ruling elite. To the take the most egregious case, “progressive” Londoners still appear willing to vote for Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral elections next year, even though he backed Qaradawi and went on to take the money of the Iranian regime’s propaganda station Press TV, after the mullahs’ secret policemen had killed and raped pro-democracy demonstrators in Tehran. London is one of the world’s centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; “Islamophobic” to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm. David Cameron seems to be prepared to stand up for elementary principles. He was almost pitch-perfect in his speech in Germany as he rejected with the required scorn the right’s argument that a clash of civilisations made Muslims and democracy incompatible and the double-standard of the multi-culturalists, who hold that one can oppose fascistic doctrines when they are held by white-skinned demagogues but not when they are propagated by brown-skinned reactionaries. I am not sure the prime minister understands that he is taking on a sensibility as much as a political platform. Because Britain was never invaded by the Nazis, and never suffered from any of the other versions of 20th-century tyranny, there is an unforgivable frivolity about our dealings with totalitarianism. Dilettante bureaucrats, journalists and intellectuals play with extremists and their ideas with the insouciance of men and women who know that they will never have to suffer the consequences of coping with extremists in power. The best gift the British can give the world in this moment of crisis is to imitate the crowds in North Africa and say enough of all of that. It is time to break away from a shameful past. Egypt Islam Foreign policy Nick Cohen guardian.co.uk
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Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo. Boing Boing fave Richard Dawkins points us to Ben Hillman’s lovely hymn about evolution that should be taught in all schools. Sung by the angelic Beatrice Athene. Video link… Broadcasting platform : Vimeo Source : Boing Boing Discovery Date : 06/02/2011 01:07 Number of articles : 4
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This fair-minded and accessible expert guide to the conflict between the United States and al-Qaida is essential reading On around the fifth day of the demonstrations in Cairo, there was a rapid but revealing exchange on CNN. Presenter Wolf Blitzer introduced the channel’s national security analyst Peter Bergen, “the author of the new and best-selling book The Longest War and expert on the Middle East”. After recapping recent events in Egypt, he asked his guest, “Where, if at all, does al-Qaida fit into this entire equation?” Bergen replied, slightly taken aback, “I would say not at all.” This is not the first time Bergen has had to field such startling questions about al-Qaida or Islamic militancy in general. Since first becoming interested in the topic in the mid-90s, and meeting Osama bin Laden in 1997, Bergen has, through his books, journalism and lecturing, established a reputation as one of America’s foremost al-Qaida experts. Though there are some with a more specialised knowledge of certain corners of the vast field that is “jihadi studies”, few rival Bergen’s overall knowledge or ability to explain, patiently and intelligibly, complicated concepts to people whose knowledge of the subject is, at best, variable. He is also one of the very rare such figures to consistently spent time on the ground: in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and most recently in Egypt. The Longest War is ambitious both in scope and aims. It sets out to chart “the enduring conflict between America and al-Qaida”. Its goal, the author says, “is to tell a history of the ‘war on terror’ in one volume.” In particular it aims to tell the story from all sides. Events in the US have been well covered by a series of instant histories by Bob Woodward and through the wonderful American tradition of senior figures releasing detailed memoirs soon after leaving office. Though some of the material in The Longest War is familiar, Bergen, through interviews with lesser-known figures, particularly from the world of counter-terrorism, adds much to what is already known. However, it is on the other side that the book is revelatory. The internal workings of bin Laden’s group are still largely obscure, at least to the general public, and Bergen does a fine job of negotiating the maze of personalities and ideologies to explain the various evolutions al-Qaida has undergone. One valuable early point is that the 9/11 attacks were deeply controversial within al-Qaida itself, and the broader Islamic militant community. Many believed that to risk the overthrowing of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the consequent loss of a safe haven was a mistake. Noman Benotman, a Libyan former militant and Afghan veteran, now in London, told Bergen that “the tactics took over the strategy”. Some, though far fewer, believed it was theologically unjustified. These debates, often acrimonious, continued. By 2007, senior figures, among them founder members of al-Qaida and senior Gulf clerics with strong militant credentials, were renouncing violence, or at least bin Laden’s leadership. Another debate within militant ranks was over whether to favour an “open front” strategy, where non-conventional but overt campaigns would aim to “liberate” territory, or a broader, decentralised strategy, which would aim to spark a “global uprising” and a host of miniature al-Qaidas would spring up. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter was the brainchild of Syrian-born Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, better known as Abu Musab al’Suri, who was one of those in Afghanistan pre-9/11 who was deeply suspicious of bin Laden and his pretensions to primacy within the world of Islamic extremism. This argument reflects a broader one among analysts over the centrality of al-Qaida in contemporary militant Islam. Bergen is very clear: al-Qaida and bin Laden remain critical. They are at the centre of many plots, providing leadership, inspiration and focus. In the unlikely event of the capture or killing of bin Laden – and Bergen surgically slices away the bombast to reveal the deep inadequacies of the hunt for the fugitive terrorist – a huge hole would be left. Here, Bergen perhaps goes too far. Certainly al-Qaida continues to play a major role, particularly in adding the practical knowledge and strategic focus that turns a “bunch of guys” into a terrorist cell. But if the radicalisation process is traced further back, other elements become much more important, not least personal acquaintances and the ideological environment in any given community. A survey of militant Islam around the world shows how limited bin Laden’s influence is on the broader movement, despite the media attention he receives. Though new groups in Somalia and the Yemen are linked, tenuously, to the “AQ hardcore”, many others – in Iraq, Indonesia, Algeria, Morocco, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – are not. If these groups have sometimes come close to al-Qaida’s vision in ideological terms, they would not necessarily evaporate if bin Laden was removed from the scene. Indeed, the current interest of Pakistani groups such as Lashkar e-Taiba or Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami in global agendas could be read as a sign of the end of al-Qaida’s monopoly on international campaigns. This debate has huge implications for the current crisis in Egypt, in which al-Qaida, as Bergen told Blitzer, has played no role whatsoever. Rather than asking about al-Qaida, Blitzer should have been asking about Islamism more generally. One of the most striking developments over recent years in the Middle East has been the growing conservatism, political, social and religious, of much of the population. Often this has been in opposition to the westernised values and lifestyles of an elite unwilling to share power and wealth with the expanding urban middle class. In Egypt, democracy is seen as a tool to oust that elite. Quite what will follow is uncertain. The critical question is the extent to which the population share the social values of the educated, media and tech-savvy activists who have so far been driving events. Though the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organisation founded in Egypt in 1928, would probably win only a third of votes in a free and fair election, it is likely that a “mild or moderate” Islamist worldview is shared by a greater proportion of people. One possibility is an evolution along the lines of Turkey, where an ongoing tension between new conservative, religious moderates and an old secular elite has neither derailed economic growth nor destabilised the country. But other less positive outcomes are entirely feasible. The biggest problem for reformers in Iran, too, is bringing on board the country’s reactionary rural and working-class constituency, who are still suspicious of anything that smacks of westernisation. A second element is worth remembering. Bergen recounts the history and roots of “the longest war” (that there is still no commonly agreed name for the conflict reveals much about the lack of clarity as to its real nature and even the identity of its participants). It is a conflict that is often described as “generational”, meaning that it will last for somewhere between 20 and 25 years. However, there is another sense in which generations play a role. Looking at some of the regions hit by violence associated with militant Islam in recent years, such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia, it is clear that the revulsion most people feel when they see what radical campaigns at home actually mean was the crucial factor in the failure of extremists to convince communities to heed their call-to-arms. The same was true of Algeria and Egypt in the 90s. Yet those out on the streets in Cairo and Alexandria are extremely young. In Egypt, 29% of the population is under 30. Most barely remember the hideous brutality that accompanied the militant campaigns of 15 or 20 years ago. They may, if their aspirations are not met in this new period of change, be tempted to turn once more to the bomb and the bullet. But to understand “the equation”, as Blitzer put it, you need to understand al-Qaida, and Bergen, with this detailed, serious, scrupulously fair, perceptive and sometimes startling work has made a significant contribution to us doing exactly that. Jason Burke’s new book, The 9/11 Wars, will be published by Penguin later this year. al-Qaida Global terrorism History Afghanistan Egypt Islam Jason Burke guardian.co.uk
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The way Twitter managed to get past Egypt’s internet shutdown was the perfect example of a crisis breeding innovation When they first came to office, the Obama team had a mantra: “Never waste a good crisis”. They then spent the next two years doing exactly the opposite. In the past few months we’ve seen a couple of decent crises – the first involving WikiLeaks, the second involving the political upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt. Both involve the internet in one way or another. So, in the spirit of Obama Mk I, let us ponder what might be learned from them. As far as the leaked US cables are concerned, the fury of the US administration and of certain US politicians was, for a time, positively comical. It stopped being funny when they began talking about prosecuting Julian Assange for “espionage”, given the draconian penalties that a conviction would carry. But the State Department’s indignation over the leaks of allegedly valuable secrets was, and remains, preposterous. Why? Because there is absolutely no way that a huge database containing 250,000 “secret” documents that can be lawfully accessed by more than a million officials can ever be secure. Any security engineer will tell you that it cannot be done: if you want to keep things secret online then the only way to do it is by compartmentalising the system. Huge, monolithic systems are intrinsically insecure. Ironically, that is how the Americans used to do it. They kept stuff in data silos. But in the recriminations after 9/11 there was a great deal of angst about the government’s failure to “join up the dots”, because it turned out that some of these silos had contained useful intelligence about the hijackers. So the silos were breached and linked – which is how Private Manning was able to access the system and download a quarter of a million documents on to the CD-Rom which eventually found its way to WikiLeaks. The moral of the story: if governments want to keep information secure, then they have to think architecturally about system design. And if the UK government thinks that the NHS can put all our health information into a single, national system that can be accessed by more than 100,000 staff, and still keep it secure, then they ought to think again. The WikiLeaks story has lessons for the rest of us too. The speed with which Amazon and PayPal dropped WikiLeaks should be a wake-up call to anyone who thinks that Cloud Computing services can be trusted to protect the interests of their customers when the government cuts up rough. The idealistic kids who signed up to participate in denial-of-service attacks on PayPal and the credit-card companies as retribution for cutting off WikiLeaks’s funding need to learn how to conceal their IP addresses before they engage in “hacktivism” – as many of them discovered this week when the police came knocking. For hardcore geeks, the WikiLeaks saga should serve as a stimulant to a new wave of innovation which will lead to a new generation of distributed, secure technologies (like the TOR networking system used by WikiLeaks) which will enable people to support movements and campaigns that are deemed subversive by authoritarian powers. A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. “Like many people”, they blogged , “we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.” They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet . What’s exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, before the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of innovation is needed. The way in which the Mubarak regime was able to shut down the net provided a sobering reminder of the power of governments that are prepared to take extreme measures. As the country disappeared from cyberspace I was suddenly struck by the thought that if PCs still came with steam-age built-in dial-up modems, Egyptians could have logged on to servers abroad and stayed connected. The only way of stopping that would be to shut down the entire phone system. And even Mubarak might have balked at that. Internet Computing Twitter Google WikiLeaks Egypt Mobile phones John Naughton guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The Professional Left Weekly Podcast: Egypt, Charlotte, and the Sarah Palin Embargo
February 6, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Credit: The Professional Left Time for your weekly Professional Left podcast with our own Driftglass and Bluegal . I hope everyone who was hit by the big snow and ice storm this week is doing alright and staying warm. Have a great weekend everybody and enjoy the podcast. You can listen to the archives at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/ and you can also make a donation there if you’d like to help keep these going.
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Photo: Flickr/ ndrwfgg Lowering the thermostat is a good, green thing. And I mentioned last week, it could surprisingly help you lose weight . Those of us in cold climes less in for the weight loss and more in for a cooler planet, are trying to keep the thermostat moderately set (not cranked) and arming ourselves with eco-thrifty ways to stay warm. Hot cocoa might not help shed lbs. but it will help warm–and delight–the belly. For your drinking enjoyment…my ‘
Continue reading …News Networks to Acknowledge Ronald Reagan, but Pulled Out All the Stops for FDR’s 100th
February 5, 2011 No CommentSaturday morning, TVNewser summarized the news networks’ plans for covering former President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday tomorrow — Fox News plans a documentary for Sunday night, CNN will have live programming Sunday afternoon and NBC’s Meet the Press will originate from the Reagan library with guests including James Baker, Reagan’s first White House chief of staff. The effort seems a bit modest for the most successful conservative president of the 20th century, who re-invigorated the American economy and helped bring the Soviet Union’s communist empire to its knees. The best contrast is with late January 1982, when the towering liberal president of the 20th century, Franklin D. Roosevelt, reached his 100th milestone. For that anniversary, NBC carved out an hour of primetime on Sunday, January 24, for a documentary narrated by newsman John Hart: “Nothing to Fear — The Legacy of FDR.” And ABC worked up a three-hour documentary, “FDR,” which aired on Friday, January 29, 1982, the day before Roosevelt’s actual birthday. Narrator Robert Trout, who covered Roosevelt’s presidency for CBS Radio, told the Christian Science Monitor he’d describe FDR as “dynamic, vigorous, cheerful, optimistic, perhaps the most inspiring example in history of somebody who overcame seemingly unsurmountable odds….” A two-page advertising spread in Time magazine (February 1, 1982) described the scope of ABC’s effort to commemorate Roosevelt: “ABC News for the past year has been preparing this work — calling upon the finest consultants and journalistic talent, aided by historic film footage, to create a unique television event.” ABC recruited former Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, plus Reagan, to pay homage to FDR: “For the first time in broadcasting history, four living presidents were willing to appear on one program to share their own thoughts, feelings and criticisms of Roosevelt’s leadership and legacy.” I’m sure most of the comments about Ronald Reagan tomorrow will be positive and heartfelt, but the strenuous journalistic effort to honor FDR, vs. the relative paucity of coverage for Reagan, is probably as good an indicator as any of the liberal skew that tilts the media playing field as much today as it did in Reagan’s 1980s — and Roosevelt’s 1930s.
Continue reading …Here’s one great story emerging from the week’s brutal blizzard: An alert neighbor and her trusty pair of binoculars saved the life of a 66-year-old Wisconsin man who was buried under snow for four hours, reports AOL News . Joe Latta’s ordeal began about 5am when he trudged out his driveway…
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