Jul

16

Eagerly anticipating the World Cup Finals - there were other reasons to be anxious for the finals.This post features an entry written by a friend - STEVE - a Palestinian who decided to turn the world’s most watched sporting event into a wonderful show of solidarity for Palestine.He wrote this entry which A PRIORI gladly posts:

“Lamia and I got this flag commissioned in Hamra, Beirut. I was blessed with World Cup Final tickets and wanted to show some Filistini love. We got the flag up right before kickoff, and although it wasn’t on the broadcast, we got a few texts from people back home who said they saw it in the background…. FIFA officials took it down after about 7 minutes up, as they said it was too big.  

In truth, the thing was 12 x 5 meters — pretty massive (really massive) but we made our point. Although lots of people helped put this together, in the end it was (last names withheld) me, Saif, Tarek and Flavia representing Brazil (2014!!!) who put it up, and the crowd around us was totally supportive, if not directly helpful, in assisting; great energy in that sense.

The flag looks like it says “MAD” (which works too) but in fact says “MADIBA” (Nelson Mandela’s tribal nickname), which got us LOTS of local support, even from the cops, who were giving us thumbs up and smiles all around!

There were probably 30-40 palestinian flags up all around the stadium and anyone with the audacity to wave an Israeli flag in Free South Africa was heckled (people shouting Palestina! Gaza! etc).

From what i understand, FIFA officials cut up the FLAG and disposed of it. I think that’s just protocol, frankly…I didn’t really talk to them about it.

Keep up the momentum everywhere….The South Africans did it; my whole experience in that country was enchanting; really can’t think of a more appropriate word. I’ve attached some video I found on you tube, and here’s the link to another video that has it.”

Jun

23

THIS WEEK ON A PRIORI’S FEATURED COLUMN: Below is Mirella Hodeib’s Daily Star article about Amin Maalouf’s book  Dereglement du Monde: French for Disorders of the World. 

Amin Maalouf

Lebanese-French writer Maalouf talks about the “world in disorder” and his recent essay “Le Dereglement du monde. Quand nos civilisations s’epuisent” for Le Nouvel Observateur. The writer laments the “simultaneous sell-out” of Arab-Muslim and Western cultures. As the website Sign and Site notes, Maalouf writes how, “The Muslim world is in the midst of a traumatic crisis which, in many countries, is bringing chicanery, discrimination and racism in its wake.”Maalouf:

“One would expect religious belief to sharpen moral sensitivity. But the opposite is often the case. As if the very proclamation of faith simultaneously negates all ‘civil’ values. I level my criticism of the West elsewhere. At the incessant talk of values. At people who seem to believe they are engaged in a constant struggle for freedom, democracy and human rights. But all too often these concepts are used selectively, to suit the situation at hand. (…) This is why moral credibility has a become a rare commodity these days. The West’s supply is dwindling and the rest of the world does not have enough.”

Confessionalism: The drug that weakens Lebanon’s bodyBy Mirella Hodeib 

BEIRUT: Lebanese novelist and writer Amin Maalouf is preoccupied by sectarianism, which he readily left in Lebanon decades ago, and its increasingly hold across the world.

Maalouf’s most recent book “Dereglement du Monde: French for Disorders of the World,” is a candid cry against confessionalism and the resulting loss of collective intelligence in the West and the East.

In his latest book, Maalouf offers a poignant account of the miseries of our world today, urging all to re-evaluate their stances.

Maalouf denounces the political system in Lebanon, and says he has long considered it “subversive.” The writer says his dread of confessionalism was mainly due to his Lebanese origins.

“Lebanon, where I was born, is the typical example of a country divided by confessionalism, that’s why I never sympathize with this subversive regime,” he writes.

Maalouf, adds that while confessionalism might have constituted a remedy for the disease in the past; in the long run it proved to be more harmful than the disease itself.  He compares confessionalism to a drug that the entire country has become addicted to, and which “weakens its body and intelligence day after day.”

The 1993 Prix Goncourt laureate for “The Rock of Tanios”, deplores Lebanon’s confessionalism and blames the ancestors for having taken part in it.

“Confessionalism was in the end a swamp that our fathers must have never sank in,” he writes.

Using elegant language, Maalouf argues that disorder spreads and consequently confessionalism has widened its grip to almost everything. He adds that identity replaced ideology long time ago in the Middle East.

“We have moved from a world where rifts were mainly ideological and where debate was incessant, to a world were rifts touch upon identity and where there is little, if no place for debate,” he writes. According to Maalouf, this global trend has had devastating effects in the Middle East.

In “Dereglement du Monde”, Maalouf blames the Arab world for lacking “moral consciousness,” and accuses the West of making use of this absence to dominate the world.

“The Western civilization is, first and foremost, the creator of universal values; but it has been incapable to properly transmitting those. Humanity is paying the price for this gap,” he writes, in one of the book’s most powerful passages, which reveals a bitter disappointment in all that he had believed in.

Maalouf’s book reveals another facet of the Lebanese author. His mind is a made up of contradictions that yield positive and humanist reasoning. He is a Christian who defends Muslims, he is an Oriental lover of Europe, and last but not least he is a Lebanese who despises confessionalism.

Jun

7

The United States military build up in Haiti has two faces that are being scrutinized in the wake of the two massive wars it is fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Riffing off of Pat Robertson’s ridiculous statements during the first days of the Haiti earthquake crisis, I ask who really are the devils and/or angels taking care of the quakes aftermath in Haiti? It’s a question that is still relevant even if the media has all but dropped Haiti as a regular news item. Published in the March issue of the men’s magazine UMEN.

By JACKSON ALLERS

BEIRUT - Shortly after the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, American televangelist and former U.S. presidential candidate, Pat Robertson told viewers on the Christian Broadcasting Network that the island nation had been “cursed”  because Haitians had “swore a pact to the devil.” 

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” he said. “They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal.” 

Robertson said Haiti had been “cursed by one thing after another” ever since. 

I won’t speak about the abject disgust I had for Robertson’s statement, but I will point out that the only real devil - or devils as it were - that Haiti has made any pacts with in the quake’s aftermath are the same governmental players and economic institutions that have extended their “helping” hands to assist the more than 1 million people left homeless and the untold thousands of Haitians injured and dying. 

Indeed, much media hype has been made of the United States Military’s relief efforts and the debt relief pledges being offered by G-7 finance ministers, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 

But I can’t help but ask if we should rejoice at the seeming benevolence of these political and economic players now that the poorest country in the Western hemisphere has just become even poorer? 

Or even more fundamental is the question of what the motivation is for this group? To be sure these players never do things without a bottom-line - an “end game” if you will.  

First lets talk about the facts on the ground nearly two months later - or at least look at the facts on the ground from what the media is telling us. We know that CNN, the New York Times and other mainstream news sources all reported that the severe destruction in the capital city of Port au Prince was because the earthquake struck one of the densest urban areas in the world.  

Over populated, ramshackle, the “fragile city” was “constructed by the poor people themselves. And the country’s many years of underdevelopment and political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster,” historian Carl Lindskoog explained. 

As Lindskoog describes, this is definitely an incomplete narrative, and one that is easily digested by the concerned audiences that have been keenly sympathetic to the horrific images of Haiti after the quake. It’s an easily played out narrative that allows the west to absolve themselves of their own personal responsibility for Haiti’s “fragility.” 

This is particularly true of the narrative coming from the U.S. State Department and the U.S.-based media. Why? As Lindskoog so aptly lays out on the website Common Dreams, it’s been U.S. policies over the last six decades that have largely contributed to the dire conditions in Haiti - first from 1957 - 1971 with the brutal dictator, “Papa Doc” Duvalier” – a U.S. ally because of his staunch anti-Communist tendencies - and then later in the 1970’s and 80’s with Duvalier’s son - Jean-Claude “Baby Doc.” 

Under Baby Doc, the U.S. government and the increasingly globalized U.S. business sector, in coordination with the State Department-run international development agency USAID (US Agency for International Development), convinced the Haitian policy-makers and business elite to turn away from its agricultural base and develop an “export-oriented, market-based production” sector. 

The Americans set it up so that Haiti would become a dumping ground for their surplus agricultural products, and of course as Baby Doc and his henchmen foolishly redesigned their manufacturing and agricultural base, Haitians living in the countryside were forced to migrate to the urban centers because the rural economies literally dried up. 

In the 1990s the IMF and the World Bank contributed to this master plan by imposing structural adjustment policies, code for ultimatums set up to accept loans from these financial institutions. 

For example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff in 1995 from 35 percent to 3 percent, “leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States.” 

Richard Kim, senior editor of The Nation magazine writes, “As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, ‘by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US.’ During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this ‘charity’ came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti’s agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti’s dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.” 

As mentioned, the debt that the United States and other G-7 countries and financial institutions are purporting to alleviate for Haiti are actually debts initiated by the same institutions that are calling for the debt relief. The United States, the G-7 countries, the IMF and the World Bank lose nothing by calling for alleviating the debt. 

Consider the massive debt burden from Haiti’s post-colonial days under French occupation. From 1825 to 1947, Haiti spent huge portions of its national budget working off its debt, which was essentially a French extortion racket in which a former slave colony was forced to pay off their former slave masters to keep the French and their western allies from enforcing a complete embargo. “By 1900, Haiti was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments.” 

To put the debt in perspective, in today’s standards Haiti’s debt to France in 1825 was more than $30 billion, and that didn’t include the debt Haiti incurred from other countries like the United States. 

In fact, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced in 2003 that Haiti would attempt to sue the French government for stealing so much money from the former slave colony. As Aristide’s former lawyer Ira Kurzban told Naomi Klein, the French enforced an invalid debt agreement “because it was based on the threat of re-enslavement at a time when the international community regarded slavery as an evil.”   

Of course shortly after Aristide announced this lawsuit, he was ousted from his post in a coup d’etat, and the lawsuit disappeared.  

So in the earthquakes aftermath, when the IMF and World Bank offer to cover all of Haiti’s debt, what these two institutions are doing is setting the terms of agreement, whether Haiti like it or not - lest it not got any economic aid at all. And as Klein writes, “Even if Haiti does see full debt cancellation (a big if), that does not extinguish its right to be compensated for illegal debts already collected.” 

These same players have added to existing aid and finance deals with Haiti for loans, agricultural subsidies, and infrastructure development schemes, and will continue to do so under whatever government emerges from this tragedy.  

Which leads observers to question the next phase of governance for Haiti and the global struggle for influence over Haiti - something critics of the relief operations say is the reason why the U.S. military presence has been so beefed up.  

The United States military build up in Haiti has two faces that are being highly scrutinized right now in the wake of the two massive wars it is fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. True, the U.S. soldiers are not wearing Kevlar body amour and the vehicles are not outfitted with improvised explosive device detectors, but their role in stewarding the vast majority of aid services is questionable as arch-rivals for hemispheric influence - Venezuela and Cuba - are also pledging support  for Haiti. 

The operative words to the American relief efforts, according to the Pentagon and the United Nations are “security” and “stability.” Two very important aims, to be sure, but knowing the strategic nature of every U.S. action around the world, I am not surprised that critics claim that America is looking to secure Haiti’s role in a neo-liberal, globalized economy - as well as providing disaster relief. 

Haiti’s economic debt, cheap labour force, and reliance on foreign food subsidies puts it in a very vulnerable position for accepting ill-fated development plans that according to Arun Gupta of The Indypendent are based on sweatshop labour and tourism schemes. 

Thus, defanging the nation that was the first freed slave colony is perhaps the way for G-7 countries can force development and military occupation on Haiti when the pact of South American leftist nations led by oil-rich Venezuela is building up its own military arsenal and beefing up its aid to Caribbean nations like Haiti.  

By many credible accounts, U.S. military efforts during the first three weeks after the January 12 earthquake were actually hampering arriving aid into the Port au Prince airport. As Gupta notes: 

“Nineteen days into the crisis, only 32 percent of Haitians in need had received any food (even if just a single meal), three-quarters were without clean water, the government had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running ‘dangerously low’ on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers.” 

With estimates of more than 400,000 injured Haitians, relief efforts like this must be questioned in the months to come. U.S. commander, Lt. General Ken Keen said that he would not put a time frame on how long U.S. forces were planning on staying in Haiti. He said, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.” 

What that end will be has yet to be determined, and while activist Hollywood personalities like Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn talk about the incredible job the U.S. military and the United Nations peacekeeping forces are doing in the midst of so much suffering, we will all need to make sure that the real issues of justice with Haiti are attended to while the earthquake is still fresh in the minds of the world. 

Debt relief is the least the G-7 countries, the IMF and World Bank can offer Haiti. A non-militarized aid response is more appropriate. Better still, a world or U.N. Security Council plan to put in place a viable post earthquake scenario that will account for the fact that March is the beginning of the rainy season, and shelter must be provided for the more than 1 million displaced people without homes and the hundreds of thousands in need of medical care - all of whom are susceptible to the potentials of diseases like typhoid, and malaria. 

What devilish pacts are offered Haiti’s leaders by the economic and aid relief players in the months to come will determine whether the environmentally and economically devastated country will become a viable state or not. As Naomi Klein wrote, “Haiti’s history needs to be confronted now, because it threatens to repeat itself.”

Feb

7

My assessment of the misreading of events in Iran in the wake of the government’s hijacking of the presidential election last June. Written for the February edition of the men’s magazine UMEN.

By JACKSON ALLERS 

BEIRUT - Western democracies like the United States, Britain, Germany and France have all demonstrated a fundamentally skewed idea of democracy.  Through foreign aid, business agents and at times by the barrel of a gun, each one of these states has attempted to export the idea of democracy as a sort of ‘cure-all’ for the ills of the world. For these players, democracy is the sort of modern snake oil for the ills of bad governance - at least this is the narrative of the west.

Since the rigged Iranian presidential elections last June, these western countries have been using the actions of the increasingly emboldened Iranian opposition movement to push their own ‘public relations’ version of events. Indeed, writers and opinion-makers in the United States, for example, have given in to the idea that Iran’s religious leadership is in danger of being toppled.

“What began as anger over a stolen election has grown into a revolt against Iran’s system of Islamic government,” wrote London Daily Telegraph executive foreign editor in an opinion piece printed in The Wall Street Journal in December.

The opposition movement was certainly emboldened last December when Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, Iran’s most senior cleric, became a martyr for their cause. Montazeri had for years been among the most vociferous critics of the regime established by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after the death of the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Montazeri had been considered the most logical heir to Khomeini when he died in 1989, but his opposition over the government policies in 1988 led to Montazeri’s house arrest sentence in the Iranian holy city of Qom. Khamenei was subsequently appointment as Iran’s Supreme Leader.

The senior cleric’s death came as protests - pro and anti-government - took to the streets during the major Shia religious holiday of Ashoura. What is new with this opposition movement - making it fodder for the west’s propaganda machines - is that the demonstrators are very open about their anger against the Supreme Leader, prompting opinion writers like Coughlin to say the protest movement “has become a protest against the entire system of religious government.”

Many in the west point to Iran’s insistence at moving ahead with a “domestic nuclear energy program” and their reluctance to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency over the country’s clandestine uranium-enrichment activities as being additional reasons for the growing public opposition movement to feel vindicated in their actions.

Even China and Russia, who previously backed Iran’s domestic nuclear development, have joined other western nations hell-bent on stopping the Iran’s nuclear program. Adding to this, Iran’s Mullah appointed president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been spitefully defiant on the nuclear issue - despite the fact that his government has driven Iran into financial crisis in recent years.

Ahmadinejad himself is a perfect target for the west, and his fiery retorts against the validity of the Holocaust and his calls to wipe out Israel have done nothing to engender himself in the eyes of the west.

So goes the refrain: “The overwhelming majority of the people are no longer willing to settle for a vote recount or a less repressive Islamic rule. They are determined to establish a fully secular democracy with complete separation of mosque and state.”

In truth, the west cannot gauge what the Iranian people want or desire because the Iranian people are not some sort of mindless, zombi-fied religious mass as the west’s biggest anti-Iranian proponents would have the public believe. And figuring out what the consensus is for the majority of Iranians is impossible because of the various currents within Iranian society.

We know that the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the repressive regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a broad movement that was not solely made up of rabid Shia fundamentalists wanting to impose Sharia law over Iran. It was made up of secularists, moderates, artists, bureaucrats and democracy advocates that saw the western-backed regime of the shah as oppressive, corrupt and inattentive to the growing needs of the underclasses within Iranian society.

Unlike 1979, we don’t know how much power the Iranian opposition movement actually has with the larger Iranian population. “Alternative” narratives are emerging which suggest that the opposition does not have huge populist support, as governments like the United States would have one believe.

These narratives which suggest that despite the well-meaning efforts of the reformist elements within Iran seeking to change the current anti-democratic actions of the Iranian leadership, there will be no change in Iran’s system of government.

In fact, what is known about the Green protest movement is mostly what the west reports – obviously aided by the Iranian regime’s total control of the media coming out of Iran. We know that Iranians loyal to Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated candidate for the Iranian presidency, have shown their willingness to protest, and die for what they see is the betrayal of the tenets of the Iranian revolution. However, European and American media reported the December protests during Ashoura as being in the “tens of thousands” or even “hundreds of thousands,” but many on the ground say that the larger demonstrations at the time were the pro-government rallies designed to show support for the Islamic Republic.

Flynt Leverett, director of the New America Foundation’s Iran Initiative, and Hillary Mann Leverett, who heads a political risk consultancy wrote in the New York Times that “photographs and video clips lend considerable plausibility” that the pro-Republic rallies had “possibly the largest crowds in the streets of Tehran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral in 1989. In its wake, even President Ahmadinejad’s principal challenger in last June’s presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, felt compelled to acknowledge the ‘unacceptable radicalism’ of some Ashura protesters.”

Meaning that the west did very little reporting on the fact that much of Iranian society was upset that the opposition used the sacred Ashoura commemoration of the murder of Imam Hossein, one of Shiite Islam’s most revered figures. In fact, as Coughlin noted in the Wall Street Journal, “Protestors compared the imam’s martyrdom with those killed in the government’s violent suppression of last summer’s street protests.”

Still, as noted in the New York Times, a poll conducted by the University of Maryland after the June elections and the recent Ashoura protests indicate that the opposition has failed to evoke any real calls for the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

Of course this is not to say that the theocracy in Iran isn’t aware that they need to continue to placate the large class of bureaucrats that constitute Iran’s strongest political base.

As writer Iason Athanasiadis notes in a New York Times article, “There is a Persian concept that translates as the ‘party of the wind.’ It refers to the tendency of Iranians to bend politically whichever way the ideological winds blow. The oversubscribed classes of civil servants are some of the Islamic Republic’s most invested supporters, but they are not necessarily true believers. Their loyalty is likely to last only as long as the monthly checks and the subsidized cars, plasma-screen televisions and pilgrimages to Damascus and Mecca.”

But westerners like Athanasiadis seemingly contradict themselves – predicting the downfall of the Iranian regime as if to say that “I am predicting this change in government because I am one of the prophets for this change.” Indeed, Athanasiadis recounts one Iranian diplomat at an embassy in Europe saying recently that the time of “justice and freedom” would be happening in the “next few months,” and then quotes a high-ranking Iranian official in 2007 as ammunition to the claim of imminent regime overthrow.

“’The disillusionment within the regime is sometimes stronger than the disillusionment of the ordinary people, because these are people who had traveled outside Iran, to Europe, and knew a different level of life,’” Athanasiadis quotes the diplomat as saying.

Of course, even cursory investigation into the current Green movement in Iran reveals that the regime elements Athanasiadis is talking about aren’t the ones making the calls at the moment. They are not sending sicking the entire security structure on the opposition – they’re diplomats and certainly not part of the religious (read: poorer) mainstream citizenry of Iran. Indeed, going back to 2007 to bolster the arguments for the onset of a new Iranian revolution are only symptomatic of the west’s larger misreading of the situation.

As Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett note, “One of the reasons that Iran’s 1979 revolution was relatively bloodless was the smooth, almost instant shift in the loyalties of thousands of bureaucrats and military men from Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the opposition.”

This is not the case in the current situation – the bureaucrats and military men are NOT going to abandon their support of the government.

For the real purveyors of the new Iranian revolution – namely the United States and Israel – diplomatic engagement with Iran means something much more sinister. It means fomenting whatever power the opposition may have domestically in tandem with imposing unrealistic demands on a country struggling to meet it’s own social and economic needs – particularly where energy is concerned.

It means clearing the way for U.S. military and/or Israeli military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets as the ultimate policy of “regime change.” Thus, it is no wonder that media pundits and western interventionists are parroting the same information: “Iran’s religious leadership is perilously close to being toppled.”

However, what very few in the west are acknowledging – at least publicly – is that Iran is going through its own version of political reform 30 years after the revolution. Even after the violent crackdown of opposition supporters in early 2010 and the massive repression and brutalization of opposition elements after the June elections, nowhere has Mousavi called for the oustering of Ahmadenijad and Iran’s theocratic system of rule.

Mousavi has joined other supporters of the revolution – the original revolution – who are calling for new election rules, the lifting of media restrictions, recognition of the right for people to form political parties and to protest, and a more transparent government that is accountable to the people,

I should think the Iranian theocracy is smart enough to understand that they have an historic opportunity here. What Mousave and his supporters are calling for are the core concepts that will need to be put in place to assure the survival of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Failure to do these things will eventually lead to the predictions of regime change. But there’s a long way to go before that ‘reality’ is seen – no matter what the west my have us believe.


Blogroll

WP Themes