well yes...#FreeMohamedFahmy the complete betrayal of Egypt/Canada's son Mohamed Fadel Fahmy ..... and horrid and Al-Jazeera is popular in Canada
Press conference announcing lawsuit against Al
Jazeera Network filed in British Columbia-Canada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAolPuTGRFs … #FreePressBattle
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WORDPRESS BLOG:
#FreeMohamedFahmy
-finally can say that because our Canadian/Egyptian Journalist son, Mohamed
Fadel Fahmy tells the truth about Al-jazeera F**K-UP and Egypt’s betrayal- of
an honest Journalist caught in middle of mean war games – BRING MOHAMED FADEL
FAHMY HOME 2 CANADA PLEASE… enough of betrayalsy’alldon’tdeserve him
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APRIL 21, 2015- Canadian Son is getting his Canadian Passport- see u just can't have it both ways.... and am so glad Egypt is working with Canada 2 bring our Canadian son, Mohamed Fahmy home.... We love Egypt... millions and millions have visited as tourists 2 see the incredible history and beauty that is glorious Egypt.... logic wins... and so does Mohamed Fahmy.... congrats 2 Mohamed and congrats 2 Canada and congrats 2 Egypt....
Canada to issue passport to jailed Al Jazeera journalist Fahmy
Source: Reuters - Mon, 20 Apr 2015 22:33 GMT Author: Reuters
OTTAWA, April 20 (Reuters) - The Canadian government said on Monday it is now able to issue a passport to Mohamed Fahmy, the Al Jazeera journalist and naturalized Canadian who had been jailed in Egypt and is awaiting retrial there.
"After several weeks of intervention by government officials on Mr. Fahmy's behalf, we are now in a position to issue Mr. Fahmy's a passport despite ongoing legal issues and travel restrictions," Kevin Menard, a spokesman for Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, said in an e-mail.
Fahmy, who has given up his Egyptian citizenship, was released on bail in February after spending more than a year in custody.
He and another Al Jazeera journalist were originally sentenced to between seven and 10 years in prison on charges including spreading lies to help a "terrorist organization, which they have denied. Egypt's high court in January ordered a retrial.
The Canadian government in February welcomed the decision to release Fahmy on bail but said the prospect of him standing retrial was "unacceptable." (Reporting by Jeffrey Hodgson and Leah Schnurr; Editing by Leslie Adler)
http://www.trust.org/item/20150420223409-umd9t/
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April 8, 2015- wtf??? - HEADS UP- CANADIANS ARE BRILLIANTLY EDUCATED.... AND BREAKING THE LAW AND CANADIAN PASSPORTS CONFISCATED IN FOREIGN LANDS- returned or reissued is a very, very serious business..... WHY WLD. EGYPT RETURN FAHMY'S PASSPORT WHILE HE'S STILL ON TRIAL 4 TREASON... AND WHY WOULD CANADA ISSUE A TEMP. PASSPORT 2 A CANADIAN-EGYPTIAN CITIZEN BEING CHARGED 4 TREASON IN EGYPT???....\\
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So the question is... What is it that Egypt - the nation, of which, u are under house arrest requires... and what does Canadian banking etc... request of u that u don't have after living in Egypt 4 over 8 years or so???
NOTE:Canadian passport. He said it was taken from him the minute he was arrested in December 2013
NOTE: Complicating matters, the Egyptian court has not returned Fahmy's Canadian
passport
NOTE:
Canadian Passport Applications and Criminal Records + Charges + Offences
9. Passport Canada may refuse to issue a passport to an applicant who
(a) fails to provide the Passport Office with a duly completed application for a passport or with the information and material that is required or requested
(i) in the application for a passport, or
(ii) pursuant to section 8;
(b) stands charged in Canada with the commission of an indictable offence;
(c) stands charged outside Canada with the commission of any offence that would, if committed in Canada, constitute an indictable offence;
(d) is subject to a term of imprisonment in Canada or is forbidden to leave Canada or the territorial jurisdiction of a Canadian court by conditions imposed with respect to
(i) any temporary absence, work release, parole, statutory release or other similar regime of absence or release from a penitentiary or prison or any other place of confinement granted under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, the Prisons and Reformatories Act or any law made in Canada that contains similar release provisions,
(ii) any alternative measures, judicial interim release, release from custody, conditional sentence order or probation order granted under the Criminal Code or any law made in Canada that contains similar release provisions, or
(iii) any absence without escort from a penitentiary or prison granted under any law made in Canada;
(d.1) is subject to a term of imprisonment outside Canada or is forbidden to leave a foreign state or the territorial jurisdiction of a foreign court by conditions imposed with respect to any custodial release provisions that are comparable to those set out in subparagraphs (d)(i) to (iii);
(e) has been convicted of an offence under section 57 of the Criminal Code or has been convicted in a foreign state of an offence that would, if committed in Canada, constitute an offence under section 57 of the Criminal Code;
(f) is indebted to the Crown for expenses related to repatriation to Canada or for other consular financial assistance provided abroad at his request by the Government of Canada; or
(g) has been issued a passport that has not expired and has not been revoked.
http://dan.matan.ca/Canadian-Passport-Application-Criminal-Record-Parole-Charged?page=1
and.... frankly.... Fahmy has and is in a quandary...of Al-Jazeera's making.... and the horrific crimes of terror groups....
Canadian government begins invalidating passports of citizens who have left to join extremist groups
HOWEVER.... AS OLD IMMIGRATION..... don't 4get the Canadian Citizenship card and valid SIN card and did Fahmy keep his Canadian documents up 2 scratch..... (seriously folks why immigrate 2 Canada get your citizenship and then tear off making your home in your natural homeland? and not keep property, taxes, phones, licences, medical cards, sin cards, identity cards, Canadian tax records yearly as proof, Canada bank records, Canada volunteer organizations, Canada community groups u stay with like homeless, education, religion, schools of kids, shopping cards, education cert. etc.????- AS OLD IMMIGRATION WE MAKE SURE EACH AND EVERY NEW LANDED IMMIGRANT NEW THIS>>>>>
Canada Medical Card
Canada SIN card
Formal Canada Citizenship form-
SO... Mohamed Fahmy- get your Canadian sheeeeeet in order.....and get on home 2 Canada.
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John Baird wouldn't give up... and neither will Canadians.... We love u Egypt... and someday we want 2 visit your glorious culture and beautiful people.... but please let our Canadian son come home now. It's time.
Mohamed Fadel Fahmy @MFFahmy11 · 5 minutes ago
I
had a flashback at the police station today when I saw prisoners
shackeled as they were being escorted into that dreadful blue police van
March 19- War games... just like we said... and Mohamed Fahmy is the sacrifice.... O Canada
Mohamed Fahmy terror trial in Cairo delayed again
Fahmy claims victory: Al Jazeera journalists on terror charges in Egypt see new delay in trial after technical witnesses contradict testimony
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/03/19/mohamed-fahmy-terror-trial-in-cairo-delayed-again.html
Al-Jazeera betrayed their English Jouralists by siding with Muslim Brotherhood… INSTEAD… of honest news… SHAME ON YA… apologize 2 ur Canadian/English speaking clients who pay 2 watch ur news programs…. u sacrificed our Canadian/Egyptian son….. in your betrayal and u knew better… AND…DID…NOTHING…
MARCH 18- POSTED
MARCH 18 2015-Egypt... please allow us 2bring our Canadian son Mohamed Fahmy home now.... it's time Egypt... and we love u so much... would love 2 visit Egypt and see the pyramids b4 passing over....Our Foreign Minister John Baird tried hard.... now we understand the hijacking of this Canadian/Egyptian son... by Al-Jazeera.... and it breaks our heart- loved Al-Jazeera news and thought they were at least honest excluding Israel of course...their English channel has some excellent documentaries especially on Islamic cultures and history - #FreeMohamedFahmy - God bless our Canada... and God bless our Queen
It's time 2 bring our Canadian son home #FreeMohamedFahmy in Egypt prison used and betrayed by Al-Jazeera news - disgraceful... this proud son of Egypt who is a Canadian Citizen.... giving English news.... unbeknownst that Aljazeera was playing crapshoot with his life and their Muslim Brotherhood on the Islamic news channels of their Al-Jazeera... over the soverignty of beautiful Egypt''s people-
So many millions of aged want 2 visit and smell and taste the history of vacation travel 2 Middle East and Europe- USED 2 BE A LIFELONG DREAM AND SO GLORIOUS....
bring our Canadian son home... Dear beautiful Egypt.... it's time.... it's healing time... love u John Baird... u stepped up quietly and on a visit 4 this Canadian son... as many Canadians were dubious about Al-Jazeera betraying English Channels 2 pamper Muslim Brotherhood.... over Egypt youth's true democracy.... sigh
- USA was involved mightily in Arab Spring... and left behind a broken mess of beautiful Islam youth and youngbloods and women and girls.... sigh
God save our Queen- 2.2 billion of us and our nations belong 2 our Commonwealth of Canada- was born a citizen of the British Empire.....
Canada's First Nations- IDLE NO MORE CANADIANS....
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MARCH 19: posted
FreeMohamedFahmy - Dear Egypt...MARCH 19, 2015- please let Canada bring her Canadian/Egyptian son back 2 Canada... oh and by the by... KICK AL-JAZEERA'S ARSE-
AL-JAZEERA sacrificed our Canadian speaking Mohamd Fahmy and all - tv Al-Jazeera and THEIR English Channel journalists- in their despicable betrayal of Egypt, Egyptians, freedom, democracy in their horrific pampering of the crappy Muslim Brotherhood over the youthblood and Arab Spring of glorious beautiful Egypt??? Shame on the lot u Al-Jazeera.....
As Canada's Foreign Minister John Baird said at the time... it's just wrong- Mohamed Fahmy has done nothing but honour Canada and Egypt with honest news period..
Al-Jazeera... Canadians and English speaking fans trusted ur impartiality and ur glorious documentaries, news, and history and cultures of our beautiful world.
..... u need 2 apologize 2 ur global public... and reimburse these journalists and win their trust back..... because Mohamed Fahmy and those 4 journalists give u credibility back... AND U NEED CREDIBILITY... imho....so we can 4give u and want ur input like we used 2.
God bless our beloved Nato troops and our children... from Old Momma Nova.... and always- God Bless our Canada and God bless our Queen Elizabeth II- our Commonwealth of 2.2 Billion defines r freedoms
Egyptian president promises pardon of journalists, paper reports
QMI AGENCY
Sunday, March 1, 2015 1:56:56 EST PM
http://www.lfpress.com/2015/03/01/egyptian-president-promises-pardon-of-journalists-paper-reports
MARCH 13- It's time 2 bring our Canadian son home #FreeMohamedFahmy in Egypt prison used and betrayed by Al-Jazeera news - disgraceful... this proud son of Egypt who is a Canadian Citizen.... giving English news.... unbeknownst that Aljazeera was playing crapshoot with his life and their Muslim Brotherhood... over the soverignty of beautiful Egypt''s people- so many millions of aged want 2 visit and smell and taste the history of vacation travel 2 Middle East and Europe- USED 2 BE A LIFELONG DREAM AND SO GLORIOUS.... bring our Canadian son Mohamed Fahmy home now.... it's time Egypt... and we love u so much... would love 2 visit Egypt and see the pyramids b4 passing over....Our Foreign Minister John Baird tried hard.... now we understand the hijacking of this Canadian/Egyptian son... by Al-Jazeera.... and it breaks our heart- loved Al-Jazeera news and thought they were at least honest excluding Israel of course... #FreeMohamedFahmy
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153199682776886&set=pb.627936885.-2207520000.1426279642.&type=3&theater
FEBRUARY 20th... update.... NOW HERE'S OUR CANADIAN SON BACK WITH OUR CANADIAN VALUES.... Al-Jazeera u f**ked up your brave journalists and betrayed them on foreign soil.... SHAME ON U..... It is obvious Canadian Mohamed Fahmy was hijacked and adores his Canada and his Egypt equally..... SHAME ON AL-JAZEERA.... SHAME!!! POSTED WAY LAST JUNE... and 2da am so proud that Mohamed Fadel Fahmy speaks like a true journalist..... u make Canada and Canadians proud.... NOT only do we want our Journalist Fahmy free... we want him Canadian and Egyptian free as well.... Mohamed Fadel Fahmy was hijacked by Al-Jazeera - we said so back in June 2014 and we say it more so in February 2015. Peace of Christ cause that's how I roll.
HALIFAX METRO NEWS- NOVA SCOTIA
Mohamed Fahmy says Al Jazeera English partly to blame for ordeal
By Sarah El Deeb
CAIRO – Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy, who is awaiting retrial after more than a year behind bars in Egypt on terrorism-related charges, said his employer — Al Jazeera English — is partially to blame for his grinding ordeal.
Fahmy said it would be “naive” and “misleading” to see the case purely as a crackdown on press freedom, because it was complicated by Al-Jazeera’s “negligence” and Qatar’s use of the outlet to “wage a media war” against Cairo.
“I am not losing sight of who put me in prison,” he said, referring to the Egyptian prosecutors, who failed to present any evidence related to the terror charges in a trial widely condemned by rights groups and major media outlets.
“However, Al-Jazeera’s epic negligence has made our situation harder, more difficult, and gave our captor more firepower,” Fahmy said in an interview at his family home in a Cairo suburb.
“It is an infringement on freedom of speech to silence three innocent, recognized journalists. Yet a very important aspect of this case is Qatar abusing its Al-Jazeera Arabic platform in waging a media war against Egypt,” he said.
Al-Jazeera spokesmen did not respond to emails seeking comment. The broadcaster spearheaded a global media campaign calling for the release of the reporters, insisting they were unjustly punished for doing their job.
Egypt and Qatar have had tense relations since 2013, when the Egyptian military ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi amid massive protests. Doha is a strong backer of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the region. Cairo accused Al-Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for Morsi’s supporters, charges denied by the broadcaster.
Fahmy maintained that Al-Jazeera English, for which he was bureau chief for just three months before being detained in December 2013, was doing balanced and independent reporting. Al-Jazeera’s Arabic affiliates, however, were the only remaining platform for Islamists to criticize the military-backed government after Morsi’s ouster.
Fahmy said his senior managers failed to provide the English network’s staff with enough security, and to explain to the Egyptian government that they were different from the Arabic stations.
“They should have provided a security umbrella and put the security of their staffers ahead of getting the story, because it was framed as Al-Jazeera and Qatar are challenging the Egyptian government,” he said.
He also said Al-Jazeera failed to provide press passes or equipment permits. Al-Jazeera has said that lacking press credentials is an administrative matter that should never have landed the reporters in criminal court.
After a purely Egyptian affiliate of the network was ordered closed by a court in September 2013, the network continued to broadcast from its Doha studios, relying on amateur videos. At least 11 defendants were tried with Fahmy and the others allegedly for providing amateur videos to the network.
Late last year, before a retrial was ordered, Al-Jazeera shut down its Egyptian affiliate, in what was seen as part of a thaw in the relations between Cairo and Doha. But tensions flared again over Egypt’s recent airstrikes in Libya, when an Egyptian official accused Qatar of funding terror groups there.
Fahmy said the new tiff will likely complicate matters for him.
“Like it or not, this case is a public opinion case and the judge could be affected by what is happening in the political arena,” he said.
Al-Jazeera’s lawyer quit during the course of the trial in a highly emotional scene in which he also accused the broadcaster of jeopardizing its staff by choosing to sue the Egyptian government for $150 million for closing its offices and jamming its signal at the height of the trial.
Fahmy is now raising funds for his own defence team, which includes Amal Clooney, who has waived 90 per cent of her fees, he said.
Fahmy and his Egyptian producer Baher Mohammed begin their retrial on Monday, after an appeals court threw out the case that opened last year and ended in sentencing the two to seven and ten years respectively. Australian journalist Peter Greste, who was originally sentenced to seven years, was released and deported Feb. 1.
Fahmy was released on bail Feb. 12 following more than a year in prison. He said he is preparing for a lengthy legal battle in which his lawyers will question the main investigator in the case, who accused him of being the head of a terror cell that was providing a platform for the Islamists.
He is also going to seek deportation under the same new law that allowed Greste to be deported and spared a retrial.
Fahmy, a dual Canadian-Egyptian citizen, was asked to give up his Egyptian nationality by Egyptian officials in order to qualify for deportation. It’s not clear why he was not then deported, but Fahmy said he thinks Canada could have pressed Cairo harder on the matter.
Fahmy, who turned 40 in detention, has meanwhile been forced to postpone his wedding. Without Egyptian citizenship, he must apply to the Justice Ministry to marry his Egyptian fiancee Marwa Omara. Fahmy also has to report to the local police station every day while the trial continues.
http://metronews.ca/news/canada/1292466/mohamed-fahmy-partly-blames-employer-for-ordeal/
AND...
CHRONICLE HERALD....
Fahmy says Al-Jazeera shares blame for ordeal
Journalist speaks while awaiting retrial on charges in Egypt
SARAH EL DEEB THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAIRO — Al-Jazeera English journalist Mohamed Fahmy, who is out awaiting retrial after more than a year behind bars in Egypt on terrorism-related charges, said his Qatar-funded employer is partially to blame for his grinding ordeal.
Fahmy said it would be “naive" and “misleading" to see the case purely as a crackdown on press freedom, because it was complicated by Al-Jazeera’s “negligence" and Qatar’s use of the outlet to “wage a media war" against Cairo.
“I am not losing sight of who put me in prison," he said, referring to the Egyptian prosecutors, who failed to present any evidence related to the terror charges in a trial widely condemned by rights groups and major media outlets.
“However, Al-Jazeera’s epic negligence has made our situation harder, more difficult, and gave our captor more firepower," Fahmy said in an interview at his family home in a Cairo suburb.
“It is an infringement on freedom of speech to silence three innocent, recognized journalists. Yet a very important aspect of this case is Qatar abusing its Al-Jazeera Arabic platform in waging a media war against Egypt," he said.
Al-Jazeera spokesmen did not respond to emails seeking comment. The broadcaster spearheaded a global media campaign calling for the release of the reporters, insisting they were unjustly punished for doing their job.
Egypt and Qatar have had tense relations since 2013, when the Egyptian military ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi amid massive protests. Doha is a strong backer of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in the region. Cairo accused Al-Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for Morsi’s supporters, charges denied by the broadcaster.
Fahmy maintained that Al-Jazeera English, for which he was bureau chief for just three months before being detained in December 2013, was doing balanced and independent reporting. Al-Jazeera’s Arabic affiliates, however, were the only remaining platform for Islamists to criticize the military- backed government after Morsi’s ouster.
Fahmy said his senior managers failed to provide the English network’s staff with enough security, and to explain to the Egyptian government that they were different from the Arabic stations.
He also said Al-Jazeera failed to provide press passes or equipment permits. Al-Jazeera has said that lacking press credentials is an administrative matter that should never have landed the reporters in criminal court.
Fahmy, a dual Canadian-Egyptian citizen, was asked to give up his Egyptian nationality by Egyptian officials in order to qualify for deportation. It’s not clear why he was not then deported, but Fahmy said he thinks Canada could have pressed Cairo harder on the matter.
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feb 20- as promised- walking the talk
TWITTER:
BLOGGED: WORDPRESS
#FreeMohamedFahmy -finally can say that because our Canadian/Egyptian
Journalist son, Mohahamed Fadel Fahmy tells the truth about Al-Jazeera F**K-UP
and Egypt’s betrayal- of an honest Journalist caught in middle of mean war
games – BRING MOHAMED FADEL FAHMY HOME 2 CANADA PLEASE… enough of
betrayalsy’alldon’tdeserve him
https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/freemohamedfahmy-finally-can-say-that-because-our-canadianegyptian-journalist-son-mohahamed-fadel-fahmy-tells-the-truth-about-al-jazeera-fk-up-and-egypts-betrayal-of-an-honest-journalist-caug/-------------------------
VERSUS
FROM CANADA-
The Most Hated Name in News
Can al Jazeera English Save Journalism?
October 2009, The Walrus
There are three forces shaping the world, an Arab reporter I met in the Gaza Strip once told me: money, women, and journalism.
On the first and third counts, he might have been thinking of Qatar, where I pass by luxury shopping malls, glittering real estate developments, and, in a spirit of reasonableness, traffic signs that advise caution when driving the wrong way down one-way streets. Over the past decade, this tiny desert emirate of a million and a half people — a bump on the rib cage of Saudi Arabia, directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran — has asserted itself on the world stage in large measure by pouring money into, of all things, journalism. Since 1996, it has been funding Al Jazeera (Arabic for “the island”), the network that revolutionized the Arab media and is poised to do the same for the English-speaking world.
Passing through the security gate, where a Yemeni guard gives my documents the once-over, I enter the air-conditioned headquarters of Al Jazeera English, the international news channel the network launched in November of 2006. Inside the sweeping high-tech production facility, cameras roll as a young Australian anchor opens a segment on the South African elections, then passes the baton to his co-anchors at the channel’s three other broadcast centres, in Washington, London, and Kuala Lumpur.
The managing director of this ambitious operation is on the second floor, above the fray. Tony Burman, the former news chief of CBC Television, has the sort of face that can appear to be scowling when in fact he is deep in thought. Most of the time, what he is thinking about is news — like today’s story by AJE’s Beijing correspondent Melissa Chan, who managed to gain entry to one of China’s secret “black jails,” where the government imprisons citizens who challenge its authority. It’s a classic AJE story: a local reporter familiar with the language and culture investigates a place where few foreign correspondents venture to any depth, focusing on the plight of ordinary people and putting the story into context for a global audience. This kind of intrepid field reporting is how Burman made his mark as a producer for Canada’s public broadcaster in the ’80s and early ’90s, when he covered conflict in South America, civil war in Sudan, Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa, and the famine in Ethiopia. His crew famously broke that last story for North American viewers, in the process discovering three-year-old Birhan Woldu, who became the face of international relief efforts like Live Aid.
From his spacious corner office, Burman keeps an eye on four television screens: Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, and AJE’s two main competitors in the global news game, BBC World and CNN International (neither of which is broadly available in North America). Fumbling with the remote, he misfires, landing on what might be considered his arch-nemesis. “I come all the way to Qatar to watch Fox?” he says, bemused.
By the time Burman resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2007 after thirty-five years, eight of them as editor-in-chief, he’d had enough of an upper management he thought was turning CBC into a “B-minus version of Global,” the network owned by ailing media giant Canwest. He had become, he says, “less and less happy” with CBC’s Americanized direction (though not nearly as unhappy as he might have been had he stayed for the savage staff and budget cuts of late). “It was really time to leave.” Yet neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that a year later he would decamp halfway across the world to take on the greatest challenge of his career, lured by a fascinating — and unlikely — development in international journalism.
In less than three years, Al Jazeera English has emerged as the dominant channel covering the developing world. As the first worldwide news station to be based in the “global South,” it has an audacious mandate: to reverse the information flow that has traditionally moved from the wealthy countries of the North to the poorer countries south of the equator, and to be the “voice of the voiceless,” delivering in-depth journalism from under-reported regions around the world. With more than seventy bureaus run by staff drawn from some fifty nations, a typical news day for AJE might include reports on a nomadic camel-herding tribe whose members are key rebel leaders in Darfur, a lawsuit against Chiquita (formerly the United Fruit Company) for financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia, the effects of the global financial crisis on Pakistani carpet weavers, and the recent massive spike in arms sales to the United Arab Emirates. AJE currently broadcasts to 150 million households in more than 100 countries — with the exception, until now, of North America.
That’s where Burman comes in. A bred-in-the-bone journalist who started out in the late ’60s reporting for the Montreal Star, where his father was a news editor, he has a lifelong passion for foreign correspondence. Hired by CBC as a radio and TV producer in the early ’70s, he took a year off to freelance in South America before rejoining the network, where he eventually served as its European bureau chief, then moved into management. As head of television news, he was the kind of leader journalists were grateful to have on their side.
“When Tony left, people thought, ‘There goes the last great journalist in management,’” says Beth Haddon, an old friend and colleague of Burman’s who is an adjunct professor at the journalism school of the University of British Columbia. They met when both were senior news producers at CBC in the ’80s. “Tony really stood for something,” she says. “For quality journalism — that’s old-fashioned, of course — of fairness, balance, verification, public discourse.”
Burman had a reputation for defending his journalists when their reporting raised hackles. (His physical presence can be intimidating: “Give Tony a cigar,” one young Al Jazeera staffer told me, “and you could roll the cameras on a Mafia film.”) And he didn’t mind taking controversial positions if the facts backed them up. Such qualities stand him in good stead running not only AJE’s global news coverage, but also its campaign to break into Canada and the US, where cable and satellite carriers have been loath to associate themselves with a network that much of North America still considers Terror TV. The task of demolishing the misconceptions attached to the Al Jazeera brand is daunting. As Haddon warned Burman when he first floated the idea of leaving Toronto for Doha, the job sounded good, “but you’ll never have lunch in this town again.” Yet his move could hardly have been better timed, coming at a moment when the Western media are in a state of unparalleled crisis, undergoing the first seismic challenge to their dominance since the advent of television.
After years of sacrificing qualified reporting staff to the bottom line, and substituting public relations (press releases barely rewritten, press conferences reported verbatim) for costly investigative journalism, the media corporations that, starting in the ’90s, convinced regulators that consolidation was essential to their survival have found themselves with little immunity against the financial crisis. Faced with the simultaneous defection of their ad revenue and audiences to the Internet, even towering news titans such as the Boston Globe and the New York Times are struggling, while others are perishing outright.
Foreign bureaus have been among the hardest hit by cost-cutting measures in print and television media alike. According to the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media report, coverage of international events by American media fell by about 40 percent in 2008. Thus has a bizarre situation arisen: at the most interconnected time in history, accurate and comprehensive news of the outside world is disappearing — and with it an informed public.
“The mainstream American networks have cut their bureaus to the bone,” says Burman. “They’re basically only in London now. Even CNN has pulled back. I remember in the ’80s when I covered these events, there would be a truckload of American journalists and crews and editors, and now Al Jazeera outnumbers them all.” The channel plans to open ten new bureaus in the coming year, including one in Canada. “At the risk of sounding incredibly self serving,” Burman says, “that’s where, in the absence of alternatives, Al Jazeera English can fill a vacuum, simply because we’re going in the opposite direction.”
Today Burman is marking a victory: Al Jazeera English has finally broken into the United States. A non-profit educational broadcaster has agreed to carry it in Washington and twenty other American cities. The breakthrough is a watershed after years of confinement for aje to two small areas in the US (besides the State Department and the Pentagon), and — in stealth manoeuvres that have essentially commandeered new technology to circumvent the blockade — on YouTube, or streaming for free online through Livestation.com. Burman’s main thrust, however, has been Canada, which he considers a critical beachhead. If AJE can get permission to broadcast here, he expects to have a far easier time with the commercial American cable carriers that have thus far shied away.
“My hope is that once people see that the sun still shines, kids still go to school, people still laugh at good jokes, and the republic holds,” he says, “they will give it a shot.”
Al Jazeera built its name on opposing the status quo. The first twenty-four-hour news channel in the Arab world, it was launched by the Emir of Qatar in 1996, a year after he overthrew his father while the old man was holidaying in Switzerland. The coup, which ushered in an era of liberalization in the emirate, was nothing compared with the revolution the channel would create — one arguably as significant for the Arab world as Martin Luther’s legendary nailing of his dissident theses to a church door was for Europe. (That old-school press conference, which ignited the Protestant Reformation, took off thanks to a new technology: the printing press. For the Arab world, that technology is the satellite dish.)
The birth of Al Jazeera marked the first time in modern history that a plurality of viewpoints was included in the Arab public discourse — and there was something to outrage just about everyone. With a mandate to broadcast “the opinion and the other opinion” through a mix of news and audience-participation talk shows, the channel gave Israeli and American commentators a voice, along with religious skeptics, Islamic fundamentalists, women’s advocates, and political dissidents. The result was accusations from all quarters — that it was an instrument of the Mossad, the CIA, or, of course, al Qaeda. As American political science professor Marc Lynch, author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today, has said, the channel provided “a relentless criticism of the status quo, of political repression, of economic stagnation.” It pried the stranglehold on information from the hands of state leaders, and allowed formerly heretical views to enter the living rooms and coffee shops of the Arab public, forcing their politicians to, as Lynch puts it, “at least think about what will play well on Al Jazeera.”
By contrast with AJE’s bright new premises, the Arabic channel’s headquarters are spare — nothing more than a series of high-end trailers with stained industrial carpeting and the scent of coffee laced with cardamom floating through the hallways. Just inside the front entrance is the original production facility, recognizable from Control Room, the 2004 documentary about Al Jazeera filmed during the early days of the Iraq invasion. On this particular afternoon, Wadah Khanfar, the forty-year-old director general of the network (which encompasses the Arabic and English channels, plus a documentary channel, and a handful of subscription-only sports channels — the network’s primary money-makers, given an ongoing Arab advertising boycott) has been contending with two new sources of outrage. Today it is Egypt, which is claiming that the “state of Al Jazeera” is plotting to overthrow its government; and Sudan, where an adviser to the president wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes has stated that Al Jazeera is too “stupid” to understand the concept of national interest.
For Khanfar, an imposing figure in a navy blue pinstriped suit and red tie who wields stock phrases like “speaking truth to power” and clearly relishes the role of the muckraker, it’s just another ordinary day. Seated in his first-floor office next to the newsroom, where a beautiful woman with blown-out hair and full TV makeup is preparing to anchor a segment, he complains about the authoritarianism of Arab states. “You know what is the national interest for every leader in the Arab world?” he asks. “To protect his seat.” He pounds the leather armrest on his chair for effect. “Can you believe that most of them, when they die, their children take over?”
Like in Qatar? “Everywhere. I don’t think of Qatar as a haven for freedom and democracy, but it has done this: it allowed Al Jazeera to exist while every other Arab government either closed down bureaus or arrested journalists or put them in jail. And for this the Arab world, I must tell you, is experiencing something different.”
Having begun his career as an Africa correspondent, Khanfar went on to report for Al Jazeera from the Kurdish region of Iraq in the lead-up to the US invasion. He presented, he says, the facts: that the Kurds hated Saddam Hussein and wanted him gone. Khanfar’s broadcasts so enraged Iraq’s then minister of information (not to mention viewers who supported Saddam Hussein) that he marched into Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau with his Kalashnikov and a security detail and promised that Khanfar would be hanged in the main square in Baghdad. Within days, however, the government had fallen. Khanfar became Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau chief and in October 2003 was named director general.
If the channel has made enemies among Arab states — it’s currently banned in Iraq, Tunisia, and Algeria, and was prohibited in Saudi Arabia until this summer — it has found a weightier opponent in a former friend, the United States. Prior to 9/11, Al Jazeera was greeted by US officials as good news for Arab democracy. All that changed in October 2001, when it aired the first videotaped message from Osama bin Laden after the attacks on New York, and then began reporting on civilian casualties during the American invasion of Afghanistan. That year, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s Kabul bureau, an event echoed two years later when it bombed the one in Baghdad, killing a correspondent. On Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, meanwhile, Sami al-Hajj, a rookie cameraman with the station, was captured in what he believes was a case of mistaken identity (another cameraman named Sami had filmed an interview with bin Laden); he spent six years in Guantanamo before being released in 2008. The forty-year-old Sudanese national, who now walks like an old man, told me he was interrogated more than 300 times — almost exclusively about Al Jazeera, on whom he was asked to spy.
America’s obsession with Al Jazeera has inadvertently handed the network star power. A week before my arrival, surfer-haired Virgin CEO Richard Branson and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez both dropped by to visit. Such establishment figures as Tzipi Livni, Shimon Peres, Madeleine Albright, Ban Ki-moon, and General David Petraeus have also made the pilgrimage. Even former British prime minister Tony Blair came by for a private meeting. Blair had reportedly discussed with George Bush the possibility of bombing the channel’s Doha headquarters in the wake of its reports on heavy civilian casualties during the 2004 battle in Fallujah — an issue Khanfar made sure to bring up. (Blair, he says, brushed him off, laughingly suggesting that such matters were in the past and might not have been what they seemed.)
Well before the Bush-Blair discussion, international demand was mounting for an English version of Al Jazeera’s contentious brand of reporting. The network’s response was to create an entirely new entity, which would share some footage with the Arabic channel yet have a completely separate staff, management, and editorial mandate. “We wanted it to be an authentic English channel that broadcasts from within the mainstream but carries the ideas Al Jazeera has established,” Khanfar says. The ideas he’s referring to are editorial independence, an emphasis on field reporting, and a diverse staff who reside in the regions they cover, “so they understand and interpret and forecast much better than those who come overnight equipped with intensive reading from Wikipedia.”
He continues: “We are at the centre of a lot of troubles — Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestine, Sudan — a curse for us as individuals but a blessing for us as journalists. The developing world is generating a huge number of stories, and a TV station headquartered in one of the most complicated and news-producing regions is a great opportunity for audiences all over the world to see a different angle.” AJE is already the most watched international channel in sub-Saharan Africa, and Khanfar argues that the wealthy countries of the North, too, will benefit from an inside view of such developing-world issues as terrorism, immigration, oil, and energy: “If they are not explored properly from within the South, the North is going to suffer as well.”
AJE has poured resources into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, building on the Arabic channel’s access in the Middle East. This at a time when other networks, driven by commercial agendas, are scaling back, which Khanfar considers a “disaster” for the profession. “I mean, a journalist who used to go for a month to do something investigative will find it shortened to a few days, if it’s commissioned at all.” Given that his network is funded by the emir of the richest nation in the Middle East and is therefore free from commercial pressures, he knows he has an advantage in steering AJE through the current financial crisis. “We would like to appear, later on, as the player when it comes to English news internationally.”
In the lobby of the Four Seasons Doha, where I am waiting for Tony Burman, a young Qatari woman in a rhinestone-encrusted black abaya and head scarf checks her text messages, then floats across the marble floor clutching her Louis Vuitton bag. It’s a far different setting from the rundown auditorium at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver where I first met Burman earlier this year. There, he was launching a Canadian speaking tour, a kind of pre-emptive strike to address concerns about AJE as it applied for and received a broadcast license from the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission. In 2004, the Arabic channel had been granted a CRTC license that was essentially useless, freighted with the onerous condition that its content be monitored continuously. This time would have to be different, and so on a cold Tuesday evening in February several hundred people turned out to see a panel discussion on the future of international news — the first of many appearances at which Burman would deliver his message. Though there were other luminaries on the panel, which was moderated by Global national news anchor Kevin Newman, it was clearly Burman they had come to see.
Burman readily acknowledges, as we sit at the Four Seasons patio bar with the waters of the Persian Gulf lapping up beside us, that his stature in Canadian media is part of the reason he was tapped for the managing directorship at AJE. “I think, to speak as dispassionately as I can about myself, that it’s better it be a North American,” he says, pausing to order a gin and tonic, “because like any Canadian I feel I’m a Ph.D. student on the US. And obviously the Canadian system I know.”
When Burman left CBC, he initially planned to go small — to take on manageable creative projects as a consultant, which is what he initially did for AJE. Pressed to take on an expanded version of his job at CBC, he was resistant. He would have to leave Toronto just as he was finally becoming reacquainted with his two adult children, and planning his marriage this past summer to Jane Ferguson, an Ontario Superior Court judge. Yet as someone who had devoted his life to understanding the wider world, he couldn’t pass up the chance to oversee one of the most ambitious ventures in global news. His timing has been fortuitous, not only because competition in international newsgathering has withered, but because of the channel’s biggest scoop to date.
The Gaza war of 2008-09 was to Al Jazeera English what the first Gulf War was to a little-known satellite network called CNN. As the only international broadcaster based inside Gaza during the three-week Israeli onslaught, in which some 1,300 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed, AJE had the story everyone wanted but couldn’t get, since Israel had banned journalists from entering the war zone. AJE, unlike other international news agencies, had a permanent presence on both sides (Jerusalem is its largest foreign bureau), which meant it was already on the ground when the war started. Then it made the prescient, groundbreaking decision to give away its content to other networks for free, under the most lenient of Creative Commons licences.
The station’s coverage swept the globe, garnering accolades from international media, including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and even Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, in whose pages columnist Gideon Levy called the channel’s twenty-nine-year-old Gaza correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, “my hero of the Gaza War.” An American born to Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Mohyeldin had worked as a producer for CNN in Iraq before being headhunted by AJE. “There was plenty of opportunity for journalists to go into Gaza almost a week before the war,” he told me. “But they decided it wasn’t sexy enough or picture-rich or gripping.”
“Al Jazeera,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai in May, “has broken the West’s monopoly on how the world views conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. Its coverage of Gaza was nothing short of remarkable. While most American people are still denied the right to view Al Jazeera, many networks were forced to carry its reports and images simply because they were so insightful. Gaza also proved, if needed, the objectivity and professionalism of Al Jazeera.”
Gaza also provided an argument for AJE’s campaign to enter North America, the last significant holdout in the English-speaking world. Views of video reports on the English website — launched in 2003, the same year it was hacked, in one of the largest-ever denial-of-service attacks, after posting photographs of dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians — jumped 600 percent, with 60 percent of those coming from the United States. Monthly visits to the site, meanwhile, rose to 22 million. That’s proof, Burman says, of the appetite for the channel’s reportage.
AJE’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict may have put it on the map, but that same reporting is the chief source of opposition to the channel. “The introduction of an English-language Al Jazeera into Canadian homes can only provide yet another outlet for vicious anti-Israel propaganda,” Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, told the Jewish Tribune after Burman spoke at a Canadian Journalism Foundation event in February. “Al Jazeera may masquerade as an unbiased, neutral media outlet, but it is fooling nobody.”
“The argument that Al Jazeera English should not be allowed in North America because it’s, quote, anti-Semitic, is bogus,” Burman says as our waiter brings another round. “I think they realize they have nothing on Al Jazeera English, so if they want to keep it out the only way to do it is through guilt by association.” Rather than letting matters lie, Burman met with Canadian Jewish leaders earlier this year in what Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, characterized as a frank exchange, and agreed to open a direct channel for them to communicate any concerns. The strategy worked. In the end, the CJC, which had lobbied vigorously against licensing Al Jazeera Arabic, chose not to oppose the English channel’s application to broadcast in Canada because, says Farber, his organization’s job is to reflect the community’s mainstream, and “we have people who feel both ways.” (B’nai Brith told the CRTC that in a “spirit of co-operation,” it had also decided not to challenge AJE’s entry into Canada, but added that it would remain vigilant.)
Having watched AJE during his travels in Europe and on the Internet, Farber found the channel no more alarming than the BBC (“which I have concerns about because of its depiction of Middle East issues”), and in fact welcomes Al Jazeera English’s coverage of under-reported places like South America and Sudan. “The largest of the albatrosses hanging around their neck,” he says, “is their name.”
Burman’s first year on the job has been a scramble to revive morale, which had stagnated under his predecessor, a former BBC executive who was part of a management team that staff privately dubbed the British Boys Network. A high-profile American hire, former ABC correspondent David Marash, had quit after being removed as the channel’s Washington anchor, and publicly criticized its British executives for relying on lazy anti-American stereotypes when covering issues like poverty in the United States.. “Al Jazeera English is an absolutely first-rate news channel, and if you’re interested in the world south of the equator it is absolutely dominant,” Marash told me. “What’s so heartbreaking to me is that the United States would be its weakest link.”
Marash’s analysis “has merit,” admits Burman. Better coverage of the United States from a “helicopter view” is a priority as the channel begins airing there — a prelude to what he believes is a turning point in the channel’s relations with the West. The limited entry of AJE into the US, and the station’s likely approval in Canada — which Canadians overwhelmingly supported with thousands of comments to the CRTC this spring — coincide with a cultural shift symbolized by Barack Obama’s decision to give his first presidential interview to the Arab network Al Arabiya in January, followed by his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo this June. Since then, attitudes in Washington have changed so dramatically that officials who used to regard being asked to appear on Al Jazeera English like an invitation to an al Qaeda training seminar are suddenly courting the network.
This shift, combined with the fact that Western media have essentially abandoned foreign correspondence, leaves AJE well situated to assume the sort of dominance it has already achieved in other parts of the world. And it may be — with a planned Canadian bureau and expanded coverage of the United States, including a new US-focused current affairs show hosted by Avi Lewis — that North Americans underserved even by domestic journalism will start looking to Qatar not only for news of the outside world, but to understand what is happening at home.
It’s World Press Freedom Day, an annual event organized by the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and held this year in Doha. In the crowded hallway outside the Intercontinental Hotel conference room, a hundred or so journalists and media freedom types mill about, exchanging business cards and revelling in one of the last places on earth where they are free to smoke indoors.
Tolerance is the theme of this year’s event — aptly illustrated by the bikini-clad women at the pool next to others in head scarves and full bodysuits. Even the surprise appearance of Flemming Rose, the editor who published the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, yields only mild indignation. And while conference organizers have a great deal to say about the “information explosion,” the rise of new media, and the need for everyone to just get along, the drastic decline in the amount of actual journalism being done is barely addressed.
It’s a subject of some obsession for one of the participants, Andrew Stroehlein, communications director of the International Crisis Group, a global non-profit that advises governments and intergovernmental agencies such as the UN, the European Union, and the World Bank on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. An Anglo-American journalist in a natty suit, and a two-thumbed demon on his BlackBerry, Stroehlein churns out op-eds from his office in Brussels in an attempt to draw attention to forgotten wars. He worries that the plummeting budgets for foreign coverage mean more and more conflicts will fall into that category.
“People think there’s an information explosion,” he tells me while the rest of the participants feast on pastries during a break, “but what’s not being replaced is newsgathering by professionals.” And what of the assumption that everyone with access to the Internet or a camera phone will fill the gap? “Citizen journalism,” he says, “is like citizen dentistry.” Without trained journalists expending the time and resources to find out what is going on, the risk in places such as the United States — where the news can seem like an endless lunatic carnival in which the outside world doesn’t exist — is not only of becoming cut off from reality and developing skewed perceptions. (“That,” he says, “has already happened.”) The greater concern is what such an information vacuum permits. “You get away with things like Iraq because people don’t know what’s going on. That’s why these things happen.”
In an op-ed titled “Welcome to a World without Foreign Correspondents,” Stroehlein lamented the dearth of coverage of Somalia and Sri Lanka, adding, “Too bad Al Jazeera English is not available on most living-room screens in the US, and people there have to choke down the endless rotting fish heads of celebrity news, or the same tiresome group of ignoramuses shouting at each other in a studio — both the cheapest forms of filling air time after a test card.”
He calls himself a “major fan” of AJE, which is widely watched in Europe. “I think Al Jazeera English is the best international television news in the world, with the caveat that BBC World News is probably equally good. We as an organization take it very seriously. We’re trying to get political decisions made to stop conflict, so we’re fairly elite-media driven, and people in foreign policy circles watch it because it’s so intelligently done.”
At a time when the media have come to be regarded as actors in international conflicts rather than impartial observers — embedded coverage of the Iraq war being a case in point — a Knight Foundation-funded study of Al Jazeera English, conducted by the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, found that the channel functions as a form of “conciliatory media.” In other words, it works as a “clash of civilizations” in reverse, facilitating cross-cultural reconciliation rather than pitting us versus them. The longer viewers had been watching AJE, the study concluded, the less dogmatic was their thinking.
Comparing it with the American networks “is like comparing The Economist to Newsweek,” Philip Seib, author of The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics, told me in Dubai. “It’s so much more sophisticated and broad in terms of coverage.” A professor at USC Annenberg who studies the links between media, war, and terrorism, Seib says AJE has “expanded the realm of discourse” and could be invaluable in breaking down American insularity. “I think you’ll find those who criticize it have never seen it,” he says.
Stroehlein, meanwhile, thinks AJE has caused its only real competitor, BBC World, to up its game. “One reason I’m desperate to see Al Jazeera English enter the American news market is that it’s going to challenge the other news providers,” he says. Or maybe it won’t. Solid international reporting is important, but it’s hardly profitable; and serious reporting, Stroehlein acknowledges, is all about the dateline. That means foreign bureaus based in the countries they cover. It means long-term commitments to a region. In other words, it means something commercial broadcasters aren’t willing to provide: money.
Journalism has a responsibility to society, Stroehlein says, arguing that news reporting is not just another business: “How many businesses are there where if someone screws up just a little bit, you have mass violence?”
The same potential exists when no one is there to bear witness at all — potential not only for mass violence but for corruption, nepotism, and an uninformed public incapable of holding anyone to account. Which is why the current crisis in journalism is so dire, and why any and all efforts to reverse that trend should be welcomed, even if they come from the most hated name in news.
For Tony Burman — who can, it turns out, still have lunch in Toronto, despite occasional ribbing about “shilling for al Qaeda” (he likes to say he’s only met Osama bin Laden a dozen times), and who expects you’ll be watching Al Jazeera English somewhere around the same time you read this — controversy is the price of admission for hard-hitting journalism. Al Jazeera, he believes, “will be controversial every day it exists. That’s not only the nature of the organization; that’s almost the purpose of the organization: to keep stirring the pot so that change happens.”
October 2009, The Walrus
There are three forces shaping the world, an Arab reporter I met in the Gaza Strip once told me: money, women, and journalism.
On the first and third counts, he might have been thinking of Qatar, where I pass by luxury shopping malls, glittering real estate developments, and, in a spirit of reasonableness, traffic signs that advise caution when driving the wrong way down one-way streets. Over the past decade, this tiny desert emirate of a million and a half people — a bump on the rib cage of Saudi Arabia, directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran — has asserted itself on the world stage in large measure by pouring money into, of all things, journalism. Since 1996, it has been funding Al Jazeera (Arabic for “the island”), the network that revolutionized the Arab media and is poised to do the same for the English-speaking world.
Passing through the security gate, where a Yemeni guard gives my documents the once-over, I enter the air-conditioned headquarters of Al Jazeera English, the international news channel the network launched in November of 2006. Inside the sweeping high-tech production facility, cameras roll as a young Australian anchor opens a segment on the South African elections, then passes the baton to his co-anchors at the channel’s three other broadcast centres, in Washington, London, and Kuala Lumpur.
The managing director of this ambitious operation is on the second floor, above the fray. Tony Burman, the former news chief of CBC Television, has the sort of face that can appear to be scowling when in fact he is deep in thought. Most of the time, what he is thinking about is news — like today’s story by AJE’s Beijing correspondent Melissa Chan, who managed to gain entry to one of China’s secret “black jails,” where the government imprisons citizens who challenge its authority. It’s a classic AJE story: a local reporter familiar with the language and culture investigates a place where few foreign correspondents venture to any depth, focusing on the plight of ordinary people and putting the story into context for a global audience. This kind of intrepid field reporting is how Burman made his mark as a producer for Canada’s public broadcaster in the ’80s and early ’90s, when he covered conflict in South America, civil war in Sudan, Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa, and the famine in Ethiopia. His crew famously broke that last story for North American viewers, in the process discovering three-year-old Birhan Woldu, who became the face of international relief efforts like Live Aid.
From his spacious corner office, Burman keeps an eye on four television screens: Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, and AJE’s two main competitors in the global news game, BBC World and CNN International (neither of which is broadly available in North America). Fumbling with the remote, he misfires, landing on what might be considered his arch-nemesis. “I come all the way to Qatar to watch Fox?” he says, bemused.
By the time Burman resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2007 after thirty-five years, eight of them as editor-in-chief, he’d had enough of an upper management he thought was turning CBC into a “B-minus version of Global,” the network owned by ailing media giant Canwest. He had become, he says, “less and less happy” with CBC’s Americanized direction (though not nearly as unhappy as he might have been had he stayed for the savage staff and budget cuts of late). “It was really time to leave.” Yet neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that a year later he would decamp halfway across the world to take on the greatest challenge of his career, lured by a fascinating — and unlikely — development in international journalism.
In less than three years, Al Jazeera English has emerged as the dominant channel covering the developing world. As the first worldwide news station to be based in the “global South,” it has an audacious mandate: to reverse the information flow that has traditionally moved from the wealthy countries of the North to the poorer countries south of the equator, and to be the “voice of the voiceless,” delivering in-depth journalism from under-reported regions around the world. With more than seventy bureaus run by staff drawn from some fifty nations, a typical news day for AJE might include reports on a nomadic camel-herding tribe whose members are key rebel leaders in Darfur, a lawsuit against Chiquita (formerly the United Fruit Company) for financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia, the effects of the global financial crisis on Pakistani carpet weavers, and the recent massive spike in arms sales to the United Arab Emirates. AJE currently broadcasts to 150 million households in more than 100 countries — with the exception, until now, of North America.
That’s where Burman comes in. A bred-in-the-bone journalist who started out in the late ’60s reporting for the Montreal Star, where his father was a news editor, he has a lifelong passion for foreign correspondence. Hired by CBC as a radio and TV producer in the early ’70s, he took a year off to freelance in South America before rejoining the network, where he eventually served as its European bureau chief, then moved into management. As head of television news, he was the kind of leader journalists were grateful to have on their side.
“When Tony left, people thought, ‘There goes the last great journalist in management,’” says Beth Haddon, an old friend and colleague of Burman’s who is an adjunct professor at the journalism school of the University of British Columbia. They met when both were senior news producers at CBC in the ’80s. “Tony really stood for something,” she says. “For quality journalism — that’s old-fashioned, of course — of fairness, balance, verification, public discourse.”
Burman had a reputation for defending his journalists when their reporting raised hackles. (His physical presence can be intimidating: “Give Tony a cigar,” one young Al Jazeera staffer told me, “and you could roll the cameras on a Mafia film.”) And he didn’t mind taking controversial positions if the facts backed them up. Such qualities stand him in good stead running not only AJE’s global news coverage, but also its campaign to break into Canada and the US, where cable and satellite carriers have been loath to associate themselves with a network that much of North America still considers Terror TV. The task of demolishing the misconceptions attached to the Al Jazeera brand is daunting. As Haddon warned Burman when he first floated the idea of leaving Toronto for Doha, the job sounded good, “but you’ll never have lunch in this town again.” Yet his move could hardly have been better timed, coming at a moment when the Western media are in a state of unparalleled crisis, undergoing the first seismic challenge to their dominance since the advent of television.
After years of sacrificing qualified reporting staff to the bottom line, and substituting public relations (press releases barely rewritten, press conferences reported verbatim) for costly investigative journalism, the media corporations that, starting in the ’90s, convinced regulators that consolidation was essential to their survival have found themselves with little immunity against the financial crisis. Faced with the simultaneous defection of their ad revenue and audiences to the Internet, even towering news titans such as the Boston Globe and the New York Times are struggling, while others are perishing outright.
Foreign bureaus have been among the hardest hit by cost-cutting measures in print and television media alike. According to the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media report, coverage of international events by American media fell by about 40 percent in 2008. Thus has a bizarre situation arisen: at the most interconnected time in history, accurate and comprehensive news of the outside world is disappearing — and with it an informed public.
“The mainstream American networks have cut their bureaus to the bone,” says Burman. “They’re basically only in London now. Even CNN has pulled back. I remember in the ’80s when I covered these events, there would be a truckload of American journalists and crews and editors, and now Al Jazeera outnumbers them all.” The channel plans to open ten new bureaus in the coming year, including one in Canada. “At the risk of sounding incredibly self serving,” Burman says, “that’s where, in the absence of alternatives, Al Jazeera English can fill a vacuum, simply because we’re going in the opposite direction.”
Today Burman is marking a victory: Al Jazeera English has finally broken into the United States. A non-profit educational broadcaster has agreed to carry it in Washington and twenty other American cities. The breakthrough is a watershed after years of confinement for aje to two small areas in the US (besides the State Department and the Pentagon), and — in stealth manoeuvres that have essentially commandeered new technology to circumvent the blockade — on YouTube, or streaming for free online through Livestation.com. Burman’s main thrust, however, has been Canada, which he considers a critical beachhead. If AJE can get permission to broadcast here, he expects to have a far easier time with the commercial American cable carriers that have thus far shied away.
“My hope is that once people see that the sun still shines, kids still go to school, people still laugh at good jokes, and the republic holds,” he says, “they will give it a shot.”
Al Jazeera built its name on opposing the status quo. The first twenty-four-hour news channel in the Arab world, it was launched by the Emir of Qatar in 1996, a year after he overthrew his father while the old man was holidaying in Switzerland. The coup, which ushered in an era of liberalization in the emirate, was nothing compared with the revolution the channel would create — one arguably as significant for the Arab world as Martin Luther’s legendary nailing of his dissident theses to a church door was for Europe. (That old-school press conference, which ignited the Protestant Reformation, took off thanks to a new technology: the printing press. For the Arab world, that technology is the satellite dish.)
The birth of Al Jazeera marked the first time in modern history that a plurality of viewpoints was included in the Arab public discourse — and there was something to outrage just about everyone. With a mandate to broadcast “the opinion and the other opinion” through a mix of news and audience-participation talk shows, the channel gave Israeli and American commentators a voice, along with religious skeptics, Islamic fundamentalists, women’s advocates, and political dissidents. The result was accusations from all quarters — that it was an instrument of the Mossad, the CIA, or, of course, al Qaeda. As American political science professor Marc Lynch, author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today, has said, the channel provided “a relentless criticism of the status quo, of political repression, of economic stagnation.” It pried the stranglehold on information from the hands of state leaders, and allowed formerly heretical views to enter the living rooms and coffee shops of the Arab public, forcing their politicians to, as Lynch puts it, “at least think about what will play well on Al Jazeera.”
By contrast with AJE’s bright new premises, the Arabic channel’s headquarters are spare — nothing more than a series of high-end trailers with stained industrial carpeting and the scent of coffee laced with cardamom floating through the hallways. Just inside the front entrance is the original production facility, recognizable from Control Room, the 2004 documentary about Al Jazeera filmed during the early days of the Iraq invasion. On this particular afternoon, Wadah Khanfar, the forty-year-old director general of the network (which encompasses the Arabic and English channels, plus a documentary channel, and a handful of subscription-only sports channels — the network’s primary money-makers, given an ongoing Arab advertising boycott) has been contending with two new sources of outrage. Today it is Egypt, which is claiming that the “state of Al Jazeera” is plotting to overthrow its government; and Sudan, where an adviser to the president wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes has stated that Al Jazeera is too “stupid” to understand the concept of national interest.
For Khanfar, an imposing figure in a navy blue pinstriped suit and red tie who wields stock phrases like “speaking truth to power” and clearly relishes the role of the muckraker, it’s just another ordinary day. Seated in his first-floor office next to the newsroom, where a beautiful woman with blown-out hair and full TV makeup is preparing to anchor a segment, he complains about the authoritarianism of Arab states. “You know what is the national interest for every leader in the Arab world?” he asks. “To protect his seat.” He pounds the leather armrest on his chair for effect. “Can you believe that most of them, when they die, their children take over?”
Like in Qatar? “Everywhere. I don’t think of Qatar as a haven for freedom and democracy, but it has done this: it allowed Al Jazeera to exist while every other Arab government either closed down bureaus or arrested journalists or put them in jail. And for this the Arab world, I must tell you, is experiencing something different.”
Having begun his career as an Africa correspondent, Khanfar went on to report for Al Jazeera from the Kurdish region of Iraq in the lead-up to the US invasion. He presented, he says, the facts: that the Kurds hated Saddam Hussein and wanted him gone. Khanfar’s broadcasts so enraged Iraq’s then minister of information (not to mention viewers who supported Saddam Hussein) that he marched into Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau with his Kalashnikov and a security detail and promised that Khanfar would be hanged in the main square in Baghdad. Within days, however, the government had fallen. Khanfar became Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau chief and in October 2003 was named director general.
If the channel has made enemies among Arab states — it’s currently banned in Iraq, Tunisia, and Algeria, and was prohibited in Saudi Arabia until this summer — it has found a weightier opponent in a former friend, the United States. Prior to 9/11, Al Jazeera was greeted by US officials as good news for Arab democracy. All that changed in October 2001, when it aired the first videotaped message from Osama bin Laden after the attacks on New York, and then began reporting on civilian casualties during the American invasion of Afghanistan. That year, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s Kabul bureau, an event echoed two years later when it bombed the one in Baghdad, killing a correspondent. On Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, meanwhile, Sami al-Hajj, a rookie cameraman with the station, was captured in what he believes was a case of mistaken identity (another cameraman named Sami had filmed an interview with bin Laden); he spent six years in Guantanamo before being released in 2008. The forty-year-old Sudanese national, who now walks like an old man, told me he was interrogated more than 300 times — almost exclusively about Al Jazeera, on whom he was asked to spy.
America’s obsession with Al Jazeera has inadvertently handed the network star power. A week before my arrival, surfer-haired Virgin CEO Richard Branson and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez both dropped by to visit. Such establishment figures as Tzipi Livni, Shimon Peres, Madeleine Albright, Ban Ki-moon, and General David Petraeus have also made the pilgrimage. Even former British prime minister Tony Blair came by for a private meeting. Blair had reportedly discussed with George Bush the possibility of bombing the channel’s Doha headquarters in the wake of its reports on heavy civilian casualties during the 2004 battle in Fallujah — an issue Khanfar made sure to bring up. (Blair, he says, brushed him off, laughingly suggesting that such matters were in the past and might not have been what they seemed.)
Well before the Bush-Blair discussion, international demand was mounting for an English version of Al Jazeera’s contentious brand of reporting. The network’s response was to create an entirely new entity, which would share some footage with the Arabic channel yet have a completely separate staff, management, and editorial mandate. “We wanted it to be an authentic English channel that broadcasts from within the mainstream but carries the ideas Al Jazeera has established,” Khanfar says. The ideas he’s referring to are editorial independence, an emphasis on field reporting, and a diverse staff who reside in the regions they cover, “so they understand and interpret and forecast much better than those who come overnight equipped with intensive reading from Wikipedia.”
He continues: “We are at the centre of a lot of troubles — Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestine, Sudan — a curse for us as individuals but a blessing for us as journalists. The developing world is generating a huge number of stories, and a TV station headquartered in one of the most complicated and news-producing regions is a great opportunity for audiences all over the world to see a different angle.” AJE is already the most watched international channel in sub-Saharan Africa, and Khanfar argues that the wealthy countries of the North, too, will benefit from an inside view of such developing-world issues as terrorism, immigration, oil, and energy: “If they are not explored properly from within the South, the North is going to suffer as well.”
AJE has poured resources into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, building on the Arabic channel’s access in the Middle East. This at a time when other networks, driven by commercial agendas, are scaling back, which Khanfar considers a “disaster” for the profession. “I mean, a journalist who used to go for a month to do something investigative will find it shortened to a few days, if it’s commissioned at all.” Given that his network is funded by the emir of the richest nation in the Middle East and is therefore free from commercial pressures, he knows he has an advantage in steering AJE through the current financial crisis. “We would like to appear, later on, as the player when it comes to English news internationally.”
In the lobby of the Four Seasons Doha, where I am waiting for Tony Burman, a young Qatari woman in a rhinestone-encrusted black abaya and head scarf checks her text messages, then floats across the marble floor clutching her Louis Vuitton bag. It’s a far different setting from the rundown auditorium at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver where I first met Burman earlier this year. There, he was launching a Canadian speaking tour, a kind of pre-emptive strike to address concerns about AJE as it applied for and received a broadcast license from the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission. In 2004, the Arabic channel had been granted a CRTC license that was essentially useless, freighted with the onerous condition that its content be monitored continuously. This time would have to be different, and so on a cold Tuesday evening in February several hundred people turned out to see a panel discussion on the future of international news — the first of many appearances at which Burman would deliver his message. Though there were other luminaries on the panel, which was moderated by Global national news anchor Kevin Newman, it was clearly Burman they had come to see.
Burman readily acknowledges, as we sit at the Four Seasons patio bar with the waters of the Persian Gulf lapping up beside us, that his stature in Canadian media is part of the reason he was tapped for the managing directorship at AJE. “I think, to speak as dispassionately as I can about myself, that it’s better it be a North American,” he says, pausing to order a gin and tonic, “because like any Canadian I feel I’m a Ph.D. student on the US. And obviously the Canadian system I know.”
When Burman left CBC, he initially planned to go small — to take on manageable creative projects as a consultant, which is what he initially did for AJE. Pressed to take on an expanded version of his job at CBC, he was resistant. He would have to leave Toronto just as he was finally becoming reacquainted with his two adult children, and planning his marriage this past summer to Jane Ferguson, an Ontario Superior Court judge. Yet as someone who had devoted his life to understanding the wider world, he couldn’t pass up the chance to oversee one of the most ambitious ventures in global news. His timing has been fortuitous, not only because competition in international newsgathering has withered, but because of the channel’s biggest scoop to date.
The Gaza war of 2008-09 was to Al Jazeera English what the first Gulf War was to a little-known satellite network called CNN. As the only international broadcaster based inside Gaza during the three-week Israeli onslaught, in which some 1,300 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed, AJE had the story everyone wanted but couldn’t get, since Israel had banned journalists from entering the war zone. AJE, unlike other international news agencies, had a permanent presence on both sides (Jerusalem is its largest foreign bureau), which meant it was already on the ground when the war started. Then it made the prescient, groundbreaking decision to give away its content to other networks for free, under the most lenient of Creative Commons licences.
The station’s coverage swept the globe, garnering accolades from international media, including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and even Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, in whose pages columnist Gideon Levy called the channel’s twenty-nine-year-old Gaza correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, “my hero of the Gaza War.” An American born to Palestinian and Egyptian parents, Mohyeldin had worked as a producer for CNN in Iraq before being headhunted by AJE. “There was plenty of opportunity for journalists to go into Gaza almost a week before the war,” he told me. “But they decided it wasn’t sexy enough or picture-rich or gripping.”
“Al Jazeera,” investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai in May, “has broken the West’s monopoly on how the world views conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. Its coverage of Gaza was nothing short of remarkable. While most American people are still denied the right to view Al Jazeera, many networks were forced to carry its reports and images simply because they were so insightful. Gaza also proved, if needed, the objectivity and professionalism of Al Jazeera.”
Gaza also provided an argument for AJE’s campaign to enter North America, the last significant holdout in the English-speaking world. Views of video reports on the English website — launched in 2003, the same year it was hacked, in one of the largest-ever denial-of-service attacks, after posting photographs of dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians — jumped 600 percent, with 60 percent of those coming from the United States. Monthly visits to the site, meanwhile, rose to 22 million. That’s proof, Burman says, of the appetite for the channel’s reportage.
AJE’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict may have put it on the map, but that same reporting is the chief source of opposition to the channel. “The introduction of an English-language Al Jazeera into Canadian homes can only provide yet another outlet for vicious anti-Israel propaganda,” Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, told the Jewish Tribune after Burman spoke at a Canadian Journalism Foundation event in February. “Al Jazeera may masquerade as an unbiased, neutral media outlet, but it is fooling nobody.”
“The argument that Al Jazeera English should not be allowed in North America because it’s, quote, anti-Semitic, is bogus,” Burman says as our waiter brings another round. “I think they realize they have nothing on Al Jazeera English, so if they want to keep it out the only way to do it is through guilt by association.” Rather than letting matters lie, Burman met with Canadian Jewish leaders earlier this year in what Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, characterized as a frank exchange, and agreed to open a direct channel for them to communicate any concerns. The strategy worked. In the end, the CJC, which had lobbied vigorously against licensing Al Jazeera Arabic, chose not to oppose the English channel’s application to broadcast in Canada because, says Farber, his organization’s job is to reflect the community’s mainstream, and “we have people who feel both ways.” (B’nai Brith told the CRTC that in a “spirit of co-operation,” it had also decided not to challenge AJE’s entry into Canada, but added that it would remain vigilant.)
Having watched AJE during his travels in Europe and on the Internet, Farber found the channel no more alarming than the BBC (“which I have concerns about because of its depiction of Middle East issues”), and in fact welcomes Al Jazeera English’s coverage of under-reported places like South America and Sudan. “The largest of the albatrosses hanging around their neck,” he says, “is their name.”
Burman’s first year on the job has been a scramble to revive morale, which had stagnated under his predecessor, a former BBC executive who was part of a management team that staff privately dubbed the British Boys Network. A high-profile American hire, former ABC correspondent David Marash, had quit after being removed as the channel’s Washington anchor, and publicly criticized its British executives for relying on lazy anti-American stereotypes when covering issues like poverty in the United States.. “Al Jazeera English is an absolutely first-rate news channel, and if you’re interested in the world south of the equator it is absolutely dominant,” Marash told me. “What’s so heartbreaking to me is that the United States would be its weakest link.”
Marash’s analysis “has merit,” admits Burman. Better coverage of the United States from a “helicopter view” is a priority as the channel begins airing there — a prelude to what he believes is a turning point in the channel’s relations with the West. The limited entry of AJE into the US, and the station’s likely approval in Canada — which Canadians overwhelmingly supported with thousands of comments to the CRTC this spring — coincide with a cultural shift symbolized by Barack Obama’s decision to give his first presidential interview to the Arab network Al Arabiya in January, followed by his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo this June. Since then, attitudes in Washington have changed so dramatically that officials who used to regard being asked to appear on Al Jazeera English like an invitation to an al Qaeda training seminar are suddenly courting the network.
This shift, combined with the fact that Western media have essentially abandoned foreign correspondence, leaves AJE well situated to assume the sort of dominance it has already achieved in other parts of the world. And it may be — with a planned Canadian bureau and expanded coverage of the United States, including a new US-focused current affairs show hosted by Avi Lewis — that North Americans underserved even by domestic journalism will start looking to Qatar not only for news of the outside world, but to understand what is happening at home.
It’s World Press Freedom Day, an annual event organized by the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and held this year in Doha. In the crowded hallway outside the Intercontinental Hotel conference room, a hundred or so journalists and media freedom types mill about, exchanging business cards and revelling in one of the last places on earth where they are free to smoke indoors.
Tolerance is the theme of this year’s event — aptly illustrated by the bikini-clad women at the pool next to others in head scarves and full bodysuits. Even the surprise appearance of Flemming Rose, the editor who published the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, yields only mild indignation. And while conference organizers have a great deal to say about the “information explosion,” the rise of new media, and the need for everyone to just get along, the drastic decline in the amount of actual journalism being done is barely addressed.
It’s a subject of some obsession for one of the participants, Andrew Stroehlein, communications director of the International Crisis Group, a global non-profit that advises governments and intergovernmental agencies such as the UN, the European Union, and the World Bank on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. An Anglo-American journalist in a natty suit, and a two-thumbed demon on his BlackBerry, Stroehlein churns out op-eds from his office in Brussels in an attempt to draw attention to forgotten wars. He worries that the plummeting budgets for foreign coverage mean more and more conflicts will fall into that category.
“People think there’s an information explosion,” he tells me while the rest of the participants feast on pastries during a break, “but what’s not being replaced is newsgathering by professionals.” And what of the assumption that everyone with access to the Internet or a camera phone will fill the gap? “Citizen journalism,” he says, “is like citizen dentistry.” Without trained journalists expending the time and resources to find out what is going on, the risk in places such as the United States — where the news can seem like an endless lunatic carnival in which the outside world doesn’t exist — is not only of becoming cut off from reality and developing skewed perceptions. (“That,” he says, “has already happened.”) The greater concern is what such an information vacuum permits. “You get away with things like Iraq because people don’t know what’s going on. That’s why these things happen.”
In an op-ed titled “Welcome to a World without Foreign Correspondents,” Stroehlein lamented the dearth of coverage of Somalia and Sri Lanka, adding, “Too bad Al Jazeera English is not available on most living-room screens in the US, and people there have to choke down the endless rotting fish heads of celebrity news, or the same tiresome group of ignoramuses shouting at each other in a studio — both the cheapest forms of filling air time after a test card.”
He calls himself a “major fan” of AJE, which is widely watched in Europe. “I think Al Jazeera English is the best international television news in the world, with the caveat that BBC World News is probably equally good. We as an organization take it very seriously. We’re trying to get political decisions made to stop conflict, so we’re fairly elite-media driven, and people in foreign policy circles watch it because it’s so intelligently done.”
At a time when the media have come to be regarded as actors in international conflicts rather than impartial observers — embedded coverage of the Iraq war being a case in point — a Knight Foundation-funded study of Al Jazeera English, conducted by the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, found that the channel functions as a form of “conciliatory media.” In other words, it works as a “clash of civilizations” in reverse, facilitating cross-cultural reconciliation rather than pitting us versus them. The longer viewers had been watching AJE, the study concluded, the less dogmatic was their thinking.
Comparing it with the American networks “is like comparing The Economist to Newsweek,” Philip Seib, author of The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics, told me in Dubai. “It’s so much more sophisticated and broad in terms of coverage.” A professor at USC Annenberg who studies the links between media, war, and terrorism, Seib says AJE has “expanded the realm of discourse” and could be invaluable in breaking down American insularity. “I think you’ll find those who criticize it have never seen it,” he says.
Stroehlein, meanwhile, thinks AJE has caused its only real competitor, BBC World, to up its game. “One reason I’m desperate to see Al Jazeera English enter the American news market is that it’s going to challenge the other news providers,” he says. Or maybe it won’t. Solid international reporting is important, but it’s hardly profitable; and serious reporting, Stroehlein acknowledges, is all about the dateline. That means foreign bureaus based in the countries they cover. It means long-term commitments to a region. In other words, it means something commercial broadcasters aren’t willing to provide: money.
Journalism has a responsibility to society, Stroehlein says, arguing that news reporting is not just another business: “How many businesses are there where if someone screws up just a little bit, you have mass violence?”
The same potential exists when no one is there to bear witness at all — potential not only for mass violence but for corruption, nepotism, and an uninformed public incapable of holding anyone to account. Which is why the current crisis in journalism is so dire, and why any and all efforts to reverse that trend should be welcomed, even if they come from the most hated name in news.
For Tony Burman — who can, it turns out, still have lunch in Toronto, despite occasional ribbing about “shilling for al Qaeda” (he likes to say he’s only met Osama bin Laden a dozen times), and who expects you’ll be watching Al Jazeera English somewhere around the same time you read this — controversy is the price of admission for hard-hitting journalism. Al Jazeera, he believes, “will be controversial every day it exists. That’s not only the nature of the organization; that’s almost the purpose of the organization: to keep stirring the pot so that change happens.”
-------------------------
Egypt-Qatar love and hate relationship
In a world where treaties are quick to form but animosities rarely forgotten, this new romance is no surprise
Just a few weeks ago, Egypt asked Interpol to arrest the influential ex-Egyptian Qatari Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Qatari TV giant Al-Jazeera was aggressively slamming Egyptian president Abdel Fattah a-Sisi for “slaughtering his own people” and betraying the Arab solidarity. A reconciliation between the two countries seemed then as imaginary as having the self-styled caliph of the Islamic State, Abdel Bakr al-Baghdadi, fighting for a human rights cause. However, stranger things have happened in the Arab world, where cheeks are warmly kissed, hands strongly shaken, treaties quickly formed, but animosities rarely forgotten.
Just a few weeks ago, Egypt asked Interpol to arrest the influential ex-Egyptian Qatari Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Qatari TV giant Al-Jazeera was aggressively slamming Egyptian president Abdel Fattah a-Sisi for “slaughtering his own people” and betraying the Arab solidarity. A reconciliation between the two countries seemed then as imaginary as having the self-styled caliph of the Islamic State, Abdel Bakr al-Baghdadi, fighting for a human rights cause. However, stranger things have happened in the Arab world, where cheeks are warmly kissed, hands strongly shaken, treaties quickly formed, but animosities rarely forgotten.
This past
Saturday, the special envoy of Qatari Sheikh Tamim arrived in Cairo and met
with President Sisi. The meeting lasted a few hours and was reported in the
media of both countries. On the same day, General Farid al-Tohami, the head of
the Egyptian intelligence service, was dismissed “for health reasons” although
rumors in Cairo claim al-Tohami, a ferocious enemy of Islamists, fell victim to
a surprising rapprochement with Qatar.
The road to
Cairo was actually paved during the GCC summit two weeks ago. It was there, in
the glittering palace in Doha, that leaders of the Gulf states agreed to put
aside their differences for the sake of “regional security” - whatever this
vague term may mean. The deal, reached between the Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim and
the Saudi King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz was simple: Qatar would stop its
relentless support of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and of the
now-banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and stop its anti-Saudi and anti-Egyptian
propaganda on al-Jazeera. In return, the GCC countries will normalize
relations with Doha, reinstate their ambassadors and resume security ties.
Qatar will improve its reputation in the Arab world and will no longer be a
pariah swimming against the current.
The most
important issues, however, remained unresolved. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
agreed to disagree on such issues as support for the rebels in Syria (Qatar’s
ties with Jabhat a-Nusra were widely exposed during the UN personnel hostage
crisis a few months ago), as well as Qatari ties with Hamas in Gaza. Some
Egyptian television channels, such as Al-Hayat and Faraeen,
claimed that Sisi had demanded the exile of Khaled Mashal, the head of the
Hamas political department from Doha, while others suggested that the Egyptian
president asked Qatar to stop its financial aid to the Hamas government in
Gaza. For now it seems Mashal is not going anywhere. As for financial aid to
Gaza - Qatar has already made some payments that allowed Hamas to pay some
debts to its civil servants.
Saudi Arabia and
other donor countries in the Gulf are not eager to strengthen Hamas and say all
their aid for Gaza will be transferred solely through the Palestinian
Authority, in order to secure the return of PA leader Mahmoud Abbas to the
Strip. What did the Qatari envoy promise the president of Egypt is still
unclear, and most probably problems will emerge shortly, but for now the
agreement satisfies both countries – Qatar is busy improving its image in the
East and in the West, and Egypt will probably enjoy some major loans from
Qatari banks providing a measure of freedom for its failing economy.
The new romance
between Doha and Cairo is also likely to influence a third party – Turkey. For
the past 18 months, both Turkey and Qatar were united by their mutual
resentment towards Egypt’s new strongman. Both had supported Morsi and his
regime, both hoped for a different future in Egypt, both fancied the role of
new Middle Eastern leader. Recep Tayyip Erdagan was the first foreign leader to
visit Egypt after Morsi’s election. During that historic visit, he attempted to
act as the older brother to the young Egyptian democracy, giving advice and
patronizing his Egyptian hosts. No one in Cairo, Islamist or military, was
impressed.
The same went
for Qatar, which allocated a huge eight billion dollar loan to Egypt. Egyptian
papers reacted with publishing news items about Qatari attempts to purchase the
Suez Canal and other important national symbols.
During the GCC
summit in Doha, Sheikh Tamim announced that “the security of Egypt is the
security of Qatar,” recognizing Egypt’s special status in the Arab world. Now
the Egyptians are looking for a wind of change from the Bosphorus, too.
Turkey’s submission and reconciliation would constitute a triumph for the
Saudi-Egyptian axis. The Egyptian media is already savoring the moment when its
national hero unites the Sunni world around Egyptian leadership and overcomes
the rest of Egypt’s many enemies.
Is this a naïve
dream? Perhaps. But considering that some 56 years ago, the Saudi king offered
Syria’s head of intelligence a two-million-dollar bribe to kill Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser, and today the Saudis and the Egyptians are sharing the same
world vision and joining forces against the same enemies, one should not be
astonished by the sudden change of heart in the Arab world.
Ksenia Svetlova
is an Arab affairs analyst for Israel's Russian-language Channel 9 and a fellow
at "Mitvim", the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies.
-----------------------
JUST IN- DECEMBER 22, 2014
Oh
please, this 'journalist' will come home write and book and make a $$$$-
seriously.... MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD???? seriously???? u instigated this.... u
did... in beautiful and glorious Egypt.... and USA- must mind your own
business.... imho
Don't
feel pity 4 this man - who conveniently has a Canadian Passport and yet.....
NEVER LIVES IN CANADA.... LIKE SO MANY....
REFUGEE CLAIMS... SAME OLE BULLSHIT... Aljazeera is an excellent
broadcaster of news- BUT IT IS MUSLIM OWNED- do NOT 4get that...... CBC was
great... BUT IS LIBERAL OWNED.... etc. etc.... know the slant of the news...
and u can acually get good news....
JOURNALISTS....MUST
START JUST REPORTING THE NEWS.... THE FACTS... THE NEWS.... PERIOD!!!..... or
the new age news will destroy them...... with actual instead of $$$$ guessing
and pressing and taking sides with the monsters over humanity.... and losing
all respect....imho
the
fifth estate
Mohamed Fahmy, Canadian imprisoned in Egypt, pleads
for Harper's help
Al-Jazeera
journalist speaks with CBC's the fifth estate in exclusive interview
-------------
ALJAZEERA
SPONSORS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD.... IS GLOBALLY KNOWN... WHY WOULD U THINK
INTELLIGENT EDUCATED ORDINARY PEOPLE GLOBALLY WOULD NOT SEE THIS- ESPECIALLY WITH THE AMERICANS AGAIN MAKING
GLOBAL YOUTH BELIEVE THAT FREEDOM IS SO EASY IN HARD PLACES IN THE WORLD- WHERE
RULES AND LAWS HAVE ACTUALLY KEPT THE PEACE AND DECENT LIVING 4 YEARS???
‘’Fahmy
warned Al Jazeera that tactics could come back to ‘bite’ them l
DIANA
MEHTA
The
Canadian Press
Last
updated Monday, Dec. 22 2014, 7:26 PM EST
·An
Egyptian-Canadian journalist who has spent the last year in a Cairo prison
sounded the alarm about his network’s approach to Egypt’s precarious security
situation months before he and his colleagues were arrested, documents obtained
by The Canadian Press suggest.
Mohamed
Fahmy had taken over as acting bureau chief in Cairo for Qatar-based satellite
news broadcaster Al Jazeera English in September, 2013, when he raised the
issue with his bosses, a series of e-mails show.
At
the time, Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel – Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr – had been
barred from broadcasting in Egypt after authorities claimed it was biased
towards supporters of the country’s ousted former president and accused it of
harming national security. The Al Jazeera English service was still operating
from within the country, although out of a hotel and not its offices, but its
legal status was unclear, Mr. Fahmy noted.
“I
have met with the whole team yesterday on my first day and I am impressed with
their attitude and energy considering the pressure they have been dealing with
lately on the ground,” he wrote in an e-mail to executives at Al Jazeera in
Doha, Qatar’s capital.
“However,
the staff is very concerned where Al Jazeera stands legally and I would like to
be able to comfort them at some point regarding their security and well-being.”
In
response, an e-mail from the acting executive producer of newsgathering at Al
Jazeera English told Mr. Fahmy that his “concern about the legal issue” was
appreciated, “but Doha management will deal with it from here.”
A
few week’s later, Mr. Fahmy voiced his concerns again.
He
noted that his team had produced a story for Al Jazeera English, making the
distinction between the network’s English and Arabic services to the sources
involved, and then pointed out that the item had been translated into Arabic
and was broadcast on the network’s Arabic channel.
“I
would imagine that due to the security situation this action may come back to
bite us,” he wrote in an e-mail to senior officials at the network. “The team here
was also concerned regarding this matter.”
To
that e-mail, the director of news at Al Jazeera English replied, “I will handle
this. Thank you for alerting me.”
The
concerns Mr. Fahmy had highlighted turned out to be well-founded.
The
40-year-old was arrested on Dec. 29 last year along with two colleagues –
Australian correspondent Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed, an Egyptian producer.
When
asked what the network had done to protect Mr. Fahmy and his team in light of
the concerns raised, a spokesperson for Al Jazeera said the safety of its
journalists was of utmost importance, and noted that the team in Egypt had been
“content to continue working.”
“As
in any hostile environment, we gave them every support, including on safety,
which we take more seriously than anything else,” said the spokesperson, who
asked not to be named.
“No
one should lose sight of the fact, though, that Baher, Peter and Mohammed have
been sentenced to years in jail over serious baseless accusations, not due to
paperwork offences.”
The
trio were accused of supporting the banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group of
ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi. They were also charged with
fabricating footage to undermine Egypt’s national security.
Mr.
Fahmy’s family and a number of observers have suggested the case is largely a
political one as Egyptian authorities have claimed Al Jazeera is biased towards
the ousted Mr. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood – an allegation the broadcaster
has rejected. In a new development Monday, the network shut down its Arabic
channel in Egypt, quieting a major source of tension between Qatar and Egypt.
Mr.
Fahmy and his colleagues have denied all charges against them, saying they were
just doing their jobs, but after a trial, which was denounced by critics as a
sham, the trio were found guilty. Mr. Fahmy and Mr. Greste were sentenced to
seven years in prison, while Mr. Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years.
Now,
as they mark a year behind bars, Mr. Fahmy is voicing his frustration at his
situation, his family says.
“My
brother is extremely angry that he is caught in a political debacle between
Qatar and Egypt and Al Jazeera,” Mr. Fahmy’s brother, Sherif, told The Canadian
Press.
Mr.
Fahmy is now pinning his hopes on an appeal, set to be heard on Jan. 1, and has
been using an online crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for his legal fees.
His
family hopes the journalist will be at least temporarily released after the
appeal hearing “on health grounds” – Mr. Fahmy suffers from Hepatitis C and an
injured shoulder which has grown worse in prison.
“We
all know they’re not going to get acquitted on Jan. 1, they’re not going home.
But he’s hoping that they are at least released with a travel ban until the
retrial proceeds,” his brother said.
The
family is also cautiously optimistic after Egypt’s president said he is
considering issuing a pardon for Mr. Fahmy and his colleagues. Abdel Fattah
el-Sissi also issued a decree that gives him the power to deport foreigners
convicted or accused of crimes.
In
the mean time, Mr. Fahmy spends his days writing a book on the events that led
up to his imprisonment, his family says.
“It’s
almost like therapy, it helps him a lot,” his brother said. “He feels a lot of
context has been lost in regards to the case and there are so many issues that
he needs to highlight – the backdrop of what happened once the Muslim
Brotherhood were removed, the nature of the Al Jazeera coverage and their own
story.”
Mr.
Fahmy is also yearning to return to Canada, his brother said, and plans to head
back to Montreal, where his family has a home, soon after he is released.
Mr.
Fahmy moved to Canada with his family in 1991, living in Montreal and Vancouver
for years before eventually moving abroad for work, which included covering
stories for the New York Times and CNN.
.jpg)
---------------------
JULY 25- What is going on in Middle East with Journalists??? - Muslim Brotherhood is scary... and Syria and Iran will listen 2 Russia Putin anyday over USA.... or UN- who the world's politics ignores anyway... but WTF is going on..... NOW IRAN???..... Obama's friend IRAN???
Globe and Mail
---------------
JULY- 2014
SERIOUSLY???-
muslimbrotherhood.... got destroyed- NEWAGEMEDIA- GET OVER IT AND UR PANDERING
2 DEBASING WOMEN!!!
All
educated, professional women are “unoriginal and common,” says Egyptian sheikh
In
order to expose the Islamist and Salafi mindset, Egyptian journalists continue
posting and commenting on the assertions and observations made by the various
clerics during former President Morsi’s one year reign and earlier, when the
“radicals” felt especially free to speak their
-------------
CANADA- VOICE OF THE PEOPLE- 2 many people come 2 Canada as Refugees and then turn around and go right back 2 those nations they claim - hardship against.... this is an Egyptian Citizen... and worked Immigration many years... this is NOT going 2 turn out well... u cannot and have not the jurisdiction 2 dictate 2 other nations.... it's another sad story.... and the Muslim on Muslim hate is a horrific story played be4 the eyes of the world who prefers 2 watch the beautiful game in a country that crucifies their Aboriginals First Peoples and poorest of the poor.... imho...
PM UNFAIRLY MALIGNED
Bruce MacKinnon’s June 26 cartoon plays directly into the standard media line, “It’s Harper’s fault!"
Here are a few details on the subject of this cartoon. The individual involved is one Mohamed Fahmy, who came to Canada from Egypt with his parents 23 years ago. He left Canada following university graduation, first for the U.S. and then back to Egypt. He holds dual citiz enship: Canadian/ Egyptian. He was employed as the Cairo bureau chief of English news for Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, supports the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the ISIS organization.
The charge against Mohamed Fahmy is that he was fabricating news that undermines Egypt’s security. It is important to appreciate that whilst Fahmy holds dual citizenship, he is being charged as an Egyptian citizen in an Egyptian court and there is little if anything his Canadian citiz enship can do for him in this circumstance. Regrettably, Bruce’s cartoon is an untrue portrayal of the PM’s assistance in this matter.
It is important for Canadians who hold dual citiz enship with countries in this part of the world to recognize that travel to these places may be required with that country’s passport.
W.J. Phillips, Halifax
---------------------
just in- with comments- USA (RIGHTFULLY ASHAMED)... AND CANADA
1 day ago ... Mr.
Kerry said that the U.S. had recently released $575 million in
assistance for ... U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that he had
phoned Egypt's Foreign Minister ... by sentencing
three al-Jazeera journalists to long prison terms only hours after Kerry ....
Americans: people hate you all over the world.
------------------
-----------------
Egyptian president ignores Obama call for clemency over al-Jazeera ...
www.theguardian.com/.../al-jazeera-journalists-sisi-egypt-denied-celemency - Cached5 hours ago ... Abdel Fatah al-Sisi with John Kerry in Cairo: the Egyptian president's ... Sisi's
refusal to intervene comes just under a year after he ousted Mohamed ... release,
and only two days after America's top diplomat, John Kerry, reiterated that
millions of dollars in suspended aid money to Egypt would be unfrozen.
-----------------
O Canada
Fahmy’s family blasts
Harper over silence on Egypt prison sentence
OTTAWA — The
Globe and Mail
Published
Monday, Jun. 23 2014, 12:36 PM EDT
Last
updated Tuesday, Jun. 24 2014, 1:06 PM EDT
COMMENT:
An Egyptian citizen gets
sentenced in an Egyptian court for actions he took in Egypt???
If a Canadian citizen gets
sentenced in Canada for a crime committed in Canada would we expect
intervention on his behalf from Egypt? Would we be influenced.
Having a passport and
benefits of a country (Egypt) says that you agree to accept the benefits and
responsibility of that country.
Why did Famhey not totally
renounce his Egyptian citizenship and passport when he became Canadian? He had
a choice and decided that he was willing to be Egyptian... now he has to live
with that choice.
Question the reporter
avoided:
Are the rest of Famhey's
family so upset with the Egyptian's court's decision that they are renouncing
their Egyptian citizenship and passports? If not why not?
COMMENT:
Harper is in a no win
situation where his bullhorn diplomacy is nothing compared to Kerry's US
influence and it failed. Harper will not wade in as there are no votes to be
gained in Canada.
COMMENT:
Harper saying anything will
have no effect on this situation just as Egypt cannot influence a court case
where a Canadian citizen is being tried. Dual citizenship has its positives as
well as its negatives, and this is one of the negatives. While in Egypt this
reporter was an Egyptian citizen and he was treated as such. Dual citizenship
is not some get out of jail free card (although it seems to be thought of this
way quite often).
But all of this information
is irrelevant to most of the people commenting here. They just see Harper's
name and go ballistic, blaming him for everything.
comment:
The family forgot to blame
George W. Bush too.
But, let me get this
straight, an Egyptian citizen, working for a anti-Semitic, anti-Egyptian,
pro-Muslim Brotherhood organization gets arrested and convicted in Egypt and
it's Harper's fault? What was Harper supposed to do? Cancel the guy's passport?
Do as the Australian and
Dutch governments did for their citizens? (How did that work out?)
COMMENT:
As a person with dual
Canadian-Turkish citizenship, I cannot believe that a fellow immigrant would be
so recklessly naive as to think that a Canadian passport would shield him from
the laws of his "other" nationality. I returned to Turkey to do my
national service in the early 1980s because I clearly understood the risks of
not doing so, also understanding that Canada would be unable to do anything
about my home country asserting its authority.
COMMENT:
Can anyone provide any links
to what this person actually said in his reporting or what he did in his
position as the head of Al Jazeera in another country that led to him being in
jail? Just a question. Is this maybe another case of a party utilizing the dual
citizenship ploy via a sympathetic press? What are the facts?
COMMENT:
A question, "can anyone
recall hearing of just one Canadian being held by a foreign government or
having been found guilty of breaking a law of a foreign country rushing to the
microphones and admitting their guilt?
I suspect not, but
automatically the press and for obvious reasons the accused friends and family
all profess his/her innocence.
Now this gentleman may be
innocent as he and his family and friends proclaim but please allow me to be
just a bit skeptical that "every" Canadian that runs afoul of the
laws of a foreign country is automatically deemed innocent. Life just doesn't
work that way folks.
comment:
In Egypt the man is
Egyptian, not Canadian, and lives by Egyptian rules. I am always surprised at
the anti multi-cultural stance people take when that propaganda does not suit
them.
Here in Canada the man does
not deserve to be in jail, but that does not mean we should denigrate another
culture's right to do things differently in their own country. In fact those
from other cultures are even allowed to do thing differently here in Canada,
often whether it suits Canadians or not. It is only when they start murdering
their women or plot to kill us that we are allowed to get upset.
Should we interfere with another
country's culture, especially for someone who chose to be there and knew the
culture very well?
I have never understood
multi-cult supporters, I suppose that is because it was a lie to begin with.
I do not support Harper or
the Cons, but I do understand their reluctance to get involved every time a
CanCon gets in trouble.
COMMENT:
"How “Canadian” the
family is becomes relevant because a government official said Mr. Fahmy’s dual
nationality limited what the Canadian government could do.
The Fahmy family — parents
Fadel and Wafaa with their three young sons, Mohamed, Adel and Sherif — moved
to Canada from Egypt in 1991 and settled in Montreal, said Sherif, now 29. The
boys grew up in Montreal and all of the family became Canadian citizens, he
said.
They all lived in Canada,
with each son attending post-secondary education in Canada before travelling
abroad to build a career.
Adel graduated from
Montreal’s Concordia University before starting a career in Kuwait. Sherif
attended a business management school in Montreal before joining him in Kuwait.
After Mr. Fahmy graduated from the University of Calgary, he moved first to the
United States to work with the Los Angeles Times and then to cover the war in
Iraq.
He continued working as a
journalist and interpreter in the Middle East and in September 2013, he became
the acting Cairo bureau chief at Al Jazeera English."
Quote from National Post.
--------------------------
WHY DO PEOPLE CLAIM REFUGEE STATUS 2 COME 2 OUR CANADA- THAN LEAVE AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN... AND HAVE THE AUDACITY 2 THEN CLAIM DUAL CITIZENSHIP WITH THE COUNTRY THEY FEARED?????- and expect Canada and $$$$Canada taxes 2 save their arses- Aljazeera - check the stories here and the history and religious war and the mis-information spewed once 2 often...... everyday folks aren't buying it..... and journalism must get back 2 basics b4 they are totally replaced by actual people giving actual facts over the waves- CHECK OUT WIKILEAKS ON FORWARNING THIS BY THE BY
TRUEST COMMENT OF ALL....- Western Nations and
United Nations (a deliberate $$$$$trillion waste) there are various definition
of democracy- and the USA West must stop
enforcing their dogma on the rest of the planet- MILLIONS OF INNOCENTS ARE DYING BECAUSE OF
IT...FIX YOUR OWN COUNTRY MESSES- GOD KNOWS U ALL GOT PLENTY...imho
comment
What is happening in
Egypt is very regrettable indeed, but it could also be a loud message that
democracy as seen and understood with a Western mindset might not work in other
parts of the world. Iraq is another guinea pig where Western democracy has gone
horribly wrong.
--------------------
John Baird says ‘bullhorn’ diplomacy won’t free
Canadian journalist jailed in Egypt
The Canadian Press, Postmedia News
OTTAWA — “Bullhorn diplomacy” won’t win the
release of Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird
said Tuesday in a pointed rebuttal to critics of his government’s response to
the imprisonment of the Al-Jazeera journalist.
Canada is pursuing all legal avenues to secure
the release of Fahmy, the minister told Ottawa radio station CFRA.
The government is working hard to have Fahmy
freed on appeal, or through a possible presidential pardon, Baird said.
“We want a successful resolution and I guess
either way, critics of the government can win because if we’re loud and vocal,
we’re practising bullhorn diplomacy and are not being professional,” Baird
said.
“But if we try to take the case directly to the
leadership, we’re accused of not standing up. I think you want to pursue the
path that would be the most effective to resolving the case.”
The terrorism charges and sentences against
Fahmy, Australian Peter Greste and Egyptian Baher Mohamed have been widely
condemned as bogus.
The harsh sentences have been the subject of
vocal condemnation by Australian and U.S. politicians, but some critics say the
Harper government is too muted in its response.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said
Tuesday he will not interfere in the rulings and said people should stop
criticizing his country’s courts.
Fahmy’s family, the federal New Democrats and
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression have all urged Prime Minister Stephen
Harper to call the Egyptian president personally.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called
el-Sissi to proclaim the innocence of the Australian journalist, while the
country’s Foreign Minister Julia Bishop said she was appalled by the severity
of the verdict.
“I’ll note that the Australian hasn’t been released
either,” Baird said Tuesday.
Baird defended his junior minister, Lynne Yelich,
who is responsible for consular affairs. She issued a news release Monday that
was widely criticized because it merely said she was very disappointed with the
sentence.
Yelich works hard and does a good job, Baird
said, while his role as foreign minister is to make representations to his
Egyptian counterpart, which he did on a visit to Cairo two months ago.
“We have many cases in Egypt of Canadians that
are before the courts,” Baird said without elaborating.
“When I met with the Egyptian foreign minister
and had a long discussion of this case, they can’t issue a presidential pardon
unless there’s a verdict, and until the appeals are exhausted, so obviously
we’re going to stay engaged with this file, with this case,” Baird said.
Baird also confirmed that he and his deputy
minister called in Egypt’s ambassador on Monday and issued a formal diplomatic
protest.
Baird said Fahmy’s case is complicated by the
fact that he is a dual Egyptian and Canadian national and also by the
intertwined relationship between Al-Jazeera, its Qatari ownership and Egypt’s
banned Muslim Brotherhood.
Fahmy and his two co-accused were convicted of
giving a voice to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt has labelled a
terrorist group. They were accused of harming Egypt’s national security.
The journalists deny the charges, and say they
were only doing their jobs.
“One of the challenges of this case is that
Al-Jazeera is, of course, funded by the government of Qatar, who is also
directly funding the Muslim Brotherhood, and that’s what makes this case more
complex and adds a different dimension to it,” said Baird.
He added: “I don’t think anyone believes he’s in
cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood, but obviously the government of Qatar had
a close relationship.”
AND
THERE’S UR TROUBLE.....
uscpublicdiplomacy.org/.../wikileaks_al_jazeera_and_the_qatari_public_
The cables also state that
Qatari-Saudi relations "are generally improving after ... influence that goes beyond
self-censorship of domestic issues coverage. ... No matter what Aljazeera
says, Egyptians can distinguish enemies from ... to become recognized but qatar way
is going to bring them and the region to its extinction.
-----------------
1.
13 Aug 2012 ... Qatar funds al-Jazeera
television, the modern face of Islamism. The Saudis hate and fear the Brotherhood, which
wants to overthrow the Saudi ... Qatar has only about $30 billion in reserves
and can't sustain Egypt for long. ... But Egypt's root problem is a dysfunctional economy (it imports half its food), ...
10 Mar 2014 ... The
Saudis view the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over Egypt for a
... Qatar and Aljazeera were
widely influential. ... While the fringes of the Brotherhood had violent people in them,
the ... In return, Egypt will protect the very wealthy but very weak GCC from Iran and Shiite
Iraq, and from the Brotherhood.
www.barenakedislam.com/.../saudi-arabia-threatens-to-isolate-qatar-for-its-
20 Feb 2014 ... Will
Muslim Brotherhood support Al-Jazeera based in Qatar soon be
banned in Saudi Arabia ... based in Qatar soon be banned in Saudi
Arabia as it has been in Egypt? ... King, I used to think that too, but they aren't supporting
them today. ... They all hate us, but we
have plenty of useful idiots to suck us in.
-------------------
Kerry's Blank Check to
Egypt
2 Jun 24,
2014 12:59 PM EDT
By The Editors
The
timing of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's meeting last weekend with Egypt's newly elected president,
Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, was unfortunate. What it says about the confusion that
reigns over U.S. foreign policy in Egypt is worse.
In Cairo,
Kerry assured El-Sisi that U.S. military aid that had been frozen because of
Egypt's atrocious human-rights record -- including the killing of 1,150 mostly
unarmed protesters last year -- would be released "very soon." Less
than 24 hours later, an Egyptian court sentenced
three Al Jazeera journalists to jail for seven to 10 years for doing their
jobs.
It's
worth quoting in full Kerry's reasoning for ending the freeze on aid
and, in essence, handing El-Sisi a blank check for U.S. support: "He gave
me a very strong sense of his commitment to make certain that the process he
has put in place, a re-evaluation of human-rights legislation, a re-evaluation
of the judicial process, and other choices that are available are very much on
his mind, and that he’s only been in office for 10 days, but he indicated to me
that we should work closely, as we will, and stay tuned to what he is going to
try to implement over the course of these next days, weeks and months."
That is,
to put it politely, naive. El-Sisi has been running Egypt since he seized power
in a military coup a year ago. Nothing suggests he has begun to alter his
policies. The only thing that appears to have changed since his election is
that he now wears a suit instead of a uniform.
Since
last July, El-Sisi has done nothing to respond to U.S. admonishments over his
brutal methods. On the contrary: About 20,000 of his political opponents,
mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood but also the liberal opposition, have been
jailed; each mass trial of alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters becomes more
Orwellian than the last; media freedoms have been suppressed; and Bassem
Youssef, the so-called Jon Stewart of Egypt, was forced off the air just days after El-Sisi's election.
The
situation in Egypt would test any U.S. president. Still, is it too much to ask
for some consistency? There are at least two choices.
The
Barack Obama administration could acknowledge that, after a brief experiment
with democracy that brought the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to power, another
dictatorship in Egypt is consistent with U.S. security interests, which
includes honoring Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. If the U.S. is releasing
the aid because doing so is required by the peace treaty, Kerry should just say
so.
Or the
administration could say that the primary U.S. interest in the Middle East is
combating the rise and spread of anti-Western Islamist terrorist organizations,
and that El-Sisi isn't helping. His repressive tactics are not only
antagonizing the Muslim Brotherhood, but they also are inflaming sentiment that
is leading to the rise of more dangerous Islamist terrorist groups.
The facts
suggest that El-Sisi is intent on building a state at least as repressive as
that of former dictator Hosni Mubarak, who enjoyed decades of U.S. support
until he was toppled by pro-democracy protests in 2011. The U.S. supported the aims of those protests. Now it is supporting a man
who is brutally turning back the clock.
No wonder
a poll published today found that Americans are confused about
what exactly U.S. policy in the Middle East is. Undoubtedly Egyptians are, too.
To
contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg View's editorials: David
Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net.
RELIGION...... AND POLITICAL GAMES AND INTERFERENCE HAVE
CREATED ALJAZEERA’S MONSTERS...
Arabs
and Persians beyond the Geopolitics of the Gulf
Fred
HALLIDAY
The
formation of states, the definition of their interests and the mechanisms
education, socialization in the armed forces, nationalists' writings, print and
electronic media that served to create and spreand national ideas must be
examined if one is to understand the form that the relations between Arabs and
Iranians is currently taking. Indeed these relations owe much to these two
factors state- and nation-building- and much less to the Medes or Persians,
Sunnis or Shi'ites, Ottomans or Safavis. To illustrate this point, one may
divide the modern history of the Gulf into three periods : 1921-1958 ;
1958-1979 ; and 1979 to the present day.
Haut
de page
Plan
A
Gulf of Misperceptions
1921-1958:
Compartmentalised State Building
1958-1979:
Arab Nationalism Confronts Imperial Iran
1979-1995:
Revolutionary Iran, Aggressive Iraq
Gulf
Geopolitics in the 1990s: the Issues
'If
the Iranians had not tried to establish the Abbassid Government and culture in
Baghdad, or their great thinkers and volunteers had not striven and even
sacrificed their lives in 1920 for the independence of Iraq, the Iraqis could
not now pride themselves of their past history'. Iranian Foreign Minister,
1965, quoted in Jasim Abdulghani, Iraq and Iran (London : Croom Helm, 1984) p.
21.
'What
are these Persians shouting about all the time? We were Shi'ites before they
were Shi'ites. We had a revolution before they had a revolution'. Author's
conversation in the Baghdad suq, April 1980.
A
Gulf of Misperceptions
1
The geopolitics of the contemporary Gulf are
dominated by a triangular conflict between the three most powerful states of
the region - Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Emerging from an earlier history of
western intervention, and from the process of state building within Gulf states
in the post-1918 period, this conflict has dominated the region for the past
quarter of a century, and shows no sign of abating: no stable resolution of the
conflict, one in which each state feels itself to be at a potential
disadvantage, has yet been achieved. Yet if this instability is evident to all,
the causes of it remain less evident. There is, at first sight, no insuperable
international obstacle to peace between these three states; there are plenty of
mechanisms that could resolve those issues - territorial, economic, political -
that divide them. It is this apparent conundrum that the article which follows
seeks to examine i.e how this apparently factitious conflict came about, and
what its underlying determinants are. The central thesis is that the causes of
instability in the Gulf, of past conflicts and probable future ones, lie much
less in a continuous history or in the geopolitics itself, in past external
intervention or relations between local states, and more in the contemporary
domestic politics of these countries. The story is one of how in the modern
period politics has both created linkages between the two peoples that hitherto
did not exist, and has at the same time constituted new barriers between them,
as well as between the two major Arab states of the Gulf themselves.
2
In this perspective, the conflict between Gulf
states, and between Arabs and Persians, is a product not so much of imperialist
interference, or of long, millennial or atavistic, historical antagonisms, but
of two interrelated, modern, processes, state formation and the rise of
nationalism. This is visible in the nature of the psychological gap that
divides Arabs from Iranians: one of the most enduring features of the strategic
situation in the Persian Gulf is the gap, as much psychological and cultural,
as economic, military or political, between the Arab and Iranian perceptions of
the region, a point I would like to illustrate with an anecdote. In the spring
of 1980, I visited the Centre for Arab Gulf Studies at the University of Basra.
The Centre was situated in the university campus, on the outskirts of Basra,
but a few miles from the frontier with Iran. It would have taken little more
than an hour to walk to Iran. Within months, the area was to be convulsed by
the war which was to last for the following eight years. In the course of the
discussion with faculty members I asked whether any of them had ever been to
Iran. The answer was no. I asked to see the Iranian newspapers that they had in
their library : some old copies of the English edition of Kayhan, from the time
of the Shah, were produced. I asked if anyone spoke Persian. A junior colleague
was produced: a Palestinian, who was an expert on Hafez and Sa'adi. This
academic centre, closely tied to the party and state structures in Iraq, had no
resources with which to evaluate, let alone understand, the powerful neighbour
lying nearby.
3
The purpose of this story is not to single out
the faculty of the Centre for Arab Gulf Studies in Basra. It illustrates a
broader characteristic of relations between the two communities, and one that
could certainly be replicated on the Iranian side as well. The Arab world
occupies a place in the consciousness and history of modern Iran, but very much
as a symbolic point of reference, negative for Iranian secular nationalists,
selectively positive for Islamists. Iraq has been important as the site of the
holiest cities of Shi'ite Islam, Najaf and Karbala, and networks of clerics and
traders have grown around these pilgrimage routes. But in the modern period
such connections have, largely, been without political import. Thus, while
references to Russia and Britain, America and Germany would be mandatory, one
could write the modern political history of Iran up to the time of the
revolution without mentioning Iraq or the Arab world at all. The same applies,
grosso modo, to Iraq up to the fall of the Hashemite monarchy1. Arabs and
Persians are aware of each other's existence, and of the long history of
culture, religion and politics that has linked them. There is not between them
the complete chasm that, until at least very recently, separated Arabs and
Israelis. Yet proximity has not produced, and is not producing, greater
knowledge or understanding. The antagonism, or lack of shared perception,
between the two sides is enduring, and is an important constitutive element in
the unstable strategic situation in the Gulf.
4
It is certainly easy in such circumstances to
fall back as an explanation on 'history': there is plenty of history to invoke,
above all because the dividing lines have been, if not uninterrupted, then
certainly recurrent. From pre-Islamic times one can cite the conflicts between
the Persians and their western neighbours, the Mesopotamians and Medes: during
the Iran-Iraq war Iraqi propaganda made much of the claim that Khomeini was a
magus, an ancient Persian king. Iraqi and other Arab nationalist denunciations
of Iranian expansionism al-tawassu' al-irânî, make much of this connection. The
conquest of Iran by the Arab armies and the victory of Qadisiyyah have often
been invoked by modern politicians: if Iranian secular nationalists denounced
the Arab conquest and sought to claim legitimacy from the pre-Islamic times,
leading even to the linguistic distortions of the Pahlavi period, Saddam was
quick to invoke Qadisiyyah as a mobilisatory symbol in his war with the Islamic
Republic2. The subsequent history has its own themes, appropriate for defining
difference: the Arab hostility to the Persians, traditionally denoted by the
contemptuous term 'ajam, is matched by Ferdousi's characterisation of the Arabs
as 'eaters of lizard'3. The re-emergence of distinct Iranian states in the
mediaeval period is associated with a reassertion of a distinct Persian
culture, and political interest. This was to culminate in the establishment of
the Safavi dynasty in 1501: in addition to creating a strong Iranian state,
which on several occasions invaded Ottomans Iraq, the Safavis continued to
clash with the Ottomans over the frontier between the two states, and in
particular over the delimitation of the Shatt al-Arab river. A series of
treaties did succeed in defining most of the land boundary between the Safavi
and Ottoman empires, but the issue of the Shatt, and the related issue of the
loyalties of groups living across the frontiers, remained unresolved4. The
Safavis also institutionalised what was to be another central defining difference
between Arabs and Persians, the predominance of Shi'ite Islam in Iran. This
made formal the religious difference between Arabs and Persians that had been
smouldering since the early years of Islam. In subsequent nationalist rhetoric
the Iranians could be seen as shu'ûbiyyin, defectors from both Arabism and the
orthodox faith5, while in Khomeini's rhetoric Saddam was associated with Yazid,
the Ummayad tyrant who killed Hussain at Karbala in 680AD6.
5
In this perspective, hostility between Arabs
and Iranians has been an enduring feature of the Gulf for centuries, if not
millennia. It is in this way that contemporary nationalists, and those who see
the region in terms of timeless cultural forces, often present current
conflicts. But such an approach is questionable. History is not univocal: for
all the conflicts and conquests, and insults and divergences, there has been at
least as much to unite and bring together the Arabs and Iranians as there has
to divide them. Language, religion, pilgrimage, migration, trade have tied the
regions of both peoples together for all of history. For much of the time they
have lived in peace, not war. Moreover, the very formulation of the issue in
terms of two opposed, conflicting, 'nations' is misleading: the political
boundaries have not corresponded to neat ethnic and linguistic divisions.
Within what is today the Arab domains there have always been communities with
Iranian characteristics; in Iraq, open for centuries to Iranian influence, not
least in the period of the Persian-influenced Abbasid empire, the very culture
of the Arab speakers is suffused with Iranian influence. One only has to listen
to spoken Iraqi7, or look at the turquoise domes of the mosques of Iraqi
cities, to see how strong the Iranian influence is, not forgetting the fact
that half of the whole population of Iraq are Shi'ites, while another quarter
are Kurds who, by language and culture, fall very much within the Iranian
cultural sphere8. On the Iranian side, script, vocabulary and religion are all
of Arab origin. If one ventures into the difficult and often tendentious domain
of racial characteristics, the situation is clear enough: the faces, physical
characteristics, body language in Baghdad and Basra differ little if at all
from those in Tehran and Isfahan. The 'we' and the 'they' are not given by
history but are the products of specific, often conscious, political
interventions.
6
To answer the question of where this
misperception comes from it is not, therefore, sufficient to invoke 'history':
indeed far from history being an explanatory factor, a cause, it would be
better to see this history, or more precisely the contemporary interpretation
of it, as itself a result of other factors. For all that they draw on the past
all nationalisms, and all official ideologies of 'historic' national conflict,
are modern products, a result of the intellectual and economic processes of the
past two centuries, and in particular of the rise of modern forms of
communication and of the state9. This applies to the Gulf as to anywhere else.
If we are to ask what it is that has constituted the current divisions within
the Gulf, including the misperceptions, the answer is to be found in the forms
of state produced in the region in the modern period, and in the way which two
groups of people, previously almost completely separated from each other, came
to be brought into contact by modern political forces, in particular by two
such forces, first external, imperial intervention, and then internal, the rise
of nationalism. Here we have to look at the formation and interests of states,
and at the mechanisms - education, socialisation in the armed forces, writings
of nationalists, print and electronic media - that served to constitute and
diffuse such ideas. The form that relations between Arabs and Iranians take
today has much to do with these two factors, and much less to do with Medes or
Persians, Sunnis or Shi'ites, Ottomans or Safavis. To illustrate this argument,
one may divide the modern history of the Gulf into three periods: 1921-1958;
1958-1979; and 1979 to the present day.
1921-1958:
Compartmentalised State Building
7
The emergence of the contemporary inter-state
system in the Gulf, and of the antagonisms underlying it, can be seen as a
product of the imposition of modern forms of state formation, and of the
nationalist or revolutionary ideologies associated with it, upon the
pre-existing mosaic of peoples, languages and beliefs in this area of West
Asia. The initial territorial divisions were a result of imperial state
formation from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The boundary
between Safavis and Ottomans was the site of substantial wars in the sixteenth
to eighteenth centuries but was gradually stabilised through treaties,
beginning with that of Zuhab (Qasr-i Shirin) in 1639, and culminating in the
Treaty of Erzurum of 1847, while that between the two encroaching modern
empires, the Russian and the British, was gradually drawn from the late
eighteenth century onwards: the Romanovs took Iranian territory in the
Transcaucasus, while the British pushed against Iran's eastern frontier,
through India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan, and from the late nineteenth
century also encroached on the Arab territories lying on the southern side of
the Gulf.
8
World War I was to produce a new strategic
situation, and create the structure of inter-state relations that has continued
thereafter. The frontiers of Iran with the Russian, now Bolshevik, state and
with British India remained constant, but the territories formerly ruled by the
Ottomans were divided into a now independent Turkey to the north-east and the
new state of Iraq, formed from three Ottoman vilayet, to the west and
south-west. In the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, one further change was to
occur: in the oases of central and eastern Arabia, regions only vaguely
influenced by either Ottomans or British, a tribal confederacy led by the Saud
family, and proclaiming a revival of the Wahhabi sect first seen in the
eighteenth century, seized large areas of territory (including two thirds of
Kuwait) and established, in 1926, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Thus one year
after Reza Khan established a new dynasty in Iran, the Saudi dynasty had
emerged in the Arabian Peninsula. Albeit this probably caused little concern in
Tehran at the time, it was later to do so, to both Shah and Imam; for the
Iraqis, on the other hand, this rebel regime, which had ousted the Hashemites
from the Arabian Peninsula, was to remain a rival, and at best an uneasy ally,
for decades to come.
9
For
the following four decades the dominant power in the Gulf was neither Arab nor
Persian, but Britain, in formal control of Iraq and much of the Peninsula's
coastline, from Kuwait to Aden. The strategic situation was, therefore, one in
which Britain maintained its military and administrative dominance : local
states, Iran included, conducted their relations largely with Britain, and
other major powers. There was very little contact of substance between the
regional states. Iran and Saudi Arabia formally recognised each other. At
first, however, Iran refused to recognise Iraq, since Baghdad refused to
provide suitable guarantees to Persians living in its territory10. Later Reza
Khan was drawn into a loose, sympathetic, relationship with Atatürk, and with
Iraq and Afghanistan, and formalised in the Saadabad Pact of 1937: but these
were secondary, largely ineffectual, activities. The real business was in
relation with the great powers: hence, because of British control of Iraq, the
frontier between Iraq and Iran itself, particularly that along the Shatt
al-Arab, reflected Iraqi interests.
10
Where there was upheaval, nationalist and
social, in these states it had little to do with other regional peoples, and
much to do with external, imperial, domination. Thus the 1920 revolt in Iraq,
or the mobilisations in Iran between 1941 and 1953, were not to any significant
extent influenced by events elsewhere in the Middle East11. Indeed in accounts
of the politics of these countries there is little or no mention of this
regional dimension. This was most evident in the case of the Mosadeq period in
Iran itself: Iran's challenge to the western states, and to the oil companies,
took place in the aftermath of the first war over Palestine, and coincided with
the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Yet there was little echo in the Arab world of
what was happening in Iran, and the Arab upheavals had little influence on
Iran. If there was an interaction, it was a negative one: Iran's
nationalisation of oil, and the embargo on oil exports subsequently imposed by
western states, provided an opportunity to the Arab world to promote its own
interests. Kuwait increased its production to fill the gap left by Iran, while
in the British colony of Aden BP constructed a refinery to replace the one lost
at Abadan. The Arab world's exploitation of Iran's difficulties confirmed the gap
between the two regional blocs, and was to leave some bitterness in Iran in
subsequent years.
11
Following the restoration of the Shah to power
in August 1953, the US began to encourage the formation of a regional military
bloc, and this led in 1955 to the signing of the Baghdad Pact, comprising Iran,
Iraq and Turkey. While this very much reflected the continued dominance of
external, western, strategic concerns, it also reflected the shared interests
which the monarchs of Iran and Iraq had in facing a rising nationalist tide in
the region: the Shah had already weathered the storm of the Mosadeq years, the
Hashemites in Iraq were increasingly anxious about the challenge from Egypt. On
this basis the first overt Gulf alliance was formed. All was, however, to
change in 1958, when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Iraq became an
unstable revolutionary republic, the site of successive nationalistic military
regimes that were seen as a challenge to Iran's political system and regional
influence. Equally, the Iraqi revolution reopened two other issues that were to
have a permanent destabilising impact on the region - territorial claims on
neighbouring states (Kuwait and Iran's Khuzistan province) and the Kurdish
question.
12
This picture of an apparently
compartmentalised Iran and Arab world in the period up to 1958 requires,
however, one important qualification, one that was to have an important
function in later periods. For if external relations were largely conducted
without reference to each other, Iran and the Arabs, and particularly Iran and
Iraq, sought to define this new national identity, and territory, in
contradistinction to the others. While
Reza Khan eliminated the autonomous Arab region ruled by Sheikh Khazal in
Khuzistan, the new rulers of Baghdad began to put pressure on the Persian
inhabitants of Iraq12. At the same time, each used perceptions of the other as
an important element in a central component of the new process of state
formation, namely education. The post-World War I states in both Iran and Iraq
sought to consolidate their hold on society by the development of education and
by the diffusion of a state ideology of national identity: as elsewhere, such
an identity involved both a recuperation of the past, sifted or even invented
to suit present purposes, and the identification of what distinguished their
own people or 'nation' from others. It was here above all, in the requirements
of national state building, that ideologies of antagonism were formed. On the
Iranian side, the Pahlavi monarchy sought to distinguish Iran from the Arabs,
by highlighting the glories of the pre-Islamic past, by promoting changes in
symbolism, vocabulary and personal names, and by identifying Iran as an 'Aryan'
as distinct from a Semitic culture and people. In both official and unofficial
nationalism, the Arab world became identified with what Iran was not, with what
had weakened it in the past13. On the Iraqi side a comparable process took
place, with an educational programme that drew heavily on the writings of the
Arab nationalist Sati' al-Husri. Al-Husri, who worked in Iraq and wrote
fictional stories that focussed on the suspicious influence of Iran on the
Arabs, not only played up the unique national characteristics of the Arabs, but
also identified Persia as the great enemy of the Arab people14. To ascribe
subsequent hostilities between Iran and Iraq simply to such ideologies would be
simplistic: but the diffusion of such ideas, by states intent on mobilising
their populations through nationalist ideology, was a prelude to later
inter-state conflicts.
1958-1979:
Arab Nationalism Confronts Imperial Iran
13
If there was, therefore, one event that served to break the mould of
previous Gulf politics and lay the foundations for the later decades of
instability and rivalry in the Gulf it was the Iraqi revolution of 1958. This
for the first time breached the compartmentalisation which had separated the
domestic politics of the Arab world from those of Iran, and provoked considerable
anxiety within the Iranian regime itself15. In the first place, the fall of the
Hashemite monarchy in Iraq marked the beginning of the end for British
influence in the Gulf, coming as it did a year and a half after the
Anglo-French debacle at Suez: decolonisation was already in the air, yet the
fall of the Baghdad monarchy, albeit in a country formally independent since
1932, was a serious additional blow to British influence and prestige. The
withdrawals from other comparatively less important states followed: Kuwait
1961, South Yemen 1967, Bahrain, Qatar and the Emirates 1971, Oman 1977. In
part, the British place - military, political, economic - was being taken by
the USA, which had begun developing its position in the Peninsula in the 1940s
and which had taken advantage of the crisis in Iran to displace Britain as the
Shah's major ally. But the USA, while increasing its naval presence and
becoming the main arms supplier to pro-western regional states, was not willing
to duplicate the British presence. The result was that Iran came, increasingly,
to present itself as the dominant power in the Gulf: it developed its navy,
and, especially after 1971, insisted that the Gulf be known by the name
'Persian Gulf'. During the l970s this assertion of Iran's hegemony was
reinforced by the Shah's desire to make Iran a great economic power, a 'second
Japan': this imperial project was conceived of as a counter-weight to the Arab
world as a whole, and Iran sought to develop its military and economic ties with
a bloc of non-Arab states - Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India - as a
counter-weight to the Arabs.
14
This assertion of Iranian influence in the
Gulf was a result, however, of another factor, namely the improved relations
with the USSR. If after the 1953 coup relations between Tehran and Moscow had
been cool, reaching a critical point in 1959, there was thereafter a
significant improvement, such that Iran felt, by the middle 1960s, that it did
not face a major threat to the north. This meant, in effect, that Iran could
refocus its forces to face a possible challenge in the south, from Iraq, and to
promote its presence in the Gulf. On the
Iraqi side, the revolution of 1958 also opened the way for increased confrontation
with Iran: the assertion of Iraqi nationalist aspirations on the one hand, and
the involvement of Iran, real or imagined, in the now fragmented domestic
politics of Iraq, made the connection with Iran for the first time a factor in
Iraqi politics16. This was all the more so because onto the regional conflict
was now superimposed the conflict of the cold war: Iraq, allied with the USSR,
faced Iran, an ally of the USA. Iran was seen as a potential supporter both of
Kurdish and Shi'ite movements. As a result the tone of Arab nationalist reference
to Iran became much more assertive and critical: Iran was accused of
expansionism, of using Iranian migrants in the Gulf as agents, of infiltrating
the Iraqi educational system and so forth. These themes were particularly
present in Ba'thist ideology, where, under the influence of al-Husri, Iran was
presented as the age-old enemy of the Arabs.
15
Al-Husri's
impact on the Iraqi education system was made during the period of the
monarchy, but it was the Ba'thists, trained in that period and destined to take
power later, who brought his ideas to their full, official and racist,
culmination. For the Ba'thists their pan-Arab ideology was laced with
anti-Persian racism, just as their interpretation of Iraq's international role,
and of the character of Iraqi society, rested on the pursuit of anti-Persian
themes. Thus over the decade and a half after coming to power, Baghdad
organised the expulsion of Iraqis of Persian origin, beginning with 40 000
Fayli Kurds, but totalling up to 200 000 or more, by the early years of the war
itself. Such racist policies were reinforced by ideology: in 1981, a year after
the start of the Iran-Iraq war, Dar al-Hurriya, the government publishing
house, issued Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies.
The author, Khairallah Tulfah, was the foster-father and father-in-law of
Saddam Hussein17. It was the Ba'thists too who, claiming to be the defenders of
'Arabism' on the eastern frontiers, brought to the fore the chauvinist myth of
Persian migrants and communities in the Gulf being comparable to the Zionist
settlers in Palestine18.
16
The stage was therefore set for the protracted
military rivalry between Iran and the Arab states that lasted for the two
decades between the overthrow of the Hashemites in Baghdad and the fall of the
Pahlavis in Tehran. Following the revolution of 1958, Iran began to support the
Kurds in northern Iraq, a commitment that reached its peak in the period
1969-1975 when Iran and Iraq fought a controlled, but at times intense, border
war. Iraq, for its part, provided some assistance to Kurdish groups inside
Iran, and, from 1965 began to champion the cause of the Arab population of
south-west Iran. Much of the overt conflict between the two states involved the
question of the frontier: an unfavourable settlement imposed by Britain on Iran
in 1937 was rejected by Iran in 1969, but this border issue was less an issue
of substance in itself, a reasonable compromise being possible at any time, and
more a symbol around which inter-state and nationalist mobilisation could
occur. The settlement reached by Iran and Iraq at Algiers in 1975, an agreement
made possible because of Iraq's exhaustion and Soviet withholding of arms
supplies to Baghdad, contained three elements: an agreement on the disputed
land frontier, an agreement on the Shatt al-Arab water frontier, and, most
importantly, an agreement on non-interference in each other's internal affairs.
It was around this third issue that the conflict had raged since 1958 and which
was to occasion the next, and far bloodier, confrontation after the Iran
revolution.
17
The concentration on conflict with Iraq did
not prevent Iran from asserting its position vis-a-vis other states in the
region. Relations with the third powerful state in the Gulf, the fellow monarch
Saudi Arabia, remained correct, but there was suspicion between the two royal
families, not least because of Tehran's closeness to the Hashemites in Baghdad.
As the British withdrew, the USA tried to promote a loose alliance, the 'twin
pillar' policy, involving Iran and Saudi Arabia in a formal 'Gulf Pact': however,
this never reached fruition, and the Saudis, lacking a significant military
capability, were suspicious of the Iranians. For its part, Iran continued to
press for recognition of the 'Persian' character of the Gulf, and was to a
considerable extent hostile to the constitutional plans made for the British
withdrawal from the smaller Gulf states between 1968 and 1971. Thus Iran at
first opposed the independence of Bahrain, and only accepted its sovereignty
after a UN 'consultation' of the islands' population. Less officially, but in
unmistakeably terms, it also insisted that its yielding on Bahrain should be
compensated for by the acquisition of three small islands, the Tumbs and Abu
Musa, belonging to the Emirates: when no agreement was forthcoming, London
acquiesced in the Iranian seizure of the islands in November 1971, on the eve
of the British withdrawal. Iran also took advantage of crises in other regional
states to assert its military influence : thus it sent support to the royalist
forces in North Yemen after 1962, despatched several thousand troops to assist
the Sultan of Oman against the Marxist guerrillas in his southern, Dhofar,
province between 1973 and 1975, and provided the Bhutto government in Pakistan
with helicopter gunships to help suppress the guerrillas operating, with some
Iraqi support, in Baluchistan in the early 1970s19.
18
These conflicts over influence, nomenclature
and military power opposing Iran to the Arab states were not, however, the only
side of the picture. In another, very significant, arena, oil, a different
pattern emerged, one in which the dividing line conformed not to the
Arab-Iranian distinction, but to demography and economic logic. Iran and the
Arab states had been members of OPEC since its founding in 1960, but from the
early l970s divergences began to emerge, the Iranians forming an alliance with
Arab states, including radical ones, to increase prices. Here Iran and Iraq had
a common cause, and one that pitted them against the Saudis and other Arab Gulf
states, even as the latter benefitted from higher prices. Throughout the
ensuing two and a half decades, Iran and Iraq, for all their other differences,
shared a broadly common position on oil prices and quotas: whatever else, their
disagreements were not a result of a divergence on economic interest.
19
The conflicts unleashed by the Iraqi
revolution of 1958 lasted for nearly twenty years and produced a linkage
between the politics of Iran and the Arab states that had previously been
absent. Yet by 1975 it appeared that these tensions had abated: Iran and Iraq
settled their disagreements in Algiers, with Iraq recognising the thalweg or
middle course principle in division of the Shatt al-Arab river, the
revolutionary movement in Dhofar had been defeated, and the Iranians and
Saudis, albeit suspicious of each other, had learned to live together. For
their part, the Russians and the Americans had, in the spirit of negotiation
then prevailing, agreed to reduce their rivalry in the West Asian and Indian
Ocean regions. They did not want trouble. All this was, however, to last for
only a rather short time: four years later the politics of the Gulf were to be
convulsed by another upheaval, as sudden and dramatic as that which had
convulsed Iraq in 1958, namely the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979.
1979-1995:
Revolutionary Iran, Aggressive Iraq
20
The fragile understandings of the mid-1970s
were overturned by the Iranian revolution, and its impact on the Arab states of
the Gulf. As in the case of all revolutions, interpretations tend to diverge as
to whether the subsequent worsening of relations was a result of the actions,
based on various forms of internationalist appeal, of the revolutionary regime,
or whether the prime responsibility lies with the states opposed to the
revolution, who used a supposed 'threat', in this case from Tehran, to pursue
their own political goals, domestically and in the region. The reality, in the
case of the Iranian revolution, as much as in that of other revolutions caught
up in such conflicts (France after 1789, Russia after 1917, China after 1949,
Nicaragua after 1979 etc.) is that both factors operated. No objective reader
of the record can doubt that Iranian leaders did appeal to fellow
revolutionaries, and in particular to Shi'ites, beyond their own frontiers, and
that at least some sections of the Iranian state gave active, financial and
military, support to such forces. No one can doubt either that on occasion
Iranian leaders challenged frontiers: they allowed clashes to develop along the
land frontier with Iraq and some sought to revise the agreement on Bahrain
which the Shah had concluded in 197120. At the same time, it is equally evident
that Arab regimes, and the Iraqi regime in particular, responded to the Iranian
revolution by seeking to promote their own interests in the Gulf: in other
words, beyond a very real apprehension about the potential impact of the
Iranian revolution on their own people, and above all on the Kurds and the
Shi'ites, the Baghdad regime believed it had an opportunity to wrest dominance
of the Gulf from Iran and to push its territorial and other claims against Iran
itself. We shall never know the full story, but it would seem likely that, in
part influenced by the exaggerated reports of Iranian exiles, in part deluded
by their own fantasies and lack of information, the Iraqi regime believed that
by attacking Iran it could lead to the fall of the Khomeini regime itself21.
The result of these multiple forces was the Iraqi attack on Iran in September
1980, and the ensuing eight year war, the second longest war between states of
the twentieth century22.
21
As with any war, it is too easy to identify
one single cause: both sides contributed to the outbreak of hostilities in
September 1980, which was preceded by months of recrimination and border
clashes, and in each case several factors seem to have operated. International
factors were certainly present: Iran saw an opportunity to promote its
revolutionary message, against Iraqi and other Arab leaders; Iraq believed it
could reverse its 1975 acceptance of the thalweg division of the Shatt al-Arab
and project its power in the Gulf. In both states too there were groups who saw
the Iranian revolution as an opportunity to revive their causes and becoming
politically active - the Kurds and Shi'ites in Iraq, the Kurds and Arabs in
Iran. The old fear which both states had, of external support for domestic
opposition, had returned.
22
However, on their own these causes could
hardly have led to war. The decisive factors were, in each case, internal. On
the Iranian side, the revolution, like all such processes, unleashed a
political process in which calls for revolution abroad, and assertions of the
importance which the new regime had in other countries, were part of the
domestic legitimacy of the state itself. In addition, in the Iranian as in
other revolutions the ideology of the revolution led its exponents to deny the
very legitimacy, or importance, of inter-state frontiers: when Khomeini
proclaimed 'Islam has no frontiers', he was merely repeating, in altered form,
what revolutionaries of the past two centuries had proclaimed23. The reason for
this was primarily the logic of the ideology itself: if the ideals in the name
of which the old regime had been overthrown and a new regime was being created,
were to be legitimated this could not be done simply by reference to what was
occurring within Iran. If they had any relevance, it had to be an international
one. On the Iraqi side, two very important factors operated: on the one hand,
the fear of domestic challenge, encouraged to a greater or lesser extent
officially by Iran, on the other, the temptation to consolidate domestic
legitimacy by an act of international bravado that would mobilise patriotic
sentiment within24. No explanation of the outbreak of the war can omit the role
which these domestic factors, products of the contrasted priorities of the two
states involved, played.
23
The consequences of the war were three. In the
first place, the Iraqi attack, far from leading to the collapse of the Iranian
regime, enabled the Islamic Republic to consolidate its hold, political and
administrative, on the country. Within three years of the war having started,
and most spectacularly in the confrontation with the Mujahidin-i Khalq in July
1981, the regime had confronted, and defeated, all the main opposition currents
in the country. At the same time it not only rebuilt the regular army, but
developed para-military institutions, the basij and the pasdaran, that served
both internal political as well as front-line functions. The long-term cost to
Iran of the war was enormous, in terms of destruction and lost opportunities,
but the immediate result was to give the regime a patriotic legitimacy it had
sorely lacked, not least because of the sense, widespread in 1978 and 1979,
that Khomeini was too influenced by the Arabs. Within a short time, Iran had
reconstructed a viable, if disorganised, army and air force; in the longer run
the war led to the mobilisation of large numbers of young people into military
and para-military units25. At the level of ideology, the regime also adjusted
its message to introduce patriotic, as well as strictly Islamic, elements into
its appeal: Khomeini, in the initial days of the revolution had spoken only of
the 'people of Islam', now began to talk of Iran and of the need to defend this
particular country (mihan).
24
Secondly, the Iraqi attack on Iran led to a realignment
of the other Arab Gulf states. To say that they simply supported Iraq would be
mistaken. They continued to fear Iraq, and, in varying measures, maintained
relations with Iran: while Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were closest to Iraq, and
provided substantial financial support to Baghdad, estimated at around $30
billions by the end of the war, some lower Gulf states, notably Dubai and Oman,
maintained commercial and diplomatic links to Tehran. One of the most striking
indices of this dual concern, directed both at Baghdad and Tehran, was the
founding of the Gulf Cooperation Council. For years prior to the Iranian
revolution, there had been calls, most notably from the USA and Iran, for the
establishment of a Gulf alliance, or pact: the reason it was not set up was
that the Arabs, and particularly Saudi Arabia, feared Iranian dominance. At the
same time, the Arab monarchies feared Iraq, just as, to a lesser extent, they
feared Yemen. Rich monarchies, with small populations, feared larger states,
not least Arab republics, with large populations and comparatively less oil
resources. It is this dual concern which explains the timing of the
establishment of the GCC: March 1981. It was only possible to establish this
union of Arab monarchs once both Iran and Iraq were otherwise distracted: the
main function of the GCC was not, as it might have appeared at the time, to
control Iranian influence, but rather to protect the Arab monarchies from the
influence of Iraq. Its correct title
might have been the 'Keep Saddam Hussein Out of the Gulf Council'.
25
The timing of the founding of the GCC is
important, however, because it occurred at a time when Iraq was in a stronger
military situation and appeared to be capable of winning victory over Iran: the
other Gulf states understood very well what this could mean for them. They
provided aid to Iraq, but at the same time feared its triumph. When, from the
middle of 1982, the tide of war swung against Iraq, and when it appeared that
Iran might win, their problem was to a large extent resolved: they could now
support Iraq without fearing negative consequences for themselves. In 1984 this
alignment with Iraq went a stage further when Iraq, seeking to internationalise
the war, began attacking Iranian shipping: since, because of the Iranian
blockade of Iraqi ports, there was no Iraqi shipping for Iran to retaliate
against, Iran began attacking the ships of Iraq's closest allies, Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait. The 'tanker war', in which the USA and other navies were eventually
drawn on Iraq's side, had begun.
26
The third consequence of the war was a gradual
alienation of Iran from the populations of the Arab Gulf states. This is not an
issue about which it is easy to be precise: there is a need to be sceptical
about claims either that there was great sympathy for Iran immediately after
Khomeini's advent to power, or that subsequent events completely alienated Arab
popular opinion. The reality is that, given the undemocratic nature of these
states, no-one can be sure, and in any case sentiment on such issues was
probably confused. The Iranians hoped that the oppressed masses, the
mustazafin, of the Gulf would, as elsewhere support the Iranian revolution.
They must also have hoped that where there was a Shi'ite population this would
play a leading role in opposing existing governments. There was considerable
validity to this latter point of view: in Iraq, support for the underground
al-da'wa al-islamiyya rose in 1979 and 1980, and the low-level guerrilla war
being waged in Iraqi cities must have been a contributing factor to Saddam's
decision to go to war with Iran; in Bahrain, an underground Shi'ite
organisation came quite near to staging an uprising in 1981; in Kuwait, an
urban guerilla bombing campaign by non-Kuwaitis, with some support from
Shi'ites in Kuwait, was waged from 1983 to 198526. However, not only did these
movements not succeed, but there is also considerable evidence that even among
Shi'ites support for the Iranian revolution was qualified. In Kuwait the
majority of the Shi'ites, a community comprising around a quarter of the
population, remained supportive of the state. In Bahrain, the Shi'ites, while
sympathetic to Iran, continued to work within a Bahraini political framework,
calling for the restoration of the constitution abrogated in 1975. Above all,
in Iraq the mass of the Shi'ite population, while resenting Saddam, remained
supportive, and did not seek to rise in response to Iranian appeals. It would
be too simple to say that the Iranian revolution was perceived simply as a
Shi'ite revolution, or as yet another chapter in the history of Iranian
expansionism. But some suspicion of Tehran, and some support for an Arab or
Iraqi patriotism, seem to have been evident27. The result of the war was,
therefore, that far from creating more links or solidarity between Arabs and
Persians it compounded those divisions which earlier state policies and
nationalist movements had created.
27
The end of the Gulf war led to some
improvement in relations between Iran and the GCC countries, yet suspicions on
both sides remained. Tensions continued for some time over the Iranian
participation in the hajj, the Saudi organisers believing that the Iranian
pilgrims were using their visit to Mecca and Medina for political purposes.
Relations with the Emirates remained difficult because of the unresolved issue
of the Tumbs and Abu Musa: Iranian moves to reinforce their position on these
islands led to protests from Arab countries. Above all, however, the ceasefire
between Iran and Iraq in August 1988 did not lead to a new period of stability
in the Gulf, but rather, after a year and a half of apparent calm, to a new
crisis, this time between Iraq and Kuwait, culminating in the Iraqi occupation
of the state in August 1990.
28
There is as little agreement on the causes of
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as there is of its invasion of Iran in
198028. One contrast is obvious enough: if in the case of Iran in 1980 it could
at least be argued that the Iranian revolution presented a political and
military threat to the Iraqi regime, this was not so in 1990. Iraq's attack on
Kuwait can, however, be seen as following a comparable logic to its earlier assault
on Iran. There were international causes, in particular Iraq's sense, shared in
this instance by Iran, that its economic strength was being undermined by lower
oil prices, a trend encouraged by Kuwaiti and Abu Dhabi exports above their
OPEC quotas. The fear that the GCC states were overproducing to keep both Iran
and Iraq weak was evident in both Baghdad and Tehran. At the same time, Iraq
may have felt that there was a political vacuum in the Middle East caused by
the lack of progress in the Arab-Israeli context, which Iraq could fill by a
dynamic move. But as in 1980 the domestic factors were important, and in
particular the link between the impasse vis-a-vis Tehran and domestic
sentiment: Saddam had fought the eight year war with Iran, and had survived,
but he had little to show for it. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had died,
tens of thousands were held prisoner by the Iranians, the national debt had
risen to an estimated $80 billions29. Immediately after the ceasefire he may
have felt that he could impose an unfavourable peace on Iran and he seems to
have wanted to wait to see how Tehran would react. But events following the
death of Khomeini, in June 1989, followed by mass outpourings of grief and
support for the regime, and by the rapid reorganisation of the Iranian
government, may have convinced him that he would not wring more concessions
from Iran. It can be argued that the attack on Kuwait had less to do with
conflict with the Arab world, and more to do with the inability of Saddam to
force the Islamic Republic to its knees. In these circumstances, he appears to
have felt that, failing any breakthrough on the east, Iraq should try instead
to attack Kuwait, as a compensation. The domestic cost of inaction was too
high; the prospects of international benefit were too great.
29
The events following this Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait do not need detailed repetition here: suffice it to say that despite its
hostility to any external intervention in the Gulf region, Iran did not oppose
the US-led coalition in its war with Iraq30. Yet the war, while it reversed the
Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, and reduced Iraq's power, did not resolve the most
important issues in the Gulf itself that had led to the crisis in the first
place. As far as the international issues were concerned, there was no progress
: Iraq continued to dispute the frontier with Kuwait, especially after it was
redrawn in Kuwait's favour by the UN; there was no progress on the issue of
'unitization', concerning oil fields that lay beneath their common frontier;
the issue of oil prices remained beyond any diplomatic or negotiating process,
with Iraq remaining under a complete embargo; beyond the specific limits
imposed on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, there was no discussion of
multilateral arms control measures for the Gulf states as a whole, and an arms
race continued apace31. Most importantly, the underlying political causes of
both wars, the character of the political regimes in Iran and Iraq and, by
extension, in other states remained fundamentally unchanged. If anything, the
situation got worse: while in Kuwait there was some political improvement,
associated with the parliamentary elections of October 1992, the Saudi elite
remained anxious about nationalist and religious discontent, and its
constitutional reforms had little effect; in Iran, the regime, buffeted by
economic and social pressures, and facing continued difficulties abroad, was
more beleaguered than at any time since the crisis of 1981. The difficulties of
regional accommodation, and the temptations of external confrontation,
therefore remained.
30
To a considerable extent, the drama of
1990-1991 was therefore followed by a return to the uneasy status quo ante,
with the difference that Iraq was, for some time at least, reduced in
power. Iran's acceptance of the GCC and
US response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait did not lead to any marked improvement
in relations with Saudi Arabia, or in relations with Iraq: on the contrary, at
least two issues emerged following the Kuwait war to make relations with Saudi
Arabia and other states more difficult. One was the continued conflict between
Iran and the west, and in particular the USA, now exacerbated by the increased
direct US presence in the Gulf, following the Kuwait war. Any prospects of
improved Tehran-Washington relations that had existed in the immediate
aftermath of the Kuwait war were soon dissipated: by the early months of the
Clinton administration, Iran and the USA were once again on collision course,
and Washington evolved a policy of 'dual containment' towards both Iran and
Iraq. As with the policy of 'containment' vis-à-vis the USSR, the explicit goal
of preventing external expansion by these states was accompanied by an implicit
goal, that of weakening them within. Although
it was not able to get complete western and Japanese support for this policy,
Washington was able to put significant economic pressure on Iran. For their
part, and despite some differences between them on dealing with Iran, the GCC
states rejected Tehran's insistence that the security problems of the Gulf
should be solved without external involvement, and in particular without the
involvement of the USA. For Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose whole security
policy rested upon a US guarantee, this was unacceptable. The USA justified its
containment of Iran by reference to four issues: Iran's opposition to the
Arab-Israeli peace process, Iranian support for 'terrorism', including its call
for the killing of Salman Rushdie, its alleged plans for nuclear weapons, and
its domestic, human rights, record. As in the case of the earlier policy of
'containment' towards the USSR, first enunciated in the 1940s, the apparent
goal of the policy, to contain the expansion of the revolutionary state
concealed another goal, that of undermining it altogether, by depriving it of
its international ideological legitimation, the spread of revolution32.
31
The other issue that divided Iran from the
GCC, less obviously spelt out but present in the minds of Gulf rulers, was the
fear that if there were a crisis in Iraq, and if the regime was foundering
under international or domestic pressure, the Iranians would take advantage of
it and install their own supporters in Baghdad. Iran had failed to promote an
uprising in Iraq during the eight year war, and had been indecisive in the
opportunity opened up by the Iraqi uprising of March 1991: but Iran obviously
retained a long-term interest in the political future of Iraq and could be
expected to take advantage of any new crisis to promote its interests, through
both its Kurdish and Shi'ite associates. For the Saudis, and probably for the
others, a weakened Ba'thist regime, even with Saddam in charge, was thought
preferable to the creation of a pro-Iranian Islamic Republic of Iraq33.
Gulf
Geopolitics in the 1990s: the Issues
32
From the perspective of the mid-1990s the Gulf
would appear to be one of the potentially most unstable regions of the world,
given the combination of economic resources, militarized tension, and internal
political instability. Yet beyond this evident instability it is worth
examining in what the difficulties consist. As far as international questions
are concerned, one can identify at least six areas of tension: territory,
ethnic and religious minorities, oil, arms races, conflicts in foreign policy
orientation, and interference in each other's internal affairs. Yet the sheer
accumulation of these issues need not lead to alarmist conclusions. The
territorial issues, if properly addressed, can be resolved by compromise, be
they the Shatt al-Arab or the Tumbs and Abu Musa: by the standards of other
border disputes, these are relatively minor affairs. The question of minorities
is again something that can, when not enflamed by external factors, be
resolved. Iraq has no formal claim on Khuzistan, while Iran accepts the
sovereignty of the Gulf states in which Iranian minorities live. These
communities only become a major, international, problem, when states for other
reasons chose to make them so. As far as oil is concerned, there are
differences of opinion, and interest, but, as in the l970s, these correspond not to any Iranian-Arab
division, but to the division that underlay the Iraqi attack on Kuwait in 1990,
namely that between oil-producing states with larger and small populations, and
between states which are disputing a restricted world market. It is commercial
and demographic factors, not religion or history, that explain this issue,
which is one that can also be resolved by multilateral negotiation: for this,
OPEC remains the obvious forum. The issue of the arms race is, equally, one
that should, under suitable political conditions, be open to resolution: for
all that arms races are seen as having an autonomy of their own, beyond
political rationale or control, that in the Gulf is born of the evident
political suspicions of the three major states of each other and of the sense
that each may be tempted, for reasons of political calculation, to engage in
further military adventures in the future. The same applies, a fortiori, to the
two final issues mentioned above, non-interference and foreign policy
coordination: the former is a pure function of political will, of calculation
by regimes of where their state and national interest lies; the latter is
something which could easily be resolved, through a combination of tolerated
diversity, as on the Arab-Israeli question, and broad consultation.
33
It is not the issues themselves that pose the
greatest problems, but rather the insecurity of the three major regimes
vis-a-vis their own peoples and their fears as to what others will seek to
exploit. In such circumstances relations
between Iran and the Arabs, and the ideologies of rivalry and suspicion which
Gulf states generate, reflect the political character of these states
themselves. What we see in the 1990s is what has been the pattern since the
collision of Arab nationalism with Iranian state interests first emerged in
1958: the upheavals in both Arab states and in Iran have produced a situation
in which the politics of all countries are now interconnected but this
interconnection has been accompanied by the intervention of states whose
ideologies stress the differences, and reinforce the psychological gaps,
between Iranians and Arabs. The rise of the modern state, and of forms of
radical nationalism and revolutionary ideology associated with it, has,
therefore, in addition to dividing Iraq from the Arab monarchies of the Gulf,
served to drive a deeper wedge than ever before between the Arab world and Iran
ends.
Haut
de page
Notes
1.
For example, in Ervand Abrahamian's classic study, Iran Between Two Revolutions
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) there is no mention of Iraq.
Equally, in Hanna Batatu's study of the Iraqi revolution of 1958, The Old Social
Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978) there is virtually no mention of Iran. These silences
are an accurate reflection of how events were perceived at the time discussed.
2.
Samir al-Khalil, The Monument. Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1991); Amatzia Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in
the formation of Ba'thist Iraq, 1968-89 (London: Macmillan, 1991).
3.
'By drinking the milk of camels, and eating lizards, the Arabs have reached
such a state that they aspire to capture the crown of Persia'. The derogatory
Iranian expression for Peninsula Arabs, mushkhor, 'mouse-eaters', is in similar
vein.
4.
On this historical background see Jasim Abdulghani, Iraq and Iran. The Years of
Crisis (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Keith McLachlan, The boundaries of Iran
(London: University College London
Press, 1994).
5.
For a perceptive discussion of the usages, and suppressed racist connotations,
of shu'ûbiyya see Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear (London: Hutchinson/Radius,
1989) pp. 216-220.
6.
Saddam was also another one of the 'idols' which the Imam, officially titled
bot-shekan, or 'idol-smasher', was to smash, following the others he had
destroyed - the Shah, Carter and Bani Sadr. Unfortunately, Saddam did not
oblige.
7.
Among many examples, hich, 'nothing', chare 'remedy', and the half-Persian
half-Arabic khoshwalad, 'good guy'.
8.
Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), p.25. But Shi'is only came to comprise the majority in Iraq in the
nineteenth century. The Kurds also qualify for inclusion in the Persian sphere
of cultural influence by the fact that they celebrate the Persian New Year,
nuruz, the Zoroastrian festival.
9.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford:Basil Blackwell 1983); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
10
For background, see Nakash, The Shi'is of Iraq, pp.100-105.
11
The Iraqi revolt of 1920, in which Shi'i clergy played a leading role, was to
some degree encouraged by hostility to British plans for Iran: but it was the shared enemy, rather than
active solidarity, that produced this interaction.
12
There were an estimated 80 000 Persians in Iraq in 1919. 75% of the population
of Karbala were reckoned to be Persians (Nakash, pp.100-101).
13
This anti-Arab orientation was no means confined to the official ideologists of
the state. From the early nineteenth century onwards Iranian writers identified
the source of their country's backwardness in the influence of the Arabs, and
Islam, on their country. Ahmad Kasravi, a twentieth century theorist of secular
nationalism, sought to locate the backwardness of Iran in the influence upon
the Persian peoples of Arab and other, such as Turkish, cultures (Evrand
Abrahamian, 'Kasravi: The Integrative Nationalist of Iran', Middle East
Studies, Vol.9, October 1973).
14
Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear pp. 152-160. Al-Husri also argued against the
possibilities of Muslim unity, counterposing to a more desirable, and
attainable, Arab unity. In Sylvia Haim ed., Arab Nationalism. An Anthology (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1964) pp. 147-154.
15
Shahram Chubin and Sepehr Zabih, The Foreign Relations of Iran (London:
University of California Press, 1974), chapter IV, 'Iran-Iraq Relations'.
Graphic illustration of how much Iraq concerned the Iranian regime can be found
in the diaries of the royal adviser, Asadollah Alam, The Shah and I (London:
I.B. Tauris, 1991). These cover the years 1969-1975.
16
Majid Khadduri, Republican Iraq (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp.
181-5.
17
Republic of Fear, p. 17 n. 21. According to Tulfah, Persians are 'animals God
created in the shape of humans'.
18
Abdulghani pp. 77-78.
19
Chubin and Zabih, Chapters V-VII; Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and
Development (London: Penguin, 1978) Chapter 9.
20
R. K. Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran. Challenge and Response in the Middle East
(London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) Chapter 4. Ramazani argues,
persuasively, that it was the fall of the more cautious Bazargan government in
November 1979 which precipitated the more militant phase of Iran's policy
towards Iraq.
21
'Never Invade a Revolution' ran the editorial in The Times soon after the
outbreak of hostilities. For analysis see references in note 19 and al-Khalil,
Republic of Fear, 'Conclusion'.
22
The war lasted seven years and eleven months, two months less than the
Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945. Among general accounts see Shahram Chubin and
Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988); John Bulloch
and Harvey Morris, The Gulf War. Its Origins, History and Consequences (London:
Methuen, 1989).
23
Fred Halliday, 'Iranian Foreign Policy Since 1979: Internationalism and
Nationalism in the Islamic Revolution', in Juan Cole and Nikki Keddie, eds.
Shi'ism and Social Protest (London: Yale University Press, 1986).
24
On the Iraqi Shi'ite opposition see Hanna Batatu, 'Shi'a Organizations in Iraq:
al-Da'wah al'Islamiyah', in Cole and Keddie, eds.
25
See Chubin and Tripp op. cit.
26
See Ramazani, Chapter 3; and 'Iran and the Gulf Arabs', Middle East Report No.
156, Vol. 19 No. 1, January-February 1989.
27
Faleh Abd al-Jabbar, 'Why the Uprisings Failed', Middle East Report No. 176,
Vol. 22, No. 3, May/June 1992, pp. 3-4.
28
Among many analyses, Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict
1990-1991, (London: Faber and Faber, 1992); Amatzia Baram and Barry Rubin,
Iraq's Road to War (London: Macmillan, 1994); 'The Gulf war 1990-1991 and the
study of international relations', Review of International Studies, (vol. 20
no. 2 April 1994).
29
In itself a debt of $80 billions, roughly half owed to Arab states and half to
western and Soviet institutions, was not catastrophic: Iraq had plenty of oil
reserves against which to pledge repayment, and the Arabs had no way of
enforcing repayment of their share. But any such arrangements would have
involved international agreements and monitoring of Iraqi finances to which
Saddam was opposed.
30
Hooshang Amirahmadi, 'Iran and the Persian Gulf Crisis' in Hooshang Amirahmadi
and Nader Entessar eds. Iran and the Arab World (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1993); Said Amir Arjomand, 'A Victory for the Pragmatists: The Islamic
Fundamentalist Reaction in Iran', in James Piscatori ed. Islamic
Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis (Chicago: American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 1991).
31
Anthony Cordesman, Iran and Iraq: The threat from the Northern Gulf (Oxford:
Westview Press, 1994).
32
Geoffrey Kemp, Forever Enemies? American Policy and the Islamic Republic of
Iran (Washington: the Carnegie Endowment, 1994); Fred Halliday, 'An Elusive
Normalization: Western Europe and the Iranian Revolution', The Middle East
Journal Vol. 48 No. 2 Spring 1994.
33
Even if, in a longer-term perspective, such a second Islamic Republic would be
most unlikely to enjoy good relations with Iran: one could envisage that, after
initial protestations of eternal Islamic fraternity, a revolutionary Islamic
Iraq would find itself at odds with Tehran, a Shi'ite China to Tehran's Moscow.
Haut
de page
Pour
citer cet article
Référence
électronique
Fred
HALLIDAY, « Arabs and Persians beyond the Geopolitics of the Gulf », Cahiers
d'Etudes sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le monde Turco-Iranien [En ligne], 22
| 1996, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2005, consulté le 24 juin 2014. URL : http://cemoti.revues.org/143
--------------------
Arab
Spring has turned into nightmare - Sanef
2014-06-23
19:13
Johannesburg
- The SA National Editors' Forum (Sanef) expressed shock on Monday at the
conviction and sentencing of three Al Jazeera journalists in Egypt.
"What
started off as the dawn of the Arab Spring has turned into a nightmare where
freedoms of Egyptian people are treated with disdain by the ruling
military-aligned government," Sanef said in a statement.
"The
sentencing of the journalists comes as African leaders gather in Equitorial
Guinea for a summit of heads of state and governments."
Sanef,
which is part of the African Editors' Forum (TAEF), called on the African Union
Commission to ensure that the summit condemned the sentencing of the
journalists.
It
also wanted Egypt's participation in the AU to be suspended until it observed
its principles and protocols.
"Sanef
also calls on TAEF to embark on continent-wide protests against this heinous
act by the Egyptian government."
The
three Al Jazeera journalists, Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed,
were arrested in Cairo in December last year while covering the aftermath of
the coup that deposed Mohamed Morsi.
They
were sentenced on Monday to seven years in prison each on terrorism-related
charges.
Baher
Mohamed was sentenced to three extra years in prison on separate charges.
-
SAPA
----------------
Op-Ed:
Why the Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood Hate Each Other
Saudi
Arabia was once a haven for Muslim Brotherhood leaders who fled persecution in
Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Now the Saudis are pouring money into Sisi's
regime in order to destroy them.
Published:
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 12:24 AMDr. Mordechai Kedar
Hamas...is
caught between the hammer of Sisi...and the anvil of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
Emirates. This is one of the main factors behind Hamas' search for ways to go
back to cooperating with the PLO.
When
the revolt against Mubarak broke out towards the end of January 2011, it was
expected that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) would gain control of Egypt. The
Saudis did not hesitate to express their opposition to this possible outcome.
In June 2012, when Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammed Morsi became the president
of Egypt, he tried to calm the Saudis, but to no avail, and they supported
General Sisi when he deposed Morsi in July 2013.
Since
Morsi's fall from power, Saudi Arabia has granted Sisi billions of dollars to
support him in preventing Morsi from returning to the presidential office.
Saudi Arabia has also come out publicly against the position of the US which
called for Sisi to reinstate Morsi.
Saudi
opposition to the "Brothers" can be seen in its willingness to hand
over members of the movement who escaped to Saudi Arabia after Morsi was
deposed, when the Egyptian regime began to search out Muslim Brotherhood
activists after defining the movement as a terrorist organization. The obvious
question is why the Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood so much, even though
both groups are devout Sunnis, and why it chooses to help the secular Sisi
supporters.
This
question becomes even more acute considering past relations between the Saudis
and the "Brothers". Once Saudi Arabia was a safe haven for many of the
Muslim Brotherhood leaders who fled persecution in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and
Iraq.
There
are several answers to this question that, together, form a synergetic whole.
1.
The name "al-Ikhwan" – "the Brothers" – was, at the start
of the 20th century, the name of the militia of Ibn Saud, the founder of the
Saudi Arabian dynasty. This was a cruel militia that sowed panic among the
tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and ended the rule of Sherif Hussein Bin Ali,
King of the Hejaz. When Hassan al-Banna
founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, he took the name of Ibn
Saud's militia and added the adjective "Muslim", to emphasize that
the Egyptian members of the organization were truly Muslim, as opposed to Ibn
Saud's army.
Ibn
Saud did not forgive this treachery to his dying day in 1953.
2.
Saudi Arabia is a tribal country, where religion makes the tribal cohesion even
stronger, through laws, rules and tradition, whereas the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood believes that religion takes the place of tribal-family loyalties
which should disappear from politics entirely. The Muslim Brotherhood's policy
allows it to enlist people from all sectors and turn members into a developing
civilian society that is culturally self-sufficient, while the Saudi model
depends on a closed family group which cannot absorb people from outside its
framework.
3.
Islam in Saudi Arabia is institutionalized. The Sharia scholars and legal
arbiters have been inseparable from the regime since the founding of the
kingdom, and all their legal writings - books, treatises and decisions - are
meant to strengthen the regime and give it religious legitimacy. In contrast,
the religious approach of the "Brothers" is inherently oppositionary
and intended to enable anti-institutional activities in the countries in which
the organization functions - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, among others.
The Palestinian branch of the "Brothers" created a terror
organization, Hamas. All the religious writings of the MB scholars is intended
to justify their struggle against the governments of the countries in which
they reside. It is impossible to bridge the gap between Saudi institutionalized
Islam and the MB's revolutionary Islam.
4.
The organizational model of the "Brothers" allows them to expand
their activities and influence to other countries, including those without a
Muslim majority, such as Israel, Europe and the USA. In contrast, the family
organizational model of the Saudis is limited to Saudi Arabia and the Arab
Emirates, and its influence can only reach outside those countries by buying
supporters and involving itself financially in
efforts to spread Islam.
The
fact that the "Brothers" can expand their influence and presence to
new communities causes the Saudis and the Emirates to feel that they are losing
the contest for supremacy.
5.
The Saudi approach to Islam is "Salafist", which sanctifies the
original, glorious past of Islam as a religion whose states are ruled by
uncompromising . religious tenets. The
Saudis view the "Brothers" as a modern political movement that has
transformed Islam into a pragmatic ideology willing to reach compromises with
other prevalent civilian ideologies, even those that oppose Islam or do not
hold its beliefs. The official positive
attitude of the "Brothers' to the Egyptian Copts, for example, infuriates
the Saudis.
6.
The lslamic legal system prevalent in Egypt is the Hanfit system, whereas the
one prevalent in Saudi Arabia is the fundamentalist and extreme version of the
Hanbal system, known as Wahhabism. Since the Hanfit system is less stringent
than Wahhabism, the "Brothers" are seen by the Saudis as lacking
respect for Islam. Wahhabists, for
example, force a woman to cover her face with a niqab when going outside in
public, forbid her from going out without a male family member as escort,
prevent her from driving and working in most professions. The Hanfists, on the
other hand, allow a woman to go out by herself, uncover her face, drive and
work in any respectable field. The Saudis have no religious expectations from
the Egyptian military, but the irreverent attitude of the "Brothers"
angers them.
7.
In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates there are quite a few people who
are not connected to the tribal system and the ruling families, so that the
"Brother's" ideology is suited to their way of life and thinking.
They would like to see the Saud famiy ruling the country and the ruling
families in the Emirates exchanged for a non-family-tribal cadre. The rise of
the "Brothers" to the position of Egyptian president encouraged this
trend and spread suspicion among the ruling families who fear that the "Brother's"
ideology may threaten the stability of their regimes. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, the
head of the Dubai police, said that the danger the "Brothers" pose to
the Emirates is greater than that posed by Iran.
8.
During the twentieth century, an economic rift developed between Saudi Arabia
and the Emirates on the one hand, and the poor populations of Egypt and other
Arab countries, people who are the natural breeding ground for the
"Brothers". The stark contrast
between the wealth of the Arabian Peninsula and the poverty, neglect,
backwardness, diseases and ignorance in the other Arab lands created envy,
hate, suspicion and intrigues between the two sides.
Evening
papers in Arab countries portray the Saudis and leaders of the Emirates as
grotesquely fat and round, an image not divorced from reality. Undoubtedly, the
"Brothers'" popularity with the vast Arabic masses is much greater
than that of the ruling House of Saudi, a situation which causes the Saudis much
discomfort.
In
a cartoon, a typical Palestinian Arab in Khan Yunis says to the Saudis:
"You are all traitors" because of their silence on what is going on
in Gaza. The artist? Omia Jucha, wife of one of the heads of Hamas, Rami Saad.
9.
The Peninsula countries have had a symbiotic relationship with the West for
decades. They supply the West with oil and gas, while the West protects them
from external threats, such as Russia, Arab nationalism of the Gamal Abdul
Nasser kind and the undercover activities of the Baath regimes of Syria, Iraq
and Iran. To the Muslim Brotherhood, the West is the main enemy of the Middle
Eastern nations: the British conquest of Egypt in the last quarter of the 19th
century, the British and French conquest of the Levant after WWI, the establishment
of the State of Israel, materialism, theft of natural resources, political
hegemony and permissiveness that pervade the western media and reach every home
in the Middle east are viewed by the "Brothers" as a Western attack
on Islamic culture, policies and economic interests.
The
contrast between Muslim Brotherhood's attitude towards the United States and
that of the Arabian Peninsula exacerbated the tension between the two sides.
10.
Jerusalem remains the central point in the conflict between the
"Brothers" and Saudi Arabia, although this dispute is not waged in
public and must be read between the lines. The "Brothers" made their
views on Jerusalem clear on May 1, 2012, in a speech by MB leader Sheikh Safwat
Hijazi to hundreds of thousands of supporters during Morsi's presidential
election campaign: "We have seen the dream of the Islamic Caliphate, the
Land of the Caliphate, come to pass - Allah willing - the group (MB, ed.) and
its party. We have seen the great dream that we all dream of, the 'United Arab Nations'. The 'United Arab Nations' will return, Allah
willing, by this man's hand, with the help of his party. And the capital of the
'United Arab Nations' will be Jerusalem, Allah willing (loud approval from the
crowd). Our capital will not be Cairo, nor Mecca nor Medina, Allah willing, and
our slogan will be "Millions of shahids march on Jerusalem" (as the
crowd fanatically shouts the slogan).
Another
instance of Jerusalem's centrality to the MB occurred in 2001 when the leader
of the Northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Raad Salah,
announced his intention of bringing
water from the Zamzam well in Mecca to Jerusalem, in order to stress
Jerusalem's holiness and its connection to Mecca. When the Saudis heard of his
plan, they kept him from attending the Haj. They did not offer an explanation,
but everyone knew why he was not allowed to reach Mecca.
In
general, the Saudis hardly mention Jerusalem, and when they do, it is to say
that it must be returned to the Palestinians. This keeps them from being seen
as Zionists, but it seems as if they fear that if Jerusalem becomes the capital
of a Palestinian state, it will become the focus of Islamism rather than Mecca.
The Palestinian Arab leader might call himself "Guardian of the El Aksa
Mosque", a title that overshadows the Saudi king, who is "Guardian of
two holy places.
It
is important to note that the rivalry between the Hijaz center of Islam with
Mecca as its holy city and Medina its capital, and the political center in Greater
Syria (Alsham) with Damascus as its capital and Jerusalem its holy city, broke
out in the seventh century, almost 1400 years ago. That was when the first
Umayyad Caliph, Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, moved the capital from Medina to
Damascus. Later on, in 682 C.E., he chose Jerusalem as an alternative for the
Haj because of a revolt that broke out in Mecca, preventing Syrian pilgrims
from attending the Haj. The great
Islamic arbiter Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), whose decisions are adhered to by the
Saudi Wahhabists, lowered the level of Jerusalem's importance and holiness to
that of every other Islamic city, because he knew that its "holiness"
was only the result of a political, ethnic and personal dispute. The rivalry
between the two centers - the Hijaz Mecca and the Alsham Jerusalem continues to
this day, and adds to the tension between the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi
Arabia.
Egypt
has Salafist groups which are growing and spreading; their Islamic practice and
way of life is becoming similar to that of the the Saudis. They oppose the
"Brothers" and cooperate with Sisi and his security forces against
the "Brothers". Thus, the "Muslim Brotherhood" in Egypt and
the Hamas, its cohort in Gaza, find themselves caught between the hammer of
Sisi and his security forces and the anvil of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
Emirates. This is one of the main factors behind Hamas' search for ways to go
back to cooperating with the PLO.
The
abyss separating the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, except for Qatar, and
the "Muslim Brotherhood" is wide and deep, and the developments of
the past three years in the Middle East have only served to make it wider and
deeper.
-----------------------------
Differences
Between Arab and American Culture
•
Categorized under Culture | Differences Between Arab and American Culture
Arab
vs American Culture
The
differences between Arab and American culture are both staggering and yet
negligible. Both countries are deeply political, and throughout both countries’
histories are deeply committed to their spiritual, moral, and social standards.
But the similarities could not go deeper – origins, religion, and cultural
backgrounds are the main reasons that both cultures could never agree on key
points and have been a source of chronic conflict through the history of the
world.
Religious
Differences
While
America is originally founded by Christianity (Puritans from the United
Kingdom), the Arab countries, on the other hand, embrace Islam since the 6th
BC. This religious difference is one of the major contributors of sporadic
clashes that are often mistaken as “political” in nature. Since Arab nations
make sure that the state religion is kept, the American culture fights for the
individual’s faith, the freedom to choose what religion he or she thinks would
be best for him or her. This has been one of the flashpoints between both
cultures. The American eagerness to “free” the Arab press is one good example
of the widening gap between both cultures. While Islam preaches one God, the
majority of those who embrace Christianity believe in a God represented by the
Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. To this day, both cultures are forcing the
other to heed the call to accept their religions.
Language
The
Arab language and the American language are both regional languages. The
English language is seen to be the default Western language, while the Arabic
language is seen as an Eastern language that has its roots in the Aramaic and
Hebrew languages. The Arab language, however, is not just a regional language
but also a religious language as well that is closely attached to Islam.
Countries that are predominantly Muslim speak and write Arabic with schools
teaching the language extensively. The English language (American), has its
influence tied to global commerce making it the default international language.
The glaring differences are also stressed on how these languages are perceived
by the other – often creating animosity and clashes on socio-political,
economic, and religious issues.
Literature
English
literature has a long history and has been seen as the foundational platform of
the existing world literature. The Arab literature, however, is more localized
and, again, spread around by the Arab religion – Islam. Although the Arab
culture existed before the creation of Islam, Islam successfully overpowered
previously written literature and replaced it with excerpts from the Qur’an and
other Islamic texts and derived poetry.
Media
The
socio-political climate of both the American and Arab cultures dictates the
activities of their respective media. This is one of the clearest differences
between the Arab and American cultures. American media is freer but can also be
severely unregulated, causing legal debacles from claims and counterclaims of
published reports. Some call this the curse of democracy to American media.
This often leads to the conflict of privacy, personal interests, and national
security. The Arab media, on the other hand, is burdened by the responsibility
to support the existing regime – oftentimes dictated by Islamic clerics. This
often leads to severe regulation and censorship. Worse yet, it is also prone to
manipulation and propaganda. Although these issues are as real in the American
media, it is often downplayed by the fact that freedom of the press is alive
and well in the American culture.
Terrorism
Terrorism
has been an ongoing battle and a key part of defining the differences between
Arab and American cultures. “Terrorism” in both cultures has different
meanings. American interference in Arab affairs within Arab lands (the Jewish
issue) has been hailed as terrorism by the Arab nations. Suicide bombings and
Islamic insurgencies are terrorism for the American public. These terror “acts”
from both cultures also have different motivations. The American side see it as
a socio-economic pursuit to establish a presence in the Arab region, while the
Arab side see it as expressing their sovereignty – socially, politically, and
spiritually through the integration of the Islamic reasoning for the attacks
(often attributed to Islamic extremism).
Summary:
American
culture promotes individual faith while Arab culture often embraces Islam.
American
culture utilizes English while the Arab culture makes use of the Arabic
language.
American
literature serves as one of the major foundations of world literature while
Arabic literature is more localized and is mostly based on Islam.
American
media has more freedom than Arab media.
Both
the Arabs and Americans have various views regarding terrorism. Arabs see it as
a way to express their sovereignty while Americans see it as a socio-economic
pursuit.
Read
more: Differences Between Arab and American Culture | Difference Between |
Differences Between Arab vs American Culture http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/culture-miscellaneous/differences-between-arab-and-american-culture/#ixzz35Y92qcQu
-----------------------
Iran–Saudi
Arabia relations
Saudi–Iran
Arabian relations refers to the bilateral relations between the Islamic
Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Iran have
clashed over interpretations of Islam, their aspirations for leadership of the
Islamic world, oil export policy, relations with the US and other Western
countries.
Relations
have been problematic throughout the countries' history due to differences in
religion. Saudi Arabia represents a
"Wahhabi" Sunni Islamic government, while Iran represents a Shia Islamic
governments. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have aspirations for Islamic leadership
and both countries possess a different vision of regional order.
After the Islamic Revolution, Iran followed a strict anti-US policy, while
Saudi Arabia had close relations with the United States. Iran has accused Saudi
Arabia of being an agent of the US in the Persian Gulf region, representing US
interests. On the other side, Saudi Arabia has had concerns about Iran's desire
to export its revolution, expand its influence to other parts of the Persian
Gulf region -- notably in post-Saddam Iraq -- and about Iran's nuclear
program.[1]
The
difference of political ideologies and governance also divided both countries.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is based on the principle of Guardianship of the
Islamic Jurists, which hold that a faqih (Islamic jurist) should have
custodianship over all Muslims, including their governance. Iran's Supreme
Leader is a Shia faqih. The founder of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah
Khomeini, was ideologically opposed to monarchy, which he believed to be
unIslamic. Saudi Arabia's monarchy, on the other hand, is conservative, not
revolutionary, and its religious leaders have long supported monarchy were the
king was given absolute obediance as long as he did not violate Islamic sharia
law.[2] Saudi Arabia has, however, a Shia minority which has made bitter
complaints about institutional discrimination against it,[3] and whom at times
has been urged to overthrow the king.[4]
Both
countries are major oil exporters but have clashed over energy policy. Saudi
Arabia, with its large oil reserves and smaller population, has a greater
interest in taking a long-term view of the global oil market and incentive to
moderate prices. In contrast, Iran is compelled to focus on high prices in the
short term.[1]
QUESTION: Is there a difference between Arab and
Persian
Answered
Most Recently
Zanjackson
Yes,
there is a mountain of difference. The Arabs, though themselves not homogenous,
are a Semitic people, whereas the Persians are Indo-Iranian, their language
belonging to the Indo-European language family. In short, they are
historically, culturally, linguistically and ethnically separate populations
who happen to share a home in the Middle East.
QUESTION:
What is the difference between Muslims and Arabs?
Updated
Answer
Prioktan918
Simple
Answer
Muslims
are peoples that follow the religion of Islam.
Arab
represents the ethnicity of the peoples originally lived in Arabia and now live
across the Middle East and North Africa.
It
is important to note that only 23% of Muslims are Arabs, but 90% of Arabs are
Muslims.
More
Complex Answer
Muslims
A
person is considered to be Muslim if he testifies that: "there is no God
besides Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger, servant and prophet of
Allah."
There
are a varieties of sects and schools in Islam such as Sunnis, Shiites, Ibadis,
and marginal or heretical sects.
Muslims
are followers of the religion of Islam. There are many Muslims who are not
Arabs - there are Muslim Indonesians, Muslim Chinese, and Muslim Americans. The
vast majority of Muslims (over 75%) are not Arabs and many more of them are
South Asians (like Pakistanis, Indians, and Bengalis).
Arabs
Arabs
are people of the Middle East that are united by a common language: Arabic, and
a common history: the Islamic Caliphates. Arabs are not necessarily of the same
ethnic stock and in many cases are of mixed heritage due to intermarriage
between the Arabs coming up from the Arabian Peninsula and indigenous Semites
and Berbers. Not all Arabs are Muslim, but all Arabs have (in their history)
spent time under an Islamic government. Arabs follow different religions; most
are Muslims, but some are also Christians, Jews, Druze, Baha'i, Yazidi, and
Zoroastrian.
Someone
can be called Arab when his nationality is from an Arab country or when his
parents are Arabs (from the Arab countries).
Therefore,
you can divide "Arab" by the nationalities of these countries.
There
are "Saudi Arabs", "Yemeni Arabs", and "Moroccan
Arabs", etc.
Arab
culture and language may be classified as Afro-Asiatic. Arabs mainly occupy
lands in the Middle East, N. Africa & E. Africa, as well as the E.
Mediterranean and parts of SW Asia. Islam originated in Arabia, so naturally
many Arabs are Muslim, but not all.
---------------------
Answered
in KURDISH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
QUESTION: Is there a difference between Arab and Kurd?
Well,
yes there is. both of them Arabic and Kurdish are different, even though
they're Muslims. but Arabs speak Arabic as t... CONTINUE READING
-----------------
QUESTION:What
is the difference between Muslims and black Muslims?
Answer
1 There is no difference in Islam between any race, color or creed. The verse
of the Qur'an unequivocally explains thi... CONTINUE READING
------------------
BLOGGED:
CANADA
MILITARY NEWS: African Muslims - Slave Trade by Arab Muslims - over 1,000
years- it's time 2 stop it- videos- photos- proof... SHAME
-------------------
The
Connection Between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Jews
Christians And Muslims
Modern
day skeptics and theologists continue to analyze passages of the Jewish,
Cristian, and Muslim faiths. There are both similarities and stark differences
among these three prominent religions. In order to fully understand one or all
of these religions fully, it's important to compare their similarities and
differences. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have a lot more in common than most
people think.
Monotheistic
Jews,
Christians, and Muslims are all considered monotheistic religions. This means
people of practice these religions and their associated rituals pray to one
god. While the religions are similar in this regard, the perception of god
varies by religion. For example, Christians believe that god exists in three
forms: the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. The son represents Jesus
Christ, who is considered the messiah in the Christian faith, but not in the
Jewish and Muslim religions. Muslims pray to a single god in the name of
"Allah". People of the Jewish faith pray to a single god as well, referred
to as "A'donai" in the historic Hebrew language.
Group
Divisions
While
the religions have similarities, there are divisions within Judaism,
Christianity, and Islamic faiths. Christianity is divided into three prominent
denominations: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. Judaism also has
several divisions, with differences in faith, region, and theory. Some Jewish
sub cultures include Orthodox, Traditional, Conservative, and Reform. In the
Islamic religion, there are two groups: Sunni and Shia.
QUOTE
Jews,
Christians, and Muslims are all considered monotheistic religions. This means
people of practice these religions and their associated rituals pray to one
god. While the religions are similar in this regard, the perception of god
varies by religion.
The
Holy Land
Jews,
Christians, and Muslims all regard Israel as the Holy Land. Jerusalem is
considered to be one of the most spiritually significant cities in all three
religions. The iconic city is also the capital of Israel. The Torah, considered
the Old or First Testament, makes many references to Israel as the Holy Land.
It is also referenced in Christian and Islamic religious texts. All three
religions are linked to Israel as Holy Land in some form.
Holy
Scripture
Holy
Scripture is another connection between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. While
the religions contrast in overall theory, all three have historic religious or
holy scripture. Followers of the Jewish faith read passages from the Torah,
including the ten books of Moses. The Christians acknowledge the Torah as the
"Old Testament," the precursor to the Christian based bible. Muslim
religious leaders and followers depend on their religious theory and ideology
on the Koran, which Muslims believe was passed down from the Islamic prophet Mohammed.
Following
Religions
Jews,
Christians, and Muslims are scattered around the globe. There is an estimated
2.2 billion followers of the Christian faith, based on 2009 estimates. Based on
the same estimation in 2009, there are 1.5 billion followers of the Islamic
faith. In Israel and scattered among the world, there are more than 14 million
Jews. The presence of these prominent religions all have religious ties to the
Middle East but are widely practiced in major Western based societies.
There
are major similarities between the religious history and theory practiced by
Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Though these religions are based on similar
principles and beliefs, each is unique of its own traditions, customs, and
following. It's important to understand how these religions relate to
one-another, in order to understand one or all three of the religions. Scholars
and skeptics continue to study religion and theory to try to understand the
best ways to carry out the dreams and expectations of their religious
ancestors.
From
the Community
How
are Muslims perceived by Jews and Christians?
Answer
1 _ They are perceived by a very small minority of Jews _ and Christians as
unbelievers and as their enemies although the _ vast majority of educated Jews
and Christians will simply view them _ as fellow humans worshipping the same
God according to their own _ beliefs and traditions. Muslims view Jews and
Christians as " _ people of the book" as Muslims believe in their
holy books; The _ Bible and the Torah; and their prophets; Jesus and Moses.
Refer to _ questions below. _ _ Answer 2 _ _ The Jewish perception of Muslims
depends on whether you are asking _ from a religious perspective or a political
perspective. _ Religiously, Jews accept that Islam is a valid religion for _
non-Jewish people and the famous Rabbi Moses Maimonides (Rambam) _ said over
900 years ago that Islam was part of the Divine Plan to _ make Knowledge of God
a worldwide phenomenon. Jews support Muslims' _ right to pray and see their
rituals and ceremonies as valid and _ proper, just not for Jews (who are
obligated to follow Jewish Law). _ _ _ Politically, Jews and Muslims have a
number of unresolved issues. _ During Mohammed's life and the Caliphate period,
Jews saw Muslims _ as preferable overlords than the Christians since Muslims
permitted _ Jewish practice whereas Christians often did not. However, this _
tolerance is viewed by Muslims as being peaceful and harmonious, _ whereas Jews
see it as a second-class citizenship. Additionally, _ Muslims circulated
numerous Anti-Semitic hadiths and, in the modern _ period, embraced many
Anti-Semitic books and pamphlets from Europe. _ Jews are immensely bothered and
angered by the positive reception _ that many Muslims gave such derisive
nonsense. Most recently, the _ united Islamic opposition to the State of Israel
and its _ internationally confirmed Right to Exist infuriates Jews because _
Muslim politicians continually try to deny both the political _ validity of
Israel as well as the religious connection that Jews _ have to the land. The
Jewish perception is that these Muslim _ leaders and many Muslims in
Muslim-majority countries are unwilling _ to even consider the Israeli or
Jewish points of view while _ demanding that their political will be enacted. _
Do
Muslims hate Jews and Christians?
Answer
1 Muslims treat all people equally .. Muslims do not hate Jews and Christians.
The Quran refers to Jews and Christians as "People of the Book" and
demands that Muslims respect them. Muslims don't hate anyone. And In the Koran,
Muslims should believe for all God's Messengers and respect them From Adam to
Mohammad. It is correct that as an Abrahamic faith, Islam has a lot in common
with Judaism and Christianity. But most Muslims do not hate Jews and
Christians. The Quran refers to Jews and Christians as "People of the
Book" and demands that Muslims respect them. Muslims don't hate anyone.
And In the Koran Muslims should believe for all God's Messengers and respect
them From Adam to Mohammad. Answer 2 While the Qur'an proscribes tolerance for
Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians have not always been tolerated or
when they have it is as second-class citizens. The notion of toleration for
other religions is very different in Muslim-majority countries than it is in
the West, namely that toleration in Islam is seen as an Islamic gift to others
and Islam remains in charge whereas in the West toleration is based on the fact
that no religion has the high-ground. Proselytization of non-Islamic faiths is
prohibited in most Muslim countries whereas Proselytization of non-Christian
faiths is permitted in most Western countries. Mosques can be built without
issue in most Muslim countries, but existing churches and synagogues cannot
even be repaired without executive decrees. There is much anti-Western rhetoric
used in Muslim-majority countries as a response to the humiliation of
colonialism or recent American Wars in the Middle East and some of that has
also been given a religious tone. Finally, many Jews and Christians (especially
in the United States) support the State of Israel and this has caused enmity
with Muslims who support Palestinian independence if not complete control of
that area. Zionist Muslims are beaten in many countries because they are
believed to have been paid off by "evil Jews" and perhaps the the
torture can "fix" their opinion.
How
did Muslims treat Christians and Jews and why?
Muslims
treat Christians and Jews and all non Muslims kindly and with tolerance so far
they don't attack Muslims, they don't expel them from their lands and homes,
and/or they don't fight them. Quran; Muslims holy book, and prophet Muhammad
(PBUH) call for kind treatment and with tolerance with all non-Muslims. Islam
religion is a religion of peace. Quran; Muslims holy book that they follow its
instructions and teachings and rules; say (meaning English translation):
"Allah (or God and same God worshiped in Christianity and Judaism) does
not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not
expel you from your homes - from being righteous toward them and acting justly
toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly.Allah only forbids you
from those who fight you because of religion and expel you from your homes and
aid in your expulsion - [forbids] that you make allies of them. And whoever
makes allies of them, then it is those who are the wrongdoers." (60:8-9)
and says: "And if they incline to peace, then incline to it [also] and
rely upon Allah. Indeed, it is He who is the Hearing, the Knowing." (8:61)
It is important to emphasize that Muslims believe in Moses and Jesus and they
believe in their holy books (The Torah and the Bible) as God revelations. That
is why they call Christians and Jews in the Muslims Holy Book the Quran as
"the people of the book". Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)
married a Jewish woman and married a Christian woman. Quran includes a fill
chapter titled (Mary). The virgin Mary is the only woman mentioned explicitly
in many locations in Quran and the only woman with her name is the title of
full chapter in Quran. Refer to question below for more information.
How
were Muslims perceived by Jews and Christians?
Answer
1 Jews were fighting with Muslim to get a land which called Israel. Jews are
enemy with Muslim. ================================ Another contributor stops
by, briefly, just to point out that the answer above could not have been
written by a Jew. Answer 2 When? There has been nearly 1300 years of serious
interaction between the three religions. During the vast length of that time,
there was a general respect and approval of Islam and of Muslims. Islam was,
for most of the medieval period, relatively tolerant of the other monotheistic
faiths. Jews and Christians had a relative freedom and security of their
persons that was not existent for Jews or Muslims in Christian Europe. This led
to much Jewish support of the Islamic regimes since it "was better than
the alternative". It is important to note, however, that this period of
toleration has often mistakenly been seen as universal under Islamic
governance, and mistakenly that it was exactly like the modern concept of Human
Rights. To the first count, there are numerous Islamic Massacres and Pogroms
against Jews and Christians like those perpetrated by the Almohads, even though
they were significantly rarer than in Christian Europe. To the second count,
Jews and Christians were allowed to live in Islamic countries by right of the
sovereign which meant that they had to submit to unfair taxation (such as the
jizya and kharaj), certain neighborhoods, an inability to openly preach or
practice "insulting parts of their faith", and had serious
difficulties in protecting their legal rights (such as giving witness
testimony). These misperceptions are quite common in Muslim circles which earns
them much ire among Jews and Christians living today who clearly note the
inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries and see
the lack of willpower by Muslims to not promote and systematically deny any
change in the status quo to be an act of supreme intolerance and cognitive
dissonance with what they say they believe.
How
do Jews differ from Christians and Muslims?
OK,
first off all of these religions are monotheistic meaning they only believe in,
worship, one God. Interestingly enough, they all believe in the same God and
are related in history. The Jews, believe, live by and follow the Tanach
(Jewish Bible) upon which the Christian Old Testament was based. Judaism is
strictly monotheistic and doesn't consider the Christian concept true
monotheism. Many people believe that the only real difference between Judaism
and Christianity is Jesus, however, that is not correct. Examples of Christian
concepts that Judaism does not accept are; the Trinity, hell and the devil
(also Muslim concepts), original sin, damnation (Muslim too), the Christian
concept of Messiah, and many more. Christians, live by, believe and follow the
Bible with BOTH the New and Old Testament therefore they do believe that Jesus
was the Son of God and that salvation is through Him. The God of the Muslims is
Allah. The Muslim's religious text is the Koran, which they believe contains
literal words of God. The Five Pillars of Islam are five acts that are expected
from anyone proclaiming themselves as believers. There's a lot more to all
three religions than that of course, I can not even begin to scratch the
surface these are just a few of the basic facts from each one.
Why
did the Muslims respect Jews and Christians?
All
human beings are the off-spring of Hazrat Adam (AS), and the creation of
Almighty God. The Muslims are commanded by Allah Almighty and the Last Prophet
Hazrat Muhammad (May peace be upon him) to be kind, helpful and merciful to all
humans. They are supposed not to hurt the feelings of others. The Muslims show
respect to the cultures of all nations and the followers of all religions,
especially the Christians and the Jews because they also believe in One God,
angels, Prophets, and the Day of Judgment as do the Muslims. the Muslims also
have faith in the Prophet-hood of all Prophets (may peace be upon them all).
That is why they respect Chritmas and Jews.
Does
Iran have Jews Muslims and christians?
Yes,
among other religions. Bahai, Zarostarian...
How
do Muslims see Christians and Jews?
Muslims
see Jews and Christians as "people of the book" because they are
holders of the holy books Torah and the Bible that Muslims believe in their
divinity.
--------------
Egypt president ‘won’t interfere’ in Al Jazeera
trial
Tuesday,
June 24, 2014
PHOTO |
AFP | FILE Egypt's former army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (centre). He said
that authorities will not interfere in the judiciary, as protests were staged
worldwide in solidarity with Al-Jazeera journalists, including an Australian,
whose jailing has sparked outrage. AFP
In Summary
They
consider the pan-Arab satellite network as the voice of Qatar, and accuse Doha
of backing Morsy’s Brotherhood, while the emirate openly denounces the
repression of the Islamist supporters.
By SARAH BEINHAIDA More by this Author
Egypt’s president said today the authorities will
not interfere in the judiciary, as protests were staged worldwide in solidarity
with Al-Jazeera journalists, including an Australian, whose jailing has sparked
outrage.
The United States is leading calls for President
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to pardon the journalists convicted of aiding the
blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood movement and “spreading false news”.
A Cairo court sentenced award-winning Australian
journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fadel Fahmy to seven
years in jail on Monday, while producer Baher Mohamed was handed 10 years.
Eleven of 20 defendants who stood trial were
giving 10-year sentences in absentia, including one Dutch journalist and two
British journalists. Those sentenced can appeal before the court of cassation.
Since the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed
Morsy in July 2013, the Egyptian authorities have been incensed by Al-Jazeera’s
coverage of their deadly crackdown on his supporters.
Morsy’s Brotherhood
They consider the pan-Arab satellite network as
the voice of Qatar, and accuse Doha of backing Morsy’s Brotherhood, while the
emirate openly denounces the repression of the Islamist supporters.
Sisi, the ex-army chief who led Morsy’s ouster before
being elected president in May, said the authorities “will not interfere in
judicial matters”. “We have to respect judiciary rulings, and not comment them
even if others don’t understand them,” he said in a televised speech.
Sisi’s comments came a day after the White House
urged the Egyptian authorities to pardon the journalists. But a presidency
official told AFP Sisi cannot legally do so until a final court ruling after
any appeals.
Monday’s ruling sparked an international outcry,
with US Secretary of State John Kerry denouncing “a chilling and draconian
sentence”.
Greste’s shattered parents vowed to keep fighting
for press freedom as Australia urged Sisi to issue a pardon.
“This is a very dark time not only for our
family, but for journalism generally,” his father Juris said in Brisbane. “The
campaign for media freedom and free speech must never end. Journalism is not a
crime.”
Al-Jazeera, whose journalists had been working in
Cairo without official accreditation, condemned the verdict as “unjust”.
Journalists around the world demonstrated Tuesday
in solidarity with those jailed, including staff at the London headquarters of
the BBC, Greste’s former employer, and reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’
Club in Hong Kong.
“The verdict is unjust, the case is unfounded,”
BBC news director James Harding told the gathering, before a one-minute silent
protest was observed exactly 24 hours after the sentencing. France on Tuesday
joined Britain and the Netherlands in summoning the Egyptian ambassadors, after
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said she was “shocked and alarmed” by the
ruling.
Amnesty International also spoke of a “dark day
for media freedom in Egypt”, and Human Rights Watch said the verdict showed
“how Egypt’s judges have been caught up in the anti-Muslim Brotherhood hysteria
fostered by President al-Sisi”.
But reactions remained limited to verbal
objections, as no Western capital can afford severing ties with Egypt, the
first Arab country to have signed a peace treaty with Israel and a strategic US
ally in the Middle East.
A day before the ruling, US officials announced
that $572 million (Ksh49bn) aid, frozen since October, had been released to
Egypt after a green light from Congress.
The Al-Jazeera ruling is the latest issue in
Egypt to concern human rights groups since a 2011 uprising toppled long-time
autocratic president Hosni Mubarak.
And since Morsy’s ouster on July 3 last year,
political unrest has reached unprecedented levels in Egypt, with more than
1,400 people killed and at least 15,000 jailed in a government crackdown.
Hundreds have also been sentenced to death in
speedy mass trials and dozens of youth activists who spearheaded the 2011
uprising have been handed jail terms, with the authorities being accused of
using the judiciary as a blunt tool of repression.
“Many judges believe the state was threatened”
during Morsy’s single year of rule, said Hassan Nafaa, a political professor at
Cairo University. “They are taking their revenge today with harsh and
unjustified verdicts.”
Middle East expert Karim Bittar told AFP the
“rulings confirm that Egypt is living in a purely McCarthyist climate”.
In Egypt, however, the Al-Jazeera rulings drew
limited criticism, with newspapers on Tuesday speaking of verdicts against
“terrorists” accused of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad”.
The few voices denouncing the court’s decision
were to be found on social media networks.
Egypt regime gets US seal of approval
by Judith Orr
US secretary of state John Kerry met Egypt’s
president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday of last week to promise the unblocking
of US military aid.
He said that ten Apache helicopters “will come,
and they'll come very very soon".
As Kerry was assuring el-Sisi of US support and
millions of dollars for his brutal regime, a court confirmed hanging sentences
to 180 Muslim Brotherhood protesters.
A total of 683 Brotherhood supporters have been
sentenced to death.
On Monday of last week six Al Jazeera journalists
were sentenced to seven years in jail, and another to ten years. They had
reported on Brotherhood protests after the fall of president Mohammed Mursi.
Ten year sentences were also given to one Dutch
and two British journalists in absentia.
In protest at the sentences and increasing
targeting of those challenging the protest ban, around 250 activists and
detainees’ families marched in Cairo last Saturday.
The demo was attacked by plain-clothed thugs with
knives, broken bottles and stones and by police firing tear gas.
A total of 37 people were arrested, including
Sana Ahmad Seif, the younger sister of jailed activist Alaa Abdel Fattah. Many
suffered beatings in cells.
An international day of action was held last
Saturday in solidarity with detainees.
--------------------------
Tunisian Media Experts React
to Egypt Verdict
Experts condemn Egyptian
sentences against Al Jazeera journalists and express mixed views on Tunisia's
own progress
By Jacob Jaffe | Jun 24 2014
Maghreb journalists mark
World Press Freedom Day | الصحفيون المغاربيون يحتفلون باليوم
العالمي لحرية الصحافة | Les journalistes du Maghreb marquent la Journée mondiale de
la liberté de la presse
Three Al Jazeera journalists, Peter
Greste, Mohamed Fahmy, and Baher Mohamed, received seven-year prison sentences
in Egypt Monday, allegedly for spreading false news and supporting the now
banned Muslim Brotherhood, according to BBC News. Baher Mohamed received an
additional three years for a separate charge of possession of “unlicensed
ammunition.” Eleven others, including three foreign journalists, were tried in
absentia and received ten-year sentences.
Their arrest, widely considered to be
politically-motivated, has sparked international outrage, giving rise to the
#FreeAJStaff campaign and drawing sympathy from journalists worldwide. The
three have consistently maintained their innocence, as has Al Jazeera, since
being taken into into custody on December 29, 2013.
The sentencing has drawn a sharp
rebuke from media experts in Tunisia.
“I’m against this sentence which
violates the freedom of press,” Hichem Snoussi, member of the High Independent
Board of Audiovisual Communication (French: HAICA), told Tunisia Live. “Al
Jazeera is a channel [...] that has a political agenda, but that does not
justify imprisonment of its journalists.”
“
Many watchdog groups, professional organizations, and media syndicates
are performing the role of observation and are documenting and denouncing
abuses against journalists. [...] But this effort alone cannot stop these
abuses without real political will to protect journalists and hold violators
accountable.
”
Fahem Boukkadous
Tunis Center for Press Freedom
HAICA is Tunisia’s independent media
regulatory authority and has been hailed as a “fundamental asset for Tunisia,”
according to Reporters Without Borders. HAICA was born out of Decree 116 of
2011 which, along with Decree 115, was approved by Tunisia’s interim government
and forms the basis for media reform in post-revolution Tunisia.
“From a legal perspective, I think we
have taken good steps to protect our journalists.” Snoussi said. “The problem
is that sometimes the courts use the penal code to [circumvent these laws and]
issue heavier sentences to journalists.”
The arrest of blogger and activist
Azyz Amami was one such politically-motivated case, according to some. Police
arrested Amami, known for his political activism and criticism of police
behavior, for possession and consumption of marijuana. The charges were met
with considerable suspicion.
“What we are missing in Tunisia today
is the political will to implement these laws and make [them] the only source
to judge the crimes that come from journalists,” he added.
Fahem Boukkadous, member of the Tunis
Center for Press Freedom, also expressed anger at the events in Egypt.
“I want to condemn this harsh,
unjustified judgement against journalists who have done nothing but their jobs
in transmitting a different version of events from the one authorities want to
show,” he told Tunisia Live.
Boukkadous’s concern for journalism in
Egypt extends to Tunisia as well.
“In May, Tunisia witnessed the highest
number of abuses against journalists in three years. Ninety-three journalists
were assaulted,” he said. “Military and security forces continue to be at the
top of the list of those who have committed violations,” despite commitments
from the Ministry of the Interior to stop abuses and protect journalists.
“Many watchdog groups, professional
organizations, and media syndicates are performing the role of observation and
are documenting and denouncing abuses against journalists. [They are also]
filing suits and are in regular contact with authorities,” he continued. “But
this effort alone cannot stop these abuses without real political will to
protect journalists and hold violators accountable.”
Boukkadous expressed concern that the
upcoming presidential and legislative elections will negatively affect press
freedoms.
“The climate of the upcoming election
will create new challenges for journalists and the freedom of the press in
Tunisia,” he said. “It is possible to have multiple abuses against journalists,
given the electoral stakes and attempts to influence media in order to serve
political and financial agendas.”
Asked if he was pessimistic about the
prospects for journalistic freedoms in Tunisia, he responded, “I’m not
pessimistic, but this is reality. I’m sure that in December, there will be
double the amount of abuses [... Authorities] will not respect [media]
legislation in the absence of political will.”
-----------------------
Op-Ed: Why
the Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood Hate Each Other
Saudi Arabia was once a haven for Muslim
Brotherhood leaders who fled persecution in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Now
the Saudis are pouring money into Sisi's regime in order to destroy them.
When the revolt against Mubarak broke out towards the end of January
2011, it was expected that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) would gain control of
Egypt. The Saudis did not hesitate to express their opposition to this possible
outcome. In June 2012, when Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammed Morsi became
the president of Egypt, he tried to calm the Saudis, but to no avail, and they
supported General Sisi when he deposed Morsi in July 2013.
Since Morsi's fall from power, Saudi Arabia has granted Sisi
billions of dollars to support him in preventing Morsi from returning to the
presidential office. Saudi Arabia has also come out publicly against the
position of the US which called for Sisi to reinstate Morsi.
Saudi opposition to the "Brothers" can be seen in its
willingness to hand over members of the movement who escaped to Saudi Arabia
after Morsi was deposed, when the Egyptian regime began to search out Muslim
Brotherhood activists after defining the movement as a terrorist organization.
The obvious question is why the Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood so much,
even though both groups are devout Sunnis, and why it chooses to help the
secular Sisi supporters.
This question becomes even more acute considering past relations
between the Saudis and the "Brothers". Once Saudi Arabia was a safe
haven for many of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who fled persecution in Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Iraq.
There are several answers to this question that, together, form a
synergetic whole.
1. The name "al-Ikhwān" – "the Brothers" –
was, at the start of the 20th century, the name of the militia of Ibn Saud, the
founder of the Saudi Arabian dynasty. This was a cruel militia that sowed panic
among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, and ended the rule of Sherif Hussein Bin Ali, King of the
Hejaz. When Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in
1928, he took the name of Ibn Saud's militia and added the adjective
"Muslim", to emphasize that the Egyptian members of the organization
were truly Muslim, as opposed to Ibn Saud's army.
Ibn Saud did not forgive this treachery to his dying day in 1953.
2. Saudi Arabia is a tribal country, where religion makes the
tribalcohesion even stronger, through laws, rules and
tradition, whereas the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood believes that religion takes
the place of tribal-family loyalties which should disappear from politics
entirely. The Muslim Brotherhood's policy allows it to enlist people from all
sectors and turn members into a developing civilian society that is culturally
self-sufficient, while the Saudi model depends on a closed family group which
cannot absorb people from outside its framework.
3. Islam in Saudi
Arabia is institutionalized. The Sharia scholars and legal arbiters have been
inseparable from the regime since the founding of the kingdom, and all their
legal writings - books, treatises and decisions - are meant to strengthen the
regime and give it religious legitimacy. In contrast, the religious approach of
the "Brothers" is inherently oppositionary and intended to enable
anti-institutional activities in the countries in which the organization
functions - Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, among others. The Palestinian
branch of the "Brothers" created a terror organization, Hamas. All
the religious writings of the MB scholars is intended to justify their struggle
against the governments of the countries in which they reside. It is impossible
to bridge the gap between Saudi institutionalized Islam and the MB's
revolutionary Islam.
4. The organizational model of the "Brothers" allows
them to expand their activities and influence to other countries, including
those without a Muslim majority, such as Israel, Europe and the USA. In
contrast, the family organizational model of the Saudis is limited to Saudi
Arabia and the Arab Emirates, and its influence can only reach outside those
countries by buying supporters and involving itself financially in
efforts to spread Islam.
The fact that the "Brothers" can expand their influence
and presence to new communities
causes the Saudis and the Emirates to feel that they are losing the contest for
supremacy.
5. The Saudi approach to Islam is "Salafist", which
sanctifies the original, glorious past of Islam as a religion
whose states are ruled by uncompromising . religious tenets. The Saudis
view the "Brothers" as a modern political movement that has
transformed Islam into a pragmatic ideology willing to reach compromises with
other prevalent civilian ideologies, even those that oppose Islam or do not
hold its beliefs. The official positive attitude of the "Brothers'
to the Egyptian Copts, for example, infuriates the Saudis.
6. The lslamic legal system prevalent in Egypt is the Hanfit
system, whereas the one prevalent in Saudi Arabia is the fundamentalist and
extreme version of the Hanbal system, known as Wahhabism. Since the Hanfit
system is less stringent than Wahhabism, the "Brothers" are seen by
the Saudis as lacking respect for Islam. Wahhabists, for example, force a
woman to cover her face with a niqab when going outside in public, forbid her
from going out without a male family member as escort, prevent her from driving
and working in most professions. The Hanfists, on the other hand, allow a woman
to go out by herself, uncover her
face, drive and work in any respectable field. The Saudis have no religious
expectations from the Egyptian military, but the irreverent attitude of the
"Brothers" angers them.
7. In Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates there are quite a
few people who are not connected to the tribal system and the ruling families,
so that the "Brother's" ideology is suited to their way of life and
thinking. They would like to see the Saud famiy ruling the country and the
ruling families in the Emirates exchanged for a non-family-tribal cadre. The
rise of the "Brothers" to the position of Egyptian president encouraged
this trend and spread suspicion among the ruling families who fear that
the "Brother's" ideology may threaten the stability of their regimes.
Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police, said that the danger the
"Brothers" pose to the Emirates is greater than that posed by Iran.
8. During the twentieth century, an economic rift developed
between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates on the one hand, and the poor populations
of Egypt and other Arab countries, people who are the natural breeding ground
for the "Brothers". The stark contrast between the wealth of
the Arabian Peninsula and the poverty, neglect, backwardness, diseases and
ignorance in the other Arab lands created envy, hate, suspicion and intrigues
between the two sides.
Evening papers in Arab countries portray the Saudis and leaders of
the Emirates as grotesquely
fat and round, an
image not divorced from reality. Undoubtedly, the "Brothers'"
popularity with the vast Arabic masses is much greater than that of the ruling
House of Saudi, a situation which causes the Saudis much discomfort.
In a cartoon, a typical
Palestinian Arab in Khan Yunis says to the Saudis: "You are all
traitors" because of their silence on what is going on in Gaza. The
artist? Omia Jucha, wife of one of the heads of Hamas, Rami Saad.
9. The Peninsula countries have
had a symbiotic relationship with the West for decades. They supply the West
with oil and gas, while the West protects them from external threats, such as
Russia, Arab nationalism of the Gamal Abdul Nasser kind and the undercover
activities of the Baath regimes of Syria, Iraq and Iran. To the Muslim
Brotherhood, the West is the main enemy of the Middle Eastern nations: the
British conquest of Egypt in the last quarter of the 19th century, the British
and French conquest of the Levant after WWI, the establishment of the State of
Israel, materialism, theft of natural resources, political hegemony and
permissiveness that pervade the western media and reach every home in the
Middle east are viewed by the "Brothers" as a Western attack on
Islamic culture, policies and economic interests.
The contrast between Muslim Brotherhood's attitude towards the
United States and that of the Arabian Peninsula exacerbated the tension between
the two sides.
10. Jerusalem remains the central point in the conflict between
the "Brothers" and Saudi Arabia, although this dispute is not waged
in public and must be read between the lines. The "Brothers" made
their views on Jerusalem clear on May 1, 2012, in a speech by MB leader Sheikh Safwat Hijazi to
hundreds of thousands of supporters during Morsi's presidential election
campaign: "We have seen the dream of the Islamic Caliphate, the Land of
the Caliphate, come to pass - Allah willing - the group (MB, ed.) and its
party. We have seen the great dream that we all dream of, the 'United
Arab Nations'. The 'United Arab Nations' will return, Allah willing, by
this man's hand, with the help of his party. And the capital of the 'United
Arab Nations' will be Jerusalem, Allah willing (loud approval from the crowd).
Our capital will not be Cairo, nor Mecca nor Medina, Allah willing, and our
slogan will be "Millions of shahids march on Jerusalem" (as the crowd
fanatically shouts the slogan).
Another instance of Jerusalem's centrality to the MB occurred in
2001 when the leader of the Northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel,
Sheikh Raad Salah, announced
his intention of
bringing water from the Zamzam well in Mecca to Jerusalem, in order to stress
Jerusalem's holiness and its connection to Mecca. When the Saudis heard of his
plan, they kept him from attending the Haj. They did not offer an explanation,
but everyone knew why he was not allowed to reach Mecca.
In general, the Saudis hardly mention Jerusalem, and when they do,
it is to say that it must be returned to the Palestinians. This keeps them from
being seen as Zionists, but it seems as if they fear that if Jerusalem becomes
the capital of a Palestinian state, it will become the focus of Islamism rather
than Mecca. The Palestinian Arab leader might call himself "Guardian of
the El Aksa Mosque", a title that overshadows the Saudi king, who is
"Guardian of two holy places.
It is important to note that the rivalry between the Hijaz center
of Islam with Mecca as its holy city and Medina its capital, and the political
center in Greater Syria (Alsham) with Damascus as its capital and Jerusalem its
holy city, broke out in the seventh century, almost 1400 years ago. That was
when the first Umayyad Caliph, Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan,
moved the capital from Medina to Damascus. Later on, in 682 C.E., he chose
Jerusalem as an alternative for the Haj because of a revolt that broke out in
Mecca, preventing Syrian pilgrims from attending the Haj. The great
Islamic arbiter Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), whose decisions are adhered to by
the Saudi Wahhabists, lowered the level of Jerusalem's importance and holiness
to that of every other Islamic city, because he knew that its
"holiness" was only the result of a political, ethnic and personal
dispute. The rivalry between the two centers - the Hijaz Mecca and the Alsham
Jerusalem continues to this day, and adds to the tension between the Muslim
Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia.
Egypt has Salafist groups which
are growing and spreading; their Islamic practice and way of life is becoming
similar to that of the the Saudis. They oppose the "Brothers" and
cooperate with Sisi and his security forces against the "Brothers".
Thus, the "Muslim Brotherhood" in Egypt and the Hamas, its cohort in
Gaza, find themselves caught between the hammer of Sisi and his security forces
and the anvil of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. This is one of the main
factors behind Hamas' search for ways to go back to cooperating with the PLO.
The abyss separating the countries of the Arabian Peninsula,
except for Qatar, and the "Muslim Brotherhood" is wide and deep, and
the developments of the past three years in the Middle East have only served to
make it wider and deeper.
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