Bassem Youssef on Trusting Your Muslim Neighbors

The brilliant Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef has been banned from Egyptian TV,  but apparently we're going to see more of him over here, starting with this:

The Republican National Security Debate

I don't blog about American politics because it's not my brief and I'll offend half my American readers, except when it relates to the Middle East and the Islamic world, but tonight's CNN Republican debate related to little else, except for some attacks on Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. So I'll venture a few comments. Even though, being on blood pressure medication, I shouldn't even have watched.

1. The reality of the Middle East and the perceived reality seem rather different. At a time when Kurdish forces in Rojava and northern Iraq are pushing towards Raqqa and Mosul and the Iraqi Army and its allies are taking Ramadi and the Syrian regime is also advancing, most candidates said ISIS is gaining ground. It isn't.
2. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (who must have mentioned that he was a Former Federal Prosecutor half a dozen or more times but who is otherwise one of the less alarming candidates) said, "When I stand across from King Hussein of Jordan, I say to him, 'You have a friend again, sir, who will stand with you to fight this fight,' he'll change his mind." I wonder where he plans to stand across from King Hussein, who died in 1999, 16 years ago?
3. For all Republican Presidential candidates, "BarackObamaandHillaryClinton" now appears to be a single word. And they seem to have created all the ills of the Middle East. A previous President, brother of one of the folks on the stage, was barely mentioned, except in a question.
4. We shouldn't have supported Saddam Hussein (we did?), Qadhafi (we did?) or Mubarak (well yeah, we did that) but we shouldn't have overthrown them either (did we?).
5. It's a sad day when the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt has descended to the point where the only candidate who had a realistic picture of events was Rand Paul. 
6. The question of exactly which Muslims should be barred from the US seems to have replaced the question of whether any should.

I've been, in one job or another, explaining the Islamic world to the US and vice versa for more than 40 years. There were rough moments for US Muslims during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and of course after 9/11, but I'm not sure Islamophobia has run as high or as openly as right now. Several mosques have been firebombed. Women in hijab (even some women wearing a scarf because it's winter) are being insulted or physically attacked. One example among far too many is here, where an American-born, only half-Iranian notes:

"Today. On a crowded bus. On Michigan Avenue. On my way home from a great job in a city in a diverse country that I was born in. A man screamed at me. Called me a sand ni**er. Told me I was the problem. That I need to get the fuck out of his country," Drury wrote. "I may have been wearing my scarf higher on my head than usual because it was cold out. I may have show looked suspicious [sic] listening to Spotify. I am half Iranian, so maybe it was my skin or my eyes."

This is on a public bus on Chicago's main avenue, in America's third largest city. Everybody on the Republican stage tonight treats Ronald Reagan as a saint, but I don't think St. Reagan, who called America a "shining city on a hill," wanted Americans subjected to such abuse. (The cultural anthropologists among you may note that the word that is asterisked in the Facebook post [sand ni**er] might have appeared without censorship half a century ago while "get the fuck out of my country" would not have.)

Is this who we are becoming? We must always remember that none of us are immune. The land of Goethe and Heine, Beethoven and Bach produced a Hitler; the land of Dante and Petrarch, Verdi and Rossini produced Mussolini; the land of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, etc. gave rise to Lenin and Stalin.

Let's not go there.

If You're Looking for Something to be Angry About ...,

UNICEF say 1,600 people were killed in Syria last week; other reports say 5,000 died in the month of August.

The overwhelming majority of these dead were Muslims. And yes, I know, many were killed by the opposition. In a civil war, both sides kill. It's the killing we need to address.

I am not a Muslim, but everything I know about the Prophet Muhammad, may God Bless Him and Grant Him Peace, from reading the Sira and the Hadith, tells me that he would be more concerned by this number than the juvenile effort by some ignorant racists who can't even make a decent video.

Newsweek, "Muslim Rage," and the Best Response: Muslim Humor

Newsweek, which was once something you younger folk may have heard about, a weekly newsmagazine, has changed hands recently and is trying to figure out what role a weekly magazine may have in reporting news in a round the clock online world, and now has provoked controversy over a seemingly provocative if not incendiary cover called "Muslim Rage." It has also provoked something else, which is both reassuring and encouraging: widespread ridicule (of the funny, not the angry, kind),  in the Muslim world. Newsweek actually tweeted asking for responses to its cover, so it deserves everything it's gotten:

Gawker put up 13 images of "Muslim rage" showing Egyptians having fun, Iranians building snowmen, and other such, though I can't reproduce their photos here. But Twitter, which can create a massive humor wave instantly, produced a wave of commentary. Some was serious, like veteran journalist Larry Pintak:

And there was sharp criticism as well, including some requiring a crude language warning, but still worth noting:

But most was tongue in cheek, with Muslims describing various day-to-day annoyances as #MuslimRage. There are news accounts here and here, but it may make more sense just to let the contributors speak:

Ignorant Armies, Continued

Nor can goodness and Evil be equal. Repel (Evil) with what is better: Then will he between whom and thee was hatred become as it were thy friend and intimate!
—Holy Qur'an Sura 41:34

 Returning to the subject of my earlier post, "When Ignorant Armies Clash," the growing waves of rage throughout the Muslim world seem increasingly remote from the specific presumed provocation: a poorly made, overdubbed, ignorant amateurish film attacking the Prophet of Islam. Clearly organizers of demonstrations are channeling ill-informed popular rage not just at symbols of the United States, but at the West generally. Besides US Embassies and targets such as the American School in Tunis, rioters are going after Western targets of all sorts. Though Germany had no connection, even remotely, to the film that allegedly provoked the violence, the German Embassy in Khartoum has been burned. The photo above shows a KFC and a Hardee's in Tripoli, Lebanon, aflame, though since these are franchised chains, I'm wagering the owners are Lebanese and (in Tripoli) quite probably Muslim.

Since the perpetrator of all this is turning out to be a small-time operator with multiple pseudonyms and a conviction on drug charges, this clearly isn't about the film anymore, but it already has become another outburst of rage, on the pattern of the Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons, to be directed by organizers towards symbolic targets, but with real people dying in the process.

All this in defense of a Prophet who preached mercy and returning evil with good (see above), and of whom there is a hadith to this effect:

[The Prophet said] So I departed, overwhelmed with excessive sorrow, and proceeded on, and could not relax till I found myself at Qarnath-Tha-alib where I lifted my head towards the sky to see a cloud shading me unexpectedly. I looked up and saw Gabriel in it. He called me saying, 'Allah has heard your people's saying to you, and what they have replied back to you, Allah has sent the Angel of the Mountains to you so that you may order him to do whatever you wish to these people.' The Angel of the Mountains called and greeted me, and then said, "O Muhammad! Order what you wish. If you like, I will let Al-Akh-Shabain (i.e. two mountains) fall on them." The Prophet said, "No but I hope that Allah will let them beget children who will worship Allah Alone, and will worship none besides Him."

There is also the ominous fact that the perpetrator seems to  be a Copt, which could lead to new sectarian violence, especially in Egypt. I will have more to say on that a bit later.

An Elusive Filmmaker Who's Riled the Islamic World

I'm on deadlines and will write more when I can, but as demonstrations against the mysterious anti-Muslim film spead, the mysterious and shadowy producer is starting to emerge, and it seems clear that the actors in the film were unaware it had anything to do with Muhammad, which explains why all the religious dialogue appears to have been dubbed.


The multimedia revolution: Salman Rushdie needed a publisher and a hardcover book to anger as many people as these (still mostly anonymous) folks did with bad production values and YouTube.

When Ignorant Armies Clash

There is much we do not know about the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo. Who organized them? The presence of jihadi black flags is ominous. They do not appear to have been entirely what they purport to be: purely spontaneous outrage at a video no one has seen, or seen more than a trailer for.  It may well be that this was merely a pretext for attacking US Embassies on the anniversary of September 11.

What is clear enough is that the US Embassies found themselves caught, as it were, in the crossfire of two ignorant armies: rabid Islamophobes determined to attack the Prophet of Islam on the one hand, and the most extreme Islamists on the other, determined to avenge him. As is so often the case, the two extremes have more in common with each other than they do with the vast majority of Christians and Muslims and Jews in between. Both consider that there is a war to the death between Islam and the West. There is not, yet. And it is important for people of good will on all sides to prevent their vision from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some of the scurrilous charges being made against the Prophet are ancient slanders that are older than the Crusades; antiquity does not add credibility: they are as old as, and as false as, the blood libel against the Jews.

The First Amendment guarantees any bigoted American the sovereign right to parade his ignorance in public; I treasure the freedom, but that does not lead me to defend ahistorical rhetoric.

Just as we are not sure who organized the Embassy attacks (but there is little doubt about their intentions), it is also still not clear who is behind the video that provoked the outrage. A well-known evangelical preacher whose fame exceeds his minuscule congregation has said  he was going to distribute it but didn't make it; a report that a "Sam Bacile," first identified as an Israeli, was behind it, has evaporated. Many Egyptians are blaming a well-known US Coptic activist, but I won't name him as I don't want to add further fuel to a burning fire; I hope that it isn't true.

There is only one remedy for this clash of ignorances: one of the longstanding goals of the Middle East Institute has been to educate the US about the Middle East and the Middle East about the US. This tragic intersection of Western Islamophobia and radical Jihadi murderous outrage is a sign there is still a lot to be done, on both sides. We are still with Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Joplin, MO Rallies to Rebuild its Burned Mosque

I have previously noted the response my home town of Joplin, MO has demonstrated in the wake of the burning of the local mosque, the only one in a 50 mile radius, in posts here and here.

While I don't want to overemphasize this story because of my personal link to the place, I think it's an encouraging sign at a time when opposition to the building of mosques is getting a lot of attention in the US and Europe; here, in the heart of the Bible Belt, are local citizens who have rallied to raise money to rebuild the mosque, with the Christian churches and the one synagogue joining in and one of the organizers coming from the local Bible college, who arranged a "Neighbors" rally last Saturday. A clip from that rally:


The story has been picked up many places; here's a piece from Al Jazeera, and another from a peace group. More links are to be found on the Islamic Society of Joplin's Facebook page. While I'm angry and ashamed that the arson could occur in my hometown, I'm delighted at the response of the people there, responding as they did to last year's devastating tornado, to stand up for their neighbors.

Update on the Joplin Mosque Story

Shortly before I left on vacation I noted that the professional and personal had intersected when the mosque in my home town of Joplin, Missouri was destroyed in a suspicious fire (after two earlier acts of vandalism); arson is suspected.

The spirit that the town showed in last year's F5 tornado showed itself again in this instance. The mosque had hoped to raise $250,000 by the end of Ramadan for rebuilding; they're now at $350,000 and counting. the Christian churches and the synagogue in the town have come together to help, and  a student at the local Christian Bible College is organizing a rally in support. On that rally, see here; the Islamic Society of Joplin's Facebook page is here.

A couple of news clips;




Though I've been live-posting yesterday  and today, I'll be retreating to the pre-prepared posts as I resume my vacation. The second part of the Aramaic/Coptic discussion will appear later this week.

A Personal Note: An Islamophobic Outrage Close to Home

I don't normally post on Islamophobic outbreaks here in the US, since 1) there are too many; 2) others regularly monitor this stuff; and 3) it's bad for my blood pressure. But this one is almost personal, since it took place in my home town of Joplin, Missouri, where the local mosque was destroyed by fire last night. There had been a small fire July 4, extinguished before much damage was done, but last night's fire destroyed the building. Ironically, just Saturday night the Imam had invited clergy from Joplin's Christian churches and its United Hebrew Congregation to an Iftar at the mosque, to promote interfaith understanding. The other congregations are now offering help.

The fact that the arson took place during Ramadan merely rubs salt in the wound.

When Joplin High School was completely destroyed by an F5 tornado in last year's record storm, the United Arab Emirates provided free laptops for every student (or perhaps every graduating senior, at least). Joplin will be recovering for a long time from that disaster, and I believe all the faith communities have worked together. The cross that stood outside St. Mary's Catholic Church — my old childhood parish — was all that remained standing (left) of the church and its elementary school, and became a nationally noted symbol of Joplin's will to rebuild. This stupid hate crime against a faith community profanes that symbol.

Joplin deserves better: its people are trying to rebuild a town devastated by the tornado; they deserve to be known for their will to survive, not for the hatred  of some individual who believes in burning places of worship.  Forunately this act, in which no one was injured, will hopefully be buried by the coverage of the killings at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, I hope the mosque can rebuild soon.

Anatomy of a Hoax and Media Credulity: The "Egypt Necrophilia Law" Story

A quote attributed (dubiously) to Mark Twain has it that "A lie can go halfway around the world while truth is getting its boots on." And that was before the Internet. There was a classic example of this yesterday, when a story so grotesque, bizarre, and appalling that you'd think no one would believe it without evidence (and there was none) managed to turn up in print media and all over the Internet before a few intrepid souls noticed that there was no credible sourcing to the story. It's a case study in the down side of instant 24/7 reporting, and it tells us something about the tendency for Western media to believe absolutely anything about Islamists. Even this, from the (usually) respectable, liberal, Huffington Post, which is less sensational than some of the reports:

Egypt’s new Islamist-dominated parliament is preparing to introduce a controversial law that would allow husbands to have sex with their deceased wives up to six hours after death.

Known as the “farewell Intercourse” law, the measure is being championed as part of a raft of reforms introduced by the parliament that will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 for girls.

After an inevitable "WHAT!!!???" response, which of the following options do you think was the reaction of many (thankfully, not all) of the media?:

1. Traditional journalistic due diligence: Who has introduced this outrageous law in Parliament. What are the sources of the story? Where is this supposed bill in the Parliamentary process? When was it introduced? Why would anybody believe this outrageous story without even citing the name of one Member of Parliament supporting such a bill? Or:
2. Just reprint it without checking with anyone. After all, I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true. 

Yes, a lot of folks who should know better chose door number two.

It's such an outrageous story that one is reminded of Josef Goebbels' famous dictum that "the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." This story, improbable as it ought to have seemed to anyone with common sense, somehow went halfway round the world before truth could get its boots on. Several Egyptian reporters/bloggers and an American or two have gradually reconstructed where this grotesque report came from, and I am trying to summarize all their findings here.

I'll cite specific instances below, but this story turned up in English first, I think, in the English website of Al-Arabiya, was picked up by the tabloid The Daily Mail, and then started to turn up all over the place: in rabid right-wing Islamophobic sites, of course, but also in liberal venues like The Huffington Post. For the right, it proves the morbid perversity of Islam; for the left, it proves the repression of women. Both points might be well taken if anyone had the slightest evidence that any such law exists. No one has produced any.Yet by the time it gets to The Daily Mail, the story has become:

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives - for up to six hours after their death. The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

Now it "will soon be legally allowed" under a law "introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament." It sounds like it's a done deal, about to be rammed through a pliant parliament. Very alarming, except for the minor detail of not being true

There were a few voices who actually used their heads and called BS early on. Several Egyptian journalists and bloggers, notably journalist Sarah Carr and blogger Zeinobia, who I'll quote in discussing how this bizarre thing got started below, and Dan Murphy at the Christian Science Monitor, in a piece entitled "Egypt 'Necrophilia Law'? Hooey, Utter Hooey.  Murphy's response should have been the first reaction of any serious reporter, or of anyone familiar with Egypt. It was pretty much mine, which is why I didn't mention the story. (Well, my reaction wasn't precisely "utter hooey," because I'm not sure I've ever actually said, or even thought, "hooey," but apparently you can't say "bullshit" in The Christian Science Monitor.)

As Murphy put it:

There's of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt's parliament. I'm willing to be proven wrong. It's possible that there's one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe. 

No one has proven him wrong. Although Murphy and the Egyptian blogosphere were raising red flags, the story made its way around. Gossip sites and sensational sites joined the Islamophobic sites in repeating the tale.

Andrew Sullivan, whose widely-read blog at The Daily Beast is usually above this sort of thing, but who distrusts fundamentalism whether Christian or Muslim, quoted The Daily Mail (since he's British, I doubt if he had it confused with The Economist as far as reliability goes), and had some harsh words for Islam. ("One wonders: what part of Islam requires fucking your dead wife?") Admittedly and to his credit, he has since noted and quoted the evidence that the story's untrue, but it's further evidence of how far this story went and how respectable media bought it for a while.

So how did this story go so far? The following reconstruction is based on others' work, mostly 1) Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr, who posted a response to the Daily Mail article (which is now buried in a comments thread that runs to more than 800, but which she posted to Facebook for the record) and has since pursued the issue, blogger Zeinobia, who was also on the case early, and Murphy's previously cited CSM article. Carr, I think, nails the unspoken presumptions that helped spread the story:

While I appreciate that the Daily Mail sifts the Internet daily for news pieces that will confirm to its readers that Muslims are all book-burning, wife-incarcerating, turban-wearing lunatics, and while I appreciate that this item is particularly attractive because of its salaciousness, if Lee Moran had troubled himself to do a little bit of research beyond translating an op-ed and a TV talking head, he would have discovered that in fact, a draft law to allow men to bonk their deceased wives does not exist. This may seem remarkable, given that Egyptians (i.e. scary mooslems) revolted in 2011 for PRECISELY this right, but there we are.

If Mr Moran's googling had been more thorough he would have discovered that this rumour was started by a local wacko who, alas, has a public platform by virtue of the fact that he owns a satellite channel.

This is what seems to be the timeline:

1. The only named person who is known to have actually claimed that Islam supports this bizarre idea is a Moroccan sheikh, Zamzami Abdelbari, a fringe figure, and even he apparently said it was a repulsive practice. I've spoken before somewhere on this blog about my reluctance to indulge in the latest "crazy sheikh/crazy fatwa" report, in which the media focuses on a so-called "fatwa" from some self-proclaimed "sheikh" with a following that may include his immediate family, and treat this as some sort of "official" ruling. This guy has nothing to do with Egypt.

2. Next, the plot moves to Egyptian satellite TV owner/talk show host/conspiracy theorist Tawfiq Okasha. Okasha has been a critic of the revolutionaries, a conspiracist who sees the US and Israel behind everything, a rabble-rouser last mentioned on this blog as being blamed for promoting attacks on the US Embassy. Zeinobia compares him to the US' Glenn Beck. This broadcast (Arabic) seems to be the first appearance of this idea  of "Farewell intercourse"  (مضاجعة الوداع) in Egypt:



3. Next, the story moves to the state-owned Al-Ahram where a secularist, anti-Islamist columnist named Amr Abdel Samea edtorialized that the Egyptian National Organization for Women were protesting this and a proposed law reducing the marriage age (which actually is advocated by some Islamists.) The link is in Arabic. It doesn't clearly cite a specific bill or any advocates of such a bill. It refers to "talk about" such a bill, but not specifying by whom. It's more a case of  a rhetorical "if the Islamists have their way they're liable to do something this crazy."

4. Abdel Samea's op-ed then provokes in turn a sensational TV commentary from Gaber al-Qarnouty on the channel ON TV. He quotes Abdel Samea but talks as if there is actually a draft law under discussion. It has gone from nightmare scenario to stated fact:



5. It's this Qarnouty broadcast that was picked up by the English website of Al-Arabiya, in the post that was then picked up throughout the West:

Egyptian prominent journalist and TV anchor Jaber al-Qarmouty on Tuesday referred to Abdul Samea’s article in his daily show on Egyptian ON TV and criticized the whole notion of “permitting a husband to have sex with his wife after her death under a so-called ‘Farewell Intercourse’ draft law.”

“This is very serious. Could the panel that will draft the Egyptian constitution possibly discuss such issues? Did Abdul Samea see by his own eyes the text of the message sent by Talawi to Katatni? This is unbelievable. It is a catastrophe to give the husband such a right! Has the Islamic trend reached that far? Is there really a draft law in this regard? Are there people thinking in this manner?” 

Of course, the answer to Qarnouty's rhetorical questions are "No, no, and no." But the next step is the jump to the Daily Mail report that "Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives." The fact that there's no basis for the report that anyone has yet found, is of course lost in translation.

Sarah Carr again:"Conclusion: It's a load of bollocks." That's the British equivalent of Murphy's "utter hooey." It's a crock.

Once again, at the end of the day there no "there" there, there's no story. Most of the respectable media that reported the story yesterday have put up hedging clarifications, but this is a story that didn't need to spread so widely to begin with. There may be a Moroccan sheikh who's this far over the edge, but there's no necrophilia bill in the Egyptian Parliament.

EEK! It's an Al Jazeera Reporter!

I rarely deal with the wilder shores of American Islamophobia/Arabophobia because I assume anyone reading me is not reading them, and vice versa. Oh, sure, sometimes it's irresistible, as in spring 2010's Miss USA furor, when Rima Fakih, a Lebanese-American of mixed Shi‘ite-Christian background who posed in a leopard-skin bikini (photos at the link for historical and educational purposes only) and whose family in South Lebanon fly a huge American flag from their house, was accused of being a Hizbullah mole. When it was learned she'd posed topless, but with her back to the camera, that proved it. Somehow. And I also noted it when Switzerland, with a 5% Muslim population and a total of four minarets in the entire country, voted to ban minarets.  But Jon Stewart's take was so much funnier than mine that I gave up on that issue.

But I have not yet dealt with the issue of Al Jazeeraphobia. Al Jazeera was the pioneer of Arab satellite television, and being based in Doha, Qatar, they have long been pretty free to criticize other Arab countries and regimes. (Qatar is immune, but pretty much only Qatar. The Saudis, Mubarak's Egypt, and other Arab countries hate Al Jazeera, but they have by far provided the best coverage of the Arab revolutionary movements. Though Bahrain is a traditional rival of Qatar's, they've been a bit cautious there, but not elsewhere. As a result Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria have all accused them of seditious plotting. This is usually a good sign.)

Though Al Jazeera has been around for quite a while and Al Jazeera English has a growing reputation as one of the finest non-Western-based cable news channels in English, Al Jazeera's reputation in the US has always been somewhere between spotty and downright hostile. Many people know nothing of it other than it has received certain Usama bin Ladin tapes before anyone else. Most Americans cannot even see Al Jazeera English: in a few markets such as New York and Washington, it's available as an extra cable package or in some broadcast HD side-channels, but most can't get it even if they want it, which is why Al Jazeera English offers a Watch Live link on their website. 

I don't agree with everything Al Jazeera Arabic or Al Jazeera English broadcast, but they do broadcast multiple viewpoints. Instead of Voltaire's classic, "I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," much of the criticism of Al Jazeera amounts to "I disagree with what (I imagine) you say (though I haven't actually read it or heard it) so I will not only fight against your right to say it but also against your saying anything at all." If much of their coverage of the Middle East is critical of US policy, that's simply a reflection of the  current opinion on the ground.

What provoked this rant are some recent incidents emphasizing the US attitude towards Al Jazeera.

First off, my former MEI colleague and now Al Jazeera English correspondent Clayton Swisher, who  broke the Palestine Papers story, big news in Israel, Palestine, and the Arab World, though mostly ignored in the US, recently had a post on the recent Wikileaks uncensored document dump in which he studied the attitudes toward Al Jazeera in some of the US Embassy Cables. From Clayton's blogpost:

And right now I'm thinking about how they made sources out of just about everyone they spoke with, in many instances without their permission. That was obvious as I waded through the trove of US Embassy Doha cables related to my employer, Al Jazeera.
We may have been hailed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for doing real news when she spoke to the Senate this year. But thanks to WikiLeaks, we now know that, not even five years ago, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was scaremongering to then-US Ambassador to Qatar that "Al Jazeera is killing Americans".

The result? Under the Bush Administration, numerous US diplomats began cycling in and out of Al Jazeera. Senior network staff became targets of "information warfare", and as they followed the Arab customs of offering tea and dates to visiting dignitaries, we now know the US ambassador was reading off a tightly prepared script of questions submitted by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Even rank-and-file journalists were probed by the Americans' passive elicitation. Doha-based US diplomats seemed to want grist to feed their White House audience on the "we're-losing-Mideast-wars-because-of-Jazeera" narrative.

Yet Qatar, Al Jazeera's home, and the Royal Family of which is the patron, sustainer and at least partial owner of Al Jazeera, is a critical ally in the US position in the Gulf.

But Clayton's post was from several days ago. What prompted this really was this report from an Al Jazeera English correspondent, making a road trip across the US in preparation for the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, who tried to interview people at a high school football game in Texas:  "Welcome to Texas! Unless You're Al Jazeera".

The journalist is Brazilian. But when he presents his business card:

She said she was out of business cards, so I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my wallet, grabbed by business card, and handed it to Mrs. Yauck.

I don't think anything can wipe that double-wide smile off Mrs Yauck’s face. But my Al Jazeera business card does the job pretty quick.“So you’re from Al Jazeera,” Mrs Yauck says in a sharp tone, still looking down at my card. Looking up at me, she adds quickly, “ So what’s your spin on this story?”

“I don’t have a spin,” I say, still smiling to try to ease any sudden tension. “What I told you is exactly what I want to do. Just talk to people, film a bit. That is it. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

“But you’re with Al Jazeera?”

“Yes,” I say proudly, still smiling.

But Mrs Yauck is again staring down at my business card.

“Our superintendent is here, let me just go talk to him and I’ll be right back.”

Ultimately, he is told he can neither film nor interview.

Now, admittedly, and it's important to note that Al Jazeera is noting this as well, the school official involved is insisting that he was preoccupied with other issues and disputing some details of the account.
But the mere fact that the first person to see the journalist kicked the matter upstairs, apparently because it was Al Jazeera, is where things went astray.

America: Al Jazeera was the first Arab news channel, other than official Egyptian and Jordanian channels, to interview Israeli leaders regularly. Before you proclaim them the enemy, watch them a bit. Online anyways, since your local cable probably doesn't offer them.

New Website responds to Juan Williams: Muslims Wearing Things

In the wake of the whole Juan Williams/NPR firing episode (in which the commentator was fired for saying seeing someone in Muslim garb when he flew made him nervous), someone has inevitably created a website of Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things. Since humor is usually the best response, bravo. Muslim in NYPD uniform, Rima Fakih, other well known folks.

And do note the picture of King ‘Abdullah II (when he was a Prince) in a Starfleet uniform in a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Voyager. [UPDATE: Go to Page 1 or 2. The site has grown exponentially over the Weekend.]

Have a good weekend.

The Washington Post on Jim Zogby

I probably should have linked to this yesterday, when it appeared, but better late than never. (I think I sometimes assume that all my readers wake up with The Washington Post on their doorstep, as I do, and I don't need to comment on it. Then I remember the Internet reaches beyond the Beltway.) Yesterday's Washington Post Style section led with a front page article on James Zogby of the Arab American Institute. Jim is no stranger to those of us who do the Middle East beat in Washington, but he may be less familiar to some of those outside the Beltway or across the pond, so do read it if you don't know him. (And of course you should read it if you do know him. So just read it anyhow, okay?)

I first crossed paths with Jim in the 1970s I think, and we've both grayed a bit. In those days I hadn't yet heard of his brother John, the pollster, though John today is the better known brother. But Jim keeps doing the work that needs to be done.

I'm not sure if it's the "Ground Zero Mosque," the general atmosphere of suspicion of Islam, or what exactly, that made them profile Zogby now. I'm also not sure why they made sure to put "Catholic" in the headline itself. Are they saying, "he's not a Muslim, so you can read about him", or what? After all, many Arab-Americans of deep roots in this country are Arab Christians, particularly among the Lebanese. I guess they're trying to make him less threatening. (Jim Zogby is a bright and intense guy, but anything but threatening.) Congratulations Jim, for a well-deserved tribute.

Miss USA (You Remember: the Hizbullah Mole) is Fasting

You may remember the high weirdness that ensued when Rima Fakih, a Lebanese American, was chosen Miss USA/Universe last May. There were some utterly insane far-right Islamophobic posts suggesting she was some sort of Hizbullah plant (her father at least is a Lebanese Shi‘ite, though I get a sense it may be a mixed marriage), but since some of her cousins (in the usual Lebanese extended family) are alleged to have been Hizbullahi, the lunatic right decided she was some sort of Hizbullah plant to, um, take over our beauty pageants? Most Hizbullahis have tended to do well in pole dancing contests, after all. (And, as Hanin Ghaddar pointed out, it's not your average Hizbullah family, since the family home in Lebanon flies a big American flag. And also, the family celebrates both Christian and Muslim holidays, which is why I think it may be a mixed marriage.)

Now we are informed that she is, in fact, fasting for Ramadan, despite the fact that the Miss Universe Contest starts Monday. Ramadan Karim, Rima. (Why is this news? She can eat in the evenings. The photo below suggests she's not a big eater anyway.)

She's also modest, as noted in The Huffington Post:

Miss USA Rima Fakih talked to "Access Hollywood" about the Miss Universe promo shots, which will feature each contestant wearing body paint. Fakih said, "I love it. Oh my god. I've always wanted to do body paint and the fact that we get to do it with Miss Universe, that just shows you that there's going to be a lot of professional artists."
Some of the contestants offered to do it topless, including Fakih, but she will only be showing her back in the pics. "I told the [pageant organizers] I feel comfortable with beauty and with being unique. I'm known to standout and always wanting to do something different," Fakih said. She also mentioned the Miss USA lingerie photo controversy, remarking, "I think [people] need to look within what the pictures are trying to show, more than just what you just see on cover."

I guess if she's a Hizbullah mole, topless is okay as long as only your back is shown. And as soon as time permits, I will "look within what the pictures are trying to show." I obviously owe this to my readers.

If it isn't obvious, I consider the whole flap over her last May the stupidest story of all in the growing Islamophobia of the paranoid right. What, exactly, defines the alleged enemy? If a woman wears niqab, which the press will probably call a "burka," France, Turkey, and even Egyptian universities will ban it. Even hijab, the head veil only, is cause for suspicion. But then this young lady gets denounced as a Hizbullah mole?:



Okay, you guys, stop salivating. You just need to know the face (you are looking at the face, right?) of Hizbullah! (Though how she'd hide a suicide vest under the leopard-skin bikini is problematic.)

Now making fun of extreme Islamophobia is a bit unsporting since it's so easy, like dynamiting for fish at a dam, but if that young lady above is Hizbullahi, I'm converting. (Note if wife reads this: joke purely for rhetorical effect, dear.)

I don't pay attention to beauty pageants generally, and Miss Universe rarely at all, but this could be worth watching. (Umm, I mean entirely for its Middle Eastern resonances, of course.) And of course as an American, I'll root for Miss USA.

Arab Commentators Distancing Themselves from Mosque Controversy

I haven't been writing about the Park51/Cordoba House controversy (the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque") because it strikes me as a manufactured/manipulated debate aimed more at influencing the midterm US elections in November than anything else. I basically agree with Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama (version 1.0 last Friday, not the revised and confused version 2.0) that religious freedom is paramount, and besides, it's just a prayer room in a community center. And, as has been pointed out, no one has objected to the Pentagon mosque, (technically a non-denominational chapel, but when used for Muslim prayer it's a mosque).and that actually was built in the location where the aircraft hit the building, not two blocks away.

The controversy is worrisome, of course, insofar as it incites and inflames hostility to ordinary Muslim Americans, and indeed, some regular towns with no connection to 9/11 are campaigning to keep mosques out. (Yes, you can't build churches in Saudi Arabia. America is not Saudi Arabia. That's the point.)

Since I had little to add that others with more readers than I haven't already said, I haven't posted. But I thought I'd point to an interesting development: while, quite predictably, most Muslims abroad seem to sympathize with the project, there are Arab voices taking a note of caution, either saying that this is a domestic US issue, or worrying that the debate will inflame anti-Muslim feelings. Here's a piece in Arab News, for example, and an English-language piece from Al-Sharq al-Awsat. True, those are both Saudi newspapers, and Saudi cautiousness is proverbial, but the experts quoted are not all Saudis; there are Egyptians for example.

Now one can argue that this caution is centered mostly in defenders of pro-US regimes who worry that the controversy will give ammunition to Islamists, But it's still a phenomenon worth noting.

Most Ridiculous Controversy of the Day: Right Wing Furious About Arab-American Miss USA

Much Updated Below. As this story gets weirder, I'll update this post or add new ones.

My candidate for most ridiculous controversy of the day: the Miss USA Contest — a Donald Trump-run pageant several notches down from Miss America — has been won by an Arab-American of Lebanese origin. Apparently this has produced a lot of craziness on the far right, amid claims that she is a pro-Hizbullah mole of some sort infiltrating our beauty pageants in order to . . . what, exactly? Certainly the pictures of her in the swimsuit competition look like your standard Hizbullah infiltrator. (I wouldn't label these linked photos "not safe for work," but let's say she's not in a niqab.) And she went to Catholic High School in Dearborn, another sure indicator of Hizbullah ties. [Initially I didn't link directly to the insane stuff, but as it gets weirder and explodes in the blogosphere, you may want to read this diatribe, or this one, which flat-out calls her sharmuta, or whore (and not in the best sense, if you know what I mean) in Arabic (but wait: I thought she was a Hizbullah agent), and it gets worse.]

I thought anti-Arab, anti-Islamic paranoia couldn't get worse, but I hadn't realized that we needed to be on constant guard against the Islamist infiltration of our precious beauty pageants.

UPDATED: More evidence of radical Islamist tendencies are emerging: pictures in fishnet stockings and garter belts (see left), pictures of her pole-dancing in a "Stripper 2007 " competition, (also here), etc. She's obviously about one step away from strapping on a suicide vest, if she ever starts wearing much above her waist. Have we gone insane? She's being denounced over here as a (nearly-naked) Hizbullah mole and yet Hizbullah is unlikely to reprint these pictures. And this report says that 1997 "photos show Fakih pole dancing and with dollar bills in her bra.". ..

I'm pretty sure that's prima facie evidence of terrorist activity, aren't you? Obvious money laundering, by putting the dollar bills in her bra they figure they're going to escape detection . . .

Real Americans: Know Your Enemy (Just Kidding):


Ah, Lebanon.

A Few More Words About Minarets: Facts are Stubborn Things

Since my posting on the Swiss and the minaret ban a couple of days ago, it has come to my attention that many right-wing and anti-Islamic blogsites are reveling in what they seem to think is an aha! moment proving that minarets are indeed triumphalist. I'm not going to link: you can google for them if you wish. But they keep repeating the same point (I've now seen it several places): that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan supposedly said:

Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, believers our soldiers.

And this, supposedly, proves that minarets are seen as a triumphalist gesture over Christianity. (Apparently this quote also was used during the Swiss campaign.)

Okay: let's look at some facts, which, as John Adams once said, are stubborn things:

1. Erdogan did utter those words, and was prosecuted and imprisoned for doing so, as being a violation of Turkish secularism. He was not, of course, Prime Minister at the time.
   
2. They are not his words. He was reciting a poem by the great Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp.
3. Ziya Gökalp was not an Islamist. In fact he was a staunch Kemalist secularist, committed to the Westernization (though not necessarily democratization) of Turkey. He was a sociologist, poet, and ultra-nationalist, a complex man deeply influenced by Emile Durkheim. Erdogan was quoting his poem a bit out of context as I think those applauding the Swiss referendum (and those who jailed Erdogan for quoting the poem) are quoting Erdogan out of context.
4. They were not written about Christianity or Western Europe: they are essentially, I think, intended to defend Turkey's cultural heritage.

That seems worth adding to the debate. Gökalp is not one of my favorite thinkers (I don't know Turkish, but did write a paper on him in grad school and had to read his work in translation, and his Turkic nationalist ideas were not friendly to either Armenians or Kurds), but he certainly would never have wanted to Islamize Switzerland. He was a pan-Turanian, not an Islamist.

A Few Words About Minarets

Okay, if you have an interest in the Middle East (otherwise why are you here?) you already know about the Swiss referendum banning the construction of new minarets in the country a few days ago, but if you've been in a cave all week this is as good an introduction as any. Switzerland has successfully defended its mountainous redoubt, which has avoided wars for centuries by an armed populace, democracy (women got the vote in the 1970s, long after half the Arab world), fondue, and extremely clever army knives, from an architectural feature. [Hey, if Swiss voters can stereotype Islam, I can stereotype Switzerland. Apologies to those Swiss who didn't vote yes.] An unusual coalition of anti-immigration types, xenophobes, and feminists — with differing motivations obviously — somehow coalesced to ban the minaret. What structural features should we go after next? Domes? Cupolas? Steeples?

I usually stay out of the immigration/Islamophobia/wilder shores of paranoia debates, because they produce more heat than light and too often just give publicity to the folks trying to deepen divisions that are already a problem. But this one does verge on the absurd.

In the first place, as the NYT article notes, of 150 mosques and prayer rooms in Switzerland, only four have minarets, and only two more minarets are planned. None broadcast the call to prayer; apparently the fastidious Swiss noise laws guarantee that already, so waking the neighbors up at dawn is not an issue.

There's an enormous amount of commentary out there in the blogosphere, with the right seemingly proclaiming a triumph over the imminent Islamic takeover of Switzerland (they're five percent of the population!), and the Muslim world of course reacting in shocked fury. I'm not going to echo the more anti-Muslim bloggers: you have Google if you really want to see it. Some of it's pretty bad. The notorious poster of the campaign is offensive enough that I won't reproduce it here, (okay: changed mind: see adjacent: I may take it down if it's too divisive), but Juan Cole has (and even now that I have, too, you should really read his post anyway), and it shows more minarets sitting on the Swiss flag than the four that actually exist in the entire country. And the NYT notes that 90% of Switzerland's Muslims come from Turkey and Kosovo, and the niqab-veiled woman in the poster would be breaking the law in Turkey, and from the pictures some friends who just spent two years in Kosovo showed me, I don't think it's typical of Kosovar garb either. Juan Cole's post evokes Cordova and the glories of Islamic Spain, and Juan's at his indignant best when he concludes:

The other Wahhabi state besides Saudi Arabia, Qatar, has allowed the building of Christian churches. But they are not allowed to have steeples or bells. This policy is a mirror image to that of the Swiss. So Switzerland, after centuries of striving for civilization and enlightenment, has just about reached the same level of tolerance as that exhibited by a small Gulf Wahhabi country, the people of which were mostly Bedouins only a hundred years ago.

Actually, Juan, Qatar was mostly Bedouin when I was in grade school, and that's nowhere close to a hundred years ago (though my daughter thinks so), but I know what you mean. Also, Juan uses the word "enlightenment" with a small "e" here, but with a capital in his post heading, and at least as far as the "Enlightenment" (big "e") goes, I don't think of it as particularly Swiss. I know, Geneva has links to Rousseau (born there) and Voltaire (lived there), but also it's John Calvin's Calvinist city-state. And Geneva is the one part of Switzerland that went against the ban on minarets anyway. And I can't think of a lot of Enlightenment (big e) figures outside Geneva. (Go ahead and attack in the comments. I'm no expert here.)

Now kal over at The Moor Next Door also has an interesting post: I wish he hadn't lumped the Inquisition, Crusades, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust together in the first sentence (rhetorical overkill that will alienate some potentially friendly readers), since while Europe as a whole did all those things Switzerland at best only banked the profits; nonetheless I mostly agree with him on the rest.

The campaigners against minarets have used some very strange arguments that suggest the authors have either an unfamiliarity with the history of religious architecture in general or of Europe in particular: if the minaret — which is merely the means to call people to prayer in the pre-electronic age — is an attempt to declare Islam's superiority to everyone else (one of the arguments used), then what is a Gothic cathedral? What is Chartres if not a declaration that God (in Christian terms) is far superior to worldly things? I've been much more awed by Chartres and several other Gothic cathedrals than by the minaret of the mosque that's just up the road from my house. But I don't want to ban Gothic cathedrals. That would be comparable to the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

It's also odd that the minarets in the objectionable poster look distinctively Ottoman (and thus rather missile-like: no doubt intended) and that other iconography used in the campaign seems to be derived from Hagia Sophia. It may be the "typical" mosque for many people who've never been east of Istanbul, but it wasn't built as such: It is, of course, the Emperor Justinian's grandest church in Christendom, transformed into a mosque after 1453. Who's triumphalist now?

It's an odd choice of symbols, frankly. Yes, the minaret is distinctly Muslim, but in some ways it is the architectural successor of bell towers and steeples: one of the specific restrictions on Christian churches in most Muslim countries was the banning of bells, and as Cole notes, the Swiss ban on minarets is a modern analog to that: except that none of the Swiss mosques with minarets broadcast the call to prayer.

The good news is that a mosque does not need a minaret. The earliest mosques were simply rooms set aside for prayer (and many still are). This is a slap in the face to Muslims but it neither stops them from practicing their religion or somehow reduces immigration. It just offends. I'm not Swiss and I'm not a Swiss voter so it's not mine to decide, and I suspect the far too frequent elitism of European political leaderships led to an assumption that this couldn't pass until it did; I can't imagine what it actually accomplishes.

New Saudi Complaints on US Airport Treatment

For those who read Arabic: Just in time for the eighth anniversary of September 11, the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh ran a frontpage piece on complaints of mistreatment of Saudi nationals on arrival in New York at JFK, ending with a lament that things have not improved under the Obama Administration and are in fact worse than they were under George W. Bush. The relatively short, but strong, piece alleging racist and other abusive treatment, seems to have touched a nerve, and there's now a piece on reactions to the original story. For the Arabic readers I'm posting the links now; for those who don't read Arabic, I'll try to post a precis later today or sometime soon.