The War on Christians in the Middle East. By Michael Gerson.

The War on Christians. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, December 27, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

What the Middle East would be like without Christians. By Christa Case Bryant. The Christian Science Monitor, December 22, 2013.


Gerson:

In some parts of the world, Herod’s massacre of the innocents is a living tradition. On Christmas Day in Iraq, 37 people were killed in bomb attacks in Christian districts of Baghdad. Radical Islamists mark — and stain — the season with brutality and intolerance.

 

The violence, of course, is not restricted by the calendar. In recent months, we’ve seen Coptic Christians gunned down in Cairo and churches burned. Thousands of Syrian Christians have fled to Turkey. “Where we live,” said one refugee, “10 churches have been burned down. . . . When the local priest was executed, we decided to leave.”

 

Across North Africa and the greater Middle East, anti-Christian pressure has grown during the past few decades, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. This persecution has gained recent attention from the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope. “We won’t resign ourselves,” says Pope Francis, “to a Middle East without Christians.”

 

The most passionate advocate has been Prince Charles — an often underestimated, consistently thoughtful figure. “For 20 years,” he said in a recent speech, “I have tried to build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding. The point though, surely, is that we have now reached a crisis where the bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested interest in doing so.”

 

The growth of this persecution is sometimes used as a club against the very idea of democracy promotion. Middle East democracy, the argument goes, often results in oppressive Sunni religious ascendancy. Majority rule will bring the harsh imposition of the majority faith.

 

But this is the criticism of a caricature. Democracy promotion — as embraced by the National Democratic Institute or the International Republican Institute or Freedom House — is about human liberty protected by democratic institutions. Securing institutional respect for minority rights is particularly difficult in transitioning societies, as we’ve recently seen. But clinging to authoritarianism further hollows out civil society, making the results even more chaotic and dangerous when a dictator falls. And even marginally more favorable dictators can’t be propped up forever, as we’ve also recently witnessed. So it matters greatly whether America and other democracies can help pluralism survive and shape the emerging political order.

 

This is a priority for both humanitarian and strategic reasons. As William Inboden of the University of Texas notes, there is a robust correlation between religious persecution and national security threats. “Including World War II,” argues Inboden, “every major war the United States has fought over the past 70 years has been against an enemy that also severely violated religious freedom.” The reverse is equally true. “There is not a single nation in the world,” he says, “that both respects religious freedom and poses a security threat to the United States.”

 

There are a number of possible explanations for this strong correlation. The most compelling is that religious freedom involves the full and final internalization of democratic values — the right to be a heretic or infidel. It requires the state to recognize the existence of binding loyalties that reach beyond the state’s official views.

 

It took many centuries for Christendom to achieve this thick form of pluralism. Whether the Islamic world can move toward its own, culturally distinctive version of this democratic virtue is now one of the largest geopolitical questions of the 21st century.

 

Some argue that Muslim theology — emphasizing fidelity to its conception of divine law — makes this unlikely (or impossible). Others point to past centuries when Muslim majorities and rulers coexisted with large Arab-Christian populations — a thin form of pluralism in which Christians were second-class citizens but not subject to violent intolerance. Every major religious faith contains elements of tribal exclusivity and teachings of respect for the other. The emergence of social pluralism depends on emphasizing the latter above the former.

 

Promoting democratic institutions is no easy task in the midst of revolution and civil war. But even limited levers — stronger condemnation of abuses, conditioning aid on the protection of minorities, supporting moderate forces in the region — are worth employing when the stakes are so high. America, however, seems strangely disengaged. “One of America’s oddest failures in recent years,” argue Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “is its inability to draw any global lessons from its unique success in dealing with religion at home. It is a mystery why a country so rooted in pluralism has made so little of religious freedom.”

 

A recovery of that emphasis might begin with a simple commitment: not to resign ourselves to a Middle East without Christians.

How the U.S. Triumph in South Sudan Came Undone. By Colum Lynch.

How the U.S. Triumph in South Sudan Came Undone. By Colum Lynch. Foreign Policy, December 26, 2013. Also here.

The White House bet on guerrilla fighters changing their warring ways. Turns out it was a bad bet.


Drill Down. By Keith Johnson. Foreign Policy, December 23, 2013. Also here.


Lynch:

Earlier this month, Riek Machar, South Sudan’s first vice president, returned to what he knows best, leading an armed insurgency being fought by members of his Nuer tribe. In recent days, the fighting has escalated sharply, engulfing several of the country's 10 provinces, and bringing the young nation to the brink of civil war.

 

The stakes are high for the United States, as fighting threatens to upend one of the most important foreign policy initiatives of the last two decades in sub-Saharan Africa – one that unified Republicans, Democrats, African Americans, human rights advocates, and Christians. On Saturday, four U.S. troops were wounded when their V-22 Osprey came under fire during an aborted operation to evacuate U.S. nationals from the town of Bor. An additional 150 Marines have been sent to the region to prep for possible future evacuations.

 

It’s an extraordinary and painful development, given America’s major role in securing independence for South Sudan. But the toughest part for Americans to swallow may be that it’s the U.S.-backed leaders of South Sudan – the supposed good guys – that are responsible for plunging the country into chaos and threatening to wreck America's signature achievement in the region.

 

“A whole generation of U.S. leaders that are invested in the success of South Sudan are heartbroken; I’m heartbroken about what going on there, especially because you don’t see the hand of Khartoum in this,” said [U.S. diplomat] Cameron Hudson. “I think it’s going to be very [difficult] to get the genie back in to the bottle. These guys are good at fighting and they are comfortable doing it.”


Johnson:

But turning that oil promise into reality faces plenty of daunting challenges, as underscored by the violence in South Sudan over the last week. Security looms largest, because it is a precondition both to develop the oil itself and also to build the pipelines, roads, and rail lines the region needs to make energy development a reality. But cronyism, weak laws, poor governance, corruption, and domestic politics can combine to scuttle hopes of a quick energy-fired economic bonanza.

 

“There is a myth that many oil companies and policy makers subscribe to, which is that economic interests will trump everything else. What gets discounted, is that in some places in Africa, there is a different calculus. Tribal animosities, personal animosities, political grudges  all those weigh a lot heavier, and there are a lot of people willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces,” said the Atlantic Council’s J. Peter Pham.

Palestinian Leader Farouq Qaddoumi: We Supported the Nazis in World War II.

Palestinian Leader Farouq Qaddoumi: We Supported the Nazis in WWII. MEMRI TV. Video No. 4075, December 7, 2013. YouTube. Atlas Shrugs.

The Mufti of Jerusalem: Architect of the Holocaust. By Pamela Geller. Breitbart, February 7, 2010. Atlas Shrugs.

MEMRI Transcript:

Interviewer: Were you sympathetic with Nazi Germany in WWII?

Farouq Qaddoumi: I don’t think it would be wrong to say that we were enthusiastic supporters of Germany.

Interviewer: You supported Hitler and his people.

Farouq Qaddoumi: Germany, yes. This was common among the Palestinians, especially since our enemy was Zionism, and we saw that Zionism was hostile to Germany, and vice versa.

Interviewer: There was a Nazi radio station in Arabic at the time, right?

Farouq Qaddoumi: I recall something like that.

A&E’s Duck Dynasty Dilemma. By Lee Habeeb.

A&E’s Duck Dynasty Dilemma. By Lee Habeeb. National Review Online, December 26, 2013.

Habeeb:

It had never happened before. When big, powerful TV executives ask a star to apologize for what they deem inappropriate comments or behavior, the star simply complies. A team of publicists is assembled, the star does the obligatory apology tour for the press and promises never to do or say what he did or said again. Ever.

 

But the TV gods never met a man like Phil Robertson. Or his family. When they decided to place the patriarch of the Duck Dynasty clan on a non-suspension suspension for his comments to a GQ magazine writer about homosexuality, the executives at A&E created a problem.

 

Because this family believes in a bigger God. The same God that roughly 70 percent of Americans believe in. The Robertsons take their faith seriously, and one of the more important elements of that faith involves putting no god before theirs. Not even the suits at the big network.

 

It is such an important notion in Christianity that there are commandments about it in the second book of the Bible. I guess the executives at A&E never got that far.

 

If not, didn’t they at least see the movie version with Charlton Heston?

 

Here’s a quickie theology lesson for those executives: The Ten Commandments are pretty important rules for followers of Christ. And for Jews, too. The first four commandments are all about man’s relationship to God and how God must be first in our lives.

 

Not network executives or ratings. God.

 

Those commandments are the reason dictators throughout history haven’t much cared for Christians and Jews.

 

The executives at A&E weren’t aware of the Fifth Commandment, either — the one that talks about honoring your father. When they decided to punish Phil Robertson, they should have been ready for the immediate response from his sons: We stand by our dad.

 

This is a family that honors their father and understands that without his commitment to them, there would be no Robertson family, let alone a Duck Dynasty.

 

If only we had more fathers respect their commitments, this country would be in much better shape.

 

Indeed, that’s been the appeal of Duck Dynasty from the beginning: the culture of family that Phil Robertson created. The culture of family the show celebrates. His family sticks together. They tease and mock each other. They fight, play, and work together. They even eat together.

 

It’s the secret wish of almost everyone I know — to be a part of a big, loving family. And it seems harder than ever to pull off, given the pace of modern life. Given the temptations around us to put other values above family.

 

In that GQ article that caused all the fuss, we learned a lot about Phil Roberston. Yes, he described his position on homosexuality not very artfully, but it is no different in the end from what most Christians believe about it, that it is a sin. And that is enough these days to get yourself in a lot of trouble with gay activists.

 

But here is, as Paul Harvey liked to say, the rest of the superb GQ story by Drew Magary that most Americans never read. And it is a heck of a tale.

 

Phil Robertson grew up poor as poor can be in the northwest part of Louisiana, where, as the writer pointed out, “Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture intersect.”  His father was tough as nails, his mother a manic-depressive. Roberston was a star quarterback in high school and as a scholarship athlete played for one year at Louisiana Tech. But he never played a second year, because duck-hunting season and football season overlapped. The young man who replaced him at Louisiana Tech was none other than Terry Bradshaw, because, as Drew Magary wrote, “that’s how these kinds of stories go.”

 

Robertson spent his days after college working a series of dead-end jobs and his nights chasing girls, getting drunk, and popping pills. At one low point, he had to flee the state of Arkansas after beating up a bar owner and his wife. Kay Robertson persuaded them not to press charges, in exchange for a sum of money that amounted to most of their then-meager life savings.

 

In his mid 20s, GQ reported, a “piss-drunk Robertson” even managed to kick his wife and three kids out of the house. “I’m sick of you,” he told Kay.

 

That’s a story that repeats itself every day in America, with tragic consequences.

 

Luckily for Phil and his family, he stopped worshipping Jim Beam and chose to follow Jesus Christ. Phil turned to God and turned his life around. And the lives of his wife and boys.

 

That, too, is a story that repeats itself every day in America.

 

Robertson soon founded a company that created a contraption that was able to replicate with remarkable accuracy the sound of a real-life duck. It was bad news for ducks everywhere but great news for duck hunters. And the Robertsons. They made a DVD about the family duck hunts, which led to a show on the Outdoor Channel, which led to Duck Dynasty, and fame and fortune.

 

Right from the beginning, though, this was no ordinary reality-TV family. The Robertsons were not the Kardashians. During their negotiations with A&E, Jase Robertson told the GQ reporter, “the three no-compromises were faith, betrayal of family members, and duck season.”

 

That’s why the A&E executives will never get an apology from the Robertsons. Because people of faith should not have to apologize for what they believe in. Even if they give an answer now and then that is less than artful — or even insulting.

 

Ironically, there was a day not too long ago when network executives thought it best for gay people to keep quiet about their lifestyle. It would have ruined careers, and shows.

 

It was a tragedy that actors such as Rock Hudson had to live a lie their entire adult lives out of fear they might be “outed” and lose everything. It’s a type of cruelty one can’t imagine, being compelled to lie to the world, and even families and friends, about such a fundamental aspect of your life — your sexuality.

 

That Ellen DeGeneres can be who she is, and what she is, and do a great show for all to enjoy, and do it with class, style, and wit, is a testament to how far we’ve come as a society. And how tolerant we’ve become. She has many Christian fans. I know, because I’m one of them.

 

I also happen to be one of those Christians who believe she should have the right to get married. That the state should be the state, and the church the church, and that we should not punish each other or boycott each other for who we are. And what we think.

 

If anything, a new brand of intolerance is rising from certain gay activists hell-bent on bullying Christians into suppressing their core beliefs — or else. They are also showcasing their own narrow-mindedness by judging a man’s entire life through the narrow prism of their own agenda. And one bad sound bite. (Conservatives, too, have been guilty of this same practice; think Bill Maher after 9-11, and the Dixie Chicks during the Iraq War.) I was thumbing through a book recently about John Wooden, the legendary coach of UCLA’s great basketball program. On the subject of integrity, he had this to say: “The five people who first come to mind that best reflect integrity are Jesus, my dad, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. The order of the last three really doesn’t matter.”

 

There they are, the two most important influences on one of the most influential coaches and exemplary men of the 20th century — Jesus, and his father.

 

Today, Wooden would get roped into an interview with some reporter, get asked what the Bible says about homosexuality, give the “wrong” answer, and get fired from his post for “hate speech.”

 

Is that the gay activists’ idea of progress?

 

But back to Phil Robertson and that article in GQ. The writer wasn’t expecting his time killing time on the Robertsons’ 20,000-acre stretch of Louisiana floodplain to affect him as it did. Here was Drew Magary’s remarkable confession:

The ecology here has been so perfectly manipulated that it feels as if two giant hands reached down from the sky and molded the land itself, an effect that I’m sure would please Phil. Whatever you think of Phil’s beliefs, it’s hard not to gaze upon his cultivations and wonder if you’ve gotten life all wrong.

Magary wondered about his own life, and his own priorities, and if they may indeed need to be reassessed:

I shouldn’t be sitting around the house and bitching because the new iOS 7 touchscreen icons don’t have any [f***ing] drop shadow. I should be out here, dammit! Killing things and growing things and bringing dead things home to cook! There is a life out in this wilderness that I am too [chickens***] to lead.

The reporting from Magary ended as gracefully as it began, with the two men leaving the wilderness after a day together.

We hop back in the ATV and plow toward the sunset, back to the Robertson home. There will be no family dinner tonight. No cameras in the house. No rowdy squirrel-hunting stories from back in the day. There will be only the realest version of Phil Robertson, hosting a private Bible study with a woman who, according to him, “has been on cocaine for years and is making her decision to repent. I’m going to point her in the right direction.”

As we reflect on all matters at the turn of the new year, maybe we should think about how lucky we all are to live in a country as rich, diverse, and beautiful as ours. One that allows the Robertson family and Ellen DeGeneres to live their lives freely, and to make a living without fear of reprisal for simply being who they are, and for believing what they believe.

 

And as some among us seek to cleanse the world of sound bites and speech that hurt our feelings and sensitivities, maybe we can reflect on Thomas Jefferson’s great words on the subject: “It does me no injury for my neighbors to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my legs.”

 

For a New Year’s resolution, let’s stop breaking legs and destroying the livelihoods of people for the mere act of disagreeing with us. Or saying something we don’t like.

 

We are better than that. And tougher.

The Orphaned Middle Class. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Orphaned Middle Class. By Victor Davis Hanson. Real Clear Politics, December 26, 2013.

Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon. By Brian Whitmore.

Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon. By Brian Whitmore. The Atlantic, December 20, 2013.

Is Putin One of Us? By Patrick J. Buchanan. Townhall.com, December 17, 2013. Also at The American Conservative.

Putin the Paleo? By Rod Dreher. The American Conservative, December 18, 2013.

Strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Putin. By Harold Meyerson. Washington Post, December 24, 2013. Also here.

TRANSCRIPT: Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly (transcript concluded). By Vladimir V. Putin. Johnson’s Russia List, December 16, 2013. Also at eng.kremlin.ru.

Islamic Militant Al-Ahrar Movement in Gaza: “We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews.”

Islamic Militants in Gaza: Allah’s Teachings Are the Fire with Which “We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews.” MEMRI TV. Video Clip No. 3190, November 3, 2011. YouTube. YouTube. Transcript, Transcript. Also at The Elder of Ziyon, Michael J. Totten.














Transcript:

Following are excerpts from statements made at a rally of the Palestinian Al-Ahrar movement in Gaza, a pro-Hamas group that split from Fatah, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on November 3, 2011:

Rally organizer: Praise be to you, our Lord. You have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship, through which we come closer to you.

[…]

Allah’s prayers upon you, our beloved Prophet [Muhammad]. You have made your teachings into constitutions for us – the light with which we dissipate the darkness of the occupation, and the fire with which we harvest the skulls of the Jews.

[…]

Yes, our beloved brothers, even though the entire world moves closer to Allah through fasting, through hunger, and through tears, we are a people that moves closer to Allah through blood, through body parts, and through martyrs.

[…]

Oh sons of Palestine, oh sons of the Gaza Strip, oh mujahideen – wage Jihad, wreak destruction, blow up and harvest the heads of the Zionists. Words are useless by now. The lie of peace is gone. Only weapons are of any use – the path of [recently killed] Yousuf and Ali, the path of martyrdom and Jihad. Only our wounds talk on our behalf. We speak nothing but the language of struggle, of Jihad, or rockets, of bombs, of cannons and of martyrdom-seekers. This is the language in which we talk and negotiate with the Zionist enemy.

[…]

We say to the Zionists: Like a bad seed, we shall uproot you from our land, so that it can blossom in the light of the everlasting sun of our Jihad, and of our invincible religion. Jerusalem is not yours – get out of it! Haifa is not yours – get out of it! Tel Aviv is not yours – get out of it! Oh Zionists, get out before we expel you. these are the words of the mujahideen.

[…]

Jon Stewart’s Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Jon Stewart’s Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, December 23, 2013.

Jon Stewart, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 28, 2013.

Mead:

The prevalence of delusional conspiracy thinking at all levels of Egyptian intellectual and political life is a “tell” that points to important limits on Egypt’s potential for political, social and economic progress. Societies in thrall to this kind of darkness are unlikely to develop the vigorous, forward looking and competent civil societies that can promote true democracy. Societies whose intellectual leaders cannot understand how power works in the modern world are unlikely to adopt policies that bring rapid economic progress. Given the power of these ideas among prominent Muslim Brotherhood officials and leaders, it should have been clear to the Obama administration that whatever it was observing in Egypt, it was unlikely to be a “transition to democracy.” At best, the Egyptian revolution was always likely to be an interregnum between despotisms; at worst there is still a chance (hopefully small) that the country could fall into the kind of chaos and violence that has become much too common across the Middle East.

 

Rabid anti-Semitism coupled with an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom; Nazi Germany isn’t the only country to have followed these dark stars to the graveyard of history. Many liberal minded Americans (though loathing both anti-Semitism and chowderheaded conspiracy thinking themselves) don’t like to look this truth in the eye.  It leads to some very uncomfortable reflections about the potential for democracy in many countries beyond Egypt, and casts a dark shadow over the prospects for the development of a stable and prosperous Palestinian state. It suggests that there are narrow limits on what we can expect from diplomacy with Iran.

 

Two American administrations in a row have seen their Middle East policies come crashing down because they ignored the unpleasant implications of the unhealthy thought climate so prevalent in so much of the region. President Bush and President Obama, dissimilar as they are in so many of their regional policies, shared a naive optimism about the prospects for quick transitions to democracy in the Middle East. In both cases that optimism led to unwise policy choices that made both US interests and values harder to protect. In the Bush years, those who raised questions about Iraq’s and the Arab world’s readiness for democracy were denounced as racists; in the age of Obama they are called Occidentalists or sometimes Islamophobes.

 

Not everybody in the region is caught up in the kind of thinking behind Mr. Ammar’s clownish pronouncements, and it is certainly true that Israeli actions sometimes contribute to an emotional climate that makes crazy talk appealing to minds that otherwise might be ready to take a more sensible view. But the grim reality remains: as long as feverish conspiracy thinking dominates the world views of so many regional social, cultural and political actors, civil society will be weak and both democracy and prosperity will prove elusive.

 

The whiggish optimism of American culture rebels at such thoughts, but the Middle East at the moment is not a particularly fertile mission field for liberal ideals. At the same time, the region’s role in world oil markets and its place on world trade routes makes it a region from which we cannot walk away. Managing our national portfolio under these difficult circumstances will take more maturity and patience than either the Bush or the Obama administration (so far) has displayed. We can hope that the unraveling of its once bright hopes in the region will lead the White House to a process of reflection and analysis that will bring it to a more sober understanding of the region and our choices in it. Beyond that, we must hope that the winning candidate in 2016 will bring a more sensible and grounded approach to what for some time to come will be an inescapable but difficult theater for American foreign policy.


Egyptian Author Amr Ammar Attributes Involvement In Subversive Anti-Egypt Schemes to Jewish-American Comedian Jon Stewart. Video Clip No. 4070. MEMRI TV, December 5, 2013. Transcript.

Nobody Should Fear a Merry Christmas. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Nobody Should Fear a Merry Christmas. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 24, 2013.

Most Jews Wish You a Merry Christmas. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, December 24, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Indigenous? Native American Studies and Big Lies About Israel. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Indigenous? Native American Studies and Big Lies About Israel. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 18, 2013.

Tobin:

We’ve reported about the decision of the American Studies Association to join the boycott of Israel. Supporters of the economic war against the Jewish state calling for institutions to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel have failed to gain much traction even in academia, let alone mainstream sectors of American society. As Jonathan Marks noted here the national council of the ASA that endorse the BDS resolution is largely compose of radicals. But they are not alone. The latest group of academic outliers to back the boycott is the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. As the Jerusalem Post reports:

Ohio State English professor Chadwick Allen, the president of the association and coordinator of American Indian Studies at Ohio State, wrote on the association’s website that the move followed a “member-generated” petition asking that the group “formally support the Boycott of Israeli Academic and Cultural Institutions that was initiated by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.”

 

Over the course of several months, Allen wrote, the NAISA council reached a consensus to support the boycott, and wrote their own declaration of support for the boycott. The document reads that the NAISA Council “protests the infringement of the academic freedom of Indigenous Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the Occupied Territories and Israel who are denied fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly, which we uphold.”

That another group of campus radicals with doctorates in subjects that are geared toward furthering left-wing theories would join the boycott of Israel is no surprise. That they don’t boycott China in sympathy with Tibet or any number of Arab and Muslim countries for their oppression of minorities is just the usual hypocrisy to be found on campus these days. But there are two points in their rant worth responding to.

 

One is the notion that Palestinians in the territories and Israel are denied “fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly.” This is simply false.

 

Academics in the West Bank are not suppressed. Quite the contrary, they work, publish, and pontificate in public while working in the many Palestinian institutions of higher education that were all founded after Israel took control of the area in 1967. Far from censoring activity at those schools, Israel has no input or ability to influence them whatsoever. All Palestinian colleges exist as hotbeds of support for terror and the delegitimization of Israel. The Palestinian media, especially that run by the Palestinian Authority which governs the daily lives of Palestinians in almost all of the West Bank, is similarly unrestrained by Israel and, as Palestine Media Watch reports on a regular basis, is a steady source of incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews. Nor are there any restrictions on the right of assembly for academics as the kerfuffle over the student body-supported Islamic Jihad fascist-style military parade at Al Quds University in Jerusalem proved. As for freedom of movement, it is true that Palestinians must deal with some Israeli army checkpoints that make travel difficult at times. But that doesn’t prevent them from moving about as they please.

 

It is also interesting that the Native American Studies Association include Arabs living in the State of Israel in their rant. This is entirely risible as Israeli Arabs have the same full rights that Jewish Israelis enjoy including the right to call for Israel’s destruction. The irony is that the institutions that these allege scholars want to boycott are the places in Israel that are friendliest to anti-Zionist incitement.

 

But there is a broader, more important point to make about their ridiculous manifesto. They say:

As the elected council of an international community of Indigenous and allied non-Indigenous scholars, students, and public intellectuals who have studied and resisted the colonization and domination of Indigenous lands via settler state structures throughout the world, we strongly protest the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the legal structures of the Israeli state that systematically discriminate against Palestinians and other Indigenous peoples.

By attempting to portray the Palestinians as the “indigenous people” of the territory on which the State of Israel and the administered territories exist and the Jews as the colonial settlers, they are perpetrating the big lie of Palestinian history. Jews are not foreigners in Israel as Europeans were in Africa. They happen to be the indigenous people of their ancient homeland and efforts to deny this isn’t scholarship. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and those who would deny them the same rights accorded other peoples are practicing bias, not scholarship. As with Palestinian attempts to deny the Jewish connection with the country or with Jerusalem and ancient Jewish holy sites such as the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, attempts to cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between foreign occupiers and natives is revisionist myth recast as left-wing politicized scholarship.

 

There can be honest disagreement and debate about Israel’s policies in the territories, settlements, and borders. But by extending their argument to all of pre-1967 Israel as well as by smearing the Jews as colonists in their own country, the Native American studies group forfeits its credibility. Rather than being seen as the cutting edge of enlightened opinion, their support for BDS should mark them as a pack of incorrigible haters who should be treated with the same disdain and isolation that they would like to dish out to Israelis.

The Unique Tragedy of the Palestinian Refugees. By Avi Jorisch.

The unique tragedy of the Palestinian refugees. By Avi Jorisch. Al Arabiya, December 19, 2013.

The Palestinian refugees – a realitycheck. By Yoram Ettinger. Israel Hayom, December 13, 2013.

The “refugee” diversion. By Einat Wilf. Israel Hayom, December 17, 2013.


Jorisch:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is tasked with assisting Palestinian refugees. The films, pictures, slides and prints the organization has collected on the plight of the refugees will now be displayed in Jerusalem’s Old City in an exhibit entitled “The Long Journey,” which will then tour Europe and North America. The images are heartbreakingly powerful and emotive.

 

Like all refugee stories, Palestinian stories of displacement and loss needs to be told. The question is what lessons one takes out of it. For Israel, as many prominent Israeli intellectuals, historians and politicians have argued for decades, the Palestinian plight is one that must be confronted and acknowledged with honesty.

 

What about the rest of the world, and particularly Muslims, Arabs and the Palestinians themselves?

 

The Palestinian refugees have an emotional hold in the Muslim world unlike any other refugee group. No other Muslim refugee problem, including those of conflicts in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan, generates such indignation.

 

Why is that? What makes the Palestinians unique? Remarkably, Palestinian refugees in the Levant are the only refugee group to have a special U.N. agency dedicated to them. All others across the world are handled by one agency, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). According to the UN, the special treatment of the Palestinians is justified by “the scale and uniqueness of the Palestinian refugee problem.”

 

Yet by any measure, the scale of the Palestinian refugee problem is dwarfed by numerous refugee events of the 20th Century. In 1948, credible estimates recorded approximately 700,000 refugees, and in 1967 approximately 300,000.

 

To put these numbers in perspective, the displacement of the Palestinians occurred within the context of the largest population transfers in history, in the aftermath of World War II. In 1947, around the same time that the British mandate of Palestine was being portioned into one state for Jews and one for Arabs, India was partitioned to create a state for Muslims - Pakistan. This resulted in the largest movement of refugees in history, with over 14 million people displaced and the death of over 1 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.

 

Meanwhile, at least 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern and Central Europe (where they had lived for centuries) from 1944–1950, in the largest population transfer in modern European history.

 

In 1923, Greece and Turkey engaged in a forcible population exchange that turned 2 million people into refugees. And since the 1950s, numerous African nations have fought civil wars that led to massive refugee flight. The UNHCR estimates that in 1992, there were over 6.5 million refugees across Africa, with that number remaining high in 2004 at over 2.7 million.

 

How many people have studied these events or were even aware of them? Most were forgotten because after one generation, or two at most, the refugees were integrated into other countries.

 

A long lasting dilemma

 

And that points to one aspect of the Palestinian problem that is in fact unique: unlike most others, it has lasted for generations. The original estimated 700,000-1 million refugees now number approximately 6.5 million. That is not just a problem, it is a tragedy.

 

Imagine if the Palestinians had been allowed to integrate into neighboring Arab countries – often less than 20 miles away from their original homes? Germany took in ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern and Central Europe, though they had not lived in Germany for centuries. India accepted Hindu refugees from the newly created state of Pakistan. Israel absorbed an estimated 800,000–1 million Jewish refugees who were expelled or fled from Arab countries between 1948 and the early 1970s.

 

The Arab League has instructed Arab states to deny citizenship to Palestinian refugees and their descendants “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” The result is that six decades later, Palestinians languish in camps throughout Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – instead of becoming productive citizens, as they have in other countries where they have emigrated. While the Arab world urges Israel to face its responsibility, it should not be an excuse to ignore its own.

 

A common issue

 

Painting the Palestinian problem as the most serious issue facing Muslims today minimizes the plight of refugees everywhere. Even through the narrower lens of the Muslim world, the Palestinian experience is not exceptional.

 

Pakistan is far from the only case. In Darfur, an estimated 2.5 million people have become refugees since 2003 because of the Janjaweed militia, backed by the Sudanese army. In Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion in 1979 until the ouster of the Taliban in 2002, 6 million refugees fled to Pakistan and Iran (5 million of whom have been repatriated since).

 

Today an estimated 2 million Syrians have left their country to escape the civil war that began in 2011. Other refugees in the Muslim world include 1.6 million Iraqis fleeing civil war in the past decade and several hundred thousand Feyli Kurds forcibly expelled by Saddam Hussein starting in the 1970s.

 

Displacement as a result of war is not distinctive. History is replete with refugee suffering, and it would be difficult to argue that Palestinians have suffered infinitely more than others in recent times.

 

It is hard to see what good can come from this false sense of uniqueness. Arguable, it causes even greater pain and trauma. It also makes it harder for Palestinians to envisage peacemaking rather than revenge, and strengthens extremists who feed on hatred and oppose any prospect for peace.

 

Is it possible to have a more nuanced understanding of the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict that does not absolve Israel of all wrongdoing, but doesn’t demonize it either? Similarly, is it feasible to recognize the pain individual Palestinians underwent but concedes that this tragedy is similar to that experienced by millions of others? Answers to both questions may ultimately help bring an end to this sad Middle Eastern chapter.

Boycott Me. Please. By Martin Kramer.

Boycott me. Please. By Martin Kramer. Foreign Policy, December 20, 2013. Also here. Sandbox.

Whatever Happened to the Arab Spring? By Madawi al-Rasheed.

Whatever happened to the Arab Spring? By Madawi Al-Rasheed. Al-Monitor, December 17, 2013.

Al-Rasheed:

Three years after the Arab Spring, the dominant narrative about this region remains articulated in terms of binary opposites: vanishing republics versus resilient monarchies, the secular versus Islamist divide and the Sunni versus Shiite schism.

 

While not denying the violent manifestations of these opposites, it is time to go beyond the apparent multiple polarizations that conceal a fundamental truth, namely the collapse or near-collapse of an old republican and monarchical order without successfully moving toward a new, stable configuration. Even after three years of protest and bloodshed in the republics and low-level mobilization in the monarchies, the Arab world is still far from shaking off the old order or a stable transition toward something that I would call democracy.

 

The old political order consisted of either militarized governments ruled by the post-colonial nationalist elite or hereditary dynasties that had been fixed in their positions by departing colonial powers. In both republics and monarchies, ruling classes consolidated as a result of achieving military hegemony, monopolizing economic resources, foreign support and a kind of nationalist or religious legitimacy. In practice, no serious structural differences between republics and monarchies were apparent, for both forms of government exercised power without representation, accountability, transparency or equality.

 

In both republics and monarchies, the ruling classes became larger but without real attempts to be inclusive or equitable. Rulers tried to liberalize their authoritarian rule, introducing empty quasi-parliaments lacking any power, expanding state bureaucracy to absorb the unemployed and opening up centralized economies in a drive toward a neoliberal market model, whose benefits unsurprisingly went to power-holders and their cohorts, a large coterie with undisputed loyalty. A service economy concealed the reality of crony capitalism and opaque markets, where corruption and nepotism flourished in the absence of legal structures and transparency.

 

After destroying any viable political society on the left, center and right, there emerged a vacuum which many Arab leaders thought could be filled with vigorous Islamism that focuses on issues such as Islamizing society, returning to God’s law and purifying the landscape of external undesirable values and norms.

 

As long as this Islamism remained focused on society and its piety, Arab presidents and monarchs thought they were immune from the winds of political change. They tolerated socially conservative trends such as Salafism and oppressed the vocal politicized Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. In countries like Saudi Arabia, Salafists delivered a society obsessed by its purity, piety and conformity and conducive to perpetuating absolute monarchy. In Egypt, Salafists were seen as a good alternative to the politicized Brotherhood.

 

All Islamists strove to control their share in the market, promoting a pious capitalism that might guarantee the newly emerging entrepreneurs a place on the political economic map of the Arab world, and now this world was increasingly drawn into global markets by the prospect of profit. Islamizing everything from banks to Barbie, Islamists struggled to have their narrative shape not only societies but also economies. Politics remained elusive, as this domain remained well controlled by the old guard.

 

At the same time, Arab leaders of all shades nourished their so-called liberal or secular constituencies, in case they needed them in future confrontations with Islamists. This instigated a deep rift between so-called liberal and Islamist constituencies, amounting to an unbridgeable ideological divide that not only affected society at large but was also felt in the sphere of the family. Ideological schisms concealed that the secular-Islamist divide was often a masquerade for deeper economic divisions and competition. In many countries, though secularists and Islamists were trying to win regimes to their sides, those regimes saw no benefit in compromise, for as long as constituencies remained divided, they could play the old game of divide and rule.

 

The Islamists were not the destiny of the Arab world, but they certainly filled a vaccuum created by oppression and exclusion at a time when liberation from authoritarian rule lacked the language under which it could be pursued. Hence the secular-Islamist divide was important to fragment Arab publics and ensure the persistence of authoritarian rule. From North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, regimes flirted with Islamism even while they might have appeared to be confronting it. There was a love-hate relationship between the two despite the multiple confrontations. Islamism served important purposes and was only curbed when it became a threat to regimes, not societies.

 

Equally, neither is the sectarian Sunni-Shiite schism in the dominant narrative about the region an inevitable destiny unfolding in every corner of the Arab world. Yes, sectarian tension and even killing are rife and tend to show their ugly faces in diverse societies such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain. Yet this sectarianism flourished specifically in those corners where either exclusion was entrenched or the regimes themselves were sectarian. Both republics and monarchies co-opted sectarian elites and rewarded them for their loyalty, but continued to exclude the rest of the communities. The regimes searched for token mediators rather than representatives, thus allowing grass-roots sectarian populist entrepreneurs to inflame the imaginations of their followers with utopias of identity politics that promise future emancipation, equality and power. Resisting exclusion from the corridors of power and the economy found a disturbing niche in the language of sectarian identity. Both Sunnis and Shiites adopted the discourse of mathloumiya, historical injustice inflicted on them because of their sect, to the detriment of seeing clearly the roots of exclusion that have grown under authoritarian rule. So sects were either indulged by the regimes in an attempt to use them against political rivals or suppressed to please their wider constituencies.

 

Negotiating this complex and explosive sectarian terrain proved to lead to cumulative problems that the Arab world is now facing, with no foreseeable chance of going beyond this Sunni-Shiite divide. The divide is not about majorities and minorities, but about authoritarian rule and the political games it entails.

 

Arab regimes can hardly be described as either Sunni or Shiite. Their loyalty is to members of their families and a circle of loyalists who may or may not necessarily share their faith. These regimes have developed a distorted “secular” logic of their own, nourished by the requirements of ruling over a disenfranchised population that includes both Sunnis and Shiites, not to mention other non-Muslim groups. There is great doubt about their commitment to promoting the interests of their own co-religionists, as their main focus remains on keeping their grip on power and resources. While the piety of presidents and monarchs remains their own business, it is clear that any religiosity they express or resources they spend on religious projects are above all strategies to achieve political ends. Before Islamists fused religion and politics, Arab dictators had already mastered the art. They saw in religion a political capital that could be invested for profit, but this transaction proved in some instances to be drenched in killing and bloodshed. It is no surprise then that those who opposed them used the same old game, namely finding salvation in religion to achieve political and economic ends.

 

Before we start inventing magical solutions for a region struggling with the outcomes of a crumbling old political order and unequitable distribution of dwindling resources, it is important to identify the real causes that have prevented a movement toward stable politics, let alone democracy. It does not help to continue to recite the set of binary opposites mentioned here.

 

It has become urgent for the foundation of the old Arab order to be shaken. This does not mean replacing one ruler with another who may turn to be nastier than the previous one. It means a structural change to replace the narrow foundation of government with a wider base that promises both political and economic inclusion. Anything less than this will prove to be futile and prolong the confrontations. Perhaps the Arab uprisings were simply the first round of a marathon that had already started. It can pause, but this marathon is certainly destined to be re-launched in the future. The last three years may be a fourth democratic wave, but all indications point to future ones waiting for their moment.

Bashar al-Assad: An Intimate Profile of a Mass Murderer. By Anna Ciezadlo.

Bashar Al Assad: An Intimate Profile of a Mass Murderer. By Anna Ciezadlo. The New Republic, December 19, 2013.

Lawrence of Arabia: The Stranger in a Strange Land. By Fouad Ajami.

Lawrence of Arabia: The Stranger in a Strange Land. By Fouad Ajami. Hoover Institution, December 19, 2013. Also at Real Clear World.

How Peter O’Toole Saved the Arabs (According to David Lean). By Juan Cole. Informed Comment, December 16, 2013. Also at History News Network.

Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia.