Category Archives: BAB’s A List

The Palestinian Authority May Face ‘Death by Recognition’

BAB's A List, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The PA may well come to regret invoking the Kosovo precedent, says Nebojsa Malic:

THE EFFORTS OF THE Palestine Authority (PA) to declare independence and get UN recognition have been compared to those of the “Republic of Kosovo,” a province of Serbia occupied by NATO in 1999 on behalf of the ethnic Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA, a terrorist organization dabbling in drug-running, slavery and other unsavory practices on the side, orchestrated NATO’s aerial campaign and subsequent invasion (much like the current “rebels” in Libya), and after almost nine years of ethnically cleansing the province and laying the groundwork, declared it an independent state in 2008. While “Kosovo” is recognized by around 80 governments (most notably the US and major Western European powers), it has yet to claim a seat at the UN, faced with a certain Russian and probable Chinese veto.

Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, not to be confused with faux tribunals such as the ICTY and ICTR) turned in a stunning verdict, refusing to recognize that the KLA government’s declaration directly violated the UN resolution regulating the status of Kosovo and accepted international law. Torturing language and logic, the majority of judges said that the declaration had been made not by the UN-regulated provisional government, but the “direct representatives of the Kosovo people,” and as such not bound by UN resolutions or international law (!). Following this sort of logic, any group, anywhere, could declare statehood – and the only thing that mattered would be whether it has sufficiently powerful patrons to enforce that statehood by force.

Upon recognizing “Kosovo,” its U.S. and EU sponsors insisted it would not establish any sort of precedent, as fervently as they had once insisted that the occupation of the province in no way conflicted with Serbia’s sovereignty over it. And now the PA is about to exploit the very Kosovo precedent. Critics of the American Empire often deride Washington’s belief in American exceptionalism, but it does actually apply in one, albeit unintended, respect: the U.S. may well be the first country in history to destroy the very international order its global dominance was built upon. Flouting the law with impunity is one thing; declaring that behavior to be the law, quite another.

However, there are drawbacks to PA’s invocation of the Kosovo precedent. For one, it would undermine “Kosovo” itself, obliterating a major argument of the separatists’ sponsors and putting the rest of the world on notice regarding their own separatist issues (and many countries have them). With many already uneasy about the professional revolutionaries (a method of unconventional takeover first tested in Serbia) in their midst, now another legacy of the Euro-American Balkans interventions – death by recognition – threatens to go global. While few seem to be aware of these potential problems down the road – there appears to be near-universal support in the UN for a state of Palestine – they will most certainly read their heads sooner or later.

Arabs themselves may be ill-served by the declaration. The PA is not self-sustaining, while the economic activity in the territories in question leans heavily on Israel. However much of a nuisance navigating the security checkpoints may be now, becoming an international border won’t make them any better – quite the contrary. Statehood would also mean taking ownership and responsibility for one’s actions and behavior, including terrorist attacks; until now, everything that happened could be blamed – and usually is – on Israel and the occupation. With statehood, that excuse disappears.

Claiming a Palestinian state in the territories of West Bank and Gaza would also go against the charters of both Fatah (current PA leadership) and Hamas. Both deny Israel’s right to exist and claim the entire territory of the old Palestine Mandate as their own. Settling for territories annexed by Egypt and Jordan in 1948, and occupied by Israel in 1967, is not just a matter of quantity, but of principle: it is an indirect recognition of Israel’s legitimacy. Last, but not least, the existence of a Palestinian state would shift the dynamic of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the current field of 4th-generation warfare (where weakness is strength) that has benefited the Arabs to a more conventional model, where Israel has proven its superiority repeatedly (as the Egyptians who remember 1967 and even 1973 can attest).

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

From ‘Syria’ With Love

BAB's A List, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Journalism, Media, Middle East, Nationhood, Propaganda, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

Like the PLO (Jenin) and the KLA (Kosovo), Americans are lying for their cause—fame and a seat on Oprah’s (concave) couch.

BY NEBOJSA MALIC

The most curious thing about the case of Amina Arraf is that it was exposed as a fraud.

For those unfamiliar with the story, a blogger purporting to be a young Syrian woman (“Gay Girl in Damascus”) has been posting for the last several months – by the strangest of coincidences, just as the anti-government protests in Syria got going. Then, on June 6, a post purportedly from the blogger’s cousin claimed she had been detained by the Syrian police, whereabouts and fate unknown. This caused an uproar on the blogs, Facebook, Twitter and whatnot, as the entire conflict in Syria came to be seen through the prism of “Amina Arraf,” a Damascene lesbian.

Except she was a fraud. “Amina Arraf” was actually an American man, (aptly) named Tom McMaster. All the photos featured on the blog were from his Syrian trip. The photo purporting to be Amina was of Jelena Lecic, a London-dwelling Serb. The speed with which the hoax unraveled was simply amazing.

McMaster’s “apology” on the blog rang hollow: “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground.”

Well, all right then. It doesn’t matter that Tom just lied to the entire world for months. Or that he hasn’t given anyone any reason to believe he actually knows what is actually going on in Syria. It doesn’t matter – he FEELS strongly about it, so he’ll just make up some stuff and serve it with a side of gay rights. The audience will love it.
Both the mainstream media and the internet, suckered by McMaster’s sock-puppetry, are now making excuses. Well, Assad’s Syria is a repressive dictatorship, so there was no way to verify the story, and uh…

Horse-hockey! People didn’t bother challenging the Araf fiction because it was a fiction they wanted to believe. The story had it all – a plucky young woman, gay no less, going up against an “oppressive” regime Washington has hated for a long time. Even now, when the whole thing has been exposed as a massive fraud, most people take the underlying assumptions behind it in stride: that the government in Damascus is evil and needs to be overthrown. Why, they are sending tanks against its own people! (Psst: so did Clinton at Waco.)

It isn’t the first time something like this is happening. Back in 1998, a CBC reporter named Nancy Durham visited the Serbian province of Kosovo, covering a terrorist outfit known as the “Kosovo Liberation Army.” She was told a heart-rending story by a girl, Rajmonda, who claimed to have lost her sister to “Serbian aggressors.” The story aired in January 1999, just as the Western public opinion was mobilizing for a war on Serbia (then still called Yugoslavia). The war began in March and lasted till June, when NATO occupied Kosovo and let the KLA run wild. Returning to look in on Rajmonda, Durham found her family very much alive and well. She had been conned. The whole thing was a KLA trick. Anything for the cause. Yet even as Nancy Durham apologized for being duped and, in turn, duping her audience (the only reporter covering the Balkans that has done so), she still called Rajmonda’s town by its Albanian name, Skenderaj (instead of Srbica). It was a reflection of the “reality” the KLA was creating with the help of NATO troops and the mosaic of lies such as Rajmonda’s story, which they’d fed to all the Western reporters.

Jack Kelley, a USA Today reporter, was busted in 2004 for making up many of his stories. He also covered the conflict in Yugoslavia, and his story of a war diary “proving” Serb atrocities fell firmly into the fake category. Interestingly enough, the source Kelley quoted, “humanitarian activist” Natasa Kandic, weaseled out of the entire affair claiming that, while she personally hadn’t seen the diary in question, surely the claim of atrocities contained therein was true. You see, Kandic makes a pretty penny spinning tall tales of Serbian atrocities, and even gets access to the New York Times editorial pages. The fact that she’d fed Kelley a line of bull never hurt her reputation – because the publishers of her drivel wanted and needed her atrocity porn to be true.

Last, but not least, I vividly remember this sort of behavior during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). During the last year of the war, I worked with a host of Western journalists covering the war from Sarajevo, where I used to live. As their interpreter, I accompanied them to interviews and also translated the local media coverage. Imagine my surprise a year later, when I came across some of their archived articles while I was studying in the US (thanks to the wonders of computerized university libraries, then in infancy) and discovered a substantially different account of what had taken place.

We saw the same things, heard the same words, yet they reported something quite unlike what I had seen and heard. They reported what the audiences back home wanted to hear: vicious villains and virtuous victims, black hats and white hats, and in the end a noble West riding to the rescue, too late for many but better late than never. Some went on to become celebrities, others got into positions of power from which to start more “humanitarian” crusades. And their myth about the Bosnian War still stands, despite the steady trickle of revelations about its fictional character.

In 2004, an unnamed Bush administration official (later said to have been Karl Rove), contemptuously dismissed NY Times reporter Ron Suskind as someone belonging to the “reality-based community“:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

While it sounds like unbelievable hubris, I don’t doubt for a moment that Rove (if that was indeed him) fully believed this then, or that he still does. It helps explain the entire Bush presidency, but also that of his successor. It doesn’t matter what actually goes on, only what people believe is going on. Everything becomes contingent on perception management. It’s Orwellian. It’s Hollywood. It’s the world our rules live in, and most of us go along.

To borrow a famous line from an Aaron Sorkin play, we can’t handle the truth. We want the lies, because the lies are what we’ve been conditioned to expect and digest. And our rulers believe they can will the world to conform to their desires. They were proven wrong over a thousand years ago, by a Viking named Knud who shamed his fawning courtiers by pretending to believe their platitudes and trying to command the tide.

Knud went on to conquer England. Modern-day emperor wannabes can’t even conquer Afghanistan, and not for the lack of trying. But in the minds of their subjects and their own, they are all-powerful, invincible and unquestionable, even as the tide is coming.

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDAED: Wahhabi Mosque At Ground Zero

BAB's A List, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Freedom of Religion, History, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Religion, The West, War

My guest today on BAB is Jihad scholar Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS. Dr. Bostom is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, and a contributor to many publications.

The NYP piece informs about the background of the Muslims involved in erecting the Mega-Mosque at ground zero. Although I am not an historian, I do, however, believe Andrew’s Sharia-Shintoism analogy is utterly erroneous. I am unaware that the Japanese wished to enforce their faith on the world; or that they have the pedigree of bloody conquest in the name of the faith to match Islam’s. Of course, that depends how you view America’s incinerating antipathy toward the Japanese. (Most Americans love this particular mass murder.)

Be mindful too that, as I wrote in “Dhimmis At Ground Zero?,” “restricting acquisitive property rights in a free society should never be entertained, as much as I approve of actions wishing to peacefully prevent this religious monstrosity from replacing a statist one.” It is, moreover, worse than futile to “request kindness and consideration from those they regard as conquistadors.” That’s plain dhimmi.

As I see it, fans of the heroic Geert Wilders refuse to adopt his immigration restrictionism, and prefer to concentrate on tiresome, futile talk against the evils of honor killings and genital infibulation, which no one sanctions.


BEHIND THE MOSQUE
By ANDREW G. BOSTOM
New York Post

Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in the coterie planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism. This fact alone should compel Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg to withdraw their support for the proposed mosque.

In August 2007, the NYPD released “Radicalization in the West — The Homegrown Threat.” This landmark 90-page report looked at the threat that had become apparent since 9/11, analyzing the roots of recent terror plots in the United States, from Lackawanna, NY, to Portland, Ore., to Fort Dix, NJ. The report noted that Saudi “Wahhabi” scholars feed the jihadist ideology, legitimizing an “extreme intolerance” toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians and Hindus. In particular, the analysts noted that the “journey” of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadis often begins in a Wahhabi mosque.

The term “Wahhabi” refers to the 18th century founder of this austere Islamic tradition, Muhammad bin Abdul al-Wahhab, who claimed inspiration from 14th century jurist Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah. At least two of Imam Rauf’s books, a 2000 treatise on Islamic law and his 2004 “What’s Right with Islam,” laud the implementation of sharia — including within America — and the “rejuvenating” Islamic religious spirit of Ibn Taymiyyah and al-Wahhab.

He also lionizes as two ostensible “modernists” Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani (d. 1897), and his student Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905). In fact, both defended the Wahhabis, praised the salutary influence of Ibn Taymiyyah and promoted the pretense that sharia — despite its permanent advocacy of jihad and dehumanizing injunctions against non-Muslims and women — was somehow compatible with Western concepts of human rights, as in our own Bill of Rights.

In short, Feisal Rauf’s public image as a devotee of the “contemplative” Sufi school of Islam cannot change the fact that his writings directed at Muslims are full of praise for the most noxious and dangerous Muslim thinkers.

Indeed, even the classical Sufi master that Rauf extols, the 12th-century jurist Abu Hamed Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, issued opinions on jihad and the imposition of Islamic law on the vanquished non-Muslim populations that were as bellicose and bigoted as those of Ibn Taymiyyah.

Also relevant is the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow program run by the American Society for Muslim Advancement, an organization founded by Rauf and now run by his wife. Among the future leaders it has recognized are one of the co-authors of a “denunciation” of the NYPD report, a counter-report endorsed by all major Wahhabi-front organizations in America. Another “future leader” of interest to New Yorkers: Debbie Almontaser, the onetime head of the city’s Khalil Gibran Academy.

More revealing is the fact that Rauf himself has refused to sign a straightforward pledge to “repudiate the threat from authoritative sharia to the religious freedom and safety of former Muslims,” a pledge issued nine months ago by ex-Muslims under threat for their “apostasy.” That refusal is a tacit admission that Rauf believes that sharia trumps such fundamental Western principles as freedom of conscience.

Wahhabism — whether in the form promoted by Saudi money around the globe, or in the more openly nihilist brand embraced by terrorists — is a totalitarian ideology comparable to Nazism or, closer still, the “state Shintoism” of imperial Japan. We would never have allowed a Shinto shrine at the site of the Pearl Harbor carnage — especially one to serve as a recruiting station for Tokyo’s militarists while World War II was still on.

For the same reasons, we must say no to a Wahhabi mosque at Ground Zero.

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of “The Legacy of Jihad” and “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.”

UPDATE: In “Who’s paying for the ground zero Islamic center?” Rick Lazio raises similar concerns. Lazio, a super statist, has found a cause he can run on. I like the idea I’ve heard floated of “landmarking” the targeted “historic 150-year-old building that was seriously damaged by the landing gear of one of the hijacked jetliners that flew into the World Trade Center.”

Republicans Have No Equipment, Philosophical, That Is

BAB's A List, Barack Obama, Democrats, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Republicans, Welfare

As the “historic meeting at Washington’s Blair House” drags on, Tibor Machan points out just how ill-equipped philosophically the Republicans are to go up against the president’s pitch today for an egalitarian healthcare dispensation.

How about them Philosophical Differences?
By Tibor R. Machan

President Obama and others at the summit Thursday (2/25/10) kept talking about philosophical difference between his team and the Republicans but what did they have in mind?

By “philosophical” most mean “basic,” or “fundamental,” or, possibly “systemic.” Bottom line is that believing in an extensive role of the federal government in determining the health care requirements of American citizens differs from believing in an extensive role by individuals and their providers to do so. The president is right, however, to point out that it is now too late for any Republican to beef about heavy federal involvement in medical care and insurance, given that the Food and Drug Administration has been around for many decades, and Medicare is also a near fixture on the American scene, not to mention the vast amount of government regulations—federal, state, municipal—that we have in our mixed economy. So any Republican who complains about extensive federal involvement is way too late–we already have it in place [thanks to successive Republican administrations], now it is just about how much more of such involvement should be accepted.

There is another philosophical issue that’s hovering over the debates and it is about whether everyone in American must have nearly equal coverage and care. Republicans keep trying to resist this objective for a variety of reasons, including the enormous expense it is projected to involve; the huge differences between different (groups of) American citizens for whom no one-size-fits-all health care and insurance approach will work; the differential burdens such a system will create for Americans, with the young carrying the bulk of it and the old the benefits, and so forth. So it doesn’t look like Obama’s full egalitarian agenda has a chance, not if practical considerations matter in the decisions that will be reached.

On the other hand, the rhetoric of equal provisions for everyone—whether with or without pre-existing conditions, whether prudent or imprudent in their health management, whether fortunate or not as to vulnerability to ailments—is difficult if not impossible for Republicans to rebut. They have no philosophical equipment with which to respond to this egalitarian pitch, so they just have to swallow when the president’s team brings up how unacceptable it is when an insurance company considers pre-existing conditions as disqualifying someone for insurance. Of course any responsible insurance company management would take that into consideration! It may be lamentable, but there is nothing unjust or morally objectionable about this. To maintain otherwise is to deny the insurers their basic right to choose with whom they want to do business and to pursue a profitable enterprise rather than a losing one.

But in order to present this kind of point, one must drop all the hand wringing about what is admittedly lamentable but cannot be helped. People who have been sick, especially with chronic ailments, are not a good risk to insure and those who want to make a living by selling insurance will tend to avoid doing business with them. And that is, really, their basic right in a free society unless they present themselves in the market place as unconcerned with the issue; as open for anyone’s business regardless of pre-existing conditions. But to force the insurers to do business with anyone, never mind their own terms of prudence, is wrong and should not be proposed in a free country however nice it would be to help everyone.

But Republicans are philosophically disarmed from making this point, especially from making it insistently, emphatically, because the Obama team is ready to pounce on them as being mean and nasty if they do. And Republicans are ill-equipped, philosophically—that is when it comes to their basic principles–to keep so insisting. For them to do so they would have to return to the founding principles of the American republic—to mentioning individual rights and so forth. But then, of course, Obama and his team could point fingers at them for being inconsistent, for lacking integrity, seeing how they have accepted a great many egalitarian government edicts, regulations, policies over the the decades.

The little commitment to individual liberty and free market transactions left within the ranks of Republicans just isn’t going to give them intellectual—philosophical—leverage against a clever bunch of egalitarians.

Tibor Machan holds the R.C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University’s Argyros School of B & E and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). To read more of Tibor’s essays, click on the Barely A Blog A-List category.