Tuesday December 15, 2009
Wanted: Former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni canceled a trip to Britain for fear of being arrested. (Ronen Zvulun-Pool/Getty Images)
Organizers of the Jewish National Fund conference in London had invited former Israeli Prime Minister Tzipi Livni to address their assembly at Hendon Hall Hotel on Dec. 13. Protest groups warmed up for the occasion--to no avail: Livni canceled her trip after a British court issued a warrant for her arrest.
The reason: A pro-Palestinian group filed suit against her in connection with her role in the Gaza war of 2009 (a war she crassly termed a "product of circumstance"). The warrant was annulled once the court figured out that Livni wasn't yet in the country, but it served its purpose as far as the protesters were concerned.
Livni used that old standard to explain her cancellation, an alleged scheduling conflict. But she was also listening to the advice of legal experts at Israel's foreign and justice ministries, who "have also advised Israeli officials to avoid Spain, Belgium and Norway, out of fear of similar 'universal jurisdiction' arrest warrants for war crimes," according to Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.
Among those officials: Ehud Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and current defense minister (a post he held during the Gaza assault), and Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister. Potential warrants against Livni and Barak gained credibility following the release of the United Nations Human Rights Council's Goldstone Report, which found Hamas and Israel to have committed what may be judged war crimes in an international court, though the report made clear that Israel's atrocities against civilians far surpassed those of Hamas.
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Thursday December 10, 2009
Exile Becomes Him: Rahim AlHaj, sultan of the oud. (© Douglas Kent Hall)
To keep up with music in (or from) the Middle East, I must sometime turn to my Alabaman colleague and friend, Rick de Yampert, who wields pen and sitar with equal dexterity.
The Grammy Awards are the quintessential American music celebration--one part art, 12 parts pop, 36 parts marketing. It hasn't been without its Arab influences of late: Shakira, whose blood courses with the torrid rhythms of Lebanese ancestry, won herself a few Grammys, and I vaguely recall Cheb Mami (the Algerian rai singer lesser known as Ahmed Khelifati Mohamed) doing "Desert Rose" with Sting at the 1999 Grammy Awards.
But I'd have missed it entirely had Rick not told me of one of this year's nominees in the Best Traditional World Music Album: Rahim Alhaj And Amjad Ali Khan. Alhaj is an Iraqi exile (and recent naturalized American) who plays the oud, the sultan of Arab instruments. Amjad is an Indian musician who plays the sarod, a sitar-like instrument distantly related to the oud. (I linked to a couple of wonderful oud pieces in a previous blog post.)
Rahim Alhaj's story is quite remarkable. Hearing it from Rick, I asked him to write a profile for Middle East Issues. He quickly obliged. An excerpt:
When Iraqi exile Rahim AlHaj fled to the United States in 2000, a charity organization in Albuquerque, New Mexico, found him a job. AlHaj spoke no English, but the academically trained oud player, who had studied both Western and Arabic music at the Institute of Music in his native Baghdad, quickly recognized that the venue was not suitable for his art.
No matter -- the job , at a McDonald's, was washing dishes.
Now, nine years later, AlHaj has been nominated for his second Grammy Award, one of the most prestigious music awards given in the United States. His latest album, a duo work with Indian Sarod master Amjad Ali Khan titled "Ancient Sounds," has been nominated in the Best Traditional World Music Album category.
In his homeland, AlHaj was known for his song "Why?," which became an anthem for the underground revolutionary movement that opposed Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime.
Read Rick de Yampert's full profile of Rahim AlHaj.
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Tuesday December 8, 2009
The Other Iraqi Awakening: Sunnis are back on the beat. (Getty Images)
It was like that in the Beirut of the 1980s, too: weeks, months of calm would pass, giving the impression that the civil war was over, then a colossal bombing would kill dozens and shatter the illusion of anything resembling peace or national cohesion. That's Iraq today, where the illusion of peace is always a trigger away exploding.
Five bombs today in Baghdad, at least three of them set off by suicide bombers. More than 120 killed so far. The bombers went after the central institutions of civilized and communal life: a college, a courthouse, a market, a mosque, a residential neighborhood not far from the Interior Ministry. That last is a clue about the bombers: the ministry is controlled by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki at one level, and by former Shiite militiamen at another. The ministry is the enforcer of Shiite hegemony in Iraq. It's Iraqi Sunnis' Bastille.
The coordinated bombings are al-Qaeda's signature, but that's knee-jerk analysis. Al-Qaeda didn't invent the coordinated bombing. Back in the Lebanon of the early 1980s, it was Hezbollah's signature (Hezbollah is Shiite). Al-Qaeda may have adopted the tactic. That doesn't mean the bombings today were an al-Qaeda job. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been eliminated, principally by Iraqis--and more to the point, by Iraqi Sunnis, whose distaste for al-Qaeda is similar to Hamas' in Gaza.
That's not to say that the bombings are less worrisome for it. To the contrary. They're more worrisome if, as I think is the case, they turn out to be the work of a reconstituted, or reconstituting, indigenous Sunni insurgency. That's been a running fear in Iraq: the so-called "Sons of Iraq," the former members of the Sunni insurgency bribed with American money to give up the fight and join the "Iraqi Awakening," have not been treated well since the Americans began their pull-back. They've not been paid. They've not been incorporated into the armed forces. They've certainly not been given entry to the Interior Ministry. The bombings may be their answer.
The bombings, besides their bloody results on Baghdad's streets, reflect another serious disconnect between American popular assumptions about Iraq and Iraqi realities. The "surge" didn't work. It pressed the pause button. As Steven Lee Myers wrote in The Times in late November, "Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling Iraq's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- all were benchmarks, and all remain partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed to create the space for political progress and thus peace."
Keep that in mind in light of President Obama's Afghan escalation.
Keep this in mind, too--the words Obama spoke about withdrawing from Iraq when he last visited there in April: "It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty. And in order for them to do that, they have got to make political accommodations."
Isn't that what he's already saying about Afghans? If most Afghans aren't listening, the Taliban certainly are.
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Monday December 7, 2009
His own muezzin: Muammar el Qaddafi is lecturing Switzerland on its minaret ban. (right, Artyom Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images, and Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Libya's Muammar Qaddafi is a study in contradictions. The former "Mad Dog of the Middle East" (to borrow Ronald Reagan's somewhat rabid phrase) and the 1970s leading sponsor of terrorism is now accusing Switzerland of inviting terrorism with open arms.
"Al-Qaeda militants are now saying: 'We warned you that they were our enemies... Look at what they are doing in Europe. Come and join us for a jihad (holy war) against Europe,'" Qaddafi said Saturday in a speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of his rule. "Switzerland has done the so-called Al Qaeda, or the terrorists, the biggest favor."
Qaddafi was lamenting Swiss voters' approval last week of a referendum banning the building of minarets (even though there are no more than four minarets in the entire country, which is about a shade smaller than Virginia. Fewer than 6% of its of 7.5 million people are Muslim, fewer than a fifth of those are practicing Muslims, though the vote is likely to raise that proportion a few notches.
Of course Qaddafi is being disingenuous. But he's also right. He characterized the vote as the short-sighted idiocy that it is, an invitation for Muslim countries to impose ban on the building of churches and other non-Muslim houses of worship (something Saudi Arabia already does) and to launch economic boycotts against Switzerland.
There are reports however that a move is afoot to reverse the ban through another referendum. "Club Helvetique, a group of over 20 Swiss intellectuals, will draw up an action plan to overturn the ban," Reuters reports.
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