The Angry Arab Idiot

I just read something that put me in a bad mood, indeed almost made me angry—though not as angry as the idiot who has put me in the bad mood. France 24 reporter (and personal friend) Leela Jacinto has a blog post on Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri’s new film, ‘The Attack’, which has been banned in Lebanon, as Doueiri—who holds a French passport—shot part of it in Israel. In her post, Leela discreetly hyperlinked to a critique of Doueiri’s film, which I happened to click on, and which turned out to be from a blog well-known in the academic MENA milieu. The blogger in question is an idiot, so much of one that I will not sully AWAV by mentioning his name, except to say that he is a fellow academic political scientist, hails from south Lebanon, did his studies at AUB and Georgetown, and teaches in the California State University system (for his tronche, see above image). Here is what he wrote about Doueiri’s film on his blog the other day

Ziad Doueiri: prostration at the feet of Zionists

This Lebanese filmmaker (I have not seen any of his films and won’t see any of his films) has a new silly film about a silly love story based on a silly plot by Yasmina Khadra (the latter told Haaretz in an interview that both Arabs and Israelis are mere victims and that the only culprit is the US and its love for Israel, which is bad for Israel).  He shot the film in Israel and used Israeli actors.  The dumb filmmaker (he really is very dumb, please see any of his interviews on youtube) said that he could not hire Arabs to play Israelis because that would not be proper.  The dumb filmmaker does not know that we know that he worked on the silly Showtime series, Sleeper Cell (which contained the typical stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims and where the only good Muslim is an FBI agent, while the rest are all terrorists) hired an Israeli actor to play the main Arab (terrorist of course) role in the series.  He had no objection at the time.  It is shameful that the Lebanese state did not apply the law against Doueiri who is now rushing to Zionist media to claim that he is a victim of anti-Israel repression in Arab society.  That claim always leads to awards in the West, especially for those without talent.  Hell, any Arab or Muslim in the West can write a silly story about love between an Arab and an Israeli, and he/she would surely win Oscars, Nobel, and Pulitzer at the same time.  And since this silly director is obsessed with awards and represents all that I mock about Lebanonese [sic] culture (he in fact claimed in an interview with BBC Arabic that “the president of Oscars” called him and told him to apply and told him that he has a good shot at winning.  Kid you not), he should get the award for prostration before Zionists.  You now can figure out what type of a person we are talking about.   Look what he told this Israeli paper:  ““I hated Israel’s guts during the 1982 war and the 2006 war, but I have done my questioning too. I’ve changed.””  So this buffoon has changed although Israel has not changed.  He is willing to change some more in return for more Western awards from the Zionist white man.

What idiotic drivel. This idiot blogger, pour mémoire, has a Ph.D. in political science from a major American university. For someone with such credentials to engage in such asinine commentary on a film he has not seen—and by a director he refuses to see (and for what possible reason?)—is intellectually beneath contempt. He is intellectually depraved—though the intellectual depravity of the academic blogger in question has been known for many years, demonstrated daily on his delirious, unhinged blog. To get an idea of what a nutbag crackpot idiot he is, just take a look at the blog (no link, as it is well known; better known than mine, that’s for sure; though its regular readers, judging by the comments thread—which I followed a number of years ago—, are not academics, loin s’en faut).

Now the nutbag crackpot blogger is not stupid. He is actually rather smart. Really: one may be both smart and insane. As it happens, we both published chapters in an edited book two decades ago, and which the editor of the book told me at the time were the book’s best chapters. Anecdote: a fellow (Israeli) MENA academic recounted to me that he once participated in a Washington conference with the nutbag crackpot, who was flown to DC to give a talk. There were DOS and CIA people in attendance—and Israelis too—, whom the crackpot blogger academic regards as the enemy. But he was oh so polite, soft spoken, and serious (he was being paid for his services, of course, and is no doubt bien élevé on the personal level). Sort of like the schizophrenic drunks in Bryant Park in the pre-Giuliani era, who would rant and rave in public but, upon entering the NY Public Library next door to use the facilities, knew to behave themselves. Once back in the California central valley, one may assume the crackpot idiot academic blogger recommenced his ranting-and-raving against the DOS, CIA, and, of course, Israel. Voilà l’intégrité intellectuel! At the risk of sounding like a nutbag myself, I will end this here. One gets the idea.

In any case, ‘The Attack’ opens in Paris on May 29th. I will see it that day and review it illico.

West Bank: The Resisters

Nabi Saleh, West Bank, May 21 2010 (photo: Oren Ziv, activestills.org)

Freelance journalist Ben Ehrenreich had a lengthy article in the March 17th NYT Magazine—published online under the title “Is this where the third intifada will start?“—that I just got around to reading. It is one of the most important reportages I’ve read on the popular resistance by Palestinian villagers in the West Bank to the Israeli occupation. In fact, it is one of the better reportages I’ve read on the occupation, period. The report focuses on Nabi Saleh, a village of 500 inhabitants some 20 km to the northwest of Ramallah (in Area B)—and close by the Gush Emunim settlement of Halamish—, which has been a haut lieu of popular resistance for the past four years. Halfway through the article Ehrenreich describes how the resistance took form

The strategy [of unarmed resistance] appeared to work. After 55 demonstrations, the Israeli government agreed to shift the route of the barrier to the so-called 1967 green line. The tactic spread to other villages: Biddu, Ni’lin, Al Ma’asara and in 2009, Nabi Saleh. Together they formed what is known as the “popular resistance,” a loosely coordinated effort that has maintained what has arguably been the only form of active and organized resistance to the Israeli presence in the West Bank since the end of the second intifada in 2005. Nabi Saleh, Bassem [Tamimi] hoped, could model a form of resistance for the rest of the West Bank. The goal was to demonstrate that it was still possible to struggle and to do so without taking up arms, so that when the spark came, if it came, resistance might spread as it had during the first intifada. “If there is a third intifada,” he said, “we want to be the ones who started it.”

Bassem saw three options. “To be silent is to accept the situation,” he said, “and we don’t accept the situation.” Fighting with guns and bombs could only bring catastrophe. Israel was vastly more powerful, he said. “But by popular resistance, we can push its power aside.”

But the strategy of unarmed resistance does not sit well with the Israelis

As small as the demonstrations were, they appeared to create considerable anxiety in Israel. Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told me that while the West Bank demonstrations do not pose an “existential threat” to Israel, they “certainly could be more problematic in the short term” than a conventional armed revolt. Eytan Buchman, a spokesman for the I.D.F., took issue with the idea that the weekly protests were a form of nonviolent resistance. In an e-mail he described the protests as “violent and illegal rioting that take place around Judea and Samaria, and where large rocks, Molotov cocktails, improvised grenades and burning tires are used against security forces. Dubbing these simply demonstrations is an understatement — more than 200 security-force personnel have been injured in recent years at these riots.” (Molotov cocktails are sometimes thrown at protests at the checkpoints of Beitunia and Kalandia but never, Bassem said, in Nabi Saleh.) Buchman said that the I.D.F. “employs an array of tactics as part of an overall strategy intended to curb these riots and the ensuing acts of violence.” He added that “every attempt is made to minimize physical friction and risk of casualties” among both the I.D.F. and the “rioters.”

One senior military commander, who would agree to be interviewed only on the condition that his name not be used, told me: “When the second intifada broke out, it was very difficult, but it was very easy to understand what we had to do. You have the enemy, he shoots at you, you have to kill him.” Facing down demonstrators armed with slings and stones or with nothing at all is less clear-cut. “As an Israeli citizen,” the commander said, “I prefer stones. As a professional military officer, I prefer to meet tanks and troops.”

But armies, by their nature, have one default response to opposition: force. One soldier who served in Nabi Saleh testified to the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence about preparing for Friday protests. “It’s like some kind of game,” he said. “Everyone wants to arm themselves with as much ammo as possible. . . . You have lots of stun grenades . . . so they’re thrown for the sake of throwing, at people who are not suspected of anything. And in the end, you tell your friend at the Friday-night dinner table: ‘Wow! I fired this much.’ ”

According to a leaked 2010 U.S. State Department memo, Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi of Israel “expressed frustration” with the West Bank protests to American diplomats, and “warned that the I.D.F. will start to be more assertive in how it deals with these demonstrations, even demonstrations that appear peaceful.” The memo concluded that “less-violent demonstrations are likely to stymie the I.D.F.,” citing the Israeli Defense Ministry policy chief Amos Gilad’s admission to U.S. officials, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”

Sagi Tal, a former I.D.F. soldier, who was stationed near the villages of Bil’in and Ni’lin, which also held weekly demonstrations, explained to me that his unit sometimes conducted night raids to gather intelligence or make arrests and sometimes simply so “that they should feel that we are here and we are watching them.”

Yes, the IDF doesn’t do Gandhi very well. And it harasses Palestinians just to remind them whose boss…

On the stone throwing

I asked one of the boys why he threw stones, knowing how futile it was. “I want to help my country and my village, and I can’t,” he said. “I can just throw stones.”

“We see our stones as our message,” [Nabi Saleh resident] Bassem [Tamimi] explained. The message they carried, he said, was “We don’t accept you.” While Bassem spoke admiringly of Mahatma Gandhi, he didn’t worry over whether stone-throwing counted as violence. The question annoyed him: Israel uses far greater and more lethal force on a regular basis, he pointed out, without being asked to clarify its attitude toward violence. If the loincloth functioned as the sign of Gandhi’s resistance, of India’s nakedness in front of British colonial might, Bassem said, “Our sign is the stone.” The weekly clashes with the I.D.F. were hence in part symbolic. The stones were not just flinty yellow rocks, but symbols of defiance, of a refusal to submit to occupation, regardless of the odds.

But the strategy hasn’t borne fruit, needless to say

“This is the worst time for us,” Bassem confided to me last summer. He meant not just that the villagers have less to show for their sacrifices each week, but that things felt grim outside the village too. Everyone I spoke with who was old enough to remember agreed that conditions for Palestinians are far worse now than they were before the first intifada. The checkpoints, the raids, the permit system, add up to more daily humiliation than Palestinians have ever faced. The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank has more than tripled since the Oslo Accords. Assaults on Palestinians by settlers are so common that they rarely made the news. The resistance, though, remained limited to a few scattered villages like Nabi Saleh and a small urban youth movement.

I sat down one afternoon in Ramallah with Samir Shehadeh, a former literature professor from Nabi Saleh who was one of the intellectual architects of the first intifada and whom I met several times at Bassem’s house. I reminded him of the car accident that ignited the first uprising and asked what kind of spark it would take to mobilize Palestinians to fight again. “The situation is 1,000 times worse,” he said. “There are thousands of possible sparks,” and still nothing has happened.

Part of the reason is the disconnect between the situation of the residents of Nabi Saleh and so many other villages in the West Bank, on the one hand, and the Palestinian elite in the “Ramallah bubble,” on the other, with its “bright and relatively carefree world of cafes, NGO salaries and imported goods… the clothing shops and fast-food franchises [that] are filled…[the n]ew high-rises [that] are going up everywhere.”

Life in the “Ramallah bubble” is indeed not too bad, as one may glean from pics I took on my last visit there (in a post from Sep. ’11 arguing why there will not be a third intifada…).

The “Ramallah bubble” does put a damper on the resistance, as Ehrenreich reports

At times the Palestinian Authority acts as a more immediate obstacle to resistance. Shortly after the protests began in Nabi Saleh, Bassem was contacted by P.A. security officials. The demonstrations were O.K., he said they told him, as long as they didn’t cross into areas in which the P.A. has jurisdiction — as long, that is, as they did not force the P.A. to take a side, to either directly challenge the Israelis or repress their own people… In Hebron, P.A. forces have stopped protesters from marching into the Israeli-controlled sector of the city. “This isn’t collaboration,” an I.D.F. spokesman, who would only talk to me on the condition that he not be named, assured me. “Israel has a set of interests, the P.A. has a set of interests and those interests happen to overlap.”

No wonder Israel has shown minimal interest in reviving negotiations with the PA, as the PA is already doing almost precisely what Israel wants it to do

Bassem saw no easy way to break the torpor and ignite a more widespread popular resistance. “They have the power,” he said of the P.A., “more than the Israelis, to stop us.” The Palestinian Authority employs 160,000 Palestinians, which means it controls the livelihoods of about a quarter of West Bank households. One night I asked Bassem and Bilal, who works for the Ministry of Public Health, how many people in Nabi Saleh depend on P.A. salaries. It took them a few minutes to add up the names. “Let’s say two-thirds of the village,” Bilal concluded.

New forms of resistance are being developed, however

In late November [2012], Netanyahu announced plans to build 3,400 settlement units in an area known as E1, effectively cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank. Just before I arrived in January, popular-resistance activists tried something new, erecting a tent “village” called Bab al-Shams in E1, symbolically appropriating the methods of land confiscation employed by settlers. “The time has come now to change the rules of the game,” the organizers wrote in a news release, “for us to establish facts on the ground — our own land.” The numbers were relatively small — about 250 people took part, including Nariman and a few others from Nabi Saleh — and, on direct orders from Netanyahu, soldiers evicted everyone two days later, but the movement was once again making headlines around the globe. Copycat encampments went up all over the West Bank — some in areas where the popular resistance had not previously been active.

Very good initiative the tent villages, though it’s hard to be optimistic that it will succeed. In point of fact, the situation in the Palestinian territories—the WB and Gaza—is hopeless, or nearly so. The Israelis are not going to withdraw to the ’67 lines and the IDF is not going to renounce its freedom to intervene wherever it pleases in the West Bank (and Israel will not loosen its vise on Gaza so long as Hamas remains in power). This is a statement of fact. The Palestinians are powerless to make the Israelis do what they want them to do and the international community—the US, EU, UN, Arab states, etc—is not going to—and cannot—make the Israelis do it for them. The situation has been going on for 46 years and for which all parties bear their share of responsibility: the Israelis, the Arab states, and the Palestinians themselves. It’s a terrible situation for Palestinians outside the “bubble”—for those whose lives are made miserable by checkpoints, IDF raids, land confiscation, fanatical settlers, and everything else—but I have no brilliant strategies to propose to them apart from continuing to do Gandhi (and maybe rethink the stone throwing). If persons more perspicacious than I have other strategies, do let me in on them.

Some questions (rhetorical) to those who support Israeli policy: what do you propose for the inhabitants of Nabi Saleh and other villages and towns in the West Bank? How should they deal with the IDF, its checkpoints, and the extremist settlers in their midst? What would you do if you were in their shoes?

Ben Ehrenreich’s article is long (over 8,000 words) but worth reading in its entirety.

Hannah Arendt

The movie. Directed by Margarethe von Trotta. It should not be labeled a biopic, as it focuses on only two episodes of Hannah Arendt’s life: of her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial—and the controversy that followed the publication of her articles in The New Yorker—and her youthful relationship with Martin Heidegger (though this part, treated in flashbacks, receives lesser attention). It’s a well done film, impeccably depicts the German émigré academic-intellectual milieu in New York in the early 1960s, and with a first-rate performance by Barbara Sukowa. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the firestorm Arendt’s articles on the Eichmann trail provoked in the American Jewish community. The film clearly takes Arendt’s side (her speech at Bard College, where she defended her intellectual integrity against her detractors, is the high point of the film). French reviews have been good. For reviews in English, see the ones by New School sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, feminist blogger Mary Creighton, and Spiegel Online. The film opens in the US at the end of the month.

I’ve seen two other films lately on Germany and Nazis. One was ‘Lore’, by Australian director Cate Shortland (the film is in German, though she doesn’t speak it). The film follows the children of a Nazi family—father in the SS, mother a Nazi ideologue—at the end of the war, who are left by their parents to fend for themselves, to make their way on foot to their grandmother’s home near Hamburg, which is a few hundred km to the north from where they set out. The whole movie is of their journey through the countryside—of the children of the Nazi elite reduced to penury and in the sauve qui peut atmosphere of 1945 Germany—, and of their encounter with a young man who passes himself off for a Jew. It’s a good film, particularly for the performance of the remarkable teenage actress Saskia Rosendahl. The pic opened in the US in February and reviews were good.

The other film was ‘Combat Girls’ (in France: ‘Guerrière’; the German title, ‘Kriegerin’, means ‘warrior’), which is about contemporary neo-Nazi skinheads in the former East Germany and with the protag a 20 year-old neo-Nazi woman named Marisa (actress Alina Levshin). The film opens with the neo-Nazi gang marauding through a train physically assaulting anyone of non-European origin. During the scene I asked myself why I was subjecting myself to this, that coming to see the film was maybe a mistake. There is no lower specimen of humanity than neo-Nazis, and having to watch them for an hour and a half on the screen is not pleasant. But it turned out not to be a bad film, as it shows Marisa—who is full of rage and hate—to be a complex character and who is carrying baggage from her difficult family history. And in the link she forms with a teenage refugee from Afghanistan—which at first seemed contrived but finally wasn’t—, she shows herself to have at least an ounce of humanity—and unlike the lowlife reptiles of her neo-Nazi gang, who have none whatever. Reviews of the pic are here and here.

A few days after seeing the film I read this article in Le Monde about a trial of five neo-Nazis that is presently underway in Germany, which is the biggest trial of its kind there since that of the Baader-Meinhof gang in 1977. One learns that 152 murders have been committed by neo-Nazis in Germany, mainly in the east, since reunification in 1990. That’s a lot. Neo-Nazis are marginal in Germany but not as marginal as they should be.

Le Premier Homme

Voilà some publicity for Harvard University Press’s recent publication of Albert Camus’s Algerian Chronicles—a compilation of Camus’s essays and letters on Algeria from the 1930s through the ’50s—, translated into English by Arthur Goldhammer—of French Politics blogging fame (and who has been translating French social science and humanities since my college days)—and edited and introduced by Alice Kaplan (reviews here and here). On the subject of Camus—whose birth centennial is this November 7th—I recently saw the cinematic adaptation of his unfinished autobiographical novel Le Premier Homme (in English, The First Man), by Italian director Gianni Amelio. I liked the novel—and more than any other I’ve read by Camus, including L’Étranger and La Peste—, in particular for its vivid imagery of lower-class pied-noir life in Algiers in the 1910s and ’20s. The film closely follows Camus’s childhood such as depicted in the novel via the character of Jacques Cormery and with flash-forwards to the 1950s—of Cormery’s return to Algiers during the war—, scenes that weren’t in the novel. Technically the film—which was entirely shot in Algeria (mainly in Algiers and Mostaganem) and employed Benjamin Stora as historical adviser—is impeccable. Nice to watch. But it doesn’t work. This is one of those novels that cannot be adapted to the screen. And if one has not read it—and is not aware that Jacques Cormery is Albert Camus (and does not know too much about Camus or Algérie française)—, the film will make no sense at all. So if you haven’t read the book—and are not familiar with France’s history in Algeria—, do not see the movie; you will be wasting your time. Gianni Amelio directed two very good films in the ’90s, ‘Il ladro di bambini‘ and ‘Lamerica‘, so I had somewhat high expectations for this one. Oh well. US reviews are here and here, French reviews here, and the NYT review of the book here.

Needless to say, the film was not a box office hit in France. I saw it on the first Saturday night after its opening and in a big Paris multiplex. The salle was well over half empty. Un échec annoncé. As I’ve said before, the French movie-going public is simply not interested in Algeria, post- or pre-1962.

À propos, another movie about Algérie française—and likewise based on a novel by a major author—opened in France last fall: ‘Ce que le jour doit à la nuit’, from Yasmina Khadra’s eponymous 2008 novel (in English: What the Day Owes the Night), which I have not read. This director of this one was the middle to lowbrow Alexandre Arcady, juif d’Algérie who is not precisely known for making films d’auteur. I hesitated on seeing it and despite the compelling subject matter, in view of its 2 hour 40 minute length and the fact that Arcady has never done anything that could remotely be called a chef d’œuvre, but decided to take the plunge (Saturday AM matinee) before it disappeared from the salles. I’ll let Le Monde’s Noémie Luciani—who liked the pic more than did other French critics—describe it

Dans l’Algérie des années 1930, Younes, 9 ans, est recueilli par son oncle et sa tante et rebaptisé Jonas. Elevé par ce couple peu ordinaire (Mohamed est musulman, Madeleine chrétienne), Jonas grandit à Oran puis à Rio Salado, véritable jardin d’Eden où la vie est douce et lente, jusqu’à ce qu’Emilie n’amène les premières violences de l’amour, et l’Histoire les premiers feux de la guerre.

Adapté du roman à succès de Yasmina Khadra, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit est une fresque monumentale dans tous les sens du terme. Reconstitution détaillée à l’extrême, musique grandiose, mise en scène toute dans l’ampleur, jusqu’aux orages, qui répondent avec un mimétisme verlainien aux émotions : que Jonas perde un instant le goût de vivre, et “il pleure dans son coeur comme il pleut sur la ville”.

Ce totalitarisme de moyens, s’il est indéniablement l’expression vibrante d’un amour fou du réalisateur pour le livre auquel il offre un monde visible, a ses charmes et ses limites. D’un côté l’élégance du décor, la belle musique d’Armand Amar, une intelligence remarquable du rythme, tenant de bout en bout l’histoire sur presque trois heures de film.

De l’autre, l’explicite imposant, le poids des fatalités trop visibles, la place ténue de l’humour. Surtout, le jeu d’acteurs enivrés de se voir devenus Rhett et Scarlett, Juliette et Roméo : exalté, plus rarement exaltant, tout en grands gestes, grands mots, grands yeux noyés de larmes. Fu’ad Aït Aattou (Younes/Jonas) : la gravité un peu appuyé de la voix, le port de tête. Nora Arnezeder (Emilie) : le sourire lentement construit pour illuminer, un peu trop lent à venir. Anne Parillaud (madame Cazenave, la mère d’Emilie) : la démarche alanguie, la diction lourdement sensuelle, les tics de séductrice aguerrie.

On hésite à leur autoriser tant de fards : peut-être faut-il autant pour que l’histoire ait moins à voir avec le commun amour qu’avec le mythe. Peut-être avons-nous perdu l’habitude. Dans le doute, être un peu plus crédule, glisser sur certains traits. Tout travaillé qu’il soit, tout alourdi d’art qu’il peut être, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit garde au coeur un souffle romantique volé à l’Hollywood des heures anciennes : naïf et flamboyant à son image, emportant furieusement tout ce que l’on consentira à lui laisser prendre – l’amour, le feu, la guerre…

A ‘Gone With the Wind’ in the waning days of Algérie française (for a synopsis of the pic in English—there are as yet no reviews from the US or UK—, go here). One gets the general idea. The film is melodramatic and maudlin, i.e. it’s schlock. But… I was thoroughly entertained (as were others who saw it, to judge by Allociné’s audience ratings; though, as befitting films in France with an Algeria theme, it was a box office failure). It’s a grand spectacle and in which the director pulls out all the stops (trailer here). So for this one I suspended critical judgment and decided to just take it in (it’s also hard for me to give the total thumbs down to a film on Algeria whose historical adviser was the incontournable, inévitable Benjamin Stora). As it will likely not be making it outre-Atlantique or outre-Manche anytime soon, the only way to see it will be via streaming (if one requires English subtitles, that might be a problem).

There was a special projection of the film in Algiers last October, which was the subject of an amusing reportage by El Watan’s Chawki Amari, “Le film d’Arcady n’a pas réconcilié les Algériens.” The lede

«Ce que le jour doit à la nuit», le film d’Alexandre Arcady, tiré du chef-d’œuvre de Yasmina Khadra, a été projeté à Alger sur fond de rivalités entre des ministres et de rumeurs sur la mort du président Bouteflika. Récit cinématographique.

Among other things, one learns that Arcady’s film, despite the sponsorship of the Algerian Ministry of Culture, failed to receive the necessary authorizations in time, so had to be shot in Tunisia. Une histoire algérienne. Amari’s article, which is quite funny—I was cracking up while reading it—, will be appreciated by those who know Algeria well.

Obama is right on Syria

Aleppo, October 3 2012 (photo: SANA AP)

So says Leslie Gelb in a column in TDB. The lede:

Obama is right not to rush to war, given our checkered past on the use of chemical weapons and the sinkhole of hatreds in Syria

On the question of chemical weapons, Gelb says

Of course, we Americans think it’s horrible for any nation to use chemical weapons—except when we don’t. And of course, we want to punish any user of chemical weapons—except when we don’t. And of course, many now screaming against Syria’s likely use of chemical weapons against its rebels didn’t do much complaining when Iraq hurled these internationally banned gases against Iran and its own Kurdish people in the 1980s. And of course, American interventionists now demand U.S. military action against the Syrian government. But America’s history on chemical weapons is littered with mistakes and hypocrisy, and Syria itself is a bottomless pit of hatreds that can’t be “fixed” by more and more outside military force.

In regard to America’s history, he reminds us that

The United States used Agent Orange against the North Vietnamese (and in South Vietnam). Agent Orange is a chemical herbicide. Washington excused its employment on the grounds that U.S. forces used it for purposes of “deforestation” and not against people. Incidentally, it killed and injured many, perhaps half a million of them. We’ve flushed memories of this incident aside; others remember it well.

Read Gelb’s column here.

Obama and Gitmo

[update below]

There are plenty of reasons to be disappointed with Obama’s presidency but one of the most is his failure to close the Guantánamo prison as he promised he would during the 2008 campaign. One could perhaps understand the political constraints during his first term—in view of the opposition from Congressional Democrats and public opinion—but he has no such excuse now. So he’s speaking out again against Gitmo and his desire to close it. If he can do so via executive order, he should just do it. Shut the goddamned place down and now. If assholes members of Congress and right-wing media pundits scream and holler, let them scream and holler. Ignore them. The New York Times has a good editorial on the subject. Le voici

The President and the Hunger Strike
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama said a lot of important things on Tuesday about the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It is a blight on the nation’s reputation. It mocks American standards of justice by keeping people imprisoned without charges. It has actually hindered the prosecution and imprisonment of dangerous terrorists. Even if Guantánamo seemed justified to some people in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, those justifications are wearing thin. It is unsustainable and should be closed.

We were pleased that Mr. Obama pledged to make good, finally, on his promise to do just that. But that reaction was tempered by the fact that he has failed to do so for five years and that he has not taken steps within his executive power to transfer prisoners long ago cleared for release. Mr. Obama’s plans to try to talk Congress into removing obstacles to closing the prison do not reflect the urgency of the crisis facing him now.

As of Tuesday morning, Charlie Savage reported in The Times, 100 of the 166 inmates at Guantánamo are participating in a hunger strike against their conditions and indefinite detention. Twenty-one have been “approved” for force-feeding, which involves the insertion of a tube through their nostrils and down their throats.

Mr. Obama defended the practice. “I don’t want these individuals to die,” he said.

Most people don’t. But a recently published bipartisan report on detainee treatment by the Constitution Project said “forced feeding of detainees is a form of abuse and must end.” The World Medical Association has long considered forced feeding a violation of a physicians’ ethics when it is done against a competent person’s express wishes, a point that was reinforced on April 25 by Dr. Jeremy Lazarus, president of the American Medical Association, in a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

There is no indication that the inmates being force-fed were unconscious or incapable of making decisions. And virtually all inmates at Guantánamo have never been charged with any crime and never will be. Nearly 90 have been cleared for release, and another large group can never be tried because they were tortured or there is no evidence they were involved in a particular attack. Only six are facing active charges before a military tribunal.

Mr. Obama was asked about the hunger strike at a White House news conference. “I think it is critical,” he said, “for us to understand that Guantánamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists.”

Mr. Obama said permanent detention without trial is “contrary to who we are. It is contrary to our interests.”

Mr. Obama correctly said that Congress passed malicious laws that restrict the use of federal money to transfer Guantánamo detainees to other countries and prohibit sending them to be tried in federal courts, which, unlike the military tribunals, are competent to do that.

But those laws were lent political momentum by the Obama administration’s bungling of an attempt to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in a federal court. And, since then, Mr. Obama has approved a dangerous expansion of military detention of terrorist suspects.

If he is serious about moving toward closure, there are two steps proposed by the American Civil Liberties Union that could get the ball rolling. He could appoint a senior official “so that the administration’s Guantánamo closure policy is directed by the White House and not by Pentagon bureaucrats,” the A.C.L.U. said, and he could order Mr. Hagel to start providing legally required waivers to transfer detainees who have been cleared. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has urged Mr. Obama to urgently review the status of those prisoners — a primary issue for the hunger strikers.

The hunger strike is an act of desperation over policies even Mr. Obama says cannot be defended. It is his responsibility to deal with it — and close the prison.

Shut it down, Mr. President. Shut it down.

UPDATE: In an NYT op-ed (May 3) Bruce Ackerman and Eugene R. Fidell of the Yale Law School tell President Obama what he should do: “Send judges to Guantánamo, then shut it.”

Imad Mughniyeh

Imad Mughniyeh in the cockpit of TWA flight 847, June 1985

Continuing from my previous post, Mark Perry has a fascinating investigative report on the Foreign Policy website on Hizbullah Über-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who met his just desserts in a quiet Damascus neighborhood on 12 Feb. ’08. I normally find Perry’s writings dodgy but this one is good. Among other things, he says that we don’t know who was responsible for Mughniyeh’s killing, though rather strongly suggests that it may have been the Syrian regime itself. I suspected this myself from the outset—I didn’t believe the Israelis were responsible, as I doubted they were capable of pulling off such an operation in the heart of the Syrian capital—and said so to my (pro-Bashar) Palestinian-Syrian friend as we drove by the spot where Mughniyeh met his end (see pics below). She concurred, saying that it smelled like an inside job.

Whatever the case, the world is not poorer with the eradication of Imad Mughniyeh.

Imad Mughniyeh was blown up in this spot (photo: Arun Kapil)

Iranian Cultural Center, Damascus.
Imad Mughniyeh was blown up to the right of the building (photo: Arun Kapil)

Entrance to Baalbek, Lebanon.
Effigy of Imad Mughniyeh on a tank (photo: Arun Kapil)