When Richard Carleton Interviewed Ghassan Kanafani

Here is my transcription of the late Australian broadcast journalist Richard Carleton's 1970 interview with the Beirut-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesman Ghassan Kanafani, as posted by the Lebanese-American academic Asad Abukhalil (otherwise known as The Angry Arab) on his Twitter feed on 25/6/19.

But first a word from Kanafani's Danish wife Anni to put you in the picture regarding what you are about to read:

"If none of the hundreds of foreign correspondents who filled the by then legendary office at Al-Hadaf [the PFLP's newspaper] were unable to put Ghassan down in a dialogue, it was because the answers he always gave were penetrating, sharp and accurate, the main reason being that the cause which he was defending - the Palestinian revolutionary struggle - is a just one." (Ghassan Kanafani, Palestine Research Center, 1973)

Note also that I have modified some of Kanafani's syntax for greater clarity of meaning:

Richard Carleton: Of the 11 Palestinian movements the most radical of all is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)... It was the Popular Front that hijacked and blew up 3 [sic] jet aircraft at Revolution Airport in the Jordanian desert... The Beirut leader of the Popular Front is Ghassan Kanafani. He was born in Palestine but fled in 1948, as he puts it from Zionist terror. Since then he's been plotting the destruction of both the Zionists and the reactionary Arabs.
Ghassan Kanafani: I know what I know really that the history of the world is always the history of weak people fighting strong people, of weak people, who have a correct case, fighting strong people, who use their strength to exploit the weak.
RC: Turn to the fighting that's been going on in Jordan in recent weeks.* It's your organisation that's been one side of the fight. What has it achieved?
GK:  One thing. That we had a case to fight for. That's a lot. This people, the Palestinian people, prefer to die standing than to lose its case. We proved that King [Hussein] is wrong. We proved that this Palestinian nation is going to continue fighting until victory. We proved that our people can never be defeated. We taught every single person in this world that we are a small, brave nation who are prepared to fight to the last drop of blood for justice for ourselves after the world failed to give it to us. This is what we achieved.
RC: It does seem that the war, the civil war, has been quite fruitless.
GK: It is not a civil war. It's a people defending themselves against a fascist government which you are defending simply because King Hussein has an Arafat problem. It's not a civil war.
RC: Well, the conflict...
GK:  It's not a conflict. It's a liberation movement fighting for justice.
RC: Well, whatever it might be best called...
GK:  Not whatever, because this is where the problem starts. Because this is what makes you ask all your questions. This is exactly where the problem starts. This is a people who are discriminated against fighting for their rights. This is the story. If you say it's a civil war, then your question will be justified. If you say it's a conflict, then, of course, it'll come as a surprise to know what's happening.
RC: Why won't your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?
GK:  You don't mean peace talks exactly. You mean capitulation, surrender.
RC: Why not just talk?
GK: Talk to whom?
RC: Talk to the Israeli leaders.
GK: That kind of conversation is between the sword and the neck.
RC: Well, if there were no swords or guns in the room, you could still talk.
GK: No, I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement.
RC: But despite this, why not talk?
GK: Talk about what?
RC: Talk about the possibility of not fighting.
GK: Not fighting for what?
RC: Not fighting at all. No matter what for.
GK:  People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something. So tell me what is it we should speak about.
RC: Stop fighting...
GK: Or rather what is it we should stop fighting for to talk about?
RC: Talk to stop fighting, to stop the death, the misery, the destruction, the pain.
GK: Whose death, misery, destruction and pain?
RC: Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs.
GK:  Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, forced into refugee camps, starved, murdered for 20 years, and forbidden even to call themselves Palestinians.
RC: Better that way than dead though.
GK: Maybe to you, but to us, no.To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our basic human rights, is as essential as life itself.
RC: You call King Hussein a fascist. Who else among the Arab leaders are you totally opposed to?
GK: We consider the Arab governments to be of two kinds. Ones we call reactionaries who are tied to imperialism: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia. Then there are the other Arab governments, which we call the military placebos [?], such as Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria and so on.
RC: Let me get back to the hijacking of the aircraft.** On reflection, do you think that was now a mistake?
GK: We didn't make a mistake in hijacking them. On the contrary, they were one of the most correct things we ever did.

***

Nothing so much as the manner of their lives and deaths, conferred only by an accident of birth, confirms the vast gulf separating the privileged, white colonial reporter from Australia, Richard Carleton (1943-2006), and the exiled Palestinian driven out of his ancestral homeland by Zionist terror gangs in 1948, Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972).

While Carleton returned to Australia to do the kind of work he enjoyed doing, eventually ending up working for Channel 9 television's 60 Minutes program, and dying of a heart attack while on the job at the age of 62,  Kanafani, aged just 36 at time of his death, was cruelly incinerated along with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees, on July 8 1972 after Israel's Mossad had planted explosives on his car.

You will be interested to know that Richard Carleton is the father of James Carleton who runs ABC Radio National's God Forbid program. To give you the measure of the son, see my 16/7/13 post Our ABC Owned for a transcription of his interview with George Galloway.

[* Carleton here is referring to the period of fighting in Jordan between the armed Palestinian resistance movement, led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah, and allied Palestinian groups such as the PFLP. The fighting ran from 6/9/70 - 17/7/71; **Briefly, Carleton here is referring to the PFLP's hijacking of 5 planes from 6/9/70 to 9/9/70 to Dawson's Field in Jordan. In August 1969, Leila Khaled was one of a PFLP commando unit which hijacked a TWA flight. She ordered the pilot to fly over her ancestral city, Haifa, and land in Syria where the plane was blown up after its passengers were evacuated. In September 1970, she and Patrick Arguello, a Nicaraguan-American, hijacked Israeli EL AL flight 219 from Amsterdam, forcing it to land at Dawson's Field. Patrick was martyred by an Israeli security guard. Leila was captured and flown to a police lockup in Britain. Note that all planes hijacked to Jordan were blown up by PFLP commandos after they had evacuated the passengers.]

Project Rozana

So much to record. So little time. Here's one I've so far had to put on hold. It concerns the woes of, in the words of the appended bio to the opinion piece I'm about to highlight, "Jamal Rifi AM is a Lebanese-born Australian citizen who runs a medical practice in Sydney. He is a prominent member of the Lebanese Muslim community and was awarded The Australian newspaper's Australian of the year in 2015. https://projectrozana.org/"

Dr Rifi's woes are connected with his involvement in Project Rozana, but I'll leave it to him to relate them, as he has in a 31/5/19 opinion piece in The Australian, The children are all that count: Politics & Religion have no role on Project Rozana, where healthcare is paramount:

"During the past two weeks I have been subjected to an enormous amount of abuse from people whose agenda runs counter to mine Most of that abuse has appeared in Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, an influential Arabic language newspaper affiliated with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the country of my birth."

Now if I may interrupt here to clarify the status of Al-Akhbar. Asad Abukhalil, aka The Angry Arab, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, has not only been a contributor to Al-Akhbar's pages but has had something of a love-hate relationship with the paper over the years, making him something of an objective source on the subject. Here, for example, are just two of his blog (The Angry Arab News Service) posts on Al-Akhbar:

"Ignorant Western correspondents who can't read Arabic refer to Lebanese daily, Al-Akhbar, as 'Hizbullah's paper'. Here is a supplement on Lenin published by the paper. You think Hizbullah likes Lenin?" (Al-Akhbar has a special supplement on Lenin: and you think that a Hizbullah paper would honour Lenin and Bolsheviks? November 13, 2017)

"Al-Akhbar's publisher, Ibrahim Al-Amin, published a scathing critique of Hizbullah and its corrupt role in Lebanese domestic politics. He takes on the party for its reluctance to engage in social justice struggle. But the party is not a progressive party so it is not surprising to me." (Criticisms of Hizbullah's political role in Al-Akhbar, September 15, 2017)

Having, I hope, clarified that Al-Akhbar is emphatically not "affiliated" with Hizbullah, let us return to the words of Dr Rifi:

"I have even been referred to the military court in Lebanon in a poorly disguised attempt to discredit me and silence my brother in Beirut, Major-General Achraf Rifi, a former director-general of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, former minister of justice and an outspoken critic of Hezbollah and its masters in Iran." (ibid)

(What Dr Rifi does not divulge here is that his brother has "close ties to Saudi Arabia." (See Wikipedia entry for Achraf/Ashraf Rifi.))

"The abuse is directed at my involvement with Project Rozana, a humanitarian organisation that started in Australia in 2013 and is active in the US, Canada, Israel and Palestinian territory. I joined as a director in 2017. Among my fellow directors are inspirational communal leaders of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths... Our single-minded desire is to build bridges to better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians through health... A cornerstone of Project Rozana is to provide lifesaving treatment for Palestinian children and to build the health capacity of Palestinian society... It's about the children... So why am I accused of promoting a policy of 'normalisation' between Palestinians and Israelis? Why have I become the punching bag of people in Australia and Lebanon who regard any affiliation with Jews, let alone professed Zionists, as being haram (forbidden according to Islamic law)? [...] During my 2017 visit [to Israel], I was privileged to meet Palestinian and Israeli volunteers who each day drive critically and chronically ill Palestinian children from their homes in the West Bank to the checkpoints and from these checkpoints to hospitals in Israel... This is a lifesaving service in the real sense of the word." (ibid)

You'll note here that there is no mention of taking critically ill children from Gaza to Israel for medical treatment. The case of Aisha a-Lulu, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14/6/19 under the title A little girl lost in Gaza politics (Isabel Debre & Fares Akram) is a case in point. Here are the relevant extracts from that piece:

"When Palestinian preschooler Aisha a-Lulu came out of brain surgery in a strange Jerusalem hospital room, she called out for her mother and father. She repeated the cry over and over, but her parents never came. Instead of a family member, Israeli authorities had approved a stranger to escort Aisha from the blockaded Gaza Strip to the east Jerusalem hospital. As her condition deteriorated, the child was returned to Gaza unconscious. One week later, she was dead... So far this year, about half of applications for patient companion permits were rejected or left unanswered by Israel, according to the World Health Organisation. That has forced more than 600 patients, including some dozen children, to leave the territory alone or without close family. [...] The Shin Bet [Israel's FBI] declined to comment on the case. But in a statement, it emphasised Israel's security concerns about Gaza patients and their companions. 'The terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, headed by Hamas, are working tirelessly to cynically exploit the humanitarian and medical assistance provided by Israel,' it said. Efrat, of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said he was confident that 'most of these rejections are arbitrary'."

Which begs the question: why isn't Dr Rifi's Project Rozana involved in cases like that of Aisha a-Lulu in Gaza? If Project Rozana has the ability to do what it does in the West Bank, with gravely ill Palestinian children such as Rozana, who have their parents by their side in hospital, then why doesn't the same pertain in Gaza? Has Dr Rifi ever raised the matter of gravely ill children from Gaza with Project Rozana? If so, what was their response? And if he hasn't raised the matter, why not?

Benny Morris, Again

Today is Nakba Day. So I thought I'd reflect on the latest emission by Israeli 'historian' Benny Morris, author of the 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, written at a time when he could have passed muster as an historian, albeit relying exclusively on Israeli archival material for his tome. Whatever Morris' worth as a historian back then, he has unfortunately undergone a precipitous decline to the point where, today, he is little more than a peddler of pro-Zionist hasbara. Indeed, one could say that the scholarly worth of an historian of the Palestine problem is in inverse proportion to his Zionism, and that there is no better example of the applicability of this axiom than Benny Morris.

What follows is his attack in the current issue of The Atlantic on the views of Palestinian-American legislator, Rashida Tlaib. I have reproduced here only the historical component of Morris' hatchet job on Tlaib, and interpolated my own comments in his text (in italics in square brackets), as well as the wonderfully acid, tweeted commentary of Asad Abukhalil (aka The Angry Arab) (in bold in square brackets) on same. Morris' distortions of the Palestinian past are enough to discredit what he has to say on the more recent history of the Palestine problem:

"On Friday, Representative Rashida Tlaib was attacked by President Donald Trump for a 'horrible and highly insensitive statement on the Holocaust' and for having 'tremendous hatred of... the Jewish people.' Trump's off-base attack distracted from the actual problems with Tlaib's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which she deployed deliberately imprecise language, misleading her listeners about the early history of the conflict in Palestine and misrepresenting its present and future.

"Tlaib told the hosts of the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery that when she remembers the Holocaust, it has a 'calming' effect on her to think that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land, and some their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity; their existence in some ways had been wiped out... all of it in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and terrific persecution of Jews across the world [sic] at that time.' She was, she said, 'humbled by the fact that it was [my Palestinian] ancestors that had to suffer for that to happen.'

"But the historical reality was quite different from what Tlaib described: The Palestinians indirectly, and in some ways directly, aided in the destruction of European Jewry.

"After Hitler's accession to power in Germany in 1933, German and then European Jews sought escape and safe havens. But all the Western countries, including the United States and Britain and its dominions, closed their doors to significant Jewish immigration. [In large part because the Zionist movement wanted them only in Palestine.] Palestine emerged as the only potential safe haven. In 1932, the British allowed 9,500 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. In 1933, the number shot up to 30,000, and in 1935, it peaked at 62,000.

"But from 1933 onward, Palestine's Arabs - led by the cleric Muhammad Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem - mounted a strident campaign to pressure the British, who governed Palestine, to bar all Jews from entering the country. [You are telling me that the Palestinians were opposed to the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state on Palestinian lands and who wanted to displace the natives? And they were opposed to that? That is certainly anti-Semitic. If the Palestinians wanted to prove they were not anti-Semitic they should have given up their homeland, and told the Jewish immigrants to take it over, and they should even have welcomed the bullets and bombs directed against them. Anything less would indeed be anti-Semitic. Just think of it this way, if millions of Muslims wanted to come to America against the wishes of the American population and create a Muslim state over all the US, and if the Americans were to oppose their plan, would that not be outright anti-Islam bigotry? Think about it. Benny Morris may have a point here. Not only that, as Morris tells us, those impudent Palestinians revolted against those who occupied their homeland.] To press home their demand, in 1936 they launched an anti-British and anti-Zionist rebellion that lasted three years. [How dare they!] Apart from throwing out the British, the rebellion's aim was to coerce London into halting all Jewish entry into Palestine.

"Moreover, the anti-Jewish violence [Well, the Zionists were indeed Jewish and they wanted to create a state atop Palestine. So Palestinians should have fought Buddhists and Hindus just to prove they were not anti-Semitic?], which claimed the lives of hundreds of Jews and wounded many more, itself served to deter would-be emigrants from seeking to move to Palestine. [And Palestinians should have been mindful of this and abandoned their opposition to mass immigration? Seriously?] British entry certificates for Jews to Palestine declined to 30,000 in 1936, 10,000 in 1937, and 15,000 in 1938. Those who couldn't get in were left stranded in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Almost all died in the Holocaust, which the Germans unleashed in 1941.

"But the Palestinians' contribution to the Holocaust was also more direct. Husseini, having fled Palestine during the revolt, helped pro-Nazi [but only because they were against the British occupation of their homeland] generals launch an anti-British rebellion in Iraq in 1941 (which itself engendered a large-scale pogrom against Baghdad's Jews, the Farhoud). [As Orit Bashkin, a genuine historian, cautions in her nuanced account of the Farhud ('New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq' (2012)) "a distinction should be made between an analysis of the Farhud and the Farhudization of Jewish Iraqi history - viewing the Farhud as typifying the overall history of the relationship between Jews and greater Iraqi society." As a Zionist, of course, Morris indulges simplistically in the latter. As Bashkin points out: "The Jewish community strived for integration in Iraq before and after the Farhud. In fact, the attachment of the community to Iraq was so tenacious that even after such a horrible event, most Jews continued to believe that Iraq was their homeland. The vision was shattered only by the realities created following the 1948 war in Palestine." (pp 138-39) That Zionism was the undoing of Iraq's Jews (among other Jewish communities in the Arab world) is made abundantly clear by Bashkin: "Equating Judaism and Zionism imperiled Jewish communities in Arab countries. Rather than thinking about the ways in which Arab regimes served colonialism, Arabs began worrying about whether the Jews living among them were serving the interests of Zionism. In this sense British colonialism created a Jewish problem in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine prior to the arrival of British colonialism and Zionism." (p 160)]

"When that rebellion failed, he fled to Berlin, where he was given a villa and a generous monthly salary, and lived in comfort until the end of the world war. During the war, he helped recruit Muslims from the Balkans for the German army and the SS, and in radio broadcasts exhorted Middle Eastern and North African Arabs to launch jihad against the British and 'kill the Jews.' (The texts of Husseini's broadcasts appear in the historian Jeffrey Herf's book The Jewish Enemy.) [Herf btw, although a Zionist historian, is at pains in a 2014 essay, 'Haj Amin, al-Husseini, the Nazis & the Holocaust', to point out that Husseini "did not have an impact on Hitler's decision to murder the Jews of Europe." He also makes no distinction in his essay between Judaism, the faith and Zionism, the political ideology, yet hypocritically critiques Husseini, a Muslim cleric, for failing to make the same distinction. Incredibly, Herf also writes thus of the Nakba: "While acknowledging pressure from other groups that made war in 1948 seem inevitable, the war of 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have taken place without al-Husseini... " IOW, Ben-Gurion's Zionists would have taken their cue from a Jewish state-accepting/collaborating Husseini, and Zionists and Palestinians would have lived happily ever after together in the same land. Some fairy tale that!]

"Subsequently, Hussein fled Germany and, with the Allies reluctant to trigger Arab anger by trying him for collaboration [seeing the British were responsible for driving Husseini into Hitler's arms in the first place], settled down in Cairo. In 1947, he rejected the UN partition plan to settle the Palestine conflict and helped launch the first Palestinian and pan-Arab war against the Zionist enterprise. He spent his last years in Lebanon, embittered by the loss of Palestine and the pan-Arab failure to effectively support the Palestinians, and published a series of anti-Semitic articles before his death in 1974.

"The most prominent Palestinian American intellectual, Edward Said, toward the end of his life enjoined the Palestinians to study the Holocaust and empathize with what had happened to the Jews, if only to properly understand the deep-seated fears and aspirations of the Israelis. It would seem that Tlaib has forsworn such an effort. [I have no idea here just what Morris is referring to here when he paraphrases Edward Said - propagandists generally don't do footnotes - but let me conclude this post with the following eminently commonsense reflection of Said's on the Holocaust and the fate of the Palestinians, written in 2002 during Israel's cruel West Bank rampage, Operation Defensive Shield: "Every human calamity is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes, Yasir Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader (Ariel Sharon) who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Israel's army, airforce, and navy, heavily subsidized by the United States, have been wreaking havoc on the totally defenseless civilian population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the past half century the Palestinians have been a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of the rest under a 35-year-old military occupation, at the mercy of armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land and an army that has killed them by the thousands. Thousands more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihoods, made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without civil or human rights." (From the essay Low point of powerlessness in Said's 2004 book From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap,  pp 206-07)]

The Simple Truth

In response to this tweet of Bernie Sanders@SenSanders...

The Maduro government has waged a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election many observers said was fraudulent. The economy is a disaster and millions are migrating. 1/3 (24/1/19)

Asad Abukhalil@asadabukhalil tweeted...

Those who disappoint you on Palestine will disappoint you on Venezuela, and vice versa.

How true.

The Silence of the 'Humanitarians' on Palestine

Western rhetoric & discourse on Palestine: Human Rights Watch & others, angryarab.blogspot.com, 31/3/18:

"Yesterday's news was symptomatic. You can take it as an example of the hypocrisy of Western (government, academic and media) rhetoric on Palestine. Notice the utter silence of all those who have been shedding crocodile tears over Syrian civilian victims. All those who called for NATO attacks on Libya, Syria and other places in the name of humanitarian concern were silent yesterday. Their ostensible humanitarianism stops at the borders of Palestine, thus exposing their hollow arguments. Worse, look at the statement issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday:

'The shocking number of Palestinians killed and hurt today by soldiers firing across the Gaza fence raises serious questions about Israel's longstanding use of live ammunition to police demonstrations. Israeli allegations of violence by some protesters do not change the fact that using lethal force is banned by international law except to meet an imminent threat to life.'

"This organization has been rightly exposed in the Arab world as a mere arm of Israeli and Western propaganda in our region. Notice that the statement refers to the Israeli massacre as 'policing demonstrations', and it seems to disagree with Israel only on the number of Palestinians killed, not on the killing itself. The statement even refers to unfounded claims by the Israeli occupation forces that unarmed Palestinians used violence, thus justifying the Israeli occupation army's use of gunfire on demonstrators under certain conditions. HRW's director, Kenneth Roth, usually tweets around the clock, and yesterday had one or two tweets [about the massacre] in which he used only the mildest language. However, when foes of the US use gunfire, whether against civilians or armed groups, he automatically refers to the result as 'slaughter'. Yet he never refers to Israeli war crimes as 'slaughter'. Nor was the term 'war crime' used by HRW yesterday. This is the organisation which calls cases of Palestinians stepping on the toes of Israeli soldiers 'war crimes'. Roth was busy reporting alleged government crimes in Venezuela. This is a man obsessed (according to previous reports on him on this blog - just search it) with what he calls 'pro-Israel donors' to his organization, who basically dictate how HRW covers for and beautifies Israeli war crimes. HRW should have been invented by Western war apparatuses long before its founding. It has been a great gift to colonial practice and thought. If the killings yesterday had been perpetrated by a government not aligned with the US, HRW would have called for a meeting of the Security Council and action at the ICC."

Wikipedia Warning

"Yesterday, I was checking. I can report that there has been a clear, organised effort to insert Zionist lies and fabrications into entries about the Arab-Israeli conflict on Wikipedia. Even historical matters are altered and edited, and then they cite the work of polemicists like Alan Dershowitz. It must be coming from the Israeli foreign ministry or the propaganda arm of the occupation regime in Tel Aviv." (Wikipedia entries on Arab-Israeli conflict, The Angry Arab News Service, 9/2/17)

The Syrian Tooth Fairy

When it comes to Syria, it seems that ms journalists can even manage a belief in the tooth fairy:

"Bana Alabed is a 7-year-old Syrian girl with outsized optimism and lustrous brown hair that tumbles past her waist. She enjoys reading about dinosaurs, practicing English with her mom, and playing with her two little brothers... She recently lost a tooth, but the tooth fairy never came, because she lives under siege in eastern Aleppo. 'The tooth fairy is afraid of the bombing here,' she said. 'It ran away to its hole. When the war finishes it will come.' Bana's thoughts are broadcast by her mother, Fatemah, on a Twitter account that she launched earlier this year. It has already amassed more than 200,000 followers. Many news organizations published stories on the earliest tweets and videos, and a Danish reporter brought up Bana's case during an in-person interview with Syria's President, Bashar al-Assad, who dismisses it as 'a game of propaganda'." (Bana Alabed, Twitters child witness to the battle for Aleppo, Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 6/12/16)

Whether the following bucket of cold water was enough to sober Taub up or not is anyone's guess:

Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek Dec 7 @bentaub91 FYI there is no tooth fairy in our culture. This is a very strange line. The tooth fairy is a western thing.

Still, here's another just in case:

"Shame on this woman. Shame on this terrible mother of Bana in Syria. I don't know the circumstances but she should be ashamed to make a statement to the camera and to hold her little child as a prop. I don't know anything about this Fatima but I know that she is one lousy mother. I also notice that her English on Twitter is far better than her spoken English on camera. Notice how Bana seems to be prodded to speak? I can't believe that the insensitive Western reporters are in fact circulating such videos which are not only exploitative of a child but even endangering her by using her as a propaganda prop. But then again, this is by the NBC correspondent [Richard Engel] who still praises the Syrian rebels who kidnapped him and who produced a false spectacle about his release. Fatima can only be forgiven if some man or men behind the cameras are forcing her to engage in this terrible behaviour." (Don't blame Bana - a little child - blame her shameless & terrible mother who exploits her child for the cameras, The Angry Arab News Service, 18/12/16)

Some Questions for Paul McGeough

Fairfax's Paul McGeough on the fall of Aleppo:

"Leaflets recently dropped to the 250,000 to 300,000 residents still in Aleppo's eastern quarter read: 'If you don't leave these areas quickly, you will be annihilated. Save yourselves - everyone has left you alone to face your doom.' True words in that last phrase, and the emphasis is mine." ('Save yourselves': Aleppo residents await dark end game, 14/12/16)

Sorry to spoil your story, Paul, but that Human Rights Watch translation of the Syrian army leaflet is quite misleading (for reasons best known to HRW). The Angry Arab has posted a copy of the original leaflet in Arabic as well as his own translation (30/11/16). Here's mine:

"Read this very carefully. It's your last hope. Save yourselves. If you don't evacuate these areas now, your fate will be sealed. We have provided a safe passage for you to leave. Decide now. Save yourselves. You must understand that you have been abandoned and left to face your fate alone, and that no one will come to your aid. General Command of the Army & Armed Forces."

So where's the annihilation and where's the doom? Who's behind these embroideries? And why?

In an age of spin and disinformation, shouldn't you be a bit more cautious before running with this kind of stuff?

I notice Asad gets most of your stick. You variously describe him as "mimicking Moscow's utter destruction of the city of Grozny," displaying "dictatorial inflexibility," and allegedly being unable to "cope with a bunch of kids daubing anti-regime slogans on a wall in 2011."

Is it really all as as simple as that?

What about your "mishmash of rebel groups, whose levels of radicalisation range from zero to friends of al-Qaeda"?

Who are they? Where do they come from? And are they your idea of an alternative to Asad?

And what about your "Gulf States and others who'll happily fund and arm the rebels, if only for the pleasure of putting a burr beneath the saddle of Damascus, Moscow and Tehran"?

Putting burrs beneath saddles?

Seriously, now, Paul, please tell us just what compelling reason this lot have for feeding the flames in Syria? It better be good!

The War for Israel that Never Ends

Listen up:

"Make no mistake about it, there is a universal campaign for war on Syria. The rise of Hillary Clinton has emboldened the warmongers out there. There are many elements to this campaign. It includes the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties; the Gulf regimes and their lobbyists in Washington, DC; and of course the Zionist lobby through all of its branches. The DC think tanks are now part and parcel of the Zionist-Gulf lobbies in the US capital.

"The Gulf regimes are utilizing tactics of vilification and defamation against Arab and Western progressives who oppose war and destruction in Syria. When you read that Arab leftists have supported Bashar Al-Asad and his mafia regime, do not believe it. I find it hilarious to read such accusations by people who, only a few years ago, were official apologists for, or diplomats of, the Al-Asad regime, at a time when I, for example, was banned by the Syrian regime for years from entering Lebanon (for writings against the father tyrant, Hafidh Al-Asad), and was accused by official Syrian TV in 2012 of receiving money from the West to attack the Syrian regime. While only a minority of Arab leftists support the Al-Asad regime, the overwhelming majority of Arab liberals are supporters, apologists and stooges of the Gulf regimes.

"Arab leftists are on the whole opposed to the Syrian regime and its brutality while also condemning the transparent Western-Zionist-Gulf conspiracy against Syria and the Arab world. Those who advocated the NATO bombing of Libya, and who are responsible for the mess and destruction in Libya today, are trying to replicate the Libyan scenario in Syria under different headings and titles - or under the same headings and titles: the same propaganda techniques are being used, nakedly.

"They are resorting to a variety of tactics and tricks. They sometimes roll out a Syrian supporter of the Gulf regimes and label him a leftist when he hasn't been a leftist for more than 30 years, and when he writes against Arab leftists in Gulf regimes newspapers. They roll out people working for Gulf regime media and present them as neutral observers and as representatives of the silent majority. They roll out former Ba`thists and operatives of the Syrian regime who now pretend they have been fighting for 'peace and democracy' all their lives. They roll out people who have never studied the Middle East, and present them as the foremost experts on the region because they want to push for war and destruction in Syria. They roll out Western journalists who have never before shown any sympathy for Arab victims, and have them pose for the moment in the media as arbiters of sentiment and humanitarianism and as lovers of the Syrian people.

"They roll out Zionist haters of Arabs and Muslims and tell us that they are the real champions of the interests of the Syrian people. They use people such as Obama administration officials who have presided over war and destruction throughout the world, and have them to counsel war and destruction in Syria. They are willing to revive the rhetoric of the Cold War to present the war on Syria as the only safe and rational option for the US and 'national interests'. They even rely on the authority and opinions of a Jordanian regime royal who was installed in the UN to handle human rights from the standpoint of the US-Israeli alliance which put him in his post.

"It is time to raise our voices and to warn of the deadly and devastating consequences of war - or more war - on Syria. Those who still, laughably, claim that there are some secret secular, feminist, democratic Syrian rebels (whose names and identities are never revealed) out there are engaged in the same propaganda which preceded the US war on Iraq and on Libya. The scenario is obvious for all to see. Too many leftists and progressives have been intimidated into not speaking out against Western conspiracies in Syria for fear of being labeled as Asad regime supporters, just as Zionists have intimidated people into not speaking out against Israel for fear of being labeled anti-Semites.

"Don't let it happen, not now, not any time. Western governments and media don't want an end to the war in Syria; they want what have been the most favored Western policies for decades: the continuation of bloodshed by Arabs against Arabs, or by Muslims against Muslims. They want what they worked for in the Iran-Iraq war and the Lebanese civil war, that is, a never-ending war in order to safeguard Israeli aggression and occupation." (There is an orchestrated campaign for war in Syria, and it's in sync with the rise of Hillary Clinton, The Angry Arab News Service, 27/10/16)

When a Sectarian State is OK

When Zionists tell you you're an anti-Semite because you can't accept Israel as a Jewish state, say:

Not really. I also reject Christian, Islamic and Buddhist states.

But then, maybe I could be persuaded to accept Israel as a Jewish state - so long as it's not bang on top of someone else's home. If it were on the moon, say.*

[*A reworking of the Angry Arab's Rejection of Israel? 20/3/16.]

Propaganda 101 by The New York Times

A rejigging of the Angry Arab's piece Just look how the New York Times (with a byline by a token Arab reporter) characterizes the murder of Palestinians (26/12/15):

"Palestinians using knives, guns and vehicles have killed 19 Israelis, an American and a Palestinian resident of the West Bank over the past 3 months. More than 130 Palestinians have been killed during the same period, about two-thirds of them in carrying out, or attempting to carry out, attacks. Others were killed during violent clashes with Israeli forces in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and demonstrations along the Gaza border."

Notice how:

- We know that Palestinians "killed" 19 Israelis. But we don't know who killed 130 Palestinians, only that they "have been killed."

- Israeli victims always precede Palestinian 'victims'.

- Palestinians are always killed for a reason. They were all "using knives, guns and vehicles" in "carrying out, or attempting to carry out, attacks." Regarding those Palestinians "attempting to carry out attacks," all the 'evidence' comes, of course, from Israeli sources.

- We have no idea why Palestinians are killing Israelis because the word 'occupied' is missing in action.

 - Those Palestinians who weren't killed for "carrying out, or attempting to carry out, attacks," were killed "during violent clashes... and demonstrations... " Presumably, whether they were throwing stones at the trigger-happy thugs of the Occupying Power, or engaged in "demonstrations along the Gaza border" (in which case the demonstrating Palestinians are situated behind a fence), they were all criminals and deserved to die, throwing stones at, and demonstrating against, the trigger-happy thugs of the Occupying Power being hanging offences in the apartheid state.

- Those 19 Israelis are presumably, one and all, as pure as the driven snow.

Some Observations on the Carnage in Paris

by As'ad Abukhalil (aka The Angry Arab), 14/11/15

1) ISIS has gone on the offensive: in 10 days, they downed a Russian civilian airliner, massacred Hazara Shi'ites in Afghanistan, bombed the southern suburbs in Beirut and now Paris.

2) Western governments, the US and France in particular, along with their Saudi, Qatari and Turkish allies are directly responsible for the rise and expansion of ISIS through their policies in Syria, which have cradled and nurtured ISIS and its sister terrorist organizations.

3) There is no way on earth to stem the menace of ISIS and Al-Qa'idah-like organizations without going to their source in Saudi Arabia, which is the official headquarters of the Ibn Taymiyyah terrorist interpretation of Islam.

4) Ibn Taymiyyah* is the one thinker/theologian who has inspired and guided the thoughts and deeds of terrorists striking in the name of Islam.

5) Western governments AND media have been cynically silent about the victims of ISIS terrorism if the victims happen to be categorized as 'enemies.' Western governments AND media (just look at the dispatches from the New York Times and Washington Post over the last 4 years on Syria) have consistently ignored and even cheered sectarian massacres of Syrian and Lebanese civilians if they are perpetrated by foes of the Syrian regime.

6) Just as ISIS and Al-Qa'idah have brought terrorism to the heart of the West, Western governments have been exporting death and destruction to the Middle East and North Africa: from Mali to Libya to Egypt to Sudan to Somalia to Syria to Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan. Terrorism has been inflicted on people in those countries by ISIS and Al-Qaidah, and by the bombs and rockets and drones of Western governments.

7) All Arabs today have noticed something that cannot be ignored: how ISIS and Al-Qa'idah terrorists travel the world to inflict their terrorism but yet spare Israel and its interests. The relationship between the Zionist occupation entity and the Nusrah Front - the official branch of Al-Qa'idah in Syria - is no longer secret.**

8) ISIS cannot be defeated from the air as long as Western governments and their Gulf and Turkish allies assist it on the ground, directly or indirectly.

9) Just as Western powers created and nurtured the precursor of Al-Qa'idah in Afghanistan to defeat the communist regime there, those same powers have created and nurtured a deadly cocktail of the worst Middle Eastern terrorists ever in Syria in the hope that they would bring down the Syrian regime.

10) The story of ISIS terrorism began not only with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but also with the creation of a vast safe haven for Islamist terrorism in Libya. Libya was the biggest gift to jihadi terrorism since the fall of the Taliban.

11) The US and France (along with the GCC countries) have been creating a culture of terrorism in the region by creating a terrorist haven in Syria in the name of fighting for 'democracy and secularism' - in the stupid language of John Kerry. They have done this by making dubious distinctions between various terrorists in Syria [and] through making allies of the Nusrah Front and its affiliates.

12) The myth of moderate Syrian rebels has to be discarded. The remnants of the Free Syrian Army are basically ISIS-in-waiting.

13) Western correspondents in Beirut in charge of covering the savage war in Syria are all guilty (with the exception of Patrick Cockburn) of misinforming and misguiding their leaders. They have been ignoring and JUSTIFYING the scores of car bombs and war crimes by Syrian rebels in Syria and Lebanon because they see them as fitting in with the struggle against the Syrian regime.

14) Western human rights organizations are also guilty of creating a culture of bogus human tights rhetoric which has belittled and even justified the war crimes of Syrian rebels (see the latest HRW report on the placing of Alawite women in cages).

15) French policy under the socialist government has even elevated its relationship with the Saudi and Qatari regimes - the two governments most responsible for sponsoring, financing and arming the cocktail of dangerous terrorists in Syria.

16) It is high time for Western governments to give up on their policies and wars in Syria, not to preserve the Syrian regime (as Iran and Russia would like), but to exclude from the future both sets of war criminals there.

17) I don't like Bashar Al-Asad one bit and I have wanted the overthrow of that regime since 1976 when its army invaded Lebanon and smashed my dreams of a progressive, leftist revolution in Lebanon, but who can now disagree with the warnings given by him 3 years ago that those terrorists that the West are now supporting would one day strike at the heart of Europe? Syrian regime supporters are today reprising those words and re-airing them.

18) The Saudi and Qatari regime media (Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya in particular, but others as well) have created a culture of terrorism in which crimes against civilians who happen to be Shi'ites or Alawites or Christians or Sunnis who happen to reside in 'regime-dominated areas of Syria' are justified on a daily basis. Just yesterday, for example, Saudi and Qatari regime media provided ample justification and rationalization for the crimes, and lionized the terrorists who perpetrated them. This culture of terrorism is responsible for the climate in which the crimes in Paris have taken place.

19) Western governments can't have it both ways; they can't continue to support Gulf regimes and arming them while claiming to want to fight terrorism.

20) US and Western governments and media are responsible for a culture of selective denunciations and condemnations: they are silent about the daily crimes committed by that key Western ally, the terrorist state of Israel, against Palestinians.

21) Arabs/Muslims can't reach an agreement against all manner of terrorism as long as Western governments and Arab regimes continue to be selective in condemning terrorism.

22) Western support for dictatorships in the Arab world is responsible in many ways for the creation of ISIS and other terrorist groups.

23) Terrorist groups in the Middle East have been used and misused by local regimes, Western powers and Israel for decades.

24) Yes, the Iraq invasion of 2003 has proven to be exactly what Jacques Chirac warned it would be: a dangerous Pandora's box.

25) Obama has really not deviated from the dangerous policies of Bush, and his expansion of wars in the Middle East has fueled ISIS.

26) The Islam of Arab regimes is a dangerous and conservative Islam. It cannot be changed by Western military commanders, but it can be changed by the people of the region if they are allowed to think freely and choose: but neither the West nor the Arab regimes want the Arabs to think freely. Al-Azhar University has become, through bribes, a tool of the Saudi Wahhabi regime.

27) It is not sectarian to declare Saudi Wahhabi doctrine as the official doctrine of jihadi terrorism. Wahhabiyeh is not a sect: it is a school of fanatical thought and terrorist practice.

28) How do Western powers fight ISIS? They foolishly rely on a royal buffoon in Jordan and on the UAE regime to engage in the promotion of a kinder Islam in social media. The fools in DC who think that those potentates have any standing among young Muslims need to have their heads examined.

29) Western powers and media are all hypocrites: they still cheer or cover up the war crimes of ISIS and Nusrah in Syria if the affected victims happen to reside in Syrian regime-controlled areas.

30) There should be a categorical end to external support of ALL Syrian rebels and to the Syrian regime by all sides.

31) Finally, why does the media coverage portray these massacres as West-vs-Islam when many of the victims in Paris are likely to be Muslims, and when ISIS in the Middle East kills far more Muslims than non-Muslims, despite the fact that members of the US Congress only see Jews and Christians as victims?

[*Ibn Taymiyyah's (1263-1328) writings are a major source for the wahhabi/salafi movements in Islam, which reject modernity and advocate that society should emulate that of Muhammad and the early believers, as literally described by the Qur'an and the hadith;**See my 3/7/15 post Those Rebels, That Hospital, Our Ambassador & His Wife.]

Islamic State's Wahhabi Roots 2

"'Abdul-Wahhab did not confine himself to a revolution in words. He also led, in alliance with Ibn Sa'ud, a violent campaign of forced conversion. In 1746... the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance declared jihad against 'the polytheists' [ie, other Muslims in Arabia and beyond]: for them, it was a war of Muslims against pagans... Najd was the first target for conquest. 'Abdul Wahhab did not live to see the conquest of Mecca; he died 12 years earlier, in 1791... The conquest of Hijaz was the most important, but the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance set its sights on the Shi'ites to the north in Iraq. 'Abdul-Wahhab would refer to Shi'ites as rawafid [rejectionists], which remains part of the current terminology in both Wahhabi and al-Qa'idah literature. What transpired in the campaign against the Shi'ites of southern Iraq, especially in the holy city of Karbala', which contains the burial site of Imam Husayn [grandson of the Prophet, and the great martyr of Shi'ism], was nothing short of a massacre. A Wahhabi historian tells the story:

'In the year 1216 [Hijri, 1802], Sa'ud... set out with his divinely supported army and cavalry and nomads from Najd, from the south, from the Hijaz, Tihama and elsewhere. He made for Karbala and began hostilities against the people of Al-Husayn... The Muslims [ie, the Wahhabis] scaled the walls, entered the city by force, and killed the majority of its people in the markets and in their homes. Then they destroyed the dome placed over the grave of Al-Husayn by those who believe in such things. They took over whatever they found inside the dome and its surroundings. They took the grille surrounding the tomb, which was encrusted with emeralds, rubies, and other jewels. They took everything they found in the town: different types of property, weapons, clothing, carpets, gold, silver, precious copies of the Qur'an, as well as much else - more than can be enumerated. They stayed in Karbala for no more than a morning, leaving around midday with all the property they had gathered and having killed about 2,000 people...'

"Thus we learn of 'holy war', Wahhabi style. Other campaigns of plunder, pillage, and mayhem followed. The attack on Mecca and Medina also included the destruction of the gravestones and tombs of close companions and wives of the Prophet. The Ottomans became concerned; the holy sites of Mecca and Medina constituted important sources of legitimacy of the Sultan... by 1819 an Egyptian army, sent to liberate the holy places by order of the Ottoman sultan, landed in Yanbu', and by 1819 the Sauds were defeated - they were pushed out of the Hijaz, and their capital [Dir'iyyah] was sacked... The House of Saud did not settle for defeat. They made various efforts in the 19th century to reclaim their past glory, but internal disputes and interfamily feuds prevented the family from establishing its control over the whole of Arabia or the holy places. That task was undertaken by the founder of the modern kingdom, King 'Abdul-'Aziz." (pp 63-6)

Islamic State's Wahhabi Roots 1

"People didn't notice, or noticed but did not want to mention [it] for obvious reasons: but a few days ago ISIS explained their practice, on Twitter, of destroying [the] tombs of prophets. They said that Muhammad ibn 'Abdul-Wahhab had done that. How many times do we have to tell you that the inspiration for these fanatics comes from the ideology of the regime you most like in the Middle East... after Israel." (Inspiration of ISIS, The Angry Arab News Service, 31/7/14)

So who is Muhammad ibn 'Abdul-Wahhab? The following notes are taken from As'ad Abukhalil's The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, & Global Power (2004)

"Wahhabiyyah, or Wahhabism, refers to the doctrine founded by Muhammad ibn 'Abdul-Wahhab (1703-92). The followers of the founder are known as Wahhabis... It is debatable whether the movement should be considered a reform movement. Some may look at it as a regressive movement in that it fights reforms in the name of fighting 'innovations'. Members of the movement do not call themselves Wahhabis, they simply call themselves Muslims, or muwahhidun [literally, unifiers, but it refers to those who insist on the unification of the worship of Allah] or Ahl (Community of) At-Tawhid." (p 52)

Abdul-Wahhab was born in the Arabian province of Najd. "His father... was a local judge belonging to the Hanbalite school of jurisprudence [one of the 4 Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Hanbalite...is known as the strictest and most conservative, in a region not renowned for religious scholarship..." (p 53)

"In Medina, a center of great learning before it fell under the control of the anti-intellectual clerics of Wahhabiyah, he was introduced to the works of Ibn Taymiyyah (A.D.1263-1328), who influenced him a great deal... Ibn Taymiyyah was also a man of the sword: he fought the Crusaders and others in his lifetime, and observed that the foundation of religion is 'Qur'an and sword'... Today, Ibn Taymiyyah's thought and practice can be seen as a key philosophical predecessor of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism... His most important contribution to present-day militant ideologies, like those of Al-Qa'idah, is his belief that misguided Muslims - those who do not abide by (his interpretation of) Shari'ah (the body of Islamic laws) - should be fought as if they were infidels." (p 54-5)

Abdul-Wahhab "struck a firm alliance [with Prince Muhammad Bin Sa'ud, ruler of the town of Dir'iyyah] that remains at the core of the Saudi state to this very day: the alliance between the House of Sa'ud and the House of Ash-Shaykh [as the contemporary descendants of 'Abdul-Wahhab are known]. 'Abdul-Wahhab settled and began a campaign of jihad. Jihad means holy struggle in general, but here it refers to the holy war that the two men led in Arabia. Their war continued into the last century until the Saudi kingdom was founded." (p 58)

"The ideas of 'Abdul-Wahhab can be summarized by reference to tawhid, which had at least 3 meanings for him: the first refers to the exclusive quality of lordship of the world to Allah; the second refers to the exclusive association of the divine names and attributes with Allah only... and the third refers to the concentration of worship in God alone... But 'Abdul-Wahhab applied everything dogmatically, and any disagreements that he had with any other Muslims he easily and casually attributed to Satan... This explains the zeal with which 'Abdul-Wahhab, with the aid of the Sauds, went about waging wars, in the name of jihad, against Muslims in Arabia and beyond. For him, war against Muslims who were in error was not only permissible, it was 'obligatory'. Muslims who did not accept his doctrine were no longer to be considered Muslims but rather mushrikun [polytheists]." (pp 60-1)

"The alliance between the Sauds and 'Abdul-Wahhab has produced a politically quiescent and conservative school of political thought that urges obedience to the rulers, within a Wahhabi doctrine. 'Abdul-Wahhab forbade revolt against the rulers, regardless of the policies and conduct of those rulers... This has been the most useful element of Wahhabism for the House of Saud..." (pp 61-2)

To be continued...

What Palestinians Need to Do...

... to get Western media sympathy

by As'ad AbuKhalil (english.al-akhbar.com, 14/7/14)

Basically, for Palestinians to get Western media sympathy and human rights legitimacy, they need to emulate Israeli tactics and methods. Here's what they should do:

1) Palestinians are justified in killing Israelis so long as they first knock on their roofs or call them on their cellphones.

2) Palestinians are justified in shelling Israel provided they declare that their intention is not to harm civilians.

3) Palestinians can get the support of Western media if they refer to Israeli civilian targets as command and control centres.

4) Palestinians are justified in killing Israeli civilians so long as they claim that Israeli terrorists are hiding behind them.

5) Palestinians need to kill far more Israelis than they do so that the kill ratio becomes more like it is now in Gaza - 200 to 0. This is because the absence of casualties in Israel makes Israel the victim and not vice versa.

6) Palestinians need to acquire far more advanced weapons because Human Rights Watch has ruled that possessing advanced weapons makes you morally superior and less liable to commit war crimes.

7) Palestinians should include in their casualty lists all of those suffering from 'shell-shock', or who die from illness or natural causes in times of conflict.

8) Palestinians need to form a lobby to control the US Congress.

9) Palestinians need to be less poor and speak in unaccented American English to make them more friendly to American television audiences.

10) Palestinians need to persuade the New York Times and the Washington Post to plaster the pictures and profiles of their dead on the front pages, otherwise no one in the US will believe that they're victims.

11) Palestinians need to refer to Israelis as terrorists because that makes you the victim - in the case of Israeli terrorists that is.

12) Palestinians need to claim that they are consumed with anguish over any deaths they cause on the Israeli side and to pretend that this makes them less guilty of war crimes. Invoking anguish makes Israeli terrorists sympathetic figures in US eyes.

13) Palestinians need to convert en masse to Judaism because Islam, and even eastern Christianity, is not something westerners identify with.

14) Palestinians need to acquire an air force ASAP and to use it regularly against Israel because that would make them more impressive in Western eyes

15) Palestinians need to obtain the support of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands at the UN because those two states are a great help in protecting Israel from international condemnation.

16) Palestinians need to declare the Saudi king their leader because the Saudis enjoy wide respect in Western capitals.

17) Palestinians need to stop punishing collaborators and agents of Israeli terrorism who provide bombing co-ordinates to the Israeli military because they are the only Palestinians who are liked by Western media and governments.

18) Palestinians in Gaza need to remind the West, just as Israel does on a daily basis, that their government is the only democracy in the Middle East.

19) Palestinians need to field a national orchestra because Aaron David Miller once told me that it is the very existence of an Israeli national orchestra that explains American support for Israel.

20) Palestinians need to label their victims as Mossad-affiliated, or just plain Mossad, terrorists. This labelling trick has worked wonders for Israel.

21) Palestinians need to show the world that they drink whiskey. That always seems to impress the hell out of American correspondents. They're not used to seeing Arabs drink whiskey.

22) Palestinians need to call any attack on their cause racist and anti-Arab, just as Israel always describes criticism of its policies and war crimes as anti-Semitic.

23) Palestinians need to appoint Abe Foxman as their Washington representative. For some bizarre reason, the US media consider him an authority on the Palestinian national movement.

Israel Studies Comes to China

From the Angry Arab:

"From my Saudi student source in China: 'I had a long and fruitful conversation with Prof. X that might be of interest to you regarding Zionist outreach efforts in China. (You can quote but please delete [his name as] they can really hurt him.) He was quite forthcoming since, he admitted, he was hoping for someone to come [from] outside the Israeli-Zionist circles and ask him what they are doing. He added that despite his affiliation with many Zionist groups here, he is pro-Palestinian. However, they still co-opt his name for their projects (as in the Project3500*) and other groups like SIGNAL.** He added that the Zionists have been active in buying scholars since the salaries of scholars in China is quite low, which also explains why there has been such a flowering of Israel studies programs across China (10 have opened over the last 2 years). Most institutions and universities resisted this initially, especially those staffed by the older generation of scholars but the new generation is cracking across the board. (Beijing University doesn't have one. He resisted opening an Israel studies program since he saw it for what it was but he suspects one will open as soon as he leaves.) A lot of the funding for these programs does not come from the Israeli government but from Zionist groups in the US such as AJC [American Jewish Committee]. An indigenous organization called SIGNAL, headed by a Yale alumni businesswoman*** is also doing a lot of work in China... The rationale behind these programs is to fight the so-called de-legitimisation campaign globally and influence Chinese and Indian elites. Zionist advocacy has another angle - working through Christian channels in China. Apparently, the Israeli Tourism Ministry is inviting the leaders of evangelical Christian communities to visit the Holy Land. Many of them end up being very supportive of Israel." (Israel & Chinese universities, angryarab.blogspot.com, 19/5/13)

Can a Max Brenner outlet be far behind?

[*"History is being rewritten to portray Israel as a colonial State built on the lands of the indigenous people, the Palestinian Arabs. This willful erasing of 3,500 years of Israel's history has not yet infected the 1.3 billion Chinese. Dry Bones Project: educating China about Israel's 3500 year history before 1948 through a series of free, online, digital Chinese-language graphic books written and drawn by Dry Bones cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen. Each work will tie the history of China to the history of Israel, emphasizing the concept of the Jews and the Chinese as two ancient civilizations which have survived centuries of attack by barbarian forces and foreign empires." (drybonesproject.com); **Sino-Israel Global Network & Academic Leadership (SIGNAL): "Enhancing China and Israel's relationship through high-level academic interchange. SIGNAL established the first Israel Studies Programs (ISPs) at universities in China. During 2011-2012, SIGNAL opened ISPs in cooperation with Sichuan International Studies University (SISU) in Chongqing, Henan University in Kaifeng, Shanghai International Studies University (SHISU) in Shanghai and Shihezi University in Shihezi, Xinjiang... SIGNAL sponsored Israel Studies research paper competitions expose an ever growing number of students to the modern Jewish State. For a full semester, under faculty-supervised research, the students focus on a range of topics including Israel's history, society, culture and politics." (en.sino-israel.org) ***Carice Witte]

Oriana Fallaci & George Habash: A Correction 3

My last two posts were predicated on the fact of Oriana Fallaci's having fabricated, in her 2004 Islamphobic rant, The Force of Reason, a whole new jihadi version of George Habash out of the interview she did with him for Life magazine back in 1970.

Having re-read that interview, I now believe that As'ad Abukhalil is absolutely correct: Fallaci was also in the business of putting words into Habash's mouth in 1970.

Two quotations in particular from the Life interview, which appeared under the heading A leader of the fedayeen: 'We want a war like the Vietnam war' in the June 22 issue, warrant attention:

"Countries like Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland, with many Jews among their population, allow their territory to be used as a base for the Jews to fight the Arabs. If Italy, for instance, is a base against the Arabs, the Arabs have a right to use Italy as a base against the Jews."

"The attacks of the Popular Front are based on quality, not quantity. We believe that to kill a Jew far from the battleground has more of an effect than killing 100 of them in battle; it attracts more attention."

When one compares these quotations (with their suggestion that Jews qua Jews, wherever they live, are potential targets for Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) guerillas) with what the PFLP were really saying at the time, their authenticity immediately becomes suspect.

For example, here's a quote from a PFLP booklet, Palestine: Towards a Democratic Solution. (The booklet, in English, was issued by the PFLP Information Department in 1970.):

"The Palestinian liberation movement is not a racial movement with aggressive intentions against the Jews. It is not directed against the Jews. Its object is to destroy the state of Israel as a military, political and economic establishment which rests on aggression, expansion and organic connection with imperialist interests in our homeland. It is against Zionism as an aggressive racial movement connected with imperialism which has exploited the sufferings of the Jews as a stepping stone for the promotion of its interests and the interests of imperialism in this part of the world, which possesses resources and provides a bridgehead into the countries of Africa and Asia. The aim of the Palestinian liberation movement is to establish a democratic national state in Palestine in which both Arabs and Jews will live as citizens with equal rights and obligations..." (pp 7-8)

Oriana Fallaci, therefore, appears to have perpetrated layer upon layer of fabrication as far as the figure of George Habash (and who knows how many others) is concerned, stretching across 4 decades. Perhaps we should consider the creation of an annual 'Oriana Fallaci Prize for Zionist Fabrication'.

Oriana Fallaci & George Habash: A Correction 2

Further to yesterday's post on Fallaci and Habash, after sending As'ad Abukhalil a link, he has responded to my post on his website as follows:

"Oh no, I am not confused. Her profile in Life magazine was NOT an honest piece of reportage, and it was in that profile that she fabricated a quotation by Habash." (23/8/12)

Just to get to the bottom of the matter, here's Abukhalil's post of 4 February 2008, written in response to my original post on the subject, Fabricating Dr George Habash (2/2/08) (NB: The quotation comes from Fabricating Dr George Habash.):

The lies of Fallaci: "There's only one problem - Habash said nothing of the kind, and the text of Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with him gives her lunacy the lie. To begin with, the interview took place in 1970, not 1972, the Palestinian resistance having been purged from Jordan by July 1971. Then there's the nonsense about the gun. In the introduction to the interview, she wrote, 'We met at night in the suburbs of Amman, in a building attached to a refugee camp. The room contained one desk and a few chairs; outside the closed doors, armed fedayeen stood guard. Inside there were only 4 of us: Habash, myself, a photographer and the man who had driven us there'." (thanks Merc)

Now in my 2008 post, Fabricating Dr George Habash, I compared Fallaci's 1970 Life interview with Habash to the reworking of that interview in her 2004 book The Force of Reason, exposing the latter as an obvious forgery.

It may well be that Fallaci's original Life interview contained a fabricated quotation. I don't know. If that is the case, as Abukhalil contends, then what we're dealing with here amounts to a fabrication (Fallaci: 2004) of a fabrication (Fallaci: 1970). (I note, for example, that AbuKhalil, in his 18/3/12 comments on Daniel Byman's book A High Price: The Triumph & Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, mentions that Byman cites "an invented quotation attributed falsely by the fanatical Zionist journalist Oriana Fallaci to George Habash." It would be interesting to know what that quotation is.)

I again refer those who are interested in the matter to my original 2/2/08 post Fabricating Dr George Habash.

Oriana Fallaci & George Habash: A Correction

In a recent comment on fabricated quotes by Zionists, As'ad Abukhalil wrote as follows:

"I was thinking about the recent Zionist fabrication of a quotation by Hasan Nasrallah which made it into a front page article in the New York Times. There is a long history of such fabrications: over the decades Zionists have fabricated quotations and attributed them to Nasser, to Ahmed Shuqayri, to Arafat and most recently to Hasan Nasrallah. Oriana Fallaci, the lousy, sleazy, trashy Italian journalist, fabricated a quotation by George Habash which made it into a Life magazine profile of him..." (Zionists & the fabrication of quotes by their enemies, Angry Arab News Service, 17/8/12) 

Abukhalil was first alerted to Fallaci's Habash fabrication by me some years back. Unfortunately, however, in recalling the matter, he's confused her 1970 Life magazine profile of Habash, which appears to be an honest piece of reportage, with her later distortion of same in her book-length Islamophobic rant, The Force of Reason (2004).

I refer those who are interested in the full story to my 2/2/08 post Fabricating Dr George Habash.

Syria's 'Alawis: A Corrective

Asad Abukhalil, aka The Angry Arab, one of the closest observers of the Syrian scene, was moved recently to blow the following whistle:

"It is the season of open bigotry against 'Alawites - qua 'Alawites. I see it in the Qatari-Saudi media and in the Western media. Western journalists are even justifying the butchery of 'Alawites by gangs of the Free Syrian Army. The coverage is almost exterminationist in aim. Every attack on 'Alawite civilians is coupled with a reference to shabihah (equating the two) and ''Alawite rulers'. It is quite unprecedented. I mean, key elements of the Zionist regime are Jewish, but I never see Western journalists justifying attacks on Israeli civilians [for that reason]. When you read articles on Syria... just replace the word 'Alawite with the word Jewish and see how it sounds. The fact that the Syrian regime is 'Alawite does NOT mean 1) that the regime has not repressed anyone and everyone regardless of sect: the key criterion is [regime] loyalty and not sect; 2) that the regime would have survived and endured without support from non-'Alawites (13-14% of the population); 3) that there has ever been a consensus among 'Alawites in support of the Asad regime. Overall, the Western media adhere to liberal standards - except when it comes to the Middle East. Then they start sounding like Europe's fascist media." (Angry Arab News Service, 20/7/12)

So what's really going on here?

It should never be forgotten that Israel, the archetypal Middle Eastern sectarian state, has long dreamt of remaking the area into a sectarian patchwork under its domination. The "most explicit, detailed and unambiguous statement to date [1982] of the Zionist strategy in the Middle East," to borrow the words of scholar Israel Shahak, is the nightmare scenario of Israeli journalist and foreign ministry official Oded Yinon:

"Lebanon's total dissolution into 5 provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in the present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today." (A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties)

The Ziocon-initiated, US-led war on Iraq, which tore apart the cohesive, non-sectarian Ba'thist state and society there, effectively reducing it to three separate sectarian statelets (Shia, Sunni, Kurd), has been Israel's signal success so far. Syria could well be its second - helped along, if not yet a Libyan-style intervention, then at least by covert USraeli involvement.

Side by side with those mysterious explosions* aimed at key members of the Asad regime, the Western press has begun disseminating  Zionist fantasies of a dismembered Syria. Examples include US Zionist academic Franck Salameh's speculation about the 'logic' of a separate 'Alawi state in Syria (An Alawite State in Syria? nationalinterest.org, 10/7/12) and the following ludicrous analogising by Jonathan Kay of the Ziocon Foundation for Defence of Democracies:

"A small, marginalised people, kicked around the Middle East for centuries by Muslim empires, finally carves out an independent home for itself on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. But life remains precarious: Islamists seek to delegitimize the newly established homeland, declaiming the ruling sect as a gang of infidel occupiers. Now, the simmering hatred of the occupied people finally has been transformed into an unstoppable political and military intifada - cheered on by Western human-rights advocates... Like Israel's Jews, members of the 'Alawi sect in Syria regard their control of the nation as an existential issue. There is only one 'Alawi state, just as there is only one Jewish state, and its destruction would mean the end of the 'Alawis as a political entity on the world stage - probably forever." (How Assad's fall will lay ruin to the Alawi once-in-a-millenium promised land, nationalpost.com, 9/7/12)

To help clarify the position of the 'Alawis in Syria and chart a way through the ms media propaganda fog currently directed at them, a species of sectarian agitprop exposed so perceptively by Abukhalil, I thought it might be useful to present the following relatively objective assessment of Syria's 'Alawi community and its links with the ruling Asad dynasty. It comes from a 1991 Human Rights Watch publication, Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime:

"Hafez Asad [Bashar's father] and many of his associates are 'Alawis, Syria's largest minority community. The 'Alawis, who number about 1.4 million, have their origins in peasant villages in the Jabal al-Ansariya mountain chain near Syria's Mediterranean coast. There they lived in relative isolation until fairly recently, preserving their heterodox beliefs. Extremely poor, many farmed the land of absentee Sunni landlords from Lataqia or Hama (though there were some 'Alawi landlords). The Sunni-'Alawi tension in Syria has its roots, in part, in this class distinction.

"In the 1940s, many ambitious 'Alawi youth entered the army or the Homs Military Academy - admission after 1945 was no longer based on social background - as a way of moving up in the world. And many did rise swiftly in the late 1940s and 1950s as military coups decimated the upper ranks of the officer corps. The Ba'th party also attracted some of these young 'Alawis, including Hafez Asad. By the early 1960s, many noncommissioned and junior officers were 'Alawis. Some of these young officers eventually led the party to power in 1963.

"Unable to rely on mass support, the Ba'thist officers turned to reliable co-religionists to secure control over the military. An 'Alawi officer named Salah Jadid assumed control over military assignments and promotions. In 1963, he purged some 700 officers, replacing more than half with 'Alawis.

"With Jadid's coup in 1966, an 'Alawi network emerged at the heart of the regime. Hafez Asad's coup in 1970 brought even more 'Alawis into top posts in the Ba'th party, security services, and key army units. Since then, the security services and commands of the key military units at the division and brigade levels have been securely in 'Alawi hands. Some two-thirds of Military Academy students and over half of the top ranks of the officer corps are also 'Alawis. The Ba'th party, too, has been strikingly 'Alawi, though less so than the military-security nexus. Both the Regional Command and the Central Committee have had a markedly 'Alawi membership - between a quarter and a half of the total. This is also true of other key party organs.

"At the very top, personal connections are narrower than 'Alawi status alone, and include relations to the Asad family, membership in Asad's 'clan', or ties to his natal village of Qardaha. Many of the top security chiefs, such as 'Ali Duba and Muhammad al-Kuly, belong to these more intimate circles.

"'Alawis have increasingly made large fortunes, usually through their connection to the security apparatus. They are to be found disproportionately among the country's foremost real estate magnates, construction billionaires, and wealthy black marketeers. Muhammad Haydar, for example, amassed a large fortune as the regime's economic chief in the 1970s; his kickbacks earned him the sobriquet 'Mister 5%'. Rif'at as-Asad became the richest of them all. With profits from smuggling and protection rackets, he built up an international portfolio of investments, including a casino in Malta, a hotel in Marseilles, a cement factory in East Beirut, a publishing company in Paris, and even a sizable bloc of shares in the Anglo-French Chunnel.

"In addition to making money, many 'Alawis have risen through the university and joined the professions and intelligentsia. Although influence and favoritism may have helped some, a number are very gifted and have taken their place among Syria's foremost filmmakers and authors.

"The regime has tried to organize the entire 'Alawi community as a base of support with partial success. Jamil al-Asad, another of the president's brothers, founded the 'Alawi-based Imam 'Ali Murtada Committee to galvanize 'Alawis behind the regime in the late 1970s, when it was most threatened. But such a blatantly sectarian group became an embarrassment and Asad disbanded it in 1983. There remain many poor 'Alawis who receive few benefits from the fact that they are so well represented at the top. Many 'Alawi intellectuals are sharply critical of the regime. And many 'Alawis are active in the secular opposition parties, especially in the Party for Communist Action, which is heavily 'Alawi both in its leadership and in its rank and file.

"At the same time, Sunnis, together with a handful of Druze and Kurds, have occupied many top posts, even if they may have been excluded from the innermost circles of power. Among the top Sunni officeholders are Vice President 'Abd al-Halim Khaddam, Defence Minister Mustafa Tlas, Ba'th Assistant Secretary-General 'Abdullah al-Ahmar, and Army Chief-of-Staff Hikmat Shihabi. Many of these figures have profited as handsomely as their 'Alawi counterparts. Tlas, for example, has amassed a fortune over the years and owns a well-known publishing company as well as agricultural properties and manufacturing concerns.

"Nor has 'Alawi domination of the regime necessarily kept many Sunni merchants and businesspeople from prospering. Among the more prominent are Othman al-'Aidi, owner of the Sham and Merinid hotel chains, and Badr al-Din Shallah, president of the Damascus Chamber of Commerce and a trader in agricultural produce. Christians, such as Armenian construction magnate Pyzant Ya'qubian, also have an important place among the business elite, as do those from other minorities, such as Shi'i tourism king Saib Nahhas.

"'Alawi favoritism is far from absolute. Nor is it in any way incorporated in law. But it is reasonable to conclude that the domination of the commanding heights by an 'Alawi clique has soured group relations in the country and detracted from the development of a secular and integrated Syrian society." (pp 93-94)

[*The latest of which has been described by the clueless Anthony Loyd of my previous post simply as a "rebel bomb" (Death of loyalists a blow to Assad, The Times/The Australian, 20/7/12).]