…for whatever my opinion is worth.
Executing prisoners is disgusting enough; executing civilians in cold blood, like prominent Aleppo families, because they’re friends of the Assad’s, is when I pull my vote.
And, though I’ve learned to become pretty wary of these jihadist allegations and their Bush II “war-on-terror” timbre, these don’t sound so bogus: Al Qaeda Insinuating its Way into Syria’s Conflict.
And the video:
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From the New York Times — August 3, 2012
By MUNIB R. MASRI
Nablus, West Bank
EARLIER this week, while Israel’s cheerleaders and Las Vegas casino moguls were parsing every syllable uttered by Mitt Romney in Jerusalem as fastidiously as the Olympic judges were scrutinizing every back flip in London, millions of Palestinians issued a giant collective yawn.
There was little anger when Mr. Romney made thinly veiled racist allusions to the supposed inferiority of Palestinian culture and genuflected at the altar of distant fund-raising thrones in New York and Los Angeles.
Of course, Hamas sputtered rejections and the Iranians hyperbolically accused Romney of “kissing the foot” of Israel — shrill criticisms easily dismissed in the West.
On the legendary “Palestinian street,” however, there was only weariness after Mr. Romney’s slight. It was nothing we haven’t heard before, nothing we haven’t seen in so many other pre-election panderings.
American Jews like to split hairs over which candidate is more pro-Israel or who better represents their interests: Is Mr. Obama’s facial expression lacking? Is that omitted adjective by Mr. Romney significant? But ask 9 out of 10 Palestinians and you will get an identical response: “There is no difference between Obama and Romney.”
President Obama brought his clarion call for hope and change to Cairo early in his tenure. He said nice, positive things about respecting the Muslim world and encouraging a true peace between Israel and Palestine. And then he did nothing in slow motion for more than three years.
Now Mr. Romney has waded into the debate. His claim that there can be “no daylight” between Israeli and American policies amused us here in the West Bank. In fact, there is no daylight today under Mr. Obama, nor was there under George W. Bush. America’s veto of Palestine’s bid for statehood in the United Nations Security Council continues to stifle our legitimate ambitions for self-determination. Like peas in a pod or twins in a crib, American foreign policy and Israel’s desires move in tandem. Palestine plays no role whatsoever in this cozy equation.
Mr. Romney believes that Israel’s impressive economic growth is because of the country’s strong culture and that the Palestinian economy lags because — implicitly — our culture is inferior.
As one of the most successful businessmen and industrialists in Palestine today (there are many of us), I can tell Mr. Romney without doubt or hesitation that our economy has two arms and one foot tied behind us not by culture but by occupation.
It’s hard to succeed, Mr. Romney, when roadblocks, checkpoints and draconian restrictions on the movement of goods and people suffocate our business environment. It is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of our Palestinian culture that we have managed to do so well despite such onerous constraints.
It was predictable that Mr. Romney would eventually visit our area — although he didn’t actually set foot on our land or see how we live up close and personal — in order to score points.
Palestinians were genuinely saddened, however, by the fact that he deliberately chose to ignore us. There was nary a word about our plight, our day-to-day challenges, our rights and our future. We were here, just meters away from his entourage, yet we were not on his radar or on his agenda.
To paraphrase an ancient observation: Romney came. He saw only what his advisers permitted him to see. And he conquered his fund-raising goals by saying what his boosters insisted on hearing, while completely ignoring one of the two peoples who live here.
But peace is not made by ignoring one party while lionizing the other. In Palestine, we stubbornly continue to hope that the occupant of the White House will one day recognize this.
Munib R. Masri, a businessman and industrialist, is the chairman of Padico, the Palestine Development and Investment Company.
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From The New York Times: “As Syrian War Roils, Sectarian Unrest Seeps Into Turkey”
As Syria’s civil war degenerates into a bloody sectarian showdown between the government’s Alawite-dominated troops and the Sunni Muslim majority, tensions are increasing across the border between Turkey’s Alawite minority and the Sunni Muslim majority here.
Many Turkish Alawites, estimated at 15 million to 20 million strong and one of the biggest minorities in this country, seem to be solidly behind Syria’s embattled strongman, Bashar al-Assad, while Turkey’s government, and many Sunnis, supports the Syrian rebels.
The Alawites fear the sectarian violence spilling across the border. Already, the sweltering, teeming refugee camps along the frontier are fast becoming caldrons of anti-Alawite feelings.
“If any come here, we’re going to kill them,” said Mehmed Aziz, 28, a Syrian refugee at a camp in Ceylanpinar, who drew a finger across his throat.
He and his friends are Sunnis, and they all howled in delight at the thought of exacting revenge against Alawites.
Many Alawites in Turkey, especially in eastern Turkey where Alawites tend to speak Arabic and are closely connected to Alawites in Syria, are suspicious of the bigger geopolitics, and foreign policy analysts say they may have a point. The Turkish government is led by an Islamist-rooted party that is slowly but clearly trying to bring more religion, particularly Sunni Islam, into the public sphere, eschewing decades of purposefully secular rule. Alawites here find it deeply unsettling, and a bit hypocritical, that Turkey has teamed up with Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive countries in the world, and Qatar, a religious monarchy, both Sunni, to bring democracy to Syria.
The Alawites point to the surge of foreign jihadists streaming into Turkey, en route to fight a holy war on Syria’s battlefields. Many jihadists are fixated on turning Syria, which under the Assad family’s rule has been one of the most secular countries in the Middle East, into a pure Islamist state.
More:
The Alawites here are worried they could become easy targets. Historically, they have been viewed with suspicion across the Middle East by mainstream Muslims and often scorned as infidels. The Alawite sect was born in the ninth century and braids together religious beliefs, including reincarnation, from different faiths.
Many Alawites do not ever go to a mosque; they tend to worship at home or in Alawite temples that have been denied the same state support in Turkey that Sunni mosques get. Many Alawite women do not veil their faces or even cover their heads. The towns they dominate in eastern Turkey, where young women sport tank tops and tight jeans, feel totally different than religious Sunni towns just a few hours away, where it can be difficult even to find a woman in public.
Compilation from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:
Yesterday, Reuters reported that Obama had authorized covert assistance to the Syrian rebels:
Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad. This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit still circumscribed, support for Assad’s armed opponents – a shift that intensified following last month’s failure of the U.N. Security Council to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government. The White House is for now apparently stopping short of giving the rebels lethal weapons, even as some U.S. allies do just that.
Today, Kofi Annan quit his job as the UN and Arab League’s peace envoy for Syria, citing “finger pointing and name calling” in the Security Council. Meanwhile, Juan Cole catches us up on the battle for Aleppo:
The BBC speaks of a ‘stalemate’ in Aleppo, with the regime so far unable to oust the rebels from key neighborhoods. I was told by a young activist from Aleppo, in telephone contact with family & friends, that the rebels were taking new neighborhoods and police stations. That these actions were being taken mid-week was confirmed from Aleppo by Kim Sengupta. The fighters appear to hope to take and keep Aleppo, which can be resupplied easily with arms via the Turkish border.
Massacres are occuring on both sides. Earlier this week, rebels in Aleppo executed some leaders of a local Alawite ghost brigade death squad. [Human Rights Watch] warned them that this kind of thing could get them charged with war crimes. On Thursday, the regime was accused of carrying out executions of rebels as it went door to door in Damascus, where it killed dozens.
James Miller passes along the following video, which is said to be of families grieving over the bodies of those killed in that massacre:
The Guardian has more details about the situation in Aleppo, including analysis of a video that purports to show the Free Syrian Army (FSA) executing regime combatants. The newspaper also just built a remarkable tool to help understand the escalating death toll in Syria, while Aj Jazeera has their own tool to track regime defections. Food is running out inside Syria as well, and the nation’s banks are coming to a standstill. Meanwhile, the composition of the anti-regime forces continues to be of great concern, as foreign jihadists and Al-Qaeda are clearly operating in Syria. Two kidnapped journalists were rescued by the FSA last week after being mistakenly led into a jihadist camp and captured:
The jihadist group is believed to have arrived in the area only days earlier and is believed to be made up solely of men who identify with a salafist jihadist world view, a more puritanical version of Islam.”There wasn’t a Syrian present,” [journalist Jeroen] Oerlemans said. “They were all youngsters from other countries, African countries, Chechnya. They said they thought we were CIA agents. But then it quickly became apparent they wanted to trade us for ransom.”
(Photo: Rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters capture two policemen who the FSA allege are “Shabiha” or pro-regime militiamen, on July 31, 2012, as the rebels overran a police station in Aleppo. A watchdog said that rebels killed 40 officers and seized three police stations during the pivotal battle for the commercial capital. By Emin Ozmen/AFP/Getty Images)
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No more to be said.
“The medal was Phelps’s 22nd over all, the most by any Olympian; his 18th gold; and his 6th in London. Phelps’s week has been something of a farewell tour, marked at different times by sadness or smiles, memories and melancholy. He has seemed to soften around the edges, letting people into a life so long closed to outsiders as he pursued swimming history, but he never lost his edge.”
The vultures’ll continue hounding him, come up with the tritest dirt; as soon as they had to stop dissing him when he shook off his initial losses in London, the sleazebag press had started going off on stories about why his father was absent — a real wound for him — and not like Lochte’s, red-faced and slobbering over his son after every event.
Knowing his anger and sensitivity about his relationsip with his father, I can only imagine how that infuriated him; and can now guess at how the 2009 witch-hunt and the American public repentance machine he has had to bow to all these years must’ve twisted up his guts in rage: Michael Phelps. Maybe now he can fulfill my fantasy and publicly declare: “I’m Michael Phelps and fuck all y’all.” And take a good, deep hit. And not just a hit. Drink. Eat whatever what you want. Sleep late. Travel. Fuck a lot. And then eventually think about what’s next.
‘Cause whatever this tough, driven, generous and fundamentally All-American good-natured kid does next, he’ll kick ass and the gods’ll all be behind him as he does.
Twenty-two medals — eighteen gold. The greatest Olympian in history.
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“But tell me: how did gold get to be the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its brilliance; it always gives itself. Only as an image of the highest virtue did gold get to be the highest value. The giver’s glance gleams like gold. A golden brilliance concludes peace between the moon and the sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless, it is gleaming and gentle in its brilliance: a gift- giving virtue is the highest virtue.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
By Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images (GOTTA click)
For other Phelps posts see: “Michael Phelps“; “An angry man — that is my subject.”; “…απορώ και εξίσταμαι.” , which explains the title of this post; and “I told you they wouldn’t leave him alone” or check out tag box at lower right.
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From The New York Times: “Syria’s Crumbling Pluralism”
Would be nice to have a little more information on the photo; doesn’t this feel like part of the indifference the opinion piece is about? What is this? From their generic “Syrian Christian” file…? (Reuters)
“Syria’s 2.3 million Christians, constituting about 10 percent of the country’s population, have generally known a more privileged existence under the Assad dynasty than even the Shiite Alawi sect to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs. Yet their allegiance to Assad was never absolute. Some Christians openly clamored for political change in the early months of the anti-government uprising. But as the rebellion became suffused with Sunni militants sympathetic to or affiliated with Al Qaeda, Christians recoiled.
“A churchgoing Syrian told me that he used to see himself primarily as “Syrian” and that religious identity, in political terms, was an idea that never occurred to him — until an opposition gang attacked his family earlier this year in Homs. “It’s a label they pinned on us,” he said. “If their revolution is for everyone, as they keep insisting it is, why are Christians being targeted? It is because what they are waging is not a struggle for freedom, and it’s certainly not for everyone.””
“As Saudi Arabian arms and money bolster the opposition, the 80,000 Christians who’ve been “cleansed” from their homes in Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan in Homs Province in March by the Free Syrian Army have gradually given up the prospect of ever returning home.
“The rebels’ conduct has prompted at least some Sunnis who had supported the rebels and once-wavering Syrians to pledge renewed loyalty to Assad. Many who once regarded the regime as a kleptocracy now view it as the best guarantor of Syria’s endangered pluralism.”
And the usual well-intentioned bullshit:
A Sunni shopkeeper in the impoverished suburb of Set Zaynab, which was partly destroyed in the clashes last week, no longer supports the rebellion. “I wanted Assad to go because he is corrupt,” he said. “But what happened here, what they did, it scared me. It made me angry. I cannot support the murder of my neighbors in the name of change. You cannot bring democracy by killing innocent people or by burning the shrines of Shiites. Syrians don’t do that. This is the work of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia,” he added, referring to the ultra conservative Sunni sect.”
Please see other posts under tag: Syrian Christians
And then this, which rankles my Shi’ite affections, especially for Zeynep:
And the shock? Who’d you think these guys were? the Boy Scouts?
“Video Said to Show Execution by Syrian Rebels Stirs Debate”
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 