Mideast Media Sampler 08/04/2011

From DG:

1) The only hate

This week the New York Times reported on a poll of Muslims in America, Muslims Are Loyal to U.S. And Hopeful, Poll Finds. After establishing:

“The prejudice and discrimination are definitely there, and that’s something we have consistently seen in the data,” Mr. Younis said. “But at the same time many of the people in the Muslim-American community seem to be doing relatively well, and part of their doing well is being able to be full-fledged Americans, to participate in the American experience.” 

the final three paragraphs read

Among the most intriguing findings: two-thirds of American Muslims say they identify strongly with the United States, about the same percentage as those who say they identify strongly with their religion. But other religious groups identified far more than Muslims with the United States. Protestants, Catholics and Jews said they identified with the United States far more strongly than they identified with their respective faiths. 

Almost half of Muslim Americans said that they had experienced religious or racial discrimination in the last year. That was far more than the members of any other religious group. About one-third of Mormons said they had experienced discrimination in the last year, putting them second in that category after Muslims. About one-fifth of Jews, Catholics and Protestants said they had experienced prejudice.
On many key questions in the poll, it was American Jews whose answers most resembled those of Muslims. Jews were the most likely of any religious group besides Muslims to say that Muslims are loyal Americans, and that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Jews were just as likely as Muslims to say that American Muslims face prejudice. 

I find it interesting that the self-perception of Muslims is treated unchallenged as news. There are two contrasts.


A few weeks ago, when writing about the flotilla, Setting Sail on Gaza’s Sea of Spin, Ethan Bronner wrote:

Shlomo Avineri, a historian and onetime director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper last week that when the flotilla is described as aimed at delegitimizing Israel, he recalls the Soviet Union’s reaction to any criticism as an assault on its right to exist. Opposition to Israeli policy is not the same as an attack on its existence, he said, and the government’s approach damages Israel.
His argument about the flotilla points to the larger dynamic: the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is increasingly disintegrating from a debate over borders and security into a battle between those claiming that Israel is a genocidal machine and those who dismiss every attack on its policy as an assault on its essence. 

Bronner argued that Israeli concerns were largely exaggerated. That's after whitewashing the nature of the IHH in the article.

The other contrast with this article is the lack of reporting on the FBI's annual survey of hate crimes. According to the latest annual figures (covering 2009) there were 931 hate crimes classified as anti-Jewish and 107 classified as anti-Muslim, which would be at odds with the poll just reported. Except for the immediate wake of 9/11, this ratio has held ever since the FBI has been reporting on hate crimes. If this has been reported on by the New York Times recently, I haven't found it.

Another recent artcile, The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement, focuses on David Yerushalmi. The tone of the article is adversarial.

A confluence of factors has fueled the anti-Shariah movement, most notably the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York, concerns about homegrown terrorism and the rise of the Tea Party. But the campaign’s air of grass-roots spontaneity, which has been carefully promoted by advocates, shrouds its more deliberate origins. 

In fact, it is the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the office of a little-known lawyer, David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam. Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah. 

Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, Mr. Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war. 

I know little about Mr. Yerushalmi other than his name, but the article was written not to illuminate anything about him but to refute him and his efforts.

Contrast that with New York Times treatment of the Walt-Mearsheimer essay The Israel Lobby (before it was expanded into book form) Essay Stirs Debate About Influence of a Jewish Lobby

While condemnations have been fierce at home, the article has drawn some praise in British publications for stimulating debate.

The Kennedy School removed its logo from the cover page of the essay on its Web site to make clear that it contained the professors' opinions and analysis, not the school's. But Harvard and the University of Chicago have stood behind Dr. Mearsheimer and Dr. Walt, with officials citing the need to protect free expression.

''This is a kind of classic call in academic freedom,'' said David T. Ellwood, dean of the Kennedy School. ''If universities stand for anything, they stand for getting ideas out there and then for open debate. Some ideas are controversial, some ideas are very controversial, some ideas are wrong. But the administration shouldn't be in the position of making a judgment on something like this. Other scholars should be making those judgments, and ideas should rise and fall in the bright light of scholarly debate.'' 

While the article does quote from critics including Alan Dershowitz and Eliot Cohen, the essay is still presented as an exercise in academic freedom sparking a much needed debate. Criticisms of the essay were attributed to its critics ("Many of the articles have castigated the paper as historically inaccurate and sloppy in its scholarship..." but not reported uncritically ("Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law...").


2) The Mubarak trial

The Wall Street Journal reports on perceptions of the Mubarak trial

Televised images of Egypt's former President Hosni Mubarak lying on a gurney in a courtroom cage transfixed viewers in the Middle East. 

Many said they hoped the trial would set an example for other autocratic leaders in the region who were clinging to power despite widespread calls for change, as in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

Others voiced pity for 83-year-old Mr. Mubarak, looking frail on a hospital bed, and worried that his public humiliation could send the reverse message to other dictators—that if they stop fighting they would face a similar fate.

The Associated Press has more.

Sayed Ahmad, 29, an unemployed Bahraini, said he hoped his countrymen would learn from Egypt.
“I wished I were in the courtroom to shout loudly: ‘Long live justice!’” he said. “Today is the beginning of the victory for the Egyptian revolution and (for the) martyrs who demanded pride and honor to achieve the rule of law.”

Not everyone saw the courtroom drama as a step forward, however.

“The Mubarak trial today is a massive shame for the Arab world. For 30 years he served the people. ... They should have made him a statue of honor next to the Sphinx,” said Hassan al-Masri, 45, from Gaza City.

The New York Times has a slide show.

Jackson Diehl is skeptical of the fairness of the trial:

However, the staging of the trial reeks of haste and political calculation. The prosecution was ordered by Egypt’s temporary military rulers, who until February reported to Mubarak; they are seeking to satisfy the demands of both secular and Muslim political movements that have made the trial of Mubarak a rallying call in continuing street demonstrations.  

Trials of former rulers usually take months, if not years, to prepare: Witness the endless proceedings of international tribunals on the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. But Mubarak was brought to court less than six months after he was forced from office, and only two months after he was charged. Even the most diligent prosecutors would have been hard-pressed to put together a solid case against him. 

And Egypt’s prosecutors lack credibility. They were appointed, after all, by Mubarak himself, and form part of a judicial system notorious for its politicization. The judge in the case, Ahmet Refaat, is known for having ruled against the regime during Mubarak’s time in office. But the court system itself remains unreformed and unanswerable to any democratic authority. 

3) Couldn't they both lose?

Robert Fisk has been fisked, legally!

Saudi Prince Nayef Bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud has accepted undisclosed libel damages from Britain’s newspaper The Independent over an article which accused him of ordering police chiefs to shoot and kill unarmed demonstrators. 

The Independent Print Ltd. and its Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk both offered their “sincere apologies” at London’s High Court Wednesday, saying that there was no truth to the claim.

Interestingly, no activists were quoted complaining that Britain's very loose standards for libel endanger British democracy by suppressing criticism of the rich and powerful.


4) Iranian Monetary Fund?

This is disturbing:

The International Monetary Fund gave a rosy portrayal of Iran's economy in a report issued Wednesday, saying it grew by 3.2 % in 2011, contradicting its earlier assessment and surprising Iran analysts who contend that the economy is shrinking.

The new IMF report is based mainly on official Iranian data, independent economists said—rather than on a second set of economic statistics in Iran that is made by independent economists

Technorati Tag: Israel and Middle East.