Mideast Media Sampler 05/12/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Fatah Hamas unity deal

Here are a number of takes on the deal

The Reconciliation Agreement between Fatah and Hamas – An Initial Evaluation - By Pinchas Inbari

It marks an outstanding political achievement for Mahmoud Abbas. He well understands that Europe is eager to have a Palestinian state materialize, and any indication of the viability of that vision may encourage Europe to support the planned UN vote in support of a Palestinian state in September. In fact, major European parties such as Spain, Britain and France have encouraged the PA to follow the track of a unilateral declaration of statehood. 

U.S. President Barack Obama is an enthusiastic supporter of Palestinian statehood, but because he lost the majority in the pro-Israel House of Representatives, he cannot pressure Israel in the open. So he exerts pressure through the Europeans.

Europeans Threaten to Recognize Palestinian State Unless Israel Negotiates With Terrorist Group - By Soeren Kern

Several European countries are threatening to recognize an independent Palestinian state -- on the basis of the pre-1967 boundaries to include the West Bank, Gaza, and with East Jerusalem as its capital -- if Israel refuses to return to the negotiating table with the Palestinian Authority by September. Given the new "reconciliation deal" between the rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas, Europeans are effectively demanding that Israel negotiate with Hamas, an Islamist terrorist group unambiguously committed to Israel's destruction.

The End of the “Peace Process” by Elliott Abrams

In choosing to enter a coalition with Hamas, Abbas is abandoning all the advances made to date and abandoning his own former approach.  Cooperation with Israel to improve life in the West Bank and security cooperation against terrorism have now been jettisoned in favor of the appearance of unity.  All of Abbas’s past statements about Hamas as his enemy, Fatah’s enemy, and the PA’s enemy have been put aside in an embrace of Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader.  Under the agreement, elections will be held for the PA presidency and parliament, and for the PLO bodies, in one year, and security forces are to be put under one umbrella.

Why the Hamas-Fatah Deal Is Bad for the Palestinians by Jonathan Schanzer

But the deal should nonetheless concern Washington. This deal with Hamas – which recently criticized America for killing Osama bin Laden – signals that Fatah no longer believes U.S. recognition and support are essential to their national aspirations.

Fatah-Hamas Agreement: Another Nail in the “Peace Process’s” Coffin by Barry Rubin

Anyone who thinks this helps the peace process is deluded. Hamas will never accept any peace agreement with Israel and will radicalize Fatah’s negotiating position out of competition between the two rivals to prove their militancy. The race to commit the most bloody terrorist acts would also intensify. Make no mistake. Whether or not this development has any direct effect on the ground, it’s another step toward the death of any real Israel-Palestinian peace process. 

Pact or Fiction by Lee Smith

I, too, think the deal reveals something important, which is why I am a big fan of Hamas-Fatah reconciliation—not because I think it will make peace likely, but because I think it is the only way to expose the hypocrisy and moral rot that has been at the core of Western thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict for more than 30 years.

2) Islamists vs. Copts

From Babylon and Beyond, we have Religious conflict becomes the revolution’s biggest enemy

Former President Hosni Mubarak's regime relied on dividing Egyptians.  Authorities carefully presided over a volatile status quo between Muslims and Copts, all the while pretending religious strife didn't exist. Tribal settlements to conflicts were preferred and supported by police officials, who often blamed disputes on individual grudges or foreign terrorists. Mubarak skillfully manipulated the threat of outside extremists to convince the West, which long criticized Egypt's human-rights record, that he was an ally in battling terrorism.Nonetheless, Copts felt secure under Mubarak, who tightened his grip over Islamists -- the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood as well as the more extreme Salafis and jihadists. Copts worried that the 18-day revolution that overthrew Mubarak in February would unbottle ultraconservative Islamist voices and lead to greater problems. What has been unfolding recently justifies those fears.

So the author, while admitting that Mubarak kept a tighter rein on the Islamists has somehow found a way to portray that aspect of Mubarak's rule as a bad thing.

Nina Shea writes:

It has been observed that the American mainstream media does not get religion. Regarding the weekend atrocities in Egypt, the most egregious blindspot was probably displayed by the New York Times, which uncritically reported the Egyptian interior ministry’s press releases, appearing to blame equally the victimized Coptic minority and their attackers. Quoting unnamed people on the street, it advanced the economic-determinist theory that unemployment rather than ideology was the trigger: Times correspondent David D. Kirkpatrick wrote that “people on both sides said the fighting pitted one group of frustrated and underemployed young men from the neighborhood against another, along battle lines that had more to do with tribal allegiances than any religious or political ideas.”

Barry Rubin observed:

No kidding! Did you think a single Egyptian Christian didn’t know this in February? Why didn’t the media report or the U.S. government understand that this was absolutely inevitable and predictable? But the only mentions of Christians were to claim that they were really enthusiastic about the revolution.

Lee Smith on the general move in Egypt away from the United States:

The other option is to present an Egypt much less reliable and stable than Mubarak’s. In other words, a scary Egypt, an unpredictable Arab leviathan that might go to war with Israel or just fall apart at the seams. In order to keep this Egypt from exploding or imploding, someone has to pay, but it’s unlikely to be the Saudis or the Iranians. There’s no superpower contest in the Middle East, so the only option is Washington. To survive, Egypt needs to raise the rent on the Americans. “They think Mubarak sold Egypt for too little at $2 billion a year,” says Kramer. “They’re rattling the cup.”

Cairo is normalizing relations with Iran and giving Hamas a ride in order to get the Americans to pay up—unless they want to see Egypt get really ugly. The military is not going to crack down on the Salafists unless Washington pays for it, full price and not as part of any package deal. So what if street confrontations between Muslims and Copts leaving dozens dead in the streets of Cairo keep tourists at home? $15 billion a year in tourist revenue is not enough to cover Egypt’s basic requirements in the first place.

It seems that Lee Smith's take isn't that different from Thomas Friedman's. The difference is that Friedman sees it as a good thing because the views of ordinary Egyptians are being represented.

A Washington Post editorial makes a more general point that is too often ignored:

Pressure on Christian minorities, violent and otherwise, has been a chronic feature of the Arab and Muslim political landscape in recent years. In Pakistan, gunmen murdered two high-profile opponents of laws that impose the death penalty for insulting Islam; one victim was a Christian, the other the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother. Iraq was home to more than 1 million Christians before the 2003 U.S. invasion; roughly half have fled, largely because of radical Islamist attacks. 

Of course it's not just Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq; it's all over the Islamic world. And Islam doesn't have a really good record of tolerance towards Judaism either.


3) IHH press release in the New York Times

I faulted a news report about plans for a new flotilla the other day, but an article in the New York Times appears to be little more than a press release for the IHH.

“The Mavi Marmara has become a symbol for the Gaza cause in the whole world,” Gulden Sonmez of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Turkish nongovernmental organization that owns the ship, said in an interview this week. “So we are planning to set forth again with the same ship.” At dawn on May 31 last year, Ms. Sonmez stood on the observation deck of the Mavi Marmara, shouting orders as Israeli helicopters hovered overhead and commandos boarded the ship. Her colleague Cevdet Kiliclar, who managed the relief foundation’s Web site, was shot and killed while taking photographs “just three or four steps away from me,” she recounted. 

Notice how nothing in these sentences acknowledge that the Israeli soldiers were attacked and didn't fire until several were endangered. And a Turkish journalist - who was sympathetic to the IHH acknowledged that the IDF was attacked.

Later a Turkish "specialist" is quoted arguing against the flotilla, but he makes the astonishing comment:

“Turkey is more democratic now, and society plays a much more important role in Turkish politics,” he said, arguing that it was no longer possible to maintain bilateral relations from the top down. “Instead, we must build relations between the two societies, involving civil society and the media and nongovernmental organizations.” 

Maybe the journalists in jail and under arrest in Turkey would have a different opinion.


4) Making the case

Posting at Instapundit, Kenneth Anderson has been making the argument that the United States needs to justify its killing of Osama Bin Laden.
He's cited a number of other writers too.

Here's a longer post of his on the topic at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Legitimacy is always easy to undervalue and pooh-pooh, mostly because it is a passive substratum — the thing you don’t miss until it’s gone or reduced.  But if you are the advocacy community, targeted killing is just the next phase of the campaign that started with interrogation and detention — and from its point of view, why shouldn’t it be?  It has no actual obligations to keep anyone safe from attack, no skin in the game of national security, and at this moment it has both an opportunity to undermine the legitimacy of targeted killing and a threat, in the form of the newly revived debate over interrogation.

And while I don't necessarily agree 100% with his argument, David Bernstein writes how this applies to Israel.

The hostility emanating to Israel emanating from these sources is not, primarily, a result of anti-Semitism or other Jewcentric mental maladies. Rather, it is a natural result of a cauldron of ideologies–pacifism, anti-liberalism, Third Worldism, hostility to the West, warmed-over Marxism, and so on, combined with a dash of naive human rights idealism–that dominates certain intellectual circles. 

Israel receives more grief than almost anyone else from such circles for several reasons: (1) because of its precarious security situation, it uses military force more regularly than other potential targets; (2) because of its precarious political situation, it is far more vulnerable to such criticism than, say, the U.S. (which will studiously ignore criticism of the OBL operation); and (3) unlike in the U.S, Israel has a significant and influential domestic far left that encourages and magnifies such criticisms. Indeed, given universal military service among Jewish non-Haredi adults, Israel often faces criticism from its own leftist soldiers and reservists of the sort quite rare in the U.S.

One of the writers Anderson quoted, Sandeep Gopalan writes:

But first, the popular question: Who cares? 

Osama bin Laden was responsible for the most heinous act of terror in modern history. Only lawyers and their sophistry could defend human-rights protections for someone who displayed so little humanity. Right? 

These arguments may seem obvious to most, but disquiet in legal circles has been growing after the initial euphoria following bin Laden’s death. It is quickly becoming apparent that the “who cares” retort will not wash, that Washington must establish a proper legal basis for having killed bin Laden. By doing so the U.S. could not only deconstruct the myth that an unarmed bin Laden was an innocent who was killed unjustifiably; it could also negate the jihadi narrative about Western hypocrisy: that we are no different from the terrorists. In what could be bin Laden’s last hurrah, Washington has yet to make its case, and the Obama administration is rapidly losing the narrative.

What's important is to set the agenda yourself.

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