How Crazy is the Middle East?

Well, this crazy:

While thousands of Arabs are trying to get out of Syria with a reported 3000 crossing over into Jordan recently and in Turkey, 25,000 with some sources saying more than 90,000 refugees have so far fled to Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, 2000 'internationalists', that special type of humanist progressive with a regressive morality, tried to get into Israel to "visit Palestine".

Never has there been such a "ships passing each other in the dark night" of ridiculousness.


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Islamic Blooming

“from the Arab Spring to the ‘Islamic Blooming’”

Israel Ambassador Shalom Cohen

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Apartheid? Segregation? Discrimination?

No, not in Israel.

In Tyre, Lebanon:

Tyre has its own charm...the city still has an old core composed of two haras (quarters) separated by a street. The quarters are locally known as Haret el Masihiyeh (Christian quarter) and Haret el Jalaji’ (the quarter of the everyman – Muslim quarter) and a street (built in 1956 to separate the Christian quarter’s Chamoun supporters from the mostly Muslim backers of Abdel Nasser) which has created two worlds with a distorted vision of the ‘other’.

Spaces are segregated through class, religious and political dynamics. And the haras, are the two spaces par excellence, where the interrelations of these three factors produce spaces which exclude or include individuals.

The Christian core is located at the northern end of the tiny peninsula, while the Muslim quarter occupies the southern part. Both are encircled by a newly built corniche whose name is not very welcoming: al-Kharab, the wreck.

When you tell people from Tyre “I live in Haret el Masihiyeh,” eyes shine and you might even hear “lucky you!” A sort of urban utopia, the hara is a small agglomeration of winding streets, where mostly stone buildings of the turn of the last century or older are accompanied by small gardens or courtyards and share an uninterrupted relationship with the street.

Its low density, the surprise and composition of its scenes, the light reflections on its walls, and its proximity to the sea are specifically important features for those who think this is Tyre’s best place to live. The port is adjacent to Tyre’s Christian hara which houses most of the city’s fishermen...

and more

...the Christian and Muslim women of the haras rarely mingle, go to mass together, or secretly plan the lives of men...Religious differences can be a substantial obstacle to the development of friendships along those lines. Not to mention that those coffee breaks include certain amounts of badmouthing “the other.”

While Muslim women don’t necessarily wear the veil, a class factor plays a role. The middle and higher classes wear veils less than lower income-earners. So while Muslim hara women belong to a low-income community, there is a higher percentage of veiled women, and a non-veiled woman would more often belong either to a higher-income class or to another religion.

Walking on an afternoon along the corniche, the women of the two areas do look like Nadine Labaki’s women. But only from afar. They occupy the same space, speak the same dialect, and may have similar dreams and share similar fears, but they have not been able to cross that wide street which is ‘saving’ them from one another.

Is that the norm?

Oh, well.

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Quiz: Who Wrote This and About Who?

This:

‘silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging blethering ass.’

Answer.

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Obama Bammed

From Ben Stein:-

First, the "Arab Spring" as a force for democracy, human rights and peace in Egypt seems to me to be a fraud...Egypt is now rapidly becoming anti-Israel, pro-Iran, pro the Iranian-sponsored terrorist group Hamas, and very far from being pro-human rights...the Muslim Brotherhood, hates the United States, loathes Israel, condemns the killing of bin Laden (whom they praised as a martyr), and have been wedded to terror for their entire existence. Oh, P.S, they are closely connected with Adolph Hitler.

...Has anyone noticed that the common denominator of all the successful Arab street movements is that they are sympathetic to Iran? When the dust settles, Iran is going to own the Middle East...There is a gigantic regional coup by Iran taking place. We are doing very little, if anything, to stop it...

...with Iran now the regional superpower, it is a lot more like an extremely bleak Mideast winter...

Mitt Romney and others:-

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said Obama, whom he served as U.S. ambassador to China until last month, undercut an opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians to build trust. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said Obama “threw Israel under the bus” and handed the Palestinians a victory even before negotiations between the parties could resume. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it “the most dangerous speech ever made by an American president for the survival of Israel.”

_____________________

After searching seem to bamm is a word:

Lying to another person. Not telling the whole and complete truth

Close, but not what I meant.  I meant Obama is getting clunked, by which I mean knocked about.  Like this:

clunk    n.

1. A dull sound; a thump.
2. A blow that produces a dull sound.
3. Informal A stupid, dull person.
v.intr.

1. To make or move with a clunk.
2. To strike something so as to make a dull sound.

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Absurd is not the word

Excerpts from Nick Cohen's Observer piece:-

...Far from being a cause of the revolution, antagonism to Israel everywhere served the interests of oppressors...The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forgery the far-right wing of the decaying tsarist regime...denounces human rights and democracy as facades behind which the secret Jewish rulers of the world manipulated gullible gentiles.

Syrian Ba'athists, Hamas, the Saudi monarchy and Gaddafi eagerly promoted the Protocols...Europe's amnesia about how tyranny operated in our continent explains why the Libyan revolution is embarrassing a rich collection of dupes and scoundrels who were willing to laugh along with Gaddafi. His contacts in Britain were once confined to the truly lunatic fringe. He supplied arms to the IRA, funded the Workers' Revolutionary Party, Vanessa Redgrave's nasty Trotskyist sect, and entertained Nick Griffin and other neo-Nazis. We should not forget them when the time comes to settle accounts. But when Tony Blair, who was so eloquent in denouncing the genocides of Saddam, staged a reconciliation with Gaddafi after 9/11, his friendship opened the way for the British establishment to embrace the dictatorship...British academics who were happy to accept his largesse...

...The European Union, which did so much to export democracy and the rule of law to former communist dictatorships of eastern Europe, has played a miserable role in the Middle East. It pours in aid but never demands democratisation or restrictions on police powers in return. That will have to change if the promise of the past month is to be realised. If it is to help with democracy-building, Europe will need to remind itself as much as the recipients of its money that you can never build free societies on the racist conspiracy theories of the Nazis and the tsars. They are and always have been the tunes that tyrants sing.

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Middle East Pics From Space

So quiet and peaceful from up there.

(k/t [that's shorthand for "Kippah tip", my Jewish Hat Tip]: Lady OK)


Source

Obama, the Middle East and...Democracy

This is just terrible:-

...The Obama administration, in contrast, often speaks as if it does not recognize the existence of an Arab reform movement. Bush's frequently articulated argument that political and social liberalization offer the best antidote to Islamic extremism appears absent from this administration's thinking.

"People in Jordan are beginning to understand that the United States will not play the same role as under the old administration on democracy," said Musa Maaytah, Jordan's minister of political development -- who, like Awadhi, visited Washington recently for a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy. "People think that the U.S. has many issues that for it are a priority, and they prefer to have stability in these countries more than democracy."

For the reformers, a big signal came this month in a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered in Marrakech, Morocco. Clinton was attending a session of the Forum for the Future, a body the Bush administration established at the height of its pro-reform campaign. The idea was to foster a dialogue between Western and Arab countries about political and social reform that would resemble the Helsinki process between the West and the Soviet bloc during the 1970s.

Clinton began her speech by referring to Obama's call in Cairo for "a new beginning between the United States and Muslim communities around the world." She then said that after consulting with "local communities" the administration had "focused on three broad areas where we believe U.S. support can make a difference."

These turned out to be "entrepreneurship," "advancing science and technology" and education. As if citing the also-rans, Clinton added that "women's empowerment" was "a related priority" and that "the United States is committed to a comprehensive peace in the Middle East." The word "democracy" appeared nowhere in the speech, and there was no reference at all to the Arabs who are fighting to create independent newspapers, political parties or human rights organizations...

...For Arab liberals, the translation is easy, if painful: Regardless of what the president may have said in Cairo, Obama's vision for the Middle East doesn't include "a new beginning" in the old political order.

The "Ideological" President

Martin Kramer:

...as I've suggested already, his real problem with Iran's turmoil is that it's just so inconvenient to a Palestine-first approach.

Laura Rozen at her blog The Cable quoted an "Iran hand in touch with the administration" as saying that Obama "is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological," that he's already decided what he wants to do in the Middle East "over the next eight years" (bit of presumption there), and that he doesn't want to be "distracted" from the "larger strategic objective" or "let himself get shaken by stuff like this"—"stuff" referring to the reality in the streets of Iran and the Middle East more generally.

If this spectacular hubris isn't a formula for failure in the Middle East, what is?

Just one fleeting, passing thought:

So why can't Bibi Netanyahu be ideological?

When Progressive Humanist Liberalism Meets the Middle East

The New York Times claims that the following is the conventional, wide-spread 'wisdom' throughout the Middle East - this is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.

Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States...the United States and Israel were behind the attacks...

...“Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.”

The rumors...spread...First among these is that Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center on that day. Asked how Jews might have been notified to stay home, or how they kept it a secret from co-workers, people here wave off the questions because they clash with their bedrock conviction that Jews are behind many of their troubles and that Western Jews will go to any length to protect Israel.

“Why is it that on 9/11, the Jews didn’t go to work in the building,” said Ahmed Saied, 25, who works in Cairo as a driver for a lawyer. “Everybody knows this. I saw it on TV, and a lot of people talk about this.”

And what is the reporter's conclusion?

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point...such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

But that's what I and many others have been sounding out for years (okay, in my case, decades). There is something called a mindset. There is nothing racist in this. It is a fact. And the MiddleEast/Arab mindset is such that logic and rationality play much less a role in political education and wisdom than in other regions.

You recall the old frog and the scorpion joke, yes? If not, my version:-


A frog and a scorpion were on the bank [not the West Bank - there is no such thing] of the River Jordan. Said the scorpion. "I need to go to the other side of the river. Would you carry me across on your back, Mr. Frog?"

"Of course not," replied the frog. "If I do that, you'll sting me and I will die."

The scorpion responded, "If I stung you while we were in the river, we'd both drown. That's stupid and certainly not logical."

"Hmmm," said the frog. "You're right. OK, get on."

So, with the scorpion on the frog's back, they head out into the River Jordan. About halfway across the river the scorpion stings the frog.

"What did you do that for?" cried the frog just as they finally began to sink. "Was that a logical thing to do?"

"Logic?" gurgled the scorpion. "In the Middle East?"


The logic would be: why keep trying to kill Jews, push them into the sea, deny that there is such a thing as the Jewish national homeland, etc., etc. when you Arabs have 22 states, your yourselves are a foreign conquerer in what you call "Palestine" (638) and that it would be more beneficial to make peace?

But let's get back to the New York Times. Now that it has acknowledged the irrationality of the Arab Middle East, maybe it won't pressure Israel to yield on its security by surrendering territory and resources to people who believe that Jews and America planned 9/11?


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Read Bernard Lewis' piece in FP.

A Bit Disturbing

In some colleges, it has become common for professors to assign students to create work that appears on Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia’s list of school and university projects, this spring the University of East Anglia in England and Oberlin College in Ohio will have students edit articles on topics being taught in courses on the Middle East and ancient Rome.

Source.

Will there be enough pro-Israel students to

a) keep watch
and
b) correct errors?