A State in Need of a Spine

Marla Braverman
Azure no. 39
Winter 5770 / 2010

Last January, courtesy of YouTube, millions of viewers around the world watched Turkey’s prime minister lose his cool. Speaking on a panel on Gaza at the usually punctilious World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Recep Tayyip Erdogan capped a series of recent tirades against Israel—he had alternately decried its “inhumane” actions against innocent Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead and demanded its ejection from the United Nations—with an outraged response to Israeli President and co-panelist Shimon Peres’s defense of the military campaign in the Strip. When moderator David Ignatius of the Washington Post repeatedly cut short Erdogan’s attempts at a rebuttal, the Turkish premier stormed offstage, declaring this his last appearance in Davos. Israel quickly shifted into crisis-management mode, with Peres insisting to reporters afterward that the spat was “nothing personal.” Turkey, he claimed, remained an important ally of the Jewish state. Erdogan, by contrast, donned a kaftan of indignation. “My responsibility,” he proclaimed to flag-waving supporters upon his arrival in Ankara, “is to protect the honor of the Turkish nation.”

Unfortunately, the Turkish premier’s theatrics were merely another maneuver in a surprise offensive that left Israelis smarting at their treatment by a supposedly key partner in the region. Just weeks before Davos, Erdogan had openly snubbed prime minister Ehud Olmert’s conciliatory overtures, and refused foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s offer to fly to Ankara for a visit. In October of last year, Turkey barred Israel’s air force from participating in a routine nato exercise in what Erdogan admitted was an act of protest against Israel’s handling of the Gaza campaign. That same month, Turkey’s state television aired an inflammatory series showing IDF soldiers in Gaza killing Palestinian babies and lining up civilians before a firing squad. This past November, Erdogan remarked that he would rather host Omar al-Bashir, indicted for orchestrating crimes against humanity in Darfur, than meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Egypt: Where Bookburners Are Heroes and Democracy Advocates Are Villains

Barry Rubin

The Rubn report

29 September 09

Hala Mustafa is one of Egypt’s leading thinkers regarding contemporary political and international issues. Recently, she’s been the subject of a campaign to destroy her career because of something she did which has made her the object of hatred amidst the Egyptian professional and intellectual elite: She met for a few minutes with the Israeli ambassador to Egypt.

The Mustafa case is a real sign of how things work in the Arab world, far different from the assumptions so often made by policymakers, journalists, and both experts and “experts.”

Thirty years ago, Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, captured in the 1967 war, to Egypt, providing that country with a valuable strategic and economic (Suez Canal and oilfields) asset. Relations were nominally normalized though the Egyptian government limited tourism and trade. The Egyptian media continued to treat Israel as a demonic and enemy state. Egyptian professional associations, many under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, banned their members from any contact with Israel.

It was in this context that Israeli Ambassador Shalom Cohen asked to visit Mustafa’s office to discuss a symposium he wanted to hold, in which Egyptians, Israelis, and Palestinians were to discuss the peace process. After a short discussion, Mustafa told him that she would have to consult her bosses about whether she could participate.

The head of the Egyptian journalists’ association has claimed this violates the group’s 1983 boycott of Israel and therefore Mustafa should be punished. Whether or not this actually happens, she is under a severe and vicious verbal and print assault.

To understand Mustafa’s complex position is to learn a lot about the contemporary Arabic-speaking world. Egyptian professionals and intellectuals can often be truly mediocre, slogan-spouting people who resemble the bureaucrats of the Soviet Communist regime. In contrast, Mustafa is clearly a serious and bright person, as became immediately evident to me in our conversations and through her writing. She also really cares about issues of free speech and democracy while showing some real courage on their behalf.

But what’s a liberal intellectual to do? Her main job is as editor of the quarterly journal Democracy. While published in Arabic, I believe that more copies are printed in English. This indicates the journal’s purpose as a showpiece, designed more to show the West that the Egyptian government is democratic-minded than it is to spark real discussion in Egypt.

Indeed, the journal virtually never publishes articles about Arabic-speaking countries, much less Egypt. The quality of the material, to Mustafa’s credit, is good but it is hardly going to spur a struggle for democracy within Egypt. And, of course, it cannot publish articles about, say, Syria or Saudi Arabia, since those governments would then protest this as an attack by the Egyptian regime.

For Democracy is, ironically but typically in Arab political terms, a state publication. Mustafa’s bosses are the heads of the al-Ahram Center. Al-Ahram is Egypt’s leading newspaper which is controlled by the state. It runs editorials, for example, claiming that the United States is responsible for all the terrorist violence in Iraq because it wants to split and rule Arabs and Muslims.

So a propaganda arm of a dictatorial regime is the publisher of the main journal in the Arabic world that nominally advocates democracy. If you understand that paradox, you get a concept of the situation.

What keeps the journal from being a stolid mouthpiece is the effort of Mustafa to do as much as possible within the limits permitted. At the same time, she is a member of the ruling National Democratic Party's policy planning staff, a point that is even more significant when it is noted that this is part of the apparatus of Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son and likely successor.

None of this is said to criticize Mustafa. If you want to know more about the constraints under which liberal reformers work in the Arabic-speaking world and why they are doomed to fail, at least in the short- to medium-run, you can read my book on the subject which is still quite up to date: The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, John Wiley Publishers (2005).

It has now been reliably reported that the entire al-Ahram group has decided to boycott Israel entirely and to punish Mustafa. Note that this means the staff of Egypt's leading newspaper and Egypt's largest international affairs' research center will be forbidden from meeting Israelis (and perhaps from reading any Israeli publications?). In other words, no reporter can interview any Israeli. If anyone from this large media group would even have a conversation with me, they could be subject to firing.

And who appoints the head of the al-Ahram group and determines its policy? Why, President Husni Mubarak, the man who is supposedly a great U.S. ally, whose country hosted Obama's speech of conciliation when he spoke about the greatness of Islam, criticized Israel harshly, and urged Arabs to make peace with Israel. This is Mubarak's answer but no U.S. official will acknowledge that fact and it will not enter into U.S. policy.

Meanwhile, a key theme in Obama's strategy is the abandonment of any support for democratic change--which was a historic liberal position long before President George W. Bush thought of it--and close cooperation with the Arab regimes. This is a defensible tactic on one condition: that the United States gets something out if it. And this doesn't seem to be happening.

As for Arab liberals, they are being abandoned by the United States and the West in general. Here's one little anecdote that gives you a sense of how hard is the life of Arab liberals. A Syrian dissident, who has spent a lot of time in prison, during the course of an interview said: "Our government is fascist" but a few minutes later added that it was vital to support the government. Why? Because he hates the existing repressive regime but fears a radical Islamist one, the most likely alternative, would be worse.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, while Mustafa is under attack, former Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni is a hero. Hosni was the supposed cultural custodian of Egypt at the same time as he was uttering antisemitic statements and told the Egyptian parliament that if he found any Israeli-authored books in Egypt’s libraries he would immediately and personally burn them.

Oh, and Hosni--like the al-Ahram media group--is also close to Mubarak, the man whom Obama looks upon as a close ally, the recipient of massive U.S. aid, the leader who has benefited by Obama's taking off the pressure over reform, etc.

In one of the few signs of sanity in the world recently, his behavior was too much even for the UN (which is saying a lot!) and he lost the election to be the next head of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural, educational, and scientific organization. In today’s atmosphere, it could not be assumed that a man who advocated book-burning might be rejected for the post of world’s leading cultural official. After his defeat, Hosni blamed an international Jewish conspiracy for his humiliation.

Egypt, by the way, is a country where despite about $2 billion in U.S. aid a year over a period of more than a quarter-century, the textbooks still claim that America secretly attacked the country in June 1967 and destroyed its air force in order to help Israel. And the media regularly publish articles on how the U.S. government or Israel were behind the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on America.

The story of Mustafa and Hosni is but one small tale of the contemporary Middle East. What are some of the lessons?:

--You can tell a lot about a country by who it regards as heroes and villains.

--The efforts of President Barack Obama have had no effect on the situation. The real problem is not due to U.S. actions or insensitivities but to the needs of the Egyptian regime. It requires America as a scapegoat to mobilize support for the dictatorship among those whose primary ideology is either Arab nationalism or Islam-oriented. Remember that the worst thing President George W. Bush did from an Egyptian government perspective was to advocate democracy in the Arabic-speaking world.

--There is almost no margin for the free functioning of intellectuals and democracy advocates in the Arab world. What the state doesn’t eat up, the extremist and repressive consensus devours.

--After thirty years of peace with Egypt, Israel is viewed with the same overweening hatred and slander as it was before the treaties were signed. Thus, real peace is extraordinarily difficult to achieve and is not subject to the kinds of expectations Western leaders and media have.

Related: Silencing Dissent

Very, Very Lost in Translation

How the Egyptian literary czar who wants to lead the world's top cultural body got caught up in his own country's rabid anti-Semitism.

Raymond Stock
Foreign Policy
24 August 09
(KT to IMRA)

To say that Farouk Hosni doesn't much like Israel is putting it lightly. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he has called it "inhuman," and "an aggressive, racist, and arrogant culture, based on robbing other people's rights and the denial of such rights." He has accused Jews of "infiltrating" world media. And in May 2008, Hosni outdid even himself, telling the Egyptian parliament that he would "burn right in front of you" any Israeli books found in the country's libraries.

What's shocking is not just that Hosni has said these things, but that he is Egypt's culture minister -- and even more scandalous, that he is the likely next head of UNESCO, the arm of the United Nations sworn to defend cultural diversity and international artistic cooperation. Less surprising but also sadly true is that Hosni's opinions about Israeli culture are par for the course among Egypt's intelligentsia, for whom 30 years of official peace with the Jewish state, the longest of any Arab country, have done virtually nothing to moderate its rampant Judeophobia. If anything, the opposite might be true.

This affair has sparked protests from prominent intellectuals and politicians in Israel and around the world. And the only reason Hosni even has a shot at the UNESCO job, which he'd be the first Arab to hold, is because, in a major reversal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently lifted his country's opposition to the Egyptian's candidacy. How this came to pass remains shrouded in mystery. All that's known is that on May 11, Netanyahu met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and was convinced not to block the culture minister's candidacy in return for some unpublicized conditions. A few weeks later, Farouk Hosni penned an apologetic article in Le Monde, retracting his statement on book burning. Soon after that, he pledged that Egypt's culture ministry would translate literary works by two Israelis, Amos Oz and David Grossman. This seemed like a significant concession because official Egyptian policy mostly bars translation from Hebrew to Arabic -- or at least any dealings with Israeli publishers.

But what appeared to be signs of positive change in Egypt's literary elite were actually just reflections of its deep-seated hostility to Jewish and Israeli culture. Hosni was quickly and widely attacked as "courting Zionist influence" by his fellow members of the Egyptian intelligentsia. In fact, Gaber Asfour, the head of Egypt's National Translation Center, immediately denied any link between the translations and Hosni's UNESCO campaign. He clarified that there would be no translation of the Israeli authors from Hebrew at all, but rather from existing European translations, so as not to have to actually deal with the Israeli rights-holders themselves. Although there are certainly a lot of books about Israel on the market in Egypt -- most of them full of conspiracy theories or tendentious views of Jewish history -- Egypt's head translator said he wanted to publish more, if not directly from the Hebrew. For his justification, he quoted an Arabic proverb: "Who knows the language of a people is safe from their evil."

This whole imbroglio only serves to highlight the Egyptian literati's generally hateful and hidebound views of Israel, which are often more virulent than those of the Egyptian public at large. To this day, Egyptian cultural figures and academics are professionally barred from contacts with Israelis. Even the faculty senate at the American University in Cairo passed a resolution urging a boycott of Israeli scholars and schools. In July, the longtime management of the Atelier du Caire, the main gathering place for the city's artists and writers, fell to a coup mounted by a group of disgruntled members; the charge was incompetence and catering to Israelis. And Egypt's greatest modern writer, the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, was nearly expelled in 2001 from the Egyptian Writers' Union simply because many of his books had been published in Israel.
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Tell Me When to Start Worrying: A Review of the Current Ridiculous International Situation

Barry Rubin

The Rubin Report

24 August 09

So let me get this straight. Iran's designated minister of defense is a wanted terrorist (for bombing the Jewish community building in Buenos Aires and, according to some sources, was also involved in attacks on Americans in Saudi Arabia) but there is no talk of boycotting Iran's government.

Farouk Hosni, Egypt's culture minister, as Raymond Stock reminds us, who will soon be the world's "culture czar" as head of UNESCO, says Israel is "inhuman," and "an aggressive, racist, and arrogant culture, based on robbing other people's rights and the denial of such rights." He says he would burn Israeli-authored books and accused Jews of "infiltrating" the world media.

Hamas, Hizballah, Syria and Iran daily attack Israel and Jews in language reminiscent of the Third Reich, but the Guardian--Britain's most prestigious newspaper--tells us that Israel is the Nazi one.

Rather than inform us that Western feminist groups have ignored the plight of Muslim women--not campaigning against things like honor killings, forced wearing of hijabs or burkas, and denial of education, to name but a few--the New York Times alerts us to a new danger. According to the once-great newspaper, there is a radical force of which we must be aware. What's that, you ask? Radical Islamists, the rise of antisemitism in "respectable quarters," Iran's nuclear weapons, Syria's sponsorship of terrorism?

No, there's a movement calling for the liberation of Muslim women by force! True, the Times can only come up with one name who advocates this and has never done anything about it, but so what? As the editor of Sweden's largest newspaper has informed us, you don't need any evidence to publish something.

Meanwhile, a flunky of Muammar Qadhafi is running the UN General Assembly, the human rights' violators are ruling the UN human rights' committee, and a Lockerbie terrorist who murdered 240 people (unrepentant and failing to cooperate with the investigation) has just been released, coincidentally at the very moment when Britain and Libya seem close to concluding a huge oil deal.

I could go on, and so could you. So, are Western democratic leaders waging a campaign on any of these issues? No. (Yes, I know, a bit on the Iran sanctions but in connection with the nuclear weapons' drive, not the [alleged] terrorist who is going to be controlling the atomic bombs when they roll off the assembly line.

Meanwhile, we are being told that the greatest threat to world peace (ok, an exaggeration but not by much), are the construction of 2500 apartments by Israel on the West Bank.

In fact, we thus face three problems simultaneously:

--A threat from radical and terrorist forces who are increasing in confidence and aggressiveness,

--A failure from Western leaders who not only don't seem to feel that action is vital but usually don't even admit the problem exists.

--And a dereliction of duty by institutions, like universities and media, which are supposed to warn their societies about this kind of thing rather than either cover it up or apologize it.

Tell me when I should start worrying.

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