The Cedar Revolution is no Spring

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

NOW Lebanon

Revolutions are not made through speeches, but through achievements, and March 14 can claim few accomplishments since it successfully brought about the end of the Syrian occupation in April 2005. One can blame Hezbollah's penchant for armed violence for March 14's inability to influence many events, but the list of issues that March 14 could have fought for and won, yet chose to ignore, is long. This makes the "Cedar Revolution" just more of the same Lebanese politics rather than part of the "Arab Spring."

The first “Cedar Revolution" failure is March 14's inability to run genuine democratic elections within its General Secretariat or inside its member political parties. With all due respect to former lawmaker Fares Soueid, he has been secretary general for more than five years now. No one knows who elected Soueid or when his mandate will expire.

Similarly, in the front row at March 14’s seventh anniversary celebration at BIEL last week were politicians who have been in the public spotlight for too long. With all due respect to former President Amin Gemayel, his term expired in 1988, and he should be probably writing his memoirs and appearing in an honorary capacity rather than as an actual March 14 leader. The fact that Gemayel's successor is his young son Sami does not make for "leadership renewal" or "new blood."

The everlasting leadership, whether in state positions, in March 14 positions or as heads of its parties looks nothing like a "revolution" or an "Arab Spring." If March 14 is serious about its calls for a democratic Lebanon, it should start displaying its understanding of democracy inside its own political parties and General Secretariat.

The "Cedar Revolution" also failed on freedom of expression when it called for, and supported, the censoring of “Sayyed Masih,” an Arabic series depicting Jesus as prophet rather than deity, on NBN and Al-Manar, Amal and Hezbollah-run stations respectively. Yet March 14 complained when, a few years before, Hezbollah supporters rioted in Ain al-Remmaneh to protest a comic show that made fun of their leader Hassan Nasrallah. March 14 also remained mostly silent when the movie "Beirut Hotel," among other films, was censored.

Freedom of expression has no "sensitivities," and people should be able to express any opinion on any issue without fearing restriction, reprisal or recrimination. If March 14 does not revolt against the prevailing "sensitivities," then why call the movement a revolution?

March 14's performance has also been disappointing on women's rights. Seven years into the "Cedar Revolution" and March 14 has not put out any plan to tabulate in parliament, lobby for or support laws that give women equal rights. If March 14 is a revolution, then it should not fear possible demographic imbalances if women are able to pass their nationality to their children from non-Lebanese husbands.

March 14's weak stance on the law against domestic violence was unjustifiable as well. And the same applies to the coalition's absence from the debate on the all-too-common abuse of foreign domestic workers.

March 14's understanding of the relationship between money and public life also looks skewed. For years now, most March 14 leaders, and aspiring leaders now serving as "advisors," have had one purpose: Suck money out of the Hariri family.

While the Hariris' largesse has helped oil the wheels of March 14, the movement should have conducted highly transparent fundraising. March 14 supporters are certainly willing to fund their "revolution," but before they do so, they want to see audited party treasuries and public balance sheets. Such an exercise would be especially helpful if repeated when March 14ers assume public offices.

Last but not least, March 14's sticking with the principle of national Muslim-Christian co-existence, as outlined in the recent "political document" of the Future Movement, is now old news given the "Arab Spring." If Supervisor of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood Riyad Shaqfeh says in interviews that post-Assad Syria will be a "civil state," then what is March 14 waiting for?

A civil state in Lebanon that turns a blind eye to a citizen's religious affiliation should be a March 14 priority if one is to believe all the talk about Christians and Muslims "not fearing each other" anymore.

I write these lines not to pick a bone with March 14. After all, as a Shia, my stance has been more controversial than March 14 supporters born into other sects. The Shia-born March 14ers have exposed their families to social pressure, and have risked losing the security and economic networks that come with sectarian affiliation.

But despite seven years of high cost, March 14 supporters like me are keener to criticize their "revolution" and dream that it turns, one day, into an actual "Spring." After all, people who are invested in March 14 want a movement that is worth their risks.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai

The Christian Problem

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

NOW Lebanon

The fortunes of Arab Christians have been on the decline for decades. The segregation and autonomy advocated by Egypt's Copts (and some Lebanese Christians) are counterproductive, while in Lebanon neither Christian MP Michel Aoun's populism, nor Patriarch Bechara Rai's support of the Syrian regime, can stop the rot.

But the Christians have not always been as uncreative as they are now. Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, Christian intellectuals argued that only secularism could grant equal rights to all Arabs, regardless of faith, thus ending 14 centuries of Muslim dominance and the treatment of Christians, and other non-Muslims, as second-class citizens.

But by 1920, they were divided over the creation of “Greater Lebanon.” While many saw it as their homeland, others believed that replicating the Ottoman milla, or coexistence, system, was better. It offered Muslims a partnership of sorts and lasted from 1943 until the Taif conference in 1990, when it was amended to improve the Muslim lot after the 1975-1990 civil war.

During this latter period a few Christian leaders toyed with other ideas, including the restoration of they called "Smaller Lebanon" and the creation of a confederacy or a federal union. Nothing came of them, and all the while the various Christian experiments failed, a financial prowess that lasted well into the 1970s also declined, and the rate of Christian emigration surged, especially after 1990.

Dwindling numbers meant that, given the demographic-based milla system, Christian political clout also weakened. After their last power concession at Taif, Lebanon's Christians today find themselves under pressure to further give up the 50-50 formula and settle instead for a one-third share of the state.

Aoun promised the Christians he would stop the decline and since 2006, with Shia militia muscle and money behind him, the former general has indeed emerged as the leader of sizeable parliamentary and ministerial blocs. But Christians, especially Aoun’s followers , should ask themselves this: After six years of Aoun's de facto leadership, have their lives improved? Has the alarming level of Christian emigration stopped or been reversed?

The answer on both counts is no. Aoun has offered nothing but angry rhetoric, often aimed at Lebanon's Sunnis, in particular the Hariri family, reaffirming the Christian suspicion that it was Hariri who undermined Christian superiority and it is he who should be blamed for their problems.

And all the while the emigration, which has taken its toll on more Christians than Muslims, continues. The choice of destination does not help. Christians prefer Western countries and Australia, where rights are protected and where they can assimilate easier, over Arab countries where, despite good money, rights and naturalization prospects are non-existent.

Christian emigration thus becomes more permanent and has led to a decline in the community. The fewer Christians in Lebanon, the more Muslims will demand representational readjustment. The Taif Agreement is already 22 years old and looks more anachronistic by the day.

Lebanon's Christians stand at a crossroads. They can either continuously concede power, or they can replace coexistence with a system that gives them – and everybody else – equal rights as citizens and equal access to power, regardless of population numbers.

They should understand that when population numbers are not their strongest asset, they should not insist on them. They should realize that no document, or ruler, can guarantee their special status. Holding onto the obsolete French-sponsored census of 1932, and later to the National Convention arrangement in 1943, and to Taif after 1990, have all given Christians only short-lived peace of mind.

The same applies to betting on despots, like Syria's Bashar al-Assad, whose future is uncertain. Hanging onto Assad is a risky gamble, and Christians, like Rai, will be lucky to be spared Muslim retribution – even if political only – after the downfall of the Damascus dictator.

Last but not least, calling for autonomy, whether through decentralization or federalism, is as bad as clinging to coexistence or betting on Assad. Even if the idea of a Christian country proves economically viable, a Christian-only society will most likely be racist and globally rejected.

The solution to the Christian problem will only come through secular Arab states that ignore religious and ethnic affiliations and respect all sects and ethnicities.

While the idea is appealing, secular states in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt cannot be created overnight, and Muslims should be convinced to relinquish their quest for the creation of Islamic or Islam-inspired states.

In Lebanon and Syria, Christians have the best chance of creating such states, only if Christians realize this and stop fighting for special rights that end up as privileges for their leaders and patriarchs while the average Christian packs and leaves.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai.

Iraqi Democracy: Emos killed, threatened, forced to change their style

A group of Iraqi Emos (the subculture) and others with similar styles who live in the predominantly Shia Baghdad suburb of Sadr City received a death notice (picture above) from self-formed religious police. The letter, which includes the names of those threatened, opens with a few lines (and lots of misspellings) giving the Emos "four days" to change their style, or risk facing "God's punishment" at the hands of "mujahidin."

Twenty-two Iraqi Emos have been killed so far, according to reports. Their heads were smashed using building blocks.

Welcome to Iraq's Democracy!

Threatened

David Remnick

The New Yorker

Democracy is never fully achieved. At best, it’s an ambition, a state of becoming. In America, it took generations for blacks, women, and gays and lesbians to win the rights of citizenship—rights that, in many instances, remain incomplete. (Various contenders for the Presidency are now competing to scale back such rights.) The twenty-first century began with a fraudulent Presidential election. And this is in the luckiest of nations. Elsewhere—in Russia, in Hungary, in Zimbabwe—the fragility of democratic aspiration is a brutal fact of history.

To revisit the Arab Spring, one year later, is to celebrate popular awakening but also to acknowledge the distance between the ecstasy of rebellion and the realization of democratic institutions. In Egypt, autocratic military officers vie for power with varying shades of Islamists. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad has responded to the demands of his people by slaughtering them, many hundreds each week. In the Persian Gulf, sultans and emirs stifle potential protest with petro hush money.

There is another state in the region that is embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming. This is the State of Israel. For decades, its citizens—its Jewish ones, at least—have justifiably described their country as the only democracy in the Middle East. Although Israel as imagined by Theodor Herzl and built by the generation of David Ben-Gurion was never intended to be a replica of the Anglo-American model—its political culture, even now, is closer to that of the European social democracies—its structures of governance are points of pride. And yet, as an experiment in Jewish power, unique after two millennia of persecution and exile, Israel has reached an impasse. An intensifying conflict of values has put its democratic nature under tremendous stress. When the government speaks daily about the existential threat from Iran, and urges an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it ignores the existential threat that looms within. Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French. The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle. But in Israel the threat is especially acute. And the concern comes not only from its most persistent critics. The former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned of a descent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.

The political corrosion begins, of course, with the occupation of the Palestinian territories—the subjugation of Palestinian men, women, and children—that has lasted for forty-five years. Peter Beinart, in a forthcoming and passionately argued polemic, “The Crisis of Zionism,” is just the latest critic to point out that a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper. The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish state; for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund; and for laws constricting freedom of expression.

Herzl envisioned a pluralist Zionism in which rabbis would enjoy “no privileged voice in the state.” These days, emboldened fundamentalists flaunt an increasingly aggressive medievalism. There are sickening reports of ultra-Orthodox men spitting on schoolgirls whose attire they consider insufficiently demure, and demanding that women sit at the back of public buses. Elyakim Levanon, the chief rabbi of the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, says that Orthodox soldiers should prefer to face a “firing squad” rather than sit through events at which women sing, and has forbidden women to run for public office, because “the husband presents the family’s opinion.” Dov Lior, the head of an important West Bank rabbinical council, has called Baruch Goldstein—who, in 1994, machine-gunned twenty-nine Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs, in Hebron—“holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.” Lior endorsed a book that discussed when it is right and proper to murder an Arab, and he and a group of kindred rabbis issued a proclamation proscribing Jews from selling or renting land to non-Jews. Men like Lieberman, Levanon, and Lior are scarcely embittered figures on the irrelevant margins: a hard-right base—the settlers, the ultra-Orthodox, Shas, the National Religious Party—is indispensable to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state. Many of them did their military duty in the Occupied Territories; some learned to despise the Occupation they saw firsthand, but others learned to accept the official narratives justifying what they were made to do.

Last year, a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that fifty-one per cent of Israelis believed that people “should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the State of Israel in public.” Netanyahu encourages the notion that any such criticism is the work of enemies. Even the country’s staunchest ally, the United States, is not above suspicion. The current Administration has coöperated with Israeli intelligence to an unprecedented extent and has led a crippling sanctions effort against Iran, yet Netanyahu, who visits Washington this week, has shown imperious disdain for Barack Obama. In fact, the President is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew. Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes. Wolf brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak in his synagogue, marched in Selma, and, in 1973, helped found Breira (Alternative), one of the first American Jewish groups to endorse a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu has distaste for such associations; his gestures toward Palestinian statehood are less than halfhearted. (After he spoke of giving Palestinians their own state, his father, the right-wing historian Benzion Netanyahu, shrewdly observed, “He supports it under conditions that they will never accept.”) To Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson—the longtime casino tycoon and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich—who owns a newspaper in Israel devoted to supporting him. Netanyahu knows that young American Jews are split, with the growing Orthodox community solidly in his corner, and the less observant and secular majority—a majority that is increasingly assimilated and uninterested in Jewish learning—losing their attachment to Israel. The Prime Minister clearly feels that the fervor of the few offers him more than the disillusion and drift of the many.

“The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation,” Obama has said. Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise; too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics. Such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream—and the process of democratic becoming—may be painfully, even fatally, deferred. ♦

How long does the U.S. wait to aid Syria?

The Washington Post

AS SYRIAN TANKS and troops were assaulting the city of Homs on Thursday, brutally restoring the regime’s control over the neighborhood of Bab Amr at the cost of uncounted civilian lives, two senior U.S. officials were testifying to Congress about the Obama administration’s policy. Their message, as Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman described it, was that “the demise of the Assad regime is inevitable” and that U.S. policy is “accelerating the arrival of the tipping point” because “the longer the regime assaults the Syrian people, the greater the chances of all-out war in a failed state.”

Yet the administration remains opposed to military intervention to turn the tide against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or even to protect civilians. It also rejects supplying arms to the opposition. “For more aggressive action,” Mr. Feltman said, “we would need to have a larger international consensus than currently exists.”

The news from Homs, which Mr. Feltman rightly described as “horrific,” ought to prompt a fundamental rethinking of those positions. First, it is far from clear that Mr. Assad’s downfall is inevitable; for now, at least, he is winning his war to stay in power. The steps the United States is taking to “accelerate the tipping point” are too weak to reverse the situation. And the absence of an “international consensus” reflects a failure of American leadership.

Mr. Feltman, a respected professional, correctly spelled out the danger of a prolonged Syrian conflict. The “longer this goes on,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “the higher the risks of long-term sectarian conflict, the higher the risk of extremism.” Syria could descend into a chaotic conflict between Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect and Sunnis, with Kurds, Christians, Druze and others picking sides, along with neighbors Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and perhaps even Israel. Al-Qaeda is already attempting to join the fray.

What’s happening now is bad enough: the unchecked slaughter in Homs and elsewhere of women and children with indiscriminate artillery fire directed at residential areas; the massacre of people attempting to flee; and what seems to have been the deliberate targeting of journalists and bloggers attempting to report these crimes. As during the Russian siege of Grozny a decade ago, or the Serbian pounding of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s, a state is inflicting carnage on civilians while the world stands by. Now that Homs has been reduced, Mr. Assad’s forces seem likely to move on to other cities.

The administration’s response remains limited to diplomatic and humanitarian measures, such as urging other governments to tighten sanctions or providing supplies to relief groups. Other countries that have proposed tougher steps, such as giving the opposition arms or creating safe zones for civilians, have met administration resistance. Officials argue that military aid would intensify the fighting — in other words, there would be two sides instead of one. They say the arms might go to extremists. But it is the ad hoc militias attempting to defend civilian neighborhoods that need help in finding weapons, not al-Qaeda.

There are steps the administration could take short of direct intervention. It could work with Iraqi Kurds — who are U.S. allies — to deliver aid to Kurds in Syria. It could provide opposition groups with communications gear and take steps to disrupt the communications of Syrian military units. If it has not already, it should prepare plans to secure the Assad regime’s stocks of chemical and biological weapons — and implement them at the first sign that the regime is preparing to use those arms or allow them to fall into the hands of others.

The Obama administration’s public arguments against the use of force in Syria are simply encouraging a rogue regime to believe it can act with impunity. Until he is faced with a credible threat of force, from the opposition or outside powers, Mr. Assad’s slaughter will go on.