English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese,
Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For March 07/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news
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Bible Quotations For today
The Parable of the Lost Son
Luke15/11-32/Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two
sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the
estate.’ So he divided his property between them.“Not long after that, the
younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there
squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a
severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and
hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to
feed pigs. 16 He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were
eating, but no one gave him anything. “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How
many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to
death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have
sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your
son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his
father. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was
filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and
kissed him. “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and
against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ “But the father said
to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on
his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s
have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he
was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate. “Meanwhile, the older son
was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he
called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has
come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has
him back safe and sound.’“The older brother became angry and refused to go in.
So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look!
All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet
you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But
when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes
home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are
always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be
glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and
is found.’”
Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on March 06-07/2021
Elias Bejjani/Visit My LCCC Web site/All That you need to know on Lebanese unfolding news and events in Arabic and English/http://eliasbejjaninews.com/
Values That We Can We Learn From “The Lost Son” Parable/Elias Bejjani//March 07/2021
Health Ministry: 3,158 new Corona cases, 42 deaths
Sethrida Geagea to Asharq Al-Awsat: We Are Waiting for Aoun to Take Historic
Resignation Move
Diab Threatens to Suspend His Duties as Caretaker PM
Lebanon’s caretaker PM Diab threatens to stop running government
Oweidat commissions security apparatuses to pursue and arrest money changers,
manipulators of national currency
Presidency Press Office: President’s stances are issued by him personally, and
are not attributed to "visitors" or "sources”
Wehbe to Radio Lebanon: I summoned the Iranian ambassador to a ‘frank meeting’
on Monday, in wake of what was published by Al-Alam TV about Patriarch al-Rahi
FPM: We regret the persistent recklessness on part of the PM-designate towards
the people, country's fate
Report: Hizbullah-Bkirki Committee to Meet Next Week
Minister Leads Delegation to Syria for Refugee Talks
Attack on MTV team on Ring Bridge
Strong Republic" Bloc visits Russian Embassy
Video: Lebanon’s Predicament: Political Stagnation and Economic Collapse in a
Hezbollah-Dominated State Makram Rabah, Ali al-Amin, Alia Mansour/The Washington
Institute/March 05/2021
A Lebanese solution today or regional conflict tomorrow/Baria Alamuddin/Arab
News/March 06/2021
Titles For The
Latest
English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published
on
March 06-07/2021
Pope holds historic meeting with Iraq’s top Shia cleric
Iran says US approved release of frozen Iranian assets in Iraq
Biden’s quiet style belies ambitions beyond undoing Trump legacy
Regional tensions on Sisi’s agenda in Khartoum
Turkey’s ‘common values’ with Egypt may bring new developments soon: Defense
Minister
Saudi Arabia intercepts another two explosive Houthi drones, totaling 8 in 24
Missile Strikes on Syria Oil Refineries Kill 4
Syria Kurds Hand 12 Children to their Iraqi Yazidi Mothers
Fighting in Yemen's Marib Kills 90 in 24 Hours
Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on March 06-07/2021
Hero of the Month: M. Zuhdi Jasser – President of the
American Islamic forum for Democracy./Grégoire Canlorbe/ Gatestone
Institute/March 06/2021
Al Jazeera: The mouthpiece of criminals/Anwar A. Khan/Sri Lanka Guardian/March
06/2021
Myanmar coup once again exposes the futility of the UN Security Council/Dr Azeem
Ibrahim/Arab News/March 06/2021
Iran’s target: An Israeli ship or the nuclear deal?/Yossi Mekelberg/Arab
News/March 06/2021
New fault lines that define the Middle East/Hafed Al-Ghwell/Arab News/March
06/2021
What does the future hold for Trump and Trumpism?/Dalia Al-Aqidi/Arab News/March
06/2021
The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials
published on
March 06-07/2021
Elias Bejjani/Visit My LCCC Web site/All That you need to know on Lebanese unfolding news and events in Arabic and English/http://eliasbejjaninews.com/
Values That We Can We Learn From “The Lost Son” Parable
Elias Bejjani//March 07/2021
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/73276/elias-bejjani-values-that-we-can-we-learn-from-the-lost-son-parable/
In our Maronite Catholic Church’s rite, on the Fourth Lent Sunday
we recall and cite the biblical Lost Son’s parable that is known also as The
Prodigal Son. (Lost Son) This impulsive, selfish and thoughtless son, as the
parable tells us, fell prey to evil’s temptation and decided to take his share
of his father’s inheritance and leave the parental dwelling.
He travelled to a far-away city where he indulged badly in all evil conducts of
pleasure and corruption until he lost all his money and became penniless. He
experienced severe poverty, starvation, humiliation and loneliness.
In the midst of his dire hardships he felt nostalgic, came back to his senses
and decided with great self confidence to return back to his father’s house,
kneel on his feet and ask him for forgiveness.
On his return his loving and kind father received him with rejoice, open arms,
accepted his repentance, and happily forgave him all his misdeeds. Because of
his sincere repentance his Father gave him back all his privileges as a son.
This parable is a road map for repentance and forgiveness. It shows us how much
Almighty God our Father loves us, we His children and how He is always ready
with open arms and willing to forgive our sins and trespasses when we come back
to our senses, recognize right from wrong, admit our weaknesses and wrongdoings,
eagerly and freely return to Him and with faith and repentance ask for His
forgiveness.
Asking Almighty God for what ever we need is exactly what the Holy Bible
instructs us to do when encountering all kinds of doubt, weaknesses, stumbling,
hard times, sickness, loneliness, persecution, injustice etc.
Matthew 07/07&08: “Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find.
Knock, and it will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives. He who
seeks finds. To him who knocks it will be opened”
All what we have to do is to pray and to ask Him with faith, self confidence and
humility and He will respond.
Matthew 21/22: “All things, whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will
receive.”
We are not left alone at any time, especially when in trouble, no matter how far
we distance ourselves from God and disobey His Holy bible. He is a Father, a
loving, caring and forgiving Father.
What is definite is that in spite of our foolishness, stupidity, ignorance,
defiance and ingratitude He never ever abandons us or gives up on our salvation.
He loves us because we His are children.
He happily sent His only begotten son to be tortured, humiliated and crucified
in a bid to absolve our original sin.’
God carries our burdens and helps us to fight all kinds of Evil temptations.
Matthew11/28-30: “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle
and lowly in heart; and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy,
and my burden is light.”
God is waiting for our repentance, let us run to Him and ask for forgiveness
before it is too late
The Parable Of The Lost son
Luke15/11-32: He (Jesus) said, “A certain man had two sons. The younger of them
said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of your property.’ He divided his
livelihood between them. Not many days after, the younger son gathered all of
this together and traveled into a far country. There he wasted his property with
riotous living. When he had spent all of it, there arose a severe famine in that
country, and he began to be in need. He went and joined himself to one of the
citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed pigs. He
wanted to fill his belly with the husks that the pigs ate, but no one gave him
any. 15:17 But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many hired servants of my
father’s have bread enough to spare, and I’m dying with hunger! I will get up
and go to my father, and will tell him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven,
and in your sight. I am no more worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of
your hired servants .”’ “He arose, and came to his father. But while he was
still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and
fell on his neck, and kissed him. The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned
against heaven, and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe, and put it on
him. Put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. Bring the fattened calf,
kill it, and let us eat, and celebrate; for this, my son, was dead, and is alive
again. He was lost, and is found.’ They began to celebrate. “Now his elder son
was in the field. As he came near to the house, he heard music and dancing. He
called one of the servants to him, and asked what was going on. He said to him,
‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he
has received him back safe and healthy.’ But he was angry, and would not go in.
Therefore his father came out, and begged him. But he answered his father,
‘Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed a commandment
of yours, but you never gave me a goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.
But when this, your son, came, who has devoured your living with prostitutes,
you killed the fattened calf for him.’ “He said to him, ‘Son, you are always
with me, and all that is mine is yours. But it was appropriate to celebrate and
be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and
is found.
N.B: The Above Piece Is From The writer’s Faith Achieves
Health Ministry: 3,158 new Corona cases, 42 deaths
NNA/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
The Ministry of Public Health announced, on Saturday, the registration of 3,158
new Corona infections, thus raising the cumulative number of confirmed cases
to-date to 393,211. Additionally, the Ministry indicated that 42 deaths have
been recorded during the past 24 hours.
Sethrida Geagea to Asharq Al-Awsat: We Are Waiting for Aoun to Take Historic
Resignation Move
Beirut - Caroline Akoum/Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
Lebanese Forces lawmaker Sethrida Geagea has said that forcing President Michel
Aoun’s resignation through street protests is “an unconstitutional move” but
that the LF was waiting for him to take a historic step to resign.
“We are waiting for the president to take the historic stance of resigning and
calling for early elections,” Geagea told Asharq Al-Awsat in an interview
published Saturday. “We believe in the state and its institutions … Bringing the
president down through street protests is an unconstitutional and illegitimate
move,” she said. Asked about the LF’s ties with Prime Minister-designate Saad
Hariri, the lawmaker, who is the wife of LF leader Samir Geagea, told the
newspaper that the improvement of relations between the two sides hinged on a
change in some of Hariri’s stances.
“Restoring (of ties) hinges on him and his stances from essential issues such as
running the state, governance, fighting corruption, approving reforms and
others,” she said.
On Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rai’s call for political parties to submit
their vision for an improvement in the Lebanese political system, she hailed the
move as essential for the coming stage. Yet she stressed that the state should
have sovereignty across all Lebanese territories before talking about any change
in the system.
Thousands of Lebanese rallied at the seat of the Maronite church in Bkirki last
Saturday in support of the patriarch who has called for a UN-sponsored
international conference in the face of Lebanon's economic collapse and
political impasse.
Rai wants Lebanese parties to present their vision on what needs to be changed
in the political system, in order to submit it to the UN.
“There shouldn’t be any illegitimate arms,” Geagea said in reference to
Hezbollah. “The state should restore its strategic decision on peace and war.”
“We can’t discuss a matter as important as a change in the system at a time when
a certain Lebanese party manipulates the state’s strategic decisions,” she
added. Hezbollah last week slammed al-Rai’s proposal for an international
conference on Lebanon, saying it would open the door to foreign interference.
But Geagea said: “We remain fully committed to Bkirki’s plans and we always back
the patriarch.”
Asked if her husband is a candidate for the presidency, the lawmaker said that
the LF’s main interest currently lies in “salvaging the Republic … because we
are in a state of total collapse.”“We will discuss about the candidacy for the
presidency after we succeed in our mission.”
Diab Threatens to Suspend His Duties as Caretaker PM
Associated Press/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab warned Saturday that the country was
quickly headed toward chaos and appealed to politicians to put aside differences
in order form a new government that can attract desperately needed foreign
assistance. Diab threatened to suspend his duties if that would increase
pressure for a new Cabinet to be formed. He spoke in a terse address to the
nation as the currency continued its rapid collapse against the dollar, trading
at one point at 10,500 Lebanese pounds on the black market for the first time in
its history. Angry protesters have blocked streets and highways across the
country with burning tires for days, as the pound slid to record new lows. The
crash in the local currency has resulted in a sharp increase in prices as well
as delays in the arrival of fuel shipments, leading to more extended power cuts
around the country, in some areas reaching more than 12 hours a day. The crisis
has driven nearly half the population of the small country of 6 million into
poverty, wiped out savings and slashed consumer purchasing power. Diab, who
resigned in the wake of the massive August 4 explosion at Beirut port, suggested
he might stop working in his role. "If it helps to form a government, I am
prepared to resort to that option even though it goes against my principles," he
said. In October, former Prime Minister Saad Hariri was named to form a new
Cabinet but five months later, disagreements between him and President Michel
Aoun on the shape of the Cabinet has stood in the way of a new government's
formation. Lebanon has also been in desperate need of foreign currency, but
international donors have said they will only help the country financially if
major reforms are implemented to fight widespread corruption, which has brought
the nation to the brink of bankruptcy.
"What are you waiting for, more collapse? More suffering? Chaos?" he said,
chiding senior politicians without naming them for grandstanding on the shape
and size of the government while the country slides further into the abyss.
"What will having one minister more or less (in the cabinet) do if the entire
country collapses," he asked. "Lebanon is in grave danger and the Lebanese are
paying the price."
Lebanon’s caretaker PM Diab threatens to stop running
government
Rawad Taha, Al Arabiya English/06 March ,2021
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab threatened on Saturday to stop
performing his duties to pressure politicians to form a new government. “The
equation is clear: there is no solution to the social crisis without solving the
financial crisis, no solution to the financial crisis without the resumption of
negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), no negotiations with
the IMF without reforms, no reforms without a new government,” Diab added.
Diab’s cabinet resigned on the back of the August 4 Beirut port explosion that
devastated swathes of the capital. Prime minister-designate Saad al-Hariri was
nominated in October but has failed to form a new cabinet so far due to
political deadlock between him and President Michel Aoun. Lebanon has been
witnessing a devastating political and socio-economic crisis since October 2019
when nationwide protests demanding pollical and economic reforms pressured for
the resignation of al-Hariri’s government. Diab added that Lebanon has reached
the brink of explosion after the collapse and that there is fear that “the
dangers will no longer be contained”. “As if it is our destiny in this country
to remain tormented. As if the Lebanese’s dreams of a stable homeland are
imprisoned. As if their aspirations for a just state is forbidden. As if their
wishes for reassurance to tomorrow were confiscated,” Diab added.
“If seclusion helps with cabinet formation then I am ready to resort to it,
although it goes against my convictions for it disrupts the entire state and is
detrimental to the Lebanese,” Diab said in a speech. “What is the responsibility
of the Lebanese in the world’s conflicts? Why does Lebanon remain at the center
of conflict in the region? Who is using our country as an arena to settle
foreign agendas,” Diab added. Diab added that the Lebanese are suffering a
serious social crisis, and it is likely to worsen if a new government with
powers is not formed. “Is not the scene of the race for milk a sufficient
incentive to transcend the formalities and round the corners in order to form a
government,” Diab said. Diab added that the politicians cannot blame the people
for their cry, while the formation of the government is in a vicious circle, and
thus the suffering of the Lebanese is deepening, and social problems are
accumulating. Diab added that Lebanon is in grave danger, and that the Lebanese
are paying the heavy price of waiting. “Let us leave the illusions and ambitions
of the authority aside, because the days to come do not bode well if
stubbornness, defiance and arrogance remain barriers to forming the future
government. May God protect Lebanon; May God protect the Lebanese,” Diab added.
- with Reuters
Oweidat commissions security apparatuses to pursue and
arrest money changers, manipulators of national currency
NNA/06 March ,2021
Attorney General of the Court of Cassation, Judge Ghassan Oweidat, issued a
circular today to all security apparatuses on Lebanese territories, including
the Army Intelligence, Internal Security Forces, Public Security, State Security
and Customs Police, stating: “We, the Attorney General of the Court of
Cassation, charge you to conduct the necessary and required investigations to
prosecute all manipulators and money changers handling the national currency and
illegal competition in foreign currencies, and seek to arrest them wherever they
are, and to interrogate them to find out about the parties inciting them and
participating with them, in undermining the status of the national currency, and
to inform us of the result as quickly as possible.”
Presidency Press Office: President’s stances are issued by
him personally, and are not attributed to "visitors" or "sources”
NNA/06 March ,2021
The Presidency Press Office issued today the following statement: “Various media
outlets tend to publish stances attributed to ‘sources of Baabda’, and ‘sources
close to the presidency of the republic’, and other descriptions. The Presidency
Press Office, once again confirms, that the stances of His Excellency the
President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, are issued by him personally, or
through the Press Office of the Presidency of the Republic, and are not
attributed to "visitors", "informed sources" or "close sources" etc…, because
what is attributed to the aforementioned bodies is baseless and false. As for
the positions issued by heads of the parliamentary blocs, they only reflect
their views from events, and it is their natural right based on their political
positions. The Presidency Press Office renews its call on the media to refer to
it in everything related to the positions of His Excellency the President, on
any topic”.
Wehbe to Radio Lebanon: I summoned the Iranian ambassador
to a ‘frank meeting’ on Monday, in wake of what was published by Al-Alam TV
about Patriarch al-Rahi
NNA/06 March ,2021
Caretaker Foreign Affairs and Emigrants Minister, Charbel Wehbe, said in an
interview with "Radio Lebanon" today, that the criticism targeting him about his
failure to take any action in light of what was mentioned by “Al-Alam TV”
against Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Bechara al-Rahi, is “unfounded”, stressing
that he immediately requested information about what was broadcasted by the
Channel and contacted the Lebanese ambassador in Tehran over the matter, who
assured him of the apology and condemnation issued by the Iranian government for
what was published.
Wehbe also disclosed that he has summoned the Iranian ambassador to a meeting
upcoming Monday, at the Foreign Ministry, with whom "he will speak frankly and
honestly, based on the existing friendship between the two sides." He pointed
out that the apology from the Iranian side has reached the Patriarch, adding
that he will attend Sunday Mass service in Bkirki tomorrow and listen to all the
Patriarch’s directives, hoping that matters are already resolved. Referring to
the talk about the absence of Arab interest in Lebanon during the meeting of
Arab foreign ministers in Cairo, Wehbe considered it to be rather “exaggerated”.
He explained that the meetings of the Arab League at the level of foreign
ministers is held according to a pre-determined and agreed-upon agenda that is
discussed at the level of permanent delegates in Cairo, and then submitted to
the foreign ministers for approval. He indicated that Lebanon is always present
in discussions at the Arab League meetings, relating to its support and
solidarity, assuring that the Arab countries still accord Lebanon attention and
care. “We must understand that in the Arab world there are hot spots that
require the attention of Arab countries in order to deal with them with the
available capacities, and this does not mean that Lebanon has not received
noticeable attention," Wehbe went on, pointing to discussions that tackled the
Turkish intervention in Libya and the Iranian in Yemen, during the Arab foreign
ministers’ meeting.
Wehbe continued to describe his encounter with his Egyptian counterpart on the
sidelines of the meeting in Cairo as "important."He said, "Egypt is very
interested in helping Lebanon overcome its internal crisis, especially in terms
of the stalled government formation,” adding that he has briefed the President
on this matter upon his return from Cairo. He also noted that Egypt is a close
brethren that Lebanon greatly counts upon, pointing to Egyptian efforts in
support of Lebanon within the context of the French initiative. “I think that
there will be an Egyptian-French coordination to lay the foundations for ending
the crisis in Lebanon, leading to the interest of the Lebanese people and
stability, and not leaving Lebanon to an uncertain fate of unknown
consequences,” he corroborated.
Meanwhile, Wehbe stressed that "what is required of us, as Lebanese officials,
is not to depend on the outside for an internal solution. Rather, we must work
internally and the outside will help us as much as we endeavor in this
direction."
In response to a question about the message he received from his Canadian
counterpart during his meeting with the Canadian ambassador to Lebanon, Wehbe
said: "The humanitarian factor that binds us to Canada is the expatriate factor,
as there are nearly half a million Lebanese residing in Canada, and this country
has important positions on human rights related to developmental aid for the
poorer classes…Canada used to consider Lebanon to be a middle-income country,
but now the Lebanese situation has become more difficult, which prompted me to
draw attention to that and convey the reality of the Lebanese conditions that
need more humanitarian support."Wehbe revealed that he would contact his
Canadian counterpart on the 25th of this month to discuss the mechanisms of
assistance required for Lebanon. “We have a friendly country, Canada, and this
friendship must be preserved," he emphasized.
Over Lebanon’s complaint regarding the recent Israeli attack on the Lebanese
coast, he stated that “Lebanon informed the United Nations of the huge
environmental damage it has suffered and documented it in a letter to the UN. We
asked the UN for three things, firstly to provide technical support to deal with
environmental pollution, and secondly, to determine the extent of pollution in
the water, and thirdly, to determine the cause and source of said pollution.”He
added: “According to our data, the source is from the waters of the occupied
Palestinian territories, and the enemy says that it is investigating the source
of the leakage, and we hold Israel responsible, but this is not enough. We want
the Security Council to issue a decision based on scientific conviction over
this matter. The most important thing remains to compensate Lebanon, in word and
deed."
Finally, the Caretaker Foreign Minister commented on "the importance of the
historic visit of His Holiness, the Pope, to Iraq, which will confirm religious
diversity in this East and consolidate coexistence in it."
FPM: We regret the persistent recklessness on part of the
PM-designate towards the people, country's fate
NNA/06 March ,2021
The Free Patriotic Movement’s political council regretted, in an issued
statement after its periodic meeting chaired today by its Chief, MP Gebran
Bassil, "the persistent disdain on part of the PM-designate towards the fate of
the people and the country", holding him responsible “for deepening the crisis,
by deliberately refraining from making any effort or consultations to form the
government, and rejecting any action by those concerned.”“Instead, he only sets
dates for travel to the capitals of the world, as if the government is formed in
these capitals, and not in Beirut!" the statement added sarcastically.
The Movement’s political council also expressed its concern about the stalled
execution of the forensic audit contract, calling on the Finance Minister and
the Central Bank Governor to update the Lebanese on where matters have reached
with “Alvarez and Marsal” Company, in order to ensure transparency and unveil
the truth. On the other side, the council hailed the "perseverance of the
President of the Republic in following-up on the audit file to uncover the
causes of the financial collapse and putting pressure to restore the rights of
depositors," while expressing surprise at the positions of some parties in
accusing the President of violating the Constitution by meeting a state employee
for the purpose of inquiry or giving directives, which is at the core of the
President’s constitutional responsibilities. At the regional level, the council
welcomed the visit of Pope Francis to Iraq, deeming it "a message of peace to
this dear country that has been exhausted by conflicts and interventions and
wars," and hoping that “the visit will help the Iraqis find their way to
stability and restore their role and position in the East and the world.”“We see
in this visit an invitation to all the Levantines to preserve their diversity
and to live together in devotion and brotherhood, rejecting all extremism and
terrorism while tolerating every difference. It is an act of faith in the
peculiarities of the Levantine and the need to preserve them within the
framework of unity and acceptance,” the council asserted. Touching on the need
to respect diversity, the FPM political council expressed its "categorical
rejection of the article published by Al-Alam TV Channel, addressing the
Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, with words that are
offensive in content and form.”“Bkirki has always been, and shall remain, a
beacon of open thought and a declaration of convergence, and was never a seat of
isolation and curtailment…This Patriarch, in particular, was always an advocate
for deep-rootedness in this East and solidarity with all its components in the
face of the dangers and enemies lurking ahead, and was never a conduit for
plotting against any of his people,” the statement emphasized.
Report: Hizbullah-Bkirki Committee to Meet Next Week
Naharnet/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
The members of the dialogue committee tasked with following up on dialogue
between Bkirki and Hizbullah is expected to meet early next week to appease
rhetoric, al-Akhbar daily reported Saturday. The newspaper said the meeting is
the first between the two sides after tensed relations between Bkirki and
Hizbullah over Maronite Patriarch Beshara el-Rahi’s fiery statements against
Hizbullah. The daily said that the two sides exchanged messages in that regard
away from the media, before they agreed on the meeting expected to be held on
Tuesday. The committee includes: Bishop Samir Mazloum and Hareth Shehab from
Bkirki, and Hizbullah officials Mohammed al-Khansa and Mustafa Hajj Ali. Al-Rahi
had called for a UN-sponsored "international conference" in the face of
Lebanon's economic collapse and political impasse, but Hizbullah chief Hassan
Nasrallah slammed the proposal, saying it would open the door to foreign
interference or even to an "occupation".
Minister Leads Delegation to Syria for Refugee Talks
Naharnet/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
Caretaker Social Affairs and Tourism Minister Ramzi Musharrafieh led a
delegation to Syria on Saturday on a two-day visit during which he will hold a
series of meetings, the National News agency reported.
Musharrafieh will meet with Syrian Foreign and Expatriate Ministers Faisal
Mokdad, Interior Mohammed Khaled al-Rahmoun, Local Administration and
Environment Hussein Makhlouf, Social Affairs and Labor Salwa al-Abdullah and
Tourism Mohammed Rami Martini. NNA said the talks will focus on the file of
Syrians displaced in Lebanon, and the plan for their return as approved by the
Lebanese government in July last year.
Attack on MTV team on Ring Bridge
NNA/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
The MTV team was subjected to an attack as they were covering events along the
Ring Bridge in downtown Beirut this afternoon, which prevented them from
carrying on with their live transmission, NNA correspondent reported.
Strong Republic" Bloc visits Russian Embassy
NNA/Saturday, 6 March, 2021
The "Strong Republic" Parliamentary Bloc continued its tour among ambassadors of
the permanent members of the UN Security Council to brief them on the letter
that the "Bloc" addressed to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to demand the
formation of an international fact-finding committee on the issue of the Beirut
port blast, and to request their countries' support. In this context, a Lebanese
Forces Bloc delegation, consisting of MPs Antoine Habshi and Fadi Saad, and the
LF Party's Head of Foreign Relations Department, former Minister Richard
Kouyoumjian, visited the Russian embassy in Beirut today, where they met with
Ambassador Alexander Rudakov and handed him a copy of the letter. The delegation
also presented the reasons for resorting to an international commission of
inquiry, with discussions touching as well on the current prevailing situation.
فيديو حلقة /عربي وانكليزي من اعداد وتقديم حنين غدار موضوعها
لبنان الذي يسيطر عليه حزب الله، المنهار اقتصادياً والمعطل سياسياً/من معهد
واشنطن/شارك في الحلقة مكرم رباح وعلي الأمين وعليا منصور
Video: Lebanon’s Predicament: Political Stagnation and Economic Collapse in a
Hezbollah-Dominated State Makram Rabah, Ali al-Amin, Alia Mansour/The Washington
Institute/March 05/2021
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/96703/%d9%81%d9%8a%d8%af%d9%8a%d9%88-%d8%ad%d9%84%d9%82%d8%a9-%d8%b9%d8%b1%d8%a8%d9%8a-%d9%88%d8%a7%d9%86%d9%83%d9%84%d9%8a%d8%b2%d9%8a-%d9%85%d9%86-%d8%a7%d8%b9%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%af-%d9%88%d8%aa%d9%82%d8%af/
Brief Analysis
Three Lebanese experts explore Beirut’s precarious politics, Hezbollah’s
continued ability to evade accountability, and the Biden administration’s
options.
On March 3, The Washington Institute held a virtual Policy Forum with Makram
Rabah, Ali al-Amin, and Alia Mansour. Rabah is a lecturer of history with the
American University of Beirut and author of the book Conflict on Mount Lebanon:
The Druze, the Maronites and Collective Memory. Amin is a columnist and
editor-in-chief for Janoubia, a Lebanese news website that focuses on the Shia
community and Hezbollah. Mansour is a columnist at al-Majalla, a leading
Arabic-language news magazine, where she covers developments in Lebanon. The
following is a rapporteur’s summary of their remarks.
Makram Rabah
The real enemy of Hezbollah is not the Lebanese political establishment or
Israel, but the October Revolution. Lokman Slim supported this revolution and
was proud of his public connections with the United States and the wider
international community. Most important, he was an outspoken critic of
Hezbollah, arguing that the group’s destruction of Lebanon should not be
normalized. Like him, I am a firm believer in the phrase, “Let justice be done
though the heavens fall.”
The people who killed Lokman on February 4 are the same people who hijacked the
Lebanese state years ago. Hezbollah’s forces kill because they know they can get
away with it, and the government is incapable of holding them accountable.
Furthermore, the group tries to incite fear within us and our families through
cyberbullying and threats. The government says it is investigating his murder,
but we already know who killed him: the same people who killed Rafiq Hariri.
Some people believe that elections can be a means of change in Lebanon. Yet we
cannot win an election that is rigged due to gerrymandering. Hezbollah restricts
people from voting unless they are loyal supporters.
The Biden administration has been clear that it will not replicate the Obama
administration’s policies. Indeed, the United States cannot allow people like
Lokman to be executed with impunity. The Biden administration should urge
policymakers to adopt sanctions against Lebanon, targeting the political elite
as a whole since Hezbollah is a nonstate actor and therefore difficult to target
individually. Applying the Magnitsky Act would be a good approach. The United
States should also continue using soft power and offering safety nets for the
people of Lebanon.
Ali al-Amin
Lebanon is facing the near-collapse of its economic, educational, medical, and
other essential sectors. Yet despite these conditions and the ongoing tensions
between religious and political parties, there is consensus on avoiding a
relapse into civil war, which most Lebanese understand is ineffective at solving
conflict and too costly for all those involved.
One of the main goals behind Lokman’s assassination was to communicate a message
to the Shia community: namely, that even individuals who have international
acclaim and connections can be killed without any severe consequences for
Hezbollah. This message created enough fear to suppress social discontent
momentarily, as a lot of people became more scared about expressing their
opinions. Yet the group’s use of violence ultimately implies weakness, since it
shows that Hezbollah members sense their decline in popularity and influence.
Historically, Shia in Lebanon were not a homogeneous group and were never
unified under the same leader. Their belief system is based on ijtehad, which
encompasses diversity and individual differences. From this perspective, the
current era—in which Iranian ideology has wrested control over disparate Shia
religious platforms—is an anomaly. Tehran has used money and military power to
become the sole ruler of the Shia community in Lebanon.
The main turning point for Hezbollah was its interference in the Syria war and
other regional conflicts. The group convinced much of the Shia community that
the war in Syria was a war against Sunnis. It also fed them the idea that they
are surrounded by enemies—not just Sunnis in Syria, but also Israelis and even
some of their own countrymen inside Lebanon. By using propaganda to build up
this state of fear, Hezbollah has convinced many Shia that they would be in
danger without the group’s protection, especially given the absence of a strong
state in Lebanon.
This misinformation campaign is relentless inside the Shia community, at the
religious, ideological, and political levels. Hezbollah censors or otherwise
controls all of the community’s leading institutions (e.g., the Supreme Islamic
Shia Council and Dar al-Ifta al-Jaafari), and it exploits media outlets to get
its message across.
Alia Mansour
Lebanon’s problem can be characterized as a regional problem. All of the
countries under Iran’s influence are suffering, and Lebanon’s collapse is
similar to what has happened in Iraq and Syria. Tehran believes that its control
extends to Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut, so no answer can be found to Hezbollah
or similar militias without resolving the interconnected problems in Syria and
Iraq.
Moreover, arms and militias lie at the root of Lebanon’s problems, so any
proposed solution that fails to focus on those two issues will be partial at
best. Iran’s agenda is to destroy the principle of a state in favor of proxy
militia control. An absent or weak state cannot fight corruption or hold
individual violators accountable. Yet simply strengthening state authority is
not a solution in of itself in Lebanon, where the sectarian dimension often
produces gridlock due to recriminatory narratives like “Why should we fight
Sunni corruption if we can’t fight Shia corruption? Why should we hold our
officials accountable if we can’t do the same to Christian officials?”
Many believe that Hezbollah is silent on other officials’ corruption in exchange
for their silence on the group’s illegal weapons. Yet this narrative is false
and dangerous because it implies that hoarding weapons is the only way in which
Hezbollah has corrupted the Lebanese system. In reality, the group stands
accused of rampant tax evasion, money laundering, and racketeering, among other
offenses. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to find a way of holding
Hezbollah accountable for these crimes, and I am not optimistic that this will
change under the Biden administration. But I hope I am wrong.
*The Policy Forum series is made possible through the generosity of the Florence and Robert Kaufman Family.
A Lebanese solution today or regional conflict tomorrow
Baria Alamuddin/Arab News/March 06/2021
بارعة علم الدين/حل لبناني اليوم او صراع اقليمي غدا
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/96722/baria-alamuddin-a-lebanese-solution-today-or-regional-conflict-tomorrow%d8%a8%d8%a7%d8%b1%d8%b9%d8%a9-%d8%b9%d9%84%d9%85-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%d9%8a%d9%86-%d8%ad%d9%84-%d9%84%d8%a8%d9%86%d8%a7%d9%86/
Lebanon’s cedars resemble a sun-dried forest awaiting the spark: Escalating
civil disorder, violence by armed factions, assassinations, state failure,
financial collapse … this is the same remorseless path into civil war that we
passively watched Libya, Syria and Yemen pursue after 2011. Have we learned
nothing?
Like Nero fiddling while Rome burns, Lebanon’s discredited political classes can
proudly boast a year of wasted efforts toward forming a competent, technocratic
government, each time predictably met with dogmatic refusals by Michel Aoun,
Gebran Bassil and Hassan Nasrallah — who insist on flooding the administration
with corrupt loyalists, while Lebanon implodes before our eyes.
Hence the outbreak of mass public support (and naked panic from Hezbollah) at
Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai’s proposals for a new way forward in his speech
last week to a large and diverse audience including Sunni, Shiite, Druze and
Christian leaders. Nevertheless, Rai is being viciously denounced as a “traitor”
by figures who long-ago sold their souls to Tehran, and whose obstructionism was
denounced by the patriarch as a “coup against Lebanese society.”
Yet Rai’s proposals for “internationalizing” the situation will achieve nothing
if the international community has no desire to get involved, or if France,
America and Britain on one side, and Russia and China on the other, act to
frustrate each other’s efforts.
Any meaningful action would require France and Russia to agree on a way forward,
given their ability to compel Lebanese factions to cooperate. An overburdened
Biden administration, an introverted UK, and a COVID-blitzed EU and China have
scant appetite for prioritizing Lebanon — but would they rather grapple with a
political crisis today, or another regionalized war tomorrow?
There is no viable path forward that Hezbollah would voluntarily agree to,
because the international donors and GCC support required to salvage Lebanon
would never countenance Hezbollah being a significant part of the
administration. Hence the need for active Russian involvement in compelling Iran
and Hezbollah to refrain from resorting to violence to sabotage such a route.
Both Paris and Moscow have already demonstrated their desire to rescue Lebanon
through diplomatic support for government formation efforts. But are they
willing to do what it really takes to address this unraveling catastrophe?
In parallel with Rai’s call for internationalization, the other side of the coin
is his insistence on Lebanon’s “neutrality” – i.e. the Lebanese state and its
component factions not being on the payroll of any foreign power, whether
Western states, Arab regimes, Russia or Iran. “Failure to respect neutrality is
the sole cause of all the crises and wars that the country has gone through,” he
argued in his speech last week. “There is no state with two powers within it,
nor with two armies or two peoples.” Lebanon can never enjoy stability or
tranquility without the full disarmament of all nonstate entities: Palestinians,
Hezbollah, criminal gangs, extremists and political factions.
Amid Lebanon’s furiously escalating sectarian and factional tensions, a single
incident risks triggering all-out conflict.
Given the patriarch’s powerful spiritual role, and the respect he also enjoys
among non-Christians, he can play an immense role in breaking the political
gridlock. We have seen a comparable role in Iraq from Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani,
who intervened at critical junctures to force politicians to overcome their
differences, and worked to obstruct Tehran’s schemes for dominating Iraq’s
theological and political spheres. Pope Francis’ Iraq visit likewise has high
ambitions for encouraging national unity and protection of minorities. I
normally strongly oppose the interference of theocrats in politics — but what
other options remain once politicians have repeatedly failed?
The patriarch’s intervention could be the final gasp for Lebanese and Middle
Eastern Christianity: With each new bout of civil conflict the Christian
population has plunged, as hundreds of thousands flee persecution and extremism.
The self-serving, traitorous alliance with Hezbollah by Christian leaders like
Aoun and Bassil has accelerated Lebanese Christianity’s demise. This represents
a catastrophe for Christianity, but also a disaster for Lebanese and Middle
Eastern diversity, as a bastion against Tehran’s intolerant, monolithic
worldview.
Amid Lebanon’s furiously escalating sectarian and factional tensions, a single
incident risks triggering all-out conflict. Lest we forget, the Lebanese civil
war effectively erupted within a single day — April 13, 1975, known as Black
Sunday. In a similar context of explosive inter-factional tensions, a drive-by
church shooting triggered a retaliatory massacre against a busload of
Palestinians. Hundreds were killed as clashes escalated throughout the following
days.
For the world at large, this isn’t just about another civil war: Lebanon would
be swamped with weapons as regional powers rush to back their favored factions,
while the West and nearby states would be swamped with new influxes of refugees.
The collapse of Lebanon would suck in Israel as it sought to prevent Hezbollah
consolidating its own terrorist state upon the smouldering ruins. America and
the West would likewise be drawn in, anxious to protect their favored Israeli
ally, faced with the existential threat of being encircled by anarchic failed
statelets under Persian hegemony, populated by millions of starving, desperate,
and war-ravaged citizens.
For the ayatollahs of Tehran, the nuclear issue, their enmity toward the West,
Arab states and Israel, and their paramilitary encroachments in Iraq, Syria,
Yemen and Lebanon, are one and the same conflict. A conflagration in Lebanon
would put Iran’s paramilitary proxies in several states, armed to the teeth with
medium-range missiles, on a war-footing — making the entire region a highly
explosive powder keg.
Exactly a year ago, governments around the world acted several months too late
because they lacked the foresight to comprehend how a virus in an obscure region
of China could spread like wildfire, killing millions. Today, we are similarly
just a couple of incidents away from Lebanon and the region being dragged back
into devastating new rounds of conflict with profound global ramifications.
The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on March 06-07/2021
Pope holds historic meeting with Iraq’s top Shia cleric
The Arab Weekly/March 07/2021
“May there be an end to acts of violence and extremism, factions and
intolerance!” Francis urged his audience.
NAJAF, IRAQ--Pope Francis held a historic meeting with Iraq’s top Shia cleric
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on Saturday, in a powerful appeal for coexistence
in a country torn by sectarianism and violence.
Their meeting in the holy city of Najaf, during a whirlwind and risky tour of
Iraq by Francis, was the first time a pope has met with such a senior Shia
cleric.After the meeting, Sistani, the top Iraqi cleric of Shia Islam, called on
world religious leaders to hold great powers to account and for wisdom and sense
to prevail over war. Sistani also told Pope Francis that the country’s
Christians should live in “peace.”The meeting, on the second day of the
first-ever papal visit to Iraq, marked a landmark moment in modern religious
history and a milestone in Francis’s efforts to deepen dialogue with other
religions. The pope called for religious communities to work together.
“(He) underlined the importance of collaboration and friendship between
religious communities so that, by cultivating mutual respect and dialogue, we
can contribute to the good of Iraq, of the region,” the Vatican said in a
statement after the meeting, which lasted about 45 minutes.
The pontiff, 84, has visited predominantly Muslim countries including Turkey,
Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and the
Palestinian territories, using those trips to call for inter-religious dialogue.
In a statement, Sistani said, “Religious and spiritual leadership must play a
big role to put a stop to tragedy … and urge sides, especially great powers, to
make wisdom and sense prevail and erase the language of war”.
Great powers must “not sponsor their own self-interest at the expense of the
right of people to live in freedom and dignity”, he said, adding that Christians
should live like all Iraqis in peace and coexistence.
The meeting took place at Sistani’s home that he has rented for decades, located
along a narrow alleyway in Najaf near the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine in Najaf.
An official Vatican photo showed Sistani, 90, in his traditional black Shia robe
and turban sitting across from Francis, in his white cassock.
Words for Iraqis
Pope Francis called for an end to extremism and violence in his opening address
Friday. “May there be an end to acts of violence and extremism, factions and
intolerance!” urged Francis in the stirring address, his first after arriving in
Iraq. “The age-old presence of Christians in this land, and their contributions
to the life of the nation, constitute a rich heritage that they wish to continue
to place at the service of all,” said Pope Francis.
He also urged Iraqi officials to “combat the scourge of corruption, misuse of
power and disregard for law,” in a country consistently ranked one of the most
graft-tainted by Transparency International.
From Baghdad, Francis headed straight to the desert site of the ancient city of
Ur, where Abraham is believed to have been born in the second millennium BC.“It
all started from here,” Pope Francis said, after hearing from representatives of
Iraq’s diverse religious communities.
There were Yazidis, whose ancestral heartland of Sinjar was ravaged by the
Islamic State group in 2014, as well as Mandeans, Kakais, Bahais and
“Here, among so many who have suffered, my thoughts turn to the Yazidis,
innocent victims of senseless and brutal atrocities,” he said.
Shia and Sunni sheikhs, as well as Christian clerics, were in attendance.
Each were wearing their traditional religious garb, with a dozen different types
of robe and headdress on display in the red-carpeted pavilion set up for the
visit. Iraq is a Muslim-majority country of 40 million whose Christian
population has shrunk in the last two decades to just one percent, with
minorities still complaining of ostracism and persecution.
During his address, Pope Francis said freedom of conscience and of religion were
“fundamental rights” that should be respected everywhere.
“We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion,” Francis said, in
a message of solidarity with the minorities persecuted under the rule of the
Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.
He also made an impassioned plea for “unity” after conflict.
“Let us ask for this in praying for the whole Middle East. Here I think
especially of neighbouring war-torn Syria,” he said.
Following the prayer service in Ur, Pope Francis is to head back to Baghdad to
preside over a mass at the St. Joseph Cathedral.
‘Cease partisan interests’
Pope Francis, a strong proponent of interfaith dialogue, has met top Sunni
clerics in several Muslim-majority countries, including Bangladesh, Morocco,
Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Sistani, meanwhile, is followed by most of the world’s 200 million Shias — a
minority among Muslims but the majority in Iraq — and is a national figure for
Iraqis. In 2019, he stood with Iraqi protesters demanding better public services
and rejecting external interference in Iraq’s domestic affairs.
On Friday in Baghdad, Pope Francis made a similar plea.
“May partisan interests cease, those outside interests who don’t take into
account the local population,” Francis said.
Sistani has had a complicated relationship with his birthplace Iran, where the
other main seat of Shia religious authority lies: Qom.
While Najaf affirms the separation of religion and politics, Qom believes the
top cleric — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — should also govern.
Iraqi clerics and Christian leaders said the visit could strengthen Najaf’s
standing compared to Qom.
In Abu Dhabi in 2019, the Pope met Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the imam of the Al-Azhar
mosque in Cairo and a key authority for Sunni Muslims.
They signed a text encouraging Christian-Muslim dialogue, which Catholic clerics
hoped Sistani would also back, but the meeting passed without such an
endorsement. While the pope has been vaccinated and encouraged others to get the
jab, Sistani’s office has not announced his vaccination.
Iraq is currently gripped by a resurgence of coronavirus cases, recording more
than 5,000 infections and more than two dozen deaths daily.
Iran says US approved release of frozen Iranian assets in
Iraq
Yaghoub Fazeli, Al Arabiya English/07 March ,2021
An Iranian trade official said Friday the US green-lit the release of Iranian
funds that have been frozen in Iraq due to US sanctions. Citing Iraqi sources,
Hamid Hosseini, board member of the Iran-Iraq Joint Chamber of Commerce, said
Washington has approved the release of frozen Iranian assets at the Trade Bank
of Iraq. “Several transactions have [already] been made,” Hosseini wrote on
Twitter, without mentioning the value of the assets. US sanctions have prevented
Iran from accessing tens of billions of its assets in foreign banks. Iranian
frozen assets in Iraq amount to more than $6 billion, according to Iranian
officials. The release of Iran’s frozen assets will help with the “provision of
essential items” for the public ahead of the Iranian new year and the Muslim
fasting month of Ramadan, Hosseini said. Under US sanctions, Iraq pays the money
for gas bought from Iran to an account at the Trade Bank of Iraq, which Tehran
is only allowed to use to buy humanitarian goods from Iraq itself. Last October,
the head of the Iran-South Korea Chamber of Commerce said the release of Iranian
frozen funds in South Korea, which he said are worth $8.5 billion, depended on
the outcome of the US presidential election. Iran’s economy has been hit hard
since 2018 when former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear
deal between Tehran and world powers and reimposed sweeping sanctions on the
country. Last month, South Korea said it reached an agreement with Iran over the
release of Tehran’s frozen funds in South Korean banks but signalled that the
agreement was effectively subject to US approval.
Release of British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in
doubt despite end of sentence
AFP/06 March ,2021
The release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a UK-Iraninan dual national held in
Tehran, could be in doubt, her husband told the BBC on Saturday, a day before
the end of her five-year jail term. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained in Iran
in 2016, is due to be released on Sunday, the official end of a sentence over
charges she plotted to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Nazanin, now 42, has
strenuously denied the accusations with her case becoming a matter of major
diplomatic disagreement between Britain and Iran during the five years she has
spent separated from her husband and young daughter. Despite the official end of
the sentence, Nazanin's husband Richard Ratcliffe told the BBC her detention has
"the potential to drag on and on". "It's perfectly possible that Nazanin gets a
new court case thrown at her," he said. In September, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was
summoned before an Iranian court and notified of a new indictment against her,
Iranian state media reported at the time. Richard Ratcliffe, who has campaigned
for his wife's return, said the family had "never seen a copy of the charges on
which she was sentenced". "There is no written documentation on anything," he
added, accusing Iran of preserving "the space to make it up as they go along at
every stage"."Now the end of her actual sentence -- which was once the
worst-case scenario -- looks like a good outcome, at this point," he added.
Nazanin has been temporarily released from Tehran's notorious Evin prison and
has under house arrest since the spring due to the coronavirus outbreak.
For four years, however, at Evin she spent time in solitary confinement in
windowless cells, declared hunger strikes and had medical treatment withheld.
Media in both the UK and Iran and Richard Ratcliffe have drawn a possible link
between Nazanin's detention and a British debt dating back more than 40 years.
The British government has previously admitted it owes Iran up to £300 million
($390 million), but both countries have denied any link with the
Zaghari-Ratcliffe case.
Biden’s quiet style belies ambitions beyond undoing Trump legacy
Bloomberg/06 March /2021
The new U.S. president starts his days with an early morning workout in the gym
of the White House residence, watching MSNBC or CNN, and ends them at a
reasonable hour often with a bowl of Breyers chocolate chip ice cream. He
doesn’t read Twitter unless someone shows him a tweet, and the posts at his own
accounts are written by other people and almost never make news. He pores
through briefing books, his aides say, beginning about 7:30 a.m. on weekdays,
and receives an intelligence briefing most every day.
He requires masks in the White House. His interactions with reporters and his
public appearances are limited and stage-managed -- and even then, there are
stumbles that require clean-up by his staff.
Both in policy and in style, Joe Biden has moved rapidly to shape the presidency
in his own image, drawing obvious contrasts -- often, deliberately -- with his
mercurial predecessor, Donald Trump. He is determined not to occupy as much
space on the front-burners of American minds.
But Biden’s unobtrusive presidency masks his desire to dramatically reshape the
country -- ambitions that extend well beyond simply erasing Trump’s legacy or
reviving Barack Obama’s agenda.
Already, he has challenged Congress to pass what would be the second-largest
stimulus in U.S. history to snuff out the pandemic, as well as an immigration
overhaul that could lead to millions of undocumented people gaining citizenship.
Soon to come: a multi-trillion dollar plan to construct roads, bridges, airports
and other infrastructure projects across the country, remake the energy and
manufacturing sectors and potentially rewrite the tax code. He has taken early
steps targeting racial inequality and climate change, two of the most divisive
issues. And he has broadly wielded presidential power, issuing 54 executive
orders and other actions during his first five weeks in office -- more than any
other president in the same span.
Biden’s voters “didn’t send him here to be a placeholder, White House Chief of
Staff Ron Klain said in an interview. “They didn’t send him here to take small
measures. They sent him here to beat a pandemic that’s killed 500,000 people and
to reverse a record of economic failure and to start to deal with our climate
crisis and our racism crisis.
On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers who once hoped for a partner in a
president who entered office preaching “unity are beginning to suspect there
will be few actual opportunities for bipartisan gains. Biden’s own party has
begun to splinter along familiar faults between liberals and moderates, who
enjoy outsize influence in the Senate.Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a West
Virginia Republican regarded as persuadable in the White House, has already met
twice with the new president.
“You get the sense, the distinctive sense that he wants to be an active part of
getting there, she said, referring to bipartisan agreement. “Just because he
understands how, I guess, how the sausage is made more, you could see that he
could push the right buttons, so to speak, rather than, you know, President
Trump maybe trying to get things done from an executive standpoint.
But she added: “I’m not sure what’s going to come of the meetings.
Six weeks into his presidency, Biden has yet to sign a single piece of
legislation despite his desire to move quickly -- let alone the $1.9 trillion
pandemic relief bill that’s been his administration’s focus. Though he’d
initially planned to address a joint session of Congress in February, like all
of his recent predecessors, the timing has slipped as he waits for the stimulus
to pass.The closely divided Senate and Trump’s second impeachment trial have put
the confirmation of Biden’s cabinet well behind schedule. Just 13 out of 23
cabinet members are in place, compared to 18 of 22 for Trump at the same point
in his presidency.
At 78, Biden is the oldest first-term U.S. president in history. While aides
less than half his age insist that Biden outworks them, the president sometimes
misreads his teleprompter or injects inadvertent inaccuracies into his remarks.
His staff had to publicly correct him after a misstatement last weekend.
At a CNN town hall earlier in February, Biden broke the news that the
administration had invoked the Defense Production Act to speed vaccine
distribution. But he misspoke, calling the law the “National Defense Act.
Much of the next day’s press briefing was spent explaining what Biden had meant
the night before. But Biden’s age confers advantages as well: He has immense
confidence in his own command of the federal government and his familiarity with
Congress, and he enjoys long relationships with many lawmakers in both parties.
At an Oval Office meeting with a bipartisan group of mayors and governors last
month, Biden responded sharply after one participant offered a suggestion on
passing the pandemic relief bill through the Senate. The president said that he
would handle the politics of the legislation, and that he had brought the state
and local leaders to the White House to talk about the virus response in their
areas and how the federal government could help. Jeff Williams, the Republican
mayor of Arlington, Texas, said Biden made the comment “in jest and that he and
the other elected officials didn’t take offense. “Everybody laughed when they
realized, ‘you’re right, what are we doing talking to him about the politics
side?’ And everybody respected that and went back to the substance, Detroit
Mayor Mike Duggan, a Democrat, said. The White House has meanwhile moved quickly
on requests from congressional, state and municipal leaders, especially
regarding the pandemic, they say.
Speeding Vaccinations
Less than a week after the meeting with Biden and expressing concerns about
vaccine distribution in his area, Miami’s Republican mayor, Francis Suarez, got
a call from the administration to let him know that a federal mass vaccination
site would be opening in Miami-Dade County, he said. After House Majority Whip
James Clyburn recommended that Biden use federally qualified health centers for
vaccinations, the administration announced a policy to make it happen in just a
few days.
“Not in a week. They did it over the weekend, Clyburn said. Biden entered office
declaring that his top priority would be to curb the pandemic, and he has
publicly shown a White House almost exclusively focused on the task.
Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, became the
president’s top medical adviser. Near-daily Covid-19 briefings resumed. The
president hardly goes a day without discussing the state of the pandemic and the
U.S. vaccination effort, and he has made a point of wearing a mask almost
anytime he’s in public, even though he has received both doses of the Moderna
Inc. vaccine.
There have been moments when he’s relaxed his precautions: Biden invited the
governors of Michigan and Wisconsin to ride with him in the presidential
limousine when he visited their states, for example.
Biden speaks frequently of the pandemic’s death toll in his public appearances,
offering another contrast to Trump, who struggled to show empathy and rarely
mentioned the human tally.
“He’s seen some very tough things over the course of his life, Klain said. “He
has a centering, an emotional solidness that comes from having experienced
triumph and tragedy that I think makes him so well suited to be president at
this time. Biden marked a half-million U.S. dead with a solemn ceremony on the
South Lawn of the White House, lining a staircase Trump famously climbed upon
his return from hospitalization for Covid-19 with dozens of candles representing
the lost lives.
“The day will come when the memory of the loved one you lost will bring a smile
to your lips before a tear to your eye. It will come. I promise you, he said at
the Feb. 22 event. “My prayer for you, though, is that day will come sooner
rather than later.
The pandemic limited Biden’s in-person interactions during his campaign, but
vaccination has helped him resume some of the folksy behavior that’s core to his
public persona.
The president has leaned on intimacy in his White House meetings, holding almost
all of them in the Oval Office. Several people who also visited the White House
during previous administrations said they’d never been inside the office before
Biden, a gesture they interpreted as a sign of respect.
Negotiating Failure
Still, Biden has not shown much progress on a core promise of his presidential
campaign: what he described as a singular ability to work across the aisle.
Entreaties from 10 Senate Republicans to compromise on the stimulus legislation
resulted in a single meeting with the president and some follow-up memos. Now,
each side blames the other for the failure of negotiations.
Biden’s advisers have sought to define bipartisanship broadly, pointing to polls
that show many Republicans in support of the pandemic relief bill in addition to
most Democrats. What’s important to voters, they say, is not a show of
cooperation with Biden’s political opponents but rapid results.
“He has kept his promises that he made as a candidate. He is proceeding to
govern the way he believes a president should lead, senior adviser Anita Dunn
said. “Nobody should be surprised at how President Biden is conducting himself
because it’s exactly what he said he would do.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon, who together with four
other major business leaders spent 90 minutes with Biden, Vice President Kamala
Harris and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in February, said he found the
president engaged and focused.
“You got a sense from him that he really did want to hear from you and wasn’t
just going through the motions of bringing in business because that’s the thing
that the president’s supposed to do, Dimon said.
But Dimon indicated he is reserving judgment for Biden’s results.
“You can do infrastructure well or do it badly. It can never be about just
getting a bill, he said. “What’s key always is focusing on competent government
as opposed to simply just governing, making decisions.
Regional tensions on Sisi’s agenda in Khartoum
The Arab Weekly/March 07/2021
KHARTOUM— Egypt’s president arrived in Sudan on Saturday, his first visit to the
country since a popular uprising led to the military’s overthrow of longtime
autocrat Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi landed at Khartoum international airport and
headed to a meeting with Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the ruling
Sovereign Council, at the presidential palace. There, they inspected a military
guard of honor. Sissi also met with Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
The Egyptian leader was scheduled to discuss with Sudanese officials an array of
issues, including economic and military ties and the two nations’ dispute with
Ethiopia over a massive dam it is building on the Blue Nile, Egypt’s presidency
said in a statement prior to the visit.
Sisi also was expected to discuss Sudan’s border dispute with Ethiopia and
security in the Red Sea region, which has become a theater of growing
competition among world and regional powers in recent years, the statement said.
Both Sudan and Egypt are members of a newly established Red Sea forum, along
with six other African and Asian nations. The visit came amid a rapprochement
between the two governments. Egypt has in recent years sought to rebuild ties
with its southern neighbor, an effort that has intensified since Bashir’s ouster
in April 2019. Top civilian and military officials from both nations have
exchanged regular visits. The countries signed an agreement last week to
strengthen their military cooperation. “We have been facing common regional
threats, and we have to work together to face these threats on all fronts,”
Egypt’s Chief of Staff Mohamed Farid said while visiting Khartoum last week.
During Bashir’s era, relations between Sudan and Egypt suffered from sporadic
tensions. These included the revival of a longstanding dispute over a border
territory, the Halayeb Triangle, which is held by Egypt and claimed by Sudan.
Despite decade-long negotiations, the two countries have repeatedly failed to
reach a three-party deal with Ethiopia over its massive dam. Cairo and Khartoum
have recently called for internationalising the dispute to include the US, the
European Union, the UN and the African Union to facilitate reaching a deal on
the filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam. In a phone call
Friday with Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry, UN Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres said the world body was ready to “support and participate” in AU-led
negotiations to resolve the dam dispute. Sudan has criticised Ethiopia’s plans
to start a second filling of the dam’s massive reservoir during the next rainy
season. At least 20 million Sudanese, more than half the country’s population,
could be affected if Ethiopia fills and operates the dam without coordinating
with Sudan, the government in Khartoum has said. Sudanese could suffer both from
flooding and less access to drinking water because Sudan’s own dams would be
affected, it says. Sudan wants Ethiopia to coordinate and share data on the
dam’s operation to avoid flooding and protect its own power-generating dams on
the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile River. The Blue Nile meets with
the White Nile in central Sudan. From there, the Nile winds northward through
Egypt and flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Egypt, the Arab world’s most
populous country with over 100 million people, has called the dam an existential
threat and worries that it would reduce its share of Nile waters. The country
relies almost entirely on the Nile to supply water for agriculture and its
people. About 85% of the Nile’s flow originates from Ethiopia. Ethiopian
officials hope the dam, now more than three-quarters complete, will reach full
power-generating capacity in 2023, helping pull millions of its people out of
poverty.
Turkey’s ‘common values’ with Egypt may bring new
developments soon: Defense Minister
Tuqa Khalid, Al Arabiya English/06 March ,2021
Turkey’s Defense Minister said on Saturday his country shared common values with
Egypt which may bring about “different developments” in the coming days. “We
have many historical and cultural values in common with Egypt. When they are put
in use, we consider that there may be different developments in the coming
days,” state news agency Anadolu cited Hulusi Akar as saying. He added that
Egypt “respected” Turkey’s continental shelf limits when the Middle Eastern
country made a tender on hydrocarbon exploration in the eastern Mediterranean,
which he described as a “very important development.”Ties between the two
countries have been strained since Egypt’s army ousted Muslim Brotherhood
President Mohammed Mursi, an ally of President Tayyip Erdogan, in 2013. Cairo
designates the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organization. Erdogan’s
Islamist-rooted AK Party supported Mursi’s short-lived Egyptian government. Many
Brotherhood members and their supporters have fled to Turkey since the group's
activities were banned in Egypt. Ankara and Cairo have also clashed over
maritime jurisdiction and offshore resources, as well as differences in Libya,
where they backed opposing sides in the civil war. Last month, Egypt announced
the start of a bid round for oil and natural gas exploration and exploitation in
24 blocks, including some in the Mediterranean. After trading insults and
accusations for years, Turkey and Egypt have recently lowered the temperature of
their public comments. However, Turkish officials have said there are still no
political talks between the two sides, and that any contacts are solely for
intelligence reasons. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on
Wednesday: “As the two countries with the longest coastlines in the eastern
Mediterranean, if our ties and the conditions allow it, we can also negotiate a
maritime demarcation deal with Egypt and sign it amongst ourselves.”- With
Reuters
Saudi Arabia intercepts another two explosive Houthi
drones, totaling 8 in 24
Tuqa Khalid, Al Arabiya English/06 March ,2021
The Arab Coalition intercepted two explosive-laden drones launched by Yemen’s
Houthis towards Saudi Arabia’s Jazan and Khamis Mushait, raising the number of
such drone attacks to eight over the past 24 hours. The Houthi’s explosive-laden
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) were the latest in a series of escalated
cross-border aerial attacks on the Kingdom by the Iran-backed militia in Yemen.
This week’s attacks have injured at least seven civilians, according the Saudi
authorities. Debris from intercepting six explosive drones injured ten-year-old
child and a Saudi civilian who was wounded while driving his car, the civil
defense said earlier on Friday. Saudi Arabia said on Thursday the Houthis
launched a ballistic missile towards the southern Jazan region. On Tuesday, a
Houthi military projectile fell in Jazan, injuring at least five civilians.
Saudi Arabia says a military projectile launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi
militia fell in the Kingdom’s southern Jazan region, March 2, 2021. (SPA) Saudi
Arabia says a military projectile launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia
fell in the Kingdom’s southern Jazan region, March 2, 2021. (SPA) The attacks on
Jazan came days after the Coalition said it had thwarted a ballistic missile
attack by the Houthis on the Saudi capital Riyadh and destroyed six armed drones
launched towards cities in the Kingdom’s south. Riyadh had also said a Houthi
drone attack caused a fire in a civilian aircraft at an airport in Abha
mid-February. Coalition Spokesperson Colonel Turki al-Maliki said: “The Houthi
militia deliberately escalates hostile and terrorist targeting of civilians and
civilian objects systematically using ballistic missiles… Those actions
constitute war crimes.”
Missile Strikes on Syria Oil Refineries Kill 4
Agence France Presse/06 March ,2021
Missile strikes on makeshift oil refineries in northern Syria killed four people
and injured more than 20 others, a war monitor said Saturday. The Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights said a series of strikes launched from Russian
warships and by allied Syrian government forces hit the makeshift refineries in
Aleppo province on Friday night, causing a massive blaze in the area controlled
by Turkey and its Syrian rebel proxies. The Britain-based monitor "documented
the deaths of four people, while 24 others sustained various injuries and burns"
in the attacks near the town of Jarablus. At least one Syrian rebel was among
the dead, said Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman. Rescue workers spent hours
trying to extinguish the fire which spread to about 30 oil tankers, according to
the war monitor. Oil installations in Turkey-controlled parts of Aleppo have
come under repeated attack in recent months although Moscow and the Syrian
regime have not claimed responsibility. The Observatory reported two such
missile attacks last month. In January, unidentified drones also hit oil
refineries in Turkish-held areas of Aleppo, causing a large fire, according to
the Observatory. Syria's war has killed more than 387,000 people and displaced
millions since starting in 2011 with a brutal repression of anti-government
protests. It later evolved into a complex conflict involving jihadists and
foreign powers. Northern neighbour Turkey has seized control of several regions
inside Syria in military campaigns against the Islamic State group and Kurdish
fighters since 2016.
Syria Kurds Hand 12 Children to their Iraqi Yazidi Mothers
Agence France Presse/06 March ,2021
Syria's Kurds have handed back 12 children of alleged Islamic State members to
their mothers from Iraq's Yazidi minority, a Kurdish official said Friday. "The
children, aged two to five, were all born to Yazidi mothers and fathered by IS
members. They were handed over to their mothers" on Thursday, said Syrian
Kurdish official Zeyneb Saroukhan. Dozens of Yazidi women and girls survived sex
slavery at the hands of IS jihadists in Syria and have since returned to Iraq,
but many were forced to leave their children behind or risk being shunned by
their community. Saroukhan said this was the first time children had been given
back to their mothers. IS abducted thousands of Yazidi women and girls from
their ancestral Iraqi home of Sinjar in 2014, then enslaved, raped, or married
them off by force to jihadists, including in neighbouring Syria. US-backed
Syrian Kurdish fighters say they have rescued dozens during their years of
battles against IS that led to their 2019 territorial defeat. But while the
Yazidi community welcomed those survivors back to northern Iraq, that compassion
was not extended to their children. Saroukhan said it had been the Syrian
Kurdish authorities' duty to look after the children until their mothers asked
for them. Yazidi women and children have previously returned from Syria to Iraq,
but many of those abducted remain missing. In May last year, a then 17-year-old
Yazidi girl abducted by IS returned to Iraq after the coronavirus lockdown in
Syria delayed her homecoming. In 2019, Syria's Kurds repatriated 25 women and
children.
Fighting in Yemen's Marib Kills 90 in 24 Hours
Agence France Presse/06 March ,2021
Fierce fighting between Yemeni pro-government forces and Iran-backed Huthi
rebels has killed at least 90 combatants on both sides in the past 24 hours,
government military sources said Saturday. The Shiite rebels launched an
offensive last month to seize Marib, the last stronghold in northern Yemen of
pro-government forces who are backed by a Saudi-led military coalition. The
clashes in the oil-rich province left 32 dead among government forces and
loyalist tribes, while 58 Huthi rebels were killed in coalition air strikes, the
sources told AFP. They said heavy clashes broke out on six fronts as government
forces were able to counter attacks by the Huthis who managed to advance only on
the Kassara front northwest of Marib city. The fighting also left dozens of
people wounded, the sources added. The loss of Marib would be a huge blow for
the Yemeni government, but would also threaten catastrophe for civilians,
including hundreds of thousands of displaced people sheltering in desolate camps
in the surrounding desert. It would also be a major setback for Saudi Arabia,
which has been the target of increasingly frequent Huthi missile attacks in
recent weeks. Shrapnel from Huthi drones intercepted by the Saudis on Friday
wounded two civilians, including a 10-year-old, in the southwest of the kingdom,
the official SPA news agency reported. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on
Monday urged the Huthis to halt their offensive in Marib, as he announced $191
million in aid at a donors' conference. "Aid alone will not end the conflict. We
can only end the humanitarian crisis in Yemen by ending the war... so the United
States is reinvigorating our diplomatic efforts to end the war," he said. The
United Nations had sought to raise $3.85 billion from more than 100 governments
and donors, but only $1.7 billion was offered.
The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on March 06-07/2021
Hero of the Month: M. Zuhdi Jasser – President of the
American Islamic forum for Democracy.
Grégoire Canlorbe/ Gatestone Institute/March 06/2021
كركوري مانلوربي/معهد كايتستون: بطل الشهر هو ام . زوهدي زاهر رئيس الفوروم
الإسلامي الأميركي للديموقراطية
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/96698/gregoire-canlorbe-gatestone-institute-hero-of-the-month-m-zuhdi-jasser-president-of-the-american-islamic-forum-for-democracy-%d9%83%d8%b1%d9%83%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a-%d9%85%d8%a7%d9%86%d9%84/
The Obama Administration handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the theocrats
as well as an insurance of security, as well as a future with a nuclear bomb.
These, along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group
Hizballah, gave Iran’s leaders a green light to spread terror into Syria.
Some may appropriately say that no real democracies evolved quickly [in the
“Arab Spring”] after centuries of tyranny. In fact, there may be a need for
multiple revolutions before democracy can take hold. Perhaps, though, there can
be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of
reform and liberalization, as we have seen done so successfully with the 2020
Middle East agreements.
The challenge, as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point
of fiction—which has been “Plan A” for the tyrants across the Middle East since
World War II. They lie to the West about reforms in order to placate each new
administration with a five- or ten-year plan while transitions in power in the
West along with our short-term, societal “attention deficit disorder” give them
a pass.
Regardless of whether a state’s approach is top-down or bottom-up, if its raison
d’être is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than on
individual rights and the protection of minorities, as in secular liberal
democracies, it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.
We will have to watch very closely if there will be new interpretations from the
pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca, or mosques in Medina and across the
country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and
Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.
As for Biden’s foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will
focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So, the Pentagon is a branch
of the State Department? If that is not “leading from behind 3.0”, I don’t know
what is. Sources say he wants to “de-emphasize the military” and lift up
diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that
will signal a green light actually to usher in more war, not less. Peace through
weakness doesn’t work against thugs like Khamenei and Assad across the planet.
We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing
of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden’s apparent appeasement
strategy.
It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what the Islamists
want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model
of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual
inquiry and their universal human rights, rather than the oppressive collective
and the proverbial Islamic state.
Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser. (Image source: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)
Canlorbe: Dear Dr. Jasser, thank you for joining me. Ilhan Omar and Rashida
Tlaib are the first two Muslim women to serve in American Congress. Do you think
they representative of the mentality of the majority of Muslims in America?
Jasser: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are simply
byproducts of the Islamist teams that recruited them and trained them in the art
of ideology and dissimulation. Those teams include the alphabet soup of Islamist
organizations—”Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups”—that exist in the United
States. These include, for instance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),
the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS),
and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Future politicians, media pundits,
or the many demagogic imams, they all rise up from within the Islamist populist
movement in the West by telling insular Islamist communities what they want to
hear while claiming to speak for all Muslims.
Omar and Tlaib rose up in Democratic politics because they represent decades of
cooperation between the Islamist movements here in the West, and the far left’s
progressivism. Since 2011, other Muslim reform leaders and I were asked by
Congress to testify many times on the Hill on the compromising influence of
Islamist organizations and ideologies, both global and domestic, to our national
security.
The American Islamist groups worked in a coordinated fashion to attack me, the
organization I represent, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and
the other Muslims in our Muslim Reform Movement. Each time we testified to
Congress, their attempts at takfirism (declaring us not to be “real” Muslims)
were often less than subtle and typically defamatory. They repeatedly attempted
to smear us on social media and never addressed the issues or ideas that we
represented in our testimony. It is always revealing how fearful Islamists are
of actually addressing the connection between their non-violent ‘political
Islam’ (Islamism) and violent political Islam.
This is the classic method of many Islamists: they tag onto “identity movements”
and transform the belief in the ideology of a faith, Islam, into an identity
racial group—which it is not. This distortion stifles any real diversity of
ideas and promotes a culture where the community is perceived to be a racial
monolith. Thus, anyone who speaks out becomes an “Uncle Tom” and supposedly
against the whole tribe.
In 2020, we saw Islamist identity politics fit right into the Black Lives Matter
Movement and its racialization of every issue. It is quite a cooperation to
behold, even though ultimately the Islamists actually agree with very little of
the ideas of the far left—for example when it comes to implementing extremist
Muslims’ draconian interpretations of ‘shariah law,’ such as child marriage,
slavery, unequal legal rights for men and women, death for homosexuals, female
genital mutilation, or beating women, to name a few.
The bottom line is that there is one alliance, progressive, that exists between
AOC and her progressive extremists, and another different, alliance, Islamic
fundamentalist, that exists between, say, AOC and her following and the Islamist
members of Congress and their following.
Those two members of Congress represent the current leading edge, in identity
politics, of political Islam in the West and its emphasis on group rights rather
than individual rights. Both women, however, represent the trend to stifle
dissent and dissidents. They also both represent the effort to empower domestic
and global Islamist supremacists and their Islamic nation-state ideologies over
the exceptionalism of secular liberal American democracy. They would most likely
deny this, and certainly there are some clear differences between Omar and Tlaib.
For example, Omar’s foreign policy has clearly proven that she formulates her
positions by looking first for the interests of the global political Islamist
populist movement, and then all else follows. She spins it to her benefit in a
deceptively American context, yet you can see—in her unwavering support of
Turkey’s Erdogan, Qatar, various permutations of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, Hamas, and even Iran—that her affinity for Islamists is paramount.
As a naval officer, there is nothing I found more offensive than her fabricated
statements, right before she was elected, that somehow Americans killed
thousands in Somalia, more than the terrorists we were fighting, and implying
that those of us who served in “Operation Restore Hope” were terrorists.
Canlorbe: You make no mystery of your Syrian origins. How do you assess Bashar
al-Assad’s policy? Do you believe that former President Donald J. Trump had the
right attitude towards Bashar when, in April 2017, he decided on a missile
strike in response to the use of chemical attack?
Jasser: Bashar Assad’s policies are in line with the Syrian Ba’ath party fascism
of more than 50 years. The Syrian revolution, which began in 2011, needs to be
understood in the context of the methods with which the ruling party wields its
power. The Syrian Ba’ath Party is an Arab nationalist socialist party (akin to
an Arab Nazism), which seized power by military coup in 1963. The Alawite—a
Shi’ite offshoot—faction of Ba’ath Party loyalists then took power in another
bloody coup in February 1966. After that Alawite coup, the fascist Ba’ath
transformed its predominantly supremacist political platform to incorporate a
preference for the Alawite Shi’ite sect. Members of Sunni Muslim leadership were
purged from the military. The entire leadership became comprised of Alawite
Ba’athist faithful. The influence of Sunnis, Christians, Druze and Ismailis was
all but eliminated. Non-Alawite officers who were ousted reported that in the
late 1960s and early ’70s, Syria was on the verge of a civil war among all their
sects. This condition was often difficult to ascertain for blind analysts since,
like many Arab tyrants, Hafez Assad ruled in a predominantly secular fashion
rather than theocratic. Now this began to shift as his son, Bashar, moved Syria
into the orbit of Iran and essentially became a client-state of Iran as well as
Russia.
In 1970, however, Hafez al-Assad took the reins from his fellow Alawites in
still another coup. In line with the totalitarian doctrine of the Ba’athist
Party, Assad, ruled Syria with an iron fist for 30 years. He ended the Ba’ath-Alawite
in-fighting and his regime cleansed any non-Alawites in its midst, and
obliterated any Sunni protestations. To quell the religious unrest of other
sects, Assad placed a few party loyalists who were Sunni, Christian, and Druze
in mid-level, and a few higher levels, of political leadership—but not military.
Most people knew they were window dressing and sympathizers. The Syria of Hafez
Assad was much like the Iraq of Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, described by one
expatriate, who used a pseudonym, as “A Republic of Fear”: “a regime of
totalitarian rule, institutionalized violence, universal fear, and unchecked
personal dictatorship.” Many of our Syrian families, after suffering for years
in and out of prison, and muzzled in every form of expression, left for American
freedom after realizing that a revolution to topple one of the world’s most
ruthless military tyrannies would likely never materialize in their lifetimes.
The Assad regime, using incalculably cruel methods, paralyzed the humanity of 22
million Syrians for two generations. Brothers, sisters, families reported on one
another to Syrian intelligence (Mukhabarat). Many vanished, never to be seen
again, and anyone who dared to dissent from the ruling party was systematically
tortured and made an example of by frequent collective punishment. By the
twenty-first century, there were more Syrians living outside Syria than inside,
and some analyses claim that one in nine expatriates living abroad provided
steady information to the Assad regime on expatriate Syrian activities in order
to spare the family. The Syrian Human Rights Committee has chronicled many of
the atrocities committed in the past 45 years by the Assad regime: the Hama
massacres of 1963, 1982, and again in 2011, Tadmur, and the countless prisoners
of conscience were systematically snuffed out by the regime.
It is upon this background that the Syrian revolution commenced in March 2011 as
part of the greater regional Arab awakening. The Assad regime calculated that it
would be able to slow-walk a genocidal cleansing operation against the Syrian
people who were part of the revolution. While the first year of the revolution
showed significant diversity—with Sunnis, Alawites, Druze, Christians and others
marching in the streets—Assad did as his party always did. He drove internal
divisions among the sects to rip his country apart, while leaving his regime
alone. He was sustained with heavy foreign help, from Russia and Iran, in
military, financial, and human assets. The Sunni population was eventually
radicalized, with ISIS arising in 2013 in Syria and Iraq. It was due to a
perfect storm of Assad’s radicalizing Sunnis—combined with their ideological
influence from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—at the same time as Iraq’s
descent into anarchy. The growth of ISIS provided the Assad regime a convenient
cover for continued military genocidal operations and the use of chemical
weapons against the majority of the population who were unarmed and who had
naively thought that if the world saw it on YouTube, the public would put enough
pressure on Assad to bring it to an end. Sadly, Russia and Iran were likely the
primary reason Assad survived and the civil war did not evolve organically.
Russia and Iran consolidated Assad’s grip on Syria’s humanity and systematically
exterminated more than 600,000 people and displaced 10,000,000 people out of
Syria’s 22,000,000. The UN remained feckless.
This is not to say that the West or anyone should have intervened in any way
close to what happened in Iraq. What use is the UN, however, if ruthless tyrants
can use chemical weapons and eradicate swaths of their own population with no
repercussions? A Bosnian type of response, akin to President William Jefferson
Clinton’s and the UN’s response to Serbia’s crimes in 1995 might have helped.
President Barack Obama, however, did not just avoid military intervention; his
administration actively supported the Assad regime at the altar of their
“nuclear deal” with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the empowerment of The
Iranian Republican Guard Corps and its Masters in Tehran. The Obama
Administration handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the theocrats as well
as an insurance of security, as well as a future with a nuclear bomb. These,
along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group Hizballah,
gave Iran’s leaders a green light to spread terror into Syria.
President Donald Trump’s Administration’s response to the Assad’s repeated use
of chemical weapons in April 2018, while minimal in the scheme of what had
happened in Syria to that point, did send a message that reverberated within the
Assad regime, not to mention Russia and Iran, that red lines do mean something
for that administration. It did have some deterrent effect, as limited as it
was.
Canlorbe: At Trump’s request, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco,
Sudan and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, promising to make peace with
Israel. They also promised to stop financing and hosting terrorist
organizations. Do you believe those regimes can be trusted? How will they behave
under a Biden presidency?
Jasser: In President Ronald Reagan’s words, “trust but verify”. But first, it is
important to reflect on the failed “Arab Awakening”. While it was not a
Spring—except for Tunisia where a culture of democracy and some liberalism is
actually beginning to take hold—a complete reset in the Arab world against
tyranny was certainly very appealing to those of us from families that have been
fighting against these dictators, autocratic monarchs, and otherwise Islamist
theocrats for more than two generations. After a decade of failed
revolutions—between the 20th century’s tyrannies and the chaos after 2011—was
there a better path forward?
Some may appropriately say that no real democracies evolved quickly in the “Arab
Awakening,” after centuries of tyranny. In fact, there may be a need for
multiple revolutions before democracy can take hold. Perhaps, though, there can
be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of
reform and liberalization, as we have seen done so successfully with the 2020
Middle East agreements?
The challenge, as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point
of fiction—which has been “Plan A” for the tyrants across the Middle East since
World War II. They lie to the West about reforms in order to placate each new
administration with a five- or ten-year plan while transitions in power in the
West along with our short-term, societal “attention deficit disorder” give them
a pass. Remember, the changes in 2011 created vacuums facilitating the
re-emergence of tyranny and radical Islamists, but sometimes, like treating
cancer, the patient has first to get more ill before returning to health.
Essentially, a model of reform that I see possible—perhaps remotely, but
possible—for liberalism and freedom, may be an evolution towards constitutional
monarchies (much as I disagree with “genetic supremacism”). Some of them have
been building civil society institutions that begin to modernize Islamic
thought, end the concept of an Islamic state and its jihad, and instead are
looking at their state and citizens through the prism of universal human rights.
What we have been seeing in the UAE gives hope, as do Bahrain, Sudan, with, one
hopes, more to come. So far, I have less optimism for Saudi Arabia relinquishing
the dominance of the ideas of salafi-jihadism and its draconian interpretation
of Islam even as the Saudis openly condemn and declare war on ‘political Islam’.
Their track record is just so abysmal. But as we see them outlaw child marriage
and make other changes, the principle of “trust but verify” may be appropriate
to push them forward?
This is likely confusing to many non-Muslims, if we try to say, that the Saudis
are now anti-Islamist despite decades of supporting Muslim Brotherhood groups
across the planet? Please understand, though, that the concept of an Islamic
Republic, with an Islamic flag and an Islamic jurisprudence (sharia) in which
the Qur’an is the source, not just a source of law, is in fact certainly still a
form of political Islam, just more of a top-down, corporate, theocracy no matter
which way you cut it. However, even the Islamist populist movements, such as the
Muslim Brotherhood, are not much better. They are simply bottom-up, grass roots
theocracies founded in sharia ideologies. Regardless of whether a state’s
approach is top-down or bottom-up one, if its raison d’être is based in Islam
and the primacy of Islamic law rather than on individual rights and the
protection of minorities, as in secular liberal democracies, it will always be
anti-freedom and illiberal.
We will have to watch very closely if there will be new interpretations from the
pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca, or mosques in Medina and across the
country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and
Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.
For the first time I do also see peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia as not
only a short-term possibility but even a long-term one. The combination of the
populist Islamist movement threat to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its radical
offshoots of ISIS and al Qaeda combined with the threat of Shia Islamism of
Khomeinism has shaken the foundations of the Saudi state establishment and
forced them to reckon with monsters they helped create—such as the Muslim
Brotherhood and their mosques—while also pushing them to forge more meaningful
acknowledgement of the state of Israel and the West. Let us not also
underestimate the role of the Trump administration and the Pompeo State
Department in making this happen. This early reform however will only be real
when it is met with a genuine reinterpretation of the antisemitic translations
and interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith (the Prophet’s deeds and sayings)
that the government of Saudi Arabia pushes. Not until their imams begin to
marginalize the anti-Semitic bigotry of so many of those interpretations and
begin to present new interpretations will that change be in fact durable.
As for Qatar, we should begin closing our base there and finding other options
for our regional security. Their state propaganda arm of Al Jazeera—in addition
to their relationship with Iran, Turkey and global Islamist movements of the
Muslim Brotherhood—has rendered them no longer an ally, let alone even a “frenemy”.
This should not surprise anyone. The Al-Thani family went all in the Muslim
Brotherhood since 1961 when they gave safe haven to the spiritual guide of the
Ikhwani movement—Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. He has since been a close partner of the
royal family aligned ideologically and strategically with a global reach of at
least tens of millions of Islamists. We have long followed and dissected
Qaradawi’s English and Arabic work and there is little doubt that he and his
followers are the central cancer of the Sunni Islamist global movement against
the west and our way of life. The Qatari government’s fealty for Islamists has
brought them economically and ideologically closer to Iran’s Khomeinists in
addition to the Taliban. My position has always been that Qatar sees itself as
the global center for Islamists, meaning “The Caliphate”. Their extreme wealth
makes for a toxic global brew for most of our Islamist enemies.
I see no inkling of reform or change on the programming of Al Jazeera or any of
their imams or clerics. In fact, only months ago we saw systematic Holocaust
denial on the programming of Al Jazeera as they attempted quickly to erase
history of that. They are too deeply embedded at heart and economically with
Iran, Turkey and other Islamist supremacists across the planet to have any hope
at reform unless their regime falls. We can only pray.
There is little doubt that the Biden administration will simply be Obama 3.0. It
may even be worse than the Obama administration because it is going to trip over
itself in such an exaggerated fashion trying to undo the progress against the
Islamists—domestically and abroad—that we have made since 2016, that the
pendulum will swing back further than even the Obama administration in defense
of Islamists.
We are already seeing this in the Islamist that was selected to be a senior
White House staffer for legislative affairs—Reema Dodin. She is notably not only
historically an operative with Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups such as CAIR in
DC but she also stated as a student at UC-Berkley, “Palestinian suicide bombings
are the last resort of a desperate people”. With her likes running interference
with the Hill for the White House, we may see an even more radicalized policy in
favor of not only Iranian appeasement but overt support of Islamist interests
domestically and abroad. What is certain—based on how Dodin while at Senator
Durbin’s office with her allies at Muslim Advocates beat the drum of Muslim
American victimization against our testimony on the Hill—it will only get worse.
As for Biden’s foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will
focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So, the Pentagon is a branch
of the State Department? If that is not “leading from behind 3.0”, I don’t know
what is. Sources say he wants to “de-emphasize the military” and lift up
diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that
will signal a green light actually to usher in more war, not less. Peace through
weakness doesn’t work against thugs like Khamenei and Assad across the planet.
We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing
of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden’s apparent appeasement
strategy. Now more than ever, our private work needs to push for anti-Islamist
reformers against the likely ascendant Islamist threats.
Canlorbe: Putin is an ally of the mullahs and sits at the Organization of
Islamic Cooperation. In Russia, Muslims represent 10% of the total population,
and Islam is the second most widely professed religion. Is the Russian regime a
trustworthy ally in promoting enlightened Islam and fighting against terrorist,
political Islam?
Jasser: Domestically, as Michael Weiss pointed out in 2017, the Russians have
long played a double game with radical Islamist terror, in fact helping fuel
ISIS with recruits from Chechnya to give Assad cover and allow Russia to ship
out the jihadists it creates. Regionally, Putin’s regime has empowered our
greatest enemies—Iran’s terror regime from its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp
(IRGC) to Hizballah, and Assad. Its state propaganda—RT is finally listed under
FARA and is an unwavering part of the Assad/Khameinist media arm state-sponsored
media. They have worked with our nominal ally, Turkey (selling them missiles)
and giving them the green light against our Kurdish allies in Syria. Part of
their longtime interest in Syria is their only Mediterranean port and base at
Tartus. Chechnya’s tyrant, Ramzan Kadyrov, portrays himself as a devout Muslim
but he is a two-bit radical tyrant and Putin tool who has systematically
radicalized his population while violating the human rights of every minority
group from the gay community to dissidents.
In my book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriots’ fight to Save
his Faith, I recount how my father told me that our family’s deep seeded
anti-communism and anti-Islamism is what drove them to become enamored of West
and learn about the exceptionalism of secular democracy and especially about
Americanism. Russia’s Putin and its kleptocrats would never promote an
enlightened anything, let alone defeat a theocracy. They still have a
state-sponsored church; the other faiths, whether within Christianity or
outside, have lesser to no rights. There is a reason their entire economy is
oil, and produce no products of any kind competing in the free markets. The
Putin regime is against individual creativity and battles of ideology. In order
for reformists to emerge, we need a public platform of critical thinking and
modern civil institutions that protect universal human rights.
Canlorbe: Both Maimonides and Averroes endeavored to conciliate religion and
philosophy. How do you assess the legacy of Averroes in Islam and that of
Maimonides in Judaism?
Jasser: As a physician dedicated to treating the ill, your question resonates
with me more than you would ever know. My chosen profession is as a doctor and
it was the inspiration of clear broad-minded thinkers and doctors like
Maimonides and Averroes who influenced so much of my idealism about medicine and
medical ethics. Their confidence in weighing in on philosophy, theology,
legalisms, and politics are an example of what I have always aspired to be and
do in my own life even if their ideas are from almost 1000 years ago. It was not
necessarily the specifics of their ideas, but the courage of their inquiry.
Scholars have often pointed out the strong resemblance between Maimonides’
“understanding of God’s manifestness in the order of nature” and Averroes’
“conception of God and providence which focuses heavily on God’s essential
preservation of all species, and his role as the cause of being and unity in all
hylomorphic substances.” Averroes, for example, saw God in every element of
nature’s diversity. Averroes’s gift or legacy to Islamic thought was much like
that of Maimonides; he took human feelings and sensations, like ‘heat’,
‘intellect’, ‘mind’, ‘wisdom’, and ‘creativity’ and used them to broaden our
human understanding of God. To most Salafists, even the suggestion of imparting
human-like attributes to God is blasphemy whether or not it is intended just to
understand and relate better to our understanding of God. Giving philosophical
descriptions of God using human metaphors and nature provided Averroes, like
Maimonides, a flexibility of thought about God which in the right era of
boundless human creativity and inquiry can become the foundation of real
enlightenment and liberalism.
Similar to Maimonides, Averroes sought to bring to Islamic thought a “blending
of God as pure unity and God as intellect” a very Hellenic thought process seen
throughout Arabic discourse, as seen in, for example, the Theology of Aristotle.
Contrary to essentially every extremist or literalist movement in Islam today,
Averroes’ legacy was about taking God’s unity (tawhid) and giving Muslims a way
of looking at that unity, consistency, and omnipresence in a way that does not
conflict and actually explains the infinite diversity of the human condition,
our nature, and our laws. This is actually also the essence of our Muslim Reform
Movement—an attempt to bring back such a deep understanding of diversity of
thought and interpretations of Islamic law (shariah) in a way that allows us to
live in harmony with modernity and secular liberal democracy through a
separation of “history and religion”—or more allegory and less literalism.
Averroes may not have explicitly gone so far as real liberalism. But then again
there were no liberal democracies upon which to reflect for these thinkers at
the time. But the foundations of his thought, similar to what Maimonides was to
Judaism, gave metaphysical nuggets of what God is and what God is not, along
with the infinite possibilities for human nature brought about by God. Averroes,
like Maimonides, looked at scripture, the Qur’an for Averroes, as allegory. This
courage to go beyond literalism is part of his legacy and similarities to
Maimonides.
Sadly, while both Maimonides and Averroes did their amazingly open-minded and
deep work during the 12th century, both in Muslim majority nation states,
Averroes’ legacy has so far been very difficult to find in the “Islamic world”
if not lost to hundreds and hundreds of years of intellectual and philosophical
stagnation and reactionary movements that ultimately dominated and decimated
most free Islamic academic and civil institutions since his life.
It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what the Islamists
want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model
of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual
inquiry and their universal human rights, rather than the oppressive collective
and the proverbial Islamic state.
*M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American Islamic forum for Democracy.
He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander. He is a former Vice-Chair and
commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)
appointed by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from 2012-2016. He is also a physician
in private practice specializing in internal medicine, primary care, and medical
ethics in Phoenix, Arizona. You can find him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser
© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do
not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No
part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied
or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17128/m-zuhdi-jasser-interview
Al Jazeera: The mouthpiece of criminals
Anwar A. Khan/Sri Lanka Guardian/March 06/2021
Iran and Qatar are allies. Qatar for years has sided with Iran in one proxy
fight after another, whether in Bahrain, Yemen or in backing Hamas terror
against Israelis and Palestinians.
Al Jazeera Satellite Channel, now known as AJA, was launched on 1 November 1996
following the closure of the BBC's Arabic language television station, a joint
venture with Orbit Communications Company in Qatar.
At Al Jazeera they claim they stand in solidarity with all their colleagues in
the media. They further add, “We believe that no journalist should be
intimidated, persecuted or imprisoned for carrying out their duty. We believe in
the fundamental truth that freedom of speech is the very basic building block to
uphold the values of democracy”, but in fact, they act diametrically just the
opposite. It is just a most spoilt den of worst criminals!
Al Jazeera has lost reporters and anchors in London, Paris, Moscow, Beirut and
Cairo. Ali Hashem, the organization's Shia Beirut correspondent, resigned after
leaked emails publicized his discontent with Al Jazeera's unprofessional and
biased coverage of the Syrian civil war at the expense of the Bahraini protests
of 2011.
Since the Bahrain government was supported by the Gulf Cooperation Council (of
which Qatar is a member), the protests were given less prominence than the
Syrian conflict on the network. Longtime Berlin correspondent Aktham Suliman
left in late 2012, saying that he felt he was no longer allowed to work as an
independent journalist in Al Jazeera.
It was committed to the truth, but it is bent. It's about politics, not
journalism. For the reporter that means: time to go ... The decline in 2004–2011
was insidious, subliminal, and very slow, but with a disastrous end.
According to Walid Phares, Al Jazeera became the "primary ideological and
communication network" for the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 Arab Spring in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Phares noted that after democratic
forces had begun the rebellions, Al Jazeera played a tremendous role in
supporting Islamist elements of the revolution.
One of the organization's largest resignations was that of 22 members of Al
Jazeera's Egyptian bureau. The group announced their resignation on 8 July 2013,
citing biased coverage of Egyptian power redistribution favouring the Muslim
Brotherhood, a killing outfit like Jamaa-e-Islami mass-murderers in 1971 in
Bangladesh.
During the visit of the Qatari delegation to the 2017 UN General Assembly,
anonymous critics commissioned what ostensibly appeared to be a news website,
authoring a variety of articles calling Al Jazeera a "state-run propaganda arm",
criticizing the Gulf state's link to terror groups or to Iran, and promoting a
dark view of the Qatari economy in response to the diplomatic crisis that year.
The organization commissioned to launch this website was later identified as a
conservative-leaning PR firm, Definers Public Affairs, which was also hired by
Facebook to attack the social network's opponents, including Apple, Google…
BANGLADESH
In 2012, Al Jazeera faced criticism from Bangladeshi human rights activists and
relatives of those killed in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. The news
channel is often accused of downplaying the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which
Islamist militias assisted the Pakistan Army in targeting Bengalis who sought
independence from Pakistan.
In response to the Al Jazeera Investigates Documentary All the Prime Minister's
Men, the Government of Bangladesh described it as "a misleading series of
innuendos and insinuations in what is apparently a politically motivated “smear
campaign” by notorious individuals associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami extremist
group, which has been opposing the progressive and secular principles of the
People’s Republic of Bangladesh since its very birth as an independent nation in
1971.”
The foreign ministry stated that the Bangladeshi government "regrets that Al
Jazeera has allowed itself to become an instrument for their malicious political
designs aimed at destabilizing the secular democratic Government of Bangladesh
with a proven track record of extraordinary socio-economic development and
progress".
The ministry also stated that "the fact that the report’s historical account
fails to even mention the horrific genocide in 1971 in which Jamaat perpetrators
killed millions of Bengali civilians" was "one reflection of the political bias
in Al Jazeera’s coverage". The Bangladesh Army called the documentary a
"concocted and ill-intended report by a vested group in the news channel
Al-Jazeera", according to a statement by ISPR.
Responding to allegations by Al Jazeera that Israeli surveillance equipment is
used by Bangladesh UN Peacekeeping Forces, United Nations spokesman Stéphane
Dujarric said that UN agreements with Bangladesh on peacekeeping deployments did
not include the "operation of electronic equipment in the nature described by Al
Jazeera in its documentary, and such equipment has not been deployed with
Bangladeshi contingents in UN peacekeeping operations".
The Bangladesh Federal Union of Journalists demanded a ban on Al Jazeera
transmission within Bangladesh citing similar bans in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,
Egypt, Jordan and the UAE.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3946749368709315 – this face-book link must
uncover the ugly faces of Al-Jazeera, David Bergman and many more…
One voice, one message is what the executives of Iran’s Islamic Republic News
Agency (IRNA) and Qatar’s Al Jazeera had in mind when they signed a cooperation
agreement over summer.
But while these supposed news agencies and their sponsoring nations officially
entered into formal cooperation only a few months ago, the reality is that these
working partnerships were announced so soon after Qatar’s high-profile fight
with some other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members because the executives
were merely formalizing what had already been in place for years.
Iran and Qatar are allies. Qatar for years has sided with Iran in one proxy
fight after another, whether in Bahrain, Yemen or in backing Hamas terror
against Israelis and Palestinians.
Even when Qatar officially joined GCC positions against Iran, its real foreign
policy — the so-called news pumped out by my former employer Al Jazeera — was on
full display to anyone with a satellite dish or Internet, showing unquestionably
that the emirate was firmly aligned with the mullahs, not with its Arab
neighbours.
It is clear that the Qataris learned their current diplomatic strategy by
following the Iranians’ lead of using their governmental mouthpiece,
masquerading as a news organization, as a weapon to achieve their goals.
Since IRNA’s inception, its objective has been to secure Iran’s national
interests, pit Sunni Arab communities against each other, fuel sectarian
conflict, incite against Western nations and Israel and obtain hegemony at any
cost — a terrifying design Qatar has unwisely duplicated with Al Jazeera,
particularly with the new agreement.
What Al Jazeera continues to do is far more and far worse than simple bias. The
Pan-Arab network has a deliberate agenda that serves as Qatar’s actual foreign
policy, one that costs lives and promotes violence.
Al Jazeera’s open sponsorship of the agendas of terrorist groups including
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim
Brotherhood under the guise of so-called press freedom must no longer be
tolerated.
The US and the West believe that Al Jazeera’s one-sidedness is a reflection of
the freedom of press. That belief, however, is dangerously wrong!
What actually happened with that coverage was the result not just of Al Jazeera
siding with the Iranian axis, but also of Qatar’s leadership directing the
network to do so.
Evidence of this collusion come from an authenticated audio recording released
months ago of a 2011 phone call between Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Attiya, the adviser
to the Qatari emir, and Hassan Ali Sultan, who has close ties to Iran and
Hezbollah.
The network’s open sponsorship of the agendas of terrorist groups including
Al-Qaeda and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps under the guise of so-called press
freedom must no longer be tolerated.
Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war in Yemen fueled by an Iranian-backed Houthi
insurgency is another horrifying example of how the network has become an active
player in the regional struggle rather than maintaining an independent role of
an unbiased news organization.
Amjad Taha, an Iranian dissident living in exile and the head of the British
Middle East Center in London, has been outspoken about Qatar’s financing of
terrorist groups and Al Jazeera’s dubious role in the region.
“Al Jazeera hardly reports on the crimes committed by the Iranian-aligned Houthi
criminals who recruit women and children, target coalition forces, disregard
human rights and have zero political legitimacy. Iranian media cannot relay its
views to the Arab viewer mainly because of the language barrier,” Taha said in a
phone interview from his home in Bahrain.
“Iran does not want to portray what is happening in Yemen as a war, or case of
good versus evil. They want to present it as a work of their nemesis — Saudi’s
war. Al Jazeera translates this idea through its Arabic and English language
channels — an exact duplication of the message broadcast day and night on Al
Alam, the Iranian TV channel controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or
IRGC, which could potentially be designated as a terrorist organization.
The use of Al Jazeera as a weapon to push Qatar’s agenda resulted in
imprisonment of many.
Egypt suspected that Al Jazeera reporters would be engaged with supporting
terrorists. It was because, quite simply, Al Jazeera uses the cover normally
granted to members of the press to aid and abet terrorists in war zones.
In prison, when Brotherhood members and non-journalists were interviewed, they
told that they had received production resources from Al Jazeera Arabic — a
systematic technique - the network applied in conflict zones, such as, Syria,
Libya and Iraq.
In a recent interview, Canadian scholar and Simon Fraser University professor
Adel Iskandar described Al Jazeera’s unethical and at times illegal
newsgathering tactics, including the distribution of technical equipment that
would allow for satellite uplinks for distribution of footage.
This gave Al Jazeera an advantage over its competitors as the network
essentially was recruiting protesters and fighters to become journalists and
information gatherers for its news programming. And since the Syrian opposition
(particularly those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups) was
ideologically harmonized with the Qatari policy in the Levantine country, the
coverage often went straight to air without verification, clarification or
corroboration.
Al Jazeera long ago disposed of any pretense that it was anything other than a
weapon used by its Qatari masters to promote a dangerous agenda — one that is
firmly in line with Iran’s, and directly opposed to the Arab allies.
The behaviour of Al Jazeera does not represent the worthy of reliance or trust
journalism.
The End –
The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who
writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and
international affairs.
Myanmar coup once again exposes the futility of the UN Security Council
Dr Azeem Ibrahim/Arab News/March 06/2021
After the military coup in Myanmar on Feb. 1, some members of the UN Security
Council moved swiftly to draft a condemnation. Just as swiftly, Beijing vetoed
the effort, and the whole affair was done by Feb. 3.
The justification invoked by the military leadership for the coup was election
fraud; indeed, the rhetoric challenging the win of the civilian National League
for Democracy party of Aung San Suu Kyi was lifted almost word for word from the
efforts of Donald Trump to delegitimize the results of the presidential election
in the US. The evidence to back up that rhetoric was equally nonexistent. The
only difference between the US and Myanmar in this sad parallel is that Myanmar
has no institutional capacity to resist any power play by the military, whereas
the capacity of Trump to seize power was constrained by Congress, and by lack of
buy-in from the military. In Myanmar, the only check on the power of the
military is resistance from the people, which in recent weeks has cost some of
them their lives.
In an ideal world, the people of Myanmar would not be standing alone against
this coup; they would have the backing and support of the international
community. If we lived in such a world, there would be no need for ordinary
civilians to go on to the streets and get themselves killed for their
democracies. There would be an international space where the dispute between the
military, the civilian government they deposed, and the people of Myanmar could
be arbitrated by the international community with no loss of innocent lives.
In an ideal world, the people of Myanmar would not be standing alone against
this coup; they would have the backing and support of the international
community. If we lived in such a world, there would be no need for ordinary
civilians to go on to the streets and get themselves killed for their
democracies.
But we do not live in that world. So long as the formal stance of the
international community needs to be formulated through the UN Security Council,
the people of Myanmar will never get the formal backing of the UN against those
who usurped their government, any more than Palestinians will ever get justice,
or indeed any more than any other people who are oppressed by forces who have
the backing of any of the permanent members of the Security Council. And so,
these people have been left with no recourse but direct resistance, with all
that comes with it.
The purpose of the UN system from its inception was supposed to be to uphold
international law, human rights, and peace. All those things are just as needed
today as they have ever been since the Second World War. But under the current
structure of the UN institutions, the political side of the UN system is close
to useless.
Conversely, the technocratic and humanitarian agencies within the UN system
which escape politicisation by the Security Council powers continue to
illustrate what international cooperation can achieve, and what the UN system as
a whole could do for the world as a force for good. To the extent to which they
avoid undue political influence, these agencies frequently, even if not always,
turn out on the right side of history, and they are routinely among the most
powerful voices for those who the UN Charters aimed to protect — the powerless,
the marginalised, the dispossessed.
Even at the risk of generalizing, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
everything useless or even harmful about the UN stems from the politicization of
its functions, above all the great power rivalries among the permanent members
of the Security Council; and conversely, most things the UN system does that
remain untouched by those political rivalries continue to show us why we need
something like the UN to coordinate international cooperation, and how
desperately we need to reform the structure of the political institutions within
the UN system, for it to be able to uphold the promises of its charters.
• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a Director at the Center for Global Policy and author of
“The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim
Iran’s target: An Israeli ship or the nuclear deal?
Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/March 06/2021
The relative lull in the volatile relationship between Iran and Israel leaves a
deceptive sense that both sides are comfortable with the current state of
affairs. The latest instalment was the explosion on the MV Helios Ray, a cargo
ship owned by an Israeli company, which Israel has categorically attributed to
Tehran, and probably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran was quick to
deny, but for a change there was a consensus in the Israeli government between
Benjamin Netanyahu and his “alternate” prime minister, Benny Gantz, who is also
the defense minister, that responsibility lay with Iran. Gantz based his claim
on “the location and context” — and context is the key factor here, as this
incident adds to the wider geography and circumstances of a hostile relationship
that stretches from the Strait of Hormuz to Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and
clandestine operations elsewhere. However, much of the diplomatic and military
commotion currently taking place has to do with the change of administration in
Washington, and the posturing over a possible revival of the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program in return
for the lifting of sanctions, which effectively collapsed when Donald Trump
pulled out in 2018. Neither the US nor Iran would like to be seen as either
coerced into negotiations or coming to the table from a position of weakness.
And Israel, though not directly involved, is making sure its voice and concerns
are heard.
A blunt contextualisation of the attack on the Helios Ray came from Lt. Gen.
Aviv Kochavi, the Israeli military chief of staff, asserting that this was “a
reminder that Iran is spreading terrorism and is acting against civilian
targets.” Kochavi added that Iran’s threat was not limited to its efforts to
develop nuclear capability, but equally in unsettling the region by acts of
terrorism, including those against civilian targets. Kochavi has already
departed from the convention for those still in uniform, of refraining from
expressing political views in public, arguing recently in a major speech
outlining Israel’s strategy in the region that it would be a mistake for the US
to return to the nuclear deal, and that neither Israel nor the US should rule
out military operations against Iran, speculating that without America’s
withdrawal from the 2015 agreement Iran would have developed a nuclear bomb by
now.
Kochavi’s views widely represent those of most of Israel’s political and
security establishment, and their fear of the Biden administration being too
soft on Tehran rushing back into the JCPOA without essential adjustments to
reflect on the enhancement of Iran’s missile capabilities and Tehran’s
continuing regional adventurism, let alone the progress that has been made in
its nuclear program.
Iran is still licking its wounds from a difficult 2020, a year that exposed its
vulnerabilities, beginning with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, commander
of the elite Quds Force, followed by the tragic fiasco of the shooting down of
Ukraine Airlines flight 752, and later in the year the assassination of the head
of the nuclear weapons programme Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on Iranian soil. Iran has
also been hit worse than any other country in the region by the COVID-19
pandemic, exacerbating an already dire economic situation and leading to
increased social malaise. And it didn’t help Tehran’s increasing sense of
isolation to witness Israel’s 2020 normalization agreements with the UAE and
Bahrain, and improved relations with other countries in the region.
Such worsening international conditions for Iran suggest that it should have
shown more flexibility, at least on some of the fronts where it clashes with its
regional rivals, but this hasn’t been the case so far. It has continued to play
hardball, even employing threatening language toward Washington suggesting that
it won’t give the US much time to ponder whether it intends to rejoin the JCPOA.
Biden’s response of ordering a US airstrike on Iranian-backed militia in Syria
might be the first sign that the new administration is embarking on a two-headed
policy, one that wishes to return to the negotiating table while at the same
time demonstrating that it won’t refrain from tightening the screw on Iran,
including by the use of military force.
Iran’s intransigence — for instance, ruling out an informal meeting with the US
and European powers on how to revive the nuclear deal until America repeals all
its unilateral sanctions — may resonate with the more hawkish elements in the
country, and may avoid antagonism with the Revolutionary Guards. Nevertheless,
the possible trade-off is one of friction with the international community and
further economic hardships that will increase unrest at home.
Imminent elections both in Israel and Iran have also become a major obstacle to
addressing the fraught relations between the two powers. The vicious cycle of
retribution, especially when the stakes are so high, and given the number of
potential theaters of confrontation, is creating an extremely unpredictable
situation. The attack on the Helios Ray was not the first incident at sea
between the two countries, and as with previous flashpoints both sides are at
least for now adhering to a limited use of force, leaving enough room for
plausible deniability that won’t force the other side to overreact. However,
ensuring the safety of maritime routes is essential for both countries’ trade,
and putting them at risk will have a severe impact on both economies. And these
types of incident have a cumulative effect.
With more frequent clashes in Syria and even in Iraq, and heightened diplomatic
confrontation around the nuclear issue handled by two political systems that
suffer from inherent instability, any future incident could be the trigger to a
wider and more dangerous confrontation that might further destabilise the
region.
• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations at Regent’s University
London, where he is head of the International Relations and Social Sciences
Program. He is also an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. He
is a regular contributor to the international written and electronic media.
New fault lines that define the Middle East
Hafed Al-Ghwell/Arab News/March 06/2021
Whether it was the fragmentation of the Arab world after the fall of the Ottoman
Empire, the scramble among European “powers” to dominate the region,
post-colonial Arab nationalism or, until recently, US dominance of the region —
the Middle East has almost always had distinct fault-lines and alignments. It
was easy to point a root cause of the ensuing struggles that sought to strike
the right balance between moderation and radicalism, authoritarianism and
democratization, pan-Arabism or Western-style self-determination, and numerous
other ideological bifurcations.
However, the chaotic aftermath of the “War on Terror” and repeated missteps
after the Arab Spring, followed by Washington’s intensifying urge to withdraw
from the region, have ushered in a new era of Middle East power dynamics.
New allegiances against common “adversaries” now crisscross a formerly
fragmented landscape marked by intense competition and rivalries, as the era of
bold interventions by far-off militaries gives way to a novel mix of proxies and
hybrid high-tech warfare by regional medium powers. In short, it is no longer
the geopolitical ambitions of super-powers that dominate the region, but the
appetites for regional domination and geoeconomic designs by some of the
region’s own capitals.
Conflict is no longer guided by the pursuit of nebulous ideals but realpolitik
gambles for self-preservation against growing threats, perceived or legitimate,
and to widen spheres of influence in the power gaps of America’s inevitable
permanent withdrawal. Contrary to the usual refrains and alarmism against
further US disinterest lest the region descend into intractable chaos, it is
highly unlikely that the Middle East will ever see such a future. The future
conflict landscape is already taking shape in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq.
Arguably, developments in the eastern Mediterranean, Palestine and even the
disputed Western Sahara are also reflective of the how the region’s conflict
dynamics will play out.
While the states of affairs in Syria, Libya and Yemen may have different root
causes, the relatively recent interventions by rival regional interests in these
conflict zones cannot simply be dismissed. In fact, external actors actually
have a far bigger influence on how these conflicts will either persist, freeze
or hobble their way through to some form of resolution than the will of the
citizenry or any urging from the international community.
The chaotic aftermath of the “War on Terror” and repeated missteps after the
Arab Spring, followed by Washington’s intensifying urge to withdraw from the
region, have ushered in a new era of Middle East power dynamics.
Thankfully, gone are the days of large-scale offensives driven by extremely
narrow zero-sum objectives, with little concern for the post-conflict period — a
go-to strategy for distant military superpowers, at least until after the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Failure to account for and mitigate the spillover effects of
war as well as lack of interest in the post-conflict phase have consistently led
to developments that imperil regional security and stability. It was
unsurprising, therefore, and to some, a welcome development to see regional
actors wading into Libya, Turkey in Syria, or the Gulf states rising to halt the
Houthi encroachment in Yemen.
However, given the lessons of postwar Iraq combined with limited, often
constrained national budgets and small populations, large-scale military
operations by regional powers that require massive and unprecedented commitments
of men, munitions and money are no longer tenable or sustainable. It is why
Cairo only went as far as a unilateral declaration of a red line to halt the
Turkish-backed, internationally recognized Government of National Accord from
over-running its ineffectual proxies from eastern Libya. Meanwhile in Syria,
Turkey’s involvement is restricted to a narrow strip along its southern border,
while Tehran refrains from direct confrontations in favor of a combination of
incendiary rhetoric and emboldened proxies to drive its regional destabilization
agenda.
These are just a few examples of what is effectively a "rethink" of the most
efficient strategies among regional medium powers, particularly those aligned
with Washington and wary of its departure along with its security “umbrella.”
Any new strategies will also have to retain the ability to stabilize growing
spheres of influence, maximize the benefits of new alignments against common
adversaries or, in Turkey’s case, even test the waters with a neo-Ottoman
expansionist agenda. By transforming conflict and intervention strategies,
combining them with broader geopolitical ambitions, it should inform us of the
kind of future that awaits the Middle East.
What does such a future look like?
Unlike the battlefields in the War on Terror or the urban hellscapes left in the
aftermath of the struggles to democratize Syria and Libya, hostile
confrontations among regional rivals will not be as violent, widespread or
catastrophic. Instead, sporadic, relatively small-scale skirmishes, within
clearly defined “red lines” and among local nonstate armed actors backed by
regional sponsors, will dominate the future conflict landscape.
Surprisingly, most of these will occur not in pursuit of material gains or
strategic advantages but more to influence attempts at diplomacy or the
trajectory of settlement dialogues. It is less risky and less costly, and even
allows regional powers to escape culpability for the inevitable atrocities
committed in the fog of war. Furthermore, it allows countries to mix
negative-sum military confrontations with positive-sum diplomacy — making it
possible for countries to continue influencing post-conflict developments and
relevant political processes to safeguard their interests.
It is not to say the Arab world will cease preparing for the eventuality of
large-scale military offensives, as inadvisable as they are now. However, by
shrinking the scale of conflicts, fortifying areas of control behind red lines
and coordinating with local non-state or sub-state actors, the region is able to
avoid the worst atrocities or the chaos alarmists portend as the future of a
Middle East without the US. Granted, juggling numerous, competing interests in
settlement dialogues or processes will only extend the timeline from conflict to
settlement as seen in Libya.
Fortunately, a silver lining remains given the fact that belligerents are far
less likely to go to war, since the risks of doing so outweigh any perceived
benefits. Thus, what lies ahead is not a fragmented landscape of nascent powers
backed by powerful, far off military superpowers, but new regional dynamics
shaped by three distinct polarities — the Gulf states, the Ankara-Doha alliance
and the “Shiite crescent” — amenable to dialogue but equally well-positioned to
frustrate encroachments on their spheres of influence.
It would be a paradox if the intensification of regional rivalries resulted in
less instability and conflict in the Middle East than expensive, ill-conceived
and misguided interventions ever did.
*Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the
John Hopkins University School of AdvancedInternational Studies. Twitter: @HafedAlGhwell
What does the future hold for Trump and Trumpism?
Dalia Al-Aqidi/Arab News/March 06/2021
Following US President Donald Trump’s dramatic departure from the White House
there was a great deal of speculation not only about his own political future
but also the future of a divided Republican Party.
Would Trump form a new political party? Would he run again for president in
2024? Would his defeat by Joe Biden mark the end of the ideology of Trumpism?
Most of the answers eventually came straight from the horse’s mouth after almost
two months of planning, discussions and silence.
In his first major public appearance since he joined the ranks of former
presidents, Trump gave a 90-minute speech at the 2021 Conservative Political
Action Conference (CPAC) in which he assured attendees that the journey he and
his supporters set out on more than four years ago, which he described as
incredible, is far from being over, implying that he intends to seek the 2024
Republican presidential nomination.
He also eased Republican concerns that he might have plans to start a new party,
which would be a disaster for the future of conservatism in the US and a serious
setback for the GOP in future election cycles. A divided party results in
divided voters.
For many of those watching, regardless of whether they supported his presidency
or not, the sight of the former president as the CPAC superstar — and the
absence of fellow Republicans who stood against him in his final days — was a
clear indication of just how much influence he continues to have within the
party and on his base.
The conference was a reflection of the reality that the GOP is still the party
of Trump, given the fact that he gained 11 million more votes in 2020 than he
did in 2016. This is a number that cannot be ignored by any political party.
The GOP is still the party of Trump, given the fact that he gained 11 million
more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016.
The past four years drew a new map for the GOP that has left it divided into
three blocs.
Bloc A: Trump’s allies and supporters who share his ideology and goals and are
still defending and standing behind him. They include Sen. Ted Cruz, who
emphasized the vital role and the lasting influence of the former president
within the Republican Party.
“Let me tell you this right now: Donald Trump ain’t going anywhere,” he said
during his own CPAC speech.
Other supporters include Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Josh Hawley and Rep. Steve
Scalise. Rep. Matt Gaetz announced at CPAC that he is a member of the
“pro-Trump, America First” wing of the conservative movement. “We’re not really
a wing, we’re the whole body,” he added.
Bloc B: The “never Trumpers,” who view him as a major liability — he is the
first president since 1932 to lose the White House, the Senate and the House in
a single term.
Among them are a small group of prominent Republicans who have spoken out
publicly against Trump, including former presidential nominee Mitt Romney and
congressional leaders such as Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell. Even Nikki Haley,
who was appointed by Trump as the US ambassador to the UN, has recently voiced
her objection to his style of leadership, stressing that the Republicans should
not have followed Trump.
Nevertheless, this group is relatively small and currently does not have the
required strength and support to influence the GOP.
Bloc C: This large group includes most of the Republican politicians who
supported Trump’s presidency but would rather see a more traditional
conservative leading their party in 2024.
Trump lost the 2020 election, but the populist ideology that got him to the
White House in the first place will not be fading any time soon and his populist
policies, which widened the conservative base, will be the dominant theme of the
Republican Party for years to come.
In the absence of a strong challenger, he is still very much in charge.
No one knows exactly what role Trump will play in the future, as it becomes
quite clear that he does not want to be simply a former president.
Will he be the Republicans’ 2024 front-runner — or occupy a powerful position as
an extremely influential kingmaker? Even if he does decide to go away, Trumpism
is not going anywhere.
Given the deep divisions within the party, a Republican victory in a
presidential election will not be achievable unless traditional conservatives
and Trump-supporting populists form an alliance that can combine the votes of
the two groups.
Is that doable? I do not think so.
If Trumpism continues to be the GOP norm, many moderate Republicans will abandon
the party — and a few might even cross the aisle, which would make regaining
control of the House in 2022 an exceedingly difficult task for any presidential
candidate.
• Dalia Al-Aqidi is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. She is a
former Republican congressional candidate. Twitter: @DaliaAlAqidi