Blaming Syria .. Fisk and Others

Up to seventy people have been killed so far in Lebanon’s most violent internal battle since the end of the civil war. On one side are the Wahhabi militants of Fateh al-Islam, Palestinians, Lebanese, Saudis and others, based in Tripoli’s Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Bared. On the other is the Lebanese army, with the support of most Lebanese and Palestinians.

Very sadly, very ominously, Wahhabi nihilists are expanding their reach. In recent weeks there have been al-Qa’ida linked bomb attacks in Morocco and Algeria, and hundreds of arrests in Saudi Arabia when a plot to attack infrastructure was allegedly uncovered. In Iraq, Wahhabi car bombings and beheadings continue, with Sunnis now as likely to be the victims as Shia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan al-Qa’ida increases its power. The nihilists are sometimes confused with genuine resistance against occupation (in Afghanistan and Iraq) or against dictatorship (in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia), but in fact their presence confuses and weakens resistance.

There are many reasons for the growing al-Qa’ida phenomenon, some of which I have discussed previously. They include past and present American, Saudi and Pakistani promotion of Wahhabi groups to trouble the Soviet Union, revolutionary Iran and Arab nationalism, and the collapse of traditional patterns of social belonging and religious observance in large parts of the Muslim world, and the poverty of education in many Muslim countries, and the brutalisation caused by both dictatorship and occupation. Then ample funding from private donors in the Gulf as well as Wahhabism’s long term supporters (see above) married to nihilistic ruthlessness can make a small group of fighters extremely effective. In Nahr el-Bared there are an estimated couple of hundred fighters, but it will be almost impossible for the Lebanese army to arrest or kill them without a politically impossible and bloody invasion of the camp.

What is not in doubt is that the nihilist phenomenon is widespread, complex and dangerous. As usual, however, some people are resorting to simplistic, propagandist explanations. In the case of the Nahr el-Bared battle, Lebanese government officials and large sections of the media are blaming the Syrian regime, without providing any proof. It’s true that Fatah al-Islam’s parent organisation was Syrian sponsored, a creation of the divisions among the Lebanese-based Palestinians following the expulsion of PLO forces by Israel in 1982, but Fateh al-Islam broke away from the parent organisation a long time ago. There is far more evidence that Fateh al-Islam is being helped by Syria’s enemies. Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, published in the New Yorker, suggested that Saad al-Hariri, among others in the wealthy Lebanese Sunni establishment, is helping to channel American funds to Wahhabi groups to counter the influence of Shia Hizbullah.

Robert Fisk in the Independent writes “it is difficult not to feel Syria’s hand these days.” His evidence for Syrian involvement in Nahr el-Bared? The Syrian border is “scarcely ten miles away.” Which brings me to my problems with Fisk. There is no question that he has been the best-connected, best-informed and bravest of British Middle East correspondents, and that he has often been fearless in calling a spade a spade when it comes to Israeli crimes. Most Western journalists in the region can’t even speak Arabic, so we should be grateful for Fisk. He’s been better than the rest, but latterly, still not good enough. During last summer’s onslaught on Lebanon he kept reminding his readers that Hizbullah’s border incursion and hostage-taking had ‘provoked’ the Israeli attack, without mentioning the more than 10, 000 border violations by Israel in the previous six years, or the Lebanese hostages. He didn’t change his tune even when Olmert announced that Israel had prepared the attack months in advance, months before the supposed provocation.

Fisk once wrote very convincingly of how Western journalists may become biased in the Middle East, before politics and money come into play, for simple cultural reasons. Anglo-Saxons, he said, will naturally feel more at home with Israeli friends who eat the same kind of food, watch the same kind of TV shows, and so on, than with Palestinians in their mosques and camps. French journalists will naturally sympathise with Lebanese Maronites, who speak French, listen to French music, and worship in Catholic churches. And now it seems that something similar has happened to Fisk, who was so personally moved when his friend Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated. (There is a good case to be made for Syrian guilt in the Hariri assassination, but there are other arguments too, and Fisk has not aired them.) Fisk has become uncritically supportive of the Lebanese Sunni and Druze establishment and its perspectives. In the stand-off between the government and opposition, it is clear where he stands. Stooping low, he tells us again and again how “intelligent” war-criminal Waleed Junblatt is, and, worse, how “glorious” Junblatt’s wife.

I put it down to exhaustion, and perhaps to fame. The poor man has seen more than his share of blood, from the Iran-Iraq war to Sabra and Shatila. He’s been shot at on numerous occasions and beaten up by Afghan refugees from Anglo-American bombing. He’s written at least one excellent book (“Pity the Nation” on the Lebanese war – I haven’t read his latest) and it is time for him to have a dignified rest. But not to rest on his laurels. Too much of his newspaper journalism now looks like a blog: his moral and emotional responses to events are as important as the events themselves. He uses the phrase “of course” in nearly every paragraph. He goes on about his old dad and his mother Peggy. He consistently refers to Blair as “Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara” – which is vaguely funny, but suited to satire rather than reportage. I have become tired of reading articles which I know will give me Fisk’s opinion rather than fresh information, which will degenerate into ‘why, o why?’ and ‘if they’d only asked me.’

Back to Syria. There are plenty of good reasons to condemn the Syrian dictatorship, such as its staggering capacity for corruption and its abuses of human rights. The recent imprisonment of intellectuals like Anwar Bunni and Michel Kilo simply for expressing their opinions will have horrified all true friends of the country. For all I know (because I’m no expert on intelligence matters) Syrian officials may be playing a stupid and dirty game in Nahr el-Bared. But there is no evidence for it, not yet, and there are better explanations. People who illogically blame Syria for absolutely everything that goes wrong in the region, providing no proof whatsoever, lose their credibility. In Iraq’s al-Anbar, the Sunni resistance has now realised that its first enemy is al-Qa’ida style Wahhabism. It would be nice if the so-called Sunni leadership in Lebanon could do the same, in this case at least, and stop playing anti-Syrian politics.

Racaille

Segolene Royal has been much criticised for warning that the French ‘banlieu’ will riot if Sarkozy, the interior minister who called banlieu inhabitants ‘racaille’ (‘scum’), is elected president. The banlieu is prone to riot anyway. Why?

Well, here are a few personal anecdotes. The stories are 15 years old, so are not directly relevant to Sarkozy, but explain something of the racist background to France’s social problems.

One: I was walking one evening in Paris with an upper-middle class English friend, whose mother is Malaysian. I’m an English Arab, but white-skinned and blue-eyed. Out of nowhere arrived two policemen. With no warning they grabbed my friend, threw him against a wall, pushed a truncheon against his throat until he was choking and weeping. They took me round the corner and asked why I was walking with him.

Two: I had a French girlfriend of Algerian origin, also white and not noticeably Arab, who was being harassed by an insane neighbour. She was scared, so we went to the police station to inform them of the situation. The police were polite and concerned. They wrote everything down. But when they asked my girlfriend’s name, their tone changed radically. They scrumpled up the report sheet, told us no offence had been committed, and advised us to get out immediately.

That girlfriend remembered her old maths teacher ordering her to the back of the classroom with the rest of the Arabs and Africans because, as the teacher explained, “I’m employed by the French state to teach French children.”

Her father had escaped from the extreme poverty of his (French-occupied) Algerian childhood to France, where he spent a lifetime as a migrant labourer, suffering casual and brutal violence from foremen and police – and then inflicting some himself, in his impotence, on his own family. When they finally settled in an industrial town, he found work in a factory where he would train white teenagers to do his dangerous, lowest-of-the-low job, and then watch them promoted after a couple of months to brighter and better things.

In Paris I had an African friend who for a time lived in a slum building with other African families. One day a skinhead threw a teargas canister into the corridor where children were playing. The police weren’t interested. They clearly had more important things to do with their time. The same friend was stopped almost every day by police on his way to work, insulted, and ordered to show his papers.

These scorned and abused French citizens, the blacks and beurs who work in the worst jobs for the lowest pay, who live in the ‘rabbit cages’ of the urban wasteland, who have the least representation, whose voices are not heard, are supposedly the omnipotent Islamic fiends who threaten to destroy French secularism, the whole French way of life, and whose clothing choices must therefore, for the sake of freedom, be sanctioned by the state. (To his credit, Sarkozy did not support the ban on hijab in schools.)

The fact that the French were still using torture and prison camps for civilians in Algeria in the 60s in an attempt to hold on to their empire, and that an ex-Vichy police chief (Maurice Papon) at the same time dealt with demonstrating pro-independence Algerians in Paris by tieing their feet and throwing them into the Seine, suggests that France has got savage racial prejudice to blame, primarily, for its social problems. The bodies-in-the-Seine incident happened in October 1961. At least 200 civilians were murdered, a crime in which the French media collaborated by its silence and concealment.

It’s certainly the case that many young French Arabs and Africans are somewhat raggamuffin, but extreme alienation and marginalisation tends to have that result. Besides, if white men in France have a couple of years off the rails they are not in danger of being shot by the police. When I was there, beurs and blacks were shot in the back every couple of months. This was considered normal. It certainly didn’t result in soul-searching by the white population.

It is the complex of racism and class oppression which has made the French innercities unbearable. The real 'racaille' are those who blame the victims.

See this link for information on the 1961 massacre:

http://w02-0209.web.dircon.net/Flame/algerians.htm

My absence .. and Sectarianism

Just to remind my readers that I’m here, I’m posting my response to Henry Porter’s Guardian article ‘When Will Islam Damn the Chlorine Bombers?’ The article is at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story
/0,,2062876,00.html

I’m tremendously busy at the moment. I should be able to post properly in a couple of weeks' time. In the meantime, here’s my Commentisfree response:

I agree with Porter's general point that there has not been enough official Muslim condemnation of the Salafi nihilist sectarian killers at work in Iraq. This is because the pro-American order in the Arab world (the Sauds and Hashemites and Mubaraks) has been busy rabble-rousing against Iran and the Shia - hoping to defuse anger against imperialism and its puppets by provoking sectarian and ethnic hatreds. And also because, yes, thre is a serious problem in the Muslim (especially Arab) world of Wahhabi intolerance and literalism, and many people do not realise the extent of the danger. Wahhabism appeals in terms of its anti-Westernism, but of course it has previously been America's greatest Arab ally (against Communism, then against revolutionary Iran) in the region. It causes 'fitna' (dissension) among Muslims, and seeks to erase the riches of Islamic history, philosophy, diversity, and mysticism. Its foot soldiers are deracinated and confused - the products of a brutal Middle Eastern modernism.

However, I must say that there are many unofficial Muslim voices condemning the terrorism. I live in a non-Wahhabi Gulf state, and my family are Syrian. (I have plenty of Lebanese and Iraqi friends). People cheer for the anti-American resistance, but bitterly condemn the 'dogs' and 'agents' responsible for violence against civilians. Syrians in particular fear the wild sectarianism that has established itself in Iraq, and worry that the same could happen in their own diverse and divided society.

Not everybody of course. I've heard Syrian villagers and taxi drivers spout the most obscene sectarian hatred. Ethnic and sectarian divisions are rife in the Middle East, and the chaos unleashed by the destruction of Iraq has been fuel for them.

I also disagree with Porter's comment that Western forces would leave Iraq quicker if there was less bloodshed. This is what they tell the Iraqi and Western publics, but it's obviously not true. Why spend so much money building huge permanent bases inside Iraq? Why provoke the sectarian war in the first place, by many steps, not least Negroponte's Central American style death squads made up of Shia and Kurdish militiamen operating in Sunni areas.

Unsustainable Development

Unsustainable Development

I recently spent a weekend in Oman's ash-Sharqiyya region – the easternmost part of the Arab world – collecting wind-polished rocks in the desert, sleeping on an isolated beach (a turtle crawled up the sand to bury its eggs before dawn), and passing through small coastal villages.

This area remains – for a short time still – unspoilt. Although the inhabitants of the Sharqiyya enjoy the basic amenities which modernisation can and should provide – sanitation, electricity, health services – the state's footprint is soft in the sand. I saw no sign of police. Institutional buildings are few and far between. The corporations have not yet arrived. None of the fast food outlets and coffee factories that homogenise the globe from the tropics to the tundra. So the settlements are handsome. The doors of the simplest houses are carved and patterned wood. Recent building may have been done with breeze blocks, but it's been finished with mud.

The region wobbles on the edge of misnamed 'development.' It would be unwise in this water-scarce area to install flush toilets, but there will be worse. Emirati money is buying up the shoreline. Painted rocks mark the outlines of future residential complexes and hotels. I prayed as I passed that these were markers of dreams that would remain unfulfilled.

We stopped to drink tea in a low-slung village inhabited by shoeless people 'undeveloped' enough to sit in the road, in the shade of the mosque, talking and laughing. Goats nibbled at occasional rubbish. Children squealed. And in the tea house we met … a worker from Kerala state, south India. Even here in this unmonied corner of the Gulf, a member of the imported working class. Down the street a black man crouched, racially African, by culture and language an Arab.

When Oman was new to me I thought that Zanzibari Omanis could be recognised by the colour of their skin. I soon learnt things were more complicated. Many Omanis went to work or trade in east Africa, and many of them intermarried with the people there. At one point Zanzibar was the political capital of Oman, and well before the current bout of globalisation the trade in perfumes, spices, gold and slaves moved capital and people around the Indian Ocean and deep into Oman's mountainous interior. Zanzibari 'Arabs' – usually Swahili-speakers, black, brown and white – claimed Omani nationality in the post-1970 passport age, and helped to build the modern state. Distinct from the Zanzibari community are Arabs of African descent, from every part of Oman, but particularly from the old slave ports of Sur and Salalah.

The Prophet Muhammad did not explicitly ban slavery, but he worked against it by example, freeing slaves and encouraging his followers to seek God's pleasure by doing the same. Notably, the first muezzin in Islam (the man who calls the faithful to prayer), Bilal, was a freed slave. Given this example, it's somewhat shameful that slavery lasted as long as it did in the southern Arabian peninsula (and still exists today in Muslim as well as Christian and animist areas of Sahelian Africa).

Unlike its Euro-American variant, slavery in the Arab world was not associated with rigid racial ideology, and slaves were not so totally dehumanised. Omani slaves were African, but slaves in Syria or Egypt were often brought from the Caucasus or the Balkans. Slaves quickly became assimilated into Arab society. In the peninsula they were adopted by the tribes they worked for. Slaves could marry, do business, buy their own freedom, own property. They were sometimes – like the pre-Islamic Antar – the heroes of epic and romance, and ex-slaves – like the Egyptian Mamluks – even formed their own ruling dynasties. None of that justifies slavery, of course, nor alters the fact that there are some very un-Islamic attitudes to blacks in the Arab world, attitudes which have their roots in the institution of slavery.

In the old days, Gulf Arabs herded animals, dived for pearls, traded frankincense, and often relied on slaves to do menial work. In the oil age, menial work is done by the imported working class, mainly Indians. While the Africans became Arabs, and changed the Arabs, the Indians are sent home at the end of their contracts. One result of oil wealth has been that Oman, by importing workers, has preserved its tribal social system in which all are strong – whatever their skin colour or personal wealth – because all are backed by the solidarity of their tribe. Omanisation, which aims to replace foreign workers with locals, is necessary, and has a better chance of succeeding in Oman than its counterpart programmes in other Gulf states. One result, however, will be to replace tribal equality with a savage internal class system.

Welcome to capitalism, Oman. Eight kilometres of beach front in the capital area which were previously used by locals and foreign workers for picnics, swimming, walks and football have become eight kilometres of private land. A gated community is being built there, the unbuilt houses already sold to rich foreigners – Indians, Arabs, Westerners – and a private road being built from the nearby airport. The mineral spring in the town of Rustaq also seems to have become private property overnight. Public access to the spring is under threat, as are the old houses built over the channeled spring water. There are rumours that a luxury hotel is to be built in their place. A five-star 'Shangri-La' hotel has been built on the previously free-access beach at Jussa. Yitti beach, Muscat's favourite day trip, is slated for further developments – luxury housing and yet another five-star hotel.

The social and environmental disaster that is Dubai crawls closer.

In a region short of water and increasingly long on population, in an economy built on that most dangerous and outdated product, oil, in an Arab world groaning under the weight of American military bases, with Iran staring back at the bases, with depleted uranium wafting down from Iraq-Kuwait, with hatred of foreigners rising, none of this development is in any way sustainable. Part of me wants the collapse to come soon, for the sake of the Sharqiyya and all those regions of the world happily still undeveloped.

Gunboat Diplomacy

On January 11th, US occupation forces took five Iranian officials hostage from a diplomatic office in Arbil, Northern Iraq, prompting protests from the Kurdish regional authorities who had invited the Iranians. On February 4th, an Iraqi army unit under direct American command kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad. These are incidents we can be sure of.

On February 14th, the anniversary of the bomb which killed Rafiq Hariri and many passersby in Beirut, eleven Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen died when their bus was bombed by Jundallah, a Sunni fundamentalist and Baluchi separatist group active in southeastern Iran. Iranian authorities accused the US of involvement in the attack, a claim which is backed up by Seymour Hersh and several other analysts who have described American promotion of ethnic and sectarian conflict in Iran, and specifically American cooperation with al-Qa'ida linked anti-Shia groups throughout the region.

Murkier still are rumours that the US administration's Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group is running a campaign to kidnap Revolutionary Guard commanders. Veteran Guardsman Alireza Askari either defected or was kidnapped during a visit to Istanbul in early February, and the fates of several other officers are unknown.

One of Iran's top nuclear scientists, Ardeshir Hussainpur, died on January 18th. His death wasn't announced until a week later, and the cause given then was 'gas poisoning.' The US security company Stratfor has said that the Israeli Mossad assassinated Hussainpur.

Meanwhile, there are now two US aircraft carrier batle groups in the Gulf, and Britain's naval presence has recently been boosted.

This is the context in which 15 British sailors have been arrested by Iranian forces while patrolling the Shatt al-'arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. Immediately much of the Western media fits the event into the narrative of the American embassy hostage crisis. We are told, without a hint of irony, that the British navy is on the Shatt al-'arab to ensure that 'intruders' will be chased off. The British mission, writes Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, is to 'protect Iraq's oil supply' against 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists.' If the Anglo-American invasion and destruction of Iraq is seen against the background of the new oil law hurried through Iraq's absentee parliament, the words 'pirates, smugglers and terrorists' seem apt descriptors of US and British forces. In any case, Western packaging of the story has made very little reference to the recent history of US kidnapping operations against Iranian targets, or to the fact that the Shatt al-'arab was one front in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war during which Saddam Hussain used Western arms and money to cover Iranian cities in poison gas.

Nobody has wondered what the British reaction would be if Iranian forces were found half a mile outside of British territorial waters (this is the British claim; the Iranians say the sailors had crossed the border). The press, 'liberal' and conservative, have remained largely loyal in framing the victim as the aggressor, the aggressor as the victim, once again. Watch this story carefully. It has the potential to escalate into a deliberately-plotted, nation-smashing tragedy. Once again.

America versus America

My children have a Dreamworks animated film called AntZ. I suppose it’s better than the average American children’s film, but still, once you’ve watched 15 minutes you can predict both the conclusion and the moral message that will be rammed violently past your gullet for the next hour and a bit. As in very many Disney films for children or in the Hollywood versions for adults, the message is BE YOURSELF. BE AN INDIVIDUAL. STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD.

It seems contradictory that the country which feeds its children unto obesity with this message is also the country with the most conformist of populations. Americans are more likely than any other people to confuse their national identity with their state machinery, to identify themselves with their leaders and their flag, to believe that their country has a divinely-ordained manifest destiny. The ability of Americans to contemplate alternative perspectives on the world, or even to understand that people in different countries may not want to speak English or eat hamburgers, is severely limited. The declared ideology is individualism, but the reality is rigid conformism.

Parallel to this, the American political system is described as democratic. The assumption even exists that America is in a position to export its vaunted democracy to more benighted lands. In reality, however, the American political system has much more in common with Italian fascism than it does with Athenian democracy. Athenian democracy suggests the rigorous debate of issues by the people in a public space, followed by direct voting. In Mussolini’s model, and in the contemporary US, the people are kept too busy to be able to think, are offered entertainment in place of debate and fantasy instead of facts. Corporations, media and the political parties are all on the same side. In the United States more than in Mussolini’s Italy, much of the religious apparatus is also absorbed into the corporate body. There is no public space. It has all been bought, from the airwaves to the shopping mall which replaces the old town centre.

BE YOURSELF doesn’t mean convert to Islam, or become an anarcho-syndicalist, or opt out of consumerism and live in the forest. There’s a strong media machinery to deal with such possibilities: you don’t want to be a freak, a loser, an evil-doer. GET REAL, buddy! There are prescribed ways to be yourself. You can, for instance, express your individuality by downloading a mass-produced individualised ring tone, or by wearing Ralph Lauren shirts, or Nike shoes, by hanging out with people who read a certain newspaper or drive a certain type of car. You can even prove your anti-establishment credentials by smoking Che Guevara cigarettes.

It’s important to rebel against your parents and the previous generation because by doing so you DEFINE YOURSELF and STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD. Novelty is important. Whatever was done last year is passé. REINVENT YOURSELF constantly. There was even an American TV show about women winning the opportunity to have extensive plastic surgery as well as posture and elocution lessons.

Our economy too requires constant tumult, continual renewal, in order to keep itself out of crisis. Standing still is, for it, disaster. And this points to the truth of American ‘individualism’ – not in fact particularly American, but specifically late capitalist. Marx predicted it. He called it the commodification of the human soul. There are other ways of defining your individuality, which do not rely on brands and products. You could, for instance, examine your position in relation to your family, your nation, human history, to the divine. This is a contemplative exercise which is not helped by the screen screaming BE YOURSELF, or by the late capitalist dissolution of the notion of history itself.

These thoughts have been sparked by Seymour Hersh’s latest article, and by the consequent question, what, and who, is anti-American? Hersh is America’s finest investigative journalist. He broke the My Lai story from Vietnam, and the Abu Ghraib story from Iraq. Now he’s investigating the coming US or Israeli attack on Iran and the proxy wars that the US is already involved in throughout the Middle East.

America is currently fingering Iran for supplying the weaponry that kills US occupying troops in Iraq. This is absurd, and the Americans at the top know it. 95% of American deaths in Iraq have been caused by Baathist or Salafi radicals who despise Iran. These anti-American fighters make or loot their own weapons, or buy them on the open market. They are funded not by Iran but by Saudi Arabia, America’s greatest Arab ally. The American ruling class don’t seem to actually give a damn about the American troops being killed.

Hersh also points to US funding of extreme Salafi groups in Lebanon and elsewhere. There’s nothing new in this. America has backed Wahhabi extremists before, to isolate revolutionary Iran and to trouble the Soviet Union. What makes this time different is that we are in the middle of a series of wars supposedly triggered by an attack on New York on September 11th 2001 … by extreme Salafis. The American ruling class don’t seem to give a damn about the American citizens killed on that historic day.

Last week a bus carrying Revolutionary Guards was blown up in Iranian Baluchistan by a Baluchi separatist (and Sunni fundamentalist) group which is funded by the US. One ‘strategy’ which Hersh describes is the weakening of Iran by arming and encouraging separatist terrorist groups among Iran’s Kurdish, Arab, Baluchi and Azeri minorities. Anyone who still thinks that the US administration is horrified by the civil war and fragmentation of Iraq should think again. They planned for it, and they are planning for it again. The disaster in Iraq has immeasurably strengthened instability and terror worldwide, as well as the global hatred of Americans. The American ruling class don’t seem to give a damn about Americans.

I despise the BE YOURSELF crap that passes for individualism in the US, but I’m not anti-American. Once Americans think beyond the capitalist poison (which is spreading far beyond America’s shores) and media illusion, they can be as bright as anyone else. America has produced Spike Lee and Martin Scorcese, Public Enemy and Miles Davis, John Cheever and Saul Bellow, the Bill of Rights and Malcolm X. America has a lot to be proud of.

What it should be ashamed of, and suspicious of, is its corporate ruling class. The people who whip up the wildest displays of flag-waving patriotism, and who actively collaborate with the enemies of the American people. Who ARE the enemies of the American people.

The Hersh article is here: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa_fact_hersh
On the corporate rape of America, I recommend Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo.”

In Defence of Iran

Many people will have seen the excerpt from an al-Jazeera discussion programme in which Iraqi MP Mish’an al-Jabouri and Iraqi journalist Sadeq Musawi threaten and scream at each other. The occasion is Saddam Hussain’s execution, and the cleavage is sectarian (al-Jabouri is Sunni and Musawi is Shia). Al-Jabouri calls on the audience to read the fatiha for the soul of the ‘martyred president.’ When Musawi objects and points out that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, al-Jabouri says he will do ‘unimaginable things’ to Musawi, and calls him an Iranian, a Persian, and a Persian shoe. After Musawi has walked off, al-Jabouri demonstrates what looks to me like mental illness. He tells us that his own brother and brother-in-law were killed by Saddam, but that he nevertheless considers the martyr president to be the master of Iraq, and specifically the master of Musawi and Musawi’s parents. He regrets that Saddam was killed by “the same people who killed our master Umar and our master Abu Bakr.” Then he seems to remember that Abu Bakr wasn’t killed, and says “Sorry. The people who hate Abu Bakr and all the companions of the Prophet.”

I found al-Jabouri’s ranting tragic to watch. For people like him, sectarian hatred supercedes even family loyalty. And as far as he is concerned, anyone who disagrees with Baathist tyranny or Sunni dominance of Iraq is not Iraqi and not Arab, but Persian.

As the American campaign against Iran intensifies, there is a corresponding chorus of paranoid voices in the Arab world howling about Persian imperialism and Shia infiltration. The chorus includes pro-American ‘liberals’ and anti-American Baathists and Wahhabi fundamentalists. The interests these Arabs ultimately serve are neither liberal nor anti-American.

Some Arabs wonder why Iran is involved in the Arab Levant. I see nothing particularly sinister in this engagement. Iran is an important regional power. If it is engaged in the area, so are America, Israel and France, and to a lesser extent Russia and Turkey. I would go so far as to say that Iran is a lot less ‘foreign’ than these other interventionists. And I greatly admire Iran for providing political, financial and military help to resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon. It’s not as if Hamas and Hizbullah turned down Arab aid in favour of the Iranians. Arab states have not only failed to help, they have actively conspired against the resistance and against the democratically elected government of occupied Palestine.

Some Arabs worry that Iran has become a regional superpower after the fall of the Iraqi Baath and the Afghan Taliban. But surely Iran can’t be blamed if it has become stronger as a result of American wars against erstwhile American clients. Although Iran had suffered horribly at the hands of Saddam Hussain, it didn’t help America to invade Iraq. The Saudis, however, provided land and airspace for the American campaign. True, Iran has relationships with some of the Iraqi Shia militia, just as the Saudis have relationships with Sunni militia, but some of the most important Shia militia – such as Sadr’s Mahdi Army – are Iraqi and Arab nationalists who oppose Iranian influence. The Iranian leadership more than Arab leaderships has called on Iraqis to avoid sectarian warfare, and has more to lose from Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq than the Sunni Arab client regimes.

Most absurdly, Yusuf Qaradawi, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian newspaper columnists have recently fulminated against supposed Shia-Iranian efforts to convert Sunnis to ‘the Shia heresy’ in Sunni-majority countries. There are two responses to this. The first is that there is absolutely no evidence that it is happening. In his Ashura speech in Beirut Hassan Nasrallah addressed this issue, calling on the Saudis to establish an investigation into such allegations. The second response is that, even if Shia were trying to convince Sunnis that their brand of belief is best, so what? What’s wrong with theological debate, so long as it doesn’t become coercion? Anyway, is it not obvious (and regrettable) that the best organised and funded Islamic evangelists in the world are Wahhabis?

What else is there for Arabs to fear from Iran? Some condemn Iran as a tyranny. It would be overly optimistic to call the Islamic Republic a democracy, but it is certainly more democratic than any Arab state. There are real, if controlled, elections, in which real issues are debated. There is a vibrant, if besieged, press and student movement. The hijab is imposed on Iranian women (many of them wear it slipping off the back of their heads), but Saudi women are forced to wear niqab, and are forbidden from driving. Iran makes wonderful films. Iranian high streets are full of bookshops, and the bookshops stock titles on Buddhism, yoga, contemporary European philosophy, quantum physics, Russian literature. The most popular language for internet blogs after English is Farsi. I wish the Arab world was more like Iran.

I don’t pretend that Iran doesn’t have serious problems. When I visited I was surprised by just how many people complain about the government. Not only young, Westernised English speakers. I can speak guidebook Farsi, and even working-class and middle-aged people would quickly express to me their hatred of the regime. But I took some heart from the fact that people would shout their opinions in Farsi in the middle of crowded teahouses. In no Arab country would people have so little fear.

The key conflict in the area is between the ruling class, which is both a money class and a client to imperialism, and the ordinary, impoverished people, who now have more information about the links between their rulers and Zionist and imperialist forces. The rulers of the region and of the world don’t want this conflict to be revealed in the light of day, so they seek to mask it by sectarian and ethnic conflicts. The classic divide and rule strategy. So Abdullah of Jordan, that shining hero of Islam, warns of the Shia crescent. Mubarak of Egypt, the gallant knight of Arabism, points out darkly that Arab Shia are always more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. Tony Blair recently referred to an ‘arc of moderation.’ Meaning, I suppose, the moderate anal rape tactics of the Egyptian police, and the moderate public beheadings in Saudi Arabia. It’s a shame to see so many Arabs, for reasons of sectarian prejudice, siding despite themselves with Blair and the Arab puppets. Some liberal Arabs who claim to be in favour of peace and moderation, dazzled by Western media, are falling into the same trap.

Apocalypto

The end times are everywhere. The country where millenarian fundamentalists have the most sway over foreign policy is probably the United States. That means the Empire is partially run by people for whom ‘Bring it on!’ has cosmic connotations. For America’s Christian Zionists, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a clear sign that the end is near. Many have it carefully mapped out, from Rapture to Armageddon. And these days the apocalypse is almost as popular amongst Muslims. Many Sunnis like to point to the Signs of the Hour which they believe are already in place; my favourite, and one which is hard to argue with if you’ve visited Dubai or Riyadh, is ‘Beduin will compete in building high towers.’ The one-eyed dajjal or antichrist who will rule before the Mahdi, or guided-one, and the final return of Christ, is seen variously in the single eye of the dollar’s masonic pyramid or in the one-eyed television screen. I’ve even met someone who claims that their cousin saw the Mahdi in Mecca. Shia Muslims identify the Mahdi with the last, and hidden, Imam. Moqtada as-Sadr has frequently explained the build-up of US forces in the region over the past decade and a half as preparation of a rapid-reaction force to take on Imam al-Mahdi. The explosion in the shrine at Samara, the place where the final Imam was last seen, and chaos throughout Iraq – the holy land of Shiism – has naturally encouraged apocalypticism among Shia Muslims. But apocalypticism goes beyond the monotheisms. For some Hindus, we are reaching the end of Kali Yag, the age of darkness, which means this cycle of history is approaching a full stop. Doomsday cults thrive in Japan and Russia. Mayan prophecies locate the end in 2012. And, of course, environmentalists describe a hotter near future in which what we call civilisation could totally collapse, billions of us could die, and most of the world could become uninhabitable.

People have always worried about the apocalypse. An Assyrian clay tablet of 2800 BC says, “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end.” But we seem to be having a spike in apocalypse-fantasies at the moment. There are good reasons for this.

Firstly, the power balance in the world is shifting dramatically. It’s a good bet that even if we are still here in a century, the world will look completely different. The West has been dominant for the last 500 years, to the extent that everybody now wears Western clothes, consumes Western cultural products, studies English, models their architecture, technology, state machineries and legal systems on Western prototypes. This century will see power shift decisively to China, India and other non-Western centres. It’s not at all clear what the consequences of this will be, but it’s natural that people’s dim sense of the huge change will expand to earth-shaking size.

Secondly, people everywhere feel lost, and frequently seek nihilistic compensations (fascism, Wahhabism, hedonist-consumerism, etc…), as they have been uprooted from their traditions and past. I include in this category young British people who don’t know the Bible or English literature, and therefore are disconnected from the long tradition of their culture, as much as tribesmen of the Southern Arabian peninsula who suddenly have no idea how to live without air conditioning and MTV, and who wouldn’t recognise desert poetry if it bit them on the nose. If your cultural rootedness reaches as far back as Britney Spears’ first release, it’s hard to conceptualise a non-exploding future.

Thirdly, the world capitalist system, to which there doesn’t seem to be any serious alternative, is clearly unsustainable. Marx’s suggestions about how to replace capitalism have all been discredited, but much of his basic criticism seems sounder now than ever before. Capitalism would be fine if it got stuck at the level of small business – a set-up which seems to me to be conducive of democracy and social responsibility – but capital inevitably concentrates, and corporations or state complexes take over. These cause ever bloodier and bigger wars. And the international concentration of capital is continuing apace. Marx said capitalism would inevitably morph into imperialism as capital seeks more capital and more markets. Well, look at the world. Marx said capitalism will inevitably commodify the natural environment and the human soul. Again, look about you.

Finally, there’s global warming, the environmental apocalypse. There is now very nearly consensus among scientists, although not among popular media and corporate-sponsored lobbyists, that climate change is happening very rapidly and is caused by our economic activity. If there is a 4 degree C increase in temperature over the century, as seems likely, our world will become significantly harsher even for the best-placed people. If there is a 6 degree increase, the scenario really is semi-apocalyptic. So what are we doing about it? Renouncing capitalism? Learning desert survival skills? Banning cars, planes, electric light and computers? Well, a few of us are buying energy-saving lightbulbs.

The more I talk about it the more convincing the prospect of apocalypse becomes. So it’s apt that Mel Gibson’s latest film, Apocalypto, addresses the issue head on. Gibson has hinted that Apocalypto is a critique of contemporary Western civilisation, specifically of the Iraq war. But that’s bollocks. What it really is is a celebration of Catholic imperialism as the answer to our problems. As such, it is much more problem than solution. The film mashes history to conflate Mayan and Aztec civilisations, implies that the great American city states were intact when Europeans arrived (in fact they collapsed centuries before), and portrays native Americans as, one the one hand, noble savages with an inarticulate, intuitive grasp of Catholic liturgy and, on the other, ignoble and very scary murderers. Much of the film is an extended chase scene structured around sub-Biblical imagery and prophecies of the end. The end for the wild men and redemption for the Christ-hero comes with the arrival of European ships, of bearded men in robes bearing crosses. The audience can’t help but think ‘Thank God for Christian Europe!’ Reality tells a different tale. Over 90% of native Americans died in the first century of European colonisation. Most of these were killed by European diseases, but many were killed by massacre. Genetic studies of the present population of Colombia, for instance, show what happened. Most Colombians are descendants of a group of European males and native females. So it was straightforward, kill the men or work them till they die, take the women for the bedroom. Not much redemption there.

The violence in the film is at times pornographic, in the sense that you feel Gibson must have actually had an erection while organising it. An example is the part when our hero clubs our villain in the head and blood spurts sideways for a good twenty seconds. The blood lust of the cinematic consumer, of course, is good and redemptive, while the blood lust of the savage Mayan-Aztec human sacrifice is bad and, well, savage.

A note on human sacrifice. Of course, human sacrifice was a grotesque and barbaric means of keeping people loyal to the ‘state,’ and was based on the worst superstition. Such practices are revealed in their spectacular and naked barbarism when you view them from outside the ideological prism in which they are performed. If aliens from the planet Zog were to invade the Earth, slaughter everybody, and burn our books, their archeologists would soon find Auschwitch, where Europeans recently committed mass slaughter for reasons of redemptive purity, or for that matter, Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have been killed in a slaughter sparked in the name of Democracy and Civilisation. Some of the worst superstitions.

If the Zog people wait a century, perhaps they won’t need to bother slaughtering us.

I should say before I go that Apocalypto is a wonderfully well-made, tremendously exciting and often beautiful film. Recommended, so long as genocidal reality doesn’t get in your way.

Bad Signs

Two things. First, Shaikh Yusuf Qaradawi. A ‘moderate conservative’ linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi has previously made positive statements about the need for Sunni-Shia unity, particularly in Iraq. At the Doha Inter-Islamic Dialogue Conference a couple of days ago he condemned the cleansing of Sunnis from mixed or Shia areas. “No one can tolerate such unspeakable hatred,” he said. “Sunnis are suffering more in Iraq. I had repeatedly called upon the Shia scholars and leaders in Iraq and Iran to intervene to stop this bloodshed.” He continued, “Iran has influence in Iraq. It can stop this violence and put out the fire that could destroy everything.” Then he went on to complain about Shia attempts to convert Sunnis living in Sunni majority nations.

Qaradawi was right to raise the issue of Shia death squads. He was wrong to keep silent about Salafi/ Baathist/ extremist Sunni terrorism. The Shia of Iraq put up with more than two years of massacres before they began to respond.

When the Shii shrine of the last Imam in Samara was bombed, Qaradawi commented, “We cannot imagine that the Iraqi Sunnis did this. No-one benefits from such acts other than the American occupation and the lurking Zionst enemy.” Perhaps he has a point. But it looks a lot like when Sunnis commit crimes Qaradawi blames America, and when Shia commit crimes, he blames the Shia, and Iran. His paranoia about Shia conversion squads is also suspect. 90% of Muslims are Sunni. It doesn’t seem that is going to change. Why shouldn’t Shia, or anyone else, express their beliefs in public? If some Sunni are ‘converted’ it will be because they are convinced by Shia ideas. What’s the problem? The Prophet said al-ikhtilaf rahma, or difference of opinion is a mercy. If the aim is to defuse sectarian tension, surely what is needed is Sunni scholars who will publicly condemn extremist Sunni intolerance, and Shia scholars who will publicly condemn extremist Shia intolerance.

Second, Lebanon. Yesterday opposition strike action and street protests degenerated into fighting and rioting in which three people were killed and tens injured.

The conflict is political. The opposition (which includes almost all the Shia, half of the Christians, and a few Sunni) wants a more representative government. It is demanding enough cabinet places to give it veto power over government decisions. This seems fair to me. Better still would be a reformed electoral system, so that the vote of every Lebanese is worth the same. Currently the vote of a Christian is worth more than the vote of a Sunni, and that of a Shii is worth least of all.

The conflict also centres on economics and class issues. This is why the General Labour Confederation backed the opposition’s call for a strike yesterday. The government has been dramatically raising prices of basic goods and selling national assets to international corporations. Government figures like Marwan Hamade are making huge profits from the deals.

It is doubtful that the Cedar Revolution was supported by the majority in Lebanon, and its PR was certainly run by American companies, but it represented a widespread demand for an end to Syrian military presence and political interference. This is no longer the issue. Michel Aoun was perhaps Syria’s fiercest Lebanese opponent, but he is now in opposition to the so-called ‘anti-Syrian’ government. After the government’s half-hearted support for the resistance during the 2006 Israeli onslaught, all the Shia ministers resigned from the cabinet. The Shia are Lebanon’s largest community. Sinyura’s government is not representative, but it refuses to budge because its Saudi, Israeli and American backers are telling it to stand firm.

I have made it clear where my sympathies lie. You can disagree, for political or economic reasons. As I’ve said, the conflict is political and economic. But it is increasingly being understood in sectarian terms. What do working class Sunnis have in common with millionaire businessmen like Hariri and Sinyura? Absolutely nothing, except the mirage of sectarian identity. This mirage is so strong in certain Sunni heads that it has made them obey their banker leaders and stand with the killers and fascists of Geagea’s Lebanese Forces against those who defended Lebanon from Israeli attack last summer. I understand why opposition protesters held pictures of Nasrallah and Aoun yesterday – these are Lebanese figures. But why were Sunnis waving pictures of Saddam Hussain in the street? Only because Saddam was Sunni. A Sunni who murdered Shia.

I have a Lebanese friend who says he’s given up talking politics with other Lebanese. Tony says that after the civil war ended people began to talk about ideas, about left and right policies, about globalisation and imperialism, about economics, about democracy and rights. For a few years it felt to him that sect would never again be a basis for political discussion. But in the last months that has changed. An idea is judged by the sect of the person expressing it. It feels, says Tony, like the war years.

Escalation

It seems this broken region, and this broken world, are in for a further escalation of conflict in 2007.

The report of the US Congress-mandated Iraq Study Group recommended that US forces end direct participation in combat operations in Iraq and concentrate on training Iraqi troops instead. It also called for American dialogue with both Iran and Syria for the sake of stabilising Iraq. Although the report failed to recognise the gravity of the problems in Iraq (that there are no ‘Iraqi’ troops, for instance, only militiamen) or to propose serious political solutions, and although its authors still envisaged a long-term American controlling presence in the country, it nevertheless represented an acknowledgment that America is failing in Iraq, and an attempt to limit the damage.

Bush and his people are ignoring the report. Who are Bush’s people? On the one hand, there are traditional right-wing Republicans who are unable to countenance defeat, the kind of people who don’t understand that America was militarily defeated in Vietnam. If it hadn’t been for hippies and weak politicians at home, they think, we’d have smashed the Cong. We won’t be defeated again! And there are neo-con nihilists, believers in ‘creative chaos,’ ideologues often more loyal to Israel’s perceived interests than to America’s. Many commentators have claimed the neo-cons are in decline: I fear not. They have been repositioning, certainly – blaming Bush and Rumsfield for the conduct of the war in Iraq (but not the war itself), making themselves more attractive to the right-wing of the Democratic party. It is very important to remember that as far as large sections of the American ruling class are concerned the Iraq war has not been a failure.

When people examine the war from a human perspective, when they consider the 650, 000 Iraqi dead, the millions of internal and external refugees, the tens of millions suffering poverty, trauma and the effects of Depleted Uranium, when they consider too the 3, 000 American dead, it seems obvious that the war has been a disaster. When we examine the war according to its supposed aims, we see that it has failed on every one. To capture Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? There were no weapons of mass destruction. To establish democracy? Instead of democracy there is gang rule, civil war and sectarian hatred. To enshrine human rights? The United Nations says that torture is more prevalent in Iraq now than under Saddam, and the Americans themselves have done their bit for torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. To promote secularism at the expense of Islamism? One of the most secular Arab countries is now ruled by competing groups of fundamentalist clerics. To stop terrorism? The presence of violent Salafi groups in Iraq has risen from zero before the invasion to plague proportions now.

But look at the real reasons for the invasion and the picture becomes rosier. Corporations like (Cheney’s) Halliburton have made huge profits reconstructing Iraq despite the fact that nothing has been reconstructed. For these (overwhelmingly American) business interests, Iraq has been a risk-free investment. The American taxpayer foots the bill, whatever the result. The government (staffed by the same people who staff the corporations and the media) signed the contracts. Moreover, it looks like an oil law committing Iraq to long-term agreements with foreign corporations is about to be pushed through the parliament. It should be noted that many parliamentarians do not live in Iraq. The United States has seen drafts of the oil law, but the Iraqi public, and many Iraqi parliamentarians, haven’t. Another positive result: Iraq may be a danger to itself, but it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to be a danger again to the puppet monarchies of the Gulf, or to Israel. Plus this benefit: the Arab and Muslim masses, who only six years ago seemed increasingly united in opposition to Israel and American imperialism, increasingly aware and politically active, are now consumed with sectarian and petty-nationalist rivalries.

Yes, Americans are dying, but usually only blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. Plenty of mercenaries from South America, South Africa and Eastern Europe are being killed too, but they aren’t officially members of the American armed forces, so their deaths are not reported. The American tax payer is losing – but that’s the tax payer, and not the ruling class.

The novelist Thomas Pynchon offered two approaches for understanding the contemporary world: either as chaos, which he called entropy, or by paranoia, the assumption that everything is organised by hidden conspiracy. Most Westerners, being trusting folk, prefer the chaos explanation. That is, the Washington and London ‘experts’ really did expect to find nuclear missiles in Saddam’s bathroom; they really did think the Iraqi Muslim masses would welcome GIs with flowers; they thought Depleted Uranium was good for you; they believed radical Islamists would want only to disco dance in Tel Aviv once they’d tasted American candy. Me, I don’t think so. In the case of Iraq, I tend to paranoia. Bush may be a chimpanzee who hadn’t heard the word ‘shia’ until last Tuesday, but he is surrounded by professionals, men with PhDs, by intelligence men. These people guessed what would happen. It wasn’t difficult to foresee. I foresaw it, and I’m not paid to study the region. They understand Arab and Muslim weaknesses, Arab and Muslim backwardness, better than the Arabs and Muslims do themselves. It’s very depressing to watch the Muslims, particularly the Arabs, fall into the traps which have been laid for them.

The one failure of the war, from the point of view of the ruling classes, is that Iran has been inadvertantly strengthened by the fall of the Baathist regime. So 2007 is the year to destroy Iran.

Attempts are well underway to neutralise Iran’s allies. In Palestine, Abu Mazen’s Fatah goons are being armed by Israel, Jordan and Egypt to take on the elected Hamas government. In Lebanon, Sinyora’s government is being funded (and some say armed) by Saudi Arabia and America to strengthen it against the legitimate demands (for a representative government) of Hizbullah and its allies. It looks as if the American ‘surge’ in Iraq will be directed against as-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi.

Meanwhile, patriot missiles are being sent to Gulf states which host large American military bases, and extra warships are being deployed in the Gulf. These weapons have nothing to do with Iraq, and everything to do with Iran. The recent arrest of the Iranian diplomats in Iraqi Kurdistan seems designed to provoke Iran into actions which can be used to justify war. We should expect further provocation.

America cannot sustain a ground invasion of Iran. From what I read it (or Israel) is more likely to launch intense air attacks on Iranian military and infrastructural targets. The campaign will be followed by efforts to incite rebellion among ethnic minorities in Iran – Balush, Arabs, Azeris and Kurds. The aim is to keep the Iranians so busy they won’t be able to project power beyond their borders. If the plan works (and I don’t think it will – Iran is more cohesive and less traumatised than Iraq), we can expect to see the kind of ‘busyness’ in Iran that we are seeing in Iraq.

Of course, I exaggerate when I say the War on Terror has been an unqualified victory for the empire. America’s imperialistic hubris is losing it influence and respect throughout the world. America’s essentially third world nature is becoming more and more apparent – hysterically nationalist, religiously fundamentalist, educationally backward, a country with vast divergences between classes and ethnic groups, with a propagandist media, whose government is controlled by vested interests. Empires are sustained by consensus as much as by coercion, and there is no longer anything resembling consensus that America is a serious candidate for global governance. The probable attack on Iran will be America’s Suez moment. America will win militarily, but lose, massively, politically. It’s all bad for America (remember America is not the same as the American ruling class), and worse for the Middle East.

Erm .. Happy New Year!

Executing Saddam

On his excellent ‘In the Axis’ blog (http://www.readingeagle.com/blog/syria/) Brian Anthony complains about the Sunni Arab world and international organisations protesting the execution of Saddam Hussain. Quite rightly, Brian objects to the tendency of many Sunnis to turn a blind eye to Saddam’s crimes. He also suggests that Sunnis may actively support repression of Shia in Iraq.

Saddam was certainly a murderous tyrant. He was helped to power by the CIA first in order to destroy the powerful Iraqi Communist Party, and then funded and armed by the US, Europe and the Gulf regimes to attack revolutionary Iran. He poisoned Iranian cities and Kurdish villages (Iraqi Kurdish militias were in alliance with Iran at the time) with gas. After falling into the American trap and invading Kuwait, he dealt with the 1991 intifada in the south and north of Iraq by annihilating whole clans and villages. This is when the sectarian horror really began to take a grip on Iraq. Tanks painted with the slogan ‘No Shia after Today’ moved into southern cities, and provided ample filling for mass graves. The aunt of one of my friends was driven insane when her sons were tortured to death by Saddam’s mukhabarat: just one story from very many. Saddam didn’t only build the worst secret police state in the Middle East, he actually organised rape squads, and special rape rooms, to destroy Iraqi women and Iraqi family honour. His victims number in the hundreds of thousands, and millions if you include the wars he started.

I still think it is legitimate to oppose his execution for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, I oppose the death penalty. Sure, if anyone deserves it, Saddam does, but I still oppose the death penalty for a range of political and moral (and Islamic) reasons, and in every circumstance. My opposition to capital punishment requires a posting by itself, but in brief: I don’t believe the state should ever be given the ‘right’ to kill; I don’t believe that impartial justice has ever been practised by any state; I don’t believe the death penalty has a deterrent effect; although capital punishment was practised by the first Muslims (who didn’t have prisons, and who were seeking to stop tribal feuding), the detail of Sharia law suggests that it is better not to kill a criminal if an acceptable alternative punishment can be found.

Secondly, the execution was carried out in a nasty sectarian manner. Inasmuch as I support any ‘side’ in Iraq I support the Shia, and I know they have very good reason to want revenge. But for the sake of Iraq, if we had to have taunting of Saddam in his last moments, we should have had a speech read out about his crimes to Shias and Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds. Although Shias suffered disproportionately under the Baathist regime, Sunnis were also persecuted, and the regime included Shia ministers and generals. Chanting ‘Moqtada’ at the execution, while a civil war is raging, does not help bring peace to Iraq, and Iraqi peace is more important than Saddam the individual.

Thirdly, carrying out the execution at the time of Eid prayers seems like a calculated insult to the sentiments of Muslims. Eid is supposed to be a time of peace and reconciliation, and it falls in the months when bloodshed is prohibited. Of course, Saddam did worse things against Islam, and Muslims have spilled plenty of blood in the holy months, but that’s no justification. I resented spending the Eid days fielding questions from my children about the famous man who was choked to death, just as any Christian would feel uncomfortable talking about the electric chair on Christmas morning.

Fourthly, and most importantly, Saddam should have been kept alive to face charges for his major crimes (not just the local and relatively small scale crime of Dujail) in a properly transparent trial. The US, Europe and Gulf regimes didn’t want this because it would have exposed their complicity in his repression of Communists and Shia and his gas attacks on Iranian cities and Kurdish villages. But the Iraqi government should have insisted on a real trial, which would have shown Sunni Arabs (whether they wanted to listen or not) the extent to which Saddam was a brutal puppet rather than a nationalist leader.

If it is simple revenge that was sought (and, yes, I think the majority of Iraqis burned for revenge against Saddam), I would have preferred to this partially-transparent, American-run trial, of which bits were televised but the sound was cut whenever anyone said anything controversial, and during which defense lawyers were assassinated, that Saddam had been released into the streets of Basra or Kirkuk. We’d have got the blood, without the farce.

Compare the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa to this ugly charade of justice. Compare the cultural and economic success of new South Africa (albeit marred by crime) to the sectarian, criminal, bloody chaos of occupied Iraq.

The Horns of Satan

The Arabs and Muslims have many internal enemies. But the greatest of these, in my opinion, are the Saudi regime – America’s key Arab ally – and the Wahhabi doctrine it has at different times promoted, exploited and tolerated. Its malign influence has spread to Pakistan, Afghanistan, West Africa, Egypt and inner-city Europe, where traditional and plural Islamic cultures are being crushed by reductive ‘rulebook’ religion and sectarian intolerance. The Saudis are currently interfering in Lebanon to prop up the Siniora government, funding and providing manpower for Sunni terror organisations in Iraq, and discussing attacks on Iran with the Israelis.

Despite being the chief sponsor of the Taliban and the homeland of most of the September 11th bombers, Saudi Arabia’s alliance with the United States remains strong. American miltary bases remain dotted around the country, secret police continue to cow people into suspicious silence, criminals (but not the big ones) are still beheaded in public squares on Friday afternoons.

How long will this traitorous and barbaric regime last? In ‘The Rise and Coming Fall of the House of Saud’ Saeed Aburish predicted the regime’s downfall – for the late 1990s. When I was in Saudi Arabia, from 2001 to 2003, there was a widespread sense that the regime was in its last days. Al-Saud governance – rigidly Islamist at home, supinely pro-imperialist in its foreign relations – satisfied no-one at all, from Taliban types to Western-educated shabab who wanted more personal freedoms.

The local education system, run by Wahhabi ideologues, has completely failed to produce a generation of Saudis capable of running their own economy, let alone of thinking critically. The majority of doctors, nurses, managers, educators, engineers, technicians, mechanics, cleaners, builders, computer programmers and salesmen are foreigners – a usually despised third of the population who have no reason to stay in the country once things start to break down. The capital city, Riyadh, has 4 million inhabitants and no local water supply. One well-placed bomb on the pipeline from the desalination plant on the coast, and you have 4 million thirsty people.

I once drove past a funfair in the desert. A ghost funfair. My companion told me that it is opened up, switched on, and staffed only when a prince decides he wants to visit. For all the other days in the year it sits there rusting. Not a bad metaphor for the massive corruption and incompetence that passes for economic management in Saudi Arabia. People in the West often think that the Gulf Arabs are rich, because of the newspaper stories about princes blowing millions on yachts, European palaces, binges in Harrods and so on. In fact, the income of all the Arab countries combined is less than the income of Spain. And most towns and villages in Saudi Arabia look no less third world than towns in Syria.

When the alliance of the al-Sauds and Wahhabi fanatics took control of the huge country that now bears the Saud family name (come the revolution, sisters and brothers, it shall be renamed Qunfuziyya, after me), they imposed the culture of their own region, Najd, on every province, and the anti-culture of Wahhabism on the non-Wahhabi Sunnis of the Hijaz and the Shia of the oil-rich eastern province. Their first act on taking Mecca was to destroy mosques associated with Sufi practices and shrines of any description.

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, which the Saudis pretended to oppose even while giving the US access to their airfields, the kingdom resounded with whispers. “Something’s going to happen here,” people told me. “Something’s going to change. Within the next year or two.”

What happened was murderous bomb attacks on residential compounds and beheadings of foreign civilians. The regime was rescued by al-Qa’ida-linked Salafi terrorism, itself a creation of al-Saud acts and omissions. When the people saw that the alternative to the regime might be violent nihilism of this kind, they decided to stick with the regime. And now, high oil revenues allow them to pay their way out of crisis. There are signs that the Sauds have understood Wahhabism has become a threat to them too, and that they are trying to reduce its influence, at least within their borders. There are signs that they are making a proper effort to organise the economy.

Another boon to the regime has been the civil war in Iraq. Now they have a nearby location to export their salafis to. They rarely come back again.

I’ve complained on this blog about people who quote scripture out of its context, cheaply, to make political points. So it is with tongue halfway in cheek that I refer to the following hadeeth:

According to Saheeh Bukhari the Prophet said: “God bless our Sham (Syria/ the Levant); God bless our Yemen.”

Those present said: “And our Najd, O messenger of God!”

Muhammad repeated, “God bless Sham and Yemen,” twice, without mentioning Najd.

When the men continued to press the Prophet to seek God’s blessings for Najd, Muhammad said, “Earthquakes and fitnah (dissension/ tribulation) are there, and there shall arise the horns of Satan.”

Updike's Terrorist

John Updike, upon whom I would bestow grand titles such as, possibly, Greatest Living Writer in English (now that Bellow is dead), has written a topical novel called ‘Terrorist.’ The terrorist of the title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Molloy, the confused and bitter American son of an Irish-American mother and absent Egyptian father.

Ahmad starts the novel as a schoolboy, and then is guided by a malign imam to give up his studies to become a truck driver (ignoring the more wholesome advice of guidance counsellor Jack Levy, a worldly, unbelieving Jew). Before long Ahmad drives his truck into a terrorist plot.

Updike, in his usual present tense, observes acutely and describes intensely. His beautifully rhythmed prose balances psychological analysis and social comment, the internal and the external. His digressions are eloquent and well-placed. Updike criticises in passing the black and white solutions of fundamentalist Christianity and the Black Muslims as well as al-Qa’ida style Islam, and diagnoses as the cause of these fundamentalisms the loss of direction and hollowness of a hedonist, consumerist society. Although Updike doesn’t speak directly. We find his position in the midpoint between his ironising distance from and sympathy for the perspectives of the characters through whom the narrative is focalised. His easy shifts between these perspectives is done professionally. There is a professional’s handling of detail too. For instance, Ahmad feels his beloved Excellency truck is a part of him, and responds badly to the ugly truck he will drive on the day of the ‘operation.’ It looks, like him, dispensable.

But there are flaws. In the second, more plot-driven half of the book the characters have a tendency to collapse into mouth pieces for set opinions. An example is when Ahmad’s unreligious, unintellectual mother pontificates (forgive the pun) about Vatican 2.

Everything falls a little too easily into place. As the novel (and Ahmad’s truck) rushes towards its climax, Hollywood gets a look-in. The book is transformed from psychological and political commentary to thriller, and I’m not sure the transformation works.

For one thing, there is an accumulation of false notes. For his last breakfast the Imam of Ahmad’s mosque, Shaikh Rashid, leaves him a special bread made by Shiites for the mourning day of ashura. A militant Sunni jihadist like Shaikh Rashid would want nothing to do with Shia ‘superstition’ and ‘innovation.’ And another bin Ladenist (the technician) would never have approved of Qaddaffi, even before he changed his tune, or Arafat. These faults reveal a strange laziness in a novel which is otherwise so well researched (the Arabic and Quranic references, though limited by the fundamentalism of the characters, are generally accurate). I suppose Updike assumed that his American audience wouldn’t notice, and this is a shame (on two levels).

More disturbing is the novel’s reliance on sub-Hollywood stereotypes. Ahmad is born and bred in New Jersey, but he’s still an easy target for grooming by sinister Arabs. The exploitation of an innocent has no realist value for understanding anti-US terrorism. The September 11th hijackers were all educated men with their own opinions. In Iraq and Afghanistan gullible youngsters may be convinced by older men to sacrifice themselves, but the imams there wouldn’t be quoting Shakespeare. And I find it hard to believe that a Shakespeare-quoting imam would make such harsh interpretations of the Quran as Shaikh Rashid does.

In “Terrorist” there are a couple of token ‘good’ American Muslims - a CIA operative and a man who thinks Guantanamo Bay and the invasion of Iraq are just wonderful. There are also glimpsed ghetto Muslims, the unlucky inheritors of Islamic culture. Otherwise, it’s the cabal: dark of aspect, in dirty gellabiyas, scheming, sneering. There is no sense that in the range of Muslim (and specifically, Arab American) opinion there are intermediate positions between flag-waving pro-Americanism and explosive puritanical fury.

Ahmad’s racism (he uses the archaic Arabic term zanj to refer to blacks) is not entirely convincing. Neither is his formal eloquence. More fundamentally, his terrorist motivations are supect. A suicide bomber, however much religious vocabulary he may employ, is driven by political anger. The September 11th bombers (I mention them again because the novel is clearly written in the shadow of that day) were Saudis, Lebanese and Egyptians. Despite being comfortably well-off, they had direct experience of Middle Eastern (US-backed) tyranny, and were neighbours to war and occupation. But Ahmad rarely reads the newspaper. So terrorism is to be understood only as a symptom of a religion obsessed with cleansing the unclean and purifying the impure. It’s a pathology of the Arab Muslims, not something arising from societal failures and the horrors of imperialism. In this respect Updike does no better in helping Americans to think about where their empire has led them than does Fox news.

It’s a tribute to Updike that all this doesn’t manage to ruin the book for me. It would have been better if it had avoided the thriller genre, but even so it reminds me of the best philosophical thriller writing, of Graham Greene if not Dostoyevsky. And the final five pages go some way to redeeming the failings. Ahmad’s change of heart comes as he remembers a few of the names of God: “The Beneficent, the Merciful, the Living, the Patient, the Generous, the Perfect, the Light, the Guide. He does not want us to desecrate His creation by willing death. He wills life.”

But there isn’t a happy ending. Even without blood and thunder, the world around Ahmad, in the novel’s last paragraph, is a purposeless hell of consumption and struggle. I felt this wasn’t only Ahmad’s point of view. Something is rotten, that much is apparent, that much is the near-consensus which still doesn’t quite declare itself.

Gemayel Assassinated

Now here’s a tricky one. When Rafiq Hariri, the erstwhile ally of Syria but latterly a quiet but effective opponent, was assassinated by a huge car bombing in central Beirut on Valentine’s Day 2005, I was convinced that Syria was not the guilty party. I knew the regime could be brutal and stupid, but I didn’t think it could be quite that stupid. As expected, the assassination of Lebanon’s best-connected multimillionaire (and the man who, as prime minister, had rebuilt Beirut after the civil war and 1982 Israeli invasion) led to massive anti-Syrian protests in Beirut and the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country.

There were also massive pro-Syrian demonstrations, called by Hizbullah, which were not covered in nearly as much loving detail by the Western media. But in any case, it was a good thing that Syria pulled out. Although the Syrian presence had been one of the factors preventing an Israeli-Phalangist takeover of Lebanon, and although Syria had contributed to ending the civil war and reconciling Lebanon's warring factions, its clumsy militarism, corruption and police state interference naturally alienated many Lebanese, probably the majority. What was so damaging to both Syria and Lebanon was not that the withdrawal happened but that it happened like this, like a particularly bad-tempered divorce.

If the assassination of Hariri was ordered by Syria, the regime had scored a historic own goal. But I was gradually persuaded that this is just what happened. The inexperience of the president, gangster-style jockeying for influence and money within the regime, sectarian tensions between regime Alawis and Sunnis, underestimation of the Lebanese Sunni response: all of these seem to have contributed to the decision to kill Hariri.

I'm still, of course, not sure. America and Israel were the big winners from the realignement following Hariri's death, and a network of Israeli-sponsored agents was recently uncovered in Lebanon. But, most probably, I was wrong when I presumed Syrian innocence.

So it's with a certain lack of confidence that I make the following claim: Syria just could not have been so stupid as to assassinate Pierre Gemayel this afternoon, not now, not again. The failure of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians to build a functioning democracy, and Israel's failed war against Lebanon this summer, had given the advantage back to Syria's Lebanese allies. An alliance of Hizbullah, Amal, and the popular Christian General Michel Aoun is about to start a peaceful protest movement to change the unpopular pro-Western government. Everything has been going Syria's way. If Lebanon shapes up as a Syrian ally, but independent of Syrian interference, and also stable and at peace with itself, this would be the best outcome for both countries. It would also complete the total failure of Israeli-American plans for Lebanon. But the Gemayel assassination, at a time when sectarian tensions are already high, threatens civil war. This was the thinly disguised aim of Israel's (and America's) war this summer. So I'm pointing the finger at them. But as I've said, I may be wrong.

To a Christian Zionist

I have recently been discussing Middle East issues with an American colleague who I would describe as a Christian Zionist. Although I like him personally I find some of his ideas (on Palestinian history, and Lebanon, and the wider Middle East) pretty offensive, and I have told him so. So as not to start an argument, I told him so in writing. He replied, saying that although he disapproves of collective punishment of the Palestinians he believes that the Bible clearly states that the Holy Land belongs to the Jews, and that the rebuilding of Israel prophesied in the Old Testament has happened since 1948. Hmm. My first response is anger. I understand Jews with memories of European anti-Semitism being attracted to Zionism, however wrong I think they are, but Americans? People who are not oppressed, who think Palestine is a Cecil B Demille set, who think real human beings (Arabs) are less important than their own narrow interpretations of scripture. It makes my blood boil. But I think responding intelligently to this kind of thing is important, because there are millions of Americans (with power) who see the Middle East through a Biblical prism. Anyway, here is my latest letter:

Dear

When I first read your letter I thought, this is Christian fundamentalism. There's nothing to be done when your opponent has a fixed idea of a religious text. What's the point? Letting it brew in my mind for a few hours, however, I find I have arrived at what may be a glimmer of light, a point on which we may be in some kind of partial agreement. (I'll get to that at the end.) And that's the benefit of communicating by letter: it allows for emotional reactions to subside into something more constructive.

I must say I take some exception to your comment about my limited Biblical knowledge. I have read the Bible and have read about the different interpretive traditions in Christianity. Of course I am aware of the scriptures which say God promised the land to the tribes (the Quran tells the same story), and I know about the prophets such as Isaiah and Ezekiel who foretold the doom and then re-establishment of Israel. However, to go from here to the political belief that we should support a 20th century ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a state in the 20th century definition of the term is an interpretation, and not 'the Bible.' I think it is important to recognise this, even if you believe the interpretation is the right one. It seems to me that the followers of all religions fall into trouble, even into immorality, when they can't distinguish between the word of God and their own interpretations. I know that the pro-Zionist interpretation is prevalent in the United States, but I continue to assure you that it is not nearly so prevalent in Europe. Many European interpretations of Old Testament prophecy have been symbolic, understanding the reestablishment of Israel to mean the establishment of the Kingdom of God with the coming of Christ. Of course, the Palestinian and Syrian Christians I have spoken to about this are horrified and deeply confused by American Christian support for Zionism. Still more to the point if we are discussing Biblical texts, the preaching of Christ according to the New Testament does not seem in any way to support exclusive nationalism or violence. I can't imagine the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount manning a checkpoint, firing artillery at residential areas or firing missiles from warplanes.

I feel a little dishonest discussing scripture with you because I do not believe the Bible is the literal word of God as you do, although I can accept that it may well be divinely inspired, in part at least. Modern textual analysis of Biblical texts as well as archeology have shown that not all the events in the Bible are literally true. I expect that for you faith will trump science in this case, and I respect that. I should stress here that, in my opinion, a lack of literal truth does not equate a lack of truth full stop. I believe that reading ancient religious texts (Islamic as well as Jewish) in search of literal historical truth misses the point somewhat, and says more about our contemporary preoccupations than it does about the texts themselves. The people (or God) composing the texts sought not to give a scientifically verifiable account of the world and history but to warn and to inspire, to teach lessons. Anyway, what I am saying here is that even if you are able to prove that the Old Testament calls specifically for the establishment of a Jewish ethno-state with all the 20th century machinery of state (and I don't believe you can), I still would not support Zionism. Likewise, even if a Wahhabi is able to prove that the only possible interpretation of certain Quranic verses is that all societies at all times should stone adulterers to death (and I don't believe he can), I still would not support stoning adulterers. I work on this principle: as soon as my interpretation of a text makes me do something immoral, that will unjustly and counter-productively hurt others, I know that I have gone wrong somewhere. Before God gave me religious texts to struggle with, he gave me reason, conscience and compassion. It is not possible that God could be less moral and compassionate than me.

To reemphasise (and I know I'm being much too longwinded about this): I think this is a universal problem. Muslims very often squash their own conscience in order to believe, say or do things which they have been brought up to believe are Islamic. Christians do unchristian things in the name of Christ, and Jews do unjewish things in the name of Judaism. It goes beyond religious communities. Socialists hurt society in the name of society. Democrats do undemocratic things in the name of democracy. Atheists hold unreasonable positions in the name of reason.

I also disagree with your statement that Biblical narratives of return to the Promised Land are the foundation of Israeli culture and beliefs. Of course, the Torah is one crucial element of Jewish and Israeli identity, along with the Talmud, modern nationalism, and secular European culture. The first Zionists were European secularists and, in many cases, atheists. Their motivations were nationalist and defensive, and not Biblical. Herzl was a secular Jew who was prepared to establish a state in Uganda or Argentina if Palestine was too politically difficult. Many Western European Jews before the 30s were socialists and internationalists. The European Jewish bourgeoisie produced Marx and Freud. As for Orthodox Jewry, they believed that the return to Israel would not happen until the coming of the Messiah. Some of them understood the return to be symbolic of a spiritual state, some understood it literally, but all thought it would not and should not happen until the Messiah came. They considered Zionism to be blasphemous. A minority of Orthodox Jews, including the Naturai Karta people, still hold to this position. It was the rise of Fascism which changed the minds of most Jews. Anti-semitism, not religion, made Zionism attractive to the Jews.

I'm glad that you don't approve of collective punishment or of the Sabra and Chatila camp massacres in 1982. Sharon also holds responsibility for the blood of 29,500 Lebanese and Palestinians who were killed in the summer of 1982, 40% of them children. In 1953 Sharon helped direct the massacre of 69 civilians in the Palestinian village of Qibya. In 1956 he played a role in the massacre of 270 Egyptian prisoners of war. This mentions only Sharon, and only some of his crimes. Some of these crimes could have been avoided, but it was inevitable that crimes would have to be carried out on a large scale for a state with a Jewish majority to be established in Palestine.

Now here is the point on which, possibly, we will find some slight grounds for agreement. I said in one of our discussions that I don't have a problem with diaspora Jews coming to live in Palestine per se. I have a problem when they seek to drive out and oppress the original inhabitants of the land (who have been there since Canaanite times). In fact, relations between the Palestinians and Jewish immigrants were generally good until the Palestinians realised that Zionist plans were being made to dispossess them. Interestingly, it was the more secular Jewish immigrants who often came in with racist attitudes to the Arabs, rather than the religious, who came with a spiritual love of the land which the Palestinians could understand. (Both Martin Buber and Ahad Ha-Aam have written about their more spiritual, less military and statist approaches to Zionism). Now, I understand that one reason why Christian Zionists support the establishment of the Jewish state is that they believe Jewish return is a prerequisite for the return of Christ. Christ the prophet of love and compassion. Well, about a third of the Jews have settled in Palestine (along with quite a few Russian Christians to make up numbers), but there is no sign of Christ yet, and no sign whatsoever of love and compassion guiding Israeli ideology and behaviour. If the Israelis could find a way of recognising that the birth of their state caused tremendous suffering for the Palestinians, and if they could find a 'Christian' way of living in peace with them, without (inevitably temporary) apartheid or military solutions, then the Israelis could indeed be a light unto the nations, and the rule of Christ on earth would be a lot closer.

With best wishes

Another Massacre

News is coming in that Israeli shells have killed 19 Palestinian civilians, most of them children, as they slept this morning, Wednesday 8th November. This follows a week-long attack on the Gaza town of Beit Hanun in which 60 Palestinians were killed. Many of those were civilians too, but most were young men carrying guns. I must say that I don’t consider young men fighting to liberate their land as equal to occupation troops, who seem to me to be fair military targets. All Beit Hanun men aged between 16 and 45 have been rounded up and taken off to join the Israeli gulag. There are already nearly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners (or hostages – that’s what the Western media would call them if they were Israelis) in Israeli jails.

This week a 700-year-old mosque was destroyed in Beit Hanun. Destruction of Palestinian heritage, of the environment, of sewage and irrigation systems, and of residential buildings, continues unabated. None of this is new to Gaza. Most of the population are refugees from the lands stolen in 1948, from the villages of central Palestine that were ethnically cleansed and bulldozed then. The Gazan refugee camps have witnessed sporadic massacres ever since.

More have been killed in the past week than in the London tube bombings. Gaza is now worse than any pre-Nazi Jewish ghetto in Europe, and perhaps as bad as a Nazi-era ghetto. It's closed from the land and sea – when fishermen try to fish they are shot at by Israeli boats. There are continual sonic booms from the air, which smash windows and traumatise children. The power is still intermittent at best – the only power station was bombed a few months ago. Even without major incursions, the average number of Gazans murdered by Israel since the summer has been eight a day. I don't notice expressions of horror from the 'international community.' I don't notice Bush or Blair frothing about 'civilisation' and 'barbarism.' In fact the ‘international community’ – meaning the US and the EU and the client Arab regimes – is directly participating in the throttling of Gaza by imposing extreme sanctions on the already impoverished Palestinian territories because the Palestinians voted for a resistance government. Most of the weaponry used to murder in Gaza is American built and supplied. Bush describes Israeli killing sprees as 'self-defence.' After all, one Israeli soldier was killed this week, and the crap Qassam rockets have killed 8 people over the last six years.

Is anybody still surprised when Arabs and Muslims scorn official Western bleatings about law for the farce that they are? Is anybody surprised that many Muslims believe this kind of violence must be met by violence?

There is plenty that needs to be negotiated between Israelis and Arabs, such as the future of the millions of refugees who live in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and how European Jews can be integrated peacefully into the region while keeping their cultural and religious rights intact. Whether there will be a Palestinian state or a unitary state, and what kind of unitary state, needs to be negotiated. But on the brute fact of the brutal occupation, there is nothing to negotiate. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is every bit as unlawful and criminal as Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. If this occupation was imposed on Western Europeans or Americans for even a day there would be an outcry. There must be (but won’t be) an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces, and an immediate end to the siege.

The slogan says, No Justice No Peace. This is not a threat but a statement of what is obvious and inevitable. Oppression breeds hatred, and reaction. Of course, the people in charge, in every country, are far more interested in in conquest and wealth than in peace and justice. There has to be change from below. Real change. Swapping Democrat for Republican imperialists won’t make any difference.

What's Wrong With Travel Writing

I’ve recently read “Cleopatra’s Wedding Present” by Robert Tewdwr Moss, a well-written account of travels through Syria in the late 1990s. Moss is an evocative and sensuous writer. His sense of place and time is highly accurate: I immediately recognised the streets he described, and wanted to tell him how things have changed. (But it’s impossible to tell Moss anything now. He was stabbed to death by a rent boy in London shortly after finishing this book).

The strength of characterisation – of Syrians and foreign tourists – in the book suggests that Moss would have made a great satirical novelist. There are also strong set pieces on some of the archeological highlights of Syria, such as Queen Zenobia’s desert city of Palmyra, Saladin’s castle in the green Lattakian mountains, and the ‘dead cities’ around Aleppo – Byzantine settlements which were suddenly and mysteriously vacated, leaving mosaics, churches and olive presses for archeologists to puzzle over.

Moss is particularly good on death and decay. Whether he is describing a crumbling old city hara or a Mesopotamian tell with its layers upon layers of ancient habitation, he captures the weight of history that can be felt as a burden in Syria. (The Prince’s long monologue on the endlessly colonised dry landscape of Sicily in di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” does it even better). And the particular series of deaths that Moss most illuminates are of those killed in the Armenian holocaust, when Turkish authorities force-marched civilians into the Syrian desert, where they starved and shot at them until there were a million corpses to stuff down wells or into caves.

He is good with atmospherics in general. There is a sustained expressionism in which, for example, an old printing press bucking and screeching like a chained animal in the room beneath his hotel bed becomes emblematic of the fettered Syrian spirit in thrall to dictatorship, the secret police, and the forces of history. The fact that Moss was gay throws stranger light onto this mood. He relates cruising anecdotes that will be as eye-opening to many Syrians as to foreign readers. Moss tends to meet misfits, not only because of his sexuality. A fellow Englishman, also gay, tells Moss that he feels he belongs in Syria because it is a land of misfits, a land of victims, a land of the weak. Moss seems to agree, but by the end of the book these are the reasons that make him want to get out of Syria and not return.

Anyone closely connected to Syria will find this difficult reading. Moss’s dark vision of the country’s political tyranny and its numberless private tragedies is accurate enough, but it shows only one aspect of Syrian life. Moss misses the genuine national pride of Syrians away from the inanities of official discourse, and Syrian intellectual vigour, and the irrepressible Syrian sense of humour. (When he is told a joke about the president on a bus into Syria, Moss notes that the joker quickly grows serious as the bus arrives in Damascus, and that this is absolutely the only president joke he has heard. In fact, there are hundreds of jokes about the president and the regime. Joking about the dire political situation is a Syrian speciality). Moss talks about the Turkish massacre of Armenians but doesn’t dwell on the Syrian hospitality which allows for the presence of a million Armenians and half a million Palestinian refugees. (A million Iraqis have arrived since Cleopatra’s Wedding Present was written). He is wrong when he suggests that the Armenians don’t have their own schools (they do) and that most Armenians converted to Islam (they didn’t). He makes the incomprehensible statement that Syrian food is boring (granted restaurant food in poor villages isn’t exciting, but city restaurants and homes provide a wonderful variety), and generally fails to recognise the Syrian love of the good life.

What else? Not all Syrian hospitals are as dirty and badly organised as he claims. For a third world dictatorship, Syria has remarkably good medical care and some top flight doctors. The private hospitals are in much better shape than the state hospitals, but that’s the case in Britain too. And…Arabs don’t swig unhygenically from shared botttles. They pour from bottle into opened mouth without touching the bottle with their lips. And…Muslim men have a taboo about wearing gold, but not about working with it. The fact that most of the gold merchants in Aleppo are Christians doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of Muslim gold workers in Syria too.

Now I’m working up a heat. Moss consistently refers to his Palestinian lover as an ex-terrorist, because he had been an anti-Israeli fighter in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion. Sleeping with a ‘terrorist’ may have given Moss a frisson of subversion, and certainly feeds the stereotype that any Arab with a gun is a terrorist, but you have to twist definitions very far to describe fighting an invading army (which was beseiging refugee camps and organising massacres of civilians at the time) as terrorism. Moss also follows the neo-cons’ favourite orientalist Bernard Lewis in connecting contemporary Syrian ‘terrorism’ with the medieval terrorism of the Ismaili ‘Assassin’ group. Suddenly history – and context, motivation, politics – loses its weight and becomes very light indeed.

Finally, I can assure you that Moss is wrong when he tells us that sex amongst Arabs is always a heartless transaction. That must have been his experience, and that’s a great shame I’m sure, but I wish he wouldn’t generalise to include all sexual encounters between all 300 million of us.

Moss pretends to speak Arabic, but whenever he includes an Arabic word it is unrecognisable. This is the problem. He’s in a country which he can’t understand, surrounded by people speaking, as far as he’s concerned, gobbledygook. Sadly, most people who read his book will have read none other about Syria. They’ll have learnt what they ‘know’ about the country from CNN or some equally blind source, and so may take Moss’s assertions as the only truth. And that’s problematic for Syrians for all sorts of reasons, not least the fact that Western audiences hold a degree of power over Syria. Put simply, they decide through their assumptions whether to allow their leaders to bomb or sanction Syria.

I thought of an equivalent travel book about Britain for British people to read, and realised that there isn’t an equivalent. There are books about Britain written by foreigners who speak English as a first language and who share most of Britain’s cultural assumptions. But what the travel writing market needs – and what I would most definitely commission if I were a publisher – is accounts of Britain written by people entirely wrapped up in the perspectives of their African or Asian villages, people who would find ordering a meal in English a challenge.

These comments don’t invalidate Cleopatra’s Wedding Present. It’s still a great read which gives a sharp if one-sided picture of Syria. My top two travel books for the Middle East are Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, for which Thesiger lived and travelled and starved with Beduin of the Empty Quarter, and The Marsh Arabs, about the tribes of Southern Iraq. Both books read as a lament for the days before state machineries, oil and superpower machinations wrecked the region. Thesiger spoke very good Arabic. He never ‘goes native’ and is never sentimental. At the same time, his obvious sympathy and respect for the ancient ways of life he discovers is the motor of his writing.

I’ll add to the list From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, which traces the steps of a Byzantine monk from Mount Athos through what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, focusing on contemporary Christian Communities in those countries.