Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Tell me, what kind of government security force wears ski masks and walks around with machine guns pointing up? I mean internal security here, not even armies.

Anyway, your telling lead line for the day:

GAZA (Reuters) – Rival Palestinian forces faced off at Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt on Friday after border guards loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas caught a Hamas official trying to smuggle in 639,000 euros ($804,000), authorities said. (NY Times)

Border guards loyal to the President against “security forces” loyal to the legislature?

Combine with trouble in Egypt. There’s an awful lot of dry kindling lying around the Middle East nowadays…

Demonstration in Egypt quited by force: A while ago, two judges alleged that the parliamentary elections were fixed. (They were) The judges faced a disciplinary hearing for saying so, and there have been protests by the public against this for a while. Big protest today, put down with force by the government.

Further background on this: Egypt is run by a secular dictatorship. (Um, sorry. He’s a president, really. Of course you can vote for anyone you want. It says so right here on the label, next to the nice man with the gun.) They’re not particularly popular because the economy is, as usual, in the toilet. The Muslim Brotherhood is essentially the original radical Islamist group; they were founded in Egypt several decades ago, and most modern organizations of that sort claim some sort of descent from them. They originated in Egypt to resist the local government. While they have pursued terrorism, their other major tack is to get legitimate political power. Since the parliament and presidency are under tight control, they’ve been slowly taking over the judiciary: an increasingly large fraction (already in the mid-double-digits) of Egypt’s judges are strict Islamists.

This is the sort of thing that has the potential to boil over into broader social conflict or even revolution. Egypt is the most populous Arab state; trouble in there could easily seep over the borders to Saudi, Jordan, etc. Watch it carefully: things may happen there soon which impact daily life in the U.S.

The text of Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush. It’s a fascinating read, although I don’t believe it gives as much insight into Ahmadinejad’s thinking as others have claimed; it’s written in the format of the old exchanges of letters between Christian and Muslim kingdoms during the Middle Ages, a fashion which led to the development of the high points of both Christian and Muslim apologia. (i.e., arguments for why X is better than Y meant to genuinely convince believers in Y)

The contents themselves are somewhat interesting. There are attacks of the form “how can US policy X be consistent with Christianity,” where X includes the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, and American opposition to Latin American and African regimes. Next there’s a bit on 9/11, with questions about failures of American intelligence and security and hints that the US government was complicit in it. (For those who haven’t heard this before, it’s a popular rumor in the Islamic world, along with the belief that the Jews were in on it)

The fact is, there are some very good points in this letter, and there are some that are total crap. Most fall somewhere in between. Tradition would require that Bush respond in kind (allowing, of course, an arbitrary amount of ghost-writing; even in the Middle Ages kings and caliphs weren’t all masters of discourse), and frankly it would be quite straightforward to respond and skewer those arguments fairly thoroughly. The thing which I find most important about this letter is that it opens the door for a new form of discourse between the countries that may have much more of a chance of influencing matters than the American political team may realize: if Ahmadinejad is as serious about the tradition as this letter suggests he is, then rational argumentation may hold sway over him when it comes in through the appropriate channels.

(And, one may hope, our people would understand the virtue of writing such a letter both in English and Farsi, and adding appropriate honorifics and tropes where needed. A good medievalist in government would be quite helpful)

Take a look at the following list of articles from the recent past:
Jewish man tortured and killed in France
Russia urges Hamas to change
Bombing of Shi’ite shrine leads to bloodshed
France reassesses its future after major riots
Map of the Cartoon Riots

We are standing on the verge of war, not the minor sort of war we’ve seen so far in Iraq, but an all-out war that could spread across the globe. But there are other counterpressures that could divert the flood into something wholly different.
(more…)

Flemming Rose, culture editor of Jyllands-Posten and the editor responsible for the decision to publish the famous cartoons of the Prophet, writes an editorial in the Washington Post explaining why he published them.

(And for the record, I am in entire, wholehearted agreement with Mr. Rose on this issue. I have no sympathy, none whatsoever, for the sorts of people who want everyone in the world to obey their tribal rules. I speak respectfully of the Prophet; but I will defend, without hesitation and with all due force, the right of anyone not to. And frankly, countries that sponsor 41-part television series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as a matter of government policy, really don’t have much room to be complaining about the insensitive Danish free press. Let them choke on it.)

I don’t know why this article hasn’t been more widely noticed. Nir Rosen, a journalist for the NYTimes who is fluent in Arabic, went to Jordan and interviewed jihadis past and present, visited mosques, and generally brought back a vivid and interesting picture of what is going on there. It adds a lot of context to Israeli Gen. Naveh’s recent undiplomatic remarks about the danger to the present regime in Jordan, as well as giving a good picture of where the major players in Iraq today are coming from.

(The article doesn’t explain all the names as well as some articles do, though, so you may want to pop over to Wikipedia occasionally while reading it.)

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