Iraq's fugitive VP convicted as attacks kill 92

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's fugitive Sunni vice president was sentenced Sunday to death by hanging on charges he masterminded death squads against rivals in a terror trial that has fueled sectarian tensions in the country. Underscoring the instability, insurgents unleashed an onslaught of bombings and shootings across Iraq, killing at least 92 people in one of the deadliest days this year.

It's unlikely that the attacks in 13 cities were all timed to coincide with the afternoon verdict that capped a monthslong case against Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a longtime foe of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Still, taken together, the violence and verdict could energize Sunni insurgents bent on returning Iraq to the brink of civil war by targeting Shiites and undermining the government.

Al-Hashemi fled to Turkey in the months after the Shiite-led government accused him of playing a role in 150 bombings, assassinations and other attacks from 2005 to 2011 — years in which the country was mired in retaliatory sectarian violence that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime. Most of the attacks were allegedly carried out by al-Hashemi's bodyguards and other employees, and largely targeted government officials, security forces and Shiite pilgrims.

The vice president declined to immediately comment on the verdict after meeting with the Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Ankara. He said he would "tackle this issue in a statement" in coming hours.

The politically charged case — which was announced the day after U.S. troops withdrew from the country last December — sparked a government crisis and fueled Sunni Muslim and Kurdish resentment against al-Maliki, whom critics say is monopolizing power.

Violence has ebbed significantly, but insurgents continue to stage high-profile bombings and shooting rampages. Al-Qaida's Iraq branch has promised a comeback in predominantly Sunni areas from which it was routed by the U.S. and its local allies after sectarian fighting peaked in 2007.

"These attacks show al-Qaida's ability to hit any place in Iraq and at any time," said Ali Salem, 40, an elementary school teacher in Baghdad. "The lack of security could take us back to zero."

The worst violence on Sunday struck the capital, where bombs pounded a half-dozen neighborhoods — both Sunni and Shiite — thoughout the day. But the deadliest attacks in Baghdad hit Shiite areas Sunday evening, hours after the al-Hashemi verdict was announced. In all, 42 people were killed in the capital and 120 wounded, according to police and hospital officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

The countrywide attacks began before dawn, with gunmen killing soldiers at an army post in the central Iraqi city of Dujail. A few hours later, a car exploded in a lot where police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs outside Kirkuk in the country's north. Both Dujail and Kirkuk are former insurgent strongholds.

Over the day, at least 92 people were killed and more than 360 wounded in at least 21 separate bombings and shootings, according to reports from police and hospital officials. No group immediately claimed responsibility, but Iraq's Interior Ministry blamed al-Qaida in Iraq.

"The attacks today on the markets and mosques are aimed at provoking sectarian and political tensions," the ministry said in a statement. "Our war against terrorism is continuing, and we are ready."

The courtroom at Baghdad's criminal court was silent Sunday as the presiding judge read out the verdict. It convicted al-Hashemi and his son-in-law, Ahmed Qahtan, of organizing the murders of a Shiite security official and a lawyer who had refused to help the vice president's allies in terror cases. The two defendants were acquitted in a third case of the killing of a security officer due to a lack of evidence.

The court sentenced both men in absentia to death by hanging. They have 30 days to appeal the verdict and could win a retrial if they return to Iraq to face the charges. Al-Hashemi — who has been in office since 2006 — is on Interpol's most-wanted list, but Turkey has shown no interest in sending the vice president back to Baghdad.

The defense team began its closing statement with a searing indictment of Iraq's justice system, accusing it of showing no independence and siding with the Shiite-led government.

"From the beginning and through all procedures it has become obvious that the Iraqi judicial system has been under political pressure," attorney Muayad Obeid al-Ezzi, the head of the defense team, told the court.

The presiding judge immediately interjected, warning that that the court would open legal proceedings against the defense team if it continued to heap accusations on the court or the legal system.

Reaction to the verdict was largely along sectarian lines on the streets of Baghdad.

Sunni lawyer Abdullah al-Azami called the trial "another farce to be added to the Iraqi judicial system."

Shiite pharmacist Khalid Saied, meanwhile, said he supported the verdict and hoped the government would broadcast all the evidence against al-Hashemi "so that the entire world knows him."

Sunday's violence came amid fears that the insurgency has gained new strength after suffering heavy setbacks in U.S. and Iraqi offensives. Four of the attacks targeted Kirkuk, where city police commander Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir blamed the violence on al-Qaida.

The carnage stretched into the country's south, where bombs stuck to two parked cars exploded in the Shiite-dominated city of Nasiriyah, 320 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Baghdad. The blasts were near the French consulate and a local hotel in the city, although the consulate did not appear to be a target of the attack.

Local deputy health director Dr. Adnan al-Musharifawi said two people were killed and three were wounded at the hotel, and one Iraqi policeman was wounded at the consulate. Al-Musharifawi said no French diplomats were among the casualties. In Paris, France's Foreign Ministry said it "condemns with the greatest severity" the wave of attacks.

A string of smaller attacks Sunday also struck nine other cities. It was one of the worst outbreaks of violence in Iraq in 2012, although the single deadliest day was July 23, which saw at least 115 people killed — the most in more than two years.

___

Associated Press Writers Sinan Salaheddin and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad and Yahya Barzanji in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, contributed to this report. Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at www.twitter.com/larajakesAP

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Religion and foreign policy

When religion defines foreign policy it will inevitably clash with national interests, creating the grounds for wars that only elites who rule in the name of religion win, writes Gamil Matar

That Egypt's president cites Quranic verses and uses religious phrases in his public addresses does not surprise me. If we are accustomed from an early age to using them in our school compositions, there is nothing inherently odd in the president peppering his speeches with them, especially given that he is a religious man and a prominent member of an Islamist organisation that elevated him to his current office. Nevertheless, I must confess that I was taken aback by the prologue to the speech he delivered at a recent conference in Iran and in which he made mention of the companions of the Prophet and cited a verse from the Quran. Something about that prologue did not ring true. It's intent was consummately political and it conveyed the sense of a future policy orientation, which may well have been the intent of the speechwriters.

The conference in which this speech was delivered was the last summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This movement is made up of numerous member states whose peoples have diverse religious affiliations. What bound these states together from the outset and protects them to this day as a non-aligned grouping is a set of political principles and interests that have no direct bearing on religion.

Clearly, the political point of employing religious references in a speech at a conference in which religion was not on the agenda was to deliver a "religious" message or, more accurately, a sectarian message to the host people, which in this case were the Iranians. I doubt that such a message could ever have been delivered in the era of NAM's founding fathers or in any of the subsequent conferences. Nothing in the substance of this message addressed a single one of that set of principles established by the conferences of Bandung and Belgrade and that set the course for generation after generation of Third World leaders and diplomats for the next 60 years.

Of course, our president was hardly the first political leader to use religious language for political ends. History is filled with accounts of the practice of mixing religion with politics in order to promote narrow interests or ambitious policies. Perhaps the architects of Western colonial policies set world records in the use of religion to accomplish imperial ends. History is similarly full of stories in which religion and politics are blended in order to evangelise or spread a religious calling, or to instil noble morals and ethics in international political practices. As we know, there are long-established schools in international relations that specialise in the connection between politics and ethics, and also power.

The stories abound and their conclusions and consequences are varied. Certainly no Arab or Muslim will forget the story of President George W Bush when he deliberately inserted the word "crusade" in his televised speech on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. I recall that at the time many international affairs specialists anticipated the onset of an age in which religion would interweave with international relations to a degree unprecedented in modern history. Their prediction came true. To read the political studies and minutes of Congressional hearing sessions of this period one would think that American scholars, politicians and diplomats had begun to regard religion as a state enterprise.

What this means is that US diplomacy can use religion to further US national interests. It does this through the application of the "religion by proxy" theory, which holds that people place their faith in the hands of a religious ruling minority that represents or claims to represent the pious majority. There are many testimonies to this transformation in US foreign policy design. Take, for example, how the US has changed its approach to religious movements in various parts of the world. The rule in US diplomacy used to be that since the US constitution insists on the separation of church from state, US diplomats should avoid dealing with religious parties and leaderships even if the aim is to further US interests. This rule vanished with the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001. From then onward, US statesmen and diplomats made it their business to deal with foreign religious parties and political forces, as well as to furnish all possible support to Christian evangelistic groups and organisations which became more energetic than ever in their campaigns to spread their ideas in South America, Africa and China.

In short, the US now began to follow in the heels of the erstwhile European colonial powers, when the imperialistic drive donned a religious mantle and blazoned the fiction of the Christian civilising mission in order to justify the occupation of the continents of the South and the East for the purpose of plundering their national resources and reducing their peoples to subjugation. Some people claim that the US added other pretexts to that flagrantly religious mission, namely the missions to spread democracy and human rights and liberties, and that sometimes it jumbled the lot of them together.

Others make a distinction between how the Europeans and how the Americans use religion in foreign policy. For example, Javier Solana, the former EU foreign affairs commissioner, warned against the danger of the American use of religion in foreign policy. The Americans are "absolutists," he said. Everything to them is either black or white, good or evil, with us or against us. Therefore, he argued, it is hard for them to be tolerant with other peoples or other religions, unlike the Europeans who had learned over centuries the true meaning of religious hatreds. Because the Europeans had had to pay a horrific toll for their religious wars, they eventually became among the most tolerant people on earth and the most accepting of the "other," which today is reflected in their foreign policies, or so argue the defenders of the properties of European culture and policy.

A foreign policy academy in the US has cautioned that the mixing religion with politics can frequently give rise to the "hijacking of religion". Unethical political leaders may take advantage of -- or feel compelled by -- certain circumstances to use religion as a cover for the pursuit of personal ends or for promoting narrow partisan interests. There are also many instances of political leaders who drew on religious passions to turn their people against other peoples, which only serves to make conflicts much more complex and intractable.

Others have been prompted by developments in their own countries or societies to warn against excessive blending of religion and politics. It is natural for different communities living side-by-side to fall into dispute and for disputes to erupt into violence. It is equally natural for local authorities to seize the opportunity to diffuse the situation before it spirals out of control, even before central authorities become aware of the situation. But in this day and age of ours, local disputes are increasingly becoming a cause of general concern because they offer an opening for foreign powers to meddle on the pretext of protecting a minority sect or ethnic group, and because the foreign meddling often causes the disputes to escalate into civil strife or even civil war. I am not sure of the scale of injustice being inflicted on the Muslims of Burma. Perhaps it is of a degree that merits such worldwide attention and international intervention. However, I am certain that other Muslims in northeastern India and in Bangladesh, itself, which is a Muslim nation, are the victims of grave injustices, while the "international community" remains unconcerned.

In all events, with Burma, as in many other cases, religion is being used to serve the "national" interests of other countries, in spite of the well-known "cost" of this practice, which is exorbitant and usually very bloody. This is not to say that the international community should stop supporting oppressed groups in Sankyang, Tibet, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and in many Arab and Islamic countries. Rather, the point is that the intervention should avoid inflaming the religious sensitivities of the peoples concerned. As history has shown, this practice has often created the soil upon which groups that originally existed on the fringes of society could develop into mass religious or sectarian movements with transnational dimensions. Or, more dangerously, it sparked the rise of terrorist groups that wrought fear, destruction and chaos and some of which were enlisted into the intelligence agencies of some governments in order to perform these governments' dirty work in other countries.

In certain quarters there is this assumption that communities or peoples that share the same religious affiliation rarely fight or engage in war. In my opinion, this theory is just as fallacious as the famous one that holds that democratic countries never make war on one another. As many international politics experts will tell you, the prime engine of the foreign policy of any state is national interest. The idea was first formulated by the father of the science of international relations, Hans Morgenthau, and the overwhelming majority of political scientists and statesmen still subscribe to it. Some of these go on to assert that the goal of realising national interests sometimes gives politicians the incentive to pursue actions that defy ethical principles. The eminent political scientist Arthur Schlesinger coined a now famous term for this phenomenon. He called it the "necessary immorality" in the manufacture of foreign policy.

This concept brings us to an inescapable reality. "Religious states" go to war just as "secular states" do and "religious states" can become embroiled in gruelling wars with other "religious states", including those that share the same religion and even the same religious denomination. The history of the Middle East, since the dawn of religion, is filled with religious wars, some of which lasted decades and left disastrous and long-lasting effects. Otherwise put, when religion enters into the equation as a shaper of foreign policy, it will inevitably clash with the chief engine of foreign policy, which is national interest. The winners in this game are never the people and the advancement of their societies, but only the elites who claim to rule in the name of religion and who will have no compunction about going on the warpath against other ruling elites who are their coreligionists in another country. There is an endless train of such wars, from the eras of the Islamic caliphates in Damascus, Baghdad and Istanbul, to the clash in Europe between the eastern and western Christian empires. In the Arab and Islamic world, alone, we have had the wars between Egypt and Yemen, Libya and Chad, Iraq and Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, the Turks and the Persians, and western Pakistan and eastern Pakistan or the "land of the Bengals."

The forced or artificial mixture of religion and foreign policies is fraught with risks, especially when the political elites who forge the policy decisions or orientations are "religious" in their political orientation or definition of their identity.

The writer is a political analyst and director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.

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Culture: Justifying intervention

In a recent diary and film, French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy has recalled the role he played in last year's NATO-led intervention in Libya, writes David Tresilian

The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, well-known in France for his popular books on philosophy and his journalism, came to international attention early last year when he went to the Libyan city of Benghazi to meet the leaders of the uprising against former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, subsequently promoting their cause with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and helping to bring about their international recognition.

For some days in March last year it might have even seemed that Lévy had taken over the running of French diplomacy, sidelining the country's then foreign minister Alain Juppé and persuading Sarkozy to place himself at the head of western efforts to intervene in Libya on the side of anti-Gaddafi forces.

According to the diary that Lévy has now published recalling these events, entitled La Guerre sans l'aimer (War without Liking It), he says that he originally went to Libya on a whim, having watched the Benghazi uprising on television, and it was only later that he decided to press Sarkozy into recognising the rebels as the legitimate Libyan government and into intervening militarily in their support against the Gaddafi regime.

He telephoned Sarkozy from Benghazi on 5 March last year, proposing to bring the Libyan rebels to Paris as a step towards their recognition as an alternative to the Gaddafi regime. This is shown in real time in Lévy's filmed version of events, entitled Le Serment de Tobrouk (The Tobrouk Oath), which was released in France earlier this year.

"Would you agree to meet this delegation personally," he asked Sarkozy, knowing that if so this would be "a major act with international ramifications." "Of course," Sarkozy apparently said in reply. "I will meet your friends with pleasure. Let's talk about it when you get to Paris."

Following a second telephone call, France recognised the Libyan National Transitional Council, composed of leaders of the uprising in Benghazi. Some days later, members of the Council were "stupefied" to be told, during a meeting in Paris organised by Lévy, that France also intended to recognise them "as the sole legitimate representatives of Libya" and that it would take the lead in organising an international coalition against the Gaddafi regime.

At this point in Levy's record of events, non-French readers may well have decided that he must be exaggerating the role he played in persuading Sarkozy to initiate the intervention that eventually brought in NATO and led to the collapse of the regime in Tripoli. Even in France foreign policy cannot be decided quite like that.

However, if Lévy did not in fact play the role he thinks he did, perhaps acting more as a front man for policies already decided elsewhere, this possibility does not seem to have struck him. In any event, readers of Lévy's diary or viewers of his film may want to put their scepticism on hold and attend instead to the reasons he gives for his decision to promote the western intervention in Libya, particularly since Lévy has recently been arguing in the French press for similar intervention in Syria.

In order for an uprising to be considered justified, a rebel group must be credible in its organisation and demands, and in order for a government to lose its legitimacy it must act in such a way as to forfeit its claim to be acting in the interests of its citizens. Yet, in practice such tests can be hard to meet, since rebel groups may not represent a majority, or even a large minority, of a country's population, and they may act to promote their own interests rather than those of the country as a whole.

It can also be hard to decide at what point a government has lost its legitimacy and has started acting in ways contrary to the interests of its citizens, since all governments have a duty to ensure security, meaning that they may decide to act militarily against groups that threaten it. There is also the question of double standards, since historically interventions, whatever the reasons given for them, have tended to take place unequally, some countries being considered ripe for foreign intervention and others being left well alone, whatever the nature of the events taking place within them.

In the Libyan case, Lévy seems to be in no doubt about the justification for the Benghazi uprising or the illegitimacy of the Gaddafi regime, though his use of a diary form can make it difficult to track down a definitive statement of the reasons behind his views. The waters are muddied further by Lévy's habit, linked to his use of a diary form, of writing down whatever enters his head, such that there is much material about his family, his personal and professional feuds, and his own career.

In the entry for 2 March, Lévy asks himself whether "I haven't put my finger on what is, in the end, the crime of Gaddafi ?ê" the imprisonment, the confinement, the placing in quarantine, and, at root, the attempt to bring about the spiritual deaths of the descendants of the kingdom of Cyrenaica?"

But it can't have been for this crime that the rebellion was initiated or the NATO-led intervention in its support carried out, since a desire to "bring Libya back to life" is not a credible political demand. There is much material about allegedly parallel cases, mostly to do with Lévy's earlier support of western intervention in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, as well as about Sarkozy's own sabre-rattling. But on the question of how to deal with those states, Germany among them, that did not share Lévy's views about the necessity of foreign military intervention he has little to say apart from fulminate against them for not agreeing with his views.

Among the requirements before any intervention is carried out are that it should not make the situation worse and that the rebellion it is designed to support should have a reasonable chance of succeeding in bringing down the existing government and establishing an improved replacement regime. In the run-up to the NATO-led intervention in Libya, there must have been doubts about these requirements since the rebel groups in Benghazi did not seem to speak for the entire Libyan population and little was known about their aims and objectives for a replacement government.

Lévy brushes aside these doubts in the entry for 20 March entitled "where it is explained that Libya will not be like Iraq," in which he finally explains his views on what makes a war, or foreign military intervention, right. He runs through the standard arguments, including the intrinsic justice of the cause, the idea of intervention as an act of last resort, and the principle of proportionality, and claims that these fit the NATO-led intervention in Libya and the bringing down of the Gaddafi government.

According to Lévy, there were "five objective, clear, undeniable reasons for why this is a different set of circumstances and why this war is the 'anti-war' of Iraq: (1) a mandate from the UN, the source of undeniable international legitimacy; (2) a strong moral mandate, given by the Arab League, which, it must not be forgotten, was immediately ready to condemn, with the West, the aggression carried out by Gaddafi against his own people; (3) the presence of a national transitional council that has the merit of actually existing, of having genuine popular support and of being much more attractive than the wretched Iraqi National Congress that [Iraqi opposition figure Ahmed] Chalabi used to preside over."

"(4) A democratic uprising, a popular and democratic uprising that came before the foreign intervention and which the latter is taking place not to bring about, but to support ?ê" and that changes everything; and (5) no ground troops and no army of occupation. Should it be possible to go ahead without a ground army and protect the civilians in Benghazi or even bring down Gaddafi without having to send in an expeditionary force, this would mark this war out from those prosecuted by the West up to now."

Yet, not everyone shared Lévy's certainty on points (1), (3) and (4). The UN mandate, contained in UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of March last year, authorised member states "to take all necessary measures?ê? to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory." It also established a no-fly zone over Libyan territory and tightened up the arms embargo. This text was interpreted to justify the commencement of a NATO-led bombing campaign of Libya and the bringing down of the Gaddafi regime ?ê" actions that some considered went beyond what the original mandate had authorised.

Moreover, just as Ahmed Shalabi, an exiled Iraqi politician and opponent of the Saddam Hussein regime, turned out not to have had the kind of popular support in Iraq that he had apparently claimed he had once the US had invaded and occupied that country in 2003, there were also doubts at the time of the NATO-led bombing campaign in Libya regarding the extent of support for the Benghazi-based Libyan National Transitional Council, given its regional character, though these were apparently not shared by Lévy.

Finally, it is possible to agree or disagree with the reasons Lévy gives for supporting the NATO-led intervention in Libya, but the particular tone of his book owes less to its arguments, which are those that circulated at the time, than to its author's staging of himself as playing a special role in the victory of the Libyan rebels and the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. Readers might even gain the impression that this is not really a book about Libya at all, given Lévy's obsession with the history of French foreign policy and his desire to make up for earlier failures to persuade former French presidents Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac to intervene militarily in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, respectively, before the United States did so.

"I have been pleading for the right to intervene for more than 30 years," Lévy writes, giving the examples of campaigns he has engaged in in Bangladesh, Darfour in Sudan, Angola, Burundi, Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, and in support of the former Afghan Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Masoud.

The abiding tone of the book can perhaps be illustrated by the following passage, where Lévy not only deploys his address book and his apparently indefatigible self-regard, but also manages to insert himself into the history of French literature and diplomacy.

"Dinner with [US chat show host] Charlie Rose and [media tycoon] Arianna Huffington. Let's admit, I told them, that I played the role?ê? of helping to bring about this war. But there is a single precedent of a French writer launching a war, though this is a hugely important predecent, obviously?ê? It is that of [Francois-Rene de] Chateaubriand becoming foreign minister in order to launch the Spanish war in 1823 and put Ferdinand VII back on the throne."

Bernard-Henri Lévy, La Guerre sans l'aimer, journal d'un écrivain au coeur du printemps libyen, Paris: Grasset, 201, pp.640.

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Jewish refugees?

With astounding gall, Israel is now claiming that more Jews "fled" Arab countries than Palestinians fled Palestine, writes Saleh Al-Naami The mother of Ehab Abu Nada holds a photograph of her son as she reads the Quran at her house in Gaza; a pro-Palestinian activist flashes the victory sign after being detained by Jordanian police during a demonstration in front of the Israeli embassy in Amman

Jawla Levy, 78, who lives in Arad settlement in southern Israel, still remembers the four Jewish Europeans who visited her family that lived in Baghdad in the summer of 1949. Levy told Israel Radio Sunday this group of Jewish men who spoke fluent Arabic did their best to convince her father -- a leading figure in Iraq's Jewish community at the time -- to help convince Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel. Israel was still a nascent state, barely one year old, established in Palestine after the original inhabitants were chased out by Zionist guerrillas.

Levy said her father found it very hard to persuade many Jews to leave Iraq to go to Palestine, and she accused Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, of executing a careful plan to force Jews to leave Iraq by firebombing Jewish synagogues and businesses. This resulted in a mass exodus by Jews from Iraq to the erstwhile Palestine. She added that Mossad recruited Iraqi groups to carry out the attacks to convince Jews that Iraq was not a place they want to be.

Levy's account corresponds with what is stated in books examining Jewish presence in Iraq that documented bombings by Mossad that convinced the Jews to leave. Her testimonial is especially relevant because it comes at a time when the Israeli government launched a broad campaign to rally international support to demand recognition of Jews who emigrated from Arab countries to Israel as refugees -- just as Palestinian refugees. The testimonials of Levy and others confirm that Israel initiated plans to bring Jews into Israel and did not hesitate in using terrorism to achieve this goal.

It is evident that the campaign proposed by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman fundamentally aims to strip Palestinian refugees of their right to return to the lands they were expelled from. Also, according to Security Council Resolution 194, demanding reparations for losses incurred as a result of the expulsion schemes by Zionist guerrillas before and after the declaration of the Israeli state.

Israel's move is based on painting Eastern Jews who left Arab states after the creation of Israel as "refugees" who were "expelled and dispossessed", which requires the world community to support Israel's position demanding compensation for these "refugees". Israel's former foreign minister and ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon was appointed to lead the campaign, who suggested it should be called "I am a Jewish refugee." Three Israeli institutions -- the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Pensioner Affairs and the World Jewish Congress -- will cooperate in documenting and gathering data on the properties of those who lived in the Arab world and then immigrated to Israel.

So far, 20,000 cases of migrant Jews have been documented as the three institutions prepare to hold news conferences and international seminars beginning this month to coincide with the UN General Assembly gathering. To make it more believable, the Knesset will also issue laws and regulations obligating Israeli negotiators to include the issue of Jewish "refugees" from Arab states in final negotiations, as a precondition to finalise any peace plan or signing any agreements. This augments a law issued by the Knesset in 2010 stipulating that any final agreement should be linked to resolving the issue of possessions of refugee Jews and their rights as refugees.

Further still, the move also aims to embarrass the "moderate" camp in the Arab world since it demands linking the issue of Jewish "refugees" with the Arab Peace Initiative sponsored by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in 2002. That plan proposes the creation of a Palestinian state inside 1967 borders and a return of refugees as prerequisites for normalising relations with Israel. The campaign would mean settling the rights of Jewish immigrants as part of normalising relations, along with targeted moves to integrate the issue of Jewish refugees in talks with all countries as well as the UN, and demanding that countries around the world adopt this issue in new laws and stipulations.

More worrying is that the campaign links the issue of immigrant Jews from Arab countries with the Holocaust and considers their deportation from Arab countries as "genocide," and thus they should be commemorated as victims at Israel's Holocaust and Heroism Memorial. The campaign further claims that the number of Jewish "refugees" exceeds the number of Palestinian refugees, and that they suffered losses worth more than $100 billion. Meanwhile, Israel's publicity machine claims that the land owned by Jewish "refugees" was far greater than the size of Palestine itself.

Supervising these fabricated facts is a US Jewish organisation concerned with the affairs of immigrant Jews that recently claimed that it would create "Justice for Jews in Arab Countries (JJAC)". It has recently established a fund to protect graves, rehabilitate synagogues and recover copies of the Torah located in Arab countries, as well as granting academic scholarships for the study of Jewish presence in Arab countries.

Tawfiq Abu Shumar, a Palestinian researcher and writer, describes the comparison of the issue of Palestinian refugees with Jewish refugees from Arab states as "invalid and baseless". Abu Shumar retorts: "Palestinians left their motherland and possessions and continue to live in exile and Diaspora, while the Jews of the Arab world have seized our homes and possessions and returned to their alleged homeland. What possessions they left behind are far less than the possessions and land they stole from us."

He continued: "Linking Jewish emigration with the Holocaust is provocative to the mind of all humanity; historic documents do not report any massacres of Jews in the Arab world. In fact, many of them still live in several Arab states as respectable citizens. Meanwhile, Arab Jews who immigrated to Israel still have fond memories of the Arab world which hosted them for many years, and did not deport them."

He explained that "many Jews in Israel still hang the portrait of Morocco's King Mohamed V; I have seen it with my own eyes. The Jews of Iraq and Egypt are still sentimental about these two countries and listen to Arabic music and speak Arabic, not Hebrew, at home, and promote Arab culture and arts."

Israel's campaign spurred Abu Shumar to criticise Palestinian institutions responsible for documenting the dilemma of Palestinian refugees. "The multitude of Palestinian refugee institutions, organisations and societies are still incapable of forming comprehensive archives with audio and video footage of the rights of refugees and their descendants, and the ramifications on life and education based on these rights," he said, noting that all these institutions and societies are good for is publishing papers on anniversaries, distributing booklets, maps, portfolios and hot meals. Sometimes they would hold a conference without any centralised effort to boost cooperation among refugee bodies to document all the rights of Palestinians with audio, video and document records.

Abu Shumar believes that this a much more worthy endeavour than empty political rhetoric, repetitive party slogans, and disputes over forming governments and ministries on which factions on the Palestinian arena differ.

Israel's fabrications are shamelessly provocative, foolish and superficial because official Zionist records confirm that there was no Jewish "refugee" problem. Zionist records state that the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, decided to bring in Jews from Arab states although the Zionist movement had ruled it out. These documents also state that the founders of the Zionist movement planned to establish the Zionist entity by relying on Western Jews only, but after World War II and what happened to Jews before and during the war, the Zionist movement decided it needed to displace Jews in Arab states in order to enhance the demographic presence of Jews in confronting the Palestinian population.

To this end, Ben-Gurion gave the following orders: First, sending Jewish Orientalists to Arab countries where Jews are present to gather information about them and then convince them to emigrate. Second, when it became apparent to Ben-Gurion that these missions were not as successful as he had hoped, he ordered Mossad to carry out terrorist attacks against Jews in the Arab world, such as booby-trapping and firebombing synagogues and assassinating Jewish leaders in order to terrorise Jews living there to persuade them to escape to the Zionist entity.

Israel is trying by all means to invent ways to justify its noncompliance with the demands of reaching a just political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and more importantly recognising the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homeland they were expelled from. "I am a Jewish refugee" campaign is one such attempt.

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Mayor of Trenton Arrested in Federal Corruption Probe

The Mayor of Trenton, New Jersey was arrested along with seven other people as the FBI prepares to unleash formal charges following a months-long corruption investigation. The suspects were taken into custody early on Monday morning, but the formal indictments will not be revealed until later today. 

RELATED: FBI Raids in New York and California Target Anonymous

Mayor Tony Mack only took office a little over two years ago, but has faced nothing but trouble since assuming office. Allegations of cronyism and corruption began almost from the start of his term in July 2010, and several members of his staff have been arrested on various charges, including his chief of staff who was caught trying to buy heroin. He survived a recall election after his first year in office, but the FBI raided his home in July during the ongoing investigation. Mack's first city business administrator quit after just one month, accusing the mayor of not believing in "good government" while another employee sued, saying she was fired for refusing to give jobs to the mayor's friends.

RELATED: Huge Round of Arrests for $450 Million in Medicare Fraud

While authorities have withheld the actual charges so far, they are likely to focus on his campaign fundraising, which has raised questions given that Mack's home faced foreclosure and one of his biggest donors (who was among those arrested) is a convicted sex offender. 

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Tehran timeline

While the location of Tehran may have added a historic dimension to this year's NAM summit, most everything else appeared as business as usual, writes Abdel-Moneim Said

The world of international diplomacy has a way of preserving international organisations and conventions even when there is no longer any need for them. As a result, these organisations or conventions have an amazing ability to survive long after the historical circumstances that gave rise to them have ended and after the founding nations, themselves, have changed and, worse, when the newcomers are clueless as regards the original motives and ideas that led to their creation. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a prime instance of one of those auto-driven organisations whose members are compelled to meet, not in order to achieve some objective but simply for the sake of meeting. Not that the speechwriters for the NAM president lack for "essential" justifications for convening a summit that brings together the heads of member states and that, in and of itself, is an "accomplishment". After all, who can predict the fruits that will develop when adversaries meet and rub shoulders, or when one president sits next to another at a banquet table? Undoubtedly, this is why it is very rare that anyone bothers to consider what happens between one summit and the next, for nothing will prevent NAM members from repeating the same exercise as predictably as ever.

To my generation, which grew up under the generation of Third World leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of NAM was a watershed in the history of the national liberation struggle. Newly independent states were taking up UN seats in rapid succession at a time when the Cold War was spiralling and its chief antagonists were exerting enormous pressures on the still tender shoots of the emergent nations. Whether for economic or strategic reasons, some of these nations immediately chose to side with either the socialist or capitalist camp. Regardless of which side they chose, the sense of dependency put them under constant moral and psychological strain. What was the point of all those sacrifices that were made for the sake of independence if these former colonies were only to end up in an orbit in which they would still have no say in their own fate? It was this very dilemma that gave rise to the notion of what was first referred to as "positive neutrality". A product of the Bandung conference of 1955, the concept held that it was not enough for newly independent nations to be passively neutral, like Switzerland. They needed to act constructively in order to alleviate the international tensions generated by the Cold War, especially given that the risks of the nuclear game would not be borne by the opposing camps alone.

The concept was originally championed by Nehru, Nasser and Tito, which is to say India, Egypt and Yugoslavia. Subsequently, many other countries that fell in the orbit of the soviet or capitalist camp came to support it. However, the Non-Aligned Movement represented a third option, a way for many national leaders to "whitewash" dependency. Thus, NAM broadened to include most of the countries of the Third World. They climbed on board and stayed aboard even after the celebrated leaderships that led them to independence had passed away or were overthrown by coups or simply crumbled, and even after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union and its camp collapsed. As for the original founders, Yugoslavia disintegrated into several countries, India's drive to become a great power brought it into the Western camp where markets and technological progress abound, and Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel and forged a strategic relationship with the US. More significantly, there arose some far more powerful and effective international organisations with some very specific goals, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most industrialised nations, and the G8 whose members consist of those powers that control the lion's share of the global economy. Meanwhile, NAM continues as ever. It convenes its summits periodically and its member states take their turns in the presidential seat. At the time of the last summit, Egypt held the chair and hosted the convention in Cairo with Hosni Mubarak presiding. This year the summit took place in Tehran against a historic backdrop very different to anything that preceded it. There were heads of state and national representatives of lower rank, although the meeting went ahead regardless of the status of the attendees. The political context was certainly unlike that which characterised all previous summits, which had all the excitement of arriving at a party just as all the guests are leaving. The context this year is an international conflict in which Iran is a chief protagonist. Some may argue that an element of the old Cold War still exists because of the tensions between Russia and the US. However, Russia is not the USSR and there is a world of difference between the mortal animosity that characterised the old Cold War and the sharp differences of opinion and conflicting interests that are often overridden by many types of cooperation between Washington and Moscow today. As for the notion of a global bipolarity between the US and China, that remains in the metaphysical realm. So this leaves Iran as a party to a conflict that has elements of a cold war, in which the other side consists of the US and Israel, backed by the West in general, which is driving to break Tehran through boycotts, sanctions and other means of pressure. These elements are combined with the spectre of a "hot war" that both sides seem to be preparing for as though it were about to erupt tomorrow morning. In other words, Iran can hardly be described as non-aligned or even positively neutral and constructively seeking to promote noble goals. It is caught in a mill that none of the participants in the NAM summit knew how to deal with apart from appealing to Tehran to demonstrate that it intends its nuclear programme for peaceful purposes.

Against this tense backdrop Egypt made its first appearance in a new form. During the past few decades, Egypt generally regarded NAM as one of those heavy but unavoidable obligations it inherited but often felt duty-bound to observe in order to show its gratitude to countries that had stood by it in difficult times while simultaneously realising that the alliance could come in handy when something new cropped up with regard to the Palestinian cause or the application of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to Israel. But all this had little relevance on this occasion. What marked this occasion, for Egypt, was that this was the first NAM summit it attended following the Egyptian revolution and the subsequent democratic elections that brought to power a president who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Egypt is still in the early phases of this change, but we can say that it is no longer the purely pragmatic Egypt that acted in accordance with the dictates of circumstance and the existing balances of power, as was the case under Mubarak, but rather an Egypt in which ideological motives are tempered by the force of the continuity of the Egyptian state and its foreign policy outlooks.

This new mixture has not yet settled, for which reason the force of continuity is what ultimately defined President Mursi's map of action on his way to the conference. There was no question of him not going, because his attendance was required by virtue of the diplomatic obligations that remain incumbent upon the state and its presidency, and because no one has the right to tell this state how to act with respect to a movement of which it was one of the chief founders. Above all, there were also Egyptian interests to pursue.

For Mursi, the summit amounted to a four-hour trip, of which 40 minutes were spent in a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Perhaps the visit was purely symbolic, but it carried some powerful messages. For one, it was impossible to keep Nasser out of the picture. As one of NAM's founding fathers, he remains an asset of the Egyptian state, however bitter the animosity had once been between this state and the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, the Syrian question, which loomed heavily over the meeting, served to demarcate some clear lines between the policy outlooks of Egypt and Iran, thereby driving home to people in the West and in the Gulf that the NAM summit was, indeed, a convocation of independent sovereign states, not a platform for Islamic revolutions. Finally, while all due respect was given to Shia Islam, Egypt remains a Sunni country and, therefore, still a member of a camp to which it belonged in the former era. Tehran may have been the setting, but ultimately the Egyptian state was engaged in the routine business of carrying out foreign policy in a conventional summit.

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A grim prophecy in festive robes

Nehad Selaiha watches the first fruit of a cooperation protocol between the State Theatre and Cultural Palaces organisations

So far, the 25 January revolution has effected no material change in the structure, organization, working methods, or funding policies of the public theatre sector. Nor was such a change to be credibly expected in view of the rapid succession of ministers of culture we have had so far (5 ministers in less than 2 years). Key positions in the ministry remain in the hands of the same old familiar faces, all nearing the age of retirement, and are bandied about amongst them in the semblance of a ridiculous game of musical chairs. No wonder that the upgrading of poet Saad Abdel Rahman to the post of head of the Cultural Palaces organization, where he served for years, or the transference of Naser Abdel Mon'im from the headship of the National Theatre Centre to that of the State Theatre Sector have left things pretty much the same as they found them and both seem happy to let the old, halting machines creak along on the same old rusty rails until such time as they inevitably grind to a stop. No fresh visions or reform plans have come from either. More depressingly still, no word from Abdel Mon'im about the long delayed restoration of the National theatre, destroyed by fire on Saturday, 27 September, 2008 and still in ruins, and no word from Abdel Rahman about rebuilding El-Samer theatre, recklessly pulled down in 1985 to be replaced by an ambitious theatrical complex that never materialized.

With the same endemic bureaucracy still bedeviling the Cultural Palaces and crippling its performance, and with the State Theatre growing more anaemic, presenting fewer plays of poorer quality than before the revolution, it was natural, perhaps, that the two organizations should lean on each other for support. Rather than individually address their basic problems and initiate reform, the 2 organisations have recently signed a 'cooperation protocol' which allows troupes belonging to both establishments to pool their resources and work together in joint productions. The first fruit of this project was Madad Ya Shikanara! (Succor, O Shikanara!), a co-production by the Youth State Theatre and Al-Samer Cultural Palaces Company, written by Mohamed Amin Abdel Samad and directed by Adel Hassan. It opened on 9 July (and is still running at the time of writing this article) in a colourful, roofless marquee, pitched for the occasion on the derelict site of the old demolished El-Samer.

Though the show was good, as I shall soon demonstrate, the choice of venue, if it can be called a choice, was painfully ironical. Here were two major theatre-making state organizations, joining forces in a worthy initiative, and the only space they could come up with to house it was this rugged, rat-infested, walled-in piece of waste land! This alone speaks volumes about the dire shortage of suitable performance spaces in Egypt and the decades-long criminal neglect of the infrastructure of theatre. Not only is the Samer company without a home, but so is also the Youth theatre. It has recently lost its original modest venue, the Yusef Idris small hall at El-Salaam theatre, which is the headquarter of the Modern State Theatre Company, when the whole building, with its two halls, rehearsal spaces and offices, was declared unsafe and put out of action after a minor fire in the basement of the adjacent Academy of Scientific Research, to which the theatre originally belonged before it was rented (or taken over) by the ministry of culture.

As a result, the Modern Theatre Company has temporarily taken refuge in Al-Hanager Centre, thus usurping for a time, and may be forever, the only state-run place in Cairo that is supposed to nurture independent artists and theatre troupes. Moreover, the Youth Theatre's other, modest venue ?ê" the Small hall of the Floating Theatre in Giza (originally the home base of the Children's Theatre Company) ?ê" is currently closed for repairs and maintenance, and so is the big hall of the same theatre which serves as the venue of The Comedy Theatre Company. With so many homeless companies and such few venues to go round, not to mention the bureaucracy, mismanagement meager budgets and outdated technical equipment, theatre-making in Egypt has become a real nightmare. And yet, artists go on making theatre, distilling magic out of the ugly, the painful and the mundane

The primitiveness and technical shortcomings of the venue were uppermost in my mind as I made my way to see Shikanara. I had seen scores of visiting provincial shows in that same spot, shabbily mounted on small, rickety, make-shift stages, with pathetic lighting and sound facilities, drab curtains and no wings, and had unfailingly writhed with embarrassment for the poor actors. This time, however, as soon as I stepped inside the tent, all my fears were dispelled. Stage designer Mohamed Gaber had made a virtue of all the evils of the place, transforming the derelict site of the demolished El-Samer into a brilliantly lit fairground, in an old quarter of Cairo, during preparations for an annual celebration of some holy sheikh. It struck me as an Egyptian version of what I have always imagined the setting of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fayre (a comedy written in 1614) to look like. At the back of the gaily coloured marquee, near the entrance, was a modest, make-shift caf??, selling a variety of hot and cold drinks to the audience, in the middle, a children's roundabout, on one side at the far end, a puppet sideshow, on the other, facing it, a live band of folk musicians and singers in their long, traditional robes and turbans, while two painted clowns in motley, a dervish in rags, with rosaries and strings of beads round his neck and swinging a censer, and a fortuneteller in a gypsy costume moved freely among the seated audience, talking and joking with them. One side of the marquee was built to look like a typical old Cairene alley, with a domed holy shrine, a traditional, popular caf??, a newsstand, some shops, and a high archway, suggesting other alleys beyond, and flanked on both sides with attics, rooftops and lattice windows. It would have been wonderful had that structure extended to enclose the whole space within, spreading the action round the audience and allowing them to walk freely around or move their seats as they liked. This, however, would have required more extras, raw material and work and proved all together too expensive. As it was, when the show proper began, the carnival atmosphere retreated to the built side of the marquee, which remained the only lit place and, except for occasional forays by the clowns among the audience, was the sole acting area.

The curious, intriguing title of the play, Madad Ya Shikanara, is deliberately facetious and pointedly satirical; it blatantly joins the sacred and profane, using the word 'madad' (Succor), a prayer or call for help strictly reserved by tradition for sacred figures, to address an imaginary burlesque of a holy man carrying a funny-sounding, nonsensical name. Judging by his name, this Shikanara was most likely a charlatan, an invention of a conman, a figment of some crazed imagination, or a creation of a mind stuffed with drugs or steeped in alcohol. His shrine, however, or, rather, the lucrative, influential job of 'shrine servant', which carries immense power and authority, is the focus of the play and its primum mobile. When the job falls vacant due to the death of its holder, the conflict erupts over whom to succeed him. The conflict divides the alley dwellers, triggering words and deeds that reveal the socioeconomic structure of this little community (a microcosm of Egypt), its clashing interests and ideological differences. Though the wealthy merchants and the leaders of various religious sects vie for the job among themselves, they, nevertheless, band together against the working poor and join forces with the police to wheedle, cheat, and/or terrorize them. Needy, ignorant, and long intimidated, the working poor are at first reluctant to defy their oppressors and waste time quarrelling among themselves over trifles and nursing petty feuds and grudges, thus becoming more vulnerable and easier to infiltrate and deceive. Eventually, however, they are aroused by the intellectual rebel Ghareeb (Stranger in Arabic) who comes amongst them from no-one-knows-where and earns his living as a waiter in the alley's caf??. He preaches resistance, unity and the sharing of power through democratic elections and eventually succeeds in getting them to choose a candidate from among their own ranks and to go to the polls and cast their votes.

Suddenly, however, Ghareeb disappears as mysteriously as he appeared and is rumoured to have been killed. Subsequently, the elections are rigged by the policeman and his agents in favour of the candidate supported by the regime and all the groups ?ê" the working people, the business men, and the warring religious factions ?ê" are furious and suspicious and hurl accusations of treachery and collusion with the regime at each other. The play ends with a gang of long-bearded, white-robed, fierce-looking and gun-waving Salafis suddenly invading the alley through the archway, as if to quell all fights and impose their laws. Whether they will take over the shrine or not is a question the play leaves open. The final scene is a tableau vivant in which all the parties in the conflict, including the newcomers, stand still, glaring at each other.

But this is not the only question the play leaves open; another and more intriguing one concerns the shrine; that it is a metaphor is obvious; but a metaphor for what? For Egypt? For political power? For political Islam? It is a credit to Mohamed Amin Abdel Samad, the author of the Shikanarqa text, that one can convincingly argue in favour of all three answers and still the meaning remains uncertain, dubious and teasingly elusive. One wonders if this short, serious, and thought-provoking political play will gain in concentration and clarity if presented without the many frills contributed by director Adel Hassan, particularly the many religious chants and folk songs contributed at short intervals by Samir Azmi, accompanied by the South Folk and Popular Music Band, the lively antics of the two delightful clowns, Mohamed El-Nabawi and Nawal El-'Adl, and the qaraqoz puppet show presented by Mohamed Abdel Fattah.

In the absence of those frills, however, some of the play's flaws, like its weak characterization and occasional preachy tone, may become more glaring. It is true that the actors seemed at times irritated and distracted by the constant intrusion of music and song; in the absence of such interruptions, however, parts of their dialogue and some of their speeches might have come across as somewhat pallid, repetitive, unconvincing, or underwritten. Purists may argue that Hassan's amusing frills and the festive ambience contributed by Mohamed Gaber's design may have diluted the drama a bit, and possibly blunted the political edge of the play's warning. But one can also counter argue that thanks to the director's and designer's combined imaginative efforts, Abdel Samad's somewhat dry text gained a vibrant, attractive theatrical dimension and its important message was put across in an entertaining popular form that drew audiences and made the show a definite success.

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