22 July 2018

Israel’s New-Old Discrimination

Jacobin

On Thursday, the Israeli parliament passed a new law establishing Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” The consensus thus far in the ever-astute elite media is that the move was “controversial.”
The Jerusalem Post website provides the English text of the legislation, which stipulates that “[t]he actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” In other words, Palestinians need not exist.
Other gems include the affirmation that “[t]he state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” The New York Times carefully speculates that this provision could “possibly aid … those who would seek to advance discriminatory land-allocation policies.” The law furthermore demotes Arabic from an official language to one with “special status in the state.”
While Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has celebrated the law’s passage as “a pivotal moment in the annals of Zionism and the State of Israel,” other Zionists are less jovial. The Times of Israel quotes Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the prominent Union for Reform Judaism in the United States, as lamenting: “The damage that will be done by this new Nation-State law to the legitimacy of the Zionist vision and to the values of the state of Israel as a democratic — and Jewish — nation is enormous.”
Jacobs is no doubt correct, but it would seem that such legitimacy would already have been definitively crushed by Israel’s recurring habit of slaughtering unarmed Palestinians and taking their land. Indeed, the ruckus over the brand-new law obscures the reality that there’s not actually much new about it at all. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

20 July 2018

Meet Amir Fakhravar, the 'snake oil salesman' pushing regime change in Iran

Middle East Eye

On 26 June, an event billed as the fifth “Iran Democratic Transition Conference” was held in a US congressional building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., hosted by an American outfit called the National Iranian Congress (NIC).
Defined on its website as a “political party in Washington, DC, United States of America”, the NIC pledges to support the “people of Iran” in their “battle to cut short the hands of celestial and terrestrial ideologies from the people’s lives, affording them proprietorship of their destiny”. In simpler terms: regime change all the way.
May 2018 report on Iran by the US Congressional Research Service provides a brief history of the NIC: “[T]he Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS), led by U.S.-based Amir Abbas Fakhravar, believes in regime replacement and in 2013 formed a ‘National Iran Congress’ to advocate that outcome. The group has drafted a constitution for a future republic of Iran.”
Fakhravar is listed on the NIC’s “Leadership” page as “Chairman of the Senate”, in between “Attorney General of NIC” Arzhang Davoodi and “Secretary General of the Executive Cabinet” Ramin Nikoo. Surely it's only a matter of time before the organisation appoints a minister of agriculture and fisheries.
But who, exactly, is Amir Abbas Fakhravar?
2006 WikiLeaks cable from the US Consul General in Dubai describes him as an “Iranian student activist and political prisoner on the run”, having ditched Iran “while on prison leave” and ended up in the United Arab Emirates “with the help of ‘friends’ who bribed [Iranian] airport officials not to enter his name into the computer”. 
In Dubai, the cable specifies, Fakhravar had “met with Richard Perle” - one of the neocon gang that brought us the Iraq War and a staunch advocate for regime change in Iran - and “received a US visa to speak about Iran, at the invitation of the American Enterprise Institute”, an entity essentially dedicated to combating political and economic sovereignty across the globe on behalf of, well, American enterprise. And in the US he remained. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

09 July 2018

Will Lebanon win the World Cup?

Middle East Eye

During the noisy aftermath of a basketball game in Beirut a couple of years ago, I asked my Lebanese companion when the sport had become popular in Lebanon. "When we discovered we could make it sectarian," he joked.
Now, the occasion has again arisen to contemplate themes of sectarianism and athletics in the context of a short documentary film titled Lebanon Wins the World Cup, originally released in 2015 but currently available for free streaming on Vimeo for the duration of this year's World Cup competition.
The title is indeed fitting; after all, if you've ever experienced a World Cup in Lebanon, you're likely to have assumed the Lebanese won the whole darn thing based on the amount of horn-honking, flag-waving, and general ruckus that transpires. This is particularly the case following a win by Germany or Brazil, both of which play host to sizable Lebanese populations.
The film's synopsis reads: "On the eve of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, two former enemies from the Lebanese civil war prepare to support their favourite team Brazil. Can the tournament unite them despite everything that's gone wrong?"
The duo consists of Edward Chamoun, a former fighter with the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces, and Hassan Berri, a Shia Muslim who fought with the Lebanese Communist Party for several years of the conflict, which lasted from 1975-1990.
The film spotlights their individual reflections on life and war, and then follows them as they meet in Beirut to root for Brazil. The answer to the question of whether or not the tournament can unite them isn’t difficult to predict.
Both men, it turns out, had supported Brazil in the 1982 World Cup, which took place in the middle of the Lebanese civil war and overlapped with Israel’s summer invasion of Lebanon, a devastating affair that killed some 20,000 people, the majority of them civilians.
Recalls Berri: "Your country is being invaded, it's under attack. And imagine, all I could think about was a game." Hooking up a car battery to a small television, he and his comrades tuned into the Italy-Brazil match, at which point the bombing suddenly stopped: "It was as if the Israeli Army wanted to watch the match too."
Lebanon clearly didn’t win that World Cup, and neither did Brazil, with victory instead going to the Italians - who incidentally also won the 2006 World Cup, which concluded a few days prior to the launch of Israel’s bloody 34-day assault on Lebanon. Some might therefore view Italy’s failure to qualify this year as reassuring. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.