Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Just what Hamas needs–a friend like Osama bin Laden. As if they, and the Palestinians don’t have enough problems between imminent bankruptcy, malnutrition, economic stagnation and constant Israeli shelling. They need a friend like Osama like they need a hole in the head.

Nevertheless, there were some interesting aspects of bin Laden’s audio tape as reported in the NY Times. Apparently, he hardly mentioned Iraq at all. It’s almost as if bin Laden conceded that Iraq was a lost cause for America and that our departure was guaranteed. Almost as if bin Laden is saying he’s tired of toying with Bush as the latter has defeated himself in Iraq. Now, the former seems to feel the need to look to new domains for potential Al Qaeda “traction.” Those domains are, he now informs us, Palestine and Sudan. No doubt, he’s throwing some food against the wall to see what sticks.

Osama’s newfound support for Hamas (consider that he’s denounced the movement for participating in electoral politics) should be a lesson for the west in the price they pay if they continue their attempts to isolate and humiliate Hamas:

Mr. bin Laden sought to tap into the wide public support among Arabs for Hamas, which Israel, the United States and the European Union regard as a terrorist organization.

“The blockade which the West is imposing on the government of Hamas proves that there is a Zionist-crusaders war on Islam,” he said.

No doubt bin Laden is right. The bullying of Hamas and the Palestinians plays poorly (to say the least) in the Arab street. If we continue with such an open-ended policy of suffering, we WILL create a perfect opening for the jihadists, another Iraq in the making. However, if we see things more pragmatically and come to understand that there may be a way to test Hamas to determine its level of seriousness; and subsequently to bring Israel into dialogue and negotiation with Hamas, then we will have blunted the power of bin Laden’s message.

Thankfully, Hamas had the good sense (which they don’t always display in these situations) to reject bin Laden’s “good wishes” while sounding a note of warning to the west about their short-sided policies toward Palestine’s elected political leadership:

As in the past, Hamas sought to distance itself from Al Qaeda and its leadership. But Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas, said Western financial penalties against the Palestinian Authority government it now leads were a source of anger for Muslims around the region.

“We have warned many times that the siege upon Hamas and the policy of hunger will create a situation of hatred in Arab and Muslim nations,” Mr. Zuhri said. “It will create the impression there is a Western war against the Islamic world.”

The CIA’s former bin Laden expert presents the keenest analysis, warning us that bin Laden’s work is made infinitely easier by the mess that is U.S. Mideast policy:

Michael Scheuer, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s bin Laden unit, said the segments of the tape he had read about suggested that Mr. bin Laden “is at the top of his game” largely because of America’s own foreign policy. “We cut off Hamas after we had a fair election,” he said. “It looks like we are going to intervene in another Muslim country with oil, in Sudan; we followed Israel’s lead with Hamas. His most important ally is American foreign policy.”

That says it all, I’m afraid.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the NY Times’ Michael Slackman for his excellent coverage of last week’s Egyptian massacre of Sudanese refugees in Cairo. The death toll is now up to 26 (with Infoshop News reporting it as 27). UNHCR, which should be mortally embarrassed by its abandonment of the refugees before they were slaughtered by the riot police, has done precious little to redeem itself. The thug Mubarak has called for his attorney general to investigate while the government’s chief spokesman blames the Sudanese for their own murder:

…The government’s official position is that the Sudanese were to blame. Magdy Rady, the government’s chief spokesman, said the Sudanese injured their own people by trampling those who collapsed, and he said they also attacked the police, injuring more than 70 officers.

[ed. Note the bitter irony of the following statement]
The Sudanese were unarmed and many were barefoot. The police were wearing riot gear, including helmets with face shields, and wielded truncheons.

“We are sorry,” Mr. Rady said. “What happened is unfortunate, it is sad, but it was not the intention of the police. The Sudanese pushed us to do this. They do not want even to settle in Egypt. They want to move to another country. We did not know what else to do. It was a very difficult situation.”

(photo: Shawn Baldwin/NYT)

After clearing the park, the police took all of the Sudanese, about 3,000, to detention camps. where they were asked for identification papers. Those with passports or United Nations documents allowing them to be in Egypt were being released.

Those without documents, or those who had twice been denied refugee status by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, would probably be sent back to Sudan, Mr. Rady said. Officials acknowledged that many people had lost their documents during the violence.

“I do not understand,” Mr. Rady said. “What were they fighting for?”

Can you imagine a human being, faced with such abject suffering who can still manage to mouth something so obtuse and clueless? I find Egypt’s behavior absolutely repulsive. I think the U.S. Congress needs to reexamine the extraordinarily high level of U.S. aid to that country. We should take action to show our displeasure. Yet, has Secretary Rice released any statement at all? Does anyone in this heartless Administration care?

And Kofi Annan, are you listening? Your representatives in Egypt deserve to be fired immediately. They betrayed the mandate of UNHCR to protect refugees rather than throwing them to the wolves. Even after the disaster which it had a hand in creating, the organization’s spokesperson in Egypt still relies on bureaucraspeak in addressing this tragedy:

…A United Nations spokeswoman said that the agency wanted to help all of the people who had been in the park to find a new place to live, and that the agency would help with the first month’s rent. But many of the refugees said they doubted the agency’s sincerity.

At Sacred Heart Church, Father Mbuthia said the only signs of the refugee agency were the blankets that had been purchased with United Nations money and distributed through a Catholic charity.

“At the moment we’re giving out a lot of assistance, but it’s emergency assistance, like paying bills at hospitals, first aid and blankets,” said the refugee agency spokeswoman, Astrid van Genderen Stort. But, she added, “It has to be organized so we can do it in a structured way.”

[Again note the Slackman's delicious (wrong word choice perhaps) irony in the following]

But there was no order - and no one trying to impose order - in the church courtyard, which many of the people from the camps said was the only place where they could go.

Instead of offering the Sudanese a month’s rent and blankets, why doesn’t the UN immediately announce it will transport the refugees to whatever nation they wish to go to which will have them? I have to imagine that several countries might combine to accept as many of the 3,000 as wish to go.

As a father of one year old twins, the tales of child death in this disaster move me most to tears and rage:

Abdul Aziz Muhammad Ahmed, 29, sat shivering on the steps just beneath the metal door leading to Father Mbuthia’s offices. “I’m not sick,” he said through a far-off gaze. “My daughter, Asma, was killed.” Asma was 9 months old, and her uncle said he dropped her when the police clubbed him.

“I haven’t told my wife yet,” Mr. Ahmed said. “She is already sick”…

Solaiman Youssef, 32, said he had been holding his 3-month-old daughter in his arms when the police clubbed her over the head. She screamed for a while, and then died. His wife is still missing.

“I just wanted to live with dignity; that is all I wanted,” he said. “Now I feel angry, sad and I want revenge. I am boiling and I want revenge. I have no hope, no idea what I am going to do next. No money, no clothes, no family.”

This incident amounts to a monumental failure not only of the Egyptian government (which is only to be expected), but of the entire world community. It is a failure of empathy and fellow-feeling–a freezing of the heart in the face of a fellow human being’s suffering. We should be ashamed as we have tarnished our own humanity through impassivity.

Protesting Sudanese drenched by water cannon defy Egyptian authorities command to disperse (photo: Ben Curtis/AP)

Every so often a picture really is better than a thousand words. This is true of Ben Curtis’s moving images of the Sudanese refugee massacre in Cairo two days ago in which Egyptian riot police, wielding truncheons, sticks, and water cannon waded into a crowd of 3,000 unarmed people. In the process of forcibly removing these people from the park where they were encamped illegally, the security forces trampled or beat to death 25 people, mostly elderly, women and children. The image looks entirely cinematic with powerful kleig lights shining on the protesters. And their upraised arms remind me of Delacroix’ Liberty Leading the People in which Liberty raises her arms to rally her comrades to fight on against tyranny. Curtis’ image is the priceless capture of a moment of righteous resistance against brutal dictatorship.

Liberty leading the people, Eugene Delacroix

Anyone who follows news about Egypt even remotely knows the brutal nature of the Mubarak regime. We remember that those same security forces killed almost a score of voters who wished nothing more than to cast a vote for the candidate of their choice (Mideast democracy…something you claim to support Mr. Bush) who happened not to be the one favored by the government. And many of them were beaten brutally or murdered for their trouble.

More recently, we have seen the top opposition candidate running against Mubarak in the last election, Ayman Nour, thrown into prison for allegedly forging signatures for his petition to get on the ballot. Of course, the accusation is a complete fraud. But more than that, the severity of the punishment forces one to realize that Mubarak could’ve chosen any charge, secured a conviction and thrown Nour away for as long as he wished.

It’s astonishing that George Bush uses countries like Egypt as torture partners. When a suspect’s too hot to handle or needs some roughing up, we farm him out to bully nations like Egypt where they really know how to bust someone’s chops but good. And by getting into bed with a thug like Mubarak, we completely compromise what should be our most important message (one supposedly sacred to Mr. Bush): democracy. If we cannot harshly condemn Egypt for its awful behavior because they do us such favors in torturing our terrorists, then what good is our message? Why should any Egyptian or Arab for that matter believe our rhetoric when they see our actions? “Watch what I [Bush] do, not what I say” should be their motto.

Therefore, we officially welcome Egypt into the International Hall of Shame. Here to welcome Mr. Mubarak as he comes onstage to accept his award are the ‘murderer’s row’ of dictators: Saddam Hussein, Kim Song Il (North Korea), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Islam Karimov (Uzbekistan), and I suppose we must add George Bush as well. A lovely group of guys. To all of them I say with a bitter smile: “To your health and that of your loyal, brutalized subjects.”

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees must also come in for harsh criticism. They were the agency at whom the refugees were directing their protests. They are the agency which washed its hands of them and turned the matter over to Egyptian authorities for the bloody resolution of the problem. The group’s spokesperson in Egypt is doing a miserable job of explaining to the world why UNHCR fed the poor and defenseless to the wolves. Instead of apologizing for the loss of life and taking at least partial responsibility for it, she said the following to the New York Times:

“The Egyptian authorities have been tolerating the sit-in strike for the past three months because, just like us, they wanted a peaceful solution, ” said Astrid Van Genderen Stort, a spokeswoman in Cairo for the refugee agency. “But at a certain point the situation became an issue of public disorder. There were serious health threats.”

Little did she know that the most serious ‘health threats’ didn’t involve poor living conditions or disease, but instead involved death.

I don’t known whether the refugees were in the wrong here for not compromising earlier in the process. But I do know that UNHCR should’ve known better than to shove the responsibility onto the Egyptian government. And while it appears that the police tried for hours to persuade them to leave, it is absolutely inexcusable for a simple physical removal of people that you need to stomp on them and beat them to death. Next we’ll be hearing from the Egyptians that the refugees were trampled by their own comrades in their rush to escape the police charge. Of course, the victim is always at fault especially in a dictatorship like Egypt. And while they’re at it, why don’t they charge the poor schmos with lawbreaking and throw a few of the ringleaders in the slammer for a few decades to teach ‘em a lesson? Actually, I just checked today’s reports on this story in the Times and it proves I am clairvoyant or just know what kind of bullshit tyrants sling when they’re caught in the kleig lights with nowhere to run:

The Egyptian authorities said the Sudanese died in a stampede. The Sudanese had thrown bottles and rocks at the police, they added.

Human Rights Watch said that by international standards police must use non-violent means before resorting to force and may use force only when strictly necessary.

“The blood is still on the sidewalks, and already the government is blaming the Sudanese refugees and migrants,” said Stork. “Given Egypt’s terrible record of police brutality, an independent investigation is absolutely necessary to assess responsibility and punish those responsible,” he added.

Hey, Hosni go ahead, appoint that commission, you’ve got nothing to hide, right?