city:mecca

The Story of Feminist #Punk in 33 Songs

From Patti Smith to Bikini Kill, the songs that have crushed stereotypes and steered progress

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►https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/9923-the-story-of-feminist-punk-in-33-songs
#musique #féminisme #stéréotypes
ping @sinehebdo

UPDATE: Palestinian teen shot dead by Israeli forces for alleged stab attempt
Jan. 30, 2019 11:13 A.M. (Updated: Jan. 30, 2019 2:39 P.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=782391

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BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli security forces shot and killed a Palestinian teen at the al-Zaayim checkpoint, on a road that leads to the entrance of the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, east of occupied Jerusalem, on Wednesday morning.

Hebrew-language news sites reported that Israeli soldiers deployed at the checkpoint opened fire at a Palestinian teen who was allegedly wielding a knife and running towards them.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health identified the killed teen as 16-year-old Samah Zuheir Mubarak , a resident from Ramallah City.

An Israeli police spokesperson said in a statement that the Palestinian teen attempted to stab one of the Israeli soldiers situated at the checkpoint, when security forces intervened and opened fire.

The teen was critically injured, however, succumbed to her injuries within a few minutes.

No injuries were reported among Israelis.

#Palestine_assassinée

Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html

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Ah, cette logique des « expériences » en direct live sans que les cobayes soient au courant... En fait, c’est cela le fonds de commerce de facebook : devenir un lieux d’expérimentation de la manipulation mentale. Voir le livre de Jaron Lanier, « Ten arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts ».

As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.

The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore. But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.

One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.”

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

Mr. Morgan said in an interview that the Russian botnet ruse “does not ring a bell,” adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as “a small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election.

Mr. Morgan said he could not account for the claims in the report that the project sought to “enrage and energize Democrats” and “depress turnout” among Republicans, partly by emphasizing accusations that Mr. Moore had pursued teenage girls when he was a prosecutor in his 30s.

“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” said Mr. Morgan. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.”
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The project had a budget of just $100,000, in a race that cost approximately $51 million, including the primaries, according to Federal Election Commission records.

#Médias_sociaux #Manipulation_mentale #Politique #USA

Generation Hate: French far right’s violence and racism exposed

Al Jazeera investigation reveals Generation Identity members carrying out racist attacks, making Nazi salutes in Lille.

It was the first weekend of 2018 and Remi Falize was hungry for a fight.

The 30-year-old far-right activist, who previously said his dying wish was to kill Muslims in the northern city of Lille, took out a pair of black plastic-reinforced leather gloves.

“Here, my punching gloves, just in case,” he told his friends in a secretly filmed conversation. “We are not here to get f**ked about. We are in France, for f**k’s sake.”

Falize found his fight towards the end of the night.

Around 1am, outside the O’Corner Pub in Lille’s main nightlife strip, a group of teenagers approached Falize and his friends. One asked for a cigarette. Suddenly, Falize’s friend pushed him and the doorman at the bar was pepper-spraying the teenagers.

“I swear to Mecca, don’t hit me,” one girl in the group pleaded.

Falize was incensed. “What to Mecca? I f**k Mecca!”

The burly man went after her even as she turned to leave and punched her in the head several times.

“Girl, or no girl, I couldn’t give a f**k. They’re just Arabs,” he said. Then, taking a drag on his cigarette, he shook his wrist and said: “She really must have felt it because I’m hurting.”

Falize and his friends are part of Generation Identity (GI), one of Europe’s fastest growing and most prominent far-right movements. The organisation was set up in France six years ago, and now has branches in several countries, including Italy, Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom.

The pan-European group, estimated to have thousands of members and an online following of tens of thousands, advocates the defence of what it sees as the identity and culture of white Europeans from what it calls the “great replacement” by immigration and “Islamisation”.

It presents itself as a patriotic movement and claims to be non-violent and non-racist.

But when an Al Jazeera undercover reporter infiltrated GI’s branch in Lille, he found the opposite.
’Defend Europe’

Footage our reporter filmed secretly over a period of six months, beginning in September 2017, shows GI members carrying out racist attacks and admitting to a series of other assaults on Muslims.

The group’s activists were frequently seen making Nazi salutes and shouting “Heil Hitler”. Its leaders meanwhile explained how they’ve infiltrated the National Front (now the National Rally), a far-right French party led by Marine Le Pen, who lost a 2017 presidential election runoff to Emmanuel Macron.

Made up of white nationalists, the group first came to prominence in 2012 when dozens of its activists occupied a mosque in Poitiers, western France, for more than six hours before police ejected them. Days later, GI issued a “declaration of war” on multiculturalism and called for a national referendum on Muslim immigration.

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Robin D’Angelo, a French political analyst, said the group considers France their “main battleground” in Europe, as it’s the country with the largest Muslim community on the continent. Muslims make up nearly 10 percent of France’s 67 million population. A second and more significant factor, D’Angelo said, was a rise in deadly attacks by Muslim assailants in the country in recent years.

They include a 2015 gun attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the French capital, which left a dozen people dead, as well as a series of coordinated assaults later that year in Paris, including at the Bataclan theatre, in which more than 130 people were killed. The next year, assailants drove a 19-tonne cargo truck into crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day in the Mediterranean city of Nice, killing 86 people.

GI, however, differs from traditional far-right groups, D’Angelo said, in its public attempts to distance itself from violence and overt racism. “What they understood was that marginalisation would never bring their ideas to power, would never make their ideas spread, so they try to be as clean as possible,” D’Angelo said.

The group’s strategy to influence public debate includes staging spectacular publicity stunts to attract media attention and gain a huge social media following, he said.

Such moves include a 2017 boat mission called “Defend Europe” which sought to disrupt refugee rescue ships in the Mediterranean Sea. GI raised more than 50,000 euros ($57,000) in less than three weeks for the mission, which ultimately failed when the group’s boat was blocked from refuelling in Greece and Tunisia.

In April, more than 100 GI activists tried to shut off a snowy mountain pass on the French-Italian border used by migrants. After erecting a makeshift barrier there, they unfurled a banner which read: “You will not make Europe your home. No way. Back to your homeland.”
’We want power’

Aurelien Verhassel was one of the GI leaders who took part in the group’s Alpine mission. He is also the head of the group’s Flanders branch. In a backstreet in Lille’s city centre, the 34-year-old runs a members-only bar called the Citadelle.

“It’s not just a bar,” he told Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter. “It’s a community with all the activities that go with it; a boxing club, a library, a cinema club.”

Membership in GI Flanders had almost tripled, he said, from 300 to 800 in just a year.

At the Citadelle, Verhassel, a man with an angular face and slicked-back hair, hosted lengthy discussions on politics, entertaining GI members from other parts of France and sometimes journalists, too. One Friday in December last year, Verhassel asked members to be present for a TV interview with journalists from Quebec, Canada.

In his television appearance, Verhassel, who has a string of criminal convictions for violence, including a five-month prison sentence for an attack on two North African teenagers that he is appealing, presented the image of a committed but professional politician.

“Europe has been invaded,” he told the Canadian journalists. And the aim of GI, “a serious political movement that trains young leaders”, was to tackle mass Muslim immigration, he said.

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GI’s main solution, he added, was a concept called “remigration” - a programme to send non-European families to their ancestral homelands. “For us, the non-Europeans, the Islamists, can go home by any means,” he said. “By boat, by plane or by spaceship. They can go home however they want.”

The “remigration concept” is at the core of GI’s vision for France’s future, and was detailed in a policy document the group released during the 2017 election campaign. Jean-David Cattin, a GI leader who was in charge of the group’s communications when its activists targeted refugee rescue missions in the Mediterranean, told Citadelle members in October last year that France could force former colonies to take back migrants by making development aid conditional on the return of non-European residents and migrants.

“We are France, we have nuclear weapons. We give them hundreds of millions in development aid,” he told a sceptical activist. “We’d say: ’Listen, we’d love to help you out financially, but you’ve got to take back your guys.’”

Mathias Destal, a journalist who has been investigating France’s far right for years, called the “remigration” concept “delirious” and likened it to ethnic cleansing.

“It would mean deporting thousands and thousands of people to countries which are supposedly their countries of origin because their ancestors might have lived there or because the colour of their skin or their culture refers to countries which are not France … so, in fact, it would nearly be ethnic cleansing.”

Verhassel believed that the strategy to take the concept mainstream was to protect the group’s media image.

GI Lille has refused entry to “skinheads and all those anti-social types”, he told our undercover reporter, and expelled others who might damage GI’s reputation. The image he wanted to cultivate, Verhassel said, was “it’s cool to be a fascist”.
Verhassel was particularly worried about people who might post photos online of themselves doing Nazi salutes at the Citadelle. “We’d be shut down. We’d be done for,” he said.

Over a beer at the Citadelle, Verhassel explained: “They want to make gestures. We want power … They just want romanticism. It’s beautiful, it’s sweet, but it doesn’t do much to advance the cause. The goal is to win.”
Racist attacks and Nazi salutes

Despite the public disavowal of violence and racism, Verhassel himself was secretly filmed encouraging activists to carry out assaults. “Someone needs a smack. But yeah, the advantage is that we’re in a violent environment and everyone accepts that,” he said.

Footage from the Citadelle and other parts of Lille also show activists frequently boasting about carrying out violent attacks and making Nazi salutes.

On the night of the attack on the teenagers, a far-right activist associated with GI, known as Le Roux, greeted Falize and his friends at a bar in central Lille that same night, saying: “Sieg Heil! Come on Generation Identity! F**king hell! Sieg Heil!”

Charles Tessier, another associate of Falize, described an attack on three Arab men in which Falize broke his opponent’s nose.

“It started pissing blood,” he said.

“Then we fight, three on three, and they ran off. We chase them shouting ’Dirty Arab! Sieg Heil!”

“We were Sieg-Heiling on the street.”

Such racist attacks, another activist called Will Ter Yssel said, brought GI activists together.

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Falize, meanwhile, was caught on camera confessing that if he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, his wish would be to “sow carnage” against Muslims, perhaps by going on a shooting spree at a mosque in Lille, or even a car-ramming at the city’s Wazemmes market, which is popular with Arabs and Muslims.

“If you take your car there on a Sunday, it’ll be chaos,” he said, laughing.

“As long as I don’t die during the carnage, I’ll do it again.”

Responding to Al Jazeera’s findings, a lawyer for Verhassel said the Citadelle welcomed people of “diverse persuasions” and does not represent GI.

The Citadelle “condemned in the strongest terms” the comments from its members if such statements were attributable to them, the lawyer added.

Sylvie Guillaume, vice president of the European Parliament, called the footage of the attacks and admissions of violence “disturbing”.

Calling for legal action, she added: “They intend to get into fights, they say it, they’re preparing themselves, they have gloves for hitting, they target their victims. These are people who make direct references to Hitler, who speak with phrases the Nazis used.”

Guillaume continued: “That is punishable by law.”

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Israel’s Iron Dome defense of Saudi Arabia aims to avert collapse of Trump and Netanyahu’s entire Middle East strategy- Haaretz.Com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-israeli-defense-of-saudis-aims-to-avert-fall-of-trump-and-bibi-s-m

The September downing of a Russian spy plane over Syria has inhibited the air force’s freedom of action against Iran and Hezbollah

The Real Reasons Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Wanted Khashoggi ‘Dead or Alive’
▻https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reasons-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-wanted-khasho

Christopher Dickey 10.21.18
His death is key to understanding the political forces that helped turn the Middle East from a region of hope seven years ago to one of brutal repression and slaughter today.

The mind plays strange tricks sometimes, especially after a tragedy. When I sat down to write this story about the Saudi regime’s homicidal obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood, the first person I thought I’d call was Jamal Khashoggi. For more than 20 years I phoned him or met with him, even smoked the occasional water pipe with him, as I looked for a better understanding of his country, its people, its leaders, and the Middle East. We often disagreed, but he almost always gave me fresh insights into the major figures of the region, starting with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, and the political trends, especially the explosion of hope that was called the Arab Spring in 2011. He would be just the man to talk to about the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, because he knew both sides of that bitter relationship so well.

And then, of course, I realized that Jamal is dead, murdered precisely because he knew too much.

Although the stories keep changing, there is now no doubt that 33-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the power in front of his decrepit father’s throne, had put out word to his minions that he wanted Khashoggi silenced, and the hit-team allegedly understood that as “wanted dead or alive.” But the [petro]buck stops with MBS, as bin Salman’s called. He’s responsible for a gruesome murder just as Henry II was responsible for the murder of Thomas Becket when he said, “Who will rid me of that meddlesome priest?” In this case, a meddlesome journalist.

We now know that a few minor players will pay. Some of them might even be executed by Saudi headsmen (one already was reported killed in a car crash). But experience also tells us the spotlight of world attention will shift. Arms sales will go ahead. And the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi risks becoming just one more entry in the annals of intensifying, murderous repression of journalists who are branded the “enemy of the people” by Donald Trump and various two-bit tyrants around the world.

There is more to Khashoggi’s murder than the question of press freedom, however. His death holds the key to understanding the political forces that have helped turn the Middle East from a region of hope seven years ago to one of brutal repression and ongoing slaughter today. Which brings us back to the question of the Saudis’ fear and hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, the regional rivalries of those who support it and those who oppose it, and the game of thrones in the House of Saud itself. Khashoggi was not central to any of those conflicts, but his career implicated him, fatally, in all of them.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not a benign political organization, but neither is it Terror Incorporated. It was created in the 1920s and developed in the 1930s and ‘40s as an Islamic alternative to the secular fascist and communist ideologies that dominated revolutionary anti-colonial movements at the time. From those other political organizations the Brotherhood learned the values of a tight structure, party discipline, and secrecy, with a public face devoted to conventional political activity—when possible—and a clandestine branch that resorted to violence if that appeared useful.

In the novel Sugar Street, Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz sketched a vivid portrait of a Brotherhood activist spouting the group’s political credo in Egypt during World War II. “Islam is a creed, a way of worship, a nation and a nationality, a religion, a state, a form of spirituality, a Holy Book, and a sword,” says the Brotherhood preacher. “Let us prepare for a prolonged struggle. Our mission is not to Egypt alone but to all Muslims worldwide. It will not be successful until Egypt and all other Islamic nations have accepted these Quranic principles in common. We shall not put our weapons away until the Quran has become a constitution for all Believers.”

For several decades after World War II, the Brotherhood’s movement was eclipsed by Arab nationalism, which became the dominant political current in the region, and secular dictators moved to crush the organization. But the movement found support among the increasingly embattled monarchies of the Gulf, including and especially Saudi Arabia, where the rule of the king is based on his custodianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. At the height of the Cold War, monarchies saw the Brotherhood as a helpful antidote to the threat of communist-led or Soviet-allied movements and ideologies.

By the 1980s, several of the region’s rulers were using the Brotherhood as a tool to weaken or destroy secular opposition. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat courted them, then moved against them, and paid with his life in 1981, murdered by members of a group originally tied to the Brotherhood. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, then spent three decades in power manipulating the Brotherhood as an opposition force, outlawing the party as such, but allowing its known members to run for office in the toothless legislature, where they formed a significant bloc and did a lot of talking.

Jordan’s King Hussein played a similar game, but went further, giving clandestine support to members of the Brotherhood waging a covert war against Syrian tyrant Hafez al-Assad—a rebellion largely destroyed in 1982 when Assad’s brother killed tens of thousands of people in the Brotherhood stronghold of Hama.

Even Israel got in on the action, initially giving Hamas, the Brotherhood branch among the Palestinians, tacit support as opposition to the left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization (although PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat once identified with the Brotherhood himself).

The Saudi royals, too, thought the Brotherhood could be bought off and manipulated for their own ends. “Over the years the relationship between the Saudis and the Brotherhood ebbed and flowed,” says Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on extremism at George Washington University and one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. studying the Brotherhood’s history and activities.

Over the decades factions of the Brotherhood, like communists and fascists before them, “adapted to individual environments,” says Vidino. In different countries it took on different characteristics. Thus Hamas, or its military wing, is easily labeled as terrorist by most definitions, while Ennahda in Tunisia, which used to be called terrorist by the ousted Ben Ali regime, has behaved as a responsible political party in a complex democratic environment. To the extent that Jamal Khashoggi identified with the Brotherhood, that was the current he espoused. But democracy, precisely, is what Mohammed bin Salman fears.

Vidino traces the Saudis’ intense hostility toward the Brotherhood to the uprisings that swept through much of the Arab world in 2011. “The Saudis together with the Emiratis saw it as a threat to their own power,” says Vidino.

Other regimes in the region thought they could use the Brotherhood to extend their influence. First among these was the powerful government in Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has such longstanding ties to the Islamist movement that some scholars refer to his elected government as “Brotherhood 2.0.” Also hoping to ride the Brotherhood wave was tiny, ultra-rich Qatar, whose leaders had used their vast natural gas wealth and their popular satellite television channel, Al Jazeera, to project themselves on the world stage and, they hoped, buy some protection from their aggressive Saudi neighbors. As one senior Qatari official told me back in 2013, “The future of Qatar is soft power.” After 2011, Jazeera’s Arabic channel frequently appeared to propagandize in the Brotherhood’s favor as much as, say, Fox News does in Trump’s.

Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, and the birthplace of the Brotherhood, became a test case. Although Jamal Khashoggi often identified the organization with the idealistic hopes of the peaceful popular uprising that brought down the Mubarak dynasty, in fact the Egyptian Brotherhood had not taken part. Its leaders had a modus vivendi they understood with Mubarak, and it was unclear what the idealists in Tahrir Square, or the military tolerating them, might do.

After the dictator fell and elections were called, however, the Brotherhood made its move, using its party organization and discipline, as well as its perennial slogan, “Islam is the solution,” to put its man Mohamed Morsi in the presidential palace and its people in complete control of the government. Or so it thought.

In Syria, meanwhile, the Brotherhood believed it could and should lead the popular uprising against the Assad dynasty. That had been its role 30 years earlier, and it had paid mightily.

For more than a year, it looked like the Brotherhood’s various branches might sweep to power across the unsettled Arab world, and the Obama administration, for want of serious alternatives, was inclined to go with the flow.

But then the Saudis struck back.

In the summer of 2013, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the commander of the Egyptian armed forces, led a military coup with substantial popular support against the conspicuously inept Brotherhood government, which had proved quickly that Islam was not really the “solution” for much of anything.

Al-Sissi had once been the Egyptian military attaché in Riyadh, where he had many connections, and the Saudis quickly poured money into Egypt to shore up his new regime. At the same time, he declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and launched a campaign of ruthless repression. Within weeks of the coup, the Egyptian military attacked two camps of Brotherhood protesters and slaughtered hundreds.

In Syria, the efforts to organize a credible political opposition to President Bashar al-Assad proved virtually impossible as the Qataris and Turks backed the Brotherhood while the Saudis continued their vehement opposition. But that does not mean that Riyadh supported moderate secular forces. Far from it. The Saudis still wanted to play a major role bringing down the Syrian regime allied to another arch enemy, the government of Iran. So the Saudis put their weight behind ultra-conservative Salafis, thinking they might be easier to control than the Muslim Brothers.

Riyadh is “okay with quietist Salafism,” says Vidino. But the Salafis’ religious extremism quickly shaded over into the thinking of groups like the al Qaeda spinoff called the Nusra Front. Amid all the infighting, little progress was made against Assad, and there to exploit the chaos was the so-called Islamic State (which Assad partially supported in its early days).

Then, in January 2015, at the height of all this regional turmoil, the aged and infirm Salman bin Abdelaziz ascended to the throne of Saudi Arabia. His son, Mohammed bin Salman, began taking into his own hands virtually all the reins of power, making bold decisions about reforming the Saudi economy, taking small measures to give the impression he might liberalize society—and moving to intimidate or otherwise neutralize anyone who might challenge his power.

Saudi Arabia is a country named after one family, the al Saud, and while there is nothing remotely democratic about the government, within the family itself with its thousands of princes there traditionally has been an effort to find consensus. Every king up to now has been a son of the nation’s founder, Abdelaziz ibn Saud, and thus a brother or half brother of the other kings.

When Salman took over, he finally named successors from the next generation. His nephew Mohammed bin Nayef, then 57 and well known for his role fighting terrorism, became crown prince. His son, Mohammed bin Salman, became deputy crown prince. But bin Nayef’s position between the king and his favorite son clearly was untenable. As one Saudi close to the royals put it: “Between the onion and the skin there is only the stink.”

Bin Nayef was pushed out in 2017. The New York Times reported that during an end-of-Ramadan gathering at the palace he “was told he was going to meet the king and was led into another room, where royal court officials took away his phones and pressured him to give up his posts as crown prince and interior minister. … At first, he refused. But as the night wore on, the prince, a diabetic who suffers from the effects of a 2009 assassination attempt by a suicide bomber, grew tired.” Royal court officials meanwhile called around to other princes saying bin Nayef had a drug problem and was unfit to be king.

Similar pressure was brought to bear on many of the richest and most powerful princes in the kingdom, locked up in the Ritz Carlton hotel in 2017, ostensibly as part of an extra-legal fight against corruption. They were forced to give allegiance to MBS at the same time they were giving up a lot of their money.

That pattern of coerced allegiance is what the Saudis now admit they wanted from Jamal Khashoggi. He was no prince, but he had been closely associated in the past with the sons of the late King Faisal, particularly Turki al-Faisal, who was for many years the head of the Saudi intelligence apparatus and subsequently served as ambassador to the United Kingdom, then the United States.

Although Turki always denied he had ambitions to be king, his name often was mentioned in the past as a contender. Thus far he seems to have weathered the rule of MBS, but given the record of the crown prince anyone close to the Al Faisal branch of the family, like Khashoggi, would be in a potentially perilous position.

Barbara Bodine is a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, which has suffered mightily since MBS launched a brutal proxy war there against Iran. Both MBS and Trump have declared the regime in Tehran enemy number one in the region. But MBS botched the Yemen operation from the start. It was dubbed “Decisive Storm” when it began in 2015, and was supposed to last only a few weeks, but the war continues to this day. Starvation and disease have spread through Yemen, creating one of the world’s greatest humanitarian disasters. And for the moment, in one of those developments that makes the Middle East so rich in ironies, in Yemen the Saudis are allied with a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“What drives MBS is a ruthless effort toward total control domestically and regionally; he is Putin of the Desert,” says Bodine. “He has basically broken the back of the princelings, the religious establishment and the business elite, brought all ministries and agencies of power under his sole control (’I alone can fix it’), and jailed, killed or put under house arrest activists and any and all potential as well as real opposition (including his mother).”

In 2017, MBS and his backers in the Emirates accused Qatar of supporting “terrorism,” issuing a set of demands that included shutting down Al Jazeera. The Saudis closed off the border and looked for other ways, including military options, to put pressure on the poor little rich country that plays so many angles it has managed to be supportive of the Brotherhood and cozy with Iran while hosting an enormous U.S. military base.

“It was Qatar’s independent streak—not just who they supported but that they had a foreign policy divorced from the dictates of Riyadh,” says Bodine. “The basic problem is that both the Brotherhood and Iran offer competing Islam-based governing structures that challenge the Saudi model.”

“Jamal’s basic sin,” says Bodine,“was he was a credible insider, not a fire-breathing radical. He wrote and spoke in English for an American audience via credible mainstream media and was well regarded and highly visible within the Washington chattering classes. He was accessible, moderate and operated within the West. He challenged not the core structure of the Kingdom but the legitimacy of the current rulers, especially MBS.”

“I do think the game plan was to make him disappear and I suspect the end game was always to make him dead,” said Bodine in a long and thoughtful email. “If he was simply jailed within Saudi there would have been a drumbeat of pressure for his release. Dead—there is certainly a short term cost, whether more than anticipated or longer than anticipated we don’t know yet, but the world will move on. Jamal will become a footnote, a talking point perhaps, but not a crusade. The dismembered body? No funeral. Taking out Jamal also sends a powerful signal to any dissident that there is no place safe.”

#Arabie_Saoudite #Turquie #politique #terrorisme #putsch

As Khashoggi crisis grows, Saudi king asserts authority, checks son’s power : sources | Reuters

▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-politics-king-insight/as-khashoggi-crisis-grows-saudi-king-asserts-authority-checks-sons-power-so

DUBAI (Reuters) - So grave is the fallout from the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that King Salman has felt compelled to intervene, five sources with links to the Saudi royal family said.

Last Thursday, Oct. 11, the king dispatched his most trusted aide, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of Mecca, to Istanbul to try to defuse the crisis.

World leaders were demanding an explanation and concern was growing in parts of the royal court that the king’s son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to whom he has delegated vast powers, was struggling to contain the fallout, the sources said.

During Prince Khaled’s visit, Turkey and Saudi Arabia agreed to form a joint working group to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The king subsequently ordered the Saudi public prosecutor to open an inquiry based on its findings.

“The selection of Khaled, a senior royal with high status, is telling as he is the king’s personal adviser, his right hand man and has had very strong ties and a friendship with (Turkish President) Erdogan,” said a Saudi source with links to government circles.

Since the meeting between Prince Khaled and Erdogan, King Salman has been “asserting himself” in managing the affair, according to a different source, a Saudi businessman who lives abroad but is close to royal circles.

Toux, fièvre, vomissements… une étrange épidémie dans un avion Emirates reliant Dubaï à New York
▻https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/transports/avion/toux-fievre-vomissements-une-etrange-epidemie-dans-un-avion-emirates-re

http://en-cdnmed.agilecontent.com//resources/jpg/6/5/1536159686256.jpg

À leur arrivée à New York, mercredi, plus 500 passagers d’un A380 de la compagnie Emirates ont été examinés. Une centaine d’entre eux présentaient de la fièvre, de la toux et certains étaient pris de nausées. Dix personnes ont été hospitalisées.

Dix personnes hospitalisées, plus de 100 passagers se plaignant de toux et de fièvre. Le rappeur Vanilla Ice, parmi les 521 personnes bloquées sur le tarmac à New York : l’aéroport John F. Kennedy, s’est mobilisé mercredi face à une alerte santé d’une rare ampleur, probablement due à un épisode grippal.

L’alerte a été donnée vers 09 h du matin (13 h GMT) à l’atterrissage du vol EK203 de la compagnie Emirates en provenance de Dubaï, assuré par un A380 avec 521 personnes à bord.

Toux, fièvre et vomissements
« On nous a informés qu’un grand nombre de passagers étaient malades : 106 présentaient des symptômes allant de la toux à de la fièvre et des vomissements », a expliqué Oxiris Barbot, responsable des services de santé de New York.

L’appareil a alors été conduit « à distance » des terminaux, et des équipes médicales, dont des spécialistes de l’agence fédérale des Centres de contrôle et de prévention des maladies (CDC), sont montées à bord pour examiner les 521 passagers.

Parmi eux, le rappeur Vanilla Ice, qui a informé ses fans qu’il était assis à l’étage supérieur de l’A380. « C’est dingue. Apparemment il y a plus de 100 personnes malades à l’étage inférieur, je suis content d’être en haut », a-t-il notamment tweeté.

Saudi Arabia Crucifies Myanmar Man for Theft and Murder - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/saudi-arabia-carries-out-rare-crucifixion-for-murder-theft

Saudi Arabia executed and crucified a Myanmar man in the holy city of Mecca on Wednesday in a rare form of punishment reserved for the most egregious crimes.

Elias Abulkalaam Jamaleddeen was accused of breaking into the home of a woman from Myanmar, firing a weapon in it then repeatedly stabbing her, which led to her death, the official Saudi Press Agency reported, citing an Interior Ministry statement. He was also accused of stealing weapons and trying to kill another man whose home he broke into, as well as attempting to rape a woman.

The ruling was supported by the country’s supreme court and endorsed by the king.

#arabie_saoudite #barbarie de nos amis

Letter from Shenzhen, by Xiaowei R. Wang (Logic Mag)
▻https://logicmag.io/04-letter-from-shenzhen

https://logicmag.io/content/images/2018/07/IMG_1151.jpg

This is the new shanzhai. It’s open-source on hyperspeed — where creators build on each other’s work, co-opt, repurpose, and remix in a decentralized way, creating original products like a cell phone with a compass that points to Mecca (selling well in Islamic countries) and simple cell phones that have modular, replaceable parts which need little equipment to open or repair.

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب : #Grotesque in Mecca
▻http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2018/06/grotesque-in-mecca.html

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yk54ob4QrbA/WyVH25gBknI/AAAAAAAAKy4/3_yNfyF0mWQvyKMfNqtkrs8BYm1QlydxACLcBGAs/s1600/Df09RT4UEAARQcD.jpg

This is almost unreal. What the House of Saud has done to the scene of Al-Ka`bah. Religion mixed with the aesthetics of Vegas.

#Saoud

A conflict of urban imaginaries: Ahmed Mater explores a brutally changing city in Mecca Journeys | MadaMasr

▻https://www.madamasr.com/en/2018/04/19/feature/culture/a-conflict-of-urban-imaginaries-ahmed-mater-explores-a-brutally-changing-c

The struggle between symbolic and actual space figures heavily in Saudi artist Ahmed Mater’s show Mecca Journeys, which ran at the Brooklyn Museum from December 2017 to early April. Made up of photographs, videos and sculpture, the exhibition focuses on work produced by Mater since 2009, when he began exploring Mecca’s brutally rapid transformation as the city underwent numerous monumental building projects. Mater’s work captures the marked dichotomies of Mecca’s recent explosive growth, exploring how inhabitants and visitors alike cope with the city’s increasingly changing landscape.

As Islam’s holiest city and the annual pilgrimage destination for millions of Muslims, Mecca exists as a potent symbol and the nexus of a global ritual practice. But, as Mater emphasizes throughout Mecca Journeys, it is also home for over 1.5 million Saudis who experience the city as the setting of their everyday realities.

Mater’s richly detailed, large-scale photographs present vistas laden with representations of socio-economic struggle, as untold fortunes are spent transforming Mecca’s urban fabric to better accommodate the flow of pilgrims, often at the expense of the comfort, stability, and livelihood of those who live in the city year-round. In the copious wall-texts that accompany his artworks throughout the show, the artist describes this contentious relationship as one of symbolic value run amok, the aura of the Kaaba motivating massive capital investment in urban renewal that necessarily favors the rich, while bulldozing the less economically fortunate under a wave of five-star luxury hotels and multi-lane highway projects.

Macron to give Saudi Arabia list of extremist groups to cut finan

▻https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2017/11/30/macron-to-give-saudi-arabia-list-of-extremist-groups

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday he would draw up a list of extremist groups to give to Saudi Arabia after its crown prince pledged to cut their funding.

Saudi Arabia finances groups overseen by the Mecca-based Muslim World League, which for decades was charged with spreading the strict Wahhabi school of Islam around the world.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman claims he is seeking to modernise the kingdom and promote a more open and tolerant interpretation of Islam.

“He never did it publicly, but when I went to Riyadh (this month), he made a commitment, such that we could give him a list and he would cut the financing,” Macron said during an interview with France 24 television.

“I believe him, but I will follow up. Trust is built on results,” Macron added.

Deux stars de la prédication islamique auraient été emprisonnées en Arabie saoudite pour avoir exprimé des positions trop favorables au Qatar. Très important si confirmé.

انباء عن اعتقال السلطات السعودية سلمان العودة وعوض القرني بعد تغريدات بشأن أزمة قطر أثارت ردودًا غاضبة في المملكة | رأي اليوم
▻http://www.raialyoum.com/?p=741098

#nuit_torride

‘Declaration of war :’ Hajj controversy widens row between Saudi Arabia & Qatar — RT News
▻https://www.rt.com/news/398027-qatar-hajj-saudi-restrictions-war

#nuit_torride. Le développement du moment, c’est « l’internationalilsation des lieux-saints » musulmans, demandée par Qatar, et qui reprend un dossier très chaud déjà évoqué par les Iraniens, ce qui n’est pas innocent bien entendu.

The feud between the Saudi-led block and Qatar escalated over the weekend, with Doha protesting to the UN over restrictions on its citizens flying to Mecca, and Riyadh threatening “war” over what it considers calls to “internationalize the holy sites” in Mecca and Medina.

Sinon, on note également la mise en place de couloirs de secours pour les vols de l’aviation civile. Curieusement, Qatar dément... ▻https://arabic.rt.com/middle_east/891350-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%8

Saudi Arabia says king’s contact with U.S. helped ease Al-Aqsa mosque tensions
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-saudi-idUSKBN1AC17J

“The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, has held contacts with many world leaders over the past few days,” the announcement from the Saudi royal court, published by state news agency SPA, said.

Saudi Arabia is custodian of Islam’s most revered places in Mecca and Medina while Jordan is the custodian of Al-Aqsa mosque, its third holiest site, which is also revered by Jews.

King Salman contacted the U.S. government and called for an end to restrictions on entry to the mosque, the statement said, saying that developments showed this push had been successful.

Non seulement, il n’est pas mort, mais il fait reculer Israël à lui tout seul…

Temple Mount crisis: Jerusalem unifies the Muslims through struggle - Palestinians
▻http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-1.802844
Although most Palestinians are not allowed to visit Al-Aqsa, this holy site is doing what the siege of Gaza and the expansion of the settlements could not: bringing them together

By Amira Hass | Jul. 23, 2017 | 12:55 PM |

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.802848.1500750590!/image/28410600.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/28410600.jpg

A secular young man from the Ramallah area expressed his astonishment at how Jerusalem was unifying the entire Palestinian people,, and compared the perpetrator of Friday night’s attack in Halamish, Omar al-Abed, to Saladin. A silly comparison, all would agree. Still, the need to bring up Saladin encapsulates all the fatigue among Palestinians about those they perceive as the new Crusaders.

That young man can’t go to East Jerusalem and the Old City, which is less than 30 kilometers (about 18 miles) from his home, because even in ordinary times Israel doesn’t give entry permits “just like that” for people his age. And perhaps he is among those who consider it humiliating to have to request an entry permit to a Palestinian city. The last time he visited was when he was 13 – some 13 years ago.

And so this young Palestinian did not hear a few of the preachers in Jerusalem on Friday talk about their longing for Saladin. Because the Palestinians stuck to their prohibition on entering Al-Aqsa through the Israeli metal detectors, self-styled preachers spoke to groups of worshippers who had gathered in the streets of East Jerusalem and the Old City, surrounded by Border Police personnel aiming their long rifles at them.

One of those preachers said that if not for the positions and actions of various regimes in the world in the past and present, the Jews would not have overcome the Palestinians. Then he paused and added, “If not for the Palestinian Authority, the collaborator, the Jews would not have the upper hand.” He also wondered: “Is it possible that in all the Muslim armies in the world today, not one can produce a Saladin?” And then he promised that the day would come when armies from Jakarta, Istanbul and Cairo will arrive to liberate Palestine, Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.

Another preacher made similar statements to a tourist from Turkey before the sermon. The content and style recalled the Islamist-Salafist party Hizb El Tahrir: There is no preaching for an armed struggle against the Israeli occupier, but strong faith in a day when the Muslim world mobilizes and brings down the “Jewish Crusaders.”

When the prayer was over, only a few joined the call warning Jews that “the army of Mohammed would return” – but no one protested the characterization of the PA as a “collaborator.” Anyway, its activities are forbidden in Jerusalem. Israel pushed out the PLO (to which the PA is theoretically subservient) from every unifying, cultural, social or economic role it had until the year 2000. A vacuum like that can only be filled with religious entities and spokesmen who will give meaning to a life full of suffering. The consistent position of the PLO and the PA that this is not a religious conflict and that Israel should not be allowed to turn it into one doesn’t sound particularly convincing in Jerusalem.

Since most Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank can’t go to Jerusalem, the city – and particularly the Al-Aqsa Mosque – are for them abstract sites, a “concept” or a picture on the wall; not a reality to be experienced. But this abstract place, Al-Aqsa, is doing what the siege of Gaza and its 2 million prisoners, the expansion of the settlements and the confiscation of water tanks and solar panels from communities in Area C, are not doing: It is unifying them. The anti-colonial discourse, which is essentially national, political and secular, is channeled to Facebook posts, to scholarly articles that do not reach the general public and to hollow slogans mouthed by leaders, the shelf-life of whose leadership and mandate has long since expired.

In other words, the national discourse and the veteran national leadership are no longer considered relevant today. While Al-Aqsa, in contrast, manages to create mass popular opposition to the foreign Israeli ruler – and that sparks the imagination and inspiration of masses of others who cannot go to Jerusalem. Not only nonreligious people came to places of worship in Jerusalem on Friday to be with their people. A number of Palestinian Christians also joined the groups of Muslim worshippers and prayed in their way, facing Al-Aqsa and Mecca.

Of course, this is first and foremost the strength of religious belief. The deeper the faith, the greater the insult to its sacred elements. The fact that Al-Aqsa is a pan-Islamic site is an empowering element. But not only that: Jerusalem has the highest concentration of Palestinians who rub elbows with the foreign Israeli ruler, with everything this entails in terms of the trampling on their rights and humiliating them. They don’t need “symbolic sites” of the occupation, like military checkpoints, to recall the occupation or express their rage. And the Al-Aqsa plaza, for its part, is where the largest number of Jerusalemites can gather together in one place to feel like a collective. And when this right to congregate is taken away from them, they protest as one – which also reminds the rest of the Palestinians that the entire public is one, suffering the same foreign rule.

But that same unified public can no longer express its oneness in mass actions. It is closed and cut off in ostensibly sovereign enclaves, and split into social classes with ever-widening social, economic and emotional gaps. Its road to the symbolic sites of the occupation, which surround every enclave, is blocked by the Palestinian security forces as well as by adaptation to life in the enclave.

This is the political and factual foundation for the continued presence of lone-wolf attackers, without reference to the outcome of their actions: First of all, the intolerable continuation of the occupation; then the inspiration of Al-Aqsa as a place that unifies, religiously and socially; the disappointing, weakened and weak leadership; and a willingness to die that is a mixture of faith in Paradise and despair at life.

en français : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/617928

This is why Arab states are conspicuously silent on Temple Mount crisis - Israel News - Haaretz.com

▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.802834

The Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, like the Kaaba in Mecca and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, is an Islamic site that is inseparable from the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They are sites that, when harmed, spark public outrage that can put the regimes in Arab and other Muslim states on a collision course with Islamic movements in their countries.
It also puts them in conflict with a sensitive Muslim public that can delegitimize closer ties between Israel and Arab countries, and places them in conflict with a secular Arab public that views the events as a deliberate attempt by Israel to take over Palestinian sites.
The recognition of people power and the threat that Arab public opinion poses is one of the most important by-products of the Arab Spring, particularly when it concerns Israel and the holy sites. Such matters constitute a loose, but perhaps only, common denominator that these parts of public opinion share.
Up to now, the Arab and Muslim rage in these countries has not been translated into public displays in the form of mass demonstrations or harshly critical articles. Events on the Temple Mount over the past week or so have indeed garnered headlines in most of the Arab world, but at this point – for possibly the first time – we haven’t seen the customary anti-Israel protests on the streets of Cairo, Amman and Morocco.

Photos: Where once were mangroves, Javan villages struggle to beat back the sea
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2017/07/photos-where-once-were-mangroves-javan-villages-struggle-to-beat-back

https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2017/06/30004342/SHR_7966.jpg

MANGUNHARJO, Indonesia – A mangrove forest once surrounded this village on Java’s northern coast. That was before the woods were clear-cut to make way for shrimp and fish farms. The new industry improved the local economy; residents could finally afford the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The bounty days were soon to vanish. The mangroves’ decline exposed Mangunharjo to massive erosion. In less than a decade, it wiped away the fishponds and almost sank the village.

Et vous aimez encore les crevettes ;-)

#Environnement #Mangrove

Serving the Leviathan | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/iran-rafsanjani-ahmadinejad-khamenei-reform

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Hashemi_Rafsanjani_at_Beit_Rahbari.jpg

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chairman of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council, died of a heart attack on January 8, 2017. Various factions immediately tried to claim this “pillar of the revolution” in the name of their competing political objectives. The wily politician would have surely recognized this technique of marshaling the spirits of the dead to score points for short-term political gain.

Temperate “principalists” (usulgarayan), technocratic conservatives (eʿtedaliyyun), and reformists (eslahtalaban) — that is, much of the Iranian political class — saw something in the elderly statesman’s legacy worth appropriating. In this way, his death mirrors his life: during his sixty-plus years of political activity, he became many things to many people, while his ultimate objectives often remained opaque, if not virtually impossible to discern.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others often painted this postrevolutionary pragmatist as a corrupt and arrogant patrician who had cast aside revolutionary austerity in favor of decadent opulence. The accusation resonated far beyond Ahmadinejad’s supporters, aligning with popular slogans that denounced the two-time president as “Akbar Shah” (meaning King Akbar, Great Shah) and compelling ordinary citizens to scrawl dozd (thief) on many of his campaign posters during the 2005 presidential campaign. He was also known to many as “the shark” (kuseh) on account of his inability to grow a fully fledged beard, though others felt it described his political modus operandi to a tee.

By 2009, however, he seemed to have aligned himself with the Green Movement, drawing closer to the reformists he once opposed. His intermittent criticisms of the Ahmadinejad government endeared him to many, who began to see him as one of the few establishment voices willing to openly defy the administration and by extension, his old ally, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He became inextricably linked with the trope of “moderation,” a powerful idea in a country on the precipice, especially after the UN imposed sanctions of 2006.

Many others remained skeptical, however, unable to forget his reputation as an arch-Machiavellian. They recycled urban legends about his family’s wealth, reinforcing his image as a power-obsessed wheeler-and-dealer.
Resisting the Shah

Born in 1934, Akbar Hashemi Bahremani grew up on his family’s small farm in the village of Bahreman in the Nuq district of Rafsanjan, Kerman province. At the behest of his father, he studied in a traditional maktab, but was still expected to help tend to the animals and orchards in a region renowned for its prized pistachio. His paternal uncle was a cleric who often took to the village pulpit, and at the age of fourteen, he left for Qom to study at the Shiʿi seminary, the chief center of Islamic learning in Iran.

Through the Maraʿshi brothers (Akhavan-e Maraʿshi), Kazem and Mehdi, fellow Rafsanjanis, with whom he lived for a number of years, Akbar quickly came to know Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini, then a relatively junior mojtahed and esteemed teacher of philosophy and mysticism. In Rafsanjani’s memoir, The Period of Struggle, he recalls how he was immediately captivated by the “majesty” of Khomeini’s visage and demeanor. Thus began an extremely close and fruitful relationship that would last the remainder of Khomeini’s lifetime. Indeed, Rafsanjani’s final resting place is alongside his political and spiritual patron.

In Qom, Rafsanjani rapidly got involved in political life and activism and found himself attracted to the militant Devotees of Islam (Fadaʾiyan-e Islam), led by Seyyed Mojtaba Mirlowhi, better known as Navvab-e Safavi or “Prince of the Safavids,” whose meetings he would attend at every opportunity. The group tried to convince the Qom seminary to agitate for a strict and unforgiving nomocratic order, but with little success. Under the guidance of Grand Ayatollah Boroujerdi, the overwhelming majority of the Qom seminary rejected the message of the Fadaʾiyan, at one point running them out of town.

Rafsanjani was studying in Qom during the years of anticolonial fervor after Prime Minister Mosaddeq nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP). He encountered Mosaddeq’s one-time clerical ally, Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqasem Kashani, who became one of the Fadaʾiyan’s initial patrons. Kashani eventually turned on Mosaddeq, and, in August 1953, a joint CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup d’état ousted the prime minister.

After the revolution, even while expressing his support for the national movement, Rafsanjani blamed Mosaddeq’s National Front and the communist Tudeh Party for their role in weakening the seminary during this period. But he still recalled with pride how the former prime minister contributed to printing and distributing his translation of The Journey of Palestine, a translation of a popular book on Palestine written in Arabic by Akram Zwayter, a Jordanian ambassador to Tehran. Published in semi-illicit form in 1961, this book marked the beginning of a long career in which he became the most prolific statesman-cum-author of the postrevolutionary era.

In 1955, Navvab was executed by firing squad, but vestiges of the Fadaʾiyan persisted, creating a vital network of clerical and lay activists in the country’s mosques and bazaars. Rafsanjani became an important organizer inside the country, following Khomeni’s exile in 1964. In January 1965, he was arrested by the Shah’s infamous secret police, SAVAK, for his role in the assassination of the pro-American premier, Hassan ʿAli Mansur. Later recollections by members of the Islamic Coalition Society have since admitted it was Rafsanjani who supplied the weapon. From 1958 until the revolution he was arrested on several occasions. He persisted in his activism despite the abuse and torture he suffered at the hands of the SAVAK, publishing illegal periodicals and distributing Khomeini’s communiqués from Najaf. It was also in 1958 that he married ʿEffat Maraʿshi, the daughter of a fellow cleric from Rafsanjan. His companion of almost sixty years, she would come to exude a formidable matriarchal presence on the Iranian political scene throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Rafsanjani also managed to travel to the United States and Japan during these years. Many regard the latter as especially formative for his worldview and proclivity toward the seemingly indigenous, albeit technologically advanced, version of modernization he would seek to exact during his own time in power. He also penned a volume on the nationalist icon Amir Kabir (who died in 1852), who tried to streamline the Qajar court’s expenditures, consolidating the weak Iranian state in Tehran while importing technical and military know-how. That Rafsanjani died on the anniversary of Amir Kabir’s murder has only fueled the flood of hagiographies.
Internal Divisions

On February 5, 1979, Rafsanjani made his first public appearance facing the world’s media with Khomeini during Mehdi Bazargan’s introduction as prime minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. He began his government apprenticeship as deputy interior minister, and soon found common ground with another junior minister, Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who held the same role in defense. More importantly, Rafsanjani also served on the revolutionary council, a secretive body dominated by clerics loyal to Khomeini that was created in lieu of a legislative branch of state.

Rafsanjani and Khamenei were on a pilgrimage to Mecca when they learned that radical students, who called themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, had overrun the United States embassy on November 4, 1979. They had by this time become leading officials of the Islamic Republic Party (IRP), and Bazargan’s resignation thrust both men into the limelight. Rafsanjani took over the interior ministry and organized the first presidential elections of 1980. In the spring of that year, he was elected to the Majlis (parliament) and became speaker, a post he turned into a personal stronghold for most of the following decade.

Rafsanjani remained steadfastly loyal to Khomeini and led the clerical front that ultimately marginalized competing revolutionary organizations in the early 1980s. But their relationship was not always easy. Together with Khamenei, Rafsanjani lobbied Khomeini to allow clerical candidates into the first presidential election; his mentor’s refusal paved the way for the victory of layman Abolhasan Bani-Sadr. Only after much of the IRP leadership was killed in the Hafte Tir bombing did Khomeini relent and allow Khamenei to run for president in the summer of 1980.

They also seem to have disagreed about the war with Iraq. According to various sources, including Khomeini’s son Ahmad, the Grand Ayatollah wanted to bring the conflict to an end after taking back the southwestern city of Khorramshahr in April 1982, but Rafsanjani, among others, prevailed on him to prepare an offensive into Iraqi territory.

As the 1980s progressed, Rafsanjani’s role within the state system far surpassed his formal title of parliamentary speaker. In international settings, he was treated like the state’s foremost figure. The West — including the Reagan administration — relied on him to end kidnappings in Lebanon, and he became known as the real power behind the scenes.

By 1985, the fervent anti-Americanism he had previously displayed gave way to the realization that a tactical accommodation with the “Great Satan” was necessary. In a risky and ultimately unsuccessful move, he agreed to hold talks with a delegation led by national security adviser Robert McFarlane, which surreptitiously visited Tehran in October 1986 with much-needed weapons for the war effort. The Iran-Contra revelations severely embarrassed both Reagan and Rafsanjani, and the whole affair had major repercussions for the domestic scene. Nevertheless, two decades later, the Rafsanjani clan published a book including the delegation’s fake passports and the inscribed Bible Reagan gave to Rafsanjani to underscore the cooperation between these erstwhile adversaries.

Rafsanjani was at the heart of several crucial developments during the last years of Khomeini’s life. Many believe he took part in the efforts lead by Ahmad Khomeini and minister of intelligence, Mohammad Reyshahri, to persuade the revolutionary leader to withdraw his support for his designated successor, Hossein ʿAli Montazeri. He certainly had motivation: Montazeri’s relative and close associate, Seyyed Mehdi Hashemi, and his people were responsible for leaking the details of McFarlane’s visit. In early 1988, Rafsanjani had to navigate a major internal crisis when Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi resigned and noted — in a secret letter to Khamenei — that other figures, including Rafsanjani, had gravely eroded his authority.

That same year, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing almost three hundred civilians. Rafsanjani gloomily indicated during a Friday prayer speech that the tragedy was not an accident and warned that the United States would now intensify its involvement in the Iran-Iraq conflict. This likely contributed to Khomeini’s acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 598, which initiated the ceasefire between the two countries and which he famously compared to drinking a “poisoned chalice.”
Consolidation

Following the Iran-Iraq War and the death of the revolutionary patriarch in June 1989, many wondered if the revolutionary state and its institutions could survive without the uniquely charismatic Ayatollah Khomeini. Even before his death, the ruling establishment proved vulnerable as militant groups such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization and the Forqan, which opposed the political clerisy’s ascent, had assassinated several senior figures in the regime. Khamenei and Rafsanjani both survived attempts on their lives in this period, ensuring that these two friends would decisively shape the post-Khomeini political order.

Rafsanjani played a key role in elevating Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor, but the more intimate details of his lobbying have yet to be fully revealed. It occurred as the Iranian elite was reeling, both politically and emotionally. Khomeini’s death came after a period of incapacitation, but it nevertheless caught senior state figures unprepared. As a result, the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body in charge of selecting and supervising the guardian jurist (vali-ye faqih), had to decide how best to handle the succession. Rafsanjani took to the podium and declared that Khomeini had stated his preference for Khamenei, despite his lack of clerical rank and authority. The latter was not an Ayatollah, let alone a marjaʿ al-taqlid (source of emulation or Grand Ayatollah).

Khamenei’s accession unfolded in tandem with major constitutional amendments and changes in the revolutionary state’s institutional structure. The position of vali-ye faqih (often referred to nowadays as the “supreme leader”) was radically revised. No longer was his capacity to act as a source of emulation for the faithful, namely the criterion of marjaʿiyyat a prerequisite for the office. Instead, Khamenei had an “absolute mandate” to rule. At the same time, the office of prime minister was abolished, leaving a directly elected president, which Rafsanjani promptly assumed. These moves quickly consolidated power between the longstanding allies.

At this moment, Rafsanjani was at the peak of his powers. Many have speculated that he placed his ally in this role because he was counting on Khamenei’s lack of religious credentials and limited influence among the clergy, to keep him relatively weak. Arguably, it was a calculation that would come back to haunt him in the last decade of his life.

His two presidential terms have become associated with the period of the nation’s reconstruction. In the first few years, his partnership with Khamenei proved most efficacious. First in the 1990 Assembly of Experts’ elections — but most decisively in the 1992 Majles elections — they used the guardian council’s arrogation of the prerogative to supervise elections and thereby disqualify candidates to rapidly marginalize the so-called Islamic left, which included groups like the Association of Combatant Clerics, the so-called Imam’s Line, and the Mojahedin Organization of the Islamic Revolution. All of whose members had been Ayatollah Khomeini’s stalwart supporters and advocated for anti-imperialism and a radical foreign policy, state control of the economy, and the egalitarian redistribution of wealth.

In response to the country’s very real internal and external economic and political challenges, Rafsanjani and Khamenei conspired to cast aside the Left. Thus, in 1992, they either saw disqualified or campaigned against a raft of sitting MPs and left-leaning regime loyalists, including Behzad Nabavi, Asadollah Bayat, Hadi Ghaffari, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, and the infamous Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali. In fact, only 20 percent of incumbents earned reelection that year.

Consequently, the traditional right dominated the Fourth Majles, adding to the duo’s firm grip on the intelligence and security apparatuses, the state institutions regulating the Shiʿi clergy, the levers of economic power and patronage — including the ministry of petroleum — and a vast network of religious endowments. Despite starting from a position of weakness, Khamenei began to strengthen his hold on economic and military power. In Rafsanjani’s second term, a mild rivalry started to color their relationship.

With the Left on the sidelines, Rafsanjani pursued what amounted to a neoliberal agenda of privatization and structural adjustment. He also created a regional détente with the Gulf states, above all Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which had bankrolled Saddam Hussein’s war effort with US support. Journalist Mohammad Quchani approvingly called Rafsanjani’s tenure the era of “depoliticization,” where “expertise” firmly supplanted “commitment.” Technocratic competency and state-directed economic liberalization without corresponding political reforms became the order of the day. Saʿid Hajjarian — a former intelligence officer who became a preeminent reformist strategist — recalled a meeting with Rafsanjani in which the president disdainfully shrugged off the very notion of political development, a euphemism for “democratization.”

But after ejecting much of the Islamic left from the ranks of government, Rafsanjani was himself forced to cede primacy over the cultural and intellectual spheres to the traditional right. His brother Mohammad had to give up his long-standing control of state radio and television, while the future president Mohammed Khatami publicly resigned from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, replaced by arch-conservative Ali Larijani (who has since joined the ranks of centrist principalists).

The traditional right’s own predominantly mercantilist interests often conflicted with Rafsanjani’s efforts at economic liberalization. As a result, he had to pursue a more modest reform program. Resistance from below also appeared. In 1992, a tentative subsidy reform on foodstuffs and energy — which would only be implemented, ironically, under the Ahmadinejad government — coincided with inflation hovering around 50 percent, leading to tumultuous provincial bread riots.

Moreover, the privatizations that did take place were far from straightforward. Selling shares to para-statal and quasi-statal organizations sparked allegations of crony capitalism and corruption that the Fourth Majles eventually had to redress through legislation, even if the issue was never satisfactorily resolved. Moreover, one of Rafsanjani’s key allies, Gholam Hossein Karbaschi — mayor of Tehran from 1989 to 1998 — played a crucial role in the capital city’s “urban renewal.” He sold off state-owned land below market value to the connected and well-heeled and exempted large developers from zoning laws, creating a speculative real-estate boom in which certain segments of the political and economic elite were seen to massively profit.

Rafsanjani also helped create the Islamic Free University, which provided higher education to hundreds of thousands of students unable to enter the state system because of the competitive national examinations. Nevertheless, the university has been criticized for introducing market logic into education and thus exacerbating existing class divisions.

As Kaveh Ehsani writes, the Rafsanjani administration had decided that “the Islamic Republic needed to first create its own loyal, Islamic (but neoliberal) middle class.” Rafsanjani, however, ultimately failed to develop an entrepreneurial class that could fully implement his neoliberal agenda. Attempts to do so — particularly through his half-hearted wooing of expatriate businessmen who had fled on the eve of the Islamic Republic — were largely met with scorn. The Executives of Reconstruction Party, heavily populated by the president’s kin, including his outspoken daughter Faʾezeh, would belatedly attempt to consolidate this new technocratic order in 1996.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was invited by the government as a quid pro quo for its services during the war, to help reconstruct the country’s severely depleted infrastructure. Khamenei shrewdly capitalized on this development to augment his institutional power.

This period also saw a slew of intellectuals, writers, and activists assassinated, arrested, and/or tortured. The long list even extends into the Khatami era and includes ʿAli Akbar Saʿidi Sirjani, Faraj Sarkuhi, Shapur Bakhtiar — the Shah’s last prime minister, who had tried to oust the Islamic Republic with Saddam Hussein’s support — and Sadeq Sharafkandi, secretary-general of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran. These killings have been strongly linked to the Iranian security apparatus, but the extent of Rafsanjani’s involvement remains unclear. Regardless, his objective of consolidating the regime he had been instrumental in building extended — with or without his direct participation — into neutralizing, by any means, dissenting and subversive voices.
Between the Establishment and Reform

When Mohammad Khatami became president in the June 1997 elections, many observers — including Rafsanjani — were surprised. In fact, the departing president would eventually admit that he had voted for Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, the establishment candidate. Nor was he temperamentally disposed to the ethos of the emerging “reformist” camp, which rallied around Khatami. Their emphasis on political, rather than economic, change and openness in the media and intellectual spheres starkly contrasted with the ambitions and priorities of his own administration.

In fact, between 1997 and 2001, the former president tilted more toward the conservatives, when the right wing became concerned the reformist coalition was taking control of the chief reins of government. In 2000, Rafsanjani ran for parliament in Tehran and sparked a major political crisis. He initially did not rank among the first thirty seats, but was reinstated after a known dissident was disqualified. The media waged a campaign against what they regarded as brazen interference, and Rafsanjani relinquished his seat at a high cost to the Khatami front.

Entrenched as leader of the expediency council — a body whose influence grew in periods of mediation between parliament and the guardian council — Rafsanjani effectively helped stymie the reformist-dominated Sixth Majles, repeatedly kicking key reforms into the long grass. As a result, the public grew disenchanted with the reformers, seeing them as incapable of implementing their program.

In 2005, Rafsanjani once again ran for president, arguing that only he could fix a deadlocked political system. His quixotic campaign used roller-skating young women to hand out posters to bemused drivers in Tehran. But Ahmadinejad’s insurgent candidacy derailed his plans and forced an unprecedented run-off. Rafsanjani scrambled and succeeded in winning the support of many moderates, dissidents, and artists, including the late ʿAbbas Kiarostami, who warned of a Chirac-Le Pen scenario.

When the veteran candidate appeared at Tehran University to this end, he responded to students chanting the name of Akbar Ganji — an imprisoned journalist and public intellectual, who had famously characterized Rafsanjani as Iran’s very own Cardinal Richelieu — by saying conditions in prisons today were far better than under the Shah’s regime. In his final televised campaign interview, he unpersuasively apologized for not holding events outside Tehran in what appeared to be a last-ditch pledge to improve the plight of the neglected provinces.

His defeat — which he half-heartedly attributed to security forces’ interference — effectively aligned him with the reformist camp he had previously been at odds with. By 2006, he recognized that Ahmadinejad threatened both the Iranian state and the fragile détente with the West that he and Khatami had laboriously engineered. For the last decade of his life, he would repeatedly call for moderation, speaking out against excesses and cautiously supporting Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 elections.

Despite warning Khamenei about possible tampering on the eve of the vote and using his Friday prayer address to call for the release of scores of reformists in July 2009, Rafsanjani managed to keep his place within the state apparatus. Rather than directly challenge Khamenei — as Mousavi and Karroubi would — he retained his position as head of the expediency council.

During the second Ahmadinejad administration, Rafsanajani stayed in the media spotlight, published his much-anticipated annual volumes of political diaries, and continued to lobby at the regime’s highest levels. Despite having few obvious cards to play, Rafsanjani drew on his myriad relationships across ministries, economic institutions, political factions, the bazaar, the clergy, and even the IRGC. He also compelled his son, Mehdi, to return home and face a jail sentence so that opponents couldn’t use the charge that his child was abroad and in the pay of foreigners against him politically.
Transformation or Rebranding?

In 2013, after remaining on the fence until the last hours of the registration window, Rafsanjani announced his bid for president without securing the customary approval from Khamenei, who rebuffed his attempts to discuss the matter. The guardian council rejected him on health grounds, paving the way for his protégé Hassan Rouhani, whom Rafsanjani had persuaded not to drop out, to carry the centrist ticket and win in the first round.

Even in his final years, after he had lost many of the institutional levers he had once wielded so dexterously, Rafsanjani managed to interject himself at crucial political moments and tilt the balance of forces in one direction or another. These interventions were not without significance or merit. His continued support for Rouhani and the nuclear accord with the P5+1 helped alleviate the atmosphere of securitization, economic distress, and growing militarization that had characterized the Ahmadinejad years. When he decried the Western sanctions that “had broken the back” of the nation, he belittled the conservative attempts to portray the accord as a sellout.

In recent years, prominent intellectuals like Akbar Ganji and Sadeq Zibakalam have debated whether Rafsanjani’s apparent “conversion” to reform represented a truly genuine transformation or another example of his essential Machiavellianism. But a more pertinent question would be what opportunities for contestation and increasing democratic accountability and pluralism were engendered as a result of his interventions and the unforeseen repercussions of elite competition and cleavage.

On the one hand, his role as mediator between the ruling establishment and the reformists in these final years played an important part in assuaging the contradictions between popular expectations and the reality of regime governance. Since the late 1990s elite competition has taken place on the terrain of electoral and constitutional politics, and Iran’s sizeable urban population and middle classes were periodically summoned to provide momentum to their own mediated demands. A process that also harbored the potential for sparking deeper political transformation, and a renegotiation of the social contract defining the relationship of government and the governed.

In the short term, reforms included resolving the nuclear impasse; returning to competent, technocratic economic management; lowering inflation and youth unemployment; releasing Green Movement leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Zahra Rahnavard; and loosening political and cultural restrictions.

But in the long term, the reformist horizon strove for something like a new constitutional settlement that would place the supreme leader under close supervision — if not call for his direct election — hold the security apparatuses accountable, and reverse the guardian council’s powers over elections. Reformist activists, as well as political currents with negligible official representation, saw Rafsanjani’s funeral procession as one more opportunity to articulate these manifold demands, proving even his posthumous relevance to the political balance of power.

Rafsanjani initiated a deeply personal form of statecraft, one that could not bring about a structured perestroika, but did enable the Islamic Republic to survive crises and challenges. Rafsanjani and Khamenei’s chief objective had always preserving the regime they helped build. The question of how to achieve this — and their material and institutional stake in it — rankled their relationship in later life and still divides the country.

▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar_Hashemi_Rafsanjani

#Iran #politique #islam

@Leb12er sur Twitter: Egyptian TV commentator roasts Wahhabi Imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque ??
▻https://mobile.twitter.com/Leb12er/status/771916411388235776

Hajj Closed to Iranians After Year of Discord | Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/12/hajj-closed-to-iranians-after-year-of-discord

Last year, almost 75,000 Iranians went on the hajj — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, a requirement of Islam, that many scrimp and save for years to afford.

This year, the Islamic Republic is set to send zero.

Since last year’s hajj, tensions between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia have peaked. Disaster marked the 2015 pilgrimage: A stampede, one of many in the hajj’s history, cost at least 2,426 lives, 464 of them Iranian. Iran said Saudi “incompetence” and “mismanagement” were to blame.

Relations between Riyadh and Tehran worsened in January, when Iranian protesters ransacked part of the Saudi Embassy after Saudi Arabia executed Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. And both countries back different factions in the civil wars, which have come to serve as proxy battles, in Syria and Yemen.

On Thursday, an Iranian official told the country’s state media that negotiations to keep hajj open had come to an impasse. “We did whatever we could, but it was the Saudis who sabotaged” it, said Ali Jannati, Iran’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance.

Saudi officials contested that narrative. “The decision not to participate in this year’s hajj is a decision made solely by the Iranian government in what is clearly an effort to politicize the hajj,” a spokesperson for the Saudi embassy in Washington said in an email to Foreign Policy. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has always welcomed all pilgrims. Any government that hinders or prevents its citizens from exercising their right to perform the pilgrimage, shall be held accountable before Allah and the entire world.”

Even if Tehran decided not to closed off the 2016 hajj, however, few Iranians would be able to go. Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran after January’s embassy incident in Tehran. Without the help of consulates or an embassy, Iranians looking to obtain hajj visas would have had to travel to other countries to apply. Even those willing and able to travel abroad for visas would likely have been wary, given last year’s tragedy and the mounting discord between the kingdom and the Islamic Republic.

The Anti-Shia Movement in Indonesia

▻http://www.understandingconflict.org/en/conflict/read/50/THE-ANTI-SHIA-MOVEMENT-IN-INDONESIA

(Jakarta, 27 April 2016) The convergence of a non-violent hardline campaign against Shi’ism with a new determination of pro-ISIS groups to wage war at home is increasing the possibility of violent attacks on Indonesia’s Shi’a minority.

The Anti-Shi’a Movement in Indonesia, the latest report from the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), examines the history of anti-Shi’a movement in Indonesia and the reasons for its newfound intensity. Three distinct groups are involved: Saudi-oriented Salafis who see Shi’ism as a deviant sect; a conservative fringe of the large Muslim social organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) that is worried about competition from Shi’a schools, especially in East Java; and those influenced by ISIS propaganda that Shi’a are enemies who must be killed. The last is by far the smallest but several anti-Shi’a plots have already been foiled by police.

Le rapport au format PDF :
▻http://file.understandingconflict.org/file/2016/04/IPAC_Report_27.pdf

B. Saudi Arabia and the Salafis in the 1980s

At the same time that the Iranian revolution was causing concern in government circles, it was triggering a reaction in Saudi-supported Salafi circles. Chief among the Salafi-Influenced groups was Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII), an organisation established in 1967 by Muhammad Natsir, the former leader of Masyumi. DDII’s link to Saudi was clear: it served as the Indonesian representative of Rabitah Alam Islami (World Muslim League), the Mecca-based organisation dedicated to strengthening Saudi Arabia’s cultural and religious influence in the Muslim world through the propagation of Wahhabism.39

DDII’s da’wah agenda was related as much to Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical interests as to the local context. In the 1960s and 1970s when the Saudi leadership was preoccupied with curtailing the in uence of Gamal Abdul Nasser’s “Arab Socialism”, DDII focused on combating Commu- nism in Indonesia, just as Soeharto was purging the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).40 Once Nasserism failed, the Iranian revolution threatened Saudi Arabia’s supremacy as the leader of the Islamic world. The Saudi government began to use various charity organisations to curtail Iranian influence by supporting anti-Shia campaigns, and DDII soon adopted this agenda. One scholar writes:

No doubt encouraged by their Saudi and Kuwaiti sponsors,[DDII] polemicized against Shi’ism as a fatal deviation from Islam and published an unending series of anti-Shi’a tracts and books. Their activities appeared to be focused increasingly on perceived threats: threats from within (Shi’a, Islamic liberalism) as well as threats from without: the Christian and Jewish threats to the world of Islam.41

In 1982, DDII’s monthly magazine, Media Dakwah, published what appears to be its first anti-Iran/anti-Shi’a article entitled “Iran Ready to Wage Ideological Invasion”. In explaining the threat of Khomeini’s Shi’ism to Muslim countries, the article argued that the imamah doctrine propagated by Khomeini entailed an expansionist ambition to “conquer the entire Islamic world [and] rule over the entire 900-million population of Muslims in the world”.42

The anti-Shi’a campaign during this period was characterised by intellectual challenges to Shi’a doctrines, often by distorting them in a way designed to incite fear and hatred among Sunnis. The focus on the imminent danger of revolution may have reflected Saudi support, but it was also a way that DDII could present itself as a “friend” of the government in the context of Soeharto’s wariness of Islamic movements. DDII was established as a non-political movement precisely to avoid the fate of its predecessor, the Masyumi party. The 1990s saw the campaign change into more direct political lobbying for a ban on Shi’ism.

Unpaid migrant workers torch 9 Bin Laden Group buses in Mecca
▻https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/angry-migrant-workers-burn-9-buses-belonging-bin-laden-group-mecca

https://media.almasdarnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/3655806653.jpg

Angry migrant workers burnt 9 buses belonging to the Saudi-owned Bin Laden Group in the holy city of Mecca on Saturday evening after they failed to receive their wages from the latter.

The spokesperson for the Mecca Civil Defense, Nayef Al-Sharif, said that their teams discovered 7 buses torched near the work site – an additional 2 buses were later set ablaze as well.

#arabie_saoudite

A Night of Art, Rap, and Pop Culture from the Arabian Peninsula | Middle East Institute
▻http://www.mei.edu/events/night-art-rap-and-pop-culture-arabian-peninsula

The Middle East Institute (MEI), with the support of Art Jameel, and in partnership with CultuRunners and Desert Storm, is pleased to present an evening highlighting the cutting-edge cultural scene emerging from the Gulf.

The evening program will include the screening of Saudi Arabian artist Ahmed Mater’s acclaimed work on the cities of Mecca and Riyadh, a live music performance by the Kuwaiti-born, California-based rap group, Sons of Yusuf, a discussion with Emirati artist and curator, Noor al Suwaidi, and a conversation about the role of the arts in breaking stereotypes, bridging cultural understanding, and empowering youth from the region.