O Contraire

Probably you’ve been concerned about family tensions within the Qaddafi family lately. Almost everyone has, even those who don’t know its members intimately, because (a) they all dislike each other, so it’s kind of interesting to watch family dynamics play out on the Libyan stage and (b) almost every one of them has what family counselors like to call “an unresolved issue.”

So here she is, bursting into the Tripoli hotel, sobbing openly in front of the reporters she has begged to see—and there she goes, pulled screaming from the cameras, her shrieks muzzled by handlers wielding knives, cloaks, anything to make her stop talking for good (watch the video here).

She’s just an anonymous woman in a burqa—no, she’s actually Eman al-Obeidy, a 26-year-old Libyan law student who looks far older. She tells the foreign journalists who are nothing more than a passel of jailbirds, incapable of roaming beyond that hotel without government permission, that she’s been raped by 15 men. They have bruised her, scratched her, urinated on her—very brave admissions on her part. And not only because the detailed playing and replaying of her impassioned pleas for help on foreign television will incite the Qaddafi regime (the same regime whose officials apparently raped her) to deal with her in ways we’d all prefer not to imagine. But because she’s a Muslim woman in a Muslim country, and Muslim women in Muslim countries by and large usually know better than to admit they’ve been raped.

I believe I have the answer to all our problems. Yes, the 22 nations of the Arab League begged and begged the US to intervene in Libya; yes, so did the Libyan rebels, who, still, keep yelling “One-two-three, Sar-ko-zee,” now that the French, the US, and the UK have acquiesced to their pleas.

And yes, you can bet that within five minutes or five days, take your pick, we’re all going to hear a lot about perfidious Western imperialism, and not just from Qaddafi. But from some of the very people (“folks,” as Obama would say, annoyingly) who once yearned to see allied fighter jets over Sirte airport and Tripoli bunkers—damn the consequences.

So here’s a little quiz:

Which nation possesses 70 F-15 S Eagle, 10 F5-E Tiger, 72 Eurofighter Typhoon, 15 Panavia Tornado ADV, 70 Panavia Tornado IDS for ground attack, and one Boeing RE-3A TASS plus a Boeing RE-3BITASS—among many other lethal instruments of war …

… but is unnaturally shy about hovering over Libya just now?

The ally in most grievous need of a couch, the hyper-emotional Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, has just called on NATO and the US to pack up and leave.

(Or did he? No one ever really knows what the president of Afghanistan means, least of all the president of Afghanistan, himself.)

First, according to the New York Times, he said over the weekend, “Our demand is that this war should be stopped. This is the voice of Afghanistan.” Then a few hours later a Karzai spokesman explained that no, that voice the world just heard wasn’t Afghanistan’s at all, and it wasn’t Karzai’s either. That, it would appear, was actually the voice of some random Afghan ventriloquist with a dummy in a soda jerk cap perched on his lap.

On the night Hosni Mubarak was toppled from power, the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square found itself liberated from all sorts of constraints: dictatorship, brutal rule, censorship, casual imprisonment, torture. And civilization. Mariam Nekiwi, a young video editor, found this out first-hand when, as her boyfriend recalled for the Los Angeles Times, “A group of men surrounded her from four directions and closed her off.”

First someone grabbed her groin, then others grabbed the rest of her body, pulling at her clothes. She couldn’t see, but she did manage to scream.

The reaction of those around her?

“People started yelling at me to be quiet,” Nekiwi told the newspaper. “They said: ‘Don’t tarnish the revolution. Don’t make a scene.’”

Quick: Which nation’s largest bank is partly owned by Libya? Which nation’s stock exchange is partly owned by Libya? Which nation, as the Australian recently emphasized, is building bombs with Libya, courtesy of a European munitions firm in which Colonel Qaddafi has heavily invested?

And which nation handed over $5 billion to Libya during a jubilant ceremony, after which the generous European leader famously bowed low and kissed Qaddafi’s hand?

There are few spectacles bleaker than watching an organization devoted to transparency and courage threaten a lawsuit against someone who writes a book critical of that organization’s founder. Yes, Julian Assange — of WikiLeaks — is angry. Very, very angry.

Here’s why. Last fall, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a valued former WikiLeaks staff member and computer scientist, broke up with Assange, feeling (as he informs the reader many times) that Assange had become “paranoid,” “a megalomaniac,” and extremely dicey about money. Naturally, the moment I learned from the New York Times that Assange was planning to take what his lawyers described as “legal action” against the book, I immediately called it up on my Kindle and started reading. Nothing like the prospect of a bully taking to the courts, I always think, to make me open up my wallet to the defendant.

Two years back, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi explained, in the wake of a string of rapes, that what the country really needed to thwart that kind of crime was at least 300,000 soldiers deployed in the streets. Lesser measures, he pointed out, simply wouldn’t work because “our women are so beautiful.”

Every time some commentator points out that Mohamed ElBaradei, who apparently hopes to become President Hosni Mubarak’s successor in Egypt, is basically a moderate and as such, worthy of US support, I think back to last June 3rd. That was the day Egypt’s biggest opposition group to Mubarak — a.k.a., the Muslim Brotherhood — announced it would back ElBaraidei and his so-called political change campaign.

The smart word around Rome is that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi will be on the next plane out of the country, perhaps a few days later than Hosni Mubarak. One piece of evidence: the underage Moroccan pole dancer Karima El Mahrough (a.k.a. Ruby Heart-Stealer) caught on tape just days ago, telling a friend: “It’s going to cost him dearly.”

The teenager meant that very literally, it now appears. The prosecutors in Milan have been helping the local print media (much of the electronic variety being owned by Berlusconi) to generous helpings of dirt: 5 million euros (about $7 million), Ruby informed her friends over the phone, is the going price of her silence. And Berlusconi, a multi-billionaire after all, was evidently more than willing to pay up to keep his throne. In Italy, it’s okay (even important) for a politician to fool around, but there are limits: apparently one of those limits is underage girls. Even in Italy, this is against the law.

What exactly is national sovereignty these days? What does it amount to? Does a nation, in other words, still have the unilateral power to choose its own destiny and the destiny of its citizens? Or are citizenship and the idea of nationality so smudged that any power, either political or mercantile, can alter the laws of another?

These are the questions that arise as the result of the actions of a single pharmaceutical company — Hospira in this instance — which may well result in making unfeasible, at least in some American states and at least for a time, the possibility of putting certain prisoners to death in the United States. Something, in other words, that battalions of lawyers, Amnesty International representatives, and previous Supreme Court rulings were unable to accomplish.

Around mid October, the world (or rather the Jerusalem Post) heard once again from the spy Jonathan Pollard — and as usual, he was not happy. He never is. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has not asked President Obama to release me … I have not been on the agenda at all … ” was the substance of his written complaint from his American prison.

Whenever there’s an assassination or an attempted assassination in the United States, the media, politicians, and a fair number of commentators are quick to assign blame. Generally, it’s of the geographic variety, one parcel of land automatically assigned criminal responsibility for the murderous intentions of a single individual. But always — and this is a constant — the crime is the result, in the minds of those who feel the urge to target a more specific and incendiary kind of responsibility, of speech. Specifically, what we (unfortunately) refer to these days as “hate speech.”

Thus the murder of John F. Kennedy was presumed at the time to be at bottom the fault of hate speech in Texas (i.e., a lot of people there didn’t like him). And the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. the result of hate speech in the South.

Let’s imagine you’re a country with a not-so-fabulous history on human rights. Like, say, Germany. And partly as a result of this unfortunate history, partly because compared to certain other countries you’re quite rich, you’re expected to do penance on what is practically a diurnal basis.

And this penance takes two forms, one of which is essentially bailing out wastrels (Portugal, Greece). And the other, the notion that the German government is duty-bound at all times to extend the hand of friendship and tolerance — and even occasionally the blessings of a Euro-nationality — to a fair number of Muslim extremists who on moving, sometimes fleeing, to Germany decide that their new haven isn’t quite good enough, and should be governed by sharia law.

Down with a democratically elected government, in other words, and up with an Islamic form of theocracy and Islamic modes of punishment the host nation has explicitly rejected.

If you visited the Washington Post's website a few days ago, you would have seen a report, stripped across the top of the homepage, that the US is furious (once again) with its alleged ally, Pakistan. This time, however, it isn’t simply because the US believes Osama bin Laden is finding protection over there or because aid workers are being massacred within its borders, but because it is convinced that country’s own intelligence service, the fundamentalist-spiked ISI, leaked the name of the CIA station chief to practically anyone it could.

After the name of that CIA station chief appeared in a Pakistani lawsuit, the Post explained, the American station chief had to flee the country. According to an agency representative, “terrorist threats against him in Pakistan were of such a serious nature that it would be imprudent not to act.”