Dispatches

I just launched a Kickstarter project to raise money for a trip to Libya in December. I’m not asking for donations this time. This time I’m asking for funding and will give something back in return. Check out the project page for all the details.

With Kickstarter, you can see how much money I need and how much I’ve raised. I won’t get any money at all unless the entire project is funded, so please make sure I don’t come up short. You and I both need me back in the field, but alas traveling—especially to a country like Libya—costs money.

There’s a promo video on the Kickstarter page you can watch, but here’s the text.

The Middle East is passing through a great gate in its history. Not for decades has the region experienced so much turmoil and upheaval. Four dictators have fallen since the Arab Spring kicked off in 2010—Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may well be next.

I’ve been working in and writing about that region for almost ten years now. And I’ve published three books, about Lebanon, Iraq, and the former communist bloc. My first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, won the Washington Institute Book Prize in 2011.

I started in Libya, in 2004, when Qaddafi still ruled the country like a blood-soaked Stalinist tyrant. His total surveillance police state was the most terrifying regime I’ve ever seen. The only countries in the entire world more oppressive at the time were Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi and North Korea under the Orwellian Kim family dynasty.

I was one of the first Americans to legally visit Libya in 2004 when the travel ban was first lifted, and I saw first-hand what it looks like when the political equivalent of a mad scientist runs a country like it’s his own private laboratory for deranged social experiments.

Qaddafi’s regime was completely demolished last year. Libyans now face the grim task of building new institutions—including the army—from scratch with little or no hands-on experience. Libya used to have far too much government, but today it does not have nearly enough. The state doesn’t yet have sovereignty over all of its territory. Militias run wild, including the terrorist organization that assassinated U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Benghazi in mid-September.

Will the country disintegrate into a failed militia state like Somalia with terrorists controlling some of the fragments? Will it lapse again into authoritarian or even totalitarian rule, the only kind of government it has ever known? Or will it beat the odds and cohere into something that looks like democracy?

Nobody knows, but I’m going over there to take a look and report on what’s happening now. My first-person narrative dispatches from Middle Eastern countries at war and in the throes of revolution garnered me three blogging awards and a book prize, but I still work as a freelancer. I don’t have a salary, let alone a travel expense account.

That’s where you come in. Fund my next trip—to Libya near the end of this year—so I can produce a brand-new batch of first-person narrative dispatches. You can follow along as I publish them on my blog. And at the end of the project, I’ll publish all my material as a dispatch pack—including full-color photographs—that you can read on your iPad, your Kindle, or any other tablet or reading device. And if you don’t have a tablet or reading device, you can just read them on your computer. Generous donors will receive public thank-yous from me, on my blog and in the dispatch pack when it’s published.

I’m not asking you for donations. I’m asking you to participate and will give you something back in return. Let’s go to Libya.

I need 7,500 dollars and I’ve got 30 days to raise it. The money will cover plane tickets, hotels, food, fixers, ground transportation, translators, travel insurace, and will even leave me a slight bit of padding in case of emergency—which in a country like Libya in 2012 is a real possibility. Click through to my Kickstarter project, pledge a bit of money, and let’s make this happen. There’s no way I can do this without your support.

Many thanks in advance to you all.

My friend and colleague Jonathan Spyer sneaked over the border with the Free Syrian Army to cover the war against Assad from the front lines. He did it twice. And he’s an Israeli.

He has the chops for it. His magnificent first book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, is partly about his experience in South Lebanon, first as a tank operator with the Israel Defense Forces during the war against Hezbollah in 2006, and then again as a journalist the following year. I won’t tell you exactly how he manages to get around in these dangerous parts of the world on an Israeli passport, but he does, and we should be grateful because he produces outstanding work.

I recently spoke with him about what he has seen in Syria recently, what the West ought to do about it, and about the even greater threat from Iran and what the West ought to do about that.

MJT: You’re a brave man, Jonathan Spyer, for sneaking into Syria twice as an Israeli. Tell us what it’s like there right now and how things have changed since you were there nine months ago.

Jonathan Spyer: Well, the most immediately notable change between my first visit in February and the most recent trip was the extent to which the rebels have consolidated their control on the ground in the Idlib and Aleppo Governates. In February, the regime’s army was still patrolling the border. The rebels were entrenched in a number of villages and rural areas, but they ventured onto the main highway only by night and for short periods. Assad’s army was the ruling force, and it could enter even the areas flying the flag of the rebellion if and when it chose to.

This situation has changed. Today, the Assad regime hardly exists on the ground in the area between the Syria-Turkey border and Aleppo city, for example. The Free Syrian Army has joint control of a border crossing – Bab al-Salaam – in cooperation with the Turkish army. I took the main highway after crossing the border, heading for Aleppo city in the company of two opposition activists. The highway is policed by FSA checkpoints every few miles.

So the contraction of the Assad regime is very notable, and new. But this does not mean rebel victory is imminent. Rather, each side has advantages and disadvantages. With the pool of loyal manpower available to it depleted, the regime prefers to rely increasingly on its overwhelming technological superiority – above all in the field of air power. The rebels may largely hold the ground in Aleppo Governate, but they have no adequate response to the regime’s jet fighters and helicopters, which carry out attacks at will on the civilian population in the rebel controlled areas. The regime’s possession of artillery lends it a similar advantage. Similarly its armored capacity affords it a notable, though less significant, advantage over the lightly armed rebel forces.

An additional notable, though not new, element was the disparate and still not united nature of the rebel forces. In Aleppo city, in which I spent a few days, there are a number of different groups fighting the regime. In addition to the various battalions operating under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, there is the powerful Islamist Tawhid Brigade, also the Saudi supported Ahrar al-Sham group and a number of other groups. In interviews, rebel commanders did their best to put an optimistic slant on the absence of unity, but none sought to deny it.

MJT: What should the US do about Syria? Stay out of it? Arm the rebels? What?

Jonathan Spyer: My own view remains that the United States and its allies should engage closely with the rebels, identify deserving clients and begin to arm and support them. This has not yet happened to a significant degree and the result is the current stalemate. It’s understandable that many Westerners feel that given the rise of Sunni Islamism as a result of the downfall of secular Arab dictatorships over the last 18 months, the US interest is to stay out. Understandable, but wrong.

The US can either engage in the Middle East or disengage from it. The Obama administration appears to prefer the latter option. But disengagement doesn’t leave a vacuum. Rather, it leaves a space which is rapidly filled by advancing hostile interests – in the Syrian case Iran and Russia, with China as the silent additional partner.

These forces are currently backing the Assad dictatorship all the way. The Iranians, in particular, see the survival of the dictatorship as a cardinal interest. Should Assad or his regime survive in some form, this would represent a major strategic victory for the Iranians and their backers. It would keep alive the Iranian ambition of establishing a contiguous pro-Iran space from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea.

It would also convince regional elites that the Iranians are the people to align with if you want to stay in power. They will have backed their friends and been seen to prevail. This will be good for the enemies of the US, and therefore bad for the US.

US strategic capital has already suffered in the last 18 months because of the perception that Washington rapidly ditched long time allies as soon as they got in trouble. Egypt is the case in point here, of course. Syria should be the arena in which the US rebuilds that strategic capital, in the heart of the Middle East.

I understand well the argument that Sunni Islamists dominate the rebellion. My own view is that the organized, tight, Iran-led bloc remains by far the most pressing and dangerous enemy of the West in the region right now. Reality and history rarely give us the luxury of having only allies that are our ideological blood brothers. The 1939-45 period offers an example. The possibly dubious nature of our ‘allies’ should not be an excuse for paralysis in the face of an active enemy who has plainly declared his intention of replacing the US-led regional dispensation that has pertained in the region since 1991. It’s also important to note that there are significant secular elements in the FSA and the opposition. Still, these elements are nationalist rather than liberal-democratic in outlook.

Regarding the type of help, the list is a familiar one: arms, most importantly anti-aircraft weapons for the rebels, and a no-fly and no heavy armor zone in the north would be the most urgent first moves.

In other words, I think the Syrian situation presents an opportunity to deal the Iran-led regional bloc and its backers a very telling defeat. I think this opportunity should be taken, though I acknowledge the concerns regarding the people in the rebel movements and the ideas they support.

MJT: You say the secular elements of the Free Syrian Army are nationalist rather than liberal-democratic. Do you mean they’re Syrian nationalists, Arab nationalists, or a mixture of both?

Jonathan Spyer: An interesting question. Well, this rebellion is overwhelmingly Sunni-Arab in character, so while the secular rebels would certainly characterize themselves as Syrian nationalists first and foremost, the particular Syrian nationalism they espouse has a Sunni-Arab flavor. I don’t mean Pan-Arab nationalism of the old Baathist/Nasserite type, of course. Anyone still professing loyalty to that in Syria is firmly on the government side. The rebels fly the flag of the pre-Baathist Syrian republic. But the armed rebellion has an unmistakable Sunni Arab and rural nature to it, which makes it correspondingly difficult for it to win the trust of non-Arab communities such as the Kurds, and non-Sunni communities such as the Christians, Druze, and of course Alawis.

But I mean also that in a country which has been under Baath rule for nearly fifty years, we would be naïve if we thought the opponents of the regime hadn’t imbibed to some extent the style of thinking favoured and spread by the regime. The familiar cocktail of paranoia, the feeling that Israel is behind everything, the hostility and paranoia toward the West, one finds manifestations of these in the rebel ranks, too. This fact shouldn’t be concealed.

MJT: The relatively “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood used to be quietly popular there back in the 80s before Hafez al-Assad beat them to death in the city of Hama. Are they still popular? Or are they a marginal force like they are next-door in Lebanon?

Jonathan Spyer: Well, after the Muslim Brothers were crushed by the regime in 1982, Assad took extreme measures to make sure that they wouldn’t rise again. Muslim Brotherhood membership is an offense punishable by death in Assad’s Syria. So unlike in, say, Egypt, the Brotherhood didn’t have a ready-made infrastructure on the ground when the uprising began. But they have by all accounts been busy, and working in close cooperation with Qatar they are said to have built up direct links to various rebel battalions active in the country. I would imagine, without knowing for sure, that the Tawhid Brigade of Aleppo is one of those. The powerful Farouq Brigade in the Homs area may well be another.

The Brothers have money and are well organized. They think, as you know, that they are now having their moment in the region after many long years of waiting. Hence their representatives are there in southern Turkey making deals, establishing supply lines, providing money, and building their structures on the ground. 

MJT: Do have any idea how many Syrians are supporting and/or working with the Salafist elements of the Free Syrian Army because there’s no other option compared with how many are supporting the Salafists because they genuinely sympathize with the Salafists?

Jonathan Spyer: Don’t know how many in terms of numbers. I saw a number of checkpoints of the Saudi-supported Ahrar al-Sham group at prominent places in Aleppo city, complete with Salafi banners. They’re certainly there. My sense was that they weren’t the most serious factor. I don’t think Salafiya as such has a particularly large constituency in Syria and I don’t think it will succeed in becoming a central political faction. Much more notable and important, I think, is the growth of Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism as a powerful element in the armed insurgency.

The Tawhid Brigade, for example, is the most powerful single armed unit in Aleppo. I interviewed one of the commanders of the brigade, and I would characterize its outlook a Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist. Its members are critical of extreme, Al Qaeda-style Islamism, but they are also open about their own desire for an ‘Islamic state.’

I also met members of a hastily assembled Sharia Council in Azaz town. The council consists of religious former FSA commanders and religious notables. I was told that it currently constitutes the highest legal authority in the town, working in cooperation with the armed rebels. Again, I’d stress that the heartland of the rebellion is a very conservative, devout, Sunni Arab space. This rebellion has a religious coloration. At the same time, this does not imply the victory of Al Qaeda types.

MJT: You and I have both spent some quality time in Lebanon, me as a journalist and you as a journalist and as an Israeli soldier. So let me ask you this: what do you think about the Free Syrian Army’s threat to take the fight to Hezbollah in its stronghold south of Beirut?

Jonathan Spyer: I would take this quite seriously. From the FSA point of view, Hezbollah is a combat arm of the Syrian regime. Hezbollah has been advising and apparently participating in combat alongside the Syrian army and in cooperation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps since the start of the Syrian uprising. The FSA has noted this.

The death of senior Hezbollah commander Ali Hussein Nassif earlier this month was only the latest evidence of Hezbollah’s deep involvement with the Assad regime. The Syrian civil war has already begun to spill across the borders of Lebanon and Turkey. Hezbollah has been engaged for many months in the harassment of Syrian oppositionists who found refuge in Lebanon. The FSA understands itself to be in a fight not only with Assad’s army but also with the regional alliance standing behind him, of which Hezbollah forms a part.

So it is quite possible that the Syrian insurgents may choose to strike back at Hezbollah in Lebanon itself at some stage. In many ways, the killing of Nassif (and reportedly other Hezbollah fighters) in fighting in Syria suggests that they have already begun to do so. The decision as to where to strike is ultimately tactical. But Hezbollah and the FSA are already at war.

Let me add a bit of anecdotal evidence regarding this from my own time in Syria. The hatred felt by FSA and other Syrian insurgent fighters toward Hezbollah is very intense. It of course also has a sectarian element. I have seen Hezbollah flags burned at opposition demonstrations in Idlib Province. In Aleppo last month, I interviewed a Tawhid Brigade fighter who referred constantly to the party as ‘Hizb a Shaytan’ (party of Satan.) It created a weird dynamic in our conversation because I would keep asking about ‘Hezbollah’ (party of God) and he would keep replying by referring to ‘Hizb a Shaytan’ until in the end I started feeling like I was acting as some kind of apologist for Hezbollah. Which I’m not. As you know.

In general, I think Hezbollah knows it has a great deal to fear from the rise of the Sunnis in Syria. If Assad falls and the rebels win, this will almost certainly mean a ‘renegotiation’ of the sectarian balance of power in Lebanon, too, to Hezbollah’s severe disadvantage. At that point, the organization will have to decide whether to accommodate itself to a new balance of power, or to fight to retain its dominance against a new, Sunni-dominated Syria and its Lebanese allies. Neither prospect is attractive to Hezbollah, so it is doing its utmost to preserve the rule of the Assad dictatorship.

MJT: Do you think Hezbollah will unleash its missile arsenal if Iranian nuclear weapons facilities are attacked? And if so, how much damage are we talking about here?

Jonathan Spyer: I think it is very likely that there will be action of some kind by Hezbollah against Israel in the event of any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Hezbollah, after all, is entirely the product of a thirty year investment by the Islamic Republic of Iran. To a great extent, this investment was intended for precisely such a moment.

Hezbollah has re-armed since the 2006 war and possesses, we are told, around 60,000 short range missiles as well as a medium and long range missile capability, including the M-600 missile system. This would give them the ability to hit targets in central Israel. However, Israel’s aerial and artillery capacity is in an entirely different league, and in such an instance there would be few political constraints against a swift Israeli response. So the result of Hezbollah’s taking such action would be the devastation of Hezbollah.

MJT: Is Israel going to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Jonathan Spyer: An Israeli attack of this kind, we can now say with some confidence, will almost certainly not take place before next spring. There are strong voices within the Israeli defense establishment who argue against an Israeli pre-emptive strike at any stage because of what they consider to be the limited damage that Israel could inflict and the very negative diplomatic fall-out (if you’ll pardon the expression) that would result from such a move.

Generally, I think that a nuclear Iran is not only, or mainly, Israel’s problem.

The Iranians want above all to replace the United States as the guarantor of security in the Persian Gulf region. This is because they understand the power that comes from having the last word in an area so vital to the global economy. A nuclear Iran is a step toward the Iranian domination of the region, of which domination over the Gulf would form the vital centrepiece. This isn’t only, or mainly, Israel’s problem, and I personally see no reason why Israel should act as the gendarme of the oil-rich Arab monarchies of that area, enabling them of course to hysterically criticize it in public and thank it from the bottom of their hearts in private. The Iranians may single out Israel for rhetorical purposes, but their ambitions are not focused only, or mainly, on Israel. I hope this point is being forcefully made in the discussions behind the scenes between Israeli officials and their Western counterparts. The opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions should be Western, which of course means US-led or nothing.

Of course, if the Obama Administration decides it doesn’t want that responsibility, and the Iranians decide to push on and come close to the point of achieving a nuclear capacity, then Israel may have no choice but to carry out an attack which might only set the process back for a relatively short period. I hope it doesn’t come to this, and that rather a more determined, Western-led campaign, including crippling sanctions and clear red lines beyond which the use of force would be a certainty, can convince the Iranians not to move further ahead.

If force must be used to stop the Iranian advance, I don’t think it is either strategically wise or ethical for that force to be Israel’s alone. 

MJT: President Barack Obama repeatedly says he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Do you believe him? How many Israelis believe him? He’s letting Assad get away with murder, but he did go after Qaddafi and bin Laden.

Jonathan Spyer: I don’t want to interfere in the internal American discussion, but your question is nicely phrased so I can comment without doing that. Confidence in President Obama is very low in Israel. That is because his performance so far seems to suggest that he has little understanding of the Hobbesian world of Middle Eastern politics and the aspects required in order to build firm alliances and proxies here. From his Cairo speech and the abandonment of Mubarak to the vacillating and paralysis on Syria, he just seems to be singing from a different and wholly unsuitable songbook.

So I think very few Israelis have confidence that he will act effectively to prevent a nuclear Iran. No coherent red lines, including an outlining of the consequences of crossing them, means the Iranians will keep on moving ahead.

Obama wants out of the Middle East, as he himself has made clear. He’ll do counter-terrorism from the air against small, extreme jihadi groups. In Libya, I think it was the Europeans and specifically the French who got that rolling, with the US following on, though of course inevitably doing most of the heavy lifting in the end.

And frankly I think many Israelis also have the feeling, which we haven’t had for quite a few years, that the man in the White House right now isn’t a deep friend of our country, that he doesn’t understand or isn’t really interested in the story of Israel and the Jewish People, and consequently lacks a grasp of the deeper moorings which I think should underlie, and have in recent years underlain, the alliance between the US and Israel.

MJT: What is it specifically that President Obama does not understand? Surely he knows the Middle East is a much rougher neighborhood than Europe and North America. What else does he still need to grasp besides the obvious? What would you explain to him if you had his ear for a couple of minutes?

Jonathan Spyer: I would try to explain to him the dynamic of patron-client relationships in our neighborhood. I would explain to him that your clients don’t need to love you, don’t want you to bow to them, and don’t even really need to know that you respect them and empathize with them (though they will need you to at least go through the motions in this regard.)

What they need to know is that if they get into trouble (and they will) you will back them and help them to your utmost. If they think you won’t or can’t do that, they won’t want to be your client. They will prefer to be the client of another patron (probably your enemy or rival) who will be willing to do this. As a result, the value of your strategic coin will rapidly decline.

Right now, the net result of Obama’s losing Egypt/Tunisia/Yemen, and Iran/Russia/China’s non-losing of Syria, is that US credibility as a patron is low. Obama seems mainly dangerous to his friends, less so to his enemies, the killing of Bin-Laden notwithstanding. This is making allies nervous and enemies happy. This is not good. In particular, the most vulnerable allies (the Gulf monarchies) are very nervous indeed, and are seeking to organize themselves independently because of their impression that the US right now is not there. The trouble is that these countries are too weak for the job. As we see now in Syria, for example, they can’t deliver against Assad.

So the end result of Obama’s conceptual error is that the Iran-led alliance, which remains by far the most potent and dangerous enemy in the region, is holding up well, while what used to look like a US-led regional alliance no longer really exists. This, in my view, derives directly from the American President’s failure to grasp the basic rules for behavior as a patron in the Hobbesian space of the Middle East. So if I had a few minutes that’s what I’d tell him. But I’d tell him this without a great deal of enthusiasm, because I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t get it.

Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center and is a columnist at the Jerusalem Post. You can purchase his first book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, at Amazon.com.

Post-script: I’m raising money for my next trip to the Arab world. Unless Assad falls in Syria, most likely I’m heading to Libya.

Please help me out. I do not have a travel expense account. PayPal donations add up to plane tickets, and I have no choice but to hire local assistants in dodgy places like Libya.

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Sohrab Ahmari at the Wall Street Journal takes a good hard look at Tariq Ramadan’s new book, Islam and the Arab Awakening, and it isn’t pretty. The man Time and Foreign Policy magazines hailed as one of the greatest intellectuals in the entire world is outing himself as a hysterical conspiracy theorist, one whose theories look asinine not only in the West, but in the Middle East, too.

Ramadan is the Swiss-born grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and he’s a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. He has published more than a half-dozen books on Islam, politics, and Islamic politics, and he has thus far managed to pass himself off as a political moderate as well as a brilliant intellectual even though he is neither.

According to Ramadan, writes Ahmari, “the American government and ‘powerful American corporations’ nurtured the young activists who triggered the Arab Spring as a way of ‘opening up Arab markets and integrating the region into the global economy.’”

This analysis is magnificent in its idiocy. It is radiant, luminescent, in its absurdity. What on earth do “powerful American corporations” know about bringing down a totalitarian regime like Moammar Qaddafi’s in Libya, a military dictatorship like Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt, or the sectarian Soviet-style creature that the Assad family hatched upon the people of Syria?

Why on earth would “powerful American corporations” care about Egypt? There’s no money to be made there. Half the country lives on less than two dollars a day. It consumes little and exports nothing of value. India, China, and Brazil are serious emerging markets, but Egypt? Come on. And what corporate boardroom worth half a damn would waste time even discussing the “nurturing” of activists in a backwater like Yemen? Yemen, from the corporate point of view, is off-planet.

Even if the world’s capitalist rapists and pillagers did see dollars signs in their greedy eyes when they gazed upon Cairo—a ludicrous proposition to almost anyone who has ever been there—the bulk of secular activists in Egypt and Tunisia don’t swoon to gigantic corporations any more than Tariq Ramadan does. Nearly all who aren’t Islamists are leftists of one stripe or another. 

Ramadan thinks it’s suspicious that the activists use the image of an upraised fist. Why does he not like the fist? Because the Serbs who toppled the mass-murdering Slobodan Milosevic used the fist, too. And the United States supported the ouster, arrest, imprisonment, and war crimes trial of Milosevic.

That fist isn’t corporatist. It sure as hell isn’t imperialist. That fist is socialist.

Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim was Google’s marketing director in the region, but so what? Google didn’t pay him to bring down Hosni Mubarak. He was a marketing guy. Thousands upon thousands of people participated in the Arab revolts. Of course some of them worked for some company or other. How could it possibly be otherwise? If no one out of so many thousands of people worked for a company—that would have been astonishing. The statistical likelihood of it happening is roughly equivalent to a million coin tosses in a row turning up “heads.”

I spent a lot of time interviewing activists in Tunis and Cairo and have yet to meet a single one whose agenda was even in the same time zone as corporate globalism. They took to the streets for the same reason revolutionaries take to the streets everywhere—to bring down a corrupt and repressive regime and to replace it with something a little less odious.

Everyone who lives in the Arab world knows that. Everyone. Even the ones who preferred the status quo. Ramadan’s problem is that he’s wallowing in a Middle Eastern-style conspiracy theory that Middle Easterners themselves don’t even take seriously. “The region has moved on,” as Ahmari puts it, and he's right.

It gets worse. Here is Ahmari again explaining Ramadan’s take on the last year and a half:

Was it not "telling" that the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy backed the Libyan uprising, "given the man's support for Israel and his access and missions to the highest levels of the Zionist state?" To frame the NATO intervention in Libya as an instance of Western imperialism, Mr. Ramadan is even willing to rehabilitate Moammar Gadhafi. The Libyan dictator was apparently a relatively benign autocrat; his regime's "horrors were deliberately exaggerated."

[…]

Al-Jazeera was also apparently in on the conspiracy. The Qatari state-owned network's reporting during the Arab Spring, the author thinks, "proved objectively useful to the American administration's purposes." By contrast, Mr. Ramadan doesn't say a word about Press TV, the Tehran regime's English-language organ, which has been militating relentlessly in favor of Syria's Bashar al-Assad and infamously aired coerced confessions after Iran's own 2009 uprising. (Mr. Ramadan currently hosts a show on the Iranian network, a fact that cost him a professorship at Erasmus University Rotterdam because the Dutch college couldn't abide his links to such a "repressive regime.")

I hardly even know what to add. Does anything need to be added? What needs to be said about a man who hosts a program on the propaganda channel for a fascistic regime and who thinks Qaddafi’s crimes were exaggerated? He is simply not a credible or respectable person. Erasmus University did the right thing when it fired him.

Something does, however, need to be said about his legion of Western cheerleaders and boosters. There is so much to be said about these people that Paul Berman wrote a whole book about them called The Flight of the Intellectuals.

I interviewed Berman two and a half years ago when his book came out. We had a long conversation about it. He understands why Ramadan has so many fans in the West even though he doesn’t like it. Here’s part of what he said then:

The Western liberals, some of them, defend Ramadan for two reasons. If you listen to Ramadan for fifteen minutes, you will learn that he says all the right things, whatever a liberal-minded person would want such a man to say.

He's against bigotry, he's against anti-Semitism, he's against terrorism, he's for the rights of women, he's in favor of democratic liberties, he's for a tolerant and multi-religious society ruled ultimately by secular values. He's for science, learning, and enlightenment. He's in favor of every possible good thing. There isn't a single objectionable point in the first fifteen minutes of his presentation.

Unfortunately, the sixteenth minute arrives, and, if you are still paying attention, you learn that he wants us to revere the most vicious and reactionary of Islamist sheikhs -- the people who promote violence, bigotry, totalitarianism, and terror. The sixteenth minute is not good. The liberal quality of his thinking falls apart entirely.

There are plenty of liberal and moderate intellectuals in the Arab world. Real ones. Smart one. Brilliant ones. I’ve interviewed lots of them. Some of them are my friends. Many of them have been bullied and menaced and even murdered by the enthusiastic followers of Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather.

I don’t know if Ramadan’s newest book and his job as an Iranian government tool will finally define him as a committed non-liberal in the eyes of the Western world’s liberals, but it’s bound to happen eventually.

Where the West Ends

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Thanks in advance to you all.

I’ll have more long-form material for you shortly. In the meantime, here is some more very short-form material I published over at Instapundit.

CLIFF MAY ON JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE and what Ahmadinejad really said at the UN.

THIS IS REALLY GETTING RIDICULOUS: Greece says it will run out of money next month if it doesn’t get yet another bailout.

HMM: The Israeli air force shot down a drone in the southern part of the country near Gaza. No one seems to know where it came from yet, but they're saying it wasn't from Gaza.

ALSO RECOMMENDED: Sarah Hoyt recommends Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain for those of you who write fiction. She’s right. That book is a classic. It’s old, but not at all dated.

I also recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King. I’m almost finished with a novel myself and have found it quite useful.

THE WASHINGTON POST'S David Ignatius is in Aleppo.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? "Egypt’s new Islamist president on Friday pledged to ease up on the crackdown in the country’s restive Sinai Peninsula and not pursue hundreds of fugitives from the lawless region that has seen a surge in militancy and cross-border attacks on Israel."

CREEPY BUT INTERESTING: Alexander J. Motyl on the moral complexities of Soviet art. I find socialist realist art disturbing on a number of levels, but I have to admit it’s also very engaging to look at. It’s also educational. This is how communists saw themselves, or at least how they wanted to be seen by others. Meanwhile, here’s a striking anti-communist installation in Prague.

WHOA: The Tunisian government is seeking the death penalty for suspects who attacked the U.S. Embassy there a few weeks ago.

FROM MY GREAT WRITING TEACHER Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Why Writers Disappear.

I’m not going anywhere.

THE TURKISH GOVERNMENT just approved more military action against Syria. They say they may not do anything with the authorization, that it's only for theoretical use in the future, but Turkey did shell targets in Syria a couple of days ago.

AWESOME IF TRUE! A comet discovered recently by Russian astronomers may outshine the moon when it passes by Earth next November.

NOT GOOD: Chinese cyber attack hits White House military office.

I’m working on my novel this week, but here are some links to other stories that you might find interesting. (Cross-posted at Instapundit.)

ARMIN ROSEN on Jeffrey Sachs’ African NGO gone awry: “Sachs gives the impression of being unbothered by leaders who steal elections, imprison dissidents, and meddle in their neighbors’ affairs. Just as importantly, these leaders seem unbothered by him. Sachs’s brand of development doesn’t require systemic political reform—just pliant authority figures who can foster the kind of stability and cooperation that an undertaking like the MVP requires. Considering Sachs and the MVP’s prominence, these are appallingly low expectations.”

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Pejman Yousefzadeh asks a good one.

RED ON RED: Syria Berates Hamas Chief, an Old Ally, on State TV.

THWARTING FREE SPEECH: Europe's medieval libel laws.

LIFE AFTER ASSAD: Syria's Kurds are already building their own institutions.

THE SYRIAN WAR HAS ALREADY BEEN REGIONALIZED: Top Hezbollah operative Ali Hussein Nassif has reportedly been killed, along with several other Hezbollah members, in clashes near Homs.

FROM THE "FRENEMIES" DEPARTMENT: A former Pakistani legislator is offering a cash reward to anyone who murders the American man who made the now-notorious anti-Mohammed video, The Innocence of Muslims. Earlier, Pakistan's railways minister offered a bounty of 100,000 dollars out of his own pocket.

IRAQ WILL ALWAYS BE IRAQ: September was the deadliest month in Iraq for the last two years.

THE INDISPENSABLE ELI LAKE on the intel behind Obama's Libya line.

Here are some links to stories around the world. Cross-posted at Instapundit.

WHO SAYS JEWS AND MUSLIMS CAN'T GET ALONG? Azerbaijan, a Muslim country that was once part of the Persian Empire, may be planning to help the Israelis strike Iranian nuclear weapons facilities.

TOO BAD THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN: Gallup surveyed Libyan public opinion a few months ago and found that 95 percent of respondents wanted the country's militias disarmed at once.

ANOTHER STATE DEPARTMENT SCANDAL: An American lawyer named Warren Rothman was tortured and nearly killed in China. State Department officials inadvertently collaborated with Rothman's would-be killers and didn't exactly handle that mistake in a confidence-inspiring manner. Joel Brinkley has the story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

[Rothman] contacted officials at the State Department Office of the Inspector General and told them of the distressing role the acting consul and other consulate officers had played in his own drama.

Well, late last month, the inspector general's office wrote back and told Rothman, "We have determined that the appropriate office to address your concerns is the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs" - the very State Department office where the diplomats in question worked.

There's an ineffectual response, if ever I have heard one.

I wrote to the agency and asked why on earth it had referred Rothman back to the office where the accused bad actors worked. Brian D. Rubendall, special agent in charge of the office, told me simply: "Our office made the decision that" the State Department bureau was "best suited to handle the complaint."

I hope I never have to count on these people.

THE MOBS ARE BACK: This sort of thing is not going to stop any time soon.

A mob torched and vandalised a village of Buddhists in Cox's Bazaar's Ramu Upazila early on Sunday in one of the worst religious attacks in Bangladesh apparently triggered by a Facebook posting allegedly defaming the Quran.

Eyewitnesses and police said the assailants set fire to at least six Buddhist temples and nearly 20 homes and looted and damaged more than a hundred others until 3am in the hate attack.

THIS IS A DAMN SHAME: Fighting in Syria has severely damaged the medieval souk in Aleppo. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Here are some pictures of what it looked like before it burned.

A BRAVE MAN: Israel journalist and researcher Jonathan Spyer illegally sneaked into Syria to report on Assad’s killing fields.

KENYA SAYS it has captured the last bastion of the Al Shabab terrorist group in Somalia.

HA! Iranian news agency falls for Onion story, plagiarizes it.

GARY MOORE on Mexico's gruesome massacre era.

I LINK, YOU DECIDE.

Max Boot: Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now.

Gary Gambill: Intervention Won't Save Syria.

HEZBOLLAH doubles down on Bashar al-Assad.

ME IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Give Egypt's Aid Money to Libya.

EGYPT ISN'T AN ALLY. This is what a real Arab ally of America looks like.

THE INTERNET HAS A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY: What Amazon.com’s first home page looked like in 1995.

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT: Egyptian prosecutors refer a man to trial for ripping a Bible. If Egypt's rulers thinks this sort of thing will placate Americans, they have a lot to learn.

SOMEBODY IN CAIRO GETS IT: Egyptian newspaper fights cartoons with cartoons.

IRAN SAYS IT WILL BOYCOTT next year’s Oscars because of that Mohamed video everyone’s rioting over. I’d say “whatever,” but this year’s best foreign film award went to A Separation, which is Iranian. That film is magnificent. It’s not about politics, but I did enjoy the jabs at the government and the country’s religious zealots that were too subtle for the bovine-like censors to notice.

THE EMIR OF QATAR calls for armed intervention in Syria.

The U.S. Senate voted down a bill this weekend that would have frozen aid money to Pakistan, Egypt and Libya. The bill's sponsor, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, was right that Egypt no longer deserves American aid. But Libya does. Libya needs help, and it needs help right now. Libya should not only continue receiving the aid it's already slated to get from Washington. Libya should also get Egypt's.

Consider how differently the governments in each country have behaved in the last couple of weeks.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party, refused to dispatch police officers or any other security personnel to protect American diplomats and property when a mob waving al Qaeda flags assaulted the embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11. His men continued to stand aside even after a terrorist cell across the border in Benghazi assassinated Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. For days Mr. Morsi refused to condemn the violence in Cairo and Benghazi. In Egypt's reactionary and hostile political climate, such actions would have appeared "pro-American." He couldn't have that.

Hardly anyone in the Muslim world actually watched the buffoonish anti-Muhammad Internet video that set off firestorm after firestorm this month. The video in question—it hardly deserves the appellation of "film"—is a trailer for an asinine low-budget schlock flick. It would still be languishing in oblivion had it not been rescued by Salafist preachers using recreational rage as a wedge issue. Entire swaths of the Arab and Muslim world were galvanized by these people. Rioting spread from Cairo to Indonesia and to most points in between, but with an exception bigger than Texas. It did not spread to Libya.

Almost everything that happened in Libya was the reverse of what happened almost everywhere else.

The Libyan exception began with the terrorist attack on Sept. 11 at the consulate in Benghazi. For a while it looked as if Libya's reaction to the video might be the worst in the world, but that didn't last. The assassination of Ambassador Stevens wasn't part of a mob action or a hysterical demonstration. On the contrary: Spontaneous protests have erupted throughout the country, but not against the U.S. or a crackpot videographer out in Los Angeles. The Libyan protesters have stood squarely against the terrorists who killed Stevens and against the militias that have been running amok since Moammar Gadhafi was lynched last year in Sirte.

Libyan demonstrators have displayed moving, hand-written signs: "Sorry people of America." "Benghazi is against terrorism." "Chris Stevens was a friend to all Libyans." "Thugs and killers don't represent Benghazi or Islam." That's what Libyans were saying while people elsewhere flew bin-Ladenist flags and set cars and buildings on fire. And it wasn't just talk. The Libyan government swiftly arrested dozens of suspects following the Sept. 11 attacks. Ten days later, thousands of demonstrators in Benghazi seized the headquarters of an Islamist militia and forced its inhabitants to flee with their guns into the desert.

Egypt and Libya are as politically opposite from each other right now as they could be. In Egypt, Islamists beat secular parties in the elections last year by a two-to-one margin. In Libyan elections this year, the Islamists lost. This month Salafist preachers in Cairo ginned up an anti-American mob with the government's tacit blessing. Meanwhile a terrorist attack by like-minded people in Libya galvanized citizens and the state in the other direction.

How does it make sense for the American government to give aid money to both?

Read the rest in the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama came under criticism recently for describing Egypt as neither an ally nor an enemy of the United States and then backtracking days later. Most Americans who follow the Middle East and North Africa know perfectly well that Egypt’s relationship with the United States is no longer friendly. After what happened over there during the last couple of weeks, even many Americans who hardly pay any attention at all have figured it out. But it’s not diplomatic for the White House or the State Department to say it out loud, so the president walked it back.

Compare and contrast Washington’s poisoned relationship with Cairo to the one at the opposite end of North Africa. The United States just upgraded its relationship with Morocco to the level of what’s called a Strategic Dialogue, bringing the two almost as close as possible without bringing Morocco into NATO. Americans have fewer than two dozen alliances like this in the world.

The timing could hardly be better. Since the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, North Africa and the Middle East have gone through an extraordinary period of tumultuous change, some of it good, but much of it bad. The U.S. needs friends it can count on over there and hardly has any other than Israel. Pro-American Arab governments — not that there are many of those — likewise need an alliance with the United States they can count on.

That part of the world also needs a stable rock somewhere—not the stultifying stability provided by the House of al-Saud in Arabia, and certainly not the tyrannical sort that Moammar Qaddafi managed for a few decades in Libya. No, what the Middle East and North Africa need right now is progressive stability, the kind that slowly advances human and political development without triggering the kinds of violent reactions and shocks we’re seeing in so many places right now. Morocco is one of the few countries that's pulling it off. 

Unlike “frenemy” states like Egypt and Pakistan, Morocco is a genuine friend of the United States and always has been. Washington and Rabat share the same strategic interests in the region and, just as importantly, the same outlook and vision.

I recently spoke with Youssef Amrani, Morocco's minister delegate for foreign affairs.

“We’ve decided to upgrade our relationship,” he said. “We have the same values. We have economic and cultural ties. The United States recognizes the commitment of Morocco to human rights and the rule of law. With all the changes in the region, we need to send the message that an Arab country can work with the United States on the basis of shared values.”

Our strong anti-communist alliance during the Cold War transitioned smoothly into a strong anti-terrorist alliance in the 21^st century. Long before the terror war started in earnest, however, Morocco stood strong against Nasserism, Baathism, and the other various noxious secular “isms” that have proven such spectacular failures everywhere they’ve been tried.

Arab Nationalism, radical Islam, and anti-Americanism exist in Morocco, of course, but they find less purchase than in most other places. The ideas make less sense there. Morocco is a pluralistic blend of Arab and Berber and has been culturally influenced by southern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa throughout its entire history. The United States has never been hostile toward Morocco and Morocco has never been hostile toward the United States. Only a small percentage of Americans know that Morocco was the first country in the world to recognize our independence from Britain, but everyone in Morocco knows and is proud of it.

Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was sort of an ally of the United States, but he wasn’t a real one. He was part of America’s security architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Washington propped him up with assistance, but he did nothing—nothing—to liberalize or modernize Egypt and prepare it for a future of peaceful relations with itself, its neighbors, or with the rest of the world. Every day his state-run media cranked out as much anti-American and anti-Semitic invective as Nazi Germany, and it did so for decades. He threw liberals as well as Islamists in prison. His military regime ruthlessly repressed anything and everything that even smelled like civil society. Revolutionary Egypt was not even remotely primed for tolerant liberal democracy. “We’ve had 7,000 years of civilization,” an activist told me in Tahrir Square last year, “and 7,000 years of oppression.”

By contrast, civil society is flourishing in Morocco. The state doesn’t have a paranoid view of non-governmental organizations. It doesn’t think they're part of a sinister foreign conspiracy like the Egyptian government did when Mubarak was running the place and like it still does today. Morocco has long had a pluralistic view of outsiders, the kind that only exists in a few isolated pockets elsewhere in the Arab world like Beirut and Tunis.

Jews live in Morocco as a protected minority. The only other Arab country where that’s true is Tunisia. King Mohammad VI had been campaigning to educate the Muslim world about the horrors of the Holocaust and to put an end to Holocaust denial once for all. It’s outrageous that he has to stand up and say the Holocaust happened and that it was bad, but that’s where we are. His government has opted out of the Arab-Israeli conflict and would, in all likelihood, sign a peace treaty with Israel tomorrow if that wouldn’t cause such a geopolitical headache for itself in the region.

While Morocco is not a democracy and Mohammad VI wasn’t elected, the country does have democratic institutions and its people are slowly developing democratic habits of mind. The king’s father, Hassan II, began liberalizing Morocco decades ago, and Mohammad VI stepped on the accelerator as soon as he came to power. He did it before widespread disgruntlement threatened to bring down the government, which is the best time to do it, not only because it’s the right thing to do on general principle, but because it’s the only way governments can maintain legitimacy over the long term. Reforms aren’t likely to placate hundreds of thousands of furious demonstrators, but genuine reforms will likely prevent hundreds of thousands of furious demonstrators from taking to the streets in the first place.

So while much of the region is boiling with turmoil, Morocco is placid and calm.

“Democratic transition and the building of institutions take time,” said Amrani from the foreign ministry. “You can’t change the world in one day. Countries that have had no institutions and no civil society are going to have problems. Democracy can’t be imposed all at once. It’s a culture. It’s something you have to do every day.”

Edward Gabriel and Michael Ussery, two former U.S. ambassadors to Morocco, put it this way on The Hill’s Congress blog: “Morocco pushed ahead with its own ambitious reform agenda that directly addressed past human rights abuses, the status and role of women in society, the need to focus attention and resources on the most disadvantaged, insistence on religious tolerance, the need to open up political space to civil society and other non-state actors, and conducted a series of the only truly free and fair local and national elections in the Arab World.”

With revolution, war, sectarian bloodshed, and renascent repression roiling so much of the region, Morocco’s gradual political liberalization looks like a better model than ever. And with two hundred years of history behind it, the American-Moroccan alliance is likely to last.

Where the West Ends

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I'm working on a few things at the moment--a novel and an opinion piece about Egypt and Libya. So I'll have more for you here shortly. In the meantime, here are some links I posted over at Instapundit.

LIBYA’S GOVERNMENT announces that all militias will be disbanded. The Supreme Security Council, a quasi-government militia under the command of the ministry of interior, responds by storming the Rixos Hotel, a headquarters of sorts for the new Libyan government.

I’VE NEVER EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT publishing fake reviews on Amazon.com, not for my own books or any other products, but thriller author Joe Konrath just posted a whole bunch of them and shows that they’ve become a genre unto themselves and are worth protecting.

WOW, REALLY? “The newly appointed Syria peace envoy gave a bleak assessment of the stalemated war there on Monday, telling Security Council diplomats that the government of President Bashar al-Assad had no wish to change and that there was no immediate prospect for a diplomatic breakthrough.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Get ready for Syrian Kurdistan.

ONE OF THE BEST New York Post covers ever.

LIBYA’S ARMY is going after the country’s militias with some success. Libya had better succeed. The last thing the world needs is an oil-rich Somalia or Yemen across the water from Italy.

NEITHER A PUPPET NOR A NEOPHYTE: James Kirchick on Paul Ryan's foreign policy views.

JAMES LINVILLE: In the Middle East, where is the indispensable nation?

MONA ELTAHAWY was arrested by New York subway police for spray-painting over an incendiary ad. I've been tempted to pull down offensive posters in my own neighborhood, but I resist because it's wrong. Some people have to learn things the hard way, I guess.

Matthew Clayfield is like an Australian version of me.

He recently returned from a nail-biting trip through the North Caucasus—the blood-soaked region of Russia that includes North Ossetia and Chechnya—and published an inexpensive novella-length e-book about his experience called The Caucasian Semi-Circle: A Journey Along Russia's Exposed Nerve.  It’s like a shorter version of my full-length book Where the West Ends.

I read his book and even blurbed it for him. Here’s an excerpt:

The Caucasus is Russia's exposed nerve. Everything wrong with the country ― electoral fraud, endemic corruption, economic inequality, widespread alcoholism, foreign-policy belligerence, inter-ethnic tensions, human rights abuses, the use of political violence ― is at its most clearly and pathologically wrong in this thousand-kilometre stretch of snow-capped mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian. A two-week journey through the region, starting in Astrakhan on the Volga delta and describing a bell-curve through Chechnya, North Ossetia and several federal districts before ending in Rostov-on-Don, where the river that gives that city its name flows quietly into the Sea of Azov, doesn't explain Russia any more than two weeks in Siberia, the Urals, or Moscow and St Petersburg might. But it certainly impresses itself upon one more forcefully. The Caucasus is Russia's exposed nerve and to travel through it is, at times, to have one's own exposed.

We depart Astrakhan at the witching hour. It is long before dawn on the twentieth morning of Oleg Shein's hunger strike against the city's mayoral election results, which saw him lose to the United Russia candidate amidst what he claims were widespread instances of fraud. In a few days, this unassuming city of five hundred thousand, instantly recognisable to fans of Tennessee Williams or Flannery O'Connor for its sleepy, dilapidated charm, will be the new political centre of Russia, and Shein will be the anti-Putin opposition's most celebrated near-martyr. But for the moment that same opposition is still trying to decide what they really think of this provocateur from the usually pro-Kremlin ‘A Just Russia’ party and we are watching two women in head scarves as they take up the ends of a large blanket and start swinging a baby to sleep above the tile floor. The familiar pre-recorded chimes of Russia's train station PA systems rouse us from our pre-dawn catatonia, which has been made worse in this instance by everything we've ever read about our destination in the work of Anna Politkovskaya and others, all of which happens to be dredging itself up here in the waiting room, between the mustachioed men and the big-boned babushkas, and which forms a cloud of uncertainty that our thousand-yard stares fail to penetrate.

The only foreigners amongst a thirty-strong group of tired Dagestanis and Chechens, we find ourselves stumbling across the train tracks in the dark, towards an engine that, in terms of speed and amenity, would have been decommissioned long ago had it serviced any other route in the country. Along with the Tyumen-Baku and Astrakhan-Makhachkala routes, with which it shares a portion of track through Dagestan, this one has been regularly delayed by terrorist attacks along it over the past couple of years. As we roll out our mattresses along maroon upholstery in the wood-paneled compartment that we have scored for ourselves, and as the train begins its halting journey south, nearly throwing us from our beds as it stops suddenly in the night, miles from any observable station, for minutes and even half-hours at a time, it occurs to me that the train needn't have left at two in the morning in order for it to have arrived at its terminus at a reasonable hour. It could have left at eight or nine o'clock and still have made good time. At first I wonder if they have scheduled the train at this hour to dissuade people from taking it. I later learn that they have done so in order to prevent it from hitting the Caucasus until after sunrise and to ensure that it has reached its destination before sunset. Passenger trains no longer pass through here in the dark.

Dagestan at dawn is reminiscent of David Davies' Moonrise: soft light, not yet aided by the sun, weaves its way through long, reedy grass, which grows from a slightly undulating plain. The view from any train in the world will throw a country's economic inequities into sharp relief ― Baltimore's ghettos, Mississippi's family graveyards, Siberia's industrial wastelands and all-wooden villages ― but none more so than the view from this one. Buildings appear unfinished, not for lack of trying, but for lack of bricks. Too-thin horses graze in too-barren holding pens in front of children's murals on concrete depicting much healthier-looking thoroughbreds. In Kizlyar, near the Dagestani-Chechen border, old women push a beat-up car along the side of the road while a group of men some twenty strong all stand around talking about how to best fell a tree. A bemused-looking fellow with an AK47 looks on as they shout over the top of one another.

Crossing from Dagestan into Chechnya, it is impossible not to note that one has done so. Run-down villages give way to the fruits of recent development and construction projects, the occasional semi-automatic weapon to the near-ubiquitous presence of firearms, and a landscape unblighted by the aesthetic preoccupations of the personality cult to one in which every public space serves as its leader's own private photo album. If the trackside food stalls patronised exclusively by Chechen Interior Ministry forces wasn't enough to indicate that a border has been crossed, Akhmad Kadyrov's face, bulbous and troll-like beneath its traditional papakha and enlarged to emphasise every pore as it stares at me gruffly from the station platform in Gudermes, certainly is. The former president was assassinated in an explosion at Grozny's Dinamo stadium during Victory Day celebrations in 2004 and was succeeded in the position three years later by his sole surviving son. Ramzan Kadyrov's face grins from a similarly oversized poster a little further along the platform. No fewer than six heavily-armed soldiers stand smoking and laughing in front of their leader. We are by now the only people left in our carriage.

*

THE post-Soviet space has inspired a good deal of journalistic shorthand. Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus remains "the Last Dictatorship in Europe" even as Viktor Yunokovych's Ukraine gives it a run for its money. For a long time, Grozny was, infamously, "the Most Destroyed City on Earth". For the first-time visitor, however, approaching the city on the train from the north-east, one is reminded of this epithet only negatively. It is certainly difficult to believe that it remained roughly accurate as little as five years ago. Today, Grozny rises out of the plain like Oz's Emerald City. The famous Associated Press image of a Russian soldier lighting a cigarette from a pile of burning refuse in the middle of the blown-to-shit street seems a world away. And more of the city is set to rise in the coming years. With cranes outnumbering the Turkish-designed buildings of its skyline by at least two to one, Grozny is today arguably the most rebuilt city in the world. The seven skyscrapers of its central development, Grozny City, were completed last year and today sparkle, glassy and blue, above both the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque and Ramzan Kadyrov's opulent presidential palace. They are soon to be joined by Grozny City 2, another seven-building development underway across Prospekt Akhmad Kadyrov, and by a dome-roofed hotel that will supposedly be used by foreign dignitaries. A brief glance out the train's opposite window, however, helps to put the new city into perspective: a sprawling military base, with hundreds of jeeps, trucks and even tanks, sits right on the city's periphery. The Russian government's investment is very heavily insured.

[…]

The first five-star hotel to open after the Second Chechen War, Hotel Arena City has long been a favourite of Western journalists, intrepid independent travellers, and celebrities who probably should have known better than to accept an invitation from a warlord. Photographs of unapologetic disaster tourists and so-called travel collectors posing with the hotel's heavily-armed night guards are dime-a-dozen on the internet. But the only hotel in Grozny is no longer the only hotel in Grozny. The five-star Hotel Grozny City opened last year and very quickly became the default choice for Ramzan Kadyrov's bought-and-paid-for party guests. These included Jean-Claude Van Damme and Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, the latter of whom told the gathering that she "could feel the spirit of the [city's] people" and "see that everyone was so happy," before human rights organisations told her more about her host and she sacked her entire management team. Like a long-popular bar in New York City or Los Angeles, Hotel Arena City today commemorates its glory years with a series of framed photographs of its celebrity guests, who have been given pride of place in the lobby beneath the obligatory portraits of the former and current presidents. It is here, on the morning of our first full day in Chechnya, that Elina Bataeva comes to pick us up.

Born and raised in Moscow, Elina is the Russian-Chechen owner of Chechnya Tourism & Travel, the only company of its kinds in the republic. She moved to Grozny in 2008, to get married and to be closer to her father, a little over twelve months after Ramzan Kadyrov announced that Chechnya was open for tourism. This slight, bird-like twenty-four-year-old has been trying to kick-start the industry single-handedly ever since. Although she is constantly fielding calls from Russians, who are curious to see what's become of the place, this is only the second time she's had the pleasure of hosting foreigners. The first was when The Globe and Mail's Mark MacKinnon visited several weeks before us. When it comes to Westerners, only journalists holiday here.

Read the whole thing.

Glenn Reynolds asked me and the rest of his usual substitutes to join him at Instapundit while we’re heading into the election, so I’ll be posting there once in a while as well as here. Glenn is not on vacation, though. I’ll be helping out rather than filling in. This isn’t a full-time thing. I’ll still be here, but at the same time I’ll also be over there.

Libya sure is different from Egypt.

This is the best news I’ve seen from the Arab world in some time:

Hundreds of Libyan protesters have stormed the Benghazi headquarters of Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia in a backlash against last week's attack on the US consulate.

Witnesses say militiamen opened fire as the crowd overran the base, but it is not clear if there are casualties.

Buildings and a car were set alight and fighters evicted following a day of anti-militia protests in the city.

US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others died in the 11 September attack.

Earlier, some 30,000 protesters had marched through the eastern Libyan city calling for an end to the armed groups that have sprung up in the country since last year's ousting of Col Gaddafi.

Several thousand supporters of Ansar al-Sharia lined up outside its headquarters, in front of the crowd, waving black and white banners, AP news agency reported.

They fired into the air to try to disperse the protesters, but fled with their weapons after the base was surrounded by waves of people shouting "no to militias", the report added.

Using riots, mayhem, and murder to “protest” an asinine trailer for an anti-Mohammad video on the Internet, the Middle East’s mobs, assassins, and hostile regimes have vetoed freedom of speech in the United States. Not only did America’s overseas diplomatic officers and staff have to hunker down under siege for a week, individual citizens here at home have good reason to fear that if they criticize the wrong religion, the response could be catastrophic for themselves, for others, or both. Neither the First Amendment nor the United States government, it seems, can do much about it.

I’ve seen this sort of thing before in another context. In the wake of the Beirut Spring in 2005, when massive demonstrations forced the end of Syria’s military occupation, Lebanon had decent provisions for freedom of speech—at least by regional standards and at least on paper. The country was theoretically free. But free speech was extra-legally and extra-judicially nullified by terrorists backed by a foreign police state. A wave of car bombs targeted journalists, activists, and officials critical of Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad. Everyone needed to watch what he said. Those who didn’t might be killed.

This is the terrorist’s veto. Now it’s our turn. A week after region-wide riots started in Cairo, Hezbollah sent half a million supporters into the streets of Beirut’s southern suburbs, ostensibly to protest the trailer for the now-infamous movie on YouTube. The mob screamed the same tired slogans we’re accustomed to hearing—“Death to America” and “Death to Israel”—but Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah said something new. “The U.S. should understand that if it broadcasts the film in full it will face very dangerous repercussions around the world.”

Hezbollah is technologically advanced and media-savvy. Nasrallah knows perfectly well that when an individual uploads a video to YouTube, it doesn’t count as “the United States broadcasting a film.” That’s actually his point. He’s not threatening the United States in the abstract. He’s threatening you. If you insult Hassan Nasrallah’s religion on the Internet, terrorists may come after you.

You’re kidding yourself if you think he’s bluffing or that this is just talk. He’s not and it isn’t. There are precedents. In 1989, Iran’s blood-soaked ruler Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa condemning acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie to death for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his novel, The Satanic Verses. Terrorists and death squads went after him and anyone who dared to publish, translate, or sell his books all over the world. They set bookstores in the United States and the United Kingdom on fire. They firebombed a small newspaper office in New York City with Molotov cocktails. They killed dozens of people around the globe as far away as Japan. Rushdie spent years in hiding under the assumed name Joseph Anton and still lives with the knowledge that he could be murdered at any time. Just a few days ago, the Iranian government increased the bounty on his head to $3.3 million.

Rushdie is lucky compared with some. In 2004, an Islamist maniac with a butcher’s knife stabbed Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to death on an Amsterdam street over a short film, Submission, about women’s rights in Muslim societies. A blood-curdling note pinned to his corpse said the local Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was “next.” Ali eventually fled the Netherlands, where she was once a member of parliament, and lives today in the United States under armed guard.

She’s not the only one who has to live this way now. Paul Berman compiled quite a list of names in his 2010 book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. Dutch politician Ahmed Aboutaleb, British writer and occasional City Journal contributor Ibn Warraq, and Italian journalist Magdi Allam all have bodyguards or have had to go into hiding. They’re liberal Arabs who live in the West, but non-Arabs are just as frequently targeted. A would-be assassin attacked Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in his own house with an axe. An international terrorist cell went after Swedish artist Lars Vilks. French writer Caroline Fourest and French philosophy professor Robert Redeker joined the ranks of those under guard, and Seattle Weekly cartoonist Molly Norris also went into hiding. She had to enter the FBI’s witness-protection program after Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (whom the United States later vaporized with a Predator drone) placed her on one of his hit lists. These names are but a sample.

Read the rest in City Journal.

It should be clear to almost everyone by now that the rampaging mob violence against American embassies and consulates in the Middle East and North Africa last week was not primarily motivated by a video uploaded to YouTube. Something offensive to Muslims (along with something offensive to just about everyone else in the world) is posted on the Internet several times every second, yet massive international uprisings against this thing or that thing break out only periodically.

Rather than a spontaneous outburst, what we saw last week was a raw play for political power by radical Salafists. We have seen things like this before, most notoriously in Tehran after the Iranian revolution.

On November 4, 1979, 52 American diplomats were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran by young supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who belonged to the so-called Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line. Iran was not yet a theocracy. Khomeini had not consolidated power after the overthrow of the Shah's government; his Islamist faction still had to battle it out for control with Iran's liberals and leftists.

Khomeinei may not have orchestrated the takeover personally, but it was not long before he threw his full support behind it: he realized how popular the hostage-takers were -- Iranian anti-Americanism was at its apogee then -- while his proposal for a theocratic constitution was meeting stiff resistance from his internal enemies. By rallying the country around the cause of anti-Americanism he was able seriously to blunt criticism of the domestic agenda. All he had to do was tar his opponents as secretly pro-American. The deflection worked brilliantly.

The Salafists have just pulled a similar stunt in Egypt. They are more extreme and therefore less popular than the Muslim Brotherhood government. By ginning up an anti-American mob and forcing President Mohamed Morsi, himself a Brotherhood member, to send riot police after the demonstrators to protect the American Embassy, they were able to make him look like a tool of the West. When push came to shove, Morsi ended up siccing the cops on his fellow Egyptians to protect the interests of the hated "imperialists."

Read the rest at the Gatestone Institute.

I’m a bit reluctant to say anything about this right now, but it’s being picked up all over the place, so I’ll go ahead.

Unnamed intelligence sources told Fox News that Sufyan bin Qumu, a former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, is linked to the terrorist attack in Benghazi.

We don’t yet know if it’s true.

According to the New York Daily News, bin Qumu was released in 2007, when George W. Bush was president.

If it is true, the government—both the Bush and Obama administrations—will look spectacularly incompetent.

If you release terrorists from jail you should expect the result to be terrorism. And the idea of shutting down Guantanamo entirely, as Obama once promised to do, will appear reckless and irresponsible as well as impossible.

Maybe this explains why the administration tried to spin the Benghazi incident away as a “spontaneous” event rather than describing it as the pre-planned attack it clearly was. I don’t know.