BEIRUT — The Israeli government move to close Al Jazeera television network’s operations in the country is not surprising in itself, given that government’s irritation with Al Jazeera for the past two decades of comprehensive, live coverage of events in Israel and the Arab territories it occupies (Palestine) or wages war against (Lebanon). The striking aspect of the Israeli government move was its explicit linking of this to the policies of the four Arab states that are laying siege to Qatar and themselves demanding the closure of Al Jazeera. This is fascinating for several reasons, including that autocratic regimes dislike the work of a free and professional press, and Israel’s desire to forge closer relations with Arab Gulf states in order to allow it virtual carte blanche in dealing with the Palestinians who are in a very weak position these days.

This pattern of behavior defines not only Israel and Arab autocracies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, it is also more evident now in NATO member countries like the United States and Turkey, whose leaders openly wage war against the press. This is in keeping with the modern legacy of autocrats who usually blame the media and foreign actors for their troubles when they are challenged at home.

The Israeli decision to close Al Jazeera reflects a wider tendency among autocrats in several continents to try and control their societies by totally shaping the flow of news and views in society. This is a pivotal step on the path from majoritarian or legitimate rule, to autocracy, to authoritarianism, and finally to totalitarianism in which citizens are treated like robots or children.

This is most obvious in many Arab countries where the mass media is a bland, wet sack of innocuous texts and audio-visual materials reflecting the different angles of a single government-defined viewpoint, often associated with hero-worshiping the great leader of the country. Israel is unable to do this with its vibrant domestic Hebrew-language press, but by closing Al Jazeera it is trying now to join the ranks of the Arab governments that prohibit any media coverage that is critical of state policies.

It is no surprise that Al Jazeera television network has now been targeted by both Arab and Israeli governments, because the network reveals the realities of these societies that governments would prefer were not known to the public. Al Jazeera rocketed to its success in just a few years after its birth in the mid-1990s precisely because it covered all the important news stories and political developments in the Arab world that ordinary Arab citizens cared about. These included ongoing developments in Palestine, the impact of the Israeli war and siege of Gaza, the Anglo-American war on Iraq, the Arab uprisings of 2010-11, and other developments that were important on a regional level, and not only as local or single-country stories.

As such, Al Jazeera reflects in one sense the continuing existence of a pan-Arab sentiment that ordinary citizens express simply by being interested in stories of other Arab citizens fighting for their rights, dignity, and well-being, whether in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen or Bahrain, to mention only a few stories of regional interest. So in the eyes of Israel, Arab autocrats, and occasional angry foreign governments, Al Jazeera is a dangerous phenomenon that “incites violence,” in the eyes of Israel, or “promotes terrorism” and dangerous groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, in the eyes of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and a few other Arab autocracies whose own media have become embarrassing sinkholes of empty mediocrity spiced up with intermittent attack dog texts.

Al Jazeera’s real danger is that it gives public voice to the sentiments of hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who are not allowed to express their views in public in any meaningful way, or to mobilize their collective views into practical political action. Perhaps autocratic regimes have good reason to be afraid of Al Jazeera, given the mass Arab public sentiment of the 2010-11uprisings that sought to change or radically reform long-running Arab governments anchored in individual families.

These regimes are not stupid, for they demonstrate that they do understand why Al Jazeera is so dangerous to them and their eternal incumbency. Yet these regimes are also infantile and naive in thinking that by banning Al Jazeera, by turning their own media into disgraced dishrags, and by trying to both control and shut the minds of their own citizens on public issues, that they can forever maintain their countries in the state they are in today. This show of high-level incompetence by these regimes ignores how in our world of digital and social media it is impossible to fully control the flow of news and views in any society.

Social media penetration rates in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf Arab states are among the highest in the world, because citizens — especially young ones who comprise some 60 percent of the population — thirst for a wide range of public views and personal entertainment alongside their desire to express themselves and discuss with others issues that matter to them.

So banning any media company (like Al Jazeera) or tool (like WhatsApp) backfires because it usually generates a greater desire by the public to access those things. It also makes the government look more dictatorial, reduces its respect and perhaps even some of its legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, sends it into the international fraternity of media-control thugs, and widens the gap between citizen and state that can only lead to social and political tensions.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 August 2017
Word Count: 931
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BEIRUT — The outburst of Palestinian protests and Israeli “security” measures in Jerusalem since July 14 continues a saga that has pertained since Israeli occupied the entire city in June 1967, but with a few significant new twists this time. Here are some of them in this ongoing battle between Israelis and Palestinians.

The power of sustained, mass, non-violent protest by Palestinian civilians, with a precise focus and specific demands, caused Israel to drop all the new “security” measures it said were needed at the Al-Aqsa compound. The success and power of such mass protest will have major implications for the future. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children who placed their prayer mats on the ground in the open air and prayed near their Islamic holy site sent a critical message to multiple audiences: Israel, the Palestinian leadership, the Arab-Islamic world, and the international community.

To the Israeli government and its rightwing colonial-settler Zionist fanatics, the message was that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem will stand their ground when they feel their rights are threatened, and they will kneel to no one, literally, but to God, as they do when they kneel in prayer.

To the divided and broadly hapless Palestinian national leaderships (Fateh and Hamas) that cling to power without serving their people very well, the message was that Palestinian men and women can take charge of their own interests and well-being when they need to; and they can negotiate with the Israelis to achieve better results than Fateh and Hamas have ever achieved. An important new development in this instance of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation in Jerusalem was the role played by the four-member religious leadership of the Islamic holy places waqf (endowment), in close consultation with local community leaders.

To the Arab-Islamic world, where support for the Palestinians in occupied Arab East Jerusalem was sporadic and erratic, the message was that it would be childish of them to try and establish close political, economic, or security links with the Israeli government while Israel was still taking measures to consolidate its control of all Jerusalem against the wishes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab residents of the city.

This is particularly relevant to continuing attempts by Israel, with apparent U.S. support, to develop more normal relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states, as a confidence-building measure to prod all concerned in the Arab-Israeli conflict towards a negotiated peace. The Palestinians on the ground showed that their confident assertion of their presence and their rights in Jerusalem was the way to push Israel to change its policy.

To the rest of the world, the message was that the international community should stop falling for the old Israeli ruse that strict controls on Palestinian movement and actions must be put in place for “security” reasons. Israel dropped all the “security” measures it had taken unilaterally — cameras, gates, railings, metal-detectors — when it saw itself confronted by the collective will of hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women, and children who took to the streets every day and night to affirm only that they are Palestinians who have the right to live in dignity in their own ancestral city.

Some people will say that this particular show of mass collective self-assertion by the Palestinians was due to the fact that it was a religious site — the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound — that they felt was being threatened and besmirched by Israeli actions. That is only partly correct. The more accurate and complete picture is that this incident exploded into a major confrontation because of the complex interactions between religious and political identity that converge in Jerusalem as they do nowhere else in the world. The Palestinians of Jerusalem have found themselves vulnerable, unrepresented, unprotected, and leaderless for many decades since 1967, because neither the occupying Israeli authorities nor the fragmented Palestinian leaderships look out for the best interests and basic human rights of the Jerusalemite Palestinians.

After the Israelis removed all their “security” measures Thursday and the waqf leadership announced that public prayers would resume in the mosque, the lengthy and boisterous Palestinian street celebrations were a rare instance of this community enjoying a collective success. All these aspects of the episode suggest that more organized local coordination among religious and civic leaders in Arab East Jerusalem is likely to occur, especially because Israeli continues to find ways to continue the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs that it wants to drive out of the city.

The latest example is an Israeli move to redraw the borders of occupied Arab East Jerusalem as Israel defines them, which would exclude over 100,000 Palestinian Arabs from being residents of the city. If this happens, the Arab proportion of Jerusalemites would shrink further, making them more vulnerable to Israeli pressures and incentives to emigrate. The lessons to be learned from this round of nationalistic confrontation in Jerusalem will be pivotal for future developments in the city where Arabism and Zionism have battled for control for many decades now, and the battle goes on.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 July 2017
Word Count: 841
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Every few years, it seems the world of Middle East and global policy analysis passes through a phase when a basic question rears its head in the media and in conversations across the world: Is Islamism a dangerous trend of the future in Muslim-majority societies, or a natural passing phase only? I am struck by how often in conversation with friends and colleagues around the world the discussion so often reverts to this issue – while in daily discussions with Arabs and Muslims across the Middle East, the issue is less frequently raised.

I am not sure if that means that, a) the West is rightly obsessed with this genuine threat of long-term Islamist militancy, b) the West has bought the line put out by assorted Arab autocrats who are directly threatened by Islamist uprisings or opposition forces, c) Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East who live with these issues every day recognize that Islamism and its manifestations like the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS are primarily surface manifestations and symptoms of deeper issues that are not really about religion — but about politics, human nature, and the abuse of power that degrades hundreds of millions of citizens who have nowhere else to turn other than their religion.

I ask this question because it is important that every time this discussion revives, we make sure to debate the right issues, rather than being sidetracked by smoke screens and diversionary propaganda that is now widely disseminated through global public relations campaigns funded by a few wealthy Arab countries that are genuinely worried about the persistence of Islamist movements all around the region.

Do countries like Egypt and some wealthy oil-producers have good cause to fear the durability and even some expansion of Islamist groups regionally and even globally? I would say the answer is both yes and no. Yes, they should fear these signs of mass discontent by Islamists and secular others, because an agitated citizenry that translates discontent into political action can generate populist momentum that overthrows governments (Tunisia, Egypt) or sends some countries whose governments fight back into endless civil wars (Libya, Syria, Yemen). No, they should not fear the persistence of Islamist politics if they correctly read this is a symptom of underlying mass discomfort among politically neutered and voiceless citizens who have been mistreated by their own societies, if these governments are prepared to address the underlying problems and fix them peacefully.

The condition and future of political-social-militant movements that wrap themselves in the banner of Islam and appeal to Muslims in a variety of ways usually sees people talking about “political Islam.” This broad term can refer to a thousand different movements in a hundred different countries — from local volunteer bakeries that provide food for the needy, to globe-skirting political mobilization movements that seek to unite all members of the Muslim community (umma) into a single Islamic nation, ideally under a revived caliphate. I find it more useful to speak of “Islamist” movements, and add an appropriate adjective to identify them as pacifist, activist but non-violent, political action-oriented, community social services-oriented, militant, terrorist, or some other words that differentiate the movements we are talking about.

We all know what we are talking about. A majority of these movements that frighten many people include, a) the traditional Muslim Brotherhood (that has existed longer than most Arab countries have been sovereign states) and its assorted national recent offshoots, b) killer terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS that attack globally, c) country-based armed resistance movements that fight to free their lands from Israeli occupation (like Hamas and Hezbollah), and, d) hundreds of smaller armed, jihadi, local or national movements in between that have now taken root in wild lands like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and Libya.

My main criticism of this common debate is that the Islamist nature of the political groups involved too often frightens people so quickly that they neglect to make a more thorough analysis of why these movements suddenly came into being or expanded quickly across our region or in foreign countries. The exaggerated emphasis on religion and Islam blocks the more important discussion of the underlying drivers of discontent and degradation in people’s lives that caused them to turn to their religion as a means to do what has mostly been impossible for them to do in other political, social, civic, or media dimensions of their lives — which is to express their grievances, engage in political decision-making as full citizens should, hold power accountable, and seek to implement national policies that ensure, rather than restrict, the political, social, and economic rights of all citizens.

If governments and their small power elites do not allow citizens to complain about or redress the underlying conditions that disenfranchise and marginalize millions of people in their own societies, they should not be surprised that exacerbated men and women turn in desperation — or in the logical flow of human experience — to their deities to save them.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 July 2017
Word Count: 827
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — Rarely does one get an opportunity to watch individuals and institutions mature before one’s eyes and in real time. This is one dimension of what is going on as we watch United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson conduct his mediation shuttle around the Gulf this week. He is trying to help the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states resolve a long-running dispute that erupted again five weeks ago when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a few other less important states broke relations with Qatar, expelled its nationals, and laid siege to its land, sea, and air transport routes.

Tillerson and others in the U.S. government seem now to have the upper hand in shaping their country’s response to the crisis, having gotten Washington deeply, directly, and consistently involved in mediation — after the initial days when a typically clueless U.S. President Donald Trump came out in public supporting the anti-Qatar campaign. U.S. policy instead sees the Saudi-UAE 13 non-negotiable demands of Qatar as unrealistic and unworkable, and demands a diplomatic settlement.

Virtually the entire world lined up with the sensible new American position, by doing several things. Major countries like Germany, Great Britain, France, Turkey and others directly engaged with Doha to explore the Qatari response to the accusations against it, openly seeing a diplomatic solution as possible and preferable to the siege warfare tactics that had been applied so brutally — but also so ineffectively, because the siege failed totally to achieve its objectives.

Qataris quickly found many alternative ways to communicate and trade with the world without using routes that crossed the territories of the siege-masters in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Qataris and their many friends around the world rallied to support them in the face of what almost every country on earth saw as an unreasonable, irrational, and impulsive strategy against Qatar.

This created unbearable pressure on the siege-masters, which caused them for once in this case to use their minds and good sense, and to issue a new statement last week which replaced the 13 demands with six “principles” that they said Qatar should adhere to in order to resolve the crisis. These very reasonable and rational principles focus on fighting terrorism and violence, stopping the funding of terrorism, not interfering in the sovereign affairs of one’s neighbors, and other such sensible ways to conduct the affairs of state.

Qatar should have no problem accepting these principles, which will open the door to finding a resolution of the outstanding issues that bedevil its relations with the Saudis and Emiratis. Once the Americans became involved in direct diplomacy in support of the floundering Kuwaiti mediation attempt, it was obvious that we would see movement towards a settlement.

Tillerson this week said the Qatari positions in the last month have been “reasonable,” and a senior assistant to him was quoted as saying that no country is blameless and that all sides in this dispute are guilty of some bad behavior that they must change. So this week marks an important shift in the nature of this dispute — an immature and irrational outburst by inexperienced Saudi and Emirati leaders whose mismanagement of their feud with Qatar only damaged their own credibility in the eyes of the world, has become a more traditional political dispute between two parties that both have some degree of valid grievances against the other that they can only hope to resolve through honest negotiations that address the rights of both sides equally.

So it is no surprise that Tuesday, in Doha, Tillerson and the Qatari foreign minister signed an agreement by which the two countries will work together to prevent terrorism and stop the funding of terrorists anywhere in the world. We should not be surprised now if this memorandum expands in the coming weeks to miraculously coincide with the wording of the six principles that the Saudi-Emirati siege-masters issued in their refreshing interlude of rationality last week.

As Tillerson continues his GCC-wide shuttle diplomacy, and other mature adults like the Germans and European Union work with GCC states to monitor terror funding accusations, the big challenge will comprise two main issues: How can the GCC states craft an agreement that applies to all of them, and not only to one country? And how can they overcome the bitterness and lack of trust that has now erupted between them, so they can resume normal relations that benefit all their citizens, friends, and trading partners?

The answer to these two issues lays in the growing up process that individuals, organizations, and countries go through to achieve a stage of maturity that is critical for managing good relations with others. All parties in this dispute are learning important lessons about the business of statecraft, which will benefit them all in the long run.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 July 2017
Word Count: 799
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — To grasp quickly the core of the Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates (UAE) accusations against Qatar, it is best to focus on the demand that the Aljazeera television, radio, and online network should be closed, along with half a dozen other media operations that Qatar initiated or funds. Aljazeera has become a proxy of sorts for all the things that the Saudi-Emirati camp fears will happen in the Arab region and inside their own borders — free flow of information, public debate of ideas, peaceful contestation among different social and political ideologies, all quarters of society holding each other accountable through constitutional means, and activist citizen organizations engaging each other and their governments in a public sphere.

The Saudi-Emirati demand to close Aljazeera mirrors the central modern Arab tradition since the 1950s of governments tightly controlling the flow of information and facts and the exchange of ideas in society.  This has destroyed much of the human vitality and national integrity of many Arab societies, leading to the sad, violent state of our region today. It is no surprise that some Arab elites want to keep things this way; Aljazeera shows that the majority of Arab men and women want otherwise.

In my entire career in mass media in Arab countries, I have witnessed first-hand the destructive consequences of governments treating their citizens like children who are not mature enough to know what to access in the realm of knowledge, culture, and ideas. This has been the single most destructive legacy of the military regimes that took power across our region in the 1940s and 50s, manifested in ministries of information that were quickly adopted by all other Arab governments.

The current debate on the ultimatum to close Aljazeera mostly revolves around whether Aljazeera, in fact, was so journalistically unprofessional and politically dangerous that it deserved to be closed. Such discussions are totally tangential to the real issues at hand, because the important debate we should be having is the following: What has been more destructive to the wellbeing of Arab societies: the legacy and impact of Aljazeera in the past 20 years, or the combined impact of the authoritarian information and media systems and mind control institutions that Arab governments have operated for the past 75 years or so?

Aljazeera gained immense, instant popularity across the region because it responded to a very basic human instinct that Arab governments had denied three generations of their citizens: the capacity to live as a full human being, able to speak one’s mind, hear a variety of other people’s views, learn about the real world as it actually is, debate ideas, experience new cultural expressions, and question in public how one’s society was developing and being managed. A foundational element of human dignity is to be treated with respect as a rational, thinking, feeling individual — rather than as cattle to be herded, or a robot to be programmed.

It is no accident that Aljazeera reached its peak during the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, which captured the spontaneous activism of hundreds of millions of ordinary men and women who wanted to practice in their lives what they saw being practiced on Aljazeera’s screens. They wanted to break free from their dead-end lives that were doomed to misery because of the unfair and unjustified total controls that their security-anchored governments exercised on them in virtually every sphere of life except for consumer shopping, real estate speculation, and, of course, emigration.

Aljazeera was the first pan-Arab manifestation of how one could live a life of dignity in one’s one home — but only in the digital media realm. The knowledge and pluralistic ideas that citizens gleaned from Aljazeera did not translate into action in the political realm that shaped people’s life conditions, or other dimensions of one’s life, like education, employment, or culture. By 2010-11, hundreds of millions of Arab citizens who had tasted the sweet nectar of intellectual freedom from a satellite dish agitated spontaneously to achieve freedom in the other dimensions of their lives.

Those protests and uprisings failed, because the local and foreign forces that fought back against the idea of freedom and pluralism as core Arab life attributes were too strong, too brutal, and too organized to be resisted. We have moved since then to today’s armed resistance, civil wars, state collapse, the rise of new groups of militant takfiri-salafists like Islamic State, and widespread direct foreign military intervention on a scale, perhaps, never witnessed anywhere in the world.

We can trace this entire complex cycle back to the foundational weakness in the modern Arab world: autocratic governments’ use of information controls that made it impossible for their citizens to use their full minds. Most Arab governments still do this. The intense focus on closing Aljazeera should remind us of these continuing constraints and crippling traditions that transformed a once promising and dynamic developmental Arab region last century into a hobbled bevy of lands whose hundreds of millions of citizens are only allowed to use portions of their minds.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 July 2017

Word Count: 836

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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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BEIRUT — The intense speculation globally, especially in the United States, about the fate of Islamic State (ISIS) militants now being flushed out of their former strongholds in Mosul, Raqqa and other parts of Syria-Iraq should prompt us to remember how the world mostly misdiagnosed related events in the Middle East and South Asia in recent decades. Such misdiagnosis led to endless and fruitless warfare, because it has always been — and remains— based on the prevailing political elites’ insistence on living in make-believe worlds of hope, fantasy, and endless speculation, instead of doing the hard work of studying how human beings actually behave, and responding accordingly.

It is natural to wonder: Will ISIS regroup in the eastern Syrian desert? Will its members join Al-Qaeda? Will they go to Mali, Yemen, Sinai, or the Philippines? Will some go to Europe and carry out terror attacks? As we do so, we should also keep in mind that in such exercises we have regularly endured entertaining speculation and misdiagnosis of reality for the past 15 years, since the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq opened up those two countries to endless new forms of violence and national destruction.

I would venture that a prevalent theme in the political-media public spheres since 2001 assumed that Al-Qaeda, ISIS and related groups could be defeated by attacking them in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and Iraq, carrying out assorted surges and special operations in several lands, and then militarily attacking Al-Qaeda- and ISIS-related groups in Syria-Iraq since 2014. This approach was paralleled by working closely with autocratic elites and governments in the Arab-Asian region to maintain “security” locally, after the U.S. and other foreign armies returned home.

In fact, such prevailing speculation proved consistently wrong for nearly three decades, since Al-Qaeda’s birth in the late 1980s and its first attacks against American targets in the 1990s. The rebirth and current expansion of Al-Qaeda sees it comprising an estimated 40,000 militants in Asia and Africa, which best confirms the failure of those Arab-Asian-Western policies that relied on making war and supporting local autocracies.

For its part, Al-Qaeda spawned ISIS, regrouped, expanded, and has learned important lessons. It applies its jihadi-takfiri-Salafist militancy more effectively now by linking closely with disaffected local groups of citizens in shattered and often war-torn lands, especially Yemen and Syria. (For a short, powerful analysis of this happening now across North Africa, see the work of the Carnegie Endowment’s Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck.)

So will ISIS’ defeat in its major bases see us speculate, scare, and entertain ourselves into another decade of misdiagnosed political conditions that send us into catastrophic wars that lead to more disintegrating countries? In wondering about the fate of ISIS’ followers and their ideas, and how we should respond, the Arab-Asian-Western world should not simply update the three pillars of blind incompetence that defined its policies in recent decades. These three are, simultaneously ignoring the harsh realities and sentiments of hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens, the incompetence of many corrupt and brutal local regimes, and the impact of external powers’ military actions, including by Americans, Israelis, Russians, Iranians, Turks, and Arabs.

ISIS, Al-Qaeda before it, and hundreds of other smaller movements of disgruntled men and women all emerged from and exploited a context of expanding human distress, misery, dehumanization, and helplessness, all of which we can trace in statistics and news stories since the 1980s.

One other point beckons as we wonder where ISIS will go next, recalling that all the speculation about its remaining as a powerful state for many years has proved to be wrong. Al-Qaeda was born and then expanded globally as a response to two major instances of foreign powers militarily dominating, or based in, Islamic lands: the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Americans in Saudi Arabia and neighboring lands after liberating Kuwait in 1992. Today both the Americans and Russian actively fight military across Syria-Iraq, alongside Turks, Iranians, Kurds, and others supported by half a dozen Arab countries.

At the same time, the Saudi-Emirati-led war with American and British support decimates Yemen; American-coddled Israelis colonize more of Palestine and other Arab lands, and seek alliances in the Gulf; Turkey and Iran make inroads into Arab strategic conditions; and, the civil, political, social, and economic rights and material well-being of a majority of Arab citizens continue to deteriorate in almost every realm of life, except perhaps for the construction of fried chicken franchises, cell phone shops, and shopping malls.

So let’s hope the speculation ends, and instead we acknowledge history’s confirmation that the human and political realities I mentioned above actually will determine what happens next to the mindsets among the 400 million Arabs today, who themselves gave birth to Al-Qaeda, ISIS and many other groups. The Arab citizenry continues to disaggregate into a small minority that lives very comfortably, and a large majority that totters precariously on the edge of poverty, joblessness, illness, death, destruction, displacement, refugeehood, starvation, chemical weapons attacks, or cholera — which have become real daily dangers in many of our countries. This is what we should focus on and try to correct, because this is the dynamic that will determine the future of our region.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 June 2017
Word Count: 864
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BEIRUT — Everywhere in the world, civil society, government, private sector and religious groups work hard to overcome prejudice and hatred, and to promote tolerance and coexistence. So why is it that all these efforts fail to stem the continued expansion of radical ideologies, while acts of violence anchored in religious, ethnic, or ideological hatred continue to be among the world’s biggest growth sectors?

In recent weeks we have seen new initiatives from giant web-based companies like Google, twitter and Facebook to prevent militant movements from promoting their criminal ideas on line. Last week we saw the launch of “Make Friends,” an initiative of the U.S.-Israel-based Elijah Interfaith Institute that seeks to counter the idea that people view each other’s religions with distrust or disdain ― and to potentially even reduce violence conducted in the name of religion. Leading global religious leaders ― from Pope Francis to the Dalai Lama ― issued a joint appeal asking people to follow a simple bit of advice: Make friends with people of other faiths.

Yet the killings go on, everywhere. It does not matter whether the bad guys doing the killing and stoking the hate are elected presidents or hereditary appointed leaders in both the West and the Middle East, or freelance criminals and terrorists working beyond the control of governments. It does not matter whether the victims are tourists and civilians in London, farmers in Yemen, or schoolgirls in Texas, and it certainly does not matter if the killers or the killed are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or any other faith identity. Almost daily attacks now occur against civilians in dozens of countries.

Most of the world’s political leaders respond with the sad phenomenon of stick-your-head-in-the-sand emotionalism and cultural jingoism. They predictably but fruitlessly orate over the bodies of murdered innocent civilians that we are tough and stoic, that we endure criminal acts against us by reasserting our moral and political superiority, that our national values are good and enduring, and that the religion of the killers – whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or any other – is a deviant version of the true religion. In Moscow, London, Paris, Orlando, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Brussels, and all points in between, the message is the same.

So my reaction and that of many others in the world is also the same: Why in their wisdom cannot our great leaders in the West and Middle East summon a more effective response to terror and political violence, slow-motion state frailty and occasional disintegration, severe ideological polarization, growing and often extreme socio-economic disparities, and heightened desperation at individual, family, and community levels in so many places around the world? Ohio, Bristol, Taez, north Paris suburbs, and Hebron now share common socio-economic fractures that are all anchored in shared attributes. We can trace most of these to government actions, including misuse of political power, uncaring and insensitive policies that disregard equity ethics, rampant free market dominance at the expense of social justice, and assorted brutal colonization and war-making efforts by governments and non-government sectarian armies.

Religious expressions of humankind’s fraternity and sorority are important endeavors. So are high-tech blockers of hate speech, or local initiatives to hug a Muslim, Jew, Black person, White farmer, aging Republican senator, or any other group identified as needing to be embraced in order to keep them from slipping into hate and war. But these occasional expressions of love are daily overwhelmed by the storms of actual government policies over the past half century that have brought us to this point today where fratricide routinely overwhelms fraternity.

At this point today, every 35 seconds a child in Yemen is hit by cholera, Zionist-Israeli colonization in Palestine remains unchecked or supported by Western powers since the late 19th Century, leading Arab governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars to wage war and lay siege to fellow countries while half their schoolchildren are not learning anything in school, and any interested regional or global power can test out new weapons in open warfare season in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and other shattered Arab lands that seem helpless before their own sustained dysfunction and frailty.

Our religious and political leaders around the world really need to wake up from and transcend their increasingly tangential world of do-good moral self-assertion; Je Suis Charlie, Boston Strong, Stiff Upper Lip, I Am a Moderate Muslim, and other moving responses to the swirling terror all around us need to be accompanied by political and religious leaders who dare to emulate the examples of the great Abrahamic prophets Moses, Elijah, Jesus, and Mohammad, who challenged the unjust political orders of their day. The current group of global leaders seem only able to perpetuate destructive, often criminal, public and private policies that generate the fear, hate, and violence they seem unable to understand or counter.

I will continue to hug Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and even the occasional Boston Red Sox baseball fan, because fraternity, mercy, and love are what my Arab-Islamic and American cultures have taught me to do all my life, as is the case with most other ordinary citizens around the world. Our political and religious leaders, though, have a greater responsibility to challenge and change the policies that are shattering our world, and as of today they are all collectively failing their mandate.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 June 2017
Word Count: 883
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The dispute between Saudi Arabia/United Arab Emirates and Qatar has added major new developments and regional dynamics to existing dramatic situations across the Middle East — especially in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine. Diving deep into any of these situations inevitably leads one to some of the others, confirming again and again the interconnections between the many actors and issues that have generated so much violence and uncertainty in the Arab region.

So it might be useful to step back from examining any one conflict and instead simply try to identify larger historical and political patterns that help us understand the players and the issues at stake. The latest dispute in particular, focused on Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has generated a flurry of speculation about new alliances coming into being. The most popular one is a possible alliance between Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Russia to face off against the Saudi-Emirati-led group of half a dozen countries that have lined up against Qatar. While nothing can be ruled out in the modern Middle East, this kind of instant alliance-formation seems more reflective of a Western tradition of toying with Arab lands and peoples like a handful of putty, rather than any serious analysis of realistic expectations.

We can, however, survey the region and identify notable new political dynamics and actors in the Arab World’s past several hundred years of colonial entanglements, state formation, and foreign military interventions. However the Qatar-GCC, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya situations are resolved, I suggest that we can see in them the beginning of a new era that has taken a quarter century to come into focus — since the end of the Cold War around 1990.

I see this as a new era because of several novel developments. One is the phenomenon of two very small and very young Arab states — Qatar and UAE — playing much bigger regional and global roles militarily and politically than their geography and demography would normally suggest. Another is the spectacle of several Arab energy-producing wealthy states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE ganging up against a third, Qatar, using siege tactics that cause havoc regionally and seek to bludgeon it into submission to their will — despite their having spent several decades trying to create a GCC regional block that values stability and security above all else. A third is the direct military, strategic, political, and economic involvement of two regional non-Arab powers — Turkey and Iran — in both participating in and trying to resolve the disputes. And a fourth is the role of the two big global powers — the United States and Russia — who promote a mediated resolution to the Qatar-GCC and Syria conflicts, but often also are vexingly imprecise on their bottom lines.

Two important things about these phenomena are that they all reached maximum impact and clarity in the last six years since the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, even though their roots sprouted during the post-Cold War years; and, they include within them a relatively clear scorecard of actors, identities, and ideologies that now battle in the open to define the Arab region, whether through the policies of the existing states or large non-state actors like Hizbollah and Hamas.

Perhaps this clarifies the major forces at work that now compete for the soul, spirit, and sovereignty of the Arab region and its many smaller components. I would list the following as the players to watch in this respect: Foreign big powers (U.S., Russia, for now), regional non-Arab powers (Iran, Turkey, for now), Arabism even in its faded state, Islamism even in its subjugated state, oil-anchored materialistic patriarchy (the energy producers and their dependents, like Egypt), and remnants of former socialist-nationalist-military states in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other places.

These actors and a few other smaller ones now wage battle in the open to shape the identities and policies of the existing Arab countries. It is unlikely that any one or two will achieve full victory and dominate the region, as imperial powers did in history. More likely is that most of them will coexist in uneasy truces, as the region gets back to a developmental phase in a no-war context that can resume the socio-economic growth needed to respond to people’s basic needs and thus achieve lasting security and stability.

The most striking thing about this situation is that the ordinary Arab citizen is not among the powerful forces battling it out for the soul and sovereignty of the Arab region, which has been the case for centuries, unfortunately. One day, who knows when, the final battle of the modern Arab era will take place and witness the will of the citizenry struggle to achieve supremacy over the stultifying power of autocratic local elites and foreign powers that have subjugated hundreds of millions of men, women and children for hundreds of years. The Arab uprisings of 2010-11 hinted at that eventuality; but they were quickly put down by local and foreign forces of autocracy and control that have stepped out into the open more clearly this week in the Qatar-GCC crisis.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 June 2017
Word Count: 845
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — I have followed closely, and read dozens of Arab and international analyses about, the new tensions generated by the Saudi Arabian-led pressures on Qatar, including cutting diplomatic ties and isolating Qatar by curtailing its use of vital air, sea and land transport routes. Not surprisingly, the media sphere is flooded with analyses that speculate about half a dozen possible motives for the moves to pressure Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Bahrain and a few other smaller states.

Speculation in such cases always replaces hard facts in discussing policy moves by Arab governments that remain secretive and unaccountable. So let me add my own thoughts on what has motivated these harsh moves against Qatar, though I focus more on broad, proven, political values rather than speculative, specific policy aims linked to issues like ties to Iran, press freedoms, strategic military ties to the United States, or support for Islamist groups in the Arab world like the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas.

This looks to me like a desperate Saudi-led move by a group of leading Arab autocrats to maintain their grip on the region, and to complete the counter-revolution against the 2011 Arab uprisings that saw tens of millions of ordinary Arab men and women demonstrate for more freedom, rights, justice, and dignity in their lives. Citizens’ freedom, rights, justice, and dignity seem to be the threats that frighten Saudi and other Arab autocrats, and these must be minimized at any cost, it seems.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others now pressuring Qatar have worked overtime in the past six years to maintain the traditional political status quo in the Arab region. This status quo comprises handfuls of old men and their sons, soldiers, and supportive foreign powers that maintain an iron grip on political power and everything that emanates from that, like media freedoms, civil society activism, quality education, and genuine accountability and meritocracy.

Saudi Arabia and its few partners now using siege tactics against Qatar seem to have complaints against several Qatari policies, which you can read about in any of the hundreds of analytical speculative articles widely available in the global media. Yet none of these Qatari activities that may have triggered the Saudi-led siege actually or seriously hurt Saudi Arabia in any tangible way — and they certainly do not impact Egypt and others in the siege party. Having working relations with Iran or Hamas, and promoting a relatively free and open media constellation in Qatar and abroad, are political irritants at most, rather than genuine security threats.

The “threats” the Saudis and Emiratis feel are neither tangible nor dangerous in any credible way; rather, they are symptoms of an independent policy by a fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member that Saudi Arabia cannot easily accept. The leadership in Riyadh has used similar tactics before, such as in its use of financial pressures against Lebanon a few years ago and other instances against fellow Arab governments, but it has always failed in these tactics. It has also tried using direct military force in Yemen, with active UAE participation, and that approach has also failed. It has tried supplying money and weapons to anti-regime rebels in Syria, and that policy has also failed. It has tried combinations of these and other tactics to contain Iran’s spreading strategic ties across the Arab region, and that has also failed. It has also spent many millions of dollars to influence the mainstream media in the West and across the Arab world, but that policy has also largely failed; for Saudi policies and some of its domestic practices are widely criticized in the global media — except by those who benefit financially from Saudi funds.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt in particular have employed draconian tactics to muzzle any independent media across the Arab world, and Qatar in this respect is a prime target for their ire. They cannot accept that independent thinkers, reporters, and analysts express their thoughts in public in a manner that deviates from the Saudi-defined policy of maintaining the autocratic status quo that has defined (and ravaged) the Arab region during the past half century or so.

Qatar’s crime in Saudi eyes is simply its insubordination and its refusal to accept the Saudi approach to maintaining stability in the Arab region through the use of guns and money to silence any critics. Qatar is particularly vulnerable to the siege tactics now being used against it, given its geographic position on a small peninsula attached to Saudi Arabia along its lone land border. It probably cannot long maintain its independent policies if the siege against it is maintained. How it responds to the pressures it now suffers will become clear in the coming weeks.

What is already evident, though, and quite depressing, is the determination of some Saudi-led Arab countries to squeeze Qatar in this manner, as a sign of their willingness to use economic and military warfare, starvation tactics, and other means to keep the Arab world in the dilapidated condition of incompetent governance, corruption, pauperization, polarization, civil wars, fragmentation, and other dire conditions that emanate directly from non-stop autocracy as the reigning paradigm of modern Arab governance. This is the real security threat to the Arab people and societies, even though the political space to express such views across the Arab region and abroad continues to narrow.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 June 2017
Word Count: 893
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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NEW YORK — In New York City last Saturday-Sunday, I followed President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia while simultaneously scanning assorted Saturday and Sunday cartoon shows on television — and at times it was very difficult to tell the difference between the two. The American president’s proven capacity to live in a make-believe world of distinctly good and bad guys reached another peak, which portends rough days ahead for the people of the Middle East.

Trump swallowed whole the Saudi (and Israeli) view that Iran is a major menace to the region and it must be fought relentlessly. In fact, the Saudis have been trying to fight Iran politically in half a dozen places around the Middle East, and largely have failed. Iran’s allies have beaten Saudi Arabia’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, and other lands, either politically or militarily. It is no wonder that Saudi Arabia — with its proven weak statecraft across the Middle East — has pulled out all the stops in enticing the Trump administration to side with it against Iran and rescue it from a predicament of its own making.

For Trump now to wage fierce political battle against Iran puts the United States in a situation where to a large extent it is fighting an imaginary enemy, on the basis of exaggerated or false threats, using tactics and strategy that have both proven ineffective in the past. Rarely has an American president moved so quickly to verify his total ineptitude in grasping the realities of the Middle East, and to craft a policy response whose nature and magnitude bring together degrees of political immaturity that only make the United States a laughing stock globally.

The economic gains for the American economy from the agreements with Saudi Arabia will be significant, if they are all implemented over the coming decade. That seems to have been the main motivation from the American side. Yet the political stresses and likely new forms of conflict and sectarian tensions we can expect across much of the Middle East will only amplify the foundation of failed policies that the U.S.-Saudi combine has just relaunched in a new format. Aggressive American militarism combined with Arab arms and money in the pursuit of political stability is the policy of delusional politicians, not sensible statesmen and women.

The emphasis on U.S. strategic cooperation with Arab conservative governments in order to fight Iran and the separate threat of Islamic State (ISIS) will not succeed, because it has been tried and has not succeeded in the past. Yemen, Syria, and ISIS are the three main reasons to believe this. It is hard to think of a more lopsided military equation than the power of Saudi, Emirati, American, British and other military capabilities against the much weaker Yemenis forces they attacked over two years ago — and still have not vanquished. Syria shows that political determination — even by cruel dictators and their powerful allies — can withstand for years the military assaults of rebels funded and armed by American, Saudi, and other countries. The consequences of a destroyed Syria, with its multiple militant jihadi armed movements, have revealed themselves in recent years, to the chagrin and new threats felt by many countries.

The ISIS threat is the most frightening example of why a U.S.-Saudi military alliance, or even the more hare-brained wider Arab-Islamic-American alliance Trump speaks of, will not easily remove the threat of ISIS, Al-Qaeda or other smaller movements like them. The sorry tale of ISIS in the Arab world has three main elements that Trump and his advisers clearly ignored, as they seem to ignore most realities in the Middle East.

The first was the birth of ISIS from deep within the belly of Arab societies during the past few decades, especially given that most of the key leaders of ISIS (and Al-Qaeda and other such militant movements) were radicalized in part in Arab jails, in countries the U.S. supported strongly. The second phase was the birth and launch of the Islamic State in mid-2014 in Syria and Iraq. The Arab countries were immobilized by this, and were totally unable or unwilling to push back ISIS. They had to rely on American and other foreign militaries to halt ISIS’ expansion. The battle to defeat ISIS militarily only gained momentum when several non-Arab armies came to the rescue, including American, British, Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian, Russian, and Lebanese Hezbollah forces. The Iraqi armed forces finally showed their capabilities in the past year, but only with considerable and direct U.S. assistance.

The third phase of the Arabs’ encounter with ISIS is now taking shape before our eyes, in the form of a grandiose alliance of Arab, Islamic and Western armies that will work together to rid us of evil. This is a worthy and necessary goal. It remains unclear, though, how such forces that helped give birth to ISIS, and then could not defend their own countries when ISIS expanded in their midst, will be able to do a better job, in view of one critical elephant in the room that all the gatherings of these parties continue to ignore: The underlying conditions of economic disparities, social stress, political autocracy, civil and regional wars, ravaged environments, and corruption that plague most of the Arab countries involved will always generate more new disgruntled and desperate militants than any high-tech weapons can kill.

In the imaginary world of weekend television cartoons, the moral dilemmas facing the protagonists always end well. In the real world of American strategic relations with assorted Arab and Islamic countries and Israel, the moral dilemmas have no place in the script. Only repeating the same script with a larger cast of characters, while wars, terror, and refugee flows continue apace, strikes me as the epitome of foolhardy and irresponsible leadership.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. He can be followed on Twitter @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 May 2017
Word Count: 962
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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