eatbees blog

There is objective proof now that the Iranian election was stolen. Juan Cole has the details.

Meanwhile, from the behavior of the Iranian state — arrests of opposition figures, a crackdown on communications, threats of “bloodshed and chaos” if the opposition doesn’t back down — it seems obvious that they have something to hide. They are acting threatened and cornered, not like their preferred candidate has just won a landslide victory.

Would a regime that enjoys broad popular support be acting like this (watch video) or this?

One of the things that stands out in these events is the courage of Iranian women, who have been in the front lines of the resistance from the beginning. Another is the inability of the major media to keep up with the story, and their dependence on citizen reporters on sites like YouTube and Twitter. Finally, there is the fact that while this is playing out before the eyes of the world, this is an Iranian struggle that must be won by the Iranians themselves. There is little the rest of us can do except bear witness as President Obama said yesterday.

Here is an excellent piece by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who has somehow managed to be on the ground in Teheran, and who eloquently captures the essence of this dangrous, inspiring moment.

My best wishes to the Iranian people in their struggle for justice.

Guest poster doga was inspired to write this article in the run-up to the Moroccan local elections, which to no one’s surprise were won by the “palace party” of the king’s friend Fouad Ali Al Himma.

In the era of Hassan II and especially after the two coups d’état of 1971 and 1972, Hassan II sought to buy the obedience of the Army generals and the men of his entourage by giving them the chance to profit from the nation’s resources, and by permitting them to have special economic advantages in order to avoid similar betrayals, espeially since at the time the system’s opponents were numerous, so that the Makhzen sought to buy the consent of its policial opponents by inventing positions of govermental responsibility that would support the maximum of opposing voices while keeping in the hands of the Makhzen the so-called “sensitive” posts such as the Foreign Ministry and the Interior Ministry which was governed for two decades by Hassan II’s right hand man Driss Basri. In fact that’s why France currently has 15 ministers and Morocco has more than 30! Meanwhile the Makhzen sent other opponents to the famous Tazammart prison, and we know what took place in the 1970s such as torture. At the same time the Makhzen found it necessary to monopolize the nation’s economy to control the sources of money in order to keep them from being used against the system, and that’s why the nation’s development occurred with a rhythm that led more and more toward poverty and misery. It was a sort of exchange between the stability of the system and the development of the nation. In the end, in one way or another the system was able to manipulate the situation to its advantage.

Thus after the death of Hassan II, the new king Mohammed VI took power at a time when there were no longer political opponents against the system, and Moroccans were inspired to have a young king who proclaimed a new era for his people based on the fight against poverty and forms of corruption, economic development for the nation, etc. — but now ten years after the arrival of Mohammed VI, why is change not more visible for everyone?

I think that despite the royal will to build Morocco, the problem lies in the forms of corruption, which are rooted everywhere in the foundations of the state and result in a very slow rhythm of development, or to put it another way, the royal will hasn’t found enough people to translate itself into action quickly enough, for several reasons.

First of all, to absorb the criticism of politicians who profited in the days of Hassan II, it was necessary to give them free rein to practice their forms of corruption, which means that the government and the parliament are there just for show in order to claim that this is a nation of institutions, when in reality the decisions that impact the destiny and the economy of the nation are made inside the palace. Indeed there was no other reason at the time to accept the political game as it was, except to profit from the nation’s riches and by giving illusory promises to the citizens during the elections, otherwise how could we explain that a politician would promise the citizens something he would be unable to carry out even if he won? This is a process that went on for decades, and at the same time, it’s this circle that frustrated Moroccans and disgusted them with politics in general. As we say in a popular proverb, “lli galha lmakhzen hiya lli kayna,” which can be translated, “There are only those who say Makhzen.” Imagine how it could be that corruption has grown for decades without hearing that a single governmental official was found guilty of any crime, as if we had angels governing us! Indeed, this corruption in the form of a monster remains the obstacle for the nation’s development, but at the same time it’s the consequence of a certain kind of politics.

Also there is a lack of initiative for reform, whether constitutional, judicial, etc., and it’s normal that politicans who have lost their legitimacy before the people would avoid this sort of initiative, while a royal initiative in this sense is perhaps pointless at this time. We say that to sow seeds, good earth is needed, but as I said, the royal will hasn’t found enough sincere individuals who can follow it. And fighting against forms of corruption unfortunately takes a great deal of time.

I think the solution is to find a new inspiration for Moroccans at the political level in order to regain their confidence. Perhaps the party of Fouad Ali Al Himma, called Authenticity and Modernity, was created in order to follow the royal will to develop the nation, and we can imagine that this party is supported by the king since Al Himma is the king’s friend — yet the perpetual question for me is why Al Himma has brought together so many politicians of bad reputation in his political party?

Despite the way it’s being played in the American media, it’s possible that the Iranian presidential election wasn’t stolen or rigged after all. I was always doubtful that the theatrical scenes of hope and change we were seeing in the major cities in the days leading up to the election, featuring youths and women in face paint and green clothing, would be validated by the rural poor whom Ahmadinejad has cultivated since the beginning of his presidency. Iran has an enormous population that lives outside the major cities and beyond the reach of Western media. These people don’t Twitter or go on Facebook, and their values can be very different from the urban, educated, often pro-Western middle class.

I’ve now found anecdotal evidence to back up this idea. Blogger south/south spoke with her Iranian grandmother, herself no Ahmadinejad supporter, around 48 hours after the election, and posted their conversation. The grandmother explains that the televised debates leading up to the election turned people against Ahmadinejad’s chief opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, rather than toward him as the Western media have assumed. Mousavi’s connection to former president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani also didn’t help, because Rafsanjani is widely seen as a “shark,” a manipulator and profiteer. Finally, Ahmadinejad spent his last term cultivating the image of a humble, down-to-earth person who raises his own food. He won in a landslide among the rural poor because he made a show of addressing their concerns. The other campaigns were focused in the cities, but as the grandmother put it:

What about the provinces? We don’t have too few of them. Ahmadinejad went to the provinces and reached out to the poor. People there still worry about buttering their bread. He went to every single one….

Iran is not Tehran, Tehran isn’t even the size of the eye of the needle. Every single countryside, province, Ahmadinejad had them…. He worked for four years holding babies and making visits to the countrside. You could have predicted these results.

So in watching coverage of this election and the protests taking place now, it may be helpful to question the assumptions of the Western media from which we get most of our information. While there are surely millions of Iranians who yearn for European-style progressive democracy, there are many millions more for whom “buttering their bread” is the first concern. And for those people, whether we like it or not, Ahmadinejad is their man.

My thanks to neufneuf and homeyra for the grandmother link. Also from neufneuf, in a similar vein, is this article by former NSC staffers Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett entitled, “Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It.”

No more lounging around the house in a leisurely way for me! Today I hit the road, first to visit friends in New York, then on to Paris, and finally Morocco before the end of the month. Watch this space as eatbees blog “goes live” from Morocco and around the world!

Also, best wishes to the Iranian people on today’s presidential election. The current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is running again, but there is talk that major change is coming. For one thing, women and young people are participating in unpredecented numbers. Go here for an slideshow of the colorful rallies that have taken place in recent weeks, and here for live updates from the ground in Tehran.

Check out my novel Not from Here and let me know what you think.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been spending most of my time doing rewrites to this novel and now, it’s finally finished. Of course no creative work is ever truly finished, at least not until it’s between covers in a bookstore, or behind a frame in a gallery, or the artist is dead. But now I feel that the novel is quite close to the final form in which it will appear commercially, if and when that happens. If I have to drive around the U.S. selling it out of my trunk on streetcorners, it will happen, but let’s try the more conventional routes first.

Not from Here is the story of a young musician, Anton, who escapes from his stifling small town to go to the city, where he tries to change the world with his music. It’s also the story of his unbreakable friendship with his alter-ego, Timmins, a reclusive artist whose paintings come true. And it’s the story of his discovery of shadowy forces that manipulate society on every level, through politics, the media and even our friends, who might be spying on us without even realizing it. At first Anton is helped by this conspiracy because they need him to stir up the youth, but as he comes to understand its goals, he decides he must fight it, expose it and try to destroy it. Will he succeed?

This novel is a coming of age story, a story of friendship and betrayal and the end of the world. In short, it has everything, an entire universe crammed into 450 pages. I spent several years working on Not from Here, so I respectfully ask you, my friends and readers, to take a few days to read it, give me your supportive and critical comments, and recommend it to friends.

Now that I’m finished with this, I’ll be traveling to New York, Paris and then Morocco, where I’ll be in time for the Gnaoua Festival at the end of the month. Readers of this blog who would like to see me while I’m in Morocco are requested to contact me at write[at]eatbees.com, or leave your contact information in the comments below.

I’ll be back in Morocco in a few weeks — this video makes me impatient.

Congratulations to the guy who created this out of still photography frames — it’s an innovative technique!

This troubles me:

The Swat valley peace deal is over, which is exactly what President Obama wanted. The U.S. and its allies opposed the deal from the beginning, applied immense pressure to the Pakistani state to overturn it, and finally offered another massive bribe to get them to resume war…. So, the Obama administration is now driving a regional apocalypse, using much the same propaganda tactics as the Bush administration to galvanise a sceptical public.

The above blog post is brief, but it contains no less than thirteen links for those seeking more information.

It’s true that in recent days, the Pakistani Taliban managed to capture the district of Buner, some 100 kilometers from Islamabad, provoking well-publicized panic among American officials and now, a heavy-handed response from the Pakistani military. This has caused even progressives to react with alarm, calling on the Obama administration to do something before Pakistan’s nukes fall into the hands of extremists. A cynic might wonder, as Lenin’s Tomb does above, whether the scare tactics are deliberate on the part of the Obama team, to justify the wider regional war Obama signaled during his campaign; or even, as some Pakistani elites fear, a spiriting away of Pakistan’s nukes by American special forces.

In the U.S. we’re hearing only one side of the story. We don’t a thoughful discussion of how the drone attacks begun under Bush and continued by Obama, intended to target Al Qaeda operatives but which inevitably kill women and children, are themselves a major cause of the instability we’re reading about. There are now up to one million refugees in Pakistan due to the fighting, and drone attacks have killed nearly 700 civilians but only 14 confirmed militants, a ratio of 50:1.

Just as in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, it might be time to ask whether U.S. tactics are part of the problem, and stop the provocative drone attacks. Concrete gestures of cooperation with the Pakistani governing class would also help, to allay fears that Washington is preparing for another military coup. This could start with U.S. officials taking Pakistani democracy more seriously than ever before, and engaging in a public, transparent discussion with Pakistani politicians, journalists and civil society. Scaremongering by the U.S. won’t help build trust on either side.

Egypt’s paranoid dictatorship is trying to distract the people from its own unpopularity by cracking down on emos.

Egyptian emos have more to worry about than just being mocked by their peers; they are now being actively targeted by the police. “State security sees us as a dangerous underground, as Satanists, as queers and faggots,” one emo told a state-run newspaper.

What’s an emo? A disaffected teenager with dyed black hair, who is always feeling sad and sensitive. Or to put it another way:

A few well-off, bored teenagers hanging around in shopping malls…. Essentially a consumer culture — it’s all about your image and which music you purchase.

Like every other problem in Egypt, like the recent pig slaughter, this seems to be due to a government that lacks legitimacy, overreacting out of weakness because it fears a challenge from Islamic conservatives.

President Mubarak’s regime has lost all legitimacy amongst Egyptians both politically and culturally, a state of affairs it seeks to reverse by inventing both internal and external enemies of the state and portraying itself as the last hope for the soon-to-be-besieged Egyptian populace…. Culturally the government likes to style itself as a last bastion of Islamic values, the irony of which is obvious to anyone witness to the daily security clampdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood. So now emos are the latest hate-figures; their strange looks and vague connections to undefined, sordid western values makes them the perfect foil for a dictatorship on the back foot.

I wish I had some pictures of Egyptian emos to present here, but apparently there aren’t that many of them. So instead I’m showing you a Western emo as a type specimen.

Could a few thousand oversensitive teenagers be a threat to Egyptian society? Read the article for a portrait of a dictatorship in decline.

I thought Christians were supposed to be fishers of men, not hunters of men?

Evangelical Christians in the U.S. military apparently think they’re in Afghanistan to bring Muslims to Christ. Leaving aside the fact that this is deeply provocative and against the military’s own regulations, these words of Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the top chaplain in Afghanistan, don’t sound very Christlike to me.

The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same thing as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We hunt ‘em down. Get the hound of heaven after ‘em. So we get ‘em in the Kingdom, right? That’s what we do, that’s our business!

The video is from Al Jazeera, with footage from Bagram Air Base, shot last year by documentary filmmaker Brian Hughes.