Draft Gore 2008 PAC

p a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7416163/Iran-and-US-trade-insults-over-Taliban-led-violence.html " Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates traded insults on Wednesday in Kabul/a. Gates accused Iran of claiming to support the Karzai government in Kabul but of playing a 'double game' and secretly giving aid to the Taliban. Ahmadinejad complained that the US fostered Sunni radicalism in the 1980s as part of its struggle to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, and now had no right to complain about radicalism and terrorism in the region.br /br /In this exchange, Ahmadinejad surely won on points. Gates's allegation of substantial Iranian support for the hyper-Sunni Shiite-killing Taliban is implausible on the face of it, and makes Gates look silly in regional eyes.br /br /a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir6IEOQ_4Go " Russia Today reports on the tiff/a:br /br /object width="390" height="285"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ir6IEOQ_4Gohl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ir6IEOQ_4Gohl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="285"/embed/objectbr /br /The dispute is particularly unfortunate, since the US and Iran largely have the same goals and friends in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration should have been talking to Iran all along about their overlapping interests in that country. br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-8890719137911257006?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p Obama's Mideast policy lies in tatters this morning and US credibility as a broker of any future settlement was deeply wounded.br /br /a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/palestinian-peace-snub "Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, announced Wednesday that he had been informed/a by Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that the latter has pulled out of indirect talks with Israel. Late Wednesday, a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5inrglldVLwlsblOirihAdfh7QCNg " the Arab League itself reversed its earlier cautious endorsement of the proximity talks/a, recommending that that support be dropped.br /br /a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioi_0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD9EC1MA00 " Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory lies at the heart of the Mideast conflict/a. It isn't a complicated issue in the law, since Israel's actions are clearly illegal and unethical to boot. But might makes right and Israel is the most powerful country in the Middle East, so all the protests on legal and humanitarian grounds have amounted to nothing.br /br /The talks were likely deliberately sabotaged by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had his Interior Minister announce the construction of 1600 new households in Occupied East Jerusalem the day before they were scheduled to begin. In fact, a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1155639.html " Israel is actively planning u50,000/u further housing units on occupied Palestinian territory./a US Vice President Joe Biden had come to kick off the process with visits to Netanyahu and Abbas, but he has now been sent home empty-handed by Netanyahu's sheer effrontery.br /br /Netanyahu's far rightwing coalition includes many members of the Knesset or Israeli parliament who are bound and determined to colonize every last inch of the Palestinian West Bank and to reduce the Palestinians to landless beggars. Were the prime minister to make too many concessions to the Obama administration, some of them might well pull out of his government, and it could easily fall. Netanyahu is convinced that the Clinton administration undermined him the last time he was prime minister, and he is determined not to allow that to happen again. So acted as though he was complying with US demands for a settlement freeze, but exempted part of Palestinian territory from the freeze. Then shortly before proximity talks were to begin he had his Interior Ministry announce further colonization, knowing that it would complicate or (better) nix the talks. Netanyahu knew that if he was pressed on the announcement, he could get himself off the hook by apologizing for his flat-footed minister's poor timing. Biden did not buy this lame shadow play and neither will anyone else with any common sense.br /br /Since 1949, the US has a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14083.htm " given Israel over $100 billion in direct aid/a, and the indirect forms of aid are orders of magnitude greater. That the vice president of the United States (and therefore the president himself) were ambushed by the prime minister in this arrogant and nearly sadistic manner raises the severest questions about why US taxpayer money should flow in such enormous amounts to a country that is actively and on a massive scale violating the Hague Agreement of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of populations by occupiers. And this at a time when the US budget deficit is ballooning and there is not enough government money to take care of the needs of US citizens. The argument that Israel is a security asset for the United States is undermined if the Israelis are provoking enmity toward the United States among 1.5 billion Muslims by their inexorable annexation of Palestinian land and daily oppression of the Palestinian people.br /br /Biden took small bits of revenge on Netanyahu, a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK_eyyRkJ7w "such as going on Aljazeera English from the Occupied West Bank and denouncing the Netanyahu government's plans to expand its colonies on Palestinian territory as "destabilizing."/abr /br /object width="390" height="285"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fK_eyyRkJ7whl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fK_eyyRkJ7whl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="285"/embed/objectbr /br /Obama is in real danger of seeing his allies lose respect for the United States once they see that Israel can treat him in this humiliating way with impunity. The security implications for the US are enormous. Many European allies feel strongly that Israel is an aggressor state in the region, and when Obama asks them for help in the fight against al-Qaeda, they may feel that Washington's coddling of Israeli colonialism produced much of the radicalism that they are now asked to spend blood and treasure combating. Moreover, many leaders may be emboldened to treat Obama and Biden just as Netanyahu did, if the latter faces no consequences for his impudence.br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-3193618469667421133?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p The far rightwing a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/03/09/2010-03-09_blindsided_biden_lashes_out_at_israel_on_settlement_boom.html "government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel majorly sandbagged Vice President Joe Biden/a on Tuesday, demonstrating once again that it has not the slightest interest in pursuing a just peace with the Palestinian people or in trading a cessation of its colonization of the Palestinian West Bank for a comprehensive peace with the Arab world.br /br /Biden went to the Mideast to kick off negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and reassured the latter of undying US support for them. On Chris Matthews' Hardball, Biden explained that when you marry someone, you tell them you love them, but that does not remove the obligation to keep saying it years later. Apparently, however, Washington is henpecked by Tel Aviv to the point almost of being a battered spouse. In response to Biden's loyal support for Israel over decades, the Likud-led government kicked him in the teeth. Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai abruptly announced that he would build 1600 new households (for 8,000 people?) in a part of the Occupied West Bank that the Israeli government had annexed to Jerusalem District. It was precisely such new and increasing Israeli building on Palestinian territory that had led Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to reject negotiations and to threaten to resign. The announcement put in doubt whether the negotiations would go forward, and made Biden and the United States government look like fools.br /br /Joe Biden should have turned around and left the country. Instead, he showed up 90 minutes late to a state dinner hosted by Netanyahu and dared actually directly complain about the way he was treated, "I condemn the decision," he said, calling it "precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel."br /br /a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1n4kMDVdxs " Aljazeera English reports on Biden's visit and the Israeli announcement of new colonization measures/a:br /br /object width="390" height="285"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Y1n4kMDVdxshl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Y1n4kMDVdxshl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="285"/embed/objectbr /br /The Netanyahu government had announced a settlement freeze in much of the West Bank for 8 months, but does not include the areas it unilaterally annexed to the district of Jerusalem as West Bank territory. Nor is the 'settlement freeze' really any such thing, since there are plans to expand housing in existing colonies on the West Bank. br /br /This controversy comes on the heels of demonstrations in al-Khalil/ Hebron and Jerusalem by Palestinians a href="http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/al-khalil-hebron-and-jerusalem-protests.html " outraged by the unilateral Israeli designation of the Tombs of the Patriarchs and the tomb of Rachel, in Palestinian West Bank territory, as bIsraeli/b heritage sites/a. In Palestinian experience, such Israeli claims often precede Israeli annexation. While US mass media did not cover the demonstrations in any detail (a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/weir02262010.html "much reporting from Israel in US media is by dual citizens or by reporters who have served or have children serving/a in the Israeli army), they are a big story in the Middle East, and the creeping Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem is guaranteed to enrage the world's 1.5 billion Muslims and result in violence.br /br /The Obama administration came into office determined to restart the negotiations between Abbas and the Israelis, with the aim of achieving a two-state solution. After over a year of meetings and carrying messages and cajoling, the patient-as-Job special envoy George Mitchell finally convinced Mahmoud Abbas to agree to indirect negotiations with Israel. For the past year, Abbas had refused to talk, on the grounds that the Israelis were actively colonizing the West Bank and so taking away the very territory that was subject to negotiation. How do you parlay with someone who is stealing from you at that very moment?br /br /The Oslo process of the 1990s, initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, had aimed at establishing two states side by side, Israel and Palestine. Neither the Likud Party of Netanyahu nor Hamas among the Palestinians wanted to see that process succeed. Likud wanted all of the former British Mandate of Palestine to be permanently under Israeli control, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967 and which have a stateless, rights-less Palestinian population of over 4 million persons. The Israelis have steadily and determinedly usurped Palestinian territory throughout the last nearly a century, and by now it is highly unlikely that what is left of the Palestinian West Bank and the besieged, half-starving Gaza Strip can plausibly be cobbled together into a 'state.'br /br /img src="http://www.leedspsc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/israel-palestine-map.jpg " width="390 " height="240 "br /br /In my view, it doesn't really matter if Netanyahu's slap in the face to Biden derails the proposed indirect talks. The Likud-led government has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state, and there is now no place to put one. Israel-Palestine has unalterably entered the era of Apartheid (actually something worse), and it will spell both the end of dreams of peace in our generation, and probably over time the end of Israel as Netanyahu's generation knew it. The Palestinians cannot be left stateless (the legal estate of slaves as well as of Jews under Nazi rule, i.e. people with no legal rights) forever. If they can't have Palestinian citizenship, then they'll have to have Israeli citizenship. The future of Israel-Palestine is likely to become a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state like Lebanon. Ironically, it is Netanyahu who is in no small measure responsible for this likely outcome, the opposite of the one he aspires to.br /br /Israelis claim a 'birthright' to do things like colonize Palestinian territory, based on romantic-nationalist reworkings of biblical narratives. But Canaan was populated for millenia before some Canaanite tribes adopted the new religion of Judaism, and it was also ruled, as Palestine, for centuries by Romans and Greeks, and for 1400 years by Muslims. The Palestinian Jews converted to Christianity and then to Islam, so they are cousins of the European Jews (who appear to have gone to Europe voluntarily as male merchants around 800 CE,, where they took local wives). European Jews are about half European by parentage and all European by cultural heritage, and it is no more natural that they be in geographical Palestine than that they be in Europe (where nearly two-thirds of their mothers were from and about a third of their fathers). From a Middle Eastern point of view, European Jews planted in British Mandate Palestine by the British Empire were no different from the million colons or European colonists brought to Algeria while it was under French rule from 1830-1962. (Algeria had been ruled in antiquity by Rome, and the French considered themselves heirs of the Roman Empire, so it was natural that people from Marseilles should return to 'their' territory. Romantic nationalism, whether French or Zionist, always has the same shape). I don't predict the same fate for Jewish Israelis as befell the French colons. Rather, I think they are likely to more and more resemble in their position the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon-- i.e. powerful and formerly dominant population-wise, but increasingly challenged by other rising communities.br /br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-4574091189355919230?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p As I a href="http://www.juancole.com/2010/01/ahmadinejad-as-truther.html "reported in January, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad /a has begun taking the line that the September 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington were actually stage-managed by US "Intelligence," to create a pretext for American invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This view is not widely shared among Iranians or Iranian politicians. Iran itself lost nationals in Afghanistan and Pakistan to assassination by al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and Shiite Hazaras in Afghanistan were massacred by the same forces. Then-president Mohammad Khatami expressed warm condolences to the US after the attacks, noting that Iran had suffered from terrorism as well. Iranian young people held candle light vigils for the victims. br /br /Ahmadinejad's recent speech to the Iranian Intelligence Ministry reiterates this 'truther' crackpot conspiracy theory about 9/11. The speech also demonstrates a Manichaean vision of history, in which the virtuous Islamic Republic is ranged against the forces of capitalism, which he says was invented by Zionists and which is intrinsically belligerent, war-like, exploitative and genocidal. (This analysis of the capitalist system as fomenting aggression and war comes not from Shiite theology but from Lenin's analysis of the outbreak of World War I, as a capitalist war over control of markets.) Ahmadinejad's looney assertion that capitalism was invented by 'Zionists' is ridiculous, since capitalism developed in early modern and modern Europe and Zionism as a movement did not amount to anything until the late nineteenth century at the earliest. But the trope of an essentialist connection between Jews, capitalism and exploitation is a commonplace in the literature of anti-Semitism, and is probably the origin of this bizarre allegation. br /br /Ancient Iran developed the first monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, which holds that history is the unfolding of a battle between Ahura Mazda, God, and the evil Ahriman, a satan figure. The prophet of the new religion was Zarathustra, whom the Greeks called Zoroaster. The archaic language of the Old Persian (which is close to Sanskrit) of Gathas, his scripture, probably places him in the 1200s BC, though there are disputes and some date him hundreds of years later. Although some speak of Zoroastrianism as dualistic, Ahura Mazda is more powerful than Ahriman and will defeat him in the fullness of time. Human beings, the creation of Ahura Mazda, play a role in determining how soon the victory comes. When they lie or commit immoral acts, they aid and abet Ahriman. When they tell the truth and are virtuous, they aid Ahura Mazda and hasten the advent of the Saoshyant or promised future messiah. Zoroastrianism invented concepts such as the Last Days, the resurrection of the dead, and an eternal afterlife. br /br /Although Iran converted to Islam gradually (and mostly willingly) after the seventh century CE, cultural influences of Zoroastrianism are visible in Iranian Shiite Islam. Indeed, Zoroastrian ideas probably influenced Judaism and the writing of the Bible during the Babylonian exile, as Iran came to rule Babylonia. And since the Parthian dynasty of Iran a href="http://www.persianempire.info/parthia11.htm " had a presence in Palestine/a shortly before the advent of Christianity, it is not impossible that Iranian themes influenced that religion, as well. br /br /Ahmadinejad's speech not only presents a dualistic war between good Iran and an evil, Ahriman-like United States (champion of oppressive capitalism), but also refers to the Iranian president's emphasis on the Shiite Promised One or Imam Mahdi. He refers to Iran's intelligence operatives as the 'unknown soldiers' of the 'Lord of the Age' (i.e. the Mahdi), and praises them for capturing Abdul Malik Rigi, the leader of the Sunni Baluch terrorist group Jundullah (Army of God), which has attacked mosques and other sites in the Iranian province of Baluchistan and Sistan in the southeast. Baluch are Sunnis and many feel oppressed under Persian, Shiite rule; the province is the poorest in Iran. Rigi's televised confession alleged that he was recruited by high-level CIA and other US intelligence officials and did not strike me as credible as to its details, but a href="http://www.raceforiran.com/from-tehran-no-revolution-looming-but-deep-disappointment-with-obama%E2%80%99s-failure-to-change-u-s-policy "it appears to have been widely believed by the Iranian public and to have hurt the image among them of the Obama administration/a, according to Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.br /br /Not only is Ahmadinejad the Iranian equivalent of a truther, he is also the mirror image of the Christian Zionists. That brand of evangelicals in the US believes that the establishment of Israel throughout geographical Palestine, i.e. the complete annexation of the West Bank and perhaps the expulsion of its Palestinian residents, will hasten the return of Christ.br /br /Ahmadinejad holds the opposite. It is in his view the collapse of what he calls the Zionist regime and the emergence of a state for all Palestinians, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, that will provoke the Promised One to come. In Shiite Islam, the promised one is the return of the 12th Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, the lineal descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. In Muslim folk belief it is sometimes alleged that when the Mahdi comes, Jesus will also return, and they will join forces to prepare the world for the Judgment Day. When he was in Damascus on 25 February, Ahmadinejad spoke thusly when meeting with Syrian Muslim clergymen, as broadcast on the official Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 radio channel that day, and translated by the USG Open Source Center:br /br /blockquote 'The day on which the Lord of the Age (REFERENCE to the 12th Shiite imam) and Jesus (peace be upon him) will come and spread monotheism and justice in the whole world, is close. Understand this. The final move has begun. God willing, with the destruction of the Zionist regime, the prophets' mission will be fulfilled. Today, the settings of the stage for the resurrection of Jesus and endeavors to prepare the ground for the re-appearance of Imam Mahdi, are factors which make up the axis of unity of all those who have faith in the holy prophets.' /blockquotebr /br /Because there will be a lot of propaganda around all this, I want to underline that Ahmadinejad did not then and has never called for the violent destruction of Israelis or Israel. He rather expects the 'Zionist regime' peacefully to collapse, as the Soviet regime in Moscow did. It is that peaceful collapse that will apparently in his view herald the return of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, and of Jesus Christ.br /br /Here is the USG Open Source Center translation of Ahmadinejad's speech of March 6, in which he again says that September 11 was a plot of US intelligence services:br /br /Iran: President Ahmadinezhad Says 11 September Attacks 'Big Lie'br /IRNAbr /Saturday, March 6, 2010 br /Document Type: OSC Translated Text . . .br /br /br /Tehran, 6 March: President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad had said: The arrest ofbr /br /Abdolmalek Rigi (the leader of rebel Sunni group Jondollah) has humiliated the intelligence services of the US, Britain, and the Zionist regime [by his televised confession that he was working in tandem with the CIA to blow up mosques and other sites in Iranian Baluchistan -JC].br /br /Ahmadinezhad, who was speaking at a meeting with the minister, deputy ministers, managers, and personnel of the Intelligence Ministry, congratulated the auspicious birthday anniversary of the prophet of light and compassion, His Holiness Muhammad al-Mustafa (peace be upon him) and the birthday anniversary of Imam Sadeq (Sixth Shi'i imam) (peace be upon him), IRNA reported on Saturday (6 March), quoting the presidential website. He said that the Intelligence Ministry's personnel are the best collection of Hezbollahi (members of Party of God; meaning pious) forces and added: Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran's intelligence system is the most virtuous intelligence system in the world.br /br /The President said that the Lord of the Age's Unknown Soldiers (intelligence forces) have a divine and sacred mission. He said: The Intelligence Ministry should be the most coordinated, organized, powerful, and flowing (Persian -- Ravantarin) organization in the country.br /br /The President said that the purpose of man's creation was to establish a world government based on monotheism and justice. He added: Throughout history, devils fought against prophets and pious people. The climax of man's fight against devils is taking place in our time. Today, the devils show that they are gathered at the forefront of the world arrogance.br /br /He added: Man's nature is a divine and heavenly one. When man's thought and nature are limited to worldly affairs, then he will have no option but to fall.br /br /The President said that capitalist thoughts have resulted in plundering, bullying, and the killing of mankind's essence. He said: Liberal democracy is the result of a fight between power and wealth. The US-led world arrogance's front against the Islamic Republic is the climax of the fight between the monotheism front and devils.br /The head of the Supreme National Security Council said that all vices in history have gathered in the arrogance front. He said: The crimes committed by the world arrogant are unprecedented in history. Today, the heaviest massacre and terrorist actions in the world are carried out by their (the arrogant of the world) accomplices by raising the flag of human rights.br /br /Ahmadinezhad said that the materialist thoughts were challenged and Marxism was destroyed after the emergence of the Islamic Republic. He said: Thanks to the grace of God, the capitalist system founded by the Zionists has reached the end of its path.br /br /The president added: US invasions and NATO's military expedition in the region are merely aimed at saving liberal democracy and the capitalist school of thought.br /br /He said that the September 11 attacks and the demolition of the Twin Towers in the US were a complex scenario carried out by the intelligence (Persian -- Eqdam-e Ettela'ati). He said: The 11 September event was a big lie. It paved the way for the military expedition to Afghanistan under the pretext of fighting with terrorism.br /br /Ahmadinezhad referred to the arrest of Abodlmalek Rigi by the Soldiers of the Lord of the Age (the Iranian intelligence forces) and said: The arrest of this terrorist bandit has humiliated the intelligence services of the US, Britain, and the Zionist regime. . .br /br /(Description of Source: Tehran IRNA in Persian -- Official state-run online news agency, headed as of January 2010 by Ali Akbar Javanfekr, former media adviser to President Ahmadinezhad. URL:http://www.irna.ir)br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-620959981524451708?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p Received from a href="http://www.mamillacampaign.org/ " the Mamilla Campaign/a, which notes:br /br /blockquote THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER AND THE GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL ARE BUILDING A “MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE” ON CENTURIES-OLD MUSLIM GRAVES.br /br /History - Since the Seventh Century, the Ma’man Allah (Mamilla) cemetery has been the most important Moslem burial site in Jerusalem. It contains the remains of leaders of Saladin’s army, Muslim scholars, and important Jerusalem families going back at least one thousand years. It is a well delineated 33 acre site that was in use until 1948 and was fastidiously respected by the Ottoman rulers and the British Mandate. It contains tens of thousands of graves in several layers as well as gravestones, monuments and the two-thousand year old “Mamilla pool.” /blockquotebr /br /and proposes:br /br /PUBLIC PETITION TO STOP DESECRATION OF MAMILLA MUSLIM CEMETERY IN JERUSALEM BY ISRAELI AUTHORITIES AND THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTERbr /br /(Sign a href="http://www.mamillacampaign.org/sign.php " the petition here/a).br /br /We demand that the competent Israeli authorities act:br /br /1.To immediately halt further construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center "Museum of Tolerance" on part of the Mamilla Cemetery site in Jerusalem;br /br /2.To declare the entire historic site of the Mamilla Cemetery an antiquity, to be preserved and protected henceforth by its rightful and appropriate custodians, the Muslim Waqf (public endowment) authorities in Jerusalem;br /br /3.To recover and rebury where they were originally found all human remains removed from Mamilla Cemetery, in coordination with the competent Muslim authorities in Jerusalem; and,br /br /4.To document and reveal to families who claim their ancestors are buried in Mamilla, or to their representatives, the whereabouts of human remains and artifacts, as well as archaeological fragments and monuments exhumed in the construction.br /-----------------------------------------------------br /br /Here is a summary of the Basic Facts regarding Mamilla Cemetery.br /br /THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER AND THE GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL ARE BUILDING A “MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE” ON CENTURIES-OLD MUSLIM GRAVES.br /History - Since the Seventh Century, the Ma’man Allah (Mamilla) cemetery has been the most important Moslem burial site in Jerusalem. It contains the remains of leaders of Saladin’s army, Muslim scholars, and important Jerusalem families going back at least one thousand years. It is a well delineated 33 acre site that was in use until 1948 and was fastidiously respected by the Ottoman rulers and the British Mandate. It contains tens of thousands of graves in several layers as well as gravestones, monuments and the two-thousand year old “Mamilla pool.”br /br /SINCE 1948 – After the 1948 War, the site was expropriated by the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property. The Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry originally recognized the great importance of the site to the Muslim community. However, the traditional caretakers of the cemetery, the Trustees of the Islamic Endowment (the waqf), were not allowed to maintain and protect the cemetery and it was neglected and vandalized. In the 1960’s, half of it was turned into an “Independence Park.” A parking lot was built over another part of the cemetery in 1964. A school, playing field and an underground parking garage were built on it. During the garage excavations, human remains from exposed graves were seen scattered about the construction site. During this time Palestinians protested these desecrations with appeals to the Israeli mayors of Jerusalem, petitions to UNESCO and public demonstrations. At present, only a fraction of the original cemetery is identifiable, with few grave markers remaining visible. br /br /The “Museum of Tolerance” – The Jerusalem Municipality, ignoring public protests, deeded part of the cemetery to the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles and in 2002, approved plans for the construction of the “Center for Human Dignity – Museum of Tolerence” on the site. Digging on the site, which began in 2005, has resulted in the exhumation of hundreds of graves and remains, some dating back to the 12th Century. The Chief Excavator for the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), Gideon Suleimani, issued a report and has attested in an affidavit to the fact that there are at least 2000 graves under the project site, in four layers, in addition to hundreds already exposed. He further attested to the intense pressure exerted on the IAA by the SWC and Israeli politicians and developers to approve construction on the site. br /br /The Israeli Courts – Public outcry, including opposition to the location of the project at the Mamilla site by the Mayor of Jerusalem and other prominent Israelis, failed to halt the construction activity. Families whose ancestors lie buried at the site, together with others, sued in Israeli courts to stop the excavations. The complainants lost in the Israeli High Court in 2008. In ruling against the families the High Court relied upon the determination of a low level Muslim judge from Jaffa that the cemetery had been “desanctified” because of disuse. The judge, acting at the behest of the Israeli authorities, was convicted of fraud in the same year, and his ruling has since been overruled by the highest Islamic authorities in Israel. br /br /Petition to the United Nations – A Petition For Urgent Action on Human Rights Violations by Israel: Desecration of the Ma’man Allah (Mamilla) Muslim Cemetery in the Holy City of Jerusalem was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights with various United Nations agencies on Feb. 10, 2010, on behalf of sixty individual Palestinians whose ancestors are buried at Mamilla, and numerous Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. NGO’s who oppose the SWC project. The Petition cites numerous violations of International Law and requests the U.N.agencies to investigate and, ultimately, ask Israel and the SWC to stop excavations, recover remains, release remains to Islamic authorities for proper reburial and designate the entire Mamilla cemetery as a protected religious site. For the text of the petition and further information, go to: www.mamillacampaign.org. br /br /A Public Petition - A public petition was drafted on behalf of all persons, regardless of ethnic or religious background or nationality, who are outraged by the desecration of the Mamilla burial site. When signed, it will be publicized and presented to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the U.N., the Israeli authorities, and the U.S. government, demanding the same relief requested in the formal petition to the U.N. bodies. br /br /Thank you for all of your helpbr /br /Sign a href="http://www.mamillacampaign.org/sign.php " the petition here/a.br /br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-334529335437047965?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

Sunday's vote for a new parliament in Iraq on Sunday could result in two possible geopolitical futures for that country.br /br /If the Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi did well enough to come to power, that would reorient Iraq radically, taking it back in some ways to 2002. Allawi's coalition is largely made up of Arab nationalists who would see Iran as a threat and would ally with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Baghdad would go back to helping contain Iran. Sunni Arab radicalism would likely be tamped down. For Washington, it would be the best of all possible worlds-- a pro-American Iraqi government headed by a former CIA asset that is willing to help pressure Iran for the West. Internally, an Allawi government that depends heavily on Sunni Arab constituencies would find it difficult to compromise with the Kurds on the disputed province of Kirkuk or on Kurdistan's interests in Ninevah and Diyala, setting the stage for a potential civil war.br /br /If, on the other hand, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki manages to hold on to power, Iraq will remain firmly in Shiite hands, and will likely have warm relations with Tehran. Certainly, Baghdad would have no interest in helping contain Iran. Relations with Saudi Arabia will continue to be bad. As the US withdraws, Iranian influence could ramp up and fill the vacuum. Al-Maliki also has his tensions with the Kurds, but his relatively bad relations with the Sunni Arabs of Mosul mean that he could deal with the Kurds without incurring much more enmity from the Sunni Arabs than he already does.br /br /So those are the two possibilities facing Iraq-- roughly, reintegration into the Sunni-dominated Arab League, or an Iran alliance. In a way, the choices replicate those of the 1930s, Iraq's first decade of independence from Britain. The government of PM Hikmat Sulaiman in 1936-1937 rejected Arab nationalism and developed good relations with Iran. Sulaiman was a Turkmen and he served under the military dictatorship of Bakr al-Sidqi, a Kurd. There is a sense in which the al-Maliki-Talibani condominium of the past 4 years revives many geopolitical themes of the Sulaiman-Sidqi period. Their dire enemies were the Arab nationalist officers, who were focused on Palestine and felt more kinship with Egypt than with Iran. Allawi is more in that Arab nationalist tradition, though he is by heritage a Shiite.br /br /Here is why I think the return of Allawi as prime minister is unlikely despite an apparently strong showing for his party in the elections.br /br /The Saudi-owned pan-Arab London daily a href="http://www.aawsat.com//details.asp?section=4issueno=11423article=560120feature= ""The Middle East" [al-Sharq al-Awsat] is reporting that its correspondents are conveying an (unscientific) impression from exit polling that the Iraqi National List/a of Allawi is doing extremely well in the Sunni Arab provinces, and is running a strong second in the Shiite south (Kurds in the north typically vote only for Kurdish parties.) The report is rather breathless and I think the numbers are almost certainly exaggerated. It also alleges that current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition is getting 40% of votes in the Shiite south, which may be true for Baghdad and Basra (it did nearly that well in the provincial elections last year), but it would represent a major change in voting patterns in rural Shiite provinces such as Maysan and Dhi Qar.br /br /Even so, without an unexpected landslide in the south, Allawi is unlikely to become prime minister. He will need 163 seats out of 325 to govern, and there is probably no way for his coalition to deliver them. Even leading lists will likely get less that 100 seats, and so will need post-election coalition partners. That small parties willing to ally with Allawi would have as many as 75 seats to deliver to him seems unlikely. So he'd have to deal with the big three--the State of Law, the National Iraqi Alliance, and the Kurdistan Alliance (or the Kurdistan parties generally). But they might well decline to deal with him, and could seek to exclude him instead.br / br /Al-Maliki's State of Law list campaigned hard against the resurgence of Baathism, and Allawi and many on his list are ex-Baathists, so al-Maliki would have to eat a lot of crow to accept a junior position in an Allawi government. It seems unlikely, even if politics makes for strange bedfellows. br /br /The Shiite religious parties grouped in the National Iraqi Alliance are said by the exit polls (for the little they are worth) to be coming in third. They are also highly unlikely to ally with Allawi, since he is an old-time CIA asset and ex-Baathist whose interim government was hostile to the Shiite religious authorities and to Iran. br /br /Allawi appears to be attracting strong support in Ninevah Province in the north, which returned an Arab nationalist party in the provincial elections of 2009. Ninevah has a Sunni Arab majority and a Kurdish minority, but the Kurds had been dominant in provincial government and the security forces because the Sunnis had sat out the provincial elections of January 2005. There is very bad blood between the Arabs and Kurds in Ninevah.br /br /So Allawi will find it difficult to ally with the Kurds while keeping his Sunni Arab nationalist base. (Update: I incorrectly said earlier that it takes two thirds to elect a president, but this rule was changed so that it is only on the first try; if parliament cannot elect a president by 2/3s, it can do so on the second ballot by 51 percent. That this is so strengthens my argument that the Shiites and Kurds could outmaneuver Allawi.)br /br /Whereas the numbers don't easily add up for Allawi, it seems likely that the State of Law, the Shiite fundamentalist parties of the NIA, and some smaller parties willing to join the two of them, could easily get to over 163, and they have a proven ability to work with the Kurds and independents. br /br /As I suggested Sunday, a href="http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/will-muqtada-and-ammar-force-next-prime.html "one price al-Maliki might have to pay to gain the National Iraqi alliance as a partner/a is to agree to accelerate the US troop withdrawal (a key demand of the Sadr faction in the NIA).br /br /Whatever the outcome of the voting (and a projected result based on one-third of the votes is scheduled to be announced on Wednesday), it may not be easily accepted by the losers. There is tremendous anxiety in Iraq about the possibility of ballot fraud in the wake of Sunday's parliamentary elections. The Iranian Arabic-language satellite station al-Alam reported on Sunday that the Shiite fundamentalist Sadr movement was alarmed to hear that ballot boxes were being transported from the provinces to Baghdad by US troops, and insisted that the US be kept away from those boxes. (They must have heard about Florida in 2000). Allawi is on Aljazeera complaining about irregularities. He didn't say this, but campaigning continued through Sunday although it was supposed to be forbidden after Friday late afternoon. In Basra, a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/116912 "al-Hayat reports that anti-Allawi pamphlets were dropped by helicopter on Saturday and Sunday./abr /br /Bottom line, another Allawi prime ministership is unlikely even if his list turns in strong performance. br /br /End/ (Not Continued)br /br /br /div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-7588196099609458982?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

pbAnnouncement/b:br / br /The National Iranian American Council is pleased to present “Iran at a Crossroads: Assessing a Changing Landscape” on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 9 AM in Dirksen Senate Office Building Room 106, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. The conference will feature experts such as Professor Juan Cole, Dr. Scott Lucas of Enduring America and Amb. Robert Hunter of the RAND Corporation. For more information, please visit a href="http://www.niacouncil.org/march10"the event page for this briefing at the NIAC site./a br /br /br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-2109388641035844764?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8553929.stm " Voting in Iraq began early Sunday, and turnout appeared to be heavy/a. The BBC analysis is that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition will do well enough at the polls to again form the government, partnering with other religious Shiite parties. According to the Iraqi constitution, the party or coalition list with the largest number of seats, even if it is not a majority, will be given the first opportunity to form a government.br /br /Al-Maliki, however, may well have to pay a price for remaining prime minister, if he can manage to do so, since that outcome would certainly require that he make a post-election coalition with the Shiite religious parties of the National Iraqi Alliance. The latter include the Sadr Movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Sadr movement, said Saturday on the Iran-based al-Alam satellite channel that he would only support a prime ministerial candidate who agreed to accelerate the departure of the US from Iraq. Based on its performance in last year's provincial elections, the Sadr Movement could well get half of the seats gained by the National Iraqi Alliance; if Sadrists did that well, they could be essential to putting together the 51 percent al-Maliki (or any other prime minister) would need to govern. Scroll down to see a translation of Sadr's remarks, which are the first entry for Sunday below. br /br /Moreover, it is not just al-Sadr. I detect a change in the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, now led by Ammar al-Hakim after the death from lung cancer of his father, Abd al-Aziz. The father had been sanguine about the presence of US troops in Iraq, and called for them to stay in the country, seeing them as a guarantor against the return of the Baathists (the secular Arab nationalists led by Saddam Hussein before his overthrow in 2003). Ammar al-Hakim was brought up in Iran and is close to Iranian hard liners. The US military once arrested him as he was sneaking across the border from Iran after a secret visit to Tehran that appears not to have involved any visas or border stations. In Ankara last winter, a href="http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:g6x9twEgTwMJ:www.orsam.org.tr/en/enUploads/Article/Files/20091223_elhekim_eng%255B1%255D.pdf+Ammar+al-Hakimcd=25hl=enct=clnkgl=us " he referred to the US military as "occupation forces"/a and gave partial credit to ISCI for forcing them to withdraw on a timetable. But as late as January, a href="http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2010/01/ammar-al-hakim-in-beirut.html " even he was saying that the US presence in Iraq is not a major issue, since it has departed and the bases are being closed/a (he probably meant that it has decided to depart). He also, however, praised armed resistance to Israeli occupation and, on a trip to Beirut, laid a wreat at the tomb of Imad Mughniya, a radical Shiite whom the US and Israeli categorized as a terrorist.br /br /Ammar has a say in who serves as the Friday Prayer leader and sermonizer at the mosque of the shrine of Ali in the holy city of Najaf, a position of great influence. It is now held by Sayyid Yasin al-Musawi. Al-Musawi's a href=" http://www.belagh.com/news.asp?id=6sId=17153" sermon on last Friday in Najaf/a contained a number of themes that suggest that ISCI may be returning to its Khomeinist roots. Al-Musawi praised political obedience to the Shiite grand ayatollahs, not just spiritual obedience. That sounded close to the Khomeinist principle of the guardianship of the jurisprudent, or rule of the ayatollahs, which prevails in Iran. And he warned of conspiracies against Iraqi independence, saying that these conspiracies were launched by 'global arrogance and the secularists.'br /br /Now, 'global arrogance' is a technical term in political discourse among hard liners in Iran, and refers to the United States. I never heard an ISCI preacher use this phrase while Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim was leading the movement. Al-Musawi was warning of a US alliance with the secular National Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi aimed at keeping Iraq a colony of Washington.br /br /(In fact, a href=" "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030602538.html"Karen DeYoung of WaPo reports that the Obama administration came to the conclusion that Washington had little chance of influencing/a the outcome of the election.)br /br /That was the other change in terminology. Al-Musawi urged voters in Najaf to cast their ballots for those who will work for Iraqi independence and against 'colonialism' (ial-isti`mar/i). Again, this term was not publicly foregrounded among leaders of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, since they had a rough alliance of convenience with Washington in overthrowing and marginalizing the Baath Party. But now the Friday prayers preacher of Najaf is denouncing global arrogance and openly calling Iraq a colonized country that must regain its independence. This point of view had more commonly been found among Iraqi Sunni Arabs or in the Sadr Movement, as well as among hard liners across the border in Iran. br /br /So if ISCI has decided that it is now in its interest to push the US out on a shorter timetable, and is allied with Sadrists who think the same way, then they could make that acceleration of the withdrawal a precondition for joining al-Maliki's coalition. Al-Maliki would not have many alternatives. He is unlikely to pair himself with Allawi, whom he sees as a dusted-off Baathist (al-Maliki campaigned against what he warned was resurgent Baathist influence in Iraq, though by that he seems to have meant simple Arab nationalism that threatened the dominance of the Shiite religious parties, including his Islamic Mission (Da`wa) Party). That stance will make it hard for him to get cooperation from the National Iraqi List. Al-Maliki is also too much of an Iraqi nationalist to have really warm and close relations with the Kurdistan Alliance, which wants to add Kirkuk to its holdings, a step that al-Maliki has generally opposed. Moreover, al-Maliki may not need much pressure to call for a quicker US departure. He has for some time insisted that the Iraqi military is perfectly capable of keeping order in the country, and he clearly chafed when Vice President Joe Biden attempted to intervene to reverse the disqualification of over 500 allegedly Baath-linked candidates.br /br /Although a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50573 " some observers are hailing the possibility that ex-Baathist secularist Iyad Allawi could become prime minister, in part based on Sunni support/a, that scenario seems unlikely to me. In the early 2009 provincial elections, Allawi's list only got 3 percent in the major southern Shiite province of Basra, and in most of the other 8 provinces with heavy Shiite populations it did equally poorly or was almost invisible in the returns; Qadisiya Province was the outlier, where Allawi gained about 8 percent of the vote, as he did in Baghdad. (For the provincial election returns, a href="http://www.juancole.com/2009_02_01_juancole_archive.html " see my analysis of a little over a year ago./a) br /br /While it is true that Allawi has a bigger coalition this time, having been joined by secular Sunni Arabs, that won't help him in the Shiite south. In December, 2005, his list got 9 percent of the vote, in part because of popularity in Basra, which seems to have substantially declined. His list only got 14 percent in the provincial elections in the Sunni province of Salahuddin, and 8 percent in al-Anbar, though admittedly he has more Sunni partners this time. The only way his list will be the largest in parliament is if virtually all the Sunni Arabs swing behind it and there has been a sea change in Basra, Baghdad and Diwaniya so that he does unexpectedly well among the urban Shiite middle classes (his major likely constituents in the Shiite south).br /br /Since there is a ban on driving vehicles, guerrillas will not be able to use car bombs to disrupt the voting. They have therefore fallen back on firing mortar shells, as they did in January 2005. By 10:30 am Iraq time, some 24 dead were being reported in these attacks in north Baghdad and in Salahuddin Province, and the Green Zone that houses the US embassy and the Iraqi parliament had also been targeted.br /br /a href="http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100304/REVIEW/703049978/1008/review " Journalist Nir Rosen, who has spent a lot of time on the ground in the Red Zone in Iraq talking to real people/a, warns against the meme that the elections could bring a return of civil war or very major violence. I concur. My interviews with Sunni Arab Iraqis in Jordan suggest to me that that community is dejected and feels defeated, and is not looking foward to more violence.br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-8194301294531469175?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p i The USG Open Source Center translates an interview with Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr, broadcast in Arabic into Iraq by the Iranian al-Alam satellite television channel, which is widely watched by Iraqi Shiites. Coming on the eve of the election, the interview seems aimed at helping al-Sadr's National Iraqi Alliance, which groups several Shiite religious parties that have good relations with Iran and several of which are eager to accelerate the US military withdrawal.br /br /Sadr's main points are:br /br /1. Iraqis should vote to put in members of parliament who will support a quicker US withdrawal;br /br /2. Members of parliament should not server Shiite, Sunni or Kurd but rather the Iraqi nation;br /br /3. Regardless of the election outcome, people should not riot or resort to violence, but rather should stage peaceful demonstrations;br /br /4. Sadr does not rule out a coalition with even secular parties as long as they will agree to accelerate the US withdrawal; br /br /5. Sadr declines to condemn Saudi Arabia or Saudi money in Iraqi politics as long as that money helps elect nationalists who will work for a US withdrawal; he points out that he has visit Saudi Arabia, and condemns the friction between Shiites and Sunnis;br /br /6. No Iraqi government will be favorable toward Israel. /ibr /br /br /Iraqi Shiite Figure Al-Sadr Rejects Violencebr /Al-Alam Televisionbr /Saturday, March 6, 2010 . . .br /Document Type: OSC Summary . . .br /br /iTehran Al-Alam Television in Arabic at 1716 GMT on 6 March broadcast a recording of a news conference by Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Tehran. Al-Sadr said during the news conference that he has rejected violence and any "immoral" acts. /ibr /br /Al-Sadr said: "In the name of God the Most Merciful and Most Compassionate. . . I say that despite the fact that I was, I still am and will continue to reject the American and other occupation of Iraq and the sacred Iraqi territory. However, this does not mean that I reject the current election process. br /br /"In the past, I used to say that the elections or any political process under occupation is null and void and has no meaning or effect. However, in this stage of the elections, we wish that the Iraqi people make this election process a political resistance action, in the hope that we may be able to drive away the occupier through these elections. The occupier holds on to the (pretext) that the Iraqi government is the one that asks it to remain in Iraq.br /br /"In case the believers, sincere and patriotic people obtain parliamentary seats, this will be a door to the liberation of Iraq and to driving out the occupier and to something else which is important and which is to serve the Iraqi people. Serving the Iraqi people is a duty. We see that many members of the previous government, I would say, were not people to serve the Iraqi people in the past four years. It is hoped that the presence of believers and sincere people in large numbers will be a door to serving the Iraqi people and not to serving parties, sectarianism and personal and partisan interests.br /br /"Thus, I pray God Almighty and I hope that the believers from the believer Iraqi people go to the polls and vote for the one who is able to be loyal to the Iraqi people, to be the liberator of the Iraqi people and be a mujahid [struggler for the Faith] and a man of resistance with political resistance of and for the Iraqi people, a servant of the Iraqi people and not serve himself and his faction and party; no. br /br /"I want from all the believers to be Iraqis only and not serve their party or faction. Let us talk frankly: I do not want the Shi'i to serve the Shi'i and the Sunni serve the Sunni and the Kurd serve the Kurd. No. I want the Iraqi to serve the Iraqi, whether he is a Kurd, a Shi'i, a Torkoman or a Sunni or a member of any other Iraqi sect, whether a minority or a majority one. Thee important thing for the believers who obtain seats is to serve the Iraqi people and not their faction or party.br /br /"This is the first thing. The second thing which is also important is that I heard, and perhaps it is true, that acts of rioting will take place after the elections and acts of, let us say, violence and unhealthy acts will take place after the elections. This is completely rejected. Yes, there is a possibility and I have great fears of rigging. The occupier is present and rigging must certainly be a possibility. This does not mean however that you carry out acts of rioting or immoral acts. No. You have peaceful means and peaceful protests you must adopt but anything more than that is not possible and in that there is treason to the Iraqi people, the Iraqi territory and its security. We called for and are still calling for the security, safety and liberation of Iraq and its people. This is our goal and anything which violates this is completely forbidden."br /Cont'd (click below or on "comments")br /br /span class="fullpost"br /An Al-Alam Television correspondent questions Al-Sadr's statement expecting setting up of an alliance or union for the liberation of Iraq. The second part of the question says that there are moves for the appointment of a prime minister who is not from the Islamic trend.br /br /Al-Sadr responds: "As for the first question, I hope that all the Iraqi people participate in this alliance which is an alliance for the liberation of Iraq and for getting Iraq away from the claws of the invaders. I am ready to cooperate absolutely with any party which wants to liberate Iraq and rid it of the occupier and I agree to cooperate and ally myself with it. Perhaps not everybody agrees with this thinking; however, I am ready (to cooperate with) any party which agrees with me on that project. As for the prime minister, I am not the one who appoints him. He is appointed by the alliances and Iraqi people. The one among people who serves the Iraqi people in the eyes of the latter will be, God willing, the one who will get that seat to serve the people through it."br /br /In response to a question on allegations by the prime minister against other parties, Al-Sadr says: "These are political wranglings which must be avoided by all. I hope that nobody will attack verbally or through the media any other side, either the alliance or others, whether the alliance attacks somebody else or somebody attacks the alliance, this is the same thing. All the parties are Iraqis and can be the servants of the Iraqi people. The effective thing which can be said is: When we see that a person or entity implements the Islamic, Iraqi and patriotic concepts, then it is the person or entity that serves the Iraqi people (?otherwise) he does not serve the Iraqi people."br /br /A correspondent asks: What can you tell us about Saudi Arabia interfering in the Iraqi elections?br /br /Al-Sadr says: "Interferences are from many sources and not just from Saudi Arabia. Perhaps some interferences are positive and others are negative. The main intervention which we do not want is rejected and is forbidden is the American intervention in the Iraqi territory. Yes, we approve the interference of Muslim and Arab brothers in the interest of the Iraqi people. We reject (the interference) in which there is foreign agenda and interests which do not serve the Iraqi people. From here, I say that I reject all types of sectarian escalation taking place in Iraq and outside it. There is a sectarian tendency in general in the Middle East, between the Shi'is and the Sunnis that must end as soon as possible as it is not at all in the interest of Iraq, Islam, Arabs or others."br /br /Responding to a question on the possible return of Ba'thists, Al-Sadr says: "Do you mean that they will return through the elections. Do you mean their return to the government or their entering the elections? If there is a new government, then the Ba'thists will not get in. Look my dear, there is one thing only out of two options. Either, what happened must happen - and I agree on it - the removal of Ba'thists and harmful people from the political process is a necessary thing and I mean either the Ba'thists or others. The second option and solution is to accept that they enter the elections - and I am certain - that the Iraqi people will not vote for them. If this happens, then the Ba'thists will not blame you for removing them. In this case, my dear, they will have entered the elections and nobody will have voted for them or given them any value."br /br /Questioned on attempts by Ba'thists to return to political arena and reports on Al-Sadr's role in uniting all lists in one national coalition, he says: "First, you should not have mentioned some national blocs with the exclusion of others. All blocs may be national. All blocs may be Iraqi. All blocs may want to serve the Iraqi people, but in the way it can do this.br /br /"Yes, I define certain bodies like terrorists, militias, Ba'thists and so forth that do not want to serve the Iraqi people. This is 100 per cent yes. But other parties, blocs and alliances may want to serve the Iraqi people. We are not sinless and they are not sinless. Good! If they not sinless, what will happen then? They try to serve, but they cannot. There may be something wrong with the application, the mechanisms and the lack of application or coordination. All try to serve Iraq and the Iraqi people. But there is something wrong with the mechanisms and the application.br /br /"Yes, if the blocs are united and cooperate among themselves, they could serve the Iraqi people. A few days ago someone asked me, saying: I am in parliament and I want to serve the Iraqi people and want to have a resolution endorsed in the Iraqi parliament. How can I have this resolution passed? In case each one has a different opinion and we cannot (agree) and we remain a minority in parliament, this resolution will never be endorsed. Consequently, the parliament may water down the resolutions that are in favour of the Iraqi people.br /br /"We hope this parliamentary grouping will coordinate its activity among (various parties). (Words Indistinct) If they cooperate, all may be nationalists and all may be servants of the Iraqi people, either the two alliances that you mentioned or others."br /Asked about Iyad Allawi's recent visit to Saudi Arabia, Al-Sadr says: "Only God knows about it. God is the knower of the unseen things. I do not know the unseen things. I do not know what they discussed. But God willing this would be for the good of Iraq. I am one of the people who wished to visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is no problem in this. But these visits, as I said before, will be in favour of the Iraqi people.br /br /"I told you this is politics. Anything can happen in political relations, the possible and the impossible."br /br /Responding to a question on the impact of Saudi and Gulf funding of some Iraqi parties on election results in favor of parties loyal to Saudi Arabia, Al-Sadr remarks: "I do not know whether it (the money) will be in favour of or not. The money is sometimes spent in favour of the Iraqi people. In this case, there is no objection. But sometimes it is spent in favour of the Iraqi people's enemy. Certainly this is unacceptable."br /br /Al-Sadr is asked about spending this money for bodies antagonistic to the Iraqi people, to which he remarks: "I do not engage in political wrangling. It may be in favour of the Iraqi people. I hope it (the money) will be in favour of the Iraqi people. But I do not know whether this is really the case or not. I do not know the unseen things."br /br /With regard to a security conference in Israel that hinted that any future Iraqi government will be anti-Israeli, he says: "This is necessary and certain. We reject any Iraqi government that will benefit and support Israel. We will be against it. We hope it will be against (Israel)."br /br /Al-Sadr is asked about his willingness to visit Saudi Arabia and whether the visit will be for pilgrimage or meeting Saudi officials, he says: "Both are okay. It is good to combine both."br /br /On the topics he may discuss during such a visit, he responds: "It will be in favour of Iraqi people and the Muslim Shi'i-Sunni unity. I have anything more than this."br /br /Questioned whether the Al-Sadr movement will support Nuri al-Maliki for the post of prime minister, Al-Sadr says: "I do not intervene in certain issues. There is a political body of Al-Sadr movement. You can ask the political body as it can decide. I prefer not to talk about this."br /br /(Description of Source: Tehran Al-Alam Television in Arabic -- 24-hour Arabic news channel, targetting a pan-Arab audience, of Iranian state-run television, officially controlled by the office of the supreme leader)br /br /br //spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-3591296219173954663?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p In an apparent bid to divide Shiites and Sunnis on the eve of Sunday's parliamentary election, guerrillas on Saturday morning a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-iraq-najaf6-2010mar06,0,3885126.story " set off a bomb only 900 feet from the shrine of Imam Ali/a (which has the sort of place in the hearts of Shiite Muslims that the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome has for Catholics). br /br /Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Sadr Movement within the National Iraqi Alliance, a href="http://al3marh.net/news/index.php?act=artcid=2985 "issued a fatwa or religious legal ruling /aon Friday insisting that believers must vote in Sunday's election and terming going to vote "political resistance," which produces success when a group is united, and ordering his adherents to unite. a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704869304575103851437150096.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines " The WSJ says that the Sadrists are using very canny electoral techniques in a quest to ensure they win as many seats/a as possible in Sunday's election.br /br /If the Sadrists succeed in rallying the Shiite masses to vote as an act of defiance toward the US military presence and the complaisance of the al-Maliki government, it could change the political landcape. br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-1632806718779293084?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p iThe USG Open Source Center translates a guide to the main party coalitions in the March 7 elections in Iraq/ibr /br /Report Lists Main Iraqi Alliances Contesting Parliamentary Electionsbr /Unattributed report: "List of [Iraqi] Political Alliances Before 2010 Elections"br /Al-Hayah Onlinebr /Friday, March 5, 2010 br /Document Type: OSC Translated Textbr /br /Baghdad, Al-Hayah - . . .br /br /tabletdthimg src=" http://news.antiwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ammar.jpg" width="200 " height="270 "/thth img src="http://www.juancole.com/graphics/muqtada_alsadr--133x198.jpg" width="150 " height="230 "/th/td/tablebr /br /The [Iraqi National Alliance] was announced on 24 August 2009 and includes 11 political entities, among them the most important Shiite parties which are the "...Islamic Supreme Council [of Iraq]" [ISCI}, "Badr Organization" [paramilitary of ISCI, organized to contest for vote], "Al-Sadr Trend", "[Islamic Virtue] Al-Fadilah Party", "Al-Da'wah Party-Iraq Organization", "National Reform Trend" (Ibrahim al-Ja'fari), "Iraqi National Congress" (Ahmad Chalabi), Ibrahim Bahr-al-Ulum, and "Al-Wasat Trend" led by Muwaffaq al-Rubay'i in addition to Sunni forces, among them the "Muslim Ulema Group", "Al-Anbar Salvation Council", and liberal, secular and independent figures.br /br /The [INA] is considered the main rival to the [State of Law] "SOL" which is led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The [ISCI] and "Al-Sadr Trend" are hoping to regain some of the Shiite votes they had lost to Al-Maliki in the governorates councils' elections last year. There are also speculations that the [INA] might forge an alliance with Al-Maliki's alliance after the elections in case none of them obtains enough seats that allow it to form a government on its own. The "State of Law Coalition"br /br /img src="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/200px_nouri_al_maliki_with_bush_june_2006_cropped.jpg " width="200" height="200"br /br /The "SOL" whose establishment was announced by Al-Maliki in October 2009 includes 50 political entities and a number of political and tribal figures, the most prominent of which are "Al-Da'wah Party General Headquarters" led by Al-Maliki, the "Islamic Turkoman Union" led by Deputy Abbas al-Bayyati, the "Mustaqillun [Independents'] Bloc" led by Oil Minister Husayn al-Shahrastani, and other groups which include some leaders of Sunni tribes, Christians, and independents. "SOL" was the biggest winner in the governorates councils' elections in January 2009 after raising the slogan of imposing security, providing services, and establishing a strong central government. Al- Maliki considers his victory in the legislative elections "a certainty" with more votes than his rivals but he announced that he would be compelled to conclude alliances with other forces if he did not win a majority (163 seats) to form a government. br /br /img src="http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Ayad_alawi_high_res.JPEG/200px-Ayad_alawi_high_res.JPEG" width="200 " height="130 "br /br /The "Iraqi National Movement": This list includes the "National Accord Movement" which was announced on 31 October 2009 under Iyad Allawi, the "Iraqi Front for National Dialogue" led by Salih al-Mutlak (the two movement's merger), Deputy Adnan Pachachi who is the former leader of the "Independent Democrats Grouping", and Salam al-Zawba'i, the deputy prime minister who had resigned. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister (title as published) Tariq al-Hashimi announced on 28 October 2009 that his "Tajdid" movement joined the "INM" which is seeking to contest the elections on the basis of a nationalist program.br /br /The "INM" came under heavy pressures. The "Accountability and Justice Commission" banned some of its symbolic figures, most notably Salih al-Mutlak and Zafir al-Ani, from participating in the elections and the movement considered this an act of revenge and unconstitutional. Al-Mutlak announced his party would not contest the elections to protest his exclusion but later rescinded the decision and announced it would participate. br /br /The "Iraqi Unity Movement"br /br /It was announced on 21 November 2009 and includes around 26 political entities and various secular and Islamic forces and technocrats. The most prominent of them is Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani, "Iraqi Al-Sahwah Council" leader Ahmad Abu-Rishah, the "Charter Grouping" led by Sunni Emoluments Council Chairman Shaykh Ahmad Abd-al-Ghafur al-Samarra'i, former Defense Minister Sa'dun al-Dulaymi, and "Iraqi Republican Grouping" led by Sa'd Asim al-Janabi.br /br /Previous leaks pointed to understandings between Al-Bulani, Abu-Rishah, and Samarra'i with "INM" leaders Iyad Allawi, Tariq al-Hashimi, and Salih al-Mutlak in addition to former parliament Speaker Mahmud al-Mashhadani to form a large political front. But the widening of the front and disagreements over its leadership apparently aborted the idea in its cradle. br /br /The Kurdsbr /br /img src="http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/iraq/gfx3/12_massoud_barzani_cp_1202249.jpg" width=220" height="306"br /br /Four main Kurdish lists are competing in the elections. The two main Kurdish parties which control the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq dominate the "Kurdish Alliance." These are the "Kurdistan Democratic Party" led by Kurdish Prime Minister Mas'ud Barzani and the "Patriotic Union of Kurdistan" led by President Jalal Talabani. The two parties underline the Kurdish nationality and have strong relations with the West.br /br /The two parties' grip on the Kurdistan Region weakened before the "Change Bloc" led by Nushiran Mustafa who had split from Talabani and which called for reforms. It scored good results in last year's Kurdish parliamentary elections and will contest this one alone. There is a fourth list, which is the "Islamic Kurdish Union" in addition to the "Islamic Group."br /br /Less important forces are contesting the elections, such as the Communist Party and the "National Unity Alliance" which includes a group of entities, most notably the "National Dialogue Council" led by Khalaf al-Alayan, "Asla" led by Fadil al-Maliki, "Ansar al-Risalah" led by Mazin Makkiyah, and the liberal "Al-Ahrar" led by Deputy Iyad Jamal-al-Din. The Tribal Chiefsbr /br /Tribal chiefs play an important role in the elections and the main parties are seeking to curry their favor. Some leaders of Sunni tribes became prominent when the US forces started to back the "Awakening Councils" against "Al-Qa'ida" gunmen in 2006. Though the prominent tribal figures were eager to engage in political activity, they did not however establish a united front but joined existing blocs. The minoritiesbr /br /Iraq's smaller minorities in Iraq include the Turkoman, Christians, Yazidis, Sabians, and Al-Shabak. They are allied to larger electoral lists in areas they do not dominate.br /br /(Description of Source: London a href="http://www.daralhayat.com "Al-Hayah Online in Arabic/a -- Website of influential Saudi-owned London pan-Arab daily...)br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-8630285444886322162?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p Iraq's campaign season will come to an end Friday evening, in preparation for the voting on Sunday. But a special vote was held Thursday for certain groups, such as the military, which was marred by three bombings that left 14 persons dead. Voting begins today, Friday, among Iraqi expatriates in Jordan, Syria and 14 other countries. br /br /Since two important Shiite coalitions are competing against one another in this round, and many Sunnis appear ready to vote for a cross-sectarian secular party, it is unlikely that any party or coalition will get more than 25 percent of seats. There is therefore likely to be a long post-election period of political negotiation and horse trading, during which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will effectively have his tenure extended. There might not even be a new government until August, and it may well be a government of national unity. The majority Shiites will need a partner to get to the 66% of votes required to elect a president, and the Kurds are the most likely partner. If so, the 'new' government may look an awfully lot like the national unity government of summer, 2006, with regard to parties represented and politicians in the cabinet, whether or not al-Maliki retains the prime ministership. That the Shiites will need the Kurds may provide an opening for the parties to resolve outstanding conflicts over the future of the northern Kirkuk oil province. The election may therefore reinforce the status quo rather than creating a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-this-sundays-iraq-elections-will-have-a-major-negative-effect-on-key-kurdish-oil-producing-region-2010-3 " the kind of political instability that foreign investors fear/a.br /br /It seems to me extremely unlikely that the post-election scene will be so violent or unstable as to call for a revision of the current timetable for US troop withdrawal from Iraq, to which President Obama has committed the US government. Iraq has actually seen much worse violence in recent months than anything it has experienced in the run-up to this election, though it is true that civilian casualties spiked in February. Iraqi authorities have repeatedly said proudly that the Iraqi military and other security forces are capable of keeping basic peace now, and they are in charge of security for the voting stations this time, not the US military. I do not believe the Iraqi parliament that is about to be elected will put up with any foot-dragging on troop withdrawals by the US,and I think the US military officers who speak of slowing down the withdrawal are doing so to discourage radical guerrillas from making trouble during the elections (warning them that attacks will backfire by making it harder to get rid of the Americans).br /br /On to Friday's voting. About a href="http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=24582 "1.4 million Iraqis are thought eligible to vote overseas/a. (There are about 17 million voters inside Iraq by my calculation). Even abroad, some voters may be deterred by militia threats from going to the polls. Iraqis in Jordan and Syria are sometimes tracked down and threatened by the same militias who chased them out of their homes in the first place. (The estimate given here of 500,000 Iraqis in Jordan is way too high, based on what NGOs in Amman told me 18 months ago, and if 200,000 Iraqis actually vote there, the ballots and voter registration should be closely examined because I doubt there are more than 100,000 eligible voters in Jordan. Most Iraqi expatriates, perhaps a million, are in Syria.) br /br /a href="br /http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPQGYI2BXyQ " Aljazeera Arabic reports that parties are attempting to buy votes among the often penniless/a refugees:br /br /object width="390" height="265"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hPQGYI2BXyQhl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/hPQGYI2BXyQhl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="265"/embed/objectbr /br /br /a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/115646 " Al-Hayat [Life] reports in Arabic that/a over a million Iraqis took part in the early voting day on Thursday, including soldiers, hospital patients and others who cannot get to the polls on Sunday. br /br /The occasion was marred by three attacks that killed 14 persons and wounded dozens, two of them suicide bombings, which targeted two voting stations set aside for the security forces in the north and west of Baghdad. Half of those killed were from the security forces.br /br /Al-Hayat says that some parties expressed suspicion that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of the Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa), which is the core of his State of Law coalition) would use Thursday's vote for fraudulent purposes benefiting his party. Usamah al-Nujaifi of the Iraqi National List called on NGOs and international observers to monitor the voting closely for such fraud, since, he warned, military elements could simply be ordered (by the prime minister) to vote one way or another. br /br /An official in the Independent High Electoral Commission, Hamdiya al-Husaini, confirmed to al-Hayat that soldiers had been pressured to vote for a certain party, which she would not name, and even that some soldiers arrived at the voting station only to find that someone else had already voted on their behalf. She promised an investigation by the High Electoral Commission.br /br /The voting process was chaotic, and many soldiers's names could not be found at their voting stations on the registration rolls. Some soldiers even staged demonstrations over being disenfranchised in this way, in response to which the the High Electoral Commission promised them redress. Nevertheless, thousands are estimated to have been unable to vote. The High Commission says that they will be allowed to vote on Sunday. br /br /a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/115649 " Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that authorities in the southern Shiite port city of Basra/a have arrested a group that is printing up counterfeit rulings or fatwas attributed to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, urging Shiites to vote for a specific party. Sistani has declared his neutrality in this election, though other grand ayatollahs seem to be plumping for the National Iraqi Alliance of Shiite religious parties led by cleric Ammar al-Hakim.br /br /a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJlXgZMa5wc " RFE/RL has video on the use of Arabic music videos and Facebook in the parliamentary campaign. /a.br /br /object width="390" height="265"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uJlXgZMa5wchl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uJlXgZMa5wchl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="265"/embed/objectbr /br /br /a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpkzI3zk5DU " Aljazeera English covers the campaigning, which ends Friday evening, and clearly throws its support behind the National Iraqi List,/a headed by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, which has both Shiite and Sunni secular support. This report's assertion that this time no party or coalition can win without cross-sectarian support is not actually true, and polling suggests that Allawi's group will only get a fifth of seats, with nearly half going again to Shiite religious parties.br /br /object width="390" height="265"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gpkzI3zk5DUhl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gpkzI3zk5DUhl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="265"/embed/objectbr /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-8158667004208040419?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p The invented Republican/ Foxy News talking point du jour is that the Democrats intend to 'ram health care reform down our throats' even though 'the American people don't want it.'br /br /Bzzz. That's just wrong! First of all, when there is a landslide triumph for a party as there was in November, 2008, for the victor to actually govern and legislate is not 'ramming' anything down anyone's 'throat.' It is doing what the people asked you to do. Obama campaigned on this issue, and presumably that fact had not escaped the electorate's notice. br /br /Just so we don't forget, if we sized the lower 48 states according to their population, this is what the Democratic victory looked like, according to a href="http://cartophilia.com/blog/2008/11/purple-states-of-america-2008.html " cartophilia/a:br /br /img src="http://cartophilia.com/blog/images/statepopredblue512.png " width="390 " height="264 "br /br /So it is that little tiny red thing that is talking about 'ramming' down 'throats.'br /br /Second, a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/2010/02/on-health-care-reform-the-roar-of-partisanship.html "80 percent of Americans in a recent ABC/Post poll want to prohibit limits on pre-existing conditions, and 72 percent want to impose an employer mandate./a Some 63 percent favor some form of public health care reform. The same proportion, 63%, want president Obama to keep trying to pass a reform. A majority, 56%, want everyone to be covered. The allegation that the 'public doesn't want it' is an artificial creation of millions of dollars in disinformation money purveyed by the pharmaceutical companies through the US Chamber of Commerce and their bought-and-paid-for congressmen and senators. a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/is_health-care_reform_popular.html " If a pollster explains to a member of the public what is actually in the bill/a, Americans like most of the provisions, as Ezra Klein says.br /br /Besides, all the Democrats want to implement (not ram) is the same thing every other advanced industrial society has, which is health care for all citizens. As it is, we pay more than the Netherlands or Germany or Sweden, but a href="http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html " our health statistics are much worse than any of theirs. /a br /br /As for ramming things down people's throats, here is what the Republicans rammed down our throats during Cheney-Bush:br /br /1. War on Iraq, costing over 4,000 American service lives, 31,000 wounded bad enough to go to hospital, many of them maimed for life, and costing over our lifetimes $3 trillion (which we don't have). All based on outright lies.br /br /2. Torture.br /br /3. Warrantless wiretaps.br /br /4. 'Protest zones' and arbitrary arrest of people peacefully assembled.br /br /5. Further gutting of financial regulation, pushing the country's economy off a cliffbr /br /6. Deep tax cuts for the superwealthy and de facto tax increases for the middle classes, passed by reconciliationbr /br /7. Unfunded programs, including wars, tax cuts and medicare changes, that created most of the current budget deficit and much of our current public debt, much of it passed by reconciliaton.br /br /8. Virtual abandonment of our troops in Afghanistan for a concentration on Iraq, and slacking off on capturing the top al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership.br /br /9. The gutting of environmental regulation and the surrender of the public to corporate polluters.br /br /10. Bush's 'victory' itself in 2000.br /br /So suck it up, GOP. You really screwed us all over and messed up the country big time. All we want to do is have people's children be able to see a doctor without it bankrupting the family. That's your big complaint?br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-852749569489145082?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

a href="http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/10/0079780"The revision thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies—By Sam Smith (Harper#39;s Magazine)/abr /br /Or, a preview of the Rove, Bush Cheney memoirs.br /br /pbr /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-7449080515419712536?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

a href="http://www.aawsat.com//details.asp?section=4issueno=11419article=559648feature= " Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that it has gotten hold of an American intelligence document/a detailing undue Iranian influence in Iraq and in the Iraqi elections. The document says that Ahmad Chalabi and Ali al-Lami, influential members of the 'Jusice and Accountability Committee' in charge of purging Baathists from public life, met repeatedly with Iranian officials last fall. Among those they met were Qasim Sulaimani, head of the special forces Jerusalem (Quds) Brigade and the Iranian foreign minister. US Commanding Gen. in iraq, Ray Odierno, charged that Iran was behind the campaign to disqualify over 500 alleged Baathists from running in Iraq's March 7 parliamentary, and this document seems to lend some credence to the allegation.br /br /Anxiety among US officials about Iran's influence, a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030303674.html "especially via militias such as the Asa'ib Ahl al-Haqq/a, is underlined by WaPo today.br /br /a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35696591/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/ " AP alleges that Iran is responsible behind the scenes for getting the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Sadr Movement form a coalition/a, the National Iraqi Alliance.br /br /a href="http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20100304_Worldview__Is_Iraq_really_a_democracy_.html " Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks if Iraq is really a democracy/a, and comes up with a resounding 'No!' She gives as evidence the repeated arbitrary arrests of a Sunni Arab young man who served as a whistle-blower on Shiite militia ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in his neighborhood. She also quotes Ali Allawi on the lack of effective checks and balances.br /br /a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwK_CSpBxsNuVUEaDuOwmSSCiqGwD9E7L3B80 " Early voting begins today in Iraq for members of the armed services, hospital patients, and others who are prevented from getting/a to the polls on Sunday. Nearly a million persons are expected to cast a ballot on Thursday.br /br /a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/iraq-election-to-bring-sunnis-out-of-political-wilderness/story-e6frf7lf-1225836995055 " Some newspapers are asking whether the Sunni Arabs will flex their muscles in this election./a. They may, but only if they do not vote on a sectarian basis. If Sunnis can make themselves an indispensable constituent of secular parties supported by Shiite urban middle classes, they can get some leverage. Otherwise, Iraq's parliament at the moment has only one chamber, and electing explicitly Sunni Arab slates dooms them to insignificance, since they will only have a fifth of seats in parliament. Sunni Arabs in Iraq's parliament will always be outvoted on an issue of national significance.br /br /In something less than a resounding vote of confidence in the electoral progress, a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/115201 " the Shiite grand ayatollahs/a said Tuesday that they are genuinely afraid of ballot fraud in the March 7 parliamentary elections.br /br /a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/115209"The Iraqi government is now saying that the appearance of the name of Muqtada al-Sadr/a on an arrest list was an error, and that no attempt will in fact be make to take him into custody. (Sadr is now studing in seminary in Qom, Iran.]br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)br /br /br /div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-1921282713744425142?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

On Wednesday morning, a href="http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE62213K20100303 " three suicide bombers attacked the HQ of the provincial government, a police station, and a hospital in Baquba/a, the capital of Diyala Province east of Baghdad, killing at least 16 persons and wounding over 40. (The report of the explosion at the government building comes via Aljazeera Arabic.) The attack was probably undertaken by militant Sunni Arabs intent on creating an atmosphere of fear intended to keep voters home on the coming Sunday. br /br /Diyala is a mixed province with a slight Sunni Arab majority. The Shiite minority, however, dominated its politics from 2003-2008, possibly with help from neighboring Iran. In response, Sunni Arabs launched a determined insurgency, making Diyala one of the more dangerous provinces in the country. br /br /In January 2009, a Sunni Arab-dominated provincial council came to power. In the aftermath, however, arrest warrants were issued by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad for several provincial council members, who were suspected of links to insurgent guerrilla groups, and who had to go into hiding. The police and military in Baquba are disproportionately Shiite, which is one of the reasons the Sunni Arab guerrillas would have attacked them.br /br /On February 26, a forum participant had posted a statement attributed to an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the radical Sunni Arab 'Islamic State of Iraq,' which ridiculed Iraq's elections. Translated by the USG Open Source Center, it said,br /blockquote '" The Islamic State in Iraq Will Participate in the Iraqi Elections, using their own methods. They (the Islamic State in Iraq) have picked several apostate figures that its soldiers will vote for, either with an explosive device or an explosive belt, God willing. br /br /"The Initial Results of Elections According to Jihadist Sourcesbr /br /"The Ministry of War of the Islamic State of Iraq has won first place in the jihadist elections in the Land of the Two Rivers, and destroyed most of the election posts.br /br /" The Electoral Program of the Al-Qa'ida Organizationbr /br /"1- Purifying and liberating the land of the caliphate (governing system) from the Crusaders and applying God's Shari'ah [religious law] in the Land of the Two Rivers.br /br /"2- Establishing an Islamic state and getting rid of the legislators and legislative councils based on infidel democracy.br /br /"3- Expanding the field of jihadist work to liberate Muslim countries from occupation, especially the Al-Aqsa Mosque[in Israeli-ruled Jerusalem], the cradle of prophets and messengers, and purifying it of the cowardly Zionists, following in the steps of Salah al-Din [Saladin].br /br /"4- Applying God's Shari'ah on Earth, establishing an Islamic caliphate, and unifying the Muslim point of view under the banner of monotheism and jihad.' /blockquotebr /br /Opinion polling shows that only a tiny minority of Iraqi Sunni Arabs find these ideas attractive, and support for them has fallen dramatically in recent years.br /br /As though a resurgence of Sunni Arab radicalism were not enough, a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwK_CSpBxsNuVUEaDuOwmSSCiqGwD9E6MDSO4 " the Associated Press has gotten hold of a warrant issued by Iraq's Supreme Court for the arrest of Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr/a, dated February 7 of this year. The surprise renewal of the warrant, originally issued under the American administration of Paul Bremer in 2004, threatens to roil Iraq. Sadr stands accused of ordering the killing of Majid al-Khoei on April 10, 2003, on the latter's return to the holy city of Najaf from exile in London. Al-Khoei was killed by enraged mobs of nativist Sadr followers in part because his return seemed to have been sponsored by London and Washington, D.C. That the death was an assassination ordered by al-Sadr as opposed to the spiralling out of control of an urban mob has not been proven.br /br /The American-inspired arrest warrant was allowed to lapse as part of the Bush administration's truce with the Shiite leader. His Sadr Movement came to be a significant player in parliament, with over 10% of the seats, and his Mahdi Army militia was at one point in control of significant swathes of southern Iraqi cities as well as the capital. The Sadr Movement is part of the National Iraqi Alliance, which groups several important Shiite religious parties, and which seems set to gain between a sixth and a fifth of seats in the parliamentary elections scheduled for the coming Sunday.br /br /The al-Maliki government denied that it had engineered the reemergence of the arrest warrant, and indeed denied that the warrant existed. br /br /a href="http://www.aawsat.com//details.asp?section=4issueno=11418article=559506feature= " Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement blamed al-Maliki for the issuance of the warrant/a and called it 'psychological warfare' against the Sadr Movement.br /br /There is now certainly a suspicious pattern whereby the major challengers to al-Maliki's State of Law coalition have run into sudden and unexpected legal problems in the run-up to the election. Salih Mutlak, a Sunni Arab ally of Iyad Allawi's National Iraqi List, was disqualified from running on grounds that he was too close to the banned Baath Party that had been led by Saddam Hussein. The move potentially weakened the Iraqiya List.br /br /Now the National Iraqi Alliance is being targeted for demoralization, with one of its chief leaders indicted anew on a 6-year-old charge that had seemed to lapse. Ironically, the Sadr Movement's support had catapulted PM al-Maliki into power in spring of 2006, before the two broke with one another in summer 2007 over al-Maliki's unwillingness to set a timetable for US withdrawal and to cease teleconferencing with President George W. Bush.br /br /Iraqis point out that a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/02/89713/iraqi-elections-have-high-stakes.html " few major Iraqi politicians have clean hands/a, as McClatchy reports.br /br /The greatest danger of these political maneuverings is that they may reignite guerrilla and militia violence in Iraq, and possibly impede the scheduled withdrawal of the US military. Both Sunni Arab guerrillas and Mahdi Army militiamen have been major sources of instability in Iraq at some points in the past six years. Some Sunni Arabs are a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gJI_4CKrOiZCjL7tSSzT-zZ8JevwD9E6L5G00 " worried about a resurgence of sectarian violence./a br /br /On the other hand, a href="http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/23/nir_rosen_stop_the_iraq_madness " experienced Iraq hand Nir Rosen believes that all the talk about the reemergence of sectarian conflict is completely overblown/a. One reason Rosen may be right is that the Sunni Arabs decisively lost the civil war and were largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so it is not clear that they have the social base to put up a further fight.br /br /a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqcWTjgPfpI "Aljazeera English reports on the campaign techniques being used in Iraq:/abr /br /object width="390" height="280"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/UqcWTjgPfpIhl=en_USfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/UqcWTjgPfpIhl=en_USfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="390" height="280"/embed/objectbr /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-7377661594403898017?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

piThe public affairs office of the US Embassy in London put out this Spot Report via its Media Outreach Center -London Hub March 2, 2010. The interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, now campaigning for his political survival, challenges the assertion of US military commander Ray Odierno that US combat troops could or would remain in iraq past the deadlines set in the Status of Forces Agreement. Odierno's assertion a href="http://www.fpif.org/articles/sliding_backwards_on_iraq "produced outrage in Iraq, according to Raed Jarrar/a./ibr /br /BBC Arabic TV interview with Iraqi PM Nouri al-Malikibr /br /BBC Arabic broadcast a 15-minute edited on-camera interview with Nouri al-Maliki at 9.45g. The main points he made were: br /br /Relations with Kurds over Kirkukbr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] We have no alliance with the Kurds; Kirkuk is important to us as well as the Kurds; we agree on legal settlement on Kirkuk based on constitution. br /br /Would you enter alliance with Iyad Allawi?br /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] That would be difficult, because of differences in history, directions, etc. br /br /Why did you object to Allawi's visits to other Arab countries?br /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] Iraqis are sensitive about foreign interference in their political system br /br /On Allawi's visit to Saudi Arabiabr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] Against idea of visiting any country with the purpose of winning support for becoming prime minister of Iraq br /br /Relations with Saudi Arabiabr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] I made one visit to Saudi Arabia for purpose of good relations, as with any other neighbor; I didn't ask for any other meeting with Saudi official; we want good relations, but if they want to maintain this estrangement it's up to them. br /br /[U.S. Ambassador Christopher] Hill's warning of possible political chaos after electionsbr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] That's a wrong reading; Iraq will be stable after the elections; those raising quarrels and spreading lies are doing so for future political advantage; br /br /Hill's accusation that Iran playing "hateful" role in Iraqbr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] They are his words; "hateful" is a big word; maybe they are interfering as Arab countries do; someone who is hateful is only intent on destroying - Iran not only intent on destruction; we seek open friendship, not political or military interference.br /br / Accountability and Justice Commission working to Iranian agenda?br /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] That's an American view; symptom of US-Iran quarrel which we do not want to see played out in Iraq; I explained to VP Biden and Amb Hill that it was the AJC that was responsible for deciding on the election candidates, not the committee controlled by Ahmed Chalabi.br /br / On decision to reintegrate 20,000 officers from Saddam's armybr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] Part of national reconciliation to integrate them; not Ba'athists; this had nothing to do with election campaign; matter been considered for last three years; br /br /Odierno's warning of security problems meaning US troops might stay onbr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] That's his view; but we think the Iraqi security infrastructure is effective even without US help; they said Basra operation (against militias [in spring of 2008]) would take us six months - we did it in nine days. br /br /Defence minister said he wanted US troops to stay till 2020br /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] I think it's unlikely he really said that; any such change would need a new security agreement that would need to be vote on by parliament. br /br /Reaction to Ahmadinejad's call in Syria for Iraq to be a third regional allybr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] We welcome close relations with Iran as we do with Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey.. but not on the basis of alliances or treaties; in the past these led the region into confrontations between axes. br /br /Foreign funding of political partiesbr /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] Parties funded from abroad, which is a problem; it's because parliament has not yet passed law we tabled on political parties; our State of Law party is not funded from abroad; has an account in the Rafidayn Bank that citizens can contribute to; so far it contains about eight million (dinars?) br /br /Your greatest achievement?br /br /[bAl-Maliki:/b] Security; other achievements in education, jobs etc would not have been possible without security.br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-6761033569059421146?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

a href="http://www.sotaliraq.com/iraqnews.php?id=58983 " Political violence spiked in Iraq during February ahead of the March 7 elections, with an 80% increase in deaths and casualties/a over January of this year. Some 352 civilians, policemen and troops were killed, along with about 50 anti-government guerrillas. Over 600 persons were wounded. br /br /a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100301/wl_csm/283970_1 "Tensions between the Kurdistan leadership and the governor of nearby Ninevah province, Athil al-Nujayfi, are near to boiling over/a, according to the CSM. Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani has threatened to issue an arrest warrant against Nujayfi. Ninevah is mostly Arab, but has a Kurdish minority. Nujayfi, who leads the al-Hadba Party that gained 50 percent of the seats on the provincial council in Jan. 2009, is a secular Arab nationalist and has feuded with the minority Kurds on the provincial council. Because Sunni Arabs boycotted the provincial elections of 2005 and because the US installed Kurds in the police and security forces, Kurds had been disproportionately powerful in Ninevah, parts of which the Kurdistan Regional Government would like to annex to its Kurdish super-province. As a leader of resurgent Sunni Arab nationalism, Nujayfi forms a direct challenge to that Kurdish project.br /br /a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/114448 "Al-Hayat writing in Arabic says that tribal chieftains in Diyala Province east of Baghdad are complaining that the al-Maliki government has not condemned what they termed /a US military attacks on Diyala towns and villages. The most egregious of these was an incident in Miqdadiya where US military personnel, presumably trainers accompanying Iraqi units, came under small arms fire and returned it. The son of the leader of the Zuhayri clan was killed in the crossfire. It is not clear when this happened, but al-Hayat says that the US military admitted and error and apologized. a href="http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world/14-suspects-of-al-qaeda-in-iraq-arrested_100318150.html " Joint US-Iraqi security operations are on-going in Diyala province/a. The Diyala notables said that they wanted the US military man responsible for the death to be turned over to Iraq for trial. br /br /After having earlier condemned the idea of a government of national unity, a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/114445 "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has abruptly begun speaking of just that. He said that when next Sunday's parliamentary elections are over, his State of Law coalition may well seek talks about a parliamentary alliance with the Shiite religious parties of the National Iraqi Alliance/a, led by Ammar al-Hakim, and with the Kurds in parliament. (To elect a president in the Iraqi parliament requires a two-thirds majority, whereas to elect a prime minister and to keep his cabinet in power requires only 51 percent. Al-Maliki will therefore have a strong motivation to ally with fellow religious Shiites. In order to get to two-thirds to elect a president, the Shiite religious parties will need allies, and the Kurds are a less controversial choice for them than the secular or Sunni parties. Although some Shiite leaders in the Iraqi National Alliance are reluctant to ally with al-Maliki,in the end they may have no choice if they are not to sit in the opposition. br /br /To form a government and remain prime minister, al-Maliki needs an alliance of 163 seats that will consistently vote with him. The Kurdistan parties will probably have 50 or so, and the Shiite State of Law and National Iraqi Alliance coalitions should have 110 between them. In fact, al-Maliki's polling suggests that his State of Law may gain as many as 100 seats all by itself, making it easy to form a government. But for reasons I gave last Thursday, I don't think it is likely that the State of Law will in fact have a third of seats in parliament, and I see it as far more plausible that al-Maliki and al-Hakim will reunite the religious Shiites after the election. In the US, the two major parties create coalitions before the public votes, whereas in parliamentary systems such as Iraq, the coalition-building is done after the election.br /br /a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100301/wl_mideast_afp/iraqvotecorruptionjordan_20100301121135 " Meanwhile, Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi/a campaigned among the some 200,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan on Sunday, the majority of whom is Sunni Arabs. He urged them to vote for change and an end to sectarianism. (He is a member of the secular-leaning Iraqi National List led by Iyad Allawi, though he had previously been active in the Iraqi Islamic Party, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood).br /br /End/ (Not Continued)br /br /br /div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-8525063775810996630?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

Abraham has been an important figure for theologians, philosophers, chroniclers and religious poets and lyricists among Jews, Christians and Muslims. All three monotheistic religions honor him and claim him as a patriarch or in Islam's case as a prophet of the one God. All tell the story of his willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Jews and Arabs see him as an ancestor, Jews claiming descent through his implausibly aged first wife Sarah and Arabs through his second wife (held in some Jewish and Muslim traditions to have been a Pharaonic princess), Hagar. They hold him to be buried in a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs " the Cave of the Patriarchs/a in al-Khalil in the Palestinian West Bank, which the Israelis call "Hebron," where Muslims erected the Mosque of the Abraham, which is split, with part of it used by Jews and the other part by Muslims.br /br /(iUpdate/i: Francis Boyle writes in to say: "The Muslims and the Jews do not “share” the Ibrahimi Mosque. In fact, Israel confiscated the chamber of the Mosque where Ibrahim, Isaac, Jacob and their wives are buried, then built a synagogue in there. In other words, the Israelis desecrated the Mosque by building a synagogue within it. I have seen it myself, truly disgusting. This regime is enforced by armed Israeli soldiers within the Mosque—further desecrating it. This was clearly a war crime in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, inter alia.")br /br /Abraham is frequently cited as a figure who should unite Jews, Christians and Muslims, since all view him as the first monotheist and a founder figure for their traditions. But a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hotgW1pijdPPgeIDXFtxBVlogKZA "last week the Israeli government designated the Cave of the Patriarchs an Israeli heritage site/a. Since it is on the Palestinian West Bank, it cannot be an bIsraeli/b heritage site, though it certainly is a Jewish one. br /br /img src="http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/claire_spera/West_Bank__Gaza_Map_2007_Settlements.1912940.gif" width="390 " height="490 " br /br /Palestinians are afraid that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's action is a prelude to an Israeli claim on the annexation of al-Khalil to Israel. The town of 150,000 is completely made up of Palestinian Christians and Muslims, though 400 Israeli settlers, some of them armed and all under the protection of the Israeli military, reside there. There have been constant frictions between the small Israeli colony and the Palestinian townspeople.br /br /The move a href="http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/02/26/hebron-shrine.html "provoked protests in al-Khalil, with youths throwing stones at Israeli soldiers/a and threatening a third popular uprising or Intifada. As a result of this atmosphere of tension, the Israeli military locked down the Palestinian West Bank on Sunday as Israeli colonists there celebrated the festival of Purim. br /br / (Purim, based on the Book of Esther, commemorates the deliverance of the Jews of the Achaemenid Empire in ancient Iran and Iraq from a hostile minister to the Persian king, Khsayarsha II, called by the Greeks Artaxerxes II and in the Bible Ahasuerus [r. circa 405 to 358 BC]. He was married to a Jewish woman, Esther, though he was unaware of her religion, and his life had been saved by her cousin, Mordecai. His gratitude causes him to turn against his minister, Haman, who wanted to kill all the Jews, and to have him hanged. The shah then gave permission to the Jews to defend themselves from attacks by Haman's supporters, which they apparently did with rather excessive zeal, polishing off 75,000 Iranians. Ancient numbers are not reliable and one historian suggested we always subtract at least one zero. You have a sinking feeling that some hawkish Israelis see President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a contemporary Haman.)br /br /But Purim in al-Khalil has other connotations, since it was the day on which Dr. Baruch Goldstein opened fire on innocent worshipers at the Mosque of Abraham, shooting 179 in cold blood, and killing 29 of those. a href="http://resistance.jeeran.com/massacres/hebron/goldstein.htm " This site gives you an idea of how Palestinians remember the incident/a. Israeli apologists often refer to Goldstein as deranged, but people who met him before his attack deny this charge. He is more likely to have simply been the Israeli equivalent of a suicide bomber, i.e. acting out of ideological conviction.br /br /Anyway, the coincidence of the anniversary of the Goldstein massacre with the designation of the tomb complex an Israeli heritage site was enough to inspire fear, outrage and anger in the Palestinian residents of the city. The cabinet of the Palestine Authority a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_14490240 " is meeting in al-Kahlil/ Hebron on Monday/a, just to reaffirm its sovereignty or at least future sovereignty over the town.br /br /On Sunday, the tensions in al-Khalil/ Hebron spilled over onto Jerusalem, where Muslims and Jews uneasily share the area around the Wailing Wall and the Haram Sharif above it. Muslims venerate the Aqsa Mosque on what Israelis maintain is the site of the ancient Temple as sacred soil, associating it with a miracle of the Prophet Muhammad. Some Israeli extremists wish to destroy the mosque so that the Temple can be rebuilt, and in 1969 a fanatic set fire to it. Muhammad Bin Laden, the Saudi developer and father of Usamah, got the contract to repair it. a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100301/wl_afp/mideastconflictjerusalem_20100301041559 " Palestinians gathered in the mosque, having apparently heard rumors (which circulate frequently) that it would be attacked by militant Israelis/a. They pelted visitors to the site with stones. Some 17 persons were wounded in the clashes, including two Israeli policemen. The Israeli security forces went into the mosque and arrested the protesters.br /br /Israeli soldiers in the Aqsa Mosque is a provocation, since it is the third holiest site in the Muslim world. a href="http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/311772,abdullah-abbas-urge-protection-for-holy-sites.html "King Abdullah II of Jordan and Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called for international protections for Muslim holy places/a in Jerusalem, several of which they said were threatened by unilateral Israeli measures. A recent controversy, which is probably related to Sunday's violence, has centered on a a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ikJf2Yoq4wB9rpWUcKIO7UojiAtwD9DPG6580 "bizarre Israeli decision to build a 'Museum of Tolerance' on top of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem./a For a fact sheet a href="http://www.ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/mamilla " On the Mamilla Cemetery, see this site/a.br /br /The events should alarm Americans. The Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and therefore of the Aqsa Mosque complex, a href="http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/jerusalem-and-terrorism-ariel-sharon.html " was one of the grievances that drove Bin Laden to declare war on the United States/a, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's provocative demarche on the mosque complex in 2000 caused Bin Laden to try to move up the date of the planned attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., as 'punishment' for Sharon's implicit threat.br /br /One obstacle to American understanding of the events of the past week is a lack of understanding of the position of Abraham and of Jerusalem in Muslim scripture and in Muslim religious and folk practice. The Qur'an sees Abraham as an early monotheist who came into conflict with his own father on behalf of the one God. Abraham starts being mentioned in the early, Meccan, chapters of the Qur'an (contrary to some Orientalist assertions). Muslim belief even holds that Abraham resided in Mecca and built the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine around which Muslims circumambulate during the pilgrimage. When Muslims first conquered Palestine in the seventh century, sources say that Jews showed them the Cave of the Patriarchs, and that Jews and Muslims both worshiped there and made pilgrimage to it. (Jews in Palestine are said to have welcomed the Muslim conquest, preferring them to the Byzantine Eastern Orthodox empire).br /br /The Jews of the Roman province of Palestine were not for the most part expelled in the second century CE, as popular history sometimes has it, but went on farming there and gradually converted to Christianity. The majority then later gradually converted to Islam and became what we now call the Palestinians. Most Palestinian and Jewish men share the same distinctive haplotypes or genetic patterns in their Y chromosomes, showing common descent. If promises were made to Abraham's putative descendants, then they share in the promise. The promise could not possibly be to adherents of Judaism, since that religion did not exist until many centuries later.br /br /The authoritative Encyclopedia of Islam notes that al-Khalil/ Hebron is at a high elevation and traditionally lacked water save for some nearby springs, saying: "Since during the later Middle Ages and the Ottoman period, large numbers of pilgrims came to the city [Hebron] and passed through it on the Hajj route to Mecca, the need for greater reserves of water necessitated the construction of two large reservoirs in the Hebron valley."br /br /That is, historians are aware that the Tomb of the Patriarchs has been sacred to Muslims for 1400 years and they have been going on pilgrimage to it for much of that period, combining visits to Jerusalem and Hebron with their pilgrimage to Mecca. (If you were living in Turkey, Northern Iran or coastal Syria, Jerusalem and Hebron are on the way to Mecca by a popular route.)br /br /It is worth noting that the figure of Abraham as described in the Bible is in any case not historical. Abraham is said to have been the forebear of the twelve tribes of Israel, including that of Benjamin or Bin Yamin. But the Banu Yamin are mentioned in clay tablets in the area dated to 2000 BC, so they precede Abraham's alleged advent. The kings he is said to have met don't correspond to any known historical figures. He is said to have bought the Caves which allegedly became his tomb from a Hittite, but the Hittites did not then exist and they didn't come to geographical Palestine until the 1400s BC. He is said to have been a monotheist, but there is no evidence in the archeology of anything but polytheists in Palestine (then Egyptian-ruled Canaan or Retenu) for many centuries after he supposedly lived.br /br /Moreover, if Abraham were from south Iraq (Ur in what is now Dhi Qar) he would have likely been ethnically Sumerian, whereas the genetic signature of a majority of Jewish men most resembles that of Palestinians and Lebanese, not of southern Iraqis. For the same reason, he is not the direct male ancestor of the Hijazi Arabs. (If he existed at all and lived 4000 years ago and if his descendants flourished, he would likely be an ancestor of most people in the greater Mediterranean by now, I.e. Arabs and Europeans and Jews from both worlds; note that only uninterrupted descent in the male line would show up in the Y chromosome.)br /br /But the Abraham stories are no more historical than those of Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim, other ancient Middle Eastern mythical figures. The jumbled stories about him were written down in the Babylonian exile, when scribes made an attempt to establish a historical timeline into which he could be asserted. Ur was a classy place to be from, as Shlomo Sands points out, and so the Babylonian Jewish authors of the written Bible endowed themselves with a distinquished Iraqi parentage.br /br /It is modern nationalism that lies behind the current tensions over Abraham's tomb and the Haram Sharif. Jews and Muslims shared pilgrimage sites all through history, most often amicably. Israeli, Arab and Palestinian nationalisms are reconfiguring sacred space as sites of national authenticity and as exclusive. br /br /The Palestine Authority should declare itself a state and offer citizenship to the 400 or so Jews in al-Khalil/ Hebron. And there are lots of Palestinian heritage sites it could then designate inside Israel. And ideally the two would share them, and allow free circulation and pilgrimage, including for international religious tourism, which would be good for the economy. I predict that eventually all these things will come to pass. It may however be decades.br /br /In the meantime, the danger to the Aqsa Mosque complex is a danger to world and American security.br /br /End/ (Not Continued)br /br /br /br /div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-8438753458501430317?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div

p Iraqis go to the voting booth a week from today, on Sunday, March 7, to elect the second full-term parliament (4 years) since the fall of the one-party Baath regime in 2003. Given the turmoil surrounding last summer's elections in Iran and Afghanistan, with massive vote fraud and stolen elections being alleged in both, many Iraqis are worried ballot and other irregularities in their polls, as well.br /br /a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/113738 " Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement/a is complaining bitterly about a rash of arrests by the government of Sadrist activists. The hard line Shiite movement asserted that these arrests were aimed at influencing the course of the election.br /br /a href="http://www.daralhayat.com/portalarticlendah/113687 " Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that the National Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shiite religious parties, has alleged/a that there are 800,000 imaginary voters' names on the election rolls. Member of parliament for the National Iraqi Alliance, Qasim Da'ud, told al-Hayat that his coalition has already detected numerous instances of attempted fraud in the upcoming election. He said that there is evidence that the Independent High Electoral Commission has come under undue pressure in this regard.br /br /Da'ud was speaking in a roundabout way about Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in making these charges. He went further, asserting that the sitting government had begun acting improperly given the closeness of the election date, with the prime minister misusing his position for electoral purposes. Da'ud said al-Maliki had distributed land and gifts to tribal sheikhs and citizens. He had also decided to purge some military officers and pardon others. Da'ud said that the most brazen such move was the addition of 800,000 imaginary names to the voting rolls just days before the election. br /br /(With regard to the purging and reinstatement of military officers, a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2010-02-26-iraq-army_N.htm?csp=34 " Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced late this week that 20,000 Saddam-era officers in the Baath army /a would be reinstated (most are at the rank of colonel or below). Critics maintain that al-Maliki is trying for the Sunni vote with this move.br /br /Muqtada al-Sadr's website for Friday carried the sermon of Sadrist preacher Shaykh Abd-al-Hadi al-Muhammadawi, who also complained about al-Maliki's gifts in his Friday prayer sermon, referring to an account that al-Maliki gave out pistols to tribal sheikhs who visited him, to curry their favor (USG Open Source Center translation): "His Eminence wondered: Where from did the prime minister bring money to distribute pistols to some chieftains? These are the methods of the destroyer Saddam. Where are the state's fund? What did Operation Knights Assault and the operations of the so-called Law Enforcement Plan achieve? What are the results of investigations on the crime of the Al-Ummah Bridge and the bloody Wednesday, Sunday, and Tuesday? What is the fate of the corrupt ones, particularly the ministers who have stolen the state's funds? Where is the wronged people's share from the ration card's items?"br /br /Back to the al-Hayat article: The Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi said it is worried about massive fraud in the election, given that, it alleged, the Independent High Electoral Commission had printed up an extra seven million ballots. The party dismissed the explanation that the Commission had had to print more ballots because the originals did not meet international criteria.br /br /In al-Anbar Province, Ahmad Abu Risha is a leader of the 'Awakening Councils' or 'Sons of Iraq' movement, wherein Sunni Arabs took money from the US to fight radical Muslim extremists such as the 'Islamic State of Iraq.' He is now part of the Unity of Iraq coalition led by Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani. He said that the Committee of Justice and Accountability's disqualification of some 500 candidates out of over 6000 was itself a reason to suspect that some political parties intend to commit ballot fraud.br /br /The Independent High Electoral Commission issued a statement denying the validity of the charges and calling them "inexcusable" and "detached from reality."br /br /Meanwhile, The Eye Network dedicated to observing the elections has expressed its fears of ballot fraud in the votes cast by Iraqi expatriates. There are about a million Iraqis in Syria, and a couple hundred thousand in Jordan, with perhaps 50,000 each in Egypt and Lebanon, as well as about 40,000 in Sweden and a few thousands in other countries. (These figures are based on my own research and that of specialists who have presented at conferences I've attended; the numbers are much exaggerated in the press for both Jordan and Egypt). The Eye Network says it is precisely the unknown number of voters abroad and the lack of authenticated voter rolls that makes fraud so potentially easy in this regard.br /br /Thre are also fears of undue religious interference. Last week the Pakistani Shiite grand ayatollah in Najaf, Bashir al-Najafi, a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100226/wl_mideast_afp/iraqvotereligionshiite_20100226175705 " implicitly denounced several of al-Maliki's cabinet members, some of them running on his State of Law ticket/a for corruption and incompetence (criticizing the provision of services such as electricity and water).br /br /Apparently as a reaction to this intervention, a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100227/wl_mideast_afp/iraqvotereligionshiite_20100227161510 " Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who outranks al-Najafi, reaffirmed the neutrality of the great Shiite clerics/a in this election. Sistani also announced that he would not meet with any further candidates in the week before the election.br /br /The USG Open Source Center translated the second Friday prayer sermon of Sistani representative Abd al-Mahdi Karbala'i:br /br /blockquote' 26 February 2010, His Eminence Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i, representative of the Higher Religious Authority, said: "Higher Religious Authority His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, may God maintain his shadow, has warned of the refusal to participate in the coming elections. He said that this is because the citizen's refusal to participate in the elections will give a chance to others who reject the democratic way of transferring power and running the country's affairs and who take violence and illegitimate ways as a means to change the situation, to assume power, and impose their policy on the others. He said that this would involve the country in a whirlpool of chaos and continuous instability.br /br /"He pointed out: So as to foil the plans of these sides and in order to prevent them from taking Iraq back to square one, everyone should participate in the elections. All this is in order to consolidate and entrench the democratic way of the rotation of power and to take the country far from the ghost of violence and military coups. If the citizens refuse to participate in the elections, a day will come when they will regret this strongly, but after it is too late." ' /blockquotebr /br /br /br /br /br /br /End/ (Not Continued)div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3463907-7858773770498270744?l=www.juancole.com' alt='' //div