North Africa: an Amazigh Revival?………….

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Najwa Alazabi has another first name, Tiarina, but under Muammar Qaddafi’s rule she could never use it. Tiarina is a traditional name of Amazighs, a North African ethnic minority also known as Berber, and expressions of the Amazigh culture and script were forbidden in Qaddafi’s Libya……… The Amazigh are the original inhabitants of North Africa. Generations of conquerors have slowly eroded the Berber culture and language, while conversion to Islam and the promotion of Arabic as the language of God encouraged assimilation. Qaddafi’s policy of strict Arabization struck a final blow to their identity. Under his rule, Amazigh names, cultural symbols, and their written language were all forbidden. Amazigh activists were routinely harassed and, often, imprisoned. The Amazigh make up approximately eight or nine percent of Libya’s 5.7 million, according to Berber scholars, although after centuries of mixing between Arabs and Amazigh, no one can be sure……….Today, their conception of the own identity can carry some contradictions. Many view their culture as both different and not so different from that of Arabs. Defining themselves in opposition to the dominant Arab identity of Libya could bring them trouble in a country known for strident Arab nationalism…………

Don’t expect any real improvement of the lot of the Amazigh. Not unless they force the issue. The new leaders were fed from the breasts of Muammar Qaddafi and his regime.
Cheers
mhg



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Riyadh Gathering of Flunkies: no Iranians, but a Turki and a Gargasha from UAE, Mutual “Satisfaction”……..

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“Iran is escalating tension in the region and the world at large,” said Prince Saud Al-Faisal, minister of foreign affairs, in a speech read out by Prince Turki bin Mohammed bin Saud Al-Kabeer, deputy minister for multilateral relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs…….. The remarks by Prince Saud came as another blow to the Iranian policy after Europe ramped up pressure on Tehran following attacks on the British Embassy in Tehran last week………. Speaking on the role of GCC states in changing the international landscape, Anwar Mohammad Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, expressed his concerns on the Iranian nuclear program. He, however, said that the GCC had emerged as a strong bloc with unified approach and with capacity to solve issues confronting the region. “This is evident from our support to Bahrain, where troops from the GCC Peninsula Shield were sent to protect vital installations,” added Gargash…………..”

The dour mullahs or their representatives were not invited, which led me to call it a GWTW without Rhett or Scarlett. So these third and fourth tier GCC flunkies met in Riyadh, all appropriately scowling in the style of flunkies on my Gulf to show some missing gravitas. Presumably with a select gaggle of invited foreigners, to discuss Gulf security. They read speeches written for the potentates, who did not attend, from Prince Saud al-Faisal to prince Muqrin.
Instead of security, the focused on bashing Iran and its ruling mullahs. Not much of a conference, if that is what it was. Not sure what the point of the thing was. A bunch of Saudi and UAE and Bahrain and other retainers meeting in Riyadh and exchanging the very same opinion with each other, extolling the Saudi invasion to crush the Bahrain uprising. Nothing new added, no value added. Just repeating the same usual shared mantra, sort of like mutual masturbation (wtf that be).

Cheers
mhg



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U.S. Campaign Hiking: Gingrich goes to CMU instead of Iraq-Iran Border, no Rice & Rice………….

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Former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has picked a foreign policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to be his national security adviser. Kiron Skinner directs CMU’s International Relations and Politics department and also services on the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and service on the Council of Foreign Relations. Skinner has previously served as an adviser on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Defense Policy Board of the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001 to 2007. Skinner will continue to teach full-time on social and decision sciences at CMU, but will be on call to advise Gingrich………

Clearly Newt Gingrich doesn’t like to stray far from the ‘reservation, at least in matters of picking policy advisers, if not in ‘other’ matters. His choice is somewhat better than Romney, who picked a veteran of the right-wing and genocidal Lebanese Forces militia (apparently Romney feels that he needs to shore up his right-wing credentials). But, hey, the day is young, and I have not looked in Mr. Skinner’s closet yet. This almost certainly means that he, Newt, will decline my advise to take a hike on the Iraq-Iran border, preferably making a two-feet sortie across the border. Dommage.
Gingrich is also eschewing the Bush-Obama-Clinton trend of seeking high profile female foreign policy advisers (Albright, Rice &Rice). Maybe ‘somebody’ has learned something after all.

Cheers
mhg



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Iran TEPIX, NYSE, NASDAQ, Blankfine, Cramer, Cain………..

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The main index of the Tehran Stock Exchange, TEPIX, has soared to a record high, despite the US-led sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran. The benchmark index gained 240 points to close at an all-time high of 24,356 on Sunday, IRNA reported. The surge was mostly due to Iran’s copper, steel, and petrochemical industries as investors traded shares worth $36.4 million. The Tehran Stock Exchange, founded in 1967, has been one of the world’s best performing stock markets in recent years and ranked as the best bourse index in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East in 2010 in terms of performance of the main index……….Press TV (Iran)

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprise. The US economy is still in the doghouse, but the NYSE and Nasdaq have soared in recent weeks. Yet clearly trading on the TEPIX is not exactly very deep. At a daily trade of $36.4 million, Lloyd Blankfine can do more trading than that. Hell, Jim Cramer can do more trading than that. Hell, Hermann Cain can trade that much after he sells his book that he ran for president to promote.

Cheers
mhg



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Rommel of Arabia in Yemen, the Vast Shi’a Conspiracy to Conquer Abu Dhabi and the World………….

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When the world is focused on the uprisings in Egypt, Syria and the President of Yemen’s agreement to step aside, the spotlight has been diverted from the threat posed by Yemen’s Al Houthi Zaidi Shiite, pro-Iranian rebels. With an estimated 100,000 fighters, the Al Houthis harbour not only an expansionist agenda but the will to topple the government and impose their own brand of Shiite religious law on the entire country and beyond. They have made territorial claims to a number of Saudi villages and in 2009 they battled with Saudi forces. For the Al Houthis, the Yemeni armed forces’ preoccupation with maintaining security on the street has been a gift. Over the past 10 months they have succeeded in expanding their territorial control from their homebase Sa’ada into four Yemeni provinces and over the main crossing points into Saudi Arabia……..n recent days, Shiites have been demonstrating against the Saudi government in the city of Qatif in the oil-rich Eastern Region, where anti-royalist slogans have been scrawled on walls. The kingdom’s mufti blames Iran for the unrest, credible when Iranian clerics are calling for an end to the Al Saud ruling dynasty………


Predictable piece of rubbish by a retainer of the al-Nahayans rulers of Abu Dhabi, in one of their own newspapers. He is writing mainly about the Yemeni Houthis, who in 2009 totally defeated the invading high-tech Saudi armed forces under Prince Khaled Bin Sultan al-Saud. (Saudi semi-official had all but declared Khaled as the Rommel of Yemen, and he did have the same fate as Rommel at El-Alamein).
In the process, this writer also accuses Saudi Shi’as who are seeking equal rights of being Iranian agents. He is also throwing in a majority of the peoples of Bahrain and Iraq (most likely Lebanon as well) as foreign agents.
Funny: the UAE of the Bin Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahayan brothers is groaning under the weight of foreign bases, from American to British to Pakistani to Monaco-an to Klingon. Not to mention the foreign mercenary force the al-Nahayan formed early this year with Blackwater veterans and Colombians, Australians, white South Africans and others. It is all part of the vast Shi’a conspiracy, I tell ya.
And what is wrong with wanting to overthrow the al-Saud, along with the mullahs in Iran and the despots in Manama? Anybody with any sense would want that
.
Cheers
mhg



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More Saudi Reforms: Commission for the Propagation of Vice arrests Cafe Couples..……

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Saudi Arabia’s feared religion police smashed a prostitution ring in the Gulf Kingdom’s second largest city, involving at least 20 airline stewardesses of Arab nationality, a newspaper reported on Sunday. Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had watched the ring for more than four months in a bid to trap its leader, who was also caught with the other members, the Arabic language daily Sabq said in a report from the western Red Sea port of Jeddah. “The ring leader had been very careful and had managed his ring only by phone. It took the Commission members at least four months to get him,” it said. The paper said the Arab ring leader was hunted when Commission members, acting on a tip off, seized a stewardess with a Saudi man at a coffee shop……….

One has got to be careful here. The Saudi religious cops have their own definition of “vice”. After all, these goons are now threatening to force women to cover (as too sexy) the only part of them that they are allowed to expose. That would be their eyes, especially sexy expressive eyes that drive these polygamous perverts crazy.
So they caught her with a man sipping lattes at a coffee shop and that is evidence of prostitution. Imagine if they were caught having a full meal together at a restaurant: that is the Saudi equivalent of ‘going all the way’. The fact that she was with a “Saudi” man is apparently also considered some kind of proof. The logic of the Commission for the Propagation of Vice goes like this: otherwise, why else would a woman be with a Saudi man? Unfortunately it is a common “logic” on the shores of my Gulf (and apparently the Red Sea as well).

Maybe that is all they do when they hook up in Saudi Arabia: drink some coffee together.
Cheers
mhg



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Taliban Chutzpah in Iran and Afghanistan and Egypt………….

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Until two months ago, Hamid had spent the better part of the past decade under house arrest in Iran, he said, after being detained entering the country when Afghanistan fell to coalition forces in late 2001…….. Now, after a sustained lobbying campaign by family members, Hamid is free. We met back in his Egyptian homeland nearly two years after we first began talking online, a months-long conversation (and, at times, debate) we had over email about our respective ideas. “I thought Iran intended to hold me forever,” he said when we met at the cafe. “They denied that I was there but after the campaign from my family, my presence became known and if the outside world knows someone is there, then they have a chance of a deal being made for their release.” Hamid knows more than most about the machinations driving Iran’s detention and release of foreign fighters who had illegally crossed its borders; he served at times as the unofficial Taliban emissary to the country. But he hotly contests that he represented al Qaeda or its interests to the government in Iran, as is alleged by the United States. “Al Qaeda did not send me, nobody sent me. I made the proposal to Mullah Omar to reach out to Iran when he came to visit us in the village south of Kandahar airport, in 1997, and he agreed.” The proposal Hamid recounts would have been part of efforts aimed at unlocking the Iranian embargo that later intensified after several Iranian diplomats were killed in 1998 by Taliban forces at Mazar-i-Sharif…………

He was an al-Qaeda man: the Arabs in Afghanistan were all al-Qaeda, not Taliban. To say that those Iranian diplomats were “killed” by “Taliban forces” is an understatement. Actually those Iranian diplomats at Mazar-e-Sharif had their throats slit in public by the Taliban when they took the city. That is not simply killing, that is like what al-Qaeda did to American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. It is interesting that the Taliban were outraged because the Iranians would not help them in 2001. Some Arab Salafis on the Gulfnare still bitter about that, that Iran in 2001 did not help the Taliban who during their rule slit the throats of Iranian diplomats and persecuted most Afghans not just Shi’as. That is what their former and future Saudi allies would call Taliban chutzpah.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Revolts and Islam: Iranian Illusions, Saudi Machinations…….

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Former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati says the use of the term ‘Arab spring’ is an attempt by the West to liken uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to ‘color revolutions’ in East European countries. By using such a term the Westerners have been seeking to deny the significant role of “Islam” in inspiring revolutions in the Muslim Arab countries, Velayati said. The Westerners use the term “Arab spring” to convey their desired “view” of the revolutions in the region, the scholar-turned politician noted. Western countries seek to convey this view that “Muslim nations have got rid of Hosni Mubarak and Bin Ali ….to embrace Western approaches,” Velayati told the Mehr News Agency. They refuse to acknowledge the fact that the uprisings in Arab countries are inspired by Islam because it contravenes with their approach, explained Velayati, the senior foreign policy advisor to the Supreme Leader. “If Muslim nations who have risen up (against dictatorship) accept Arab spring they will have no alternative other than following the Westerners; however, the reality is that regional nations have cried Allahu Akbar (God is great) ……………

The Iranian mullahs insist that the Arab uprisings were motivated by Islamist zeal. I have tried to explain to them many times that all these revolts started as secular movements and that the Muslim fundamentalists joined later, when they showed some success. Now, with the clear shift of political power in all these states to the Islamist fundamentalists, the Iranians may know something the rest of us don’t.

One of the most secular Arab states ‘was’ Tunisia, Bourguiba and Bin Ali made sure of that, and it is going Islamist. So is Egypt and Libya. Syria was absolutely the most secular Arab state of our modern times. Yet if the revolt against the Assad regime succeeds, as it looks like now, then Syrians will have a choice of alliances between: (1)Pro-Saudi Muslim Brothers, (1)Other Muslim Brothers, (3) Salafis (bought, signed, sealed, and delivered), (4) a weak minority of watered-down secularists. In the end the new Syrian regime will be dominated by Islamic fundamentalists of one stripe or another.
That is why I may humor the Iranians and say they may have a point. Still, the outcome may not be what the Iranians would have liked. Probably not.
Cheers
mhg



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Of Iranians, Eschatology Issues, the Mahdi, End of Time Films, and Drones………..

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“Q: What are the main reasons for producing “end of the world” films in the West? Do these films show the whole truth?
A: I think there are several reasons why there are a number of “end of the world” films in the West. One reason has to do with Christian eschatology (the theological study of the end times). Many Christian theologians and pastors and priests have taught and do teach that Jesus Christ will one day return to the Earth to rule humankind in righteousness. On some widespread interpretations of the last book of the Bible—the book of Revelation—there will be a great battle between good and evil in the eschaton and this battle will usher in the end of the world as we know it.
Another reason has to do with the fact that on the Western calendar, we are now at the beginning of the second millennium (the Western calendar is based on the birth and death of Jesus). In biblical chronology, it seems that major events occur every couple thousand years, so many people have concluded that the time is ripe for something significant to happen—something of biblical proportions. Added to this was the Y2K scare in which many computer engineers and others believed that computers would crash when the year 2000 CE occurred, and in some quarters there was widespread panic about this. This fueled an end-of-the-world hysteria………..Taken together, these add up to the predicted doomsday date of 21 December 2012. Though these are simply fables, the truth is that apocalyptic films do well at the box office. In fact, the recent film 2012, which graphically depicts the end of the world next year, was enthusiastically viewed in the West.
Most serious Christian scholars maintain that the Bible does not predict a specific timeframe for the end of the world………….Mehr News Agency (Iran)

Nothing here about the appearance of our long-awaited Mahdi nor about the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Israel. Without the “Rapture” and the hoped for conversion of all the Jews, many of the Christian right would have no hope, and no reason to hitch their horses to the Likud wagon. The Iranians here are not saying what ‘they’ think of all these eschatological issues. They do, however, claim to have shot down an American drone in the eastern part of the country.

Cheers
mhg



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Offshore Country on my Gulf: UAE Minority Culture, Bollywood Hits…………..

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Young Emirati filmmaker and American University of Sharjah student Sarah Alagroobi introduces herself to the regional film scene with an enticing short movie that is sure to make an impression. The Forbidden Fruit, which cleverly studies the undertones and conflicting values of modern Emirati society, will make its premier at this year’s Dubai International Film Festival in the Muhr Emirati section. Alagroobi, who directed, wrote, produced, edited and did everything short of putting herself in the film, said of the experience, “I’ve always been fascinated with the ‘inside scoop’ on what’s happening behind closed doors in Emirati society. My mother always said ‘what’s kept in the dark will always come to light’.” And that’s what this film is about, bringing a delicate topic to light. The Forbidden Fruit is unlike other Emirati films in that it exposes an aspect of a culture so remarkably polished that people might never see it for themselves. The film is based around two young Emirati adults, Alia and Rashed, who live in a modernized society that is still very much absorbed in its traditions and cultures. Viewers follow Alia and Rashed as they go about their lives carelessly partying, drinking and having a good time……………

This is a good effort but it is funny, or would be if it weren’t so sad and serious. Talking about UAE films and UAE culture: they mean the film and culture of a ”minority” in an “offshore country”. The UAE has a population that is overwhelmingly Asian (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia, etc). Most are Indians, with some Arabs and Iranians and Africans, then a few thousand Westerners. At least 85%, possibly more, are non-citizen expatriate laborers who are in the country temporarily. This is a truly “offshore country”, as I called it a year or so ago. The ruling potentates can’t even police the country, they rely on foreigners. For protection, they have formed a special mercenary force led by former Blackwater leaders, composed of Colombians, Australians, white South Africans, and possibly Mexican drug cartel veterans.

Yet they talk of an exclusive “Emirati” society as if it represents the “country”. I beg to differ. I would assert here and now that these millions of Indians and other Asians represent the true UAE society. They are a huge majority of millions among a few hundred thousand original citizens. If you want to see a film about the “real” UAE, especially Abu Dhabi and Dubai, go see an Indian film (or a Bengali or Philippine film). Hell, yeah, go see a Bollywood hit (it would be a bit more ‘native’ if it starred the Bin Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahayan brothers).
Cheers
mhg



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