All posts by Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

Dr. Mohammed Haider Ghuloum: trained as an economist, been called a few other names..... الشرقية للبنين- المتنبي- ثانوية الشويخ
Ali Khamenei, Arab Revolutions, Iran

Iran: Khamenei and the Club of Worried Leaders………

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      BFF
“Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei and a large number of Iranian elites in a meeting here on Tuesday discussed prevalence of justice in the society as among the tenets of the Islamic-Iranian paradigm of progress. At the second meeting of ‘Strategic Thoughts’ here in Tehran on Tuesday, the Supreme Leader called for maximizing prevalence of justice in the society, and said despite the massive efforts made to prevail justice in the Iranian society after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the country still has a long way to go, “since the Islamic ruling system is after maximized justice and full materialization of justice as an absolute value”. During the 4-hour meeting, the Leader said the holy Quran describes justice as the main goal of all divine religions, and said, “Religions have developed social systems in pursuit of justice, and justice has been the main goal for man’s move within the framework of religion.”. He further reminded that such a justice-oriented view cannot be found in any of the schools of thought presented by man. Ayatollah Khamenei stressed the need for serious efforts and consultations among intellectuals and thinkers to prevail the Islamic theory and view of justice in the country. ……”The use of two concepts of ‘Islamic’ and ‘Iranian’ is never meant to reject achievements and rightful experiences of others,” the Leader went on to say……..” Fars News (Iran)

Also sprach Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to a meeting of “elites”, presumably properly revolutionary “elites”.

WTF: I have to admit that I could not figure this one out, not yet. I know he is gingerly tackling the sensitive issue that is not necessarily a dichotomy: “Iranian” and “Islamic” identities. He called it a paradigm. That is a tough one: Turkey has solved it by being as Turkish as ever, but slightly more Islamic. I know Khamenei is pushing the fundamentalist theocratic line, but there is more. I discern a certain amount of worry, uncertainty even as he speaks with the seeming certainty of a theocrat.
That is a good sign: when a leader in our region worries it is always a good sign for the people. They ought to start a Club of Worried Leaders, one that goes beyond the GCC and Jordan and Morocco (I think Libya and Yemen and Syria and Bahrain are beyond the mere worried, I hope I am right). Keep on worrying, y’all.
Cheers
mhg


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Arabian Peninsula, Culture, Iran

Of Genomes, Iranians, Arabs, Jews, Gomorans, and Neanderthals…….

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“Now that Stanford University’s Iranian Genome Project has been partly funded by a diaspora philanthropic organization, speculation is running wild in certain Iranian circles. The project’s expected medical benefits notwithstanding, Facebook is abuzz with comments about the potential unintended consequences of the racial revelations it may yield. A common Iranian lamentation is that virtually every major civilization has invaded us at least once: Greek, Roman, Arab, Mongol, Turkic, and European armies have all set up camp here. The odds are that the project will deliver a healthy shock to the racial purists among us. A similar project revealed that most Palestinians are not descended from Arab interlopers, as some Israeli ideologues argued, but from the ancient Jews who converted to Christianity and Islam. The idea of racial purity came to the Middle East in the 19th century as an extreme manifestation of nationalism. Soon, storms of Pan-Turkic, Pan-Iranist, and Pan-Arab agitation were brewing in tiny social teacups around the Middle East. Suddenly everybody was congenitally better than everybody else. Grandiose maps imagining new, ethnically correct national boundaries were drawn up and plans were made to recover national innocence by exorcising foreign words. I still remember the Pan-Iranists’ slogan of my youth: “Ahead to our own borders……. The chimera of racial purity led the to fabrication of new national myths and the systematic distortion of old ones. Some Iranians (like their Turkic and Arab counterparts) sought to escape their present inglorious existence in dreams of a golden past. In this spirit, much praise was showered in Iran on the national epic of Iran, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh or Book of Kings………”

Okay, they have discovered that most ‘Palestinians” were descendants of ancient Jews rather than Arabian tribes. What else is new, and what difference does it make? I never thought Palestinians were “Arabs” in the sense that their ancestors came from Arabia, anymore than that the ancestors of most Egyptian came from Arabia (they did not). Anymore than expecting the ancestors of blue-eyed blond Syrians to have been from Hejaz or Nejd. That is not how an “Arab” is defined by sane rational people.
But it is an interesting historical exercise: one day I shall undergo it to confirm if I am truly a descendant of the ancient Gods, or if that information was just a cruel hoax. I personally suspect that it is true.
Which makes me wonder: what if all our leaders are exposed (not a pun) to such Genome tests. Suppose the al-Saud, for example, discover that they were descended from, let us say, the Jews of Khyber. What would the Mufti Shaikh A Al Al Shaikh say (if he were rational, he would just shut up about it)? Suppose the al-Khalifa rulers of Bahrain discover that they are the descendants of some Sodomite tribe (meaning from that famous Biblical city of Sodom). That may explain their predilection for sexual assaults and rapes of male and female captive protesters. Sodomites (the people of Sodom) were notorious as sexual aggressors: that is just one version of the story. As for Qaddafi, I suspect he will end up being the descendant of the fraternization of some Roman legionnaire with a female sheep herder from the old Roman Province of Africa, Nothing Arab there, is there? There has already been speculation, mostly in Saudi media like Alarabiya (and Asharq Alawsat) that Iran’s Ahmadinejad is really Jewish and that he used to go by another name. I say: who cares? The only thing that changes is that he becomes entitled to do the Aliyah (עלייה)by the “right of return”: he could some day run for the Knesset. As for the al-Nahayan clan of Abu Dhabi (and the UAE)……..oy vey.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, ethnic cleansing, Human Right, Saudi Arabia

Bahrain Hearings: State Department is AWOL, the New Deciders of America……..

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“Yesterday, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission — an entity within Congress chaired by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) charged with investigating human rights abuses — held a hearing titled “Human Rights in Bahrain,” designed to probe abuses against pro-democracy activists in the Arab monarchy. Noticeably absent among the witnesses testifying were any representatives from the U.S. government, which has been closely allied with Bahrain throughout the uprising and resulting humanitarian crisis. On the hearing’s website, you can see that both witnesses called from the State Department, William J. Burns and Jeffrey D. Feltman, declined to appear….. McClatchy reports that “scheduling conflicts” are the reason that the two officials did not appear, although no explanation is given why the State Department did not send replacements. “I was expecting at least one, possibly two witnesses from the State Department to testify,” said a disappointed McGovern. At the hearing, Human Right’s Watch’s Joe Stork stressed the need for a more forceful response from the United States, which has been very mute in reaction to the abuses in the country……..”


Some would say that Hillary Clinton and her boss Barack Obama were afraid to offend the moneybags of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. So, they have sacrificed the people of Bahrain and some in Saudi Arabia, as well as what they ‘used’ to profess to be their own principles.
I knew when Obama bowed so low in front of the absolute tribal polygamous king of Saudi Arabia that it was the beginning of something special. Before Obama the US was in the position of strength vis-a-vis Arab despots. It was always on the side of the despots, but it was the “decider”, as Bush liked to say. Now the Arab despots, the ones with money in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, are in the driver’s seat. Now Riyadh is the decider of US policy about the Gulf (the Persian-American Gulf), just as Tel Aviv is the decider of US policy about the Israeli-Palestinian-Lebanese issue.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, GCC, Human Right, Occupied Bahrain, Saudi Arabia

The Assault on the King of Bahrain……….

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The al-Khalifa regime and their Saudi occupation masters have now borrowed from the rape playbook of others in Bosnia and the Congo. They are using rape and the threat of it against the men and women in their custody. Here are afew tweets on the latest:

“NickKristof 
Our close ally, #Bahrain, has a consistent record of using sexual abuse of male and female detainees as a form of torture.”

“maryamalkhawaja
My father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, was told that they were going to find me and rape me. #bahrain #Feb14”

“kristenchick Kristen Chick
Another defendant, Mohamed Hassan Jawad, tried to show marks of torture on legs during hearing today, was silenced, say witnesses “

“kristenchick Kristen Chick
“Abdul Hadi Al Khawaja’s wife crying on the phone as she recounted her husband’s story of attempted rape in #Bahrain govt custody”

“kristenchick Kristen Chick
Khadija Mossawi, wife of Abdul Hadi Al Khawaja, just told me how 4 men attempted to rape her husband in govt custody friday “

“maryamalkhawaja 
3. Court was adjourned until the 22nd of May and alkhawaja is supposed to get a head scan for possible injuries #bahrain”

“maryamalkhawaja Maryam Alkhawaja
2. They were 4 men and it was in a diff room than were they tried to force him to apologize #bahrain…”

“maryamalkhawaja 1. Corrections to former tweets: alkhawaja banged his head against the floor, he was taken out of the court when he tried to s #bahrain…..”

“maryamalkhawaja 
5. When he tried to tell the judge about this in court hearing today, he was silenced. #Bahrain…..”

“maryamalkhawaja 
4. They began to take off his pants; he was handcuffed & couldnt resist. He began banging his head against the wall until he was unconscious..”

“maryamalkhawaja 
3. He said show me what I have done wrong, and I will apologize. At that point the men took of their pants, he said, as if to rape him cont..”

One of the tweeters is the daughter of one of the threatened victims, which makes it quite agonizing for her to recount all this. Which makes me wonder if there is something ‘Freudian’ in this: if anyone ever raped or threatened to rape the shaikh (king) of Bahrain and his uncle Khalifa bin Salman (the prime minister).
Cheers
mhg


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Al-Qaeda, Iran, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Terrorism

Ahamadinejad as Oliver Stone, Osama au masque de fer……….

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“Tehran: Al Qaida founder Osama Bin Laden was a prisoner in US custody for “sometime” before he was killed by the American military, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday. “I have exact information that Bin Laden was held by the American military for sometime… until the day they killed him he was a prisoner held by them,” the hardline president said in a live interview on Iranian state television. “Please pay attention. This is important. He was held by them for sometime. They made him sick and while he was sick they killed him,” Ahmadinejad added. He accused US President Barack Obama for announcing the Al Qaida leader’s death for “political gain”. “What the US president has done is for domestic political gain. In other words, they killed him for Obama’s election and now they are seeking to replace him with someone else,” Ahmadinejad said without elaborating……”

It is starting, predictably. It is tempting for me to explain this as Ahmadinejad being just a ….Middle Easterner. Conspiracy theories and all that. But then there is another possible explanation. Maybe the Pakistani military or ISI leaked this tidbit of gossip to the Iranians, just to muddy the waters, and counter American anger. Okay, that in itself is also a conspiracy theory. I have another one: old Papa Bin Laden had many wives, many sons; suppose there was another man who looked exactly like Bin Laden, but without wearing an iron mask……..
(FYI: Alexandre Dumas is dead, actually both are dead; no copyright, no nothing).
Cheers
mhg


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Apartheid, Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, Corruption, ethnic cleansing, Occupied Bahrain

Île du Diable: Healthcare in a Gulf Penal Colony……….

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"The light that fills my lonely cell,
Is blocked out by the key,
That locks the door to this hell,
The place they wanted me.
Time's racing like the wind,
Execution's near,
Oh lord, I wait for death,
And, yes, I have no fear......"  Megadeth (DFevils Island)

“Q: Why are medical personnel being detained?
A: They helped the injured and they are witnesses. If the government wants to destroy all the evidence, it’s one answer — you accuse medical staff because the main witness of what happened in Salmaniya Hospital, the number of figures of the injured and what kind of weapons were used at that time, was the medical staff. The medical staff know everything.

Q: Have you spoken with any of the medical personnel?
A: We did not speak with them but we spoke with some people who were with them. They said the police, they were tortured. We talked with the ones who were released.

Q: How many people did you speak with?
A: More than 30. Six talked about the doctors.

Q: Were the doctors treated differently than other detainees?
A: Yes, they get more torture. Some doctors, a very famous doctor, we don’t want to announce his name, they forced him to dance to music and they filmed.

Q: Was that meant to shame him?……...”

Doesn’t exactly sound like something out of House, does it? But then Bahrain is not a normal country. The ruling clan and the Saudi occupiers and the imported mercenaries are turning the island into nearly a penal colony.
He asked: “Was that meant to shame him?” Arab despots are shameless, and none of them more so than the rulers of Bahrain. Yet what is even more shameless are our palace self-styled “thinkers”, royal “intellectuals” and opinion makers on my Gulf. Most have been either completely silent or shamefully cheer leading the absolute tribal polygamous monarchies committing genocide on their people. A few, a very few, have spoken against this, and those few are mostly in my own hometown. The rest of the Gulf has gone deathly, cowardly silent when not joining the Salafis in cheering the despots.
Cheers
mhg


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Iran

A Theocracy’s Troubles, Islamic Republic or Iranian Republic?………

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“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad escalated an unusually public confrontation within the country’s leadership Saturday by firing three Cabinet ministers, defying Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his loyalists, who had warned him the move would be unconstitutional. Ahmadinejad accepted the resignation of the ministers of oil, welfare, and mines and industries as part of a plan to reshape the government by eventually merging eight of the country’s ministries into four, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency and letters posted to his own website………..”

Presidents usually calm down during their last year or two in office. By that time people start paying more attention to who will succeed them. Iran’s Ahmadinejad started his term of office with a bang and he seems intent on ending it with a bang, possibly a bigger one. It seems that before his final term of office expires in 2013, he will be confronting an entrenched field of rivals ranging from Ayatollah Khamenei to a conservative parliament. So far he has failed to chip away meaningfully at the powers of Khamenei, and he may now have trouble with the legislature. He did succeed finally in getting rid of Foreign Minister Mottaki. Mr. Ahmadinejad has an interesting group of people around him, including his in-law and chief adviser Mashaei who is apparently immensely disliked by the clergy. They seem to be trying to push the country toward a “softer” version of an Islamic republic, more an “Iranian” republic that is Islamic.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is the country’s third civilian president. The very first one was Bani-Sadr who had to escape to France in the early 1980s. Then there was the short-tenured Mr. Rajaie who as blown up to smithereens, along with many others, by a terrorist bomb. Then followed a succession of three clergy presidents (Khamenei, Rafsanjani, Khatami). Now it is possible that the theocracy will try to make sure the next president is a mullah: it has had nothing but trouble with civilian “presidents”. Yet that is not good for the regime, for it will give an even narrower tunnel vision. It will also make it “look” more theocratic.
Either way, we can look for tumultuous two years in Iranian politics. That will match the tumultuous next two years I expect to see in the Arab world.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Culture, GCC, Gulf states, Jordan

GCC Women, Moroccan Beauties, Jordanian Humor….

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“Gulf women fear Jordan, Morocco entry into GCC. Say their men might turn to women from those two countries after joining GCC. A bid by Jordan and Morocco to join a Gulf Arab alliance has already triggered fears among women in the oil-rich region that local men could turn to those two countries for wives. Many women from Saudi Arabia and other members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) called a prominent Saudi social and religious adviser to express their fears about the entry of Jordan and Morocco into the 30-year-old GCC. At summit talks in Riyadh last week, GCC leaders welcomed a request by the two Arab nations to join the GCC and instructed their foreign ministers to follow up their issue…….”

This is another fallout of the erratic decision by the Saudi King and his sweet brothers to invite Jordan and Morocco to join the Gulf GCC. Apparently some Gulf women would like their shaikhs, the clergy, to issue fatwas restricting marriage to Moroccan and Jordanian women. Some GCC states, especially UAE and Saudi Arabia, already have rules banning or restricting marriage to foreigners (at least requiring regime permission). This is illogical. Besides, what make them think women of Jordan and Morocco are interested in Gulf men?
I am from the Gulf and sometimes I wonder why Gulf women are interested in many of the Gulf men. Having said that, I must add that if Jordanian women are anything like Jordanian men, then they have about as much a sense of humor as most of my fellow Gulf men. Which is nada, zilch, rien. My best friend BFF (see photo up there) has a better canine sense of humor than that. So what is the attraction? As for the women of Morocco, I haven’t known many, well, not enough, but from what I discern………o boy. That may be a worry.
Cheers
mhg


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Apartheid, Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, ethnic cleansing, Occupied Bahrain

The Jews of Manama? Drowning the revolution in Shia blood………

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“Bahrain is trying to drown the protests in Shia blood. “Let us drown the revolution in Jewish blood” was the slogan of the tsars when they orchestrated pogroms against Jews across Russia in the years before the First World War. The battle-cry of the al-Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain ever since they started to crush the pro-democracy protests in the island kingdom two months ago might well be “to drown the revolution in Shia blood”. Just as the tsars once used Cossacks to kill and torture Jews and burn their synagogues, so Bahrain’s minority Sunni regime sends out its black-masked security forces night after night to terrorise the majority Shia population for demanding equal political and civil rights. Usually troops and police make their raids on Shia districts between 1am and 4am, dragging people from their beds and beating them in front of their families. Those detained face mistreatment and torture in prison. One pro-democracy activist, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, brought before a military court last week with severe facial injuries, said he had suffered four fractures to the left side of his face, including a broken jaw that needed four hours’ surgery……..It soon became clear that the government is engaged in a savage onslaught on the entire Shia community – some 70 per cent of the population……..”


This policy of apartheid has been going on in Bahrain since the ruling al-Khalifa clan reneged on its promise at independence to hold free elections. That was in 1975 when they dissolved the first and last freely elected legislature. Like in most Arab despots they managed to keep the people at bay through fear, prison, and exile. The difference is that now in Bahrain, like in other Arab states, the fear is gone. Now the al-Khalifa clan and their Saudi Wahhabi masters and their Pakistani and Jordanian mercenaries are trying to restore that old fear into the hearts of the Bahraini people. They are trying the old method of unbridled violence.
Cheers
mhg


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Al-Qaeda, Terrorism, US Foreign Policy

Two Futile Speeches: Obama and Osama……

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I am expecting two much-publicized speeches on the Middle East this next week. My advice to both speakers (I prefer speechifiers in this case) is or would have been: don’t bother. But one of them is dead. Bin Laden reportedly has an audio tape prepared for after his death. I wonder if we will hear it as we watch some of reported porno tapes found in his hideout in Pakistan (some say they were under his bed). Okay, like many of us he can watch almost all the porn he wants, there are no religious injunctions against it because in the old days they had no video recording and Arabs did not draw lewd figure on walls like the Romans and Greeks.
Osama’s speech will be a waste of time because it will not turn the tide and make his movement any more attractive to many Arabs and Muslims, especially outside the Arabian Peninsula.
The other speech, by President Barack Obama, will be as useless. Mr. Obama’s hands are tied behind his back by the coming elections and by the powerful Israeli lobby that has a veto power over American Middle East policy. He must know his speech will be useless at this time, for it will avoid or evade the Palestinian-Israeli issue. He will make some general statements about the Palestinian issue and his support for democracy in Libya and Syria but not in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. I wrote here about two years ago or so when the US administration introduced a Middle East initiative and said it expected a solution within a year: I said fohgetaboutit. As did others, and we were all right.
Cheers
mhg


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