Hamas holds the high cards?

I find Scheer almost always interesting and perspective but I really find it difficult to think that Hamas holds the high cards. The present drift towards civil war between Hamas and Fatah is absolutely disastrous for the Palestinians. It may have the virtue of showing that Fatah is willing to be a puppet of Israel and the US in order to gain a few crumbs for the Palestinians but for Scheer to think that Israel or the US would ever allow empowerment of the Palestinians is sheer fantasy.
Fatah is already moving to wipe out Hamas in the West Bank and it would not be surprising if Israel takes military action against Hamas in Gaza. The prospect is for more Palestinian losses. No doubt Hamas will try to strike Israel as well. There was a truce and no suicide bombings within Israel but that may be history as well if Hamas is attacked.


Hamas Holds the High Cards

Posted on Jun 19, 2007

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By Robert Scheer

Forty years ago, I entered the Gaza Strip—soon after Israel had conquered that teeming caldron of humanity after defeating Egypt in the Six-Day War—to report on the Israelis’ bubbling optimism about their young nation’s future. “Come back in 10 years and you won’t recognize the place,” an Israeli general told me, spelling out visions of economic development and a grateful Arab population. Similar predictions were made for the West Bank, which had been administered by Jordan in a somewhat more humane yet still quite oppressive manner.

The optimism of the Israeli occupiers did not seem so far-fetched then, given the hardships the Palestinians had endured under their fellow Arab protectors and throughout the diaspora. The experience of the Palestinians was not unlike that of the Jews: They were needed but scorned for their talents. Both refugee groups were scarred by grinding oppression and each nurtured a thirst for nationhood fortified by a tribally based religiosity that secular leaders often found useful.

That is the story of Hamas, a creation of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood, a religious and political organization that flourished after Israel humbled Gamal Abdel Nasser, the last great Arab nationalist leader, with its devastating victory over Egypt. The Palestinian movement was then led by puppets of Nasser and was secular in focus. It remained so, after being invigorated by the late Yasser Arafat, who gave the Palestinians their first serious and independent political identification. But as Arafat wasted his credibility in futile jockeying with Israel (mostly while in exile), corruption came to dominate his movement.

By contrast, the religious zealots who later formed the Hamas organization were more focused on spiritual probity and tended far more closely to the needs of their impoverished brethren in Gaza and the West Bank. As with Hezbollah in Lebanon—and that other Iranian-backed Islamist movement, the Shiites who now control Iraq—the religious movements, both Shiite- and Sunni-based, cornered the market on purity of purpose as opposed to rank opportunism. That is precisely why these fiercely anti-Western movements have been able to turn the favorite fig leaf of U.S. neocolonialism, the slogans of democracy and elections, against the United States by winning popular elections.

While the American mass media tend to join the Bush administration in ignoring this unpleasant contradiction, the fact is that the people we brand as the enemy can make a strong claim to having won the election that our President Bush champions. What irony that the United States and the European Union, both of which cut off aid to the Palestinian government in 2006 when Hamas won the election, have now resumed aid to the PLO-dominated government that lost power through the vote.

This contradiction applies even more uncomfortably to Israel, which consistently demeaned the Palestinian movement when it was run by secularists. Israel only very reluctantly, and in the most limited of ways, was willing to risk the false security of occupied land for the possibility of peace. Israeli leaders of all parties drew the line at granting the Palestinians a real state with contiguous land and a significant presence in Jerusalem as it existed before the Six-Day War. Rarely mentioned is that some elements in the Israeli government initially supported the rise of Hamas as a desired alternative to the PLO and came too late to the recognition that Arafat, for all of his very serious failings, was their best alternative.

Now it is also too late for the remnants of the PLO to once again unilaterally assert a claim to lead the Palestinians. Sure, the United States, Israel and the EU can throw aid and tax dollars their way, but if the price is that the PLO assist in crushing Hamas, or even sit idly by while Israeli troops reoccupy Gaza, there will be chaos. The only hope is for the funders, including Israel (which has withheld the tax monies paid by the Palestinians from them), to recognize that the Palestinian people need to make their own history. At this point, that must include Hamas, which it is hoped will be moved, as was the PLO, to accept Israel’s right to exist within borders that permit a viable Palestinian state.

That lesson of empowerment must also be applied throughout the region, from Lebanon to Iraq and Iran, where election results subvert the ambitions of the foreigners. Elections are great if they give the conquerors the results they want, but it is in the nature of things that people will not use the ballot to legitimize their oppression for long. The democracy project, ballyhooed by President Bush, founders on its failure to allow the will of the voters to be heard when they dare vote against U.S. policy.

Rendering Unto Syria

This is an older post by Scheer but is certainly relevant to the Arar case.


Rendering Unto Syria by Robert Scheer
Originally posted at Truthdig.com

What an outrage for the president to invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in his address to the United Nations, a day after a Canadian government commission accused the U.S. of rendering a Canadian to Syria for torture. Did no one on his staff inform the president that Article 5 of that declaration explicitly states, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"?


For those, like Bush, who regard torture as a variant of college fraternity hazing, it would be instructive to consider the fate of Maher Arar as revealed in that devastating Canadian judicial report released on Monday. Arar, a Canadian citizen and engineer who had fled repressive Syria two decades earlier as a teenager, was seized by the FBI at JFK Airport and "rendered" to the government of Syria for nearly a year of being whipped with a "shredded electrical cable until he was disoriented"--that is, when he was not confined to his coffin-size cage.

The United States transported Arar to the very same Syria which Bush has been condemning since his first days in office, and as he did again on Tuesday, calling Syria "a crossroad for terrorism." So, will anyone in that somnambulant White House press corps dare ask the president why he would turn over a prisoner to such a government? And an innocent one at that?

Yes, innocent. On Monday, the Canadian justice who headed a 30-month investigation of this case concluded: "I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence that Mr. Arar has committed any offense." The judge employed characteristic Canadian restraint in concluding in his damning three-volume, 822-page report that "The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar's case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion. They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar's case in a less than forthcoming manner."

To put it a bit more bluntly: U.S. officials lied to their Canadian counterparts and never revealed that Arar was "rendered" to Syria precisely to be tortured.

In fact, the outsourcing of torture, as Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) exposes so brilliantly on his website, has been the official and all-too-common practice of this president since 9/11. Foreign nationals have been stolen off the streets of even close democratic allies of the United States and sent to be tortured by regimes otherwise branded as fascist by this president.

Yet even the highly skilled and practiced torturers in Syria concluded that the Canadian engineer was totally innocent. Since no one in this administration has seen fit to apologize to Mr. Arar, or his government, are we to conclude that they feel the Syrian torturers failed to find evidence of guilt because they were too restrained in their techniques? We are not likely to find out if Congress and the media continue to ignore the frightening descent of this presidency into barbarism.

The epic copout behind all this, of course, is that national security after 9/11 requires the shredding of America's reputation for treating liberty as sacred. The argument is that while errors may occur when you cast a wide net--the U.S. currently is holding, according to an Associated Press report last week, more than 14,000 uncharged foreign nationals in unregulated military prisons around the world--these horrendous tactics are needed to nab the truly bad actors.

That, in effect, is the argument advanced by the president in his press conference last week defending the efficacy, indeed the necessity, of inhuman practices as proscribed in Article Three of the Geneva Convention. Burbling with his standard unwarranted optimism, Bush cited what he claimed to be the excellent results of the interrogation of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been held prisoner in secret locations for the past three years.

But according to the reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee, what has been learned from the interrogation of Khalid and other "key witnesses" is that there was nothing but enmity between bin Laden's gang and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Despite up to five years of torture, it seems that those key witnesses still did not tell the Bush administration what it wanted to hear. Perhaps they should have been rendered to some other nation with a richer tradition in such investigative techniques.