Jewellery will sustain gold industry

By Vivian Salama

The National

 

DUBAI // Gold jewellery rather than gold bars will increasingly fuel the precious metal’s market growth, a new study says.

The results of the 2008 Gold Survey, released yesterday at the sixth annual City of Gold Conference in Dubai, showed there was a shift towards gold as a luxury good and away from it as an investment.

“There is no doubt in my mind that investment isn’t the important driver in the current market climate,” said Paul Walker, chief executive officer of GFMS, a London-based gold consultancy.

“When gold prices got stuck for a while [last year], I believe that what sustained the gold industry is jewellery. Jewellery takes gold further and further from the market.”

“Fluctuating gold prices, which have reached the $1,000 per ounce mark, poses new challenges for the gold trade,” said Sultan Bin Saeed Al Mansouri, the Minister of Economy. “However, this has also spurred renewed interest in diamonds and other forms of jewellery, which is thus sustaining the combined gold and jewellery sectors.”

Mr Walker suggested that the gold price, after climbing to historic highs, could flatten out over the next couple of years or even drift lower, falling to between US$650 and $750 an ounce. If this happened, the gold market would depend heavily on jewellery sales to sustain itself as investors shied away from the metal.

According to the World Gold Council, gold consumption in the UAE increased eight per cent last year in spite of a 15 per cent escalation in price. Retail gold sales for 2007 in the UAE increased 24 per cent; 33 per cent in Saudi Arabia; 29 per cent in Egypt; and 19 per cent in the other Gulf countries.

The UAE diamond trade was also on the up. In 2007, diamonds and diamond jewellery worth Dh41.21 billion ($11.23 billion) were sold in Dubai – a 53 per cent increase over 2006. 

A recent diamond certification partnership between Damas, one of the largest jewellery retailers in the Middle East, and the Dubai Multi Commodities Center (DMCC), was also expected to help sales this year. 

The industry also welcomed new rules governing the trade in Dubai.

“New regulatory changes in Dubai will give the necessary tools towards boosting Dubai as a leading financial and trading centre,” said Ian McDonald, Executive Director of Gold for the DMCC. “We look around at the best regulatory practices around the world and clearly the UK has the best practices because it is principle based, not legislative like the US.” 

The conference produced little agreement on what the likely impact of the current global economic downturn would have on the jewellery industry. Still, most participants said education and training were an important component towards the industry’s long-term survival.

The National Institute for Vocational Education (NIVE) found that by 2015, the number of highly skilled workers, which included chemists and engineers, needed to be increased five per cent while the number medium-skilled workers should be increased three per cent. At the same time, there should be an eight per cent decrease in less-skilled labourers.

“There are plenty of jobs but there is currently a lack of the relevance in the education we are giving our people,” said Naji Almahdi, executive director of NIVE. “Human development will enable a knowledge led society in which all participants are working towards Dubai’s economic vision.”

Speak Softly, Carry a Big Checkbook

by Vivian Salama

PostGlobal-Washingtonpost.com

The late Middle East historian Albert Hourani once wrote “[He] who rules the Near East rules the world; and he who has interests in the world is bound to concern himself with the Near East.” For more than half a century, the United States has made its interests apparent to the world via a clash of political and economic endeavors. Business interests have been pursued under a veil of democracy which, when imposed, have the potential to spark the type of blowback we are witnessing today.

In recent years, China has proven that it, too, recognizes both the potential of the region as well as its vulnerability. However, unlike the United States, the quasi-Communist giant has used a different tactic: speak softly and carry a big checkbook. China’s message has been strictly one of business. Given its recent successes, it appears China – and not the United States, at least under the current administration – has excelled in the language of globalization.

Take the following example. Known more for land mines than natural resources, Afghanistan’s Logar Province is drawing attention for resources other than poppy plants. Car bombs and rocket attacks on government, military and civil targets once painted the picture of this embattled province. However, since the American military first attacked Afghanistan after 9/11, the Bush administration has sought to paint a new, more hopeful picture – one of development and progression.

Some analysts believe copper holds the key to Afghanistan’s future. Surveys conducted by Soviet geologists during the occupation of the 1970s and 1980s found that the country may contain some 240 million tons of ore at a copper grade of more than 2 percent. Realizing this market potential, some of the world’s biggest mining companies recently went head to head to get in on the multi-billion dollar contract to buy, develop and operate the Aynak project, located in a relatively calm region nineteen miles south of Kabul.

Nine foreign mining companies were granted permission to participate in the bidding process. They include Arizona copper giant Phelps Dodge Corp., India’s Hindalco Industries Ltd. and Vancouver’s Hunter Dickinson Inc. All nine companies, including firms from China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Australia, sent inspectors to evaluate the site’s potential. They have good reason to be eager: At around $3.30 a pound, copper has steadily remained above its average price of about $1 per pound. Prices peaked above $4 per pound last May.

Then last November, a decision was made: the China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) will invest in transforming the Aynak exploration area into one of the world’s largest open cast mines. With copper prices currently running high, estimates predict the reserve could be worth as much as $42 billion. MMC has also promised to build a power plant in an attempt to boost Kabul’s intermittent electricity supply.

No one is calling China a hero. The Aynak project, while certainly bringing much-needed money to war-torn Afghanistan, has also triggered a flurry of environmentalist red flags. Still, despite the convivial relationship between Washington and Kabul’s government under Hamid Karzai, China has missed no opportunity to provide neighborly assistance to the war-torn nation in an effort to further secure its presence in the region.

A UPI/Zogby Poll released last year revealed that an overwhelming number of Americans see China as the primary economic rival of the United States. Sixty percent of Americans said they view China as an economic threat to the U.S., while 22 percent believe China is a threat to U.S. national security. Just 6 percent said they would describe China as an economic partner and an ally. More than half of Americans (55 percent) reported seeing China’s growing economy and trade as a threat to the U.S., while just 20 percent see it as a benefit.

China’s time is now. As the United States loses favor on the international stage, more doors will open to the Asian giant. Simply put, many countries that have long been reliant on American dollars have thus been at the mercy of Washington. At this stage, China is not interested in telling anyone how to run their government – and quite frankly, its top officials probably recognize that they are in no position to do so. Rather, what we are seeing is a little back-scratching and a lot of business. The days of Cold War bipolarity are long gone, and the days of American hegemony are slipping away as well. With an economy expected to double over the next decade, let it be known: China is here to stay.

The Other Christmas Rush Is Christians Fleeing Arabia

 As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts!

By Vivian Salama

Newsweek

Jan 14, 2008 Issue 

Christmas is usually a time to celebrate the arrival of Christians in the Holy Land. But this year, as Patriarch Michel Sabbah of the Latin Rite Catholic Church revealed during his Christmas sermon in Bethlehem, local leaders are currently concerned with the opposite phenomenon: exodus. Speaking to the legions of Arab Christians fleeing the region, Sabbah said, “I say to you what Jesus told us: do not be afraid.”But there’s reason to be. Last year, dozens of Christians were slain in Iraq and a Syriac Orthodox priest was beheaded in Mosul. Two prominent Christian Palestinians were recently killed in Gaza. A political stalemate in Lebanon and the increased dominance of Shiite Hizbullah has made Maronites fear their traditional perks, like control of the presidency, are slipping. Even in Egypt, where religion has played little role in government, Christians now worry that the increasing popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood could lead to new restrictions.

Thus many are voting with their feet. There are now just 12 million to 15 million Arabic-speaking Christians left in the Middle East, and this could drop to 6 million by 2025. Countries are being transformed: in 1956, Lebanese Christians made up 54 percent of the country; today they’re about 30 percent. Iraq’s Christian population has fallen from 1.4 million in 1987 to 600,000 today. And Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, was 80 percent Christian when Israel won independence in 1948; now it’s 16 percent. Fred Strickert of Wartburg College estimates that hundreds of thousands of Christian Arabs have been displaced in the recent years, including half a million from Iraq alone. Christian Arabs emigration isn’t new. But according to Drew Christiansen, editor of America Magazine, the tide has increased since the second intifada in the Palestinian territories and the Iraq War. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute says most Christians chose to relocate to Europe and the Americas. Some 75 percent of the United States’ 3.5 million Middle Easterners are Christian, as are large slices in Canada, France, and Brazil. Many new exiles hope to relocate to the United States: no small irony given that the instability they’re fleeing was set in motion by the United States itself.

With the exodus, ancient practices and cultures are being lost, and Middle Eastern Christians risk eventually being “amalgamated into Western Christianity,” says Christiansen. The result will be “a dilution of the diversity of Christian traditions.” But given the life or death choices many Arab Christian emigrants now face, that looks like a small price to pay.

Call for new inquiry into Sudanese protest assaults

Thanks to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights for sending this along.  This story only continues to get sadder.  I photographed this protest extensively in the days leading up to its violent breakup exactly two years ago.  To view the photos, click here.

CAIRO — Five Egyptian and international human rights organizations today called on President Hosni Mubarak to authorize an independent judicial inquiry into the December 30, 2005 police assault on Sudanese protestors – refugees, asylum seekers and migrants – in Cairo that resulted in the deaths of 27 persons and injured scores more.
 
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Hisham Mubarak Law Center and the Nadim Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence said that an independent judicial inquiry should also examine the conduct of  the initial investigation into the incident by the Dokki Prosecution Office, which found no evidence of police or official misconduct. The groups reviewed a copy of that initial investigation and found a concerted effort to absolve the police of any wrongdoing.   
 
“President Mubarak should use the second anniversary of the police action against Sudanese protestors to initiate a complete and transparent investigation of what really took place,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division. “The public prosecutor’s total exoneration of the police lacks any semblance of credibility.”
 
In the early hours of December 30, 2005, a force of nearly 4,000 Egyptian police and security officers surrounded a makeshift camp in Mustafa Mahmoud Square in Cairo’s Mohandisin neighborhood, near the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where for three months hundreds of Sudanese refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants had engaged in a peaceful sit-in protest. According to media accounts at the time, police fired from water cannons into the crowd and then entered in force, beating people indiscriminately. The episode resulted in the deaths of at least 27 of the Sudanese, including 11 children and eight women. An investigation by the public prosecutor’s office in Dokki concluded in May 2006 that all the deaths “resulted from a stampede,” and found no wrongdoing on the part of the police.
 
The government never made public the written decision to close the investigation, but the five groups recently obtained a copy of the decision ( http://hrw.org/pub/2007/mena/dokkiNyabaDecisionMustafaMahmud.pdf ). 
 
The government’s initial “no fault” conclusion appears in a 16-page memorandum dated May 20, 2006 and signed by Wael Hussein, chief of the Dokki Prosecution Office. The memorandum reveals serious failures in the official investigation into the killings, and shows how the public prosecutors and state forensic doctors collaborated to absolve the police from any responsibility for the 27 deaths.

For example, the memorandum states that none of the police officers and security officials interviewed by public prosecutors was able to name the official who issued the order to launch the operation or the security official who led the anti-riot force responsible for carrying it out. Among the 127 police and security officers interviewed, the public prosecutors directly asked 28 police officers, two State Security Intelligence officers, the district chief of criminal investigations, and the top security official for the northern Giza district if they could identify the officers in charge. According to the memorandum, all 28 claimed they did not know the names of the officers, with one of them citing “the presence of numerous police leaders representing different sectors at the site of the incident.” The memorandum shows that public prosecutors made no serious effort to investigate this apparent attempt to protect those responsible for ordering the attack on the protestors.
 
Prosecutors also interviewed four eyewitnesses who all claimed that the protestors initiated the violence by attacking the police. The government put the total number of protestors at 1,107, and at least 650 protestors were in state custody for several weeks following the assault, but prosecutors managed to interview only one Sudanese woman who was injured in the attacks.
 
“Prosecutors were clearly more interested in protecting the police and vilifying the victims than in establishing the truth of what really happened on December 30,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa program.
 
The memorandum also shows how Justice Ministry forensic experts endeavored to obscure any criminal responsibility for the deaths. The autopsy reports cite marks of “injuries resulting from crashing against solid, rough-surfaced objects,” a death resulting from “bruises in the head and neck leading to a brain concussion and a failure of higher vital brain centers,” and another death “resulting from a head injury leading to nerve fiber injuries.” The forensic experts nonetheless concluded that all the deaths resulted from a “stampede” leading to asphyxia, and claimed there was “a lack of any signs indicating the use of excessive force in assaulting them.”
 
Chief Prosecutor Wael Hussein relied on these forensic reports and on the statements of police officers to conclude that there was “absolutely no relation between the deaths and the conduct of police forces in dispersing the protestors.” Citing “lack of evidence,” Hussein decided to exclude the charge of premeditated murder. No one has alleged that the killings were premeditated, but the prosecutor failed to indict any police officer with manslaughter or unintended injury, or even with the misdemeanor offense of carrying out his duties with cruelty or brutality, as per article 129 of the Penal Code.
 
Instead, the chief prosecutor charged the protestors en masse with committing crimes of manslaughter, unintended injury, resisting authorities, and the deliberate destruction of property. Citing the inability to identify the perpetrators of these crimes, the Public Prosecutor’s Office then decided to suspend the investigations into possible police misconduct and instructed the police to continue the search for perpetrators.  
 
“Charging the protestors with serious crimes and exonerating the police of any wrongdoing is the absurd but inevitable outcome of a sham investigation,” said Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “Two years after their deaths, the victims of police brutality in Mustafa Mahmoud Square still await justice.”
 
The five organizations called on the Egyptian government to open an independent judicial inquiry into the killings in order to identify those who ordered, led, and implemented the attacks, and to hold them responsible for any unnecessary or excessive use of force that resulted in the large number of deaths. In April 2007, the UN Committee on the Rights of Migrant Workers requested that the investigation into the killings “be reopened in order to clarify the circumstances leading to the deaths of the Sudanese migrants. Whatever those circumstances, [the committee] also recommends that measures be adopted to prevent the occurrence of similar events in the future.” The inquiry should also look into the serious, and apparently deliberate, failures of the earlier investigation into the killings, and make the results of this inquiry public.  

Christmas in Egypt

Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate the holiday today.  Here’s a short, light piece I posted on Washingtonpost.com today regarding the question of whether non-Christian countries are encorporating Christmas traditions into mainstream culture.  Naturally, I focused on Egypt. 

by Vivian Salama

PostGlobal, WashingtonPost.com

            The first year I lived in Egypt, Ramadan fell in November.  Journalists are often invited to company iftars (the meal to break fast) as a way of networking and exchanging in the holiday spirit.   You can imagine my surprise when, at one of these iftars, Santa Claus marched in to spread …Ramadan cheer(!?) 
            While this is an absolutely comical (and unusual) incident, Christmas is by no means a laughing matter in the Arab world’s most populous nation.   Of the 75 million people crammed mostly along the banks of the Nile River, approximately 15 percent are Christians – mostly Coptic Orthodox.  Along the streets of Cairo, holiday lights and decorations commemorate Christmas and the Muslim majority goes out of its way to share in the holiday spirit just as many Christians do during the month-long celebration of Ramadan.   Unlike the West, where the consumer craze has obliterated all logic, and “celebrations” (read: shopping season) start in October, Coptic Christmas is not synonymous for parties, eggnog and mistletoe.   Rather, it is the end of a 40-day fast where families often flock to midnight mass and eat various traditional dishes.  In fact, traditions such as the Christmas tree and Father Christmas ( “Baba Noel”) have only recently been incorporated into the culture.  

            That said, Christmas 2003 was one to remember in Egypt as President Hosni Mubarak – for the first time – marked it as a national holiday.   The usually congested streets of Cairo are now ghost towns on the Eastern Orthodox Christmas (January 7) as Christians and Muslims alike stay home from school and work.   While Egypt still maintains the practice of listing religion on national identification cards, Christians are very much a part of mainstream society and incidents of marginalization have been isolated.  Many Christians in Egypt hold public offices.   Even Egypt’s richest man, Naguib Sawiris, CEO of Orascom Telecom is a Copt and is responsible for building a number of churches in Egypt’s upper class resort towns.  Most Christians welcomed the move to declare Christmas a national holiday, particularly given domestic fears by Christians and moderate Muslims that the country may be headed in the same direction of some of the more conservative, less secular Arab states.   
            While Christmas may not be the best example, Western customs have seeped into Egyptian culture in other ways.   Valentine’s Day is an absolute obsession in this ancient nation where young lovers shower each other with material sentiments since physical sentiments (at least pre-marital) are frowned upon.   However Egypt still maintains some of its ancient traditions as well.  The day after Easter Sunday is a national holiday commemorating Sham el Naseem, a celebration which dates back to Pharonic times commemorating the start of Spring.  Ancient Egyptians used to offer salted fish and onions, as well as a young woman, to the Gods of the Nile River.  Today, no woman is sacrificed, but families do maintain the tradition of eating salted fish and onions, and several production companies even reenact the Pharonic offerings to commemorate this ancient festival.  

Valentine’s Day in Cairo

Absence of Courage

A Palestinian official argues that international donors are pledging millions to Gaza and the West Bank because they hope their generosity will compensate for their lack of political will.

Aid package: A Palestinian woman receives food handouts in Jenin

By Vivian Salama | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Dec 18, 2007

Amid international skepticism and ongoing regional tensions, 87 countries and international organizations have pledged $7.4 billion in aid to help build a Palestinian state. Monday’s Paris meeting of the donors comes on the heels of last month’s Annapolis talks, a White House effort to revitalize Israeli-Palestinian negotiations before the Bush administration leaves office. The money, which is expected to pass through various channels, including international aid organizations and the Palestinian government—that is, the government of Mahmoud Abbas and not the now-defunct Hamas-led government in Gaza—was donated in response to this week’s World Bank report, which noted that “even under the most optimistic scenarios significant aid will continue to be required” to ensure the economic stability of the West Bank and Gaza. Afif Safieh, a Palestinian diplomat who heads the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission in Washington, spoke to Vivian Salama about the likely impact of the aid package and the latest political developments in the Palestinian territories. Excerpts:
 
Vivian Salama: What is your reaction to the news of the aid package?
Afif Safieh: Since the international community did not show the political courage needed in Annapolis or in the pre-Annapolis period, which necessitated some confrontation with the Israeli territorial appetite, they are now showing financial generosity because of the absence of political audacity and political courage. They feel the collapse of the Palestinian society and the Palestinian economy will generate additional chaos to a region already plagued with it, so this is the result.
 
What is the alternative and/or the lacking initiative, in your opinion?
I would have preferred the political courage and the diplomatic courage which is needed to support the Palestinian state, but this would have meant a political confrontation with the Israeli political leadership. This is what countries in the international system want to avert. They compensate the lack of political courage with financial generosity. Now, the report made by the World Bank says that if the roadblocks and strangulation of [Palestinian] society and the economy of society continues, even with external financial help, our economy will continue to shrink and decline by 2 percent every year. We have the potential of going back to levels of growth which will be double digit if you give [us] the capability.
 
Do you see Israel as a partner?
The Israelis are until now reluctant to reduce the number of roadblocks, most of which have no security value except to plunge us into economic decline. Here I invite you to explore the expression that was originally coined by Sarah Roy, a Jewish-American writer, the daughter of survivors, a Harvard scholar, who invented the concept of de-development of Palestine—meaning that the deliberate Israeli policy [was] to plunge us into economic decline, and that’s what’s happening.
 
The Bush administration—namely [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice—has pledged its devotion to the creation of a Palestinian state before the end of its term. Are you optimistic, and is this new aid package what is needed to get this process off the ground?
I believe in the sincerity of President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I find the statement made by Secretary Rice that the creation of a Palestinian state is an American national interest [is] an important political statement which reflects the reality of the analysis by a growing body. I believe Bush when he told President Mahmoud Abbas in New York in September [that Bush] is growing increasingly impatient by the absence of progress. Since we have been unreasonably reasonable, I don’t think his impatience is addressed to my side of the argument. The question is will [Bush and Rice] vent their annoyance with the obstacle towards advance. Unfortunately so far there is no indication. Not only did the Israelis invest all their genius to lower expectations in the weeks that preceded Annapolis, but immediately after Annapolis they invested all their brilliance into torpedoing the modest results that emerged. Annapolis was supposed to retrigger a credible diplomatic avenue.
 
Does the aid package at least make you optimistic?
We are often asked, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?” Even though I don’t feel we Palestinians have the luxury of pessimism, even though I believe that it’s only optimists who make history, I am often reminded that the definition of a pessimist is an informed optimist.
 
The World Bank has just released a detailed account on the dire economic conditions in Gaza and the West Bank. How would you describe the situation in [Hamas-controlled] Gaza?
A stain on the conscience of mankind. I read [the World Bank] report on Gaza: the inadmissible, the inconceivable is perpetrated on a daily basis. The Israelis withdrew out of Gaza yet besieged Gaza immediately, turning it into an open-air prison. They withdrew out of Gaza in order to improve their grip on the West Bank. [Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon never concealed that aim.
 
Some see this aid package as a victory for the Palestinian cause.
It shows the reservoir of goodwill and the diplomatic and universal unanimity the birth of a Palestinian state enjoys. Yet I am today more worried by the political impotence that we have witnessed throughout the decades. I believe peace is desirable, possible, doable yesterday already! As is frequently said, every possible scenario alternative and their opposite have been explored ad nauseam. I always tell Israelis that a territory that was occupied in six days can also be evacuated in six days, so that they can rest on the seventh and we can engage in the fascinating journey of economic development and reconstruction. It’s the absence of the political will that is disturbing.

Click here for the Newsweek.com link.

Palestinian Donors’ Conference – World Bank report

Today I interviewed Afif Safieh, head of the PLO Mission to Washington, DC regarding news out of Paris of a $7 billion pledge to support a viable Palestinian state.  The conference was the first step toward finding a solution to the on-going Palestinian-Israeli crisis following the conference in Annapolis last month. I will publish and then post the interview tomorrow.  In the meantime, I encourage all of you to read the World Bank Report, entitled Investing in Palestinian Economic Reform and Development. 

Egyptian blogger who posted images of police brutality booted from YouTube

Wow. This is really too bad — a blow to all cyber-dissidents around the world.

Check out my article on the political implications of Arab and Iranian bloggers: Arab and Iranian Bloggers: Emerging Threat to the Official Line

CAIRO (CNN) — An award-winning Egyptian human rights activist who posts
videos about police abuse  said he had his account suspended by YouTube because of complaints that the videos contain “inappropriate material.”

 

 

 

Wael Abbas, an anti-torture watchdog, told CNN on Wednesday that there have been 100 videos posted on his account containing images of torture, police brutality, demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, and election irregularities. Material he has posted is no longer available on the popular video-sharing Web site.
      He said YouTube sent him an e-mail saying they suspended it. “They didn’t ask me to remove it. They said ‘your account isn’t working,’ ” he said.
      When asked about the account, a YouTube spokesperson said, “We take these matters very seriously, but we don’t comment on individual videos.”
      YouTube regulations state that “graphic or gratuitous violence” is not allowed and violations of the terms of use could result in the ending of an account and deleting all of the videos in it.
      “YouTube prohibits inappropriate content on the site, and our community effectively polices the site for inappropriate material,” the spokesperson said. “Users can flag content that they feel is inappropriate and once it is flagged it is reviewed by our staff and removed from the system within minutes if it violates our Community Guidelines or Terms of Use. We also disable the accounts of repeat offenders.”
      Abbas admitted that some of the videos were in fact “graphic,” but said it is important to convey strong imagery to underscore the issue of abuse and make an “impact on public opinion.” 
      He likened the importance of such graphic imagery to the photos and videos that emerged in 2004 and illustrated the brutality in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, stoking international outrage.
      “We managed to direct the attention of the people to something that was taboo, something that was never discussed before — which is police brutality and torture inside police stations,” said Abbas, referring to his videos.
      The 33-year-old Abbas also operates one of Egypt’s best known blogs, misrdigital.com, and the popularity exists in large part to the frequent postings about police abuse. 
      He has gotten international notice recently, with the International Center for Journalists recently awarding a Knight International Journalism Award to Abbas for his work.  In one prominent incident, Abbas posted a video on his blog of a police officer binding and sodomizing an Egyptian bus driver who intervened in a dispute between police and another driver. 
      The video was one of the factors that led the conviction of two police officers, who were sentenced to three years each in connection with the incident. “It’s the first time Egyptian people saw something like that,” Abbas said, referring to beatings and torture. “It was a shock to the Egyptian people.”
      The blogger, who said he’s in a “state of shock” because he lost videos he’s uploaded for years, said he might resort to campaigning against YouTube. “We thought that YouTube was our ally,” Abbas said. “It helped show the truth in countries like Burma … With what they did now, it doesn’t seem like that anymore,” Abbas said.
      Abbas said he has also had a problem with Yahoo! because it shut down two
of his e-mail accounts, accusing him of being a spammer.

Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal Vexed Nixon

fascinating article, particularly on the heels of the Annapolis meeting:

By DAVID STOUT

Published: November 29, 2007 

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — In July 1969, as the world was spellbound by the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, President Richard M. Nixon and his close advisers were quietly fretting about a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Their main worry was not a potential enemy of the United States, but one of America’s closest friends.

“The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons,” Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser, warned Mr. Nixon in a memorandum dated July 19, 1969 — part of a newly released trove of documents.

Israel’s nuclear arms program, which Israel has never officially conceded exists, was believed to have begun at least several years before, but it was causing special problems for the young Nixon administration. For one thing, the president was preparing for a visit by its prime minister, Golda Meir, who was also in her first year in office and whose toughness was already legendary.

Should Washington insist that Israel rein in its development of nuclear weapons? What would the United States do if Israel refused? Perhaps the solution lay in deliberate ambiguity, or simply pretending that America did not know what Israel was up to. These were some of the options that Mr. Kissinger laid out for Mr. Nixon on that day before men first walked on the moon.

The Nixon White House’s concerns over Israel’s weapons were detailed in documents from the Nixon Presidential Library that were released on Wednesday by the National Archives under an executive order that requires that classified documents be reviewed and possibly declassified after 25 years.

The documents provide insights into America’s close, but by no means problem-free, relationship with Israel. They also serve as a reminder that concerns over nuclear arms proliferation in the Middle East, now focused on Iran, are decades old.

The papers also allude to a 1972 campaign by friends of W. Mark Felt, then the second-ranking F.B.I. official, to have him named director of the bureau after the death of J. Edgar Hoover in May of that year. Mr. Nixon, of course, did not take the advice, instead naming L. Patrick Gray. Mr. Felt later became the famous anonymous source “Deep Throat,” whose revelations during Watergate helped topple the president.

There are also snippets about Washington’s desire to manipulate relations with Saudi Arabia, so that the Saudis might help to broker a Middle East peace deal; discussion of possibly supporting a Kurdish uprising in Iraq; and a 1970 clash in which four Israeli fighters shot down four Russian MIG-21s over eastern Egypt, even though the Israelis were outnumbered by two-to-one.

But perhaps the most interesting material, and the most pertinent given the just-completed peace conference in Annapolis, Md., concerns Israel and its relations with its neighbors, as well as with the United States.

“There is circumstantial evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel’s weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States about 1965,” Mr. Kissinger noted in his long memorandum.

He also said that one problem with trying to persuade Israel to freeze its nuclear program was that inspections would be useless, conceding that “we could never cover all conceivable Israeli hiding places.”

“This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us,” Mr. Kissinger said, “and may even have stolen from us.”

Although Israel has never publicly acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons, scientists and arms experts have no doubt that it has them, and the United States’ reluctance to pressure Israel to disarm has made America vulnerable to accusations that it has a double standard when it comes to stopping the spread of weapons in the Middle East.

Mr. Kissinger’s memo, written barely two years after the 1967 Middle East war and while memories of the Holocaust were still vivid among the first Israelis, implicitly acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself, as subsequent American administrations have done.

But Mr. Kissinger reflected at length on the quandary faced by the United States. “Israel will not take us seriously on the nuclear issue unless they believe we are prepared to withhold something they very much need,” he wrote, referring to a pending sale of Phantom fighter jets to Israel.

“On the other hand, if we withhold the Phantoms and they make this fact public in the United States, enormous political pressure will be mounted on us,” Mr. Kissinger went on. “We will be in an indefensible position if we cannot state why we are withholding the planes. Yet if we explain our position publicly, we will be the ones to make Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons public with all the international consequences this entails.”

One of those consequences might be to “spark a Soviet nuclear guarantee for the Arabs, tighten the Soviet hold on the Arabs and increase the danger of our involvement,” Mr. Kissinger wrote at another point.

After he met with Mrs. Meir at the White House in late September 1969, Mr. Nixon said: “The problems in the Mideast go back centuries. They are not susceptible to easy solution. We do not expect them to be susceptible to instant diplomacy.”

But Avner Cohen, the author of “Israel and the Bomb,” (Columbia University Press, 1998) who is a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, said on Wednesday that there was enough historical evidence to indicate that the president and the prime minister had reached a secret understanding on at least one issue: Israel would keep its nuclear devices out of sight and not test them, and the United States would tolerate the situation and not press Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that has been embraced by scores of countries around the world.

“That understanding remains to this day,” Mr. Cohen said.

Can Hamas be Ignored?

by Vivian Salama

Middle East Times

Middle East author and historian Rashid Khalidi offered the following forecast for Tuesday’s peace gathering in Annapolis, “Cloudy with rain and a chance of storms.” He added, “That’s been the Middle East forecast for decades.”

The media has been criticized for its relentless skepticism of the “get together” – as one White House official described it – taking place in Maryland this week. For many, this multilateral gathering of more than two dozen delegations to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli issue is merely history repeating itself. In 2000, just as President Clinton was preparing to leave office, he invited the then-embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his beleaguered Palestinian counterpart Yasser Arafat together at Camp David to negotiate a final settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Seven years later, a politically besieged President George W. Bush has invited Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas – both of whom are fighting to stay for political survival – to make long overdue concessions and revitalize final status talks. Photo-ops and cliché catch phrases like “Road Map to Peace” will not undo the decades of damage this conflict has inflicted upon both sides. Israel’s Prime Minster Olmert has lost considerable support in Israel following his futile military campaign against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. President Abbas comes to the table representing a government that was not democratically elected by the majority of Palestinians, and so by attending the meeting – all the while further alienating Hamas which essentially rules over Gaza – he may be doing himself more harm than good.

Meanwhile, since September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has been preoccupied with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the greater War on Terrorism, all the while neglecting this conflict which continues to be a source, if not a consistent grievance for much of the Middle East and the Muslim world. The War on Terrorism ultimately amounts to a war of ideas. To win the war of ideas, the U.S. must take genuine steps toward solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. That’s where Annapolis comes in.

British-Arab historian Albert Habib Hourani wrote shortly into the Suez Crisis of 1956 that “[He] who rules the Near East rules the world; and he who has interest in the world is bound to concern itself with the Near East.” With just over one year left on the clock, the administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has put considerable time and energy in recent months into assuring both sides that it is committed to finding a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. How the Bush administration intends to help foster the creation of a Palestinian state when neither the United States nor Israel recognize Hamas – elected democratically by the Palestinian people in January 2006 – has yet to be determined.

Much of the talk leading up to this meeting has revolved around the idea of concessions. Such a compromise would include full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank with the exception of a few areas amounting to minor border tweaks. Control of the city of Jerusalem would be shared along ethnic lines with commitments from both sides to strive for peaceful coexistence.

A positive aspect to staging the Annapolis gathering at this particular time is that the stakes are high for all the major players involved. The Bush administration, desperate to establish any kind of credibility in the region, knows that the road to fixing the diplomatic disaster created in Iraq runs through Jerusalem. Also, many Israelis, tired of the same old tug-of-war that has dictated the conflict, are pressing for the old “land for peace” notion that has popped up repeatedly in various peace processes involving Israel. Abbas and his Fatah party understand that a failure to achieve a final settlement for the majority of Palestinians will undermine the credibility he is struggling to retain in the face of Hamas. More poignant is that the United States and Israel understand this too.

Ultimately it is not what comes out of the meeting in Annapolis that will be telling, but rather, what is to follow. If the meeting can jump start a series of talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then hope is not lost. However, it is unrealistic to think that anything will be accomplished so long as the parties involved continue to isolate Hamas.