Archive for North Africa

The Southern Bulwark

Posted by: Ion | July 24th, 2008 · 8:20 PM

I didn’t see this report on CNN, but wish I had:

Therefore, when recently the CNN Inside Africa crew went to chat with them on the streets of Cairo, their views were expected as all the respondents rejected the notion of being Africans in the first place. It must be emphasized that this same view is shared by all North Africans from Cairo to Casablanca.
(Friends of Ethiopia)

As a matter of physical and ethnic geography this is roughly equivalent to Colombians claiming they are not South Americans. As a matter of national and political identity, it’s quite close to the truth. Above the Sahel is Empire Arabia, the domain of Islam conjoined at the heart to Mecca and the customs and convulsions of the Arab world, through unified religion and language. Wherever Islam goes in Africa, African identity is riven apart from the land. Such is Islam’s marriage to maps.

One of the interesting things to consider, is whether the modern efforts of Arab leaders in Sudan, Libya and elsewhere to expand the zone of Arabization south into the continental interior –efforts which have met with so much failure– would have proven more successful had the rise of Christianity in the 20th century not been so rapid and expansive beneath the Sahara. For force of effect, here’s a compelling little table illustrating how significant this change has been:

(Christian History Institute)

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Protest and Pessimism in the Maghreb

Posted by: Ion | September 10th, 2007 · 7:08 PM

The left-leaning (if allegedly nonpartisan) 501(c)(3) group Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), has taken exception to our reposting from June, of SnappedShot’s enormously amusing Islamic Rage Boy project. AID notes that there seems little interest on our part by contrast, in heartening nationwide demonstrations in Algeria to protest Al Qaeda’s brutal terrorist operations there.

The weekend protests staged mostly by Muslim women, had some of the better chants you’ll read this year:

The crowd, which was made up mainly of women, chanted slogans such as “Terrorists are not Muslims” and “the Algerian people reject terrorism and support President Abdelaziz Bouteflika
(BBC via Americans for Informed Democracy)

This peaceful popular revolt is coming on the heels of the revelation that Al Qaeda is in acute crisis in North Africa, following the surrender of Benmessaoud Abdelkader, a key zonal emir of Al Qaeda (formerly of the notorious GSPC). Under debriefing by Algerian authorities, Abdelkader portrayed an encouragingly chaotic situation within the organization, perhaps conditioned by the July death of Sid Ali Rachid, the mastermind of AQ’s more spectacular attacks on the Bouteflika government.

In this context, AID was using us in a general and cynical rebuke of conservative (or at least anti-salafi) blogs and their zeal for pillorying the fanaticism of Rage Boy, at the expense of a more sympathetic Muslim majority (the extraneous component of the Rage boy’s unfair argument). But since I first read about the demonstration on Gateway Pundit and it’s thereby making the rounds on the rightblogs (and as customarily is being largely ignored by the Left, in its obsession with domestic politics), the point is more than a little unfair.

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Of Dissidents and Dodd

Posted by: Ion | August 21st, 2007 · 9:13 PM

Matt Browner-Hamlin –the ordinarily very competent resident blogger for the Chris Dodd campaign– is offended today that President Bush described himself as a “dissident” against the Washington bureaucracy, in talks with Egyptian-American sociologist and human rights leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

In the course of a rebuke, Matt piously observes that the president is no Vaclav Havel. An unnecessary point, even had the president said as much. But a dissident is of course merely “one who dissents,” not a martyr or saint. The fact that the word has come to possess too much a luster of justice for Matt, is merely a testament to the proliferation of injustice in the world.

If you wish to aptly criticize the president for the remark, you might observe instead the absurdity of a man who has done a great deal to expand and lavishly fund the federal bureaucracy, appointing himself its adversary.

Granted that’s perhaps a point too far for a Dodd blogger, as his candidate seems to believe that the trouble with Bush, is that the bureaucratic state hasn’t been expanding enough these past few years. To confirm that, Matt feels obliged to point out that “Chris Dodd would never be confused for a dissident as President.” No kidding.

Perhaps there’s a vast untapped voting bloc out there demanding less dissent and a defense of the bureaucratic status quo, but I’ve yet to hear from it. Best of luck finding it though, Matt.

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Kill a Kid for Allah

Posted by: Ion | June 25th, 2007 · 10:07 PM

The barbarity of the Muslim terrorist is without many historical parallels of comparable degree. Consider Mohammed Khalil al Hakayma, Al Qaeda’s Egyptian franchisee. He just put out a call for the murder of women and children in Egypt:

“Rise up and pluck out the Zionist presence in Egypt,” he says. “Rise up and inflame a war on them everywhere. Do not differentiate between a military and a civilian person. As they struck against our women and children, we will kill their women and children.”
(JihadWatch via HotAir via ABC)

Conceptual in Egypt, it is practical reality in Afghanistan. Only lacking “Zionist” children to slaughter, they’re content with the murder of their own:

“[The Taliban] placed explosives on a six-year-old boy and told him to walk up to the Afghan police or army and push the button,” said Captain Michael Cormier, the company commander who intercepted the child, in a statement. “Fortunately, the boy did not understand and asked patrolling officers why he had this vest on.”
(HotAir via Weasel Zippers via The Guardian)

Perhaps it won’t be long before the frustration of a lack of Zionist kids to kill, will persuade the Taliban’s Egyptian counterparts to follow suit. Another grand advance for the Islamist cause.

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Police Treatment in Egypt

Posted by: Ion | June 23rd, 2007 · 4:49 AM

Egyptian police question a suspect.

For those who might think that like a man, the longevity of a civilization should increase its maturity. As a nation-state Egypt has lived for 5127 years, since Pharaoh Narmer founded the First Dynasty. The capacity for human barbarity is a permanent condition, which does not diminish with experience.

(via: The Big Pharaoh)

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Six Days to Forever

Posted by: Ion | June 6th, 2007 · 9:17 AM

This week the forty year anniversary of the Six Day War is upon us. That is to say, the anniversary of the death of the Nasserite secular Arab nationalist dream. The implications of the occasion were well captured yesterday, in a sound piece by Jonathan Kay. However, toward the end of it, he gets round to the crucial consequence and leaves a bit on the table:

Forty years ago, it was easy to believe that Jews were simply better fighters than Arabs. But the problem wasn’t that Arabs don’t make good soldiers: It was that few of them were willing to die for corrupt, dysfunctional Arab autocracies. Now that Allah is their inspiration, things are very different. In the next 40 years, the descendants of Joshua Bin-Nun, King David and the Maccabees will face a far tougher foe.
(National Post)

That’s a bit of a confusion, even if he ends up in the right place. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s command to his troops after all wasn’t to die for his dictatorship, but to die for the pan-Arab dream. One might as well say the Hamas militant in contemporary times, is dying for Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. That’s perhaps only true as a spectator.

Yet the new Islamist fighter is dying for another dream of reunification, which not coincidentally, is just as farcical and anachronistic as the old Nasserite mantras. It is only more difficult for being more elemental, as the purposes are little removed: utopia in empire.

But as in 1967, enduring victory for Israel consists of demonstrating to her enemy, that dying for the cleric’s fatwa, is the same thing as dying for Nasser’s decree: pointless. Not an easy task to put it mildly. But it does have the enduring merit of being true.

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Dark Visions of an Islamic Future

Posted by: Ion | May 10th, 2007 · 2:08 PM

In 2005, when Orb republished George Alec Effinger’s classic and increasingly relevant cyberpunk Budayeen trilogy, the publisher commissioned Hawaii based concept artist Craig Mullins to paint an original cover for each volume. It was an inspired choice. Mullins had done matte painting on movies (Apollo 13) and concept design work on games (Age of Empires III). Craig’s rich Syd Mead-like electric stylizations, create a truly enigmatic future ummah in street scene, which is well worth a look here.

First some context. The books depict a grim future, where the West has fallen and is without confidence in its unified culture. Something that seemed silly in 1989, when the first book was published, but thanks to the turn of events, the slow demographic fall of Europe to Islam and the work of Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes and others, has become a common idea. In Effinger’s Budayeen stories, Islam remains vigorous, devoutly believed by even criminals and thus has once again become the ascendant civilization on the Earth.

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Review: The Devil Came on Horseback by Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace

Posted by: Ion | May 7th, 2007 · 11:09 AM

The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur by Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace
(Public Affairs, 230 pages, market price: $16.47)

Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius observed in his Meditations, that it was absurdly wrong that man’s spirit so often surrenders before his body has begun to. There are few occasions where that sad reality is as true as in Darfur, where systematic genocide by the Government of Sudan (GOS) was dismissed as inevitable, hopeless, or irrelevant by the world long before even the most minimal efforts had been made to confront or stop it. The international community’s body was strong, but its spirit was hollow.

But what has been largely true of international politics, was not true of everyone. In 2004, a young man named Brian Steidle was hired by the African Union as an international observer in their mission to document enforcement of the then tentative ceasefire agreement in the war in Darfur. This book is a product of his experiences there, as that ceasefire (never genuinely observed by Sudan), collapses and open violence spreads.

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