Lettre 13

This is funny. With Launchbar, I start MarsEdit with « me ». Hope you get it .

You have to wonder why the BBC journalist Alan Johnston is still a hostage in Gaza. I have seen a number of its pieces on BBC News, and you can say that he is not an advocate of the Israeli intervention in Gaza. Quite the contrary. He is one of the occidental journalism that was able to give you a taste on how Israel was conducted itself as a ruthless killer in Gaza. I have in mind a particular segment where Alan Johnston was hiding on the top of the roof of a building, while Israeli drones where humming, trying to find a target. You could feel how frightening the situation was, with the BBC journalist whispering, trying not to attract the missile carried by the Israeli drone.

Now, clearly this journalist is in the hand of a gang of mobster. You have to wonder why either the Fatah or Hamas are not capable of liberating someone that you perfectly know in what hands he is. This show the limit of the power of the government in Gaza. In my opinion, the culprit is Israel which attacked what have been proto state entities, capable of imposing the law, and the Fatah and Hamas themselves that have, by corruption (Fatah), maximalism (Hamas), and infighting, discredit themselves to the point that they are no more capable to impose their legitimacy and will to mobsters carrying actions that are detrimental to the Palestinian cause.

Martin Fletcher, Mafia-Style Violence in Gaza and BBC Reporter, NBC News

The Observer, Feuding clan holds key to kidnap riddle, The Guardian

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a Muslim issue. It is a dispute over land, it is about an occupation that must end and it is about a people who deserve a state. But it is not a religious dispute. Clerics, rabbis, priests and any one else who claims religious authority for his opinion should stay out of it. As a Muslim, I’m particularly eager to keep our clerics away from Palestine.

The conflict has been one of the most jumped upon bandwagons in both the Arab and the Muslim world – but framing it in religious terms serves no one’s interest, least of all the Palestinians. With the Islamist Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian government the temptation is great to lose ourselves in the religious kaleidoscope they would love to wrap around the conflict. But just as Islamists are more about power than religion, so is the conflict less about religion than land.

Mona Eltahawy, Qaradawi Damages Palestine’s Cause by Turning Global Issue Into Islamist Weapon, muslimwakeup.com

Somber assessment on Iraq by Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post correspondent in Iraq. He thinks the American have no control on the events, and that they will be there for two decades. And last, but not least, there is no easy solution for this fiasco, and that’s why he thinks that Iraq is a tragedy.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook, Thomas Ricks on Iraq Today (mp3)

Darryl Li: This is life in a ‘disengaged’ Gaza: It is not enough to be locked into an open-air prison by Israel. Nor to be turned into a beggar by the international community for voting in a democratic election. Nor to be torn apart by internal feuding. Now Palestinians have to drown in their own shit? I can’t wait to hear the latest excuse about how this, too, is their own fault.

A vivid account on the history that is behind the collapse of Gaza’s northern sewage treatment where five palestinians dies.

Laila El-Haddad, The Death Swamps, Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation

Powerful analysis from Roni Ben Efrat reprinted from CHALLENGE magazine.

Here, once again, Hamas reveals a characteristic lack of consistency. We saw this first a year ago, when it chose to take part in elections that were based on an infrastructure provided by the Oslo Accords. It accepted the Oslo framework without the content. Now it deepens its entrapment by entering a unity government, hoping to gain Western funds without accepting Western conditions. Saudi Arabia has won a brief span of glory, but what about the Palestinian people?

The election of Hamas did not bring a change of direction. Even if we acknowledge that the movement is not corrupt, it offered no alternative to the donations state. On the contrary, the notion of charity rather than work is a principle of the Hamas movement. Now this notion has become the basis of the entire unity government. Unless the latter can thaw Western coffers, the streets will again erupt.

Roni Ben Efrat, The Mecca Charity Show, electronicintifada.net

On Saudi diplomacy, see also this podcast from On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

On Point, The New Saudi Pushback, wbur.org (mp3)

Deep analysis on the political dance around the Mecca accord. A fascinating narrative by Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry on how the Saudi diplomacy distanced itself from the US to try to end the infighting between Hamas and Fatah. Infighting partly supported by the US diplomacy (Elliot Abrams from the NSC and the neocons) against Condi Rice. So, it seems to me that the infighting inside the White House are doing a spill over on the Middle East.

Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry, How the Saudis stole a march on the US, atimes.com

Another good read is this analysis on Barack Obama’s position toward Israel from Ali Abunimah.

On Friday Obama gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Chicago. It had been much anticipated in American Jewish political circles which buzzed about his intensive efforts to woo wealthy pro-Israel campaign donors who up to now have generally leaned towards his main rival Senator Hillary Clinton.

Reviewing the speech, Ha’aretz Washington correspondent Shmuel Rosner concluded that Obama « sounded as strong as Clinton, as supportive as Bush, as friendly as Giuliani. At least rhetorically, Obama passed any test anyone might have wanted him to pass. So, he is pro-Israel. Period. »

Although, Abunimah think that Obama is more favorable to Palestinians than what he profess now, the interesting part of this article is, in my opinion, the conclusion.

Obama has also been close to some prominent Arab Americans, and has received their best advice. His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated and coordinated networks that can « bundle » small donations into million dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of politicians will have little impact. (For what it’s worth, I did my part. I recently met with Obama’s legislative aide, and wrote to Obama urging a more balanced policy towards Palestine.)

Only if enough people know what Obama and his competitors stand for, and organize to compel them to pay attention to their concerns can there be any hope of altering the disastrous course of US policy in the Middle East. It is at best a very long-term project that cannot substitute for support for the growing campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions needed to hold Israel accountable for its escalating violence and solidifying apartheid.

Ali Abunimah, How Barack Obama learned to love Israel, electronicintifada.net [via SyriaComment]

Fascinating interview with Seymour Hersh on Open Source with Christopher Lydon following its piece The Redirection (New Yorker). What is scary is that you get the feeling that the White House is playing with fire while being delusional and ignorant of the history/culture of the Middle-East. The fact of the matter for Sy Hersh is that the White House is a major contributing factor in pitching whole religious/ethnic groups against themselves, pursuing interests that maybe make sense in the short-term, but will bring more instability in the Middle-East in the long-term.

I must say that sometimes I find Sy Hersh sounding too much like if he was revealing a plot with black helicopters hovering over it, that his analysis are too much based on individuals but, overall, he presents solid arguments on how the US administration is misguided and improvising regarding its Middle-East policies.

Open Source, Making the Rounds with Seymour Hersh (mp3)

A very good round-up by Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz about what the Palestinians are enduring in Iraq.

This is not the nation’s largest minority, but it is apparently the most persecuted. Testimony by Palestinian refugees to journalists and human rights organizations paints a very grave picture: Iraqi gangs break into Palestinian homes at night and demand the residents leave within 24 hours. In isolated cases, Palestinians have been kidnapped on the street or at work, and their bodies have been found several days later, in ditches or garbage cans.

Unlike the 2 million Iraqi refugees who have left their homeland, Palestinians usually carry no documents bearing witness to their Iraqi citizenship, or anything that would permit them entry into neighboring Arab states, like Jordan or Syria.

Zvi Bar’el, Refugees, twice over, Haaretz.com

Palestinians are also part of a larger trend as Patrick Cockburn shows in The Independent:

Iraq’s minorities, some of the oldest communities in the world, are being driven from the country by a wave of violence against them because they are identified with the occupation and easy targets for kidnappers and death squads. A « huge exodus » is now taking place, according to a report by Minority Rights Group International.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says 30 per cent of the 1.8 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan, Syria and elsewhere come from the minorities.

Patrick Cockburn, ‘Exodus’ of Iraq’s ancient minorities, The Independent

Meanwhile, Rami G. Khouri is predicting that the Arab world is at a historic crossroad and that the current modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down, in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling. He adds that the way the US is pursuing its policy in the Midlle-East produce a murky picture.

The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis, to work hand in hand while also fighting bitter wars, for Islamists and secular Arabs to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats, for Western and Arab rule-of-law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the US to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities in the region.

Rami G. Khouri, Prepare for the Great Arab Unraveling, The Daily Star

There’s an excellent introduction on Shiism by Mike Shuster of NPR available as a podcast.

Mike Shuster, The Partisans of Ali: A Series Overview, NPR (mp3)

See also the reading list.

I discovered the hard way that in PHP5 there are no obvious ways to detect if some XML is well-formed, especially if you want to deploy on Unix/Windows platform and don’t want to access the shell directly.

Adding to this problem, I discovered also that the DOM and simplexml extensions can’t use the PHP5 exception handling to trap the errors when the XML is not well-formed. Using simplexml or the DOM extensions against not well-formed XML, the errors generated by these extensions are not trapped and are displayed immediately.

It’s possible to load with the DOM or the Tidy extensions not well-formed XML, and then repair it on the fly. But what if you need to detect not well-formed XML and provide a message stating the error?

Fortunately, after some research, I found that you could use the libxml functions (PHP 5.1 and over) to test XML well formedness and trap XML errors. So, I wiped out this little function called get_xml_object (see here for the inspiration) that allow me to trap errors when simplexml is used to parse XML. The function is quite simple, by default, you provide a path to a XML file. If you want to use a string, just add another argument after the first parameter (it can’t be anything, but here’s I chose « string » for clarity sakes). You can also replace the simplexml extension by the DOM extensions if you prefer this extension to parse XML.

The function get_xml_object will return an array that contains two keys, errors and xml. In this example, $result=get_xml_object($s, "string"), $result is an array. If there are no errors, $result['errors'] will be set to null. If everything is ok, $result['xml'] will contains a simplexml object that you can then manipulate with the simplexml extension.

$s = "tag>hello world</tag>";
// $s = "<tag>hello world</tag>";

function get_xml_object ($xml, $xmlFormat="file") {

  $xml_object = null;
  $result = array ("errors" => null, "xml" => null);

  libxml_use_internal_errors (true);
  $xmlFormat == "file"  ? $xml_object = simplexml_load_file ($xml)
                        : $xml_object = simplexml_load_string ($xml);

  if (!$xml_object) {
     $errors = libxml_get_errors();
     foreach ($errors as $error) {
         $error_msg = "Error: line: " . $error->line
                    . ": column: " . $error->column . ": "
                    . $error->message . "\n";
     }
     libxml_clear_errors();
     $result["errors"] = $error_msg;
  } else {
    $result["xml"] = $xml_object;
  }
  return $result;
}

$result = get_xml_object ($s, "string");

if ($result['errors']) {
  var_dump ($result['errors']);
} else {
  var_dump ($result['xml']);
}