Media Games

This morning, I woke at 4.30am and very foolishly reached habitually for my iPhone so I could check twitter for the latest news before going back to sleep.

I was jerked awake by what I read- helicopters circling Damascus, armed vehicles escorting the President and his family to the airport, the Revolutionary flag being raised over the Syrian State TV building, bloody clashes between loyalists and revolutionaries. It was almost like I had awoken into a nightmare.

In a frenzy of fear and agitation, I trawled the web for some more reliable references to the 'fall of Damascus' but was unable to find anything on any mainstream media site including al-Jazeera.

I continued to follow the increasingly alarming messages on twitter until I judged it a reasonable time to call Damascus and start screeching down the phone....scenarios of my friends and loved ones being strung up, dragged out of their beds an beaten flooded my mind but I knew I was simply scaring myself. N answered my call, sleep very evident in his voice, wondering why I was calling so early and I explained what I had been reading, he laughed and assured me all was well but would call me later when he'd found out more.

When he hung up, I was able to go back to sleep for a while but was still plagued with nightmares.

Later, I switched on al-Jazeera to see reports on what was 'happening' on Damascus- albeit they were not as sensationalist as those reports I'd seen on twitter but disturbing enough to cause family and friends from all over the world to call N to find out if all was well. He later called me and confirmed all was quiet- even in the supposed epicenter of Kafr Souseh.

But that led me to ask: who would be circulating such alarming and utterly untrue reports? What is the aim?

It would seem that the forces of the Arab Spring have employed the use of the media (particularly social media) to promote the cause and also to spread what can only be called propaganda- when Syrians claim that their president is beating a retreat to the airport or Libyans announce that they captured Saif el Islam Gaddafi and family then this represents a kind of propaganda which actually we are not strangers to- take the reports from the front in the 1967 Arab Israeli war which promised the Egyptian people that advances were being made and victory at hand. In Europe one only need look to the first and second world wars to see both the Allies and the Germans used false reporting via radio to boost morale.

Perhaps we are naive to assume that just because we live in a more technologically advanced age, where news can be transmitted instantly and media organizations have set 'standards' that people will report objectively an not use the media for their own purposes.

Unfortunately, due to increased technology and multiplied media resources it is invariably hard for the individual to sift through all the information we are bombarded with minute by minute but it is also hard for media professionals to decide on which 'eyewitness' reports to believe and which to discount- and therein lies the problem.

- and so we conquer our fear

Wake up UN Security Council?

Syrian activists on Twitter are starting a campaign today with the hashtag #WakeUpUNSC. I have been invited, along with others, to create my own tweets with this tag, in an attempt to make this trend worldwide and presumably this is intended to catch the eye of those with influence enough to get the UNSC to wake up.

Now, asides from questioning whether this will actually achieve anything, there is a more important aspect to consider and those are the implications of foreign intervention. This is a sore point, especially in the Middle East, where foreign intervention has led to a reinstatement of de facto colonialism. Iraq represents an extremely valid case in point. The Washington Post estimated the true cost of the war with Iraq to have been $3 trillion, a number which seems inconceivable but when you look at what it has achieved, one can only lament at whether it was worth the human life and suffering that ensued.

Even sanctions on Iraq in the 90s, had disastrous consequences on the development of the country as John Pilger reported:

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

One could argue that by effectively disabling a country in such a way, this is serving certain interests which seek to render the region completely impotent, starting with those rich in natural resources and finishing with those of strategic importance.

This post is simply a jumble of my own personal thoughts and reactions but I can only end on the fact that inside Syria itself, though, there has been no call for external military intervention – the people are opposed to any foreign meddling. The very thought of being showered from the sky with bombs and watching your home explode around you seems to me the darkest nightmare anyone can envisage so why are those on the outside wishing it on their brothers and sisters within?

Some Thoughts on Marriage

Arab culture may well have failed by not updating it's beliefs and cultural practices to suit the times we live in. One excellent example of this hypothesis is marriage.
In many Arab countries it is deemed better to marry someone from the same family or clan- often a cousin or other indirect relative, this is done under the premise that a family or clan member will have more in common, their upbringing and attitude to life will be more similar and they are guaranteed to be a 'good' person.

But does this thesis stand in a world where pre-marital relations no longer suffer the stigma they one had? Surely living with someone and intimately aquatinting yourself with their habits, ideas and beliefs is more reliable than taking the word of some distant relative that happens to share the same name?

The traditional retort to that is not all religious persuasions support the idea of premarital relations but that too should be put into it's context: before a time of contraception, families needed some way of assuring that the product of those close encounters would not end up unprovided for. And so the institution or legal agreement of marriage took place. One may go further as to day that it harnessed men's carnal urges into a more pragmatic alliance of families and interests- sex on the proviso that you brought something to the family and the girl. Surely we've moved on from that?

Bohemianism

To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy. ...
His faults are more commonly those of self-indulgence, thoughtlessness, vanity and procrastination, and these usually go hand-in-hand with generosity, love and charity; for it is not enough to be one’s self in Bohemia, one must allow others to be themselves, as well. ...

What, then, is it that makes this mystical empire of Bohemia unique, and what is the charm of its mental fairyland? It is this: there are no roads in all Bohemia! One must choose and find one’s own path, be one’s own self, live one’s own life.

~Gelett Burgess

Music of the Revolution

Negative Capability

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
~John Keats

Aye, on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green;There is a budding morrow in midnight;
There is a triple sight in blindness keen;

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood: An Exaggeration of power or the future of a country?

After years of being side-lined, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has suddenly come back into focus due to the recent unrest in the region and the sudden activity of the Syrian opposition. An assessment made by the US Embassy in Damascus and leaked by Wikileaks concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood posed no immediate threat but does this change five years on against the backdrop of regional crisis and unrest?

Recently President Bashar el-Assad offered political detainees, including the Muslim Brotherhood, amnesty in an attempt to dampen the unrest which has beset the country for three months, a gesture that would seem to suggest an acknowledgement of the power of the opposition movements working against the regime.

But exiled Muslim Brotherhood leader, Ali Sadreldin el-Bayanouni said that there are not many details yet about the amnesty except that it covers all members of political movements including the Muslim Brotherhood, but law no. 49 (which provides for a trial for any person proved to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood) still exists and remains in force. "Therefore, the step of this amnesty is imperfect and incomplete," he concluded.

Al-Bayanouni also considered that this decision is a step to circumvent the demands of the demonstrators, and that it does not mean anything in light of the bloody confrontations that are being carried out by the Syrian regime against the Syrian demonstrators.

Spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Zuheir Salem, noted that “The amnesty is useless as this decree is confiscated by the law No 49 promulgated in 1980. It criminalises the Muslim Brotherhood without any charges”

Indeed, a closer look at the terms of the amnesty granted by Bashar el-Assad would seem to reveal a misuse of the word, the term actually referring to a sentence reduction for some crimes. Syrian political analyst at Chatham House, Rime Allaf, told me this was another empty gesture from the regime designed to placate the protesters and majority Sunni population but did not equate to a recognition of any authority held by the Brotherhood themselves.

So, is the Muslim Brotherhood as influential in Syria as some opposition figures claim them to be? Cables sent by the US embassy in Damascus to Washington would seem to suggest that “While there has been a rise in Islamism (with some fundamentalism) in Syria in the past 20 years, we assess that the potential political influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria has been exaggerated.” The cable goes on to note that “ the most striking constraint on the potential appeal of any repackaged Muslim Brotherhood grouping is the heavy minority make-up (35 percent) of the Syrian population that is generally opposed to any Islamist domination.”

But despite a large minority group, Syria is largely Sunni Muslim and evidence has shown a steady turn towards Islam in the absence of political alternatives. Following the massacre of Hama in 1980 and the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the government launched a conciliatory campaign of promoting its own brand of Islam- It encouraged the building of some 80,000 new mosques. It also established the ‘Assad Institute for Memorizing the Koran’ in various cities and governorates, and over 22 higher-education institutions for teaching Islam. The government also encouraged setting up regional Sharia schools, in the governorate of Al-Jazeera, the Al-Khaznawi school was founded; in Aleppo the Sheikh Ahmed Hassan and Sheikh Abu al-Qaaqaa schools; in Damascus the Abu al-Nour complex and the Sheikh Mohammed Said Ramadan Hassoun and Sheikh Mohammed Habash study circles. Also in Damascus, the government created the Sheika Munira al-Qaisi complex, named after a famous Damascene lady, in which about 25,000 girls are enrolled.

These religious institutions, which total 584 in number, provide health care and food assistance to the public, and 280 of them offered comprehensive daily services to about a million people - and to about two million during the month of Ramadan. They also offer public religious instruction, either through daily lessons or through Friday prayer sermons. In order to bolster its Muslim credentials, the regime suppressed secular leftist groups, with the aim of upholding the Baath Party as the only organization worthy of that description in Syria. The government’s support for an ‘official’ Islamic ideology and the younger generation’s disenchantment with politics led many to turn to religious schools and mosques, both as a reaction against official policies and as a means of coming to grips with the economic and social problems besetting them. The annual population growth rate in Syria has dropped from around 3.4 percent a decade ago to around 2.4 percent today. However, those born during the population boom of two decades ago are the youths of today. Some 220,000 individuals are entering the labour market every year, and the government is incapable of providing work for them. According to official statistics, there are a million unemployed in Syria, about 500,000 of whom are registered at the government's employment bureaus. The danger, however, lies in the fact that 80 percent of these are between the ages of 15 and 24. When limited to the ideology of a single political doctrine and facing socioeconomic setbacks, many young people turn to religion, which, at least, offers solid solutions and spiritual comfort.

External regional and international factors, also contributed to the growth of Islamism in Syria, since during each of the past three decades major events helped further entrench Islamic dogma. The fight against the Muslim Brotherhood coincided with the onset of the Islamic revolution in Iran at the end of the 1970's, and, subsequently, the Syrian government allied itself with Tehran against an Iraqi regime with which, in theory, it shared the same secular nationalist Ba’athist doctrine. Later on, at the end of the 1980's, the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc, which supported the Syrian regime, collapsed. This not only weakened Syria's strategic alliances, but also helped undermine the credibility of Socialism and its achievements. The end of Communism, the failure of Socialist regimes to offer solutions to the economic and social ills of their own societies, and the failure of powerful ruling parties to accomplish much externally or internally, coincided with the mounting successes of Islamic parties. The Syrian public watched closely the achievements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the two Palestinian intifadas. This helped bolster Islam in Syrian society and this was further promoted by the role played by Hizbullah in ousting Israel from Southern Lebanon also helped entrench a belief that "Islam is the solution."

But does this mean that Syria is heading for an Islamist takeover? Make no mistake, there’s a possibility of an Islamist takeover and an ethnic conflict in Syria, but a number of factors suggest otherwise.

As mentioned, the regime’s promotion of an ‘official’ Islamic ideology and brutal suppression of Islamic opposition would suggest that any Islam based opposition movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, would be very disorganized.

President Assad’s efforts to court moderate Islamists –associated with the Sunni merchant class- has very much allied them with the regime. The government has been strongly anti-American, anti-Israel, allied with Iran and supportive of Hamas and HezbollahIndeed, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood declared a few years ago that it was not permissible to oppose the Assad regime because of these policies and Hassan Nasrallah’s recent speech showed no condemnation for the atrocities committed by the regime in suppressing the protests.

Most importantly, Syria is a very diverse country. While countries such as Egypt are about 90 percent Sunni Muslim, the figure for Syria is about 60 percent. There are Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Kurds, of which only the Kurds are Sunnis and they have a lot of nationalist feeling against the regime.

The Sunni Muslims, the constituency for revolutionary Islamism, also provide a large part of the middle class, secular-oriented, pro-democracy movement, thus providing a strong alternative leadership. That middle class would seem to be a pro-democratic, relatively more urbanized population.

It would seem that Syria is certainly headed for more turbulent times but whether the Muslim Brotherhood will have a role in any future administration is greatly dependent on the outcome of the current wave of unrest. Will Syria be heading towards an Iraq or Lebanon style of chaotic sectarianism or will opposition figures, including the Brotherhood, be able to harness the momentum created by weeks of violence and provide a cohesive and reasoned alternative to the Assad regime?