Outside World Will Determine Lebanon’s Future, Says BBC’s Jim Muir

By Lucy Jones


	Lebanon’s new President Michel Suleiman (c) greets Christian Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir (l) and Sunni Muslim Mufti Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Kabbani during a religious meeting between Muslims and Christians at the presidential palace in Baabda, June 24, 2008 (Reuters/Haitham Mousawi/Pool).

THE MAY 25 election of Michel Suleiman as Lebanese president produced an extraordinary display of regional and international support, the BBC’s Jim Muir observed the following day.

Following half a year of political deadlock, at least 80 people had been killed in battles between Hezbollah and pro-government groups from May 8 to 13, threatening to return the country to civil war.

“Never before has an election here produced such an eruption of jubilation among the people, across the spectrum of sect and politics,” wrote Muir. “As ever,” he added, “Lebanon’s fate will ultimately depend in large measure on what happens in the cross-currents between the major regional and international players—the U.S., Iran, Syria, Israel—whose struggles and influence the country is powerless to resist.

“But the display of support for the election of Michel Suleiman from such varied sources will encourage many to hope this is more than just a truce,” Muir concluded.

“General Suleiman will have a tough job to hold his country together,” warned the London Times on May 26.

The newspaper also noted that, so often, what happens in Lebanon depends largely on wider struggles across the Arab world.

“His success in holding together the Army—at the price of refusing to disarm Hezbollah militants—gives him nominal support from all sides. Whether this is enough to restore calm enough to allow Lebanon to continue its political and economic reconstruction remains to be seen,” the Times concluded.

Nakba Lingers Over Israel’s 60th Anniversary, Says Guardian Columnist

The story of Israel in the past six decades has been “an astonishing success when viewed in its own terms, combined with the extraordinary failure by all sides to find a political settlement which will allow the Israelis to live in peace consistently,” the London Times of May 12th said on the 60th anniversary of the creation of the modern state of Israel.

“The principal question now is whether the same will be seen come Israel’s 70th anniversary in 2018,” the newspaper continued. “The status quo is essentially one of ‘no war, no peace.’ This is scarcely ideal, but a noticeable improvement on where Israel stood 30 years ago,” it opined.

Writing in The Guardian the same day, Ahmad Samih Khalidi said the Nakba, or catastrophe, remains “an inescapable counter-reality” lingering over the anniversary.

“Despite a public discourse that often claimed the opposite, the Zionist movement set out to build a Jewish state in Palestine with a Jewish majority. This could only come about at the expense of the local inhabitants, the vast majority of whom were Palestinian Arabs—both Muslim and Christian,” he pointed out.

“At one end of the spectrum of possibilities is an open-ended and continuous spiral of conflict. At the other is a new set of relations between Arab and Jew, and new forms of association on the land of Palestine that go beyond the dying paradigm of a two-state solution toward sharing, partition or sovereignty,” Khalidi continued.

“One century after the first Zionist incursion into Palestine, and 60 years after the great determining event of 1948, it would take a brave soothsayer to predict which course will prevail,” he concluded.

British Embassy Molestations Must Be Investigated, Says London Times

Allegations that several Iraqi staff at the British Embassy in Baghdad were molested by managers at KBR, the American company that employed them, are “particularly disturbing,” wrote the London Times on May 8. “It is not simply the damage done by allegedly offensive and insulting behavior—damage that compounds the negative image many Iraqis have of the Europeans and Americans in their country; it is also the cavalier way in which these incidents were treated and the self-serving attempt by the Foreign Office to avoid a proper investigation,” the newspaper editorialized.

“It is a basic principle of justice that “no man is permitted to be judge in his own case,” continued the Times. “Yet that is exactly what the Foreign Office allowed when the embassy wanted to have nothing to do with the affair and did not appoint any outside person or body to look at KBR’s record. The facts should be fully and independently investigated, the conclusions made public and the Iraqis’ honor and demand for justice respected,” the newspaper concluded.

Turkey Entering “Dangerous Identity Crisis,” Say Der Spiegel Authors

The June 5 ruling by Turkey’s highest court that a law passed by the Erdogan government easing the ban on headscarves at Turkish universities was unconstitutional is a precursor to a dramatic confrontation likely to emerge between the ruling Islamist-based AKP party and the country’s secularist forces, led by the powerful military, said authors Ferda Ataman and Jurgen Gottschlich in Germany’s Der Spiegel the following day.

In its brief ruling, the court said the headscarf ban repeal infringes on the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, they reported.

“It is a verdict that went well beyond what observers had been expecting,” Ataman and Gottschlich commented. “Politicians and analysts alike had thought the court would merely request a supplementary law limiting the headscarf reform to the universities—which would have maintained the ban in schools and for those working in public service positions,” they noted.

“Instead, Turkey’s high court has handed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party an important political defeat. More than that, however, the verdict is a message. Turkey’s high court will soon be hearing a case aimed at banning the AKP due to its presumed roots in religion and intention to break down the barriers between church and state. [The] verdict seems to indicate that the justices are not going to back down,” the newspaper said.

“The question is whether AKP will accept a ban without mobilizing its supporters. Speculation is already brewing of massive street protests and the possibility of early elections in the autumn,” the authors concluded.

Why Was Muslim Bride Forced to Lie About Virginity? Asks France’s La Croix

There was much debate in the French press regarding a decision by a court in Lille to annul a marriage because it was discovered the Muslim bride was not a virgin. The June 2 ruling was based on a French law that stipulates that a marriage can be annulled if there has been an error or a lie about an “essential quality” of the bride or groom. In this case, virginity was considered an “essential quality.”

“Would it have been annulled if it were discovered that the man had lied about his sexual past?” asked the Catholic daily La Croix the following day. “Is virginity an essential quality for a man?”

According to the newspaper, the court and French Minister of Justice Rachida Dati argued that the decision may be good for the woman because the marriage appears to have been arranged.

“What are really at issue are women’s liberties. Why was the girl under such pressure that she had to lie?” the La Croix editorial concluded.

The case will probably return to court, even though the couple involved hasn’t asked for an appeal, said the June 3 Libération. That is because Dati thought the case should be re-examined, as it has caused such an uproar, the newspaper explained. A clear ruling needed to be established for future cases, the paper said.

The centrist daily Le Monde insisted the same day that the media have not presented the case accurately. The paper argued that a crucial aspect of this case is the fact that the couple is Muslim. Le Monde editorialized that the media, which had been so up in arms at the ruling, had ignored this fact.

Is Bin Laden Now Concentrating on Israel?

“Is Osama bin Laden moving on from Iraq?” asked BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds on May 21. The answer, he said, may be yes.

“The two latest messages [on May 16 and 18] believed to be from Osama bin Laden emphasize the centrality of a struggle against Israel and raise the question as to why he did not concentrate on Iraq,” commented Reynolds.

“The two new statements contrast with the importance given to Iraq in another message in March,” he noted. “This has led to a theory among some Western intelligence analysts that al-Qaeda accepts that it is in trouble in Iraq,” he added.

He quoted Nigel Inkster, formerly deputy head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6, as saying that one reason for this possible shift is the number of complaints about Muslims killed in Iraq and elsewhere. “There is some evidence that support for Osama bin Laden has been dropping in the Arab world because of revulsion about al-Qaeda behavior and especially the killing of Muslims…Al-Qaeda recognizes this is a not a good story and needs to rebrand,” Inkster is quoted as saying.

“On the other hand, there is still an appetite and ambition to engage in terrorism spectaculars in western Europe and the U.S., though the capacity might not match the ambition. But they only have to be lucky once,” Inkster pointed out.

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in London.