Detailed Lebanese & Lebanese Related LCCC English New Bulletin For October 18/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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So Much Winning: Why Mahmoud Abbas Thinks He’s Beating Trump—and Israel
David Makovsky/Haaretz/October 16/18
He’s 83, with no successor and no state, but he still seems to believe that defiance is a worthwhile end in of itself.
For Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the U.S. and Israel are two countries using political and economic leverage to force him to accept policies that he finds objectionable—or else risk being completely marginalized. Yet, Abbas believes that he has so far withstood at least three key challenges presented by the U.S. and Israel in recent months, and thus he believes he is scoring political victories. He may not be bringing his people an inch closer to statehood or bringing them major benefits, but he sees himself as a political survivor. Leading a movement that historically has been about defiance, he sees survival as its own reward.
While American efforts—and its policy of pressure—could still yield success on the Palestinian front in resuming meaningful negotiations in the next two years, it is important to see how Abbas sees the Trump Administration, almost at its halfway point. Whether one likes Abbas or not, it is important to see how he is likely to think he is winning when it comes to issues of the last few months.
In looking at his scorecard, it is worth starting with the United Nations. U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who has just announced her retirement, led the charge of the Trump Administration to put forward a tough position on the issues of refugees and aid to the Palestinians. That stance is popular among many Americans who question whether the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is really seeking to solve the Palestinian refugee issue, but rather seeks to perpetuate it.
However, by not putting forward an alternative U.S. plan for Palestinian humanitarian assistance focused on bona fide American non-governmental aid groups, while withholding all American aid to the Palestinian Authority, it has made it easier for Europeans and Arabs states to galvanize enthusiasm and support for UNRWA. This was exacerbated by concerns that Palestinian kids in the West Bank and Gaza will not be able to go to school this fall. Two rounds of emergency appeals, including one at the time of the opening of the UN General Assembly, equaling $320 million in pledges for 2018, has covered the deficit that UNRWA has faced, according to UN officials.
Of course, the test will be: Will these countries sustain these levels over the years to come? One senior non-American diplomat confidently declared to me, “The U.S. withholding of funding from UNRWA has created a new international equilibrium as other countries have stepped in. UNRWA has not been crippled and the U.S. has been marginalized” within the organization.
The U.S. hope was that its withdrawal of funds would lead to a shift in UNRWA’s policy, not least its definition of refugees, but this does not seem to be the case. Likewise, the U.S. hope that this would pressure Abbas to change his “no contact” stance vis a vis the Trump administration has not been borne out either. The U.S. has legitimate reasons to stop funding UNRWA, but the bottom line is Abbas seems poised to continue to use UNRWA as a political cudgel, at least for now.
Another development that Abbas must favor is President Donald Trump’s recent declaration in which he said for the first time that he favors the two-state solution, after famously refusing to publicly endorse the two-state approach since the start of his administration.
Over the first year of the Trump Administration, Palestinian officials say that Abbas was concerned that the U.S. would cajole Gulf states like Saudi Arabia into pressuring him to accept Trump’s peace deal. Those Gulf states may not much like or respect Abbas—due to an array of grievances with Abbas personally (including long-standing Emirati anger over Abbas’s feud with Mohammed Dahlan)—and subsequently have not been generous donors to the Palestinian Authority. However, that pressure has simply not materialized—and Abbas has breathed a sigh of relief.
Ever since the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) to the White House in the spring of this year, the once-fashionable term “outside-in” has lost its shine. That idea, that parties outside the immediate Israeli-Palestinian circle can facilitate Arab backing for a Trump peace plan or even pre-empt them with innovative bilateral ties, has been gradually nixed, as MBS has made it clear that the U.S. cannot count on the Saudis to twist the arms of the Palestinians. This may have been the case even if the U.S. had not moved its embassy to Jerusalem, but certainly Arab officials point to this as a complicating factor.
Two elements likely to reinforce this dropping of outside Arab pressure on the PA are the cooling of Saudi-U.S. relations, indicated not least by a public statement by Trump at a rally to his supporters recently that the Kingdom could not survive two weeks without the U.S., as well as the recent crisis surrounding the disappearance and apparent murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
A third area where Abbas feels success is that he has paid no political price for his indifference to the misery in Gaza. Not only has he not been involved in securing Qatari funding to increase electricity for Gazans, from four to eight hours per day until the end of 2018, he has opposed it. He has cut PA aid to Gaza.
His strategy has been clear: Make the situation in Gaza more severe in order to press Hamas into a military confrontation with Israel, which would break the impasse. This would yield dual benefits. It would militarily weaken his rival, Hamas. And it would allow Abbas to continue to do what he loves, namely, publicly blaming Israel as the victimizer. Blaming Israel as the bully is what enables Abbas to reinforce the Palestinian narrative in Europe as the victim. It is a cynical move, but it has worked.
Abbas has not only not paid a price for his indifference to Gaza, but he has done so while snubbing Egyptian mediation and attempts to find a way for the Palestinian Authority to return to Gaza. For Abbas, Gaza is a trap. In his view, unless Hamas surrenders its guns, he has the authority and they have the responsibility to improve the miserable living conditions in Gaza. That understandable position on Hamas disarmament, however, should be met with a concrete plan by Egypt regarding how to achieve an objective, but this has not been the case.
So whether the issue is UNRWA, the Arabs and Trump, or Gaza, Abbas believes he has avoided paying political costs in defying the U.S, even if the U.S. has indeed cut economic aid. Of course, his political maneuverings have not necessarily helped the Palestinian people. The two-state outcome seems far off. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition still builds beyond the security barrier. Moreover, succession for the 83-year-old Abbas is murkier than ever.
A common thread between the controversies relating to UNRWA, the role of Arab states and the status of Gaza is that Abbas measures successes by what did not happen—namely, by his ability to maintain the situation in these distinct arenas in a bid to foil the U.S. Sadly, in the Mideast, political survival and success are too often conflated with strategic gains. The two are not the same. In the twilight of his life, Abbas has no illusions that he is on the cusp of strategic success, and therefore consoles himself with these acts of non-cooperation. But even as the head of a movement whose very self-definition over many decades is inextricably tied to the idea of defiance of outside powers, this organizing principle has so far proven to be an insufficient catalyst to move closer to the goal of statehood.
**David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute and helped created its interactive mapping tool "Settlements and Solutions: Is It Too Late for Two States?"

Turkey: Enabling Mass Illegal Migration into Greece
Uzay Bulut/Gatestone Institute/October 17/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13127/turkey-greece-migration
Turkish authorities repeatedly have threatened Europe with an influx of migrants. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's threats should not be ignored.
Ever since the migrant crisis started to escalate in 2011 -- with the onset of civil war in Syria -- those who were critical of mass, unchecked immigration have been called "racists," "bigots" or "Islamophobes."
Today, however, the continued chaos in many European countries caused by immigration, and accompanying increase in crime -- including murder and rape committed by Islamist extremists -- appear to have proven the critics right.
A recent surge of illegal migrant arrivals has put the Greek city of Thessaloniki in crisis. "Dozens of migrants have turned Aristotelous square in the center of Thessaloniki to a makeshift camp," with many "sleeping in the open." Pictured: The Idomeni migrant relocation camp, near Thessaloniki.
Greece is currently facing a serious surge in undocumented migrant arrivals in the Evros region, an entry point for migrants illegally trying to enter the country from Turkey. Arrivals have roughly doubled since 2017, and Athens is holding Ankara responsible.
The influx from places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Bangladesh and African countries into Turkey reportedly has been on the rise in recent months, with 1.5 million people from Muslim countries waiting on the Iranian border to enter Turkey. This has sparked fears in Athens that they could be heading for Greece.
According to a fact sheet released last month by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), "Sea arrivals [in Greece] peaked this month with 4,000 people. Land arrivals through Evros also increased to 1,400."
As a result, the Greek city of Thessaloniki is in crisis. According to a recent article in The Greek Reporter, "Dozens of migrants have turned Aristotelous square in the center of Thessaloniki to a makeshift camp," with many "sleeping in the open."
This situation is likely to deteriorate even further, not only in Greece, but in the rest of Europe, with the massive number of new arrivals, particularly from Afghanistan, via Iran, into Turkey.
An investigative report in the Turkish daily Hurriyet, published in April, describes the way this is accomplished:
"Smugglers leave the Afghans and people from other countries, including children, on mountains. The illegals walk for kilometers through the border area... They all aim to go to Istanbul. But they first go to Erzurum, a city determined as the transit place.... Some then escape to Europe through Greece and Bulgaria, while others get involved in crimes, such as theft and prostitution, in Istanbul and are made to work as undocumented workers...
"According to the data of Turkey's Immigration Authority, from the beginning of this year until March 29, 17,847 illegal Afghans have been caught. 9,426 Syrians, 5,311 Pakistanis, and 4,270 Iraqis have also been caught. The total number of illegals caught by police including those from other countries is 47,198."
In an interview in April with the Turkish daily Milliyet, Erdal Güzel, head of the Erzurum Development Foundation, said:
"It has reached the point at which the people entering Turkey illegally from and returning to Afghanistan has become as easy as [a Turkish citizen's] going from one Turkish city to another. They have learned the paths.
"...According to their own testimonies, they take buses to Iran at night... They are kept waiting there... until the time is right. Some families are kept waiting with no food or water for 15 or 20 days.
"They say they walk through the mountains. They all have the same story. Some say they walk through mountains for 4 or 5 days. They are told that 'even if one of you falls off a cliff, you will not make a sound.' ... Among them are pregnant women and blind people. In recent years, the migration traffic has escalated incredibly... Thousands of people are coming here... Human smugglers stuff these people in three-story trucks in which sheep are carried... What is strange is they come here at the cost of their lives. They enter Turkey and then want to go to Germany through Greece, Serbia and Hungary. They hit the road so zealously as if to say, 'Those who will die will die, and those who will stay alive will be here with us.'"
Human trafficking and people-smuggling are serious crimes and grave violations of human rights. According to a report by the US State Department:
"People who are smuggled can be extremely vulnerable to human trafficking, abuse, and other crimes, as they are illegally present in the country of destination and often owe large debts to their smugglers."
Nevertheless, it appears that a highly organized international network of various actors -- including smuggling and trafficking groups, international organizations and even governments, such as that of Turkey -- are involved or complicit in the mass illegal movement and abuse of a large number of people.
Turkish authorities repeatedly have threatened Europe with an influx of migrants. In November 2016, for instance, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly stated:
"When 50,000 refugees headed to Kapıkule [at the Turkey-Bulgaria border], you shrieked: 'What will we do if Turkey opens it border gates?' Look at me! If you go too far, we will open those border gates. Just know this."
Erdogan's threats should not be ignored. Among the smuggled migrants and refugees are ISIS supporters and other Islamist radicals. Also, many of the jihadi terrorists who participated in the deadly attacks in Manchester, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Stockholm and St. Petersburg in recent years had connections to Turkey. Some were apprehended in Turkey; others either traveled there to cross into Syria to join ISIS or had lived there for a while. Turkey has been used routinely by Islamists as a route into areas of Syria and Iraq to join ISIS.
Ever since the migrant crisis started to escalate in 2011 -- with the onset of civil war in Syria -- those who were critical of mass, unchecked immigration have been called "racists," "bigots" or "Islamophobes."
Today, however, the continued chaos in many European countries caused by mass immigration, and accompanying increase in crime -- including murder and rape committed by Islamist extremists -- appear to have proven the critics right. It is urgent for European governments to find effective solutions to unfettered immigration. It is equally imperative for those governments to hold Turkey accountable for its part in the crisis.
*Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist born and raised in Turkey, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute. She is currently based in Washington D.C.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Are Democrats Wasting Their Campaign Cash?
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg/October 17/2018
Top-down, formally organized political parties have a presumed advantage over non-hierarchical ones: It should be easier for them to use their resources efficiently. And when Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke revealed that he had raised more than $38 million in the summer quarter, some Democrats immediately started worrying that the party was wasting its money on a quixotic campaign in very Republican Texas.
Poppycock! I think the Washington Post’s David Weigel gets this exactly right:
After 2016, Democratic donors are more ready than ever to give money but less trusting than ever of the national party's strategy. The result is that they're contesting nearly everything, while party PACs focus on more winnable races. And so far, that arrangement has kept Republicans under pressure.
We don’t know which way the wind will blow in the last three weeks of the campaign. What we do know is that very few Democrats in competitive districts — or even in marginally competitive districts — are complaining that their campaigns are being underfunded. Which means that if the final breeze helps the Democrats, the party is primed to take maximum advantage of it. That’s been true throughout the cycle, whether it’s candidate recruitment, activist involvement or fundraising. It sure seems like a good strategy to me.
Have the Democrats distributed their resources with perfect efficiency? Of course not. But a more centralized process probably wouldn’t have done so either. That’s because the more bureaucratized a party becomes, the more bureaucratic incentives will tend to drive decisions. The result is often risk-averse policy: Signing off on a huge investment in an election where the party has only a one-in-four chance of winning, rather than using that money to push the probability of victory in a few other races from 75 percent to 90 percent, is the kind of decision that can get someone fired.
Of course, decentralized parties can misuse their resources too. Donors and activists can make amateurish mistakes about where to spend, perhaps because the rewards they seek from participation aren’t closely linked to maximizing party victories, or perhaps because their information simply isn’t as good as what a centralized party might have. When party-aligned interest groups make their own decisions about which candidates to support, rather than pooling resources with a centralized party, they may think more about themselves than about a larger strategy. Too much of that, and the party fractures.
In other words, just as we can’t assume that huge fundraising totals for candidates who are likely to lose is necessarily a sign of poor decision-making, we also can’t assume that any particular party structure is best. We know that parties are essential to democracy. But we don’t know much about the best way to put them together — or even what the advantages and disadvantages of various different structures can be. That’s especially true of our peculiar parties in the United States.
1. Hans Noel on the Senate.
2. Scott Kastner, Margaret M. Pearson and Chad Rector at the Monkey Cage on Trump and China.
3. Also at the Monkey Cage: John Sides talks with Jonathan Rodden and Richard Pildes about partisan gerrymandering.
4. Lynn Vavreck debunks myths about the 2016 election.
5. Elizabeth Drew debunks myths about Watergate. An excellent primer for those who aren’t familiar with the history.
6. Amy Walter on voter enthusiasm.
7. And Ellen Kurz wants to abolish voter registration and automate the process. The truth is that the US is an outlier on this; most democracies automatically register all voters, and the main reason for establishing high hurdles to registration here was to make it harder for people to vote. Although advocates for automatic registration sometimes exaggerate the benefits, the case for making it easy to vote is nevertheless very strong.

Big Tech Snuffing Free Speech; Google's Poisonous 'Dragonfly'
Judith Bergman/Gatestone Institute/October 17/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13129/google-censorship-china
If the big social media companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.
Google has decided it will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work because Google employees were upset that the technology might be used for lethal military purposes. Yet Google is planning to launch a censored search engine in China that will empower a totalitarian "Big Brother is watching you" horror state.
Freedom Watch filed a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, claiming that they suppress conservative speech online.
A Media Research Center report found that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube stifle conservative speech and that in some instances staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional.
Chinese officials prevented a journalist, Liu Hu, from taking a flight because he had a low "social credit" score. According to China's Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips.
Google is reportedly planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code-named "Dragonfly," which will aid and abet a totalitarian "Big Brother is watching you" horror state. (Image source:
The internet, especially social media, has become one of the primary places for people to exchange viewpoints and ideas. Social media is where a considerable part of the current national conversation takes place.
Arguably, big tech companies, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, therefore carry a responsibility to ensure that their platforms are equally accessible to all voices in that national conversation. As private commercial entities, the social media giants are not prima facie legally bound by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and are free to set their own standards and conditions for the use of their platforms. Ideally, those standards should be applied equally to all users, regardless of political or other persuasion. If, however, these companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.
The current media giants' favoring one kind of political speech over another -- progressive over conservative -- and even shutting down political speech that does not conform to the views of the directors, certainly skews the national political conversation in a lopsided way that conflicts with basic principles of democratic freedom of speech and what presumably should be the obligations of virtual monopolies.
The question of whether such discrimination against conservative viewpoints constitutes a breach of law is currently the subject of a number of lawsuits. In October 2017, PragerU, a conservative educational website, filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for "intentional" censorship of conservative speakers, saying that they were "engaging in an arbitrary and capricious use of their 'restricted mode' and 'demonetization' to restrict non-left political thought."
PragerU claimed that "Google and YouTube's use of restricted mode filtering to silence PragerU violates its fundamental First Amendment rights under both the California and United States Constitutions," YouTube, for instance, restricted a video by a pro-Israel Muslim activist, discussing how best to resist hatred and anti-Semitism, as "hate speech". The US District Court Judge in the case, Lucy Koh, however, dismissed PragerU's claims because Google, as a private company, is not subject to the First Amendment. "Defendants are private entities who created their own video-sharing social media website and make decisions about whether and how to regulate content that has been uploaded on that website," Koh wrote. PragerU has appealed the decision.
In August, Freedom Watch filed a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, claiming that they act in concert to suppress conservative speech online. Freedom Watch claims, among other things, that the four media giants have violated the First Amendment to the Constitution and that they have engaged "in a conspiracy to intentionally and willfully suppress politically conservative content."
PragerU and Freedom Watch are not the only conservatives to have experienced suppression of their voices on social media. In April, the conservative Media Research Center released a report detailing the suppression of conservative opinions on social media platforms.
The 50-page report, "Censored! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech," which looked at how conservative political speech fared on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, found that the tech companies stifle conservative speech and that in some instances, staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional. The report found that Google showed a "tendency toward left-wing bias in its search results", and that Twitter (by admission of its own employees) had "shadow-banned" some conservative users. ("Shadow banning" means that their content did not appear to other users, but the account owners themselves had not been notified of this "banning" of their content).
The apparent leftist bias, however, not only shows itself in the suppression of conservative speech on social media giants' websites. Censorship and selective presentation of speech has also led to unfortunate policy decisions by some of the big tech companies. Google, for example, has decided it will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work when it expires next year, because Google employees were upset that the technology they were working on might be used for lethal military purposes.
Yet, according to leaked documents, Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code-named "Dragonfly," which will aid and abet a totalitarian "Big Brother is watching you" horror state. China, according to the Economist, is planning to become "the world's first digital totalitarian state." The Chinese government is in the process of introducing a "social credit" system by which to score its citizens, based on their behavior. Behavior sanctioned by the government increases the score; behavior of which the government disapproves decreases the score. Jaywalking, for example, would decrease the score. China is reportedly installing 626 million surveillance cameras throughout the country for the purpose of feeding the social credit system with information.
According to Gordon G. Chang, Chinese officials are using the social credit system for determining everything from being able to take a plane or a train, to buying property or sending your children to a private school. Officials prevented a journalist, Liu Hu, from taking a flight because he had a low score. According to China's state-owned Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips. "If we don't increase the cost of being discredited, we are encouraging discredited people to keep at it," said the former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council, Hou Yunchun. He added that an improved social credit system was needed so that "discredited people become bankrupt".
According to a legal expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Zhi Zhenfeng:
"How the person is restricted in terms of public services or business opportunities should be in accordance with how and to what extent he or she lost his credibility.... Discredited people deserve legal consequences. This is definitely a step in the right direction to building a society with credibility."
The goal, straightforwardly, is to control citizen behavior by aggregating data from various sources such as cameras, identification checks, and "Wi-Fi sniffers" so that Chinese citizens will end up being controlled completely. As Chinese officials have reportedly put it, the purpose of the score card system is to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."
It is, in other words, an excellent deliberate tool to suppress the human rights of the Chinese people.
Although Google has refused to comment on the concerns about Dragonfly, the leaked documents indicate that this censored version of Google's search engine will help the Chinese government do just that by blacklisting websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. It will also, reportedly, link users' searches to their personal phone numbers, thereby making it possible for the Chinese government to detain or arrest people who search for information that the Chinese government wishes to censor.
"Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China," said Cynthia Wong, senior internet researcher with Human Rights Watch. Fourteen organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, PEN International, and Human Rights in China, have demanded that Google stop its plans for a censored search engine. They say that such cooperation would represent "an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights" and could result in the company "directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations."
In a recent speech, US Vice President Mike Pence also asked Google to end Dragonfly: it "will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers," he said.
So, while Google claims it has moral qualms about cooperating with the US government, the company evidently has no moral issues when it comes to cooperating with Communist China in censoring and spying on its billion citizens with a view to rewarding or punishing them via opportunities in real life. Google employees, according to the Intercept, have circulated a letter stating that the censored search engine raises "urgent moral and ethical issues," and saying that Google executives need to "disclose more about the company's work in China, which they say is shrouded in too much secrecy, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter".
Google is apparently all too eager to work with China on micromanaging its citizens, and there is plenty to work on, according to a recent Amnesty International report :
"China has intensified its campaign of mass internment, intrusive surveillance, political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation against the region's Uighurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups."
Up to 1 million people have been detained in "China's mass re-education drive," many of them tortured, according to the report.
Eight years ago, Google co-founder Sergey Brin -- who was born in the highly repressive Soviet Union -- at least had the decency to hesitate on (if not turn down) doing business in China if it involved censorship. "[W]e have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results," Google had announced two days before "company spokesman Scott Rubin started singing a different tune."
Perhaps totalitarian Communist repression is of no consequence to Google, so long as it gets still more market share?
*Judith Bergman is a columnist, lawyer and political analyst.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

How Is the Saudi Public Likely Responding to the Crisis over Khashoggi’s Disappearance? The Popularity of Riyadh’s “Reformist Repression”
David Pollock/Fikra Forum & the Washington Institute/October 17/18
The mysterious and deeply troubling disappearance of noted Saudi political commentator Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has refocused attention on the paradox of Saudi “reformist repression.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s arrival in Saudi Arabia highlights the seriousness of this episode, and if Saudi agents were indeed involved, then, in Talleyrand’s famous phrase, “it was worse than a crime—it was a mistake.” No doubt the Western, Turkish, and some anti-Saudi regional media, and presumably some government agencies as well, will surely strive to keep the focus on this shocking incident.
But a key question, likely to be overlooked or confused in that discussion, is this: how much do Saudis themselves—as opposed to Western experts, media, or NGOs—really know or care about such problems? The question is key because it bears directly on the perennial issue of Saudi stability. Many different factors figure in that calculation, from individual violence to foreign intervention to elite factionalism, and more. In the long run, too, an erosion of domestic and foreign business confidence might outweigh today’s windfall profits from 80 dollars per barrel of oil. But right now, can the latest arrests and disappearances be a cause, or perhaps a consequence, of some major upheaval brewing beneath the kingdom’s generally placid surface?
Based on a recent visit to Riyadh, and subsequent conversations with Saudis and others about Khashoggi and similar cases, my short answer is probably not. Awful as this episode appears to be, its broader significance is a separate question. And while such incidents understandably damage Saudi Arabia’s image among some Western governments, analysts, journalists, and investors, they are of remarkably little interest to most people inside the country. As a result, contrary to conventional wisdom, they do not seriously threaten the kingdom’s government—at least not with the specter of mass protest, or of organized dissidence by major segments of the society such as the business, clerical, professional, or military establishments.
One factor behind this judgment is the clear (though little-known) evidence that the Saudi government is increasingly aware of, interested in, and at least to some extent receptive to its own public’s views. In July, during my most recent visit to Saudi Arabia, I spent a day at the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, a Riyadh-based institute for assessing popular attitudes and promoting intra-Saudi discourse. The institute was founded fifteen years ago, but significantly increased its productivity after Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) was named crown prince two years ago. It is at least nominally independent; funding, I was told, comes from renting out two of the three massive office towers it owns in downtown Riyadh.
Experts at the Center are trying to encourage the Saudi public to participate in discussion and debate on issues that affect ordinary Saudis, and on the overall direction of the country. One goal is to foster a sense of unity on behalf of the common good and national interests. The Center holds workshops, seminars, and large-scale festivals and gatherings across the country, engaging hundreds of thousands of Saudis over the past decade and a half.
But another, newer goal of this Center is to keep a finger on the pulse of public opinion for systematic input on official policies—not just outreach to promote those policies after the fact. This, one of its top managers readily acknowledged, is an unfamiliar and challenging concept in Saudi Arabia, but is currently taken quite seriously at the highest levels of government. So around the time of MbS’s ascent, the Center established a division dedicated to conducting opinion polls. Since then, it has fielded over 100 polls, surveying a total of around 33,000 Saudis.
According to the experts I talked to, the Center’s insights have enabled it to provide the government with more than 100 specific policy recommendations over the past two years, 65 of which were accepted and implemented. One striking case is popular support for the long-awaited decision this year to allow Saudi women to drive. Other initiatives, the pollsters told me, range across the gamut of social and economic issues, including the selective but very public crackdown on corruption.
As a pollster myself, I was both intrigued and reasonably impressed by all this, though unfortunately unable to obtain further details. From my own polls in Saudi Arabia, I know that Saudis have been willing to voice very mixed views even on some especially sensitive issues. For example, asked last year if Islam “should be interpreted in a more moderate, tolerant, and modern direction,” just 30 percent said yes—though that was double the figure from late 2015. But on foreign policy issues, my polls confirm that Saudi official policies are largely in tune with the public. Fear and loathing of Iran and its regional proxies, from the Houthis to Hezbollah, is nearly universal not just among the Saudi elite, but on the Saudi street as well.
Much the same is true, albeit with smaller majorities, for other seemingly provocative moves: the feud with Qatar, the close alliance with the United States, and even the conditional support for a settlement with Israel. The Saudi head of the Muslim World League, for example, recently made the astonishing proposal to march for peace to Jerusalem—along with Jewish and Christian clerics. Yet he would do so with tacit support from around two-thirds of the Saudi public, who say that peace with Israel is desirable as long as Palestinian rights are also respected.
Beyond such statistical support for the Saudi government’s evolving mix of top-down domestic reform and foreign activism, anecdotal evidence points in the same direction. For example, when I asked some well-connected but independent Saudi professionals about Jamal Khashoggi’s unknown fate, they seemed unfazed. Indeed, they sounded more concerned about the media firestorm this incident has provoked than about the man himself—or the cruel limits on personal freedoms his case exemplifies. As for the minority of truly disgruntled Saudis, Khashoggi’s shocking example will likely intimidate more than it will alienate, let alone arouse to action. Indeed, that was probably the overly aggressive motive behind his apparent abduction in the first place.
More broadly, when I talked to young middle-class Saudis in Riyadh about the arbitrary nature of the anti-corruption crackdown, most were not just unconcerned but positively enthusiastic. One typical comment: “After forty years of ill-gotten gains, those guys at the Ritz got what they deserved.” Others argued that, even granted some unavoidable unfairness, such autocratic behavior was a price worth paying for the increased social freedoms that Saudis are beginning to enjoy. External criticism of this tradeoff, they said, was simply misguided, if not ill-intentioned.
Similar opinions emerged on the war in neighboring Yemen: while some foreigners view Saudi intervention there as a needless bloody quagmire, most Saudis I’ve talked to lately, whether inside or outside their country, still see it as necessary self-defense. One American defense expert, an experienced veteran with fluent Arabic who spent the last few years working with Saudi soldiers in-country, tells me that most of them have long viewed the Houthis in Yemen as a real threat to themselves. Their chief complaint, he said, is not about the grindingly slow progress of the Saudi combat effort, but the half-hearted American support for it.
Other supposed Saudi foreign policy blunders, from the abortive kidnapping of Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri to the fruitless boycott of Qatar, also tend to get a nod of approval, a rationalization, or at worst a shrug from most Saudis I encounter. Of course the Saudi media, including social media, are tightly controlled, and lately many Saudis are cautious even about private conversations. To be sure, some sharp criticism does make its way into online Arabic discourse, despite all the restrictions. Yet there is no sign of any groundswell of mass popular opposition, nor of concentrated resistance in key segments of Saudi society.
One last factor behind the approval (or just acquiescence) of so many Saudis is their sense that Saudi expertise about their own region is at least on a par with any outside assessments. They have more reason today than ever before to feel that way. In the past few years, I have come to know and respect bona fide Saudi academic experts on Iran, on Yemen, on Shia, and even on Israel. They now have more of the requisite linguistic proficiency, intellectual independence, and sometimes even the living experience in those areas to offer informed advice about them. Today, too, there exists a small but growing number of Saudi think tanks to support this pool of local knowledge and counsel.
Altogether, then, the wisdom and ethics of current Saudi policies and practices, ranging from the whereabouts of Jamal Khashoggi to the war in Yemen, from the crackdown on corruption to the crackdown on free speech, appear very different inside and outside the kingdom. Some outsiders may well question particular Saudi government choices. They should not, however, confuse their own judgments with dire, unfounded predictions about Saudi instability. Inside the kingdom, issues that loom large abroad are outweighed by the Saudi government’s overall attentiveness to the pulse of its people.
*David Pollock is the Bernstein Fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on regional political dynamics and related issues.
*Fikra Forum is an initiative of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The views expressed by Fikra Forum contributors are the personal views of the individual authors, and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute, its staff, Board of Directors, or Board of Advisors.​​

Brexit and blatant example of a populist remark
Hazem Saghieh/Al Arabiya/October 17/18
Sometimes a strident behavior or a controversial remark holds such wide-ranging implications that cannot be fully explained even in a book. Britain has recently provided a sample of the populist speech. During the annual conference of the Conservative Party held in Birmingham, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Jeremy Hunt compared the European Union to the Soviet Union!
Before getting into the details of Hunt’s strange statement, we need to deeply examine the political circumstances, which pushed him to say what he said. It’s well-known that Britain will leave the European Union in March 2019.
So far, talks about an agreement that would regulate the relationship between the EU and the UK, after the latter withdraws from the EU, still veers between ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’. This has created political and diplomatic tension, which recently peaked when Europeans rejected the British government’s Chequers Brexit Plan.
Economic experts fear that the divorce between the UK and the EU without an agreement would be a disaster for the British economy. Therefore, there is a need for political and verbal escalation to improve the negotiating position of the British toward the Union.
Meanwhile there are the hardliner Brexiteers, headed by former Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Boris Johnson, who have been critical of British Prime Minister Teresa May’s negotiating strategy with the Europeans.
This is all understandable; however, what is illogical here is going far in riding this popular wave – or which seems to be popular – by echoing irrational remarks.
This is where the difference lies between a populist politician who rides the wave and does not hesitate to continue providing weak justifications and the responsible politician who tries to control the wave via a rational discourse in the interest of the people and the nation.
Economic experts fear that the divorce between the UK and the EU without an agreement would be a disaster for the British economy
Populist stance
By comparing the European Union to the Soviet Union, Jeremy Hunt took a populist stance that is short on rationality, if not the minimum of knowledge. The European Union is based on the principles of liberty, free exchange of ideas and products, open borders and respect for human rights.
It was established via intense democratic deliberations and member countries are allowed to withdraw from the bloc on the basis of these same democratic principles and processes. Britain used these very provisions in its Brexit referendum in June 2016. Thus, the comparison of the EU with the Soviet Union is clearly untenable, as the latter was a closed totalitarian regime that was run by a single party and a multitude of detention camps.
The Soviet Union had also confiscated freedom of expression, free elections and trade among other things. Thus, we can understand the outrage caused by Jeremy Hunt’s statement.
It is the anger of rational democratic sensibility that is opposed to populist irrationalism. The most serious reaction to the remark came from the President of the European Council Donald Tusk, who deemed the phrase to be both insulting and unwise.
The reaction came from a man who personally spent half of his life in one of the countries following the Soviet order and after the fall of communism became the head of the Polish government. Thus, he is obviously aware of the falsity and danger of the statement that makes such a comparison.
However, we here also realize how immunity against this populism is weak these days as the British political rhetoric, traditionally famous for its precision and balance, has not been able to fight it back.

Exploiting the Khashoggi card
Mashari Althaydi//Al Arabiya/October 17/18
What’s certain is that the case of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi whose fate is unknown to this day has become more of a political and a media blackmail “card” rather than a criminal case with a political scent.
It’s a card that several parties are tossing and squeezing, a piece of wood who everyone is hitting anyone they want with and their rivals! It’s a piece of wood which those swimming in several currents are paddling on!
It’s no longer about Jamal’s fate, what happened to him, who did what to him and who are “they” or about specifying pure legal responsibility. This is apart from the mysterious players in the story. This is no longer what’s important because what’s important has in fact happened in the media and political courts erected in the global Brotherhood and leftist media as they’ve taken their decision, issued their verdict, set the sanctions and adjourned the session!
Jamal bin Ahmad bin Hamza Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who wrote and preached for a strategic relationship between the Saudi state and the Brotherhood and who nominated himself as an extraordinary envoy for this great task, was he expecting in the last turn of his career to become a card that international actors and groups will fully exploit and use to serve their aims?
The point is, Saudi Arabia as a state, vision and command is greatly and persistently targeted by manifold international groups and blocs. It happened that this Jamal incident occurred during an American electoral season amid a deep rift and hostility between the Republicans, President Trump’s party, and the Democrats, who are his bitter adversaries. Hostility towards Saudi Arabia - Trump’s ally - thus became part of targeting Trump himself!
In brief – and unfortunately – Jamal is neither the first nor the last journalist or political or activist that disappears or gets killed or goes missing in the world. There are dozens or rather hundreds. Recently, the head of the Interpol himself went missing in China! Imagine that! His fate remained unknown for few days and then China said do not ask about him as we’ve detained him, so you can replace him with someone else. Everyone, international parties as well as civilians, responded to that in such a strange flexibility and an alternative was appointed. No global hysterical frenzy happened, like in the case of Jamal.
The point is, Saudi Arabia as a state, vision and command is greatly and persistently targeted by manifold international groups and blocs. It happened that this Jamal incident occurred during an American electoral season amid a deep rift and hostility between the Republicans, President Trump’s party, and the Democrats, who are his bitter adversaries. Hostility towards Saudi Arabia - Trump’s ally - thus became part of targeting Trump himself!
Whatever the result and fate of the investigation are, and which its formation was commended by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from Riyadh, many lessons must be learnt from this crisis on the media, diplomatic and cultural levels.
To those blaming Saudi media in particular or blaming those allied with Saudi Arabia, we say calm down – I do acknowledge there are real problems, not just on the media level – as what happened recently is much more worse, malicious and complicated.

Israel’s war planes unlikely to be deterred by Syrian missiles
Mohamed Chebaro/Arab News/October 17, 2018
The Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile system that is set to be delivered to Syria — whether it will be operated by the Syrian military loyal to President Bashar Assad or by his Russian allies — is unlikely to alter much the free hand Israel has enjoyed in the skies above Syria and Lebanon, at least for the foreseeable future.
The delivery of the S-300 system, if it happens, will no doubt give the Syrian military an advanced weapon system that could check Israeli supremacy, but it will not be a game-changer that will push Tel Aviv to cease its targeting of Iranian and Hezbollah military assets that are deemed threats to Israel’s security.
In the seven years since the start of the popular rebellion against Assad and his family’s rule, Israel has not attempted to interfere or even encourage the removal of Assad. Israel has always believed that Assad’s rule in Syria should continue so that it can maintain the stability of its northern border. Some even believe that Israel has lobbied through its international diplomatic channels to veto the removal of the weakened Assad regime, and that all Tel Aviv is concerned with is that the regime remain weak and that Assad’s boisterous Iranian and Lebanese allies are banned from having high-tech missile technology on Syrian soil.
Since the Russian deployment in Syria in September 2015 to prop up the Assad regime’s forces, the Israeli air force has carried out numerous attacks targeting Hezbollah militia commanders, ammunition dumps, Iranian missile development infrastructure, Iranian drone launch sites, and Iranian and Hezbollah missile convoys in Syria and Lebanon.
In the past three years, military air traffic control in Syria has never been this busy, but it has been extremely well managed thanks to Russian liaison and coordination efforts between all parties. Israeli war planes had unhindered access to strike 200 targets in 2018 alone, while the international coalition against Daesh flew tens of thousands of sorties and struck hundreds of Daesh positions. The Russian, Iraqi and Syrian air forces have also carried out thousands of sorties, and Iran has launched dozens of drones and long-range missile attacks without any major incident.
But the controversial downing of a Russian military Ilyushin Il-20 plane with 15 personnel on board — most probably by a Syrian military shoulder-operated surface-to-air missile — in September somewhat spoiled the seamless Israeli-Russian understanding over Syria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waiting for his next meeting with President Vladimir Putin to clear the air, as Israel has again rejected Moscow’s attempt to hold it responsible for the deaths of the Russian servicemen. Israel has disputed the Russian findings and says its jets were back in Israeli airspace when the Russian plane was hit.
For Israel, it is evident that it wants to continue hitting Iranian and Hezbollah targets in neighboring Syria despite Moscow’s decision to equip Damascus with the S-300 system. The S-300 could only limit Tel Aviv’s free hand over Syria if Russia also supplies the latest radars, advanced counter measures systems and friendly and enemy plane identification software at the heart of the incident that saw the Ilyushin plane downed by the Syrian military.
The S-300 is, above all, a politically sensitive weapon system and a strategic balance of power breaker.
History has shown that, even at the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1960s and 70s, Moscow refrained from supplying its Arab allies with technology that threatened Israel’s strategic supremacy, and this sensitive Russian balancing act continues today.
The S-300 is one of a series of highly capable varieties of long-range surface-to-air missile first developed and deployed in the USSR in 1979, and later modified and upgraded by the Russian armed forces. As well as targeting aircraft, the fully mobile units also have the capacity to engage ballistic missiles. But the S-300 is, above all, a politically sensitive weapon system and a strategic balance of power breaker, hence the long Russian hesitation to supply it to Damascus and Tehran.
Yet the bottom line still depends on Putin. Though his minister of defense has been keen to protect Russian forces in Syria with electronic warfare systems, as well as equipping Assad’s forces with tracking and guidance systems to prevent future mishaps, I tend to believe that the status quo will not be affected. The Israeli-Russian hotlines established in 2015 will continue to be the medium to prevent accidents, while Israeli war planes will be allowed to monitor and act unhindered against what they consider to be enemy targets in Syria.
Putin’s Russia has mastered the act of balancing its interests with those of its allies, such as Turkey, Iran and Israel. Putin succeeded in pushing the Iranians back more than 100 kilometers from the occupied Golan Heights border area at the request of Tel Aviv. He also turned his back on his Iranian allies many times as Moscow failed to supply Tehran with the S-400 system — a more advanced version of the S-300. The Russian military stood idle as Israeli war planes neutralized Iranian weapon systems destined for Hezbollah, assassinated key Iranian and Hezbollah field commanders, and removed Iran’s advanced drone operation bases in Syria without the slightest reaction from Tehran or its allies.
In Syria’s many wars, the modus vivendi governing the relations of all the militaries involved is likely to continue. The only minor adjustments may be for Israel should Putin decide to cross the strategic threshold and arm Assad’s military with sensitive weapons that could make its operations more problematic, but not impossible, in the busy skies above Syria.
*Mohamed Chebaro is a British-Lebanese journalist with more than 25 years’ experience covering war, terrorism, defense, current affairs and diplomacy. He is also a media consultant and trainer.