Detailed Lebanese & Lebanese Related LCCC English New Bulletin For October 28/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Stop romanticising that viral image of a Palestinian protester – it's not a poetic moment
Louis Staples/Independent/October 27/18
Behind the now famous photograph's palpable kinetic energy and visual dynamism lies one of the most desperate human rights situations in the world
A picture can say a thousand words, but in today’s ever-connected world, the good ones can generate even more retweets. A viral image taken in Gaza by photojournalist Mustafa Hassona, which depicts a bare-chested Palestinian protester holding a large flag and wielding a sling, has achieved both of these feats.
The photograph was taken as protests continue on the border of Israel. Gaza's health ministry said 32 Palestinians were wounded as demonstrators threw stones at Israeli forces, who responded with tear gas and live fire. The image has provoked a huge reaction online, with social media users likening it to Liberty Leading the People, the iconic Eugene Delacroix painting of the French Revolution.
From the moment we sleepily check our phones in the morning, most of us are bombarded with information and imagery, some of which can be disturbing. This photograph is undeniably striking, but the online reaction displays a worrying tone of detachment in the face of human suffering that is becoming all too common. Paintings such as Delacroix’s have decorated gallery walls for centuries. Encased within ornate gold frames and protected by glass, their figures are distant, providing us with the romantic fantasy of a world gone by. They might be based on historical events, but our minds can easily decipher that there’s nothing real behind the flat oily surface of the canvas.
But Hassona’s photograph couldn’t be more real. Behind its palpable kinetic energy and visual dynamism lies one of the most desperate human rights situations in the world.
The flag bearer, identified by Al Jazeera as 20 year-old Aed Abu Amro, is one of almost two million people that are trapped on the tiny Gaza strip, unable to leave. This year has seen hundreds of deaths at the hands of Israeli forces, who have been condemned by the United Nations for using “excessive force” against protestors. Unarmed medics, such as 21 year-old Razan al-Najjar, are among the fatalities. A 12 year-old boy was shot dead earlier this month. A UN report has warned that Israel's blockade will make Gaza, the world’s third most densely populated area, “uninhabitable“ by 2020. 97 per cent of the territory’s drinking water is undrinkable and there are only four hours of electricity a day.
These facts are distressing to read. But this hopeless situation has been facilitated by governments across the world enabling what will one day be universally accepted as crimes against humanity.
Romanticising the image of a desperate man taking on an army allows us to justify its circumstances and distract ourselves from the grim truth that, in the real world, David rarely defeats Goliath. Aed could die today, tomorrow, or the week after that. If he keeps protesting, it is almost an inevitability.
Protesting is, of course, a choice. But it is also a choice for Israel to continue flouting international law by building on Palestinian land and planning to demolish Palestinian villages – a potential war crime. It was a choice for the US to deliberately inflame the situation by moving its embassy to Jerusalem, causing unnecessary bloodshed and anguish. Left to swelter without a trace of hope in what is essentially an open air prison where 50 per cent of children express no will to live, as the world looks the other way, is there not a chance we would all do the same?
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In the most tasteless responses, social media users have remarked on Aed’s chiselled jaw and physique. This overt fetishisation of his suffering is obscene, but the idea that the pain and anguish of marginalised groups is a price worth paying for beautiful art is a notion far older than even the paintings of Delacroix.
From Asad’s chemical weapon attacks in Syria, to the bodies of refugee children washed up on the beaches of Europe, images have a radical, empathy-spreading power that can change the world. But the flippant reaction this particular shot, of someone literally risking being shot, represents our growing detachment from pain and lack of collective responsibility for it.
Don’t let this photograph fool you: there is nothing beautiful or poetic about the oppression of Palestinians. Beyond the lens, the constant misery of wasted life and unnecessary death in Gaza continues - we must not let that drift out of focus.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/palestine-israel-gaza-protest-photo-conflict-middle-east-flag-blockade-a8602416.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR09g5dv9coO88EGfMxjSsuLn3Pg4Muw3vzn69sNTjU57NeaiZEW4iP9xNg#Echobox=1540549835

Leveraging Murder
Jonathan Spyer/Jerusalem Post, 27/10
Turkey and Qatar seek to turn the death of Jamal Khashoggi to political advantage
The killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi represents a golden opportunity for all those forces opposed to the current direction of US Middle East policy. Unsurprisingly, these disparate elements are seeking to exploit the situation to the maximum. Will their efforts succeed?
The Middle East strategy of the Trump Administration has taken time to emerge, but its essential contours are now clear. The advance of Shia Islamist Iran and its allies is perceived as the central threat system – the need to rally and organize allies to face down and turn back this threat the salient imperative.
Sunni political Islam, in both its Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi forms, is an additional enemy to be confronted. This challenge is less centralized.
With the eclipse of the Islamic State, the Salafis continue to constitute a latent threat. But at present this threat does not have an immediate focus, and is mainly a matter for intelligence and specialized military attention rather than politics and grand strategy.
The Muslim Brotherhood axis of Turkey, Qatar, Hamas and the various other franchises of this movement is a far more potent and significant gathering than the Salafis. Unlike Iran, its intention is the slow and incremental establishment of Islamist polities, rather than the rapid subversion of Arab societies by a combination of political and military means.
In the longer term, given the uncompromising anti-western core outlook of the Brotherhood, the legitimacy gap faced by Iran because of its Shia nature, and the ongoing dysfunction of Sunni-majority Arab countries, this may constitute a challenge of no less or greater magnitude.
The US strategy to hold back these three enemies (all of whom, it is worth noting, are particular manifestations of political Islam), rests on alliances with a number of regional allies. Israel, by far the most powerful of all regional forces opposed to them, is a central lynchpin. President Sisi in Egypt, who is responsible for preventing the disaster of the consolidation of Brotherhood power in Egypt, is another.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are additional vital links in the chain. In the persons of Crown Princes Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Mohammed Bin Zayed of the UAE, the current US Administration thought it had found the right personalities in their respective countries for the advancement of this strategy.
The inbuilt flaw or weakness in this US regional strategy is the relative fragility of the Gulf monarchies. Iran and Turkey, the enemy and emergent rival states to the west respectively, are the most powerful and well organized states in the Middle East, with the exception of Israel.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, meanwhile, are states possessing great wealth, but only semi-modernized political systems. In so far as they are able to produce effective military organizations, this is largely because of direct western involvement (see the UAE’s Presidential Guard, for example, commanded by former commander of the Australian SAS General Mike Hindmarsh). The indifferent performance of the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen, and the Saudi failure in backing the rebels in Syria offer evidence of their limitations.
The current US strategy, of course, has many enemies. These include, unsurprisingly, partisans of Iran, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood. The list also includes supporters and adherents of the Middle East policy of the previous US President. The latter stood for a policy of cooperation with Teheran, and tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood (on the Salafis,by contrast, Obama took a relatively hard line).
Unsurprisingly, therefore, partisans of AKP Turkey, the Iranian regime and the Middle East policy of the previous Administration which favored the interests of both are currently engaged in an effort to leverage the death of the unfortunate Jamal Khashoggi in order to dismantle the recently emergent Middle East strategy of the present Administration. Forcing the US to turn on Riyadh, or creating discord and strife between the USA and KSA is the goal.
This is not, (to put it mildly), part of a consistent pattern of concern for human rights and dignity on the part of these forces. Turkey is among the most energetic jailer of journalists in the world. 150 journalists have been imprisoned in Turkey and 180 media outlets shut down since the failed coup attempt of July, 2016. Turkish forces have been in recent months presiding over grave violations of human rights in the Afrin area of Syria (largely unreported by global media). These have included looting, confiscation of properties, and ‘honor killings’. Forced disappearances and arbitrary detentions have taken place, according to Amnesty International. Several Turkish journalists seeking to comment on these matters on social media have been detained under Turkey’s ‘anti-terror’ laws. Turkish forces also killed a Kurdish journalist, 22 year old Tolhaldan Walati, during the invasion. For some reason, Walati’s killing did not subsequently become a cause celebre for large parts of the western media.
Qatar, meanwhile, whose state-run al-Jazeera channel is the main current outlet for nightly features about the Khashoggi killing, routinely arrests and detains media groups seeking to investigate the slave -like conditions endured by foreign workers in the emirate.
Turkey and Qatar’s evident desire to leverage Khashoggi’s killing to derail current Administration policy on the Middle East derives rather from the fact that they and their Muslim Brotherhood allies and clients stand to be among the chief non-beneficiaries of this policy.
Khashoggi was himself an energetic advocate for a soft-line toward the Muslim Brotherhood. In a Washington Post article on August 28th, for example, he argued that ‘The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes… There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that political Islam is a part of it.’
The article was not merely a general discussion piece – rather it was written to specifically oppose calls for the designation of the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
Articles of this type, and the current efforts of the Turkey and Qatari camp to leverage the Khashoggi killing into policy benefit, are part of a broader political war being fought out for influence on US Middle East policy, and in turn for ascendancy in the region. The killing of the journalist himself appears also to have formed a particularly foolish and inept move in this conflict.
What will be the result? Despite anger in the US, major policy shifts appear unlikely. Firstly, this is because Saudi Arabia’s status as the world’s largest exporter of oil gives it the ability to hit back at any proposed sanctions by reducing oil exports and forcing a rise in oil prices. The mere possibility of such a move may well deter significant US moves to sanction Saudi Arabia.
More broadly, the strategic imperatives that first produced the Trump Administration’s orientation toward Riyadh have not disappeared as a result of the Khashoggi killing. Political Islam, in its Muslim Brotherhood, Shia and Salafi forms remains the key threat to western interests and to stability in the Middle East. Despite the present media-generated mood, this is likely to ensure that US Mid-East strategy weathers the storm and continues broadly along its current lines for the immediate future.
https://jonathanspyer.com/2018/10/27/leveraging-murder/?fbclid=IwAR10dxFD4FARkm7jk4oum9xx1TI4KgGgw59pJdF0X4-TuZJa-qjgEoidy-A