One such moment has been reported all over the place: how he was interrogated because of a seconds-long moment of an interview for the Daily Show.

Ridiculously long block quotes after the jump.

I saw the flicker of a laptop monitor under my blindfold. Then I heard someone speaking. It was a recording of another prisoner’s confession. “It’s not that one,” said the second interrogator. “It’s the one marked ‘Spy in coffee shop.’ ” Mr. Rosewater fumbled with the computer. The other man stepped in to change the DVD. And then I heard the voice of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Only a few weeks earlier, hundreds of foreign reporters had been allowed into the country in the run-up to the election. Among them was Jason Jones, a “correspondent” for Stewart’s satirical news program. Jason interviewed me in a Tehran coffee shop, pretending to be a thick-skulled American. He dressed like some character out of a B movie about mercenaries in the Middle East—with a checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck and dark sunglasses. The “interview” was very short. Jason asked me why Iran was evil. I answered that Iran was not evil. I added that, as a matter of fact, Iran and America shared many enemies and interests in common. But the interrogators weren’t interested in what I was saying. They were fixated on Jason.

“Why is this American dressed like a spy, Mr. Bahari?” asked the new man.

“He is pretending to be a spy. It’s part of a comedy show,” I answered.

“Tell the truth!” Mr. Rosewater shouted. “What is so funny about sitting in a coffee shop with a kaffiyeh and sunglasses?”

“It’s just a joke. Nothing serious. It’s stupid.” I was getting worried. “I hope you are not suggesting that he is a real spy.”

“Can you tell us why an American journalist pretending to be a spy has chosen you to interview?” asked the man with the creases.

The absurdities never cease. His interrogator, named for his scent, is convinced that Bahari is a spy, working for the spy agency called … Newsweek. Earlier, the interrogator had listed it as a spy agency among other such notables as the CIA and MI6.

And he has a fixation with … New Jersey.

Mr. Rosewater wanted me to tell him about a dinner I’d attended with eight other journalists and photographers at a friend’s house in Tehran in April, several weeks before the election. “You are part of a very American network, Mr. Bahari,” he said, as if summing up his case in a courtroom. “Let me correct myself: you are in charge of a secret American network, a group that includes those who came to that dinner party.”

“It was just a dinner,” I murmured.

“Yes. A very American dinner. It could have happened in…New Jersey, or someplace like that.” He paused. “Your own New Jersey in Tehran.”

The strangeness of the accusation was unsettling. New Jersey?

“You’ve been to New Jersey, haven’t you, Mr. Bahari?” The thought seemed to infuriate him, and I was struck by the feeling that for some reason he might have wanted, secretly, to go to New Jersey himself. The worst thing that can happen in any encounter with Islamic Republic officials is for them to think that you’re looking down on them.

“It’s not a particularly nice place,” I said, trying to sound conversational.

“I don’t care. But it is as godless as what you wanted to create in this country.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“You were planning to eradicate the pure religion of Muhammad in this country and replace it with ‘American’ Islam. A New Jersey Islam.” He was building his case, and my responses were irrelevant. “Tell me,” he said, “did any of the women at the dinner party have their veils on?”

“No.”

“Then don’t tell me that you didn’t have a secret American network. A New Jersey network.”

In an interview on 60 Minutes, he elaborated on the moment:

He was fascinated with New Jersey. I think the words New Jersey sounded to him like the most American place that you can be in your life. Because he thought of New Jersey as kind of like paradise. To him, he had to suffer on this world in order to go to paradise — in order to drink wine and have sex with at least 72 virgins and then others if he wanted to… He hated me and he was jealous of me at the same time, because I had been to New Jersey. And then, I thought to myself, ‘Maziar, you are screwed, because these guys are in charge of your life and they are stupid, they are ignorant.’

As one of the Lede blog commenters aptly points out: “Hey, I am from New Jersey. Wine we got!”

As an aside, this kind of discourse always conflates the two (Muslims/Arabs): after all, all Muslims are Arabs (well, no, really only 20% of the world’s Muslims are Arab)–and all Arabs are Muslims (no, actually only 25% of Arabs in the United States are Muslims). Prejudice knows no facts, only linkages based on identity–a practice more broadly understood as either racism or racial profiling.

Both Goldberg and Sullivan effectively call for investigations into American Arabs/Muslims, particularly those in the military. Right, good idea: let’s alienate the few Arabs/Muslims who love their country–in spite of their country’s and fellow soldiers’ prejudices against them, drawn out by incidents like the Fort Hood massacre–enough to die for it.

Fort Hood was incredibly tragic, and incredibly sad. Did Major Hasan scream Allahu Akbar? It does not matter. He may have believed himself to be religiously motivated, he may have had ties to radicalizing Imams, but at the end of the day — he was clearly disturbed. Indeed, the military and society as a whole should watch out for people who gave warning signs of mental instability — but not warning signs based on their religious or ethnic identity, which is what Goldberg and Sullivan are demanding

There are so many underlying assumptions to Goldberg’s arguments that I’m going a little crazy myself trying to unpack all of them. I really can’t focus on it for too long, because my blood will literally boil. TNC took him down at the obvious point: what do we learn by focusing on Islam as the cause of violence?

I think this mostly hinges on what “means” means. If we grant that Hasan was motivated by religion, what does that actually tell us? What is there  beyond the fact that people will, at times, interpret religion as a justification to commit heinous acts? … That’s really my issue. What is the big “thing” that we should be seeing, in this case? What are those elite blinders preventing us from seeing?

Goldberg’s response is telling:

Let me use an example from my own religious group (I’m Jewish, in case any of you were wondering) to illustrate a possible answer to this question. Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the Navy, was convicted of spying on behalf of Israel in 1986. Pollard’s actions cast a shadow over many Jews working in the American national security apparatus. Loyal Americans were questioned, and sometimes denied security clearances, simply because they were Jewish, or had visited Israel. The FBI pursued some dubious cases, including the recently-aborted prosecution of two former AIPAC employees, in large part because of fears that another Pollard was lurking somewhere inside the American government.

Was it fair that loyal American Jews had their patriotism questioned by the FBI? No. Was it right of the FBI, in the wake of the Pollard case, to be concerned that Israel, having turned one American Jew into a spy, had turned others? Unfortunately, yes. I’m not excusing the witch-hunts that took place after the Pollard scandal, but I am saying that it would have been a dereliction of duty on the part of the FBI to ignore, because of political correctness, an actual threat. Ultimately, it was the fault of Jonathan Pollard, and the Israeli officials who used him as a spy, that innocent American Jews were suspected of spying for Israel.

Here’s the logic: America has wrongly used racial profiling in the past to discrimate against ethnic groups. Therefore, we should commit that same wrong again, because political correctness endangers us. Plus, it’s the terrorist’s fault anyway that people who have similar background are then discriminated against.

Here’s Goldberg’s logic applied to another historical example: America put Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II. It was wrong. But, they were a threat. Anyway, it’s the Japanese’s fault: they shouldn’t have bombed Pearl Harbor in the first place.

What Goldberg/Sullivan’s argument misses is the motivation behind attacks like September 11th, or the violence at Fort Hood: terrorists use violence to achieve their ends. Marc Lynch brilliantly describes why Goldberg/Sullivan’s arguments are so dangerous: they in fact, fulfill, the goals of terrorists like th 9/11 hijackers:

Since the Ft Hood atrocity, I’ve seen a meme going around that it somehow  exposed a contradiction between “political correctness” and “security.”  The avoidance of Nidal Hassan’s religion out of fear of offending anyone, goes the argument, created the conditions which allowed him to go undetected and unsanctioned in the months and years leading up to his rampage.  American security, therefore, demands dropping the “political correctness” of avoiding a  confrontation with Islamist ideas and asking the “tough questions” about Islam as a religion and the loyalty of Muslim-Americans.

This framing of the issue is almost 100% wrong.    There is a connection between what these critics are calling “political correctness” and national security, but it runs in the opposite direction.   The real linkage is that there is a strong security imperative to prevent the consolidation of a narrative in which America is engaged in a clash of civilizations with Islam, and instead to nurture a narrative in which al-Qaeda and its affiliates represent a marginal fringe to be jointly combatted. Fortunately, American leaders — from the Obama administration through General George Casey and top counter-terrorism officials — understand this and have been acting appropriately.

It’s worth walking through the connection once again, because how America responds to Ft. Hood really is important in the wider attempt to change the nature of its engagement with Muslim publics across the world.  Get the response right, as the administration thus far has done, and they show that things really have changed.  Get it wrong, as its critics demand, and the world could tumble back down into the ‘clash of civilizations’ trap which al-Qaeda so dearly wants and which the improved American approach of the last couple of years has increasingly denied it.

Terrorism is a means towards that end.  The object is to create a violent, polarized environment in which Muslims are forced to embrace a narrow, extreme version of Muslim identity.   They want Muslims to accept a master narrative in which the Islamic umma is existentially threatened by Western aggression, and the only theologically and strategically appropriate individual response is to join the jihad in the path of god (as they have defined it).

They recognize that most Muslims won’t embrace this radical conception of their identity just through messaging, internet rhetoric, or preaching. To make inroads with mainstream Muslim communities, they need to change the context in which they live — to render their status quo unacceptable and to make their narrative resonate.  And for that to happen, they need a lot of help — for the targeted governments to take inflammatory measures against their Muslim populations, for the non-Muslim citizens in the targeted countries to discriminate against them, and for the media to fan the flames of hatred and mistrust.

Understanding this strategy points towards some fairly obvious guidelines for judging various responses.   Al-Qaeda and its affiliated ideologues don’t just want their targets to overreact with blanket crackdowns on the mainstream Muslim community — they are counting on it.  They want to create a homogenous, undifferentiated Islam on whose behalf they speak and a coherent master narrative which justifies and validates their actions. American reactions which feed AQ’s master narrative, lump together disparate Muslim movements, and tar a wide range of Muslims with the AQ brush therefore serve al-Qaeda’s strategy.  Responses which disrupt AQ’s narrative, disaggregate the Muslim world and relegate AQ to a marginal fringe frustrate its strategy.

I’m proud of the Obama Administration’s response thus far, which has not given into racial or religious prejudice and fearmongering. Fort Hood was tragic. Investigations will determine if he had terrorist connections, etc.

But there is another tragedy that can be averted: the impulse toward racial profiling, alienating Arabs and Muslims, and all the accompanying garbage to the “clash of civilizations” narrative. It would be so sad to fall back into that trap because of the senseless violence of one disturbed individual.

Saudis at the gates. Well, if there were gates. Let's be kind and call the imaginary line between Saudi and Yemen a "border."

So I have been quite remiss in updating about the fighting in Yemen. This tidbit, by way of Waq al-Waq, hopefully makes up for that somewhat. As background information, the Saudis have started to get involved in Saada in a big way, bombing and shelling Saudi/Yemeni (depending on who you ask, but likely both countries’) territory in response to cross-border actions by the Houthi rebels (who claim that Yemen was encamped in a strategic mountain just on the other side of the border, on the Saudi side) Everyone denies everything, naturally. Here’s an undoubtedly scrupulous Saudi source on recent Houthi methods:

A young infiltrator was arrested Monday while he was going through the border on his donkey posing as a refugee to join his family at the refugee camp. As he was being questioned, he pulled out a gun to fire at the troops who quickly responded by shooting him dead.

Two more infiltrators in Jarbah in Abu Aresh Governorate did not resist arrest. They were dressed in women’s clothes.

An armed infiltrator was arrested in his underwear with strange drawings on his back. He was believed to have been practising black magic on Saudi troops.

The infiltrators used animals with lamps on them to attempt to trick Saudi troops into following them.

The animals, however, were detected by infrared cameras and night vision systems. After regaining captured areas, Saudi forces scaled back their assault along the mountainous border and captured 200 or more infiltrators, a government advisor told AFP Monday.

Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Robert De Niro, et. al.

The Doha Tribeca Film Festival ended a week ago, but YouTube has taken up the slack, prominently featuring four short films and one feature from the festival in the screening room. So far I’ve only gotten through the most-watched short film of the bunch (the English title given in the credits, The North Road, leaves something to be desired: compare with its top-billed French title, La Route du Nord, and the Arabic title, الطريق الى الشمال). In the interest of better expressing the film’s contents, I propose the film be retitled The Road to the North, or The Road North. But I digress. Here’s a link to the film on YouTube in high-quality (no embedding sadly).

The Road North

I highly recommend it. It’s pretty short, about 25 minutes, and it’s a fascinating meditation on French-Lebanese identity, memory, belonging, loss, post-colonialism, culture. Don’t miss it. Just try not to read the absurd comments beforehand.

The ship's name may appear to be the North Korean cargo ship, Jin Jon 2, but don't be fooled: it's still the Arctic Sea.

(Part Four, in an apparently never ending series.)

The last time we left off the saga of the Arctic Sea, the crew had been freed by the (once again mighty?) Russian navy–after a bizarre incidence of piracy in European water. But now, you’d think with the alleged pirates thrown into the slammer, the story would end. And yet …

What exactly befell the ship, called the Arctic Sea, is still largely unknown. In fact, nearly eight weeks after it was supposedly liberated by the Russian Navy, the ship is said to remain at sea under military control and has yet to make port for needed repairs. Four members of the ship’s crew have not been able to leave, despite repeated calls by their families for their release.

As if that wasn’t strange enough, one more bizarre tidbit has leaked out: the hijackers tried to change the name of the ship to “Jon Jin 2.” It just so happens that the name, as well as the corresponding identification number, belong to a North Korean general cargo ship. Which looks nothing like the Arctic Sea, and was docked in Angola at the time.

Photographs from the Russian Prosecutor General’s Investigative Committee document the new name, painted on the ship:

The Arctic Sea's masquerade.

The second in in command insists there was nothing but lumber on the ship.

“There was only lumber on board,” Mr. Falin said. “I was personally in all areas and in the ballast tanks. There was nothing else in there. I can say this with 100 percent certainty.”

Perhaps. Hijackers, what do you have to say for yourselves?

The hijackers … continue to deny any wrongdoing, maintaining that they were ecologists conducting research in the Baltic Sea when they encountered inclement weather and sought refuge aboard the Arctic Sea.

Well, I bet those Russian government officials and investigators will give us the straight truth. The government, naturally, maintains that there was nothing but lumber aboard as well, but why would the wayward “ecologists” commandeer this ship in heavily trafficked/policed European waters? Why would Russia send warships on a frantic chase … three weeks after the hijacking? And why would they not let the crew go over a month later, nor let the ship dock? The Russian government line and Choose Your Own Ending to the Tale, after the jump.

This month, Andrei A. Nesterenko, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Russian officials had finished inspecting the Arctic Sea and planned to hand the ship over to its owners.

“Given the end of the investigation, Russia does not see the necessity in detaining the ship and does not have those intentions,” Mr. Nesterenko said.

Yet, Mr. Matveyev said the navy had given little indication that it would make good on such promises. Twice, he said, company representatives have sought to board the ship after getting permission from Russian investigators. “Nevertheless, the ship was not handed over,” he said.

A Russian Navy official, who agreed to speak openly on the condition of anonymity, suggested that any delay was the ship owner’s fault and that the navy had “fulfilled our task: we liberated the ship from these hijackers.” The official said that the owners had been having financial difficulties and that Mr. Matveyev was stalling a final resolution in order to avoid costly port fees. When told about the comments, Mr. Matveyev denied the accusation.

That’s certainly believable, at least compared with the conspiracy theorists accusatoins:

In September, a secret visit to Russia by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, set off fresh talk among some analysts, who suggested, without any proof, that Israeli intelligence agents had uncovered a plot to smuggle missiles or other weapons aboard the Arctic Sea to a so-called rogue country.

The end to this story is a sort of choose-your-own-misadventure. Think of all the different paths we can go down with a North Korea connection! Cold War (2)! Nuclear proliferation!”Rogue” states! How about this one: Russia is proliferating (nuclear?) arms/technology to Israel, but tries to cover its tracks by pinning it on North Korean sales to some nefarious African/Arab state? Or, Russia hopes to provoke another Korean War to pin down the U.S.? Or Putin thought the Black Sea fleet was getting bored and needed some action? Or two Russians, two Latvians, and four Estonians just thought they could get rich quick, Somali-style, with a simple hijacking/ransom payoff, only to catch the Russians in a resurgent mood?

Really, endless possibilities.

(HT: Tom Dolan)

In other visual media news, the Yemen Embassy is participating in the Arabian Sights: Contemporary Arab Cinema (starting tonight in D.C., dear readers), with the very first Yemeni-produced movie, according to the press releases/the amazing trailer:

“Yemen’s first locally produced film, An intriguing and compelling plot, An exploration to the price of terrorism”

I’m not exactly sure what the plot will be, but based on the trailer, if you know what Allahu Akbar means, you can get by without knowing Arabic. I’m also left wondering; does first locally-produced film really just mean first government-funded propaganda feature-length propaganda piece? Interesting timing, with the Yemeni government confirming yesterday that “hundreds” of soldiers have been wounded and killed in the fighting against the Houthi in the northern region of Sa’ada.

(HT: BT for the Jawad update.)

Dubai in the 1960s.

Over at Steve Clemons’s The Washington Note, guest poster Jim Krane whipped up a storm last week by claiming that Dubai offers up an ideal model, one that other countries in the region should emulate. Call it the “Arabs need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” theory. I’m actually having a really difficult time trying to summarize the post, which is just all over the place, but I’ll give it a shot anyway:

• The U.S. is prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and otherwise bringing destruction to the region.
• The U.S. can’t fix the Middle East. The U.S. didn’t help Dubai. Arab countries need to serve their own interests.
• How?  Follow Dubai’s business-before-politics model. Don’t bother trying to help the Palestinians or complaining about Israel.

Then, watch how Krane parries the straw-man counterargument!

But wait, Dubai is in financial trouble. How could it be a role model?

Dubai’s downturn is temporary. Being one of the world’s most globalized cities, it couldn’t help but be infected by a global recession. The contagion kneecapped each one of its economic pillars: Shipping, logistics, tourism, and its binging real estate sector. Most of these pillars remain sound.

I guess he meant to say temporarily kneecapped? Bit of a strong word for something that remains “sound.”

The whirlwind, logic-free tour continues, with a reminder of the controversy from 2006 when a Dubai-based firm bought the operations of some U.S. ports.

Then we arrive at my favorite part of his incoherent evangelism:

The Dubai model is a mixture of social freedom, unbridled immigration, and raw capitalism. It is overseen by a government that is one of the world’s least democratic. This is no accident. Dubai avoids both elections and the Arab obsession with politics, especially the syndrome of feeling slighted by the West.

The writing is, if you haven’t been able to tell already, a train-wreck. “Unbridled immigration”? I suppose by unbridled he means to say unregulated and prone to coercive practices. Near the end, he concedes that the labor market is “abusive,” the dependence on the real estate market is crippling, and “raw capitalism” and its attendant consumerism also mean unbridled pollution and general deterioration of the environment.

But let’s ignore all that, and focus on the best part of Dubai: it is undemocratic, so it doesn’t have to deal with pesky elections or ideas of citizenship that demand engagement and involvement from the people of the country. Instead, citizenship in Dubai is predicated purely on transfers of wealth and privilege from the government to its citizens.

If Dubai wasn’t autocratic, think of how terrible it would be! Guest workers would (hopefully? eventually?) have a voice, or at least the ability to advocate for themselves without being subject to arrest.

Putting aside arguments about the inherent strengths and weaknesses of democracy, it’s absolutely daft to call Dubai a model that could be replicated elsewhere in the Arab world. I’m sure that if the Palestinians had a booming real estate market and large petroleum/natural gas reserves, the Emirati self-help model would serve them well. But as it stands, I don’t think the Gazans can count on tourism to fix their problems.

Burj Dubai, the tallest man-made structure in the world. Burj means tower in Arabic.

Brian Stelter wrote yesterday in the business section of the nytimes about the fallow film production studios in Dubai. Check the great lede:

When the heiress Paris Hilton traveled here in June and July to audition female friends for her show “My New BFF,” her producers had access to state-of-the-art studios and a government eager to import a touch of Hollywood glamour to the Middle East.

But to adhere to the region’s Islamic norms, many of the ingredients in reality TV were taboo: there would be no drinking, no cursing, no dramatic displays of affection. The producers thought about filming a scene at a water park, but passed on the option of dressing the contestants in religiously appropriate swimwear.

I do have to fault the article for relying on the simple equation of Hollywood/America = Sex. After all, not all American films revolved around sex–though if they are set in the Middle East, they’re probably about terrorism and oil.

“Syriana” and “The Kingdom” were both filmed in Dubai (though arguably, that was a win/win for both Dubai and the filmmakers, since it let the filmmakers approximate Saudi Arabia–while Dubai could make themselves look better, at the expense of Saudi’s flaws). But to date, they are the only Western films to be partially made in the Emirates.  I have to wonder, why was “Body of Lies,” a similar political thriller about terrorism, turned down in 2007? Maybe Dubai doesn’t want to get typecast …

This month, the government rejected the request from the producers of the sequel of “Sex and the City,” which was to be partially set in Dubai:

Dubai Studio City’s facilities have been used in 26 feature films, mostly from gulf countries and Bollywood. … In rejecting the request from the producers of the “Sex and the City” sequel this summer, Mr. Sharif said, the authorities took into account “the multicultural fabric of the society and its perceptions.”

According to a government official familiar with the script, its plot lines — with the women coming to Dubai, spending money lavishly and cavorting — were perceived to reinforce negative stereotypes about the region.

Good luck with that. When I was in Doha, and told female (khalijeeat) acquaintances that I had lived in New York City, they immediately asked if it was like “Sex and the City.” Some of them wanted nothing more than to move there and live like Carrie Bradshaw and the rest of them. So are the censoring authorities more afraid of stereotypes of the Gulf, or of their women following the Western example?

And so the article goes, assessing the hurdles to film production in Dubai, including failed co-productions (the abysmal “Shorts,” which just opened to pathetic box office returns in America). The articles focuses on Islamic law and censorship as the principal problem for the Gulf’s investments:

Dubai, its rival Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf cities face enormous hurdles as they try to diversify their economies by fostering creativity and becoming entertainment capitals. Chief among those hurdles: they operate under Islamic law. Hollywood does not. So far, the oil-rich countries have proved more able to pay for fancy media productions and to build expensive film facilities than to actually lure production to the Middle East, as economic efforts run up against their traditional values and censorship.

The article also ends on this note:

Even more than the staff issues, enduring issues of censorship may be the most stubborn hurdle for the gulf region — even if, as Mr. Hirschorn jokingly said, “our government censor turned out to be a really nice guy.”

Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Perhaps that’s why (DUH) a Paris Hilton reality TV show probably won’t have much to with the Gulf.

But the real problem in my eyes is not the strict moral codes in the Gulf countries, but the failure of their labor markets. The piece briefly touches on this point:

Some of the other hurdles are logistical. For instance, local requirements for full-time work visas mean that the country lacks a robust freelance market to support productions. Jamal al-Sharif, the executive director of Dubai Studio City, which was founded in 2005 to stimulate the regional film industry, acknowledged that “a vital ingredient for building the film industry is access to talent.”

The current business model of Hollywood is dependent on putting together “packaged” deals. Essentially, every film is established as a singular corporate entity, a one-0ff, a model that requires a lot of flexibility–negotiations must occur between every component part in a film production.

This essentially means that the talent–not just actors, writers, directors, but the production assistants, set designers, everyone beyond the camera and behind the scenes–must be brought in to Dubai for one movie. And then, once the production is over,  everyone goes home–because the countries’ visa laws won’t permit unemployed foreigners to remain in the country.

There is no efficiency involve. The Emirates doesn’t have taxes, but that doesn’t negate the expense required to move an entire production–full of all these moving parts, subject to shifting negotiations–to a country far away. And it’s not like someone can stick around after the filmmaking is done, or if something changes in the negotiations and participants need to shift around–visas in the Gulf countries are subject to strict regulations. Lose your current job, and you must leave.

The Gulf’s labor laws are one of the biggest problems in capitalizing on their outsized capital investments. Places like the Media Zone in Abu Dhabi or Education City in Doha won’t flourish on their own. Regardless of their stellar, expensive facilities, these places actually require even more, continuous investments in human capital. Skilled workers, whether engineers or educators or filmmakers or journalists, must be recruited from the West or other Arab countries and brought over on a case-by-case basis. And once again, it’s not terribly easy to change jobs once you’re in country–don’t count on an unemployment period for job hunting, because even as a Westerner or a fellow Arab, you will be deported.

This is to say nothing of the unskilled laborers, working in the Gulf. For more on them, read this lengthy investigative article I wrote while in Doha. It also delves a little deeper into the problems of the labor laws if you’re curious on that count.

In the end, if the Gulf countries want to make the most of their investments, it’s not the morality laws that need to be changed. It’s the labor laws.

A Palestinian tunnel digger in Rafah.

The AP is reporting that an Israeli airstrike killed 3 Palestinians and wounded 7 others inside a smuggling tunnel between Gaza and Egypt, according to a Palestinian Health Ministry official.

The Israeli military said the strike was in retaliation for a mortar attack from Gaza on Monday that lightly wounded an Israeli soldier.

The tunnels are the only way for Palestinians to bring in fuel and other goods (e.g., live animals for fresh meat) because of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. It is rumored that Hamas maintains its own, secret tunnels for importing arms, including the mortars and rockets used to attack Israel. The AP doesn’t specify what exactly these smugglers were doing; however, to my knowledge the Palestinian Health Ministry is not run by Hamas,  therefore the official’s involvement points to civilian smugglers. This is clearly a point requiring more reporting, so take that nugget with a lump of salt.

If the Palestinians were indeed civilians, this is truly beyond the pale. Even if they were militants, the proportionality is both disturbing and telling. The math reads like this:

Wounding an Israeli = Wounding seven Palestinians

If the math stopped there, it would be hard to justify. But to kill 3 additional Palestinians? Taken together, this one incident does a lot to reinforce and instill the perception that Israel does not consider Palestinians to be fellow humans. It also gives Palestinians little cause to extend the same consideration to Israelis. With air strikes like these, Israel does not help itself to reach a negotiable peace.

One of the more uncomfortable aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s latest bloodbath of a movie (Inglourious Basterds) is the unquestioning use of collective punishment. I am most definitely not going to argue that the Nazis were good, wholesome folks; but I think it’s safe to say that not every soldier was a Goebbels, or even an Eichmann, for that matter.

The use of collective punishment, for the people of Gaza, is tangentially related. Except in this example, rather than being soldiers of a nation perpetuating mass genocide, the people of Gaza are civilians–punished by the blockade for the sins of a few.

P.M. Maliki looks weary. Bear with the weary, over-the-top opening, I'm trying to illustrate how easily the media slips into one-sided, overly-pessimistic, elite-dominated coverage.

Iraq is going straight to hell in a hand-basket. The government’s overconfidence in its ability to provide security made it take down key blast walls, which was promptly rewarded with the massive truck bombing of two government ministries. The government blamed the remnants of Saddam’s Ba’ath party and a mysterious man in Syria, broadcasting a purported confession across national television in an effort to staunch the bleeding of its legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group, blew up two buses heading from Baghdad to the predominatly Shi’a city of Kut, drawing in shades of renewed ethnic conflict. The AP is reporting that the same Islamic State of Iraq–purportedly an al-Qaeda umbrella group–is claiming responsibility for the ministry bombings, a claim the U.S. military finds highly plausible.

At the center of all this is Maliki and his government–which may not include him in the future. Intra-Shi’a politics and Maliki’s own pragmatic political calculations are threatening to rive the government and markedly increase Iranian influence, which the AP forecasts as a coming storm of conflict.

And here ends the depressive portion of the media narrative. The bottom half of that same AP story leaves open the possibility that all this hubub about Maliki and the rest of the Shi’a coalition is just political maneuvers and posturing–and not, say, the annexation of Iraq by Iran, or another Iraqi civil war.

The WaPo coverage of the same event is more tempered, even positive:

The new alliance and the likelihood that Maliki will be forced have to partner with Sunnis suggest that Iraqi politicians are increasingly willing to cross sectarian lines in the pursuit of power.

Maliki’s exclusion from the alliance was not entirely surprising. Despite his considerable popularity, the prime minister has become a divisive figure, and a recent surge in violence has triggered criticism from Iraqis who view his administration as cocky and incompetent.

Because of the volatile nature of Iraqi politics and the fickleness of alliances, analysts cautioned that the political groupings are likely to change between now and the time the ballots are printed. Alliances could even be redrawn after the votes are tallied.

As severely pessimistic as the AP and nytimes coverage I cited in the first graf is, the other half of the nytimes coverage is positively delightful. It’s interesting that this is also the side of journalism that demands that reporters go out among ordinary people, and talk to them about their daily lives. I’m not sure what that says; maybe politics and political coverage just makes us all feel a bit jaded?

The first is the coincidence that this year, Ramadan has begun on the same day for both Shi’a and Sunna in Iraq.

Ramadan begins after the waxing crescent moon first comes into view, which, according to astronomical calculations, happened in Baghdad at precisely 6:42 p.m. on Friday.

By Islamic tradition, however, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar begins only after religious authorities see the crescent with their own eyes. When Ramadan comes in summer, as this year, the sliver of the waxing moon is invisible for most of the day, and in Baghdad it sets just a half hour after dark, making it an elusive target in the often sandy haze along the horizon.

To make matters more difficult, Shiite religious leaders say they must spot that first crescent with the naked eye. Sunnis allow themselves the aid of binoculars or a telescope, which often gives the Sunni Ramadan a full day’s jump on the Shiite observance.

This year, Iraq’s Sunnis took their cue from Abdul al-Ghafor al-Samaraie, head of the Sunni Endowment, who spotted it on Friday with the unaided eye. “This will unite the religious messages of our two sects and is a good sign,” he said.

Iraq’s Shiites begin observing Ramadan when the howza, the committee of their top ayatollahs, announces that the moon has been spotted. That word came many hours after sunset on Friday, catching many Shiites asleep and unprepared for a predawn breakfast on Saturday.

This is reckoned to be a very good omen, one that augurs cooperation between Sunna and Shi’a.

Since the war began, and with it the widespread arrival of cellphones, Iraqis have grown accustomed to sending congratulatory text messages to one another by the dozens when Ramadan is announced.

Many of the messages read like greeting cards, and some even strike a conciliatory note:

While Ramadan is at our doors,

Let us review the reasons

We became as strangers,

And live peacefully as friends.

The texts serve a practical function, too, warning those who might be asleep or not watching the news that they needed to get up before sunrise to have an early breakfast, girding themselves for the daylong fast ahead.

But with staggered starts for Ramadan, the texts became an annoyance if they arrived on the wrong day. In mixed areas there were arguments over eating and drinking in public. The biggest problem, though, was the Id al-Fitr feast at the end of the month. It is the biggest holiday of the Muslim calendar, and sheep are slaughtered in the streets, a distressing sight to those still fasting.

What wonderful understatement. For those who haven’t experienced Ramadan, or fasted for any reason, it’s surprising how cranky you can get. And understandable how resentful you can be of those who can eat. (As the article notes, the embattled Iraqi Christians will have it much worse this Ramadan, since those who break their fast in public are subject to arrest, even for smoking, and nearly all restuarants have been ordered closed. A bit khaliji, eh?)

The other bright spot in the news is a spot of desert in Anbar province:

A few hours outside Baghdad in the middle of Iraq’s vast western desert is a sight that could understandably be mistaken for a mirage: a long, sandy beach filled with thousands of people swimming and dancing barefoot under the hot sun without apparent care.

A disc jockey — “Mr. D. J.,” he calls himself — is shouting into a microphone over a thumping Syrian dance song and blurts out something remarkable in its ordinariness.

“A shoutout to everyone from Baghdad!” he says in Arabic.

“Yea!” responds the crowd that has gathered around him.

“Everyone from Adhamiya and Sadr City who came from Baghdad, show me what you got!” Mr. D. J. yells, referring to two neighborhoods in the capital — the first almost exclusively Sunni, the second nearly entirely Shiite.

In response, energetic dancing breaks out all around, and Sunnis and Shiites share a rare moment of careless bliss together.

It is amazing, but it is real: for the first time since the outbreak of the sectarian war in 2006, Iraq is enjoying a beach season.

The article is a very fast, great read with lots of telling detail. I suggest you get over to the nytimes and finish it. Don’t miss this piece.