THE SPINE SEPTEMBER 1, 2009
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Everything about the Gadhafi family is news. Everything except, of course, the 40-year chronicle of what they have done to Libya and to its people. No one looks and no one cares. Moammar is an utterly deranged man with brutal instincts that he directs and redirects as his distemper decides. He holds no public office and is, therefore, under no one's supervision--and no writ or oath either. But he has been named "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution." Quite a revolution. Rich in oil revenues (the second highest GDP in Africa), the country is unbelievably backwards; its people live destitute; its educational system, its health apparatus, its industrial base--all of these are pathetic.
On the other hand, the Libyan literacy rate is high at 82 percent, a tribute probably to the civilizational pretenses of Italian Fascism, as the literacy rate was high in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This is personalist rule as there exists perhaps nowhere else in the world. No, not even North Korea.
So, in a certain sense, it is reasonable that the Times is so interested in what Moammar Gadhafi thinks and what Saif al-Islam Gadhafi thinks, too. OK, give them a news story when (and if) it's salient.
But the Times does more ... much more.
On January 21 of this year, the newspaper of record published an op-ed "by" Moammar, whose other title, presumably bestowed on him by his people, is "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya." (The Times has pioneered in pawning off stuff written by hired hands as genuine ... but not only the Times. This is another story, a wider story of the whole culture, this routine practice of public persons presenting themselves behind other people's words.)
What interested the Times in January were Gadhafi's views on "the one-state solution," a certifiably crack-pot unriddling of the conflict. A one-state solution is a formula for another Arab state. Let's be frank. The world does not need another Arab state, each and every one of which has been stigmatized as an utter failure in the five annual volumes of the United Nations Arab Human Development Report, the last of which has just been issued. These reports have been written, by the way, by tiers mondiste intellectuals, deeply unfriendly to Western democracies and Israel. So their bona fides are not at all suspect.
There is one especially intriguing paragraph that almost nobody has noticed in Gadhafi’s little chronicle:
It is a fact that Palestinians inhabited the land and owned farms and homes there until recently, fleeing in fear of violence at the hands of Jews after 1948
But then look closely at the continuation of that sentence:
--violence that did not occur, but rumors of which led to a mass exodus. It is important to note that the Jews did not forcibly expel Palestinians. They were never 'unwelcomed'.
If that is at all true, the entire moral evidence of a "right of return" collapses utterly.
What would be interesting to know is whether the Times' op-ed editor David Shipley pursued Gadhafi for this script ... or was it some Gadhafi minion who pursued the Times?
The same question should be asked apropos the appearance of the debauched son's views on the op-ed page of this Sunday Times' "news of the week." For here, Saif al-Islam has been given the opportunity to rewrite history about the return to Tripoli—free!—of the convicted murderer of 259 passengers (plus 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie) of Pan Am 103, 189 of them Americans. No "hero's welcome" of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, writes Saif in the Times. But it was a hero's welcome that we have all seen on television. The fact is that the coverage of the entire episode has been tended by premier journalism in both the United States and in Great Britain. There's also a first-rate article by Roula Khalaf and Heba Saleh in this morning's Financial Times, "Triumphal in Tripoli." But it is the Gadhafi family's criminal roguishness that is triumphal. Its rule will survive.
And, of course, the Brits and the Scots are trying, basically without success, to hide the long process which ended with the killer's ignominious release. What we don't have enough information on is how the White House behaved in this sinuous matter. And I mean the Bush White House as well as the Obama White House. Ron Radosh has written a blog about just this. In it he links to a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed by the distinguished constitutionalist and Princeton professor Robert P. George telling a touching story and raising questions that won't, alas, be answered. "Did [the] U.S. get to weigh in on his fate?" asks George.
Gadhafi's rule has slipped through the grasp of professional social scientists. Maybe because it is so antique and also so cruel. Here is a country that lives by no predictable rules at all. But its headman is central to the very structure of international organizations. Libya has one of the precious seats on the U.N. Security Council. This year, Gadhafi designates from among his countrymen the president of the U.N. General Assembly. Yes, I know the "U.N. is mankind's last hope." Bullshit.
One more thing about Gadhafi. At his 40th fest this past weekend, the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, was not put under arrest (as mandated by the International Criminal Court). And Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, felt perfectly at home.
Gadhafi's involvement in the Sudanese genocide in Darfur is another matter. It started with The Arab Gathering. Look it up on Google. Keep smiling.
3 comments
I agree, Marty. Ghadhafi, Omar al Bashir, and Mugabe all belong in the same cesspool -- the cesspool of tyrannical and evil little gods.
- scrubby
September 2, 2009 at 6:13am
Is the Gadhafi clan to Bill Keller what the Saudi clan is to the Bush family? Which clan is the most Evil? Personalist rule? Is that a neologism? And how about God in Heaven...is this an example of how personalist rule can be a good thing? Even a righteous thing? Are the infidels in the eyes of Jewish ecclesiastics more or less doomed than the infidels in the eyes of Gadhafi? Few folks here elaborate much on the punishments awaiting infidels who die as Christians or Muslims or Hindus or atheists. How is God's mercy different from the mercy shown by folks like you to al-Megrahi? Would God approve? Also, if the Palestinians left voluntarily at or around the birth of Israel only because they feared violence from the Jews, not because Jews intended to use violence against them, what did the Zionists do back then to convince them otherwise? How did they go about trying to welcome them back? george
- iambiguous
September 2, 2009 at 6:47am
"'Gaddafi must have personally okayed Lockerbie bombing'" http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804486646&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter David Horovitz , THE JERUSALEM POST "Adding more heat to the boiling controversy in the US and UK over Britain's recent release to Libya of the only man ever convicted in the Lockerbie bombing, the senior FBI agent in the case has told The Jerusalem Post he believes Libya's Col. Muammar Gaddafi must have personally sanctioned the atrocity. In a telephone interview from the United States, Richard Marquise, a 31-year FBI veteran who led the US task force probing the December 1988 blast which destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, with the loss of 270 lives, said it was unthinkable in a regime such as Libya for that kind of major terrorist attack to have been authorized without Gaddafi's approval. "If you were a senior minister, would you do this without telling the boss? I doubt it," said Marquise. "I have to think [Gaddafi] knew something was going to happen, something that the US would be pissed about, and he said OK." Marquise has repeatedly stated his belief that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer who is the only man ever convicted in the attack, was guilty as charged. Megrahi was released from a life sentence in Scotland on compassionate grounds last month, and warmly embraced by Gaddafi on his return to Libya. Marquise told the Post he was also convinced Megrahi was no "rogue" agent. He said investigators had tried to pursue the chain of responsibility up through the Libyan hierarchy - much as Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean prosecutor investigating the 1994 AMIA Jewish community office bombing, had managed to do - but had been unable to muster the necessary evidence. Nisman's investigations persuaded Interpol two years ago to issue a series of arrest warrants for senior Iranian officials allegedly behind the AMIA blast, including Iran's new Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, whose appointment was approved by Iranian lawmakers on Thursday. In the case of Lockerbie, Libya and Gaddafi, said Marquise, "We couldn't make the connections... A lot of names came up... We had names of people in the Libyan hierarchy, buying radios, making inquiries about putting bombs in radios." The bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 was hidden in a Toshiba radio cassette player. "But there was no real overt act [that could serve as the basis for an indictment]." It "would have been nice" to indict the entire Libyan regime, Marquise added, "but our system wouldn't allow for it. It would have been a real struggle to show Gaddafi and others in the [Lockerbie] chain." Marquise said it had been hoped that Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhima, a second Libyan charged in the Lockerbie affair but acquitted, could be arrested before being indicted, and that "they'd give us the whole story, and go up the chain. That didn't happen... And Megrahi never talked. He did everything for his leader." The 270 Lockerbie victims included 180 Americans, 52 Britons and one Israeli. The US has slammed Britain for allowing Megrahi to return to Libya, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had spent months trying to thwart the move, describing it as "absolutely wrong." FBI Director Robert Mueller wrote a furious letter to the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who approved Megrahi's release, saying, "Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world... Your action rewards a terrorist even though he never admitted to his role in this act of mass murder and even though neither he nor the government of Libya ever disclosed the names and roles of others who were responsible." Marquise, a counterterrorism expert who wrote a book on the affair entitled Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation, has also repeatedly rejected alternative explanations for the Lockerbie blast, many of which claim it was commissioned by Iran and carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. "I keep reading all these suggestions that evidence was planted, that it was manipulated, twisted and changed," Marquise wrote recently. "But I got that evidence ready for the trial and I am absolutely convinced of its veracity." "
- jacksondyer
September 3, 2009 at 10:48pm