The deadly 1926 attack on the Egyptian pilgrimage caravan, or mahmal, strained relations between Egypt and the Hijaz and Najd (present-day Saudi Arabia) and the two sides presented totally different versions of what actually transpired. Egypt called the attack, which left 25 Najd troops dead, premeditated and said that its troops fired in self-defence. On the other side, the Najd claimed Bedouins had been incensed by the playing of trumpets by the Egyptians as musical instruments were prohibited in the sacrosanct area of Mina where the incident occurred. Whoever was at fault, there is little doubt that the raid, as Dr Yunan Labib Rizk* writes, ushered in the end of the mahmal tradition.

On 24 June 1926, Al-Ahram readers opened their morning papers to find some very disturbing news. "Fighting breaks out in the Hijaz between the retinue of the mahmal and people from the Najd. An Egyptian officer and three Egyptian soldiers wounded. Twenty-five dead among the Najd forces," read the headlines.

The mahmal is a set of richly decorated curtains carried by a camel procession and intended to drape the Kaaba. It was sent by Islamic rulers to Mecca at the time of the hajj. Under Al-Ahram's alarming headlines was the text of the coded dispatch that Gen Mahmoud Azmi, the commander of the Egyptian retinue, had wired to the Ministry of Interior following the incident. It read: "On the evening of the day before yesterday (21 June 1926, the first day of Greater Bairam), in the vicinity of the valley of Mina, a horde of Bedouins attacked the retinue of the mahmal with stones and guns. I responded by ordering a volley of gun and artillery fire, which led to loss of life among the assailants. I took this action when it proved that the efforts of Bin Saud were futile. Only one officer, Ali Effendi Moussa, and three Egyptian soldiers suffered minor injuries from the stones and a few camels were killed by bullets. We then exchanged official correspondence with Bin Saud. Please convey the pertinent information to the Ministry of War."

Next came the text of "a communiqué from the Kingdom of the Hijaz and the Sultanate of Najd and its adjuncts," which related quite a different version of the events: "The Egyptian mahmal procession arrived from Jeddah and camped at its customary site on the outskirts of Mecca. From there it proceeded to Mina, where the entire train arrived in safety. However, once there, the guards of the Egyptian mahmal sounded their trumpets, angering the Arabs of the Najd and others who believe such instruments should be prohibited in this sacrosanct area, especially during major religious rites. Thus, a mob of unidentified troublemakers assembled and headed to the source of the sound. In the disturbance that followed some of the Najdi guards accompanying the mahmal attempted to repel the mob by beating and threats.

"When news of the disturbance reached the king, he immediately sent his son, Prince Faisal, who in the company of an armed force, rushed to the scene, asked the retinue of the mahmal to remain calm and began to fight off the mob. The prince then requested reinforcements from his father, to which the king responded immediately by sending a force under the command of his brother, Prince Saud. However, as the government forces battled the mob, soldiers with the Egyptian mahmal opened fire indiscriminately on the areas in which the pilgrims from the Najd were camping, killing 25 innocent men, women and children, in addition to 40 camels. As soon as the king heard of this tragedy, he assembled all his children and the members of his family and his court and went personally to the area. Although the people of the Najd were outraged, he told them: 'I remind you of the presence of God in this holy place and I remind you of your honour and the honour of your pilgrimage and, finally, I tell you that no one shall violate the sanctity of this mahmal as long as I and those with me are alive.'

Despite the calamity that befell them, when the people of the Najd heard these words they returned to their senses and, within minutes, they all returned to their campsites. With the disturbance quelled, the mahmal procession resumed, surrounded by a force of government soldiers. Not a single member of the retinue came to harm, tranquillity prevailed and no further trouble occurred."

We set aside for the moment the discrepancy between the two preceding accounts -- the Egyptian version of self-defence and the Hijaz authorities' accusation that the Egyptians had panicked and opened fire indiscriminately -- in order to offer a brief history of the mahmal followed by a discussion of the political circumstances surrounding the fracas outside Islam's holiest city.

On economic and financial relations between Egypt and the Hijaz, Fouad El-Mawi provides extensive detail concerning the financial commitments of the Egyptian government to the Hijaz during the Ottoman era. Sending the mahmal in the season of the hajj alone was a source of considerable expense, entailing the costs of protecting the caravan, which required a force ranging from 500 men during times of relative tranquillity to more than 2,000 in less settled years. In addition, there were the costs of maintaining and manning the fortresses along the pilgrimage route and the payments for Bedouins residing along that route. Egypt was also responsible for supplying the kiswa -- the black, richly decorated covering for the walls of the Kaaba, made annually in Egypt and transported with the pilgrimage caravan to Mecca.

Work on the kiswa, which was heavily brocaded in gold and silver and adorned with precious jewels, began six months before the pilgrimage season and was periodically inspected by the Ottoman governor of Egypt. Upon completion, it would generally contain 17 qintars (approximately 765 kilogrammes) of silk and three qintars (approximately 135 kilogrammes) of pure silver. Then there was the grain dole Egypt sent annually to feed the residents of Mecca and Medina. The grain was sent by sea from Suez to Jeddah, along with the cash gifts for the nobles of the holy places. The man in charge of protecting the pilgrimage caravan and the transportation of the kiswa was a senior military figure who was granted the title Amir Al-Hajj, one of the highest positions of the state. He was the central figure of the grand procession of the mahmal which was marked by massive popular celebrations.

In Egyptian Society During the Ottoman Era, Laila Abdel-Latif describes what must have been a grand spectacle. The procession took place in the middle of the Islamic month of shawal. "Crowds would throng to watch the richly adorned litter in which the precious kiswa would be borne and which was mounted upon a decorated camel as it passed through the streets amidst the ululations of women and the supplications of the populace. The caravan was led by two companies of Turkish cavalry, followed by musical bands. It would come to a halt at the Citadel, from which the pasha (the Ottoman governor of Egypt) descended in order to present the kiswa to the Amir Al-Hajj."

In the more than 25-year interval between the end of the Ottoman era and the incident of the mahmal, Egyptian politics and society had undergone profound changes. For one, the rituals and obligations surrounding the procession of the mahmal were no longer so grand. By the 1920s, the Amir Al-Hajj was appointed annually by royal decree. In 1926, the text of the decree read: "In view of the approaching season for the performance of the duty of the pilgrimage and in view of the rectitude of Gen Mahmoud Azmi Pasha, we have commanded that Azmi Pasha, formerly minister of war and the navy, be appointed Amir Al-Hajj for the pilgrimage for the Hejira year 1344."

That year's mahmal was also to be escorted by a more modest military contingent. According to Al-Ahram of 5 June 1926, 20 officers under the command of Lt Col Galal Munir Bek were placed in charge of a force consisting of 300 infantry soldiers, six cavalry men, 89 artillery men, a five-man medical unit, two veterinarians, 20 camel cavalry men and 10 royal attendants. The newspaper said celebrations for the departure of the mahmal began at Khurunfish, where the kiswa had been manufactured. "It was headed by two companies of the Ninth Infantry Regiment to the accompaniment of a military band. As it made its way to Mohamed Ali Square, the magnificent procession was followed by a throng of spectators. In the evening, the kiswa was put on display attracting hordes of spectators. When the princes and dignitaries arrived, refreshments and sweets were passed around and Sheikh Ahmed Nada and Sheikh Ali Mahmoud recited verses from the Holy Qur'an."

The following day was the day of the grand procession. On this occasion the central figure was the king himself, heading government ministers, senior palace officials, senior religious officials and prominent merchants and notables. All were in full regalia as the "Egyptian garrison forces marched before the king," reports Al-Ahram, adding: "A 21-gun salute was sounded as the king entered Mohamed Ali Square and a similar salute heralded his departure." It was also the king who had drawn up the schedule of the mahmal, as Al-Ahram described it. It was to depart on 7 June at 8.05am from the Cairo train station and arrive in Suez at 2.00pm. The following day it would leave for Jeddah, arriving there two days later. From Jeddah it would proceed to Mecca where it would remain until 25 June, when it would depart for Medina, reaching it on 7 July. On 14 July it would depart for Yanbu and after six days there it would leave for Al-Tor in Egypt.

Neither court nor government officials had taken into account the major political changes that had recently taken place in the land of Islam's two holiest cities. Six months earlier, on 8 January, following the defeat of King Hussein of the Hijaz at the hands of the forces of Abdel-Aziz Bin Saud, the notables of Jeddah and Mecca proclaimed the victor king of the Hijaz, with the result that the holy places came under the control of the Wahabis, the radically fundamentalist movement around which the Saud clan built its state. The new regime sought to allay the fears of Muslims around the world, evidence of which we find in the following communiqué published in Al-Ahram on 27 April 1926: "All the lands of the Hijaz have been restored to peace and tranquillity. All worshippers are free to perform their Islamic rites and to visit the Mosque of the Prophet of God and we guarantee, with the aid of God, the safety and well-being of the pilgrims during their stay and visits to the holy places in the Hijaz." The statement was signed "King of the Hijaz and Sultan of the Najd and its adjuncts" and bore the seal of Abdel-Aziz Bin Saud.

King Abdel-Aziz may well have been sincere in his intentions to maintain order and guarantee the safety of Muslim pilgrims; however, there is reason to believe he was not greatly pleased by the prospect of the arrival of the Egyptian mahmal. Firstly, the caravan with its sizable military guard could have been perceived as an encroachment on the sovereignty of the new ruler of the Hijaz. Secondly, Egyptian pilgrims would bring with them many customs that would conflict with Wahabi doctrine, one of which was the nargila, or water pipe. Finally, the Amir Al-Hajj was also bringing with him the cash gifts for the nobles of the holy places, Bin Saud's traditional enemies.

Perhaps, then, Egyptians should not have been so surprised by the events that followed. On 11 June 1926, the Egyptian consulate in Jeddah hosted a reception to celebrate the arrival of the mahmal. In attendance, Al-Ahram reports, were "the governor of the city, notables, international consuls and representatives and the Egyptian community. As soldiers saluted the Egyptian flag, all present hailed the king of Egypt." Soon afterwards, the newspaper continues, "the search began for the camels necessary for the journey to Medina via Yanbu after the pilgrimage because it was the most convenient and safest route."

It was not long afterwards that the incident outside Mecca occurred. In the repercussions that followed we find the closing chapter in the history of the Egyptian mahmal. As soon as it got wind of the incident, the Egyptian government lodged a formal protest with the diplomatic agency of the Najd and Hijaz in Cairo against the accusations levelled in the communiqué released by the "King of the Hijaz and Sultan of the Najd." The diplomatic crisis was quickly smoothed over when Abdel- Aziz's representative in Cairo tendered an official apology, stating that "he was always keen to promote friendly relations between his government and the government of Egypt" and that "he was confident that the Egyptian pilgrims would meet with all possible kindness and assistance on the part of King Bin Saud and his government."

But beyond diplomatic niceties there was another dimension to the crisis: Egyptian public opinion as reflected in the national press. Of particular importance, in addition to Al-Ahram, were the Wafd Party newspapers, Al-Balagh and Kawkab Al-Sharq, Al-Siyasa, the mouthpiece of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, and Al- Ittihad, the mouthpiece of the pro-palace party. "This regrettable incident does not sit well with any Egyptian," wrote Al- Balagh. It went on to scoff at claims that the mobs were incited by the trumpeting from the Egyptian camp. "If the guards had struck up popular tunes or other such music for entertainment, one might have had some sympathy for their excuse. But those sounds were such as might be heard in any army camp, including the army camps of Bin Saud, which is why it is difficult to understand any excuse for that madness."

Kawkab Al-Sharq was even more critical. "The Islamic holy places are the property of all who embrace that religion. Therefore, any incident that occurs in the region, however minor, is a source of deep distress to every Muslim. If the Wahabis want to starve the Hijaz to death, they have but to continue down that erroneous path of extraordinary intolerance and fanaticism." Al-Siyasa was more restrained in its commentary. It also revealed a significant fact -- that in a communication before the pilgrimage season, Bin Saud had advised the Egyptian government not to send the mahmal that year. Naturally, this revelation sparked suspicions that the attack on the Egyptian mahmal was not so spontaneous after all. Not surprisingly, Al-Ittihad took the palace line, stressing warm bilateral relations now that the incident was diplomatically smoothed over. "The people of the Najd are our brothers in religion and it pleases us greatly that there exists in those parts a party of Muslims committed to the tenets of our righteous forefathers and, moreover, that this party has authority over the Kaaba, the focus of the immaculate Shari'a," Al-Ittihad said..

Contrary to custom, Al-Ahram remained silent on this occasion, limiting itself to publishing the views of others. Undoubtedly, the newspaper's Lebanese Christian management was reluctant to broach such a sensitive religious subject, a sensibility shared by similarly-owned newspapers and periodicals, such as Al- Muqattam and the magazines published by Dar Al-Hilal.

Meanwhile, back in the Hijaz, the Amir Al-Hajj faced a predicament unlike any faced by his recent predecessors. As one Al-Ahram reader put it, "For the Bedouins, faith takes second place after revenge... blood vengeance is so deeply ingrained in their way of thinking." Unwilling to face the prospect of retaliation, Mahmoud Azmi changed plans. Instead of proceeding from Mecca to Medina overland, he decided to return to Jeddah where he and his retinue would take a ship to Yanbu, then travel by road to Medina.

The Egyptian authorities wired their approval for this change of course and the authorities in the Hijaz encouraged it, undoubtedly eager to rid themselves of the responsibility of protecting the caravan from the dangers that lurked along the over 10-day overland route from Mecca to Yanbu.

In so doing, the new power in the Hijaz perhaps also wanted to convey a specific message to the Egyptian government. We get a closer look at this message in the report Azmi filed following his return to Cairo. It had long been the case that the artillery men with the mahmal would fire a cannon at prayer times on the day of ritual ascension of Mount Arafat and every day of the feast thereafter. Yet after this rite was performed on the first day, "a messenger arrived to notify Azmi Pasha that Bin Saud objected to the cannon fire. But Azmi refused to comply unless he had instructions from the king in writing which, indeed, were forthcoming." Azmi's report also states that Prince Faisal asked the leader of the Egyptian caravan to refrain from sounding the trumpet because the people of the Najd find it offensive, so much so that they call it "the devil's pipe." The failure of the Egyptian troops to respond to this appeal is what incited the Bedouin attack on the caravan. Upon entering Mecca, Azmi received further notification that "motorised vehicles were prohibited because they frighten the camels," with the reassurance that "the king and his household will also abstain from using such vehicles." Azmi issued instructions to leave the two cars and the truck that were with the caravan behind. Yet he soon observed that the members of the royal family were driving around the city as usual, "so I put our vehicles back to use in order to transport the sick and other such purposes."

Finally, it had always been the custom to keep the mahmal in the sanctuary of the Kaaba after returning from Mina and until it was time to leave Mecca. On this occasion, however, Bin Saud objected to this practice and had his adviser, Sheikh Hafez Wahba, instruct the Amir Al-Hajj to remove his men from the sanctuary. Again, Azmi refused to comply. This time he was warned that "if he did not leave willingly he would be removed by force." Again, too, "the Amir Al-Hajj demanded to see the orders in writing, which the sheikh showed him." Further communications apparently took place, for Azmi concludes this portion of his report by noting that "the crisis passed when permission was granted for the mahmal to remain within the sanctuary until the day of departure when it left amidst the customary celebration." Over the next few days, authorities in Cairo debated whether the caravan should complete its journey to Medina, even if by ship from Jeddah, or simply return home directly. They opted for the latter.

On 17 July, the Egyptian mahmal returned to Cairo. Although this was more than 10 days ahead of schedule, the festivities for the occasion took place as usual, with the customary procession of soldiers and bands from the various army units, and the mahmal armed retinue headed, of course, by the Amir Al-Hajj. More important, however, is the information Azmi revealed in an interview with Al-Ahram the following month. In his opinion, he told the newspaper, the attack on the Egyptian caravan was planned. Some of his men had told him they had overheard some of Bin Saud's camel drivers whispering among themselves that "their brothers were due there that night." Moreover, some had actually taken part in the stone-throwing against the caravan.

In the interview, Azmi also said the Egyptian government had decided to stop payments to the Meccan nobles entrusted with the care and supervision of the holy places. Apparently, the Saudi monarch refused to allow the Amir Al-Hajj to distribute these payments personally, with the result that a huge amount of the donations ended up in the wrong pockets. In short, there is little doubt that the attack on the Egyptian pilgrimage caravan in 1926, with all its attendant repercussions, was a prelude to ending the mahmal tradition. Henceforth, there would be a "pilgrimage mission" headed by a senior official who would not bear the title Amir Al-Hajj.

Bush covers U2

Years ago, U2 used a beautiful cut-up clip by Emergency Broadcast Network of Bush The Elder chanting the lyrics to Queen's We Will Rock You. (Link) Now, from ThePartyParty.com comes an exquisite edit of George W. singing U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." Link to ThePartyParty.com, Link to YouTube (via Puffmagic's MOG)

This high-octane rocket-rattling against Tehran is unlikely to succeed

Ringed by nuclear states, Iran's atomic programme is scarcely unreasonable. So why has Washington manufactured this crisis? Tariq Ali Wednesday May 3, 2006 The Guardian Till now, what has prevented the crisis in Iraq from becoming a total debacle for the United States has been the open collaboration of the Iranian clerics. Iranian foreign policy - fragmentary and opportunist - has always been determined by the needs and interests of the clerical state rather than any principled anti-imperialist strategy. In the past, this has led to a de facto collaboration with Washington in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from the Israeli regime to fight Iraq, then backed by Britain and the US. In the wake of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq - hoping, no doubt, that clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar might have won them a respite - the regime took a tougher stance on the nuclear question.

The Bush administration appears to be psyching itself up for a safe strike against Iran either by itself or via the Israelis, whose new leaders have referred to the Iranian president as a psychopath and a new Hitler. Why has Washington manufactured this crisis? The hypocrisy of Bush, Blair, Chirac or Olmert - their own states armed with thousands of nuclear weapons - making a casus belli of what are, by all accounts, primitive gropings on Iran's part towards the technology necessary for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence, hardly needs to be spelled out. So long as these powers are allowed to enlarge their nuclear armouries unimpeded, why should Tehran not?

The country is not only ringed by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel), it also faces a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrol the waters off its southern coast. Historically, Iran has every reason to fear outside threats. Its elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980 to 1988, the western powers abetted Saddam Hussein's onslaught, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. More than 300 Iraqi missiles were launched at Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war's final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a crowded civilian passenger plane.

For the clerical state, the war on terror has been the best and the worst of times. Oil prices have soared. Enemy regimes on both sides, Baghdad and Kabul, have been overthrown. The Iraqi Shia parties that they have been fostering for years are now in office. Washington has been reliant on their help to sustain its occupations both there and in Afghanistan. Yet social tensions in Iran are high. In this context, the nuclear issue is one of the regime's few unifying projects. It is worth recalling that the Iranian nuclear programme began under the Shah with technology offered by the Americans. Khomeini put the project on hold, considering it un-Islamic. Operations were restarted, with Russians later taking over construction of the light-water reactors at Bushehr begun by the West Germans in the 1970s. From the start, Iran, like Germany, the Netherlands or Japan, has wanted its programme to take in the full nuclear cycle, including uranium enrichment; Russia has several times threatened to impose conditions on fuel deliveries. Enrichment centrifuges were surreptitiously imported from neighbouring Pakistan; not the process, but the failure to report it, was in contravention of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agreements.

There is no evidence that Iran is much closer to nuclear weapons now than was Iraq in September 2002, when Blair and Cheney assured the world that Baghdad represented a "genuine nuclear threat". Reports in 2003 by a somewhat demented sect, the Mojahedin e-Khalq, of preliminary nuclear research at the Natanz installation were no such proof. But in the competitive scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington after the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing extra agreements on Tehran. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated. In December 2003, they signed the "Additional Protocol" demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a "voluntary suspension" of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Within three months, the IAEA was condemning them for having failed to ratify it; in June 2004, its inspectors produced examples of Iranian enrichment work, perfectly legal under the NPT, but ruled out by the Additional Protocol. Israel has boasted of its intention to "destroy Natanz" - the contrast to its stealth bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 a measure of the new balance of forces. In the summer of 2004, a large bi-partisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for "all appropriate measures" to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an "October surprise" before the 2004 presidential poll. Plans were thus well advanced before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory in the June 2005 Iranian presidential election.

Ahmadinejad reaped the vote against Khatami's miserable record between 1997 and 2005. Economic conditions had worsened and Khatami was prepared to defend the rights of foreign investors, but not those of independent newspapers or protesting students. Manoeuvring ineffectually between contradictory pressures, he exhausted his moral credit. Contrary to some reports, Ahmadinejad has not so far imposed any new puritanical clampdown on social mores. Instead, the most likely constituency to be disappointed is Ahmadinejad's own: the millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, in desperate need of a national development policy that neither neoliberalism nor Islamist voluntarism will provide.

Nor is fundamentalist backwardness exhibited in the denial of the Nazi genocide against the Jews and the threat to obliterate Israel, a basis for any foreign policy. To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy - not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics.

Clearing the way for the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba'ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of state has spoken of "ratcheting up the pressure". Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that "Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies, and we are preparing." Hillary Clinton accused the Bush administration of "downplaying the Iranian threat" and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons against such a "rogue state". Perhaps it is simply high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the west then embark on a new war? If so, the battlefield might stretch from the Tigris to the Oxus and without any guarantee of success.

· Tariq Ali is the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity

The Israel Lobby

By NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN

In the current fractious debate over the role of the Israel Lobby in the formulation and execution of US policies in the Middle East, the "either-or" framework -- giving primacy to either the Israel Lobby or to U.S. strategic interests -- isn't, in my opinion, very useful.

Apart from the Israel-Palestine conflict, fundamental U.S. policy in the Middle East hasn't been affected by the Lobby. For different reasons, both U.S. and Israeli elites have always believed that the Arabs need to be kept subordinate. However, once the U.S. solidified its alliance with Israel after June 1967, it began to look at Israelis ­ and Israelis projected themselves ­ as experts on the "Arab mind." Accordingly, the alliance with Israel has abetted the most truculent U.S. policies, Israelis believing that "Arabs only understand the language of force" and every few years this or that Arab country needs to be smashed up. The spectrum of U.S. policy differences might be narrow, but in terms of impact on the real lives of real people in the Arab world these differences are probably meaningful, the Israeli influence making things worse.

The claim that Israel has become a liability for U.S. "national" interests in the Middle East misses the bigger picture. Sometimes what's most obvious escapes the eye. Israel is the only stable and secure base for projecting U.S. power in this region. Every other country the U.S. relies on might, for all anyone knows, fall out of U.S. control tomorrow. The U.S.A. discovered this to its horror in 1979, after immense investment in the Shah. On the other hand, Israel was a creation of the West; it's in every respect ­ culturally, politically, economically ­ in thrall to the West, notably the U.S. This is true not just at the level of a corrupt leadership, as elsewhere in the Middle East but ­ what's most important ­ at the popular level. Israel's pro-American orientation exists not just among Israeli elites but also among the whole population. Come what may in Israel, it's inconceivable that this fundamental orientation will change. Combined with its overwhelming military power, this makes Israel a unique and irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East.

In this regard, it's useful to recall the rationale behind British support for Zionism. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann once asked a British official why the British continued to support Zionism despite Arab opposition. Didn't it make more sense for them to keep Palestine but drop support for Zionism? "Although such an attitude may afford a temporary relief and may quiet Arabs for a short time," the official replied, "it will certainly not settle the question as the Arabs don't want the British in Palestine, and after having their way with the Jews, they would attack the British position, as the Moslems are doing in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India." Another British official judged retrospectively that, however much Arab resentment it provoked, British support for Zionism was prudent policy, for it established in the midst of an "uncertain Arab world a well-to-do educated, modern community, ultimately bound to be dependent on the British Empire." Were it even possible, the British had little interest in promoting real Jewish-Arab cooperation because it would inevitably lessen this dependence. Similarly, the U.S. doesn't want an Israel truly at peace with the Arabs, for such an Israel could loosen its bonds of dependence on the U.S. , making it a less reliable proxy. This is one reason why the claim that Jewish elites are "pro"-Israel makes little sense. They are "pro" an Israel that is useful to the U.S. and, therefore, useful to them. What use would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.'s bidding?

The historical record strongly suggests that neither Jewish neo-conservatives in particular nor mainstream Jewish intellectuals generally have a primary allegiance to Israel ­ in fact, any allegiance to Israel. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became "pro"-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive. They're no more committed to Zionism than the neo-conservatives among them were once committed to Trotskyism; their only ism is opportunism. As psychological types, these newly minted Lovers of Zion most resemble the Jewish police in the Warsaw ghetto. "Each day, to save his own skin, every Jewish policeman brought seven sacrificial lives to the extermination altar," a leader of the Resistance ruefully recalled. "There were policemen who offered their own aged parents, with the excuse that they would die soon anyhow." Jewish neo-conservatives watch over the U.S. "national" interest, which is the source of their power and privilege, and in the Middle East it happens that this "national" interest largely coincides with Israel's "national" interest. If ever these interests clashed, who can doubt that, to save their own skins, they'll do exactly what they're ordered to do, with gusto?

Unlike elsewhere in the Middle East, U.S. elite policy in the Israel-Palestine conflict would almost certainly not be the same without the Lobby. What does the U.S.A. gain from the Israeli settlements and occupation? In terms of alienating the Arab world, it's had something to lose. The Lobby probably can't muster sufficient power to jeopardize a fundamental American interest, but it can significantly raise the threshold before U.S. elites are prepared to act ­ i.e., order Israel out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as the U.S. finally pressured the Indonesians out of Occupied East Timor. Whereas Israel doesn't have many options if the U.S. does finally give the order to pack up, the U.S. won't do so until and unless the Israeli occupation becomes a major liability for it: on account of the Lobby the point at which "until and unless" is reached significantly differs. Without the Lobby and in the face of widespread Arab resentment, the U.S. would perhaps have ordered Israel to end the occupation by now, sparing Palestinians much suffering;

In the current "either-or" debate on whether the Lobby affects U.S. Middle East policy at the elite level, it's been lost on many of the interlocutors that a crucial dimension of this debate should be the extent to which the Lobby stifles free and open public discussion on the subject. For in terms of trying to broaden public discussion here on the Israel-Palestine conflict the Lobby makes a huge and baneful difference. Especially since U.S. elites have no entrenched interest in the Israeli occupation, the mobilization of public opinion can have a real impact on policy-making ­ which is why the Lobby invests so much energy in suppressing discussion.

Norman Finkelstein's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press). His web site is www.NormanFinkelstein.com.

The new Muslim TV: media-savvy, modern, and moderate

By Ursula Lindsey Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO - The Egyptian actress Sabreen was at the peak of her fame when, in 2001, she underwent a religious "awakening," retired from acting, and donned the veil.

Now she's back on television, hosting a talk show on a new Islamic satellite channel called Al Risala ("The Message"). Sabreen, who is still a household name thanks to the popular films and TV shows she used to appear in, says she chose to make her come-back on Al Risala because the channel "talks about Islam in an enlightened, moderate way ... a very honest and frank way."

She's a far cry from the bearded men in white robes who dominate traditional religious programming here. With her smiling face framed by a stylish, sequined veil, Sabreen has become the spokesperson for a new sort of Islam: media-savvy, modern, and moderate. Her producers say they hope she will be the Muslim world's Oprah.

"For a very long time all religious programs were just isolated, artificial, old, obsolete," says Al Risala executive Ahmed Abu Haiba.

Al Risala, by contrast, has splashy graphics and state-of-the-art sets. The channel does air some traditional religious programming, but many of the shows have nothing overtly religious about them.

The set of Sabreen's show looks like a colorful living room, and the backdrop is a night-time view of the skyscrapers of Dubai. In the audience, young men and women sit next to each other, and some of the women are unveiled.

On the show, guests discuss social issues such as Muslim immigration to the West, domestic abuse, and polygamy.

Introducing an episode about non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East, Sabreen asks her audience: "Have you ever felt distinctions being made between you and a neighbor or a co-worker because of religion? Have you ever had trouble practicing the rites of your religion?"

Towards the end of the show, she tells her listeners that "Islam does not discriminate on the basis of religion or nationality or color, as long as we return to learning true Islam."

"I'm not a mufti," says Sabreen, referring to a religious scholar. "My show is not for conservative Muslims," she explains. "It's for Muslims who don't know right from wrong, because of the [other] media that targets them."

According to Al Risala's executives, that media can be both secular shows that undermine family values and religious programs that foment extremism.

"Islam has been changed throughout time," says Al Risala's general manager, Sheikh Tarek Swidan. "If we go back to the roots then we see Islam being very peaceful, very open. Respect of all humans, respect of all religions, respect of all races - that is the original message of Islam."

"We are directing the channel to be in clash with ... terrorist ideas," adds Mr. Swidan. "We are going head to head."

Swidan is from Kuwait, but lived 17 years in the US. The smiling sheikh speaks fluent English and - unlike many religious figures - shakes women's hands. He's an engineer, a business management specialist, and a popular motivational speaker.

"In our understanding, Islamic media is any clean media," he says. "So any program that is clean and has a message to improve a human being - improve them religiously, ethically, socially; push them towards being productive and effective, having ambitions."

A new Islamic media revolution

Mr. Abu Haiba, the station's Cairo bureau manager, says the station espouses the values of tolerance, peace, and progress, while being critical of some modern developments. Abu Haiba rails against cellphones and fast food, and says people should "be honest, be punctual, not raise their voices."

According to Abu Haiba, Al Risala is just the latest step in a "new Islamic media" revolution. This movement includes everything from Islamic "televangelists," who strut the stage in business suits, calling on the audience to tell personal stories, to Islamic pop stars, who sell catchy tunes about the prophet Muhammad.

It's a phenomenon that Swiss researcher Patrick Haenni calls "market Islam."

"When we speak of Islamic revival, we always focus on political organized groups aiming at gaining power," says Mr. Haenni. But just as important a phenomenon, he says, are "private religious entrepreneurs."

These entrepreneurs target the upper middle class, and focus on personal enlightenment rather than political engagement. They're socially conservative and opposed to what they see as the decadence of much of Western culture. But they want to benefit from Western science, education, and progress, and they condemn violence and extremism.

And, says Haenni, they use "fully all the means of mass culture ... chats on the Net, chat shows on TV, Islamic rap in the West. Mass culture is not the enemy anymore."

"It's a more worldly view of Islam," says sociologist Madiha al Safty. "They are trying to reconcile modernity with Islam."

Reality TV and quiz shows

Al Risala's programming includes a quiz show called "House of Dignity," in which families can win household appliances by answering general knowledge questions such as "What is the organ that cleans blood in the body?" The kidney; "What is the fastest land animal?" The cheetah; and "Who was the first Islamic caliph?" Abu Bakr al Sadiq.

Swidan hosts a program called "The Making of a Leader," in which the sheikh puts aspiring young businessmen through various tests. The station also airs music videos, although it eschews the hits of scantily clad Lebanese pop stars in favor of songs about religion and family. There is even a reality TV show, in which three young men travel through Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, following the path of early Islam's expansion.

Al Risala is financed by Saudi billionaire Prince al Walid bin Talal. Mr. bin Talal, who recently donated $40 million dollars to Harvard and Georgetown universities, is one of the more liberal members of the Saudi royal family.

The Kuwait-based channel started broadcasting at the beginning of March on two satellite carriers that reach millions across the Middle East and in Europe.

Al Risala executives say data isn't available yet on the size of the station's audience. But they note that viewers are sending thousands of daily messages of support from their mobile phones.

Yet some viewers say they've been put off by what they see as Al Risala's "commercialism." Amir El Meligi is a 21-year-old Web designer. He says Al Risala is "Iqraa TV with a Rotana flavor"- referring on the one hand to a well-known conservative religious channel, and on the other to a popular music video station. Al Risalah "has a new way of introducing stuff," says al Meligi, but "it's very showy, not very spiritual."

Others are more enthusiastic. Al Risala "is really good," says Radwa Atia, a 20-year-old art student. "It discusses a lot of things, in a more free way. It discusses real life issues."

The only fault Atia finds with the station is its cast of celebrity presenters. "All the announcers are famous actors," she says. "That annoyed me. When talking about religious matters, you should have someone who has done religious studies, someone with experience. Not just anybody."

Muslim Brotherhood approves

Some members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - the banned but tolerated Islamist group that recently won 88 seats in Egypt's parliament - have expressed enthusiasm for the station.

Al Risala also has the support of some members of the religious establishment, such as Egypt's grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, one of the country's highest religious authorities and the host of his own show on the channel. The mufti, who is generally considered a moderate figure, issues fatwas, or religious rulings, on his program. One recent fatwa was that it is acceptable for Muslims in non-Muslims countries to engage in haram (forbidden) activities when necessary, such as serving or selling alcohol.

But the station has come under attack on conservative Islamist websites. "The only Islamic thing about this station is its name," wrote one critic. The channel has received hate mail calling Swidan "an agent of the West" and accusing the station of "misguiding people."

Al Risala has also been criticized by liberal and secular voices. "They're only changing the words, the language," says Amin al Mahdi, a critic of Islamism who writes for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat. "Peacefulness and tolerance come from development and democracy, not from religion - any religion."

Profiting on religion?

The other accusation leveled against Al Risala and other Islamic TV channels, is that they use religion for profit.

"It is a business for many people," says Mr. al Safty. "People are really making good money out of that. You say the word Islam, and people will rush to that."

Of course, says Al Risala executive Abu Haiba, the channel hopes to "promote our ideas without losing money. If I lose money, that means I'm not appealing, that means I don't have my viewership, that means I'm not promoting my ideas."

But, Abu Haiba says, there's a higher goal. "I'm promoting ideas in the first places," he explains. "But I'm trying to make the difficult equation. That these values should be put in an attractive shape."

Q. What could a boarding pass tell an identity fraudster about you? A. Way too much

A simple airline stub, picked out of a bin near Heathrow, led Steve Boggan to investigate a shocking breach of security

Steve Boggan Wednesday May 3, 2006

Guardian

This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.

The traveller's name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper - actually a flimsy piece of card - was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.

It said Broer had flown from Brussels to London on March 15 at 7.10am on BA flight 389 in seat 03C. It also told me he was a "Gold" standard passenger and gave me his frequent-flyer number. I picked up the stub, mindful of a conversation I had had with a computer security expert two months earlier, and put it in my pocket.

If the expert was right, this stub would enable me to access Broer's personal information, including his passport number, date of birth and nationality. It would provide the building blocks for stealing his identity, ruining his future travel plans - and even allow me to fake his passport.

It would also serve as the perfect tool for demonstrating the chaotic collection, storage and security of personal information gathered as a result of America's near-fanatical desire to collect data on travellers flying to the US - and raise serious questions about the sort of problems we can expect when ID cards are introduced in 2008.

To understand why the piece of paper I found on the Heathrow Express is important, it is necessary to go back not, as you might expect, to 9/11, but to 1996 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound, 12 minutes out of New York, with the loss of 230 lives. Initially, crash investigators suspected a terrorist bomb might have brought down the aircraft. This was later ruled out, but already the Clinton administration had decided it was time to devise a security system that would weed out potential terrorists before they boarded a flight. This was called Capps, the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

It was a prosaic, relatively unambitious idea at first. For example, in highly simplistic terms, if someone bought a one-way ticket, paid in cash and checked in no baggage, they would be flagged up as an individual who had no intention of arriving or of going home. A bomber, perhaps.

After 9/11, the ambitions for such screening grew exponentially and the newly founded Department of Homeland Security began inviting computer companies to develop intelligent systems that could "mine" data on individuals, whizzing round state, private and public databases to establish what kind of person was buying the ticket.

In 2003, one of the pioneers of the system, speaking anonymously, told me that the project, by now called Capps II, was being designed to designate travellers as green, amber or red risks. Green would be an individual with no criminal record - a US citizen, perhaps, who had a steady job and a settled home, was a frequent flyer and so on. Amber would be someone who had not provided enough information to confirm all of this and who might be stopped at US Immigration and asked to provide clearer proof of ID. Red would be someone who might be linked to an ever-growing list of suspected terrorists - or someone whose name matched such a suspect.

"If you are an American who has volunteered lots of details proving that you are who you say you are, that you have a stable home, live in a community, aren't a criminal, [Capps II] will flag you up as green and you will be automatically allowed on to your flight," the pioneer told me. "The problem is that if the system doesn't have a lot of information on you, or you have ordered a halal meal, or have a name similar to a known terrorist, or even if you are a foreigner, you'll most likely be flagged amber and held back to be asked for further details. If you are European and the US government is short of information on you - or, as is likely, has incorrect information on you - you can reckon on delay after delay unless you agree to let them delve into your private details.

"That is inconvenient enough but, as we tested the system, it became clear that information was going to be used to build a complete picture of you from lots of private databases - your credit record, your travel history, your criminal record, whether you had the remotest dubious links with anyone at your college who became a terrorist. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable about it."

Eventually, he quit the programme.

All of this was on my mind as I sat down with my computer expert, Adam Laurie, one of the founders of a company called the Bunker Secure Hosting, to examine Broer's boarding-pass stub. Laurie is known in cyber-circles as something of a white knight, a computer wizard who not only advises companies on how to make their systems secure, but also cares about civil rights and privacy. He and his brother Ben are renowned among web designers as the men who developed Apache SSL - the software that makes most of the world's web pages secure - and then gave it away for free.

We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer's name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details - including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.

Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able - within 15 minutes - to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)

Laurie was anything but smug.

"This is terrible," he said. "It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn't enhance our security; it undermines it."

Just over $100m had been spent on Capps II before it was scrapped in July 2004. Campaigners in the US had objected to it on grounds of privacy, and airlines such as JetBlue and American faced boycotts when it emerged that they were involved in trials - handing over passenger information - with the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration. Even worse, JetBlue admitted it had given the private records of 5 million passengers to a commercial company for analysis - and some of this was posted on the internet.

But the problems did not end with the demise of Capps II. Earlier that month, after 18 months of acrimonious negotiation, the EU caved in to American demands that European airlines, too, should hand over passenger information to the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, BCBP, before their aircraft would be allowed to land on US soil. The BCBP wanted up to 60 pieces of information routinely gathered by booking agencies and stored as a Passenger Name Record, PNR. This included not only your flight details, name, address and so on, but also your travel itinerary, where you were staying, with whom you travelled, whether you booked a hire car in the US, whether you booked a smoking room in your hotel, even if you ordered a halal or kosher meal. And the US authorities wanted to keep it all for 50 years.

At first, the European Commission argued that surrendering such information would be in breach of European data protection law. Eventually, however, in the face of huge fines for airlines and cancelled landing slots, it agreed that 34 items from PNRs could be handed over and kept by the US for three and a half years.

Capps II was superseded by a new system called Secure Flight in August 2004. Later, in October last year, the BCBP demanded that airlines travelling to, or through, the US should forward "advance passenger information", including passport number and date of birth, before passengers would be allowed to travel. It called this the advance passenger information system, or APIS. This is the information that Laurie and I had accessed through the BA website.

"The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in return," says Laurie. "Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing off liability for data errors.

"You can imagine the case where a businessman's trip gets delayed because his passport details were incorrectly entered and he was mistaken for a terrorist. Since BA didn't enter the data - frequent flyers are asked to do it themselves - they can't be held responsible and can't be sued for his lost business."

By the time I found the ticket stub and went to Laurie, he had already reported his suspicions about a potential security lapse to BA (on January 20) by email. He received no response, so followed up with a telephone call asking for the airline's security officer. He was told there wasn't one, so he explained the lapse to an employee. Nothing was done and he still has not been contacted.

Three months ago, after further objections in the US, but before our investigation, Secure Flight was suspended after costing the US taxpayer $144m. At the time, Kip Hawley, transportation security administrator, said: "While the Secure Flight regulation is being developed, this is the time to ensure that the Secure Flight security, operational and privacy foundation is solid."

The TSA said it would continue its passenger pre-screening programme in yet another guise after it had been audited and added that it had plans to introduce more security, privacy and redress for errors - confirming critics' suspicions that no such systems were yet in place. To the consternation of privacy activists in Europe, the TSA also spelled out plans for its desire for various US government departments to share information, including yours and mine.

Dr Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow specialising in privacy and terrorism at the London School of Economics, is concerned about where the whole project will go next.

"They want to extend the advance passenger information system [APIS] to include data on where passengers are going and where they are staying because of concerns over plagues," he says. "For example, if bird flu breaks out, they want to know where all the foreign travellers are. The airlines hate this. It is a security nightmare. Soon the US will demand biometric information [fingerprints, retina scans etc] and they will share that around.

"But what the BA lapse shows is that companies cannot be trusted to gather this information without it getting out to criminals who would abuse it. The potential for identity theft is huge, but the number of agencies among which it will be shared is just growing and growing."

And that is where concern comes in over the UK's proposed ID cards, which may one day be needed to travel to the US. According to the Home Office, the identity cards bill currently going through Parliament allows for up to 40 pieces of personal information to be held on the proposed ID card, with digital biometric details of all of your fingerprints, both your irises and your face, all of which can be transmitted to electronic readers. The cards will contain a microchip the size of a grain of sand linked to a tiny embedded antenna that transmits all the information when contacted by an electronic reader.

This readable system, known as Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, has recently been installed in new British passports. The Home Office says the information can be transmitted across a distance of only a couple of centimetres because the chips have no power of their own - they simply bounce back a response to a weak signal sent from passport readers at immigration points.

However, the suspicion is that the distance over which the signal can be read relates only to the weakness of the signal sent out by the readers. What if the readers sent out much stronger signals? Potentially, then, criminals with powerful readers could suck out your information as you passed by. The Government denies that this scenario is viable, but, in January, Dutch security specialists Riscure successfully read and de-encrypted information from its country's new biometric passports from a distance of about 30ft in just two hours.

"The Home Office says British passport information is encrypted, but it's a pretty basic form of encryption," says Hosein. "Everyone expects the ID cards to be equally insecure. If the government insists they won't be cracked, read or copied, they're kidding themselves and us."

BA has now closed its security loophole after being contacted by the Guardian in March, but that particular lapse is beside the point. Because of the pressure being applied to airlines by the US, breaches will happen again elsewhere as our personal data whizzes around the globe, often without our knowledge or consent.

Meanwhile, accountability remains lamentable. Several calls to the US Transportation Security Administration were not returned.

Perhaps the last word should go to Mark Broer, the man whose boarding pass stub started off this virtual paper chase. He is aged 41 and is a successful executive with a pharmaceutical recruitment company. When I told him what we had done with his boarding pass stub, he was appalled.

"I travel regularly and, because I go to the US, I submitted my personal information and passport number - it is required if you are a frequent flyer and want to check yourself in," he says. "Experienced travellers today know that they have to give up information for ease of travel and to fight terrorism. It is an exchange of information in return for convenience. But as far as I'm concerned, having that information leaked out to people who could steal my identity wasn't part of the deal."

Mr. Egypt contest nominees

I may be late to the party, but I have just seen the nominees to the Mr. Egypt 2006 contest , and I still can't stop laughing. Those guys are definitely in a league of their own. Here are my 4 Favorites with their own special winning categories: My absolute favourite...

In Egypt, Revival of Political Farce

Renowned Comic Navigates Censorship to Tackle Contemporary Ills

By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, April 24, 2006; A10

CAIRO -- If Albert Brooks, the American comedian, was really "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," as the title of his satirical movie said, all he had to do was go into a Cairo video shop and pick up one of two dozen uproarious films by Adel Imam.

For four decades, Imam has been the most popular comic in Egypt and the Middle East. His movies and videotaped plays are shown morning, noon and night on TV, and his name tops theater marquees from the Persian Gulf emirates to Morocco. Traveling Egyptians say they are asked by hosts abroad to "say hello to Adel Imam" when they return home.

After a decade of starring as an overage Lothario in films that critics panned, Imam, at 65, is taking yet another potential star turn. He plays Zaki, the ruined seducer of women, in "The Yacoubian Building," the film version of the bitter, best-selling novel of Cairo life scheduled to debut here in June. The role of Zaki seems written for Imam. He will be playing his age -- he has long tried to maintain the screen persona of a young buck -- and gets caught up in conspiracies beyond his control, yet somehow emerges victorious and in the arms of a lover.

"Frankly, I was scared to play the role," he said at his apartment in Cairo's upscale Mohandessin neighborhood. "But the story is irresistible. I don't wait around for the role of a lifetime, but if this is it, okay."

With a demanding audience here for humor, being Egypt's top funny man is a challenge. Everybody's a comic; quips are to Egyptian conversation what beans are to its menu. At immigration booths at the airport, an agent informs a visitor that his comely wife may come in, but the husband must go back home. An impoverished peanut saleswoman in the old Hussein neighborhood promises a blessing to a customer if he makes a purchase and then rubs his bald head to pray for hair. A tourist on a crowded street asks her companion what time it is, and a vendor of fake Rolexes comes from behind and whispers, "It's time to buy a watch."

Professional comics must navigate the whims of Egyptian censorship, and in this, Imam is also a controversial figure. Does his comedy work solely on the fringes of Egyptian discontent and avoid the jugular of presidential misrule? Or is he the country's most subversive comic, taking on subjects few dare to raise?

In "The Yacoubian Building" film, an episode is left out that features The Big Man, a character whom readers of the novel consider a stand-in for President Hosni Mubarak or his son, Gamal. "Simply, we would not have been able to make the movie," Imam said.

Fifty years ago, Imam emerged as a new character on Egypt's stage and screen: the ugly matinee idol. "He was the first Egyptian superstar who was not handsome," said Samir Farid, a veteran film critic. Farid once likened Imam to E.T., Steven Spielberg's extraterrestrial, a comparison that grated on Imam. These days, he's at ease with such descriptions but adds, "Yes, I was not handsome, but I got a lot of girls."

He began acting at Cairo University's Agricultural College and soon starred in a play, "The Witness Who Saw Nothing." He created a stock character that he would return to through the 1970s and '80s: the Everyman who uses his wiles to survive the twists of everyday life. In "Witness," police burst into his home and unjustly accuse him of a crime, and he creates a series of unbelievable alibis and witness accounts.

"Adel Imam touched on social issues, and that kept him close to his audience," said Mohamed Maklouf, a consultant for the Dubai International Film Festival.

For anyone who has traveled in the Middle East, it is impossible not to recognize Imam the moment he emerges from the recesses of his apartment. Except for a thickening of his physique from the scrawny figure familiar from his early movies, he looks much the same as ever: hollow cheeks, bulging eyes and hair drawn tightly across the crown of his head.

He greets a visitor in the trappings of a movie star. He wears a fine, lightweight wool jacket with a movie star-appropriate silk handkerchief in the pocket. The apartment is decorated with 21 large photos of himself in various roles. Awards and plaques line bookshelves.

Arguably, Imam's most memorable movie was "Terrorism and the Kebab," from 1993, in which he played a citizen caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare in the halls of Mugamma, Cairo's central government office building, when he seeks documents to transfer his son from one school to another. A pious clerk is too busy praying to take care of Imam's business. A rifle falls into Imam's hands; he takes over the building and negotiates for a shipment of fresh roasted ground lamb to feed a band of followers. He and his comrades chant "Kebab, kebab, or your life will be hell," while police and ministers line up outside Mugamma for an assault.

Brooks's 2005 movie was less a parody of Muslims than of Americans who assume Muslims are all terrorist sympathizers, with the notion that making them laugh would be a daunting chore. Imam runs counter to the stereotype. He speaks out against terrorism. He played the lead in "The Terrorist," a film about a fugitive assassin who takes refuge with a family of well-off Muslims and has to hide his distaste for their lifestyle of unveiled women and Western music. The film was made under heavy police guard.

Imam was already the target of radical Islamic ire when, a decade before, he performed in the southern town of Assiut in protest against bombings and assassinations. "You could see the fanatics on the roofs with their rifles," he said. "But people came and they sold music on the street, something the fanatics had banned. The fanatics published pamphlets about me. They called me a homosexual, but I knew for a fact I was not," he said with a lusty laugh.

In 1998, he took the play "El-Zaim," a satire of dictatorship, to Algeria when the country was in a vicious civil war and artists and journalists were among those assassinated by Islamic rebels. "I wanted to take a stand on this. My wife once said to me, 'Stop, think of our children,' " he said. "Later, when a schoolgirl was killed by shrapnel in a terrorist attack, she said, 'Keep on. Do it for our children.' "

He also opposes the growing strain of political Islam that emphasizes religious restrictions. "When I went to university, the girls wore short skirts and were unveiled. I visited the Agricultural College not long ago, and almost all the girls had hair covers. It separated the Muslims from the Christians."

Recent violence between Muslims and Coptic Christians, he said, shows that "we are not as tolerant as 40 years ago. Our religious discourse is bad. This is the greatest crisis Egypt faces."

Imam's father was a policeman and his mother an illiterate homemaker. As a youth, Imam was a communist activist, but during government crackdowns in the '50s, his father ripped up Maoist and Marxist literature he found in Imam's room.

Imam once rejected a screenwriter's remark that he is a political party unto himself, but he occasionally blurts out strong political opinions. He described Egyptians as "schizophrenic" about the United States. "We send lots of immigrants to America," he said, "but we dislike its bias to Israel."

He called Gamal Abdel Nasser, the army officer who overthrew Egypt's monarchy and became a hero throughout the Middle East, "Egypt's first true president." Asked whether he was Egypt's last true president, Imam was silent. No reference to The Big Man. A bit later, he said, "Egypt is not like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. People insult the president every day."

Like many of his generation, Imam longs for a Cairo of the past: cosmopolitan, smaller, orderly and easygoing. That memory is part of the appeal of his role as Zaki. "He lived through a beautiful time when Egypt was privileged with multiple ethnicities and religions," he said. "The city looked beautiful. Buildings were more beautiful than in Paris. Now they are filled with garbage."

The Zaki character is a resident of "The Yacoubian Building," a once-elegant but, by the '90s, decayed apartment in downtown Cairo. He wards off efforts by his sister to grab his property. The story also recounts the lives of Taha, a youth who turns to Islamic terrorism after being rejected by a police academy because his father was a humble doorman; Busayna, once Taha's girlfriend, a shopgirl who is buffeted by the humiliations of employers who hire her for sex; Malak the tailor, who plots to take over Zaki's apartment; Hatim, a gay newspaper editor who fails to disentangle himself from a doomed affair with a poor young conscript; and Azzam, a corrupt politician at odds with sponsors from the ruling party over percentage cuts of his businesses.

Imam sees "The Yacoubian Building" as reviving a political thrust in Egyptian movies after a decade in which comedy was limited to apolitical farce, including most of his own, because that was where the money was. "I believe in social context for movies," he said. "We need a new generation that will create such films. So far, it is mostly just for laughs."

He is already working on his next picture, which takes on the contemporary Egypt of cutthroat capitalism and corruption. He plays a businessman who bribes his way into everything -- into parliament, into a university to chase a woman, into an award for performing in a student play in which he only carried a spear, and into a blessing from a Muslim cleric who had hounded him for his dissolute lifestyle.

Fatigue is not in Imam's program. "My only fear is that at some point no one will offer me a role," he said, "and then I will have to drive a taxi for a living."

Security for show

The clapped-out Egyptian regime must be held to account after three bombings in Sinai in 18 months.

All Brian Whitaker articles About Webfeeds

April 26, 2006 11:00 AM | Printable version

Lightning, they say, never strikes twice in the same place, but in Sinai it has struck three times within 18 months, each time in a tourist resort and each time to coincide with a public holiday.

Every time this happens, the news agencies are full of condemnations from world leaders. God knows why; we never imagined they would approve.

Tony Blair was in full flood yesterday, expressing "our total support and solidarity to the Egyptian authorities" and assuring them that "the whole world stands united against the terrorists that want to kill innocent people and prevent countries like Egypt making the progress they and their peoples want to see."

Instead of making fatuous statements like this, Mr Blair and the leaders of other countries should be demanding explanations from the clapped-out Mubarak regime.

There is obviously some kind of militant organisation operating in Sinai, but if you want to know who was mostly responsible for Monday's outrage in Dahab, look no further than General Habib el Adly, the Egyptian interior minister. Even after rounding up thousands of local residents for questioning in the wake of the earlier Taba bombings, and holding many of them incommunicado for weeks, General Adly seems no nearer to cracking the problem.

To be fair the interior minister, of course, he has had many other important matters to attend to while the bombings have been taking place - such as assaulting peaceful demonstrators, driving opposition voters away from polling stations, massacring Sudanese refugees and routinely torturing prisoners.

There is also the formidable task of looking after his own security. "I lived near the honourable minister in Mohandiseen for a while," a reader writes. "The security around his building is phenomenal and the roads on his run home from the office get shut off every evening during his commute."

It is true that new "security" measures have been adopted in Sinai and other parts of Egypt since the attacks began but they are mainly for show, to reassure visiting tourists. Often, they fail to do even that. Here is one visitor's comment, posted on the BBC website:

I have just returned from Luxor and Hurghada .Security was pathetic. Police appear more interested in chatting to children than watching for trouble. The armed escort to Hurghada speeds off, leaving the convoy behind, desperately trying to keep up and constantly overtaking each other. Our bags were X-rayed at Luxor airport on the way home but nobody was watching the monitor! I have no confidence at all in any security measures that may or may not be in place to protect tourists.

In a similar vein, more discussion of Egyptian security can be found here. One of the comments says:

I, too, remember being very unhappy with security in Egypt when I visited last year. Armed policemen with big guns were everywhere, but this made me feel less rather than more secure. It didn't help that none of them ever bothered to send people through the ubiquitous metal detectors. Or that the X-ray machine for carry-on luggage in Cairo airport was unmanned. When our bus convoy had an escort, this basically consisted of one police jeep riding in front of it. One wonders how useful this would even have been were there to be a serious attack on it. Although we didn't even have sniffer dogs or other security; if someone had brought a bomb on board, they could have blown us up and caused the buses behind us to crash into us. Yet, the security at Alexandria airport wanted to see my passport to allow me to use the bathroom. Great use of state resources all around. Everything looked like it was there for show. Damn police states.

This tallies very closely with my own experience on numerous visits to Egypt.

An article on the 'Aqoul blog explains in more detail "why Egypt's anti-terrorism strategy just doesn't work". One of the more telling points is where it talks about police with no shoelaces in their worn-out combat boots. "This seems trivial," the writer says, "but anyone familiar with how police forces or armies work knows that good equipment and the discipline to maintain it is the very basis of an effective force. The Egyptian policemen and soldiers are badly trained, badly equipped, badly paid, badly treated, badly motivated and thus have no incentive to do a good job."

Beside this, there are two other endemic problems. One is the antiquated policing methods, which include mass arrests and routine torture (see the reports from Human Rights Watch and the US state department). This must be a boon for the militants, since repressive measures of this kind always help their recruitment. Torture is also a thoroughly unreliable way of establishing facts. (And while we're on the subject, there are a couple of video clips circulating on the internet here and here which allegedly show gentlemen "helping" the police with their inquiries. They were apparently filmed with a mobile phone at the notorious Imbaba police station in Cairo. Though not particularly horrific examples, they seem to be the first time anyone in Egypt has managed to capture this sort of activity on camera.)

The other endemic problem is that the security forces in Egypt, along with almost all the other arms of government, are riddled with corruption. That completely undermines whatever security measures are in place. It doesn't matter how many checkpoints you have if policemen can be bribed to look the other way - and since they're so badly paid, the going rate for bribes is usually quite reasonable.

If the Egyptian authorities were really serious about tackling the Sinai problem, their first step would be a thorough purge of their security apparatus from top to bottom, but starting at the top with his excellency General Habib el Adly.

The war the world forgot

The week I spent as Unicef's guest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was one of the most shocking of my life.

April 24, 2006 11:06 AM | Printable version

The Great War of Africa has been fought for eight years in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Peace and power-sharing deals have come and gone. Elections are promised for July, the first free elections in the country's history. A UN peacekeeping force, Monuc, is in place, with 17,000 blue helmets trying to dominate a country the size of western Europe.

But the fighting continues, between the Congolese army and shifting alliances of rebel militias under the umbrella of the MRC, the Revolutionary Movement of the Congo. The death toll since 1998 has passed 4 million, the highest of any conflict since the second world war. The most volatile province is North Kivu, up against the borders with Uganda and Rwanda.

In my role as a Unicef ambassador I have just returned from a visit to North Kivu at the head of a small delegation. We travelled mostly by air because of the insecurity on the ground. New waves of refugees are on the move, driven out by government offensives against the rebels. Near Beni, in the north of the province, the militias fled to the forest and in turn displaced the native people, the pygmies. It is the first time in recorded history that the pygmies have left the forest. They had little choice. Their weapons, bows and poisoned-tipped arrows, are no match for Kalashnikovs.

The pygmy chief said: "This is a serious war and many of our relatives have been killed in the fighting. Our message to the world is that we cannot remain living like this."

This conflict in the heart of Africa shows modern warfare at its most brutal and primitive. It is the only war I have ever known where the worse things get, the more they are ignored.

Of all the war zones of the world, the DRC has the greatest concentration of child soldiers. Many thousands are thought to be still under arms. At Goma, the provincial capital, we visited a Unicef transit centre for some who have been successfully demobilised. A 17-year-old boy told me of his experiences: "I was eleven and a half years old when I became a soldier, and fought for six years. In our battalion, 17 soldiers were killed in the front line." I asked if he had ever killed anyone. "Yes," he replied, "I killed many people."

Just as shocking was a visit to a church hospital in Goma, where victims of rape take a two-month course of physical and psychological healing. This too is funded by Unicef. In the Congo's three armed conflicts since 1990, rape has been consistently used as a weapon of war. In the past three years, 4,500 of its victims have passed through the hospital - and that's frrom just one area of one province. Part of the horror of the rape epidemic is the sheer scale of it.

The approach of elections should be a force for stability, but it isn't. People can vote only where they are registered, near their homes. If they are driven from their homes they are disenfranchised. So militias and warlords with political ambitions can seriously affect the outcome. It is another of the Congo's innovations: a form of gerrymandering by armed force.

And as if that weren't enough, Goma is threatened by a volcano, the same volcano, Nyriagongo, that erupted four years ago, displacing 120,000 people. The difference between then and now is that the city has more than doubled in size, to 560,000. The new arrivals have nowehere to live except in the path of the lava. Goma's resident vulcanologist, Dr Jacques Durieux, predicts eruptions at up to eight points along the fissure between the volcano and the city. "It isn't a question of whether," he says, "but only a question of when."

The week I spent as Unicef's guest in the DRC was one of the most shocking of my life. Then I returned to find my own country in uproar about the price of petrol and the salaries of radio disc jockeys. And I wondered ... do we and the Congo really share the same planet?

• A report on the Great War of Africa is scheduled to be shown on BBC2's Newsnight at 10.30pm on Monday April 24.

Commander: Contractors violating U.S. trafficking laws

BY CAM SIMPSON

Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operations after confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

Gen. George Casey ordered that contractors be required by May 1 to return passports that have been illegally confiscated from laborers on U.S. bases after determining that such practices violated U.S. laws against trafficking for forced or coerced labor. Human brokers and subcontractors from South Asia to the Middle East have worked together to import thousands of laborers into Iraq from impoverished countries.

Two memos obtained by the Tribune indicate that Casey's office concluded that the practice of confiscating passports from such workers was both widespread on American bases and in violation of the U.S. trafficking laws.

The memos, including an order dated April 4 and titled "Subject: Prevention of Trafficking in Persons in MNF-I," or Multinational Forces-Iraq, say the military also confirmed a host of other abuses during an inspection of contracting activities supporting the U.S. military in Iraq. They include deceptive hiring practices; excessive fees charged by overseas job brokers who lure workers into Iraq; substandard living conditions once laborers arrive; violations of Iraqi immigration laws; and a lack of mandatory "awareness training" on U.S. bases concerning human trafficking.

Along with a separate memo from a top military procurement official to all contractors in Iraq, dated April 19 and titled, "Withholding of Passports, Trafficking in Persons," Casey's orders promise harsh actions against firms that fail to return passports or end other abusive practices. Contracts could be terminated, contractors could be blacklisted from future work, and commanders could physically bar firms from bases, the memos show.

"Contracts must incorporate appropriate language to compel the protection of individual rights (at both the contract and subcontract levels)," Casey's orders say, adding that it was his goal to "to promote (the) rule of law in Iraq and in the labor recruiting process."

Under future contracts, Casey is requiring that all firms, no matter how far down the chain, "provide workers with a signed copy of their employment contract that defines the terms of their employment."

He's ordering that contracts include "measurable, enforceable standards for living conditions (e.g., sanitation, health, safety, etc.) and establish 50 feet as the minimum acceptable square footage of personal living space per worker," after finding that some conditions were substandard.

Contractors and subcontractors also must "comply with international laws" regarding transit, exit and entry procedures, "requirements for work visas," and Iraqi immigration laws.

The orders also mandate that future contracts and subcontracts include "language that prohibits contractors and subcontractors at all tiers from utilizing unlicensed recruiting firms, or firms that charge illegal recruiting fees."

The short-term impact of the orders is unclear, because the separate memo to contractors, which is dated April 19 and written by Col. Robert K. Boyles, a top official with the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq/Afghanistan, shows many of the reforms would be implemented by changes in the language in future contracts.

Nonetheless, the findings and actions represent a dramatic turnabout for the U.S. military, and follow three months of behind-the-scenes pressure on the Defense Department from State Department officials charged with monitoring and combating human trafficking worldwide.

The State Department launched an investigation and promised other actions earlier this year in response to a series published Oct. 9-10 by the Tribune, "Pipeline to Peril," that detailed many of the abuses now cited in the memos.

The stories disclosed the often-illicit networks used to recruit low-skilled laborers from some of the world's most impoverished and remote locales to work in menial jobs on American bases in Iraq.

Although other firms also have contracts supporting the military in Iraq, the United States has outsourced vital support operations to Halliburton subsidiary KBR at an unprecedented scale, at a cost to the United States of more than $12 billion as of late last year.

KBR, in turn, has outsourced much of that work to more than 200 subcontractors, many of them based in Middle Eastern nations condemned by the United States for failing to stem human trafficking into their own borders or for perpetrating other human rights abuses against foreign workers.

KBR's subcontractors employ an army of workers to dish out food, wash clothes, clean latrines and carry out virtually every other menial task. About 35,000 of the 48,000 people working under the privatization contract last year were "Third Country Nationals," who are non-Americans imported from outside Iraq, KBR has said.

"Pipeline to Peril," which was based on reporting in the United States, Jordan, Iraq, Nepal and Saudi Arabia, described how some subcontractors and a chain of human brokers allegedly engaged in the same kinds of abuses routinely condemned by the State Department as human trafficking.

The newspaper retraced the journey of 12 men recruited in 2004 from rural villages in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal and documented a trail of deceit, fraud and negligence stretching into Jordan and Iraq. Most of the men had contracts filed with their government falsely promising them positions at a five-star hotel in Amman, yet all 12 were sent into Iraq in August 2004. They were ultimately kidnapped from an unprotected caravan traveling along what was then one of the most dangerous roadways in the world: the Amman-to-Baghdad highway.

All 12 men were subsequently executed by militants in likely the single worst massacre of foreign workers in Iraq since the American-led invasion more than three years ago.

Those workers and others suffered from a chain of exploitation that began in their home countries, where families often assumed huge debts to pay fees demanded by brokers, to Iraq. Even after discovering they'd been deceived, workers felt compelled to head into the war zone, or remain in danger for much longer than they desired, just to pay those debts.

The Tribune also found evidence that subcontractors and brokers routinely seized workers' passports, deceived them about their safety or contract terms and, in at least one case, allegedly tried to force terrified men into Iraq under the threat of cutting off their food and water.

The series also showed how KBR and the military left virtually every aspect of the recruitment, deployment and safety of such workers in the hands of their subcontractors. They also allowed subcontractors to employ workers from countries that had banned the deployment of their citizens to Iraq, meaning thousands were trafficked through illicit channels.

When told of the memos, John Miller, who heads the State Department office to monitor and combat human trafficking, credited the Tribune for shedding light on the illicit practices. He also praised the military for taking corrective action.

"Needless to say, we're delighted," Miller said. "This is progress, and we agree with the steps they've taken."

Although allegations of such abuses began appearing in international press reports more than two years ago, and the Tribune's own investigation was published last October, one of the memos calls on the military and the State Department to develop "an effective media strategy emphasizing the (military) Command's pro-active response to the problem."

Separate records also show that similar allegations had been raised in September 2004 with Joseph Schmitz, who was then the Department of Defense inspector general.

Schmitz did not respond in any detail until nearly a year later, saying in an Aug. 25, 2005, letter to Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., that there was a "list of corrective measures" ordered by coalition military officials in Iraq following "a preliminary inquiry" into the allegations. The letter did not mention passport seizures or violations of U.S. laws against human trafficking, but said living conditions "required further attention" and that officials were "monitoring the status of corrections" purportedly under way.

Schmitz resigned about two weeks later amid accusations that he stonewalled investigations. He took a job with Blackwater USA, a private security contractor.

It wasn't the only time officials were made aware of such allegations. Last summer, the Army, which oversees the KBR privatization deal, deflected questions from the Tribune about human trafficking onto American bases in Iraq by saying "these are not Army issues." Similarly, Halliburton said in a written statement that questions regarding "the recruitment practices" of its subcontractors "should be directed to the subcontractor."

Melissa Norcross, a Halliburton spokeswoman, issued a statement from the company Sunday saying that KBR "fully supports the Department of Defense's efforts to ensure that all contractor and subcontractor personnel working for the U.S. government be treated in a fair and humanitarian manner."

The statement also echoed previous press releases from the company, saying KBR "operates under a rigorous code of business conduct that outlines legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors are expected to follow in every aspect of their work. We do not tolerate any exceptions to this Code at any level of our company."

The company has refused to say whether it has ever taken any action against subcontractors.

Another memo obtained by the Tribune, dated April 13 and addressed to all KBR project managers, deputy project managers and operations managers, indicates the company is requiring all of its personnel to undergo human-trafficking awareness training because of Casey's orders.

A U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, confirmed the issuance of Casey's orders in a statement to the Tribune on Sunday, saying the "rights to freedom of movement and quality living standards are serious issues."

He also claimed, "There's always been a focus on this, and this is one more clarification of that," adding that the U.S. military has the ability to "terminate contracts and keep people off of bases."

Casey's orders came at about the same time the Defense Department published long-awaited interim rules that allow officials to cancel overseas defense contracts for trafficking violations.

But the orders go well beyond what is contained in the rules, and indicate that most of the measures stem from an inspection of the support operations by Casey's command. Johnson said that inspection was conducted by the command's inspector general's office, a process that was started last October.

While the orders do not indicate how many workers have had their passports seized, the April 19 memo to contractors says evidence indicated a widespread practice of "holding and withholding employee passports." It says passports are seized, in part, to keep workers from accepting jobs with other firms.

The Tribune identified three major KBR subcontractors that employed thousands of foreign workers on U.S. installations in Iraq and confiscated the passports of their foreign workers as a standard practice. At least two of those firms also have their own contracts with the United States.

The ultimate impact of the new orders will depend on how they're implemented, and on several key, unanswered questions. Included among them: how U.S. military officials in Iraq hope to influence the conduct of village recruiters and human brokers across the globe who are several links up the chain from the subcontractors ultimately employing workers in Iraq.

Johnson said U.S. military officials would not immediately refer any contractors or subcontractors for prosecution.

Miller agreed that important questions remained, but called the new rules a major step forward. "I think they are heading in the right direction."