20-Mar-15: A peek into how Middle East politics work in reality

Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh in a Saudi news report
today: “Whoever questions the legitimacy and independence of the
Shariah justice system is either ignorant or biased.”

Sweden's current government has a well-deserved reputation for irritating people, especially in our neighbourhood. It has recently given formal recognition to a state called Palestine, the first European country to do so. It has criticized Israel in ways that make people like us think the key members of its leadership are not especially well informed; the impression we have is they follow the politically-correct herd for ideological knee-jerk reasons. They're hardly alone in that - it has become something of an international disease.

But we're not writing this to make a case against Sweden. Nor - for that matter - are we especially for them. Instead, we want to explain why what is happening to Sweden is an object lesson in how international politics work in general, and how policy in the Middle East in particular is made and conducted. It's not so pretty.

Our starting point is an article in today's Washington Post [here]. It describes how Margot Wallstrom, Sweden's Foreign Minister and a woman occasionally called strident in the media, was blocked from talking about democracy and women's rights at a gathering of the Arab League in Cairo. Who blocked her? The Saudis.

An Arab diplomat confirmed to AFP that Riyadh had stopped the Swede from making her opening speech. Wallstroem had been invited as an honorary guest to the Arab ministers’ meeting in praise of her government’s decision to recognize Palestine in October. Her canceled opening speech — published by the Swedish foreign ministry — mentioned neither Saudi Arabia nor Wallstroem’s feminist foreign policy agenda but stressed women’s and human rights. [AFP | March 9, 2015]

Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom
January 2015 [Image Source]

Sweden didn't sit on its hands. It responded by scrapping a major arms deal between Swedish industry and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This was an agreement that had been in place for a decade and was up for renewal for a further five years in May. Sweden's arms industry watched, it would be fair to say, in astonishment.

Here's why: Swedish exports to Saudi Arabia were worth $1.3 billion in 2014. The now-scrapped military arms deal delivered Saudi Arabian purchase orders to Swedish factories of $39 million last year alone.

Wallstrom had already criticized the outrageous flogging of a Saudi blogger by the name of Raif Badawi. He managed a website that

"allowed social and political debate on Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government arrested Badawi in January 2012 on the charges of apostasy, insulting Islam and violations of Saudi laws on information technology." [source]

What's happening to Badawi is infuriating on any (non-Saudi) view. But in the realpolitik of international relations in our times, the customary thing is for such people - and the things officially done to them - to be ignored. Sweden not only did not ignore him; its foreign minister called Saudi Arabia a dictatorship, which on any reasonable view the absolute hereditary monarchy is.

From a Saudi campaign poster that cannot be viewed by women
without a male guardian's approval [Image Source]

The human rights climate in Saudi Arabia is a nightmare, to say the least.

With no real attempt to hide this, the authorities there routinely, systematically, oppress religious minorities, women and homosexuals, and imprison tens of thousands for their political views. Hangings and beatings for "crimes" that include apostasy and blasphemy are common. Two years ago, The Guardian reproduced a Saudi government King Khalid Charitable Foundation poster of a veiled female with a bruised eye, and this poignant slogan: "Saudi women can't do anything without a male guardian's permission – including see the advert".

Governments, like ordinary people, know this, obviously. But few say or do anything about it because, well, being polite to the Saudis has its own rewards. And being not nice can be very expensive.

Saudi Arabia's new and robust Swedish policy is just getting underway. And it promises to be uncomfortable for Stockholm's decision-makers. The Washington Post mentions several of the steps already taken:

• On March 10, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Stockholm, saying it was prompted by Sweden's "interference in its internal affairs."
• The same day, Arab League foreign ministers issued a joint statement condemning Wallstrom's statement.
• On March 18, the United Arab Emirates recalled its ambassador to Stockholm. In doing so, it issued a media release condemning Sweden and its "strong statements".
• Also March 18, the Swedish ambassador was called in to the UAE foreign ministry for a harangue featuring “the UAE’s extreme condemnation of the statements made by the foreign minister of Sweden to the Swedish Parliament regarding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its judicial system”, a free lesson about the need to "respect the religious and cultural specificities of countries and societies" and a warning not to "violate the principle of sovereignty upon which normal relations between states are based", and not to engage in "interference in internal affairs".
• Yesterday (March 19, 2015) Associated Press was told by a Saudi official that his country "would no longer issue business visas to Swedish citizens or renew the current visas of Swedish citizens inside Saudi Arabia."
• Transparently staged criticisms of Sweden and its government are now a daily occurrence in Saudi news reports: "Behind Sweden’s tirade is a hidden Western agenda to tarnish Islam", for instance, in a Saudi news channel yesterday, along with "Swedish antics condemned" and "‘Ignorant critics of KSA laws’ slammed" today.

How does this feel to the Swedes? [WaPo]:

• "This is going to have a vast negative impact for the companies with interest in the region," Andreas Astrom, the communications director at Stockholm's Chamber of Commerce, told the Associated Press. "This is not good for Swedish business society and, in the long run, jobs in Sweden."
• "In a very real way, this is about Sweden's credibility as a contractual partner," Carl Bildt, a former Swedish foreign minister and prime minister, told Defense News. "That credibility is important to a relatively small country like Sweden. This whole situation is unfortunate."
• Sweden's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Dag Yulin Danflet, has been telling the Saudi press that he is seeking to "contain the crisis."
• "Swedish firms fear losing business in Arab world", the lead article in a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday.

From which it's fair to assume that at some point, when the pressure gets to the right level, when the Foreign Ministry identifies the moment when it can save face, Sweden will climb down from its tree and adjust its foreign policy pronouncements to the prevailing winds of international trade. It's much less about rights; much more about credibility as a contractual partner and supplier.

That's how foreign policy is made, and that's how the world is. All the pronouncements about principles, human rights, self-determination and over-riding humanitarian concerns can be put back where they came from. What's really important is that those "religious and cultural specificities" are given the appropriate degree of genuflection.

The editors at the Washington Post got it right; the headline on today's report, the one we quoted above, is:

Sweden stood up for human rights in Saudi Arabia. This is how Saudi Arabia is punishing Sweden.

07-Feb-15: German synagogue petrol-bombed by Palestinian Arabs might be an overdue wake-up call if the sleepers pay attention

The sanctuary of the Wuppertal, Germany, synagogue, 2014 [Image Source]

Benjamin Weinthal, writing in the Jerusalem Post today, reports on the conviction this week of two Palestinian Arabs, 24 and 29, by a German court on criminal charges arising out of an arson attack on a synagogue in Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia.

The hurling of petrol bombs (often called Molotov Cocktails in the media) by Palestinian Arabs is a daily occurrence in Israel, where no one is in much doubt on either side that it constitutes an act of hatred and extreme hostility in the ongoing war of terror waged by Fatah/PA against Israelis.

The Wuppertal synagogue had been destroyed by fire in the German nationwide Kristallnacht pogrom on the night of November 9/10, 1938. Its replacement was daubed with "Free Palestine” slogans a few days before the attack that led to this week's conviction.

As Weinthal notes ["German Judge: Torching of Synagogue not motivated by anti-Semitism"
Jerusalem Post today"], a German political figure, Volker Beck of the Green Party, has stepped in to urge the court to reconsider and designate the criminal attack as anti-Semitic, presumably with more severe sanctions as a consequence:

The Wuppertal court sentenced the two men, ages 24 and 29, to a suspended prison term of one year and three months. The two men, along with an 18-year-old juvenile, in July tossed Molotov cocktails at the synagogue in Wuppertal, a city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with a population of nearly 344,000. The court ordered all three to perform 200 hours of community service. Beck said on Saturday the “attack on the Synagogue was motivated by anti-Semitism” and blasted the court for issuing a decision stating that the goal of the attack was to bring “attention to the Gaza conflict... The ignorance of the judiciary toward anti-Semitism is for many Jews in Germany especially alarming.”

The three perpetrators admitted the attack when their case was heard four weeks ago [German news source, which calls them Jordanian] and owned up to being "really drunk" in their own words. and wanting to "make a statement" [Deutsche Welle].  A different news report at the time of the attack said the attackers evidently aimed to burn the house of worship to the ground.

The more sober parts of the German political leadership know they have a growing and very serious problem on their hands. But denial is not hard to find, as the court decision demonstrates.

In mid-November, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at a conference on anti-Semitism that "hatred of Jews" was in the rise in Germany and across Europe. He attributed this to spiraling violence in the Middle East. [Deutsche Welle, January 14, 2015]

Wuppertal's self-appointed "Sharia Police" [Image Source]

He might have said, but didn't, that the rising hatred of Jews has some concrete causes that Germans are finding hard to articulate - or to face.

Someone else, however, did. The political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Jochen Bittner, writing in the New York Times ["What’s Behind Germany’s New Anti-Semitism", September 16, 2014] stated it pretty clearly:

Europe is living through a new wave of anti-Semitism. The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews calls it the worst the Continent has seen since World War II. He may well be right. Attacks on synagogues are an almost weekly occurrence... We’ve seen this before, of course. But there’s an important difference this time. The new anti-Semitism does not originate solely with the typical white-supremacist neo-Nazi; instead, the ugly truth that many in Europe don’t want to confront is that much of the anti-Jewish animus originates with European people of Muslim background. Until recently, Germany has been unwilling to discuss this trend. Germans have always seen Muslim anti-Semitism as a less problematic version of the “original” version, and therefore a distraction from the well-known problem of anti-Jewish sentiment within a majority of society. And yet the German police have noted a disturbing rise in the number of people of Arabic and Turkish descent arrested on suspicion of anti-Semitic acts in recent years, especially over the last several months... What has become obvious this summer is that the “old” Germans have not yet managed to properly deliver this message to all the “new” Germans. Emotionally, this may have been understandable, given how many “bio-Germans,” as we call ethnic Germans, actually had Nazi family members that they still got to know, which may have made them wary of telling others what to think...[NYTimes]

That's Germany. In the specific town whose synagogue was bombed, authorities discovered some quite specific Islamist challenges just a few months ago:

Police in Wuppertal are seeking ways to stop the group of men who have been seen patrolling the area around the western city's main train station on several evenings recently. The bearded fundamentalists have declared the sleazy nightlife area of the city of 340,000 to be a "Sharia Controlled Zone"... Police stopped 11 men between the ages of 19 and 33 in Wuppertal on Wednesday night and they are now being investigated to see whether charges of illegal assembly could be brought against them... "Intimidation or provocation won't be tolerated," Wuppertal Police Chief Birgitta Rademacher said on Friday... Wuppertal's mayor, Peter Jung, said he supported the police taking a hard line on the group's activities. "These people's intention is to provoke and intimidate and force their ideology (upon others)," Jung said. He added that Wuppertal was an "open and tolerant city, which is proud of the fact that people of different religions and convictions live together in peace." [Deutsche Welle, September 5, 2014]

We're left wondering whether German judges get briefed on issues like this.