Mouin Rabbani sent me this message about Amnesty International: "I haven't read the Amnesty International report on Syria, and don't intend to, so can't comment on the accuracy of its claims. The more important point is that while the Syrian regime is certainly capable of the alleged crimes, I would not rely on Amnesty for verification. This after all is the same organization that (along with HRW) in 1990 spread false propaganda about Iraqi soldiers ejecting prematurely-born babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them to die on the floor in order to loot the incubators. That story, as you may recall, came at a crucial time in the war debate, and perhaps more than any other helped persuade otherwise well-meaning individuals in the US and elsewhere in the West to support the Bush campaign to go to war. Not less importantly, Amnesty subsequently refused to apologize for its role in this sordid affair."The recent Amnesty International report on alleged mass executions by the Assad regime presents no evidence and is documented by sources outside Syria, making the claims dubious, especially when the sources are anti-Assad and have a motive to provide disinformation. Characteristically, the Western mainstream media has reported the allegations as if confirmed by the credibility of the sources.
Angry Arab News Service
Amnesty International and Human Rights WatchAssad Abu Khalil | Professor of Political Science, California State University, Stanislaus
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Of course, those media are talking about the Saudi and UAE regimes but they deliberately use this general language to conflate those dynasties with Sunni Arab people.How could anyone who knows anything about the Arab world claim that Sunni Arabs are now pro-Israel?
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There are many misconception about the Muslim Brotherhood and the proposed ban: it shows you how much Gulf regimes now have influence--not as much as Israel, but still--over US foreign policy. There are two countering lobbies on this: Egyptian, Saudi and UAE potentates are lobbying for the ban, while the Qatari, Turkish and Tunisian potentates are lobbying against the ban. I think that the Israeli lobby is not very active in the ban because the Muslim Brotherhood has been quite friendly toward Israel (especially in the branches in Tunisia, Turkey, Syria, and even Egypt). The ban represents the meeting point between the Egyptian, Saudi and UAE potentates and the anti-Islam advocates in the US. While I oppose the ban (when the organization Friends of the Israeli Army is not only legal but tax deductible) there are many misconceptions about the Brotherhood. Remember that it was ALL Gulf regimes AND JORDAN who advocated, armed, and financed the organization for the many decades of the Cold War and it worked very closely with Western powers in their war on socialism and communism. Israel had friendly relations with the Brotherhood in those years. And the notion that the brotherhood "renounced violence" as some newspaper are writing, applies only to the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood. Also, how could the US ban the brotherhood when it is sponsored by allies of the US to this very day? Finally, the irony is that the Brotherhood would be banned while the most sinister and fanatical version of Islamic ideologization, meaning the Wahhabi ideology, remains not only legal but friendly in the US. It was not the Brotherhood which radicalized US mosques and Western mosques (not that I like the reactionary and misogynistic and exclusivist ideology of the Brotherhood) but the Saudi Wahhabi ideology which is responsible for the radicalization of mosques and Islamic centers worldwide.The Muslim Brotherhood: the ban
