I have several new features I’ve been developing that I hope to roll out this summer, now that I have a little more time. (I graduated last Thursday, so it’s Dr. QN Bek from here on out…)

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, comments, critiques, or suggestions for what you’d like to see on the All-New 2012 Qifa Nabki version 2.0, don’t be shy.

Marcel asked him to respond to his opponents’ critique that he was not “Sunni enough” to assume the post from which Saad Hariri had been unceremoniously ejected by Hizbullah and its allies. Miqati responded with a hysterical tirade, which you can watch here. (Translation is below)…

Mikati: “I don’t accept anyone to question my Sunnism. If there’s a Sunni in Lebanon, it’s me. I won’t accept it! And those who want to hand out certificates (of Sunnism) can go do it on their own. I’m Sunni in belief, Sunni in practice, Sunni in politics, and I’m the number one defender of the Sunnis in Lebanon. If you want to talk about Sunnis, I’m the one with the highest number of Sunni votes. In the ballot boxes of Tripoli, 87% of the Sunnis voted for Najib Miqati, which has never happened in the history of elections in Lebanon. So [whoever is questioning my Sunnism] can get lost, with all my respect for the muftis and who else is concerned with this issue. I’m the Number One Sunni in Lebanon!”

Marcel Ghanem: Great. Moving on…

Today, the Sunni credentials of many of Lebanon’s leaders, including Messrs. Miqati and Hariri, are being challenged again. The situation in Tripoli has consumed the news, and I have nothing to add to the many good commentaries by Maya Mikdashi, Emile Hokayem, Karl Sharro, Michael Young, Mustapha Hamaoui, and others.

Except for this one thing: Before last week, I would have been surprised if 1% of the many Lebanese political junkies who read this blog could tell me who Shadi al-Mawlawi or Ahmad Abd al-Wahed were. Today, the identities of these men and the tension surrounding the former’s imprisonment and the latter’s death are causing a major headache for the sitting government.

The Future Movement has seized on these events to make a typically hamfisted play, pressuring Miqati to resign. I don’t see that succeeding unless the situation in Tripoli becomes far worse. And even in such a case, I continue to believe that Hariri has no desire to return to the limelight so soon. He is biding his time abroad not because of security threats but because the position of the Lebanese Prime Minister — the Number One Sunni in Lebanon — is precisely where he doesn’t want to be right now.

There will be a lot of bluster in the press for a few days, but behind the scenes, Lebanon’s political establishment will likely try to find a way to make its Tripoli problem go away. The truth is that no one is the Number One Sunni in Lebanon, which means that no one is ideally positioned to gain any political traction from the situation in the North.

Update: Have a look at Mitch Prothero’s piece for FP, which makes a similar point…

I don’t quite agree with Michael Young’s view that Sleiman’s strategy is purely tactical, that he is using the PR campaign to extend his own mandate. It pays to be cynical in politics, but Sleiman’s moves are consistent with his stance on electoral issues throughout his presidency. We would never have had a figure like Ziyad Baroud in the Interior Ministry had it not been for Sleiman. I’m not suggesting that he’s some kind of philosopher king, but I also don’t think there’s that much political capital to be gained by pushing this particular agenda… certainly not enough to ensure that his mandate is extended.

My own cynicism is directed at Berri and Aoun’s motivations. I see their campaign for PR to be all about pressuring Walid Jumblatt and Saad Hariri, which is also what the Aounist rhetoric about investigating the finances of the March 14 era is about. Aoun, in particular, is trying to shift the headlines away from the situation in Syria. He knows that PR does not have a chance in hell of being passed (and he would probably not be in favor of many varieties of PR, in fact) but there’s no harm in painting the failure of this initiative in the colors of March 14th intransigence.

Lebanon is going to need an electoral law for the 2013 parliamentary elections. What’s the most likely outcome? My sense is that we’re going to get a repeat of the 2009 law, with perhaps one or two additions like expatriate voting thrown in. It’s too late to introduce anything else except perhaps for pre-printed ballots (which would be the single most important reform to implement immediately, in my view), but no one has discussed that issue.

The banner on the right states that proportional representation deserves the attention and advocacy of civil society groups. That is certainly true. But what kind of PR would work best for Lebanon? The kind that Berri and Aoun likely have in mind (assuming that they are being genuine) would be a catastrophe. Single-district closed lists would effectively concentrate a huge amount of power in the hands of party chiefs, because they’d decide the candidates on the slates that they put forward. For PR to be effective in breaking the monopolies of the traditional parties, we need large districts, true, but open lists would be a desideratum as well.

If you are in Beirut on May 13, join the march.

and which
has lately kept me from
blogging
more often

Forgive me
It was onerous
So long
And so dense

I recently arrived late to a very good party, the party of Jiim Siin’s brilliant and wickedly satirical monologues about the Syrian uprising. Recorded on an iPhone by an anonymous Syrian fellow living in the diaspora, the series entitled وقائع طنجرة الضغط (“Chronicles of the Pressure Cooker”) is a collection of short audio clips of sketches, political allegories, and satirical musings on the revolution. You can listen to the entire series on his blog.

Among my favorites:

• Boiling up a new Constitution
• Don’t go…alone: A letter to Bashar al-Assad.
• Re-reading Syria as a sieve, rather than a pressure cooker…
• The most recent clip, excoriating the new Syrian constitution’s requirement that any presidential candidate be married to a Syrian woman.
• You know what? Do yourself a favor and listen to them all.

What I love about these clips is the language: a rich, pungent, evocative vernacular… basically colloquial poetry. Yes, I know I’m getting carried away, but I can’t really think of a more creative response to the situation than this.

I got in touch with Jiim Siin via Twitter. He tells me he was inspired by Arabic radio programs and by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “for the absurdity…” His weekly missives bring to mind Jacques Barzun’s famous definition of decadence: “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist…“

In Jiim Siin, the Syrian revolution has a very talented one indeed.

Dip into my Twitter feed at any given moment, and you’re bound to see half a dozen links for the latest videos out of Syria. A generic formalism has set in for these videos. They’re typically shot on a camera phone by a young Syrian male who begins by announcing the date and place of the video. We see scenes of bullet-scarred buildings, maybe a dead body. Sometimes, the videos are filmed during a battle scene: little puffs of concrete dust drift gently to the ground from a building or mosque that is allegedly under attack by machine-gun wielding troops or rebels. The violence is usually telegraphed: its perpetrators are invisible snipers or artillery commanders, improvised explosive devices and insurgents. We see the effects, hardly ever the crimes themselves.

I have watched a lot of these videos, more than I like to think about. Some are obvious fakes, created by cutting and splicing footage and audio from other sources. Others seem real enough but are lacking in information: Who destroyed that building? Who killed that person? Who injured that child? Who fired that rocket?

The net effect of all these fragmented shards of documentary evidence is that one approaches each new video with a higher store of cynicism. Take the latest clip that has everyone talking: an “exposé” of Danny Abdul Dayem, the most famous spokesman of the Syrian revolution in Homs. Danny has been interviewed on CNN, BBC, and other Western outlets several times, describing the atrocities of the Syrian Army and its relentless bombardment of civilian areas.

The Syrian TV station Addounia somehow got its hands on some footage of Danny standing around, waiting to speak to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on a cell phone. The annotations of the video by the pro-regime station claim to show that Danny ordered someone off screen to prepare the sound of gunfire (so as to dupe the good listeners at home into thinking he was in a war zone). At some point, he complains that his fingers are freezing and jokes darkly that someone go get him a mattress to sit on. When he eventually gets on the phone with Anderson, he says that the army has been bombing for hours, but we know that this is untrue, because we recently saw him ask for a mattress.

Here again, one detects the traces of editorial shake-and-bake. The subtitles are not quite right: he does not say, for example: “Khalas, khalli al-jift ma3naataa” (which the editors say means “Let the gunfire sound then”), but rather something else closer to “Khalas, fell al-jidd ma3naataa” (translation: “Ok, so that means that the grandfather left…” which could refer to someone’s family member leaving Homs). Even if he did say what the editors say he said, then the translation is still dubious; the phrase would more likely mean something like: “Fine, leave (or keep) the rifle, then.”

Later on, when the subtitles read “I’m waiting at the moment,” what he actually says to someone off-screen is: “Your grandmother is calling. She’s on call waiting, man.” And a bit little later, when Danny supposedly orders someone to “prepare the gunfire” and start shooting, this is followed by the sound of an explosion. But why? He wasn’t on the phone with CNN at that moment, nor does the video contain the sound of gunfire in the background when he does speak to Anderson. So why would he have ordered someone to make some noise before he even got on the phone?

You see how this can quickly feel like a wild goose chase. Without any news agencies in Homs reporting what they see and keeping each other honest, we have to rely on the pseudo-consensus of YouTube videos and social networking (what I like to call tawaatur Twitter) for our information. What’s remarkable to me is just how quickly this phenomenon has ramped up and become so sophisticated, and also so democractic, for lack of a better term.

Would like to say more, but my dissertation is beckoning. As you were…

I’ll update this page with results as they are available, and some abbreviated commentary. In the meantime, in case you’re interested in what this new constitution is all about, the only primer I’ve been able to find in the 5 minutes I have allotted for non-dissertation work today is this Q&A piece at Al-Jazeera English. Among the revelations (according to the lawyer they interviewed):

• While the Constitution creates a multi-party system, each political party is only allowed to have a budget of around $35,000. [See below]
• Bashar gets to run again (twice)
• The security services continue to enjoy immunity and can detain people at will
• No one who has spent the last 10 years out of Syria can run for president (that means all the exiled politicos are ineligible)
• The President can fire the Prime Minister without parliamentary approval
• Muslim Brotherhood (and any other religious party, like a Syrian version of Hizbullah for example) remains illegal

If anyone else can find a good discussion of the draft constitution, please stick it in the comment section and I’ll put it up on the main page. I’d like to have more insight on this document besides a single piece from AJ.

Update: Courtesy of Rime Allaf is this citizen’s amusing recipe for a tabkha dusturiyyeh, prepared by a committee of chefs in a pressure cooker… (This guy has a career on Bab al-7aarah…)

Update: Syrian state media (SANA) is reporting 89.4% approval of the draft constitution. Total number of votes cast: 8,376,447 out of 14,589,954, or 57.4%

Update: I’m grateful to reader Parviziyi (who likes to set me straight on all matters Syrian) for pointing out that the business about each political party’s budget not exceeding $35,000 per year is complete nonsense. In fact, the new political parties law stipulates that individual donations cannot exceed $35,000 per person, per year. I’m all in favor of that, and I wish Lebanon would follow suit.

Here’s a link to an English translation of the Constitution.

The debate over Syria in the Arab media and social networks has essentially become a debate about foreign intervention, and the most commonly encountered argument on the pro-regime side goes something like this:

“The Syrian opposition is a foreign-funded, foreign-armed conspiracy to topple the Assad regime and strike a blow against the Resistance Axis. The grievances of many Syrians are legitimate, but accepting any support from the West or its Arab allies is tantamount to treason, and thereby empties the opposition of any legitimacy.”

There are many reasons to oppose  intervention in Syria, but the argument above strikes me as very odd. I  find myself wondering whether the many (intelligent, otherwise reasonable) people who make it are being willfully disingenuous or are simply oblivious to to the political history of this region. The fact that these same people often proudly tout Syria’s ability to punch above its regional weight by manipulating events in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine tends to make me feel less charitable…

To take an obvious counter-example, Hizbullah makes no secret of its allegiance to and dependence upon foreign powers in pushing its agenda. The group’s weapons are not manufactured in Lebanon; they get them from Syria and Iran. A significant portion of its budget comes directly from foreign sources. And its political leaders openly state that Hizbullah’s maneuvers take into account the interests of a regional alliance stretching from Tehran to Beirut via Damascus.

Critics will hasten to point out that Hizbullah’s agenda is not directed against Arab governments but rather against Israel, but this ignores the fact that the party spent eighteen months in 2007-08 trying to bring down the Saniora government. It attempted to do this peacefully, just as the early phase of the Syrian uprising was a pageant of political protest and not an armed insurrection. But the fact that Hizbullah’s demonstration did not immediately devolve into an insurrection had less to do with the party’s benevolence toward Saniora and everything to do with the balance of military power in the country. If Hizbullah were to stage such a demonstration in Damascus today (assuming that this party would be legal in Syria, which it wouldn’t be), it would be crushed by Syrian Army tanks within a day or two.

The lesson to be drawn from this comparison is perhaps that the Syrian opposition’s greatest sin is not that it has allowed itself to be tainted by rumors of foreign tutelage, but rather that it has not embraced and rationalized such tutelage as fluently as Hizbullah has. Supporters of the party don’t mind its brand of foreign-funded, foreign-armed influence, but find it treasonous in the case of the Syrian opposition. And this is despite the fact that the extent of foreign influence on the situation in Syria is far from clear.

But even assuming that the constellation of groups collectively referred to as the “Free Syrian Army” is entirely funded and armed by a couple governments (say, Saudi Arabia and Qatar), then the following question poses itself:

What justifies, in the mind of an Assad regime supporter, a clear Iranian-Syrian agenda in Lebanon, but de-legitimizes a Saudi-Qatari agenda in Syria?

In other words, if the fact of the “foreignness” of intervention is not what makes it treasonous, then what does? I have not heard a convincing answer to this question yet, but I’m sure the many intelligent and pro-regime readers of this blog would be happy to try setting me straight.

I’ve lost track of the number of rumors about the STL that have been reported by Lebanese newspapers, but I thought it might be entertaining to take some bets on who the mysterious “fifth suspect” might be.

Note that the report does not specify that the politician is Lebanese. Any guesses?

He was one of the most curious, kindhearted, thoughtful, and intelligent journalists I’d ever met, a mentor to countless foreign correspondents, and someone who set a new standard for informed, balanced, and nuanced storytelling that somehow managed to find the momentous in the mundane.

I feel privileged to have known him personally, and I will mourn his loss.