Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: allegria, e' primavera

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/12/07/3090634/israeli-author-booted-from-marseilles-panel-discussion-at-request-of-palestinian-poe
 
 
Israeli author booted from Marseilles panel
 
December 7, 2011
 
(JTA) -- An Israeli author was kicked off a panel discussion in
Marseilles at the request of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish.
 
Moshe Sakal, the author of “Yoland,” which was shortlisted for the
2011 Sapir Prize for literature, was removed Monday from a discussion
of the Arab spring at a conference of Mediterranean writers, Haaretz
reported.
 
French-Jewish author Pierre Assouline, the director of the conference,
said Sakal’s participation in the panel “was not crucial.”
 
Darwish had apparently said that he would participate in the
conference as long as he did not have to sit with any Israelis at
roundtable discussions.
 
Describing the reaction to Sakal's dismissial, Assouline said, “Half
of the crowd got very angry, and the other half was thrilled.”
 
"I entered the hall just as [Moroccan poet] Tahar Ben Jelloun was
speaking forcefully against this type of boycott," Sakal said to
Ha’aretz. "He said that there are many Israeli authors who are
supportive [of the Palestinian cause] and one should speak to them
even if one doesn't approve of current Israeli politics."
 
"There were hundreds of people there and there were a lot of
hecklers," Sakal said. "People were very upset."

Thought the Muslim Brotherhood Was Bad? Meet Egypt’s Other Islamist
Party.
 
    Eric Trager
    December 2, 2011 | 12:00 am
 
Fayoum, Egypt—The big story from Egypt’s parliamentary elections, the
first round of which concluded on Tuesday, will likely be the Muslim
Brotherhood’s impressive victory. But the Brotherhood’s anticipated
rise from outlawed organization to parliamentary power won’t be
surprising: the Brotherhood’s strong mobilizing capabilities are well
known, and Hosni Mubarak often warned the West that its choice was
between his autocracy or the Brotherhood’s theocracy.
 
The real surprise is the emergence of the Salafist Nour party, a
deeply theocratic organization that bases its ideology on a literal
reading of the Qur’an and Sunna and, most astoundingly, didn’t exist
until a few months ago. Although Salafist political activity was,
unlike the Brotherhood, completely banned under the Mubarak regime,
the Nour Party is giving the Brotherhood a run for its money in some
districts. Not only is the Islamist Alliance, in which the Nour Party
is the major player, running 693 candidates—but those candidates’
banners and images have been ubiquitous, even in Egypt’s least
religious neighborhoods. It is now expected to place second when the
final round of elections is completed in January, perhaps winning as
much as 30 percent of the vote.
 
The Nour Party’s strong campaign was particularly noticeable here in
Fayoum, a rural governorate 81 miles southwest of Cairo that is home
to 2.5 million people. Based on my experiences covering various Cairo
polling places on Monday, I fully expected a strong showing in Fayoum
for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Islamist ideology is very much at
home in this traditional countryside region. And, indeed, the
Brotherhood was quite visible. But the Nour Party was, without
question, much more visible. From the moment we entered the
governorate, Nour banners—and often only Nour banners—were everywhere:
atop light poles, along traffic islands, and even on mosques. (One
aspect of the Nour’s campaign particularly impressed me: To get around
the ban on using the Islamic crescent as a party symbol, Nour chose to
be represented on ballots by another Islamic symbol: the fanous, a
decorative lamp that Muslims display during Ramadan.)
 
My first stop was at a polling station along a major road, a
schoolhouse that was one of the few structures in an otherwise
pastoral setting. Although there was little foot traffic,
approximately two dozen enthusiastic Nour party supporters—again, only
Nour party supporters—were milling about, apparently waiting to help
voters. “I voted for the Nour party yesterday,” Ahmed Kamel, sporting
the bushy-beard-sans-mustache look that is typical of Salafists, told
me. “They are honest and I trust them a lot. They depend on the Holy
Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.”
 
At my second stop, a very busy polling station towards the center of
Fayoum city, the Nour Party and Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and
Justice—and no other parties—manned nearby voter assistance kiosks.
But here, the Nour Party’s presence was notably more advanced: whereas
the Brotherhood was using an old desktop with a boxy monitor to tell
people which voting box was theirs, the Nour activists were working
off of two sleek, new-looking laptops and handing out impressively
concise copies of their platform.
 
Yet the most impressive scene came at my third stop, in front of the
Nour Party’s Fayoum headquarters, where I found a number of activists
clad in yellow, Nour-emblazoned, reflective vests. They had been
collecting voters from centralized locations and bringing them to the
polling places all day. “We announce where [voters] should meet,”
Mohamed Abdel Rahman Mahmoud, a 32-year-old electrician, told me. “We
have a microphone on our cars, and we move around to tell them.” The
Nour Party’s voter-roundup operation was hardly unique to Fayoum: a
colleague of mine also spotted yellow-vested Salafists in the city of
Luxor, and it is likely that they used this technique in similarly
traditional settings where they have wide support.
 
When I asked these bushy-bearded politicos how they had emerged from
obscurity to omnipresence in a matter of months, they insisted that
the Nour Party had organically grown from the bottom-up. “As
Salafists, we are part of the Muslim community and we connect with
Muslims as brothers, and there is a private connection as Salafists,”
Mohamed Abdel Tawaq, the Nour Party’s 31-year-old Fayoum coordinator,
told me. “We met each other through mosques and universities. We live
in a Muslim society.”
 
But the mass organization that they’d pulled off so quickly clearly
requires money. Where is it coming from? “We pay zakat to an
organization that belongs to the party,” said Abdel Tawaq. Rumor has
it, I replied, that most of their funds come from Saudi Arabia, which—
I didn’t say this part aloud—has a history of exporting its own
Islamic radicalism elsewhere. “You see all the [Nour Party] branches
around Egypt, and you think we have so much money,” said Ali Sharaf, a
Nour party coordinator who was sitting nearby. “But we’re really
struggling to pay the rent here. Our money comes from dues.” He said
that dues were only 10 Egyptian pounds—roughly $1.75—each month, and
that they had registered thousands of new members. (Given the ubiquity
of the Nour Party’s banners and the scale of their operation, this is
scarcely believable.)
 
I also asked the Salafists why hadn’t they just joined the Muslim
Brotherhood. “Because the Muslim Brotherhood is a group and tied to
certain rules,” said Ali Sharaf, a Nour party coordinator who was
sitting nearby. “But I’m a Muslim and Islam is open to anything.”
 
Yet I’d already learned that the Salafists were not as open-minded as
they claimed. At one of my polling place visits, a van full of women
that had been brought to vote for Nour called me over to extol the
Nour Party’s virtues. “They are good people and serve the community,”
said Nour al-Hoda Desouki, excitedly holding a Nour party sample
ballot. “We are a conservative people but we’ll talk to you.” But her
good deed couldn’t go unpunished. A Nour representative swiftly
approached my translator and told us to stop talking to women.
 
Still, I humored the Salafists. If they were truly “open to anything,”
would they support allowing Egyptian hotels to continue serving
alcohol to tourists? “In my opinion, no,” said Mehdi, the Nour
activist handing out party programs by the polling station. “Because
it’s forbidden.”
 
“But the people who drink aren’t Muslims,” my translator, himself a
committed Muslim, interjected.
 
“They have to respect the country,” Mehdi replied. “Like in Germany,
people respect the country and have to speak German. You have to
respect the country you’re in, even if you disagree.”
 
Well, what would be your policy towards Christians? Would you force
them to pay the jizya – the special tax that Muslim rulers
historically imposed on non-Muslim minorities to pay for Islamic wars?
“They already pay it through their taxes,” Sherif, another local Nour
coordinator, said. “Each society has its own revenue sources—in Islam,
it’s zakat for Muslims and jizya for non-Muslims. Even they have to
serve in the community, whether they’re Christians or Jews. They pay
jizya because we offer security.”
 
Finally, I turned to foreign policy. What is your view of Camp David,
I asked. “I heard about Camp David when I was a kid and I heard from
people and our scholars that it is unjust for us,” Sherif said. “But I
never read it.” (This Islamist apparently subscribed to the Herman
Cain school of international relations.) “I don’t want war with
Israel,” he continued. “So Israel must leave the part that it took
from me.” Which part? “Israel should withdraw from all of Palestine—
not just the West Bank or Gaza.” I gave him a confused look. “I never
denied that some Jews lived there before.” On that note, I said
goodbye.
 
As we headed back to the cab, our driver—who had sat in for that last
part—nodded approvingly. “They’re really good people,” he said. Though
he’s not an Islamist himself, he had voted for Nour earlier in the
week. Why? “They’re honest.”
 
Eric Trager is the Ira Weiner Fellow at the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy.
 
 
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98036/egypt-salifist-nour-muslim-brotherhood?page=0%2C1