Beyond “Liberal” Female Piety or “Women Read the Qur’an Too” by Amy Levin
Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project
I’m a teacher’s assistant for an undergraduate course at New York University called, “What is Islam?” The other day in... more I’m a teacher’s assistant for an undergraduate course at New York University called, “What is Islam?” The other day in class, my professor asked the students whether or not the Qur’an is considered a “book”. Fraught with anxiety over inheriting such a problematic scholarly tradition of defining and delineating what “religion” is, I kept quiet. While my professor was aiming more for something sounding like, “a book is read, while the Qur’an is recited,” I kept thinking about the physicality and sacrality of the Qur’an (among other authoritative religious texts) and the way it is handled, revered, preserved, loved, an constantly under interpretation. It was about a week later when news broke out that U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan were guilty of burning several copies of the Qur’an on their military base, followed by an unfortunate slew of casualties including at least 30 Afghan deaths and five US soldiers.
"No Person is Illegal"? Configurations and Experiences of" Illegality" Among Undocumented West African and Filipino Migrant Workers In Tel Aviv, Israel
by Sarah Willen
Willen, Sarah S. 2006. "No Person is Illegal"? Configurations and Experiences of "Illegality" among Undocumented West African and Filipino Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv. PhD thesis. Department of Anthropology, Emory University. Atlanta, GA.
“Review of Latino Migrants in a Jewish State by Barak Kalir.”
by Sarah Willen
Willen, Sarah S. Forthcoming 2012. “Review of Latino Migrants in a Jewish State by Barak Kalir.” Review of Middle East Studies. 46(1).
Manchester City victory threatens to strengthen Middle Eastern autocrats
By James M. Dorsey
Manchester City, by winning the Premier League for the first time in more than four... more
By James M. Dorsey
Manchester City, by winning the Premier League for the first time in more than four decades, has defied warnings that money cannot buy soccer success and set an example for Middle Eastern and North African autocrats and wealthy businessmen who employ the beautiful game to strengthen unpopular regimes in what an Egyptian democracy activist describes as the new opium of the people.
The Premier League title crowns the investment of an estimated $1.5 billion that the Abu Dhabi United Group headed by United Arab Emirates royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan pumped into the club since it acquired the struggling team in 2008. The investment was used to acquire high profile players, including Argentinian Carlos Tevez, Robinho, Gareth Barry, Roque Santa Cruz, Emmanuel Adebayor, Kolo Touré and Joleon Lescott for a total of approximately $330 million.
Funds were poured into upgrading Manchester City’s facilities: a new office block was built with bars and an entertainment arena for supporters; the Carrington training ground was revamped. The club’s stadium was renamed Etihad Stadium after Abu Dhabi’s premier airline signed a ten-year, $475 million sponsorship agreement with Manchester City.
The Guardian sports writer David Conn notes in a book to be published early next month, ‘Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football And Growing Up,’ that the deprived neighbourhoods surrounding the club ‘s stadium have benefitted little if anything from Sheikh Mansour’s largesse.
Nonetheless, Manchester City fans enthusiastically greeted the Middle East’s first acquisition of a major European club, by wearing Arab headdress and waving British pound notes with the picture of the queen replaced by a Gulf sheikh at the team’s first post-acquisition match. A picture in The Guardian this weekend shows Sheikh Mansour’s portrait featuring on a fake GBP 500 billion note that Manchester City supporters waved at fans of rival club Chelsea.
Fans have at times also been willing to accept cultural changes that have accompanied Arab acquisitions in Europe. FC Malaga’s new owner, law by its new owner, Qatari royal Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Thani, last year replaced bookmaker William Hill Plc the club’s jersey sponsor because gambling is banned under Islamic. United Nations culture agency UNESCO took the place of the bookmaker.
On the other hand, Real Madrid’s recent decision to remove a Christian cross from its official logo in what it described as the cost of doing business in a globalized world has sparked ire, particularly among anti-Muslim right-wingers. The removal came as Real Madrid embarked on the construction of a $1 billion sport tourist resort in the United Arab Emirates scheduled to open in 2015.
Elsewhere, fans have expressed fears that commercial investment such as new funds that invest in players - Dubai’s United Investment Bank last year launched the Middle East’s first alternative investment soccer fund modelled on similar controversial European funds -- undermines a club’s ability to generate funds of its own and often favours vested interests. Opposition last year by fans of Istanbul’s Besiktas to third party acquisition of three Portuguese players -- Hugo Almeida, Simao Sabrosa and Manuel Fernandez -- was fuelled by unsubstantiated suspicions that the fund involved was a front for club president Yildirim Demiroren, a wealthy businessman who had lent the club just under $100 million.
For Middle Eastern and North African autocrats who have long seen support and control of soccer as a tool to improve their tarnished images, divert attention from widespread grievances and manipulate national emotions the message from Manchester City is that investment in soccer pays political dividends, particularly at a time that the region is wracked by popular unrest. The message is likely to reinforce a tendency to hire and fire managers and coaches depending on how a team performs in its last game rather than in a long-term bid to build a squad’s culture and cohesion. Performance on the pitch is reduced to the prestige of a regime or nation in what to autocratic rulers is a zero sum game.
The message threatens to distort a trend towards professionalization, commercialization and the creation of a proper football industry as a key to unlocking economic opportunity in a world where the soccer pitch is often a battlefield for political, ethnic, religious and gender rights that was sparked by Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 World Cup.
For many in the region, last year’s Asia Cup final in Doha, in which half of the competing teams hailed from the Middle East with not one reaching the semi-finals, constituted a wake-up call. It is an experience, Middle Eastern and North African leaders and soccer officials do not want repeated at the Qatar World Cup for political reasons as well as a sense of pride and realization of what soccer can do for their prestige as well as that of their nations.
Manchester City’s victory threatens to send out the message that money rather than political reform, divorcing soccer from the political control of often unpopular regimes and building a strong, cohesive team over time can do the trick.
Similarly, for European clubs there is risk inherent in dependency on wealthy benefactors and in association with Middle Eastern autocrats.
Michel Platini, the head of Europe’s soccer body, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) warned his week in the wake of the Manchester City title win that that clubs dependant on the largesse of wealthy benefactors could face oblivion if they failed to maintain a realistic level of spending.
Mr. Platini defended UEFA’s new Financial Fair Play rules developed in response to an influx of wealthy club owners that require clubs to balance their soccer-related expenditure over a three-year period by telling Fox Soccer America: “We have to protect the clubs, because until they pay Manchester City will be happy but if they (the owners) leave Manchester City what is going to happen with this club?”
Under the new rules, clubs will initially be allowed to make a loss of $60 million over the first three years, falling to $36 million from 2015–16. Mr. Platini reiterated that despite the Manchester City success, money was not a guarantee. Clubs that violate the Financial Fair Play rules could be excluded from European competitions.
The experience of some European clubs illustrates the risk Mr. Platini was highlighting. Emirati Sheikh Sulaiman Al Fahim , barely three months after acquiring Portsmouth FC several years ago, sold the bulk of his stake to Saudi property tycoon Ali Al-Faraj amid reports that his flagship Hydra Village project in Abu Dhabi was floundering. Mr. Al-Faraj too had no intention of staying involved for long. Soon after the takeover, he announced that he was selling the club. But with no buyer on the horizon, Portsmouth FC went into receivership.
Geneva’s Swiss Super League club Servette FC and Austria’s Admira Wacker haven’t fared much better. Servette is on the brink of collapse after Iranian businessman Majid Pishyar who acquired it in 2008, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Mr. Pishyar, who managed the club on a shoe string, tried unsuccessfully to attract government funding by last year appointing Robert Hensler, a former top civil servant for the canton of Geneva, as vice-president. His earlier efforts to salvage Admira, his first European acquisition, failed too. Servette’s problems come on the heels of the bankruptcy in January of Neuchatel’s Super League team Xamax whose Chechen owner was arrested on charges of fraud and financial mismanagement.
Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak in an interview in
Mr. Conn’s book, an excerpt of which was published in The Guardian this weekend, illustrated the benefits as well as the risks of wealthy ownership. Mr. Al Mubarak expressed surprise at the lack of professional administration that Manchester City’s new owners encountered when they took over the club and described how he had introduced a more professional approach. "One of the big surprises was how amateurish it was. I found it shocking in the famous Premier League, to be without such basic
functions" as a personnel department, he said.
Mr. Al Mubarak appointed former Arsenal winger Brian Marwood as head of administration. Mr. Marwood showed Mr. Conn a 30-page, colour-coded analysis produced by Manchester City's new inter-departmental analytic system for a 15-year-old that was being eyed by the club. For major signings, Mr. Marwood said, the dossiers could run up to 50 pages. Before, he said, "it was in people's heads" Now, it is a spreadsheet that. “that detailed, not left to chance," Mr. Marwood said.
Manchester City is unlikely to be able to comply with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules without Sheikh Mansour. The club’s losses for 2010–11, the year before their finances were assessed under the new regulation, were $294 million, the highest ever by an English football club and five times the total the club is allowed in the coming two years.
In Mr. Conn’s book, Mr. Platini’s concern about an evolving unhealthy relationship between money and soccer seemed lost on Mr. Al Mubarak. “Whichever way I asked Al-Mubarak about the instinctive repulsion many people in football have for this kind of "project" – for a rich man to just buy a club, then pour in as much money as it took to buy success – he did not so much defend what they were doing as fail to understand the question,” Mr. Conn wrote.
“If you said football was not supposed to be about which ‘owner’ had the most money, so who could pay the most to players, thereby seducing them to their club, he (Mr. Al Mubarak) wondered aloud how United had won the Premier League so many times, and how anybody could compete with them without money. If you tried to argue that a club should be a club, belonging to the people who support it, that a sporting competition does not seem sporting if it is owned by one rich man spending whatever it takes to stockpile the necessary mercenary talent, you would be describing an abstract idea with which he was unfamiliar, and which did not match reality as it was, and as it was viewed from Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Conn said.
To Sheikh Masour and Mr. Al Mubarak buying a soccer club may be more fun than the oil and gas industry, the mainstay of Abu Dhabi’s economy, but at the bottom line it remains a business. To them clubs are business. "There is an opportunity we have identified and taken hold of. A mid-tier club will move to become a big club because of the financial resources we are able to make available. Because we see value in making that transition. And that is the bottom line," Mr. Conn quoted Mr. Al Mubarak as saying.
Beyond the financial dependency risk, European acquisition targets also run the risk of being associated with regimes potentially capable of using brute force to suppress popular demands for greater freedom. The UAE has nervously reacted to the mass protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa by cracking down on dissent and freedom of expression at home and investing more than $500 million in the creation of a mercenary force headed by former Blackwater security company head Eric Page for the eventuality of an outbreak of protests at home.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a consultant to geopolitical consulting firm Wikistrat.
A GIS Comparative Analysis of Bronze Age Settlement Patterns and the Contemporary Physical Landscape in the Jazira Region of Syria
by Tony Mathys
Most of the datasets presented in this thesis are available for free in ArcGIS shapefile format on the ShareGeo Open data repository at http://www.sharegeo.ac.uk/.
These datasets are available for everyone to use as it is important to encourage data sharing in support of research activities.
There are also some CORONA satellite images available on ShareGeo for the Syrian Jazira region. The plan is to eventually provide complete CORONA coverage for this region, though geo-referencing will not be precise as it's intended to be more for user orientation.
Acknowledgement should go to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which makes CORONA imagery available via its EarthExplorer online data service at http://edcsns17.cr.usgs.gov/NewEarthExplorer/
Many CORONA images are available to download for free from this service, though require processing and geo-referencing for use in a GIS or a software package for processing remotely sensed imagery.
Relevant to this, and the thesis, is the following paper presented which first introduced how CORONA satellite imagery could be applied to archaeological work in the Near East. Martin Fowler also wrote about the potential of CORONA in the Aerial Archaeology Research Group (AARG) news.
Mathys, Tony. “The Use of Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs in a GIS (IDRISI) to Map Archaeological Sites and the Surrounding Landscape in the Northeastern Region of the Syrian Jazirah. The University of Chicago Oriental Institute, NASA and St. Cloud State University Remote Sensing Applications in Archaeology Conference. St. Cloud, Minnesota, May 29-31, 1997.
Unfortunately, papers presented at this conference were not published.
My gratitude and thanks to Dr Sarah Parcak for citing this unpublished conference paper in her book (Satellite Remote Sensing in Archaeology), and to Dr Aled Rowlands and Dr Apostolos Sarris for citing it in their Journal of Archaeological Science article 34 (2007).
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![](http://photos.academia.edu/282048/69326/76071/tiny_julia.tzvetkova.jpg?1324137985 "<strong>Julia Tzvetkova</strong><br/>Sofia University "St.Kliment Ohridsky""){kind=small}
Download (.pdf) Al-hadâtha wal-idâra al-hadâriyya fî Misr al-'uthmâniyya. As'ila wa tafsîrât (Modernity and Administration in Ottoman Egypt: Questions and Research Perspectives)
by Nora Lafi
in Nasser Ahmed Ibrahim (ed.), Objectivity and Subjectivity in the Historiography of Egypt, in Honour of Nelly Hanna, Cairo, Gebo, 2012, p.263-273.
Egypt has always been an important research field for studies on urban governance in an Arab context. Many seminal... more
Egypt has always been an important research field for studies on urban governance in an Arab context. Many seminal concepts in the analysis of the 'Islamic' city or of the 'Arab city' were built in the Egyptian context. The Ottoman period however has always had a speficific status in this panorama. Between the 'medieval' paradigm of Islamic urban governance and the 'modern' paradigm of reformed urban governance, Ottoman times have always been objects of contradictory readings. On the one hand they were
seen in Egypt as a distorsion of the medieval urban heritage, and on the other hand they were already a distorsion of the relationship to urban modernity, a relationship then even more distorted by the colonial influence. The object of this paper, based on the study of archives from BOA in Istanbul, court record in Cairo and SHAT in Vincennes, and on local chronicles, is to try and propose a reading of urban government features
in Ottoman Egypt that could both go beyond this unsatisfactory dichotomy and discuss such important paradigms as old regime urban governance and the various morphologies of reform of the inherited framework, the aim being to discuss the very nature of urban governance in Ottoman Egypt, between institutional aspects and the various scales of relationship of the individual to power, urbanity, citadinity, community, religion and profession.
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Egyptian military’s loss of popularity brings ultras in from the cold
By James M. Dorsey
It took Egypt’s military brass less than six months to first isolate street-battle... more
By James M. Dorsey
It took Egypt’s military brass less than six months to first isolate street-battle hardened soccer fans, the country’s most militant opponents of military rule, and then restore their waning popularity amid mushrooming protests demanding an immediate return of the armed forces to their barracks and a transition to civilian government.
The ultras– militant, highly politicized, violence-prone soccer fans modeled on similar groups in Italy and Serbia – chanting "Where are the Baltagiya (thugs)? The Revolutionaries are here" and “Tantawi is Mubarak,” joined this weekend thousands of protesters in a confrontation with security forces in Cairo near the defense ministry.
The timing of the protest could not have been more symbolic – the 84th birthday of ousted President Hosni Mubarak with whom the protesters have come to equate Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
The health ministry said a soldier was killed and more than 400 people injured in clashes between the protesters and security forces barely three weeks before the first scheduled presidential elections since the toppling of Mubarak more than a year ago. A group of doctors aiding wounded protesters said two demonstrators had died of shotgun wounds.
The government declared a night curfew in the area around the defense ministry in Cairo’s Al Abbasiya neighborhood. Similar protests occurred in other Egyptian cities, including Alexandria and Suez. An effort by protesters to defy the curfew was repelled in part by residents of Abbasiya, a stronghold of support for Mubarak and the military.
The joining of forces of Salafists – proponents of return to life as it was at the time of the Prophet Mohammed --, Islamists, youth and left wing groups and ultras in their demand for an end to military rule in defiance of a warning by SCAF that it would not tolerate protests near the defense ministry or military facilities symbolizes the military’s misreading of the public mood.
The coming together of protesters of all walks of life was a far cry from the scene in late November and early December when protesters on Tahrir Square first called on the ultras to protect them against attacks by security forces but then abandoned them as they fought vicious street battles with the police in a street just off the square. Some 50 people were killed at the time in the fighting and more than a thousand wounded.
The then isolation of the youth groups and ultras – respected for their years of resistance in the stadiums to Mubarak’s brutal security forces and celebrated for their key role in toppling the hated leader -- reflected growing protest weariness at a time that the public retained confidence in the military despite its brutality, was frustrated by the lack of economic fruits of their popular revolt and longed for a return to normalcy that would put Egypt back on the path of economic growth.
The ultras’ increasing marginalization was evident in their lonely battle in recent months to demand justice for the 74 soccer fans killed in early February in a soccer brawl in Port Suez, the worst incident in Egyptian sporting history that was widely seen as an effort by the security forces to teach the militants a lesson.
Security forces failed to intervene in the brawl in which pro-government thugs armed with sticks and knives were believed to have been involved. The government has charged 61 people, including nine security officials, with responsibility for the incident. The incident led to the cancellation of this season’s top two soccer competitions. A majority of the dead were supporters of Al Ahly SC, Egypt and Africa’s foremost soccer club.
A series of unpopular measures widely seen as an effort by the military to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election to ensure that a civilian-led Egypt is governed by a president and government sympathetic to safeguarding the role of the armed forces in politics and its stake in the economy and shield them from external oversight has over the past week brought protesters back in to the streets in ever growing numbers.
The measures included the banning of popular Islamist politicians and others from standing for president and culminated in an attack by thugs on anti-military protesters last Wednesday that left 11 people dead, some of them shot, others reportedly with their throats slit. Like in the case of Port Said, few doubt that the military at the very least had turned a blind eye to aggression by unidentified pro-regime thugs.
The mounting tension has strengthened the resolve of the ultras to force justice for their fallen comrades in Port Said and press for an end to military rule. In a show of unity in March, ultras of crowned Cairo arch rivals Ahly and Al Zamalek SC warned that they would sacrifice their lives to achieve their goals.
The statement at the end of a historic meeting between the two groups who have bitterly fought each other since their inception in 2007 suggested a sea change in Egypt’s soccer politics and a cementing of relationships among rival groups that have the organization and street battle experience to turn the military’s effort to mold Egypt in its image into a bitter and bloody struggle.
State-owned Al Ahram newspaper warned earlier this year that the ultras were “a time bomb ticking due to lack of justice for fallen comrades following the Port Said disaster.”
In a statement almost two months after the Port Said incident, Ultras Ahlawy said: “You can call us thugs, you can call us crazy, but we will be crazy to regain our rights, either through legal avenues or with our bare hands. We are ready to die for our rights; we are ready to add to the toll of 74 deaths.”
The ultras bring to the demonstrations against the military in Al Abbasiya the same degree of fearlessness, recklessness and abandon that they brought to last year’s mass protests on Tahrir Square that forced Mubarak to resign after 30 years in office.
"The government has turned the ultras into their enemy. That was a mistake. The ultras are passionate; they don’t have a specific agenda and don’t want to be labeled politically. They go into battle with abandon impervious to what it may produce,” said Mohammed Gamal Bashir aka Gemyhood, a founder of the UWK and author of a recent Arabic-language book about the ultras who is widely seen as the movement’s Egyptian godfather.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Toplumsal Hareketler ve Yeni Alternatif - Radikal Medyalar
by barış çoban
Yeditepe Üniversitesi İletişim Çalışmaları Dergisi 2011, no:14
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Conflicting visions of society spark Israeli and Egyptian soccer violence
By James M. Dorsey
Fan violence has sparked match cancellations on both sides of the Arab-Israeli... more
By James M. Dorsey
Fan violence has sparked match cancellations on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.
The stakes for Egyptian and Israeli soccer fans are high – the nature of the society they want to live in and in some cases the very existence of some of their financially troubled clubs – even if the two groups are likely to agree on little more than their passion for the game.
For militant Egyptian soccer fans the battle is about securing the goals of last year’s popular uprising that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, ending military rule and saving clubs from financial ruin as a result of initial suspension and ultimate cancellation of Egypt’s top two tournaments. A majority of Egyptian fans, who favor a more pro-Palestinian Egyptian foreign policy, have little empathy for their Israeli counterparts whom they see as thugs, many of whom are racists with their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants attitudes.
The Egyptian view is not unfounded even if leaders of the Egyptian ultras – militant, highly politicized, street battle-hardened fan groups modeled on similar organizations in Italy and Serbia – are struggling to keep their rank and file whose cry for dignity is often expressed in clashes with security forces under control.
Israeli soccer brawls over the past month ranged from pure hooliganism and violent clashes between players to attacks on Palestinians and more moderate Jews outside the confines of the stadium. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday called for a crackdown on violence on the soccer field, after fighting broke out on Friday between players of Hapoel Ramat Gan and Bnei Lod. "If there's violence, there will not be soccer. We must uproot this violence in order to return to games that spectators can enjoy, myself among them,” Mr. Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting according to The Jerusalem Post.
The incident in Ramat Gan followed thousands of Hapoel Tel Aviv fans rioting on the pitch after their team lost to Maccabi Tel Aviv.
A few days later, two fans of Maccabi Petach Tikvah attempted to attack a referee. In late March a Hapoel Haifa player was hospitalized after being headbutted by a Maccabi Petach Tikvah coach and then kicked in the head by a team associate. The two most onerous incidents involved militant anti-Arab fans of financially troubled Beitar Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s notorious club, in which supporters first attacked Palestinian workers and shoppers in a Jerusalem mall and later a Jewish woman who protested against their racist attitude. Police were severely criticized for failing to intervene in the mall attack.
The situation in nationalist Israel and post-Egypt could not be more different the laxity of the Israeli police notwithstanding. Yet, they are similar when it comes to the lack of political will on both sides of the Egyptian-Israeli divide to tackle soccer violence as well as governments’ failure to create an environment in which politically motivated violence is viewed as unacceptable. To be sure, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has responded firmly to player violence but despite being the only soccer body in the Middle East and North Africa to have launched an anti-racist campaign has been lenient in meting out punishments for politically motivated violence.
The IFA last month significantly reduced Beitar's punishment for soccer violence from three home games out of town and one behind partly closed doors to on the grounds that the measure would not change fan behavior. With the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s Premier League, Beitar has faced since 2005 more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including point deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racism.
Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s mostly Sephardic fans of Middle Eastern and North African origin, revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of East European extraction rivals their disdain for Palestinians. Supported by Israeli right wing leaders, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities. Beitar is Israel’s only leading club never to have signed an Israeli Palestinian player because of fan pressure despite the fact that Palestinians are among the country’s top players.
By contrast, Egyptian teams already reeling from the cancellation of the Premier League in February following the death of 74 fans in a brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said fear financial disaster as a result of Sunday’s looming annulment of the Egypt Cup. The Egyptian Football Association (EFA) has appealed to the country’s military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to step in after a refusal by the interior ministry, which controls the police and the security forces. The refusal was prompted by the security forces’ reluctance to engage with deeply hostile, militant soccer fans because clashes would further damage their already tarnished image as the executioners of the former Mubarak regime and the military.
The military and the police have done little in the 14 months since Mubarak’s departure to polish the image of the security forces by projecting a willingness to reform the police, holding officers accountable for their actions and being seen to investigate the Port Said incident that allows the chips to fall where they fall. The trial against 61, people including fans and nine security officials, accused of responsibility for Port Said was suspended at its opening last week after disruptions by family and friends of the dead.
Police reform is a tough pill to swallow for the Egyptian military. The military “find themselves in a classic Catch-22 situation with regards to police reform. If they listen to the aspirations of the people and fully reform the police, they lose a valuable tool of state control. Should reform take place, where would the buck stop? Real reform in state institutions might later have personal ramifications for SCAF itself, as Egyptians are already calling for civilian control over the military, which may lead to investigations of the military junta down the line. On the other hand, should SCAF choose not to fully reform the police, they risk continued clashes with the people, who no longer fear the police - and consider it one of the last remaining bastions of the old regime,” said Adel Abdel Ghafar, a PhD scholar at the Australian National University and scion of a prominent Egyptian soccer figure, writing on Al Jazeera.com.
Granted, the Israeli police does not have the problems of their Egyptian counterpart. But if the stakes in Egypt are a more transparent, more accountable society, in Israel they are the very democracy that the Jewish state prides itself on, which increasingly is less based on tolerance and respect for diverging opinions and ethnic and religious minorities and ever more so on intolerance and the brutalizing effects of 45 years of occupation of Palestinian lands.
Violence in Israel is not limited to the soccer pitch. A senior Israeli military officer was celebrated by Israel’s right wing after attacking on camera a bicycle protester on the West Bank on camera in the same week as the Ramat Gan incident. Youths on a Tel Aviv beach taunted and abused a mentally disturbed woman inviting her to have sex with them.
The battles in Egypt and Israel are fought on multiple battlefields of which soccer is an important one. That puts the onus not only on governments but also on soccer associations, club management and last but not least world soccer body FIFA, which so far for all practical matters has looked the other way by at best issuing lame protests that Israelis and Egyptians can ignore because there is no price to pay.
With an inept military more concerned about its perks than the country’s future in charge in Egypt and an Israeli government that includes many Beitar Jerusalem supporters, little can be expected beyond at best demands for law enforcement from the highest authority in the country.
That means that the national soccer federations, FIFA and the regional associations, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the Confederation of African Football (CAF), more than ever need to step up to the plate.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Turkey and Tehran: Caught between a rock and a hard place
Turkish Review
BY JAMES DORSEY, S. RAJARATNAM SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL... more
Turkish Review
BY JAMES DORSEY, S. RAJARATNAM SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY, SINGAPORE
Turkey’s besting Iran in the contest for the hearts and minds of advocates of change in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa is proving to be both a blessing and a curse. With tension mounting over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the
perceived window of opportunity for a military strike closing, Turkey faces increased challenges and the threat of a proxy war with Syria and the Islamic republic. This is compounded by the fact that the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia need Turkey in their
effort to further corner the regime in Syria and to isolate Iran, but want to prevent a shift in regional power away from the kingdom and the Israeli state to Ankara -- increasingly held up as the model of an economically successful, Islamist-led democracy.
A concerted effort by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia to further isolate Iran has laid bare the challenges facing Turkey against the backdrop of an ever more severe sanctions regime, increased debate regarding a military strike to prevent the Islamic
republic from developing a nuclear weapon and popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
The challenges are evident in the anti-Iranian campaign’s little noticed subtext, with the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel seeking to prevent a shift of power in the region from Israel and the Gulf to Turkey and Iran. All three see benefit in Turkey’s rising star as a result of its emotional support for Palestine, its deteriorating relations with its erstwhile ally Israel, its perceived support for the Arab revolt, an impressive economic performance and the fact that it is ruled by an elected Islamist government. (The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), despite its Islamist origins nd appeal as well as a continued widespread perception of the party as Islamist, rejects this label, arguing that it has put its Islamist past behind it.) However, the trio does not want Turkey’s ascendance to be at the expense of either the kingdom or the Jewish state.
Turkey has so far largely been shielded from criticism that it, like the US, is seeking to maintain the status quo in the Gulf and has failed to match words with deeds in its condemnation of the Syrian regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters,
one which has already cost more than 5,000 lives. The veil shrouding contradictions in Turkish -- as well as US, Israeli and Saudi -- policy could well soon be lifted, with Syria emerging as a crucial flashpoint in the mushrooming power struggle in the Middle \ East \ and North Africa (MENA). Increasingly it is looking like a matter of when rather than if the wave of protests truly spreads to the energy-rich Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia first and foremost among them.
The gradual morphing of the 11-month old Syrian protests into a civil war, much as was the case in Libya, leaves Turkey stuck between a rock and a hard place. With little appetite for military intervention despite its support of the revolt and warnings
that there would be consequences if Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad failed to engage with his detractors and initiate political and economic reform, Turkey risks being perceived as a paper tiger. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu insisted
Turkey was “ready for all possible scenarios” but had as yet not considered military intervention and didn’t want to. Similarly, he suggested that Turkey could create a military buffer zone within Syria, should tens of thousands of Syrians seek refuge in
Turkey, all the while insisting that such a zone was “not on the agenda.” This reluctance to put its money where its mouth is from Turkey is not a stance it is likely to be able to maintain for much longer, with the failure of Arab League monitors in
Syria, tightening economic sanctions and an Arab League-backed move to get UN Security Council endorsement of its call for al-Assad to step down.
Turkey could end up in the same boat as the US, which has seen its influence and credibility in MENA wane because of its inability to match its words with deeds. Despite its denunciations of al-Assad, Turkey has -- like the US -- remained silent on the need
for change in the Gulf.Like the US it has a vested interest in ensuring that the revolt does not hit the region, Saudi Arabia in particular, with full force.
Consequently, the struggle of US President Barack Obama is one Turkey may well face.The US administration is finding it difficult to wield its influence in a region with a more
assertive Arab public opinion, one demanding that Washington make good on its promises in terms of both the revolution and declared support for an independent Palestinian state.
Obama’s inability to do so, particularly in an election year, means that the US is finding it increasingly hard to perform its past balancing of diametrically opposed demands and
expectations from its allies in the Middle East and North Africa. US support for the toppling of leaders like Egypt’s Gen. Hosni Mubarak has damaged its ties to key autocratic
allies like Saudi Arabia, while the need to be seen to be make real steps in furthering Palestinian independence threatens to put it on a collision course with Israel.
Turkey’s potential policy dilemma is complicated by continued fallout from the 2010 killing by Israeli Special Forces of nine Turkish nationals aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish aid ship seeking to run Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Israel imposed its naval blockade on Gaza after Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007, with Tel Aviv saying it was necessary to prevent weapons being supplied to
militants in the strip. Critics of the sea and land blockade describe it as collective punishment of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
Turkey has painted itself into a corner with its refusal to reverse the downgrading of diplomatic relations with Israel to the level of second secretary and the suspension of all military cooperation. Ankara is adamant that these measures will continue as long
as Israel fails to apologize or offer compensation for the death of the Turkish activists,and maintains its blockade of Gaza. Short term, Turkey’s attitude has garnered it popular support across the Arab and Muslim world, but longer term it has complicated
Turkey’s efforts to shield itself from being drawn into the region’s multiple conflicts.
Turkey’s stance on Israel means it has little (if any) ability to bring Israel and Iran back from the brink of a military confrontation at a time that escalating tension between the two countries threatens to impair Turkey’s efforts to project itself as a regional Islamic,democratic, economic and military power.
While Turkish defense and military officials have little doubt that Israel would prevail in a military confrontation with Iran, even if it is unlikely to fully destroy Iran’s decentralized and heavily fortified nuclear facilities, they worry that likely Iranian retaliatory attacks against Israel, as well as against US targets in the Gulf and
Afghanistan, would escalate confrontation with Iran. As a result, members of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling AK Party have criticized him for responding emotionally to Israeli policies. While they remain critical of Tel Aviv, they have urged
Erdoğan to repair relations with Israel in a bid to ensure that Turkey can truly act as a bridge across the West-East divide as well as MENA’s fault lines. The key to Turkey’s role may indeed lie partially in Israel, but Turkey has only a limited window of opportunity to keep the door open as Western nations and Israel increasingly rattle their sabers.
In the event of a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, any effort by Ankara to remain on the sidelines risks Turkey’s being portrayed in Tel Aviv and Washington as having not only turned on Israel -- often a yardstick in the West for assessing Turkish foreign policy -- but also sided with the enemy. Already
Tehran eyes Ankara’s condemnation of al-Assad, as well as its mounting popularity in a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Gulf, with suspicion. Tehran views these developments as a US-Saudi conspiracy designed to prevent the
Islamic Revolution of over 30 years ago getting the credit it deserves as an inspiration for the Arab revolt and to stymie the appeal of the Islamic republic for states in the turbulent region.
In a series of messages, Iranian leaders warned Turkey that Turkish support for an international campaign against Syria, the Islamic republic’s foremost Arab ally, and Syrian opposition groups would constitute a red line -- warnings Turkey has so far
ignored. Without Syria, Iran would be left only with Iraq as its foremost interlocutor in the Arab world. Iraq lacks Syria’s relationship with groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon
and Hamas in Palestine and is unlikely to be as compliant and strategic a friend as Syria is. Turkey compounded Iran’s narrowing options by not only setting its warnings
aside but going a step further with its agreement to install on Turkish soil a NATO radar system believed to constitute a shield against Iranian ballistic missiles. In recent weeks, it has also started looking at reducing its dependence on imports of Iranian oil as Western powers crack down on Iran’s oil sales and the Islamic republic threatens to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Turkey sought to soften the blow by suggesting that majority state-owned Halkbank would continue to handle Iranian oil payments as long as that does not run afoul of the sanctions regime.
Turkish officials and analysts fear that mounting tension with Iran could produce a covert proxy war, with Iran and Syria supporting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has stepped up attacks on Turkish military targets in the southeast of the country.Syria and Iran have already halted their security cooperation with Turkey with regard to the Kurds. Conservative Iranian columnists have denounced Erdoğan’s government in
recent months as a Sunni Muslim dictatorship that does not represent half the country’s population -- a reference to Turkey’ large Kurdish and Alevi communities. They warned that Turkey’s minorities constituted its Achilles’ heel and a potentially destabilizing factor.
In a strange twist, Iranian soccer, pockmarked by nationalist and environmental protests in Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province, offers a perspective of how Turkey could respond in a proxy war with Syria and Iran -- one using ethnic minorities as pawns. The soccer protests in the Bagh Shomal and Yadegar-e-Emam stadiums in Tabriz, the capital of the province, signal a rise in Azeri nationalism. This trend would enable Turkey to exploit
secessionist sentiments among its Turkic brethren in the predominantly Azeri East Azerbaijan Province, which borders the Turkic former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, a close Turkish ally.
In the latest soccer incident in Tabriz, fans of Tabriz soccer club Tractor Sazi Tabriz F.C. -- a focus of Iranian Azerbaijan’s identity politics owned by the state-run Iran Tractor Manufacturing Co. (ITMCO) -- wore shirts bearing Turkey and Azerbaijan’s flags and
raised the latter emblem during a match against Fajr-e Sepasi F.C. of Shiraz. “[The] Iranian regime will […] charge them with separatism and even arrest them. The main [Iranian concern] is that the idea of Turkism is strengthening in South Azerbaijan,”
Azeri news website news.az quoted Saftar Rahimli, a member of the board of the World Azerbaijanis Congress, as saying. Rahimli was referring to the East Azerbaijan Province by its nationalist Azeri name.
A conservative, pro-Iranian website, Raja News, confirmed the incident in November, charging that the soccer fans had employed “separatist symbols” and shouted separatist
slogans during the match. Raja News accused the fans of promoting “pan-Turkish” and “deviant” objectives. It urged authorities to ban nationalist fans from entering soccer
stadiums.
The protests during the match against the Shiraz-based club followed similar protests in September and October sparked by the Iranian parliament’s refusal to fund efforts to save
the threatened Lake Orumiyeh and by anti-government protests in Tehran’s Azadi Stadium.The latter occurred both during last month’s 2014 World Cup qualifier against Bahrain and
at a ceremony in May following the death of Nasser Hejazi, an internationally acclaimed Iranian defender and outspoken critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A decision by security forces in early October to bar fans’ entry into the stadium during a match against Tehran’s Esteghlal sent thousands into the streets of Tabriz shouting “Azerbaijan is united!” and “Long live united Azerbaijan with its capital in Tabriz!” Scores were injured as security forces tried to break up the protest. Cars honking their horns choked traffic.
“Wherever Tractor goes, fans of the opposing club chant insulting slogans. They imitate the sound of donkeys, because Azerbaijanis are historically derided as stupid and stubborn.
I remember incidents going back to the time that I was a teenager,” said a long-standingobserver of Iranian soccer.
Mounting Iran-focused tension serves, at least in the case of Israel and Saudi Arabia, multiple purposes that go beyond the nuclear threat. It puts Turkey on the spot and shifts
attention away from the wave of revolts sweeping MENA.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. This story first appeared in Turkish Review
Foreign Direct Investment in the Arab World: an Analysis of Flows and an Evaluation of Country Specific Business Environment
This is my Master's Thesis of Master in International Management (MIM) at University of Trento, Italy
Safi, A. Zamrian, M. “Foreign Direct Investment in the Arab world: an Analysis of Flows and an Evaluation of Country Specific Business Environment” Published in "University of Trento: Italy." March 2012.
Currently, Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) are considered to be one of the most attractive tools of international... more Currently, Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) are considered to be one of the most attractive tools of international business for large investments in foreign countries. International business is transforming the world in a way that has not been possible in previous years. On the other hand, FDI is growing faster than international production within the framework of international trade. This makes it possible for FDI to become a major instrument of spreading wealth. Global FDI flows rose to $1.24 trillion in 2010, but were still 15% below their pre-crisis average. This is in contrast to global industrial output and trade, which were back to pre-crisis levels. The UNCTAD estimates that global FDI will regain its pre-crisis level in 2011, increasing $1.4–1.6 trillion, and approaching its 2007 peak in 2013. This positive scenario holds, barring any unexpected global economic shocks that may arise from a number of risk factors still in play. Concerning the Arab world for the last two decades the FDI has been grown very fast regarding to the new policy. The political instability discourages investors to pay attention to risky spot. Arab world FDI and stocks is concentrated in few countries and sectors, for instance about 80% of the FDI in 2010 is concentrated in six countries: Saudi Arabia 42%, Egypt 10%, Qatar 8%, Lebanon 7%, United Arab Emirates 6% and Libyan Arab Jamahiriya 6%. The business environment and the economic performance of the Arab World still improving and the new policy and regulation that have been implemented in the Arab countries increased the attractiveness level of the FDI toward Arab countries. Despite the low rank of WGI in Arab World and the correlation of investment in some of the six indicators between countries in the Arab world especially in the highest receiver of FDI flows and in particular the GCC region the Business Doing reported great rank in regards to the proper business atmosphere for foreign investors. The six of the Arab countries Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Tunisia and Oman have climbed the scale on the ease of doing business ranked among the top 50 out of 183 countries, while Algeria, Comoros Mauritania, Iraq and Djibouti ranked very low on the same scale. The new policy and modification, which has been confirmed from World Bank by the Doing Business reports about the business environment of Arab World, show that their domestic laws in these countries pay attention to foreign companies to increase the investment in Arab world.
UAE cancels soccer match amid mounting tension with Iran
By James M. Dorsey
Increasingly strained relations between Iran and oil-rich Arab Gulf states spilled on to... more
By James M. Dorsey
Increasingly strained relations between Iran and oil-rich Arab Gulf states spilled on to the soccer pitch this weekend with the United Arab Emirates cancelling a friendly match against the Islamic republic and recalling its ambassador in Tehran.
The move against the backdrop of a war of words between Iran and Qatar and a regional battle for influence with Saudi Arabia was in protest against a controversial visit by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to two disputed islands in the Gulf 60 kilometres off the UAE coast, Greater and Lesser Tunbs. Iran occupied the two potentially oil-rich islands as well as a third one, Abu Musa, located near key shipping routes at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz in 1971 on the eve of the formation of the UAE as an independent state. The visit was part of tour by Mr. Ahmadinejad of the Iranian Gulf coast. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if Iran or the United States were to attack its nuclear facilities.
The UAE foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahayan denounced the visit as a "flagrant violation of the UAE's sovereignty'". His ministry said the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that groups Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman would meet on Tuesday, the day the match was scheduled to be played, to discuss the Iranian president's visit. The UAE immediately after cancelling the soccer match withdrew its ambassador from Teheran.
Iranian soccer officials said they would file a protest against the cancellation of the match that with world governing soccer body FIIFA. They noted that Nigeria was ordered to pay $300,000 to the Iranian football federation after cancelling in 2010 a friendly against the Islamic republic on political grounds.
It is not immediately clear why Mr. Ahmadinejad chose to provoke the UAE at a moment that Iran is engaged in six-party talks about its nuclear program in a bid to weaken international sanctions and reduce the risk of an Israeli and/or US military strike. A second round of the talks which resumed in Istanbul this weekend for the first time in more than a year is scheduled for May 23 in Baghdad.
The UAE last year emerged in remarks made by its ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, as the first Gulf state to publicly endorse military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, should peaceful efforts to resolve the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program fail. The UAE at the time also restricted Iran’s use of Dubai to imports goods sanctioned by the United Nations and the United States. The ambassador's remarks reflected the Emirates' mounting frustration with Iran’s refusal to resolve the dispute over the islands.
Mr. Otaiba described a nuclear-armed Iran as the foremost threat to the UAE, and one that needed to be neutralized at whatever cost. His remarks suggested that in case of military action, the UAE would prefer a US to an Israeli strike because that was less likely to fuel popular anger, particularly among Shiites, at a time of widespread civil unrest in the Middle East and North AFRICA
Mr. Otaiba described the UAE as the country most threatened by Iran. Contrasting the threat against the UAE with the danger a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the US, Mr. Otaiba said that a nuclear Iran would “threaten the peace process, it will threaten balance of power, it will threaten everything else, but it will not threaten you. . . . Our military . . . wakes up, dreams, breathes, eats, sleeps the Iranian threat. It's the only conventional military threat our military plans for, trains for, equips for. . . . There's no country in the region that is a threat to the UAE [besides] Iran."
Satellite imagery last year revealed Iranian installations on Abu Musa that included three missile launch pads, an elaborate underground market, and a sports field with the words “Persian Gulf” emblazoned on it -- a provocative reminder of Iran’s hegemonic view of a region the Gulf states describe as the Arab Gulf. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Zayed last year stopped short of comparing Iran’s occupation of the islands to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. “Iran refuses to allow us to send teachers, doctors and nurses. I am not comparing Iran to Israel, but Iran should be more careful than others,” Sheikh Zayed said.
The UAE has worked to ensure that its security is closely linked to U.S. and European security interests. French President Nicolas Sarkozy last year inaugurated in Abu Dhabi France’s first military base in the region. The base, which comprises three sites on the banks of the Strait of Hormuz, houses a naval and air base as well as a training camp, and is home to 500 French troops. Alongside other smaller Gulf states, the UAE has further agreed to the deployment of U.S. anti-missile batteries on its territory. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are expected to spend up to $100 billion on arms procurement in the next five years.
With his remarks, Mr. Otaiba signalled further that the UAE was willing to pay a price for stopping Iranian nuclear proliferation, and could afford to do so now that Abu Dhabi had cemented its predominance among the UAE emirates following the financial crisis in Dubai.
“There will be backlash, and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and [being] very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country,” Mr. Otaiba said. “That is going to happen no matter what.”
But he added, “If you are asking me, 'Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran,' my answer is still the same: We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.”
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Middle Eastern buying spree changes European soccer landscape
By James M. Dorsey
Play the Game
13 April 2012
Alongside their successful bids for... more
By James M. Dorsey
Play the Game
13 April 2012
Alongside their successful bids for high profiled sports events, Qatar and other Gulf states are gaining an increasing influence in European football through their acquisition of European soccer clubs, broadcasting rights and sponsorships. James M. Dorsey maps the Middle Eastern offensive, which is welcomed by some fan groups, but questioned by other stakeholders.
A Middle Eastern soccer-focused buying spree is changing the European football landscape even if the jury is still out on whether money can buy success on the pitch.
Spearheaded by gas-rich Qatar, Middle Eastern states, royals and wealthy businessmen have in recent years acquired soccer clubs and top European league broadcast rights as part of a multi-layered strategy designed to boost international images, strengthen national pride and identity, create business opportunities and generate tourism.
In financial terms and purchasing power, Middle Eastern cash has by and large bolstered teams it has acquired in Britain, France, Spain and Germany by fuelling expensive transfers and enabling clubs to upgrade their facilities even if it has yet to produce trophies. Critics charge, however, that money is insufficient to buy success and note that some clubs have suffered the downside of failed and politically troubled Middle Eastern acquisitions.
The Middle East’s lists of acquisitions is impressive even if Gulf buyers have at times signalled their refusal to buy at any price and found out the hard way that money can’t buy everything. Qatar has so far failed to secure a prize catch, Manchester United, reportedly because of a discrepancy of several hundred million dollars between the asking price and the Gulf state’s bid; Dubai International Capital’s efforts several years ago to gain control of Liverpool FC failed too as did Qatar’s attempt last year to gain control of AS Roma; and a bid by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Fund, to acquire the media agency that controls the broadcasting rights to world soccer body FIFA’s World Cup lost out to a London-based private equity firm, Bridgepoint Capital
Target list reads like a who’s who
Nevertheless, the region’s soccer-related European holdings, sponsorships and acquisition target list reads like a who’s who. The spree was kicked off by Emirates Airlines as far back as 2004 with its 15-year sponsorship of Arsenal FC valued at GBP 100 million and the renaming of its stadium as Emirates Stadium.
The agreement was at the time the largest ever British sponsorship deal. Other Emirates European sponsorships followed including AC Milan, Real Madrid, Paris Saint Germain, Hamburger SV and Olympiacos FC as well as FIFA. To its credit, Emirates proved among the sponsors to be the most vocal in its criticism of the soccer body’s handling of the worst corruption crisis in its 108-year old history.
Fans enthusiastically greeted the, the Middle East’s first acquisition of a European club, by wearing in 2008 Arab headdress and waving British pound notes with the picture of the queen replaced by a Gulf sheikh at the team’s first post-acquisition match. Little wonder given that the new owners within 24 hours of their takeover had put GBP 100 million on the table for player acquisition and clinched Real Madrid's Brazilian forward Robinho for a British record £32.5m when he had seemed destined for Chelsea. A stream of high profile acquisitions followed. Performance has improved radically with Manchester City winning in 2011 its first FA Cup in 42 years and qualifying for the first time for the UEFA Champions League. Manchester City has since concluded a controversial, ten-year, GBP 400 million sponsorship deal with Abu Dhabi carrier Etihad that sparked renew discussion about financial fair play given that it could give the Manchester Club an unfair advantage.
The acquisition of Manchester City followed in 2011 by that of Spanish La Liga soccer club Getafe CF by Dubai-based company Royal Emirates Group owned by Dubai royal Sheikh Butti Bin Suhail Al Maktoum for an estimated $100 million and of financially troubled second division German soccer club TSV 1860 Munich by a 34-year old Abu Dhabi-based Jordanian businessman, Hasan Abdullah Ismaik, were exceptions rather than the rule of the UAE’s sports strategy. Unlike rival Qatar, the UAE despite its acquisitions seems more narrowly focussed on the commercial aspects of sports with sponsorships, the hosting of international tournaments and finance.
In an illustration of the UAE’s focus, Dubai’s United Investment Bank last year launched the region’s first alternative investment soccer fund modelled on similar controversial European funds amid rising fan opposition in Turkey, Spain and Portugal. The Royal Football Fund aims to hedge bets in football player markets by acquiring the economic rights of young players in Latin America, Africa and Europe. An estimated 20 per cent of the fund will be invested in listed soccer clubs and television rights for friendly games and tournaments.
Fans fear that the association with investment funds undermines a club’s ability to generate funds of its own and often favours vested interests. Besiktas fan opposition to third party acquisition of three Portuguese players -- Hugo Almeida, Simao Sabrosa and Manuel Fernandez -- was for example fuelled by unsubstantiated suspicions that the fund involved was a front for club president Yildirim Demiroren, a wealthy businessman who has lent Besiktas just under $100 million.
Qatar becomes the Middle East’s buyer per excellence
Not that Qatar has been oblivious to the commercial and reputational benefits of sponsorship – think Qatar Foundation’s 2010 $225 million sponsorship of Barcelona FC and the 2011 naming of Qatar Airways as the Tour de France’s official airline – and tournament hosting – its controversial success in winning the right to host the 2022 World Cup.
Brasher than the UAE, certainly after the financial crisis in Dubai in 2008 that has left the emirate laden with debt, Qatar has emerged as the Middle East’s buyer per excellence with not only a willingness to wield more cash but also with more associated assets to leverage such as its Al Jazeera television network. Qatar Sports Investments last year matched Abu Dhabi’s purchase of Manchester City with its acquisition of a 70 per cent stake in Paris Saint-Germain, which hasn’t won a match in the past month, as well as of Malaga FC by Qatari royal Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Thani.
Qatar’s strategy, in contrast to that of the UAE, appears to be anchored in a more fundamental policy that aims to make sports a pillar of national identity and has had greater success in commercially leveraging its assets. Al Jazeera, for one, is taking aim at Europe's pay-TV market, using sport to build a global media brand. The broadcaster is racing to launch a new French channel in early June in time for the European soccer championships after spending some 300 million euros on broadcast rights to France's soccer league, the Champions League and Europa League, as well as some top-flight games from Germany and Italy.
The broadcaster is also reported to be willing to pay big money in a bid for UK rights to the English Premier League now mostly held by News Corp affiliate BSkyB. Al Jazeera’s European campaign builds on its success as the most popular sports network in the Middle East and Africa, with two free and 15 pay channels, plus an English version with a dozen commentators and producers. To compete however with the likes of Sky and France’s Canal+, Al Jazeera will have to build a distribution platform of its own, involving deals with cable, telecommunications, and satellite operators.
Al Jazeera also recently acquired rights to the Champions League and the UEFA EURO 2012 and 2016, as well as some top German and Italian matches and looking at challenging this spring Rupert Murdoch’s BskyB for British rights to the English Premier League, at approximately $3 billion the world’s most expensive soccer league broadcast rights. Al Jazeera could also bid for German Bundesliga rights. Al Jazeera acquired the rights under its new French company beIN SPORT together with TF1 and M6. IPTV operator Free has agreed to provide Al Jazeera a French platform, but the broadcaster has yet to sign similar agreements elsewhere in Europe as well as in the United States.
Spain and Germany have emerged as the greatest beneficiaries of the commercial offsets that energy-rich Gulf states hope to reap from their massive investments in professional sports. Sheikh Abdullah won a contract in May 2011 to develop the $550 million Marbella yacht port project a year after his acquisition of Malaga. Royal Emirates Group is looking at investing in tourism and solar-energy projects, including a spa resort based on a former Arab settlement near Granada, Wadi Ash. Granada was Muslim-controlled when Spain was ruled by Muslims from 711 until the inquisition in 1492. German companies are big winners in the massive $65 billion business to prepare Qatar for the World Cup. Qatar has allocated on average 40 per cent of its annual budget to infrastructure, including nine stadiums, for the next five years and German companies have or expect a significant chunk of the associated business.
Cultural changes in the wake of Arab acquisitions
Fans have so far been willing to accept cultural changes that accompany the Arab acquisitions such as Sheikh Abdullah’s replacement of bookmaker William Hill Plc as Malaga’s jersey sponsor because gambling is banned under Islamic law with United Nations culture agency UNESCO and Royal Emirates plans to set up a pavilion about Arabic culture at Getafe’s stadium. Nonetheless, Real Madrid’s recent decision to remove a Christian cross from its official logo in what it described as the cost of doing business in a globalized world has sparked ire, particularly among anti-Muslim right-wingers. The removal came as Real Madrid embarked on the construction of a $1 billion sport tourist resort in the United Arab Emirates scheduled to open in 2015.
Critics argue further despite Manchester City’s successes that Arab oil money is unlikely to quickly produce trophy winners. “If a club spends a lot of money quickly, it takes time for the team to settle down. There’s no easy way of winning the Premier League. You have to deserve it,” legendary former Manchester United goal scorer and Manchester United board member Sir Robert ‘Bobby’ Charlton told The Daily Mirror last year.
Sir Charlton contrasted efforts to fast track success on the back of Arab financial muscle with Manchester United manger Sir Alexander Chapman "Alex" Ferguson’s strategy of nurturing players from a young age. He said Manchester United had several promising young players. “Alex keeps them right until the exact moment he thinks that they’re ready for it, and then he’ll put them in. We've had more than our fair share of good young players and we've invested in a lot of young players too.” Sir Charlton went on to argue that “you get a bit of an affiliation with a football club when this sort of thing is taking place, and not just piling loads and loads of money in,” a reference not only to Arab investments in Europe but also to the failure of the Middle East’s authoritarian regimes to develop soccer talent at a young age.
Some European clubs have learnt that deep pockets do not necessarily mean long-term commitment. Barely three months after acquiring Portsmouth FC, Emirati Sheikh Sulaiman Al Fahim sold the bulk of his stake to Saudi property tycoon Ali Al-Faraj amid reports that his flagship Hydra Village project in Abu Dhabi was floundering. Mr. Al-Faraj too had no intention of staying involved for long. Soon after the takeover, he announced that he was selling the club. But with no buyer on the horizon, Portsmouth FC went into receivership.
Geneva’s Swiss Super League club Servette FC and Austria’s Admira Wacker haven’t fared much better. Servette is on the brink of collapse after Iranian businessman Majid Pishyar who acquired it in 2008, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Mr. Pishyar, who managed the club on a shoe string, tried unsuccessfully to attract government funding by last year appointing Robert Hensler, a former top civil servant for the canton of Geneva, as vice-president. His earlier efforts to salvage Admira, his first European acquisition, failed too. Servette’s problems come on the heels of the bankruptcy in January of Neuchatel’s Super League team Xamax whose Chechen owner was arrested on charges of fraud and financial mismanagement.
Risk in association with autocrats
Similarly, there is risk inherent in association with Middle Eastern autocrats. That risk is particularly acute at a time that autocracy is being challenged by a wave of popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.
Nevertheless, for some European soccer clubs seduced by the lure of petro dollars, nothing is a bridge too far. Take the career of Al-Saad Gadaffi, the wanted son of the deposed mercurial Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi who engineered his country’s 7.5 per cent stake in Juventus FC.
Al-Saad signed ten years ago with Maltese team Birkirkara F.C., but never showed up. Three years later, he joined Italy’s Perugia instead, but was suspended after only one game for failing a drug test. The incident earned him the reputation of being Italian Series A’s worst ever player.
Al-Saad’s dismal performance didn’t stop him from enlisting in 2005 with Italy’s Udinese where he was relegated to the role of bench-warmer except for a 10-minute appearance in an unimportant late season match. That didn’t deter Samdoria president Riccardo Garrone, head of oil company Erg, from inviting him to train with his team in the dashed hope that it would open the door to Libyan oil contracts.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Shifting Sexual Ideology and Women’s Responses: Iran between 1850-2010
Homa Hoodfar and Anissa Lucas-Helie, eds. Policing Sexuality and Women’s
Resistance in Muslim Asia and the Middle East, Zed Books
Egyptian feminists challenge militant soccer fan chauvinism
By James M. Dorsey
An Egyptian feminist group has challenged militant soccer fans that played a key role in... more
By James M. Dorsey
An Egyptian feminist group has challenged militant soccer fans that played a key role in toppling president Hosni Mubarak to recognise women's rights to unrestricted protest.
The challenge exposes conservatism that is deeply rooted in Egyptian society and cuts across ideological, cultural and religious fault lines. It lays bare differing interpretations of concepts such as diversity, freedom and faith and highlights a battle by women who were prominent in the campaign to overthrow Mr. Mubarak to have their rights recognised in post-revolt Egypt.
The women confront a conservatism that pervades the Middle East and North Africa as illustrated by the recent creation of a soccer league in the United Arab Emirates that allows women to play behind closed doors in the absence of men as well as Saudi Arabia's struggle with the International Olympic Committee's demand that it include women among its athletes at this year's London Olympics.
UAE and Kuwaiti royals joined prominent foreign representatives this week at a two day conference to encourage women’s participants in sports and the launch of the Fatima Bint Mubarak Women's Sports Awards, named after the third wife of the founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who heads the Family Development Foundation.
Egyptian women are battling to have their rights acknowledged on two fronts: recognition by their often socially conservative revolutionary male counterparts as well as Egypt's post-Mubarak military rulers who have systematically humiliated detained women protesters by subjecting them to virginity tests. A court this week acquitted a military doctor who conducted the tests.
More secular Egyptian women fear that the rise of Islamists further threatens achievement of their rights. Islamists have dissolved the Women's Council, charging that it was a creation of Suzanne Mubarak, the ousted president's widely despised wife. Islamist members of parliament have also proposed the establishment of a family ministry that would operate in accordance with Islamic law and roll back legal advances introduced by the Mubarak regime.
The feminists issued their challenge in response to a decision by the ultras -- militant, highly politicised, soccer fans -- to allow women to participate in their 16-day old sit-in in front of parliament only during daytime and to ban them at night starting from 22:00.
The ultras are demanding justice for 74 of their comrades who died in a soccer brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said that they believe was instigated by the government in retaliation for their role in the ousting of Mr. Mubarak and their militant opposition to his military successors.
In a statement quoted on the Egyptian news website Bikya Masr, the Independent Egyptian Women's Union said that those "who carry the flame of liberty against the oppressive powers should respect it first." They said that their understanding of diversity and faith ruled out restricting women's right to protest.
The battle for women's rights is one that is being waged by different women's groups -- secular and religious -- whose definition of women’s rights varies both among Middle Eastern and North African groups as well as Western ones.
Western groups objected last month to a decision by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) to allow observant Muslim women to wear a headdress that meets their religious and cultural requirements as well as safety and security standards.
The decision by the IFAB, which governs the rules of professional soccer, was intended to open opportunity to a large number of observant Muslim women who had been excluded from a professional career because of what they saw as a conflict between the rules of their faith and the rules of the game.
The conservatism is most deep-seated in Saudi Arabia, home to Wahhabism, one of the world's most puritan and restrictive interpretations of Islam that allows women to travel abroad only with the permission of a male guardian and bans them from driving. The kingdom, under threat of exclusion from the London Olympics if it fails to field women athletes and pressured by human rights groups has responded publicly with a series of test balloons on how to respond.
Saudi officials first leaked a story earlier this year about a plan to build the kingdom’s first stadium especially designed to accommodate women who are currently barred from attending soccer matches because of the kingdom’s strict public gender segregation. The planned stadium was supposed to open in 2014. Saudi media subsequently reported that the plan had been shelved.
Deputy education minister for female student affairs Noura al-Fayez said in two letters addressed to Human Rights Watch that the government was working to set up a “comprehensive physical education programme”, including sports facilities and a health and nutrition awareness scheme “as part of its national strategy for physical education for boys and girls”, according to the daily al-Watan newspaper. Ms. Al-Fayez said physical education for girls was under consideration “as one of the priorities of the ministry's leadership”.
The letters didn’t stop Human Rights Watch from accusing Saudi Arabia in a report of kowtowing to assertions by the country's powerful conservative Muslim clerics that female sports constitute "steps of the devil" that will encourage immorality and reduce women's chances of meeting the requirements for marriage.
The kingdom’s toothless Shura or Advisory Council moreover issued regulations for women's sports clubs, but conservative religious forces often have the final say in whether they are implemented or not. Saudi Arabia’s official sports body, the General Presidency of Youth Welfare, presided by a member of the royal family, Prince Nawaf Bin Faisal, only caters to men. As a result, the kingdom last year hired a consultant to develop its first national sports plan - for men only.
Al Hayat newspaper, owned by a Saudi royal, reported last month that Saudi Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud had approved plans to send female athletes to the London Olympics. That report was quickly squashed with the media quoting Prince Nayef as reversing his statement.
Prince Nawaf subsequently went a step further by telling a news conference: “Female sports activity has not existed (in the kingdom) and there is no move thereto in this regard. At present, we are not embracing any female Saudi participation in the Olympics or other international championships.”
Despite Saudi women in the kingdom pushing the envelope by forming private clubs of their own, Prince Nawaf asserted that the demand for women’s participation came from Saudi women living abroad. He said the kingdom would work to ensure that expatriate Saudi women seeking to compete in the Olympics on their own account rather than as official delegates would do so “in the appropriate framework and comported with Islamic law.” He said he was working with the Saudi mufti and religious scholars to guarantee that nothing “infringed upon the Muslim woman.”
Saudi Arabia adopted a similar approach at the Youth Olympics in 2010 where Saudi equestrian participated without official endorsement and won a bronze medal in show jumping. It was not immediately clear whether the approach would this time be sufficient to remove the IOC’s threat of excluding the kingdom from the Olympics.
The evident debate about women’s rights to sports is part of a far broader discussion about the position of women in Saudi society. In an unusually frank interview with the BBC, Princess Basma Bint Saud Bin Abdulaziz lambasted the kingdom’s discriminatory policies and called for the drafting of a constitution that would treat men and women equally as well as sweeping reforms, including “abusive” divorce laws, an education system that teaches “that a woman's position in society is inferior” and "that the angels will curse her if she is not submissive to her husband's needs," and a social affairs ministry that “is tolerating cruelty towards women rather than protecting them.”
To be sure the conservatism that inhibits women’s rights has support among conservative segments of the Middle East and North Africa’s female population. Three Emirate women, have launched, according to a report in The National, a behind closed doors soccer league in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the far more liberal UAE alongside the country’s national women’s team because they had no opportunity to play in an environment that banned men.
"There are some girls that don't mind playing in front of men. But there is a huge percentage of Emirati women who can't play in front of men because of cultural reasons. Those in the community who want to play the sport after university don't have a place to go. It's all open and there isn't really a place for the sport to be developed," said government employee Mariam Al Omaira, a founding partner of Irada (Determination) Sports Development Company.
The league has 84 players spread over six teams.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
call for papers-Metamorphosis of the Arab World-Political Geography and Alternative Maps
by barış çoban
Metamorphosis of The Arab World:
Political Geography and Alternative Maps
Editors: Barış Çoban, Barış Erdoğan
The so-called "Arab Spring", recent social movements in the Arab world, which can also be described as the "return of the oppressed", have attracted international attention on the Middle East and Arab world. The Middle East, North Africa and Turkey have been profoundly affected by this political and social metamorphosis. The objective of this project is to discuss “metamorphosis of the Arab world” in the context of international relations, politics, sociology, economics and communications and so on by the contribution of several academicians, researchers, politicians and journalists.
The geography of the Arab world is in a process of metamorphosis and consequently traditional structure of the Arab world, its power structure, power relations, politics and social relations have been fluctuated by the hand of the global super power(s). In fact, “All that is solid melts into air", this expression summarizes clearly what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa. The possible outcomes and/or result of this ongoing process are vague, and it needs to be discussed with its all aspects.
As a result, our focus is on “metamorphosis” of the Middle East and the Arab world, since it simultaneously means “metamorphosis” of the world. This book project aims to address and discuss transformation and subsequent reformation of societies and changes in the political geographies and mental maps of the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey from past to present with a multi-voice and multi-layer approach.
(Papers can be submitted in English, French and Turkish)
Deadline for Abstracts: June 10, 2012
Deadline for Full Paper: December 25, 2012
(Please use APA style)
E-mail:
barishc@gmail.com
baris.erdogan1974@hotmail.com,
Editors:
Barış Çoban (Assoc. Prof. Dr., Department of Communication Studies, Dogus University, Turkey)
Barış Erdoğan (Assist Prof. Dr., Department of Political Sciences, Yeni Yuzyil University, Turkey)
Métamorphose du monde arabe:
Géographie politique et des cartes alternatives
Editeurs: Barış Çoban, Barış Erdoğan
Les mouvenents sociaux recents apparus dans une large partie du monde arabe, appellés communement «printemps arabe», peuvent également être décrit comme le «retour de l'opprimé», ont attiré l'attention internationale sur le Moyen-Orient et le monde arabe. Le Moyen-Orient, l'Afrique du Nord et la Turquie ont été profondément touchés par cette métamorphose politique et sociale. L'objectif de ce projet est de discuter «la métamorphose du monde arabe » dans le contexte des relations internationales, politique, sociologie, économie et communication et ainsi de suite par les biais de la contribution de plusieurs universitaires, chercheurs, politiciens et journalistes.
La géographie du monde arabe est dans un processus de métamorphose et par conséquent la structure traditionnelle du monde arabe, sa structure de pouvoir, les relations de pouvoir, la politique et les relations sociales se sont gravement écroulés par la main de la(des) puissance(s) mondiale(s). En fait, «Tout ce qui est solide se dissout dans l'air", cette expression résume bien ce qui se passe au Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord. Les résultats possible et / ou résultat de ce processus en cours sont vagues, et ils doivent être discuté dans tous ses aspects.
Par conséquent, nous nous concentrons sur la métamorphose du Moyen-Orient et du monde arabe, puisqu'elle constitue à la fois la métamorphose du monde. Ce projet a pour objectif d'aborder et discuter de la transformation et la réforme de ces sociétés ainsi que les modifications de la géographie politique et cartes mentales du Moyen-Orient , de l'Afrique du Nord et de la Turquie du passé au présent, avec un multi-voix et une approche multicouche.
Transmission des propositions et date limite
Vorte propositions doit etre transmise a baris.erdogan1974@hotmail.com ou barishc@gmail.com au plus tard le 10 juin 2012. Les articles peuvent être rédigés en anglais, français ou en turc
ECHEANCIERS
- Date limite de réception des propositions : 10 juin 2012
- Date limite de réception des articles : 25 décembre 2012
Information technique
Les propositions, d’un maximum de deux pages, en format Microsoft Word ou PDF, 12 points, devront contenir: le titre de la proposition; le sujet; le nom de l’auteur ou des auteurs; l’institution ou organisation à laquelle vous êtes attaché
Articles
- les articles ne pourront dépasser, avec leur bibliographie, 30 000 caractères, espaces non compris;
- ils devront inclure un résumé de 150 mots maximum qui devra être présenté en français, en anglais ou en turque;
Editeurs :
Dr. Barış Çoban, maitre de conférence, le département de communication, l’Universite de Doğuş, Turquie.
Dr. Barış ERDOGAN, maitre de conférence adjoint, le département des relations internationales l’Université de Yeni Yüzyıl, Turquie.
Arap Dünyasının Dönüşümü:
Siyasetin Coğrafyası ve Alternatif Haritalar
Editörler: Barış Çoban, Barış Erdoğan
Arap ülkelerinde yaşanan ve “Arap Baharı” olarak adlandırılan, “bastırılmış olanın geri döndüğü” kitle hareketleri sonrasında tüm dünyanın gözü yeniden Ortadoğu ve diğer Arap ülkelerine odaklandı. Ortadoğu, Kuzey Afrika ve Türkiye yaşanan siyasal ve toplumsal bu dönüşümden derin bir biçimde etkilenmekte. Bu sürecin uluslararası ilişkiler, siyaset, sosyoloji, ekonomi ve iletişim vb. alanları bağlamında tartışılmasını amaçlayan bu kitap projesi, farklı disiplinlerden akademisyen, araştırmacı, siyasetçi ve gazetecilerin katkılarından oluşacaktır.
Söz konusu coğrafyada bir yılı aşkın bir süredir küresel iktidar(lar)ın da farklı biçimlerde müdahil olduğu toplumsal hareketler geleneksel iktidar yapılarını, siyaset biçimlerini ve toplumsal ilişkileri parçalamakta. Ortadoğu ve Kuzey Afrika’da “katı olan her şey buharlaşmakta”. Bu coğrafyada kurulma aşamasında olan yeni düzende siyasi ve sosyal aktörlerin bu buharlaşmanın ardından nasıl bir katılaşma süreci izleyeceği ise şimdilik belirsiz ve üzerinde çok boyutlu olarak düşünülmesi gereken bir konu.
Sonuç olarak, odak noktamız Ortadoğu’nun ve Arap Dünyasının dönüşümüdür, çünkü bu dönüşüm eşzamanlı olarak dünyanın dönüşümüdür. Bu kitap projesi Ortadoğu, Kuzey Afrika ve Türkiye coğrafyası bağlamında tarihten günümüze siyasal ve zihinsel haritaların değişimi ve toplumların dönüşümünü çoksesli, çok katmanlı bir yaklaşımla ele almayı ve tartışmayı amaçlamaktadır.
(Makaleler Türkçe, İngilizce, Fransızca dillerinde yazılabilir)
Makale Başlığı ve Özeti Gönderimi Son Tarih: 10 Haziran 2012
Tamamlanmış Makale Gönderimi Son Tarih: 25 Aralık 2012
(Makaleler APA formatına göre yazılacaktır.)
İletişim:
barishc@gmail.com
baris.erdogan1974@hotmail.com
(Barış Çoban, Doç. Dr. Doğuş Üniversitesi, Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, İletişim Bilimleri Bölümü)
(Barış Erdoğan, Yrd. Doç. Dr., Yeni Yüzyıl Üniversitesi, İktisadi İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü)
call for papers-
Metamorphosis of the Arab World-
Political Geography and Alternative Maps
Metamorphosis of the Arab World-
Political Geography and Alternative Maps
Métamorphose du monde arabe:
Géographie politique et des cartes alternatives
Arap Dünyasının Dönüşümü:
Siyasetin Coğrafyası ve Alternatif Haritalar
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Arabs boycott Adidas as public displeasure shifts from the West to China
By James M. Dorsey
Arab youth and sports ministers announced this week a boycott of sports apparel... more
By James M. Dorsey
Arab youth and sports ministers announced this week a boycott of sports apparel manufacturer Adidas because of its sponsorship of last month’s Jerusalem marathon. The boycott comes at a time that Arab public displeasure is expanding from the West to China and Russia because of their support for the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The announcement of the boycott by Saudi Prince Nawaf bin Faisal, chairman of the Arab council of youth and sports ministers, contrasted starkly with an analysis presented the same day by a prominent UAE intellectual that if a year ago Arabs were denouncing the United States for its support of Israel and Arab autocrats, today their anger was focused on China.
"All companies that have sponsored the marathon of Jerusalem, including Adidas, will be boycotted," Saudi Prince Nawaf said at the end of meeting of the council in Jeddah.
Adidas, the only non-Israeli sponsor, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Jerusalem municipality to re-route the marathon to avoid occupied East Jerusalem after three city council members had complained to the German multi-national. That did little however to dissuade Arab ministers.
In fact, going beyond the boycott, Prince Nawaf said the council had also decided to organise a separate marathon next year in Arab cities entitled ‘Jerusalem is Ours’ to coincide with the annual Jerusalem event. "Israel is trying to misguide public opinion into believing that Jerusalem is its capital and that is a violation of all UN resolutions," Prince Nawaf said.
Prince Nawaf’s statement appeared to have an element of the pot talking to the kettle with the marathon’s slogan seemingly matching Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem rather than to Arab countries’ long-standing endorsement of a peace plan that envisages Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine with the east of the city serving as the administrative seat of the Palestinian state.
The council’s decisions reflect as much a deep-seated Arab stake in Jerusalem, Islam’s third most holy city, as it does an effort to by largely troubled regimes to garner public support at a time that a demand for far-reaching change is sweeping the Middle East and Africa for the past 16 months. The wave has already toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and has pushed Syrian President Bashar al Assad to the brink.
Speaking at a symposium organized by the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute (MEI), Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent US-educated UAE University political scientist, cautioned that despite continued public Arab condemnation of US and Western support for Israel and contradictory policies towards the protest wave sweeping the Middle East and North Africa,
China was for the first time seeing its flags burnt at demonstrations and calls for boycotts of Chinese goods echoing on social media.
At the root of public anger with China, a country that for years was respected for its support of the Palestinians and other liberation movements, is its dithering in Libya during last year’s NATO-backed rebellion that toppled Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, and even more so China’s refusal to back away from Mr. Assad, whose year-long bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters and rebels has already cost an estimated 9,000 lives.
Speaking at the same symposium Peking University Arabist Wu Bingbing identified the wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa as a threat to Chinese interests alongside what he charged was a US concerted effort to secure its hegemony in the region. Mr. Bingbing avoided mentioning the crackdown in Syria but described Chinese-Russian cooperation, an apparent reference to the two countries’ vetoing of anti-Syrian resolutions in the United Nations Security Council, as strategic.
China has insisted its veto did not amount to supporting Mr. Assad and was intended to prevent the situation in Syria from worsening. While insisting that the battle in Syria was a domestic affair, China has since said it backs Arab League efforts to find a political solution despite military support for the anti-Assad rebels by key Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the People’s Republic’s key energy suppliers.
Mr Abdulla suggested that at this point the growing anti-Chinese sentiment was unlikely to damage China’s economic interests despite Arab leaders publicly criticizing China as well as Russia for their vetoes of anti-Syrian resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. While that appears largely to be the case for the Gulf’s autocratic oil producers, China’s most important counterparts in the Middle East, that may not be the same for those nations such as oil producing Libya that have toppled their autocrats.
Saudi King Abdullah in widely reported blunt remarks in early February directed at China and Russia without mentioning them by name described their UN vetoes as “absolutely regrettable.” The king went on to say that “no matter how powerful, countries cannot rule the whole world. The world is ruled by brains by justice, by morals and by fairness.” An Arab League representative confronted senior Russian officials days later in in even blunter, undiplomatic terms during a heated debate behind-closed-doors.
China last year supported a Security Council resolution that imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on the regime of Mr. Qaddafi, and endorsed referral of the regime’s crackdown to the International Criminal Court in The Hague but abstained from voting on a resolution that authorized international military intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds.
At the same time, China attempted to straddle the fence by cultivating relations with both Mr. Qaddafi’s embattled regime and the rebels. That even-handed approach however didn’t prevent the rebels from threatening a commercial boycott, particularly after they found documents purporting to show that Chinese defence companies had discussed the supply of arms with Qaddafi operatives.
A Chinese Ministry of Commerce delegation visiting Libya in February failed to secure agreement on recovering at least some of the losses that China, Libya’s biggest foreign contractor, suffered with the evacuation last year of 35,000 Chinese workers who were servicing $18.8 billion worth of contracts.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Israel arrests Palestinian soccer players
By James M. Dorsey
Israeli security forces have arrested the goalkeeper of the Palestinian Olympic soccer... more
By James M. Dorsey
Israeli security forces have arrested the goalkeeper of the Palestinian Olympic soccer team on charges of involvement in a shoot-out with Israeli troops, according to the Israeli military.
Palestinian soccer officials said the arrest of 23 year-old Omar Abu Rois, an alleged member of Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, was followed the next day by the detention of Ahmad Khalil Ali Abu El-Asal a player for the Aqabat Jaber Palestinian refugee camp soccer team.
The military said Mr. Abu Rois was one of 13 people arrested following an attack on Israeli troops in January in the Al Amari Palestinian refugee camp near the West Bank town of Ramallah.
The military charged that the group had fired Kalashnikovs that had been provided by the head of security for the local branch of the Red Crescent, Palestine’s equivalent of the Red Cross. The security chief, Monastery Abbas, was among those detained. Mr. Abu Rois, according to the military, is a Red Crescent employee.
The military said the shooting occurred on January 20. It said no one was hurt in the incident but that an Israeli vehicle had been damaged. It said that interrogation of the detainees had revealed that Mr. Abu Rois had prepared the weapons used in the attack a day after the incident for return to a monastery where they had originally been stashed. It said the group had planned further attacks on several Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.
In a letter to world soccer body FIFA president Sepp Blatter copied to Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Zhang Jilong and International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacque Rogue, Palestine Football Association (PFA) president Jibril Rajoub, a former Palestinian security chief, said Mr. Abu Rois was arrested on February 20 and Mr. El-Asal on February 21 in what he described as “another Israeli transgression against Palestinian players.” Mr. Rajoub said the two players had been “abducted” by Israeli occupation authorities.
PFA officials did not respond to questions about the background and possible political affiliations and activities of the two detained players.
Mr. Rajoub said Mr. Abou Rois had been arrested at work and taken to an unknown location while Mr. El-Asal was detained at his home.
The Palestinian soccer boss asked Mr. Blatter to intervene on behalf of the two players, charging that it “was in total disregard of all agreements signed by the Israeli side and in direct violation to the simplest right of our players.”
In an emailed response, FIFA official Guy-Phillipe Mathieu said FIFA would take “adequate steps.”
Mr. Rajoub, who also heads the Palestinian Olympic Committee, last year reached with the help of the IOC agreement with his counterparts at the Israeli soccer association and Olympic committee on ways to overcome Israeli security obstacles facing Palestinian players and athletes. They agreed to set up a telephone hotline so that Israeli sports bodies could intervene to ease the movement of Palestinian athletes, coaches, and officials if and when they encountered problems at checkpoints or in requests to travel.
The effort however has so far produced limited results. Palestinian officials say that FIFA shipments are often still delayed at Ben Gurion Airport customs, which incurs storage and other costs that can amount to a multi-fold of the value of the goods shipped.
Nonetheless, there has been a limited improvement in athletes' ability to move around the West Bank or between the Palestine Authority-controlled region and the Gaza Strip. "The problem is the Israeli committee is not the relevant authority for the movement of people and equipment. We are trying, but I don't want to embarrass anyone," Mr. Rajoub said in an interview last year, suggesting that the Israeli sports body had little sway with security authorities.
Mr. Rajoub as well as other soccer officials and players conceded however that crossing checkpoints had become somewhat easier. They attributed this primarily to improved security with Israel less concerned about the threat of terrorist attacks being launched from the West Bank. In addition, the PFA has created sleeping quarters in the Faisal Hussein Stadium so that players can get together to train without worrying whether they will be able to return home.
The easing of travel has meant that the Palestinian team has been able to host and travel for Olympic and World Cup qualifiers even though it failed to qualify for this year’s London Olympics.
That is in stark contrast to 2007 when FIFA forced the Palestinians to forfeit a World Cup qualifier to Singapore because they failed to field a full team after Israel denied permits to 18 players and officials from Gaza.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.