This Week in Babylon

Scary Arabs, SPLC, and more on Pakistan.

Scary Arabs!

In this month's magazine I have a story, “Parties of God,” that looks at America's refusal to engage with Islamic political movements. “While the West debates whether the Islamic world is ready for democracy,” I wrote, “an equally appropriate question is whether the West is ready for Islamic democracy.” I noted in the story that while Hezbollah in Lebanon is a media-savvy group with a well-run press office, some journalists suggest, probably deliberately, that meeting with Hezbollah “requires a singular combination of unflinching perseverance and steely nerves.” Several readers have asked if I had in mind Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker. Yes, I did.

I was thinking of two widely praised, award-winning Goldberg stories on Hezbollah published in 2002. The first piece, a classic of the genre, opens with the author in a “seedy and brown” village that was “decorated with posters of martyrs and potentates . . . and with billboards that celebrate bloodshed and sacrifice.” Why would Goldberg risk all to come to this strange land of the hijab? In order to meet a shadowy Hezbollah operative. Goldberg's bravery is underscored when we learn that, only twenty years ago, Americans were kidnapped—allegedly by the very man Goldberg now dared to meet—and brought to this same seedy, brown village where they were “kept blindfolded, and chained to beds and radiators.”

As it turned out, the operative didn't show up that day, and Goldberg was not chained to anything except his assumptions. But he did, he wrote, stare down a “stiff and unhappy-looking man” whom Hezbollah had sent to “assess my intentions.” Then, after finishing off three Pepsis in a local restaurant, Goldberg returned to Beirut unscathed.

One of the stranger assertions in Goldberg's story was that “the Western fashions ubiquitous in East Beirut are forbidden [in the Shiite southern suburbs]; many women wear the full chador.” Having been to Beirut twice, and having spent plenty of time in the southern suburbs, I have to wonder how Goldberg missed the sight of numerous Shiite women in Western dress. Of course, it's not just Goldberg—as this item from yesterday's Spiegel Online explains, cultural misunderstandings and stereotyping are legion when it comes to the Arab world.

The Oily Truth

Usually the media loves a story about a white woman in peril overseas. (Think Jill Carroll.) So why is there so little coverage of the arrest in Angola of Sarah Wykes of London-based Global Witness? Global Witness campaigns for good government and against corruption and has frequently criticized the regime of Jose Eduardo dos Santos for what appears to be the wholesale theft of Angola's oil revenues. Much of that oil, however, is produced by American firms, and dos Santos has even met with President Bush at the White House, where he received support for his 28-year-old regime.

Wykes traveled to Angola to speak to meet with the government and with independent groups on how to increase transparency about oil revenues. She was arrested at her hotel in Cabinda province, a major oil-producing region, and security forces confiscated her passport, notebooks, and camera. She was then jailed, charged with spying and violating the country's national security, and freed on bail three days later—but she is not free to leave the country and still faces trial, which could take a year to commence. According to Global Witness, the Angolan authorities have not provided her with documentation or evidence relating to the charges.

Senator Biden sent a letter to dos Santos last week that said Wykes's arrest looked to be “an act of intimidation in retaliation for her efforts to promote transparent management of Angola's oil revenues.” Senators Leahy, Obama, Levin, Dodd, Durbin, and Feingold also sent a joint letter to Angola's president in support of Wykes. But there is still no word from any major American news organization. Imagine if Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe jailed a Western democracy activist on trumped-up charges—it would be big news and the diplomatic protests would be deafening. Too bad for Sarah that she challenged a pro-American regime with so much oil.

Southern Poverty: richer than Tonga

Back in 2000, I wrote a story in Harper's about the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, whose stated mission is to combat disgusting yet mostly impotent groups like the Nazis and the KKK. What it does best, though, is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of those groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation's richest “civil rights” organization. The Center earns more from its vast investment portfolio than it spends on its core mission, which has led Millard Farmer, a death-penalty lawyer in Georgia, to once describe Morris Dees, the SPLC's head, as “the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement” (adding, “I don't mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye”).

When in 1978 the Center's treasury held less than $10 million, Dees said the group would stop fund-raising and live off interest when it hit $55 million. As he zeroed in on that target a decade later, Dees upped the ante to $100 million, which the group's newsletter promised would allow it “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising.” At the time of my story seven years ago, the SPLC's treasury bulged with $120 million, and the organization was spending twice as much on fund-raising as it did on legal services for victims of civil-rights abuses–yet its money-gathering machinery was still running without cease.

It's still going. Last week, a reader sent me the SPLC's 2005 financial filing with the IRS, which is required by law for charities. In five years, the SPLC's treasury had grown by a further $48 million, bringing its total assets to $168 million. That's more than the annual GDP of the Marshall Islands, and has the SPLC rapidly closing in on Tonga's GDP.

Revenues listed for the 2005 filing came to about $44 million, which dwarfed total spending ($29 million). Of that latter amount, nearly $5 million was spent to raise even more money, and over $8 million was spent on salaries, benefits, and other compensation. The next time you get a fund-raising pitch from the SPLC, give generously—but give to a group that will make better use of your money. Like Global Witness.

Pakistances

Thursday's story on the recent scapegoating of Pakistan for American failures against Al Qaeda generated a large amount of mail. It was pretty much equally split between people thanking me for offering Pakistan's perspective—a number of the comments came from Pakistanis—and those who accused me of being an apologist for Pakistan.

H. M. Naqvi, who teaches literature and creative writing at Boston University, sent along an editorial from Thursday's Daily Times, one of Pakistan's larger English-language papers, which read in part: “For the press in Washington, it is easy to criticize Pakistan and accuse it of being a spoiler, but the United States has to clean up its own act more than anyone else. It committed blunders of planning and was punished for it mostly in Iraq with death and casualty among its troops. In Afghanistan, the absence of any American reconstruction plan has killed mostly innocent Afghans. And since America took the easy road of leaning on the hoodlums and bandits of Afghanistan to control areas outside Kabul the Afghans were crushed by two overwhelming forces: the tyrants behind them and the Taliban in front.”

Another comment: “Mainstream discourse routinely pillories Pakistan without contextualizing the present geopolitical environment (whether it's Iran's successful efforts at destabilizing predominantly Sunni Afghanistan or Russian financing of individual warlords or India's seemingly shortsighted support for the Northern periphery of the country) or for that matter, recent history . . . Pakistan has its own imperative: security. It's not nefarious. It's fairly fundamental.”

Among the critics was James Brickmeier, who attacked Pakistan for making a distinction between "good jihadists" like the Taliban and Kashmiri militants, and "bad jihadists" like Al Qaeda. But, he wrote, every Taliban leader “swears allegiance to Al Qaeda and since 2003, many Pakistanis have been taking part in Al Qaeda attacks overseas. Think London and recent arrests in Australia. In this context, allowing Pakistan a free pass to support their favorite jihadists is a recipe for disaster.”

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