The death toll in Libya has reportedly risen above 200. In Benghazi, where Qaddafi’s sons Khamis and Saadi are charged with crushing the uprising, police and army forces are picking off demonstrators with sniper and artillery fire. The State Department has gone so far as to express “grave concern,” while the EU is “very worried.” That’s how bad things are.

So this is probably as good a time as any to revisit the sagacity of Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson, who in 2009 was granted access to Libya and duly announced the unfolding of a “Tripoli Spring.” HRW had just spent a year in relative silence as Qaddafi’s thugs neglected to death long-imprisoned dissident Fathi al-Jahmi. In the aftermath they neither called for an independent investigation nor held the Libyan regime directly responsible for the death. But lest you think they were totally unmoved by al-Jahmi’s plight, Whitson did namecheck him in the first paragraph of her gushing report on Libya’s burgeoning civil society:

What Fathi al-Jahmi died for is starting to spread in the country. For the first time in memory, change is in the air in Libya. The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate [and] proposals for legislative reform… I left more than one meeting stunned at the sudden openness of ordinary citizens, who criticized the government and challenged the status quo with newfound frankness. A group of journalists we met with in Tripoli complained about censorship… [b]ut that hadn’t stopped their newspapers… Quryna, one of two new semi private newspapers in Tripoli, features page after page of editorials criticizing bureaucratic misconduct and corruption… The spirit of reform, however slowly, has spread to the bureaucracy as well… the real impetus for the transformation rests squarely with a quasi-governmental organization, the Qaddafi Foundation for International Charities and Development.

Of course the entire article was written in a tone of “liberal changes are oh-so fragile” equivocation, the increasingly frayed rhetorical insulation with which Middle East experts coat their apologias for repressive Arab and Muslim regimes. But given the choice between emphasizing the Libyan government’s irredeemably autocratic character or its potential for reform, Whitson emphasized the latter. If Qaddafi falls in an insurrection after murdering hundreds of Libyan citizens, it won’t be because some kind of vaunted public sphere liberalized exploited legislative reforms. It’ll be because the suffocating choke of government control — which Whitson and her ilk insisted was loosening — finally became unbearable, and was met with violence to overthrow entrenched thugs.

Whitson actually made the same move a few months later when she applauded Hamas for promising to investigate its Cast Lead war crimes. Sure the eliminationist Iranian proxies were only lying so they could could enable Western apologists to highlight the Goldstone Report, but at least they were helpfully lying. So they got supportive praise and a gold star.

Unrelatedly, HRW released their libelous White Phosphorous report a few months after Whitson’s article. In any case, this is usually where it’d be appropriate to remind readers that Whitson cut her teeth as an intifada-era pro-Palestinian activist and as an apologist for terrorism, and to gesture toward Alana’s comprehensive roundup of how HRW spent 2010 ignoring terrorist crimes and rogue regimes while demonizing Israel. But insofar as the organization is now hiring actual senior Palestinian terrorists to help campaign against the Jewish State, previous HRW terrorist enabling seems almost quaint.

Bad Rachel, the neocon id, adapts Auden’s “Funeral Blues” as an Obama peroration:

Stop all the cock-ups, send home the cicerone,

Prevent the lapdog tweeting on his new iPhone,

Silence Arianna, and with muffled Christiane,

Bring out the coffers, let the donors come.

Read the all of it, and not because she’s my sister, but because she’s brilliant.

For nearly five months, Liu Xia, wife of imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has suffered under house arrest in China. But last week, she somehow managed to access the Internet and reach out to a friend through an online chat service, the Washington Post is reporting:

“I’m crazy,” Liu Xia wrote in her first known communication since she disappeared from public view more than four months ago. …

I don’t know how I managed to get online,” Liu Xia wrote to the friend in her post. “Don’t go online. Otherwise my whole family is in danger.”

The friend asked, “Are you at home?”

“Yes,” Liu Xia responded, writing in Pinyin, the Chinese transliteration system. She said she was using an old computer and apparently could not type Chinese characters.

“Can’t go out. My whole family are hostages,” Liu Xia said. Later she wrote, “I only saw him once,” apparently referring to her husband, Liu Xiaobo.

“So miserable,” she wrote. “Don’t talk.”

“I’m crying,” she added. “Nobody can help me.”

The friend sent the transcript of the conversation to the Washington Post, which was unable to independently verify its authenticity. However, the Post says that another friend of Liu Xiaobo’s “saw Liu Xia online at the same time, although he was not able to chat with her.”

It’s unclear how she was able to access an online chat service. The Chinese government has been increasing its crackdown on the Internet and known activists recently, out of concern that the uprisings in the Arab world could inspire similar demonstrations in China. On Saturday, a couple of hundred dissidents gathered in Beijing, but were met by a strong police presence that prevented any acts of protest from taking place.

Former Human Rights Watch senior military analyst Marc Garlasco, who resigned from the organization after his affinity for collecting Nazi memorabilia was discovered, is now working as a senior human rights officer at the United Nations, Israel Matzav reports.

Garlasco’s Nazi obsession – first reported by Omri Ceren – made the pages of the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post. Garlasco’s hobby seemed particularly relevant, as he had helped write numerous reports for HRW that were perceived as extremely biased against Israel.

In a column for the Huffington Post, Garlasco, whose grandfather served in the German military during World War II, denied that his interest in Nazi memorabilia had any impact on his human rights work :

I’ve never hidden my hobby, because there’s nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren’t fascinated by military history. Precisely because it’s so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things. Thousands of military history buffs collect war paraphernalia because we want to learn from the past. But I should have realized that images of the Second World War German military are hurtful to many.

Clueless collector or creepy nostalgic, the real issue with Garlasco is his anti-Israel bias, which was clearly displayed at HRW. It remains to be seen what dealings, if any, he has with Israel in his new capacity.

While attention is centered on the protestors in Madison, Wisconsin, it would be worth taking a little time to admire the magnificent building they are demeaning with their presence.

The State Capitol of Wisconsin is one of the greatest examples of Beaux Arts style architecture in the United States.  It was built between 1906 and 1917, the third capitol building on the site. (The second building burned in 1904. In one of the more ill-timed cost-cutting measures in American political history, the legislature had voted to cancel the fire insurance on the building five weeks earlier.)

The architect was George B. Post (1837-1913), a student of Richard Morris Hunt.  He also designed many early New York City skyscrapers, some the tallest in the world at the time, and the New York Stock Exchange Building on Broad Street.

Cruciform in shape, with four equal wings, the Wisconsin State Capitol has one of the highest domes in the country (only a few feet shorter than the U.S. Capitol) and the only one made of granite (the dome of the Capitol in Washington is cast iron). While grand on the outside, the inside is magnificent, abounding with Beaux Arts exuberance and luxury that never crosses the line into vulgarity.  You can get some idea of this wonderful building by viewing pictures here and here and here. But once the mob clears out and spring creeps into Madison, consider a trip to see it for yourself.

Elliott Abrams called the Obama administration’s handling of its UN veto a “manifest failure of American diplomacy.” It left virtually everyone angry at the United States — the Palestinians and Arabs because of the veto and Israel’s supporters because of Susan Rice’s intemperate statement on it. It left observers appalled as the administration tried to replace an anti-Israel resolution with an anti-Israel presidential statement and then issued an anti-Israel ambassadorial statement. Abrams called the language in Rice’s statement “amazing” for a diplomat:  “folly,” “illegitimacy,” “devastates,” “corroded,” etc.

It was not necessary for Rice to address the merits of the resolution, since there were multiple procedural reasons to veto it: (a) final status issues are to be negotiated, not resolved at the UN; (b) such issues are to be negotiated together, not individually; and (c) the U.S. traditionally vetoes one-sided UN resolutions without reference to their merits. You don’t single out settlements as an alleged “obstacle to peace” without also mentioning the Palestinian ones: the failure to dismantle terrorist groups (one of them rules Gaza); an unelected “Authority” without the legitimacy to speak for the people; the unwillingness to recognize a Jewish state even in a final agreement; the insistence on indefensible borders; the assertion of a deal-breaking “right of return,” and so on.

Rice not only addressed the merits of the resolution, but sided with the Palestinians – creating the impression the U.S. believed they were right but lacked the courage to raise its hand to support them. It created exactly what Robert Satloff warned against: a mixed message resulting in the “worst of all possible scenarios.” It also reflected extraordinary diplomatic impotence — with the Palestinian rejection of a direct presidential request to withdraw their resolution. It is hard to remember the last time anyone achieved the trifecta of offending each side while embarrassing oneself in the process.

Wait a minute – I do remember. It was when the administration promised Israel a package of benefits to extend its settlement moratorium for 60 or 90 days; then balked at putting the promises in writing; and then withdrew the offer after determining the Palestinians would not come to the table even if Israel extended the moratorium. Before that was the time Obama visited Saudi Arabia to seek a move toward normalizing relations with Israel and came away empty-handed; then sent his secretary of state to the Council on Foreign Relations to plead publicly with Arab states to take some steps, “however modest,” toward normalization — which produced nothing again; and then pressed Israel for unilateral steps that were supposed to have been reciprocal.

Last year the administration erupted against Israel for approving Jewish housing in a Jewish area of the Jewish capital, resulting in a 43-minute call from the secretary of state to Israel’s prime minister demanding “specific action” by Israel to demonstrate it was “committed to this relationship” with the United States. This year, the president himself made a 50-minute call to Mahmoud Abbas, personally requesting withdrawal of the proposed UN resolution; after failing, he sent his ambassador out to mitigate his veto by castigating Israel.

He didn’t join the jackals; he simply put the U.S. on record as endorsing their views, in language he hoped they would appreciate.

The American Historical Association is propagandizing to save the Teaching American History (TAH) Grant Program and Civic Education funding from the 2011 axe of the House of Representatives. As their e-mail to members puts it:

To help our nation’s schools meet their civic mission to help students understand their rights and responsibilities as citizens, Congress should retain the Teaching American History Grants program and maintain federal funding support for civic education, while making the civics grants competitive. The civic education grants should go to non-profits with a demonstrated ability to deliver civic education programs, emphasis should be on programs serving currently under-served student populations.

That mention of “under-served student populations” is a nice, pandering touch. One might think that a program like TAH, which funds training for elementary and secondary school teachers, might not be of much interest to the AHA, which focuses almost exclusively on history at the college and university level. But since TAH requires grantees to work in partnership with colleges and universities and — mirabile dictu – “nonprofit history or humanities organizations” like the AHA itself, it does have some skin in the game. Read More

In the 1970s-80s the United States took over the mission once performed by the British Empire, of serving as protector to the kingdoms of the Arabian peninsula. Under our benign supervision, these states have flourished, turning from sand-blown desert outposts of camel herders and pearl divers into some of the world’s richest states with a Lamborghini in every garage and a Rolex on every wrist. Or so it seemed.

Progress has been especially notable in those states which are swimming in oil and gas. According to the International Monetary Fund, Qatar has the world’s third-highest per capita income–$74,422; number eight is the United Arab Emirates (which include Abu Dhabi) with $47,406: both ahead of the United States.

Even Bahrain and Dubai (Abu Dhabi’s poorer cousin in the UAE), which lack such natural riches, have done well for themselves–Dubai spectacularly so, with a skyline that has come to resemble Hong Kong’s and enough baubles to make a Gilded Age tycoon blush. Bahrain is not as impressive but it, too, has prospered, with its share of high-rise  hotels and office towers.

Their secret, Bahrain and Dubai, has been freedom, at least relative freedom. Because they have not been as Draconian in enforcing Muslim strictures, Dubai and to a lesser extent Bahrain became the playgrounds of the Gulf–the place where other Arabs could go to drink booze, pick up Eastern European hookers, drive expensive cars recklessly, and generally enjoy the good life. This despite the fact that Bahrain nominally follows a Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, just as Saudi Arabia does. Read More

In 2009 and 2010 the New York Times covered protests against the Obama administration’s stimulus spending bill and health care plan as the barely legal revolt of an unwashed and uncivil band of reactionaries determined not only to halt what the paper considered progress but also to thwart democracy. But anyone looking at the Times’ front page article on Saturday describing protests against the effort by Wisconsin’s newly elected governor and legislature to balance the state’s books got a very different view of a protest movement.

According to the Times, the activities of the Wisconsin public sector unions — whose expensive benefits have put their state on the brink of bankruptcy — are nothing less than the moral equivalent of the demonstrations in Tunisia that brought down an authoritarian dictatorship. As the headline “Wisconsin Leads the Way as Workers Fight Cuts” indicates, the whole focus of the piece is an effort to portray the unions and their Democratic allies as revolutionaries who are on the cutting edge of a movement that will, in effect, reverse the verdict of last year’s election. Read More