Public vs. Personal: Disclosing Waddady’s contention

Many people (FB friends and non-friends) have been attacking me openly sometimes and from behind the scene other times because of what they labeled as “My Unjustified Assault on Nasser Waddady"...

These people look at the issue from their mind's empty side , if not all is there: annulled vacuum. They fail to contextualize the issue within the framework of Nasser’s blatant allegations and pretense to be a defender of Freedom of speech and Human Rights in the Arab world. Nasser has proved, beyond any shadow of doubt, that he is incriminated by his affiliation with the Zionist and Anti-Islamic lobbies when he is caught with red hands…

Some of my attackers brought in, unconsciously, the religion and misquoted it out of its context once gain by saying that I should NOT backbite a Mauritanian. They just act beside the point and disregard the fact that this issue is a public domain and has got nothing to do with attaching Nasser Waddady or anybody else…

I personally do not know Nasser and I have never met him in my life. But as a journalist and young blogger and (American-Mauritanian) who is concerned with who is out there to represent me or speak on behalf of me. I refuse sating motionless and passive because I have my own take and say about what is going on here (US) and their (RIM)…

Conversely, the self-imposed question here is not that I am disclosing one's personal life for the sake of displaying his misdeeds; it is rather about being/pretending the legitimate representative of Islam/ Muslims in the West while he is unable even to fathom what is there in his engagement, let alone to openly announce his anti-Islamic attitudes. I am not expecting any reply from Waddady's side since he kept silent, so far, and could not defend himself against the perpetual attacks from various resources. I am merely translating what is said and written either by other or by Waddady or anyone else…

I have no unsettled/unfinished or bad intention to hurt anyone whosoever he is. But, I do believe that sharing the truth and opening up the eyes of the one-dimensional audience to what is going on under the blanket of Islam by those who happen to associate themselves with our religion...

Instead of being thankful to my efforts to help the Arabic readers understand what is the whole issue about by translating and commenting from time to another, despite the scarcity of my spare time, they prefer to misunderstand and counter attach me…

Dr. Elycheikh Ahmedtelba

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لماذا دولة "الصحراويين"؟

مؤخرا بدأت قضية "الصحراء الغربية" تتصدر بعض المواقع الأخبارية بعد نجاح بعض المطالبين أو "المستغلين" للوضع المتأجج والمتأزم سياسيا بين الشرعية المغربية والمطالبة الجزائرية في الأقاليم الجنوبية من الساقية الحمراء وواد الذهب...

قد أكون محظوظا لأني سافرت أكثر من 100 مرة في تلك الربوع ودرستها وخبرتها جيدا. سافرت بكل الوسائل المتاحة من وجدة وحتى بير كندوز مرورا بأكادير فاس ومكناس وسيدي سليمان وقنيطرة والرباط والدار البيضاء وسطات ومراكش و أكادير وانزكان وسيدي ايفني وكليميم وآخفنير والطنطان ولعيون والمرسى و السمارة  وبوجدور و اوسيرد والداخلية والعرقوب ودكمار ....

يلاحظ المرء ان كل هذه المدن والقرى والتجمعات السكنية متجانسة ومكتملة البنى التحتية وتعيش تحت السيطرة الكاملة للمملكة المغربية وفيها حضور مكثف للجيش المغربي (لمخازية) و (السيمي) وكل شعوبها تعيش في رفاه وتستمتع بدعم حكومي معتبر على البضائع والمواد الإستهلاكية ، خصوصا في الأقاليم الجنوبية، وتعيش في مدن متطورة من حيث المعمار والشوارع والتخطيط الحضاري...

على الرغم من كل هذا تجد بعض الشباب المتعاطفين، بغير وعي، مع مايسمى بالقضية الصحراوية أو الإستقلال التام عن المغرب الذي تنادي به بعض الفرق المتناحرة والتي هجرت أرض تيندوقف الجرداء لتجعل من مدينتي أزويرات ونواذيبو  في موريتانيا ملاذا لأحلامهم وقلعة من قلاعهم التي يطالبون منها بالثورة وتحريك الشباب...

إن من يطلقون على أنفسهم الثوريين الصحراويين ليسوا الآ بعض المرتزقة الذين لايعترفون بالجميل لا للمغرب التي جعلت منهم دولة ولا لموريتانيا التي منحتهم الأوراق الثبوتية والجنسية... إنهم يعيشون على حلم ضائع لن يتحقق ولن يتجسد على أرض الواقع بقدرما سيظل سرابا تلهث خلفه الجزائر ويستمتع المجتمع الدولي بقتل الوقت بدل الضائع من خلال مايسمى بالمفاوضات...

لكن، لو افترضنا جدلا ان هناك دولة مستقلة تسمى "الصحراء الغربية"، اين ستكون حدود هذه الدولة؟ وماهي مقوماتها الديمغرافية والإقتصادية؟ وهل ستدعمها الجزائر، العاجزة أصلا عن توفير العيش الكريم لملايين "الحينطيست"(عبارة تطلق في الجزائر على الشباب العاطل عن العمل والذين يجلسون تحت ظل الحائط لقتل الوقت)؟

لا اعتقد ان الصحراويين بشكل خاص والبيظان بشكل عام يملكون المقومات الثقافية والسلوكية لبناء دولة مدنية متحضرة بما في ذلك "دولة البيظان"، موريتانيا...؟

د. اعل الشيخ احمد الطلبة، مدون واستاذ جامعي

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Mauritania: Military buttons on grey suits

There is greater social activism now and some Mauritanian groups are taking a stand against the discriminatory policies of the Mauritanian government that have exacerbated.

President Abdel Ould Aziz's government is on the defensive on many fronts. Civil society groups and the opposition have protested the government's plans for a census because they view it as a means to discriminate against the black population. Clashes between police and demonstrators in September led to more than 50 arrests.


Youth, students and the intelligentsia have called for the retreat of the military from politics, a clearer separation of powers, the creation of a national agency in the fight against slavery and the decentralisation of power to local governments. In August, the government ceded to opposition demands to postpone parliamentary elections until an inclusive dialogue could be held that would lead to political reform. The new date for the elections is still unknown, as the talks have not started and the opposition continues to add to its list of demands for change.


Oil production has seriously disappointed investors, but new uranium mines and the development of gad deposits will help to boost state revenues

Aziz justified his overthrow of democratically elected President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi in 2008 by the need to protect the country from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The government plans to continue its solo and joint attacks on AQIM positions in the region, especially Mali's Wagadou Forest, into 2012. AQMI kidnappings and other activities are set to continue as the group seeks to exploit regional weaknesses. Terrorism remains the government's main focus and Aziz argues that there will be no development without security.


The government has promised to fight poverty, but the statistics show little change. More than 12% of the population experiences food insecurity and one in every two Mauritanians lives below the poverty line, according to the IMF. 


The strong growth of gold, copper and iron ore will continue to spur interest in the mining sector. Other resources look promising. Australia's Aura Energy announced the discovery of a new uranium deposit at Reguibat in March 2011, while Forte Energy is also continuing its exploration efforts in Zednes and Bir En Nar. Morocco's [I]Compagnie Minière de Touissit[/I], OSEAD France and local company [I]Groupe AZIZI[/I] have been working together since June 2010 on uranium, gold and iron exploration.


Mauritania's oil boom disappoints. The Chinguetti field, which investors argued could produce 75,000 barrels per day (bpd), has never reached its potential and was set to produce about 8,000 bpd for Malaysia's Petronas into 2012. In 2011, France's Total expressed worries that its discoveries at the Taoudenni basin may not be commercially viable. In June 2011, SNIM, SOMELEC, SMC and Tasisast Mauritania signed a joint venture to generate electricity from natural gas. Tullow has now said it will enter, however.


Economic growth projections are based on a new infrastructure build out. Construction of a new minerals port at Nouadhibou has been ongoing since April 2010, and Chinese companies are doubling the capacity of the port at Nouakchott. The telecoms sector is likely to receive a boost when the first fibre­optic cable linking Mauritania to Europe and West Africa becomes operational in 2012. Current road projects will improve links to Senegal, Algeria and Mali. The search for investors will likely result in Aziz pursuing relations with Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and China, potentially compromising relations with allies in Europe and North America.

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Unfortunate and Disturbing Report: Weddady Has Some Explaining to Do

Blogger Nasser Weddady. (Photo: Flicker)

Following the recent investigative report by Max Blumenthal, a journalist affiliated with the pro-Palestinian online site Electronic Intifada, a seemingly disturbing account of a list of sponsors and sources of funding of two organizations (The American Islamic Congress and Free Arabs) came to light in rather great, and quite disturbing, detail. The article wouldn’t have drawn any personal attention had it not been the direct association of my compatriot, the social media activist and militant blogger Nasser Weddady with these two organizations.

There is no denying that Nasser Weddady is a talented young man known in the blogosphere to be a vocal advocate for human rights and democracy in the Arab world. He is also the son of a very respectable and learned political family. But given the shadow these disturbing allegations cast over his organizations, he assuredly has some explaining to do for his fellow Arab Americans and Mauritanians.

Despite the severity of the allegations and the plausibility of facts mentioned in this detailed account, including precise figures in IRS documents filed by the said organizations, Nasser Wedday is morally and legally entitled, like anyone else, to this basic democratic human right we invoke all the time and still yearn for in our part of the world: He is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. However, mere verbal denial, in this type of unfortunate situation, is alas not sufficient to wash away any suspicion, for if Max Blumenthal is, in effect, fabricating evidence, the incriminated parties could, and should, sue him for defamation.

Whatever may be our personal opinion of Nasser, and whatever slight or big the difference may be, in this case, between his persona and the organizations aforementioned, we have to remind ourselves that what is directly in question, here and now, is not so much so Nasser himself than the moral integrity and true public utility of the institutions he works for and/or is involved with. The difference may not, perhaps, matter so much yet it is worth noting, for subtlety, as a regulator of human perception, and thus a moderator of subjectivity, is of the utmost importance. If the allegations were to be confirmed, this wouldn’t necessarily make of Nasser a “traitor” but it would undoubtedly undermine the efforts of Free Arabs and AIC in asserting themselves as credible voices representing a legitimate Arab view point.

In fact, the organizations mentioned throughout the piece, as either public sponsors or private donors, are not only one-sidedly pro Israel, they are, also, openly islamophobic and racist; and the nuance here is of critical importance. Driven by their quasi hysterical hostility toward Islam and Muslims alike, their more or less declared agenda is to systematically undermine the efforts of Arabs and Muslims in the Unites States to organize themselves and lobby for their constitutional civic  rights and lawful democratic demands, be they related to their ongoing efforts at integration in their country of adoption or to legitimate political aims in their country of origin such as the right of Palestinians to self-determination and freedom etc.

Any Arab or Muslim who works in cahoots with an organization whose declared purpose is to completely sideline, or forcibly mute, the Palestinian narrative from the public space is not worthy of political leadership, let alone adulation and support. As the cornerstone of the region’s many challenges, the Palestinian question remains, in my humble opinion, a litmus test by which people’s true militancy and moral engagement can be properly and rigorously gauged.

However unapologetic I remain on this issue, I also do recognize, for the sake of peaceful human coexistence, that any settlement of the ongoing Palestinian predicament should ultimately take into consideration the lawful claims of the opposite side.

Just as it is absolutely irrational to want to deny the Palestinians their legitimate right to have a viable, independent and sovereign state in their historic homeland, it is likewise as unreasonable to disregard the fact that five million Jews now live in that land and their state is, in part at least, the result of international legality.

As they seek to use international legality as basis for achieving their lawful aims, Arabs should also learn, wherever they are, to respect and abide by the rules of international legality; rules that may not always work in their favor.

Last but not least, Arab and Muslim Americans are ultimately the ones who have to decide which group and leadership they want to associate with. At any time, people would have different agenda and purposes; the role of the elite is not to indoctrinate but to intellectually guide and morally enlighten people so as to be able to make the best choice possible.

Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba is a social analyst and political commentator.  

He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

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Anti-Muslim group leaps to defense of American Islamic Congress after EI exposé

AIC executive director Zainab Al-Suwaij, 
a vocal supporter of the US invasion of Iraq, 
meets with President George W. Bush on 4 April 2003
 

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There have been some very interesting reactions to Max Blumenthal’s investigation that revealed the virulently anti-Muslim and pro-Israel donors behind the American Islamic Congress (AIC).

That organization’s best known employee is the Mauritanian-born social media activist Nasser Weddady.

Weddady was briefly in the national spotlight when he was mysteriously parachuted in by the Governor of Massachusetts to speak on behalf of the Muslim community at the interfaith service in Boston in the days after the marathon bombing, replacing the well-known Muslim educator and imam Suhaib Webb.

As Blumenthal reported, the notorious anti-Muslim activist Daniel Pipes “has promoted the AIC as one of the ‘moderate groups’ presenting a counter-weight to Muslim organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he has repeatedly labeled as a front for a secret plot to place the US under the control of ‘sharia law.’”

AIC, and its executive director Zainab Al-Suwaij, have been major promoters of the US war in Iraq as well as beneficiaries, reaping millions of dollars in government patronage from both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Neither Weddady nor the AIC, where he serves as outreach director, nor Al-Suwaij have responded to Blumenthal’s article, and did not respond to queries when he was researching it.

The Clarion Project leaps to AIC’s defense

  But AIC did receive a vigorous defense from Ryan Mauro, the “National Security Analyst” for the Clarion Project.

The Clarion Project – previously known as the Clarion Fund – is notorious for producing several wildly Islamophobic films including Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and The Third Jihad. It’s latest film, Iranium, argues for war against Iran.

Mauro notes that CAIR shared Blumenthal’s article in its email newsletter and says:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is yet again undermining its own “moderate” credentials by slamming its Muslim rivals (and true moderates) for being part of an “Islamophobia” network and exposing its own Islamist agenda in the meantime.

He also asserts that “There is a wide opening for a group like AIC to compete with CAIR,” confirming that the view that AIC is a tool to fight groups that the Islamophobia industry and Zionist ideologues disapprove of is shared more widely than just by Pipes.

Both AIC and the Clarion Project share many of the same anti-Muslim donors, including Sheldon Adelson, the Casino magnate who believes Palestinians are an “invented people,” and is the main bankroller of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as a massive donor to the US Republican Party.

According to the Center for American Progress’s 2011 report Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, the Clarion Project received more than $17 million from one funder, Donors Capital Fund, in 2008 alone.

That massive sum, which originated from an anonymous individual, helped pay for the distribution of millions of DVD copies of the hate-film Obsession.

The Center for American Progress report argues that Obsession was “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat.”

Donors Capital Fund, as Blumenthal reported, has also been among the AIC’s “most reliable” financial supporters.

Wealthy, ultra-conservative individuals, including billionaires Charles and David Koch, use Donors Capital Fund as a conduit to support climate change denial, anti-union and other right wing causes as well as Islamophobia, according to SourceWatch.

The Clarion Project’s board of advisors includes, as Eli Clifton puts it, “some of the most high-profile and established propagators of Islamophobic rhetoric,” including Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney.

Interestingly, The Clarion Project shares a board member with AIC in Zuhdi Jasser who narrated the anti-Muslim propaganda film The Third Jihad.

If the Clarion Project’s defense of AIC was supposed to help the organization’s credibility with anyone other than extreme anti-Muslim elements, it is more likely to do precisely the opposite. It only confirms how closely held AIC is within the portfolio of think tanks and outfits supported by Donors Capital Fund, Sheldon Adelson and other bankrollers of hate.

AJC former communications director: “neo-Nazi wingnuts”

  A quite salty reaction came from Ben S. Cohen, the former communications director for the American Jewish Committee. Incensed at the perceived attack on Weddady, Cohen called Blumenthal and me “neo-Nazi wingnuts”: 

Free Arabs editor weighs in

The other notable response has come from Ahmed Benchemsi, editor-in-chief of the website Free Arabs, which came in for heavy criticism in Blumenthal’s article. Weddady is the co-founder of the website.

In his response, Benchemsi names me and Blumenthal as “master conspiracy investigators,” and “conspiracy theorists,” though Blumenthal’s article was, in fact, researched and written – extremely well, I may add – entirely by Blumenthal.

Benchemsi does not (and cannot) refute any of the hard facts about AIC’s funding from anti-Muslim hate groups, but he does try to put some distance between Free Arabs and AIC, asserting that Nasser Weddady’s association with the site is extracurricular and has nothing to do with his work at AIC.

Notably, Benchemsi also now says that the Free Arabs website’s “design and technicalities have cost around $25,000 until now, all paid by my personal savings and a donation of an Arab journalist friend who vowed to remain anonymous, i.e. away from the slander circus.”

This is interesting because until 8 May, the Free Arabs website stated on its “Who supports us?” page, “Development of the initiative was enabled by Ahmed Benchemsi’s fellowship at Stanford University’s program on Arag [sic] Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.”

This has now been deleted from the Free Arabs website.

As Blumenthal reported, the leadership of the Stanford program has habitually supported US military intervention in Arab countries from Iraq to Syria.

But after Lina Khatib, the Stanford program’s director, wrote to The Electronic Intifada to disavow any formal role for her program in supporting Free Arabs, Benchemsi no longer mentions Stanford.

Yet Benchemsi’s response is interesting for another reason; while ostensibly putting distance between Free Arabs and AIC, he divulges that his own ties to the Islamophobia industry-funded group go back to 2005:

My first contact with AIC was in 2005. I was then serving as the publisher and editor-in-chief of a weekly newsmagazine in Morocco and as such, was facing jail time and a prohibitive fine for allegedly “defaming” a government official. AIC’s Jesse Sage, who visited my office in Casablanca on a brief trip to Morocco, spontaneously offered to help by launching a solidarity campaign in the US. The same offer was reiterated 2 years later after I was accused of “offending” the King of Morocco (and later, on numerous similar occasions). Over the years and judicial hazards, I built a close relationship, then a personal friendship with Jesse, who later introduced me to Nasser Weddady.

Blumenthal reported that Sage is “a protégé of hardline anti-Muslim activist Charles Jacobs” who founded the David Project, the organization that works to suppress independent scholarship about Palestine and Palestinian solidarity activism on US campuses.

Weddady

  As noted, Weddady has not responded to Blumenthal’s article and went uncharacteristically silent on Twitter for several days, until he tweeted out a link to an article in The Atlantic:

The article by Thor Halvorssen Mendoza is about the re-emergence after two years in hiding of Bahrain human rights defender Ali Abdulemam.

Halvorssen Mendoza is president of the Human Rights Foundation, a group that promotes military intervention, and is also director of the Oslo Freedom Forum, a “shindig—launched in 2009, and on its way to becoming a human-rights equivalent of the Davos economic forum” (The Oslo Freedom Forum is, incidentally, where Free Arabs was first conceived by Weddady and Benchemsi).

In his Atlantic piece, Halvorssen Mendoza describes Weddady’s role in campaigning for Abdulemam, who had been sentenced to 15 years in prison amid Bahrain’s brutal crackdown on human rights defenders and protestors.

Halvorssen Mendoza has also defended Weddady on Twitter, calling Blumenthal’s article “fiction” and explicitly exploiting the Abdulemam case: 

It’s all well and good that Weddady spoke out for Abdulemam, but it is cynical – to say the least – of Weddady and his defenders to now use Abdulemam to deflect attention from the disturbing revelations about the American Islamic Congress and the major support it receives from the most virulent Muslim-haters in the world.

Abdulemam, after all he’s been through, does not deserve that.

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Mauritania: Refugees Stranded In Desert With No Hope Of Return

Malians fleeing fighting in the north.

 

 

Some 70,000 refugees from Mali are living in difficult conditions in the middle of the Mauritanian desert, with ethnic tensions in northern Mali quashing any hopes of a swift return home.

A report released today by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) entitled “Stranded in the desert” calls on aid organisations to urgently renew efforts to meet the refugees’ basic needs.

The report, based on testimonies collected from over 100 refugees in Mbera refugee camp in Mauritania, examines the reasons for the refugees fleeing and reveals the underlying complexity of the crisis in neighbouring Mali.

While the crisis could last for months or even years, the refugees face a future of isolation in the middle of the desert, totally dependent on outside assistance and humanitarian aid.

"In northern Mali, entire communities are currently displaced within their country or have escaped abroad as refugees," says Henry Gray, emergency coordinator for MSF. "Most of the refugees are from the Tuareg and Arab communities.

They fled pre-emptively, often for fear of violence due to their presumed links with Islamist or separatist groups. Their home in northern Mali is still in the grip of fear and mistrust."

MSF has been working in Mauritania since the arrival of the first refugees in early 2012, and has frequently warned of the alarming consequences to the refugees' health as a result of the appalling living conditions in Mbera camp.

In November 2012 MSF conducted a retrospective nutritional mortality survey that revealed a critical nutrition situation, with mortality rates above the emergency threshold for children under two years old.

The medical situation has further worsened following an influx of 15,000 new refugees in the aftermath of the January 2013 joint French and Malian military intervention.

The number of consultations in MSF's clinics in the Mbera camp has increased from 1,500 to 2,500 per week. The number of children admitted per week for severe malnutrition has more than doubled, from 42 to 106. 85 percent of the children under treatment arrived in the camp between January and February; despite the nutritional status of the new refugees being generally good when assessed on arrival in the camp.

"These statistics show that the refugees have grown weaker whilst in the camp, the very place where they should have been receiving assistance, including correctly formulated food rations from aid organisations," says Gray. "There has clearly been a lack of preparation for this new influx of refugees.

The situation has improved in recent weeks but it is still extremely precarious and aid organisations need to maintain their humanitarian response for as long as necessary. Shelter, clean water, latrines, hygiene and food must all reach those in need, and be sustained at the minimum humanitarian standards."

MSF runs medical and humanitarian programmes in the Malian regions of Mopti, Gao, Sikasso and Timbuktu, as well as for Malian refugees in Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger.

In Mauritania, MSF supports four primary health care centres in the Mbera camp and at the Fassala border crossing post, and runs an operating theatre in the town of Bassikounou. Since starting to work in Mauritania in February 2012, MSF teams have provided 85,000 consultations, assisted 200 deliveries and treated nearly 1,000 children suffering from severe malnutrition.

Download the report: Stranded in the Desert (PDF)

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Optimism back in Mauritania, without oil

IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (l) and Central Bank of Mauritania Governor Kane Ousmane (r)

 

 

 

 

Mauritania is witnessing a rebound in economic growth after a series of adverse shocks - including high import and low export prices, political instability, the global crisis - took a toll in recent years. Optimism is back, even if there will be no oil boom. 

According to IMF analysts Boileau Loko, Abdelrahmi Bessaha and Younes Zouhar, Mauritania's government was just given "a vote of confidence for the country's economic reforms" by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). After 19 months of frozen ties, the first IMF disbursement of a three-year loan was agreed on.
The three analysts, writing in 'IMF Survey', "estimate that the economy will grow by 5 percent this year and just over 5 percent in 2011. This growth reflects the authorities' strong reform agenda, the rebound in prices of Mauritania's main exports, and the normalization of relations with the international community."
The West African country had high hopes for a dramatic change of fortune when oil was discovered off its shores in 2001. Production in Chinguetti, the main oil field, started in 2006 and immediately ran into major technical difficulties, which led output to fall from close to 75,000 barrels per day (bpd) in early 2006 to 23,000 by end-2006. Since then, oil production has steadily declined, with output projected to be as low as 7,000 bpd in 2011.
On the back of the unexpected and prolonged fall in oil output, Mauritania was hit hard by the fuel and food crisis and the global recession in 2008–09. In addition, an August 2008 military coup - the second in the past five years - led to a political crisis and the suspension of assistance from many bilateral and multilateral donors, including the IMF.
The combination of these adverse shocks had a profound impact on this desert nation of just over 3 million people. Non-oil real GDP contracted by 1.1 percent in 2009, down from 4.1 percent in 2008.
With the decline in oil production, total GDP also fell by 1.2 percent. The fiscal deficit widened and the external position deteriorated sharply, with external reserves dropping below 1.5 months of imports of goods and services. As a result, progress on poverty reduction slowed.
The country's internationally recognised presidential election of July 2009, won by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, marked the return to a constitutional order. This step enabled the international community to resume normal relations with Mauritania, signalling a turning point for the country.
According to Loko, Bessaha and Zouhar, the IMF was one of the first agencies to respond, resuming its provision of technical assistance in September

Oil production (green) and GDP growth (blue) in Mauritania 2005-11

© IMF/afrol News

2009 and starting discussions with the Mauritanian authorities on a new programme of economic reforms supported by a three-year loan programme, which was approved by the IMF's Board in March this year.

Today, "Mauritanian authorities have made good progress in re-establishing macroeconomic stability," the IMF analysts hold. "Inflation is projected to remain in the single digits, while rapid credit growth, a strong pickup in exports, and a rebound in industrial production point to robust growth in the non-oil sector."

Non-oil real GDP is expected to grow by 5.6 percent in 2010 and 5.5 percent in 2011, supported by strong activity in the agriculture, mining, and construction sectors. Thanks to higher prices and production levels of Mauritania's iron ore, gold, and copper exports, the fiscal and external positions could improve, they hold.

The analysts also hold Mauritania has a "solid reform agenda." Reforms focus on achieving fiscal consolidation; creating more room for higher social and infrastructure spending; maintaining low inflation; improving the business environment to support broad-based private sector–led-growth; and strengthening social protection and safety nets.

In a move to signal a strong commitment to the reform agenda, Mauritania's central bank lowered its policy rate from 12 to 9 percent in November 2009 and restored the foreign exchange auction system in mid-December 2009. The system had been suspended in late 2008 following an acute shortage of foreign currency.

As with many low-income countries, the main goal is to achieve high and sustainable growth in order to boost employment and reduce poverty. Almost one out of two Mauritanians lives below the poverty line, and a large segment of the population remains subject to food insecurity.

"Progress has been made in many areas, but private investment is still low, in part because limited infrastructure and an unfavourable business climate continue to hamper economic growth," according tot he analysts.

Diversifying the economy is seen as essential to reducing Mauritania's vulnerability to external shocks, since the mining sector represents nearly 75 percent of exports but less than 3 percent of employment. "Meeting these challenges will require sound macroeconomic policies and the steady implementation of structural reforms," the IMF analysts claim.

By staff writers

© afrol News

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Weddady’s Free Arabs, American Islamic Congress and the pro-Israel funders who helped them rise

On 18 April, three days after a bombing killed three and left many more wounded at the Boston marathon, a figure unknown to most Americans stepped suddenly into the national spotlight. At a nationally broadcast interfaith service addressed by President Barack Obama, a Mauritanian-born social media activist named Nasser Weddady appeared on stage as the designated representative of Boston’s Muslim community. Introduced as the chairman of the New England Interfaith Council and the civil rights outreach director for the American Islamic Congress (AIC), Weddady delivered a well-received sermon referencing Jewish and Islamic scripture on non-violence.

Unlike the notable Jewish, Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant religious figures chosen to speak at the service, Weddady was not an ordained clergy member, nor was he known to many members of the community he claimed to represent. In fact, he was a last-minute replacement for Suhaib Webb, a Muslim educator and imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, the largest Muslim house of prayer in New England.

Commenting on Twitter that the office of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick “made the call” to replace him, Webb said the governor chose “Muhammad Weddady,” misidentifying Nasser Weddady. When another Twitter user asked Webb who Weddady was, he responded, “No idea.”

A report by the right-wing, pro-Israel website JNS.org suggested that Webb’s replacement by Weddady was politically motivated (“Muslim Brotherhood-linked mosque’s imam replaced as speaker at service for Boston Marathon attack victims,” 21 April 2013).

According to the article, groups including self-styled “terror expert” Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism, the anti-Muslim outfit Americans for Peace and Tolerance created by David Project founder Charles Jacobs, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claimed Webb’s mosque “has an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel history that started with its founding by members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas.”

The allegations stemmed from a failed campaign directed by Jacobs and assisted by the ADL, Emerson and other anti-Muslim elements to block the construction of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. In May 2010, after the dust cleared, Governor Patrick appeared at the mosque, seemingly rebuking the cast of Islamophobes that smeared it as a terrorist front. Patrick told the congregation, “Yours is a peaceful faith, and I know that … .”

 Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley also offered support for the mosque, dispatching a staffer to attend Patrick’s speech and earmarking $50,000 in state funds to “sensitivity training for law enforcement officials” (“‘Yours is a peaceful faith’,” Boston Globe, 23 May 2010).

Disturbing history

 

The JNS.org report has not been confirmed by Governor Patrick’s office, Webb, or by Weddady. However, the replacement of Webb, perhaps the most notable Muslim religious authority in New England, with an obscure lay figure raises questions about why the local Muslim community was not able to delegate its own representative.

And who was Weddady? Was he, in fact, a rising human rights activist promoting tolerance among Bostonians and spreading freedom abroad? And was his employer, the AIC, simply a group of earnest Muslim do-gooders “trying to build bridges among people of different faiths and ethnicities,” as Public Radio International’s The World claimed it was on its 16 April edition?

An investigation of the American Islamic Congress by The Electronic Intifada revealed a disturbing history that stretches back to the invasion of Iraq, with political patronage from the Bush administration building the organization from the ground up. Despite its claim to promote tolerance, the AIC has depended on substantial support from the very same elements that fought tooth and nail to sabotage the Islamic Society of Boston, and which seem determined to undermine Muslim communal organizing efforts across the country.

The organization has managed to maintain US government funding during the Obama era, serving as a faithful arm of soft American power in the Middle East while nurturing the creation of Weddady’s new “Free Arabs” website, a self-proclaimed portal to “Democracy, Secularism, [and] Fun” that eschews criticism of Western policies towards the Middle East while promoting US military intervention in Syria.

Weddady and AIC co-founder and Executive Director Zainab Al-Suwaij did not respond to calls and emailed queries requesting comment for this article.

According to Internal Revenue Service 990 information filings, the AIC is funded largely by a pool of right-wing donors responsible for bankrolling key players in America’s Islamophobia industry, from Charles Jacobs to Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. These same donors have pumped millions into major pro-Israel organizations, including groups involved in settlement activity and the Friends of the IDF, which provides assistance to the Israeli army.

Among the AIC’s most reliable supporters is the Donors Capital Fund, which has provided at least $85,000 in funding since 2008. Donors Capital was among the seven foundations identified in the Center for American Progress’s 2011 report Fear Inc. as “the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America.” Another foundation singled out in the report, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, has donated $325,000 to the AIC between 2005 and 2011.

The Bradley Foundation is one the most generous donors to the American conservative movement, according to People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch project, pumping millions into right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, key bastions of neoconservativism. It has also supported the work of Charles Murray, a right-wing author who notoriously argued in his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, that intelligence was based on race, and that blacks and Latinos were genetically inferior to whites and Asians.

Some of the most virulent anti-Muslim agitators, from David Horowitz to Frank Gaffney to Daniel Pipes, who has called for razing entire Palestinian villages and other forms of collective punishment, have received more than $5 million from the Bradley Foundation.

Aided by Adelson

 

In 2009, the AIC received a $95,500 donation from the Adelson Family Foundation, the charitable entity of Las Vegas casino baron Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam. Adelson is best known for his attempts to unseat President Barack Obama through million dollar donations to the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

A major donor to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Birthright Israel program that sends Jewish American youth on free trips to Israel, Adelson is also a key financial benefactor of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career (“The Bibi Connection,” Al Akhbar English, 12 January 2012).

In December 2011, Adelson told a Birthright Israel group that Palestinians were “an invented people.” “Don’t let Muslim student organizations take over the campuses,” he urged the Jewish college students. Adelson has never explained his funding of the AIC, perhaps the only Muslim-oriented recipient of his donations (“Sheldon Adelson to Birthright group: Gingrich is right to call Palestinians ‘invented people,’” Haaretz, 26 December 2011).

Of all the right-wing, pro-Israel donors to the AIC — and there are too many to mention here — none has been more generous than the Klarman Family Foundation, which provided the group with $425,000 from 2005 to 2011. The foundation is the charitable vehicle for Boston-based pro-Israel billionaire Seth Klarman. He is the principal funder of The Israel Project, an Israeli government-linked public relations and lobbying group run by former AIPAC spokesperson Josh Block, which has, among other things, taken dozens of journalists on helicopter tours in Israel and the territories it occupies (“Israel Project brags on planting story in CNN and taking 38 journalists on helicopter trips in Israel,” Mondoweiss, 18 April 2013).

Besides the AIC, Klarman has donated to a who’s who of anti-Muslim and pro-Israel groups, including the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the American Jewish Committee, The David Project, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, and Friends of Ir David Inc., the US tax-exempt fundraising arm of the settler organization behind a wave of Palestinian expulsions in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

Klarman is also a major donor to Birthright Israel, AIPAC-founded think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the pro-Israel neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The AIC is not the only putatively Muslim group funded by Klarman. In 2011, Klarman made his first donation to the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the shell organization that serves as the personal platform for Zuhdi Jasser. The previously unknown Jasser, a physician from Arizona with no academic or theological credentials, is one of the country’s most outspoken Muslim proponents of law enforcement surveillance of Muslim communities.

Two years earlier, Jasser was welcomed onto AIC’s board of directors, joining a host of like-minded neoconservatives.

“Demographic jihad”

 

Daniel Pipes, one of America’s foremost anti-Muslim activists, has promoted the AIC as one of the “moderate groups” presenting a counter-weight to Muslim organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he has repeatedly labeled as a front for a secret plot to place the US under the control of “sharia law.” A staffer for a major Muslim-American civil rights organization told me that AIC’s leadership refused to participate in any initiative with the organized Muslim American community.

Described by his frequent host Glenn Beck as “the Muslim we were all looking for after 9/11,” Jasser starred in an Islamophobic propaganda film, The Third Jihad, warning that Muslims were organizing a takeover of the US through “demographic jihad.” He gained prominence as the lead Muslim witness in the congressional hearing on “Muslim radicalization” hosted by New York Republican Congressman Rep. Peter King, and has vehemently defended the New York Police Department’s profiling of Muslims.

In October 2012, AIC director Zainab Al-Suwaij signed a letter authored by Jasser and addressed to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her to bar Pakistani politician Imran Khan from entering the US (“AILC Press Release: Secretary Clinton should bar Imran Khan from entering the U.S.,” 23 October 2012).

Jasser described Khan, one of Pakistan’s most outspoken opponents of US drone strikes, as “an anti-American politician who regularly defends the Taliban.” The letter contained the signatures of more than a dozen obscure Muslim figures, including Farid “Frank” Ghadry, a neoconservative favorite and AIPAC member who has attempted to promote himself, Ahmed Chalabi-style, as the future leader of a free Syria, including before the Israeli Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Another neoconservative activist seated on the AIC’s board, Hillel Fradkin, is a scholar of Islamic studies who signed the notorious Project for the New American Century letter calling for the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Then there is Khaleel Mohammed, a professor of religion at San Diego State University whose views have endeared him to hardline Islamophobes. A contributor to Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Quarterly, Mohammed argued in a friendly interview with David Horowitz’s far-right FrontPageMag that the Quran states that “Israel belongs to the Jews.” “Only when Muslims themselves accept Israel will they be following their Quran,” Mohammed claimed (“The Koran and the Jews,” 3 June 2004).

Mohammed is the faculty advisor for AIC’s student group at San Diego State University, Project Nur, and to the school’s Graduate Program in Homeland Security. On his personal website, Mohammed declared that Muslims who did not rise up to fight “the world terrorists” were betraying their Islamic duty. “The Quran makes it absolutely clear that Muslims must bear arms against errant Muslims in times of need,” he wrote. “It is either one or the other. We must either fight against terrorism or deem our silence as evidence of complicity” (“Statement on Terrorism,” 10 September 2004).

Bush’s Iraqi fixer

 

In August 2004, two years after she founded the AIC, Zainab Al-Suwaij appeared before the Republican National Convention to speak in support of George W. Bush’s re-election and the invasion of Iraq. “America, under the strong, compassionate leadership of President Bush, has given Iraqis the most precious gift any nation has ever given another — the gift of democracy and the freedom to determine its own future,” Suwaij proclaimed, according to a Fox News transcript.

Al-Suwaij was born into a Shiite family in Iraq that suffered under the regime of Saddam Hussein. When she appeared at the helm of the AIC just months after the 11 September 2001 attacks and with an invasion of Iraq on the way, her organization was little more than a shell, with no board of directors and only a little more than $12,000 in its coffers. By 2004, however, Al-Suwaij was earning six figures, with government contracts pouring into her organization along with requests from national media outlets. The US occupation of Iraq was propelling her ambition.

On 21 March 2003, two days after the US invasion of Iraq began, Al-Suwaij appeared on ABC’s 20/20 alongside three other Iraqi women representing a now-defunct group called Women For Iraq.

The women told host Barbara Walters that those protesting the invasion were “missing the point,” and thanked the US military for “freedom and liberty.” Days before, the four of them were invited to the White House to meet with a grateful Bush.

The following year, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $10 million grant for women’s “democracy training” in Iraq. Much of the money went to the Independent Women’s Forum, a militantly anti-feminist Republican organization then run by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and originally founded as Women For Clarence Thomas — a support group for the embattled, ultra-conservative Supreme Court nominee. Two organizations were brought in on the mission as subcontractors: the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the hard core neoconservative think tank currently promoting a US military assault on Iran, and the AIC.

In 2004, the Bush administration funneled $542,123 to the AIC; a year later, the Independent Women’s Forum paid the AIC $533,052 in State Department grants to serve as its “subcontractor” in Iraq. In 2006, the AIC received $465,780 in compensation from the Independent Women’s Forum for its work. According to IRS 990 information returns filed by the AIC, hefty State Department grants poured in to the group’s coffers throughout Bush’s second term in office.

An Independent Women’s Forum report on its work in Iraq contained few details about the concrete results it achieved. However, it hinted at a slew of embarrassing failures, including an Iraqi women’s conference held in Jordan in 2005 where participants arrived exhausted, famished and shell-shocked after being shot at by unnamed assailants. According to the report, the women were not provided with the food or lodging they requested, and “providing and confirming flights for the participants in a very short period of time proved impossible” (“Advancing Women’s Rights - Two Years in Iraq” [PDF]).

When Al-Suwaij attempted to open women’s centers in Basra and Karbala, local officials rebuked her — “this segment of the grant was never fully realized,” the report noted. A more successful forum organized through the AIC instructed Iraqis in Nasiriyah on “coughing into one’s elbow instead of into one’s hand, and other basic health concepts.”

Despite having participated in a dubious mission that was widely criticized as right-wing political patronage, the AIC has maintained a steady stream of government funding since Barack Obama entered the White House. In 2009, the AIC received more than $433,000 from the State Department to conduct conflict resolution programs in Iraq, claiming to have “diffused 60 conflicts” in the country. Two years later, it reaped $1.28 million in government funding for Iraqi conflict resolution and to train “social entrepreneurs” in Tunisia; over $170,000 of the government money was earmarked for democracy promotion. Today, the AIC maintains offices in Tunis and Cairo, both apparently supported by State Department grants.

To help coordinate its efforts across the Middle East and at its gleaming new cultural center in Boston, the AIC has turned to social media activist Nasser Weddady.

“Democracy, secularism, fun”

 

The son of a prominent Mauritanian diplomat and opposition politician, Weddady was hired by the AIC in 2007 as outreach director for the organization’s Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance (HAMSA). HAMSA is overseen by Jesse Sage, a protégé of hardline anti-Muslim activist Charles Jacobs, who hired him to direct the American Anti-Slavery Group that spearheaded a nationwide Sudan divestment campaign. Weddady boasts on his bio that he has briefed the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force, a division of the FBI, and claims to speak five languages fluently, including Spanish, French and Hebrew.

A profile of Weddady by Karen Leigh in The Atlantic describes him as a hidden force behind the Arab revolts — “an activist quietly pulling strings from Boston.” According to Leigh, Weddady is among the “top four most-influential Twitter users of the Arab Spring uprisings” and “is networked in every country in the region.” Leigh went on to claim “Weddady’s network” was largely responsible for the release of several activists jailed in Syria and Egypt during the Arab uprisings (“Behind the Arab Revolts, an Activist Quietly Pulling Strings From Boston,” 25 January 2012).

One of Weddady’s most high-profile projects is the “Dream Deferred Essay Contest.” With approximately $58,000 in grants since 2005 from the Earhart Foundation, a right-wing charity best known for funding conservative efforts to unravel affirmative action programs for minority students in the US, the “Dreams Deferred” competition has doled out cash prizes to Arab youth for essays detailing repression and cultural problems like female genital mutilation in their countries. Among the winners selected by a panel chaired by famed American feminist Gloria Steinem was Maikel Nabil Sanad, an Egyptian anti-military conscription activist who told Israel’s Ynet “I am pro-Israel,” and who supported Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip in 2008-09, blaming Palestinians for provoking Israel “to defend itself” (“Egyptian refusenik: I’m pro-Israel,” 25 October 2010).

In 2012, Palgrave Macmillan published an anthology of “Dreams Deferred” contest winners co-edited by Weddady and called Arab Spring Dreams. The book earned a glowing review from The Times of Israel, the Israeli publication financed by top AIC funder Seth Klarman. The blogger iPouya offered a less charitable critique, accusing the authors of committing a multitude of embarrassing factual errors.

Weddady co-edited the anthology with one of the neoconservative movement’s rising stars — Sohrab Ahmari, an Iranian-American former fellow at the right-wing Henry Jackson Society, and assistant books editor at The Wall Street Journal, who has been described by MJ Rosenberg at The Huffington Post as “the neocons’ favorite Iranian” (“Neocons Do Not Speak for Iranian-Americans,” 27 March 2012).

Ahmari is a vocal proponent of a US military strike on Iran to precipitate regime change, a position he advocated last year in an article for Commentary (“Can Iran Be Saved?” March 2012).

In the introduction to their book, Weddady and Ahmari explain their decision to exclude the Palestinian narrative from the anthology on the grounds that “a [Palestinian] state there, or a treaty here, are of little consequence to the Middle East’s struggle for civil rights.”

While speaking on a panel at the American Jewish Committee’s 2012 national conference in Washington, DC, Ahmari argued that the US “should try to actively shape the outcomes of the Arab Spring. In other words, we don’t have the opportunity to be humble and stay away from the region and favor all actors equally,” he stated, as video of the event shows. “… What needs to happen from the Western perspective is to be equally engaged, morally and militarily, to make sure the Arab Spring reflects our preferences rather than Tehran’s.”

Views like these have found an occasional home at Free Arabs, the website co-founded by Weddady. Described as a forum for Arab liberals who “confront both oppressive autocrats and religious zealots with audacious reporting,” the website’s launch generated a wave of online criticism and debate. Many critics pointed at “The Fatwa Show,” a comical portrayal of ultra-conservative Muslim sheikhs who issue absurd edicts against high heels and body hair.

Others homed in on “The Horrific 4,” a narrative series aiming to “push to an extreme the worse [sic] prejudices seen in the Arab world, sometimes with a satirical tone.” No satire was apparent, however, when “Yehudi,” a fictional Mizrahi Jew from Israel who appeared as part of the series, claimed, “we Middle Eastern Jews [living in Israel] … are the most free Arabs in the world” (“Mizrahi Jews are the ultimate pan-Arabs,” 24 October 2012). Without a trace of irony, Yehudi added: “Yes, we Middle Eastern Jews in Israel are the ultimate pan-Arabs — and we are free to explore that cross-cultural mix and blaze new identities in one of the most experimental societies in the world.”

Free Arabs states on its website that it was born from “a network of creative next-generation Arab activists facilitated by the American Islamic Congress, backed by a small grant from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.” Another sponsor of the website is Stanford University’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where the Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi — a co-founder of Free Arabs — serves as a visiting scholar.

The Stanford program that houses Benchemsi and Free Arabs is overseen by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Larry Diamond, a liberal interventionist academic and former senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed the US occupation of Iraq. Diamond emerged as a critic of the war after the occupation turned into a bloodstained boondoggle, but maintained that the invasion was just (“What went wrong in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, September-October 2004).

Almost a decade later, with the Arab revolts in flux, he sees new opportunities for the exercise of hard American power. In a recent commentary for The Atlantic, Diamond and Stanford’s Lina Khatib argued for US military intervention in Syria, warning that the failure to intervene would have “catastrophic consequences for regional stability and for the position of the United States in the Middle East” (“The Case for Intervening in Syria,” 25 April 2012).

Three days later, Free Arabs republished Diamond and Khatib’s piece, headlining it, “Syria - No More Excuses!”

Around this time, Weddady was busy organizing a 2 May panel discussion at AIC’s Boston cultural center that would be co-hosted by the the leading pro-Israel advocacy group the American Jewish Committee. Themed as “A New Vision of Muslim-Jewish Relations,” the event’s keynote speaker was Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

Built into the original scaffolding of Bush’s imperial project, the AIC emerged unscathed from its dramatic collapse, finding favor in a new era among Obama’s top allies. As Washington grasps for strategies to influence the course of the Arab revolts, Wedaddy and his colleagues are earning new opportunities, and ample compensation.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated since publication to indicate that Sohrab Ahmari is no longer a fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and is now assistant books editor at The Wall Street Journal.

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