My article on the Tawakkol/Nobel/ Muslim Brotherhood controversy is here, click. It says Islah founder al Zindani openly advocates jihadist violence, but he’s Saleh’s buddy, not Tawakkol’s. Furthermore the protesters reject the ineffectual opposition parties entirely and advocate a parliamentary system that will reinforce political diversity and empower small parties, minorities and independents. (The US backed GCC plan will empower the radicals, Islah and the status quo; one reason the protesters reject it entirely.)
This is a current interview and video of Tawakkol at Democracy Now and her statement with Ban Ki Moon is here
I am astonished that so many conservative commentators jumping in with both feet, meme of the day. Two of the most informed and rational are linked in my article, but there’s a dozen others going off who never covered the blood bath in Yemen or Saleh’s relationship with AQAP and are now obsessed with trashing Tawakkol as a radical solely because she belongs to the Islah party. Then logically all the Democrats should resign their party because of Bill Ayers (among other reasons).
Some analysis is based on Wikipedia depth understanding of Yemen. One theme was, Why doesn’t she join/create another party? Its Yemen. Tawakkol couldn’t get a license to text message news or establish a news paper for two years. No non-Saleh loyalist can create a new party. When I say the JMP is “diverse,” I mean Islamist oriented Islah joined with the secular YSP, socialist remnants of the ruling party of the former southern state, the PDRY, to form the JMP. The reason Islah itself is diverse is that the southerners’ YSP is the only other opposition party that has any seats in Parliament, due to the hegemony of the ruling GPC. Options to oppose Saleh from within the political system are limited to Islah or the socialists, and both have long been compromised and not fully within the opposition.
But overall, how Tawakkol feels about homosexuals (now that we know what she thinks about Jews) is much less relevant than the fact that Saleh is inserting National Security operatives (and paying al Qaeda) to create chaos in Abyan and the fact that he regularly releases AQAP operatives in a quid pro quo arrangement. Saleh asked for and got a fatwa against protesting. He plays the religion card internally and the terrorism card externally. The threat to US national security is not Tawakkol Karman.
Defector Ali Mohsen is very well deserving of scrutiny in this regard, as are US sweethearts, Saleh’s relatives, security force commanders and CT partners, the Four Thugs. Tawakkol Karman is a democracy activist representative of thousands of other democracy ideologues in Yemen. The backlash against her is more about the politicized Nobel Committee.
Updates: Rusty gets it, see The Arab World, It ain’t Switzerland
The same principle holds in Yemen where a woman with ties to Islamists won the Nobel Peace prize. I don’t give the Nobel Prize much credence as anything more than what Norwegian politicians think, but the reaction about Tawakkol Karman sharing in the prize has been, well, kinda stupid.
This isn’t the choice between a pro-American dictator and Lockean liberals, it’s the choice between a Pakistani like “ally” which pays lip service to the GWOT but who had deep ties to al Qaeda and Saudi style Islamists and those that oppose him. That the opposition is made up of other Islamists is just part of the game you play in the Arab world. It’s also made up of socialists, Baathists, and whatever other insane and discredited ideology still lingering in the region.
Yes, exactly, there are actually Nasserites. All the parties are left over from before 1990’s unity and have a stale ideologies. They don’t really function as parties in that they are top down organizations that don’t ask their members for input or have real transitions of power or transparency themselves.
There are plans in work for a democratic party, but Saleh has to go before it can be founded.
Below is a write up from MEMRI that notes Tawakkol is of a liberal mindset. The MEMRI article says she renounced her Islah membership in favor of the democratic demands of the revolution. Like my article, it highlights her activism in favor of journalists, villagers and women’s rights. It also says that she advocates safeguarding against extremists stealing the revolution by advancing a pluralist model of a transitional government.
There’s a couple of good citations including, “Her preference of liberal over Islamist views was also reflected in her call, during an interview, for equality between Muslim Yemenis and religious minorities such as the Jews, which would include the right to run for president.[13]”
“During the protests against President Saleh, Karman stood out as an independent leader representing no partisan position. Thus, for example, she refused to negotiate with the regime, though her party did negotiate with it.”
There are a few minor factual errors in the MEMRI article including, Tawakkol is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not they claim her. She is not and never was a member of Parliament. (She was elected to the ruling council of Islah because she is so popular, to the dismay of the hard liners in the party.) The name of her NGO, Women Journalists without Borders was stolen by a regime clone in 2006, the correct name for her NGO is Women Journalists without Chains.
Tawakkul Karman, one of the three women awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year, is a leader of the Yemeni protest movement who advocates nonviolent struggle for regime change in her country. A 32-year-old mother of three, she was born to a rural family in Taiz province. Her father, ‘Abd Al-Salam Khaled Karman, is a politician and lawyer, and her sister, Safa Karman, is a news editor for Al-Jazeera TV.[1]
After the family moved to San’a, she earned a bachelor’s degree in commerce from the University of Science and Technology there, followed by a master’s in political science and a certificate in general education from Sana’a University. She also studied investigative journalism in the U.S.
Karman is active in trade unions, human rights organizations and media institutions in Yemen and outside it. She is a member of the Yemeni parliament on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood party, Al-Islah, and of the Youth Revolution Council. She is also the chair of Journalists without Borders in Yemen, and a prominent advocate of free press, women’s rights and human rights in her country. (Read on …)