Arab monarchies and the illusion of stability

Galip Dalay

Photo: A handout picture provided by the Saudi Royal Palace on 4 December 2016 shows Saudi King Salman (C) sitting between UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum (C-L) and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (C-R) during a ceremony in Abu Dhabi. (AFP)

The Arab Spring barely touched the region's monarchies. But as the Qatari crisis shows, for the region's kings, the era of stability and exceptionalism is coming to an end

The Arab Spring was an event that affected Arab republics first and foremost. The regimes of most of the countries which experienced rebellions with lasting results in the Arab world were - at least on paper - republics. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Yemen all claim to run republican regimes.

However, the Arab Spring barely touched the monarchs of the Arab world, and the Gulf was relatively unaffected by this process. That does not mean that the Arab Spring-era protests did not also take place in the Gulf or the larger monarchical map of the MENA region. They did. But they were either comparatively negligible or suppressed by force, as was the case with Bahrain and Oman.

In Oman, from January 2011 onwards, a small demonstration by a group of people demanding socio-economic improvements broke out in the country’s capital Muscat. These protests reached the country’s commercial hub, Sohar, by February. Yet after the forcible suppression and killing of a few demonstrators, these protests swiftly spread to other parts of the country, where they were later put down by the regime.

Though the Omani case was important, the most noteworthy Arab Spring-era waves of demonstrations in the Gulf occurred in Bahrain. And this was also where the pro-Arab Spring camp failed to uphold its integrity.

An image grab taken from Bahrain TV shows a contingent of Gulf troops arriving in Bahrain across a causeway from Saudi Arabia in March 2011 (AFP/Bahrain TV)

In March 2011, while troops led by Saudi Arabia were harshly suppressing the civil uprising in Bahrain, the overwhelming majority of the countries in the region that had supported the Arab Spring were either taking part in this crime or keeping their silence. While Qatar made contributions to the Saudi-led military force in Bahrain, Turkey stayed silent about the operation launched against this arm of the Arab Spring. 

Later, Iran would make much hay from this situation when a similar bloc began supporting the opposition in Syria. Iran and some of the other actors who opposed the Arab Spring believed that the silence of those countries which had supported regional change in the face of incidents in Bahrain was either a result of these countries having a selective understanding of democratisation, their inconsistency, or policies of sectarianism. Shias, after all, were the majority in Bahrain, and they had formed the backbone of the wave of protests.

How the Gulf broke the Arab Spring influence

Despite such incidents, the Arab monarchs, particularly the dynastic ones of the Gulf, were somehow able to manage the waves of change in the Arab world.

While uprisings in the Arab republics were designed to change regimes, the ones in monarchies seemed to aim to precipitate regime reform

While protests in the Arab republics culminated either in the overthrow of ancien regimes or morphed into fully fledged civil wars, the monarchies weathered the storm either by undertaking some cosmetic constitutional amendments and opening up political space as was the case in Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait, or handing out the state’s largesse to the population, as happened in the Gulf.

To state it differently, while uprisings in the Arab republics were designed to change regimes, the unrest in the monarchies sought to precipitate regime reform.   

Beside this initial response, many countries in the Gulf, notably Saudi Arabia, followed a three-pronged strategy aimed at breaking the Arab Spring's influence over their societies:

1. Aid packages and development projects

Firstly, Gulf monarchs sharply increased current spending to accommodate social pressure and stave off popular discontent. The governments of the Gulf states, one after another, presented packages of incentives or bribes to their societies. Just in the two months of February and March 2011 alone, Saudi Arabia announced social welfare packages that were in total worth $130bn.

The more they could render their societies economically dependent, idle and unproductive, the more that they rendered them politically passive

These countries not only announced packages aimed at domestic audiences, but there was also a kind of monarchical solidarity in place, through which the better-off monarchies helped the lesser-off monarchies financially fend off social discontent. This mechanism of solidarity was not only confined to the Gulf region: it was also extended the two non-Gulf Arab monarchies, namely Jordan and Morocco.

In the initial phase of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia promised an aid package of $20bn to Bahrain and Oman, prompting some observers to describe it as a “Gulf Marshall Plan”. While extending its defence of monarchical rule to outside the Gulf, to Jordan and Morocco, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Secretary General Abdallatif al-Zayani prematurely announced at the organisation’s summit in Riyadh in May 2011 that it would invite both states to become members, a plan later downgraded to a strategic partnership offer and then again to the offer of economic aid. In December of the same year, the GCC announced that it would fund development projects worth $5bn in both Jordan and Morocco.

Jordan's King Abdullah II addresses the opening of the Jordanian parliament in October 2011 saying that the Arab uprisings emphasised the need for political reform in the kingdom (AFP)

Economic blessings were used by Gulf states to functionally take control of the political direction of their societies or to leave their societies politically weak. This was already one of the best-known practices of these states. In short, it was their specialism.

The legitimacy of these monarchs now largely came down to the amount of economic rent they were able to distribute, or to the welfare state policies they had put into practice. The more they could render their societies economically dependent, idle and unproductive, the more that they rendered them politically passive.

2. Crackdowns

Secondly, crackdowns on opposition and controls on all social and political groups were carried to an extreme. Even though Arab monarchs were not as successful as Arab republics on this score, they also had structures which mixed the qualities of a police state with those of a welfare state, and this format was put into practice at a maximum level during the uprisings in the Arab world.

Gulf monarchies employed all the coercive and repressive measures of Arab police states while at the same time providing generous social welfare benefits and services

These Gulf monarchies employed all the coercive and repressive measures of Arab police states, like Syria, while at the same time providing generous social welfare benefits and services to their societies. Most of the Arab police-state republics couldn’t afford to implement such welfare policies.   

Paradoxically, these monarchs were able to undertake some kind of institutional flexibility and a limited level of socio-political permissiveness while at the same time utilising the tactics and tricks of the Arab police states to their fullest extent.

Saudi Arabia, for example, has dramatically tightened measures against any public meetings or gatherings while at the same time forcefully cracking down on protests occurring in the largely Shia-inhabited eastern provinces.

Saudi special force units attached to the Ministry of Interior stand during a training in 2010 (AFP)

Taking such measures to another level during the same time period, the UAE agreed with Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince, about whom we often hear as a result of his notoriety from the war in Iraq, to ​​form a new security unit called Reflex Responses (R2), comprised of mercenary soldiers able to quickly suppress incidents of social upheaval, conduct special operations domestically and abroad and defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks. A military unit of 800 people consisting of mercenary foreign fighters, mainly Colombians, South Africans, Australians and Europeans, was formed as a result.

3. Launch a counter-revolution

Thirdly, the monarchs in question, especially those in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, considered this wave of change to be an existential threat and attempted to organise a counter-revolution and anti-Islamist wave on a regional scale.

The Egyptian coup was the greatest achievement of this wave of counter-revolution. The Egyptian coup d'etat was "made in the Gulf" from its planning to its implementation, and we saw the same form of counter-revolution and anti-Islamist wave in Libya.

Monarchical exceptionalism?

This strategy has, in some senses, worked so far. This has led some to assert a monarchical exceptionalism in the face of popular uprisings in the Middle East. The stability of these regimes has largely been taken for granted. It is clear that monarchical regimes had some advantages over their republican peers when it came to weathering the storm of waves of change in the Arab world.

Arab monarchies, family rule and power inheritance were acceptable and weren't perceived by the people as a form of humiliation

Different patterns of political legitimacy between Arab republics and monarchies may provide a partial explanation for this. Arab republics built their legitimacy on an ideological core of pan-Arabism, socialism, and national independence, while deploying democratic tools such as constitutions and elections to have a facade of legitimacy.

That is why, since the 1990s, with the erosion of this ideological core and with the emergence of the phenomenon of family rule and power inheritance, the legitimacy of the Arab republics has suffered from a severe legitimacy crisis.

In contrast, in Arab monarchies, family rule and power inheritance were acceptable and weren't perceived by the people as a form of humiliation. In fact, the legitimacy of family rule has been strong, since these family lines precede even the establishment of the states in the Gulf and they have formed the core of the state and nation building in this area, thus leaving states and families intimately interlinked.

Moroccan King Mohamed VI - 'Commander of the Faithful' - attends the inauguration of an exhibition in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat in March 2017 (AFP)

In addition, the Arab monarchies did not base their claims to legitimacy on an ideological core, unlike the pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism of the republics. Rather, they built their legitimacy on customs and traditions which have deep religious roots rather than on Islamism as an ideological framework or a political project. 

In this respect, even calling King Mohammed VI of Morocco "Commander of the Faithful", or the kings of Saudi Arabia "Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques" - in reference to the most important shrines in Islam, in Mecca and Medina - is not an ideological endeavour. Rather, they are an attempt to derive legitimacy from religious traditions and customs. 

Fears outgrow reality

But these advantages cannot shield these regimes from popular discontent for long. Therefore, Arab Spring-era strategies employed by Arab monarchies only work to some extent. And by now, they have run their course.

Indeed, the fact that these actors are still investing so much in these strategies may lead them to backfire. But there is not much evidence that some of the actors in question sufficiently understand the threats or challenges of the post-Arab Spring period. The fears resulting from the Arab Spring are still holding these actors hostage.

It is obvious, however, that this new era comes with its own new threats and challenges. The common fear that all these actors had during the Arab Spring era was political Islam. Even though these actors had different prescriptions for how Islam should relate to politics and how political Islam should relate to the state, they were united on the issue of the suppression of political Islamic groups, which threatened to obtain political power through democratic channels.

Brotherhood supporters demonstrate against the military coup in July 2013 in Cairo (Anadolu Agency)

But the nature of the threats these countries are facing in the post-Arab Spring period has undergone serious change. Political Islam for the UAE and the Sisi regime in Egypt may still be a priority threat, though an exaggerated one, particularly for the UAE.

The size and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Al-Islah party, founded in 1974, in the UAE has been limited. In fact, even Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, who is paranoid about and prone to exaggerating the Brotherhood's power and influence, and is hell-bent on destroying the organisation across the region, contended that the UAE contained up to 700 Brotherhood members, according to a US Department of State diplomatic cable dated in 2004.

Comparing the marginal level of threat that the Muslim Brotherhood poses to the political authority of the UAE to the tens of billions of dollars that the UAE has spent fighting the organisation is perplexing. From bankrolling the coup in Egypt and, mainly with Saudi Arabia, keeping the Sisi regime afloat to fighting political Islamic forces in Libya, Yemen, Palestine, and the Gulf, the UAE has wasted billions of dollars. By doing so, the UAE isn’t fighting a real threat, rather it is trying to suppress a popular trend. Even now, it seems plausible that the size of the Emirati Muslim Brotherhood remains within the range of hundreds, not thousands. Its activities - pushing back the Westernisation of society and culture and imbuing the younger generation with Islamic moral codes - have largely been confined to social, cultural and educational fields rather than political ones. 

Political Islam, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, poses an even lesser threat to Saudi Arabia. As an organisation, the Brotherhood doesn’t have a large presence - and consequently much power to mobilise - in Saudi Arabia. In fact, conscious of Saudi’s concerns, Mohamed Morsi's government in Egypt tried hard to alleviate these concerns. Upon acquiring the power, the first country that Morsi called and visited was Saudi Arabia.

In July 2012, then-Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi speaks to reporters alongside then-Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz upon Morsi's arrival in Jeddah for his first foreign trip (AFP)

During his rule which lasted less than a year, Morsi visited Saudi Arabia three times. He even tried to align Egypt's foreign policy with that of Saudi Arabia when it came to Iran, the kingdom’s archenemy. During the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran in August 2012, Morsi strongly rebuked the Assad regime along with Syria's Iranian patron. Yet, these efforts didn’t improve Saudi-Muslim Brotherhood relations. To the contrary, Saudi Arabia was the most important outside power, alongside the UAE, in plotting to overthrow the Morsi government in the 3 July 2013 coup.     

So why did Saudi Arabia become such a sworn enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood? It seems that the threat wasn’t the Brotherhood’s organisational capacity in the kingdom, but its power to set forth a new and more attractive model defining the nature of relations between Islam, political power and legitimacy. 

It was political Islam’s ability to lead the regional transformation in the early phase of the Arab Spring that was so alarming for Saudi Arabia. Clearly, the Brotherhood and the kingdom represent two different models when it comes to the relations between Islam and political authority.

Why did Saudi Arabia become such a sworn enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood? 

By upholding Islamic tenets, traditions and customs, the Saudi royal class has pushed the people out of the equation when defining and deciding on the source of legitimacy of political power. Its ruling philosophy thus far has been premised on the binary choices of Islamic tenets and popular legitimacy.

The Muslim Brotherhood has presented a different model in which the ruling class is expected to be equipped with both religious legitimacy and Islamism on the one hand, and popular legitimacy and democracy on the other. The Muslim Brotherhood’s conflation of religion and popular legitimacy or Islam and democracy is exactly what threatens the Saudi regime.

To put it differently, when the Muslim Brotherhood was perceived to be largely a socio-religious group focused on Islamising societies between 1950 and the late 1980s, Saudi Arabia, alongside other Gulf countries, saw a partner in the Brotherhood. But whenever the Brotherhood transitioned from being just a socio-religious group to a political actor at the regional level, advancing a different vision of politics and of state-society-religion relations, as has been the case since the 1990s, Saudi Arabia started to see the group through hostile lenses.

A critical moment in this respect was 1994 when the International Organisation of the Ikhwan-i Muslimin declared its support for political reform, democratic governance, peaceful transition of power and women’s rights.

Saudi Arabia perceived the declaration as posing a major threat to its political authority and, from this moment on, the nature of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Brotherhood has deteriorated: if people embrace this democratic Islamic model, the Saudi model of absolutist monarchy becomes redundant and out of date. 

The Brotherhood model still poses a conceptual challenge to Saudi Arabia. But this conceptual challenge won't be operational anytime soon and its risk pales in comparison with the real threats that Saudi Arabia faces in the region.

Greater threats on the horizon

Saudi Arabia’s anti-Islamist agenda, particularly directed at mainstream Islamists, is making itself geopolitically fragile and weakening it in its rivalry with Iran. Moreover, the inclusion of opposition to Turkey - and the closure of Turkey's base in Doha - on the 13-item list of demands sent to Qatar will only deepen the dilemmas emerging in Saudi regional policies.

Saudi Arabia’s anti-Islamist agenda, particularly directed at mainstream Islamists, is making itself geopolitically fragile and weakening it in its rivalry with Iran

The kingdom must carry out a rational analysis and reorder priorities. Geopolitically, Iran's regional ambitions are the biggest threat to Saudi Arabia. This is not only a foreign policy issue for the Saudis, but also a security issue that directly affects their domestic situation as well.

There is a large Shia population which Iran could address and mobilise in the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s ill-treatment of this population only strengthens Iran’s ability to appeal to this section of the Saudi population. The more Saudi Arabia invests in repressive measures in this part of the country, the more politicised and sectarian their grievances will become, hence providing opportunities for Iran to gain influence over them.

In addition, while the partition scenario the UAE is pushing in Yemen is gaining steam each passing day, Saudi Arabia has not yet even managed to secure its border with Yemen properly. Moreover, despite the devastation of war and numerous massacres, the Houthis have not been defeated yet.

If the kingdom were able to pursue a more sophisticated foreign policy, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islah Party in Yemen should naturally be more of a partner to the Saudis than a threat. Likewise, it is unlikely that the Saudis will be able to get results by making both the Shia majority and political Islamists in Bahrain into enemies. However, Al Minbar, which has a relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, is represented in Bahrain’s parliament.

'Hit both sides'

The kingdom's geopolitical fragility coincides with a period in which a great change is being experienced in the structure of power and power transition in Saudi Arabia. The post of king has always horizontally shifted between the sons of King Abdulaziz, the founding king of Saudi Arabia. This is changing now.

With the appointment last month of Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince, political power will be able to change hands vertically from now on. In place of a competition between sons, a competition between grandchildren is now taking place, inviting many complications and challenges.

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley told the House Foreign Affairs committee that the US should take the Qatari crisis 'as the opportunity that it is and hit both sides' (AFP)

Saudi's geopolitical fragility, including the failures in the wars and campaigns that have been launched in Yemen and against Qatar, and the domestic game of thrones and social discontent in the kingdom are greater threats than Islamists for the country in the near future. Saudi will therefore likely be more reliant on foreign powers. At the same time, Saudi's traditional role as security provider in the region will decline, particularly for the US.

Situating this background within the framework of the recent intra-monarchical feud which pits the Saudi-led country of four against Qatar, it seems that at the end of this crisis, neither Saudi Arabia, nor the UAE, nor Qatar will gain any major concessions from one other.

Instead, the US will obtain concessions from all of them. As a matter of fact, when she was asked on 28 June about the US position on the crisis, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, told the House Foreign Affairs committee that the US “should take it as the opportunity that it is and hit both sides".

Goodbye stability

So both Qatar and Saudi Arabia will have to be more open to US demands. As a result of this crisis, the common front which the Saudis want to establish against Iran will be dispersed and Arab republics as well as Arab monarchies will end up more fragile. 

Saudi Arabia has had a golden opportunity to play the leading role in the Arab world at a time when other major Arab countries are in disarray. But it chose to co-lead, with the UAE, the authoritarian status quo camp, which is limited in terms of its composition of countries and influence. Not only did the Saudi-led camp fail to rally more Arab or Islamic countries to support its bid to isolate Qatar, but it has also failed to impose its will on this small country.

If Qatar refuses to grant this camp any major concessions, the reputational damage for the Saudi-led bloc will be even more severe. As the primary feuding parties, barring Egypt, are all members of the GCC, the GCC will emerge from this crisis significantly weakened, if not finished in all but name. 

Given the predominance of Saudi Arabia over the GCC, the weakening of the organisation will mean a major loss of power for Saudi foreign policy. On top of this, the more the adjective ‘crisis’ is affixed in front of the name Gulf, the more this sub-region will be seen through the same prism of the chaotic and crisis-ridden Middle East and no longer an island of stability. This will have implications on the Gulf’s security, stability and prosperity. 

And more broadly, the longer this crisis lingers on, the more likely it is that we will witness the end of monarchial exceptionalism in the region - and the illusion of monarchical stability shattered.

- Galip Dalay works as a research director at al-Sharq Forum and senior associate fellow on Turkey and Kurdish Affairs at the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies.

How neoliberal states use mass media to dehumanize the Muslim world

BY ZEYNAB LADAK

Neoliberal movements, such as the American-led invasion of Iraq, have resulted in the dehumanisation and negative representations of people of the Middle East. That is, dehumanisation has occurred through violence and disrespect for their culture, and when a select few respond aggressively, the actions of this group are taken as representative of all of Islam. In other words, beyond orientalism–whereby the West looked at Middle Eastern culture as something inferior–there is evidence that today the Western mass media is using the identity of radical groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as the primary representative of those who live in the Middle East, or who follow the religion of Islam. However, this is a dangerous game to play as it arguably has more severe consequences than just the marginalisation of Muslims. That is, it also leads to a perception that it is morally acceptable to attack people living in the Middle East, or Muslims living in the West, because of the threat they are supposed to pose. Neoliberalism in practice defies democracy Although in theory, neoliberalism propagates democracy and individual freedom, in practice, the opposite occurs. Western states that support neoliberalism have often used politics and military intervention around the world in order to maximise their own profit and have posed a challenge and/or threat to states that refuse to embrace the dominant neoliberal model. Thus, neoliberal fundamentalists, such as the US in many cases, end up defying democracy in order to spread neoliberalism to other countries. A true democracy would reflect what the majority of people want, but in a neoliberal approach, the focus is on what a minority of elite corporations want, which is an oligarchy rather than a democracy (Gould, 2008). Neoliberalism has used state terrorism and extreme force in order to push its policies to other countries. As well as that, it has used the mass media as a propaganda tool in order to allow it to intervene in other countries. In this regard, Iraq constructs a good example, after the US bombarded Iraq, economic policies changed in Iraq and nationalisation was no longer the main economic policy (Klein, 2008). Neoliberalism took over and exploited Iraq even more and left it in shambles.

US Navy in Southern Iraq Also, the approach of spreading neoliberalism is being acted out in a fundamentalist, extremist form as the US has used brutal tactics such as military invasions and sanctions in order to coerce other countries to follow the neoliberal path. Those who fail to comply have also been demonised in the mainstream media as “evil” in order to justify extreme American foreign policies in different nations. For instance, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was perceived as “evil” in the media when America wanted to invade Iraq, but he was not “evil” when he was an ally of the US before the war on terror began (Gregory, 2004). Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi endured a similar treatment. This is linked to a tactic used by mainstream media in order to legitimise American extremism, namely dualism, which involves reducing those involved in any given conflict to two parties. For example, reducing the war in Iraq to a Sunni-Shia sectarian war without mentioning how the American invasion also played a role that escalated the conflict. Simplifying a demographic Another technique used by the media is Manicheanism; which is to display one side as “evil” and the other as “good” whereby Muslims are seen as “evil” and America is depicted as “good.”Also the tactic of “focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes” and “focusing on the irrational without looking at the reasons for unresolved conflicts” (Steven, 2010) where the emphasis is only on the religious beliefs of individuals who carry out terrorist attacks without digging in-depth to the political, economic and social issues surrounding the conflict which influence it. For instance, the emphasis of American media channels such as CNN on ISIS as only a religious group that wants to build an “Islamic” caliphate without the mention of how the Western invasion of Iraq played a vital part on helping ISIS rise to power as admitted by the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair (Chulov, 2015) . Relatedly, the manner in which Muslims are portrayed in the media is simplistic, whereby distinctions between “the numerous Islamic sects, jurisprudential schools, hermeneutic styles, linguistic theories and the like” (Said, 1997) are seldom made. By doing this, neoliberal extremists can justify the targeting of numerous Islamic countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Pakistan–all of which speak different languages/dialects, have dissimilar belief systems/sects and are comprised of heterogeneous cultures–and paint the same label of fighting “Islamic extremism” whilst spreading neoliberalism as it reduces the diverse group of Muslim people into “the other”. Some lives matter Another aspect of this dehumanizing tactic is also used in Western media in order to portray Middle-Easterners in a bad light by stereotyping them and not having the same amount of news coverage when people lose their lives in that region as the mainstream media would if it was people from Western countries that had died. The result of this is that audiences start dehumanizing Muslims and seeing them as “the other” to the point where the lives of Muslims lost through foreign attacks or as collateral damage are seen as less important and somehow not newsworthy enough. For instance, the ISIS terrorist attack that occurred in Paris in 2015 was reported using entirely different language in comparison to the ISIS attack on Beirut during the same week. Although both targets involved civilians, most of the mainstream media reported the attack in Beirut as a target to a “Hezbollah neighbourhood”, despite the victims being innocent civilians including women, the elderly and children; they were reduced to dehumanized coverage and dismissed because they lived in a Hezbollah controlled area. In contrast, the Paris attack victims were humanized in the news as the coverage did not focus on “the ethno-religious makeup of the area attacked, but the civilian nature of the scene” (Ajaka, 2015), thereby making it easier to sympathize with them.

Aftermath of bombing in Beirut Furthermore, there was no explicit connection between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein, but the US invaded Iraq shortly after the 9/11 attacks although none of the 9/11 hijackers was Iraqi (CNN, 2013). This was possible due to the generalization of the entire Middle Eastern region as a place where the terrorists came from, without making the important distinctions between entirely different countries within that region. This generalization that reduces and simplifies the Middle East in a simplistic, homogeneous manner is strongly promoted by mainstream Western media. The result Unfortunately, as a result, Islamophobia has risen. Islamophobia is defined as “dread or hatred of Islam – and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims” (Tanya, 2014). Stereotyping and generalizing all Muslims into a narrow label by Western media outlets has led to general fear of Muslims in the Middle East as well as the West, as a 2015 survey found that fifty-five percent of Americans who participated in the survey, had an “unfavourable” view of Islam (Chalabi, 2015) and hate crimes against Muslims increased by seventy percent in London (Adesina & Marocico, 2015). Also, a University of Cambridge study revealed that “mainstream media reporting about Muslim communities is contributing to an atmosphere of rising hostility toward Muslims in Britain” (Versi, 2016). And this hostility is extended to Muslims living in the Middle Eastern region whose death at hands of neoliberal terrorism it is deemed more or less acceptable. What this amounts to is a neoliberal propaganda campaign in the media whereby Muslims or people from the Middle East are represented simplistically or unfairly as compared to other religious groups. This ensuing phobia of Islam has made a pathway for the Western neoliberal governments to further their neoliberal extremist tactics in the Middle Eastern region, such as toppling Gadhafi in Libya, drone strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan, intervening in Syria and Iraq, sanctioning Iran and more. In short, neoliberal extremists have used the mass media to spread Islamophobia to the masses in order to let them continue coercing their agendas in Muslim countries with minimum accountability and maximum exploitation of resources for themselves. The more they do so, the more this message becomes normalized through the uniformity of discourses across several platforms, such as popular news channels and the entertainment industry. The more this message normalizes, the more Islamophobia becomes normalized as a result. References: Ajaka, N., 2015. Paris, Beirut, and the Language Used to Describe Terrorism. [Online] Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/paris-beirut-media-coverage/416457/ [Accessed 20 April 2016]. Chalabi, M., 2015. How anti-Muslim are Americans? Data points to extent of Islamophobia. [Online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/08/muslims-us-islam-islamophobia-data-polls [Accessed 19 April 2016]. Chulov, M., 2015. Tony Blair is right: without the Iraq War, there would be no Islamic State. [Online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/tony-blair-is-right-without-the-iraq-war-there-would-be-no-isis [Accessed 3 May 2016]. CNN, 2013. September 11th Hijackers Fast Facts. [Online] Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/27/us/september-11th-hijackers-fast-facts/ [Accessed 17 April 2016]. Gould, B., 2008. Who voted for the markets?. [Online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/nov/26/economy-marketturmoil [Accessed 2 May 2016]. Gregory, D., 2004. The colonial Present- Afghanistan- Palestine- Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Klein, N., 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador. Said, E., 1997. Islam as News. In: Covering Islam-How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. London: Vintage. Steven, P., 2010. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media. Oxford: New Internationalist. Tanya, B., 2014. What Does ‘Islamophobia’ Actually Mean?. [Online] Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/is-islamophobia-real-maher-harris-aslan/381411/ [Accessed 19 April 2016]. Versi, M., 2016. The Independent. [Online] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-the-british-media-is-responsible-for-the-rise-in-islamophobia-in-britain-a6967546.html [Accessed 3 May 2016].

How Media Spread CIA’s Sectarian, Anti-Iran ‘Mideast Cold War’ Narrative

FAIR 

 A new Vox video (7/17/17) is the latest addition to a media onslaught that propagates numerous misleading talking points to demonize Iran—just as the US government, under Donald Trump’s vehemently anti-Iran administration, is ratcheting up aggression against that country. The 10-minute film, titled “The Middle East’s Cold War, Explained,” is a textbook example of how US government propaganda pervades corporate media. With the help of a former senior government official and CIA analyst, the Vox video articulates a commonplace pro-US, anti-Iran narrative that portrays the violent conflicts in the Middle East as sectarian proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In order to do so, the film grossly downplays US involvement in the region, treating Saudi Arabia as though it acts independently of the US. It also fails to ever mention Israel, totally removing one of the most important players in the Middle East from its “Cold War” narrative. 

 Vox multimedia producer Sam Ellis likewise constructs a false equivalence for Iran, depicting it as a kind of Shia Saudi Arabia that is just as guilty of spreading sectarianism. The video correspondingly exaggerates Iran’s international influence, which is assumed to be dastardly and malign. “The Middle East’s Cold War, Explained” made a huge splash. It garnered nearly half a million views in one day, and was trending as one of YouTube‘s most-watched videos. It serves as an illustrative case study of how corporate media not only grossly simplify the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, they also effectively act as a mouthpiece for the US government. The crux of the video is an interview with a former top US government official, CIA analyst and think tank apparatchik who has spent years crafting US policy in the Middle East. Vox presents his deeply politicized views as unchallenged facts.

Kenneth Pollack Kenneth Pollack (photo: Brookings) 

 Kenneth Pollack, the only person featured in Vox‘s video, is identified simply as a “former Persian Gulf military analyst, CIA.” After several years as an Iran/Iraq military analyst at the CIA, Pollack went on to direct Persian Gulf affairs and Near East and South Asian affairs for the Clinton administration’s National Security Council. Pollack’s bio at the Brookings Institution notes “he was the principal working-level official for US policy toward Iraq, Iran, Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council States at the White House.” The man around which the entire video is framed is also a resident scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute—although Vox does not disclose this in the video. 

AEI, a conservative bastion that has received generous funding from large corporations and the ultra-right Koch brothers, clearly appreciated Vox‘s work: AEI posted the video on its website, and its official YouTube account even wrote to Vox in the comments, “Thanks for featuring our scholar Ken Pollack in your video!” Pollack is also a senior fellow at Brookings, an establishment friendly think tank that gets generous funding from US-backed Gulf regimes. Pollack previously directed Brookings’ prestigious Saban Center for Middle East Policy, funded by Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban—who called for bombing “the living daylights out of” Iran. A lifelong anti-Iran hawk, Pollack was one of the most influential advocates for the illegal US invasion of Iraq, writing in his 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq: The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction. 

 His support continued steadfastly throughout the Iraq War, even when many former champions had become opponents. Pollack penned an op-ed in the New York Times (7/30/07) in 2007, staunchly defending the US troop surge and insisting, “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq.” Ironically, neoliberal pundit Matthew Yglesias—a co-founder of and senior editor at Vox—criticized Pollack in a 2007 column in the Los Angeles Times (8/2/07), noting the former CIA analyst was a key influence in persuading him to support the Iraq War. Yglesias wrote: Those of us who read Pollack’s celebrated 2002 book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, and became convinced as a result that the United States needed to, well, invade Iraq in order to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s advanced nuclear weapons program (the one he didn’t actually have) might feel a little too bitter to once again defer to our betters. 

 Moreover, while Pollack spent years formulating US policy on Iran and the broader region, analyzing it for US intelligence and writing several books on the subject, journalist Philip Weiss noted in a 2006 column in The Observer (4/28/06) that “Pollack has never been to Iran and doesn’t speak Persian, [and] has only dribs and drabs of Arabic.” This crucial detail was only mentioned in an author’s note at the end of Pollack’s book The Persian Puzzle. “You’d think a book that purports to explain the ‘Persian Puzzle’ might have offered that disclaimer at the front,” Weiss quipped. Without providing any of this context, Vox centers Pollack’s expertise, extensively quoting him throughout its explainer video to paint a particular narrative of the Middle East that is, predictably, pro-US and anti-Iran.

Blame Sectarianism 

 Vox: Saudi Arabia/Iran proxy wars Vox‘s depiction of Mideast conflicts as “proxy wars” between Saudi Arabia and Iran conveniently leaves out the US role. Vox‘s video expertly reflects the CIA’s perspective of Iran, first and foremost by regurgitating a popular yet false talking point: The violent conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and part of a larger new Cold War. Ubiquitous in US media, this narrative is misleading for two primary reasons: These wars are not all proxy conflicts, and Saudi Arabia is not acting independently of the US. Yemen is a great example of just how false this narrative is. Vox casually states in the video that the conflict in this impoverished country is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, even going so far as to call Yemen’s Houthis “an Iranian proxy.” This is an outrageous propaganda point used by the US and Saudi Arabia. 

 Even the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—which gets significant funding from the US and British governments—has published research acknowledging that “Iranian support for the Houthis has been marginal and does not shape their decisionmaking as much as local alliances and conflict dynamics do,” and that “claims of Iran’s influence over the Houthis have been overblown.” According to the CIA narrative peddled by Vox and virtually all corporate media, the Houthis are “Iran-backed” “Shia rebels.” Yet the Carnegie report, titled “Iran’s Small Hand in Yemen,” criticizes this sectarian language used about the war in Yemen, noting the Houthis, who are Zaidi Muslims, are theologically closer to Sunnis than they are to Twelver Shiites, the dominant tendency in Iran. 

 In fact, the word “Shia” was not even used to refer to Yemenis until the 2011 uprisings—when the sectarian narrative was weaponized. Ansar Allah, the official name of the Houthi movement, is an organic group that was founded in Yemen in the 1990s. The framing of the conflict in Yemen as an Iran/Saudi Arabia proxy war, as Vox does so lazily, is a US government narrative that has been imposed after the fact. The reality is the war in Yemen is a foreign war on Yemen, carried out by the US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Britain and several other countries, which have desperately tried to restore an unpopular leader, Abdrabbu Mansour Hadi, who won an “election” in 2012 with no other candidates, illegally overstayed his term in office and then officially stepped down before he fled to Saudi Arabia for protection. 

 With planes, bombs, weapons, ammunition, fuel and military intelligence from the US and Britain—along with foot soldiers from several other countries (including even mercenaries from Colombia)—Saudi Arabia has waged a relentless war inside Yemen, launching more than 90,000 air sorties, incessantly bombing civilian areas, killing thousands of innocents. At most, Iran may have provided some small guns—and even that is contested. Vox, however, falsely portrays this as a proxy war in which Saudi Arabia and Iran supposedly bear equal responsibility.

Create a False Equivalence 

 Vox: Saudi Arabia and Iran Vox presents Iran as the Shia Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia as the Sunni Iran. At the heart of the US government narrative echoed by Vox—and by most US corporate media—is the notion that Iran is merely the Shia Saudi Arabia, that Iran is just as sectarian as Saudi Arabia, that both states are ultimately sectarian reflections of each other. This false equivalence glosses over the fact that Iran’s government, although Shia, has allied with numerous Sunni forces. 

In fact, Iran is regularly attacked by Western governments over its support for Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political group in the besieged Gaza Strip. Iran has in general been one of the only states to consistently support Palestinian militant groups resisting illegal Israeli military occupation and colonization, and nearly all Palestinian Muslims are Sunni. (Although, again, Israel is never mentioned in Vox‘s video.) Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also recently spoken out in support of Muslims in Kashmir, the vast majority of whom are Sunni. And Iran has pressured the United Nations to take international action to protect the rights of the Rohingya, a primarily Sunni minority facing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. 

 While Iran’s Shia government certainly has sectarian tendencies and has discriminated against religious minorities, there is no comparison to the extreme sectarianism of Saudi Arabia’s state doctrine of Wahhabism, a fundamentalist ideology that considers Shia to be non-Muslim apostates, and that is shared by genocidal militias like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Government documents have acknowledged that US client Saudi Arabia has supported ISIS and Al Qaeda. The so-called Islamic State even used official Saudi state textbooks to brainwash children in its capital Raqqa. All of ISIS’s judges in Raqqa were Saudi, and based their draconian system on Saudi-style policies. Moreover, Saudi state clerics often go on television and call for genocide of Shia and other religious minority groups. Seeing these explicit incitements to genocide is not at all uncommon in Saudi Arabia (as well as in the US-backed regimes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates). 

Shia clerics in Iran do nothing remotely close to this. Politically, this false equivalence is even less accurate. Iran is a theocracy with autocratic elements, by no means a progressive model that leftists would want to emulate. But in contrast to Saudi Arabia, Iran is a republic that just held a presidential election with an impressive 73 percent voter turnout, in which a popular reformist politician, Hassan Rouhani, was re-elected in a landslide. Women and religious and ethnic minorities in Iran do indeed face various forms of structural oppression, but the government is also consistently reforming, and Rouhani has pledged to continue moving forward. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is an extremist absolute monarchy that is tightly controlled by the royal family, and that bans women from traveling and making major life decisions without the consent of a male guardian. The Saudi monarchy has made no serious indications that it is planning on significantly reforming, despite some PR rhetoric and cynical op-eds in major US newspapers to the contrary (FAIR.org, 4/28/17). 

 Yet this false equivalence between Iran and Saudi Arabia has several useful effects: It exaggerates the sectarianism of Iran while minimizing the US-backed fundamentalist sectarianism of Saudi Arabia that is fueling Salafi-jihadist groups throughout the world. And it obfuscates the complexity of the wars in the Middle East. Misrepresent Wars Vox‘s risible portrayal of the Iraq War is another great example of this false equivalence. Producer Sam Ellis depicts the aftermath of the illegal 2003 US invasion as a sectarian proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, noting that each side supported militias—Shia and Sunni, respectively. Vox doesn’t mention that most Iraqis are Shia, and that many of those “Shia militias” were in fact linked to the Iraqi government—given the US had entirely dissolved Iraq’s non-sectarian army and effectively dismantled the government through its unilateral policy of De-Ba’athification (facts Vox also fails to include). 

 Vox likewise depicts Iraq’s “Shia militias” as politically equivalent to the “Sunni militias,” while failing to point out that some of the latter, who enjoyed support from Saudi Wahhabi authorities, were fighters in Al Qaeda in Iraq or Salafi groups linked to AQI, which later metastasized into ISIS. In the same vein, the Vox video describes the Lebanese militia Hezbollah simply as an “extremist group,” the implication being that it is in some way similar to Salafi extremist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, which frequently intentionally massacre civilians. Unlike them, however, Hezbollah rarely targets civilians, and instead goes after military and police targets, typically from the US and Israel. Moreover, Hezbollah has recruited Sunnis, Christians and Druze to fight ISIS and Al Qaeda. The video’s treatment of Bahrain is just as misleading. 

Vox says, “In Bahrain, Iran supported Shia leaders seeking to overthrow the government. Saudi Arabia in turn sent troops to help quash the unrest.” What Vox again fails to report is that the vast majority of the population in Bahrain is Shia, so of course the protesters are largely Shia. On the other hand, the Khalifas, the extremely repressive Bahraini royal family that is propped up by the US and Saudi Arabia, are from the minority Sunni community, and discriminate against the Shia majority. Similarly, Vox depicts the war in Syria as a conflict in which both Saudi Arabia and Iran share equal responsibility. Compared to Yemen and Iraq, Syria is indeed more of an actual sectarian proxy war. But this is largely because the armed opposition to the Syrian government—backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—is dominated by extremist Salafi-jihadist groups that have threatened genocide against Syria’s religious minorities. 

 Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite—an offshoot of Shia Islam—and religious minorities are indeed disproportionately represented in the government. On the other hand, the majority of the Syrian Arab Army is Sunni, as are many state officials. Moreover, the war in Syria was not an offensive war for Iran. Iran was not trying to replace Syria’s government; it was trying to preserve it. It is the US and Saudi Arabia that spent years trying to overthrow Syria’s government in an offensive war. Iran was already allied with the Syrian government before the violence even began. Yet by creating this overly simplistic polar inversion, in which Iran is the Shia Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia is the Sunni Iran, media outlets can gloss over any complicating factors. 

 “Neither the government of Saudi Arabia nor the government of Iran are looking for a fight,” Kenneth Pollack insists in the Vox video. Yet Saudi Arabia was indeed looking for a fight when it spent years trying desperately to overthrow Syria’s government. Pollack likewise claims the Saudis “are the ultimate status quo power. They want the region stable, and they don’t want anybody rising up and overthrowing a sclerotic autocratic government.” Whereas, he adds, “The Iranians are the ultimate anti–status quo power.” This, again, is categorically false. Saudi Arabia has played a key role fueling the war in Syria, the bloodiest of the Middle East conflicts. Saudi Arabia and Iran—like virtually every state in the world—are only interested in preserving the status quo when it benefits them. Thus far, the US-dominated status quote in the Middle East has benefited Saudi Arabia. But that status quo has been changing since the US invasion of Iraq.

Downplay US Involvement trump saudi king salman swords Donald Trump meeting with King Salman (holding sword) and other Saudi officials. (photo: White House) Vox is far from alone in peddling these myths. In an article in AlterNet (7/17/17), FAIR analyst Adam Johnson dissected a New York Times article (7/15/17) that rewrote the history of the Iraq War in order to pit Iran as a malevolent villain. 

This plays into US war hawks’ favorite sectarian narrative of the “Shiite Crescent” Iran is supposedly constructing in the Middle East—a narrative that emerged around the time Hezbollah defeated Israel in its 2006 war in Lebanon. All of this highlights another misleading point in the “Middle East’s cold war” framework. In fact, this cold war is not just between Saudi Arabia and the Iran; it is between the US and Iran. This reporting by Vox and the New York Times overlooks the fact that Saudi Arabia does very little independently of the US, of which it is effectively a proxy. Saudi Arabia is politically a rather weak state. It has enormous oil reserves that have kept it afloat economically, but it has never developed a significant independent political and military apparatus. 

 On paper, the Saudi military is very large, with hundreds of thousands of personnel and with a staggering one-quarter of the regime’s budget going toward funding it. But the Saudi military has little experience, and has seen ghastly results in the few military operations it has participated in. In Yemen, for instance, the Saudi military is relying on US and European planes, weapons, bombs, ammunition, fuel, intelligence and training. American and British military official have physically been in the command room advising the Saudis. The Saudi military is effectively an extension of the US military; Saudi Arabia can be seen as a kind of Western protectorate. Saudi Arabia did $112 billion in arms deals with the Obama administration, and President Trump has claimed he will sell them another $110 billion in weapons. 

Yet, while the Saudi military has vastly outgunned the Houthis and allied forces loyal to ousted Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh, it has made little progress. For months, the Saudi military, with support from the US and UAE, has gained little ground, killing thousands of civilians in order to effectively maintain a stalemate. Vox ignores the fact that, as the New York Times editorial board (8/17/16) once surprisingly acknowledged, “Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support.” Or, as Foreign Policy (3/14/16) put it, “None of the raids [in Yemen] could happen without direct US support.” Similarly, in Syria, Saudi Arabia worked hand-in-hand with the US, spending billions of dollars to support the US-led training program. Saudi Arabia was not acting alone. 

The deal was the Saudi monarchy would provide the money, while the CIA did the dirty work. The narrative peddled by Vox and many corporate media outlets would have us think otherwise—that Saudi Arabia intervened in Syria, while the US played a minor supplementary role (FAIR.org, 9/5/15, 4/7/17). But the reality is the opposite: Washington was in charge, not Riyadh. Echoing the CIA perspective, nevertheless, Vox and other corporate media present Saudi Arabia as an independent actor. This allows them to maintain a nationalist, exceptionalist view of the United States, as a nation that might have problems but ultimately is a benevolent actor, fighting for freedom and democracy. From this perspective, the US has to sometimes dirty its hands by supporting dubious allies like Saudi Arabia, in order to counterbalance big baddies like Iran. But in this view it is Saudi Arabia that is ultimately the morally questionable actor, not the benevolent US. If the problems in the Middle East are presented as mainly internal ones, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Western imperial intervention is only incidental.

Selective History 

 Vox: Saudi king and Shah of Iran Vox lamented that the Shah wasn’t as beloved and legitimate as the Saudi royal family. In its historical overview of the conflicts in the Middle East, Vox‘s video echoes this same US government perspective. Accordingly, in Vox‘s telling of the history, the trouble all began with the Iranian Revolution. In order to explain the 1979 revolution, Kenneth Pollack tells viewers the Shah of Iran did not have “the same legitimacy and affection that the Saudi people felt toward their monarchy.” This phrase is loaded with baseless presuppositions, namely that the Saudi people do indeed feel affection toward their brutal absolute monarchy, yet alone the notion that that—and not the US military—is what keeps it in power. But this also, again, glosses over the crucial factor of Western empire. 

 Vox paints the Iranian Revolution as an Islamist backlash against the Shah’s secular, pro-Western reforms. The reality is much more complex. The Iranian Revolution was fundamentally an uprising against US imperialism (a concept corporate media studiously avoid in their Middle East “explainers”), and there were different tendencies within it. The Islamist elements ultimately came out on top, but there were also revolutionary Marxist elements involved, united in their collective opposition to foreign domination. (Many of the leftist revolutionaries were later purged by the Islamists.) To its credit, Vox‘s video does acknowledge that, in 1953, the US staged a coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh—although Vox does not mention that Mosaddegh was democratically elected. But Vox, like many US media, still depicts the revolution as the source of the region’s woes: “The rise of Iran as a regional power threatened other neighboring countries,” Vox‘s narrator states. 

 In this perspective, it was Iran doing the “threatening.” But the video then immediately proceeds to report that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran in 1980. Vox‘s discussion of the subsequent Iran/Iraq War is correspondingly misleading. The video does not mention that the US supported Saddam Hussein in his merciless war against Iran, even as he carried out heinous chemical weapons attacks. It does, however, note: “When Iran started winning, the Saudis panicked, and came to Iraq’s rescue. They provided money, weapons and logistical help.” Again, Vox conspicuously avoids mentioning US intervention. Where did Saudi Arabia get the weapons it gave to Iraq? The US looked the other way as Saudi Arabia shipped US-made weapons to Iraq in violation of rules against third-party transfers. 

 It is Iran that is depicted as a threat, even though it was the country that was invaded by a US-backed dictator, who then waged an exceedingly bloody eight-year war. After the Iran/Iraq War, Vox‘s video says, “Fast forward 15 years”—totally omitting the Gulf War and the genocidal US-led UN sanctions against Iraq. Hype the Iran ‘Threat’ This is ultimately the effect of media reporting like this. It shields the US government from fundamental critiques, and shifts the blame onto proxies like Saudi Arabia and, more so, Official Enemies like Iran. Vox does not just frame its film around a former CIA analyst. It even cites a 1980 CIA report that warns of Iran’s international meddling, of the “threat” of the country “exporting its revolution.” 

 But Vox‘s video is also a form of more sophisticated propaganda. Instead of directly articulating neoconservative talking points and openly calling for regime change in Iran, it portrays Iran as one side in a “Cold War,” with Iran supposedly escalating aggression against Saudi Arabia, not the other way around. The decades of efforts the US has pursued in trying to topple Iran—the heart of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”—are erased. The crippling sanctions the US has imposed on Iran, which continue to increase, are overlooked. Vox portrays itself as a voice of the “resistance” against far-right US President Donald Trump. 

Yet, on issues of foreign policy, it fails to even pretend to buck the trend. Liberal media in general have been derelict in their duty to hold the US government responsible vis-à-vis war. In fact, when it comes to Trump’s most destructive, warmongering policies, corporate media have almost universally echoed the bipartisan consensus, and actively applauded (FAIR.org, 4/11/17). Instead of challenging and informing the public, corporate media speak directly from the perspective of the CIA, and act as handmaidens to empire.