Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Abu Dhabi-based Erem News reports that the Prime Minister of Libya’s internationally recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh, has vehemently denied the report in the “American Thinker” by what Libya called the “notorious conspiracy theorist” Jerome Corsi that the Trump administration is negotiating with the Libyan government to take one million Palestinians.
It is an absurd allegation on the face of it. Libyans have long been extremely pro-Palestinian and any leader that cooperated with the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in ethnically cleansing so many Palestinians from their homeland of millennia would be overthrown by angry mobs that made the ones who chased down former dictator Moammar Gaddafi and polished him off in a ditch look like pussy cats.
Al-Dbeibeh’s hold on the prime ministership in Western Libya is anyway shaky. Reuters reports that three of his cabinet ministers resigned Friday after several hundred protesters stormed his office and killed a security guard, as they demanded he step down. The departing ministers said they agreed with the protesters. Earlier this week the capital was rocked by fighting between rival militias that left 8 dead, including one of the militia leaders, Abdulghani “Ghaniwa” Kikli. People blamed Al-Dbeibeh for increasingly relying on militia rule.
Does that sound like a situation where it would be wise to plop down a million brutalized Palestinians, who just want to live at home like everyone else?
Al-Dbeibeh, a businessman who falsely claimed to have an engineering degree from the University of Toronto, came to power in a UN-backed process in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was supposed soon thereafter to hold elections, but never did, and so he had no real grassroots, just a power base in his home town of Misrata where he was involved in construction works under Gaddafi. His critics charged him with corruption after the 2011 revolution but he has outlasted them.
Eastern Libya is still in the grip of the strongman Khalifa Haftar, leader of the so-called Libya National Army. One root of the split is that Haftar is a secular nationalist with Egyptian and UAE backing, while the Tripoli government tilts to the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Al-Dbeibeh is said to have ties.
The prime minister’s press office responded angrily to Corsi’s scurrilous article, saying it had appeared in a “marginal publication” and was not authored by a professional journalist but by someone with a long history of promulgating conspiracy theories and fake news. The idea that Libya was prepared to take in Palestinian refugees, it said, was “completely fabricated” and based on no reliable sources.
The office said it regretted that some Libyan newspapers were taken in by the hoax and urged them to depend only on official Libyan government statements.
“In this framework,” the office of the prime minister said, “Libya again underscores its unyielding and supportive position on the Palestinian issue, and the right of the Palestinian people to live with liberty and dignity on its own land, and affirms that its policy regarding this matter depends on the principles and values in which the Libyan people believe.”
“Tripoli, Libya,” © by Juan Cole.
No offense to the Libyan government, which has been through a lot in the past decade, but when Tripoli calls you a scurrilous conspiracy theorist and purveyor of fake news, that’s a very serious slam. They’ve seen it all.