Yearly Archives: 2010

Cost of Operation Hemorrhage: $4,200. Damage done: priceless

Al Qaeda no longer needs its bombs to detonate. It merely needs to toy with those who have allowed themselves to be governed by fear.

By pursuing a strategy with minimal cost to itself, al Qaeda can be assured that we will inflict the maximum economic damage to ourselves because of our unwillingness to face life’s only certainty: our mortality. Neither the TSA, nor the US Government, nor the US military, nor the war on terrorism, can make us safe, because life isn’t safe.

In pursuit of an unattainable level of safety we show ourselves willing to accept all manner of indignities — all in the name of security. But as one of the latest airline passengers, recounting the humiliation he suffered at the hands of TSA officers, said: “if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”

Indeed, as al Qaeda’s planners survey the American scene, they can only marvel at the ease with which they have established their own competitive advantage.

As the New York Times reports:

In a detailed account of its failed parcel bomb plot last month, Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen said late Saturday that the operation cost only $4,200 to mount, was intended to disrupt global air cargo systems and reflected a new strategy of low-cost attacks designed to inflict broad economic damage.

The group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, released to militant Web sites a new edition of its English-language magazine, called Inspire, devoted entirely to explaining the technology and tactics in the attack, in which toner cartridges packed with explosives were intercepted in Dubai and Britain. The printers containing the cartridges had been sent from Yemen’s capital, Sana, to out-of-date addresses for two Chicago synagogues.

The attack failed as a result of a tip from Saudi intelligence, which provided the tracking numbers for the parcels, sent via United Parcel Service and FedEx. But the Qaeda magazine said the fear, disruption and added security costs caused by the packages made what it called Operation Hemorrhage a success.

“Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the magazine said.

It mocked the notion that the plot was a failure, saying it was the work of “less than six brothers” over three months. “This supposedly ‘foiled plot,’ ” the group wrote, “will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage.”

The magazine included photographs of the printers and bombs that the group said were taken before they were shipped, as well as a copy of the novel “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens that it said it had placed in one package because the group was “very optimistic” about the operation’s success.

Although Western security officials have insisted that at least one of the parcel bombs was hours away from exploding, it seems just as likely that this operation was designed to showcase security vulnerabilities — that indeed it was conceived as a magazine cover story.

Facebooktwittermail

Who has the courage to end the war in Afghanistan?

British ex-soldier, Joe Glenton, was jailed for refusing to return to Afghanistan in a war he believed to be unjustified. On November 19 he handed back his medal to Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron in Downing Street, as a protest against the war in Afghanistan.

Glenton’s story was told in a Press TV documentary earlier this year. Watch parts one, two and three. (Thanks to a reader for passing along the report about Glenton’s protest and yesterday’s rally in London.)

Meanwhile, Politico reports:

President Barack Obama and nearly 50 world leaders attending the NATO Summit that concluded here Saturday adopted a call to give the Afghan government control over its own security by 2014.

Not so much talked about, in public anyway, were some of the toughest decisions that may be required to get there.

With the public in the U.S and particularly in Europe losing patience with the Afghan mission, the NATO announcement seemed intended to generate headlines or at least a public perception of a plan for withdrawal.

In fact, the transition plan is more of a hope than a detailed roadmap. The provinces to be handed over next year by NATO and U.S. forces have yet to be selected, officials said, and the prospects for transition in parts of the country facing the fiercest fighting are murky at best. Decisions about whether to negotiate with the Taliban have yet to be made and disagreements remain about what concessions could be made.

Christian Science Monitor adds:

[T]he Pentagon on Thursday said the goal of handing over security duties to the Afghans in 2014 was “aspirational.”

“Although the hope is, the goal is, to have Afghan security forces in the lead over the preponderance of the country by then, it does not necessarily mean that … everywhere in the country they will necessarily be in the lead,” said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

Crunching the numbers

So how much extra would it cost if the bulk of the withdrawal starts rather than finishes around 2014? About $125 billion, says Mr. Harrison at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, at that’s just through 2014. He uses two different troop level scenarios – one high, and one low. He calculates costs based $1.1 million per soldier per year, which reflects the five-year average in Afghanistan.

The lower cost – $288 billion – assumes that the troops involved in Obama’s surge would be withdrawn by 2012, and that by the end of 2014 only 30,000 US troops would remain. The higher cost – $413 billion – assumes no drawdown will happen until 2013, and 70,000 US troops would remain by the end of 2014. The difference: $125 billion.

Facebooktwittermail

Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between

Newly released by Just World Books:

With Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between, El-Haddad takes us into the life and world of a busy Palestinian journalist who is both covering the story of Gaza and living it—very intensely. This book is El-Haddad’s self-curated choice of the best of her writings from December 2004 through July 2010. She was in Gaza City in 2005, watching hopefully as the Israelis prepared their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. She covered the January 2006 Palestinian elections—judged ‘free and fair’ by all international monitors; but then, she watched aghast as the Israeli government, backed by the Bush administration, moved in to punish Gaza’s 1.5 million people for the way they had voted by throwing a tough siege around the Strip. Tensions then escalated between Israel’s very lethal (and U.S.-backed) military and the forces loyal to Gaza’s elected Hamas leadership. As the casualties and privations they suffered soared, Gaza’s people found that Israel’s much-bally-hooed withdrawal of 2005 had led to something very different from what they had hoped for…

El-Haddad was not only covering Gaza’s situation as a journalist and correspondent. She was also living them, including by trying to explain the ongoing events to her own young children. Her husband, U.S.-trained physician Yassine Daoud, is also a Palestinian but one without the (Israeli-administered) right to reside in or even enter Gaza. In 2006, El-Haddad left Gaza to be with Daoud in the U.S., but her beloved parents stayed behind. In the book she recounts the angst of a person stranded outside her homeland when it was came under intense Israeli assault at the turn of the year 2008-2009– though she was also able to publish and amplify the experiences of her parents as they cowered in central Gaza City under Israel’s harsh, 22-day bombardment.

In Gaza Mom El-Haddad shares many intimate details of her life as a parent. We watch her young children growing up throughout the text. She also tells us about her life as a journalist and a media activist, including her involvement in the many new Palestinian-rights initiatives that emerged after Israel’s late-2008 attack on Gaza.

Facebooktwittermail

Evolving understanding of Stuxnet

Reporting on the latest findings on the design of the Stuxnet malware which targeted Iran’s nuclear program, the New York Times says that Ralph Langner — a German software engineer who has been one of the leading investigators — has identified two forms of attack directed at different targets.

In a statement Friday on his Web site, he described two different attack modules that are designed to run on different industrial controllers made by Siemens, the German industrial equipment maker. “It appears that warhead one and warhead two were deployed in combination as an all-out cyberstrike against the Iranian nuclear program,” he wrote.

In testimony before the Senate on Wednesday, federal and private industry officials said that the Iranian nuclear program was a probable target, but they stopped short of saying they had confirming evidence. Mr. Langner said, however, that he had found enough evidence within the programs to pinpoint the intended targets. He described his research process as being akin to being at a crime scene and examining a weapon but lacking a body.

The second code module — aimed at the [Bushehr] nuclear power plant — was written with remarkable sophistication, he said. The worm moves from personal computers to Siemens computers that control industrial processes. It then inserts fake data, fooling the computers into thinking that the system is running normally while the sabotage of the frequency converters is taking place. “It is obvious that several years of preparation went into the design of this attack,” he wrote.

In a separate report, the New York Times said:

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was.

Langner says: “Stuxnet is like the arrival of an F-35 fighter jet on a World War I battlefield.”

Why would Israel target a civilian nuclear facility that is generally understood to pose no proliferation threat?

In line with its practice of paying selective attention to international opinion, Israel’s public position has been that Iran should not be “rewarded” for its defiance of the international community by being allowed to operate Bushehr. Moreover, there could also be a political motive for trying to prevent Bushehr from operating successfully, that being, to undermine the credibility of the nuclear program in the eyes of the otherwise widely supportive Iranian public.

Langner says that a cyber attack targeting a nuclear reactor is virtually impossible but that Bushehr’s steam turbine (located outside the containment facility) could be hit and that “Stuxnet can destroy the turbine as effectively as an air strike.”

Like everyone else, the Israelis understand that the most critical part of the infrastructure in Iran’s nuclear program is not made of steel or concrete — it is the expertise of Iran’s nuclear scientists and engineers. (For that reason, Israel’s covert war against Iran apparently includes a “decapitation” program aimed at eliminating the top figures in Iran’s nuclear operations.)

Since many of the skills required to run a civilian nuclear power program are presumably transferable to a military program, sabotage on any of Iran’s nuclear facilities will have the net effect of becoming a drain on the human resources available to advance the program as a whole.

The fact is, after decades of nuclear development, Iran still has precious little to show for its efforts. Keep in mind, the construction of Bushehr began 35 years ago and Iran’s nuclear program was launched in the 1950s!

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. and Israel: still no consensus on pressuring Iran

Tony Karon writes:

An open disagreement between Israel and the Pentagon in recent weeks has highlighted the dilemma President Barack Obama faces in making progress on Iran. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday poured cold water on last week’s suggestion by Israeli Prime Minister that the only way Iran can be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons is for the U.S. to threaten military action. Military action, Gates warned, would solve nothing; in fact it would be more likely to drive Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu had warned, during a visit to the U.S., that “economic sanctions are making it difficult for Iran, but there is no sign that the Ayatullah regime plans to stop its nuclear program because of them.” The Israeli media reported that Netanyahu had told Vice-President Joe Biden, “The only way to ensure that Iran will not go nuclear is to create a credible threat of military action against it if it doesn’t cease its race for a nuclear weapon.”

Gates, however, turned Netanyahu’s argument on its head, warning that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would provide only a “short term solution,” setting the Iranians back two or three years. But any military strike would “bring together a divided nation [and] make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons” via programs that would simply “go deeper and more covert.” Instead, Gates argued, “The only long-term solution to avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest.”

Facebooktwittermail

An American bribe that stinks of appeasement

Robert Fisk writes:

In any other country, the current American bribe to Israel, and the latter’s reluctance to accept it, in return for even a temporary end to the theft of somebody else’s property would be regarded as preposterous. Three billion dollars’ worth of fighter bombers in return for a temporary freeze in West Bank colonisation for a mere 90 days? Not including East Jerusalem – so goodbye to the last chance of the east of the holy city for a Palestinian capital – and, if Benjamin Netanyahu so wishes, a rip-roaring continuation of settlement on Arab land. In the ordinary sane world in which we think we live, there is only one word for Barack Obama’s offer: appeasement. Usually, our lords and masters use that word with disdain and disgust.

Anyone who panders to injustice by one people against another people is called an appeaser. Anyone who prefers peace at any price, let alone a $3bn bribe to the guilty party – is an appeaser. Anyone who will not risk the consequences of standing up for international morality against territorial greed is an appeaser. Those of us who did not want to invade Afghanistan were condemned as appeasers. Those of us who did not want to invade Iraq were vilified as appeasers. Yet that is precisely what Obama has done in his pathetic, unbelievable effort to plead with Netanyahu for just 90 days of submission to international law. Obama is an appeaser.

The fact that the West and its political and journalistic elites – I include the ever more disreputable New York Times – take this tomfoolery at face value, as if it can seriously be regarded as another “step” in the “peace process”, to put this mystical nonsense “back on track”, is a measure of the degree to which we have taken leave of our senses in the Middle East.

Facebooktwittermail

Israel must choose between Enlightenment and Romanticism

Carlo Strenger and Menachem Lorberbaum write:

Political discourse in Israel is governed by the presumption that Israel needs to decide whether it will be a Western state or a Jewish state. Ostensibly the question is: should Israel be more Jewish or more democratic? And the subtext is that this a choice between a state governed by the language of individual human rights, or by a specifically Jewish language.

This assumption is false. Israel is not about to choose between being Jewish or being democratic but rather which of two European traditions to embrace: that of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on universal individual rights and division of powers, or that of political romanticism with its emphasis on the connection between an entity called ‘the nation’ and land.

Israel’s right wing, to an ever growing extent, tends toward the position that Israel should not approve the language of individual human rights accepted today in international politics, but that it should insist on its right to be a purely ethnic state.

Facebooktwittermail

Hitchens on 9/11

From an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Australia’s ABC TV (the full interview can be viewed on broadband here on Windows Media Player):

TONY JONES: So let’s talk briefly about that day September 11, 2001.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: You described it very tellingly soon afterwards, if not on the day, as it being as if Charles Manson had been made God for a day.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Mmm. Yes, I remember thinking that as I watched this huge cloud of filth emerge from the wreckage, as the towers sank, up came this sort of billowing cloud of ordure and wreckage and including the shredded remains of about 3,000 of my fellow creatures.

This is a really evil looking cloud. There was shot from a helicopter above Manhattan showing it sort of spreading on this really beautiful day all across the southern tip of my favourite island. And I thought “it’s as if Charles Manson is giving orders today, yes”.

TONY JONES: The other…

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: That’s how it felt. I think about it every day, still.

TONY JONES: Take yourself back then to watching it. Because one of the most horrific images – and I think you actually described this as one of the most horrific images that still remains in your head that you have ever seen and that is, the burning people falling or jumping, in fact, from the towers before they collapsed.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

Yes – hesitating between jumping to their deaths or being burnt alive and getting both – jumping while burning.

And a terrible little shrill cry that was overheard on the streets of Greenwich Village by a school teacher who was trying to escort some children along the sidewalk and one of them pointing and saying, “Look, teacher, the birds are on fire”.

A childish attempt to rationalise what was going on, make sense of it or, if you like – the wrong word but to humanise it.

That stayed in my mind as well. Still does.

TONY JONES: One of the more remarkable things that happened in the aftermath was the reaction of some on the Left – and I am sure this rather helped your – or helped galvanise the transformation that you were already undergoing – particularly from the reaction from people like Noam Chomsky.

Tell us a little bit about that.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, once I had sorted out my various impression of the day, which I had in common with everyone else – and which also included the realisation that a friend of mine had just been flown into the walls of the Pentagon.

I felt, with that additional horror, much as everyone else did, to discover, work through shock, rage, fear – not so much, oddly enough. I didn’t feel I was frightened by it but I was very powerfully shaken by it.

And then – I wasn’t sure whether to trust myself with this but I actually have to admit it – a sort of sense of exhilaration coming from, “Okay, it’s everything I hate versus everything I love”.

It’s a summons of a sort. It’s “Okay, now if you don’t recognise this as a crisis, when would you recognise one?”

And then very soon succeeded by the realisation – I then had been working for The Nation magazine as columnist for the flagship journal of the American Left for upwards of two decades – immediately realising I wasn’t going to like what a lot of my comrades were going to say.

And I remember thinking of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, and a few others. They would find a way of explaining this away.

And that I wasn’t in the mood for it. And I don’t just mean mood for that moment. It wasn’t a temporary sort of eruption of my digestive system or anything.

I wasn’t prepared to tolerate that.

To tar the Left with the suggestion that 9/11 would simply be “explained away” is to ignore a dimension of the response in many observers which had nothing to do with diminishing the magnitude of what had happened or claiming that America had it coming. We weighed the significance of the events of that single day against what we feared would follow in the years and decades to come. Which is to say, there were many of us who witnessed 9/11 with a sense of dread, convinced that what would follow would be vastly more destructive, but unlike al Qaeda’s attack be violence done in our name.
(H/t to Pulse.)

Facebooktwittermail

Hitchens on mortality

Christopher Hitchens interviewed by Australia’s ABC TV (the full interview can be viewed on broadband here on Windows Media Player):

TONY JONES: I want to ask you what you think about Martin Amis’ idea that writers like you must actually believe in some form of life after death because not all of you, not all of the parts of you are going to die because the printed words you leave behind constitute a form of immortality. I mean, is he just being kind, or do you think that there’s a truth to that?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Littera scripta manet – “The written word will remain”. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me.

Of course I do write – I’ve always had the sense of writing, as it were, posthumously. I once wrote an introduction to a collection of my own essays. I stole the formulation from Nadine Gordimer who said you should try and write as if for post-mortem publication because it only then can screen out all those influences: public opinion, some reviewer you might want to be impressing, some publisher who might want to publish you, someone you’re afraid of offending. All these distractions, you can write purely and honestly and clearly and for its own sake. And the best way of doing that is to imagine that you won’t live to see it actually written, then you can be sure that you’re being objective and you’re being scrupulous.

I think that’s a wonderful reflection, but it doesn’t – it isn’t the same term as immortality at all.

TONY JONES: As you say in your memoirs, you’ve written for decades day in, day out – I think you said at least 1,000 words a day for many, many years – despatches, articles, lectures, books – in particular books. Doesn’t it give you some comfort that your thoughts, and indeed some version of you, is going to exist after your death, is imperishable?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, if you want to know – because I try to avoid the blues when talking about all of this, but if you want to know one of the most sour reflections that I have when I think that I’m 61 now and I might not make 65 – I quite easily might not.

One of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coalface, I worked very hard. In the last few years I’ve got a fair amount of recognition for it. In my opinion, actually, rather more than I deserve. Certainly more than I expected. And I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just, as it were, relishing that, enjoying it.

Not ceasing to work, not resting on the laurels, but savouring it a bit and that – I was just getting ready for that, as a matter of fact. I was hit right at the top of my form, right in the middle of a successful book tour. I’m not going to get that and that does upset me. So that’s how I demarcate it from immortality.

Similarly, I’m not going to see my grandchildren – almost certainly not. One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

The great Cuban writer Jose Marti said that a man – he happened to say it was a man – three duties: to write a book, to plant a tree and to have a son. I remember the year my first son was born was the year I published my first real full-length book, and I had a book party for it and for him – Alexander, my son – and I planted a tree, a weeping willow and felt pretty good for the age of, what?, I think 32 or something.

But, the thought of mortality, in other words of being outlived, is fine when it’s your children, your books or your trees, but it doesn’t reconcile you to an early death. No, it doesn’t.

Facebooktwittermail

Shock over senior UK Jewish leader’s Bibi criticism

Britain’s TheJC.com reports:

One of British Jewry’s most senior leaders this week shattered a longstanding taboo by publicly criticising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the peace process, voicing moral reservations about some of Israel’s policies, and calling for criticism of Israel to be voiced freely throughout the community.

Mick Davis, chairman of both the UJIA and the executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, also warned that unless there were a two-state solution with the Palestinians, Israel risked becoming an apartheid state.

As news of his views, aired at a meeting in London on Saturday night, began to ripple around the Jewish community, other leaders backed his stance, although it also drew criticism.
[…]
He said that if the world community were to lose hope in the possibility of a two-state solution, then demographics would eventually cause Israel to become an apartheid state “because we then have the majority going to be governed by the minority”.

Mr Davis was appearing in a discussion with Peter Beinart, author of a recent essay critical of America’s Zionist leaders which sparked widespread debate overseas.

Facebooktwittermail

American supremacy

Matt Miller writes:

Does anyone else think there’s something a little insecure about a country that requires its politicians to constantly declare how exceptional it is? A populace in need of this much reassurance may be the surest sign of looming national decline.

American exceptionalism is now the central theme of Sarah Palin’s speeches. The supposedly insufficient Democratic commitment to this idea will be a core Republican complaint in 2012. Conservatives assail Barack Obama for his alleged indifference to it. It’s part of their broader indictment of Obama’s fishy cosmopolitanism, his overseas “apology tours,” his didn’t-wear-the-flag-lapel-pin-until-he-had-to peevishness. Not to mention the whole anti-colonial Kenyan resentment thing the president’s got going.

Real men – real Americans – know America is the greatest country ever invented. And they shout it from the rooftops. Don’t they?

Miller quotes newly-elected Republican senator, Marco Rubio, who offers this supercharged declaration of American exceptionalism: “Americans believe with all their heart, that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history, a place without equal in the history of all of mankind.”

Leave aside the fact that many Americans who hold this view have never actually visited another country, expressions of America’s exceptional character such as that by Rubio, represent a view of the world as much as one of America. Moreover, this is not merely about saying that America is unique but that it is superior to every other nation and that it must vigorously guard this position of supremacy.

If this was about praising a set of virtues, then one might imagine that those who see America in this way, would hope that every other nation might at some time share the same set of virtues. Clearly they do not hold this hope, because this is not about virtue or excellence — it is about power and domination. That America could be dislodged from its position of supremacy — this is the greatest fear of the supremacists.

In as much as American exceptionalism is rooted in a belief in American supremacy, then the power ascribed to the nation is implicitly shared by every American. That this is make-believe power is evident in the frequency and loudness with which it is declared and the fact that those who profess their conviction in this power nevertheless clearly easily feel threatened — threatened by the government; by the rest of the world; by immigrants; and by other Americans who don’t share their views.

And yet, the idea that the next presidential election will be a contest based on Americanism, is something that Democrats can justifiably fear. Even if Sarah Palin’s candidacy flops, this theme will be picked up by others as the cause of raw American nationalism easily resonates with a dispirited electorate.

As his victory speech made evident, Marco Rubio has an America-first message much harder to dismiss than Palin’s. The worst mistake of those who find this view of America unpalatable is to fail to take it seriously.

Facebooktwittermail

The fog of containment

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett write:

In the coming weeks, the United States may well be joining a new round of nuclear negotiations with Iran. But, rather than working to promote their success, most commentators seem to be consumed with explaining their anticipated failure. And their follow-up policy prescriptions seem designed to do more harm than good. Take Karim Sadjadpour’s article, “The Sources of Soviet Iranian Conduct,” in the November issue of Foreign Policy. Sadjadpour seeks to adapt George Kennan’s famous 1947 “Mr. X” article — which proposed the outlines of the Cold War “containment” strategy used against the Soviet Union — for America’s current Iran debate.

“Like the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic is a corrupt, inefficient, authoritarian regime whose bankrupt ideology resonates far more abroad than it does at home,” Sadjadpour writes. “Also like the men who once ruled Moscow, Iran’s current leaders have a victimization complex and, as they themselves admit, derive their internal legitimacy from thumbing their noses at Uncle Sam.” It’s a clever conceit, but it would be a disaster for U.S. interests if Sadjadpour’s piece attains anything close to the level of influence achieved by Kennan’s.

That’s so for three main reasons. First, Sadjadpour’s reading of the drivers of Iranian foreign policy is profoundly at odds with the historical record of the Islamic Republic’s actual conduct. Second, his policy prescriptions would keep the United States from acting in its own best interests to pursue a comprehensive realignment of U.S.-Iranian relations. Third, his policy prescriptions would lead ultimately to a U.S.-initiated military confrontation with Iran.

Sadjadpour uses a highly selective exegesis of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rhetoric about the United States as a basis for arguing that the Islamic Republic’s very survival requires antagonism with America. This is a politically convenient argument, absolving Washington of any responsibility to engage seriously with Tehran, until the deus ex machina of “regime change” solves the Iran problem.

Facebooktwittermail

The Return of Ghosts: Debating the rise of Geert Wilders and the far-right at the Nexus Symposium

Max Blumenthal writes:

I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, the symposium was the occasion for the first public appearance in Europe by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last month. The arrival of Vargas Llosa, one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, resulted in an overflow crowd filled with members of the Dutch media, the country’s political class, and the royal family.

Even with Vargas Llosa in the spotlight, the participants’ attention was focused on Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which is now the third leading party in the Netherlands. With his gathering influence, Wilders has essentially placed the Dutch coalition government in a stranglehold; the government meets with him every Wednesday to gauge his opinions and ask for his instructions. While Wilders dictates at will to the government, he remains independent of it, comfortably avoiding the consequences of policies he has helped to shape. It is the perfect position for a politician whose agenda is comprised exclusively of xenophobic populism, and typical strategy of the far-right in countries across the continent.

Wilders’ base lies in the mostly Catholic south, where ironically few people have ever encountered a Muslim. He has also generated support in the city of Groeningen, once a citadel of the communists. Seeking to expand his base, Wilders promised to hire scores of “animal cops” to investigate and prosecute the abuse of animals, a clever wedge strategy in the only country I know of that has a party dedicated exclusively to animal rights. Of course, Wilders could care less about our furry friends. His stated goal is to end immigration not just to Holland but to all of Europe; ban the Quran (free speech is only for the “Judeo-Christian” community), and severely limit the rights of Muslim citizens of Europe by, for instance, instituting what he called a “head rag tax” on Muslim women. Wilders’ international allies include the goosestepping neo-Nazis of the English Defense League, the far-right pogromist Pam Geller, the Belgian neo-fascist party Vlaams Belang, and a substantial portion of the US neocon elite. Over the course of just a few years, he has become perhaps the most influential Islamophobe in the world.

Facebooktwittermail

Will Miral be this generation’s Exodus?

Adam Horowitz writes:

Today, I saw Julian Schnabel’s new film Miral. It won’t be arriving in theaters in the US until next March, so it will be awhile until we see what effect it has, but my initial impression was amazement at what I was watching. Here was a film following many of the conventions of a traditional Hollywood film, but this time it was telling the Palestinian liberation story (which might explain why it was not produced in Hollywood and instead was a French/Israeli/Italian/Indian co-production).

The film, based on Rula Jebreal’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, takes us from the Nakba, and children orphaned during the Deir Yassin massacre, through the first Intifada to the signing of the Oslo Accords. I know there will be criticisms, and I have a few that I’ll share later, but right now I am struck by the emotional impact of the film. You follow the lead character through checkpoints, refugee camps, home demolitions, interrogations, humiliations and protests. After that it is impossible to not understand, and feel, the Palestinian call for justice.

This film was due for release on December 3 but this has been pushed back until March 25 when it will get a limited launch. Even if it doesn’t get shown widely, one way strong interest can be registered is if Netflix users add Miral to their DVD queue.

Facebooktwittermail

What we need to learn from Lawrence of Arabia

Michael Korda, author of a new biographer of TE Lawrence, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, writes:

Lawrence fought against the Sykes-Picot Agreement, attempted to undermine it, drove the Arabs on in a desperate race to capture Damascus and declare an independent Arab state before the British Army could get there, argued against the Sykes-Picot Agreement vehemently with Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau after the war in Paris at the peace conference, as well as face to face with King George V at Buckingham Palace, and with the Marquess of Curzon at the War Cabinet. Even at the most courageous and daring moments of his service in the desert, Lawrence was gnawed by these doubts. When he rode off to enter Damascus in 1917, alone and with a price on his head, he wrote an agonized note to his chief in Cairo: “Clayton, I’ve decided to go off alone to Damascus, hoping to get killed on the way… We are calling them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.”

It was his view then and later that the Allies had persuaded the Arabs to take up arms against the Turks with a false promise, and that even as the Arabs were fighting, the British and the French were secretly laying claim to the spoils of war in advance, and sharing between themselves the areas that the Arabs had been promised: Lebanon and Syria for France, Palestine, what is now Jordan, and what is now Iraq (with its rich oil reserves) for Great Britain, leaving for the Arabs only a few worthless strips of desert, without major ports or sensible frontiers, like throwing them the carcass of a chicken once the meat had been carved away.

It was not shame at having been beaten and gang-raped by the Turks when he was briefly captured at Deraa (fortunately for Lawrence, they did not recognize him) that caused him to refuse the Distinguished Service Order and the insignia of a Companion of the Bath from the hands of King George V, and also the king’s offer of a knighthood or the Order of Merit. Rather it was Lawrence’s guilt over the fact that the Allies had broken their promises to the Arabs that led him to reject all honors, give up his rank, and join the Royal Air Force in 1922 as an aircraftman second class, the equivalent of a private, under an assumed name, “solitary in the ranks.”

It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it. In the eyes of Arabs, the West (including the United States, which acquiesced to the brutal and cynical British and French partition of the Middle East) is responsible for the fragmented reality of the area today, and for its artificial frontiers. This is the unforgivable “original sin” to Arabs, and the subsequent partition of Palestine is merely a further extension of it, exacerbating wounds that were already there.

Many of the problems that exist in the area—including, but by no means limited to Syrian-armed interference in Lebanon, the failure to create a viable “Kurdistan” for the Kurd people, the hostility between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, the future of the West Bank—were addressed by Lawrence in the map [see below] he prepared for the British War Cabinet and the Paris Peace Conference, but brushed under the table by the great powers. Indeed, it is typical of Lawrence that he managed to get Prince Feisal, the leader of the Arab Revolt, and Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, to sit down together in January 1919 and sign an extraordinary agreement (largely drafted by Lawrence himself) that would have created a joint Arab-Jewish government in Palestine, with unlimited Jewish immigration. Feisal conceded that Palestine could contain 4 million to 5 million Jewish immigrants without harm to the rights or property of the Arab population, a number not greatly different from the number of Jews living in Israel today. Had Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George been willing to agree to Arab demands, an Arab-Jewish state might have existed that could have absorbed the bulk of the European Jews whom the Germans would slaughter between 1933 and 1945, as well as producing a state with advanced agriculture, industry, and education, in which Jews and Arabs might have proved that they could live together peacefully and productively.

Facebooktwittermail

Do neoconservatives really care about the Iranian opposition?

Ali Gharib writes:

The rumblings of the largely underground Iranian Green Movement encourage neoconservative pundit Reuel Marc Gerecht. “I think it’s the most amazing intellectual second revolution…that we’ve seen in the Middle East,” he told a packed briefing room at Bloomberg’s D.C. headquarters last month. But even as he called on President Barack Obama to do more to vocally support the embattled rights movement — thinly veiled U.S. encouragement for regime change, in other words — Gerecht pushed for bombing Iran.

Yet Green activists who work on the ground in Iran roundly oppose a military attack precisely because it will undermine opposition efforts. Confronted with their warnings against strikes by his debate opponent, Gerecht was dismissive. He derided dissident journalist Akbar Ganji as “delusional” and spoke in dangerous innuendo about Shirin Ebadi, a human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate.”There is a huge difference between what some dissidents will say privately and what they’ll say publicly,” said Gerecht of Ebadi, “and I’ll leave it at that.”

In a phone interview, Ebadi couldn’t remember Gerecht by name (noting that she speaks to four or five journalists a day), but emphatically denied the charge that she talks out of both sides of her mouth. “Me, no! Everything I say, is exactly what I say,” she told me in Farsi. “Whoever said this, that I say different things in public and private, is wrong.” “I’m the same person in public and private,” she went on. “And I’m against war.”

Ebadi hasn’t been in Iran since the crackdown on demonstrators in the wake of the June 2009 elections, but she’s nonetheless a tireless advocate for reform and human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran.”The military option will not benefit the U.S. interest or the Iranian interest,” she said recently in an interview with Think Progress, a Center for American Progress blog. “It is the worst option. You should not think about it. The Iranian people — including myself — will resist any military action.”

The soon-to-be-released “documentary,” Iranium, produced by the Clarion Fund, makes it plain that when it comes to Iran, the neoconservatives have only one objective: war.

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s dubious Mideast bet

Tony Karon writes:

In the grand poker game of Middle East peacemaking, everyone around the table is wondering just what cards President Barack Obama is holding. That’s because the President has placed a potentially ruinous bet on what can be achieved over the 90 days of the partial settlement freeze he appears to have persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept — in exchange for an extra $3 billion worth of advanced F-35 fighter aircraft. That is over and above the annual $2.75 billion military subsidy Israel receives from Washington. In addition, the Obama Administration has promised to run interference for Israel against any attempt to bring international law into play to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via the U.N. But Obama is gambling with a lot more than $3 billion that the two sides can agree on borders between Israel and a Palestinian state within three months.

Netanyahu still has to convince his entire Cabinet to embrace the deal, and he’ll get some pushback from within his own party and among settlers furious about a new building slowdown (although the Israeli group Peace Now, which strongly opposes settlements, noted last week that over the six weeks since the last moratorium expired, settlers have started to work on pretty much the same number of housing units as they would have built over the 10 months it covered). The Palestinians, for their part, insist that they won’t return to negotiations until Israel completely halts building on occupied land, including in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu, however, is adamant that his construction freeze won’t apply to settlements in East Jerusalem, which he doesn’t deem to be settlements — although the international community does, having never recognized Israel’s annexation of those parts of the Holy City captured in the 1967 war.

But even if the deal manages to get talks restarted, the real gamble Obama has taken is giving the two sides just 90 days to agree on where to draw the final borders between Israel and a Palestinian state.

Facebooktwittermail