The Republican upset in the race for the U.S. Senate seat held for nearly half a century by liberal Edward M. Kennedy reflects a huge victory for opponents of U.S. President Barack Obama – and also for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Scott Brown defeated once-favored Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts seat even after U.S. President Barack Obama rushed to Boston on Sunday to try to save her candidacy.
Over the past nine months, Netanyahu has managed to curb pressure from Obama, who enjoys a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Now, however, Obama will be more dependent on the support of his Republican rivals, the supporters and friends of Netanyahu. [continued…]
A massive aftershock jolted awake thousands of earthquake victims and relief workers in this ravaged capital early Wednesday, sparking new cries of fear and sorrow even as an enormous international aid effort continued. [continued…]
The U.S. Army arrived to Haiti’s capital in dramatic style on Tuesday, landing on the lawn of the crumpled presidential palace in Black Hawk helicopters to the cheers of Haitians eager for help and more security after last week’s earthquake. [continued…]
We saw this type of Iraq-style disaster profiteering in New Orleans, and you can expect to see a lot more of this in Haiti over the coming days, weeks and months. Private security companies are seeing big dollar signs in Haiti thanks in no small part to the media hype about “looters.” After Katrina, the number of private security companies registered (and unregistered) multiplied overnight. Banks, wealthy individuals, the US government all hired private security. I even encountered Israeli mercenaries operating an armed checkpoint outside of an elite gated community in New Orleans. They worked for a company called Instinctive Shooting International. (That is not a joke). [continued…]
“Tere are no security issues,” says Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, reporting from the General Hospital in Port-Au-Prince in Haiti, where 1,000 people are in need of operations. Lyon said the reports of violence in the city have been overblown by the media and have affected the delivery of aid and medical services. [continued…]
The single biggest lie in War on Terror revisionist history is that our torture was confined only to a handful of “high-value” prisoners. New credible reports of torture continuously emerge. That’s because America implemented and maintained a systematic torture regime spread throughout our worldwide, due-process-free detention system. There have been at least 100 deaths of detainees in American custody who died during or as the result of interrogation. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” Gen. Antonio Taguba said after investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses and finding they were part and parcel of official policy sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and not the acts of a few “rogue” agents: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Despite all of this, our media persists in sustaining the lie that the torture controversy is about three cases of waterboarding and a few “high-value” detainees who were treated a bit harshly. That’s why Horton’s story received so little attention and was almost completely ignored by right-wing commentators: because it shatters the central myth that torture was used only in the most extreme cases — virtual Ticking Time Bomb scenarios — when there was simply no other choice. Leading American media outlets, as a matter of policy, won’t even use the word “torture.” This, despite the fact that the abuse was so brutal and inhumane that it led to the deaths of helpless captives — including run-of-the-mill detainees, almost certainly ones guilty of absolutely nothing — in numerous cases. These three detainee deaths — like so many other similar cases — illustrate how extreme is the myth that has taken root in order to obscure what was really done. [continued…]
Israeli authorities today deported an American journalist who was working as an editor for a Palestinian news agency.
Jared Malsin, who is Jewish and in his late 20s, was detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport eight days ago as he returned from a holiday in Prague.
His girlfriend, a Lutheran church volunteer who flew back with him, was deported two days later., but Malsin was held in detention at a cell in the airport while he began a legal challenge to his deportation order.
Early today Malsin, who has worked with the Ma’an news agency for two years as its English news editor, spoke by telephone to a colleague to say he was being deported and was then put on a flight to New York. “He was not in a good place. He sounded very confused,” said George Hale, a staff writer at Ma’an.
Sabine Hadad, a spokeswoman for the Israeli interior ministry, said Malsin had refused to answer questions and co-operate with security staff when he landed at the airport last week. “It is the minimal right of every immigration authority to ask questions or to clarify things that are not clear about every person who wants to enter Israel,” she said. “He refused to co-operate and we told him if he continued to refuse he would not enter Israel.”
Hadad said they did not know Malsin was a journalist until they were contacted by the press about his detention.
However, Hale said Malsin was interrogated repeatedly and was asked about articles he had written from the occupied West Bank that were critical of Israeli policies. Hale said Malsin had briefly overstayed his last tourist visa, but was registered as a journalist with the Palestinian Authority and with the authority’s labour ministry. He had applied for an Israeli government-issued press card, which most foreign journalists here carry, but was told it would not be granted because he was based in Bethlehem, in the West Bank. [continued…]
Israel is arresting a growing number of prominent opponents to its policies toward the Palestinians, say critics who are accusing the government of trying to crush legitimate dissent.
In the most high-profile case yet, Jerusalem police detained the leader of a leading Israeli human rights group during a vigil against the eviction of Palestinian families whose homes were taken by Jewish settlers. [continued…]
Last month the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) revealed an alarming trend in its annual survey on the protection of human rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories – the conditioning of rights.
“The realisation of the entire spectrum of rights is now more than ever dependent on what we say or believe, what ethnic group we belong to, how much money we have, and more,” says the ACRI.
“We have the freedom to express ourselves and demonstrate – only if we don’t say anything displeasing; we have the right to equal treatment and opportunities – only if we are “loyal” to the state.”
In the streets, the Israeli security forces are waging a war against protests by Jewish left wing and human rights activists, who non-violently protest against Israel’s separation barrier or against Jewish settlers taking over Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
Many have been arrested and some were attacked by the security forces.
However, right-wingers protesting against the government’s decision to temporarily freeze building in settlements are accorded much more leniency by Israeli law enforcement agencies.
During Operation Cast Lead about 800 Israeli citizens, most of them Arab, were arrested, with criminal charges brought against most of them.
In a recent editorial, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz called the arrests “an evil omen regarding the state’s attitude toward protesters” and said that as a result, “concern is growing over Israel’s image as a free and democratic country”. [continued…]
The Interior Ministry has stopped granting work permits to foreign nationals working in most international nongovernmental organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, Haaretz has learned.
In an apparent overhaul of regulations that have been in place since 1967, the ministry is now granting the NGO employees tourist visas only, which bar them from working.
Organizations affected by the apparent policy change include Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Terre des Hommes, Handicap International and the Religious Society of Friends (a Quaker organization). [continued…]
Jamal Juma’ could not help but laugh at one of the accusations he said he had been threatened with while in Israeli detention.
“They said they would indict me for links to Hizbollah. They didn’t like it when I started laughing,” Mr Juma’, a lifelong communist, said on Sunday, five days after his release.
He was talking in an office in Ramallah at the headquarters of the Stop the Wall organisation, of which he is a coordinator. Stop the Wall is a Palestinian grassroots effort dedicated to peaceful and popular resistance against the separation barrier Israel is building up and down the occupied territories. [continued…]
In his teen years, Sirajuddin Haqqani was known among friends as a dandy. He cared more about the look of his thick black hair than the battles his father, a mujahideen warlord in the 1980s, was waging with Russia for control of Afghanistan.
The younger Mr. Haqqani is still a stylish sort, say those who know him. But now, approaching middle age and ensconced as the battlefield leader of his father’s militant army, he has become ruthless in his own pursuit of an Afghanistan free from foreign influence. This time the enemy is the U.S. and its allies.
From outposts along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, his Haqqani network is waging a campaign that has made the Afghan insurgency deadlier. He has widened the use of suicide attacks, which became a Taliban mainstay only in the past few years. U.S. officials believe his forces carried out the dramatic Monday gun, grenade and suicide-bomb attack in Kabul on Afghan government ministries and a luxury hotel. The assault claimed five victims plus seven attackers. [continued…]
The Taliban’s spectacular attacks in Kabul yesterday took place just as the new cabinet members were taking their oath of office. In a report posted online on the Taliban website, their spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid listed the ministries under attack: the ministry of mining, the ministry of justice, and the ministry of finance. The Taliban’s message was clear: even though the ministers were taking charge of Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, the power in control of Kabul was not Karzai but the Taliban.
The ministers might not be used to the idea of dual governments, but outside Kabul Afghans have long learned to live under two parallel regimes, a daytime government run by President Karzai and a nighttime one run by the Taliban and other local strongmen. Ministers living in Kabul had been spared this unsettling reality until now, hiding as they do in bullet-proof cars, on blocked roads and behind the protective walls of Kabul’s green zone. But the reality outside the capital is otherwise and ordinary Afghans have learned to negotiate their daily routine around avoiding random violence by the Taliban and other troublemakers. Monday’s attacks might have given the ministers a taste of what life is like for a majority of Afghans, especially those who live in restive regions. [continued…]
Twenty-four hours after seven insurgents stormed a shopping center in downtown Kabul and immobilized the city, the shoemakers who ply their trade in front of the mall were back in business on Tuesday.
Nearby, shopkeepers returned to hawk tapes of Madonna alongside recordings of Afghan and Bollywood stars, and a crowd of men joked with a man wearing a large shawl, because that was the same outfit the attackers wore on Monday to hide their guns.
Stoic about the assault, convinced that it would happen again and lacking faith in the government’s ability to stop such attacks, those who work near the sites that were attacked were most interested in the question of why the insurgents had not killed more civilians. [continued…]
overty and violence are usually portrayed as the biggest challenges confronting Afghanistan. But ask the Afghans themselves, and you get a different answer: corruption is their biggest worry. A new UNODC survey reveals that an overwhelming 59 per cent of Afghans view public dishonesty as a bigger concern than insecurity (54 per cent) and unemployment (52 per cent).
Corruption in Afghanistan: Bribery as Reported by Victims [PDF] is based on interviews with 7,600 people in 12 provincial capitals and more than 1,600 villages around Afghanistan. It records the real experiences (rather than just perceptions) of urban as well as rural residents, men and women, between autumn 2008 and autumn 2009. [continued…]
There is no better way to take the temperature of Arab politics than to examine the state of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful religiously-organised opposition movement in Egypt and the Arab world. With branches in several Arab and Muslim countries, the Brotherhood portrays itself as a more authentic, viable alternative to secular authoritarian rulers and religious extremists of the al-Qaida variety.
The recent election of a new leader, however, has utterly discredited those claims and exposed a serious rift within the 81-year-old Islamic organisation. After weeks of internal turmoil and infighting, the Brotherhood announced that it has chosen Mohammed Badie, an ultra-conservative veterinarian, as its eighth supreme leader since its founding in 1928, along with 16 members of its highest executive policy-setting “guidance bureau”.
Members of the old guard like Mahmoud Izzat, secretary general and gatekeeper of the Brotherhood’s finances and secrets, and Mohammed Akif, former supreme leader, who oppose opening up the organisation and democratising its decision-making, gained the upper hand. Ignoring the wishes of many younger members who called for transparency and respect for electoral rules, Izzat, Arif and their cohorts shoved the secretly-arranged results down the throats of opposition. [continued…]
America has a message for the millions of Haitians left homeless and destitute by last week’s earthquake: Do not try to come to the United States.
Every day, a United States Air Force cargo plane specially equipped with radio transmitters flies for five hours over the devastated country, broadcasting news and a recorded message from Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington.
“Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country,” Mr. Joseph says in Creole, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. “If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”
Homeland Security and Defense Department officials say they are taking a hard line to avert a mass exodus from the island that could lead to deaths at sea or a refugee crisis in South Florida. Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is about 700 miles from Miami.
So far, there has been no sign of Haitians trying to flee the island by boat, United States officials say. Nor has there been a mass exodus of Haitians into the neighboring Dominican Republic, except for about 3,000 injured people who are being treated at hospitals just over the Dominican border, officials there say.
But United States officials say they worry that in the coming weeks, worsening conditions in Haiti could spur an exodus. They have not only started a campaign to persuade Haitians to stay put, but they are also laying plans to scoop up any boats carrying illegal immigrants and send them to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Department of Homeland Security officials have also transferred 200 illegal immigrants from the Krome Service Processing Center here — a federal jail for people awaiting deportation — to make room for a possible influx of Haitian migrants.
The State Department has also been denying many seriously injured people in Port-au-Prince visas to be transferred to Miami for surgery and treatment, said Dr. William O’Neill, the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, which has erected a field hospital near the airport there.
“It’s beyond insane,” Dr. O’Neill said Saturday, having just returned to Miami from Haiti. “It’s bureaucracy at its worse.” [continued…]
Wharf Jérémie on this city’s edge was all chaos and destruction on Monday, with upturned shipping containers lying in the sea and pigs foraging on piles of refuse. But for a thousand or more seeking a ride on rickety boats away from the ruined capital, the wharf was a means to something hopeful: escape.
“Our home is destroyed,” said Yanique Verly, 33, who sells vegetables on the street. She waited for a boat to take her and her three children to her home on Haiti’s western coast. “My only hope is to return to my family’s arms.”
Ms. Verly joined thousands of others, as the exodus from the capital accelerated on Monday, by boat, bus, car and truck, in uncertain quest for shelter, fresh water and stability in the countryside. They sought to leave an anarchic city marked by acute shortages of basic goods and aid efforts hampered by bottlenecks and security fears. [continued…]
When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners. [continued…]
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.
E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.
A Justice Department inspector general’s report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed. [continued…]
For the pacifist Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh, Israel will soon have no choice but to integrate its Arab population. Sari Nusseibeh, Dean of al-Quds University in Jerusalem and committed Palestinian intellectual, was the author in 2002 of a peace plan co-written with Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service.
LE FIGARO – Doesn’t the issue of Jerusalem, which resurfaced in 2009, complicate the resumption of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians?
SARI NUSSEIBEH – Everyone kept putting off the issue of Jerusalem. Suddenly they rediscovered that it is undoubtedly the main problem. And also that the parameters of this problem are no longer the same. While the negotiators were working in their bubble towards a peaceful solution, the city was fundamentally changing: the 1967 state of affairs no longer exists today, and sharing it has become much more difficult.
What are these changes?
Geographically, the area of Jerusalem and its suburbs has grown from 20 sq km to 50 sq km: in the eastern part of this Greater Jerusalem, the Israelis have built 13 new neighborhoods, where 250 000 Jews now live, linked together by freeways. They encircle the Arab areas of East Jerusalem and separate them from one another. The Israelis have also invented the concept of the “holy basin”, which includes the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and the surrounding areas, which form the core of Arab Jerusalem. They are carrying out an active policy of expulsions, destruction and expropriation, making an eventual partition of Jerusalem much more difficult.
And yet the two-state solution is supported by the whole world?
In 1967, one of the first advocates of the two-state solution was Uri Avnery (historic figure on the Israeli pacifist left). He had no support at that time. Four decades later, his ideas have been immensely successful, as they are shared today by the entire world, even Bush. But in the meantime, the possibility of creating two states has faded away. Even if I do not rule out the possibility of a miracle, I do not personally believe anymore that the prospect is achievable. [continued…]
(H/t to Mondoweiss)
Freedom House’s approach to Israel provides the starkest example of the abyss into which liberal thinking has fallen on the relationship between colonialism and freedom. Israel, we are told, “remains the only country in the [Middle East] region to hold a Freedom in the World designation of Free.” We are informed euphemistically that “The beginning of the year [2009] was marred by fierce fighting between the Israeli military and the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.”
There is no mention of the deliberate targeting by Israel of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and the resulting massive destruction, and death and injury to thousands of Palestinian civilians. Nothing is said of the denial of fundamental political, civil and human rights, or freedom of movement, association and education to four million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is no mention of the systematic discrimination, and social and political exclusion faced by 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor of the denial of the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees.
There is an acknowledgment that “Hundreds of people were arrested during demonstrations against the Gaza conflict, and the parliamentary elections committee passed a measure banning two political parties from national elections, though the ban was quickly overturned by the Supreme Court.”
Despite this, on the tables accompanying the report, “Israel” receives the highest score of “1” for political rights, and a very respectable “2” for civil liberties — on a par with Italy and Japan. The overall impression is of minor glitches that could occur in any exemplary “Western” democracy. [continued…]
Sabah Haider visited the West Bank for ten days over Christmas and New Year 2010 to teach filmmaking to more than a hundred children at the SOS Village orphanage in Bethlehem. Here are some of the photographs that she took in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus. [continued…]
A team of militants launched a spectacular assault at the heart of the Afghan government on Monday, with two men detonating suicide bombs and the rest fighting to the death only 50 yards from the gates of the presidential palace.
The attack paralyzed the city for hours, as hundreds of Afghan commandos converged and opened fire. The battle unfolded in the middle of Pashtunistan Square, a traffic circle where the palace of President Hamid Karzai, the Ministry of Justice and the Central Bank, the target of the attack, are located.
As the gun battle raged, another suicide bomber, this one driving an ambulance, struck a traffic circle a half-mile away, sending a second mass of bystanders fleeing in terror. Afghan officials said that three soldiers and two civilians — including a child — were killed, and at least 71 people were wounded.
The assault was the latest in a series of audacious operations by insurgents meant to shatter the calm of the Afghan capital. The Taliban are a mostly rural phenomenon in a mostly rural country; the overwhelming majority of United States troops are deployed in small outposts in the countryside. On most days, the war does not reach the urban centers.
But increasingly the Taliban are bringing the fight into the cities, further demoralizing Afghans and lending to the impression that virtually no part of the country is safe from the group’s penetration. [continued…]
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that there could be a surge of Taliban followers willing to reintegrate with the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, but that for now an Afghan government reconciliation with the Taliban leadership was unlikely.
Mr. Gates, who made his comments on his plane en route to India, was reacting to the announcement on Sunday of a major new Afghan initiative to offer jobs, security, education and other social benefits to Taliban followers who defect. The plan is in the final stages of preparation and has qualified support from American officials, who see luring large numbers of Taliban supporters to change sides as critical to success in Afghanistan.
But Mr. Gates, like other American officials, effectively ruled out reconciliation with the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. Mr. Karzai has offered repeatedly to talk directly with Mullah Omar, with little result, but Afghan officials are now considering removing his name from the United Nations list of terrorists. Those placed on the list are barred from international travel and their bank accounts can be frozen. [continued…]
Saleh al-Mutlaq has never shied from controversy, sometimes relishing his plunge into the turbulence of Iraqi politics. But even Mr. Mutlaq, a disheveled former agronomist, seems taken aback at landing square center in a growing dispute that threatens to unleash turmoil ahead of Iraq’s parliamentary elections in March.
A government commission moved this month to bar his candidacy, on grounds that he was promoting the Baath Party of former President Saddam Hussein. With the decision, Mr. Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician, has emerged as an emblem of a process widely viewed as opaque and capricious. To supporters, he is a victim. To critics, he is a relic. For both, his future could say something about Iraq’s fate. [continued…]
As the disqualification of some 500 leading Iraqi politicians on the grounds of alleged ties to the Baath Party is continuing to roil Iraqi politics, Arab papers today report that both U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Vice President Joseph Biden have been intervening with Iraqi officials in an attempt to find a way to walk back the disastrous decision — perhaps by postponing the implementation of the committee’s decisions until after the election. The commission in turn is complaining about foreign interference, while Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki broke his silence by calling to “not politicize” the process (a bit late for that, no?) and some Iraqi outlets are screaming about alleged American threats. There is still a chance that the appeals process could provide an exit strategy, but this doesn’t seem hugely likely at this point; the final list of those disqualified is set to be released tomorrow.
Iraqi politicians, especially those associated with Mutlak’s bloc such as Ayad Allawi and Tareq al-Hashemi, have been loudly complaining about alleged conflict of interest and abuse of power behind the moves. The indefatigable Norwegian researcher Reider Visser deserves credit for unearthing that Ali Faysal al-Lami, who spent about a year in a U.S.-run prison on charges of complicity with attacks by Shia militias and runs the Parliamentary committee responsible for the disqualifications, is actually standing for election on Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress list. Visser, like a number of Iraqi analysts, argue that they are using their official positions to stack the deck in their own favor: “It is they who effectively control the vetting process for the entire elections process. They enjoy full support in this from Iran; meanwhile their leaders are being feted in Washington, where Adil Abd al-Mahdi has just been visiting.” The committee’s defenders claim that it is simply enforcing the law. Finally, the editor of the Saudi al-Sharq al-Awsat complains that Iran’s allies in Iraq are using their control of the mechanisms of Iraqi democracy to seize power for themselves on behalf of Iran — and the similarity between the DeBaath “vetting” of candidates and Iran’s Guardians Council’s vettting of candidates has been noted. [continued…]
As Dr Aafia Siddiqui goes on trial in a federal court in New York City her case is unknown to most Americans yet in her native Pakistan the frail neuroscientist, mother of three and reputed al Qa’eda associate has become a cause célèbre.
Last week Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said that he had been in direct communication with Pakistan’s mission in the United States for the provision of all possible assistance and cooperation for her release, News International reported. He said that the government had also engaged lawyers to defend her in the court.
At a pre-trial hearing last week the defence team rejected the charge of shooting at FBI agents since there were no fingerprints or other forensic evidence that she even picked up the gun, the Associated Press of Pakistan reported. “We’re not saying she did it in self-defence. We’re not saying it was an accident. We’re saying she simply did not do it,’ defence attorney Linda Moreno told US District Judge Richard Berman.
In The Guardian, Decan Walsh told the story whose plausibility will be weighed in the Manhattan courtroom. [continued…]
oogle’s clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company’s decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.
The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China.
If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a Leninist one-party state, that is America’s only plausible geopolitical rival, is a different proposition. Combine this political disillusionment with double-digit unemployment in the US that is widely blamed on Chinese currency manipulation, and you have the formula for an anti-China backlash. [continued…]
Ian on Tuesday welcomed what it called the West’s newfound “realism” on Tehran’s nuclear programme after world powers failed to decide on new sanctions.
China, meanwhile, urged flexibility on the standoff over Iran’s nuclear drive and a return to negotiations.
However, Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi renewed a warning that Iran’s forces could hit Western warships in the Gulf if it comes under attack over the nuclear standoff.
On the diplomatic front, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters: “Speaking of sanctions is repetitive and it is not constructive.
“Some Western countries … should correct their approach and be realistic about our (nuclear) rights. And we feel there are traces of realism to be seen,” he added. [continued…]
China on Tuesday urged flexibility in the standoff over Iran’s nuclear drive, as well as a return to negotiations, after world powers failed to reach a decision on whether to hit Tehran with new sanctions.
“China has all along proposed the proper settlement of the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue and consultation,” foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters.
“We hope relevant parties can enhance consultations, show flexibility and promote the early peaceful solution of the relevant issue in a proper manner.”
Ma was speaking after representatives of six world powers who met in New York on Saturday failed to reach a decision on whether to impose new sanctions on Iran over its long-standing nuclear defiance.
The meeting brought together senior officials from four of the five permanent UN Security Council members — Britain, France, Russia and the United States — as well as Germany.
But the fifth member China, signalling its reluctance to back tougher sanctions pushed by the West, sent a lower-level diplomat, winning praise from Tehran. [continued…]
Mr Cheney’s outburst [as he recently accused Barack Obama of being soft on terrorism]… is part of a bigger story in Washington. The aim reaches beyond self-exculpation for his lead role in the calamities of George W. Bush’s administration. It represents the sharp tip of a broader assault on Mr Obama’s foreign policy.
The proposition is that the world’s superpower has a binary choice – between aggression and appeasement – in the conduct of foreign policy. It can get its way by beating up enemies and bullying friends; or it can sacrifice the national interest to weak-kneed engagement and soggy multilateralism. Mr Obama has chosen appeasement.
On one level, there is nothing new in the charge. Republicans have accused the Democrats of being weak on defence ever since the end of the second world war, even if the attacks have rarely been infused with as much partisan vitriol. Soft on terrorism has become a substitute for soft on communism.
For all that, one might have thought that the events of the past few years would have given even the most partisan ideologues on the right pause for thought. The war in Iraq did more than any military adventure since the Vietnam war to drain American power and prestige. It was Mr Cheney and his chums who allowed the Taliban to return to Afghanistan and Mr bin Laden to escape. How did any of this make America safer?
The critics have moved on. The underlying charge now is that Mr Obama has decided that the US should accommodate the big shifts in global power that presage a relative weakening – relative is a vital qualification – in US primacy. Simply put, the president stands accused of standing idly by while other nations rise. America should be blocking the advance of future adversaries rather than inviting them to join a new global order.
Beguiling though the thought might be that history can be stopped in its tracks to preserve the west’s global hegemony for another couple of centuries, there is no accompanying explanation of how precisely Mr Obama can turn back the geopolitical tides. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — At his inauguration, President Obama evinced an understanding that the primary challenge facing America is not whether it can retain its power but whether it has the flexibility to adapt — as he said: “the world has changed, and we must change with it.”
With the New American Century having lasted less than a decade, Obama recognized that the neoconservative vision of American hegemony was a fundamentally unrealistic imposition of the past on the present. But he has yet to clearly articulate a new vision of America’s role in the world and all too frequently falls back on familiar references to America’s greatness.
The strange thing about America’s enduring imperial pretensions is that they are rooted in an underlying sense of inferiority. What other nation engages in such frequent declarations about its own virtues? It’s as though in the absence of continuous self-praise, American pride would rapidly melt into a pool of self-doubt.
For America to meaningfully engage with the world, it also needs to engage with itself. In that process it must begin to move towards an era of national adulthood where it can look in the mirror and see its real face, without having to cling to a childish fantasy.
Referring to the Israeli aid delegation sent to Haiti, the prime minister said that “the moment the dimensions of the disaster became known, I instructed the immediate deployment of an aid delegation on behalf of the State of Israel, which has already reached the place.
“This includes supplies, medication, doctors, a field hospital, an x-ray machine and many other vital things.”
According to the prime minister: “This is the true heritage of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. This act joins similar action we have taken in the past in Mexico, Kenya, and Turkey. We may be a small country, but we are a country with a big heart. This is the expression of Jewish ethics and heritage – to help others.” [continued…]
Who said we are shut up inside our Tel Aviv bubble? How many small nations surrounded by enemies set up field hospitals on the other side of the world? Give us an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Thailand or a terror attack in Kenya, and the IDF Spokesman’s Office will triumph. A cargo plane can always be found to fly in military journalists to report on our fine young men from the Home Front Command.
Everyone is truly doing a wonderful job: the rescuers, searching for survivors; the physicians, saving lives; and the reporters, too, who are rightfully patting them all on the back. After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon became the face we show the world, the entire international community can now see Israel’s good side.
But the remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour’s drive from the offices of Israel’s major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea? [continued…]
Abdu opened the business about a year and a half ago, and employed Arab drivers. About a year later, a competitor opened a business about 200 meters away employing Jews and began making his life miserable, he said.
“They straight away began conspiring against me. They come every week, shouting ‘death to Arabs’, ‘we don’t want you here’, ‘we’ll murder you’.”
He added that only a month ago he was attacked by a “large group.” “They came with knives, clubs and stones, and caused a lot of damage. Many people were beaten. The attackers are all known to the police, but despite all the complaints against them, the police don’t do anything. They keep coming and damaging my business.”
Abdu added that he is certain that if it were Jews being attacked, the police would act differently. “In our village they bring investigators and police in response to the smallest incident, but here nothing happens. It makes me crazy. My drivers are scared. They don’t want to work here. It is destroying my business. I am a father of five – how else can I support them?”
Jerusalem city councilor Laura Wharton (Meretz) also criticized police behavior.
“I am shocked that pogroms are carried out in Jerusalem and the police don’t do anything,” she said. “I am concerned for the Arab residents, of course, but also for Jewish morality and the principles upon which the state should be based. It’s clear that the incidents are racist in nature, and if it was the other way round, everyone would call it a pogrom.” [continued…]
Walking along the beachfront street in Akko recently with a social activist from the town’s Arab community, I looked up at a sign and saw I was at the corner of Shlomo Ben-Yosef Street. Then I looked again just to make sure. Really, I’m embarrassed I was surprised. Naming the street after Ben-Yosef showed an entirely predictable blend of bad taste and flagrant educational incompetence.
Akko, on the northern Israeli coast, is an ethnically mixed city: Arab citizens of Israel make up a little more than a quarter of the town’s 53,000 residents. The rest are Jews. Today’s relations between the two communities are just short of explosive, but I’ll leave that story for another time. Akko was entirely Arab until May 1948, when the Haganah — the proto-army of Israel — conquered it. Afterward, those Arabs who stayed in the town lived in the walled Old City, later spreading to nearby neighborhoods. The beachfront thoroughfare, which runs into the Old City, is named after the Haganah. This must be painful for Arab residents, but it follows an old, unwritten principle: To the victors go the street names.
Shlomo Ben-Yosef Street, just outside the walls, is a more egregious insult. In 1938, Ben-Yosef and two comrades from the ultra-nationalist Irgun underground attacked a bus full of Arab civilians on a mountain road, seeking to kill them all. (Historian Avi Shlaim gives details). The attack failed; the British rulers of Palestine captured, tried, and hanged Ben-Yosef, turning him into a martyr of the Zionist right wing. A smaller, nearby street is called Shnei Eliahu, “Two Eliahus.” It commemorates Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Bet Zouri, two members of the even more extreme Lehi (Stern Gang) underground. In 1944 they assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in Egypt. They, too, died by hanging and became martyrs of the right. The Comprehensive Arab High School of Akko is on the street of the assassins, and you’d take the street of the bus ambusher to get there. I doubt those who picked the names thought of all the possible lessons that their choice might teach. [continued…]
M agda Mughrabi, the Advocacy Officer at Addameer Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association, which represented Othman at some of his court hearings, argued Othman’s case exemplifies Israel’s use of administrative detention as a tactic to punish non-violent activism.
“Israeli is using detention as an arbitrary policy as opposed to something founded on strong evidence,” Magda Mughrabi, Advocacy Officer with Addameer Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association, told The Media Line. “Mohammad Othman wasn’t charged with anything.”
“Representatives of the British, Norwegian and German governments all attended the hearings and there was no substantiated evidence,” she claimed. “They issued an administrative detention order against him saying he posed a security threat to the area and his detention was necessary to neutralize the threat. Then later the judge said Mr Othman still poses a security threat but that there is no progress in his interrogation.”
“This is contradictory,” Mughrabi maintained. “Legally administrative detention can only be used for preventative purposes when there is information that there is an imminent threat to the security of the state. So if they say that his administrative detention should be shortened because there is no progress in the investigation that means they are not holding him for preventative purposes but as a substitute for prosecution because they don’t have evidence against him.”
“This is a war between the campaign and the Israeli authorities,” she added. “The human rights community has written a lot about the arbitrary use of administrative detention. It’s not used as a preventive measure but as a punitive measure when they don’t have enough evidence to prosecute someone.”
There are over 7,000 Palestinians currently held by Israel as ‘security prisoners’, around 290 of them administrative detainees and many of whom, Palestinians claim, have been arrested solely for political reasons.
Palestinian groups claim that Israel has arrested a number of non-violent activists in reprisal for their international advocacy efforts or involvement in demonstrations. Most notable has been the detention of dozens of Palestinian activists arrested in nighttime raids in the West Bank villages of Ni’ilin and Bil’in, the sites of weekly demonstrations against Israel’s separation barrier. Many of those arrested have been accused by Israel of incitement and put in administrative detention based on secret evidence. Very few have been charged. [continued…]
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