Monthly Archives: October 2010

Why the threat of cyber-warfare is being exaggerated

In an assessment of the dangers posed by cyber-warfare and while noting that the threats posed by cyber-warfare and cyber-espionage are repeatedly being conflated, Seymour Hersh points out that the interests of the National Security Agency and those of hackers coincide: both want communications networks that remain open to interception. But John Arquilla, who has taught since 1993 at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, argues that privacy and security are complimentary. “We would all be far better off if virtually all civil, commercial, governmental, and military internet and web traffic were strongly encrypted,” he writes in his book, Worst Enemies.

At the same time, cyber-warfare fearmongers like Richard Clarke describe apocalyptic scenarios in which America could be crippled by China, though China’s motives for engaging in such an attack would be hard to fathom.

Within a quarter of an hour, 157 major metropolitan areas have been thrown into knots by a nationwide power blackout hitting during rush hour. Poison gas clouds are wafting toward Wilmington and Houston. Refineries are burning up oil supplies in several cities. Subways have crashed in New York, Oakland, Washington, and Los Angeles. . . . Aircraft are literally falling out of the sky as a result of midair collisions across the country. . . . Several thousand Americans have already died.

Hersh quotes James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who points out that China is massively invested in the maintenance — not destruction — of America’s economic health: “Current Chinese officials have told me that we’re not going to attack Wall Street, because we basically own it” — a reference to China’s holdings of nearly a trillion dollars in American securities — “and a cyber-war attack would do as much economic harm to us as to you.”

[President Obama’s coordinator for cyber security] Howard Schmidt doesn’t like the term “cyber war.” “The key point is that cyber war benefits no one,” Schmidt told me in an interview at the Old Executive Office Building. “We need to focus on that fact. When people tell me that these guys or this government is going to take down the U.S. military with information warfare I say that, if you look at the history of conflicts, there’s always been the goal of intercepting the communications of combatants — whether it’s cutting down telephone poles or intercepting Morse-code signalling. We have people now who have found that warning about ‘cyber war’ has become an unlikely career path” — an obvious reference to McConnell and Clarke. “All of a sudden, they have become experts, and they get a lot of attention. ‘War’ is a big word, and the media is responsible for pushing this, too. Economic espionage on the Internet has been mischaracterized by people as cyber war.”

Schmidt served in Vietnam, worked as a police officer for several years on a SWAT team in Arizona, and then specialized in computer-related crimes at the F.B.I. and in the Air Force’s investigative division. In 1997, he joined Microsoft, where he became chief of security, leaving after the 9/11 attacks to serve in the Bush Administration as a special adviser for cyber security. When Obama hired him, he was working as the head of security for eBay. When I asked him about the ongoing military-civilian dispute, Schmidt said, “The middle way is not to give too much authority to one group or another and to make sure that we share information with each other.”

Schmidt continued, “We have to protect our infrastructure and our way of life, for sure. We do have vulnerabilities, and we do talk about worst-case scenarios” with the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. “You don’t see a looming war and just wait for it to come.” But, at the same time, “we have to keep our shipping lanes open, to continue to do commerce, and to freely use the Internet.”

How should the power grid be protected? It does remain far too easy for a sophisticated hacker to break into American networks. In 2008, the computers of both the Obama and the McCain campaigns were hacked. Suspicion fell on Chinese hackers. People routinely open e-mails with infected attachments, allowing hackers to “enslave” their computers. Such machines, known as zombies, can be linked to create a “botnet,” which can flood and effectively shut down a major system. Hackers are also capable of penetrating a major server, like Gmail. Guesses about the cost of cyber crime vary widely, but one survey, cited by President Obama in a speech in May, 2009, put the price at more than eight billion dollars in 2007 and 2008 combined. Obama added, referring to corporate cyber espionage, “It’s been estimated that last year alone cyber criminals stole intellectual property from businesses worldwide worth up to one trillion dollars.”

One solution is mandated encryption: the government would compel both corporations and individuals to install the most up-to-date protection tools. This option, in some form, has broad support in the technology community and among privacy advocates. In contrast, military and intelligence eavesdroppers have resisted nationwide encryption since 1976, when the Diffie-Hellman key exchange (an encryption tool co-developed by Whitfield Diffie) was invented, for the most obvious of reasons: it would hinder their ability to intercept signals. In this sense, the N.S.A.’s interests align with those of the hackers.

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Not getting to the promised land

“I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968

“[T]oday, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime.” President Obama speaking in Prague, April 5, 2009

“I do know also that the future holds the possibility of progress, if not in our lifetimes then certainly in our children’s.” Hillary Clinton addressing the American Task Force for Peace in Washington DC, October 20, 2010

Is this the star by which President Obama plots his course: the promise of destinations that others must reach? Realism that just looks like cynicism, or cynicism dressed up as realism?

Just over a year ago, he sounded quite emphatic on the issue of the Middle East conflict — the issue on which Clinton now hints that progress may have to wait a generation.

Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

I say sounded emphatic, but here’s the clue revealing Obama’s own lack of commitment: he leaves himself out. He is the observer rather than the agent. He doesn’t make demands.

What’s the use of an American president who can see the promised land but has no idea how to get there?

Less than two years after making Middle East peace central to his foreign policy agenda, Obama’s efforts have come to nothing.

The Washington Post reports:

In perhaps the shortest round of peace negotiations in the history of their conflict, talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have ground to a halt and show little sign of resuming.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas haven’t met since Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton brought the two together on Sept. 15 in Jerusalem, two weeks after President Obama launched the resumption of negotiations on Palestinian statehood in Washington with much fanfare, including the presence of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Now, the nearly six-week pause threatens to become permanent.

Pressure to restart the talks eased after the Arab League said it would wait a month – until Nov. 8 – before ending Abbas’s mandate for negotiations, thus pushing the issue beyond the U.S. midterm elections. But if Republicans score big gains, some Israelis argue, that could limit Obama’s ability to pressure Israel to make concessions. U.S. peace envoy George J. Mitchell is supposed to return to the region, but no date has been set.

In a speech Wednesday to Palestinian peace activists, Clinton acknowledged that “I cannot stand here tonight and tell you there is some magic formula that I have discovered that will break through the current impasse.”

While the administration has set a goal of achieving an agreement less than 11 months from now, Clinton at one point suggested a much longer time frame: “The future holds the possibility of progress, if not in our lifetimes, then certainly in our children’s.”

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Archbishop: Palestine is not Israel’s ‘promised land’

Sapa/AFP report:

Israel cannot claim Palestinian territory as its promised land citing the Bible to justify its occupation and the expulsion of Palestinians, a Catholic archbishop said.

Cyril Salim Bustros, head of the Greek Melkite Church in the United States, made his comments after the Middle East synod of Catholic bishops called on the United Nations to implement its resolutions and end Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

The synod’s final statement, drawn up by a commission headed by Bustros, also said that “recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable.

“On the contrary, recourse to religion must lead every person to see the face of God in others and to treat them according to their God-given prerogatives and God’s commandments, namely, according to God’s bountiful goodness, mercy, justice and love for us.”

Speaking at press conference, Butros said: “The theme of the promised land cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel and the expatriation of the Palestinians.”

“For Christians one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people,” he said, because the “promise” was “abolished by the presence of Christ.”

In the kingdom of God, which covers the whole world, “there is no longer a favoured people, a chosen people, all men and women of every country have become the chosen people,” the Lebanese-born Butros said.

Lebanon’s Daily Star adds:

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri hailed Sunday a call by Catholic bishops for the international community to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, while Israeli officials reacted angrily to the appeal.

The “participation [of Christian thinkers] in challenging the Zionist project is a necessity for Muslims not to be left alone in this confrontation, and for Arabism not to be restricted to Islam,” the Lebanese premier said in Beirut Sunday.

The bishops and patriarchs of the Middle East’s Catholic churches said at a Vatican synod on the Middle East over the weekend that Israel cannot use the biblical concept of a promised land or a chosen people to justify new settlements in Jerusalem or territorial claims.

“Recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable,” said a final statement issued after a two-week synod chaired by Pope Benedict XVI.

The bishops’ statement also called on the international community to take “the necessary legal steps to put an end to the occupation of the different Arab territories.”

Palestinians welcomed a call from the synod’s conclusions and highlighted the role of Christians in confronting the threat posed by Israel.

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Clearing the fog of war in Iraq

The expression “fog of war” evokes both the confusion of the battlefield and the ways in which uncertainty can be used as propaganda tool to obscure the real nature of warfare.

One of the striking things about the statistics that Wikileaks have released is that the leading cause of death which accounts for half the 66,081 civilian deaths recorded between January 2004 and December 2009 is murder. This was not about ordinary people being the random victims of violence — caught in crossfire, or the targets of trigger happy soldiers, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time when roadside or car bombs caused carnage. These were extrajudicial executions, in the tens of thousands, occurring under the watch of American and coalition forces.

Patrick Cockburn writes:

From late in 2004 Interior Ministry troops trained by the Americans were taking part in savage raids on Sunni or suspected Baathist districts. People prominent in Saddam Hussein’s regime were arrested and disappeared for few days until their tortured bodies were dumped beside the roads.

Iraqi leaders whispered that the Americans were involved in the training of what were in fact death squads in official guise. It was said that US actions were modelled on counter-insurgency methods pioneered in El Salvador by US-trained Salvadoran government units.

It was no secret that torture of prisoners had become the norm in Iraqi government prisons as it established its own security services from 2004. Men who were clearly the victims of torture were often put on television where they would confess to murder, torture and rape. But after a time it was noticed that many of those whom they claimed to have killed were still alive.

The Sunni community at this time were terrified of mass sweeps by the US forces, sometimes accompanied by Iraqi government units, in which all young men of military age were arrested. Tribal elders would often rush to the American to demand that the prisoners not be handed over to the Iraqi army or police who were likely to torture or murder them. The power drill was a favourite measure of torture. It is clear that the US military knew all about this.

The Guardian reports:

Britain’s role in the alleged torture and unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians may be the subject of legal action following the publication of nearly 400,000 leaked military documents by the website WikiLeaks.

British lawyers said the classified US army field reports embroiled British as well as American forces in an alleged culture of abuse and extrajudicial killings in Iraq. Solicitor Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, appearing alongside WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in London today, said some of the deaths documented in the reports may have involved British forces and could now go through the UK courts.

The Iraq logs, Shiner said, indicated that UK as well as US commanders were likely to have ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities, contrary to international law. He said: “Some of these deaths will be in circumstances where the UK have a very clear legal responsibility. This may be because the Iraqis died while under the effective control of UK forces – under arrest, in vehicles, helicopters or detention facilities.”


Al Jazeera reports:

In October 2006, an Iraqi army unit reportedly robbed a number of people living in Sunni neighbourhoods in western Baghdad. The unit was arrested on October 11 – and told its captors that it was operating under the authority of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

1/5/6 IA patrol stops 2X IA M1114s and 1X pick up truck occupied by 17X LNs in IA uniforms and equipment. 5/6 orders detenftion of all 17 individuals and vehicles due to reports over several days of 2X IA M1114s conducting robberies in the Mansour and Washash areas of 5/6 IA battle space.

[…] Detainees claim to be Iraqi special forces working for the prime minister’s office.

The unit seems to be a sort of “detention squad” operating under al-Maliki’s authority. An official from the defence ministry showed up several hours later and urged the US to release the men, saying their mission was “directed by PM Maliki”.

Politics, unsurprisingly, factors little into these leaked documents: They are ground-level assessments from army units, far removed from the government.

Still, some of the reports paint the Iraqi prime minister in an unflattering light, which may be why al-Maliki and his allies have described them as a smear campaign. “These are all just fakes from the Internet and Photoshop,” Hassan al-Sneid, a member of al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition, said on Saturday.

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Torture and terrorism

One of the strange aspects relating to conspiracy theories concerning 9/11 is that they unwittingly obscure something even worse: that the US government foments terrorism not by design but by neglect; that its policies have had a direct and instrumental role in creating terrorists not simply by providing individuals and groups with an ideological pretext for engaging in terrorism but much more specifically by creating the conditions an individual’s political opposition to America’s actions would shift to unrestrained violent opposition.

The key which often unlocks the terrorist’s capacity for violence is his experience of being subject to violence through torture.

Chris Zambelis writes:

There is ample evidence that a number of prominent militants — including al-Qaeda deputy commander Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and the late al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — endured systematic torture at the hands of the Egyptian and Jordanian authorities, respectively. Many observers believe that their turn toward extreme radicalism represented as much an attempt to exact revenge against their tormentors and, by extension, the United States, as it was about fulfilling an ideology. Those who knew Zawahiri and can relate to his experience believe that his behavior today is greatly influenced by his pursuit of personal redemption to compensate for divulging information about his associates after breaking down amid brutal torture sessions during his imprisonment in the early 1980s. For radical Islamists and their sympathizers, U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support for regimes that engage in this kind of activity against their own citizens vindicates al-Qaeda’s claims of the existence of a U.S.-led plot to attack Muslims and undermine Islam. In al-Qaeda’s view, these circumstances require that Muslims organize and take up arms in self-defense against the United States and its allies in the region.

The latest revelations provided by Wikileaks show how the war in Iraq — the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism — became not simply a terrorist training ground, but a cauldron in which terrorists could be forged.

FRAGO 242: PROVIDED THE INITIAL REPORT CONFIRMS U.S. FORCES WERE NOT INVOLVED IN THE DETAINEE ABUSE, NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION WILL BE CONDUCTED UNLESS DIRECTED BY HHQ. JUNE 26, 2004

The Guardian reports:

A grim picture of the US and Britain’s legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The Pentagon might hide behind claims that it neither authorized nor condoned violence used by Iraqi authorities on Iraqi detainees, but the difference between being an innocent bystander and being complicit consists in whether one has the power to intervene. The US military’s hands were not tied. As the occupying power it had both the means, the legal authority and the legal responsibility to stop torture in Iraq. It’s failure to do so was a matter of choice.

Will the latest revelations from Wikileaks be of any political consequence? I seriously doubt it, given that we now have a president dedicated not only to refusing to look back but also to perpetuating most of the policies instituted by his predecessor.

For more information on the documents released by Wikileaks, see The Guardian‘s Iraq war logs page.

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Letter from Islamophobistan

Pepe Escobar writes:

Austrian-American psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, in his Mass Psychology of Fascism, stressed that racial theory is not a creation of fascism. On the contrary; fascism is a creation of racial hatred and its politically organized expression.
[…]
In the extremely well-argued book [Why the West is not leaning to the Left], [Italian linguist and essayist Raffaele] Simone proves that the European Left is intellectually dead; it simply has not understood the drive of hardcore capitalism (which he defines as “arch-capitalism”, or “the political and economic manifestation of the New Right”); it has not understood the correlated primacy of individualism and consumerism; and it has refused to discuss the phenomenon of mass immigration.

From France to Denmark, from Italy to Sweden, it’s easy to see how savvy populists skillfully deploy those European values of free speech, feminism and secularism – oversimplifying issues to the point that their take seems logical – as ammunition against mosques, minarets, headscarves and, of course, “sub-intelligent beings”.

And then there are local realities. The majority of those voting SD were protesting against overwhelmingly Muslim immigrants, a great deal of them jobless, who come to Sweden, get fat government benefits and remain idle. Sweden is nowhere as tough on immigration as Denmark, Norway or Holland.

In Malmo, a mere 20-minute train ride via the stunning Oresund bridge from Copenhagen, about 80,000 (60,000 of them Muslims) of the overall population of 300,000 are immigrants. There are certified losers in Malmo’s carefully calibrated transition from old industrial city to a post-mod consumer haven; the old, the poor, and most of all, immigrants. So Sweden seems to have posed the European-wide question of the necessity for the European welfare state to concentrate less on health care and pensions and more on “including” immigrants. But is this really the real question?

Talk about an European summer of hate – from minarets banned in Switzerland to burqas banned in Belgium.

The populist extreme right has been part of coalition governments in Italy and Switzerland for many years now. And they are represented in the parliaments of Austria, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The National Front in France had 9% of the vote in last spring’s French regional elections.

But now everywhere it feels like a Lamborghini let loose. Geert Wilders’ Freedom party in Holland has turbo-charged Islamophobia to the point of almost paralyzing Dutch governance. The elegant, eloquent, peroxide-blonde populist Wilders wants to ban the Koran – which he has compared to Hitler’s Mein Kampf – and impose a “headscarf tax” (how come no government thought about this in the Middle East or in Pakistan?)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy – now facing his own, self-provoked May ’68 remix in the streets over his pension reform – tried to seduce (once again) the National Front by expelling planeloads of Romanian gypsies.

Austrian extreme right stalwart Heinz-Christian Strache, running for mayor of Vienna less than two weeks ago, took no less than 27% of the vote. And Barbara Rosenkranz, who insists anti-Nazi laws should be abolished, came second in Austria’s presidential race.

The Islamophobic, anti-immigrant Northern League of Umberto Bossi in Italy is part of the government in Rome and not accidentally the country’s fastest-growing party, now controlling the ultra-wealthy provinces of Veneto and Piemonte. During the latest election campaign, La Lega supporters handed out bars of soap to be used “after touching an immigrant”.

In Spain, the movement Preventive Reconquista is gaining ground – a perhaps George W Bush-inspired preventive war against the 1 million Muslim immigrants and their allegedly “evil” plans to re-attach Spain to Islam. A “headscarf controversy” already erupted in Madrid last April. Local town councils have been prohibiting the burqa and niqab – French-style (although a national ban was only narrowly defeated in the Spanish Congress last July).

It comes as no surprise that the extreme right is more turbocharged than ever in scores of European post-industrial cities which used to be center-left; that’s certainly the case of Wilders in Rotterdam, Le Pen in Marseille, Strache in Vienna and Akesson in Malmo. Simone’s assessment is being proven right.

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Foreign occupation, not religious fervor, is the primary motivation behind this form of terrorism

Robert Pape writes:

On Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Marines as they slept. This dark chapter of American history was one of the country’s first experiences with suicide attack since the Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II. The attack, combined with the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that April and a sustained terrorism campaign waged by the group that came to be known as Hezbollah, was a major reason President Reagan ordered American forces to leave Lebanon in 1984.

The barracks bombing is perhaps the most well known attack in Lebanon during that period, but it was far from an isolated incident. Hezbollah’s campaign of suicide terrorism, mainly against American, French and Israeli military forces along with Western political targets, killed about 900 people. And the attacks would serve as a major inspiration for future terrorist groups that adopted similar tactics, most notably Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Tamil Tigers.

At the time, the prevailing narrative was that these attacks in Lebanon were the result of Shiite Muslim fundamentalism. It has become a common refrain over the last several decades that religion, and Islam in particular, is the primary cause of suicide bombings. This is an easy, convenient and clear argument that fits with the United States’ approach to the war on terror over the last decade.

There is just one problem with this argument: It’s wrong.

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U.S. officials, experts: No high-level Afghan peace talks under way

McClatchy reports:

Despite news reports of high-level talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, no significant peace negotiations are under way in Afghanistan, U.S. officials and Afghanistan experts said Thursday.

These same experts said the reports, which appeared in a number of U.S. media outlets, could be part of a U.S. “information strategy” to divide and weaken the Taliban leadership.

“This is a psychological operation, plain and simple,” said a U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s outreach effort.

“Exaggerating the significance of it (the contacts) is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency, to make insurgents suspicious with each other and to send them on witch hunts looking for traitors who want to negotiate with the enemy,” said the U.S. official. He requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Ali Jalali, a scholar at the National Defense University and a former Afghan interior minister who maintains close contacts with the Afghan government, said he knew of no significant peace negotiations.

“There is a desire (by the Afghan government and its foreign backers) for talks with the Taliban and others, but the situation is not ready for these talks yet,” he told McClatchy. “There is a lot of smoke, but no fire.”

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How to deal with Islamophobia in the media

So, as just about everyone now knows, NPR analyst and Fox News contributor, Juan Williams said this to Bill O’Reilly on Monday:

I’m not a bigot… But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

When someone says, “I’m not a bigot,” we can generally be sure they’re about to say something that we’d expect to come out of the mouth of bigot. We can also infer that they’ve bought into an improbable idea: bigots identify themselves as such. Thus the implausible disclaimer: take my word for it — I’m not a bigot. Err, OK Juan, but I’m sorry. You don’t sound too convincing.

Jeff Bercovici notes:

The notion that “people in Muslim garb are scary” is widespread in America, and its noxious that many people believe as much. Countless people getting on planes have thought the same thing as Mr. Williams. This is exactly the sort of case where airing and logically refuting a bigoted view is better than making it so that it’s an unspoken thing that many people persist in thinking privately.

Thanks to NPR’s knee-jerk reaction, more is now being said about the fact that Williams got fired than the fact that what he said was both prejudiced and dumb. Not only does the debate have the wrong focus but Williams has now been rewarded for his “blunder” by getting a new three-year contract from Fox News worth almost $2 million.

The people with the greatest regrets right now are probably local NPR station managers whose current fundraising efforts have been disrupted by the ruckus.

NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller says: “This isn’t a case of one strike and you’re out.” They have had “an on-going issue” with Williams.

The problem is, each time a journalist gets fired for making a dumb remark, this doesn’t improve the overall quality of journalism. Instead it means that those journalists who are most disciplined in concealing their views will have a professional advantage over those journalists guilty of the occasional indiscretion. My suspicion is that the well-wrapped bigots are more common than the bigots with loose tongues. Bigots are better clearly labelled than fired.

What consequences should Williams have faced for revealing his Islamophobia? How about mockery on the Daily Show where the evidence that known terrorists do not wear “Muslim garb” would swiftly have exposed the folly behind his fear.

What should really scare Williams and anyone else who wants to play spot-the-terrorist next time they fly is that terrorists can wear business suits, carry US passports and have names like David Headley.

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The post-colonial era is slow coming

“It seems like the ragheads and the Pakis are worrying your dad, but your dad’s favorite food is curry and kebab,” sings Lowkey, summing up the multicultural dilemma facing quite a few white Englishmen.

Peyvand Khorsandi provides another multicultural vignette:

Golborne Road, on the outskirts of Notting Hill in west London, is home to two Portuguese cafés, Stella McCartney, and my favourite burger van, run by two Moroccan men. I’ve been a regular for almost 10 years – the van offers no ordinary fare. A ball of meat goes splat on the griddle as it’s evened into shape while onions sizzle.

Money and Arabic banter are exchanged – when the meat is crispy brown an egg is cracked open, stuffed alongside the patty into a heated bun with a sprinkle of chopped salad, fries and some warm, homemade, tomato sauce (fried prawns optional).

I am usually finishing off my second bowl of soup – they do a mean bean, lentil and pea – when the beaming parcel of beefy goodness is handed to me, smiling as a good burger should.

On Fridays Mohammed and Aziz repair to a mosque in the converted building opposite – customers find the van shut from around 12.30pm to 2pm. Caterers should hold these hours sacred but Mohammed and Aziz, as their prices testify, are not about money. The van’s closes for Ramadan.

The punters are largely Moroccan men but you do see Bohemian non-Moroccan women and men of all ages stopping off for a bite, too.

In the background the magnificent Trellick Tower — a hive of different people and cultures living next-door to, and on top of, each other — literally looks down on the rest of us.

If German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration this weekend that multiculturalism has been an utter failure, was to be reduced to a motto, it might be this: we don’t want you, we just want your stuff.

That stuff includes all kinds of things from food, to cheap labor, to exotic artifacts, to land. But the one thing it excludes is non-native culture in the form of people.

If multiculturalism has failed it is only in as much as it has been conceived as a method for grappling with the legacy of colonialism. The problem with that notion is that colonialism hasn’t ended; it simply can’t be delineated on maps as clearly as it once could.

Meanwhile, out in the state that views itself as the most dangerous outpost of Western civilization, the old-fashioned colonial land-grabbing mindset was never more clearly expressed than it was a couple of years ago by Uzi Arad, currently Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser. When asked whether it was time to abandon the two-state solution (and by implication for Israel to annex the West Bank) he responded: “We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of the Palestinian populations — not territories. It is territory we want to preserve, but populations we want to rid ourselves of.”

If there should be any doubt that we in the West remain shackled to mindsets shaped by colonialism, just look at the ever-widening chasm that separates Barack Obama as the embodiment of hope from Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.

The only chance that our multicultural president could be enticed to take an action requiring only a modicum of political daring during his upcoming trip to India — to visit Amritsar’s Golden Temple where head coverings are obligatory — would have been if the Sikh religious custodians of the temple deemed a baseball cap acceptable. The don’t. (As a reader here suggested in jest: “Why can’t he just wear a kippah? It would fulfill the requirement, and he loves sucking up to the Israelis.)

Tunku Varadarajan asks:

[W]hat does this decision to avoid Amritsar tell us about how this White House feels about Americans? Does it feel that ordinary Americans will pillory their president for having associated himself with “ragheads” in Amritsar? Is this a variant of that elite condescension for ordinary folks who are “bitter,” and who “cling to guns and religion”?

That Obama can’t find a way to explain the symbolism of a little square of cloth on his head — placed there by enthusiastic, welcoming Indian hosts who wish him and America well — suggests that he has lost confidence in his own intellect, his own charisma, his own eloquence. A man once celebrated for his promise of change now allows a state visit to be shaped by his fear of the blogosphere — and by his fear of abuse that might come at him from an ignorant subset of the American population. Let’s just call it the pygmification of a president, and lament the gutlessness of this White House.

The operative fears here no doubt include all those Varadarajan lists but he omits the most obvious one, the one that was probably decisive: the reasonable expectation that images of Obama with head covered, showing his respects at a foreign domed temple would feature in GOP attack ads during the 2012 presidential campaign. The political value of such images suggests that the “ignorant subset” this commentator dismisses, penetrate much more deeply into mainstream America than he cares to admit.

Obama’s failing — and it is unforgivable — is that rather than challenge prevailing prejudices he has chosen to accommodate them.

When he meets India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — note that he is a Sikh in a majority Hindu nation — will Obama muster the courage to put his hands together and say namaste?

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Israel’s coma

While most Israelis can’t visit Ariel Sharon in hospital, they can now do the closest thing: go stand next to a life-size model of the former prime minister, propped up in bed, attached to a drip and steadily breathing in an otherwise empty room in a Tel Aviv art gallery.

“Sharon’s still breathing and beating body is an allegory for the Israeli political body — a dependent and mediated existence, self-perpetuated artificially and out of inertia, with open eyes that cannot see,” the gallery’s curator Joshua Simon writes in an introduction to the exhibit, the creation of Israeli artist Noam Braslavsky.

Sharon’s coma mirrors the effect that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended to have: that it would suspend any real movement towards the creation of a Palestinian state.

But as Henry Siegman made clear, three years ago, the fiction that Israel was responsive to external stimuli began over 40 years ago:

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

In an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in ‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved.

Do we really have to wait until Sharon stops breathing before the peace process can officially be declared dead?

Whatever political differences there have been between Barak, Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu, each Israeli prime minister has shown himself equally adept in the art of living without a solution, “with eyes open that cannot see.”

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“No Pakistani child is worth one whit less that any American child”

FB Ali at Sic Semper Tyrannis drew my attention to a blog post that appeared in Pakistan’s Express Tribune. It was written by a US Army helicopter pilot, John Bockmann, who was recently deployed to help in relief work, following this summer’s devastating flooding.

US humanitarian aid — especially when provided to a country like Pakistan — often looks like nothing more than a cynical attempt to pacify resentment provoked by the Pentagon’s primary mission: attacking its adversaries. For that reason, American soldiers have good reason to wonder how they will be received when their mission is peaceful.

Bockmann writes:

The days since arriving have passed quickly. Every day we take rice, flour, blankets, housing materials, cooking oil – anything – up and down the Swat and Indus River Valleys. We also bring sick, injured, and displaced people to hospitals and hometowns.

My first mission took us up the Indus river valley, and I embarrassed myself by constantly exclaiming its beauty. Below me was the Karakorum Highway – the old Silk Road into China – and the valley itself, with terraced farmland overshadowed by majestic, snow-capped mountains.

Along with the beauty, though, I see reminders of the flood, bridges that are broken or missing and roads and fields that have been washed away. I am beginning to see widespread reconstruction now as well and feel hope for the people in these villages. They will soon have another way to get help.

I realize that some who read this will question our intentions and some may even wish us ill. I certainly did not imagine that cheering throngs would greet us at each village though — we are always welcomed. I did not expect our goodwill to be taken at face value by all of Pakistan, but we have received immense support.

I have learned in my time here that Pakistani people are truly gracious. Strangers have invited me for chai and conversation. Almost anyone will shake my hand and ask my name, inquire about my health and how I am getting along. Instead of a handshake at our first meeting, I have sometimes been embraced. “Strangers shake hands,” my new friend Mahmood explained, “but brothers hug each other.”

This warms my heart. My mission, our mission, is straightforward, noble, and good. I am deeply grateful to those who support us here, for we need all the help we can get in order to help those in need. I am honored to do this work. I feel at home here beyond anything I could have expected.

So is this just the sentimental perspective of an American soldier who believes, almost as a matter of religious conviction, that America is a force of good in the world? The dozens of comments that follow his post suggest otherwise. Admittedly they come mostly from Pakistan’s English-speaking educated liberal elite, but they lead this helicopter pilot to this conclusion:

I know the hearts of many Pakistanis now, but I am still surprised by their outpouring of warmth–especially in such hard times. I read all of the comments — the stories, the blessings, the frustrations — and I am increasingly convinced that international relations are effected more by common people like you and me than by politicians who may never get a chance to have tea and real conversation with “the other side”. I am so privileged to be so well loved while I am so far from home. God’s blessings on Pakistan and her people.

His mother, Maggie Bockmann, adds her own thoughts which reveal that she does not have a sugar-coated view of America’s impact on Pakistan:

I scarcely comprehend where this delightful soul named John might have come from. As Gibran said,
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
I trust John will not mind my telling you that in the early days of our family, we had a particularly heartbreaking religious fracture between his dad and myself. But now, by the grace of God, we are strong in all the weak places.
Thus shall it be between Christians and Muslims, your country and mine: despite the heartbreaking fractures, we shall become strong in all the weak places, and no government policies, no misguided violent people shall prevent it, because God wills it, whether we call him Allah or Jehovah, and we will it, with all our hearts. We shall support each other while respecting our differences.
And though I understand from this newspaper that some of your countrymen support the U.S. drone attacks, and I’m sure they have compelling reasons, which I shall not judge, I want you to know that I am willing to suffer whatever I must suffer to stand with the Pakistani people against such heartbreaking attacks, for no Pakistani child is worth one whit less that any American child, and mothers are the same around the world, as Wajih said.
As Kathy Kelly so poignantly says in this video, no Pakistani children should be quaking in their beds at night for fear of what devastation my countrymen may visit on them from the sky.
CIA Drone Protest, Kathy Kelly – 1/16/2010

For those who disagree, please forgive me, for I do not mean to be contentious. I am but a mother with a mother’s heart. That is my weakness and that is my power.

Civilian Harm and Conflict in Northwest Pakistan, a new report by CIVIC, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflicts, reveals that while the local populations in the areas being targeted by drone attacks do not, by and large, question their accuracy, they object to the fact that the losses caused to innocent bystanders are being ignored.

Nadia, 10 years-old, was at school when her house was hit by a drone, killing her father and mother: “My relatives rushed to the spot and tried to recover the dead bodies trapped under the debris but we couldn’t identify them as they were completely burned.” Nadia is an only child and has moved in with her aunt in a nearby town.

She says she has “no source of income with my parents gone… my aunt looks after me now and I help her in the house…but I want admission into school. I want an education. Please ask the government to provide me with a monthly stipend so I can get an education.” The lack of US transparency about the drone program as well as the Pakistani government’s duplicity — public criticism while offering clandestine support — means civilians’ losses are entirely ignored. Civilian victims interviewed by CIVIC demanded an end to the drone strikes and compensation for their losses.

Without exception, drone strike victims interviewed by CIVIC were left to pick up the pieces on their own, denied even the recognition and acknowledgement of their loss by the Pakistani and US governments. Neither the US, FATA Secretariat or the Pakistani Federal Government have any standard, public procedures for investigating civilian losses from drone strikes, acknowledging or recognizing losses, or providing help for victims to recover.

The common denominator here is that human beings, whether they live in North Waziristan, the Swat Valley, Gaza, New Orleans, or Washington DC, all want the same thing: respect.

This is the basis of human relations and human society, that right down on the level at which one person engages with another, the foundation of their transactions needs to be the recognition: your life is worth just as much as mine. As war tramples on this recognition, all other forms of destruction then become possible.

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Obama bows to sensitivities of ignorant Americans and political advisers

The New York Times reports:

The Golden Temple, a sprawling and serene complex of gleaming gold and polished marble that is the spiritual center of the Sikh religion, is one of India’s most popular tourist attractions. Revered by Indians of all faiths, it is a cherished emblem of India’s religious diversity. So it was no surprise when the gold-plated marvel was promoted as the likely third stop on President Obama’s visit to India, scheduled for early November.

But the United States has ruled out a Golden Temple visit, according to an American official involved in planning. Temple officials said that American advance teams had gone to Amritsar, the holy city that is the site of the temple, to discuss a possible visit. But the plan appears to have foundered on the thorny question of how Mr. Obama would cover his head, as Sikh tradition requires, while visiting the temple.

“To come to golden temple he needs to cover his head,” said Dalmegh Singh, secretary of the committee that runs the temple. “That is our tradition.”

Mr. Obama, a Christian, has struggled to fend off persistent rumors that he is a Muslim, and Sikhs in the United States have often been mistaken for Muslims. Sikhism, which arose in the Punjab region in the 15th century, includes elements of Hinduism and Islam but forms a wholly distinct faith. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Sikhs in the United States have been occasional targets of anti-Muslim discrimination and violence — a Sikh was killed in Arizona a few days after the attack on the World Trade Center by a man who mistook him for a Muslim.

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Zionism and the war on terrorism both rest on the same hollow foundation

Distilling some of his findings from extensive research conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, Robert Pape writes:

For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill them. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, this was perfectly explicable — the need to destroy al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan was too urgent to await sober analyses of root causes.

But, the absence of public debate did not stop the great need to know or, perhaps better to say, to “understand” the events of that terrible day. In the years before 9/11, few Americans gave much thought to what drives terrorism — a subject long relegated to the fringes of the media, government, and universities. And few were willing to wait for new studies, the collection of facts, and the dispassionate assessment of alternative causes. Terrorism produces fear and anger, and these emotions are not patient.

A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, “Why do they hate us?” and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of “who we are, not what we do.” As President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Thus was unleashed the “war on terror.”

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked and encourage war against Iraq. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies — with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism.

This narrative had a powerful effect on support for the invasion of Iraq. Opinion polls show that for years before the invasion, more than 90 percent of the U.S. public believed that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But this belief alone was not enough to push significant numbers to support war.

What really changed after 9/11 was the fear that anti-American Muslims desperately wanted to kill Americans and so any risk that such extremists would get weapons of mass destruction suddenly seemed too great. Although few Americans feared Islam before 9/11, by the spring of 2003, a near majority — 49 percent — strongly perceived that half or more of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims were deeply anti-American, and a similar fraction also believed that Islam itself promoted violence.

The narrative — “it’s not what we do but who we are” — that Americans swallowed after 9/11, came ready-made. It is the narrative that provides the bedrock of Zionism by characterizing opposition to Israel’s creation and expansion as being an expression of anti-Semitism rather than a reaction to colonialism and dispossession.

Palestinians don’t attack Jews because their homes are being destroyed and their land is being taken away; Palestinians attack Jews because Palestinians hate Jews.

Al Qaeda didn’t attack Americans because American governments for many decades have propped up oppressive regimes across the Middle East and supported Zionism; al Qaeda attacked America because al Qaeda hates Americans.

In both Zionism and the war on terrorism, the refusal to deal with political injustice expresses itself through an ideological fixation on security and military solutions.

As Ariel Sharon focused on “dismantling the terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza and the West Bank, George Bush pursued a parallel course across the whole region. Americans and Israelis united in the belief that they were all innocent targets of the same implacable enemy: Islamic extremism.

Our war on terrorism was simply an extension of Israel’s war on terrorism — simply on a much larger scale. Naturally, we would borrow most of Israel’s techniques for tackling “the terrorists” — targeted killing, torture, extrajudicial detention, remote warfare and so forth.

And the underlying imperative was identical: that our righteous victimhood could not be questioned, our innocence was unassailable. Indeed it was our virtue that made us targets for attack.

If we were successful in dismantling the terrorist infrastructure or draining the swamp in which evil festered, we would save the world. We would engage in war without choice, knowing that we did so in the name of peace.

No wonder that on September 11, Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to contain his satisfaction about the way the attacks would help solidify the bond between Americans and Israelis. “It’s very good,” he said and then, quickly realizing his candor might not be well-received, added: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” The attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

Lies breed unconsciousness because they deprive intelligence of the invigorating effect of experience, thus, as we near the end of a decade of a war on terrorism we now inquire even less as shock has been given way to indifference.

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Dubai murder suspect arrested in Canada

(Update below)
Gulf News reports:

Dubai Police Chief Tuesday confirmed the arrest in Canada of a suspect, believed to be involved in the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud Al Mabhouh last January.

Speaking to reporters, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim said Canadian authorities have arrested another suspect who is connected to the murder of Al Mabhouh that took place in a Dubai Hotel on January 19.

Lt Gen Dahi refused to give further details, but according to Al Ittihad Arabic daily, the suspect was one two people caught by the hotel’s CCTV cameras wearing tennis gears as they staked out Al Mabhouh’s room in the Bustan Rotana Hotel.

Update: Richard Silverstein reports: “Israel’s Channel 10 has revealed that the alias of the arrested Mossad agent is Eric Rassineux. His passport is displayed here. It is the first Israeli source also to confirm that Canada is holding him.”

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Taking over Jerusalem

At 7 min 45 sec into this segment we see a widely reported incident where Imran Mansur, 12, and Iyad Gheit, 10, are hit by a car driven by David Be’eri, leader of Silwan’s Jewish settlers. Mansur’s leg was broken and Gheit had to have glass removed from his arm. Be’eri was briefly questioned after the hit and run, but Mansur — the boy who went flying into the air — has now been arrested.

The thread that ties together this 60 Minutes report is the unassailable confidence of the Israelis in their resolute intransigence.

To the extent that they acknowledge that any viewpoint might exist other than their own, they regard such perspectives as a product of ignorance. If you knew everything we know, you’d think the way we do. To some extent this is like the inflexible conviction of evangelicals, but whereas the success of the business of saving souls hinges on having some powers of persuasion, the Zionists taking over Jerusalem simply don’t care if they fail to win over non-Zionist global opinion. We don’t give a damn about the world, is the implicit message. Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.

But how can anyone who holds to this assertion — as most of Israel’s leaders do — claim to have an interest in negotiations with the Palestinians? Such “negotiations” amount to nothing more than a desire to force Palestinians to agree to Israeli terms of surrender. No capital in Jerusalem. No right of return. No sovereignty for a Palestinian state…. Oh, and there should of course be no preconditions for talks.

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Why some Israelis regard peace as the greatest threat to the Jewish state

Zeev Sternhell writes:

The facts must be acknowledged: The heads of the rightist parties have a strategic outlook and the ability to take the long view, and they also know how to choose the right tools to carry out their mission.

The proposed new amendment to the Citizenship Law, which is aimed at fomenting a state of constant hostility between Jews and everyone else, is just one aspect of the greater plan of which Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is the official spokesman. The other aspect is the foreign minister’s promise to the nations of the world that our war with the Palestinians is an eternal war. Israel needs both an external and an internal enemy, a constant sense of emergency – because peace, whether with the Palestinians in the territories or the Palestinians in Israel, is liable to weaken it to the point of existential danger.

And indeed, the right, which includes most of the leaders of Likud, is permeated with the awareness that Israeli society lives under a cloud of danger of breakdown from within. The democratic and egalitarian virus is eating away at the body politic from within. This virus rests on the universal principle of human rights and nurtures a common denominator among all human beings because they are human beings. And what do human beings have more in common than their right to be masters of their own fate and equal to one another?

In the right’s view, that is precisely where the problem lies: Negotiations on partitioning the land are an existential danger because they recognize the Palestinians’ equal rights, and thereby undermine the Jews’ unique status in Eretz Israel. Therefore, in order to prepare hearts and minds for exclusive Jewish control of the population of the entire land, it is necessary to cling to the principle that what really matters in the lives of human beings is not what unites them, but rather what separates them. And what separates people more than history and religion?

Beyond that, there is a clear hierarchy of values. We are first of all Jews, and only if we are assured that there will be no clash between our tribal-religious identity and the needs of Jewish rule, on one hand, and the values of democracy on the other can Israel also be democratic. But in any case, its Jewishness will always be given clear preference. This fact ensures an endless fight, because the Arabs will refuse to accept the sentence of inferiority that the state of Lieberman and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman intends for them.

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