Monthly Archives: July 2011
Seeds of terror in Norway
Andrew Gumbel writes:
America’s violent far right would have no difficulty recognizing the tell-tale signatures of Friday’s killing spree in Norway — and not just because they would see the confessed perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, as an ideological soul mate who, like their own heroes, thought he could trigger a white-supremacist revolution with bombs and bullets.
Breivik appears to have been more than simply inspired by American predecessors such as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber: The materials he used, the way he planned and carried out his attacks, and his own writings all suggest he was deeply familiar with the actions of some notorious political killers on this side of the Atlantic.
Breivik possessed a Glock semiautomatic, the same weapon McVeigh was carrying when he was arrested by a hawk-eyed Highway Patrol officer 90 minutes after the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma. Breivik also possessed a .223-caliber Ruger assault rifle, just like McVeigh.
The Ruger, in fact, has a long history of use by violent extremists because it is dependable, easy to load and fire, and cheaper than an AR-15 or M-16. It is also convertible, without much difficulty, to a fully automatic weapon.
Gordon Kahl, an iconic white-supremacist tax protester, was armed with a Ruger Mini-14 — the same model as Breivik’s — when he led the FBI on a multi-state shooting spree from North Dakota to Arkansas in 1983. Richard Wayne Snell, a protege of Kahl’s, was carrying a Mini-14 when he killed the only black trooper in southwestern Arkansas in 1984 and then battled it out with police across the state line in Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, the Irish Times reports:
Breivik played the online role-playing war game World of Warcraft with a Dutch enthusiast – who won the Norwegian gunman’s approval because he’d voted for far-right leader Geert Wilders.
In his 1,500-page manifesto, Breivik describes how he used Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to prepare for last Friday’s twin attacks which left a total of 76 people dead.
“I just bought Modern Warfare 2, the game,” he wrote in the document, entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence . “It is probably the best military simulator out there and it’s one of the hottest games this year. I see MW2 more as part of my training-simulation than anything else.”
It emerged yesterday that one of Breivik’s regular opponents in the multi-player computer game – known as WoW – was Dutch video games enthusiast, Jeroen Rink, who had no idea of Breivik’s real political views or of the double massacre he was allegedly planning.
New hacking case outrages Britain
The New York Times reports:
Britain was awash in a new surge of outrage over the phone hacking scandal on Thursday as news emerged that Scotland Yard had added to the list of probable victims a woman whose 8-year-old daughter was murdered by a repeat sex offender in 2000.
The tabloid at the center of the scandal, The News of the World, aggressively championed the campaign of the grieving mother, Sara Payne, for a law warning parents if child sex offenders lived nearby. Mrs. Payne had written warmly of the paper in its final issue, calling it “an old friend.”
A statement released on behalf of Mrs. Payne by the Phoenix Foundation, a children’s charity she founded, described her as devastated and disappointed.
“Today is a very sad dark day for us,” the charity added in a posting on Facebook. “Our faith in good people has taken a real battering.” Other postings noted that she was struggling in light of the July 1 anniversary of her daughter’s abduction and from the effects of a stroke she suffered 19 months ago, which paralyzed her left side.
The Guardian was the first to report Scotland Yard’s alert to Mrs. Payne, but the e-mail newsletter Popbitch suggested earlier this month that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail had been hacked and that the phone in question might have been provided to her by Rebekah Brooks, then the editor of The News of the World.
In a statement, Ms. Brooks confirmed that The News of the World had provided Mrs. Payne with a cellphone “for the last 11 years” as part of the campaign for the law, but said that “it was not a personal gift.” She said that she found the allegations that Mrs. Payne’s voice mail had been hacked “abhorrent and particularly upsetting, as Sara Payne is a dear friend.” In recent testimony on the scandal in Parliament, Ms. Brooks cited the measure named after Mrs. Payne’s daughter, Sarah’s Law, as evidence of the good she had done in her years at the tabloid’s helm.
Abdul Fatah Younis ambush killing blamed on pro-Gaddafi forces
The Guardian reports:
The Libyan rebels’ chief of army staff, Abdel Fatah Younis, has been killed in an assassination by pro-Gaddafi agents, according to the rebel authorities.
The president of the ruling National Transitional Council, Abdul Mustafa Jalil, made the dramatic announcement of the death of Younis at a chaotic late-night press conference at a hotel in Benghazi.
He told reporters that Younis had been called back from the frontline near Brega to Benghazi for questioning on the progress of the campaign, and suggested he had been killed by “pro-Gaddafi” forces on the route early in the morning.
But questions remain over the lack of detail over how Younis died or who killed him. The general usually travels inside an armoured car in a multi-vehicle convoy with 30 armed guards, posing problems for any potential assassination team.
Jalil said two senior rebel officers were killed alongside Younis, and demanded that what he called pro-Gaddafi elements he said were operating in Benghazi surrender or join the rebel forces.
The shock announcement came after a day of heated speculation that Younis had been arrested on the orders of Jalil. Younis was Gaddafi’s former interior minister until he dramatically changed sides to join the revolution in February.
The rumours were still swirling late on Thursday night, with armed men declaring their support for Younis appearing on the streets of Benghazi, claiming they would use force to free him from NTC custody.
Soldiers loyal to Jalil from the 17 Brigade, Benghazi’s elite unit, had surrounded Younis’s house in the late afternoon.
Then in the evening, Jalil said at the press conference that “with regret” he had to announce the death of general Younis. Jalil called him “one of the heroes of the 17th of February revolution”.
Minutes later, gunfire broke out in the street outside the Benghazi hotel where the announcement was made, with machine gun bullets smashing windows.
The press conference, which ended abruptly with the NTC president refusing to take questions, failed to explain how the general could have been ambushed in a highly guarded convoy.
Younis has been a controversial figure as head of the rebel forces because – until the uprising – he was Muammar Gaddafi’s Interior Minister, one of his most trusted officials and confidants. The general’s friendship with Gaddafi dated from 1969 when he joined a group of fresh-faced army officers in deposing Libya’s king.
An un-American response to the Oslo attack
Glenn Greenwald writes:
Over the last decade, virtually every Terrorist plot aimed at the U.S. — whether successful or failed — has provoked greater security and surveillance measures. Within a matter of mere weeks, the 9/11 attacks infamously spawned a vast new surveillance statute (the Patriot Act), a secretly implemented warrantless eavesdropping program in violation of the law, an explosion of domestic surveillance contracts, a vastly fortified secrecy regime, and endless wars in multiple countries. As it turned out, that massive over-reaction was not a crisis-driven anomaly but rather the template for future actions.
The failed Christmas Day bombing over Detroit led to an erosion of Miranda rights and judge-free detentions as well as a due-process free assassination program aimed at an Muslim American preacher whose message allegedly “inspired” the attacker. The failed Times Square bombing was repeatedly cited to justify reform-free extension of the Patriot Act along with a slew of measures to maximize government scrutiny of the Internet. That failed plot, along with Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Fort Hood, provoked McCarthyite Congressional hearings into American Muslims and helped sustain a shockingly broad interpretation of “material support for Terrorism” that criminalizes free speech. In sum, every Terrorist plot is immediately exploited as a pretext for expanding America’s Security State; the response to every plot: we need to sacrifice more liberties, increase secrecy, and further empower the government.
Human rights groups warn of a severe water crisis in the Gaza Strip
Philip Weiss responds to DailyKos censorship and smear
At Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss writes:
DailyKos has acted to ban commenters from linking to Mondoweiss, charging me with anti-Semitism. It is a disgraceful smear and hides DailyKos’s real anxiety: it cannot deal with the issue of Palestinian human rights, any more than the Democratic Party can, and so Israel supporters are striking at me.
Their point of attack is my repeated insistence on talking about the large Jewish presence in the American establishment and the importance of Jewish money in the political process. Such an attack was inevitable, and in that sense I welcome it. For while these are delicate issues, they are important ones. I have often expressed my own discomfort with them, and yet I advance them in the discourse because as a journalist I recognize that they meet an ancient test of what is newsworthy: these issues are new, true, and important. Were they merely new and true, I would ignore these issues. But their importance has put them in my road, and I can’t shy away from discussing them, and DK’s smear gives me an opportunity to revisit my thinking.
Why is the Jewish prominence in the American establishment an important issue? For a few reasons. 1, it is a development I witnessed myself and celebrate as a Jew. When I was growing up, we were excluded from the turrets of the American system by anti-Semitism. Today that is not the case. Jews should recognize this new reality, celebrate it, and yes, allow it to affect our consciousness of our unfolding historical position in western society. 2, It deeply affects Middle East policy, which is the true source of my difference with Daily Kos; I believe you cannot talk about the Israel lobby without addressing the Jewish presence in the establishment. And following directly from that, 3, the Jewish presence is not neutral– no, sadly (and because of the Holocaust), my community has been indoctrinated with Zionism.; as J Street’s Steven Krubiner said the other night, Jewish identity education includes Loving Israel. Well, I think Zionism is a form of anachronistic nationalism that has served to oppress the Palestinians and helped lead my own country into war, and in seeking to uproot Zionism inside Jewish life, I have repeatedly pointed out that the ideological basis of Zionism is the idea that we are unsafe in the west, a claim that is patently absurd in the face of our achievement in the United States and our prominence in the establishment– which everyone knows about and accepts, but DailyKos finds it anti-Semitic even to mention.
Israeli security forces’ September weapons
Ynet reports:
The Defense Ministry has invested more than NIS 75 million (roughly $22 million) in purchasing non-lethal weapons to disperse mass protests in preparation for possible September riots.
The Ministry is gearing up for possible riots in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and inside Israel following the Palestinian plan to seek UN membership. Defense Ministry Director-General Udi Shani ordered the allocation of funds from the ministry’s budget as well as from foreign aid for the purchase of sophisticated crowd dispersal means.
Last May the IDF lacked appropriate means to prevent the infiltration of Palestinians from Syria and Lebanon during the “Nakba” and “Naksa” day events forcing the troops to use live ammunition. The IDF was criticized for causing injury to non-armed individuals.
Gearing UpThe crowd dispersal means will be divided between the police and the army: Police will get NIS 40 million-worth of equipment and the IDF will receive the equivalent of NIS 35 million. The majority of the non-lethal weapons will arrive in Israel towards September.
The Defense Ministry purchased gas grenades, “Federal” rifles mounted on vehicles and water tanks that can carry 2,500 liters to be installed on vehicles. The police and the IDF will have at least 17 vehicles with water spraying systems at their disposal by September.
The Ministry also purchased a small amount of electroshock taser guns to be used against protestors standing close to security forces, as well as a large amount of gas grenades, helmets and protective gear.
But the “star” acquisition is “the skunk” – a strong-scented substance which causes nausea and vomiting. The IDF will spray the substance from the ground or from the air in clashes with rioters. The Defense Ministry purchased massive amounts of “the skunk” which is manufactured in Israel. A senior security official described the acquisitions as a “dramatic step up in the security forces preparedness.”
Canada clamps down on criticism of Israel
Al Jazeera reports:
Nearly two years after the first hearings were held in Ottawa, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition fto Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) released a detailed report [PDF] on July 7 that found that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Canada, especially on university campuses.
While the CPCCA’s final report does contain some cases of real anti-Semitism, the committee has provided little evidence that anti-Semitism has actually increased in Canada in recent years. Instead, it has focused a disproportionate amount of effort and resources on what it calls a so-called “new anti-Semitism”: criticism of Israel.
Indeed, the real purpose of the CPCCA coalition seems to be to stifle critiques of Israeli policy and disrupt pro-Palestinian solidarity organizing in Canada, including, most notably, Israeli Apartheid Week events. Many of the CPCCA’s findings, therefore, must be rejected as both an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of protest, and as recklessly undermining the fight against real instances of anti-Semitism.
When is Palestine’s Arab revolution?
Larbi Sadiki writes:
‘Parity of esteem’ is the name of the game – and finding a way to overcome inter-communal conflict matters. It matters because the Arab state has failed three basic tests: provision of security, provision of welfare, and distribution of power.
However, as the literati carry on unpacking the still-unfolding Arab revolution, one dimension is missing from this ongoing investigation which must be highlighted: The Palestinian corollary.
Observers have been hasty in dismissing Palestine from the Arab revolution. I argue here that it was one of many dynamics, definitely one of the final straws that broke the back of an already heavily weighed down camel.
Two betes noires of international politics loomed large, by negation and denial, in much of the early diagnosis of the Arab revolution.
Islamists and the Palestinian cause were written off as inconsequential in the Arab revolution. The first is of issue to secularists, Westernisers and many Westerners. The second is of concern for those concerned about the Arab revolution’s implications for Israel.
The trembling at News Corp has only begun
Geoff Colvin at Forbes writes:
Some people aren’t at all surprised by the unending scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. They are the investors, insurers, lawyers, and others who had read the “Governance Analysis” report on the company from The Corporate Library, a research firm. The firm grades companies’ governance from A to F, and for the past six years News Corp. has received an F — “only because there is no lower grade,” says Nell Minow, who co-founded The Corporate Library in 1999 on the premise that governance “can be rated like bonds, from triple-A to junk.” News Corp.’s overall risk, says the prophetic report: “very high.” Risk of class-action securities litigation: “very high.” Scandal-related lawsuits are already piling up.
For those who think corporate governance is the concern of prissy do-gooders who don’t understand real-world business, News Corp. (NWS) is the latest example that the truth is just the opposite: Governance is the foundation of real-world business. If it isn’t solid, trouble is inevitable. For News Corp., it’s the reason the trouble is far from over.
News Corp.’s variety of lousy governance is simple — one man exerts control wildly out of proportion to his stake in the business.
At The New Yorker, Anthony Lane describes how a tabloid culture runs amok.
On March 21, 2002, a thirteen-year-old English schoolgirl took the train home. Usually, she took it all the way to Hersham, seventeen miles from London, where she lived, but on that day she got off one stop before, at Walton-on-Thames, to get something to eat. From that decision flowed two events, one terrible and final, the other more ambiguous and by no means complete. The first was the death of the girl, whose name was Milly Dowler. Walking home from Walton, she was abducted and murdered by a man named Levi Bellfield. Her body was found six months later, in a field twenty-five miles away, by mushroom pickers. The second consequence has been the fraying of an empire, and the sight of its emperor under siege. Many people have dreamed of such a day; far fewer would have predicted the swiftness with which it arrived; others view it as an overreaction tinged with hypocrisy and hysteria; and only the unworldly would claim that the end is nigh. Empires strike back.
The emperor is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corporation; the owner of Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal; the proprietor, in Britain, of the Times, the Sunday Times, and the Sun, and the holder of a 39.1-per-cent stake in BSkyB, the country’s leading satellite-broadcasting company; an Australian by birth and an American by choice; the proud father of six children; the thirty-eighth-richest person in this country; and, in the words of his mother, the adamantine Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, now a hundred and two years old, “that wretched boy of mine.” Never underestimate the wish, in the heart of a child, even a child aged eighty, to please the matriarch and prove himself less wretched in her eyes. It takes only three minutes, near the start of “Citizen Kane,” to shift from the stony stare of Mrs. Kane, as she watches young Charles leave forever, to the bullish proposal of the grown lad: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
The Guardian reports:
Former staff at the News of the World are understood to be underwhelmed by efforts by News International to find them work after they were handed a list of potential jobs which included posts in Siberia, Russia and Dubai.
Some former News of the World journalists said that former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks’ promise that as many staff as possible would be redeployed is proving an empty gesture as the vast majority of the alternative jobs being discussed are either non-editorial or entail a move abroad.
A job list given to ex-NoW staff include exotic positions such as oil reporter or “symbology analyst – Russian language” for parent company News Corporation’s Dow Jones wire service and “materials manager” for Fox in Siberia.
“The idea that you would go from the News of the World to becoming an oil reporter for Dow Jones, a high end financial wire service, is laughable,” said one former employee.
And:
The editor of the Times, James Harding, has admitted that News International’s handling of the phone-hacking crisis was “catastrophic” and that it impacted on the paper’s sales.
Harding said readers had cancelled subscriptions to the Times and to digital versions of the paper in the immediate aftermath of the revelations about Milly Dowler’s phone allegedly being hacked by News International sister title the News of the World.
Asked whether News International would recover and if he still felt the way the company had reacted had been “catastrophic”, as described by one of his paper’s leader columns, he said: “Yes, I think that would be a pretty descriptive word for what it happened and the struggle they had in getting to grips with it.”
And Roy Greenslade writes:
News Corporation is certainly counting the cost of Wapping’s phone hacking scandal. Top lawyers don’t come cheap.
According to The Lawyer magazine, the barrister hired by the media company for his legal advice, Lord Grabiner QC, commands fees of £3,000 an hour.
Torture still rampant in post-revolution Egypt, activists say
McClatchy reports:
Egyptian human rights activists say they’ve documented hundreds of cases of civilians tortured by police and army forces since the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, but that none have yet gone to trial.
Under former President Mubarak, the security services were notorious for abuses, but since he left office in February dozens of cases have been filed to the general prosecutor’s office accusing police and military authorities of torture and other crimes against anti-government protesters.
For activists, that’s a sign that the interim military government hasn’t reined in the security forces, which were all-powerful during the Mubarak era. The only difference in post-revolution Egypt, they say, is that victims empowered by the uprising are speaking publicly of their brutal experiences.
Hossam Bahgat, the executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, offered a grim list of the torture methods that authorities are accused of using: “kicking and punching; beating using batons, rifle butts, whips; electrocuting (shocking) victims; hanging in painful positions; sleep and food deprivation; and sexual assault.”
Bahgat, who’s run the advocacy group since 2002, said that until the revolution, torture victims “were unable to speak. At times there was an informant watching the victim’s house. If they see activists making contact they either harassed them or threatened the victim not to speak.”
Palestinian women take a rare trip to the beach
The New York Times reports:
Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, the women and girls entered the sea, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy.
Most had never seen the sea before.
The women were Palestinians from the southern part of the West Bank, which is landlocked, and Israel does not allow them in. They risked criminal prosecution, along with the dozen Israeli women who took them to the beach. And that, in fact, was part of the point: to protest what they and their hosts consider unjust laws.
In the grinding rut of Israeli-Palestinian relations — no negotiations, mutual recriminations, growing distance and dehumanization — the illicit trip was a rare event that joined the simplest of pleasures with the most complex of politics. It showed why coexistence here is hard, but also why there are, on both sides, people who refuse to give up on it.
“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”
Such visits began a year ago as the idea of one Israeli, and have blossomed into a small, determined movement of civil disobedience.
The rise of the right
Ex-Berlusconi minister defends Anders Behring Breivik
The Guardian reports:
One of Silvio Berlusconi’s former ministers has defended the thinking of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.
Interviewed on a popular radio show, Francesco Speroni, a leading member of the Northern League, the junior partner in Berlusconi’s conservative coalition, said: “Breivik’s ideas are in defence of western civilisation.”
Speroni spoke as other right-wingers around Europe, including leading officials of his own party, distanced themselves from the massacre on Utøya and the ideology that inspired it.
The Italian politician was endorsing the comments of another high-profile member of the league who had drawn fierce criticism for arguing that the killings might have been part of a plot to discredit hardline conservative thinkers. Like many in his party, Mario Borghezio, who sits in the European parliament, is an admirer of the writings of the late Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci, who popularised the term Eurabia to describe a future, supposedly Islamised Europe.
Crime and punishment
Reading Anders Behring Breivik’s account of his preparations for his July 22 attacks in Oslo and Utøya evokes a certain dread at the sight of such a deliberate effort to cause carnage. Breivik expresses no doubt about what he is doing other than the fear that he might run out of funds and be unable to rent the car in which he intends to load explosives.
Mass murder, committed with such cold calculation surely merits the harshest punishment. Many Americans are thus now perplexed to learn about the apparent leniency of Norway’s penal system. Eli Lake’s views, as expressed in conversation with Hans-Inge Lango, will be shared by many.
But if Norway’s approach to crime is really sending the wrong message, just look at the numbers: an incarceration rate of 71 per 100,000 Norwegians versus 743 per 100,000 Americans; and while in Norway 80% of prisoners once released never return to jail, in the US almost 70% end up back behind bars.
Americans should not be asking whether Norway is capable of being tough enough with terrorists, but instead why a country that spends more on its security than any other also imprisons more of its own citizens than any other. (And for any of the xenophobes out there who might want to attribute America’s high incarceration rate to the high number of immigrants in this country, Germany has a similar proportion of immigrants and an incarceration rate of 85 per 100,000.)
Why Norway terror accused Breivik says he loves Israel
Tony Karon writes:
There was a time when a blond, blue-eyed nationalist looking to violently rid Europe of its “alien” immigrant population could be reliably assumed to hate Jews. It’s no longer quite that simple.
Anders Behring Breivik insists, in his rambling 1,500-page manifesto released on the day of his confessed rampage that killed 76 Norwegians, that he’s no Nazi, despite expressing some sympathy for what Hitler had been trying to achieve. Instead he styles himself a latter-day warrior of the Knights Templar, vanguard force of the medieaval Christian Crusades that briefly claimed the Holy Land for Christendom and made Jerusalem’s streets run ankle deep with the blood of those they saw as usurpers. Even then, it’s worth remembering that the blood spilled by the Crusaders was both Muslim and Jewish.
Despite the Crusader lineage to which he aspires, however, Breivik has no intention of driving Jews from Europe, much less from the Holy Land. On the contrary, his manifesto hails Zionist Jews as a crucial ally in his battle between Christendom and Islam, proclaiming Israel as the frontline citadel in that war. Breivik’s Crusade would have Jews on board for an existential fight against Islam; the mirror image of the “Crusader-Jewish” alliance that Osama bin Laden vowed to drive out of what he defined as Muslim lands.