Monthly Archives: August 2011

Who benefits from the attacks in Israel?

Today’s attacks in southern Israel in which gunmen killed eight people were clearly carefully planned. It seems reasonable to assume that as much attention was given to the attacks’ timing.

Reuters reported:

The Magen David Adom ambulance service said seven people were killed along the road, just meters from the border with Egypt. The military put the number of wounded at around 25.

Israeli special forces were called in and engaged the gunmen as police and the military closed roads around Eilat, a popular Red Sea resort. The military said between two and four gunmen were killed. Israeli media reports said up to seven were killed.

The Israeli government was swift to assign responsibility for the attacks as spokesman Mark Regev said Israel “has specific and precise information that these terrorists who targeted Israelis today came out of the Gaza Strip.”

Time reports:

Israeli security officials had been tracking the militants from the Gaza Strip, where plans were laid for the attack, into the lawless Sinai desert that since the fall of Hosni Mubarak has offered a more and more accessible back door to Israel. But somehow, the militants found a way to strike first, killing seven Israelis on a lonely desert highway.

“It wasn’t supposed to end this way,” a senior Israeli intelligence officer tells TIME. “And now we have to find out why it didn’t end the way it should have.”

Retaliatory airstrikes in Gaza today were aimed at members of the Popular Resistance Committees. Reports on Twitter describe ongoing Israeli missile strikes on multiple locations across Gaza.

One of the other immediate results of the attacks was that J14 protests scheduled to take place across Israel were cancelled. That decision was then reversed and Saturday night’s main rally in Tel Aviv will take the the form of a quiet memorial march with torches and candles.

Will this be the moment at which Israelis once again close ranks as they find solidarity through opposition to a common enemy? In other words, is the J14 movement about to fizzle out?

If every act of terrorism can be regarded as a form of bloody political theater, it’s hard to imagine that the organizers of this performance would have been oblivious about who happened to be in the audience at this time. A group of Republican members of Congress is visiting Israel this week, with another batch scheduled to arrive this weekend, Politico notes.

No doubt many of the visiting Americans will have exceptionally harsh words for one of their colleagues upon their return to Washington. Sen. Patrick Leahy’s effort to apply sanctions against Israeli special forces units accused of human rights violations, now looks particularly badly timed.

Just as Benjamin Netanyahu felt that the 9/11 attacks were good for Israel, it’s hard not to believe that he must feel that today’s attacks are good for his government.

And just in case anyone in Turkey still holds out any hope that Israel might apologize for murdering nine of its citizens just over a year ago, today’s events will merely make this week’s refusal even more emphatic.

Meanwhile, Hamas is cooperating with the Egyptian government in an effort to shut down an al Qaeda affiliate based in Gaza.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports:

Hamas has responded to Egypt’s request to crack down on the Army of Islam and prevent its forces from infiltrating through the tunnels into Egypt.

A security source said clashes took place on Wednesday between Hamas and the Army of Islam in Gaza in a bid to capture their leader Mumtaz Daghmash, who is accused of carrying out bombings and terrorist attacks in Egypt.

Hamas met on Wednesday with officials of the Egyptian intelligence service to agree on border control measures with a view to preventing attacks by elements of the Army of Islam and the Jaljalat organization, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

The Egyptian military and police sent a large number of special forces troops into North Sinai a week ago in an effort to crack down on armed criminal gangs and insurgents in the peninsula. The initiative, named Operation Eagle, saw Egyptian army tanks and troops deployed to the streets of Sinai towns for the first time since the 1970s.

Bloomberg adds:

Egyptian security forces in the northern Sinai Peninsula arrested 20 people, including Palestinians, suspected of involvement in attacks on police stations and a natural gas pipeline to Israel, the state-run Middle East News Agency said.

Some of the suspects belong to “jihadi cells,” and others are accused of criminal activities, MENA reported today, citing Saleh el-Masri, the Northern Sinai security chief, as saying. Those arrested include Egyptians from other provinces who have been recruited and sent to Sinai, it reported.

Violence in Sinai since the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak prompted security forces to conduct an operation to capture “criminals and extremists” in the peninsula, the state-run Al Ahram newspaper said on Aug. 16. Egyptian gas supplies to Israel were disrupted after four attacks on the pipeline network from Feb. 5 to July 12.

El-Masri said forces discovered a workshop that manufactures explosive devices, explosive belts and landmines, MENA reported. He stressed the importance of the cooperation of tribal leaders in the area with the army and other forces to restore security in Sinai, it said.

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Libya’s rebels face questions as transition looms

Reuters reports:

Opponents of Muammar Gaddafi have managed to cobble together an alliance and, with plenty of NATO help, fight the Libyan leader’s forces to what increasingly looks like the verge of defeat.

Now the hard part might be about to begin: The rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC) might soon have to step up and run the country, if Gaddafi is swept aside.

The council has been unable to shake off fears about its ability to govern, let alone remain united, in this oil-producing country awash with weapons. It may face tribal and regional divides and creeping Islamisation.

The council, recognised as Libya’s legitimate authority by more than 30 countries, says it is ready to lead Libya on a path to stability and democracy.

“Of course we’re ready to take over,” the head of the NTC’s political committee, Fatih Baja, told Reuters. “We’ve been preparing for this since the first month of the revolution.”

The NTC is a disparate group of Gaddafi opponents which emerged in February in the wake of uprisings in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt. It includes former Gaddafi officials.

It is based in Benghazi, operating out of hotels and homes in eastern Libya’s biggest city, which feels more like a laid-back seaside town than the hub of a revolution.

The NTC’s suburban headquarters is guarded by fighters in pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the back. Reporters have to show rebel-issued press cards before passing through a metal-detecting gate.

Along with fly-blown piles of uncollected trash in the streets, there is a sense of disorganisation. Rebel officials have earned a reputation for poor communications, both among themselves and with their allies and the media.

Faced with the prospect of Gaddafi’s departure after 41 years of harsh rule, they have set up a task force with a plan to take over quickly in the capital, Tripoli, Baja said.

“Security is at the top of the list, to secure Tripoli militarily and socially,” he said.

But analysts fear trouble could begin as soon as the inevitable volleys of celebratory gunfire die down.

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Libyan rebels ‘capture Zawiya oil refinery’

Reuters reports:

Libyan rebels took control of an oil refinery in the western town of Zawiyah and blocked the main highway north to the capital on Thursday, further isolating Muammar Gaddafi’s Tripoli stronghold.

Rebel advances in recent days have cut Gaddafi’s forces off from their main resupply routes following a months-long stalemate, putting the Libyan leader’s 41-year rule under unprecedented pressure.

Small groups of rebel fighters occupied the inside of the Zawiyah refinery complex, about 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli along the highway linking Tripoli to Tunisia, with no sign of the pro-Gaddafi forces that had battled for the plant.

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Obama calls on Syria’s Assad to step down

Al Jazeera reports:

International pressure is mounting on Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, with the United States calling for his resignation and the United Nations claiming Syria’s use of force against anti-government protests may constitute crimes against humanity.

In a written statement on Thursday, President Barack Obama said: “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way … For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”

Obama said the US “cannot and will not impose this transition upon Syria” but will support “an effort to bring about a Syria that is democratic, just, and inclusive for all Syrians. We will support this outcome by pressuring President Assad to get out of the way of this transition”.

Obama said Syrians “have spoken with their peaceful marches” and that the Syrian government “has responded with a sustained onslaught”.

“I strongly condemn this brutality, including the disgraceful attacks on Syrian civilians in cities like Hama and Deir ez-Zor, and the arrests of opposition figures who have been denied justice and subjected to torture at the hands of the regime,” the president’s statement said.

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Phone hacking: News of the World Hollywood reporter is arrested

The Guardian reports:

James Desborough, an award-winning reporter at the former News of the World newspaper, has been arrested by officers investigating the phone-hacking scandal.

Desborough was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to section 1 (1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977 after arriving at a south London police station on Thursday morning at 10.30am. He had arrived at the station by appointment for questioning about criminal activities at the paper.

The allegations are believed to relate to events prior to Desborough being promoted to be the newspaper’s Los Angeles-based US editor in April 2009.

He was given the job less than a month after winning the British Press Award for showbusiness reporter of the year.

His move to the US makes his arrest, the 13th made by Operation Weeting, particularly significant. If Desborough was involved in hacking while in Britain, as police appear to believe he was, it raises the question of whether he practised those techniques in the US – and if so, whether he was the first and only News of the World journalist in the US to do so.

Meanwhile, News Corp shareholders have been warned about the cost of phone hacking.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has warned that it is “not able to predict the ultimate outcome or cost” of the phone-hacking scandal, admitting it could “impair” its ability to conduct its business.

In its annual report filed on Wednesday, News Corp said its reputation could be damaged by the crisis that has engulfed the company and led to the closure of the News of the World.

The report also revealed that Freud Communications, the public relations firm run by Matthew Freud, Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law, was paid $202,000 (£122,000) by News Corp in the financial year ended 30 June 2011 for “press and publicity activities”.

News Corp, which is the subject of a wide-ranging FBI investigation, said it was “not able to predict the ultimate outcome or cost” of the police investigations and civil actions related to alleged unlawful activity.

“UK and US regulators and governmental authorities are conducting investigations after allegations of phone hacking and inappropriate payments to police at our former publication, News of the World, and other related matters, including investigations into whether similar conduct may have occurred at the company’s subsidiaries outside of the UK,” said News Corp in its report.

“The company is co-operating fully with these investigations. It is possible that these proceedings could damage our reputation and might impair our ability to conduct our business.”

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How Rupert Murdoch tries to destroy the lives of his enemies

The Guardian reports:

Five years ago Robert Emmel was enjoying the American dream. He lived in a detached house in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, drove a BMW, and earned $140,000 a year as an accounts director in a highly successful advertising company called News America Marketing.

Today, Emmel is described by his lawyers as destitute. Jobless and in debt, he was discharged from bankruptcy last year. He does occasional consultancy work that last month brought in $500, and this month, court documents show, will probably produce nothing. His wife’s earnings raise monthly household income to about $3,000 – half their outgoings.

This is a cautionary tale about what can happen to someone who dares to become a corporate whistleblower. Or, more specifically, someone who incurs the wrath of News Corporation, the media empire owned by Rupert Murdoch, of which News America forms a part.

Emmel’s lawyer, Philip Hilder, has had a ringside seat at the gradual unravelling of his client’s life. A former federal prosecutor based in Houston, Texas, Hilder is well versed in whistleblower cases having represented Sherron Watkins, who helped uncover the Enron scandal. Hilder said: “News America has engaged in Rambo litigation tactics. They have a scorched earth policy, and it’s taken a huge toll on him.”

News Corp has devoted the efforts of up to 29 lawyers to pursuing Emmel personally, at a cost estimated at more than $2m. Emmel, by contrast, has relied on two lawyers, Hilder and Marc Garber in Atlanta, working for no pay since January 2009.

Attention has been focused on News Corporation’s activities in the UK, where the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has led to the arrest of 10 people associated with the company. In the US, oversight of News Corp is gathering pace with the department of justice and the FBI looking into the company, while senators are considering launching committee hearings into News Corp practices.

One incident that US investigators are exploring is the hacking of a website run by one of News America’s rivals, an instore advertising business called Floorgraphics. The firm discovered that its password-protected site had been breached from an IP address at News America’s offices in Connecticut. News America has condemned the breach as a “violation of the standards of our company” but says it does not know how it happened.

Emmel was one of the main witnesses for Floorgraphics at a subsequent trial against his old company. He worked for News America for seven years from 1999 to 2006, turning whistleblower in his final year there. The company is the leading US provider of in-store advertising services, helping to bring products from firms such as Coca-Cola, Kraft and Nabisco to the attention of supermarket shoppers. Headed by Paul Carlucci, who now publishes Murdoch’s tabloid the New York Post, it enjoys annual revenues of more than $1bn and has a 90% stranglehold on the market. News America also has a record of legal disputes with its commercial rivals, three of whom have launched lawsuits against it in recent years accusing the firm of using unlawful practices.

All three lawsuits – including the Floorgraphics one and cases initiated by Valassis and Insignia – were eventually settled, but not before News America agreed to pay an astounding $655m to end the disputes. Emmel acted as a whistleblower in all three cases. He gave two days of evidence in the Floorgraphics trial after which News America rapidly settled, and was also named in the Valassis and Insignia cases.

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Rebels gain near Tripoli, as refugees pour out

Charles Levinson reports from Zawiya:

Fighting raged for a fourth straight day in this strategic coastal city 30 miles west of Tripoli on Wednesday, as rebel fighters battled to mop up pockets of loyalist soldiers and laid siege to the regime’s last working oil refinery.

The roads leading to Zawiya were clogged with rebel fighters pouring toward town and refugees fleeing in the opposite direction. The refugee flow from Zawiya, a city of 200,000 people, and from Tripoli hinted at the possible flood that could pour into rebel-held havens and neighboring Tunisia as fighting moves closer to the capital.

Rebel fighters reported a series of other gains in the west as well. They said they had eliminated government forces in the town of Tiji and had secured the coastal town of Sabratha, west of Zawiya, bolstering their control of the vital coast road that is a key lifeline to the capital, Tripoli, which is still controlled by Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The regime wasn’t available for comment. Officials in Tripoli have been quiet in recent days, not holding the regular news conferences and journalist trips they had sponsored earlier in the conflict.

While the momentum has swung toward the rebels in recent weeks, they remain heavily dependant upon air power from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose 90-day mandate to operate in Libya could need to be extended a second time in late September. And the rebels’ potentially toughest battle—to capture Tripoli—may still lie ahead.

Zawiya’s fleeing residents and rebel fighters said most of the city was now under rebel control. On Wednesday, fighting was fiercest around the oil refinery on the western edge of the city, where a group of pro-Gadhafi fighters were holed up and surrounded by rebel fighters, said rebel commanders and fighters.

The commanders said they had already shut down the fuel lines leading to and from the refinery, knocking Mr. Gadhafi’s last refinery offline. The refinery provides only a fraction of the regime’s fuel oil and doesn’t produce gasoline. The government has been smuggling in most of its fuel needs from Algeria and Tunisia.

Still, it further pressures Col. Gadhafi and deals him a symbolic blow by depriving the once oil-rich strongman of the ability to produce even a drop of his own fuel needs.

Control of the coast road between Tunisia and Zawiya, and another road from Algeria in the south are far more crucial fuel and supply conduits for the regime, but are also collapsing beneath the rebel offensive.

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Thousands of Palestinian refugees in Syria flee during military assault

The New York Times reports:

United Nations officials said Tuesday that as many as 10,000 residents of a Palestinian refugee neighborhood in the Syrian port city of Latakia had fled during a four-day assault, as security forces carried out more arrests and intimidation in what residents said was a government attempt to rebuild a wall of fear in one of Syria’s largest cities.

Latakia, on the country’s Mediterranean coast, is the third locale to bear the full brunt of military and security forces this month, though the government has also persisted in its crackdown on the suburbs of Damascus and Homs, the third-largest city. The violence has provoked international condemnations that have grown sharper, but still stopped short of demanding that President Bashar al-Assad step down.

On Tuesday in Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it was more effective to forge international consensus against Mr. Assad — as well as intensify economic pressure through sanctions — than for the United States alone to lead the way.

“It’s not going to be any news if the United States says Assad needs to go,” Mrs. Clinton said at the National Defense University. “O.K., fine, what’s next? If Turkey says it, if King Abdullah says it, if other people say it, there is no way the Assad regime can ignore it.”

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists Palestinian refugees, said that it had no information on the whereabouts of the Latakia Palestinians. Activists have said many of the displaced have left for the countryside or Aleppo, Syrian’s second-largest city, to the northeast.

“A forgotten population has now become a disappeared population,” said Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the agency in Jerusalem, calling the situation “very, very worrying.”

Reuters reports:

Syria’s crackdown on government opponents has deeply embarrassed the Palestinian group Hamas, which is anxious not to anger its backers in Damascus while at the same time hoping not to alienate its supporters at home.

President Bashar al-Assad’s five-month purge of protesters has gathered pace since the start of August, causing thousands of Palestinians to flee a refugee camp in the city of Latakia this week as Syrian security forces attacked the area.

Ordinary Palestinians watching from a distance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been swift to denounce the violence, but the Islamist group Hamas has itself said nothing and tried to prevent public displays of anti-Syrian sentiment.

“If they keep silent they will score points with the Syrian regime,” said political analyst Talal Okal, explaining that such a stance could be politically costly in the Palestinian Territories, especially in Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas.

“The people will not accept it and will see it as a betrayal of the Palestinian refugees in Syria,” he added.
A number of Hamas leaders, including its chief, Khaled Meshaal, moved to Syria after they were expelled from Jordan in 1999. From there they hone their strategy against arch-foe Israel and are relatively free to move around the region.

But the Sunni Muslim group’s dependence on Assad, who is from Syria’s minority Alawite community, is proving a boon for some Hamas’ rivals, who have been highly critical of the violence that rocked the Al Raml refugee camp.

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Looting with the lights on

Naomi Klein writes:

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities – window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion – a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina’s mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

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The empire at dusk

In State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire, Stephen Glain writes:

In its scramble to avoid another legislative gang war over the nation’s debt ceiling, Washington is preparing to shake down the Defense Department in the name of deficit reduction. While budget cutters preoccupy themselves with line-item expenditures, they overlook the Pentagon’s biggest cost center: empire. The burden of global hegemony, the commitment to project force across every strategic waterway, air corridor, and land bridge, has exhausted the U.S. military and will be even harder to sustain as budget cuts force strategists and logisticians to do more with less. A national discussion about the logic of maintaining huge forward bases, to say nothing of their financial and human costs, is long overdue.

American relations with the world, and increasingly America’s security policy at home, have become thoroughly and all but irreparably militarized. The culprits are not the nation’s military leaders, though they can be aggressive and cunning interagency operators, but civilian elites who have seen to it that the nation is engaged in a self-perpetuating cycle of low-grade conflict. They have been hiding in plain sight, hyping threats and exaggerating the capabilities and resources of adversaries. They have convinced a plurality of citizens that their best guarantee of security is not peace but war, and they did so with the help of a supine or complicit Congress. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidents have ordered troops into battle 22 times, compared with 14 times during the Cold War. Not once did they appeal to lawmakers for a declaration of war.

The legacy of American militarism is a national security complex that thrives on fraud, falsehood, and deception. In the 1950s, Americans were told the Soviets had not only the means to destroy the United States but the desire to do so. In reality, Moscow lacked the former and so gave little thought to the latter, while Washington squandered billions of dollars on needless weaponry. Time and again, U.S. presidents weaponized their response to challenges overseas to protect them from charges of appeasement from the right. Habitually, their administrations misinterpreted events — from Russia’s Bolshevik revolution to the September 11 attacks — to disastrous effect. In each case, expert advice was overlooked, ignored, or concealed, while in others, threats were manufactured as chips in petty political wagers. The fraudulent bomber and missile gaps and the Gulf of Tonkin incident did as much to injure U.S. interests overseas as did the notion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them preemptively.

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Shaping a new world order

Andrew Bacevich writes:

Chief among the problems facing the United States today is this: too many obligations piled high without the wherewithal to meet them. Among those obligations are the varied and sundry commitments implied by the phrase “American global leadership.” If ever there were an opportune moment for reassessing the assumptions embedded in that phrase, it’s now.

With too few Americans taking notice, history has entered a new era. The “unipolar moment” created by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has passed. To refer to the United States today as the world’s “sole superpower” makes about as much sense as General Motors bragging that it’s the world’s No.1 car company: Nostalgia ill-befits an enterprise beset with competitors breathing down its neck. Similarly, to call Barack Obama the “most powerful man in the world” is akin to curtsying before Elizabeth II as “Queen of Great Britain, Ireland and British Dominions beyond the Seas”: Although a nice title, it confers little by way of actual authority.

A new global order is rapidly emerging. In that order, the United States will no doubt remain a very important player. Yet alongside the U.S. will be several others: China preeminently among them, but with Russia, India, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and Brazil also demanding to be reckoned with. (Whether Europe, currently wallowing in disarray, can muster the will and wallet to play in this company qualifies as an unknown.)

Nothing Washington can do will prevent this geopolitical transformation. Politicians may insist that the United States still stands apart — always and forever a “triple-A nation” — but their declarations will have as much effect as King Canute ordering the waves to stop. Indeed, to indulge further in the fiction of American omnipotence — persisting in our penchant for fighting distant wars of dubious purpose, for example — will accelerate the process, with relative decline becoming absolute decline. For Americans, husbanding power rather than squandering it is the order of the day.

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Is capitalism doomed?

Nouriel Roubini writes:

The massive volatility and sharp equity-price correction now hitting global financial markets signal that most advanced economies are on the brink of a double-dip recession. A financial and economic crisis caused by too much private-sector debt and leverage led to a massive re-leveraging of the public sector in order to prevent Great Depression 2.0. But the subsequent recovery has been anemic and sub-par in most advanced economies given painful deleveraging.

Now a combination of high oil and commodity prices, turmoil in the Middle East, Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, eurozone debt crises, and America’s fiscal problems (and now its rating downgrade) have led to a massive increase in risk aversion. Economically, the United States, the eurozone, the United Kingdom, and Japan are all idling. Even fast-growing emerging markets (China, emerging Asia, and Latin America), and export-oriented economies that rely on these markets (Germany and resource-rich Australia), are experiencing sharp slowdowns.

Until last year, policymakers could always produce a new rabbit from their hat to reflate asset prices and trigger economic recovery. Fiscal stimulus, near-zero interest rates, two rounds of “quantitative easing,” ring-fencing of bad debt, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and liquidity provision for banks and financial institutions: officials tried them all. Now they have run out of rabbits.

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U.S. impotent in face of Middle East events

Zvi Bar’el writes:

How long will the Syrian protesters wait until the United States and its allies deign to intervene in their slow massacre? What is the critical mass of people who must be killed for the “international community” to act? When there’s an earthquake, countries jostle each other to be visibly first in line with rescue forces for the victims; when thousands were killed in Darfur, the “community” went into deep hibernation until roused to assist.

In Syria, the barometer of bloodshed is still not a cause for concern. Condemnation, scolding and a few weak sanctions made it clear to President Bashar Assad that he’s still far from danger. Against Muammar Gadhafi, Washington quickly raised a military coalition. It called on Hosni Mubarak to resign; in Yemen it stirred things so as to prevent the return of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to Sana’a. And in Syria? The key statement, “Assad has to go,” is still stuck in Washington’s throat.

The rational explanations for American restraint are not to be taken lightly: concern over Iran’s response; the desire to avoid putting a Western umbrella over a popular revolt so as not to impair its legitimacy; concern over the status of the United States in the Middle East if it finds itself facing a new front after Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, Washington must take “the day after” into consideration. But understanding for the considerations of “the day after” is what makes possible a murderous “today.”

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Libya shows signs of slipping from Muammar Gaddafi’s grasp

The Guardian reports:

Muammar Gaddafi’s regime has shown fresh signs of buckling as rebels have come close to cutting off supply routes and the Libyan interior minister arrived in Egypt in what appeared to be the highest-ranking defection for many months.

The Libyan leader broadcast a defiant appeal to his supporters to rid the country of “traitors”, telling them: “The blood of martyrs is fuel for the battle.” But the call was issued over a poor telephone line to state television, and most was inaudible – the result of what officials said was a technical breakdown.

Gaddafi’s rallying call came as rebel fighters moved into Zawiyah, 30 miles west of Tripoli, straddling a critical road supply route from the Tunisian border. Rebel forces claimed to have near total control of the town, but government troops still held its oil refinery, the regime’s last homegrown supply of fuel. Reuters reported that pro-government snipers in Zawiyah were firing on any civilians who ventured out of doors.

The anti-Gaddafi National Transitional Council (NTC) also claimed to have taken the city of Surman and said it was close to gaining control of Sabratha, along the same coastal road. A rebel spokesman said that talks were under way with government forces over their surrender.

There were clashes near the Ras Ajdir border crossing with Tunisia, and opposition forces were reported to be pushing towards Tripoli from the south having taken the strategic crossroads of Garyan over the weekend. Control of Garyan, in the Nafusah highlands, cuts off Tripoli from the Gaddafi stronghold of Sabha in the south. The multi-pronged offensive was an attempt by rebel commanders to cut off Tripoli’s supply lines and regain the initiative after the killing of their military leader, General Abdul Fattah Younes.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports:

Libya’s rebel-held city of Misrata, under siege by forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi for the past six months, is experiencing something new: traffic jams.

With rebels advancing toward the Libyan capital, Tripoli, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the west, honking horns and the voices of children playing in Misrata’s streets have replaced the explosions of incoming rockets and artillery shells.

“We are confident we are safe now,” English student Aisha Alifafer, 20, said in an interview yesterday. “We can go shopping and visit others. In the last six months we could not go outside and see the sun.”

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England riots: pair jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder

The Guardian reports:

Two men have been jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, from Marston near Northwich, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, appeared at Chester crown court on Tuesday. They were arrested last week following incidents of violent disorder in London and other cities across the UK.

Neither of their Facebook posts resulted in a riot-related event.

During the sentencing, the recorder of Chester, Elgin Edwards, praised the swift actions of Cheshire police and said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent to others.

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Donors help keep Palestinians in cages

Charlotte Silver writes:

“Israel besieges us, puts us in cantons — in cages — and the international community is feeding us in these cages. It’s anything but developmental and it’s helping Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing and dispossession,” Dr. Samia Botmeh said, as she sat in her office in the Center for Development Studies (CDS) at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Despite the massive amounts of development aid that have been poured into the West Bank, the productive capacity of the Palestinian economy — measured by examining the agricultural and manufacturing sectors — is half that of 1994, and accounts for no more than 12 percent of employment. While the World Bank and Palestinian Authority boast an 8 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP), real per capita income is still 8.4 percent lower than what it was in 1999, signifying that the GDP growth is not reflective of income growth for the average Palestinian.

Egypt provides an elucidative comparison. Two decades of serious neo-liberal reforms produced a GDP growth in Egypt that was similarly applauded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF): between 2006 and 2008, GDP grew 7 percent and there was a 4.6 percent spike in 2009 alone. However, as was made stunningly clear at the end of January, the country’s GDP growth had not trickled down to the majority of the people: unemployment had actually increased and 40 percent of the population lived on less than two dollars per day.

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Al Jazeera journalist held in Israeli prison

Al Jazeera reports:

Samer Allawi, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Kabul bureau chief, has been brought before an Israeli military court, almost a week after he was arrested by Israeli officials when he tried to cross the border between Jordan and the occupied West Bank.

Israeli authorities extended his detention by seven days and charged him with being a member of Hamas on Tuesday.

Allawi was arrested on August 10 at the end of a three-week holiday in his home town of Sabastia near Nablus.

The Israeli authorities originally informed Allawi’s family that he would be held for four days for questioning, saying that it was a “security-related arrest”.

Last Thursday, the authorities told Al Jazeera that Allawi’s detention would be extended.

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Is the Islamic terrorism threat overblown?

Religion News Service reports:

After a car bomb detonated on Wall Street one minute past the noon lunch hour killing 38 people, federal investigators came up with a possible link to an overseas group.

Islamic terrorists?

Al-Qaida?

No, Italian anarchists.

The year was 1920, and in those days anarchists were the equivalent of today’s terrorists, waging acts of mass destruction against Western capitalism.

Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, thinks the wave of 20th century anarchist violence bears a resemblance to the Islamic terrorism of the 21st century in one sense:

Neither resulted in a spiraling escalation of violence.

“In many ways,” said Kurzman, “Islamic terrorism is simply the latest form of transnational revolutionary violence to grab global attention.”

Put another way: This too shall pass.

While mindful of the pain and suffering terrorism has caused, Kurzman has written a book challenging the dominant narrative that worldwide terrorism is out of control.

In “The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists,” Kurzman argues that Islamic terrorism has accounted for a miniscule number of murders compared with violent death tolls from other causes.

In the United States, for example, fewer than 40 people died at the hands of terrorists in the 10 years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

That compares with about 140,000 other murders during the same time.

The bad news, said Kurzman, is that Islamic terrorists really are out to kill Americans. The good news is there are very few of them. In fact, of the less than 40 killed at the hands of terrorists over the past decade, none were tied directly to al-Qaida. These include the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, in which 10 people were killed in the Washington, D.C., area, and the 2009 Fort Hood shootings in which U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 14 people.

That count does not include the many failed terrorist bombings united by a common theme: Incompetence. Had these plots, such as the bungled 2010 Times Square car bomb, succeeded, the death toll would have been much higher.

The truth is, said Kurzman, the more terrorists kill, the less popular they become. That does not mean the world is safe from terrorism, and Kurzman cautions America may well see another horrific terrorist attack.

It does mean the U.S. government should examine the evidence and ratchet down the discourse, he said.

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