Monthly Archives: March 2016

How the tribal warfare of our ancestors explains the rise of ISIS

ISIS-catwalk

Luke Glowacki writes: Humans are hard-wired to adopt their communities’ norms, and these norms can include rules for how to treat others — including whether to tolerate differences or attack outsiders. When norms provide status, material rewards or membership in a privileged group, they become even more potent.

Cultures are able to hijack this psychology for violent ends by providing status, promises of an afterlife and a sense of meaning. People belonging to communities that advocate violence will adopt norms of violence, whether those communities are tribal societies, neighbors and family, or Facebook friends. Cross-cultural research I’ve conducted shows that the most important predictor of warfare in a society is a cultural system that awards warriors with social benefits.

In East Africa, where groups battle each other for livestock, access to grazing lands and water, conflicts are fought with modern weapons such as AK-47s but occur along tribal borders and resemble the dynamics of ancestral warfare in important ways. Access to resources such as livestock and water can be critical for a group’s survival, and so these cultures award status and livestock to successful warriors. Such warriors are able to marry more wives and have more children than other men. Half a world away, in the Venezuelan Amazon, researchers found that warriors also ended up better off than non-warriors. Over the time scales at which humans and cultures evolve, benefits such as these may have had profound significance in the development of human behavior.

Such incentives help explain how people can be lured into supporting the Islamic State. The group promises its recruits prestige, a sense of community and the possibility of glory — the same types of incentives that cultures across the globe have historically used to motivate youth to take up arms. [Continue reading…]

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Soldier’s shooting of Palestinian sets off uproar in Israel

The Associated Press reports: Amateur video appearing to show an Israeli soldier killing an already wounded Palestinian attacker sparked uproar in Israel on Sunday, reflecting the deep divisions in the country following six months of violence.

As the Israeli military pressed on with an investigation, nationalistic politicians accused the army of abandoning the soldier, while political doves bemoaned the erosion of the nation’s morals. Palestinians, meanwhile, said the shooting proved their claims that Israel is guilty of using excessive force and carrying out extrajudicial killings.

The shooting took place last Thursday in Hebron, the volatile West Bank city that has been a focal point of the latest wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence. The military said two Palestinians stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier before troops shot and killed the pair. [Continue reading…]

Human Rights Watch reports: The B’Tselem volunteer who filmed the video, Imad Abu Shamsiyyeh, told Human Rights Watch in a phone interview that Israeli forces had threatened him both at the scene and later, when he went to give a statement to the military. A few minutes after he filmed the shooting from the roof of a nearby building, he said, “more journalists gathered on the roof, and the Israeli soldiers noticed us. They pointed their guns at us and screamed at us to get down. Soldiers came into the building and told the [owner] not to allow people there or the family would pay the price.”

Abu Shamsiyyeh said that after B’Tselem shared the video with military investigators, the military asked him to give a statement. During questioning at a military office in Hebron, Abu Shamsiyyeh said he felt the interrogator was trying to intimidate him to make him say that he had not filmed the video:

He told me, ‘How will you benefit from this video? It got a lot of publicity. Your name is known to everyone. Who is going to protect you and your family from right-wing Israelis? Remember you live in [Tel Rumeida], surrounded by Israeli settlers, who will be able to protect you there?’ I felt that I was being threatened. They took the original footage from me.

Abu Shamsiyyeh said he had received two phone calls on March 24 from a Hebrew-speaker, calling from a private number, but did not understand what was said. “I feel in danger and my children are afraid,” Abu Shamsiyyeh told Human Rights Watch. “I’m not letting them out of the house. I’m afraid of walking in the street.” [Continue reading…]

Anshel Pfeffer writes: It was a moment made for television. Abed Fatah al-Sharif could be seen lying on the ground in Hebron, after he and a friend had been shot while trying to stab Israeli soldiers. Still moving, 21­-year-old Sharif lay there without receiving medical attention for several minutes, until a helmeted Israeli soldier, in the presence of his officers, walked up and shot him in the head.

Just like that – what looks like a summary execution in the middle of the day, on camera.

You would have expected the killing of Sharif to be headline news around the world, not only an internal debate over the battlefield morals of the Israel Defense Forces, as it has in the last four days. The IDF Spokesman Unit was prepared for a media onslaught, notified in advance through operational channels of the incident.

By the time the footage, taken by a field worker of human rights NGO B’Tselem, landed in the journalists’ inboxes, a statement had already been prepared announcing that the soldier had been arrested and his actions, which were contrary to “the IDF’s values,” were under criminal investigation. It took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few hours but eventually he came out with a similar statement, distancing the IDF and its values from what was seen on the screen.

But as far as the foreign media was concerned, they need not have bothered. The foreign correspondents stationed in Israel dutifully filed their reports, but in a week in which Europe was still in shock from the devastating Brussels attacks their story barely had a chance. Add to the continent’s news agenda that day the conviction in The Hague of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for charges of genocide and the American media’s preoccupation with Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency as well as with their current president, Barack Obama, watching baseball in Cuba and doing the tango in Argentina, while trying to get as far as possible from the Middle East.

When the officials in charge of Israel’s global PR saw on Friday the daily summaries of the previous 24 hours in the world media, they heaved a sigh of relief. With the exception of Al Jazeera, the Hebron killing didn’t feature prominently on any of the main news channels, in the news bulletins of major networks or on the front pages of influential newspapers. It was relegated deep in to the inside pages and low down on the websites’ home pages.

“My report got quite a lot of clicks” said one reporter for a top news-site. ”But it didn’t make it into our top-ten news stories. There was just way too much happening elsewhere.” And if the media isn’t interested, then foreign politicians and diplomats won’t be making much of a fuss either. Perhaps even if it hadn’t taken place on a such a heavy news day we may have been surprised at the relatively low level of international media interest. After all, the global audience has become inured in the last three years to much more distressing images of ISIS beheadings, immolations and explosions of prisoners.

The improved professionalism in recent years of the IDF Spokesman’s Unit’s foreign media branch also played a role. They didn’t try to duck the issue or stonewall the reporters. Any hint of a cover up would probably have generated a few more headlines. But then after all, the world has also grown sick of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and hardly expects better of us anymore.

Some Israelis are certainly happy that the world has more burning issues to deal with and may even be experiencing a feeling of schadenfreude that this time the Europeans have too many dead bodies of their own to be interested in those here. Not only is such an attitude ugly and callous, but Israelis may find that living in one of the areas where the world media has lost interest in its cruelties is not such a great a thing, even if the coverage is sometimes biased and disproportional.

A world which is no longer shocked by Israeli cruelty towards Palestinians probably won’t be that excited when the cruelty goes the other way either. [Continue reading…]

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How the Syrian revolt became armed

In an excerpt from their book, Burning Country, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami write: The Bashar al-Assad regime has burned Syria with artillery, Scud missiles, barrel bombs and sarin gas. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council, it has committed “the crimes against humanity of extermination; murder; rape or other forms of sexual violence; torture; imprisonment; enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts.” Assad is responsible for the lion’s share of the violence, but criminal and authoritarian elements in the opposition’s Free Army and Islamic Front have contributed to the terror too. And the third force — the transnational Sunni jihadists, particularly ISIS — has murdered surrendered soldiers, opposition activists, journalists and gays, while subjecting religious minorities to forcible conversion or sexual slavery. Syria’s ancient heritage — most famously Palmyra — has been pulverized. Somewhere between 300,000 and half a million Syrians are dead. Almost twelve million have been displaced. None of this is pretty.

At the same time, coexistent with the horror, some Syrian communities are practicing democracy, organizing themselves for practical rather than ideological purposes, debating everything, publishing independent newspapers, running independent radio stations, and producing art, music and writing on a massive scale. This much more positive story is largely unknown outside the country. And that’s one reason why I, a British-Syrian novelist, and Leila al-Shami, a British-Syrian activist, wrote our book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.

One of the supposed reasons for the American and British invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was to bring democracy to the Arabs. In Syria in 2016 there are over 400 local councils, most of them democratically elected, and most of us in the West have never heard of them.

Revolutionary Syrian voices have been drowned by war noise, inaccurate grand narratives and simplistic assumptions. Currently under full-scale Russian and Iranian military assault, they are now in danger of elimination. We may well end up with Putin’s preferred choice — only Assad and the jihadists left standing. So for the historical record, we should know that another alternative existed, and one of rare intelligence and courage. And for our children’s sake, we need to better understand the escalating Syrian tragedy, and to encourage our leaders to do better. [Continue reading…]

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An American in Istanbul: Molly Crabapple on art and activism

Pacific Standard: “To draw is to objectify, to go momentarily to a place where aesthetics mean more than morality,” Molly Crabapple writes in her memoir, Drawing Blood, an addictive volume that I devoured a few weeks ago during a flight from Rome to Istanbul, the city that stands at the center of Crabapple’s fascination with what was once called “the Orient.” With her artwork already placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, her essays and illustrations published in venues like Vanity Fair and Vice, the 33-year-old artist is a curious composite of entrepreneur, revolutionary, and bohemian artist. The book is an account of Crabapple’s formation as an artist and political dissident, from her childhood in Long Island to teenage travels in Europe and the Middle East, to her mature return to New York in the heart of Occupy protests at Zuccotti Park.

Drawing Blood is designed as a notebook, where Crabapple sketches her life story in both words and lines — 30 short chapters featuring snappy episodes from the artist’s life crammed together with illustrations done in the style of a courtroom sketch. The book’s central characters and places, meanwhile — a group of intellectuals, artists, sex workers, refugees, dissidents, bookstores, and streets who have helped shape Crabapple’s conscience — come to life in the book’s sketches, wherein Crabapple seems to have painted each at the moment she first came into contact with them. [Continue reading…]

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Why science and religion aren’t as opposed as you might think

By Stephen Jones, Newman University and Carola Leicht, University of Kent

The debate about science and religion is usually viewed as a competition between worldviews. Differing opinions on whether the two subjects can comfortably co-exist – even among scientists – are pitted against each other in a battle for supremacy.

For some, like the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, science and religion represent two separate areas of enquiry, asking and answering different questions without overlap. Others, such as the biologist Richard Dawkins – and perhaps the majority of the public – see the two as fundamentally opposed belief systems.

But another way to look at the subject is to consider why people believe what they do. When we do this, we discover that the supposed conflict between science and religion is nowhere near as clear cut as some might assume.

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An American divide

McClatchy reports: “The establishment is anybody with big money who can get to the Congressmen and lobbyists,” said Judy Surak, a nurse from Clemson, South Carolina.

All over South Carolina, ask the people reveling in the music at Greenville Heritage Main Street Fridays, or starting their day with homemade onion sausage at Lizard’s Thicket on Two Notch Road in Columbia to define the establishment, and they usually echo Surak.

They often add a gentle qualifier: They don’t want to blow up the political system. They just want it to be more responsive, to work better.

“The country’s long-term problems have to be fixed within the system we have,” said Mark Cruise, a Columbia executive.

The most wary tend to be better educated, higher earning, older voters, according to the national poll. They tend to see establishment figures easing in and out of lucrative, comfortable jobs, climbing ladders to success that seem unavailable to the rank and file who populate South Carolina’s office cubicles.

Of 78 members of Congress who left after the 2010 elections, four out of five found work with lobbying firms or clients, state or federal governments or political action committees.

One of Bill Clinton’s former White House spokesmen hosts an influential network Sunday talk show. NBC hires Chelsea Clinton as a “special correspondent,” paying her a reported $600,000 annually, far above the typical pay for a reporter with no journalistic experience.

The ties are intricate and deep. Five Treasury secretaries in the past three presidential administrations have either headed big Wall Street firms, or became top executives after leaving their jobs.

Every member of the U.S. Supreme Court has at least one Ivy League degree. Every president elected since 1988 is an Ivy Leaguer. So are Clinton and Trump.

Even among Republican presidential candidates who insist they’re running against the establishment, establishment ties have served them well.

Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, promotes himself as a maverick, but has two Ivy League degrees and worked in state and federal governments before being elected. Gov. John Kasich of Ohio was a congressman for 18 years, then was a senior executive at Lehman Brothers’ investment banking division. Trump’s company is building a luxury hotel five blocks from the White House.

Somehow, many see Trump through a different lens.

“He has all he ever wanted. He doesn’t have to bother with this,” explained Elaine Verma, a Kiawah Island court reporter. “He just has the best interests of the United States at heart.” [Continue reading…]

Nicholas Kristof writes: I personally made the mistake of regarding Trump’s candidacy as a stunt, scoffing at the idea that he could be the nominee. Mea culpa.

We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing [the first being that the news media gave Trump $1.9 billion in free publicity, and the second being that the media treated Trump as a farce]: We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated. “The media has been out of touch with these Americans,” [Ann] Curry notes.

Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.

All this said, I have to add that I don’t know if more fact-checking would have mattered. Tom Brokaw of NBC did outstanding work challenging Trump, but he says that when journalists have indeed questioned Trump’s untrue statements, nothing much happens: “His followers find fault with the questions, not with his often incomplete, erroneous or feeble answers.” [Continue reading…]

Once a system is perceived as rigged, its agents lose social authority — and that opens a space in which authority is up for grabs and the loudest voices will be those who claim their own authority on the basis that they operate outside the establishment. Paradoxically, authority is easily transferred to those who possess none.

Someone like Kristof can spend as much time as he wants talking to jobless Americans, but that won’t change his status as a member of the establishment. It won’t increase his level of influence among those Americans who are open to the influence of people like Alex Jones.

Half of Republicans don’t believe in evolution. 40% of conservative Republicans think global warming will never happen. 43% of Republicans think that President Obama is a Muslim.

Alex Jones now claims that “the establishment is announcing that they do intend to cancel the presidential election in this country.” And he says the mainstream media is being encouraged to report it “like it’s no big deal.”

In a Facebook video, Jones hands over to his cameraman, Buckley Hamman, who says: “Whether or not Trump is the person that we all hope and believe that he is, he is our last best hope at this point…”

“That’s right,” Jones interjects, “the establishment is scared of him.”

“They don’t have a right to come steal the elections and steal the government and be run by foreign interest, like communist China and all these other foreign governments and Saudi Arabia, telling us we can’t have Donald Trump. Donald Trump could be a monster and I would say we have to vote for him because these foreign mass murderers tell us he’s the worst guy in history.”

Hamman adds: “He is aware, he is open and he is conscious to the idea of the world being enslaved. And he is pissed off about it and he doesn’t want to have it happen any more… And look at how brilliant he is at manipulating the media.”

And who does Trump hold up as an authoritative media source? Alex Jones.

The problem in a broken political system where the mainstream media has largely abandoned its responsibility as a fourth estate, is that the doors get flung open to false prophets — people whose passion for “truth telling” and “exposing lies,” can seduce an audience ripe for a populist, xenophobic message.

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Why young people are right about Hillary Clinton

Matt Taibbi writes: I was disappointed to hear that Rolling Stone had endorsed Hillary Clinton, but I also understood. In many ways, the endorsement by my boss and editor, Jann Wenner, read like the result of painful soul-searching, after this very magazine had a profound influence on a similar race, back in 1972.

Jann explains this eloquently in “Hillary Clinton for President“:

“Rolling Stone has championed the ‘youth vote’ since 1972, when 18-year-olds were first given the right to vote. The Vietnam War was a fact of daily life then, and Sen. George McGovern, the liberal anti-war activist from South Dakota, became the first vessel of young Americans, and Hunter S. Thompson wrote our first presidential-campaign coverage. We worked furiously for McGovern. We failed; Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.”

The failure of George McGovern had a major impact on a generation of Democrats, who believed they’d faced a painful reality about the limits of idealism in American politics. Jann sums it up: “Those of us there learned a very clear lesson: America chooses its presidents from the middle, not from the ideological wings.”

But it would be a shame if we disqualified every honest politician, or forever disavowed the judgment of young people, just because George McGovern lost an election four decades ago.

That ’72 loss hovered like a raincloud over the Democrats until Bill Clinton came along. He took the White House using a formula engineered by a think tank, the Democratic Leadership Council, that was created in response to losses by McGovern and Walter Mondale.

The new strategy was a party that was socially liberal but fiscally conservative. It counterattacked Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, a racially themed appeal to disaffected whites Nixon tabbed the “Silent Majority,” by subtly taking positions against the Democrats’ own left flank.

In 1992 and in 1996, Clinton recaptured some of Nixon’s territory through a mix of populist positions (like a middle-class tax cut) and the “triangulating” technique of pushing back against the Democrats’ own liberal legacy on issues like welfare, crime and trade.

And that was the point. No more McGoverns. The chief moral argument of the Clinton revolution was not about striving for an end to the war or poverty or racism or inequality, but keeping the far worse Republicans out of power.

The new Democratic version of idealism came in a package called “transactional politics.” It was about getting the best deal possible given the political realities, which we were led to believe were hopelessly stacked against the hopes and dreams of the young.

In fact, it was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that D.C. pundits first began complaining about a thing they called “purity.” This was code for any politician who stood too much on principle. The American Prospect in 1995 derisively described it as an “unwillingness to share the burden of morally ambiguous compromise.” Sometimes you had to budge a little for the sake of progress.

Jann describes this in the context of saluting the value of “incremental politics” and solutions that “stand a chance of working.” The implication is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don’t realize what it takes to get things done.

But I think they do understand. Young people have repudiated the campaign of Hillary Clinton in overwhelming and historic fashion, with Bernie Sanders winning under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins, as high as 80 to 85 percent in many states. He has done less well with young African-American voters, but even there he’s seen some gains as time has gone on. And the energy coming from the pre-middle-aged has little to do with an inability to appreciate political reality.

Instead, the millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary’s campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others.

And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues. [Continue reading…]

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Humans of New York founder takes on Donald Trump

The New York Times reports: Brandon Stanton, the nimble shutterbug behind the immensely popular photo blog Humans of New York, has worked hard to filter politics and moral judgments out of his posts, intent on maintaining objectivity as he captures his subjects in words and on film, letting them speak for themselves.

That changed last week when Mr. Stanton, 32, shed his sedulously cultivated neutrality to take on Donald J. Trump, excoriating the Republican presidential candidate in a 300-word Facebook post presented as an open letter to Mr. Trump.

“I’ve watched you retweet racist images,” the post read in part. “I’ve watched you retweet racist lies. I’ve watched you take 48 hours to disavow white supremacy. I’ve watched you joyfully encourage violence, and promise to ‘pay the legal fees’ of those who commit violence on your behalf.”

The reaction was explosive. Within eight hours the post was shared 712,000 times, eventually garnering more than 2.2 million “likes,” 1,131,389 shares and 69,000 comments, making it among the most-shared posts in the history of Facebook. In the process, it turned Mr. Stanton, already a best-selling author, into a web sensation. [Continue reading…]

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The painful lessons of Brussels seem hard to learn, so they continue

Rami G Khouri writes: The terror attacks in Brussels this week, beyond their inherent cruelty and criminality, in themselves are not particularly distinctive or noteworthy in the larger picture of Islamic State and other acts of terrorism, which have become common fare in this era of expanding violence across all continents. Terrorism database compilers are working overtime these months trying to take note of every such act — and that may be the real significance of what is going on these days: hundreds of thousands of desperate and dehumanized individuals transform their former local grumblings or security-forced passivity into a growing global network of terrorists and anarchists whose numbers are beyond the capacity of any intelligence system’s ability to monitor, arrest, prevent, or shut down.

The heart of this criminal universe mainly comprises Arabs or emigrants of Arab descent. The terror problem at its deepest core is the consequence of the dysfunction of mostly Arab societies that have been subjected to more than half a century of security-enforced docility and lack of citizen rights. Nearly 400 million human beings today across the Arab world were born with innate natural and human rights to freedom, identity, growth, and societal well-being, but they have not been allowed to manifest these dimensions of their full humanity.

Economic, political, environmental, and social constraints that have grown more severe in recent decades have sparked a terrible cycle of stagnation and de-development in the minds and capabilities of men and women — while shopping malls, water-pipe cafes, reality television, supermarkets, and cell phone shops have proliferated like mad across the Arab world, in a futile attempt to keep people busy and happy with material diversions. [Continue reading…]

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Brussels terror suspect was jailed over Ahmad Shah Massoud assassination, just before 9/11

Khamma Press reports: The coordinated terror attacks in Brussels has unveiled new information regarding the assassination of a key jiahdi leader in Afghanistan as a terror suspect who was arrested by police in Brussels after a dramatic stand-off at a tram stop is believed to have previously been jailed for helping to assassinate an Afghan leader just days before 9/11.

The suspect has been identified as Abderaman A who was shot in the leg at the tram stop in Schaerbeek because he was carrying a rucksack police believed contained a bomb.

Massoud was the arch rival of the Taliban group and was holding the last strategic stronghold in northern Panjsher province as he was assassinated in a suicide attack during an interview by militants who had disguised themselves as journalists.

He was killed shortly before the deadly terrorist attack on New York and Washington and shortly after he paid a visit to Brussels where he issued warnings regarding the terror attack plots by al-Qaeda terrorist network.

In his speech in European Pearliament in April 2001 Massoud “warned the US government” about bin Laden as he was on a diplomatic trip to Europe seeking financial support for his cause from the EU and individual countries. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Mail reports: Osama bin Laden is widely believed to have ordered Massoud’s killing as a favour to the Taliban, whose protection would be critical after the 9/11 attacks.

Passports found on Mr Masood’s killers were linked to a Brussels-based militant cell run by Tarek Maaroufi.

Ameroud was handed a sentence of seven years when he went on trial for his part in the assassination at a court in Paris in 2005. [Continue reading…]

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Brussels attacks: Molenbeek’s gangster jihadists

Secunder Kermani writes: Most people in Molenbeek are rather sick of journalists – they resent the way they are portrayed in the media as a “jihadist capital of Europe”. But one phrase you often hear when foreign journalists attempt a vox pop is that “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam”.

Certainly, many of those who joined IS from the area did not come from particularly religious backgrounds.

Salah Abdeslam and his elder brother Brahim – who blew himself up in the Paris attacks – used to run a cafe in Molenbeek that sold alcohol and was closed down for drug offences. One friend of the brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam “watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another”. He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no-one took him seriously.

Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing – this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris. [Continue reading…]

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CIA-armed militias are shooting at Pentagon-armed ones in Syria

The Los Angeles Times reports: Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud. [Continue reading…]

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Assad hails Syrian regime’s capture of Palmyra from ISIS

The Guardian reports: The Syrian and Russian governments have hailed their recapture of the ancient oasis city of Palmyra from Islamic State, ending a 10-month ordeal that saw the destruction of some of the historic site’s most famed monuments.

The battle for the city is the latest in a string of defeats for Isis, now in retreat across Syria and Iraq, where it once controlled vast tracts of territory: nearly half of Syria and the desert plains of Nineveh and most of Anbar in Iraq.

Palmyra’s reclamation by Assad’s army, after weeks of intense combat, was aided by some of the heaviest Russian airstrikes since Moscow launched its military intervention last autumn. It is also a significant morale boost for the embattled Syrian strongman as well as the Kremlin. [Continue reading…]

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Global warming’s terrifying new chemistry

Bill McKibben writes: Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.

There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet methane, otherwise known as CH4.

In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere. [Continue reading…]

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How much does it matter whether God exists?

Nathan Schneider writes: Two rooms, in two different cities, but pretty much the same scene: one man stands before a few dozen supporters, many of them middle-aged white males, plus a smaller, precocious cohort in early adulthood. As the man speaks, they interrupt him with good, earnest, detailed questions, which he ably answers more or less to their satisfaction. These crowds crave the intricacies of arguments and the upshots of science. The only thing that seems beyond their ken is how their counterparts in the other room could be convinced of something so wrong.

One of those rooms was in New York City, high in an office building overlooking the ruins that then still remained of the World Trade Center; the man was Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist and ‘New Atheist’ polemicist. The man in the other room was his arch-rival, the evangelical Christian philosopher and debater William Lane Craig, speaking in a classroom on the sprawling campus of his megachurch in Marietta, Georgia. If one were to attend both events without understanding English, it would be hard to know the difference.

Whether such a thing as God exists is one of those questions that we use to mark our identities, choose our friends, and divide our families. But there are also moments when the question starts to seem suspect, or only partly useful. Once, backstage before a sold-out debate at the University of Notre Dame between Craig and Sam Harris, Dawkins’s fellow New Atheist, I heard an elderly Catholic theologian approach Harris and spit out: ‘I agree with you more than I do with that guy!’

During the heyday of the New Atheist movement, a few years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was in the wake of a teenage conversion to Catholicism. One might think that my converts’ zeal would pit me squarely against the New Atheist camp. But it didn’t. Really, neither side of the does-God-exist debates seemed to represent me, and the arguments in question had little to do with my embrace of my new-found faith. I had been drawn by the loosey-goosey proposition that love can conquer hate and death, expressed concretely in the lives of monks I had briefly lived among and members of the Catholic Worker Movement who shared their homes with the homeless and abandoned. I actually agreed with most of what the New Atheists wrote about science and free enquiry; what I disagreed most sorely with them about was their hawkish support for military invasions in Muslim-majority countries. [Continue reading…]

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