Author Archives: News Sources

NATO attacks Syria — on Twitter

Bashar al-Assad might need to take refuge in his cyber-bunker to protect himself from today’s concerted attack by NATO Secretary General AndersFogh Rasmussen. After four laser-guided tweets struck in the space of less than ten minutes, cyber-smoke could be seen rising above Damascus.


Don’t read my jest the wrong way. To mock NATO’s tough stance is not to imply that what it should really be doing is launching real missiles. All I’m saying is, spare us from the posturing. It doesn’t help anyone.

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How the Israel lobby erodes U.S. sovereignty

Ahmed Moor writes: The United States is a sovereign country. That is sometimes hard to remember.

Illinois Senator Mark Kirk had a stroke in January. The serious neurological event sent him into surgery, where doctors excised two, tiny, damaged pieces of his brain. By all accounts, the senator is now in great recovery, his office releasing a video in May, which showed him walking on a treadmill and describing his eagerness to “get back to work”. Yet it appears that he has already got back to it.

At the end of last month, Kirk sponsored an amendment to a Senate appropriations bill, seemingly intent on stripping the United Nations Relief and Works Agency of some of its funding. His attempt to re-determine the definition of Palestinian refugees was met by stiff opposition from the State Department, but the senator prevailed – a considerable feat for a recovering patient.

The amendment requires the State Department to distinguish between and report on how many of those Palestinians who receive assistance from UNRWA were personally displaced from their homes as a result of the 1948 war, and those who are their descendants – which the UN agency continues to count as refugees, unable to return to their ancestral homes.

Ha’aretz reported that the senator had some help with his legislative burden, and not only from his deputy chief of staff, Richard Goldberg. It turns out that the amendment to the bill was first written by an Israeli politician. Einat Wilf, a member of the Israeli parliament, reportedly spent months working with current and former AIPAC employees, including Steve Rosen – who was once suspected by FBI agents of obtaining classified US government information and passing it on to Israeli officials – to deliver the language on Palestinian refugees to the US legislature.

In summary: a senator who suffered crippling neurological damage received legislation from an Israeli politician by way of AIPAC before he slipped it into a US bill that eventually became law. In other words, an Israeli politician helped write a US law. Then she boasted about it. [Continue reading…]

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A new urban consciousness in the Arab world?

Deen Sharp writes: New York’s built environment is continuously being made and remade. The 1950s and 1960s was a particularly dramatic period for construction in the big apple, and a single man, Robert Moses was responsible for much of the reconstruction. For twenty years, Moses constructed huge highway infrastructure projects and urban renewal projects that dislocated hundreds of thousands of people. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities and led activist campaigns to fight against Moses grandiose projects.

The rise of Jacobs and the activist groups that supported her vision of preserving historic building and the preference for low-rise housing changed the way people and policy planners thought about cities. Good cities, Jacobs argued, encouraged: social interaction at the street level, public transport, pedestrianization and mix development. Jacobs also noted the criticality to the social life a city of old, as well as architecturally significant, buildings.

In the Arab region, the ghost of Robert Moses has cast a large shadow. In the streets of Beirut, Lebanon the evidence of his legacy is evident in the reconstruction process following the civil war. The parallels between Robert Moses and Rafik Hariri are startling. In Cairo, Moses’ legacy is seen through the creation of the multiple desert cities and highways, in addition to the – attempted – dislocation of hundreds of thousands of urban poor. Indeed, if Moses had not died in 1981 it would not be hard to imagine he personally wrote the grandiose Cairo 2050 proposal for the future redevelopment of Cairo.

Activists, architects, social planners and residents of Arab cities have not been quiescent to the onslaught of these large-scale projects. Indeed, some have argued that the Egyptian uprising was fuelled by government attempts to remove the urban poor from downtown Cairo to the desert cities.

In addition to large-scale projects there have also been piecemeal reconstructions by developers and speculators to reshape the urban fabric. Whole districts have been transformed building by building through the tearing down – often illegally – of low-scale buildings and replacing them with high-rises. The economic benefit is simple to understand, but the cost to the social fabric of the city and its inhabitants devastating and complex.

In response, social movements across the Middle East are calling for a new urban consciousness among citizens. [Continue reading…]

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For Iran, sanctions are a price worth paying to preserve the Islamic republic

Hadi Kahalzadeh and John Schiemann write: The latest wave of sanctions against Iran comes into effect today. Such measures are largely predicated on a “rational actor model” in which the west hopes Iran’s leaders will eventually find it in their own interests to give up their nuclear programme. The problem with such a strategy is not that Iran’s leaders are irrational but that such a game only works if the west knows how Iran evaluates costs and benefits and the options Iran believes it has available.

After the failure of previous sanctions, the west has imposed a new set of much tougher sanctions while Iran has adopted a more assertive stance vis-a-vis the west, stating that it will respond to economic and military threats with its “own threats”. Why, then, has Iran failed to respond to international pressure?

According to the basic sanctions model, the target of sanctions will alter its behaviour in the desired direction when the costs of defiance become greater than its perceived costs of compliance. Yet despite Iran’s reliance on oil, the structural weakness of its economy, and deep economic costs such as the sharp rise in inflation, negative economic growth and increasing unemployment, it has failed to bend. This should prompt policymakers to ask how Iran evaluates the costs of sanctions and defying the west. [Continue reading…]

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Plan to end Syria crisis falls flat

Matt Lee writes: The much-hyped plan to end Syria’s misery and guide its transition to democracy appears to have fallen flat despite the endorsement of Western powers.

Russia’s objections gutted the most stringent conditions on a potential interim leader in Damascus. The Syrian opposition quickly dismissed the proposal as a waste of time and with “no value on the ground.”

The U.S. and its allies insist the plan will force Syrian President Bashar Assad from power. Russia disagrees and Assad is unlikely to acquiesce.

It all leaves U.N. envoy Kofi Annan’s efforts to end 15 months of bloodshed no better off than before.

Western nations needed to win Russia’s backing for the plan at an international conference Saturday in Geneva, so they dropped the demand that “those whose continued presence and participation would undermine the credibility of the transition and jeopardize stability and reconciliation” would be excluded from the process.

That was widely understood to mean Assad and much of his inner circle, and while the West insisted, Assad’s main allies in Moscow resisted intensely.

As a result, the plan contains no criteria for excluding anyone from the transitional government and leaves its composition entirely up to the “mutual consent” of Assad administration and the fractured opposition. Both sides presumably have unlimited veto power over members of the interim government, which could prolong the stalemate and keep Assad in charge.

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Rise in sea level can’t be stopped: scientists

Reuters reports: Rising sea levels cannot be stopped over the next several hundred years, even if deep emissions cuts lower global average temperatures, but they can be slowed down, climate scientists said in a study on Sunday.

A lot of climate research shows that rising greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for increasing global average surface temperatures by about 0.17 degrees Celsius a decade from 1980-2010 and for a sea level rise of about 2.3mm a year from 2005-2010 as ice caps and glaciers melt.

Rising sea levels threaten about a tenth of the world’s population who live in low-lying areas and islands which are at risk of flooding, including the Caribbean, Maldives and Asia-Pacific island groups.

More than 180 countries are negotiating a new global climate pact which will come into force by 2020 and force all nations to cut emissions to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius this century – a level scientists say is the minimum required to avert catastrophic effects.

But even if the most ambitious emissions cuts are made, it might not be enough to stop sea levels rising due to the thermal expansion of sea water, said scientists at the United States’ National Centre for Atmospheric Research, U.S. research organization Climate Central and Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research in Melbourne.

“Even with aggressive mitigation measures that limit global warming to less than 2 degrees above pre-industrial values by 2100, and with decreases of global temperature in the 22nd and 23rd centuries … sea level continues to rise after 2100,” they said in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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‘I am an illegal alien on my own land’

David Shulman writes: In 1949, shortly after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar—the doyen of modern Hebrew prose writers—published a story that became an instant classic. “Khirbet Khizeh” is a fictionalized account of the destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of all its inhabitants by Israeli soldiers in the course of the war. The narrator, a soldier in the unit that carries out the order, is sickened by what is being done to the innocent villagers. Here he is in Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck’s translation (Ibis Publications, 2008):

I felt a terrifying collapse inside me. I had a single, set idea, like a hammered nail, that I could never be reconciled to anything, so long as the tears of a weeping child still glistened as he walked along with his mother, who furiously fought back her soundless tears, on his way into exile, bearing with him a roar of injustice and such a scream that—it was impossible that no one in the world would gather that scream in when the moment came….

Still, the narrator goes along with the expulsion without overt protest. Yizhar himself was an intelligence officer during the war; he describes events he may well have seen himself: “We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile. What in God’s name were we doing in this place?”

Somewhat surprisingly, this story was taught for many years in Israeli secondary schools as part of the modern Hebrew canon; even today it is still on the books as an optional text for the matriculation exam (unless the Netanyahu government has secretly removed it). The story embodies the conscience of Israel at the moment of the state’s formation. It also gives voice to a much older Jewish tradition of moral protest and the struggle for social justice. When I was growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s, I mistakenly thought that this tradition was at the core of what it meant to be Jewish.

Sixty-three years have passed since Yizhar wrote “Khirbet Khizeh.” I wish I could say that what he described was an ugly exception and that such actions don’t happen any more. It is not, and they do. This week I find myself in Susya, in the South Hebron hills, near the southern corner of the West Bank. Like their counterparts in many other Palestinian villages, Susya’s approximately 300 inhabitants are impoverished, badly scarred, terrified, and defenseless. The week before last the officers of the Civil Administration, that is, the Israeli occupation authority, turned up with new demolition orders in their hands; these orders apply to nearly all the standing structures in the village — mostly tents, ramshackle huts, sheep-pens, latrines, and the wind-and-sun-powered turbine that Israeli activists put up some three years back to generate electricity on this stony, thirsty hilltop in the desert. If the orders are carried out — this could happen at any moment — then it means the nearly complete destruction of an entire village and the violent expulsion of its people. They will be, quite literally, cast into the desert. [Continue reading…]

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Remembering Yitzhak Shamir, leading Israeli terrorist and former prime minister

The Financial Times reports: Yitzhak Shamir, who has died at the age of 96, is most likely to be remembered as a terrorist against British rule in Palestine during the 1940s and as a man whose aggressive Jewish settlement policy on Arab lands may have stymied Middle East peace for a generation.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants that established the state of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its land”.

In the New York Times, Joel Brinkley writes: Under [Shamir’s] leadership [in 1942 the Stern Gang] began a campaign of what it called personal terror, assassinating top British military and government officers, often gunning them down in the street.

To the Jewish public, and even to the other Jewish underground groups, Mr. Shamir’s gang was “lacking even a spark of humanity and Jewish conscience,” Israel Rokach, the mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944 after Stern Gang gunmen shot three British police officers on the streets of his city.

Years later, however, Mr. Shamir contended that it had been more humane to assassinate specific military or political figures than to attack military installations and possibly kill innocent people, as the other underground groups did. Besides, he once said, “a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history.”

Several histories of the period have asserted that he masterminded a failed attempt to kill the British high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, and the killing in Cairo of Britain’s minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. When Mr. Shamir was asked about these episodes in later years, his denials held a certain evasive tone.

It was during his time in the underground that Mr. Shamir met Shulamit Levy, who was his courier and confidante, he wrote in his autobiography, “Summing Up.” The couple married in 1944, meeting at a location in Jerusalem and gathering people off the street as witnesses, said their daughter, Gilada Diamant. After a hasty ceremony in deep cover, each departed immediately for a separate city.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Shamir is survived by a son, Yair, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His wife died last year.

For a brief period after World War II, the three major Jewish underground groups cooperated — until the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. Scores of people were killed, and Mr. Shamir was among those arrested and exiled to an internment camp in Eritrea. But he escaped a few months later and took refuge in France. He arrived in the newly independent Israel in May 1948.

Mr. Shamir was a pariah of sorts to the new Labor government of Israel, which regarded him as a terrorist. Rebuffed in his efforts to work in the government, he drifted from one small job to another until 1955, when he finally found a government agency that appreciated his past: the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.

President Obama: “Yitzhak Shamir dedicated his life to the State of Israel. From his days working for Israel’s independence to his service as Prime Minister, he strengthened Israel’s security and advanced the partnership between the United States and Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the people of Israel.”

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U.S. must arm Syria rebels despite Islamists: opposition

Reuters reports: Syria’s opposition says the United States must overcome its fear of Islamists among the rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, and start arming the resistance movement to show it wants the entire ruling elite removed.

Islamists are among the most effective fighters against the Syrian leadership, some opposition figures said, and Washington needs to know that while these rebels are conservative Muslims they are a far cry from Afghan-style jihadi militants.

Frustration is growing that the United States will not supply weapons to the rebels, who have largely used small arms during the 16-month uprising against Assad and a state apparatus dominated by members of his Alawite minority.

“We have been kissing the hand of the United States and the rest of the world for the 16 months to intervene. Now, after Assad spared no one in Syria, the United States is surprised that al Qaeda may be operating in the country,” veteran opposition campaigner Fawaz al-Tello said from Istanbul.

Opposition campaigners and Free Syrian Army commanders said the rebels need weapons such as shoulder-fired missiles to destroy the tanks and bring down the helicopters that Assad is using against the uprising. Washington could anyway supply parts of the diverse rebel movement which are more to its liking.

“The U.S. has intelligence on the ground and by clever management it can channel weapons to the right people. First it has to give a clear signal that it really wants an end of the Alawite-dominated police state in Syria and not just the sidelining of Bashar,” said Tello, speaking from Istanbul.

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Researchers demonstrate how easy it is to hijack a drone

Fox News reports: A small surveillance drone flies over an Austin stadium, diligently following a series of GPS waypoints that have been programmed into its flight computer. By all appearances, the mission is routine.

Suddenly, the drone veers dramatically off course, careering eastward from its intended flight path. A few moments later, it is clear something is seriously wrong as the drone makes a hard right turn, streaking toward the south. Then, as if some phantom has given the drone a self-destruct order, it hurtles toward the ground. Just a few feet from certain catastrophe, a safety pilot with a radio control saves the drone from crashing into the field.

From the sidelines, there are smiles all around over this near-disaster. Professor Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory have just completed a successful experiment: illuminating a gaping hole in the government’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones.

They could be turned into weapons.

“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys told Fox News.

In other words, with the right equipment, anyone can take control of a GPS-guided drone and make it do anything they want it to.

“Spoofing” is a relatively new concern in the world of GPS navigation. Until now, the main problem has been GPS jammers, readily available over the Internet, which people use to, for example, hide illicit use of a GPS-tracked company van. It’s also believed Iran brought down that U.S. spy drone last December by jamming its GPS, forcing it into an automatic landing mode after it lost its bearings.

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Iraq’s growing oil-financed consumerism

The New York Times reports: One has a designated prayer room. Another frisks patrons at the entrance, requiring them to check their pistols, like coats in a fancy restaurant. They are good places to escape the desert heat, and in a conservative Islamic culture, they are one of the few places where young couples openly flirt or women smoke cigarettes in public.

American-style malls, fixtures in most of Iraq’s wealthy Persian Gulf neighbors, have come late to war-torn Baghdad, but Iraqis are taking to them now like Valley Girls, as a consumer society fueled by the country’s booming oil profits begins to flourish here.

Big malls are being built across the capital. The largest will include a five-star hotel and a hospital, and at one already in operation, a truck arrives each week carrying frozen Big Macs from a McDonald’s in Amman, Jordan.

The construction boom is generally hailed as proof of Iraq’s progress and return to normalcy, more than nine years after the American invasion and six months after the last combat troops departed. But economists and other experts see a dark side. They say the emerging consumer culture masks fundamental flaws in an economy that, like those of other energy-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stifles productive enterprise by relying almost solely on oil profits and the millions of government salaries those profits finance as part of the country’s vast patronage system.

“Basically, Iraq is trying to build a consumer society, not on state capitalism like in China, but on socialism,” said Marie-Hélène Bricknell, the World Bank’s representative in Iraq.

One of Washington’s principal aims was to develop a free-market economy here. Yet with so much oil wealth at hand, Iraq’s leaders have taken few steps to develop a private sector. More than 90 percent of Iraq’s government revenues derive from oil, and with oil production rapidly expanding, the country’s annual revenues could triple over the next five years, to more than $300 billion. With that kind of wealth rolling in, one of the greatest questions the country faces is what it will do with all that cash.

Given the statist mentality of most top Iraqi officials and widespread corruption, diplomats are generally pessimistic that the expected boom in government revenues will be used either to help develop a private sector or to pay for an ambitious public works program — something the country, where 40 percent of the population still lacks access to safe drinking water, desperately needs. Instead, experts worry it will finance more of what Iraq already has: corruption and a huge government work force.

Most of the major industries remain in the hands of the state, and the greatest ambition of many Iraqis is to secure a government job. According to statistics from the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, almost a third of the labor force works for the government. That is more than five million people, and the number is rising, as political parties that run government ministries use paychecks to expand their constituencies. [Continue reading…]

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The Invisible War

Salon: Kirby Dick’s “The Invisible War” is already the darling of the festival circuit, a documentary that won the audience award at Sundance and critical praise for its sharp, skillful storytelling. But as compelling as his film is, the director of “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” and the Catholic Church sex abuse documentary “Twist of Faith” doesn’t merely want to impress you. This is a movie that intends to reform the entire United States military. And it stands a very good chance of succeeding.

Inspired by Helen Benedict’s 2007 Salon story “The Private War of Women Soldiers,” “The Invisible War” is a gut-wrenching condemnation of the way the military has, across the board and in every branch, failed to protect its members from sexual assault – and then failed them again and again afterward. In a series of harrowing personal accounts, victims – mostly women but a sampling of men as well – recount the trauma of their rapes while in uniform and the sickening personal consequences they experienced for reporting them. It’s estimated that over 20 percent of female veterans have been sexually assaulted during their service – and some believe the real figure is even higher. It’s an epidemic.

As the film demonstrates, because the military handles sexual assault internally, a stunning number of victims are simply brushed off by their superiors. But even more outrageously, many of them have faced retribution. The subjects speak of having their careers ruined, of being punished for committing “adultery” with their married rapists, or being denied veterans’ benefits for the long-term consequences of the emotional and physical batterings they received.

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Assad’s future blurry as world powers sketch new Syria transition plan

Bloomberg reports: World powers agreed today on a plan for a Syrian transition government that doesn’t directly address the fate of President Bashar al-Assad.

The parties altered a draft agreement proposed by Kofi Annan, the envoy for the United Nations and Arab League, after Russia objected to language that would prohibit Assad and members of his inner circle from being part of a transitional government. The document also added a Russia-backed provision opposing “further militarization of the conflict,” alluding to Arab nations’ shipments of arms to the opposition.

International efforts to mediate a peace deal have stumbled over whether Assad must leave power before a transition can begin. The communique from foreign ministers in Geneva — which declares a “firm timetable” for actions without any dates or deadlines — may draw scrutiny over whether the U.S. and allies France and the U.K yielded too much to get a transition “road map” embraced by Russia and China.

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