Author Archives: News Sources

Struggling to adapt: The Muslim Brotherhood in a new Syria

A report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, by Aron Lund, makes these findings:

The Syrian Brotherhood is not as strong as commonly believed. The incessant focus on the Brotherhood by the Assad regime, Western nations, and rival opposition groups has helped it build a fearsome reputation. Its actual political and organizational capability appears to be far more modest.

The failures of others have benefited the Brotherhood. The real reason for the group’s success in the exile community is the extreme disorganization of the rest of the opposition. As long as rival actors cannot get their act together, the Brotherhood will win by default.

The Brotherhood tries to distance itself from extremism. Despite its theocratic ambitions and a past history of sectarian violence, the Brotherhood now promotes a moderate Islamist approach and seeks to accommodate concerns about its ideology. Since 2011, it has consistently cooperated with secular groups, spoken in favor of multiparty democracy, and worked through mainstream opposition frameworks such as the Syrian National Council, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, and the Free Syrian Army.

Several armed groups linked to the Brotherhood fight in Syria. The leadership refuses to admit to having an armed branch, but Brotherhood exiles have been funding armed groups since late 2011. The organization now controls or sponsors dozens of small paramilitary units inside Syria.

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Car bombs in Turkey kill at least 42 near Syria border

The Los Angeles Times reports: At least 42 people were reported dead Saturday in a pair of car bombings in the southern Turkish town of Reyhanli, the latest apparent example of spillover violence from the conflict in nearby Syria.

More than 140 people were injured, with at least 20 in critical condition, according to Turkish officials and news reports.

The blasts reportedly caused panic in the town, where tension has arisen between Syrian refugees and Turkish residents. Reyhanli, in Hatay province, is just a few miles from the Syrian border and has been a magnet for Syrian refugees and rebels.

After the bombings, outraged Turks attacked Syrians and cars with Syrian license plates, according to reports from a resident and the BBC, which quoted local news reports.

Some Turks have objected to the influx of Syrian refugees and express fear that the region is being dragged into the Syrian conflict.

“I never witnessed any explosions when I was in Syria so they brought them here so I wouldn’t miss out,” said a Syrian woman, Fairouz, reached in her home in Reyhanli. “Today they are giving us many surprises.”

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Sharif poised to form strong government after Pakistan poll

Reuters reports: Toppled in a 1999 military coup, jailed and exiled, Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif has made a triumphant election comeback and looks set to form a stable government capable of implementing reforms needed to rescue the fragile economy.

Sharif may not win enough seats to rule on his own but has built up enough momentum to avoid having to form a coalition with his main rivals, former cricketer Imran Khan’s Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

The steel magnate held off a challenge from Khan, who had hoped to break decades of dominance by Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and the PPP, led by the Bhutto family.

The two parties have formed governments whenever the military, the most powerful force in the nuclear-armed nation, has allowed civilian rule.

Khan put up a strong fight and he is likely to remain a force in politics, possibly becoming the main opposition figure. The PPP, which led the government for the last five years, has done badly and could come in third place.

Television channels said of the results declared by midday on Sunday, Sharif’s PML-N had captured 94 of the 272 contested National Assembly seats.

Based on trends, it was likely to get around 130, and should easily be able to make up the required majority of 137 with support from independents and small parties.

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New York Times Pakistan bureau chief expelled on eve of country’s election

The Guardian reports: The New York Times’ Pakistan bureau chief has been expelled from the country, on the eve of the national election.

The paper said Pakistan’s Interior Ministry had not explained why it ordered Declan Walsh out of the country. Police officers delivered the interior ministry’s order to Walsh at his home at 12.30am local time on Thursday.

“It is informed that your visa is hereby canceled in view of your undesirable activities,” the order said. “You are therefore advised to leave the country within 72 hours.”

This means Walsh must leave Pakistan by the night of the elections. Saturday’s election is being hailed as a milestone in the development of the country’s much abused democracy – it is the first time in Pakistan’s history that one elected government has handed power to another.
[…]
Walsh told the New York Times he was away from his home when he received a phone call from an unrecognized number that said: “Come home now.” He said a half-dozen police officers and a plainclothes officer were waiting outside his home. The plainclothes officer then gave him the order and asked him to sign for it.

“I opened the letter in front of him because I knew it was something serious,” he said. “This was a complete bolt from the blue. I had no inclination that anything of this sort was coming.”

The finger of blame is likely to be pointed at the country’s powerful military establishment, which made clear its anger at some of Walsh’s reporting, particularly on the CIA’s clandestine drone programme, an extremely controversial subject in the country.

In March, Walsh reported that unnamed US officials had denied two drone strikes that had been reported by Pakistan’s media, most likely based on information provided by Pakistan’s military intelligence service. The report suggested the army “may be using the [drone] program to disguise its own operations”.

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Voting in Pakistan

Basharat Peer writes: [O]n Saturday, Pakistan was overwhelmed by an enthusiastic outpouring of voters across classes and ethnicities. Some waited for hours to get into the polling booths. Some walked miles, in temperatures ranging from a hundred to a hundred and ten degrees Farenheit. Some had flown from U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, and the United States, taking time off from their jobs, to be able to cast their votes and make a statement in favour of sustained civilian rule, in hope of a better Pakistan.

One of the Pakistanis who partly lives abroad is the London-based novelist, Kamila Shamsie, the author, most recently, of “Burnt Shadows.” Shamsie had returned to her city, Karachi, before the elections. As she left home to vote, she began to tweet #pollingboothtales describing the atmosphere. Shamsie was moved by a mass turnout of women voters: “They came in niqab, they came in hijab, they came in combat trousers and even a kaftan,” she tweeted.

Shamsie had never seen voters in Pakistan so intent on making it to the polling booths and casting their ballots. “I went to vote in the morning, stood around two hours with very good-natured, chatty women all around me. Then it turned out that the ballot papers were invalid because they didn’t have the necessary official stamp,” Shamsie told me. She went home and returned after an hour. “An hour or so later the stamps arrived at the polling booth and I went back, queued for another two hours. People were wilting, but still determined. And I finally cast my vote. I am very moved by the Pakistan populace’s faith in this battered process, and I’d like to see that honored by the government (probably a coalition) which comes in,” she continued. [Continue reading…]

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Two last-minute candidates stir up Iran presidential race

The Los Angeles Times reports: The run-up to Iran’s June presidential election took a dramatic turn Saturday with last-minute candidacy announcements by two controversial political figures: former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, top aide to outgoing incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the final moments before the five-day registration period expired, Rafsanjani and Mashaei arrived via separate entrances at the Interior Ministry, where all would-be candidates were required to sign up by 6 p.m. Saturday.

Their cinematic entrance prompted cheers from rival groups of supporters who had gathered outside. Scuffles then erupted between the two groups, and order was not restored until police responded.

Ahmadinejad accompanied Mashaei, and the longtime friends held their hands aloft in a show of mutual support. Mashaei thanked the departing president, barred by law from seeking a third four-year term, for encouraging him to run.

Despite the theatrics, neither of the two candidates is guaranteed a place on the June 14 ballot. The Guardian Council, composed of senior clerics and jurists, vets candidates to determine who is qualified to run based on a series of criteria.

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Human activity pushes atmospheric carbon dioxide to highest level in 3 million years

LiveScience reports: The proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke 400 parts per million Thursday, according to one of the best climate records available.

The Keeling Curve, a daily record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, has been running continuously since March 1958, when a carbon dioxide monitor was installed at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. On the first day, the observatory measured a carbon dioxide concentration of 313 parts per million (ppm). The number means there were 313 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air per every million air molecules.

Now, the Keeling Curve has reached 400 ppm for the first time in human history, with a new measure of 400.03 ppm. The data are preliminary, pending quality control checks, according to the National Oceaninc and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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History repeats itself with ‘war on terror’

Remi Brulin writes: More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, we are finally getting a clearer picture of the ways in which the United States is waging what it calls its “war on terrorism.”

At the center of the government’s strategy has been the decision to shift the focus away from capturing and interrogating alleged terrorist suspects to killing them, with a series of covert wars prosecuted mostly by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command frequently relying on so-called kinetic operations: night raids, “find, fix and finish” operations, cruise missile strikes, and the increasing use of drones.

Yet these approaches raise not only fundamental legal and moral questions, but also doubts about their long-term strategic effectiveness. And, to a historian, they also carry disturbing echoes of the past.

Decades ago, Latin American regimes allied with the U.S., and then the U.S. government itself, insisted that they were fighting a war on terrorism. In the process, they resorted to methods and tactics that themselves fit any reasonable definition of terrorism. Indeed, America’s “targeted killings” and the 2004 decision to fund and train Iraqi special commandos echo very specific practices of the 1970s and 1980s. Considered in such a historical context, they highlight some of the fundamental contradictions and inconsistencies that lie at the heart of the discourse on terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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The political roots of American obesity

E. Douglas Kihn writes: Remember when Reagan was elected in 1980? He came in just at the beginning of the recession of 1981, when thousands of Americans suddenly found their incomes slashed or eliminated. His administration soon took on the unions, with the aim of breaking them. The first famous victim was PATCO – the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.

On August 3, 1981, the union declared a strike, seeking better working conditions, better pay and a 32-hour workweek. On August 5, following the PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order and banned them from federal service for life. PATCO was decertified from its right to represent workers by the Federal Labor Relations Authority on October 22, 1981.

From that time onwards, American unions have taken a savage beating to the point where only 7 percent of private enterprises are unionized today, and public service union employees – teachers, nurses, office workers, firefighters – are fighting everywhere to keep their jobs and unions.

It was during Reagan’s first term that the phrase bean counter came into prominent usage. These were the efficiency experts whose job it was to increase profits for the major corporations, mainly by introducing speedups, job consolidations, forced overtime, the hiring of part-time workers – along with artful and ruthless union-busting.

This was also the beginning of the “War on Iran,” the “War on Drugs,” the war against the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador (all of them Marxists doubtless bent on rampaging through the streets of US cities) and a dangerous escalation of threats against the Soviet Union/Evil Empire.

As social fear and insecurity rise, mental health declines.

Apparently, so does physical health. According to a new study from Rice University and the University Colorado at Boulder in Social Science Quarterly, despite modest gains in lifespan over the past century, the United States still trails many of the world’s countries when it comes to life expectancy, and its poorest citizens live approximately five years less than more affluent people. The United States, which spends far more money on medical care than other advanced industrialized countries, has the sickest residents in every category of unwellness.

The result of all of this hysteria and whip-cracking on the backs of the American workforce is that we feel harried and harassed, with little reward to show for it. Mental health has been worsening for a long time in the United States, and this mental decline has been the culprit behind so many – probably the majority – of physical health problems as well. One of them, as we shall see later, is obesity.

Chinese medicine can help to make sense of most mental and physical problems in the United States and organize them into three main categories: those of chronic tension, excessive interior heat and excess weight. Together, they form a super-syndrome some would call the American Syndrome, since it seems to be a universal phenomenon. [Continue reading…]

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Sword of division is poised over Iraq

The Los Angeles Times reports: Less than a year and a half after the last U.S. troops left, Iraq’s political leaders are openly debating the prospect of two dangerous paths for their country: de facto division or civil war. Perhaps both.

Tension between the Shiite majority, now in control of the levers of power, and the Sunni Arab minority, which dominated under Saddam Hussein, has been building for months. But politicians on all sides agree that the country has entered a perilous new phase, highlighted in late April by an attack on a Sunni protest camp by security forces that killed at least 45 people.

As word of the shootings spread, fighting erupted around the country, leaving more than 200 people dead. Overall, the United Nations said, more than 700 people were killed in Iraq in April, the highest monthly toll in five years.

Polarized political leaders openly discuss the threat of more bloodshed and the gradual breakup of the country, either through an informal declaration of an independent Sunni Arab region, modeled on the Kurds’ region in northern Iraq, or outright war. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistani authorities say CIA drone strikes have killed 896 civilians; high court accuses U.S. of war crimes

The Times of India reports: A Pakistani high court on Thursday declared the US drone strikes in the country’s tribal regions illegal and directed the government to use force to “protect the right to life” of its citizens. Stating that the United States strikes must be declared war crime as these kill innocent people, it also called the government to move a UN resolution against such attacks.

The high court in Pakistan’s north-western city of Peshawar announced the verdict against the CIA-driven drone strikes on four writ petitions, stating that these attacks kill innocent civilians and cause collateral damage. Time and again, Washington has said that drone attacks target al-Qaida and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas, from where they carry out cross-border attacks in Afghanistan.

According to a report submitted by political authorities of North Waziristan Agency, 896 Pakistani civilians living there were killed in the last five years until December 2012 while 209 were seriously injured. “In these drone attacks only 47 foreigners were killed and six injured. Many houses and vehicles and cattle heads worth millions of dollars were destroyed in these attacks. Similarly, in South Waziristan Agency, 70 drone strikes were carried out in the last five years until June 2012 in which 553 people were killed and 126 injured,” the report said.

“In view of the established facts, undeniable in nature, under the UN Charter & Conventions, the people of Pakistan have every right to ask the security forces either to prevent such strikes by force or to shoot down intruding drones,” the court verdict said.

“The government of Pakistan must ensure that no drone strike takes place in the future,” it added and also asked the ministry of foreign affairs to table a resolution in the UN against the US attacks.

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Israel has no desire for Assad to fall

Efraim Halevy, the former chief of Mossad, writes: In October 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to inform him that peace was at hand between Israel and Syria. Two weeks later, Rabin was dead, killed by a reactionary Jewish Israeli fanatic; the peace agreement that Rabin referenced died not long thereafter. But Israeli hopes for an eventual agreement with the Assad regime managed to survive. There have been four subsequent attempts by Israeli prime ministers — one by Ehud Barak, one by Ehud Olmert, and two by Benjamin Netanyahu — to forge a peace with Syria.

This shared history with the Assad regime is relevant when considering Israel’s strategy toward the ongoing civil war in Syria. Israel’s most significant strategic goal with respect to Syria has always been a stable peace, and that is not something that the current civil war has changed. Israel will intervene in Syria when it deems it necessary; last week’s attacks testify to that resolve. But it is no accident that those strikes were focused solely on the destruction of weapons depots, and that Israel has given no indication of wanting to intervene any further. Jerusalem, ultimately, has little interest in actively hastening the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Israel knows one important thing about the Assads: for the past 40 years, they have managed to preserve some form of calm along the border. Technically, the two countries have always been at war — Syria has yet to officially recognize Israel — but Israel has been able to count on the governments of Hafez and Bashar Assad to enforce the Separation of Forces Agreement from 1974, in which both sides agreed to a cease-fire in the Golan Heights, the disputed vantage point along their shared border. Indeed, even when Israeli and Syrian forces were briefly locked in fierce fighting in 1982 during Lebanon’s civil war, the border remained quiet. [Continue reading…]

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Stephen Hawking’s support for the boycott of Israel is a turning point

Ali Abunimah writes: A standard objection to the Palestinian campaign for the boycott of Israel is that it would cut off “dialogue” and hurt the chances of peace. We’ve heard this again in the wake of Professor Stephen Hawking’s laudable decision to withdraw from Israel’s Presidential Conference in response to requests from Palestinian academics – but it would be hard to think of a more unconvincing position as far as Palestinians are concerned.

One of the most deceptive aspects of the so-called peace process is the pretence that Palestinians and Israelis are two equal sides, equally at fault, equally responsible – thus erasing from view the brutal reality that Palestinians are an occupied, colonised people, dispossessed at the hands of one of the most powerful militaries on earth.

For more than two decades, under the cover of this fiction, Palestinians have engaged in internationally-sponsored “peace talks” and other forms of dialogue, only to watch as Israel has continued to occupy, steal and settle their land, and to kill and maim thousands of people with impunity.

While there are a handful of courageous dissenting Israeli voices, major Israeli institutions, especially the universities, have been complicit in this oppression by, for example, engaging in research and training partnerships with the Israeli army. Israel’s government has actively engaged academics, artists and other cultural figures in international “Brand Israel” campaigns to prettify the country’s image and distract attention from the oppression of Palestinians. [Continue reading…]

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Hezbollah and Israel spar as Syria’s conflict threatens to spin out of control

Nicholas Blanford writes: A dangerous game of brinkmanship is unfolding in the Middle East pitting Israel against Syria and its militant Shi‘ite ally Hizballah in what threatens to expand the two-year Syrian civil war into a full-blown regional conflict. On three separate occasions since January — two of them within 48 hours of each other last Friday and Sunday — Israeli jets have attacked Syrian military bases, targeting consignments of advanced weaponry supplied allegedly by Iran that were pending transfer to Hizballah across the nearby border with Lebanon. The air raids were unprecedented. Israel has never before risked striking at Hizballah’s Iranian-supplied weapons inside Syria.

For now, though, Israel’s gamble seems to have paid off. Other than some initial huffing and puffing from Damascus, no immediate retaliation was forthcoming. But rather than acting as a deterrence, the air strikes appear to have galvanized Syria to promise even greater amounts of sophisticated weaponry to Hizballah and also to announce the launch of a popular resistance campaign to liberate the Golan Heights, the strategic volcanic plateau in the southwest corner of the country that has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Israel’s intervention into the grueling Syrian civil war comes amid faint glimmers of a diplomatic breakthrough with the U.S. and Russia agreeing to an international conference to help end a conflict that has left more than 70,000 people dead. But the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has gained some tactical military successes of late, launching mini-offensives to retake territory previously lost to opposition rebels. The rebel setbacks may have strengthened the Assad regime’s grim resolve to win the conflict, especially given its confidence in the continued support of regional allies, Iran and Hizballah. [Continue reading…]

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Morsy and the Brothers

Shadi Hamid writes: Many Americans — and many Egyptians — are souring on the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are rather smugly saying, “I told you so.” From the American and Arab liberal perspectives, the Brotherhood seems run by hyper-charged Islamists bent on imposing their will on the Egyptian people. Like most things in politics, though, it depends on what exactly you’re comparing them to. More than two years into the Arab revolts, Islamists are weighing the virtues of moving more aggressively to implement their agenda versus the benefits of proceeding cautiously in an attempt to placate their critics and opponents.

There is little doubt that the Brotherhood has veered to the right. The real debate within the group is whether they’ve veered far enough. With Egypt as polarized as ever, the country’s largest Islamist movement has effectively given up on reaching out to liberals and leftists, focusing instead on closing ranks and rallying its base. During the presidential race, Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s original candidate, chose a Salafi-leaning council of scholars for his first campaign event, where he affirmed that the application of sharia law was his ultimate goal and that he would form a committee of scholars to help parliament achieve that goal. After Shater’s disqualification, Mohammed Morsy — a weaker, less convincing candidate — doubled down on Shater’s back-to-basics message. “Needless to say,” Morsy said, “[I am] currently the only contender who offers a clearly Islamic project.”

After winning the presidency, Morsy took a brief stab at rising above his partisan origins. But the tragic events of Dec. 4, when anti-Brotherhood protesters and government supporters clashed outside the presidential palace, rendered such efforts moot. The violence of that night — provoked by the Brotherhood when it called on supporters to confront protesters — claimed “martyrs” on both sides. For many in the opposition, this was the point of no return — blood had been spilled.

For the Brotherhood, it had much the same effect. As one Brotherhood official told me, “there was a return to the mentality of mihna [inquisition]” after that day. The subsequent months saw the presidential office hiring a steady stream of Brotherhood members. The Brothers had no one to turn to — not even the Salafis — but each other. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt NGO law could betray revolt’s ideals, says UN human rights chief

Reuters reports: The U.N.’s human rights chief said on Wednesday Egypt risked betraying the ideals behind the 2011 revolution and slipping into authoritarianism with a new civil society law.

The Arab country was at a “critical moment” more than two years after the uprising that ousted autocratic President Hosni Mubarak, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said, citing a range of social and political rights concerns.

She singled out a law backed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) that she said risked making non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worse off than they were under Mubarak by imposing curbs including funding restrictions.

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