Author Archives: News Sources

Iran shipping arms, personnel to Syria via Iraq

Reuters reports: Iran has been using civilian aircraft to fly military personnel and large quantities of weapons across Iraqi airspace to Syria to aid President Bashar al-Assad in his attempt to crush an 18-month uprising against his government, according to a Western intelligence report seen by Reuters.

Earlier this month, U.S. officials said they were questioning Iraq about Iranian flights in Iraqi airspace suspected of ferrying arms to Assad, a staunch Iranian ally. On Wednesday, U.S. Senator John Kerry threatened to review U.S. aid to Baghdad if it does not halt such overflights.

Iraq says it does not allow the passage of any weapons through its airspace. But the intelligence report obtained by Reuters says Iranian weapons have been flowing into Syria via Iraq in large quantities. Such transfers, the report says, are organized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“This is part of a revised Iranian modus operandi that U.S. officials have only recently addressed publicly, following previous statements to the contrary,” said the report, a copy of which was provided by a U.N. diplomatic source.

“It also flies in the face of declarations by Iraqi officials,” it said. “Planes are flying from Iran to Syria via Iraq on an almost daily basis, carrying IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) personnel and tens of tons of weapons to arm the Syrian security forces and militias fighting against the rebels.”

It added that Iran was also “continuing to assist the regime in Damascus by sending trucks overland via Iraq” to Syria.

Although the specific charges about Iraq allowing Iran to transfer arms to Damascus are not new, the intelligence report alleges that the extent of such shipments is far greater than has been publicly acknowledged, and much more systematic, thanks to an agreement between senior Iraqi and Iranian officials.

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The agony of Syria

I posted an excerpt of the following article when it first appeared in the New York Review of Books but at that time the whole article could only be read by subscribers. It’s now publicly viewable and essential reading.

Max Rodenbeck writes: Postcolonial governments have often seemed condemned to repeat the sins of the imperialists they replaced, a sad irony that has been especially pronounced in the Middle East. The British in 1920, for instance, pioneered the use of poison gas against civilians in order to subdue a tribal revolt in Iraq. The last known deployment of chemical weapons for mass murder was again in Iraq, in 1988, when Saddam Hussein gassed his fellow citizens during the notorious Anfal campaign against the Kurds.

Syria, too, has experienced sinister symmetries. Soon after France grabbed the territory as a share of its spoils from World War I, an insurrection among the proud Druze of the Houran region in the south quickly spread elsewhere. The colonial government countered this challenge with a mix of sweet propaganda and extreme violence. Depicting their foes as sectarian fanatics, the French posed as patrons of progress and as the noble guarantors of peace between Syria’s diverse sects. Yet they also worked hard to sharpen the schism they warned of. Arming and empowering favored groups, they brutalized others with summary executions, the burning of crops, and the razing of villages.

The counterinsurgency culminated with a brazen demonstration of destructive power that effectively terrorized Syria’s propertied class into submission. In October 1925 French artillery and aircraft bombarded Damascus for two days, leaving 1,500 dead and much of the Syrian capital in ruins; the large, incongruously grid-patterned section of the Old City known simply as al-Hariqa—The Fire—today serves as a memorial to that conflagration. In May 1945, French forces again shelled Damascus indiscriminately, killing more than six hundred people in what proved a vain attempt to reassert control following the end of World War II.

The regime built under the Assad clan, whose godfather, Hafez Assad, Syria’s then minister of defense, seized power in 1970 and held it for three decades until his son Bashar’s succession, has followed these unfortunate examples. Like France’s colonial governors the Assads have posed as defenders of a modern secular state. They have called their opponents sectarian extremists, even as their favoritism toward some parts of Syria’s complex ethnic and religious mosaic—particularly their own minority Alawite sect—and punishment of others, such as the 10 percent Kurdish minority, have enflamed communal resentment. The striking viciousness and scale of state repression, enforced by seventeen competing intelligence agencies whose upper ranks are dominated by Alawites, have been excused as a necessary bulwark against threats to national unity. [Continue reading…]

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New ad directed at Netanyahu supporters in Florida

Politico reports: Bibi Netanyahu is not running a campaign in the US – it just looks that way in this new ad.

A spot featuring only the Israeli prime minister talking about Iran is set to hit the airwaves in select Florida markets today, a media tracking source confirms.

The spot is the work of a c4 called Secure America Now – which, thanks to its tax status, doesn’t have to disclose its donors.

A Republican involved with the project said its airing in Miami, West Palm Beach and Ft. Myers. The flight is ultimately going to be $1 million, the official said – a media-tracking source said about $400,000 has been placed so far.

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How Israel’s leaders have misread Hamas

Zvi Bar’el reviews, Lehakir et Hamas ‏(Getting to Know Hamas‏), a new book (in Hebrew) by the Gaza-affairs correspondent for Israel’s Channel 10 News, Shlomi Eldar. The book explains how Israel’s leaders have squandered peacemaking opportunities because their ideological inflexibility has led them to ignore Hamas’s pragmatism; that their insistence on viewing the movement as a terrorist organization whose leadership could be decapitated has resulted in a failure to understand Hamas’s political maturity; and that the timing of Operation Cast Lead, the war on Gaza in 2008-2009, was determined by domestic Israeli politics, not a breakdown of the ceasefire.

“Hamas offers two alternatives: 1. A separate track, dealing only with the release of Gilad Shalit in return for 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners. 2. A release of prisoners will take place in the broader context of a strategic approach ‏(as follows‏), and the number of prisoners released will not be in the hundreds.”

That is an excerpt from an extraordinary document its authors called “Hamas and Israel: Peaceful Coexistence.” Its publication for the first time, in the fascinating book “Getting to Know Hamas” by Shlomi Eldar, the Gaza-affairs correspondent for Channel 10 News, is more than a journalistic coup. According to Eldar, the document − composed by Khaled Meshal, the political chief of Hamas, after Shalit was seized by Palestinian militants in a 2006 cross-border raid, and sent by messenger to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert − represents the first demonstration of strategic thinking on the part of Hamas: thinking that Israel does not recognize and does not want to get to know.

The detailed document, whose existence and transmission to the prime minister were denied completely by Olmert’s office at the time, constituted an offer by Hamas to conduct a multilevel dialogue with Israel, beginning with discussion about a cease-fire and the building of long-term trust, and ending with a coexistence agreement to last 25 years, and the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.

The document does not mention recognition of Israel or a peace agreement per se. It does, however, stipulate not only a cease-fire ‏(“tahadiyeh” in Arabic, which literally means “lull” but has come to mean a “temporary truce”‏), but also cooperation on the civilian front, such as the opening of border crossings and a renewal by Israel of tax-money transfer to the Palestinians.

The coexistence document represents the high point of repeated attempts by Meshal to build a system of practical cooperation with Israel, an effort that began after Hamas was swept into power in general elections held at the beginning of 2006. Such attempts are confirmed in the book, both in documents cited by Eldar and in descriptions of talks Eldar had with Hamas leaders. And it is here that the profound importance of the book lies. Along with a series of tactical and strategic decisions made by Hamas during this period, Eldar acquaints us not only with that organization but also with Israel’s ideological, strategic outlook in its struggle against it. [Continue reading…]

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How the West focuses more attention on thousands than millions of protesters

Rami G Khouri writes: It is always instructive but also irritating to be in the United States when tumultuous events occur around the Middle East or the wider Arab-Asian region with its predominantly Muslim populations. Last week was such a week, as we witnessed demonstrations and occasional violence in over a dozen countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, sparked by the insulting film trailer about Islam and the Prophet Mohammad that angered so many Muslims and others, including myself.

I see the fascinating and troubling dimension of mainstream American media coverage of the past week’s events, including the prevailing themes of public political discussions, as the tendency to link the historic events of the past 21 months (the Arab Spring, as it is known in the United States) to the outbursts of anger and resentment among those who demonstrated across the Arab-Asian region, and to ask: “Was the Arab Spring worth it?” A variation on this is to declare that the Arab Spring has led to a Dark Autumn, or some other such pairing of positive and negative attributes.

Many conclusions are drawn from this sort of discussion, including one streak in American thinking that says the U.S. should minimize its contacts with those violent and ungrateful Muslims over there who keep attacking our embassies and killing our citizens every time they are angered by manifestations of American free speech.

A subtext of this is the questioning of why those Muslims cannot be modern and tolerant like Americans or Westerners, who are much more casual about insults to their religion or prophets (and the questions are always about “Muslims,” not Nigerians, Indonesians or Tunisians, let’s say, and often the subject of bewilderment here is simply “Islam,” not even Muslims as individuals).

My concern is primarily about the frequent and negative linkages between the Arab uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa that seek more legitimate and democratic governance systems, and the angry protests and the few incidents of violence or death that erupted across the Arab-Asian region in the past week. Some in the U.S. now feel that demonstrations and occasional violence essentially negate the epic gains of the Arab uprisings.

This is such a terrible equation because the demonstrators usually involved a few hundred and occasionally a few thousand people (mostly men) who went out for a few hours here and there to express their rather legitimate anger (along with a few illegitimate and unacceptable acts of violence) at having their Prophet and religion deliberately demeaned. The attacks against the American consulate in Benghazi may also have included a preplanned attack by a small band of Salafist militants.

In contrast, the Arab Spring uprisings have gone on uninterrupted, in some cases for a year and nine months, and have seen tens of millions of ordinary citizens go out into the streets to demonstrate peacefully for the most part as they worked to remove their dictators and live a more dignified and free life. In some cases, as in Syria and Libya, violent regime responses prompted some opposition elements to use military means to confront the regimes, usually with assistance from Arab and Western countries.

One gets the impression over and over in the United States that Arabs and Muslims often are perceived as something akin to juvenile delinquents on parole – they have to behave well and obey the rules in order to enjoy the normal benefits of a free life. Arab freedom and sovereignty do not seem to be absolute rights, but rather are held hostage to American, Western and, in some cases, Israeli validation that we are behaving correctly. [Continue reading…]

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Taliban are fighting a political war while the U.S. is still fighting a tactical military war

Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports: As U.S. and NATO forces have evicted insurgents from a broad swath of southern Afghanistan, senior Taliban commanders have shifted toward a new battlefield strategy, one less focused on reclaiming lost territory and more on winning the next phase of the 11-year-old war.

U.S. military and intelligence officials believe that Taliban commanders, driven by a combination of desperation and savvy, have started assigning more of their suicide fighters to conduct audacious attacks against prominent targets across the country, including the U.S. Embassy and well-fortified NATO bases.

Insurgent leaders, they say, have redoubled a campaign to assassinate key Afghan government and security officials who are likely to play leadership roles in the country once foreign troops depart. And by happenstance or meticulous planning — U.S. military officials are not sure which — the Taliban has managed to kill numerous Western troops by joining the ranks of the Afghan army.

“The Taliban are fighting a political war while the United States and its allies are still fighting a tactical military war,” said Joshua Foust, a former U.S. intelligence analyst who has worked in Afghanistan and is now a fellow with the American Security Project. “We remain focused on terrain. They are focused on attacking the transition process and seizing the narrative of victory.”

The impact of the strategic shift, which has occurred gradually over the past year, has been profound. The high-profile assaults and assassinations have prompted new doubts among Afghans about the ability of their government and security forces to keep the insurgents at bay once NATO’s combat mission ends in 2014. The infiltration of the security forces led the top allied operational commander in Kabul on Monday to order extraordinary new restrictions on joint patrols and other missions, a move that strikes at the heart of the U.S. and NATO strategy to operate in closer partnership with Afghan soldiers. [Continue reading…]

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Libya’s central government exercises little authority outside capital

Abigail Hauslohner reports: Hussein Abu Hameida, the head of security in Libya’s second-largest city, was sacked this week over the attack on the U.S. consulate here that killed the ambassador and three other Americans. But he says he’s not going anywhere.

On the night of Sept. 11, he says, his police were outnumbered and outgunned by the attackers. The blame, he says, belongs not on his own shoulders, but with the central government for its failure to rein in Libya’s powerful postwar militias.

“There has been no strategy in place to remove the weapons from the streets,” Abu Hameida said Wednesday in the sprawling, high-ceilinged chamber that serves as his office in Benghazi’s national security headquarters. “There has been no strategy to contain these [militias] and to move them into either the police or the army.”

Nearly a year after Libyan rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi, ushering in a new democratic era, Libya’s central government still exercises so little authority here in the eastern part of the country that Abu Hameida sees little peril in refusing an order from the Interior Ministry in Tripoli that he step down from his post.

Libyan officials have blamed foreign fighters for the Benghazi assault. On Wednesday, Matthew G. Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, called it a “terrorist attack” and said there is evidence that those involved came from extremist groups in eastern Libya and from affiliates of al-Qaeda.

For many here, last week’s violence underscored the security vacuum left by Libya’s anemic central authority. With a far weaker police force than existed before the revolution, people in Benghazi have become “self-disciplining,” said Fatima Aguila, a local English teacher. “We govern ourselves.” Residents go about their daily business, help each other to resolve tribal disputes and continue to stop at stoplights, she said.

But in lawless Libya, weapons also carry clout. Well-armed bands of former rebel fighters make up more than 200 militias nationwide, according to an Atlantic Council study released last week. Some militias claim to have been absorbed, at least symbolically, into the ranks of Libya’s Tripoli-based Interior Ministry and military, but ground-level security is often uncoordinated, decentralized and lacks a hierarchy.

In many cases, including in Benghazi and in the western mountain town of Zintan where Libya’s highest-profile prisoner, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, is being held, the militias hold considerably more sway — and arms — than the Interior Ministry’s police force.

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Ignorance on parade: Islamophobia, Left and Right

Jeff Sparrow writes:

‘Koran discovered with coffee cup stain on the front cover, US marines deployed to all Starbucks franchises.’

The quip, retweeted by celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, exemplifies the belligerent incomprehension with which so many, including self-proclaimed liberals, have responded to protests against the film The Innocence of Muslims.

Rioting over a YouTube clip that offends the Muslim sky fairy? How tremendously foolish! How childish; how superstitious; how very, very silly!

Well, we’ve certainly seen ignorance paraded over the last few days but it’s as much by smug progressives as anyone else.

Consider a historical analogy.

In 1857, Bengali soldiers (known as ‘sepoys’) shot their British officers and marched upon Delhi. The Great Indian Rebellion became very violent, very quickly. The rebels massacred prisoners, including women and children; the British put down the revolt with a slaughter of unprecedented proportions.

Now, that rebellion began when the troops learned that their cartridges, designed to be torn open with their teeth, would be greased with beef and pork fat, an offence to the religious sensibilities of Hindus and Muslims alike. Had Twitter been an invention of the Victorian era, London sophisticates would, no doubt, have LOLed to each other (#sepoyrage!) about the credulity of dusky savages so worked up about a little beef tallow. Certainly, that was how the mouthpieces of the East India Company spun events: in impeccably Dawkinesque terms, they blamed ‘Hindoo prejudice’ for the descent of otherwise perfectly contented natives into rapine and slaughter.

But no serious historian today takes such apologetics seriously. Only the most determined ignoramus would discuss 1857 in isolation from the broader context of British occupation. In form, the struggle might have been religious; in content, it embodied a long-simmering opposition to colonial rule.

That’s why those who pretend the protests against The Innocence of Muslims came from nowhere merely reveal their own foolishness.

‘Today, many Americans are asking — indeed, I asked myself — how could this happen?’ said Hillary Clinton after the riots in Libya. ‘How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.’

The echoes of George Bush’s infamous query ‘Why do they hate us when we’re so good?’ suggests nothing whatsoever has been learnt from the last decade and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For this is, of course, the same Hillary Clinton who, as recently as 2009, proclaimed Mubarak, Egypt’s torturer-in-chief, and his wife, ‘friends of my family’, acknowledging a relationship that exemplified the pally connections between the US elite and every dictator and despot in the region. Mubarak might have been crossed off the Clinton Christmaas list but President Obama forges ever closer relations with the tyrants of Saudi Arabia, delivering the biggest ever arms deal in US history to fortify a reactionary and criminal government against its populace.

No, Hillary Clinton might not recall such matters. But the people of the Muslimworld are considerably better informed – and that’s the context for their anger. [Continue reading…]

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Muslims decry French Mohammad cartoons as new insult

Reuters reports: Muslim leaders criticised a French magazine’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday as another Western insult to their faith and urged France’s government to take firm action against it.

“We reject and condemn the French cartoons that dishonour the Prophet and we condemn any action that defames the sacred according to people’s beliefs,” the acting head of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Essam Erian, said.

The cartoons were featured in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Its front cover showed an Orthodox Jew pushing a turbaned figure in a wheelchair and several caricatures of the Prophet were included on its inside pages, including some of him naked.

The Guardian reports: Mahmoud Ghozlan, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, said that French law should deal with insults against Islam in the same way as it deals with Holocaust denial.

“If anyone doubts the Holocaust happened, they are imprisoned, yet if anyone insults the prophet, his companions or Islam, the most (France) does is to apologise in two words. It is not fair or logical,” he said.

Richard Prasquier, president of the Representative Council for Jewish Institutions, said he disapproved of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons after the killings in the row over the film.

“It is in consideration of those deaths that I disapprove of Charlie Hebdo’s initiative,” he said in a statement. “To publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in these times, in the name of freedom, is an irresponsible kind of panache.”

Dalil Boubakeur, the senior imam at the Grande Mosquée de Paris, appealed for France’s Muslim community, which is the largest in Europe, to remain calm and not “throw oil on the fire”.

André Vingt-Trois, the Catholic Archbishop of Paris, told French radio the cartoons would “provoke revulsion among many Muslim believers, who will feel their faith has been insulted”. He added: “You cannot say anything in the name of freedom of expression.”

Laurent Fabius, the minister of foreign affairs, said he was “against all provocation”.

However, Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, was unrepentant. He said the latest caricatures would shock “only those who will want to be shocked”.

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The wife of Jesus: New discovery challenges fundamental Christian belief

Ariel Sabar interviews Harvard researcher Karen King who talks about the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’”

The fragment was a shade smaller than an ATM card, honey-hued and densely inked on both sides with faded black script. The writing, King told me, was in the ancient Egyptian language of Coptic, into which many early Christian texts were translated in the third and fourth centuries, when Alexandria vied with Rome as an incubator of Christian thought.

When she lifted the papyrus to her office’s arched window, sunlight seeped through in places where the reeds had worn thin. “It’s in pretty good shape,” she said. “I’m not going to look this good after 1,600 years.”

But neither the language nor the papyrus’ apparent age was particularly remarkable. What had captivated King when a private collector first e-mailed her images of the papyrus was a phrase at its center in which Jesus says “my wife.”

The fragment’s 33 words, scattered across 14 incomplete lines, leave a good deal to interpretation. But in King’s analysis, and as she argues in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Theological Review, the “wife” Jesus refers to is probably Mary Magdalene, and Jesus appears to be defending her against someone, perhaps one of the male disciples.

“She will be able to be my disciple,” Jesus replies. Then, two lines later, he says: “I dwell with her.”

The papyrus was a stunner: the first and only known text from antiquity to depict a married Jesus.

But Dan Brown fans, be warned: King makes no claim for its usefulness as biography. The text was probably composed in Greek a century or so after Jesus’ crucifixion, then copied into Coptic some two centuries later. As evidence that the real-life Jesus was married, the fragment is scarcely more dispositive than Brown’s controversial 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code.

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text’s significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article’s publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” [Continue reading…]

If references to Jesus’s marriage were removed from the gospels, this may have less to do with the promotion of celibacy as a Christian ideal than with the need to buttress claims about Jesus’s divinity. After all, if he had a wife then he almost certainly had children and not just a mother but also a father — a human father.

And with that blasphemous thought perhaps it’s worth remembering that those who feel their faith is being challenged can have extreme reactions — whatever their faith. Remember The Last Temptation of Christ?

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Syria’s secular and Islamist rebels: Who are the Saudis and the Qataris arming?

Time reports: Vast swaths of northern Syria, especially in the province of Idlib, have slipped out of the hands of President Bashar Assad, if not quite out of his reach. The area is now a de facto liberated zone, though the daily attacks by Damascus’ air force and the shelling from the handful of checkpoints and bases regime forces have fallen back to are reminders that the rebel hold on the territory remains fluid and fragile.

What is remarkable is that this substantial strip of “free” Syria has been patched together in the past 18 months by military defectors, students, tradesmen, farmers and pharmacists who have not only withstood the Syrian army’s withering fire but in some instances repelled it using a hodgepodge of limited, light weaponry. The feat is even more amazing when one considers the disarray among the outside powers supplying arms to the loosely allied band of rebels.

As TIME reports here, disorder and distrust plague two of the rebels’ international patrons: Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The two Gulf powerhouses are no longer on the same page when it comes to determining who among the plethora of mushrooming Syrian rebel groups should be armed. The rift surfaced in August, with the alleged Saudi and Qatari representatives in charge of funneling free weaponry to the rebels clearly backing different factions among the groups — including various shades of secular and Islamist militias — under the broad umbrella that is the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The middlemen of the two countries operate out of Turkey, the regional military power. Ankara has been quite public with its denunciation of Assad even as it denies any involvement in shuffling weapons across the border to Syrian rebels. It claims its territory is not being used to do so. And yet, as TIME reported in June, a secretive group operates something like a command center in Istanbul, directing the distribution of vital military supplies believed to be provided by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and transported with the help of Turkish intelligence to the Syrian border and then to the rebels. Further reporting has revealed more details of the operation, the politics and favoritism that undermine the task of creating a unified rebel force out of the wide array of groups trying to topple the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]

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Syria tested chemical weapons systems, witnesses say

Der Spiegel reports: The Syrian army is believed to have tested missile systems for poison gas shells at the end of August, statements from various witnesses indicate.

The tests took place near a chemical weapons research center at Safira [ten miles] east of Aleppo, witnesses told SPIEGEL. A total of five or six empty shells devised for delivering chemical agents were fired by tanks and aircraft, at a site called Diraiham in the desert near the village of Khanasir.

Iranian officers believed to be members of the Revolutionary Guards were flown in by helicopter for the testing, according to the statements.

The Safira research center is regarded as Syria’s largest testing site for chemical weapons. It is officially referred to as a “scientific research center.”

Scientists from Iran and North Korea are said to work in the expansive, fenced-off complex. According to Western intelligence agencies, they produce chemical agents such as sarin, tabun and mustard gas and test them on animals. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu’s Iran strategy erases the Palestinian problem

Chris McGreal writes: Binyamin Netanyahu’s appearance on Meet the Press this weekend was telling.

Interviewer David Gregory called him the “leader of the Jewish people”. That’s certainly how the Israeli prime minister would like to see himself, and he wouldn’t be the first.

Israeli leaders have long claimed the mantle of voice of the Jewish people around the world and protector of the Diaspora. Part of that is rooted in the idea of Israel as a safe haven, and the desire of every Israeli government to draw in new citizens. A few years back, Ariel Sharon tried to tell Jews in France that they were so persecuted they needed to move to Israel for their own protection. This at a time when Hamas and Islamic Jihad were blowing innocents to pieces in Jerusalem restaurants and on Tel Aviv buses. There was no rush to the El Al flight from Paris.

But there is also the global aspect. Netanyahu stood before the United Nations last year and claimed to speak for hundreds of generations of Jews across the world. It was an attempt to elevate himself above a mere political leader to claim to represent the full weight of Jewish suffering in justifying his government’s stance towards the Palestinians.

Gregory’s slip – he later corrected himself by tweeting that it would be better to call Netanyahu the leader of Jewish state – was revealing of a mindset in certain sections of the American press that has a hard time dealing with the fact that Israel’s prime minister might not be the leader of an entire people, but just another politician less worried about the common good than shoring up his power.

That was where Meet the Press was revealing on a second point. It threw up evidence of just how successful Netanyahu has been at putting his political interests before those of Israel’s future, which should lie in keeping the ever-dimming prospect of a two-state solution alive.

There wasn’t a single mention of the Palestinians during the 15 minute interview. Gregory didn’t ask about them, and Netanyahu didn’t talk about them. Thus the fate of several million people living under varying degrees of an occupation that continues to plunder land, maintain discriminatory laws and administrative procedures – such as rationing water to Arab villages while their neighbors in the Jewish settlements have unlimited supplies – remains in limbo. Netanyahu’s government, meanwhile, pays lip service to the creation of a Palestinian state while pursuing policies intended to stave off the day of its birth. [Continue reading…]

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Mitt Romney’s no-state solution

Robert Mackey writes: As my colleague Sarah Wheaton reports, Mitt Romney said privately in May that “there’s just no way” for an independent Palestinian state to be established on the West Bank territory Israel has occupied since 1967. The Republican presidential candidate’s comments, during a discussion with donors in Florida, were secretly recorded and published on Tuesday by Mother Jones, a liberal magazine.

In the surreptitiously recorded video, Mr. Romney can be heard asserting that “the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish,” because “the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace” and remain “committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel.” He then cast doubt on the viability of a Palestinian state, given the region’s geography: [continue reading…]

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Towns in rebel-controlled Syria experiment with open democracy

Borzou Daragahi reports: The leaders of the council governing Souran, a town in rebel-controlled Syria, decide to hold an impromptu meeting right on the footpath along its main street, a gesture of open government that would impress Canada or Sweden.

They draw together some plastic chairs and a table, pour tea and, as pedestrians listen in, explain the workings of the government they have set up to replace the Baath Party and the security officials who ran the region with an iron fist under President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

“This is a new thing for us,” says Faez Hamsho, a businessman and one of 11 members of the town’s governing council. “But when Bashar’s men fled, we had to solve the day-to-day problems of the area.”

A commotion suddenly erupts. Word trickles in that a missile fired by one of Assad’s fighter jets has struck a nearby village. There are numerous injuries. Drivers on motorcycles and cars full of children and loaded with suitcases zoom past, fleeing in fear of further bombs. Aircraft can be heard circling overhead. A minor panic erupts.

The experiment in open democracy is adjourned and the men rush indoors.

As a ferocious war pits Syrian rebels against Assad’s regime, a self-rule experiment has begun to take root in the parts of the country under the control of the opposition. Much of the country’s north is under rebel control. The regime still controls Damascus, but parts of the capital city remain contested. Elsewhere there are rebel enclaves.

Under the shadow of Assad’s fighter jets, shelling and helicopters, the self-described revolutionaries manage local affairs such as refuse collection or food distribution, house the many displaced by war, mete out justice and resolve potentially cataclysmic disputes between clans before they get out of hand.

Syrians have little democratic experience. They lived for decades under the tight-fisted, centralized rule of Assad and his father, Hafez. But many of those now leading their communities took part in the peaceful protests last year, a time of intense political education and dialogue infused with the democratic spirit that ignited revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. [Continue reading…]

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Syria massacres seem to show slow, steady killing strategy

The Los Angeles Times reports: As he hid from soldiers in a field next to his neighborhood, a young man watched as a cat wandered down a street. Suddenly, it was shot dead. That’s when Zuhair noticed the sniper on a nearby roof.

But a father and son walking along the street didn’t see the gunman, Zuhair said. The sniper lowered his head and peered through his scope.

He shot the boy first. As the man tried to grab his son, who looked to be about 10, he was shot as well.

The two are among a reported 700 victims of snipers, shelling and summary executions, most of them men, since forces loyal to President Bashar Assad stormed the Damascus suburb of Dariya in late August, one in a growing list of Syrian towns and villages that briefly enter the world’s spotlight, only to be replaced by another one when a new mass killing is committed.

Unlike a massacre by government forces three decades earlier in the city of Hama, which left more than 20,000 dead in just three weeks and still haunts the country, the reported atrocities have been spread over months of bloodshed in Syria. That has led some to call the government campaign a kind of slow-motion Hama.

Late last year, as the government siege of the city of Homs was underway, activists began tweeting: “Homs 2011 = Hama 1982, but slowly, slowly.” As the conflict becomes more bloody on both sides, the same can be said for the entire country.

“They killed them in one sweep [in Hama]; with us, it’s in stages,” said Um Hussam, a mother of five who runs a small convenience shop in an old neighborhood of Dariya. “We expected they would kill and terrorize people, but not to this … level of barbarity.”

After videos of children’s bodies emerged after a massacre of 108 people in the town of Houla in May, there was brief international outcry, and several Western countries expelled their Syrian ambassadors and diplomats. Less than two weeks later in the town of Qubair, 78 were killed and United Nation monitors were fired upon when they first tried to visit the village.

On Thursday, activists said 36 civilians had been executed in Yalda, a Damascus suburb.

Like the Hama massacre before, these mass killings are an effort not only to crush dissent but also to ensure that future generations don’t think of revolting, said Muhammad Shihadeh, an activist in Dariya. He also sees a sinister motive in the relatively smaller toll in each mass killing.

“It was a smart tactic on the part of the regime so there wouldn’t be a shock from the international community,” Shihadeh said. “But we’re seeing that the world has a very expansive red line.”

The opposition estimates at least 27,000 have been killed, and the numbers are rising.

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Syria’s Libyan revolutionary

The Libya Herald reports: Over the past few months, growing reports have emerged from Syria of a group of Libyans engaged in the conflict to overthrow the regime of longtime dictator Bashar Al-Assad.

Having lived through the horrors of last year’s revolution in Libya, these young men have travelled to Syria to fight for a second time, out of a sense of solidarity with a country many feel has been abandoned to its fate by the outside world.

Perhaps the most famous of these repeat revolutionaries is Mahdi Al-Harati, commander of the Liwa Al-Ummah, a 6,000 strong body composed overwhelmingly of Syrians but led by a Libyan.

A softly spoken man raised in Ireland, Harati led the Revolutionaries of Tripoli brigade during last year’s uprising in Libya, and his was the first group of fighters to enter the capital from Zawiya, on 21 August 2011. Muammar Qaddafi’s last redoubt, his fortress compound Bab Al-Azizia, fell two days later.

Harati subsequently served as deputy head of the Tripoli Military Council, before stepping down in November and heading to Syria to witness the plight of the people there first-hand.

What he saw there resolved him to use his fighting experience to help Syria’s often-ramshackle revolutionaries to organise themselves into a more effective fighting force.

Earlier this year, he formed the Ummah brigade for that purpose. Here he speaks to the Libya Herald about his experiences and what it means to be a Libyan in a Syrian revolution.

“When I first arrived in Syria, what I saw was a group of people in a terrible condition. I was touched with the response I received and realised these men wanted all the help they could get.

“They welcomed me and requested me to help them”, Harati says. “I accepted and initially started to work on the lines of relief goods.”

What Harati soon realised, however, was that the level of fighting and the loss of life was such that the situation was much more difficult than even what he had faced in Libya.

“The situation was very grim and there was no comparison between the two countries. I realised the fight was tough as the people were being killed in large numbers every day and the Syrians would require all the help possible to succeed.”

After realising the nature of the war Harati knew that it would take help from the broader Muslim community (the Ummah) to topple the Assad regime, and so it was that the Ummah brigade was formed.

“War required a serious contribution from the Ummah and they didn’t disappoint, praise be to God. People contacted me from all over the world to help the Syrian cause,” he said.

“There are now more than 6,000 fighters in the Liwa Al-Umma. We have strictly kept 90 per cent of the members Syrians.”

The remaining ten per cent, Harati says, are drawn from other Muslim countries, including Libya. Many of the Libyans fought with Harati in the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade and are amongst Harati’s closest confidants, including his brother-in-law Housam Najjair.

“The Syrians were very willing to fight but didn’t have the expertise to do so effectively. So I decided to put my experience from Libya to good use and trained the locals. But the response from around the world was amazing. People were coming from different countries to help their brothers and sisters in Syria. They realised that Syria is the gateway to Quds [Jerusalem] and the Ummah must contribute to help liberate and protect it.

“Turkey was full of people who wanted to fight. At one point I had to stop them from coming to Syria as I lacked the resources to manage that many fighters.” [Continue reading…]

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