Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Watch out for the terrorism ‘experts’

Whenever an act of violence gets widely described as an act of terrorism, the one thing we can be confident about while facts remain hard to come by is that there will be no shortage of “expert” opinion — a lot of it resting on very dubious foundations.

Consider, for instance, this assessment by Robert Pape, the director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.

One month after the December 2015 San Bernardino attacks that murdered 14, killers Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik appeared in the pages of [the ISIS magazine] Dabiq. It is almost certain that [Orlando shooter, Omar] Mateen will appear in the next issue.

It may also emerge that Mateen watched ISIS videos that seek to recruit Westerners, an area in which their propagandists have excelled. If so, he was a perfect fit for the profile of previous ISIS recruits.

A male in his late 20s, with a connection to the Middle East, but who is not necessarily a traditionally devout Muslim, Mateen ticked many of the boxes that ISIS looks for. Reports from former co-workers and family members paint the picture of an individual who became increasingly withdrawn and radicalized, but maintained an outsized ego and liked to snap selfies. In other words, prime recruitment material.

ISIS offered Mateen a step-by-step blueprint for terror, from target selection to tactics, and told him that if he followed their instructions he would be a hero.

This guidance has been laid out by ISIS in online communications. “Hit everyone and everything,” wrote ISIS in a March 2015 magazine article, a commandment that the group’s operatives have followed in choosing soft targets like nightclubs, sports stadiums, and airplane terminals in Paris, Brussels, and now Orlando.

This timing as well may be no accident. ISIS posted an audio clip in late May asking its followers to schedule attacks for the holy month of Ramadan, which started on the evening of June 5. The content of the message is especially relevant in the case of Orlando.

In one chilling passage, the speaker states, “The smallest action you do in their heartland is better and more enduring to us than what you would if you were with us. If one of you hoped to reach the Islamic State, we wish we were in your place to punish the Crusaders day and night.”

Orlando brings up a new specter of fear for Americans. Instead of trained ISIS operatives slipping into our country to form sleeper cells, we must now confront the reality that “lone wolf” attackers are far from alone when we consider the world of training and online inspiration at their fingertips.

Mateen’s appearance in the next issue of Dabiq is not “almost certain” — on the contrary, it seems increasingly unlikely.


If Mateen had ever ventured to Raqqa, he would have risked meeting his own grisly end by getting thrown off a rooftop.

As for the features that distinguished this young man as “prime recruitment material” for ISIS, if those include a liking to take selfies, the pool of potential so-called lone wolves ready to kill for ISIS must now span every corner of the globe.

The ISIS directive to “hit everyone and everything,” certainly leaves a lot of latitude when it comes to the choices made by any individual killer. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t underestimate the capacity of ISIS recruits to engage in some elementary strategic thinking.

After Larossi Abballa murdered an off-duty police officer and his female companion in France this week, the killer took to Facebook to present his goals:

Mr. Abballa’s Facebook post from Monday night made clear that he wanted to terrify and destroy those he deemed “unbelievers,” people he had come to hate. He also wanted to encourage other lone wolves to do the same.

“It’s super simple,” he said, looking into the camera. “It’s enough to wait for them in front of their offices; don’t give them any respite. Know this, whether you are a policeman or a journalist, you will never feel calm again. One will wait for you in front of your homes. This is what you have earned.”

Boasting that he had “just killed a policeman and I just killed his wife,” he called on fellow believers to give priority to killing “police, prison guards, journalists.” He specifically named several writers and journalists, adding rappers to the list because, he said, they “are the allies of Satan.”

Although a gay nightclub in Orlando fits the indiscriminate directive of “everyone and everything,” it wasn’t an obvious target for someone wanting to strike fear across a nation.

Abballa clearly wanted an isolated murder to be treated as a threat to the state. Mateen’s motives, however, remain far from clear. Indeed, an attack on the LGBT community would be an ill-conceived way of attacking America, given that there are so many conservative Americans who are homophobic.

It has been reported that the gunman took his wife at least once to the location of the nightclub for “reconnaissance,” and yet regulars there say he had visited the club repeatedly for several years — so why the need for reconnaissance? If he didn’t want his wife to be aware of his prior connection, this may have been an exercise designed to obscure his familiarity with his target and mislead his wife about his motives.

The specter of lone wolf attacks in America is certainly a fear that ISIS wants to promote, but terrorism experts and the media need to avoid amplifying that fear without due cause. The evidence, so far, indicates that those who plot alone are the exception rather than the rule.

[A] Reuters review of the approximately 90 Islamic State court cases brought by the Department of Justice since 2014 found that three-quarters of those charged were alleged to be part of a group of anywhere from two to more than 10 co-conspirators who met in person to discuss their plans.

Even in those cases that did not involve in-person meetings, defendants were almost always in contact with other sympathizers, whether via text message, email or networking websites, according to court documents. Fewer than 10 cases involved someone accused of acting entirely alone.

The extent of Mateen’s radicalization remains unclear, but anyone who professed to have ties to ISIS, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah at a time when these groups are at war against each other, seems less like a committed jihadist than someone who was clumsily constructing a fake identity.

Lastly, for those who remain fixated on images of scary Middle Eastern guys, it’s worth being reminded that Omar Mateen was in so many regards an ordinary American — as can be seen in this video clip which apparently shows him when he was working as a G4S security guard around 2012.

 

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Why it’s premature to call Omar Mateen a terrorist

Each time an atrocity takes place in which innocent people become targets of indiscriminate violence, there is a rush to brand the violence as terrorism.

This has little to do with any widely accepted definition of the term and much more to do with a need to voice outrage and mobilize a forceful response.

If on one side everyone’s shouting “terrorism!” while others are voicing doubt, the doubters instantly get cast as being soft on terrorism.

From what we know at this time, I’m inclined to believe that the massacre in Orlando was a mass-murder/suicide disguised to look like a terrorist attack.

It has already been widely reported that Mateen’s father, Seddique Mir Mateen, said his son got “very angry” two months ago when he saw two men kissing in Miami. This was presented as evidence of the gunman’s existing and strong homophobia.

There are now indications that the foundation of Mateen’s homophobia may have been extreme ambivalence around his own homosexuality.

The Associated Press reports:

The ex-wife of the shooter at a gay Florida nightclub says the man enjoyed nightlife, but she’s not sure if he had any homosexual tendencies.

Sitora Yusufiy spoke to CNN on Tuesday from Denver.

She says: “When we had gotten married, he confessed to me about his past … that he very much enjoyed going to clubs and the nightlife, and there was a lot of pictures of him. … I feel like it’s a side of him or a part of him that he lived, but probably didn’t want everybody to know about.”

Regulars at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando including Ty Smith, say that Mateen had been seen there on numerous occasions over an extended period.

Smith told the Orlando Sentinel that he saw Mateen inside at least a dozen times.

“We didn’t really talk to him a lot, but I remember him saying things about his dad at times,” Smith said. “He told us he had a wife and child.”

When asked about those sightings, Orlando Police Chief John Mina said he had no information.

Another Pulse regular, Kevin West, told the Los Angeles Times that Mateen messaged him on and off for a year using a gay chat app.

Fox News reports:

Smith’s husband, Chris Callen, told the Canadian Press that Mateen had been to Pulse regularly for “at least three years.”

Jim Van Horn, 71, told the Associated Press he was a frequent patron at Pulse and said another “regular” there was Mateen.

“He was trying to pick up people. Men,” Van Horn said late Monday outside the Parliament House, another gay club.

If the sight of gay men kissing provoked so much rage in Mateen, why would he have been a regular at a gay nightclub for several years, using Jack’d, a gay dating app, and trying to pick up men?

The indications suggest that what Mateen hated most was being gay. No doubt, the fact that he had been raised a Muslim, would have made his own conflicted feelings that much more intense and difficult to resolve.

To go on a rampage at the conclusion of which the gunman could reasonably expect to be killed, may have been conceived as a murderous effort to purge himself of his own feelings. And if he felt such a deep need to bury his own homosexuality, it would make sense to conjure the impression that this was an act of terrorism — and one that would predictably be applauded by ISIS.

But we don’t know — at this point, much of the above remains conjecture.

Nevertheless, since this is at least a plausible explanation for what happened in Orlando on Sunday, it’s worth looking at Donald Trump’s reaction to the massacre and considering the wildly inappropriate actions he would probably have taken had he been the president at this time.

In the name of a forceful response to terrorism, Trump would be rounding up Muslims and shutting down airports. He would (and is) fueling national Islamophobic hysteria. And all in the name of fighting terrorism.

In other words, at a time when wise leaders would be promoting gun control and encouraging similarly troubled young men to embrace their own sexuality rather than turn to violence, Trump would be creating a national security crisis.

Which is exactly why terrorism is a word that should be used with extreme caution.

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Orlando, gun violence, and American identity

Since 9/11, nearly half a million Americans have died as a result of gun violence inside the United States. That’s more than the number of Americans killed during World War II, the most deadly war in history.

Suppose that during the same period, from 2001-2016, this number of deaths could be attributed to terrorism. Were that the case, democratic governance in the U.S. would have been suspended. We would now be living under martial law.

The fact that gun violence is not generally regarded as an issue vastly more perilous than terrorism, has nothing to do with an objective assessment of each threat. It is simply because the ability for Americans to kill themselves and each other with legally obtained weapons is widely accepted as a feature of American culture. It’s an American thing. It’s the homicidal/suicidal shadow of freedom.

Many of those Americans who are desperate to defend the right of each citizen to arm themselves, now want to characterize the mass shooting in Orlando as not being an American thing and the easiest way of doing that is to undermine the American identity of the gunman.

In news reports, journalists with what I assume are good intentions, are referring to Omar Mateen as “American-born” and a “U.S. citizen.” Both are accurate labels and yet they obscure the fact that Mateen was just as much an American as Donald Trump.

Who gets referred to simply as an American and who does not, illustrates the fact that in common discourse here, it’s generally assumed that there are three categories of name.

Someone who is white and has a vaguely English-sounding name — like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Tom Hanks, or Bernie Sanders — gets called an American and no distinctions of heritage need be specified.

Then there are those Americans with Spanish names — like Gonzalo Curiel, Alberto Gonzales, Eva Longoria, or Sonia Sotomayor — who tend to fall in the nebulous might-be-American category.

And then there are Americans with “foreign” names like Omar Mateen.

Anyone with a name that signals Muslim or Middle Eastern, is commonly regarded as foreign until proved otherwise. And even if it turns out the individual was born in America and has never lived in any other country, they are still likely to be viewed in some unstated sense as somehow not quite fully American. These are the Americans who get asked where they come from after having already explained that the come from Florida, Texas, California, or wherever in America they happened to be born.

As much as this country professes to uphold a system of non-discrimination, the core category of membership has yet to shed racial and ancestral connotations. It’s ironic that a country that came into existence by breaking away from English rule and which took a Spanish name, should still retain such strong cultural ties to England.

Nevertheless, to understand what Mateen did, it’s necessary to acknowledge that he was no less American than Donald Trump or any other American who might currently be using the Orlando shootings to fuel Islamophobia and xenophobia.

Mateen’s dream was to become a law enforcement officer. He pictured himself as a cop in the NYPD.

In post 9/11 America, how much more American can someone aspire to become than to serve as a police officer in New York City?

Even so, while recognizing that American identity is not linguistically or ethnically determined, we also have to divest it of its mythological accretions: the notions that Americans are blessed in some way.

Americans aren’t special. They have no unique virtues and a multitude of commonplace failings.

What we are learning from those who knew Mateen was that, his dreams of the NYPD notwithstanding, he was a disaster in the making.

Former co-worker, Daniel Gilroy, a former police officer who worked with Mateen as a private security guard, found Mateen’s habitual and out-of-control rage so threatening, he ended up quitting his job. Gilroy now says: “I saw this coming.”

“I feel responsibility — there was no shock. I feel responsible. I felt like, because I was a coward, 50 people are dead. That’s the way I feel.”

American-born Donald Trump, with no foundation to make such an assertion, also claims prescience about the shootings.


Of course he’s not referring to a ban on the purchase of assault rifles — he’s alluding to his promised ban on Muslims.

He has yet to amplify what it would mean to “ban” American Muslims. Is he calling for all Muslims to be rounded up and put inside concentration camps?

The only predictable effect of Trump’s statements on this issue is that they will fuel hatred.

Hatred is contagious and can be found among the religious and non-religious in every nation.

As much as many people might pray for the creation of a more loving, less violent country, we will inevitably continue living in an America that harbors countless hateful individuals.

And yet as much as hate can harm others, hate alone cannot result in a massacre.

Without access to instruments of deadly violence, Omar Mateen’s hatred could certainly be hurtful but it was very unlikely to result in anyone’s death.

How many more mass shootings are to come is simply a question of how willing America remains as a facilitator of mass violence. Most likely, it takes a president to say resolutely, enough is enough — and follow through in action — but such a president has yet to take office.

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How Bernie Sanders exposed the Democrats’ own racial divisions

Issac Bailey writes: Donald Trump is on the verge of locking in a racial deficit within the Republican Party that GOP officials won’t overcome for at least a generation, as he systematically alienates Latinos, African-Americans and anyone worried about the powerful undercurrent of white anger on display at his rallies.

But as his racial gaffes have claimed the spotlight, far less appreciated is what has been happening in the opposing party. Democrats face their own racial split that could haunt the party well into the future if it isn’t handled properly now.

Though it might offend his uber-progressive supporters to hear this, the Sanders insurgency is largely a white revolution. All the talk about Sanders representing the future of the Democratic Party because of his overwhelming popularity among young people leaves out an important caveat: He couldn’t persuade minority voters to sign on. In many ways a Sanders victory, propelled by the least diverse states in the nation, would have been a step backward in American race relations. Now that Hillary Clinton has laid claim convincingly to the nomination with decisive wins in California and New Jersey, the party — and Bernie’s supporters — are at a crossroads. If they insist on maintaining their purist divide from Clinton, they will create a rift in the party that’s not just ideological, but racial. [Continue reading…]

Bailey notes an important observation made recently by Jonathan Chait: “The expectation that a politician should agree with you on everything is the ultimate expression of privilege.”

At a time when there’s a lot of talk about “voting your conscience” and not being badgered into accepting “the lesser of two evils,” it’s worth subjecting these self-declared positions of uncompromising principle to some critical scrutiny.

What casts itself as defiant idealism, seems to me to have less to do with participation in a democratic process — a process in which, by definition, our choices are limited — than it has with a narcissistic indulgence: the desire to say, this is who I am — to hell with the outcome of the election.

We each cast votes individually and yet are being called to act in our most widely defined collective interests.

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How to make racist comments without being a racist

The New York Times reports: Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the nation’s highest-ranking Republican, on Tuesday called Donald J. Trump’s remarks about a Latino judge “racist,” an extraordinary indictment that generated a fresh wave of criticism and panic from other Republicans. By the end of the day, Mr. Trump was forced into a rare moment of damage control and said that his words had been “misconstrued.”

Mr. Trump, who said last week that a Mexican-American judge in a case involving Trump University was biased against him because of his heritage, issued a statement Tuesday saying, “I do not feel that one’s heritage makes them incapable of being impartial.” He added that he was simply questioning whether he was receiving a fair trial, but he did not apologize for his remarks, something many Republicans had urged him to do.

Mr. Ryan said Mr. Trump’s criticism of the judge, Gonzalo P. Curiel of United States District Court, was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” But Mr. Ryan also reiterated his support for Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. [Continue reading…]

The Republicans, such as Ryan, who are disavowing Trump’s racist comments yet reiterating their support for him, are less concerned that Trump is indeed a racist than they insist he must stop sounding like a racist.

Paradoxically, on the one hand they acknowledge that racism is manifest in behavior — such as the comments someone makes — and yet they also seem to be saying that someone can engage in racist behavior without being a racist.

It’s either that, or what Ryan et al are really saying is this: We know Trump’s a racist but we wish he’d stop making it so obvious.

Trump’s statement that from now on he’ll stop talking about the Trump University court case, suggests he got the message. The question now is not whether he’s a racist but whether he can keep his mouth shut. That seems about as likely as it is for his hair to stay in place.

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The kinds of surveillance people want

shadow2

If you use a credit card, your daily activities are under continuous surveillance. Information gathered from each transaction is monitored and analysed, not by the NSA, but by the financial companies themselves.

Most cardholders who are aware of this are grateful for the fact. It means that if or when you get a phone call or text message from the company telling you they’ve noticed suspicious activity on your account, the chances are that the warning is warranted and some fraud can get snipped in the bud.

Suppose your online activity was being monitored in an analogous way — not to spot fraud but instead to spot symptoms of undiagnosed disease — would you welcome this kind of surveillance?

Right now, this is a hypothetical question, but it probably won’t be long before automated health-tracking systems emerge. Perhaps health insurance companies will offer a discount to individuals who opt-in for the service.

The hyperbole surrounding the issue of surveillance usually looks at it through the lens of the intelligence agencies and political oppression, but what may in the long run be much more significant, socially, is the kind of benign surveillance that caters to our needs — that makes life easier by anticipating our needs.

Needs easily met create an expanding field of things we take for granted, but with that comes a diminishing state of awareness. For some people, the fewer their cares, the more creative they become, but more often it seems like ease fuels a hunger for stimulation and distraction.

The surveillance state we are moving into is not one where we are at much risk of getting whisked away by the secret police, but rather it is one in which we are likely to submerge deeper and deeper into the oblivion of convenience.

The New York Times reports: Microsoft scientists have demonstrated that by analyzing large samples of search engine queries they may in some cases be able to identify internet users who are suffering from pancreatic cancer, even before they have received a diagnosis of the disease.

The scientists said they hoped their work could lead to early detection of cancer. Their study was published on Tuesday in The Journal of Oncology Practice by Dr. Eric Horvitz and Dr. Ryen White, the Microsoft researchers, and John Paparrizos, a Columbia University graduate student.

“We asked ourselves, ‘If we heard the whispers of people online, would it provide strong evidence or a clue that something’s going on?’” Dr. Horvitz said.

The researchers focused on searches conducted on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, that indicated someone had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. From there, they worked backward, looking for earlier queries that could have shown that the Bing user was experiencing symptoms before the diagnosis. Those early searches, they believe, can be warning flags. [Continue reading…]

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In EU poll 70% outside Britain say UK’s exit would be bad for Europe

Pew Research Center reports: On June 23, people in the United Kingdom will vote on a referendum on whether to remain in the European Union or to leave the Brussels-based institution, a decision that has come to be called Brexit. The British go to the polls at a time when a new multi-nation survey from Pew Research Center finds that Euroskepticism is on the rise across Europe and that about two-thirds of both the British and the Greeks, along with significant minorities in other key nations, want some powers returned from Brussels to national governments. Whether favorable or not toward Brussels, most Europeans agree that a British exit would harm the 28-member EU. [Continue reading…]

I don’t think the desire to see some powers returned to national governments should be conflated with Euroskepticism. The latter questions the value of the existence of the EU, but the fact that a very large majority of those polled see the UK’s exit as being detrimental to the EU, strongly implies that there is widespread appreciation for the value of European unity.

A skeptical minority wants to break Europe apart, whereas the majority want to see revisions in the EU’s power structure.

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Should chimps be considered people under the law?

Jay Schwartz writes: In late 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a first-ever lawsuit to free a pet chimpanzee named Tommy from the inadequate conditions provided by his owner. The NhRP, a legal group focused on animal protection, argued that Tommy is an autonomous being who is held against his will and that he is entitled to a common-law writ of habeas corpus, a legal means of determining the legality of imprisonment. Granting habeas corpus to a chimpanzee would mean viewing chimpanzees as legal persons with rights, rather than as mere things, so this case was rather controversial.

The Tommy case came to a close on December 4, 2014, as the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court’s five-judge panel ruled against the NhRP. (The state’s highest court is the Court of Appeals.) Justice Karen K. Peters, the presiding judge, wrote: “Needless to say, unlike human beings, chimpanzees cannot bear any legal duties, submit to societal responsibilities or be held legally accountable for their actions. In our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights … that have been afforded to human beings.” [Continue reading…]

A lot of people will regard the effort to confer legal rights to non-humans as being driven by anthropomorphism. But consider the court’s argument. Could not the exact same line of reasoning be used to argue that small children or adults with developmental disabilities be deprived of legal rights? Of course, such an argument would rightly be decried as inhuman and barbaric.

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With Trump’s racism out in the open, how does he ‘come around’?

To say that Donald Trump has become an embarrassment to Republicans is an understatement. Yet with Trump’s racism now on open display when it comes to his criteria for suspecting judicial bias, the Republican establishment has yet to truly disown him.

For instance, Trump supporter, Newt Gingrich, says Trump’s remarks about American-born District Judge Gonzalo Curiel were “inexcusable.”

The implication being made by most of these critics is that using skills which have thus far not been evident, Trump might somehow be able to maneuver his way out of this situation. What’s he going to say that can undo what he’s done?

He’s already used all those gambits about how much he loves Mexicans and Muslims, but with his racism so far out in the open, the question isn’t about how he can make amends; it’s about the racism that permeates the Republican Party.

Disavowals of racism coming from individuals who are nevertheless willing to see their party led by a racist, make it all the more evident that it is the GOP’s long-standing toleration of thinly veiled racism that provided one of the central driving forces behind the Trump campaign.

What Trump has done is made it virtually impossible for anyone to plausibly pretend that he is not a racist. And as much as Trump imagines he’s cast aside the shackles of political correctness, the appearance of racism in contemporary America is indeed inexcusable. There’s no way to complete the sentence: Trump’s a racist, but…

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Dalai Lama distances himself from Brexit poster

The Guardian reports: The Dalai Lama has distanced himself from a poster circulated by Brexit campaigners that suggested the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader was in favour of the UK leaving the EU.

Leave.EU, the unofficial Brexit campaign run by the Ukip donor Arron Banks, tweeted an image of a quote attributed to the Dalai Lama stating: “The goal should be that migrants return and help rebuild their countries. You have to be practical … It’s impossible for everyone to come.”

Underneath, the tweet written by Leave.EU said: “The Dalai Lama favours a more balanced approach to migration. Let’s reclaim democratic control on June 23rd!”

A representative for the Dalai Lama, who is a refugee from Tibet, said no permission was given to use his words as part of an anti-EU campaign.

“We are not aware of any campaign using His Holiness’ image in regard to the issue of the UK leaving the European Union and would certainly not have given permission,” said Tenzin Taklha, secretary to the Dalai Lama.

Though the Dalai Lama has not taken any official position on the EU, Thubten Samdup, his former representative in northern Europe, said he thought it highly unlikely that he would support Brexit.

“In fact he has always mentioned highly of how EU has come together for the benefit of the people of Europe,” he said. “He felt it made lot of sense and encouraged others to do the same in this rapidly changing and inter-connected world.” [Continue reading…]

The Dalai Lama, having lived in exile from the country of his birth, Tibet, since 1959, understands the plight of refugees.

Those who see refugees as a threat and who are more broadly opposed to immigration — treating non-natives as intruders — overlook the sense of loss incurred in every form of exile. The immigrant is viewed in terms of the things to which he might lay claim rather than that which he left behind.

Irrespective of the national identities we immigrants might lose or adopt, the loss of ones homeland is mostly experienced on a more granular level.

Home is made up from so many tightly woven threads of familiarity — relatives and friends, food and music, abodes and terrain. Plants, birdsong, weather patterns, sounds, and smells — each contribute to a sense of place once known in intimate detail as a sensory world and now confined to memory.

This is what gets left behind and the sense of loss must be so much more acute when it’s clear that what has been lost has been destroyed forever.

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Can Trump sustain his success story?

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Michael Wolff writes: One thing to understand about Trump is that, rather unexpectedly, he’s neither angry nor combative. He may be the most threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern life, and yet, in person he’s almost soothing. His extreme self-satisfaction rubs off. He’s a New Yorker who actually might be more at home in California (in fact, he says he usually comes to his home here — two buildings on Rodeo Drive [in Beverly Hills] — only once a year). Life is sunny. Trump is an optimist — at least about himself. He’s in easy and relaxed form campaigning here in these final days before the June 7 California primary, even with Hillary Clinton’s biggest backers and a city that is about half Latino surrounding him.

Earlier in the day, I’d met with Trump at a taping of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he was the single guest for the evening (musicians The Weeknd and Belly canceled upon learning of his appearance). “Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked. He meant this, the Trump phenomenon. Circumventing any chance that I might dampen the sentiment, he quickly answered his own question: “No one ever has.”

His son-in-law, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, married to his daughter Ivanka and also a real estate scion — but clearly a more modest and tempered fellow, a wisp next to his beefsteak father-in-law — offered that they may have reached 100 percent name recognition. In other words, Trump could be the most famous man in the world right now. “I may be,” says Trump, almost philosophically, and referencing the many people who have told him they’ve never seen anything like this. “Bill O’Reilly said in his lifetime this is the greatest phenomenon he’s ever seen.”

That notion is what’s at the center of this improbable campaign, its own brilliant success. It’s its main subject — the one you can’t argue with. You can argue about issues, but you can’t argue with success. Hence, to Trump, you’re really foolish to argue with the Trump campaign. “I’ve spent $50 million of my own money to go through the primaries. Other people spent $230 million and they came in last. You know what I’m saying?” And this provides him the reason to talk endlessly and repetitively about the phenomenon of the campaign. [Continue reading…]

Trump doesn’t have to make serious campaign promises or coherently articulate his vision for how exactly he intends to make America great again. Instead, he’s offering himself as the embodiment of success.

The long calendar of the primaries and the large number of GOP contestants have served the Trump campaign well by sustaining a rolling narrative of perpetual and rising success.

The question is, once Trump has had his official coronation at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next month, how will he sustain his success narrative for three more months with little else to point at than polling numbers?

Of course, if he soars ahead in the polls, then Trump America is just around the corner. But if he doesn’t pull away, his message of success may start to lose a lot of its power.

The Democrats might try to build solidarity around fear of Trump with the unintended effect of magnifying both negative and positive perceptions of his strength, but perhaps instead they need to focus their attack on the Trump brand of success. Once Trump loses a firm grip on his success story, he has nothing.

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The camaraderie of outrage

Harambe

“The killing of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo in order to save a child who fell in its enclosure has sparked nationwide outrage,” reports CBS News.

I share the outrage.

I happen to be among those who believe that the incarceration of wild animals for the entertainment of sightseers, cannot be justified. It does little to elevate the consciousness of the people and even less the well-being of the captives. The protection of endangered species requires first and foremost the protection of endangered habitats.

Upon seeing the news of the gorilla’s death, like many others, I also thought that if a four-year boy could even get into a situation like this, there had to be negligence on the part of parents, bystanders, and/or the zoo operators. Likewise, the decision to shoot and kill the 17-year-old gorilla, Harambe (a Swahili name which means, “all pull together”) seemed very questionable.

Among the outraged voices showing up on Facebook, the most venomous attacks have been directed at Michelle Gregg, the boy’s mother.

Jan Dadaista Subert:

The crappy mother should have gotten shot instead, not the poor innocent gorilla!

Andrew Weprin:

Michelle Gregg says, “God protected my child until the authorities were able to get to him.” No, Harambe protected your child after you & God failed to stop him from climbing into the enclosure! And innocent Harambe ended up dead for his efforts, shot with a bullet that would have been better spent on you, for failing to look after your own child and being the cause of all this!

The creator of a Facebook page, Justice For Harambe (which has already received over 60,000 likes), propagated the claim that Gregg was planning to sue to zoo, and yet when asked to support this claim with some evidence simply said: “Educated guess.” The page’s stated objective is: “We wish to see charges brought against those responsible!!”

The outrage directed at Gregg has prompted a smaller wave of outrage coming from those who underline the fact that even when under the supervision of the most attentive of parents, small children do have a talent for slipping out of sight.

Meanwhile, the United Nations refugee agency announced on Sunday that at least 700 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean this week as tens of thousands of refugees continue to seek safety in Europe.

The latest chapter in the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II has prompted very little outrage on this side of the Atlantic.

For observers of social media in the U.S., it’s hard to avoid concluding that the life of a gorilla is commonly regarded here as being more precious than the lives of countless human beings.

Although to some extent it’s heartening that this much concern is being shown about the premature death of a gorilla, it’s disturbing that over the last year and longer there has been such widespread indifference shown towards millions of people in desperate need.

Is there really such a compassion deficit in America, or does this reveal more about the psychology of rage?

My guess is that among those now seeking justice for Harambe, prior to this weekend many had not paid a great deal of interest in the welfare of western lowland gorillas.

The guiding emotions here were outrage at what seemed like the unnecessary loss of an innocent life, and a certain sympathy with fellow primates which all children feel and most adults have learned to sublimate.

The great apes fascinate us because on some level we recognize them as kin. We don’t just look at them; we see them with reflective awareness looking at us.

Yet why would a sense of kinship be able to extend outside our own species while falling short among other members of the human race?

What is at play here seems to have less to do with who or what we identify with than it does with the pathways that facilitate our connections.

It turns out that in the age of social media, outrage has become such a potent force because it allows strangers to bond.

Teddy Wayne writes:

A 2013 study, from Beihang University in Beijing, of Weibo, a Twitter-like site, found that anger is the emotion that spreads the most easily over social media. Joy came in a distant second. The main difference, said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, who studies anger, is that although we tend to share the happiness only of people we are close to, we are willing to join in the rage of strangers. As the study suggests, outrage is lavishly rewarded on social media, whether through supportive comments, retweets or Facebook likes. People prone to Internet outrage are looking for validation, Professor Martin said. “They want to hear that others share it,” he said, “because they feel they’re vindicated and a little less lonely and isolated in their belief.”

Harambe’s death pulled strangers together in their shared anger. The sad and stern face of a silverback resonated across a population which, struggling to find common ground through things we can affirm, finds it much more easily in our discontent.

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As rich nations turn their backs on those in need

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: The world is witnessing the largest exodus of refugees in generations, spawned by armed conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. But “witnessing” is perhaps the wrong word. Many world leaders, including those who run most of the richest countries, are choosing to look the other way. They are more interested in barricading their nations from the fallout of conflict than in investing in peacekeeping and stability.

This willful neglect was on display last week at the inaugural World Humanitarian Summit, convened to face the needs of the world’s most vulnerable people. Most heads of state from the richest nations — including the United States — didn’t bother to show up, drawing a rebuke from the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

“It’s disappointing that some world leaders could not be here, especially from the G-7 countries,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday. “We have reached a level of human suffering without parallel since the founding of the United Nations” 70 years ago. [Continue reading…]

Contrast Ki-moon’s words with the happy talk from Barack Obama two weeks ago when he gave the commencement address at Rutgers:

by almost every measure, America is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, or even eight years ago.

This assessment has I believe less to do with the dry statistical arguments made by the likes of Steven Pinker, than it has with the group-think inside the Obama administration.

The easiest way to counter criticism on Syria, with the refugee crisis, and elsewhere, is by insisting we did all that we could.

This self-administered anesthetic is designed to suppress remorse, guilt and a keen sense on personal responsibility.

Obama’s faith in inexorable progress derives from his refusal to “look backwards” — a conviction not unlike that of a hit-and-run driver who keeps his eyes firmly on the road ahead.

Likewise, the notion that the United States can extricate itself from its Middle East entanglements by simply walking away, is really no different from the attitude of a deadbeat father who thinks he can leave his past behind.

Our need to understand the past derives from our need to understand the present — it has nothing to do with (as Obama claims) a fear of the future.

The simplistic approach favored inside the White House reduces everything to a choice over which Obama had no control: the decision to invade Iraq.

Those who make that the beginning of history, have very often thereafter indulged in the conceit that by having personally opposed that misadventure, they can thereby shed any sense of collective responsibility for what followed — as though the neocons’ war never actually became America’s war.

What is ostensibly geographically circumscribed by a neat divide between domestic and foreign is really a separation between those things we claim as our own and those we don’t.

The convenient reflex to which most people are susceptible is simply to disown whatever becomes problematic.

We turn our backs on refugees because we prefer to believe that they are not our problem.

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Trump’s big tent for bigotry

Jonathan Weisman writes: A Jewish 17-year-old, inflamed by the Black Lives Matter movement and the cause of L.G.B.T. rights, told me recently there is no anti-Semitism, certainly nothing compared with the prejudices that afflict other minorities. I surprised myself when I recoiled from her words and argued passionately that Jews must never think anti-Semitism has been eradicated. I sounded like my mother.

Just weeks later, I found myself staring down a social-media timeline filled with the raw hate and anti-Semitic tropes that for centuries fueled expulsion, persecution, pogroms and finally genocide.

“I found the Menorah you were looking for,” one correspondent offered with a Trump-triumphant backdrop on his Twitter profile; it was a candelabrum made of the number six million. Old Grand Dad cheerfully offered up a patriotic image of Donald Trump in colonial garb holding up the Liberty Bell and fighting “against the foreign hordes,” with caricatures of the Jew, the American Indian, the Mexican, the Chinese and the Irish cowering at his feet.

I am not the first Jewish journalist to experience the onslaught. Julia Ioffe was served up on social media in concentration camp garb and worse after Trump supporters took umbrage with her profile of Melania Trump in GQ magazine. The would-be first lady later told an interviewer that Ms. Ioffe had provoked it. The anti-Semitic hate hurled at the conservative commentator Bethany Mandel prompted her to buy a gun.

Beyond journalism, stories of Muslims assaulted by Trump supporters are piling up. Hispanic immigrants are lining up for citizenship, eager to vote. Groups that have been maligned over centuries at different times in different regions now share a common tormentor, the alt-right, a militant agglomeration of white nationalists, racists, anti-Semites and America Firsters that have been waging war on the Republican establishment for some time. Their goals: Close the borders, deport illegal immigrants, pull out of international entanglements and pull up the drawbridge. [Continue reading…]

The middle way here requires neither minimizing anti-Semitism nor granting it special status among the array of bigotries that are being fomented by Trump.

The struggle now is between the politics of inclusion and those of exclusion.

There’s never been a time of greater need for a show of solidarity between Jews, Muslims, blacks, immigrants and all Americans who recognize that shared human values matter more than the identities we use to set ourselves apart.

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Eagles take down drones

The New York Times reports: Its wings beating against a gathering breeze, the eagle moves gracefully through a cloudy sky, then swoops, talons outstretched, on its prey below.

The target, however, is not another bird but a small drone, and when the eagle connects, there is a metallic clunk. With the device in its grasp, the bird of prey returns to the ground.

At a disused military airfield in the Netherlands, hunting birds like the eagle are being trained to harness their instincts to help combat the security threats stemming from the proliferation of drones.

The birds of prey learn to intercept small, off-the-shelf drones — unmanned aerial vehicles — of the type that can pose risks to aircraft, drop contraband into jails, conduct surveillance or fly dangerously over public events.

The thought of terrorists using drones haunts security officials in Europe and elsewhere, and among those who watched the demonstration at Valkenburg Naval Air Base this month was Mark Wiebes, a detective chief superintendent in the Dutch police.

Mr. Wiebes described the tests as “very promising,” and said that, subject to a final assessment, birds of prey were likely to be deployed soon in the Netherlands, along with other measures to counter drones. The Metropolitan Police Service in London is also considering using trained birds to fight drones. [Continue reading…]

This has been described as a “a low-tech solution for a high-tech problem” but, on the contrary, what it highlights is the fact that in terms of maneuverability, the flying skills of an eagle (and most other flying creatures) are vastly superior to any form of technology.

In this, as in so many other instances, technology crudely imitates nature.

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How would Trump ‘take the oil’?

Zack Beauchamp writes: In the past five years, Trump has consistently pushed one big foreign policy idea: America should steal other countries’ oil.

He first debuted this plan in an April 2011 television appearance, amid speculation that he might run for the GOP nomination. In the interview, Trump seemed to suggest the US should seize Iraqi oil fields and just operate them on its own.

“In the old days when you won a war, you won a war. You kept the country,” Trump said. “We go fight a war for 10 years, 12 years, lose thousands of people, spend $1.5 trillion, and then we hand the keys over to people that hate us on some council.” He has repeated this idea for years, saying during one 2013 Fox News appearance, “I’ve said it a thousand times.”

Trump sees this as just compensation for invading Iraq in the first place. “I say we should take it [Iraq’s oil] and pay ourselves back,” he said in one 2013 speech.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump has gotten more specific about how exactly he’d “take” Iraq’s oil. In a March interview with the Washington Post, he said he would “circle” the areas of Iraq that contain oil and defend them with American ground troops:

POST: How do you keep it without troops, how do you defend the oil?

TRUMP: You would… You would, well for that— for that, I would circle it. I would defend those areas.

POST: With U.S. troops?

TRUMP: Yeah, I would defend the areas with the oil.

After US troops seize the oil, Trump suggests, American companies would go in and rebuild the oil infrastructure damaged by bombing and then start pumping it on their own. “You’ll get Exxon to come in there … they’ll rebuild that sucker brand new. And I’ll take the oil,” Trump said in a December stump speech.

Trump loves this idea so much that he’d apply it to Libya as well, telling Bill O’Reilly in April that he’d even send in US ground troops (“as few as possible”) to fight off ISIS and secure the country’s oil deposits.

To be clear: Trump’s plan is to use American ground troops to forcibly seize the most valuable resource in two different sovereign countries. The word for that is colonialism.

Trump wants to wage war in the name of explicitly ransacking poorer countries for their natural resources — something that’s far more militarily aggressive than anything Clinton has suggested.

This doesn’t really track as “hawkishness” for most people, mostly because it’s so outlandish. A policy of naked colonialism has been completely unacceptable in American public discourse for decades, so it seems hard to take Trump’s proposals as seriously as, say, Clinton’s support for intervening more forcefully in Syria.

Yet this is what Trump has been consistently advocating for for years. His position hasn’t budged an inch, and he in fact appears to have doubled down on it during this campaign. This seems to be his sincere belief, inasmuch as we can tell when a politician is being sincere. [Continue reading…]

Ignoring the issue of whether this policy might be widely supported in the U.S. (I fear that large numbers of Americans, like Trump, may actually feel the U.S. is entitled to lay claim to Iraq’s oil), and ignoring the fact that Iraqis themselves would object to the theft of their resources, a problem that Trump seems to overlook is the reaction of the rest of the Gulf’s oil producing countries.

Rather than succeeding in taking the oil, what Trump would more likely accomplish is something that currently looks improbable: the formation of an alliance between Iran, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, all of whom would feel threatened by Trump’s move. Not only would they feel threatened but they would also have the means to apply a stranglehold on the global oil supply by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz until Washington’s Pirate-in-Chief stepped back in line by respecting Iraq’s sovereignty.

What’s scarier than any of Trump’s outlandish proposals, is the fact that millions of Americans take him seriously.

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Did Obama just carry out an experimental execution?

Reuters reports: U.S. President Barack Obama approved the drone strike that killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour because the Taliban leader was overseeing plans for new attacks on American targets in Kabul, the Afghan capital, U.S. officials said on Monday. [Continue reading…]

Drone strikes are always carried out in the name of necessity. From the president on down, everyone wants to be able to claim that the decision to launch a deadly attack was driven by an imminent threat, there being no legal basis for indiscriminate killing or vengeance.

In the case of the assassination of the Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, in Pakistan over the weekend, Obama’s comments on the killing suggest that this actually had less to do with preventing an imminent attack, than it was a kind of experiment.

No one knows what the consequence of killing Mansour will be, but Obama apparently thought that the potential benefits outweighed the risks.

An otherwise risk-averse president always seems confident about the bets he places when they involve Hellfire missiles.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mr. Obama, speaking Monday during a visit to Hanoi, said the drone strike against Mr. Mansour did not constitute a “shift” in the U.S. mission. “We are not re-entering the day-to-day combat operations that are currently being conducted by Afghan forces,” he said.

He stressed Saturday’s airstrike was an opportunity for the Taliban to shift direction in favor of reconciliation talks, because Mr. Mansour for months has been against those talks.

Whether Mr. Mansour’s death changes things remains to be seen, according to those who track the group. Some believe his death could lead to a power struggle, accelerating the Taliban’s breakup. A main breakaway group already is being funded by the Afghan government as part of an effort to splinter the movement, The Wall Street Journal reported.

It was disclosed last year that the former Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died two years earlier.

However, the infighting is unlikely to encourage the group to negotiate with the Afghan government, according to those familiar with its operations. Mr. Mansour’s death actually may make it difficult for moderates among the Taliban to negotiate. [Continue reading…]

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Countering American anti-intellectualism involves more than challenging ignorance

The Washington Post reports on President Obama’s commencement address at Rutgers University on Sunday: The president throughout his speech decried a strain of anti-intellectualism in American politics that he said rejects science, reason and debate. “These are things you want in people making policy,” Obama said to laughter. “That might seem obvious.”

At one point, clearly referring to Trump and congressional Republicans who have decried efforts to combat global warming, Obama warned that “in politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.”

“It’s not cool to not know what you are talking about,” he said. “That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you are talking about.”

Throughout the year, Obama has turned again and again in speeches to the obligations that come with citizenship and the need for a more reasoned and respectful political debate at a moment when the country’s politics have never seemed more vulgar and poisonous. [Continue reading…]

Given Obama’s youthful audience, it’s hardly surprising that he would appeal to their desire to be cool, but that itself strikes me as being part of the problem.

Intellectual development hinges less on knowing what you are talking about, than it requires the cultivation of curiosity.

It’s got more to do with asking the right questions, than knowing the right answers.

To be cool, on the other hand, suggests never being caught by surprise — as though to be surprised (which means to encounter the unexpected) must be a bad thing.

But no one can become so seasoned in life that they actually never encounter anything new. On the contrary, where the sense of surprise has been lost, nothing more is being learned. The process of digesting new information and new perceptions that modify ones understanding of the world, has atrophied. Thought, once malleable, has become fixed.

Those who claim they’ve seen it all before, have more likely just stopped looking.

The rancor in political debate which Obama criticizes, is itself not simply representative of a fractious political environment. It isn’t just that discourse is lacking in civility; it’s a reflection of the fears that inhibit creative political thinking.

When politics is strictly factionalized, orthodoxies rule. No one wants to challenge the conventional wisdom inside the camp to which they are aligned. Politics is then simply a power struggle between competing camps.

The intransigence we project onto our opponents is mirrored by the inflexibility on our side.

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