Sam Bacile, brave enough to incite murder, isn’t brave enough to show his face. Neither he nor the people who funded his movie have the guts to stand up for what they claim to believe in — which makes their “political message” very similar to other acts of anonymous violence.

The Associated Press reports: An Israeli filmmaker based in California went into hiding Tuesday after his movie attacking Islam’s prophet Muhammad sparked angry assaults by ultra-conservative Muslims on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya, where one American was killed.

Speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, writer and director Sam Bacile remained defiant, saying Islam is a cancer and that the 56-year-old intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.

Protesters angered over Bacile’s film opened fire on and burned down the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, killing an American diplomat on Tuesday. In Egypt, protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and replaced an American flag with an Islamic banner.

“This is a political movie,” said Bacile. “The U.S. lost a lot of money and a lot of people in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re fighting with ideas.”

Bacile, a California real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world.

“Islam is a cancer, period,” he said repeatedly, his solemn voice thickly accented.

The two-hour movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” cost $5 million to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors, said Bacile, who wrote and directed it.

The U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith who was killed in Benghazi last night was known to his online gaming friends as “Vile Rat.” One of his friends, “The_Mittani,” describes the way in which Smith’s professional life and online life intersected. To those of us who know nothing about the virtual worlds in which players such as Smith obviously spent a large amount of time, many of the details below will mean little. Even so, there is — at least to my mind — a disturbing degree to which there seem to be a lack of clear boundaries between the virtual and the real.

We knew that Vile Rat was in Benghazi; he told us. He commented on how they use guns to celebrate weddings and how there was a constant susurrus of weaponry in the background. He was in situ to provide IT services for the consulate, which meant he was on the net all the time, hanging out with us on Jabber as usual and talking about internet spaceship games.

The last time he did something like this, he was in Baghdad in 2007 or 2008. He would be on jabber, then say something like ‘incoming’ and vanish for a while as the Kayatushas came down from Sadr City – State had been in the former Saddam Hussein palace on the Tigris before they built that $2bn fortress-embassy later. He got out from his Baghdad post physically unscathed and had some more relaxing postings after that. Montreal, then the Hague. He kept asking me to come visit him – we’d hang out in the States a couple of times a year or see each other in Iceland for CSM crap, but I didn’t have the time visit for whatever reason so I would always say ‘next year’. I missed Montreal, but had made real plans for the Hague… fuck.

So.

Eve.
[…]
If you play this stupid game, you may not realize it, but you play in a galaxy created in large part by Vile Rat’s talent as a diplomat. No one focused as relentlessly on using diplomacy as a strategic tool as VR. Mercenary Coalition flipped sides in the Great War in large part because of Vile Rat’s influence, and if that hadn’t happened GSF probably would have never taken out BoB. Jabberlon5? VR made it. You may not even know what Jabberlon5 is, but it’s the smoke-filled jabber room where every nullsec personage of note hangs out and makes deals. Goonswarm has succeeded over the years in large part because of VR’s emphasis on diplomacy, to the point of creating an entire section with a staff of 10+ called Corps Diplomatique, something no other alliance has. He had the vision and the understanding to see three steps ahead of everyone else – in the game, on the CSM, and when giving real-world advice.

Vile Rat was a spy for the Goonfleet Intelligence Agency. He infiltrated Lotka Volterra; he and I cooked up a scheme where we faked VR blowing up one of Sorenson’s haulers full of zydrine in Syndicate – this was back in 06 when zydrine mattered – and that proved to Lotka Volterra that he had gone ‘fuck goons’. BoB invaded Syndicate, then shortly thereafter GSF went to Insmother, allied with Red Alliance, and plowed over Lotka Volterra’s territory, all with Vile Rat’s aid. He came back in from the cold and became one of the most key players in the GSF directorate. His influence over the grand game and the affairs of Nullsec cannot be overstated. If you were an alliance leader of any consequence, you spoke to Vile Rat. You knew him. You may have been a friend or an enemy or a pawn in a greater game, but he touched every aspect of EVE in ways that 99% of the population will never understand.

With the U.S. presidential election just eight weeks away, the actions of the Israeli prime minister are reaching a point at which they appear to be a transparent effort to determine the outcome. This should be no surprise coming from a man who has long been of the opinion that America is easy to push around. Still, Israeli officials are already starting to express fears about the payback that may well follow Obama’s re-election. Next time Israel expects American defense at the U.N., the veto that it has so often counted on might be unavailable.

But even before then, there might soon come a tipping point at which the Obama campaign needs to signal rather bluntly that it’s time for Netanyahu to back off. If the appearance of the Israeli government trying to choose the next U.S. president were to become part of the campaign debate, Israel would be cast in a new and negative light for many Americans. And Mitt Romney, rather than being able to rely on standard expressions of slavish devotion to Israel, might find himself in the much more awkward position of needing to explain why he accepts support from a foreign entity.

Marsha B Cohen writes: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu marked Sept. 11 with “an unprecedented verbal attack on the U.S. government,” according to Barak Ravid of Haaretz.

Netanyahu told reporters on Tuesday that “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

Netanyahu seems to be having a hard time keeping a lid on his temper these days. But the White House may also be losing patience with Netanyahu. A few hours after Netanyahu’s rant, the White House declined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to meet with Obama during a UN conference in New York in late September. A White House official said that Obama’s schedule does not allow for a meeting during the two and a half days Netanyahu will be in the United States. Ravid considers the White House’s response as marking “a new low in relations between Netanyahu and Obama, underscored by the fact that this is the first time Netanyahu will visit the US as prime minister without meeting the president.”

From another perspective Bradley Burston points out:

…it’s not every day that the prime minister of an Israel whose very security depends on close cooperation with the White House, appears to work angles to try to see an incumbent president defeated – for example, announcing just at the climax of the Republican convention his intention to go to the UN to tell the world of the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program.

Only, in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu and his staff, it has been literally every day.

On August 14, the Israeli news daily Ma’ariv reported that Netanyahu had given Obama a deadline of September 25 to announce to the world that the US would be taking military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Israel would agree to defer a military attack on Iran if Obama publicly declared — at the UN General Assembly or any other public venue of his choosing — that the US will launch a war on Iran as soon as the US election results are in. No further elaboration — or corroboration — of the Sept. 25 “deadline”, which coincides with the eve of the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, has since appeared in Israeli or US press. [Continue reading…]

Akiva Eldar is widely regarded as one of Haaretz’s more enlightened columnists, but his latest piece reveals the bedrock of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the dimension that unites Israelis on the left and the right: their fear of Palestinians.

For Eldar, a binational state in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights is inconceivable since to his mind it is inevitable that if Palestinians enjoyed the political power that is now the privilege of Jewish Israelis, then the current inequalities would simply end up being reversed. He writes:

What will happen when the Palestinian minority in the binational state becomes the majority − in 2020, or 2030, or perhaps in 2050? What will we do then, when the Palestinian majority exercises its right to vote? The model for action already exists: The Palestinian parliament can copy the behavior of Israel’s Knesset in the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Eldad era.

Is anyone willing to guarantee that the Palestinians won’t replace Israel’s Law of Return, for Jewish immigrants, with a law enshrining the Palestinian right of return? Can anyone guarantee that they won’t turn the Jewish National Fund into the Palestinian National Fund; replace the blue and white flag with a black, white and green flag with a crescent moon on the side, and replace “Hatikva” with “Fida’i” ‏(popularly known as “Biladi, Biladi”‏)? Who will light the torches on Mount Herzl on Independence Day? Or perhaps the government of Israstine will ban ceremonies marking the Jews’ temporary victory.

Why wouldn’t they give funding preference for schools in Arab local councils, rename the Israstine international airport after Yasser Arafat and change the name of Ariel University Center of Samaria to the Arab University of the West Bank? We’ve been riding them for decades, why wouldn’t they want to turn the tables on us? At best we’d come out of it with only a few broken ribs.

It’s certainly possible that Palestinians empowered by majority rule would look for ways to exact revenge on their erstwhile oppressors, but that doesn’t look like the most plausible outcome of a binational state. Why?

Look at South Africa where fear and enmity between whites and blacks was surely just as intense as the division in the Holy Land. While the end of apartheid stripped whites of their institutional political power, they retained a significant amount of their economic power. In a binational state, Jewish-owned and run businesses would not be under threat (unless there was a Jewish exodus or state socialism); instead, integrated workforces and expanding markets would open up new opportunities in what could become a much more dynamic economy internally and internationally. The assumption that every Palestinian gain would necessitate a Jewish loss is simply an expression of the narcissistic and narrow-minded Israel-first mentality.

And then there are the cultural differences between the Palestinians and the Zionists. To be blunt, the Palestinians don’t carry the same psychological baggage that burdens their adversaries: they have the more modest and adaptive identity of an indigenous people — not God’s chosen people; that they have suffered decades of oppression — not millennia of persecution — and thus don’t have victimhood at the very core of their identity; and they have a stronger sense that they belong to the land, than that the land belongs to them.

Hard as it might seem for many Israelis to imagine, in a binational state, Jews might end up profitably learning from the neighbors they have so long feared.

What threatens Israel more than anything else is fear — fear which shackles life, undermines courage and takes away dignity.

While the token of loyalty that the Israel lobby demanded from the Democrats on Wednesday was the undemocratic reinstatement of an affirmation of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, curiously another piece of doting flattery from the 2008 platform — “our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy” — has been dropped.

Allies cooperate and they also function with autonomy. The relationship that the Israel lobby insists on securing, however, is one of absolute subservience in which the United States bows without question to Israeli demands with no semblance of the mutual respect that real allies afford each other. If or when the U.S should attack Iran is, supposedly, a matter for Israelis to decide, so why bother with the pretense that Israel be called ‘our strongest ally’?

As for the notion that the U.S. has a vital role to play in mediating a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that’s a thing of the past.

Tony Karon writes: The Obama Administration essentially threw up its hands in December of 2010, forced to accept defeat after two years of trying to complete the peace process.

Today, there’s no prospect of achieving a two-state peace agreement through bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The only change to Jerusalem’s status quo currently underway is the expansion of Israel’s control of the eastern parts of the city it occupied in the war of 1967 — hardly a cause for concern among those who proclaim it the undivided capital of the Jewish State, even if it is routinely denounced as “unhelpful” by a U.S. State Department mindful of the damage that expansion does to the prospects for a peace agreement.

So it’s plausible, albeit unlikely, that the Democrats’ initial omission of any reference to Jerusalem could simply have been an oversight. After all, who in Washington talks to or about the Palestinians any more? When it comes to Israel, the only topic of conversation these days is Iran’s nuclear program.

A few Israeli intellectuals glumly warn that Netanyahu has effectively buried the two-state solution, and that the result will be eventual Palestinian demands for civil rights within a single, common polity. Even Ehud Barak, Netanyahu’s defense minister and fellow Iran hawk, warned early in 2010, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Barak was describing the status quo in words that would bring a frenzy of denunciation if spoken in the U.S. domestic political mainstream. Apartheid, after all, is the South African term coined for the system of white domination in which black people were denied the rights of citizenship in the state that ruled over them — and it eventually prompted a campaign of international isolation and economic sanctions. The recent decision by South Africa’s post-apartheid government prohibiting products made in occupied territories from being labeled “Made in Israel” could be a portent of things to come in the wider international community.

Ynet reports: The United States has indirectly informed Iran, via two European nations, that it would not back an Israeli strike against the country’s nuclear facilities, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday.

According to the report, Washington used covert back-channels in Europe to clarify that the US does not intend to back Israel in a strike that may spark a regional conflict.

In return, Washington reportedly expects Iran to steer clear of strategic American assets in the Persian Gulf, such as military bases and aircraft carriers.

We already know that Benjamin Netanyahu is hell-bent on trying to extract a hard promise from President Obama that precisely spells out the circumstances in which the United States will launch a military strike on Iran and we know that the U.S. is in overdrive trying to ensure that Israel does not unilaterally launch an attack on Iran. In this context, is it plausible that the U.S. would spell out to Iran those conditions in which the U.S. would leave Israel to suffer the consequences of Iranian retaliation?

This report sounds more like an Israeli fabrication designed to prompt an unequivocal denial from Washington and thus an implicit confirmation that however recklessly Israel acts, the United States remains committed to protect its least dependable ally.

Sure enough, Reuters now reports:

The White House on Monday denied an Israeli newspaper report that accused Washington of secretly negotiating with Tehran to keep the United States out of a future Israel-Iran war.

“It’s incorrect, completely incorrect,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told Reuters while accompanying President Barack Obama on a campaign trip in Ohio. “The report is false and we don’t talk about hypotheticals.”

Unlike the White House, I have no reluctance to speculate and my guess is that there is a grain of truth in the Yedioth report, which is to say that the Pentagon’s primary concern is first and foremost the protection of U.S. regional interests. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already gone on record indicating, in effect, that if Israel unilaterally attacks Iran, then they’re on their own. “I don’t want to be complicit if they choose to do it.”

The Israelis (or perhaps some of their friends in Washington), rather than accept that they have been duly cautioned, have twisted this warning into an imaginary back-channel deal between Iran and the U.S. in an attempt to delegitimize Dempsey’s warning. At least that’s one way of interpreting what’s behind this story.

The New York Times reports: With Israel openly debating whether to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming months, the Obama administration is moving ahead with a range of steps short of war that it hopes will forestall an Israeli attack, while forcing the Iranians to take more seriously negotiations that are all but stalemated.

Already planned are naval exercises and new antimissile systems in the Persian Gulf, and a more forceful clamping down on Iranian oil revenue. The administration is also considering new declarations by President Obama about what might bring about American military action, as well as covert activities that have been previously considered and rejected.

Later this month the United States and more than 25 other nations will hold the largest-ever minesweeping exercise in the Persian Gulf, in what military officials say is a demonstration of unity and a defensive step to prevent Iran from attempting to block oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the United States and Iran have each announced what amounted to dueling defensive exercises to be conducted this fall, each intended to dissuade the other from attack.

The administration is also racing to complete, in the next several months, a new radar system in Qatar that would combine with radars already in place in Israel and Turkey to form a broad arc of antimissile coverage, according to military officials. The message to Iran would be that even if it developed a nuclear weapon and mounted it atop its growing fleet of missiles, it could be countered by antimissile systems.

The question of how explicit Mr. Obama’s warnings to Iran should be is still a subject of internal debate, closely tied to election-year politics. Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers have argued that Israel needs a stronger public assurance that he is willing to take military action, well before Iran actually acquired a weapon. But other senior officials have argued that Israel is trying to corner Mr. Obama into a military commitment that he does not yet need to make.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to criticize Mr. Obama for being too vague about how far Iran can go. “The international community is not setting Iran a clear red line, and Iran does not see international determination to stop its nuclear project,” he told his cabinet. “Until Iran sees a clear red line and such determination, it will not stop the progress of its nuclear project — and Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.”

None of the steps being taken by the Obama administration addresses the most immediate goal of the United States and its allies: Slowing Iran’s nuclear development. So inside the American and Israeli intelligence agencies, there is continuing debate about possible successors to “Olympic Games,” the covert cyberoperation, begun in the Bush administration and accelerated under Mr. Obama, that infected Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and, for a while, sent them spinning out of control. An error in the computer code alerted Iran to the attack in 2010, and since then many of the country’s nuclear sites have been modified to defend against such attacks, according to experts familiar with the effort.

The “Olympic Games” attack on Iran’s centrifuges was chosen over another approach that the Bush administration explored: going after electrical grids feeding the nuclear operations. But Mr. Obama has rejected any attacks that could risk affecting nearby towns or facilities and thus harm ordinary Iranians. Other plans considered in the past, and now reportedly back under consideration, focus on other targets in the nuclear process, from making raw fuel to facilities involved in missile work. One missile plant blew up last year, and Israeli sabotage was suspected, but never proven. American officials say the United States was not involved.

One other proposal circulating in Washington, advocated by some former senior national security officials, is a “clandestine” military strike, akin to the one Israel launched against Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007. It took weeks for it to become clear that site had been hit by Israeli jets, and perhaps because the strike was never officially acknowledged by Israel, and because its success was so embarrassing to Syria, there was no retaliation.

But Iran’s is a much higher-profile program. “At best this would buy you a few years,” one administration official said, without acknowledging such a strike was under consideration by the United States or Israel. Even if an explosion at an Iranian facility was accidental, the official said, “the Iranians might well see it as a provocation for an attack of their own.”

“Some former senior national security officials”? Of course the New York Times has to be coy and protect the identity of one of its favorite sources, but can there be any doubt that it’s former NSC Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, Dennis Ross, who is pushing this reckless proposition? And how long would such an attack remain ‘clandestine’? 24 hours? 48 at most. Then what?

The Associated Press reports: With America embroiled in its longest armed conflict, Mitt Romney became the first Republican since 1952 to accept his party’s nomination without mentioning war.

Three election cycles after the 2001 terrorist attacks, neither Romney nor his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, had anything to say about terrorism or war while on their party’s biggest stage. The only one who did Thursday was actor Clint Eastwood, who won cheers for suggesting invading Afghanistan was a mistake and calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops — a line that might have earned boos and catcalls four years ago.

The Romney strategy reflects the weak public support for the Afghanistan war, fatigue over a decade of terrorism fears and the central role of the economy in the campaign. But it was still a remarkable shift in tone for a party that, even in times of peace, has used the specter of war to call for greater military spending and tough foreign policy.

Candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon criticized the handling of the Vietnam War. Bob Dole said the way to prevent conflict is to prepare for more, greater wars than a country will need to fight. Ronald Reagan warned that a weak nation would tempt the Soviet Union.

“Four times in my lifetime America has gone to war, bleeding the lives of its young men into the sands of beachheads, the fields of Europe and the jungles and rice paddies of Asia,” Reagan said in 1980. “We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak.”

Even President Gerald Ford, who in 1976, a year after the last U.S. troops left Vietnam, declared that, “not a single American is at war anywhere on the face of this Earth tonight,” went on to say, “A strong military posture is always the best insurance for peace.”

Things are different now, 11 years after President George W. Bush pledged to “starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or rest.”

Osama bin Laden is dead. The Iraq war is over. Al-Qaida is weakened. The color coded alerts that for years warned of a constant, unseen danger have faded away. None of the presidential or vice presidential candidates for either party has ever served in the military, a first in 80 years.

The only thing that is evident is that in the current climate, war talk doesn’t win votes. But that hardly seems indicative of a fundamental change in mindset, either among Republicans or Democrats.

The opponents of Big Government have yet to call for slashing big defense spending. The president who promised to change the mindset that took America to war in 2003 has himself instead become the leading practitioner of remote warfare. Neither presidential candidate is promising to launch a war against Iran; but neither are they promising to do everything they can to prevent one. In 2011 the U.S. pumped more weapons into the global arms market than ever.

As the longest war in American history continues in Afghanistan, even if no one has much appetite to talk about war, war nevertheless remains the narrow prism that distorts America’s view of the world.

Faheem Younus writes: The straw man of the famous post-Sept. 11 slogan, “Not every Muslim is a terrorist but every terrorist is a Muslim” was debunked by a 2005 FBI report.

It showed that only 6 percent of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1980 to 2005 were carried out by extremists calling themselves Muslims. But one group has sustained the Islamophobic rhetoric, nonetheless.

So I wonder if Muslims would rally outside the Republican National Convention this week carrying a banner stating, “Not all Republicans are Islamophobes but all Islamophobes are Republicans.” Trust me. The data supports it.

A new poll conducted by the Arab American Institute asked the attitudes of voters, analyzed along party lines, towards different religious groups, including Arabs and Muslims. Overall, 57 percent of the Republican voters viewed all Muslims unfavorably in comparison to 29 percent of Democrats who expressed a similar opinion. When it came to American Muslims, 47 percent of Republicans, in contrast with 23 percent of Democrats, held an unfavorable view.

Islamophobia in America is not innate, rather it’s the fruit of a decade-long hysteria against Muslims generated by a largely Republican machine comprised of pundits, conservative funders, media conglomerates and fiery politicians.

By pundits, I mean the likes of lawyer/political commentator Ann Coulter who boldly asked Muslims to “take a camel” instead of flying on a plane and talk show host Sean Hannity who compared Islam with Nazism. Others such as media personality Glenn Beck, Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes, televangelist Pat Robertson, Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, and activist Pamela Geller also mesmerized millions with their imagery of the Muslim terrorist next door.

Then comes the funding component. Fear Inc., a 2011 report by the Center for American Progress, showed that seven conservative charitable groups provided $42.6 million to Islamophobic think-tanks between 2001 and 2009. This fear is then packed and loaded, not on camel backs, but on the airwaves such as the Rush Limbaugh Show and the Savage Nation as well as a plethora of Web sites, blogs, forums, and chain e-mails.

Republican politicians such as Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann and New York congressman Peter King and almost every Republican presidential candidate in the 2012 primaries save Ron Paul, are then given the megaphone to add trust to this fear mongering. But here is the rub: According to Gallup, 90 percent of Americans don’t even trust these politicians.

You can’t help but wonder: Why is it that nearly all Islamophobes are Republicans? Probably some “data girl” – as Carl Rove calls one of his staff members – in a cubicle reckoned that the American Muslim vote bank is better bashed, than embraced.

The theory is simple. Muslim youth? Tell them to take a camel. Muslim communities? Link them with creeping shariah. Muslim congressmen? Question their loyalty. Do it consistently and it will galvanize the conservative base. [Continue reading…]

During a presidential election, I can see the temptation in claiming that American bigots all belong to one party, but I think Democrats who claim this are either deluded or disingenuous. Xenophobia, Islamophobia, and plain ignorance are features of this culture that can reasonably be called all-American in the sense that they are ubiquitous to this society.

Sure, the Islamophobes are no doubt predominantly Republican, white, and Christian, but lets not leave out the Islamophobic Democrats, atheists, and Zionists.

The Guardian reports: The mullah at the centre of the furore surrounding a young Pakistani Christian girl facing a death sentence for blasphemy has been accused of deliberately framing her by planting burnt Islamic texts.

In an extraordinary development in the case, which has attracted international condemnation, Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti arrived in court blindfolded and under tight security after being arrested late on Saturday night. The judge ruled he should be held in police custody for two weeks.

Police say two of his colleagues gave statements that he added pages from the Qu’ran to strengthen the case against Rimsha Masih, who has been in custody for two weeks after she was accused by Muslim neighbours in her Islamabad neighbourhood of burning the holy book.

The crime is particularly serious under the country’s much-criticised blasphemy laws and offenders can be sentenced to death.

Maulvi Zubair and two other assistants at a mosque near Rimsha’s house told police Chishti deliberately added pages from the Qu’ran to some charred refuse she was carrying.

Zubair is said to have objected at the time but Chishti insisted it was the only way to get rid of Christians in the area.

Rimsha’s lawyers maintain that she did not commit any crime. They say that not only is she only 13 years old, and should be tried as a juvenile, she also has Down’s syndrome and therefore “cannot commit such a crime”, according to her bail application.

Chishti has been outspoken about his dislike of the hundreds of Christian families who live in the area, even appearing on a popular national television show to complain that the noise made by Christian worshippers had disturbed Muslim residents.

This is the kind of story that Islamophobes inevitably jump on as representative of the “nature” of Islamic intolerance, yet I think what it actually shows is the reason why there needs to be a clear separation between religion and state because of the inherently corrupting influence of power.

Consider the states in which religious power and the operations of government are most deeply intertwined — Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, and the Vatican. Each gives a bad name to the religion with which it is associated.

Whether power is usurped by religion, corporations, ethnic groups, a tyrannical majority, or any other faction, the mere fact of its being consolidated means that power is being accrued by some at the expense of others. The claim that the powerful can act in the interests of the powerless is invariably a lie.

The Washington Post‘s ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, writes: Readers periodically ask me some variation on this question: “Why does the press follow every jot and tittle of Iran’s nuclear program, but we never see any stories about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability?”

It’s a fair question. Going back 10 years into Post archives, I could not find any in-depth reporting on Israeli nuclear capabilities, although national security writer Walter Pincus has touched on it many times in his articles and columns.

I spoke with several experts in the nuclear and nonproliferation fields , and they say that the lack of reporting on Israel’s nuclear weapons is real — and frustrating. There are some obvious reasons for this, and others that are not so obvious.

First, Israel refuses to acknowledge publicly that it has nuclear weapons. The U.S. government also officially does not acknowledge the existence of such a program. Israel’s official position, as reiterated by Aaron Sagui, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy here, is that “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace.” The “introduce” language is purposefully vague, but experts say it means that Israel will not openly test a weapon or declare publicly that it has one.

According to Avner Cohen, a professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California who has written two books about this subject, this formulation was born in the mid-1960s in Israel and was the foundation of a still-secret 1969 agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon, reached when the United States became sure that Israel possessed nuclear bombs.

President John Kennedy vigorously tried to prevent Israel from obtaining the bomb; President Lyndon Johnson did so to a much lesser extent. But once it was a done deal, Nixon and every president since has not pressed Israel to officially disclose its capabilities or to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In return, Israel agrees to keep its nuclear weapons unacknowledged and low-profile. [Continue reading…]

Pexton leaves it until the end of his piece to include the most telling statement on this issue and like most journalists who are reluctant to use their own voice to express the truth, he defers to the voice of an expert — in this case, George Perkovich, director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who says: “It’s like all things having to do with Israel and the United States. If you want to get ahead, you don’t talk about it; you don’t criticize Israel, you protect Israel. You don’t talk about illegal settlements on the West Bank even though everyone knows they are there.”

Glenn Greenwald writes: The rightwing transparency group, Judicial Watch, released Tuesday a new batch of documents showing how eagerly the Obama administration shoveled information to Hollywood film-makers about the Bin Laden raid. Obama officials did so to enable the production of a politically beneficial pre-election film about that “heroic” killing, even as administration lawyers insisted to federal courts and media outlets that no disclosure was permissible because the raid was classified.

Thanks to prior disclosures from Judicial Watch of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, this is old news. That’s what the Obama administration chronically does: it manipulates secrecy powers to prevent accountability in a court of law, while leaking at will about the same programs in order to glorify the president.

But what is news in this disclosure are the newly released emails between Mark Mazzetti, the New York Times‘s national security and intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf. The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA’s role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama’s re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd’s column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: “Any word??”, suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd’s impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.

A mere two minutes after the CIA spokeswoman sent this Friday night inquiry, Mazzetti responded. He promised her that he was “going to see a version before it gets filed”, and assured her that there was likely nothing to worry about:

“My sense is there a very brief mention at bottom of column about CIA ceremony, but that [screenwriter Mark] Boal also got high level access at Pentagon.”

She then replied with this instruction to Mazzetti: “keep me posted”, adding that she “really appreciate[d] it”.

Moments later, Mazzetti forwarded the draft of Dowd’s unpublished column to the CIA spokeswoman (it was published the following night online by the Times, and two days later in the print edition). At the top of that email, Mazzetti wrote: “this didn’t come from me … and please delete after you read.” [Continue reading…]

Mazzetti has told the Times’ public editor Arthur Bisbane, “I did make a bunch of calls and was doing this on deadline. As part of the process, I also did send the column [to the CIA]. It was definitely a mistake to do. I have never done it before and I will never do it again.”

Mazzetti was working on a deadline. So? He’s a reporter. That’s what reporters do.

Still, he’s acknowledged his mistake — but which one? Sending the column to the CIA? Or asking them to cover it up?

Then to cap the damage control he offers this assurance: he never did it before and will never do it again.

This is coming from a journalist who didn’t just get caught colluding with the CIA. He also got caught trying to cover up the evidence. And now he wants everyone to believe this was a one-time offense.

On the contrary, it sounds more like the kind of mea culpa one might expect from a serial liar. After all, he could merely have acknowledged this “mistake” without trying to portray himself as a choir boy.

Executive Editor Jill Abramson and Managing Editor Dean Baquet both went out of their way to minimize what Mazzetti did. If it turns out that he is really a serial offender, all three of them should get fired.

A video posted on YouTube in the last few hours has this description:

The FSA captures a missile storage base near Damascus. Some of the missiles were being modified by the Assad regime so that chemically charged warheads could be fixed on them.

I can’t confirm any of that information or say anything about the Arabic text at the beginning. What seems evident, nevertheless, is that this video was indeed made in a missile storage facility which is no longer under the control of the Syrian military.

Watch the video at YouTube — embedding has been disable so I can’t post the video here.

At first glance, the statistics on Twitter use across the Arab world suggest that there is an inverse relationship between tweeting and revolution. With the exception of Bahrain, Twitter activity appears to be at its greatest among the unrevolutionary Gulf states.

The numbers used for this infographic come from the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report and, as far as I can tell, their statistics are gathered simply on a country-by-country basis. For that reason, the numbers for the Gulf states need to be viewed with some caution since most of these countries have large and in some cases majority non-national populations. In other words a proportion of Gulf tweeters (who knows how large) are foreigners most of whom are likely to be politically disengaged by default — these are people who live in the Gulf to make money, not foment social change.

(Click on the image to enlarge.)

Browse more infographics.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the ultra-Orthodox leader of the Shas party, does not speak for the Israeli government. Nevertheless, since Yosef’s advice has been sought by Israel’s political leaders on the issue of a possible attack on Iran, the comments from Yosef and those coming from Tehran deserve to be compared.

Nima Shirazi notes:

The rhetoric used in recent speeches by top Iranian officials has garnered much attention in the mainstream media. In addition to the outrage expressed over the statement that the Israeli governmental system and guiding Zionist ideology is an “insult to humanity,” comments that the “Zionist regime” is a “cancerous tumor” have also met fierce condemnation.

Here, as is typically the case, the target of Iranian political venom is not the Jewish people or the state of Israel but instead the political system, Zionism, through which Israel is governed. Naturally, many Jews inside and outside Israel find such strident and hateful language threatening, yet such attacks on Zionism are no more a threat to annihilate the Israeli population than were calls for the end of the Soviet Union the expression of a desire to wipe out Russians.

In contrast, when Rabbi Yosef calls for Iran’s destruction, as he did yesterday, he appears to be advocating genocide. He might be calling on God to destroy Israel’s enemies but many a war maker claims as his inspiration, divine guidance.

Haaretz reports: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who was updated last week on the Iranian nuclear project, called on Jews to pray for the destruction of Iran, this past Saturday.

During his weekly sermon, the ultra-Orthodox leader of the Shas party stated that his followers should pray for the annihilation of the enemies of the Jewish people during Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year), with an emphasis on Iran and Hezbollah.

“When we say ‘may our enemies be struck down’ on Rosh Hashana, it shall be directed at Iran, the evil ones who threaten Israel. God shall strike them down and kill them,” said Yosef.”

The comments come in the wake of visits by senior defense officials, including National Security Council head Ya’akov Amidror and Interior Minister Eli Yishai, to Yosef to convince Yosef to support a possible Israeli attack on Iran.

It is not known whether Amidror or any of the others succeeded in persuading Yosef. However, during a sermon delivered the previous week, a day after his meeting with Amidror, Yosef said: “You know what situation we’re in, there are evil people, Iran, about to destroy us. … We must pray before [the almighty] with all our heart.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, which Israeli officials have said is divided over the question of launching a go-it-alone attack on Iran, includes a Shas minister as one of its eight members. Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes.

Yosef wields significant influence over Shas’s lawmakers, who seek his guidance on policy.

In the past, the Baghdad-born Yosef has stirred controversy by likening Palestinians to snakes, calling for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to “perish from this world” and describing non-Jews as “born only to serve us”.

But he has also spoken out in favour of Israel ceding occupied land for peace with the Palestinians in order to end conflict and save Jewish lives.

Journalists don’t quite maintain a code of silence when it comes to covering professional misconduct in their own business, but there’s clearly a general reluctance within the press to scrutinize itself. No one wants to look treacherous or close doors to their own career advancement. So, the following report from The Forward is unusual in shining a spotlight on willingness of American journalists to take guidance from the Israel lobby.

The report focuses on the operations of the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), an AIPAC offshoot which funds Congressional trips to Israel, but their propaganda efforts are not just directed at the so-called representatives of the American people; they also manipulate the so-called Fourth Estate:

AIEF takes more than just members of Congress on trips to Israel; it takes journalists, too, on a regular basis. Discussing the latest Sea of Galilee events, Chris Matthews host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” said on August 20: “I’ve been there a number of times, a trip sponsored by a pro-Israel group, Jewish group, very educational trips. They show you a lot about the geography of the land and the situation they’re facing with the Palestinians.”

MSNBC did not return several calls requesting comment on Matthews’ participation in these trips and the network’s policy on joining press junkets.

A spokesman for AIEF would not provide details on the number of reporters hosted by the group in Israel, but there are estimates based on reports of participants indicating that dozens of journalists have participated in pro-Israel junkets throughout the years.

“It’s a super-effective strategy,” said David Plotz, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Slate. Plotz attended an AIEF trip in 2007. He noted that while the junket was “incredible fun,” with business class travel and fancy hotels, organizers packed the agenda with informative tours and “amazing interesting people,” including Israeli President Shimon Peres, top officers of the Israel Defense Forces and a senior Palestinian representative. Participants were free to quiz their hosts and to pose tough questions, but still, Plotz said he left Israel with the impression that “Gaza is a mess, the [security] wall is serving its purpose and that — oh, my God — Iran is six months away from nuclear weapons.” Slate does not have a policy prohibiting participation in junkets as long as reporters clearly state where the funding came from.

Many other American publications do not prohibit trips paid for by businesses or interest groups, though it is common to require full disclosure when reporting on topics relating to the tour. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and all major TV networks insist on paying for their own expenses in all cases, as does the Forward.

“A responsible journalist has no business taking a free trip to Israel — or to any other country, or to a Hollywood film studio’s junket at a resort, or to any other destination that is involved in the subject matter that the journalist covers or is likely to cover in the future. Period,” said Samuel Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and an expert on media ethics. Freedman stressed that even if the free trips do not create actual bias in the reporting, “they absolutely create the perception of bias, and that perception is just as corrosive to a journalist’s credibility.” Larry Lorenz, professor emeritus of journalism at Loyola University New Orleans, agreed that receiving free trips is wrong regardless of whether reporters write about the issue. “Journalism organizations should be concerned about giving the appearance of being bought,” Lorenz said.

Fittingly, a Norwegian court today pronounced its conclusion that Anders Behring Breivik is sane and thus has been given the maximum sentence for his crimes. As The Guardian notes, Norway demonstrated that terrorism can be faced without suspending the legal rights of the accused through ‘an open trial in an open society.’

But to say that Breivik is sane — even if we understand that to be nothing more than a determination of his legal responsibility for his own actions — begs the question of what we really mean by sanity.

We live in societies where it is generally assumed that, with a relatively small number of exceptions, everyone is sane. Sanity is normality, but what form of sanity functioned in Breivik’s mind?

To be sane is to be of sound mind and soundness of mind is a determination of mental coherence — that the mind is not broken. Whatever is sound is not about to fall apart.

This image of mind as an internal structure that may or may not rest on solid foundations, misses the fluid and dynamic relationship between cognition, awareness and the flood of sensory input out of which we can construct a constantly evolving understanding of the world.

If we are to view sanity as something with intrinsic value and not assume it to be commonplace, it actually has less to do with the internal structure that we designate as a sound mind than it has to do with the manner in which that mind engages with the world.

You can’t think straight unless there is a corresponding clarity in the way you see, hear, feel, and connect with your surroundings.

So many of the nominally sane are nothing more than sleepwalkers satisfied to engage with a crude representation of the world (“the world as I see it”) which becomes a filter that narrows and eventually replaces perceptions.

And nowhere is this filtering mechanism applied more extremely than in the mind of the ideologue. There, an infatuation with a representation not only means that filters are constructed in order to shut out anything that might challenge the ideology, but the ideologue then goes one radical step further by attempting to propagate his own conceptual framework inside the minds of others.

Breivik’s mind was consumed by a particularly destructive ideology; the fixations of others tend to be more benign, but what all hold in common is this inclination to shut out the world — a world that cannot be reduced to a collection of ideas; a world in which perceptions constantly touch the unknown; a world in which everyone’s vision springs from a vantage point.

John Rosenthal writes: There has recently been a small stir in the American media, as media organizations from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Associated Press have finally gotten around to acknowledging a “presence” of al-Qaeda and like-minded jihadist groups among the Syrian rebel forces seeking to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

It is difficult to see what the cause of the excitement is. After all, such a presence has been blindingly obvious for many months: whether as a result of the dozens of suicide attacks that have plagued Syria or the numerous videos that have emerged showing rebel forces or supporters proudly displaying the distinctive black flag of al-Qaeda.

Dozens of suicide attacks? Is that an overstatement? The Long War Journal has compiled the statistics and the total currently stands at 25 such attacks. Two dozen is technically dozens because it’s more than one dozen but I think for most people the phrase “dozens” connotes a lot more.

For years, Bashar al Assad’s regime sponsored the flow of suicide bombers and foreign fighters into Iraq to fight Coalition forces. But suddenly, on Dec. 23, 2011, the regime’s own intelligence apparatus was struck by two suicide bombers in Damascus, leaving 44 dead and more than 160 wounded. The rebellion against Assad had begun nine months earlier, but no major suicide attacks, if any at all, were reported until that day in December.

The Syrian government blamed “terrorists.” The Syrian opposition blamed Assad, saying that the attacks were a false flag operation intended to undermine support for the rebels. But the opposition has clear incentives to write off the December 2011 suicide attacks as the work of the Assad regime. The rebellion had not been started by al Qaeda, and the group’s entry into the fight would only complicate international support for overthrowing the Syrian dictator.

There is a simple explanation for the suicide attacks in December and the others that would follow: blowback. Al Qaeda is staging a remarkable surge of its own in Syria.

Top US officials worried about just such a possibility well before the rebellion began. For example, a leaked State Department cable from July 2009 summarizes General David Petraeus’s view of the relationship between AQI and the Syrian regime. “In time,” the cable reads, “these fighters will turn on their Syrian hosts and begin conducting attacks against Bashar al Assad’s regime itself, Petraeus predicted.”

Relying on translations prepared by the SITE Intelligence Group and other publicly-available reports, The Long War Journal has found that approximately 25 suicide bombings have been executed in Syria since the end of last year. This includes the Dec. 23, 2011 attacks and 24 suicide bombings since the first of this year. That is, there have been about 25 suicide bombings in Syria in less than eight months.

A listing of these attacks, including links to sources when appropriate, is included below.

While this may not seem like an especially high number, it is a striking figure when compared to the global martyrdom campaign. For instance, according to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), there were 279 suicide attacks in the world in 2011. 259 of these attacks were carried out by “Sunni extremists,” or jihadists. Only one of the 259 occurred in Syria. This suggests that the prolific use of suicide bombers in Syria that began late last year now represents a significant percentage of all such attacks carried out around the globe.

Based on the available information about the number of casualties from suicide attacks in Syria, the average number of deaths per day may be as few as one and perhaps as high as two. Given that the average number of deaths overall is now well over 100 per day, deaths from suicide attacks make up a tiny fraction.

Meanwhile in neighboring Iraq during 2012, deaths from suicide attacks have averaged seven per day. In other words, the risk of being killed by a suicide bomber is far greater in Iraq than it is in Syria even though the overall level of violence in Syria is vastly more than in Iraq.

In the Western media suicide attacks often seem to be portrayed as random acts of violence by Jihadist extremists who have a hunger for martyrdom, but in reality they are simply one of many gruesome forms of violence employed in a variety of situations for a variety of purposes.

Contrary to the state-driven propaganda which portrays Assad’s forces arraigned against hordes of foreign terrorists, there is currently no reason to suppose that such attacks are likely to become much more prevalent in Syria than they already are — which is to say, they are likely to remain a peripheral feature of the conflict.