Category Archives: Analysis

Kabul car bomb reminds us this bloody conflict is no nearer an ending

The Guardian reports: The complex attack by the Taliban on an elite military unit at the heart of the Afghan capital on Tuesday morning was a bloody reminder of how the war there is spiralling to new levels of violence, and spilling into urban areas that were once deemed relatively safe.

For years Afghans fled to the capital, and other major cities, to escape the daily brutality of a war fought mostly in their rural home districts. But as the conflict has intensified nationwide, following the departure of western forces, both fear and bloodshed has spilled over into urban areas.

The promise of the government and its western backers that their authority would stand firm in towns and cities, even if insurgents took the countryside, are ringing increasingly hollow.

Kabul’s streets are now deemed so dangerous that the US embassy ferries its staff from airport to bunkered embassy by helicopter, to avoid a five-minute drive down a broad, straight road. [Continue reading…]

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What the European Union can learn from CERN about international co-operation

By Roger Barlow, University of Huddersfield

Can Europe work? This is the real question being asked of British people on June 23. Behind the details of subsidies, regulations and eurozones lies a more fundamental puzzle: can different nationalities retain their own identities and work together, without merging into some bland United States of Europe?

I would like to suggest that there may be an example to follow in the history of CERN, the international research organisation based in Switzerland, and home to the world-famous particle accelerators used recently by teams of thousands of scientists from many nations to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson.

There are many similarities between CERN and the EU. The former was founded in 1954 and the latter in 1957, when the Treaty of Rome was signed (although it was then called the European Economic Community). Both CERN and the EU have grown over the years. The EU started with six countries and now brings together 28. CERN has grown from an initial 12 members, including the UK, to 21.

Both also emerged as a response to a post-war world in which the two superpowers dominated, not only militarily but also economically and scientifically. The US and the USSR were supreme on either side of the iron curtain, and with their great resources they pushed ahead with prestige research: space travel, electronics, and nuclear physics.

The European nations were impoverished by the financial and human cost of the war. Many of its greatest (often Jewish) scientists had fled to the US and were slow to come back. None had the people or the capacity to compete on their own.

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Anders Behring Breivik’s inexplicable crime

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Karl Ove Knausgaard writes: Norway is a small country. It is also relatively homogeneous and egalitarian. This means that the distance from top to bottom is short, and that great disasters affect the entire populace. For example, every Norwegian knows someone who knows someone who died when the Alexander Kielland drilling rig capsized, in 1980 — I recall that my brother had a schoolmate whose father died in the disaster — or when, a decade later, a ferry, the Scandinavian Star, burned and a hundred and fifty-eight of the passengers died. There is also something deeply sincere, almost innocent, about Norwegian culture. Practically every time something about Norway or one of its people appears in the foreign press, the Norwegian media mention this with pride. And every May 17th, National Constitution Day, people don their nicest clothes, whether these be bunads, suits, or dresses, retrieve their flags and ribbons with Norwegian colors, and spill onto the streets to watch children sing songs about Norway, while everyone shouts hurrah and waves flags in a show of patriotism that encompasses every layer of society and plays out in every part of the country. The celebration takes place without irony and is essentially unpolitical — both the left and the right are united in this sea of flags and children. This says something about the country’s egotism, but also about its harmlessness.

It was out of this world that the thirty-two-year-old Anders Behring Breivik stepped when, on the afternoon of July 22, 2011, he set out from his mother’s flat in Oslo’s West End, changed into a police uniform, parked a van containing a bomb, which he had spent the spring and summer making, outside Regjeringskvartalet, lit the fuse, and left the scene. While the catastrophic images of the attack, which killed eight people, were being broadcast across the world, Breivik headed to Utøya. That was where the Workers’ Youth League had its annual summer camp. There Breivik shot and killed sixty-nine people, in a massacre that lasted for more than an hour, right until the police arrived, when he immediately surrendered.

He wanted to save Norway. Just a few hours before detonating the bomb, Breivik e-mailed a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto to a thousand recipients, in which he said that we were at war with Muslims and multiculturalism and that the slaughter of the campers was meant to be a wake-up call. He also uploaded to YouTube a twelve-minute video that revealed, with propagandistic simplicity, what was about to happen in Europe: the Muslim invasion.

The shock in Norway was total. After the Second World War, the most serious political assault in the country had been the so-called Hadeland Murders, in 1981. Two young men, members of a small neo-Nazi underground movement, Norges Germanske Armé, were killed. Breivik’s crime was radically different. The television broadcasts of the scene were chaotic; the journalists and anchorpeople were just as affected by the events as the people they were interviewing; one read in their eyes and their body language incredulity, shock, confusion. The usual detachment with which news is delivered had collapsed. Indeed, at that moment it seemed as if the world stood open. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in 2011, lives in conditions that would seem luxurious by American incarceration standards: a three-room suite with windows that includes a treadmill, a fridge, a television with DVD player and even a Sony PlayStation.

But on Wednesday, a Norwegian court found that the government had violated his human rights, concluding that his long-term solitary confinement posed a threat to his mental health. Mr. Breivik has virtually no contact with other inmates and is subjected to frequent strip searches and searches of his cell. At a trial in March, he argued that his isolation amounted to torture.

Judge Helen Andenaes Sekulic of the Oslo District Court, who oversaw the trial, which was held at the prison for security reasons, found on Wednesday that prison officials had violated an article of the European Convention of Human Rights that prohibits “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” She directed the government to reduce the extent of Mr. Breivik’s isolation — though she did not specify how — and ordered the government to pay Mr. Breivik’s legal fees of 331,000 kroner, or about $40,600. [Continue reading…]

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How animals think

Alison Gopnik writes: For 2,000 years, there was an intuitive, elegant, compelling picture of how the world worked. It was called “the ladder of nature.” In the canonical version, God was at the top, followed by angels, who were followed by humans. Then came the animals, starting with noble wild beasts and descending to domestic animals and insects. Human animals followed the scheme, too. Women ranked lower than men, and children were beneath them. The ladder of nature was a scientific picture, but it was also a moral and political one. It was only natural that creatures higher up would have dominion over those lower down.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection delivered a serious blow to this conception. Natural selection is a blind historical process, stripped of moral hierarchy. A cockroach is just as well adapted to its environment as I am to mine. In fact, the bug may be better adapted — cockroaches have been around a lot longer than humans have, and may well survive after we are gone. But the very word evolution can imply a progression — New Agers talk about becoming “more evolved” — and in the 19th century, it was still common to translate evolutionary ideas into ladder-of-nature terms.

Modern biological science has in principle rejected the ladder of nature. But the intuitive picture is still powerful. In particular, the idea that children and nonhuman animals are lesser beings has been surprisingly persistent. Even scientists often act as if children and animals are defective adult humans, defined by the abilities we have and they don’t. Neuroscientists, for example, sometimes compare brain-damaged adults to children and animals.

We always should have been suspicious of this picture, but now we have no excuse for continuing with it. In the past 30 years, research has explored the distinctive ways in which children as well as animals think, and the discoveries deal the coup de grâce to the ladder of nature. The primatologist Frans de Waal has been at the forefront of the animal research, and its most important public voice. In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, he makes a passionate and convincing case for the sophistication of nonhuman minds. [Continue reading…]

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It’s time to reinstate the forgotten ideal of the commons

Antonia Malchik writes: The ranch my mother was born on was not built solely by her family’s labour. It relied on water aquifers deep beneath the surface, the health of soil on plains and hills beyond their borders, on hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years of care by the Blackfoot tribe whose land it should have remained, the weather over which they had no control, the sun, seeds, and a community who knew in their bones that nobody could do this alone. These things comprised an ecosystem that was vital to their survival, and the same holds true today. These are our shared natural resources, or what was once known as ‘the commons’.

We live on and in the commons, even if we don’t recognise it as such. Every time we take a breath, we’re drawing from the commons. Every time we walk down a road we’re using the commons. Every time we sit in the sunshine or shelter from the rain, listen to birdsong or shut our windows against the stench from a nearby oil refinery, we are engaging with the commons. But we have forgotten the critical role that the commons play in our existence. The commons make life possible. Beyond that, they make private property possible. When the commons become degraded or destroyed, enjoyment and use of private property become untenable. A Montana rancher could own ten thousand acres and still be dependent on the health of the commons. Neither a gated community nor high-rise penthouse apartments can close a human being from the wider world that we all rely on. [Continue reading…]

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On the front line against ISIS

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Scott Atran and ARTIS Research report: According to discussions with U.S. military commanders in Iraq, plans to retake Mosul call for eight to 12 combat brigades (up to 50,000 soldiers or so). These troops would outnumber the estimated ISIS force in Mosul by more than 5 to 1. But unless there is fighting spirit and coordination in the Iraqi Army from the squad level on up, the troops won’t be enough.

It may be wishful thinking to believe that U.S. advisors will make the “massive difference” that some “Iraq experts” suggest. As retired army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis writes in The National Interest: “It is clear that the problems with the Iraqi Army’s disintegration in 2014 when confronted with ISIS, and the conditions affecting the future battle for Mosul, go far deeper than anything a handful of U.S. military advisors are going to solve.”

From the road connecting Makhmour to Aliawa we can see the camp for the Iraqi Army’s 15th Division being set up for the advance on Mosul. Currently designed for 4,500 soldiers, it will likely grow.

ISIS targets the camp frequently. At dawn on March 15, ISIS took advantage of fog and rain to launch a suicide attack. Three ISIS inghamasi rushed the gate; two were killed before reaching it; a third blew himself up at the gate, wounding four soldiers.

At dawn on March 21, five inghamasi died on their way to the camp along with two Iraqi soldiers. General Najat Ali, the Peshmerga commander of the Makhmour front, said that he had warned about the camp’s unsafe location and vulnerability to ISIS attacks. And they keep coming without apparent regard for risk or cost. “They are brave and they fight without calculation,” said one Kurdish communist fighter who fought alongside Peshmerga at Kudilah, but who is usually with the PKK.

He told us that he often hears Shia songs at the camp. “That’s not a good sign of things to come,” he said, because there would be conflict between Shia and Sunni Arabs who some suspect of giving inside information to ISIS, although the few Shia and Sunni Arab soldiers our research team interviewed from the camp deny this is so. The PKK fighter also reminded us that the Sunni Arabs in Mosul initially supported al Qaeda against the Americans, and welcomed ISIS with open arms as a way of taking power back from the Shia, whose installation in power they still blame on the U.S. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinians pop up in Panama Papers

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Adnan Abu Amer writes: Ever since the inception of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994, local and international organizations have repeatedly issued reports on the rampant corruption plaguing its ministries and departments. The problem is not limited to administrative and financial excesses committed by irresponsible individuals for personal motives, but rather is seems entrenched in the PA’s structure.

The most recent corruption case was revealed by the so-called “Panama Papers,” which were published April 4. The Panama Papers exposed the involvement of international figures in tax evasion and money laundering.

Tareq Abbas, the son of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, was among the Palestinian names contained in the papers. According to these documents, Abbas secretly owns, in partnership with the PA, a holding company worth more than $1 million in the British Virgin Islands. [Continue reading…]

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Offshore in central London — the curious case of 29 Harley Street

The Guardian reports: On 10 November, 2003, Gerry Florent, and Ralph Abercia, plus his son, Ralph Jr, left the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, and drove to the Stirling Club, a high-end private venue just off the Strip. They were to attend separate meetings with Sir Richard Benson, but had met each other that morning, when they were collectively coached on the etiquette expected of them: speak only when spoken to, stand when he comes in. They were happy to comply. This was a man who had bailed out the Queen, after all.

Both Florent and the Abercias wanted the same thing from Sir Richard: money, of which he had plenty. Sir Richard, who was portly, balding and elderly, explained to them that he owned a company named Sherwin & Noble, which was worth billions and was prepared to finance their business projects. At their meetings, the prospective investors received a glossy spiral-bound summary of S&N’s balance sheet, which showed it to be a financial firm of significant size.

Florent wanted $55m to buy land on which to build a hotel in Florida; the Abercias needed $105m for an “aquarium/entertainment complex” in Houston. In return for the money, all Sir Richard asked was that they pay advance fees (two payments of $412,250 each from Florent, and two payments of $787,500 each from the Abercias) to signal their commitment to the projects. If S&N decided not to go ahead with the loans, the fees would be repaid.

The investors left Las Vegas, instructed their lawyers to wire the first tranche of the fees over, and settled down to wait for their money. They waited. And they waited. When they rang or faxed the S&N office in London, they were reassured that there was nothing to be concerned about. But, over the next few months, Florent and his business associates became suspicious. They held off wiring the second half of the fee, and brought in a private investigator, who discovered that S&N, far from being worth billions, was an empty shell company. The glossy booklet detailing its assets had been copied from the banking company HBOS, with the names changed.

Thus, the fraud fell apart. The Abercias, who had wired the whole fee asked of them, were devastated. “That was a lot of money,” Ralph Sr told a local journalist. “We’re still paying the damgum thing back.”

The whole saga had been scripted by a conman named Lal Bhatia. Sir Richard Benson was an actor. He had never rescued Buckingham Palace from foreclosure. The billions and the knighthood were fictitious. S&N had no assets, beyond a registered presence at a house in London – 29 Harley Street. [Continue reading…]

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Obama to visit a Saudi Arabia deep in turmoil

The New York Times reports: The images of the past year have been deeply unsettling for the people of Saudi Arabia, long accustomed to oil-fueled prosperity and regional clout: militants firing at communities along the country’s southern border; protesters storming the Saudi Embassy in Tehran; civil wars raging in three nearby states.

The view from Riyadh has become increasingly bleak as stubbornly low oil prices constrain the government’s ability to respond to crises and as the kingdom’s regional rival, Iran, moves aggressively to expand its influence at Saudi Arabia’s expense.

Under huge stress, the Saudis have responded in unpredictable ways, often at odds with Washington’s interests. They have launched a costly military offensive in neighboring Yemen that has failed to defeat the Houthi rebels and has empowered the Qaeda affiliate there. They have executed dozens of men on terrorism charges, including a prominent dissident Shiite cleric. And they have largely walked away from Lebanon, suspending billions of dollars in promised aid as Iranian influence there grows. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s hollowed-out society

Gamal Eid writes: On Wednesday, three judges in Cairo will decide whether to allow prosecutors to pursue their case against me and my co-defendant, the journalist and human rights advocate Hossam Bahgat, in the government’s continuing attack on nongovernmental organizations in Egypt. The case against me has centered on my role in founding the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, which aims to educate the Egyptian public about their civil and human rights.

As for Mr. Bahgat, it is widely known that his investigative reporting has rattled the government. But the case against him has focused on the activities of the organization he founded, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

We have been targeted because our groups provide critical resources to those facing human rights abuses in Egypt. We have represented victims of torture from across the spectrum: Muslim Brotherhood members, liberals, leftists, victims of arbitrary arrest and even government supporters. We have stood for the ideas that human rights belong to all, no matter their ideology, and that civil rights belong to all citizens, no matter their wealth or power. [Continue reading…]

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Prisoner’s letters document tragedy and hope inside Guantánamo

The Intercept reports: On April 16, the Department of Defense issued a short press release announcing that Mohammed al-Hamiri, a Yemeni citizen held at Guantánamo Bay, had been transferred for release. Hamiri had been incarcerated at Guantánamo since 2002, when he was detained by American forces. First taken into custody at the age of 19, Hamiri spent more than a third of his life at the prison. During that time, he was never charged with any crime.

Writing was one of Hamiri’s greatest comforts during the 13 long years he spent at Guantánamo. Hamiri’s letters and other personal writings were cleared for release earlier this year through the work of lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights. The letters reflect an enduring sense of hope, love for family and friends, and a remarkably poetic imagination.

Hamiri’s release this week represents the start of a new chapter in his life, one he has spent years waiting for with both hope and trepidation. His writings from Guantánamo offer a glimpse into what the prospect of freedom meant to him during his long imprisonment. “I do not know why I am writing these words, and I do not know if my letters and my words are going to be read by eyes that know the meaning of justice,” he reflected recently, writing that prison had given him “no voice other than this pen with which to write a painful memory from the pages of my life.” [Continue reading…]

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Karen Greenberg: No justice at Gitmo

With only nine months to go, in the fashion of modern presidents, Barack Obama is already planning his post-presidential library, museum, and foundation complex.  Such institutions only seem to grow more opulent and imperial as the years and administrations pass.  Obama’s will reportedly leave the $300 million raised for George W. Bush’s version of the same in the dust.  The aim is to create at least an $800 million and possibly billion-dollar institution.  With his post-Oval Office future already in view and his presidency nearly history, his “legacy” has clearly been on his mind of late. And when it comes to foreign policy, he definitely has some accomplishments to brag about.  The two most obvious are the Iran nuclear deal and the opening to Cuba.  In their own ways, both could prove game changers, breaking with venomous relations that lasted, in the case of Iran, for more than three and a half decades, and in the case of Cuba, for more than half a century.

You can already imagine the exhibits celebrating them at the Barack Obama Presidential Center to be built on the south side of Chicago.  But it’s hard not to wonder how that institution will handle the three major foreign policy promises the new president made in the distant days of 2008-2009.  After all, he was, in part, swept into the presidency on a blunt promise to end George W. Bush’s catastrophic war in Iraq.  (“So when I am Commander-in-Chief, I will set a new goal on Day One: I will end this war.”)  Nine years later, he’s once again taken this country into the Big Muddy of an Iraq War, either the third or fourth of them in the last five presidencies (depending on whether you count the Reagan administration support for Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran in the 1980s).  At this moment, having just dispatched B-52s, the classic Vietnam-era carpet-bombing plane of choice (Ted Cruz must be thrilled!) to Qatar as part of that war effort, and being on a mission-creep path ever deeper into what can only be called the Iraq quagmire, we’re likely to be talking about a future museum exhibit from hell.

But it won’t begin to match the special exhibit that will someday undoubtedly explore the president’s heartfelt promise to work to severely curtail the American and global nuclear arsenals and put the planet on a path to — a word that had never previously hovered anywhere near the Oval Office — nuclear abolition.  The president’s disarmament ambitions were, in fact, significantly responsible for his 2009 Nobel Prize, an honor that almost uniquely preceded any accomplishments.  Now, the same man is presiding over a planned three-decade, trillion-dollar renovation and modernization of that same arsenal, including the development of an initial generation of “smart” nukes, potentially first-use weapons.  It’s certainly been a unique path for our first outright anti-nuclear president to take and deserves a special place of (dis)honor at the future Obama center.

Barring surprising developments in the coming months, however, no exhibit is likely to be more striking or convoluted than the one that will have to be dedicated to the “closing” of Guantánamo, the notorious offshore, Bush-era prison camp.  After all, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, a striking soon-to-be-published anatomy of post-9/11 national security state mania, points out today, the closing of Guantánamo within a year represented one of the president’s first promises on entering the Oval Office.  Unless somehow he succeeds in shutting Gitmo down over fierce Republican congressional opposition in these final months, it could prove the pièce de résistance of his future museum. Tom Engelhardt

Still in the Bush embrace
What really stands in the way of closing Guantánamo
By Karen J. Greenberg

Can you believe it?  We’re in the last year of the presidency of the man who, on his first day in the Oval Office, swore that he would close Guantánamo, and yet it and everything it represents remains part of our all-American world. So many years later, you can still read news reports on the ongoing nightmares of that grim prison, ranging from detention without charge to hunger strikes and force feeding. Its name still echoes through the halls of Congress in bitter debate over what should or shouldn’t be done with it. It remains a global symbol of the worst America has to offer.

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Europe tried to rein in Google. It backfired

The New York Times reports: Google is a top target for European regulators and privacy watchdogs, who openly fear and distrust its dominance. The American tech giant’s search engine alone gobbles up roughly 90 percent of the European market.

But a landmark court ruling intended to rein in Google has instead put it at the forefront of Europe’s enforcement of Internet privacy. That has upended conventional wisdom about the company and raised questions about the role of commercial interests in protecting people’s privacy, often with little or no transparency.

In the almost two years since Europeans gained the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet, Google has passed judgment in over 418,000 cases — roughly 572 a day — from people wanting links of certain search results to be removed, according to the company’s records. It has approved fewer than half of those requests, all behind closed doors.

Google’s total number of privacy-related judgments is double those of most of Europe’s biggest individual national authorities over the same period, even though these public agencies address a wider range of data protection complaints.

Despite a history of animosity toward the company, national regulators have handed over the review powers to Google with few complaints, saying they are merely following Europe’s complex data protection rules. Other search companies, including Microsoft, have been given the same authority, though their number of judgments pales by comparison.

Some consumer groups and privacy experts are not satisfied with that arrangement. They have sounded alarm bells over a for-profit company — one that relies on tapping into people’s digital lives to make billions of dollars and that is the subject of multiple privacy and antitrust investigations — playing such a central role in protecting individuals’ data, and doing so in such a secretive manner. [Continue reading…]

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Islam is reshaping Europe

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Robert Kaplan writes: Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions and comparative studies, as [Edward] Said intuited it might. Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.

Although the idea of an end to history — with all its ethnic and territorial disputes — turns out to have been a fantasy, this realization is no excuse for a retreat into nationalism. The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.

“The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. [Continue reading…]

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One Palestinian village’s death by a thousand cuts

Joseph Dana writes: My first visit to the village of Al Walaja in 2009 was little more than an afterthought. Having spent most of the day in Bethlehem monitoring Israeli settlement encroachment around the hilltop city, a friend suggested we stop by Al Walaja on our way back to Jerusalem. A non-violent protest movement was taking shape in the village.

Al Walaja sits above a neatly terraced hillside, close to Jerusalem’s southern edge. From the verandas of village homes, you can see Malha Mall and Teddy football stadium, home to the ultranationalist Beitar Jerusalem team. Over the past decade, the Israeli military has aggressively pushed for the creation of its separation barrier on Al Walaja’s border as part of a larger plan to remove Palestinian villages from the Jerusalem municipality.

The pattern is simple: put the village on the West Bank side of the wall, declare a new city boundary, and get rid of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites.

Al Walaja is unique given its proximity to both Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The plans for the barrier, which have been partially carried out, effectively turn Al Walaja into an open-air prison by encircling the village with an eight-metre high concrete wall and a series of fences. Last week, Israeli bulldozers, accompanied by soldiers, entered the village under the cover of darkness and destroyed three homes for “lacking building permits”. [Continue reading…]

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Everything we knew about this ISIS mastermind was wrong

Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan writes: The Pentagon calls him Haji Imam. His other nicknames include Abu Ali al-Anbari, Abu Alaa al-Afri, Hajji Iman, or simply the Hajji, the Arabic word for “pilgrim” but one that is colloquially used to refer to a revered person or gray eminence. Iraqi and American security officials were so confused by his multiple noms de guerre that they identified him as two distinct high-level leaders of the so-called Islamic State; Wikipedia even has two biographies, and two photographs for the one jihadist whose obscurity was in direct proportion to his significance. For Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Shakhilar al-Qaduli — that’s his legal name — is known as a man of many talents. He’d have to be to attain the rank of second-most powerful figure in ISIS, next to the caliph himself.

The U.S. military announced that al-Qaduli—who oversaw ISIS’s intelligence operations — was killed in an airstrike in Deir Ezzor, in eastern Syria, on March 25. Although his death was proclaimed at least four times before by the Iraqi government and twice by the U.S.-led coalition, this time it might be real. Several ISIS supporters eulogized him on social media, and new details about his curriculum vitae and all-important role within the organization have been disclosed, possibly because operational security is no longer a priority.

That the No. 2 man in the world’s most dangerous terror organization may be dead matters almost as much as we’ve only been able to learn about him in death. Al-Qaduli’s biography has been cloaked in rumor, myth, and misinformation — or disinformation, given that much of what had been produced on his history came from disgruntled al Qaeda sources looking to ruin his reputation following the bin Ladenist’s split from ISIS in 2014. [Continue reading…]

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Will Jabhat Al Nusra and ISIS join forces?

Hassan Hassan writes: In a two-part interview with Al Jazeera in May, Mohammed Al Jolani of Jabhat Al Nusra revealed that Al Qaeda’s central leadership had issued instructions against using Syria as a launch pad for attacks against the West. Although the anti-ISIL air campaign frequently struck his cells in northern Syria, Al Jolani said he was still committed to the strict orders.

Almost a year after the interview, much has changed in Syria and the wider neighbourhood. The organisation’s leadership continues to be pounded by the US-led campaign, which targeted operatives most qualified to plan and launch attacks against the West, loosely dubbed by the Americans as the “Khorassan Cell”. According to Hassan Abu Haniya, an observer of Islamist groups from Jordan, the cell’s commanders in Syria have been all but decapitated after a series of high-level killings. This has caused profound anger among Jabhat Al Nusra and Al Qaeda supporters, who started to question the current live-and-let-live strategy in Syria.

The continuing attacks against both ISIL and Al Qaeda, and their affiliates across the region, have led some sympathisers to wonder why the two jihadist groups do not collaborate. In addition to encouragement by ordinary extremist supporters, prominent jihadist ideologues offered help to narrow differences between the two groups. Abu Qatada Al Filistini from Jordan, for example, called for “management of differences” among warring jihadist and Islamist groups, while Abu Muhammed Al Maqdisi, also from Jordan, recently wrote on Twitter that he was willing to revise his position towards ISIL and join it “to spite the whole world” if it stopped labelling other jihadists as apostates. [Continue reading…]

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Facebook’s dominion

The Economist reports: Around a third of Facebook’s active users are in Asia (excluding China, where the service is blocked). Another third are in America and Europe; and the rest are elsewhere around the world. Of the top ten apps in India, Facebook controls three.

Facebook is in such an exalted position because no other company, with the exception of Google, has as many users, knows as much about their behaviour online and can target them as effectively. In addition to all the personal and geographical information, interests, social connections and photos users share, the social network is able to see where else they go online. Anywhere with a “like” symbol feeds back information, as do sites that allow people to log on with their Facebook credentials.

Advertisers can reach consumers with laserlike precision. An energy-drink company may target ads at parents of teenage athletes; a retailer can market goods to people from specific neighbourhoods who have visited its website. “There are three compulsory elements to online advertising today: you have to have a mobile website, and be involved with Google and Facebook,” says Peter Stabler of Wells Fargo, a bank. As a result Facebook claimed 19% and Google 35% of the $70 billion spent on mobile advertising worldwide in 2015, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Twitter and Yahoo had to make do with a meagre 2.5% and 1.5%, respectively.

Facebook is likely to remain on Google’s tail. Its core service continues to grow. Last year it added 200m new users. It has successfully outmanoeuvred regional competitors, such as Orkut, a social network owned by Google that was popular in Brazil. This is partly down to Mr Zuckerberg and his hacker mentality. He believes in rolling out products quickly: “Move fast and break things” is a company motto. [Continue reading…]

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