Category Archives: Analysis

The world needs drastic action to meet Paris climate goals

Wired reports: Last week’s UN climate meeting took place inside six massive, climate-controlled warehouses, on the grounds of France’s oldest commercial airport. That airport is in the suburb of Le Bourget, which itself is part of the Paris metropolitan region—home to some 12 million people and their homes, workplaces, commutes, appetites, and pastimes. With the exception of a small but growing slice powered by renewables, the majority of everything that everybody does in Paris and beyond is powered by fossil fuels.

That’s the electricity powering your computer, Xbox, microwave, refrigerator, and heater. Gas goes in your car, into the trucks that deliver your year-round vegetables, into the ship that brought your hoverboard over from China. Coal provides the heat to make the steel in every building, every train track. It’s essential for concrete, too.

The goal of the Paris climate deal is to keep average global temperature increase well below 2 degrees Celsius, and as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible. Let’s assume the best case scenario, compliance-wise. Every nation outdoes their pre-submitted plans (which currently add up to 2.7 degrees above global average by the end of the century). Every five years every nation ratchets up their commitments, and carbon pricing sends a planet-wide price signal to the economy that it is cheaper to do business with renewables. What does all that look like? What exactly needs to happen in order to meet that ambitious goal? [Continue reading…]

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How noise pollution is changing animal behaviour

By Graeme Shannon, Bangor University

Noise pollution, generally an unintended byproduct of urbanisation, transport and industry, is a key characteristic of human development and population growth. In some cases, it is produced intentionally, for example when seismic surveys are being carried out using powerful airgun arrays to explore and map the seafloor, or active sonar, which uses sound waves to detect objects in the ocean.

All of this noise – whether intentional or not – has the ability to alter the acoustic environment of aquatic and terrestrial habitats. This can have a dramatic effect on the animals that live in them, perhaps even driving evolutionary change as species adapt to or avoid noisy environments.

Rising noise levels

The dramatic and comparatively recent rise in noise levels is marked in both magnitude and extent, with an estimated 30% of the European population exposed to road traffic noise levels greater than 55dB (decibels) at night, well above the 40dB target recommended by the World Health Organisation. Even remote natural areas do not escape the reach of anthropogenic, or manmade, noise. One study across 22 US national parks demonstrated that this kind of noise was, on average, audible more than 28% of the time.

Noise is not just irritating; we have known for some time that it can have direct human health impacts. Indeed, chronic exposure to noise levels above 55dB dramatically increases the risks of heart disease and stroke, while aircraft noise has been shown to impact the development of reading skills in children attending schools close to busy airports. The WHO estimates that in Europe at least a million healthy life years are lost every year due to traffic noise.

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6,000 years ago humans upturned 300 million years of evolution

Smithsonian.com reports: It’s hard to imagine a global force strong enough to change natural patterns that have persisted on Earth for more than 300 million years, but a new study shows that human beings have been doing exactly that for about 6,000 years.

The increase in human activity, perhaps tied to population growth and the spread of agriculture, seems to have upended the way plants and animals distribute themselves across the land, so that species today are far more segregated than they’ve been at any other time.

That’s the conclusion of a study appearing this week in the journal Nature, and the ramifications could be huge, heralding a new stage in global evolution as dramatic as the shift from single-celled microbes to complex organisms.

A team of researchers led by S. Kathleen Lyons, a paleobiologist at the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems (ETE) program in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, examined the distribution of plants and animals across landscapes in the present and back through the fossil record in search of patterns.

Mostly they found randomness, but throughout time, there was always a small subset of plants and animals that showed up in relationship to one another more often than can be attributed to chance. That relationship either meant that pairs of species occur together, so when you find one, you usually find the other. Or it meant the opposite: when you find one, the other is usually not present, in which case they’re considered segregated. [Continue reading…]

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Life in Raqqa: Bombed by the government during the day, then bombed by the coalition at night

A paediatric doctor describes his flight from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa: One day ISIS came to me and put pressure on me to join the hospital that they controlled in the city. Most doctors had left Syria and they needed me. But I refused. As a result, I received threats. There was nowhere to hide from them – not in the small villages around Raqqa, nor in the city itself. I began to realise that my only way out was to leave Syria. I thought, ‘I’d prefer to go on one of the death boats than risk staying here’.

Life in Raqqa was terrifying. During the day we lived with the government’s airstrikes; at night there were coalition airstrikes. The sound of the jets was so loud it was like an earthquake. A close friend was killed by a government airstrike.

I realised that life had stopped for me, and the one thing I had to do was save my family. I worried that in Syria my children wouldn’t have a life or even get an education. I wanted to protect my life to save my children’s lives.

I started to plan my departure. I planned to travel to Turkey then take the boat to Europe, heading for Holland. My wife was in the final month of her pregnancy with our third child. She was so exhausted by the pregnancy that it was difficult for her to travel. So the idea was that I would go with a friend, and once I had immigration papers, my family would follow me.

I decided to sleep that last night with my children. Although they didn’t know I was leaving, they felt it somehow. I wish I could have brought them with me.

Leaving Raqqa was not easy, with fighting going on between ISIS, Kurdish fighters, Al Nusra and the FSA. I had to pass through three checkpoints between Raqqa and Efreen – it was like passing through three separate countries.

When I reached Turkey, I heard that the government was arresting people going to Izmir [a city on the coast]. Deep inside me, there was a voice hoping that this trip would fail and I’d have to return to Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Assad, thanks to Russia and Iran, is too strong for a political settlement to be made right now in Syria

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Aron Lund writes: Wrapped up on time, on December 10, the event [the Syrian opposition conference held in Riyadh] was met with widespread and unsurprising acclaim from the organizing governments and other nations sympathetic to the Syrian opposition. “We welcome the positive outcome of the gathering of the Syrian opposition in Riyadh,” wrote the U.S. State Department in a congratulatory message, hailing the “broad and representative group of 116 participants.”

At the meeting, a final statement was adopted that laid out the principles for the upcoming negotiations with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Among them, according to a widely circulated draft, was “faith in the civilian nature of the Syrian state and its sovereignty over all of Syria’s territory, on the basis of administrative decentralization.” The document also expressed a commitment to “a democratic mechanism through a pluralistic system that represents all segments of the Syrian people, men and women, without discrimination or exclusion on a religious, sectarian, or ethnic basis,” organized by way of “free and fair elections.” The delegates promised to “work to preserve the institutions of the Syrian state, although it will be necessary to reorganize the structure and formation of its military and security institutions.” There would be a state monopoly on armed force. They condemned terrorism and stressed their refusal of “the presence of any foreign fighters.”

Regarding the upcoming talks, the delegates expressed their readiness to engage in a UN-supervised political process such as that described in the November 14 Vienna communiqué, which calls for Syrian-Syrian negotiations by January 2016 and a ceasefire by June of the same year. However, they asked the international community to “force the Syrian regime to perform measures ascertaining its good faith before the start of the negotiating process,” such as an end to death sentences and starvation tactics and a release of prisoners. The start of a ceasefire was linked to the creation of a transitional government, as sketched out in the Geneva Communiqué of 2012. Regarding the most crucial question of all, the conference stated that “Bashar al-Assad and his clique” have to leave power at the start of the transition — not at the end of it.

Last but not least, the delegates also agreed to create a High Negotiations Committee, tasked with electing and overseeing a team of 15 negotiators who will face the government delegation and decide the future of the country. And that, of course, was where it got tricky. [Continue reading…]

Kyle Orton writes: The opposition now has some diplomatic clout because it has a reasonably credible return address, but “as soon as negotiations in Vienna begin they will falter over the central issue: Iran and Russia will insist that Assad stays,” says Thomas Pierret, a lecturer on contemporary Islam at Edinburgh University and author of Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution. “The United States is unable to change the Iranian and Russian demands,” Pierret adds, “so will face the choice of either accepting the failure of the negotiating process they’ve invested in, or pressuring the opposition — whom the U.S. can effect—into a ‘creative solution,’ which is to say allowing Assad to stay.”

The removal of Assad and his instruments of repression is key to ending the civil war and defeating ISIS, but unless Assad is military checkmated he and his Iranian and Russian supporters will have no reason to negotiate his departure. At the present time Assad is simply too secure and there is little sign of a Western appetite to make him less so. This means the Vienna process offers many more potential costs than benefits for the opposition. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s October missile test violated UN ban

Reuters reports: Iran violated a U.N. Security Council resolution in October by test-firing a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, a team of sanctions monitors said, leading to calls in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday for more sanctions on Tehran.

The White House said it would not rule out additional steps against Iran over the test of the medium-range Emad rocket.

The Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Iran said in a confidential report, first reported by Reuters, that the launch showed the rocket met its requirements for considering that a missile could deliver a nuclear weapon.

“On the basis of its analysis and findings the Panel concludes that Emad launch is a violation by Iran of paragraph 9 of Security Council resolution 1929,” the panel said.

Diplomats said the rocket test on Oct. 10 was not technically a violation of the July nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, but the U.N. report could put U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration in an awkward position. [Continue reading…]

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CNN debate ignores climate change, does not ask GOP candidates about historic Paris agreement

Media Matters reports: Three days before CNN hosted the fifth Republican presidential debate, leaders from every country in the world struck a historic climate change agreement in Paris to reduce fossil fuel emissions and face up to one of the greatest threats facing our country and our planet. The Paris agreement was a front page story in newspapers throughout the U.S. and around the globe. So considering that the Pentagon says climate change “could impact national security” and experts have identified a relationship between global warming and the rise of ISIS, the issue clearly belonged in the December 15 CNN debate, which co-moderator Wolf Blitzer described as a “discussion about the security of this nation.”

CNN’s own Michael Smerconish pointed to the significance of the Paris climate agreement in the cable outlet’s debate preview coverage the night beforehand, yet CNN failed to ask a single question about the agreement or climate change more broadly during the debate itself. While GOP candidates may have their own political reasons for avoiding the issue — and a couple of them dismissively brought climate change up on their own — CNN is a news organization with a responsibility to press the candidates for our nation’s highest office on the most important issues facing the country and the world, particularly when there are major new developments to address. [Continue reading…]

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How a joke can help us unlock the mystery of meaning in language

By Vyvyan Evans, Bangor University

What do you get if you cross a kangaroo with an elephant?

You’ll have to wait for the punchline, but you should already have shards of meaning tumbling about your mind. Now, jokes don’t have to be all that funny, of course, but if they are to work at all then they must construct something beyond the simple words deployed.

Language is the tissue that connects us in our daily social lives. We use it to gossip, to get a job, and give someone the sack. We use it to seduce, quarrel, propose marriage, get divorced and yes, tell the odd gag. In the absence of telepathy, it lets us interact with our nearest and dearest, and in our virtual web of digital communication, with hundreds of people we may never have met.

But while we now know an awful lot about the detail of the grammatical systems of the world’s 7,000 or so languages, scientific progress on the mysterious elixir of communication – meaning – has been a much tougher nut to crack.

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Possessed by a mask

Sandra Newman writes: It is an acknowledged fact of modern life that the internet brings out the worst in people. Otherwise law-abiding citizens pilfer films and music. Eminent authors create ‘sock puppets’ to anonymously praise their own work and denigrate that of rivals. Teenagers use the internet for bullying; even more disturbingly, grown-ups bully strangers with obsessive zeal, sometimes even driving them from their homes with repeated murder threats. Porn thrives, and takes on increasingly bizarre and often disturbing forms.

Commentators seem at a loss to satisfactorily account for this surge in antisocial tendencies. Sometimes it’s blamed on a few sociopathic individuals – but the offenders include people who are impeccably decent in their offline lives. The anonymity of online life is another explanation commonly given – but these behaviours persist even when the identities of users are easily discovered, and when their real names appear directly above offensive statements. It almost seems to be a contagion issuing from the technology itself, or at least strong evidence that computers are alienating us from our humanity. But we might have a better chance of understanding internet hooliganism if we looked at another form of concealment that isn’t true concealment, but that nonetheless has historically lured people into behaving in ways that are alien to their normal selves: the mask.

There doesn’t seem to be any culture in which masks have not been used. From the Australian outback to the Arctic, from Mesolithic Africa to the United States of the 21st century, people have always made and employed masks in ways that are seemingly various and yet have an underlying commonality. Their earliest appearance is in religious ritual. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is a revolution

Scott Atran writes: As pundits and politicians stoked the recent shootings in California into an existential threat; as French troops were deployed in Paris; as Belgian police locked down Brussels, and US and Russian planes intensified air attacks in Syria following yet another slaughter perpetrated in the name of the so-called Islamic State, it was easy to lose sight of a central fact. Amid the bullets, bombs and bluster, we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our efforts often appear to contribute to it.

What accounts for the failure of ‘The War on Terror’ and associated efforts to counter the spread of violent extremism? The failure starts with reacting in anger and revenge, engendering more savagery without stopping to grasp the revolutionary character of radical Arab Sunni revivalism. This revival is a dynamic, countercultural movement of world-historic proportions spearheaded by ISIS, (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). In less than two years, it has created a dominion over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres and millions of people. And it possesses the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force since the Second World War.

What the United Nations community regards as senseless acts of horrific violence are to ISIS’s acolytes part of an exalted campaign of purification through sacrificial killing and self-immolation: Know that Paradise lies under the shade of swords, says a hadith, or saying of the Prophet; this one comes from the Sahih al-Bukhari, a collection of the Prophet’s sayings considered second only to the Qu’ran in authenticity and is now a motto of ISIS fighters.

This is the purposeful plan of violence that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-anointed Caliph, outlined in his call for ‘volcanoes of jihad’: to create a globe-spanning jihadi archipelago that will eventually unite to destroy the present world and create a new-old world of universal justice and peace under the Prophet’s banner. A key tactic in this strategy is to inspire sympathisers abroad to violence: do what you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are, whenever possible.

To understand the revolution, my research team has conducted dozens of structured interviews and behavioural experiments with youth in Paris, London and Barcelona, as well as with captured ISIS fighters in Iraq and members of Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria). We also focused on youth from distressed neighbourhoods previously associated with violence or jihadi support – for example, the Paris suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois and Épinay-sur-Seine, the Moroccan neighbourhoods of Sidi Moumen in Casablanca and Jamaa Mezuak in Tetuán.

While many in the West dismiss radical Islam as simply nihilistic, our work suggests something far more menacing: a profoundly alluring mission to change and save the world. [Continue reading…]

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Trump and Le Pen grow in strength with the help of ISIS

Roger Cohen writes: America, like Europe, is rattled by Islamic State terrorism and unsure how to respond to the black-flagged death merchants. Its polarized politics seem broken. The right of Donald Trump and the right of France’s Marine Le Pen overlap on terrorism and immigration. On the American left, Bernie Sanders sounds like nothing so much as a European social democrat. But that’s another story.

Le Pen is now a serious candidate for the French presidency in 2017. Her strong first-round performance in regional elections was not matched in the second round. She faded. But as with Trump, she answers the popular call for an end to business as usual after two Paris massacres this year in which the Islamic State had a role. The three jihadists who killed 90 Friday-night revelers in the Bataclan club were French citizens believed to have been trained in Syria.

“Islamist fundamentalism must be annihilated,” Le Pen says. People roar. “France must ban Islamist organizations,” she says. People roar. It must “expel foreigners who preach hatred in our country as well as illegal migrants who have nothing to do here.” People roar.

There is no question Le Pen is being taken seriously in France. Europe’s watchword is vigilance. Its entire postwar reconstruction has been premised on the conviction that peace, integration, economic union and the welfare state were the best insurance against the return to power of the fascist right.

That conviction is shaken. The rise of the Islamic State, and the Western inability to contain it, leads straight to the Islamophobia in which Trump and Le Pen traffic with success. It would be hard to imagine an atmosphere better suited to the politics of fear. Americans say they are more fearful of terrorism than at any time since 9/11.

“Every time things get worse, I do better,” Trump says. He does. They may get still worse. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s dispassion and Kerry’s wishful thinking on Syria

Frederic C. Hof writes: President Obama recently told reporters in Manila that he cannot “foresee a situation in which we can end the civil war in Syria while Assad remains in power.” But according to the president, “it may take some months for the Russians and the Iranians and frankly some members of the Syrian government and ruling elites within the regime to recognize the truths that I just articulated.” Syrian President Bashar al- Assad himself told Italian state television that the diplomatic process supposedly launched in Vienna to transition away from him is nonsense. According to Syria’s barrel-bomber in chief, “nothing can start before defeating the terrorists who occupy parts of Syria.” “Terrorist,” according to Assad, is anyone opposing him.

So much of Washington’s Syria policy has rested on wishing and hoping that others would recognize objective truths and act accordingly. The list goes back to 2011: Assad should choose to be part of the solution rather than the problem; Assad should step aside for the good of Syria; Assad should not use chemical weapons on his own people lest he cross a bright red line; Assad should read the words of the 2012 Geneva Final Communique and prepare to pack; Moscow should realize its military intervention in Syria will alienate it from the Sunni Muslim world; Iran should grasp the chance to become a normal state and a force for regional stability; everyone should recognize the incompatibility of uniting Syrians against the Islamic State with a continuing political role for Assad.

No doubt Syrians, Russians and Iranians would be much better off, and the world a safer place, if the president’s “truths” were taken to heart by their political leaders. Alas, these truths are not regarded by his adversaries — and, yes, they are his adversaries — as true. And even if they are objectively true, they are not self-actualizing. Yet this administration sometimes sees the alpha and omega of foreign policy as delivering the lecture and hoping the students get it. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s media war

Elizabeth Dickinson writes: The driver stops on a crowded, dusty road lined with cars. Used SUVs and sedans are parked two deep in front of tired warehouses bearing sun-bleached signs for a shipping company and a tire store. “Is it here?” I credulously ask the chauffeur who was dispatched to bring me to this desolate stretch of road. “Yes, wait,” he says, pointing as a man weaves his way towards us. I get out and follow the man to one of the warehouses’ unmarked doors. After passing through a lobby that smells of cigarette smoke and mint tea, we push through a second, locked door and into the newsroom of Orient TV, a Syrian satellite channel run and broadcast from Dubai.

The discreet exterior is no accident. Syria’s media is at war, and with its $1.5 million monthly budget, dozens of correspondents, and four regional bureaus, Orient TV is in the middle of it.

As the Syrian conflict has unspooled over the last four years, Orient TV has earned a reputation as an opposition bulwark. A Syrian automotive exporting mogul named Ghassan Aboud founded the channel in Damascus in 2009, intending to broadcast movies and frothy serial drama programs.* But since the 2011 Arab Spring, he has used the channel to become an outspoken advocate of rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad. In addition to Orient TV, he bankrolls a chain of field hospitals in Syria. He has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money in the form of humanitarian aid, advocated an anti-government stance to policymakers across Western capitals, and trained a legion of young journalists in the opposition.

Along the way, Orient TV’s evolution has tracked that of the broader Syrian media. Like much of the Arab Spring, Syria’s revolution began with a flood of optimism about independent, citizen-driven news. When protesters thronged the streets, obtuse state television and radio networks played patriotic songs on loop, while satellite channels like Orient TV ran grainy cellphone videos of police firing on peaceful demonstrations. By evading censorship, platforms like Twitter and Facebook achieved two things Syria’s tightly-controlled media never had before: They gave the political opposition a voice, and they exposed to the world Syria’s brutal police state.

Within weeks, social media had helped topple decades-old despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. Orient TV, like so many broadcasters covering the uprisings, tapped into this new pool of readymade sources on the ground. Its journalists built a database of as many as 9,000 Syrian activists ready to send in video and tips. International NGOs and foundations sent smartphones to activists and deployed media trainers to advise them on Skype. A new generation of citizen journalists was born, helping to grow Syria’s mobile phone penetration rate from just 46 percent in 2011 to nearly ubiquitous today.

Yet four years later, the much-vaunted media revolution hasn’t delivered the freedom or the plurality it promised. As unarmed demonstrations gave way to conventional warfare, the media, too, entered the fray. The number of citizen sources grew, but their audiences fragmented. Opposition, regime, jihadist, and ethnic media today rarely resemble one another; the stories they tell speak less to a shared reality than to the fissures between different versions of the prevailing narrative.

These days, every militia and brigade has its own YouTube channel, theme song, and social media network. And as armed groups have grown to resemble media organizations, the media has started looking like militias too: partisan, sectarian, and driven by hate speech. On social media particularly, but in the established media as well, broadcasts don’t just report the violence. With inflammatory language and provocative storylines, they actively incite it.

Orient TV has not been immune to these trends. The channel was a voice of reason in the early days of the uprising, and remains among the most professionally produced and one of the few to have reporters on the ground, breaking news few others can. But Orient TV, which describes itself as a non-partisan opposition channel, also took a side. Critics see a station that panders to a limited, Sunni revolutionary subset, adopting sectarian lingo to speak to and about most everyone else.

Syria is hardly the first conflict in which the media landscape has become a battlefield. But the rapid expansion of social media in the last few years has sped the process. The sheer volume of information the conflict has produced, and the vast number of people who are shaping it, mean that everyone is both citizen and journalist, partisan and reporter. The media war is just as real as any fighting on the ground, because many of the actors are the same. Ending the military conflict likely won’t be possible until the information battle dies down.

This explains why Orient TV operates behind unmarked doors, tucked away a dozen miles from the flashy Dubai neighborhood hosting most other satellite stations. The channel’s stance hasn’t just won it critics, but also enemies. Orient TV and its staff have been targeted by the Syrian government, the Islamic State (ISIS), and many others.

And Orient TV is fighting back. “The journalists don’t take it just as professionals; they take the revolution as their cause,” says Aboud, the owner. “They take it personally because Syria is their home.” [Continue reading…]

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Russian airstrikes force a halt to aid in Syria, triggering a new crisis

The Washington Post reports: Aid agencies are warning of a worsening humanitarian crisis in northern Syria as sharply intensified Russian airstrikes paralyze aid supply routes, knock out bakeries and hospitals and kill and maim civilians in growing numbers.

Air attacks have escalated significantly since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane along the Turkey-Syria border on Nov. 24, the aid agencies say, with Russia responding to the incident by stepping up its effort to crush the anti-government rebellion in the insurgent-held provinces bordering Turkey.

Among the targets that have been hit are the border crossings and highways used to deliver humanitarian supplies from Turkey, forcing many aid agencies to halt or curtail their aid operations and deepening the misery for millions of people living in the affected areas, according to a report this month by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Hospitals and health facilities also have been struck, reducing the availability of medical care for those injured in the bombings. According to the U.N. report, at least 20 medical facilities have been hit nationwide in Syria since Russia launched its air war on Sept. 30. [Continue reading…]

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Russia grapples with its own ‘Jihadi John’ as Moscow steps up role in Syria

The Wall Street Journal reports: For Russia, it was a shock: A blue-eyed Siberian with shaggy brown hair raged against his homeland in an Islamic State video before slicing the throat of a fellow Russian accused of being a spy.

The executioner, identified by Russian media and his friends as a 28-year-old named Anatoly Zemlyanka from the city of Noyabrsk, has risen to infamy in Russia since Islamic State released the undated video from Syria on Dec. 2.

Russian authorities, while not confirming his identity in the propaganda video, have put him on Interpol’s wanted list. Russian media have dubbed him Jihadi Tolik, based on the Russian nickname for Anatoly, in describing his apparent transformation from Siberian college student to the Slavic face of Islamic State brutality.

Mr. Zemlyanka’s image has spurred comparisons to Jihadi John, or Mohammed Emwazi—the British militant whose appearances in videos presiding over the beheadings of Western hostages while leveling demands at President Barack Obama made him a prime propaganda tool for Islamic State. But instead of speaking English and condemning Mr. Obama, Mr. Zemlyanka is speaking in Russian and berating Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Listen to me, Putin, you dog, and let your henchmen hear me too!” Mr. Zemlyanka says in the video. “Before your arrival, the Assad regime bombed us, then America bombed us with its cowardly coalition, and now you’re bombing us. But nothing has come of it, apart from the fortitude and conviction that we’re on the side of truth.”

Islamic State is increasingly pointing its propaganda apparatus at Russia, as the Kremlin steps up its military support for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. The campaign appears aimed at raising Russian fears of possible further retribution from Islamic State, particularly after the suspected Oct. 31 bombing of a Russian charter flight traveling to St. Petersburg from Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh. [Continue reading…]

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Saudis ridiculed over ‘anti-terror’ coalition — new alliance likely to stir up sectarianism

By Brian Whitaker,

Amid widespread derision, Saudi Arabia has announced that it will lead a new military coalition to protect “the Islamic world” against terrorism.

Speaking at a news conference in Riyadh, deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman – the king’s favourite son and chief architect of the military disaster in Yemen – said the move stems from “the Islamic world’s vigilance in fighting this disease which has harmed the Islamic world first and is now harming the international community as a whole”.Saudi Arabia has put itself in charge of the coalition and, according to Prince Mohammed, “There will be an operations room in Riyadh for the coordination and support of efforts to fight terrorism in many parts of the Islamic world.”

More than 30 predominantly Muslim countries have allegedly signed up to join the coalition (full list here). They include the other Gulf monarchies, but with the notable exception of Oman which also previously declined to get involved in the war in Yemen.

The move seems partly intended as a response to complaints that Saudi Arabia is not doing enough to combat terrorism and that it is more interested in pursuing its quarrel with Iran than fighting ISIS. There has also been growing criticism of its efforts, over many years, to promote the intolerant religious ideology that now fuels ISIS and similar organisations elsewhere.

However, it looks as though the anti-terror coalition may nevertheless be designed to pursue a sectarian agenda. Judging by its reported membership, the “Islamic world” does not include Iran, the main representative of Shia Islam, or Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria – though it does reportedly include Lebanon which has a large Shia population along with large numbers of Sunni Muslims and Christians. Asked at the news conference if the coalition would only be targeting ISIS/Daesh, Prince Mohammed replied: “No. To any terrorist organisation that appears in front of us, we will take action to fight it.”

This is especially alarming because the Saudi regime has some very strange ideas about what constitutes terrorism and will presumably now be pressing other countries to accept them. Under a law introduced last year, virtually any criticism of the kingdom’s political system or its interpretation of Islam counts as terrorism:

Article 1: “Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.”

Article 2: “Anyone who throws away their loyalty to the country’s rulers, or who swears allegiance to any party, organization, current [of thought], group, or individual inside or outside [the kingdom].”

Article 4: “Anyone who aids [“terrorist”] organizations, groups, currents [of thought], associations, or parties, or demonstrates affiliation with them, or sympathy with them, or promotes them, or holds meetings under their umbrella, either inside or outside the kingdom; this includes participation in audio, written, or visual media; social media in its audio, written, or visual forms; internet websites; or circulating their contents in any form, or using slogans of these groups and currents [of thought], or any symbols which point to support or sympathy with them.”

Article 6: “Contact or correspondence with any groups, currents [of thought], or individuals hostile to the kingdom.”

Article 8: “Seeking to shake the social fabric or national cohesion, or calling, participating, promoting, or inciting sit-ins, protests, meetings, or group statements in any form, or anyone who harms the unity or stability of the kingdom by any means.”

Article 9: “Attending conferences, seminars, or meetings inside or outside [the kingdom] targeting the security of society, or sowing discord in society.”

Article 11: “Inciting or making countries, committees, or international organizations antagonistic to the kingdom.”Last December the cases of two women who defied the ban on driving cars were also referred to the special anti-terrorism court.

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British support for Saudi Arabia wrecking aid to Yemen

The Telegraph reports: David Cameron has been accused of squandering nearly £400 million in taxpayers’ aid to Yemen through its support for the Saudi-led military offensive in the country’s civil war.

The Prime Minister is facing an outcry from aid agencies and a rift in his own government over his continued backing for Saudi Arabia’s role in the conflict, in which nearly 6,000 people have died.

Britain has not only sold Saudi Arabia weapons that have allegedly been used for indiscriminate bombing, but also supports Riyadh diplomatically, despite claims by aid agencies that Saudi forces are making the situation worse.

Ahead of United Nations-sponsored peace talks this week aimed at ending nine months of fighting, senior Tory figures have warned that the Government’s policy has also wrecked more than a decade’s worth of British aid spending in Yemen, where the UK is one of the main donors.

The Department for International Development has spent some £227 million in Yemen in the past five years alone. It spent almost as much there in the decade after the 9/11 attacks, when Yemen was first identified as a failing state.

That entire programme is now in disarray as the civil war has led to the collapse of the government, left more than two million people homeless and pushed the country to the brink of famine. The fighting has even led to British-funded aid projects being directly targeted.

An air strike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a relief warehouse run by Oxfam, while the Save the Children has had two of its bases destroyed. Both charities’ aid efforts in Yemen are funded in part by DFID. Clinics operated by the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres have also been destroyed.

The chaos is also helping jihadists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State cement their foothold – the very outcome Britain lavished aid on Yemen to avoid. [Continue reading…]

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