Category Archives: Analysis

Residents of Raqqa now more terrified of airstrikes than ISIS

Financial Times reports: “This is what daily life is like. You wake up in the morning and if you don’t hear the sound of shelling, or a jet breaking the sound barrier, you feel like it could be a good day,” says Abu Hadi. “The first thing I do next is look outside for clouds and pray for them to come — or better yet a storm.”

Sorties are always fewer in number during bad weather, he says. On Monday it rained — a good day.

Abu Hadi lives 2km from the centre of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital in Syria. The city has become the focal point of an intensified air campaign by the US-led international coalition since the Isis attacks on Paris. France has led with stepped up air strikes and has been joined by the UK. But Raqqa is also home to hundreds of thousands of civilians who are prevented from leaving by the jihadis. One of the only ways to leave the city is to prove a health condition requiring treatment that Isis hospitals cannot provide.

Abu Hadi speaks to the Financial Times on an internet connection he had secretly rigged and uses only at dead of night. Like all those interviewed for this report, he asks for his real name not to be used.

The 50-year-old used to worry more about Isis brutality — he speaks of militants on motorcycles dragging mangled corpses behind them as he was walking his son to school. Now, terror for him is waking to the sound of warplanes. “If someone looks upwards without an obvious reason, everyone around will be terrified . . . When there is quiet, you spend all your time thinking, OK now a plane is coming.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Government attacks on Syria’s health care system

In the New England Journal of Medicine, Michele Heisler, M.D., M.P.A., Elise Baker, B.A., and Donna McKay, M.S., write: In July 2015, a 26-year-old pediatrician described to our team of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) investigators his experiences in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city. When he was a medical student in 2012, government forces detained and severely beat him. He now works as an emergency medicine physician and surgery resident in a hospital that has twice been bombed by the Syrian government. He lives in fear of being killed by bombs on his way to work or while there. His family wants him to leave Syria as they did, but he explained, “It’s our country, and if we leave, it will fall apart. At times, I think maybe I will leave and specialize and come back with better skills, but then I see how much the people need me. Maybe that’s the biggest thing that’s keeping me inside.”

Media coverage of Syria has focused on the exodus of refugees fleeing the sectarian warfare and the atrocities committed by the Islamic State. Less attention is paid to the Syrian government’s destruction of hundreds of hospitals and clinics in opposition-controlled areas and deaths of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Since the conflict began in 2011, PHR has documented the killings of 679 medical personnel, 95% of them perpetrated by government forces. Some personnel were killed in bombings of their hospitals or clinics; some were shot dead; at least 157 were executed or tortured to death.

In July, a PHR team investigated the state of the health care system in eastern Aleppo.3 Though Aleppo does not reflect the worst of the destruction in Syria today, conditions there illustrate the consequences of these repeated attacks: the city’s medical facilities have been attacked nearly 50 times since opposition groups gained control of eastern Aleppo in 2012. The government has rained rockets, missiles, and since 2013, “barrel bombs” (100-to- 1000-kg barrels filled with explosives, shrapnel, nails, and oil that are dropped from helicopters and break into thousands of fragments on impact) on homes and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. The number of barrel-bomb attacks reached an all-time high between April and July 2015. These bombs, which obliterate everything they hit and inflict head-to-toe injuries on anyone in their large blast radius, have had a devastating impact on life in eastern Aleppo. Only a quarter of the city’s 1.2 million residents remain, more than two thirds of the hospitals have stopped functioning, and roughly 95% of doctors have been killed or have fled. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

This is what happens when modernity fails all of us

Muqtedar Khan writes: Muslims were told that if they embraced modernity they would become free and prosperous. But modernity has failed many Muslims in the Muslim World. It brought imperialism, occupation, wars, division and soul stifling oppression by home states and foreign powers. Today the most important element of modernity, the modern state, is crumbling across the Arab World, precipitating chaos and forcing Muslims to seek refuge abroad.

For Muslims in the West, unjust foreign policies of their new homes, persistent and virulent Islamophobia, state surveillance, discrimination and demonization can be at best alienating and at worst radicalizing. Perhaps it is those whom modernity has failed at home and abroad who are tempted by the fatal attraction of extremism.

But why Muslims only you might ask? My answer: Open your eyes and look, modernity is failing non-Muslims too. Egregious income inequalities, police brutality, rampant institutionalized racism, mass-killings, drugs, gang violence, sexual predatory behaviors, militarization of police, diminishing civil rights as the state becomes more intrusive and rising rhetoric of intolerance from mainstream politicians — they are symptoms of institutional failures, extremism and even domestic terrorism.

We can combat extremism only by recognizing and resisting it everywhere. But we must make the promise of modernity a reality for all in order to render the appeal of radical utopias less attractive. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistan stops foreign reporters’ probe into radicalization of California shooters

The Times of India reports: Pakistan has begun preventing western reporters from investigating the radicalization of the San Bernardino terrorists even as it emerged that the Pakistani wife of the Chicago-born Pakistani-American Syed Rizwan Farooq may have “honey-trapped” him into entering the United States.

Correspondents who made their way to the city of Multan in Pakistan’s Punjab province, considered the hotbed of sunni extremism where Farooq’s jihadi wife Tashfeen Malik studied pharmacy, reported they had been corralled in a local hotel and are not being permitted to go out to investigate.

“Pakistani ‘officials’ not letting some journalists out of our hotel in Multan this morning to do reporting. I am still barred from leaving hotel in Multan and Pakistani ‘officials’ strongly suggest I, as foreign journalist, ‘go back to Islamabad”‘ tweeted Washington Post’s Tim Craig, who has been reporting from Pakistan.

“On one hand officials say Tashfeen Malik wasn’t radicalized here in Multan, yet on other hand they say ‘it’s too dangerous’ for foreigners,” Craig tweeted, adding, “I’ve lost track of how many different security/intel officials I’ve had to talk to, copy my passport, etc in past 17 hours – think 12 to 16.”

By putting “officials” in quotes, the correspondent seemed to indicate they are ISI roughnecks who are frequently tasked with tailing foreign reporters to make sure they do not get too close to the truth, in this case the fact that Multan and surrounding areas in Pakistan’s Punjab is the hotbed of state sponsored Sunni sectarianism and extremism.

The country’s security apparatus uses rough methods, including beating up foreign journalists as it happened with New York Times’ Carlotta Gall, to protect its interests. It also uses the grisly example of Daniel Pearl’s murder to advise foreign reporters that they are treading in dangerous territory, which in this case appears to be the state-protected Southern Punjab region. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Dr. Shah, of the [Bahauddin Zakariya] university faculty, said he was shocked by the news that Ms. Malik was suspected of committing a mass killing. He said he did not think she had become radicalized at the university, because it does not have a reputation for extremism.

But neither Multan nor Ms. Malik’s university have been immune to extremist currents. A proliferation of hard-line religious schools across southern Punjab have obtained a reputation as incubators for sectarian and militant groups, some of which enjoy the tacit support of political leaders and elements of the Pakistani security forces.

In response, the university kept a “very vigilant eye” on its students, said Dr. Janbaz, the lecturer, and coordinated with intelligence agencies to install surveillance cameras. Ms. Malik, however, never came under scrutiny, he said.

“We never heard anything suspicious about her activities,” he said. “She kept to herself and seemed to just focus on her studies.”

But the authorities did little to stop a virtual witch hunt on campus that led to a nationally publicized death after Ms. Malik left the university.

In 2013, Islamist students there accused Junaid Hafeez, a young lecturer in English who had traveled to the United States as a Fulbright scholar, of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in comments he made on his Facebook page. Mr. Hafeez was later charged with blasphemy, a crime that carries a possible death penalty in Pakistan, and he is currently in jail awaiting trial.

Mr. Hafeez has struggled to find legal representation since two men fatally shot his lawyer, Rashid Rehman, in May 2014, in what was seen as punishment for daring to defend someone accused of blasphemy.

Pakistani security officials say there is no indication yet that Ms. Malik moved in extremist circles on campus or in the city. Yet they have sought to restrict reporting from the area in recent days, often by issuing quiet threats to Pakistani reporters to back off. The officials conducted a search of Ms. Malik’s former home in Multan on Saturday. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The women of ISIS

Mia Bloom and Charlie Winter write: Reactions to the (mis)reported claim that Hasna Aït Boulahcen — who was killed in a police raid in Saint Denis a few days after the Paris attacks that killed 130 — was France’s first female suicide bomber prompted fierce discussion about the role women play in ISIL. Now Sally Jones — a mother of two and widow of a British ISIL fighter — has announced her intention to blow herself up in Syria. Has ISIL joined the long list of jihadi groups using female suicide bombers?

DNA evidence corrected the mistake — Boulahcen was killed when the person standing next to her detonated a suicide vest — and the Zura treatise (which documents the group’s position on female suicide bombers and was circulated by ISIL supporters in the summer) does not yet allow for women to carry out martyrdom operations. Still, it is worth exploring the role women play in terrorism.

Their participation isn’t anything new. Women were already bound up in terrorist schemes in the 19th century as part of the Russian anarchist movement Norodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), and involved in assassination attempts against the Czar. Several women became well-known terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, as members of a variety of groups, ranging from the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Yes, it’s fair to compare the plight of the Syrians to the plight of the Jews. Here’s why

Josh Zeitz writes: Peter Shulman, an associate professor of American history at Case Western Reserve University, [recently] caused a political stir when he tweeted results from a Fortune Magazine poll dated July 1938. “What’s your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian & other political refugees to come into the US?” Fortune asked its survey audience. Over two-thirds of respondents answered in the negative.

Shulman’s tweet went viral, igniting a spirited debate about whether opposition to welcoming Syrian refugees is morally or situationally equivalent to American indifference in the 1930s toward Jewish victims of the Nazi state. In what can only be described as a sharp reversal of prevailing norms, many conservatives, who these days seem inclined to liken every government overreach to Nazism, are incensed by the analogy, while many liberals, who have grown accustomed to rolling their eyes each time that Bill Kristol invokes the Munich Agreement, are sticking by it.

So is the analogy a good one? In short, yes. Contrary to what conservatives are saying these days, language commonly invoked in opposition to admitting Syrian refugees bears striking similarity to arguments against providing safe harbor to Jewish refugees in the late 1930s. Then as now, skepticism of religious and ethnic minorities and concerns that refugees might pose a threat to national security deeply influenced the debate over American immigration policy. For conservatives, this likeness is an inconvenient truth.

But the analogy doesn’t stop there. There may be no historic precedent for the rise of the Islamic State, but many current-day conditions in the Middle East are reminiscent of the broader context in which the Holocaust occurred. Europe in the 1930s and 1940s witnessed a systemic breakdown of national borders and civil society; brutal ethnic cleansing and population transfers; and a refugee crisis that strained the world’s creativity and resources. These human-made disasters do not just befall majority-Muslim countries.

For liberals, this raises its own inconvenient truth. Even had the United States admitted a large number of Jewish refugees in 1938, the underlying forces tearing Europe apart would not have abated. Winning this particular argument is important, but it does not resolve the larger challenge facing Syria or Iraq. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel’s identity crisis is at the heart of its conflicts

Joseph Dana writes: In remarks delivered at the Saban Forum in Washington last week, US secretary of state John Kerry warned that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is heading towards a one-state reality. For close observers of the conflict, Israel and Palestine have long been mired in a one-state situation. It is one in which Israel administers rights and privileges based solely on ethnicity and religion.

The pressing question now is not how the international community can avoid such a situation – it won’t – but how the conflict reached this stage and what can be done to reverse the current regime of inequality.

To address these issues requires an honest evaluation of Israel’s identity politics and the various manifestations of exclusionary policy that define Israeli governance. Since its founding in 1948, the country has been struggling to create a coherent identity for itself. How can a state remain democratic when it favours the rights of one ethnic or religious group over others? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump County, USA

Politico reports: The most accurate pundits in the history of American presidential politics reside far from the Beltway, on a 403-square mile patch of land along the western border of Indiana. At the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, and off Interstate 70, you find yourself in Vigo County, with its 108,000 residents and its ho-hum county seat, Terre Haute, situated along the Wabash River. Terre Haute is the land of Clabber Girl Baking Powder—and its citizens call it the “Crossroads of America.” It’s the place where both Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh and labor leader and Social Democratic Party founder Eugene Debs were born, and home to the U.S. penitentiary where the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh died.

And, in nearly every presidential election since 1888, voters here in this blue-collar county have selected the winning candidate, missing only twice: Once, in 1908, when they opted for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft, and again in 1952, when they chose Adlai Stevenson rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“It’s obviously because of our extraordinary intelligence and good sense,” said Bayh, whose father built the family’s political dynasty here. “It’s classic middle America. Small businesses. Family farms. Community schools. We care more about common sense results than we do about party labels and ideology. … You don’t get the excesses of New York or California. We keep it between the 40-yard-lines.”

So, when it comes to 2016, you might expect these “between-the 40-yard-lines” voters to be soberly weighing the merits of Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, with maybe an occasional flirtation with Bernie Sanders or Mike Huckabee. And yet, when I spent two days traveling around its gathering places and watering holes, I discovered that, while the county’s Democrats have, for their part, coalesced around Clinton, its Republicans mostly wanted to talk about just one candidate: Donald Trump. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Global emissions to fall for first time during a period of economic growth

The Guardian reports: Worldwide greenhouse gas emissions will fall in 2015, researchers have said, in what would mark the first time they have declined while the economy has grown substantially.

Emissions have fallen in previous years but only because of financial crashes, such as the global slump in 2007.

But a decline in coal consumption by China, the world’s carbon juggernaut responsible for more than a quarter of emissions, means global levels are projected to fall 0.6% this year. China’s own emissions are expected to drop 3.9% in 2015, after a decade of rising by nearly 6.7% a year.

The figures, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, will provide a fillip to negotiators from 195 countries entering a second week of climate talks in Paris on Monday.

But the paper’s authors warned the fall may only be temporary and that a switch away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy needs to be accelerated if dangerous warming is to be avoided. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The red wolf and a new theory about how evolution actually works

Ben Crair writes: Since the red wolf was originally classified as an endangered species, biologists have studied it intensely — sequencing its DNA, scrutinizing its morphology, and piecing together its evolutionary history. And they’ve put forward a compelling new theory: The red wolf, an animal the U.S. government has spent decades and millions of dollars attempting to save from extinction, may not actually be a distinct species at all.

The implications of this idea extend far beyond the swamps and farms of North Carolina, threatening the very foundations of biology itself. “Not to have a natural unit such as the species would be to abandon a large part of biology into free fall, all the way from the ecosystem down to the organism,” the noted biologist and theorist E.O. Wilson wrote in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life. And yet, the research into the red wolf challenges our accepted notions about how species are defined—and about how evolution actually works. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Donald Trump’s demagogy leavened with a smile and joke

The New York Times reports: “Something bad is happening,” Donald J. Trump warned New Hampshire voters Tuesday night, casting suspicions on Muslims and mosques. “Something really dangerous is going on.”

On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.”

“There is something going on with him that we don’t know about,” Mr. Trump said of the president, drawing applause from the crowd in Washington.

The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months. The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS is expanding its international reach. That is hardly a sign of weakness

Hassan Hassan writes: The United Nations’ sanctions monitoring team warned last Tuesday that Libya was emerging as a key stronghold for Islamic State close to the shorelines of Europe.

The warning aligns with assessments by US intelligence officials that the organisation’s franchise is entrenching itself in the midst of chaos in the north African country.

Isis’s expansion outside its heartlands in Iraq and Syria has raised questions about how more than a year of a relentless air campaign has affected it. The group has faced military defeats in north-eastern Iraq and Syria in recent months, but it also carried out large-scale international terror attacks.

More perplexing is that, as Isis faces increased pressure at home, many fighters are reportedly returning to Libya to shore up its franchise there. This has led some western officials to saythe group might be preparing to use the Libyan front as a fallback base in case of a defeat in Iraq and Syria. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS’s moneymaking streams take a hit as it loses territory

The Washington Post reports: By most estimates, the Islamic State is the world’s richest terrorist organization. But it appears to be wrestling with money problems that could affect its ability to wage war while trying to govern millions of people in its self-declared caliphate.

U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria have retaken significant amounts of territory from the group, depriving it of traditional sources of income, analysts say. Towns and villages that the Islamic State had relied on for tax revenue have been captured by Arab and Kurdish opponents. And lucrative spoils of war, including oil fields, properties to confiscate and captives to ransom off, have become scarcer as the group struggles to seize new areas.

“A problem they face is that much of their income over the last two years has been through conquest, confiscation and extortion, and those are all one-time things that aren’t sustainable,” said Quinn Mecham, an assistant professor of political science at Brigham Young University. “And now they’re losing territory, and that makes it difficult to continue to extract revenues. The pressure is on.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. struggling over what to do with Syrian rebels once tied to al Qaida

McClatchy reports: Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

But that’s a tough reality for U.S. diplomats, who are keenly aware that many of Ahrar’s members still cling to a hard-line ideology that’s caused Secretary of State John Kerry to liken the group to the Islamic State, al Qaida’s Nusra Front and Hamas – all designated terrorist organizations. A seemingly ascendant reformist faction within the group offers only slight encouragement, they say.

Faysal Itani, a Syria specialist with the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, says Ahrar al Sham itself is riven by debate over what direction to go. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

What passing a key CO2 mark means to climate scientists

Climate Central reported in November: This week is a big one for our world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory and it’s distinctly possible they won’t be back below that level again in our lifetimes.

Humans have burned enough fossil fuels to drive atmospheric CO2 to levels that world hasn’t seen in at least 400,000 years. That’s driven up temperatures, melted ice and caused oceans to acidify. Some extreme weather events around the world have become more likely and stronger because of it, and some will likely only get worse as the planet continues to warm.

Because CO2 sits in the atmosphere long after it’s burned, that means we’ve likely lived our last week in a sub-400 ppm world. It also means that the reshaping of our planet will continue for decades and centuries to come, even if climate talks in Paris in two weeks are successful. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS wants to destroy cultural pluralism

Maha Yahya writes: ISIS wants to make the world in its own image. How the international community reacts to its horrific attacks will determine whether it will succeed.

ISIS has claimed more than 400 innocent lives in less than a month with attacks beyond Iraq and Syria in Paris and Tunis, a twin suicide bombing in Beirut, and the downing of a Russian jet in Egypt. Many saw in those attacks a civilizational struggle between the values of a liberal western world and a parochial intolerant Islam. Across Europe, calls are increasing for stringent measures restricting fundamental freedoms and eroding personal privacy as more than half US governors declared that their states will not accept Syrian refugees.

Through such responses policymakers are inadvertently dancing to the tune of ISIS that also views the world as divided in two; in their terms the “camp of Islam” and the “camp of the crusader coalition” that also includes Muslims who do not believe in the mission of ISIS. Its bloody attacks are one step in its efforts at eliminating the grey zone between these camps. This grey zone is the cosmopolitanism of Beirut and Paris; the places where the deliberate and accidental encounters between cultures, ethnicities and religions find themselves in music and writing, in scientific discoveries and in architectural feats.

ISIS did not begin its elimination of this grey zone in Paris or Beirut. It began with a pogrom in Iraq in June 2014, attacking more than two and a half million people of diverse religions and ethnicities that coexisted for centuries. Christians were expelled, the Turkomans and Shiites slaughtered and Yezidi women and children enslaved. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Guns don’t kill people; bullets do

The carnage unleashed by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino, is yet another reminder of how easy it is for anyone to go on the warpath inside a country that remains awash with guns.

Once again the need for more effective gun control has been highlighted. And once again, I guarantee that gun owners are rushing to dealers to expand their home arsenals in anticipation of new laws.

Indeed, the only predictable consequence of another spectacular display of gun violence in America, is that it always boosts gun sales.

As the gun lobby likes to say, guns don’t kill people, and as Daniel Patrick Moynihan more accurately stated: bullets do.

And yet it’s easier to legally buy bullets and stockpile them by the thousand, than it is to legally get a prescription for OxyContin.

The U.S. government deems an array of drugs so dangerous that they are regulated as “controlled substances” — even though none are manufactured in pills containing a lethal dose.

Bullets, on the other hand, while always designed to contain a lethal dose of kinetic force, are as easy to buy as candy.

Guns are indeed relatively harmless — no more dangerous than any other heavy object — absent the fuel supply of violence: ammunition.

While taxation might have some effect, it seems to me that the levers of control would need more precision. Why not set absolute limits on how many bullets an individual can purchase and retain. And why not have those wishing to replenish their stocks be required to return their spent cartridges?

Control the supply and then maybe there’s some chance of stemming the violence.

Four years ago, the New York Times reported: In 1993, a United States senator with one of the great political brains of 20th-century America, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said that we ought to forget gun control as a way to stanch criminal violence. It was hopeless, Senator Moynihan pointed out: even if the sale of new guns was totally forbidden, there were already enough guns in homes and private hands to last the country for 200 years.

“These mostly simple machines last forever,” Mr. Moynihan said.

But he wasn’t through.

“On the other hand, we have only a three-year supply of ammunition.”

His solution: Increase the tax on bullets. He wouldn’t raise the tax on ammunition typically used for target shooting or hunting. But he proposed exorbitant taxes on hollow-tipped bullets designed to penetrate armor and cause devastating damage.

“Ten thousand percent,” Mr. Moynihan said.

That would have made the tax on a 20-cartridge pack of those bullets $1,500. “Guns don’t kill people; bullets do,” said Senator Moynihan, a Democrat who died in 2003.

Another sharp political mind, the comedian Chris Rock, argued that the price of bullets ought to be even higher than what the senator had suggested.

“If a bullet costs $5,000, there’d be no more innocent bystanders,” he said during a routine in the film “Bowling for Columbine.”

In June, the City of New York sold 28,000 pounds of spent shell casings to a an ammunition dealer in Georgia, where they were to be reloaded with bullets. Anyone with $15 can buy a bag of 50, no questions asked, under Georgia law. As The New York Times reported, the city has previously sold shell casings — which are collected at the police target shooting range — to scrap metal dealers, but in this case the highest bidder was the ammunition store.

It was perfectly legal. And jarring, considering that the mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, has made aggressive gun regulation one of his prime causes, at no small risk to any national political ambitions he might harbor. He has arranged sting buys and filed lawsuits against firearms dealers in other states who, in his view, flouted even the easygoing regulatory regimen of recent years.

But surely, it couldn’t make any sense for the city itself to put more bullets into the weapons economy by recycling casing? After all, the city destroys perfectly usable — and sellable — guns that it recovers from criminals. The sale of the casings must have been the product of someone in an unnoticed cubicle in city government, simply following the bidding rules by rote.

You might think that when learning about the sale, the mayor would have said, “Thanks for the tip.”

Instead, City Hall rose in chorus to sing of the constitutional freedom to own guns and the bullets that go in them. Indeed, the city would gladly sell the next batch of shell casings to a high-bidding ammunition dealer, said John Feinblatt, the criminal justice coordinator. (The dealers of super-size soft drinks, now facing mayoral regulation, must be wondering why the founding fathers couldn’t have added “and drink soda” after the right to “bear arms.”)

Asked about the sale on Monday, the mayor said that people could legally own guns and bullets.

Then one of the most experienced and professional of New York television reporters, Mary Murphy of WPIX, asked Mr. Bloomberg if the city was going to change its policy and not sell shell casings to ammunition dealers. Mr. Bloomberg set forth into a minisermon about how it was an act of integrity.

“This is the public’s money that we are stewards of, and deliberately deciding to sell things at lower prices than the marketplace commands makes no sense at all, and if you think about it, would create chaos and corruption like you’ve never seen,” he said.

Ms. Murphy pressed on: “Does it send the wrong message though?”

The mayor scolded her as if she were an errant schoolgirl.

“Miss, Miss,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Either you want to ask a question and I give you an answer, or please come to the next press conference and stand in the back.”

Oh, dear.

Bill Cunningham, a former aide to Senator Moynihan and Mr. Bloomberg, said that the senator would have been delighted to discover that he was aligned on the issue with Chris Rock.

“Pat would have liked that,” Mr. Cunningham said, “although we’d have to answer his query, ‘Who is Mr. Rock?’ ”

Facebooktwittermail

Don’t make San Bernardino a victory for ISIS

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick writes: I am an American Muslim. I have spent my adult life teaching and advising senior military leaders in the fight against terror. On Wednesday night, as I watched representatives of the American Muslim community in San Bernardino, Calif., denounce the shooters who had just killed 14 people in their city, I recognized in their bearing and words their feelings of humiliation, horror and loyalty to the United States — alongside a great fear that a new round of Islamophobia will now follow.

I know from my own experience that more Islamophobia would be the worst outcome for American efforts to defeat the Islamic State.

As a naval officer I’ve taken an oath to defend the American Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’ve trained members of the Navy SEAL teams, and my mentors include the former head of the National Rifle Association, the supreme allied commander of NATO, and the commanding general of the war in Afghanistan.

I have been deeply troubled by the anti-Muslim vitriol in our country since Islamist fanatics wreaked havoc in Paris. Fearmongers have already called for registering Muslims and closing mosques. The F.B.I. has warned Muslims about possible attacks from white supremacist militias.

If we don’t want to play into the hands of Islamic State propaganda that America is at war with Islam, we must stand up against Islamophobia. We should separate the few extremists from the vast majority of law-abiding patriotic American Muslims by working with the moderates, not against them.

The Islamic State has little to no support in most Muslim-majority countries, according to a Pew Research Center poll after the Paris attacks. Instead, with more than 60 countries aligned against it, the Islamic State is banking on Western societies to alienate their Muslim populations to increase recruitment. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail