Category Archives: Analysis

Silicon Valley likes to promise ‘digital socialism’ — but it is selling a fairytale

Evgeny Morozov writes: The outside world might regard Silicon Valley as a bastion of ruthless capitalism but tech entrepreneurs fashion themselves as believers in solidarity, autonomy and collaboration.

These venture humanitarians believe that they – and not the wily politicians or the vain NGOs – are the true champions of the weak and the poor, making the maligned markets deliver material benefits to those on the fringes of society. Some of the valley’s in-house intellectuals even cheer the onset of “digital socialism,” which – to quote digital thinker and environmentalist Kevin Kelly’s 2009 cover story in Wired – “can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.”

Leaving aside the battles over the true meaning of “sharing” in buzzwords like “the sharing economy”, one can discern an intriguing argument in all this self-congratulatory rhetoric. The magnanimous Silicon Valley really wants to be the perfect antidote to the greedy Wall Street: if the latter yields an ever greater increase in income inequality, the former helps to bridge the gap in consumption inequality. [Continue reading…]

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Does Boris Nemtsov’s assassination represent the turning point for Russian politics?

Julia Ioffe writes: On Friday evening, Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, went on a prominent Moscow radio station to exhort his fellow citizens to come out to protest President Vladimir Putin’s policies. There would be a rally on Sunday, a spring march, to demonstrate against the deepening economic crisis and Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. The most prominent Russian opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, had been put in jail for 15 days, which just happened to be long enough to keep him from attending the rally. Nemtsov, who was older and, by now, less influential, had handed out leaflets in the metro and encouraged people to come anyway.

After the radio show, on which Nemtsov warned that too much power in the hands of one man would “end in catastrophe,” he met Anna Duritskaya, his girlfriend of three years — and, as the police would later pointedly note, a citizen of Ukraine. They had dinner and then headed home, strolling across Red Square and past the swirling domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, adjacent to the Kremlin. Just before midnight, as they crossed the bridge toward the historic Moscow neighborhood where Nemtsov lived, a white car pulled up, and, according to investigators, someone inside fired seven or eight shots. Four of them hit Nemtsov in the head, heart, liver and stomach, killing him on the spot.

Duritskaya was unharmed and immediately taken in for questioning. Nemtsov, a big, broad man, was left on the pavement in the rain, his shirt yanked up to his chin.

On Russian social media, liberal Moscow has struggled to wrap its head around something that seemed like it simply couldn’t happen, until it did. It had been years since Nemtsov, a rising star in Yeltsin-era politics, had been the standard-bearer of Western liberalism, and he could be a silly bon vivant. But he was deeply intelligent, witty, kind and ubiquitous. He seemed to genuinely be everyone’s friend; when I lived in Moscow as a journalist, he was always willing to jaw over endless glasses of cognac. And he was a powerful, vigorous critic of Vladimir Putin, assailing him in every possible medium, constantly publishing reports on topics like the president’s lavish lifestyle and the corruption behind the Sochi Olympics.

How could such a prominent politician — a founder of the opposition Solidarity Party, a sitting member of the Yaroslavl city parliament — be gunned down so brazenly, within steps of the Kremlin? “We didn’t kill members of government,” Gleb Pavlovsky, an independent political consultant who used to work for Putin, told me over the phone. “It’s an absolutely new situation.” Olga Romanova, a prominent opposition activist and a close friend of Nemtsov, said, “There are more cameras in that spot than there are grains in a packet of grain.” When I called her last night, she had just come from the scene of the crime, where her friend still lay on the ground, surrounded by laughing policemen. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a very close person murdered, lying on the pavement,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

Putin promptly called Nemtsov’s mother to offer his condolences and threw what seemed like the entire Ministry of Internal Affairs on the case. Yet we can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere. At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will founder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all. This has been the pattern for other high-profile killings, like those of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky. [Continue reading…]

The Economist notes: Given the level of security in the vicinity of the Kremlin, it is hard to imagine why Mr Nemtsov’s killers would have picked that spot for the shooting, unless they had reason to believe they would be able to escape. The assassins did not try to cover their traces; they did not shoot the woman who was walking with Mr Nemtsov. It is by far the most significant political assassination in recent Russian history. Many have drawn parallels between this crime and the fates of other recent victims, such as Galina Starovoitova, a democratic reformer killed in 1998. Yet the atmosphere in Russia is increasingly reminiscent of darker days from a more distant European past.

It is an atmosphere Mr Nemtsov himself described 10 months ago, when nationalist euphoria was building on the back of the annexation of Crimea and an escalating war in Ukraine. “I can’t remember such a level of general hatred as the one in Moscow today,” Mr Nemtsov wrote on his Facebook page…

Not in 1991, during the August coup, not even in 1993 [during Yeltsin’s stand off with parliament]. Aggression and cruelty are stoked by the television while the key definitions are coming from the slightly possessed Kremlin master. “National traitors”, “fifth column”, “fascist junta”—all these terms are coming from the same Kremlin office…The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. People are set off against each other. This hell can not end peacefully.

In the past year, the atmosphere of aggression and intolerance has only become stronger.

Ilya Ponomarev, a Russian left wing politician and member of the Russian parliament, says: I think this is indeed a turning point for Russian politics. Some would say just another turning point but I think this is the turning point.

I think that, for the future of Russia, the murder of Boris Nemtsov will mean the similar thing as the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934 [the a prominent Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union who was shot dead in his own office. — Editor’s note]. That murder was a trigger for the great terror of 1937.

The audience of this crime is not the Russian people. For the overwhelming majority of Russians, Boris was a very honest and straightforward guy, but he was a personification of the 1990s and the ill-manifested reforms of Boris Yeltsin. All the hatred against Yeltsin was personified in Nemtsov.

I think that the target audience for this murder is within the elites. It’s within the Russian elites who knew Nemtsov very well… and within the elites in the West — which probably is even a greater target.

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ISIS and the caliphate

Hassan Hassan writes: ISIL is not an apocalyptic cult as people tend to make it out to be. It employs Islamic eschatological ideas but only as part of its wider religious and political project. Messianic movements do not attract large followings in the way ISIL seems to.

The disproportionate focus on this part of its propaganda, which might be a result of familiarity with the concept in the West, risks misdiagnosis of the appeal of ISIL.

ISIL has a strategy for a clear religious and political project. Its focus on Dabiq [the location in Syria of an epic battle between Muslims and Christians, which prophecies predict] is nothing new. Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, ISIL’s founding father, spoke about the prophecy during his jihadi operation in Iraq. According to Yaroslav Trofimov, author of Siege of Mecca, Al Zarqawi took the idea from his Jordanian mentor Abu Mohammed Al Maqdisi.

In its videos, ISIL refers to its fighters as the “soldiers of the caliphate”, not the soldiers of Dabiq. It is the caliphate, or the Islamic state, that draws the attention of new recruits and invigorates them to fight for the group. It claims to represent the interest of Sunnis in Iraq, Syria and beyond. So it is this idea that must be the focus of attention for those fighting ISIL.

As politicians and commentators repeatedly warn about the danger of radicalization and the need for effective de-radicalization programs, this way of framing the threat posed by ISIS seems to me to involve an implausible proposition: that those who have a passionate desire to create a caliphate can be persuaded to abandon that desire.

Much as the issue of radicalization has in recent months focused on European Muslims who have been drawn into the ranks of ISIS, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the bulk of ISIS’s fighters did not abandon the comforts (or alienation) of Western societies. They came from Muslim countries that hold out no promise of becoming Islamic states and whose governments have little interest in representing the interests of the populations over whom they rule.

Millions of Muslims, without being extremists of any variety, see the Islamic world as having been carved up by Western colonialism, robbed of its sovereignty, and placed under the control of compliant and corrupt rulers. Broadly speaking, what’s on offer right now is a brutal ISIS caliphate vs. a fractious status quo. That seems like a lousy choice.

As Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya demonstrated over the last half century, the project of pan-Arab secular nationalism was a spectacular failure.

On the other hand, the Arab monarchies have the durability of a chronic disease — their ability to survive has accomplished little more than cripple the region.

If ISIS and the other forms of Islamic extremism are seen for what they are — symptoms of a disease, rather than the disease itself — then the remedy cannot be found by merely looking for ways to suppress its symptoms.

What is called for is a better vision that can be embraced on a larger scale than what ISIS or anyone else is currently offering.

This isn’t about de-radicalization but instead, real radicalism which goes to the root and is built around a vision of what it wants to create rather than what it endeavors to destroy.

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Europe’s jihadis in search of identity

Kenan Malik writes: What is striking about the stories of wannabe jihadis is their diversity. There is no “typical” recruit, no single path to jihadism.

Sahra Ali Mehenni is a schoolgirl from a middle-class family in the south of France. Her father, an industrial chemist, is a non-practising Muslim, her mother an atheist. “I never heard her talk about Syria, jihad,” said her mother. One day last March, to the shock of her family, she took not her usual train to school but a flight from Marseilles to Istanbul to join Isis. When she finally phoned home it was to say: “I’ve married Farid, a fighter from Tunisia.”

Kreshnik Berisha, a German born of Kosovan parents, played as a teenager for Makkabi Frankfurt, a Jewish football club and one of Germany’s top amateur teams. He went on to study engineering and in July 2013, boarded a bus to Istanbul and then to Syria. “I didn’t believe it,” said Alon Meyer, Makkabi Frankfurt’s coach. “This was a guy who used to play with Jewish players every week. He was comfortable there and he seemed happy.” Berisha later returned home to become the first German homegrown jihadi to face trial.

There are hundreds of stories such as these, from all over Europe. What they tell us is that, shocking though it may seem, there is nothing unusual in the story of the runaway Tower Hamlets schoolgirls. And that what Emwazi has in common with other European recruits is not so much his harassment as his college education.

The usual clichés about jihadis – that they are poor, uneducated, badly integrated – are rarely true. A survey of British jihadis by researchers at London’s Queen Mary College found no link to “social inequalities or poor education”; most were highly educated young people from comfortable families who spoke English at home. According to Le Monde, a quarter of French jihadis in Syria are from non-Muslim backgrounds.

What draws most wannabe jihadis to Syria is, to begin with, neither politics nor religion. It is a search for something a lot less definable: for identity, for meaning, for “belongingness”, for respect. Insofar as they are alienated, it is not because wannabe jihadis are poorly integrated, in the conventional way we think of integration. Theirs is a much more existential form of alienation.

There is, of course, nothing new in the youthful search for identity and meaning. What is different today is the social context in which this search takes place. We live in a more atomised society than in the past; an age in which many people feel peculiarly disengaged from mainstream social institutions and in which moral lines often seem blurred and identities distorted.

In the past, social disaffection may have led people to join movements for political change, from far-left groups to anti-racist campaigns. Today, such organisations often seem equally out of touch. What gives shape to contemporary disaffection is not progressive politics but the politics of identity.

Identity politics has, over the last three decades, encouraged people to define themselves in increasingly narrow ethnic or cultural terms. A generation ago, “radicalised” Muslims would probably have been far more secular in their outlook and their radicalism would have expressed itself through political organisations. Today, they see themselves as Muslim in an almost tribal sense, and give vent to their disaffection through a stark vision of Islam. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS killer Mohammed Emwazi had link to 2005 London bomb plot

The Observer reports: Mohammed Emwazi, the Islamic State (Isis) extremist behind the beheading of western hostages, was able to flee Britain and the scrutiny of the security services, despite being a member of a terror cell that was known to have links to the failed 21/7 attacks on London in 2005, the Observer can reveal.

One leading member of Emwazi’s network had a telephone conversation on the day of the attacks with Hussein Osman, who was later jailed for life for placing an explosive at Shepherd’s Bush tube station.

The security services were also aware that associates of the 12-strong west London terror group had joined the four 21/7 bombers at a training camp in Cumbria a year before the attempt to bring carnage to London’s streets.

The revelations, contained in court documents seen by this newspaper, raise urgent questions over how Emwazi, who became known as “Jihadi John”, was able to evade surveillance, slip out of the country in 2013 using false papers and re-emerge in Syria a year later to become the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Not only was Emwazi a “person of interest” for MI5 as a member of a London jihadi cell set up in 2007 to recruit for al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida affiliate, but at least one member of his network had a connection with one of the most infamous crimes in British history.

The failed 21/7 attacks came a fortnight after four men blew themselves up on tubes and a bus, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700, the worst terrorist atrocity committed on British soil. [Continue reading…]

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Ex-Mossad chief: Netanyahu has caused Israel ‘strategic damage’ on Iran

Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer interviewed ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan: Dagan isn’t exactly a leftist; anyone familiar with his biography will testify to this. When it comes to Iran, he shares Netanyahu’s concerns. “A nuclear Iran is a reality that Israel won’t be able to come to terms with,” he said.

But Dagan believes that Netanyahu, because of the way he is handling the issue, is only bringing us closer to this harsh reality. “The person that has caused Israel the most strategic damage when it comes to the Iranian issue is the prime minister,” he told us.

The White House, we said, has announced that it will stop sharing with Israel classified information pertaining to the negotiations with Iran. In your experience, does such a decision trickle down to our relations with the US administration on all levels?

“Yes,” Dagan said, “and it happens very quickly. The head of the CIA is a political appointee; the national security adviser is a political appointee; the secretary of state is a political appointee. They all, the lower-level officials too, work in keeping with the spirit of their commander. We’ve witnessed this phenomenon during confrontations in the past, with the (Jonathan) Pollard case, for example. We depend on the Americans for strategic weapons. When senior administration officials say that Israel is acting against the national interests of the United States, it represents a grave long-term danger for us.

“What message does it send when our prime minister says that we don’t need information from the talks and that we have our own sources? Is he implying that we are spying on the United States?

“Our standing in the world isn’t that great right now. The question of Israel’s legitimacy is on the agenda. We shouldn’t be gnawing away at our relations with our most important ally – certainly not in public and certainly not by getting involved in American domestic politics. This is not the kind of behaviour one expects from a prime minister.”

Most Israelis breathed a sigh of relief following Operation Protective Edge in the summer; and then came the sense of disappointment – after 51 days of fighting, one could have expected a little more than a stalemate when up against an organization like Hamas. Dagan reached a different and much harsher conclusion. The operation was a “resounding failure,” in his view. “What did we achieve?” he continued. “Nothing, except a ceasefire that Hamas will violate whenever it chooses.

Dagan is convinced that the current status quo poses a danger to Israel. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, he said. “Netanyahu’s actions are leading us towards a bi-national state, and I don’t want a bi-national state. I don’t want Abbas as the prime minister of my country. Continuing to establish facts on the ground in the territories will inevitably lead us to an apartheid state.”

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The genetic code is less like a blueprint than a first draft

Nessa Carey writes: When President Obama delivered a speech at MIT in 2009, he used a common science metaphor: “We have always been about innovation,” he said. “We have always been about discovery. That’s in our DNA.” Deoxyribonucleic acid, the chemical into which our genes are encoded, has become the metaphor of choice for a whole constellation of ideas about essence and identity. A certain mystique surrounds it. As Evelyn Fox Keller argues in her book The Century of the Gene, the genome is, in the popular imagination at least, the secret of life, the holy grail. It is a master builder, the ultimate computer program, and a modern-day echo of the soul, all wrapped up in one. This fantasy does not sit easily, however, with geneticists who have grown more aware over the last several decades that the relationship between genes and biological traits is much less than certain.

The popular understanding of DNA as a blueprint for organisms, with a one-to-one correspondence between genes and traits (called phenotypes), is the legacy of the early history of genetics. The term “gene” was coined in 1909 to refer to abstract units of inheritance, predating the discovery of DNA by forty years. Biologists came to think of genes like beads on a string that lined up neatly into chromosomes, with each gene determining a single phenotype. But, while some genes do correspond to traits in a straightforward way, as in eye color or blood group, most phenotypes are far more complex, set in motion by many different genes as well as by the environment in which the organism lives.

It turns out that the genetic code is less like a blueprint and more like a movie script, subject to revision and reinterpretation by a director. This process is called epigenetic modification (“epi” meaning “above” or “in addition to”). Just as a script can be altered with crossed-out words, sentences or scenes, epigenetic editing allows entire sections of DNA to be activated or de-activated. Genes can be as finely tuned as actors responding to stage directions to shout, whisper, or cackle. [Continue reading…]

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The atmosphere of hate in which Boris Nemtsov was murdered

Michael Weiss writes: “We need to talk about Magnitsky.”

The last time I saw Boris Nemtsov, in Tallinn, Estonia in 2013, he had wanted to find a way to tack on more Putin regime officials to a U.S. law that would ban them from entering the country or freeze whatever assets they held here. The former first deputy prime minister of Russia, who was brutally shot to death within eyeshot of the Kremlin this evening, had many enemies, not least of them the president of Russia. He was handsome, charismatic and popular in the West and in Eastern Europe. “First we liberate Belarus, and then Russia!” former Belarusian presidential candidate, dissident and Lukashenko torture victim Andrei Sannikov told him on that same occasion. Nemtsov joyfully agreed. On Sunday he had planned to lead a march against Vladimir Putin’s unacknowledged dirty war in Ukraine. He was shot repeatedly in the back by several assailants emerging from a car while he walking down the Moskvoretskiy bridge with Anna Durickaya, a Ukrainian model.

Two years ago, Nemtsov and his colleague Leonid Martynyuk released a report titled, “Winter Olympics in the Sub-Tropics: Corruption and Abuse in Sochi,” which alleged that Putin had personally overseen the enormous, profligate project and was therefore responsible for the estimated $26 billion frittered away in “embezzlement and kickbacks.” They named names. Nemtsov, who was born in Sochi, and Martynyuk debunked the myth peddled by the Kremlin that the bulk of the costs for the Olympics was borne by private investors, showing that actually only two — aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska and nickel magnate Vladimir Potanin — were the private financiers of the world’s most expensive Winter Games.

Moreover, they showed how brothers Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, childhood friends of Putin, were awarded 15 percent of the money controlled by Olimpstroy, the state company created to finance the Olympics; and that the bulk of this percentage was spent in awarding no-bid sweetheart contracts. They also suggested that Vladimir Yakunin, the chairman of the state-owned Russian Railroads, who along with Putin helped found the St. Petersburg Ozero Dacha Cooperative, commanded 20 percent of the Olympstroy budget and then purchased property which, according to his official declared income, he simply could not afford.

“Putin is part of a mafia,” Nemtsov told me and my colleague Olga Khvostunova, in an interview about his report. “They do not turn in their own. He gave his friends an opportunity ‘to earn some cash.’” [Continue reading…]

Joshua Yaffa writes: Without knowing who gave the orders, it’s possible to understand that the current political environment allowed for this to happen. Over the past year, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seen the rise of a new, much coarser and more doctrinaire political language. During the first decade of Putin’s rule, the Kremlin depicted its opponents as freaks or idiots, but now they are portrayed as outright enemies of their country. In a triumphant address to parliament last March, as Russia was formalizing its takeover of Crimea, Putin warned of “a fifth column,” a “disparate bunch of national traitors” determined to sow discord inside the country. Its members were obvious, if at first unmentioned: people like Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who had become the most popular leader in the country’s fractured opposition; Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow, a long-beleaguered radio station that is one of the last homes for critical and liberal voices; and of course Nemtsov, a recognizable face​from all his years in politics, and a favorite opponent of pro-Kremlin activists and propagandists.

It wasn’t long before the political technologists in the Kremlin and those who do their bidding in the media — whether at state-run television channels with national reach or on pro-Kremlin Web sites that publish memes and jokes disparaging the West and Russia’s small number of liberals — seized on the idea, releasing pseudo-documentaries on the evils of the fifth column and designing graphics that surrounded their disembodied heads with images of space aliens. For a while, a giant poster hung on the side of Moscow’s main bookstore with the face of Nemtsov, among others. “The fifth column: there are strangers among us,” it read. The most apocalyptic and vile of Russia’s television hosts, Dmitri Kiselyov, a man who once warned that Russia could turn the United States into “radioactive ash,” took pleasure in naming and insulting members of the so-called “fifth column.” “Putin legalized that term in the political language of Russia,” he said. “We know their names.”

That act of legalization, as Kiselyov aptly put it, means any number of people or factions could have murdered Nemtsov. In an interview two weeks ago, Nemtsov admitted that he was afraid Putin could have him killed, but “not that much.” In the hours after Nemtsov’s death, Vladimir Ryzhkov, a co-founder of R.P.R.-PARNAS with Nemtsov, told Echo of Moscow that he blamed “the atmosphere of hate that was artificially created” by the state and its supporters. Putin, for his part, called the killing a “provocation,” and said that he would personally oversee the investigation, evoking Stalin’s oversight of the prosecution of Sergei Kirov’s supposed killers in 1934. Will Nemtsov’s death similarly presage a wave of political purges? In the current climate, almost anything seems possible. Either the authorities would kill someone who poses little real political danger, or they have given rise to a venomous hatred that they can no longer control.

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Mohammed Emwazi was not a fine young man driven to murder

Shashank Joshi writes: Cage is a British organisation that “campaigns against state policies” towards “communities impacted by the war on terror”. It had been in contact with Emwazi until 2012. They portray him as an “extremely gentle, kind” and “beautiful young man” – words that might lead one to question their judgment – radicalised under relentless and arbitrary pressure from the British government. In this version, Emwazi is a tragic victim crushed by the power of an overweening security state. The world sees a butcher; Cage sees a dupe. In case anyone was in danger of missing the point, Cage’s website broadcast a simpler message: “the state is the only terrorist”.

This narrative would be funny, were the charge not so serious. Cage’s account of Emwazi’s radicalisation is self-serving, disingenuous, and highly selective. They start the story in 2010, when Kuwait cancelled Emwazi’s visa – under British pressure, he alleges – and he was prevented from returning to the country of his birth. This is presented as unprovoked harassment, borne of MI5’s sadistic compulsion to target the Muslim community as a whole. There’s a reason that Cage have left out the backstory, which helps us understand why Emwazi was on the government’s radar in the first place.

In 2009, he had travelled to Tanzania to go on “safari”. He was refused entry, deported, and questioned by MI5, who reportedly accused him of seeking to join al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate al-Shabab. This is entirely plausible. Why? Because British court papers identify Emwazi as a member of a network of Islamist extremists connected to Somalia.

This network had been in contact with a 7/7 bomber, and one key member, Bilal Berjawi, had also tried to go on a “safari” earlier that year – eventually ending up fighting in Somalia, later dying in a drone strike. It’s also worth noting that Emwazi, in his incarnation as Jihadi John, was “obsessed with Somalia” and forced hostages to watch al-Shabab videos.

So if you think that Emwazi was really going on safari, I have a bridge to sell you. And some free travel advice: if you desperately want to see lions and elephants, my suggestion is that you opt for a reputable travel agency rather than a well-established jihadist network. [Continue reading…]

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Mohammed Emwazi triable in British courts for war crimes, say prosecutors

The Guardian reports: Prosecutors and detectives have been working on building a criminal case against Mohammed Emwazi, 26, for potential offences of war crimes and multiple counts of murder, the Guardian has learned.

The the Islamic State militant dubbed “Jihadi John” has featured in seven propaganda videos claiming responsibility for the beheadings of hostages from Britain, the US and other countries.

The Crown Prosecution Service on Friday confirmed it is working with detectives from Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command to prosecute Emwazi over the videos and other suspected crimes if he ever comes within Britain’s jurisdiction.

A former top prosecutor said Emwazi’s crimes would be triable in British courts if committed overseas in territory seized by Isis in Syria during the civil war there.

A CPS spokesperson said: “We are liaising with the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) on their assessment of the content of videos that have been posted online that appear to show the murder of hostages.”

Lord MacDonald QC, the former director of public prosecutions, said the fact the offences took place in Syria would not prohibit a prosecution in a British court: “Since Victorian times it has been a criminal offence for British citizens to commit murder anywhere.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. rethinks plan to retake Mosul

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. military is considering a months-long campaign of airstrikes to squeeze Islamic State fighters in Mosul before inserting Iraqi ground forces to retake the city, officials said Friday.

The on-the-ground fight to retake Mosul isn’t likely to start until the fall at the earliest, after an intensified air campaign to target Islamic State leaders and cut off supply lines in and around the city, the officials said.

The emerging plan is at odds with a briefing by a U.S. military’s Central Command official in February in which he said the U.S. and Iraq were looking at starting a campaign to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, by April or May.

Afterward, Iraqi and American officials cast doubt on the likely readiness of Iraqi forces.

U.S. military officials now say they believe that Iraqi’s best military units are many months away from being in a position to successfully conduct such an operation. Those forces haven’t yet begun their training at the bases set up by American military officers in Iraq.

“When we feel that the Iraqi forces are ready to go and win decisively, we will go and advise the Iraqis to begin the operation,” a military official said. [Continue reading…]

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Darwin learned more about evolution from plants than Galapagos Finches

Henry Nicholls writes: When the HMS Beagle dropped anchor on San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the Galapagos archipelago, in September 1835, the ship’s naturalist Charles Darwin eagerly went ashore to gather samples of the insects, birds, reptiles, and plants living there. At first, he didn’t think much of the arid landscape, which appeared to be “covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood…as leafless as our trees during winter” But this did not put him off. By the time the Beagle left these islands some five weeks later, he had amassed a spectacular collection of Galapagos plants.

It is fortunate that he took such trouble. Most popular narratives of Darwin and the Galapagos concentrate on the far more celebrated finches or the giant tortoises. Yet when he finally published On the Origin of Species almost 25 years later, Darwin made no mention of these creatures. In his discussion of the Galapagos, he dwelt almost exclusively on the islands’ plants.

By the early 19th century, there was increasing interest in what we now refer to as biogeography, the study of the distribution of species around the globe. Many people still imagined that God had been involved in the creation of species, putting fully formed versions down on Earth that continued to reproduce themselves, dispersing from a divine “center of creation” to occupy their current habitats. To explain how the plants and animals reached far-flung places such as the isolated Galapagos, several naturalists imagined that there had to have been land bridges, long-since subsided, that had once connected them to a continent. But in the wake of the Beagle voyage, the collection of Galapagos plants suggested an alternate scenario.

Even if there had once been a land bridge to the islands, it could not account for the fact that half of the plant species Darwin collected were unique to the Galapagos, and that most of them were particular to just one island. “I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted,” wrote Darwin in his Journal of Researches. His observations could be best explained if species were not fixed in nature but somehow changed as the seeds traveled to different locations. [Continue reading…]

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The big melt: Antarctica’s retreating ice may re-shape Earth

The Associated Press reports: From the ground in this extreme northern part of Antarctica, spectacularly white and blinding ice seems to extend forever. What can’t be seen is the battle raging thousands of feet (hundreds of meters) below to re-shape Earth.

Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans. As the ice sheets slowly thaw, water pours into the sea — 130 billion tons of ice (118 billion metric tons) per year for the past decade, according to NASA satellite calculations. That’s the weight of more than 356,000 Empire State Buildings, enough ice melt to fill more than 1.3 million Olympic swimming pools. And the melting is accelerating.

In the worst case scenario, Antarctica’s melt could push sea levels up 10 feet (3 meters) worldwide in a century or two, recurving heavily populated coastlines.

Parts of Antarctica are melting so rapidly it has become “ground zero of global climate change without a doubt,” said Harvard geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS may not be a global threat, but neither is it a problem with a ready solution

The New York Times reports: The reports are like something out of a distant era of ancient conquests: entire villages emptied, with hundreds taken prisoner, others kept as slaves; the destruction of irreplaceable works of art; a tax on religious minorities, payable in gold.

A rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, perhaps, but in reality, according to reports by residents, activist groups and the assailants themselves, a description of the modus operandi of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate this week. The militants have prosecuted a relentless campaign in Iraq and Syria against what have historically been religiously and ethnically diverse areas with traces of civilizations dating to ancient Mesopotamia.

The latest to face the militants’ onslaught are the Assyrian Christians of northeastern Syria, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, some speaking a modern version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Assyrian leaders have counted 287 people taken captive, including 30 children and several dozen women, along with civilian men and fighters from Christian militias, said Dawoud Dawoud, an Assyrian political activist who had just toured the area, in the vicinity of the Syrian city of Qamishli. Thirty villages had been emptied, he said. [Continue reading…]

In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, some Americans, perceiving echoes of the government-fueled national hysteria that followed 9/11, now regard the attention being given to ISIS as disproportionate to the size of the threat.

A few days ago, one commentator described ISIS as: “A nasty nuisance, which has killed thousands in the Middle East, but a nuisance nonetheless.”

If one subscribes to the Steven Pinker view of the world, then how bad the current situation is, just comes down to numbers.

Fewer people have been killed by ISIS than by barrel bombs dropped by the Assad regime in Syria, or were killed during the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The threat to humanity posed by climate change, far exceeds all other global threats, including what can arguably be called a minor threat from ISIS.

But if an issue is defined as not rising above the threshold of being a nuisance, solely based on numbers, then since between 1882 and 1968 only 3,446 blacks were lynched in America, should the racial violence occurring during that chapter in this country’s history be described as having been no more than a nasty nuisance?

The very fact that we view lynching as emblematic of a chapter in history, illustrates the fact that significance can never be reduced to numbers.

In France, the death toll from the Charlie Hebdo shootings was little more than the average number of fatalities that occur every day on France’s roads.

Since statistically, the French face little more risk from terrorism than they face from traffic accidents, does that mean the French government should devote the same amount of time and resources to addressing road safety as they do to tackling terrorism?

Again, this doesn’t just come down to numbers. For one thing, there’s no reason to view road safety as a problem that risks escalating. Neither is there reason to imagine that individuals or groups of people have a specific interest in making the roads more dangerous. Road safety is an issue that gains ongoing and appropriate attention from every relevant constituency from central government to local government, town planners to school teachers, and vehicle manufacturers to medics.

The fact that it is the type of issue that generally gets effectively addressed, is the very reason it is largely ignored in political and popular discourse.

Conversely, while it’s easy to say that ISIS presents a problem that needs “to be dealt with,” the very fact that it remains unclear what mechanisms might be effective in tackling this problem, is one of the main reasons ISIS continues to grab the headlines.

ISIS might not represent an unstoppable force and yet its campaign of violence has proved very difficult to contain.

Politicians glibly talk about the strategy for defeating ISIS, yet no one has made a convincing case that such a strategy has been found.

Some observers believe that each time another ISIS headline appears, the group has simply been served up the attention it craves, but to dismiss this as a group of attention-seekers is to gravely misjudge ISIS’s ambitions.

A year ago, before ISIS had become a household name but after it taken over Fallujah, President Obama wanted to downplay its significance in what became an infamous dismissal — he said they were just “a jayvee team.”

In those early months of 2014, ISIS used America’s inattention to its full advantage.

Whether showered with or starved of attention, ISIS pursues its goals because they have less concern about how they are perceived by Americans, or for that matter the rest of the world, than we might imagine.

The issue now is less about the quantity of attention ISIS garners that it is about the quality of that attention.

When viewed through the paradigm of the war on terrorism, it’s natural and appropriate to point to that neocon project’s manifold failures. We might also see this as the latest manifestation in a problem that cannot wholly be solved. In other words, that we need to learn how to live with what can be regarded as a manageable amount of terrorism.

But maybe we are being distracted by the category of terrorism itself.

In spite of the fact that ISIS has engaged in what are generally viewed as some of the most grotesque acts of terrorism ever carried out, it differs from all other terrorist groups in at least two fundamental ways:

  • It has spawned a mass movement, and
  • It has captured and now governs large tracts of territory.

While there was recent furious debate about whether ISIS should be called Islamic, there has been little discussion about its claim to have created a state.

That claim is treated as too preposterous as to merit consideration — the so-called Islamic State is surely destined to implode.

And yet that hasn’t happened and it isn’t about to happen. Neither is this a state that stands any chance of being recognized by any other, but nor does it seek such recognition. On the contrary, the recognition it seeks is from all those who reject the legitimacy of nation states — and this constituency is large and growing.

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ISIS executioner, Mohammed Emwazi, was under watch by British intelligence

The New York Times reports: Mr. Emwazi was called “Jihadi John” by the foreign hostages he guarded, a number of whom he apparently beheaded in widely circulated videos. He was first identified on Thursday by The Washington Post website, and his name was confirmed by a senior British security official. The official said that the British government had identified Mr. Emwazi some time ago but had not disclosed his name for operational reasons. The identification was also confirmed in Washington by a senior United States military intelligence official.

Information is still vague about Mr. Emwazi, with Britain officially refusing to confirm that he is indeed “Jihadi John” because of what are described as continuing operations.

But Mr. Emwazi appears in 2011 court documents, obtained by the BBC, as a member of a network of extremists who funneled funds, equipment and recruits “from the United Kingdom to Somalia to undertake terrorism-related activity.”

Mr. Emwazi is alleged to be part of a group from West and North London, sometimes known as “the North London Boys,” with links to the Somalia-based terrorist group Al Shabab, organized by an individual who had returned to London in February 2007 and whose name was redacted in court documents.

Another person associated with that group was Bilal al-Berjawi, who was born in Lebanon but brought to West London as a baby. He fought in Somalia and rose through the ranks of Al Shabab and Al Qaeda in Africa before being killed in a drone strike in January 2012, according to Raffaello Pantucci, also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

Mr. Berjawi traveled to Kenya in February 2009, telling his family he was heading for a safari; he and a friend were detained in Nairobi and shipped back to London, but made it to Somalia in October that year.

The neighborhood group “is a tight community and it’s very probable that they knew each other and were part of the same crew,” Mr. Pantucci said.

So it is likely that Mr. Emwazi’s own safari a few months later in May, from Britain to Germany to Tanzania, using the name of Muhammad ibn Muazzam, set off alarms with the British security services, and that he had started on the road to radicalism even before his encounter with MI5 in 2009. [Continue reading…]

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The contradiction between the secular and fundamentalist roots of ISIS is more apparent than real

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss — a Chatham House review: Despite its declaration of a new ‘caliphate’ based on jihadist principles, much of the senior leadership Islamic State is actually made up of Saddam-era Baath Party members.

A study of the origins and make-up of Islamic State characterizes the jihadist group as a ‘spectral hold-over’ of the old regime.

‘Most of its top decision-makers served either in Saddam Hussein’s military or security services. In a sense, ‘secular’ Baathism has returned to Iraq under the guise of Islamic fundamentalism.’

The authors, Syrian researcher Hassan Hassan, who hails from the town of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border, and the American journalist Michael Weiss, write that this contradiction between secular and fundamentalist is more apparent than real.

Despite the secular origins of the Baath party, Saddam Hussein used it to preserve the dominance of Iraq’s Sunni Muslims – only 20 per cent of the population – and repress the majority Shia. In the declining years of his rule Saddam Hussein adopted an overtly religious path, in the hope of co-opting the Sunni Muslim leadership. In fact, Saddam lost control of his so-called Islamic Faith Campaign and many Baath Party members fell under the spell of the imams. [Continue reading…]

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Libya’s revolution and its aftermath

Nicolas Pelham writes: As in the time of Qaddafi, words and reality in postrevolutionary Libya often seem to inhabit separate spheres. Twenty minutes before landing in Tripoli, women returning from Egypt drape their highlighted hair and designer jeans in black cloth. The women at passport control have gone, and the man in charge of immigration is the one with the bushiest beard. Inside the city, Muslim iconoclasts are purging the capital of its colonial-era images. Soon after capturing the capital in August, they fired a shell through the belly of the Bride of the Sea, a sculpture of a bare-breasted mermaid entwined with a tender gazelle, which since Italian times had served as a backdrop for wedding photos. And last month they stole the sculpture itself. Herati only got it back because the thieves could be traced by the cameras Qaddafi hid in the capital’s roadside trees. For now, though, he says, it is safer for it to remain under wraps.

Other monuments in the capital are disappearing too. The three tombs of Ottoman mystics that graced the entrance of the eighteenth-century Ahmed Pasha Qaramanli mosque at the entrance of the souk have been smashed, and replaced with an already overgrown patch of grass. Islamists have snapped off the antique Koranic inscriptions in the souk’s other old mosques, lest believers be led astray into polytheism by venerating the ornaments instead of God alone.

Libya Dawn’s officials blame the attacks on the local followers of a Saudi scholar, Rabi’ al-Mudkhali. He works, says an official, with Saudi intelligence, seeking to tarnish the name of Islamist groups that do not follow Saudi’s puritanical doctrines or more importantly their politics. Others suggest that acolytes of Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State, or ISIS, are finding a foothold thanks to Libya Dawn’s relaxed approach to Islamic extremists. I failed to find evidence of the Islamic State cadres that had been reported in Tripoli, but cafés frequented by couples have been torched and embassies car-bombed. A couple of days after I left Tripoli, a gunman shot dead an unveiled woman driving home near the city center. Lest anyone be tempted to investigate, in mid-November Libya Dawn raided the National Commission for Human Rights, seized its database, and padlocked its doors. [Continue reading…]

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Boehner’s campaign rally for Netanyahu

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: It would be reassuring—sort of—to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu decided to set the U.S.-Israel relationship on fire mainly because he fears that President Obama is selling out Israel. But Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on March 3—a speech arranged without Obama’s knowledge by Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and by Obama’s chief Republican rival, House Speaker John Boehner—is motivated by another powerful fear: the fear of unemployment. The message Bibi is preparing to deliver on Tuesday (a “statesmanlike message,” according to an official close to him) has as its actual target not Congress but, instead, Israeli voters who need reminding, in Netanyahu’s view, that he is the only leader strong enough to face down both the genocidal regime in Tehran and the Israel-loathing regime in Washington. (Make no mistake: Netanyahu sees Obama as an actual adversary. If only all of Israel’s adversaries would veto U.N. Security Council resolutions hostile to Israel…)

Bibi is facing an existential threat to his career, and Boehner is staging for him the ultimate campaign rally, 6,000 miles away from home. People I’ve spoken with in Israel who have a sophisticated understanding of current campaign dynamics—the Israeli election is set for March 17—say that a well-delivered, well-received speech (standing ovations in Congress seem very impressive unless you know better) could gain Netanyahu two or three extra seats in the Knesset, which might be what he needs to retain his job. [Continue reading…]

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