Category Archives: Issues

Arabs accuse Kurds of exploiting war with ISIS to grab land

The Wall Street Journal reports: After U.S.-backed Kurdish forces drove Islamic State militants from the Iraqi city of Sinjar this month, some of the fighters involved began looting houses of Sunni Arabs suspected of ties to the extremist group.

A week later in the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, Kurdish fighters expelled about 60 Sunni Arab families who had remained in the ruins of one village, according to local officials and residents. They said it was one of more than 50 Arab villages razed or partially demolished by Kurds who recaptured them from Islamic State since July. The Kurds suspected some male relatives of the expelled families of fighting with the Sunni radicals of Islamic State.

Sunni Arab officials and residents in Iraq accuse Kurds of exploiting the war with Islamic State to grab land. In Syria as well, Sunni Arabs are either fleeing, being forced out or are blocked from returning to areas seized by Kurds or Iran-backed groups, according to residents and some of the Kurdish fighters themselves.

It is part of a broader shift in Iraq and Syria, where opponents of Islamic State such as Shiites and Kurds are claiming recaptured land and oil resources that have long been in dispute. These conquests are redrawing internal boundaries, displacing communities and deepening ethnic and sectarian tensions in the two increasingly fragmented countries. [Continue reading…]

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Terrorism response puts Belgium in a harsh light

The New York Times reports: A month before the Paris terrorist attacks, Mayor Françoise Schepmans of Molenbeek, a Brussels district long notorious as a haven for jihadists, received a list with the names and addresses of more than 80 people suspected as Islamic militants living in her area.

The list, based on information from Belgium’s security apparatus, included two brothers who would take part in the bloodshed in France on Nov. 13, as well as the man suspected of being the architect of the terrorist plot, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Molenbeek resident who had left for Syria to fight for the Islamic State in early 2014.

“What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists,” Ms. Schepmans said in an interview. That, she added, “is the responsibility of the federal police.”

The federal police service, for its part, reports to the interior minister, Jan Jambon, a Flemish nationalist who has doubts about whether Belgium — divided among French, Dutch and German speakers — should even exist as a single state. [Continue reading…]

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Darkness in the Arab Spring’s brightest spot, Tunisia

The Atlantic reports: Last month, the Norwegian Nobel Committee bestowed the world’s most prestigious prize upon The Quartet, a body consisting of four Tunisian groups, whose work helped ensure a peaceful democratic transition in Tunisia in 2013.

In its statement, the Nobel Committee paid homage to Tunisia’s successes in the aftermath of the Jasmine Revolution, but also acknowledged that the country still “faces significant political, economic, and security challenges.”

As Tunisia tries to endure as the birthplace of the Arab Spring and its golden child, violence keeps interrupting. Back in March, 23 people died in a terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in the capital city of Tunis and, in July, 38 tourists were killed when a gunman opened fire at a beach in Sousse. Both attacks were claimed by the Islamic State.

On Tuesday, not far from the Bardo Museum, an explosion killed a dozen Tunisian presidential guards and wounded several others on a bus in the central part of the capital. No group has claimed responsibility yet, but following the attack, President Beji Caid Essebsi reinstated the country’s state of emergency, which had been lifted in October, and set a curfew. The violence comes just one week after Tunisia’s interior ministry boasted that security forces had foiled a major plot against a number of targets when it broke up a heavily armed terrorist cell in the country. [Continue reading…]

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The cost of inaction with climate change

Pacific Standard reports: Next week in Paris, some 40,000 government officials, journalists, activists, and lobbyists will descend on the city as delegations from 195 countries convene to nail down plans for curbing emissions and opening new energy markets in the face of climate change. The last Conference of the Parties, as the summit is known, occurred six years ago in Copenhagen. While the Copenhagen COP was supposed to be a turning point in climate change policy, it was largely deemed a failure. Should COP21 fall similarly short, it’ll likely be at the expense of the 3.5 billion poorest people around the world, according to a new report from Oxfam International.

Ahead of this year’s conference, participating nations submitted emissions reduction pledges, known officially as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. The United States, for example, agreed to cut emissions 25 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Still, the promises of many developed nations tend to fall “well short of their fair share,” according to the report. And either way, cumulatively, the pledges wouldn’t be enough to prevent runaway climate change. “Even if all countries meet their INDC commitments, the world is likely to warm by a devastating 3°C or more, with a significant likelihood of tipping the global climate into catastrophic runaway warming,” the report warns.

If that were to happen, developing countries would be left to foot an astronomical bill by mid-century, according to the report. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s power base as a demagogue rests on this: racism and lying

Wikipedia:

A demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from French “demagogue”, derived in turn from the Greek “demos” = people/folk and the verb “ago” = carry/manipulate thus “people’s manipulator”) or rabble-rouser is a political leader in a democracy who appeals to the emotions, fears, prejudices, and ignorance of the lower socioeconomic classes in order to gain power and promote political motives. Demagogues usually oppose deliberation and advocate immediate, violent action to address a national crisis; they accuse moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness. Demagogues have appeared in democracies since ancient Athens. They exploit a fundamental weakness in democracy: because ultimate power is held by the people, nothing stops the people from giving that power to someone who appeals to the lowest common denominator of a large segment of the population.

Following one of Donald Trump’s latest examples of blatant lying — through a sixfold exaggeration of the likelihood that a white person gets murdered by a black person — Daniel W. Drezner writes: Now we’re at the point in this campaign when Trump’s defense for this — and those of his supporters — will be predictable. Trump was just RTing someone else’s lie, so it’s not really his fault. Trump’s MO on this ever since he’s become a candidate has been a simple five-step plan:

  1. Say/tweet/retweet outrageous thing;
  2. Dominate the next news cycle;
  3. Bully the media that focus on the outrageous statement;
  4. Backtrack/claim misinterpretation;
  5. Sustain polling advantage.

[Continue reading…]

Michael Tesler writes: Political commentators have asserted for months that Donald Trump’s dominance of the Republican presidential field is fueled by his anti-immigrant rhetoric. As Thomas Edsall put it:

Donald Trump’s success is no surprise. The public and the press have focused on his defiant rejection of mannerly rhetoric, his putting into words of what others think privately. But the more important truth is that a half-century of Republican policies on race and immigration have made the party the home of an often angry and resentful white constituency — a constituency that is now politically mobilized in the face of demographic upheaval.

This is a very plausible hypothesis, but one with little comprehensive evidence to date. Now, thanks to a collection of survey data from YouGov, we can show how, and how much, voters’ concern about immigration has helped Trump. [Continue reading…]

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Canada to turn away single men as part of Syrian refugee resettlement plan

AFP reports: Canada will accept only whole families, lone women or children in its mass resettlement of Syrian refugees while unaccompanied men – considered a security risk – will be turned away.

Since the Paris attacks launched by Syria-linked jihadis, a plan by the new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to fast-track the intake of 25,000 refugees by year’s end has faced growing criticism in Canada.

Details of the plan will be announced Tuesday but Canada’s ambassador to Jordan confirmed that refugees from camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey will be flown to Canada from Jordan starting 1 December. [Continue reading…]

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The endless recurrence of the clash of civilizations narrative

Marc Lynch writes: Jihadists have always sought to use terrorism to polarize politics, spread their ideas, discredit moderates and advance their preferred narrative of clashing civilizations. They have not always been so successful [as they are now] in winning mainstream acceptance for their narrative.

I would highlight three possible explanations. One part of the answer may be the pervasive effects of social media. By this I do not mean the Islamic State’s use of social media for recruitment and propaganda, as impressive and interesting as this phenomenon has been. Instead, I mean the ways in which social media itself is structured, creating new openings for extreme ideas to gain traction with the broader public. Social media networks typically tend to encourage ideological clustering, in which self-selected communities of the like-minded cultivate shared narratives, identities and arguments. Today’s pervasive social media is organically interwoven with broadcast media and more traditional print publications in ways that facilitate the movement of these narratives from isolated clusters into the mainstream. The 9/11 attacks took place at a moment when blogs had only just begun to reshape the American political public sphere, but the Islamic State’s rise has occurred in an era of near complete social mediation of information and opinion. Such an environment seems highly conducive to the cultivation and nurturing of radical fringe ideas – and their transmission into the broader public arena.

A second strand is the absence of George W. Bush. For all his other foreign policy struggles, Bush was staunchly opposed to the demonization of Islam, and frequently argued — as Hillary Clinton does today — that America was not at war with Islam. He understood the importance of denying the al-Qaeda narrative of a clash of civilizations. Bush’s stance acted as a check on the anti-Islamic impulses of the right wing base. That obstacle has long since passed from the scene. President Obama’s invocation of the same themes invites the opposite response. The right wing now can be unified against this rhetoric, without Bush to restrain them. Meanwhile, the waning of the Obama presidency has encouraged a large portion of the policy community to position themselves against the outgoing administration, which typically means adopting more hawkish and interventionist positions. By the old political math, the majority of Democrats combined with the Bush Republicans to block the anti-Islamic trend. By the new political math, the vast majority of Republicans combines with enough Democrats to push the “center” well to the right.

A third factor is the real changes within the Islamist landscape, far beyond the Islamic State itself. Syria has generated a wide variety of jihadist groups, which often position themselves against the Islamic State. Local insurgencies that once took on the al-Qaeda label now embrace the Islamic State’s franchise. Above all, the 2013 Egyptian military coup and subsequent repressive campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood severely weakened one of al-Qaeda’s traditionally most powerful competitors. The destruction and demonization of the Brotherhood has likely contributed to eroding the idea of a mainstream Islamism buffering the jihadists. The political push by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to label the Brotherhood a terrorist organization has reshaped the politics of the issue as well. Propaganda from the region against the Muslim Brotherhood then refracts through the Western public discourse. Old debates revolving around the Brotherhood’s role as a firewall against extremism are now far less relevant, with its organization shattered and ideology of peaceful participation discredited. Analysts who follow Islamism closely are now in uncharted territory, creating openings for those peddling simple, well-rehearsed narratives about Islam. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is promoting its own form of imperialism

Sunny Hundal writes: It seems as though every atrocity committed against the West by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is followed by claims in the media that such attacks are the result of our military action against them. The former mayor of London Ken Livingstone told the BBC yesterday: “All these terrorist attacks, the statements they make on their websites and so on are all about foreign policy.” He added that the French-led military intervention against the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was “coming back to haunt [it].”

This attitude isn’t isolated. Not long after the Paris attacks, Stop the War Coalition, which organized the million-plus march in London against the war in Iraq in 2003, tweeted an article claiming Paris “reaped the whirlwind of Western extremism.” It was hastily deleted. Writing for Salon, foreign-affairs columnist Patrick L. Smith opined, “We brought this on ourselves,” while in The Guardian yesterday, the Al Jazeera English presenter Mehdi Hasan suggested that the Paris attacks were the result of geopolitcal blowback.

Claiming that terror attacks such as those that shook Paris on Nov. 13, are a “blowback” isn’t just offensive to its (mainly Muslim) victims—it misreads the very nature of ISIL. It amounts to an excusal of the terrorist group’s intentions, as if to say that ISIL would not have done any of this if the US, UK, France, and company weren’t so meddlesome. This is a convenient tale, which is told to push a non-interventionist foreign policy, but it doesn’t reflect reality. [Continue reading…]

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Why do we only allow a narrow sliver of psychological research to influence the discussion around climate change?

Renee Lertzman writes: With the climate talks in Paris at COP21 fast approaching, we’re seeing an unprecedented interest in what has been, for decades, a rather rogue yet burgeoning field: the psychology of climate change and environmental issues.

From Obama’s call to engage behavioral sciences to inform climate change engagement, to Bill Nye’s depiction of climate denial, it’s now become acceptable to acknowledge that climate change is, in fact, not only a scientific, political, economic, technical, and industrial issue, but also a deeply psychological one. To reckon with this “super-wicked problem” effectively, there is a growing awareness that we cannot ignore the underlying psychological dimensions that inform engagement, innovation, and political response.

There’s one question that appears to underlie virtually every report, book, and paper on the topic: Why are we not responding more actively and effectively to one of the greatest threats facing life on the planet today? Last week, a study was published in Perspectives on Psychological Science responding to this question, identifying “Five ‘Best Practice’ Insights From Psychological Sciences” for improving public engagement on climate change. The authors’ aim was to distill “five simple but important guidelines for improving public policy and decision making about climate change.” The paper reflects a growing movement to translate and bridge research findings with on-the-ground applications in policy, advocacy, and communities of practice. We need this kind of connection between research and practice, without question. However, we must ask: What about additional — and arguably critical — psychological insights that may be lost in translation? [Continue reading…]

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More than 2,000 academics call on world heads to do more to limit global warming

The Guardian reports: More than 2,000 academics from over 80 countries – including linguist Noam Chomsky, climate scientist Michael E Mann, philosopher Peter Singer, and historian Naomi Oreskes – have called on world leaders to do more to limit global warming to a 1.5C rise.

In an open letter, they write that leaders meeting in Paris at a crunch UN climate summit next week should “be mustering planet-wide mobilisation, at all societal levels” and call for citizens around the world to hold their leaders to account on the issue.

The world has already warmed by 1C above pre-industrial levels. Holding warming to 1.5C would be a far greater challenge than the 2C that leaders at previous climate talks have agreed to limit rises to. Current emissions pledges tabled ahead of the Paris summit would see warming of around 2.7-3C.

They say that such a rise is: “profoundly shocking, given that any sacrifice involved in making those reductions is far overshadowed by the catastrophes we are likely to face if we do not.”

Separately, the CEOs from 78 companies collectively worth over $2tn – among them Nestlé, Accenture, HSBC, Lloyd’s, Microsoft, BT Group, PepsiCo, Siemens, SOHO China, UniLever, PwC, Marks & Spencer and the Mahindra Group – have pledged their support to governments to implement ambitious targets.

The companies, which operate in more than 150 countries, call for support for alternative energy sources, a carbon price to bolster investment, “consistent policies and robust monitoring” and for greater disclosure on investments related to fossil fuels and alternative energies.

In a letter co-ordinated by the World Economic Forum, the corporations recognise the internationally agreed target to limit global warming to 2C. [Continue reading…]

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Climate advocates to Department of Justice: It’s time to prosecute Exxon

Good reports: Members of Congress, presidential candidates, and now at least 350,000 American citizens are calling upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate and prosecute Exxon Mobil for intentionally deceiving the public about the science of climate change.

In September, two exclusive investigative reports by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, revealed that Exxon’s own scientists were researching climate change, even as the company was spending big money to misinform the public about climate science. The Inside Climate News investigation found that as early as 1977, Exxon’s own scientists were warning management about oil’s role in “potentially catastrophic” global warming.

Many climate advocates – including a growing number of politicians – believe that the deception could well be criminal. Last Thursday, representatives from a number of climate advocacy group – including Climate Hawks Vote, 350.org, the Moms Clean Air Force, the Working Families Party, and Greenpeace USA – delivered over 350,000 signed petitions to the Department of Justice demanding an investigation. [Continue reading…]

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Women targeted as hate crime against British Muslims soars following Paris attacks

The Independent reports: Muslims living in Britain have suffered more than 100 racial attacks since the terrorist atrocities in Paris, figures prepared for ministers reveal.

A report to the Government’s working group on anti-Muslim hatred, seen by The Independent, shows a spike in Islamophobic hate crime of more than 300 per cent, to 115, in the week following the killings on November 13 in France.

Most victims of the UK hate crimes were Muslim girls and women aged from 14 to 45 in traditional Islamic dress. The perpetrators were mainly white males aged from 15 to35. [Continue reading…]

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Little evidence to show that prisons have become ‘universities of terror’

By Sarah Marsden, Lancaster University

From “shoebomber” Richard Reid, to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the attacks in Paris, there seem to be increasing examples of people becoming “radicalised” in jails. So how concerned should we be about the role of prisons in producing violent extremists?

Contrary to those who argue that jails are at risk of becoming “universities of terror” there is actually relatively little systematic evidence of a link between prison and involvement in terrorism.

That is not to say that apparently “radical” groups have not developed in prisons, or that there haven’t been efforts to recruit people to militant Islamism in UK jails. Jamaal Uddin, who was convicted for assault and enforcing a “Sharia-controlled zone” in east London, boasted of his ability to “radicalise” people in the face of apparently powerless authorities. In the worst cases, such as in Iraq where several American-run detention facilities became pivotal in the development of what was to become Islamic State, prisons have been intimately implicated in terrorism.

Continue reading →

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Iran’s Guard simulates capture of Al-Aqsa Mosque

The Washington Post reports: Paramilitary forces from Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard held a war game simulating the capture of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the holy site that has been at the center of the tensions in Israel and the West Bank.

Iranian state media on Saturday said the forces stormed and “liberated” a replica of the mosque in the exercise. It said thousands of members of the Basij, the paramilitary unit of the Guard, participated in the exercise outside the holy city of Qom in central Iran.

The symbolic operations were backed up by Guard helicopters, drones and planes that bombed hypothetical enemy positions before ground troops captured the replica of the mosque. Official photos showed one of the troops going to the top of the dome and waving an Iranian flag and a red flag, a symbol of martyrdom. [Continue reading…]

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Memo to Trump: The cheering in New Jersey on 9/11 was coming from Israelis, not Arabs

The Daily Beast reports: It seemed likely that after Donald Trump lied about the residents of Jersey City’s behavior on Sept. 11, 2001 — claiming they cheered the attacks across the river in New York City — Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, would be first in line to repudiate him.

That was a naive assumption. It turns out a Republican presidential candidate would sooner slow-dance with Hillary Clinton than criticize the party’s frontrunner in defense of American Muslims.

At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday, Trump said, “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering!”

This is, of course, incorrect. The New York Times reported that rumors of Muslims cheering in New Jersey were “discounted by police officials at the time.”

Trump then claimed on Sunday on ABC’s This Week that he had seen footage of the thousands of people cheering on TV — but no such footage seems to exist.

A request for comment from Christie, sent at around 10:30 Sunday morning, went ignored all day by his campaign. Which was curious, since the governor’s tough talk against “crazies” fear-mongering about Muslims — never mind his constant talk about the 9/11 attacks throughout the course of his presidential campaign — has been a defining aspect of his governorship.

In 2011, Christie nominated Sohail Mohammed as a Superior Court judge. When rumors began to circulate on the Internet that Mohammed was tied to terrorism and sympathetic to Sharia, Christie came to his aid.

“This Sharia law business is crap,” he said. “It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post spoke to Jerry Speziale, the police commissioner of Paterson, N.J., for his response to Trump’s claims and he said: “That is totally false. That is patently false. That never happened. There were no flags burning, no one was dancing. That is bullshit.”

Speziale’s statement might not be completely accurate because as Jim Galloway, a journalist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, noted yesterday: “As the towers came down, some people indeed saw a group of five — not thousands, but five — Middle Eastern men clowning around and photographing themselves in front of the burning towers from the New Jersey waterfront. They weren’t Arabs, and they weren’t Muslims.”

At that time, an FBI bulletin was issued warning law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

Twenty-five minutes after the alert had been sent out, the van was stopped by officers with the East Rutherford Police Department who arrested its five occupants who all turned out to be Israelis.

Christopher Ketcham later investigated the story in detail and published his findings in a 2007 report, “What did Israel know in advance of the 9/11 attacks?”

I have reposted that report and an accompanying article, “The Kuala Lumpur deceit.”

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From the archives: What did Israel know in advance of the 9/11 attacks?

By Christopher Ketcham, March 16, 2007

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO — “be on lookout” — was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physically removed” Kurzberg, while four other men — two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning — were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg],’We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo — falsely — that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”. From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counter-terrorism teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven lie-detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it. Continue reading →

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From the archives: The Kuala Lumpur deceit

By Christopher Ketcham, March, 2007

The possible link between pre-9/11 Israeli warnings and the watch-listing of the hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi was pointed out in late 2004 by a retired top corporate lawyer named Gerald Shea, who compiled a 166-page memo detailing the alleged operations of the Israeli groups in New Jersey, Florida and elsewhere. In the memo, which is drawn from publicly available source material and which he sent to members of the 9/11 Commission and the joint House and Sen­ate intelligence committees, Shea notes that neither the 9/11 Commission’s final report nor the joint report of the intelligence committees “specifically mentions any such [warnings] from the Israeli government”.

Instead, both reports, hewing closely to the CIA’s public stance, attribute the watch-listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi solely to the bumbling work of U.S. intelligence. But a review of the alleged facts in this route to the watch list, Shea insists, makes one doubt their veracity. “The issue is important”, Shea argues, “because any downplaying of Israeli warnings … draws attention away” from the surveillance role the Israeli groups may have played.

The key element in the CIA’s account is the claim that in January 2001 the agency had identified an operational link between the Mihdhar-Hazmi duo and one of Bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants, Khallad, a.k.a. Tawfiq bin Attash, who was suspected of masterminding the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. According to the CIA, Mihdhar, Hazmi and Khallad had together attended a high-level al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. This meeting was historic in the annals of Islamic terrorism, for it was here that the germ of 9/11 was seeded. Continue reading →

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Don’t let Paris attacks stop COP21 climate change deal, pleads Obama

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has moved to ensure that the Paris attacks do not sabotage a crucial climate change summit in the city next week, urging his fellow leaders to attend and strike a new deal on global warming.

The US president spoke out amid concerns that security fears in Paris coupled with an understandable deflection of French attention away from the imminent two-week summit might undermine chances for a historic agreement to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think it’s absolutely vital for every country, every leader, to send a signal that the viciousness of a handful of killers does not stop the world from doing vital business,” Obama said.

He added that world leaders had to show the murderous adversaries who killed at least 130 people “that we’re not afraid”. And the first chance to do that is next Monday, when the Paris climate change talks, known as COP21, start.

The Paris attacks have cast a deep shadow over COP21 – demonstrations have been banned and security has been stepped up – though none of the 130-plus heads of state and government due to attend has yet pulled out.

France has made a huge play of preparing for the summit, which is supposed to achieve a new global deal to curb emissions from 2020 and prevent the planet from catastrophic overheating. But in the wake of the 13 November attacks, there have been concerns that the French political leadership, and president François Hollande in particular, might have other things on their mind.

Privately, French officials insist they are determined not to let their agenda be set by terrorists. And some observers are hoping that the threat might galvanisethe talks to greater solidarity and urgency. [Continue reading…]

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