Category Archives: Issues

Haunting images from the Syrian crisis tell only half the story

Susie Linfield writes: In early September, Nilüfer Demir’s photographs of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Kurdish-Syrian three-year-old boy who washed up on a Turkish beach in his family’s desperate attempt to escape the Syrian war, appeared on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the world. The photographs immediately ricocheted across the globe, became instant icons, and inspired an outpouring of outrage, empathy, urgency, and shame. The Guardian‘s headline — “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees” — was echoed by countless others. (The photographs also inspired a somewhat pointless social-media debate about whether they injured young Aylan’s dignity — apparently forgetting that it was Assad, Hezbollah, ISIS, et. al. who had done that.)

This image-inspired concern may be too glib and the resulting donations to humanitarian organizations short-lived; it’s easy to disparage all this as the self-congratulatory pity that the comfortable feel for the afflicted. Such disparagement has a respectable intellectual lineage. The political philosopher Judith Shklar regarded pity as an essentially negative reaction that can even be “mean-spirited,” while French philosopher and human-rights activist Pascal Bruckner argues that it encompasses “sadism” and “an ostentatious pleasure…derived from the pain of others.” I am deeply sympathetic to their critique. And yet the Syrian war also illuminates, with brutal clarity, what a world without pity looks like. In this case, I am inclined to think that a bit of pity — a desire by onlookers, however superficial, to alleviate even a modicum of suffering — is a good thing. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu provokes uproar in Israel by linking Palestinians to Holocaust

The Associated Press reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an uproar in Israel on Wednesday for suggesting that a World War II-era Palestinian leader convinced the Nazis to adopt their Final Solution to exterminate 6 million Jews.

Holocaust experts and survivors slammed Netanyahu’s comments as historically inaccurate and serving the interests of Holocaust deniers by lessening the responsibility of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Critics also said the statement amounts to incitement against modern-day Palestinians in the midst of a wave of violent unrest and high tensions.

Speaking to a group of Jewish leaders Tuesday, Netanyahu tried to use a historical anecdote to illustrate his claim that Palestinian incitement surrounding Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site goes back decades. He has repeatedly claimed that a wave of Palestinian attacks in recent weeks is the result of decades of hatred, and not connected to Israel’s 48-year occupation of lands claimed by the Palestinians, as the Palestinians have claimed.

Netanyahu said the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem, Nazi sympathizer Haj Amin al-Husseini, also instigated Palestinian attacks on Jews over lies that they planned to destroy the Temple Mount, known to Muslims at the Noble Sanctuary.

Netanyahu said al-Husseini played a “central role in fomenting the final solution” by trying to convince Hitler to destroy the Jews during a November 1941 meeting in Berlin.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu told the group. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.’”

Details of the meeting between al-Husseini and Hitler are sketchy. The Nazis released a grainy propaganda video showing the mufti making a Nazi salute before a warm handshake. The official record from the meeting says Hitler pledged “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.”

While the Nazis’ official endorsement of the Final Solution came months after the meeting, historians note that the Nazis’ mass killing of Jews was already well underway.

Several concentration camps were up and running, and Hitler had previously repeatedly declared his lethal intentions for the Jews. If anything, they said it was the Nazis who were trying to use al-Husseini for their own propaganda interests and that Hitler didn’t need any outside inspiration. When Hitler did consider deporting Jews, it was in the context of sending them to countries like Ukraine and Lithuania where they would face persecution or death. [Continue reading…]

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Russian-led offensive in Syria triggers new wave of refugees fleeing to Turkey

VOA reports: Turkish officials say 50,000 refugees have left the Syrian city of Aleppo and are heading to the border, but it remains unclear whether they will be allowed to enter Turkey after a hazardous journey dodging airstrikes and negotiating checkpoints manned by disparate rebel militias, including al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria.

For months now border gates have been officially closed to new refugees, and those fleeing are forced to pay smugglers to enter illegally – sometimes using tunnels to escape the killing fields.

The rich can bribe border-gate guards — the going rate is $700 per person — the poor may get across after paying smugglers $50 to $100 per person to sneak past Turkish border guards patrolling farm-fields and olive-tree orchards adjacent to the border.

Russian airstrikes and a Syrian army ground offensive mainly in the countryside to the south and east of the city of Aleppo have triggered the surge in Syrians heading for the border. Syria Turkmen Council President Abdurrahman Mustafa said he also estimates about 50,000 people have left the city and are picking their way down pot-holed roads, through checkpoints and past ruined villages to Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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What it means to become a refugee

For most people, most of the time, the news is a kind of background noise. It’s something to which we are willing to give some attention and when our attention tires, our gaze moves elsewhere. The media, forever hungry for attention, tosses up something new to revive its weary audience. But relentless stimulation produces numbness.

All too rarely is the news told from the inside. We mostly hear the voices of passive observers who serve as uninformative guides to a mass of rubberneckers. But every so often, there is an exception — such as this:

Kim Ghattas writes: Last month, 44 children died at sea trying to cross to safety from the Middle East to Europe. None of them made world headlines. The world has moved on since the body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, briefly focusing the globe’s attention on the crisis. According to Google Trends, searches for the word “refugee” have already declined by more than half.

Every single one of these stories throws me back to a dark time in my own life, a time of helplessness and fear.

I was never a refugee, but I could have been. For the first 12 years of my life, I lived in a no-man’s land in Beirut, on the front lines of a war that ravaged my country. I was born two years into the 15-year conflict, and bombs and shelters seemed normal to me while growing up, just part of everyday life, like having breakfast and going to school. We had no power or running water for days on end; stray bullets periodically were fired into our apartment. Men with guns camped out on the ground floor of our building for years.

I often get asked why my family never left — or more pointedly, why my parents kept us there, dodging sniper fire on the way to school and back. The answer is this: We stayed because leaving is hard. Becoming refugees meant leaving our lives, our identity, and our dignity behind.

No one’s first instinct is to leave. Their first choice is usually to hold on to the comforting familiarity of home; when that becomes impossible, you leave for another safer area within the country. Then you leave for a neighboring country, so you can return as soon as possible or even keep an eye on your property while you’re away. Only when the walls are closing in and the horizon is total darkness do you give up and leave everything you have ever known behind, lock the door to your home, and walk away.

This is the choice Syrians are making today. In a country of 23 million people, more than 4 million are now refugees, 7.5 million are internally displaced, and 12 million are in need of assistance. The crisis has reached a point where, unless we end the war, the country will slowly empty itself — a hemorrhaging of its brightest and best, its young and old, escaping unspeakable horrors in the largest refugee migration since World War II, until all that will be left are the fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt polling stations empty for no-contest vote

AFP reports: Like scores of polling stations across the Egyptian capital, a school in the Dokki neighbourhood stood empty Monday, with local residents showing scant interest in the country’s no-contest parliamentary election.

In the absence of any real opposition, the new parliament is expected to firmly back President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s iron-fisted regime that has crushed all forms of dissent.

Sisi, who enjoys cult-like status in Egypt after having ousted his Islamist predecessor Mohamed Morsi in 2013, will have a parliament to rubber-stamp his decisions, experts say. [Continue reading…]

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Tweets on Justin Trudeau — elected Canadian prime minister

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Mismanaging the conflict in Jerusalem

Nathan Thrall writes: The streets of Jewish West Jerusalem are eerie and still. Silence hangs over the city, punctured occasionally by a siren’s wail. Buses are half empty, as is the light rail that runs alongside the walls of the Old City.

Heavily armed security forces, joined by army reinforcements, patrol checkpoints, bus stops and deserted sidewalks. Young men in plain clothes carry assault rifles. The evening news broadcasts images of stabbings and shootings. Among the few shops doing good business are those selling weapons and pepper spray.

In the city’s occupied East, residents are frightened, too. Massive cement cubes block exits from their neighborhoods. Lengthy lines at new checkpoints keep many from their jobs. Men under 40 who were barred from Al Aqsa Mosque on Friday prayed instead behind police barricades in the surrounding decrepit streets.

Last week, an Israeli minister called for the destruction of all Palestinian homes built in East Jerusalem without permits, a threat that targets nearly 40 percent of the city’s Palestinians because of restrictive zoning. Jerusalem’s gun-wielding mayor has called on Israeli civilians to carry arms. Jewish mobs chanting “Death to Arabs” have paraded through the streets.

Palestinian parents keep children indoors, afraid they will be arrested or shot. Nightly police raids visit their neighborhoods. Returning from work in West Jerusalem’s kitchens, hotels and construction sites, some Palestinians seek to protect themselves by wearing yarmulkes. On their cellphones, teenagers watch videos of stabbing attacks and of Palestinians shot at close range.

Several days ago, an East Jerusalem business owner told me that he and his employees were frightened to travel to the West. Like many others I’ve spoken with, he lamented the growing hatred and the killings, but rejected the idea that they had been without purpose. They had made clear to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said, that a red line stands before Al Aqsa; no matter how weak the Palestinian leadership might be, he argued, the people would not allow Israel to restrict Muslims’ access to the occupied holy site, particularly while growing numbers of Israeli activists, some calling for the mosque’s destruction, are permitted to visit under armed protection.

Perhaps most significant, he concluded, the violence signaled that whatever the intentions of their leadership, Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank will not indefinitely extend to Israel a period of calm while no corresponding reduction of the occupation takes place. [Continue reading…]

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Why would a community leader with faith in Gandhi turn to violence?

Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters had their commitment to non-violence severely tested.

In the West nowadays, however, most proponents of peace face less extreme challenges. It’s much easier to denounce war and stand up for peace if you are neither directly exposed to war nor subject to violent attacks.

For this reason, when it comes to the situation in the Middle East, many observers outside the region are inclined to focus on the innocent victims of war and occupation because they find it too difficult to identify with the armed adversaries. There is an unwillingness to entertain the notion that in certain sets of conditions, almost anyone might turn to violence. It’s much more comfortable to assume that some people have violent inclinations while others do not.

For anyone with this perspective, the story of Bahaa Alian, a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, might be instructive.

Creede Newton and Dylan Collins write: On Tuesday, Oct. 13, two simultaneous attacks rocked Jerusalem in what was the bloodiest day of the current round of violence.

Around nine in the morning, Bilal Ranem, 23, and Bahaa Alian, 22, two Palestinian men from the Jabal al-Mukaber neighborhood in East Jerusalem, boarded a bus in nearby East Talpiot, an Israeli settlement. One was armed with a knife and the other with a pistol. As the bus began moving, the men started shooting and stabbing. Ten were injured, and two killed, including one of the attackers.

Rubi Muhatbi, an 18-year-old Israeli, told Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most widely-read daily, that in that “moment, you feel fear and stress and you don’t know what to do. I preferred running away rather than confronting him… all I was thinking about was I was either going to survive this or I die.”

The attack was shocking by any standard, but it was made doubly so for us after the identities of the attackers were released. We quickly realized that we had met Bahaa Alian, the attacker who was killed, less than a year ago.

From what you’ve read in media reports, these two men were either terrorists who were quickly “neutralized” by Israeli security forces, or troubled Palestinian youth from an impoverished neighborhood, surrounded by Jewish-only settlements.

Perhaps both are true, but neither agrees with the impression Alian made when we met him. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli mob lynches Eritrean after bus station attack

Al Jazeera reports: An Eritrean man has died after he was shot and beaten by a mob after he was mistaken for an attacker during a raid in southern Israel, Israeli police say.

The attack on Sunday night at a bus station in the city of Beersheba saw a Palestinian man armed with a rifle and a knife kill an Israeli soldier and wound about 10 other people.

The Palestinian attacker was killed, while a security guard shot the Eritrean bystander, identified by Israeli media as 29-year-old Haftom Zarhum, thinking he was an accomplice of the assailant. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS launches Palestinian ‘lone wolf’ adoption program

The Associated Press reports: The Islamic State group has launched an unprecedented media campaign calling on Palestinians to step up attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, taking advantage of a wave of violence between the two sides to deliver rare incitement against Israel.

In a video posted Monday, the group urged Palestinians to carry out attacks using every means at their disposal, including knives, vehicles, poison and explosives.

In the past two days, IS posted six videos in which militants deliver speeches to the backdrop of scenes from recent stabbings and other attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. The extremist group also published several articles written by prominent IS writers.

The videos coincide with a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence and ratcheted-up tensions among Israelis after a series of seemingly random lone-wolf attacks by Palestinians.

In the video titled “Return Terror to the Jews,” a masked fighter praised Arabs who are attacking Israelis, describing them as “lone wolves who refused to be subdued and spread fear among the sons of Zion.”

The Islamic State group, which has established a self-declared Islamic caliphate in the third of Iraq and Syria that it controls, operates a sophisticated media machine and often releases high-tech propaganda videos. Although IS operatives often describe Jews and Christians as infidels, the group has rarely issued videos that touch on Israel.

The IS group has no organized presence in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. But dozens of Palestinians in Gaza are believed to be inspired by the group’s extremist ideology, seeing Gaza’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers as too soft. [Continue reading…]

Unless there are reports of Palestinians involved in the current wave of attacks who say that they actually were inspired by ISIS, what appears to be behind ISIS’s media campaign is an utterly cynical attempt to elbow its way into the issue.

ISIS calls for attacks and when they happen, it takes credit as an inspirational force.

At the same time, Israeli politicians prattle on about terrorists, and a public that prefers to ignore the political roots of the violence will become amenable to the idea that ISIS is gaining a stronger foothold among Palestinians. The propaganda thence serves both ISIS and the Zionists.

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Could the Saudis be dragging the U.S. into a war crimes scandal?

PRI reports: Thirteen liberal legislators have put President Barack Obama on the spot for his support of Saudi Arabia’s unchecked war in Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition has been guided by US intelligence, flying American fighter jets and dropping US-made bombs.

A Human Rights Watch researcher has put the death toll from the incursion at 2,355 civilians since March.

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingel and her colleagues reminded the president in a letter last week that Saudi Arabia, America’s strongest Arab ally and best weapons customer is behaving badly in Yemen, and could be dragging the US into a war crimes scandal. “With this level of active involvement in the campaign,” the letter reads, “we are concerned that some overseas may hold the United States responsible for any civilian casualties resulting from the bombing.”

Many Yemenis already hold America — and the UK — responsible for Saudi actions. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey is buying its way into the EU with a deal that won’t solve the refugee crisis

By Durukan Kuzu, Coventry University

The EU has struck a deal with Turkey designed to stem the flow of Syrian refugees into Europe. It offers Turkey a multi-billion euro aid package to handle refugees and take back refugees who entered the EU from Turkish territory, eventually giving them a legal right to settle and work.

In return, the halted talks on advancing Turkey’s EU membership bid will be jump-started, and the EU will accelerate visa-free access for Turks who want to visit the Schengen area.

The deal certainly looks like a win-win scenario for president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ever-pragmatic counterparts in Europe. Many of them fervently blocked Turkey’s accession to the EU only a few years ago after deciding Turkey’s human rights record was not befitting an EU member state. Now, with the prospect of relief from the refugee crisis, those concerns seem to have been shelved.

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Germany shows signs of strain from mass of refugees

Der Spiegel reports: The road to the reception camp in Hesepe has become something of a refugees’ avenue. Small groups of young men wander along the sidewalk. A family from Syria schleps a clutch of shopping bags towards the gate. A Sudanese man snakes along the road on his bicycle. Most people don’t speak a word of German, just a little fragmentary English, but when they see locals, they offer a friendly wave and call out, “Hello!”

The main road “is like a pedestrian shopping zone,” says one resident, “except without the stores.” Red-brick houses with pretty gardens line both sides of the street, and Kathrin and Ralf Meyer are standing outside theirs. “It’s gotten a bit too much for us,” says the 31-year-old mother of three. “Too much noise, too many refugees, too much garbage.”
Now the Meyers are planning to move out in November. They’re sick of seeing asylum-seekers sit on their garden wall or rummage through their garbage cans for anything they can use. Though “you do feel sorry for them,” says Ralf, who’s handed out some clothes that his children have grown out of. “But there are just too many of them here now.”

Hesepe, a village of 2,500 that comprises one district of the small town of Bramsche in the state of Lower Saxony, is now hosting some 4,000 asylum-seekers, making it a symbol of Germany’s refugee crisis. Locals are still showing a great willingness to help, but the sheer number of refugees is testing them. The German states have reported some 409,000 new arrivals between Sept. 5 and Oct. 15 — more than ever before in a comparable time period — though it remains unclear how many of those include people who have been registered twice.

Six weeks after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s historic decision to open Germany’s borders, there is a shortage of basic supplies in many places in this prosperous nation. Cots, portable housing containers and chemical toilets are largely sold out. There is a shortage of German teachers, social workers and administrative judges. Authorities in many towns are worried about the approaching winter, because thousands of asylum-seekers are still sleeping in tents. [Continue reading…]

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Harper’s campaign is embracing Islamophobia to make Canada’s election a referendum on the niqab

Rafia Zakaria writes: On Oct. 9, Zunaira Ishaq, an immigrant from Pakistan, finally took her citizenship oath and became a Canadian. Her refusal to take the oath without niqab, or a face veil, has been a subject of legal battle between Canada’s courts and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government.

This controversy has become a backdrop for Canada’s parliamentary elections today. Having lost legal challenges that would have prevented Ishaq from taking the oath while veiled, Harper’s Conservative Party is now vowing to pursue a niqab ban during citizenship ceremonies and to consider a wider ban for all public employees if re-elected. His opponents, the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau and the New Democratic Party’s Thomas Mulcair, have dismissed the niqab issue as a distraction and oppose such bans.

Harper’s fear-mongering reflects Canada’s growing distance from the “respect for multiculturalism” and “freedom of religion” enshrined in its own Charter of Canadian Rights and Freedoms. A Conservative victory in today’s polls would express an endorsement of Islamophobia and a xenophobic fear of the immigrant “other.” It will also show that the country’s commitment to women’s right to choose does not extend to Muslims who wear the face veil. [Continue reading…]

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The world has 21 million slaves – and millions of them live in the West

Wagner Moura writes: As a child growing up in one of Brazil’s poorest regions, I was used to seeing well-off families take in girls from poorer ones to come live in their homes and be brought up as one of their own. This was seen as an act of kindness. It was only much later that I came to see it for what it really was: these young girls, who would do all the domestic chores all day long in return only for food and a roof over their heads, were in fact modern slaves.

There are 21 million modern slaves in the world today, most of them women and girls hiding in plain sight in poor and rich countries alike – 7% of today’s slaves live in North America or the European Union. From trafficking and sexual exploitation to work in private homes, agriculture, fishing, construction and manufacturing, modern slavery is not only a crime, it is big business. It generates some $150bn in illegal profits every year, according to an estimate by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Poverty is at the root of it, as is lack of awareness by both victims and the general public. Forced labor affects the most vulnerable and least protected people, perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty and dependency. Women, low-skilled migrant workers, children, indigenous peoples and other groups suffering discrimination on different grounds are disproportionately affected. And many victims don’t even consider themselves to be slaves – working to pay off a debt passed down through generations, or being a servant in a private home from dusk to dawn is the only life some have ever known. At the same time, you may be eating food picked by modern slaves, or wearing clothes made with slave labor without realizing it. [Continue reading…]

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Why solving climate change will be like mobilizing for war

Venkatesh Rao writes: If scientists are right, and there is no reason to think they aren’t, averting climate change will require such large-scale, rapid action, that no single energy technology, new or emerging, could be the solution. Neither could any single non-energy technology, such as video-conferencing as a substitute for travel, solve the problem on its own.

There is always a possibility that a single cheap and effective solution will emerge, rendering expensive interventions moot, but few climate experts are willing to trust the future to that unlikely prospect.

The challenge therefore, is one of rapid, concerted deployment of a portfolio of emerging and mature energy and non-energy technologies. This means accepting a certain level of attendant risks. The Volkwagen emissions scandal illustrates these risks well: Aggressive forcing, through EU policy instruments, of the adoption of diesel engines (which are better suited to reducing emissions) created incentives that led to sophisticated gaming.

The Volkswagen scandal won’t be the last or the worst. Unlike many of the other objections put forth by climate skeptics, the objection that managing moral hazards at a planetary scale might prove impossible is a solid one.

Assuming we do manage to significantly accelerate deployment without cancerous levels of corporatist corruption, if emissions targets still remain out of reach, some growth must be temporarily sacrificed. At the same time, investment across the portfolio of energy technologies will need to continue.

In other words, we are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.

What [Bill] Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have.

Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude — wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear — only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating. Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector, only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, and computing technology have had similar levels of bureaucratic direction.

None of these are true comparables, however, for one critical reason. In each historical case, the revolution was highly focused on a single core technology rather than a broad portfolio of technologies, and a managed transition of infrastructure at civilization scale. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian refugees face growing resentment in Turkey

The Wall Street Journal reports: The European Union is looking to Turkey for more help in containing the flow of refugees that have fed the greatest migration in Europe since World War II. It is considering a pledge of up to $3.4 billion in aid requested by Turkey — after the bloc offered $1.1 billion last month — while Turkey in return demands speeding up its membership negotiations with the union and visa liberalization for its citizens.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to Istanbul on Sunday to secure Turkish authorities’ assistance in containing the refugee influx to Europe via Turkey.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been dismissive of Europe’s newfound alarm over a refugee crisis his government has been long trying to manage — and frustrated by fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members who have rebuffed his calls to create a safe haven in northern Syria that could reduce the flow of refugees uprooted by war. That has left Turkey to shoulder much of the responsibility, Turkish officials say.

“The two million Syrians are not a burden only financially, but also in other terms,” Omer Celik, spokesman of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, told reporters Friday. “The best solution would be to set up the safety zone inside Syria, settle the Syrians there, and provide them assistance through Turkey.”

The government has handed out just 6,000 work permits to Syrians, a tiny percentage of the immigrant workforce. And less than 15% of Syrian children in Turkey are able to go to school, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency. [Continue reading…]

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