Category Archives: Issues

Palestinian footballer ends hunger strike

Ma’an News Agency reports: Mahmoud al-Sarsak, on hunger strike in an Israeli jail for 92 days, agreed to start eating on Monday in a deal that will see him released on July 10, his lawyer said.

Mohammad Jaberein said al-Sarsak signed the agreement during his visit to the prisoner on Monday. Israeli prison authorities asked al-Sarsak to eat something in their presence to ratify the deal, after which he took a piece of chocolate from the lawyer, Jaberein said.

An Israeli prisons spokeswoman could not be reached for comment.

Under the deal al-Sarsak will visit a civilian hospital for treatment on Tuesday, but the same day will return to Ramle prison clinic until his release on July 10, the lawyer added.

Physicians for Human Rights – Israel say the clinic is not equipped to treat long-term hunger strikers or manage the health risks when they return to eating, and has called for transfer of hunger strikers to civilian facilities.

The 25-year-old soccer player from the Gaza Strip has been imprisoned by Israel without charge or trial since July 2009.

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American tourists visit West Bank and learn how to kill Palestinians

Ynet reports on a “tourist attraction” in the West Bank settlement block of Gush Etzion where visitors from the U.S. and around the world are taught by former IDF soldiers how to kill “terrorists.”

'First she cried, then she fired'

Michel Brown, 40, a Miami banker, chose to take his wife and three children to the range with the purpose of “teaching them values.”

Upon entering the range, his five-year-old daughter, Tamara, bursts into tears. A half hour later, she is holding a gun and shooting clay bullets like a pro.

“This is part of their education,” Michel says as he proudly watches his daughter. “They should know where they come from and also feel some action.”

Sharon Gat, the range’s manager, says all the instructors at the site have served in elite IDF units.

“This is a special program created due to popular demand,” he says. “Travelers from all over the world come here to meet former combat troops and hear stories about elite units. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

“We heard on the news about shootings in the West Bank,” the mother, Olga, says. “We came to see it in person.”

Her son, Jacob, 24, puts down his rifle and exclaims: “This is an awesome experience. I learned how to stop a terrorist and how to rescue hostages. Now, when I find myself in distress, I will know how to deal.”

Davidi Pearl, who heads the Gush Etzion Regional Council, notes that this kind of experience turns the district into a world-famous “tourist gem.”

At the end of the thrill-filled day, the tourists get a diploma indicating they “completed a basic shooting course in Israel.”

“Boom, boom,” the 13-year-old Riley mutters on the way out of the range.

“Boom, boom!” Jacob responds, knowingly.

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America’s dangerous love affair with counterinsurgency

Adam Curtis writes: At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of “black ops” to track down and arrest the terrorists.

In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance – and he turned up in Kabul dressed like this.

And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and newspaper reporting of the war on terror.

He told the journalists and the TV presenters all kinds of lies and fantasies. He even became the central, heroic figure in a book called The Hunt for Bin Laden.

Then Idema charged journalists fortunes for what he said was an “al qaeda” video of a “a training camp” – where strangely many of the terrorists spoke in english, and allegedly you could hear Idema’s voice on the soundtrack. Few of the journalists did anything to really check if any of what he was saying was true.

CBS did a special programme about the tapes fronted by Dan Rather, called “Heart of Darkness”. They did check on the tapes – the producers went to some of the new breed of “terror experts” that were spawning after 2001. CBS’s press office said that they “showed the tapes to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda”.

The BBC did a report that showed the tapes. And they travelled to the village where they had been recorded – and found an old man who said, yes there had been Arabs there.

But much later a number of journalists did investigate Jack Idema properly – and the consensus now is that the tapes are probably fakes. [Continue reading…]

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Robert Mangabeira Unger: Obama must be defeated

Roberto Unger, who has been a tenured professor at Harvard Law School since 1976 and taught Barack Obama — a student in his “Reinventing Democracy” class — says the president “has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.”

  • “His policy is financial confidence and food stamps.”
  • “He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices.”
  • “He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money.”
  • “He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice.”
  • “He has reduced justice to charity.”
  • “He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight.”
  • “He has evoked a politics of handholding, but no one changes the world without a struggle.”

(Huffington Post)

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We can’t crush Iran

Jordan Michael Smith reports: This month’s Vanity Fair has a feature on Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. “An Israeli strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities gone awry may pose the single greatest peril to his political future, which may be the biggest guarantee — more than American opposition to any move or the effectiveness of sanctions — that it won’t happen,” the article reads. Indeed, gradually and without fanfare, the possibility of a military strike against Iran, which only a few months ago seemed imminent, has lately receded from view. It seems that perhaps the U.S. and Israel came to their senses and realized that an attack on Iran would be disastrous.

The turning tide against a military strike is underscored by three new reports on the problems of an attack. Taken together, they suggest that significant parts of the U.S. establishment are pushing back against the notion that, in senior Romney adviser John Bolton’s words, “There is no doubt that Washington could shatter Iran’s nuclear program,” and that “Iran’s real options, post-attack,” would be “limited.”

First on the table is a monograph from the staunchly pro-Israel think tank the Washington Institute on Near East Policy. The report is called “Beyond Worst-Case Analysis,” suggesting that it intends to avoid what it calls “apocalyptic” conclusions about an attack on Iran. And yet, as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar notes, the paper’s ideas suggest that the “consequences would be very bad indeed.” The report’s authors, Michael Eisenstadt and Michael Knights, write that Iran would “respond in a way that deters additional Israeli strikes and U.S. intervention.” They suggest Iran would strike against any attacking country, which even if it is meant to be “limited” could easily escalate into a full-blown regional conflict. Iran would want to make retaliation as “painful as possible” for Israel, employing direct and indirect measures.

It would use Hezbollah and other proxies to sabotage petrochemical infrastructure in the Gulf, and attack “commercial ships or elements of the U.S. Fifth fleet in the area.” In other words, it would attack the United States military. Iran also “would likely respond almost immediately with missile strikes on Israel, to punish it and deter follow-on strikes.” The Persian nation would attack Israeli military and civilian population centers with its hundreds of long-range conventional missiles. Hezbollah could launch thousands of rockets from Lebanon, and attacks could be forthcoming from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even beleaguered Syria. Israeli or Jewish targets around the world would not be immune. The list goes on: terrorism against U.S. targets on several continents, attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, kidnapping American citizens, strikes against neighboring countries, harassment of U.S. vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and a revitalization of the popularity of the Iranian government. And all of this, according to the report, is far from a worst-case scenario. [Continue reading…]

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A global perfect storm

Nouriel Roubini writes: Dark, lowering financial and economic clouds are, it seems, rolling in from every direction: the eurozone, the United States, China, and elsewhere. Indeed, the global economy in 2013 could be a very difficult environment in which to find shelter.

For starters, the eurozone crisis is worsening, as the euro remains too strong, front-loaded fiscal austerity deepens recession in many member countries, and a credit crunch in the periphery and high oil prices undermine prospects of recovery. The eurozone banking system is becoming balkanized, as cross-border and interbank credit lines are cut off, and capital flight could turn into a full run on periphery banks if, as is likely, Greece stages a disorderly euro exit in the next few months.

Moreover, fiscal and sovereign-debt strains are becoming worse as interest-rate spreads for Spain and Italy have returned to their unsustainable peak levels. Indeed, the eurozone may require not just an international bailout of banks (as recently in Spain), but also a full sovereign bailout at a time when eurozone and international firewalls are insufficient to the task of backstopping both Spain and Italy. As a result, disorderly breakup of the eurozone remains possible.

Farther to the west, US economic performance is weakening, with first-quarter growth a miserly 1.9% – well below potential. And job creation faltered in April and May, so the US may reach stall speed by year end. Worse, the risk of a double-dip recession next year is rising: even if what looks like a looming US fiscal cliff turns out to be only a smaller source of drag, the likely increase in some taxes and reduction of some transfer payments will reduce growth in disposable income and consumption.

Moreover, political gridlock over fiscal adjustment is likely to persist, regardless of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney wins November’s presidential election. Thus, new fights on the debt ceiling, risks of a government shutdown, and rating downgrades could further depress consumer and business confidence, reducing spending and accelerating a flight to safety that would exacerbate the fall in stock markets.

In the east, China, its growth model unsustainable, could be underwater by 2013, as its investment bust continues and reforms intended to boost consumption are too little too late. A new Chinese leadership must accelerate structural reforms to reduce national savings and increase consumption’s share of GDP; but divisions within the leadership about the pace of reform, together with the likelihood of a bumpy political transition, suggest that reform will occur at a pace that simply is not fast enough.

The economic slowdown in the US, the eurozone, and China already implies a massive drag on growth in other emerging markets, owing to their trade and financial links with the US and the European Union (that is, no “decoupling” has occurred). At the same time, the lack of structural reforms in emerging markets, together with their move towards greater state capitalism, is hampering growth and will reduce their resiliency.

Finally, long-simmering tensions in the Middle East between Israel and the US on one side and Iran on the other on the issue of nuclear proliferation could reach a boil by 2013. The current negotiations are likely to fail, and even tightened sanctions may not stop Iran from trying to build nuclear weapons. With the US and Israel unwilling to accept containment of a nuclear Iran by deterrence, a military confrontation in 2013 would lead to a massive oil price spike and global recession. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s drift toward war with Iran

Robert Wright writes: The most undercovered story in Washington is how President Obama, under the influence of election-year politics, is letting America drift toward war with Iran. This story is the unseen but ominous backdrop to next week’s Moscow round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

The basic story line, pretty well known inside the beltway, is simple: There are things Obama could do to greatly increase the chances of a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, but he seems to have decided that doing them would bring political blowback that would reduce his chances of re-election.

The good news is that Obama’s calculation may be wrong. The blowback he fears–largely from Bibi Netanyahu, AIPAC, and other “pro-Israel” voices–is probably less forbidding than he assumes. And the political upside of successful statesmanship may be greater than he realizes.

But suppose Obama’s right about the politics. It’s still a little scandalous that he’s imperiling peace and America’s security in order to increase his chances of re-election by 1.5 percent, or whatever the imagined number is. And it’s even more scandalous how unscandalous this is, how people throughout the Washington establishment–in government, in NGOs, in journalism–are so inured to the corruption of policy by politics that almost nobody bothers to complain about it even when it could lead to war. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. declassifies attacks in Yemen and Somalia

The Associated Press reports: The White House is partially lifting the lid of secrecy on its counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaida in Yemen and Somalia by formally acknowledging for the first time that it is conducting lethal attacks in those countries.

The White House’s semiannual report to Congress on the state of U.S. combat operations abroad, delivered Friday, mentions what has been widely reported for years but never formally acknowledged by the administration: The U.S. military has been taking “direct action” against members of al-Qaida and affiliates in Yemen and Somalia.

The report does not elaborate, but “direct action” is a military term of art that refers to a range of lethal attacks, which in the case of Yemen and Somalia include attacks by armed drones. The report does not mention drones, which are remote-controlled, pilotless aircraft equipped with surveillance cameras and sometimes armed with missiles.

The report applies only to U.S. military operations, including those by special operations forces — not those conducted by the CIA.

“In all cases we are focused on those al-Qaida members and affiliates who pose a direct threat to the United States and to our national interests,” Pentagon press secretary George Little said after the report’s release. “This report contains information about these operations owing to their growing significance in our overall counterterrorism effort.”

The report does not provide details of any military operations in either Yemen or Somalia. It merely acknowledges they have happened. Killings of terror suspects overseas are acknowledged by the administration, but it does not mention the involvement of drones. The CIA and military have separate drone fleets.

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How climate change got removed from the agenda of the Rio+20 Summit

In These Times reports: The Durban Climate Conference last winter ended in almost unqualified failure. The original framework of U.N. climate negotiations was all but abandoned in favor of a new global pact that may or may not be negotiated by 2015 and may or may not be legally binding. Climate change deniers literally crashed the party by parachuting onto a beach in Durban carrying a “Climategate 2.0” banner—and public perception in the U.S. on the reliability of climate science continued to shift in their direction, cementing the stalemate on a domestic climate deal.

Now, it would seem, many international negotiators have altogether given up on the idea of establishing a global regulatory framework for reducing carbon emissions. Next week, more than 130 national leaders will gather at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to discuss proposals ranging from replacing GDP as the indicator of economic prosperity to conducting annual “state-of-the-planet” assessments. Notably absent, particularly given a new U.N. study finding that carbon emissions have increased by 40% in the past two decades, will be any concrete negotiations on climate change.

The summit, to be held in Rio from June 20 – 22, is the follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit that produced multilateral agreements on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. But this time, no binding agreements are expected to result from the three-day meeting. At best, the talks may result in a commitment to drafting new goals for sustainable development by 2015.

The summit’s dodge of continued climate talks is an intentional move to avoid politics in favor of platitudes. After Durban, U.N. officials sought to redirect the agenda for Rio away from the contentious territory of emissions cuts and climate finance and toward issues of trade and technology. In an interview with Reuters in January, when pre-Rio talks were underway, Brazilian negotiator Ambassador Andre Correa do Lago acknowledged that the focus on sustainable development was more palatable to politicians and business leaders with a stake in the negotiations. [Continue reading…]

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Nearly three months without food, as Israel looks away

Richard Sudan writes: Akram Rikhawi, one of many Palestinian political prisoners said to be held by the Israeli government, without charge and without seeing a trial, today will enter his 64th day on hunger strike. 64 days without food. As he does, 25 year old former Palestinian national team footballer Mahmoud Sarsak enters his 88th day on hunger strike, the longest any detainee has gone through such an ordeal in an Israeli jail. That’s nearly 3 months without food.

Once a star athlete and now according to physicians, having lost 33 percent of his body weight, Sarsak has been detained since 2009, but without having seen any judicial proceedings. It’s also nearly 3 years since he saw any family members. Sarsak is from the village of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza strip. Having seen no trial, instead, for Sarsak, he has been subjected to a continued process of administrative detention, which the state has the discretion to continue indefinitely, but which has no legal precedent according to international law. It’s what led him to begin a hunger strike in the first place. Now both mens’ health is in dire condition. Their defiance and steadfastness in the face of such brutal and psychological oppression may ignite another mass hunger strike similar to the one which came to an end last month. Such is the seriousness of the situation facing the men, that when Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, upon visiting the men last week, issued a statement calling for immediate international intervention in order to save the men.

After Sarsak’s condition deteriorated rapidly at the weekend, it was reported yesterday that he had agreed to take milk upon advice from his lawyer Mohammad Jabarein, to keep him alive until at least today when a judicial review is due to take place. According to Jabarein “The 25-year-old prisoner has decided that if the Supreme Court does not agree to release him he will refuse all supplements until his death”.

While most of the Football World is focusing on the European competition right now, there have been some statements of support for Mahmoud Sarsak at least. This week footballing icon Eric Cantona and head of Fifa Sepp Blatter sent a letter Uefa’s Michel Platini reportedly signed by other individuals including Noam Chomsky and Michael Mansfield QC, making clear their support for Sarsak calling for his release.

But it is hard to imagine the same outpouring of sympathy for Sarsak, or any of the hunger strikers, equal to the outpouring of concern that was shown when footballer Patrice Muamba’s life hung in the balance recently following his collapse on the pitch. If these alleged human rights abuses were taking place anywhere else there would simply be a greater level of attention paid to them. It is not hard to see what evokes such desperation. [Continue reading…]

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Fear and loathing of Islam in the U.S.

Moustafa Bayoumi writes: Something’s gone terribly wrong.
 
In August 2007 the New York Police Department released a report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” claiming that the looming danger to the United States was from “unremarkable” Muslim men under 35 who visit “extremist incubators.” The language sounds ominous, conjuring up Clockwork Orange–style laboratories of human reprogramming, twisting average Muslims into instruments of evil. And yet what are these “incubators”? The report states that they are mosques, “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores”—in other words, precisely the places where ordinary life happens.

But the report wasn’t based on any independent social science research, and actual studies clearly refuted the very claims made by the NYPD. The Rand Corporation found that the number of homegrown radicals here is “tiny.” “There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad—about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence,” Rand’s 2010 report found. “A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced,” it concluded. This year, an analysis by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security also described the number of American Muslims involved in domestic terrorism since 2001 as “tiny.” “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sense of proportion,” it said. And a 2011 Gallup survey found that American Muslims were the least likely of any major US religious group to consider attacks on civilians justified.

Every group has its loonies. And yet the idea that American Muslim communities are foul nests of hatred, where dark-skinned men plot Arabic violence while combing one another’s beards, persists. In fact, it’s worse than that. In the past few years, another narrative about American Muslims has come along, which sows a different kind of paranoia. While the old story revolves around security, portraying American Muslims as potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, the new narrative operates more along the axis of culture. Simple acts of religious or cultural expression and the straightforward activities of Muslim daily life have become suspicious. Building a mosque in Lower Manhattan or in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, or in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, becomes an act of “stealth jihad.” Muslims filing for divorce invokes the bizarre charge of “creeping Sharia.” A dual-language Arabic-English high school in New York is demonized as a “madrassa.” The State Board of Education in Texas determines that reading about Islam is not education but indoctrination. Changing your Muslim-sounding name to one with a more Anglophone tenor triggers an NYPD investigation, according to the Associated Press. Even the fact that some Butterball turkeys are “halal” was enough to fire up the bigotry last Thanksgiving, the most American of holidays.

What happens when ordinary life becomes grounds for suspicion without a hint of wrongdoing; when law enforcement premises its work on spying on the quotidian and policing the unremarkable; and when the everyday affairs of American Muslim life can so easily be transformed into nefarious intent? Something has gone terribly wrong for American Muslims when, more than a decade after the terrorist attacks of September 11, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States continues to grow. [Continue reading…]

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The sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate

Max Blumenthal writes: In late April, Geert Wilders arrived in New York City to tell his quixotic tale to a rapt American audience. The far-right Dutch Party of Freedom leader—perhaps the world’s most prominent anti-Muslim populist—was poised to release Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me, a memoir just out from Regnery, the right-wing US publishing house, in which he recounts his courageous efforts to stop the “Islamicization” of Europe. On his US tour, Wilders proudly portrayed himself as a man on the run—a round-the-clock security detail guarding him against radical Muslims whose violent passions he had supposedly inflamed by his truth-telling—and as a man on the rise: the exodus of his party from the governing coalition had forced new elections in the Netherlands, throwing the country’s ossified establishment into chaos.

Upon Wilders’s arrival in New York, a little-known think tank called the Gatestone Institute rolled out the red carpet for him. On April 30, before a select crowd that according to Gatestone’s website had paid $10,000 a head, he held forth on the persecution he had endured during his recent trial for incitement to hatred and discrimination. “This charade that happened in the Netherlands for the last few years could not have happened in your great country,” Wilders said in his speech. Then he cut to the heart of his appeal: “Islam is primarily a dangerous ideology rather than a religion. This is the truth. This violent ideology wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the whole world, including us—the Kafirs, the non-Muslims…. Islam is the largest threat to freedom which the world is currently facing.”

Some Dutch liberals have branded him a demagogue who summons the ghosts of Europe’s dark past, but Wilders counters the accusation by assiduously cultivating Jewish support. He quotes Zionist forefather Theodor Herzl and boasts of his more than forty trips to Israel, where he once toiled on a rural kibbutz. Wilders, in fact, has made a special friend of right-wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In Wilders’s world, the Jewish state represents Fort Apache on the frontiers of the war against the barbarians threatening Western civilization. “Mothers in the West can sleep safely because Israeli mothers at night worry about their sons in the army,” he told the Gatestone Institute. “Their fight is our fight. We should support it.”

At the April event, Wilders’s seamless fusion of anti-Muslim bombast and pro-Israel cant was gratefully received by the Gatestone Institute’s founder and director, Nina Rosenwald, whom he acknowledged at the top of his jeremiad as another of his good friends. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald spreads her millions through the William Rosenwald Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation named for her father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal in 1939. His daughter’s focus is more explicitly political. According to a report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear Inc.,” Rosenwald and her sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000 to “organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

Besides funding a Who’s Who of anti-Muslim outfits, Rosenwald has served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm of America’s Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations. As groups like AIPAC lead the charge for a US military strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran, threatening to turn apocalyptic visions of civilizational warfare into catastrophic reality, Rosenwald’s wealth has fueled a rapidly emerging alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe. (In 2003 alone the Rosenwald Family Fund donated well over half of its $1.6 million in total contributions to pro-Israel and Islamophobic organizations.) This alliance serves to sanitize and legitimize professional anti-Muslim bigots like Wilders, allowing their ideas to mingle easily with those of neoconservative foreign policy heavyweights intent on promoting the appearance of a convergence between US and Israeli interests by invoking the specter of a common “Islamofascist” enemy. With Gatestone — which publicizes the writings of figures ranging from pro-Israel super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz to “counter-jihad” propagandist Robert Spencer, and boasts Harold Rhode, a neoconservative former Pentagon official credited, as a senior fellow, with helping to try to push the Bush administration to invade Iraq — Rosenwald has attempted to shift the alliance into overdrive. [Continue reading…]

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Why elites fail

In an essay on the anti-democratic nature of organizations, Christopher Hayes reviews the work of the social theorist, Robert Michels (1876-1936).

Born to a wealthy German family, Michels came to adopt the radical socialist politics then sweeping through much of Europe. At first, he joined the Social Democratic Party, but he ultimately came to view it as too bureaucratic to achieve its stated aims. “Our workers’ organization has become an end in itself,” Michels declared, “a machine which is perfected for its own sake and not for the tasks which it could have performed.”

Michels then drifted toward the syndicalists, who eschewed parliamentary elections in favor of mass labor solidarity, general strikes and resistance to the dictatorship of the kaiser. But even among the more militant factions of the German left, Michels encountered the same bureaucratic pathologies that had soured him on the SDP. In his classic book Political Parties, he wondered why the parties of the left, so ideologically committed to democracy and participation, were as oligarchic in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right.

Michels’s grim conclusion was that it was impossible for any party, no matter its belief system, to bring about democracy in practice. Oligarchy was inevitable. For any kind of institution with a democratic base to consolidate the legitimacy it needs to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. The rank and file will not have the time, energy, wherewithal or inclination to participate in the many, often minute decisions necessary to keep the institution functioning. In fact, effectiveness, Michels argues convincingly, requires that these tasks be delegated to a small group of people with enough power to make decisions of consequence for the entire membership. Over time, this bureaucracy becomes a kind of permanent, full-time cadre of leadership. “Without wishing it,” Michels says, there grows up a great “gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.” The leaders now control the tools with which to manipulate the opinion of the masses and subvert the organization’s democratic process. “Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective, will soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.”

All this flows inexorably from the nature of organization itself, Michels concludes, and he calls it “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”: “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.” [Continue reading…]

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A former Israeli soldier who wants to become a Palestinian

Haaretz reports: A former Israeli soldier, who was residing in the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, was recently arrested by Palestinian security forces at Israel’s request.

Born in the Soviet Union, Andrey Pshenichnikov, 24, moved to Israel eleven years ago. Pshenichnikov served in the Israel Defense Forces, including an extra 18 months as a career soldier.

In the past three months, Andrey resided on Palestinian territory in the city of Bethlehem and in Deheishe refugee camp, “as part of the political struggle for Palestinian rights,” he explains.

“I wanted to prove that it’s possible to live with Palestinians, as long as you are not coming off as an enemy,” Pshenichnikov told Haaretz. He says that he wanted to “abandon the privileged Zionist life, and cross to the side of the occupied people as a sign of solidarity.”

Pshenichnikov stated he even tried to surrender his Israeli citizenship in order to apply for a Palestinian one; however, his request was not fulfilled.

Three months ago Pshenichnikov decided to move to Bethlehem, residing in Deheishe for the past three weeks. In this time, Pshenichnikov worked as a waiter and a construction worker in the Palestinian Authority.

Pshenichnikov’s new neighbors in Bethlehem accepted him, but moving to Deheishe was harder, since the “Arabs suspect any Israeli,” he says. However, Pshenichnikov says he never felt his life was threatened.

It seems Pshenichnikov went through a dramatic ideological shift over recent years, although he is not happy to admit it. “Since I arrived in Israel, I began analyzing reality, reading history. I cannot point at the exact moment, but there was a change,” he explained.

In the IDF, Pshenichnikov served as a computer programmer, but also performed guard duties in the West Bank. Today, Pshenichnikov rejects Zionism and says his views are close to those of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Pshenichnikov’s stay in the West Bank ended three weeks ago, after Palestinian security forces arrested him, at Israel’s request. The Palestinian forces searched his home, interrogated him and transferred Pshenichnikov to the Israeli authorities. [Continue reading…]

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Respect is crucial in nuclear talks with Iran

Hossein Mousavian and Mohammad Ali Shabani write: After a decade, we are nearing an endgame on Iran’s nuclear file. The initial positive atmosphere during Tehran’s talks with the P5+1 (the five members of the UN security council plus Germany) in Istanbul in April had been lost by the next round of talks in Baghdad, in May.

In Istanbul all the players seemed to understand that the most important issue was trust – not the number of centrifuges in the Islamic republic’s possession. This was displayed through the announcement of EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, that negotiations would be held on the basis of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT, which recognises Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes). Such mutual respect must be the basis of any dialogue, and future agreement.

Yet in Baghdad it became obvious there was a long road ahead when the P5+1 went in demanding the maximum concessions from Iran, in return for making minimal concessions themselves. The Iranian negotiators were offered merely spare parts for passenger planes and help with acquiring a light water reactor. In exchange the P5+1 wanted Iran to stop enriching uranium to 19.75% (medium enriched uranium), export all such material, halt operations at the Fordo plant and allow IAEA inspectors to visit sensitive military sites.

This trade-off was considered an insult by the Iranians. And the P5+1’s incentive of fuel plates (uranium enriched to 19.75% moulded into plates) or the Tehran research reactor – which could have been attractive to Iran as recently as 2010, when it hadn’t mastered the technology to manufacture such fuel on its own – didn’t improve the mood. Luckily, this did not lead to the dialogue collapsing. [Continue reading…]

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The imperial agenda of the U.S.’s ‘Africa Command’ marches on

Dan Glazebrook writes: “The less they see of us, the less they will dislike us.” So remarked Frederick Roberts, British general during the Anglo-Afghan war of 1878-80, ushering in a policy of co-opting Afghan leaders to control their people on the empire’s behalf.

“Indirect rule”, as it was called, was long considered the linchpin of British imperial success, and huge swaths of that empire were conquered, not by British soldiers, but by soldiers recruited elsewhere in the empire. It was always hoped that the dirty work of imperial control could be conducted without spilling too much white man’s blood.

It is a lesson that has been re-learned in recent years. The ever-rising western body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan have reminded politicians that colonial wars in which their own soldiers are killed do not win them popularity at home. The hope in both cases is that US and British soldiers can be safely extricated, leaving a proxy force of allies to kill opponents of the new regime on our behalf.

And so too in Africa.

To reassert its waning influence on the continent in the face of growing Chinese investment, the US established Africom – the “Africa Command” of the US military – in October 2008. Africom co-ordinates all US military activity in Africa and, according to its mission statement, “contributes to increasing security and stability in Africa – allowing African states and regional organizations to promote democracy, to expand development, to provide for their common defense, and to better serve their people”.

However, in more unguarded moments, officials have been more straightforward: Vice Admiral Robert Moeller declared in a conference in 2008 that Africom was about preserving “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, and two years later, in a piece in Foreign policy magazine, wrote: “Let there be no mistake. Africom’s job is to protect American lives and promote American interests.” Through this body, western powers are resorting to the use of military power to win back the leverage once attained through financial monopoly. [Continue reading…]

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This time, Europe really is on the brink

Niall Ferguson and Nouriel Roubini write: Is it one minute to midnight in Europe?

The failure of German public opinion to grasp the dire state of affairs in Europe today is inviting a repeat of precisely the crisis of the mid 20th century that European integration was designed to avoid.

With every increase in the probability of a disorderly Greek exit from the monetary union, the pressure on the Spanish banks increases and with it the danger of a Mediterranean-wide bank run so big that it would overwhelm the European Central Bank. Already there has been a substantial re-nationalization of the European financial system. This centrifugal process could easily continue to the point of complete disintegration.

We find it extraordinary that it should be Germany, of all countries, that is failing to learn from history. Fixated on the non-threat of inflation, today’s Germans appear to attach more importance to the year 1923 (the year of hyperinflation) than to the year 1933 (the year democracy died). They would do well to remember how a European banking crisis two years before 1933 contributed directly to the breakdown of democracy not just in their own country but right across the European continent.

Astonishingly few Europeans (including bankers) seem to remember what happened in May 1931 when Creditanstalt, the biggest Austrian bank, had to be bailed out by a government that was itself on the brink of insolvency. The ensuing European bank crisis, which saw the failure of two of Germany’s biggest banks, ushered in the second half of the Great Depression. If the first half had been dominated by the American stock market crash, the second was all about European banks going bust.

What happened next? The banking crisis was followed by President Hoover’s one-year moratorium on payment of World War I war debts and reparations. Nearly all sovereign borrowers subsequently defaulted on all or part of their external debts, beginning with Germany. Unemployment in Europe reached an agonizing peak in 1932: In July of that year, 49 per cent of German trade union members were out of work.

The political consequences are well known. But the Nazis were only the worst of a large number of extremist movements to benefit politically from the crisis. “Anti-system” parties in Germany — including Communists as well as fascists — had won 13 percent of votes in 1928. By November 1932, they won nearly 60 percent. The far right also fared well in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. Communists gained in Bulgaria, France and Greece.

The result was the death of democracy in much of Europe. While 24 European regimes had been democratic in 1920, the number was down to 11 in 1939. Even bankers know what happened that year. [Continue reading…]

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