Category Archives: Issues

Egypt’s military barrier to democracy

In an interview with the Egyptian English-language daily, Al-Masry Al-Youm, Robert Springborg, who has written extensively on the Egyptian military and the politics and political economy of the Middle East, spells out some of the reasons the military ended up supporting the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. They were not siding with the Egyptian people; instead they saw an opportunity to consolidate their own interests.

Al-Masry Al-Youm: A trend in the economy during the transitional phase is the re-nationalization of companies privatized under the Mubarak regime. How much is this in the military economy’s interests?

Robert Springborg: The military opposed privatization that intensified in 2004 under the government of former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, and that was overseen by former Investment Minister Mahmoud Mohie Eddin. It was upset at the increased pace of privatization. That said, the military was happy with privatization as long as it ended up [gaining from it]. It didn’t want the government to sell state-owned enterprises to Gamal Mubarak’s cronies. So under the Nazif government, some of the privatization in state-owned enterprises went to the military to mollify its leadership. Its interests in strategic areas, such as port facilities, ship repair and building, increased. The Alexandria Shipyard, for example, is owned by the military, and under Nazif they acquired a competitor company. There was also an unwritten rule under Mubarak that mid-ranking officers and generals would get senior positions within privatized companies. Aviation companies and construction companies do have senior generals working in them.

Al-Masry: How important are their business holdings given that strategic industries, such as cement, are not within their control?

Springborg: Well, they are unhappy about that state of affairs. The military is not strongly represented in energy-intensive industries. The compensation to that is that they do control a lot of land. The total asset value of their land holdings is not clear, but we know that much of the land allocated to the construction and tourism sectors was or remains under military control. Starting from the 1980s, under Mubarak, the military got the land and crony capitalists got the energy intensive production industries.

The military’s biggest interest is in the construction industry. This is because the military has its own, internal construction capacities; because of its influence over the allocation of land; and because construction depends heavily on relations with government, either because it is paying for it or because it must authorize it. Military officers have the governmental connections that facilitate contracts and approvals.

Al-Masry: From the perspective of protecting the military economy, is the military threatened by the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections?

Springborg: Yes. What it wants is a weak parliament and a presidency that will not challenge its authority. As it now looks the parliament will be weak because it will be divided among various political forces and because it will not be based on any definitive constitutional authority. So it will not be strong enough to oversee the military, such as by examining its finances. So, any civilian control of the military by default will fall to the president.

That is why the apparent thinking now of the military is for the president to be someone from the military. The delay of the presidential election is due in part probably to the attempt to prepare the ground for a candidate either from the military or absolutely subordinate to it. In the meantime the military will look to expand its role in the economy, either through acquiring more companies or by assisting officer-owned companies gain more business.

The Washington Times reports: In the eight months since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s ruling military has postponed presidential elections, extended a controversial emergency law, cracked down on peaceful demonstrators and arrested critics.

Pro-democracy activists and Middle East analysts worry that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is reversing a revolution that toppled the autocratic Mubarak regime after 30 years in power.

“We, the revolution, are not governing Egypt now,” said Ahmed Maher, co-founder of the April 6 Youth Movement, a Facebook group, and a prominent participant in the anti-Mubarak demonstrations

“The SCAF is governing Egypt. I think they want to keep the power, and they want to make a new regime … depending on the same behavior of the Mubarak regime,” Mr. Maher told the Arab American Institute on a visit to Washington last week.

The ruling council has accused Mr. Maher’s group of being foreign agents.

“The SCAF has made a number of very troubling moves that suggest it is not serious about giving up power,” Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Institution’s center in Doha, Qatar, said in a phone interview with The Times.

“It has become so clear as to be entirely self-evident that the SCAF is an autocratic force and, in my view, the foremost danger to Egyptian democracy right now.”

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Islamist democratic victory in Tunisia

Reuters reports: Tunisian electoral officials confirmed the Islamist Ennahda party as winner of the North African country’s election, setting it up to form the first Islamist-led government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.

But the election, which has so far confounded predictions it would tip the country into crisis, turned violent when protesters angry their fourth-placed party was eliminated from the poll set fire to the mayor’s office in a provincial town.

Ennahda has tried to reassure secularists nervous about the prospect of Islamist rule in one of the Arab world’s most liberal countries by saying it will respect women’s rights and not try to impose a Muslim moral code on society.

The Islamists won power 10 months after Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable seller in the town of Sidi Bouzid, set fire to himself in an act of protest that led to the fall of Tunisia’s leader and inspired uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

“We salute Sidi Bouzid and its sons who launched the spark and we hope that God will have made Mohamed Bouazizi a martyr,” said Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi, a soft-spoken Islamic scholar who spent 22 years in exile in Britain.

“We will continue this revolution to realize its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, developing and prosperous in which the rights of God, the Prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured because Tunisia is for everyone,” Ghannouchi told a crowd of cheering supporters.

Announcing the results, election commission members said Ennahda had won 90 seats in the 217-seat assembly, which will draft a new constitution, form an interim government and schedule new elections, probably for early 2013.

The Islamists’ nearest rival, the secularist Congress for the Republic, won 30 seats, the commission members told a packed hall in the capital, ending a four-day wait since Sunday’s poll for the painstaking count to be completed.

Issandr El Amrani writes: Initially, Tunisia’s transition was extremely fragile. Ministers associated with the old regime remained in place, chaos was sown by remnants of the old ruling party, and a million grievances were expressed at the same time, overwhelming a fragile government. Over time, after revolutionary forces exercised concerted pressure, things stabilized: more acceptable ministers were appointed, a transition roadmap was agreed upon, and major political forces forged a consensus. At the same time, institutions of the state — old and new — maintained order and, most notably, prepared the ground for the election administratively and politically. This included months of preparations and training for election officials and putting together a remarkable get-out-the-vote campaign with the help of international election specialists.

Why Tunisia’s election is such a resounding success, in other words, is no mystery: the Tunisians worked very hard to ensure that it would be. The result is that while there are still cynics and some who are unhappy with the result, most Tunisians have bought into the new system and feel confident that, if the new assembly does not meet their aspirations, they will be able to pressure it on the street or through the ballot box at the next poll.

In comparison, the way the Egyptian elections have been handled is a disaster. The authorities repeatedly ignored the desire of the vast majority of political forces for a fully proportional, list-based system. They finally offered an agreement on a system that was two-thirds list-based and one-third single-winner-based, only two months before the poll, which was only reluctantly accepted by parties. The final delimitation of districts was still uncertain as candidate registration opened, making the parties’ electoral planning difficult, to say the least.

Moreover, the SCAF has continued the Mubarak-era policy of opposing foreign monitoring missions, despite this being a widespread practice around the world. In Tunisia, thousands of international monitors did not undermine national sovereignty; they added to the credibility of a well-run process. The concession made in Egypt to the Carter Center and other missions to allow “observers” rather than “monitors” is simply not good enough; it is only by beginning their work long before the actual poll is held and having unfettered access to the organizing agencies and every step of the voting process that monitoring agencies can truly certify the legitimacy of an election. It does not help that the international community currently seems to be placing more emphasis on the elections happening then on them being credible.

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Gaddafi’s son Saif opens ICC talks on surrender

The Daily Telegraph reports: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi’s fugitive son, who is wanted for crimes against humanity has established indirect contacts with the International Criminal Court on his surrender, the court’s chief prosecutor said.

The prosecutor said that his office was in “informal contact” with Muammar Gaddafi’s son through intermediaries regarding his surrender to the war crimes court.

“Through intermediaries, we have informal contact with Saif. The office of the prosecutor has made it clear that if he surrenders to the ICC, he has the right to be heard in court, he is innocent until proven guilty. The judges will decide,” prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said in a statement.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo would not say with whom the court is talking. He also said the court does not know al-Islam’s whereabouts.

If Saif is brought before the court, Mr Moreno-Ocampo said, he will “have all the rights and be protected,” and will be allowed to present his defence.

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Hisham Matar on Libya’s awakening

David Lepeska writes: One morning in late September, as Libyan rebels launched their final advance on Sirte, Muammar Qaddafi’s hometown, Hisham Matar explained to a small, rapt audience at the century-old Chicago Club why the removal of repressive long-time dictators, though great, had not been the most meaningful achievement of the Arab Spring. “Our collective imagination – a whole array of expectations about our governments, our institutions, our dreams – has just shifted,” he said. “The horizon has moved much further than even the most audacious of us would have suggested.”

Matar speaks softly, but with confidence and precision. “You can see it on people’s bodies, in their eyes and their faces, hear it in their voices,” he adds during an interview in the lobby of his downtown hotel later that morning. “It’s as if these regimes were sitting literally on top of us. There’s a new ease, a new optimism, a new sense of ownership of the future. That tiresome record of complaining with resignation at the end of it – that’s gone, and it’s quite an extraordinary thing to lose so quickly.”

***

Little-known outside literary circles before this year, Matar seems to have surfaced at precisely the right moment to herald a new Arab modernity. Born in New York City in 1970, he moved with his family to Tripoli three years later when his father, Jaballa, resigned from a United Nations posting in objection to the Qaddafi regime. In 1979, Jaballa found himself on a Libyan government watch list and again moved the family, this time to Cairo. He wrote articles calling for democracy, and became a leader of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya. In the mid-80s, Matar was sent to boarding school in the UK, where he stayed to study architecture at university.

On the afternoon of March 12, 1990, Jaballa was taken from the family’s Cairo home by Egypt’s mukhabarat, handed over to the Libyan government and deposited in Abu Salim prison. Two letters, smuggled out by fellow prisoners in 1992 and 1995, relayed stories of interrogation and torture. The family has not heard from Jaballa since. His fate remains unknown.

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The Arab Spring at nine months

Helena Cobban writes: What a whirlwind nine months it’s been for the Arab world. As I wrote at a much earlier point in this phenomenon called the ‘Arab Spring’, it is as if some tremor in the long-frozen tectonic plates of the region’s political geography had suddenly burst through all those plates, freeing up waves of long-frozen political energy that have ricocheted– and continue to ricochet– through all the region’s countries.

This is a phenomenon of an almost Biblical 40-year periodicity: After all, it was back in around 1970 that the Arab world’s political shape settled into broadly the same pattern that it then retained until January of this year.

(As it happens, I made my first visit to the region– to Beirut– in 1970. This is, I realize, neither here nor there… Mainly, it makes me feel old.)

It was in 1969 that a young colonel called Muammar Qadhafi had toppled “King” Idris in Libya… The political shifts that occurred in the Arab world the following year were more closely related to Palestine since they stemmed in good part from the tragic battles of 1970’s ‘Black September’. In those battles, Jordan’s U.S.-backed (and discreetly Israeli-backed) King Hussein reimposed an oppressive system of total control on his kingdom (and on its national population which then as now included a numerical majority of ‘West Bank’ Palestinians) by chasing out the Palestinian guerrillas who had become well established there over the preceding three years… Provocatively well established, one could say. The king’s Black September campaign was, indeed, directly precipitated by an action in which the PLO-affiliated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four international aircraft and landed them at an airstrip in northern Jordan…

During Black September, the Cairo-based Arab League worked hard to try to negotiate a settlement between Hussein and the Palestinians. On September 27, Egypt’s iconic, strongly Arab-nationalist president Gamal Abdel-Nasser convened an emergency summit meeting of Arab leaders in Cairo in an attempt to hammer out an agreement. The next day, he suffered a heart attack and died. (Five million Egyptians flocked to the streets to witness the passing of his cortege.)

Nasser was succeeded in the presidency by his vice-president, Anwar Sadat, a man who shared Nasser’s military background but not his commitment to a broadly ‘non-aligned’ form of Arab nationalism. Throughout Sadat’s eleven years in office, his main goal was to steer Egypt into a close alliance with Washington; and he seemed more than willing to enter into the bilateral peace agreement with Israel that was the entry-fee for that alliance. The Egyptian-Israeli peace of 1979 decoupled mighty Egypt from the Palestinians’ long-running quest for national liberation. After Sadat was assassinated in 1981, his vice-president, Hosni Mubarak, succeeded him. Mubarak hewed just as closely to the pro-American path as his predecessor. His longevity and the hyper-alertness of his ever-repressive mukhabarat gave him the time in office that neither Nasser nor Sadat had, in which to build the basis of dynastic rule..

Notably, in all the time Mubarak was president, he never named a vice-president… He also increasingly evidently started to groom his son Gamal to succeed him.

Meantime, back in the Black September of 1970, the conflict in Jordan soon enough made its effects felt on Syria, as well. The ‘leftist’ wing of the Baath Party, which until then was in power in Syria, had sent tanks into northern Jordan to help the Palestinians. But when those tanks came under threat of serious attack from Hussein’s tanks, the ground forces commanders in Damascus begged for air support from Syria’s air force. The air force commander, Hafez al-Asad, turned down their request. Without any air support, the Syrian tanks retreated speedily back to Syria; and amidst the political chaos and bouts of recriminations that ensued he undertook a swift coup in Damascus that brought his much more cautious, centrist wing of the Baath Party into power…

Where it has stayed until today.

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Slapping at Syria, Turkey shelters anti-Assad fighters

The New York Times reports: Once one of Syria’s closest allies, Turkey is hosting an armed opposition group waging an insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, providing shelter to the commander and dozens of members of the group, the Free Syrian Army, and allowing them to orchestrate attacks across the border from inside a camp guarded by the Turkish military.

The support for the insurgents comes amid a broader Turkish campaign to undermine Mr. Assad’s government. Turkey is expected to impose sanctions soon on Syria, and it has deepened its support for an umbrella political opposition group known as the Syrian National Council, which announced its formation in Istanbul. But its harboring of leaders in the Free Syrian Army, a militia composed of defectors from the Syrian armed forces, may be its most striking challenge so far to Damascus.

On Wednesday, the group, living in a heavily guarded refugee camp in Turkey, claimed responsibility for killing nine Syrian soldiers, including one uniformed officer, in an attack in restive central Syria.

Turkish officials describe their relationship with the group’s commander, Col. Riad al-As’aad, and the 60 to 70 members living in the “officers’ camp” as purely humanitarian. Turkey’s primary concern, the officials said, is for the physical safety of defectors. When asked specifically about allowing the group to organize military operations while under the protection of Turkey, a Foreign Ministry official said that their only concern was humanitarian protection and that they could not stop them from expressing their views.

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NYT bureau chief to appear on panel for Islamophobic organization’s film

Eli Clifton reports: The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, has stirred up controversy over recent speaking engagements. But an announcement on the 92nd St. Y’s website shows that Bronner is now scheduled to appear on a panel hosted by the Clarion Fund, an Islamophobic organization, to discuss the “threat of a nuclear Iran.”

The invitation, as it appears on the Clarion Fund’s website, reads:

On Monday, November 7, 2011, at 7:30 PM, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, NY will host a panel discussion about the threat of a nuclear Iran, interspersed with clips from the award-winning documentary Iranium. The panel will be moderated by the film’s director, Alex Traiman, and will be simultaneously broadcasted in over 20 communities throughout the U.S. (details below).

Panelists include:

John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Nazie Eftekhari, Director, Iran Democratic Union
Richard Green, Executive Director, Clarion Fund
Richard Perle, former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Bush administration

Click HERE for details and to order tickets.

Bronner and the 92nd Street Y are free to associate themselves with whatever organizations they choose. But the fact that the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief is lending his name to a Clarion Fund event, and the promotion of a film which advocates for military action against Iran, raises further questions about Bronner’s growing record of engaging in activities which could produce the appearance of a conflict of interest or undermine the impartiality of his reporting.

The Clarion Fund, which was profiled in the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” distributed the inflammatory anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West to 28 million swing state voters before the 2008 presidential election.

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Protest smearing of Occupy Wall Street, Palestine solidarity movements as “anti-Semitic”

Electronic Intifada reports: In a news segment broadcast Wednesday night by ABC 7 News in Chicago, reporter Chuck Goudie claims that there is “a vein of anti-Semitism flowing through the movement that has Jewish leaders concerned.”

I and other activists have responded to this vile smear attack on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement more generally…

In his report, Goudie purports to expose the “ugly underbelly of Occupy Wall Street” and cherry-picks unrepresentative, isolated cases of anti-Semitic speech to make it seem that anti-Jewish sentiment is a pervasive problem in the OWS movement.

Goudie also attempts to prove his point by saying that Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian-American community leader in Chicago, gave a speech at an Occupy Chicago rally in which Goudie claims Abudayyeh “spoke about destroying Israel.”

The short broadcast includes a seconds-long clip from a YouTube video of Abudayyeh’s speech — which was actually given at a rally held on the anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan, not at an OWS rally. Abudayyeh states in the clip “they [the Palestinians] will win their freedom and independence from Israel and from the United States” — a far cry from calling for the destruction of Israel, as Goudie states in his ad hominem attack. [See a call to action at Electronic Intifada.]

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Occupy Movement scores huge victory in Cleveland after seeking a federal injunction eliminating curfew

Cleveland Leader reports: Last Friday night, members of the group Occupy Cleveland, which have been demonstrating on Public Square in downtown Cleveland since early October, were told that they must vacate the premises as the permit they had been granted by the city expired at 10pm. Without a permit, city law prohibits camping out between the hours of 10pm and 5am. Several arrests were made, all while the demonstrators peacefully explained that they were expressing their 1st amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly. On Wednesday, the group scored huge victory when a federal judge issued an injunction that would allow them to occupy the Tom Johnson quadrant of Public Square at all hours of the day for an indefinite period of time.

The success of the Occupy Cleveland participants in establishing their right to freely assemble and speak may serve as an example for groups facing similar situations in cities across the United States that are also participating in the global Occupy Wall Street movement. Oakland, Cincinnati, and Atlanta, to name a few, may be especially interested in this lawsuit and the subsequent agreement as their “occupations” of public areas were also raided and broken up by police, essentially halting their freedom of speech and assembly.

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Occupy first. Demands come later

Slavoj Žižek writes: What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: “They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time.”

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the “horizontal organisation” of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question, “What is to be done?“

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Occupy Wall Street: The primary the president never had?

Matt Stoller writes: It’s been a little over a month since this bolt of political lightning known as Occupy Wall Street jolted through the political establishment. It’s time to assess just what Occupy Wall Street has gotten done. That it has accomplished a great deal is beyond dispute. Franklin Foer in the New Republic and John Nichols in the Nation have both noted that Occupy Wall Street profoundly challenged President Obama and the Republicans. But what an odd challenge. A few thousand people camped out in parks around the country? Really?

Yet this challenge has completely changed the dominant theme in Washington. Less than a year ago, JP Morgan’s Bill Daley was the glad-handling centrist du jour, praised by everyone from Howard Dean to Bob Reich. The “austerity class,” as Ari Berman so nicely put it, was in control of the debate, with the Tea Party waiting in the wings ready to slash and burn.

Fast forward to October 2011. Obama is increasingly taking on a populist tone and using executive orders to attempt stimulating the economy, with Democrats smacking around Mitt Romney for encouraging foreclosures as a way to clear the market (a policy Obama administration officials like HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan agree with. The centrists are losing, perhaps not power, but certainly the debate. Third Way, the political brain behind this centrist White House and Senate, is one of the few groups warning Democrats away from Occupy Wall Street, but few are listening.

There’s a reason; the themes put out by the protesters are overwhelmingly popular. The poll numbers are out. If Occupy Wall Street were a national candidate for president, it would be blowing away every other candidate on the stage, including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Fifty-four percent of Americans agree with the protesters, versus 44 percent who think President Obama is doing a good job. Seventy-three percent of Americans want prosecutions for Wall Street executives for the crisis. Seventy-nine percent think the gap between rich and poor is too large. Eighty-six percent say Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much power in Washington. Sixty-eight percent think the rich should pay more in taxes. Twenty-five percent of the public considers itself upset, 45 percent is concerned about the country and 25 percent is downright angry.

That these themes are dominating establishment debates now is somewhat bizarre. It’s not as if people didn’t hate banks in 2008, 2009 or 2010. And when you think about it, camping out in various cities isn’t a particularly radical act, in and of itself. Occupy Wall Street can’t project political power, at least not in any traditional sense. It can’t make decisions about how to relate to the police, or politicians. It is ideologically incoherent. It can’t even stop drum circles from drumming at night, because drummers don’t recognize the legitimacy of the general assemblies that try to cut deals with the neighborhood. There are increasing reports of medical and safety problems in parks around the country. One person at the protests told me the World War I disease called trenchfoot is making an appearance due to damp conditions. The protests are a ball of raw energy, with one basic message: The 1 percent on Wall Street have taken advantage of the 99 percent of the rest of us.

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NYPD keeps files on Muslims who change their names

The Associated Press reports: For generations, immigrants have shed their ancestral identities and taken new, Americanized names as they found their place in the melting pot. For Muslims in New York, that rite of assimilation is now seen by police as a possible red flag in the hunt for terrorists.

The New York Police Department monitors everyone in the city who changes his or her name, according to interviews and internal police documents obtained by The Associated Press. For those whose names sound Arabic or might be from Muslim countries, police run comprehensive background checks that include reviewing travel records, criminal histories, business licenses and immigration documents.

All this is recorded in police databases for supervisors, who review the names and select a handful of people for police to visit.

The program was conceived as a tripwire for police in the difficult hunt for homegrown terrorists, where there are no widely agreed upon warning signs. Like other NYPD intelligence programs created in the past decade, this one involved monitoring behavior protected by the First Amendment.

Since August, an Associated Press investigation has revealed a vast NYPD intelligence-collecting effort targeting Muslims following the terror attacks of September 2001. Police have conducted surveillance of entire Muslim neighborhoods, chronicling daily life including where people eat, pray and get their hair cut. Police infiltrated dozens of mosques and Muslim student groups and investigated hundreds more.

Monitoring name changes illustrates how the threat of terrorism now casts suspicion over what historically has been part of America’s story. For centuries, foreigners have changed their names in New York, often to lose any stigma attached with their surname.

The Roosevelts were once the van Rosenvelts. Fashion designer Ralph Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz. Donald Trump’s grandfather changed the family name from Drumpf.

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Denunciation and disruption: the vision that drives Occupy Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham writes: It’s 4:45 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 15, the day Occupy Wall Street went global. The march in Manhattan is twin pronged on 6th Avenue, several blocks long on the east and west sidewalks of the street. It flows as juggernautish and loud and flashing as a flood in a canyon. The police don’t know what to do except keep it on the sidewalk, barricade it off the street with a line of scooters and hundreds of foot cops and dozens of cop vans directed by the dreaded White Shirts. These latter are the captains, the field commanders, feared because in the five weeks the occupiers have been at Zuccotti Park, clawing into the financial district with no intention of departure, the White Shirts have done the most cawing into bullhorns, have seemed the most pissed off about the occupation, and have shown the most willingness to bust heads and punch kids and break out the mace and the pepper spray when faced with the threat of young women.

I get swept in the boiling mass on the east sidewalk next to a man in a white linen suit coat who chews on a cigar and is chiding the cops mercilessly. “What’s next, officers? How about planting season? Time to plant drugs on these people!”

“Keep tawkin,” says a detective.

“Randy Credico,” says the man in the linen suit, turning to me. “Activist, political comedian. Ran against Chuck Schumer in 2010.” A little guy, spry, a cynic who likes to dress up in public as Diogenes, a New Yorker with one of those sinewy New York accents. We shake hands. Then the drums are upon us, the banners—“Revolt” and “Generation Revolution” and “Wall Street: The Enemy of Humanity”—and the shouting: “We! Are! The 99 percent!”

The goal today is the convergence at Times Square, where it’s said 20,000 people are already waiting.

The goal tomorrow is the toppling of the 1 percenters—the Wall Streeters, the socially useless financiers, the bankers, the hedge funders, the derivatives traders, the corporate lawyers, the big-moneyed class that, in a more muscular age of progressivism, say, a hundred years ago, would be denounced as the parasite class. The parasites in New York, at last count in 2007, took for themselves close to 45 percent of all income in the city. Forty-five percent of all income going to roughly 34,000 households. The occupiers know their addresses, and in recent weeks have visited their doors in a most disrespectful manner to make known that the parasite class is not welcome anymore.

That’s a good start, the act of shaming and ridicule. How the toppling of the parasites is functionally to be accomplished, the machinations needed to smash their power and put them on a rocket ship to an airless planet, is as yet unknown. Nor does anyone here much care that it’s unknown. What matters on a day like this is morale, and to find morale means to gather en masse to make a mess of the normal state of affairs—the politics of disruption for its own sake. The Occupy Wall Street movement has collaborators in dozens of cities—Occupy Chicago and Occupy Los Angeles and Occupy Seattle—but it is the occupation in New York, the most regressive city in the nation, to which Occupiers nationwide look for inspiration. The enemy is nested in New York, and it is here the battle is to be joined.

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U.S. warns Israel: New Jerusalem construction will aid Palestinian bid at UN

Haaretz reports: The United States urged Israel on Wednesday to halt a plan that would approve new construction in a contentious Jerusalem neighborhood, saying that such a move would harm U.S. efforts to thwart the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations.

The Jerusalem District Planning Committee announced late last month that it would approve the construction of 1,100 new housing units in Gilo, despite past U.S. objections concerning any work that would expand the neighborhood further beyond the Green Line.

The proposal would allot 20 percent of the units in the neighborhood to young couples, in compliance with a directive given by Interior Minister Eli Yishai. The plan also includes the construction of a boardwalk, public structures, and a commercial center.

U.S. envoy to Israel, Dan Shapiro, met with Yishai on Wednesday, and urged him to shelf the Gilo construction plan, warning it could push international support in favor of the Palestinians in their move for UN recognition.

Yishai reportedly rejected Shapiro’s request, saying that construction in Jerusalem has never stopped – even during left-wing governments – and that it would not stop now.

Israel’s plan for Gilo has already drawn considerable international criticism. Earlier this month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harshly to task over the move, precipitating an unprecedented diplomatic crisis.

A senior Israeli official said the plan greatly angered Merkel, after she had enlisted massive support of Israel over the past few weeks to help in thwarting a Security Council vote approving Palestinian membership in the United Nations.

Senior German officials told their Israeli counterparts that Merkel was “furious” and “does not believe a word [Netanyahu] says.”

At Netanyahu’s request, Merkel had also put major pressure on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to accept the Quartet’s initiative and renew peace talks immediately, the Israeli official said, adding that Germany may now reconsider and support upgrading the PA’s status to that of a non-member state in the UN General Assembly.

Netanyahu rejected criticism against the construction plan, saying that Gilo is not a settlement, but rather a Jerusalem neighborhood five minutes from the center of the capital. He noted that all Israeli governments built in such neighborhoods.

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