Category Archives: Issues

Libyan rebels advance into gateway to Tripoli

The Associated Press reports:

Libyan rebels fought their way into the strategic city of Zawiya west of Tripoli on Saturday in their most significant advance in months, battling snipers on rooftops and heavy shelling from Moammar Gadhafi’s forces holding the city.

Zawiya, 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the capital, is a key target for rebels waging a new offensive launched from the mountains in the far west of Libya, an attempt to break the deadlock in combat between the two sides that has held for months in the center and east of the country.

A credible threat from the rebels in the west could strain Gadhafi’s troops, which have been hammered for months by NATO airstrikes. Defending Zawiya is key for the regime but could require bringing in better trained forces who are currently ensuring its hold over its Tripoli stronghold or fighting rebels on fronts further east.

A group of about 200 exuberant rebel fighters, advancing from the south, reached a bridge on Zawiya’s southwestern outskirts, and some rebels pushed farther into the city’s central main square. They tore down the green flag of Gadhafi’s regime from a mosque minaret and put up two rebel flags. An Associated Press reporter traveling with the rebels saw hundreds of residents rush into the streets, greeting the fighters with chants of “God is great.”

Gadhafi’s forces then counterattacked, unleashing rounds of heavy shelling and gunfire could be heard as rebels and government troops battled.

Regime snipers were firing down from rooftops on the rebels, said one resident, Abdel-Basset Abu Riyak, who joined to fight alongside the rebels when they entered the city. He said Gadhafi’s forces were holed up in several pockets in the city and that there were reports of reinforcements coming from Tripoli, though there was no sign of them yet. He said NATO airstrikes had hit Libyan military positions near the city the night before.

Rebel spokesman Gomaa Ibrahim claimed that the opposition’s fighters controlled most of Zawiya by nightfall. “What remains are few pockets (of Gadhafi forces) in the city,” he said. “The road is now open all the way from the western mountains to Zawiya, we can send them supply and reinforcement anytime.”

Zawiya’s residents rose up and threw off regime control when Libya’s anti-Gadhafi revolt first began in February. But Gadhafi’s forces retaliated and crushed opposition in the city in a long and bloody siege in March. Many of Zawiya’s rebels fled into the mountains — and were among the lead forces advancing on the city Saturday — while others like Abu Riyak remained in the city, lying low.

Speaking to the AP by telephone, Abu Riyak said residents were now joining up with the rebels’ assault, saying, “95 percent of Zawiya’s people are with the revolution.”

“There is shooting from all sides,” said another rebel, 23-year-old Ibrahim Akram. “The people joined us. Fierce clashes are still ongoing, but thank God our numbers are great.”

But Gadhafi is likely to fight hard to keep control of Zawiya. The city of about 200,000 people on the Mediterranean coast is key because it controls the main supply road to the capital from the Tunisian border and is the site of the sole remaining oil refineries in the west still under the regime’s control.

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Tribal rifts threaten to undermine Libya uprising

The New York Times reports:

Saddled with infighting and undermined by the occasionally ruthless and undisciplined behavior of its fighters, the six-month-old rebel uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is showing signs of sliding from a struggle to overthrow an autocrat into a murkier contest between factions and tribes.

The increase in discord and factionalism is undermining the effort to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi, and it comes immediately after recognition of the rebel government by the Western powers, including the United States, potentially giving the rebels access to billions of dollars in frozen Libyan assets, and the chance to purchase more modern weaponry.

The infighting could also erode support for the rebels among members of the NATO alliance, which faces a September deadline for renewing its air campaign amid growing unease about the war’s costs and direction. That air support has been a factor in every significant rebel military goal, including fighting on Saturday in which rebel forces were challenging pro-Qaddafi forces in or near three critical towns: Brega, an oil port in the east, Zawiya, on the outskirts of Tripoli, and Gharyan, an important gateway to southern Libya.

While the rebels have sought to maintain a clean image and to portray themselves as fighting to establish a secular democracy, several recent acts of revenge have cast their ranks in a less favorable light. They have also raised the possibility that any rebel victory over Colonel Qaddafi could disintegrate into the sort of tribal tensions that have plagued Libya for centuries.

In recent weeks, rebel fighters in Libya’s western mountains and around the coastal city of Misurata have lashed out at civilians because their tribes supported Colonel Qaddafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighborhood. In the rebels’ provisional capital, Benghazi, renegade fighters assassinated their top military commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, apparently in revenge for his previous role as Colonel Qaddafi’s security chief.

In response, the chief of General Younes’s powerful tribe threatened to retaliate against those responsible, setting off a crisis in the rebels’ governing council, whose members were dismissed en masse last week.

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Abbas calls for a Palestinian Awakening in September

Marc Gopin and Aziz Abu Sarah write:

In his speech to the Central Council of the PLO in Ramallah, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced his strategy to end the occupation. The President stressed in his speech that he will not retreat from seeking recognition of the Palestinian state from the United Nations. Abbas had been under enormous pressure to withdraw the request for recognition of a Palestinian State on borders of June 1967. He announced that 122 nations are already in favor of the draft submitted to the UN. Concerning US opposition, he referred to the fact that this has not been communicated in a formal manner.

President Abbas surprised many of his listeners when he spoke about another element of his strategy. Perhaps for the first time Abbas highlighted clearly his vision of the Palestinian people’s active participation to achieve the dream of a Palestinian state. He called upon the Palestinian people to go out to the streets and demonstrate in an Arab-style revolution.

I insist on popular resistance, and insist it is an unarmed popular resistance so no one misunderstand us. We follow the example demonstrated in the Arab Awakening, which says, ‘Selmiya, Selmiya’, ‘Peaceful, Peaceful.’

The Arab Awakening in Egypt and Tunisia proved that popular masses in the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder in a coherent, peaceful movement, can accomplish anything. What seemed impossible in the past is possible today.

The challenge is that most of the Palestinian demonstrations until now have focused on fighting the Separation Wall, and on resisting the expansion of the settlements at the expense of Palestinian villages. These protests are still limited in the number of participants, and they do not exceed tens of protestors, or hundreds in the best scenarios. This is not enough to create the political change that is necessary now.

President Abbas did not hide his disappointment about the Palestinian popular resistance movement’s inability to grow to a national level.

We talk about the Resistance, but when we see what is happening in these demonstrations, frankly we don’t find anyone talking about it.

Clearly, he wants to see this grow on a national level, and he wants this reality to become an established fact that will impact the global conversation and debate about the future of Palestine.

The success of the Palestinian Popular Resistance movement has apparently become a key factor in the Palestinian strategy for achieving independence. The diplomatic efforts to gain recognition worldwide are going to be fruitless if they are not coupled with a strong nonviolent movement in the Palestinian territories, which will make the march to independence an irresistible and newsworthy drama of unprecedented proportions.

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J14 tent protests: What about the occupation?

Joseph Dana writes:

Largely shielded from the European and American financial crises, the Israeli economy has been growing at an astonishing rate over the past five years: 4.7 per cent in 2010 alone. But the wealth isn’t evenly distributed: most Israelis living inside the 1967 borders struggle to make ends meet because of the high cost of living and relatively high taxes, which are largely spent on security and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Last month, a group of Tel Aviv residents in their twenties set up camp in the centre of Rothschild Boulevard to protest against housing costs in the city. They didn’t have a serious plan for political change, but the protest tapped into nationwide discontent. Within a few days, hundreds more people had joined them. The momentum spread quickly through the country, with camps appearing everywhere from Eilat on the Red Sea to Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border.

On Saturday, 250,000 Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and 10,000 marched to the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, demanding ‘social justice’. Netanyahu, the main target of the demonstrators’ placards, was quick to paint the protests as a misdirected reincarnation of the ‘radical left’. But this stale tactic didn’t stop an overwhelming majority of Israelis supporting the protests. According to recent opinion polls, 87 per cent see the demands for economic reform as legitimate.

The protester’s working definition of ‘social justice’, however, is unclear and full of contradictions. Most glaringly, they have yet to address the question of the Occupied Territories. From the start, organisers maintained that their protests were a rare instance of ‘apolitical’ social organising. The Palestinian issue was understood to be too divisive to be included under the umbrella of Israel’s social justice revolution, and there’s no doubt that, had protesters connected their struggle for social justice to the occupation, many fewer Israelis would have joined the protests.

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Israeli tent protests ignore link between neoliberalism, occupation

Max Ajl writes:

What have thus far been mostly absent [during Israel’s J14 protests] are calls to end the occupation, a silence that speaks eloquently to the composition of Israeli society, in which a call to end the occupation or dismantle the racist juridical structure is perceived as an attack on the state religion: militarist nationalism. Such a call would be “political,” as opposed to the current protests, which are merely “social” in nature.

It is yet early, but two things seem clear. One, this movement will not break the Israeli structure of power. Two, this is an early fracture – a foretaste of later ruptures – within Zionism.

It would be wonderful to be wrong about the first point. One could not predict the fall of the Iranian shah from the Peacock Throne in 1977 before months-long street melees sent him into flight. The rise of Hugo Chavez was not prefigured in the caracazo, the countrywide riots against Venezuelan neoliberal austerity measures, of 1989. Revolutions are inherently unpredictable, as people move out of the gentle ebbs and flows, the quotidian cycles, of their lives, and move to messianic time. At such moments, belief in their own power, a kind of “collective effervescence,” can create opportunities that no one would have predicted or believed possible just weeks before, and radical change becomes a kind of a mirage that one suddenly wills into being real. Such sparks of human creativity and the instinct for freedom kindle flames within structures designed to douse them.

Still, the fractures within those structures are real. The average apartment is unaffordable for 90 percent of the population, what academic and housing researcher Danny Ben Shahar calls a “social time-bomb,” in part the result of housing inflation as a jet-setting Jewish transnational elite flits into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the summer, stays at their “ghost apartment,” then returns to Paris and Los Angeles. Inflation is not restricted to the housing market. As Histadrut Labor Federation Chairman Ofer Eini said, “If once I was able to go to the supermarket and make a NIS 700 purchase, today I pay double. And that is not linked to the CPI. If the CPI rises 3 percent, the supermarket prices rise 30 percent. The one benefiting from these rising prices is the government.”

The question of the “government” benefiting from rising prices is dubious. Inflation might be partially pushed by the government, but historically, Israeli inflation has led to a redistribution of economic clout from the bottom and middle of Israeli society to its upper echelons. The upper class, welded solidly into transnational capital circuits, is the real beneficiary, behind the veneer of the state and the politicians it pushes into office. And it frequently does not bother with the veneer: amidst a cartelized economy, prices are pushed higher and higher by the corporations that set prices, while wages do not come close to keeping pace with price increases.

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State Dept funding neocon-Zionist propaganda outfit

Ali Gharib reports:

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Middle East media watchdog closely aligned with U.S. neoconservatives and Israel’s hawkish security establishment and rightist Likud Party. The grant was awarded “to conduct a project that documents anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East.” The announcement continues:

This grant will enable MEMRI to expand its efforts to monitor the media, translate materials into ten languages, analyze trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and glorification, and increase distribution of materials through its website and other outlets.

Finding examples of anti-Semitism is already a robust MEMRI project and one wonders why exactly they needed the cash: According to publicly available tax filings, MEMRI had nearly $5 million in revenue in 2007 and more than $4.5 million in revenue in 2008.

What’s more troubling, MEMRI has faced accusations of mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources to portray regional media and attitudes in an overly-negative fashion. One of the most common issues has been with MEMRI’s mistranslations which appear to show anti-Semitism on thin evidence. In 2007, CNN correspondent Atika Shubert checked MEMRI’s translations of a Palestinian children’s program against those provided by the cable news channel’s own interpreters:

Media watchdog MEMRI translates one caller as saying – quote – ‘We will annihilate the Jews.’ But, according to several Arabic speakers used by CNN, the caller actually says ‘The Jews are killing us.’ MEMRI told us it stood by its translation.

In other instances, MEMRI has been accused of twisting translations to portray criticisms of Israel and its driving ideology, Zionism, as anti-Semitic..

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Capitol Hill’s representatives for Israel

Josh Ruebner writes:

Nearly 20 percent of the constituents of Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) live under the poverty line, and nearly 15 percent are unemployed. Jackson’s congressional district, covering parts of the south side of Chicago and its southern suburbs, has been hit harder than many others by the crises plaguing the economy. Many of his constituents are looking at even more cutbacks in social services, higher prices for food and fuel, and ever scarcer jobs.

During this August congressional recess, Rep. Jackson, Jr. should be at home, meeting with constituents and proposing to them how he will help them cope with their difficult circumstances. Instead, the politician is proudly gallivanting around Israel, in one of three separate congressional delegations heading there this month on all-expense-paid junkets organized by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), a so-called charitable affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential of the myriad pro-Israel lobbying outfits.

In total, 81 representatives, nearly one-fifth of the entire House, will participate in these jaunts, which, according to The Washington Post, include “a round-trip flight in business class for lawmakers and their spouses (that alone is worth about $8,000), fine hotels and meals, side trips, and transportation and guides.

Of course, these congressional delegations are not all fun and games. Members of Congress will be expected to sing for their lavish dinners by honoring President Bush’s 2007 pledge to provide the Israeli military with $30 billion of tax-payer-funded weapons between 2009 and 2018. So far, proposed increases in military aid to Israel have been spared from the budgetary chopping block by President Obama and a compliant Congress that treats Israeli militarism as more sacrosanct than medical care for seniors. This despite the fact that Israel misuses the funds, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act, to commit human rights abuses against Palestinians living under its illegal 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.

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My Fellow American

About My Fellow American:

My Fellow American is an online film and social media project that calls upon concerned Americans to pledge and spread a message that Muslims are our fellow Americans. It asks people of other backgrounds to pledge, and share a real life story about a Muslim friend, neighbor, or colleague that they admire. Using the power of social media, My Fellow American seeks to change the narrative – from Muslims as the other, to Muslims as our fellow Americans.

Most Americans have never met an American Muslim. Many only know Muslims through the way they are portrayed in the media. American Muslims are so often vilified as “the other” that it is possible not to recognize that most were born in the U.S. Or that those who immigrated here came seeking the same freedoms and opportunities that have always attracted people to America.

Muslims are our fellow Americans, who today face threats to their civil rights and even their personal safety because of the fearful and often hateful rhetoric that would not be tolerated were it uttered about any other minority group.

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The CIA, lies and intelligence

After a recent speech, John Brennan, a longtime former CIA officer and currently President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor, took a question from John Hopkins professor of strategic studies, Elliot Cohen, on the US policy of so-called targeted killing. Brennan responded by highlighting the “surgical” precision that Obama has insisted upon when the US chooses its targets.

If there are terrorists who are in an area where there are women and children or others, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger. In fact I can say that the types of operations that the US has been involved in — in the counter-terrorism realm — that nearly for the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities that we have been able to develop.

Brennan might have been repeating what he had been told by the CIA and their reports may have stated that in each drone attack over the said period no civilians were knowingly killed. But ignorance is no defense.

Indeed, the CIA’s lack of interest in the truth is evident in the fact that they have been eager to refute the findings on the latest research on civilian casualties from drone attacks on the tribal areas of Pakistan before such findings had even been published.

  • One in seven of all US strikes appear to have resulted in child fatalities.
  • Between 2,292 and 2,863 people have died in the attacks.
  • Since Obama took office, those attacks have occurred on average once every four days.
  • Among those killed only 126 militants have been named.
  • Credible news reports indicate that between 385-775 civilians have been killed, including 164 children.

The New York Times reports:

On May 6, a Central Intelligence Agency drone fired a volley of missiles at a pickup truck carrying nine militants and bomb materials through a desolate stretch of Pakistan near the Afghan border. It killed all the militants — a clean strike with no civilian casualties, extending what is now a yearlong perfect record of avoiding collateral deaths.

Or so goes the United States government’s version of the attack, from an American official briefed on the classified C.I.A. program. Here is another version, from a new report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists: The missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, killing 18 people — 12 militants, but also 6 civilians, known locally as Samad, Jamshed, Daraz, Iqbal, Noor Nawaz and Yousaf.

The report, “Drone War Exposed – the complete picture of CIA strikes in Pakistan,” comes from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

CIA drone strikes have led to far more deaths in Pakistan than previously understood, according to extensive new research published by the Bureau. More than 160 children are among at least 2,292 people reported killed in US attacks since 2004. There are credible reports of at least 385 civilians among the dead.

In a surprise move, a counter-terrorism official has also released US government estimates of the numbers killed. These state that an estimated 2,050 people have been killed in drone strikes – of whom all but an estimated 50 are combatants.

The Bureau’s fundamental reassessment of the covert US campaign involved a complete re-examination of all that is known about each US drone strike.

The study is based on close analysis of credible materials: some 2,000 media reports; witness testimonies; field reports of NGOs and lawyers; secret US government cables; leaked intelligence documents, and relevant accounts by journalists, politicians and former intelligence officers.

The Bureau’s findings are published in a 22,000-word database which covers each individual strike in Pakistan in detail. A powerful search engine, an extensive timeline and searchable maps accompany the data.

The result is the clearest public understanding so far of the CIA’s covert drone war against the militants. Yet US intelligence officials are understood to be briefing against the Bureau’s work, claiming ‘significant problems with its numbers and methodologies.’

Iain Overton, the Bureau’s editor said: ‘It comes as no surprise that the US intelligence services would attack our findings in this way. But to claim our methodology is problematic before we had even published reveals how they really operate. A revelation that is reinforced by the fact that they cannot bring themselves to refer to non-combatants as what they really are: civilians and, all too often, children’.

The Bureau’s data reveals many more CIA attacks on alleged militant targets than previously reported. At least 291 US drone strikes are now known to have taken place since 2004.

The intended targets – militants in the tribal areas – appear to make up the majority of those killed. There are 126 named militants among the dead since 2004, though hundreds are unknown, low-ranking fighters. But as many as 168 children have also been reported killed among at least 385 civilians.

More than 1,100 people are also revealed to have been injured in the US drone attacks – the first time this number has been collated.

In the wake of the Bureau’s findings Amnesty International has called for more CIA transparency.

But transparency is not what intelligence agencies trade in — “transparency” is for them nothing more than another name for public relations.

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In Middle East tumult, new hope for Palestinian cause

The New York Times reports:

In the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, a corner of Beirut bearing the scars of massacres and an enduring despair, the words of a young barber hinted at an emerging optimism about what the Arab revolts could mean for a central issue of the last half century in the Middle East: the fate of Palestinians.

The barber, Mohammed Assad, was not naïve; life here is too grim for that. But in a region whose politics are being recalculated, he celebrated the rising influence of popular will on governments that long ignored it.

“There is hope,” he said.

In all the tumult of the Arab revolts, one of the most striking manifestations of change is a rejuvenated embrace of the Palestinian cause. The burst in activism in Egypt, Lebanon and even Tunisia has offered a rebuttal to an old bromide of Arab politics, that authoritarian leaders cynically inflamed sentiments over Israel and Palestine to divert attention from their own shortcomings.

But the embrace of the issue also helped confirm its status as a barometer of justice and freedom for many Arabs and Muslims. And now, the demands of an empowered public raise the possibility of a significant change in the region’s foreign policies which, at least tacitly, capitulated to the dictates of the United States and Israel.

“We always said, ‘If you want to liberate Palestine, you need to liberate yourselves,’ ” said Gamal Eid, founder of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, in Cairo.

In Tunisia, activists have insisted on an article in the Constitution banning normalization with Israel and making support for Palestinians state policy. Through a vibrant social media network, Lebanese and Palestinian youths have organized marches and sought ways to have a greater say in decisions of the Palestinian leadership. Protesters in Egypt have urged officials to let boats sail from Egyptian ports to break the partial blockade against Gaza; one boat docked in Alexandria last month before the Israeli military boarded and seized it.

“Even if the revolutions fail to achieve full and thorough regime change, there is no Arab government that can ignore its people now,” said Rashid Khalidi, a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. “All the rulers — the kings of Morocco and Jordan, all the dictators and all the autocrats — they’re scared blind of their own people.”

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Obama’s secret war in Somalia where ‘the Americans are creating a monster’

“Mercenary” is a word with lots of ugly connotations — not least for men who’ve been jailed for being mercenaries.

So, Bancroft Global Development, a private company based in Washington DC currently providing “military services” for the US State Department and the UN in Mogadishu, doesn’t like the term “mercenaries.” It describes itself instead as a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding permanent solutions to violent conflict. It also has what might be a unique distinction of operating in the United States as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit charitable organization.

The Obama administration clearly doesn’t feel comfortable employing mercenaries or “mentors,” as Bancroft’s soldiers call themselves, and so they get paid by the governments of Uganda and Burundi who then get reimbursed by the State Department.

Richard Rouget, the French-born South-African Bancroft employee who is the primary source for the New York Times article cited below, let’s the company’s PR mask fall momentarily and reveals a 19th century colonial mentality when he refers to his Somali adversaries as “savages”.

In the 1970s, Rouget is said to have been active in neo-fascist organizations such as Groupe Union Défense (GUD).

This is how GUD (founded in 1968) and a similar ultra-right group, Unité Radicale, were described in The Guardian:

Both the GUD and UR, founded in 1998, are rabidly racist, anti-semitic and anti-American, declared enemies of “global, cosmopolitan finance”, supportive of the September 11 attacks and believers in la France blanche .

While they profess to be genuine “nationalist revolutionaries” rather than neo-Nazis, the paraphernalia of the Third Reich is never far from their gatherings.

Meanwhile, through its creation of the Somali National Security Agency — an intelligence organization financed largely by the CIA — the Obama administration is backing what one Somali official says is becoming a “government within a government.”

“No one, not even the president, knows what the NSA is doing,” he said. “The Americans are creating a monster.”

The New York Times reports:

Richard Rouget, a gun for hire over two decades of bloody African conflict, is the unlikely face of the American campaign against militants in Somalia.

A husky former French Army officer, Mr. Rouget, 51, commanded a group of foreign fighters during Ivory Coast’s civil war in 2003, was convicted by a South African court of selling his military services and did a stint in the presidential guard of the Comoros Islands, an archipelago plagued by political tumult and coup attempts.

Now Mr. Rouget works for Bancroft Global Development, an American private security company that the State Department has indirectly financed to train African troops who have fought a pitched urban battle in the ruins of this city against the Shabab, the Somali militant group allied with Al Qaeda.

The company plays a vital part in the conflict now raging inside Somalia, a country that has been effectively ungoverned and mired in chaos for years. The fight against the Shabab, a group that United States officials fear could someday carry out strikes against the West, has mostly been outsourced to African soldiers and private companies out of reluctance to send American troops back into a country they hastily exited nearly two decades ago.

“We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground,” said Johnnie Carson, the Obama administration’s top State Department official for Africa.

A visible United States military presence would be provocative, he said, partly because of Somalia’s history as a graveyard for American missions — including the “Black Hawk Down” episode in 1993, when Somali militiamen killed 18 American service members.

Still, over the past year, the United States has quietly stepped up operations inside Somalia, American officials acknowledge. The Central Intelligence Agency, which largely finances the country’s spy agency, has covertly trained Somali intelligence operatives, helped build a large base at Mogadishu’s airport — Somalis call it “the Pink House” for the reddish hue of its buildings or “Guantánamo” for its ties to the United States — and carried out joint interrogations of suspected terrorists with their counterparts in a ramshackle Somali prison.

And while Washington continues to look at Somalia through the mind-numbing prism of “global terrorism,” the people of this war-torn nation struggle to survive.

A staggering ten percent of children under five are now dying from starvation every 11 weeks.

AFP reports:

Ten per cent of Somali children aged under five are dying every 11 weeks in the country’s devastating famine, which is spreading faster than aid agencies can cope with, UN officials warned on Wednesday.

The UN representative to Somalia also told the UN Security Council that warlords will take control of areas of Mogadishu abandoned by Islamist insurgents last weekend unless the transitional government quickly gets a grip.

The envoy, Augustine Mahiga, said about half the Somali population, about 3.7 million people, are now at risk from famine. The UN estimates that more than 12 million are affected across East Africa.

Across the famine zone, more than 13 children out of every 10,000 aged under five die each day, Mahiga said. ‘This means that 10 per cent of children under five are dying every 11 weeks. These figures are truly heart-wrenching,’ the envoy told the council, appealing for greater international assistance.

The UN has asked for one billion dollars for Somalia, but Catherine Bragg, the deputy UN emergency relief coordinator, said less than half the sum has been raised.

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Assad rebuffs Turkish envoy’s plea to end crackdown

The New York Times reports:

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria rebuffed an appeal from Turkey on Tuesday to end the Syrian crackdown that has emerged as one of the bloodiest chapters in the Arab uprising and has plunged his country into its deepest isolation in years.

Mr. Assad said in a statement after a six-hour meeting with Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, that his government would press ahead with its fight against militant Islamists, the term the government has often used to describe the instigators of an uprising that began in March and has posed the gravest challenge to Mr. Assad’s rule.

Sana, Syria’s state news agency, quoted Mr. Assad as telling Mr. Davutoglu that Damascus “will not relent in pursuing the terrorist groups in order to protect the stability of the country and the security of the citizens.”

“But it is also determined to continue reforms. And is open to any help offered by friendly and brotherly states,” the statement published by Sana said.

The Turkish foreign minister arrived in Syria on Tuesday morning to deliver a message that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has summarized as Ankara’s having “run out of patience” with a crackdown that has killed, by the count of some Syrian opposition groups, more than 2,000 people.

The Associated Press reports:

The Obama administration is preparing to explicitly demand the departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad and hit his regime with tough new sanctions, U.S. officials said Tuesday as the State Department signaled for the first time that American efforts to engage the government are finally over.

The White House is expected to lay out the tougher line by the end of this week, possibly on Thursday, according to officials who said the move will be a direct response to Assad’s decision to step up the ruthlessness of the crackdown against pro-reform demonstrators by sending tanks into opposition hotbeds. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

President Barack Obama and other top U.S. officials previously had said Assad has “lost legitimacy” as a leader and that he either had to spearhead a transition to democracy or get out of the way. They had not specifically demanded that he step down. The new formulation will make it clear that Assad can no longer be a credible reformist and should leave power, the officials said.

Rana Kabbani writes:

One of two eye doctors are determining the future of Syria. The first is alive and kicking: son of a brutal military dictator; heir to a corrupt family junta that has ruled the country for 41 years. The second is a long-dead private citizen, buried at the bottom of his family’s modest garden.

Dr Hikmat Khani was head of Hama’s national hospital when, in 1982, his city was besieged and bombarded on the orders of Bashar Assad’s father Hafiz and his uncle Rif’at. To rout 1,500 armed Islamists there, the Assads killed 25,000 innocent civilians. Tens of thousands were rounded up and tortured. Young girls were gang-raped and women had their hands chopped off so their bracelets could be stolen more quickly after their men had been murdered.

The maimed lay on the streets of the half-flattened city, crying out in agony, as many eyewitnesses have recounted since. Dr Khani sought to help what wounded he could treat. For this, he was taken to the state porcelain factory, which had been turned into a detention centre. There, this renowned specialist was made an example of in front of the other prisoners. He had his right eye gouged out, then was left to bleed for three hours before being beaten to death. His broken mess of a body was sent to his pregnant wife, with his identity card nailed to his naked chest.

Today Hama is being bombarded in much the same way by Bashar and Maher, with weaponry paid for by an impoverished Syrian people through the stiff “defence tax”. It is thus that Deraa, Deir Ezzor, Qamishli, Homs, Hama, Latakia, Maarat al-Numan, Idlib, Jisr al-Shughour, Muadhamiya, Zabadani, Midan and all our other towns and cities and quarters have been made to subsidise the murder of their own sons and daughters.

Though all the undemocratic regimes of the Arab world are unremittingly cruel, Assad’s must stand out as the most inventively macabre. Its brutish, uncouth, illiterate and famously greedy Shabbiha death squads are being bussed around the country, with orders to rape, loot, burn, and kill. It is they who pull out the fingernails of young boys, they who torture them to death, castrate their bodies, only to force their grief-crazed parents to recant their accusations on the state’s propaganda television.

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Breivik embodies the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness

The philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, writes:

In Anders Behring Breivik’s ideological self-justification as well as in reactions to his murderous act there are things that should make us think. The manifesto of this Christian “Marxist hunter” who killed more than 70 people in Norway is precisely not a case of a deranged man’s rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of “Europe’s crisis” which serves as the (more or less) implicit foundation of the rising anti-immigrant populism – its very inconsistencies are symptomatic of the inner contradictions of this view.

The first thing that sticks out is how Breivik constructs his enemy: the combination of three elements (Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism), each of which belongs to a different political space: the Marxist radical left, multiculturalist liberalism, Islamic religious fundamentalism. The old fascist habit of attributing to the enemy mutually exclusive features (“Bolshevik-plutocratic Jewish plot” – Bolshevik radical left, plutocratic capitalism, ethnic-religious identity) returns here in a new guise.

Even more indicative is the way Breivik’s self-designation shuffles the cards of radical rightist ideology. Breivik advocates Christianity, but remains a secular agnostic: Christianity is for him merely a cultural construct to oppose Islam. He is anti-feminist and thinks women should be discouraged from pursuing higher education; but he favours a “secular” society, supports abortion and declares himself pro-gay.

His predecessor in this respect was Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch rightist populist politician who was killed in early May 2002, two weeks before elections in which he was expected to gain one fifth of the votes. Fortuyn was a paradoxical figure: a rightist populist whose personal features and even opinions (most of them) were almost perfectly “politically correct”. He was gay, had good personal relations with many immigrants, displayed an innate sense of irony – in short, he was a good tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic stance towards Muslim immigrants.

What Fortuyn embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness. Indeed, he was the living proof that the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin: ie we can have a racism which rejects the other with the argument that it is racist.

Furthermore, Breivik combines Nazi features (also in details – for example, his sympathy for Saga, the Swedish pro-Nazi folk singer) with a hatred of Hitler: one of his heroes is Max Manus, the leader of the Norway anti-Nazi resistance. Breivik is not so much racist as anti-Muslim: all his hatred is focused on the Muslim threat.

And, last but not least, Breivik is antisemitic but pro-Israel, as the state of Israel is the first line of defence against the Muslim expansion – he even wants to see the Jerusalem temple rebuilt. His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren’t too many of them – or, as he wrote in his manifesto: “There is no Jewish problem in western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US, on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.” He realises the ultimate paradox of a Zionist Nazi – how is this possible?

A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik’s attack: its mantra was that in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed “legitimate concerns about genuine problems” – mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, or, to quote the Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy “as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere”. The newspaper has since apologised for this editorial. (Incidentally, we are yet to hear a similar interpretation of the Palestinian acts of terror, something like “these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate Israeli politics”.)

A reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation: a “multicultural” Israel has no chance to survive; apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews: the implicit deal is “we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst”.

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Syrian death toll passes 2,000

The Guardian reports:

Syria defied Arab isolation and mounting international anger on Monday as President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces continued attacks on pro-democracy protesters across the country.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urged al-Assad to return his troops to barracks and release all prisoners, one of the bluntest demands yet made of the Syrian leader, after regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia led a rare chorus of Arab states in condemning the repression.

Reports from Deir al-Zor described artillery and heavy machinegun fire and snipers on roofs as troops and intelligence agents carried out mass arrests in the north-eastern city. On Sunday, 42 people were killed there, nudging the death total during five months of the uprising to more than 2,000.

Brian Whitaker writes:

Saudi Arabia has become the first Arab country to take a firm stand against the Syrian regime’s killing of civilians. In a statement issued late on Sunday night, King Abdullah demanded an end to the bloodshed and announced that the kingdom was recalling its ambassador from Damascus.

There are only two options for Syria, the king said: “Either it chooses wisdom willingly, or drifts into the depths of chaos and loss.” He called for “quick and comprehensive reforms” – “reforms that are not entwined with promises, but actually achieved so that our brothers the citizens in Syria can feel them in their lives”.

These are the strongest comments made so far by any Arab leader, and on that basis we should probably welcome them – especially if they encourage other countries in the region to take a stand. But, as one Twitter user noted, the king’s denunciation of the Assad regime does make him sound a bit like Al Capone condemning the Kray twins.

Back home, King Abdullah has shown no inclination towards the “quick and comprehensive reforms” that he is now urging upon Syria; Saudi Arabia has nothing to teach Syria about democracy, and protest demonstrations in the kingdom are totally banned. So the king’s message to Syria betrays more than a little irony.

Perhaps more troubling, though, is the negative role that Saudi Arabia has been playing during the “Arab spring” – a role that now it seems to be extending to include Syria.

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In valley where SEALs died, U.S. raids boost Taliban support

McClatchy reports:

The 30 U.S. soldiers, many of them Navy SEALs, who died Saturday in the U.S. military’s single biggest loss of the Afghan war, were operating in a Taliban-controlled valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids have won the insurgents popular support, area residents said Sunday.

The raids occur “every night. We are very much miserable,” said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament. “They are coming to our houses at night.”

Wardak runs a clinic about 3 miles from the rugged Tangi Valley where insurgents early Saturday shot down a helicopter carrying the U.S. troops, an Afghan translator and seven Afghan commandoes.

Night raids have become a significant part of the U.S. strategy aimed at weakening the insurgents and compelling their leaders to accept U.S. and Afghan government offers to hold talks on a political settlement of the decade-old war.

The Taliban have suffered heavy losses in the operations, which have soared since last year to an average of 340 per month, according to a Western intelligence official, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the issue.

There has been no apparent progress toward convening peace talks, but U.S. commanders defend the raids as effective in eliminating and capturing insurgents, and gaining intelligence that leads to other militants and arms caches.

“Eight-five percent are shots not fired, when you’re talking about night raids and disruption,” said the Western intelligence official. “Over 50 percent of the time they hit the target that they’re after, which shows the intelligence has been accurate.”

Afghan commandoes participate in all such operations, he added.

The tactic, however, has proven highly controversial with ordinary Afghans amid charges that they claim civilian lives. President Hamid Karzai has demanded that they stop.

Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban.

“There are night raids every day or every other day,” said a second doctor who asked not to be identified because he feared for his safety. He said he lives about 100 yards from the parched riverbed where the U.S. Chinook helicopter crashed.

“The Americans are committing barbaric acts in the area and this is the reason that the Taliban have influence,” he said.

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Israel’s Arab citizens must join the social struggle

Oudeh Basharat writes:

In days gone by there were long lines of cars at the gas stations on the eve of a rise in prices. The late comedian Dudu Topaz ridiculed the Israeli citizen who “puts one over” on the state by stocking up before the price increase, opportunistic individualism was at its zenith, and people used elbows energetically to obtain yet one more cheap liter of fuel.

Moreover, up until half an hour before the Rothschild intifada erupted, the economics reporters were still feeding us stories about the paradise in which we live, about the wonders of the Israeli economy that survived the worldwide crash. The ordinary citizen asked himself: If the economy is so far up, why are we so far down?

Now, it emerges, the economic press has been like a cunning high-school principal who allows five of 40 students to take the matriculation exams, and then boasts of 100 percent success. For the tycoons everything is glitzy whereas nobody ever goes to see the backyard. And all along representatives of the government and the “court” reporters explained that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and the masses who couldn’t make it until the end of the month were urged to stand tall and show their pride in this hollow patriotism.

After a while, however, the masses discovered that in the only democracy there is no voice except that of swinish capitalism, and an opposition functioning as the coalition’s watchdog. The dizzying economic “success” was the second episode in the series; in the first, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – during his term in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government – wiped out the welfare state, and the press told us that the Israeli economy had been saved. About this kind of paradox, people say: “The operation was a success, but the patient died.”

This month it has emerged that this dead man is alive and kicking – and hurting. “I wonder from where you came to know the struggle?” poet Abdel Rahman Abnoudi asked the young people at Tahrir Square in Cairo, the “mother” of all squares. There as here, after years of despondency, they had eulogized the young generation. They had convinced them it wasn’t worth struggling because there was no other way: either corrupt dictatorship or fanatical religious zealousness. In this country, they convinced the young people that there was nothing to be done: The choice was either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigodor Lieberman with the tycoons – or opposition leader Tzipi Livni with Lieberman and the tycoons.

The young people of Rothschild, like the young people of Tahrir, have proved that revolutions bubble like subterranean currents, and even when they are not visible they continue to flow. This outburst will grow even stronger and will start to raise fundamental questions about the connections between the huge investment in the settlements and the worsening plight of other citizens. This outburst will yet lead the Rothschild revolutionaries, who are fighting against the tycoons’ exploitation, to conclude that they cannot fight their exploiters and at the same time be the exploiters of the another people’s young population.

The Arab population, schooled in suffering and struggles, is watching what is happening on Rothschild with tremendous sympathy. The fight against exploitation has captured its heart – whether in Tel Aviv or in Aleppo. After the bitter experience that has been this population’s lot, the state is perceived as destructive, not constructive.

The Arab citizens and their leadership must now join the general struggle and insist that the government treat them as equal citizens. This integration will be a worthy opening shot in a process that will lead to deeper understanding of the civil essence of their struggle.

And let us return to Abnoudi, who warned the Tahrir revolutionaries about “the wolves.” This advice is also sound for the Rothschild revolutionaries. After all, in the tall buildings where the lights are burning nonstop, people are not necessarily working on rectifying injustice. Perhaps someone there is thinking about how to make the September tsunami happen sooner.

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News Corp.’s soft power in the U.S.

David Carr writes:

Over the last month, many Americans watched from a distance in horror or amusement as it became evident that the News Corporation regarded Britain’s legal and political institutions as its own private club.

That could never happen in the United States, right?

As it turns out, a News Corporation division has twice come under significant civil and criminal investigations in the United States, but neither inquiry went anywhere. Given what has happened in Britain with the growing phone-hacking scandal, it is worth wondering why.

Both cases involve News America Marketing, an obscure but lucrative division of the News Corporation that is a big player in the business of retail marketing, including newspaper coupon inserts and in-store promotions. The company has come under scrutiny for a pattern of conduct that includes below-cost pricing, paying customers not to do business with competitors and accusations of computer hacking.

News America Marketing came to control 90 percent of the in-store advertising business, according to Fortune, aided in part by a particularly quick and favorable antitrust decision made by the Justice Department in 1997. That year, the News Corporation announced it wanted to buy Heritage Media, a big competitor, for about $754 million in stock plus $600 million in assumed debt. The News Corporation said it would sell the broadcast properties and hang onto the marketing division, which serviced 40,000 groceries and other retailers.

The deal would make News America Marketing the dominant player in the business and, for that reason, the San Francisco field office of the Justice Department recommended to Washington that the News Corporation’s takeover bid be challenged on antitrust grounds. Typically, such a request from a field office would carry great weight in Washington and, at a minimum, delay the deal for months.

But the Justice Department brass overrode San Francisco’s objections and gave its blessing in just two weeks. So who ran the antitrust division at the Justice Department at the time? Joel Klein, who this year became an executive vice president at the News Corporation, head of its education division and a close adviser to Rupert Murdoch on the phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

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Enter the cyber-dragon

In the September issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Joseph Gross writes:

Lying there in the junk-mail folder, in the spammy mess of mortgage offers and erectile-dysfunction drug ads, an e-mail from an associate with a subject line that looked legitimate caught the man’s eye. The subject line said “2011 Recruitment Plan.” It was late winter of 2011. The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA. RSA is the security division of the high-tech company EMC. Its products protect computer networks at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, most top defense contractors, and a majority of Fortune 500 corporations.

The parent company disclosed the breach on March 17 in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The hack gravely undermined the reputation of RSA’s popular SecurID security service. As spring gave way to summer, bloggers and computer-security experts found evidence that the attack on RSA had come from China. They also linked the RSA attack to the penetration of computer networks at some of RSA’s most powerful defense-contractor clients—among them, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and L-3 Communications. Few details of these episodes have been made public.

The RSA and defense-contractor hacks are among the latest battles in a decade-long spy war. Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits. Because virtual attacks can be routed through computer servers anywhere in the world, it is almost impossible to attribute any hack with total certainty. Dozens of nations have highly developed industrial cyber-espionage programs, including American allies such as France and Israel. And because the People’s Republic of China is such a massive entity, it is impossible to know how much Chinese hacking is done on explicit orders from the government. In some cases, the evidence suggests that government and military groups are executing the attacks themselves. In others, Chinese authorities are merely turning a blind eye to illegal activities that are good for China’s economy and bad for America’s. Last year Google became the first major company to blow the whistle on Chinese hacking when it admitted to a penetration known as Operation Aurora, which also hit Intel, Morgan Stanley, and several dozen other corporations. (The attack was given that name because the word “aurora” appears in the malware that victims downloaded.) Earlier this year, details concerning the most sweeping intrusion since Operation Aurora were discovered by the cyber-security firm McAfee. Dubbed “Operation Shady rat,” the attacks (of which more later) are being reported here for the first time. Most companies have preferred not to talk about or even acknowledge violations of their computer systems, for fear of panicking shareholders and exposing themselves to lawsuits—or for fear of offending the Chinese and jeopardizing their share of that country’s exploding markets. The U.S. government, for its part, has been fecklessly circumspect in calling out the Chinese.

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