Category Archives: Lands

Pentagon reaches out to U.S. weapons manufacturers to find new ways to threaten Russia and China

Reuters reports: The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office plans to reach out to U.S. industry in about a month for ways to put existing weapons technologies to new uses as the department scrambles to maintain its competitive edge over Russia and China.

“We’re looking for things we can put our hands on today, go test today,” said Will Roper, director of the SCO, or what he called the Pentagon’s “take risk” office, said.

This is the first time the office is broadly going out to industry for specific ideas on how to repurpose existing weapons, which could result in lucrative new contracts.

The secretive Pentagon office was set up in August 2012 at the behest of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, then the deputy defense secretary, who worried that the U.S. military was not ready for a return to great power competition after years of fighting extremist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The office is now managing a nearly $1 billion dollar annual budget that is aimed at upsetting assumptions made by China and Russia about U.S. military capabilities. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS built the machinery of terror under Europe’s gaze

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The New York Times reports: The day he left Syria with instructions to carry out a terrorist attack in France, Reda Hame, a 29-year-old computer technician from Paris, had been a member of the Islamic State for just over a week.

His French passport and his background in information technology made him an ideal recruit for a rapidly expanding group within ISIS that was dedicated to terrorizing Europe. Over just a few days, he was rushed to a park, shown how to fire an assault rifle, handed a grenade and told to hurl it at a human silhouette. His accelerated course included how to use an encryption program called TrueCrypt, the first step in a process intended to mask communications with his ISIS handler back in Syria.

The handler, code-named Dad, drove Mr. Hame to the Turkish border and sent him off with advice to pick an easy target, shoot as many civilians as possible and hold hostages until the security forces made a martyr of him.

“Be brave,” Dad said, embracing him.

Mr. Hame was sent out by a body inside the Islamic State that was obsessed with striking Europe for at least two years before the deadly assaults in Paris last November and in Brussels this month. In that time, the group dispatched a string of operatives trained in Syria, aiming to carry out small attacks meant to test and stretch Europe’s security apparatus even as the most deadly assaults were in the works, according to court proceedings, interrogation transcripts and records of European wiretaps obtained by The New York Times. [Continue reading…]

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Brussels attacks: ‘Fight the Westerners’ text sent to youths in Molenbeek

The Guardian reports: Young men in the Molenbeek district of Brussels were sent messages over the weekend calling on them to “make the right choice” and “fight the westerners”.

The texts were sent on Sunday night from a prepaid account that could not be traced or replied to. It followed a video distributed on Facebook, since removed, apparently showing local youths celebrating the attacks in Brussels last week. The death toll from the bombings has risen to 35, Belgium’s health minister said on Monday.

The short SMS message written in French, which the Guardian has seen, says: “My brother, why not fight the westerners? Make the right choice in your life.”

The rapid use of technology to spread propaganda after the attacks will stoke fears that Islamic State is trying to use the heightened tension to recruit more disaffected youths.

It is not known how the recipients’ phone numbers were obtained, but community activists believe Isis handlers download all contacts from the phone books of new recruits and select young men of north African origin to follow up. [Continue reading…]

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Thomas Frank: The inequality sweepstakes

Reading Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined. And in case you’re wondering in which direction inequality is trending on Planet Earth, note that in 2010, it took 388 of the super-rich to equal the holdings of that bottom 50%. At this rate in the inequality sweepstakes, by 2030, just the top 10 billionaires might do the trick. Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work, Donald Trump doesn’t have to win the presidency for billionaires to stand triumphant on the American part of our planet. Hillary Clinton will do just fine, thank you.

Listen, Liberal is, in a sense, a history of how, from the Clintonesque 1990s on, the Democratic Party managed to ditch the working class (hello, Donald Trump!) and its New Deal tradition, throw its support behind a rising “professional” and technocratic class, and go gaga over Wall Street and those billionaires to come. In the process, its leaders fell in love with Goldman Sachs and every miserable trade pact that hit town, led the way in deregulating the financial system, and helped launch what Frank terms “the greatest wave of insider looting ever seen”; the party, that is, went Silicon Valley and left Flint, Michigan, to the Republicans.  Only a few years after Bill Clinton vacated the Oval Office the financial system he and his team had played such a role in deregulating had to be rescued, lock, stock, and barrel from ultimate collapse. Quite a record all in all. Put another way, as Frank makes clear, in these years the Democrats (with obvious exceptions) became a more or less traditional Republican party. And if the Democrats are now the party of inequality, then what in the world are the Republicans? Don’t even get me started on the cliff that crew walked off of.

In the following post, adapted from his new book, Frank does a typically brainy thing. Since we’ve all heard for years about how the Democrats have been stopped from truly pursuing their political program by Republican experts in political paralysis, he turns to a rare set of places where, in fact, the Republicans were incapable of getting in the way and… well, let him tell the story. Tom Engelhardt

The blue state model
How the Democrats created a “liberalism of the rich”
By Thomas Frank

[This piece has been adapted from Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books).]

When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds — their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior — when you press them on any of these things, they automatically reply that this is the best anyone could have done. After all, they had to deal with those awful Republicans, and those awful Republicans wouldn’t let the really good stuff get through. They filibustered in the Senate. They gerrymandered the congressional districts. And besides, change takes a long time. Surely you don’t think the tepid-to-lukewarm things Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have done in Washington really represent the fiery Democratic soul.

So let’s go to a place that does. Let’s choose a locale where Democratic rule is virtually unopposed, a place where Republican obstruction and sabotage can’t taint the experiment.

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Companies are leaving the West Bank as international boycott campaign gains ground

Vice News reports: For the past 28 years, the Israeli cosmetics giant Ahava has manufactured its line of Dead Sea mud-based skincare products in a settlement located in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But this month, the company announced it would build a new facility 10 miles to the south, just across the internationally recognized border separating Israel proper from the Palestinian territory.

Though the company did not link the move to political pressure, instead citing “expanding production needs due the success in marketing Ahava products around the world,” it has long been targeted by activists who protest Israeli companies operating in the West Bank, which much of the international community regards as illegally occupied.

Ahava is not alone — a number of companies have chosen to abandon their operations in the West Bank, according to a new report by the Israeli anti-occupation group Gush Shalom that was compiled from publicly available information and published as a wiki-entry.

Twenty years ago, Gush Shalom drew up a list of Israeli companies doing business across the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank that has been a sticking point in negotiations over a future Palestinian state. As of March, between 20 and 30 percent of those companies are no longer operating there. [Continue reading…]

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Nusra’s ambition to govern faces challenge from Syrian activists

Borzou Daragahi reports: Syria’s al-Qaeda branch is seeking to emulate its jihadi rival, ISIS, by establishing its own government in areas it controls.

Over the past year, the Nusra Front, a powerful and well-organized Syrian rebel army that is the country’s official arm of al-Qaeda, has shifted tactics from being a solely military force to one seeking to tighten its hold over areas under its control by seizing the reins of governance, including law enforcement and municipal affairs, in what its supporters have hinted could become its own emirate in the northwestern Idlib province.

“They switched from just being a military power to taking over services,” said Abu Yahya, nom de guerre of a Syrian activist in the city of Muraat al-Noman, in Idlib province. “Nusra is trying to build institutions and trying to oversee services. They have now developed a love for power.”

The group’s efforts are concentrated on the city of Idlib, which the regime surrendered last year as a coalition of Islamist rebel groups that included Nusra pushed its way into the city. Over the following months, Nusra began to muscle out other rebel groups when it came to running the city. It did the same in other parts of Idlib province, where it has sought to create an institution called the The Liberated Districts Administration (Idaret al Manateq al Muharrarra), in an area that includes the cities of Idlib, Reeha and Jusr al-Shughoor, which would give them direct control of taxation, sanitation, electricity, water and as well as municipal governance. [Continue reading…]

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Assad’s success in Palmyra dims prospects for political change in Syria

Charles Lister writes: The capture of Palmyra is an invaluable opportunity for the Assad regime and Russia to now proclaim themselves as capable and willing partners in the fight against ISIS. But we must not forget that the Assad regime purposefully ignored ISIS gains in Syria for nearly 18 months — April 2013 to August 2014 — as they proved an effective counterweight to the mainstream opposition. There is also bountiful evidence of the Assad regime’s deep and decades-long complicity in bolstering ISIS and its predecessor movements, for the purpose of manipulating them into shaping Syria’s domestic and foreign policy agendas. While there can be no doubting that ISIS’ loss of Palmyra represents a substantial strategic blow to their operations in Syria, this is the Assad regime’s first major victory against the group — after its presence on its territory for 3 years.

Events in Palmyra will also affect the viability of the political process in Geneva. Russia’s intervention has fundamentally transformed the balance of power on the ground and for the first time since mid-2013, the Assad regime is sitting comfortably in Damascus. Having recaptured Palmyra in a widely reported military operation conducted with Russian support, there is now no reason at all for Bashar al-Assad to even get close to considering a political transition. The next round of Geneva talks are scheduled to begin on April 11. Not only will this almost certainly be delayed, but the prospects for any progress on the substantive issue of political change look slim to none. [Continue reading…]

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Putin and Assad score a major victory against ISIS, after months targeting Syrian rebels opposed to ISIS

Aymenn Al-Tamimi writes: The retaking of the ancient city of Palmyra from the Islamic State (ISIS) by the Syrian regime backed with intense Russian airpower is predictably being hailed as a victory over terrorism. Symbolically, of course, the recapture of Palmyra allows for the regime and Russia to portray themselves as the defenders of civilization over barbarism, as ISIS had destroyed some of the most archaeological sites in the area last year. But what do the events tell us about Russia’s broader approach towards ISIS? What may unfold in the aftermath of Palmyra’s recapture?

Fighting in the vicinity of Palmyra has occurred ever since ISIS took the city in a swift offensive through the Homs desert last year in which regime forces melted away on multiple occasions without much of a fight. This was similar to the losses the regime experienced in Idlib province at the hands of rebel offensives in the same year, pointing to broader problems of manpower shortages facing the regime, which led to a shift in strategy focusing on the defense of perceived vital areas, including setting up of local militia formations such as Coastal Shield in Latakia and Homeland Shield in Suwayda’ designed to recruit locals to fight within their own areas. These calculations changed somewhat with the official commencement of Russian intervention in the fall of 2015 in the form of intense airstrikes, allowing the regime to go on the offensive in multiple areas. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan bombing: Who are Jamaat ul-Ahrar?

By Talat Farooq, University of Birmingham

The Easter Sunday suicide attack on Gulshan-e-Iqbal amusement park in Lahore, Pakistan has claimed more than 70 lives. A rescue services spokeswoman confirmed that at least 29 children, seven women and 34 men were killed and more than 300 were wounded. On the fateful day, the popular resort was crowded with people marking Easter.

Pakistan is in a state of shock and dismay as eye witnesses on television screens recalled scattered body parts and pools of blood across the park, and hospital officials tweeted calls for blood donations.

Jamaat-ul Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), claimed responsibility for the attack. Ahsanullah Ahsan, the spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, said the group had targeted Christians celebrating Easter, although the police are still investigating the claim. Warning Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that “we have entered Lahore”, the capital of the Punjab province and the political power base of Sharif, the militant group threatened further attacks.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has so far launched several attacks on Pakistani civilians and security forces in recent months in an apparent attempt to boost its profile among Pakistan’s increasingly fractured Islamist militants, who since June 2014 have been at the receiving end of a fully-fledged military operation in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). So far, the military has killed and arrested hundreds of suspected militants in the operation.

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Thousands of protesters in Pakistan’s capital call for Sharia law

The Associated Press reports: Hundreds of Islamic extremists resumed protests in Pakistan’s capital on Tuesday over the execution of a man who killed a secular governor, in a show of defiance amid a government crackdown following a suicide attack two days earlier.

The rally by Pakistan’s Sunni Tehreek group brought more than 10,000 protesters into the streets of Islamabad on Sunday, where they clashed with police. On Tuesday, local police official Mohammad Kashif said some 700 remained, bringing parts of the capital to a standstill.

The protesters are demanding strict Shariah law after the hanging of police officer Mumtaz Qadri, who killed Gov. Salman Taseer in 2011 over his opposition to the country’s far-ranging blasphemy laws. The protesters are also demanding the hanging of a Christian woman Taseer had defended against blasphemy allegations. [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s shattered peace, Europe’s struggling values

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Judy Dempsey writes: The terrorist attacks that have killed at least 31 people in Brussels and injured some 270 others on March 22 have changed Europe’s perception about itself. Until now, despite so many calculated murders of many innocent civilians in Madrid, London, Copenhagen, and Paris— among other cities across Europe—since 2004, European leaders have adopted ad hoc measures to counter this new challenge. What makes Brussels different is that there’s now an acceptance by EU leaders that these attacks will continue.

All the measures taken so far have fallen way short of confronting the threat. European leaders didn’t want to admit that the peace that reigned across Europe since the end of World War II had been shattered. As Elmar Brok, the German chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee said after the Brussels bombings, “This is a new form of war that Europe has to deal with.”

This is the new and uncomfortable reality that European leaders now have to accept and respond to. It is a reality that is not going to go away as long as the so-called Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and their battalions of supporters inside and outside Europe continue their mission to attack everything that Europe stands for. It is Europe’s liberal values and open society that the perpetrators of these attacks, many of them born in Europe, are taking advantage of. Those values are now at stake. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Even before the shock of last week’s deadly Brussels bombings, gallows humor had taken hold in the square kilometer around Schuman Roundabout, the heart of the city’s European district.

It’s been a miserable start to the year for the European Union with the unresolved migration crisis poisoning relations among member governments, negotiations to avert a British exit getting trickier, Greece’s debt crisis dragging on, and Islamist militant attacks exposing serial cross-border security lapses.

A succession of emergency summits of the 28 national leaders has fueled an atmosphere of permanent crisis. And political weather forecasters say worse storms may be on the way.

Among staff working for EU institutions, long used to being unloved scapegoats for national politicians, the mood oscillates between despond and defiance.

“The European Union is like the orchestra that played on the Titanic,” Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said in January, urging EU officials to redirect their focus to promoting growth and employment instead of “this mistaken bureaucratic approach”.

Officials have been strictly instructed not to do or say anything that may affect Britain’s knife-edge June 23 referendum on whether to remain in the bloc. [Continue reading…]

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Brussels terror attacks: a continent-wide crisis that threatens core European ideals

By Fiona de Londras, University of Birmingham

The attacks of March 22 in Brussels were shocking, but not surprising. They reinforced what many have known for years: Belgium has a serious problem with terrorism.

For a long time, security analysts have expressed anxiety about the depth and extent of radicalisation and fundamentalism in the country. It is thought that Belgium has the highest per capita rate of foreign terrorist fighters of any EU country. A February 2016 “high-end estimate” puts that number at 562 out of a population of just over 11 million.

Last November it was revealed that some of the Paris attackers had Belgian connections and were known to the security forces there, and Brussels was virtually locked down for almost a week.

Over recent years there have been attacks on Belgian museums, supermarkets and trains, raising questions about why the country cannot seem to effectively tackle the challenges of insecurity.

As ever, the answer is not a simple one. Rather, as observed by Tim King, Belgium’s “failures are perhaps one part politics and government; one part police and justice; one part fiscal and economic. In combination they created the vacuum that is being exploited by jihadi terrorists”.

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Lahore bombing is faction’s boldest bid to stake claim as Pakistan’s most violent terrorists

The Guardian reports: Christian leaders have expressed horror at the massacre of more than 70 people in Lahore on Easter Sunday, the most significant day in the church calendar.

The Vatican said Pope Francis was praying for the victims and their families in the aftermath of the suicide bombing, which “casts a shadow of sadness and anguish on the feast of the Easter”. [Continue reading…]

Jason Burke reports: The bombing of Lahore’s most popular park is the bloodiest attempt yet by a new Islamic extremist faction to establish itself as the most aggressive and violent of the many such groups active in Pakistan.

The target was the country’s long-beleaguered Christian community, according to a credible claim of responsibility from Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a group founded about two years ago after a split within the fragmented movement known as the Pakistan Taliban.

However, many Muslims were among the scores of victims when a suicide bomber detonated a nail-filled device near a children’s playground. This is unlikely to bother the perpetrators.

Extremist clerics have made sustained efforts to find theological justification for such casualties in recent decades and, though such arguments are contested by mainstream scholars, they are preached in hardline mosques and taught in many religious schools in Pakistan.

The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, like the broader Pakistan Taliban, follow an extremist branch of the rigorously conservative Deobandi strand of Islam which, along with equally intolerant schools of practice influenced by those in the Gulf, has made major inroads in Pakistan in recent years at the expense of more open-minded local traditions. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s military intervention in Syria expected to yield $6-7 billion worth of new arms contracts

RT reports: The $500 million Russia spent on the military operation in Syria may soon pay off for the Kremlin, reports business daily Kommersant, as Moscow expects $6-7 billion worth of new arms contracts.
According to the newspaper’s source, close to military exports and technical cooperation, potential customers are looking to buy the weapons proved in action. These are armaments in the inventory of Russian military or already bought by another country.

“In Syria, we achieved two goals. On the one hand, we demonstrated the combat capabilities of our military technology and attracted the attention of customers. On the other hand we tested more than half of our fleet in combat conditions,” the source said. [Continue reading…]

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Google search technique aided N.Y. dam hacker in Iran

The Wall Street Journal reports: An Iranian charged with hacking the computer system that controlled a New York dam used a readily available Google search process to identify the vulnerable system, according to people familiar with the federal investigation.

The process, known as “Google dorking,” isn’t as simple as an ordinary online search. Yet anyone with a computer and Internet access can perform it with a few special techniques. Federal authorities say it is increasingly used by hackers to identify computer vulnerabilities throughout the U.S.

Hamid Firoozi, who was charged Thursday by federal prosecutors, stumbled onto the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye Brook, N.Y., in 2013 by using the technique to identify an unprotected computer that controlled the dam’s sluice gates and other functions, said people briefed on the investigation. Once he identified the dam, he allegedly hacked his way in using other methods.

“He was just trolling around, and Google-dorked his way onto the dam,” one person familiar with the investigation said.

The search technique has been around for about 10 years, said cybersecurity experts, and is neither illegal nor always malicious. It is primarily used by “white hat hackers,” computer specialists who test an organization’s computer system for vulnerabilities, said Michael Bazzell, a former computer crime investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi reporter jailed for five years for insulting rulers

Reuters reports: Saudi Arabia has sentenced a journalist to five years in jail for insulting the kingdom’s rulers and “inciting public opinion” on Twitter, Amnesty International said.

Amnesty described the sentencing of Alaa Brinji on Thursday as “a clear violation of international law” and said it showed intolerance of the right to peaceful expression.

Officials at Saudi Arabia’s Justice Ministry could not be reached for comment over the weekend.

Against the background of regional turmoil, the ultra conservative Sunni Muslim country has issued tougher penalties against all forms of dissent. [Continue reading…]

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Soldier’s shooting of Palestinian sets off uproar in Israel

The Associated Press reports: Amateur video appearing to show an Israeli soldier killing an already wounded Palestinian attacker sparked uproar in Israel on Sunday, reflecting the deep divisions in the country following six months of violence.

As the Israeli military pressed on with an investigation, nationalistic politicians accused the army of abandoning the soldier, while political doves bemoaned the erosion of the nation’s morals. Palestinians, meanwhile, said the shooting proved their claims that Israel is guilty of using excessive force and carrying out extrajudicial killings.

The shooting took place last Thursday in Hebron, the volatile West Bank city that has been a focal point of the latest wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence. The military said two Palestinians stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier before troops shot and killed the pair. [Continue reading…]

Human Rights Watch reports: The B’Tselem volunteer who filmed the video, Imad Abu Shamsiyyeh, told Human Rights Watch in a phone interview that Israeli forces had threatened him both at the scene and later, when he went to give a statement to the military. A few minutes after he filmed the shooting from the roof of a nearby building, he said, “more journalists gathered on the roof, and the Israeli soldiers noticed us. They pointed their guns at us and screamed at us to get down. Soldiers came into the building and told the [owner] not to allow people there or the family would pay the price.”

Abu Shamsiyyeh said that after B’Tselem shared the video with military investigators, the military asked him to give a statement. During questioning at a military office in Hebron, Abu Shamsiyyeh said he felt the interrogator was trying to intimidate him to make him say that he had not filmed the video:

He told me, ‘How will you benefit from this video? It got a lot of publicity. Your name is known to everyone. Who is going to protect you and your family from right-wing Israelis? Remember you live in [Tel Rumeida], surrounded by Israeli settlers, who will be able to protect you there?’ I felt that I was being threatened. They took the original footage from me.

Abu Shamsiyyeh said he had received two phone calls on March 24 from a Hebrew-speaker, calling from a private number, but did not understand what was said. “I feel in danger and my children are afraid,” Abu Shamsiyyeh told Human Rights Watch. “I’m not letting them out of the house. I’m afraid of walking in the street.” [Continue reading…]

Anshel Pfeffer writes: It was a moment made for television. Abed Fatah al-Sharif could be seen lying on the ground in Hebron, after he and a friend had been shot while trying to stab Israeli soldiers. Still moving, 21­-year-old Sharif lay there without receiving medical attention for several minutes, until a helmeted Israeli soldier, in the presence of his officers, walked up and shot him in the head.

Just like that – what looks like a summary execution in the middle of the day, on camera.

You would have expected the killing of Sharif to be headline news around the world, not only an internal debate over the battlefield morals of the Israel Defense Forces, as it has in the last four days. The IDF Spokesman Unit was prepared for a media onslaught, notified in advance through operational channels of the incident.

By the time the footage, taken by a field worker of human rights NGO B’Tselem, landed in the journalists’ inboxes, a statement had already been prepared announcing that the soldier had been arrested and his actions, which were contrary to “the IDF’s values,” were under criminal investigation. It took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few hours but eventually he came out with a similar statement, distancing the IDF and its values from what was seen on the screen.

But as far as the foreign media was concerned, they need not have bothered. The foreign correspondents stationed in Israel dutifully filed their reports, but in a week in which Europe was still in shock from the devastating Brussels attacks their story barely had a chance. Add to the continent’s news agenda that day the conviction in The Hague of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for charges of genocide and the American media’s preoccupation with Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency as well as with their current president, Barack Obama, watching baseball in Cuba and doing the tango in Argentina, while trying to get as far as possible from the Middle East.

When the officials in charge of Israel’s global PR saw on Friday the daily summaries of the previous 24 hours in the world media, they heaved a sigh of relief. With the exception of Al Jazeera, the Hebron killing didn’t feature prominently on any of the main news channels, in the news bulletins of major networks or on the front pages of influential newspapers. It was relegated deep in to the inside pages and low down on the websites’ home pages.

“My report got quite a lot of clicks” said one reporter for a top news-site. ”But it didn’t make it into our top-ten news stories. There was just way too much happening elsewhere.” And if the media isn’t interested, then foreign politicians and diplomats won’t be making much of a fuss either. Perhaps even if it hadn’t taken place on a such a heavy news day we may have been surprised at the relatively low level of international media interest. After all, the global audience has become inured in the last three years to much more distressing images of ISIS beheadings, immolations and explosions of prisoners.

The improved professionalism in recent years of the IDF Spokesman’s Unit’s foreign media branch also played a role. They didn’t try to duck the issue or stonewall the reporters. Any hint of a cover up would probably have generated a few more headlines. But then after all, the world has also grown sick of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and hardly expects better of us anymore.

Some Israelis are certainly happy that the world has more burning issues to deal with and may even be experiencing a feeling of schadenfreude that this time the Europeans have too many dead bodies of their own to be interested in those here. Not only is such an attitude ugly and callous, but Israelis may find that living in one of the areas where the world media has lost interest in its cruelties is not such a great a thing, even if the coverage is sometimes biased and disproportional.

A world which is no longer shocked by Israeli cruelty towards Palestinians probably won’t be that excited when the cruelty goes the other way either. [Continue reading…]

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How the Syrian revolt became armed

In an excerpt from their book, Burning Country, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami write: The Bashar al-Assad regime has burned Syria with artillery, Scud missiles, barrel bombs and sarin gas. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council, it has committed “the crimes against humanity of extermination; murder; rape or other forms of sexual violence; torture; imprisonment; enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts.” Assad is responsible for the lion’s share of the violence, but criminal and authoritarian elements in the opposition’s Free Army and Islamic Front have contributed to the terror too. And the third force — the transnational Sunni jihadists, particularly ISIS — has murdered surrendered soldiers, opposition activists, journalists and gays, while subjecting religious minorities to forcible conversion or sexual slavery. Syria’s ancient heritage — most famously Palmyra — has been pulverized. Somewhere between 300,000 and half a million Syrians are dead. Almost twelve million have been displaced. None of this is pretty.

At the same time, coexistent with the horror, some Syrian communities are practicing democracy, organizing themselves for practical rather than ideological purposes, debating everything, publishing independent newspapers, running independent radio stations, and producing art, music and writing on a massive scale. This much more positive story is largely unknown outside the country. And that’s one reason why I, a British-Syrian novelist, and Leila al-Shami, a British-Syrian activist, wrote our book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.

One of the supposed reasons for the American and British invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was to bring democracy to the Arabs. In Syria in 2016 there are over 400 local councils, most of them democratically elected, and most of us in the West have never heard of them.

Revolutionary Syrian voices have been drowned by war noise, inaccurate grand narratives and simplistic assumptions. Currently under full-scale Russian and Iranian military assault, they are now in danger of elimination. We may well end up with Putin’s preferred choice — only Assad and the jihadists left standing. So for the historical record, we should know that another alternative existed, and one of rare intelligence and courage. And for our children’s sake, we need to better understand the escalating Syrian tragedy, and to encourage our leaders to do better. [Continue reading…]

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