Category Archives: Lands

How does it feel to be told you are welcome in your own country?

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Ever since I became a U.S. citizen, I’ve got a kick out of the fact that when re-entering this country (after visits to the UK), after presenting my passport, the immigration official commonly returns it to me, saying: “welcome back.”

Maybe this happens more often for travelers coming through laid-back Atlanta than somewhere like New York City, but it’s an endearing friendly touch where one otherwise confronts the cold face of bureaucracy and security.

Across the globe, crossing a border tends to be a dehumanizing experience when who we are is so sharply defined by a piece of paper.

As a dual national and British citizen, it’s frankly unimaginable that a representative of the government there would offer any kind of greeting.

Once back in the U.S., however, I would find it a bit disturbing if a fellow citizen wanted to reassure me that I’m welcome here, since, supposedly, we both share equal rights and an equal claim to American identity.

Even so, since I wasn’t born here and since I “have an accent” (to which I like to respond: who doesn’t?), it’s not difficult for me to understand why I might be viewed by some Americans as an outsider. Indeed, the term “naturalization” has always struck me as being an oxymoron. An innate attribute is either there or it isn’t — I don’t see how it can be inserted.

For that reason, I’m inclined to defer moderately to those Americans who feel like an American who was born in this country is in some sense more American than those of us who were born elsewhere.

That shouldn’t imply any discrimination in terms of status or rights — it’s simply an observation about depth of enculturation.

Which brings me to Muslim Americans, a large proportion of whom were indeed born in this country and have never lived anywhere else.

When someone such as Mark Zuckerberg reaches out to Muslims and says, “I want you to know that you are always welcome here,” I realize this kind of message is well-intended, but it isn’t deeply inclusive.

One American should never be so presumptuous as to tell another American that they are welcome here.

What is called for at this time is something much more radical. What is being contested is the meaning of solidarity.

Some Americans are saying that we now need to stand together to protect ourselves from foreign threats. This kind of unity divides humanity into two camps: Americans and non-Americans. And this division undercuts the very notion of humanity.

It becomes clear then, that the actual rift here is between those for whom their experience of being American is subordinate to their experience of being human, and those for whom their identity as Americans, trumps all others.

Is someone who gives such preeminence to national identity, really capable of any genuine expression of solidarity?

If you’re ability to empathize with another person depended on first knowing what kind of citizenship they held or which religion they practiced, how could such empathy be heartfelt?

I have to wonder whether those Americans who are afraid of Muslims are not also, to a lesser degree, afraid of each other?

Empathy is the core human recognition. It is the knowledge that your experience of pain is the same as mine; that love, joy, grief, and anger are universal emotions.

Where this knowledge is lacking, or where it gets buried beneath a rigid national identity, xenophobia and Islamophia are merely symptomatic of a degradation of an underlying sense of humanity.

Americans who do not see themselves as indivisibly part of humanity, should be less concerned about how they protect America than what they think it means to be human.

And since so many American-firsters describe themselves as Christians, they might begin a process of self-inquiry by reminding themselves that according to their own belief system, they are the descendants of a human lineage that traces back to a single source preceding all national identities.

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Iran’s October missile test violated UN ban

Reuters reports: Iran violated a U.N. Security Council resolution in October by test-firing a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, a team of sanctions monitors said, leading to calls in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday for more sanctions on Tehran.

The White House said it would not rule out additional steps against Iran over the test of the medium-range Emad rocket.

The Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Iran said in a confidential report, first reported by Reuters, that the launch showed the rocket met its requirements for considering that a missile could deliver a nuclear weapon.

“On the basis of its analysis and findings the Panel concludes that Emad launch is a violation by Iran of paragraph 9 of Security Council resolution 1929,” the panel said.

Diplomats said the rocket test on Oct. 10 was not technically a violation of the July nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, but the U.N. report could put U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration in an awkward position. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is a revolution

Scott Atran writes: As pundits and politicians stoked the recent shootings in California into an existential threat; as French troops were deployed in Paris; as Belgian police locked down Brussels, and US and Russian planes intensified air attacks in Syria following yet another slaughter perpetrated in the name of the so-called Islamic State, it was easy to lose sight of a central fact. Amid the bullets, bombs and bluster, we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our efforts often appear to contribute to it.

What accounts for the failure of ‘The War on Terror’ and associated efforts to counter the spread of violent extremism? The failure starts with reacting in anger and revenge, engendering more savagery without stopping to grasp the revolutionary character of radical Arab Sunni revivalism. This revival is a dynamic, countercultural movement of world-historic proportions spearheaded by ISIS, (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). In less than two years, it has created a dominion over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres and millions of people. And it possesses the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force since the Second World War.

What the United Nations community regards as senseless acts of horrific violence are to ISIS’s acolytes part of an exalted campaign of purification through sacrificial killing and self-immolation: Know that Paradise lies under the shade of swords, says a hadith, or saying of the Prophet; this one comes from the Sahih al-Bukhari, a collection of the Prophet’s sayings considered second only to the Qu’ran in authenticity and is now a motto of ISIS fighters.

This is the purposeful plan of violence that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-anointed Caliph, outlined in his call for ‘volcanoes of jihad’: to create a globe-spanning jihadi archipelago that will eventually unite to destroy the present world and create a new-old world of universal justice and peace under the Prophet’s banner. A key tactic in this strategy is to inspire sympathisers abroad to violence: do what you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are, whenever possible.

To understand the revolution, my research team has conducted dozens of structured interviews and behavioural experiments with youth in Paris, London and Barcelona, as well as with captured ISIS fighters in Iraq and members of Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria). We also focused on youth from distressed neighbourhoods previously associated with violence or jihadi support – for example, the Paris suburbs of Clichy-sous-Bois and Épinay-sur-Seine, the Moroccan neighbourhoods of Sidi Moumen in Casablanca and Jamaa Mezuak in Tetuán.

While many in the West dismiss radical Islam as simply nihilistic, our work suggests something far more menacing: a profoundly alluring mission to change and save the world. [Continue reading…]

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Trump and Le Pen grow in strength with the help of ISIS

Roger Cohen writes: America, like Europe, is rattled by Islamic State terrorism and unsure how to respond to the black-flagged death merchants. Its polarized politics seem broken. The right of Donald Trump and the right of France’s Marine Le Pen overlap on terrorism and immigration. On the American left, Bernie Sanders sounds like nothing so much as a European social democrat. But that’s another story.

Le Pen is now a serious candidate for the French presidency in 2017. Her strong first-round performance in regional elections was not matched in the second round. She faded. But as with Trump, she answers the popular call for an end to business as usual after two Paris massacres this year in which the Islamic State had a role. The three jihadists who killed 90 Friday-night revelers in the Bataclan club were French citizens believed to have been trained in Syria.

“Islamist fundamentalism must be annihilated,” Le Pen says. People roar. “France must ban Islamist organizations,” she says. People roar. It must “expel foreigners who preach hatred in our country as well as illegal migrants who have nothing to do here.” People roar.

There is no question Le Pen is being taken seriously in France. Europe’s watchword is vigilance. Its entire postwar reconstruction has been premised on the conviction that peace, integration, economic union and the welfare state were the best insurance against the return to power of the fascist right.

That conviction is shaken. The rise of the Islamic State, and the Western inability to contain it, leads straight to the Islamophobia in which Trump and Le Pen traffic with success. It would be hard to imagine an atmosphere better suited to the politics of fear. Americans say they are more fearful of terrorism than at any time since 9/11.

“Every time things get worse, I do better,” Trump says. He does. They may get still worse. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s dispassion and Kerry’s wishful thinking on Syria

Frederic C. Hof writes: President Obama recently told reporters in Manila that he cannot “foresee a situation in which we can end the civil war in Syria while Assad remains in power.” But according to the president, “it may take some months for the Russians and the Iranians and frankly some members of the Syrian government and ruling elites within the regime to recognize the truths that I just articulated.” Syrian President Bashar al- Assad himself told Italian state television that the diplomatic process supposedly launched in Vienna to transition away from him is nonsense. According to Syria’s barrel-bomber in chief, “nothing can start before defeating the terrorists who occupy parts of Syria.” “Terrorist,” according to Assad, is anyone opposing him.

So much of Washington’s Syria policy has rested on wishing and hoping that others would recognize objective truths and act accordingly. The list goes back to 2011: Assad should choose to be part of the solution rather than the problem; Assad should step aside for the good of Syria; Assad should not use chemical weapons on his own people lest he cross a bright red line; Assad should read the words of the 2012 Geneva Final Communique and prepare to pack; Moscow should realize its military intervention in Syria will alienate it from the Sunni Muslim world; Iran should grasp the chance to become a normal state and a force for regional stability; everyone should recognize the incompatibility of uniting Syrians against the Islamic State with a continuing political role for Assad.

No doubt Syrians, Russians and Iranians would be much better off, and the world a safer place, if the president’s “truths” were taken to heart by their political leaders. Alas, these truths are not regarded by his adversaries — and, yes, they are his adversaries — as true. And even if they are objectively true, they are not self-actualizing. Yet this administration sometimes sees the alpha and omega of foreign policy as delivering the lecture and hoping the students get it. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s media war

Elizabeth Dickinson writes: The driver stops on a crowded, dusty road lined with cars. Used SUVs and sedans are parked two deep in front of tired warehouses bearing sun-bleached signs for a shipping company and a tire store. “Is it here?” I credulously ask the chauffeur who was dispatched to bring me to this desolate stretch of road. “Yes, wait,” he says, pointing as a man weaves his way towards us. I get out and follow the man to one of the warehouses’ unmarked doors. After passing through a lobby that smells of cigarette smoke and mint tea, we push through a second, locked door and into the newsroom of Orient TV, a Syrian satellite channel run and broadcast from Dubai.

The discreet exterior is no accident. Syria’s media is at war, and with its $1.5 million monthly budget, dozens of correspondents, and four regional bureaus, Orient TV is in the middle of it.

As the Syrian conflict has unspooled over the last four years, Orient TV has earned a reputation as an opposition bulwark. A Syrian automotive exporting mogul named Ghassan Aboud founded the channel in Damascus in 2009, intending to broadcast movies and frothy serial drama programs.* But since the 2011 Arab Spring, he has used the channel to become an outspoken advocate of rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad. In addition to Orient TV, he bankrolls a chain of field hospitals in Syria. He has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money in the form of humanitarian aid, advocated an anti-government stance to policymakers across Western capitals, and trained a legion of young journalists in the opposition.

Along the way, Orient TV’s evolution has tracked that of the broader Syrian media. Like much of the Arab Spring, Syria’s revolution began with a flood of optimism about independent, citizen-driven news. When protesters thronged the streets, obtuse state television and radio networks played patriotic songs on loop, while satellite channels like Orient TV ran grainy cellphone videos of police firing on peaceful demonstrations. By evading censorship, platforms like Twitter and Facebook achieved two things Syria’s tightly-controlled media never had before: They gave the political opposition a voice, and they exposed to the world Syria’s brutal police state.

Within weeks, social media had helped topple decades-old despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. Orient TV, like so many broadcasters covering the uprisings, tapped into this new pool of readymade sources on the ground. Its journalists built a database of as many as 9,000 Syrian activists ready to send in video and tips. International NGOs and foundations sent smartphones to activists and deployed media trainers to advise them on Skype. A new generation of citizen journalists was born, helping to grow Syria’s mobile phone penetration rate from just 46 percent in 2011 to nearly ubiquitous today.

Yet four years later, the much-vaunted media revolution hasn’t delivered the freedom or the plurality it promised. As unarmed demonstrations gave way to conventional warfare, the media, too, entered the fray. The number of citizen sources grew, but their audiences fragmented. Opposition, regime, jihadist, and ethnic media today rarely resemble one another; the stories they tell speak less to a shared reality than to the fissures between different versions of the prevailing narrative.

These days, every militia and brigade has its own YouTube channel, theme song, and social media network. And as armed groups have grown to resemble media organizations, the media has started looking like militias too: partisan, sectarian, and driven by hate speech. On social media particularly, but in the established media as well, broadcasts don’t just report the violence. With inflammatory language and provocative storylines, they actively incite it.

Orient TV has not been immune to these trends. The channel was a voice of reason in the early days of the uprising, and remains among the most professionally produced and one of the few to have reporters on the ground, breaking news few others can. But Orient TV, which describes itself as a non-partisan opposition channel, also took a side. Critics see a station that panders to a limited, Sunni revolutionary subset, adopting sectarian lingo to speak to and about most everyone else.

Syria is hardly the first conflict in which the media landscape has become a battlefield. But the rapid expansion of social media in the last few years has sped the process. The sheer volume of information the conflict has produced, and the vast number of people who are shaping it, mean that everyone is both citizen and journalist, partisan and reporter. The media war is just as real as any fighting on the ground, because many of the actors are the same. Ending the military conflict likely won’t be possible until the information battle dies down.

This explains why Orient TV operates behind unmarked doors, tucked away a dozen miles from the flashy Dubai neighborhood hosting most other satellite stations. The channel’s stance hasn’t just won it critics, but also enemies. Orient TV and its staff have been targeted by the Syrian government, the Islamic State (ISIS), and many others.

And Orient TV is fighting back. “The journalists don’t take it just as professionals; they take the revolution as their cause,” says Aboud, the owner. “They take it personally because Syria is their home.” [Continue reading…]

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Russian airstrikes force a halt to aid in Syria, triggering a new crisis

The Washington Post reports: Aid agencies are warning of a worsening humanitarian crisis in northern Syria as sharply intensified Russian airstrikes paralyze aid supply routes, knock out bakeries and hospitals and kill and maim civilians in growing numbers.

Air attacks have escalated significantly since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane along the Turkey-Syria border on Nov. 24, the aid agencies say, with Russia responding to the incident by stepping up its effort to crush the anti-government rebellion in the insurgent-held provinces bordering Turkey.

Among the targets that have been hit are the border crossings and highways used to deliver humanitarian supplies from Turkey, forcing many aid agencies to halt or curtail their aid operations and deepening the misery for millions of people living in the affected areas, according to a report this month by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Hospitals and health facilities also have been struck, reducing the availability of medical care for those injured in the bombings. According to the U.N. report, at least 20 medical facilities have been hit nationwide in Syria since Russia launched its air war on Sept. 30. [Continue reading…]

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Russia grapples with its own ‘Jihadi John’ as Moscow steps up role in Syria

The Wall Street Journal reports: For Russia, it was a shock: A blue-eyed Siberian with shaggy brown hair raged against his homeland in an Islamic State video before slicing the throat of a fellow Russian accused of being a spy.

The executioner, identified by Russian media and his friends as a 28-year-old named Anatoly Zemlyanka from the city of Noyabrsk, has risen to infamy in Russia since Islamic State released the undated video from Syria on Dec. 2.

Russian authorities, while not confirming his identity in the propaganda video, have put him on Interpol’s wanted list. Russian media have dubbed him Jihadi Tolik, based on the Russian nickname for Anatoly, in describing his apparent transformation from Siberian college student to the Slavic face of Islamic State brutality.

Mr. Zemlyanka’s image has spurred comparisons to Jihadi John, or Mohammed Emwazi—the British militant whose appearances in videos presiding over the beheadings of Western hostages while leveling demands at President Barack Obama made him a prime propaganda tool for Islamic State. But instead of speaking English and condemning Mr. Obama, Mr. Zemlyanka is speaking in Russian and berating Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Listen to me, Putin, you dog, and let your henchmen hear me too!” Mr. Zemlyanka says in the video. “Before your arrival, the Assad regime bombed us, then America bombed us with its cowardly coalition, and now you’re bombing us. But nothing has come of it, apart from the fortitude and conviction that we’re on the side of truth.”

Islamic State is increasingly pointing its propaganda apparatus at Russia, as the Kremlin steps up its military support for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. The campaign appears aimed at raising Russian fears of possible further retribution from Islamic State, particularly after the suspected Oct. 31 bombing of a Russian charter flight traveling to St. Petersburg from Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh. [Continue reading…]

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Putin signs law allowing Russia to overturn rulings of international rights courts

Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin has signed a law allowing Russia’s Constitutional Court to decide whether or not to implement rulings of international human rights courts.

The law, published on Tuesday on the government website, enables the Russian court to overturn decisions of the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) if it deems them unconstitutional.

Human Rights Watch has said the law is designed to thwart the ability of victims of human rights violations in Russia to find justice through international bodies.

The law comes after the ECHR ruled in 2014 that Russia must pay a 1.9 billion euro ($2.09 billion) award to shareholders of the defunct Yukos oil company, a verdict that added to financial pressure on Moscow as it struggles with shrinking revenues due to tumbling oil prices and Western sanctions.

The ECHR said it had received 218 complaints against Russia in 2014 and that it had found 122 cases in which Moscow had violated the European Convention on Human Rights, including the deportation of Georgian citizens in 2006 and the incarceration of defendants in metal cages during Russian court hearings. [Continue reading…]

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Saudis ridiculed over ‘anti-terror’ coalition — new alliance likely to stir up sectarianism

By Brian Whitaker,

Amid widespread derision, Saudi Arabia has announced that it will lead a new military coalition to protect “the Islamic world” against terrorism.

Speaking at a news conference in Riyadh, deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman – the king’s favourite son and chief architect of the military disaster in Yemen – said the move stems from “the Islamic world’s vigilance in fighting this disease which has harmed the Islamic world first and is now harming the international community as a whole”.Saudi Arabia has put itself in charge of the coalition and, according to Prince Mohammed, “There will be an operations room in Riyadh for the coordination and support of efforts to fight terrorism in many parts of the Islamic world.”

More than 30 predominantly Muslim countries have allegedly signed up to join the coalition (full list here). They include the other Gulf monarchies, but with the notable exception of Oman which also previously declined to get involved in the war in Yemen.

The move seems partly intended as a response to complaints that Saudi Arabia is not doing enough to combat terrorism and that it is more interested in pursuing its quarrel with Iran than fighting ISIS. There has also been growing criticism of its efforts, over many years, to promote the intolerant religious ideology that now fuels ISIS and similar organisations elsewhere.

However, it looks as though the anti-terror coalition may nevertheless be designed to pursue a sectarian agenda. Judging by its reported membership, the “Islamic world” does not include Iran, the main representative of Shia Islam, or Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria – though it does reportedly include Lebanon which has a large Shia population along with large numbers of Sunni Muslims and Christians. Asked at the news conference if the coalition would only be targeting ISIS/Daesh, Prince Mohammed replied: “No. To any terrorist organisation that appears in front of us, we will take action to fight it.”

This is especially alarming because the Saudi regime has some very strange ideas about what constitutes terrorism and will presumably now be pressing other countries to accept them. Under a law introduced last year, virtually any criticism of the kingdom’s political system or its interpretation of Islam counts as terrorism:

Article 1: “Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.”

Article 2: “Anyone who throws away their loyalty to the country’s rulers, or who swears allegiance to any party, organization, current [of thought], group, or individual inside or outside [the kingdom].”

Article 4: “Anyone who aids [“terrorist”] organizations, groups, currents [of thought], associations, or parties, or demonstrates affiliation with them, or sympathy with them, or promotes them, or holds meetings under their umbrella, either inside or outside the kingdom; this includes participation in audio, written, or visual media; social media in its audio, written, or visual forms; internet websites; or circulating their contents in any form, or using slogans of these groups and currents [of thought], or any symbols which point to support or sympathy with them.”

Article 6: “Contact or correspondence with any groups, currents [of thought], or individuals hostile to the kingdom.”

Article 8: “Seeking to shake the social fabric or national cohesion, or calling, participating, promoting, or inciting sit-ins, protests, meetings, or group statements in any form, or anyone who harms the unity or stability of the kingdom by any means.”

Article 9: “Attending conferences, seminars, or meetings inside or outside [the kingdom] targeting the security of society, or sowing discord in society.”

Article 11: “Inciting or making countries, committees, or international organizations antagonistic to the kingdom.”Last December the cases of two women who defied the ban on driving cars were also referred to the special anti-terrorism court.

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British support for Saudi Arabia wrecking aid to Yemen

The Telegraph reports: David Cameron has been accused of squandering nearly £400 million in taxpayers’ aid to Yemen through its support for the Saudi-led military offensive in the country’s civil war.

The Prime Minister is facing an outcry from aid agencies and a rift in his own government over his continued backing for Saudi Arabia’s role in the conflict, in which nearly 6,000 people have died.

Britain has not only sold Saudi Arabia weapons that have allegedly been used for indiscriminate bombing, but also supports Riyadh diplomatically, despite claims by aid agencies that Saudi forces are making the situation worse.

Ahead of United Nations-sponsored peace talks this week aimed at ending nine months of fighting, senior Tory figures have warned that the Government’s policy has also wrecked more than a decade’s worth of British aid spending in Yemen, where the UK is one of the main donors.

The Department for International Development has spent some £227 million in Yemen in the past five years alone. It spent almost as much there in the decade after the 9/11 attacks, when Yemen was first identified as a failing state.

That entire programme is now in disarray as the civil war has led to the collapse of the government, left more than two million people homeless and pushed the country to the brink of famine. The fighting has even led to British-funded aid projects being directly targeted.

An air strike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a relief warehouse run by Oxfam, while the Save the Children has had two of its bases destroyed. Both charities’ aid efforts in Yemen are funded in part by DFID. Clinics operated by the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres have also been destroyed.

The chaos is also helping jihadists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State cement their foothold – the very outcome Britain lavished aid on Yemen to avoid. [Continue reading…]

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Social media lifts Saudi women in vote

The Wall Street Journal reports: After Lama al-Sulaiman became one of Saudi Arabia’s first elected female politicians over the weekend, she celebrated her landmark victory through her Twitter account.

She expressed thanks to her supporters and said she hopes to meet their expectations. “Words of gratitude are not enough,” she tweeted.

As with many other candidates who had to campaign under restrictive rules in this absolutist monarchy, Ms. al-Sulaiman bet heavily on social media to promote her political program and to hear from voters.

Ahead of Saturday’s historic election — the first in which women were allowed to participate as voters as well as candidates — she combined face-to-face campaigning with social-media outreach to secure a seat in the local council of her hometown, the coastal city of Jeddah.

“Saudi Arabia is ready for women in politics,” said Ms. al-Sulaiman, the entrepreneur behind a woman-only fitness club and one of at least a dozen women who won a seat in Saturday’s nationwide municipal election.

That Saudi Arabia has one of the highest rates of social-media use in the world — there are an estimated five million Twitter users in the country — helps explain the ease in which candidates promoted their campaigns and articulated their priorities. [Continue reading…]

Michael Stephens writes: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s recent municipal elections is not usually a story most international observers would spend an awful lot of time on. But the election of 19 women from some 2,100 candidates has focused attention for the first time on the role of women in a country which has over the years received much criticism for its perceived imbalance of gender.

While fewer than one percent of the successful candidates were female, make no mistake, this is a big moment for Saudi. Thirty women already sit in Saudi Arabia’s 150-member parliament, known as the Shura Council, but they are appointed directly by the king. So the election of women by the public is a welcome step which in the eyes of many commentators – indeed many Saudis – is long overdue.

There is much more to be done, the next most likely step being the normalisation of driving for men and women. But as with all things in the kingdom, change happens slowly and at its own pace. [Continue reading…]

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Torture by Iraqi militias: The report Washington did not want you to see

Reuters reports: It was one of the most shocking events in one of the most brutal periods in Iraq’s history. In late 2005, two years after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, U.S. soldiers raided a police building in Baghdad and found 168 prisoners in horrific conditions.

Many were malnourished. Some had been beaten.

The discovery of the secret prison exposed a world of kidnappings and assassinations. Behind these operations was an unofficial Interior Ministry organisation called the Special Investigations Directorate, according to U.S. and Iraqi security officials at the time.

The body was run by militia commanders from the Badr Organisation, a pro-Iran, Shi’ite political movement that today plays a major role in Baghdad’s war against Islamic State, the Sunni militant group.

Washington pressured the Iraqi government to investigate the prison. But the findings of Baghdad’s investigation – a probe derided by some of its own committee members at the time as a whitewash – were never released.

The U.S. military conducted its own investigation. But rather than publish its findings, it chose to lobby Iraqi officials in quiet for fear of damaging Iraq’s fragile political setup, according to several current and former U.S. military officials and diplomats.

Both reports remain unpublished. Reuters has reviewed them, as well as other U.S. documents from the past decade.

The documents show how Washington, seeking to defeat Sunni jihadists and stabilise Iraq, has consistently overlooked excesses by Shi’ite militias sponsored by the Iraqi government. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both worked with Badr and its powerful leader, Hadi al-Amiri, whom many Sunnis continue to accuse of human rights abuses.

Washington’s policy of expediency has achieved some of its short-term aims. But in allowing the Shi’ite militias to run amok against their Sunni foes, Washington has fueled the Shia-Sunni sectarian divide that is tearing Iraq apart.

The decade-old U.S. investigation of the secret prison implicates officials and political groups in a wave of sectarian killings that helped ignite a civil war. It also draws worrying parallels to the U.S. government’s muted response today to alleged abuses committed in the name of fighting Islamic State.

Those accused of running the secret prison or of helping cover up its existence include the current head of the Iraqi judiciary, Midhat Mahmoud, Transport Minister, Bayan Jabr, and a long revered Badr commander popularly referred to as Engineer Ahmed. [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani allies embrace censored reformers ahead of Iranian polls

Bloomberg reports: Allies of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani are challenging restrictions on top reformist politicians as wrangling with conservative rivals heats up ahead of elections next year.

The state-run Ettelaat newspaper ran a front-page editorial last week criticizing as unlawful a ban on publishing the name and picture of former President Mohammad Khatami. A day earlier, Rouhani’s brother Hossein Fereydoun had visited opposition leader Mehdi Karrubi, who’s under house arrest and accused of sedition by hardliners.

Buoyed by Rouhani’s success in striking July’s nuclear deal with world powers in the face of domestic resistance, a reformist camp largely silenced since 2009 is showing signs of renewed ambition. Elections for parliament and the assembly that will choose Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s successor could embolden Rouhani, who’s seeking to control a majority in the legislature.

Infighting “is reaching the highest and most sensitive” level since Rouhani won a four-year term in 2013, said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Middle East Institute. “How Rouhani chooses to respond to the hardline pushback against his agenda, and the degree to which he is successful, will be a major indicator of political life in Iran for the remainder of his presidency.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters adds: An Iranian committee is examining potential candidates to be the next Supreme Leader, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Sunday, breaking a taboo of talking publicly about succession in the Islamic Republic. [Continue reading…]

Earlier, the New York Times reported: Iran’s conservative judicial authorities indicted the managing editor of a prominent daily newspaper on Tuesday, saying that he had violated prohibitions on the coverage of Mohammad Khatami, a reformist-minded former president they now describe as a seditionist.

Rights activists said the indictment was a sign not only of the escalating repression of the news media in Iran, but also of heightening tensions between hard-line factions and the administration of the current president, Hassan Rouhani, with parliamentary elections due in February.

“It is absurd that Khatami, president for eight years, has been declared essentially nonexistent to such an extent that disseminating his picture and voice is considered a crime,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group based in New York. [Continue reading…]

Absurd indeed.

It is likewise absurd to view the factions that would try to enforce this kind of political repression as belonging to an “Axis of Resistance.”

Let’s hope that as Iran’s reformists once again grow in confidence, they don’t end up facing the same kind of ruthless oppression that strangled the Green Movement in 2009.

That was an uprising that deserved global support and only the regime’s most rigid loyalists could have viewed it otherwise.

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Refugees in a world in which the stranger’s welcome is in doubt

Richmond Eustis writes: In my first class on “The Odyssey” at the University of Jordan, my students surprised me with readings far darker than any I’d encountered in my classes in the U.S. I have taught this work in translation perhaps a dozen times. In teaching the work, I like to focus on depictions of terrain: lush Ogygia, rocky Ithaka, the perilous wilderness of the wine-dark sea. And still smoldering on the shore behind them, the ruins of Troy. There are nymphs and witches, seduction and intrigues, gruesome violence and angry gods. There is an awkward adolescent becoming a man, a clever hero taking vengeance on his enemies, and a crafty wife thwarting the designs of boorish suitors. There is the joyful reunion of a loving, long-parted couple, and the restoration of order to a troubled oikos. “The Odyssey” is romance and comedy.

But that’s not how my students in Jordan read it at all. Many of them are Syrian, or Iraqi, or Palestinian refugees. In their written responses to the first three books, much of the class wrote some variation of: “We know this story. We know what it is to be unable to go home, to show up with nothing at the door of strangers and hope they greet us with kindness instead of anger. We know what it’s like to wonder about the fate of family members, caught up in wars that seem to go on forever, and to hope that one day we will see them again.”

In its depiction of Odysseus’ journey, “The Odyssey” is a survey of the Ancient Greek practice of xenia—reciprocal hospitality. But for my students, it depicts the exile’s anxiety in a world in which the principle of xenia is threatened, in which the stranger’s welcome is in doubt. Odysseus asks himself many times about the inhabitants of the unknown islands: “Savages are they, strangers to courtesy? Or gentle folk who know and fear the gods?” Today, this set of questions from an ancient work has surfaced again in the political debates in the U.S. and the rest of the world: What is the morally appropriate way to respond to a stranger in need, a person from a distant land who arrives on your shore in need of aid and shelter? What obligations do civilized people owe to the destitute stranger in a world aflame with slaughter and destruction? And how are we to think about those who refuse to acknowledge any such obligations? [Continue reading…]

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Marine Le Pen lost this time, but the mainstream is still flowing in her direction

Christopher Dickey writes: So, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party, which placed first in six of 13 French regions last week, failed to win the second round in a single one this week.

But there’s no joy in the mainstream French political establishment, or in the mainstream French media that worked hard to defeat Le Pen and her candidates, because the mainstream is still flowing in her direction, and everyone knows it.

Indeed, traditional politicians here regard Le Pen with something like the same horror that the American mainstream regards Donald Trump, and for some of the same reasons. Seen as sly, anti-immigrant, implicitly racist populists, both are portrayed in the political language of Europe as “fascists.” But there are limits to the analogy.

The National Front, whose platform would do away with open European borders, the euro currency, and indeed “Europe” itself, has become not just a third party in the multi-party French system, it has become the third party. And when presidential elections roll around about 18 months from now, there is every chance that Le Pen will make it into the sudden-death second-round run-off. [Continue reading…]

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Syrians yearn for peace, but not under Assad

Hassan Hassan writes: Three months after the spark that gave rise to the uprisings of 2011, Syria changed forever. No doubt many Syrians will now wish for a reset of the situation so they could do things differently, but a reset does not necessarily mean a desire for life under the same regime, in the same way that many Iraqis hanker for the pre-war stability they enjoyed rather than a wish to live under Saddam Hussein’s rule again.

This distinction is worth bearing in mind as a new round of peace talks – including attempts to deal with rising extremism – begins by countries involved in the Syrian conflict.

Over the weekend, Syrians reflected on the beginnings of the conflict through a campaign of support for the Free Syrian Army.

Each one of the past five years was defined by a broad theme that would add to the intractability of the Syrian conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Turkish troops said to leave Iraqi camp after Baghdad orders them out

Reuters reports: Some Turkish troops started leaving their camp in Iraq and moving north on Monday, a Turkish military source and a senior official said, days after Baghdad protested to the United Nations and ordered them out.

Any move northwards would take them back closer to Iraq’s border with Turkey, but the officials did not say where they were going and it was unclear how far Ankara was bowing to pressure to bring its soldiers home.

Iraq said in early December hundreds of Turkish troops had arrived in its territory without its knowledge, calling it a hostile act.

Turkey said at the time the troops were meant to guard an international mission training and equipping Iraqi forces who are preparing for an offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul, seized by Islamic State militants more than a year ago.

But the move was widely seen as a Turkish attempt to establish a greater foothold in the simmering conflicts across its border, which have already pulled in other regional and global powers. [Continue reading…]

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