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Majority of Americans support nuclear deal with Iran

PRNewswire: Negotiations over a proposed deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program are coming to a head while a new study finds a clear majority of Americans – 61 percent – support an agreement that would limit Iran’s enrichment capacity and impose additional intrusive inspections in exchange for the lifting of some sanctions. This included 61 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents.

The alternative option, being promoted by some members of Congress, calls for ending the current negotiations, and increasing sanctions in an effort to get Iran to stop all uranium enrichment. This approach was recommended by 36 percent.

The study was conducted by the Program for Public Consultation and the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, with Steven Kull and Shibley Telhami as principal investigators. It was fielded with a representative sample of 710 Americans drawn from GfK’s probability-based KnowledgePanel.

The deal endorsed by a majority specified that Iran could enrich uranium only to the level necessary for nuclear energy, and provided that it accepts intrusive inspections to ensure that Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Some sanctions would be gradually removed, provided that Iran upholds the agreement.

“Americans find convincing the arguments for making a deal as well as for ending the negotiations and ramping up sanctions,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation. “But when asked to finally decide, a clear majority breaks in favor of a deal.” [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu agitating for war against Iran

Fred Kaplan writes: Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress on Tuesday was a disturbing spectacle: shallow, evasive, short on logic, and long on cynicism.

The Israeli prime minister pretended to criticize the specific deal that the United States and five other nations are currently negotiating with Iran, but it’s clear from his words that he opposes any deal that falls short of Iran’s total disarmament and regime change. He pretended merely to push for a “better deal,” but he actually was agitating for war.

At the start of his speech, he played nice, thanking President Obama for the generous bounty of security assistance, the rescues from embassy sieges, the shipment of Iron Dome missile-defense batteries (which probably saved hundreds of Israeli lives from Hamas rocket attacks), and for his help in other programs so highly classified that they cannot be mentioned.

But this had all the sincerity of Mark Antony coming to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The burying soon commenced. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq’s attack against ISIS in Tikrit catches U.S. ‘by surprise’

Nancy A. Youssef reports: The Iraqi military launched a major campaign to take back a key city from the self-proclaimed Islamic State over the weekend — a move that caught the U.S. “by surprise,” in the words of one American government official.

The U.S.-led coalition forces that have conducted seven months of airstrikes on Iraq’s behalf did not participate in the attack, defense officials told The Daily Beast, and the American military has no plans to chip in.

Instead, embedded Iranian advisers and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are taking part in the offensive on the largely Sunni town, raising the prospect that the fight to beat back ISIS could become a sectarian war.

The news is the latest indication that not all is well with the American effort against the terror group. On Friday, U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast that a planned offensive against the ISIS stronghold of Mosul had been indefinitely postponed. Over the weekend, an American-backed rebel group in Syria announced that it was dissolving, and joining an Islamist faction.

Then there was the unexpected battle for Tikrit. Over the weekend, a reported 30,000 troops and militiamen—mostly Shiites —stormed the Sunni dominated city of Tikrit, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s hometown and the symbolic birthplace of his three decades of repressive practices against the majority Shiite population.

U.S. officials were largely left in the dark of the planning and timing of the operation, defense officials said. The Pentagon said Monday it was not conducting airstrikes in support of the Tikrit offensive because the Iraqi government did not ask for such help. [Continue reading…]

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Iran backs Iraq military campaign to reclaim Tikrit from ISIS

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iran took a leading role in the Iraqi military’s largest offensive yet to reclaim territory from Islamic State, throwing drones, heavy weaponry and ground forces into the battle while the U.S. remained on the sidelines.

The operation that began Monday aims to retake Tikrit, best known as the hometown of Saddam Hussein, 80 miles north of the capital Baghdad. In addition to supplying drones, Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard force has fighters on the ground with Iraqi units, mostly operating artillery and rocket batteries, according to a U.S. military official. Iraqi Shiite militias closely allied with Iran are also heavily involved.

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency reported that Qasem Soleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s overseas unit Quds Force, was on the ground near Tikrit advising commanders.

The offensive is a test of Iraqi security forces’ fitness for the much more daunting challenge of recapturing Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

It has also thrown a new spotlight on Shiite Iran’s role in assisting Shiite-dominated Iraq to regain control of large parts of the country taken by the Sunni radical group Islamic State. Tehran has wielded increasing influence over Iraq’s military affairs after Iraqi security forces proved unable to contain the Islamic State onslaught that began in summer. [Continue reading…]

Time adds: [M]ilitary planners believe that Tikrit’s Sunnis have grown tired of ISIS’s harsh rule for 10 months. They hope that some of those Sunnis will now be willing to turn their guns against ISIS. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has offered these Sunni tribes a pardon, and a last chance to come back into the fold with the national government.

“I call upon those who have been misled or committed a mistake to lay down arms and join their people and security forces in order to liberate their cities,” said Abadi at a press conference on Sunday in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

During the American occupation of Iraq, these local Sunni tribes did rise-up against ISIS’s Al-Qaeda predecessor and fought in coordination with US-forces against other Sunni militiamen through the Sunni Awakening Movement.

“Sunni tribes of Tikrit could turn against ISIS,” says Hamed al-Mutlaq, a member of the Iraqi parliament and an influential Sunni politician. “They prefer the security forces to be in control. They would rather be with the Iraqi forces than ISIS.”

While tribal leaders may not want to see ISIS wielding all the influence in their territory, they’re even less likely to want to see Shiite militiamen controlling their streets.

“We know that there are Sunni tribal sheiks that don’t like [ISIS],” says Pollack. “But there are other Sunni sheiks who are more scared of the Shiite militias than they are of [ISIS].”

And they have reason to be. These Shiite militias that are marching alongside the Iraqi government forces have been accused of kidnappings, forced evictions and summary executions of Sunni civilians.

“The use of Shiite militias is a big problem,” says Mutlaq. “They have burned houses, terrorized and abducted people in Diyala, Samarra and Baghdad. They have a bad reputation.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran calls Obama’s 10-year nuclear demand ‘unacceptable’

Reuters: Iran on Tuesday rejected as “unacceptable” U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that it freeze sensitive nuclear activities for at least 10 years, but said it would continue talks aimed at securing a deal, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported.

“Iran will not accept excessive and illogical demands,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by Fars.

“Obama’s stance … is expressed in unacceptable and threatening phrases … ,” he reportedly said, adding that negotiations underway in Switzerland would nonetheless carry on.

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Kremlin Murder Inc.

Nina L. Khrushcheva writes: One by one, Putin’s critics have been eliminated. In 2006, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in an elevator, and Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who had been critical of Putin, died of polonium poison while in exile in London. In 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer campaigning against corruption, died in prison after being denied medical care for life-threatening conditions. The same year, another lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, a champion of human rights, was shot following a news conference.

The murder last week of Boris Nemtsov, a leading opposition politician and a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, should come as no surprise. But it should come as a shock – and as a wake-up call for those Russians who until now have tolerated a culture of lawlessness and impunity, unseen since the darkest days of Stalin’s personal rule in the Soviet Union.

Before his death, Nemtsov was said to be working on a report titled “Putin and the War,” providing proof of Russia’s involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. He was scheduled to lead a protest against the war two days after his murder. Some have wondered if Putin was afraid of what Nemtsov had uncovered, and thus ordered the assassination.

That is unlikely, at least in terms of someone receiving a direct order from Putin. Simply put, orchestrating Nemtsov’s murder was not worth the trouble; after all, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine would have had little problem twisting Nemtsov’s report to Putin’s benefit.

Indeed, even Nemtsov’s brazen murder is unlikely to hurt Putin politically. His popularity now stands at 86%. For many Russians, Nemtsov’s opposition to the war in Ukraine made him a traitor, whose death was justified – indeed, almost demanded – by national necessity.

Putin has announced that he will personally oversee the investigation into the assassination. But those leading the effort have already indicated its likely conclusion: Nemtsov’s murder was an attempt to destabilize Russia. We can be all but certain that some culprit or another will be “found,” and that his crime will be part of a conspiracy by the CIA or Ukrainian authorities.

The Kremlin is no stranger to twisting the truth to fit its needs. Before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it argued that the United States had hired snipers to fire at pro-Western protesters in Kyiv in order to blame Russia for their deaths. When a Malaysian airliner was shot down over Ukraine – most likely by pro-Russia rebels – the official Kremlin story was that Western secret services downed it to undermine Putin’s reputation. Allegations like these have whipped up nationalism, hatred, and anti-Western hysteria, distracting Russians from Putin’s culpability for their country’s economic crisis.

As menacing as Putin’s Russia may be, however, nothing about it is original. In 1934, Joseph Stalin, too, ordered a thorough investigation into the murder of a rival: Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad. The NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, orchestrated the assassination on Stalin’s order, but the inquiry gave the Soviet dictator a pretext for eliminating other opponents. The search for Kirov’s murderers eventually culminated in the Great Terror, a massive purge of Party leaders, military commanders, and intellectuals. [Continue reading…]

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CIA veterans finger Putin in Nemtsov assassination

Newsweek reports: Four shots, expertly placed. A perfectly timed getaway car. Nearby security cameras turned off “for repair.”

The murder of prominent Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, say CIA veterans, many with long experience in Moscow, was obviously a professional job, inspired, if not explicitly ordered, by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s allies and Russian-controlled media, rejecting any state hand in the affair, have floated a variety of alternate villains responsible for the murder of Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and an outspoken critic of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. They range from fellow reformers who wanted to create “a martyr” to personal rivals to “fascists” in Ukraine.

CIA veterans with long experience with Russia were having none of it. Nearly all spoke only on terms of anonymity to discuss such sensitive issues.

“Clearly the Putin government either ordered this, or accepted it, as in the case of Thomas Becket – ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’” says one former top CIA operative, alluding to the plea attributed to Henry II, England’s 12th-century monarch, for someone to kill the archbishop of Canterbury.

The absence of any nearby close-circuit video recordings of Nemtsov’s murder, which occurred just a few hundreds yards outside a Kremlin wall just after midnight on Friday, Feb. 28, also suggests official complicity in the crime, he and other CIA veterans say.

Government-controlled media has said that all the nearby security cameras were turned off for repairs or pointed the wrong way when Nemtsov was killed by a lone gunman, who then jumped into a passing car and sped off. [Continue reading…]

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The secularization of Turkey

Mustafa Akyol writes: Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, Turkey’s “Islamization” has been a recurrent theme in the media. Over the past two years — during which time Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president and AKP leader, has combined increasingly authoritarian rule and an overtly Islamist narrative — this theme has become more common and assumed greater validity. It is often asked whether Turkey is turning into “another Iran,” and most commentators take it for granted that, at the very least, Turkey is becoming more “conservative.” Turkish academic Volkan Ertit, a doctoral candidate focusing on the sociology of religion at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, emphatically argues otherwise.

In his new book, “The Age of Anxious Conservatives: Turkey, That Moves Away From Religion” (Endiseli Muhafazakarlar: Dinden Uzaklasan Turkiye), Ertit presents ample evidence suggesting that the power of religion is actually declining in Turkish society. To Ertit, the “secularization of society” means the decline in the “impact of the individual’s faith in the sacred on the actual conduct of life.” In this regard, he thinks Turkey is certainly on a secularization path. If the trend were toward Islamization, he argues, Turkey should have experienced the following:

  • Increased religiosity among young generations than in older generations
  • Decline in the visibility of homosexuality
  • Decline in the rate of premarital flirtation
  • Decline in the rated of premarital and extramarital sex
  • Increase in the belief in supernatural beings
  • Greater preference for dress that does not reveal body shapes
  • Greater impact of the “sacred” on daily affairs

What one sees in Turkey, however, Ertit says, is the opposite. [Continue reading…]

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How climate change fueled conflict in Syria and threatens the rest of the Middle East

Scientific American reports: Climate change can make storms stronger, cold spells longer and water supplies drier. But can it cause war? A new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says drought in Syria, exacerbated to record levels by global warming, pushed social unrest in that nation across a line into an open uprising in 2011. The conflict has since become a major civil war with international involvement.

Drying and drought in Syria from 2006 to 2011 — the worst on record there — destroyed agriculture, causing many farm families to migrate to cities. The influx added to social stresses already created by refugees pouring in from the war in Iraq, explains Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who co-authored the study. The drought also pushed up food prices, aggravating poverty. “We’re not saying the drought caused the war,” Seager said. “We’re saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.”

Seager added that the entire Middle East “faces a drier, hotter climate due to climate change. This will stress water resources and agriculture, and will likely further increase risk of conflict.” Global warming is desiccating the region in two ways: higher temperatures that increase evaporation in already parched soils, and weaker winds that bring less rain from the Mediterranean Sea during the wet season (November to April). [Continue reading…]

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Main U.S.-backed Syrian rebel group disbanding, joining Islamists

The Washington Post: The Syrian rebel group Harakat al-Hazm, one of the White House’s most trusted militias fighting President Bashar al-Assad, collapsed Sunday, with activists posting a statement online from frontline commanders saying they are disbanding their units and folding them into brigades aligned with a larger Islamist insurgent alliance distrusted by Washington.

The statement bore Hazm’s stamp and logo, and according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group, the brigade’s fighting units are disbanding. Emails and phone calls to Hazm’s political leaders were not returned.

“Given what is happening on the Syrian front, offenses by the criminal regime with its cronies against Syria as a whole, and Aleppo specifically, and in an effort to stem the bloodshed of the fighters, the Hazm movement announces its dissolution,” the statement said.

Charles Lister, an analyst with U.S, think tank Brookings, described in a tweet the implosion of the group as “absolutely remarkable.” [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia gives top prize to cleric who blames George Bush for 9/11

AFP: An Indian television preacher who has called the 9/11 attacks an “inside job” received one of Saudi Arabia’s most prestigious prizes on Sunday, for “service to Islam”.

Zakir Naik, president of the Islamic Research Foundation in India, was one of five recipients of the King Faisal international prize from Saudi Arabia’s King Salman during a ceremony at a luxury Riyadh hotel.

The annual prizes are a project of the King Faisal Foundation, established in 1976 by the children of King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz who died in 1975.

Naik was honoured for being one of the most renowned non-Arabic speaking promoters of Islam. He founded the Peace TV channel, billed as the world’s only channel specialising in comparative religion.

It has an estimated English-language audience exceeding 100 million, according to his award citation.

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Nemtsov’s murder presages a grim new era of darkness in Russia’s political life

Christian Caryl writes: It’s no stretch to say that [Boris] Nemtsov’s career exemplified both the promise and the weaknesses of Russia’s liberal opposition movement. In the early 1990s, the young Nemtsov – then a governor of the region around Nizhny Novgorod — made a name for himself as an ardent supporter of President Boris Yeltsin’s reform course. In 1997, a year after Yeltsin’s re-election to a second term as president, Nemtsov joined his cabinet, part of a “dream team” of young reformers who were celebrated by western politicians and investors for their liberal economic policies and their embrace of democratic values. Nemtsov’s energy and charisma made him a particular hit with voters, and there was a time when he was even touted as the great hope of the reformist camp, perhaps even as a possible successor to the increasingly erratic Yeltsin.

Yet these were also the very years when the dream of a new Russia based on free markets and liberal values foundered fatally. Most Russians remember the 1990s as a decade of shocking industrial decline, salaries left unpaid for months or years, and savings lost to hyperinflation. Organized crime ran amok, and life expectancy plummeted. The newly minted “oligarchs,” the small circle of well-connected businessmen who benefited disproportionately from the privatization of the nation’s prime assets, paraded their wealth and influence.

The liberal politicians favored by Yeltsin either abetted these developments or proved powerless to stop them. Their dream ended with a bang on Aug. 17, 1998, when the government, headed by baby-faced Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko, devalued the ruble and defaulted on its debts. Nemtsov was Kirienko’s deputy prime minister, and it was a moment he would never quite live down. Amid the chaos, the general yearning for a “strong leader” became almost palpable. The Russian financial crisis marked the real start of Putin’s path to the presidency.

The liberals’ subsequent exile from power wasn’t made much easier by their own fractiousness and all-too-frequent contempt for political realities. Nemtsov himself played a starring role in one of the most notorious examples of opposition obliviousness. A 2003 campaign ad for his political party depicted Nemtsov and his two colleagues, Anatoly Chubais and Irina Khakamada, flying over Russia in a cushy private plane as they discussed their plans for the country’s future. Few images could have better summed up the popular image of the liberal opposition as arrogantly detached from the gritty realities of everyday life.

In a truly democratic society, of course, politicians have the chance to learn from their mistakes, giving them the hope of returning, revived, to the give-and-take of honest competition. Russia’s Putin-era opposition has never had this luxury. Its adherents have been thrown into jail, hounded into silence, driven into exile. Yet even these crimes pale against the killing of Nemtsov, whose death presages a grim new era of darkness in the country’s political life. [Continue reading…]

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How a single nuclear strike on Manhattan would end all life and destroy almost everything else

After the end of the Cold War, the political movement striving for nuclear disarmament lost most of its momentum. Supposedly, even though enough missiles remained armed that life as we know it could be destroyed in minutes, the threat of Armageddon had fallen away because there was no plausible reason why the two largest remaining nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, should risk mutual destruction.

Because of this nuclear complacency, the opportunity provided by the 1990s, when giant strides towards disarmament could have been made, was wasted.

As animosity between the United States and Russia is once again on the rise, it’s worth being reminded of exactly what would happen if, for instance, a single 800-kiloton intercontinental ballistic missile (of which Russia possesses 700 such warheads) were to be detonated over Manhattan.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes the effects: The warhead would probably be detonated slightly more than a mile above the city, to maximize the damage created by its blast wave. Within a few tenths of millionths of a second after detonation, the center of the warhead would reach a temperature of roughly 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius), or about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.

A ball of superheated air would form, initially expanding outward at millions of miles per hour. It would act like a fast-moving piston on the surrounding air, compressing it at the edge of the fireball and creating a shockwave of vast size and power.

After one second, the fireball would be roughly a mile in diameter. It would have cooled from its initial temperature of many millions of degrees to about 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 4,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun.

On a clear day with average weather conditions, the enormous heat and light from the fireball would almost instantly ignite fires over a total area of about 100 square miles. [Continue reading…]

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SNL skit targets American militarism, Toyota — and ISIS?

When an American man reaches that juncture in life where he’s ready to buy a Toyota Camry, he can be confident he’s now living the American dream: a reliable car, a house in the suburbs and then the final act that will prove his boldness and manhood — he tearfully ships off his teenage daughter to join the U.S. Army.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, so I didn’t see this ad until today. My reaction to Toyota’s message: WTF?

It seems like the writers for Saturday Night Live also took exception to Toyota’s message and thought that it was worth a parody — a parody which a segment of SNL’s audience thought was in bad taste.

As much as some viewers are applauding SNL for being so bold as to take on ISIS, I think that what the show really did was use ISIS to give themselves some cover while taking an indirect punch at U.S. militarism and the Americanist dogma that military service is the closest thing to saintliness.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Toyota to seize the marketing opportunity that has been staring them in the face for decades: to launch The Technical — a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a factory-installed gun-mount, and “fully loaded” with all the features that an organization like ISIS needs for desert warfare.

But joking aside, when the military history of the 21st century gets written, among the tools of warfare of preeminent importance, the Toyota pickup truck is probably going to rank higher than the drone. And it’s not just any Toyota truck; the truck of choice is the Hilux.

“The Toyota Hilux is everywhere,” says Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and now a fellow of the Center for a New American Security. “It’s the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47. It’s ubiquitous to insurgent warfare. And actually, recently, also counterinsurgent warfare. It kicks the hell out of the Humvee.”

Whether you’re an American dad, or you’re fighting for ISIS, there’s only #OneBoldChoice: Toyota.

Now if there’s any way Toyota could trick ISIS to trade in their Hiluxes for the Toyota Isis minivan — that’s right, Toyota makes an “Isis” — there’s no question the militant group could swiftly be defeated.

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Does Boris Nemtsov’s assassination represent the turning point for Russian politics?

Julia Ioffe writes: On Friday evening, Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, went on a prominent Moscow radio station to exhort his fellow citizens to come out to protest President Vladimir Putin’s policies. There would be a rally on Sunday, a spring march, to demonstrate against the deepening economic crisis and Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. The most prominent Russian opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, had been put in jail for 15 days, which just happened to be long enough to keep him from attending the rally. Nemtsov, who was older and, by now, less influential, had handed out leaflets in the metro and encouraged people to come anyway.

After the radio show, on which Nemtsov warned that too much power in the hands of one man would “end in catastrophe,” he met Anna Duritskaya, his girlfriend of three years — and, as the police would later pointedly note, a citizen of Ukraine. They had dinner and then headed home, strolling across Red Square and past the swirling domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, adjacent to the Kremlin. Just before midnight, as they crossed the bridge toward the historic Moscow neighborhood where Nemtsov lived, a white car pulled up, and, according to investigators, someone inside fired seven or eight shots. Four of them hit Nemtsov in the head, heart, liver and stomach, killing him on the spot.

Duritskaya was unharmed and immediately taken in for questioning. Nemtsov, a big, broad man, was left on the pavement in the rain, his shirt yanked up to his chin.

On Russian social media, liberal Moscow has struggled to wrap its head around something that seemed like it simply couldn’t happen, until it did. It had been years since Nemtsov, a rising star in Yeltsin-era politics, had been the standard-bearer of Western liberalism, and he could be a silly bon vivant. But he was deeply intelligent, witty, kind and ubiquitous. He seemed to genuinely be everyone’s friend; when I lived in Moscow as a journalist, he was always willing to jaw over endless glasses of cognac. And he was a powerful, vigorous critic of Vladimir Putin, assailing him in every possible medium, constantly publishing reports on topics like the president’s lavish lifestyle and the corruption behind the Sochi Olympics.

How could such a prominent politician — a founder of the opposition Solidarity Party, a sitting member of the Yaroslavl city parliament — be gunned down so brazenly, within steps of the Kremlin? “We didn’t kill members of government,” Gleb Pavlovsky, an independent political consultant who used to work for Putin, told me over the phone. “It’s an absolutely new situation.” Olga Romanova, a prominent opposition activist and a close friend of Nemtsov, said, “There are more cameras in that spot than there are grains in a packet of grain.” When I called her last night, she had just come from the scene of the crime, where her friend still lay on the ground, surrounded by laughing policemen. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a very close person murdered, lying on the pavement,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

Putin promptly called Nemtsov’s mother to offer his condolences and threw what seemed like the entire Ministry of Internal Affairs on the case. Yet we can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere. At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will founder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all. This has been the pattern for other high-profile killings, like those of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky. [Continue reading…]

The Economist notes: Given the level of security in the vicinity of the Kremlin, it is hard to imagine why Mr Nemtsov’s killers would have picked that spot for the shooting, unless they had reason to believe they would be able to escape. The assassins did not try to cover their traces; they did not shoot the woman who was walking with Mr Nemtsov. It is by far the most significant political assassination in recent Russian history. Many have drawn parallels between this crime and the fates of other recent victims, such as Galina Starovoitova, a democratic reformer killed in 1998. Yet the atmosphere in Russia is increasingly reminiscent of darker days from a more distant European past.

It is an atmosphere Mr Nemtsov himself described 10 months ago, when nationalist euphoria was building on the back of the annexation of Crimea and an escalating war in Ukraine. “I can’t remember such a level of general hatred as the one in Moscow today,” Mr Nemtsov wrote on his Facebook page…

Not in 1991, during the August coup, not even in 1993 [during Yeltsin’s stand off with parliament]. Aggression and cruelty are stoked by the television while the key definitions are coming from the slightly possessed Kremlin master. “National traitors”, “fifth column”, “fascist junta”—all these terms are coming from the same Kremlin office…The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. People are set off against each other. This hell can not end peacefully.

In the past year, the atmosphere of aggression and intolerance has only become stronger.

Ilya Ponomarev, a Russian left wing politician and member of the Russian parliament, says: I think this is indeed a turning point for Russian politics. Some would say just another turning point but I think this is the turning point.

I think that, for the future of Russia, the murder of Boris Nemtsov will mean the similar thing as the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934 [the a prominent Bolshevik leader in the Soviet Union who was shot dead in his own office. — Editor’s note]. That murder was a trigger for the great terror of 1937.

The audience of this crime is not the Russian people. For the overwhelming majority of Russians, Boris was a very honest and straightforward guy, but he was a personification of the 1990s and the ill-manifested reforms of Boris Yeltsin. All the hatred against Yeltsin was personified in Nemtsov.

I think that the target audience for this murder is within the elites. It’s within the Russian elites who knew Nemtsov very well… and within the elites in the West — which probably is even a greater target.

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Europe’s jihadis in search of identity

Kenan Malik writes: What is striking about the stories of wannabe jihadis is their diversity. There is no “typical” recruit, no single path to jihadism.

Sahra Ali Mehenni is a schoolgirl from a middle-class family in the south of France. Her father, an industrial chemist, is a non-practising Muslim, her mother an atheist. “I never heard her talk about Syria, jihad,” said her mother. One day last March, to the shock of her family, she took not her usual train to school but a flight from Marseilles to Istanbul to join Isis. When she finally phoned home it was to say: “I’ve married Farid, a fighter from Tunisia.”

Kreshnik Berisha, a German born of Kosovan parents, played as a teenager for Makkabi Frankfurt, a Jewish football club and one of Germany’s top amateur teams. He went on to study engineering and in July 2013, boarded a bus to Istanbul and then to Syria. “I didn’t believe it,” said Alon Meyer, Makkabi Frankfurt’s coach. “This was a guy who used to play with Jewish players every week. He was comfortable there and he seemed happy.” Berisha later returned home to become the first German homegrown jihadi to face trial.

There are hundreds of stories such as these, from all over Europe. What they tell us is that, shocking though it may seem, there is nothing unusual in the story of the runaway Tower Hamlets schoolgirls. And that what Emwazi has in common with other European recruits is not so much his harassment as his college education.

The usual clichés about jihadis – that they are poor, uneducated, badly integrated – are rarely true. A survey of British jihadis by researchers at London’s Queen Mary College found no link to “social inequalities or poor education”; most were highly educated young people from comfortable families who spoke English at home. According to Le Monde, a quarter of French jihadis in Syria are from non-Muslim backgrounds.

What draws most wannabe jihadis to Syria is, to begin with, neither politics nor religion. It is a search for something a lot less definable: for identity, for meaning, for “belongingness”, for respect. Insofar as they are alienated, it is not because wannabe jihadis are poorly integrated, in the conventional way we think of integration. Theirs is a much more existential form of alienation.

There is, of course, nothing new in the youthful search for identity and meaning. What is different today is the social context in which this search takes place. We live in a more atomised society than in the past; an age in which many people feel peculiarly disengaged from mainstream social institutions and in which moral lines often seem blurred and identities distorted.

In the past, social disaffection may have led people to join movements for political change, from far-left groups to anti-racist campaigns. Today, such organisations often seem equally out of touch. What gives shape to contemporary disaffection is not progressive politics but the politics of identity.

Identity politics has, over the last three decades, encouraged people to define themselves in increasingly narrow ethnic or cultural terms. A generation ago, “radicalised” Muslims would probably have been far more secular in their outlook and their radicalism would have expressed itself through political organisations. Today, they see themselves as Muslim in an almost tribal sense, and give vent to their disaffection through a stark vision of Islam. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS killer Mohammed Emwazi had link to 2005 London bomb plot

The Observer reports: Mohammed Emwazi, the Islamic State (Isis) extremist behind the beheading of western hostages, was able to flee Britain and the scrutiny of the security services, despite being a member of a terror cell that was known to have links to the failed 21/7 attacks on London in 2005, the Observer can reveal.

One leading member of Emwazi’s network had a telephone conversation on the day of the attacks with Hussein Osman, who was later jailed for life for placing an explosive at Shepherd’s Bush tube station.

The security services were also aware that associates of the 12-strong west London terror group had joined the four 21/7 bombers at a training camp in Cumbria a year before the attempt to bring carnage to London’s streets.

The revelations, contained in court documents seen by this newspaper, raise urgent questions over how Emwazi, who became known as “Jihadi John”, was able to evade surveillance, slip out of the country in 2013 using false papers and re-emerge in Syria a year later to become the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Not only was Emwazi a “person of interest” for MI5 as a member of a London jihadi cell set up in 2007 to recruit for al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida affiliate, but at least one member of his network had a connection with one of the most infamous crimes in British history.

The failed 21/7 attacks came a fortnight after four men blew themselves up on tubes and a bus, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700, the worst terrorist atrocity committed on British soil. [Continue reading…]

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Ex-Mossad chief: Netanyahu has caused Israel ‘strategic damage’ on Iran

Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer interviewed ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan: Dagan isn’t exactly a leftist; anyone familiar with his biography will testify to this. When it comes to Iran, he shares Netanyahu’s concerns. “A nuclear Iran is a reality that Israel won’t be able to come to terms with,” he said.

But Dagan believes that Netanyahu, because of the way he is handling the issue, is only bringing us closer to this harsh reality. “The person that has caused Israel the most strategic damage when it comes to the Iranian issue is the prime minister,” he told us.

The White House, we said, has announced that it will stop sharing with Israel classified information pertaining to the negotiations with Iran. In your experience, does such a decision trickle down to our relations with the US administration on all levels?

“Yes,” Dagan said, “and it happens very quickly. The head of the CIA is a political appointee; the national security adviser is a political appointee; the secretary of state is a political appointee. They all, the lower-level officials too, work in keeping with the spirit of their commander. We’ve witnessed this phenomenon during confrontations in the past, with the (Jonathan) Pollard case, for example. We depend on the Americans for strategic weapons. When senior administration officials say that Israel is acting against the national interests of the United States, it represents a grave long-term danger for us.

“What message does it send when our prime minister says that we don’t need information from the talks and that we have our own sources? Is he implying that we are spying on the United States?

“Our standing in the world isn’t that great right now. The question of Israel’s legitimacy is on the agenda. We shouldn’t be gnawing away at our relations with our most important ally – certainly not in public and certainly not by getting involved in American domestic politics. This is not the kind of behaviour one expects from a prime minister.”

Most Israelis breathed a sigh of relief following Operation Protective Edge in the summer; and then came the sense of disappointment – after 51 days of fighting, one could have expected a little more than a stalemate when up against an organization like Hamas. Dagan reached a different and much harsher conclusion. The operation was a “resounding failure,” in his view. “What did we achieve?” he continued. “Nothing, except a ceasefire that Hamas will violate whenever it chooses.

Dagan is convinced that the current status quo poses a danger to Israel. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, he said. “Netanyahu’s actions are leading us towards a bi-national state, and I don’t want a bi-national state. I don’t want Abbas as the prime minister of my country. Continuing to establish facts on the ground in the territories will inevitably lead us to an apartheid state.”

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