Will the Israel lobby block Samantha Power’s appointment to the UN?

Even if Samantha Power’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the UN is not blocked by the Senate, I don’t expect we’ll hear her reassert her view that a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will require an imposed solution, including the use of a “mammoth protection force,” or that the U.S. should stop spending billions supporting Israel’s military forces but should instead be investing the same amounts in a Palestinian state. But, what seems certain is that the following clip from a 2002 interview will be reappearing on lots of Zionist websites and that the Israel lobby will kick into high gear to oppose her nomination. Unless, that is, their failure to block Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Defense Secretary has led organizations such as the Emergency Committee for Israel to adopt some tactical changes.

Maybe the White House figures that its opponents will reserve all their venom for Susan Rice, and thus allow Powers to take up office without strong opposition.

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Just a few months ago, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next national security adviser, saw her main chance to become secretary of state dissipate before her eyes, as Senate Republicans (with John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the lead) excoriated her for, as they saw it, misleading the public about the attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year. (My thoughts about the attacks on Rice can be found here.)

Rice was forced to withdraw her name, and Senator John Kerry was awarded the job. Now Rice will be, in effect, Kerry’s supervisor. McCain and Graham, by turning Rice into the scapegoat of the Benghazi debacle, have inadvertently allowed the president to bring her into the innermost ring of power, in a role that requires no Senate confirmation.

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Netanyahu signals readiness to consider 2002 Arab peace plan

Reuters reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled readiness on Wednesday to consider a 2002 Arab peace plan whose terms were recently softened to include possible land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.

“We are listening to every initiative – the Arab initiative has been mentioned – and we are prepared to discuss initiatives that are proposals and not edicts,” he said in a speech in parliament.

Netanyahu spoke during a debate on the plan, proposed at an Arab League summit 11 years ago. Israel had rejected the initiative that offered normalized ties for it with much of the Arab world, citing its call for complete withdrawal from land captured in the 1967 Middle East war as a main stumbling block.

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A turning point in Turkey’s history?

Emre Caliskan and Simon A. Waldman write: The protests come as Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seeking to change the Turkish constitution to give more powers to the president, an office Erdogan is believed to be eyeing when his term as prime minister soon expires. Many Turks believe that this will give him further powers. Already there are deep concerns over sweeping laws and policies passed by Erdogan which threaten to alter the nature of Turkey’s identity to one that favors Islam over secularism without transparency or due process.

Last week, with little public debate, Turkey’s parliament passed legislation to restrict the sale of alcohol. “We don’t want a generation wandering around in a merry state day and night,” declared Erdogan. This is despite the fact that Turkey enjoys one of the lowest levels of alcohol consumption and drink-related problems in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Also last week at a groundbreaking ceremony for a third Bosporus bridge in Istanbul, it was announced that the bridge would be named after Selim the Grim, a conquering Ottoman sultan known for his aversion to alcohol and his massacres of Alevis, a constituency that represents roughly 15% of Turkey’s population. This controversial decision was again made without public consultation.

Meanwhile, the independent media, a pillar of any healthy democracy, has been consistently targeted by Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). According to the Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 World Press Freedom Index, Turkey is “the world’s biggest prison for journalists,” where approximately 70 journalists are still behind bars. Turkey was ranked 154th for open press out of 179 countries, a worse ranking than Iraq, Afghanistan and Russia.

This has not gone unnoticed by the public. The almost total media blackout of the first day of protests shocked many Turkish demonstrators who took to Twitter and Facebook to transmit news. But even social media has not escaped the wrath of Erdogan. “There is a now menace which is called Twitter,” the prime minister remarked, “Social media is the worst menace to society.”

Another source of public concern is the peace talks between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Considered a terrorist group by Ankara, the PKK has waged a battle against Turkey since 1984 in its demand for Kurdish rights and autonomy. However, there was little public knowledge or debate about the negotiations. When a team of “elders” was finally selected to discuss the issue with the public, its members were drawn almost exclusively from supporters of Erdogan’s party. Many Turks and Kurds doubt the sincerity of the peace process; there are more than 8,000 Kurdish politicians, journalists and activists behind bars, mostly for non-violent offenses. [Continue reading…]

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Viewing the Gezi Park protest the right way

Ziya Meral writes: Much has been and will be written about why and how a small and peaceful protest in Taksim Square’s Gezi Park evolved into a large social eruption. Relatively little has been said about what this might mean politically, socially, economically and diplomatically in the near future.

No matter from which political angle one looks at the events we have seen in Turkey over the past days, it is clear that one of the biggest problems in Turkey is our weak democratic culture. We have problems in handling different opinions, lifestyles, beliefs and political views and expressing ourselves, compromising, negotiating and reconciling.

Soon, there will be healthy calls for accountability and justice over how the police and authorities and, in some cases, protesters have conducted themselves and how the government handled this process. All of these are necessary, but if we want to see a lasting impact of what we have experienced last week and if we want to learn lessons from it as a nation beyond our usual polarization of “us” versus “them,” we must find ways to conceptualize Gezi Park’s memory from now on.

One way of not only memorializing but also seeking to develop Turkey’s democratic culture would be to declare Gezi Park as a Speakers’ Corner in the style of Hyde Park in London. This would not only make sure that protesters’ voices are not lost amid all the party politics and finger pointing that will follow, but also it would give us an inclusive platform to learn to communicate, listen and disagree. Thus, it would be a memorial site with a dynamic and future-looking aspect, which not only seeks to establish an account of what happened but universalizes what we learn or should learn from it. [Continue reading…]

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France says tests confirm sarin gas used in Syria

The Associated Press reports: Samples taken from Syria and tested in France have confirmed that sarin gas has been used there multiple times, France’s foreign minister said Tuesday.

Laurent Fabius said the tests carried out by a French laboratory “prove the presence of sarin in the samples in our possession.” He said France “now is certain that sarin gas was used in Syria multiple times and in a localized way.”

The brief statement concluded: “It would be unacceptable that those guilty of these crimes benefit from impunity.”

Earlier Tuesday, a U.N. report on Syria said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that limited quantities of toxic chemicals have been used as weapons in at least four attacks in Syria’s civil war, but that more evidence is needed to determine the precise chemical agents used or who used them.

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry said conclusive findings can be reached only after testing samples taken directly from victims or the site of the alleged attacks. It called on Damascus to allow a team of experts into the country, saying lack of access continues to hamper the commission’s ability to fulfill its mandate.

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Don’t trust the Pentagon to end rape

Kirby Dick writes: The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing today on sexual assault in the military. This comes after months of revelations of rapes and other violent attacks at military bases and academies. At the hearing, the chiefs of staff of the military branches will likely admit that there is a serious problem and insist that the solution involves changing military culture. But the challenge goes far deeper.

The military has a problem with embedded, serial sexual predators. According to a 2011 report from the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault and Prevention Office, 90 percent of military rapes are committed by men with previous histories of assault. These predators select and befriend lower-ranking victims; often they ply their victims with alcohol or drugs and assault them when they are unconscious.

In my film “The Invisible War,” a retired brigadier general, Loree K. Sutton, describes the military as a “target-rich environment” for serial predators. The training and leadership efforts the Pentagon proposes won’t change this environment. It simply isn’t possible to “train” or “lead” serial predators not to rape.

There is a way to stop these predators: we should prosecute and incarcerate them. But here the military fails entirely. [Continue reading…]

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The banality of ‘don’t be evil’

Julian Assange writes: “The New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire. [Continue reading…]

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The shooting of Ibragim Todashev: is the lawlessness of Obama’s drone policy coming home?

George Monbiot writes: Did the FBI execute Ibragim Todashev? He appears to have been shot seven times while being interviewed at home in Orlando, Florida, about his connection to one of the Boston bombing suspects. Among the shots was the assassin’s hallmark: a bullet to the back of the head. What kind of an interview was it?

An irregular one. There was no lawyer present. It was not recorded. By the time Todashev was shot, he had apparently been interrogated by three agents for five hours. And then? Who knows? First, we were told, he lunged at them with a knife. How he acquired it, five hours into a police interview, was not explained. How he posed such a threat while recovering from a knee operation also remains perplexing.

At first he drew the knife while being interviewed. Then he acquired it during a break from the interview. Then it ceased to be a knife and became a sword, then a pipe, then a metal pole, then a broomstick, then a table, then a chair. In one account all the agents were in the room at the time of the attack; in another, all but one had mysteriously departed, leaving the remaining officer to face his assailant alone.

If – and it remains a big if – this was an extrajudicial execution, it was one of hundreds commissioned by US agencies since Barack Obama first took office. The difference in this case is that it took place on American soil. Elsewhere, suspects are bumped off without even the right to the lawyerless interview Ibragim Todashev was given. [Continue reading…]

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Ambiguous drone policies cast doubt on Obama’s lofty pledges

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: It was a “season of fear”, he said. Government trimming facts and evidence “to fit ideological predispositions”; making decisions based on fear rather than foresight; setting aside principles “as luxuries that we could no longer afford”. “We went off course,” he concluded.

It was a fine speech: thoughtful, bold and idealistic. The US president, Barack Obama, delivered it at the National Archives in Washington on May 21, 2009.

Last Thursday, when Mr Obama addressed the question of national security again during his National Defense University speech, he sounded equally high-minded. But where in his first speech he addressed the excesses of his predecessor, this time he had his own to consider. The most serious of these were born of Mr Obama’s inability to deliver fully on promises he made in his earlier address.

At the National Archives, Mr Obama vowed to end torture, shut CIA black sites and close Guantanamo. It was the clean break he had promised. But faced with a Republican backlash, Mr Obama caved. Torture and black sites were abolished but Guantanamo remained. Torture memos were released but torturers roamed free. To shield himself against charges of weakness, Mr Obama escalated the covert war.

The war since its inception was governed as much by security considerations as by its political logic. By eschewing large-scale military deployment in favour of drones and special forces, and through aggressive prosecution of journalists and whistle-blowers, Mr Obama has kept his actions secret, releasing himself from domestic political constraints, claiming successes where they have occurred, disowning failures. [Continue reading…]

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Nationwide strike call in Turkey likely to inflame anti-Erdogan protests

McClatchy reports: Police clashed with anti-government protesters in major cities around Turkey for a fourth day Monday as one of the country’s biggest public service unions threatened a nationwide strike Tuesday to show its discontent with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

In Ankara, police in helicopters, firing tear gas and plastic bullets, pursued groups of demonstrators throughout the city, Turkish television reported; on the ground, they discharged tear gas at one group of about 1,000 demonstrators. But more young people flocked to the city center.

In the western port city of Izmir, protesters threw fire bombs at the offices of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party overnight, setting the building ablaze, Turkish television reported.

In Istanbul, where the protests began over the government’s plans to build a shopping center in one of the few parks in the city center, a Turkish doctors association announced the first fatality of the clashes – a young leftist who was killed when a car struck him during a protest on a major highway.

The Obama administration Monday took the unusual step of delivering a public dressing down of the Turkish government, a vital ally, for excess use of force.

Secretary of State John Kerry called for “a full investigation” of reports of excessive force and “full restraint from police.” He urged both the government and the protesters “to avoid any provocations and violence.”

The White House said those protesting were peaceful, law-abiding citizens, exercising their right to free expression – a very different take on the nature of the protests from that offered by Erdogan.

The combative leader, boasting that he’s won three elections and has the support of half the country, showed no intention of defusing the tensions, which erupted after police used heavy-handed tactics against a peaceful protest in Istanbul’s Gezi Park that began last week after workers began chopping down trees. After calling the protesters “looters” and “extremists” over the weekend, he charged on Monday that they were walking “arm in arm with terrorists,” Reuters reported. [Continue reading…]

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A breakout role for Twitter? Extensive use of social media in the absence of traditional media by Turks in Turkish in Taksim Square protests

A protest outside Turkey's NTV against their lack of coverage of the #occupygezi protests.

Pablo Barberá and Megan Metzger write: Over the past several years the role of social media in promoting, organizing, and responding to protest and revolution has been a hot topic of conversation. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring Revolutions, social media has been at the center of many of the largest, most popular demonstrations of political involvement. The protests taking place in Turkey add to this growing trend, and are already beginning to add new layers to our understanding of how social media can contribute to public participation.

Protests have been ongoing since early this week in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Organized in response to government plans to tear down the green space in the center of the square and replace it with a shopping center, the protests have morphed into a more visceral expression of the general discontent with the government’s policies over the last several years In response, the police fired massive amounts of tear gas and pepper spray into the crowd and set fire to tents set up for protesters to sleep in, leaving several people injured. Protesters have begun wearing homemade gas masks while continuing to protest on the street. As of 2 AM Turkish time on Saturday, the protests are still in progress and some protestors have reportedly breached the barrier and entered the park.

The social media response to and the role of social media in the protests has been phenomenal. Since 4pm local time yesterday, at least 2 million tweets mentioning hashtags related to the protest, such as #direngeziparkı (950,000 tweets), #occupygezi (170,000 tweets) or #geziparki (50,000 tweets) have been sent. As we show in the plot below, the activity on Twitter was constant throughout the day (Friday, May 31). Even after midnight local time last night more than 3,000 tweets about the protest were published every minute. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan says social media is ‘the worst menace to society’

The Guardian reports: Thousands of protesters have controlled Istanbul’s main square once more after two days of violent clashes with rampaging riot police, as Turkey’s prime minister vowed to press on with the controversial redevelopment that provoked the clashes.

Calling the protesters an “extremist fringe”, Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the opposition Republican People’s party for provoking the protests.

“We think that the main opposition party, which is making resistance calls on every street, is provoking these protests,” Erdogan said on Turkish television, as an estimated 10,000 demonstrators streamed into the area waving flags and calling on the government to resign.

“There is now a menace which is called Twitter,” Erdogan said. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.”

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Ten tweets on the hypocrisy of the Turkey protests

Yavus Selim writes: “What’s going on in Turkey?” is a common question on the lips of people as varied as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and some American Muslim scholars. People are finding it hard to wrap their head around the facts. The most stable, economically successful and popular democratically elected government in the Middle East has been experiencing widespread protests over… a planning application? That doesn’t sound right and of course, it isn’t the case at all.
I do not condone violence against protestors-there is definitely some police brutality at play which President Erdogan himself hinted at and said that it would be investigated and dealt with- but do want to take a closer look at the why people are gathering in Taksim Square and elsewhere in Turkey.

Here are ten tweets that expose what the current “protests” in Turkey are all about:

Tweet 1: So much for the trees


Yes. The figures are astronomical but in the last ten years this Turkish government has planted enough trees to repopulate a sizable section of Amazon. So we can now establish that these protests have nothing to do with the environment at all and they were merely using it as a cover. A cover for what?

Tweet 2: With friends like these


For once, Pamela Gellar (the well known anti-Islam blogger who stated that she hopes Israel bombs Mecca and Madīnah) is right. This isn’t about trees at all. It is about the secular bloc in Turkey making a final anarchic stand against what they hate most in this world – their nation coming closer to Islam once more.

Tweet 3: Don’t believe me?


[Continue reading…]

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Not a ‘Turkish Spring’ but still important

Mustafa Akyol and H.A. Hellyer dismiss the idea that the protests currently sweeping across Turkey should be viewed as a “Turkish Spring,” but Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan needs to draw the right lessons.

Erdoğan has certainly attracted the ire of his opponents more prominently recently. He named Istanbul’s new intercontinental bridge after an Ottoman Sultan, who is widely respected among the Sunni majority, but also seen by the Turkish Alevi minority as a bloody tyrant; and he’s implemented limitations on alcohol consumption, which infuriated secularist Turks, who feel that a conservative and intimidating Erdoğan threatens their lifestyle. Erdoğan has other illiberal enemies as well: nationalist groups despise Erdoğan for initiating a peace process with the PKK, the Kurdish separatist guerrilla army, while communist groups condemn him for being “an American collaborator,” & an enemy of the Assad regime in Syria, which they hold dear.

These protests weren’t begun by any of these groups – and Erdoğan’s government made a grave mistake by not restraining the police, resulting in state brutality upon the protestors. Indeed, had the police not responded so viciously, it’s likely the protests would have fizzled out quite quickly. That brutality brought out many Turks without any particular political agenda onto the streets, including those who took seriously the allegations of corruption with regards to the construction projects. Perhaps less than interested in the serious environmental issue that results from the loss of green spaces (which is rare indeed in Istanbul), many political groups then found a locus for their cumulative discontent.

Nevertheless, none of this means that Erdoğan has to resign, as some protestors have demanded: he is the most popular Turkish Prime Minister in the past half-century, and while thousands went on the streets to protest him, millions who support him remained in their homes. Yet that ought not be a reason for Erdoğan to be complacent either. Indeed, it is he who needs to take the greatest lesson from all this. He and his government ought to recognise that the ballot box is not the only thing that counts in truly participatory democracy – and those that govern the largest Arab country on the other side of the Mediterranean sea should acknowledge the same. Here, there are indeed some similarities – as governments in both Turkey and Egypt need to identify that the lack of consensus does come at a price, and causes unnecessary tensions.

A report in The Independent reveals no signs of Erdoğan expressing an interest in consensus building as he contemptuously dismisses his critics.

Turkey’s Prime Minister has rejected claims from protesters, who have taken to the streets across the country over the past two days, that he is an authoritarian leader, as thousands of people marched and reoccupied the centre of Istanbul.

Protesters returned to Istanbul’s Taksim Square on Sunday, the site where a small protest over plans to redevelop a park spiralled into violent confrontations on Friday when police moved to evict the demonstrators.

The heavy-handed tactics of authorities sparked more than 90 demonstrations around the country on Friday and Saturday, officials said. More than 1,000 people have been injured in Istanbul and several hundred more in Ankara, according to medical staff.

In Taksim Square on Sunday afternoon, people were chanting slogans against Mr Erdogan and calling for him to resign. Undeterred, Mr Erdogan used a television interview to rebuke the demonstrators, who he dismissed as “a few looters”.

“[They say] Tayyip Erdogan is a dictator. If they call one who serves the people a dictator, I cannot say anything,” said the Prime Minister during a televised speech. Erdogan insisted the project to revamp Gezi Park would go on despite the protests. “We will build a mosque in Taksim and we do not need the permission of the CHP [Republican People’s Party, the main opposition party in Parliament] or of a few bums to do it.”

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Reports of Anonymous attack on Turkish government

Today’s Zaman reports: Global “hacktivist” group Anonymous has announced a campaign to disrupt communications channels of the Turkish government in response to its handling of the Gezi protests, with reports of two cyberattacks on Sunday.

Turkish media reported on Monday that Anonymous had “managed to take down access” to the Official Gazette, the Turkish government’s journal for publishing legislation and announcements, on Sunday. As of Monday morning, the site appeared fully functional.

An early-Monday attack on the website of the private news channel NTV was also reported. NTV is among the many Turkish media outlets that have been criticized for their scant coverage of the ongoing protests and violence.

Addressed to “citizens of Turkey,” a video apparently posted by Anonymous on Sunday on YouTube and titled “#opTurkey” took aim at the Turkish government’s response to protests against the demolition of İstanbul’s Gezi Park, a small sit-in that morphed into demonstrations involving thousands after police responded with tear gas and water cannon.

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