The Taliban’s main fear is not drones but educated girls

Mohammed Hanif writes: Apparently, Pakistanis don’t need the Taliban to destroy their schools any more – they can do it themselves. Last week, a girls’ high school was set ablaze in Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore. And no, the Taliban were not the culprits. A mob, enraged after allegations of blasphemy against a teacher, carried out the attack. Instead of taking action against them, the police arrested the school’s 77-year-old owner.

The accused teacher, who allegedly committed blasphemy by photocopying the wrong page of a book for homework, is in hiding. Pakistan may have declared an “education emergency” earlier this year, but it still fails to protect the schools it already has. How did we get here?

“They have shut down girls’ schools,” I told a childhood friend who was effusively praising the Pakistani Taliban after its temporary takeover of the Swat valley three years ago. Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani peace activist shot last month by the Taliban, was a bored 11-year-old schoolgirl then. My friend lived about 350 miles away from Swat, and had three daughters. His reasons for liking the Taliban were simple: they were local heroes who had decided to take things into their own hands. “If only people in our area had the same courage,” he said. “Would you like a Taliban-type system here in your city?” I asked him. Yes, of course, he would.

Every morning, my friend drove two of his daughters to school and was pretty certain that one of them would go to medical school. “But the Taliban don’t allow girls’ education. What will happen when they shut down your daughters’ school?” I asked. My friend was puzzled, but only for a moment. “They wouldn’t do that here. What they did in Swat is their culture, Pashtun culture.”

Not educating girls is not the only myth about Pashtuns: Pashtun mothers produce sons so that they can send them to war; fathers will shoot their daughters if a stranger sees their faces. Of course, as the myth goes, they also don’t want to send their daughters to schools. And why do they need to send their sons to school anyway, if they are born soldiers in an eternal jihad?

But there was no evidence of any such Pashtun culture in the Swat valley I had visited the day before our conversation. When the Taliban made their bid to rule the region, Swat could have easily passed as the education capital of Pakistan. There were law schools, medical schools, nursing schools and more computer schools than any other valley of this size could accommodate. And that’s without counting the hundreds of informal beauty schools that provide on-the-job training for girls so poor they can’t afford any other type of education.

A lot of Pakistanis, as well as people the world over, have expressed their solidarity with Malala by doing the obligatory status update or tweet: “We are all Malala”. But for most people, she is someone else’s child and will remain so. She is a child whose name can be invoked to start another military operation, a child whose name can be used to prove the blindingly obvious – that parents, whatever their religion or culture, would like their children to be at school – if they can afford it.

What is conveniently ignored in the debate over Malala is the fact that every 10th child in the world who doesn’t go to school is Pakistani. The Taliban are not the only ones keeping kids out of school. [Continue reading…]

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Mahmoud Abbas outrages Palestinian refugees by waiving his right to return

The Guardian reports: The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is facing widespread condemnation and anger in the Palestinian territories and abroad after he publicly waived his right to return to live in the town from which his family was forced to flee in 1948, a repudiation of huge significance for Palestinian refugees.

After his image was burned in refugee camps in Gaza, Abbas rejected accusations that he had conceded one of the most emotional and visceral issues on the Palestinian agenda, the demand by millions of refugees to return to their former homes in what is now Israel.

He insisted that comments made in an interview with an Israeli television channel were selectively quoted and the remarks were his personal stance, rather than a change of policy.

Abbas told Channel 2 he accepted he had no right to live in Safed, the town of his birth, from which his family was forced to flee in 1948 when Abbas was 13.

“I visited Safed before once, he said. “But I want to see Safed. It’s my right to see it, but not to live there.”

Referring to the internationally-recognised pre-1967 border, he went on: “Palestine now for me is ’67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever … This is Palestine for me. I am a refugee, but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that the West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts are Israel.”

The comments sparked protests in Gaza, where people in refugee camps burned images of the Palestinian president. Abbas was denounced on Twitter by pro-Palestinian activists.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas ruler in Gaza, said the issue was not about Abbas’s right to return to Safed but “the rights of 6 million Palestinians”.

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Arafat’s remains to be exhumed Nov. 26

The Associated Press reports: A Western diplomat says the exhumation of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s remains will take place Nov. 26.

He says a Swiss team has arrived in the West Bank ahead of the planned exhumation. The team will assess the grave site and plan how best to dig up the remains.

The Swiss team will be joined by French investigators. The two teams, who are set to conduct parallel probes into Arafat’s death, will only be allowed one chance to draw samples.

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Israeli report cites a thwarted 2010 move on Iran

The New York Times reports: An Israeli news channel reported Sunday night that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak asked the Israeli military in 2010 to prepare for an imminent attack on the Iranian nuclear program, but that their efforts were blocked by concerns over whether the military could do so and whether the men had the authority to give such an order.

The report, by the respected investigative journalist Ilana Dayan, came in the form of a promotional preview for an hourlong documentary about Israel’s decision-making process regarding Iran, which is scheduled to be broadcast Monday night. Ms. Dayan said on the channel’s evening newscast on Sunday that Mr. Netanyahu, in a meeting with a small circle of top ministers, turned to Gabi Ashkenazi, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces at the time, and told him to “set the systems for P-plus,” a term meaning that an operation would start soon.

Mr. Ashkenazi and Meir Dagan, who was the head of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, at the time, would later say that this was an attempt at “stealing a war,” Ms. Dayan reported, because in their view such an order required a decision of the full cabinet, not the smaller group in the meeting, who were then known as the forum of seven.

Both Mr. Ashkenazi, who is now retired, and Mr. Dagan, who stepped down after the meeting, have become vocal critics of plans for a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran, and of Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak’s aggressive approach.

Ms. Dayan said in the preview report on Sunday that the issue deepened a divide in Israel’s top echelon.

Mr. Ashkenazi was quoted saying of the P-plus order: “This is not something you do unless you are certain you want to execute at the end. This accordion will make music if you keep playing it.” But Mr. Barak told Ms. Dayan that “it is not true that creating a situation where the I.D.F. and the country’s operational systems are, for a few hours or for a few days, on alert to carry out certain operations means the state of Israel is compelled to act.”

“Eventually, at the moment of truth, the answer that was given was that, in fact, the ability did not exist,” Mr. Barak said in the clip that was shown on Sunday. [Continue reading…]

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Is Obama both entirely powerless and utterly essential?

Matt Stoller asks: What is gained by not supporting Obama for reelection? Simply put, there is power in resistance. Organized people that distrust and constrain their political leaders can have a significant impact on policymaking.

The President does not sit in the Oval Office and play a video game where he governs the country. The Presidency is constrained by the various checks and balances in our governance system, notably a partisan opposition and public opinion. Under Obama, that partisan opposition has been a right-wing Republican force buttressed by well-funded Tea Party activists. This has made it far easier for Obama to implement conservative policies. Under Mitt Romney, the Democrats will be far more likely to oppose Romney from the left, and the public will be much more likely, as it was under Bush, to mistrust its President and demand social justice.

One of the more intriguing arguments in this line came from a Canadian UAW member, Joe Emersberger, who actually tried measuring the difference between recent Republican and Democratic Presidents. He noted that Ronald Reagan was the worst President for life expectancy growth, income growth of the top one percent, deunionization, and closing the racial gap in life expectancy. But the second worst – for deunionization and share of income going to the top one percent – was actually Bill Clinton, followed by Barack Obama. George Bush did substantially better than those two on these measures, and surpassed Clinton in closing the racial life expectancy gap. This is quite possibly accurate – Clinton’s changed the country with NAFTA, a policy nearly as hostile to labor rights as Reagan’s embrace of union busting. George W. Bush though faced a hostile public and a partisan Democratic opposition. Certainly, this is not conclusive evidence, and I’m sure political scientist Larry Bartels would lay out different data. But it’s worth considering the power of this “resistance effect”. Partisan opposition isn’t worth nothing, and there’s no sense pretending it doesn’t matter.

In other words, as Glen Ford put it, Obama is not necessarily the lesser of two evils, he may be the “more effective evil”. He puts the left to sleep (whether by defunding progressive groups or allowing the destruction of Occupy encampments), and the left is where the resistance to imperial tendencies currently resides. It is this problem, of how to organize large groups of people into a political force for justice, that should concern us. [Continue reading…]

I have my doubts about the assumption that a President Romney would serve as the trigger of a “resistance effect.”

Firstly, let’s not overestimate how much resistance George W Bush provoked. Opposition to the war in Iraq accomplished very little — neither should we forget that Obama didn’t bring the troops home, the Iraqis told them to leave.

Romney will, I have no doubt, have learned plenty of useful lessons from Bush’s failures and far from being a figure who unintentionally mobilizes the left, I don’t find it difficult to see him bumbling through two terms without generating any large waves of opposition. (I don’t think, for instance, that the risk of him starting a war with Iran is as great as is feared. He would probably be more loyal to the Pentagon than Israel and the Pentagon’s opposition to such a war has been made crystal clear.)

However, he would also quite likely end up doing something of particularly long-lasting and damaging consequence: appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices, determining the political complexion of the court for as much as the next twenty-five years.

Where does the Supreme Court fit into Stoller’s argument? It doesn’t.

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The politics of fear

Mark Danner writes: Amid the clamorous controversies of this election campaign, what strikes one here on the West Bank of the Jordan is the silences. Though the issue of Palestine promises to have a much more vital part in the volatile, populist politics of the Middle East’s new democracies—whose vulnerable governments actually must take some account of what moves ordinary people—here in Ramallah we have heard virtually nothing substantive about it, apart, that is, from Mitt Romney’s repeated charge that President Obama, presumably in extracting from Israel a hard-fought ten-month freeze on settlement building early on in his administration, had “thrown Israel under the bus.”

In fact, the West Bank is perhaps the place on the globe that has seen the least of President Obama’s promised “change you can believe in.” Nearly fifty years after Israel conquered the territories, its young soldiers are still on patrol, herding millions of Palestinians through and around an increasingly elaborate labyrinth of checkpoints, walls, and access roads, while Israeli settlers, now numbering in all more than half a million, flow over the hills, swelling their gated and fortified towns, creating one “fact on the ground” after another. Even as the land of the long-promised Palestinian state vanishes behind these barricades, the phrase “two-state solution” lives on, hovering like a ghost over the settlements, a remnant mirage of a permanently moribund “peace process” that has produced no agreement of consequence in twenty years, since the Oslo Accords vowed a Palestinian state would be declared no later than 1999.

Governor Romney’s own view of how to achieve Middle East peace is decidedly more modest—indeed, almost Buddhist in its fatalism. As he told guests at the now-infamous Boca Raton “47 percent” fund-raiser:

You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that it’s going to remain an unsolved problem…. And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

Whatever that “something” that will “somehow…happen” might be, it will presumably not come at the initiative of a Romney administration, since, as the governor went on, “The idea of pushing on the Israelis to give something up, to get the Palestinians to act, is the worst idea in the world.” [Continue reading…]

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It’s time for sanctions on Israel

Jamal Zahalka, a member of Israel’s Knesset, writes: Ahead of the Israeli elections next January, a merger between the parties of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has been announced. They are to contest the elections on a joint list, intending to become the largest bloc in the Knesset.

The move is seen as an achievement for both men. Netanyahu was shaken by the recent decline in the popularity of his Likud party at the rate of one seat per week. More specifically, his apprehension revolved around the possible return of Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, as leader of an opposition alliance consisting of Tzipi Livni, the former foreign minister; Shaul Mofaz, leader of Kadima; and Yair Labed, a rising political star.

Netanyahu’s avowed objective is to assemble a major political force that would guarantee his re-election and ensure his dominance of the Israeli right. Lieberman is the main beneficiary of this alliance: it guarantees power for his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and under the agreement, Lieberman can choose to run whatever ministry he desires, including the important ministry of defence. He will gain political legitimacy and be transformed from a mere participant in a coalition government to a key player. If in recent years the government has been a construct of Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, the next government will be a Netanyahu-Lieberman one. Lieberman can also contest Likud’s leadership after Netanyahu.

The alliance reflects a lunge to the right, at a time of greater extremism in Israeli politics. [Continue reading…]

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Israelis imagine an attack on Iran would be a cakewalk

David Patrikarakos describes witnessing a recently conducted war game “designed to explore the likely outcome of an Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran.” All participants were Israelis and their conclusion was that Israel would accomplish its goal — almost total destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities — and that the global response would effectively focus on preventing military escalation. Simply put, Israel would win and Iran would lose.

I had seen Israel’s perspective on a possible attack and now wanted an Iranian view, so I caught a flight to Istanbul to put the game’s results to Hossein Mousavian, a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team. He believed the game was deeply flawed.

Dismissing the limited nature of Iran’s response, Mousavian argued that in reality Iran would respond ‘by all means’, employing the total power of its armed forces to draw Israel into a long-term war. Perhaps, more importantly, Mousavian argued that Iran would see the US as complicit.

Iranians, he said, are convinced that Israel is too small to attack Iran unilaterally Iran. “They see Israeli as just a baby,” he said. “One that would never act without US assistance.”

The attack would also have huge regional consequences, he continued. Most obviously, Iran would use its status as the symbol of resistance against Israel in the Middle East to stoke the high levels of anti-Americanism that already exist there. Even groups like Al Qaeda, he argued, who are Iran’s enemies, would use “inflamed Muslim sentiment to launch attacks at American citizens across the world and on US soldiers on the many American bases in the region.”

At the end of our interview, he leaned forward, took my arm and looked me right in the eyes. He recalled the Israeli strikes on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor in 2007.

“This is the big mistake that people make,” he told me. “To think if Israel attacks Iran, like it attacked Iraq and Syria, the Iranians would not retaliate.

“The nation is one hundred percent different. The whole region would be engulfed.”

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The death of Arab secularism

Faisal Al Yafai writes: The death of Arab secularism is the story of a country that no longer exists and a world almost impossible to imagine.

That world can be glimpsed in old newsreels from the Arab cities of the 1950s and 1960s. The cities of the post-war period – Cairo, Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Aden – look much the same as many developing countries of the time: American-built cars, European-style suits, a certain easy mingling of men and women.

Unseen is something difficult to describe, but immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the Egypt or Yemen of today: the thick beards of men and the tightly wrapped headscarves of women – symbols of religious devotion, but also symbols of a public expression of Islam – were almost entirely absent from the new urban world then being created.

The vision of the future the men and women in those over-saturated newsreels had, how they saw their modern world unfolding, cannot easily be understood.

But it can perhaps be surmised from a joke, told by Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to an audience in the years after the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of attempting to assassinate him. Nasser described meeting with the Brotherhood’s leader in 1953 in an attempt to reconcile the group with his leadership. (Nasser doesn’t mention whom he met, but it was most likely Hassan Al Hudaybi, a judge who led the group for 20 years from 1951.)

“The first thing he asked me was to make the wearing of hijab mandatory in Egypt,” says Nasser, “and to force every woman walking on the street to wear a hijab.” The crowd laughs and Nasser hams it up for them, looking perplexed at such an outlandish request. “Let him wear it!” shouts an audience member, and the crowd erupts in laughter and applause.

But that’s not the punchline. Nasser tells Al Hudaybi he knows the Brotherhood’s leader has a daughter studying medicine, and his daughter doesn’t wear the hijab. “Why haven’t you made her wear the hijab?” he asks, before delivering a knockout blow: “If you cannot make one girl – who is your own daughter – wear the hijab,” he says, “how do you expect me to make 10 million women wear the hijab, all by myself?” The crowd roars its approval.

Nasser’s joke is instructive for the world view it implies. The middle and upper classes of 1950s Egypt considered it ridiculous that the wearing of the hijab could be enshrined in law. Most did not wear it; they considered the proper role of religion to be private, outside the realm of government and politics. Nasser himself explicitly declared the same thing.

Contrast that with today’s Egypt, and indeed the wider Arab world, and it is clear how much has changed in just half a century. [Continue reading…]

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Is Occupy Sandy outperforming the Red Cross in hurricane relief?

Slate reports: In Sunset Park, a predominantly Mexican and Chinese neighborhood in South Brooklyn, St. Jacobi’s Church was one of the go-to hubs for people who wanted to donate food, clothing, and warm blankets or volunteer help other New Yorkers who were still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. On Saturday, Ethan Murphy, one of the people heading the kitchen operation, estimated they would prepare and send out 10,000 meals to people in need. Thousands and thousands of pounds of clothes were being sorted, labeled, and distributed, and valuable supplies like heaters and generators were being loaded up in cars to be taken out to the Rockaways, Staten Island and other places in need. However, this well-oiled operation wasn’t organized by the Red Cross, New York Cares, or some other well-established volunteer group. This massive effort was the handiwork of none other than Occupy Wall Street—the effort is known as Occupy Sandy.

The scene at St. Jacobis on Saturday was friendly, orderly chaos. Unlike other shelters that had stopped collecting donations or were looking for volunteers with special skills such as medical training, Occupy Sandy was ready to take anyone willing to help. A wide range of people pitched in, including a few small children making peanut butter sandwiches, but most volunteers were in their 20s and 30s. A large basement rec room had become a hive of vegetable chopping and clothes bagging. They held orientations throughout the day for new volunteers. One of the orientation leaders, Ian Horst, who has been involved with a local group called Occupy Sunset Park for the past year, says he was “totally blown away by the response” and the sheer numbers of people who showed up and wanted to help. He estimated that he’d given an orientation to 200 people in the previous hour.

By midday, a line stretched all the way down the block of people who’d already attended orientation and were waiting for rides to be dispatched to volunteer. Kiley Edgley and Eric Schneider had been waiting about 20 minutes and were toward the front of the line. Like several people I spoke to, the fact that this effort was being organized by the occupy movement wasn’t a motivating factor—they found out about the opportunity to volunteer online and just wanted to help.

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Climate change and Americanism

Katherine Stewart writes: Now, you don’t have to believe that Earth was created in six hectic days in order to be skeptical about climate science, but a large number of climate science deniers also happen to be evolution deniers.

What exactly is the theology of climate science denial? The Cornwall Alliance – a coalition whose list of signatories could double as a directory of major players in the religious right – has a produced a declaration asserting, as a matter of theology, that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.”

It also tells us – on the firm foundation of Holy Scriptures – that policies intended to slow the pace of climate change represent a “dangerous expansion of government control over private life”. It also alerts us that the environmental movement is “un-Biblical” – indeed, a new and false religion. If the Cornwall Declaration seems like a tough read, you can get what you need from the organization’s DVD series: “Resisting the Green Dragon: A Biblical Response to one of the Greatest Deceptions of our Day.”

Now, this isn’t the theology of every religion in America, or of every strain of Christianity; not by a long stretch. Most Christians accept climate science and believe in protecting the environment, and many of them do so for religious as well as scientific reasons. But theirs is not the theology that holds sway in the upper reaches of the Republican party, or moves your average climate science denier Chuck. As Rick Santorum explained at an energy summit in Colorado:

“We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth … for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit.”

For anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Christian teachings, one of the glaring contradictions in the vigorous defense mounted by many right-wing American Christians in response to what they present as secular threats to their faith, is the fact these defenders of the faith are clearly willing to discount many of their own faith’s foundational principles.

Love of God and to love your neighbor as yourself are, the New Testament declares, the supreme commandments to followers of Christ. But how do these commandments jive with declarations such as this, from Pastor John Hagee:

This nation was not built for atheists or by atheists. It was built by Christian people who believed in the Word of God. To the atheists watching this telecast, if our belief in God offends you, move. There are planes leaving every hour on the hour, going every place on planet earth. Get on one, we don’t want you and we won’t miss you, I promise you.

Maybe the way Hagee interprets the injunction to love ones neighbor is that it requires one to first evict those neighbors one can’t love.

What Hagee’s words and those that spout from the mouths of millions of like-minded Americans reveal, is that the faith they are defending is not Christianity. It is Christian Americanism. It is the worship of this country and its creators sustained through a theological ideology designed to sustain the myths that America is blessed by God; that it was a land with no people given to people with no land; and that its settlers’ right to take what was not theirs derived from their conviction that they were receiving gifts from God.

What naturally flows from this belief in God-gifted land is a conception of divinely ordained ownership and the belief: we can do with this land what we damn well please.

What those who warn about climate change and other environmental perils are challenging has less to do with an interpretation of scientific data and much more to do with a religiopolitical conviction: we own this land.

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With Glenn Beck’s help, can Romney win over the ultimate undecided voter?

The New York Times reports: On radio and on his Internet network, the influential conservative pundit Glenn Beck frequently invokes God, religious freedom and the founding fathers, but he does not regularly discuss his own Mormon faith.

But in early September, he broke with practice and hosted a special one-hour show, asking his audience, “Does Mitt Romney’s Mormonism make him too scary or weird to be elected to president of the United States?”

Mr. Beck has not always supported Mr. Romney. (“I think he’s an honorable man, but I don’t trust him,” he said last year.) But as perhaps the best-known Mormon after the Republican presidential candidate and a major influence on evangelical Christians, Mr. Beck has emerged as an unlikely theological bridge between the first Mormon presidential nominee and a critical electorate.

At the same time, Mr. Beck’s defense of his and Mr. Romney’s shared faith speaks to the long-frayed relationship between evangelical Christians and Mormons and raises the question of whether evangelicals will ultimately put aside religious differences and vote on common conservative issues.

During his special program, Mr. Beck took questions from mostly evangelical Christian listeners, colorfully debunking misperceptions about Mormonism. The “magic underwear” was compared to a skullcap, and Mr. Beck insisted that polygamy was seen as a “perversion” in the modern church.

“It’s not weird to be a Mormon,” he assured his listeners at the end of the program, “and it’s not weird to be president if you’re Mormon.”

Although Mr. Beck’s national media profile has waned since he left Fox News last year, his support among his core audience remains strong. “The Glenn Beck Program” is typically the third-most-popular talk-news radio show, after “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and “The Sean Hannity Show.” In September, an agreement was reached with Dish Network to bring Mr. Beck’s online network, The Blaze, to traditional television.

Mr. Beck’s unique position as both a Mormon and a prominent voice among evangelicals has been too tempting for Mr. Romney’s campaign to pass up. Campaign officials have quietly courted Mr. Beck, according to a person briefed on his meetings with campaign surrogates who could not discuss private conversations publicly. Mr. Beck declined to comment for this article.

Last month, Mr. Beck, along with former Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Romney’s son Josh, headlined a Dallas fund-raiser that brought in more than $250,000 for the Romney Victory committee, and on Friday Mr. Beck held a rally in Columbus, Ohio, intended to influence voters in that swing state. On Saturday, he attended Mr. Romney’s rally in Dubuque, Iowa.

Stalwart conservatives who support the Romney-Ryan ticket, like Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas; Rick Santorum, a former senator and Republican presidential candidate; and retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, have appeared on Mr. Beck’s program not so much to tout Mr. Romney directly as to discuss hot-button political issues like the handling of the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Mostly Mr. Beck has helped Mr. Romney by directly addressing his devout Mormon faith, something the candidate himself rarely does. “I believe Mr. Romney prays on his knees every day,” Mr. Beck said recently on his radio program. “I believe he is being guided.” He has also said that a Romney victory would be “a sign from God.” [Continue reading…]

But as usual, God is struggling to make up her/his/its mind. Maybe the saturation advertising ends up confusing an omniscient mind — just imagine having to hear/see all those robocalls and commercials simultaneously.

Maybe the sign from God in this election will end up being revealed not by who wins but how many Americans bother voting.

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Lieberman becomes a bigger liability for the Israel lobby

The Forward reports: Pro-Israel activists who have long depicted Israel’s firebrand foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as a marginal figure are now pondering how to explain his enhanced role to American politicians and others following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to merge his party with Lieberman’s and effectively make Lieberman his chief deputy.

Lieberman, a longtime lightning rod, has epitomized the concerns some critics voice about Israel’s commitment to democratic norms. They cite his objection to any move toward compromise with the Palestinians, his call to curb Israeli Arabs’ citizenship rights and his support for restrictions on Israeli civil society organizations, among other things.

Now, the merger of his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, with Netanyahu’s ruling Likud faction will give Lieberman control of one-third of the seats in the new, merged party’s political list as it prepares for upcoming elections.

“Likud’s merger with Avigdor Lieberman’s party is bad news for Israel,” said Ori Nir, spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, a dovish group on the left end of the Jewish organizational spectrum. “It will further isolate Israel globally and erode its image as a democracy and a legitimate member of the family of nations.”

But others, closer to the center, don’t see Lieberman’s embrace by Netanyahu as a drag on Israel’s image or on its relations with the United States, since the platforms of the Israeli government coalition and the Likud party that leads it have not changed.

“Israel’s government supports a two-state solution, as does ours, and the merger of their two leading coalition partners, and the emergence of others parties, like [Yair] Lapid’s Yesh Atid, seems to make a secular, centrist coalition even more likely after their upcoming elections,” said Josh Block, CEO and president of The Israel Project, a group focused on promoting a pro-Israel approach in the media and in public opinion.

The complexity of the Israeli political system and Lieberman’s divergence from formerly known patterns of right-wing politics have made it difficult to decipher the possible impact of the merger of his party — Israel’s third largest — with Israel’s largest political party. The Moldovan-born Lieberman staunchly opposes abandoning exclusively Jewish settlements on the Israeli-occupied West Bank in order to achieve compromise with the Palestinians. But he willingly accepted the Netanyahu government’s guidelines, which declare the government’s support for a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. On domestic issues, critics view him as the single biggest threat to equality and democracy in Israel. At the same time, he is staunchly anti-clerical and a consequent ally of liberals in their fight against perceived religious infringements on the rights of secular Israelis. [Continue reading…]

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Alawite FSA supporter whose father backs Assad tells of a Syrian family ripped apart

The National reports: Loubna Mrie is one of the few who belong to the minority Alawite sect of Syria’s president, Bashar Al Assad, and oppose his rule.

The 21-year-old activist, from a village near Latakia, said the country’s conflict has torn her family apart. She fled to Turkey in August after hearing security forces knew about her role in smuggling bullets to the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA). En route, she was recorded talking to an FSA rebel in a video that was uploaded to YouTube. Within days, her mother was kidnapped from her home and has not been heard from since.

Ms Mrie blames her father, Jaodat Kamel Mrie, for the abduction.

“He is ready to do anything to show his loyalty to the government and Bashar Assad,” she said in an interview last week.

At the beginning of the uprising, her father, 69, a wealthy businessman, became a member of the dreaded shabiha, armed Alawite groups accused of acting as government sponsored militiamen.

Ms Mrie said he felt his financial success was due to privileges granted by the regime. He began arming unemployed Alawi men, paying them to carry out attacks, and training them.

“I am sure he is responsible for what happened to my mother,” she said.

Her decision to work against the regime came from a fierce independence her mother had instilled in her, she said. Her parents had divorced when she was in fifth grade and growing up she only saw her father a few times a week. Because so many people in Latakia, where she attended university, were pro-regime, she left for Damascus and begin assisting the FSA. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian opposition meeting in Qatar to broaden, unify ranks

Reuters reports: Syria’s splintered opposition factions prepared to begin talks in Qatar on Sunday on a common front to gain international respect and recognition and, crucially, better weapons for their quest to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

It was the first concerted attempt to meld opposition groups based abroad and align them with rebels fighting in Syria, to help end a 19-month-old conflict that has killed over 32,000 lives, devastated swathes of the major Arab country and threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.

Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have thwarted prior attempts to forge a united opposition.

Four days of talks in the Qatari capital Doha are expected with the goal of expanding and broadening the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 200 members to 400, SNC politicians said.

SNC leaders hope this will pave the way for a separate meeting in Doha on Thursday of the wider opposition movement, aiming to form a united coalition.

“The four coming days for the Syrian National Council… will see for the first time the election of the leading committees and a new president for the council,” veteran opposition figure George Sabra told Reuters ahead of the talks.

The broadened council will include more representatives from other political and revolutionary groups, he said.

The United States called last week for an overhaul of the opposition’s leadership, saying it was time to move beyond the SNC and bring in those “in the front lines fighting and dying”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the meeting in Qatar would be an opportunity to establish a credible opposition.

Internal divisions, including a lack of cooperation between leaders abroad and fighters in Syria, as well as the rising profile of Islamist militants in rebel ranks, have put off Western states otherwise keen to see Assad fall.

Influential opposition figure Riad Seif has proposed a structure melding the rebel Free Syrian Army, regional military councils and other insurgent units alongside local civilian bodies and prominent opposition figures. [Continue reading…]

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Hawking women’s rights

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: For advocacy to be successful, it has to come from a place of empathy rather than superiority. Many of the most vocal advocates of women’s rights in Pakistan today are also known for their sanguine views on the “war on terror.” It is, therefore, doubtful that their new self-image as the deliverers of women from patriarchal tyranny will gain much purchase among the sufferers.

Women have doubtless borne the brunt of the dislocation and insecurity occasioned by the “war on terror.” But, to treat women’s rights in isolation from the general malaise merely serves to put the concern under a pall of suspicion. This is because women’s rights have been long used as a pretext for imperial aggression. Far from bringing relief, their invocation—especially by the apologists for war—merely helps obscurantist criminals, like the TTP, elevate misogyny to anti-imperial expression.

The situation in Pakistan’s troubled northwest is no doubt ugly. From the indiscriminate violence of the Taliban, the gratuitous butchery of sectarian criminals, the bombing of girls’ schools, the targeting of children, to the threats against the media, it is a predicament that is begging for a visionary political solution.

The Pakistani government, it seems however, will not provide that. Under pressure from foreign allies and cheered on by home-grown pugilists, the government has repeatedly opted for half-hearted military solutions which, given its limited resources and ill-defined goals, inevitably descend into collective punishment and extra-judicial killing. The confused and often indiscriminate nature of these operations has swelled the ranks of the very enemy the state is out to destroy. If war for Clausewitz was politics by other means; in Pakistan, it has become a substitute for politics. [Continue reading…]

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