Video: What defines the Democrats?
The so-called ‘Democratic’ party ‘votes’ in ‘favor’ of Jerusalem as so-called ‘capital’ of Israel
The Los Angeles Times reports: Democrats sought to tamp down a pair of controversies as they gaveled open the second night of their convention Wednesday, inserting the word “God” into their platform and restating support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Both had been omitted from the original draft and Republicans had seized on the absence to question both the Democrats’ faith and their commitment to Israel.
The language was adopted as amendments to the party platform as the first order of Wednesday’s business, but not without controversy. It took three attempts to pass the language regarding Jerusalem and a subjective decision by the convention chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to decide the change had the required support of two-thirds of the delegates. To many listeners, the voice vote seemed at least evenly divided.
That wasn’t a subjective decision. It was a shameless lie after three failures in getting the desired result.
Assad’s massacre strategy
Hassan Hassan writes: What is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad thinking? Over the past several weeks, his regime has escalated military operations throughout the country — shelling neighborhoods in previously loyal cities, using airplanes to drop what rebel fighters call “TNT barrels” containing hundreds of kilograms worth of explosives, and unleashing its militias to commit gruesome massacres such as the one in the city of Daraya, where more than 400 people were slaughtered on Aug. 27. Approximately 5,000 Syrians were killed in August — making it the deadliest month of the 17-month conflict.
At the same time, the Syrian regime has embarked on a PR offensive. Damascus invited the Independent‘s Robert Fisk into the country — allowing him to interview Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, embed with Syrian forces battling insurgents in Aleppo, and interview imprisoned foreign fighters and Syria jihadists. Most prominently, Assad himself granted an interview to the pro-regime Addounia TV on Aug. 29 where he insisted “Syria will return to the Syria before the crisis.”
Western and Arab media dismissed the interview as detached from reality: Assad’s comments appeared to be directed at an outside audience, and he did not offer any concessions to the opposition. But the interview merits a closer look, as it can offer insights into a recent shift in the regime’s thinking and tactics.
In the interview, Assad explained that a recent “public understanding” has allowed the regime to escalate its offensive, unlike during the early stages of the uprising. “Some wanted us to handle that stage as we handle the stage today,” he said. “This is illogical. The stage was different, their [rebels’] modus operandi was different, even the public understanding of what’s happening was different.”
There is of course no public consent as such, but some of Syria’s internal dynamics have shifted in favor of the regime. Many in Syria have made up their minds about standing with the regime until the end. Though some do not support the violence, they believe that blood is a price that has to be paid to prevent the country from lapsing into chaos. Others want a decisive end to the conflict, regardless of who delivers, and currently see the opposition as unable to tip the balance. [Continue reading…]
The making of a Syrian rebel: The saga of Abboud Barri
Time magazine reports: Abboud Barri jiggles the dog tags as if they belonged to animals being raised in a puppy mill. “I have a lot of these,” Barri says. “Any buyers?” He is joking. The tags belong to human beings, soldiers of the Assad regime who are now held captive or were killed by Barri, a local commander of one of the franchise groups of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA). Unlike some other militia leaders, Barri says he isn’t interested in demanding ransom from his captives’ families. He says he keeps the ID tags so those families know “to look for them in hell.”
He keeps the eight military-issued dog tags in the right pocket of his sand-colored cargo pants; they are war booty from his unit’s recent assault on a loyalist checkpoint in Idlib province.
Barri, along with 20 or so other men from several different FSA units in Idlib, is reclining on deep red cushions spread out on plastic straw mats under a sprawling almond tree in the Jabal al-Zawya region in northern Syria. Some of the men laugh as they recount some of Barri’s wilder antics, like the time he set out on an extremely perilous but heroic journey to the besieged town of Rastan, halfway between Homs and Hama, to deliver much needed bags required for blood transfusions. Others recall how Abu Rabieh, a respected revolutionary figure in Idlib province, refused to give Barri a gun, fearing what the former agricultural worker might do with it. Rabieh was shot dead late last year in an ambush. A few months later, Barri formed a military unit, which he now says includes some 58 men. “He was always a risk taker,” one of the men later says about Barri. “In the beginning of the revolution, before there was so much destruction, we didn’t want hot-blooded risk takers who didn’t carefully study their actions. Now it doesn’t matter.”
As Barri speaks, one of his phones beeps. Like a few others in his possession, the device belongs to one of his prisoners. It has received a text message from the captive’s father, wishing him a happy ‘Id al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. After several minutes, the phone rings. It is the father. “Read him the fatiha,” Barri says dismissively to the parent, referring to a Muslim prayer often recited for the dead. “May God have mercy on his soul.” Some of the other men, who admire Barri’s bravado, are taken aback by his coldness. “I was very uncomfortable when I heard him say that,” one of the men says. “I was sad for the father.”
War is dehumanizing, and civil wars in particular can brutalize a society in ways that fundamentally alter its very nature. Neighbors become enemies; differences — social, economic, religious — become magnified as a means to confirm the otherness of the enemy. Local accents and surnames can reveal sectarian identities and, by extension, presumed political views. There is little room for nuance or civility in a civil war.
The U.N. and other international organizations have said that both sides in the bitter 18-month Syrian conflict are guilty of committing human-rights abuses, although President Bashar Assad’s forces are responsible for the vast majority of the transgressions. In more than a year of clandestine travel in Syria, TIME has seen little direct evidence of rebel attacks on civilians, although suspected shabiha (regime thugs) and loyalist troops are often treated mercilessly.
However, an FSA fighter told TIME of a rebel attack on Alawite civilians in a village in Sahel al-Ghab, a vast expanse of plains between Idlib and Hama. He said the small group of rebels were in the village to apprehend a suspected shabih, but things didn’t go as planned. He said a woman opened fire on the group, prompting some of the fighters to shoot her dead and then kill two other women and several children in the house. “We had a serious fight. We, the rebels, clashed over the killing of the women and children,” he said. “We told the others it was wrong, forbidden, but some of them didn’t care.”
The fighter was extremely troubled as he recalled the incident. “See this blood?” he said, pointing to a patch on the knees of his jeans. “It’s Alawite blood.” He held his head in his hands, asking for forgiveness. “What are we becoming?” he said. There was no way to verify his account. He said he and the other men buried the bodies and hurriedly left town before the army arrived. There has been no report of the alleged incident in state media. [Continue reading…]
Syria comes under scathing criticism from Turkey and Egypt
The Associated Press reports: Syria came under scathing international criticism Wednesday, with Turkey calling the country a terrorist state and Egypt’s leader calling on President Bashar Assad to “learn from recent history” and step down.
Alluding to the fate of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, which were overthrown by Arab Spring uprisings, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi warned his Syrian counterpart that “it’s too late to talk about reform, this is the time for change.”
Morsi’s strong comments to Arab foreign ministers in Cairo followed an address last month during a summit meeting of the so-called nonaligned movement in the Iranian capital, Tehran, where the Egyptian leader gave a hearty call for world support of Syria’s rebels. Iran is Assad’s strongest foreign backer.
Also Wednesday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed Assad’s government.
“The regime has become one of state terrorism,” he said. “Syria is going through a huge humanitarian saga. Unfortunately, as usual, the international community is merely watching the slaughter, massacre and the elimination of Muslims.”
Syrian refugee children speak of desire for revenge
The New York Times reports: Like all the small children in the desert refugee camp here, Ibtisam, 11, is eager to go home to the toys, bicycles, books, cartoons and classmates she left behind in Syria.
But not if that means living with Alawites, members of the same minority offshoot of Shiite Islam as Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. “I hate the Alawites and the Shiites,” Ibtisam said as a crowd of children and adults nodded in agreement. “We are going to kill them with our knives, just like they killed us.”
If the fighters seeking to oust Mr. Assad sometimes portray their battle as a struggle for democracy, the Sunni Muslim children of the Zaatari camp tell a much uglier story of sectarian revenge. Asked for their own views of the grown-up battle that drove them from their homes, child after child brought up their hatred of the Alawites and a thirst for revenge. Children as young as 10 or 11 vowed never to play with Syrian Alawite children or even pledged to kill them.
Parroting older relatives — some of whom openly egged them on — the youngsters offered a disturbing premonition of the road ahead for Syria.
Their unvarnished hatred helps explain why so many Alawites, who make up more than 10 percent of the Syrian population, have stood by Mr. Assad even as the world has written him off. They see him as their best protection against sectarian annihilation. [Continue reading…]
Video: Will U.S. personnel ever face torture charges?
In brain surgery, experience reveals the importance of luck
Henry Marsh writes: I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing. With a pair of short-wave diathermy forceps I coagulate a few millimetres of the brain’s surface, turning the living, glittering pia arachnoid – the transparent membrane that covers the brain – along with its minute and elegant blood vessels, into an ugly scab. With a pair of microscopic scissors I then cut the blood vessels and dig downwards with a fine sucker. I look down the operating microscope, feeling my way through the soft white substance of the brain, trying to find the tumour. The idea that I am cutting and pushing through thought itself, that memories, dreams and reflections should have the consistency of soft white jelly, is simply too strange to understand and all I can see in front of me is matter. Nevertheless, I know that if I stray into the wrong area, into what neurosurgeons call eloquent brain, I will be faced with a damaged and disabled patient afterwards. The brain does not come with helpful labels saying ‘Cut here’ or ‘Don’t cut there’. Eloquent brain looks no different from any other area of the brain, so when I go round to the Recovery Ward after the operation to see what I have achieved, I am always anxious.
There are various ways in which the risk of doing damage can be reduced. There is a form of GPS for brain surgery called Computer Navigation where, instead of satellites orbiting the Earth, there are infrared cameras around the patient’s head which show the surgeon on a computer screen where his instruments are on the patient’s brain scan. You can operate with the patient awake The idea that . . . memories, dreams and reflections should have the consistency of soft white jelly, is simply too strange to understand under local anaesthetic: the eloquent areas of the brain can then be identified by stimulating the brain with an electrode and by giving the patient simple tasks to perform so that one can see if one is causing any damage as the operation proceeds. And then there is skill and experience and knowing when to stop. Quite often one must decide that it is better not to start in the first place and declare the tumour inoperable. Despite these methods, however, much still depends on luck, both good and bad. As I become more and more experienced, it seems that luck becomes ever more important.
I had a patient who had a tumour of the pineal gland. The dualist philosopher Descartes, who argued that mind and brain are entirely separate entities, placed the human soul in the pineal gland. It was here, he said, that the material brain in some magical and mysterious way communicated with the mind and with the immaterial soul. I wonder what he would have said if he could have seen my patients looking at their own brains on a video monitor, as some of them do when I operate under local anaesthetic.
Pineal tumours are very rare. They can be benign and they can be malignant. The benign ones do not necessarily need treatment. The malignant ones are treated with radiotherapy and chemotherapy but can prove fatal nevertheless. In the past they were considered to be inoperable but with modern microscopic neurosurgery this is no longer the case: it is usually now considered necessary to operate at least to obtain a biopsy – to remove a small part of the tumour for a precise diagnosis of the type so that you can then decide how best to treat it. The biopsy result will tell you whether to remove all of the tumour or whether to leave most of it in place, and whether the patient needs radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Since the pineal is buried deep in the middle of the brain the operation is, as surgeons say, a technical challenge; neurosurgeons look with awe and excitement at brain scans showing pineal tumours, like mountaineers looking up at a great peak that they hope to climb. To make matters worse, this particular patient – a very fit and athletic man in his thirties who had developed severe headaches as the tumour obstructed the normal circulation of cerebro-spinal fluid around his brain – had found it very hard to accept that he had a life-threatening illness and that his life was now out of his control. I had had many anxious conversations and phone calls with him over the days before the operation. I explained that the risks of the surgery, which included death or a major stroke, were ultimately less than the risks of not operating. He laboriously typed everything I said into his smartphone, as if taking down the long words – obstructive hydrocephalus, endoscopic ventriculostomy, pineocytoma, pineoblastoma – would somehow put him back in charge and save him. Anxiety is contagious – it is one of the reasons surgeons must distance themselves from their patients – and his anxiety, combined with my feeling of profound failure about an operation I had carried out a week earlier meant that I faced the prospect of operating upon him with dread. I had seen him the night before the operation. When I see my patients the night before surgery I try not to dwell on the risks of the operation ahead, which I will already have discussed in detail at an earlier meeting. His wife was sitting beside him, looking quite sick with fear. [Continue reading…]
Video: Zizek!
How to read Žižek
Adam Kotsko writes: Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst from Slovenia, is one of the few academics to have achieved a degree of genuine popularity among general readers. He regularly lectures to overflow crowds, is the subject of a documentary film (called simply Žižek!), and surely counts as one of the world’s most visible advocates of left-wing ideas. When Žižek first broke into the English-speaking academic scene, however, few would likely have predicted such success. For one thing, his research focused on an unpromising topic: the long-neglected field of “ideology critique,” a staple of Marxist cultural criticism that had fallen into eclipse as Marxism became less central to Western intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century.
“Ideology” is one of those philosophical terms that has entered into everyday speech with an impoverished meaning. Much as “deconstruction” means little more than “detailed analysis” in popular usage, so “ideology” tends to refer to a body of beliefs, most often with overtones of inflexibility or fanaticism. But as Žižek argued in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, ideology is not to be found in our conscious opinions or convictions but, as Marx suggested, in our everyday practices. Explicit opinions are important, but they serve as symptoms to be interpreted rather than statements to be taken at face value.
Racism, for example. Žižek recommends that we look for symptomatic contradictions, as when the anti-Semite claims that the Jews are both arch-capitalist exploiters and Bolshevik subversives, that they are both excessively tied to their overly particular tradition and deracinated cosmopolitans undercutting national traditions. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were presented simultaneously as childlike innocents needing the guidance of whites and as brutal sexual predators. In contemporary America, Mexican immigrants are viewed at once as lay-abouts burdening our social welfare system and as relentless workaholics who are stealing all our jobs.
These contradictions don’t show that ideology is “irrational” — the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many reasons supporting their views. Žižek argues that these piled-up rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.
A similar sense that something else is going on always strikes me when I read a review of Žižek’s work in the mainstream media. (A recent example is John Gray’s review of two of Žižek’s books in the New York Review of Books, to which Žižek has responded.) Now academics are always ill-used in the mainstream press, particularly if they deal in abstract concepts and refer to a lot of European philosophers. Yet there’s something special about the treatment of Žižek. In what has become a kind of ritual, the reader of a review of Žižek’s work always learns that Žižek is simultaneously hugely politically dangerous and a clown with no political program whatsoever, that he is an apologist for the worst excesses of twentieth-century Communism and a total right-wing reactionary, both a world-famous left-wing intellectual and an anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself.
The goal is not so much to give an account of Žižek’s arguments and weigh their merits as to inoculate readers against Žižek’s ideas so they feel comfortable dismissing them. To find left-wing thinkers and movements simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and totalitarian, overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power is to suggest: there is no alternative. Rather than simply knocking around a poor, misunderstood academic in the public square, it is an attempt to shut down debate on the basic structure of our society. The rolling disaster of contemporary capitalism — war, crisis, hyper-exploitation of workers, looming environmental catastrophe — demands that we think boldly and creatively to develop some kind of livable alternative. Žižek can help.
The biggest obstacle facing the reader of Žižek’s work is not the academic trappings — the technical terms, the references to other thinkers — but a writing style that defies convention. Broadly speaking, the general expectation of argumentative writing is that it will lay out a more or less straightforward chain of reasons supporting a clear central claim. Even though we acknowledge that this format is almost never encountered in its pure form, it still remains a kind of ideal. In Žižek’s writing, though, it’s difficult to pick out anything like a “thesis statement,” and the argument most often proceeds via intuitive leaps rather than tight chains of reasoning. This is true even of pieces that are more or less totally non-academic, and it is doubtless one of the reasons his work is so often misunderstood. One thing I hope to show here, though, is that his method fits with his goals and with the kinds of phenomena he is trying to get at. Although Žižek’s work can be difficult to get into at first, he is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking writers working in philosophy today, with a unique ability to get people excited about philosophy and critical theory. He is, in short, a gateway drug, and I’m the pusher. [Continue reading…]
Video: Was the revolution lost in Tunisia and Egypt?
Egypt is starting to take sexual harassment seriously
Baher Ibrahim writes: Sexual harassment of women is not new to Egypt. Almost every woman in the country has experienced some form of harassment, whether verbal or physical.
What is new, though, is a slow but steady change in the tide of public opinion. It began with Eid in 2006, where a crowd of women fell prey to sexual predators, some having their clothes ripped off.
Until recently, the Arabic word for harassment (tahharush) was not used in this context. It was previously known as muakssa – implying playful behaviour by young men having a good time. It was simply accepted as part of a “boys will be boys” attitude, with women and girls having to embrace it because that’s just how boys are.
Finally, this social cancer has come to be referred to as “harassment” and the media have begun to pay attention rather than turn a blind eye. [Continue reading…]
Video: Domestic violence in the West Bank on the rise
French judges investigating Arafat’s death seek exhumation
Reuters reports: Three French judges are preparing to travel to Ramallah to seek the exhumation Yasser Arafat’s body as part of an investigation into whether he was murdered by poison, a judicial source told Reuters on Wednesday.
The investigating magistrates will need approval from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already expressed his government’s willingness to exhume the body from a limestone sepulchre in Ramallah.
Arafat’s widow, Suha, said in a statement sent to Reuters that the judges told her lawyer they had begun the necessary steps to travel to Ramallah, where police experts would carry out tests under their authority.
“I respectfully ask the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League to suspend all initiatives while the French justice system is looking into the case, other than to act together with them,” Suha Arafat wrote.
The French murder investigation “should take precedence over all other procedures, because it is the incontestable guarantee of independence and neutrality”, she added.
The court launched the murder inquiry last month into the 2004 death of Arafat in a Paris military hospital after his widow said he may have been poisoned.
No autopsy was carried out after Arafat died, aged 75, a month after being flown to France, seriously ill, from his headquarters in Ramallah.
Still separate and unequal
Rhena Catherine Jasey writes: Legal segregation is no more in the United States, but the de facto segregation of far too many American schools and whole school districts continues to this day. And yes, educational outcomes depend on more than what happens in schools, but nonetheless, the struggle for equity and fairness in public education is the preeminent civil rights issue of our time.
We face a basic question of justice and equity when it comes to the first building blocks of the educational process. The most vulnerable members of our society, children in our neediest areas, face a gross injustice when they go to school each day. The Campaign for Educational Equity, which is now studying New York City public schools, has identified several gaps in “availability of basic educational resources.” (These resources are those listed by Justice Leland DeGrasse in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York court case as necessary in order to “provide all students the opportunity for a sound basic education under the New York State Constitution.”) The Campaign’s research confirms what I have seen firsthand. The schools serving our poor urban populations face a chronic and pervasive lack of resources to support teacher development, to provide a safe learning environment for children, to support curriculum development and to provide basic technology. These problems are not isolated, but systemic.
Given all the variables at work in education, it is a real challenge to guarantee equal educational outcomes, and yet we must insist on a level playing field for all our children regardless of the circumstances of their birth. The fact is that many of our urban students require more support to have a fair opportunity to excel academically, and it is their basic civil right to expect that level of investment from society.
It is disappointing and surprising that so many people seem blind to the current state of affairs in public education. Many deny that the inequalities that exist between the children of middle and upper-middle class parents and their poorer counterparts is an issue of justice. Some claim that the issue is “cultural”, a capacious word used in this case to mean “futile.” Whatever the silent assumptions lurking in the background, the fact is that few not already engaged in addressing the problem feel much motivation to do anything about it. There is certainly no sense of urgency among the general public, or in our political class as a whole, about addressing the current state of public education in our cities.
It is instructive to compare this widespread apathy with the dramatic activism that in past decades overcame other societal injustices. We have seen, for example, remarkable shifts in public opinion, and in the application of our concepts of justice and equity, with respect to the handicapped. Our society and government have also reacted vigorously to the perils of second-hand smoke. We have come a long way in a short time, and spent billions and passed many laws, when it came to creating and enforcing new behavioral norms to protect the environment. The sense of the public welfare has been so strong in these areas that the public will has developed to pursue initiatives that benefit society notwithstanding the fact that the benefits may not correlate with the population making the bulk of the sacrifice. What has applied in those cases applies as much as, if not more, to the task of providing a more equitable educational experience for poor urban and rural children: Everyone would gain. This is not charity but self-interested social investment. How do we explain the lack of public ardor for fixing our educational inequalities? [Continue reading…]
We can’t grow ourselves out of debt, no matter what the Federal Reserve does
Charles Eisenstein writes: Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s pledge at Jackson Hole last Friday to “promote a stronger economic recovery” through “additional policy accommodation” has drawn criticism from economists, liberal and conservative, who question whether the Fed has the wherewithal to stimulate economic growth. What we actually need is more spending, say the liberals. No, less spending, say the conservatives. But underneath these disagreements lies an unexamined agreement, a common assumption that no mainstream economist or policy-maker ever questions: that the purpose of economic policy is to stimulate growth.
So ubiquitous is the equation of growth with prosperity that few people ever pause to consider it. What does economic growth actually mean? It means more consumption – and consumption of a specific kind: more consumption of goods and services that are exchanged for money. That means that if people stop caring for their own children and instead pay for childcare, the economy grows. The same if people stop cooking for themselves and purchase restaurant takeaways instead.
Economists say this is a good thing. After all, you wouldn’t pay for childcare or takeaway food if it weren’t of benefit to you, right? So, the more things people are paying for, the more benefits are being had. Besides, it is more efficient for one daycare centre to handle 30 children than for each family to do it themselves. That’s why we are all so much richer, happier and less busy than we were a generation ago. Right?
Obviously, it isn’t true that the more we buy, the happier we are. Endless growth means endlessly increasing production and endlessly increasing consumption. Social critics have for a long time pointed out the resulting hollowness carried by that thesis. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Why, then, are liberals and conservatives alike so fervent in their pursuit of growth? [Continue reading…]
All-American terrorists and the jihadist threat that never materialized
Kelley B. Vlahos writes: In what papers are calling “one of the most startling and potentially serious cases of an anti-government militia to be brought before the courts in recent years,” three U.S. soldiers have been arraigned for murder and may get the death penalty, stemming from charges they amassed an arsenal, plotted several domestic terror attacks, and killed two friends who had become “loose ends” in their diabolic plans.
You haven’t heard of this? Not surprising, since this story doesn’t square with the narrative that homegrown Muslim radicals are not only infiltrating the government, and the military, but plotting the next big domestic terror assault on American soil. These militiamen, arrested in Georgia where they were stationed at Fort Stewart, are white. They don’t pray in a mosque and certainly don’t want to build one. According to reports, however, they were members of FEAR — Forever Enduring Always Ready — which has been loosely described as an anarchist group set on overthrowing the government and killing President Obama.
These aren’t the first white militia types to be arrested in recent years. Indeed, they join a string of supposed Muslim plotters arrested since 2001. The difference between the recent Georgia case and many of the others is the FBI wasn’t involved from the beginning to set them up and lead them by the nose (the Muslim community is quite familiar with these tactics). These FEAR guys were apparently the real deal. They bought real weapons, and a lot of them, and in the case of the Fort Stewart gang, they committed real murder, killing the guy who allegedly helped to get them the weapons and his girlfriend, execution style, after luring them into the woods. [Continue reading…]
Music: Paolo Fresu, Dhafer Youssef, Eivind Aarset — medley