James Ball writes: With its stand-off at the tiny Ecuadorian embassy in London, the Assange melodrama has entered its third act. But despite the drama, we don’t yet know for sure what kind of story it is.
The first possibility is political thriller: Assange is right, his critics wrong. The US is indeed trying to extradite Assange via Sweden, using a method which avoids due process and involves political interference.
There’s been no evidence to support this theory, despite it being the basis of Assange’s bid for asylum, but it would be a problematic one for the US: a backdoor extradition would bring a lot of disillusioned WikiLeaks supporters back into the fold, likely prompt a (grudging) defence of Assange from the New York Times and others, and give Obama serious first amendment and human rights challenges in an election year.
Tactically, it would be the worst possible way for the US to seek extradition.
The second option is greek tragedy: a world in which Assange has spent so long conflating allegations centred around his private life on a few days in Sweden with WikiLeaks’ wider battles he’s come to believe his own spin.
Instead of seeing a Swedish prosecution, Assange’s belief it comes wider has led him to breach his bail, lose his supporters their bail money, and cause an diplomatic ruckus.
The third is soap opera: time and again during his Swedish sex case, Assange has escalated the situation – refusing to take an STD test, leading to the prosecution. Leaving the country and refusing. to attend a face-to-face interview (offering only Skype or through the embassy), leading to extradition.
Fighting the extradition through every court to the highest in the UK. And now, prompting a stand-off outside an embassy – always moving in the direction of increasing drama and public attention.
To those supporters still fanatically loyal to Assange, which of the three is happening matters a great deal.
To others, it’s already a tragedy. WikiLeaks’ alleged source Bradley Manning faces trial – and a possible death sentence – in the US. Sixteen supporters who allegedly took part in attacks on PayPal, Mastercard and Visa, the online equivalent of sit-in protests, for their boycott of WikiLeaks each face up to fifteen years in prison, and await their day in court.
A group of alleged UK hackers belonging to the Lulzsec group will each face their trials next week. And the WikiLeaks submission system remains down, as it has for nearly two years.
But we’re not looking at any of that. We’re looking at the Ecuadorian embassy – the aftermath of a few days in Sweden.
Joshua Rozenberg adds: It is for the Ecuadorians to decide whether they want to annoy the UK, the EU and, no doubt, the US by offering Assange asylum.
But to do so might be something of an empty gesture. The police will not enter a foreign embassy to make an arrest. But short of giving Assange Ecuadorian diplomatic status or hiding him in a rather large diplomatic bag, there seems no way in which he can get to Heathrow, let alone Ecuador, without being arrested for breach of his bail conditions.
Max Blumenthal writes: I recently learned of a major exodus of key staffers at Al Akhbar caused at least in part by disagreements with the newspaper leadership’s pro-Assad tendency. The revelation helps explain why Al Akhbar English now prominently features the malevolent propaganda of Amal Saad Ghorayeb and the dillentantish quasi-analysis of Sharmine Narwani alongside editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin’s friendly advice for Bashar Assad, whom he attempts to depict as an earnest reformer overwhelmed by events.
When I joined the fledgling Al Akhbar English website last fall, I was excited to contribute my writing on the Israel-Palestine situation and US foreign policy to a paper that I considered one of the most courageous publications in the Arab world. At the time, the Syrian uprising had just begun, and apparently, so had the debates inside Al Akhbar, which reflected the discussions within the wider Lebanese Left. Almost a year later, the results of the debate have become clear on the pages of the paper, where despite the presence of a few dissident voices, the apologia for Assad and his crimes has reached unbearable levels.
I considered responding on my blog to some of the more outlandish ravings published at Al Akhbar, but eventually decided my energy would be better spent on covering the topics I knew best — and which I could discuss with the authority of journalistic experience. Meanwhile, my frustration and embarrassment mounted as one Ghorayeb screed after another appeared on the site, each one more risible than the next.
Following her vehement defense of the Syrian dictator’s use of surgery metaphors to refer to his security forces’ brutal crackdowns, Al Akhbar English featured Ghorayeb’s daftest work to date: an attack on Arab Third Wayers (supporters of the anti-imperialist, anti-authoritarian political tendency) in which she asserted that “the real litmus of Arab intellectuals’ and activists’ commitment to the Palestinian cause is no longer their support for Palestinian rights, but rather, their support for the Assad leadership’s struggle against the imperialist-Zionist-Arab moderate axis’ onslaught against it.”
Ghorayeb’s rant, rightly condemned by As’ad Abu Khalil as an “outrage,” was of a piece with the Syrian regime’s long record of exploiting the Palestinian struggle to advance its narrow self-interests. For me, it was the final straw. Had Al Akhbar’s editorial leadership provided a platform to Ghorayeb and other apologists because of the quality of their writing or because of their willingness to defend the regime behind the cover of leftist ideology? This had become a salient question.
I was forced to conclude that unless I was prepared to spend endless stores of energy jousting with Assad apologists, I was merely providing them cover by keeping my name and reputation associated with Al Akhbar. More importantly, I decided that if I kept quiet any longer, I would be betraying my principles and those of the people who have encouraged and inspired me over the years. There is simply no excuse for me to remain involved for another day with such a morally compromised outlet. And so, instead of preparing to throw up in my own mouth each time I click on one of the pro-regime op-eds appearing with regularity on Al Akhbar English’s home page, I am washing my hands of the whole operation. [Continue reading…]
Juan Cole writes: The Syrian upheaval has gone through several stages. It began with relatively peaceful protests by crowds in a handful of small and medium-size cities outside the large metropolitan areas of Damascus and Aleppo. Severe repression by the national regime led some revolutionaries to turn to guerrilla tactics. The ruling Baath government subjected the quarters held by the Free Syrian Army to heavy artillery and tank assaults. More recently, as the rebellion continued to spread in small towns, the military has provided cover to death squads that have massacred civilians in an attempt to scare them into submission. The most frightening thing about this spiral of ever greater violence and brutality is that some of the now-hardened lines have been sectarian.
The Syrian army assault on the rebellious Sunni village of al-Haffa in Latakia province, which has left it a ghost town, exemplifies this move toward religious war. Latakia is heavily Alawite, and protecting members of this religious group from Sunni dominance is one of the latent functions of the regime. The upper echelons of the ruling Baath Party and its officer corps are dominated by the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam. Only about 10 percent of Syrians are Alawite. On the order of 70 percent of Syrians belong to the rival Sunni branch of Islam. (Many Syrian Sunnis are secularists.) The car bomb that recently damaged the Shiite shrine of Sayyida Zaynab in Damascus may have primarily targeted nearby Intelligence Ministry buildings, but those who detonated it may have been happy enough to hurt Shiite religious sensibilities.
The death squads, Shabiha, deployed by the regime against the towns of Houla and Mazraat al-Qubair in recent weeks are drawn from the Alawi sect. Many of the Sunnis being targeted have been organized by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Houla and Mazraat al-Qubair are largely Sunni hamlets surrounded by powerful Alawi towns.
The black-garbed Shabiha, or “ghost gangs,” began as criminal organizations in the Alawite-dominated port of Latakia in the 1970s after the Alawite Assad family came to power in Syria, and some of its members are drawn from the Assad and related Deeb and Makhlouf clans. Although the groups were curbed in the 1990s after they became too arrogant even for the Assads to countenance, they re-emerged in 2011 as paramilitary adjuncts to the army and security police. In Alawite areas, they have been accused of detaining Syrians with Sunni names at checkpoints and doing away with them.
The Baath Party was founded in the 1940s by two Christian intellectuals who advocated a secular Arab nationalism. In some ways, the “Resurrection,” or Baath, party was to resemble the Communist Party, but instead of championing the working class and being universal it would uplift ethnic Arabs and unite them to throw off the vestiges of Western, colonial domination. This attempt to subvert socialism with an appeal to essentially racist themes made the Baath an odd hybrid of fascism and Third-Worldism. Non-Arab minorities in Baath-ruled countries, such as the Kurds, often faced discrimination or worse.
Baathists came to power through coups in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s. Ironically, the Baath one-party state became a vehicle for well-organized minorities to take over the government. Thus, in Syria the Alawite Shiites dominated the Baath regime from 1970, whereas in Iraq control of the ruling Baath party was held by a Sunni clan from Tikrit (that of Saddam Hussein). [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: A U.S. election monitoring group said on Tuesday it was unable to say if Egypt’s presidential election was free and fair as it had not been given sufficient access, accusing the military leadership of hampering a transition to democracy.
The Carter Center said it had been unable to monitor the vote properly and that a “return of elements of martial law” meant it was “now unclear whether a truly democratic transition remains under way in Egypt”.
Supporters of both presidential candidates – the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsy and former air force commander Ahmed Shafik – say their man won last weekend’s run-off. Official results are not expected until Thursday.
“We cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of the integrity of the elections due to the limited nature of the mission,” the Carter Center’s field office director, Sanne van den Bergh, told Reuters.
The group complained of late accreditation to monitor the vote, limits on the amount of time it was allowed to stay in polling stations and said it was denied access to the central count.
In the Greater Middle East — the geographic expanse in which the global war on terrorism has been largely waged — the Obama administration has now abandoned any pretense of liberating or pacifying or dominating the Islamic world. Through a campaign of targeted assassination (supplemented in the case of Iran with cyber attacks) the aim is now merely to keep adversaries off-balance in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. In that context, Pakistan serves chiefly as a target-rich environment.
In East Asia, the Obama administration touts its proposed strategic “pivot” as the emerging centerpiece of U.S. national security policy. In Washington, however, “pivot” is a code word, translated by those in the know as “containing China.” The imperative of thwarting China’s perceived (but as yet indecipherable and perhaps undetermined) ambitions elevates the importance of India. In the eyes of aspiring Kissingers, an India aligned with the United States will check Chinese power just as aligning China with the United States once served to check Soviet power. Here too the effect is necessarily to render Pakistan, which views India as its mortal enemy, redundant.
Yet while a certain logic informs the coming U.S. abandonment of Pakistan, there are massive risks as well.
Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world. (Go ahead: Plug that sentence into your search engine.) Mired in poverty, burdened with a dysfunctional government and weak institutions, dominated by deeply fearful military and intelligence establishments that have little regard for civilian control or democratic practice, it possesses one trump card: a formidable nuclear arsenal. A potential willingness to use that arsenal is what ultimately makes Pakistan so dangerous — and should give U.S. policymakers pause before they give that country the back of their hand, as the United States has done so many times before.
To the extent that foreign policy ends up figuring in the upcoming presidential election, Iran’s putative nuclear weapons program will probably attract some attention. OK, but that’s a potential bomb, not a real one. The bomb that will keep the next president up late is not the one that Iran may be building but the one that Pakistan already holds in readiness to use.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports: Pakistan’s combative top judge made his most audacious foray into judicial activism yet on Tuesday, firing Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, emptying the cabinet and forcing President Asif Ali Zardari to reset his fragile governing coalition.
Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry’s order was the culmination of a three-year transformation that has injected the once supine Supreme Court into the heart of Pakistan’s power equation. Yet in doing so, Justice Chaudhry has ventured deeply into the political fray, drawing accusations of partisan, even grudge-driven, prosecutions.
“This is a court that is determined to establish itself as a player to be respected and feared,” said Cyril Almeida, a political analyst with Dawn newspaper. “First it was elbows out, now it’s come out swinging — and it’s knocked out the prime minister.”
The true target of Justice Chaudhry’s order, though, may have been President Zardari. The two men have been at odds since 2009, when Mr. Zardari opposed Justice Chaudhry’s reinstatement. They have engaged in proxy combat through the courts ever since — indeed, Mr. Gilani’s dismissal stemmed directly from his refusal to heed court orders to pursue a corruption inquiry against the president.
Tuesday’s decision presented a blunt challenge to the president’s authority; one critic, the human rights campaigner and lawyer Asma Jahangir called it a “soft coup.” And its disruptive effects on his governing Pakistan Peoples Party could lead to a new round of national elections well ahead of their scheduled date next spring.
For Justice Chaudhry, the action also offered a convenient diversion from an awkward affair: less than a week ago, the judge found himself explaining his personal finances in court after a billionaire property developer with close ties to both the P.P.P. and the military came out with explosive corruption allegations against his family.
Now, those accusations, which damaged the judge’s anticorruption credentials and may have tarnished his populist appeal, are likely to be sidelined amid the fresh political maneuvering over his ruling on Tuesday.
Reuters reports: India has done well to resist U.S. calls for greater involvement in Afghanistan, the Taliban said in a rare direct comment about one of the strongest opponents of the hardline Islamist group that was ousted from power in 2001.
The Taliban also said they won’t let Afghanistan be used as a base against another country, addressing fears in New Delhi that Pakistan-based anti-India militants may become more emboldened if the Taliban return to power.
The Afghan Taliban have longstanding ties to Pakistan and striking a softer tone towards its arch rival India could be a sign of a more independent course.
Direct talks with the United States – which have since been suspended – and an agreement to open a Taliban office in Qatar to conduct formal peace talks have been seen as signs of a more assertive stance.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta this month encouraged India to take a more active role in Afghanistan as most foreign combat troops leave in 2014. The Taliban said Panetta had failed.
“He spent three days in India to transfer the heavy burden to their shoulders, to find an exit, and to flee from Afghanistan,” the group said on its English website.
“Some reliable media sources said that the Indian authorities did not pay heed to (U.S.) demands and showed their reservations, because the Indians know or they should know that the Americans are grinding their own axe.”
There had been no assurance for the Americans, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters on Sunday.
“It shows that India understands the facts,” he said.
India is one of the biggest donors in Afghanistan, spending about $2 billion on projects ranging from the construction of highways to the building of the Afghan parliament. It has also won an iron ore concession in a $11 billion investment.
But New Delhi has avoided involvement in bolstering Afghan security, except for running courses for small groups of Afghan army officers at military institutions in India.
“No doubt that India is a significant country in the region, but is also worth mentioning that they have full information about Afghanistan because they know each other very well in the long history,” the Taliban said.
“They are aware of the Afghan aspirations, creeds and love for freedom. It is totally illogical they should plunge their nation into a calamity just for the American pleasure.” [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: A militant commander in northwest Pakistan warned polio vaccination teams on Saturday to stay away from the territory he controls near the Afghan border, saying he would not allow immunizations until U.S. drone attacks in the country are stopped.
The statement by Hafiz Gul Bahadur is an obstacle to efforts to beat polio on Pakistan, one of only three nations where the virus is endemic.
The threat came in a pamphlet distributed Saturday in markets in the troubled North Waziristan tribal region. “We don’t want benefits from well-wishers who spend billions to save children from polio, which can affect one or two out of hundreds of thousands, while on the other hand the same well-wisher (America) with the help of its slave (Pakistan’s government) kills hundreds of innocent tribesmen including old women and children by unleashing numerous drone attacks,” it said.
The pamphlet also said spies could enter the region under the cover of vaccination teams to get information for the United States about “holy warriors.” It said teams who disregarded his warning would be responsible for any consequences.
LEHRER: The title of The Self Illusion is literal. You argue that the self – this entity at the center of our personal universe – is actually just a story, a “constructed narrative.” Could you explain what you mean?
HOOD: The best stories make sense. They follow a logical path where one thing leads to another and provide the most relevant details and signposts along the way so that you get a sense of continuity and cohesion. This is what writers refer to as the narrative arc – a beginning, middle and an end. If a sequence of events does not follow a narrative, then it is incoherent and fragmented so does not have meaning. Our brains think in stories. The same is true for the self and I use a distinction that William James drew between the self as “I” and “me.” Our consciousness of the self in the here and now is the “I” and most of the time, we experience this as being an integrated and coherent individual – a bit like the character in the story. The self which we tell others about, is autobiographical or the “me” which again is a coherent account of who we think we are based on past experiences, current events and aspirations for the future.
The neuroscience supports the claim that self is constructed. For example, Michael Gazzaniga demonstrated that spilt-brain patients presented with inconsistent visual information, would readily confabulate an explanation to reconcile information unconsciously processed with information that was conscious. They would make up a story. Likewise, Oliver Sacks famously reported various patients who could confabulate accounts to make sense of their impairments. Ramachandran describes patients who are paralyzed but deny they have a problem. These are all extreme clinical cases but the same is true of normal people. We can easily spot the inconsistencies in other people’s accounts of their self but we are less able to spot our own, and when those inconsistencies are made apparent by the consequences of our actions, we make the excuse, “I wasn’t myself last night” or “It was the wine talking!” Well, wine doesn’t talk and if you were not your self, then who were you and who was being you?
LEHRER: The fragmented nature of the self is very much a theme of modernist literature. (Nietzsche said it first: “My hypothesis is the subject as multiplicity,” he wrote in a terse summary of his philosophy. Virginia Woolf echoed Nietzsche, writing in her diary that we are “splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.”) In your book, you argue that modern neuroscience has confirmed the “bundle theory” of the self proposed by Hume. Do you think they have also confirmed these artistic intuitions about the self? If so, how has science demonstrated this? Are we really just a collection of “splinters and mosaics”?
HOOD: Yes, absolutely. When I was first asked to write this book, I really could not see what the revelation was all about. We had to be a multitude – a complex system of evolved functions. Neuroscientists spend their time trying to reverse engineer the brain by trying to figure out the different functions we evolved through natural selection. So far, we have found that the brain is clearly a complex of interacting systems all the way up from the senses to the conceptual machinery of the mind – the output of the brain. From the very moment that input from the environment triggers a sensory receptor to set off a nerve impulse that becomes a chain reaction, we are nothing more that an extremely complicated processing system that has evolved to create rich re-presentations of the world around us. We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. [Continue reading…]
This conversation has been sitting untouched in my sources ‘inbox’ for a while because it deals with a complex philosophical issue that doesn’t really lend itself to the on-the-fly nature of blogging. Even so, for better or worse, I’ll now venture forth and tease out at least one strand (and probably pick up a few others along the way).
“We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality,” says Hood as he deconstructs self yet sustains subject-object dualism. This isn’t really correct (and I think Hood would readily concede this point) because the abstracted versions of reality constructed within and constantly transforming our brains are just as much a part of reality as the things these abstractions represent.
What distinguishes selves from the rest of reality is the dynamic relationship they possess with everything around them.
A rock has a relationship with its environment that is relatively simple and mostly passive. Under the influence of heat, moisture, and wind, it slowly erodes. It affects its immediate environment by casting a shadow and restricting the availability of oxygen, water, and light to soil under its surface, but in the network of terrestrial phenomena it forms a simple node.
In contrast, human selves are fabulously complex nodes that mirror and interact with each other through a vast array of connections in constant flux. An image of these nodes of complexity is captured in a Buddhist metaphor called Indra’s net. Timothy Brook eloquently describes the idea:
When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true — every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy — is a pearl in Indra’s net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra’s web implies all else that exists.
Beyond this feature of universal connectivity in which everything participates, our neural pearls are supercharged with complexity. This is where reality fizzes!
With the hubris of science in general, neuroscience is inclined to treat its exploration of self as a new frontier, but Buddhist philosophy has been mapping out this territory for about 2,500 years. As this theory of self was first exported to the West through translations and later through spiritual teachings, it often got expressed in pop culture as the idea that the self is non-existent — egolessness. But as Robert Thurman explains, it is not that we have no self but that self’s nature is relational. There is no self which exists outside the set of relationships within which it forms a complex, dynamic, ever-changing node.
That may be distressing for Egyptian democracy, but it could help the Israel-Egypt relationship.
Sunday’s decision by military rulers in Egypt to rewrite the country’s constitution – a move that strips much of the power of the Egyptian presidency — confirms what many skeptics had warned about since Hosni Mubarak was deposed in February 2011: This wasn’t so much a revolution as a military coup.
It was the Egyptian army that played the decisive role during the 2011 uprising, siding with the people against the regime and overthrowing Mubarak. It was the military’s leaders who then assumed control of the country. And it was the army that again intervened this week in the middle of a presidential election that would have delivered control of the country to the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi.
A few days before this weekend’s presidential vote, in which Morsi edged Ahmed Shafik, a former Mubarak-era prime minister and air force general, the military dissolved the country’s Islamic Brotherhood-dominated parliament. It did so by declaring that up to one-third of the legislators were elected illegally. The Brotherhood controlled 47 percent of seats in the body after Islamist parties captured more than 65 percent of the votes In Egypt’s first real democratic elections six months ago.
The moves against the parliament and the presidency make clear that Egypt’s military rulers are unwilling to cede power to a democratically elected government, especially if elections empower the Muslim Brotherhood.
“With this document, Egypt has completely left the realm of the Arab Spring and entered the realm of military dictatorship,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said in widely quoted comments.
“It is a soft military coup that unfortunately many people will support out of fear of an Islamist takeover of the state,” Bahgat told The Associated Press.
That may be bad news for democracy and the Egyptian revolution, but it could be good for Israel.
Sara Khorshid writes: Preliminary election results show that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi is likely to become Egypt’s next president. But even if Mr. Morsi is declared the official winner later this week, Egypt’s first popular presidential election will not have been a democratic milestone.
With the Supreme Court’s ruling dissolving Parliament and the military’s declaration curtailing the presidency’s authority, Mr. Morsi will be a toothless figurehead under the thumb of an authoritarian military council that doesn’t seem likely to relinquish power anytime soon.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has tightened its grasp on power, giving itself control of legislation and the national budget, the right to appoint a panel to draft a new constitution, immunity from democratic oversight, and the power to veto a declaration of war. The new president is also expected to have no say in foreign policy and on relations with the United States, which gives Egypt $1.3 billion in annual military aid.
The military’s unwillingness to cede power and allow a genuinely democratic government has been clear for months. Yet the United States has continued to support the council — indeed, American-made tear gas canisters are still being used by the Egyptian authorities to suppress anti-military protesters.
When I voted “no” in the referendum on constitutional amendments last March, just weeks after the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak was ousted, it was a vote against the entire military-led transition process that set off the continuing legal mess that culminated in the recent dissolution of the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament and in the military’s seizure of sweeping legislative powers.
The amendments and the referendum marked the beginning of a process that led Egyptians and the world to falsely believe that Egypt was being democratized. On March 19, 2011, many Egyptians proudly showed off their inked fingers to symbolize participating in a referendum that they thought laid down a “road map of transition to civil, democratic rule,” as members of the council like to call it.
But that twisted road map was always intended to suppress the Egyptian people’s aspirations by delaying a democratic transition and dragging Egyptians along a path determined by the military. The referendum and the parliamentary and presidential elections have kept the people distracted by the trappings of democracy. [Continue reading…]
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means,” Michel Foucault wrote in “Society Must Be Defended” (2003), reversing Clausewitz’s well-worn dictum. Foucault’s point is that there is a continuous battle of sorts that takes place in times of peace, and the public space that hosts civil society, with all its depth, substance, and methods of influence, is the ultimate field of battle. Foucault asserts the importance of replacing the juridical discourse with the discourse of war. According to him, the law and official political agreements are imbued with violence and the modern ”achievements” of establishing governmental political institutions only serve to obscure a continuous infrastructure of war that is inherent to such institutions. Utilizing this interpretation, I hope to show how the war waged on Palestinians in Israel rages on.
The 1948 war has not ended for Palestinians from within the borders of Israel established by the 1949 armistice (the so-called Green Line). The establishment of Israel and the cease-fire agreements with neighboring Arab countries set the stage for “the continuation of war by other means” through the imposition of Israeli law over the Palestinian population. This war that started with Zionist settlement in the pre-state era lies within the system of Israeli citizenship.
Following the establishment of the Israeli state, this war was waged through the enactment of legislation to enable the conquest of as much Palestinian land as possible; attempts to forbid Palestinian internally displaced persons (IDPs) from returning to their homes even as they remained in Israel; and the deportation of residents of some villages even after the armistice. One such case of the latter is the villages of Iqrit and Biram. This war has been quite explicit: from 1948-66, Palestinian-populated areas were governed through a military government inside Israel. After the military government ended, the implementation of policies discriminating against Palestinian citizens in the political, social, and economic fields continued. Among other Israeli ambitions, this “war” sought the Judaization of entirely or predominantly Arab areas. Since 2000, following the start of the second intifada, these practices have only escalated, and there has been an unprecedented pursuit of aggressive legislation targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel. [Continue reading…]
George Monbiot writes: Worn down by hope. That’s the predicament of those who have sought to defend the earth’s living systems. Every time governments meet to discuss the environmental crisis, we are told that this is the “make or break summit”, on which the future of the world depends. The talks might have failed before, but this time the light of reason will descend upon the world.
We know it’s rubbish, but we allow our hopes to be raised, only to witness 190 nations arguing through the night over the use of the subjunctive in paragraph 286. We know that at the end of this process the UN secretary general, whose job obliges him to talk nonsense in an impressive number of languages, will explain that the unresolved issues (namely all of them) will be settled at next year’s summit. Yet still we hope for something better.
This week’s earth summit in Rio de Janeiro is a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago. By now, the leaders who gathered in the same city in 1992 told us, the world’s environmental problems were to have been solved. But all they have generated is more meetings, which will continue until the delegates, surrounded by rising waters, have eaten the last rare dove, exquisitely presented with an olive leaf roulade. The biosphere that world leaders promised to protect is in a far worse state than it was 20 years ago. Is it not time to recognise that they have failed?
These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed. Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires. The past 20 years have been a billionaires’ banquet. At the behest of corporations and the ultra-rich, governments have removed the constraining decencies – the laws and regulations – which prevent one person from destroying another. To expect governments funded and appointed by this class to protect the biosphere and defend the poor is like expecting a lion to live on gazpacho. [Continue reading…]
Paul Froese writes: In recent decades, “big tent” conservatism has seemed on the brink of collapse, its poles buckling under competing constituencies with “values” voters in one corner pitted against fiscal conservatives in the other. Discussions among academics and media pundits suggest these are two distinct categories of Republicans—the former made up of mainly working-class white evangelicals and the latter historically comprised of higher-income whites. Republican politicians must seek the favor of both special interests, appealing not only to traditional social issues—gay marriage and abortion—but also to economic fare such as reducing government and lowering taxes.
This distinction is central to Thomas Frank’s engaging analysis of the popularity of conservatism in the American Midwest in his 2004 bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank championed the narrative that working-class Americans vote against their economic interests, having been lured into the GOP tent largely with what he sees as insincere religious rhetoric. “The people at the top know what they have to do to stay there,” writes Frank, “and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”
However compelling this dichotomy may be, it is a false one. As a researcher and social scientist, I have found that economic perspectives are indelibly tied to religious cosmologies. Voters need not choose between God and mammon. Instead, they tend to see their money, the market, and the economy as a reflection of their God.
This finding is a rarity in the annals of social science, where the division between economic and social interests is often reinforced. Pollsters and social scientists think in terms of variables, some measuring economic opinions and others indicating various forms of religiosity. These two are often correlated but their ongoing association is rarely tested directly. Though classical theorists such as Max Weber have famously demonstrated the constant interplay of economic and religious ideologies, contemporary social scientists seldom ask people directly about how their economic position informs their religion, or vice versa. In fact, we often assume that working-class evangelicals struggle to either prioritize their economic interests or remain committed to their religious ethics.
In 2005, I, along with a team of researchers at Baylor, began surveying American religious beliefs, values and behaviors. Last fall, our third installment of the Baylor Religion Survey was released. Our combined research, which included polling from Gallup and dozens of detailed one-on-one interviews, suggests that value and economic concerns are becoming increasingly hard to disentangle. In fact, for many white evangelicals, religious and economic spheres are conceptualized as two sides of the same coin. They describe their worldview as one in which the spiritual and the material are mutually dependent and interactive. And the popularity of this worldview cuts across social class.
This compatibility of social and economic concerns has become apparent, of course, in the Tea Party movement. While Tea Partiers were initially cast as die-hard fiscal conservatives, the movement’s pious rhetoric — along with subsequent polling data — indicated that religious concerns were central to its popularity. Ultimately, the Tea Party movement revealed the extent to which religious and economic beliefs meld in the minds of many frustrated Americans.
To put this more concretely, approximately 31 percent of Americans, many of whom are white evangelical men, believe that God is steering the United States economy, thus fusing their religious and economic interests. [Continue reading…]
Dozens of national organizations including National Nurses United and Health GAP, celebrities including Mark Ruffalo, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, leading economists including Jeffrey Sachs, former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs executives and global leaders such as Desmond Tutu joined today for an unprecedented coalition, calling for a “Robin Hood Tax” on Wall Street.
The Robin Hood Tax is a small sales tax, less than half of 1% — or 50 cents per $100 on trading in stocks, and even smaller assessments on bonds, derivatives and currencies, that could raise hundreds of billions in the U.S.
“Wall Street’s reckless speculation and risky deals caused our economy’s most devastating crash since the Great Depression, forcing millions of Americans to lose their jobs, their homes, and their pensions,” said Jean Ross, RN and co-president of NNU. “Three years later, Americans on Main Street still struggle to recover from a crisis we didn’t create. This is the way to start to turn it around.”
Stephen Frum, RN, a nurse at Washington Hospital Center, added, “As registered nurses in D.C., we see so much suffering related to the economic crisis. Our patients and our own families often struggle to make ends meet and our health suffers. The Robin Hood Tax is something we can all get behind, and nurses will lead the charge.”
Mark Ruffalo, star of the current movie “The Avengers,” releases a video on Tuesday calling on Americans to join the campaign. He was joined in the video by Chris Martin and Tom Morello.
The Robin Hood Tax is aimed at high-volume trading, which today makes up a majority of all trades. Experts say it will help place limits on the reckless short-term speculation that threatens financial stability—as with JPMorgan Chase’s losing bet of $3 billion recently. A Robin Hood Tax would also assist in curtailing speculation in essentials, such as food and fuel. [Robinhoodtax.org]
At Alternet, Joshua Holland interviews M.J. Rosenberg and first explores the Israel Lobby.
Joshua Holland: You are a former AIPAC staffer, right?
MJ Rosenberg: Right. To defend myself that was way back in the ’80s. In fact I was a pretty happy AIPAC staffer. I even left there on good terms. I have to say in those days it’s not so much my politics were different, AIPAC was different then. The policies weren’t nearly as reactionary then as they are now.
JH: From your inside perspective on that organization, what did you see as far as their tendency to call out criticism that they think is illegitimate or beyond the pale?
MR: They consider all criticism of Israel illegitimate. It’s all beyond the pale. I suppose their definition would be if by some miracle someone like Joseph Lieberman made a statement critical of Israel it would be legitimate. When I worked there in the ’80s, back before everyone had computers, they had a big war room where all they did was assemble every bit of data on members of Congress, on candidates, but also on writers, celebrities – anyone in the public eye.
In those days they would just put them in these folders. They always had at hand all this negative information — what they considered negative information — to tar people as being anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic. That stuff would be given to reporters if something came up. They were either initiated on their own to give to reporters or some reporter called them because they had a treasure trove of information.
They still operate that way. In those days they did it directly; now they have former staffers and people who are close to the organization in the blogging world and political world who do it for them. They do it so much. When you read that someone is anti-Israel they’re the ones putting it out there. They’ve got the data. [Continue reading…]
Ma’an News Agency reports: Mahmoud al-Sarsak, on hunger strike in an Israeli jail for 92 days, agreed to start eating on Monday in a deal that will see him released on July 10, his lawyer said.
Mohammad Jaberein said al-Sarsak signed the agreement during his visit to the prisoner on Monday. Israeli prison authorities asked al-Sarsak to eat something in their presence to ratify the deal, after which he took a piece of chocolate from the lawyer, Jaberein said.
An Israeli prisons spokeswoman could not be reached for comment.
Under the deal al-Sarsak will visit a civilian hospital for treatment on Tuesday, but the same day will return to Ramle prison clinic until his release on July 10, the lawyer added.
Physicians for Human Rights – Israel say the clinic is not equipped to treat long-term hunger strikers or manage the health risks when they return to eating, and has called for transfer of hunger strikers to civilian facilities.
The 25-year-old soccer player from the Gaza Strip has been imprisoned by Israel without charge or trial since July 2009.
Just as much as life is threatened by the loss of species and degradation of habitats, humanity suffers irreparable loss each time a language disappears — one language dies every 14 days.
Along with each of those languages, a way of understanding the world is also lost. For instance, the speakers of Tuvan, of whom fewer than 250,000 remain, have a radically different way of viewing time. Songgaar means future, but it also means go back. Burungaar means past and also go forward. We can see the past; it is known and thus we face it. We cannot see the future; it is unknown, out of sight and thus ‘behind’ us.
The Republic of Tuva
Russ Rymer writes: One morning in early fall Andrei Mongush and his parents began preparations for supper, selecting a black-faced, fat-tailed sheep from their flock and rolling it onto its back on a tarp outside their livestock paddock. The Mongush family’s home is on the Siberian taiga, at the edge of the endless steppes, just over the horizon from Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tuva, in the Russian Federation. They live near the geographic center of Asia, but linguistically and personally, the family inhabits a borderland, the frontier between progress and tradition. Tuvans are historically nomadic herders, moving their aal — an encampment of yurts — and their sheep and cows and reindeer from pasture to pasture as the seasons progress. The elder Mongushes, who have returned to their rural aal after working in the city, speak both Tuvan and Russian. Andrei and his wife also speak English, which they are teaching themselves with pieces of paper labeled in English pasted onto seemingly every object in their modern kitchen in Kyzyl. They work as musicians in the Tuvan National Orchestra, an ensemble that uses traditional Tuvan instruments and melodies in symphonic arrangements. Andrei is a master of the most characteristic Tuvan music form: throat singing, or khöömei.
When I ask university students in Kyzyl what Tuvan words are untranslatable into English or Russian, they suggest khöömei, because the singing is so connected with the Tuvan environment that only a native can understand it, and also khoj özeeri, the Tuvan method of killing a sheep. If slaughtering livestock can be seen as part of humans’ closeness to animals, khoj özeeri represents an unusually intimate version. Reaching through an incision in the sheep’s hide, the slaughterer severs a vital artery with his fingers, allowing the animal to quickly slip away without alarm, so peacefully that one must check its eyes to see if it is dead. In the language of the Tuvan people, khoj özeeri means not only slaughter but also kindness, humaneness, a ceremony by which a family can kill, skin, and butcher a sheep, salting its hide and preparing its meat and making sausage with the saved blood and cleansed entrails so neatly that the whole thing can be accomplished in two hours (as the Mongushes did this morning) in one’s good clothes without spilling a drop of blood. Khoj özeeri implies a relationship to animals that is also a measure of a people’s character. As one of the students explained, “If a Tuvan killed an animal the way they do in other places”—by means of a gun or knife — “they’d be arrested for brutality.”
Tuvan is one of the many small languages of the world. The Earth’s population of seven billion people speaks roughly 7,000 languages, a statistic that would seem to offer each living language a healthy one million speakers, if things were equitable. In language, as in life, things aren’t. Seventy-eight percent of the world’s population speaks the 85 largest languages, while the 3,500 smallest languages share a mere 8.25 million speakers. Thus, while English has 328 million first-language speakers, and Mandarin 845 million, Tuvan speakers in Russia number just 235,000. Within the next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear. More than a thousand are listed as critically or severely endangered — teetering on the edge of oblivion. [Continue reading…]
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