With science, new portrait of the cave artist

The New York Times reports: Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported on Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists.

A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art — 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain — was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe.

The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to 45,000 years ago, and that they were making flutes in German caves about 42,000 years ago. Then there is the new genetic evidence of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, suggesting a closer relationship than had been generally thought.

The successful application of a newly refined uranium-thorium dating technique is also expected to send other scientists to other caves to see if they can reclaim prehistoric bragging rights.

In the new research, an international team led by Alistair W. G. Pike of the University of Bristol in England determined that the red disk in the cave known as El Castillo was part of the earliest known wall decorations, at a minimum of 40,800 years old. That makes it the earliest cave art found so far in Europe, perhaps 4,000 years older than the paintings at Grotte Chauvet in France. [Continue reading…]

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Finally, a map of all the microbes on your body

NPR reports: Scientists Wednesday unveiled the first catalog of the bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that populate every nook and cranny of the human body.

Researchers hope the advance marks an important step towards understanding how microbes help make humans human.

The human body contains about 100 trillion cells, but only maybe one in 10 of those cells is actually — human. The rest are from bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms.

“The human we see in the mirror is made up of more microbes than human,” said Lita Proctor of the National Institutes of Health, who’s leading the Human Microbiome Project.

“The definition of a human microbiome is all the microbial microbes that live in and on our bodies but also all the genes — all the metabolic capabilities they bring to supporting human health,” she said.

These microbes aren’t just along for the ride. They’re there for a reason. We have a symbiotic relationship with them — we give them a place to live, and they help keep us alive. [Continue reading…]

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On eve of vote, Egypt’s military extends its power

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s military rulers moved to consolidate power Friday on the eve of the presidential runoff election, shutting down the Islamist-led Parliament, locking out lawmakers and seizing the sole right to issue laws even after a new head of state takes office.

The generals effectively abandoned their previous pledge to cede power to a civilian government by the end of the month, prolonging the increasingly tortuous political transition after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year. The power play has also darkened the prospects that Egypt, the most populous Arab state and one that historically has had tremendous influence on the direction of the region, might quickly emerge as a model of democracy for the Middle East.

Their moves, predicated on a court ruling on Thursday and announced with little fanfare by the state news media, make it likely that whoever wins the presidential race will — at least at first — compete with the generals for power and influence. The military counsel also indicated through the official news media that it planned to issue a new interim constitution and potentially select its own panel to write a permanent charter. The generals have already sought permanent protections for their autonomy and political power.

Robert Mackey writes: As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, many of the Internet activists who helped drive Egypt’s 2011 revolution are dismayed about the choice offered by this weekend’s presidential runoff between two conservatives. In meetings with bloggers in Cairo all this week, conversations returned again and again to how best to respond to a deeply unpalatable choice: voting for Ahmed Shafik, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, or Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that was Mr. Mubarak’s main opposition but has managed to alienate many former allies from last year’s protest movement.

Although some prominent activists have called on revolutionaries to cast strategic votes for Mr. Morsi to block the standard-bearer of the old order, many others are convinced that it is better not to cast any vote at all in elections conducted under continued, even intensifying, military rule.

But even those bloggers who have decided not to vote for either candidate are still debating how best to register their disapproval of the election: by staying away from the polls entirely, and seeking to depress voter turnout, or by spoiling their ballots, crossing out the names of both candidates and forcing the authorities to report the number of voters who actively rejected both men.

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Egypt: As Shafiq steps up attacks on Brotherhood, some fear crackdown

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: Presidential campaigns are often ugly, divisive affairs with bitter rivals slinging accusations and recriminations, sometimes veering into the territory of outright dishonesty. But as the fight over Egypt’s presidency heats up between the Muslim Brotherhood’s nominee and Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, the country’s largest Islamist organization stands accused of more than just dishonesty or incompetence — the Brotherhood is being bombarded with accusations of killing protesters and instilling chaos during the 25 January Revolution. And some see that as an unnerving harbinger of what could be to come.

The Brotherhood’s nominee, Mohamed Morsy, and Mubarak’s long-serving civil aviation minister and last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, are set to compete in the runoff scheduled for 16 and 17 June.

Although Shafiq is not officially backed by Egypt’s military rulers, he is widely viewed as the facade of the generals and the deeply entrenched and highly influential Egyptian security apparatus. Meanwhile, the retired air force general’s campaign draws heavily on the old networks of Mubarak’s disbanded National Democratic Party.

In recent days, both candidates have exchanged a glut of accusations. While Morsy has constantly emphasized Shafiq’s ties with Mubarak’s “corrupt” regime and his animosity to the revolution, Shafiq accuses the Brotherhood of seeking to take Egypt backward by establishing a religious state.

But Shafiq’s attacks haven’t stopped there.

In a television interview last week, Shafiq accused the Muslim Brotherhood of being implicated in the killing of protesters in the notorious “Battle of the Camel” that took place during the 18-day uprising that culminated in Mubarak’s ouster. Eleven people died when pro-Mubarak thugs, some of them riding on horses and camels, attacked Tahrir Square with rocks, Molotov cocktails and bladed weapons.

Since the revolution, the Brotherhood has always taken pride in the role played by their members in defending the square during the Battle of the Camel. Many revolutionary figures and politicians had given Brotherhood youth credit for being a central part of the battle, which marked the last nail in the coffin of Mubarak’s rule. Meanwhile, Shafiq was prime minister during the battle and is currently under investigation for his role in it.

Two low-profile lawyers had reportedly filed a complaint with the general prosecutor against the Brotherhood accusing them of having burned police stations and opened prisons during the revolution. Media outlets, long criticized as mouthpieces of the old regime, have been reiterating these allegations. However, most observers have stated over the past year that they believe the Interior Ministry was responsible for the release of prisoners as a tactic to stir up trouble during the protests.

The allegations, which are reminiscent of smear campaigns routinely launched by the state-media and security apparatus, raise questions of whether the Brothers are faced with mere negative campaigning that only seeks to improve Shafiq’s chances and will eventually cease with the conclusion of the poll or if a potential crackdown on Egypt’s largest political organization looms on the horizon.

For the Brothers, it is more than a mere campaigning tactic.

“If we perceive it only as a part of negative campaigning, we will be missing the larger picture,” Amr Darrag, a leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, told Egypt Independent. Darrag believes the discourse emanating from Shafiq’s campaign and its sympathizers is a reproduction of the old regime and signals that, if Shafiq wins, retaliation against the Brotherhood and revolutionary forces will be in store.

“For the old regime, it is a matter of survival,” said Darrag. “The [retaliation] will not be restricted to the Brothers.” [Continue reading…]

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Nearly three months without food, as Israel looks away

Richard Sudan writes: Akram Rikhawi, one of many Palestinian political prisoners said to be held by the Israeli government, without charge and without seeing a trial, today will enter his 64th day on hunger strike. 64 days without food. As he does, 25 year old former Palestinian national team footballer Mahmoud Sarsak enters his 88th day on hunger strike, the longest any detainee has gone through such an ordeal in an Israeli jail. That’s nearly 3 months without food.

Once a star athlete and now according to physicians, having lost 33 percent of his body weight, Sarsak has been detained since 2009, but without having seen any judicial proceedings. It’s also nearly 3 years since he saw any family members. Sarsak is from the village of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza strip. Having seen no trial, instead, for Sarsak, he has been subjected to a continued process of administrative detention, which the state has the discretion to continue indefinitely, but which has no legal precedent according to international law. It’s what led him to begin a hunger strike in the first place. Now both mens’ health is in dire condition. Their defiance and steadfastness in the face of such brutal and psychological oppression may ignite another mass hunger strike similar to the one which came to an end last month. Such is the seriousness of the situation facing the men, that when Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations, upon visiting the men last week, issued a statement calling for immediate international intervention in order to save the men.

After Sarsak’s condition deteriorated rapidly at the weekend, it was reported yesterday that he had agreed to take milk upon advice from his lawyer Mohammad Jabarein, to keep him alive until at least today when a judicial review is due to take place. According to Jabarein “The 25-year-old prisoner has decided that if the Supreme Court does not agree to release him he will refuse all supplements until his death”.

While most of the Football World is focusing on the European competition right now, there have been some statements of support for Mahmoud Sarsak at least. This week footballing icon Eric Cantona and head of Fifa Sepp Blatter sent a letter Uefa’s Michel Platini reportedly signed by other individuals including Noam Chomsky and Michael Mansfield QC, making clear their support for Sarsak calling for his release.

But it is hard to imagine the same outpouring of sympathy for Sarsak, or any of the hunger strikers, equal to the outpouring of concern that was shown when footballer Patrice Muamba’s life hung in the balance recently following his collapse on the pitch. If these alleged human rights abuses were taking place anywhere else there would simply be a greater level of attention paid to them. It is not hard to see what evokes such desperation. [Continue reading…]

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Fear and loathing of Islam in the U.S.

Moustafa Bayoumi writes: Something’s gone terribly wrong.
 
In August 2007 the New York Police Department released a report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” claiming that the looming danger to the United States was from “unremarkable” Muslim men under 35 who visit “extremist incubators.” The language sounds ominous, conjuring up Clockwork Orange–style laboratories of human reprogramming, twisting average Muslims into instruments of evil. And yet what are these “incubators”? The report states that they are mosques, “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores”—in other words, precisely the places where ordinary life happens.

But the report wasn’t based on any independent social science research, and actual studies clearly refuted the very claims made by the NYPD. The Rand Corporation found that the number of homegrown radicals here is “tiny.” “There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad—about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence,” Rand’s 2010 report found. “A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced,” it concluded. This year, an analysis by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security also described the number of American Muslims involved in domestic terrorism since 2001 as “tiny.” “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while maintaining a responsible sense of proportion,” it said. And a 2011 Gallup survey found that American Muslims were the least likely of any major US religious group to consider attacks on civilians justified.

Every group has its loonies. And yet the idea that American Muslim communities are foul nests of hatred, where dark-skinned men plot Arabic violence while combing one another’s beards, persists. In fact, it’s worse than that. In the past few years, another narrative about American Muslims has come along, which sows a different kind of paranoia. While the old story revolves around security, portraying American Muslims as potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, the new narrative operates more along the axis of culture. Simple acts of religious or cultural expression and the straightforward activities of Muslim daily life have become suspicious. Building a mosque in Lower Manhattan or in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, or in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, becomes an act of “stealth jihad.” Muslims filing for divorce invokes the bizarre charge of “creeping Sharia.” A dual-language Arabic-English high school in New York is demonized as a “madrassa.” The State Board of Education in Texas determines that reading about Islam is not education but indoctrination. Changing your Muslim-sounding name to one with a more Anglophone tenor triggers an NYPD investigation, according to the Associated Press. Even the fact that some Butterball turkeys are “halal” was enough to fire up the bigotry last Thanksgiving, the most American of holidays.

What happens when ordinary life becomes grounds for suspicion without a hint of wrongdoing; when law enforcement premises its work on spying on the quotidian and policing the unremarkable; and when the everyday affairs of American Muslim life can so easily be transformed into nefarious intent? Something has gone terribly wrong for American Muslims when, more than a decade after the terrorist attacks of September 11, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States continues to grow. [Continue reading…]

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The sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate

Max Blumenthal writes: In late April, Geert Wilders arrived in New York City to tell his quixotic tale to a rapt American audience. The far-right Dutch Party of Freedom leader—perhaps the world’s most prominent anti-Muslim populist—was poised to release Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me, a memoir just out from Regnery, the right-wing US publishing house, in which he recounts his courageous efforts to stop the “Islamicization” of Europe. On his US tour, Wilders proudly portrayed himself as a man on the run—a round-the-clock security detail guarding him against radical Muslims whose violent passions he had supposedly inflamed by his truth-telling—and as a man on the rise: the exodus of his party from the governing coalition had forced new elections in the Netherlands, throwing the country’s ossified establishment into chaos.

Upon Wilders’s arrival in New York, a little-known think tank called the Gatestone Institute rolled out the red carpet for him. On April 30, before a select crowd that according to Gatestone’s website had paid $10,000 a head, he held forth on the persecution he had endured during his recent trial for incitement to hatred and discrimination. “This charade that happened in the Netherlands for the last few years could not have happened in your great country,” Wilders said in his speech. Then he cut to the heart of his appeal: “Islam is primarily a dangerous ideology rather than a religion. This is the truth. This violent ideology wants to impose Islamic Sharia law on the whole world, including us—the Kafirs, the non-Muslims…. Islam is the largest threat to freedom which the world is currently facing.”

Some Dutch liberals have branded him a demagogue who summons the ghosts of Europe’s dark past, but Wilders counters the accusation by assiduously cultivating Jewish support. He quotes Zionist forefather Theodor Herzl and boasts of his more than forty trips to Israel, where he once toiled on a rural kibbutz. Wilders, in fact, has made a special friend of right-wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In Wilders’s world, the Jewish state represents Fort Apache on the frontiers of the war against the barbarians threatening Western civilization. “Mothers in the West can sleep safely because Israeli mothers at night worry about their sons in the army,” he told the Gatestone Institute. “Their fight is our fight. We should support it.”

At the April event, Wilders’s seamless fusion of anti-Muslim bombast and pro-Israel cant was gratefully received by the Gatestone Institute’s founder and director, Nina Rosenwald, whom he acknowledged at the top of his jeremiad as another of his good friends. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald spreads her millions through the William Rosenwald Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation named for her father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal in 1939. His daughter’s focus is more explicitly political. According to a report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear Inc.,” Rosenwald and her sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000 to “organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

Besides funding a Who’s Who of anti-Muslim outfits, Rosenwald has served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm of America’s Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations. As groups like AIPAC lead the charge for a US military strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran, threatening to turn apocalyptic visions of civilizational warfare into catastrophic reality, Rosenwald’s wealth has fueled a rapidly emerging alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe. (In 2003 alone the Rosenwald Family Fund donated well over half of its $1.6 million in total contributions to pro-Israel and Islamophobic organizations.) This alliance serves to sanitize and legitimize professional anti-Muslim bigots like Wilders, allowing their ideas to mingle easily with those of neoconservative foreign policy heavyweights intent on promoting the appearance of a convergence between US and Israeli interests by invoking the specter of a common “Islamofascist” enemy. With Gatestone — which publicizes the writings of figures ranging from pro-Israel super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz to “counter-jihad” propagandist Robert Spencer, and boasts Harold Rhode, a neoconservative former Pentagon official credited, as a senior fellow, with helping to try to push the Bush administration to invade Iraq — Rosenwald has attempted to shift the alliance into overdrive. [Continue reading…]

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Why elites fail

In an essay on the anti-democratic nature of organizations, Christopher Hayes reviews the work of the social theorist, Robert Michels (1876-1936).

Born to a wealthy German family, Michels came to adopt the radical socialist politics then sweeping through much of Europe. At first, he joined the Social Democratic Party, but he ultimately came to view it as too bureaucratic to achieve its stated aims. “Our workers’ organization has become an end in itself,” Michels declared, “a machine which is perfected for its own sake and not for the tasks which it could have performed.”

Michels then drifted toward the syndicalists, who eschewed parliamentary elections in favor of mass labor solidarity, general strikes and resistance to the dictatorship of the kaiser. But even among the more militant factions of the German left, Michels encountered the same bureaucratic pathologies that had soured him on the SDP. In his classic book Political Parties, he wondered why the parties of the left, so ideologically committed to democracy and participation, were as oligarchic in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right.

Michels’s grim conclusion was that it was impossible for any party, no matter its belief system, to bring about democracy in practice. Oligarchy was inevitable. For any kind of institution with a democratic base to consolidate the legitimacy it needs to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. The rank and file will not have the time, energy, wherewithal or inclination to participate in the many, often minute decisions necessary to keep the institution functioning. In fact, effectiveness, Michels argues convincingly, requires that these tasks be delegated to a small group of people with enough power to make decisions of consequence for the entire membership. Over time, this bureaucracy becomes a kind of permanent, full-time cadre of leadership. “Without wishing it,” Michels says, there grows up a great “gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.” The leaders now control the tools with which to manipulate the opinion of the masses and subvert the organization’s democratic process. “Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective, will soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.”

All this flows inexorably from the nature of organization itself, Michels concludes, and he calls it “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”: “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.” [Continue reading…]

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Who knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad?

This must be a very, very important story. Why else would I be getting an email alerting me to this very, very important story from Jennifer Scoggins, a senior publicist for CNN in Washington?

“Do you believe high officials in Pakistan knew bin Laden was hiding for years in A — at that compound in Abbottabad?”

We can be in no doubt that this is a very, very serious question because it’s coming from Wolf Blitzer hunkered down in his Situation Room.

Pakistan is costing the U.S. $100 million a month by depriving NATO of its right to transport supplies to Afghanistan by the cheapest route. On top of that they had the audacity to jail Dr Shakil Afridi after he had demonstrated his ability to be an indispensable asset to the CIA, leading to the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

So, it’s understandable that Washington and CNN have run out of patience. It is indeed time for Pakistan to come clean and admit that bin Laden was under the protection of the ISI… or something like that. After all, there can be absolutely no doubt that someone knew he was in Abbottabad.

Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t watch CNN but I do know that CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, widely touted as al Qaeda expert supremo, rejects the idea that any Pakistani officials knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Why? Bin Laden had clearly gone to great lengths to keep his whereabouts secret. Why would he have taken the risk of revealing his location to anyone who did not need to know?

Most likely Abbottabad offered a secure hideout for the al Qaeda leader not because he had been offered some official or semi-official sanctuary there but because he could have reasonably assumed that it was an area that could not so easily come under CIA surveillance.

Neither in Pakistan nor the United States does government truly have all-seeing eyes.

Does the Secret Service know the owner and occupant of every vehicle currently operating within a two mile radius of the White House? Does it run background checks on every property owner, tenant and sub-tenant in this area? I don’t think so.

Is it possible that right now someone is living in Washington DC whose presence and identity might be a cause of great alarm for the FBI, but they have no idea what’s going on under their noses? No doubt.

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Egypt’s dissolution of parliament is a counter-revolution in all but name

David Hearst writes: The Nile Palace Bridge, where some of the fighting in Egypt’s revolution took place, is today a popular shrine. The bedlam of street life in Cairo, a city of 12 million people where traffic lights are an afterthought, is amplified on this bridge.

Kids taunt each other by hanging off the bridge over the fast-flowing Nile. They could not have produced a better image for the revolution itself. A year and a half on, it is perilously poised.

On Thursday, two days before voting in the second round of the presidential elections, the army and the old regime showed their hand by getting the judges they appointed to the constitutional court to declare the parliamentary elections – won overwhelmingly by the Muslim Brotherhood – null and void. The court went further and ordered parliament’s dissolution, even though it may not have the power to do that.

At a stroke, the gameplan of SCAF – the ruling military council – became clear for all to see. If parliament were dissolved, the constituent assembly drawing up the constitution would be abolished with it. If on Monday the army’s candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, is declared the winner, the old regime would have conducted a clean sweep of the revolution: the power to order new parliamentary elections, the power to rewrite the consitution and the presidency. A counter-revolution in all but name.

For some observers like the columnist Fahmi al-Huweidi, signs of the counter-coup were apparent before the constitutional court’s decision. “Journalists who were paid by the old regime and who had disappeared from the media for over a year suddenly began resurfacing with a barrage of articles saying why they were supporting Shafiq. Who gave them the courage to speak out like this? It would be have been impossible a few months ago.”

Another sign was a bizarre declaration on Wednesday by the justice minister empowering all members of the security and armed forces and police to arrest any civilian causing trouble in the streets – a power not seen since emergency rule, which Egypt has only just abandoned. It was as if they were anticipating trouble.

But the move may be backfiring. The Muslim Brotherhood did not take the bait by withdrawing its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, from the race, thus handing the presidency to Shafiq – although there were fierce arguments within the movement at their headquarters in Moquatom in Cairo to do just that.

Instead, the quiet technocrat Morsi came out fighting in the early hours of the morning. He said the Egyptian people would not allow a counter-revolution, and if the weekend’s vote was rigged in favour of Shafiq, the brotherhood would call everyone out on to the streets and the revolution would be “stronger” than it was before. [Continue reading…]

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Is the revolution in Egypt now truly over?

Tony Karon writes: The coup d’état that began 18 months ago in Egypt with the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak initially camouflaged itself in the language of revolution and promises of democracy, even as it worked to prevent the collapse of the old order and divide and conquer its challengers. But Thursday’s rulings by the Supreme Constitutional Court have shed the disguise: Egypt will be effectively ruled by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) junta and its backers in the bureaucracy and judiciary until further notice.

The court, a holdover from the Mubarak era, not only slapped down a law passed by the democratically elected parliament to bar officials of the former regime from running for office but also effectively dissolved the legislature itself. The first ruling upholds the candidacy of the military’s preferred option, former Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik, in Saturday’s presidential-election runoff against the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. And given the events of recent weeks, the smart money wouldn’t bet against him coming out on top in the race for a position whose powers have not yet been defined, a process over which the military retains a prerogative. Dissolving the parliament on the grounds that one-third of its seats were allegedly elected in an unconstitutional manner (albeit under the supervision of the junta and judiciary) may have even more far-reaching consequences: the Constituent Assembly, a highly contested body appointed by the parliament to draft a new constitution, is unlikely to survive the dissolution of the legislature that created it.

“Today’s moves by the Constitutional Court on behalf of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces seem difficult to overcome and likely to push Egypt onto a dangerous new path,” warns George Washington University analyst Marc Lynch, who was an adviser to the Obama Administration during last year’s Arab rebellions. “With Egypt looking ahead to no parliament, no constitution and a deeply divisive new President, it’s fair to say the experiment in military-led transition has come to its disappointing end. Weeks before the SCAF’s scheduled handover of power, Egypt now finds itself with no parliament, no constitution (or even a process for drafting one) and a divisive presidential election with no hope of producing a legitimate, consensus-elected leadership. Its judiciary has become a bad joke, with any pretense of political independence from the military shattered beyond repair.” [Continue reading…]

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A former Israeli soldier who wants to become a Palestinian

Haaretz reports: A former Israeli soldier, who was residing in the Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, was recently arrested by Palestinian security forces at Israel’s request.

Born in the Soviet Union, Andrey Pshenichnikov, 24, moved to Israel eleven years ago. Pshenichnikov served in the Israel Defense Forces, including an extra 18 months as a career soldier.

In the past three months, Andrey resided on Palestinian territory in the city of Bethlehem and in Deheishe refugee camp, “as part of the political struggle for Palestinian rights,” he explains.

“I wanted to prove that it’s possible to live with Palestinians, as long as you are not coming off as an enemy,” Pshenichnikov told Haaretz. He says that he wanted to “abandon the privileged Zionist life, and cross to the side of the occupied people as a sign of solidarity.”

Pshenichnikov stated he even tried to surrender his Israeli citizenship in order to apply for a Palestinian one; however, his request was not fulfilled.

Three months ago Pshenichnikov decided to move to Bethlehem, residing in Deheishe for the past three weeks. In this time, Pshenichnikov worked as a waiter and a construction worker in the Palestinian Authority.

Pshenichnikov’s new neighbors in Bethlehem accepted him, but moving to Deheishe was harder, since the “Arabs suspect any Israeli,” he says. However, Pshenichnikov says he never felt his life was threatened.

It seems Pshenichnikov went through a dramatic ideological shift over recent years, although he is not happy to admit it. “Since I arrived in Israel, I began analyzing reality, reading history. I cannot point at the exact moment, but there was a change,” he explained.

In the IDF, Pshenichnikov served as a computer programmer, but also performed guard duties in the West Bank. Today, Pshenichnikov rejects Zionism and says his views are close to those of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Pshenichnikov’s stay in the West Bank ended three weeks ago, after Palestinian security forces arrested him, at Israel’s request. The Palestinian forces searched his home, interrogated him and transferred Pshenichnikov to the Israeli authorities. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. official: Russia sends troops to Syria as peace hopes fade

NBC News reports: Russia is sending armed troops to Syria amid escalating violence there, United States military officials told NBC News Friday, in a move certain to frustrate Western efforts to put pressure on the regime of President Bashir Assad.

Moscow has sent a ship carrying a small contingent of combat forces to guard Russia’s deep-water port and military base at the Syrian city of Tartus, the US officials said.

The U.S. officials also said Russia has not sent additional attack helicopters to the Syrian government, but replacement parts for the Russian helicopters the Syrians are already flying.

It comes after the conflict was declared by France on Wednesday to be a full-blown civil war.

The head of the U.N. observers in Syria said Friday a recent spike in bloodshed is derailing the mission to monitor and defuse more than a year of violence and could prompt the unarmed force to pull out.

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Respect is crucial in nuclear talks with Iran

Hossein Mousavian and Mohammad Ali Shabani write: After a decade, we are nearing an endgame on Iran’s nuclear file. The initial positive atmosphere during Tehran’s talks with the P5+1 (the five members of the UN security council plus Germany) in Istanbul in April had been lost by the next round of talks in Baghdad, in May.

In Istanbul all the players seemed to understand that the most important issue was trust – not the number of centrifuges in the Islamic republic’s possession. This was displayed through the announcement of EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, that negotiations would be held on the basis of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT, which recognises Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes). Such mutual respect must be the basis of any dialogue, and future agreement.

Yet in Baghdad it became obvious there was a long road ahead when the P5+1 went in demanding the maximum concessions from Iran, in return for making minimal concessions themselves. The Iranian negotiators were offered merely spare parts for passenger planes and help with acquiring a light water reactor. In exchange the P5+1 wanted Iran to stop enriching uranium to 19.75% (medium enriched uranium), export all such material, halt operations at the Fordo plant and allow IAEA inspectors to visit sensitive military sites.

This trade-off was considered an insult by the Iranians. And the P5+1’s incentive of fuel plates (uranium enriched to 19.75% moulded into plates) or the Tehran research reactor – which could have been attractive to Iran as recently as 2010, when it hadn’t mastered the technology to manufacture such fuel on its own – didn’t improve the mood. Luckily, this did not lead to the dialogue collapsing. [Continue reading…]

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How Obama’s drones help al Qaeda

Ibrahim Mothana, a writer, activist and co-founder of the Watan Party in Yemen, writes: “Dear Obama, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda,” a Yemeni lawyer warned on Twitter last month. President Obama should keep this message in mind before ordering more drone strikes like Wednesday’s, which local officials say killed 27 people, or the May 15 strike that killed at least eight Yemeni civilians.

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair. Robert Grenier, the former head of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center, has warned that the American drone program in Yemen risks turning the country into a safe haven for Al Qaeda like the tribal areas of Pakistan — “the Arabian equivalent of Waziristan.”

Anti-Americanism is far less prevalent in Yemen than in Pakistan. But rather than winning the hearts and minds of Yemeni civilians, America is alienating them by killing their relatives and friends. Indeed, the drone program is leading to the Talibanization of vast tribal areas and the radicalization of people who could otherwise be America’s allies in the fight against terrorism in Yemen. [Continue reading…]

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