Rebels gain near Tripoli, as refugees pour out

Charles Levinson reports from Zawiya:

Fighting raged for a fourth straight day in this strategic coastal city 30 miles west of Tripoli on Wednesday, as rebel fighters battled to mop up pockets of loyalist soldiers and laid siege to the regime’s last working oil refinery.

The roads leading to Zawiya were clogged with rebel fighters pouring toward town and refugees fleeing in the opposite direction. The refugee flow from Zawiya, a city of 200,000 people, and from Tripoli hinted at the possible flood that could pour into rebel-held havens and neighboring Tunisia as fighting moves closer to the capital.

Rebel fighters reported a series of other gains in the west as well. They said they had eliminated government forces in the town of Tiji and had secured the coastal town of Sabratha, west of Zawiya, bolstering their control of the vital coast road that is a key lifeline to the capital, Tripoli, which is still controlled by Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The regime wasn’t available for comment. Officials in Tripoli have been quiet in recent days, not holding the regular news conferences and journalist trips they had sponsored earlier in the conflict.

While the momentum has swung toward the rebels in recent weeks, they remain heavily dependant upon air power from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose 90-day mandate to operate in Libya could need to be extended a second time in late September. And the rebels’ potentially toughest battle—to capture Tripoli—may still lie ahead.

Zawiya’s fleeing residents and rebel fighters said most of the city was now under rebel control. On Wednesday, fighting was fiercest around the oil refinery on the western edge of the city, where a group of pro-Gadhafi fighters were holed up and surrounded by rebel fighters, said rebel commanders and fighters.

The commanders said they had already shut down the fuel lines leading to and from the refinery, knocking Mr. Gadhafi’s last refinery offline. The refinery provides only a fraction of the regime’s fuel oil and doesn’t produce gasoline. The government has been smuggling in most of its fuel needs from Algeria and Tunisia.

Still, it further pressures Col. Gadhafi and deals him a symbolic blow by depriving the once oil-rich strongman of the ability to produce even a drop of his own fuel needs.

Control of the coast road between Tunisia and Zawiya, and another road from Algeria in the south are far more crucial fuel and supply conduits for the regime, but are also collapsing beneath the rebel offensive.

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Thousands of Palestinian refugees in Syria flee during military assault

The New York Times reports:

United Nations officials said Tuesday that as many as 10,000 residents of a Palestinian refugee neighborhood in the Syrian port city of Latakia had fled during a four-day assault, as security forces carried out more arrests and intimidation in what residents said was a government attempt to rebuild a wall of fear in one of Syria’s largest cities.

Latakia, on the country’s Mediterranean coast, is the third locale to bear the full brunt of military and security forces this month, though the government has also persisted in its crackdown on the suburbs of Damascus and Homs, the third-largest city. The violence has provoked international condemnations that have grown sharper, but still stopped short of demanding that President Bashar al-Assad step down.

On Tuesday in Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it was more effective to forge international consensus against Mr. Assad — as well as intensify economic pressure through sanctions — than for the United States alone to lead the way.

“It’s not going to be any news if the United States says Assad needs to go,” Mrs. Clinton said at the National Defense University. “O.K., fine, what’s next? If Turkey says it, if King Abdullah says it, if other people say it, there is no way the Assad regime can ignore it.”

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists Palestinian refugees, said that it had no information on the whereabouts of the Latakia Palestinians. Activists have said many of the displaced have left for the countryside or Aleppo, Syrian’s second-largest city, to the northeast.

“A forgotten population has now become a disappeared population,” said Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the agency in Jerusalem, calling the situation “very, very worrying.”

Reuters reports:

Syria’s crackdown on government opponents has deeply embarrassed the Palestinian group Hamas, which is anxious not to anger its backers in Damascus while at the same time hoping not to alienate its supporters at home.

President Bashar al-Assad’s five-month purge of protesters has gathered pace since the start of August, causing thousands of Palestinians to flee a refugee camp in the city of Latakia this week as Syrian security forces attacked the area.

Ordinary Palestinians watching from a distance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been swift to denounce the violence, but the Islamist group Hamas has itself said nothing and tried to prevent public displays of anti-Syrian sentiment.

“If they keep silent they will score points with the Syrian regime,” said political analyst Talal Okal, explaining that such a stance could be politically costly in the Palestinian Territories, especially in Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas.

“The people will not accept it and will see it as a betrayal of the Palestinian refugees in Syria,” he added.
A number of Hamas leaders, including its chief, Khaled Meshaal, moved to Syria after they were expelled from Jordan in 1999. From there they hone their strategy against arch-foe Israel and are relatively free to move around the region.

But the Sunni Muslim group’s dependence on Assad, who is from Syria’s minority Alawite community, is proving a boon for some Hamas’ rivals, who have been highly critical of the violence that rocked the Al Raml refugee camp.

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Looting with the lights on

Naomi Klein writes:

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities – window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion – a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina’s mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

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The empire at dusk

In State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire, Stephen Glain writes:

In its scramble to avoid another legislative gang war over the nation’s debt ceiling, Washington is preparing to shake down the Defense Department in the name of deficit reduction. While budget cutters preoccupy themselves with line-item expenditures, they overlook the Pentagon’s biggest cost center: empire. The burden of global hegemony, the commitment to project force across every strategic waterway, air corridor, and land bridge, has exhausted the U.S. military and will be even harder to sustain as budget cuts force strategists and logisticians to do more with less. A national discussion about the logic of maintaining huge forward bases, to say nothing of their financial and human costs, is long overdue.

American relations with the world, and increasingly America’s security policy at home, have become thoroughly and all but irreparably militarized. The culprits are not the nation’s military leaders, though they can be aggressive and cunning interagency operators, but civilian elites who have seen to it that the nation is engaged in a self-perpetuating cycle of low-grade conflict. They have been hiding in plain sight, hyping threats and exaggerating the capabilities and resources of adversaries. They have convinced a plurality of citizens that their best guarantee of security is not peace but war, and they did so with the help of a supine or complicit Congress. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. presidents have ordered troops into battle 22 times, compared with 14 times during the Cold War. Not once did they appeal to lawmakers for a declaration of war.

The legacy of American militarism is a national security complex that thrives on fraud, falsehood, and deception. In the 1950s, Americans were told the Soviets had not only the means to destroy the United States but the desire to do so. In reality, Moscow lacked the former and so gave little thought to the latter, while Washington squandered billions of dollars on needless weaponry. Time and again, U.S. presidents weaponized their response to challenges overseas to protect them from charges of appeasement from the right. Habitually, their administrations misinterpreted events — from Russia’s Bolshevik revolution to the September 11 attacks — to disastrous effect. In each case, expert advice was overlooked, ignored, or concealed, while in others, threats were manufactured as chips in petty political wagers. The fraudulent bomber and missile gaps and the Gulf of Tonkin incident did as much to injure U.S. interests overseas as did the notion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them preemptively.

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Shaping a new world order

Andrew Bacevich writes:

Chief among the problems facing the United States today is this: too many obligations piled high without the wherewithal to meet them. Among those obligations are the varied and sundry commitments implied by the phrase “American global leadership.” If ever there were an opportune moment for reassessing the assumptions embedded in that phrase, it’s now.

With too few Americans taking notice, history has entered a new era. The “unipolar moment” created by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has passed. To refer to the United States today as the world’s “sole superpower” makes about as much sense as General Motors bragging that it’s the world’s No.1 car company: Nostalgia ill-befits an enterprise beset with competitors breathing down its neck. Similarly, to call Barack Obama the “most powerful man in the world” is akin to curtsying before Elizabeth II as “Queen of Great Britain, Ireland and British Dominions beyond the Seas”: Although a nice title, it confers little by way of actual authority.

A new global order is rapidly emerging. In that order, the United States will no doubt remain a very important player. Yet alongside the U.S. will be several others: China preeminently among them, but with Russia, India, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and Brazil also demanding to be reckoned with. (Whether Europe, currently wallowing in disarray, can muster the will and wallet to play in this company qualifies as an unknown.)

Nothing Washington can do will prevent this geopolitical transformation. Politicians may insist that the United States still stands apart — always and forever a “triple-A nation” — but their declarations will have as much effect as King Canute ordering the waves to stop. Indeed, to indulge further in the fiction of American omnipotence — persisting in our penchant for fighting distant wars of dubious purpose, for example — will accelerate the process, with relative decline becoming absolute decline. For Americans, husbanding power rather than squandering it is the order of the day.

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Is capitalism doomed?

Nouriel Roubini writes:

The massive volatility and sharp equity-price correction now hitting global financial markets signal that most advanced economies are on the brink of a double-dip recession. A financial and economic crisis caused by too much private-sector debt and leverage led to a massive re-leveraging of the public sector in order to prevent Great Depression 2.0. But the subsequent recovery has been anemic and sub-par in most advanced economies given painful deleveraging.

Now a combination of high oil and commodity prices, turmoil in the Middle East, Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, eurozone debt crises, and America’s fiscal problems (and now its rating downgrade) have led to a massive increase in risk aversion. Economically, the United States, the eurozone, the United Kingdom, and Japan are all idling. Even fast-growing emerging markets (China, emerging Asia, and Latin America), and export-oriented economies that rely on these markets (Germany and resource-rich Australia), are experiencing sharp slowdowns.

Until last year, policymakers could always produce a new rabbit from their hat to reflate asset prices and trigger economic recovery. Fiscal stimulus, near-zero interest rates, two rounds of “quantitative easing,” ring-fencing of bad debt, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and liquidity provision for banks and financial institutions: officials tried them all. Now they have run out of rabbits.

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U.S. impotent in face of Middle East events

Zvi Bar’el writes:

How long will the Syrian protesters wait until the United States and its allies deign to intervene in their slow massacre? What is the critical mass of people who must be killed for the “international community” to act? When there’s an earthquake, countries jostle each other to be visibly first in line with rescue forces for the victims; when thousands were killed in Darfur, the “community” went into deep hibernation until roused to assist.

In Syria, the barometer of bloodshed is still not a cause for concern. Condemnation, scolding and a few weak sanctions made it clear to President Bashar Assad that he’s still far from danger. Against Muammar Gadhafi, Washington quickly raised a military coalition. It called on Hosni Mubarak to resign; in Yemen it stirred things so as to prevent the return of its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to Sana’a. And in Syria? The key statement, “Assad has to go,” is still stuck in Washington’s throat.

The rational explanations for American restraint are not to be taken lightly: concern over Iran’s response; the desire to avoid putting a Western umbrella over a popular revolt so as not to impair its legitimacy; concern over the status of the United States in the Middle East if it finds itself facing a new front after Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, Washington must take “the day after” into consideration. But understanding for the considerations of “the day after” is what makes possible a murderous “today.”

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Libya shows signs of slipping from Muammar Gaddafi’s grasp

The Guardian reports:

Muammar Gaddafi’s regime has shown fresh signs of buckling as rebels have come close to cutting off supply routes and the Libyan interior minister arrived in Egypt in what appeared to be the highest-ranking defection for many months.

The Libyan leader broadcast a defiant appeal to his supporters to rid the country of “traitors”, telling them: “The blood of martyrs is fuel for the battle.” But the call was issued over a poor telephone line to state television, and most was inaudible – the result of what officials said was a technical breakdown.

Gaddafi’s rallying call came as rebel fighters moved into Zawiyah, 30 miles west of Tripoli, straddling a critical road supply route from the Tunisian border. Rebel forces claimed to have near total control of the town, but government troops still held its oil refinery, the regime’s last homegrown supply of fuel. Reuters reported that pro-government snipers in Zawiyah were firing on any civilians who ventured out of doors.

The anti-Gaddafi National Transitional Council (NTC) also claimed to have taken the city of Surman and said it was close to gaining control of Sabratha, along the same coastal road. A rebel spokesman said that talks were under way with government forces over their surrender.

There were clashes near the Ras Ajdir border crossing with Tunisia, and opposition forces were reported to be pushing towards Tripoli from the south having taken the strategic crossroads of Garyan over the weekend. Control of Garyan, in the Nafusah highlands, cuts off Tripoli from the Gaddafi stronghold of Sabha in the south. The multi-pronged offensive was an attempt by rebel commanders to cut off Tripoli’s supply lines and regain the initiative after the killing of their military leader, General Abdul Fattah Younes.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports:

Libya’s rebel-held city of Misrata, under siege by forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi for the past six months, is experiencing something new: traffic jams.

With rebels advancing toward the Libyan capital, Tripoli, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the west, honking horns and the voices of children playing in Misrata’s streets have replaced the explosions of incoming rockets and artillery shells.

“We are confident we are safe now,” English student Aisha Alifafer, 20, said in an interview yesterday. “We can go shopping and visit others. In the last six months we could not go outside and see the sun.”

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England riots: pair jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder

The Guardian reports:

Two men have been jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, from Marston near Northwich, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, appeared at Chester crown court on Tuesday. They were arrested last week following incidents of violent disorder in London and other cities across the UK.

Neither of their Facebook posts resulted in a riot-related event.

During the sentencing, the recorder of Chester, Elgin Edwards, praised the swift actions of Cheshire police and said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent to others.

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Donors help keep Palestinians in cages

Charlotte Silver writes:

“Israel besieges us, puts us in cantons — in cages — and the international community is feeding us in these cages. It’s anything but developmental and it’s helping Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing and dispossession,” Dr. Samia Botmeh said, as she sat in her office in the Center for Development Studies (CDS) at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Despite the massive amounts of development aid that have been poured into the West Bank, the productive capacity of the Palestinian economy — measured by examining the agricultural and manufacturing sectors — is half that of 1994, and accounts for no more than 12 percent of employment. While the World Bank and Palestinian Authority boast an 8 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP), real per capita income is still 8.4 percent lower than what it was in 1999, signifying that the GDP growth is not reflective of income growth for the average Palestinian.

Egypt provides an elucidative comparison. Two decades of serious neo-liberal reforms produced a GDP growth in Egypt that was similarly applauded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF): between 2006 and 2008, GDP grew 7 percent and there was a 4.6 percent spike in 2009 alone. However, as was made stunningly clear at the end of January, the country’s GDP growth had not trickled down to the majority of the people: unemployment had actually increased and 40 percent of the population lived on less than two dollars per day.

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Al Jazeera journalist held in Israeli prison

Al Jazeera reports:

Samer Allawi, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Kabul bureau chief, has been brought before an Israeli military court, almost a week after he was arrested by Israeli officials when he tried to cross the border between Jordan and the occupied West Bank.

Israeli authorities extended his detention by seven days and charged him with being a member of Hamas on Tuesday.

Allawi was arrested on August 10 at the end of a three-week holiday in his home town of Sabastia near Nablus.

The Israeli authorities originally informed Allawi’s family that he would be held for four days for questioning, saying that it was a “security-related arrest”.

Last Thursday, the authorities told Al Jazeera that Allawi’s detention would be extended.

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Is the Islamic terrorism threat overblown?

Religion News Service reports:

After a car bomb detonated on Wall Street one minute past the noon lunch hour killing 38 people, federal investigators came up with a possible link to an overseas group.

Islamic terrorists?

Al-Qaida?

No, Italian anarchists.

The year was 1920, and in those days anarchists were the equivalent of today’s terrorists, waging acts of mass destruction against Western capitalism.

Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, thinks the wave of 20th century anarchist violence bears a resemblance to the Islamic terrorism of the 21st century in one sense:

Neither resulted in a spiraling escalation of violence.

“In many ways,” said Kurzman, “Islamic terrorism is simply the latest form of transnational revolutionary violence to grab global attention.”

Put another way: This too shall pass.

While mindful of the pain and suffering terrorism has caused, Kurzman has written a book challenging the dominant narrative that worldwide terrorism is out of control.

In “The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists,” Kurzman argues that Islamic terrorism has accounted for a miniscule number of murders compared with violent death tolls from other causes.

In the United States, for example, fewer than 40 people died at the hands of terrorists in the 10 years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

That compares with about 140,000 other murders during the same time.

The bad news, said Kurzman, is that Islamic terrorists really are out to kill Americans. The good news is there are very few of them. In fact, of the less than 40 killed at the hands of terrorists over the past decade, none were tied directly to al-Qaida. These include the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, in which 10 people were killed in the Washington, D.C., area, and the 2009 Fort Hood shootings in which U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 14 people.

That count does not include the many failed terrorist bombings united by a common theme: Incompetence. Had these plots, such as the bungled 2010 Times Square car bomb, succeeded, the death toll would have been much higher.

The truth is, said Kurzman, the more terrorists kill, the less popular they become. That does not mean the world is safe from terrorism, and Kurzman cautions America may well see another horrific terrorist attack.

It does mean the U.S. government should examine the evidence and ratchet down the discourse, he said.

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Mounting evidence of a News Corp cover-up

The Guardian reports:

Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World’s disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.

In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was “widely discussed” at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with “the full knowledge and support” of other senior journalists, whom he named.

The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave last month on the aftermath of Goodman’s allegations. In a separate letter, one of the Murdochs’ own law firms claim that parts of that evidence were variously “hard to credit”, “self-serving” and “inaccurate and misleading”.

Nicholas Wapshott writes:

The first letter, from News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman, who became the patsy for the affair, gives the lie to the suggestion to Parliament by Murdoch’s most trusted retainer Les Hinton that phone hacking was the work of a single rogue reporter. In the letter, Goodman lets slip that “the actions … were carried out with the full knowledge and support” of some of the paper’s other journalists and that “other members of staff were carrying out the same illegal procedures.” The names of those others have been redacted for now, at the request of Scotland Yard, for fear of jeopardizing a prosecution.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s judgment is also called into question by the letter. The socially remote Cameron felt he could not connect with humdrum voters and hired Andy Coulson, top editor at the News of the World when the hacking took place, to explain his government’s policies in language the ordinary person could understand. Cameron says he hired the tainted Coulson because Coulson denied knowing of the illegality going on under his nose. But Goodman reports that hacking “was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the Editor [Coulson].” The “smoking gun” letter makes Cameron look naïve and gullible for being taken in so easily.

As in the Watergate affair, the coverup is becoming as important to understanding the culture within Murdoch’s business, and the failure of corporate governance by the board, as the crimes themselves. The Commons media committee received two copies of the Goodman letter, one from News International lawyers Harbottle & Lewis, who were released from their confidentiality after sharp questioning of James Murdoch by committee members Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson. News International executives repeatedly tried to have Watson removed from the committee, and when they failed ran vicious stories about him.

While Harbottle & Lewis redacted a single line from the Goodman letter, at the request of the police, a second copy was issued by News International, on the instructions of James Murdoch. This version not only redacts the names of other employees implicated in the crime but also blots out the sentence saying Coulson openly spoke about the hacking in editorial meetings. Further, it blanks the section that shows that Murdoch’s company wanted to buy Goodman’s silence: “[H.R. director] Tom Crone and the Editor [Coulson] promised on many occasions that I could come back to a job at the newspaper if I did not implicate the paper or any of its staff in my mitigation plea. I did not, and I expect the paper to honour its promise to me.”

A second letter also provides evidence of a coverup of the original crime. At the Commons hearing in July, questioning centred on what Rupert and James Murdoch knew about a Harbottle & Lewis investigation into thousands of e-mails that showed extensive use of hacking by Murdoch journalists in which the legal firm appeared to clear the company of permitting wrongdoing. James Murdoch used the letter to suggest that he had no reason to believe criminality was widespread. Released from its confidentiality, however, Harbottle & Lewis has now revealed that it was never asked to comment on whether they found that the hacking was prevalent, only whether Goodman had been ordered to hack by others. “There was absolutely no question of the firm being asked to provide News International with a clean bill of health which it could deploy years later in wholly different contexts for wholly different purposes,” it writes. “Nor was it being given a general retainer, as Mr. Rupert Murdoch asserted it was, ‘to find out what the hell was going on.’” They found James Murdoch’s attempt to hide behind their letter “hard to credit” and Rupert Murdoch’s assertion “inaccurate and misleading.”

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Syria orders thousands into stadium in Latakia crackdown

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Syrian security forces cracking down on opposition strongholds in Latakia herded thousands of people into a stadium and took away their identification cards and cellphones, activists said Monday.

Forces loyal to the regime of President Bashar Assad continued hammering opposition strongholds in the country’s main port city, especially in the district of Ramleh, which has been pummeled with tank, gunboat and automatic weapons fire after unusually large antigovernment demonstrations broke out there Friday.

Security forces began ordering residents of the area, which includes a refugee camp housing more than 10,000 Palestinians, to go to a soccer stadium ahead of what they described as a huge military operation, activists said. At least five people were confirmed dead.

“They were told they should leave their homes and go to stadiums because the armed forces were going to flatten the area,” said an activist in the city, who asked that his name not be used. “Cellphone networks were cut as thousands of people left their houses and flocked toward the stadium. As they were gathered and directed to the stadium, their IDs were confiscated.”

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Rick Perry, friend of Israel, on a mission from God, calls for Ben Bernanke to be lynched

Think Progress:

Texas Governor Rick Perry, who entered the presidential campaign on Saturday, appeared to suggest a violent response would be warranted should Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “print more money” between now and the election. Speaking just now in Iowa, Perry said, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.” Treason is a capital offense.

The economist, Nouriel Roubini, tweeted: “The mind of Rick Perry (his sick words on Bernanke) is not much different from that of the Norway mass murdered. Loaded words cause violence”

Meanwhile, Ron Kampeas reports:

To some conservative Jews, Texas Gov. Rick Perry would make an excellent presidential candidate. He’s been to Israel more than any other candidate in the field and has said he loves it. And Perry creates jobs.

But other Jewish conservatives seeking the anti-Obama candidate look at the three-term governor and see something arresting: He believes he’s on a mission from God.

Perry has nonplussed longtime Jewish supporters by claiming that he has been “called” to the presidency and by hosting a prayer rally this month that appealed to Jesus to save America.

Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s Right Turn columnist and a bellwether of Jewish conservatism, took liberals to task on her blog for treating the event as “a spectacle” — it was borne of deeply considered worries about the country’s parlous state, she said — but Rubin also expressed caveats about the rally.

“His words at the event were restrained but not ecumenical,” she wrote. “And his use of public office to promote the Christian event was, to me, inappropriate. The event, while scheduled last December, is still reflective of the man who would be president. Would he do this in the Oval Office? Does he not understand how many Americans might be offended? Is he lacking advice from a non-Texan perspective?”

Fred Zeidman, an influential Houston lawyer who has known Perry for decades and has hosted him at his home, said that “None of us remember him being quite as devout as he seems to be now, but we wouldn’t necessarily have known.”

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Britain follows Iran’s lead — clamps down on water fights

Robert Mackey reports:

In a demonstration of the kind of zero-tolerance policing of modern criminality that will no doubt impress Iran’s morals police as much as Egypt’s military rulers, officers outside London announced on Monday that they had arrested a man for sending text messages encouraging people to take part in a mass water fight.
[…]
Last week, after reports that rioters had communicated over social networks and BlackBerry’s encrypted messaging service, Prime Minister David Cameron said at an emergency session of Parliament, “We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

On Monday, Vikram Dodd, Richard Norton-Taylor and Josh Halliday reported for The Guardian that MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, and the intelligence agency known as Government Communications Headquarters, which intercepts and decodes communications, have been drafted in “the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger,” to organize looting.

The crackdown in England comes as Egypt’s interim military government continues to prosecute bloggers on charges of insulting the army on Facebook and Twitter. On Sunday, the Cairo daily Al Masry Al Youm reported, a 26-year-old activist was forced to pay more than $3,000 in bail after being summoned by a military prosecutor on charges of insulting the army.

Earlier this month, authorities in two Iranian cities made several arrests as they broke up two mass water fights that had been organized on Facebook.

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Glenn Beck calls Israel social protesters ‘communists’

Haaretz reports:

Beck is currently in Israel for a mass rally to “Restore Courage” in Jerusalem.

The conservative pundit, who left Fox News in June of this year, scoffed at the protesters’ list of demands, comparing many of their calls for increased social benefits to those of the former Soviet Union.

When he heard that the protest leaders were calling for higher taxation for the Israeli upper-classes, Beck laughed derisively, saying “ah, hate the rich.”

Beck then went on to suggest that the housing crisis could be solved by simply building up empty land in the West Bank. The right-wing commentator emphasized that the area, biblically referred to as “Judea and Samaria”, is “Judea – like Jews”.

The commentator said that Judea and Samaria is the contested territory’s real name, not the West Bank.

Beck continued to poke holes in the “extreme left” protesters’ demands calling for decreased privatization of health care, free education and an increase in minimum wage.

Beck also insinuated a possible collaboration between socialists and Islamists, pointing out historical instances in which the two movements went hand in hand.

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Report reveals harsh condition in Israeli jails

Haaretz reports:

Inmates were cuffed hand and foot as a punishment, sometimes for months on end, while prisoners considered suicidal remained in restraints for long periods without access to proper medical care, according to a recent report on conditions in Israeli prisons in 2009 and 2010.

The report, issued by the Justice Ministry’s Public Defender’s Office, reveals widespread overcrowding, poor hygienic conditions and excessive punitive measures in most facilities.

In the Sharon Prison, for example, the agency found a policy of restraining suicidal inmates to their beds in order to punish them rather than in order to protect them.

One prisoner was found to have been kept in bed with arm and leg restraints for several hours, during which time he was unable to eat, smoke, cover himself with a blanket or go to the toilet. The restraints were so tight they left red marks on the prisoner’s wrists.

In Tsalmon Prison representatives of the Public Defender’s Office observed a prisoner kept in bed with arm and leg restraints in a stench-filled cell with cockroaches crawling on the walls. The prisoner, who is being treated with psychiatric drugs, told PDO officials he had been held for a number of months in this way. He said that in order to use the toilet he had to shout for a guard stationed some distance away, at the entrance to the wing.

PDO officials observed an inmate at Hadarim Detention Center who had been cuffed to his bed 24 hours a day for five and a half months, and afterward remained in restraints at night, for 13 hours a day, for an additional period of about six months.

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