Doha Debates: Resistance to the “Arab Spring” is futile
Hillary Clinton adviser compares internet to Che Guevara
“There was no person more feared by the company [the CIA] than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America.” Philip Agee
“On October 9th, 1967, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was put to death by Bolivian soldiers, trained, equipped and guided by U.S. Green Beret and CIA operatives.” Peter Kornbluh
The Guardian reports:
Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation at the US state department has lauded the way the internet has become “the Che Guevara of the 21st century” in the Arab Spring uprisings.
Speaking at the Guardian’s Activate summit in London on Wednesday, Alec Ross said “dictatorships are now more vulnerable than ever” as disaffected citizens organise influential protest movements on Facebook and Twitter.
The US has pledged to back the pro-democracy movements that have swept the Middle East and north Africa since January. Ross welcomed the “redistribution of power” from autocratic regimes to individuals, describing the internet as “wildly disruptive” during the protests in Egypt and Tunisia.
“Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part – but not entirely – because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual,” he said.
“One thesis statement I want to emphasise is how networks disrupt the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation state – from governments and large institutions – to individuals and small institutions. The overarching pattern is the redistribution of power from governments and large institutions to people and small institutions.”
Ross said that the internet had “acted as an accelerant” in the Arab spring uprisings, pointing to the dislodging of former Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in little over a month. The internet had facilitated leaderless movements, Ross added, describing it as the “Che Guevara of the 21st century”.
Al-Assad running out of options?
U.S. Libya mission exposes divisions in Congress and within GOP
The New York Times reports:
It is a familiar pattern in a government of checks and balances: members of Congress almost instinctively criticize the foreign adventures of a president from the opposite party.
But the current imbroglio in Congress over the American involvement in Libya exposes a deep and unusual foreign policy schism within the Republican Party, driven in large part by a Tea Party-infused House whose members are more fiscally conservative, particularly constitutionalist, less internationalist and, in many cases, too young to have been politically influenced by the cold war that informed the more established members of the party.
The divisions came to the fore on Tuesday when Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, introduced a measure with Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, to offer President Obama official Congressional authorization for the Libyan operation.
The legislation is an effort to blunt a series of House measures expected to seek to cut off financing for the operations in Libya as early as Thursday.
In introducing it, Mr. McCain chastised House Republicans for seeking to end the Libya mission. “Is this the time for Americans to tell all of these different audiences that our heart is not in this,” Mr. McCain said, “that we have neither the will nor the capability to see this mission through, that we will abandon our closest friends and allies on a whim? These are questions every member of Congress needs to think about long and hard, especially my Republican colleagues.”
House members of both parties and various political stripes seemed undaunted. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat of Ohio, will offer an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill to deny money for operations in Libya, as will Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a Republican freshman.
Meanwhile, AFP reports:
Italy on Wednesday called for an immediate halt to hostilities in Libya to allow humanitarian aid to reach the population in the strife-torn country, while NATO defended the credibility of its air war after a bomb misfired killing civilians.
On the diplomatic front, China said it recognises Libya’s opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) as an “important dialogue partner.”
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini warned on Tuesday that NATO’s credibility was “at risk” following the civilian casualties, and urged it to ensure it was not providing ammunition to Kadhafi’s propaganda war.
Frattini followed up his comments in a speech on Wednesday to the lower house of parliament in Rome.
“With regard to NATO, it is fair to ask for increasingly detailed information on results as well as precise guidelines on the dramatic errors involving civilians,” he said.
The comments came after NATO admitted a bomb misfired in Tripoli at the weekend, killing nine people according to Moamer Kadhafi’s regime.
The Gaza cruise
Jesse Rosenfeld reports:
“Oh my god Jesse, you’ve got to come, it’s a Mediterranean cruise to Gaza,” filmmaker and social justice activist John Greyson said to me, tongue partly in cheek, a while back.
He was trying to convince me that I should get on board a boat of Canadian activists and report on their voyage to Gaza as part of a flotilla of ships running bringing supplies and running Israel’s blockade.
Ten days later I find myself on a cramped flight to Athens, sandwiched between Toronto’s contingent on the Canadian boat. After watching the latest rendition of Gullivers Travels starring Jack Black, Greyson chats with me about how his involvement in the struggle against South African apartheid, desire to tackle tough issues in the Queer community and the influence of his progressive Jewish friends has put him on a collision course with Israel’s siege.
He, along with the other Toronto activists flying out had received a less than warm send off by members of the far right nationalist, Jewish Defense League (JDL), who protested their planned voyage at the airport, accusing them of supporting terrorism.
Michael Archer, at Guernica, interviews Alice Walker:
Guernica: You just returned from a trip to Palestine a few weeks ago. What’s changed since your last visit to the West Bank? You worked a lot with Palestinian children there. What were your impressions of that experience? What did you leave knowing that you didn’t know before?
Alice Walker: My first trip to Palestine was to Gaza, in 2009, shortly after “Operation Cast Lead,” during which the Gaza strip was bombed for twenty-two days and nights, with airstrikes every twenty-seven minutes. There was enormous devastation: Over 1400 people killed, including over 300 children, and countless people, many of them children, injured and of course terrorized for the rest of their lives. I tried to get into Gaza a second time to help deliver aid but was denied entry through Egypt. This most recent visit was to the West Bank (for a TED inspired event and a few days with the Palestine Literary Festival) which friends had told us was quite different than Gaza. They were right. There was the feeling of a more intact people, though frazzled and suffering every day from racist oppression which includes witnessing the theft of their land by construction of Israel’s apartheid wall, which is amazingly huge and oppressive: simply gobbling up all the good land to be had, with the wall built right in people’s faces in many instances.
I discovered that artists everywhere are a frisky lot, that we will raise our voices and our songs and our dances and our poems in the face of any oppression, and that we will maintain apparently to our dying breath a sense of humor about the craziness of other people’s actions. This is brilliantly demonstrated in the talk by the writer Suad Amiry, (available on Youtube) who closed out the TEDxRamallah evening by talking about her experience of being put under curfew by the Israelis at the same time that she was being visited by her mother-in-law. She had everyone rolling in the aisles with this story of how important it is to see one’s dilemma, whatever it is, with humor and grit.
Fayyad to stay on as Palestinian prime minister
Salam Fayyad on Tuesday dismissed reports that he was thinking of stepping down as Palestinian prime minister after the Islamist Hamas movement rejected him as a candidate to run the new government.
The Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas had insisted on Fayyad staying as prime minister. Abbas told a Lebanese television station on Monday that since he would name the new government, his only choice would be Fayyad, regardless of Hamas’s position.
The move caused concern that the national reconciliation agreement that Fatah and Hamas concluded on May 4, and which was supposed to result in a government of consensus, may not work because of strong differences over Fayyad.
Interview: Turkey’s FM Ahmet Davutoglu
Hezbollah and the Arab revolution
Larbi Sadiki writes:
Is there something amiss within Hezbollah?
It rose from the ignominy of oblivion, feudal exploitation, sectarian bias, and overall marginalisation to occupy political centre stage. In fewer than thirty years it converted Shia socio-political weightlessness into a counterbalancing political gravity.
It stood up against the Israeli Goliath. It survived the “incendiaries” dropped on it by Arab politicians arrayed against it from Amman to Cairo. It outclassed its enemies within and outside of Lebanon, with imaginative political guile and fine calculation against all odds.
But resisting the Goliath of Tel Aviv while embracing the lion of Damascus risks a decreasing commitment to Arab revolution within “the Party of God” – and to its own revolutionary standing.
Freedom for Palestine – OneWorld
John McCain, John Kerry introduce Libya resolution
Politico reports:
Sens. John McCain and John Kerry introduced a resolution Tuesday that would give President Barack Obama the green light to continue limited military operations in Libya.
The language of the proposal has more teeth than the “sense of the Senate” resolution McCain and Kerry rolled out last month, which was merely a symbolic gesture backing the Libya effort. The latest plan would authorize U.S. operations in Libya but expires after one year and would make clear that the Senate agrees there is no need or desire to put boots on the ground in the North African nation.
“The Senate has been silent for too long on U.S. military operations in Libya,” McCain said on the chamber floor.
“It is time for the Senate to act. It is time to authorize the president’s use of force, whether he thinks he needs it or not. And it is time to send a message to our allies, to [Muammar Qadhafi] and to his opponents in Libya who are fighting for their freedom that there is strong bipartisan support in the Senate, and among the American people, for staying the course in Libya until we succeed.”
Clinton hails female Saudi driving activists
Al Jazeera reports:
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has praised Saudi women fighting for the right to drive in their country as “brave” but said it was up to Saudi society to determine the way forward.
“What these women are doing is brave and what they are seeking is right,” Clinton said.
Clinton was commenting on the show of defiance displayed by women in the kingdom who are campaigning a against a ban that prohibits women from driving in the kingdom.
On Friday, several woman drove cars in defiance of the ban.
“I am moved by it and I support them,” said Clinton in her first comments on the issue.
Prior to her remarks, the US state department had said that Clinton was engaged in “quiet diplomacy” on the driving ban.
This drew an appeal from a Saudi women’s group for a more forceful US stance.
In a statement emailed to reporters, Saudi Women for Driving said: “Secretary Clinton: quiet diplomacy is not what we need right now.
“What we need is for you, personally, to make a strong, simple and public statement supporting our right to drive.”
While Clinton did praise the women and their efforts she maintained that it was an internal issue.
“This is not about the United States, it is not about what any of us on the outside say,” said Clinton.
“It is about the women themselves and their right to raise their concerns with their own government,” she said.
US mayors call for end to wars and nuclear weapons
Truthout reports:
Peace activists won a major victory on Monday, June 20, when the US Conference of Mayors voted to adopt two resolutions that call for a drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the abolition of nuclear weapons. Both resolutions also demand the reprioritization of defense spending, including the $126 billion spent each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, toward the needs of municipalities.
The group, which represents mayors of municipalities with 30,000 or more residents, has not passed such a resolution in 40 years.
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) fellow Karen Dolan directs IPS’s Cities For Peace project, which organizes elected officials and activists to take action against war on a local level. In a statement to Truthout, Dolan said that the mayors, “are responsive to the needs of the people in a way in which Congress and the president have not been. Unless money is better spent at the state and local level, we will not see an economic recovery.” According to IPS, hundreds of municipalities around the United States have called for the end to the wars in the Middle East.
Israeli undercover agents boast of killing Palestinians on TV
The Ma’an News Agency reports:
Undercover Israeli intelligence officers appeared on national television Saturday to talk about assassinating Palestinians in a program broadcast on Israel’s Channel 10.
Oren Beaton presented a photo album of Palestinians he killed during his time as a commander of an undercover Israeli unit operating in the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
Beaton explained that he kept photos of his victims.
“This is a photo of a Palestinian young man called Basim Subeih who I killed. This is another young man. I shredded his body, and the photo shows the remnants of his body,” he said.
The TV program also featured an undercover agent referred to as “D”, who openly admitted killing “wanted Palestinians.”
He complained of suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and said that the state had rejected his demands for compensation.
The Channel 10 presenter appealed to the Israeli government to meet the agent’s demands.
“Those are the Shin Bet agents we only hear about and never see, and thanks to them we live safely,” she said.
Another theocracy in the heart of the Muslim world
Uri Avnery writes:
I am fed up with all this nonsense about recognizing Israel as the “Jewish state.”
It is based on a collection of hollow phrases and vague definitions, devoid of any real content. It serves many different purposes, almost all of them malign.
Benjamin Netanyahu uses it as a trick to obstruct the establishment of the Palestinian state. This week he declared that the conflict just has no solution. Why? Because the Palestinians do not agree to recognize, etc., etc.
Four rightist members of the Knesset have just submitted a bill empowering the government to refuse to register new NGOs and to dissolve existing ones if they “deny the Jewish character of the state.”
This new bill is only one of a series designed to curtail the civil rights of Arab citizens, as well as those of leftists.
Netanyahu: Israel needs to separate from the Palestinians
Haaretz reports:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surprised many of the participants in the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday when he embarked on a monologue praising the idea of parting from the Palestinians and in relinquishing portions of the West Bank. Netanyahu said the number of Palestinians and Jews between the Jordan River and the sea “is irrelevant” and that it’s more important to “preserve a solid Jewish majority inside the State of Israel.”
The PM made these statements during a discussion on a report by the Jewish People Policy Institute on demographic changes among Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank.
Members of the institute presented the demographic data of Prof. Sergio DellaPergola, which show that, in a number of years, the demographic trends will result in a Palestinian majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel and Turkey holding secret direct talks to mend diplomatic rift
Haaretz reports:
Israeli and Turkish officials have been holding secret direct talks to try to solve the diplomatic crisis between the two countries, a senior official in Jerusalem said. The negotiations are receiving the Americans’ support.
A source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry and a U.S. official confirmed that talks are being held, though in Israel the prime minister and foreign minister’s aides declined to comment.
The talks are being held between an Israeli official on behalf of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu, a firm supporter of rehabilitating ties with Israel.
Talks are also being held between the Israeli representative on the UN inquiry committee on last year’s Gaza flotilla, Yosef Ciechanover, and Turkey’s representative on the committee, Ozdem Sanberk. The two, who have been working together for several months on the UN committee, pass on messages between Israel and Turkey and have taken pains to draft understandings to end the crisis.
In addition, the U.S. administration has held talks with senior Turkish officials, mainly to foil the flotilla to Gaza due later this month, but also in a bid to improve relations with Israel.
On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke to her Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu and expressed satisfaction with the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation’s announcement that the ship the Mavi Marmara would not take part in the flotilla this time around, officials said.
Syrian protesters reject Assad’s latest offers of reform
Hannah Allam reports:
Fighting to save his family’s 40-year reign over Syria, President Bashar Assad on Monday described some anti-regime protesters as “saboteurs” and “germs,” but he pledged more reforms as the nationwide rebellion continued for a fourth bloody month.
Anti-government protesters in Syria and among more than 10,000 refugees in neighboring Turkey rejected Assad’s latest promises as vague and disingenuous, however, saying he offered no concrete steps or timetable to allow citizens a greater voice in one of the Arab world’s most repressive police states.
In Assad’s televised speech, his third since large-scale protests began in mid-March, the embattled leader struck a slightly more conciliatory tone, acknowledging the rising death toll in his regime’s crackdown. He announced a 100-member panel to draft reforms related to parliamentary election law and press freedoms.
Assad also suggested that he’d prosecute those responsible for the bloodshed and would support drafting a new constitution that could challenge his Baath Party’s monopoly on political life. Opposition activists long have demanded rival political parties.
“We must isolate true reformers from saboteurs,” Assad said, speaking from an auditorium at Damascus University, where an audience of supporters clapped and cheered.
Protesters weren’t appeased, reiterating their demand that the fall of the Assad dynasty is the only acceptable resolution to the crisis, although there’s no obvious successor in a country whose opposition has been intimidated and exiled for decades.
The Greek protests are not just about the economic crisis
Aditya Chakraborrty writes:
A sunny Saturday afternoon in central Athens, and Christos Roubanis is sitting outside having a beer, while telling me about the death threats he’s received. We’re in Victoria Square, one of the most racially mixed areas in the capital. The nearby payphones have queues of Bangladeshis waiting outside, and after every few shops comes that telltale feature of immigrant-ville: a Western Union money transfer booth. Locals reckon that more than a third of residents are non-Greek subjects.
And that’s made the neighbourhood the target of fascist activity, especially since Greece plunged into severe recession in 2009. A few minutes down the road is a playground, complete with seesaws, slides and climbing frames. It was where Afghans and others used to take their kids – until the Nazis marched in and declared it a no-go zone a couple of years ago. Although most of the equipment inside looks like it’s working, the entire rec is still locked up.
Just outside, on the stones in front of the handsomely domed church, is daubed various graffiti. “I love my country” reads one in the national colours of blue and white. Another is more direct: “Immigrants go home.” Sprayed on the shutters of nearby shops are swastikas. They look particularly incongruous in a country that tried so heroically to fend off Hitler’s invasion.
Christos lives here, but can’t walk me to the playground for fear of getting beaten up. Bald, with a small greying moustache, he’s previously stepped in to prevent immigrants being hassled – so the Nazis have turned their attention on him. They ring his mobile “and call me a bloody communist and say they will kill me”. Once, he was trapped by a fascist gang brandishing wooden poles. “They brought them this close,” he says, his hand stopping just in front of his thick glasses.
Under the awning of this bar, Christos and his friends Afrodite and Olga can debate how waves of badly-managed immigration have put pressure on this working-class neighbourhood. But one thing they agree on is that the fascists are managing to exploit the tension in the area. In elections at the end of last year, the extremist Golden Dawn party won 10% of the municipal vote.
Numbers like that flatly contradict the cosy view of the popular Greek reaction to the spending cuts as being articulate, engaged, left-wing. And it is – in parts. But as Christos and his neighbours will tell you, the politics of austerity can boost the thuggish right as well as the post-enlightenment left. Indeed, the defining feature of the Greek protests is not ideology – it’s visceral hostility to anything that smacks of the mainstream, whether in politics, or business or the media.