American graduate student killed in stabbing rampage near Tel Aviv

The New York Times reports: A Palestinian on a stabbing rampage on Tuesday along a coastal promenade near Tel Aviv killed an American combat veteran who was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University.

The attacks occurred along a popular seaside boulevard in Jaffa, about a mile away from where Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was meeting with a former president of Israel, Shimon Peres.

The stabbing attacks, carried out over 20 minutes, came just after Mr. Biden arrived for a two-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories. He is expected to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday.

The American was identified as Taylor Force, 28, a first-year M.B.A. student at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt, the university said in a statement. He was one of 29 students from the graduate school on a trip to Israel to learn about global entrepreneurship, according to a news release from Vanderbilt. The rest of the students, as well as the four faculty and staff members that accompanied them, were safe, it said. [Continue reading…]

Last October, following a knife attack on an Israeli policeman by a 19-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Ali, Peter Beaumont wrote: How violence plays out in conflict –the weapons used, how attacks are executed and organised and who takes part and against what targets – are indicative of more than simply the act of killing or attempted killing. While the first Palestinian intifada was defined in the popular imagination as the “stone-throwing intifada” and the second as a conflict of suicide bombings and gun attacks, the new surge in violence has been so closely associated with knife attacks that on social media some have dubbed it the “knife intifada”.

At the entrance to the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem where Ali lived, three burned-out, overturned cars – part of a recent barricade – lie facing the Israeli police at the checkpoint in the wall that seals off the camp. The house where Ali’s male relatives are sitting in mourning is deep within the camp’s narrow lanes. They have not yet received his body for burial. His uncles, Assad Mohammed Ali and Mahmoud, tell a story familiar to those who have done these rounds of questioning before. Their nephew, they say, was a popular and happy youth. He had no problems – except he was angry at the Israeli occupation, and in particular at Israeli actions around the flashpoint religious site of the al-Aqsa mosque. So far, so familiar.

“We have a new generation,” another relative standing on a stairs above the uncles interjects, unwilling to be identified. “They are smart and clever. They can’t sustain the humiliation. They think: if you are going to kill us in the end, we should attack first. You have to understand that this generation is well educated. It is well informed and globalised. They can’t be fooled, like we were fooled in the old days. They have their own way of finding out what is going on. Social media and the internet are educating them.”

Asked about why this episode is different from the first and second intifadas, in the weapons of choice and the organisation or lack of it, Assad Mohammed Ali says: “This is a pure intifada. It is pure because it is about individuals’ personal motivation. They are the ones who sparked it.” The other uncle adds: “The last ones were political. This is not political; it is spontaneous.”

Assad Mohammed Ali adds that, confronted with what has been happening at al-Aqsa – with the fatal shootings of Palestinian teenagers – “kids started carrying knives” and his nephew was among them. He suggests a widespread and fatalistic anticipation of death. “When a person thinks death may be imposed, then he wants to die in a heroic way.” He mentions two men from the camp who were killed last year. “The new generation wants to try and imitate them.” [Continue reading…]

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Michael Klare: A take-no-prisoners world of oil

It’s evident that we’re still on a planet where oil rules. The question increasingly is: What exactly does it rule over? After all, every barrel of oil that’s burned contributes to a fast-approaching future in which the weather grows hotter and more extreme, droughts and wildfires spread, sea levels rise precipitously, ice continues to melt away in the globe’s coldest reaches, and… well, you know that story well enough by now. In the meantime, Planet Earth has a glut of oil on hand and that, it turns out, doesn’t mean — not for the major oil companies nor even for the major oil states — that the good times are getting ready to roll.

Of all the powers struggling with that oil glut and the plunging energy prices that have gone with it, none may be more worth watching than Saudi Arabia. While exporting its own extremists and its extreme brand of Islam from Afghanistan to Syria, and lending a decades-long hand to the destabilization of the Greater Middle East, that kingdom has itself been a paragon of stability. Nothing, however, lasts forever, and so keeping an eye on the Saudis is a must. That’s especially so since the latest version of the royal family has also made what might be called the American mistake (with the backing of the Obama administration, no less) and for the first time plunged the Saudi military directly into a typically unwinnable if brutal war in neighboring Yemen. Combine the destabilizing and blowback effects of wars that won’t end, including the Syrian one, and of oil prices that refuse to rise significantly and, despite the kingdom’s copious money reserves, you have a formula for potential domestic unrest. Already the royals are cutting their domestic subsidies to their own population, pulling billions of dollars in aid out of Lebanon, and exploring a possible $10 billion bank loan.

As TomDispatch’s invaluable energy expert Michael Klare suggests today, when oil prices began plummeting in 2015, the Saudis launched an “oil war of attrition,” imagining that others would be devastated by it (as OPEC partners Nigeria and Venezuela already have been) but that the royals themselves would emerge triumphant.  Should the unimaginable happen, however, and should the kingdom itself begin to come unglued in a Greater Middle East that is increasingly the definition of chaos — watch out. Tom Engelhardt

Energy wars of attrition
The irony of oil abundance
By Michael T. Klare

Three and a half years ago, the International Energy Agency (IEA) triggered headlines around the world by predicting that the United States would overtake Saudi Arabia to become the world’s leading oil producer by 2020 and, together with Canada, would become a net exporter of oil around 2030. Overnight, a new strain of American energy triumphalism appeared and experts began speaking of “Saudi America,” a reinvigorated U.S.A. animated by copious streams of oil and natural gas, much of it obtained through the then-pioneering technique of hydro-fracking. “This is a real energy revolution,” the Wall Street Journal crowed in an editorial heralding the IEA pronouncement.

The most immediate effect of this “revolution,” its boosters proclaimed, would be to banish any likelihood of a “peak” in world oil production and subsequent petroleum scarcity.  The peak oil theorists, who flourished in the early years of the twenty-first century, warned that global output was likely to reach its maximum attainable level in the near future, possibly as early as 2012, and then commence an irreversible decline as the major reserves of energy were tapped dry. The proponents of this outlook did not, however, foresee the coming of hydro-fracking and the exploitation of previously inaccessible reserves of oil and natural gas in underground shale formations.

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Why the world needs a UN treaty to combat violence against women

By Ronagh McQuigg, Queen’s University Belfast

Violence against women is one of the most prevalent human rights abuses in the world. It is estimated that 35% of women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lives either by their partner or a stranger.

Yet there are no provisions under existing UN treaties which refer directly to this issue. This is unacceptable. It is time for the world to develop a new UN treaty on violence against women.

The absence of international, legally binding provisions set down in a UN treaty creates difficulties in holding countries accountable for their responses to domestic violence, forced marriage and a host of other abuses.

The UN’s primary instrument on the rights of women is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979. This convention contains no express mention of violence against women, although the CEDAW Committee (the convention’s monitoring body) interprets the issue as part of its remit.

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Women of the Amazon defend their homeland against new oil contract

Emily Arasim and Osprey Orielle Lake report: In late January 2016, the government of Ecuador signed a controversial contract with Chinese oil company Andes Petroleum, handing over rights to explore and drill for oil deep in the country’s pristine southeastern Amazon Rainforest, known and revered by many as “the lungs of the Earth.”

For decades, Indigenous communities of the southern Ecuadorian Amazon have successfully fought to protect their land from encroachment by oil companies, engaging in local action and international policymaking and campaigns with a powerful message of respect for the Earth’s natural laws and the rights of Indigenous peoples.

At the forefront of this ongoing struggle are courageous Indigenous Amazonian women leaders who have declared, “We are ready to protect, defend and die for our forest, families, territory and nation.”

In marches, protests, conferences and international forums, the women of the Ecuadorian Amazon are standing with fierce love and conviction for the forests and their communities, and navigating a brutal intersection of environmental devastation, cultural dislocation and violence and persecution as women human rights and land defenders.

The women have repeatedly put their bodies on the frontline in an attempt to halt oil extraction across the Amazon, often facing harsh repression by the state security. [Continue reading…]

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Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here’s why

Thomas Frank writes: Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic power brokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace.” A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America. [Continue reading…]

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‘The military is not his palace guards,’ retired three-star general says of Donald Trump

The Washington Post reports: Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling says he had “a visceral response” to some of the rhetoric Donald Trump unleashed during the most recent Republican debate.

But the statement that really concerned him, Hertling told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Monday, came when Trump told debate moderator Bret Baier that there’s no way U.S. service members would refuse to follow his orders.

“They won’t refuse,” Trump said during Thursday’s debate on Fox News. “They’re not going to refuse me, believe me. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.”

Hertling forcefully disagreed, calling the Republican front-runner’s management style “toxic leadership.” [Continue reading…]

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Is Donald Trump a fascist?

Jeffrey Herf writes: Is Donald Trump, now with the results of Super Tuesday the Republican presidential nominee-apparent, a fascist? It is stunning even to pose the question in the context of a national-scale American election, but many people are posing it, and they are not entirely wrong to do so. The short answer to the question is “no, but.” But the “but” begs an historically tutored explanation, the conclusion to which should not make us feel too good about the “no” part of the answer.

When an historian asks a question like this, methodological fragilities rush to consciousness. Context is critical, so much so that in some ways it is impossible to state in any simple fashion what the similarities and differences are between Donald Trump and the fascist and Nazi dictators of Europe’s 20th century. But we can sketch out the domains in which a comparison might make sense. Those domains include, most prominently, attitudes toward democracy, political violence, press freedoms, and the role of the state within society and culture.

When Trump asserts that politicians are “all talk and no action” he casts doubt on a great virtue of elected legislatures in democracies—namely, the creation of a public sphere in which people with divergent views can talk with and to one another. Trump does not, as Hitler and Mussolini did, openly denounce the institutions of liberal democracy. Yet like them he accuses those institutions of failing to adequately address political and economic crises. The classic dictators denounced democracy itself, especially the peaceful democratic competition among political parties, as a formula for national weakness. Trump has not done so, but his dictatorial personality suggests that he can do singlehandedly what American political institutions have failed to do for many years running. [Continue reading…]

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Limit the next president’s power to wage drone warfare

Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman write: When Barack Obama took office as the reluctant heir to George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” he renounced some of his predecessor’s most extreme policies. There is one Bush-era policy, though, that President Obama made emphatically his own: the summary killing of suspected militants and terrorists, usually by drone.

In less than a year, the president will bequeath this policy, and the sweeping legal claims that underlie it, to someone who may see the world very differently from him. Before that happens, he should bring the drone campaign out of the shadows and do what he can to constrain the power he unleashed.

President Bush started the drone wars, but Mr. Obama vastly expanded them. Almost entirely on his watch, United States strikes have killed as many as 5,000 people, possibly 1,000 of them civilians. The president approved strikes in places far from combat zones. He authorized the C.I.A. to carry out “signature strikes” aimed at people whose identities the agency did not know but whose activities supposedly suggested militancy. He approved the deliberate killing of an American, Anwar al-Awlaki.

The president also oversaw an aggressive effort to control the public narrative about drone strikes. Even as senior officials selectively disclosed information to the news media, his administration resisted Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, arguing that national security would be harmed if the government confirmed drone strikes were taking place. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. strikes in Somalia kill 150 Shabab fighters

The New York Times reports: The fighters had just completed “training for a large-scale attack” against American and African Union forces, said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.

Pentagon officials would not say how they knew that the Shabab fighters killed on Saturday were training for an attack on United States and African Union forces, but the militant group is believed to be under heavy American surveillance.

The Shabab fighters were standing in formation at a facility the Pentagon called Camp Raso, 120 miles north of Mogadishu, when the American warplanes struck on Saturday, officials said, acting on information gleaned from intelligence sources in the area and from American spy planes. One intelligence agency assessed that the toll might have been higher had the strike happened earlier in the ceremony. Apparently, some fighters were filtering away from the event when the bombing began.

The strike was another escalation in what has become the latest battleground in the Obama administration’s war against terror: Africa. The United States and its allies are focused on combating the spread of the Islamic State in Libya, and American officials estimate that with an influx of men from Iraq, Syria and Tunisia, the Islamic State’s forces in Libya have swelled to as many as 6,500 fighters, allowing the group to capture a 150-mile stretch of coastline over the past year.

The arrival of the Islamic State in Libya has sparked fears that the group’s reach could spread to other North African countries, and the United States is increasingly trying to prevent that. American forces are now helping to combat Al Qaeda in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso; Boko Haram in Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad; and the Shabab in Somalia and Kenya, in what has become a multifront war against militant Islam in Africa. [Continue reading…]

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The soldier with PTSD who flew halfway around the world to die alone on the side of a mountain

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Kathryn Joyce writes: On the second-to-last day of 2013, when the glow of Christmas had passed and there was nothing to do but settle in for months of unbroken winter, a stranger arrived in Saranac Lake, a 5,400-person mountain town 70 miles shy of the Canadian border. Set amid the patchwork of forest preserves and villages that make up the largest publicly protected area in the Lower 48, Saranac Lake is the self-appointed “Capital of the Adirondacks,” a onetime best small town of New York, and the place where I’m from.

The stranger was a 31-year-old infantry captain in the Royal Australian Regiment who’d been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Afghanistan two years before. He arrived at 6 p.m. on the one bus that comes through town each day: an Adirondack Trailways coach that chugs slowly uphill from Albany, stopping in what seems like every podunk town along the way.

To get to Albany, he’d taken a bus from New York City, and before that planes from San Francisco, Sydney, Canberra, and, ultimately, Adelaide, Australia, his own hometown, more than 10,500 miles away. He was male-model good-looking—wholesome and tidy, with intelligent eyes—though he’d recently grown shockingly thin and had cut his brown, widow’s-peaked hair so close it was nearly shaved.

He’d been a battle captain in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, just north of Kandahar, working as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization coalition force. But his PTSD diagnosis had placed him on restricted status, and he’d since been re-assigned to a desk job in Canberra, Australia’s sterile government seat. He had a medical review coming up in January and, his family would later tell the police, he feared he might be discharged. The Australian Defence Force was withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, and the military was downsizing; everyone who remained had to be fit to deploy. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisian clash spreads fear that Libyan war is spilling over

The New York Times reports: Fear engulfed Tunisia on Monday that Islamic State mayhem was spilling over from neighboring Libya, as dozens of militants stormed a Tunisian town near the border, assaulting police and military posts in what the president called an unprecedented attack.

At least 54 people were killed in the fighting in the town, Ben Gardane, which erupted at dawn and lasted for hours until the security forces chased out what remained of the assailants. An enormous stash of weapons was later found.

The authorities said at least 36 militants were among the dead. The others were a mix of security forces and civilians, including a 12-year-old girl.

It was unclear where the assailants had come from, although some witnesses reported that they had local accents and had pronounced themselves as liberators. But President Beji Caid Essebsi of Tunisia, increasingly alarmed about the Islamic State’s expansion in Libya, blamed the militant group. In a televised address, he suggested that the motive was to create a new Islamic State territory on Tunisian soil, similar to the 150-mile stretch it controls in Libya. [Continue reading…]

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Takeover of opposition newspaper is a death warrant for free speech in Turkey

By Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, University of Ljubljana

On Friday March 4, a Turkish court ruled that the country’s biggest daily newspaper, Zaman, would be run by appointed trustees – ostensibly because of its so called “terrorist” activities, but more likely because the publication was linked to US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen, an opponent of the government.

Shortly after the court’s decision, police stormed the paper’s Istanbul headquarters in a dramatic midnight raid, firing tear gas and water cannon at the hundreds-strong crowd that formed outside.

The new administrative members dismissed the editor, executive editor and other senior staff, transforming the newspaper’s editorial line, in less than 48 hours, from a rigorous opposition voice into a propaganda mouthpiece for the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Full disclosure: I have written oped pieces for Zaman for the past two years or so – at a rate of about two or three per month. Never at any time was there any attempt to dictate my angle or censor my work, even when – as I did several times – I wrote articles that were critical of Gulen or his movement. Now I feel that the doors of this newspaper are closed – not only for me but also for most of the other academic writers who had used the paper as a vehicle for their opinions.

This episode has not come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been following Turkey’s political scene. While Erdoğan and his AKP party enjoyed close relations with Gulen and his Hizmet educational and religious movement when the party first emerged – and observers believe that Hizmet used his enormous popularity to help Erdogan secure his first term as prime minister in 2002 – things have gone bad between them since 2013.

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Turkey cracks down on foreign fighters

The Washington Post reports: The plea for help came from Sweden: Two young Muslim males had left Stockholm for Syria and would soon be terrorists-in-training unless authorities in Turkey could intercept them.

Turkish security caught the men arriving at an airport in Istanbul with one-way tickets and camouflage gear, officials said. The two were sent back to Sweden and the trouble averted — until eight days later, when the same duo turned up at a Turkish seaport, this time arriving by ferry from the Greek island of Kos.

The back-to-back deportations of those would-be militants last year were in some ways a sign of substantial progress in the cooperation between Western governments and Turkey in sharing intelligence and stemming the flow of foreign fighters to Syria.

But the sequence and hundreds of similar cases have also fueled rising levels of frustration in Turkey, which has been accused of enabling the migration of fighters into Syria even while being called upon to block militants on behalf of other governments unwilling or unable to do the job themselves. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia’s unholy war in Yemen

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Nasser Arrabyee writes: Since it began its war on the Houthis in March 2015, Saudi Arabia has justified its intervention as a broader holy duty to fight Shia and protect the government in exile. Yet Yemenis increasingly view Saudi intervention more as a campaign—in which they are collateral—to upgrade Riyadh’s own influence and an ill-conceived effort to promote Mohammed Bin Salman as a powerful future Saudi king. As such, Yemenis fail to see any moral or legal justification for the U.S.-backed Saudi war. What is evident to them is the deliberate destruction of people and capital—all to no end, as the war has failed to accomplish Saudi Arabia’s goal of weakening the Houthis. Instead, the airstrikes and blockade that form the core of Saudi Arabia’s strategy have increased anti-Saudi hatred, driving greater numbers of Yemenis to support the Houthis every day.

The war has done particular damage to infrastructure — including reservoirs, airports, electric power stations, bridges and roads, markets, factories, stadiums, and hospitals. The education sector has been hit especially hard, with 39 universities damaged, 810 primary and secondary schools damaged, and another 3,809 closed. About 85 percent of the population of 27 million is in dire need of food, water, medicine, and fuel. Over 2.5 million Yemenis are displaced, and the attacks have killed or injured more than 23,000 civilians — among them thousands of women and children—using internationally prohibited weapons such as cluster bombs, as documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. [Continue reading…]

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How AIPAC mainstreams anti-Muslim hate

Ali Gharib writes:  ast year, Investigative Project on Terrorism head Steven Emerson quietly pulled out of the annual conference of Washington’s most influential pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He pinned the withdrawal on “an unexpected medical problem that required my immediate attention,” but it was impossible not to notice that it came amid reverberations of criticism for the latest of Emerson’s Islamophobic outbursts.

A couple months before the AIPAC summit, Emerson had taken to the airwaves of Fox News to expound on so-called no-go zones in Europe, purported Muslim enclaves where governments dared not go. But there was a problem: “They don’t exist,” David Graham wrote in The Atlantic. And yet Emerson took the myth even farther. In the United Kingdom, he reported on Fox, “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims simply don’t go in!”

The Birmingham comment elicited ridicule from across the spectrum — “This guy is clearly a complete idiot,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said in an interview — and eventually Emerson and, perhaps more improbably, Fox News itself apologized. A few weeks later, Emerson was out at AIPAC.

Now, Emerson is back. His name appears on a list of confirmed speakers published by AIPAC ahead of its Washington, DC, conference later this month. [Continue reading…]

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Refugee crisis magnified by European divisions

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Der Spiegel reports: A rickety gate of galvanized wire is all that separates desperation from hope. The gate is part of the fence erected in the farming village of Idomeni on the border between Greece and Macedonia. At this moment, some 12,000 people are waiting for it to be opened.

It’s the gateway to Europe and the gateway to Germany.

A woman in boots and a blue uniform stands guard in front of the gate. Her name is Foteini Gagaridou and she is an official with the Greek border police — and she looks exhausted. All it would take for her to open the border would be to pull a thin metal pin out of the latch, but she’s not allowed to.

If it were up to her, she says, she would let every single one of these people pass through, just as they were able to do just a few weeks earlier — across the border to Macedonia and on through Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia to Austria, where they could continue their journey to Germany on what is known as the Balkan Route. It’s the same path chosen by hundreds of thousands of refugees last year, but the Balkan Route is now closed. It ends at Gagaridou’s wire gate.

This is where Fortress Europe begins, secured with razor wire and defended with tear gas. Desperate scenes played out here on Monday, reminiscent of those witnessed in Hungary back in September. A group of young men used a steel beam as a battering ram to break down the gate. Rocks flew through the air as the gate flew off its hinges, prompting the volleying of tear gas cartridges and stun grenades from the Macedonian side. Men could be seen running and children screaming. One woman lay on the ground with her daughter, crying.

This frontier has become Europe’s new southern border, with Greece serving as Europe’s waiting room — and the possible setting for a humanitarian disaster. Around 32,000 migrants are currently stranded in the country, a number that the Greek Interior Ministry says could quickly swell to 70,000. The aid organization Doctors Without Borders is even expecting 200,000 refugees. Greece’s reception camps are already full, and the highly indebted country is stretched well beyond its capacity.

The decision as to whether and how many refugees will be able to cross the border isn’t one for border guard Gagaridou to make. Rather, it will be taken by the Macedonian government. Macedonia, for its part, is pointing fingers at countries further to the north, noting it is they who have tightened their borders, especially Austria, which created a chain reaction of border closures last week. The countries apparently felt they could wait no longer for the broader European solution German Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised will result from a special EU summit scheduled for March 7.

Merkel wants to see Turkey stem the flow of refugees and put a stop to the exodus to Europe. European leaders agreed on Feb. 18 that this plan remains the “priority.” But Austria and the Balkan states nevertheless moved ahead and closed their borders.

Idomeni has become a symbol of the current political chaos in Europe and the crumbling of a joint European refugee policy. The town is emblematic of the new Europe of fences. It is here that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open border policies have met their end. Under Austria’s leadership, the Balkan Route has been closed in the precise move Berlin had hoped to avoid.

Merkel has begun warning of the EU’s disintegration “into small states” that will be unable to compete in a globalized world, as well as of the possibility that border controls might soon be reintroduced all across Europe.

Were Europe in agreement, it would be unproblematic to accommodate 2-3 million refugees, given the Continent’s population of a half billion people. From such a perspective, the current spat actually seems somewhat ridiculous. But in the run up to next week’s EU summit, Europe is gripped by strife. Europe’s greatest achievement, the opening of its borders through the Schengen agreement, is at stake, and the increasingly toxic atmosphere between countries has reached alarming dimensions. [Continue reading…]

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