Islamophobia in America in 2015: The year in review

The Bridge Initiative: Looking back at the last twelve months, it can initially appear that Islamophobia was pretty bad in 2015.

And indeed it was. Attacks against Muslims in the United States and their institutions have occurred in rapid succession. Meanwhile, leading politicians and the voting public have expressed increasingly anti-Muslim views.

Even though FBI hate crime statistics for this year won’t be released for some time, the current climate of hostility towards Muslims in the United States indicates that 2015 could be America’s most Islamophobic year since 9/11.

Despite the bleak picture, 2015 also witnessed some positive shifts in the way the media and the public dealt with and responded to Islamophobia. As prejudice towards and discrimination against Muslims intensified and gained more media attention, many journalists, activists, and ordinary Americans felt compelled to do something about it. [Continue reading…]

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French police make 2,700 raids in month, raising tension with Muslims

The New York Times reports: The French authorities have conducted more than 2,700 police raids under a nationwide state of emergency instituted after last month’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris.

Using extraordinary powers granted by France’s National Assembly, officers have conducted searches without warrants of dozens of homes, arrested hundreds of people and even shut down mosques and Muslim prayer rooms for fear they were preaching radicalization.

The use of such tactics has increased tensions between the government and Muslim communities.

“The Muslim minority in France feels like it’s being treated as the public enemy,” said Yasser Louati, spokesman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. “They are afraid of the government.”

At least 20 court complaints have been filed against the government, Reuters recently reported, citing six independent lawyers involved in the complaints. And Muslim leaders in France have said that the police tactics are excessive and unfairly target Muslims. [Continue reading…]

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The life and death of King Coal

By Ben Curtis, Cardiff University

The reign of King Coal is a story which is central to fully understanding modern Britain. Coal powered the industrial revolution, employed over a million miners at the industry’s height, shaped and sustained communities across the country, and has played a key role in the UK’s political economy. With the closure of Kellingley colliery, the country’s last deep mine, in December 2015, a defining chapter in British history comes to an end.

Although it had been mined in small quantities in Britain since Roman times, the story of coal as a major industry begins with the industrial revolution. From the 18th century onwards, demand for coal began to grow at an increasing rate. Several factors drove this, but its most important uses were as a fuel for steam-powered engines, in ironworks and metal smelting, and for domestic energy consumption in growing cities and towns. Then in the 19th century, coal grew to become the biggest industry in Britain in terms of workforce. It expanded from 109,000 workers in 1830 to nearly 1.1 million in 1913.

The early years of the 20th century proved to be the industry’s zenith, however. The period between World War I and II was one of crisis and catastrophic decline for coal. Its seemingly unassailable position was undermined by a series of economic factors – including the decision in 1925 by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, to return sterling to the gold standard. This had the inadvertent effect of making British coal too expensive in its important, but increasingly vulnerable, overseas markets.

Coal helped fuel the industrial revolution.
Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg

As labour was the biggest cost in coal production, employers’ attempts to cut wages led to a series of bitter industrial relations disputes in the 1920s. The most well-known is the 1926 general strike, called by the Trades Union Congress in support of the miners. Although the general strike itself only lasted nine days, communities around the country’s coalfields held out for a further six months before finally conceding defeat.

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What would Clausewitz recommend we do about ISIS?

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Mark Perry recently posed this theoretical question to a number of military strategists and found a broad consensus: Oddly, those most familiar with Clausewitz’s thinking issue nearly identical responses to this question. “Clausewitz would start by asking us what it is that we want to accomplish,” the Rand Corporation’s David Johnson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel says. Johnson, who has read On War “from cover to cover numerous times” notes that, for Clausewitz, finding answers to fundamental questions is the key to shaping a military strategy. “You have to understand the war you’re in, and I would bet that, with ISIS, Clausewitz would say that we haven’t done that. We’re too enthralled with trying to figure out who ISIS is  — instead of focusing on what they do. In truth, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery. If you go to Istanbul and look south the Caliphate is right there. You can point to it. It’s a state that views us as an enemy. What’s the mystery?”

[Historian and Clausewitz scholar Christopher] Bassford agrees. “I think the first thing ‘Chuck’ Clausewitz would do is wonder why the U.S. government, and the West in general, is reluctant to acknowledge ISIS as a ‘state,’” he wrote to me in an email. “ISIS controls territory, has a capital city in Raqaa, and for the most part practices a fundamentally conventional, though particularly vicious, kind of warfare. It uses terrorism, but it’s not just a terrorist group. And I also think Clausewitz would wonder why the French say they’re surprised to find themselves ‘at war’ after the Paris attack. They have been bombing ISIS for months.” While Clausewitz’s ideas are not restricted to state-on-state warfare, Bassford argues that we should accept that, for practical purposes, ISIS is a state. Indeed, in a strategy he calls “Let-the-Wookiee-Win,” we should do what we can to make ISIS more state-like. “After all, we know how to destroy states  —  we’re very good at it,” he argues.

One of the things that [U.S. Naval War College professor Donald] Stoker, Bassford, Johnson and many in the military find compelling about Clausewitz is that he views war as a subject that can be studied, understood and that, like engineering (say) or architecture, or any other discipline, improved on. It is possible to get good at killing, and if you’re better at it than your enemy  — if you break your enemy’s will to resist (as he would say)  —  you’ll win. On War provides a slew of these undiluted but axiomatic understandings. Though Clausewitz was a civilized man who recognized war’s horrors, he issued these axioms with a stern warning: “Kind-hearted people might think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed,” he writes, “and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a most dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst . . . This is how the matter must be seen. It would be futile  —  even wrong  —  to try and shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.”

It is this unblinking ability to call war what it is that has given Clausewitz such a dedicated following that large numbers of military officers have worked to grasp his thinking, and vocabulary. “Clausewitz says that the purpose of war is to achieve a particular political end,” Stoker says. “He argues that the best route to doing this is to attack the enemy’s center of gravity, the center of his strength. That might seem obvious now, but many of the most important parts of our current military thinking were first identified by him.”

Of course much of what Clausewitz tapped into in On War was a reflection of what professional soldiers already knew, and know. Thus, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued his famously Clausewitzian statement on war without, apparently, ever having read him. “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it,” he said. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” Sherman’s unflinching calculus (that true humanity consists in waging war unrelentingly, so as to end it sooner) is, in many ways, a perfect distillation of the U.S. military’s traditional mistrust of the narrative propounded by counterinsurgency advocates that the “center of gravity in a counterinsurgency is the protection of the population that hosts it.” That might have been true in western Iraq, but few would argue that it’s the case with ISIS  —  particularly after the attacks in Paris. “The Germans and Japanese were held in a vice grip by their leaders in World War Two,” Christopher Bassford says, “but that didn’t stop us from burning down their cities. If it’s safer to be with ISIS than against it, ISIS will retain its hold on the population it now controls.”

In fact, Bassford’s views reflect a growing consensus inside the U.S. military’s upper echelons that a cruel war against ISIS now, no matter how distasteful, will save the lives of many decent people  —  including many Americans  — later. [Continue reading…]

“I think in Syria the primary focus now must be destroying ISIS,” says Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump promises that if he becomes president, he will “bomb the hell out of ISIS.”

There’s no shortage of tough talk among those who want to become commander-in-chief.

But how would these words be translated into action when it comes to the major population centers under ISIS’s control?

Does destroying ISIS in Mosul, for instance, mean destroying a city in which more than a million Iraqi civilians still live?

Clearly, if the remedy for dealing with ISIS ends up being more destructive than ISIS itself, it is no remedy at all.

Moreover, as much as it is true that ISIS needs to be recognized as a state, it is also more than a state. It has a physical base in the territory under its control, but its ideological base is globally dispersed.

For ISIS followers, already convinced that the world stands in violent opposition to Islam, the destruction of their embryonic state is less likely to represent defeat than have the opposite effect by empowering a death-defying passion for revenge.

The flaws in what is physically manifest can easily be forgotten if through its destruction, ISIS as a state is then reinvigorated as an inspiring legend.

Bombs can destroy buildings and kill people, but they don’t destroy ideas.

As American presidential candidates currently vie with each other in a contest over who can make the most compelling expression of their desire to crush ISIS, they are, as much as anything else, articulating a view of America’s rightful dominance in the world. In the eyes of ISIS fighters and their supporters, they themselves are thus made the underdog in a contest between right and might.

In reality, it is ISIS which is the oppressive force which must be toppled from below rather than above.

ISIS can only be destroyed by those who will directly benefit from its elimination.

If liberation from ISIS only brings renewed subjugation from Damascus and Baghdad, then those who might take up this fight are being told what they must fight against without being offered any real reward.

Clausewitz’s answer to the question, what do we do about ISIS?, might be less blunt than the military analysts are assuming. Indeed, he may well have said it’s the wrong question.

Without changing the basic conditions that facilitated ISIS’s emergence, it’s destruction is likely to be impossible.

ISIS is the beneficiary of the status quo which is sustained above all by the Assad regime, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia — a coalition of armies, air forces, and militias that in spite of their declared opposition to ISIS, have actually done little to inhibit its growth.

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Syria and surrealism

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: Wishful thinking is the essence of Barack Obama’s Syria policy. In lieu of decisive action, the president opted for brave words. He has drawn red lines that he wasn’t willing to enforce. With no strategic interests at stake, he saw no reason to expend resources on mere humanitarian concerns. In an explicit break with the past decade’s neoconservative interventionism, he has chosen a policy of “realist” restraint.

This amoral policy of malleable principles and unsentimental reserve should warm the heart of any “realist.” But a recent issue of The New York Times carries a curious indictment by two luminaries of the “realist” school: Stephen Walt of Harvard and Gordon Adams of the American University. The authors deride Obama for basing his Syria policy on a wish and a prayer: “A wish that President Bashar al-Assad would leave and a prayer that the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition would be more than it is.”

It would be brave for “realists” to admit that their prescriptions yielded a disaster: absent a deterrent, Assad bombed his opponents with impunity; the repression and slaughter precipitated a mass exodus; and with the US a mere spectator, Russia and Iran stepped in to shore up their ally. Meanwhile ISIS remains entrenched and blowback has reached Western capitals.

But “realists,” like their neoconservative counterparts, rarely admit error. They can, however, be relied upon to compound mistakes. [Continue reading…]

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Brave New China: The most disturbing tech story of 2015

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The New Republic reports: China wants to get in on the credit racket. At the moment, most Chinese citizens don’t have credit scores, unlike in the United States, where they have been part of the consumer landscape for decades, led by the big three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. The Chinese government aims to fix that and fast, establishing a nationwide credit scoring system, known as the Social Credit System (SCS), by 2020.

As with China’s vast construction projects, this scoring system is fiercely ambitious, authoritarian, technologically sophisticated, and likely to disrupt the lives of millions of people. And although it is a deeply capitalist undertaking, the SCS is being positioned as a socialist effort. A 2014 planning document states that “a social credit system is an important component part of the Socialist market economy system” and that “its inherent requirements are establishing the idea of an sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues.” That vague phrasing actually speaks to the scope of the project. With “social credit,” the Chinese authorities plan to do more than gauge people’s finances; they want to rate the trustworthiness of citizens in all facets of life, from business deals to social behavior. Eventually, all Chinese citizens will be required to be part of the SCS.

As of now, the Chinese government is allowing select companies to roll out test projects designed to rate individuals’ trustworthiness. These include efforts by Baidu and Alibaba, respectively the country’s largest search engine and e-commerce site. The involvement of these tech companies is key. Credit scoring in the U.S. has long graduated beyond simple matters of credit card debt or bankruptcy history. The credit bureaus now double as some of the country’s biggest data brokers, and they consider a range of consumer activity when creating their proprietary scores. The scores themselves have grown in value, now being used for anything from rating credit worthiness to evaluating one’s fitness for a job (some states, including New York, have banned the use of credit scores in job screenings). As a consequence many forms of consumer scoring now lie outside existing consumer protections, as a World Privacy Forum report found last year.

China’s Social Credit System promises to build on these techniques, using the vast behavioral records of its people to rate them — as consumers, as citizens, as human beings. According to that same planning document, the SCS will be used “to encourage keeping trust and punish breaking trust,” which includes violations of the “social order.” In other words, everything Chinese citizens do, especially online, may be incorporated into their scores. Doctors, teachers, construction firms, scientists, and tourism employees will be scored. So will sports figures, NGOs, companies, members of the judicial system, and government administrators.

Approved behaviors and purchases will raise a score; other activities may lower it, perhaps drawing the unwanted attention of authorities in the process. Scores in turn will be used for employment, disbursing credit, and determining eligibility for social benefits. While the Chinese government has frequently touted its desire to create “a culture of sincerity” and “trust,” the plan uses surveillance, data collection, online monitoring, and behavioral tracking to render practically all of its citizens’ affairs in market terms. Rather than being equal, China’s citizens will be in fierce competition with one another, jostling for rankings better than their peers. [Continue reading…]

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Russia endorsed and then immediately violated the UN resolution on Syria

An editorial in the Washington Post begins: The UN Security Council unanimously passed a resolution Friday demanding that “all parties immediately cease any attacks against civilians and civilian objects” as well as “any indiscriminate use of weapons, including through shelling and aerial bombardment.” Less than 48 hours later, Russian planes carried out at least six airstrikes on civilian targets in the northern Syrian provincial capital of Idlib, killing scores of people. It was a blatant violation of the resolution Russia had just voted for — and an indication of how Vladimir Putin actually regards the diplomatic deals on Syria the Obama administration has been pushing.

According to local sources cited by Reuters and The Post’s Hugh Naylor, the Russian bombing struck a marketplace in the heart of Idlib as well as a courthouse. Rescue workers told Reuters they had confirmed 43 dead and that dozens more bodies had yet to be identified or pulled from the rubble. While the town is controlled by a rebel alliance composed mostly of Islamist factions, it is nowhere near territory held by the Islamic State. And few would argue that a souq was not a civilian target.

Not just the Security Council’s ambassadors should be embarrassed by this outrage. There is also Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who just last Tuesday emerged from a meeting with Mr. Putin saying that the Russian ruler would “take on board” Mr. Kerry’s objections to airstrikes on Syrian targets outside Islamic State-held land. Perhaps Mr. Putin tossed the U.S. concerns back overboard once Mr. Kerry had left Moscow. More likely, he never had any intention of altering Russia’s policy of proclaiming war against the Islamic State while focusing its fire on the forces opposed to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi forces storm downtown Ramadi in bid to oust ISIS occupiers

The Washington Post reports: Iraqi forces began an attack on downtown Ramadi on Tuesday, in what they hope will mark a final push to wrest control of the western city from Islamic State militants.

The offensive began at around 10 a.m., with Iraqi counterterrorism troops crossing the Euphrates River to storm the Bakir neighborhood and advancing on the city’s main government compound, the Iraqi military said in a statement. Iraqi commanders said they were encountering limited resistance.

Ramadi has been under the control of the extremists since May, when it fell despite an ongoing U.S.-led air campaign in support of Iraqi troops. Backed by intensified airstrikes, Iraqi forces have encircled the city in recent weeks in an offensive that is seen as a key test of their ability to recapture urban areas from the Islamic State.

Much of the city’s center remains in the hands of the extremists, with booby traps and remaining civilians likely to hamper progress. Iraqi commanders, however, have said they believe they can completely retake it by the end of the year. [Continue reading…]

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What really happened to the U.S. train-and-equip program in Syria?

McClatchy reports: When the first group of Syrians from a U.S.-trained force intended to combat the Islamic State crossed into their country from Turkey in mid-July, they arrived in uniform carrying M16 rifles, mortars and flak vests. But they had no expense money, little food and no clear idea of how they, just 54 men, were to do battle against the extremists.

Most had been in near-total isolation during their two months of training in Turkey and Jordan, and they wanted to see their families, many of whom had been under heavy government bombardment. And it was Ramadan, a month of fasting, so they voted to take a two-week break, according to their elected commander, a former Syrian army lieutenant colonel, Amin Ibrahim.

Disaster struck when the break was over and they were headed back to their base. On July 29, a day after U.S. aircraft had attacked an outpost of the Nusra Front, al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, Nusra seized Col. Nedim Hassan – the commander of Division 30, the rebel unit in which the trainees were to be embedded – along with seven of his men.

Then on July 31, Nusra attacked the headquarters of the division in a battle that ended with U.S. airstrikes and ground intervention by Kurdish militias. As many as 50 Nusra members died in the fighting, according to some reports, but Nusra managed to seize 10 graduates of the so-called train-and-equip program.

Ten weeks later, the Pentagon announced that it had halted the program, which until that moment had been the keystone of the Obama administration’s policy to combat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, in Syria.

The program’s demise has been ascribed to a number of factors, including the participants, the Turkish intelligence agency MIT and a Syrian militia, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, better known as the YPG.

But a McClatchy investigation shows that the primary factor may well have been the United States itself, which conceived of a program that didn’t have the support of the people it was intended to train and was viewed with deep skepticism by its key training partner, Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Why a Syrian town surrendered to ISIS — and why it now wishes it never had

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The Daily Beast reports: “It was a two-year nightmare I just woke up from.”

Muhammad just arrived in Turkey with his family after fleeing the ISIS-controlled Syrian town of al-Ashara, in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor. He’d spent two years under the jihadist army’s rule. “I am going to tell my story once,” he told The Daily Beast after several prior attempts to get him to share his tale. “And then I want to forget it for good.”

Muhammad is a Syrian in his early thirties. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and worked as a teacher. He asked to keep his full name and any other details secret, because some members of his family are still back in al-Ashara and could face retribution from the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS. He added that even in Turkey, he doesn’t feel safe since ISIS operatives are all over the place. Two members of the activist monitor Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently were murdered in Urfa around a month ago in the living room of their house.

Just a few days after Muhammad fled from his town, on Nov. 20, the Russians bombed it. Many houses were destroyed, but none of them was used by ISIS. Nor were the jihadists’ facilities destroyed or any militant killed. A number of civilians were injured. The one fatality was a little girl named Maha Ghazi al-Abbad. She was 15 years old. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey is betting on Aleppo rebels to get ISIS out of border area

Vice News reports: After the Islamic State’s November attack on Paris, carried out by European fighters returning from the Syrian battlefield, international efforts to close the terrorist group’s last route to and from Turkey have taken on a new urgency.

US officials have been publicly leaning on Turkey to immediately close its border with the Islamic State (IS) in Syria’s northern Aleppo province and deploy thousands of troops on the frontier. The Turkish government has proposed instead that Turkey and the US-led coalition first back Syrian rebels who can drive IS out of the area and create a rebel-controlled “safe zone.”

Amid this public back-and-forth, Turkey’s plan is already underway — and, according to rebels interviewed by VICE News, it is making some progress. The question is whether it can work fast enough to stop the two-way flow of would-be IS recruits heading to Syria and battle-hardened jihadists returning from Syria to terrorize Europe. [Continue reading…]

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How to help Libya … before it’s too late

Mustafa Fetouri writes: While the US-led coalition has been busy attacking Islamic State (IS) strongholds in Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, the faraway coastal city of Sirte, Libya, has been seized by the extremist group. Only an hour’s flight from Europe’s southern shores, Sirte fell without a shot of resistance. What began as a small group of locals pledging allegiance to IS has evolved into a sizeable force that has extended its control nearly 40 miles west of Sirte and nearly twice that to the east, threatening the city of Ajdabiya and even Benghazi.

Omar, a civil servant who requested the use of a pseudonym, has lived all of his 30 years in Sirte. He told Al-Monitor by phone, “IS now has full control of the city and all roads leading to Sirte in all directions.” IS has imposed laws banning tobacco sales and smoking and ordering women to cover their hair. “Actually, my own brother was jailed for a couple of days because they caught him smoking in the street,” Omar said. Like other residents, he is extremely worried and is already planning to leave if his mother agrees to go with him.

Sirte is strategically situated at the crossroads connecting Libya’s three regions: Fezzan in the south, Cyrenaica to the east and Tripolitania to the west. In addition, it is close to the country’s main oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf as well as Sidra. Ras Lanuf could well be the next safe haven for IS’ top leaders. On Dec. 9, England’s Daily Mail cited the Iranian news agency, FARS, as reporting that an injured Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had already arrived in Sirte, having fled his headquarters in Mosul with Turkish assistance. [Continue reading…]

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How ConocoPhillips won the fight for oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness

By Alec MacGillis, ProPublica, December 21, 2015

This story was co-published with Politico Magazine.

From his seat in the small plane flying over the largest remaining swath of American wilderness, Bruce Babbitt thought he could envision the legacy of one of his proudest achievements as Interior Secretary in the Clinton administration.

Babbitt was returning in the summer of 2013 from four sunlit nights in Alaska’s western Arctic, where at one point his camp was nearly overrun by a herd of caribou that split around the tents at the last minute. Now, below him, Babbitt saw an oil field 2014 one carefully built and operated to avoid permanent roads and other scars on the vast expanse of tundra and lakes.

Under the deal he’d negotiated just before leaving Interior in 2000, that would be the only kind of drilling he thought would be allowed in the 23 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which, despite its name, is a pristine region home to one of the world’s largest caribou herds and giant flocks of migratory birds. The compromise was fair and, he hoped, enduring — clear-eyed about the need for more domestic oil but resolute in defense of the wilderness.

The deal lasted barely 15 years.

In February, the Obama administration granted the ConocoPhillips oil company the right to drill in the reserve. The Greater Mooses Tooth project, as it is known, upended the protections that Babbitt had engineered, saving the oil company tens of millions and setting what conservationists see as a foreboding precedent.

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Jewish extremists’ leader: Christians are ‘blood sucking vampires’ who should be expelled from Israel

Haaretz reports: Benzi Gopstein, leader of the extremist anti-assimilationist group Lehava, has called for the prevention of Christmas celebrations in Israel and the expulsion of Christians whom he compared to “vampires.”
“Christmas has no place in the Holy Land,” Gopstein wrote in an article posted a few days ago on the Haredi website Kooker.

The Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism has called on the prosecutor and the police to launch an investigation.

Gopstein wrote in the article that he is disturbed by “the fall of the line of defense of the Jewish people against our deadly enemy for hundreds of years – the Christian Church.”

He said the Church had used “the maximum tools at its disposal to destroy the Jewish people,” and that today “the Church has been defeated roundly when the Jewish people has one of the strongest armies in the world and they have no chance any longer of destroying our body.”

However, Gopstein said, the Church has not given up. “A last hope remains to those vampires and blood suckers – the mission. If Jews cannot be killed, they can still be converted.”

Gopstein said “missionary bookstores offer their products in front of everyone on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, whole communities are crawling with missionaries, many businesses are run by them and are used by the mission, many cases using camouflage and without the knowledge of the employees.”

Gopstein said that the “fear that every Jew felt, the disgust that we described above at Christianity – disgust that was the only thing that saved us from the dark days in Europe – has disappeared with the ‘good life’ of the democratic age…and the missionary is on the prowl for prey.”

Gopstein ends his article by writing: “I call on everyone to raise a cry and fight this corrupt phenomenon in the best tradition of Judaism, before we all, including those who observe the commandments among us, become a community of sycophants.”

“Christmas has no place in the Holy Land,” he wrote, adding “Let us remove the vampires before they once again drink our blood.”

The Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism and the Coalition Against Racism have asked the deputy prosecutor for special functions, as well as the police unit in charge of cybercrime, to investigate. The movements wrote: “The article calls for the prevention of celebration of Christmas, the most important Christian holiday, and to work to remove Christians from Israel.” The groups also noted that Gopstein’s description of Christians as “vampires and blood-suckers” contravenes the law prohibiting insult to religious feelings.

“This statement was not made in a vacuum but in the context of many acts of violence against Christian clergy in recent years,” the groups wrote.

Orly Erez-Likhovski, head of the Reform center’s legal department said: “Benzi Gopstein stops at nothing to incite against anyone who is not him – Arab Muslims, Christians and others, using harsh language and calling for violence. Unfortunately…in the face of this incitement…law enforcement is thunderously silent.” [Continue reading…]

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Why is the U.S. subsidizing Israeli settlements?

Uri Blau writes: An office chair is positioned on the top of Dagan Hill, on the outskirts of Efrat, a thriving West Bank settlement. Someone must like to sit here and take in the changing landscape. Once-bare mountains are losing their shape, carved up by new roads and villas for a growing population of Jewish settlers.

Nadia Matar, one pillar of this community, should be happy. Twenty years ago, as she struggled to make a life on this hill, the success of her mission seemed improbable, if not impossible. Now, from the top of the windy peak, the fruits of her victory are apparent. Yet Matar, founder and leader of the pro-settlement nonprofit Women in Green, doesn’t sound cheerful when I call to ask about the funding of her organization. “Choose which side are you on,” she tells me in Hebrew, “ours, or the enemies who try to destroy us.”

Many from Israel’s far right and the settlers’ community condemn the Obama administration as that “other” side. They should know better: While one American hand opposes development of settlements, the other keeps feeding it. [Continue reading…]

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