To the newcomers from Syria: Welcome to Canada

An editorial in the Toronto Star says: Welcome to Canada.

Ahlan wa sahlan.

You’re with family now.

And your presence among us makes our Christmas season of peace and joy just that much brighter.

The people of Toronto are honoured to greet the very first group of 25,000 Syrians who will be arriving in this country in the next few months, and who have chosen to make a new life here. It’s been a long trek, but you are no longer refugees. Your days of being strangers in a strange land are over.

You are permanent residents of Canada now, with all the rights and protections and possibilities that confers.

You’ll find the place a little bigger than Damascus or Aleppo, and a whole lot chillier. But friendly for all that. We’re a city that cherishes its diversity; it’s our strength. Canadians have been watching your country being torn apart, and know that you’ve been through a terrifying, heartbreaking nightmare. But that is behind you now. And we’re eager to help you get a fresh start. [Continue reading…]

Not only is Canada showing an example that America should follow, but their choice surely poses a problem for Donald Trump and his Islamophobic supporters. If they insist Syrian refugees pose a threat and they also want a wall built along the southern border to keep out illegal immigrants from Mexico, wouldn’t it also make sense (from their point of view) to have a wall between the U.S. and Canada along a border that’s currently so easy to cross?

Facebooktwittermail

Lindsey Graham: Trump leading because 40% of GOP voters think Obama is Kenyan Muslim

BuzzFeed reports: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said his presidential opponent Donald Trump is leading in the polls because nearly half of Republican primary voters hate Obama and think he is a Kenyan-born Muslim.

“Well there’s about 40% of the Republican primary voter who believes that Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim,” Graham said on Boston Herald Radio on Friday. “There’s just a dislike for President Obama that is visceral. It’s almost irrational.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

For Muslims in the U.S. military, a different U.S. than the one they swore to defend

The Washington Post reports: U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Emir Hadzic was a Muslim refugee.

“The way Americans welcomed us made such a huge impression on me that I felt like I owed something back,” said Hadzic, a Bosnian-Muslim who fled Sarajevo in 1995. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Hadzic joined the Marine Corps as an infantryman — hoping to help peacekeepers deploying to his homeland.

“I thought I would sign up and pay my debt and on behalf of my family,” he added.

Eight deployments later and still in the Marine Corps, Hadzic has become disturbed by the rising anti-Muslim sentiment in this country after the recent Islamic State attacks in Paris and last week’s San Bernardino shootings. GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, a candidate Hadzic used to support, has called for barring Muslims from entering the United States.

“We used to be a balanced people. We used to be true to our values, but now we’re willing to betray our values because of a sense of fear? That’s not American,” said Hadzic. “What the hell happened to that America I immigrated to?” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Understanding ISIS through the insights of Eric Hoffer

David Brooks writes: After the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, some people’s minds flew to the materialistic element of the atrocity — the guns that were used in the killing. But the crucial issue, it seems to me, is what you might call the technology of persuasion — how is it that the Islamic State is able to radicalize a couple living in Redlands, Calif.? What psychological tools does it possess that enable it to wield this far-flung influence?

The best source of wisdom on this general subject is still “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer, which he wrote back in 1951. Hoffer distinguished between practical organizations and mass movements. The former, like a company or a school, offer opportunities for self-advancement. The central preoccupation of a mass movement, on the other hand, is self-sacrifice. The purpose of an organization like ISIS is to get people to negate themselves for a larger cause.

Mass movements, he argues, only arise in certain conditions, when a once sturdy social structure is in a state of decay or disintegration. This is a pretty good description of parts of the Arab world. To a lesser degree it is a good description of isolated pockets of our own segmenting, individualized society, where some people find themselves totally cut off.

The people who serve mass movements are not revolting against oppression. They are driven primarily by frustration. Their personal ambitions are unfulfilled. They have lost faith in their own abilities to realize their dreams. They sometimes live with an unrelieved boredom. Freedom aggravates their sense of frustration because they have no one to blame but themselves for their perceived mediocrity. Fanatics, the French philosopher Ernest Renan argued, fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

The successful mass movement tells such people that the cause of their frustration is outside themselves, and that the only way to alter their personal situation is to transform the world in some radical way. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Top Shi’ite cleric says government should not tolerate Turkish infringement of Iraq’s sovereignty

Reuters reports: Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on the government on Friday to show “no tolerance” of any infringement of the country’s sovereignty, after Turkey deployed heavily armed troops to northern Iraq.

Sistani’s spokesman, Sheikh Abdul Mehdi Karbala’i, did not explicitly name Turkey, but a row over the deployment has badly soured relations between Ankara and Baghdad, which denies having agreed to it.

Sistani also said Iraq’s neighbours should not send any troops to Iraq “under the pretext of fighting terrorism”, except with the approval of the Baghdad government.

“The Iraqi government is responsible for protecting Iraq’s sovereignty and must not tolerate any side that infringes upon on it, whatever the justifications and necessities,” Karbalai’i said in a weekly sermon.

Ankara says the troops were sent as part of an international mission to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight Islamic State. Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday a withdrawal was “out of the question for the moment”. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pakistani Shi’ites fighting for Iran in Syria

Reuters reports: For years, websites linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have posted articles eulogizing Shi’ite fighters who die in Syria. But two men heralded last month for dying to defend a shrine near Damascus were different from most martyrs given such treatment in the past: they were Pakistanis.

The men were part of the Zeinabiyoun, a unit of Pakistani fighters named for a granddaughter of the prophet Mohammad buried in the shrine, the latest contingent in an Iranian drive to recruit Shi’ites from the region to fight in Syria.

The increase in the number of “martyrdom” notices of fighters from the group this year indicates they are taking a more active role in the conflict. A posting in mid-November on a Twitter account bearing the group’s name displayed the pictures of 53 men, described as fighters killed in battle.

While there has been no official announcement of their total numbers, a regional source familiar with the issue said there were hundreds of Pakistanis fighting in Syria, many stationed around the shrine of Mohammad’s granddaughter Zeinab.

Iran’s recruitment of the Pakistani fighters adds yet another international dimension to Syria’s 4-year-old civil war, which has deepened sectarian divisions across the Muslim world and drawn in most regional and global powers. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

This is what will happen to the climate in the next 100 years

By Katja Frieler, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

At the Paris climate summit, delegates are deciding on a global goal for temperature rise. At the time of publication, the latest draft text calls for the world to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃”.

But the climate action pledges made by 185 countries ahead of the summit don’t add up to 1.5℃ or warming or even 2℃. Taken together, they add up to a 2.7℃ world.

As the negotiations go on, 2015 is about to set a new global temperature record, and is likely to have reached 1℃ warming already.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

The Arctic as we know it is at stake at the Paris climate talks

By Ilona Mettiäinen, University of Lapland

Type “Arctic climate change” into a Google image search and you’ll see how the issue is largely perceived by the public: stranded polar bears, melting sea ice, icebergs and glaciers.

The anticipated melting of Arctic sea ice has also sparked global interest in the oil and gas resources that could be made available as the ice retreats, raising the prospect of a new Northern sea route between Europe and Asia.

Entirely missing from the results of the image search – and to large extent also the discussion – are the people of the Arctic, both indigenous and non-indigenous.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Naturalists are becoming an endangered species

By David Norman, University of Cambridge

The phrase “Natural History” is linked in most people’s minds today with places that use the phrase: the various Natural History Museums, or television programmes narrated so evocatively by renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

As times have changed, used in its traditional sense the phrase now has an almost archaic ring to it, perhaps recalling the Victorian obsession with collecting butterflies or beetles, rocks or fossils, or stuffed birds and animals, or perhaps the 18th century best-seller, Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne.

Once natural history was part of what was equally archaically called natural philosophy, encompassing the enquiry into all aspects of the natural world that we inhabit, from the tiniest creature to the largest, to molecules and materials, to planets and stars in outer space. These days, we call it science. Natural history specifically strives to study and understand organisms within their environment, which would these days equate to the disciplines of ecology or conservation.

In a recent article in the journal BioScience, a group of 17 scientists decry what they see as a shift away from this traditional learning (once typical parts of biology degrees) that taught students about organisms: where they live, what they eat, how they behave, their variety and relationships to their ecosystems in which they live.

Partly by the promise of a course-specific career, and perhaps partly because of poorly taught courses that can emphasise rote learning, students are enticed into more exciting fields such as biotechnology or evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”), where understanding an organism is less important than understanding the function of a particular organ or limb.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS aims to provoke backlash against Muslims in West

Yaroslav Trofimov writes: Before dawn in February 2006, militants sent by the precursor of today’s Islamic State sneaked into the golden-domed Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra, disarmed the guards and rigged the building with explosives.

By most accounts, nobody died in the explosion itself, which blew off the dome and reduced the venerated mosque to rubble. But the bombing achieved its goal of baiting Iraq’s Shiite majority into a spree of retaliation against the country’s Sunnis. Thousands died in the wave of sectarian killings that began hours later, and the social fabric of Iraq was torn forever.

In this environment of sectarian strife, many Iraqi Sunnis eventually came to view Islamic State as their only, however unpalatable, protector.

That is why just a few hundred of the group’s militants were able to seize Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, home to 1.5 million people, in June 2014.

This lesson of Samarra now looms over the West. Islamic State is using the same playbook in its attacks on Western targets this year — be it the ones directly organized by the group, such as the Nov. 13 massacre in Paris, or ones apparently only inspired, such as the shooting in San Bernardino.

The group’s objective is clear: to try to bait Western societies into an indiscriminate backlash against millions of Muslims living in Europe and the U.S. It is a backlash that, if successfully provoked, would disrupt these Muslims’ bonds with their countries of citizenship and residence and — as is it happened with Iraq’s Sunnis — validate Islamic State’s claim to be their only protector.

“ISIS thrives on polarization,” said Hassan Hassan, an expert on the group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “They want people to say — they hate us, and so we hate them. This is the foundation of their success.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Putin says he ‘hopes’ nuclear warheads will never be needed against ISIS… or anyone else

The Independent reports: Vladimir Putin has said he hopes nuclear warheads will not be needed to deal with terrorists or anyone else, after Russia launched cruise missiles from its submarine at Syria.

During a meeting in the Kremlin, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told the President that Kalibr cruise missiles had been fired by the submerged Rostov-on-Don submarine from the Mediterranean Sea for the first time.

He said TU-22 bombers also took part in the latest raids and that “significant damage” had been done to a munitions depot, a factory manufacturing mortar rounds and oil facilities. Two major targets in Raqqa, the defacto capital of Isis, had been hit, said Mr Shoigu. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why Assad is uninterested in defeating ISIS

Christoph Reuter writes: Assad’s official army is now just one of many fighting forces on the side of the regime — and is also suffering from poor morale and a lack of soldiers. For many young Syrians from areas under government control, forced conscription has become the most significant motivator for embarking on the refugee trail to Europe.

This is also one reason why Russia’s initial strategy for Syria is not finding success. Moscow had been hoping that massive air strikes would force rebel fighters in opposition-held areas to abandon the fight. That would then pave the way for Assad’s ground forces to advance and take back those regions. But in October, when Assad’s tank units rolled into those areas that Russian jets had previously bombed, they didn’t get very far. Instead of fleeing, rebels there had dug in instead.

Using TOW anti-tank missiles supplied by the US, in addition to Russian anti-tank weapons that had been captured or acquired from corrupt officers, the rebels struck some 20 tanks before the others turned back. The army’s ground offensive south of Aleppo likewise quickly ground to a halt. Meanwhile, rebels near Hama were able to finally take control of a long-contested city.

Assad’s army isn’t just vulnerable, it also isn’t strictly a Syrian force anymore. For the last two years, the forces on his side have increasingly been made up of foreigners, including Revolutionary Guards from Iran, members of Iraqi militias and Hezbollah units from Lebanon. They are joined at the front by Shiite Afghans from the Hazara people, up to 2 million of whom live in Iran, mostly as illegal immigrants. They are forcibly conscripted in Iranian prisons and sent to Syria — according to internal Iranian estimates, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 of them fighting in the country. The situation leads to absurd scenes: In the southern Syrian town of Daraa, rebels began desperately searching for Persian interpreters after an offensive of 2,500 Afghans suddenly began approaching.

It is the first international Shiite jihad in history, one which has been compensating for the demographic inferiority of Assad’s troops since 2012. The alliance has prevented Assad’s defeat, but it hasn’t been enough for victory either. Furthermore, the orders are no longer coming exclusively from the Syrian officer corps. Iranian officers control their own troops in addition to the Afghan units, and they plan offensives that also involve Syrian soldiers. Hezbollah commanders coordinate small elite units under their control. Iraqis give orders to Iraqi and Pakistani militia groups. And the Russians don’t let anyone tell them what to do. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Assad buys oil from ISIS

Matthew M. Reed writes: Russia’s claim that ISIS smuggles 200,000 barrels a day assumes of course that the group produces that much. In reality, ISIS has never been credited with pumping so much oil. The group’s own internal assessment, retrieved by U.S. commandos during the May raid that killed ISIS oil emir Abu Sayyaf, pegged production at 55,000 barrels a day earlier this year. More recent estimates point to daily output of 40,000 barrels at most. That’s still a lot for a cult that fancies itself a state. But supply is only half the story. More than 5 million people are trapped in ISIS territory, and they could easily consume that amount every day. ISIS is also at war. If it retains any refining capacity for itself, or takes a cut from local refiners, that’s one more customer at home who gets priority.

We know ISIS has a discreet arrangement with a neighbor, but it’s not Turkey. The Syrian regime has done business with ISIS from day one, just as it did with al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other rebels who took over energy assets early in the war. President Bashar al-Assad’s point man for ISIS deals, George Haswani, was first designated by the European Union in March. The U.S. Treasury went a step further with its designation on Nov. 25. In addition to the oil deals, Treasury fingered Haswani’s engineering and construction company (HESCO) for servicing active ISIS fields. Leading up to the most recent wave of airstrikes against ISIS oil targets, U.S. officials admitted the network was more resilient and resourceful than expected. Another Treasury designation in late September hinted that ISIS actually increased oil production this year. They may have had some help from Assad’s man.

We don’t know how much oil ISIS has delivered to Assad, but there’s no doubt he needs it. For the first half of 2015, the regime’s oil output was less than 10,000 barrels a day. That was before pro-Assad forces retreated from even more oil-rich territory. All those eyes in the sky over Syria can’t tell how much ISIS oil passes through pipelines to regime-held refineries in the west. There are, however, curious gaps in official data. In April, for instance, Syria’s oil ministry said it refined 106,000 barrels a day, yet trade press could only explain where 85,000 barrels of that oil came from. Data has been increasingly hard to come by since.

Besides oil, ISIS delivers natural gas to the regime. These deals are durable because ISIS can’t use it or sell it to anyone else: It must be captured at the source and moved by pipeline. The only users connected to the gas fields are power plants, refineries, and industries, which are concentrated in Assad’s strongholds. In exchange for gas, the regime provides utilities like electricity, which ISIS taxes accordingly. At natural gas fields like those around Palmyra, which produce lighter liquid hydrocarbons in addition to gas, ISIS takes whatever it can turn into fuel. The gas goes west to Assad. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Key Syria rebel group quits opposition talks?

AFP reports: One of Syria’s main rebel groups, Ahrar al-Sham, on Thursday pulled out of opposition talks aimed at forging a united front ahead of potential discussions with President Bashar Assad’s government.

It said it took the decision because of “the fundamental role… given to personalities linked to the regime” at the conference in Riyadh.

It named the Syria-based National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which is generally tolerated by the government and participated in talks organized by Moscow on the conflict in 2014 and 2015.

Allied with the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham said it “rejects the outcomes” of the meeting which “did not affirm the identity of our Muslim people” in Syria.

The Riyadh conference which opened Wednesday and its outcomes were not “truly” representative of the Syrian “revolutionary factions”, the group said.

Ahrar al-Sham had agreed to attend the Riyadh talks despite the “lack of representation of jihadi factions at a level matching their… role” on the ground in Syria.

But the Islamist group had warned it “will not accept the results of this conference” unless they include “cleansing Syrian territories of the Russian-Iranian occupation and sectarian militia supporting them.” [Continue reading…]

Earlier, Aron Lund wrote: If the conference fails, through high-profile defections or a failure to reach agreement, the opposition will have stumbled on the threshold of the new peace process. Assad, Iran, and Russia will be overjoyed and current trends in the West, where countries are fast losing the last of their faith in Syria’s opposition, will be reinforced. But if the conference succeeds in producing a joint platform and keeps all the major groups on board, particularly the armed ones, it will have been a step toward a real political process—a necessary step, but not in itself sufficient.

Many problems remain, including the difficulty of accommodating hardline Islamist demands in a process geared to produce a political compromise, while also not alienating the rebel fighters that need to be involved for the process to have any meaning. Ahrar al-Sham opened the talks demanding “the complete cleansing of the Russian-Iranian occupation of Syrian land, and the sectarian militias which support it,” also calling for the “overthrow of the Assad regime with all its pillars and symbols, and handing them over for fair trial.” The United States, for its part, is imploring the opposition to come up with “creative language” on the issue of whether Bashar al-Assad should stay or go, seeing a measure of intentional ambiguity as the only realistic way to move forward. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

From a severed pig’s head to a bullet-riddled Koran, attacks on Muslims are rising

The Los Angeles Times reports: Attacks on mosques appear to have become more frequent and threats against Muslims more menacing since the terrorist attacks in Paris and the shooting in San Bernardino.

“A pigs head at a mosque in Philadelphia, a girl harassed at a school in New York, hate mail sent to a New Jersey mosque … I can’t event count the amount of hate mail and threats we have received,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Hooper said he witnessed a similar upswing in Islamophobia after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January, but nothing close to the litany of attacks, vandalism and racially-charged threats in recent weeks: [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why India’s plan to fight climate change doesn’t hold water

By Steffen Böhm, University of Essex; Sanjay Lanka, University of Essex, and Zareen Pervez Bharucha, University of Essex

As the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, the pressure is on India to offer something meaningful at the Paris climate talks. Yet the country demands the right to develop and lift its population out of poverty.

In its official submission to the summit, the so-called INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) which every country had to provide before negotiations began, India pledges to reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by 33 to 35% by 2030 based on 2005 levels. It proposes to achieve this by investing significantly in low-carbon technologies. But do these numbers stack up?

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi addresses the Paris talks.
Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

It may have the third highest greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, but India’s emissions per person are much lower than those of all so-called developed countries. This is why stakeholders insist on India’s right to develop.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

On climate, developing countries need more than betting billions on clean energy breakthroughs

By Ambuj D Sagar, The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

When the heads of state gathered in Paris at the beginning of the climate talks last week, there was much excitement over the launch of Mission Innovation, a program to “reinvigorate and accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation with the objective to make clean energy widely affordable.”

This was a welcome step and, frankly, long overdue – total public energy R&D expenditures of the major industrialized countries are still lower than the peaks reached after the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Yet at the same time, it is symptomatic of the flawed global approach to address climate change. We move forward in some ways but sidestep the key issues – in this case, the provision of adequate and suitable support to developing countries to quickly begin a transition to low-carbon energy. The result is that we leave large gaps in our attempts to avoid dangerous climate change.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail