Donald Trump’s demagogy leavened with a smile and joke

The New York Times reports: “Something bad is happening,” Donald J. Trump warned New Hampshire voters Tuesday night, casting suspicions on Muslims and mosques. “Something really dangerous is going on.”

On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.”

“There is something going on with him that we don’t know about,” Mr. Trump said of the president, drawing applause from the crowd in Washington.

The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months. The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is expanding its international reach. That is hardly a sign of weakness

Hassan Hassan writes: The United Nations’ sanctions monitoring team warned last Tuesday that Libya was emerging as a key stronghold for Islamic State close to the shorelines of Europe.

The warning aligns with assessments by US intelligence officials that the organisation’s franchise is entrenching itself in the midst of chaos in the north African country.

Isis’s expansion outside its heartlands in Iraq and Syria has raised questions about how more than a year of a relentless air campaign has affected it. The group has faced military defeats in north-eastern Iraq and Syria in recent months, but it also carried out large-scale international terror attacks.

More perplexing is that, as Isis faces increased pressure at home, many fighters are reportedly returning to Libya to shore up its franchise there. This has led some western officials to saythe group might be preparing to use the Libyan front as a fallback base in case of a defeat in Iraq and Syria. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s moneymaking streams take a hit as it loses territory

The Washington Post reports: By most estimates, the Islamic State is the world’s richest terrorist organization. But it appears to be wrestling with money problems that could affect its ability to wage war while trying to govern millions of people in its self-declared caliphate.

U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria have retaken significant amounts of territory from the group, depriving it of traditional sources of income, analysts say. Towns and villages that the Islamic State had relied on for tax revenue have been captured by Arab and Kurdish opponents. And lucrative spoils of war, including oil fields, properties to confiscate and captives to ransom off, have become scarcer as the group struggles to seize new areas.

“A problem they face is that much of their income over the last two years has been through conquest, confiscation and extortion, and those are all one-time things that aren’t sustainable,” said Quinn Mecham, an assistant professor of political science at Brigham Young University. “And now they’re losing territory, and that makes it difficult to continue to extract revenues. The pressure is on.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. struggling over what to do with Syrian rebels once tied to al Qaida

McClatchy reports: Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

But that’s a tough reality for U.S. diplomats, who are keenly aware that many of Ahrar’s members still cling to a hard-line ideology that’s caused Secretary of State John Kerry to liken the group to the Islamic State, al Qaida’s Nusra Front and Hamas – all designated terrorist organizations. A seemingly ascendant reformist faction within the group offers only slight encouragement, they say.

Faysal Itani, a Syria specialist with the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, says Ahrar al Sham itself is riven by debate over what direction to go. [Continue reading…]

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What passing a key CO2 mark means to climate scientists

Climate Central reported in November: This week is a big one for our world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climbed above the 400 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory and it’s distinctly possible they won’t be back below that level again in our lifetimes.

Humans have burned enough fossil fuels to drive atmospheric CO2 to levels that world hasn’t seen in at least 400,000 years. That’s driven up temperatures, melted ice and caused oceans to acidify. Some extreme weather events around the world have become more likely and stronger because of it, and some will likely only get worse as the planet continues to warm.

Because CO2 sits in the atmosphere long after it’s burned, that means we’ve likely lived our last week in a sub-400 ppm world. It also means that the reshaping of our planet will continue for decades and centuries to come, even if climate talks in Paris in two weeks are successful. [Continue reading…]

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As America’s fear of terrorism grows, a ‘wacky gun enthusiast’ supposedly threatens no one

“Right now it looks like he’s a wacky gun enthusiast and a police buff, yet he was going around pretending to be a federal agent – that’s troubling,” a source told the New York Daily News.

Mark Vicars

He had a fake federal air marshal ID in one pocket, a Ruger .380-caliber pistol in the other and was driving around Long Island with ballistic body armor and a loaded AR-15 assault rifle. He also had an arsenal of weapons at his gated home.

But don’t worry folks, Mark Vicars wasn’t a threat to anyone, Nassau County officials insisted Friday.

The amount of firepower is comparable to what terror couple Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik had during the massacre they committed Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif.

So why did the Nassau County Police Department spokesman Det. Lt. Richard LeBrun tell reporters, “At this time we don’t see any immediate threat to the public”?

[C]ops don’t believe that Vicars was up to anything nefarious — except for masquerading as a federal agent.

“We don’t see any nexus to any terrorism at this time,” LeBrun said, adding that no anti-American literature or links to terrorism were found at his home.

How about links to organizations such as Stop Islamization of America? Or indications of support for any of the current xenophobic, anti-immigrant GOP presidential candidates?

(Note also that in the current climate, “anti-American literature” is apparently a red flag raising suspicions of terrorism. It sounds like the police were less alarmed by the weapons Vicars owned, than they would have been had they found in his possessions a few books by Noam Chomsky.)

Even if it turns out that there’s no evidence to suspect Vicars might be ideologically motivated to engage in an act of terrorism, why should a heavily armed individual like this be any less a cause for public concern?

Along with his arsenal of weapons (“seven illegal firearms, three high-capacity magazines and 8,300 rounds of ammunition”) he was found (without prescription) to be in possession of steroids used for muscle growth — drugs known to cause aggression and violence.

For America’s gun lovers, pieces of steel are symbols of personal freedom, even though for many such individuals, this bond of affection thinly masks underlying fears of the rest of society.

This is the paradox of gun-bound right-wing patriotism: the country in whose name so much red-blooded passion gets vented, is one upon whose streets it is supposedly only safe to walk while carrying a weapon.

If Mark Vicars needed body armor, muscle armor, an arsenal, and a fake identity in order to feel strong, there must be a very weak and vulnerable man on the inside.

Unfortunately, fear is contagious and nowadays grips some sections of American society.

Unfortunately, the fearful are liable to lash out — to shoot first and ask questions later.

At a time such as this, a country needs leaders who through their own example can demonstrate that courage is stronger than fear. Instead, we are left to choose between the strident and the timid — an environment in which the loudest voices easily drown out all others.

A society built on fear will ultimately be no society at all, since fear leads to isolation.

As much as ISIS and other terrorist groups do indeed pose a real threat to America, a much greater threat is posed by fear itself because of the corrosive effect this has on social bonds.

Far from making America stronger, the easy availability of weapons simply makes this country more dangerous.

Rather than looking for ways to individually and collectively become more defended, reinforcing and amplifying our fears, what we need are more expressions of human solidarity and mutual support.

Unity built around antipathy is just another way of validating fear. Our real strength, however, can only be found on common ground — an understanding of and commitment towards a shared destiny.

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ISIS wants to destroy cultural pluralism

Maha Yahya writes: ISIS wants to make the world in its own image. How the international community reacts to its horrific attacks will determine whether it will succeed.

ISIS has claimed more than 400 innocent lives in less than a month with attacks beyond Iraq and Syria in Paris and Tunis, a twin suicide bombing in Beirut, and the downing of a Russian jet in Egypt. Many saw in those attacks a civilizational struggle between the values of a liberal western world and a parochial intolerant Islam. Across Europe, calls are increasing for stringent measures restricting fundamental freedoms and eroding personal privacy as more than half US governors declared that their states will not accept Syrian refugees.

Through such responses policymakers are inadvertently dancing to the tune of ISIS that also views the world as divided in two; in their terms the “camp of Islam” and the “camp of the crusader coalition” that also includes Muslims who do not believe in the mission of ISIS. Its bloody attacks are one step in its efforts at eliminating the grey zone between these camps. This grey zone is the cosmopolitanism of Beirut and Paris; the places where the deliberate and accidental encounters between cultures, ethnicities and religions find themselves in music and writing, in scientific discoveries and in architectural feats.

ISIS did not begin its elimination of this grey zone in Paris or Beirut. It began with a pogrom in Iraq in June 2014, attacking more than two and a half million people of diverse religions and ethnicities that coexisted for centuries. Christians were expelled, the Turkomans and Shiites slaughtered and Yezidi women and children enslaved. [Continue reading…]

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Guns don’t kill people; bullets do

The carnage unleashed by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino, is yet another reminder of how easy it is for anyone to go on the warpath inside a country that remains awash with guns.

Once again the need for more effective gun control has been highlighted. And once again, I guarantee that gun owners are rushing to dealers to expand their home arsenals in anticipation of new laws.

Indeed, the only predictable consequence of another spectacular display of gun violence in America, is that it always boosts gun sales.

As the gun lobby likes to say, guns don’t kill people, and as Daniel Patrick Moynihan more accurately stated: bullets do.

And yet it’s easier to legally buy bullets and stockpile them by the thousand, than it is to legally get a prescription for OxyContin.

The U.S. government deems an array of drugs so dangerous that they are regulated as “controlled substances” — even though none are manufactured in pills containing a lethal dose.

Bullets, on the other hand, while always designed to contain a lethal dose of kinetic force, are as easy to buy as candy.

Guns are indeed relatively harmless — no more dangerous than any other heavy object — absent the fuel supply of violence: ammunition.

While taxation might have some effect, it seems to me that the levers of control would need more precision. Why not set absolute limits on how many bullets an individual can purchase and retain. And why not have those wishing to replenish their stocks be required to return their spent cartridges?

Control the supply and then maybe there’s some chance of stemming the violence.

Four years ago, the New York Times reported: In 1993, a United States senator with one of the great political brains of 20th-century America, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said that we ought to forget gun control as a way to stanch criminal violence. It was hopeless, Senator Moynihan pointed out: even if the sale of new guns was totally forbidden, there were already enough guns in homes and private hands to last the country for 200 years.

“These mostly simple machines last forever,” Mr. Moynihan said.

But he wasn’t through.

“On the other hand, we have only a three-year supply of ammunition.”

His solution: Increase the tax on bullets. He wouldn’t raise the tax on ammunition typically used for target shooting or hunting. But he proposed exorbitant taxes on hollow-tipped bullets designed to penetrate armor and cause devastating damage.

“Ten thousand percent,” Mr. Moynihan said.

That would have made the tax on a 20-cartridge pack of those bullets $1,500. “Guns don’t kill people; bullets do,” said Senator Moynihan, a Democrat who died in 2003.

Another sharp political mind, the comedian Chris Rock, argued that the price of bullets ought to be even higher than what the senator had suggested.

“If a bullet costs $5,000, there’d be no more innocent bystanders,” he said during a routine in the film “Bowling for Columbine.”

In June, the City of New York sold 28,000 pounds of spent shell casings to a an ammunition dealer in Georgia, where they were to be reloaded with bullets. Anyone with $15 can buy a bag of 50, no questions asked, under Georgia law. As The New York Times reported, the city has previously sold shell casings — which are collected at the police target shooting range — to scrap metal dealers, but in this case the highest bidder was the ammunition store.

It was perfectly legal. And jarring, considering that the mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, has made aggressive gun regulation one of his prime causes, at no small risk to any national political ambitions he might harbor. He has arranged sting buys and filed lawsuits against firearms dealers in other states who, in his view, flouted even the easygoing regulatory regimen of recent years.

But surely, it couldn’t make any sense for the city itself to put more bullets into the weapons economy by recycling casing? After all, the city destroys perfectly usable — and sellable — guns that it recovers from criminals. The sale of the casings must have been the product of someone in an unnoticed cubicle in city government, simply following the bidding rules by rote.

You might think that when learning about the sale, the mayor would have said, “Thanks for the tip.”

Instead, City Hall rose in chorus to sing of the constitutional freedom to own guns and the bullets that go in them. Indeed, the city would gladly sell the next batch of shell casings to a high-bidding ammunition dealer, said John Feinblatt, the criminal justice coordinator. (The dealers of super-size soft drinks, now facing mayoral regulation, must be wondering why the founding fathers couldn’t have added “and drink soda” after the right to “bear arms.”)

Asked about the sale on Monday, the mayor said that people could legally own guns and bullets.

Then one of the most experienced and professional of New York television reporters, Mary Murphy of WPIX, asked Mr. Bloomberg if the city was going to change its policy and not sell shell casings to ammunition dealers. Mr. Bloomberg set forth into a minisermon about how it was an act of integrity.

“This is the public’s money that we are stewards of, and deliberately deciding to sell things at lower prices than the marketplace commands makes no sense at all, and if you think about it, would create chaos and corruption like you’ve never seen,” he said.

Ms. Murphy pressed on: “Does it send the wrong message though?”

The mayor scolded her as if she were an errant schoolgirl.

“Miss, Miss,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Either you want to ask a question and I give you an answer, or please come to the next press conference and stand in the back.”

Oh, dear.

Bill Cunningham, a former aide to Senator Moynihan and Mr. Bloomberg, said that the senator would have been delighted to discover that he was aligned on the issue with Chris Rock.

“Pat would have liked that,” Mr. Cunningham said, “although we’d have to answer his query, ‘Who is Mr. Rock?’ ”

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San Bernardino gunwoman pledged allegiance to ISIS, officials say

The New York Times reports: The woman who helped carry out the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook posting, according to federal law enforcement officials.

There’s no evidence the group directed the woman, Tashfeen Malik, and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, to launch the attacks, which killed 14 and wounded 21, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

“At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting,” one of the officials said.

The posting had been removed from the social media site and it’s not clear when federal authorities obtained it.

In recent months, the F.B.I. has been particularly concerned about individuals inspired by the Islamic State staging attacks in the United States, law enforcement officials say. Even before the shootings and bombings in Paris last month, the agency had under heavy surveillance at least three dozen individuals who the authorities were concerned might commit violence in the group’s name. [Continue reading…]

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Don’t make San Bernardino a victory for ISIS

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick writes: I am an American Muslim. I have spent my adult life teaching and advising senior military leaders in the fight against terror. On Wednesday night, as I watched representatives of the American Muslim community in San Bernardino, Calif., denounce the shooters who had just killed 14 people in their city, I recognized in their bearing and words their feelings of humiliation, horror and loyalty to the United States — alongside a great fear that a new round of Islamophobia will now follow.

I know from my own experience that more Islamophobia would be the worst outcome for American efforts to defeat the Islamic State.

As a naval officer I’ve taken an oath to defend the American Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’ve trained members of the Navy SEAL teams, and my mentors include the former head of the National Rifle Association, the supreme allied commander of NATO, and the commanding general of the war in Afghanistan.

I have been deeply troubled by the anti-Muslim vitriol in our country since Islamist fanatics wreaked havoc in Paris. Fearmongers have already called for registering Muslims and closing mosques. The F.B.I. has warned Muslims about possible attacks from white supremacist militias.

If we don’t want to play into the hands of Islamic State propaganda that America is at war with Islam, we must stand up against Islamophobia. We should separate the few extremists from the vast majority of law-abiding patriotic American Muslims by working with the moderates, not against them.

The Islamic State has little to no support in most Muslim-majority countries, according to a Pew Research Center poll after the Paris attacks. Instead, with more than 60 countries aligned against it, the Islamic State is banking on Western societies to alienate their Muslim populations to increase recruitment. [Continue reading…]

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If Assad is not forced out, ISIS never will be

Kyle Orton writes: it is now of primary importance that the British Government and the U.S.-led anti-Isis coalition as a whole make Assad’s ouster a central feature of their stated political objectives. The defeat of Isis requires the enlistment of Sunni Arab forces, and that can only happen if they are confident that Isis will not be replaced by radical sectarian forces of the Assad regime or Iran, which is in control of the Assad regime and which has deployed tens of thousands of Shi’a jihadists into Syria.

Limiting Iran’s power more broadly in Syria is crucial to defeating Isis. Iran and Isis are symbiotic, feeding off one-another by committing atrocities against the other’s political constituency against which they can claim to be the only protectors. The appearance of the coalition siding with Assad/Iran by only bombing Sunni radicals, while doing nothing as Iran moves tens of thousands of European- and U.S.-designated Shi’ite terrorists into Syria, is deeply damaging, helping Isis to present itself as the guardian of the Sunnis.

Sunni Arab forces are needed to defeat Isis because it is in Sunni Arab areas that Isis has its caliphate. Much propaganda has been spread by Assad, Iran, and Russia that there are no moderate Syrian rebels left, but this is simply untrue. The entire rebellion is at war with Isis and there are about 75,000 moderate rebels whom the coalition could work with, plus a further 25,000 not-so-moderate rebels who are also fighting Isis. (Al-Qaeda and pro-al-Qaeda forces amount to 15,000 at the most.) While the Pentagon’s train-and-equip program failed, as it was bound to do since it was only directed against Isis, and gets a lot of media attention, this ignores the more than 40,000 moderate rebels who have been vetted by the CIA and supplied with lethal weaponry, virtually none of which has gone astray. If the moderate rebels forces had something to fight for — namely the promise of self-rule, protected from Isis and Iran — and were given the appropriate resources they could be mobilized to defeat these two Western enemies. The Sunni Arab tribes also remain astonishingly unengaged, though when the West defeated Isis’s predecessor in Iraq it was exactly by aligning with these tribes to help them provide local security.

Finally, it is necessary not to over-rely on Kurdish forces. The Kurds have proven very adept at protecting Kurdish-majority zones from Isis, but many commentators have extended this fact to declare that the Kurds are our only reliable ally in Syria. Leaving aside the political authoritarianism and ethnic engineering of the PYD, the party in control of the Syrian Kurdish armed units, the PYD has been able to clear Isis from less than one province in a year with the backing of Coalition airstrikes. In early 2014, the rebellion, without any air support, expelled Isis from positions in seven provinces, two of which Isis remains wholly absent from and two of which Isis is still largely absent from. Organically rooted, local forces are needed to sustainably hold territory from which Isis is removed. If Kurds stayed in occupation of Arab territory it would produce a backlash similar to Iran’s militias that would redound to Isis’s benefit, as Sunni Arabs fear sectarian domination more than Isis. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday he believes that if an agreement can be reached to ease President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from power, a coalition of Americans, Russians and Syrian forces could wipe out the Islamic State “in a matter of literally months.”

Mr. Kerry’s comments, in a speech to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday morning, were the first in which he publicly offered an estimate of how quickly a well-organized effort might be able to defeat the radical Sunni group. He also said that “without the ability to find some ground forces that are prepared to take on Daesh,” using an Arabic acronym for the group, “this will not be won completely from the air, and we know that.” But he was not specific about where those ground troops would come from. His aides later said they would have to be indigenous. [Continue reading…]

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Don’t bomb Syria and don’t listen to Syrians?

As I understand it, the foundational premise of any antiwar movement is that the only way of protecting people who are harmed by wars is to end those wars. In other words, although the named issue is war, the object of concern is the victims of war.

At least I thought that was the issue, but these days if often looks like the victims of war are getting marginalized in the name of standing up for a wider cause: global justice. Indeed, when it comes to the UK’s Stop the War Movement, they profess such a deep interest in righting the world, that they often treat Syrians as an irritant who might undermine the group’s larger objectives. Moreover, when those crying, “Don’t bomb Syria” also welcome in their ranks some who are also calling for support for Bashar al-Assad, it becomes clear that the issue at hand is not actually where the bombs are falling but who is dropping them. Stop the War held no demonstrations outside the Russian Embassy in London when Vladamir Putin launched his bombing campaign on Syria.

Jeremy Cliffe writes: “Do we have Syrians?” interjects a woman. A brief silence. The gathering in Manchester’s Central Library is pondering who might take the microphone at its upcoming protest against plans to bomb Islamic State in Syria. On the list so far: Labour Party MPs, MEPs, councillors, the Green Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, musicians, poets, trade unionists and “definitely a student of some sort”. Phone messages have been left, e-mails fired off and brains racked for names of old-time peaceniks. Only now has the idea of asking a Syrian arisen.

“There’s a big Syrian group,” murmurs one. “But they’re not anti,” continues another, disgusted: “They were lobbying for Britain to bomb Assad.” Those present sigh as one. On to the logistics of the event. It is decided that stewards should guard the mic, poised to fend off any “pro-war Syrians or imperialists”. After all, notes the chairman: “We know what we’re talking about here.” Would that BBC Manchester possessed such discernment. The station is interviewing pro-war Kurds tomorrow, to the group’s distain: “They dig ’em up.” “Amazing how they find them!”

Such is the eye-swivelling world of Stop the War, the organisation that, though not the same as the anti-war movement (dominated by decent, mild-mannered types), is its main organising force and has a record of sidelining the very peoples in whose interest it professes to act. Rethink Rebuild, the Syrian society in Manchester, requested a speaking slot at its Don’t Bomb Syria meeting there in October, but was ignored. It claims: “The Syrian voice was marginalised throughout the event.” Other Stop the War gatherings have followed that pattern. At one in Westminster Syrians criticising the unrepresentative panel were jeered at and the police called; in Birmingham a Syrian invited to speak was disinvited and branded a supporter of imperialism for backing a no-fly zone. This knack for alienating its notional beneficiaries goes all the way back to Stop the War’s foundation in 2001 by (among others) the Socialist Workers Party, an authoritarian far-left outfit. At one of its first conferences Iraqi and Iranian delegates quit when their motion condemning “Islamic terrorism” was defeated.

That is the thing with Stop the War. It is not anti-war so much as anti-West; a permanent howl of relativist anguish at NATO and its members. For example, the group could hardly be more indulgent of Vladimir Putin’s wars. It defended the invasion of Georgia as a reaction to “the ambition of the USA to exercise global hegemony”, called many of the Maidan protesters in Kiev neo-Nazis and excused Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. Tellingly, at its “anti-war” demonstration in London on December 1st a poster emblazoned with Syrian flags and the slogan “Support For Bashar Al-Assad” was brandished above the crowd. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: The munitions trail

Financial Times reports: As a known arms dealer for rebels fighting Isis in his east Syrian home town, Abu Ali was sure his days were numbered when, a year ago, two jihadi commanders stepped out of their pickup truck and walked towards him.

He was baffled when they handed him a printed paper. “It read, ‘This person is permitted to buy and sell all types of weaponry inside the Islamic State,’” recalls Abu Ali. “It was even stamped ‘Mosul Centre’.”
Rather than being detained or expelled as they had feared when the jihadi group swept through eastern Syria last year, many black-market traders such as Abu Ali were courted by Isis. They were absorbed into a complex system of supply and demand that keeps the world’s richest jihadi group stocked with munitions across a self-proclaimed “caliphate” spanning half of Syria and a third of Iraq.

“They buy like mad. They buy every day: morning, afternoon and night,” says Abu Ali, who, like others who have operated inside Isis territories, asked not to be identified by his real name.

Isis seized weapons worth hundreds of millions dollars when it captured Iraq’s second city, Mosul, in the summer of 2014. Since then, in every battle that it has won, it has acquired more material. Its arsenal includes US-made Abrams tanks, M16 rifles, MK-19 40mm grenade launchers (seized from the Iraqi army) and Russian M-46 130mm field guns (taken from Syrian forces).

But dealers say despite this, there is one thing Isis still needs: ammunition. Most in demand are rounds for Kalashnikov assault rifles, medium-calibre machine guns and 14.5mm and 12.5mm anti-aircraft guns. Isis also buys rocket-propelled grenades and sniper bullets, but in smaller quantities. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli expert: Trump’s call to kill terrorists’ families immoral, ineffective

CNN reports: A leading Israeli counter-terrorism expert says Donald Trump’s call to “take out” the families of terrorists would run afoul of international law and degrade the moral standing of the U.S.

“Any deliberate attacks aimed against civilians is a war crime, regardless if they are family members of terrorists or presidents or presidential candidates,” said Boaz Ganor, a former consultant to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Adopting this policy is immoral and against the common liberal democratic values,” added Ganor, the founder and executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel. “Deliberate attacks against the terrorist families is blurring the moral differences between the terrorist organizations and the state which is fighting terrorism. This by itself might benefit the terrorists which are trying to claim that they are fighting a moral war against relentless and immoral entity.”

On Wednesday, Trump responded to a question on Fox News about minimizing civilian casualties in the fight against ISIS by saying the U.S. should hit the kin of enemy fighters.

“You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said. “When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” [Continue reading…]

It’s a shame Ganor wasn’t pressed to provide clarification on Israel’s long-standing policy of destroying the family homes of suspected terrorists. It’s immoral to kill family members but it’s ok to send in bulldozers to flatten their homes? Even Trump might find that confusing.

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Naomi Klein’s ‘Leap Manifesto’: We can’t rely on big business for a climate fix

By Peter Burdon

Discussions at the Paris climate talks take place within incredibly narrow parameters. In fact, it would not be too great an exaggeration to say that the summit’s main purpose is to send the private sector a message about which way it should steer its future investments.

The financial press tends to be the most explicit on this point. The Financial Times, for instance, described the purpose of the Paris summit like this:

Investors will need to be persuaded that governments are going to make it easier for them to make money from a new electric bus system or a wind farm rather than a highway or a coal power plant.

I am under no illusion about the scale of business investment required to help developing countries move to low-carbon energy sources.

But by narrowing the conversation to neoliberal, market-based solutions, we risk ignoring other opportunities for social and environmental change. This is particularly true under the current state of emergency in France, which has silenced alternative or opposing voices.

These concerns are shared by the Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, who this week (alongside her compatriots, the film-maker Avi Lewis and author Maude Barlow) came to Paris to present her Leap Manifesto – featuring strategies for a just transition away from fossil fuels.

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Is Facebook luring you into being depressed?

Chelsea Wald writes: In his free time, Sven Laumer serves as a referee for Bavaria’s highest amateur football league. A few years ago, he noticed several footballers had quit Facebook, making it hard to organize events on the platform. He was annoyed, but as a professor who studies information systems, he was also intrigued. Why would the young men want to give up Facebook? Social scientists had been saying the social network was a good thing.

“At the time, the main paradigm in social networking research was that Facebook is a positive place, it’s a place of happiness, it’s a place where you have fun, you get entertained, you talk to friends, you feel amused, accepted,” says Hanna Krasnova, an information systems researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Influential studies had shown that the social capital we earn on social media can be key to our successes, big and small. Our virtual connections were known to help us access jobs, information, emotional support, and everyday favors. “Everyone was enthusiastic about social media,” Laumer says.

Laumer, an assistant professor at Otto-Friedrich University in Germany, suspected that quitting Facebook was a classic response to stress. He knew other researchers had looked at something called “technostress,” which crops up in workplaces due to buggy interfaces or complex processes. But that didn’t really fit with Facebook, which is easy to use. Something else seemed to be stressing people out. “We thought there was a new phenomenon on social media in particular,” Laumer says.

Through probing interviews, surveys, longitudinal studies, and laboratory experiments, researchers have begun to shift the paradigm, revealing that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and their ilk are places not only of fun and success, but of dark, confronting, and primal human emotions—less Magic Kingdom and more creepy fun house. In many ways, researchers say, these platforms are giant experiments on one of our species’ most essential characteristics: our social nature. So it shouldn’t be a surprise there are unintended consequences. [Continue reading…]

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