Norway’s Muslims form protective human ring around synagogue

Reuters reports: More than 1000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo’s synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.

Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” Norway’s Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.

“Humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that,” Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the protest’s organizers told a crowd of Muslim immigrants and ethnic Norwegians who filled the small street around Oslo’s only functioning synagogue.

“There are many more peace mongers than warmongers,” Abdullah said as organizers and Jewish community leaders stood side by side. “There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”

Norway’s Jewish community is one of Europe’s smallest, numbering around 1000, and the Muslim population, which has been growing steadily through immigration, is 150,000 to 200,000. Norway has a population of about 5.2 million. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. warns it is ready to walk away from Iran nuclear talks

The Associated Press reports: With only weeks left to the deadline to reach a first-stage nuclear deal with Iran, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that “significant gaps” remained and warned that America was ready to walk away from the talks if Tehran doesn’t agree to terms demonstrating that it doesn’t want atomic arms.

Kerry spoke after the Iranian Atomic Energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi and U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz added their muscle to the talks for the first time to help resolve technical disputes standing in the way of an agreement meant to curb Iran’s nuclear programs in exchange for sanctions relief for the Islamic Republic.

But Kerry warned against undue optimism. Salehi’s and Moniz’s presence is no “indication whatsoever that something is about to be decided,” he said. “There are still significant gaps.”

World powers and Iran have set an end of March deadline for a framework agreement, with four further months for the technical work to be ironed out. The talks have missed two previous deadlines, and President Barack Obama has said a further extension would make little sense without a basis for continuing discussions. [Continue reading…]

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Leading climate-change denier was paid $1.2 million by fossil fuel industry

The New York Times reports: For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work. [Continue reading…]

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Russian news report: Putin approved Ukraine invasion before Kiev government collapsed

McClatchy reports: A Russian newspaper claims to have an official government strategy document outlining the invasion of Ukraine that was prepared weeks before the Ukrainian government collapsed last year.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitri Muratov, reported the document during an interview with Echo of Moscow, a radio station. In the interview, which was reported by news outlets Saturday, he did not reveal how the newspaper came into possession of the document in the media unfriendly Russian world, but said he had confidence it was authentic.

Novaya Gazeta is considered a rarity in Russia these days, an independent investigative newspaper that’s known to anger the Kremlin on a regular basis. The editor said the paper’s plan is to publish the full details of the strategy document next week.

Muratov said the document characterized then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as “a person without morals and willpower whose downfall must be expected at any moment.” Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia on Feb. 22, 2014. [Continue reading…]

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Talking to the Syrian activists behind Douma’s symbolic ‘Cage of Death’

NOW: How would you describe the current situation in Douma?

Baraa Abd al-Rahman: Today we have clouds and rain, which are preventing Assad’s planes from committing massacres against the civilians. However, there is mortar shelling.

NOW: And within the last few weeks, how has the situation been?

Abd al-Rahman: The situation has been tragic; a violent escalation of airstrikes and barrel bombs. In one week alone, there were more than 150 airstrikes, which completely demolished more than five neighborhoods and dozens of residential buildings on top of their residents. There were 140 killed; 40 of them children, and 20 women.

And no headquarters exist [in the areas hit] for the rebels or opposition factions.

NOW: You mean no rebels were killed by these strikes?

Abd al-Rahman: Not one. [Continue reading…]

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Saadallah Wannous and the war on stories

Matthew McNaught writes:

In a souq in the center of Damascus, a crowd has gathered. In the center of the crowd stands a man dressed in rags, a child huddling close to him. Word has spread he is a refugee from Aleppo. “Were you there?” asks a man in the crowd. The stranger nods. “What have you left behind?” asks the man. The stranger replies: “Starvation and horror.” Another voice in the crowd asks: “What has become of Aleppo?”

“Nothing remains standing but towers of skulls,” says the man. [From Historical Miniatures, by Saadallah Wannous.]

I started my Arabic lessons with Mazen in early 2007. Twice a week, I would take the microbus from my home in the center of Damascus to Yarmouk Camp, five miles south of the center. I’d get off by the hospital, cross the busy main road, head down an alleyway, pass the corner store, and take a short and winding path to the high metal gate of Mazen’s house. If the weather was good, we would sit at a table in Mazen’s small courtyard, crowded in by climbing plants and hanging laundry. Other days we would sit inside his one-room flat, surrounded by his vast library: the hundreds of books, journals, plays, and multivolume dictionaries that covered his walls.

Munamnamat Tarikhiya, which is best translated as Historical Miniatures, was the first reading assignment Mazen gave me. Written by Saadallah Wannous, a contemporary Syrian writer, it is a play set in Damascus in 1401, when the armies of the Mongol leader Tamerlane were heading toward the city. The armies have reached as far as Hama, leaving a trail of destruction behind them, and it will be only a matter of days before they arrive in Damascus. The Sultan and his army are absent, having left the city to deal with an uprising in Egypt, and there is panic among the remaining political leaders and religious authorities.

The towers of severed heads in Aleppo, Mazen told me, were a Tamerlane trademark. There was a logic to these massacres; the news of a city’s destruction would soon spread, leaving the wider population terrified into submission. But Tamerlane did not kill everybody in the city. The finest artists and artisans were often spared the slaughter and sent to Samarkand, the imperial capital. There they would set to work decorating Tamerlane’s palaces, painting pictures of his victories and paying tribute to his glory. [Continue reading…]

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Silicon Valley’s fake philanthropists

Maria Bustillos reports: The Puente de la Costa Sur community center sits at the end of a quiet street in Pescadero, an isolated farming town of about 5,000 nestled amid green hills just inland from California’s Pacific Coast. It’s a beautiful, lively place to be at sunset, right before the kids will be picked up from day care.

Rita Mancero is the petite program director who assists local immigrant and migrant farm workers with learning English and preparing tax returns; the center also offers college scholarships, helps with writing resumes, getting children vaccinated, applying for citizenship, even with Zumba classes. Mancero, who holds a master’s degree in education from Universidad YMCA in Mexico City, is a Red Cross instructor certified in CPR, a paralegal, a trained tax preparer. And a ham radio operator. Her biggest priority?

“The famous ‘Education Gap,’” she says. Her affection for the children in her care is direct and immediate.

Some of the grant money that funds the Puente de la Costa Sur center comes through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest such foundation in the country. Its assets have ballooned in recent years, from just over $2.9 billion in 2012 to more than $6 billion today. But the foundation’s direct grants to Silicon Valley’s surrounding communities last year amounted to just $8 million.

There have been many news stories about the vast sums contributed to philanthropy by Silicon Valley tech tycoons. Where does this money finally wind up? The short answer is that most of it stays put. Most of that $6 billion in assets at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation isn’t under the foundation’s real control, nor should the money be understood as even remotely intended to provide direct assistance to the residents of Silicon Valley. It might not even be money: It might be real estate, or stock, as in the case of the Zuckerbergs’ recent donation of 18 million Facebook shares, then valued at $991 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Donations like this one are, first and foremost, a wealth management tool: Assets are parked at the designated charity in order to obtain tax breaks, and these days they generally stay under the control of the donor. That is, the donor can’t take the money back, he’s “given” it, but he can direct its granting and its investment. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon doubts its own ISIS war plan

Nancy A. Youssef reports: Skepticism about the U.S. and Iraqi military plans for the next phase of the ISIS war begins inside the Pentagon.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. military officials publicly detailed their plans for a spring offensive on ISIS-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, many within the Pentagon privately questioned whether that timetable was plausible. They said that they were dubious that their partners in the Iraqi military — the troops supposed to lead the offensive — would be capable of conducting such a campaign by then.

“I really doubt it is going to happen that soon,” said one military officer who, like several others, served in Iraq between 2003-2011 and spoke on condition of anonymity. “And if it does, it will take months.”

The largely Shiite troops of the Iraqi army are unlikely to risk their lives to win back a Sunni dominated city, several U.S. military officers told The Daily Beast on Friday. Indeed, when ISIS stormed the city last June, Iraqi forces walked away, leading the U.S. and 60 other nations to form a coalition against the terror group.

Even if the Iraqi troops do stand up and fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, having a Shiite force move in and potentially ravage a major Sunni city in a bid to save it could have adverse affects on the Sunnis in Iraq and broader Sunni Arab world. Sectarian tensions, particularly in Iraq, run that deep.

“I cannot believe that Shiites would fight for Mosul,” one officer who served in the restive Sunni province of Anbar during the Iraq War told The Daily Beast.

So far, there is no evidence of a strong Sunni-majority Iraqi Army brigade, and U.S. Central Command has said it will take at least eight brigades to win back the city. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s Shiite militias are running amok in Iraq

Ali Khedery writes: It took the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, for Western elites to finally begin to understand what many of us saw firsthand in the years since 2003:

The Iraqi government is hopelessly sectarian, corrupt, and generally unfit to govern what could be one of the world’s most prosperous nations. Washington’s response to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are “allies” that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself.

The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was branded the “Republic of Fear” due to its wanton disregard for the sanctity of human life. Saddam’s abuses were legendary: The invasion of Iran in 1980, where his forces employed chemical and biological weapons; the genocide of more than 100,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign; the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and 1991’s massacre of Shiites in Karbala are only a few examples of his gruesome handiwork.

Post-2003 Iraq was supposed to be different. Throughout the past decade, however, countless NGOs and international news organizations have borne witness to the accelerating pace of abuses. The Republic of Fear is being reborn. [Continue reading…]

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Syrians struggle to capture the attention of an audience entranced by ISIS’s brutal imagery

The New York Times reports: The killings have been both deliberately lurid and strangely intimate. Designed for broadcast, they have helped the Islamic State militant group build a brand of violence that shocks with its extreme brutality, yet feels as close to viewers as the family images on their smartphones.

Broadcast specifically to frighten and manipulate, the Islamic State’s flamboyant violence consumes the world’s attention while more familiar threats, like the Syrian government’s barrel bombs, kill far more but rarely provoke global outrage.

A few human rights advocates and antigovernment activists in Syria are creating shocking if nonviolent images and videos — even herding children in orange jumpsuits into a cage — to call attention to the wider scope of violence. So far, though, their voices have hardly been heard.

The Islamic State’s campaign of high-profile killings is not war at a remove, with the mechanized distance of drone strikes or carpet bombing. It is one-on-one slaughter with Hollywood production values, seeking to maximize emotional impact and propaganda value. [Continue reading…]

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The real ruler of Israel: Sheldon Adelson

Sheldon Adelson: '[The Olmert government] is an illegitimate government. It must be thrown out.'

Uri Avnery writes: Who is the ruler of Israel?

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of course.

WRONG.

The real ruler of Israel is one Sheldon Adelson, 81, American Jew, Casino king, who was rated as the world’s tenth richest person, worth 37.2 billion dollars at the latest count. But who is counting?

Besides his casinos in Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, Macao and Singapore, he owns the US Republican party and, lately, both Houses of the US Congress.

He also owns Binyamin Netanyahu.

Adelson’s connection with Israel is personal. On a blind date, he fell in love with an Israeli woman.

Miriam Farbstein was born in Haifa, attended a prestigious high school, did her army service in the Israeli institute which deals with bacteriological warfare and is a multifaceted scientist. After one of her sons (from her first marriage) died of an overdose, she is devoted to the fight against drugs, especially cannabis.

Both Adelsons are fanatical supporters of Israel. Not just any Israel, but a rightist, supremacist, arrogant, violent, expansionist, annexationist, non-compromising, colonialist Israel.

In “Bibi” Netanyahu they found their man. Through Netanyahu they hope to rule Israel as their private fief. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen rebels use increasingly brutal tactics against demonstrators

The Washington Post reports: The Houthi rebels who have seized control of northern Yemen are systematically targeting peaceful protesters in the capital with death threats, abductions and severe beatings, according to activists and human rights groups.

The increasingly brutal tactics, they say, are meant to halt demonstrations that erupted ­after the Houthis toppled Yemen’s pro-American government in Sanaa last month and then dissolved parliament. But the knifings and other violent measures appear to be having the opposite effect. Rallies against the Houthis have increased in frequency and size, heightening concerns that the country is heading for all-out civil war.

Several Yemenis said in interviews that they or their friends had been unlawfully detained and abused by Houthis. At least one protester, identified as Salah al-Bashri, died as a result of what appeared to be beatings he suffered while in Houthi custody, according to an ­Amnesty International report released Monday. [Continue reading…]

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Greece should not give in to Germany’s bullying

Philippe Legrain writes: Ever since the initial bargain in the 1950s between post-Nazi West Germany and its wartime victims, European integration has been built on compromise. So there is huge pressure on Greece’s new Syriza government to be “good Europeans” and compromise on their demands for debt justice from their European partners — also known as creditors. But sometimes compromise is the wrong course of action. Sometimes you need to take a stand.

Let’s face it: no advanced economies in living memory have been as catastrophically mismanaged as the eurozone has been in recent years, as I document at length in my book, European Spring. Seven years into the crisis, the eurozone economy is doing much worse than the United States, worse than Japan during its lost decade in the 1990s and worse even than Europe in the 1930s: GDP is still 2 percent lower than seven years ago and the unemployment rate is in double digits. The policy stance set by Angela Merkel’s government in Berlin, implemented by the European Commission in Brussels, and sometimes tempered — but more often enforced — by the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, remains disastrous. Continuing with current policies — austerity and wage cuts, forbearance for banks, no debt restructuring or adjustment to Germany’s mercantilism — is leading Europe into the ditch; the launch of quantitative easing is unlikely to change that. So settling for a “compromise” that shifts Merkel’s line by a millimeter would be a mistake; it must be challenged and dismantled.

While Greece alone may not be able to change the entire monetary union, it could act as a catalyst for the growing political backlash against the eurozone’s stagnation policies.

For the first time in years, there is hope that the dead hand of Merkelism can be unclasped, not just fear of the consequences and nationalist loathing.

More immediately, Greece can save itself. Left in the clutches of its EU creditors, it is not destined for the sunlit uplands of recovery, but for the enduring misery of debt bondage. So the four-point plan put forward by its dashing new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, is eminently sensible. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Ending an acrimonious standoff, European leaders hashed out a deal on Friday to extend Greece’s bailout by four months, giving the troubled country a financial lifeline and avoiding a bankruptcy with potentially destabilizing consequences for the region.

The agreement, reached at an emergency meeting of eurozone finance ministers here, paves the way for Greece to unlock further aid from its bailout, worth 240 billion euros, or $273 billion. But the creditors will dole out the funds only if Greece meets certain conditions, setting the stage for tense negotiations that could unsettle the markets and create more political friction with Germany and other European countries.

If Athens moves slowly, it might not get the money for months. Or the deal could fall apart altogether, again raising the prospect of a messy Greek departure from the euro currency. [Continue reading…]

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Hate in the aftermath of Chapel Hill murders

Imraan Siddiqi writes: In 2012, the American Muslim community experienced one of the biggest upticks of violence and harassment that the community has ever seen. Eleven years removed from 9/11, there was a seemingly unexplainable rash of attacks against mosques, including arson, vandalism and even shots being fired at different Islamic centers throughout the U.S. Much of this upswing in activity can be attributed to a continued flow of money and rhetoric into what’s termed “The Islamophobia Industry” – as outlined in Center For American Progress’ Fear, Inc., as well as CAIR’s 2013 report: Legislating Fear.

Fast forward to February 2015. The news of a horrific execution-style murder of three young students in Chapel Hill, NC hit the Muslim community like a punch in the chest. The deaths of dental-student Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu Salha and Razan Abu Salha saw three bright lights from our community have their lives cut short, in a crime that seemingly had a bias component to it. This came on the heals of the equally horrific murder of Mustafa Mattan, a well-respected Muslim community member who was shot dead while answering his door in Fort McMurray, Canada. But while the community grieved over these losses, an unprecedented string of hate crimes has swarmed not only Muslims, but other minorities who suffer from the epidemic of anti-Muslim sentiment. Here is a listing of confirmed anti-Muslim incidents that have taken place in recent days: [Continue reading…]

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Oliver Sacks on his approaching death

A few weeks ago, Oliver Sacks learned that he has terminal cancer: Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands. [Continue reading…]

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