Music: Avishai Cohen — ‘Seven Seas’
The effectiveness of Israel’s iron fist
Larry Derfner writes: Those who oppose Israel’s iron fist tactics against violent Palestinian resistance argue, as a rule, that it’s impractical, it won’t work, you can’t repress a nation forever, and the only solution is to end the injustice that provokes the violence. But this is a sentimental view that comes, I think, from a need to believe that justice always wins in the end. The fact is that Israeli iron fist tactics have worked pretty damn well in keeping the Palestinians down over the last decade, and there’s a very strong chance that the tactics Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out Tuesday night – overwhelming armed force, house demolitions, draconian punishments for rioters and their parents, and more – will work again this time.
The iron fist put down the Second Intifada in 2004/5, and Israel has enjoyed remarkable quiet from the West Bank since then, also from East Jerusalem until this summer. A crucial difference between the first two intifadas and the current violence is that those earlier upheavals were organized; this one isn’t, which makes it much easier for Israel to overcome.
The iron fist has also worked in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead nearly six years ago. Israel has had to “mow the lawn” twice more since then, most recently over the summer, but otherwise the Palestinians in the Strip have been largely harmless in their cage.
What are the chances that this time around, Palestinian resistance will force Israel to begin reversing course, with an eye toward ending the occupation? I think they’re extremely slim. Even though it’s true that the First Intifada led to the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada led to the disengagement from Gaza, those were different times in a different Israel. [Continue reading…]
The new American Jewish struggle over Israel: Hawks versus ultra-hawks
Peter Beinart writes: The most important trend in American Jewish politics today is the collapse of the center. The American Jewish establishment isn’t only being challenged by left-leaning groups like J Street. It also faces a less widely recognized, but equally powerful, challenge from the right.
Consider this week’s spat between Sheldon Adelson and Abraham Foxman. At an event last Sunday, Adelson’s fellow oligarch, Chaim Saban, said Israel needed to support a Palestinian state if it wanted to remain a Jewish democracy. To which Adelson replied, “I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy. I think God didn’t say anything about democracy. God talked about all the good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state, otherwise Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state — so what?”
So what? With that question, Adelson lobbed a grenade at the American Jewish establishment. When the American Jewish establishment defends Israel, it doesn’t talk much about God. That’s because while theological language plays well among conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, it tends to alienate secular liberals. Indeed, it alienates some of the secular liberals who populate American Jewish organizations. As a result, America’s mainstream Jewish groups generally justify Israeli policy not via religion but via America’s civil religion — democracy — a creed that enjoys unquestioned reverence across the political spectrum. By claiming democracy doesn’t matter, Adelson was sabotaging the case for Israel that the American Jewish establishment has been making for decades. Which is why one of that establishment’s senior members, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, called Adelson’s remarks “disturbing on many levels.” Foxman added that, “the founders of Israel got it exactly right when they emphasized the country being both a Jewish and democratic state. Any initiatives that move Israel away from either value would ill-serve the state and people of Israel.”
The problem is that Israel has been pursuing just such an initiative for almost a half-century now. Since 1967, it has established dominion over millions of West Bank Palestinians who lack citizenship or the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.
Far from apologizing for that control, or seeking to undo it, Israel’s current government is making it permanent. And the Israeli leaders most committed to the settlement project freely acknowledge that for them, democracy is not the highest value. In the words of Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, “The State of Israel was created for the Jewish people, and its democracy is supposed to serve the Jewish people. If this state acts against the interests of the Jewish people, there is no longer any point in its existence, be it democratic or not.” [Continue reading…]
Palestinian rift reopens as Abbas blames Hamas for bombings
Reuters reports: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday accused his Islamist Hamas rivals of carrying out a series of bombings against officials loyal to him in Gaza last week, in a move sure to harm already floundering unity efforts.
A series of small explosions targeted the homes and vehicles of officials from Abbas’s Fatah movement on Friday, causing minor damage but no injuries.
A bomb also demolished a stage erected to commemorate the 10th anniversary of former president and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat’s death, leading to the event being canceled.
“Who committed this crime? The leadership of the Hamas movement did, and it’s responsible!” Abbas roared to applause at a Fatah rally for Arafat in Ramallah, his seat of government in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. [Continue reading…]
Kurdish fighters recapture strategic hill in Kobane and cut off key supply route for ISIS
Middle East Eye reports: Kurdish and Syrian fighters in Kobane have recaptured a strategic landmark and cut off a key supply route on Wednesday after more than 50 days of fighting against Islamic State fighters, a Kobane official told MEE.
After fierce fighting that started on Monday, the fighters – which include soldiers from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and the Free Syrian Army – have taken back a strategic part of Mashta al-Nur, a hill which overlooks Kobane.
From this hill, the fighters will be able to bomb IS fighters around the city and also on the other side of the hill, said Idris Nassan, deputy foreign affairs minister for the Kobane, who said he was holed up in a safe location about 1km from Mashta al-Nur.
Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party called the capture a ‘game changer’ on its official Twitter account.
BREAKING: strategic Mishtenour hill has been liberated by #YPG in #Kobane. Major gain, likely a game changer. #TwitterKurds #Rojava
— PYD (@pydinfo) November 12, 2014
“ISIS is defeated mostly,” Nassan told MEE. “ISIS is still in Kobane, but with Mashta al-Nur, ISIS will be in a very small part of Kobane. Defeating ISIS will be more easy.”In addition to regaining control of most of Mashta al-Nur, the fighters have also cut off the Halanj-Ain al-Arab road south of the town, a key supply route that IS has been using during the battle. Sixteen IS members were reportedly killed in the advance. [Continue reading…]
The fighters of Iraq who answer to Iran
Reuters reports: Among the thousands of militia fighters who flocked to northern Iraq to battle militant group Islamic State over the summer was Qais al-Khazali.
Like the fighters, Khazali wore green camouflage. But he also sported a shoulder-strapped pistol and sunglasses and was flanked by armed bodyguards. When he was not on the battlefield, the 40-year-old Iraqi donned the robes and white turban of a cleric.
Khazali is the head of a militia called Asaib Ahl al-Haq that is backed by Iran. Thanks to his position he is one of the most feared and respected militia leaders in Iraq, and one of Iran’s most important representatives in the country.
His militia is one of three small Iraqi Shi’ite armies, all backed by Iran, which together have become the most powerful military force in Iraq since the collapse of the national army in June.
Alongside Asaib Ahl al-Haq, there are the Badr Brigades, formed in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, and the younger and more secretive Kataib Hezbollah. The three militias have been instrumental in battling Islamic State (IS), the extremist movement from Islam’s rival Sunni sect.
The militias, and the men who run them, are key to Iran’s power and influence inside neighboring Iraq. [Continue reading…]
Why no one cares about Syria
Barry Andrews is the CEO of GOAL, an international humanitarian agency dedicated to alleviating the suffering of the poorest of the poor.
Climate crisis, the deindustrialization imperative and the jobs vs. environment dilemma
Richard Smith writes: Since the 1990s, climate scientists have been telling us that unless we suppress the rise of carbon dioxide emissions, we run the risk of crossing critical tipping points that could unleash runaway global warming, and precipitate the collapse of civilization and perhaps even our own extinction. To suppress those growing emissions, climate scientists and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have called on industrialized nations to slash their carbon dioxide emissions by 80 to 90 percent by 2050.
But instead of falling, carbon dioxide emissions have been soaring, even accelerating, breaking records year after year. In May 2013, carbon dioxide concentrations topped the 400 parts per million mark prompting climate scientists to warn that we’re “running out of time,” that we face a “climate emergency” and that unless we take “radical measures” to suppress emissions very soon, we’re headed for a 4-degree or even 6-degree Celsius rise before the end of the century. And not just climate scientists have made warnings, but also mainstream authorities, including the World Bank, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and others. In 2012, the IEA warned that “no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if we hope to prevent global warming from exceeding more than 2 degrees Centigrade.” In September 2014, the global accounting and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers warned that:
For the sixth year running, the global economy has missed the decarbonisation target needed to limit global warming to 2˚C . . . To avoid two degrees of warming, the global economy now needs to decarbonise at 6.2 percent a year, more than five times faster than the current rate, every year from now till 2100. On our current burn rate we blow our carbon budget by 2034, sixty-six years ahead of schedule. This trajectory, based on IPCC data, takes us to four degrees of warming by the end of the century.
Yet despite ever more dire warnings from the most conservative scientific, economic and institutional authorities, and despite record heat and drought, superstorms and floods, and melting ice caps and vanishing glaciers, “business as usual” prevails. Worse, every government on the planet is pulling out all the stops to maximize growth and consumption in the effort to hold on to the fragile recovery. [Continue reading…]
U.S. unwilling to unequivocally apply ban on prisoner abuse
The New York Times reports: A treaty ban on cruel treatment will restrict how the United States may treat prisoners in certain places abroad, the Obama administration is expected to tell the United Nations on Wednesday, according to officials.
That interpretation would change a disputed Bush administration theory that the cruelty ban does not apply abroad. But the Obama administration also stopped short of an unequivocal acceptance that the ban imposes legal obligations everywhere that American officials have a prisoner in their custody or control, as human rights advocates had urged it to say.
An American delegation will unveil the administration’s position in Geneva on Wednesday in a presentation before the United Nations Committee Against Torture. The panel, which monitors compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture, has asked whether the United States still takes the Bush-era view.
Most of the torture treaty contains no geographic limitations. But its ban on “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” that falls short of torture is one of several provisions that apply to a state’s conduct “in any territory under its jurisdiction.” That phrase is ambiguous, and the administration of President George W. Bush took the view that the ban did not apply beyond domestic soil.
The Obama administration, after an internal debate that has drawn global scrutiny, is taking the view that the cruelty ban applies wherever the United States exercises governmental authority, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. That definition, they said, includes the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and American-flagged ships and aircraft in international waters and airspace.
But the administration’s definition still appears to exclude places like the former “black site” prisons where the C.I.A. tortured terrorism suspects during the Bush years, as well as American military detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there. Those prisons were on the sovereign territory of other governments; the government of Cuba exercises no control over Guantánamo. [Continue reading…]
Societies in harsh environments more likely to believe in moralizing high gods
EurekAlert!: Just as physical adaptations help populations prosper in inhospitable habitats, belief in moralizing, high gods might be similarly advantageous for human cultures in poorer environments. A new study from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) suggests that societies with less access to food and water are more likely to believe in these types of deities.
“When life is tough or when it’s uncertain, people believe in big gods,” says Russell Gray, a professor at the University of Auckland and a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for History and the Sciences in Jena, Germany. “Prosocial behavior maybe helps people do well in harsh or unpredictable environments.”
Gray and his coauthors found a strong correlation between belief in high gods who enforce a moral code and other societal characteristics. Political complexity–namely a social hierarchy beyond the local community– and the practice of animal husbandry were both strongly associated with a belief in moralizing gods.
The emergence of religion has long been explained as a result of either culture or environmental factors but not both. The new findings imply that complex practices and characteristics thought to be exclusive to humans arise from a medley of ecological, historical, and cultural variables.
“When researchers discuss the forces that shaped human history, there is considerable disagreement as to whether our behavior is primarily determined by culture or by the environment,” says primary author Carlos Botero, a researcher at the Initiative for Biological Complexity at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to throw away all preconceived notions regarding these processes and look at all the potential drivers together to see how different aspects of the human experience may have contributed to the behavioral patterns we see today.” [Continue reading…]
Americans say they want privacy, but act as if they don’t
The New York Times: Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.
That paradox is captured in a new survey by Pew Research Center. It found that there is no communications channel, including email, cellphones or landlines, that the majority of Americans feel very secure using when sharing personal information. Of all the forms of communication, they trust landlines the most, and fewer and fewer people are using them.
Distrust of digital communication has only increased, Pew found, with the young expressing the most concern by some measures, in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden about online surveillance by the government. Yet Americans for now seem to grudgingly accept that these are the trade-offs of living in the digital age — or else they fear that it is too late to do anything about it.
“The reason is often they don’t have real choice,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s not like picking up the newspaper and realizing ice cream has too many calories and you can start eating frozen yogurt, information that people can act on.”
One reason is that once people are invested in a service — if they have all their social contacts on Facebook or years of email on Gmail, for instance — they have a hard time giving it up. [Continue reading…]
Music: Avishai Cohen — ‘Four Verses / Continuation’
The battle for Kobane offers a glimpse of Kurds’ new model democracy
By Karthick Manoharan, University of Essex
As the battle against Islamic State fighters draws in viewers across the world, there has been some attention given to the men and women resisting them in northern Syria. The Syrian part of Kurdistan, or Rojava, as the Kurds would like to call it, has been fighting Islamists for well over two years now but only recently has the battle for the border town of Kobane brought them to light.
And while it’s easy to portray the Kurdish people as pitted against this new terrorist threat, they are actually involved in something far more profound. Kobane is symbolic and the conflict there carries a universal significance. Not only are the Kurds battling the Islamists, but they are also attempting to create a model of democracy that might actually bring stability to a war-torn region.
The Kurdish political vision is not founded on any particular racial, ethnic, regional or religious belief but rather on an idea, or a set of ideas, that should resonate with people everywhere.
Fighters in Kobane claim to be standing up for the freedom of everyone in the region, be they Kurds, Turks, Arabs or anyone else. The way the fighters in Kobane have challenged stereotypical gender roles is just one example.
As far as religious difference goes, Kobane disproves both Islamophobes who believe the Middle East to be incapable of progress and politically correct Islamophiles who push the patronising idea that religious identity is a top priority for Muslims the world over. In their readiness to defend the Yazidi minority against persecution from IS, the Kurds have essentially been promoting a radical secularism and a vision of tolerance in a region torn by religious strife.
Syria Kurds ‘recapture’ areas of Kobane from ISIS
AFP reports: Kurds battling the Islamic State jihadist group in Kobane reportedly made advances Tuesday in the south of the flashpoint Syrian town on the border with Turkey.
Top Kurdish officials told AFP their fighters were advancing “street by street”, voicing confidence that the IS would soon be ejected.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights backed up the report.
“The (Kurdish) People’s Protection Units (YPG) recaptured streets and buildings in the south of Kobane, after a fierce battle against the IS that began yesterday (Monday) evening,” said the Britain-based Observatory. [Continue reading…]
Jabhat al-Nusra blows up Armenian church in Deir el-Zour: A savage blow that echoes through Armenian history
Robert Fisk reports: In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour, built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into the street beside the ruins.
This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour. Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the genocide 99 years ago.
Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide – the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi Germany: “Shoah”, which means “holocaust”. [Continue reading…]
Militant group in Egypt vows loyalty to ISIS
The New York Times reports: They have slaughtered hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police officers, recruited experienced fighters and staged increasingly sophisticated raids from the Western desert to the Sinai Peninsula. They have beheaded informants and killed an American in a carjacking, say Western officials familiar with intelligence reports.
On Monday, Egypt’s most dangerous militant group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, also pledged obedience to the organization that calls itself the Islamic State, becoming its first significant international affiliate in the bet that the link will provide new money, weapons and recruits to battle the government in Cairo.
The affiliation could pull the militant group away from its current, almost exclusive focus on attacking Egyptian military and security forces toward the Islamic State’s indiscriminate mass killings of civilians. The pledge alone could undermine the government’s efforts to win the trust of Western tourists, a vital source of hard currency.
The decision injects the Islamic State into the most populous and historically most influential Arab nation, a milestone weeks into an American-led bombing campaign against its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. The endorsement is a major victory for the Islamic State in its rivalry with Al Qaeda — a group with deep Egyptian roots — and could now help recruit fighters and affiliates far beyond Egypt. [Continue reading…]
Obama’s support for net neutrality
(The text of President Obama’s statement on net neutrality.)
Tim Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality,” writes: The President has long been criticized as a compromiser: a man whose cool temperament leads him to always seek out a way to please everyone. But here he appears to have concluded that, with the industry and Republicans already religiously opposed to any form of net-neutrality rule, that there was nothing to be gained from playing the middle. And there’s something else: he’s right. Only a strong net-neutrality rule will actually protect the open Internet.
In short, the White House today is forcing the F.C.C. to take sides instead of reaching for an appeasement that isn’t possible. The cable and telephone companies and the Republican Congress aren’t going to like any version of strong net-neutrality rules. There really is no middle ground here.
Grant Gross writes: While the FCC is an independent agency, Obama’s policy statement takes some heat off FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler as he leans toward reclassifying broadband, said several telecom law experts, both for and against reclassification.
Obama’s new statement may be intended both to nudge the FCC toward broadband reclassification and give Wheeler some space to make it happen, said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group that supports strong net neutrality rules.
“There’s a real issue of historical legacy here,” Black said. “You don’t want to be the president, and I don’t think you want to be the FCC chairman, who would be looked back upon as the ones who ended net neutrality for the Internet.”
Tim Berners-Lee: A Magna Carta for the web