Music: Pat Metheny — ‘Always And Forever’
The catastrophe inflicted on Gaza – and the costs to Israel’s standing
Saree Makdisi writes: The statistics coming out of Gaza as Israel’s most recent bombardment of that hapless territory gradually winds down are on the scale of a natural disaster, but they capture the nature of a catastrophe methodically inflicted by one people on another.
In a month of indiscriminate bombardment, Israel has killed or injured almost twelve thousand people, including thousands of children. It has severely damaged or destroyed the homes of some 17,000 families (over 100,000 people). It has terrorized half a million people into flight from one corner of the tiny coastal enclave in which they are trapped to another, leaving them in urgent need of food assistance merely to survive. Schools, clinics, refugee shelters, hospitals, ambulances, a university campus and Gaza’s only power plant have all come under Israeli fire, sometimes repeatedly. UN schools designed to accommodate 500 people as emergency shelters have been packed with up to 3,000. The social infrastructure — already strained to its limits by years of siege — is close to breakdown. Hospitals have run low on urgent supplies including water and fuel for emergency generators. Morgues were filled; the broken bodies of Palestinian children ended up in ice-cream counters that — in a just world — would be those same children’s sources of delight.
Of the fatalities whose identity and status have been verified so far, 86 percent are civilians, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Of those tabulated in its most recent update, 226 are members of armed groups; 459 are children.
Despite the sheer scale of the catastrophe it has inflicted on Gaza, Israel failed to attain a single one of its ever-shifting array of declared objectives (which ranged, according to Israel’s whims, from stopping rocket fire to completely demilitarizing the Gaza Strip). [Continue reading…]
Iraq Sunni tribes take up arms against #ISIS
AFP reports: Members of more than 25 prominent Sunni tribes took up arms against jihadists and their allies west of the Iraqi capital Friday, a tribal leader and officers said.
The uprising in Anbar province, where jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) group and insurgent allies hold major areas, came a day after Nouri al-Maliki, the incumbent premier who is widely reviled by Iraqi Sunni Arabs, abandoned his bid for a third term.
Anbar was the birthplace of a 2006 U.S.-backed uprising against extremist militants that helped bring about a sharp reduction in violence.
The current effort could potentially be a major turning point in Iraq’s two-month conflict against an ISIS-led offensive. [Continue reading…]
Sunni leaders open to joining Iraq government if conditions met
Reuters reports: Tribal leaders and clerics from Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland who rebelled against outgoing premier Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite-led government are willing to join the new administration if certain conditions are met, a spokesman said on Friday.
One of Iraq’s most powerful Sunni tribal leaders said he was ready to work with the new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, provided he protected the rights of the minority sect, which was marginalized by Maliki.
In a television appearance, Ali Hatem Suleiman, head of the Dulaimi tribe that dominates the Sunni heartland Anbar province, said a decision on whether or not to fight the Sunni Islamic State insurgents who threaten to break up Iraq would come later.
Abadi faces the daunting task of pacifying Anbar, where Sunni frustrations with Maliki’s sectarian policies have goaded some to join the radical Islamic State insurrection.
Taha Mohammed Al-Hamdoon, the spokesman for tribal and clerical leaders, said Sunni representatives in Anbar and other provinces had drawn up a list of demands to be delivered to the moderate Shi’ite Abadi through Sunni politicians.
He called for government and Shi’ite militia forces to suspend hostilities to allow space for talks.
“It is not possible for any negotiations to be held under barrel bombs and indiscriminate bombing,” Hamdoon said in a telephone interview with Reuters. “Let the bombing stop and withdraw and curtail the (Shi’ite) militias until there is a solution for the wise men in these areas.” [Continue reading…]
How Haider al-Abadi became Iraq’s next prime minister
Ali Hashem writes: According to Al-Monitor’s sources in Tehran and Baghdad, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after learning of Sistani’s position [that Nouri al-Maliki shouldn’t continue as a prime minister], asked his aides to facilitate the change, calling on them to play a role in convincing Maliki to withdraw. “There were several alternatives for Maliki, one was him being appointed vice president. He refused. He was obstinate on the prime minister position and gave all those who tried [to talk] with him reasons for him not to accept. His main challenge was that he’s the leader of the bloc that won the election, and the constitution gives him the right to form the new government.”
As the negotiations continued, one of the historical leaders of the Dawa Party traveled to Tehran, possessing what he believed was a solution for the dilemma. The leader carried the name Haider al-Abadi with him, along with a brief on the man and his stances. Until that moment, Abadi was an outsider in a race that included several tough names, such as Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Ibrahim Jaafari, Ahmad Chalabi, Qusay al-Suhail and Tarek Najem.
Abadi, an ex-Londoner, was known to the Iranians, though he was never seen as a prime minister candidate. “Iranian officials told the Dawa representative that they would support a name that wouldn’t intimidate the Sunnis and the Kurds,” said the source in Baghdad. “They believe that the priority today is to open closed channels with other parties. Moreover, they are quite sure the main problem is the lack of trust between the sects and ethnicities present in Iraq.” [Continue reading…]
As ISIS closes in, is it game over for Syria’s opposition in Aleppo?
Charles Lister writes: The fate of Syria’s Western-backed opposition hangs on a knife edge in the northern part of the war-torn country — and with radical Sunni militants and regime forces closing in on them from all sides, time may be running out.
At least six villages north of Syria’s largest city of Aleppo fell Wednesday to militants from ISIS, according to AFP. The jihadist group has seized large swathes of land in Iraq and consolidated control over considerable territory in northeastern Syria in the past year.
ISIS fighters are now just 30 miles from the rebel-controlled northern suburbs of Aleppo and within striking distance of key opposition positions leading to the Turkish border.
The situation for the opposition may be even worse inside Aleppo city, where forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are gaining ground after a brutal months-long campaign against opposition forces.
With the radical Sunni fighters bearing down on them from the north, and troops loyal to President Assad retaking Aleppo neighborhood by neighborhood from the south and west, Syria’s beleaguered rebels are facing an existential threat. [Continue reading…]
U.S. pulls back on plans for Mount Sinjar rescue
The New York Times reports: On Wednesday afternoon, President Obama’s national security advisers gathered in a videoconference to discuss options for rescuing tens of thousands of Yazidis starving and besieged by Sunni militants in northern Iraq. But the meeting was upended by a report from Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the United States Central Command, on the findings of the small team of Marines and Special Operations forces that had just spent 24 hours on Mount Sinjar.
The team had found that there were not tens of thousands of Yazidis on the mountain anymore, only between 4,000 and 5,000. They were no longer starving; many pallets of food and water dropped by the American planes remained unopened. And they were no longer stranded, as Kurdish pesh merga fighters had spent the previous five nights escorting thousands of refugees to safety.
The news took the far-flung advisers who were in the videoconference — including Secretary of State John Kerry, who was in Hawaii; Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, on a plane over the Rockies; and the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, who was with the president on Martha’s Vineyard — by surprise. Just hours before, the White House had sent out a top aide with a statement saying that the United States was considering using American ground troops to rescue the Yazidis. [Continue reading…]
How a Polish student’s website became an #ISIS propaganda tool
The Guardian reports: The rapid advance of the militant Islamic State movement in Syria and Iraq this year has been notable not just for its barbarity and brutality but for its deft and chilling social media operation.
Operations are routinely accompanied by grim images and videos of the atrocities perpetrated by the extremists. At the same time, Isis also takes care to document the donation of toys to children and TVs and fans to civilians in the battle for hearts and minds.
Twitter has very recently started cracking down on accounts used by Isis, and other mainstream organisations may follow. But the propagandists are web savvy, and can exploit the internet just like anyone else.
This is how, unknowingly, a 26-year-old Polish man’s website has become an essential part of Isis’s propaganda machine.
JustPaste.it, owned and managed by Mariusz Żurawek, is being used by Isis to upload a large number of images of executions, beheadings and massacres, as well as more prosaic images of life – an essential part of the group’s social media operation. [Continue reading…]
What happens to #Ferguson affects Ferguson: Net neutrality, algorithmic filtering and Ferguson
Zeynep Tufekci writes: Ferguson is about many things, starting first with race and policing in America.
But it’s also about internet, net neutrality and algorithmic filtering.
It’s a clear example of why “saving the Internet”, as it often phrased, is not an abstract issue of concern only to nerds, Silicon Valley bosses, and few NGOs. It’s why “algorithmic filtering” is not a vague concern.
It’s a clear example why net neutrality is a human rights issue; a free speech issue; and an issue of the voiceless being heard, on their own terms.
I saw this play out in multiple countries — my home country of Turkey included — but last night, it became even more heartbreakingly apparent in the United States as well. [Continue reading…]
#Kafranbel #Syria Revolution salutes #RobinWilliams
From #Kafranbel #Syria #Freedom #RobinWilliams pic.twitter.com/xCNaYVvoss
— Oula Abdulhamid (@OulaAbdulhamid) August 15, 2014
Israel’s war on Palestine: It’s bad, but is it ‘genocide’?
Charles Davis writes: “It’s heartbreaking to see,” said US President Barack Obama of the death and destruction his government has helped the state of Israel deliver to the people of Gaza. It’s “really heartbreaking,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry of the nearly 2,000 innocent people killed by the Israeli military with weapons provided by the US government. “The loss of children has been particularly heartbreaking,” said Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations, of dead little boys and girls — more than 400 of them — being stacked on top of one another in a freezer meant for ice cream because Gaza’s morgues are overflowing with corpses.
There are a lot of words that one could use to describe the collective punishment of a stateless people living in what a top United Nations official describes as an “open-air prison,” but “heartbreaking” is perhaps the most inadequate, suggesting that there’s a certain tragic inevitability to Israel’s bombardments of Gaza, to which the only proper response is a shrug and a shake of the head. It’s acceptable to lament Israel’s killing of innocents, but the repeated bombing of UN schools packed with thousands of frightened civilians is, according to the harshest respectable critics, a strategic error — a case of “good intentions” paving the way to hell on Earth for Palestinians — not a reason to withdraw support for the settler-colonial project in Palestine or to “delegitimize” the idea of a state explicitly founded on ethnic supremacy.
Israel’s brutality is, of course, tragic, and the killing of babies is never a good look, but it’s more than just heartbreaking folly. “It is a moral outrage and a criminal act,” according to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Widely viewed as an ally of the US and Israel, Ban nonetheless has labeled Israel’s deliberate targeting of UN schools in Gaza a “gross violation of international humanitarian law.”
Amnesty International has likewise accused Israel of committing “crimes against humanity” over its targeting of hospitals, ambulances, and first-responders, saying the state should be referred to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. And Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of “blatantly violating the laws of war,” with the group documenting numerous instances in which Israeli soldiers went out of their way to shoot fleeing civilians. But no Western official has called the terrorizing of 1.8 million people living in Gaza an “act of terrorism,” though it is openly intended to bring about political change and punish the people of Palestine for electing the wrong leaders. And while you’ll hear the word at protests, the leading human rights organizations have refrained from calling it “genocide.” [Continue reading…]
Israel braces for war crimes inquiries on Gaza
The New York Times reports: The fighting is barely over in the latest Gaza war, with a five-day cease-fire taking hold on Thursday, but attention has already shifted to the legal battlefield as Israel gears up to defend itself against international allegations of possible war crimes in the monthlong conflict.
Israel has excoriated the United Nations Human Rights Council over the appointment of Prof. William Schabas, a Canadian expert in international law, to head the council’s commission of inquiry for Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip.
The broader struggle will be over what some experts describe as Israel’s “creative” interpretation of international law for dealing with asymmetric warfare in an urban environment. More than 1,900 Palestinians were killed in the recent fighting, a majority of them believed to be civilians, while on the Israeli side 64 soldiers and three civilians were killed.
Israeli leaders view the Human Rights Council as hopelessly biased against Israel and say statements made in the past by Professor Schabas rule him out as a fair adjudicator. In one prime example, Professor Schabas was filmed in New York almost two years ago saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was his “favorite” to be in the dock at the International Criminal Court.
“The report of this committee has already been written,” Mr. Netanyahu said this week. “They have nothing to look for here. They should visit Damascus, Baghdad and Tripoli.”
Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Hamas of a “double war crime” for targeting Israeli civilians with its rockets and, he says, using Gaza’s civilians as a human shield for its activities.
Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, said that paradoxically, the only way Professor Schabas could prove he was worthy of the job would be by resigning from it.
Responding to the charges by telephone from London, Professor Schabas said Thursday: “Everybody in the world has opinions about Israel and Palestine. I certainly do.”
He added: “I was recruited for my expertise. I leave my own personal views at the door, as a judge does.”
Rejecting assertions that he is “anti-Israeli,” he said he had lectured in Israel often and was on the board of the Israel Law Review. “I don’t think everyone in Israel agrees,” he said. “I would fit in well there.” [Continue reading…]
Syria: Witnesses corroborate mass deaths in custody claims
Human Rights Watch: Horrific accounts by former detainees in Syria corroborate allegations of mass deaths in custody by a military defector. Four former detainees released from the Sednaya military prison in 2014 described deaths in custody and harsh prison conditions that closely match the allegations of the defector, who photographed thousands of dead bodies in military hospitals in Damascus.
In January, a team of senior international lawyers and forensic experts published a report concluding that Syrian authorities had committed systematic torture and killing of detainees. According to the report, a military defector, code-named Caesar, had taken 55,000 photographs of an estimated 11,000 bodies in military hospitals and other locations in Damascus. The bodies showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing.
“The accounts of the four recently released detainees we interviewed lend further credibility to the already damning evidence about mass deaths in Syria’s prisons,” said Ole Solvang, senior emergencies researcher. “When the Syrian authorities are held to account, the deaths in custody will be one of the first crimes they will have to answer for.”
All four former detainees told Human Rights Watch that they had witnessed the death of fellow detainees in Sednaya prison in Damascus following a combination of beatings, torture, malnutrition, and disease. The former detainees, who were held for between 21 and 30 months, most of the time at Sednaya, described abhorrent conditions, including overcrowding, lack of food, inadequate heating and ventilation, poor medical services, and extremely poor sanitary conditions that caused detainees to develop skin diseases and diarrhea. The detainees said that they had lost significant weight during their detention. One said that he lost more than half of his body weight, weighing only 50 kilograms when he was released. [Continue reading…]
Iraq’s Maliki concedes defeat, backs PM designate
AFP reports: Iraq’s divisive premier Nuri al-Maliki dropped his bid to stay in power Thursday, bowing to huge domestic and international pressure two months into a jihadist-led offensive threatening to tear the country apart.
The two-term premier threw in the towel after an acrimonious political battle and backed his designated successor Haidar al-Abadi, a fellow member of the Shiite party Dawa.
“I announce before you today… the withdrawal of my candidacy in favour of the brother Doctor Haidar al-Abadi,” he said in a televised address, with Abadi standing next to him.
‘Let’s put away the toys, boys’: Ferguson spotlights police militarization
Al Jazeera America reports: Canisters of tear gas thrown indiscriminately into crowds, armored vehicles rolling through city streets and men in camouflage wielding machine guns — it seems like a scene from Fallujah or Kabul or perhaps from the dark days of the U.S. civil rights movement.
But as the world knows, this is Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Even as the community struggles to come to grips with the tragic shooting death of yet another unarmed young African-American man, the events unfolding in Ferguson have thrown a spotlight on a second alarming trend: the increasing militarization of local police departments.
In response to protesters expressing outrage over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown, the St. Louis County and Ferguson police departments have turned the streets of this majority-African-American suburb into a veritable war zone, firing rubber bullets, menacing demonstrators with dogs and in general displaying excessive force for the purposes of security and crowd control.
“This militarization that we are witnessing — police officers dressed as soldiers, using military vehicles and military weapons to engage largely unarmed protesters — is outrageous,” said Tom Nolan, chairman of the department of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, who served for 27 years in the Boston Police Department. “It’s a disgrace.” [Continue reading…]
BuzzFeed reports: Amid growing criticism of the military-style equipment and tactics deployed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, a Democrat from Georgia plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act” in Congress next month.
Rep. Hank Johnson asked his all his colleagues Thursday to join him in supporting the bill, which he said in a letter “will end the free transfers of certain aggressive military equipment to local law enforcement and ensure that all equipment can be accounted for.”
Images of assault rifle-carrying camouflaged police riding through Ferguson on military vehicles similar to the IED-resistant equipment used by American armed forces in combat have proven to be a jolt of energy for a long-simmering debate about police militarization.
In his letter to Congress, Johnson signaled that he expects his bill to break through the partisan gridlock in the House. [Continue reading…]
U.S. halts transfer of Hellfire missiles to Israel
The Wall Street Journal reports: White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval.
Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.
The munitions surprise and previously unreported U.S. response added to a string of slights and arguments that have bubbled behind the scenes during the Gaza conflict, according to events related by senior American, Palestinian and Israeli officials involved.
In addition, current and former American officials say, U.S.-Israel ties have been hurt by leaks that they believe were meant to undercut the administration’s standing by mischaracterizing its position and delay a cease-fire. The battles have driven U.S.-Israeli relations to the lowest point since President Barack Obama took office.
Now, as Egyptian officials shuttle between representatives of Israel and Hamas seeking a long-term deal to end the fighting, U.S. officials are bystanders instead of in their historic role as mediators. The White House finds itself largely on the outside looking in.
U.S. officials said Mr. Obama had a particularly combative phone call on Wednesday with Mr. Netanyahu, who they say has pushed the administration aside but wants it to provide Israel with security assurances in exchange for signing onto a long-term deal.
As a 72-hour pause in the fighting expired at midnight Wednesday, a senior Hamas official said negotiators agreed to another cease-fire, this one of five days. The cease-fire was holding on Thursday.
The frayed relations raise questions about whether Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu can effectively work together. Relations between them have long been strained over other issues, including Mr. Obama’s outreach to Iran and U.S.-backed peace talks with the Palestinians.
Today, many administration officials say the Gaza conflict—the third between Israel and Hamas in under six years—has persuaded them that Mr. Netanyahu and his national security team are both reckless and untrustworthy.
The watershed moment came in the early morning in Gaza July 30. An Israeli shell struck a United Nations school in Jabaliya that sheltered about 3,000 people. Later that day, it was reported in the U.S. that the 120-mm and 40-mm rounds had been released to the Israeli military.
“We were blindsided,” one U.S. diplomat said.
White House and State Department officials had already become increasingly disturbed by what they saw as heavy-handed battlefield tactics that they believed risked a humanitarian catastrophe capable of harming regional stability and Israel’s interests.
They were especially concerned that Israel was using artillery, instead of more precision-guided munitions, in densely populated areas. The realization that munitions transfers had been made without their knowledge came as a shock.
“There was no intent to blindside anyone. The process for this transfer was followed precisely along the lines that it should have,” another U.S. defense official said.
Then the officials learned that, in addition to asking for tank shells and other munitions, Israel had submitted a request through military-to-military channels for a large number of Hellfire missiles, according to Israeli and American officials.
The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, was about to release an initial batch of the Hellfires, according to Israeli and congressional officials. It was immediately put on hold by the Pentagon, and top officials at the White House instructed the DSCA, the U.S. military’s European Command and other agencies to consult with policy makers at the White House and the State Department before approving any additional requests.
A senior Obama administration official said the weapons transfers shouldn’t have been a routine “check-the-box approval” process, given the context. The official said the decision to scrutinize future transfers at the highest levels amounted to “the United States saying ‘The buck stops here. Wait a second…It’s not OK anymore.’ “
Worse the Israel? Why these comparisons are odious
The huge loss of life and massive destruction in Gaza over the last month has triggered an outpouring of humanitarian concern from many of Israel’s most loyal defenders — concern directed towards anywhere but Gaza.
It’s a bit like responding to the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, by saying that it’s nowhere near as bad as Aleppo — which it isn’t, but so what?
Following the release of a Human Rights Watch report which says Egypt’s leaders should be investigated for committing possible crimes against humanity, the editorial board of the Washington Post says:
the massacre staged by Egyptian security forces on Aug. 14, 2013, in Cairo’s Rabaa Square far exceeds, in its wanton use of force and calculated slaughter of women and children, any action by Israel during the recent fighting in Gaza.
That’s debatable, but the Post’s concern is that this illustrates the unfairness with which Israel has been singled out as a target of international criticism.
The editorial’s headline says “Egypt should be a pariah state for its bloody crackdown on dissent” — the implication being that it is Egypt, not Israel, which is more deserving of being branded as a pariah state. And while the piece rebukes the Obama administration for cynically maintaining its ties to the Sisi regime, it makes no mention of Israel’s close ties to Egypt.
No doubt Egypt is deserving of pariah status — but so is Israel.
Hamas talks of ‘real chance’ for Gaza agreement with Israel
The Guardian reports: Hamas believes there is a “real opportunity” to reach an agreement with Israel in Cairo negotiations to end the conflict in Gaza, saying it is “not interested in more bloodshed”.
The positive signals from the Islamist organisation, which has fought a 30-day war with Israel, came after mediators brokered a five-day extension to the current ceasefire shortly before a midnight deadline on Wednesday.
Despite there being some rocket fire from Gaza and air strikes by Israel as efforts to extend the truce went to the wire, the ceasefire held throughout Thursday. It expires at midnight on Monday.
Both the Palestinian and Israeli delegations left Cairo for a break in the talks, which are expected to resume on Sunday.
The Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, who returned to Gaza to brief the local leadership, told reporters: “There is still a real chance to clinch an agreement, but Israel must stop playing with words.”
He added: “We are not interested in more destruction for our people. We are not interested in more bloodshed.”
But, he said, Hamas would not sign an agreement that did not “meet our people’s demands”, and he warned that the organisation could “renew the battle” with greater strength. [Continue reading…]