In Syria, the enemy of America’s enemy is still a lousy friend

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: History is being rewritten. Syrian president Bashar Assad is about to emerge as a moderate peacemaker, a warrior against terror, and a secularist bulwark holding Islamist hordes at bay. His violence will be seen as no more than the tough love of a benevolent patriarch, eager to restore order amid spiraling chaos. The beast moving toward Bethlehem, it turns out, is really a dove.

These thoughts were not filched from the regime’s PR dispatches. Nor did they originate from the political fringes, where the far left and far right have long portrayed Assad as a man warring against the same governments they loathe and/or feel oppressed by. No, these are the recent opinions of respectable mainstream voices.

The ball was set rolling by Ryan Crocker, the whiz diplomat who made his reputation as the US ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan. In an article for the New York Times, he argued that it was “time to consider a future for Syria without Assad’s ouster.” His reason? “It is overwhelmingly likely that is what the future will be.” His circular logic found few takers, though notable among them was former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden.

Crocker and Hayden represent the id of US foreign policy. The instincts they embody have often been kept in check by the civic values to which, in rhetoric if not in practice, every American leader pays homage. One cannot speak of human rights, rule of law, individual freedom, civil liberty, or self-determination and be seen openly pursuing policies that violate these principles. To change course, principles have to be reconciled with preferences. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian opposition plan to oust ISIS awaits U.S. hearing

McClatchy reports: Syria’s pro-western opposition has developed a plan to oust extremists of the self-styled “Islamic State” from their base in Syria and protect Syrian civilians living in rebel-held areas, but it is waiting for the Obama administration to give it a hearing, the acting defense minister says.

Nour Kholouf, a defected Syrian army general, said Islamic extremists who last month seized more than one third of neighboring oil-rich Iraq had become a greater threat to Syrian rebels than the regime itself, because they have moved into territory rebel forces have seized from the Assad regime and routinely cut off the rebels’ supply routes.

But he said rebel forces could force the extremists on the defensive and expel them from a part of the territory they now control in just three weeks of fighting, if the United States provides the necessary backing.

In a second stage, he said rebel forces could oust the extremists from the Raqqa region up to the border region between Syria and Iraq.

“I need weapons. I need money. I need a no fly zone or anti-aircraft weapons. I need intelligence data,” Kholouf, who’s held the post since May in the Syrian interim government, told McClatchy.

“We could kick them out of the Aleppo region in 20 days and force them back to the borders of the Raqqa region,” he said in the interview Friday. At that stage, the rebels must “take account of what weapons they’re deploying, and respond,” he said.

“But I can say confidently that if the American side makes the decision to end the Syrian crisis, we will have sufficient fighters.” In six months, he said, “we can bring security to 80 per cent of Syria.” There was one condition, he said: “that we are not left alone.”

Kholouf said he could deploy at least 100,000 rebel fighters if he could provide the weapons, ammunition and provisions to sustain them. Only about half are currently armed. [Continue reading…]

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As Israel strikes Gaza, the U.S. strikes Pakistan

The Washington Post reports: A suspected U.S. drone strike killed at least 15 people in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, the deadliest such attack in at least a year.

The strike targeted a house in North Waziristan — where the Pakistani military is engaged in a month-old battle against the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups — as well as a vehicle that was passing nearby, local intelligence officials said. The strike killed at least 15 people, although some officials said at least 20 people died.

“The compound was being used by foreign militants, and some local terrorists were present in the vehicle that got targeted,” said one senior intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The attack near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan took place in an area suspected of housing fighters affiliated with the Afghan Haqqani network as well as Islamist militants from Uzbekistan, local officials said. One villager said he saw the drone fire at least four missiles.

The last time 15 or more people were killed by a U.S. drone was on July 3, 2013, when a missile strike killed 16 people, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. [Continue reading…]

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Behind the scenes, tech firms tell U.S. regulators: Make the internet a public utility

Quartz reports: As his own website crashed under the weight of public comments on net neutrality, the top communications regulator in the US was hearing protests directly from tech companies in New York City.

On July 15, at the Brooklyn office of the handicrafts e-commerce site Etsy, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler met with executives from tech companies. Attendants included Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, Tumblr CEO David Karp, Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor, and representatives from Spotify, Reddit, Foursquare, General Assembly, Buzzfeed, and Warby Parker, participants told Quartz. While the FCC declined to comment on the event, it will be filing an official notice of an outside meeting on its website later this week.

Wheeler has been meeting with different internet stakeholders as his agency moves to write rules designed to preserve the “open internet” this year, but what that means and how to do it remains far from a settled matter. While internet service providers, or carriers, want the freedom to charge different rates for different kinds of data, these technology firms were asking Wheeler’s agency to treat internet communication as a public utility with no discrimination allowed, a so-called “Title II reclassification.” US regulators are, at the moment, caught in the middle. [Continue reading…]

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Correction: Mesut Ozil representative denies reports about donation to Gaza

Update: International Business Times has corrected its earlier report (the one on which this post was based and which is excerpted below):

Germany and Arsenal superstar Mesut Ozil’s representative has denied claims that the star was set to donate his £350,000 [$600,000] World Cup winnings to the children of Gaza following his country’s triumph in the global spectacle.

“The claim that Mesut donated money to Gaza is not true,” said the midfielder’s represenative Roland Eitel.

“Maybe in the future, who knows? He donated money to causes in Brazil and he is now on holiday.”

My comment: Why did International Business Times publish this report in the first place if they hadn’t verified that it was correct? IBT is ranked as fourth-most visited website among business news publications. It’s now put itself in that dubious category of websites which publishes interesting stories that happen to be false. Those of us who sift through hundreds of news stories every day don’t have the time or resources to do what people who claim to be news reporters should be doing themselves.

Original post published July 16, 9.45, under the headline “Brazil World Cup star Mesut Ozil donates $600,000 winnings to Gaza”:
The latest Pew poll indicates that Americans lean heavily in support of Israel as Israel bombs Gaza.

Given the prevailing Islamophobia, continuing irrational fears of terrorism, and the bias of the mainstream media, along with the influence of End Times mythologies among evangelicals, it’s hardly surprising that public opinion in the U.S. remains skewed in this way.

The demographic segment where greatest support for Palestinians can be found, however, is among the religiously unaffiliated 18-29 age bracket. That also, I think it’s reasonable to assume, happens to be the group of Americans who have watched the World Cup most enthusiastically over the last five weeks.

Mesut Ozil’s gesture will resonate deeply among young people who find little to respect in the world run by their hypocritical elders.

Mesut-OzilInternational Business Times reports: Germany and Arsenal superstar Mesut Ozil is to donate his £350,000 [$600,000] World Cup winnings to the children of Gaza following his country’s triumph in the global spectacle.

As the conflict in the Middle East rages following a failed ceasefire, Ozil is set to give the £237,000 bonus he received for helping Germany win the final, and the £118,000 he received for Germany’s semi-final win, to the occupied territory. He is however yet to confirm the actual beneficiaries of his largesse.

Ozil is of Turkish descent and a practising Muslim who recites the Quran before games. He controversially opted not to fast during the tournament, which fell in the holy month of Ramadan in which Muslims fast from dawn until sunset.

According to the Middle East Monitor, Ozil caused controversy when he declined to shake a Fifa official’s hand because of his support for Israel.

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Egypt: No ongoing negotiations for Gaza ceasefire

The Guardian reports: Egypt claims it has not been involved in any negotiations since the failure of its proposed ceasefire in Gaza – which was accepted by Israel but rejected by Hamas – and maintains that it is still waiting for formal confirmation of Hamas’s stance.

“For the time being there are no negotiations,” said Egypt’s foreign affairs spokesman, Badr Abdelatty. “We announced our initiative. There is increasing support from Arab leaders and the international community for the proposals. Abu Mazen [Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas] is coming today and has given them his backing. We are still waiting for the other Palestinian factions to give their official response to the initiative.”

A key mediator in previous Israeli-Palestinian tensions, Egypt proposed a ceasefire on Monday night, which it hoped would end the latest Gaza conflict that has now killed more than 200 Palestinians and one Israeli. The proposals were quickly accepted by Israel. While one Hamas official said the group was mulling its reaction, others in the group’s political and military wings rejected the initiative outright, claiming they had only found about it through the media and were angry that it did not deal with some of the group’s major demands: a conclusive end of Israel and Egypt’s blockade on Gaza, and the release of certain prisoners from Israeli jails.

Observers remain doubtful that Egypt has really stopped participating in negotiations following the failure of its ceasefire, given the embarrassment involved in failing to fulfil its traditional role of mediation. “There is of course contact on all sorts of levels,” said one Cairo-based diplomat.

HA Hellyer, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and Cairo-based analyst, said the unilateral nature of Egypt’s earlier efforts might now make Hamas even less willing to engage with them. But he doubted that Egypt had taken a backseat. [Continue reading…]

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Water catastrophe looms in Gaza as Israel steps up airstrikes

NBC News reports: A humanitarian catastrophe looms in the Gaza Strip due to a lack of water, aid agencies warned as Israel intensified air attacks on Wednesday and ordered 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate border areas.

Airstrikes have caused massive damage to water and sewage infrastructure and have destroyed at least 560 homes, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said as it declared an emergency in the area.

“Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement. If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis,” he said.

“Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

At a news briefing, ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said: “Water is a problem and it can quickly turn into a catastrophe.” [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu’s bankrupt strategy

Noam Sheizaf puts Israel’s assault on Gaza in context: [F]ollowing the kidnapping of three Israeli teens on June 12, the government arrested hundreds of Hamas members in the West Bank, most of them from the political leadership who had nothing to do with the attack (which in all likelihood was carried out by rogue freelancers). Dozens of prisoners who had been released in the prisoner exchange deal for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit were detained again, as a purely punitive measure and without any evidence that they had returned to militant activities.

Since the accord between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Israel has also prevented the transfer of funds that pay the salaries of public officials in Gaza. In fact, when UN envoy Robert Serry sought an arrangement with Israeli officials that would allow the salaries to be transferred, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened to expel Serry for “aiding Hamas.” And, not least, Israel had stepped up its own military activities in Gaza before the latest escalation, claiming the lives of several militants and at least one boy, who was injured on June 11 and died three days later.

The denial of funds, along with the closing of the tunnels from Egypt to Gaza by the new regime in Cairo, which is overtly hostile to Hamas, has caused a political and economic crisis in the Strip, and thus left Hamas—whose main political currency is its image of “resistance”—with little reason to avoid escalation.

These facts, which have been largely ignored by the Israeli media, do not justify Hamas’s tactics, which deliberately target civilians in clear violation of international law. They suggest, however, the existence of alternative courses of action that Israel could have taken in the weeks preceding the current crisis. But the Israeli government has refused for years to address the fundamental problems in Gaza—the siege and its separation from the rest of the Palestinian population in Israel and the West Bank being the most obvious ones. The Hamas-PA accord actually presented Jerusalem with an opportunity to deal with Hamas politically; instead, Israel decided to cut ties with the newly formed government and even demanded that the international community follow suit. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli calls for Palestinian blood still ring at fever pitch

David Sheen writes: Concerned humanists may have hoped that when a group of Jewish Israelis confessed to kidnapping and killing Muhammad Abu Khudair, a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem — forcing him to drink gasoline and torching him to death from inside his body — that top Israeli legislators and rabbis would have been horrified at what their revenge rhetoric had triggered, and seriously scaled back their calls for war.

These hopes would have been in vain. In the days since the lynchers were arrested, the anti-Arab rhetoric has continued to ring at a fever pitch. Even as the Israeli army pummels the Gaza Strip with explosives — more than 1,500 tons have been dropped on Gaza by the time of this writing, killing 193 people and wounding approximately 1,200, the vast majority of them civilians — Israeli political, religious and cultural leaders continue to incite sectarian divisions for political profit.

On the eve of Abu Khudair’s lynching, Member of Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and government faction whip Ayelet Shaked issued a call over Facebook to ethnically cleanse the land, declaring “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy.” She advocated their complete destruction, “including its elderly and its women,” adding that these must be slaughtered, otherwise they might give birth to more “little snakes.”

It would be hard to find a more explicit call for genocide. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s actions are radicalizing Palestinians

Mark Perry writes: Successive Israeli attacks on Gaza over the last years have splintered Gaza’s militant groups — strengthening some, such as certain elements in the Popular Resistance Committees and Islamic Jihad, that are far more radical than Hamas. In 2007, again in 2009, and then just last May, the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, which calls for the establishment of a caliphate to “liberate the Holy Land,” held rallies in Hebron and Ramallah that attracted a small but dedicated band of followers.

“In the American media, it’s ‘Hamas, Hamas, Hamas,'” Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, said. “It’s a great talking point, but this shouldn’t be about talking points. Israel’s actions are radicalizing Palestinian society. Maybe that’s what they want, but I can’t imagine that’s what we want.”

While Israeli officials might lump Hamas in with ISIS, the group itself has been increasingly worried about the emergence of more radical Islamist movements. This could be clearly seen in the immediate aftermath of the June 12 kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teens, which took Hamas’s leadership by surprise. “They were caught flat-footed,” the senior Fatah official with whom I spoke confirmed. “They didn’t order the kidnapping or the murder and were surprised it happened. We ourselves thought it wasn’t aimed at Israel, but at breaking up the unity agreement.”

[Osama] Hamdan, the head of Hamas’s foreign relations bureau, refused to comment on this speculation, but denied that Hamas was behind the incident. “To this moment we don’t know” who the perpetrators are, he told me in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping. He provided the same answer when I gave him the names of the prime suspects, members of the Qawasmeh family of Hebron. “We don’t know,” he repeated.

With Operation Protective Edge entering its eighth day, the United States is now scrambling to again find a way out of the conflict. But unlike previous confrontations, getting both sides to agree on a cease-fire will be much more difficult. “Abbas is weakened; Israel has a government that needs to show how tough it is; and Hamas is looking at its competitors in Gaza,” said Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. “There aren’t too many exit points. The current crisis could go on for quite some time and be very bloody.”

So far, Israel’s eight-year attempt to batter Hamas into submission has not only met with failure, but its successive military onslaughts might just have succeeded in creating an increasingly radicalized Palestinian population and alienating Israel’s most powerful ally.

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Israel, Palestinians battle as Egyptian-proposed Gaza ceasefire collapses

Reuters reports: Israel resumed air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after agreeing to an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire deal that failed to get Hamas militants to halt rocket attacks.

The week-old conflict seemed to be at a turning point, with Hamas defying Arab and Western calls to cease fire and Israel threatening to step up a week-old offensive that could include an invasion of the densely populated enclave of 1.8 million.

Under a blueprint announced by Egypt – Gaza’s neighbour and whose military-backed government has been at odds with Islamist Hamas – a mutual “de-escalation” was to have begun at 9 a.m. (0600 GMT), with hostilities ceasing within 12 hours.

Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, rejected the ceasefire deal, a proposal that addressed in only general terms some of its key demands, and said its battle with Israel would “increase in ferocity and intensity”.

But Moussa Abu Marzouk, a top Hamas political official who was in Cairo, said the movement, which is seeking a deal that would ease Egyptian and Israeli border restrictions throttling Gaza’s economy, had made no final decision on Cairo’s proposal. [Continue reading…]

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A ‘quiet night’ in Gaza? Just five deaths and 25 sites bombed

Just imagine if in the space of 12 hours there were 25 bomb attacks in Israel and five people were killed.

In the United States, the cable news networks would devote round-the-clock coverage to the “terrorist bloodbath” (or whatever other sufficiently dramatic branding they chose) and this would go down as an important date in history.

But when the dead are Palestinians, it’s a completely different story.

The New York Times reports that last night was:

… a relatively quiet night, in which the Israeli military bombed 25 sites in Gaza, killing five Palestinians in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; about 1,400 others have been wounded.

Ashraf al-Qedra, the Health Ministry spokesman, and local journalists said that Ismail and Mohammed Najjar, relatives in their 40s who worked as guards on agricultural land in a former Israeli settlement in Khan Younis, were killed early Tuesday. In Rafah, drone strikes killed Atwa al-Amour, a 63-year-old farmer, and Bushra Zourob, 53, a woman who was near the target, a man on a motorbike, who was wounded.

Perhaps reporters Jodi Rudoren and Anne Barnard are employing Benjamin Netanyahu’s novel definition of quietness, that being: the silence that follows explosions.

The Israeli prime minister said:

[I]f Hamas does not accept the cease-fire proposal, as it looks now, Israel will have all the international legitimacy in order to achieve the desired quiet.

So far Israel has launched 1,609 air strikes, detonating hundreds of tons of explosives in order to create quietness.

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Israeli excesses provoke Hamas

A short commentary by Fawaz A. Gerges is noteworthy mostly because it appears in USA Today. Whether we are witnessing the beginning of the Third Intifada seems like a pointless question to attempt to answer. Most likely, its beginning (if it occurs) will only become apparent after the fact.

Superficial observations in the Western news media that blame Hamas for the latest wave of violence ignore two important factors:

First, Israeli strangulation of Gaza through an air and land blockade in cooperation with Egypt have brought Palestinian frustrations to a boiling point.

The rocket attacks are a manifestation that Hamas feels cornered with its back to the wall. In fact, the attacks are probably the opening shots of a third Palestinian intifada.

Second, it is a fallacy to believe that the West Bank and Gaza are two separate entities. The bonds of Palestinian nationalism inextricably bind the two together, emotionally and politically.

Israeli excesses in the West Bank after the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens, especially the targeting and arrest of Hamas former prisoners in the West Bank, were bound to produce a reaction from Gaza.

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Syrian parliament condemns Israel’s ‘war of annihilation’

During the period since Israel launched its latest assault on Gaza, more than 300 people have been killed in Syria, mostly by the Syrian government, mostly by barrel bombs. The Syrian parliament, nevertheless felt that it was important to go on the record, denouncing the Israeli operation:

The People’s Assembly expressed on Saturday a vehement condemnation of Israel’s brutal aggression it has unleashed against the besieged Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip over the past days.

The Assembly dismissed in a statement on Saturday the aggression as “a war of annihilation” that demands international prosecution for the Israeli enemy’s authorities and all their supporters.

Likewise, Syria’s closest military ally, Iran, is deeply troubled about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza (Palestinians in Syria, not so much):

Iran Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani has condemned the silence of international organizations on the Israeli regime’s ruthless massacre of Palestinians.

In separate telephone conversations with his Emirati, Pakistani and Syrian counterparts on Tuesday, Larijani highlighted the Muslim leaders’ responsibility in preventing the criminal Zionist regime’s ruthless actions and the carnage of Gazans.

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Kurds enter Syria from Turkey to fight ISIS

AFP reports: Hundreds of Kurdish fighters have entered northern Syria to help battle jihadists besieging the Kurdish city of Ain al-Arab, a monitor said Tuesday.

“At least 800 Kurdish fighters crossed the Turkish-Syrian border to help their comrades in Ain al-Arab (Kobane in Kurdish), which is under total siege by Islamic State jihadists,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

A Kurdish Syrian activist said the flow of fighters came as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), blacklisted in Turkey as a terrorist organisation, gave orders for Kurdish fighters to move to protect Kobane.

“Fighters started going into Kobane from Turkey some four or five days ago,” said Havidar, who goes by only one name.

“But the latest entry, last night, came after orders from the higher leadership of the PKK. Last night, there were celebrations in Kobane — fighters were firing into the air as they arrived in the town,” he told AFP.

The Observatory’s Abdel Rahman also said the mobilisation had come after a call by the PKK, which has branches in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

“The Kurds are preparing for an assault by the Islamic State,” he said.

Syrian Kurds have been fighting the IS for many months.

“But this is the first time that the jihadists appear to be advancing while the Kurds are suffering real setbacks. That is because IS has brought in a lot of weapons from Iraq,” said Havidar, referring to weapons seizures from the Iraqi army amid an IS offensive there.

“Kurds going in to fight are from everywhere — Turkey, Iran, Syria and others. Even some Kurds based in Europe are saying they want to go fight,” he added. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi army remains on defensive as extent of June debacle becomes clearer

McClatchy reports: Five weeks after Islamist fighters stormed across northern and western Iraq in a surprise offensive that nearly reached the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, virtually every captured location remains firmly in rebel hands, while the central government’s meager efforts at a counteroffensive have met with failure on virtually every front.

Worse yet, Iraqi and U.S. officials have confirmed that fighters allied with the Islamic State not only captured hundreds of U.S.-supplied Humvees and large amounts of ammunition in their march across Iraq, but they also now possess as many as 52 U.S.-supplied artillery pieces with GPS aiming systems. The 155mm guns have a range of 20 miles, putting many Iraqi cities still in government hands easily within range of Islamic State positions.

Even the Iraqi government’s military briefings, consistently upbeat, hint at the grim outlook: The list of accomplishments cited by the Iraqi military’s spokesman are almost entirely defensive, making it clear that the Islamic State remains on the offensive and in control of when and where fighting takes place. [Continue reading…]

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