By Ramona Wadi*

Palestine continues to face an increasing contradiction which is becoming normalized in diplomatic arenas. During this year’s first UN Security Council session debating the Middle East and the Palestinian Question, Cuban representative Humberto Rivero Rosario made an observation that has been lacking in official rhetoric, but one that was diluted by the adherence to the two-state compromise. Referring to statistics and noting the increase in Israeli demolition of Palestinian dwellings in 2016, Rivero declared: “These figures, alarming as they seem, do not show the real magnitude of this reality for Palestinian families and for future generations of Palestinians.”

The statement represented a rare occasion in which statistics were considered part of the entire framework, rather than a mere research result, given the humanitarian dimension which is often minimized in order to preserve the dictated priorities which give rise to endless, futile debates about Palestine.

Rivero also noted that UNSC Resolution 2334 is inadequate. Following a reminder that this year will mark the 50th year of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the Cuban representative declared: “It is time to break the silence and the immobilization that has caused suffering and unfair humiliation to the Palestinian people; it is time to end impunity over Israel’s criminal actions against Palestine.”

Yet, driving this discourse was an affirmation of support for the two-state paradigm: “We reiterate that the only possible solution to the Palestinian issue is the peaceful coexistence of two independent states, with the establishment of the independent, sovereign and viable State of Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem and respecting the pre-1967 borders.”

It could be argued that since the internationally-imposed paradigm became a permanent, yet obsolete, requirement in discussing Palestine, support from countries which are pro-Palestine is becoming jeopardized. The parameters of expressing support for Palestine have become obscured due to the necessity of aligning such support to the imposition that has only resulted in further fragmentation of Palestine, rather than serving as a foundation upon which a semblance of a state can be achieved.

The slightest criticism of Israel, particularly from countries that are traditionally supportive of Palestine, have elicited venomous attacks from the colonial entity’s international representatives. One might remember the Israeli reaction to Venezuela’s UN Ambassador Rafael Ramirez’s criticism in May 2016 when highlighting the colonial intent to makes not only Palestine disappear, but also Palestinians. Disappearance, as Israel has exhibited time and again, is only subject to Israeli interpretations and statements – any other external reference is immediately construed as an affront.

However, one of the greatest threats to international support for Palestinians comes from the Palestinian Authority. Its appeasing role is contributing to statements which are constantly seeking to occupy that middle ground where support for Palestine is considered acceptable given that criticism does not extend to the Israeli colonial project. Last year, the Venezuelan Ambassador’s comments elicited such a vehement response because opposition to Israeli colonialism was hinted at, despite the government’s stance which also adheres to the two-state compromise.

Indeed, the PA is actively encouraging compromised support. The Palestinian UN Permanent Observer Riyad Mansour is reported to have hailed the resolution as “a chance to salvage the two-state solution and make Palestinian-Israeli peace a reality.” It is no wonder that the anti-colonial struggle has been relegated to history, given the political promotion by the internationally-recognized Palestinian leadership of harmful requirements aiding, rather than opposing colonization.

Cuba’s stance at the UN is partly commendable. It can, however, be a driving force internationally by a simple adherence to what Fidel Castro once stated at the UN: “Colonies do not speak. Colonies are not known until they have the opportunity to express themselves.” Yet, while Cuban insistence on this requirement can be a catalyst for diplomatic change, the PA’s penchant for normalizing colonization might prove to be the primary source of annihilating a comprehensive and authentic approach.

*Ramona Wadi is a staff writer for Middle East Monitor, where this article was first published. She is also a columnist in various newspaper, and an artist.

The United States has a new President — and for many, not only in America (in the extreme version) — the totally unacceptable Donald J. Trump.

In a precise ceremony in front of the Congress, Trump gave his oath and delivered his first speech as head of state. And for everybody who is not biased or has not become a prisoner of prejudices, he announced a complete turn in regard to  US policy. This turn can be detected in a couple of key messages which are, admittedly, populist, but not without a deeper political contents.

First of all, Trump confirmed that he is a convinced enemy of political elites, accusing them of prospering while ordinary Americans suffered. To the “forgotten men and women” of America he promised: “You are not forgotten any more and you will never be forgotten again”, adding that the day of his inauguration marks not the transfer of power from one political party to another, but from Washington DC to the people.

Then, using – historically speaking – the slogan of American isolationists, he stressed that from this day in deliberating on any decision only one principle will be applied and that is: America first! (accepting that every state in the world has the right to put its interests above everything else).

After that, more clearly than ever before, he repeated what he said for the first time accepting the nomination of the Republican party as presidential candidate. Last summer, namely, he announced that the US will stop imposing regimes. In his first presidential address he was even more precise: America will not impose her way of life on anybody. It is worth noting that the “American way of life” was until now sort of a sacred cow in the vocabulary of American politicians. Trump added that the US will be a shining example and the others will follow (if they want, of course).

And finally he said something that European neo-fascists — who (wrongly) think of him as “one of them” — would never understand: “If you open your heart to patriotism, there is no place for prejudices.”

Had he said nothing more, this speech should be remembered. Therefore it is absolutely wrong when the reporter of the German public TV (ARD) says this was not a presidential speech at all, but only a continuation of the election campaign.

By the way it would be interesting to hear what would the so-called liberals said had he after the inauguration changed his rhetoric and contents. They would lament about hypocrisy and not-consistency. But, as Trump remained consistent, they wrote him off as somebody who did not grasp at all that he is the President and is just continuing his campaign.

But, objectively speaking, the messages we mentioned has – for anybody willing to hear — marked as the beginning of what Trump described as the necessity to turn form empty words to deeds.

The core of his economic policy can be detected from the short slogan “buy American and hire American”. And only after being 30 minutes in office he put into question the multilateral trade agreements for American continent and Pacific region, confirming what he announced during the campaign, namely that he prefers a net of bilateral trade agreements instead of  multilateral ones.

He did not mention any of the concrete problems he will confront as President, such as relations with Russia or the health insurance system in the US. But, it was a programmatic speech, based on crucial messages and principles. He did, however, mention radical Islamism (not Islam, but radical Islamism), promising that he would eradicate it from the face of the Earth, for which he will without any doubt need cooperation from Russia.

Trump repeated that he will create new jobs in America, he spoke again about the decline of former US industrial centers (“inspiring” the German television to say that this is simply not true, but forgetting how many times we have seen the empty fabric hales in Detroit and empty streets in the now declining and many years ago prosperous American cities). And he promised, once again, that he will change this situation, that he will build new highways, new bridges, new railroads.

Some objected immediately that he did not say: how. It would have been almost a miracle had he done so in a situation when many of his planned members of the US government still lack the Congressional approval and when even some of them voice opinions quite different in regard to his own.

Be it, as it is, Trump has his vision of the future and he outlined the cornerstones on which he intends to build his vision, despite his critics who were not hesitating to say that he does not understand today’s world.

Some analysts heard in his words the echo of the inaugural speeches of the most famous American president of the 20th Century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and some said they had the impression that Bernie Sanders, the “apostle” of the democratic socialism in America is speaking through Trump’s mouth.

We would dare to go even one step further. If we put aside Trump’s person and the fact that he is extremely rich, and if we forget his repeated mentioning of God at the end of his speech, we can come to only one conclusion: What was said by Donald Trump should be embraced by every liberal leftist in the world. Caring for the ordinary, forgotten people, wealth for everyone, equality between all people (“we can be black, brown or yellow, but we all have the same red blood”), transformation of a system which benefited the politicians, while the middle class suffered, starting of new production, the transfer of power, it is worth repeating, not from one political party to another, but from the Washington elite to the people.

All of this can be seen, let us not deny this, as a populist, if not even a nationalist approach. But, at the same time it is closer to the left side of the political scene, than to the right one.

These are the first impressions based on Trump’s inaugural speech.

But, let us make one thing crystal clear. This is not a noncritical look at Donald Trump, who has many minuses – from the total lack of political experience, the unnecessary and potentially dangerous antagonizing of the People’s Republic of China to the very dubious hints about his energy policy or his standpoints about the global warning phenomena.

But, at the same time it is a call for much needed and long overdue change of American policy which made the world unstable and insecure and which made the global terrorism a real threat for everybody and everywhere by accepting the protagonists of this terrorism as allies in its projects of toppling the regimes in the Middle East.

Yes, such a change, even if it would be Trump’s turn, would be mostly welcome. Of course, if he delivers on what he has promised it stops here and it stops now. In only a few months we will know if he will be able to transform into reality his vision of America and its new role in the world. Not more: just a few months. After that we will know if Trump’s turn can become a success, or not. And his voters will know if he was right, when he promised them on the Inauguration day, “I will never let you down”.

*Author, born 1943., is a Croatian journalist – TV and press, specialized in covering the international relations. He was foreign policy advisor to the second President of the Republic of Croatia, Mr. Stjepan Mesić

There is much debate about what spurs political violence. The explanations are multi-fold. There is one aspect that I’d like to discuss tonight as it relates to Africa and that is the role of Saudi Arabia. Let me be clear: With the exception of a handful of countries, none of which are in Africa, Saudi Arabia, that is to say the government, the religious establishment and members of the ruling family and business community, does not fund violence.

It has however over the last half century launched the single largest public diplomacy campaign in history, pumping up to $100 billion dollars into ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam.[1] That campaign has succeeded in making ultra-conservatism a force in Muslim religious communities across the globe. It involves the promotion of an intolerant, supremacist, anti-pluralistic interpretation of Islam that even where it rejects involvement in politics creates an environment that in given circumstances serves as a breeding ground, but more often fosters a mindset in which militancy and violence against the other is not beyond the pale.

What that campaign has done, certainly in Muslim majority countries in Africa, is to ensure that representatives of Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism have influence in society as well as the highest circles of government. This is important because contrary to widespread beliefs, the Saudi campaign is not primarily about religion, it’s about geopolitics, it’s about a struggle with Iran for hegemony in the Muslim world. As a result, it’s about anti-Shiism and a ultra-conservative narrative that counters that of Shiism and what remains of Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary zeal.

The campaign also meant that at times resolving the question whether the kingdom maintains links to violent groups takes one into murky territory. Again, I want to be clear, certainly with the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and its affiliates in Africa and elsewhere, and even before with the emergence of Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia has made countering jihadism a cornerstone of its policy. That is however easier said than done.

What is evident in Africa is that the kingdom or at least prominent members of its clergy appear to have maintained wittingly or unwittingly some degree of contact with jihadist groups, including IS affiliates. What I want to do in the time I have is anecdotally illustrate the impact of Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism on three African states – Nigeria, Niger and Mali – and how this at times relates to political violence in the region.

Let’s start with Nigeria. One of the earliest instances in which Saudi Arabia flexed its expanding soft power in West Africa was in 1999 when Zamfara, a region where Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram has been active, became the first Nigerian state to adopt Sharia. A Saudi official stood next to Governor Ahmed Sani when he made the announcement. Freedom of religion scholar Paul Marshall recalls seeing some years later hundreds of Saudi-funded motorbikes in the courtyard of the governor’s residence. They had been purchased to enforce gender segregation in public transport. Sheikh Abdul-Aziz, the religious and cultural attaché at the Saudi embassy in Abuja declared in 2004 that the kingdom had been monitoring the application of Islamic law in Nigeria “with delight.”[2]

Like elsewhere in the Muslim world, local politicians in Zamfara were forging an opportunistic alliance with Saudi Arabia. If geopolitics was the Saudi driver, domestic politics was what motivated at least some of their local partners. Nonetheless, the lines between militant but peaceful politics and violence were often blurry. Political violence analyst Jacob Zenn asserts that Boko Haram even has some kind of representation in the kingdom.[3] A Boko Haram founder who was killed in 2009, Muhammad Yusuf, was granted refuge by the kingdom in 2004 to evade a Nigerian military crackdown. In Mecca, he forged links with like-minded Salafi clerics[4] that proved to be more decisive than his debates with Nigerian clerics who were critical of his interpretation of Islam.[5]

Once back in Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno state, Yusuf built with their assistance a state within a state centred around the Ibn Taymiyyah mosque and a compound in the city centre on land bought with the help of his father-in-law. Yusuf’s group had its own institutions, including a Shura or advisory council, a religious police force that enforced Islamic law, and a rudimentary welfare, microfinance and job creation system.[6]

It operated under a deal struck in talks in Mecca brokered by a prominent Salafi cleric between a dissident Boko Haram factional leader identified as Aby Muhammed and a close aide to former Nigerian President Jonathan Goodwill.[7] Under the agreement Yusuf pledged not to preach violence and to distance himself from separatist groups, an understanding he later violated. Boko Haram has further suggested that before joining IS, it had met with Al Qaeda operatives in Saudi Arabia.[8] Moreover, a Boko Haram operative responsible for attacking a church in Nigeria reportedly spent months in Saudi Arabia prior to the attack.[9]

Yusuf’s religious teacher, Sheikh Ja’afar Adam, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina, presided over a popular mosque in the Nigerian city of Kano that helped him build a mass audience. Adam’s popularity allowed him to promote colleagues, many of whom were also graduates of the same university in Medina, who became influential preachers and government officials. Adam was liberally funded by Al-Muntada al-Islami Trust, a London-based charity with ties to Saudi Arabia[10] that has repeatedly been accused by Nigerian intelligence a British peer, Lord Alton of Liverpool, of having links to Boko Haram and serving as a platform for militant Islamic scholars.[11] Al Muntada, which operates a mosque and a primary school in London, has denied the allegations while a UK Charity Commission investigation failed to substantiate the allegations. Kenyan and Somali intelligence nonetheless suspected Al-Muntada of also funding Al Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, Al Shabab.[12]

Among scholars hosted by Al Muntada are Mohammad Al Arifi, a Saudi preacher who argues that “the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honour for the believer.” He also reasons that the Muslim world would not have suffered humiliation had it followed “the Quranic verses that deal with fighting the infidels and conquering their countries say that they should convert to Islam, pay the jizya poll tax, or be killed.”[13]

Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, a Saudi academic, is another Al Muntada favourite. Al-Fawzan advises the faithful that “if (a) person is an infidel, even if this person is my mother or father, God forbid, or my son or daughter; I must hate him, his heresy, and his defiance of Allah and His prophet. I must hate his abominable deeds.”[14] Organizationally, the charity also maintained close ties to major Saudi funding organizations, including the Muslim World League (MWL), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), and Al Haramain Islamic Foundation,[15] a Saudi governmental non-nongovernmental organization that was shut down in the wake of 9/11 because of its jihadist ties.

Adam publicly condemned Yusuf after he took over Boko Haram. In response Yusuf in 2007 order the assassination of Adam, a protégé of the Saudi-funded Izala Society (formally known as the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Re-establishment of the Sunnah), which sprang up in northern Nigeria in the late 1970s to campaign against Sufi practices and has since gained ground in several West African states. Much like Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism’s relationship to jihadism, Izala after spawning Boko Haram became one of its main targets. The group has since the killing of Adam gunned down several other prominent Saudi-backed clerics.

Nigerian journalists and activists see a direct link between the influx of Saudi funds into Yusuf’s stomping ground in northern Nigeria and greater intolerance that rolled back the influence of Sufis that had dominated the region for centuries and sought to marginalize Shiites. “They built their own mosques with Saudi funds so that they will not follow ‘Kafirs’ in prayers& they erected their own madrasa schools where they indoctrinate people on the deviant teachings of Wahhabism. With Saudi petro-dollars, these Wahhabis quickly spread across towns & villages of Northern Nigeria… This resulted in countless senseless inter-religious conflicts that resulted in the death of thousands of innocent Nigerians on both sides.” said Shiite activist Hairun Elbinawi.[16]

Adam started his career as a young preacher in Izala, a Salafist movement founded in the late 1970s by prominent judge and charismatic orator Abubakr Gumi who was the prime facilitator of Saudi influence and the rise of Salafism in northern Nigeria. A close associate, Gumi represented northern Nigeria at gatherings of the Muslim World League starting in the 1960s, was a member of the consultative council of the Islamic University of Medina in the 1970s and was awarded for his efforts with the King Faisal Prize in 1987. All along, Gumi and Izala benefitted from generous Saudi financial support for its anti-Sufi and anti-Shiite campaigns.[17]

Adam and Gumi’s close ties to the kingdom did not mean that they uncritically adopted Saudi views. Their ultra-conservative views did not prevent them from at times adopting positions that took local circumstances in northern Nigeria into account at the expense of ultra-conservative rigidity. Adam’s questioning of the legitimacy of democracy, for example, did not stop him becoming for a period of time a government official in the state of Kano. In another example, Gumi at one point urged Muslim women to vote because “politics is more important than prayer,” a position that at the time would have been anathema to Saudi-backed ultra-conservative scholars. Similarly, Adam suggested that Salafists and Kano’s two major Sufi orders, viewed by Saudi puritans as heretics, should have equal shares of an annual, public Ramadan service.[18]

Peregrino Brimah, a trained medical doctor who teaches biology, anatomy and physiology at colleges in New York never gave much thought while growing up in Nigeria to the fact that clerics increasingly were developing links to Saudi Arabia. “You could see the money, the big ones were leading the good life, they ran scholarship programs. In fact, I was offered a scholarship to study at King Fahd University in Riyadh. I never thought about it until December 2015 when up to a 1,000 Shiites were killed by the military in northern Nigeria,” Brimah said.[19] “Since I started looking at it, I’ve realized how successful, how extraordinarily successful the Wahhabis have been.”

Brimah decided to stand up for Shiite rights after the incident in which the military arrested prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky following a clash with members of Shiites in Kaduna state.[20] The Nigerian military confirmed that it had attacked sites in the ancient university town Zaria after hundreds of Shia demonstrators had blocked a convoy of Nigeria’s army chief General Tukur Buratai in an alleged effort to kill him. Military police said Shiites had crawled through tall grass towards Buratai’s vehicle “with the intent to attack the vehicle with [a] petrol bomb” while others “suddenly resorted to firing gunshots from the direction of the mosque.” Scores were killed in the incident.[21] A phone call to Nigerian President Mohammed Buhari in which King Salman expressed his support for the government’s fight against terrorist groups was widely seen as Saudi endorsement of the military’s crackdown on the country’s Shiite minority. The state-owned Saudi Press Agency quoted Salman as saying that Islam condemned such “criminal acts” and that the kingdom in a reference to Iran opposed foreign interference in Nigeria.[22]

Brimah’s defense of the Shiites has cost him dearly and further illustrated the degree to which Saudi-funded Wahhabism and Salafism had altered the nature of Nigerian society. “I lost everything I had built on social media the minute I stood up for the Shiites. I had thousands of fans. Suddenly, I was losing 2-300 followers a day. My brother hasn’t spoken to me since. The last thing he said to me is: ‘how can you adopt Shiite ideology?’ I raised the issue in a Sunni chat forum. It became quickly clear that these attitudes were not accidental. They are the product of Saudi-sponsored teachings of serious hatred. People don’t understand what they are being taught. They rejoice when thousand Shiites are killed. Even worse is the fact that they hate people like me who stand up for the Shiites even more than they hate the Shiite themselves.”

In response to Brimah’s writing about the clash, Buratai, the Nigerian army chief, invited him to for a chat. Brimah politely declined. After again, accusing the military of having massacred Shiites, Buratai’s spokesman, Col. SK Usman, adopting the Saudi line of Shiites being Iranian stooges, accused Brimah of being on the Islamic republic’s payroll. “Several of us hold you in high esteem based on perceived honesty, intellectual prowess and ability to speak your mind. That was before, but the recent incident of attempted assassination of the Chief of Army Staff by the Islamic Movement of Nigeria and subsequent events and actions by some groups and individuals such as you made one to have a rethink. I was quite aware of your concerted effort to smear the good name and reputation of the Chief of Army Staff to the extent of calling for his resignation. He went out of his way to write to you and even invited you for constructive engagement. But because you have dubious intents, you cleverly refused…. God indeed is very merciful for exposing you. Let me make it abundantly clear to you that your acts are not directed to the person of the Chief of Army Staff, they have far reaching implication on our national security. Please think about it and mend your ways and refund whatever funds you coveted for the campaign of calumny,” Usman wrote in the mail.[23] Brimah’s inbox has since then been inundated with anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian writings in what he believes is a military-inspired campaign.

Brimah was not the only one to voice opposition to Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism. Murtada Muhammad Gusau, Chief Imam of Nagazi-Uvete Jumu’at Mosque and Alhaji Abdurrahman Okene’ s Mosque in Nigeria’s Okene Kogi State took exception to the kingdom’s global effort to criminalize blasphemy, legitimize in the process curbs on free speech, and reinforce growing Muslim intolerance towards any unfettered discussion of the faith. In a lengthy article in a Nigerian newspaper, Gusau debunked the Saudi-inspired crackdown on alleged blasphemists citing multiple verses from the Qur’an that advocate patience and tolerance and reject the killing of those that curse or berate the Prophet Mohammed.[24]

Brimah and Gusau were among the relatively few willing to invoke the wrath of spreading ultra-conservative, sectarian forms of Islam across a swath of Africa at an often dizzying pace. In the process, African politicians and ultraconservatives in cooperation with Saudi Arabia have let a genie of intolerance, discrimination, supremacy and bigotry out of the bottle. In the Sahel state of Niger, Issoufou Yahaya recalls his student days in the 1980s when there wasn’t a single mosque on his campus. “Today, we have more mosques here than we have lecture rooms. So much has changed in such a short time,” he said.[25]

One cannot avoid noticing Saudi Arabia’s role in this development. The flags of Niger and Saudi Arabia feature on a monument close to the office tower from which Yahaya administers the history of department of Université Abdou Moumouni in the Niger capital of Niamey. Sheikh Boureima Abdou Daouda, an Internet-savvy graduate of the Islamic University of Medina and the Niamey university’s medical faculty as well as an author and translator of numerous books, attracts tens of thousands of worshippers to the Grand Mosque where he insists that “We must adopt Islam, we cannot adapt it.”[26] Daouda serves as an advisor to Niger president Mahamadou Issoufou and chairs the League of Islamic Scholars and Preachers of the Countries of the Sahel. “Before, people here turned to religion when they reached middle age, and particularly after they retired. But now, it is above all the young ones. What we see is a flourishing of Islam.” Daouda said.[27]

What Daouda did not mention was that with Africa, the battleground where Iran put up its toughest cultural and religious resistance to Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism, was witnessing the world’s highest rates of conversion to Shi’a Islam since many Sunni tribes in southern Iraq adopted Shiism in the 19th century. Shiites were until recently virtually non-existent in Africa with the exception of migrants from Lebanon and the Indian subcontinent. A Pew Research survey suggests that that has changed dramatically. The number of Shiites has jumped from 0 in 1980 to 12 percent of Nigeria’s 90-million strong Shia community in 2012. Shiites account today for 21 percent of Chad’s Muslims, 20 percent in Tanzania and eight percent in Gaza, according to the survey.[28]

Source: Pew Research Center

Ironically, Mali a nation where Shiism has not made inroads and where only two percent of the populations identifies itself as Ahmadis, an Islamic sect widely viewed by conservative Muslims as heretics, is the only country outside of Pakistan that Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (AMTKN), a militant anti-Ahmadi, Pakistan-based group with a history of Saudi backing, identifies by name as a place where it operates overseas.[29] The fact that AMTKN, which says that it operates in 12 countries, identified Mali is indicative of the sway of often Saud-educated imams and religious leaders that reaches from the presidential palace in the capital Bamako into the country’s poorest villages. The government at times relies on Salafis rather than its own officials to mediate with jihadists in the north or enlist badly needed European support in the struggle against them. Moreover, cash-rich Salafi leaders and organizations provide social services in parts of Mali where the government is absent. In 2009, the Saudi-backed High Islamic Council of Mali (HICM) proved powerful enough to prevent the president from signing into law a parliamentary bill that would have enhanced women’s rights. Malian president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita reportedly phones HICM chief Mahmoud Dicko twice a week. Malians no longer simply identify each other as Muslims and instead employ terms such as Wahhabi, Sufi and Shia that carry with them either derogatory meanings or assertions of foreign associations.^[30]

Dicko condemned the November 2015 jihadist attack on the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako in which 20 people were killed but argued that world powers cannot enjoy peace by fighting God through promotion of homosexuality. Dicko said the perpetrators were not Muslims but mostly rappers with drug-related charge sheets. “They rebel and take arms against their society. This is a message from God that the masters of the world, the major powers, which are trying to promote homosexuality, must understand. These powers are trying to force the world to move towards homosexuality. These world powers have attacked the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) into his grave… These masters of this world, who think that the world belongs to them, must understand that we will not attack God and escape safely. They cannot provoke God and get his clemency, his mercy. They cannot have peace and peace with such provocations towards the Creator of the world down here. They will not have peace. God will not leave them alone.”^[31]

Like elsewhere, ultra-conservatism as a cornerstone of Saudi soft power has proven in Mali to be a double-edged sword for the kingdom and its beneficiaries. Iyad Ag Ghaly nicknamed The Strategist, a Malian Tuareg militant who led tribal protests in the 1990s and emerged in 2012 at the head of Ansar Eddine, one of the jihadist groups that overran the north of Mali, found ultra-conservative religion while serving as a Malian diplomat in Jeddah. A Sufi and a singer who occasionally worked with Tinariwen, the Grammy Award winning band formed by veterans of Tuareg armed resistance in the 1980s and 1990s, co-organized an internationally acclaimed annual music festival outside of Timbuktu that attracted the likes of Robert Plant, Bono and Jimmy Buffett, and hedonistically enjoyed parties, booze and tobacco, Ag Ghaly grew a beard while in Saudi Arabia. His meetings with Saudi-based jihadists persuaded the Malian government to cut short his stint in the kingdom and call him home.^[32] Pakistani missionaries of Tablighi Ja’amat, an ultra-conservative global movement that has at times enjoyed Saudi backing despite theological differences with Wahhabism and Salafism, helped convince Ag Ghaly to abandon his music and hedonistic lifestyle. He opted for an austere interpretation of Islam and ultimately jihadism.^[33]

This pattern is not uniquely African even if Africa is the continent where Iranian responses to Saudi promotion of Sunni ultra-conservatism have primarily been cultural and religious in nature rather than through the use of militant and armed proxies as in the Middle East. It is nonetheless a battle that fundamentally alters the fabric of those African societies in which it is fought; a battle that potentially threatens the carefully constructed post-colonial cohesion of those societies. The potential threat is significantly enhanced by poor governance and the rise of jihadist groups like Boko Haram, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and Al Shabab in Somalia, whose ideological roots can be traced back to ultra-conservatism but whose political philosophy views Saudi Arabia as an equally legitimate target because its rulers have deviated from the true path. At the bottom line, both Africans and Saudis are struggling to come to grips with a phenomenon they opportunistically harnessed to further their political interests; one that they no longer control and that has become as much a liability as it was an asset.

Thank you.

Annotated remarks at Terrorism in Africa seminar, Singapore 18 January 2017

*Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and a forthcoming book, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa

[1] Sohail Nakhoda, Keynote: Workshop on Islamic Developments in Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 15 November 2015; Prince Ghazi Bin Muhammad Bin Talal, “What Has Broken? Political, Sociological, Cultural and Religious Changes in the Middle East over the Last 25 Years”, S R Nathan Distinguished Lecture, Middle East Institute, 17 November 2015,

https://mei.nus.edu.sg/themes/site_themes/agile_records/images/uploads/What_has_broken_v.8,_As_Given_14.11.15.pdf / David Aufhauser, An Assessment of Current Efforts to Combat Terrorism Financing, Testimony of Hon. David D Aufhauser, Washington DC: Government Printing Office, June 15, 2004, p. 46.

[2] Email exchange with the author, 11 January 2016 / Pew Research Center, The Global Spread of Wahhabi Islam: How Great a Threat? 3 May 2005, http://www.pewforum.org/2005/05/03/the-global-spread-of-wahhabi-islam-how-great-a-threat/

[3] Jacob Zenn, Boko Haram’s International Connections, Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, 14 January 2013, https://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/boko-harams-international-connections

[4] Andrew Walker, Join us or die: the birth of Boko Haram, The Guardian, 4 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/join-us-or-die-birth-of-boko-haram

[5] Ahmad Salkida, Muhammad Yusuf: Teaching and preaching controversies, Salkida.com, 28 February 2009, http://salkida.com/muhammad-yusuf-teaching-and-preaching-controversies/

[6] Ibid. Walker

[7] Agence France Press, Nigeria not talking to Boko Haram Islamists, president says, 18 November 2012, https://www.modernghana.com/news/431127/1/nigeria-not-talking-to-boko-haram-islamists-presid.html / Ibid. Walker

[8] Monica Mark, Boko Haram vows to fight until Nigeria establishes sharia law, The Guardian, 27 January 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/27/boko-haram-nigeria-sharia-law

[9] Ibid. Zenn

[10] Alex Thurston, How far does Saudi Arabia’s influence go? Look at Nigeria, The Washington Post, 31 October 2016,

[11] Jamie Doward, Peer raises fears over UK charity’s alleged links to Boko Haram, The Observer, 8 September 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/09/uk-charity-boko-haram

[12] Interview with Islam scholar, 04 November 2016

[13] The Middle East Media Research Institute, Saudi Cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi: ‘The Desire to Shed Blood, to Smash Skulls, and to Sever Limbs for the Sake of Allah Is an Honor for the Believer,’ 12 August 2010, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print4523.htm

[14] Stand for Peace, Briefing document: Month of Mercy Conference, 2012, http://standforpeace.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Month-of-mercy-briefing-updated.pdf

[15] Samuel Westrop, Grooming Jihadists, Gatestone Institute, 28 July 2014, https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4521/grooming-jihadists

[16] Hairun Elbinawi, How Wahhabism Made The North Lethally Intolerant: Gratitude To Nigerian Christians, Newsrescue.com, 7 February 2016,

http://newsrescue.com/hiw-wahhabism-made-the-north-lethally-intolerant-gratitude-to-nigerian-christians/#ixzz3zXcEwaNO

[17] Ousmane Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria, Leiden: Brill, 2003

[18] Ibid. Thurston

[19] Interview with the author, 8 February 2016

[20] Hadassah Egbedi, The Arrest of Sheikh Ibrahim Zazaky Revealed these Four Things, Ventures, 17 December 2015, http://venturesafrica.com/four-things-the-arrest-of-sheikh-ibrahim-zakzaky-reveals/

[21] Al Jazeera, Nigeria accused of killing hundreds of Shia Muslims, 16 December 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/nigeria-accused-killing-hundreds-shia-muslims-151216032540123.html

[22] Arab News, King Salman vows support to Nigeria’s fight against terror, 19 December 2015, http://www.arabnews.com/featured/news/852581

[23] Email dated 9 January 2016 from Col. SK Usman to Peregrino Brimah, provided by Brimah to the author.

[24] Murtada Muhammad Gusau, Kano Killing: What Islam says about blasphemy and killings, The Premium Times, 5 June 2016, http://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/204702-premium-times-special-kano-killing-islam-says-blasphemy-killings.html

[25] Ibid. Trofimov, Jihad Comes to Africa

[26] Abdourahmane Idrissa, The Invention of Order: Republican Codes and Islamic Law in Niger, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Florida, 2009, http://etd.fcla.edu/UF/UFE0024288/idrissa_a.pdf

[27] Ibid. Trofimov

[28] Pew Research Center, The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity, 9 August 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-executive-summary / Yaroslav Trofimov, With Iran-Backed Conversions, Shiites Gain Ground in Africa, The Wall Street Journal, 10 May 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/with-iran-backed-conversions-shiites-gain-ground-in-africa-1463046768

[29] Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat, www.amtkn.com

[30] Jack Watling and Paul Raymond, The Struggle for Mali, The Guardian, 25 November 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/25/the-struggle-for-mali

[31] Kassim Traore, Mali : L’Imam Mahamoud Dicko à propos des actes terroristes dans le monde : «Les maîtres du monde doivent cesser de faire la promotion de l’homosexualité. Ceux qui posent des actes terroristes sont des anciens rappeurs, ceux qu’on appelle la racaille…, MaliActu.net, 29 November 2015, http://maliactu.net/mali-limam-mahamoud-dicko-a-propos-des-actes-terroristes-dans-le-monde-les-maitres-du-monde-doivent-cesser-de-faire-la-promotion-de-lhomosexualite-ceux-qui-posent-des-acte/

[32] Julius Cavendish, The Fearsome Tuareg Uprising in Mali: Less Monolithic than Meets the Eye, Time, 30 March 2012, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2110673,00.html?xid=gonewsedit

[33] Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts, New York: Simon & Shuster, Kindle edition

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen met Archbishop Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiagathe, the coordinator of Pope Francis’ advisory body during her recent visit to Central America.

On the second day of her itinerary in Honduras, Tsai attended Mass at the Basilica of Suyapa of Tegucigalpa Archdiocese and received a blessing by Cardinal Maradiaga.

Cardinal Maradiaga is the coordinator of the pope’s appointed nine-member Council of Cardinal Advisers, which was created to help the pontiff with reforms to the Roman Curia.

The cardinal, 74, prayed for Taiwan to be “free of conflict and continue moving forward amid dialogue.” Cardinal Maradiaga also asked God to bless Taiwan and see that the country receives its just reward for all the assistance it has provided Honduras over so many years, said a report from the Taiwan’s president’s office.

During her last day in El Salvador on Jan. 13, Tsai also visited the Holy Savior Cathedral of San Salvador, where Blessed Oscar Romero, the former archbishop, was buried.

Together with Archbishop Jose Luis Escobar Alas, Tsai presented a wreath on Blessed Romero’s tomb and wrote in Chinese “Brave man without fear, Axiom forever” in the visitor’s book.

A Taiwan observer believed such arrangements was to reassure Tsai of the stability of the Taiwan-Vatican relationship as “it is not necessary for a church official to meet Tsai during a diplomatic visit.”

Tsai visited Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador from Jan. 8-13. All these countries maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan which neighboring China considers a renegade province.

In his much-anticipated Inaugural address, US President Donald Trump was thin on foreign policy, save his “America First” and the pledge to wipe Radical Islam off the face of planet, raising new questions about the “new” American foreign policy that aims to deliver a “winning strategy,” to paraphrase Trump.

At the core of Trump’s foreign policy belief is that (a) radical Islam is the number one global threat and (b) the US is losing that war partly because of the failed policies of the Obama administration, and (c) the US can and should win this war. This is a view that is shared by Trump’s top foreign policy advisers, including General Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, and his deputies, who have articulated the narrative behind this belief. Trump’s decision to visit the CIA’s headquarter on his second day in office, where he repeated the theme of prioritizing the war on radical Islam, illustrates his determination to put that belief into action without any delay.

In a 2016 book, titled The Field of Fight: How We can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, Flynn spells out his understanding of “Radical Islam” (with capital letters) and what it takes to defeat it. He defines it as a totalitarian anti-Western ideology out to destroy the West and dominate the world, epitomized by the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

There is, indeed, no substantive distinction between ISIS and today’s Iran, given Flynn’s insistence that “there is a direct relationship between the fanaticism of the Islamic radicals and the Iranian regime.” (p. 128). According to Flynn, the US 2003 invasion of Iraq was a “huge mistake” and “our primary target should have been Tehran, not Baghdad.” (p. 175). But, the problem is that Iran is not alone and has “allies” such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Venezuela, benefiting from “Obama’s curious sympathy.” (p. 91). Flynn’s proposed solution is essentially three-fold: first, stand up to Iran and weaken its alliance by propping up the anti-Iran alliance, split the Russia-Iran alliance and cause a US-Russia common cause against Radical Islam, and, third, support the internal opposition in Iran.

A major lacuna of Flynn’s book is that there is a near total absence of any reference to Saudi Arabia and its role in propagating “radical jihadism.” Despite the availability of numerous evidence of active Saudi support for the ISIS terrorists in Iraq and Syria, Flynn completely dispenses with this subject and limits himself to passing references to many “partners” of the US in the region who support and enable the “violent Islamic ideology.”

This does not wash and a candid consideration of the problem is needed that does not shy away from Saudi Arabia’s culpability in exporting radical jihadism in the region and beyond. Flynn recognizes Pakistan’s role in harboring radical jihadists and proposes that the US should send a message that it does not “tolerate” the existence of training camps and a save haven for Taliban, Haggani, and al-Qaeda forces on their territory,” and should cut off aid in case such countries refuse to toe the line against the threat of radical Islam.

Much like Trump, who repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for, “not fighting to win,” Flynn writes about the need for an aggressive leadership that is not worried about consensus at home before waging a new war against this “existential threat.” He calls for the removal of existing restriction on “rules of engagement” that tie the hands of the US military, which will likely mean less sensitivity to “collateral damage” and interrogation techniques.

Convinced that Russia too “has a good deal to fear from radical Islamists, Flynn’s solution is to target Iran, the “linchpin” and “centerpiece” of radical Islamists and their alliance, which contradicts Trump’s own analysis, stated in the presidential debates, that both Iran and Russia are fighting ISIS. In Flynn’s worldview, however, Iran is a “radical Islamist regime” and, therefore, it is impossible to negotiate a modus vivendi with Iran’s rulers who are, supposedly, unable or unwilling to “abandon” their virulent anti-Western “messianic vision.”

Although he writes about the ISIS and al-Qaeda, Flynn nonetheless is adamant that, “the issue is the regime in Tehran and their radical version of Islam…New American leaders will have to craft a winning strategy that will bring freedom to Iran.” (pps. 88, 176). This too collides with Trump’s statement that the US in the past has erred by pushing for “regime change” around the world.

Notwithstanding the Flynn’s above-mentioned Manichean Iranophobia, a big question is of course to what extent this narrative will guide the Trump administration’s foreign policy? Thick on generalities and short on details and in-depth analysis, Flynn’s narrative leaves a lot to be desired and omits significant topics, such as how the US itself has used the “radical Islamist” card against its enemies such as Russia? A limited functional use of this threat for America’s anti-Russian policy is thereby overlooked, just as Flynn is incapable of providing an apt account of the US-Saudi nexus behind the anti-Syrian jihadists in the Syrian theater during the past five years, polished over in the name of supporting “moderate rebels.”

Clearly, the Trump administration’s adoption of the restrictive and narrow-minded proposals by Flynn could be a recipe for disaster and lead to a significant harm in the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorism. At a time when the US is pondering whether or not to participate in the Syrian peace talks brokered by Russia, Turkey, and Iran, it would be nothing short of dysfunctional to shy away from the window of opportunity for a US effort with these other nations against ISIS simply as a result of an unreconstructed and abstract notion of “Radical Islam” that bundles different species of Islam together and thus presents a distorted and undifferentiated image that does not correspond with reality.

The inherent danger of getting sidetracked from the war on terror by lumping Iran as an enemy in this war, instead of a partner, cannot be overstated.

(EurActiv) — International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Christine Lagarde reassured German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble this week that the IMF plans to remain constructively engaged in talks about aid for Greece, a spokesman for Schäuble said earlier today (20 January).

Lagarde spoke with Schäuble about the Greek bailout programme during the World Economic Forum in Davos and told him the IMF was aiming to continue its participation, the spokesman told a regular government news conference.

The German Finance Ministry this week denied a report in Bild newspaper that Berlin was preparing for a deal without the global lender, which has said it will join the deal only if it includes significant debt relief.

Speaking at the annual Swiss forum, Lagarde also said that one of the biggest risks to the global economy in 2017 was “a race to the bottom” on taxes, regulations and trade, in an indirect reference to the policy plans of the incoming US administration.

“If the disruptions we are expecting for 2017 as a result of what has happened in 2016 prove to be all negative and we are to end up in a race to the bottom on the tax front, on the trade front, on the financial regulation front, then that for me would be a really big black swan that would have devastating effects,” Lagarde told the Davos crowd.

Schäuble took a more direct swipe at Donald Trump, who is enjoying his inauguration today, telling German media that the US will have to stick to international agreements.

“The United States also signed international agreements,” Schäuble told magazine Der Spiegel.

“I don’t think a big trade war will break out tomorrow, but we will naturally insist that agreements are upheld,” he said.

Trump criticised German auto makers this week for failing to produce more cars in the US and warned that he would impose a tax of 35% on vehicle imports.

U.S. companies employ more than 600,000 people in Germany, the United States’ biggest European trading partner, and German firms employ roughly the same number in the U.S.

Schäuble said he wished Trump luck if he wanted to tell Americans which cars to buy. “That’s not my vision of America and I don’t think it’s his either,” he said.

He also recommended not taking Trump’s practice of tweeting policy changes too seriously.

“One shouldn’t confuse Trump’s form of communication with statements of government policy. We will not participate in that,” he said.

In medicine, vaccinating against a virus involves exposing a body to a weakened version of the threat, enough to build a tolerance.

Social psychologists believe that a similar logic can be applied to help “inoculate” the public against misinformation, including the damaging influence of ‘fake news’ websites propagating myths about climate change.

A new study compared reactions to a well-known climate change fact with those to a popular misinformation campaign. When presented consecutively, the false material completely cancelled out the accurate statement in people’s minds – opinions ended up back where they started.

Researchers then added a small dose of misinformation to delivery of the climate change fact, by briefly introducing people to distortion tactics used by certain groups. This “inoculation” helped shift and hold opinions closer to the truth – despite the follow-up exposure to ‘fake news’.

The study on US attitudes found the inoculation technique shifted the climate change opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats alike.

Published in the journal Global Challenges, the study was conducted by researchers from the universities of Cambridge, UK, Yale and George Mason, US. It is one of the first on ‘inoculation theory’ to try and replicate a ‘real world’ scenario of conflicting information on a highly politicized subject.

“Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus,” says lead author Dr Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist from the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab.

“We wanted to see if we could find a ‘vaccine’ by pre-emptively exposing people to a small amount of the type of misinformation they might experience. A warning that helps preserve the facts.

“The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible.”

To find the most compelling climate change falsehood currently influencing public opinion, van der Linden and colleagues tested popular statements from corners of the internet on a nationally representative sample of US citizens, with each one rated for familiarity and persuasiveness.

The winner: the assertion that there is no consensus among scientists, apparently supported by the Oregon Global Warming Petition Project. This website claims to hold a petition signed by “over 31,000 American scientists” stating there is no evidence that human CO2 release will cause climate change.

The study also used the accurate statement that “97% of scientists agree on manmade climate change”. Prior work by van der Linden has shown this fact about scientific consensus is an effective ‘gateway’ for public acceptance of climate change.

In a disguised experiment, researchers tested the opposing statements on over 2,000 participants across the US spectrum of age, education, gender and politics using the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk.

In order to gauge shifts in opinion, each participant was asked to estimate current levels of scientific agreement on climate change throughout the study.

Those shown only the fact about climate change consensus (in pie chart form) reported a large increase in perceived scientific agreement – an average of 20 percentage points. Those shown only misinformation (a screenshot of the Oregon petition website) dropped their belief in a scientific consensus by 9 percentage points.

Some participants were shown the accurate pie chart followed by the erroneous Oregon petition. The researchers were surprised to find the two neutralised each other (a tiny difference of 0.5 percentage points).

“It’s uncomfortable to think that misinformation is so potent in our society,” says van der Linden. “A lot of people’s attitudes toward climate change aren’t very firm. They are aware there is a debate going on, but aren’t necessarily sure what to believe. Conflicting messages can leave them feeling back at square one.”

Alongside the consensus fact, two groups in the study were randomly given ‘vaccines’:

• A general inoculation, consisting of a warning that “some politically-motivated groups use misleading tactics to try and convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists”.
• A detailed inoculation that picks apart the Oregon petition specifically. For example, by highlighting some of the signatories are fraudulent, such as Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls, and less than 1% of signatories have backgrounds in climate science.

For those ‘inoculated’ with this extra data, the misinformation that followed did not cancel out the accurate message.

The general inoculation saw an average opinion shift of 6.5 percentage points towards acceptance of the climate science consensus, despite exposure to fake news.

When the detailed inoculation was added to the general, it was almost 13 percentage points – two-thirds of the effect seen when participants were just given the consensus fact.

The research team point out that tobacco and fossil fuel companies have used psychological inoculation in the past to sow seeds of doubt, and to undermine scientific consensus in the public consciousness.

They say the latest study demonstrates that such techniques can be partially “reversed” to promote scientific consensus, and work in favour of the public good.

The researchers also analysed the results in terms of political parties. Before inoculation, the fake negated the factual for both Democrats and Independents. For Republicans, the fake actually overrode the facts by 9 percentage points.

However, following inoculation, the positive effects of the accurate information were preserved across all parties to match the average findings (around a third with just general inoculation; two-thirds with detailed).

“We found that inoculation messages were equally effective in shifting the opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats in a direction consistent with the conclusions of climate science,” says van der Linden.

“What’s striking is that, on average, we found no backfire effect to inoculation messages among groups predisposed to reject climate science, they didn’t seem to retreat into conspiracy theories.

“There will always be people completely resistant to change, but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little.”

The saga of cocoa (Theobroma cacao) in southern Bahia is part of Brazil’s economic and cultural history. Brazil was once the world’s second-largest cocoa producer and now ranks sixth. After more than 20 years of exile from the global market, cocoa growers were able to resume exports of the commodity only in 2015.

The culprit behind the decline of Bahian cocoa was the fungus Moniliophthora perniciosa, which causes witch’s broom. This disease appeared in the Ilhéus-Itabuna area in 1989 and attacked the shoots, flowers and pods of cocoa trees.

Their branches had ineffective leaves and bore no fruit. Brazil produced only 190,000 tons of cocoa in 1991, down from 320,000 tons per year before the disease hit. The plunge was entirely due to crop losses in Bahia, which had previously produced 80% of the nation’s total cocoa output.

In the past two decades, strenuous efforts have been made to combat witch’s broom, mainly by developing new varieties of disease-resistant cocoa, given that the fungus is still alive and well in southern Bahia.

One of the most innovative initiatives is a study of the genetic structure and molecular diversity of the varieties of cocoa grown in Bahia for over 200 years. The principal investigator is Anete Pereira de Souza, a professor at the University of Campinas’s Biology Institute (IB-UNICAMP) in São Paulo State and a researcher at the same university’s Center for Molecular Biology & Genetic Engineering (CBMEG), in collaboration with researchers from several universities and research institutions in Bahia.

“The low resistance of Bahia’s cocoa trees to witch’s broom has always intrigued me,” Souza said. “The Brazilian Amazon is one of the oldest origins of the species Theobroma cacao. So many varieties and types of cocoa must exist there, and some of them must be resistant to M. perniciosa. Why did the disease practically wipe out southern Bahia’s cocoa plantations in a few years if the plant originally came from the Amazon? We decided to study the genetic history of Bahian cocoa in order to discover why it’s so vulnerable and find a way of making it more resistant to the fungus.”

Cocoa arrived in Bahia in 1746, when Louis Frédéric Warneau, a French settler living in Pará, sent seeds of the variety Forastero (in the Amelonado group) to Antonio Dias Ribeiro, a farmer of Portuguese origin, who sowed them on his plantation in what is now the municipality of Canavieiras in Bahia.

The next generation was sown in Ilhéus in 1752. The plants adapted well to the local climate. Cocoa plantations spread throughout the region in the nineteenth century, and exports rose in step with demand for chocolate in Europe and the United States. By the early twentieth century, cocoa was Bahia’s main export.

“The quality of Bahian cocoa is outstanding,” Souza said. “So much so that Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria and Cameroon, the top five producers, in that order, all grow Bahian cocoa. The original seeds introduced were from Bahia’s Forastero variety.”

Witch’s broom is endemic to South America and the Caribbean. It has never crossed the oceans to infest plantations in Africa or Southeast Asia.

The results of the huge epidemiological and scientific campaign waged against the disease in Brazil are starting to appear. After bottoming out at 170,000 tons in 2003, Brazil’s cocoa output rebounded to a 26-year high of 291,000 tons in 2014.

Improved control of witch’s broom has enabled Bahia to resume exports. It shipped 6,600 tons of cocoa beans to Europe in 2015.

To understand the genetic reasons for Bahian cocoa’s extreme susceptibility to witch’s broom, Souza went into the field with Elisa Santos, then her PhD supervisee at the University of Southwest Bahia (UESB), and with researchers from the University of Santa Cruz (UESC) and the Cocoa Recovery Plan Steering Committee (CEPLAC), based in Ilhéus, Bahia. Santos collected 219 samples of cocoa leaves from seven farms and 51 samples of hybrids developed over decades at the Cocoa Research Center (CEPEC) in Ilhéus.

Back at CBMEG in Campinas, Souza sequenced the nuclear DNA of all 270 samples. The investigation focused on 30 molecular markers, short DNA sequences that served as parameters for comparing varieties.

The genetic base was found to be very narrow: literally all of Bahia’s cocoa trees are the descendants of only a few individuals. More specifically, they all originated from a small number of Forastero seeds, including the handful picked by Warneau 270 years ago.

The researchers also found that the seeds were well chosen for the quality of the fruit produced by the trees concerned.

While low genetic diversity guarantees high-quality fruit, it also explains why the population of cocoa trees as a whole was so fragile, as it resulted in a lack of varieties capable of resisting diseases such as witch’s broom.

“The genetic base was already narrow, and they chose only plants from that base to obtain hybrids,” Souza said. “It didn’t occur to them to introduce new varieties from outside Bahia so as to enrich the genetic base in the region. As a result, the hybrids produced were even less disease resistant.”

The good news brought by the researchers was the discovery of trees growing on local farms that were disease resistant and that displayed greater genetic diversity than the previously known hybrids. “The cocoa trees concerned were planted before the appearance of witch’s broom and have never been attacked. That’s why they were left intact and continued producing,” Souza said. “There must be others, besides the ones we took samples from. These trees can’t be lost. Government and growers must preserve these varieties, as they represent the future success of the cocoa industry not just in Bahia but also nationwide and indeed worldwide, given that Bahian cocoa has been exported to so many countries around the world.”

New hybrids involving the trees found to be disease resistant and to display broader genetic diversity are now being obtained by plant breeders at Bahia’s research centers.

Elderly women who sit for more than 10 hours a day with low physical activity have cells that are biologically older by eight years compared to women who are less sedentary, according to a researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine.

The study, publishing online January 18 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found elderly women with less than 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day and who remain sedentary for more than 10 hours per day have shorter telomeres — tiny caps found on the ends of DNA strands, like the plastic tips of shoelaces, that protect chromosomes from deterioration and progressively shorten with age.

As a cell ages, its telomeres naturally shorten and fray, but health and lifestyle factors, such as obesity and smoking, may accelerate that process. Shortened telomeres are associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes and major cancers.

“Our study found cells age faster with a sedentary lifestyle. Chronological age doesn’t always match biological age,” said Aladdin Shadyab, PhD, lead author of the study with the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Shadyab and his research team believe they are the first to objectively measure how the combination of sedentary time and exercise can impact the aging biomarker.

Nearly 1,500 women, ages 64 to 95, participated in the study. The women are part of the larger Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), a national, longitudinal study investigating the determinants of chronic diseases in postmenopausal women. The participants completed questionnaires and wore an accelerometer on their right hip for seven consecutive days during waking and sleeping hours to track their movements.

“We found that women who sat longer did not have shorter telomere length if they exercised for at least 30 minutes a day, the national recommended guideline,” said Shadyab. “Discussions about the benefits of exercise should start when we are young, and physical activity should continue to be part of our daily lives as we get older, even at 80 years old.”

Shadyab said future studies will examine how exercise relates to telomere length in younger populations and in men.

Researchers from the field of ultrafast phenomena and photonics have built on their earlier findings, published in October 2015 in the scientific journal Science, where they have demonstrated direct detection of signals from pure nothingness.

This essential scientific progress might make it possible to solve problems that physicists have grappled with for a long time, ranging from a deeper understanding of the quantum nature of radiation to research on attractive material properties such as high-temperature superconductivity. The new results are published on 19 January 2017 in the current online issue of the scientific journal Nature.

A world-leading optical measurement technique, developed by Alfred Leitenstorfer’s team, made this fundamental insight possible. A special laser system generates ultrashort light pulses that last only a few femtoseconds and are thus shorter than half a cycle of light in the investigated spectral range. One femtosecond corresponds to the millionth of a billionth of a second. The extreme sensitivity of the method enables detection of electromagnetic fluctuations even in the absence of intensity, that is, in complete darkness. Theoretically, the existence of these “vacuum fluctuations” follows from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Alfred Leitenstorfer and his team succeeded in directly observing these fluctuations for the first time and in the mid-infrared frequency range, where even conventional approaches to quantum physics have not worked previously.

The conceptual novelty of the experiments is that instead of the frequency-domain techniques used so far, the physicists from Konstanz accessed quantum statistics of light directly in the time domain. At a chosen point in time, electric field amplitudes are directly measured instead of analysing light in a narrow frequency band. Studying different points in time results in characteristic noise patterns that allow for detailed conclusions about the temporal quantum state of light. As the laser pulse propagates together with the quantum field under study, the Konstanz physicists can, so to speak, bring time to a stop. Ultimately, space and time, that is “space-time”, behave absolutely equivalently in these experiments – an indication of the inherently relativistic nature of electromagnetic radiation.

As the new measurement technique neither has to absorb the photons to be measured nor amplify them, it is possible to directly detect the electromagnetic background noise of the vacuum and thus also the controlled deviations from this ground state, created by the researchers. “We can analyse quantum states without changing them in the first approximation”, says Alfred Leitenstorfer. The high stability of the Konstanz technology is an important factor for the quantum measurements, as the background noise of their ultrashort laser pulses is extremely low.

By manipulating the vacuum with strongly focused femtosecond pulses, the researchers come up with a new strategy to generate “squeezed light”, a highly nonclassical state of a radiation field. The speed of light in a certain segment of space-time is deliberately changed with an intense pulse of the femtosecond laser. This local modulation of the velocity of propagation “squeezes” the vacuum field, which is tantamount to a redistribution of vacuum fluctuations. Alfred Leitenstorfer compares this mechanism of quantum physics graphically with a traffic jam on the motorway: from a certain point on, some cars are going slower. As a result, traffic congestion sets in behind these cars, while the traffic density will decrease in front of that point. That means: when fluctuation amplitudes decrease in one place, they increase in another.

While the fluctuation amplitudes positively deviate from the vacuum noise at temporally increasing speed of light, a slowing down results in an astonishing phenomenon: the level of measured noise is lower than in the vacuum state – that is, the ground state of empty space.

The simple illustration with the traffic on a motorway, however, quickly reaches its limits: in contrast to this “classical physics” picture, where the number of cars remains constant, the noise amplitudes change completely differently with increasing acceleration and deceleration of space-time. In case of a moderate “squeezing”, the noise pattern is distributed around the vacuum level fairly symmetrically. With increasing intensity, however, the decrease inevitably saturates toward zero. The excess noise that is accumulated a few femtoseconds later, in contrast, increases non-linearly – a direct consequence of the Uncertainty Principle’s character as an algebraic product. This phenomenon can be equated with the generation of a highly nonclassical state of the light field, in which, for example, always two photons emerge simultaneously in the same volume of space and time.

The experiment conducted in Konstanz raises numerous new questions and promises exciting studies to come. Next, the physicists aim at understanding the fundamental limits of their sensitive detection method which leaves the quantum state seemingly intact. In principle, every experimental analysis of a quantum system would ultimately perturb its state. Currently, still a high number of individual measurements needs to be performed in order to obtain a result: 20 million repetitions per second. The physicists can not yet say with certainty whether it is a so-called “weak measurement” in conventional terms of quantum theory.

The new experimental approach to quantum electrodynamics is only the third method to study the quantum state of light. Now fundamental questions arise: What exactly is the quantum character of light? What actually is a photon? Concerning the last question, that much is clear to the Konstanz physicists: instead of a quantized packet of energy it is rather a measure for the local quantum statistics of electromagnetic fields in space-time.

The age of big data has seen a host of new techniques for analyzing large data sets. But before any of those techniques can be applied, the target data has to be aggregated, organized, and cleaned up.

That turns out to be a shockingly time-consuming task. In a 2016 survey, 80 data scientists told the company CrowdFlower that, on average, they spent 80 percent of their time collecting and organizing data and only 20 percent analyzing it.

An international team of computer scientists hopes to change that, with a new system called Data Civilizer, which automatically finds connections among many different data tables and allows users to perform database-style queries across all of them. The results of the queries can then be saved as new, orderly data sets that may draw information from dozens or even thousands of different tables.

“Modern organizations have many thousands of data sets spread across files, spreadsheets, databases, data lakes, and other software systems,” said Sam Madden, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and faculty director of MIT’s bigdata@CSAIL initiative. “Civilizer helps analysts in these organizations quickly find data sets that contain information that is relevant to them and, more importantly, combine related data sets together to create new, unified data sets that consolidate data of interest for some analysis.”

The researchers presented their system last week at the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research. The lead authors on the paper are Dong Deng and Raul Castro Fernandez, both postdocs at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Madden is one of the senior authors. They’re joined by six other researchers from Technical University of Berlin, Nanyang Technological University, the University of Waterloo, and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. Although he’s not a co-author, MIT adjunct professor of electrical engineering and computer science Michael Stonebraker, who in 2014 won the Turing Award — the highest honor in computer science — contributed to the work as well.

Pairs and permutations

Data Civilizer assumes that the data it’s consolidating is arranged in tables. As Madden explains, in the database community, there’s a sizable literature on automatically converting data to tabular form, so that wasn’t the focus of the new research. Similarly, while the prototype of the system can extract tabular data from several different types of files, getting it to work with every conceivable spreadsheet or database program was not the researchers’ immediate priority. “That part is engineering,” Madden said.

The system begins by analyzing every column of every table at its disposal. First, it produces a statistical summary of the data in each column. For numerical data, that might include a distribution of the frequency with which different values occur; the range of values; and the “cardinality” of the values, or the number of different values the column contains. For textual data, a summary would include a list of the most frequently occurring words in the column and the number of different words. Data Civilizer also keeps a master index of every word occurring in every table and the tables that contain it.

Then the system compares all of the column summaries against each other, identifying pairs of columns that appear to have commonalities — similar data ranges, similar sets of words, and the like. It assigns every pair of columns a similarity score and, on that basis, produces a map, rather like a network diagram, that traces out the connections between individual columns and between the tables that contain them.

Tracing a path

A user can then compose a query and, on the fly, Data Civilizer will traverse the map to find related data. Suppose, for instance, a pharmaceutical company has hundreds of tables that refer to a drug by its brand name, hundreds that refer to its chemical compound, and a handful that use an in-house ID number. Now suppose that the ID number and the brand name never show up in the same table, but there’s at least one table linking the ID number and the chemical compound, and one linking the chemical compound and the brand name. With Data Civilizer, a query on the brand name will also pull up data from tables that use just the ID number.

Some of the linkages identified by Data Civilizer may turn out to be spurious. But the user can discard data that don’t fit a query while keeping the rest. Once the data have been pruned, the user can save the results as their own data file.

By Jared Ferrie*

When international leaders met in the Bangladeshi capital last month for ongoing discussions about a new global migration policy, they glossed over what experts say will soon become a massive driver of migration: climate change.

“The international system is in a state of denial,” said A.N.M. Muniruzzaman, a retired major-general who now heads the Bangladesh Institute for Peace and Security Studies.

The Global Forum on Migration and Development in Dhaka came less than two months after UN nation states committed to developing within two years a Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Climate change figured only as a sub-theme during one roundtable at the conference, which Muniruzzaman said was typical of similar events.

“If we want an orderly management of the coming crisis, we need to sit down now – we should have sat down yesterday – to talk about how the management will take place,” he said in an interview in his office in Bangladesh’s crowded capital.

Groups like the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, and the International Organization for Migration, are well aware of the risks, and say they are working to bring climate change to the forefront of policy discussions. During the roundtable in Dhaka, Michele Cavinato, head of UNHCR’s Asylum and Migration Unit, called climate change “the defining challenge of our times”.

Hard to measure

It’s difficult to say exactly how many people around the world will be forced to move as the effects of climate change grow starker in the coming decades. But mass displacement is already happening as climate change contributes to natural disasters such as desertification, droughts, floods, and powerful storms.

About 203 million people around the world were displaced by natural disasters between 2008 and 2015, and the risk has doubled since the 1970s, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council’s 2016 Global Report on Internal Displacement.

Most of the displacement takes place within countries, but those driven across borders are not considered refugees, because the 1951 Refugee Convention recognises only people fleeing war or persecution.

“There is a legal gap to assist and protect people who cross borders in the context of disasters and climate change,” Marine Franck, a UNHCR climate change and disaster displacement officer, told IRIN.

Another aspect of climate change, which makes it hard to quantify the exact number of people displaced by the phenomenon, is that it is a “threat multiplier”. This means it exacerbates the potential for for other drivers of forced migration such as conflict; so refugees fleeing war may also be fleeing climate change. It also often triggers slow-onset disasters like droughts, which gradually erode people’s livelihoods.

How many people will be displaced by climate change depends to a great degree on what countries do now to mitigate the future effects.

Flashpoint Bangladesh

It’s hard to think of a country that encompasses more of the risks of climate change than Bangladesh.

The impoverished nation’s approximately 160 million people are squeezed into an area slightly smaller than Tunisia, which has 11 million people, making it one of the most densely-populated countries on earth. Its coastline hugs the Bay of Bengal, putting it in the path of cyclones that are increasing in frequency and intensity.

Bangladesh is also one of the world’s flattest countries, with a river delta comprising much of its territory, making it especially vulnerable to land erosion. Himalayan glaciers will continue to melt, swelling the rivers, while rising sea levels engulf coastal areas and cause salinisation further inland, contaminating drinking water and rendering agriculture impossible.

By 2050, Bangladesh could see more than 20 million people displaced, according to the government’s Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan. Many of those will migrate to the capital, which the government predicts will swell from 14 to 40 million people. But Bangladesh’s cities will not be able to absorb the influx of people driven from their homes by climate change.

“The settlement of these environmental refugees will pose a serious problem for… densely populated Bangladesh and migration [abroad] must be considered as a valid option for the country,” says the government’s plan. “Preparations in the meantime will be made to convert this population into trained and useful citizens for any country.”

Yet many countries will be dealing with crises of their own and Bangladesh will find it hard to convince them to welcome its “climate change refugees”. Massive displacement within the country could further undermine a fragile political system and contribute to militancy, which is already on the rise.

“It could destabilise the country and it could also go to the point of state collapse,” said Muniruzzaman.

Officials at Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry failed to reply to repeated requests for comment

Global security

While Bangladesh will be one of the countries hardest hit by climate change, it is of course a global issue.

Desertification is already consuming fertile land in Africa, causing people to leave their homes to find work elsewhere, including Europe. Some countries are predicted to disappear entirely into rising seas. The Pacific Island nation of Kiribati has a strategy that would ideally allow its 100,000 citizens to “migrate with dignity”.

However, South Asia, with its large population and vulnerability to various climate change effects, is particularly at risk, according to a new report by the International Organization for Migration. Of the 203 million people internally displaced between 2008 and 2015 by natural disasters, 36 percent were in South Asia.

The report notes that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has recognised climate change as a threat, and made policies intended to mitigate the effects. However, “migration concerns are only scantily mentioned.”

That’s a pattern worldwide, said Muniruzzaman, noting that last month’s Global Forum on Migration and Development did not include a session dedicated to climate change.

Unless the focus shifts, he warned, the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration will be unable to address mass displacement due to climate change – and the threat multiplier effects could reach far further than many expect.

For example, he said, climate change migrants with few options for employment may swell the ranks of criminal and militant groups, while the disappearance of island nations could spark armed conflict on the high seas as countries rush to claim newly vacant maritime territory.

“It will not be just a humanitarian problem,” said Muniruzzaman. “It will be an international security problem.”

* Jared Ferrie, Asia Editor for IRIN

Donald Trump takes office having vowed to enact policies that would threaten rights at home and abroad if actually implemented, Human Rights Watch said.

According to HRW, human rights advocates, elected officials, and members of the public should press the new United States president to abandon those proposals and should call out government actions that violate rights. Congress, the courts, and the people of the United States should demand transparency and hold the administration accountable for policies and actions that threaten rights.

“This inauguration opens up a dangerous and uncertain new era for the United States,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Even if President Trump acts only on ten percent of the most problematic of his campaign proposals, it will cause a momentous setback for human rights at home and abroad.”

Roth said the onus is now on elected officials and the public to demand respect for rights that Trump, “seems to have put in his crosshairs.”

According to HRW, both during his presidential campaign and since his election, Trump has embraced policies that would harm the rights of millions of people – from the immigrants he has vowed to deport in vast numbers, to the women whose reproductive rights he has promised to restrict through his judicial appointments.

“He has at times publicly embraced torture and the illegal targeted killing of civilians abroad. He said he would halt the release of men from Guantanamo Bay detention facility and ‘load it up with some bad dudes.’ Trump’s pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has a long track record of hostility and disdain towards the very civil rights enforcement tools the US Justice Department is called on to deploy in defense of rights,” HRW said.

HRW said greatly compounding all of these concerns, there is every reason to worry that the Trump administration will seek to minimize scrutiny of its actions.

“Trump and his advisers have regularly and very publicly insulted or smeared his critics. Reports indicate his team is considering restricting media access to the White House. And Trump has famously said that he would like to weaken libel laws to facilitate lawsuits against journalists,” HRW said.

“By trampling on the rights of millions of people in the US and abroad, Trump’s proposals if enacted would weaken everybody’s rights,” Roth said. “Elected officials and the public should call out proposals and policies that would weaken rights, and demand a government that protects them.”

By Katharina R. Lestari

Catholic students have rejected a request by a hardline Muslim cleric for talks aimed at getting them to drop a blasphemy charge filed against him.

Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, leader of the Islamic Defenders Front, requested talks this week with the Indonesian Catholic Students Association with the aim of reaching a compromise over the row. The students refused to meet with the cleric.

The students filed a blasphemy complaint against Shihab on Dec. 26 after he allegedly insulted Christianity by ridiculing the birth of Jesus in a speech delivered a day earlier and which was widely circulated on the internet.

About 150 lawyers and many moderate Muslims back the complaint against Shihab, who is known for making hate speeches against other groups.

The complaint comes amid a high-profile blasphemy trial involving Jakarta’s Christian governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known as “Ahok,” who is accused of insulting Islam.

“We do not want to think about mediation right now,” said Angelo Wake Kako, the union’s chairman, on Jan. 19.

“The blasphemy case is being processed according to the law. We have to respect it, and we must continue with that,” he told ucanews.com.

Shihab had also appealed to other individuals and organizations, who filed legal complaints against him, to negotiate.

By refusing the cleric’s request the Catholic students want to send a strong message that hate speeches threaten national unity, Wake Kako said.

“It’s clear the [blasphemy] case needs to be dealt with legally, so as to prevent horizontal conflicts,” he said.

Petrus Salestinus, one of their lawyers, backed the decision to pursue the case.

“Blasphemy involves the public interest, so it cannot be handled through mediation,” Salestinus said.

“If he wants to apologize, go ahead. We can forgive him, but this will not stop the legal process,” he said.

The police are still working on the case and will meet Catholic and Protestant leaders soon to discuss it, Salestinus said.

Communion of Churches in Indonesia spokesperson Reverend Jerry Sumampouw also praised the Catholic students standing firm.

“It’s important to highlight issues that could potentially destroy inter-religious relations,” Sumampouw said.

Shihab’s request for talks came amid growing calls from many Indonesians for the government to disband Shihab’s group, the Islamic Defenders Front, for stirring up religious unrest in many parts of the country.

Thousands of people staged protests in Bandung, West Java and in Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara on Jan. 19 demanding the dissolution of the Islamic Defenders Front and for its leader to be prohibited from preaching in their areas.

“We need to make immediate efforts to save the nation from any attempt to disunite people,” said Chrisman Damanik, chairman of the Indonesia National Students Movement in Jakarta on Jan. 19.

Around 24 hours after Russian ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov was assassinated at an art exhibition in Ankara, the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran, and Turkey met in Moscow to discuss the agenda for greater cooperation in the Syria crisis. While the trilateral cooperation may be an effective way to settle the crisis, questions still loom on how the troika alliance can come to a political solution with marginalized US intervention in the negotiations.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the steps the troika alliance should take in fighting against the Islamic State and the Al-Nusra Front: “Russia, Iran, and Turkey have been recently taking coordinated steps that have allowed for the safe evacuation of the majority of the civilian population from eastern Aleppo with support of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Health Organization.”

The three capitals Moscow, Ankara, and Tehran passed the Moscow Declaration to design a ceasefire after five consecutive years of Syria’s Civil War. According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the goal of the Moscow Declaration, “was to achieve a ceasefire in Syria’s five-year-old civil war which has killed more than 400,000, displaced more than 10 million and led to a refugee crisis in Europe that has destabilized governments.”

During the meetings, all three foreign ministers said they remain committed to a political solution, but this will be very difficult over the long run especially with more western interference.

Russia’s role in Syria is to increase security and rejuvenate the Syrian economy, but Russia wants other nations to take a stance on their ambitions.

Throughout the Syria Crisis, Turkey’s objectives have been aligned with the West in overthrowing Assad, but with the failed coup in July, Turkish officials have found common ground with the Russians and the Iranians on finding a political solution. Russia could be the glue that helps both Turkey and Iran adopt a pragmatic approach within the region in the interests of defeating terrorism, the principle threat to the global community.

The worry coming from the United States after these trilateral negotiations is how the balance of power can change in Syria. The troika alliance could possibly challenge the Western hegemony in the region and counter Western interests such as bringing in more humanitarian aid, destroying oil fields and blocking safe havens for refugees escaping the crisis. The United States and the seventy-member coalition still remains engaged in a political solution and State Department Spokesman John Kirby had stated that the United States denies, “the U.S. role as the indispensable power in the Middle East had been diminished or replaced by Russia and it new allies.”

The west may be on the sidelines of the recently ratified Moscow Declaration, but these trilateral negotiations will not put an end to the Syria civil war once and for all. The United States must act as a diplomatic leader and role model for the global community. This means that the U.S. must accept the roles other countries are playing as well, and this does include accepting the troika alliance.

The troika alliance is tired of five years of civil war in Syria and they are now addressing the crisis without any help from the west and its regional actors. This trilateral alliance may not entirely find a political solution to the situation in Syria, but at least they are making some type of progress on talking and taking a similar stance on finding reasonable solutions to the crisis.

Former US Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns stated that the United states influence in the Middle East is dwindling, even though the U.S. still remains heavily engaged in the region, now that they have been absent from the talks in Moscow; “We were the dominant diplomatic power. Now, we’re not even at the table.” The West and the actors that support the Assad regime might not see eye to eye, but the common enemy is Islamist terrorism, and this should be the main objective for both sides.

*Vincent Lofaso, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

By Emanuel L. Paparella, Ph.D. *

“The Brussels wall will have come down just like the Berlin wall came down. The EU, this oppressive model, will have disappeared. But the Europe of free nations will have been born… The EU should not last more than two minutes longer.” –Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far right National Front, seems poised to become the next President of France in 2018. Political pundits are predicting her victory following Donald Trump’s victory in the US. They aver that Trump’s populism has paved the way for a veritable political revolution in Europe which portends to reshape the existing world order.

How so? Well, for one thing, Le Pen wants the EU to withdraw from NATO, alleging that it would end American dominance in Europe. She repeats Trump’s assertion that NATO is now obsolete, and has in fact declared publicly that Trump’s victory makes such a feat quite possible now. To her way of thinking, NATO is a “tool for making sure countries that are part of it comply with the will of the United States.” She finds this unbearable. What would she substitute it with? She has some interesting proposals in this regard. She has called for “cooperation agreements” with Russia with close cooperation between European capitals and Moscow. In other words, Washington gets substituted with Moscow. She claims that there is “absolutely no reason we should turn systematically to the United States.”

This may sound a bit incoherent. She sees Trump’s victory as an additional stone in the building of a new world order but at the same time wants the EU to take its distance from the US. How does Le Pen square this circle? Thus: “Obviously we have to compare this victory [Trump’s] with the rejection of the European constitution by the French people, of course, with the Brexit vote, but also with the emergence of movements devoted to the nation—patriotic movements in Europe. All these elections are essentially referendums against the unfettered globalization that has been imposed upon us, that has been imposed upon people, and today has been clearly shown to have its limits.” That is to say, she sees Trump’s victory as a “victory of the people against the elite.” This of course is populism at its best, or perhaps its worst.

What is most intriguing about the above glaring statements is that they seem to reveal a mind-set quite similar to that displayed by Trump and Putin. All three seems to have quite a few affinities and seem to like each other. The major affinity seems to be this: they see the political struggles currently going on as struggles of civilizations against each other. Le Pen is on record as saying that next year’s presidential election in France would “establish some real choices of civilization.” She made such a statement in the context of a lashing out against the EU and its immigrant policies based on open borders. She added: “Do we want a multicultural society, following the model of the English-speaking world, where fundamentalist Islam is progressing…or do we want an independent nation, with people able to control their own destiny, or do we accept to be a region, managed by the technocrats of the European Union?”

She has gone as far as comparing the European Union to the Soviet Union: “I don’t see why we should recreate, virtually, this wall between European countries and Russia, unless to obey the orders of the United States, which up until now, have found an interest in this.” She has moreover blamed the EU and the US for destabilizing Europe’s relations with Russia, and has claimed that there is not “a hair’s breath” between her party and the UKIP regarding immigration and the European Union. Keep well in mind that Russia is currently footing the bill for her campaign expenses.

What can one conclude from the above analysis? It could prove useful in answering this crucial question: is this the beginning of the end of the world order established after World War II with its culmination the formation of the European Union and the NATO Alliance? To put it another way: is this the beginning of the breakdown of European stability? Let’s attempt an answer beginning with some historical background in a rather personal mode.

Back in the 50s, when I was a teen-ager, still living in Italy, when the EU institutions were still fragile, I remember writing an essay launched by the lyceum I was attending at the time, where I opined that I was rather skeptcal that the Western Alliance and the European Union would ever take off. In the 70s I was living and studying in the US (where my father was born) and lived through the Vietnam War and read the news about the Red Brigades, and began having doubts again about the survival of the West. I was then in college and was reading books like “The Decline of the West” by Oswald Spengler. That might have influenced me. But in all my adult life I am hard pressed to remember a dramatic moment such as the one we are now witnessing. All we need now is for good men to do nothing and the decline and possible destruction of the West is pretty much assured.

I hope I am wrong, but, following Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, with a President, so called, totally uninterested in “shared values” with our allies (“not worth American lives” as he puts it), seeming to prefer the company of dictators such as Putin with whom he can make deals, to that of democratic allies, deeming the geo-political world as a huge transactional stage to be exploited on which to negotiate deals, incapable of conceiving the greater good, it would appear that we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union, and possibly the end of the liberal world order. The almost inevitable consequence will be the return of nefarious ultra-nationalism and fascism in Europe and the loss of democracy in America. Putin and his Trojan horses all over Europe are waiting in the wing. Their strategy is simple: divide and conquer.

To repeat the urgent question: are the lights going out; is it the end of the West as we presently know it?

What I call “the Caligua Presidency” constituted by political entertainment and double talk, has begun, people unfortunately end up getting the government they deserve and the monsters they have created. The omens are bad, but let’s not forget Le Pen. She is now the front runner in next year’s French presidential elections and she also finds alliances burdensome. Some of her campaign commitments are that she will withdraw from both NATO and the EU, will nationalize French companies, will restrict foreign investors, will promote a special relationship with Russia, the same Russia whose banks are funding her election campaign.

The question persists: is Le Pen at least partially right in considering what is going on a civilizational breakdown? More specifically: once France is out of the EU too (after Brexit), possibly followed by other copycats, can Europe’s economic single market survive in any shape or form? Will NATO and the Atlantic Alliance crumble? Trump of course will not be sorry for that, as his misguidedly appealing rhetoric to his misguided followers has made clear; indeed, the short term cost of alliances is easier to see and assess than the longer-term benefits. Let’s not forget that his span of attention is that of the time needed to write a tweet.

There is little doubt that shared economic space, nuclear deterrence via the NATO alliance, and standing armies, while being costly short term, produced more than half a century of political stability and prosperity in Europe and North America. We all take those benefits for granted now, until they are gone for good.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

About the author:
*Emanuel L. Paparella has earned a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism, with a dissertation on the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico, from Yale University. He is a scholar interested in current relevant philosophical, political and cultural issues; the author of numerous essays and books on the EU cultural identity among which A New Europe in search of its Soul, and Europa: An Idea and a Journey. Presently he teaches philosophy and humanities at Barry University, Miami, Florida. He is a prolific writer and has written hundreds of essays for both traditional academic and on-line magazines among which Metanexus and Ovi. One of his current works in progress is a book dealing with the issue of cultural identity within the phenomenon of “the neo-immigrant” exhibited by an international global economy strong on positivism and utilitarianism and weak on humanism and ideals.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

By Ahmet S. Yayla, Ph.D.*

Turkey has been ruled by a declared State of Emergency since the July 2016 coup attempt, allowing President Erdogan to consolidate additional powers and target not just those responsible for the coup, but allegedly also those who hold or express opposing political views.

The Turkish Government has been using State of Emergency Decrees to fire people, close media outlets, and swiftly pass regulations and laws they deem necessary without going through parliament and the normal checks and balances – regulations and laws which would be expected to face harsh criticism and opposition under normal circumstances. Since the coup, over 135,000 people have lost their jobs, 85,000 have been detained, and almost 45,000 arrested in a wide-ranging purge from different segments of the state and society, including the military, judiciary, national police, academics, doctors, teachers and low skilled workers. In addition, over 180 journalists have been arrested and hundreds of businesses, NGOs, and associations were closed. Amid unconfirmed allegations of torture and killing during detentions and inside prisons, many people have felt the need to escape Turkey and go into hiding abroad to save themselves from an unknown and potentially deadly future.

Erdogan appears to be using State of Emergency Decree powers to shape the future of Turkey and to guarantee his own safety and fate. Two recent batches of the State of Emergency Decrees (SED) signed by Erdogan include critical rulings that will shape Turkey’s short and long-term governing future. These decrees are essentially turning Turkey into a de facto dictatorship and harming Turkish society in a way that will not be easily undone. One decree on January 6, 2017 has a special impact. The decree fires 1699 Ministry of Justice personnel. This is significant because a large portion of the forensic doctors who were working for the Medical Forensic Examination Divisions were fired. These doctors are the forensic examiners who issue reports regarding detainees, arrestees, and inmates to ensure they were not mishandled and tortured and who examine bodies to reveal the cause of death. According to media reports, after the coup attempt over 40 prisoners were reported dead through “suicide” in Turkish prisons, along with hundreds of torture allegations. This decree opens the door to ensure torture and deaths are not going to be reported, that torturers who support Erdogan will feel freer to engage in such activities, and that there will be an increase in so-called “suicides” in prison. This risks moving Turkey towards a Police State.

The new decrees are also reshaping and restructuring the Turkish military. Erdogan has seen the military as a rival since the beginning of his rule. The coup attempt, which he called “a gift from God”, has enabled him to act against the military, firing and arresting thousands of officers, over half of the generals, and more than 2/3 of military pilots, most of whom did not have direct ties with the coup attempt. Many positions after this extensive purge were filled with generals and high-level military officers known to have ties to Dogu Perincek and considered to be pro-Russian or Shanghai-Five. Perincek is a former Maoist and communist terrorist leader from the 1970s who turned into an ultra-leftist nationalist political leader with his Vatan Party. Several retired generals aligned themselves with Perincek after they left the military, receiving high level positions in his party, still others writing as columnists in his media. In the interests of transparency, I myself arrested Perincek in 1998 while I was working for the Ankara Counter-terrorism and Operations Division, due to his ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). I was very surprised to find copies of Top Secret Turkish Supreme Military Council (YAŞ) decisions in his safe at his office, the highest secrecy level documents in Turkey. Finding copies of Top Secret documents in his office prompted to me look further into Perincek’s background in the archives. I discovered he had been sentenced to prison after the March 1971 coup in Turkey as the leader of a Revolutionary Youth (Dev-Genç) terrorist movement. More surprising is that even though several of the suspects in the main Dev-Genç case were military academy students or young military officers, they were not fired and by 1998 they were on active duty, mostly as colonels, a high rank.

In November 2016, Erdogan signed an SED which opened a path back into the military for officers who were previously fired from the military (mainly before 2010) due to their connections with different Islamist groups. As a secular institution, the Turkish military has always deemed officers who had any ties with Islamist groups in Turkey as an essential threat to its existence, firing them if the connections are discovered. Through the SED, Erdogan has basically invited back over 8000 officers who were fired in the past. Those officers are also expected to start work within the military at the ranks they would be if they had not been fired. The result is that all of a sudden Erdogan now has numerous high-level military officers that are supportive of him. Several of those are also affiliated with a private company named “SADAT International Defense Consulting”, led by another previously-fired general, Adnan Tanriverdi, who serves as chief military advisor to Erdogan. New SEDs signed on January 6, 2017 put into place further measures to strengthen Erdogan’s position. Among the most critical ones are the fact that the Supreme Military Council (YAŞ) was sidelined. This commission used to decide on the future and critical assignments of the military, such as the commanders of the military branches and other critical commanders. Now, with the decree, the Defense Ministry will simply offer the names of the proposed commanders and they will be appointed by the Prime Minister’s signature and President’s approval. In addition, the mandatory service time for different branches and the age of retirement for the top commanders was amended, enabling Erdogan to keep the generals he likes and force others into retirement.

The new SEDs have also canceled the requirement of having advanced degrees to become military corporals and sergeants, decreasing the education requirement to the completion of elementary school, which in Turkey is only four years of education. There are several reasons behind this significant change. The first is that SADAT has been having difficulties finding suitable candidates to recruit due to the previous higher education requirements. Similarly, several other Islamist groups who were working with Erdogan had the same problem: not being able to find suitable candidates to recruit for the military, including the AKP’s known and assigned Islamist teacher, Nurettin Yıldız. With this change in education requirement, SADAT and Erdogan’s close circles will be able to hire anyone they want, as they have claimed that educated people were not good for them because they would think and not carry out orders. Now they will have elementary school graduates who will more readily follow orders without question. In addition to the changes in the military, another essential SED was granting permission to private security guards to carry weapons. In the past, only specifically trained guards working for specific industries, like state banks, could receive such special permission. Now all will be armed. Another important SED concerns the revocation of citizenship of those alleged to be part of the July coup attempt. The government has decreed it will cancel the citizenship of any suspects being tried due to alleged ties to the coup attempt and/or are living abroad if they do not go back to Turkey within three months. According to this decree, all suspects fleeing Turkey will be stripped of their citizenship, in most cases rendering the person stateless. In addition to rendering many Turks stateless, the decree also appears to be contrary to International Law.

The SEDs continue to give additional powers to the government. For example, the police were given the authority to determine who owns which internet IP addresses throughout the country, an authority previously only available through a court warrant to a limited number of specific IPs. The police were also given the authority to obtain any internet traffic they want, without a court order, with just the signature of a police chief, a power that again in the past was only available for limited IPs and for certain times through court warrants. In addition, the government now has the authority to shut down any media establishment they want if the media does not comply with the press bans which are increasingly issued by courts as a means of controlling the population.

These new regulations are in effect as of January 6, 2017, resulting in a Turkey that is more anti-democratic, dangerous and becoming close to a lawless state, to a real dictatorship. Time will soon tell who will win one of the most dangerous and bloody chess games in the region: who will be leading Turkey in the coming years and, more importantly, what kind of political system will it be and will rule of law still be known there?

About the author:
*Ahmet S. Yayla, Ph.D. is co-author of the just released book, ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. He is Adjunct Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. He formerly served as Professor and the Chair of the Sociology Department at Harran University in Turkey. He is the former Chief of Counterterrorism and Operations Division for the Turkish National Police with a 20‐year career interviewing terrorists.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy.

The White House has confirmed that Donald Trump’s team is in the “beginning stages” of a plan to move the US embassy in Israel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

“We are at the very beginning stages of even discussing this subject,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in a statement.

Trump repeatedly vowed during the election campaign to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem, despite warnings the move would violate international law and destroy the Middle East peace process.

According to a source speaking on condition of anonimity to an Israeli news outlet, the announcement on the US embassy moving from Tel Aviv would be made on Monday.

Palestinians widely view the embassy move as the end of the peace process.

Both Palestine and Israel view Jerusalem as is their capital, but most of the world considers its final status a matter for peace negotiations.

Any decision to break with the status quo is also likely to prompt protests from US allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Washington relies on those countries for help in fighting the Islamic State militant group, which the new US president has said is a priority.

Original source

By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

A new movement dedicated to countering the influence of billionaire US philanthropist George Soros has been formed in Macedonia, shortly after the leader of the main ruling VMRO DPMNE party, Nikola Gruevski, stepped up attacks against NGOs financed from aboard.

The Stop Operation Soros movement, SOS, was presented in Skopje. Its founders are the editor-in-chief of the state-run news agency MIA, Cvetin Cilimanov, the editor-in-chief of the pro-government Republika news portal, Nenad Mircevski, and Nikola Srbov, a columnist for another pro-government news portal, Kurir.

The founders called on all “free minded citizens” to join SOS in the “fight against one-mindedness in the civil sector, which is devised and led by George Soros”.

They say their first activities will focus on exposing the subversive activities of Macedonian NGOs financed by the billionaire in Macedonia.

NGOs backed by the Soros Foundation have long been a target of nationalist governments in Russia, Hungary, Macedonia and elsewhere, where authorities are deeply suspicious of their politically and socially liberal agenda and focus on human rights.

A former opposition MP, Professor Gjorge Spasov warned of the seriousness of the recent attacks on NGOs in Macedonia, noting that, along with the opposition Social Democrats, SDSM, “the Soros Foundation in Macedonia, judging by the [ruling] party’s press releases, are the ‘undertakers’ of the democracy built by Gruevski, puppets, mercenary revolutionaries, a disgrace and a disaster for Macedonia.

“Judging by this vocabulary and its intensity, Gruevski is launching a purge which should end in the banning of the Open Society Foundation – Macedonia, and if possible, of the Social Democrats, too,” Spasov wrote on Facebook.

Last last year, immediately after the December 11 early general elections, which Gruevski’s party narrowly won, he issued a direct threat to NGOs that receive funds from abroad, saying his party would “fight for the de-Soros-isation of the country”.

Since then, the party’s press releases have announced that work on “de-Soros-isation” has already begun, also naming various activists in the NGO sector as “foreign mercenaries” who work against the national interest.

Financial inspectors have also been sent to the offices of various NGOs.

Russia more or less outlawed Soros-affiliated organisations in 2015. This January, authorities in Hungary said they would use “all the tools at its disposal” to “sweep out” NGOs funded by the Hungarian-born financier, which “serve global capitalists and back political correctness over national governments.” Hungarian Leader Viktor Orban last year accused Soros of destabilizing Europe by encouraging mass immigration to Europe from Middle Eastern war zones.

Born in Hungary in 1930, Soros moved to England in 1947 and to the US in 1956. An active philanthropist and supporter of liberal causes, his Open Society Foundations operate in about 60 countries.
– See more at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonia-forms-anti-soros-movement-01-18-2017#sthash.qzhHBi6A.dpuf

(Civil.Ge) — The U.S. Mission to the OSCE condemned the destruction of a historical site near the village of Tsebelda, in Gulripshi district of Abkhazia, Georgia.

“The destruction by Russian forces on January 3 in order to prepare the area for a military firing range for its Southern Military District’s 7th brigade is in contravention of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The site consisted of ruins dating from the 8th and 9th centuries and the late Middle Ages, as well as a 20th century cemetery. All of these elements of Georgia’s, and the Caucasus’, cultural heritage were irretrievably lost,” Deputy Chief of Mission Kate M. Byrnes stated at the Permanent Council on January 19.

The Deputy Chief of Mission said that the U.S. “expects relevant local authorities” to allow the international community “full and unfettered access” to the site through the Gali IPRM.

She also noted that “Russia’s continued occupation of Georgia’s Abkhaz and South Ossetian regions” is “unacceptable” for the United States. “We reiterate our calls for Russia, as a party to the conflict, to fulfill its obligations under the 2008 ceasefire agreement, including by withdrawing all its forces to pre-conflict positions, providing unhindered access for humanitarian assistance, and reversing its unilateral recognition of these Georgian regions as independent states,” Byrnes added.

U.S. diplomat reiterated the country’s “unequivocal support” to “Georgia’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, as well as its aspirations to integrate into Euro-Atlantic institutions.”

She also “encouraged” the Austrian Chairmanship to “resume consultations on re-establishing a meaningful OSCE presence in Georgia.” The OSCE mission to Georgia closed after Russia vetoed extension of the mission mandate in December, 2008.

In her statement, the Deputy Chief of Mission also spoke on the announcement of the de-facto Abkhaz authorities that two crossing points along the Abkhaz administrative boundary line – at Nabakevi-Khurcha and Meore Otobaia-Orsantia – will be closed by the end of January and said that this could “further restrict freedom of movement, including of schoolchildren and patients requiring medical treatment.” “We are also concerned that de-facto Abkhaz authorities intend to create an enlarged “border zone” along the Abkhaz administrative boundary line, requiring special permits to enter, which would further hinder movement,” she added.

RFE/RL’s Russian-language Ekho Kavkaza reported on January 6 that the ruins of a church in the village of Tsebelda in Gulripshi district of breakaway Abkhazia were demolished with a bulldozer on January 3. According to the report, the territory was handed over to Russian border guards for building a military firing range.

Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili strongly condemned the demolition of the church and the Polish cemetery by Russian troops as “an act of deliberate vandalism” in his statement on January 10 and called on the international community “for adequate reaction.”

The de facto Abkhaz officials responded to the statement on January 11, accusing Tbilisi of “politicizing the facts” and stating that the de facto Abkhaz Foreign Ministry is ready “to contribute to establishing contacts” between the region’s Ministry of Culture and UNESCO “for elaborating joint protection mechanism” of historical heritage sites in Abkhazia.

The de facto Abkhaz officials said that “the historical site” was damaged when “cleaning the territory of the firing range,” but did not provide details on who ordered the demolition.

The press service of the Russian Federal Security Service’s (FSB) border guard forces, deployed in Abkhazia, issued a statement a day later, saying that the accusations of their involvement are “deliberately false” and that the location is not in their use.