By Frank F. Islam*

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently called for empowerment and education of Muslim women. One would have expected this message to receive widespread acceptance and support. It did not.

There was resistance on several fronts for a variety of reasons. Some saw Modi’s move as a political stunt. Some questioned whether Modi was doing anything meaningful in the education and empowerment area. Others came out against it because of a connection to the triple-talaq controversy.

There is no gainsaying that there is an unequivocal and critical need to empower Muslim women through education in order for India to achieve its full potential. The status of education in general was captured by the 2001 census which revealed that the Muslim literacy rate was only 59 per cent.

In response to these and additional findings regarding Muslims and others in the weaker sections, the Sachar Committee Report of 2006 disclosed a development deficit in a number of areas. The report resulted in the creation of an across-the-board programme for the development of minorities.

This programme and other initiatives have had a beneficial effect. In the 2011 census, the overall literacy rate for Muslims went up substantially to 68.5 per cent against the national literacy rate of 74 per cent.

That was good news. But the numbers within the numbers tell a different story. The worst literacy rate for women in India is among those in the Muslim community at less than 52 percent. That is cause for concern.

Even more worrying is the performance of Muslims in terms of higher education. A US India Policy Institute released in 2013, six years after the Sachar Report, showed that only 11 per cent of Muslims in India pursue higher education compared to a national average of approximately 19 per cent. Most significantly, that study revealed that there has been a decline in the general category of Muslims participating in higher education.

The literacy rate and the higher education statistics represent a double whammy for Muslim women as it relates to empowerment. In education, literacy is the starting line and higher education is the finishing line for becoming fully empowered. These statistics indicate that not enough Muslim women even get to the starting line and very few get to the finishing line.

This must change. Muslim women must be able to participate fully along the entire educational continuum. This participation is pivotal for the future of the individual Muslim woman, the Muslim family and India.

For the individual Muslim woman, education itself is empowering. It removes the shackles of ignorance. It develops the knowledge, skills and attitudes to pursue and create one’s own destiny. It builds self-esteem and confidence. Education is the gift that keeps on giving. It is an opportunity creator and bridge to the future.

For the Muslim family, education prepares the Muslim woman to be a change agent. Too many Muslim families are trapped in poverty because of a lack of education. With her own education, the woman can educate and equip her children to escape that trap. I firmly believe education is a powerful equaliser, opening doors to Muslim women to lift themselves out of poverty.

For India, education delivers on the promise of the largest representative democracy in the world. Central to that promise are equality, opportunity and inclusive economic mobility. Education levels the playing field and makes that promise a reality. Once that reality exists for Muslim women they will be able to deliver on that promise for India by helping others up the ladder of success. They will have the capacity to change the face of India and the landscape of the world.

In the 21st century, higher education is becoming more important for climbing that ladder. By higher education, I don’t just mean four-year colleges or universities. I include technical, vocational and professional education at the secondary levels.

It might seem that I am a little delusional given the current circumstances in talking about Muslim women and higher education. But that is not the case.

On my last visit to India in February this year, I had the good fortune to give addresses and speak with young Muslim women students at Fatima Girls Inter College in Azamgarh and Abdullah Women’s College at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). I was inspired by them and their commitment to making a positive difference in India.

During that visit, my wife Debbie and I also dedicated the new Management Complex that we had financed at AMU. In my comments at the dedication ceremonies, I predicted that from this Complex “will come the future leaders who will make India and the world a better place.”

Many of those leaders will be educated and empowered Muslim women who will be in the forefront of empowering other Muslim women who will then educate and empower other Muslim women — and the cycle will continue.

When that occurs, those Muslim women would have realised their full potential and they will ensure that India and the world do as well. When they succeed, all of us succeed. India succeeds. The world succeeds.

*Frank Islam is an Washington-based entrepreneur, civic leader and thought leader. His website is www.frankislam.com

By James M. Wall*

Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump have one thing in common: They both have as much credibility as the man who killed his parents and then begged the judge for mercy because he was an orphan.

Why should we believe what they say? President Trump is an accomplished prevaricator in a job he is clearly not qualified to hold.

But we know that already.

What concerns me at the moment is the way in which Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu follows the classic colonial playbook by living a lie and inducing the colonized to fight among themselves.

The current internal Palestinian conflict involves a severe drop in medical care and adequate electrical power in Gaza, two essential elements which must be provided for a civilian population.

Instead of providing, Bibi Netanyahu greatly reduces these elements from Gaza and then lies that he is not to blame. The harsh truth is that Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza for fifty years.

Occupiers are responsible for the occupied whether for one year or fifty years.

If you feel as though you are just now arriving to see a movie that has been running for an hour, its because this current movie, a Gaza-West Bank blame game, has been evolving on the screens of the Israeli and Palestinian media.

Preoccupied with the Donald’s twitters and threats, the American press has largely ignored the story of lies about Gaza. To our media, it is a conflict waged within a distant land between “long-time foes”.

To Palestinians, it is not a conflict. It is an occupation that blames the occupied.

To catch you up on the latest set of Bibi lies, here is some background:

Israel’s occupiers “withdrew” from Gaza in 2005.  But the occupiers did not “withdraw” Israel’s control over what is now an outdoor Gaza prison in which essential ingredients of life–food, water, medical care, and electrical power–remain completely in Israeli hands.

To remind Gazans who holds the power, Israel stages vicious military attacks and periodic wars against Gaza citizens.

The 1993 Oslo Accords looked at the time like a good stop-gap measure. It was, in reality, a moment in history when Israel sold the world and occupied Palestinians a package of wampum disguised as a “peace process”,

The Accords were never intended by Israel to bring peace. That was an Israeli lie.  The Accords were decorative beads, intended as a cover to pretend reaching for peace agreements while Israel remained busy expanding its settlements, and tightening its control over all aspects of Palestinian life.

Then, as colonialists are wont to do, they sold that same peace process wampum to the U.S. congress and its Israeli allies in American media and cultural institutions.

The lies that sustain the Israeli–driven “peace process”,  are rooted in greed and control, which derive from the evil twins of racism and religious bigotry.

You wish to see racism and religious bigotry? Both are on display in this week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to allow a Trump ban against all travelers from six Muslim nations to stand.

The caveat that the ban would not apply to travelers who had U.S. family or institutional ties, is sheer racial and religious bigotry.

The Trump ban tells us to ignore these words engraved on the Stature of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

It is that same spirit that rejects Liberty’s call and leads Bibi to blame the medical and electrical shortage in Gaza on a Gaza-West Bank struggle for political leadership.

If this spirit is not racism/religious bigotry, then what is it?  I first encountered this racist/bigotry nonsense in my childhood in a racist White-controlled American South.

That same racist/bigotry began with American colonialism conquering a continent against the resistance of Native Americans. It now extends to all facets of our American life and culture.

The embedded racism in our nation makes Bibi’s racist lies an easy sell in the land built on the backs of Native Americans and African Americans.

Two sources from the front lines explain the conflict Bibi has cultivated. The first report from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, demonstrates how the PA and Hamas have allowed their own quest for power inside the prison to control their actions. It begins:

While much attention has been focused on the cutbacks to Gaza’s electricity, testimonies from the Strip indicate that for the past two months the Palestinian Authority has also been blocking Gaza patients from leaving the Strip for medical treatment.

Gazan Palestinians are reporting unexplained delays in receiving permits from the PA in Ramallah to leave the Strip for treatment in Israel, Jordan or the West Bank. These testimonies have been reinforced by data received by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, indicating that the PA Health Ministry has stopped facilitating this treatment for Gazans.

To whatever extent these are true reports, and not completely fabricated, it reflects the poor leadership  that has evolved among the Palestinian factions. What goes on between Bibi and Mahmoud Abbas, the long-reigning PA president, is never an equal interaction.

Abbas runs a vassal state under Israel’s absolute control.  What little he gains from Israel in his role as PA president, it is granted because Bibi expects subservience in return.

I envision that relationship with Bibi as a Mafia boss allowing deliveries to  Mahmoud Abbas’ neighborhood stores.

Is Abbas getting what he can from his Boss by trying to undermine Hamas in a conflict inside the prison?

I saw that same desperate subservience unfold with Christian leaders desperate to help young students leave Communist East Germany for education elsewhere.

A second source on this story is this Palestinian Ma’an News Agency report, which rejects the Hamas accusations and denies that The Palestinian Authority (PA) “has been preventing Palestinians in the blockaded Gaza Strip from leaving the territory for medical treatment, and said Israel was responsible for denying Gazans the exit permits, which has had fatal consequences in recent weeks”

Whom are we to believe? Statements from the Occupier with the power or “the PA’s medical referral department in the southern district, Bassam al-Badri, who told Ma’anthat Israel was accountable for the deterioration of the medical situation in Gaza’”

Al Badri adds that, “by denying exit to thousands of patients via the Erez crossing so that they may be treated in hospitals in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem”. Al-Badri also points out that “only 50 percent of medical permits were approved as a result of the Israeli restrictions”.

There is no doubting that health care inside Gaza “has greatly suffered as part of the decade-long Israeli siege, with Israel limiting medical equipment allowed in and restricting travel for doctors seeking further medical training and specialization”.

Closely related to the reduction in medical care is the reduction in the delivery of electrical supply to Gaza. Palestinians there are reduced to a few hours of power a day. This had caused a “devastating” impact on hospitals.

Bassam al-Badri also told Ma’an that the Palestinian Ministry of Health transfers between 1,600 and 1,800 patients to the West Bank and Jerusalem every month.

One-fourth of those transfers are cancer patients.

Two sources from the front lines of limited medical care and electrical services, arrive at the same conclusion: The situation in Gaza is dire.

Exactly who is to blame? We must conclude that with all the Palestinian squabbling over internal control, one government, and one government alone, is responsible.

Israel has the power and the responsibility as the occupier, to serve the human services needs of the Palestinian citizens of the West Bank and Gaza.

– James M. Wall is currently a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. Visit his blog.

Ford is moving closer to vehicle autonomy by announcing its creation of a dedicated robotics and artificial intelligence research team, Engadget reports.

In a blog post by vice president and CTO Ken Washington, the company lays out its ambitious plans for exploring and innovating a whole range of vehicle tech with designs “to be at the forefront in the field.”

Meanwhile, Volkswagen has recently announced its cars will be ‘talking’ to each other within as little as two years, while Tesla, a company focused on tech innovation, last year delivered less than 80,000 cars compared to Ford’s 6.7 million, and has still managed to overtake Ford in terms of market value.

The creation of this new team is unsurprising given the leadership reshuffle seen in May, when self-driving car chief Jim Hackett was brought in to replace CEO Mark Fields. This renewed focus is certainly attributable to his vision — and Ford is better-positioned to realize this now it’s working in partnership with self-driving tech company Argo AI, Engadget said.

Of course, car manufacturers are already focusing their efforts on innovating their technology so the announcement doesn’t give Ford any lead. But it does put it back in the race, Engadget said. As Washington says in his blog post, this is “a team tasked with not just watching the future, but helping to create it.”

By Gary K. Busch*

Washington has been at war in Africa for years.  But in French-speaking parts of the continent it is Paris that is fully in control. Who becomes president and how national affairs are conducted is a matter determined by the French for their own interest under the colonial-era doctrine of Françafrique. And American tax-payers foot much of the bill for this neo-colonialism.

At the end of his first week in office, newly elected President Emmanuel Macron visited French troops in the West African country of Mali. Macron flew into Gao, a city in Mali’s north, where political unrest and ethnic strife have raged for more than five years. He met some of the 1,600 French soldiers stationed there, at the largest French military base outside of France. The French had intervened in its former colony in January 2013 in an effort to drive out al-Qaeda-linked groups which had taken advantage of the unrest and conflict created by a rebellion of the ethnic Tuaregs in 2012 to try to take control of the central government in Bamako, Mali’s capital. This rebellion spread throughout the Sahel; an ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition in Africa between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian Savanna to the south covering more than 3.053 million km².

Before one can explain the role played by the U.S. in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel it is important to understand the continuing role of the French Government and army in the region. France established military bases in Africa during the colonial period and maintained a military presence in Africa after the ‘flag independence’ of its former colonies in the 1960s. The independence struggle of French Africa resulted, with the exception of Guinea, in the notional independence of the African states, each with a flag, a national anthem, a football team, and a continuing dependence on France under the terms of a Colonial Pact. The terms of this pact were agreed at the time of independence as a condition of the de-colonialization of the African states.

The Colonial Pact Agreement enshrined a number of special preferences for France in the political, commercial and defence processes in the African countries. On defence, it agreed two types of continuing contact. The first was the agreement on military co-operation or Technical Military Aid (AMT) agreements. These covered education, training of soldiers and officers of African security forces. The second type, secret and binding, were defence agreements supervised and implemented by the French Ministry of Defence, which served as a legal basis for French interventions within the African states by French military forces. These agreements allowed France to have pre-deployed troops and police in bases across Africa; in other words, French army and gendarme units present permanently and by rotation in bases and military facilities in Africa, run entirely by the French. The Colonial Pact was much more than an agreement to station soldiers across Africa. It bound the economies of Africa to the control of France. It made the CFA franc the national currency in both former colonial regions of Africa and created a continuing, and enforceable, dependency on France.

In summary, the colonial pact maintained the French control over the economies of the African states:

• it took possession of their foreign currency reserves;
• it controlled the strategic raw materials of the country;
• it stationed troops in the country with the right of free passage;
• it demanded that all military equipment be acquired from France;
• it took over the training of the police and army;
• it required that French businesses be allowed to maintain monopoly enterprises in key areas (water, electricity, ports, transport, energy, etc.).
• it required that in the award of government contracts in the African countries, French companies should be considered first; only after that could Africans look elsewhere. It didn’t matter if Africans could obtain better value for money elsewhere, French companies came first, and most often got the contracts.
• The African states must make a contribution to France each year for the infrastructure created by the French colonial system and left behind when independence was granted.
• France not only set limits on the imports of a range of items from outside the franc zone but also set minimum quantities of imports from France. These treaties are still in force and operational.

The system is known as Françafrique. These policies of Françafrique were not concocted by the French National Assembly or the result of any democratic process. They were the result of policies conducted by a small group of people in the French President’s office, the ‘African Cell’, starting with Charles DeGaulle and his African specialist, Jacques Foccart. For the past half-century, the secretive and powerful “African Cell” has overseen France’s strategic interests in Africa, holding sway over a wide swath of former French colonies. Acting as a general command, the Cell uses France’s military as a hammer to install leaders it deems friendly to French interests and to remove those who pose a danger to the continuation of the system. Sidestepping traditional diplomatic channels, the Cell reports only to one person: the president.

Under Chirac, African policy was run by the president himself. He worked with the “Cellule Africaine” composed of African Advisor Michel De Bonnecorse, Aliot-Marie (the Defence Minister) and DGSE chief Pierre Brochand. They were aided by a web of French agents assigned to work undercover in Africa, embedded in French companies like Bouygues, Delmas, Total, and other multinationals; pretending to be expatriate employees.

Under Sarkozy the “Cellule Africaine” was run by the president and included Bruno Joubert and an informal adviser and Sarkozy envoy, Robert Bourgi. Claude Guéant, secretary general of the presidency and later interior minister, played an influential role. Hollande’s “Cellule Africaine” was composed of his trusted friends: Jean-Yves Le Drian (Minister of Defence); the chief of his personal military staff, General Benoît Puga; the African Advisor Hélène Le Gal, and a number of lower-level specialists from the ministries of foreign affairs and the treasury. It isn’t clear yet who will make up Macron’s African Cell.

What is important about the effects of Françafrique on African states is that the French resisted any locally-engendered change in the rules and had troops and gendarmes available in Africa to put down any leader with different ambitions. During the last 50 years, a total of 67 coups happened in 26 countries in Africa; 61% of the coups happened in Francophone Africa. The French began the ‘discipline’ of African leaders by ordering the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio in Togo in 1963 when he wanted his own currency instead of the CFA franc.

• In June 1962, the first president of Mali, Modiba Keita, decreed that Mali was leaving the CFA zone and abandoning the Colonial Pact. As in Togo the French paid an African ex-Legionnaire to kill the president. In November 1968 Lieutenant Moussa Traore made a coup, killed Modiba Keita, and became President of Mali.
• The French use of African ex-Legionnaires to remove presidents who rebelled against the Colonial Pact, the CFA or Françafrique became commonplace. On 1 January, 1966, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, an ex-French foreign legionnaire, carried out a coup against David Dacko, the first President of the Central African Republic.
• On 3 January 1966, Maurice Yaméogo, the first President of the Republic of Upper Volta, now called Burkina Faso, was victim of a coup carried out by Aboubacar Sangoulé Lamizana
• On 26 October 1972, Mathieu Kérékou who was a security guard to President Hubert Maga, the first President of the Republic of Benin, carried out a coup against the president.
• There were several other assassinations managed by the French which took place without the use of Legionnaires. These included:
• Marien Ngouabi, President of the Republic of the Congo, assassinated in 1977.
• In Cameroon, Felix Moumie, who was the successor to previously-assassinated Reuben Um Nyobe, was murdered by thallium poisoning in Geneva on 15 October 1960. His killer was a French agent, William Bechtel, who posed as a journalist to meet Moumie in a restaurant and poisoned his drink.
• François Tombalbaye, President of Chad, was assassinated by soldiers commanded by French Army officers in 1975. Then, in December 1989 the French overthrew the government of Hissan Habre in Chad and installed Idriss Deby as President because Habre wanted to sell Chadian oil to U.S. oil companies.
• Perhaps the most tragic was the assassination of Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso in 1987. Sankara seized power in a popular coup in 1983 in an attempt to break the country’s ties to its French colonial power. He was overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by his best friend and childhood companion Blaise Compaoré on French orders.
• In March 2003 French and Chadian troops overthrew the elected government of President Ange-Felix Patasse and installed General François Bozize as President when Patasse announced that he wanted French troops out of the Central African Republic. A few years later the French deposed Bosize as well.
• In 2009, the French supported a coup in Madagascar by Andry Rajoelina against the elected government of Marc Ravalomanana who wanted to open the country to investments by international companies in mining and petroleum and refused to allow Total to unilaterally raise its contracted price for oil by 75%.
• The French used its troops in the Ivory Coast to provoke an attempted overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Gbagbo. When the rebellion to oust Gbagbo failed, the French troops divided the country into two areas and continued to plan coups against Gbagbo. When Gbagbo won the election in 2010, despite French interference, the French troops (and the UN ‘peacekeepers’) used helicopter gunships to attack the Ivorian citizenry and took over the country in 2011.

French military involvement in Africa

The current problem for France is that it maintains wide engagement of its military in operations outside of metropolitan France. These are very expensive. There are currently 36,000 French troops deployed in foreign territories-such operations are known as “OPEX” for Opérations Extérieures (“External Operations”).

Since colonial days France has stationed its troops across Africa in permanent bases. These participate in controlling the internal politics of the African nations of Franćafrique as well as their borders.

These included:

• Côte d’Ivoire, where the French troops in Operation Licorne and its helicopters recently overthrew the government of Gbagbo and supervised the killing of numerous Ivoirian citizens in collaboration with UN “peacekeepers”.
• Chad, with the Epervier Mission. Established in 1986 to help re-establish peace and maintain Chad’s territorial integrity, and establish and protect the government of Deby
• France has been present in Mali since January 2013 in support of the Malian authorities in the fight against terrorist groups. 2,900 men were deployed with the Serval operation.
• Since December 2013, France also has operated in the Central African Republic in support of the MISCA, the African Union peacekeeping operation. 1,600 men are deployed with the Sangaris operation.

France also supports the participation of African soldiers in peacekeeping operations through the Reinforcement of African Peacekeeping Capabilities (RECAMP) program.

Recently the French have concentrated their troop deployments in West Africa to fight the rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Around 3,000 soldiers remain in the expansive Sahel area of Africa to check Islamist violence and arms trafficking, with no specified exit date. French forces are organised around four base camps, each with its own focus, and with headquarters based in the Chadian capital of Ndjamena. Their primary aim is not entirely the suppression of fundamentalist forces; their primary aim is to safeguard the French Areva uranium mines in Niger which provide France with it supply of fuel for its nuclear power programs.

This operation is known as Operation Barkhane (the name refers to a sickle-shaped sand dune). It is an effort to streamline French military activity in the region and to retain the military power but reduce the costs of duplication of tasks. Following diplomatic agreements with Chad, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania (the “Sahel G-5”), over 3,000 French troops are involved in securing the Sahel-Sahara region in cooperative operations involving G-5 troops. Other assets deployed in the operation include 20 helicopters, 200 armoured vehicles, 200 trucks, six fighter-jets, ten transport aircraft and three drones

The initiation of Operation Barkhane brought to an end four existing French operations in Africa; Licorne (Côte d’Ivoire, 2002-2017), Épervier (Chad, 1986-2014), Sabre (Burkina Faso, 2012-2014) and Serval (Mali, 2013-2014). Licorne is coming to an end in June 2017 (though 450 French troops will remain in Abidjan as part of a logistical base for French operations) while the other operations were folded into Operation Barkhane. Operation Sangaris (Central African Republic, 2013-present) is classified as a humanitarian rather than counter-terrorism mission and the deployment of some 2,000 French troops will be reduced to 1,200 French soldiers who will remain in northern Mali. Existing French military deployments in Djibouti, Dakar (Senegal) and Libreville (Gabon) are expected to be scaled back significantly.

France military bases

France’s problem in maintaining its military presence in Africa is that it has run out of money. It cannot afford to maintain such a strong military posture in Africa. It has been able to get the assistance of its European Union partners in a Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) in programs like EURFOR in Chad which notionally confronts the terrorist organisations with European troops, but the funds needed to provide a real challenge to the terrorists are wanting.

The notion of intrinsic forces is important in the evaluation of warfare in the Sahel. These terrorists are not, for the most part, invading foreigners coming to seek domination, power or advantage. They are locals who have taken up the Salafist ideology to further their joint aims of setting up an Islamic State and in preserving the smuggling routes across the Sahel. The ancient salt caravans across the Sahel from Mali making their way to Europe and the Middle East have evolved into caravans of drugs, diamonds and gold from Mali to Europe and the Middle East. The large revenues earned from this smuggling have helped fund the AQIM, the MNLA, MUJAO and other bands and have generated financial and political support from the Wahhabi extremists of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The collapse of Libya under Kaddafi left these smugglers without a protector so the radical extremists who supplanted Kaddafi offered the smugglers of the Sahel the same protection as before and lots of weapons.

The Sahel is still a major centre of illicit trafficking in goods. The tribes of Northern Mali are emboldened and protected by terrorist organisations in the barren wastes of Northern Mali and live, symbiotically, with the terrorist forces. Their paths are overlapping. While the tribes continue their smuggling Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) engages in illegal taxation in its areas of control, ISIS in Libya is active in human and narcotics trafficking, and Boko Haram generates significant revenues from trade in cocaine and heroin.

Illicit trafficking and threat networks

The trafficking overlaps the terrorist threats. It is matched by a large influx of weapons. Conflict Armament Research, a UK organization that monitors armaments transfers and supply chains, published an important report in late 2016, “Investigating Cross-Border Weapon Transfers in the Sahel.”  The report confirms that a flow of weapons from Libyan dictator Qaddafi’s stockpiles after his fall played a major role in the Tuareg and Islamist insurgencies in Mali in 2012. That same stockpile supplied weapons systems that included man-portable air defence systems to insurgents throughout the Sahel region. But, the report documents that weapons flows since 2011 are no longer predominantly from Libya. Instead, the weapons now come from African countries with weak control of their own weapons stockpiles, notably the Central African Republic and Ivory Coast. Sudan has also been an important source since 2015 of weapons used by insurgents in the Sahel. The report posits that the jihadist attacks in 2015 and 2016 on hotels and government installations specifically in Mali, Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast also included weapons from a common source in the Middle East; Iraqi assault rifles and Chinese-manufactured weapons are also used by the Islamic State.[i]

The logistical challenge in opposing the terrorist threat

The terrain of the Sahel does not lend itself to conventional warfare. There are broad expanses of sand and dunes, broken up by small villages and, occasionally, a town or city. There are no petrol stations, wells, repair shops, water stores, food stocks or fuel reserves in most of the region. Trucks and buses, as well as conventional armour, are difficult to transport in such a terrain. Air bases are usually suited only to small aircraft and lack the scissor-tables, cranes, fork-lifts and loading equipment which allow the free flow of cargo.

On the positive side, in the war in the Sahel the lack of ground cover and a tree canopy in the region enables a strategy of using the most modern weapons, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) which can seek out, observe and destroy small and mobile enemy forces. This has meant that the logistical demands of the war in the Sahel have generated a strategy of the use of high-tech weaponry deployed by Western forces combined with African troops on the ground as garrison forces for towns and cities.

Warfare, in general, in Africa requires a policy of expeditionary war. This is a polite way of saying that massed troop formations have no real use as there are few opposing forces of equal size to fight. African insurgents are bands and groups of often irregular soldiers. Across most of Africa troops must pass through jungles, deserts, mangrove swamps and hostile terrain to get to the enemy, often under heavy fire from the bush. The enemy of the peacekeepers is rarely an army battalion of any strength. Large-scale troop concentrations can sit in a city or town and maintain order, but they rarely can take the battle to the enemy. African armies have virtually no equipment which will allow them to fight an expeditionary war. This is a war of helicopters – in and out movement of troops to desert encampments or remote landing zones or the shooting up of ground formations by helicopter gunships when the enemy can be located.

This is how African wars are fought. Except for rented MI-8 and MI-24 helicopters leased from the Ukraine and Russia, most of Africa is bereft of air mobile equipment. They are certainly bereft of African pilots (other than South Africans and a small band of Angolans and Nigerians). There are very few African military aircraft capable of fighting or sustaining either air-to-air combat or performing logistics missions. Either they don’t exist or they are in such a state of disrepair that African combat pilots are unwitting kamikazes. There are very few airbases in the bush which allow cargo planes to land safely when a war is on given that every rebel group has its share of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and mortars. There are no fuel reserves at the airports outside most African capitals, and there are no repair facilities. There is no air-to-air refuelling, except that provided by foreign militaries. Indeed, except for Denel in South Africa and the main airbase in Ethiopia there are no places on the continent which perform sophisticated aircraft or weapons maintenance. Indeed most Western European armies themselves don’t have sufficient helicopters or heavy-lift capacities. The Africans have less. This lack of transport is critical to moving out the wounded. This takes its toll on the soldiers. This is mirrored in the lack of effective battlefield communications. In Africa the phone system doesn’t work in peacetime; why should it work in a period of war? Sending orders and receiving information between the central staff and outlying units is a ‘sometimes’ process. It sometimes takes days to contact units operating far from command headquarters.

The Europeans are not really ready to assist in the Sahel, despite the EU plans. In 2015 when Angela Merkel made the grand gesture of sending weapons to Kurdish rebels fighting Isil, she learned that her cargo planes couldn’t get off the ground. At the time, the German military confessed that just half of its Transall transport aircraft were fit to fly. Of its 190 helicopters, just 41 were ready to be deployed. Of its 406 Marder tanks, 280 were out of use. In 2016 it emerged that fewer than half of Germany’s 66 Tornado aircraft were airworthy. The French Transall fleet is out of date and few are being replaced.

This matches the debacle of the European military effort to conduct warfare on its own, starting in Kosovo. The Europeans wanted to show they had some independent military capability.  The amount of bombs, missiles and other tactical devices used in the first two weeks of the Kosovo campaign exceeded the total arsenal storage of the totality of the European Community. The amount spent per day on the bombing of Kosovo, including indirect costs, amounted to over $12.5 million. It would have been far cheaper to buy Serbia than to bomb it. NATO could have offered each Serb $5,000 a head plus moving costs and still saved money. Under NATO rules the US was obliged to pay two-thirds of these costs.

This was just as true in Libya. The Europeans (calling themselves NATO) quickly ran out of ammunition, bombs and money. The US spent almost $1.5 billion in the first wave of attacks by the French and British. As Secretary of Defence Gates said in his speech, “Despite more than 2 million troops in uniform – not counting the U.S. military – NATO has struggled, at times desperately, to sustain a deployment of 25,000 to 45,000 troops — not just in boots on the ground, but in crucial support assets such as helicopters; transport aircraft; maintenance; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and much more.” He went on:

“We have the spectacle of an air operations centre designed to handle more than 300 sorties a day struggling to launch about 150. Furthermore, the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country – yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference.”

That is the key point in analysing the struggle against terrorism in the Sahel. Despite the good wishes of the French and the other Europeans, success relies on an active U.S. participation and engagement.  The French have requested the support of the U.S. military (through NATO) in its ambition to retain control of its former African colonial empire.

There is an ironic side to French requiring assistance from NATO to support its neo-colonial policies. France withdrew from being a full member of NATO in 1966, and remained separated for decades. The reason for French withdrawal was that France believed that NATO was not militarily supportive enough.  France’s effort to develop its own non-NATO defence capability, including the development of its own nuclear arsenal in the 1960s, was to ensure that the French military could operate its own colonial and post-colonial conflicts more freely. Under de Gaulle, France had attempted to draw NATO into France’s colonial conflicts (on France’s side). De Gaulle claimed that Algeria was part of France and thus was part of NATO. Therefore, NATO was required to intervene to assist France in putting down Algerian independence movements. After the British and Americans refused to assist with French colonialism, de Gaulle expelled NATO troops from France and set up a more independent French military. Now that France is back in NATO it is making the same request of its partners as De Gaulle.

The Germans lead the EUTM Mali which trains Mali’s armed forces and EUCAP Sahel Mali which is training and advising the country’s police, gendarmerie and National Guard. The Eucap Sahel Mission, under the command of the German diplomat Albrecht Conze, is coordinating European aid to the region.  Gunther Nooke, Angela Merkel’s representative to Africa, a Commissioner for Africa at the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, has proposed a “German Marshall Plan” for Africa to relieve a continent struggling with terrorist bands in the region coupled with a drought which is causing mass famine. However, no money is yet attached to such a plan.

The U.S. has its own strategic interests in fighting the Islamic terrorists in the Sahel because they pose a major danger to U.S business interests in the area; a threat to political stability in Africa as a whole which has produced a human tide of refugees; and, most importantly, this terrorism in the Sahel produces a major source of revenue to the international terrorist structures of Al-Qaeda, Daesh and the myriad sub-groups of these in the Middle East as well as Africa.

The U.S. has agreed to support the French and European efforts to fight terrorism in the Sahel but has been unwilling to commit U.S. regular forces to fighting on the ground. It has offered training, equipment and Special Forces participation in military programs in the Sahel and frequently arranges mass exercises to make sure the trained remain so.

The U.S. military presence in Africa

The US is at war in Africa and has been so for many years. The U.S. has had practical experience in African wars. America has been fighting wars in Africa since the 1950s – in Angola, the DRC, Somalia, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Morocco, Libya, Djibouti to name but a few counties. In some countries they used US troops, but in most cases the US financed, armed and supervised the support of indigenous forces. In its support of the anti- MPLA forces in Angola it sent arms and equipment to the UNITA opposition. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Larry Devlin of the CIA was an unofficial minister of Mobutu’s government; the US ran its own air force in the Congo at WIGMO. US airmen supported the South African forces in Kwando, Fort Doppies and Encana bases in the Caprivi from WIGMO. At these bases one could also find soldiers from Southern Rhodesia (in their DC3s) and German, French, Portuguese and other NATO troops.

One of the largest of these bases was at Wheelus Field, in Libya. Wheelus Air Base was located on the Mediterranean coast, just east of Tripoli, Libya. With its 4,600 Americans, the US Ambassador to Libya once called it “a Little America.” During the Korean War, Wheelus was used by the US Strategic Air Command, later becoming a primary training ground for NATO forces. Strategic Air Command bomber deployments to Wheelus began on 16 November 1950. SAC bombers conducted 45-day rotational deployments in these staging areas for strikes against the Soviet Union. Wheelus became a vital link in SAC war plans for use as a bomber, tanker refuelling and recon-fighter base. The US left in 1970.

Another giant U.S. base was Kagnew Field in Asmara. The base was established in 1943 as an Army radio station, home to the U.S. Army’s 4th Detachment of the Second Signal Service Battalion. Kagnew Station became home for over 5,000 American citizens at a time during its peak years of operation during the 1960s. Kagnew Station operated until April 29, 1977, when the last Americans left.

However, with the end of the Cold War, the US has found itself fighting a much more difficult and insidious war: the war with Al Qaeda. This is much less of a war that involves military might and prowess. It is a war against the spread of drug dealing, illicit diamonds, illicit gold, human trafficking and the sheltering of Salafists (Islamic militants) who use these methods to acquire cash which has sustained the Al Qaida organisation and now Daesh throughout the world. It is a conflict between organised international crime and states seeking to maintain their legitimacy.

There are now several ‘narco-states’ in Africa. The first to fall was Guinea-Bissau where scores of Colombian Cartel leaders moved in to virtually take over the state. Every day an estimated one tonne of pure Colombian cocaine was thought to be transiting through the mainland’s mangrove swamps and the chain of islands that make up Guinea-Bissau, most of it en route to Europe. This was equally true of Guinea under President Lansana Conte whose wife (and her brother) was shown to be a kingpin in the Guinean drug trade. Many in the National Army were compromised and active participants. This drug trade has spread to Senegal, Togo, Ghana and Nigeria. There are very few jails anywhere in the world which are not home to West African ‘drug mules’ tried or awaiting trial or execution. This drug trade is spreading like wildfire in West Africa, offering rich remuneration to African leaders, generals or warlords well in excess of anything these Africans could hope to earn in normal commerce.

According to a US Congressional Research Service Study published in November 2010, Washington has dispatched anywhere between hundreds and several thousand combat troops, dozens of fighter planes and warships to buttress client dictatorships or to unseat adversarial regimes in dozens of countries, almost on a yearly basis. The record shows the US armed forces intervened in Africa forty-seven times prior to the now-concluded LRA endeavour. The countries receiving one or more US military intervention include both Congos, Libya, Chad, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Central African Republic, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea. Between the mid-1950’s to the end of the 1970’s, only four overt military operations were recorded, though large scale proxy and clandestine military operations were pervasive. Under Reagan-Bush Sr. (1980-1991) military intervention accelerated, rising to eight, not counting the large scale clandestine ‘special forces’ and proxy wars in Southern Africa. Under the Clinton regime, US militarized intervention in Africa took off. Between 1992 and 2000, seventeen armed incursions took place, including a large-scale invasion of Somalia and military backing for the Rwandan Kagame regime. Clinton intervened in Liberia, Gabon, Congo and Sierra Leone to prop up long-standing troubled regimes. He bombed the Sudan and dispatched military personnel to Kenya and Ethiopia to back proxy clients assaulting Somalia. Under Bush Jr. fifteen US military interventions took place, mainly in Central and East Africa.

Most of the US’s African outreach is disproportionally built on military links to client military chiefs. The Pentagon has military ties with fifty-three African countries. The Bush Administration announced in 2002 that Africa was a “strategic priority in fighting terrorism”. Henceforth, US foreign policy strategists, with the backing of both liberal and neoconservative congress people, moved to centralize and coordinate a military policy on a continent-wide basis forming the African Command (AFRICOM) and Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA). These organise African armies, euphemistically called “co-operative partnerships,” to support anti-terrorist activities in the continent. U.S. special operations teams are now deployed to 23 African countries and the U.S. operates bases across the continent.

In his 2015 article for TomDispatch.com, Nick Turse, disclosed that there are dozens of US military installations in Africa, besides Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti (Main Operating Base). These numerous cooperative security locations (CSLs), forward operating locations (FOLs) and other outposts have been built by the US in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda. According to Turse, the US military also had access to locations in Algeria, Botswana, Namibia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, Zambia and other countries.

Gen. Charles F. Wald divided these into three types:

• Main Operating Base (MOB) is an overseas, permanently manned, well protected base, used to support permanently deployed forces, and with robust sea and/or air access.
• Forward Operating Site (FOS) is a scalable, “warm” facility that can support sustained operations, but with only a small permanent presence of support or contractor personnel. A FOS will host occasional rotational forces and many contain pre-positioned equipment.
• Cooperative Security Location (CSL) is a host-nation facility with little or no permanent U.S. personnel presence, which may contain pre-positioned equipment and/or logistical arrangements and serve both for security cooperation activities and contingency access.

There are a large number of UAV bases as well.

AFRICOM’s two forward operating sites are Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier and a base on the United Kingdom’s Ascension Island off the west coast of Africa.  Described as “enduring locations” with a sustained troop presence and “U.S.-owned real property,” they serve as hubs for staging missions across the continent and for supplying the growing network of outposts there. [ii]

One of the most important of these bases is in Niamey, the capital of Niger, and nearby at Agadez, into which the U.S. has just spent $100 million on improvements.  N’Djamena, in Chad, has been heavily used in the battle against Boko Haram.

AFRICOM’s programs

The main thrust of AFRICOM programs involves the training and equipping of local forces. It engages in regular exercises with African armies and conducts JCET training programs. Most of these involve working alongside and mentoring local allies.  SOCAFRICA’s showcase effort, for instance, is Flintlock, an annual training exercise in Northwest Africa involving elite American, European, and African forces, which provides the command with a plethora of publicity. More than 1,700 military personnel from 30-plus nations took part in Flintlock 2016. There are a wide range of programs in addition to the U.S. participation in various UN programs like AMISOM in Somalia.

Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative/Partnership (formerly Pan Sahel Initiative) (TSCTI) Targeting threats to US oil/natural gas operations in the Sahara region Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Nigeria, and Libya.

Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Program (ACOTA) (formerly African Crisis Response Initiative) (ACRI)) Part of “Global Peace” Operations Initiative (GPOI) Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia.

International Military Training and Education (IMET) program Brings African military officers to US military academies and schools for indoctrination Top countries: Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa.

Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS) (formerly Africa Center for Security Studies) Part of National Defence University, Washington. Provides indoctrination for “next generation” African military officers. This is the “School of the Americas” for Africa. All of Africa is covered.

Foreign Military Sales Program sells US military equipment to African nations via Defence Security Cooperation Agency Top recipients: Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Zimbabwe.

African Coastal and Border Security Program Provides fast patrol boats, vehicles, electronic surveillance equipment, night vision equipment to littoral states.

Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) Military command based at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti. Aimed at putting down rebellions in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Somaliland and targets Eritrea. Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti.

Joint Task Force Aztec Silence (JTFAS) Targets terrorism in West and North Africa. Joint effort of EUCOM and Commander Sixth Fleet (Mediterranean) Based in Sigonella, Sicily and Tamanrasset air base in southern Algeria Gulf of Guinea Initiative, US Navy Maritime Partnership Program Trains African militaries in port and off-shore oil platform security Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, Sao Tome & Principe, Togo.

Tripartite Plus Intelligence Fusion Cell Based in Kisangani, DRC, to oversee “regional security,” i.e. ensuring U.S. and Israeli access to Congo’s gold, diamonds, uranium, platinum, and coltan. Congo-Kinshasa, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, United States.

Base access for Cooperative Security Locations (CSLs) and Forward Operating Locations (FOLs) U.S. access to airbases and other facilities Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Namibia, Sao Tome & Principe, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia, Algeria.

Africa Command (AFRICOM) Headquarters for all US military operations in Africa in Stuttgart.

Africa Regional Peacekeeping (ARP) Liaison with African “peacekeeping” military commands East Africa Regional Integration Team: Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania. North Africa Regional Integration Team: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya. Central Africa Regional Integration Team: Congo (Kinshasa), Congo (Brazzaville), Chad.

Regional Integration Teams: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola. West Africa Regional Integration Team: Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger, Western Sahara.

Africa Partnership Station (APS) Port visits by USS Fort McHenry and High Speed Vessel (HSV) Swift. Part of US Navy’s Global Fleet Station Initiative. Training and liaison with local military personnel to ensure oil production security Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, Gabon, Sao Tome & Principe.

The U.S. taxpayer is paying for French neo-colonialism

The U.S. military is engaged in over 34 nations in Africa in the fight against terrorism and the growth of the various Al-Qaeda and ISIL affiliates in the region. One of the key problems in conducting this on-going battle is that the political situation in each Francophone country is determined by the needs of Françafrique to keep their chosen president in power; not necessarily what the Africans want. A good example is Mali, where the French intervened militarily in January 2013 to stop an uprising of various militant groups in the north.

As the price for this assistance, France signed a new defence agreement with Mali, which would allow it to maintain a considerable military presence in the country. The agreement’s eleven pages of mostly general statements say that French military troops and civil servants will be allowed to stay in Mali, build military bases, operate, if needed, with Malian troops, etc., for the next five years. The five years’ term, as written in the document, is renewable.

This was a great triumph for France. Ever since the inauguration of the first President of Mali, Modibo Keïta, Mali had resisted the military aspects of the Colonial Pact. The last French soldier departed Mali in 1961. Keita refused to sign the defence protocols. Keita didn’t allow French military bases or troops on Malian soil. Even after the French had him assassinated by Lt. Moussa Traore, the Malians continued to refuse the defence pact. Traore’s successors Alpha Oumar Konare and Amadou Toumany Toure also refused, despite huge diplomatic and economic pressure. The most France could get in Mali was a 1985 military cooperation accord which allowed France to give military training and technical assistance to Malian troops.

Now, after engaging French troops to fight the Islamic forces in the North, France took over military control of Mali. After having defeated the invaders, and chasing them out of Timbuktu and other northern cities, and disarming factions of the rebellions, the French military banned the Malian army from Kidal, the central city of the northern Azawad region. The territory is claimed by different rebel groups, but it is under the de facto control of the mainly Tuareg MNLA (National Movement for Liberation of the Azawad). France allowed the rebels to occupy the area, reorganise and later gain a place at the post-war negotiations table.

France has openly supported the MNLA for a long time and insisted that they be a party to the negotiations with the Malian government who did not want to negotiate with the Tuareg rebels. Then the French put on the agenda the division of Mali into two parts, despite the Malian refusal. There was a short interval of peace and hostilities started again. The French realised that they could no longer afford the military costs of the Malian war and persuaded the UN to send peacekeepers to Mali.  In December 2013 France announced 60% reduction in its troops deployed in Mali to 1,000 by March 2014. Interim peace deals were agreed but were quickly broken. By August 2016 there continued to be attacks on foreign forces. More than 100 peacekeepers have died since the UN mission’s deployment in Mali in 2013, making it one of the deadliest places to serve for the UN.

The French were satisfied that the bulk of the expenses for the capturing of Mali in the web of Françafrique were being paid for by the “international community” (the UN, the US, and ECOWAS). In 2015, the European Union also joined to promote France’s ambitions. France got its military pact with Mali and control of the country. This seemed such a good idea the French then expanded its ambitions to pursue the military options of Operation Barkhane based in Chad to cover Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger and make sure that the costs of this expansion of the reach of Françafrique were being passed on to the ‘international community’; the large part of which is the U.S. taxpayer (directly and indirectly).

The same situation emerged in Niger and the Central African Republic. The French intervened militarily in domestic disputes which they created and took over de facto control of the countries. Claiming that this was a battle against “terrorism” the French were able to pass on the costs of their reoccupation of their former colonies using European, UN and, mainly, U.S. taxpayer money. Both African countries remain at war with domestic enemies in conflicts created by France and perpetuated by French policies towards reinstalling the rigours of Françafrique; all in the name of counter-terrorism. The UN, the EU and the U.S. don’t get a chance to decide who is the enemy in francophone Africa; this is decided by France. They only get to pay for it and use their military to train the soldiers who keep Françafrique in place.

Perhaps the current NATO meeting in Brussels will make it clear to the new Macron Government that the U.S. is capable of choosing its own enemies and, as in the time of de Gaulle, the U.S. is not in the business of preserving French neo-colonial rule on the continent.

End notes:
[i] John Campbell,, “Weapons in the Sahel”,CFR, November 22, 2016

[ii] Nick Turse. “America’s War-Fighting Footprint in Africa”, TomDispatch 22/5/17

After a long legal battle, the remains of Mwambutsa IV, the former king of Burundi, who died in 1977 were re-buried at a local Geneva cemetery. A Swiss court had ruled that he should rest in peace in Switzerland as he had wished.

In a small ceremony, the remains of King Mwambusta IV were reinterred on Friday at Meyrin cemetery in canton Geneva.

Five years ago, his body was dug up and kept in a cold room at a Geneva funeral parlour as part of a legal case brought by the king’s daughter, backed by the Burundi government, who had wanted a state funeral and burial in Burundi to help a reconciliation process.

In May, the Swiss Federal Court ruled that his remains could stay in Switzerland and be reburied at a local Geneva cemetery rather than be repatriated to Africa.

The court decision marked the end of a four-year legal battle between family members.

In 2012, the king’s daughter had asked her half-sister, who lived in Geneva, to dig up the remains with a view to repatriating them. His niece had opposed the repatriation of the remains arguing that the king’s final wishes were for him to be buried in Switzerland.

King Mwambutsa IV Bangiriceng became king of Burundi on December 16, 1915. He was invested with full ruling powers in 1929. He saw Burundi’s transfer from Germany to Belgium following the First World War and was on the throne when the country gained independence on July 1, 1962.

After a Hutu-led coup in October 1965, he withdrew to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life and died in 1977.

The Burundi authorities had argued that a state funeral would have helped a reconciliation process and calmed tensions in the country. The small African country has been battered by political strife since President Pierre Nkurunziza sought and won a third term in 2015, which opponents said violated the constitution and terms of a peace deal that ended civil war in 2005.

The Islamic State group [IS] no longer has a presence in Syria’s Aleppo province after withdrawing from a series of villages where regime forces were advancing, a monitor said on Friday.

“IS withdrew from 17 towns and villages and is now effectively outside of Aleppo province after having a presence there for four years,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Regime forces had been advancing on a sliver of southeastern Aleppo province around a key highway linking Hama province to the southwest and Raqqa province further east.

Abdel Rahman said regime forces seized control of the road late on Thursday night, prompting the remaining IS fighters to flee.

A Syrian military source in rural Aleppo confirmed the withdrawal.

“The military operation is ongoing and Daesh withdrew from the Aleppan countryside towards rural territory in Hama and Raqqa,” the source told AFP, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

“The Syrian army is clearing out the last few metres,” the source added.

A second military source, quoted by Syrian state news agency SANA, also confirmed that IS had pulled out of territory along the Ithraya-Rasafa highway.

Since early 2015, multi-front offensives against IS have eaten away at territory the group held in Aleppo province.

US-backed Kurdish and allied Arab fighters ousted the militants from Kobane on the Turkish border in 2015, and from the key city of Manbij last year.

Meanwhile, Turkish-backed rebels seized the town of al-Bab in February, and Syrian government troops have steadily chipped away at IS towns in the south of the province.

In neighbouring Raqqa province, a US-backed offensive is bearing down on the provincial capital of the same name, which has served as the militants’ de facto Syrian capital.

Abdel Rahman described Friday’s withdrawal as “a new loss for IS that decreases its influence and demonstrates that we are watching its collapse as an organisation that can manage geographical territory”.

Syria’s conflict broke out in March 2011 with peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad, whose heavy-handed response turned the situation into a complex six-year bloody war.

World powers including Russia, Turkey, and a US-led global coalition have all been drawn into the war, which has left more than 320,000 people dead.

Talks aimed at reaching a lasting ceasefire will resume in the Kazakh capital Astana next week, before another round of UN-backed peace negotiations in Geneva in mid-July.

Original source

No matter how hard White House officials try, they cannot construct a coherent “Trump doctrine” that would make sense amid the chaos that has afflicted US foreign policy in recent months. But this chaos is not entirely the making of President Donald Trump alone.

Since 1945, the US has vied for total global leadership. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, gave the US complete global hegemony. It became the force that stabilized and destabilized any region in the world as it saw fit — which always served the interests of the US and its allies. Political opinions and ideological strands in the US and globally were formulated around this reality.

Often unwittingly, we are all pushed into one of two categories: Pro- or anti-American. For decades, many critical voices warned of an uncontested unipolar world. Conformists fought back against the “un-American” and “unpatriotic” few who dared break ranks.

In the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history,” with the US and its Western allies having managed to defeat communism. He prophesized the end of “sociocultural evolution,” where a new form of a single human government can be formed. It appeared, however fleetingly, that all the obstacles before the US vision of total domination had been subdued.

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times imagined such a world in his bestselling book “The World is Flat.” He wrote, with the wisdom of a sage and the triumphalism of a victorious war general: “Communism was a great system for making people equally poor — in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”

But history never ended. It just went through a new cycle of conflicts, problems and alliances of enemies and foes. Unchecked consumerism was hardly a triumph for the neoliberal order, but a defeat of a delicately balanced planet where global warming emerged as the world’s greatest enemy. US military power could hardly wait to rearrange the Arab world, as once promised by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Since then, the so-called “new Middle East” has become a horrifying nightmare that has traversed many countries and destabilized the entire region. Worse still, the US economy has crashed, taking with it the global economy and sending some of the smallest, most vulnerable countries into abject poverty.

The rise of Trump to power is an outcome of the chaotic years that preceded his advent. By the end of his second term, former President Barack Obama spoke of his success in stabilizing the economy and creating more jobs in a process of swift recovery, contrary to evidence. A US Federal Reserve survey last year concluded that nearly half of all Americans “did not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense.”

Americans did not elect Trump simply because they are “racist,” as some have presumed, but because they are desperate. He knew how to exploit the many woes of his people with mantras such as “make America great again.” For most Americans, Friedman’s “unequally rich” paradigm seemed like detached, intellectual nonsense.

Expectedly, the greatest backlash to Trump’s chaotic politics emanates from the liberal and neoliberal forces in politics and economy that had assiduously defended the failing US order for many years. They continue to rebrand the failures of the past as either astounding successes or well-intentioned but unsuccessful endeavors to make the world a better place.

Consider a recent self-delusional discourse from the Brookings Institution to understand the complete lack of introspection. “No American president since 1945, whether Republican or Democrat, has broken so decisively with the American stewardship of the postwar liberal global order,” wrote Constanze Stelzenmüller recently, referring to Trump’s policies toward Europe and the rest of the world.

“In the service of the higher good of world peace, even the victorious superpower was willing to be bound to universal rules — a concession that admitted the existence of a worldwide community of humanity based on shared values rather than the principle of ‘might makes right’.”

This view is largely inconsistent with history. Immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, “might makes right” became the new doctrine championed by every US administration. Iraq has been bombed by all US presidents since George H. Bush in 1991.

Trump represents a strange amalgamation of US military power, business monopoly and media savviness. He seems smart enough to understand that his country requires a change of course, but does not have the will, wisdom or skills to guide it in any other direction.

After six months in the Oval Office, he is presiding over the same old power struggle between neoconservative-type ideologues, who want to see more interventions to rearrange the world as they see fit, and the military brass, which wants the US military to reign supreme but on a steady and predicable course.

While Trump rejected the idea of regime change during his campaign for office, Politico reported on June 25 that his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “appeared to endorse subverting the Iranian regime” and the “philosophy of regime change.” Meanwhile, the battle between ideologues and the military brass, which had defined both terms of the George W. Bush administration, is back.

Foreign Policy magazine described that ongoing fight in detail in a revealing report on June 16. Top White House officials — led by Ezra Cohen, senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council — want to expand the Syria war, taking the focus away from defeating Daesh to target US foes involved in that proxy war, it was reported. Defense Secretary James Mattis wants to stay the course.

Given the impulsive way Trump makes decisions, the pendulum could swing in any direction without warning or logic. Contradictions in US foreign policy emerge almost daily. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley seems to be running her own show, independent of Trump’s administration. She recently declared that Muslim sites in occupied East Jerusalem are part of “Israeli territory,” before saying she is “unclear of official US policy on the issue.”

While chaos and contradictions abound, Trump’s allies are simply unable to sum up the “Trump doctrine.” A top administration official told Time magazine that it is a “combination of very good personal skills — one-on-one… defeating (Daesh) and … commitment to people that there are certain things that the United States isn’t going to put up with.”

While such a “doctrine” lacks any serious substance, previous doctrines are equally useless. None offer a real vision that is predicated on achieving a multipolar world based on mutual respect and adhering to an equitable frame of reference such as international law.

This chaos will continue to bode badly for the Arab world and the Middle East in particular. Since Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and the onset of the current turmoil, the region has been in flames.

Unable to offer a courageous diagnosis of the violence, the Trump administration is parroting the same old jingoism of defeating “Islamic terrorism.” Lacking a vision for peace and unable to win the war, the US administration seems to have no plan except inconsistent, self-contradictory policies, while blaming everyone else but never introspecting.

It turns out that the world is indeed not “flat,” and that history remains in motion, moving beyond the jurisdiction of a single country. But until the US leadership — Trump’s or any other — realizes this, the world in general and the Arab world in particular will continue to suffer the consequences wrought by imperial arrogance and impulsive politicians.

The Beiteddine International Art Festival, one of the Arab world’s leading music festivals, was launched on Saturday at Lebanon’s magnificent 200-year old Beiteddine Palace in the Chouf Mountains.

This year’s edition features international, regional and local artists including Majida Al-Roumi, Kadim Al-Saher, Jordi Savall, Omar Kamal, Emel Mathlouthi and The Political Circus.

The festival’s organizers described the event as “a beacon of culture, heritage and art across the Arab world” with a “mission to create platforms for creativity in the Middle East.”

Beiteddine festival was founded in the summer of 1985 in the midst of the Lebanese civil war.

Its launch, at the time, was considered a leap of faith and an attempt to revive Lebanon’s cultural and creative scene.

Two years after its start, Nora Joumblat and an executive committee became the official organizers of the festival, and ever since it has become a leading regional and international annual event.

Each year, in the months of July and August, the festival presents outstanding performances by world famous stars and Lebanese artists. Concurrent with the performances, the palace houses one or more international art exhibits.

Thousands of people from across the Arab world attend the festival every year.

The United States is a schizophrenic asylum of extreme paradoxes: While its internal politics reverberates with fake news-mediated recriminations, Americans yet find merit in the same disinformation machinery that facilitates false flags abroad.

The US is now threatening Syria over an imminent “chemical weapons attack” without offering a shred of proof to the international community. Then again, the last time the US resorted to due UNSC process had instead resulted in wars and mayhem that continue till today. The vial brandished by Colin Powell was found to contain nothing more than a concoction of fraudulent intelligence and mass-mediated hysteria over Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nevertheless, fake news had come of age and forged an indispensable bond between elected US officials and the sheeple who voted them in.

Fake News: A Collective American Psychosis

No one epitomizes the fake news paradox better than the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, himself.

Trump’s tantrums against the fake news machinery, particularly CNN, reached a new nadir when the president thumped the imaginary daylights out of a wrestler who supposedly represented CNN. It was a textbook demonstration of the Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) – a mental condition characterized by impulsive outbursts of anger, violence and rage that are usually disproportionate to the situation at hand.

IED is listed as a behavioural disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) but it can share co-morbidity with various forms of psychoses. This may explain how Trump could magically see CNN in a rehearsed wrestling segment he had acted in years earlier. When fake wrestling is blurred with reality TV show and politics, the result is Donald Trump!

Just how this juvenile video montage is going to roll back years of collective citizen addiction to fake news is open to question but the incident does confirm what the world has been suspecting for a long time: The US is run by lunatics for lunatics. The recent US presidential elections, after all, was a deep state-engineered Hobson ’s choice between two psychopaths whose fanatical support base was evenly-split between 100 million adult Americans.

Trump’s electoral nemesis, Hillary Clinton, remains the catalyst for the fake news hydra but the president somehow lacks the courage to take her on. He is instead lashing out like a helpless child against institutions and personalities that are mere cogs in America’s disinformation complex.

In the meantime, the US public has meekly accepted a status quo where the IEDs of its elected officials regularly result in US troops being blown up by the IEDs of the combat variety. Call it a poetic validation of the laws of “reaping what you sow.”

In any case, one in five Americans already suffer from mental illness and this crisis is expected to aggravate under the Trump presidency. Expect suicides, spree shootings and homelessness to skyrocket in the coming months. Perhaps, some genius in the White House had figured out that mentally-impaired citizens may be more receptive to fake news.

Fake News as an Instrument of War

Joseph de Maistre once noted: “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” This is particularly true in the case of the United States where Americans do not really vote for a president every four years but rather a messiah who can deliver them from the apocalyptic bogeys of the other deep state candidate. Forget the thinning bread; it is the ever-bloodying circus that counts!

After a while, fake news, lurid allegations and gutter politics are autonomously perpetuated through a zombified sheeple. Thereafter, the deep state only has to provide directions to the slaughter house.

This pathos was apparent when the latest WMD allegations were arrayed against Syria. The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, did not disappoint with her inimitable performance. Her repertoire was as forceful and convincing as the incongruous melange of a Bollywood tear-jerker, rampant American militarism and open defecation along the Attari-Wagah border. Deconstructing Haley’s argument for anything of factual merit is like studying the erupting contents of a burst sewer pipe for intellectual stimulation. But then, Haley is the populist product of the very society that earlier elected her as the governor of South Carolina. Haley’s supporters like this sort of stuff, fake or not, and they continue to rally behind her in the social media.

The US fake news hydra also relayed Haley’s WMD allegations without questioning the need for an urgent deliberation by the UN Security Council, as is the case with anything concerning WMDs. Perhaps they forgot a famous precedence set by the United States during the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when US envoy Adlai Stevenson prevailed against the USSR’s Valerian Zorin. The John F. Kennedy administration even won the admiration of the Soviets after that episode, and both superpowers thereafter entered a period of détente that brought a tangible degree of stability to the world.

However, officials of Stevenson’s calibre who can resort to facts, evidence and logic are virtually extinct in the United Sates. Instead, we have the insensate antics of Sean Spicer and Heather Nauert who themselves embody walking-talking WMDs against basic human intelligence – reflecting the sure prospect of oblivion that awaits the United States!

By Ryan McMaken*

It’s difficult to say what most Americans commemorate or celebrate on Independence Day nowadays. Many appear to focus on some vague notion of “America.” Others even take to jingoism equating the United States government with the very notion of “freedom.”

Lost in all of this is the fact that the Declaration of Independence — the document we’re supposed to remember today — is a document that promotes secession, rebellion, and what the British at the time regarded as treason.

On the other hand, those who do recall the radical nature of the Declaration often tend to romanticize the American Revolution in a way that is neither instructive nor helpful today.

So, what should we remember about Independence Day, and what can it teach us? For starters, here are three things about the history and context of this holiday that should continue to inform us today and into the future.

One: If You Can’t Secede, You’re Not Really Free

The very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence lays it out. Sometimes, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another…”

The document then goes on to list in detail why 1776’s specific act of secession was justified and necessary for preserving the rights of the colonists.

By the 19th century, this philosophy of self-determination would become a foundational element of the ideology now known internationally as liberalism — or “classical liberalism” in the United States.

Not surprisingly, we find this idea in the later writings of liberals such as Ludwig von Mises who, writing in Vienna in 1927, concluded:

It must always be possible to shift the boundaries of the state if the will of the inhabitants of an area to attach themselves to a state other than the one to which they presently belong has made itself clearly known…

[W]henever the inhabitants of a particular territory … make it known … that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time … their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

Mises, like Jefferson, understood that without this right of self-determination, there is no freedom.

Nevertheless, modern opponents of self-determination and secession will claim that secession cannot be tolerated because it is not “legal.”

This is scarcely relevant. After all, the colonial uprising against the King was not “legal,” and it hardly matters whether political victors consider any breakaway secession movements legal. Times and societies change, and nothing is forever or written in stone.

For Mises, secession must be tolerated for pragmatic reasons. It is “the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.” But For Jefferson, as for his fellow secessionists, it was a moral imperative, whether “treasonous” or not.

Two: Independence Day Is Not a Military Holiday

For obvious reasons, government institutions have little motivation to emphasize the Declaration of Independence or the philosophy it represents. This would amount to the government undermining itself. Consequently, many have attempted to turn the Fourth of July into a holiday that embraces vague notions of celebrating “America.”

These ahistorical interpretations notwithstanding, Independence Day recalls resistance and a withdrawal of fealty to a hostile political power. We should not twist it into a celebration of our current rulers in Washington, the federal government, or the troops that work for and represent the federal government.

It should be a celebration against government and a reminder that Americans can once again walk away from tyranny, even if force of arms is required.

This does not defame or insult the American troops, but rather reminds us that we are a civilian nation and the government (and its troops) is supposed to be our servant rather than our master. Slavish displays of patriotism and loyalty to the state are inimical to the real meaning of the holiday.

Three: Armed Revolt Is a Serious and Rare Event

Among those who do wish to commemorate the true resistance offered by the revolutionaries, there is a different error: thinking that armed resistance is always right around the corner.

In some corners of America, it’s become almost commonplace to hear claims that surely the Second American Revolution will come with just a few more outrages committed against life, liberty, or property. All it will take is a few more no-knock raids committed against peaceful families sleeping in their beds. Or perhaps the government need only seize a few more guns before the American people “wake up.” Or perhaps once someone reveals the extent to which the US government spies on us all — as Edward Snowden has already done — then Americans will simply refuse to tolerate it any more.

In truth, armed resistance tends to only materialize in the midst of poverty or foreign invasion. Not surprisingly, over the past century, despite decades of immense growth in government power, rising taxes, and stifling government regulations, virtually no Americans have been taking up arms against the American state.

Some of this may stem from admirable prudence. After all, the American Revolution was an exceptionally bloody conflict, and such conflicts should not be started lightly. As noted by the Library of Congress, “[t]he Revolution … was, after the Civil War, the costliest conflict in American history in terms of the proportion of the population killed in service. It was three times more lethal than World War II.” The poverty, property destruction, and loss of life was immense given the tiny size of the American population at the time.

Most Americans are unaware of these specifics, but most people instinctively know that armed conflict can bring with it a very high price.

This doesn’t mean armed resistance is impossible, of course. It’s simply worth recognizing that so long as Americans enjoy some of the world’s highest standards of living few will be motivated to take up arms.

Ideas Always Matter

It is also helpful to remember that armed conflict can be especially disastrous when motivated by the wrong ideas and the wrong ideologies. Who can say with confidence that if the US government were wiped away today, that it would not be replaced with something even worse? Under such circumstances, we must never abandon the important work of laying the foundations first for a revolution in ideas. Without a true respect for the freedoms outlined in the Declaration of Independence, political resistance is of little value. Moreover, in a society where true freedom is valued — and where a majority embraces liberal ideals — violence will prove to be totally unnecessary. And this would be the best outcome of all.

About the author:
* Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. (Contact: email; twitter.) Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute.

Atheism remains one of the most extreme taboos in Saudi Arabia. It is a red line that no one can cross. Atheists in Saudi Arabia have been suffering from imprisonment, maginalisation, slander, ostracisation and even execution. Indeed, atheists in Saudi are considered terrorists. Efforts for normalisation between those who believe and those who don’t remain bleak in the kingdom.

Despite constant warnings of Saudi religious authorities of “the danger of atheism”, which is, according to them, “equal to disbelieving in God”, many citizens in the kingdom are turning their back on Islam. Perhaps inter alia the Saudi dehumanising strict laws in the name of Islam, easy access to information and mass communication are the primary driving forces pushing Saudis to leave religion. Unfortunately, those who explicitly do, find themselves harshly punished or forced to live dual lives.

Unfair Trials and Atheists

Just recently Saudi Arabia has sentenced another atheist to death for uploading a video renouncing Islam.

The man has been identified as Ahmad Al-Shamri, in his 20s, from the town of Hafar Al-Batin, a village located in Saudi Arabia’s eastern Province. In his video, Al-Shamri renounces Islam and makes disparaging remarks about the prophet Muhammad.

Saudi authorities first picked him up in 2014 after he uploaded a series of videos reflecting his views on social media, which led to him being charged with “atheism and blasphemy”.

While leaving Islam is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, the country’s Supreme Court, ruled against Al-Shamri on 25 April 2017, effectively sending him to his death. Court proceedings could last for months but when it comes to blasphemy, atheism or homosexuality, the sentence is more likely to be known beforehand.

Riyadh introduced a series of laws in 2014 criminalising those who spread “atheist thought” or question the “fundamentals of the Islamic religion”. According to Amnesty International Global Report on death sentences and executions, Saudi Arabia has scored 154+ executions, in which “death penalty was imposed after proceedings that did not meet international fair trial standards”.

In January 2017, an unnamed Yemeni man living in Saudi Arabia reportedly was charged with apostasy and sentenced to 21 years in prison for insulting Islam on his Facebook page.

In November 2016, Indian migrant worker Shankar Ponnam reportedly was sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of 1,195 € for sharing a picture of the Hindu god Shiva sitting atop the Kaaba on Facebook.

In November 2015, Palestinian poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh was sentenced to death for apostasy for allegedly questioning religion and spreading atheist thought in his poetry. His sentence was reduced to eight years in prison and 800 lashes to be administered on 16 occasions.

In 2014, Raif Badawi was also convicted of blasphemy for creating a website dedicated to fostering debate on religion and politics. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes.

In 2012, the journalist Hamza Kashgari was accused of blasphemy after he posted a string of tweets. He was captured in Malaysia and brought back to the kingdom. No further information about his case has surfaced since.

Atheists Are Terrorists

In 2014, Saudi Arabia introduced a series of new laws in the form of royal decrees, which define atheists as terrorists. The new royal provisions define terrorism as “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which Saudi Arabia is based”.

Conflating atheism and terrorism has become official in Saudi Arabia, by which nonbelievers who commit “thought crimes” are the same as violent terrorists.

Article 4 of the kingdom’s laws on terrorism states: “Anyone who aids [“terrorist”] organisations, groups, currents [of thought], associations, or parties, or demonstrates affiliation with them, or sympathy with them, or promotes them, or holds meetings under their umbrella, either inside or outside the kingdom; this includes participation in audio, written, or visual media; social media in its audio, written, or visual forms; internet websites; or circulating their contents in any form, or using slogans of these groups and currents [of thought], or any symbols which point to support or sympathy with them.”

In a program named “UpFront” on Al Jazeera America, Saudi Ambassador to the UN, Abdallah Al-Mouallimi explains why advocating atheism in Saudi Arabia is considered a terrorist offence.

Al-Mouallimi says that atheists are deemed terrorists in his country because in Saudi Arabia, “we are a unique country”.

“We are the birthplace of Islam,” he adds. “We are the country that hosts the two holiest sites for Muslims in Mecca and Medina. We are the country that is based on Islamic principles and so forth. We are a country that is homogeneous in accepting Islam by the entire population. Any calls that challenge Islamic rule or Islamic ideology is considered subversive in Saudi Arabia and would be subversive and could lead to chaos.”

“If he [an atheist] was disbelieving in God, and keeping that to himself, and conducting himself, nobody would do anything or say anything about it. If he is going out in the public, and saying, ‘I don’t believe in God’, that’s subversive. He is inviting others to retaliate,” Al-Mouallimi elaborates.

Counter Measures

President of the Centre for Middle East Studies in Riyadh Anwar Al-Ashqi does not see the authorities’ adoption of these laws as suppression of freedoms. While he believes that atheism, as an independent thought is positive, it may become negative and require legal accountability if it aims to transform the traditional nature of the Saudi society, which instigates communal strife and challenges religion. The state in this case, according to him, “has the right to outlaw this type of atheism and declare it as an aspect of terrorism”.

Similar to other Gulf States, Saudi Arabia perceives atheism as a threat that should be eliminated. Thus, there have been several conferences, trainings and workshops in recent years aimed at “immunising society, especially the youth, against atheistic ideas”. Saudi Arabia has established Yaqeen Centre at The Al-Madina University Department of the Study of Faith and Religions. Yaqeen Centre, which means “certainty”, is specialised in combating atheistic and non-religious tendencies. The centre’s vision is “to achieve leadership in countering atheism and non-religiosity locally and globally”. Activities of this centre remain unknown.

In October 2016, the Saudi Ministry of Education launched a government program called “Immunity” in schools to “inoculate” children against Westernisation, atheism, liberalism and secularism.

Atheists in the Kingdom?

In 2012, a poll by WIN-Gallup International (Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism) found that almost a quarter of people interviewed in Saudi Arabia described themselves as “not religious” and of those 5 to 9% declared themselves to be convinced atheists. Extrapolating that figure on a national scale suggests there are about 1.4 million atheists living in Saudi Arabia. This of course excludes all work migrants from different parts of the world, who might be already nonbelievers.

The percentage of people who believe they are “convinced atheists” is the highest in Saudi Arabia among all Arabic-speaking countries. This percentage is the highest in comparison to Arab countries, even those known for their secular leanings such as Tunisia and Lebanon.

However, these figures contradict the ones released by the Egyptian Fatwa observatory of Dar al-Iftaa Al-Missriyyah in 2014, in which only 174 atheists are thought to be living in Saudi Arabia. It remains mysterious how this number could be this accurate.

Scientifically speaking, there are no official figures about the number of atheists in Saudi Arabia because it is very difficult to conduct a research about such a sensitive topic. However, there are several pages for atheists sweeping the Internet such as “Saudis Without Religion”, “Spreading Atheism in Saudi”, and “Saudi Secular”, which indicate that there is some “atheist” activities despite all restrictions. It is difficult to determine whether these pages operate from within the kingdom or from outside.

On Twitter, the most widely used site in Saudi Arabia, over 20,000 Saudis reacted to topics related to the spread of atheism in Saudi Arabia. Voices advocating the rights of atheists appeared only very rarely compared to the ones affirming demanding persecution of atheists in the kingdom.

It must be noted that most accounts in Saudi Arabia hide behind fake names to avoid prosecution. A Saudi young man, 28, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, 2,000 lashes and 4,780 € fine after being convicted of publishing more than 600 atheist tweets.

Many Saudis say the presence of atheists in Saudi Arabia is like any other country, but their number in the kingdom is negligible compared to millions of Saudis who are adherents of Islam as a religion and as a law applied by their state in the finest details of life.

This article was originally published on Mashreq Politics & Culture Journal

It is only when the world’s people collectively forget their own individual humanity will their eternal global enslavement be accomplished by the global oligarchs.

It is now a sign of success and well adjustment to be completely and totally sociopathic in the modern day developed first world.

If one exhibits any semblance of humanity or compassion, one is considered altogether weak and not fully adapted to the consumer-driven culture of the current age, where not only are articles of manufacture, agricultural products, natural resources, and other inanimate objects having intrinsic value measured by their capitalistic worth, but also the very people themselves, who inhabit the earth.

In this modern day, every man, woman and child has now been ascribed an inherent value, in monetary terms, and their humanity is at once mitigated, if not completely removed, when factoring their worth in the world.

This is indeed the first beginning phase of a near certain brave new world in which the global oligarchs/plutocrats are preparing the majority of humanity for near chattel-like status, only ending in abject and pure slavery, wherein their entire existence is only to please their global masters and service their needs.

This reality has not yet hit the majority of the earth’s people, because if it did, there would already be mass pandemonium, revolution, and overthrow of the oligarchs/plutocrats and their prostitutes in all of the world’s governments who are responsible for slowly “boiling” the proverbial “frog” through the subtle, yet deadly, implementation of their policies and laws.

The key to saving humanity from eternal slavery is the immediate recognition of the inherent worth and humanity of each of the people on earth, and a wholehearted resistance to accepting and growing accustomed to the worthlessness and marginalization being foisted upon them by the global oligarchs/plutocrats.

This is indeed the greatest battle of all – the struggle for earth’s people to remember and keep at the forefront of their minds their individual greatness and divinity (humanity) within.

At the end of the day, no amount of techno-tyranny being slowly erected around the masses by the global oligarchs can crush the human spirit, provided of course, that the people fight to keep it.

This is another reason why the oligarchs favor “drugging” the masses through massive and organized legal (and illegal) opioid dispensation, because it is a lot easier to control the masses when they have been dehumanized in the first place.

This is also the reason why the oligarchs have abolished the home-schooling mechanism, opting instead to forcibly mandate all of the world’s children to attend government sponsored and designed educational programs which, by design, are meant to quell, crush, stunt, and dumb down even the most curious and intellectually powerful of the world’s youth.

The Hindu philosophy advocates two forms of divinity within the world – that of the “brahma,” ie, divinity external to the human experience, and that of the “atma,” representing the inherent divinity existing individually within us all.

It is the latter, the atma, which is what the world’s people must cling to, and guard jealously, if they are to maintain their individual freedoms, and ability to choose their own destinies by first recognizing, and then overthrowing and banishing the tyrants within their midst.

Recognition of evil in global society in the form of human oligarch enslavers, absolutely requires a keen ability to become introspective and tap into ones humanity, in order to gauge the external enemy attempting to enslave.

Unfortunately, since the world is on a fast trajectory towards total consumerism of the human entity, at great cost and effectiveness by the world’s enslavers, it will always be a struggle to hold on to that humanity, but in the end, this chalice of the human spirit can, and must, endure in order for the world’s people to remain free (and alive) into eternity.

The foreign ministers of the four countries calling for combating terrorism, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt, are meeting in Cairo Wednesday to discuss Qatar’s response to the four nations’ list of 13 demands amid the Gulf diplomatic crisis.

“We look forward to receiving Qatar’s response to the demands in order to study it thoroughly before taking stances,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said on Monday at a joint press conference with his German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel.

The meeting is being held after the four Arab nations — who accuse Qatar of supporting extremism — gave Doha an extra 48 hours to meet their demands after an initial 10-day deadline expired on Sunday.

“At the invitation of (Egyptian) Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, there will be a quartet meeting of the foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in Cairo on Wednesday July 5 to follow up on the developing situation regarding relations with Qatar,” Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in a statement earlier.

The four countries severed diplomatic and travel ties with Qatar last month, accusing it of supporting terrorism and being an ally of regional foe Iran, charges that Doha denies.

They threatened further sanctions if Qatar did not comply with a list of 13 demands presented through mediator Kuwait 10 days ago, which Qatar rejected.

Meanwhile, Gabriel had meetings with the UAE and Qatari foreign ministers, and said he saw signs emerging of a chance to involve “international bodies” in the discussions and to get all sides involved in the dispute around the negotiating table.

UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan said on Tuesday that the four Arab nations have yet to receive details on Qatar’s response to demands they made as part of the diplomatic crisis gripping the Arabian Gulf. He refused to say what action the countries may take against Qatar.

Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani did not give any further details on Tuesday, but said Doha was looking for a solution to the month-long crisis based on dialogue.

“The state of Qatar has adopted a very constructive attitude since the beginning of the crisis. We are tying to act mature and discuss the matter,” he said.

The 13 demands included Doha closing broadcaster Al Jazeera as well as downgrading diplomatic ties with Iran.

By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh*

A jury has concluded that federal prosecutors can confiscate a skyscraper in Manhattan to pay the families of victims of terrorism linked to Iran’s government. This includes the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the bombing of a US Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983.

The confiscation is estimated to bring nearly $1 billion to the victims’ families. Sixty percent of the skyscraper is owned by the Alavi Foundation and 40 percent by Assa Corp., which is controlled by and operates on behalf of Iran’s Bank Melli, according to the US government.

After going through a “massive amount of evidence,” the judge said she was “firmly convinced” that the Alavi Foundation “takes directives from Iranian government officials, and its day-to-day operators have been appointed by Iranian officials to ensure conformity with the interests of the government of Iran.” The foundation has made donations to various institutions in the US, including Iranian programs and universities such as Columbia.

Joon H. Kim, the acting US attorney in Manhattan, said the jury’s finding “represents the largest civil forfeiture jury verdict and the largest terrorism-related civil forfeiture in US history.” Iran was previously found to have played a significant role in 9/11. Released documents from a US federal court revealed that Iran and its proxy, the Shiite radical group Hezbollah, had a “firsthand” role in perpetrating 9/11.

US District Judge George Daniels in New York ordered Iran to pay more than $10.5 billion in damages to the estates and families of people who died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

According to the US District Court in the Southern District of New York: “In the Havlish (previous) proceeding, this Court held that ‘Iran furnished material and direct support for the 9/11 terrorists’ specific terrorist travel operation’ and (that) facilitation of Al-Qaeda’s operatives’ travel to training in camps in Afghanistan was ‘essential for the success of the 9/11 operation… The second way in which Iran furnished material and direct support for the 9/11 attacks was that a terrorist agent of Iran and Hezbollah helped coordinate travel by future Saudi hijackers.”

The finding that Iran and Al-Qaeda are interconnected is significant because it cracks the binary and superficial theory that Shiite Iran only aligns itself with radical Shiite groups, not Sunni ones.

Through it partnership with Assa Corp., the Alavi Foundation was helping Tehran via various means, the jury found, such as money-laundering. Financial donations to various programs in the US were more likely aimed at spreading Tehran’s narrative, preserving its interests and empowering its agents in the US to lobby and advocate for it.

As Kim said: “In this trial, 650 Fifth Avenue’s (the skyscraper’s) secret was laid bare for all to see.” He added: “The owners of 650 Fifth Avenue gave the Iranian government a critical foothold in the very heart of Manhattan through which Iran successfully circumvented US economic sanctions.” Iran should be forced to pay victims’ families, and every government must detect and closely monitor domestic organizations and individuals operating on behalf of Tehran.

The US State Department’s latest report found that Iran is a top state sponsor of terrorism. Tehran is engaged in financial, political and military support for militias and designated terrorist groups across the Middle East and in the West, with the aim of exporting its extremist ideals, expanding its influence and achieving its hegemonic ambitions.

• Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated, Iranian-American political scientist. He is a leading expert on Iran and US foreign policy, a businessman and president of the International American Council. He serves on the boards of the Harvard International Review, the Harvard International Relations Council and the US-Middle East Chamber for Commerce and Business. He can be reached on Twitter @Dr_Rafizadeh.

German carmaker Volkswagen (VW) said Tuesday it would resume exports to Iran as soon as next month, marking a return to the resurgent market of the Islamic Republic after a 17-year absence.

The aim is to reduce the manufacturer’s dependence on volatile markets such as China and Brazil. VW’s deliveries to China reportedly dropped 3.3 percent between January and May to 1.51 million cars while sales in Brazil fell 1.9 percent to 116,600 vehicles.

The company sealed a deal with local importer Mammut Khodro, which is due to import VW Tiguan and Passat models through eight dealerships mainly in the Tehran area.

VW is seeking to catch up with European rivals Renault and Peugeot Citroen that became the first car makers to re-enter the Iranian car market after Tehran’s 2015 deal with world powers.

Europe’s largest car manufacturing group began selling vehicles in Iran in the 1950s, but suspended exports in 2000 as the international sanctions introduced against Tehran over its nuclear weapons program began to bite.

“We are strengthening once more our international presence,” said Anders Sundt Jensen, VW’s project leader for Iran in an emailed statement, as quoted by Reuters.

The company is trying to embrace new overseas markets as it struggles with multi-billion euro losses following the diesel gate scandal. VW is currently investing into electric car projects and new mobility services.

The latest move will help the automaker to get to know local market conditions and re-establish the Volkswagen brand, according to the statement.

Annual sales in the Iranian market are seen rising to about three million cars over the medium- to longer-term, VW said, citing government estimates.

By Maja Zivanovic

After Belgrade newspaper Politika reported on Tuesday that the Hungarian government is testing an electrified ‘smart fence’ on the border with Serbia, the Belgrade Centre for Protection and Help for Asylum-Seekers said the move was a violation of European human-rights agreements.

“Hungarian [border police] are beating migrants, attacking them with dogs, they are even beating children, and according to statements of migrants, they are periodically turning on the electricity in some parts of the [border] fence,” Rados Djurovic from the Centre told BIRN.

According to Politika, Hungarian officials insisted however that the voltage of the electricity is low, at 900 volts, so “it can’t seriously hurt people”.

Its aim is to alert the police every time someone makes contact with the fence and attempts to breach the border, the officials said.

Djurovic argued however that such methods contravene the European Convention on Human Rights, which Hungary has signed.

According to the Hungarian government’s official website, police apprehended 61 illegal border-crossers within the territory of Hungary between Friday and Sunday, while 166 of them were apprehended over the past week and accompanied back to the border by police.

“The border management system is providing a suitable level of security against the reconnaissance methods and latest border-crossing attempts of people-smugglers,” György Bakondi, the chief security advisor to the Hungarian prime minister, told Kossuth Radio on Sunday, the government’s website said.

Bakondi added that the fences that have been erected on Hungary’s border use electronic monitoring equipment, including cameras, thermal imaging devices, and an “intelligent fence alarm system, to immediately sense if the fence is cut and alert border guards, who immediately rush to the scene”.

In a separate development in Serbia, the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians political party called on July 1 for the closing of a centre for migrants in the northern Serbian city of Subotica, near the border with Hungary.

The party also expressed its discontent with announcements that a new centre will be built in Subotica.

It said that migrants “should be transported to other cities”.

According to the Serbian government’s Commissariat for Refugees and Migration, around 6,000 migrants from Asia and Africa are currently accommodated in such centres in the country.

(Civil.Ge) — Russian President’s aide Vladislav Surkov, who oversees Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions, visited Sokhumi on July 3, and discussed, among other issues, Russia’s financial assistance to the region.

Surkov, who is deeply implicated in all political decisions of the two regions, held meetings with Abkhaz leader Raul Khajimba, as well as the head of the Abkhaz government Beslan Bartsits.

In the opening statement before his meeting with Raul Khajimba, Vladislav Surkov pointed out that it was important to look at “outstanding issues” of economic and political cooperation during the talks, including the implementation of the treaty on “alliance and strategic partnership” signed between Sokhumi and Moscow on November 24, 2014.

At the press engagement after the meeting, Surkov praised relations with Sokhumi leadership and said that he and Khajimba “understand each other perfectly and are absolutely like-minded.” “I am happy to underline that politically there is a very favorable period in the republic, [there is] stability, which is critically important for the development of the republic, its economy and social life,” Surkov noted.

“Our meeting was held in a very positive atmosphere … new stage of the investment program has been launched, financial transfers have already been made from Russia, high quality documentation was prepared [by the Abkhaz side] on all facilities [to be funded], most of which is of infrastructural character, which I believe is very important, since we have built quite a lot of social facilities already. Infrastructural facilities are necessary for economic development, as well as for tourism, industry and many other [sectors],” Surkov added.

Speaking on the business environment in the region, the Kremlin aide stressed that there are “certain” restrictions “hampering” the private investments from Russian businesses, including of infrastructural and political nature (property in Abkhazia can be only owned by “the citizens of Abkhazia”).

“The real estate market is strictly limited here and if this restriction was reasonably lifted, without endangering Abkhazia’s sovereignty, it would give as a strong impetus ahead,” Surkov noted.

Surkov also touched upon Russia’s future plans with regards to Sokhumi, saying that he hopes the agreement on medical insurance will be “ratified and completed,” increasing the level of medical service in Abkhazia “to Russian standards.”

The two spoke on the agreement on dual citizenship between Sokhumi and Moscow, granting the right to obtain Russian citizenship to “the citizens of Abkhazia.” Here, the Abkhaz leader noted that the agreement “is being discussed by the [Abkhaz] cabinet of ministers” and expressed hope that the Russian and the Abkhaz sides would complete the process “in the nearest future.”

The agreement on dual citizenship, is part of the treaty on “the friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance” signed between Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev and the Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh on September 17, 2008.

According to the document, citizens of one contracting party can obtain the citizenship of another contracting party “on terms and in the manner established by the legislation of the contracting party whose citizenship is obtained.”

Russia also committed to “undertake additional measures” to ease procedures required for obtaining Russian citizenship for “the citizens of Abkhazia,” in the treaty on “alliance and strategic partnership” signed between Sokhumi and Moscow on November 24, 2014.

During his one-day visit to Sokhumi, Vladislav Surkov and Beslan Bartsits inspected a number of facilities renovated with Russian funding, including a school and a library in Sokhumi.

One might rightly ask why the three topics of trade, food security and new technology might be ‘challenges’ for agriculture and by extension food and fibre production. How do all three help ensure a food secure world?

By Kenneth M. Baker*

Global trade deals such as those falling under the remit of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have long been difficult to negotiate particularly those encompassing agriculture. And the same goes for Regional deals. The United States has pulled out of the newly-agreed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and wants to re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). There is also the similar situation of the United Kingdom wishing to pull out of the world’s largest trading block, thinking it can quickly negotiate new trade deals with other countries and world areas.

The world’s global trading system is not in good shape. It is under attack from all sides; by those campaigning for local protectionism, by arguments against ‘globalisation’ for example and for reasons of political posturing. The argument is often that local jobs and employment need to be protected by restricting imports – while frequently at the same time promoting and subsidising exports to other markets; a contradiction in itself. Many ‘new’ politicians are now taking these arguments up with unrestricted enthusiasm which will have many nefarious effects if they persist.

Food and Trade Facilitation

Vast quantities of agricultural commodities are traded around the world. However, recent statistics show there has been a tendency for trade flows to stagnate. Historically, agriculture has proved to be the most difficult of all sectors for which to reach agreements. Probably because it is still the global sector which employs most people.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimate that although continuing to fall, some 33% of global employment is in agriculture. It is also the sector where average wages for those in employment are lowest.

But all the argument and contention forget one key thing. Food cannot just be produced anywhere. Production is highly dependent on available land, geography, water, sunlight and moderately temperate climates. Therefore there is a natural limitation on what can be produced and where in the world. If we want to keep the world fed, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that trade in agriculture and food products is facilitated, not hindered. This is particularly so with the growing tendency of global populations to concentrate in large dense cities and heavily populated countries.

Food Security

We eat to live. If there is not enough to eat, the consequences are dramatic. History has amply demonstrated that lack of sufficient food leads to starvation, population unrest, an increase in crime, and in the direst of cases, famine and death. There have been many causes of food shortages both natural, such as unusual climatic events like drought or the reverse, and man-made, such as war, poverty or restrictions on production and trade. Thus the moral onus is to ensure there is sufficient food production and that it is available where needed, i.e. to ensure food security.

Currently, global agriculture systems if allowed and encouraged, could probably produce sufficient food to largely ensure food security. However all is not rosy and much produce does not get to where it is and will be needed. There are also ongoing and significant changes such as in population diets with an increasing global trend to increased animal protein consumption and the swelling demands on agriculture as an energy source. This is accompanied by greater overall levels of food consumption, particularly as populations become more prosperous.

The predicted population growth will also place extra demands on agriculture and food production systems. Population growth is still accelerating. The United Nations recently upped its predictions for world population to 9.8 billion in 2050 from today’s level of 7.6 billion. This is an increase of some 30% over the next 30 years with roughly 83 million people being added each year.

This is a huge challenge for agriculture and food production systems and will be exacerbated by a desire for higher individual levels of consumption and dietary changes. It thus behoves us to take all measure possible to ensure food security. No more land will be produced and ongoing measures to protect what we have increase the challenge.

Agriculture and New Technologies

The standard of living of populations has above all depended on food supply and nutrition and in turn, much of this has depended on the close relationship between new technologies and agriculture. One of the most significant of all technological developments was ‘the new husbandry’ which occurred in the late Middle Ages.

The three principal elements of the new technique were new crops, stall feeding of cattle and elimination of fallowing, which combined, led to a dramatic improvement of agriculture productivity. In later years followed the development of artificial fertilisers and fungicides and the mechanisation of many tasks including in the textiles sector. Such developments continue apace in modern times.

At the same time, there was and is much resistance to new technology in agriculture. One of the enduring reasons has been the fear of resultant job losses also exacerbated by the proportion of the population involved in agriculture and their poverty and low remuneration levels. This resistance still continues today; with an extra element.

There is a growing trend for some populations, generally those in prosperous environments, to want greater varieties of food produced as in the historical past and without using modern techniques. This is fine as far as it goes and for those who can afford it. However it should not be at the cost of either overall general levels of food production or diminished nutrition levels for everyone else especially in less prosperous countries.

Looking to the future and given all the constraints, the focus must be on ‘producing more from less’. As in the past, the answer can only come from applications of new technology while respecting conservation and sustainability needs. Modern techniques which conserve water such as micro-irrigation and hydroponics, specially modified specialty resistance crops, highly specific chemical crop protection agents, satellite assisted crop production, improved farm machinery and many others will assist in the task and help achieve the demands of the challenge.

The list is almost endless and undoubtedly there are other techniques which have not yet been invented and which will allow greater production from the same input. All must be allowed to proceed while respecting general health, safety and nutrition requirements; however my own first-hand experience with biotechnology crops does not bode well. But while the challenge is great, it is not insurmountable.

*Kenneth M. Baker PhD is Chairman of the World Agricultural Forum, a not-for-profit institution established for scientific, educational and charitable purposes. He has contributed widely to the debate on the role of science in economic development, given evidence to parliamentary enquiries and chaired many government and other committees examining this same question. This is part of a series on the World Agricultural Forum 2017.

By Daren Bakst and Patrick Tyrrell*

There is a simple way to promote economic opportunity that helps the poor without using any taxpayer money: The federal government can eliminate numerous misguided policies. Policymakers too often think that big government is the only solution to creating opportunity and reducing poverty. They fail to ask how government might itself be the problem.

This Backgrounder answers that question and focuses on federal policies that hurt the poor,1 with an emphasis on economic regulation. The policies identified are merely the tip of the iceberg. An interagency task force is needed to identify and eliminate policies throughout the federal government that are making it more difficult to achieve the American dream.

Policies that Limit Opportunity and Hurt the Poor

Heritage Foundation scholars identified many harmful policies at the federal, state, and local levels in a recent Special Report.2 (See the appendix for the full list). There are two recurring themes to these policies, including the federal policies. First, they limit the opportunities for poor and other Americans to secure jobs or otherwise advance their economic status. Second, they drive up consumer prices for goods and services that meet basic needs, which has a disproportionate impact on lower-income households. As shown in Chart 1, low-income households spend a greater share of their after-tax income than higher-income households on meeting basic needs, such as food and electricity.A special interagency task force could evaluate, and consider ending, the following federal policies—and other similarly harmful ones:

• Climate Change Regulations. The Obama Administration issued a wide range of climate change regulations that would drive up electricity prices. Based on a Heritage Foundation analysis, electricity expenditures could increase between 13 percent and 20 percent, hitting America’s poorest households hardest.3 These significant costs would be imposed despite the climate return on these regulations, if any, being negligible.4
• Energy Efficiency Regulations for Appliances. The Department of Energy imposes energy efficiency regulations on over 60 different household appliances, from showerheads to toilets.5 The higher up-front costs and reduced choices that result from such regulations can have a significant impact on the poor.6
• Fuel Efficiency Mandates and Tier 3 Gas Regulations. As required by Congress, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently finalized new fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light-duty trucks (Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards) that will require an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) for 2025 model-year vehicles that will drive up prices for new vehicles.7 If the agencies involved eliminated future targets, people who buy new cars could save up to $3,400 for model year 2025.8 The EPA also set new standards on gasoline (Tier 3 gasoline standards) in order to lower sulfur and other tailpipe emissions from gasoline starting in 2017, with smaller companies required to comply by 2020.9 Industry estimates that the new gas standard could raise the cost of formulating gasoline by six cents to nine cents per gallon.10
• Stricter Ozone Standards. The EPA again tightened the ozone standard on ground-level ozone in 2015,11 even though states have had insufficient time to implement the strict 2008 standard. Further, the national average ground-level ozone levels have fallen 32 percent since 1980.12 The ozone standard has become increasingly controversial as it has become more expensive to meet tighter standards with smaller margins of tangible benefits.
• Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The RFS mandate that requires renewable fuels to be mixed into America’s gasoline supply has led to higher food and fuel prices. According to separate analyses by University of California–Davis economists and a Heritage Foundation economist, the mandate accounts for an increase in corn prices of 30 percent, or even as much as 68 percent, respectively.13
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Counter to its original purpose of providing affordable electricity to an economically depressed region, the TVA does not sell the cheapest electricity in the region, and in recent history has had some of the highest rates in the Tennessee Valley.
• Federal Sugar Program. As a result of government attempts to limit the supply of sugar, the price of American sugar is consistently higher than world prices: Domestic prices have been as high as double that of world prices.14 This policy may benefit the small number of sugar growers and harvesters, but it does so at the expense of sugar-using industries15  and consumers.16
• Fruit and Vegetable Marketing Orders. Marketing orders are ostensibly aimed at helping to provide stable markets for certain commodities.17 The most egregious problem with marketing orders18 is the volume controls. These controls allow representatives from a specific industry to intentionally limit the supply of commodities, thereby driving up food prices and disproportionately harming the poor.19
• U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Catfish Inspection Program. While the Food and Drug Administration is generally charged with inspecting seafood for safety, a special exception was created in the 2008 farm bill to have the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspect catfish.20 This special exception will likely reduce competition for domestic catfish producers. Foreign exporters will be blocked from selling catfish in the U.S. unless their countries develop new and unwarranted regulatory inspection schemes. This policy is a textbook example of cronyism and trade protectionism in order to help a very small interest group (domestic catfish producers) at the expense of everyone else, including the poor.21
• Import Restraints on Food and Clothing. A 2013 report by the International Trade Commission estimated annual welfare benefits from liberalization of import restraints for various sectors, including food. Between 2012 and 2017, liberalization of import restraints would benefit U.S. consumers annually by an average of $50 million for cheese, $277 million for sugar, and $8 million for tuna.22
• The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (Jones Act). The Jones Act requires the use of domestically built ships when transporting goods between U.S. ports. The law drives up shipping costs, increases energy costs, stifles competition, and hampers innovation in the U.S. shipping industry.23 It costs about $2 per barrel to ship crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, but due to the Jones Act it costs between $5 and $6 to ship it to the U.S. East Coast.24
• Smart Growth. This anti-development urban planning philosophy drives up housing prices.25 “Smart growth” plays a significant role in agencies, such as the EPA26 and the U.S. Department of Transportation,27 which have been leading drivers of these policies that are so harmful to the poor.
• Payday Lender Rules from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The proposed payday lending rule is written in a manner that will likely force many lenders to stop offering these small-dollar loans. By the CFPB’s own admission, these rules could effectively destroy the payday lending industry, eliminating up to 85 percent of the loans currently made.28 More than 12 million people per year use short-term loans, and the majority are those who have emergency credit needs and lack other forms of credit.29

Recommendation: The Trump Administration Should Create an Interagency Task Force

On April 25, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order30 creating an interagency task force to promote agriculture and rural prosperity. The President should issue a similar executive order creating an interagency task force to identify and eliminate federal policies that limit opportunity for all Americans, including the poor.

A leading economic official in the Administration, such as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers,31 should lead the task force. The task force, through a public comment process, should develop a comprehensive report that lists policies for elimination that would be submitted to the President and widely disseminated to the public, congressional leadership, and relevant committees. While the report should focus on federal policies, the task force should identify harmful state and local policies that the federal government perpetuates through federal funding. The report should also identify which policies could be eliminated by the Administration on its own, and which changes would require legislation.

Conclusion

President Trump can help lead the nation to an era in which federal policies become less harmful to those who want to advance their lives and the lives of their families. This leadership could help to transform the lives of the poor, in particular, by allowing them to have the necessary freedom to improve their lives without the government standing in their way.

*About the authors:
Daren Bakst is Research Fellow in Agricultural Policy, and Patrick Tyrrell is Research Coordinator, in the Center for Free Markets and Regulatory Reform, of the Institute for Economic Freedom, at The Heritage Foundation.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation