The ongoing, preventable plight of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is an important issue for those of us who have observed its steady decline over the last several years due to unimaginative management, huge prepayment obligations imposed by Congress, and a deck stacked to favor corporate rivals such as FedEx and UPS. The historic institution, created by Benjamin Franklin, has cut thousands of jobs: There are 220,000 fewer postal workers now than there were just over a decade ago. In addition, postal rates have been raised, and services have been cut or scaled back.

The USPS reported a $5.5-billion loss in 2014, out of $67.8 billion in revenues. Some critics argue that the postal service has become antiquated in the modern age of instantaneous email, and that its services should be corporatized. Despite setbacks and unnecessary fiscal burdens, however, the USPS still reliably delivers over 150 billion pieces of mail a year, at uniform rates, regardless of whether or not the area is deemed profitable for deliveries. The corporate mailers cannot make the same claim. The USPS has impressively not taken any taxpayer money since 1971, a feat not achieved by many subsidized or bailed-out big corporations.

The postal service has suffered from a severe lack of broad thinking and imaginative leadership. Recently retired Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe sought to fix the USPS’s declining business by proposing shutting down rural post offices, reducing hours, slashing an additional 150,000 jobs, ending Saturday delivery and door-to-door delivery, and extending delivery times into the evening. Through these actions, Donahoe aided the postal service’s spiral of decline by slashing away once-steady and reliable services and fair costs instead of seeking bold, transformative new strategies to bring in new revenue and maintain the postal service’s vital utility and relevance for future generations.

Subtracting the prefunding requirements from the USPS, it would have been in the black by $1.9 billion in 2014 — the second year in a row of revenue growth.

Mr. Donahoe’s replacement, Megan Brennan, will be the first woman to serve as Postmaster General. Here are a few questions and concerns for the new postmaster general to consider as she begins her historic tenure:

*Where does she stand on the congressional mandate that required USPS to pay out $103.7 billion by 2016 to cover future health benefits of postal retirees for the next 75 years? No other government or private corporation has to meet such an absurd financial burden. It is the primary reason for much of the USPS’s financial woes.

*How does she feel about reinstating the successful Postal Savings System (which bank lobbyists forced into cessation in 1968) for simple savings accounts? There are tens of millions of unbanked Americans, whom the banks do not want, who could use postal banking.

*What about other sources of revenue? Establishing an honest notary service, cashing most checks, selling fishing and hunting licenses, wrapping holiday gifts, and accepting wine or beer for delivery are just a few congressionally prohibited proposals that have been put forward by postal activists and watchdogs.

*What of improving the USPS’s use of the Internet, even so far as providing affordable broadband and email services?

Recently 64 organizations, led by the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), came together in what is being called the Grand Alliance to Save Our Public Postal Service. (Check out this finely produced video featuring actor Danny Glover, who comes from a family of postal workers, discussing the new alliance to save and expand the postal service.)

The alliance is advocating for increased services, including the aforementioned postal banking service.

“Building the grand alliance is the only way we will ensure that a vibrant, public Postal Service exists for many years to come,” said APWU President Mark Dimondstein.

Too many members of Congress lack understanding and appreciation of the USPS as a vital public service. Privatization advocates in Washington, D.C. — most of whom don’t use the USPS — obscure our postal system’s defining mission: “to bind the nation together” with universal service.

There are numerous compelling reasons to save the postal service from further degradation. It’s one of the largest employers of veterans and minorities in the United States while also offering fair wages and benefits. Having a letter carrier walk all neighborhoods each day can be both a deterrent to crime and also an important safety protocol; there are many examples of elderly or infirm people in trouble being discovered and aided by their letter carrier. And the USPS is never going to redline your neighborhood or threaten to move overseas.

The post Ralph Nader: An Expanding US Postal Service Is Very Possible – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

One of the greatest scenes in movie history occurs at the end of Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart is standing over the gestapo major’s body with a smoking gun. When the police drive up, the French colonel announces that the major has been shot and orders his men to “round up the usual suspects.”

Nearly all Democrats, and even many Republicans, now agree that inequality is a serious problem. They are desperately struggling to find ways to address the problem. Meanwhile, they will likely stand by and watch as the Fed raises interest rates. They will mostly like jump on board of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other trade deals that may come before Congress. While these policies go into effect, which are designed to redistribute income upward, we can count on our political leaders rounding up the usual suspects: looking for reasons why most workers are not sharing in the gains from economic growth.

Starting with the Fed, the purpose of raising interest rates is to slow economic growth and to keep workers from getting jobs. The ostensible rationale is that if the unemployment rate gets too low, then wages will start rising more rapidly and then we could have a problem with inflation. In order to ensure that inflation doesn’t become a problem, the Fed raises rates and keeps the unemployment rate from falling further.

This is about as much of smoking gun as anyone can ask for. After all, we know that wages will rise more rapidly if the unemployment rate falls further. And we know that workers at the middle and bottom of the income distribution will disproportionately benefit from wage increases as the unemployment rate falls. And, as one more piece of the puzzle, we know that the unemployment rate has been much higher by any measure over the years since 1980 when inequality was growing than it had been in the years up to 1980 when workers shared in the gains of economic growth.

Yet somehow we are supposed to ignore Fed policy when it comes to determining economic policy. The Washington Post editorial page, that great mouthpiece of elite opinion, expressed the sentiment perfectly last week. It essentially said it would be okay if the Fed started raising rates soon, or they could wait somewhat longer, sort of like they were deciding on which color suit to wear. Hey, might this decision affect the job prospects of millions of workers and the wages of tens of millions? Don’t bother the folks at the Washington Post editorial board; they’re busy trying to figure out the causes of wage inequality.

There is a similar story on trade. Our trade pacts over the last three decades have been designed to redistribute income upward. They have quite deliberately placed U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world. The predictable result of this policy is lower wages for U.S. manufacturing workers as millions lose jobs to foreign competition. Furthermore, the loss of jobs in manufacturing puts downward pressure on wages in other sectors as displaced workers in manufacturing are forced to look for jobs in the retail and service sector.

There was nothing inevitable about this pattern of trade. It was done by design. Instead of writing trade deals that focused on making it easier for foreign manufactured goods to be brought into the United States we could have written trade deals that would have made it easier for foreign doctors, lawyers, and other high-end professionals to train to U.S. standards and compete with our professionals. This would have offered gains to consumers and the economy in the same way as low-cost shirts and shoes from China offer gains. However in this case the losers would be doctors, lawyers, and other high-end professionals.

But the politicians in Washington chose not to write trade deals this way. High end professionals have more political clout than ordinary workers. Therefore they are still largely protected from foreign competition. We only subject less-educated workers to international competition.

This situation is made worse when the dollar becomes over-valued as is now the case. This increases the downward pressure on the wages of workers subject to international competition. To address the problem of foreign countries deliberately pushing up the value of the dollar to gain an edge in trade, many economists and unions have urged rules on currency in the TPP.

It seems virtually certain that the TPP will not include any currency rules. After all, it just the jobs and wages of ordinary workers at stake. The Washington Post expressed elite concerns beautifully in an editorial that essentially paraphrased the famous Barbie doll line about math being hard, telling readers that currency values are hard.

Of course there are issues in designing currency rules, but none that are obviously insoluble. If you want hard, look at the leaked TPP chapter on intellectual property. There are plenty of very hard issues there, but when the question is profits for Pfizer, Microsoft, or Disney, our trade negotiators are up to the task. But when the issue is currency rules that could benefit ordinary workers they get Barbie doll stupid.

The main point of the TPP is writing rules on patents, copyrights and regulations more generally that will favor corporations. In other words, it’s about making the rich still richer.

But the elites are likely to get their way on both Fed policy and the TPP. But don’t worry; they will spend lots of time and money trying to uncover the causes of inequality.

This article originally appeared on Al Jazeera America and is reprinted with permission.

The post Making The Rich Richer – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Selcuk Colakoglu

Islamic countries face huge security issues at the time being. Besides the traditional security issues at the border and land disputes that are also faced by other countries, Islamic countries face non-traditional security problems, such as terrorism, drug trafficking and human trafficking.

All these security problems Islamic countries face were discussed in the 6th Think Tanks Forum of Islamic Countries, which was held on 6-7 March 2015, in Islamabad, Pakistan. The main theme of the conference was ‘Addressing Multi-Dimensional Security Challenges.’ The forum was organized by five organizations: the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Pakistan Senate Defence Committee, the Pakistan-China Institute, the Turkish-Asian Centre for Strategic Studies (TASAM), and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. In the forum, Pakistan President H.E. Mamnoon Hussain, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs and National Security Mr. Sartaj Aziz, and Pakistani Senate Chairman Syed Nayyer Hussain Bokhari made the keynote speech in various sessions.

Diversity of Islamic Countries

The 57-membered Organization of Islamic Conference primarily consists of countries with a majority Muslim population. Muslims live not only in these 57 countries but also spread throughout the world. The number of Muslims living in India, Russia and China is more than the population of most Islamic countries. The majority of Muslim countries are categorized as developing or under developed southern countries. Although there are Muslims in Europe and South America, the majority of Muslim countries are situated in Asia and Africa, and there are huge differences in their cultural, economic and political features. In this respect, it is very difficult to talk about one monolithic Islamic world.

Although Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, as members of G20, are prominent countries in the world in terms of economy, most Muslim countries have serious developmental problems. Despite the Muslim countries that are rich in oil and gas, industrialized and developed Islamic countries (such as Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia) that have reached great achievements is extremely small in number. In this sense, insufficient development, injustice in income distribution, unemployment, unqualified labour, regional disparities, as well as insufficient health and education services display that Muslim countries have huge structural economic problems.

Management of Security Issues

In addition to economic problems, Muslim countries face many serious security risks. The main issues are border problems, territorial disputes and minority issues between neighbouring countries. In addition, as the overwhelming majority of Muslim countries have colonial pasts, the serious problems related to state-building and national reconciliation still exist. Due to the insufficiency of the state capacity, the Muslim countries experience serious insecurity. Many countries have no capacity to carry out the necessary fight against illicit networks and terrorist organizations. It is easy for criminal organizations and radical groups to gain a base of large masses of people because of the poor living conditions in Muslim countries. Thus, economic problems and insufficient development become obstacles to the development of the state capacity and the provision of security.

Under these circumstances it is difficult for Muslim countries to develop joint solutions to security problems. However, the awareness necessary for Muslim countries to cooperate on common security issues is growing. In particular, there is a serious concern about the spread of religious extremism and radical organizations in the Islamic world. There is a common approach that these kinds of radical religious movements use, and it destabilizes the countries where they operate and paves the way for terrorism. First among the issues to be addressed, there is widespread movement of radical religious terrorist organizations towards the center of the Islamic world from the periphery. However, in terms of methods of combating these movements, Islamic countries have not found an effective solution for these extremists and radical groups. It is obvious that some countries, by themselves, do not have the capacity to fight with such radical groups. Ultimately, long-term strategies should be developed considering the rising radicalism and developmental issues. For this purpose, the generally accepted idea is that Islamic countries must act in close cooperation with other Islamic countries as well as with major powers and international organizations.

China is seen as an important partner in terms of solving the enormous development problems of Islamic countries. China is able to build stronger partnerships with Muslim countries due to its announcement of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) project, which is covered by a $40 billion infrastructure fund. China has also played a significant, positive role in the development of African countries. Islamic countries consider Japan and South Korea as significant partners in economic development, too. The idea to cooperate with the US, Russia and European countries is gaining weight and importance in terms of helping manage the security issues of Islamic countries, namely fighting against international terrorist organizations. Thus, it is not a fortuitous circumstance that the 6th Think Tanks Forum of Islamic Countries has decided, in the period ahead, to invite think tanks from outside of the Islamic world, and to adopt a common strategy on security issues. In the upcoming period the Islamic countries can be expected to take a more active role in multilateral cooperation for security.

The post Can Islamic Countries Manage Security Issues? – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Nicholas Birns and Larry Birns*

President Obama’s upcoming trip to Panama for the Summit of The Americas on April 10-11, 2015, offers a considerable opportunity as well as a significant danger. The opportunity could come from a desire to further establish the lineaments of a new U.S. approach to Latin America— one that is more multilateral and expresses American values through an acceptance of pluralism and political diversity rather than cultivate the paradigm of imperiously imposing U.S. animus will on a recalcitrant set of partners. The danger is that Washington’s now unrestricted animus against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela will be seen as being worthy of undermining this new agenda and invoking U.S. policy back to former, totally ossified posture which was heightened by the White House’s March 9 executive order, targeting specific individuals associated with the Venezuelan government for sanctions, and employing hyperbolic rhetoric, casting Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”i

The surprising opening to Havana announced last December was thought to heavily revolutionize U.S. policy in the region; it certainly has at least provided an opening repositioning the long-tattered and heavily frayed image of the U.S. among its American neighbors. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson had clarified that she wished the preliminary work for the reopening of U.S. and Cuban embassies in Havana and Washington to be completed and touched up by the time the Summit begins. Thus, if the path had been followed, the U.S. would have had a showplace for its revitalized approach to an issue bound to be prominently visible at the conclave’s inauguration. The Obama administration, though, now faces the problem of pressures coming from the right, particularly from those who feel Cuba’s outreach, which had been a force for capitulation for the government of Raül Castro, attended by a muffling of social concerns over such persistent questions as human rights and transparency. This is no doubt regarding the origin of the sentiments, starting from that of the President himself at a December 17 press conference where he announced Washington’s restoration of ties with Cuba, but not the full-blown relaxation; the Summit would now be able to stress democracy and adherence to human rights, but in addition to one thing to another. This was compounded by additional rhetoric to be found in the March 9 executive order by the White House, which stated “We are committed to advancing respect for human rights, safeguarding democratic institutions, and protecting the U.S. financial system from the illicit financial flows from public corruption in Venezuela.”ii

There is legitimate need for a more earnest step-up for an advanced discussion of civil society and aforementioned long sought-after transparency in the Americas had been guaranteed, which will carry with it the additional diplomatic burden of covering territory where different personnel will have to negotiate in various ways and will not in and of itself be able to provoke a dramatic dispute among the participants at the summit. Unfortunately this agenda threatens to be politicized in a negative way by the growing tension between the U.S. and the Maduro government. Caracas has recently made several declarative statements against the U.S. diplomatic presence in Venezuela.

On March 2, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez announced that the U.S. had been ordered to slash its Embassy staff in Caracas to only seventeen people. The previous weekend, Maduro had claimed to detain no less than several American spies, though these have neither been named for verified. It is also certainly possible to overreact to the grave Venezuelan moves, or to interpret them disproportionately. The Obama administration’s executive order of March 9 certainly qualifies as such a disproportionate response. This need not have been the inevitable countermove to the Maduro government’s demands. As the Venezuelan embassy in Washington only has seventeen people, it is asking the U.S. to trim back its presence proportionately might be vexatious, or annoying, but it should not be incendiary.

The U.S. might protest that as a great power it needs to have a larger set of aides for its economic, militarily, philanthropic, and development agenda, and that it needs to set a wider bore to discharge its diplomatic and economic weaponry. However, Maduro clearly thinks that some among the U.S. Embassy staff are CIA officers, who he profoundly suspects of fomenting a so-called “golpe azul,” or a “blue coup,” against him by his own military officers. Maduro has asserted that on several occasions he had planned to present evidence of a suspected U.S. role behind the purported golpe at the Panama summit.

In the decade and a half since the ascent of the late Hugo Chávez to power in Venezuela, there have been many moments of high or low theater and embarrassing rodomontade in the troubled U.S.-Venezuelan relationship. This coming April, the Summit of the Americas in Panama must be seen by the White House as a serious venue,. By overly prosecuting a zealous anti-Caracas agenda, the U.S. is in danger of squandering the small amount of good will that it has accumulated as a result of the long-desired but tactically unexpected, December opening from Cuba’s aperture. There is no doubt that the U.S., in spite of reality, no doubt sees Cuba and Venezuela as barely separate cases.

Yet Cuba is no longer on the table for Washington to appeal to a Miami audience, nor is the Venezuelan exile population large enough to be taken seriously as a political force in the near future. And the U.S., with no existing economic ties because of long-established embargo, desires a consequential piece of the coming profits. Venezuela, with whom the U.S. has always had sensible diplomatic and political ties, houses the single most densely populated oil reserve and is already a part of the contemporary world economy. The country exerts a degree of power due to its oil supply despite fluctuation of market prices. Furthermore, even though there exists a decided and, in some sectors of the society, popular opposition to the Maduro regime, both Chávez and now Maduro have, unlike the Castro brothers, been affirmed repeatedly by one variant democratic process or another. The current Venezuelan leaders have a broadly accepted political legitimacy as freely elected representatives of their people that the Castro brothers never had.

Even those Latin Americans—and there are many—who take a bemused or even skeptical view of the Chávez-Maduro regimen, do not in any form want Washington to challenge them or complain that it at times acts like a bully or an ideological monitor. All Latin Americans are hardly in accordance with social policies or aspire towards Caracas-like political model. They wish that any change in Venezuela evolves organically and not be triggered as a result of U.S. pressure. Even those countries that have been critical of Venezuela do not wish to be seen as engaging in subversion or to be actively involved in intrudes to delegate or weaken Maduro. When Raúl Sendic, the Vice President of Uruguay, stated that the U.S. in his view was not trying to bring about the fall of the Venezuelan government, Maduro called Sendic “a coward.”iii Yet, soon after, Julio Chirino, the Ambassador of Venezuela to Uruguay, met with Uruguayan Foreign Minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa, who pronounced ties between Montevideo and Caracas to be fundamentally positive.iv The Obama administration threatens to come into the Panama summit having driven potentially ambivalent Latin American public opinion rather than into the arms of its opponent. The other national representatives at the summit will be, in different degrees, sympathetic or unsympathetic to any Caracas players in the dispute. The bulk of regional sympathy no longer desires any kind of coup against Venezuela, or even the equivocal posture towards a potential “golpe azul.” Lamentably, the U.S. maintains its position with hopes to emulate the events that transpired in Honduras June 2009.

Although the belligerent U.S. posture towards Cuba throughout the Cold War, was justified by the Soviet threat, afterwards its maintenance of the embargo was, later, largely the province of exile groups principally lodged in the politically important state of Florida. With policy toward Latin America now having unshackled itself from the millstone of the Cuban embargo, it would be sad if a new Venezuelan bogeyman were to assume its place. The Summit of the Americas in Panama City should advance genuine shared policy goals and take advantage of the opportunity generated by the Cuban opening, not simply replay outdated and tired antagonistic scenarios.

Latin America wants to talk about the environment, global and regional financial policy, the maintenance of fair prices for resources, and help in making the necessary transition to modern societies without falling under a new wave of financial imperialism fostered by neoliberal forces. The question is whether the U.S. will shove these apt subjects off the petty proscenium of a contrived crusade against Venezuela.

*Nicholas Birns, Senior Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), faculty at the New School, and co-editor of The Contemporary Spanish American Novel (Bloomsbury) and Larry Birns, Executive Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA).

Reference:
i. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/09/fact-sheet-venezuela-executive-order

ii. http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/150312/venezuelan-ambassador-terms-positive-meeting-with-uruguayan-fm

iii. http://www.ibtimes.com/venezuela-uruguay-spat-over-claims-us-backed-coup-tenses-relations-ahead-regional-1846258

iv. http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/150312/venezuelan-ambassador-terms-positive-meeting-with-uruguayan

The post Intemperate US Actions on Venezuela Threaten To Dissipate Cuba-Related Goodwill – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By William James Martin*

Former President, Nobel Laureate, and founder of the Carter Center, Jimmy Carter, was conspicuously absent from the podium at the National Democratic Conventions in 2008 and 2012 in which Barak Obama was nominated by the Democratic Party for the US Presidency. Reasonable speculation for Carter’s absence is that Obama felt Carter’s presence might be harmful to Obama’s election, or re-election in the 2012, probably because of his very public views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue which is not popular with much of the most influential membership of the Democratic Party, nor of their most important contributors.

Whether the snubbing of Carter was a matter of pure political calculation, or whether Obama is genuinely hostile to Carter’s views is probably an open question.

What Obama’s views really are and what his perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is and his understanding of the history of the conflict we shall examine.

Speaking on June 4, 2008, before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the day after receiving the Democratic nomination for President, Obama stated the following:

Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds.

The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, and he left us when I was 2. My mother was white; she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional and cultural identity. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea — that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

I also learned about the horror of the Holocaust, and the terrible urgency it brought to the journey home to Israel (Italics mine).

He then describes his great-uncle who had been a part of the 89th Infantry Division — the first Americans to reach a Nazi concentration camp. They liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald, on an April day in 1945.

When the Americans marched in, they discovered huge piles of dead bodies and starving survivors. …

I saw some of those very images at Yad Vashem, and they never leave you. …

It was just a few years after the liberation of the camps that David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the Jewish State of Israel. We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle and decades of patient work. But 60 years later, we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security.

Not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust. Not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction. Not when there are maps across the Middle East that don’t even acknowledge Israel’s existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred toward Jews. Not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot, and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.

I have long understood Israel’s quest for peace and need for security. But never more so than during my travels there two years ago. Flying in an [Israeli Defense Forces] helicopter, I saw a narrow and beautiful strip of land nestled against the Mediterranean. On the ground, I met a family who saw their house destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. I spoke to Israeli troops who faced daily threats as they maintained security near the blue line. …

Hamas now controls Gaza. Hezbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon, and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran — which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq — is emboldened and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation. Iraq is unstable, and al-Qaida has stepped up its recruitment. Israel’s quest for peace with its neighbors has stalled, despite the heavy burdens borne by the Israeli people.

… Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.

That starts with ensuring Israel’s qualitative military advantage. I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat — from Gaza to Tehran. Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As president, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade — investments to Israel’s security that will not be tied to any other nation. First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defense. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO. And I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world.

We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations. That is why I opposed holding elections in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot.

Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. … any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided. [Italics mine]

In this impassioned speech, Obama manages to hit all the talking points of Israel’s state propaganda, and could just as well have been written by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech writer. It includes: 1) the centuries long yearning of Jews to ‘return’ to a homelands, which, though a widespread belief and a persistent theme of Zionist ideology and propaganda, is nonetheless a complete myth, as will be discussed. 2) the horror of the Holocaust, which, though not at all a myth, is invoked constantly by the state of Israel to justify its existence. In fact, this repetitive invocation of a threat of another Holocaust even began in 1948 in the midst of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the Jewish army, even though it was the Palestinians who were facing a Holocaust, not the Jews, 3) the insidious threat of the ‘terrorist group ‘ Hamas, which ‘seeks Israel’s destruction’, along with Al Qaeda, Iran, and Hezbollah, the latter ‘is tightening its grip on Lebanon”. And 4), the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip ‘raining down on Siderot’ with the danger to Israeli school children transiting to and from school. 5) government funded textbooks across the Middle East which teach ‘hatred toward Jews.

Of course, Obama announces that he will appropriate $30 billion in grants to Israel over the next ten years.

There is the suggestion in the speech that the reason he voted against the Iraq war, as a senator during the Bush administration, was because regime change in Baghdad would strengthen Iran. “Iran — which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq — is emboldened and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation.” In other words, Obama opposed the Iraq war for the sake of Israel.

He refers to flying over Israel, as had George Bush before, and observing that ‘narrow strip of land’, with the implication that the strip of land is too narrow.

And of course, “any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders.[Italics mine]

The requirement that any agreement with the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state’ was enunciated 6 years prior to the injection of this requirement into the ‘peace talks’ by Mr Netanyahu. Possibly, Obama and Netanyahu mean two different things by, “a Jewish state’. However that may be, one wonders if Mr Netanyahu did not review Obama’s speech before introducing this new requirement for a settlement with the Palestinians in order to assess American receptivity before adding a requirement which most observers believe would be impossible for the Palestinians to accept, though apparently embraced by the American president.

And, Jerusalem must remain Israel’s undivided capital; very much in line with the persistent refrain of the Israeli Prime Minister, and another principle which the Palestinian leadership could not possibly accept. This claim that Jerusalem must be the undivided capital of Israel flies in the face of previous American policy as upheld by every American president since 1967, and is in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis of the American position since the ’67 War, at least up until the Obama administration whose support for this principle is either weak or non-existent. It also runs in contradiction to UN General Assembly Resolution 184 upon which Israel claims international legitimacy. That resolution set aside Jerusalem as a UN administrated area neither a part of the Jewish or Arab states.

There is not much that the President-elect left out, if his purpose was to appease the Zionists and capture the Jewish vote in the upcoming general election.

Any Palestinian listening to this speech must have been horrified; Obama had taken the most extreme hardline Israeli positions.

Whether these words actually reflect his personal understanding of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and it’s just solution or whether he is acting politically with the primary goal of winning the election and capturing the Jewish vote is probably a distinction without a difference, especially considering that, having now won two elections, he has never contradicted this message over the past seven years, and in fact, he has repeated it,.

Though the speech is from 2008, Obama has recycled the same themes repeatedly since, in particular in his 2011 speech to the United Nations General Assembly and in his March 2012 speech before AIPAC with almost word for word replication.

Obama regurgitates a central concept embodied in the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948:

“Exiled from the Land of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.

“Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regained their statehood. In recent decades they returned in their masses. …”

In fact, this is sheer mythology, one of Mr Ben Gurion’s many fabrications which he wrote into the Israeli Declaration of Independence, long a part of the Zionist mythos, and swallowed uncritically by a wide range of people including the American president.

Though Jerusalem, or at least central Palestine was the metropole of the development of monotheism and Judaism, the focus of Biblical narrative, and the phrase, “next year in Jerusalem” made its way into one of the Seder prayers, apparently dating from the middle ages, in fact no practical effort was ever made by any of the world’s Jews, up until the end of the nineteenth century, to settle in Palestine; and one searches in vain for any proposal of the creation of a state up to this period.

Nor was a longing for Palestine or Jerusalem a widespread culturally induced icon within the Jewish community as the lack of any significant movement toward reclaiming the Holy Land or migrations of Jews to the Holy Land, or even any significant amount of Jewish pilgrimages to the Holy Land, before about the 1880’s, by Jews attest.

The concept of a Jewish migration from Europe and elsewhere to the Holy Lands and the establishment of a Jewish state is a Christian, and not a Jewish, invention and was first embraced by the Jewish communities of the Russian Pale, and then only a small proportion of them, from about the 1880’s onward owing to a wave of anti-Jewish violence. During this period about 1.5 million Jews of western Russia migrated to the United States and only a few thousand to Palestine. Overwhelmingly, the preference of eastern European Jews during this period of emigration was the United States, not Palestine.

It was Christianity, not Judaism that introduced the ideas of ‘wandering Jews’ displaced from their original homeland and seeking to “return”. It was Christian Zionism that introduced the term return to describe a Jewish migration into Palestine implying a continuity, if not an identification, between the ancient Judeans and modern Jews, and that Jews are the “lawful” owners of the land of Palestine.

It is doubtful that anyone would invoke the term return to describe a contemporary conquest of Palestine by Egypt, or Persia or Macedonia for that matter, even though Egypt had ruled Palestine a millennium before there was a Jewish city state in Jerusalem, the latter occurring at the end of the first millennium BCE. And likewise both Persian and Macedonia, under Alexander and his sons, ruled Palestine before Jewish rule, the latter of which did not even encompass all of Palestine and was certainly did not bear a resemblance to a modern day nation state.

It is not exactly known when monotheism developed, but it was most probably in the middle of the first millennium BCE concurrent with the writing of the Bible which occurred most likely between the seventh and the fifth centuries of the first millennium BCE.

According to historian Shlomo Sand in his recent book, “The Invention of the Land of Israel”:

Jewish pilgrimages [to Jerusalem and the Holy Land] emerged as an afterthought to Christian pilgrimage. It never reached comparable dimensions and so perhaps cannot be considered an institutional practice. Few Jewish pilgrims set out to the Holy land between the twelfth century and the end of the eighteenth century CE, by comparison to the tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims who made the trip during the same period. … the degree to which the Land of Israel did not attract the “original children of Israel” is nonetheless astounding.

… it is evident that journeying to the Land of Israel was no more than a marginal practice in the life of the Jewish communities. All comparisons between the members of Christian and Jewish pilgrims reflect that Jewish trips to the Holy Land were a drop in the ocean. We know of approximately thirty texts that provide accounts of Jewish pilgrimages during the seventeen hundred years between 333 CE and 1878, we have some 3,500 reports of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land.(1)

It was English Christians, and not eastern European Jews who began the campaign to promote Jewish immigration to the Holy Lands.

The British Library contains the oldest document, written in English on Christian Zionism entitled Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (‘A Revelation of the Revelation), a 50 page monograph, written in 1585 by the Anglican priest, Thomas Brightman, often described as the ‘father of the Restoration of the Jews’.

Brightman argued that the ‘rebirth of a Christian Israelite nation’ would become the ‘center of the Christian world’, and further that a ‘restoration’ of Jews to Palestine was necessary if England was to be blessed by God when history enters its last days and the prophesies of the book of Daniel are to be fulfilled. (Sizer 2004, Christian Zionism; the road to Armageddon)

However the campaign began, in earnest, with the ascendancy of the Puritans in England in the early seventeenth century who engendered a refocus and a reemphasis on the Old Testament and on the children of Israel with whom the Puritans identified.

Barbara Tuchman states:

“The period … up to 1600 let us say, Palestine had been to the English a land of purely Christian association, though lost to the Christian world through the unfortunate intrusion of Islam. Now it came to be remembered as the homeland of the Jews, the land carrying the Scriptural promise of Israel’s return. Interest now centered on fulfilling the Scripture. Starting with the Puritans ascendency, the movement among English for the return of the Jews to Palestine began.”

In the year 1649, the very peak and midpoint of Puritan rule in England, two English Puritans of Amsterdam, Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, petitioned the government “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in the ships to the Land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.” …

To understand their motive one must realize the transformation wrought by the Bible acting through the Puritan movement. It was as if every influence on thought exerted today by the press, radio, movies, magazines were equaled by one book speaking with the voice of God, reinforced by the temporal authority of the Supreme Court. Particularly the Old Testament, with its narrative of a people unalterably convinced of having been chosen by the Lord to do His work on earth, governed the Puritan mind. They applied its narrative to themselves. They were the self-chosen inheritors of Abraham’s covenant with God, the re-embodied saints of Israel, the “battle-ax of the Lord”, in the words of Jeremiah. Their guide was the prophets, their inspiration were owed not to the Heavenly father of Jesus, but to Jehovah, the Lord God of Hosts. Scripture, the word of god revealed to His chosen people, was their command, on the hearth as on the battlefield, in Parliament as in church. (2)

Shlomo Sand tells us:

Woven through not only the Cartwrights’ petition but also the stance taken by the foreign secretary Lord Palmerston in the 1840’s and Lord Balfour’s well known letter to Lord Rothschild in 1917is a common thread or, to use another metaphor, a critical artery pulsating within the English (and subsequently British) body politic. Lacking this artery and the unique ideological elements it carried, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have ever been established. (3)

Impelling the promotion of a Jewish migration into Palestine was a program, not essentially for the sake of Jews, but as it was read from the Scripture, or rather read into the Scripture, that such an re-assemblage of Jews in the Land of the Children of Israel and then their conversion to Christianity was necessary for the return of Christ and a millennium of peace. Such ideas persist among Christian Zionist in our time.

The Puritans believed that since their own doctrines were closer to Judaism, and that the Jews, once in close contact with them, would find conversion to Christianity relatively smooth.63.

The idea of a Jewish migration into and assemblage in Palestine was very much in the air by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

During the Syrian campaign of Napoleon’s Oriental expedition in which he had sought to defeat the Ottoman rulers, cut off Britain from its empire, and recreate the empire of Alexander from France to India, he become (sic) the first political leader to propose a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine:

‘Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine. Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny were able to deprive of the ancestral lands only, but not of name and national existence …She [France] offers to your at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel’s patrimony … Rightful heirs of Palestine … hasten! Now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of your rights among the population of the universe which had shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Yehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and in likelihood for ever.’ (4)

Observe that Napoleon is here attempting to initiate a program or a movement among Jews which , in his understanding, did not exists at that time. Napoleon is not trying to tap into a recognizable “2000 year old yearning of Jews to return to Zion” but is trying to create one from scratch.

A similar conclusion can be reached from this letter, written a half century later, 1841, from Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, antecedent to Winston Churchill, to Moses Montefiore:

I cannot conceal from you my anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavor once more to resume their existence as a people. I consider the object to be perfectly obtainable. But two things are indispensably necessary: Firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly that the European powers will aid them in their views. (5)

Lord Shaftesbury – Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, nobleman, philanthropist with the ear of Prime Ministers, Lords, and others who held power in mid nineteenth century, in particular, that of Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister from 1855 to 1865, was a deeply religious man who based his life on the Bible, “God’s written word”. “I accept it, believe it, bless it, as announced in the Holy Writ.” Ashley became president of the Palestinian Exploration Fund whose mission was to explore every inch of Palestine and to “prepare it for the return of its ancient possessors …” Ashley presided for 40 years over the London Society for the Promotion of Jewish Conversion to Christianity whose signal achievement was the establishment by the Church of England of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem with a converted Jew as its first bishop. Shaftesbury invented the phrase, “A country without a nation for a nation without a country’ which later transmogrified into the Zionist slogan, “A land without a people for a people without a land’.

Tuchman writes:

On August 17, 1840 the Times published a letter on a plan to “plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers” which it said was now under “serious consideration.” It commended the efforts of Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury), author of the plan, as “practical and statesmanlike” and quoted a canvass he was making of Jewish opinion designed to find out how they felt about a return to the Holy Land, how soon they would be ready to go back, and whether Jews “of station and property” would join in the return and invest their capital in the land if the Porte could be induced to assure them law and justice and safety to person and estate and if their rights and privileges were “secure to them under the protection of a European power.” [Italics mine] (6)

By the late nineteenth century most all of England was primed for the promotion of Jews to be assembled, “reassemble” as they put it, in Palestine. The literature- novels and poetry from Milton to Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron to George Eliot and to Benjamin Disraeli, politician/novelist, promoted the assemblage of Jews in Palestine. The newspapers, the Manchester Guardian, in particular, the political actors of the day, with few dissenters, were all aligned driven by religious fervor combined with a vision of imperial by proxy.

Speaking on the floor of the House of Lords in 1922, five years subsequent to the Balfour Declaration, Lord Balfour said:

… that he would be unfair to himself if he sat down without insisting “ to the upmost of my ability” that there was a great deal involved in Britain’s sponsorship of the Jews’ return to their homeland. “This is the ideal which chiefly moves me … that Christendom is not oblivious to their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them the opportunity of developing in peace and quietness under British rule, those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries which know not their language and belong not to their race. (7)

Balfour speaks to us again:

Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in the age-long tradition in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land … . The idea of planting a [European] minority of outsiders upon an indigenous majority population, without consulting it, was not calculated to horrify men who had worked with Cecil Rhodes or promote European settlement in Kenya. (8)

Of what was Balfour speaking? Jewish history, or the five centuries of English philo-semitism from the 50 page Christian Zionist monograph of Thomas Brightman to the declaration that bears Balfour’s name. That is, is he speaking of Jewish history or of the English interpretation of that history and contribution of British conceptualization of that history, however Balfour may have understood his own words? Was he not referring, not to Jewish endeavors, but to the long and deep tradition within British society and culture of Christian Zionism?

Mr Ben Gurion’s insertion into the Israeli Declaration of Independence of the claim of 2000 year of Jewish yearning and struggle to return to Palestine is a fraud and an effort to claim provenance of the creation of Zionism which was, in fact, a product of Christians, or of Christian society. It was Christian culture that developed and nurtured the concept of the return of Jews and the continuity of the ancient Judeans with modern Jews overlooking the possibility that modern Jews might well not be the descendants of the ancient Judeans, as it ever more looks like they are not. This created trait of continuity, and identification, of ancient Judeans with modern Jews has allowed Mr Netanyahu, as well as the Revisionist/Lukud strain of Zionism, to claim a right of proprietorship over Palestine which, in his view, and theirs, overrides the constraints of international law, in particular, international law’s injunction against ethnic cleansing.

Ever how much Mr Netanyahu and his Lukud party, and most Israelis for that matter, would be displeased to hear it, Jewish Zionism is an outgrowth of Christian Zionism which developed , incubated, and nurtured it and is not an auto-genetic, self-contained, or autochthonous product of Jewish energy.

President Obama’s pre-presidential background in foreign policy was modest consisting of his having taken some classes on foreign policy at Columbia University as an undergraduate and, as a member of the United States Senate, having served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Notwithstanding his tenure on the Foreign Relations Committee, and maybe with the exception of his vote against authorization for the Iraq invasion, he seems never to have attempted to influence American foreign policy in any significant way.

According to Fawaz Gerges (Obama and the Middle East, p 97), Obama had read a few popular books on foreign affairs – Fareed Zakaria’s Post American World and Thomas Freedman’s There World is Flat, and also Samantha Power’s Putlitzer Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell, a history of genocides. (9)

He certainly lacked the foreign policy experience of some whom he appointed to cabinet, or deputy cabinet posts such as John Kerry, or Richard Holbrook and some others.

One searches in vain for any detailed and highly competent writings or speeches on foreign policy, given by Obama, that go beyond idealistic platitudes, ever how souring the rhetoric.

Looking to the beginning of his presidency, his only foreign policy projections were to correct the overextended foreign policy and adventurism of his predecessor and affect a retraction of foreign involvement ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and retrenching American energy toward a domestic agenda.

Obama’s orientation is toward domestic policy as an academic program of constitutional law would dispose. Between Columbia and Harvard Law School, Obama worked, not in any capacity having to do with foreign policy but as a community organizer in Chicago’s south side.

The contrast with President Carter is instructive.

Coming into office, Carter clearly identified several areas of foreign policy in which he was determined to act. Those were: 1) To establish a working relation with the Soviet government on the issue of nuclear arms reductions. 2) To complete to diplomacy initiated Richard Nixon and establish full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. 3) To resolve the growing potential conflict with Panama over the Panama Canal and to complete a treaty that previous presidents had left dangling. 4) To resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 4) To reduce American’s dependence on the importation of foreign oil and to end the possibility of a disruption of oil supplies as, for instance, caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973. 5) To move southern Africa toward constructive change and away from apartheid. Carter was largely successful in in carrying out these initiatives.

By contrast with Carter, there were no positive foreign policy initiatives envisioned by the new incoming president other than the intention of ending the involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The so-called “pivot toward Asia”, which was also a pivot away from involvement in the Middle East only reflects the reaction against the Bush policies and is an effort at correction. It is a reaction against rather than a genuinely positive refocus.

There is, however, a fairly consistent foreign policy strategy, consistent with Obama’s disposition toward limited foreign involvement which is discernable if one ignores the idealistic words and speeches. In the historic tension between idealism and Realpolitic, Obama comes down on the side of Realpolitic. Thus, foreign involvement is only justified if American’s vital interests are threatened.

Thought of this way, the Palestinians are as peripheral to core American interests are the Bahrainian protestors in Pearl Square.

Though Obama has exhibited sympathies toward the peaceful protests as they began in Syria and later for the rebel fighters resisting the crush or the Syrian army, Obama rejected Secretary of State Clinton’s proposal to arm the Syrian rebels, and even now, American aid to the moderate Syrian rebels, such as can be found, is quite modest.

What is not modest, however, is the effort to defeat ISIS while the Assad regime in Damascus is largely ignored. Overthrowing or destabilizing the Assad regime would not make any more sense to Obama than the invasion of Iraq under President Bush.

In terms of Realpolitic, there is little contribution that the Palestinian or their liberation can do for US strategic interests, whereas there is considerable cooperation between the US and Israel on security matters.

One might argue, as many have, that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict along with Israel’s continued occupation and land confiscation is harmful to American’s image in the Arab world and is possibly behind much of the unrest and overall hostility, harbored by some, toward the US.

But this involves long term interest, and further, a clear straight line cannot be drawn between a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem and a diminution of tensions and conflicts in the Middle East.

Arguably, the combined efforts of the US and Israel to develop the Stuxnet virus, or malware, which did considerable damage to the Iranian centrifuges at their Natanz nuclear facility, and the recently revealed combined US-Mossad intelligence cooperation which resulted in the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, along with the combined British, Israeli, and US espionage on Iranian government leaders recently revealed by Edward Snowden , indicate the close security cooperation between the US and Israel on matters of security and the fight against terrorists threats (10). It also reflects a shared interest in matters of security, an interest not shared between the US and the Palestinians.

Despite Obama’s pledge in in 2009 Cairo to do everything in his power to achieve a Palestinian state living peacefully beside a secure Israel, Obama is not going to discard, or risk the loss of, the potential intelligence asset of Israel’s technical capability or experience in the Middle East in order to achieve freedom for the Palestinian people. Nor has he shown the slightest interest in risking political capital in a public fight with Israel over basic issues.

As of the writing of this article, there is a test of wills occurring between the White House and the Israeli government led by Mr Netanyahu’s implacable hostility to any compromise in negotiations on Iranian nuclear program.

This is a battle Mr Obama did not choose. Rather it represented a challenge by the Israeli government to Obama’s determination to avoid further military involvement in the Middle East and, in particular, a war with Iran, as Mr Netanyahu has been trying to promote, or to avoid the US to be drawn into a war with Iran initiated by Israel.

Obama’s concentration of energy on the implementation of a policy based on Realpolitic allows Obama to avoid acquiring a very detailed knowledge of the history of Israel or of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or, for that matter, any other area of foreign policy.

The several paragraphs quoted at the beginning of this paper reveal that, at best, Obama has a superficial knowledge of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and its history and also reveals his embrace of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda largely discredited since the writing of the historians, mostly Israelis, since the 1990’s. I refer primarily to the writing of historians Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and others.

Obama could do no better at the beginning of this past summer’s Israel was against Gaza than repeat the Bush mantra we heard so often – “Israel has a right to defend itself.” As in the case of his predecessor, there is no consideration of the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves. Nor was there a consideration of who was defending against whom. This often repeated platitude reflect a considerable shallowness and an indication that Obama has given very little thought to what is the actual nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is difficult to imagine President Obama replicating Jimmy Carter’s 13 days long Camp David Summit which consisted of virtually non-stop debates between President Carter and Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with Benjamin Netanyahu replacing Begin. Obama lacks the interest, the passion and the necessary knowledge or historical grasp to conduct such a session. But Obama would hardly be undertake such a summit in the first place

Israel can offer the US cooperation at the security level with Israeli intelligence which is highly capable and has extensive experience in the Middle East.

The Palestinians have little to offer Obama.

Do not expect any significant progress engendered by the Obama administration for the rest of his term.

If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will emanated from the International Court of Justice.

*William James Martin contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: wjm20@caa.columbia.edu

Footnotes:

• Sand, Shlomo; Verso, “The Invention of the land of Israel”
• Tuchman, Barbara; Ballantine, “The Bible and the Sword”, p 122
• Sand; ibid, p 145
• Stephen Sizer: “The Road to Balfour: The History of Christian Zionism”
• Tuchman; ibid, p 209
• Tuchman; ibid, p 176
• Tuchman, ibid, p 316
• Masalha, Nur: Zed, Bible and Zionism, p 100
• Gerges, Fawaz; Palgrave, p 95
• Oren, Amir; Insreli intel cooperated with US and Britain to surveil Iran Leaders, Haaretz, February 22, 2015

The post Obama And The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Patrick Bond*

Sometimes a single event reveals crucial stories about our strengths and weaknesses in advancing progressive social change and ecological sanity. Early last month I sought out intersections between three simple phenomena: the predatory extractive industries now looting Africa; our energy access crises (especially here in South Africa); and climate change.

I thought that progressive civil society allies might begin to assemble their strengths in class, gender, race, generational and environmental consciousness; that they would fuse activist passion and NGO technical sophistication; and that they could draw upon lessons from Africa’s many great anti-extraction struggles.

I fear I was wrong. Even with the best will, and amongst truly exceptional activists and strategists at the Cape Town Alternative Mining Indaba (AMI) from February 9-12, a typical civil society “intersectionality” gap was glaringly evident.

That clunky word – “the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination” – is increasingly understood to be vital medicine to treat the NGO disease of silo-isation: being stuck in our little specialisations with historic prejudices intact, unable to lift up our heads and use the full range of human capacities to find unity.

The AMI brought together more than 150 activists from vibrant African community organisations, another hundred or more NGO workers stretching from local to international, the hottest advocacy networks, a phalanx of public interest lawyers, a few brave trade unionists and even some curious armchair academics like myself. It should have offered the best conditions possible for intersectional work.

The kick-off day included a set-piece protest march to the gleaming Cape Town International Convention Centre. The target: the corporate African Mining Indaba attended by thousands of delegates from multinational and local mining houses plus a few of their side-pocket politicians.

There, former UK Labour Party prime minister Tony Blair gave a keynote speech notably hostile to “problematic, politicised” trade unions who enjoy class struggle more than class snuggle. Security was ultra-tight because Blair is, after all, regularly subject to citizen arrests because of his Iraq-related war crimes.

And money was another reason no activists could make their case inside: the entrance fee was nearly $2000. For a taste of some of the grievances against the big mining houses, see the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s balanced fact sheet.

The AMI’s internal critics told me they felt the march was tame and predictable. It was. Actually, the week’s best moment for confrontation was a small guerrilla theatre stunt just outside the convention centre. Pretoria’s Anglican Bishop Jo Seoka invited suited executives to drink the disgusting water that his grassroots allies brought from mining-affected communities. No one took the bait; and amusing video resulted.

The march helped activists let off some steam, for they were angry at the blasé mood in both Indabas. Just beforehand in the opening AMI plenary, two charismatic keynote speakers – Zimbabwean democracy advocate Brian Kagoro and Matthews Hlabane from the SA Green Revolutionary Council – were joined by militants from several communities who raged openly against petit-bourgeois NGO reformism.

Warned Kagoro, “We risk here, as the elite of civil society – civilocracy – becoming irrelevant. If you want mining to carry on, in just a bit more humane way, there will be another Alternative Mining Indaba happening in the streets.”

Indeed, if the AMI does avoid that fate, a healthier future would probably require switching the event away from trendy Cape Town suburbs and instead convening a people’s assembly and set of (translated, inter-connected) teach-ins located at various sites within the gritty mining belts sweeping from northwest to eastern or northern South Africa. Only in such venues can the masses properly hold forth.

Perhaps with this bracing threat in mind, the march was followed by three days of exceptionally rich presentations and debates. The break-out rooms were filled with campaigning tales and most carried the frisson of outright opposition to non-essential mining.

For example, asked the leading-edge critics, do we really need to drink the fizzy sugar water (Coca Cola products whose profits line Cyril Ramaphosa’s gorged pockets) from the tin cans (smelted in Richards Bay, South Africa, at a wicked cost in terms of coal-fired electricity) that we immediately toss away into the AMI hotel’s (non-recycled) rubbish bin?

To slow the awesome destruction caused by senseless mining, some activists suggested UN “Free Prior and Informed Consent” language as the best way for communities to deflect prospecting. Techniques to delay Environmental Impact Assessments were shared. Tax justice narratives came in handy, given the mining houses’ prolific capital flight and illicit financial flows. Still other progressive lawyers suggested routes into the jurisdiction of legal reparations. And almost everyone complained of a Resource Curse in which multinational mining capitalists corrupt African politics, economics, environments and societies.

I had a clear sense that no one believed minor Corporate Social Responsibility reforms will ever treat, much less cure, the Resource Curse. Instead, the reforms discussed were practical handles for raising concerns, getting publicity, adding a bit of pressure, and giving mining-affected communities – especially women – a sense of hope and solidarity.

Still, for me, the event also provided a sobering and somewhat depressing lesson: much more work is needed to generate intersectionality: connecting the dots to other issues, political scales and constituencies. The disconnects were obvious regarding three issues which might become vital elements in campaigning against extractive industries, in both the short and long term: electricity access, climate change and mineral economics. Consider each in turn.

SHORT-TERM EMPOWERMENT CRISIS

Just outside the AMI, but apparently unnoticed, South African society was seething with hatred against state electricity supplier Eskom. The increasingly incompetent agency has threatened near-daily ‘load-shedding’ (electricity black-outs for two hours at a time) for years to come.

There’s not enough working power capacity (only 30 000 MegaWatts when 43 000 are technically available) to meet industrial and household demand most days – with mega-mining corporations having extraordinary access to power, symbolized in 2014 when a former executive of the world’s largest commodity firm, GlencoreXstrata, was seconded into Eskom to represent mining interests: Mike Rossouw.

Rossouw had for many years served as chair of the 31-member Energy Intensive Users’ Group (EIUG), the largest corporate guzzlers which together consume 44% of the country’s supply. The nickname Minerals-Energy Complex emerged 20 years ago thanks to very sweet Eskom deals that have persisted for most of the company’s 85-year history. For example, two of the world’s biggest mining houses, BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation, signed decades-long agreements supplying them at US$0.01/kWh, a tenth as much as what low-income South Africans pay.

So South Africa’s load-shedding phenomenon should be blamed on both the multinational mining corporations and the local energy industry, and their allies in Pretoria and Eskom’s MegaWatt Park headquarters. This is not an unusual configuration in Resource-Cursed Africa, where vast amounts of electricity are delivered via high-tension cables to multinational corporate mining houses for the sake of extraction and capital-intensive smelting.

Most African women meanwhile slave over fires to cook and heat households: their main energy source is a usually fragile woodlot; their transmission system is their back; and their energy consumption is often done while coughing, thanks to dense particulates in the air. Going from HIV-positive to full-blown AIDS is just an opportunistic respiratory infection away, again with gendered implications for care-giving.

Given these intense contradictions, how could the AMI anti-mining activists, strategists, funders and intellectuals not connect the dots; how could they fail to put together load-shedding due to mining overconsumption, with most Africans’ lack of basic electricity access, and place these at or near the fore of their grievances so as to harvest so-far-untapped popular support for their programme of rolling back mining and rolling forward clean household electricity?

A Cape Town-based “Million Climate Jobs” campaign already suggests how turning off the vast flow of electricity to South Africa’s smelters and mines would, in turn, help redirect employment there to more constructive, post-carbon activities: jobs in renewable energy, public transport, insulation retrofitting, digging biogas digesters and many others.

As for communities, their class/race analysis of electricity access is expressed readily when they show visitors their own dirty household energy, often in the immediate vicinity of a massive mine, smelter or powerplant (see the excellent mini-doccie “Clear the Air” by the NGO groundWork, for example, or the fiery tv Big Debate episode on energy).

So why can’t those dots – the environment-labour-community-feminist sites of struggle – be connected at the NGO-dominated AMI? Why do the words energy and electricity not even appear in the final AMI declaration, in spite of their extreme abuse by multinational mining capital?

LONG-TERM CLIMATE CRISIS NOT ON SA CIVIL SOCIETY SHORT-TERM AGENDA?

As I mulled this paradox over in the unlikely (luxury Hilton Hotel) AMI venue, my eye was caught by a flashy red-and-white document about South African coal, containing explosive information and some of the most vivid photos I’ve ever seen of ecological destruction and human suffering. It is full of horrifying facts about the coal industry’s wreckage: of public and household health, local environments, and the lives of workers, women, the elderly and children. (Regrettably there’s no web link and I won’t name the agency responsible in order to make a more general point and avoid singling out a particular example by name.)

This particular booklet doesn’t hesitate to explain mining industry abuse via cooptation of African National Congress ruling-party elites via Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Cyril Ramaphosa-style BEE translates into worse misery for the many, and enrichment for a very few such as South Africa’s deputy president. His billion-dollar net worth comes not only from that notorious 9% share of Lonmin and all that it entailed, but also from his Shanduka company’s filthy coal operations. With men like him at the helm, South Africa certainly isn’t going to kick the life-threatening Minerals-Energy Complex habit.

It’s a good critique that connects many dots, and certainly the particular agency that published it is one I consider amongst the half-dozen better international NGOs. Their grantees do amazing things in many South African, other African and global contexts.

Yet the coal booklet offered only a token mention – a few words buried deep in the text – about climate change. Though coal is the major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and although there’s a vibrant world campaign against coal mining in favour of renewable energy, the climate crisis was completely lost amidst scores of other eloquently-described grievances.

Drawing this to the agency’s attention, I received this explanation from one staffer: “While climate change is a great middle class rallying point, it has no relevance to people living in poverty beyond their empty stomachs, dirty water and polluted air.”

As we learned the hard way at the civil society counter-summit during the United Nations COP17 here in Durban, this may be a brutally frank but true estimation of the hard work required to mobilise for climate justice. In the last comparative poll I’ve seen (done by Pew in 2013), only 48% of South Africans considered climate change to be a ‘top global threat’, compared to 54% of the rest of the world.

Fortunately though, the terrain is fertile, especially in the South African provinces – Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal – attracting the most militant and sophisticated attacks on Big Coal anywhere in Africa. They are carried out by a myriad of militant community and environmental groups, including Mining Affected Communities United in Action, the Green Revolutionary Council, Bench Marks Foundation (a progressive church-based research/advocacy network), periodic critiques by radical NGOs groundWork and Earthlife (the latter hosts a branch of the International Coal Campaign), legal filings by the Centre for Environmental Rights and Legal Resources Centre, supportive funders like ActionAid, and women’s resistance organisations (supported by Women in Mining, Womin).

Still, aside from communiqués by Womin feminists and occasional NGOs (mostly in passing), it is extremely rare that they connect the dots to climate change.

GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS ARE POLLUTANTS, TOO (!)

A good example of disconnecting-the-dots emerged last week, when South African Environment Minister Edna Molewa infuriated grassroots communities, NGO activists and progressive lawyers who fight prolific pollution by mining houses, petro-chemical plants and smelters. Molewa’s job includes applying new Minimal Emissions Standards to 119 firms – including the toxic operations of Eskom, Sasol, AngloPlats, PPC cement, Shell, Chevron and Engen oil refinery – whose more than 1000 pollution point sources are subject to the Air Quality Act.

Ten years ago when the law was mooted, these firms should have begun the process of lowering emissions. They didn’t, and so Molewa just let 37 of them (mostly the largest) off the hook for another five years by granting exemptions that make a mockery of the Act.

Yet notwithstanding justifiably vociferous complaints, South Africa’s environmental NGOs (ENGOs) simply forgot to mention climate change. There was just one exception, Samson Mokoena, who coordinates the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance: “Not only has Eskom been granted postponements, but so has the largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the country, Sasol.”

(At its Secunda plant, Sasol squeezes coal and gas to make liquid petroleum, in the process creating the single greatest site of CO2 emissions on earth, and Eskom is Africa’s largest CO2 emitter by far when adding up all its plants together.)

In contrast to Mokoena, one of the world’s top campaigning ENGOs ignored CO2 in predicting Molewa’s decision will “result in about 20,000 premature deaths over the remaining life of the [Eskom] power plants – including approximately 1,600 deaths of young children. The economic cost associated with the premature deaths, and the neurotoxic effects of mercury exposure, was estimated at R230 billion.” Add climate change (that NGO didn’t, for reasons I just don’t get) and these figures would rise far higher.

The excuse for giving Molewa a pass on the climate implications of her latest polluter-massage is that the Air Quality Act was badly drafted, omitting CO2 and methane. That omission allowed one of the country’s leading journalists to report, “The three pollution baddies that can cause serious health issues, are particulate matter (soot), sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.”

Ahem, surely in such a list, GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions qualify as a baddy? More than 182 million Africans are expected to die prematurely by 2100 thanks to GHGs, according to Christian Aid.

But Molewa “seemed to have developed a ‘massive blind spot’, ignoring how air pollution was transported over very long distances to damage human health in places far removed from the source of emissions,” alleged another international ENGO.

Sorry, but just as big a blind spot exists when that very ENGO simply forgot about climate change, even though GHGs are co-pollutants with all the other air-borne toxins, transported over very long distances, wreaking enormous damage.

There is, however, one thing worse than neglecting climate change when you have an excellent chance to raise consciousness: assimilation into the enemy camp. In some cases, civil society degenerates from watchdog to lapdog.

I don’t mind naming what may be the most notorious, a multinational corporate tool called the WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF), whose SA chairperson Valli Moosa also chairs AngloPlats. Moosa was responsible for what, five years ago, the SA Public Protector termed “improper conduct” when approving the world’s largest coal-fired power plant now under construction, Eskom’s Medupi.

At the time, Moosa was serving as both Eskom chair and a member of the ruling party’s finance committee, and signed a dubious boiler-supply deal worth more than $4 billion with a company, Hitachi, whose local affiliate was 25% owned by Moosa’s party. The Medupi boilers needed to have 7000 of the welds redone. (The ruling party led the liberation struggle and regularly wins elections… but really isn’t too experienced at making coal boilers.)

With a man like Moosa at the helm, I wasn’t too surprised when, a couple of days after Molewa’s announcement and a day after the SA finance minister yet again postponed introducing a carbon tax law, WWF’s Saliem Fakir “welcomed the government’s commitment to the mitigation of climate change and support which showed that South Africa was leading the way among developing countries in terms of policy measures towards easing the burden on the environment.”

When WWF meets a toxic polluter or a captive regulator like Molewa, it seeks a snuggle-not-struggle relationship. It’s long overdue that it changes its acronym to WTF.

BEHIND THE DISCONNECTIONS LIES CAPITALISM

In Naomi Klein’s brilliant new book and her husband Avi Lewis’ forthcoming film, ‘This Changes Everything’, we find crystal-clear linkages between climate (“This”) and practically all other areas of social struggle. For Klein, it is the profit motive that, universally, prevents a reasonable solution to our emissions of greenhouse gases: from energy, transport, agriculture, urbanisation, production, distribution, consumption, disposal and financing.

In other words, the intersectionality possibilities and requirements of a serious climate change campaign span nearly all human activity. Through all these aspects of the world’s value chains, we are carbon addicted. In each sector, vested corporate interests prevent the necessary change for species survival.

It is only by linking together our single issues and tackling climate as the kind of all-embracing problem it is, that we can soar out of our silos and generate the critical mass needed to make a difference.

But in turn, that means that any sort of systemic analysis to save us from climate catastrophe not only permits but requires us to demand a restructured economic system in which instead of the profit motive as the driving incentive, large-scale ecologically-sound planning becomes the fundamental requirement for organising life.

So it’s time, in civil society, that “capitalism” should be spoken about openly, even if this occurs now for the first time in many generations, especially in those politically backward societies – e.g. North America and Europe – where since the 1950s it was practically forbidden to do so.

In much of Africa, in contrast, grievances against colonialism were so fierce that when neo-colonialism replaced it over fifty years ago, many progressive activists found courage to talk about capitalism as the overarching, durable problem (worse even than the remaining white settlers). In South Africa, anti-capitalist rhetoric can regularly be heard in every township, blue-collar (and red-collar) workplace, and university. Here, Moscow-trained presidents and even communists who were once trade union leaders have quite comfortably populated the highest levels of the neoliberal state since 1994.

Talking about capitalism is now more crucial than ever. If we don’t make this leap to address the profit motive underlying so much eco-social chaos, then our economic future is also doomed, especially in Africa. One reason for that is what is sometimes called “natural capital” depletion: the minerals, gas and oil being torn out of the earth don’t grow back.

The next logical question is whether, given the diminishing natural wealth that results, the economic activity associated with extractive industries is a net positive or net negative. In resource-rich Norway, Australia, Canada and the US, where the headquarters of mining and petroleum companies are located, the profits recirculate. According to natural capital accounts compiled in the World Bank’s book [url=http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ENVIRONMENT/Resources/ChangingWealthNations.pdfThe Changing Wealth of Nations[/url], this plus educational investment gives these countries much higher net positive returns.

Environmental damage is another matter – but on economic grounds, again, the critical question is whether the profits are being reinvested. Answer: in the Global North, yes; but in Africa, no! They’re being looted by multinational corporates and local comprador allies.

That means that one of the AMI’s other dot-disconnections was any talk of the capitalist economy, or even mention of the way mineral resources are being stripped away so fast and with so little reinvestment that the net economic effect of mining is profoundly negative for the continent’s wealth. (This fact you need not accept from me; have a look at the Changing Wealth of Nations to see Africa’s -6% annual wealth effect from natural capital outflows.)

What is the solution? Can Africans with intersectionality dot-connecting talents now more forcefully consider an eco-socialist model? If we do not recover the socialist traditions of Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Ruth First, Thomas Sankara and Chris Hani, and to these add environmentalist, feminist and other intersectional arguments, the generations living now will have quite literally kindled next-generation Africans’ scorched-earth future.

Large-scale planning may sound terrifying, given how badly earlier attempts turned out, such as the Soviet Union’s. On the other hand, Cuba has made the jump out of carbon addiction faster than any other society thanks to planning. Or just compare the well-planned and executed evacuation of Havana during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to utter chaos in capitalist New Orleans. State-led innovations ranging from municipal water systems to the internet (a product of Pentagon R&D) are so vital to daily life that, unless denied them, we don’t think twice about their public sector origins and status as public goods.

And after all, is there any other way to achieve the power shift required to overcome a climate disaster, than to build a movement for democratic state decision-making?

To do so, though, requires a somewhat longer-term perspective than the average activist and NGO strategist has scope for, in sites like the AMI.

If we do not make that leap out of the silos in which all of us have sunk, we will perish. We are so overly specialised and often so isolated in small ghettoes of researchers and advocacy networks, that I’m not surprised at the AMI’s conceptual impotence. Even our finest extractives-sector activists and strategists are not being given sufficient scope to think about the full implications of, for example, where our electricity supply comes from, and why mining-smelting corporates get the lion’s share; how climate change threatens us all; and how the capitalist economy makes these crises inevitable.

The solution? A critical part of it will be to think in ways that intersect, with as much commitment as we can muster to linking our class, race, gender, generational, environmental and other analyses of the oppressed. Action then follows logically.

* Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa.

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Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says Iran and the P5+1 global powers can reach a deal over Tehran’s nuclear program if the six countries show the same political will as Iran.

“In my view, if the opposite side has the same political will as the Islamic Republic of Iran, reaching a solution will not be difficult,” Zarif said.

The Iranian chief nuclear negotiator added that technical aspects and the lifting of sanctions will be the two most important issues that will be discussed in the upcoming round of talks with the P5+1.

“There are two issues that need to be highlighted in this round of talks. One is regarding the issues which have not been resolved yet or those for which there are solutions but the details of which have not been fully discussed,” he said.

He said that Iran and the P5+1 countries may require more elaborated discussions about certain technical topics, adding that head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi and US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz started technical discussions on Sunday.

“The second issue pertains to the sanctions and the commitments of all parties…it should be made clear how the sanctions will be removed and what guarantees are provided for the agreement,” Zarif stated.

He underscored the importance of working out a specific mechanism to make sure that all sides stick to their commitments.

Zarif said political directors of the P5+1 countries are also likely to join talks on Tuesday, noting that the negotiating sides should make efforts to put final touches on the proposed solutions as they should discuss all the proposed solutions before drafting the text of an agreement.

Zarif emphasized that “reaching solutions does not mean a comprehensive agreement.”

He further criticized the US senators for recently sending a threatening letter about the future of any final deal, saying their action showed to the world that Iran is genuinely seeking to find solutions, but a small group is resorting to all means to prevent any deal.

Iran’s Foreign Minister also said solutions to outstanding nuclear issues with the P5+1 countries are at hand although differences still remain between the two sides.

“We are closer to a solution in some cases and it can therefore be said that solutions are at hand, but in some cases solutions are still elusive,” Zarif said.

He added that it is necessary to negotiate with all sides until Friday to see the final results of the talks.

Asked whether a prospect has been considered for the removal of sanctions in his meeting with Kerry, the chief Iranian negotiator said, “There is a prospect for all issues.”

He noted that the outstanding issues pertaining to Tehran’s nuclear program, sanctions and a recent letter sent by a group of US Republican senators to Iran over an emerging nuclear deal were mainly discussed during his Monday meeting with Kerry.

The Iranian foreign minister said Tehran “regards the Congress letter as a political move” and emphasized that the US administration should brief Iran on its stance regarding the issue.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani also said a deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries over Tehran’s nuclear issue is possible if the six world powers abandon their “excessive demands.”

“I do not have a pessimistic stance towards the talks. Many steps have been taken and if the other side drops its excessive demands, the Iranian and the P5+1 negotiators could cut a deal,” he added.

The top parliamentarian also expressed the legislative body’s support for the Iranian negotiating team led by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif if they manage to get a “good deal.”

Larijani, however, stressed that “it won’t be the end of the world” if a final deal is not reached, saying Iran is doing without a comprehensive agreement at the moment.

“We will pursue other approaches if an agreement is not reached,” added the speaker.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker also said the letter by the US Republican senators shows the influence of the Zionist lobby on the country’s political scene, saying the move undermined the US’s legal standing in the global community.

The senators’ move in writing the letter explains the reason behind the international community’s growing “distrust” in the US administration, Larijani said.

The top parliamentarian further slammed as “hollow” and “void” a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint session of the US Congress earlier this month, saying the American senators decided to send such a letter to Iran in another “thoughtless” move after the world ridiculed Netanyahu’s anti-Iran rant.

The letter dealt a heavy blow to the legal standing of the US on the international stage, Larijani stressed.

Larijani further called on the Iranian negotiators to block any “reactionary measures” such as the loopholes suggested in the controversial letter in a possible agreement with the P5+1 group of countries over Tehran’s nuclear work.

Meanwhile, 260 Iranian lawmakers in a statement said the lifting of all the sanctions and the closure of Iran’s nuclear dossier at the UN Security Council followed by its referral to the International Atomic Energy Agency are conditions for a comprehensive deal with the six countries.

They emphasized that the Iranian nation’s achievements should be protected and its rights should be fully restored in accordance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Meanwhile, Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi said the Iranian and American negotiators have held progressive talks.

“During today’s session, technical issues and sanctions were discussed by the two sides,” Salehi added, emphasizing that certain issues still stand between the two sides and reaching a common point.

He noted that the two sides’ negotiators are making efforts to reach a general conclusion about the nuclear issue in the upcoming days.

The new round of talks opened in the Swiss city as the AEOI head and US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz held high-level technical talks. Experts from Iran and the US as well as the AEOI spokesman, Behrouz Kamalvandi, were also present in the meeting.

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Sri Lanka President Maithripala Sirisena on Monday met with the political party leaders to seek their opinions and proposals to change the current preferential voting system as stated in his election manifesto.

The President meeting with the party leaders of both government and opposition at the Presidential Secretariat said the peoples’ opposition has been drawn at present on the preferential voting system in the same manner as the agitations were conducted against the unrestricted powers of the executive presidency.

Sirisena said his personal opinion is that the preferential voting system should be changed and replaced with a mixed electoral system.

The President in his 100-day program pledged to set up an all-party committee to put forward proposals to replace the current preference vote system and replace it with an mixed electoral system that ensures representation of individual members for parliamentary constituencies, with mechanisms for proportionality.

Accordingly the government has already commenced preliminary activities to change the system, Sirisena said.

The meeting was convened to seek the opinions and proposals of the political party leaders.

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Spanish companies will have the chance to bid on contracts worth 8 billion dollars in United Arab Emirates ahead of the 2020 World Expo. Transport, energy, water treatment, farming and food security infrastructures are the priority sectors, the Spanish government said.

The Spain-United Arab Emirates Joint Committee, chaired by the Ministers for Economic Affairs of the two countries, Luis de Guindos and Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansoori, agreed to promote investments and bilateral economic and trade relations, as well as to increase support for trade between the two countries in collaboration with the EU.

The committee meeting, which took place on Monday and Tuesday in Madrid and Granada, provided an opportunity for the delegations from the two countries to exchange information on trends in the main macro-statistics on their trade exchanges, examine opportunity sectors for exports and investment, and analyze potential barriers that could become an obstacle to future trade exchanges. During the course of the meetings, particular emphasis was placed on the important role played by SMEs in the process to strengthen bilateral economic relations between the two countries.

Expo 2020

The World Expo to be hosted by Dubai in 2020, as well as the numerous infrastructure, equipment and service projects scheduled to be developed there between now and then, were a major topic in the presentations given by the UAE delegation. In turn, Spain expressed the interest shown by Spanish companies in forming part of this development of infrastructures, provision of equipment and rendering of services for the event. A public investment of 8 billion dollars and a private investment that will far surpass this amount are expected to take place over the next five years.

The Spanish delegation highlighted the track record and prestige of Spanish companies in terms of railway expansion, metro lines and other transport infrastructures being built in the United Arab Emirates. It also highlighted their leadership in other areas of interest to UAE, such as desalination, water treatment, renewable energies, farming and food security.

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During an interview with Carlos Herrera for the program “Herrera en la Onda” on Onda Cero, Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy stressed that the main objective for the future must be achieving the figure of 20 million Spaniards in work. After reminding the audience that the bipartite model has brought Spain progress and well-being, Rajoy underlined the “resolution” and “independence” with which corruption has been combated.

In respect of the regional elections in Andalusia, Rajoy pointed out that it would be positive for Andalusia to opt for a political change on 22 March, In terms of possible post-election pacts, he reiterated that his position is for the most-voted for party to govern and to try to reach agreements if that party does not have a sufficient majority to govern. “That is what takes place in any democracy”, Rajoy asserted.

According to the Spanish Prime Minister, “the most important objective, to which end all efforts should be addressed in the coming years, is to create jobs in Andalusia”. Hence, if “the Regional Government of Andalusia had implemented policies geared towards creating jobs, encouraging new entrepreneurs and generating the right conditions for people to invest, Andalusia could have created 500,000 new jobs during all this time, thus bringing it up to the same level of employment as the national average”.
Bipartisanship

Rajoy claimed that the bipartisan model has worked well in Spain because it has resulted in us being one of the five countries in the world to have most increased its per capita income in the last 40 years. “This is a great country and I believe that the parties that have governed have provided a great service” However, Mariano Rajoy accepted that “this is something for the Spanish people to decide on”.

Despite the crisis, the major parties are the ones who have offered Spain stability and progress, stressed Rajoy. Although no political pacts have been agreed on for the next legislature, Rajoy did assert that “consensus is always sought with the other major party in Spain when reaching important State agreements”.

At any event, “what most concerns me at the present time, in terms of what could happen in Spain in the future, is a change in economic policy”, Rajoy said, because thanks to the present policy the economy is growing and jobs are being created. He declared that “the figure of 20 million people in work can be achieved based on half a million new jobs per year if we do things right”.

The Spanish Prime Minister also underlined that, despite the “disproportional” economic crisis we have suffered, “this country has managed to maintain the basic pillars of its Welfare State and this should spur us on for the future”. The indices on inequality, which grew in Spain between 2008 and 2012, started to fall in 2013. “I am absolutely convinced that these figures also improved in 2014″.

On another note, Rajoy clarified that, when he came to power, his priority was to avoid bankruptcy because the situation in 2012 was “drastic”; 70 billion euros had been lost in revenue in just two years and it was not possible to maintain the same level of expenditure. “That is what we principally tackled in that year”, added the President of the Government, “which was a tough and complicated year because there was pressure on us to ask for a bailout and refusing that was the most important thing we have done in this legislature”. Mariano Rajoy explained that thanks to these decisions, “we have now grown more than anyone else and, moreover, we are now creating more jobs than anyone else”.

According to Rajoy that financial assistance was requested because if not, Spain would have lost “some of its leading financial institutions and we would now have much greater problems accessing credit”. Thanks to this decision, “the Spanish financial system has recently passed the European Central Bank’s stress tests and is acknowledged as one of the soundest systems in Europe”.

Fight against corruption

Rajoy stressed that “the issue of corruption is truly one of the worst issues we have faced in Spain in recent years and people are rightly outraged at these things”. The police, the Guardia Civil, public prosecutors and the justice system have all acted with “resolution” and “independence” on these matters, he highlighted.

As regards the presence of defendants on the electoral lists, the Prime Minister commented that “an accusation is not a sentence”, although sometimes “people are judged before the due process”. Hence, “the right decision will need to be taken in each case”.

General State Budget

Rajoy explained that 40% of the Spanish Government’s budget is allocated to the 9.2 million pensioners. That is why the main priority is job creation because “the more people in work, the more people making National Insurance contributions, which helps maintain and improve pensions”. The other major items of the Budget, he added, are unemployment benefits (30 billion euros per year) and servicing debt (which is fortunately falling, “thanks to the policy we have implemented”).

The Prime Minister insisted that the main priority must continue to be job creation and to this end, “we have taken some important decisions in recent times”, as he announced in the latest Debate on the State of the Nation.

Catalonia

As regards the issue of Catalonia, Rajoy recalled that “at the very most, a simulation of a referendum” took place, without any guarantees or political worth. He also underlined that “firm yet proportional” action was taken, and that no President of the Government of Spain is ever going to accept a debate on “the unity of Spain, on national sovereignty, on equality among Spaniards or on their fundamental rights”.

After committing to dialogue to resolve these questions, Rajoy remarked that in Catalonia “things are calmer than a year ago and I am convinced that they will be even calmer in a year’s time”.

Greece

The Prime Minister expressed his wish to see Greece remain in the Euro, although he asked for the country to meet its commitments, “as indeed we all do”. He stressed that the European Union has helped Greece a great deal and is in a position to continue doing so.

However, Rajoy added, “Greece must help itself and it must take decisions that other EU countries have taken”.

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On Monday, the Security Council approved a resolution renewing the mandate for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), only one day before the current mandate was due to expire. This is the first resolution facilitated by Spain during its current membership of the Security Council, which was adopted unanimously.

In its capacity as penholder on Afghanistan, Spain led the complex and arduous negotiation process over a period of more than a month. Finally, after a long negotiation session that lasted until Friday night, the resulting text satisfies the positions of all Members of the Council and the wishes of the authorities in Afghanistan.

In his speech at the Council session at which the resolution was adopted, and besides expressing gratitude for the confidence placed in Spain by the other Members of the Security Council for entrusting it with responsibility on Afghanistan, the Spanish representative highlighted the main changes and new features contained in this resolution when compared with its predecessors:
First of all, it recognises and adapts to the new situation in Afghanistan following the satisfactory conclusion of the first democratic transition in the country’s history since the agreement reached to create a National Unity Government and the start of the Decade of Transformation on 1 January 2015, the goal for which is security and economic sustainability in the country.

Secondly, it underlines Afghan sovereignty, ownership and leadership over its own nation-building process.

And, thirdly, it entrusts the Secretary-General with launching a process to examine the function, structure and actions of the United Nations entities in Afghanistan, in full consultation and collaboration with the Government of Afghanistan and the main stakeholders involved, including the community of donors.

The Spanish representative reiterated Spain’s full support for the new authorities in Afghanistan and its citizens, while also calling on the Government of Afghanistan to firmly implement the already announced programme of reforms on democratisation, good governance and human rights, especially women’s rights.

He concluded by calling on the Government of Afghanistan to persevere in its efforts to achieve national peace and reconciliation, while closely tackling common challenges together with its neighbours.

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By Abe Jimenez

Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays were masters at understanding how images and rhetoric could be manipulated in order to trigger certain psychological responses from the public. They perfected this craft over the course of World War I, while serving as advisers to President Wilson. Bernays served on the Committee for Public Information (Creel Committee), tasked with turning American public opinion towards military involvement in World War I. The strategy worked, and after the war Bernays took his talents to Madison Avenue where he became the “father of public relations.”

Bernays believed that people were innately stupid and could not be counted on to make rational decisions, instead ruled by their most base emotions. People could therefore be manipulated and controlled, not by the use of force, but by use of psychological triggers and the power of suggestion.  Different approaches in advertising were designed to trigger within people different emotions that led them to purchase certain products, each according to the desire ignited by the public relations specialist. What Bernays accomplished in the private sector, Lippmann propagated and advanced in politics and the media. Lippmann called the public “the bewildered herd,” whose perceptions were to be shaped by propagandists, who create “pseudo-environments” of reality within the herd’s minds.

When attempting to understand al-Da’esh (the “Islamic State”), it seems apparent that those within the organization tasked with producing propaganda have perfected the methods and techniques first originated by men like Bernays and Lippmann. The rise of al-Da’esh was, in itself, a public relations coup engineered by both the group itself and oblivious media outlets serving as conduits of its propaganda.

Al-Da’esh’s propaganda is targeted towards a foreign and regional, rather than local, audience. Their regional PR efforts are tailored for recruiting, relying heavily on narratives about resisting a perverse and exploitative international order. Vis a vis the West, their primary target for terror is the minds of the public and its leaders, with an understanding that reactionary actions and policies will likely work to their advantage.

Through public statements, videos, religious sermons and public rallies, they exploit deep-seated fears and misconceptions about Islam, Arabs, and the Middle East. They do not shy away from the jingoist, some would say “Orientalized” images of themselves, since it’s these stereotypes that help them propagate their grandiose persona as the holy warriors, as the nightmare inside Western imaginations. They go out of their way to evoke xenophobic tropes about “sharia law,” especially with relation to intolerance, misogyny, extremism. They try hard to insinuate that virtually any Muslim could be sympathetic to their cause, plotting lone-wolf attacks against the West—that all Muslims (should) secretly want to conquer the world, overthrowing liberal systems and institutions.

Al-Da’esh utilizes the platforms available to them on social media, projecting their image and message to potential recruits and adversaries. The emphasis placed on the production value of their videos is one example; the well-regimented access they give to some, but not all, media outlets, is another. Their video production is well-polished and accompanied by soundtracks, good graphics and well-timed graphics. These manufactured images create “pseudo-environments” within the minds of the target audiences–instilling a foreboding feeling, a sense of inevitable conflict. Their prophecies of religious war can, therefore, become self-fulfilling.

Al-Da’esh knows how to play a good heel. It knows how to garner a negative reaction or draw heat from the crowd, while appearing completely confident and self-assured. These tactics, no doubt, well-learned during the Iraq War (2003-2010). It knows what its enemies fear and what drives American and Western military power. They are aware of the current debates about putting “boots on the ground” in Iraq or Syria, the widespread aversion to expensive or protracted conflicts. Similar to the way that Osama Bin Laden wanted to draw the U.S. into Afghanistan through the attacks of 9/11, al-Da’esh seeks the same in Iraq and Syria. This may have been the purpose of the journalist beheadings back in August.

It is mind-baffling to see how Western governments and media, especially in the U.S., have almost on command played into this whirlpool of propaganda. Al-Da’esh created itself as an object of fear and angst–whether justified or not, whether truly a threat or not, they have pulled the U.S. back into Iraq. They seem to know exactly what button to push in order to garner the desired reaction from America and its leaders. The air is now rife with talk of sending more ground troops to Iraq, in addition to those already sent.

American civilian and military strategists should refrain from allowing the actions and self-created persona of the enemy from influencing how they perceive and confront the enemy. By calling al-Da’esh “Apocalyptic” in nature, officials play into the hands of their adversaries and allow them to dictate the nature of the conflict. Likewise when the public allows al-Da’esh to perpetuate Orientalist and irrational fears within their minds, they help enhance the enemy’s status as an archetypal adversary—elevating them into the sort of ideological construct which is much more difficult to definitively “defeat,” especially by military means.

Source:
This article was published by SISMEC, which may be found here.

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In Washington DC, consistency is considered a vice, never a virtue. It is for this reason that many in Washington, especially the neoconservatives, consider their foreign policy one of virtue. You would think that our political leaders, both in the Republican and Democratic parties, would learn something from the devastating effects of our very inconsistent foreign policy, especially after the last 15 years. The chaos that we have brought to Iraq and Afghanistan should be a loud and clear message to anyone who has ears to hear.

We now get the message from our current Secretary of State John Kerry that it’s time to “reignite” negotiations with Assad for the purpose of ending the conflict in Syria. I guess it’s better late than never, but after more than four years of us needlessly meddling in the internal affairs of Syria, it’s about time. Of course we as Americans, as well as the entire Middle East, would have been better off if we had never adopted the policy in August 2011 that “Assad must go.” What is never realized is that, no matter whether we’re intervening with good intentions or not, our involvement in countries halfway around the world only makes things worse.

Of course now it becomes “practical” for us to deal in an entirely different manner with Assad since we cannot handle the chaos in Syria that we helped bring about. As a consequence of our policy, ISIS has become a dominant force in the region to the point where we welcome military assistance, at least for now, from our stated enemy, Iran. Currently Secretary of State John Kerry is expressing his desire to bring about a successful diplomatic solution to this mess. Kerry has even acknowledged, “everybody agrees there is no military solution.” He is in agreement now that there is only a “political solution.” What is so aggravating is that there were plenty of people in this country who knew this five years ago — and for that matter who had the same opinion about the insanity of our aggressive policy in Iraq, which started in 1990 but was greatly accelerated with the invasion in 2003.

Foolishly, and to me somewhat surprisingly, President Obama declared he was drawing a red line that President Assad was not to cross. His warning made in August 2012 was for Assad not to use any chemical weapons. But all this did was set the stage for the next escalation in the unnecessary military confrontation with Assad. A year later the war propagandists declared that indeed Assad did cross the red line and used chemical weapons against the rebels. Of course there was never any evidence that this actually occurred and more likely it was the rebels that use the gas in a minimal way. It was conceivably a false flag and served to escalate the war. However public pressure was then put on Obama to respond with force and start outright bombing of the Syrian government and getting rid of President Assad by force.

President Obama in September 2013 decided that he should get Congressional approval to proceed. Though it looked originally like it would be easy to get this authority, once the American people became aware of the seriousness of the problem, they expressed their outrage and President Obama was forced to withdraw his request. Approximately two-thirds of the American public opposed this military escalation and this obviously had a bearing on the change in policy.

So once again our leaders who are tolerant of inconsistencies have shifted to solving the problems in Syria through diplomacy rather than depending on military force. This is a better way to go than depending on expanding the war. But there is even a better way to deal with this. Consistently stay out of the internal affairs of other nations and avoid all entangling alliances that prompt our political leaders to consistently make mistakes by pursuing a foreign policy that makes no sense and is of no value to the American people. Eventually bankruptcy and anger directed toward America will dictate a total shift away from the policies of the neoconservatives that have plagued us for too long.

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute.

The post Ron Paul: So…Assad Can Stay? – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, like it or not, provided Sri Lanka with what could be termed an autocratic stability, which helped the country in terms of foreign investment. The Chinese and other investors felt safe pumping their resources into the system.

However, the change of government in January 2015 had the potential to push the country into a state of instability. This seems to have come true with the current tussle over the issue of dissolution of parliament and the general election. The political system is now operating in a peculiar set of realities and philosophies. A minority government is in place while the party that commands absolute majority in the national legislature operates as the main opposition without making a big fuss about it.

Partly due to this complicated reality, Prime Minister Ranil Wickramesinghe and his government want parliament dissolved in April so that a fresh election could be held this year. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which still commands the majority in parliament, opposes the dissolution and its leaders have indicated that they are ready to form the government if Ranil Wickramesinghe resigns in April.

Sri Lanka’s Maithripala Sirisena. Official photo via Facebook.

President Sirisena, who has the constitutional authority to dissolve parliament, seems to be facing a dilemma between his party and the voters who elected him to power. Conflicting Contradictory reports are emerging from Colombo. Some suggest that the president is leaning more towards a late election while others point to the desire to comply with the United National Party (UNP) plea. Therefore, presently it is not clear whether the election will be held this year or after its term expires in 2016. The timing of the election could also have an impact on the outcome. Therefore, this issue leads to uncertainty and perhaps a sense of instability.

The Election

Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa

When Mahinda Rajapaksa decided to call an early presidential election, it was widely assumed that parliament would be dissolved immediately after the election. There were two reasons for this. Until Sirisena came forward to contest as the common opposition candidate, Rajapaksa was expected to win the election and in the past winning presidential candidates have used the victory as a launching pad to win parliamentary elections. Hence, the expectation that Rajapaksa would go for the general election in 2015.

Upsetting Rajapaksa and his plans, Maithripala Sirisena won the presidential election. Although, President Sirisena could have also dissolved parliament, his realities were different. Since he won the presidential election with the help of the UNP-led coalition, Sirisena wanted to give the coalition an opportunity to form the administration, which led to the present minority government.

Moving beyond April or May with the same parliament, although legal, seems illogical and problematic for two main reasons.

First, providing an opportunity to the UNP to form the government in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election seemed reasonable and logical because people gave a mandate for a change. The voter obviously wanted a new administration. However, it is immoral to continue with a minority government for too long especially when the opposition party still has a clear majority in the national legislature. It makes a mockery of the democracy and good governance that the voter mandated in January.

Second, it leads to instability and could undermine economic gains, because the present government could be toppled at any time with a nod from the SLFP leadership. Therefore, there is no guarantee that the present policies and agendas will continue for a substantial period of time. Uncertainty is anathema for investors. The SLFP leadership has already been threatening the government with no-confidence motions and the possibility of dismissal. Pressure from the SLFP could also force the administration to adopt a soft approach towards the allegations of corruption and abuse of power levelled mostly against members and supporters of the former (SLFP led) government.

It seems that it is President Sirisena who is preventing the SLFP from effectively challenging the UNP in parliament. It is already evident that if the election is held in 2016, the UNP could lose its momentum. Consequently the election could be lost. The present administration’s fate therefore, depends on the president and the SLFP. This does not augur well for political stability.

Scenarios

There are two possibilities if parliament is not dissolved in April. One, the UNP could continue the administration despite its promises to conclude the 100-day program and an election immediately thereafter. The problem is that the longer it takes to conduct the next parliamentary election, the fewer seats the party can expect to win. This is one reason why the UNP is eager to have the election soon. At the same time it would like to face the election eventually as the caretaker government, rather than as the opposition party, due to the advantages of state resources in an election. This would encourage the UNP to continue with the minority government, which is not preferable for the reasons discussed above.

The second option for the UNP is to resign in April if parliament is not dissolved. Then the president will invite the SLFP to form the government. If one goes by the recent statements of frontline SLFP leaders, the party will accept the invitation and form the government. This would be totally legal, but unprincipled. The January election was not only about Rajapaksa. It was about the SLFP and its style of governance. It was about a systemic change.

This was why candidate Sirisena and the opposition alliance promised constitutional reform. Lack of good governance was an important issue in that election. The people, rejecting Rajapaksa and his government, voted for a structural change or at least adjustments. Therefore, an SLFP government without an election would go against the will of the people. An SLFP president and an SLFP government without an election would mark a continuation rather than a change. If the SLFP want to form the government, it should win the general election and come to power.

The SLFP obviously prefers a late election because it will have adequate time to disrepute the UNP and convince the people that the party cannot provide the structural changes and relief the party promised. The SLFP will also expect the people to forget the problems they faced under its administration. It is imperative to note that the SLFP has already slowed down the constitutional amendment project with the demand to change the electoral system as well. It is believed the party will not support constitutional amendments without electoral changes.

Final Arbiter

Ultimately, the authority is with the president to decide whether to dissolve parliament in April or not. A decision to delay the dissolution will implicitly help the cause of the SLFP, his party. He also has a responsibility to the people who voted for him and the political coalition that helped him win the presidential election. This is the dilemma he seems to be facing presently. Depending on the decision, he could be accused of supporting one or the other party.

Yet, if he has the determination to respect the public will expressed in the January election, he would dissolve parliament after 100 days and allow the people to elect a legitimate government. This would also allow him to resolve problems of uncertainties caused by the present predicament. After the election, regardless of the winners and losers, he can lead an administration with legitimacy. Therefore, the president should dissolve parliament in April or May and call for a fresh general election.

The post Sri Lanka’s Precarious Government And Parliamentary Election – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

As I first mentioned in an article last week, there’s a Parliamentary debate tomorrow for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, when MPs, from amongst the 38 members of the recently established Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, will be seeking assurances from the government that Shaker’s long and unjustifiable imprisonment will soon be brought to an end. See the list of members of the Parliamentary Group here.

I’ll be speaking, as a long-time activist and the co-founder of We Stand With Shaker, at a rally organised by John McDonnell MP at 12.30 in Committee Room 11 of the House of Commons, and earlier, at 11am, Shaker’s sons, and his father-in-law and brother-in-law, will be handing in an Amnesty International petition, signed by over 32,000 people, to 10 Downing Street.

On the eve of the debate, I wanted to make sure that I publicised a letter to David Cameron — and Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband — from 284 imams, community leaders and activists within the Muslim community — calling for Shaker’s “urgent release.”

Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted before, and it is a credit to the letter’s organiser, Imam Suliman Gani, a teacher, broadcaster and friend of Shaker’s family — who has been working tirelessly for Shaker’s release, and with whom I have been campaigning for many years — that it has taken place now.

The letter, originally published on the website of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, is posted below:

Letter from British Imams, community leaders and activists calling for the release of Shaker Aamer

Dear Prime Minister David Cameron,
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg,
Ed Miliband MP

We the undersigned call for the urgent release of our brother Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp.

Shaker Aamer is the last British resident detained in Guantánamo, since 14 February 2002. This year marks 13 years of his incarceration, with a rapid deterioration in Shaker’s mental and physical health condition.

Shaker Aamer has been cleared for release in 2007 and again in 2010. He has never been charged, nor has he ever been given a trial.

We urgently ask for Shaker Aamer to be released and returned to the UK, to be reunited with his British wife and four children in London, the youngest of whom has never met his father.

In April 2013, over 110,000 signatures were collected from the British public urging Shaker Aamer’s release, yet in spite of great public support, there has been a lack of response towards his release.

We urge you to co-operate with the cross party Parliamentary group set up by John McDonnell MP, and take immediate action to secure the release of Shaker Aamer!

Yours sincerely

1) Imam Suliman Gani, South London
2) Jamil Rashid, MRDF
3) Shiplu Miah, MEND
4) Shamiul Joarder, FOA
5) Imam Yunus Dudhwala, East Ham
6) Dilly Hussain, 5Pillars News
7) Yasmin Khatun, Journalist Islam Channel
8) Imtiyaz Damiel, Lecturer, Al Kauther Institute
9) Imam Shuaib Nurgat, Masjid Umer, Walthamstow
10) Dr Ashraf Laher, Jamiatul Ulama
11) Ghulam Esposito Haydar, Myriad Foundation
12) Vaseem Ahmed, Redbridge Islamic Centre
13) Imam Abdul Mateen, East London
14) Khabbaab Ahmad, Founder, Al Hashim Academy
15) Imam Abdul Majid Iltaf, Crawley
16) Irfan Akhtar, Secretary of Waltham Forest Islamic Association
17) Asghar Bukhari, MPACUK
18) Raza Nadim, MPACUK
19) Imam Khalil Laher, East Ham
20) Imran Shah, MEND
21) Mohammed Shafiq, Chief Executive, Ramadhan Foundation
22) Ahmad Nawaz, General Secretary, Ilford Islamic Centre
23) Yusuf Khapi, Neeli Mosque
24) Amjad Shaikh, Hoxton Mosque, London
25) Malik Gul, Director of WCEN
26) Massoud Shadjareh, Islamic Human Rights Commission
27) Imam Fadhlul Islam Khan, The Shade Centre
28) Dr. Daud Abdullah, Middle East Monitor
29) Zaher Birawi, Europal Forum
30) R Altikriti, Muslim Association of Britain
31) Walaa Ramadan, MAB
32) Aiman Tariq, UKIM
33) Maham Karim, UKIM
34) Dilowar Khan, Islamic Forum Europe
35) Yousof Khan, IFE
36) Haitham Al-Haddad, MRDF
37) Abu Sayed, Dawat ul Islam UK
38) Mohamed Ali, CEO, Islam Channel
39) Khoyrul Shaheed, Darul Ummah
40) Belgalem Kahlalech, MAB
41) Nazim Ahmed Chowdhury, Dawatul Islam UK
42) Altaf Hussain, Dawatul Islam UK
43) Omer El-Hamdoon, MAB
44) Imam Suhail Bawa, Khatme Nabuwat Academy
45) Shoaib Khalid Bhatti, Muslim Lobby Scotland
46) Shaykh Zaheer Mahmood, Birmingham
47) Imam Mohammed Hoque, Leeds
48) Abdur Rahman Ibn Yusuf, Zamzam Academy
49) Mufti Yusuf Danka, Croydon
50) Reza Pankhurst
51) Imam Muhammad Ameen Gani, Luton
52) Imam Nagib Khan, Bristol
53) Ustadh Adnan Rashid, Hittin Institute
54) Imam Saqib Mahmood, Zuhri Academy, Luton
55) Moulana Muhammad Rayhan, Zuhri Academy, Luton
56) Imaam Muhammad Umar Masjid Noor, Luton
57) Moulana Aminur Rahman, Zuhri Academy, Luton
58) Moulana Noorul Ameen, Al Hikmah, Luton
59) Imam M Abul Hassan, Jamiatul Uloom, Luton
60) Moulana Kaydul Islam, Luton
61) Imam Mohammed Shajahan, Jamiatul Uloom, Luton
62) Imam Abdul Alim, Northampton
63) Imam M Abbas Khan, Masjid Zakariya & Almadina Institute
64) Moulana Minhajul Haque, Al-Hikmah, Luton
65) Shaykh Syed Ali, Ta’allam Tuition, Luton
66) Atif Mahmood, FHYT Farley Hill Youth Trust
67) Imam Hafiz Abu Lais, Dacorum Bangladesh Welfare Association, Hemel Hempstead
68) Imam Abul Mansur, Teacher, Hemel Islamic Academy
69) Imam Muhamed Gani, Chaplain
70) Hafiz Kaysar Hussain, Community Worker, Global Aid UK
71) Mahmud Choudhury, Secretary, Shahjalal Masjid, Poplar, London
72) Dr Ahmed Younis, Lecturer Medical School, Tooting
73) Dr Imran Khan, Tooting
74) Imam Muhammad Usman, Tooting
75) Imam Aziz Ibraheem, Iman Trust, St. Helens, Merseyside
76) Rahim Jung, Broadcaster, TV Presenter and Campaigner
77) Mumtaz Ali (AFG), Trustee, a Humanitarian Aid Charity UK
78) Imam Mustafa Graf
79) Imam Abdul Majid, Streatham Hill Mosque‏
80) Imam Abdul Wahhab, Markaz us Dawat wal Irshad, East Ham
81) Mohammed Hoque, Darul Uloom, Bury, Al-Azhar
82) Imam Mujahid Ali, Hafs Academy, London
83) Abubaker Laher, Batley, West Yorkshire
84) Khaled Fikry, Imam, Lecturer, MD Madinah International University
85) Imam Mohammed Mota, Jame Masjid, Batley
86) Abdullah Kola
87) Amin Sadak, Chingford Masjid
88) Shaykh Haytham Tamim, Chairman of Utrujj Foundation
89) Imam Shakeel Begg, Lewisham Islamic Centre
90) Qaari Ishaaq Jasat, Masjid e Abu Bakr, Walthamstow
91) Imam Shaqur Rehman, Redbridge Islamic Centre, London
92) Imam Mohammed Abul Hassan, Khateeb at University of Bedfordshire, BPD Academy, Luton
93) Ismail Patel, Friends of Aqsa, Leicester
94) Imam Mohammed Ilyas, Canary Wharf Community Organisation
95) Dr. Musharraf Hussain, CEO & Chief Imam, Karimia Institute
96) Imam Abdul Khabir, Idara Mosque
97) Mufti Mohammad Ashfak, Masjid Umar Farooq, Bradford
98) M Pandor, Batley
99) Imam Irfan Soni, Rabetah
100) Imam Amin Sadak, Chingford Masjid
101) Ebrahim Ravat, Rabetah, Batley
102) Imam Huzaifa Kolia, Masjid Abu Bakr
103) Imam Mohammed Ejaz, Sharee Council, Dewsbury
104) Imam Salim Makda, Masjid Umar
105) Imam Ahmed Sarkar, Darul Uloom
106) Shaykh Ayyub Surti, Da’watul Haq
107) Imam Muhammad Saeed Mulla, Chingford Masjid
108) Hashim Sacha, Chair Rabetah Al Ulama
109) Mufti Hafiz Syed Fokhrul Islam, Luton
110) Imam Khurshid, Jamia Masjid Hanfia, Bradford
111) Imam Hajji Abdul Motin, Bait Ul Aman Jamia Masjid, Bradford
112) Imam Sajid Farashi, Jamia Masjid Sayyidah Amini, Bradford
113) Imam Hafiz Sujad, Madni Jamia Masjid, Bradford
114) Imam Talib, Roxy Masjid, Bradford
115) Imam Mufti Imran Sayed, Majlise Dawatul, Leicester
116) Imam Muhammad Patel, Leicester
117) Imam Muhammad Lorgat, Leicester
118) Imam Sameer Ismail, Leicester
119) Sabir Khan, Bolton Council of Mosques
120) Imam Sajid Mahmood Masjid Aminah, Bradford
121) Imam Muhammad Saleem Nawab, Quwwat ul Islam, Upton Lane
122) Imam Rayan Mahmud, Iqra TV Presenter
123) Imam Fadhil Ahmad Choudhury, London
124) Imam Syed Ali, Shahporan Masjid, London
125) Michael Aamer the eldest son of Shaker Aamer has just added his name to the list.
May father be united with his wife and 4 lovely children soon. Amen
126) Adnan Qurayshi, Al-Ashraaf School, BBCA Masjid
127) Shah Shuaib Ahmed, Al-Ashraaf Ilford & IZA
128) Abdul Mukith, London
129) Imam Ilyas Badat, Quwwatul Islam, Upton Lane
130) Usman Adam, Quwwatul Islam Society
131) Imam Tahir Talati, Zakariya Academy
132) Atif Ali, Masjid E Abu Bakr, Walthamstow
133) Asim Qureshi, Cage
134) Ali Ahmed, AlWaqi’ah
135) Saleem Beg, former Imam, Dar al-Hadith.
136) Imam Maulana Mohamed Thawa, Plashet Grove Masjid, London
137) Imam Mushtaq Patel, Masjid-e-Tauheed, East Ham
138) Imam Zaakir Munshi
139) Imam Farooq, Leyton Masjid, East London
140) Yusuf Razi, Green Street Mosque, London
141) Qari A. Rahman, Romford Mosque, Romford
142) Niaz Ahmed, Barking Road Mosque, East Ham
143) Hamid ur Rahman, Selwyn Road Masjid, London
144) Maulana Zeeshan Ahmed, Lea Bridge Road Centre, London
145) M. Hanif, Shah Jalal Mosque, London
146) Basheer ud Din, Barking Road Islamic Centre, London
147) Musa Admani, Northholt Mosque, London
148) Adil Farroqi, Stanmore Mosque, London
149) Musa Wahalu, Goodmayes Tutor Centre, Essex
150) Maulana Islam Ali, Wakefield Mosque, West Yorkshire
151) Mufti Faizur Rahman, Stockport Road Mosque, Manchester
152) Dawood Ismail, Chairman, Leeds Road Centre, Bradford
153) Mufti Iqbal Qadree, Tayibah Mosque, Bolton
154) Mr Ahmed Ismail, Chairman, Muslim Society, Coventry
155) Imam Qari Hashim, Crawley Mosque, Sussex
156) Imam Qari Rafiq, Masjid Noor, Gloucester
157) Maulana Abdul Muneimin, Masjid Ayesha, London
158) Haji Abdur Rahman, Chairman, Kokni Society, Luton, Bedfordshire
159) Imam Hafiz Farooq, St. Saviour’s Road Mosque, Leicester
160) Haji Mustafa Karim, Chairman, Kenya Muslims Society, Leicester
161) Imam Maulana Suleiman, Masjid-an-Noor, Leicester
162) Haji Abdul Quddus, Chairman, Haj & Umrah Tours, Blackburn
163) Mr Ramzan Hasham, Chairman, Kumbhar Society, Blackburn
164) Haji Esmail Patel, Chairman, Whalley Wholesalers, Blackburn
165) Maulana Nakhuda Ahmed, Ex-Imam, Masjid-e-Noor, Preston
166) Mr Ahmed Yusuf, Lecturer, Bolton College, Bolton
167) Haji Iqbal Hussein, Chairman, East Africa Society, Birmingham
168) Haji Gulam Mohammed, Chairman, Sunni Society, Coventry
169) Catherine Heseltine, MPAC
170) Shaykh Abu Abdissalam, Makkah
171) Yusuf Hansa, Chairman, Noor Ul Islam, London
172) Imam Minar Ali, East Ham
173) Farouk Ismail, Redbridge Muslims
174) Asif Hassan Ali, CSCB, Croydon Safeguarding Children’s Board
175) Carl Arrindel, ICTV
176) Alyas Karman, Diversity Ltd.
177) Sufyan Ismail, CEO of Mend
178) Imran Adam, Video Journalism
179) Rahat Ali, MEND
180) Imam Mohammad Khan, NW London
181) Abdul Aleem, Qiblah Premium
182) Imam Zalin Hussain, Al-Muzzamil Mosque
183) Imam Irfan Patel, Jamiah Masjid, Gillingham
184) Imam Muhammed Anas, Zakariya Academy/Forest Gate Masjid
185) Mohammed Asim Razaq, Chairman, Masjid Abu Bakr
186) Irfan Akhtar, Executive Committee, Muslim Community Trust
187) Abdul Majid, Vice President, Waltham Forest Islamic Association
188) Adil Baporia, Trustee, Chingford Islamic Society
189) Mehmood Patel, Chairman, Masjid Tawheed
190) Yusuf Hansa, Chairman, Noor ul Islam
191) Mohammad Khergami, Green Street Mosque, London
192) Ismail Achhodi, Forest Gate Masjid, London
193) Mohammed Masood Kaziwala, Madina Mosque, East Ham
194) Yusuf Tadkeshwarwala, Ilford Mosque, Ilford, Essex
195) Elyas Sacha, Studley Road Mosque, East London
196) Yakub Patel, Shrewsbury Road Mosque, London
197) Haroon Lodhi, Plashet Road Centre, London
198) Kasim Miyanjee, Central Mosque, Southall
199) Qari M. Taahir Abbasi, Abu Bakr Mosque, Southall
200) Maulana M. Salim Makda, Palmers Green Mosque, London
201) Ismail Pathan, Leyton Green Centre, East London
202) Ashfaq Dungarwala, Browning Road Mosque, Bradford
203) Maulana M. Ismail Desai, Harrowgate Road Centre, Bradford
204) Mr. Abdul Haq Dabheli, Chairman, Horton Grange Centre, Bradford
205) Imam Haafiz Rabbani Lahori, Madina Mosque, Huddersfield
206) Imam Ashraf al- Misri, Masjid Hidayah, Manchester
207) Maulana Abdullah Pathanwala, Bicknell Street Mosque, Blackburn
208) Maulana M. Shafiq Meerpuri, Leeds Road Centre, Bradford
209) Dawood Karodi, Wood Green Road Mosque, Leicester
210) Osman Jalalpurwala, The Mosque, Nuneaton
211) Maulana M. Yusuf Seedat, Chairman, Islamic Centre, Fairbank Road, Bradford
212) Maulana Asif Ayub Fakir, Hayes Mosque, Middlesex
213) Shaykh M.Faisal Ismail, Edgware Road Centre, West London
214) Haji Abdul Aziz Abu, East Africa Society, Leicester
215) Ebrahim Khan, Madni Masjid, Bradford
216) Haji M. Ghani Garatwala, Lecturer, Leicester College
217) Haji Yusuf Ismail Jamal, Bradford College
218) Mr. Bashir Ahmed Pandor, Solicitor, Bradford
219) Dr. Mehboob Alam Khan, Homeopathic Doctor, Bradford
220) Haji Ismail Bhai Loonat, Chairman, Alipur  Society, Batley
221) Haji Ismail Noor Mohammad, Muslim Society, Coventry
222) Imam Maulana Moazzam Mohammad, Central Mosque, Rochdale
223) Asif M. Khan, Swindon Mosque, Swindon
224) Haji M. Yusuf Kabbani, Chairman, York Muslim Association, York
225) Imam Maulana Ebrahim Mangera, Jamia Mosque, Derby
226) Imam Shabbir Ahmed Patel, Masjid-e-Usman, Walsall
227) Imam Inamul Haq Malik, Croydon Mosque, Croydon
228) Syed Shafi, Chairman, Cann Hall Masjid, Leytonstone
229) Will Hutton, President of Leeds University Amnesty International
230) Oscar Frandsen, Campaign Representative of Leeds University Amnesty International
231) Jo Cutler, Amnesty International Member and Student Activist
232) Eleanor Wakeford, Treasurer, Leeds University Amnesty International
233) Saghir Hussain, Solicitor
234) Majed Iqbal, Freelance Journalist and Muslim Blogger
235) Abdul Aslam, Manager, Ravensthorpe Centre
236) Ruhal Ahmed, Ex British Guantanamo Detainee
237) Mr Nazir Daud, Business Executive
238) Laura Stuart, Human Rights Activist
239) Mr Orlando Miller, Ex Royal Air Force
240) Samayya Afzal, Women’s & Campaigns Officer, University of Bradford Union of Students
241) Iqbal Nasim, NZF
242) Imam Huzayfa Shaikh, Al Khair
243) Harun Daud, Trustee, Tooting
244) Saleem Chagtai, Khateeb
245) Maryam Hassan, Activist
246) Mohammed Patel, Leyton
247) Samad Billoo, The Respect Party
248) Shoyab Divelli, Z.I.A. BOLTON
249) Imtiaz Mian,Teacher, Madina Masjid, Manchester
250) Mohamed Umar Dana, Ashford and Staines Community Centre
251) Imaam Shokat Patel, Quwwat ul Islam, Forest Gate
252) Shah Safwan Ahmed, Al Falah Primary School
253) Shah Yahya Ahmed, Al-Ashraaf, Whitechapel
254) Shah Hamza Ahmed, Al-Ashraaf, Whitechapel
255) Shah Talha Ahmed, Al-Ashraaf, Whitechapel
256) Shah Mujahid Uddin, Forest Gate
257) Maulana Raza Ali, Masjid Abu Bakr
258) Dr. Uthman Lateef, Slough
259) Usman Qureshi, Trustee, HHUGS
260) M Quresh Ali, Al Hikmah Learning Centre, Bradford
261) Shohidul Islam, London Youth Worker, Tower Hamlets
262) Fahad Ansari, Human Rights Solicitor
263) Ali Ahmad, Imam, BBCA Cultural Centre
264) Hafiz Mawlana Abdul Mateen Khandoker, MKMA and Jamiate Ulamae Islam Europe, Milton Keynes
265) Mufti Shakir Ahmed
266) Shaykh Faisal Ismail, Edgware Road Centre, West London
267) Ilyas Badat Quwwatul Islam Upton Lane
268) Imam Ibrahim Mogra, MCB, Leicester
269) Khawar Chaudhry, TKC Foundation
270) Mufti Shah Sadaruddin, London
271) Molana Muhammad Anas, London
272) Mufti Shah Talha Ahmed, London
273) Molana Shah Yahya Ahmed, London
274) Mufti Shah Shuaib Ahmed, London
275) Mufti Shah Hamza Ahmed, London
276) Mufti Shah Safwan Ahmed, London
277) Imam Uthman Jeewa, Al Medinah Mosque, Brighton
278) Mufti Suhail Ilyas, Imam, Seven Kings Muslim Educational Trust
279) Iqbal Gangat, Imam of Masjid Zeenatul Islam, Coventry
280) Moulana Iftikhar Hussain, Islamic Ansaar Foundation, Birmingham
281) Moulana Sikandar Iqbal, Islamic Ansaar Foundation, Birmingham
282) Moulana Sulayman Patel, Imam, Masjid Naqueebul Islam
283) Moulana Zubair Ahmed, Imam, Masjid Naqueebul Islam
284) Hamid Mahmood, Head of Fatimah Elizabeth Cates Academy, Walthamstow

To add your name, if you’re a prominent member of the Muslim community, please email the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign.

The post 284 British Imams And Community Leaders Call For Shaker Aamer’s Release From Guantánamo – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Cemre Nur Öztürk

The construction of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) began Tuesday with an official groundbreaking ceremony in Kars, a north-eastern city of Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili, the European Commission’s Vice President in charge of Energy Union Maros Sefcovic, and Chairperson of TANAP Management Board Rovnag Abdullayev attended the ceremony.

The TANAP,1850 km pipeline, stretches from Turkey’s border with Georgia to Greece through 20 Turkish cities. TANAP is one of three pipelines comprising the Southern Gas Corridor with The South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) and The Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The SCP runs from Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkish border. TANAP will be feeding from the SCP and transfer an important amount of gas to TAP which run across Greece, Albania, on the seabed of the Adriatic Sea, terminating in southern Italy and connecting there with the Italian pipeline grid.

The maximum transportation capacity of TANAP is planned 31 bcm of gas annually, transporting from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz-2 and other southern gas fields in the Caspian Sea to Europe through Turkey.

According to the partnership agreement for TANAP signed on March 13, 2015, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company SOCAR and Turkish gas monopoly Botas will hold 58% and 30% of stakes respectively, while BP has a 12% of share. However, the final deal has not been signed yet. The pipeline’s cost is estimated at $10-11 billion.

Turkey’s Energy Minister, Taner Yildiz said at the ceremony for the partnership agreement on Friday that the first gas from Shah Deniz-2 will be started pumping to Turkey in late 2018. Magsud Mammadov, Director for External Relations of TANAP, said to Natural Gas Europe: “It is expected the pipeline will be completed by the end of 2019 in order to start deliveries of gas from Shah Deniz II to Europe in 2020.” By the end of 2019, it will be transporting 16 billion cubic meters of gas and Turkey is expected to buy 6 bcm of the gas. The amount of gas delivered by TANAP will increase gradually.

Erdoğan said at the groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday that TANAP will also deliver peace and stability alongside the gas.

Aliyev emphasized at the ceremony that a new alliance model is being formed in Eurasia that will bring important consequences. He also added that all agreements among Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan implemented successfully, and so will TANAP.

The post Turkey Breaks Ground For TANAP Pipeline appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The Obama Administration’s confrontational policy towards Russia over Ukraine is dangerously misguided on two counts. Not only is Ukraine of marginal geopolitical significance to the United States, but the White House badly needs Moscow’s cooperation on the far more salient issues of counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, and counterbalancing a rising China.

By Evan Resnick*

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its backing of secessionist rebels in Eastern Ukraine have set the Kremlin on a collision course with the West. The United States and its European allies have angrily retaliated by imposing economic sanctions against Moscow and deploying additional NATO troops to Eastern Europe.

The Obama Administration has also signalled that its next step may be to send arms to the Kiev government. In turn, the Putin regime has even further raised the region’s temperature by flying Russian nuclear bombers into the airspace of the United Kingdom and other NATO states. From Washington’s vantage point, this frightening escalation of tensions between the world’s two most formidable nuclear powers is deeply misguided.

Game not worth the candle

Firstly, it is unnecessarily dangerous because although Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is contemptible and brutal, it does not encroach on any US vital interests. Ukraine has never been a formal ally or even informal strategic partner of the US, has minimal trade or investment links with the US, and since becoming independent in 1991 it has been a political and economic basket case.

Ukraine’s forced re-absorption into Russia’s sphere of influence hardly tilts the balance of power in Europe towards Moscow. To put it bluntly, the game is not worth the candle: it is not worth risking World War III to keep Ukraine out of Russia’s clutches.

Secondly, the Obama Administration’s preoccupation with Russian aggression in Ukraine prevents it from cultivating cooperation with Russia on matters of far greater geopolitical concern. Most importantly, Russia is a partner to the ongoing P5+1 talks with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear programme, which are reportedly on the threshold of delivering a major agreement. Moscow has a history of nuclear cooperation with Tehran, having defied repeated American urgings over the years to abandon construction of a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr. Just a few months ago, Russia concluded a deal to construct two additional reactors at Bushehr.

If tensions over Ukraine continue to escalate, it is not hard to imagine the Putin regime defecting from the P5+1 process and taking up a spoiler’s role on the Iranian nuclear issue. Inauspiciously, just a few months ago, the Russian leader scuttled the US-funded Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, which over two decades had achieved enormous success in securing and destroying Russia’s Soviet-era nuclear weapons and fissile materials.

Also, since the late 1990′s, both the US and Russia have been frequently targeted by radical Islamist terrorist organisations. Despite the two countries’ shared interest in counter-terrorism, bilateral cooperation on this score has been erratic. To wit, even prior to the Ukraine crisis, Russian authorities allegedly withheld from the Federal Bureau of Investigation key details concerning the Chechen terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev which might have enabled the FBI to foil the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, over the long term a full-fledged strategic partnership between the US and Russia would more effectively counterbalance a rising China. This is the only country in the world that has the potential to challenge not just America’s longstanding regional dominance of East Asia, but even its hegemonic global position. China poses an even greater danger to a much weaker and much closer Russia. Ominously, along the two countries’ 2,500-kilometre shared border, the Chinese population already outnumbers Russia’s by a staggering 20:1 margin that is expected to grow over time.

Finlandise Ukraine, “Reset” Russia Relations

Rather than continuing to ratchet up tensions with the Kremlin, the Obama Administration should instead propose a negotiated resolution to the crisis that assuages the deep Russian insecurities that spurred Moscow’s aggression in the first place. Genuine Russian support for a peace agreement in Ukraine will likely only be secured if the US and its European allies agree to end sanctions against Russia, indefinitely refrain from extending NATO and EU membership to Ukraine, and abstain from the provision of both lethal and non-lethal military assistance to Kiev.

Given Ukraine’s weakness and highly unfortunate location, both US and Ukrainian policymakers must recognise that the least bad option is for that country to be “Finlandised”: similar to Finland during the Cold War, Ukraine will have to accept neutrality and a de facto Russian veto over its foreign policy behaviour as the price for a modicum of domestic political autonomy.

Once the Ukraine issue is taken off the table, the path will be cleared for the White House to immediately establish a more constructive working relationship with Moscow on counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism, and lay the groundwork for a future strategic partnership to balance China.

Successive US administrations since the end of the Cold War have repeatedly engaged in unnecessarily confrontational and threatening behaviour towards Russia and in the process have repeatedly fumbled the opportunity to genuinely “reset” the bilateral relationship. After standing aside as the Russian economy melted down in the early 1990′s, American policymakers proceeded to expand NATO right up to Russia’s borders and unilaterally abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972 that formed the centerpiece of nuclear arms control between the two countries.

Most recently, the Obama Administration helped catalyse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by fanning the flames of political opposition to pro-Russian Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich, which resulted in his overthrow. Having forfeited several easier opportunities to build a stable bilateral relationship with Russia that furthers rather than retards vital US interests, Washington has little choice now but to seize the much harder one that is presently on offer.

*Evan N. Resnick is an assistant professor and Coordinator of the United States Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The post America’s Dangerously Misguided Russia Policy – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Inadequate vaccine coverage is likely a driving force behind the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak, according to calculations by a research team at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Their report, based on epidemiological data and published online by JAMA Pediatrics, indicates that vaccine coverage among the exposed populations is far below that necessary to keep the virus in check, and is the first to positively link measles vaccination rates and the ongoing outbreak.

By examining case numbers reported by the California Department of Public Health and current and historical case data captured by the HealthMap disease surveillance system, the researchers–led by Maimuna Majumder, MPH, and John Brownstein, PhD, of Boston Children’s Informatics Program–estimate that the measles vaccination rate among the case clusters in California, Arizona and Illinois is between 50 and 86 percent, far below the 96 to 99 percent necessary to create a herd immunity effect.

Measles is highly contagious. It’s estimated that an infected individual in a population fully susceptible to measles will spread the virus to between 11 and 18 additional people. This number is called the virus’s basic reproduction rate, or R0. In a population where at least some individuals are immune to measles, the virus spreads from person to person more slowly. The rate of spread in an immune population is called the virus’s effective reproduction rate, or RE.

Using case data, R0 and measles’ serial interval (the length of time for each successive wave of transmission to follow the one before), Majumder and Brownstein calculated that the virus’s RE in the Disneyland outbreak is between 3.2 and 5.8. From there, the pair calculated their vaccination estimate.

The researchers are quick to note that their estimate does not reflect vaccination across the United States, the state of California or even among the population of Disneyland visitors at the outbreak’s start. Rather, it reflects the vaccination rate among the exposed populations in each cluster of cases linked to the outbreak so far.

“It’s as though you took everyone exposed to measles in the areas with case clusters, put them in a room and measured the level of vaccine coverage in that aggregate population,” saidMajumder.

Using the same data sources, the HealthMap team has separately released an interactive model illustrating how differing rates of vaccine coverage could affect the growth of a measles outbreak over time. The model, available at healthmap.org/measlesoutbreak, puts the effects of vaccination into stark relief. If a population is fully vaccinated against the virus, the model predicts that one case of measles will give rise to only two additional cases over 70 days. By contrast, if only 60 percent of a population is vaccinated, more than 2,800 cases will occur over the same time period.

“Our data tell us a very straightforward story–that the way to stop this and future measles outbreaks is through vaccination,” said Brownstein, a digital epidemiologist and co-founder of HealthMap and VaccineFinder, an online service that allows users to search for locations offering a variety of vaccinations, including the MMR vaccine that protects against measles. “The fundamental reason why we’re seeing the number of cases we are is inadequate vaccine coverage among the exposed.

“We hope these data encourage families to ensure they and their loved ones are vaccinated,” he continued, “and help local public health officials in their efforts to control this outbreak.”

The post Low Vaccination Rates Fuel 2015 Measles Outbreak appeared first on Eurasia Review.

INTERPOL is backing Operation Captura, an appeal by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and independent crime-fighting charity Crimestoppers, to locate Britain’s most wanted fugitives.

The 10 men are wanted in connection with crimes including rape, indecent assault of a child and drug trafficking and are believed to be hiding in Spain.

The world police body is joining the call for the public’s assistance in providing additional information that could help track down the fugitives.

“The UK’s Operation Captura has seen significant results in previous years and INTERPOL is pleased to provide additional support in helping to track down these fugitives,” said Michael O’Connell, Director of INTERPOL’s Operational Support unit.

The 10 fugitives targeted are Mohammed Jahangir Alam; Paul Buchanan; Carlo Dawson; Paul Monk; Anthony Dennis; David McDermott; Jayson McDonald; Scott Hughes; Michael Roden; Shane Walford.

This is the ninth Operation Captura appeal to be made since 2006, and the previous eight have so far resulted in 65 out of 76 wanted fugitives being apprehended.

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Europe seeks influence, yet fails to strengthen institutions to stabilize economic and regional security.

By Chris Miller*

Europeans have control over their own fate, yet at no point since the end of the Cold War has their collective fate seemed so precarious. The threats are diverse as the continent’s political institutions and way of life are being tested by Islamic State–linked terror attacks, Russia’s hybrid war on Ukraine and the continuing agony of economic depression in southern Europe. Each challenge has separate causes, but all are exacerbated by the chasm between Europe’s goals and its capabilities.

For years, many in Europe have called for the continent to take charge of its own destiny. During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States played significant roles in European politics, but since 1991, Washington has been the significant outside player, cajoling European states into participating in American-led efforts at global governance. US predominance has occasionally grated, and many Europeans advocated that their continent become an influential geopolitical actor in its own right. Some even hoped that Europe could act as a counterweight to what many Europeans perceived as an overbearing America. With the creation of the European Union and its expansion throughout Central and Eastern Europe, by the early 2000s it seemed that Europe had the tools to act independently of outside powers.

In the aftermath of the second Iraq War and the election of Barack Obama, the United States seemed more willing than at any point since World War II to relinquish many of its responsibilities in Europe. Even under the George W. Bush administration, Washington had begun redeploying combat troops from Western Europe to other theaters. The Obama administration has continued to disengage from Europe, because it, too, prioritizes other regions, and hopes that reducing US commitment will force allies to bear more costs of their own defense. The last several years, therefore, provided a test of the European project, as US disengagement gave Europe ample room to chart its own course in political, military and economic terms. So far, the results of this experiment have disappointed. Europe bungled its response to Greece’s debt crisis while relying on the International Monetary Fund to help fund the bailout. Meanwhile, the continent continued to rely on American resources to attain Europe’s geopolitical goals. Even as the United States reduced defense spending, most European countries declined to better fund their own militaries.

In Ukraine, for example, Europe faces a contradiction between its desire for a peaceful neighborhood and unwillingness to take steps needed to realize this goal. Russia’s invasion Ukraine in March 2014, lopping off Crimea, caught most Europeans off guard. They had hoped the prospect of trade and economic growth would encourage Russia and Ukraine to play by Europe’s rules. When Russia chose to reject these rules, using what Western officials have criticized as 19th century behavior to assert their influence in Ukraine, European capitals were divided about whether to respond with diplomacy and sanctions. Military intervention was out of the question.

On the one hand, Europe continued to insist that Ukrainian sovereignty is inviolable and that Russia should not be allowed to obstruct Kiev’s relations with the European Union. But Brussels has not backed up its claims with serious resources. Economic sanctions have harmed Russia’s economy, but not yet forced Russia out of Ukraine. Meanwhile, despite insisting that Ukraine’s sovereignty is sacrosanct, the EU took relatively minor steps to support Kiev. Financial help has been modest. Indeed, Europe turned to US-led institutions such as the International Monetary Fund to organize a bailout of Ukraine’s government, suggesting that Europe remains dependent on the Atlantic Alliance.

Cold War redux? European allies disappoint the US by refusing to assume greater defense burden; among Europe’s most populous nations, only Russia increased military expenditures as percentage of GDP (Source: World Bank)

Across the Mediterranean, too, Europe has floundered in the face of a series of crises. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many Europeans called for the US to step back from the Middle East and North Africa on the grounds that the EU could wield effective influence. Indeed, Europe has many assets in the region: three of the EU’s biggest member states, France, Italy and Spain, are located on the shores of the Mediterranean. France in particular makes use of links dating back to the colonial era to exercise influence from Lebanon to Morocco. Europe also dominates the Mediterranean economy, which depends on Europe as a source of investment and an outlet for laborers.

Despite these levers of influence, Europe struggles to provide stability on its southern borders. In 2011, for example, France and Britain led a bombing campaign to end Libya’s civil war by toppling the country’s long-serving dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Though several Arab countries and the US participated in the intervention, the campaign was widely recognized as a European initiative. One Obama advisor described US strategy as “leading from behind,” suggesting that Washington would let its allies play a prominent role.

Yet Europe proved unable to do so. The continent was divided, with Germany unwilling to participate in the military campaign led by France and Britain. That left EU institutions paralyzed. At the same time, lacking clear lines of responsibility for dealing with the war’s aftermath, Europe’s powers lost interest, counting on others to pick up the slack. Yet no one did. Libya – a country only several hundred miles from Europe’s border – slipped back into civil war. In an array of crisis zones across the Mediterranean, from Libya to Egypt to Syria, the EU has struggled to devise coherent policies even as thousands of European citizens have joined Islamic Stat–linked militias.

The depression in Greece is usually seen as an economic problem, but it, too, is exacerbated by the mismatch between political goals and institutional capabilities. Greece is stuck between knowledge that exiting the eurozone would spark an economic meltdown more disastrous than its current state and the reality that the only way to stay in the eurozone is to accept painful austerity programs demanded by European partners. Greece’s creditors, too, are constrained, because easing the terms of Greece’s bailout deal increases the chance that far-right parties – many of which oppose the euro itself – would take power in future elections.

In the euro crisis, the continent’s governing structures are at fault. The EU, envisioned as a single economic space, has 28 mechanisms for economic governance, one for each country. Meanwhile, with the smallest countries holding veto power, the requirement that many decisions be taken unanimously has paralyzed Europe’s ability to make tough decisions. Here, too, the continent is suspended at an unhappy midpoint between being a group of states and a single country. As in the Ukraine crisis, Europe has had to call in the IMF to help fund Greece’s bailout. Far from transcending the old order, Europe could not survive without it.

These spiraling crises have not only eroded the credibility of the entire European project, they have underscored the difficulty of getting Europe to act in unison when it remains a group of 28 separate countries. Germany is the clear leader, but Berlin struggles to corral European partners toward a single policy. The continent’s failures, meanwhile, are empowering populists and undermining Europe’s hard-won political stability. Europe’s leaders have spent the past half-decade putting out a series of fires, from Greece’s debt mountain to war in Ukraine to the threat of British exit from the EU, and back again to Greece. The continent remains in desperate need of strategic thinking. Until European leaders realize that no number of short-term fixes can remedy the long-term mismatch between Europe’s expansive goals and its meager capabilities, such crises will persist.

*Chris Miller is a PhD candidate at Yale University and a research associate at the Hoover Institution. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on Russian-Chinese relations.

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