The doctrine of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ which is central to the ideology of modern Salafism poses challenges to Muslim and non-Muslim relationship and integration. A nuance and “sophisticated” understanding of the concept is critical to guide the direction of this integration.

By Mohamed Bin Ali*

The concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ as portrayed in modern Salafism poses great challenges to the realities of modern living. This is so especially in the context where Muslims are living as minority communities in non-Muslim countries. What is the valid and appropriate attitude of Muslims to relationships with non-Muslims?

A major source of confusion and controversy with regards to this relationship comes from the allegation that Muslims must reserve their love and loyalty for fellow Muslims and to reject and declare war on the rest of humanity. This idea and allegation can most acutely be seen through the Islamic concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ (Loyalty and Disavowal), which appears as central to the ideology of modern Salafism.

What is Al-Wala’ wal Bara?

Modern Salafis argue that the concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ is an important shield and tool for the Muslims to face the challenges of modernism in the current world. This is so as Muslims are struggling to maintain Islam’s authenticity and legitimacy amidst an onslaught of foreign values and belief systems as a result of conquests, colonisations and the current wave of globalisation.

Understanding modern Salafi conceptions of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ is an urgent priority in the lives of Muslims today. This understanding is critical, as Muslims increasingly live as minority communities across the globe and the concept has specific implications for whether (and how) Muslims can live harmoniously with non-Muslims. The consequences of applying the modern Salafi concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ are serious – it promotes a way of life that is insular and hostile towards non-Muslims and this, it might be argued, is at variance with the more tolerant, inclusive nature of Islam.

In its most fundamental definition, the concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ prescribes the relationship Muslims are enjoined to have with God and their fellow human beings. The term wala’ refers to the undivided loyalty Muslims should portray to God, Islam and their Muslim co-religionists over all other things, while bara’ refers to the disavowal of anything deemed un-Islamic.

Fundamentally, Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ in modern Salafism describes the posture Muslims should take in their relationship with non-Muslims, their cultures, systems and environments. Sometimes, modern Salafis consider cultures which one might normally view as Islamic to be “un-Islamic” since they have “deviated” from the practice of the Prophet and the salaf al-salih (the pious predecessors or early Muslims).

The four dimensions of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’

The concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ in modern Salafism has four dimensions namely (1) creedal (aqidah); (2) social; (3) political; and (4) Jihadi (which literally means struggle or fighting). Generally, all Salafis agree on the concept of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ at the aqidah level. They claim Muslims must believe and uphold the concept as it is connected to the faith. Also at the aqidah level, they claim that Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ is important to fight any religious innovations or bid’ah that has crept into the religion.

However, they differ in the application of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ at the social and political level. At the social level, Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ is characterised by a portrayal of non-Muslims as potential enemies, and un-Islamic practices as dangerous acts that could threaten the purity of Islam and tawhid (monotheism). Examples of this dimension include giving and accepting gifts from the non-Muslims, joining them in their religious festivals and even using the non-hijri calendar which according to some Salafis constitutes al-tashabbuh bil kuffar (imitation of the non-Muslims).

As for the use of the concept by those who actively incorporate elements of politics into their belief some Salafis assert that Muslims must give their loyalty only to Muslim rulers who rule according to the Islamic system or the shariah (Islamic law). Muslim rulers who do not rule with the shariah must be disavowed, and Muslims must abandon any un-Islamic political system such as democracy, nationalism and secularism, just as they are required to perform bara’ of the non-Muslims.

In its political form, Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ is linked to the concept of tawhid al-hakimiyya (the unity of governance), in which a Muslim leader who does not rule by the shariah in its entirety is an infidel who should be overthrown, by violent means if necessary. The political dimension of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ can lead to the Jihadi dimension.

Salafis who apply this role of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ usually incorporate the practice of takfir (ex-communication of Muslims) especially to Muslim rulers who do not implement shariah or, who apply any non-Islamic political systems which are seen by some Salafis as against Islamic teachings. The act of takfir will eventually lead to jihad which is commonly manifested in the form of overthrowing and attacking them.

Contesting the doctrine of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’

Practising the modern Salafis’ version of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ could be a barrier to integration between different ethnic and religious groups, and develop intolerance amongst them. At worst, the concept could be the foundational basis for the very extreme Salafis to incite hatred and legitimise violence against the unbelieving majority.

Due to these effects and consequences of applying the modern Salafis’ version of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’, the so-called mainstream Muslims or non-Salafi Muslims have made attempts to challenge the modern Salafis and prove that their understanding of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ is incorrect and inappropriate especially in the context of modern living.

As a divine code of conduct, the consequences of applying modern Salafis’ version of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ are serious – arguably it promotes a life that is insular and hostile towards non-Muslims. As such, there is a need to reach a legitimate meaning and position of the principles of Al-Wala’ wal Bara’ as it applies to contemporary Islam in light of the primary Islamic sources.

In this globalised world, many Muslims feel that their key beliefs are challenged and their identity is threatened. As a result, Muslims are searching for signposts and guidelines to practice Islam in a world seemingly at odds with Islamic principles. A “sophisticated” understanding of the concept is seen as critical to guide the direction of integration and is crucial to assist Muslims to confidently lead good lives wherever they may be.

*Mohamed Bin Ali is Assistant Professor with the Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also a counsellor with the Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG).

By Bhaskar Roy*

Paris, on November 13 evening, was nothing unusual. A concert with an American band from California performing. A friendly football match in the stadium between France and Germany. And people in bars and cafeterias enjoying themselves. Gay and Carefree Paris was impervious to a threat from Islamic State (IS) or Daesh, when all hell broke loose.

The IS had struck, leaving 129 dead and over 300 injured with 99 of them in critical state. Nine terrorists who took part in the killings were eliminated by the police or blew themselves up with explosive belts they were wearing (According to available reports, two are absconding).

This IS claimed responsibility for the carnage, and gave a warning that they had infiltrated into Europe in the guise of refugees. France swung into action and Belgium coordinated in almost simultaneous response as some of the perpetrators were also Belgian citizens. The support elements of the attackers are being hunted down. The French authorities believe the attack was planned outside France. At least one of the terrorists killed carried a Syrian passport and had entered as a refugee.

Since the attack on the French satirical magazine Charbie Heblo in January this year, French agencies had neutralised ten terrorist plots according to French officials, which were not made public. This was apparently done to avoid public anxiety and maintain the character of Paris and France – that of government and people who do not discriminate between religion, colour and creed. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe.

It is very important to note that the November 13 bloody killings did not provoke a public reaction against Muslims, unlike what happened in the USA following the “9/11” terrorist attacks. If the IS planned to divide France and Europe on religious lines and create chaos, they have been frustrated. But elsewhere in Europe the repercussions may have been different, at least to an extent. The IS may have achieved a limited objective by raising questions over Muslim refugees desperately seeking asylum in Europe fleeing from these marauding terrorists like the IS and al-Nusra fronts.

Europe and the US must not fall into this IS trap because the consequences would be even worse. Other countries including India should take a lesson from the French resilience, and political and social philosophy. That these terrorists are a small lot who do not espouse the true Islam. The IS is anything but Muslim and Islamic. They have become a satanic cult. But the problem is cults also attract the undiscerning and the vulnerable.

It is well known that the IS does not espouse the core spirit of Islam, which is basically a balanced and peaceful religion. Of course, over the centuries Islam has been interpreted in many ways including perfecting the holy word ‘Jihad’ and upholding obscurantist conservatism like Wahabism and Salafism.

The IS has created its own ideology, targeting Shias, Ahmeddias, peaceful Sunni derivatives like Sufism and, of course, the Kafirs or non-believers.

IS, which was first noticed in Iraq around 2006 fighting against the US forces went underground after a series of defeats. It re emerged later as a tool in the hands of anti-Assad forces and regimes especially Saudi Arabia and UAE. With the Saudis and Iranians at each other’s throats, the IS began playing an anti-Shia frontline fighter’s role. There was no stopping this organisation after that. In 2014, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared a Caliphate over areas they controlled in Syria and Iraq and himself as the Caliph.

Meanwhile, for the US and other western powers who were bent on removing Syrian President Bashr Al Assad, any anti-Assad weapon was welcome. What goes around comes around. The Saudi royals are beginning to feel the IS heat. The IS caliphate does not recognise kings and emperors. The caliph derives his powers directly from Allah. It is no wonder that the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa against the IS.

The horrific attack in Paris has jolted the west and the rest of the world. Containment of the IS will not work. The organisation must be rooted out and that can happen if all join together in a decisive war, dropping regime change in Syria and co-opting Russia, Iran and the Kurd Peshmergas fully. The West must concede that the best fighters against the IS have been Iranians and Peshmergas.

Can this really happen? It can perhaps be successful if a political solution in Syria can be arrived at with Russian and Iranian participation; if the Sunnis and Shias can come to a truce in the Middle East; and all terrorists and states sponsoring terrorism and addressed with fervour without political and strategic considerations. This is a very big task.

Russian President Vladimir Putin disclosed at the recently concluded G-20 summit in Turkey that they had intelligence that citizens of at least 40 countries were financing the IS by various means, these included some member countries of the G-20. Putin shared this information with members of this conclave.

Initial large funding for the IS came from the millions of dollars they looted from banks located in areas they took over. But regular income came-in from sale of illegal oil to unscrupulous dealers. And, of course, donations,

Although the G-20 agreed to target and further squeeze the IS funding routes, it is not going to be easy. There are parties who still hope to further their political and ideological agenda through the IS.

Targeting the IS in Syria by military means is only part of the solution, though quite effective. What about organisations like the Al-Nusra Front? The IS has also established a foot hold in parts of Afghanistan. No international effort has taken this into account.

The IS influence has spread in concentric circles than that of the Al Qaeda because of its expert propaganda and daring to take the war against the west to their front yard. The manner in which volunteers have streamed to the IS in thousands in such a short time is startling. Even more important is that of women joining it with the fore knowledge how they are treated once they are there. But they are mesmerised and think they are sacrificing for a greater good.

For example, not a single Indian joined the Taliban or the Al Qaeda. Yet, at least 15 Indians if not more are now fighting with the IS in Syria in various capacities, some have been stopped from going, and a few have returned and have been put through a process of deradicalisation,- not arrested and thrown into prisons. But the threat to India remains palpable with India-centric IS affiliates like Ansur-ut Tawhid fi Bilad al-Hind (AUT) stepping on-line propaganda. AUT’s trajectory suggests it may be expanding to neighbouring Bangladesh.

If the international community is sincere in eradicating and not containing, terrorism all terrorists must be addressed simultaneously. The old strategy of good terrorists and bad terrorists must be jettisoned. Still the old strategy of my ally’s terrorists should be protected because they attack a potential enemy, continues.

In the Indian subcontinent, Bangladesh is in urgent need of international assistance. Whether the IS has taken a toehold there is one question. The other is terrorists are striking and killing liberals, the people in government and the police. Who are these people, who is behind them and how are they financed?

India is home to all sects and sections of Muslims. And all leading shoots of Islam have come together to condemn the IS and issue a fatwa.

The international community must draw a lesson from this and concert it into a much larger concerted global effort. In the meanwhile, countries like the US, the UK and others must discard the policy of giving shelter to terrorist ideologues in the name of human rights and free speech. Terrorists do not respect human rights and freedom of speech, and they deserve none!

*The writer is a New Delhi based analyst. He can be reached at e-mail grouchohart@yahoo.com

Russia’s S-300 family of surface-to-air missiles is generally acknowledged to include the most sophisticated and effective air-defence systems in the world. There are nearly 30 variations of S-300 in existence, and the PS and PM versions are, it is believed, fitted with nuclear warheads. It was more than mildly disturbing, therefore, to learn on November 9 that Russia has lifted its embargo on supplying Iran with the S-300, and that a firm contract to provide four systems is signed and sealed. What is not yet clear is when they will be delivered.

Speaking at the Dubai Airshow-2015, which ran from November 8-12, Sergei Chemezov, the head of Russia’s Rostec Corporation, the conglomerate that includes arms exporter Rosobornexport, said: “The contract for the delivery of the S-300 to Iran…has already entered into force.”

This deal has had a long gestation. The contract under which Russia agreed to supply Iran with S-300 missile systems was signed back in 2007. Three years later, following the imposition of sanctions by the UN on Iran, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stepped in to prohibit the deal from going ahead. Iran hit back by filing a lawsuit with a Geneva arbitration tribunal against Russia’s Rosoboronexport arms company, claiming nearly $4 billion in damages.

In April, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin repealed his predecessor’s ban on fulfilling the contract. Following the conclusion of the US-led nuclear deal with Iran on July 14, Putin decided that, since international sanctions on Iran were about to be lifted, Russia would give the S-300 contract the go-ahead. As a result Iranian and Russian officials are negotiating about the withdrawal of the lawsuit.

But Russia has jumped the gun. The official timeline for implementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran allows sanctions to be lifted only when the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) verifies that Iran has implemented key nuclear-related measures, such as reducing its stockpiles of fissile materials and centrifuges.

But on October 21 Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, published a document laying down nine new requirements before Iran would agree to implement the JCPOA. These unilateral conditions fundamentally change what was agreed on July 14, and virtually declare the JCPOA a dead letter.

For example, under the JCPOA Iran is obligated to start changing the function of its nuclear reactor at Arak and shipping out most of its stockpile of enriched uranium as a precondition for the lifting of sanctions. In his document Khamenei declares that Iran will not carry out these actions until after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) closes its dossier on Iran, targeted for December 15. But how can the IAEA report by the target date about Iran meeting its obligations, when Iran is not even going to begin doing so by then? In short, the JCPOA has been thwarted from the very start.

So far the US and the EU appear to have turned a blind eye to Iran’s new position on the nuclear deal, but if Khameini means what he says and acts on it, they will surely have to defer the lifting of sanctions. Russia too, as one of the negotiating parties to the nuclear deal, will have to decide whether to hold off providing Iran with the S-300 missile systems.

Providing the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism with the world’s most sophisticated surface-to-air missile system might be a lucrative business deal for the Russian arms industry, but it represents a considerable risk for the world in general, and the Middle East in particular. It seems to have little relevance to the joint Russo-Iranian operation in Syria in support of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Neither the Free Syrian Army nor Islamic State have air power at their disposal. The only air combatant besides Russia itself is the US-led alliance, and there could surely be no intention in Tehran to use S-300 surface–to-air missiles against them – although, if Syria’s civil conflict were to be prolonged, Iran’s mere possession of them might act as some sort of deterrent.

No, Iran is seeking, and Russia is supplying, S-300s as part of a system of defense against aerial attack on one or more of three possible targets: Iran’s nuclear facilities; the military installations of its stooge army, Hezbollah, in the event of a new conflict with Israel; or the Iranian-supported Houthi forces in Yemen, currently under aerial bombardment by the Saudi Arabian coalition.

No wonder that the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel are all opposed to the missile contract that Russia has signed with Iran. The one saving grace is that no date has been set for delivery of the S-300 systems. Long may it be delayed.

It’s a Saturday night in Ho Chi Minh City, and the kids are starting to gather at the Tan Thuan evangelical church in District 7. They pull up on shiny motorbikes, clothes neat, hair slicked back. They cast shy looks at strangers, greet friends exuberantly, and sprawl across the pews.

“Here, the brotherhood is close, I have a lot of friends,” said Tin, 24, who attends the church’s Saturday youth services regularly with his 27-year-old brother Dinh.

One night a week, services are just for youth. One night, they’re for new members. One night: the elderly. There are early morning prayers every day and several services on Sundays. During the week, there are scheduled missions to spread the word of God.

The experience is vastly different to what the brothers grew up with in Quang Ngai province in central Vietnam, where authorities routinely blocked access to church and cut off evangelizing trips.

“In the past, the local government wouldn’t let us gather in a group and wouldn’t let us attend our house church. There used to be one there, but after 1975, the government took it and turned it into a community center,” recalled Dinh.

For decades, local authorities refused to return it and it wasn’t until 2009 that they returned the land and allowed the house church to be rebuilt.

“Here, it’s more free,” he said.

Growing church

Protestantism is thriving in Vietnam. The government’s own census shows an increase from 410,000 in 1999 to 734,000 adherents a decade later. Today, the government puts that figure at around 1 million, while church officials insist it is closer to 2 million. Churches themselves report booming membership, with Sunday services often spilling out the doors as new members crowd in.

Despite the best efforts of the authorities, Protestantism has shown particular growth among Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. While reliable statistics don’t exist, the U.S. State Department wrote in its last religious freedom report that “based on adherents’ estimates, two-thirds of Protestants were members of ethnic minorities.”

But such growth has come in spite of major obstacles. While Protestantism is one of the 38 religions officially recognized by the Vietnamese government, its activities are frequently banned outright by local authorities. Most evangelism is considered illegal and members report their activities are monitored and curtailed. The government has put pressure to prevent a merger of the Northern and Southern evangelical churches, a move aimed at keeping the north (which is more heavily restricted and has not seen the growth of the south) under check.

In rural areas, particularly in the highlands, repression is rife. A report published in June by Human Rights Watch outlined a systemic persecution of ethnic minority Christians who “have been subjected to constant surveillance and other forms of intimidation, arbitrary arrest and mistreatment in security force custody.”

Even in the relatively open Ho Chi Minh City, Christians have faced pushback. Pastors and church members see their movements monitored and have been detained for handing out tracts. Those who are members of churches not officially recognized by the government have faced particular pressure. In January, a prominent Mennonite pastor who has long been a government target was brutally attacked and the perpetrators never arrested. The previous year, his Bible college was ransacked on seven different occasions.

Persecution problem

Open Doors, a Christian nongovernmental organization monitoring persecution, has ranked Vietnam one of the worst countries to be Christian on its World Watch List. The country is ranked 16 among 50 and given the tag of “severe persecution.”

Hoang *, a house church pastor, said despite a general atmosphere of openness in Ho Chi Minh City, even he had been detained on numerous occasions.

“One time I was spreading religion in a nearby area and the police ‘invited me’ and gave me a speech for four hours. They say that you can’t spread religion and I said: people ask so I answer … This happened three times,” he said.

While the situation has generally improved, he said, government control remains omnipresent.

“There is less threat from the outside now but from the inside they still want to take action,” he said.

Quang*, who heads the Tan Thuan evangelical church, said movement was controlled to no small degree.

“We’re allowed to hold activities according to our registration papers that say: ‘in the next year, I want to do this or that.’ You have to let the government know in advance and you can only follow that paper,” he said.

But, he noted, “the magical thing is that the more the government puts pressure on Christian members, the more people want to join.”

Quang’s church is considered midsize, with about 400 regular members and an unknown number of “casual visitors.” In Vietnam, the term house church is something of a misnomer. While some are erected in converted shop houses, many are built specifically as churches and nearly all are registered with the government. One of the biggest “house churches” boasts a congregation of 4,000, is half a city block and has been located on prime downtown real estate for seven decades.

Though groups like Open Doors have listed Vietnam as a dire nation in which to be Christian, one has the sense the government is fighting a losing battle.

“Every year, from central Vietnam to the southern tip, there’s at least 20,000 new Christian converts,” said Hoang An, a young pastor who works with several churches in Ho Chi Minh City.

“God has helped Vietnam to develop Christianity really well.”

*Names have been changed for those who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing a backlash from the government

(Burj al-Barajneh Palstinian camp, Beirut) — Following the June 6, 1982 Yawm an-Naksa (‘day of the setback’) of the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, I began to notice that youngsters in the camps in Lebanon, and in the Palestinian diaspora, specifically in Washington DC where I worked, were identifying more with scholars from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University and with Political Salafism. They would explain to me the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and of a new Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement called Hamas, which was created as a direct result of the 1982 Israeli aggression against Lebanon.

A few indicated that they wanted to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which was established around 970 by the Fatmids as a center of Islamic learning and where students studied the Qur’an and Islamic law. Salafism was part of their education. For centuries the mission of al-Azhar was to propagate Islam and Islamic culture. Until today its Islamic scholars counsel students on Islam and even render edicts (fatwas) on disputes submitted to them. Requests for their fatwas come from all over the Sunni Islamic world regarding proper conduct for Muslim individuals and societies and how to achieve justice for all people of good will. Al-Azhar also trains Egyptian government-appointed preachers in the best ways to achieve proselytization (da’wa).

In light of the failure of Arab political elites, including Lebanese and Palestinian leaders, to provide an alternative model for peaceful political change and for acquiring elementary civil rights, including the right to work in Lebanon, many of the angry Palestinian youth in Lebanon are concluding that they have few options to achieve civil rights and are listening to the new chorus siren calls from Jihadist Salafism.

With respect to the differences between Political Salafism and Jihadist Salafism, all Salafists take the same basic approach to Islam, emulating the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers—al-Salaf al-Salih, (the pious forefathers) even to details such as facial hair. They reject religious innovation, or bida, and support the implementation of sharia law. However, non-Jihadist Salafist scholars are far from homogeneous, expressing different views on everything from apostasy to activism. Many Salafists in Lebanon now engage in politics despite a tradition of quiescence. But with little to show for their efforts some Political Salafis are beginning to withdraw from quiescence and are gradating toward Jihadist Salafism with its focus on war and terrorism to achieve equality and justice under sharia.

Moderate Islamic groups, proponents of Political Salafism have long had significant influence in the Palestinian community and have a long history in the struggle to liberate Palestine and resisting the occupation. But it is also the case that with respect to the Zionist occupation, Salafi Jihadist groups in Palestine and Lebanon do not have an impressive record in resisting and fighting against the occupation forces, when compared to other Palestinian factions over the past 35 years.

Their influence is being challenged by the Salafi Jihadists. The extent of anger and tension in Lebanon’s camps, the appalling political and economic conditions, rising poverty, lack the most elementary civil right to work and banned from owning a home, repression, marginalization, harassment by security forces, create fertile ground for radicalization and violence.

Salafi Jihadism as an alternative model for Lebanon is being promoted especially on social media recruitment sites as ISIS (Da’ish) which play the Palestinian card in Lebanon as many in the region do. ISIS is telling Palestinians in Lebanon and elsewhere that Arab regimes for more than half a century have repressed them and that these regimes and claimed “Resistance” movements are irrelevant in achieving freedom for Palestine and have refused the Palestinians right to work and to own a home in Lebanon.

Given its simplistic apocalyptic rhetoric, diligent planning, its highly touted religious purity and its severe dealing with corrupt warlords and tribal leaders, its reputation for being uninterested in popularity, its austerity and reception of fellow jihadists without discrimination, and its substantial social services all add to its popular appeal among many raised in a corrupt Lebanese system.

So does its Safafi Jihadist appeal to liberate Palestine and guarantee civil rights for Palestinians in Lebanon. Simultaneously, proponents of moderate Political Salafism are losing their Palestinian audience and the confidence of many in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps and have to reconsider political positions to prevail over the rising tide of Jihadist Salafism. To date there is little evidence that they will rise to the challenge.

In my view, despite some perceptible movement in its direction, it is not likely that Jihadist Salafism will succeed in Lebanon’s camps despite the misery caused partly from being denied the right to work or even to own a home. Palestinians in Lebanon possess a deep moderation and an abiding commitment to tolerance and to coexistence among religious, social, and political aspects of their society. They are increasingly united in their commitment for Full Return to their Zionist occupied country.

For example, on a typical Sunday afternoon a visitor to the village of Maroun al-Ras which is perched some 945 meters above sea level on the Lebanon-Palestine border with a wide view of Palestinian territories, will observe Palestinian families looking deep into their country with parents often teaching the history of the Nakba to their children, answering their questions and pointing toward their village or visible towns such as Akka toward the south west.

The Beirut Al-Zaytouna Centre’s Atef Joulani in his recent instructive report entitled Salafi Jihadist Groups and the Possibilities of Proliferating among Palestinians, argues that Salafi Jihadist groups have a limited presence and influence in the Palestinian arena. He points to the close knit Palestinian community which he believes will likely continue to reject Salafi Jihadism. I agree.

Another barrier preventing broad camp penetration by Jihadi Salafism e.g. al-Quada, Islamic State/ISIS and countless others operating in Syria and Iraq these days, is the fact that Palestinians in Lebanon’s camps are known for their openness, moderate political views and employing dialogue among factions to reach peaceful solutions when security breaches do occur.

Islamist jihadi groups are seeking to create a wedge between Muslims and those of other faiths. ISIS is demanding the destruction of what it calls the “gray zone,” where people of all religions co-exist. They face a hard sell to Palestinians whose views are overwhelmingly the obverse.

Moreover, Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees, given a half century of being used for political purposes by warlords in this host country, some of whom became and remain political lords since granting themselves amnesty a quarter century ago, are very sophisticated about detecting efforts to infiltrate their camps by corrupt politicians or radical elements. Still fresh in their memory is the terrorism and extremism of the 2007 tragedy at Nahr al-Bared camp when the jihadist Fateh-al-Islam was sent into the camp to cause strife and create security chaos presenting themselves as moderate devout Muslims.

ISIS has failed in its attempt this month to incite sectarian tensions in Lebanon following last week’s double suicide attack on the edge of Burj al Barajneh refugee camp which killed 43 civilians including five Palestinians.

Those who claim to want to preserve the relative quietude in the Palestinian camps here would do well to resist ISIS in a concrete form. One of the most effective ways would be resisting with actions not just ‘feel-good Resistance speeches but rather by using their political power positively by taking 90 minutes in Parliament to grant Palestinians in Lebanon the six decade overdue most elementary civil rights to work and to own a home.

By Dr. S. Chandrasekharan

If the Prime Minister of a neighbouring country makes an open accusation in his televised address to the nation, then it is something serious and needs to be examined. In the instant case, Prime Minister K. P. Oli in his address to the nation accused India of imposing a blockade which he described as cruel, inhumane and beyond imagination.

While this outburst says something about the failure of Indian diplomacy towards a close neighbour, it is also necessary for Nepal and its leaders to make an introspection as to what went wrong. There is only one word for it- Nepal has always been insensitive to Indian concerns and interests. Nepal’s summary rejection of Indian request to put off promulgation of the new constitution for a while in view of Bihar elections is a case in point.

The special envoy of the Indian Prime Minister who carried a personal request was also sent back with minimum courtesies.

No doubt, the diplomatic crisis between India and Nepal evinced some interest in Bhutan and it was refreshing to see a very objective and frank assessment of the crisis from the Bhutanese point of view given by Tenzing Lamsang in the October 31 issue of Bhutanese.

The author begins the essay with the statement with which I fully agree that Bhutan historically has been very good at drawing lessons from the diplomatic mistakes of its neighbours and taking necessary steps to avoid them. This he attributes rightly to the unique quality exemplified by the fourth Gyalpo and the present King.

The current prosperity, peace and stability in Bhutan are not a little due to their guidance as also the importance Bhutan gives to Indo Bhutan relations. On the other hand, Nepal neither in the past nor at present has realised the need for good relations with India.

What Nepal needs is a great and a visionary leader which it is lacking while Bhutan has. For a while it was thought that after the demise of G.P. Koirala, Pushpa Kumar Dahal of the UCPN (Maoist) would fill the bill. But he turned out to be a disappointment!

The author has pointed out that “ What has escaped understanding of Nepal’s policy makers and even people is that India is not a perfect neighbour. India is a very big neighbour looking after its own interests which in a few areas coincides with the interests of its neighbours.”

On the other hand Bhutan knows what India is and what to get from it for its own interests in good time without pushing it too far. Nepal does not know. For example, Oli’s tirade against India in a national televised speech will do no good to Nepal.

Another case in point is the euphoria in Kathmandu valley over the current supply of oil from China. Of the promised 1.2 million litres of oil, only hundred trucks have come so far over a perilous route considered to be the second most dangerous in the world. Nepal needs 350 or more oil tankers a day and this cannot be made up by China in the near or even long term. The solution for Nepal is that instead of spewing hatred against India, the new government should negotiate with its own Madhesi citizens and hammer out an understanding. This is what India is telling Nepal time and again!

The author then flags important developments both in Nepal and Bhutan and tries to indicate that while Bhutan benefitted from the insecurities in regional and border security by India, Nepal lost out.

When in 1958, developments in the north were getting more uncertain, India entered into a strong and mutually beneficial friendship with Bhutan at the time of the third Gyalpo. Bhutan with both sponsorships and material support from India, joined the United Nations in 1971. Another delicate issue admirably solved was the change to the 1949 treaty which no longer requires Bhutan to seek foreign policy advice from India it its foreign affairs or permission to buy arms.

On the other hand, “Nepal’s foreign policy moves with India have often been big and brash moves and almost every time, it has suffered for it and yet refused to learn from it. As a result, it has affected the future of an entire country and its people.”

The list could go on but I would end with two good quotes from the author which are relevant to the current crisis. He says-

“Nepal started from what would be considered a strong position and had a lot of promise and potential around five decades ago, but it has turned itself into a cautionary tale.

Bhutan by contrast, started from a very vulnerable position in the 1950s and has bided its time with patience and discipline under a strong leadership to stabilize and strengthen itself.”

While the fourth Gyalpo and the present King of Bhutan can take credit for Bhutan’s development in all aspects, the past rulers as well as the political leadership of Nepal should take the blame for the ills of that country.

By Jorge Valero

(EurActiv) — A ‘mea culpa’ emerged from the emergency meeting on security matters on Friday (20 November), as EU member states acknowledged they did not use all the tools at their disposal to address the terrorist threats.

“We are completely aware” that the measures endorsed by the EU ministers of Justice and Home Affairs have been discussed in the past, confessed Etienne Schneider, the Minister of Home Affairs of Luxembourg, whose country is at the EU’s helm this semester.

But, he added, that after the Paris attacks on 13 November, when 129 people died, member states realized that they needed to implement them “as soon as possible”.

Although they agreed last May on strengthening the checks for certain EU citizens, according to a set of common risk indicators, only a few governments are following these recommendations, EU officials pointed out.

Terrorists with EU passports, such as the majority of the militants involved in the Paris attacks, represent a major challenge for the European authorities, as controls at the external borders are limited to a minimum check to establish their identity, through the verification of their travel documents, according to Schengen rules.

Although the set of common risk indicators remains secret for security reasons, it allows member states to carry out systematic controls on all EU citizens arriving from a particular third country, or to all flights arriving into a particular member state.

The ministers agreed on making these checks mandatory. Moreover, all EU citizens will be now considered a potential threat, so all EU travellers will be subject to a stricter scrutiny, including checks against the Schengen Information System (SIS), as is the case for all third country nationals.

“We are now in the phase of implementing Schengen” in order to be “efficient” in protecting our borders, said French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

France asked for the crisis meeting with three requests on the agenda: bolstering external border controls, setting up of a European Passenger Name Record (PNR) and the fight against the illegal trafficking of weapons.

The meeting illustrated that Europe needs better implementation of measures previously agreed after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January, instead of new ones.

Besides the loopholes in the external border controls, ministers also emphasised that member states should improve their exchange of intelligence. Officials estimate that five member states share “half of the information” related to foreign terrorists, while the other capitals barely engage in the exchange of information.

Therefore, the ministers agreed on making “maximum use” of the Schengen tools to improve the overall level of information exchange between counter-terrorism authorities in the EU.

“Member states will ensure that the relevant national authorities significantly increase their contributions to Focal Point Traveller at Europol to reflect the threat and connect to relevant Europol information exchange systems,” the conclusions read.

In light of this lack of cooperation among the capitals, Dimitris Avramopoulos, Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, called for an EU intelligence service “to respond to the real needs of security in Europe”. However, he said that this was an “ideal idea” that it was not discussed during the meeting, as he did not put it on the table.

European PNR

Meanwhile, the ministers also emphasized the “urgency and priority of finalising an ambitious EU PNR before the end of 2015”, including internal flights within Schengen, which is currently being negotiated with the European Parliament.

One of the main bones of contention is how long the data can be retained. While the member states wanted three years, Parliament was ready to accept only one month, over privacy concerns.

During the press conference, Cazeneuve highlighted that it should be at least one year. “No single EU citizen would understand why the European Parliament is blocking it,” he added.

The Council will also speed up the legislative process of the new rules presented by the Commission on 18 November, to fight against arms trafficking.

“We must be implacable in our determination, we must speed up our action, otherwise Europe will lose its way,” he said in his concluding remarks.

Over the past 15 years the US has been engaged in a series of wars, which has led many writers to refer to the ‘rise of militarism’ – the growth of an empire, built primarily by and for the projection of military power – and only secondarily to advance economic imperialism.

The rise of a military-based empire, however, does not preclude the emergence of competing, conflicting and convergent power configurations within the imperial state. These factions of the Washington elite define the objectives and targets of imperial warfare, often on their own terms.

Having stated the obvious general fact of the power of militarism within the imperial state, it is necessary to recognize that the key policy-makers, who direct the wars and military policy, will vary according to the country targeted, type of warfare engaged in and their conception of the war. In other words, while US policy is imperialist and highly militaristic, the key policymakers, their approach and the outcomes of their policies will differ. There is no fixed strategy devised by a cohesive Washington policy elite guided by a unified strategic vision of the US Empire.

In order to understand the current, seemingly endless wars, we have to examine the shifting coalitions of elites, who make decisions in Washington but not always primarily for Washington. Some factions of the policy elite have clear conceptions of the American empire, but others improvise and rely on superior ‘political’ or ‘lobbying’ power to successfully push their agenda in the face of repeated failures and suffer no consequences or costs.

We will start by listing US imperial wars during the last decade and a half. We will then identify the main policy-making faction which has been the driving force in each war. We will discuss their successes and failures as imperial policy makers and conclude with an evaluation of “the state of the empire” and its future.

Imperial Wars: From 2001 – 2015

The current war cycle started in late 2001 with the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. This was followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, the US arms support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the proxy invasion of Somalia in 2006/7; the massive re-escalation of war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 – 2009; the bombing, invasion ‘regime change’ in Libya in 2011; the ongoing proxy-mercenary war against Syria (since 2012), and the ongoing 2015 Saudi-US invasion and destruction of Yemen. In Europe, the US was behind the 2014 proxy putsch and violent ‘regime change’ in Ukraine which has led to an ongoing war against ethnic Russian speakers in south-east Ukraine, especially the populous industrial heartland of the Donbas region.

Over the past 15 years, there have been overt and covert military interventions, accompanied by an intense, provocative military build-up along Russia’s borders in the Baltic States, Eastern Europe (especially Poland), the Balkans (Bulgaria and Romania) and the mammoth US base in Kosovo; in Central Europe with nuclear missiles in Germany and, of course, the annexation of Ukraine and Georgia as US-NATO clients.

Parallel to the military provocations encircling Russia, Washington has launched a major military, political, economic and diplomatic offensive aimed at isolating China and affirming US supremacy in the Pacific.

In South American, US military intervention found expression via Washington-orchestrated business-military coup attempts in Venezuela in 2002 and Bolivia in 2008, and a successful ‘regime change’ in Honduras in 2009, overthrowing its elected president and installing a US puppet.

In summary, the US has been engaged in two, three or more wars since 2001, defining an almost exclusively militarist empire, run by an imperial state directed by civilian and military officials seeking unchallenged global dominance through violence.

Washington: Military Workshop of the World

War and violent regime change are the exclusive means through which the US now advances its foreign policy. However, the various Washington war-makers among the power elite do not form a unified bloc with common priorities. Washington provides the weapons, soldiers and financing for whichever power configuration or faction among the elite is in a position, by design or default, to seize the initiative and push their own war agenda.

The invasion of Afghanistan was significant in so far as it was seen by all sectors of the militarist elite, as the first in a series of wars. Afghanistan was to set the stage for the launching of higher priority wars elsewhere.

Afghanistan was followed by the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, dictated by Tel Aviv, penned by presidential speech-writer, David Fromm and mouthed by the brainless President Bush, II. The ‘Global War on Terror’ was the thinly veiled slogan for serial wars around the world. Washington measured the loyalty of its vassals among the nations of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America by their support for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan invasion provided the template for future wars. It led to an unprecedented increase in the military budget and ushered in ‘Caesar’-like dictatorial presidential powers to order and execute wars, silencing domestic critics and sending scored of thousands of US and NATO troops to the ‘Hindu Kush’.

In itself, Afghanistan was never any threat and certainly no economic prize for plunder and profit. The Taliban had not attacked the US. Osama Bin Laden could have been turned over to a judicial tribunal – as the governing Taliban had insisted.

The US military (with its ‘Coalition of the Willing’ or COW) successfully invaded and occupied Afghanistan and set up a vassal regime in Kabul. It built scores of military bases and attempted to form an obedient colonial army. In the meantime, the Washington militarist elite had moved on to bigger and, for the Israel-centric Zionist elite, higher priority wars, namely Iraq.

The decision to invade Afghanistan was not opposed by any of Washington’s militarist elite factions. They all shared the idea of using a successful military blitz or ‘cake-walk’ against the abysmally impoverished Afghanistan as a way to rabble rouse the American masses into accepting a long period of intense and costly global warfare throughout the world.

Washington’s militarist elites fabricated the link between the attacks on 9/11/2001 and Afghanistan’s governing Taliban and the presence of the Saudi warlord Osama Bin Laden. Despite the ‘fact’ that most of the ‘hijackers’ were from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and none were Afghans, invading and destroying Afghanistan was to be the initial test to gauge the highly manipulated and frightened American public’s willingness to shoulder the burden of a huge new cycle of imperial wars. This has been the only aspect of the invasion of Afghanistan that could be viewed as a policy success – it made the costs of endless wars ‘acceptable’ to a relentlessly propagandized public.

Flush with their military victories in the Hindu Kush, the Washington militarists turned to Iraq and fabricated a series of increasingly preposterous pretexts for war: Linking the 9/11 ‘jihadi’ hijackers with the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, whose intolerance for violent Islamists (especially the Saudi variety) was well documented, and concocting a whole fabric of lies about Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which provided the propaganda basis for invading an already disarmed, blockaded and starved Iraq in March 2003.

Leading the Washington militarists in designing the war to destroy Iraq were the Zionists, including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and a few Israel-centric Gentile militarists, such as Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The Zionists had a powerful entourage in key positions in the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon.

There were ‘outsiders’ – non-Zionists and militarists within these institutions, especially the Pentagon, who voiced reservations – but they were brushed aside, not consulted and ‘encouraged’ to retire.

None of the ‘old hands’ in the State Department or Pentagon bought into the hysteria about Sadaam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but to voice reservations was to risk one’s career. The manufacture and dissemination of the pretext for invading Iraq was orchestrated by a small team of operatives linking Tel Aviv and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s “Office of Special Plans”, a tight group of Zionists and some Israelis headed by Abram Shulsky (Sept. 2002 – June 2003).

The US war on Iraq was an important part of Israel’s agenda to ‘re-make the Middle East’ to establish its unchallenged regional hegemony and execute a ‘final solution’ for its own vexing ‘Arab (native Palestinian) problem’: It was made operational by the powerful Zionist faction within the Executive (White House), which had assumed almost dictatorial powers after the attack on 9/11/2001. Zionists planned the war , designed the ‘occupation policy’ and ‘succeeded wildly’ with the eventual dismemberment of a once modern secular nationalist Arab state.

In order to smash the Iraqi state – the US occupation policy was to eliminate (through mass firings, jailing and assassination) all high level, experienced Iraqi civil, military and scientific personnel – down to high school principals. They dismantled any vital infrastructure (which had not been already destroyed by the decades of US sanctions and bombing under President Clinton) and reduced an agriculturally advanced Iraq to a barren wasteland which would take centuries to recover and could never challenge Israel’s colonization of Palestine, let alone its military supremacy in the Middle East. Naturally, the large Palestinian Diaspora refugee population in Iraq was targeted for ‘special treatment’.

But Zionist policymakers had a much larger agenda than erasing Iraq as a viable country: They had a longer list of targets: Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Libya, whose destructions were to be carried out with US and NATO blood and treasure (and not a single Israeli soldier).

Despite the fact that Iraq did not even possess a functioning air force or navy in March 2003 and Afghanistan in late 2001 was rather primitive, the invasions of both countries turned out to be very costly to the US. The US completely failed to benefit from its ‘victory and occupation’, despite Paul Wolfowitz’ boasts that the pillage of Iraq’s oil fields would pay for the entire project in a ‘few months’. This was because the real Zionist plan was to destroy these nations – beyond any possibility for a quick or cheap imperialist economic gain. Scorching the earth and salting the fields is not a very profitable policy for empire builders.

Israel has been the biggest winner with no cost for the ‘Jewish State’. The American Zionist policy elite literally handed them the services of the largest and richest armed forces in history: the US. ‘Israel-Firsters’ played a decisive role among Washington policy-makers and Tel Aviv celebrated in the streets! They came, they dominated policy and they accomplished their mission: Iraq (and millions of its people)was destroyed.

The US gained an unreliable, broken colony, with a devastated economy and systematically destroyed infrastructure and without the functioning civil service needed for a modern state. To pay for the mess, the American people faced a spiraling budget deficit, tens of thousands of American war casualties and massive cuts in their own social programs. Crowning the Washington war-makers’ victory was the disarticulation of American civil and constitutional rights and liberties and the construction of a enormous domestic police state.

After the Iraq disaster, the same influential Zionist faction in Washington lost no time in demanding a new war against Israel’s bigger enemy – namely Iran. In the ensuing years, they failed to push the US to attack Teheran but they succeeded in imposing crippling sanctions on Iran. The Zionist faction secured massive US military support for Israel’s abortive invasion of Lebanon and its devastating series of blitzkriegs against the impoverished and trapped people of Gaza.

The Zionist faction successfully shaped US military interventions to meet Israel’s regional ambitions against three Arab countries: Yemen, Syria and Libya.. The Zionists were not able to manipulate the US into attacking Iran because the traditional militarist faction in Washington balked: With instability in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US was not well positioned to face a major conflagration throughout the Middle East, South Asia and beyond – which a ground and air war with Iran would involve. However, the Zionist factions did secure brutal economic sanctions and the appointment of key Israel-Centric officials within the US Treasury. Secretary Stuart Levey, at the start of the Obama regime, and David Cohen afterwards, were positioned to enforce the sanctions.

Even before the ascendency of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Tel Aviv’s military objectives after Iraq, including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Yemen had to be spaced over time, because the non-Zionist factions among Washington’s elite had been unable to integrate occupied Afghanistan and Iraq into the empire.

Resistance, armed conflict and military advances in both Afghanistan and Iraq never ceased and are continuing into their 2nd decade. As soon as the US would withdraw from a region, declaring it ‘pacified’, the armed resistance would move back in and the local sepoys would defect to the rebels or take off for London or Washington with millions in pillaged loot.

‘Unfinished wars’, mounting casualties and spiraling costs, with no end in sight, undermined the agreement between the militarist and the Zionist factions in the Executive branch. However, the massively powerful Zionist presence in the US Congress provided a platform to bray for new and even bigger wars.

Israel’s vicious invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was defeated despite receiving massive US arms supplies, a US funded ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system and intelligence assistance. Tel Aviv could not defeat the highly disciplined and motivated Hezbollah fighters in South Lebanon despite resorting to carpet bombing of civilian neighborhoods with millions of banned cluster munitions and picking off ambulances and churches sheltering refugees. Israelis have been much more triumphal murdering lightly armed Palestinian resistance fighters and stone-throwing children.

Libya: A Multi-faction War for the Militarists (without Big Oil)

The war against Libya was a result of multiple factions among the Washington militarist elite, including the Zionists, coming together with French, English and German militarists to smash the most modern, secular, independent state in Africa under President Muammar Gaddafi.

The aerial campaign against the Gaddafi regime had virtually no organized support within Libya with which to reconstruct a viable neo-colonial state ripe for pillage. This was another ‘planned dismemberment’ of a complex, modern republic which had been independent of the US Empire.

The war succeeded wildly in shredding Libya’s economy, state and society. It unleashed scores of armed terrorist groups,( who appropriated the modern weapons of Gaddafi’s army and police) and uprooted two million black contract workers and Libyan citizens of South Saharan origin forcing them to flee the rampaging racist militias to the refugee camps of Europe. Untold thousands died in rickety boats in the Mediterranean Sea.

The entire war was carried out to the publicly giddy delight of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her ‘humanitarian interventionist’ lieutenants (Susan Rice and Samantha Power), who were utterly ignorant as to who and what the Libyan “opposition” represented. Eventually, even Hillary’s own Ambassador to Libya would be slaughtered by . . . the same victorious US-backed ‘rebels’ (sic) in the newly liberated Bengasi!

The Zionist faction destroyed Gaddafi (whose capture, grotesque torture and murder was filmed and widely disseminated), eliminating another real adversary of Israel and supporter of Palestinian rights. The US militarist faction, which led the war, got nothing positive – not even a secure naval, air or training base – only a dead Ambassador, millions of desperate refugees flooding Europe and thousands of trained and armed jihadists for the next target: Syria.

For a while Libya became the main supply-line for Islamist mercenaries and arms to invade Syria and fight the secular nationalist government in Damascus.

Once again the least influential faction in Washington turned out to be the oil and gas industry, which lost lucrative contracts it had already signed with the Gaddafi regime. Thousands of highly trained foreign oil workers were withdrawn. After Iraq, it should have been obvious that these wars were not ‘for oil’!

Ukraine: Coups, Wars and Russia’s ‘Underbelly’

With the US-orchestrated coup and intervention in Ukraine, the militarist factions once again seized the initiative, establishing a puppet regime in Kiev and targeting Russia’s strategic ‘soft underbelly’. The plan had been to take over Russia’s strategic military bases in Crimea and cut Russia from the vital military-industrial complexes in the Donbas region with its vast iron and coal reserves.

The mechanics of the power grab were relatively well planned, the political clients were put in power, but the US militarists had made no contingencies for propping up the Ukrainian economy, cut loose from its main trading partner and oil and gas supplier, Russia.

The coup led to a ‘proxy war’ in the ethnic-Russian majority regions in the south east (the Donbas) with four ‘unanticipated consequences’. 1) a country divided east and west along ethno-linguistic lines, (2) a bankrupt economy made even worse by the imposition of an IMF austerity program, (3) a corrupt crony capitalist elite, which was ‘pro-West by bank account’, (4) and, after two years, mass disaffection among voters toward the US puppet regime.

The militarists in Washington and Brussels succeeded in engineering the coup in Ukraine but lacked the domestic allies, plans and preparations to run the country and successfully annex it to the EU and NATO as a viable country.

Apparently the militarist factions in the State Department and Pentagon are much more proficient in stage managing coups and invasions than in establishing a stable regime as part of a New World Order. They succeed in the former and fail repeatedly in the latter.

The Pivot to Asia and the Pirouette to Syria

During most of the previous decade, traditional global strategists in Washington increasingly objected to the Zionist faction’s domination and direction of US war policies focused on the Middle East for the benefit of Israel, instead of meeting the growing challenge of the new world economic superpower in Asia, China.

US economic supremacy in Asia had been deeply eroded as China’s economy grew at double digits. Beijing was displacing the US as the major trade partner in the Latin American and African markets. Meanwhile, the top 500 US MNC’s were heavily invested in China. Three years into President Obama’s first term the ‘China militarist faction’ announced a shift from the Middle East and the Israel-centric agenda to a ‘pivot to Asia’, the source of 40% of the world’s industrial output.

But it was not profits and markets that motivated Washington’s Asia faction among the militarist elites – it was military power .Even trade agreements, like the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), were viewed as tools to encircle and weaken China militarily and undermine its regional influence.

Led by the hysterical Pentagon boss Ashton Carter, Washington prepared a series of major military confrontations with Beijing off the coast of China.

The US signed expanded military base agreements with the Philippines, Japan and Australia; it participated in military exercises with Vietnam, South Korea and Malaysia; it dispatched battleships and aircraft carriers into Chinese territorial waters.

The US confrontational trade policy was formulated by the Zionist trio: Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzer, Trade Negotiator Michael Froman (who works for both the Asia militarist and Zionist factions) and Treasury Secretary Jake Lew. The result was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving 12 Pacific countries while deliberating excluding China. Washington’s Asian militarist faction planned to militarize the entire Pacific Basin, in order to dominate the maritime trade routes and, at a moment’s notice, choke off all of China’s overseas markets and suppliers – shades of the series of US provocations against Japan leading up to the US entering WW2.

The ‘Asia-militarist faction’ successfully demanded a bigger military budget to accommodate its vastly more aggressive posture toward China.

Predictably, China has insisted on defending its maritime routes and has increased its naval and air base building and sea and air patrols. Also, predictably, China has countered the US-dominated TPP by setting-up a one hundred billion dollar Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), while contributing to the multi-billion dollar BRICS Bank. Meanwhile, China even signed a separate $30 billion dollar trade agreement with Washington’s strategic ‘partner’, Britain. In fact, Britain followed the rest of the EU and joined the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank – despite objections from Washington’s “Asia faction”.

While the US depends heavily on its military pacts with South Korea and Japan, the latter nations have been meeting with China – their most significant trading partner – to work on expanding and deepening economic ties.

Up until 2014, the “business-with-China faction” of the Washington elite played a key role in the making of US-Asia policy. However, they have been eclipsed by the Asia militarist-faction, which is taking US policy in a totally different direction: Pushing China out as Asia’s economic superpower and escalating military confrontation with Beijing now heads Washington’s agenda.

Ashton Carter, the US Defense Secretary, has China, the second most important economy in the world in the Pentagon’s ‘cross-hairs’. When the TPP failed to curtail China’s expansion, the militarist faction shifted Washington toward a high risk military course, which could destabilize the region and risk a nuclear confrontation.

The Pirouette: China and Syria

Meanwhile in the Levant, Washington’s Zionist faction has been busy running a proxy war in Syria. The pivot to Asia has had to compete with the pirouette to Syria and Yemen.

The US joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf Emirates and the EU in sponsoring a replay of the Libyan ‘regime change’– sponsoring proxy terrorists from around the globe into invading and devastating Syria. Damascus has been attacked from all sides for the ‘crime’ of being secular and multi-ethnic; for being pro-Palestinian; for being allied with Iran and Lebanon ; for having an independent foreign policy; and for maintaining a limited representative (but not necessarily democratic) government. For these crimes, the West, Israel and the Saudis would have Syria fractured into ethnically cleansed ‘tribal state’ – something they had accomplished in Iraq and Libya.

The US militarist faction (personified by Secretary of Defense Carter and Senators McCain and Graham) have funded, trained and equipped the terrorists, whom they call ‘moderates’ and had clearly expected their progeny to follow Washington’s directions. The emergence of Isis showed just how close these ‘moderates’ stuck to Washington’s script.

Initially, the traditional militarist wing of Washington’s elite resisted the Zionist faction’s demand for direct US military intervention (American ‘boots on the ground’). That is changing with recent (very convenient) events in Paris.

Warfare: From Piecemeal Interventions to Nuclear Confrontation

The Washington militarists have again committed more US soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan; American fighter planes and Special Forces are in Syria and Yemen. Meanwhile, US naval armadas aggressively patrol the coasts of China and Iran. The militarist – Zionist ‘compromise’ over Syria was comprised of an initial contingent of 50 US Special Forces to join in ‘limited’ combat roles with (“loyal” sic) Islamist mercenaries – the so-called ‘moderates’. There are commitments for greater and heavier weaponry to come, including ground to air missiles capable of shooting down Russian and Syrian military jets.

Elite Factional Politics: An Overview

How does the record of these competing factions, formulating US imperial war policies in the Middle East over the past 15 years stack up? Clearly there has been no coherent imperial economic strategy.

The policy toward Afghanistan is remarkable for its failure to end the longest war in US history – over 14 years of occupation! The recent attempts by US-led client NATO forces to withdraw have been immediately followed by military advances by the nationalist-Islamist resistance militia – the Taliban, which controls much of the countryside. The possibility of a collapse of the current puppet in Kabul has forced the militarists in Washington to retain US bases – surrounded by completely hostile rural populations.

The Afghan war’s initial appearance of success triggered new wars – inter alia Iraq. But taking the long view, the Afghan war, has been a miserable failure in terms of the stated strategic goal of establishing a stable client government. The Afghan economy collapsed: opium production (which had been significantly suppressed by the Taliban’s poppy eradication campaign in 2000-2001) is the now predominant crop – with cheap heroin flooding Europe and beyond. Under the weight of massive and all pervasive corruption by ‘loyal’ client officials – the Afghan treasury is empty. The puppet rulers are totally disconnected from the most important regional, ethnic, religious and family clans and associations.

Washington could not ‘find’ any viable economic classes in Afghanistan with which to anchor a development strategy. They did not come to terms with the deep ethno-religious consciousness rooted in rural communities and fought the most popular political force among the majority Pashtu, the Taliban, which had no role in the attack on ‘9/11’.

They artificially slapped together a massive army of surly illiterates under Western imperial command and watched it fall apart at the seams, defect to the Taliban or turn their own guns on the foreign occupation troops. These “mistakes”, which accounted for the failure of the militarist faction in the Afghanistan war were due, in no small part, to the pressure and influence of the Zionist faction who wanted to quickly move on to their highest priority, a US war against Israel’s first priority enemy – Iraq – without consolidating the US control in Afghanistan. For the Zionists, Afghanistan (envisioned as a ‘cake-walk’ or quick victory) was just a tool to set the stage for a much larger sequence of US wars against Israel’s regional Arab and Persian adversaries.

Before the militarists could establish any viable order and an enduring governmental structure in Afghanistan, attention shifted to a Zionist-centered war against Iraq.

The build-up for the US war against Iraq has to be understood as a project wholly engineered by and for the state of Israel, mostly through its agents within the US government and Washington policy elite. The goal was to establish Israel as the unchallenged political-military power in the region using American troops and money and preparing the ground for Tel Aviv’s “final solution” for the Palestinian ‘problem’; total expulsion…

The US military and occupation campaign included the wholesale and systematic destruction of Iraq: Its law and order, culture, economy and society – so there would be no possibility of recovery. Such a vicious campaign did not resonate with any productive sector of the US economy (or for that matter with any Israeli economic interest).

Washington’s Zionist faction set about in a parody of ‘Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge’ to identify and destroy any competent, experienced Iraqi professional, civil servant, scientist, intellectual, or military official capable of re-organizing and re-building the county and war-battered society. They were assassinated, arrested, tortured or driven into exile. The occupation deliberately encouraged religious parties and traditional tribes to engage in inter-communal massacres and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the Zionist faction did not pursue the traditionally understood policy of empire building which would incorporate the second tier functionaries of a conquered state to form a competent client regime and use Iraq’s great oil and gas wealth to build its economy. Instead they chose to impose a scorched earth policy; setting loose organized sectarian armies, imposing the rule of grotesquely corrupt ex-pats and placing the most venal, sectarian clients in positions of power. The effect has been to transform the most advanced, secular Arab country into an ‘Afghanistan’ and in less than 15 years destroying centuries of culture and community.

The goal of the ‘Zionist strategy’ was to destroy Iraq as Israel’s regional rival. The cost of over a million Iraqi dead and many million refugees did not prick any conscience in Washington or Tel Aviv.

After all, Washington’s traditional ‘militarist faction’ picked up the bill (costing hundreds of billions) which they passed on to the American taxpayers (well over one trillion dollars) and used the deaths and suffering of tens of thousands of American troops to provide a pretext for spreading more chaos. The result of their mayhem includes the specter of ‘Isis’, which they may consider to be a success – since hysteria over ‘Isis’ pushes the West ‘closer to Israel’.

The sheer scale of death and destruction inflicted on the Iraqi population by the Zionist faction led to thousands of highly competent Ba’athist officers, who had survived ‘Shock and Awe’ and the sectarian massacres, to join armed Islamist Sunnis and eventually form the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This group of experienced Iraqi military officers formed the strategic technical core of Isis which launched a devastating offensive in Iraq in 2014 – taking major cities in the north and completely routing the US-trained puppet armies of the ‘government’ in Baghdad. From there they moved into Syria and beyond. It is fundamental to understanding the roots of ISIS: The Zionist faction among US militarist policymakers imposed a deliberate ‘scorched earth’ occupation policy, which united highly trained nationalist Ba’athist military officers with young Sunni fighters ,both locals and increasingly foreign jihadist mercenaries. These deracinated members of the traditional Iraqi nationalist military elite had lost their families to the sectarian massacres; they were persecuted, tortured, driven underground and highly motivated. They literally had nothing left to lose!

This core of the Isis leadership stands in stark contrast to the colonial, corrupt and demoralized army slapped together by the US military with more cash than morale. ISIS quickly swept through half of Iraq and came within 40 miles of Baghdad.

The US militarist faction faced military defeat after eight years of war. They mobilized, financed and armed their client Kurdish mercenaries in northern Iraq and recruited the Shia Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to appeal to the Shia militia.

ISIS exploited the Western-backed Islamist uprising in Syria – and extended their sweep well across the border. Syria had accepted a million Iraqi refugees from the US invasion, including many of Iraq’s surviving experienced nationalist administrative elite. The US militarists are in a dilemma – another full-scale war would not be politically feasible, and its military outcome uncertain…Moreover the US was aligned with dubious allies – especially the Saudis – who had their own regional ambitions

Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Kurds were each eager to expand their power territorially and politically.

In the midst of this, the traditional Washington militarists are left with no overall viable imperialist strategy. Instead they improvise with faux ‘rebels’, who claim to be moderates and democrats, while taking US guns and dollars and ultimately joining the most powerful Islamist groups – like Isis.

Throwing a wrench into the machinery of Israeli-Saudi hegemonic ambitions, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have sided with the secular Syrian government. Russia finally moved to bomb Isis strongholds – after identifying a significant Isis contingent of militant Chechens whose ultimate aims are to bring war and terror back to Russia.

The US-EU war against Libya unleashed all the retrograde mercenary forces from three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe) and Washington finds itself with no means to control them. Washington could not even protect its own consulate in their “ liberated” regional capital of Benghazi – the US ambassador and two intelligence aides were killed by Washington’s own ‘rebels’. The competing and cooperating factions of the Washington militarist elite placed Libya on a steaming platter: Serving up invasion, regicide and hundreds of thousands of refugees, which they did not bother to even ‘season’ with any plan or strategy – just unadulterated scorched earth against another opponent of Zionism. And a potentially lucrative strategic neo-colony in North Africa has been lost with no accountability for the Washington architects of such barbarism.

Latin America: The Last Outpost of the Multi-Nationals

As we have seen, the major theaters of imperial policy (the Middle East and Asia) have been dominated by militarists, not professional diplomats-linked to the MNCs. Latin America stands as something of an exception. In Latin America, US policymakers have been guided by big business interests. Their main focus has been on pushing the neo-liberal agenda. Eventually this has meant promoting the US-centered ‘free trade’ agreements, joint military exercises, shared military bases, and political backing for the US global military agenda.

The ‘militarist faction’ in Washington worked with the traditional business faction in support of the unsuccessful military coups in Venezuela (2002 and 2014), the attempted coup in Bolivia 2008, and a successful regime change in Honduras (2010).

To harass the independent Argentine government which was developing closer diplomatic and trade ties with Iran, a sector of the US Zionist financial elite (the ‘vulture fund’ magnate Paul Singer) joined forces with the Zionist militarist faction to raise hysterical accusations against President Cristina Kirchner over the ‘mysterious’ suicide of a Israel-linked Argentine prosecutor. The prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, had devoted his career to ‘cooking up a case’ against Iran with the aid of the Mossad and CIA for the unsolved, bombing the Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994. Various investigations had exonerated Iran and the “Nisman Affaire” was an intense effort to keep Argentina from trading with Iran.

The Washington business faction operated in a mildly hostile Latin America for most of the past decade. However, it was able to recover influence, via a series of bilateral free trade agreements and took advantage of the end of the commodity cycle. The latter weakened the center-left regimes and moved them closer to Washington.

The ‘excesses’ committed by the US backed military dictatorships during the nineteen sixties through eighties, and the crisis of the neo-liberal nineties, set the stage for the rise of a relatively moderate business-diplomatic faction to come to the fore in Washington. It is also the case that the various militarist and Zionist factions in Washington were focused elsewhere (Europe, Middle East and Asia). In any case the US political elite operates in Latin America mostly via political and business proxies, for the time being.

Conclusion

From our brief survey, it is clear that wars play a key role in US foreign policy in most regions of the world. However, war policies in different regions respond to different factions in the governing elite.

The traditional militarist faction predominates creating confrontations in Ukraine, Asia and along the Russian border. Within that framework the US Army, Air Force and Special Forces play a leading, and fairly conventional, role. In the Far East, the Navy and Air Force predominate.

In the Middle East and South Asia, the military (Army and Air Force) factions share power with the Zionist faction . Fundamentally the Zionist dictate policy on Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine and the militarists follow.

Both factions overlapped in creating the debacle in Libya.

The factions form shifting coalitions, supporting wars of interest to their respective power centers. The militarists and Zionists worked together in launching the Afghan war; but once launched, the Zionists abandoned Kabul and concentrated on preparing for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was of far greater interest to Israel.

It should be noted that at no point did the oil and business elite play any significant role in war policy. The Zionist faction pushed hard to secure direct US ground intervention in Libya and Syria, but was not able to force the US to send large contingents of ground troops due to opposition from the Russians as well as a growing sector of the US electorate. Likewise, the Zionists played a leading role in successfully imposing sanctions against Iran and a major role in prosecuting banks around the world accused of violating the sanctions. However, they were not able to block the military faction from securing a diplomatic agreement with Iran over its uranium enrichment program – without going to war.

Clearly, the business faction plays a major role in promoting US trade agreements and tries to lift or avoid sanctions against important real and potential trade partners like China, Iran and Cuba.

The Zionists faction among the Washington elite policymakers take positions which consistently push for wars and aggressive policies against any regime targeted by Israel. The differences between the traditional militarist and Zionist factions are blurred by most writers who scrupulously avoid identifying Zionist decision-makers, but there is no question of who benefits and who loses.

The kind of war which the Zionists promote and implement – the utter destruction of enemy countries – undermines any plans by the traditional militarist faction and the military to consolidate power in an occupied country and incorporate it into a stable empire.

It is a serious error to lump these factions together: the business, Zionist and various militarist factions of the Washington policy making elite are not one homogeneous group. They may overlap at times, but they also differ as to interests, liabilities , ideology and loyalties. They also differ in their institutional allegiances.

The overarching militarist ideology, which permeates US imperial foreign policy obscures a deep and recurrent weakness – US policymakers master the mechanics of war but have no strategy for ruling after intervening. This has been glaringly evident in all recent wars: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine etc. Improvisation has repeatedly led to monumental failures: from financing phantom armies to bleeding billions to prop-up incompetent, kleptocratic puppet regimes. Despite the hundreds of billions of public money wasted in these serial disasters, no policymaker has been held to account.

Long wars and short memories are the norm for Washington’s militarist rulers who do not lose sleep over their blunders. The Zionists, for their part, do not even need a strategy for rule. They push the US into wars for Israel, and once having destroyed “the enemy country” they leave a vacuum to be filled by chaos. The American public provides the gold and blood for these misadventures and reaps nothing but domestic deterioration and greater international strife.

Moroccan Press Agency (MAP) reported that King Mohammed VI was received at the Elysee Palace in Paris, by French President Francois Hollande, the King’s Cabinet said.

During this audience, the two heads of State voiced the shared determination of France and Morocco to fight terrorism and radicalization together and endeavor to settle regional and international crises. The President of the French Republic expressed his thanks to HM King Mohammed VI for the efficient assistance provided by Morocco following last Friday’s attack that killed 130 people.

Moroccan and French sources have told Reuters Rabat had given vital information that led to locating Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected Islamic State coordinator of the last week’s attacks, to a flat in the Parisian suburbs.

“The president thanked the King of Morocco for the efficient help given by Morocco following Friday’s attacks,” a French presidency statement said after the two met in Paris.

During the last French President Francois Hollande’s two-day visit to Morocco in September, France and Morocco signed a joint statement on cooperation in the training of imams at the Mohammed VI Institute, opened in Rabat in March.

The training will promote “an Islam with the right balance” that conforms to “values of openness and tolerance”.

As many as 50 French imams could attend the international institute each year for religious training.

“Through this cooperation between France and Morocco, UMF hopes to meet the immediate needs of training imams and chaplains, and prepare at the same time future teacher training institutions to be created on French territory,” said UMF head Mohammed Moussaoui in a statement.

A first class of 20 students from France joined the Institute at its inauguration in March, while 30 more are expected to begin this month, according to the UMF.

The average duration of the training is three years. On their return to France, students will enrol in additional academic training focused on the sociology of religion in France and the right of worship.

The religious impact of the Kingdom and its commitment to the precepts of moderate, open and tolerant Islam turned Morocco into a religious model widely solicited not only in Africa, but also in Europe.

Moroccan spiritual diplomacy has been very successful in West Africa due to the country’s historic Maliki School through Sufi channels and methods of reaching worshipers in the sub-Saharan region and West Africa. The Tijaniya sufi order widely operating in West Africa was founded in North Africa during the 18th century. Other Sufi orders – including the Qadiriyya and Chadiliya orders – soon followed, gaining large numbers of devotees who identified heavily with Morocco, where the tomb of Sheikh Ahmed Tijani, the founder of the Tijaniyyah order, is buried.

Sufism attracts more young Africans because of its tolerance, due to the easy interpretation that gives to the Qur’an, its rejection of fanaticism and its embrace of modernity. Young people are the principles of” beauty” and” humanity”. Sufism balanced lifestyle that allows them to enjoy arts, music and love without having to abandon their spiritual or religious obligations. Sufi orders exist throughout Morocco. They organize regular gatherings to pray, chant and debate timely topics of social and political, from the protection of the environment and social charity to the fight against drugs and the threat of terrorism.

In addition, focusing on the universal values ​​that Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism (as the pursuit of happiness, the love of the family, tolerance of racial and religious differences and the promotion of peace) Sufi gatherings inspire young people to engage in interfaith dialogue.

Sufism is so diffuse in Moroccan culture that its role cannot be properly understood if reduced to a sect or a sacred place. People get together to sing Sufi poetry, the primordial essence of the human being, the virtues of simplicity and the healing gifts of Sufi saints such as Sidi Abderrahman Majdub, Sidi Ahmed Tijani, and Sidi Bouabid Charki, the spiritual masters revered by peers and disciples for having attained spiritual union with God during their earthly lives.

In March 2015, King Mohammed VI inaugurated the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams, Morchidines, and Morchidates in the capital, Rabat. The religious training center that aims to instill the values of Morocco’s open, moderate form of Islam, based on the Maliki rite and Sunni Sufism, in the next generation of Muslim religious leaders (imams) and preachers (morchidines and morchidates) from across the region and the world.

The center is a key element in Morocco’s ongoing efforts to promote religious moderation and tolerance as a shield against extremism in the region. So it is no surprise if the Moroccan tolerant Islam is widely solicited.

Morocco owes its image of a modern Muslim nation to Sufism, a spiritual and tolerant Islamic tradition that goes back to the first generations of Muslims who, for centuries, has supported religious cohesion, social and cultural Moroccan society. Sufism provides answers to some of the most complex problems facing the contemporary Muslim world, where youth comprise the majority of the population.

Most Moroccans, young or old, practice one form of Sufism or another. Deep component of the Moroccan identity, Sufism absorbs all members of society, regardless of their age, sex, social status or political orientation.

In addition, focusing on the universal values ​​that Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism (as the pursuit of happiness, the love of the family, tolerance of racial and religious differences and the promotion of peace) Sufi gatherings inspire young people to engage in interfaith dialogue.Sufi orders exist throughout Morocco. They organize regular gatherings to pray, chant and debate timely topics of social and political, from the protection of the environment and social charity to the fight against drugs and the threat of terrorism.

Taken together, Sufi seminars, chants and spiritual gatherings provide a social medium where millions of Moroccans mix the sacred and the secular, the soul and the body, the local and the universal. Every aspect that is both possible and enjoyable.

Sufis distance themselves from fundamentalists (who see Islam strict and Utopian emulation of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions), with particular emphasis on the adaptation of community concerns and priorities of the modern time. Sufis neither condemn unveiled women nor do they censor the distractions of our time. For them, the difference between virtue and vice is the intent, not appearances.

Sufism is so diffuse in Moroccan culture that its role can not be properly understood if reduced to a sect or a sacred place. People get together to sing Sufi poetry, the primordial essence of the human being, the virtues of simplicity and the healing gifts of Sufi saints such as Sidi Abderrahman Majdub, Sidi Ahmed Tijani, and Sidi Bouabid Charki, the spiritual masters revered by peers and disciples for having attained spiritual union with God during their earthly lives..

It is this fusion of Sufism and modernity that produces a unique aesthetic experience, which is attractive to Moroccan youth who reject extremism and uphold values ​​of a shared humanity.

It is not a secret that terrorism has had a negative impact in our society, especially in recent times. Ever since the terrorist attacks of September 11th took place, humanity has witnessed numerous of awful terrorist attacks that had never taken place before. It is definitely an issue that has gone overboard. Thankfully, countries such as Morocco and France are uniting in order to combat this matter much more efficiently. France and Morocco are two countries that have decided to vow to fight terrorism together. Morocco’s intelligence services have proved their efficiency on many occasions. They have foiled several attacks and dismantled several terrorist cells at home and helped many friendly countries to thwart terror plots.

South African Airways (SAA) Chief Commercial Officer, Sylvain Bosc, has been suspended, the national carrier announced on Friday.

“SAA has taken a decision to suspend its Chief Commercial Officer, Mr Sylvain Bosc, pursuant to a forensic investigation by ENSafrica into various allegations that were received through the Deloittes Tip Offs hotline,” SAA spokesperson Tlali Tlali said.

Tlali said a forensic investigation confirmed that there is substance to a tip-off allegation which suggested that Sylvain allegedly doctored the numbers for Abu Dhabi to favour the opening of this route and sold SAA out.

“He knowingly misrepresented the board by overestimating the figures without substantiation and ignored network specialist advice.”

The investigation confirmed that Bosc had approved a business case which he had input into and was approved by him that was presented to the SAA board of directors for approval to open a route between Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi.

This new route would then be used as a gateway to the far east for SAA passengers into China and India. It would operate at a substantial profit, as the current routes into those destinations were causing losses to SAA in excess of R400 million per annum, said SAA.

SAA has had a Code Share Agreement with Etihad Airlines, which commenced in the 2013/2014 financial year, and is still in operation, which indicated that the passenger fares generated from this route are substantially lower than estimates put forward to the board and the Minister in a Section 54 Public Finance Management Act (PMFA) application by Bosc.

A former SAA International Network Planner apparently warned Bosc that the exaggerated fare price that he had used in the calculation, would not be achieved, and that this would cause further losses to SAA.

“Mr Bosch elected to ignore that advice, which subsequently was proven to be correct and the selection of the Abu Dhabi Network resulted in substantial continuous losses to SAA.

“The submission to the board by Bosc amounted to an overestimation of the projected revenue figures and ignored network specialist advice who had advised that the Abu Dhabi route would run at a substantial loss,” explained Tlali.

Based on the non-disclosure of these risks to the board of directors of SAA, and subsequently to the Minister of Finance in the Section 54 application, a business case that was substantially flawed and caused losses to SAA was approved.

U.S. Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) led a bipartisan group of Senators this week on a letter urging the U.S. Department of Justice to protect craft brewers across America from potentially unfair and illegal trade practices on the part of larger beer companies. In the letter, which was sent to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the senators express concern about the possibility of larger beer companies pressuring beer distributers to favor their products, creating an unfair advantage for beer giants and limiting the ability of consumer to find craft brewers’ products in the stores, bars and restaurants where they shop.

“The past decade has seen a dramatic change in the American beer industry, which was long dominated by a small number of products from large brewers such as AB InBev and SABMiller. Craft beer now drives expansion of domestic beer sales.  Small and independent craft breweries exist in all 50 states and the District of Columbia,” the Senators wrote in their letter. “As members with robust craft brewing industries in our states, we ask that you take the necessary steps to ensure that AB InBev’s purchase of SABMiller does not allow the new combined company to squeeze out America’s craft brewing industry, stifle innovation, further constrain beer distribution to U.S. retailers, or create further barriers to entry. Large multinational brewers should not be allowed to use their market power to limit consumer choice and access to small innovative breweries. Put simply, we believe craft brewers must be able to conduct their business without being denied access to necessary raw materials and distribution companies.”

The Senators particularly expressed concern about the potential for anti-competitive distribution practices to grow as the largest beer companies get even larger through mergers. On October 16, 2015, AB InBev’s, the world’s largest beer conglomerate, announced its intention to purchase SABMiller, the second-largest. The Senators raise concerns that AB InBev may try to use the acquisition to increase its already dominant market position, possibly by constraining distribution channels in order to crowd out smaller beer companies. Some reports have already suggested that the company uses its large market share to put pressure on distributors to favor AB InBev products, which could potentially be deemed an exclusionary and illegal practice.

The Senators also highlight the dramatic growth of small and independent craft breweries, noting that since 2011, the number of craft breweries in America has more than doubled from 1,776 to 3,739. Small and independent craft brewers contribute some $55.7 billion to the U.S. economy and support more than 424,000 jobs.

The letter was also signed by Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.).

The full text is below:

The Honorable Loretta E. Lynch
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Lynch:

We write because our offices have been made aware of potentially unfair and illegal trade practices that may harm the ability of craft brewers in our states to compete on a fair and level playing field with large brewers.  We are particularly concerned about large commercial beer companies attempting to gain market share by either purchasing distributors or pressuring independent distributors to favor their products.  We understand the Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating some of these practices and we want to express our support for that investigation.  We also hope the Department keeps these concerns in mind as the Antitrust Division reviews AB InBev’s purchase of SABMiller.

The past decade has seen a dramatic change in the American beer industry, which was long dominated by a small number of products from large brewers such as AB InBev and SABMiller. Craft beer now drives expansion of domestic beer sales. Small and independent craft breweries exist in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.  They have expanded at a staggering rate: since 2011, the number of craft breweries has more than doubled, going from 1,776 to 3,739.  Small and independent craft brewers contribute some $55.7 billion to the U.S. economy and support more than 424,000 jobs.

Large brewers have taken notice and have taken actions that we believe may amount to exclusive dealing and other violations of antitrust law. For instance, while many craft brewers lawfully and successfully distribute beer in their local markets, the recent purchases of craft breweries and distributors by AB InBev suggests a dangerous plan to constrain distribution channels to the detriment of its competitors.  Because of consolidation by distributors, there are now far fewer distribution channels for craft brewers.  The purchase by AB InBev of one of the two distributors that deliver the vast majority of beer in a given territory effectively either forces other brewers out of that distribution channel or places those that stay in the uncomfortable situation of being distributed by their largest competitor.  Reports also suggest that, in markets where two independent full-service distributors exist, AB InBev puts pressure on the distributors to favor AB InBev products—a practice that could well be deemed exclusionary and illegal.

Given these concerns, AB InBev’s October 16 announcement of its intention to purchase SABMiller should raise significant red flags.  As members with robust craft brewing industries in our states, we ask that you take the necessary steps to ensure that AB InBev’s purchase of SABMiller does not allow the new combined company to squeeze out America’s craft brewing industry, stifle innovation, further constrain beer distribution to U.S. retailers, or create further barriers to entry.

While AB InBev announced plans to divest itself of SABMiller’s U.S. assets as part of such a transaction, DOJ should vigorously scrutinize the acquisition and any divestiture plan to ensure that AB InBev does not increase its already-dominant market position through the transaction.  Moreover, even if the transaction does not result in an increase in AB InBev’s market share in the U.S., DOJ should carefully consider how global consolidation could impact the market for hops, barley, wheat, bottles, cans and other supplies needed by craft brewers.  In addition, we hope DOJ will probe how each of these companies has acted with regard to distributors and investigate whether distributors owned by these companies also need to be divested.

Large multinational brewers should not be allowed to use their market power to limit consumer choice and access to small innovative breweries.  Put simply, we believe craft brewers must be able to conduct their business without being denied access to necessary raw materials and distribution companies.

We appreciate your prompt attention to our letter and urge the Department to appropriately vet the AB InBev purchase of SABMiller and ensure that we maintain a market that does not disproportionately harm beer consumers and the craft brewing industry. We hope you will continue investigating our concerns and conduct additional outreach with craft brewers to gather evidence from their experiences.  We look forward to hearing your findings.

Reconciliation is a process where former adversaries in a conflict or war come together and forge new relations after the conflict has been ended. Sri Lanka’s ethnic war was terminated by military means in 2009. The Western world, including the United States of America, was involved in the conflict as well as the peace process.

However, when the government headed by Mahinda Rajapaksa decided to mount an all-out attack on the LTTE to finish it off, most of the Western states either tacitly supported the war efforts or remained silent. They preferred termination of the rebels. Such an attitude, they believed, would facilitate resolution of the ethnic conflict and also would help them to remain relevant in Sri Lanka. Both did not happen as Rajapaksa government refused to address political concerns of the Tamils and leaned drastically towards a block consisting of China, Russia and Iran.

Resolutions

Consequently, sponsored by some of the leading Western states, a series of resolutions were adopted in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) since 2012. The resolutions essentially, demanded a credible investigation, preferably an international one, into allegations of violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws. The Western states that supported these resolutions maintain that a mechanism to investigate alleged violations was recommended, only to promote “reconciliation and accountability” in Sri Lanka. These states are fervently focused on the investigative mechanism and believe that a credible investigation will bring reconciliation to this divided society. Since, they do not have other proposals or projects for reconciliation, one has to assume that these states believe that an investigation leading to prosecution alone would facilitate reconciliation. This is exactly why the push for an investigation as a sole means to reconciliation could be illustrated as a flawed approach.
Investigation

The West has been investing on an impossible or a highly unlikely project. There is absolutely no possibility for an international investigation in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala majority community, which has the capacity to make and unmake governments believes that suggestions for an international investigation are conspiracies of the West, undertaken on behalf of the Tamil Diaspora or the “Eelamists” against the people of Sri Lanka. Therefore, they would resist an international investigation at any cost and there has been a general consensus about this within the community. The previous government headed by Rajapaksa, obviously, was openly opposed to this idea. Even the present government would not dare entertain this proposal. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was unseated in 2004 primarily because the peace process he spearheaded was seen as anti-national.

With the coming to power of the present government this year, the U.S and its allies in the UNHRC have watered down their demand and now talk about a domestic mechanism with international assistance. At this point in time, a domestic mechanism seems feasible if the West can persist beyond November 2016. However, a domestic mechanism that would lead to prosecution of perpetrators of human rights violations seems remote. The Sinhala community would not allow the prosecution of their heroes including political figures who provided leadership to the war efforts. Therefore, the proposed mechanism is unlikely to deliver justice.

The investigative mechanism has also been conceived as an instrument of truth. The proposed investigative mechanism is expected to serve as a South African style truth commission. Theoretically, there is no concrete evidence to suggest that truth would lead to reconciliation. The South African experience indicates mixed results. Not every victim was ready to forgive after listening to narratives of violence perpetrated. In Sri Lanka, knowing the “truth” most probably would exacerbate ethnic divisions because some of the worst atrocities have been committed against all ethnic communities. Therefore, if properly implemented the proposed mechanism could serve as a tool for justice, but not as a mechanism for reconciliation. The Tamil attitude towards the proposed investigation could reinforce this argument.

Tamil Attitude

Despite the overwhelming resistance from the Sinhala community, the Sri Lankan Tamils have been pushing for the (international) investigation. Meanwhile, the Tamils, in the last six years have demonstrated almost zero interest in reconciliation. Their political leadership has not undertaken any serious actions to promote reconciliation. Then, why are they backing the idea of an international investigation? Obviously, they view it as an opportunity to punish members of the armed forces and policy makers who were involved in the last phase of the war. They would not be keen on the investigation if they believe that the proposed mechanism will promote reconciliation.

Conflict Resolution

The fundamental reason why the present Western approach to reconciliation in Sri Lanka is flawed is that it treats the present situation in the country as post-conflict; not as post-war. However, the reality is that the problem of violence has been terminated while the socio-political issues that have paved the way for the conflict remain the same. For example, the Tamils started to fight demanding regional autonomy. The problem of devolution of power always remained the cornerstone of the conflict. This issue has not been adequately addressed so far. The Sinhala fear and suspicions of the Tamils also remain intact. The question is, can ethnic groups reconcile and forge new relations when their basic problems remain unresolved? The answer is a firm no. Therefore, any meaningful project for reconciliation in Sri Lanka should primarily deal with socio-political problems that led to the conflict. Truth commissions and investigations should be introduced as supplementary mechanisms, because they alone will not promote reconciliation; not only in Sri Lanka, but anywhere else in the world.

A call for any memorial event following the Paris attacks to be ‘more sensitively handled’ than the official response to the 2005 London bombings has been made by a University of Leicester researcher.

According to Dr Matthew Allen, “Precisely how the attacks are remembered in society and how organisations compel people to remember is an understated, and often neglected, aspect of the post-conflict response to the attacks.”

Dr Allen, Lecturer in Culture and Political Economy in the University’s School of Management, has carried out extensive studies into the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings.

“I am concerned primarily for the people who were most immediately affected by the attacks in Paris. It is these ordinary people who will now be looking to political leaders, public services and their communities for guidance and support in living with and working through their experiences of grief, trauma and loss,” Allen said, adding that, “A rush to commemorate the attacks will be distressing for survivors and bereaved relatives. My hope is that the memorial response to the Paris attacks can be more sensitively managed than the response to 7/7.”

Dr Allen said issues that arose following the London bombings included: The first remembrance service was poorly coordinated with survivors and relatives recalling that it was ‘too soon’ after the attack; The seating plan was seen by some to be divisive with injured survivors feeling they were ‘pushed to one side’; The centrality of political and religious leaders at the memorial service was commented upon as ‘distasteful’; Government support for the independent remembrance practices was inconsistent.

Nevertheless, Dr Allen noted that the first-year anniversary service was more satisfying. The seating plan was inverted, the central role of elite figures was lessened and participants were able to make their own gestures of remembrance by laying flowers in a “specially designed area”.

Dr Allen said the issue of compensation for the victims and survivors was also a highly controversial subject and, in the case of the London bombings had garnered much media attention. A government report stated that survivors found the compensation process bureaucratic, slow and distressing.

“At the time of the bombings, the process involved submitting a standard form with police and medical reports, the Authority then determines the sum paid according to a table of compensation awards,” Dr Allen said. “The problem with this bureaucratic process is that grief and trauma are deeply subjective experiences. In contrast the compensation process involved distressingly objectifying tools for thinking about, remembering and communicating a painful relationship to the past.”

“The impersonal compensation framework offered nothing that was meaningful to help bereaved relatives and survivors make sense of the newly unfolding identities.”

Dr Allen said against the backdrop of the national politics there are personal struggles for life to become liveable again, and the memorial response to the attacks is an important part of those struggles.

“Survivors and bereaved relatives should be supported by government in pursuing their own independent and informal memorial practices,” he said.

An international team of physicists has published ground-breaking research on the decay of subatomic particles called kaons – which could change how scientists understand the formation of the universe.

Professor Christopher Sachrajda, from the Southampton Theory Astrophysics and Gravity Research Centre at the University of Southampton, has helped to devise the first calculation of how the behavior of kaons differs when matter is swapped out for antimatter, known as direct “CP” symmetry violation.

Should the calculation not match experimental results, it would be conclusive evidence of new, unknown phenomena that lie outside of the Standard Model-physicists’ present understanding of the fundamental particles and the forces between them.

The current result, reported in Physical Review Letters, does not yet indicate such a difference between experiment and theory, but scientists expect the precision of the calculation to improve dramatically now that they’ve proven they can tackle the task.

The target of the present calculation is a phenomenon that is particularly elusive: a one-part-in-a-million difference between the matter and antimatter decay strengths. The calculation determines the size of the symmetry violating effect as predicted by the Standard Model.

Professor Sachrajda, said: “It is particularly important to compare Standard Model predictions for tiny subtle effects, such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry in kaon decays, with experimental measurements. The small size of the effects increases the chance that new, as yet not understood, phenomena may be uncovered in such a comparison. This motivates our quest for ever more precise theoretical predictions, a quest being made possible by new theoretical developments as well as access to more powerful supercomputers.”

Results from the first, less difficult, part of this calculation were reported by the same group in 2012 and was the subject of the theses by two Southampton PhD research students, Drs Elaine Goode and Tadeusz Janowski. However, it is only now, with completion of the second part of this calculation-which required more than 200 million core processing hours on supercomputers -that a comparison with the measured size of direct CP violation can be made.

Physicists’ present understanding of the universe requires that particles and their antiparticles (which are identical but have opposite charges) behave differently. Only with matter-antimatter asymmetry can they hope to explain why the universe, which was created with equal parts of matter and antimatter, is filled mostly with matter today.

The first experimental evidence for the matter-antimatter asymmetry, known as CP violation, was discovered in 1964 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States. This was built upon to a more accurate degree in 2000, to uncover direct CP violation – a tiny effect which only affects a few particle decays in a million. Although the Standard Model does successfully relate the matter-antimatter asymmetries, this is insufficient to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe today.

“This suggests that a new mechanism must be responsible for the preponderance of matter of which we are made,” said Christopher Kelly, a member of the team from the RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC). “This one-part-per-million, direct CP violation may be a good place to first see it. The approximate agreement between this new calculation and the 2000 experimental results suggests that we need to look harder, which is exactly what the team performing this calculation plans to do.”

The calculation was carried out on the Blue Gene/Q supercomputers at the RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC), at Brookhaven National Laboratory, at the Argonne Leadership Class Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, and at the DiRAC facility at the University of Edinburgh. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (HEP), by the RIKEN Laboratory of Japan, and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Stone tools, cooked animal and plant remains and fire pits found at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile provide greater interdisciplinary evidence that the earliest known Americans–a nomadic people adapted to a cold, ice-age environment–were established deep in South America more than 15,000 years ago. The research, led by Tom Dillehay, Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, appears in the Nov. 18 issue of PLOS ONE.

In 2013, at the request of Chile’s National Council of Monuments, Dillehay and an international team of archaeologists, geologists and botanists performed an archaeological and geological survey of Monte Verde to better define the depth and breadth of the site, which is protected by the Chilean government.

It’s familiar ground for Dillehay, who has worked there since 1977, and it’s there that Dillehay found evidence that fundamentally contributed to a new understanding of how and when humans first arrived in the Americas.

Until about 40 years ago, the prevailing understanding was that the Americas first began to be populated 13,000 years ago by big-game hunters from Asia who used a distinctive type of fluted stone projectile point called Clovis points. Dillehay’s work at Monte Verde, however, has yielded a wide variety of scientific evidence of a small human settlement using a different stone tool technology that predated the Clovis people by about 1,500 years at a site called MVII. He also uncovered possible, though not conclusive, evidence of a much earlier human presence at a nearby site called MVI. Subsequent excavations at sites in both North and South America have also yielded evidence supporting this earlier human migration through the Americas.

On this visit, Dillehay’s team explored key areas around MVI and MVII. Though it was not intended to be a comprehensive reexamination of the site, their findings did yield new insights. “We began to find what appeared to be small features–little heating pits, cooking pits associated with burned and unburned bone, and some stone tools scattered very widely across an area about 500 meters long by about 30 or 40 meters wide,” said Dillehay.

The stone tools discovered by the team were similar to what Dillehay had previously found at Monte Verde. Many were simple unifacial tools–meaning they were worked on only one side of the stone, to create a sharp edge–though some of the younger tools and projectile points indicate bifacial technologies. “One of the curious things about it that is that unlike what we found before, a significant percentage, about 34 percent, were from non-local materials. Most of them probably come from the coast but some of them probably come from the Andes and maybe even the other side of the Andes,” said Dillehay. Prior research had revealed evidence of Andean plants in the area, providing further support for a highly mobile population.

Stones, bones, plants and fires

The team recovered a total of 39 stone objects and 12 small fire pits associated with bones and some edible plant remains, including nuts and grasses. The bones tended to be small fragments, broken and scorched, indicating that the animals had been cooked. They often came from very large animals, like prehistoric llamas or mastodons, as well as smaller creatures like prehistoric deer and horses. The Monte Verde site was unlikely to have been able to support the kind of vegetation that those animals needed to eat, so they were likely killed and butchered elsewhere. The objects were radiocarbon dated and most were found to range in age from more than 14,000 to almost 19,000 years old.

The wide scattering suggests that the people who created these features were nomadic hunter-gatherers who might have camped for only a night or two before moving on. “Where they’re going, we don’t know, and where they’re coming from, we don’t know, but this would have been a passageway from the coast to the foothills of the Andes,” Dillehay said. Dillehay believes that they may have come through Monte Verde because the terrain was more walkable than the surrounding bogs and wetlands, and because it provided access to stone to make tools.

Rain, ice, soil and ash

A key goal during this visit was to better understand the geological and environmental context of the site. At the end of the last ice age, Monte Verde was a sandur plain–a runoff area situated about six kilometers away from a glacier, crisscrossed by a network of shallow streams and brooks fed by rain washing off the glacier, as well as melting snow. It was also a time marked by volcanic activity and a gradually warming climate, as the last glaciers began to retreat.

“It appears that these people were there in the summer months,” Dillehay said. “Each one of these [burned] features and the bones and stones associated with them is embedded in thin, oxidized tephra”–a type of geological layer formed by airborne ash particles from nearby volcanoes that only form in rainy, warmer temperatures. But though the glaciers had begun to retreat by 19,000 to 17,000 years ago, it was still an extremely challenging environment, Dillehay said. “We’re looking at people living in some really cold, harsh areas, even in the summer months.” Only later, around 15,000 years ago, did the climate warm enough to support the kind of longer-term settlement found at MVII.

New questions

Put together, these findings support the paradigm shift toward an earlier peopling of the Americas, although questions inevitably remain about how the hemisphere was settled. It also underscores the importance of long-term interdisciplinary research. “We now realize that the geology and the climate and the archaeology are much more complex than we ever calculated,” said Dillehay.

A James Cook University scientist says a new study shows more than half of all tree species in the world’s most diverse forest — the Amazon — may be globally threatened.

Long-time Amazon researcher, Professor William Laurance from JCU, is a co-author of the study, published this week in the journal Science Advances.

It compared data from forest surveys across the Amazon with maps of current and projected deforestation to estimate how many tree species have been lost, and where.

Professor Laurance said the study suggests existing Amazonian parks and reserves, if properly managed, could protect many of the threatened species. But it was not a forgone conclusion.

“It’s a battle we’re going to see play out in our lifetimes,” he said. “Either we stand up and protect these critical parks and indigenous reserves, or deforestation will erode them until we see large-scale extinctions.”

The findings were announced by a research team comprising 158 researchers from 21 countries, led by Hans ter Steege of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands and Nigel Pitman of the Field Museum in Chicago, USA.

The authors say protected areas and indigenous territories now cover over half of the basin, and are likely to contain sizeable populations of most threatened species.

“This is good news from the Amazon that you don’t hear enough of,” said ter Steege.

“In recent decades Amazon countries have made major strides in expanding parks and strengthening indigenous land rights,” he said. “And our study shows this could have big benefits for biodiversity.”

However, the authors caution that Amazonian forests and reserves still face a barrage of threats, from dam construction to wildfires and droughts intensified by global warming.

Fifty-five terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda are awaiting execution in Saudi Arabia after they were found guilty of involvement in terrorist activities that claimed the lives of more than 100 citizens and residents, and 71 security men.

Since 2003, 124 terrorist attacks have taken place, claiming 100 lives and injuring 569 others.

Over 250 terror strikes have been thwarted across the Kingdom.

In confrontations with terrorists, 71 security men were killed and 407 wounded, with authorities killing 176 terrorists.

Coded, secret, encrypted technology is a boon for the privacy world. For security officials and government figures, it is perceived to be the enemy, the retarding effect against decent law enforcement, policing and general terrorist detection.

The fear on their part is ubiquity, encryption’s democratic tendency: Any one of us can download encryption programs and employ it in the context of communications. Telegram, one such platform, is supposedly being used by Islamic State, though it has been suggested by Dan Frookin at The Intercept that communications between the terror suspects behind the Paris attacks did not use encrypted technologies.

That fact has not deterred officialdom aggrieved that individuals, who seem to have been communicating in the clear light of day, managed to plan their attacks under the noses of some of the most supposedly sophisticated surveillance networks. Because they were not detected in time, they must have been undetectable all along, looming large in the dark.

Instead of learning from that school of hard knocks, the establishment reaction to the Paris attacks has been one that will have lawyers and civil liberty defenders mounting the soapbox in dismay. Law makers are wondering if encryption – its impenetrable use – was the problem to begin with. From Washington to Paris, legislators are now chewing over the issue that is, in reality, a non-issue in any democratic context: Do we undermine encryption altogether?

This mentality was already evident in the words of Robert Litt, legal denizen for the Officer of the Director of National Intelligence. Having taken a battering on the encryption front from those tedious defenders of liberty, he expressed views in a September email that he, and his frustrated colleagues, were facing a “legislative environment” which was “very hostile”. That said, “it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or a criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”

The point missed here is that banning such technology will be akin to putting cooking knives away because they can be used to cut up the neighbour. Mechanisms, not in themselves moral or otherwise, will always be put to some nefarious use.

Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc. of Cupertino, California, made the salient if trite observation back in August 2003 (Computer News) that, “Infrastructure is used by good guys and bad guys. There are so many more good guys than bad and we’re better off with the infrastructure than without it.”

The sentiment against solid encryption means that intelligence agencies are not doing what they had previously done: cultivate local contacts, establish trails, create networks of contacts.

More government access means total access; nudging the argument in favour of snooping loses the basis for viable privacy. It means that data get easier to pilfer, making commercial pillage in the digital world irresistible. Companies such as Apple and Google, who have provided consumers the means to encrypt their data on iPhones and Android phones, will provide resistance, concerned that they will lose their patrons. US companies are under enough pressure as it is about how reliable their means of holding information on consumers is.

Then come those activists who, working in dangerous environments, utilise such encryption in their communications to harry governments, or at the very least exist under them with some modicum of safety. The reasons behind Philip Zimmermann’s creation of Pretty Good Privacy, a public key encryption scheme for email, was the offspring of peace activism.

Human Rights Watch, in a news release on June 17 this year, also emphasised that governments should encourage “the use of strong encryption and protect anonymous expression online. In an era of unprecedentedly broad and intrusive government surveillance, these tools often offer the only safe way for people in repressive environments to express themselves freely.” In this regard, supposedly free world defenders align themselves with the police state philosophers, mistrusting activists as potential lawbreakers and terrorists.

The CIA Director, John Brennan, has been undertaking his own crusade against the encryption defenders. Before the Centre for Strategic International Studies, he claimed that, “There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult, both technically as well as legally, for intelligence security services to have the insight they need to uncover it.”

What Brennan fails to mention is that the National Security Agency has, for years, attempted to undermine end-to-end encryption, encouraging inferior technologies, tapping into existing ones, and encouraging friendly intelligence agencies to do the same. It has discouraged human agency on its own part over technological usage on the part of everybody else. Sloth has replaced incentive.

FBI Director James Comey and New York City Police commissioner Bill Bratton have also made similar points, with the latter claiming that, “We’re seeing it everyday where we are losing the ability to gather intelligence.” Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) has decided to bite the bullet on that score and suggest the availability of back door access. “It’s time we had another key that would be kept safe and only revealed by means of a court order.”

The final point here is one of possibility. You cannot stop encryption, notably commercial encryption. You can retard technologies to your disadvantage, implementing local bans, and inhibiting the take up at a domestic level. (At best, this would only succeed in a very limited way.) The result is the advantaging of others. The great dilemma lies there, and the security conscious communities might end up rendering themselves unconscious in this enterprise.

“We are afraid that they will close the border now. But we don’t fear terror much anymore. Every village in Syria is worse than Paris… we don’t have much to lose,” a 17-year-old Syrian called Mossa told BIRN in Belgrade.

Mossa said that he and several of his friends were heading for the Croatian border and hoped to reach Western Europe from there.

But many of the refugees fear that their route to the EU will be blocked in the wake of the Paris attacks on November 13.

Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia this week decided to close their borders to so-called economic refugees.

From November 19, only refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq will be treated as legal migrants.

Those coming from Sri Lanka, Sudan, Morocco, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Pakistan cannot cross state borders anymore since these countries are not officially in war.

Previously, on November 17, French police called for witnesses to identify the attacker who blew himself up near the Stade de France stadium on Friday in attacks that killed 129 people. A Syrian passport was found under the name of Ahmad al-Mohammad near his body but it has not been confirmed whether the passport is genuine.

Police officers in the Balkans confirmed that the man pictured on the Syrian passport passed along the Balkan refugee “route” running through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia.

Right-wing politicians all over the EU have since called for stricter border checks and for the scrapping of the passport-free Schengen agreement, saying that Islamic State militants were posing as refugees.

France has demanded stricter external controls on the EU’s border. A response to this request will be made at the EU ministerial meeting starting November 20.

Human rights NGOs say the EU must resist the urge to further seal its external borders, as this would result in human rights abuses while doing little to enhance security, or slow the influx of refugees.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, on November 17 said it was “nonsense” to blame refugees for the terror attacks in France, stressing that they could not be held collectively responsible for what had happened in Paris, Beirut and elsewhere.

Speaking in Serbia, Guterres urged European governments not to make any unilateral moves in response to the recent attacks but to find a united response.

“It is not the refugee outflows that cause terrorism, it is terrorism, tyranny and war that create refugees,” he said.

Sadam Ahmed, 19-year-old from Afghanistan, agreed that the Paris killings had caused new problems for refugees.

“We are in big trouble now… we are also coming from a war and now they want to send us back because of that,” he told BIRN.

Ahmed, who wants to go to Switzerland, said the EU needs to establish procedures to distinguish terrorists from ordinary refugees.

“They need to check people… take fingerprints… do whatever they need to do to separate us out because we are not terrorists… we just want to start a new life,” he said.

He said he was well acquainted with ISIS because they have a base in his home village of Pekha in the Achin district of Afghanistan.

“I lost my parents and two brothers and a sister. I don’t know where they are at the moment. ISIS soldiers have a headquarters in my village of Pekha and everybody fears them… we are also running away from them,” he said.

Ahmed reached Serbia through Turkey and Bulgaria and hoped to reach Switzerland through Croatia.

But the refugee route may become more complicated after the EU meeting on November 20, if countries on the route introduce additional border controls.

In total, EU member states have built more than 235 km of fences on the EU’s external borders at a cost of over €175 million.

This includes the 175 km fence along the Hungary-Serbia border, a 30 km fence along the Bulgaria-Turkey border, which is to be extended by a further 130 km and a 10.5 km fence in the Evros region along the Greece-Turkey border.

Macedonia has started to erect a fence on its southern border with Greece, currently the main entry point for refugees.

Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov said on November 15 that the fence would “not be aimed at closing the border”, but at controlling and limiting the flow.

If this occurs, however, refugees could end up trapped in Balkan states that cannot even cope with the refugee quotas agreed at the EU meeting held on October 25.

The European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, then agreed with leaders of Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria and Germany that 50,000 refugees would be accommodated in Greece and another 50,000 in Western Balkan states.

However, the current total capacities of the Balkan states do not exceed holding 10,000 refugees.

Although some informal refugee centres have opened at key points along the route, few of them can be adapted for winter conditions.

Macedonian authorities say they have a capacity to accept only some 2,000 refugees over a longer period.

The Macedonian Security Council said if more refugees stay for a longer time, the country could not guarantee their humane treatment.

“Macedonia will be forced to confront the challenge of a longer stay of uncontrolled number of migrants for which it has neither capacity nor possibility to offer humane treatment,” the council said on November 15.

Most refugees from the Middle East and Africa pass through through Serbia.

Since the beginning of the year, 436,000 have been registered in Serbia, the majority entering the country at the southern town of Preševo near the border with Macedonia.

Some 3,000 refugees can find temporary shelter on Serbian territory where they can receive medical services, use hygienic facilities and receive some food in order to continue their journey. But the five existing asylum centres can hold only about 1,200 permanently.

Ivan Gerginov, from the Serbian Commissariat for the Refugees, told BIRN that the situation could be better but Serbia was struggling with problems such as a lack of infrastructure and human resources.

After registration in Presevo, refuges move northwest towards Sid, on the border with Croatia, crossing into Croatia and then reaching other EU countries.

With snow and rain forecasted for the upcoming week, Croatia is trying to adapt its refugee centres to sub-zero temperatures.

Croatian police say the country’s only refugee centre that is ready for winter, in Slavonski Brod, can hold a maximum of 5,000 persons.

“Everything in the camp functions well for now. Compared to other camps in other countries like Serbia and Macedonia, this is one of the better camps in terms of conditions,” Tea Vidovic, from the Centre for Peace Studies, which is dealing with the refugee crisis, told BIRN.

“But these capacities are not enough to keep people over a longer period of time,” she added.

Croatia can permanently accommodate only 550 people.

“Croatia does not have a plan to increase its capacities as that would mean the greater engagement of authorities dealing with migrants, and our resources at the moment are limited,” Croatian police told BIRN.

A total of 369,440 refugees have entered Croatia since the beginning of the crisis, few of whom stay long in Croatia.

Balkan leaders hope the EU will pay to increase their capacities to deal with refugees but the amount of money that Brussels is willing to offer the Western Balkans is unknown.

Many human rights organisations working in the field have criticised the EU for failing to help the Balkan countries to tackle the refuge crisis in a proper manner.

NGOs warn that the current action plan, which seeks to prevent asylum seekers moving on from transit countries, and to make those countries responsible for processing their claims, could create human bottlenecks.

The NGO Human Rights Watch says the EU’s plan will trap refugees in countries that lack the capacity to receive and process them properly.

“Drowning at sea or freezing in a Balkan field can never be acceptable forms of border control,” Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said on November 16.

“European governments should expand safe and legal channels and ensure access to asylum and humane treatment at its borders and inside every single member state,” she added.

The rights organisation Amnesty International urges the EU to implement a series of achievable, realistic measures to respond to the global refugee crisis and ensure protection for the hundreds of thousands who have already arrived in mainland Europe.

“The global refugee crisis represents a huge challenge for the EU but it is far from an existential threat,” John Dalhuisen Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia, said.

“Managed, safe and legal routes into Europe would go a long way towards identifying security threats before they arrive,” he added.

“The EU needs to be responding not with fear and fences but in the best tradition of the values it purports to hold dear,” he concluded.

Marija Ristic, Sven Milekic, Natalia Zaba, Sasa Dragojlo and Sinisa Jakov Marusic contributed to this article.

A 1,111 carat “high quality diamond” has been discovered at a mine in Botswana, said to be the biggest find in more than a century, according to the mine company, AFP reports.

The gem, only second in size to the Cullinan diamond which was unearthered in South Africa in 1905, was mined by Lucara Diamond Corp.

“The magnificent stone, which originated from the south lobe of Lucara’s Karowe Mine, is the world second largest gem quality diamond ever recovered and largest ever to be recovered through a modern processing facility,” the Stockholm listed company said a statement.

Shares in Lucara shot up 34 percent to 14.2 kronor in morning Thursday trading in Stockholm.

Botswana is the world’s second biggest diamond producer, and Lucara said the gem was the largest ever to be recovered in the country.

“The significance of the recovery of a gem quality stone larger than 1,000 carats, the largest for more than a century….cannot be overstated,” said William Lamb, the President and chief executive of Lucara.

The stone is yet to be evaluated, but commodities and mining analyst Kieron Hodgson, said it has “the potential to be one very expensive diamond.”

“Valuation will depend on potential inclusions, how it would behave in cutting, optimal shape as well as final colour,” he told AFP.

“All these things will need to be evaluated prior to bidding.”

The biggest diamond discovered is the 3,106-carat Cullinan, found near Pretoria in South Africa in 1905.

It was cut to form the Great Star of Africa and the Lesser Star of Africa, which are set in the Crown Jewels of Britain.

Lucara indicated on its website that the Karowe Mine had also this week turned up further finds — an 813 carat stone and a 374 carat stone, prompting Lamb to laud “an amazing week” for the company.