Friday, September 30, 2011

Arab Debate Pits Islamists Against Themselves

 

Ali Sallabi, left, a Libyan, and Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, an Egyptian, say their states should blend Islam and modernity. 

By ANTHONY SHADID and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: September 29, 2011

CAIRO — By force of this year’s Arab revolts and revolutions, activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of a reckoning decades in the making: the prospect of achieving decisive power across the region has unleashed an unprecedented debate over the character of the emerging political orders they are helping to build.

Few question the coming electoral success of religious activists, but as they emerge from the shadows of a long, sometimes bloody struggle with authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments, they are confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies with very concrete needs.

In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the name “Islamist” to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.

A backlash has ensued, as well, as traditionalists have flirted with timeworn Islamist ideas like imposing interest-free banking and obligatory religious taxes and censoring irreligious discourse.

The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists, but rather among the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.

“That’s the struggle of the future,” said Azzam Tamimi, a scholar and the author of a biography of a Tunisian Islamist, Rachid Ghannouchi, whose party, Ennahda, is expected to dominate elections next month to choose an assembly to draft a constitution. “The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout public. It’s going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.”

The moment is as dramatic as any in recent decades in the Arab world, as autocracies crumble and suddenly vibrant parties begin building a new order, starting with elections in Tunisia in October, then Egypt in November. Though the region has witnessed examples of ventures by Islamists into politics, elections in Egypt and Tunisia, attempts in Libya to build a state almost from scratch and the shaping of an alternative to Syria’s dictatorship are their most forceful entry yet into the region’s still embryonic body politic.

“It is a turning point,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar on Islamic law and politics at the University of Notre Dame who was in Cairo.

At the center of the debates is a new breed of politician who has risen from an Islamist milieu but accepts an essentially secular state, a current that some scholars have already taken to identifying as “post Islamist.” Its foremost exemplars are Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey, whose intellectuals speak of a shared experience and a common heritage with some of the younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and with the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. Like Turkey, Tunisia faced decades of a state-enforced secularism that never completely reconciled itself with a conservative population.

“They feel at home with each other,” said Cengiz Candar, an Arabic-speaking Turkish columnist. “It’s similar terms of reference, and they can easily communicate with them.”

Mr. Ghannouchi, the Tunisian Islamist, has suggested a common ambition, proposing what some say Mr. Erdogan’s party has managed to achieve: a prosperous, democratic Muslim state, led by a party that is deeply religious but operates within a system that is supposed to protect liberties. (That is the notion, at least — Mr. Erdogan’s critics accuse him of a pronounced streak of authoritarianism.)

“If the Islamic spectrum goes from Bin Laden to Erdogan, which of them is Islam?” Mr. Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate with a secular critic. “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models, models that combine Islam and modernity?”

The notion of an Arab post-Islamism is not confined to Tunisia. In Libya, Ali Sallabi, the most important Islamist political leader, cites Mr. Ghannouchi as a major influence. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who is running for president in Egypt, has joined several new breakaway political parties in arguing that the state should avoid interpreting or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious taxes or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion.

A party formed by three leaders of the Brotherhood’s youth wing says that while Egypt shares a common Arab and Islamic culture with the region, its emerging political system should ensure protections of individual freedoms as robust as the West’s. In an interview, one of them, Islam Lotfy, argued that the strictly religious kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the Koran is ostensibly the constitution, was less Islamist than Turkey. “It is not Islamist; it is dictatorship,” said Mr. Lotfy, who was recently expelled from the Brotherhood for starting the new party.

Egypt’s Center Party, a group that struggled for 16 years to win a license from the ousted government, may go furthest here in elaborating the notion of post-Islamism. Its founder, Abul-Ela Madi, has long sought to mediate between religious and liberal forces, even coming up with a set of shared principles last month. Like the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, he disavows the term “Islamist,” and like other progressive Islamic activists, he describes his group as Egypt’s closest equivalent of Mr. Erdogan’s party.

“We’re neither secular nor Islamist,” he said. “We’re in between.”

It is often heard in Turkey that the country’s political system, until recently dominated by the military, moderated Islamic currents there. Mr. Lotfy said he hoped that Egyptian Islamists would undergo a similar, election-driven evolution, though activists themselves cautioned against drawing too close a comparison. “They went to the streets and they learned that the public was not just worried about the hijab” — the veil — “but about corruption,” he said. “If every woman in Turkey wore the hijab, it would not be a great country. It takes economic development.”

Compared with the situation in Turkey, the stakes of the debates may be even higher in the Arab world, where divided and weak liberal currents pale before the organization and popularity of Islamic activists.

In Syria, debates still rage among activists over whether a civil or Islamic state should follow the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, if he falls. The emergence in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria of Salafists, the most inflexible currents in political Islam, is one of the most striking political developments in those societies. (“The Koran is our constitution,” goes one of their sayings.)

And the most powerful current in Egypt, still represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, has stubbornly resisted some of the changes in discourse.

When Mr. Erdogan expressed hope for “a secular state in Egypt,” meaning, he explained, a state equidistant from all faiths, Brotherhood leaders immediately lashed out, saying that Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey offered no model for either Egypt or its Islamists.

A Brotherhood spokesman, Mahmoud Ghozlan, accused Turkey of violating Islamic law by failing to criminalize adultery. “In the secularist system, this is accepted, and the laws protect the adulterer,” he said, “But in the Shariah law this is a crime.”

As recently as 2007, a prototype Brotherhood platform sought to bar women or Christians from serving as Egypt’s president and called for a panel of religious scholars to advise on the compliance of any legislation with Islamic law. The group has never disavowed the document. Its rhetoric of Islam’s long tolerance of minorities often sounds condescending to Egypt’s Christian minority, which wants to be afforded equal citizenship, not special protections. The Brotherhood’s new party has called for a special surtax on Muslims to enforce charitable giving.

Indeed, Mr. Tamimi, the scholar, argued that some mainstream groups like the Brotherhood, were feeling the tug of their increasingly assertive conservative constituencies, which still relentlessly call for censorship and interest-free banking.

“Is democracy the voice of the majority?” asked Mohammed Nadi, a 26-year-old student at a recent Salafist protest in Cairo. “We as Islamists are the majority. Why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities — the liberals and the secularists? That’s all I want to know.”

Anthony Shadid reported from Cairo, and Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli, Libya. Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.

Arab Debate Pits Islamists Against Themselves - NYTimes.com

Stop asking Germany to pay, and you might save the euro

Germany, Europe's richest country, should not accept responsibility for debts built up by Italy, Spain and Greece from long before the euro was established.

Helping hands: German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacts during the debate about the eurozone bailout fund at the German parliament in Berlin - Stop asking Germany to pay, and you may just save the euro

Helping hands: German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacts during the debate about the eurozone bailout fund at the German parliament in Berlin Photo: AP

By Andrew Lilico 8:09PM BST 29 Sep 2011

Yesterday, the German parliament backed the expansion of the eurozone bailout fund – the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) – voting to raise the lending capacity of the fund to 440 billion euros, up from 250 billion euros. If German parliamentarians had rejected the expansion, it would have thrown the eurozone authorities’ attempts to preserve the euro into disarray.

One concern in Berlin was that, despite assurances to the contrary, once this vote went through, it would be used to justify a further expansion or another form of “debt pooling” — that is to say, an arrangement under which the Germans, Finns, and other wealthier members of the eurozone shouldered the responsibility for the debts of Italy, Portugal and other high-debt members. That suspicion was not allayed by the fact that many in the financial markets seemed to share it. Indeed, the recovery in stock prices earlier this week has been attributed precisely to the belief that in the end, the Germans will agree to debt pooling.

Almost every scheme suggested recently for saving the euro — eurobonds, a leveraged two-trillion-euro EFSF, the European Central Bank guaranteeing to buy all the debts of Italy and Spain — is simply a variant on the same debt pooling theme. They are all just more or less complicated ways to make Germany, Finland etc responsible for the debts of Italy, Portugal etc. The Germans keep saying, “We’re not going to agree to debt pooling”, and everyone else — the markets, the European Commission, the G20, the Americans — keeps coming back with more and more fancy schemes for precisely this, as if the Germans might eventually give up and agree.

I don’t believe they will. I don’t believe they should. And I believe that if they did, it would probably bring about the swift demise of the euro. Debt pooling would not be the salvation of the euro; it would (at best) be a mechanism to achieve its orderly death. The Germans should not accept responsibility for debts built up by Italians over decades, from long before the euro was established. And if they were to do that, then all incentives for fiscal discipline in the eurozone would be gone. Germany’s credit rating would drop, and its own debts would become much more expensive to service. This route is foolish and impossible. That supposedly intelligent bureaucrats keep proposing essentially the same concept over and over and over again illustrates the policy vacuum in the eurozone.

There are three groups of crisis countries in the eurozone. First, the unsalvageable: Greece and Cyprus. Second, the countries with banking sector crises but not over-indebted governments: Ireland and Spain, and perhaps Belgium (though its government debt is rather high, also). Third, the low-growth, high-government-debt countries: Italy and Portugal.

 

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There must be different solutions for these three groups. Greece will default. I assume it will exit the euro, along with Cyprus. Ireland and Spain (and, to a lesser extent, Belgium) can resolve their issues fairly straightforwardly, by imposing losses on the bondholders of their banks. They do not, fundamentally, have significant sovereign debt problems.

Portugal and Italy are trickier. There can be no euro (or European Union) without Italy, so exit is not an option. Instead, Italian and Portuguese growth must be raised, so these countries can service their own debts. The way to do that is for the stronger eurozone members to send money every year, for decades, to the EU in Brussels, and the EU then to spend that money in Italy and Portugal, thereby raising their wealth just enough that they can service their own debts. This is not legally problematic, as it has already happened for decades under what are called the EU “structural funds”. All we need is a eurozone-only version of these structural funds.

Increased growth for the weaker members, not debt pooling, is the way to save the euro.

Stop asking Germany to pay, and you might save the euro - Telegraph

Friday, September 23, 2011

As the UN Debates Its Bid for Statehood, Palestine Disappears

 

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

ISRAELPALMAP

It’s the show that time and the world forgot. It’s called the Occupation and it’s now in its forty-fifth year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day. Diplomats shuttle back and forth from Washington and Brussels to Middle Eastern capitals; the Israeli-Turkish alliance ruptures amid bold declarations from the Turkish prime minister; crowds storm the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, while Israeli ambassadors flee the Egyptian capital and Amman, the Jordanian one; and of course, there’s the headliner, the show-stopper of the moment, the Palestinian Authority’s campaign for statehood in the United Nations, which will prompt an Obama administration veto in the Security Council.

But whatever the Turks, Egyptians or Americans do, whatever symbolic satisfaction the Palestinian Authority may get at the UN, there’s always the Occupation and there—take it from someone just back from a summer living in the West Bank—Israel isn’t losing. It’s winning the battle, at least the one that means the most to Palestinians and Israelis, the one for control over every square foot of ground. Inch by inch, meter by meter, Israel’s expansion project in the West Bank and Jerusalem is, in fact, gaining momentum, ensuring that the “nation” that the UN might grant membership will be each day a little smaller, a little less viable, a little less there.

How to Disappear a Land

On my many drives from West Bank city to West Bank city, from Ramallah to Jenin, Abu Dis to Jericho, Bethlehem to Hebron, I’d play a little game: Could I travel for an entire minute without seeing physical evidence of the occupation? Occasionally—say, when riding through a narrow passage between hills—it was possible. But not often. Nearly every panoramic vista, every turn in the highway revealed a Jewish settlement, an Israeli army checkpoint, a military watchtower, a looming concrete wall, a barbed-wire fence with signs announcing another restricted area, or a cluster of army jeeps stopping cars and inspecting young men for their documents.

The ill-fated Oslo “peace process” that emerged from the Oslo Accords of 1993 not only failed to prevent such expansion, it effectively sanctioned it. Since then, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank has nearly tripled to more than 300,000—and that figure doesn’t include the more than 200,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem.

The Oslo Accords, ratified by both the Palestinians and the Israelis, divided the West Bank into three zones—A, B and C. At the time, they were imagined by the Palestinian Authority as a temporary way station on the road to an independent state. They are, however, still in effect today. The de facto Israeli strategy has been and remains to give Palestinians relative freedom in Area A, around the West Bank’s cities, while locking down “Area C”—60 percent of the West Bank—for the use of the Jewish settlements and for what are called “restricted military areas.” (Area B is essentially a kind of grey zone between the other two.) From this strategy come the thousands of demolitions of “illegal” housing and the regular arrests of villagers who simply try to build improvements to their homes. Restrictions are strictly enforced and violations dealt with harshly.

When I visited the South Hebron Hills in late 2009, for example, villagers were not even allowed to smooth out a virtually impassable dirt road so that their children wouldn’t have to walk two to three miles to school every day. Na’im al-Adarah, from the village of At-Tuwani, paid the price for transporting those kids to the school “illegally.” A few weeks after my visit, he was arrested and his red Toyota pickup seized and destroyed by Israeli soldiers. He didn’t bother complaining to the Palestinian Authority—the same people now going to the UN to declare a Palestinian state—because they have no control over what happens in Area C.

The only time he’d seen a Palestinian official, al-Adarah told me, was when he and other villagers drove to Ramallah to bring one to the area. (The man from the Palestinian Authority refused to come on his own.) “He said this is the first time he knew that this land [in Area C] is ours. A minister like him is surprised that we have these areas? I told him, ‘How can a minister like you not know this? You’re the minister of local government!’ ”

“It was like he didn’t know what was happening in his own country,” added al-Adarah. “We’re forgotten, unfortunately.”

The Israeli strategy of control also explains, strategically speaking, the “need” for the network of checkpoints; the looming separation barrier (known to Israelis as the “security fence” and to Palestinians as the “apartheid wall”) that divides Israel from the West Bank (and sometimes West Bankers from each other); the repeated evictions of Palestinians from residential areas like Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem; the systematic revoking of Jerusalem IDs once held by thousands of Palestinians who were born in the Holy City; and the labyrinthine travel restrictions which keep so many Palestinians locked in their West Bank enclaves.

While Israel justifies most of these measures in terms of national security, it’s clear enough that the larger goal behind them is to incrementally take and hold ever more of the land. The separation barrier, for example, has put 10 percent of the West Bank’s land on the Israeli side—a case of “annexation in the guise of security,” according to the respected Israeli human rights group B’tselem.

Taken together, these measures amount to the solution that the Israeli government seeks, one revealed in a series of maps drawn up by Israeli politicians, cartographers and military men over recent years that show Palestine broken into isolated islands (often compared to South African apartheid-era “bantustans”) on only about 40 percent of the West Bank. At the outset of Oslo, Palestinians believed they had made a historic compromise, agreeing to a state on 22 percent of historic Palestine—that is, the West Bank and Gaza. The reality now is a kind of “10 percent solution,” a rump statelet without sovereignty, freedom of movement or control of its own land, air, or water. Palestinians cannot even drill a well to tap into the vast aquifer beneath their feet.

Living Amid Checkpoints, Roadblocks and Night Raids

Almost always overlooked in assessments of this ruinous “no-state solution” is the human toll it takes on the occupied. More than on any of my dozen previous journeys there, I came away from this trip to Palestine with a sense of the psychic damage the military occupation has inflicted on every Palestinian. None, no matter how warmhearted or resilient, escape its effects.

“The soldier pointed to my violin case. He said, ‘What’s that?’” 13-year-old Alá Shelaldeh, who lives in old Ramallah, told me. She is a student at Al Kamandjati (Arabic for “the violinist”), a music school in her neighborhood (which will be a focus of my next book). She was recalling a time three years earlier when a van she was in, full of young musicians, was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus. They were coming back from a concert. “I told him, ‘It’s a violin.’ He told me to get out of the van and show him.” Alá stepped onto the roadside, unzipped her case, and displayed the instrument for the soldier. “Play something,” he insisted. Alá played “Hilwadeen” (Beautiful Girl), the song made famous by the Lebanese star Fayrouz. It was a typical moment in Palestine, and one she has yet to, and may never, forget.

It is impossible, of course, to calculate the long-term emotional damage of such encounters on children and adults alike, including on the Israeli soldiers, who are not immune to their own actions.

Humiliation at checkpoints is a basic fact of West Bank Palestinian life. Everyone, even children, has his or her story to tell of helplessness, fear and rage while waiting for a teenaged soldier to decide whether or not they can pass. It has become so normal that some kids have no idea the rest of the world doesn’t live like this. “I thought the whole world was like us—they are occupied, they have soldiers,” remembered Alá’s older brother, Shehade, now 20.

At 15, he was invited to Italy. “It was a shock for me to see this life. You can go very, very far, and no checkpoint. You see the land very, very far, and no wall. I was so happy, and at the same time sad, you know? Because we don’t have this freedom in my country.”

At age 12, Shehade had seen his cousin shot dead by soldiers during the second intifada, which erupted in late 2001 after Israel’s then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon paid a provocative visit to holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. Clashes erupted as youths hurled stones at soldiers. Israeli troops responded with live fire, killing some 250 Palestinians (compared to twenty-nine Israeli deaths) in the first two months of the intifada. The next year, Palestinian factions launched waves of suicide bombings in Israel.

One day in 2002, Shehade recalled, with Ramallah again fully occupied by the Israeli army, the young cousins broke a military curfew in order to buy bread. A shot rang out near a corner market; Shehade watched his cousin fall. This summer Shehada showed me the gruesome pictures—blood flowing from a 12-year-old’s mouth and ears—taken moments after the shooting in 2002.

Nine years later, Ramallah, a supposedly sovereign enclave, is often considered an oasis in a desert of occupation. Its streets and markets are choked with shoppers and its many trendy restaurants rival fine European eateries. The vibrancy and upscale feel of many parts of the city give you a sense that—much as Palestinians are loathe to admit it—this, and not East Jerusalem, is the emerging Palestinian capital.

Many Ramallah streets are indeed lined with government ministries and foreign consulates. (Just don’t call them embassies!) But much of this apparent freedom and quasi-sovereignty is illusory. In the West Bank, travel without hard-to-get permits is often limited to narrow corridors of land, like the one between Ramallah and Nablus, where the Israeli military has, for now, abandoned its checkpoints and roadblocks. Even in Ramallah—part of the theoretically sovereign Area A—night incursions by Israeli soldiers are common.

“It was December 2009, the 16th I think, at 2:15, 2:30 in the morning,” recalled Celine Dagher, a French citizen of Lebanese descent. Her Palestinian husband, Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of Al Kamandjati, where both of them work, was then abroad. “I was awakened by a sound,” she told me. She emerged to find the front door of their flat jammed partway open and kept that way by a small security bar of the sort you find in hotel rooms.

Celine thought burglars were trying to break in and so yelled at them in Arabic to go away. Then she peered through the six-inch opening and spotted ten Israeli soldiers in the hallway. They told her to stand back, and within seconds had blown the door off its hinges. Entering the apartment, they pointed their automatic rifles at her. A Palestinian informant stood near them silently, a black woolen mask pulled over his face to ensure his anonymity.

The commander began to interrogate her. “My name, with whom I live, starting to ask me about the neighbors.” Celine flashed her French passport and pleaded with them not to wake up her six-month-old, Hussein, sleeping in the next room. “I was praying that he would just stay asleep.” She told the commander, “I just go from my house to my work, from work to my house.” She didn’t really know her neighbors, she said.

As it happened, the soldiers had blown off the door of the wrong flat. They would remove four more doors in the building that night, Celine recalled, before finding their suspect: her 17-year-old next-door neighbor. “They stood questioning him for maybe twenty minutes, and then they took him. And I think he’s still in jail. His father is already in jail.”

According to Israeli Prison Services statistics cited by B’tselem, more than 5,300 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons in July 2011. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, an estimated 650,000 to 700,000 Palestinians have reportedly been jailed by Israel. By one calculation, that represents 40 percent of the adult male Palestinian population. Almost no family has been untouched by the Israeli prison system.

Celine stared through the blinds at the street below, where some fifteen jeeps and other military vehicles were parked. Finally, they left with their lights out and so quietly that she couldn’t even hear their engines. When the flat was silent again, she couldn’t sleep. “I was very afraid.” A neighbor came upstairs to sit with her until the morning.

Stories like these—and they are legion—accumulate, creating the outlines of what could be called a culture of occupation. They give context to a remark by Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law school at Birzeit University near Ramallah: “I don’t remember a happy day since 1967,” he told me. Stunned, I asked him why specifically that was so. “Because,” he replied, “you can’t go to Jerusalem to pray. And it’s only fifteen kilometers away. And you have your memories there.”

He added, “Since 17 years I was unable to go to the sea. We are not allowed to go. And my daughter married five years ago and we were unable to do a marriage ceremony for her.” Israel would not grant a visa to Saleh’s Egyptian son-in-law so that he could enter the West Bank. “How to do a marriage without the groom?”

A Musical Intifada

An old schoolmate of mine and now a Middle East scholar living in Paris points out that Palestinians are not just victims but actors in their own narrative. In other words, he insists, they, too, bear responsibility for their circumstances—not all of this rests on the shoulders of the occupiers. True enough.

As an apt example, consider the morally and strategically bankrupt tactic of suicide bombings, carried out from 2001 to 2004 by several Palestinian factions as a response to Israeli attacks during the second intifada. That disastrous strategy gave cover to all manner of Israeli retaliation, including the building of the separation barrier. (The near-disappearance of the suicide attacks has been due far less to the wall—after all, it isn’t even finished yet—than to a decision on the part of all the Palestinian factions to reject the tactic itself.)

So, yes, Palestinians are also “actors” in creating their own circumstances, but Israel remains the sole regional nuclear power, the state with one of the strongest armies in the world and the occupying force—and that is the determining fact in the West Bank. Today, for some Palestinians living under the forty-four-year occupation simply remaining on the land is a kind of moral victory. This summer, I started hearing a new slogan: “Existence is resistance.” If you remain on the land, then the game isn’t over. And if you can bring attention to the occupation, while you remain in place, so much the better.

In June, Alá Shelaldeh, the 13-year-old violinist, brought her instrument to the wall at Qalandia, once a mere checkpoint separating Ramallah and Jerusalem, and now essentially an international border crossing with its mass of concrete, steel bars and gun turrets. The transformation of Qalandia—and its long, cage-like corridors and multiple seven-foot-high turnstiles through which only the lucky few with permits may cross to Jerusalem—is perhaps the most powerful symbol of Israel’s determination not to share the Holy City.

Alá and her fellow musicians in the Al Kamandjati Youth Orchestra came to play Mozart and Bizet in front of the Israeli soldiers, on the other side of Qalandia’s steel bars. Their purpose was to confront the occupation through music, essentially to assert: we’re here. The children and their teachers emerged from their bus, quickly set up their music stands and began to play. Within moments, the sound of Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major filled the terminal.

Palestinians stopped and stared. Smiles broke out. People came closer, pulling out cell phones and snapping photos, or just stood there, surrounding the youth orchestra, transfixed by this musical intifada. The musicians and soldiers were separated by a long row of blue horizontal bars. As the music played on, a grim barrier of confinement was momentarily transformed into a space of assertive joy. “It was,” Alá would say later, “the greatest concert of my life.”

As the Mozart symphony built—Allegro, Andante, Minuet and the Allegro last movement—some of the soldiers started to take notice. By the time the orchestra launched into Georges Bizet’s Dance Boheme from Carmen #2, several soldiers appeared, looking out through the bars. For the briefest of moments, it was hard to tell who was on the inside, looking out, and who was on the outside, looking in.

If existence is resistance, if children can confront their occupiers with a musical intifada, then there’s still space, in the year of the Arab Spring, for something unexpected and transformative to happen. After all, South African apartheid collapsed, and without a bloody revolution. The Berlin Wall fell quickly, completely, unexpectedly. And with China, India, Turkey and Brazil on the rise, the United States, its power waning, will not be able to remain Israel’s protector forever. Eventually, perhaps, the world will assert the obvious: the status quo is unacceptable.

For the moment, whatever happens in the coming weeks at the UN and in the West Bank in the aftermath, isn’t it time for the world’s focus to shift to what is actually happening on the ground? After all, it’s the occupation, stupid.

Sandy Tolan

September 22, 2011

As the UN Debates Its Bid for Statehood, Palestine Disappears | The Nation

Obama's UN Debacle

 Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss on September 22, 2011 - 11:00am ET

Barack Obama’s appearance at the United Nations was an unmitigated disaster.

Like a slow-motion train wreck, one that everyone knew was coming months ago, the president succumbed shamelessly to the domestic political pressure from the Israel lobby, its Republican party allies, and the menacing Benjamin Netanyahu, the thuggish prime minister of Israel. In one speech, Obama smashed to pieces every hopeful speech, false-start peace initiative and half-hearted initiative he’s tried since taking office. The appointment of George Mitchell as Middle East peace envoy? Dead. The June 2009, speech in Cairo aimed at rebuilding ties to the Arab and Muslim world? Dead. His feckless call for Israel to stop building illegal settlements on Palestinian land under occupation by Israel’s brutish army and a vast militia of armed, fanatical settlers? Dead. His weak-kneed call for a deal between Israel and Palestine based on the 1967 borders? Dead as a doornail.

It’s impossible to say, at this stage, how bad the damage will be. At the very least, the United States has ceded all leadership in the peace process. The impact in the Middle East will be enormous, not least among the Egyptian revolutionaries and other leaders of the Arab Spring who, already cynical and hostile to American policy on Israel, will now write off Washington completely, and turn to Europe, Russia and China. Saudi Arabia, whose former ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki, has been increasingly vocal in warning the United States that the Saudis will break with Washington, will step in to pick up the pieces now if the craven members of the US Congress cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority.

In his speech, in which Obama said nary a word about Palestinian suffering, nor a word about illegal Israeli expansion and settlements, he said this:

“Let us be honest with ourselves: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, look out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile and persecution, and fresh memories of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they are. Those are facts. They cannot be denied.”

Netanyahu, the boorish piece of muscle who runs Israel, called Obama’s speech a “badge of honor.” According to news reports, though, the entire UN General Assembly sat on its hands during Obama’s speech, not applauding once. Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president, watched glumly, his head in his hands.

Obama's UN Debacle | The Nation

Friday, September 16, 2011

In Europe, the impossible may become the inevitable

Anatole Kaletsky From: The Australian

September 16, 2011 12:00AM

euro coin greece

A Greek euro coin sits on a stack of euro coins in Athens. Source: Bloomberg

IF Germany's Bundesbank fails to get its way on European bailouts, the impossible may become the inevitable.

In financial crises, events can move from impossible to inevitable without ever passing through improbable.

This is something I have been repeating since the near-collapse of every leading bank in the world that began with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the third anniversary of which was yesterday.

The eye of the hurricane has moved to Europe, but its course is as unpredictable as ever:

Three outcomes face Europe.

One seems inevitable: continuing chaos.

One appears improbable, although it must be seriously considered: a break-up of the euro caused by government defaults and bank failures in Greece.

And one fantastical scenario is still generally deemed impossible: Germany's withdrawal from the eurozone.

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The basic contradiction between one currency and a multiplicity of divergent national economic policies is now universally accepted, and financial normality cannot return until it is resolved by turning the eurozone into a tighter fiscal and political union.

But such a huge leap cannot occur for at least 18 to 24 months. Two institutions are needed: a European finance ministry with veto authority over national tax and spending policies; and the legal instruments for issuing jointly guaranteed bonds.

The trouble is that this timetable is inconsistent with any hope of restoring financial stability, at least before the end of next year.

Financial markets work on a time scale of months and weeks, not years, and the timetable difference almost guarantees a continuing series of financial crises.

Political progress comes to a standstill whenever the mood of financial crisis subsides.

Which brings us to an outcome that remains fairly improbable, but must be taken very seriously. This is a break-up of the euro after the expulsion of its weakest members, starting with Greece.

If Greece were expelled, a break-up of the single currency would follow an almost inexorable logic. Suppose Greece transformed all its bank balances from euros into drachmas and devalued them by half overnight. Citizens of Portugal, the next weakest country, would immediately anticipate similar losses and shift all their savings to German or Swiss banks.

Portuguese banks would close their doors, and even the financial power of the European Central Bank might be insufficient to prevent bank runs spreading to Spain, Italy and France.

At that point, only the promise of the German government to do whatever it takes would stand in the way of a break-up of the euro.

But what if Germany's leading politicians and businessmen, currently still united in their pro-European instincts, were challenged by some other equally powerful German institution?

This brings me to the seemingly impossible scenario that could suddenly be inevitable.

It may turn out that the key to the euro's future will be Germany's voluntary withdrawal.

This fantastical idea could gain credibility for two reasons.

First, a German exit would be much less disruptive than a Greek expulsion, because it would not trigger bank runs in countries remaining within the single currency, all of which would automatically devalue against Germany at the same moment. If Germany left, The Netherlands and Austria would follow, but the other countries could remain in a French-led single currency that would be drastically devalued.

Second, and more importantly, deep splits over the euro have begun to emerge among the German political and financial elites. This mention of elites is deliberate because the German people have always been unhappy about the euro, but popular pressure alone would never be enough to break the integrationist instincts of the main political parties, especially when coupled with the interests of German exporters, for whom the euro has been a boon. In the past few weeks, however, a new power has appeared: the Bundesbank.

The most dangerous event of the summer for the euro was the resignation last Friday of the German appointee to the ECB council and the former vice-president of the Bundesbank, Jurgen Stark.

If the ECB has to engage in an even bigger support operation for Italy and Spain, Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann has suggested he would vote against, and if he were outvoted and resigned, it would be hard for the Bundesbank to remain on the ECB board. Given the faith in the Bundesbank, the seemingly impossible could become inevitable.

The Times

In Europe, the impossible may become the inevitable | The Australian

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Using rights to gag free speech

Mark Steyn From: The Australian

September 14, 2011 12:00AM

TO be honest, I didn't really think much about "freedom of speech" until I found myself the subject of three "hate speech" complaints in Canada in 2007.

I mean I was philosophically in favour of it, and I'd been consistently opposed to the Dominion's ghastly "human rights" commissions and their equivalents elsewhere my entire adult life, and from time to time when an especially choice example of politically correct enforcement came up I'd whack it around for a column or two.

But I don't think I really understood how advanced the Left's assault on this core Western liberty actually was. In 2008, shortly before my writing was put on trial for "flagrant Islamophobia" in British Columbia, several National Review readers e-mailed from the US to query what the big deal was. C'mon, lighten up, what could some "human rights" pseudo-court do? And I replied that the statutory penalty under the British Columbia "Human Rights" Code was that Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth. In theory, if a job opened up for dance critic or gardening correspondent, I could apply for it, although if the Royal Winnipeg Ballet decided to offer Jihad: The Ballet for its Christmas season I'd probably have to recuse myself.

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And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters.

Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse-and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of "racism" for some remarks about Islam's treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world. The Rev. Stephen Boissoin was convicted of the heinous crime of writing a homophobic letter to his local newspaper and was sentenced by Lori Andreachuk, Alberta's "human rights" commissar, to a lifetime prohibition on uttering anything "disparaging" about homosexuality ever again in sermons, in newspapers, on radio-or in private emails. Note that legal concept: not "illegal" or "hateful," but merely "disparaging."

Dale McAlpine, a practicing (wait for it) Christian, was handing out leaflets in the English town of Workington and chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a "public order" charge by Constable Adams, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community-outreach officer. Mr. McAlpine had been overheard by the officer to observe that homosexuality is a sin. "I'm gay," said Constable Adams. Well, it's still a sin, Mr McAlpine said. So Constable Adams arrested him for causing distress to Constable Adams.

In fairness, I should add that Mr McAlpine was also arrested for causing distress to members of the public more generally, and not just to the aggrieved gay copper. No member of the public actually complained, but, as Constable Adams pointed out, Mr McAlpine was talking "in a loud voice" that might theoretically have been "overheard by others." And we can't have that, can we? So he was fingerprinted, DNA-sampled, and tossed in the cells for seven hours.

In such a climate, time-honored national characteristics are easily extinguished. A generation ago, even Britain's polytechnic Trots and Marxists were sufficiently residually English to feel the industrial-scale snitching by family and friends that went on in Communist Eastern Europe was not quite cricket, old boy. Now England is Little Stasi-on-Avon, a land where, even if you're well out of earshot of the gay-outreach officer, an infelicitous remark in the presence of a co-worker or even co-playmate is more than sufficient.

Fourteen-year-old Codie Stott asked her teacher at Harrop Fold High School whether she could sit with another group to do her science project as in hers the other five pupils spoke Urdu and she didn't understand what they were saying. The teacher called the police, who took her to the station, photographed her, fingerprinted her, took DNA samples, removed her jewelry and shoelaces, put her in a cell for three and a half hours, and questioned her on suspicion of committing a Section Five "racial public-order offence." "An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark," declared the headmaster, Antony Edkins. The school would "not stand for racism in any form." In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said they took "hate crime" very seriously, and their treatment of Miss Stott was in line with "normal procedure."

Indeed it was. And that's the problem. When I ran into my troubles up north, a very few principled members of Canada's bien-pensants stood up to argue that the thought police were out of control and the law needed to be reined in. Among them was Keith Martin, a Liberal MP and himself a member of a visible minority-or, as he put it, a "brown guy." For his pains, he and a few other principled liberals were mocked by Warren Kinsella, a spin-doctor for the Liberal party and a chap who fancies himself Canada's James Carville. As Kinsella taunted these lonely defenders of freedom of speech, how did it feel to be on the same side as Steyn . . . and anti-Semites . . . and white supremacists? Eh, eh, how'd ya feel about that, eh?

Mr. Kinsella was subsequently forced to make a groveling apology to "the Chinese community" after making a joke about ordering the cat at his favourite Chinese restaurant in Ottawa: Even the most censorious of politically correct enforcers occasionally forget themselves and accidentally behave like normal human beings. But, before the Chinese cat got his tongue, the Liberal hack was, like so many of his ilk, missing the point: "Free speech" doesn't mean "the brown guy" is on the same side as the "white supremacists." It means he recognizes that the other fellow is entitled to have a side. By contrast, Canada's "human rights" commissions and Britain's gay-outreach officer and Europe's various public prosecutors seem to think there should be only one side of the debate, and they're ever more comfortable in arguing for that quite openly.

Thus, after Anders Breivik gunned down dozens of his fellow Norwegians, just about the only angle on the story that got the Western Left's juices going was the opportunity it afforded to narrow the parameters of public discourse even more. They gleefully fell on his 1500-page "manifesto," wherein he cites me, John Derbyshire, Bernard Lewis, Theodore Dalrymple, and various other names familiar round these parts. He also cites Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, and my leftie compatriot Naomi Klein, the "No Logo" gal and a columnist for The Nation in the US and the Guardian in Britain. Just for the record, my name appears four times, Miss Klein's appears four times.

Yet the British, Canadian, Australian, European, and American Lef t- and more than a few likeminded Americans - rose as one to demand restraints on a very narrow sliver of Anders Breivik's remarkably - what's the word? - diverse reading material.

"I cannot understand that you think that it is fine for people to go out and say we should kill all Muslims," sighed Tanya Plibersek, the Australian minister for human services, on a panel discussion, "and that that has no real effect in the world." Because, after all, calling for the killing of all Muslims is what I and Bernard Lewis and Theodore Dalrymple and Naomi Klein and Hans Christian Andersen do all day long.

She was addressing Brendan O'Neill, a beleaguered defender of free speech on a show where the host, the guests, the studio audience, and the post-broadcast tweeters were all lustily in favour of state regulation, and not of human acts but of opinions. And not just for inciters of Norwegian nutters, but for Rupert Murdoch, too. To one degree or another, they were also in favour of the government's taking action to whip the media into line. Into line with what? Well, with the government, presumably. Whether or not they'll get their way Down Under, in London the British state is being actively urged to regulate the content of the press for the first time in four centuries.

How did we get to this state of affairs? When my travails in Canada began, somebody reminded me of an observation by the American writer Heywood Broun: "Everybody favours free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground." I think that gets it exactly backwards. It was precisely at the moment when no axes were being ground that the West decided it could afford to forgo free speech. There was a moment 40 or so years ago when it appeared as if all the great questions had been settled: There would be no more Third Reichs, no more fascist regimes, no more anti-Semitism; advanced social democracies were heading inevitably down a one-way sunlit avenue into the peaceable kingdom of multiculturalism; and so it seemed to a certain mindset entirely reasonable to introduce speech codes and thought crimes essentially as a kind of mopping-up operation.

Canada's "human rights" tribunals were originally created to deal with employment and housing discrimination, but Canadians aren't terribly hateful and there wasn't a lot of that, so they advanced to prosecuting "hate speech." It was an illiberal notion harnessed supposedly in the cause of liberalism: A handful of neo-Nazi losers in rented rooms in basements are leaving Xeroxed white-supremacist flyers in payphones? Hey, relax, we'll hunt down the extremist fringe losers and ensure they'll trouble you no further. Just a few recalcitrant knuckledraggers who decline to get with the beat. Don't give 'em a thought. Nothing to see here, folks.

When you accept that the state has the right to criminalise Holocaust denial, you are conceding an awful lot. I don't just mean on the specific point: The Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia of "hate speech" laws. In the 15 years before the Nazis came to power, there were over 200 prosecutions for "anti-Semitic speech" in Germany - and a fat lot of good it did. But more important than the practical uselessness of such laws is the assumption you're making: You're accepting that the state, in ruling one opinion out of bounds, will be content to stop there.

As is now clear, it isn't. Restrictions on freedom of speech undermine the foundations of justice, including the bedrock principle: equality before the law. When it comes to free expression, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Europe are ever less lands of laws and instead lands of men-and women, straights and gays, Muslims and infidels-whose rights before the law vary according to which combination of these various identity groups they belong to.

Appearing at a Vancouver comedy club, Guy Earle found himself obliged to put down a couple of drunken hecklers. Had he said what he said to me or to Jonah Goldberg, we would have had no legal redress. Alas for him, he said it to two drunken hecklers of the lesbian persuasion, so they accused him of putting them down homophobically and he was fined $15,000. Had John O'Sullivan and Kathryn Lopez chanced to be strolling by the Driftwood Beach Bar on the Isle of Wight when, in the course of oldies night, Simon Ledger performed "Kung Fu Fighting," they would have had no grounds for complaint, even if he'd done the extended dance remix. However, the passersby in question were Chinese, and so Mr Ledger was arrested for racism.

In such a world, words have no agreed meaning. "There were funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown" is legal or illegal according to whosoever happens to hear it. Indeed, in my very favourite example of this kind of thinking, the very same words can be proof of two entirely different hate crimes. Iqbal Sacranie is a Muslim of such exemplary "moderation" he's been knighted by the Queen. The head of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal was interviewed on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was "immoral," was "not acceptable," "spreads disease," and "damaged the very foundations of society." A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard's "community safety unit" for "hate crimes" and "homophobia."

Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a "barmy doctrine" growing "like a canker" and deeply "homophobic." In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for "Islamophobia."

Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, Scotland Yard will investigate him for Islamophobia.

Two men say exactly the same thing and they're investigated for different hate crimes. On the other hand, they could have sung "Kung Fu Fighting" back and forth to each other all day long and it wouldn't have been a crime unless a couple of Chinese passersby walked in the room.

Andrew Bolt, one of Australia's leading columnists, wrote a couple of columns on the theme of identity-group opportunism. He's now been dragged into court and denounced as a "racist". But, if the law confers particular privileges on members of approved identity groups, I believe how we define the criteria for membership of those groups is surely a legitimate subject for public debate.

One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights-because the ultimate minority is the individual. The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to mediate the hierarchy of different victim groups. In a world of Islamophobic gays, homophobic Muslims, and white blacks, it is tempting to assume the whole racket will collapse under the weight of its own absurdity.

Instead, the law increasingly bends to those who mean it the most. In some of the oldest free societies in the world, the state is not mediating speech in order to assure social tranquility, but rather torturing logic and law and liberty in ever more inane ways in order to accommodate those who might be tempted to express their grievances in non-speechy ways. Consider the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife who has lived in several Muslim countries. She was hauled into an Austrian court for calling Mohammed a pedophile on the grounds that he consummated his marriage when his bride, Aisha, was nine years old. Mrs. Sabbaditsch-Wolff was found guilty and fined 480 euros. The judge's reasoning was fascinating: "Pedophilia is factually incorrect, since paedophilia is a sexual preference which solely or mainly is directed towards children. Nevertheless, it does not apply to Mohammad. He was still married to Aisha when she was 18."

Ah, gotcha. So, under Austrian law, you're not a pedophile if you deflower the kid in fourth grade but keep her around till high school. There's a useful tip if you're planning a hiking holiday in the Alps this fall. Or is this another of those dispensations that is not of universal application?

Western governments have gone far too far down this path already. "The lofty idea of 'the war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology," the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said in 2005. "And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence." Just so. Let us accept for the sake of argument that racism is bad, that homophobia is bad, that Islamophobia is bad, that offensive utterances are bad, that mean-spirited thoughts are bad. So what?

As bad as they are, the government's criminalizing all of them and setting up an enforcement regime in the interests of micro-regulating us into compliance is a thousand times worse. If that's the alternative, give me "Kung Fu Fighting" sung by Mohammed's nine-year-old bride while putting down two lesbian hecklers sending back the Cat of the Day in a Chinese restaurant.

As John Milton wrote in his Areopagitica of 1644, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Or as an ordinary Canadian citizen said to me, after I testified in defense of free speech to the Ontario parliament at Queen's Park, "Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights."

Conversely, if you let them take your right to free speech, how are you going to stop them from taking all the others?

Using rights to gag free speech | The Australian

Monday, September 12, 2011

Financial Crisis in Europe Is Flaring Again

By LIZ ALDERMAN and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Published: September 11, 2011

Fears about Europe’s deteriorating finances intensified on Sunday as new doubts about the health of French banks, as well as Germany’s willingness to help Greece avert default, left investors bracing for another global stock market downturn this week.

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In Greece, the epicenter of the Continent’s financial disarray, government officials announced new austerity measures on Sunday, even as the country’s finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, warned that the Greek economy was expected to shrink much more sharply this year than previously anticipated. In a revision, a contraction of 5.3 percent in 2011 was predicted, rather than the 3.8 percent forecast in May.

Slower growth could make it harder for Greece to pay its debts, even as it tries to reduce them by cutting government spending and raising taxes.

While the Greek drama has been running for more than a year, only recently has it threatened French and German banks, unnerving investors around the world and sending stocks tumbling in Europe and the United States.

More than anything else, political and business leaders want to avoid the phenomenon of contagion, in which fears in one country spread to others, causing severe stress throughout the financial system, as happened in the fall of 2008. To be sure, Europe could still draw away from the precipice. That is especially true if policy makers come up with a plan to keep Greece afloat while also preventing anxiety from infecting other countries like Spain and Italy, whose huge debts and weak economies have fed worries that their borrowing has become unsustainable.

On Sunday, French government officials braced for possible ratings downgrades by Moody’s Investors Service of France’s three largest banks, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole, whose shares were among the biggest losers last week. The biggest banks in Europe, especially in France, hold billions of euros’ worth of Greek bonds, and investors fear even a partial default by Greece would sharply diminish the value of those assets, eroding already weak capital positions.

American financial institutions, typically heavy lenders to their French counterparts, have begun to pull back on these loans, but United States banks’ exposure to France remains substantial.

Still, if the French banks are indeed downgraded, it would underscore how European officials have been unable to contain the effect of the financial crisis in Greece, despite two bailout packages totaling more than 200 billion euros ($272 billion).

Frustration elsewhere in Europe has been mounting over whether Greece is sticking with the austerity goals it agreed to follow in order to qualify for the aid, and German voters in particular are wary of more handouts.

Despite repeated pledges by Chancellor Angela Merkel to keep Europe together, the cacophony of dissent within Germany has been rising. That is creating fresh doubt — justified or not — about the nation’s commitment to the euro.

“The German electorate is not in the mind-set to undertake actions it sees as subsidizing less worthy nations,” said Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. “As a result, the government is moving in a very isolationist way to try to establish a fortress Germany that’s economically secure despite the risks in its European Union partners.”

On Friday, a stalwart German member of the European Central Bank, Jürgen Stark, abruptly resigned — news that would have barely merited more than a few lines in the financial pages just a few years ago. Today, it is considered a sign of frustration within Germany about the extraordinary measures being pursued to maintain stability in the euro zone, adding to the volatility in global financial markets.

“Mr. Stark’s departure could be seen by financial markets as another indication of growing disenchantment in Germany towards the euro,” Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays, wrote in a note to clients.

Last week, Mrs. Merkel’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, warned that Greece’s European Union partners would withhold new financial aid that is needed to help Athens pay its bills through Christmas unless the Greek government fulfilled the conditions of its first bailout.

All this has generated severe discomfort in Washington, which has watched the fallout from the European debt crisis with growing alarm.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has been in regular contact with his European counterparts, repeatedly advising them to speak with a single voice to help reduce confusion in financial markets. After a series of discussions on Friday at a meeting of the Group of 8 finance ministers in Marseille, he declared that “European officials fully understand the gravity of the situation there.”

Athens is expecting to receive the next allotment of 8 billion euros of aid from the 110 billion euro rescue package that Greece was awarded last year. That aid is to be supplemented by a second bailout of 109 billion euros that European leaders agreed to in July. But the second package is threatened by demands from a handful of euro zone countries, including Finland and the Netherlands, that Greece provide collateral to secure further loans.

Mr. Venizelos said the government would do everything needed to close the budget shortfall. “If we can prove wrong those who are betting on Greece to fail, we will see the crisis recede,” he said.

Among the measures Mr. Venizelos announced on Sunday was a temporary property tax, ranging from 50 cents to 10 euros a square meter, depending on the value of the property, which would be collected for two years. The levy will be added to electricity bills to thwart tax evasion.

Mr. Venizelos also warned that the government would make further cuts to public spending. In a largely symbolic move, the government said it would withhold a month’s pay from all elected officials.

“This is a battle for the country’s survival,” Prime Minister George A. Papandreou told a news conference in the northern port city of Salonika on Sunday. “These measures are the supplies we need to fight.”

Niki Kitsantonis and Ben Protess contributed reporting.

Financial Crisis in Europe Is Flaring Again - NYTimes.com

Cairo Israeli embassy attack: New realities for Israel-Egypt relations

Friday's attack on Israel's embassy in Cairo serves as a reminder that the bilateral relationship has changed for good since former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted months ago.

Egyptian soldiers stand guard outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Saturday, after an attack by protesters the night before. Ahmed Ali/AP

By Kristen Chick, Correspondent / September 11, 2011

Cairo

Israel’s ambassador and all but one of its diplomatic staff were evacuated from Egypt after a protest Friday at the Israeli embassy in Egypt turned violent, underscoring the new reality for Israel-Egypt relations after the Egyptian uprising.

Both nations said this weekend that they remained committed to the Camp David peace treaty and Egyptian authorities issued harsh statements vowing to punish those behind the violence. But the protest and its aftermath serves as a reminder that the relationship has changed for good with the Egyptian uprising that swept from power Israel’s longtime ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“Mubarak took away our dignity, and now the military council is following the same path,” says Ahmed, a protester who asked that his last name not be used. He was speaking of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) that is ruling Egypt until new elections. "We won’t allow Israel to humiliate us any longer, and now we have the power to change this ourselves,” he says.

IN PICTURES: Egyptian protests

Few expect Egypt to back away from its agreements with Israel. But Egypt’s neighbor must be prepared for a profound shift. With parliamentary elections scheduled for this fall, presidential elections early next year, and popular anger with Israel running high, criticism of Egypt’s neighbor is likely to be a popular campaign issue. And a representative government will be much more sensitive to public sentiment than Mubarak was.

The protest, in which three people were killed by Egyptian security forces and 1,049 were wounded, reflected pent-up anger over Israel’s killing of six Egyptian border guards last month while pursuing gunmen who launched a cross-border attack that killed eight Israelis. The killing of the Egyptian border guards, and the Egyptian government’s refusal to recall its ambassador to Israel, enraged many Egyptians who want a change from Mubarak’s 30-year policy of cooperating with Israel.

Had Egypt withdrawn its ambassador from Tel Aviv after the killings, protesters would not have stormed the embassy, says Ahmed, who participated in the protest.

Egyptian officials said Saturday that they would prosecute those behind the violence in military courts, and say they have already arrested 130 people, according to state media.

How the embassy was stormed

The protest began on Friday, as demonstrators gathered at the Israeli embassy, which is housed in a residential apartment building.

Throughout the afternoon they demolished a wall that had recently been built to protect the building from protests. Security forces stood back and allowed the crowd to swell until some protesters stormed the building, breaking into the embassy and throwing hundreds of documents from the windows to the crowd below.

Clashes then ensued when riot police confronted the crowd.

Why didn't security forces do more?

Though united in anger against Israel, some Egyptians criticized the protesters for breaking into the embassy. They also sought answers to a key question: Why did the security forces stand back and allow it to happen?

Amr El Chobaky, an analyst at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, says the security forces’ restraint was part of the military’s attempt to keep popular anger at Israel from becoming directed at Egypt’s leadership. But they went too far by allowing protesters to enter the embassy, he says.

“The Egyptian people have the right to make a demonstration against Israeli policy and protest, but at the same time, the military council must respect the Egyptian obligations under international law," says Mr. Chobaky.

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Cairo Israeli embassy attack: New realities for Israel-Egypt relations - CSMonitor.com

Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Islamic Republic of Libya, Courtesy of U.S.A.

Written by Michael Tennant

Tuesday, 06 September 2011 09:35

Recent reports suggest that Libya is poised to become the third Islamic state established in the last decade with the help of the United States. On August 26 The New American reported that a draft constitution released by the Libyan Transitional National Council (TNC), the rebel group that has taken charge since the ouster of Col. Moammar Gadhafi, declares: “Islam is the religion of the state and the principal source of legislation is Islamic jurisprudence (sharia).” This wording is very similar to the post-U.S. invasion constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are, apparently, those in Libya not convinced that the TNC is serious about its commitment to Islam. The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz writes:

U.S. officials said spy agencies are stepping up surveillance of Islamist-oriented elements among Libyan rebels. A government report circulated Tuesday said extremists were observed “strategizing” on Internet forums about how to set up an Islamist state in Libya after the regime of Col. Gadhafi is defeated.

Of course, there seem to be about as many strategies as there are jihadists:

A jihadist writing as Asuli Mutatari, stated on the Shumukh al-Islam Network forum that “the real war will be fought after the fall of the tyrant [Col. Gadhafi] and after the establishment of a transitional democratic system.

“After the awakening, we will fight those outside the [Islamic] law,” he stated.
Another forum posting urged Islamists to “quickly take control of cities with economic resources and strategic locations and establish Islamic courts there.”

A jihadist identified as Abu Abra’ al-Muqadas said the National Transitional Council must be neutralized because it will never allow anyone calling for an Islamic state to be part of the new government.

“They know that merely suggesting the application of Islamic law will cause Western countries to stop their support,” he said.

Another jihadist suggested liquidating the entire TNC, while still another told alleged “sleeper cells” trained by al-Qaeda to lie low for the time being to keep the United States in the dark about their existence. Others quite wisely recommended “the expulsion of foreign bases and reduction of foreign influence,” according to Gertz.

In short, there is a lot of talk on the Internet, but how much of it will translate into action remains to be seen. The government’s report, Gertz notes, “said the jihadists’ strength and influence on the ground ‘are uncertain at this time.’”

However, the report said the jihadist plotting coincided with the high-profile emergence of Abu Abdallah al-Sadiq, a former leader of the al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and now a leading rebel. He is currently known as Abdel Hakim al-Khulidi Belhaj and led rebels in overrunning Col. Gadhafi’s Tripoli compound.

This would be the same Abdel Hakim al-Khulidi Belhaj that, as TNA reported September 3, the Central Intelligence Agency rendered to Gadhafi several years ago and who says he was tortured by CIA agents in Bangkok and then spent six years in solitary confinement in Libya. The United States has good reason, therefore, to fear the rise of such a man. Though Belhaj’s faction of LIFG appears to have ceased supporting al-Qaeda, Gertz writes, “there are concerns that some LIFG members remain committed to al Qaeda and others may be temporarily renouncing their ties to the terrorist group for ‘show.’”

Why was the report leaked to Gertz? One possibility is that the Obama administration wants to make certain that Americans don’t get the idea that U.S. personnel can return home now that Gadhafi has been removed from power. If jihadists are likely to take over in the absence of foreign powers, then those foreign powers will just have to stay indefinitely — the same excuse given for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan through at least 2024.

Another possible explanation for the leaking of the report is that a faction within the government that opposes the Libyan intervention is trying to convince the public how poorly thought out the whole mission was. Many critics have been saying the same thing from the war’s outset, noting in late March that the rebels’ ranks were peppered with al-Qaeda members and that a positive outcome of the war, even assuming Gadhafi could be ousted, was by no means certain.

Given the proposed constitution, the leadership role of Belhaj, the potential for a jihadist takeover, and — as the Associated Press reports — the rebels’ rounding up of black Africans without due process of law, Libya appears to be little more hospitable to liberty and human rights now than it was when Gadhafi still held the reins. In other words, it’s Iraq and Afghanistan all over again, only — one hopes — on a much smaller scale.

Barack Obama thought that, as an enlightened liberal, he could make humanitarian intervention work where the self-proclaimed “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush had failed. The problem, however, lay not with the person in charge of the policy but with the policy itself.

Congress has had multiple opportunities to put a stop to U.S. intervention in Libya but has thus far failed to do so. Legislators could still salvage some of their constitutional prerogatives — and perhaps many American lives — by doing their duty now and getting the United States out of Libya before the Libyans drive us out the long, hard, bloody way.

Photo: Libyan women attend Muslims weekly Friday prayers in Benghazi, Libya, April 22, 2011, the same day that U.S. Sen. John McCain praised Libya's rebels as his "heroes" in a visit to their capital: AP Images

The Islamic Republic of Libya, Courtesy of U.S.A.

The American Church and State: Cozy Comrades

Written by Becky Akers

Wednesday, 07 September 2011 11:34

Communists have warred against Christians since Lenin and Trotsky first imposed Karl Marx’s horrific nonsense on reality. Whether it was the Soviet Union’s exiling of converts to mental hospitals and the gulag or Castro’s beating of Cuban believers, Romania’s 13-year imprisonment and torture of Richard Wurmbrand or China’s fierce retribution against unofficial “house churches,” the State fears Christianity’s inherent enmity. And it abuses Christ’s followers accordingly.

Biblical Christianity cannot help but oppose government: the principles and forces that animate the two conflict irreconcilably. Christianity sees each person, no matter how insignificant, helpless, or sinful, as a being of infinite value, created in Jehovah’s image and worth His Son’s agonizing sacrifice. 

It also recognizes and respects the free will God grants every one of these immortal souls — free will the Almighty Himself honors in this present world. Certainly, “every knee should bow … and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” but here on earth, men are free to accept or reject the Gospel, to bow humbly before their Creator or to shake their fist in His face. God does not hurl thunderbolts at even the worst blasphemer, nor does He usually or even often bless the righteous with Solomonic wealth. He allows us instead to select both our temporal priorities as well as our eternal fate, and He defers to both choices. He forces no one to become a preacher, salesman, or politician, to donate to the poor or hoard every penny, to tell the truth or cheat on his wife; He saves no sinner from hell without that person’s explicit permission.

This reverence for each individual’s autonomy permeates Christianity; it extends from our Lord to believers and should always characterize our interactions with mankind. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” Christ commanded in one of the Bible’s paeans to free will. Which of us ever wants a more powerful person imposing his whims on us? Whether it’s something as trivial as lunch or as monumental as the college we’ll attend, we crave the liberty to decide for ourselves.

We seek advice, yes, and we may even forego a burger in favor of a salad if we’re trying to shed pounds — or the other way around if we heed certain nutritionists. But should Ms. Diet Guru barge into our kitchens and compel us at gunpoint to dine as she decrees, we would object, and furiously.

Indeed, acting as we judge proper and determining our own destiny renders existence meaningful. “Live free or die” is more than just Revolutionary General John Stark’s counsel: it’s a prescription for human happiness and wellbeing.

Contrast Christianity’s homage for the individual and his sovereignty with the State’s spurning of both. Rulers view other people as mere means to an end, as pawns to exploit, whether the goal is building pyramids à la Egypt or controlling the world like the ancient Roman Empire and modern American one. Far from considering us God’s children, politicians deem us taxpayers, the golden geese financing their schemes. We’re also inept fools whose silly ideas and ambitions they must override in favor of their own.

So the universal antipathy between Christianity and the State is no mystery. Worse, Christian beliefs not only radically contradict the State’s, they also dictate our behavior so that we necessarily undermine government. When Leviathan upholds chattel slavery to protect influential interests, Christians abolish such vile bondage. When the beast exterminates people with mental or physical handicaps, Jewish folks, and Gypsies, Christians hide the victims and even try to take out the murderous regime

Naturally, government avenges itself.  It hunt downs, round ups, persecutes, tortures and executes Christians. 

Except in twenty-first century America.

“Well, of course not!” you snort. “We have a Constitution, there’s the First Amendment to protect freedom of religion. “

We have a Constitution and a First Amendment that protect freedom of association, too, but try telling a sodomite you won’t hire him and watch bureaucrats from the EEOC swarm. Ditto for freedom of speech, yet last week cops arrested a woman who jokingly sketched a bomb on her friend’s suitcase.

Meanwhile, the Feds and their socialist economy control every detail of our days, from the light bulbs we buy to the milk we drink to the pensions on which we retire. America is arguably as totalitarian as Soviet Russia or Red China, as merciless and aggressive as Hitler’s Germany.

And yet, American authorities do not persecute the Church.

Why not? Why hasn’t a battle that’s raged everywhere for 2000 years bloodied believers here?

Perhaps because the lukewarm, fake “Christianity” most Americans practice doesn’t even begin to threaten the Feds. Indeed, such “Christians” are among government’s biggest boosters. Each Sunday, the American flag presides over their worship; shockingly, many pledge an allegiance that belongs to God alone: “to the Republic for which it stands.” They cheer the Feds’ imperial wars, beseeching the Prince of Peace to protect “our” troops as they massacre Iraqis and Afghanis; they trouble themselves neither to learn about nor to pray for the Iraqi and Afghani Christians trapped in the maelstrom. They applaud fortifying American borders against immigrants, including their brothers and sisters fleeing persecution. Their preachers denounce “tax cheats,” not the thieves plundering us so abortionists can slaughter infants as mercilessly as U.S. soldiers do.  

Such Christians remain ignorant and dangerous throughout the week, too. A group in the Midwest recently emailed a newsletter discussing their latest “community service projects”: “We will be painting the city jail,” they “excited[ly]” relate…

Oh, good: freshen up the hellishly cruel, corrupt prison-industrial complex rather than agitate for its destruction. God loves bright beige walls when we’re caging each other.

“…painting the court house ceiling…”

Another homer! We wouldn’t want judges who uphold the Transportation Security Administration’s “right” to ogle naked passengers to suffer peeling rafters, now, would we? And as a bonus, we save the State money so it can hire more soldiers and abortionists.

“… working with the school district to do projects in the schools …”

On evolution? Or how it’s perfectly normal, even beneficial, that Heather has two mommies?

“… and working with city code enforcement by getting referrals from them of people who need help with projects around their home that they are unable to do themselves.”

So what if the homeowner liked his house the way it was? Remember the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt assist bureaucrats as they tyrannize poor people.”

Everlasting shame on the American Church. While the satanic State viciously attacks Christians worldwide, it counts American believers among its staunchest allies.

The American Church and State: Cozy Comrades