Max Blumenthal and Tom Engelhardt, July 17, 2015 Link
We’ve just passed the first “anniversary” – if such a word can even be used with such a catastrophe – of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s third invasion of the Gaza Strip in recent years. That small bit of land has now suffered more devastation than just about any place on the planet. In the wake of the third war since 2008, more than 100,000 displaced Gazans remain homeless or crowded in with relatives. Whole neighborhoods, destroyed in the conflict, have yet to be rebuilt. A year later, there is still next to no electricity, the area’s sole power plant having been taken out by Israeli air strikes, and the situation when it comes to sewage and potable water, is disastrous. Blockaded and devastated by repeated wars, Gaza’s manufacturing sector has almost disappeared, while its economy is “on the verge of collapse,” according to the World Bank. In short, by any standard, Gaza is not a livable place and yet 1.8 million people (more than half of them under 18 years old, 43% under 15) are crammed into it with nowhere to go and in most cases nothing to do. After all, Gaza now has what may be the highest unemployment rate on the planet at 44%, with youth unemployment reaching 60%.
The great Israeli reporter Amira Hass, author of the classic book Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, recently put the matter this way: “In practice, Gaza has become a huge, let me be blunt, concentration camp… This is not a novelty… This did not start, unlike what many people think, with the rise of Hamas… This policy of sealing off Gaza, of making Gazans into… defacto prisoners, started [in 1991]… So if I want to sum up the reality of Gaza: it is a huge prison… It is an Israel-meditated, pre-meditated, pre-planned, and planned project to separate Gaza from the West Bank.”
Max Blumenthal’s new book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, catches the nightmare of the third war in this tiny piece of land in the last six-and-a-half years in a uniquely gripping way. In its pages, you follow him directly into the devastation of the Israeli invasion. (He entered Gaza during the first extended truce of the war.) I doubt there could be a more vivid account of what it felt like, as a Palestinian civilian, to endure those weeks of horror, massive destruction, and killing. Today atTomDispatch, he looks back on that experience and forward to what he doesn’t doubt will be the fourth war of its kind. If he’s right, then sadly, in the years to come, some reporter will be writing yet another book on a Gaza war. ~ Tom
The Fire Next Time Before Homes Are Even Rebuilt in the Ruins of the Gaza Strip, Another War Looms By Max Blumenthal
“A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a third Lebanon war is inevitable,” declared Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in February. His ominous comments came just days after an anti-tank missile fired by the Lebanon-based guerrilla group Hezbollah killed two soldiers in an Israeli army convoy. It, in turn, was a response to an Israeli air strike that resulted in the assassination of several high-ranking Hezbollah figures.
Lieberman offered his prediction only four months after his government concluded Operation Protective Edge, the third war between Israel and the armed factions of the Gaza Strip, which had managed to reduce about 20% of besieged Gaza to an apocalyptic moonscape. Even before the assault was launched, Gaza was a warehouse for surplus humanity – a 360-square-kilometer ghetto of Palestinian refugees expelled by and excluded from the self-proclaimed Jewish state. For this population, whose members are mostly under the age of 18, the violence has become a life ritual that repeats every year or two. As the first anniversary of Protective Edge passes, Lieberman’s unsettling prophecy appears increasingly likely to come true. Indeed, odds are that the months of relative “quiet” that followed his statement will prove nothing more than an interregnum between Israel’s ever more devastating military escalations.
Three years ago, the United Nations issued a report predicting that the Gaza Strip would be uninhabitable by 2020. Thanks to Israel’s recent attack, this warning appears to have arrived sooner than expected. Fewof the 18,000 homes the Israeli military destroyed in Gaza have been rebuilt. Few of the more than 400 businesses and shops damaged or leveled during that war have been repaired. Thousands of government employees have not received a salary for more than a year and are working for free. Electricity remains desperately limited, sometimes to only four hours a day. The coastal enclave’s borders are consistently closed. Its population is trapped, traumatized, and descending ever deeper into despair, with suicide rates skyrocketing.
One of the few areas where Gaza’s youth can find structure is within the “Liberation Camps” established by Hamas, the Islamist political organization that controls Gaza. There, they undergo military training, ideological indoctrination, and are ultimately inducted into the Palestinian armed struggle. As I found while covering last summer’s war, there is no shortage of young orphans determined to take up arms after watching their parents and siblings be torn limb from limb by 2,000-pound Israeli fragmentation missiles, artillery shells, and other modes of destruction. Fifteen-year-old Waseem Shamaly, for instance, told me his life’s ambition was to join the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. He had just finished recounting through tears what it was like to watch a YouTube clip of his brother, Salem, being executed by an Israeli sniper while he searched for the rest of his family in the rubble of their neighborhood last July.
Anger with Hamas’s political wing for accepting a ceasefire agreement with Israel in late August 2014 that offered nothing but a return to the slow death of siege and imprisonment is now palpable among Gaza’s civilian population. This is particularly true in border areas devastated by the Israelis last summer. However, support for the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas that carries the banner of the Palestinian armed struggle, remains almost unanimous.
Palestinians in Gaza need only look 80 kilometers west to the gilded Bantustans of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to see what they would get if they agreed to disarm. After years of fruitless negotiations, Israel has rewarded Palestinians living under the rule of PA President Mahmoud Abbas with the record growth of Jewish settlements, major new land annexations, nightly house raids, and the constant humiliation and dangers of daily interactions with Israeli soldiers and fanatical Jewish settlers. Rather than resist the occupation, Abbas’s Western-trained security forces coordinate directly with the occupying Israeli army, assisting Israel in the arrest and even torture of fellow Palestinians, including the leadership of rival political factions.
As punishing as life in Gaza might be, the West Bank model does not offer a terribly attractive alternative. Yet this is exactly the kind of “solution” the Israeli government seeks to impose on Gaza. As former Interior Minister Yuval Steinitz declared last year, “We want more than a ceasefire, we want the demilitarization of Gaza… Gaza will be exactly like [the West Bank city of] Ramallah.”
Keeping Gaza in Ruins
Behind the quasi-apocalyptic destruction exacted on Gaza by the Israeli military during Operation Protective Edge lies a sadistic strategy whose aim is to punish residents of the besieged coastal enclave into submission. The “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after a southern Beirut neighborhood the Israeli air force decimated in 2006, is focused on punishing the civilian populations of Gaza and southern Lebanon for supporting armed resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. In “Disproportionate Force,” a 2008 paper published by the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank closely linked to the Israeli military, Colonel Gabi Siboni spelled out its punitive, civilian-oriented logic clearly: “With an outbreak of hostilities, the [Israeli army] will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.”
In the aftermath of Protective Edge’s massive destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, the Israeli government set out to obstruct any reconstruction process and extend the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population. When diplomats including American Secretary of State John Kerry gathered in Cairo last October to discuss repairing and rebuilding some of the $7 billion in damage caused by Protective Edge, then-Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz assured them that their efforts were ultimately futile. “The Gazans must decide what they want to be: Singapore or Darfur,” Katz said, ominously invoking the threat of Sudanese-style genocide. “If one missile will be fired, everything will go down the drain.” The nature of his warning was not lost on the diplomats in Cairo, where one complained of “considerable donor fatigue.”
“No one can expect us to go back to our taxpayers for a third time; to ask for contributions for reconstruction and then we simply go back to where we were before all this began,” a diplomat complained to a reporter. Another conceded: “There isn’t a terrible amount of political commitment or hope.”
In the end, only a minuscule fraction of the $5 billion pledged at the conference has actually made its way to Gaza’s devastated masses. Instead, much of it has been diverted into the coffers of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, whose mission requires it to spend around 30% of its budget on “security,” or policing fellow Palestinians, on behalf of their occupier.
Earlier this year, as funds for reconstruction dried up entirely, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry attempted to compel Palestinians in Gaza to accept a rebuilding plan he concocted in cooperation with the Israeli military, the Egyptian military junta of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the PA. Described by Israeli military correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai as a model of “the conflict management approach,” the plan amounts to the internationalization of the siege of Gaza and the perpetual imprisonment of Palestinians there. Needless to say, it proved a non-starter among those whose lives it would have controlled.
Though Hamas has stringently maintained the ceasefire it inked when hostilities ended last August, Israel has repeatedly attacked Gaza’s fishermen as well as farmers working in areas near the Israeli border wall. As despair spreads, the previously minute ranks of Salafist extremists are expanding and pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (IS), the brutal theocratic crew that has established a “caliphate” in parts of Syria and Iraq and whose followers in Gaza have declared war on Hamas.
Gaza’s IS-allied factions have adopted a simple formula for undermining Hamas that begins with the launching of a crude rocket or mortar usually into an unpopulated area of southern Israel. That these do little or no damage hardly matters, since IS followers know that Israel will respond with airstrikes targeting Hamas-controlled facilities. Through these provocations, IS in Gaza has established an alliance of convenience with the Israeli military, with each relying on the other to tighten the vise on Hamas. Though IS has no chance now of toppling Hamas, its presence – and Israel’s apparent eagerness to play its game – has injected a volatile new element into an already unstable post-war landscape.
Field Testing the Brand
Hamas and allied militant groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad entered last summer’s war with a set of conditions that were entirely humanitarian in nature. They called for the right to construct a seaport in Gaza, rebuild the airport Israel destroyed, and freely import and export goods, as well as for Gaza’s stateless residents to obtain travel permits. In exchange, Hamas offered Israel a 10-year truce. Rather than accept any of these conditions, which would have promoted a dramatic reduction in tensions, Israel and its allies in Cairo and Washington opted for 51 days of brutal warfare, knowing that Gaza’s civilians would pay the steepest price – and that an elite sector of Israeli society would reap handsome rewards.
Unlike the rulers of Gaza, Israel’s upper classes thrive off war. The assaults on Gaza since 2005 have invigorated one of the country’s leading industries and been a boon to the 150,000 Israeli families who earn their livelihoods from it. Thanks in large part to the wars in Gaza and the ongoing occupation of Palestine, Israel’s weapons industry has tripled its profits to more than $7 billion a year over the past decade, making a country about the size of New Jersey into the fourth largest weapons exporter in the world.
“A salesman for the IAI [Israel Aerospace Industries] told me that assassinations and operations in Gaza bring about an increase of tens of percentage points in company sales,” said Yotam Feldman, the Israeli journalist whose documentary film, The Lab, provides a disturbing look at the country’s weapons industry and how it has transformed Israeli society. According to Feldman, “the war in Gaza has become inherent to the Israeli political system, possibly a part of our system of government.”
Members of the Israeli elite have benefitted directly from the Gaza wars by orchestrating the assaults as generals and politicians and then taking jobs as lobbyists, marketing to foreign militaries the newest weaponry and battlefield tactics tested on Gaza’s civilian population. Ehud Barak, for instance, was the defense minister who directed Israel’s disproportionate attacks on Gaza in 2008-2009 and again in 2012. He was also one of the closest associates of Michael Federman, a former member of his Sayeret Matkal commando unit and a political advisor who also happened to be the owner of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. It was perhaps unsurprising then that, after leading the Defense Ministry during so many wars deploying and promoting Elbit’s latest weaponry, Barak’s name suddenly wound upon the Forbes list of Israel’s wealthiest politicians in 2012.
A quick browse through Israel Defense News, the leading English-language trade publication of Israel’s weapons industry, offers perhaps the best look at how new tactics and weaponry are marketed. In its latest issue, dedicated to the “new age warfare” practiced in Gaza, readers are assured that “2015 will be good for Israeli Defense Industries.” Uri Vered, general manager of Elbit Systems, promises that “land field systems” – the tanks and armored combat vehicles deployed in the recent conflict – will experience record growth.
Among the high tech weaponry being touted by the magazine is a drone “capable of loitering over the target and attacking it.” This is a reference to Israeli Aerospace Industries’ Harop, a “suicide drone” first tested in southern Lebanon that hovers over its target before diving into it with 10 kilograms of explosives packed into its nose. With militaries around the world snapping up the Harop by the hundreds, Israel’s weapons sector is eager to roll out a next generation vehicle that includes its own launch pad. In order to brand the newfangled drone with the magical marketing label of “field tested,” IAI simply needs another war.
The Point of No Return
To be sure, there are figures within Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus keen on averting another war with Gaza’s armed factions, at least in the near term. They recognize that Hamas has become a stabilizing force in Gaza capable of maintaining ceasefires in good faith. As it did with the Fatah-controlled Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli military establishment has attempted to domesticate Hamas by assassinating “irreconcilables” like former Al-Qassam commander Ahmed Jaabari, while allowing more conciliatory and politically ambitious figures like Gazan Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to rise. Its strategy is aimed at cultivating within Hamas the kind of docile leadership that now makes up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, thereby transforming another self-proclaimed Palestinian resistance organization into an occupation subcontractor.
Yet as Israel (relying on international mediators) engages in negotiations with Hamas over a range of issues including the release of a captured Israeli citizen, there is no sense that its domestication strategy is working. And whatever accommodations the gatekeepers of Israel’s military-intelligence sector had in mind, the chaos unleashed by Operation Protective Edge has probably pushed Jewish Israeli society beyond the point of no return. Indeed, the wartime atmosphere proved a godsend for far-right mobilization, electrifying religious nationalist elements in the government and fascist goons in the streets of Tel Aviv. This January, the 45% of Jewish Israelis who complained that their military had not used enough force against Gaza went on to elect the most right-wing government in Israeli history.
Among the leaders of Israel’s increasingly dominant religious nationalist movement is Naftali Bennett, the 43-year-old head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party. Bennett spent much of last summer’s war railing against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to order a full reoccupation of Gaza and the violent removal of Hamas – a potentially catastrophic move that Netanyahu and the Israeli military brass vehemently opposed. While Bennett accused Palestinians of committing “self-genocide,” his youthful deputy, Ayelet Shaked, declared that Palestinian civilians “are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads.” According to Shaked, the “mothers of the martyrs” should be exterminated, “as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
In the current Israeli governing coalition, Bennett serves as Minister of Education, overseeing the schooling of millions of Jewish Israeli youth. And Shaked has been promoted to Minister of Justice, giving her direct influence over the country’s court system. Once one of the young Turks of the right-wing Likud Party, Netanyahu now finds himself at the hollow center of Israeli politics, mediating between factions of hardline ethno-nationalists and outright fascists.
Where Gaza is concerned, Israel’s loyal opposition differs little from the country’s far-right rulers. In the days before the January national elections, Tzipi Livni, a leader of the left-of-center Zionist Union, proclaimed, “Hamas is a terrorist organization and there is no hope for peace with it… the only way to act against it is with force – we must use military force against terror… and this is instead of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s policy to come to an agreement with Hamas.” Livni’s ally, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, reinforced her militaristic position by declaring, “There is no compromising with terror.”
Months after the cessation of hostilities, even as foreign correspondents marvel at the “quiet” that has prevailed along Gaza’s borders, the Israeli leadership is ramping up its bloody imprecations. At a conference this May sponsored by Shurat HaDin, a legal organization dedicated to defending Israel from war crimes charges, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon warned that another crushing assault was inevitable, either in Gaza, southern Lebanon, or both. After threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, Yaalonpledged that “we are going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the family. We went through a very long deep discussion… we did it then, we did it in [the] Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future.”
Yaalon went on to boast to his audience about how one year before Operation Protective Edge, he furnished his commanders with maps of “certain neighborhoods in Gaza” to hit. They included Shujaiya, an area east of Gaza City where over 120 civilians were killed in a matter of hours, and which now lies in utter ruin. Gaza still reels from last summer’s assault, yet there is no reason to doubt that the Israeli military will fulfill Yaalon’s terrifying vow – perhaps sooner than anyone expects.
For Israel, war is no longer an option. It is a way of life.
Khaled Bahah announces online that the second city has been secured by anti-Houthi local forces allied to the exiled government.
Yemen's exiled vice president Khaled Bahah announced online on Friday the "liberation" of second city Aden after four months of devastating fighting between Houthi rebels and allied army units on one side, and local anti-Houthi forces allied to the exiled government.
"The government announces the liberation of the province of Aden on the first day of Eid al-Fitr which falls on July 17," Bahah said on his Facebook page, referring to the Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
"We will work to restore life in Aden and all the liberated cities, to restore water and electricity," he said.
On Tuesday, anti-Houthi forces launched Operation Golden Arrow against the Houthis who, along with Yemeni army units loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh, seized control of much of Aden in March, forcing the government into exile in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
The counteroffensive was carried out by southern militiamen of the Popular Resistance, who largely support the secession of southern Yemen, backed by reinforcements freshly trained and equipped in Saudi Arabia.
The oil-rich kingdom leads a coalition of Arab countries which has been waging an air campaign against the Houthi-Saleh rebel forces.
Aden was President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi's last refuge after he fled the capital Sanaa earlier this year as the rebels took over the government and launched an offensive in which they seized much of the rest of the country.
Swathes of the city have been reduced to rubble by the four months of ferocious fighting.
The exiled government's official news agency said anti-Houthi forces had mopped up the last pockets of rebel resistance in the city's Mualla district on Thursday.
They already secured the airport and the surrounding Khormaksar diplomatic district earlier this week.
In a televised speech to mark the Eid al-Fitr holiday, the exiled president paid tribute to the fighters in Aden and vowed that the southern port city would be the stepping stone to victory nationwide.
"Aden will be the key to Yemen's salvation," Hadi said in the speech broadcast late on Thursday. "From Aden we will regain all of Yemen."
The counteroffensive came after the failure of a UN-declared truce that was supposed to have taken effect last weekend to allow the delivery of desperately needed relief supplies.
The United Nations has declared Yemen a level-3 humanitarian emergency, the highest on its scale.
More than 21.1 million people -- over 80 percent of Yemen's population -- need aid, with 13 million facing food shortages, while access to water has become difficult for 9.4 million people.
82% of the Iranian adult population is now literate, well ahead of the regional average of 62%. This rate increases to 97% among young adults(aged between 15 and 24) without any gender discrepancy. A Literacy Corps was established in 1963 to send educated conscripts to villages.
أرقام مخيفة تسوقها تقارير التنمية البشرية بشأن الأمية في العالم العربي، ثلث العرب لا يقرؤون ولا يكتبون، ونسبة الأمية هي ضعف المتوسط العالمي، الأمر الذي لا يقل فداحة عما تردت إليه أوضاع العرب من صراع وحروب اشتدت أوزارها في الأربع سنوات الفائتة.
الخبير المغربي في التنمية البشرية لطفي حضري يفضل في حلقة 16/7/2015 وضع الأرقام مباشرة بدل النسب المئوية حتى يستشعر المواطن العربي خطورة الحالة في بلاد طالما وصفت بأنها بلاد "اقرأ" نسبة إلى أول آية نزلت في القرآن الكريم.
بالأرقام، نحن أمام 354 مليون عربي بينهم 97 مليون أمي، 60% منهم إناث، تتصدر مصر الدول العربية من حيث الأمية بنسبة 27% بينما تؤكد المنظمة العربية للتربية والثقافة (ألكسو) أنها لا تقل عن 60%. يشير حضري إلى أن الأمية مرتبطة بالقرار السياسي بصرف النظر عن الغنى والفقر، فرقم مئة مليون تقريبا من الأميين يعني أن هناك عدم استقلال في القرار السياسي وعدم القدرة على الإبداع والإنتاج، بل إن ثمة تأثيرا على زيادة النزوع نحو "الإرهاب"، لأن الأمية هي عدم القدرة على فهم وتحليل وتركيب الواقع.
ويضيف حضري أن عدم فهم النصوص حتى مع معرفة القراءة والكتابة يدخل أيضا في تعريف الأمية، ويبقى السؤال المطروح عن كيفية الخروج من المأزق على مستوى قومي عربي: هل تضطلع جامعة الدول العربية بشيء ما؟
العقد العربي يقول المشرف في الإدارة العامة لتعليم كبار السن سعود البدر إن اجتماع القمة العربية الأخير في مصر أقر ما سمي "العقد العربي" لحل مشكلة الأمية يبدأ في 2015 وينتهي في 2024، وسيترك لكل دولة وضع خططها بحسب ما تحتاج.
في خضم الحديث عن أمية مستشرية تتفاوت المعدلات بين الدول العربية، إذ تبدو أعلاها في مصر والسودان والجزائر واليمن، لكن توقعات متفائلة تشير إلى أن قطر والأردن وتونس والكويت والسعودية قد تتخلص من الأمية قبل نهاية 2015. البدر عاين -من جانبه- تجربة بلاده السعودية التي خطت خطوات واسعة في محو الأمية منذ وضعت أول نظام لتعليم الكبار عام 1972، ونشر التعليم للأطفال في كل مكان من البلاد جعلت الأمية في عام 2015 في حدود متدنية.
لكن العامل البشري وتطويره يبقيان الأساس قبل العامل الاقتصادي، فالإنسان -كما يشير حضري- هو الذي يصنع الاقتصاد لا العكس.
ترزح مصر تحت حكم عسكري متغلّب، يقوده جنرال مهووس بذاته، يرى نفسه مبعوث العناية الإلهية لإنقاذ البلاد والعباد من "الأشرار". لا يخفي الرجل حقيقته، فهو يرى، وكذلك كثيرون من دراويشه ومهاويسه، أن الأقدار اختارته لمهمة تاريخية، رآها في منامه قبل أربعة عقود.
يخبرنا التاريخ، أيضاً، أنه كلما استمر الجنرالات في السلطة ازداد شططهم، وتضخم هوسهم بأنفسهم، وأصيبوا بحالة متقدمة من "جنون العظمة". وهو ما تبدو أعراضه جلية في الحالة المصرية. فالجنرال عبد الفتاح السيسي، بعد عامين فقط في السلطة، أصبح طبيباً وفيلسوفاً ومن الرسل والصحابة. لا يدرك كثيرون أن الرجل بات يصدق نفسه، وأنه بالفعل مخلوق فريد يتفوق على الآخرين، بفكره ورؤيته وحكمته وكلماته. اقرأ فقط تعليقات مهاويسه عليه، وعلى تحركاته وخطبه، وراقب رد فعلهم على قراراته وسياساته، وسوف تجد نفسك أمام حالة جنون جماعي، وكأنهم مسحورون ومفتونون به. ومن أعراض جنون العظمة، أيضاً، أن يتخيل الحاكم أنه يحكم "أعظم بلد" و"أفضل شعب"، ولديه "أقوى مؤسسات" و"أكفأ رجال"، وأنه سوف يحقق "المعجزات"، وأن اسمه سوف يُخلد في سجل العظماء، وهي العبارات نفسها التي لا يخلو منها خطاب للسيسي.
قصص الجنرالات والحكام العسكريين المخبولين والمصابين بجنون العظمة كثيرة، ولم يبخل علينا التاريخ بها، وغالبا ما تكون نهايتهم مأساوية. خذ، مثلاً، شارل السادس، ملك فرنسا الذي لم يكن يستحم شهوراً، وكان يتصور نفسه أنه مصنوع من زجاج، ووصل إلى مرحلة عدم تمييز أولاده وزوجته إلى أن انتهى به الحال وحيداً ومعزولاً، حتى مات عام 1422. وخذ أيضا الديكتاتور الروسي، جوزيف ستالين، الذي حكم روسيا أكثر من ثلاثة عقود، وكان يرى نفسه مبعوث العناية الإلهية، لإنقاذ الشعوب الكادحة من استعباد الرأسمالية، فكان أن قتل ملايين الروس، من أجل إثبات صحة نظريته. ومن فرط جنون العظمة الذي أصابه، قيل عنه إنه كان يرغب في تكوين جيش قوي و"سوبر"، يغزو به العالم، ويكون من جينات البشر والقرود. ونُقل عنه أنه يريد "مخلوقاً بشرياً جديداً غير مرئي، لا يحس بالألم، مقاوم ومختلف في نوعية الغذاء الذي يتناوله". وقد مات ستالين مسموماً، بحسب رواياتٍ كثيرة، بعد تناول العشاء في بيته الريفي، وظل ملقياً على أرض غرفته يوماً كاملاً، لأن أحداً لم يكن يجرؤ على طرق باب غرفته، أو الدخول عليه، من دون إذن مسبق منه. أما أشهر حكايات الجنرالات المهووسين فهي في منطقتنا العربية، فالديكتاتور الراحل، صدام حسين، كان مولعاً بتمجيد ذاته، ويرى نفسه خليفة جمال عبد الناصر، وقائد أكبر جيوش المنطقة، فكان أن ارتكب جرائم كثيرة بحق شعبه. كان صدام يخلع على نفسه صفات التبجيل والتوقير مثل "الرئيس المؤمن" و"القائد المجاهد" و"أسد الخليج"، إلى أن انتهى به الحال فى "بئر معطّلة"، ظل مختبئاً فيها شهوراً قبل إعدامه شنقاً. وخذ أيضا الطاغية الليبي، معمر القذافي، "ملك ملوك أفريقيا"، ومؤلف "الكتاب الأخضر"، وصاحب المقولات التاريخية الطريفة، ومنها "للمرأة حق الترشح، ذكراً كانت أو أنثى"، و"أيها الشعب، لولا الكهرباء لجلسنا نشاهد التلفاز في الظلام"، وكانت آخر كلماته "سأظل في ليبيا إلى أن أموت أو يوافيني الأجل". وجدير بالذكر أنه عُثر على القذافي مختبئاً في "ماسورة صرف صحي"، قبل أن يتم سحله وقتله، والتمثيل بجثته بشكل مروّع. النهايات الطبيعية للجنرالات المهووسين معروفة ومكررة، وفي معظمها نهايات تراجيدية، لا تخلو من مفارقات. ولو أن ثمة حكمة وعقلاً لدى شعوبهم، لوضعوا جنرالاتهم في مستشفيات الأمراض العقلية، أو مصحات نفسية، تعالجهم من "جنون العظمة"، قبل أن يدمّروا بلدانهم. ولكن، من يسمع ويعقل؟
New version aims to combat "misinterpretation" By Brian Whitaker Link
Assad inspects his "new standard version" of the Qur'an
A very peculiar story from Syria: the Assad regime has produced a new – revised – version of the Qur'an designed to prevent "misleading" interpretations.
It's peculiar because messing about with the text of the holy book would, in the eyes of any normal believer, amount to sacrilege. The Qur'an is considered to be the exact words of God, as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
When I first heard the story I thought it must be disinformation circulated by Assad's religious foes – but apparently not. It's there in black and white on the website of SANA, the regime's official news agency. There are even photos of Assad inspecting the revised Qur'an.
According to SANA, this "new standard version" will be adopted by the Syrian ministry of religious endowments in all its future projects and will become "the reference for all printed copies of the Holy Qur'an" in Syria (or rather, those parts still under the regime's control). Copies will also be sent to al-Azhar in Egypt and "and Arab and Muslim countries", SANA adds.
The new Qur'an "is the fruit of more than five years of hard work and was revised more than 27 times to ensure its accuracy", SANA says. However, the report is unclear about what changes have been made and how they are supposed to prevent "misinterpretation". It merely says:
"In the new version, Quranic letters are simplified and sketched with dexterity according to a set of accredited standards that scholars of Quranic science use."
If anyone can cast further light on this I would be interested to hear from them.
Although the Assad regime is often described as secular (and it does have secular leanings), it has also developed and promoted a quirky version of Islam that suits its political needs. Essentially, it's a monolithic kind of Islam which denies the existence of sectarian differences – thus disguising the fact that members of the minority Alawite sect hold dominant positions within the regime (in a country with a large Sunni majority). I described this in detail in a previous blog post.
An Islamic State affiliate has said it fired a rocket at an Egyptian naval vessel in the Mediterranean Sea near the coast of Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Photographs distributed online on Thursday by the militant group Sinai Province appear to show a rocket heading towards a ship and setting it on fire on impact. The militants’ version of events could not be verified.
Egypt’s military said in a statement that a coastguard launch had exchanged shots with “terrorist elements”, causing it to catch fire, but there was no loss of life.
Such incidents at sea are rare, but Egypt is battling an increasingly brazen Islamist insurgency in the Sinai peninsula, which lies between Israel, the Gaza Strip and the Suez Canal.
Sinai Province, the most lethal militant group in Egypt, last year pledged loyalty to Isis, which controls large tracts of territory in Syria and Iraq and has a presence in Egypt’s neighbour Libya.
The authorities said 100 militants and at least 17 security personnel were killed in a single day of clashes and attacks claimed by Sinai Province on 1 July.
A witness in Gaza saw a plume of dark grey smoke rising from a boat off the coast. Other witnesses in the territory said they had heard explosions and gunfire.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said Israel was not involved in the incident and had not been asked to assist.
Military sources said the suspected militants had fled after firing on the vessel
Link The deal between the five permanent members of the UN Security CouncilandIranover the latter’s nuclear program lifts an ominous shadow from a region already ravaged by bloodshed and conflict.
The specter of another ideological, US-led war on the pretext, once again, of eliminating phantom weapons of mass destruction recedes with this agreement. For that, the Iranian people and all humanity should breathe a sigh of relief.
Today US President Barack Obama held a press conference in Washington to promote the deal in the face of outright rejectionism from many members of Congress and Israel.
Obama laid out the detailed mechanisms that will place Iran’s nuclear facilities under strict monitoring in exchange for an end to sanctions that have targeted Iran’s economy and civilian population.
“With this deal,” the president said, “we cut off every single one of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear program, a nuclear weapons program.”
Obama directly confronted critics, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I’m hearing a lot of talking points being repeated about ‘This is a bad deal,’” Obama said. “ ‘This will threaten Israel and threaten the world and threaten the United States.’”
What he had not heard, the president said, were any alternatives.
“And the reason is because there really are only two alternatives here,” Obama stated. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war.”
“And if the alternative is that we should bring Iran to heel through military force, then those critics should say so,” Obama said, daring Netanyahu to call his bluff.
Tunnel vision
Obama’s press conference did not focus only on the nuclear deal. The president talked about what he hoped the region would look like by the time he leaves office in January 2017.
“I think my key goal when I turn over the keys to the president – the next president – is that we are on track to defeat ISIL [also known as ISIS or Islamic State], that they are much more contained and we’re moving in the right direction there.”
He said he also hoped to have “jumpstarted a process to resolve the civil war in Syria, which is like an open sore in the region, and is giving refuge to terrorist organizations.”
Obama hoped to “make sure that in Iraq, not only have we pushed back ISIL, but we’ve also created an environment in which Sunni, Shia and Kurd are starting to operate and function more effectively together, and to be in a conversation with all our partners in the region about how we have strengthened our security partnerships.”
That would include, the president said, “providing additional security assurances and cooperation to Israel, building on the unprecedented cooperation that we have already put in place” and reinforcing ties with Gulf Arab regimes.
He also urged that “we have to address the youth in the region with jobs and opportunity and a better vision for the future so that they are not tempted by the nihilistic, violent, dead-end that organizations like ISIL offer.”
Amnesia
What was notably missing, however, was any mention whatsoever of the Palestinians.
It is not surprising that Obama made no allusion to this. He publicly supported and assisted the massacre that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children.
Obama has, moreover, done nothing to lift an ongoing Israeli siege on Gaza that has meant that not a single one of the almost 20,000 completely destroyed homes has been rebuilt.
But a real measure of the official amnesia in the US capital is that not a single journalist asked a question about Gaza or more broadly Israel’s ongoing occupation and violent oppression of millions of Palestinians.
Almost every journalist given an opportunity to ask the president a question sounded like a spokesperson for Israel, echoing its government’s concerns.
No rift
The amnesia serves multiple functions: it reinforces Israeli impunity and it ensures that the official press corps can continue to promote the false narrative of a US-Israeli rift.
Those who believe that the Iran deal is likely to open a breach in US-Israeli relations that might even be beneficial to the Palestinians are therefore likely to be disappointed.
Yes, there is a sharp public disagreement agreement over the Iran deal, but even Obama knows this is mere posturing. Netanyahu too must know he cannot stop it, but what he can do is extort more concessions and handouts from the United States.
Israel’s tactic is always to scream and cry in hopes of getting more of what it wants. And it works.
Even Israel’s ostensible “opposition” leader Isaac Herzog is getting in on the act, with plans to fly to Washingtonto “lobby for a compensation package to ensure Israel’s military advantage in the region.”
What exactly is Israel being “compensated” for, since Obama has repeatedly insisted that his main motivation for negotiating with Iran is Israel’s “security”?
Rewarding Israel
In May, Obama agreed to fork over an additional $1.9 billion in US weapons to Israel that will more than likely be used against Palestinians, and to reinforce Israel’s regime of apartheid and colonization.
Obama has made it clear that this is only a down payment.
The president told the The New York Times yesterday that despite Netanyahu’s efforts to “influence the congressional debate” against the agreement, he was confident the deal would be implemented.
But Obama affirmed that after Netanyahu is done trying to sabotage the Iran deal, the president would “sit down” with the Israeli leader to figure out what more the US could give him.
The message is clear: no matter what Israel does, Obama will reward it with weapons and deeper US ties. Above all, there will be no pressure over the Palestinians. It would be foolish to think that the president’s successor – whether a Democrat or a Republican – will do any less.
The message for those concerned about the Palestinians is to step up the pressure on Israel through all available means, notably boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which Obama – like his would-be successor Hillary Clinton – has vowed to do all he can to oppose.
