Israelis Think No Concession Will Ever Satisfy the West: 6 Reasons Why They’re Right

Dec 23 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

Sometimes, I wonder how well the Israelis really understand the situation that they’re in. This suggests that they have a pretty good handle on the world opinion part of it , A newly released WikiLeaks cable quotes Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling a U.S. diplomat of Israelis’ frustration with the peace process. Surprisingly, however, Dermer didn’t focus primarily on Palestinian behavior. Rather, he charged, “the Israeli public is skeptical regarding the benefits of returning to negotiations” because “all the GOI [government of Israel] has received in return for its efforts [to date] was a ‘slap-down from the international community.’” Dermer didn’t offer evidence to support his claim about Israeli frustration with the “international community,” but the data are shocking: according to the August Peace Index poll, fully 77 percent of Jewish Israelis think “it makes no difference what Israel does and how far it may go on the Palestinian issue; the world will continue to be very critical of it.” And in fact, Israelis have good reasons for this belief. For instance, when Hezbollah continued attacking Israel even after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the world, far from condemning Hezbollah, excoriated Israel when it finally responded to these attacks in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Moreover, after having certified the withdrawal as 100 percent complete in 2000, the UN Security Council then rewarded Hezbollah’s aggression in 2006 by voting to remap Lebanon’s borders, “especially in those areas where the border is disputed” by Hezbollah, with an eye toward forcing Israel to quit additional territory. Then, when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, evacuating 25 settlements in the process, it was rewarded by daily rocket fire on its cities from the evacuated territory. Yet when it finally fought back, in 2008, it was slapped with the Goldstone Report, which accused it of “war crimes” and urged its indictment in the International Criminal Court. Here’s Israel’s real problem with “world opinion.” #1) A lot of nations vote their pocket books and a tiny little country like Israel can’t offer as much as oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Iran. #2) Anti-Semitism still runs rampant in much of the world. Is anyone surprised that nations that enthusiastically shipped their Jews off to death camps in WW2 still hate Jews today? Continue reading at Right Wing News .

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Ban the Burqa? The Argument in Favor

Nov 12 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

Originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of The Middle East Quarterly . Should other Western states follow the Belgian and French examples and ban the full Islamic body and face-covering veil—or more specifically, the burqa and the niqab ? In other words, should the West ban any and all clothing which obliterates one’s identity? Most Europeans, according to recent surveys, seem to think so. [1] Still, significant numbers, especially in the United States, [2] and including quite a few feminists, [3] have viewed such a ban as religiously intolerant, anti-woman, and anti-Western. They maintain that the state has no place in deciding what a woman can and cannot wear—it is her body, not public property; [4] that given the worldwide exploitation of women as pornographic sex objects, wearing loose, comfortable, modest clothing, or actually covering up, might be both convenient and more dignified; [5] that because of the West’s tolerance toward religions, the state cannot come between a woman and her conscience for that would betray Western values; [6] and that women are freely choosing to wear the burqa. [7] Some Western intellectuals oppose banning the burqa although they understand the harm it may do and the way in which it may “mutilate personhood.” [8] Algerian-American academic Marnia Lazreg, for example, implores Muslim women to voluntarily, freely refuse to cover their faces fully—to spurn even the headscarf; however, she does not want the state involved. [9] The phrase “the Islamic veil” refers to variety of female clothing that differs from country to country and from century to century. The “veil” ranges from hijab, or headscarf, which does not cover the face (and is not the subject of this article), to a full head, face, and body covering (burqa, niqab). The Afghan burqa, for example, covers the entire head, face, and body and has webbing or grille work over the eyes that allows the wearer no peripheral vision. Another version of the burqa exists (or existed) among Arabs in southern Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, which covers the mouth, part of the forehead and lower jaw, and the head. The niqab can cover the entire face with a small space cut out for the eyes. It can also cover the lower face, but leave more room for the eyes. In Saudi Arabia, women wear the burqa and the niqab in a variety of forms. The chador (in Iran) and the abaya (in Saudi Arabia) are not synonymous with a face-covering. In Iran, women do go in public with their faces unveiled. Add-ons to the chador and abaya may cover the face, especially in Saudi Arabia. Many online websites offer examples of these garments. It is arguable that the full body and face cover is not a religious requirement in Islam but represents a minority tradition among a small Islamist minority; that it is not a matter of free choice but a highly forced choice and a visual Islamist symbol—one that is ostentatiously anti-secularist and misogynist; [10] that the Western state does have an interest in public appearances and, therefore, does not permit public nudity or masked people in public buildings; and that it is strange that the very feminists (or their descendents) who once objected to the sexual commoditification of women “can explain to you with the most exquisitely twisted logic why miniskirts and lip gloss make women into sexual objects, but when it comes to a cultural practice, enforced by terror, that makes women into social nonentities, [they] feel that it is beneath [their] liberal dignity to support a ban on the practice.” [11] To this may be added that face-veil wearers (“good” girls) endanger all those who do not wear a face veil (“bad” girls). But before addressing these arguments at greater length, it is instructive to see what political and religious leaders in the Muslim world, as well as Muslim women, have to say about the issue. The House of Islam Unveils Its Women The forced veiling and unveiling of Muslim women, both in terms of the headscarf and the face veil, ebbed and flowed for about a century as Muslim elites strove to come to terms with the demise of the Islamic political order that had dominated the Middle East (and substantial parts of Asia and Europe) for over a millennium. Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, for example, generated a new and vibrant brand of nationalism that sought to extricate Turkey from its imperial past—and its Islamic legacy—and to reconstitute it as a modern nation state. Iran’s Reza Shah distanced his country from Islam for the opposite reason, namely, as a means to link his family to Persia’s pre-Islamic imperial legacy, which is vividly illustrated by his adoption of the surname Pahlavi, of ancient Persian origins, [12] and the name Iran, or “[the land] of the Aryans,” as the country’s official title in all formal correspondence. [13] During the 1920s and 1930s, in this new international environment, kings, shahs, and presidents unveiled their female citizens, and Muslim feminists campaigned hard for open faces in public. They were successful in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran, to name but a few countries. As early as 1899, the Egyptian intellectual Qasim Amin published his landmark book The Liberation of Women , which argued that the face veil was not commensurate with the tenets of Islam and called for its removal. [14] According to photographs taken by Annie Lady Brassey in Egypt in the 1870s, Egyptian women wore heavy, dark coverings with full niqab (face covering) or partial niqab when possible. [15] In 1923, the feminist Hoda Hanim Shaarawi, who established the first feminist association that called for uncovering the face and hair, became the first Egyptian woman to remove her face veil or niqab. [16] In the following decades, the veil gradually disappeared in Egypt, so much so that in 1958, a foreign journalist wrote that “the veil is unknown here.” [17]

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France Bans Female Head Bagging

Sep 16 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections, Senate

Referring to the anonymizing invisibility of the burqa, Sihem Habchi, president of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS) declares: I’m Muslim and I can’t accept that because I’m a woman I have to disappear. She was commenting about the fact that the French have banned the Mohammedan custom of making women wear bags over their heads. We can expect leftists all over the world to rise up in outrage over this assault on a woman’s basic freedom to be forced to wear a bag over her head. Most particularly, we can expect establishment femisogynists to rush to the defence of Muslim bully boys that wish to retain their prerogative in this matter — a revolting betrayal which I pillory here . The ban passed in the French Senate on Tuesday by a vote of 246 to 1. (Who was that joker?) According to AP , the process is not quite complete as the law must now “ pass muster with France’s constitutional watchdog. ” One can expect some brain-bending debates to come as we are told that: In an attempt to head off any legal challenges over arguments it tramples on religious and other freedoms , the leaders of both parliamentary houses said they had asked a special body to ensure it passes constitutional muster. The Constitutional Council has one month to rule. The bill is worded to trip safely through legal minefields. For instance, the words “women,” “Muslim” and “veil” are not even mentioned in any of its seven articles . You’ve got to love that. Of course AP retails some of the standard evasions and deceptions: The legislation … risks raising the level of Islamophobia in a country where mosques, like synagogues , are sporadic targets of hate. Let’s see, subjugation of women is a “ religious freedom “: cultural relativism, check. “ Islamophobia “: deceptive anti-concept, check. Mohammedans are just as subject to aggression as Jews: moral equivalence, check. There’s nothing like an honest, consistent and responsible editorial policy. What a pack of cards those AP characters are. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the enforcement phase, assuming it gets there. It is, after all, a rather curious contrast. On one hand, Paris is badly disrupted by police no-go zones, where the Muslims own the streets. Almost as ominous, just recently, at Eid al Fitr I think (the end of Ramadan), the Muslim devout flooded the streets of Paris, sticking their rear ends in the air to pray, and disrupting traffic — the police were powerless, or at least unwilling, to do a thing. The Parisian authorities seem stymied. And yet here on the other hand, they pass a law against the full, face concealing veil. Curious don’t you think?

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The Great Asia Rebalancing: The Ghost of Huntington

Sep 16 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

I just wanted to flag two thought-provoking articles on the strategic shifts associated with China’s rise, which I’ve taken to calling, “The Great Asia Rebalancing.” The first is by Hugh White (excerpted from a longer essay here ), the second by Michael Clarke . Together, they offer fascinating insights into the strategic choices faced by two historic U.S. allies, both of whom face very real constraints on their ability to keep up with the dramatic changes shaping the global security environment. Clarke notes that with the end of any real security threat either originating from or menacing Europe, the U.S. has effectively reversed poles, becoming an Asian power first, and a European power only a distant second. That shift increasingly renders obsolete Britain’s defense identity of the past 100 years, namely being the trans-Atlantic bridge cementing U.S. engagement with Europe. But facing paralyzing budget constraints over the course of the next decade, the U.K. will have difficulty fielding the kind of expeditionary force that would allow it to maintain the same privileged relationship with the U.S. in the latter’s new stomping grounds, namely the Middle East and Asia. For Australia, as White describes, the shift in U.S. strategic focus similarly calls into question Australia’s security identity, but for the opposite reason. As America’s closest ally in the region, Australia could potentially take on the kind of role in Asia that the U.K. played in Europe. But that role would necessitate a commitment, in terms of both budget and skin in the game, that Australians are unlikely to be willing or able to bear. For White, that means that Australia’s major contribution in the Great Rebalancing will be to leverage its soft power so as to convince the U.S. to privilege Asian stability and order over U.S. regional primacy — essentially, to yield to China’s regional primacy in the interests of the greater good. Should the U.S. choose instead to contest China rather than make room for it, then Australia must consider opting out of the U.S. alliance, whether through armed or unarmed neutrality, seeking a regional alliance to counterbalance China, or even accepting China as the regional hegemon. For Clarke, the U.K.’s predicament means that it, too, must find ways to leverage its soft power — in the Middle East and South Asia — to advance its shared interests with the U.S. in order to maintain the relevance of that relationship. But in order to maintain its own strategic relevance, it must seek out new relationships to supplement its traditional, but increasingly obsolete or strategically impotent alliances. He mentions Japan, Turkey, India, Brazil and Australia as potential candidates. As critiques of White’s essay — by Greg Sheridan here and Graeme Dobell here (with White’s follow-ups here and here worth reading as well) — point out, the question all this raises is whether strategic policy can be as independent of national identity as strategic thinking can be. According to this view, the connective bonds of the Western alliance are civilizational ones that go beyond shared strategic interests. If so, that suggests these alliances are suicide pacts that must persist even when the strategic interests driving their individual members diverge. In other words, a Huntingtonian clash is inevitable. But while that may or may not be true of the U.K. and Australia, it is hardly true of the U.S., which has maintained solid cross-civilizational alliances with Japan and South Korea for as long as it has with Europe and Australia. I recently wrote that the U.S. should essentially accept White’s advice in Asia, as well as Clarke’s in the Middle East, in order to focus its strategic attention on Africa. That might be easier for us to swallow than for our Western allies.

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Georgia, Azerbaijan, Romania Sign Gas Transport Deal

Sep 15 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

Azerbaijan, Georgia and Romania signed a natural gas transit deal yesterday that will transport gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe, with at least one of the links in the form of LNG shipments. The deal augments Europe’s attempt to decrease reliance on Russian gas supplies. The project is expected to cost between $2.6 and $5.1 billion and will provide an estimated 8 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe annually.

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Kazakhstan, Ukraine to Discuss Oil Transport Deal

Sep 14 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev will meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yanukovych to discuss the resumption of a stalled oil transit project during a two-day visit to Kiev. The project, which would deliver Kazakh oil to Europe via Ukraine, came to a halt after the Ukrainian oil transport company involved in the deal broke an agreement with its Kazakh counterpart. The Kazakh company, KazTransOil, announced it would route its oil via Poland instead of Ukraine in February following the dispute, however leaders in Ukraine and Kazakhstan are working to resolve the issue.

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Ukraine Discusses Energy and Trade Ties with EU

Sep 14 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

Ukraine and the EU agreed to cooperate on modernizing Ukraine’s gas transport system, which transits 141 billion cubic meters of gas into Europe annually. Ukraine has also proposed a cooperation project with Russia, however the two sides have been unable to get past Gazprom’s ambitions to merge with Ukraine’s Naftogaz. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was in Brussels to push for a free-trade agreement and visa-free travel regime with the EU, meeting with the president of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. The stalled deals would represent the first step in what could eventually be a gradual integration into the union, although both sides have downgraded EU membership as a priority.

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BP and Off-Shore Drilling in the Mediterranean

Sep 14 2010 Published by under 2010 Elections

Reaction in the Mediterranean to BP’s plans to start drilling five off-shore wells off the Libyan Gulf of Sirte in October has been surprisingly low key given the British oil giant’s recent track record in the Gulf of Mexico. So far, the only group to express vigorous concern, at least in public, has been archeologists : The seabed off that stretch of the Libyan coast is rich in ancient sites and artifacts, including the remains of a sunken port once vital to Roman shipping. Yet there is nothing particularly reassuring about BP’s new $900 million operation, even as the company continues to deal with the multibillion dollar fallout of the Gulf oil spill. Drilling for the Libyan wells will start at a water depth 600 feet deeper than the Macondo well in the Gulf, which was some 5,000 feet. Significantly, Libya and Croatia are the only Mediterranean coastal countries that don’t have a contingency plan in place to handle an oil spill in their waters. The Libyan ambassador to Rome, Abdulhafed Gaddur, told Corriere della Sera , “We know what we are doing. We’ve been doing this for 45 years, without advice from anyone.” Libya is a major oil producer, but Libya’s oil drilling has been mainly on land, with some shallow off-shore exploration. Last month, Italy’s Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo did call for a moratorium on drilling by the 21 Mediterranean coastline nations, “to give Europe time to define a new and specific strategy for the Mediterranean.” But there has been no follow-up from her own government, and little reaction from other Mediterranean states. The Financial Times recently put forward one theory why the reaction in the Mediterranean has been anemic: “With cash-strapped governments courting Libya’s oil-fueled sovereign wealth funds, countries such as Italy, Greece, and Malta — all within a radius of 310 miles of the Gulf of Sirte — have refrained from commenting on Libya’s plans,” the paper said. But it’s not as though the threat of oil spills is new to the Mediterranean. What Homer called “the wine-dark sea” is arguably the most polluted body of water in the world. According to one estimate, 370 million tons of oil are transported annually in the Mediterranean — more than 20 percent of the world’s total. A lot of it is left there, too, in the form of spillage from tankers, refineries and pipelines — between 150,000 and 600,000 tons a year. Meanwhile, BP has said it will apply lessons learned from its Macondo well spill to this and other deepwater drilling operations. But how reassuring it that, given that nobody really knows yet what happened in the Gulf of Mexico?

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