“It (immigration) was a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country (Britain). It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.”
(Melanie Phillips, as quoted by mass murderer, Anders Breivik, in his manifesto)
Melanie Philips, a rabid Zionist and the author of “Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within” is not happy to be singled out by Andres Breivik in his 1500 pages manuscript. Are they suggesting that “my writing provoked the mass murder of some 93 Norwegians?” she wonders righteously on her blog. I guess that Phillips knows the answer, as much as she knows how to play with words. But I will use this opportunity to reiterate it for her, and for the rest of us — there certainly is a clear and strong resemblance between Breivik’s views and Philips’ writing. The most obvious and immediate comparison is that both oppose Islamic immigration and multiculturalism of course, but it goes much further in that both identify the enemy within the ‘left political circuit’.
Breivik cites Philips’ take on Labour’s immigration policy: “It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place.”
I should clearly state here that I do not think that Philips provoked Breivik’s murderous inclination. I also believe that Phillips is fully entitled to express her thoughts and ideas. Yet, it is surely reasonable to suspect that Phillips , amongst others, might have contributed to inspiring Breivik, ideologically and spiritually.
Though Phillips writes on her blog that the “the forces of spite, malice and venom (within liberal media) have been unleashed in a terrifying display of irrationality,” it is obvious that it is completely rational to elaborate on the significant resemblance between Phillips’ and Breivik’s ideas.
Jewish media outlets in Israel and around the world are already aware of the deeply worrying fact that Breivik wasinspired by right wing ideologies associated with Israel and Zionism. The JTA (The Global News Service Of The Jewish People) was quick to admit that numerous online postings, including Breivik’s, attack a “mishmash of anti-modern principles” that call for “the deportation of all Muslims from Europe as well as from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Whether we like it or not, this ‘mishmash’ of ‘global Islamophobia’ and Israeli expansionism is the true face of contemporary Zionism and Israeli ideology.
And yet, there is a further central question that no one in the media has addressed yet: how is it that Melanie Philips is getting away with openly promoting vile Islamophobia in our midst ? How is it that she and other Zionists prevail ,exactly where the EDL and the BNP fail? Why is Melanie Phillips a celebrity, whilst the BNP’s Nick Griffin is regarded as a vile racist, and a social outcast? Similarly, I find myself wondering what on earth the board of ‘progressive’ Guardian editors had in mind when they nominated the Zionist, pro-war and openly Islamohopbic Harry’s Place as one of their favourite political blogs in 2005 — bear in mind that The Guardian’s nomination was made at more or less the same time that the very same Harry’s Place blog won the ‘Annual Islamophobia Awards 2006,’ within the UK section of the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s ‘Annual Islamophobia Awards.’
I believe that the answer is devastating: within our so called, liberal democratic, allegedly ‘tolerant’ discourse — it is only right wing Jews who are entitled and allowed to spread xenophobia and hatred.
This is hardly surprising, because unlike contemporary Westerners, who seem to be more than confused by their colonial heritage and notions such as nationalism, racism, expansionism, biological determinism, religion, and self-loving, Israel and Zionism actually celebrate all of these symptoms, in the open. It is far from surprising then, to see Israeli flags and Jewish symbols popping up in many far right gatherings in the UK and in other European countries, because Israel, it seems, makes racism look kosher.
The shocking ideological resemblance of the thoughts and ideals of the fearsome mass murderer Breivik and mainstream Zionist advocates such Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and Harry’s Place should surely be a bright red alert for any sensible humanist. If we want to save our society from being dragged into a violence with no end, we must de-Zionise every possible aspect of our culture, media and political institutions.
The Office of the US Trade Representative, USTR, has refused an investigation into Israel’s theft and use of classified US industrial data.
In May, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, IRmep, submitted a 62-page petition to the USTR, seeking $4.6 billion in damages from Israel over theft of classified trade data, Business Wire reported.
The petition claimed that Israeli exporters’ access to data has materially harmed the US industry.
The USTR argued that the IRmep is not in a position to represent victimized US industry organizations.
It also denied IRmep’s argument that the industry data theft constituted an “act, policy or practice of … Israel that might be actionable.”
However, the USTR did not question the veracity of the IRmep’s evidence based on a series of FBI files.
The FBI files revealed that in 2009, an Israeli cabinet minister admitted to obtaining the classified information and even passing it on to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, for lobbying and public relations in the US.
American industry groups had provided the data in confidence to the International Trade Commission in 1984.
The Taliban leadership is ready to negotiate peace with the United States right now if Washington indicates its willingness to provide a timetable for complete withdrawal, according to a former Afghan prime minister who set up a secret meeting between a senior Taliban official and a U.S. general two years ago.
They also have no problem with meeting the oft-repeated U.S. demand that the Taliban cut ties completely with Al-Qaeda.
Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, who was acting prime minister of Afghanistan in 1995-96, told IPS in an interview that a group of Taliban officials conveyed the organisation’s position on starting peace negotiations to him in a meeting in Kabul a few days ago.
“They said once the Americans say ‘we are ready to withdraw’, they will sit with them,” said Ahmadzai.
The former prime minister said Taliban officials made it clear that they were not insisting on any specific date for final withdrawal. “The timetable is up to the Americans,” he said.
Ahmadzai contradicted a favourite theme of media coverage of the issue of peace negotiations on the war – that Mullah Mohammed Omar, head of the Taliban leadership council, has not been on board with contacts by Taliban officials with the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the U.S.
He confirmed that Mullah Baradar, then second in command to Mullah Omar, had indeed had high-level contacts with officials in the Karzai government in 2009, as claimed by Karzai aides, before being detained by Pakistani intelligence in early 2010.
And contrary to speculation that Baradar’s relationship with Mullah Omar had been terminated either by those contacts or by his detention, Ahmadzai said, “Baradar is still the top man,” and “Mullah Omar’s position on him hasn’t changed.”
Ahmadzai, who studied engineering at Colorado State University before joining the U.S.-sponsored mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, maintains close ties with Quetta Shura officials but has also enjoyed personal contacts with the U.S. military. He brokered a meeting between a senior Taliban leader and Brig. Gen. Edward M. Reeder, then commander of the Combined Special Forces Special Operations Army Component Command in Kabul in summer 2009.
The former prime minister’s account of that meeting in the interview with IPS further documents the Taliban leadership’s interest in entering into peace negotiations with the United States prior to the Barack Obama administration’s decision to escalate U.S. military involvement sharply in 2009.
A senior Taliban leader told Reeder at the meeting that the insurgents had no problem with severing their ties to Al-Qaeda, but could not agree to U.S. demands for access to military bases.
Ahmadzai said he negotiated the meeting with the Taliban leadership in the spring of 2009, at the request of Reeder, who had just arrived in Kabul a few weeks earlier. The process took four months, he recalled, because the Taliban leadership had so many questions that had to be addressed.
The main question, of course, was what arrangements would be made for the Taliban representative’s safety. In the end, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command facilitated the Taliban representative’s travel into Kabul, Ahmadzai recalled.
The Taliban official who met with Reeder and Ahmadzai in Kabul was a member of the Taliban Quetta Shura (leadership council) who called himself Mullah Min Mohammed for security reasons, according to Ahmadzai.
The Quetta Shura representative complained to Reeder about the failure of the United States to follow up on a previous contact with a senior Taliban representative, according to Ahmadzai’s account.
“Mullah Mohammed” recalled to Reeder that the Taliban had met two years earlier in southern Kandahar province with an unnamed U.S. official who had made two demands as the price for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan: an end to the Taliban’s relations with Al-Qaeda and U.S. long-term access to three airbases in the country.
“We agreed to one but not to the other,” the senior Taliban official was quoted by Ahmadzai as saying.
The Taliban leader explained that it had no trouble with the demand for cutting ties with Al-Qaeda, but that it would not agree to the U.S. retaining any military bases in Afghanistan – “not one metre”, according to Ahmadzai’s account.
The Quetta Shura representative then reproached the U.S. for having failed to make any response to the Taliban offer to cut the organisation’s ties with Al-Qaeda.
“You haven’t responded to us,” he is said to have told Reeder. “You never told us yes or no.”
The Taliban complaint suggested that the Quetta Shura leadership had been prepared to move into more substantive talks if the U.S. had indicated its interest in doing so.
Reeder, who has been commander of the U.S. Army Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg since July 2010, did not respond to an e-mail from IPS to the command’s Public Affairs Office for comment on Ahmadzai’s account of the meeting.
After the announcement of the major increase in troop deployment in Afghanistan, the Obama administration adopted a public posture that suggested the Taliban leadership had no reason to negotiate unless put under severe military pressure.
In light of the contacts between senior Taliban leaders and U.S. officials in 2007 and 2009, the Taliban clearly concluded that the United States would not negotiate with the Taliban except on the basis of accepting U.S. permanent military presence in Afghanistan.
After the 2009 meeting between Reeder and the Taliban leader, a number of reports indicated the Taliban leadership was not interested in negotiations with Washington.
Despite the apparent policy shift against seeking peace talks, the Taliban continued to signal to Washington that it was willing to exclude any presence for Al-Qaeda or other groups that might target the United States from Afghan territory.
Mullah Omar suggested that willingness in an unusual statement on the occasion of the Islamic holiday Eid in September 2009.
Then in early December, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – the official title adopted by the Quetta Shura leadership for its political-military organisation – said in a statement posted on its website and circulated to Western news agencies that it was prepared to offer “legal guarantees” against any aggressive actions against other countries from its soil as part of a settlement with the United States.
ATHENS, Greece — The flotilla was intended to challenge the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, a closure that has been decried as a violation of international law. While Israel prevented the boats from reaching the Gaza Strip, the initiative was successful in bring media attention to the closure.
But Israel remains victorious on one crucial front. A tremendous majority of those talking about the blockade — from the mainstream media to critics and activists — use 2007 as the start-date, unintentionally lending legitimacy to Israel’s cause and effect explanation, an argument that pegs the closure to political events.
According to the Israeli government, the blockade was a response to the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip. The stated goals of the closure are to weaken Hamas, to stop rocket fire and to free Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has been held in Gaza since 2006.
But the blockade — which the Israeli government has openly called “economic warfare” — did not begin in 2007. Nor did it start in 2006, with Israel’s economic sanctions against Gaza. The hermetic closure of Gaza is the culmination of a process that began 20 years ago.
It is important to note, first, the groundwork that made this process so devastating.
In her definitive piece on the economic de-development of the Gaza Strip, published in 1987, Dr Sara Roy uses data from the years of 1967 to 1985 to illustrate how the Israelis turned the Gaza Strip into a captive market and made Palestinian residents a labor pool dependent on Israel.
This was achieved, in part, by limiting Gaza’s exports and commercial production. These early restrictions (or economic warfare to use the Israeli term) predate Hamas.
When freedom of movement was limited during the First Intifada, Gaza was already pinched.
Sari Bashi is the founder and director of Gisha, an Israeli NGO that advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement. In an interview, Bashi remarked that the gradual closure of Gaza began in 1991, when Israel canceled the general exit permit that allowed most Palestinians to move freely through Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. It was then that non-Jewish residents of Gaza and the West Bank were required to obtain individual permits.
This was during the First Intifada. While the mere mention of the word invokes the image of suicide bombers in the Western imagination, it’s important to bear in mind that the First Intifada began as a non-violent uprising comprised of civil disobedience, strikes, and boycotts of Israeli goods.
So, that the general exit permit was canceled during this time suggests that this early hit on Palestinian freedom of movement was not rooted in security concerns. It seems, rather, a retributive act, intended to punish Palestinians for daring to resist the Israeli occupation.
Sporadic closures of the Gaza Strip started in 1993, Bashi continues, following a wave of suicide bombings carried out by Palestinians. Because a tremendous majority of Palestinians are not and were not suicide bombers, however, the restrictions on movement again constituted collective punishment for the actions of a few — foreshadowing the nature of the blockade to come.
Over the years, there were other suggestions that a hermetic, punitive closure was on the horizon. “Movement [was] gradually restricted,” Bashi says, adding that in 1995, the Israelis erected a fence around the Gaza Strip.
At the beginning of the Second Intifada, in September of 2000, Palestinian students were subject to a blanket ban, forbidding travel from Gaza to the West Bank. At this time, the Israelis also closed the “safe passage” — an armored convoy that facilitated Palestinian movement between the occupied territories.
As the Second Intifada wore on, so did restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom. In March of 2005, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and HaMoked penned a report titled, “One Big Prison: Freedom of Movement to and from the Gaza Strip on the Eve of the Disengagement Plan.”
That there was the need to write such a report — and that the NGO’s findings elicited such an alarming title — suggests that the blockade was well under way at this time, more than two years before the Israeli government would have you believe it began.
B’Tselem’s and HaMoked’s March 2005 report stated that only a small number of Gazans were being allowed into Israel to work. Tens of thousands had lost their jobs due to the restrictions on movement.
The 2005 disengagement supposedly signaled the end of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. But, in reality, it brought more Israeli limitations on the movement of both people and goods. While the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access — brokered by the US and signed by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority — should have eased those restrictions, it didn’t.
The number of day laborers exiting Gaza via the Erez crossing offers a dramatic example. In January of 2000, before the Second Intifada began, an average of 17,635 day laborers passed through Erez every day. In January of 2005, that number had dropped to 49.
Throughout the years there were upticks and downturns in the amount of workers exiting the strip. And in 2005, too, there was a brief rebound. But in 2006, the small number of Gazans who were still working in Israel were banned from entering, cutting them off from their jobs at a time when the coastal strip’s economy was thin to the point of breaking.
As a result of this recent history, the situation in Gaza today is stark.
The economy has been driven into the ground: some estimates put the unemployment rate at almost 50 percent; four out of every five Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on humanitarian aid; hospitals are running out of supplies; the chronically ill cannot always get exit permits, which can lead to access-related deaths; students are sometimes prevented from reaching their universities abroad; families have been shattered.
While the flotilla might have successfully brought the blockade into the mainstream consciousness, it missed an opportunity to really push the envelope by re-framing the conversation altogether.
The author is an Israeli-American journalist based in Tel Aviv.
Venezuelan foreign affairs minister Nicolas Maduro has criticised the U.S. government for having an “absurd and extreme” policy with regards to Venezuela.
Maduro made the comments following the publication of a report earlier this week which outlines the U.S. government’s tactics for dealing with transnational criminal organisations. The document cites Venezuela as a country that promotes a “permissive environment for narco-trafficking and terrorist organisations”.
Venezuela’s government has consistently maintained that the U.S. is singling out Venezuela for political reasons and accuses the U.S. government of having a hypocritical attitude with regards to its own record on human rights, terrorism and narco-trafficking.
“We strongly reject the steps taken by the ultra-rightwing, which pulls a good part of Congress and the U.S. government towards an absurd and extremist policy against Latin America and against our nation, hoping to attack and intimidate us,” said Maduro, who added that the U.S. had adopted a policy of “permanent aggression” towards Venezuela.
U.S Latin American Policy
Last Wednesday, the House Committee on Foreign Relations also voted 22 to 20 to withdraw this year’s funding of $48.5 million to the Organization of American States on the basis that the organisation is supposedly controlled by left-wing states such as Venezuela and Cuba.
The House Committee also passed multiple amendments to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, including; cutting off all U.S. aid to the governments of Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and to those countries that oppose the U.S. more than 50% of the time in the United Nations. Obama’s travel reforms allowing increased travel to Cuba were also retracted.
“The five amendments passed through the full committee will send the right message from our government through the region, in the absence of any coherent foreign policy from this Administration. Prohibiting taxpayer dollars from corrupt governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua; while helping our allies is the right approach,” said Republican Connie Mack, who spearheaded some of the amendments.
Mack was also influential in engineering U.S. sanctions against Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA in May this year and has consistently demanded that Venezuela be named on the “state sponsor of terrorism” list.
The Senate and the House of Representatives will have to vote on the amendments before they are approved.
This Wednesday Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez also condemned the U.S. government’s stance towards Venezuela after U.S. Military chief, Admiral Mike Mullen, expressed “concern” over it’s relationship with Iran.
“Go and worry about your own affairs, decadent empire,” said Chávez, who also dismissed U.S. conservative Roger Noriega’s claims that he is suffering from an advanced form of cancer and has 18 months to live.
“This is all just feeding the macabre show of the rightwing. Here, the sub-imperial rightwing keeps repeating that I don’t even have anything, that my illness is just a show, a strategy mounted by Chávez and Fidel Castro,” said the president.
“I will be standing as the candidate for the 2012 elections and I will win,” he added.
On 15 July, thousands of Israelis marched in occupied East Jerusalem to show their support for a Palestinian “state” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Portrayed by its Israeli organizers as a joint Palestinian-Israeli march and ornamented with the slogans of “shared struggle” and “solidarity,” the Palestinian participation in the event was however scarce — a fraction of those in attendance were Palestinians. This event came a few weeks after a similar march in Tel Aviv, and while the Jerusalem march garnered more publicity due to its location, both events expose the failures of the purported solidarity of the Israeli Zionist “left” with the Palestinians.
The term solidarity — much like co-existence — is so overused in the liberal Zionist discourse as to render it meaningless. The misconception of solidarity raises the question: what does solidarity mean and, more specifically, when can an act carried out by Israelis in the name of supporting Palestinians be considered an act of true solidarity?
Can every instance of Israelis flocking to the streets chanting “End the occupation” be blithely described as solidarity? Should every occasion of Israelis carrying Palestinian flags be ecstatically celebrated as a major boost for the Palestinian cause? Should Palestinians be simply grateful that, amid the increasing construction of settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the overwhelming surge of racism in Israeli society, there are still some Israeli voices willing to “recognize” a Palestinian state?
When persons in a position of privilege formulate and design a solution and impose it on a colonized and occupied people as the only viable solution and the “sole remaining constructive step,” as the 15 July call to action put it, this is not solidarity but rather another form of occupation. Solidarity means not telling people what you think their problem is, let alone telling them what you think the solution should be. Solidarity means not agreeing on everything or even agreeing on a fixed solution but fighting for a shared cause irrespective of the differences.
A quasi-state built on 22 percent of the land of historic Palestine is not what Palestinians have been fighting for over the last 63 years and presenting it as such strips Palestinians of their voices and of their right to decide their own destiny.
Many argue, though, that struggling shoulder-to-shoulder with Zionist leftists widens the support base for Palestine and provides Palestinians with an opportunity to debate and convince the other side. This would be true if Zionists viewed Palestinians as equal partners but they do not. The whole idea of two states for two peoples as the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse — extremely popular among liberal Zionists — is predicated upon isolationism, exceptionalism and Zionists’ sense of moral righteousness and superiority to Palestinians which grants them the legitimacy to determine the problem, the solution and the means by which this solution shall be achieved.
A “joint” Palestinian-Zionist march does not offer an opportunity to engage in a productive dialogue; it rather gives Zionists one more chance to marginalize Palestinians’ voices and lecture Palestinians on how they should resist and what they should accept.
Thus, these demonstrations that ostensibly demand equality in reality maintain the privileged status of Israeli Jews. And although such demonstrations are capable of drawing thousands of Israelis every once in a while, they do not really widen the Israeli support base for Palestinians. Instead, they reflect support for a “solution” that overlooks the refugee problem — the core of the Palestinian struggle — and fragments the Palestinian nation and dooms Palestinian citizens in Israel to perpetual inferiority and discrimination.
Solidarity is not measured by numbers; it’s not about how many people came to a pro-Palestine demonstration. It is about why those people came. Fighting alongside fifty Israelis who are truly committed to the Palestinian cause is, therefore, much more important and valuable than marching in the shadow of thousands of Israelis who think Palestine is merely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
On its Facebook page, the 15 July Jerusalem march was titled in Hebrew “Marching for the independence of Palestine” while the Arabic version read, “Together towards the liberation of Palestine.” There is a huge difference between liberation and an “independent state.” Freedom for Palestinians means much more than establishing a bantustan in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The inconsistency in the Arabic and Hebrew wording is telling but it is neither new nor rare for “leftist” Israeli organizations to address the Palestinian public in a different language and tone to that used for addressing the Israeli public.
Of the hundred or so Palestinians who attended the march, many may have joined because of the false perception that the aim of this march was to demand freedom, rather than to call for bogus “independence.” In addition, members of the Palestinian popular committees of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, whose neighborhoods face house demolitions and a silent, grinding process of ethnic cleansing, say that they felt they had no option but to join the march in order to draw attention to their struggle. But their plight was exploited by the organizers to advertise the march as a “joint struggle,” to score political points and serve their public relations purposes.
The contributions of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, the main organizers of the 15 July march, should not be diminished. The weekly demonstrations it has been organizing in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Lydd shed light on the struggle of the Palestinian residents against Israel’s systematic policy of house demolition and evictions. Leading members of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement and other Israeli leftist peace organizations receive vicious attacks from the Israeli far right, including death threats and accusations of treason.
This, however, must not place them beyond criticism. For all their activism, they have failed to fully embrace the Palestinian public and get it involved. Their demonstrations are dominated by white, secular liberal Zionists and the Palestinian voice, which they supposedly want to make heard, is inaudible amid a chorus of Hebrew-language chants about peace and coexistence. Even the slogans and the placards which were raised during the demonstrations were decided beforehand by the Israeli organizers, turning the protests into a tedious, painfully predictable and elitist routine.
In sum, Israeli “solidarity” is a double-edged sword. It has the potential of advancing the Palestinian cause and influencing Israeli public opinion and bringing the Palestinian struggle into the mainstream media. However, there is a great risk of groups hijacking the growing grassroots movement of Palestinian popular resistance under the cloak of solidarity and coexistence.
That there is a sweeping tide of blatant extremism among the Israeli ruling elite and wider society does not mean that Palestinians should gratefully cheer soft-core Zionist “compromises.” Solidarity is neither an act of charity nor a festival of boastful speeches and empty rhetoric. It is a moral obligation that should be carried out with full, unwavering and unconditional commitment.
Those who seek appreciation and gratitude had better stay in their cozy chairs in Tel Aviv. Attempts to exploit the Palestinian plight for political purposes and to turn the Palestinian cause from a struggle for human rights, justice, freedom and equality into a parade of fake independence and cliches must be called out and countered.
Budour Youssef Hassan, originally from Nazareth, is a Palestinian socialist activist and third-year law student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/Budouroddick.
JTA columnist Ron Kampeas has been a lone voice in sounding the alarm to his Jewish readers:
“Pro-Israel leaders in the United States, Britain and Australia are warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.”
The Murdoch scandal has been extensively reported as a telephone hacking police story. Only in the JTA, the Global News Service of the Jewish People, has coverage of the Murdoch News Corp story sounded the traditional Jewish mother’s alarm: “uh oh, this will not be good for the Jewish people”.
Kampeas assumes, correctly I am sure, that his readers do have a strong interest in Murdoch’s “sudden massive reversal of fortune”. They have reason to be alarmed.
Without Daddy Murdoch’s formidable pro-Israel presence, that pesky UN September vote could tilt toward the Palestinians. After that, Israel-Palestinian border negotiations might find a disgraced Murdoch-controlled British government eager to prove its independence. Without Murdoch, Fox News will have lost its most reliable news producer.
Thus far, the Murdoch “hacking scandal” has reached ten former staffers and News Corp executives who have been arrested by British police. They are accused of “hacking into the phones of public figures and a murdered schoolgirl, and paying off the police and journalists.”
These allegations threaten to severely weaken Murdoch’s media empire, an empire the Australian built which now includes The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Australian. Murdoch also owns two major tabloids, The Sun in Britain and the New York Post. In the US, Murdoch owns and virtually writes the scripts for the Fox News Channel. Until he recently sold it, Murdoch also owned The Weekly Standard, the neo conservative magazine he created in 1995.
Admirers of Murdoch’s aggressive take-over of news outlets have praised him for revitalizing the news industry. What they overlook is that his “revitalizing” has also lowered the standards of the journalism profession. It is the Murdoch style to view the world through black and white lens, “West good, Muslim East bad”.
For the Murdoch media empire, accuracy is never as important as racist sensationalism. Glenn Greenwald reports in his Salon column this week-end how both the New York Times and the Washington Post incorrectly blamed “Muslim extremists” for the Oslo, Norway, attacks, retaining on line, false racist accusations later shown to be incorrect.
The Post’s Jennifer Rubin cited The Weekly Standard as a source for her false reporting, a dive into the Murdoch pool of sleeze for which the Atlantic’s James Fallows calls her to task.
Before the hacking scandal broke, Murdoch had expanded his empire into the Middle East, choosing, as no surprise, to connect with a Saudi prince Aljazeera recently described as “ the 26th wealthiest person on the planet, as well as the richest man in Saudi Arabia, billionaire Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al-Saud, a nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia”.
Forbes magazine reports that Prince Walid has a net worth estimated to be at least $19.6bn.
Aljazeera also reports that the Prince is the second largest shareholder (at seven per cent) in News Corp, second only to Murdoch. How close are the two men?
During a recent interview on his yacht with the BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Walid declared himself to be a “good friend” of Rupert Murdoch and his son James, and staunchly defended the men amid the ongoing News Corp scandal.
It is noteworthy that, while Prince Walid is the second largest shareholder in News Corp, Murdoch is also a major shareholder (ten per cent) in Prince Walid’s Rotana Media Group based in the Middle East. As recently as this May, Murdoch’s conglomerate took a significant stake in Prince Walid’s film, TV, and music business, a move that deepened the financial relationship between the two men.
The Saudi connection, however, will be of little help in Murdoch’s dealing with the British and possibly, the American, legal systems.
Kampeas writes that “Jewish leaders” fear that any reduction in Murdoch’s media influence could “mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.” Those “Jewish leaders” rely on Murdoch to reassure them that all is well in the world of political Zionism.
His publications and media have proven to be fairer on the issue of Israel than the rest of the media,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “I hope that won’t be impacted.”
These comments suggests that what happens to Murdoch in the future is significant to supporters of Israel not primarily because of the alleged immoral or illegal violations of the public good, but because of the potential impact on the pro-Israel voice of Murdoch’s media empire.
If there are US media outlets, other than JTA, which have included Murdoch’s Zionist zealotry in their hacking scandal stories, I have been unable to locate them.
The Big Three PEPs, (Progressive Except for Palestine) Maddow, Matthews, and O’Donnell, are progressive voices on MSNBC-TV, but they will absolutely not touch the sins of Israel, the third rail of American politics.
Writing on Consortium News, Marquette Theology Professor Daniel C. Maguire offered a list of Israel-related issues where “Rachel Maddow Dares Not Tread”. He began with a gentle priestly admonition:
To MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: On your show of July 14, you spoke of your complete freedom to say what you want on your show and Bill Moyers gently demurred, speaking of restricting forces that hover over journalists. Bill Moyers was correct. I cannot believe you don’t care, but you are not free to address on your show the political influence of the Israeli lobby (which is far broader than AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
The Big Three constantly feast off the right wing shallowness of Fox news readers and commentators, but they do not venture even close to the linkage between Murdoch’s strong pro-Israel bias, and his threatened downfall.
Kampeas, on the other hand, is quite forthright about the linkage and its potential damage to Israel. Note how eager Kampeas is to cast Murdoch in a favorable light by citing “Jewish leaders”.
Jewish leaders said that Murdoch’s view of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors seemed both knowledgeable and sensitive to the Jewish state’s self-perception as beleaguered and isolated.
Murdoch has visited Israel many times, always meeting, of course, with Israeli leaders. He is equally well received by “Jewish leaders” in the US. In 2009 he was honored by the American Jewish Committee.
On October 13, 2010, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League hosted a dinner in Murdoch’s honor. At that dinner, Murdoch said,
My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” Murdoch said last October at an Anti-Defamation League dinner in his honor. “When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century. Now it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel.
Murdoch is popular with conservatives in the US but highly unpopular with the progressive community, as the Nation magazine’s John Nichols was eager to demonstrate in his recent story on the scandal.
Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch has manipulated not just the news but the news landscape of the United States for decades. He has done so by pressuring the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to alter the laws of the land and regulatory standards in order to give his media conglomerate an unfair advantage in “competition” with more locally focused, more engaged and more responsible media.
It’s an old story: while Murdoch’s Fox News hosts prattle on and on about their enthusiasm for the free market, they work for a firm that seeks to game the system so Murdoch’s “properties” are best positioned to monopolize the discourse.
Even with such a strong progressive as Nichols, there is still no mention of Murdoch’s strong Zionist passions in his story of the scandal.
When he testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May of 2003, Murdoch was seeking to secure ownership of the nation’s largest satellite television company. Nichols writes that Murdoch was pressing for FCC rule changes that would allow him to own newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same cities. His goal was to ease controls so that “one corporation could dominate television viewership nationally”.
At that appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Murdoch’s reception, according to reports at the time, were “just short of fawning.”
Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner, who was, at the time, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, greeted Murdoch by thanking the media executive for developing the Fox News network. The chairman added: “When my wife doesn’t get a good dose of Fox News every day she gets grumpy. So there are some of us who appreciate what you are doing.”
Progressive writers like Nichols want to make it clear that the right wing Republican party has a deep affection for a strong man like Murdoch whose media empire is dedicated not only to making money but to the promotion of a conservative ideology.
Joe Nocera was equally disdainful of Murdoch in his July 18 New York Times column:
You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London — a k a Scotland Yard — he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand. . . .
When the writers and editors of the late, unlamented News of the World were busy bribing Mr. Yates’s police officers, what they wanted in return was — gosh! — malicious gossip. When they were hacking the phones of royal family members and murdered teenagers, they were seeking, you know, malicious gossip.
When the recently arrested Rebekah Brooks called Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, to tell him that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which she then edited, was about to reveal that his infant child had cystic fibrosis — information that Brown is convinced came from a hacked phone message — she was telling him the paper was going to print a piece of gossip that a more humane institution would have let pass. She might not have viewed this as malicious, but the Brown family certainly did. . . . .
Laura Barnett‘s recent story in the London Guardian, describes Rupert Murdoch’s 102-year old mother Elisabeth Murdoch (shown at top with her son) as a mother who frequently stands in “firm maternal opposition to Rupert, 80, the second of her four children.”
In her native Australia, “Elisabeth is held in high esteem as one of the country’s most beneficent philanthropists,” a sharp contrast to the “sullied reputations of Rupert, and her grandson James”, both now under intense police scrutiny.
When Elisabeth’s husband Rupert, Senior, died from cancer in 1952, she turned her attention to charity work. She became life governor of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne and helped to set up the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.
Consistently, however, she has expressed strong disagreement with the policies of News Corp. Nine years ago, for example, she told Julie Browning, author of A Winning Streak: The Murdochs, that her son’s purchase of the News of the World, “nearly killed me”.
In the US, Fox News, and more recently, the once highly respected conservative Wall Street Journal, have emerged as “house organs” for right wing Israeli governments.
If Murdoch self destructs, Israel will have lost a major weapon in its hasbara (propaganda) arsenal. Whether that is “good for the Jewish people”, depends entirely on your definition of “good”.
The massacre in Norway brought to mind a past incident in Pakistan with some interesting parallels.
The background-
Quetta, in Baluchistan province, a peaceful pro-Palestinian rally is taking place. A large peaceful pro-Palestinian rally. As in Norway a pro-Palestinian show of solidarity and support for statehood!
An alleged suicide bomber shows up to bomb the area. And gunmen too. Reported gunfire both before and after.
Norway, not just an explosion, gunmen! Gunmen targeting children.
Yes, it does seem there were at least two gunmen in Norway. Minimally. There were numerous reports of there being more then one shooter. One in police uniform and one in a sweater. These reports will go away, so you can be spoon fed the lone nut scenario.
So in Quetta, as in Norway, we are looking at pro-Palestinian support resulting in a bombing, multiple shootings and much death.
Several hundred Pakistanis, mostly minority Shi’ite Muslims, were attending the rally in the southwestern city of Quetta to support the Palestinian people.
Witnesses say a suicide bomber detonated explosives shortly after the rally arrived at a busy crossing in the center of the city.
This reporter said he heard intense gunfire just before the powerful bomb went off, and there were dust clouds and fire around him.
Police are investigating the incident, and they are also examining television footage to identify armed men who were firing at people in the surrounding area after the bomb blast.
– Speakers at an International Palestine Conference in Pakistan pledged their support with the people of Palestine . The conference organised by Palestine Foundation Pakistan (PLP), a newly established platform in Quetta this week…
The conference was addressed by the leaders of Palestine and Pakistan and they stressed upon the Muslim world, specially the Pakistanis that it was high time they step up their efforts for mobilizing global support for Palestine’s liberation from Israeli occupation in order to avert Zionists’ plans of razing Al Aqsa mosque.
Representative of the Hamas movement in Lebanon and member of its political bureau, Osama Hamdan, who made a recorded address to the conference, emphasized that defense of Palestine was in fact defense of Pakistan because Zionists believed they could never successfully occupy Palestine without first destroying the ideological Muslim nations like Pakistan.
He stressed that Muslims must work to remove American pressure against Palestinian cause which had been the main stumbling block in resolution of Palestinian problem by ending Israeli occupation.
He underlined the need to observe Youm-al-Quds on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan following the appeal of Imam Khomeini.
And on the day of Youm al Quds… while Pakistanis are showing solidarity with their Palestinian counterparts a big explosion and gunmen.
Eventually a group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (L-e-J), claimed responsibility. This alleged Sunni group of terrorists is banned in Pakistan, for obvious reasons.
Sipah e Sahaba (Army of the Companions), best described as Sipah e Yazid (Laeen ibn e Laeen) is a Wahabi/Deobandi terrorist organisation which is being funded by Saudi Arabia and supported by the Wahabi ranks in Pakistan Army’s ISI. Lashkar e Jhangavi is the death squad of Sipah e Sahaba.
Why would the Wahhabi sect sow division amongst Shiite and Suni? What or whose agenda does that serve? Why do the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia take that position, divide to conquer?
Saudi Arabia is a well known western puppet nation, a despotic regime propped up by the US and willing to always support Israel.
It is known Saudi Arabia funnels lots of western money to all kinds of suspect activity. Quite likely to the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. None more infamous than the Afghan “freedom fighters” & Osama Bin Laden funded via Operation Cyclone
The agenda behind the Norway attack seems to be in line with the western colonialist agenda of keeping the Muslim population oppressed. The same can be said of what appears to be the driving force behind the incident in Quetta in 2010.
Funny how one recalls past history when an event comes along to spark the memory?
Who benefits by keeping the Muslim populations divided?
Certainly Israel, the US and the rest of the NATO world army nations.
Saturday June 11 – Day 41: […] I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail. He must ensure that I succeed with my mission and as such; contribute to inspire thousands of other revolutionary conservatives/nationalists; anti-Communists and anti-Islamists throughout the European world. – 2083 – A European Declaration Of Independence (big pdf) (page 1459)
I am pretty sure God, should that concept exist, did not understand what the terrorist Breivig “explained” to the all knowing.
That’s because the numbers are all wrong. Given the immigration rates, fertility rates of immigrants, their adherence to religion and the trends of those numbers there is no chance for Muslim immigrants to become more than a 6% minority in Europe within the next decades (they are now at 4% of which only 20% are observant). As other historic migrations have shown it is indeed quite likely that within one or two generations the offspring of the immigrants will be indistinguishable from the general population.
Besides explaining that the numbers are wrong we should also understand why there is increasing fear of immigration in large parts of “western” populations. It has, I believe, to do with the lack of wage growth (in the U.S. declining wages) in the past decades.
There is a legitimate argument to be made against immigration. Whenever a country’s economy is in an uptrend and unemployment goes down, business interests, which want to to keep wages from growing, argue for more immigration. Workers do have a legitimate interest in increasing their wages in times of economic upturns and therefore also a legitimate interest in keeping immigration down at least until long term full employment is achieved.
But hardly any political party, at least in Europe, still makes the above argument and I wonder why. Social-democrats and other parties on the left should have this issue at their core. Instead they try to catch up with the demagogues to the right which want to fight immigration because their followers perceive it as a cultural threat or use the “Muslim threat” to further Israel’s interests in keeping the support of Europe and the U.S.
The left should also be more careful in embracing “multiculturalism”. Yes I prefer to live in a multicultural neighborhood and I am all for it. But that pro-multicultural argument can also, via the business interest as explained above, be used to further immigration to suppress wages. Pro-multicultural should be an argument for integration, not to further immigration.
The economic argument against immigration must be put back into the discussion. It is logical, sensible and will keep the people, who I believe instinctively understand it, out of the cloud of the demagogues.
German Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz has publicly spoken about being subjected to electroshock torture, lethal beatings and humiliation during his years of unlawful detention.
In an exclusive interview with Russia Today news network on Monday, the former detainee said he was held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for five years before being released without charges.
Kurnaz went on to say that Americans have not apologized for his years of torment at the notorious detainment facility, and he doesn’t think they would ever do so.
He further explained that he was arrested in Pakistan in 2001, and turned to the Americans after he had visited a school run by Tablighi Jamaat — a religious movement hated by the al-Qaeda and the Taliban for its non-political stature — in the Asian country.
Kurnaz had earlier become familiar with Pakistan-based Tablighi Jamaat movement through its assistance to homeless people and youth, who had problems with drugs.
He added that when he got booked, Pakistani forces didn’t tell him anything about what was going on.
“They didn’t tell me that they were looking for terrorists or whatever. They said we’re just going to check your passport. I didn’t know at that time they get a bounty of $3,000 for each person. Not under my name, but for anyone turned over to the Americans as terrorist they get $3,000, and $3,000 in Pakistan is a lot of money,” Kurnaz said.
He noted that after being transferred to Kandahar in Afghanistan, he witnessed all kinds of things that one can imagine as torture.
“I saw many killed under torture. I was one of those who survived those kinds of torture. They used electroshocks on me because I would not sign papers.”
“I was forced to agree I was a member of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda and I said I’m not. Really I didn’t know at that time what al-Qaeda was, I didn’t know [anything] about al-Qaeda. So when they asked me about al-Qaeda and Taliban, I said I’m not a member of them. And they brought me papers, forced me to sign. I refused,” the former Gitmo prisoner said.
“That’s why they tried to make me sign by electroshocks. And another time they forced me by water boarding. Another time they hanged me on chains. I was hanging on the ceiling. They were pulling me on the ceiling with the chain, and until my feet were over the floor. After a few days I started to pass out, because in that situation I couldn’t eat or drink and it was freezing cold. It was wintertime and I had no clothes on,” he added.
Kurnaz said Guantanamo detainees were chained hand to foot in a fatal position on the floor with no chair, food, or water for 24 hours or more.
He also said that the youngest Gitmo prisoner was nine years old, and the second underage detainee in Guantanamo was 12.
Upon taking office, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order to stop military commissions in order to close down the facility by 2010. However, this has not happened yet.
A comrade in Pakistan who wishes to remain anonymous wrote me this:
“Cmd. Junaid is correct that the Westernized, English-speaking elite of Pakistan is obsessed with Saudi Arabia to the exclusion of examining the US. It’s true that they are generally dependent on the latter for funding for their NGOs, that is, when they are just not so colonized mentally to think that Western bourgeois democracy is god’s gift to humanity, so that they actively and aggressively write crap like this: — an article riddled with omission and inaccuracy. However, one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. What has to be understood is that Saudi Arabia and, importantly, UAE have interests in Pakistan that, while on the whole are subordinate to US imperialism, also have a logic of their own.
This has to be contextualized in US strategy in West Asia, including particularly CENTO. (see Hamza Alavi’s article on the Pak-US military alliance here:) Pakistan was seen as a mercenary for West Asian reactionaries. To some extent, it did fulfill this role — for instance, Pak General Zia ul-Haq who later was dictator for over ten years was in command of Pakistani troops in Jordan who helped massacre Palestinian freedom fighters in Black September. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has funded political Islam in Pakistan since at least the late 1960s as a response to increasing leftist sentiment, according to Vali Nasr. This has to be seen as part of the same strategy that led to Saudi support for the Ikhwan in Egypt during the same period, i.e., as a response to secular nationalism and leftism. In 1970s, millions of Pakistanis migrated to Saudi and UAE to work (in shitty conditions, but relatively better paying), so that Pakistan’s political economy is structurally dependent on that of the Gulf. (Still, 40-45% of remittances come from just two sources — Saudi and UAE.) Moreover, Gulf capital is aggressively looking at Pakistan as a source of raw materials (incl. now skilled labour), a destination for excess capital, and a large market — classical imperialism…
That said, Junaid is correct that political Islam that now ravages Pakistan is primarily a result of 80s policies of Pakistan’s ruling elites, the US and the Gulf regimes — but the basic network was put in place in the latter 1960s and 1970s. More fundamentally, Pakistan’s ruling elites have sought to use these political Islamists as buffers and proxies against Indian expansionism. This has other spillover benefits for Pakistan’s ruling classes, who seek to use Islamic extremism as a counterweight to the secular nationalism of oppressed nationalities (e.g., the Baloch and Sindhi) in Pakistan. This is also an important angle that has to be identified.
Moreover, Pakistani mercenaries are hired by regimes in Oman and Bahrain, and probably others, to suppress uprisings there. Pakistan Army (and civilian elites too, note President Zardari speaking in favour of “stability” in West Asia) is seen as a vital ally of reactionary regimes in West Asia. So we have to understand the back and forth here in order to assess possibilities for liberation in North Africa/West Asia as well as Central Asia/South Asia. Meanwhile, let us be clear that Gulf countries are built literally on the back of migrant labourers which includes millions of Pakistanis, who do not receive the proper value of their work and are subject to innumerable abuses otherwise. These things are intimately tied, and strategies for emancipation have to take this into account.
I don’t know what is the state of this debate in Arab intellectual and progressive circles because I don’t know Arabic. In Pakistan, it is highly underdeveloped in both English and Urdu, not sure about the other nationalities’ languages. Rather than looking at this political history and political economy — and importantly, situating it in the context of world imperialism in which the leading and directing force is the US — Pakistan’s Westernized elite is obsessed with Saudi Arabia for its “cultural” imperialism (via Wahhabism). This means that it is harder for them to attend classical music programmes, or to wear sleeveless tops, or to drink alcohol — while the vast majority of the country is facing the obscene violence of not being able to make ends meet on a day to day basis, which is a result of dependent, neoliberal development in the context of US-led world imperialism.
Given the parlous state of the US economy, discussions about climate change, carbon dioxide emissions, and cap-and-trade schemes have largely disappeared from the political discussion.
That’s a good thing. Why? Even if the US were to launch an attempt to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, as President Barack Obama has said it should, the rest of the world will keep using carbon-based fuels, and lots of them, thereby swamping any reductions that might happen here. But don’t take my word for it. You need only look at the latest data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy to understand that reality. To underscore that point, let’s try a short pop quiz.
Which country which has had the biggest percentage growth in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade?
A: Vietnam.
Next question: Which country has had the biggest percentage growth in electricity generation?
A: Vietnam.
Which country had biggest growth in coal use?
A: Vietnam
Indeed, over the past decade, only one country, China, had faster growth in primary energy consumption than did Vietnam. And Vietnam, where some 58,000 US soldiers died, stands as a proxy for many countries in the developing world. As those countries grow their economies — their energy use and their carbon dioxide emissions — the hope for any kind of a global cap, or tax, on carbon emissions becomes ever more remote.
To be sure, Vietnam’s energy use is a tiny fraction of that used by countries like China and the US. In 2010, Vietnam’s 90 million inhabitants consumed about 900,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. That’s a rounding error when compared to China’s consumption of nearly 49 million barrels of oil equivalent per day or US consumption of nearly 46 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.
Put another way, the average resident of Vietnam now consumes about 0.4 gallons of oil equivalent per day. The average American consumes about 6.3 gallons of oil equivalent per day, while the average Chinese uses 1.3 gallons of oil equivalent per day. In fact, the average Vietnamese now consumes more energy on a daily basis than does the average Pakistani.
But with an average income of less than $1,200 per year, Vietnam is still racing to catch up to the rest of Asia. And with an annual GDP growth rate of nearly 7%, Vietnam has every reason to continue burning as much oil, coal, and natural gas as it possibly can. (1)
Vietnam represents a whole class of fast-growing, populous countries where energy use is growing ferociously and that’s resulting in more carbon dioxide emissions – 33.1 trillion tons in 2010 alone, an increase of 28% over 2001 numbers.
Let me repeat that: over the past decade, global carbon dioxide emissions increased by 28%.
That huge surge in emissions occurred during the same decade that Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Prize, an Emmy, and an Oscar, for his work on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth. During that same decade, high-profile, heavily publicized meetings were held in Copenhagen and Cancun, where, finally, world leaders were supposed to agree on something, anything, that would stop the world from using hydrocarbons.
Alas, the Vietnamese never got the memo. Or maybe they just haven’t heard Gore’s speeches. Here are the numbers: Over the past decade, Vietnam’s oil use jumped by about 82%, following only Qatar (202%) and China (86%). Over the past decade, coal consumption in Vietnam jumped by 175%, outstripping the percentage growth in Indonesia (134%) and China (128%). And nearly all of that coal is being used to produce electrons.
Over the past decade, Vietnam’s electricity generation increased by a whopping 227%, the fastest growth on the planet. Again, the total amount of electricity used in Vietnam – about 100 terawatt-hours — remains miniscule when compared to US consumption of 4,326 terawatt-hours. But the essentiality of electricity to modernity is incontrovertible. The countries that can produce cheap, abundant, reliable electricity can grow their economies, educate their citizens and pull their people out of poverty. And those that can’t, can’t. And that’s why all of the past – and all of the future meetings of the UNFCCC – will result in failure to put a hard cap or effective tax on global carbon dioxide: the developing countries know that limiting their access to hydrocarbons will necessarily retard the growth of their economies.
Look at the rest of Asia. Even if we forget for a moment about the 2.1 billion people living in China and India, we can see countries like Indonesia, where electricity generation has increased by nearly 64% over the past decade. Or consider Thailand where electricity use has jumped by 55%. Or consider Egypt, where electricity use is up 79%. That has meant big increases in carbon dioxide emissions. Over the past decade, Indonesia’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by 40%, Thailand’s jumped by 51% and Egypt’s grew by 53%.
In December, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will meet in Durban, South Africa to hold yet another climate meeting. And it will fail just as all of its predecessors have failed.
Why? Coal use is soaring. The latest BP data shows that over the past decade, global coal use is up 47%, that’s faster growth than what was seen in electricity generation (up 36%), natural gas use (up 30%), and oil consumption (up 13%). Environmentalists around the world love to vilify coal. But for countries like Vietnam, Pakistan, China, and others, coal keeps the lights on. That’s certainly true here in the US, but over the past decade, domestic coal consumption has fallen by 5%.
Thus far, I’ve given you a lot of percentages. But focus, please, on these two: 27% and 28%. Since 2001, global energy use is up by 27% and carbon dioxide emissions are up 28%. Put another way, over the last decade, global energy use increased by about 53 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, that’s equal to about six Saudi Arabias’ worth of daily oil output. Energy use is soaring as more people from Hanoi to Hangzhou move into the modern world. And that means that huge cuts in carbon dioxide emissions – by 80% as Obama claims the US must – simply will not happen.
Like it or not, the world economy runs on hydrocarbons – coal, oil, and natural gas. And that will remain true for many decades to come. Energy transitions happen over decades or centuries, not years. Countries like Vietnam, China, and India, will never agree to any tax or limit on carbon dioxide. Nor does it make much sense at all to impose heavy levies on the US, and other developed countries. Why? Well, over the last decade, US carbon dioxide emissions fell – by 1.7%.
Every once in a while, we need to focus on the numbers and put aside the hype. The scale of current global energy use — about 241 million barrels of oil equivalent per day — is the same as 28 Saudi Arabias of energy production. The great cities of the world, whether it’s Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, or Durban, run on highly processed forms of energy: electricity, ultra-low-sulfur motor fuel, and natural gas. And they need lots of it.
Global leaders should give up their fixation on cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Significant cuts will not happen voluntarily, anywhere. Instead, leaders should be focusing on providing as much cheap, abundant, dispatchable power to their citizens as possible. And to see how that’s happening in the developing world, we need only look at Hanoi.
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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Melanie Philips, a rabid Zionist and the author of “Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within” is not happy to be singled out by Andres Breivik in his 1500 pages manuscript. Are they suggesting that “my writing provoked the mass murder of some 93 Norwegians?” she wonders righteously on her blog. I guess that Phillips knows the answer, as much as she knows how to play with words. But I will use this opportunity to reiterate it for her, and for the rest of us — there certainly is a clear and strong resemblance between Breivik’s views and Philips’ writing. The most obvious and immediate comparison is that both oppose Islamic immigration and multiculturalism of course, but it goes much further in that both identify the enemy within the ‘left political circuit’.
German Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz has publicly spoken about being subjected to electroshock torture, lethal beatings and humiliation during his years of unlawful detention.
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