Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

Enjoy the Internet, Before Obama Abandons It to the UN By Claudia Rosett

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Gordon Crovitz sounds an urgent warning about President Obama’s plans, during his final months in office, to fundamentally transform the internet. It’s an intricate tale, but the bottom line is that unless Congress acts fast, the World Wide Web looks likely to end up under control of the UN.

That would be the same UN that serves as a global clubhouse for despotic regimes that like to wield censorship as a basic tool of power. Russia and China occupy two of the five veto-wielding permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Iran since 2012 has presided over one of the largest voting blocs in the 193-member General Assembly, the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Among the current members of the Human Rights Council are Venezuela, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia — where blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced in 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, for blog posts the Saudi government considered insulting to Islam.

We’re talking here about the same UN which for generations has proven incorrigibly corrupt, opaque and inept at managing almost anything except its own apparently endless expansion and self-serving overreach. This is the UN of the Oil-for-Food worldwide web of kickbacks; the UN of the evidently chronic problem of peacekeepers raping minors they are sent to protect; the UN that can’t manage to adequately audit its own books, and offers its top officials an “ethics” program of financial disclosure under which they are entitled to opt out of disclosing anything whatsoever to the public.

This is the UN where a recent president of the General Assembly, John Ashe, died this June in an accident that reportedly entailed a barbell falling on his neck, while he was awaiting trial on fraud charges in the Southern District of New York — accused by federal authorities of having turned his UN position into a “platform for profit.”

So, how might this entrancing organization, the UN, end up controlling the internet? Crovitz in his Journal column explains that Obama’s administration is about to give up the U.S. government’s longstanding contract with Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which, as a monopoly, operates “the entire World Wide Web root zone.”

If that sounds like a good idea, think again. This is not a case of Obama having some 11th-hour 180-degree conversion to the virtues of minimalist government. It works out to the very opposite. Here’s a link, again, to Crovitz’s column on “An Internet Giveaway to the UN.” Crovtz explains that as a contractor under government control, Icann enjoys an exemption from antitrust rules. When the contract expires, the exemption goes away, unless Icann can hook up with another “governmental group” so as to “keep its antitrust exemption.” What “governmental group” might that be? Well, some of the worst elements of the UN have already reached out. Crovitz writes:

Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.” CONTINUE AT SITE

‘Who Did This to Us?’ Donald Trump asks that question. So do Putin, Erdogan and Black Lives Matter. Bret Stephens see note please

This is a good column with a cogent “tour d’horizon” of foreign and national events. Too bad it ends with a “tour de hatred” of Trump. The question “who did this to us?”- our domestic and policy failures- could swiftly be answered by ” President Obama and the corrupt candidate Hillary Clinton that you endorsed.” rsk

Bernard Lewis once made the point that there are two basic ways in which people and nations respond to adversity and decline. The first, the great historian wrote in 2002, is to ask “Who did this to us?” The second is, “What did we do wrong?” One question leads to self-pity; the other to self-help. One disavows personal responsibility and moral agency; the other commands them. One is a recipe for economic failure and political squalor; the other for success.

Mr. Lewis, who recently turned 100, was writing about the Islamic world’s destructive habit of blaming its ills on imperialism, Jews and other assorted bogeymen. But his test also applies to other regimes and regions, not to mention political parties and movements, from Vladimir Putin to Black Lives Matter. So let’s take a tour of the world.

Begin with Turkey. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is again at war with the Kurds, thanks to Ankara’s violent crackdown on Kurdish protesters in 2014. It has a terrorism problem courtesy of Mr. Erdogan’s previous willingness to turn his country into a jihadist entrepôt. And it recently had a coup attempt, the result of Mr. Erdogan’s suppression of his erstwhile fellow travelers in the Gulenist movement.

But don’t expect Mr. Erdogan to offer up any mea culpas. He’s conducting the greatest political purge of the 21st century, and has released 38,000 convicts from his prisons to make room for his political enemies. Ankara’s incursion into northern Syria—supposedly to fight ISIS—has become an opportunity to expand the war against the Kurds. The Turkish media is abuzz with “reports” that assorted American military men were behind the coup.

Mr. Erdogan is a “Who did this to us?” man, and it shows in Turkey’s fast descent from beacon of Muslim secularism and democracy to another paranoid Middle Eastern regime. It’s the same story in Iran and Russia, which was to be expected, but also increasingly in China, which wasn’t.

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS

“THE ARABS DO NOT SEEM BENT ON STARTING HOSTILITIES”

[Note by Tom Gross]

(This dispatch may be of interest to historians on this list.)

I attach two articles, both by Amir Oren, defense correspondent for the Israeli paper Haaretz.

The first piece, published today, reports on newly released CIA documents that detail how the agency got their predictions about the Yom Kippur War spectacularly wrong.

The CIA wrote in a briefing for the president on October 6, 1973 (the day that Israel was attacked):

“Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day… but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities… A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus.”

Within hours (maybe minutes, considering the time gap between Washington and Jerusalem) of that report being delivered, the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel in a massive offensive from both north and south.

As Haaretz notes: “The CIA’s big secret was that it didn’t have a secret. It knew very little from covert sources. Many of the clauses that appeared in the PDB [President’s Daily Brief] were taken from ambassadors’ telegrams, leaders’ speeches and newspaper articles.”

(Tom Gross adds: The CIA has on many other occasion, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, made ill-judged predictions and assessments.)

The second piece below concerns a rare interview given in October 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, by Henry Kissinger for an Israeli television documentary called “The Avoidable War”.

Kissinger attempts to persuade Israelis that the U.S. helped save their country during the 1973 war, although many Israelis doubt this and indeed argue that Kissinger actually helped the Egyptian forces prepare for the war by, among other things, pressuring Israel not to destroy the anti-aircraft rocket launching pads which the Egyptians and Soviets set up in the Suez Canal a few days before the Egyptians invaded, and which were not supposed to be there according to the Rogers ceasefire.

By the time the war broke out, the rocket launching pads were armed and it was too late for Israel safely to do anything about it.

ENGLAND’S COMMONSENSE SOLUTION TO MUSLIM EXTREMIST PRISONERS By: BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN

This author has argued that Europe’s Islamization — aided, abetted and enabled by the continent’s multiculturalist ideology — should serve as a warning and a lesson for America.

But when a European state does the right thing, we should take notice of that, too.

In the wake of the conviction of Britain-based Islamic supremacist preacher Anjem Choudary, an advocate for imposing Sharia law on Great Britain and supporter of global jihadism, British authorities are doing something that every Western nation ought to replicate.

Recognizing the problem of the spread of Islamic supremacism among prison populations, Secretary of State for Justice Liz Truss announced that the government would be establishing separate prison units for holding “a small number of very subversive individuals.”

Truss said prisons cannot continue to allow extremists to “peddle poisonous ideology across the mainstream prison population.” As the BBC notes, UK officials visited prisons in Netherlands for a close look at the program, as a similar “jail within a jail” program has been implemented by the Dutch.

Britain is right to acknowledge the spread of Islamist ideology in its criminal justice system and undertake a plan to remove the cancer.

Germany: Amidst refugee influx, child brides as young as thirteen BY Lisa Daftari

Lawmakers in Germany are under increased pressure to tackle the country’s growing trend of child marriages, renewing the debate over whether to allow Islamic Sharia law to supersede the country’s legal system when applied to its refugee population.

With the wave of more than 1.2 million migrants, mostly of the Islamic faith, coming in from Iraq and Syria, German courts are being forced to consider the legality of Muslim marriages that include girls sometimes as young as 13, Britain’s Sunday Times reported.

According to estimates, the number of refugee child marriages is currently at 1,000, although activists believe the figure is much higher.

In one case, authorities ruled in favor of Fatima, a pregnant 15-year-old Syrian refugee, allowing her husband, a fellow Syrian refugee more than double her age, to be accommodated in the same town so they could be near each other. Fatima told reporters that after her family escaped Syria for Turkey, she pleaded with them to marry her off to “the next man who is willing” so she could escape to Europe.

In Bavaria, there are over 700 refugee brides under the age of 18, including 160 under 16. Typically, German law does not permit marriage under 18, although with parental consent, the court can recognize the marriage of a 16-year-old.

In addition, the U.N. estimates that 51 percent of brides in Syrian refugee camps are underage, compared with just 13 percent at the start of the civil war.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under a barrage of criticism from European leaders holding her open-door policy on refugees responsible for the recent wave of critical terror attacks in Germany and throughout the continent.

Last month, within one week, there were four terror attacks in Germany.

When a court in Bamberg, Bavaria ruled in June to accept the validity of a marriage between a 21-year-old Syrian man and his 14-year-old cousin, the issue of child marriage was again brought to focus, along with the debate over the extent of Islamic law and customs that will be allowed by Western countries.

Cubs of the Caliphate’: Child jihadis featured as executioners in horrific new ISIS video: Lisa Daftari

The Islamic State has released a gruesome new video showing children executing captured Kurdish and Syrian soldiers.

Children of foreign fighters reportedly hailing from Britain, Egypt, Tunisia, Kurdistan and Uzbekistan pull out handguns and place them behind their captives’ heads before taking aim and opening fire in a video published by ISIS jihadis based in the group’s de-facto capital of Raqqa, Syria.

One juvenile executioner’s gun appears to lock up briefly, but he smiles smugly before coldly completing the execution. One of the victims appears to be a teen himself.

Known as ‘cubs of the Caliphate,’ children in the Islamic State have been assigned advanced roles in ISIS propaganda movies.

The Islamic State has also systematically used children both in active jihad and in recruitment practices, encouraging many of them to leave their families and join ISIS.

Fighting alongside adults, children under ISIS control attend child soldier training facilities and are used to carry out executions and suicide bombing missions.

At the end of the video, another set of executions take place. This time, the executioners are old men, likely further jihadi propaganda suggesting that from the young to the elderly, anyone can participate in jihad.

Moderates and Radicals in Islam and the Left by Daniel Greenfield

The core strategic problem we face is two conflicts with two ideologies that operate subversively until they are in power. That is, instead of stating their agenda openly, Islam and the left operate as false fronts maintaining a friendly moderate image while pursuing a far more radical agenda.

The distinction between moderates and radicals is at the heart of the debate about Islamic terrorism. Much as it used to be at the heart of the debate about Communism and its fellow travelers. Everyone will concede that there are indeed radicals, if only ISIS and Stalin. What they will deny is the extent of the complicity and, more significantly, the fact that the radicals were pursuing the same ends as the moderates, an Islamic Caliphate or a Communist dictatorship, only more rapidly and ruthlessly.

The thing that must be understood is that moderates do not disavow radicals. Rather they bridge the gap between the radicals and the larger society, justifying their ends, and eventually their means, while pretending to disavow them. Radicals reject any dialogue. Moderates emphasize dialogue.

Moderates will verbally reject the means with which an end is pursued. Accordingly they will reject terrorism. They may even claim to reject the ends, such as an ideological dictatorship, but they will, in good fellowship, ask you to accept their premise which inevitably leads to the acceptance of both the ends and the means.

For example, moderates on the left and in Islam will ask you to accept that terrorism is caused by American foreign policy. Once you have accepted this premise, then you have partially justified terrorism and paved the way for accepting an “Arab Spring” that eliminates the consequences of American foreign policy by properly Arabizing and Islamizing the governments of the region.

Nation Building or Islam Building by Daniel Greenfield

Nation-building has become a very controversial term. And with good reason. Our conviction that we can reconstruct any society into another America is unrealistic. It ignores our own exceptionalism and overlooks the cultural causes of many conflicts. It assumes that a change of government and open elections can transform a tribal Islamic society into America. They can’t and won’t.
But it’s also important to recognize that what we have been doing isn’t nation-building, but Islam-

building.

Nation-building in Germany and Japan meant identifying a totalitarian ideology, isolating its proponents from political power and recreating a formerly totalitarian state as an open society. That is the opposite of what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, never mind Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and all the rest.

We did temporarily pursue de-Baathification in Iraq. But the Baathists were just Saddam’s cult of personality. Saddam was a problem in Iraq. But he wasn’t the problem in Iraq. His rule was a symptom of the real problem which was the divide between Sunnis and Shiites. The real problem was Islam.

Because we failed to recognize that, de-Baathification failed. The Baathists just folded themselves into ISIS. The Sunni-Shiite war went on even without Saddam. Today Sunnis and Shiites are still killing each other in Iraq much as they had for a long time. We have boiled this war down to ISIS, but ISIS, like Saddam is just another symptom of the political violence and divisiveness inherent in Islam.

Instead of secularizing Iraq, our efforts at democracy only heightened divisions along religious lines. The “Lebanon” model for Iraq with power sharing arrangements between Sunnis and Shiites was doomed.

Iraq’s first election was dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. If that name rings a bell, it should. It came out of Iran. You know, the original Islamic Revolution. The “free” election had given a boost to an Islamic terror group whose goal was the creation of an Islamic State in Iraq.

The bloodiest days of the Iraq War actually came when two sets of Islamic terror groups fighting to create an Islamic State began killing each other… and us. We know one of those groups today as ISIS. The other group is the Iraqi government. And a decade later, they’re still killing each other.

Instead of nation-building in Iraq, we practiced Islam-building. Iraq’s constitution made Islam the official religion and the fundamental source of legislation. Its first real law was that, “No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.” The new Iraq we had built was an Islamic State.

Suicide bombing kills 60 at Yemen army camp No group takes responsibility for suicide car bomb at basic training center in Aden that also left dozens dead, injured

A suicide car bomb attack on an army training camp in Yemen’s second city of Aden killed at least 60 people on Monday, medical sources said.

A security official told AFP that the attacker drove his vehicle into a gathering of new recruits at the camp in northern Aden.

The assault killed 60 people and wounded 29 others, medical sources from the three hospitals where the victims were taken told AFP.

Security officials had provided an earlier toll of 11 dead.

The port city, the temporary base of Yemen’s Gulf-backed government, has seen a wave of bombings and shootings targeting officials and security forces.

Attacks in Aden are often claimed by jihadists from either Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, which have both taken advantage of the chaos in Yemen to make gains in southern and southeastern regions.

But no group claimed immediate responsibility for Monday’s attack.

Yemeni authorities have trained hundreds of soldiers in Aden over the past two months to as part of operations to retake neighbouring southern provinces from jihadists.

Earlier this month, Yemeni government forces backed by a Saudi-led coalition entered Abyan’s provincial capital Zinjibar.

Troops retook other towns across Abyan but have been met by fierce resistance in key Al-Qaeda stronghold, al-Mahfid, a town which lies further east, security sources said.

The militants are still present in areas surrounding the recaptured towns and control large parts of the neighboring Shabwa province, the sources say.

The Arab coalition, which backs the Yemeni government against Iran-backed rebels, has also been providing troops with air cover throughout their war against the jihadists.

The coalition intervened in Yemen in March last year and has helped government troops push the rebels out of Aden and four other southern provinces.

But authorities have been struggling to secure these provinces.

More than 6,600 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Yemen since March 2015 and more than 80 percent of the population has been left in need of humanitarian aid, according to the UN.

Fuel Choices Summit 2016 2-3 November, Habima Theater, Tel-Aviv

The time is ripe for a revolution in transportation, for a world free of oil, populated by clean, accessible and efficient means of transportation.

Join us at the fourth annual Fuel Choices Summit to explore and exhibit innovation in alternative fuels and smart mobility and bring our common goals to fruition.

Hosted by Israel’s Prime Minister, we will meet on 2-3 November in ‘Habima’ National Theater in Tel Aviv, Israel, for a dialogue about the world’s most forward-thinking approaches to transportation, cutting edge technologies and future business models, and to promote Israel’s ambitious goal of reducing 60% of the country’s oil consumption by 2025.

A gathering of the world’s most distinguished decision makers and business leaders in the field of alternative fuels for a series of on-stage interviews, panel discussions, case studies, and brainstorming sessions.A cutting-edge exhibition of new and upcoming start-ups, as well as car manufacturers and alternative fuels companies at the forefront of implementing innovation in transportation. An invitation-only Gala dinner hosted by the Prime Minister in which he will award the 2016 Samson Prime Minister’s Prize for a major breakthrough in the field of alternative fuels for transportation.