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By Elise Harris

Vatican City, Feb 17, 2017 / 08:20 am (CNA/EWTN News).- On Friday Pope Francis paid a visit to Rome’s “Roma Tre” university, stressing to students the importance of dialogue, listening and integration in putting an end to the fear that can at times be generated in the face of welcoming new migrants.

“Migrations are not a danger, they are a challenge to grow,” the Pope said Feb. 17, adding that “it’s important to think well about the problem of migrants today, because there’s a migratory phenomenon that’s so strong.”

“How must migrants be received? How must they be welcomed?” he asked, stressing that first, they must be viewed “as human brothers and sisters. They are men and women like us.”

Second, “every country must see how many they are able to welcome,” he said, noting that while it’s true that a country shouldn’t take on more than they have the capacity to handle, each one must play their part.

However, part of welcoming, he said, means “to integrate. That is, to receive these people and try to integrate them so they can learn the language, look for a job, a house, integration.”

Pope Francis spoke to students during a morning visit to Rome’s “Roma Tre” University, which has a school for Economics and Business Studies, with departments for architecture, economics, philosophy, communications, law, engineering, language and culture, math and physics, political science, business and humanities.

After arriving and greeting the rector of the university, Professor Mario Panizza, as well as the university’s General Director and Vice Rector, the Pope listened to questions posed by four students at studying in different fields, and responded with a lengthy, off-the-cuff speech.

One of the questions was posed by Nour Essa, a Syrian refugee who fled to Lesbos with her husband and young son. After spending a month in a refugee camp, they were selected to be among the 12 refugees who flew back to Rome with Pope Francis after his April 16, 2016, visit to the island.

Now, almost a year later, Essa has learned Italian and is completing her studies in Agriculture and Microbiology. She asked the Pope how to overcome the fear that welcoming so many migrants into Europe will destroy its cultural identity.

In his response to Essa’s question, the Pope stressed the importance of accompanying new migrants in a process of integration, and pointed to the fact that within three days of arriving in Italy, the children who came back with him from Lesbos were already in school.

When three months later he invited 21 Syrian children to join him for lunch at the Vatican, they all “spoke Italian,” Francis said. “The older ones a bit less, but they all spoke it. They went to school and learned it. This is integration.”

He noted that the majority of migrants who came back that day have both a job and a person to help them integrate into the culture by providing “open doors” to find work, school and housing, voicing his desire for more organizations dedicated to helping in the process of integration.

On the point of the fear of losing one’s cultural identity by welcoming so many migrants, the Pope said he often asks himself “how many invasions has Europe had since the beginning? Europe was made from invasions, migrants…it was made like this in an artisanal way.”

Migrants, he said, bring their own culture which is “a richness for us,” but must also receive part of the culture they come to so that a real “exchange of cultures” takes place.

“Yes, there is fear, but the fear is not only of migrants,” but of those who commit crimes, he said, and, pointing to the bombing of an airport and subway in Belgium last year, noted that the persons who carried out the attacks “were Belgians, born in Belgium.”

They were the children of migrants, but migrants that had been “ghettoized,” rather than integrated, he said, explaining that fostering respect for one another can “take away” this fear of different cultures.

In addition to responding to Essa’s question, Pope Francis also took questions from three other students studying in different fields at the university.

The students were Roman-born Niccolo Romano, who asked about how universities can work maintain their “communis patria,” or “common homeland” for all; Giulia Trifilio, who asked the Pope what “medicine” is needed in order to combat violent acts in the world; and Riccardo Zucchetti, who asked how students can work to constructively build society in an increasingly changing and globalized world.

In response to Trifilio’s question on how to put an end to the violent acts humanity at times seems prone to throughout the world, the Pope spoke about the importance of language and “the tone” that’s frequently used, even in casual conversations.

Whether at home or on the street, many people today “yell,” he said, explaining that unfortunately “there is also violence” in the way people express themselves.

He also pointed to the arbitrary greetings between even family members, who in a morning rush pass by with a quick, yet meaningless “hey” while on the way out the door. Even these seemingly small things, he said, “make violence” because they make the other person “anonymous,” taking away their name.

“There’s a person in front of us with a name, but I greet you like you are a thing,” he said, noting that this starts at the interpersonal level, but “grows and grows and grows and becomes global.”

“No one can deny that we are at war. This is a third world war in pieces,” Francis said, adding that “we need to lower the tone a bit; to speak less and listen more.”

As a remedy, the Pope suggested the ability to listen and receive what the other person is saying as the first “medicine” to take, with dialogue as a second.

“Dialogue draws near, not only to the person, but hearts. It makes friendship. It makes social friendship,” he said, adding that where there is no dialogue, “there is violence.”

“I spoke of war. It’s true, we are at war, but wars don’t start there, they start in your heart, in our hearts, when I am not able to open myself to others, to respect others, to speak with others, to dialogue with others, war starts there.”

This must also be practiced at the university level, he said, explaining that a university must be a place where discussion takes place among students, professors and groups. If this doesn’t happen, “it isn’t a university.”

Pope Francis cautioned against what he termed as “university of the elite,” or the so-called “ideological universities” where students go, are taught one line of thinking, and then prepared “to make an agenda of this ideology” in society.

“That is not a university,” he said. “I go to university to learn, yes, but to learn to live the truth, to seek the truth, to seek goodness, to live beauty and seek beauty. This is done together on a university path that never finishes.”

In response to the question about building up society amid rapid changes and increasing globalization, the Pope said an important lesson that has to be learned is to “take like as it comes.”

With so many changes mean there is a great need for flexibility, he said, using the example of being ready to catch a ball from whatever direction it comes in.

He also emphasized the importance of unity, which is “totally different than uniformity.” Unity, he said, means “to be one among differences. Unity in diversity.”

Since we are living in “an age of globalization,” Francis said it would be “a mistake” to think of globalization like a ball in which each point is equally far from the center.

If organized this way, “everything is uniform” and there is no differences, he said, but stressed that “this uniformity is the destruction of unity, because it takes away the possibility of being different.”

On the rapid pace of communications in modern society, Pope Francis recognized that “an acceleration” is taking place, and pointed to the rule of the Law of Gravity, that as an object falls faster as it nears its destination.

“Today communications are like this with the danger of not having the time to stop oneself, to think, to reflect, and this is important, to get used to communicating, but without the sensation of ‘rapidity,’” he said.

At times communication goes so fast that it “can become liquid, without consistency,” so the challenge is one of “transforming this liquidity into concreteness,” Francis said, explaining that same concept also goes for the economy.

Using “concreteness” as his keyword for the point, the Pope said the “drama of today’s economy” is that there is a liquid economy, which leads to “a liquid society” with a high rate of unemployment.

Francis pointed to several European countries as examples and, without naming them, noted that specifically youth unemployment rates in several vary from 40-60 percent.

“I ask you the question: our dear mother Europe, the identity of Europe, how can one think that developed countries have youth unemployment so strong?” he said, explaining that the numbers are evidence that “this liquidity of the economy takes the concreteness of work, and takes the culture of work because one can’t work.”

In the absence of work, youth “don’t know what to do” and in the end fall into addictions or suicide, he said, adding that according to what he’s heard, “the true statistics of youth suicide are not published. The publish something, but it’s not the true statistics.”

Some youth even fall into terrorist groups, telling themselves “at least I have something to do that gives meaning to my life,” the Pope observed, adding that “it’s terrible.”

In order to solve the problems created by this type of “liquid economy,” concreteness is needed, he said, “otherwise it can’t be done.”

Universities must be the place in which this happens, he said, telling the students that “in the dialogue among you, also look for solutions to propose. The real problems against this liquid culture.”

17 February 2017

By Waris Mazhari

In a well-known verse in the Quran, God says:

“O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and  have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all-knowing, all-aware.”

This Quranic verse mentions that all human beings are children of the same set of primal parents. Thus, they all have, by birth itself, an equal status. They also possess a similar nature (fitrah), the nature on which God has created every human being. In the Islamic understanding, as we learn from this verse, the only criterion for distinguishing between people in terms of their nobility is their level of taqwa, i.e. God-consciousness. Taqwa is the only source of dignity and superiority in the sight of God.

Another fact that this Quranic verse highlights is that God has divided the whole of humanity into groups and tribes, and this is with the purpose that they should know each other.

The question here arises as to what it means ‘to know each other’?

Knowing each other is a means for people from diverse backgrounds, including religious backgrounds, to come closer to each other and assist one another to achieve common goals. This verse can also be read, then, as a call for interfaith and inter-community understanding and cooperation.

By underscoring the fact that human diversity is a God-given phenomenon, the Quran teaches us about the importance of ‘unity in diversity’. Nature dislikes uniformity because the universe that God has created is characterized by diversity and pluralism. The Quran very beautifully says:

“Did you not see how God sent down water from the sky with which We bring forth fruit of diverse colours. In the mountains there are streaks of various shades of white and red, and jet-black rocks; in like manner, men, beasts, and cattle have their diverse hues too. Only those of His servants, who possess knowledge, fear God. God is almighty and most forgiving (35:27-28).

Taking a cue from Nature, which displays incredible harmony amidst immense diversity, human beings are required to act in accordance with the principle of respecting the unity of human beings amidst diversity, which is only truly possible if we consider all of humankind as one vast family of  God.

In my view, when the above-quoted Quranic verse talks about people from different social groups getting to know one another, this is to be understood not simply in the sense of gaining information about one another—or information just for information sake. Rather, it could also include learning about and from each other’s religious, spiritual, social and cultural traditions in order to benefit from them.

In this regard, it is instructive to note that the Quran says that the Torah contains ‘guidance and light’ (5:44). Those who have read the Quran would know that it refers to the Bible in several places. Many famous commentators on the Quran draw on the Bible in explaining several Quranic verses. Likewise, it is worth mentioning here that the Quran (26:196) talk about zubur al-awwaleen, which means ancient books. Some Muslim scholars point out that this might also include Hindu scriptures, which according to Hindu belief contain Divinely-revealed knowledge and are called in sruti in Vedic terminology. Like the Bible and other religious books, the Vedas and Upanishads also contain many teachings similar to those in the Quran.

These similarities in different scriptures speak of the same Divine Source. It has been explained in several verses in the Quran that to every community God has sent a ‘guide’ (hadin) and a ‘warner’ (nazeer), who received revelations from God. Many of these revelations may have not have been protected from corruption over time, but one cannot over look the wisdom and insight they still contain. This treasure of wisdom is a collective or universal human inheritance, which every human being deserves to avail of. And that is in accordance with the Islamic spirit. In this regard, it is instructive to recall a well-known hadith, reported by Abu Huraira:

The Messenger of God said, “The wise saying is the lost property of the believer, so wherever he finds it then he has a right to it.”(Source: Tirmidhi)

This is a very valuable and insightful tradition. It implies that no community has a monopoly over wisdom and that everyone is entitled to wisdom wherever he or she may find it.

In this regard, it is striking to consider the tendency among many religionists to benefit as much as they can from other communities’ worldly knowledge and experiments but to avoid doing the same when it comes to their spiritual experiences and wisdom. This lamentable tendency can be overcome if we train our minds to realise that the essence of every religion is ethics and moral values and hence that they are not as different from each other as many people sadly think. If almost every religion stresses ethical values and moral character, there is really no reason why people of different faiths should think of religions other than the one they claim to follow as something totally contrary to their own.

A number of verses in the Quran and many hadith reports talk about ‘wisdom’ (hikmah). Now, what exactly does this word mean? Can we, Muslims, attempt to discover hikmah in the other religious and spiritual traditions as well? Can we spiritually benefit from this wisdom and insight that is found in other religious traditions? Some sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, irrespective of how reliable they may be, do not allow Muslims to come into touch with scriptures of other religions. But here it needs to be considered that even the traditionalist ulema are unanimous on the point that this relates to some specific circumstances when the revelation of the Quran had not been completed and the first generation of Muslim community was yet to be fully educated and trained. In this phase of early Islamic history, even Muslims were asked not to gift or carry the Quran to people of other faiths. This was similar to the prohibition on writing down of hadith reports for a certain period of time, for fear that they may be mixed with the Quranic revelations that were so far not compiled. The prohibition on reading scriptures of other religions at this time must be seen in that particular context, because those who had become Muslims had only recently embraced the faith and needed to grow fully in it. The restriction must then be seen as contextual, not as a general rule for all times.

While talking about the responsibilities of the prophets of God, the Quran (2:129) specially states that they teach people the Book and wisdom (hikmah). Commentators on the Quran have defined the word hikmah in many ways. I firmly believe that this word also includes the spiritual insights and wisdom that are contained in other religious scriptural traditions and transmitted through the generations. They nurture the human soul, illuminate the human mind and expand our spiritual experiences. They are a common human legacy and we should not remain deprived of it. In this regard, it is important to note that some commentators on the Quran suggest that hikmah includes, among other things, the Jewish and Christian scriptures—or what are conventionally called the Old and the New Testaments. In further support of our argument, it is also interesting to note that Ali bin Abi Talib, the forth Caliph, has been quoted as saying that one should seek knowledge even though it is from polytheists (Source: Jame Bayan ul-Ilm).

Some Muslim scholars expound the view that anything not found in established Islamic tradition is mere ‘ignorance’ (jahiliyyah) and hence, that there is no need for Muslims to study or benefit from it. I do not agree with this. Here the concept of jahiliyyah requires to be understood in proper sense. It is not right to think that every single thing related to the pre-Islamic period is absolutely wrong and the Prophetic mission was aimed at putting an end to it entirely, as is widely interpreted. The fact is that many social and cultural traditions in the jahiliyyah period possessed common human and moral value, which, instead of being eliminated, was promoted by Islam. One saying of the Prophet appropriately proves this fact. The Prophet said: “People are like gold and silver; those who were best in Jahiliyyah [the pre-Islamic Period of Ignorance)] are best in Islam, if they have religious understanding”(Source: Bukhari).

A story related to the Prophet make this point even more clear and visible. Once, a group of people called on the Prophet and informed him that they had learned five moral teachings in the jahiliyyah period. When the Prophet asked them to elaborate, they said: “Expressing thanks to God when hope for achieving something is fulfilled, exercising patience in the time of tribulation, firmness in front of fighting enemies, reliance on destiny and exercising patience with regard to enemies (not taking revenge) and rejoicing in grief and misfortune.” It was so amazing for the Prophet that he said: “How much wise and knowledgeable they are! They are talking like a prophet’’. (Source: Jame ul-Masaneed wa al-Sunan).

It can be inferred from this Prophetic report that wisdom and virtue are definitely not a monopoly of a certain religion or community.

Something being good does not inevitably need to be proved to be so from a religious text if it is not incompatible with reason and human nature and is not harmful to human society. If something promotes human causes and proves useful for social and human welfare, it can be availed of by everyone, irrespective of where it is found and who finds it. The Prophet is reported to have said that the best of people are those who benefit humankind (Source: Kanz ul-Ummal). This clearly indicates that what Islam teaches is not odd and unusual. Apart from a set of beliefs, it is essentially the same moral teachings and guidance of all the prophets, religious leaders and sages (rishi munis) who have appeared among the human race ever since it came to this planet. That said, it is also important to keep in mind that not everything in every culture or religious tradition is good, laudable or worthy of emulation. Benefiting from others does not mean blindly imitating them. In learning and imbibing from others one must make sure the norms and teachings of one’s own faith are preserved.

It is a well-established fact that what is called the ‘Muslim Golden Age’ was indebted to several religious and cultural traditions, including the Greek, Iranian, Indian, Coptic, Nestorian etc..This clearly shows how willingness to learn good things from other peoples and cultures is itself a good thing and is not something banned in Islam. The Sufistic tradition is the best example of bringing the best human values together in itself, for it has borrowed from several religious, non-religious and philosophical traditions, combining them with the spirit of Islam. Authentic Sufism reflects this inclusive nature of Islam and its true teachings of love for the whole of humanity.

Muslims believe that Islam embodies Truth. But that does not necessarily mean that everything pertaining to any other religion is false or ‘un-Islamic’. We should not deny the goodness in them and their great contributions to human society. Rather, we should readily acknowledge this goodness. I believe Islam, far from preventing its followers from benefiting from it, actually encourages it.

15 February 2017

By Adnan Tabatabai

As much as the United States’ new tone toward Iran is worrisome, and as much as the Islamic Republic’s Jan. 29 ballistic missile test is disconcerting, Tehran and Washington are unlikely to collide directly.

In both capitals, decision-makers see an urgent need for harsh rhetoric — albeit for different reasons. The Iranians see a need to show resilience vis-a-vis an explicitly hostile US administration. Meanwhile, the latter wants to make clear to both its domestic and international audience that the Obama era is over. This involves signaling that the easing of tensions with Iran has ended. It also involves reassuring regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel that Washington would not engage in a rapprochement with Tehran at their expense.

Indeed, it should not come as a surprise that US national security adviser Michael Flynn’s warning that Iran “is officially on notice” came shortly after lengthy phone calls between the White House and both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud.

But escalating rhetoric aside, the reality is that US policy toward Iran has largely remained intact.

In the 13 months since the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran has repeatedly conducted ballistic missile tests. And it is entitled to do so. In UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2231, which endorses the nuclear deal, Iran is “called upon” not to carry out tests of missiles “designed” to carry nuclear weapons. There is no legally binding prohibition of such launches, unlike in UNSCR 1929 — the last and most harsh UN resolution against Iran over its nuclear program — which is superseded by UNSCR 2231.

To be clear, the nuclear deal does not address Iran’s missile program. Moreover, the world powers with which Iran negotiated UNSCR 2231 — apart from the United States — did not display any appetite to insert legally binding text on Iran’s missile tests.

Thus, as provocative as the missile tests may be, it is hard to see them providing a legal basis for the United States to spearhead new multilateral sanctions, leaving Washington with the option of adopting unilateral sanctions, which it did on Feb. 3.

While it took the Trump administration less than two weeks to slap sanctions on Iran, the idea that there was a sanctions freeze in Obama’s final year in office is inaccurate. In fact, the latest sanctions were prepared by the previous administration.

In January 2016, not long after the implementation of the nuclear deal, changes were made to the Visa Waiver Program, which excluded Iranian dual nationals and anyone who had visited Iran in the preceding five years. Moreover, last December, Obama refrained from moving to veto the congressional vote on a 10-year extension of the Iran Sanctions Act. While these sanctions are unrelated to Iran’s nuclear program, they undoubtedly undermine the impact of the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions.

Iran has reacted to the escalating rhetoric and sanctions by stressing that its missile program is defensive in nature, promising retaliatory sanctions, and by carrying out new military drills.

Yet, there is little incentive for Iran to greatly alter the status quo. Iranian leaders see the JCPOA as much more than just about the United States. It is an international arrangement with world powers — including the European Union, which Iran holds in high regard as a multinational institution. They see this arrangement as beneficial to Iran’s economic and security calculations. Foreign investment, albeit limited due to remaining US sanctions, is trickling in. The EU oil embargo has been lifted and major contracts in the area of petrochemicals, civic aviation and transport are increasingly sealed. Additionally, the JCPOA provides a sense of security to Iran. It is highly unlikely for any party to the agreement to green-light military action by another party against Iran. Hence, Iran has little incentive not to abide by the nuclear deal.

As such, while the cycle of escalating rhetoric is discomforting at a time of deep uncertainty and conflict in the Middle East, it is important to see that it has its limits. Short of outright regime change, the United States has in fact rather limited options to weaken and contain Iran.

Given its experiences in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, it is unlikely that the United States will launch full-scale unilateral military action against Iran. It could move to arm a third country to hit Iranian infrastructure. This was tried with Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Today, Saudi Arabia could be such a third country. But given the lack of appetite in Riyadh for direct confrontation with Tehran, and considering the downward spiral in the Saudi military intervention against Yemen — the poorest country in the region — it is unthinkable that Saudi Arabia would take such a step. Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iranian nuclear sites. But considering the low chances of success and the potentially dire consequences, including retaliatory attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, it can be argued that such threats primarily serve a political purpose.

Less costly measures aimed at weakening and containing Iran, such as sanctions, have been tried and tested. The Obama administration managed to put in place an unprecedented multilateral sanctions regime targeting Tehran. Yet, it was under those very sanctions that Iran’s nuclear program evolved into what the international community came to perceive as a major threat to global security. Consequently, the Obama administration tried diplomacy. And it worked. The JCPOA reduced the capacity and increased the transparency of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions. And as the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified, the deal is working.

Bearing in mind the nuclear deal is fulfilling its objectives, the limited military options to contain Iran, and perhaps most of all the likely US inability to forge an international consensus against Iran in case of its unilateral breach of the accord, the security establishments of both Israel and Saudi Arabia have publicly urged Washington not to dismantle the JCPOA.

While reveling in the newfound reassurances from Washington, it can thus be argued that Riyadh and Tel Aviv understand the limits of the cycle of escalation and mostly take solace in Trump’s unwillingness to realize their nightmares under Obama.

In this vein, the Trump administration can be expected to do whatever it can to minimize the economic benefits Iran will reap under the JCPOA. It will likely seek to discredit Iran’s regional policies to prevent the normalization of the Islamic Republic’s ties with the world, while also diminishing the political capital the deal affords Iran. But it will do this short of breaching the accord.

Thus, while likely to squabble about respective obligations and further drift away from rapprochement, neither Iran nor the United States has the incentive or ability to take the new cycle of tension to a military confrontation.

Adnan Tabatabai is co-founder and CEO of the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO). As a Berlin-based political analyst on Iranian affairs, he is consulted by the German Federal Foreign Office, members of the German Bundestag, political foundations as well as journalists and authors. He writes analyses and commentaries on Iran for numerous German and English media outlets.

9 February 2017

By Ramzy Baroud

Within days of US President Donald Trump being sworn in, the Israeli government announced the approval of around 2,500 new housing units.

Within the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, the number of new housing units, all to be built illegally on Palestinian land, was raised to 5,500, including the first brand-new government-sanctioned colony in years.

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted: “We are building — and we willcontinue to build” — a statement which clearly expresses Israel’s blatant disregard for and violation of international law. What is clear is Israel’s determination to continue its ravenous expansion of illegal colonies, which is unprecedented in at least eight years.

It is true that the colony-building activities accelerated after the signing of the so-called Oslo Peace Accord, but in recent years Israel realised that every decision to approve constructing more units in illegal colonies came at the price of international criticism and condemnation.

Now that Trump is in power, Israel, controlled by right-wing, ultra-nationalist and religious zealots is rapidly moving to further ratify a new, irreversible political reality.

The current political atmosphere regarding colony expansion in Israel rings back to when the late Ariel Sharon was the country’s foreign minister. Fearing that Israel would come under international pressure to halt illegal colony construction, he called on Jewish colony extremists to steal as much Palestinian land as possible.

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many [Palestinian] hilltops as they can to enlarge the [Jewish] settlements [colonies] because everything we take now will stay ours,” Sharon said in comments that were broadcast in Israeli radio in November 1998. “Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

Sharon is dead, but his crazed mentality is clearly alive and at the helm of Israeli politics after a period in which colony growth had relatively slowed down.

According to a recent United Nations report, illegal colony numbers tell of a tragic reality, numbering 196 in the occupied West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, in addition to 232 outposts, which the current Israeli government plans to annex as well.

The total number of Jewish colonists now stands at 750,000, nearly three times the number of colonists in 1992 (shortly before the Oslo Accord was signed).

These numbers have all accompanied the continuous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land and homes, and the revocation of residency permits for Palestinians in the occupied Jerusalem area.

According to the UN report, 250,000 Palestinians have been exiled from the occupied territories since the war of 1967. (This number does not include those who were ethnically cleansed during the war itself)

Thus, the recently announced massive expansion of Jewish colonies will have not only considerable political consequences, but humanitarian ones as well.

Israel’s hankering after more land has been a persistent motive, but the advent of the Trump presidency has given the Israeli right the needed confidence to move forward with its plans, unhinged.

Throughout his campaign for the White House, Trump made numerous, blatant and often contradictory promises. While he initially pledged to keep a similar distance between Palestinians and Israel, he later reversed his position, adopting that of Israel’s right-wing government.

Trump, the opportunistic real-estate mogul entered the White House with an eerie agenda that mimics that of the current Israeli right-wing, ultra-nationalist government.

“We have now reached the point where envoys from one country to the other could almost switch places,” wrote Palestinian Professor Rashid Khalidi in the New Yorker.

He added, “The Israeli ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, who grew up in Florida, could just as easily be the US Ambassador to Israel, while Donald Trump’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, who has intimate ties to the Israeli colony movement, would make a fine ambassador in Washington for the pro-colony government of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Israel is almost in a state of political euphoria — not only are the superfluous references toa ‘peace process’ and a Palestinian state over, but they now have a free hand to build illegal Jewish colonies in occupied Jerusalem, unhindered. New bills are springing in the Israeli Knesset to annex even the Jewish colonies rendered illegal by Israel’s own definitions, and to remove any restriction on new colony construction and expansion.

Of course, Trump’s administration has no qualms with that; in fact, this falls perfectly within the agenda of the new rulers of the United States who now control the legislative and executive branches.

The Trump administration has actually gone further, pledging to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem, again in complete disregard for international law. Friedman was elected for that post precisely to administer that decision, the dangers of which the inexperienced, demagogic politician, Trump, seems to overlook.

If Trump persists in this decision, he is likely to unleash an episode of chaos in an already volatile region. The move which is now reportedly in the ‘beginning stages’, is not merely symbolic, as some have naively reported in western mainstream media.

True, American foreign policy has been centred mostly on military power, and rarely on historical fact. But Trump, known for his thoughtlessness and impulsive nature, is threatening to eradicate even the little (although vague) common sense that governed US foreign policy conduct in the Middle East, and is likely to regret the unanticipated consequences of his action.

Countries around the world, even those considered allies of Israel such as the United States, reject Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Israeli invitation to relocate their embassies.

While some in mainstream western media are already predicting “a fresh wave of Palestinian violence” should the relocation occur, the new US administration must think carefully before embarking on such a self-destructive move.

In a recent interview with ‘Fox News’, Trump restated the tired jargon of how ‘badly’ Israel has been treated and that relations between Washington and Tel Aviv have been ‘repaired.’ However, he then refused to talk about moving the embassy because “it’s too early.”

Perhaps Trump was side-stepping to avert a crisis. Yet, that was a downgraded position from that of his senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who had recently stated that moving the embassy is a “very big priority.”

Even if the embassy move is delayed, the danger still remains, as Jewish colonies are now growing exponentially, thus compromising the status of the city.

The fact is that Trump’s lack of clear foreign policy that aims at creating stability — not rash decisions to win lobby approval — is a dangerous political strategy.

Trump’s intention to reverse the legacy of his predecessor, should not mean that he should begin his legacy by inviting more violence and pushing an already volatile region further into the abyss.

7 February 2017

By Jonathan Cook

The Israeli parliament passed the legalisation law on Monday night – a piece of legislation every bit as suspect as its title suggests. The law widens the powers of Israeli officials to seize the last fragments of Palestinian land in the West Bank that were supposed to be off-limits. Now, almost nowhere will be out of the settlers’ reach.

Palestinian leaders warned that the law hammered the last nail in the coffin of a two-state solution. Government ministers gleefully agreed. For them, this is the extension of Israeli law into the West Bank and the first step towards its formal annexation.

The legalisation law – also commonly translated from Hebrew as the regulation or validation law – was the right’s forceful response to the eviction last week of a few dozen families from a settlement “outpost” called Amona. It was a rare and brief setback for the settlers, provoked by a court ruling that took three years to enforce.

The evacuation of 40 families was transformed into an expensive piece of political theatre, costing $40 million (Dh147m). It was choreographed as a national trauma to ensure such an event is never repeated.

The uniforms worn by police at demolitions of Palestinian homes – guns, batons, black body armour and visors – were stored away. Instead officers, in friendly blue sweatshirts and baseball caps, handled the Jewish lawbreakers with kid gloves, even as they faced a hail of stones, bleach and bottles. By the end, dozens of officers needed hospital treatment.

As the clashes unfolded, Naftali Bennett, the education minister and leader of the settler party Jewish Home, called Amona’s families “heroes”. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu empathised: “We all understand the extent of their pain.”

The settlers have been promised an enlarged replacement settlement, and will be richly compensated. In a more general reparation, plans have been unveiled for thousands of extra settler homes in the West Bank.

But the main prize for Mr Bennett and the far right was the legalisation law itself. It reverses a restriction imposed in the 1970s – and later violated by dozens of settlements like Amona – designed to prevent a free-for-all by the settlers.

International law is clear that an occupying power can take land only for military needs. Israel committed a war crime in transferring more than 600,000 Jewish civilians into the occupied territories.

Successive governments ignored their legal obligations by pretending the territories were disputed, not occupied. But to end the Israeli courts’ discomfort, officials agreed to forbid settlers from building on land privately owned by Palestinians.

It was not much of a constraint. Under Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule, plenty of Palestinian land had never been formally registered. Ownership derived chiefly from usage. Much of the rest was common land.

Israel seized these vast tracts that lacked title deeds, declaring them “state land” – to be treated effectively as part of Israel and reserved exclusively for Jewish settlement. But even this giant land grab was not enough.

The settlers’ territorial hunger led to dozens of “outposts” being built across the West Bank, often on private Palestinian land. Despite the fact they violated Israeli law, the outposts immediately received state services, from electricity and water to buses and schools.

Very belatedly, the courts drew a line in Amona and demanded that the land be returned to its Palestinian owners. The legalisation law overrules the judges, allowing private lands stolen from Palestinians to be laundered as Israeli state property.

Israel’s attorney general has refused to defend the law. Will the supreme court accept it? Possibly. The aim of the “traumatic” scenes at Amona was to depict the court as the villain of this drama for ordering the evictions.

Nonetheless, there could be silver linings to the legalisation law.

In practice, there has never been a serious limit on theft of Palestinian land. But now Israeli government support for the plunder will be explicit in law. It will be impossible to blame the outposts on “rogue” settlers, or claim that Israel is trying to safeguard Palestinian property rights.

Dan Meridor, a former government minister from Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party, called the law “evil and dangerous”. Israel, he pointed out, can have jurisdiction over private Palestinian land only if Palestinians vote for Israel’s parliament – in short, this is annexation by other means. It shuts the door on any kind of Palestinian state.

Over time, he added, it will bring unintended consequences. Rather than make the outposts legal, it will highlight the criminal nature of all settlements, including those in East Jerusalem and the so-called “settlement blocs” – areas previous US administrations had hinted they might accept for annexation to Israel in a future peace deal.

The other major danger was noted by opposition leader Isaac Herzog. “The train departing from here has only one stop – at The Hague,” he said, in reference to the home of the International Criminal Court.

If ICC prosecutors take their duties seriously, the legalisation law significantly raises the pressure on them to put Israeli officials – even Mr Netanyahu – on trial for complicity in the war crime of establishing and nurturing the settlements.

Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist in Nazareth

13 February 2017

By John Wight

9 Feb 2017 – Donald Trump is proving himself a President prone to unleashing inconvenient truths side by side with blatant falsehoods. One of the most scurrilous of those falsehoods is his recent claim that Iran is the “number one terrorist state.”

Throughout his campaign for the White House in 2016, and since assuming office in January, Trump has made Iran the focus of his ire, to the point where the Iranians are more than justified in preparing for the very real prospect of military confrontation with the US – and sooner rather than later.

The Trump administration’s consistent and ongoing demonization of Iran flies in the face of reality in which Iran has stood, alongside Syria, Russia, the Kurds, and the Iranian-backed Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, as a pillar against the very same Salafi-jihadist terrorism that poses a threat to the American people. It is a struggle in which the Iranians have expended both resources and blood in recent years, and as such justice demands that the world, including the United States, acknowledges that it owes Tehran a debt of gratitude.

In truth, and as most people are only too aware, the real number one terrorist state in the world today is not Iran it is Saudi Arabia, America’s friend, and ally. What is more, Washington has long been well aware of the fact. In a September 2014 email from John Podesta to Hillary Clinton (one of the many among the batches of emails exchanged between John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the White House, and Clinton that were released by Wikileaks) Podesta writes,

“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

Further evidence about the role of the Saudis and other Gulf States in actively and materially supporting terrorism is the 2015 sworn testimony of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, claiming that members of the Saudi royal family had supported Al-Qaeda. As part of a civil case that was brought against the Saudis by the 9/11 families, Moussaoui went as far as naming the specific members of the Saudi royal family who had donated money to the terrorist group in the lead up to 9/11.

But even without any evidence of direct links between the Saudis and various Salafi-jihadist terrorist groups, the extreme Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam embraced by the Saudis as a state religion is near indistinguishable from the ideology of ISIS or Nusra or any of those terror organizations. Indeed the funding of mosques and Islamic centers by the Saudis across the world, places in which this extreme and perverse interpretation of Islam is preached, has become a source of mounting concern in recent years.

In 2015 the UK’s Independent newspaper carried a story claiming a leaked intelligence report compiled by Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency alleged the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies – the Qataris and Kuwaitis – were actively supporting extreme Islamic groups in Germany. They are allegations that tally with those made by Donald Trump in an interview he conducted on NBC’s ‘Meet The Press’ in August 2015. During the interview, NBC reporter Chuck Todd presented Mr. Trump with a 2011 statement he made regarding the Saudis, which reads,

“It’s [Saudi Arabia’s] the world’s biggest funder of terrorism. Saudi Arabia funnels our petrodollars, our very own money, to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people while the Saudis rely on us to protect them.”

The barbarity and mendacity of the Saudis are beyond doubt. When they aren’t terrorizing and butchering their own people at home, they are engaged in despicable war crimes in Yemen – war crimes in which the US and UK are complicit.

So why in the face of all the evidence and acquired knowledge when it comes to Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting terrorism and fomenting extremism, does the US continue to count Riyadh as its closest and most valued ally in the region after Israel? The simple answer is commerce.

Read more: US deploys guided missile destroyer off Yemeni coast after attack on Saudi warship – reports

Saudi Arabia is the US defense industry’s biggest customer, a mantle that Donald Trump intends to maintain with his recent decision to lift the ban that was imposed by Obama on further arms sales to the Kingdom over its human rights violations in Yemen.

It is also significant that while Iran is one of the seven predominately Muslim countries placed on the Trump administration travel ban list, neither Saudi Arabia nor any of the other Gulf States has been put on it. This alone proves that the President is not as serious about fighting terrorism than he likes to make out.

Iran, to repeat, is not a state that sponsors, funds, or foments terrorism, while Saudi Arabia is. The mere fact that this needs to be pointed out to the President is redolent of a view of the world from the Oval Office that continues to be upside down.

13 February 2017

By Pepe Escobar

Trump remains hostage to his own election rhetoric, legacy of past policies. Meantime, Beijing is delivering its strategic vision for a new Pax Sinica.

11 Feb 2017 – When President Xi Jinping visited the United Nations in Geneva last month, before his landmark pro-globalization speech in Davos, he said China’s proposition to the world was to “build a community of shared future for mankind and achieve shared and win-win development.”

Then came the astonishing numbers. “In the coming five years, China will import US$8 trillion of goods, attract US$600 billion of foreign investment, make US$750 billion of outbound investment, and Chinese tourists will make 700 million outbound visits.”

For most of the “community of shared future,” it didn’t take long for the implications to sink in.

Then came the threat of a US-China trade war. The possible ending of the One China policy. The threat of a blockade in the South China Sea.

Then came The Letter. From Trump to Xi, sending good wishes to “the Chinese people.” Too little, too late – over a week after the start of the Year of the Rooster. Still, with great tact, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing stressed communication was always on, “led by China’s top diplomat, State Councillor Yang Jiechi, who outranks the foreign minister.”

Then, finally, came The Phone Call. The first time they ever talked. Trump told Xi he plans to respect the One China policy. Game on.

What’s next?

Exit ‘borders’; enter ‘corridors’

It’s open to debate whether any of Trump’s China hands – in fact, they are virtually non-existent – have written him a memo laying out the magnitude of what Beijing is trying to accomplish, business-wise. That won’t last long because Trump eventually will wake someone up with a 3am phone call wondering, “How come we’re not part of the action?”

Inbuilt in the New Silk Roads, aka One Belt, One Road, is a new transpolitical concept; territoriality is extrapolated from national borders towards belts and roads – in fact, supply chains. This goes way beyond mere technicalities: supply-chain management; inter-modality; inter-operability; a new approach to logistics; you name it. It’s posing the foundation of a transnational new geoeconomic model, and, if successful in the long run, a new geopolitical model.

The model implies that China is proposing through all these corridors – across the upgraded high-speed Trans-Siberian rail route, across Southeast Asia, across Pakistan – whole new layers to the notion of multinational cooperation; political, economic, financial (as in the role of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund). No wonder a group of Chinese researchers recently published a groundbreaking essay in Monthly Review titled One Belt, One Road: China’s strategy for a new global financial order.

Add to this the progressive interpolation of OBOR with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. The EEU is fully institutionalized, complete with bureaucratic layers, while OBOR is still a loose experiment in progress. As Xi and Vladimir Putin have stressed, OBOR and EEU are ultimately complementary – and that adds an extra dimension to the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Beijing’s advance across Central Asia is essentially geoeconomic, as an infrastructure provider; Moscow for its part is not paranoid that Beijing harbors political hegemonic designs. The light at the end of the (high-speed rail) tunnel is always Eurasia integration, with regional powers Iran and eventually Turkey also on board for the long haul.

Time for dialectic hostility

Klaus Baader, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Societe Generale in Hong Kong, recently told Bloomberg: “How many times did Trump say he would label China a currency manipulator on his first day in office? It was pure rhetoric … Rhetoric that cannot be implemented.”

That does not mean that after the Trump-Xi call all the rhetoric will vanish. The folks in Trump’s internal audience/electoral base have eagerly entertained the desire – or illusion – that they deserve a better distribution of wealth since they’re right at the heart of the “indispensable nation”; and that this may happen mostly at the expense of a China that has profited immensely from globalization. That’s what Trump’s rhetoric has been emphasizing.

For its part, China is embarking on a much more ambitious path – albeit one fraught with danger. It needs to stop depending so much on exports to the US. It must also continue to invest in its internal market, transferring wealth and opportunities from the eastern seaboard to central provinces and the west. But most of all, Beijing is focused on paving the way for a new geoeconomic Pax Sinica down the road.

Vast sectors of the US deep state though remain committed to the pivot to China – as in, its outright containment. Trump may have already understood that a trade war is a lose-lose proposition. In the absence of an Asian economic version of NATO (the dead-in-the water Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal), the emphasis will be on “vigilant” allies/semi-disguised vassals such as Japan, South Korea and Australia (after “that” phone call to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Canberra will be a tough proposition).

In a nutshell: the pivot to Asia will survive in some shape or form. Notice the set of “recommendations” to the president by a
task force on US-China policy organized by the Asia Society and the University of California San Diego.

Nestled among platitudes on human rights and the need to “reaffirm US commitments,” there’s the same misleading emphasis on “freedom of navigation” – which China reads as US naval hegemony meant as a law of nature – and the proverbial need to “maintain an active US naval and air presence” to “respond resolutely to China’s use of force against the United States or its treaty allies.” (Note the premise is always Chinese aggression.)

Wishful thinking – already debunked by reality – is also the norm, as in “changes are needed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership to gain bipartisan ratification in Congress.”

This is all too predictable. Kurt Campbell, at the moment part of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, among other roles, is a key member of the task force. Campbell was the conceptualizer of the pivot to Asia, which he sold to Hillary Clinton who then sold it to Obama. For the Pentagon, the categorical imperative remains the same: China must not be allowed in any circumstances to contest US “access” or escape from its geostrategic containment in the South and East China Seas.

Add the chilling message delivered by former CIA director James Woolsey, who until recently was advising Trump on national security: “The US sees itself as the holder of the balance of power in Asia and is likely to remain determined to protect its allies against Chinese overreach.” Crude translation: it’s our way or the highway (rather, bottom of the ocean).

So welcome to the overall guidelines of Trump’s China pivot. Dialectic hostility, anyone?

13 February 2017

By Ramzy Baroud

8 Feb 2017 – I fear that many of us are hating Donald Trump for the wrong reasons.

Multitudes are being swayed by mainstream media-inspired demonization of the new US president, based on selective assumptions and half-truths.

US mainstream media, which rarely deviates from supporting the American government’s conduct, however reckless, is now presenting Trump as if an aberration of otherwise egalitarian, sensible, and peace-loving US policies at home and abroad.

Trump may be described with all the demeaning terminology that one’s livid imagination can muster: evil, wicked, tyrannical, misogynist, war-mongering, rich buffoon, ‘insulting our allies’, infatuating with ‘dictators’, etc.

But do not miss the point.

If you chant in the street: ‘I am with her’, with reference to the defeated Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, it means that you are entirely missing the point.

To reminisce about the days of Barack Obama, his oratory skills, clean diplomacy and model, ‘relatable’ family, means that you have bought into the mass deception, the intellectual demagoguery, stifling group-think that pushed us to these extremes, in the first place.

And, within this context, ‘missing the point’, can be quite dangerous, even deadly.

It is interesting how the lives of Yemenis suddenly matter, referring to the US military botched a raid late last month against an alleged al-Qaeda stronghold in that country, killing mostly civilians.

A beautiful 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, was killed in the operation – planned under the Obama administration, but approved by Trump. Many chose to ignore that Nawar’s 16-year-old brother – both US citizens – was killed by the US military under Obama, a few years earlier.

Yemen has been a target in the US so-called ‘war on terror’ for many years. Many civilians have been killed, their deaths only being questioned by human rights groups, seldom mainstream media.

Yemen is one of the seven Muslim-majority countries whose citizens are now being barred from entering the US by the ban.

The emotional mass response by hundreds of thousands of protesters rejecting such an abhorrent decision is heartening but also puzzling.

The US military, under Obama, has shied away from leading major wars but instigated, instead, numerous smaller conflicts.

“The whole concept of war has changed under Obama,” ‘LA Times’ quoted a Middle East expert.

Obama “got the country out of ‘war,’ at least as we used to see it,” Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said. “We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight.”

From a numerical context, the Obama administration has dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. Countries that were bombed included Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia, five of the seven countries whose citizens are now denied entry by Trump.

The harm that Obama has done to devastate some of the poorest, war-torn countries on earth by far exceeds what Trump has done, so far.

Iraq and Libya were not always poor. Their oil, natural gas and other strategic reasoning made them targets for US wars, under four different administrations prior to Trump’s infamous arrival.

Libya was the richest in Africa, and relatively stable until Hillary Clinton decided otherwise. Clinton was Secretary of State during Obama’s first term in office.

In 2011, she craved for war. A ‘New York Times’ report citing 50 top US officials, left no doubt that Clinton was the ‘catalyst’ in the decision to go to war.

Former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, furious about her support for a ‘broader mission’ in Libya, told Obama and Clinton that his army was already engaged in enough wars.

“Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?” Gates had reportedly said.

Now, we are being led to believe that the war enthusiasts of the past are peacemakers, because Trump’s antics are simply too much to bear.

The hypocrisy of it all should be obvious, but some insist on ignoring it.

Party tribalism and gender politics aside, Trump is a mere extension and a natural progression of previous US administrations’ agendas that launched avoidable, unjust wars, embedded fear, fanned the flames of Islamophobia, hate for immigrants, etc.

There is hardly a single bad deed that Trump has carried – or intends to carry out – that does not have roots in another policy championed by previous administrations.

Trump’s intention to build a wall at the US-Mexico border is the brainchild of President Bill Clinton. In fact, when Clinton proposed the wall and a crackdown on illegal immigrants in his 1995 State of the Union address, the Democrats gave him a standing ovation.

As for Muslims, they have been an easy target for at least 20 years.

Muslims were mainly the target of the ‘Secret Evidence law’ in 1996, and ‘suspected’ Muslims were either jailed indefinitely or deported without their lawyers being informed of their charges.

It was then called the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, later expanded to give immigration authorities the right to deport even green card holding permanent residents.

Few protested the undemocratic, no due-process law – and the media barely covered it – as most of those held were Palestinian activists, intellectuals and university professors.

The 1996 Act morphed into the Patriot Act, following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The new Act undermined the very US Constitution, giving the government unprecedented domestic authority to arrest, detain people, and spy on whoever they wished, with no legal consequences.

The Obama administration had no qualms using and abusing such undemocratic, unconstitutional powers.

But where were the millions protesting ‘fascism’, as they are doing now? Was Obama simply too elegant and articulate to be called ‘fascist’, although he engendered the same domestic policy outlook as Trump?

Trump is extremely wealthy, but if one is to examine the US wealth inequality gap under Obama, one perceives some uncomfortable truth.

While the rich got richer under Obama, “inequality in America (grew) even at the top,” reports Inequality.org. In fact, the gap between the rich and the super-rich continued to expand, barely phased out by the Great Recession of 2008.

In 2014, a ‘Mother Jones’ headline summed up the tragic story of unfair distribution of wealth in America: “The Richest 0.1 Percent is About to Control More Wealth than the Bottom 90 Percent.”

Therefore, Trump is but merely one profiteer from an economy driven by real-estate gamblers and financial chancers.

The truth is, today’s political conflict in the US is not a clash over ‘values’, but an elites vs. elites war, par excellence.

It is also a war of brands.

Obama has spent eight years reversing George W. Bush’s bad brand. Yet, Obama has done so without reversing any of Bush’s disreputable deeds. On the contrary, he has redefined and expanded war, advanced the nuclear arms race and destabilized more countries.

Trump is also a brand, an unpromising one. The product – whether military aggressions, racism, islamophobia, anti-immigration policies, economic inequality, etc. – remains unchanged.

And that is the uncomfortable truth.

13 February 2017

By Erin Blakemore

The United States has debated immigration since the country’s founding, and the Statue of Liberty—a potent symbol for immigrants—is often invoked as an argument for why we should usher in those who seek safety and opportunity with open arms. A little-known fact about Lady Liberty adds an intriguing twist to today’s debate about refugees from the Muslim world: As pointed out by The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly in a recent op-ed, the statue itself was originally intended to represent a female Egyptian peasant as a Colossus of Rhodes for the Industrial Age.

That might be surprising to people more familiar with the statue’s French roots than its Arab ones. After all, the statue’s structure was designed by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (yes, that Eiffel), and Lady Liberty was given to the United States by France for its centennial to celebrate the alliance of the two countries formed during the French Revolution.

The statue’s designer, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, was also French, but he found inspiration in a very different place: Egypt. In 1855, he visited Nubian monuments at Abu Simbel, which feature tombs guarded by gigantic colossus figures. Bartholdi became fascinated by the ancient architecture, developing what the National Park Service calls a “passion for large-scale public monuments and colossal structures.” Eventually, he channeled that passion into a proposal for the inauguration of the Suez Canal.

Bartholdi envisioned a colossal monument featuring a robe-clad woman representing Egypt to stand at Port Said, the city at the northern terminus of the canal in Egypt. To prep for this undertaking, Barry Moreno, author of multiple books about the statue, writes that Bartholdi studied art like the Colossus, honing the concept for a figure called Libertas who would stand at the canal. “Taking the form of a veiled peasant woman,” writes Moreno, “the statue was to stand 86 feet high, and its pedestal was to rise to a height of 48 feet.” Early models of the statue were called “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia.”

Edward Berenson, author of Statue of Liberty: A Translatlantic Story, writes that Bartholdi’s concept morphed from “a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant” into “a colossal goddess.” But Egypt, which had invested enormous amounts of time and money into the landmark canal, was not as eager about Bartholdi’s idea. Isma’il Pasha, the reigning khedive, rejected the plan as too costly.

Eventually, a 180-foot tall lighthouse was installed at Port Said instead. But Bartholdi was not discouraged. He eventually repurposed his concept into “Liberty Enlightening the World”—the official name for the statue that has been overlooking New York Harbor since 1886.

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist. Her work has appeared in publications like The Washington Post, TIME, mental_floss, Popular Science and JSTOR Daily. Learn more at erinblakemore.com.

13 February 2017

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

5 Feb 2017 – Today’s China offers a rude awakening for Americans who believe that the United States and the United States alone should dominate world power. Donald Trump seems to count himself among these neoconservatives, and China is their deepest phobia today. Trump is following a game plan that has characterized US “grand strategy” against major rivals dating back to World War II. Each time America has had a rival for global leadership, the United States has aimed to cut the rival down to size and to subordinate it to US power. For a while it worked, at least to a point.

More recently, it has failed badly. And with China, any attempt to pursue such a course will fail disastrously for the United States, not to mention the world. The United States’ grand strategy of primacy can be dated to the early years of World War II. America’s main ally at the time was Britain. When Winston Churchill called on the new world to save the old world from Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt’s answer was yes, certainly, but not to save the British empire (or the French empire). America loaned Britain the funds and arms to help defeat Hitler, but tightened the financial knot during and after the war to make sure that Britain would be financially dependent on the United States. Famously, it was America and not Britain that wrote the postwar rules of global finance to ensure that the world’s leading creditor nation, the United States, would hold all of the cards against the debtor nations, then including Britain, France, and the defeated powers.

At the end of the war, the British and French empires relinquished their colonies in the face of independence movements and to rescue their own home economies. At that point, the United States took up the contest against another potential rival, the Soviet Union. From the start of the Cold War, the United States was far more developed economically and technologically than the Soviet Union. Yet because the Soviet Union was ready to devote a crushing share of national resources to its military-industrial complex, it was able to make itself a true rival of the United States in military terms. The ensuing arms race was almost enough to end the world during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and other harrowing occasions.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union lost several real opportunities to halt the arms race, and hotheads and militarists on both sides nearly got the whole world killed. Probably the best opportunity to end the Cold War came with John F. Kennedy’s peace initiative in 1963 that led to the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Some think that right-wingers took such offense to JFK’s peace initiative that Kennedy was assassinated as a result; there is real plausibility to that view.

In the end, Mikhail Gorbachev decided that the Soviet people deserved a higher quality of life instead of an economically crushing arms race. American neoconservatives claim that Ronald Reagan’s renewed arms buildup in the early 1980s pushed Gorbachev to realize that the Soviet Union was doomed to lose the arms race. Whether or not that’s the case, Gorbachev’s decision to disarm, and also not to crack down on growing discontent, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, at the end of 1991.

Neoconservatives took the lesson to be that the United States was unrivaled in power and could impose its will on any country it deemed hostile to US interests. The United States pursued two tracks of this strategy. The first was to push NATO eastward toward the Russian borders, by incorporating the Eastern European and Baltic countries into the US-led military alliance, and then aiming to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia as well. The second was to overthrow, or try to overthrow, several hostile governments in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in short order.

Both of these approaches have backfired badly. NATO’s move around 2008 to bring Ukraine and Georgia eventually into NATO helped to trigger a war in Georgia and Russia’s seizure of Crimea. And the US wars of regime change in the Middle East since 1990 have been strategic failures, fomenting new instability and terrorism rather than friendly and stable regimes.

In the 1970s, the United States briefly faced what it believed to be yet another major rival for economic power, Japan. Japan’s post-WWII recovery was so dynamic, and its mastery of the new transistor-based electronics so strong in the 960s, that many business and economic gurus in the 1970s envisioned a future world economy dominated by Japanese companies and wealth. I remember studies in the early 1980s that naively extrapolated Japan’s rapid growth and high saving rates forward for several decades to argue that the United States would be the sure loser in the long-run competition with Japan.

Starting with President Ronald Reagan, the US foreign policy establishment went to work to counter Japan. It began accusing Japan of unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, unfair state aid to Japan’s businesses, and other exaggerated or flat-out false claims of nefarious behavior. The United States began to impose new trade barriers and forced Japan to agree to “voluntary” export restraints to limit its booming exports to the United States. Then, in 1985, the United States struck harder, by insisting that Japan massively revalue (strengthen) the yen in a manner that would leave Japan far less competitive with the United States. The yen doubled in strength, from 260 yen per dollar in 1985 to 130 yen per dollar in 1990. Japan had been pushed by the United States to price itself out of the world market. By the early 1990s, Japan’s export growth collapsed and Japan entered two decades of stagnation. On many occasions after 1990, I asked senior Japanese officials why Japan didn’t devalue the yen to restart growth. The most convincing answer was that the United States wouldn’t let Japan do it.

Now comes China. American primacists are beside themselves that China seems to have the audacity to poke its nose into “the American Century.” Time Editor Henry Luce famously proclaimed the American Century in 1941, and it proved to be a remarkably astute observation and captivating, even mesmerizing, phrase for many Americans. The United States did become by far the world’s most powerful and richest country. And during several decades it often used its power and wealth wisely: founding the United Nations, creating the IMF and World Bank, establishing open trade with much of the world, inventing foreign aid and the Peace Corps, financing the global battle against AIDS.

But now China seems to be crowding the US primacy well before the American Century reaches 100. And China is doing this as a surprise entrant to the race, at least a surprise from the 20th-century perspective, making its recent rise even more unnerving to American primacists. Consider the Chinese economy as recently at 1980. For that year, the IMF estimates that China’s total GDP was a tiny 2.3 percent of the world economy, compared with America’s share, at 21.9 percent. China’s per capita GDP was a minuscule 2.4 percent of the US per capita GDP. Fast forward 37 years. The IMF now calculates that China accounts for 18.3 percent of world output compared with 15.4 percent of the United States. China’s output per person is now around 39 percent of America’s output per person according to the same IMF measurements.

Many American primacists can’t believe their eyes. Some argue that China’s economy is a giant bubble that will soon implode, following the way of the Soviet Union. This is not the case. The Soviet economy was technologically separated from the US-led trading system and, in the end, could not keep up. China, by contrast, has achieved its remarkable economic growth since 1980 precisely by adopting global technologies and integrating the Chinese economy closely with the world economy. China has also become a highly innovative economy as well.

Rather than let China catch up, the primacists say, the United States should badger and harass China economically, engage the Chinese in a new arms race, and even undermine the one-China policy that has been the basis of US-China bilateral relations, so that China ends up in economic retreat, retracing the steps of the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and Japan. One theory making the rounds indeed holds that Trump wants to sidle up to Vladimir Putin to team up against China for just this purpose.

In my view, such an approach toward China would be profoundly misguided and very dangerous. It is based on the false idea that global economics must be about winners versus losers, the United States versus China, rather than about mutual gains through trade and technological advance. Moreover, the idea of cornering China is not only unwise but unachievable.

Trump blames China for the plight of American workers left unemployed by China’s exports to the United States, but he fails to understand or acknowledge the many gains to the United States from our trade with China, including the higher profits and wages of US companies exporting to China and the lower costs enjoyed by US consumers of China’s exports. If Trump really wants to help American workers, he should tax and redistribute the soaring US profits and incomes of the rich, rather than open a trade war with China.

Even worse, an American effort to weaken China is doomed to fail. When the United States pressed Britain to give up its empire, Britain was fighting for its very survival, and with a population just one third that of America’s. When the United States pressured Japan in the 1980s, Japan’s economy was only one-third of America’s, and Japan depended on the United States for its military security.

China, by contrast, has a larger economy, is four times more populous, and is America’s creditor, not its debtor. China has strong and growing trade, investment, and diplomatic relations with other countries all over the world that would likely be strengthened, not weakened, by US belligerence. It’s also important to remember that China’s proud history as a unified nation is 10 times longer than America’s, around 2,250 years compared with around 225 years.

Aside from the usual litany of exaggerated or false charges against China (currency manipulator, unfair trader, etc.), the most recent rap is that China is a dangerously expansionist power. If ever the pot has called the kettle black, here is a case. America has military bases in roughly 70 foreign countries, while China has one small overseas base (in Djibouti). America outspends China on the military by more than two to one. For decades, America has been in nonstop overseas wars and regime-change operations, while China has been in very few overseas conflicts, all short-lived. China, in short, has not been an expansionist or aggressive power, while the United States has sought unrivaled global power.

While the United States cannot dominate China, it need not fear China’s dominance either. Yes, China is now larger economically than the United States, and will remain so, but the United States also remains far richer in per capita terms and will likely continue to be so throughout the 21st century. Moreover, China’s high growth rates are now slowing markedly, not because the Chinese economy is collapsing but because it is maturing. “Catching-up” growth slows down as it succeeds. Also, China is aging rapidly, and will have a median age above 50 years by mid-century. A mature, aging, and slower-growing economy that is still much poorer than the United States in per capita terms is hardly a deep threat to America’s own security.

If Trump tries to provoke China into a new arms race or trade war, the results will be a huge debacle for the United States and a potential threat for the world. America’s well-being depends on the maturity of judgment to cooperate with China as a major global power that can and should share the responsibilities to promote global peace and sustainable development. Working together through the United Nations, China and the United States can and should work together and with other countries to prevent or end regional wars, stop terrorism, and confront common hazards such as global warming and newly emerging diseases.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of The Age of Sustainable Development.

13 February 2017