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By Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky

President Donald Trump, like a star-struck teenager, has been swooning over King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his 31-year-old son and new crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, known to U.S. diplomats as MBS. Since FDR, American presidents have been enamored by Saudi royals, but in this case the infatuation may be downright dangerous. The young prince who would be king might not only get his own country into heaps of trouble, he could also drag the United States down with it.

It’s not just Trump who’s been heaping praise on the new crown prince. MBS has also been hailed by the likes of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson , the German foreign minister,* *the IMF  and the head of the World Bank . As the architect of Vision 2030, a galactically ambitious plan to transform and diversify the Saudi economy, MBS is seen as a potentially modernizing, dynamic and risk-ready monarch who has broken with the cautious traditionalism and risk-aversion of aging Saudi kings.

Who knows whether or not the young king will be able to live up to these expectations on the domestic side. Countervailing forces and challenges might limit his horizons. But one thing is already stunningly clear when it comes to his handling of foreign policy: In two short years, as the deputy crown prince and defense minister, MBS has driven the Kingdom into a series of royal blunders in Yemen , Qatar  and Iran, and he has likely over promised what Saudi Arabia is able and willing to do on the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking front. Far from demonstrating judgment and experience, he’s proven to be reckless and impulsive, with little sense of how to link tactics and strategy. And sadly, he’s managed to implicate and drag the new Trump administration into some of these misadventures, too.

We don’t blame the crown prince for snookering Washington into its schemes and designs—this is almost entirely the fault of a White House that seems naively to believe Riyadh and the Sunni Gulf coalition are critical to helping the United States achieve its three key Middle East goals: destroying ISIS, rolling back Iran and delivering Arab-Israeli peace. Based on Saudi behavior since King Salman and MBS came to power in 2015, it’s not at all clear that Riyadh can deliver on any of these objectives. Indeed, if Washington doesn’t lay down some rules and distance itself from Saudi misadventures, it will find its objectives even more elusive. Here are three considerations the Trump administration needs to think through before its Middle East policy becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia.

*Can the Saudis avoid further misadventures? *MBS has the Midas touch in reverse: Every initiative he has spearheaded has turned into a hot mess. For one, the crown prince owns the war against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Under his direction, the Saudis along with some of their Gulf Arab allies have conducted a relentless and brutal air campaign that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe, killing thousands of civilians, inflicting massive damage on civilian infrastructure and worsening an ongoing famine.

The Saudis are stuck in a quagmire: Their military campaign, even after doubling down, has failed to dislodge the Houthis and their allies from the capital or wrest control of the northern part of the country; and they have no viable diplomatic strategy for ending the war. By aiding and abetting the Saudis in Yemen, the United States has empowered al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, strengthened Iranian influence in Yemen, undermined Saudi security and brought Yemen closer to the brink of collapse. The Saudis have driven themselves—and the United States—into a deep ditch in the country. They need to stop digging to get out.

The crown prince’s fingerprints are also all over the Saudi decision to rupture its relations with Qatar. (As in Yemen, the Kingdom has also encouraged some of its Sunni Arab allies to go along for the ride.) This crisis, exacerbated by Trump’s open embrace of the Saudi view, has dealt a serious blow to U.S. diplomacy in the Gulf. The Trump administration hoped to build a strong and united Sunni Arab coalition to achieve its Middle East goals; instead, the needless fight the Saudis picked with Qatar has ripped this coalition apart. And make no mistake: The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the years), but rather to end Qatar’s independent foreign policy and especially its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. Simply put, the Saudis want to turn Qatar into a vassal state—as they have done with Bahrain—as part of their plan to establish Saudi hegemony over the entire Persian Gulf. But the crown prince’s grandiose ambition and national chauvinism have put the Kingdom on a collision course with Iran—and the United States, with its uncritical support for Saudi Arabia and more muscular stance against Iran, could easily get dragged into the dispute. Further, MBS’s incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising position toward Tehran only stoke the sectarian conflict that is tearing the region apart.

The Trump administration’s decision to side with Saudi Arabia in its conflict with Qatar and in Yemen is akin to pouring gasoline on a fire. Washington instead should be doing whatever it can to extinguish the flames.

*Can Saudi Arabia deliver on the peace process? *There’s no question that the twin threats of Iran and Sunni jihadi groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, plus Arab fatigue with the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a greater coincidence of interests between the Gulf states and Israel than ever before. The still unanswered question is whether this new alignment can be converted into useable currency to facilitate and support Israeli-Palestinian negotiations leading to Trumps’s desired “ultimate deal.” It may well be that the Saudis are prepared to do more than they have in the past, particularly with regard to setting up overflight rights, telecommunications links and commercial contacts with Israel.

But—and the qualification is a critical one—that will happen only if Washington is prepared to do its part. There are no free lunches here. And the down payment, from the Saudi perspective, involves the Trump administration’s willingness to intensify its effort not just to contain but also to rollback Iranian influence in the region (which we think is both unrealistic and potentially harmful to the United States) as well as a serious effort to press the Israelis for concessions both large and small on behalf of the Palestinians. The Saudis might be willing to start with offering small confidence-building concessions. But if team Trump is looking for big moves—the establishment of diplomatic relations, for example—the administration will need to get the Israelis to deliver on Jerusalem and June 1967 borders. And that seems to be mission impossible with the Netanyahu government.
There is a real danger that the administration has unrealistic and exaggerated expectations of what the Saudis are prepared to do. Riyadh will not expose itself to criticism from Iran and the Arab world on an issue like Jerusalem unless Palestinian and Arab requirements are met. And without Israeli give on Jerusalem, there can be no ultimate deal.

*Can the United States stop enabling the Saudis and set some rules?* Clearly Trump is enamored by the Saudis, with whom he’s done business for years and who flattered and catered to him during his trip to the Kingdom earlier this month. He also sees Saudi Arabia as the key to achieving U.S. policy goals in the region, giving them a pass on human rights and permitting them wide latitude to pursue their anti-Iranian agenda without considering America’s interests. MBS is the driver of much of this impulsive risk-taking. The crown prince has dragged the United States into its local quarrels, creating a serious risk of a direct U.S.-Iranian confrontation, which could undermine the nuclear agreement with Iran at a time when the United States confronts a much more serious nuclear challenge from North Korea.

It’s time that the Trump administration draws some red lines with Riyadh. Washington does have leverage it can apply to the Saudis, who remain heavily dependent on American military and intelligence support for their security. In Yemen, Washington should put the Saudis on notice that if they do not lend their unqualified support for the U.N.-sponsored effort to mediate a negotiated end to the conflict, the United States will cut off the military, intelligence and logistics support it is providing to Saudi Arabia and coalition forces. With Qatar, the White House and State Department should intervene directly with the Saudis (and UAE) to press both countries to moderate the extreme demands they have just presented to Qatar to end their dispute.

And with Iran, as painful as it might be, the president should take a page from President Barack Obama’s playbook. Rather than engage in rhetoric that escalates the conflict, the United States should make it clear to the Saudis that America’s support for its military and security establishment is not unconditional and will hinge to some extent on Saudi efforts to bring its relationship with Iran to a slower boil.

* Aaron David Miller is an American Middle East analyst, author, and negotiator. He is currently Vice President for New Initiatives at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

* Richard Sokolsky is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program. His work focuses on U.S. policy toward Russia in the wake of the Ukraine crisis.

29 June 2017

By Dr S Faizi

Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was by no means a surprise. For, the US has always been seeking to subvert the multilateral, global initiatives to address the vexing global problems. Those who express surprise at the US withdrawal seem to be unaware that the US was not a Party to the Kyoto Protocol, the global accord under the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) that the Paris Agreement is to succeed when its extended period will be over in 2020. Obama who had raised a lot of hopes during the campaign for his first term could not bring the US to ratify the Kyoto Protocol

Kyoto Protocol is not the only global environmental treaty that the US has refused to ratify. US is not Party to the universal Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), claiming it will harm US economic interests. US is not a Party to the Biosafety Protocol to regulate transboundry movement of genetically modified organisms. Nor is the US Party to the Nagoya Protocol on access to biodiversity and related benefit sharing. Not to the Basel Convention on Transboundry Movement of Hazardous Wastes either. The current withdrawal is quite in line with a consistent national policy of the US.A policy of undermining the global community and disregarding the global concerns.

Paris Agreement itself is a charade of an international solution to address the global warming crisis. It is indeed several steps back from the Kyoto Protocol provisions. Paris Agreement has no binding commitments on developed countries that have historically caused the largest levels of carbon emissions, and continue to hold high per capita carbon emission records. . They only need to submit a national climate plan- intended nationally determined contributions (INDC). The carbon emission reduction targets for developed countries are voluntary. The binding commitments of Kyoto protocol is undone in the Paris Agreement. It is virtually impossible to keep temperature increase within 2 and much less the aspirational1.5 degree centigrade above the pre-industrial level with no binding commitments on the industrial economies. The UNFCCC’s fifteenth meeting of the Conference of Parties (CoP) noted in its decision adopting the Paris Agreement that the projected level of carbon dioxide in 2030 would be a lethal 55 gigatonnes and “much greater emission reduction efforts will be required than those associated with the intended nationally determined contributions in order to hold the increase in the global average temperature to below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels by reducing emissions to 40 giga tonnes”. This cannot be achieved unless the developed countries, the US in particular, agree to mandatory emission reductions.

The Agreement does not put a target date for achieving the temperature reduction goal. It leaves the  benchmark pre-industrial temperature ambiguous, without mentioning the temperature measurement then nor agreeing the year of the start of the industrial period.The equity factor is down the drain and so is the ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ that has been central to climate negotiations, glaringly missing in the operative parts of the Paris Agreement. Common but differentiated responsibility was central to the Rio Declaration 1992 of the earth summit, the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. Indian government’s claim of introducing ‘climate justice’ is rather outlandish. It is barely in the preamble as ‘…and noting the importance for some of the concept of “climate justice”, when taking action to address climate change’. India has heavily yielded to western mechanisation in the negotiations and its claim of success in ‘climate justice’ actually caricatures the concept as being important for only some countries and climate justice or equity missing in the entire operative provisions of the text.

The elected leadership of India remains silent when the constitutional head of a foreign country publicly makes false allegations against India and the same is circulated in the news media around world. India looks like an orphan nation. The new population of sham patriots that are on a tyrannical war against Indians other than themselves remains silent, proving the travesty of their patriotism. Even the opposition remains blissfully silent, not being able to give a fitting response to the US tyrant. India’s  recent wavering in the climate negotiations has been sealed by the Modi regime. India was ridiculously yielding to the US characterisation of ‘major economies’ instead of the binary of developed-developing countries. ‘Major economies’ was a US trick since George Bush junior to encompass India and China in binding commitments (though this lingo has not got into the Paris Agreement).

While the nation’s leadership keeps studied silence on Trump’s insinuations, the fact remains that India’s per capita emission is one tenth of the US’. When the US per capita emission was 16.4 metric tonnes India’s was only 1.6 metric tonnes, according to a World Bank study of 2013. All developing countries have similar or even less rate of carbon emission as India. This is not considering the disproportionately huge levels of carbon emission by the US in the past.The global climate crisis is primarily the result of the historical carbon emissions by the industrial economies exhausting the resilience of the environment and therefore reparations for the same are due from these players. Reparations to the poor in the developing world who are the primary victims of the climate change- the sinking islands of Munrothuruthu on the southern Kerala coast and Ghoramara island in the Indian Sundarbans are only symbolic of the climate change tyranny on the people.

Was India ‘asking for billions and billions of dollars’ as Trump has alleged? India has never asked nor received anything like that in the past or present. No other developing country did either. The developed world has a fundamental obligation to compensate for the global climate change crisis. And they have reluctantly agreed to partly fulfil this obligation, hence their commitment in the UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol as well as the Paris Agreement to provide financial assistance to developing countries, especially the least developed countries and small island nations. This was the result of the collective negotiations of the G-77, the umbrella of developing countries in the UN negotiations, and India was only following the informed, objective position of the G-77 in the negotiations. India has never asked for ‘billions and billions of dollars’.

The Paris Agreement does not at all mention any figures, but asks developed countries to provide financial assistance to developing countries in order to meet their carbon reduction targets. The CoP decision adopting the Paris Agreement mentions a yearly need of US$ 100 billion in support of developing countries. This is by no means the sole responsibility of US but of all developed countries as they have agreed and the beneficiary is not India alone but over 130 countries. Compare this figure with the US$ 350 billion one developing country (Saudi Arabia) giving the US alone recently, for purchasing deadly weapons!

The haemorrhage of dollars is actually happening in the reverse way. Would Trump dare look at the figures of the billions and billions of dollars of profit repatriated by US companies from India to the US. If Trump was referring to the oversees development assistance (ODA), he is well advised to read the 1989 Presidential Report to the US Congress which plainly stated that for every dollar US invested in aid it was getting back eight dollars. No country has ever truly benefitted by the ODA other than the donor countries.

Leave alone the billions and billions to India, the US is not paying even the mandatory annual contribution to the UN although US is the primary beneficiary of UN expenditure. The UN is not paying up the dues even after the General Assembly conceded to the US demand for consensus decision making (instead of simple or two thirds majority) on financial issues. Indeed a US Permanent Representative to the UN herself had admitted this in a candid moment. Mrs Madeleine Albright,  who later rose to become the US Secretary of State, admitted to an international audience in Geneva on December 1, 1995: “It is tragic and ironic that one of the principal threats to the United Nations comes from political elements in the very country which helped create it…the forces of isolation and reaction, once on the fringe of our political system, are growing more powerful as they reach the mainstream and populate the halls of our Congress”. Trump the deluge is only a culmination of the US position of hegemony.

The author is an ecologist specialising in international environmental policy and often works as a negotiator in multilateral environmental negotiations. s.faizi111@gmail.com

1 July 2017

By Richard Falk

A modified and enlarged version of a talk Richard Falk gave in Geneva a week ago. The audience was a blend of students of all ages from around the world, with almost none from Europe and North America, and several NGO representatives with lots of UN experience.

Why the peoples of the world need the UN: multilateralism, international law, human rights, and ecological sustainability

[ISMUN (International Youth & Student Movement for the United Nations), Summer School, June 28, 2017, Geneva]

A Point of Departure

When Donald Trump withdrew American participation from the Paris Climate Change Agreement in early June of this year a bright red line was crossed. Most obviously, there were a series of adverse substantive consequences associated with weakening an agreement that was promising to provide critical interim protection against severe harms to human wellbeing and its natural habitat threatened by further global warning. U.S. withdrawal from Paris was also a rather vicious symbolic slap at multilateralism under UN auspices. We should recall that the agreement was rightly hailed at the time as the greatest success ever achieved by way of a multilateral approach to international problem solving. The Paris Agreement was indeed a remarkable achievement, inducing 195 governments representing virtually every sovereign state on the planet to sign up for compliance with a common agreed plan to address many of the challenges of climate change in the years ahead. To reach such an outcome also reflected a high degree of sensitivity to the varied circumstances of countries, rich and poor, developed and developing, vulnerable and less vulnerable.

The Paris withdrawal also exhibited in an extreme form the new nationalistic posture adopted by the United States in relation to the UN System, and a major retreat from the leadership role at the UN that the U.S. had assumed (for better and worse) ever since the Organization was established in 1945. Instead of fulfilling this traditional role as the generally respected cheerleader and predominantly influential leader of most multilateral lawmaking undertakings at the UN and elsewhere the U.S. Government has instead apparently decided under Trump to become obstructer-in chief. This Trump/US assault on the UN approach to cooperation among sovereign states and global problem solving and lawmaking is particularly troubling. This manifestation of the new American approach in the policy domain of climate change is particularly disturbing. To have any prospect of meeting the climate change challenge requires the widest and deepest international cooperation, and is absolutely vital for the future of human and ecological wellbeing. Such a dramatic disruptive act by the United States strikes a severe blow to the capabilities and legitimacy of the UN at a historical moment when this global organization has never been more potentially useful.

The credibility and severity of the threat is magnified by an evident American-led campaign to exert financial pressure to bend the Organization to the will of major funders. When the United States behaves in this manner it indirectly gives permission to other political actors to follow suit, and exerts immense pressure on the UN Secretariat and Secretary General to give ground. Saudi Arabia has used such leverage to embarrass the UN in relation to both its human rights record at home and its responsibility for war crimes against civilians, including children, in Yemen. Israel has also been the beneficiary of such delegitimizing pressures, with the UN giving ground by softening criticism, inhibiting censure, shelving damaging reports. Such backtracking by the United Nations weakens any claim to be guided in its policies and practices by international law and international morality. The weaponization of UN funding politics should awaken public opinion to the importance of finally establishing an independent funding base for the UN by way of some variant of a Tobin Tax imposed on financial transactions or international air travel. If it is desirable to encourage the UN to conduct its operations in accordance with the UN Charter and international law, UN funding should be removed from the control of governments at the earliest possible time.

It needs to be acknowledged and understood that this unfortunate shift in the U.S. role at the UN preceded the Trump presidency, involving a gradual American retreat from political internationalism, which reflected the outlook of an increasingly sovereignty-oriented U.S. Congress. Even an environmentally minded Barack Obama was led at the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit to insist that national commitments to reduce carbon emissions be placed on a voluntary rather than obligatory basis, which was regarded at the time as a major setback in the effort to safeguard the future from the perils of global warming. The Copenhagen approach was also a negative development with respect to international law, substituting volunteerism for obligation in this major effort to protect human and global interests. We need to appreciate that international law in its more imperative forms already suffers from the weakness of international enforcement mechanisms. Putting compliance on a voluntary basis dilutes the ethos of good faith that guides responsible governments when giving their assent to obligatory instruments of international law.

Beyond this, the Obama presidency boasted of its unconditional defense of Israel at the UN, regardless of the merits of criticism, and even in contexts where the U.S. was willing to voice muted criticisms directed at Israel but only in discreet language conveyed in bilateral diplomatic channels. The UN was off-limits for critical commentary on Israel’s behavior despite the long history of unfulfilled UN responsibilities toward the Palestinian people.

Why the UN is especially needed now

It should be obvious to all of us that the UN is now even more needed than when it was established in 1945. At least on the surface the UN enjoyed the ardent support of every important government and their publics at the end of World War II. These sentiments reflected the widely shared mood of the global public that maintaining world peace and security required the establishment of global institutions devoted to war prevention. There existed post-1945 a somewhat morbid atmosphere of foreboding with respect to the dawn of the nuclear age that took had taken the dire form of atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities. The concerns arising from these unforgettable events strongly reinforced and underlay the war prevention emphasis of the UN Charter, and were culturally expressed by such major works of the imagination as Hiroshima, Mon Amour and On the Beach.

This grim mood also lent an aura of poignancy to the memorable opening words of the Charter Preamble—“We the peoples of the United Nations are determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” It was evident that when the UN was established the overriding global preoccupation of public opinion and of governments was to avoid any recurrence of major international warfare, especially in light of the possession of nuclear weapons. Of course, such an impression partly reflected the absence of adequate representation at the UN and other international venues of voices articulating non-Western priorities. From the beginning the non-Western members of the UN were far more focused on anti-colonialism, development priorities, and the reform of a rigged world economy than on war prevention.

It is worth pondering why the formal legitimating call establishing the UN, as set forth in the Preamble, was phrased as coming from ‘the peoples’ and not from the ‘governments.’ In fact, governments were not even explicitly mentioned in this foundational document. Yet as a practical matter, despite this language in the Preamble, the UN as a political actor has always been almost exclusively an Organization reflecting the will of ‘we the governments,’ and in many cases ‘we the Permanent Members of the Security Council.’ Iddn some situations the ‘we’ over time and in situations of global crises has been reduced to the government of the United States, sometimes joined by its European allies. In other words, the geopolitical dimension of UN operations has had the effect of moving the actions of the Organization on war/peace agenda items away from international law and the framework set forth in the UN Charter. It has instead given decisive authority to the most powerful members of the UN with the intended effect of concentrating UN authority in the Security Council, whose operations are more subject to geopolitical discipline in the form of the veto than to the mindfulness toward international law.

An understanding of this circumstance underscores the aspirational importance of constraining geopolitics and enhancing the role of international law. Respect for international law in framing UN policy must be increased if there is to be any hope that the UN will eventually fulfill the ambitions and expectations of its strongest supporters in civil society. As matters now stand these supporters are often caught between being seen as blind idealists that are enthusiastic about whatever the UN does or dismissive cynics who dismiss the UN as a great power charade that is a waste of time and money. Both of these outlooks seems unwarranted, inducing either an uncritical passivity toward the UN or exhibiting a lack of appreciation of the contributions being daily made by the UN and what could be done to make these contributions more robust.

The UN and a Populist Reform of World Order

Two important questions that all of us, and especially young people should be asking: how can the UN System be made more responsive to the needs and wishes of people and less dependent on the warped agendas of many governments? And how can the Organization be made more responsive to international law and less of a vehicle for geopolitical ambitions? To make the relevance of positive global populism more concrete we can ask: ‘Would the establishment of an assembly of civil society organizations or a global parliament along the lines of the European Parliament be helpful from the perspective of world peace and global justice?’ What follows are several daunting questions concerning the feasibility of such a proposal: “Can the political will be mobilized that would be needed to make realizable such a UN reform?” “Even if a UN Peoples Parliament were established would it be allowed to exert significant influence?” We should remember that some past successful undertakings, such as the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), seemed utopian when proposed, and thus we should not be easily dissuaded if a project seems worthwhile. But we should also be aware that the ICC once established and operating has been chasing the mice while ignoring the tigers, which gives rise to another version of this clash between sentimentalists overjoyed that the institution exists at all and realists who believe that the ICC has surrendered to geopolitical forces, thereby betraying its overriding mission of administering justice as called for by non-compliant behavior.

For several years in the 1980s I participated annually in a large public event held in Perugia, Italy under the banner of ‘A United Nations of the Peoples.’ It made me wonder at the time whether the world was not being divided up into three distinct identies: ‘the Geopolitical Person’ who was increasingly dominating world politics, including the UN, ‘the Davos Person’ who at the World Economic Forum was mounting strong pressures on all governments to privilege the interests of market forces, essentially banks and corporations, above that of their own citizens, and ‘the Perugia Person’ who was on the sidelines whispering words to the grassroots community conveying the needs and aspirations of ordinary people, and by so doing, highlighting problems of poverty, peace, environment, biodiversity, health, and justice. In one sense, my analysis is an argument for a concerted public and grassroots transnational effort to magnify the Perugia whisper until it becomes a stentorian voice that is heard and heeded within the halls and conference rooms of the UN in Geneva and New York. Is such a call for positive global populism desirable, and if so, are there practical steps to be taken to make it happen? Will states feeling UN pressure reopen the withdrawal option, and weaken the Organization from the governmental end?

Reviving War Prevention

As it turned out the onset of the Cold War made it exceedingly difficult for the UN to be effective as a war prevention institution almost from the day it was established, although over the years it made many quiet contributions to peace when political conditions made this possible. The effort to prevent a third world war fought with nuclear weapons was mainly left up to the rival governments of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, relying on geopolitical arrangements that on occasions of confrontation sent periodic chills of fear down the collective spine of humanity, especially in Europe and North America. Global security was conceptualized around the abstract idea of deterrence, which was most simply understood as the prevention of a major war by the exchange of mutual threats of devastating retaliatory strikes with weaponry of mass destruction by these two superpowers with capabilities that were sufficiently resistant to preemptive first strikes to keep the capacity for retaliation entirely credible. This fundamental doctrine of deterrence was called ‘Mutual Assured Destruction,’ and more familiarly known by the ironically apt acronym ‘MAD.’ It amounted to a paradoxical permanent mobilization for war with the overriding goal of preventing the outbreak of war, which did strike the peace community as rationality gone mad, really mad. MAD was tied to a destabilizing ongoing arms race justified by a security rationale. Each superpower both sought to gain the upper hand and above all acted to make sure that its rival did not acquire ways of destroying its retaliatory credibility. This unstable and permanent war footing, always susceptible to accident and miscalculation, lasted throughout the Cold War, dominating the security policy of leading UN members, and as a side effect marginalized the UN Security Council in the peace and security domain. The intense ideological antagonisms between the Atlantic Alliance and the Soviet Bloc generated a series of geopolitical standoffs that made it almost impossible for the Permanent Members of the Security Council to reach agreement about who was responsible and what to do whenever international conflicts turned violent.

The world has avoided such a catastrophic war up to this point by a combination of prudent statecraft and good fortune. There were several close calls that make it apparent that it is grotesquely reckless to normalize the present role of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nine current nuclear weapons states. When the path to nuclear disarmament was abandoned, the leading global states resorted to a Plan B, a nonproliferation regime tethered to the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 (NPT), negotiated under UN auspices. It was advertised as essentially a holding operation designed to give the nuclear weapons states ample time to negotiate, as they were obligated to do, a reliable supposedly disarming treaty regime. With the hindsight of almost five decades, it has become evident that the commitment to nuclear disarmament embedded in Article VI of the NPT was never implemented, and quite likely was not meant to be. Accordingly, 123 non-nuclear states have taken a new initiative to propose a denuclearizing Plan C within the confines of the UN, a step opposed by 36 members, with an additional 16 abstentions. As with the NPT, the UN is again providing the venue and encouragement for the negotiation of a draft treaty to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons (2017 BAN Treaty; Convention to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons), leading eventually to the elimination of all nuclear weapons. This initiative enjoys the support of most non-nuclear governments, but will not pose a serious challenge to nuclearism until public opinion is effectively mounted. As yet the BAN approach is not supported by any of the nuclear weapons states nor by those governments that base their security on holding a nuclear umbrella over their country.

Beyond this overriding concern with nuclear weapons, the Perugia Person should be using the UN to raise questions about globally unregulated arms sales and rampant militarism as practiced with post-modern weaponry and tactics, what might be regarded as a Plan D framework. In this vein, the UN and its civil society supporters could begin to explore the potentialities of a nonviolent geopolitics appropriate for a post-colonial, post-Cold War world order in which the global policy agenda finally takes seriously several biopolitical challenges with respect to which traditional instruments of ‘hard power’ are totally irrelevant, or worse. If we wish the UN to fulfill its potential it is essential that the negativity of right-wing populism be countered by affirmative visions generated by a rising progressive populism. Such progressive populists, rather far removed from traditional left politics, need to keep in mind the biblical admonition: “a people without a vision perishes.”

Serving the Human Interest

Overall, there has been a failure of the UN to live up to the expectations and hopes of its founders when it came to enhancing the quality of international peace and security. At the same time, the UN has vindicated its existence in numerous other unexpected ways that have made its role in human affairs now widely regarded as indispensable, but still far below what was and is possible, necessary, and desirable. The UN validated its existence early on by offering the governments of the world a crucial platform for articulating their grievances and expressing their differences. The UN became the primary arena for inter-governmental communication. The UN, especially by way of its family of specialized agencies that have evolved over the decades has done much excellent unheralded work at the margins of world politics. These activities have made vital daily, often unheralded, contributions to the global common good in such diverse areas as human rights, economic and social development, wellbeing of children, environmental protection, preservation of cultural heritage, promotion of health, assistance to refugees, and the development of international law, including international criminal law. The UN also has provided the best available venue for cooperative problem solving associated with complex issues of global scale that reflect the uneven circumstances of sovereign states. This flexible dynamic of practices within and outside the UN provides the fabric of everyday ‘multilateralism,’ that is, the reliance on collective mechanisms for policy and law formation by representatives of sovereign states that in countless ways contribute to problem solving and life enhancement in social settings ranging from the very local to the planetary.

A strong confirmation of the value of the UN arises from the fact that every government, regardless of ideology or relative wealth and power, has up to now regarded it as beneficial to become a member and remain in the UN. True, Indonesia briefly withdrew in 1965 to announce the formation of a parallel organization of ‘newly emerging forces,’ but within a year at its request was allowed to resume its membership without even passing again through the normal admission process. Within international society, the greatest sign of a recognition of diplomatic stature has become the election of a country to be a term member of the Security Council for a period of two years. This record of universal participation is truly extraordinary, especially when compared with the disappointing record of the League of Nations. There have been no sustained withdrawals from the Organization as a whole and when the former European colonies obtained political independence they shared a uniform ambition to join the UN as soon as possible and exert some influence on global policy, especially with respect to trade, investment, and development. These efforts by the enlarged Third World membership reached their peak in the late 1960s and 1970s. A vibrant Non-Aligned Movement pursued its policy goals within the UN, its energies concentrated on the effort to create a New International Economic Order that would level the playing field internationally for trade and investment. This radical reform effort was centered in General Assembly activism, and prompted a formidable backlash led by the most industrialized states. The backlash took many forms including the formation of the Trilateral Commission as a strong undertaking led by American economic elites determined to hold the line on behalf of capitalist values, procedures, practices, and above all, privileges. Membership in the UN nevertheless continues to be regarded as not only advantageous for the legitimacy it confers on states, but because it offers weaker and less experienced countries invaluable rights of participation in the full range of UN activities, including access to knowledge and technology required for successful transitions to modernity.

Global Populism as a Threat to the UN

Yet despite all of these achievements and contributions the UN is again under sharp attack these days, especially by its most powerful member, the United States. Donald Trump and several other autocratic leaders around the world uniformly belittle the UN role in world affairs because they regard the sovereign state to be the ultimate source of political authority and deeply resent external criticisms of their own domestic behavior. These leaders are currently promoting ultra-nationalist agendas that are chauvinistic, anti-immigrant, hostile to international law, and are especially hostile to all forms of individual accountability and state responsibility for human rights violations.

This is not only a problem associated with the emergence of right-wing populist leaders enjoying domestic support. It is also a feature of dynastic autocracy, most prominently associated with the kind of regional geopolitics being promoted by Saudi Arabia, seeking hegemony over the Arabian Gulf, crushing democratizing forces even if Islamic in outlook, and waging war against any political tendency perceived to be increasing Iranian influence anywhere in the region. With respect to the UN, Saudi Arabia in particular has been following the lead of the United States, hinting at withholding financial contributions, and even bluffing possible withdrawal from the Organization, if Saudi policies should become subject of critical UN scrutiny, no matter how flagrantly these policies violate international human rights standards and the norms of international humanitarian law. Israel should also be grouped with states that push back against any and all efforts to hold them accountable. This search for total impunity with respect to UN activity gains traction to the extent endorsed by leading states.

A characteristic illustration of the detrimental global effects of this recent wave of populist nationalism revolves around the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Although Paris fell significantly short of what the scientific consensus insists as necessary if global warming is to be properly limited, it still represented what a broad consensus of informed persons regarded as a crucial step in the right direction, and a serious show of commitment to the momentous task of transforming the carbon world economy into a sustainable and benign energy system in a timely manner. For this greatest of UN multilateralist achievements to be repudiated by the U.S. Government because Trump contends that it is a bad deal for America is dramatic evidence that the UN is under assault, and what may be worse, seems increasingly leaderless and ready to submit.

This disappointment and concern is greatly magnified by the intimations that Washington intends to withhold funds from the UN, as well as threatens to boycott and defund activities and organs that reach conclusions that do not correspond with U.S. foreign policy, especially when it comes to Israel. A prime target of this Trump demolition brigade is the work of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that is under intense attack because it is alleged to devote disproportionate attention to the wrongs and crimes of Israel. Such criticism besides sidestepping the question as to whether Israel is generally guilty as charged, also overlooks the fact that the British dumped the Palestine problem into the lap of the UN after World War II, making the fledgling Organization responsible for the transition from colonial subjugation to political independence. Such a direct responsibility was not imposed on the UN with respect to the decolonization any other national territory, and it has never been able to carry it out its assigned task in a manner consistent with the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people. From a truly objective point of view, the UN has not devoted too much attention to Israel, and the Palestinian struggle, but too little. It has not gotten the basic job done, resulting in prolonged, massive, and intense Palestinian suffering with no end in sight.

In other words at the very time that the peoples of the world need a stronger UN to uphold the challenges of the present era, the Organization is under an unprecedented attack from ‘the Geopolitical Person.’ It is now time for ‘the Perugia Person’ to step forth with a strong sense of urgency and entitlement. Affirming this ‘necessary utopianism’ will give us confidence that the challenges of the present can be surmounted through the mobilization of people acting in collaboration with governments dedicated to upholding global public interests in tandem with their own national interests. For these revolutionary energies to be released within the confines of the UN will only happen in response to a new surge of grassroots transnational activism. Such a surge could foreground the hopes, dreams, and demands of people around the world, and especially the youth who have the most at stake. It has been both my pleasure and my honor to have this opportunity to meet with you today.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years.

1 July 2017

By Paul R. Pillar

A combination of circumstances has increased the risk that armed conflict will break out between the United States and Iran. Such a war is no certainty, but the chance that one will occur is greater today than it has been in years. Some of the relevant circumstances, such as the first two mentioned below, have been around in some form for a substantial amount of time, while others are more recent.

Anti-Iranism in American discourse

The vocabulary has become so repetitive and widely used that it rolls off tongues automatically: Iran is a “theocratic autocracy” and the “largest state sponsor of terrorism” that engages in “nefarious,” “malign,” and “destabilizing” behavior as part of its “drive for regional hegemony,” etc. The verbiage has become a substitute for thought and for any careful examination of exactly what Iran is and is not doing and how it does and does not affect U.S. interests. Such a commonly accepted mantra means that anyone making a focused attempt to stir up trouble with Iran starts with a built-in advantage in mustering public and political support.

The lobby pushing hostility against Iran

There indeed have been, and still are, focused attempts to stir up trouble. Politically potent interests have their own narrow reasons to keep U.S.-Iranian relations bad and to keep Iran isolated. Foremost among those interests is the right-wing government of Israel, for which Iran as chief bête noire serves to cripple a competitor for regional influence, to explain all regional trouble in terms that do not relate to Israel, to distract attention from matters (especially the occupation of Palestinian territory) the Israeli government would rather not discuss, and to keep the United States wedded to Israel as supposedly its only reliable regional partner.

Given the obvious impact of the Israeli government’s preferences on American politics, this factor weighs greatly on the current administration’s policies toward Iran. Donald Trump has tilted heavily to those Israeli preferences, as reflected in his appointments and in his rhetoric since midway through the presidential campaign. Trump still aspires to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, which would require sharp breaks with the Netanyahu government’s current course. But that might make aggressiveness and confrontation with Iran seem all the more necessary, as a form of compensation to Netanyahu while pressing him for concessions toward the Palestinians.

Anti-Obamaism and the nuclear agreement

The preceding factor was one of two major reasons for opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the multilateral agreement that severely restricts Iran’s nuclear program and closes any possible path to a nuclear weapon. The other major, and very partisan, reason was that the accord was probably Barack Obama’s biggest single achievement in foreign policy. Trump, who scathingly denounced the accord during the campaign and whose administration only grudgingly acknowledges that Iran is complying with its obligations under the agreement, still shows a strong inclination to do the opposite of whatever Obama did. Now that the Republican effort to undo Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, has run aground on the realities of health care, the urge may be stronger than ever to undo Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement. If it can be undone not through direct U.S. renunciation but as a casualty of some other confrontation with Iran, then so much the better from Trump’s point of view.

Weak voices of restraint in the administration

There are press reports of debate within the Trump administration on aspects of policy toward Iran, and real debate is much better than policy made through wee-hours tweets. But it is doubtful whether the sober reasons why armed conflict with Iran would be folly are getting adequate attention. This is not only a matter of the dominance of non-sober voices, such as that of self-declared Leninist destroyer-of-worlds Stephen Bannon, who demonstrated his clout with Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. The problem also is that visceral anti-Iranism infects even some of those looked to as adults in the room, most notably Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

Respectability given to regime change

Another of the adults, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, recently told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that regime change is part of U.S. policy on Iran. This comment resurrects a malevolent concept that amply deserves a place on the trash heap of U.S. foreign policy history, especially given the disastrous results under the previous two administrations of regime change in Iraq and Libya. The concept is no more suitable to Iran, where there is not some political movement in our own image that is just waiting to be freed from the yoke of theocratic autocrats through a new revolution.

Those with other reasons for promoting hostility toward Iran also have been promoting the regime change idea. Shortly after the inauguration, for example, the Sheldon Adelson-funded Foundation for Defense of Democracies was pushing a paper at the National Security Council centered on regime change. The specific notion usually being pushed is that forms of subversion short of armed conflict would do the job, but the fantasy outcome of a new and attractive regime in Tehran can easily become an objective of military operations initiated, or ostensibly initiated, for other reasons. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of regime change adds to tension and distrust between Tehran and Washington that make destabilizing incidents increasingly likely.

Mission creep in Syria

The crushing of the so-called Islamic State’s caliphate is close enough to completion that the difficult and deferred question of what becomes of its diminishing territory in Syria now must be faced directly. Much commentary on this question in the United States is advocating what amounts to a significant expansion of U.S. objectives in Syria by confronting the Damascus regime and its Russian and Iranian backers. U.S. actions on the ground and in the air already have moved in this direction. Incidents have included shooting down Iranian drones and a manned Syrian aircraft, as well as U.S. attacks on what were described as “Iranian-supported” militias.

It is remarkable how much the mission in Syria already has creeped and evolved. As Josh Wood puts it, “Over the course of his short tenure, Mr. Trump and his administration went from talking about potentially partnering with Damascus and Moscow against [Islamic State], to appearing absolutely disinterested in the civil war, to bombing Syrian government targets.” The evolution of objectives in the next five months could be just as rapid as in the last five. Given Iran’s significant role in Syria, and the expanding U.S. role there, Syria is one of the places most likely to spark direct warfare between the United States and Iran.

Displacement from Russia

Incidents with the Syrian regime’s other major backer, Russia, certainly are worth worrying about along with incidents involving Iran. But some of the very reasons for special worry about direct armed conflict with Russia—a nuclear-armed ex-superpower—are also reasons to expect special restraint, along lines similar to what the United States and the USSR displayed throughout the Cold War. Moreover, under the Trump administration, Russia does not play the sort of automatic, take-for-granted-as-an- adversary role that Iran plays. We have yet to fathom the full reasons for Trump’s more qualified and even benign posture toward Russia, but there clearly are such reasons. If the administration needs to strike at one of the beasts involved in the Syrian war, that beast will be Iran, even though Russian support probably has been at least as important as Iranian support in shoring up the Assad regime.

Delegation to the military

Trump’s practice of delegating to the Pentagon major decisions, even of a more strategic than tactical nature involving deployment or use of military forces, could in some circumstances be an encouragement of restraint, given the disinclination of experienced military officers to be thrust into new conflicts in which the United States is not already involved. But the United States is already involved in places such as Syria and the Persian Gulf where confrontation with the Iranians is possible, and with such involvement the military bias is in the direction of doing more rather than doing less. The bias is toward being more aggressive to accomplish presumed objectives and especially to protect American forces. At least one U.S. attack so far in Syria has been justified in terms of protection of U.S. forces. Military decisions taken for military reasons may spark an expanded conflict.

Heightened bellicosity in Arabia

The tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran is especially high right now, and most of the initiative for making it so has come from the Saudi side. The ascent to power of the Saudi king’s inexperienced son, Mohammed bin Salman, has something to do with this. The young crown prince has talked about how “we will work so the battle is there, in Iran.” He has used the relatively minor link between a Yemeni group and Iran as the excuse for prosecuting a war that has turned Yemen into a humanitarian disaster. His most recent destabilizing move has been the fracturing of the Gulf Cooperation Council for the sake of bashing Qatar, one of whose listed offenses is to have more-or-less normal, peaceful relations with Iran. The potential for the United States being dragged into an escalation of this mess is significant, especially given Trump’s inclination so far to go all in with the Saudis.

Brinksmanship in the Persian Gulf

Even without the added recklessness of young princes, the Gulf is the other most likely place, besides Syria, for an incident involving U.S. and Iranian forces to escalate out of control. The U.S. forward presence in what the Iranians regard as their maritime backyard is more than matched by the sometimes reckless and unsafe maneuvers by small craft of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The recent fatal collision of a U.S. Navy destroyer with a merchant ship in Japanese waters shows what can happen in crowded sea lanes even when there is no international conflict or animosity involved. Imagine something similar happening in the Persian Gulf amid the current hostility in U.S.-Iranian relations, with no apparent interest by the Trump administration in restoring a diplomatic channel for defusing incidents.

The nature of the person in the White House

In his congressional testimony, James Comey mentioned “the nature of the person” as a reason for meticulously documenting his conversations with President Trump. He meant that Trump is a serial liar. The first five months of Trump’s administration is sufficient to see that the lying extends not just to individual falsehoods but to large segments of his policies. On domestic and economic policy, the populism he voiced and that won him decisive votes last year has been revealed to be fraudulent, with health care being only one of the indications of this.

There is no reason to suppose that what Trump has said about foreign and security policy, including vote-winning rhetoric about aversion to more foreign wars, is any less fraudulent. With the rhetoric being next to meaningless, other aspects of the nature of the person will be influential, including Trump’s impetuosity, his dwelling on the immediate at the expense of longer-term consequences, and his insatiable appetite for personal approbation at the expanse of broader national interests. None of these qualities augurs well for avoiding conflagration with Iran.

Diversion from difficulty

These personal qualities of Trump make him a prime candidate to turn to the time-honored tactic of using foreign conflict to divert attention from domestic troubles and to win rally-round-the-flag popular support. His current support, according to the latest poll on the subject, continues to fall.

Consequences of War

Armed conflict with Iran would be an enormously negative event for U.S. interests on several grounds, beginning with whatever expenditure of American blood and treasure was involved. Other consequences would include giving a gift to the most hardline elements in Iranian politics, possibly leading to renunciation of the nuclear agreement and the opening of a path to an Iranian nuclear weapon. There would be collateral damage to U.S. good will and relations with many others, beyond some hardliners in other places who would welcome the spilling of American blood as long as it was done in the service of attacking Iran. One can hope that that there will be enough thinking about such consequences to prevent such an armed conflict from coming to pass.

But war is a possibility, with a likelihood that is somewhere above trivial levels. It is an uncertainty. Also uncertain is the extent to which any conflict that did break out would be fully intended, as distinct from an unintended consequence of aggressive and confrontational policies and postures.

Citizens and members of Congress need to be fully aware of the possibilities and the associated dangers. They should be alert to any new signs that the United States may be headed toward such a war, and they should ask the toughest of questions every step of the way as to whether this path is in U.S. interests.

Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

28 June 2017

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Mohammed Abed is a 28-year-old taxi driver from the village of Qarara, near the town of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. He has no teeth.

Lack of medical care and proper dentistry work cost him all of his teeth, which rotted and decayed at a very young age. Yet, his dire financial needs prevented him from acquiring dentures. His community eventually pitched in, collecting the few hundred dollars needed for Mohammed to finally being able to eat.

Mohammed is not unemployed. He works ten hours, sometimes more, every single day. The old taxi he drives between Khan Younis and Gaza City is owned by someone else. Mohammed’s entire daily salary ranges from 20 to 25 shekels, about 6 dollars.

Raising a family with four children with such a meagre income made it impossible for Mohammed to think of such seemingly extraneous expenses, such as fixing his teeth or acquiring dentures.

Strange as it may seem, Mohammed is somewhat lucky.

Unemployment in Gaza is among the highest in the world, presently estimated at 44 percent. Those who are ’employed’, like Mohammed, still struggle to survive. 80 percent of all Gazans are dependent on humanitarian assistance.

In 2015, the UN had warned that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020. At the time, all aspects of life had testified to that fact: lack of reliable electricity supply, polluted water, Israel’s military seizure of much of the Gaza Strip’s arable land, restricting the movement of fishermen and so on.

An Israeli military siege on Gaza has extended for over 10 years, and the situation continues to deteriorate.

A Red Cross report last May warned of another ‘looming crisis’ in the public health sector, due to the lack of electricity.

The energy crisis has extended from electricity supplies to even cooking gas.

Last February Israel cut cooking gas supplies to the Strip to a half.

“The cooking gas stations stopped accepting empty gas cylinders because their tanks are empty,” according to the Chairman of the Petroleum and Gas Owners Association of the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud Shawa. He described the situation as “very critical.”

Three months ago, the Mahmoud Abbas-controlled Palestinian Authority in Ramallah decided to reduce the salaries of tens of thousands of its employees in the Gaza Strip

The money provided by the PA had played an essential role in keeping the struggling economy afloat. With most employees receiving half – or less – of their salaries, the barely functioning Gaza economy is dying.

‘H’ is a university professor and his wife, ‘S’, is a doctor. The middle-class couple with five children has lived a fairly comfortable life in the Strip, even during the early years of the siege. Now, they tell me they are counting their money very carefully so as to avoid the fate of most Gazans.

‘S’s salary comes from Ramallah. She is now only able to claim $350 dollars from what was once a significantly higher pay.  ‘H’ does not receive his money from the West Bank’s authority, but his salary was slashed by half, anyway, since most of the students are now too poor to pay for their tuitions.

Mu’in, who lives in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, is worse off. A retired teacher, with a pension that barely reaches 200 dollars a month, Mu’in is struggling to put food on the table. An educated father of four unemployed adult sons and a wife recovering from a stroke and can barely walk, Mu’in lives mostly on hand-outs.

With no access to the West Bank due to the Israeli siege, and with severe restrictions on movement via the Rafah-Egypt border, Gaza is living through its darkest days. Literally. Starting June 11, Israel began reducing the electricity supply to the impoverished Strip, as per the request of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

The results are devastating. Gaza households now receive 2 to 3 hours of electricity per day, and not even at fixed hours.

‘S’ told me that her family is constantly on alert. “When electricity arrives at any time of the day or night, we all spring into action,” she said. “All batteries must be charged as quickly as possible and the laundry must be done, even at 3 in the morning.”

But Gazans are survivors. They have endured such hardships for years and, somehow, they have subsisted. But cancer patients cannot survive on mere strength of character.

Rania, who lives in Gaza City, is a mother of three. She has been struggling with breast cancer for a year. With no chemotherapy available in Gaza’s barely-functioning hospitals, she has taken the arduous journey from Gaza to Jerusalem every time she has needed to carry out the life-saving procedure.

That, until Israel decided not to issue new permits to Gaza’s terminally ill patients, some of whom have died waiting for permits and, others –  like Rania –  who are still hoping for a miracle before cancer spreads through the rest of their bodies.

But Israel and Egypt are not the only culprits. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah is using the siege as a bargaining chip to put pressure on its rivals, Hamas, who have controlled the besieged Strip for ten years.

Hamas, on the other hand, is reportedly seeking a partnership with its old foe, Mohammed Dahlan, to ease the Gaza siege through Egypt in exchange for making him the head of a committee that is in charge of Gaza’s external affairs.

Dahlan is also a foe of Abbas, both fighting over the leadership of the Fatah party for years.

Abbas’ requests to Israel to pressure on Gaza via electricity reduction, together with his earlier salary cuts, are meant to push Hamas out of its the proposed alliance with Dahlan.

Palestinians in Gaza are suffering; in fact, dying.

To think that Palestinian ‘leaders’ are actually involved in tightening or manipulating the siege to exact political concessions from one another, isdismaying.

While Israel is invested in maintaining the Palestinian rift, so that it continues with its own illegal settlement policies in the West Bank and Jerusalem unhindered, Palestinians are blinded by pitiful personal interests and worthless ‘control’ over occupied land.

In this political struggle, the likes of Mohammed, ‘H’, ‘S’ and cancer-ridden Rania – together with two million others – seem to be of no significance.

Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, sounded the alarm on June 14 when she warned that “the latest power cuts risk turning an already dire situation into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.”

“For 10 years, the siege has unlawfully deprived Palestinians in Gaza of their most basic rights and necessities. Under the burden of the illegal blockade and three armed conflicts, the economy has sharply declined and humanitarian conditions have deteriorated severely,” she said.

Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch director for the region, rejected the notion that the Israelis cut of electricity supplies to Gaza are made as per the Palestinian Authority’s request.

“Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the waters of Gaza, so Israel has an obligation that goes beyond merely responding to a request from Palestinian authorities,” Shakir said.

Between Israel’s dismissal of international calls to end the siege and Palestinians’ pathetic power game, Gazans are left alone, unable to move freely or live even according to the lowest acceptable living standards.

Fatima, a 52-old mother from Rafah, told me that she tried to kill herself a few days ago, if it were not for her children wrestling the knife away.

When I told Fatima that she has so much to live for, she chuckled and said nothing.

The suicide rate in the Strip is at all-time high, and despair is believed to be the main factor behind the alarming phenomena.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.

29 June 2017

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: Few books on Palestinian history become bestsellers. But one, titled A History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era, managed to rocket to the top of Amazon’s charts this month.

Its author, Assaf Voll, an Israeli academic, claims to have reviewed “thousands of sources” to explain “the Palestinian people’s unique contribution to the world and to humanity”.

However, when Amazon realised all the book’s 130 pages were blank, it hurriedly excised the title from its site. But not before hundreds of customers paid nearly $10 to enjoy the puerile joke. Speaking on Israeli radio, Voll observed: “Someone needs to tell them [the Palestinians] the truth, even if it hurts.”

A History of the Palestinian People has famous antecedents. In 1969, Golda Meir, then Israel’s prime minister, declared to the world: “There were no such thing as Palestinians.”

Fifteen years later, a book called From Time Immemorial won acclaim from scholars and newspapers across the United States. It argued that the Palestinians were not the native people of Palestine, but recent economic migrants taking advantage of advances made by the Ottoman Empire.

A talented Jewish doctoral student, Norman Finkelstein, exposed the book as a fraud and it was gradually forgotten.

An Israeli official called Peters in 2015, shortly before her death, to thank her on behalf of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “for all she had done for Israel”.

Both Voll and Peters were only echoing Israel’s popular historical narrative. In Israeli museums, the Palestinians’ presence is obscured with cryptic references to an “Ottoman” period. Like the Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks and British, the Ottomans are presented as temporary occupiers. Israeli politicians and media regularly speak of modern Palestinians as squatters and trespassers.

Israelis have been only too happy to make the Palestinians vanish. Who needs to feel guilty about the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of “Arabs” in 1948, or about Israel’s brutal domination of millions more for half a century in the occupied territories, if they had no right to be there in the first place?

The antidote to Voll’s empty book is a new anthology of essays, including by leading Jewish and Israeli writers, that never forgets the Palestinians’ deep roots in the land and keeps its gaze fixed on the crushing realities of Israel’s occupation.

Last week, Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Chabon said he had faced a barrage of abuse since the publication of Kingdom of Olives and Ash, designed to warn off others from following in his footsteps.

Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan, whose book on a love affair between a Palestinian man and Jewish woman was recently banned from Israeli schools, observed that visiting the West Bank was a way of “taking off the blindfold and opening our eyes to what is happening around us”.

One can understand why making the Palestinians invisible is the tactic of choice for Israel’s supporters. But a new report suggests that it would be wise for them to keep Israel in the shadows too.

The Brand Israel Group found that the more US college students knew about Israel, the less they liked it. In the six years to 2016, support for Israel among the next generation of Jewish leaders dropped precipitously, by 27 percentage points.

Traditionally, Israel has nurtured bonds to overseas Jews. Over the past 20 years the Birthright programme has brought half a million young American Jews on free summer trips to Israel for an intensive course of indoctrination.

The students are supposed to leave fervent ambassadors for Israel – or better still, devotees who will immigrate to help in a demographic war against the Palestinians.

But organisers are aware that a growing number sneak off afterwards into the occupied territories to discover first-hand a history their elders have kept from them. It can have a profound effect. Many get involved in protests in the occupied territories or become leaders of boycott activism against Israel on campuses back home.

Tellingly, when Israel announced earlier this year it was banning entry to foreigners who support the boycott movement, hundreds coming on this year’s Birthright signed a petition asking whether they would be allowed in.

Signs of Israel’s troubles with the next generation of American Jews are already apparent. They are at the heart of a new project near Hebron in the West Bank of non-violent direct action against the occupation. Sumud Freedom Camp – “sumud” is Arabic for steadfastness – is a project between Palestinians, Israelis and foreign Jews who refuse to turn a blind eye to Palestinian suffering. It offers a new model of joint protest.

These young Jews hope their presence will protect Palestinians trying to reclaim lands stolen by Israel. But the army has repeatedly torn down the camp. One American Jewish participant wrote in the Israeli media of how her experiences had disabused her of the image of Israeli soldiers as “superheroes who’d protect me from harm”.

Increasingly, American Jewry is becoming polarised, between an older generation whose ignorance allows them to advocate unthinkingly for Israel and a young generation whose greater knowledge has brought with it a sense of responsibility. In an ever-more globalised world, this trend is going to intensify.

Young American Jews will have to choose. Will they conspire, if only through their silence, in the erasure of the Palestinians carried out by Israel in their name? Or will they stand and fight, in the occupied territories, on campus, in their communities and, soon enough, in the corridors of power in Washington?

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

28 June 2017

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

In Egyptian mythology, gods were considered heroes.  In more modern times, it is men who are the heroes.   Without a doubt, General Gamal Abdul Nasser has secured his legacy as a hero – a revolutionary who fought for Egypt and strived for Arab unity against Israel and Western imperialism. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; a pre-planned war of aggression and expansion by Israel against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, aided by the US and Britain.

Israel’s cronies assisted in the planning and execution of the war which led to  the seizure and occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Syria Golan (Golan Heights) and the Sinai Peninsula.  Prior to the start of the war, as early as May, Lyndon Johnson who assumed the presidency after the tragic assassination of JF Kennedy, authorized air shipment of arms to Israel[i].  Furthermore, the United States facilitated Israeli air attacks and advances by sending reconnaissance aircraft to track movement of Egyptian ground forces and American spy satellites provided imagery to Israel [ii].   According to reports American and British carrier-based aircraft flew sorties against the Egyptians and U.S. aircraft attacked Egypt.   Judging by their cover-up, the American leadership had as little compassion for American blood as it did for Arab blood.   The Israeli attack against USS Liberty that killed and injured American servicemen was buried in a sea of lies.

Fifty years on, the war rages on and Israel has a different set of cronies.  In sharp contrast to Nasser, el-Sisi, Egypt’s antihero has thrown his lot in with Israel and Saudi Arabia against his Arab brethren.   El-Sisi’s betrayal has been so outlandish and stark that even the neocon leaning New York Times published a scathing article titled: “Egypt’s Lost Islands, Sisi’s Shame” by Adhaf Soueif.    This is a remarkable piece rarely seen in the pages of the NYT given its reputation (see LOOT for example).

Soueif rightly calls el-Sisi’s to task for handing over the Tiran and Sanafir Islands at the mouth of Gulf of Aqaba to Saudi Arabia.  More telling is the fact that the transfer had been discussed with, and had received the blessings of Israel,  according to Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon.   The implications of an Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian alliance are enormous; though hardly the first act of treason by el-Sisi.

In his article Soueif also touches on the dam being built by Ethiopia (the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam) which was opposed to by former President Mohamed Morsi who was ousted in a coup by el-Sisi.  It is crucial that this project be further explored as it relates not only to Egypt, but also the past and future politics and geopolitics of the region.

Before moving on however,  it is important to recall that Morsi was democratically elected to office in the aftermath of the Egyptian ‘revolution’.  His support of the Palestinians and his opposition to the dam did not sit well with Israel.  Morsi had even called “Jews descendants of pigs and apes”.    Both HAMAS and the U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed Morsi’s election.  Abbas called Morsi “the choice of the great people of Egypt” while one of his senior aides, Saeb Erekat, said the democratic vote for Morsi “meant the Palestinian cause was the Number One priority for all Egyptians“.  Though perhaps the greater concern for Israel was Morsi’s opposition to the construction of the dam.  A construction favored by  Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In 2012, it was reported that Saudi Arabia had claimed a stake in the Nile.   Israel’s ambitions went much further back.  First initiated by Theodore Herzl in 1903, the diversion plan was dropped due to British and Egyptian opposition to it only to be picked up again in the 1970s.  At that time, Israeli’s idea was to convince Egypt to divert Nile water to Israel.  In 1978, President Anwar Sadat “declared in Haifa to the Israeli public that he would transfer Nile water to the Negev. Shortly afterward, in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Sadat promised that Nile water would go to Jerusalem.  During Mubarak’s presidency, published reports indicated that Israeli experts were helping Ethiopia to plan 40 dams along the Blue Nile.”[iii]

On May 30, 2013, The Times of Israel reported that the construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (on the Blue Nile) had sparked a major diplomatic crisis with Egypt.  The article also reported (citing Al-Arabiya) that Major General Mohammed Ali Bilal, the deputy chief of staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces, had said Egypt was not in a position to confront the project (countries).  “The only solution lies in the US intervening to convince Ethiopia to alleviate the impact of the dam on Egypt.”  No such solutions from the U.S.

On June 3rd,  Morsi met with his cabinet to discuss the dam and its implications.  Cabinet members were surprised to learn that the meeting was aired live.   During the meeting, a cabinet member said: “Imagine what 80 million of us would do to Israel and America if our water was turned off”.  Morsi contended that “We have very serious measures to protect every drop of Nile water.”

With el-Sisi’s “democratic coup” which was handsomely rewarded, the dam project is on schedule to be completed by year’s end.   As Israel has expands and accelerates its wars of aggression, the wider implications of el-Sisi’s will reverberate throughout the region as serve-serving Arab leaders fight their own to execute Israel’s agenda.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the influence of lobby groups.

[i] Camille Mansour. “Beyond Alliance: Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy”  Columbia 1994, p.89

[ii]  Stephen J. Green. “Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With A Militant Israel”.  William Morrow and Co., NY 1984

[iii] “Will Nile water go to Israel? North Sinai pipelines and the politics of scarcity”, Middle East Policy  (Sep 1997): 113-124.

28 june 2017

By Binu Mathew

Junaid this is for you. Junaid this is to assure you that your death will not go in vain. You are a martyr for the idea of India. You are not a martyr in the conventional sense, that you laid down your life with full consciousness of what you are doing. But your life was snatched away from you in the flower of your youth. But we, who are alive know that you are a martyr for India, the idea of India we all stand for.

Junaid (16) was returning from Delhi to his village in Kandhawal in Haryana after Eid shopping along with his brothers Hashim, Mausim. and and Sakir  in the crowded  Delhi-Mathura passenger. As the train reached Ballabgarh  station on Thursday, June 22 some passengers called them “beef-eaters” and “anti-nationals”. According to news reports the men, man handled the brothers and some of them stabbed them. Junaid succumbed to his injuries.

Hashim told Hindustan times “What did we do to deserve this treatment? I do not understand why they started calling us names. I know nothing about nationalism. All I know is that I am an Indian. This is my home.”

Mausim who was also attacked told HT “Why were we cornered like that? To escape their blows and knife stabs, I hid under the seat of the train. I will never be able to forget helplessly looking at my brothers getting thrashed and then stabbed. There were so many people on the train, but not a single person stood up to help us. The men instead kept saying that we were beef eaters and deserved to die.”

After two hours of violence on the train, Hashim was allowed to get off at Asota with Junaid’s dead body and his two brothers, who too were badly injured.

When Narendra Modi government put restrictions on the sale of cattle for slaughter on the third anniversary of his government, this was my worst nightmare. This is what the beef ban has done to India. It has given the Sangh Parivar elements to lynch innocent people for their beliefs, identity and food habits.

The lynching of Muslims by branding them as beef eaters started with the lynching of Mohammad Akhlakh in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, a stone’s throw away from the national capital New Delhi in 2015, a few months after Narendra Modi assumed charge as Prime Minister of India. Since then dozens of Muslim and Dalit men have been lynched allegedly for eating or transporting beef.

I don’t generally celebrate religious festivals. But this Eid I went out with my son to have an Eid lunch. In the hotel menu, beef steak was mentioned. I ordered it. The boy was puzzled. Soon the manager came out with an anxious look and explained that they don’t serve beef and also that they never served beef in the hotel. It was a Momos shop and the guys were from Darjeeling, West Bengal. I told them beef is not banned in Kerala and there is nothing wrong with serving beef here.  An untold fear is gripping the country from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Some say it is an undeclared emergency, recalling the 1975 Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. I think it is worse than that. Then we knew who the enemy was. Now, nobody knows who is your enemy. As it happened with Junaid the man sitting next to you could stab you to death. This is the slow emergence of fascism. India is diving headlong into a deep fascist state. Unless the conscious people of the country rise up, India as we know it will be gone.

The blood soaked picture of Junaid lying on the lap of Hashim reminded me of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ in which body of Jesus is lying on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion. This picture must torment every heart of India. The blood that Junaid shed should not go in vain. It is our duty to make sure that from each drop of blood that Junaid shed, a thousand flowers of resistance shall bloom. In the resurrection of Junaid we will see the resurrection of India.

Binu Mathew is the Editor of www.countercurrents.org.

27 June 2017

By crcs.ugm.ac.id

The two largest followers of religion in Southeast Asia are Muslims and Buddhists. From around 618 million of its total population, 42 per cent are Muslim and 40 per cent are Buddhist. Twenty-five percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and 38 per cent of the world’s 350 million Buddhists live in Southeast Asia. Yet Muslim-Buddhist interreligious dialogue between the two is rare today. Discussing this issue, CRCS staff member Azis Anwar interviewed Professor Imtiyaz Yusuf, director of the Center for Buddhist-Muslim Understanding at Mahidol University in Thailand. Earning his PhD at Temple University where he studied with Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Professor Yusuf has written numerous encyclopedia entries and journal articles and been a regular columnist for Thai newspapers. Some of his works can be accessed on his academia.edu account. During intersession at CRCS  from May 15 until July 31, Prof. Yusuf is teaching the course Muslim-Buddhist Relations.

When and how was the first encounter between Muslims and Buddhists?

Before I answer that question I would say, Indonesia is the land of the Buddha. Yogyakarta and the Borobudur, which was built in the 9th century during the reign of the Sailendra Dynasty, represent the Mahayana tradition. The two Buddhist traditions that came to Java are Mahayana and Vajrayana. Theravada didn’t come to Indonesia. Theravada went from India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia. The Mahayana tradition came to Indonesia directly from Nalanda in India. The Sailendra kings always paid tribute to the famous Buddhist university of Nalanda in India. And, just look at the language you use everyday. Now you’re doing puasa (fasting), right? Puasa is from upavasa, which is a Sanskrit word. You use many words which are from Sanskrit. Indonesia has a strong Hindu-Buddhist culture. But unfortunately, people forget or neglect it.

Now, you asked me the question when the first encounter took place. It took place in the seventh century when Muslims came to the area called Sindh, which is now Pakistan. They came across the Buddhist temples and monks. Muhammad ibn Qasim (a general from the Umayyad dinasty) was the first to come there. He wrote to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (an Umayyad governor): What should I do to the people who are non-Muslim? The first thing Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf said was: Treat them as Ahl al-Kitab (the People of the Book, a category commonly applied to Jews and Christians—ed). Second instruction was: don’t attack their monks. Third, don’t destroy their temples. Fourth, take jizyah from them (jizyah is a per capita tax on free adult non-Muslim males under Muslim rule in compensation for protection and exemption from military service—ed). This is how Muslims treated Buddhists, long before the West came to know the Buddha.

Three important Muslim scholars of history and comparative religion spoke very highly about the Buddha. Al-Tabari (838-923 C.E.) reported that Buddhist statues were sold at a Buddhist temple next to the Makh mosque in the market of the city of Bukhara in now modern Uzbekistan. Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim Al-Shahrastani (1086-1153 C.E.) in a section called Ara’ al-Hind (The Views of the Indians) in his classic Kitab al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects), identifies the Buddha with the Qur’anic figure al-Khidr as a seeker of enlightenment. Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318 C.E.) of the Persian Ilkhanid court, wrote an introduction to Buddhism in his monumental Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) aiming to make Buddhism accessible to Muslims.

The 12th-15th centuries’ encounters between Islam and Hindu-Buddhist civilization in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand were of a mystic orientation. The pondoks or pesantrens (Muslim religious schools of Southeast Asia), seem also to have been influenced by the Hindu and Buddhist temple schools of the region.

Some mufassirs (Quranic exegetes) say the Buddha is mentioned in the Quran.

Dhul-Kifli?

(Dhul-Kifli is mentioned in the Quran and commonly interpreted as referring to the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. But some say it may refer to the Buddha, as it could mean “of Kafil”, which may mean ‘of Kapilavastu’, the ancient city where Siddartha Gautama was born and raised.—ed)

Dhul-Kifli and Wat-tini (the 95th surah/chapter of the Quran)! Wat-tini waz-zaytun; wa turi sinin; wa hadhal-baladi ‘l-amin (By the fig and the olive; and by Mount Sinai; and by this secure city [Mecca]). This surah is more important than Dhul-Kifli. There are four symbols in this surah. Az-zaytun is ‘Isa (Jesus). Sinin is Musa (Moses). Al-balad al-amin is the Prophet Muhammad. What about the “tin”? There is no tin in Arabia. The Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree, which is a tin, a type of fig, the botanical name of which is ficus religiosa.

If you go to some scholars, like Muhammad Hamidullah (1908-2002, an Indian-born scholar of Islamic law and author of more than 250 books); they said the Buddha was mentioned symbolically in the Quran. Allah says in the Quran, “Laqad arsalna rusulan min qablika”. “We have sent messengers before you, some I mention, some I don’t mention” (lam naqsus ‘alayk, referring to QS 40:78). And Allah says they (messengers) came in the lisan of their qawm; they came to their people speaking their language.

Lay Muslims today, seeing Buddhists do rituals in front of a statue, perceive Buddhists as worshipping the statue, which can be seen as a shirk or idolatrous practice. Your comment on this perception?

The whole idea of tawhid and shirk is an Islamic concept. In Buddhism, there is no shirk. You go and ask Buddhists, and I’ve asked them million times: What do you do when you’re paying respect to the statue? They say: we pay respect to the teachings of the Buddha; we don’t pay respect to the statue. The Buddha himself said, “I’m not god,” just like Nabi Muhammad. They don’t worship the statue or the stone. The idea of shirk is from the monotheistic concept of religion. So, they are not idol worshippers. The Buddha rejects the Hindu gods.

Buddhists have no god, right?

Buddhists are not atheistic. The Buddha only said God is not important; the human being is important. He was in India where there is a caste system. He had no problem with the concept of God. The most important issue is help human beings who are suffering under the exploitation of the Brahmin system. The issue is how you are going to save humanity. The Buddha himself, again, said he is not god. He was a teacher, a guru.

In one of your papers on Islam and Buddhism, you talked about the concept of the Ultimate Reality in Buddhism, and you treat it as something like parallel to the concept of God in monotheistic religions.

The Buddha says there is the Eternal, the Unborn. Without the Unborn, nothing can exist. That is called the Dharma, which means the Eternal Law, the Ultimate Reality. The Dharma and God are the same. Allah is also eternal. Dharma is not a person. Allah is not a person. The problem with the Muslims is that they think Allah as a person, because they are reacting to the Christians who have personified God.

Allah has sifat (attributes) that are part of His dhat (essence). And His sifat are bila kayfa: they have no identical quality of that of human beings. Now if you come to Buddhism, it also says there is the Dharma, the Eternal Teaching that is learned by the resis, the teachers. The Dharma is God for them, just Allah is for Muslims.

Our problem is that we have abandoned studying Buddhism. In the past, in Java, Muslims and Buddhist could talk together because of tawhid and sunyata (nothingness). In tawhid, Allah has no form. Sunyata also has no form. This is why Javanese could become Muslim, not because of jihad or anything; it is because of the compatibility between tawhid and sunyata. The Quran also talks about ummatan wasatan (the middle nation); our sharia is wasatiyya (being moderate). Buddhism also has majjhima-pattipada (the middle way).

Come down further, the Buddhism that came to Indonesia was that of the Mahayana tradition. In Mahayana, the concept of bodhisattva is very important. Bodhisattva is the one who is going to be enlightened, but he holds his enlightenment to help the people. In Islam we have the same concept: al-insan al-kamil. Another similarity is the concept of Nur Muhammad and the concept of Tathagata, the enlightened Buddha.

So there are many similarities. The problem is that Muslims don’t study Buddhism. Muslims have a long history of relationship with Christianity and there is not much peace among them, while here in Southeast Asia, in ASEAN countries, Muslims and Buddhists make the majority population, around 40-40 percent, but we don’t know each other. In 900 years of Islam and Buddhism coexistence, from the 12th century to the 21st century, there is, I’m sorry to say, not one Muslim scholar of Buddhism in Southeast Asia.

Continuing your explanation, why have Southeast Asian Muslims abandoned studying Buddhism?

Since colonial times, Muslims have gotten into the problem of power struggle. Muslims who ruled, including here in Southeast Asia, suddenly lost power to the Dutch, to the British, to the French, etc. That tradition of learning the other could not develop because the space was lost, occupied by outsiders who disrupted Muslims’ culture and educational institutions. Muslims then abandon studying Asian religion of Buddhism, of Shivaism, of Confucianism, of Taoism, because we don’t have time; we have lost power. The Buddhists also lost their power. The last dhammaraja in Myanmar, which was an important Buddhist kingdom, was exiled by the British to India. Other dhammarajas of Buddhist kingdoms were also either removed or exiled. The only dhammaraja who remained was in Thailand; it was not colonized and still has a tradition of a Buddhist king. Thailand is the largest Buddhist country in Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, those colonizers made religion into ethnic identities. Religion gets ethnicized. If you’re a Malay, you’re a Muslim. If you’re a Siamese, you’re a Buddhist. If you’re a Burman, you’re a Buddhist.

So, our problem is that on one hand there is abandonment of interreligious studies, and on the other there is an ethnification of religion.

Would you tell us briefly about the history of Muslims in Thailand? The thing that we mostly heard is only about Pattani Muslims.

Let me first tell a little bit about Pattani. The Pattani conflict is basically between orang Siam and orang Melayu. If you go to Pattani today, and I stayed five years in Pattani, they say we are orang Melayu and we are under orang Siam. The conflict was between two kingdoms: the big kingdom of Siam and the Pattani kingdom.

Now, in the historical Siam, there were Muslim immigrants from Persia, India, and parts of Malaysia (Kedah and Perlis). I divide the types of Muslims in Thailand in the following way.

In the deep south (Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat), which was annexed by Siam hundred years ago, they are Malay-speaking Muslims of Southern Thailand. They identify themselves as Malay and they don’t speak Thai. So there are multiple layers in the Pattani conflict: the issue of ethnic identity (Siam and Malay), language (Thai and Malay), and religion. The Pattani problem is basically a problem of two ethno-religious identities.

In the upper south, there are Malay but Thai-speaking Muslims. They were people from Kedah and Perlis who migrated to Thailand for economic reason; no border at that time, and they didn’t have a kingdom. They came into Nakhon Sithammarat, Phuket, Phanga, Krabi, etc.

Up in Bangkok, you have Persians, who have been there for four hundred years, from the time of King Narai (in reign 1633-1656). You have the Cham Muslims, who migrated from the Champa kingdom and they worked as soldiers for King Chulalongkorn (in reign 1868-1910). In Bangkok, there is an area called Makkasan, near the Indonesian embassy, in which there are Makassari Muslims and every year they celebrate the birthday of King Chulalongkorn, because he gave them protection and they are very grateful of him.

There is another area in Bangkok called Kampong Jawa in which there are Javanese. If you want to eat Javanese foods, go there. You know what, one son of Ahmad Dahlan (the founder of Muhammadiyah, one of the largest Indonesian Muslim organizations—ed) lived in Masjid Jawa in this kampong. This man came not as a son of a kyai; he came first as a cleaner of the masjid. Slowly they found out that this man is son of Ahmad Dahlan. He then influenced some of the prominent Thai Muslim businessmen and reformers, one of them is my brother in law, who translated the Quran into Thai.

The Salafiyyah in Thailand—and I’ve written a paper about this—is not that Salafi-Wahhabism. Salafi reformism arrived in Bangkok in 1926 with the arrival of an Indonesian Muslim scholar by the name of Ahmad Wahab, who had studied in Mecca before his return to Indonesia and subsequent exile to Thailand. Ahmad Wahab was exiled to Thailand by the Dutch authorities due to his involvement with the reformist Muhammadiyah movement and its political movement in Sarekat Islam.

In Bangkok, Ahmad Wahab along with like-minded Thai Muslims such as Direk Kulsiriswad and others formed the Ansorusunnah association in 1930s and also Jamiyatul Islam in 1950s. The religious influence of Ahmad Wahab’s reformist activities within Thai Islam extended to the north and south of Thailand within the Thai-speaking Muslims of Chiangmai and Chiangrai in the north and Pak Prayoon in Phatthalung province and Nakorn Sithammarat in the upper South.

In Bangkok there is also the Indian Muslim community, made up of Keralites and Tamils. And they also came at the time of King Chulalongkorn.

Now let’s go up again, to Northeast Thailand. Here you have the Pathan Muslims. They were coming from Afghanistan. They are Hanafi in fiqh. They were warriors, soldiers, brought there by the British. There are a lot of livestock businesses there. Most of the halal industry in Thailand is in the hands of these Pathan Muslims.

Now we go to further north, to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. There you’ll find two types of Muslims. The majority are Chinese Muslims who came from Yunan, southern part of China. They were part of the Kuomintang party and loyal to Sun Yat Sen who fled to Taiwan. When Mao Tse Tung came into rule in China, these Muslims fled first to Burma, and then to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. They are Hanafi in fiqh. And they are the most developed among the Muslim communities in Thailand. The other are Bengalis, who came seeking livelihood and were migrating from Bengal to Burma, then to Thailand.

People often think about Pattani, while only 44 percent of Muslims in Thailand live in Pattani. The rest are spread all over the country. In the last parliament from the 2007 election, we had 23 Muslim members of the parliament and only eleven of them are from Pattani.

Can we say that the Pattani conflict is an insurgency?

It is an insurgency, like in Kashmir, Papua, Palestine; and it’s an ethno-religious conflict. They are nationalists. They want their Malay-Muslim identity to be recognized. There are separatists, but most just want autonomy. The leader of this movement is Haji Sulong who, during the time of Phibunsongkhram, delivered seven demands to the Thai government. Only one of these seven demands is related to religion. The rest are about ethnic identity, language, governorship, administration, and other political demands.

Whenever there is an insurgency like that, and the insurgents are Muslims, terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS usually come in taking advantage. Do they come to Thailand?

No, they can’t. Many of the Westerners after 9/11 came searching for terrorists or jihadists in Southern Thailand, they didn’t find anybody. The Pattani Muslims don’t want an Islamic state. They are very clear about this. They say: ours is a nationalist struggle. Read their narrative. Their narrative is about their history of the past Pattani kingdom, not about an Islamic state. The Pattani kingdom had seven females as sultanahs (queens) of Pattani. In an Islamic state, will you have a queen? No.

Moving to the country next to Thailand, I expect there is a similar case as Thailand’s in the case of Myanmar’s Rohingya issue.

On the Rohingya issue, there is, first, an element of racism. The Rohingya people are ethnically Bengalis. They are South Asian like me, not Mongoloid like you. Myanmar is located at the geographic border where Aryan race stops and the Mongoloid begins. Most of the Rohingya people were from the Arakan/Chittagong area which is now part of both Myanmar and Bangladesh. They migrated to Myanmar for economic reason. When they come to Myanmar, they become an economic burden. The local people don’t want outsiders to come.

Earlier there was a state called Arakan. The Arakan state was bordering Chittagong that is part of Bangladesh. There was no border at that time. There was an Arakan Buddhist king and there were Arakan Muslims. They lived together for a long time because there were no borders. Then a Burmese Buddhist king attacked Arakan state and defeated that Arakan Buddhist king. This Arakan Buddhist king then fled to Bengal, to Bangladesh as we call it today. The Bengali people then helped him to win back his throne. The Arakan king was sympathetic to Bengalis. Many Bengalis then migrated to Arakan. And then Arab traders came in. There emerged a new group in Arakan whom we know as Arakan Muslims. Muslims and Buddhists lived side by side. If you go to writings of that period, you’d find that the Buddhist king had an Arabic title. His coin was made in Arabic. He admired the Muslim culture. What happened then is the Burmese king attacked Arakan again and he ended the kingdom.

Then came the British, controlling Arakan. The British rule ended with the independence, from which a problem emerged: Arakan Muslims were under the pressure of the Burmans. The Burmans are the majority race in Burma. They wanted to rule over all ethnic groups in Burma, so they wanted to take control over the Arakan state.

Before independence, the Arakan Muslims at that time thought that if they were under the Burmans, they were going to be oppressed. So Arakan Muslims’ leader talked to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. There are East Pakistan and West Pakistan. East Pakistan is next to Burma, which is Bangladesh. The Arakan Muslims’ leader said they wanted to migrate to East Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah then talked to General Aung San, the father of Aung San Su Kyi, who was an integrationist like Sukarno. General Aung San said to Ali Jinnah: No, these people don’t need to go to Pakistan; they’re protected under Burma, which will be independent soon. Unfortunately, General Aung San was assassinated before the independence of Burma. The army then took over Myanmar, and they changed the name of Arakan to Rakhine state. They wanted to remove the Buddhist-Muslim historical identity of coexistence.

Myanmar is a hard country. There is always a tension between the Burmans and other ethnic groups. The army made Buddhism as the national identity. They also wanted Rakhine to be Buddhist. The Rakhine people actually don’t like the Burmans. There was a war going on between the Rakhine Buddhist army, which wanted to separate from Myanmar, and the Burman army. Now they have been brainwashed that Arakan state was a Muslim state, which is not true. So they are against the Rohingya. Here comes the identity of Rohingya. The Muslim people start saying we are Arakan Muslims; we are legitimate natives of this land, and we are Rohingya. The word “Rohingya” comes into existence.

So the Burman army declared Rakhine people as the only legitimate inhabitants of the Rakhine state. This led to the rise of Rakhine nationalism against the Rohingya. The Rakhine nationalists started saying to the Rohingya: You are Bengalis. The Burman army divide and rule; they created a conflict between the Arakan Buddhists and the Arakan Muslims. They didn’t give citizenship to the Rohingya.

So, there is an element of racism, the issue of history, and of citizenship legitimacy.

Can we simplify or summarize that the root of the Pattani and Rohingya problems has more to do with modern nation-state building?

Yeah, very good. They are missed out in the nation-state building. In Pattani, religion is not an issue. In Myanmar, Buddhism is exploited by the Burmese for their racism. Bhikkhu AshinWirathu (the spiritual leader of anti-Muslim movement in Burma—ed.) said: protect the Burmese race from the Rohingyas.

I haven’t told you this: The British brought many Indians to Burma, because Burma was part of the British empire. The British brought Indians to manage the colonial administration. Fifty-four per cent of Rangoon’s (later Yangon) population were Indians. There were two ethnic riots in Burma because of this, in 1930 and 1938, against the Indians. These Indians, among them were Muslims, were traders and owners of textile and farming industries. The Burmans hate the Indians. When Burma came into independence, about 700,000 Indians were told to go back. So, there is this element in the conflict over Rohingya.

What now Wirathu does is that he collectively takes all of them as Muslims, all of them are a threat to Myanmar. All of them: the Rohingyas, the Indian Muslims, the Chinese Muslims, and the Zarbadi (children from intermarriage between the Burmese and the Muslims). This is racism in the name of religion.

It seems that in terms of inclination toward violence, Buddhism is not an exception.

I have a copyrighted term for that. I call it “non-violent extremism”. Monks don’t attack; they don’t engage in violence. They are trained not to be violent. But people like Wirathu can incite others to do violence.

How do the Buddhists justify that? I mean, like in Islam, the concept of jihad can be used to justify violence.

They can’t. They legitimize it on the grounds of nationalism. There is nothing available in the Buddhist tradition to legitimize violence.

King Ashoka, who is recognized as the model of a Buddhist king, said that he will use violence to protect his land, and he had bodhisattva warriors. But it was more of nationalism; you may call it religious nationalism. My recent article in Thailand’s newspaper The Nation (which has been republished on the CRCS website—ed) talks about nationalism that has now turned religious.

Last question, what would you suggest, particularly for us in Indonesia, to bridge the gap between Muslims and Buddhist?

I like Indonesia very much. As a Muslim I breathe freely in democratic Indonesia. It has a rich culture and it is a leading Muslim democratic country; the largest Muslim country. Indonesia has a role to play: You have to teach in your educational institutions about your historical cultural background, which is Hindu-Buddhist. You should help Muslims in Southeast Asia how to live with other cultures. It is a challenge for you already. You have to promote cultural studies, which talks about cultural configuration of Southeast Asia, and you have to do it through your local knowledges, not Western theories. You need a local social studies developed for Nusantara, for coexistence between Islam and Asian religions and cultures, especially in ASEAN. It will help a lot, and Indonesia has a big responsibility to do that.

One last thing, I met Cak Nun the other day; we were invited, and I spent three hours with him. He told me a very interesting thing; you can put this on your transcript later. I asked the question why Indonesian Muslims don’t know their Hindu-Buddhist cultural background. He said to me: Indonesians are Muslims by adoption, not continuation. Meaning, they have adopted Islam but forgotten their Hindu-Buddhist cultural identity. They have so many Hindu-Buddhist words, but they don’t know the cultural content of them.

Such as?

Such as puasa. What does this word mean? They don’t know. Pesantren is based on the Buddhist model of school; I said this somewhere in my paper. You have sembahyang, surau, langgar—langgar is a Hindu word and it means temple where people go to pray. So, they have adopted Islam, but they stop continuing their own past. This throws you out of the ground. Indonesians have to keep their feet on the soil of Indonesia; soil of Prambanan, soil of Borobudur, soil of Srivijaya.

26 June 2017

By Kim Hjelmgaard

The European Union’s competition watchdog slapped Google with a record-breaking $2.72 billion fine on Tuesday for breaching antitrust rules with its online shopping service.

The announcement marks the latest clash between European regulators and large U.S. technology companies, including Apple and Amazon, which have been ensnared in lengthy antitrust, tax and privacy-related investigations by European officials.

Regulators said Google “abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.”

The European Commission said the technology firm “gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services. It stifled competition on the merits in comparison shopping markets.”

The Commission, which oversees EU competition rules, gave the Mountain View, Calif., company 90 days to stop or face fines of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of parent company Alphabet.

Last year, Alphabet had a turnover, or annual sales, of just over $90 billion, meaning the additional daily fine would amount to about $12.3 million per day.

RELATED:

A look back at the EU’s 7 years of legal battle with Google

Google has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Kent Walker, a senior vice president for the firm, said it would review the Commission’s findings, and may appeal.

“When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That’s why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both,” he said.

Google’s share price fell 2.5% to $948.09, with losses buffered by investor expectations that the EU was preparing a fine.

The fine follows a seven-year investigation by EU regulators and is the largest ever handed out by the Commission. European regulators have two other antitrust cases against Google outstanding. One is related to the dominance of its Android mobile operating system and the other concerns its search advertising platform.

It also represents a stark contrast to the U.S, where large technology firms are often seen as innovators, job creators and do not attract the same suspicion as they do in Europe, according to legal experts. Jan Oster, a professor of EU law and institutions at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, said that the approach toward regulation in Europe is much more “paternalistic and less laissez-faire than in the U.S.”

He said that the EU perceives markets and consumers as requiring more protections than in the U.S., where the broader legal environment has different interpretations of competition, free speech, privacy and tax standards. He said the EU’s case against Google and other U.S. firms was unlikely to be replicated at home in any form.

The Commission fined Silicon Valley chip maker Intel $1.2 billion in 2009 for anti-competitive practices. Apple was hit by a $14 billion tax bill last year after the EU concluded Ireland provided the firm with improper tax benefits. Amazon has been under the microscope over allegations it used its dominant position in the e-books market to keep prices artificially low while also structuring its sales in a way that allowed it to underpay taxes in Luxembourg the EU claimed amounted to state aid.

“Microsoft fought similar battles with the Commission around the turn of the millennium so we’ve been here before,” said Oliver Fairhurst, a competition law specialist at legal firm Lewis Silkin in London. “The decision shows the exceptionally high standard that dominant businesses such as Google can be held to where otherwise lawful activity can become unlawful simply by virtue of the market share they have.”

Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition policy, nevertheless maintained that what Google has done is illegal under EU rules.

“It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation,” she said in a statement explaining the decision.

Oster said that it was not a “case of animosity, that Europe in some way targets its laws against American companies. It’s more coincidence. Usually, to the best of my knowledge, the companies that get caught in this web are exclusively U.S. technology companies simply because they are the ones that are the biggest and most influential. There is, quite, simply, no alternative to Google or Facebook in Europe.”

Kim Hjelmgaard , USA TODAY

27 June 2017