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mehrreporter

Israel that is a serious threat to Iran: aljazeera - 0 views

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    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that Iran is after the physical destruction of Israel and wants to create a new Holocaust. This is a false claim. The reality is that Iran does not present an existential threat to the people of Israel. It is, in fact, Israel that is a serious threat to Iran.
mehrreporter

Not attacking Syria to discredit threats against Iran: Blix - 0 views

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    Former IAEA Director General expresses his ideas on Syria and reasons for a probable US attack.
mehrreporter

Iranian parliament to address ISIL, coalition - 0 views

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    Tehran, YJC. The Majlis national security committee is going to consider the ISIL threat and the US-led coalition against it on Sunday.
mehrreporter

No threat from ISIS: Iran Interior Minister - 0 views

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    Terhan, YJC. Iran's Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said on Monday that Iran is full command of its borders.
mehrreporter

Opposition Figure: Riyadh Worried about Terror Backfire - 0 views

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    A Saudi opposition figure said that the royal family is worried about terrorist threats posed by extremist groups sponsored by the oil-rich monarchy.
mehrreporter

Netanyahu suggests pinning ISIS against Iran - 0 views

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    Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu waxed broadly of a Middle East in turmoil on Sunday, in his first public comments on the threat posed to the region by ISIS, a terrorist militia conquering swaths of territory in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.
mehrreporter

We've serious problem of people going to the ME to fight with terrorist groups :Austral... - 0 views

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    SYDNEY, Aug 18, 2014 (AFP) - Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Monday said migrants had to be on "Team Australia", and warned all citizens to be vigilant to the threat of home-grown terrorism.
Arabica Robusta

Egypt's revolution won't end with the presidential election - Mail & Guardian Online - 0 views

  • The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt’s political tumult in the past 18 months. A stone’s throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades by both revolutionaries and pro-Mubarak militias and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals’ most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect.
  • There are a million empirical holes that could be picked in this chronicle – the only results we have so far (from Egyptians voting abroad) put Moussa and Shafiq in fourth and fifth places respectively while the lazy insistence of characterising Aboul Fotouh as an unreconstructed Islamist (and hence automatically anti-Tahrir) bears little relation to the substance of his support on the ground.
  • Two misapprehensions underpin much of the discussion about the revolution.
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  • The first is that the metric of revolutionary success lies solely in the formal arena of institutional politics and the development of democratic mechanisms within it. The second is that Tahrir, along with the ludicrously titled “Facebook youth” who populated the square in January and February last year, is the only alternative space in which pressure on the formal arena is thrashed out.
  • And it’s that energy, that those who benefit from the status quo, from western governments to multinational corporations, really fear. Little wonder that there has been a rush by the world’s most powerful entities – from Hilary Clinton and David Cameron to Morgan Chase and General Electric – to simultaneously venerate Tahrir (as long as the demands voiced within it don’t overstep the mark), echo the generals’ calls for “stability” (shutting down broader discourses of dissent in the process) and form links with the largely neoliberal Muslim Brotherhood (whose policies, despite anguished op-eds in Washington think-tank journals, pose little threat to American interests, and indeed offer up many opportunities).
  • What they’re less keen to acknowledge – because it carries the revolution out of its sheltered borders – are the other trenches that are increasingly being etched at the margins of Egyptian society, dividing those who have reaped pharaonic-esque riches as a result of 20-odd years of “structural adjustment” from those left behind in zones of neoliberal exclusion.
  • Forget Shafiq’s advertising hoardings – the revolution is everywhere and it is potent.
  • As the sociologist Asef Bayat has argued, actions that appear to be individualistic strategies for survival and not explicitly political attempts to bring down elites can, in the right circumstances, become unstoppable and interlinked channels of mass rejection, a struggle for real agency in an era of globalised corporate cosmopolitanism that strives to deny it to so many.
Arabica Robusta

Who's heard of the 'African Spring'? | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • ‘We’ve heard so much negativity, but can you tell us what you are actually doing about it?’ The question came from the back of the hall at the Africa Centre in London, where over 100 people had gathered to hear about the state of contemporary African protest movements from a panel of African activists including Ayanda Kota of the South African Unemployed Peoples’ Movement, Bayo Oyenuga of Occupy Nigeria, Osama Zumam of the Sudanese Communist Party and the respected commentator and political activist Yash Tandon.
  • However, these events have rarely been articulated into an African narrative, with the result that western audiences end up being drip-fed stories reinforcing the impression of stereotypical African instability and ‘Afro-pessimism’. Yet if the under or mis-reported uprisings, protests, revolts and changes of regime in many parts of Africa over the past few years (including, amongst others Cote D'Ivoire, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Mozambique) have told us anything, it is that politics on the continent does not always, or mostly, take place at the point of a gun. 
  • Shrinking the state in Africa (an outcome of these policies as enforced by international donors) has produced the very conditions which protestors have revolted against: corruption, rising utility prices, and growing inequality.
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  • Of course, African protest movements do not face an easy route. Confronted with the deregulatory pressures of global development frameworks these movements must contend with mushrooming food and utility prices, and the violence meted out by states when faced with meaningful opposition to neo-liberal economic programmes. Indeed, the negativity questioned by the audience member in London referred to the state-sponsored violence visited upon African protestors which the different protestors repeatedly referred to.
  • social change takes time, and requires a broader social base than just the urban middle class elite which characterised the Tahrir Square phenomenon.
  • Calls for greater democracy in Africa are not framed purely within the actions of specific corrupt ruling elites. Rather it is the relationships between these ruling elites and the agents of global free-market capitalism which are the source of much public anger. It is these relationships which have amongst other things shrunk public services and robbed the continent of the bulk of the profits from its most valuable natural resources. And these relationships have been enabled by international donor policies which have shrunk the state in Africa in the belief that it is the state which has been the source of African’s problems. 
  • And so, if we search for images of recent African protests what we will find is not an overwhelming number of crowds with placards calling for greater openness in government, but a set of explicitly socio-economic demands relating to price rises and unemployment, or the withdrawal of affordable public services and utilities, all brought on by the skewed position of Africa in the global economy, and the enforced privatisation of land, energy and other resources which have largely fallen into the hands of foreign profit-extractive companies and their collaborators in the ruling elites of African countries. 
  • African elites are not uniquely corrupt, nor do they exist in a vacuum of African corruption, but neither is Africa a pure victim of contemporary economic imperialism.  African elites are as complicit in processes of resource and profit extraction as the multinational corporations such as Shell Oil who so often come in for the vitriol of social justice and anti-corporate activists.
  • It is not enough for international donors to call for ‘free and fair’ elections, only for them to enforce, by dint of the implicit threat of aid withdrawal, a complicity amongst all the candidates with neoliberal economic orthodoxy. This is what we find repeatedly in African elections, and in this respect at least it would be fair to say that African elections differ very little from elections in many other parts of the world, including the UK. 
  • African activists have much to teach the rest of the world in resisting austerity, and the many obstacles that lie in the path of such resistance, and it is about time more of us started to listen.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Is the Egyptian revolution dead? - 0 views

  • Millions have taken to the streets since January 2011 demanding jobs, income, democratic rights and a shift in the relations between Egypt and Israel that has been frozen since the advent of the Camp David Accords signed in 1979. Egyptian workers and youth have played a pivotal role in these struggles through mass demonstrations, strikes and rebellions. Just recently workers in the utility sector and the arts have staged occupations demanding better wages and conditions of employment.
  • The Guardian newspaper reported recently that ‘Hundreds of British troops are being prepared to deploy to North Africa to tackle al Qaeda-inspired extremists. Under secret plans being drawn up urgently by top brass, UK soldiers would be sent ‘within months’ to the region to help train the Libyan army.’ (1 July) This plan will involve at least 2,000 Libyan ‘soldiers’ who will be trained in an effort to counter so-called ‘terrorist’ threats in Libya and throughout the region.
  • However, a number of political questions remain outstanding. Will the FJP and other Islamic parties be allowed full participation in the proposed elections? Also will conditions improve for the Egyptian workers, farmers and youth under the interim governing council? In all likelihood the problems of massive unemployment and poverty will continue with no program aimed at empowering the majority within society.
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  • In order for Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Turkey to move forward there must be a revolution led by the people and not controlled by the military which represents in Egypt the interests of the national bourgeoisie in league with US imperialism. When such a revolutionary movement takes power in Egypt it can influence the political atmosphere throughout North Africa and the Middle East.
Arabica Robusta

First Egypt, next Venezuela? | venezuelanalysis.com - 0 views

  • The US and Israel are terrified of the threat of something similar occurring in the Arab world — should the democratic revolutions be successful and extend to exerting democratic control over oil and other resources.
  • However, as Santiago Alba Rico and Alma Allende said in a February 24 Rebelion article “From the Arab world to Latin America”, Venezuela and Cuba’s failure to condemn the brutal repression being carried out by the regime of Muammar Gaddafi’s against a popular revolt will have negative consequences for the anti-imperialist project in Latin America.
  • Ignoring the brutal reality of Gaddafi, who has been a friend in recent years of the West and its allied dictators, risks breaking ties with popular Arab movements, they pointed out.
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  • One thing is clear, just as the US has sought to prop up dictatorships in the Arab world, it will continue its struggle to defeat the popular revolutionary movements in Latin America.
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