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Ed Webb

How Mike Pence's Office Meddled in Foreign Aid to Reroute Money to Favored Christian Gr... - 0 views

www.propublica.org/...ey-to-favored-christian-groups

USA US diplomacy politics

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Nov 19 - Cached
  • Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake
  • ProPublica viewed internal emails and conducted interviews with nearly 40 current and former U.S. officials and aid professionals that shed new light on the success of Pence and his allies in influencing the government’s long-standing process for awarding foreign aid.
  • “There are very deliberate procurement guidelines that have developed over a number of years to guard precisely against this kind of behavior,”
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  • USAID regulations state that awards “must be free from political interference or even the appearance of such interference and must be made on the basis of merit, not on the basis of the religious affiliation of a recipient organization, or lack thereof.”
  • In August, as the White House was considering cuts to an array of foreign aid programs, it shielded funding for religious minorities abroad
  • Late in the Obama administration, USAID’s activities in Iraq focused on an effort by the United Nations to restore basic services as soon as cities had been liberated from Islamic State rule. By the end of 2016, the United States had contributed over $115 million to the effort through USAID, and other countries had contributed hundreds of millions of dollars more. U.S. officials credit the U.N.’s work with enabling millions of Iraqis to return to their homes soon after the fighting was done instead of languishing in refugee camps.
  • U.S. officials in Iraq were sensing dissatisfaction among some Iraqi Christians and American religious groups with the U.S. strategy and the U.N.’s work. Trying to head off problems, U.S. officials urged the U.N. in the summer of 2017 to pay special attention to the Nineveh Plains, an ethnically and religiously diverse region of northern Iraq where many of the country’s Christians live. U.N. officials were reluctant, arguing their assistance could go further in dense urban areas like Mosul, as opposed to the Nineveh Plains, a stretch of farmland dotted by small towns and villages.
  • Many career officials at the State Department and USAID supported the broader scope of the U.N.’s work. They acknowledged it wasn’t perfect — it could be slow, and the U.N. was not adept at communicating with local communities — but said the rebuilding had benefited wide swaths of territory that included both Muslims and minority groups.
  • Career officials also expressed concerns at the time that targeting federal funds toward particular minority groups on the basis of religion could be unconstitutional
  • Initially, Pence’s office and political appointees at USAID were focused on helping Christians, with little attention to Yazidis, a small, ancient sect that was targeted in an especially cruel manner by Islamic State militants, said a current official and a former foreign service officer. Over time, career officials “helped educate” political appointees on the extent of the Yazidis’ suffering, in hopes of getting their support for directing some aid at non-Christian groups, the former foreign service officer said. “There was a very ideological focus on Christians, and most of the questions were about Christians,” this person said. “We were trying to get them to focus on others in the minority communities that might need assistance.”
  • While the grant process was being worked out at USAID, Pence blindsided officials in October 2017 when he declared to an influential Christian group in Washington that Trump had ordered diplomats to no longer fund “ineffective” U.N. programs. USAID would now directly help persecuted communities, he said.
  • Mark Green, the head of USAID, expressed discomfort to a colleague about potential interference by Pence into the grant process
  • Pence’s then-chief of staff, Nick Ayers, called Steiger to demand somebody at the agency be punished for the failure to provide aid to Christian groups quickly enough, according to several people familiar with the conversation. Ayers did not respond to requests for comment. Green’s reaction was to remove Maria Longi, a career civil servant and a top official in USAID’s Middle East bureau. Though still on USAID’s payroll, she now teaches national security strategy at the National War College.
  • Concern spread even among Trump appointees that their jobs might be threatened. “What it did instill in the Middle East bureau was fear among the political appointees that they could be thrown out at any time,”
  • Five current or former U.S. officials said involvement in grant decisions by political appointees — particularly by someone as senior as Ferguson — is highly unusual. USAID grants are typically decided by a review committee and a contracting officer, all of whom are career officials.
  • “USAID procurement rules with technical review panels are strict, as they should be, to avoid any political interference on the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars,”
  • Aside from its small size and lack of federal grant experience, Shlama was an unconventional choice for another reason. Last year it received $10,000 in donations from the Clarion Project, a nonprofit organization which researchers at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative said “advances anti-Muslim content through its web-based and video production platforms.”
  • USAID is now expanding its emphasis on religious minorities far beyond Iraq. In December, a month after his email about White House pressure, Ferguson told USAID mission directors in the Middle East that agency leadership had identified up to $50 million it planned to use in 2019 for “urgent religious freedom and religious persecution challenges,” according to a second email seen by ProPublica. He asked mission directors to submit programming ideas. In a follow-up email in June, also seen by ProPublica, Ferguson wrote that in addition to Iraq, religious and ethnic minority programming was planned for Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia.
Ed Webb

Congressman Duncan risked career voting against the Iraq war » Knoxville News... - 0 views

m.knoxnews.com/...-career-voting-against-the-war

Iraq US USA war politics

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 23 Mar 13
     
    people who wanted to be Winston Churchill
Ed Webb

Syria Comment » Archives » "Bush White House Wanted to Destroy the Syrian Sta... - 0 views

www.joshualandis.com/blog

US USA Cheney Blair Syria Lebanon Iraq analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 05 Sep 10
     
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Sana Usman

PM Gilani will resign after UK visit. Sources - 0 views

www.newsspeedchannel.eu/gn-after-uk-visit-sources.html

Prime Gilani resign after UK official visit Makhdoom Shahabuddin Yusuf Raza punished for a thirty second prison Supreme Court letter to Swiss authorities Gilani's political career Shahab-ud-Din Federal Textile senior member of PPP President South Punjab N

shared by Sana Usman on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • Sana Usman on 10 May 12
     
    Some strong sources reported that Prime Minister Gilani will resign after UK official visit. Makhdoom Shahabuddin will take charge as his substitute.
Ed Webb

The Real Jerusalem Platform Fight - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...-jerusalem-platform-fight.html

US USA Israel Jerusalem politics lobby lobbying AIPAC foreignpolicy

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • All this because Democrats had the audacity to write a platform that did not publicly reject the position on Jerusalem held by every American administration since the founding of the Jewish state
  • AIPAC has helped create a climate in which being deemed insufficiently “pro-Israel” is almost as dangerous to a politicians’ career as being deemed insufficiently “anti-communist” was in the early 1950s. But this very climate gives politicians and activists an incentive to keep raising the “pro-Israel” bar higher and higher so as to gain an advantage over their political foes. As the definition of “pro-Israel” becomes more extreme, it becomes harder and harder to reconcile with a commitment to Palestinian statehood, America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world or even the simple realities of the foreign policy-making process. The people least fettered by those concerns—those least concerned about international opinion and Palestinian dignity—thus wield power over everyone else since they can keep establishing new “pro-Israel” litmus tests that their political foes find difficult to meet. It’s hardly news that this dynamic breeds terror inside the Democratic Party, especially around election time. What the Jerusalem platform flap reveals is the terror it can breed inside AIPAC itself.
anonymous

Freedomhouse Report: Libya - 0 views

freedomhouse.org/template.cfm

freedomhouse Libya Women

shared by anonymous on 07 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • al-Qadhafi has sought to promote the status of women and to encourage them to participate in his Jamahiriya project
  • e directly challenged the prevailing conservatism in Libya, though his regime at times has struck a conciliatory tone with the Islamist political opposition and the conservative populace at the expense of women's rights
  • al-Qadhafi has pushed for women to become equal citizens and has introduced legislation aimed at reducing discrimination between the sexes.
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  • provide women with greater access to education and employment
  • These efforts by the state have run against Libya's extremely conservative patriarchal tr
  • ditions and tribal culture, which continue to foster gender discrimination.
  • or example, women still face unequal treatment in many aspects of family law.
  • o not permit any genuinely independent organizations or political groups to exist. Membership in any group or organization that is not sanctioned by the state is punishable by death under Law No. 71 of 1972. There are a number of women's organizations in Libya that purport to be independent, but they are all in fact closely linked to the state. Consequently, their efforts to promote women's emancipation have yielded little progress.
  • promote a greater awareness of domestic violence and the fact that more women are entering the workforce.
  • government temporarily restricted women from leaving the country without their male guardian, a step that the authorities later denied.
  • Libya has no constitution
  • aws and key declarations
  • 1977 Declaration of the Authority of the People and the 1988 Great Green Charter of Human Rights in the Age of the Masses (Great Green Charter).
  • In addition, Article 1 of Law No. 20 of 1991
  • Women have been eligible to become judges since 1981, although they remain underrepresented in the judiciary. The first female judge was appointed in 1991, and currently there are an estimated 50 female judges
  • An adult woman is recognized as a full person before the court and is equal to a man throughout all stages of litigation and legal proceedings. However, in some instances, women are not considered to be as authentic witnesses as men.
  • Libya acceded to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1989. At that time, it made reservations to Article 2 and Article 16, in relation to rights and responsibilities in marriage, divorce, and parenthood, on the grounds that these articles should be applied without prejudice to Shari'a. Libya made an additional general reservation in 1995, declaring that no aspect of accession can conflict with the laws of personal status derived from Shari'a.[15]
  • In June 2004, Libya became the first country in the Arab region to ratify the Optional Protocol to CEDAW.[16] The protocol allows Libyan groups and individuals to petition the UN CEDAW committee if they believe their rights under the convention have been violated.[17] However, because the committee can only issue nonbinding recommendations to states in response to these petitions, the practical effects of the protocol remain unclea
  • There are no genuinely independent nongovernmental women's rights groups in Libya. Several women's organizations claim to be independent, such as Al-Wafa Association for Human Services, which seeks to improve the status of women and "to further women's education and social standing."[18] However, all such organizations have close ties to the authorities. The charity Al-Wattasimu, for example, organized an international conference on women's rights in Tripoli in April 2007. Participants sought to draft new concepts and principles on women's rights and "to realize a strategic support group project for African women."[19] Al-Wattasimu is run by Aisha al-Qadhafi, the daughter of Muammar al-Qadhafi.
  • zations claim to be independent, such as Al-Wafa Association for Human Services, which seeks to improve the status of
  • has encoura
  • ged women to participate in the workforce and to exercise their economic rights.
  • Society in general still considers women's primary role to be in the home. While more young women in Libya aspire to pursue professional careers, their working lives are often cut short when they marry.
  • Their political rights and civic voice remain extremely limited on account of the nature of the regime and the fact that all political activity must be sanctioned by the authorities. Recent years have brought no real change in this respect, and women continue to play a marginal role in state institutions. For example, just 36 women gained s
  • eats in the 468-seat General People's Congress in the March 2009 indirect elections
  • Women remain underrepresented in the judiciary, with none serving on the Supreme Court
  • nces. For all its discourse on women's rights, the regime clearly remains extremely reluctant to appoint women to senior positions.
  • Women are even less likely to participate in the Basic People's Congresses in rural areas, and in some cases those who do attend choose to do so indirectly on account of conservative social attitudes.
  • Women have gained access to new sources of information in recent years, but the extent to which they can use this information to empower themselves in their civic and pol
  • itical lives remains limited by the general restrictions on independent political activity.
  • gime. Women increasingly use the Internet as a source of information, though satellite television, which is more accessible, is the most influential medium
  • t the same time, social and cultural attitudes are being influenced by growing access to satellite television and the Internet, and by a partial opening in the domestic media, which has led to an increased awareness of women's issues and greater room for discussion. The expansion of mobile telephone access has also give
  • n women a greater degree of freedom, especially in dealings with the opposite sex.
Jim Franklin

Yemen child soldier tells of his hatred for al-Houthi rebels - Times Online - 0 views

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article6868811.ece

Yemen civil war houthi

shared by Jim Franklin on 10 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Jubran, who thinks he is 14 but looks a lot younger, has spent the past few months as a fighter for the Government in the civil war against the al-Houthi rebels. Now the former child soldier is a refugee. With both parents dead, he lives in the squalid al-Mazrak refugee camp near the Saudi border.
  • “I don’t feel safe in the night. I always feel like a Houthi will be coming to get me,” says Jubran.
  • Ask him what he wants to do when he grows up, and he doesn’t hesitate. “I want to f*** those Houthis,” he says.
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  • “My dad was fighting against the Houthis when he died,” says Jubran. “Then I joined the fighters. When I was fighting in the mountains with the soldiers, I used to live in caves. I would just eat whatever, I was not afraid.”
  • “On these Houthis we found a piece of paper saying they will go to paradise. They convince children to fight by giving them this paper that promises they’ll go to paradise.”
  • The rebel leader, Abdul Malek al-Houthi, has said publicly that he wants economic equality and a Shia curriculum in schools but the movement uses darker rhetoric internally. Its slogan is: “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”
  • Jubran’s military career ended in defeat. “The Houthis overtook our site and all of us were thirsty and looking for food. We felt like we’d lost the war and that’s why we ran away,” he says. “We were besieged for three days and then there was some negotiation and we left.”
  • Four have war wounds, including his five-year-old sister, who was hit in the leg when a bullet entered their house.
  • Their mother was with them, but she died of an unknown illness on the journey. Now Jubran shares two tents with 12 other children and his uncle and aunt.
  • Jubran says he cannot go to school. “I’m too busy queueing and asking for things,” he explains.
  • An estimated 150,000 people have been displaced and the death toll is unknown — but the world pays little attention. A UN appeal in September for $23 million fell on deaf ears.
  • Jubran hopes to go home eventually. “I don’t know what will be there. We used to have sheep but they all died, but we do have land. Maybe some time I’ll be able to go back.”
  • Jim Franklin on 10 Oct 09
     
    Wow...basically the definition of a crappy life.
Ed Webb

Fears over education's gender gap - The National Newspaper - 1 views

www.thenational.ae/...article

education Gulf GCC UAE gender boys girls

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Emirati boys are posting lower examination scores and dropping out of high school at a much greater rate than Emirati girls, newly released research shows.It also found that among pupils who complete secondary schooling, many fewer boys go on to a university education.
  • although 70 per cent of Emirati girls enrol at university after high school, the figure for boys is only 27 per cent.
  • The drop-out rates are highest in Grade 10, the first non-compulsory year of school, when many boys abandon their education to pursue jobs in the public sector.
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  • “By no means does this study imply that girls have an outstanding quality of education either,” she said. “I would say that neither boys nor girls are receiving the best education that they could in government schools.”
  • Dr Ridge recommended that the Ministry of Education should look at improving the quality of its expatriate teaching force, getting more Emirati men to become teachers, and making schools more attractive to pupils.
  • The Armed Forces and police were a “very attractive” career choice for some because they required minimal education
  • Emiratis make up only one per cent of the UAE’s private sector workforce. The public workforce is 85 per cent Emirati.
Ed Webb

Wagging the Dog with Iran's Maxwell Smart | Informed Comment - 1 views

www.juancole.com/...-with-irans-maxwell-smart.html

US Iran intelligence foreignpolicy analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • I am frankly shocked that Eric Holder should have brought us this steaming crock, which is now being used to make policy at the highest levels. That a Mexican former drug runner being paid by the US taxpayers might have thought he could advance his career by playing mind games with a somewhat crazy Iranian expatriate is no surprise. That you could put fantastic schemes in Arbabsiar’s mind if you worked at it seems obvious. That anyone in the DOJ or the US foreign policy establishment would take all this seriously is not plausible. I conclude that they are being dishonest, and that this is Obama’s turn to wag the dog as he faces defeat at Romney’s well-manicured hands next year this time.
Ed Webb

Arabic press roundup: the curious case of Tawfiq Okasha, MP | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...rael-egypt-relations-884817855

Egypt media politics Israel parliament television TV

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Tawfiq Okasha, a talkshow host recently turned MP
  • Okasha launched his political career by inviting the Israeli ambassador, Haim Koren, on to his television show.The blossoming friendship was cemented last week when both were pictured after a three-hour meeting
  • Egypt's parliament voted on Wednesday to annul his membership.It was a spectacular fall that was perhaps helped by as series of articles in the Egyptian press, most mnotably in Al-Youm7 newspaper, which is owned by some businessmen in Egypt and often loyal to the establishment and the army
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  • the Alyoum7 newspaper was accused by an Israeli religious website of publishing hate because of its position against Okasha
Ed Webb

Freelancing abroad in a world obsessed with Trump - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...p-impact-foreign-reporting.php

journalism journalists journalist media MENA US USA

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “I can’t make a living reporting from the Middle East anymore,” said Sulome in mid-December. “I just can’t justify doing this to myself.” The day we spoke, she heard that Foreign Policy, one of the most reliable destinations for freelancers writing on-the-ground, deeply reported international pieces, would be closing its foreign bureaus. (CJR independently confirmed this, though it has not been publicly announced.) “They are one of the only publications that publish these kinds of stories,” she said, letting out a defeated sigh.
  • Sulome blames a news cycle dominated by Donald Trump. Newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs simply have less space for freelance international stories than before—unless, of course, they directly involve Trump.
  • Trump was the focus of 41 percent of American news coverage in his first 100 days in office. That’s three times the amount of coverage showered on previous presidents
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  • Foreign news coverage has been taking a hit for decades. According to a 2014 Pew report, American newspapers even then had cut their international reporting staff by 24 percent in less than a decade. Network news coverage of stories with a foreign dateline averaged 500 minutes per year in 2016, compared to an average 1,500 minutes in 1988, according to a study by Tyndall. “Clearly it’s harder for international stories to end up on front pages now,” says Ben Pauker, who served as the executive editor of Foreign Policy for seven years until the end of 2017. He is now a managing editor at Vox. From his own experience, Pauker says, it’s simply an issue of editorial bandwidth. “There’s only so much content an editorial team can process.”
  • In October 2017, Sulome thought she had landed the story of her career. The US had just announced a $7 million reward for a Hezbollah operative believed to be scouting locations for terror attacks on American soil—something it had never done before. Having interviewed Hezbollah fighters for the last six years, Sulome had unique access to the upper echelons of its militants, including that specific operative’s family members. Over the course of her reporting, Hezbollah members told her they had contingency plans to strike government and military targets on US soil and that they had surface-to-air missiles, which had not been reported before. Convinced she had struck gold, she was elated when the piece was commissioned by a dream publication she’d never written for before. But days later, that publication rescinded its decision, saying that Sulome had done too much of the reporting before she was commissioned. Sulome was in shock. She went on to pitch the story to eight other publications, and no one was interested.
  • I’ll go back to the Middle East on trips if I find someone who wants a story, but I’m not going to live there and do this full-time, because it’s really taking a toll on me
  • According to Nathalie Applewhite, managing director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the lack of international coverage has become a real problem for Pulitzer grant recipients. Those grants, she says, were established to address the earlier crisis in which news organizations were closing foreign bureaus and could no longer fund big foreign reporting projects. “Now we’re seeing an even bigger challenge,” she says. “We’re providing the monetary support, but the problem is finding the space for it.” Grant applicants, Applewhite adds, are finding it harder to get commitments from editors to publish their work upon completion of their reporting. And stories that already have commitments are sitting on the shelf much longer, as they are continuously postponed for breaking Trump news.
  • As the daughter of two former Middle East-based journalists, Sulome knows what it used to be like for people like her. “I grew up surrounded by foreign correspondents, and it was a very different time. There was a healthy foreign press, and most of them were staff. The Chicago Tribune had a Beirut bureau for example. So when people say we’re in a golden age of journalism today, I’m like, Really?”
  • The divestment from foreign news coverage, she believes, has forced journalists to risk their lives to tell stories they feel are important. Now, some publications are refusing to commission stories in which the reporter already took the risk of doing the reporting on spec. Believing that this will discourage freelancers from putting their lives in danger, this policy adds to the problem more than it solves it.
  • “When people lose sight of what’s going on around the world, we allow our government to make foreign policy decisions that don’t benefit us. It makes it so much easier for them to do that when we don’t have the facts. Like if we don’t know that the crisis in Yemen is killing and starving so many people and making Yemenis more extremist, how will people know not to support a policy in which we are attacking Yemenis?”
  • “Whether it’s environmental, ethnic or religious conflict, these are issues that may seem far away, but if we ignore them they can have a very real impact on us at home. International security issues, global health scares, and environmental crises know no borders, and I think we ignore them at our own peril.”
Ed Webb

Donald Trump's Year of Living Dangerously - POLITICO Magazine - 0 views

www.politico.com/...licy-analysis-dangerous-216202

Trump politics US USA analysis diplomacy policy foreignpolicy

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • One year in, Trump’s much-vaunted national security team has not managed to tame the president or bring him around to their view of America’s leadership role in the world. Instead, it’s a group plagued by insecurity and infighting, publicly undercut by the president and privately often overruled by him. Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, is regularly reported by White House sources to be on his way out, with his demoralized, depleted State Department in outright rebellion. Meanwhile, the brawny military troika of White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general; Defense Secretary James Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general; and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, a serving Army three-star general, has managed to stop the chaos of the administration’s early days while crafting a national security policy that gets more or less solid marks from establishment types in both parties. The problem is, no one’s sure Trump agrees with it.
  • sanctions remain in place despite, not because of, the White House, and sources tell me Trump personally is not on board with many of the more hawkish measures his team proposes to counter Putin, a fact underscored by his eyebrow-raising signing statement in December objecting to several tough-on-Russia provisions in a defense bill
  • The language of "principled realism" put forward by McMaster is so un-Trumpian that a top adviser who received a copy told a reporter it was simply “divorced from the reality” of the Trump presidency. “It’s the first time, maybe in history, key advisers have gone into the administration to stop the president, not to enable him,” says Thomas Wright, a Brookings scholar who has emerged as one of the most insightful analysts of Trump’s foreign policy
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  • One leading European official who came to town last January looking for answers told me that, at the time, the establishment types urged him to have “strategic patience”—not coincidentally the same phrase foreign policy hands used to use about North Korea’s nuclear program. By December, he was tired of waiting for Trump to improve. “When, finally, will this strategic patience pay off?” he asked.
  • Over their year of living dangerously with Trump, foreign leaders and diplomats have learned this much: The U.S. president was ignorant, at times massively so, about the rudiments of the international system and America’s place in it, and in general about other countries. He seemed to respond well to flattery and the lavish laying out of red carpets; he was averse to conflict in person but more or less immovable from strongly held preconceptions. And given the chance, he would respond well to anything that seemed to offer him the opportunity to flout or overturn the policies endorsed by his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
  • Another conversation, with Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law who had been given an expansive international portfolio ranging from restarting Middle East peace talks to dealing with Mexico and China, was just as troubling. Kushner was “very dismissive” about the role of international institutions and alliances and uninterested in the European’s recounting of how closely the United States had stood together with Western Europe since World War II. “He told me, ‘I’m a businessman, and I don’t care about the past. Old allies can be enemies, or enemies can be friends.’ So, the past doesn’t count,” the official recalled. “I was taken aback. It was frightening.”
  • The president really does see the world differently than his own national security adviser
  • “At least the first several months all of us in the building, we thought, ‘We’ve seen this movie before, it’s growing pains, we get it.’ But eventually it seemed clear this was no longer about transition, and this seemed to be about intent rather than incompetence and lack of staffing,” she says. By fall, the word in the Foggy Bottom halls was unequivocal: “The secretary has absolutely lost the building.”
  • for many the rebellion is just to quit, as Bennett has done, on the brink of serving as an ambassador for the first time in her career. On the day she left this fall, she was one of four acting assistant secretaries—all women in a field in which that is still rare—to resign. “I felt like half of my life was probably enough to serve given the climate within the department,” she says, “and given what appears to be such limited respect for expertise gained over long decades of service.”
  • disruptions with the NSC team, where McMaster grew to resent what he saw as Tillerson’s disdain for the interagency process the national security adviser oversees, and by the time the strains on Tillerson’s relationship with Trump became publicly evident over the summer, the secretary of state was losing his remaining internal defenders. The two, said an outside adviser, are now fundamentally at odds. “McMaster and Tillerson are in a death struggle,” he said, “each of them trying to get rid of the other.”
  • I recently met a senior general of a U.S. ally at a conference. What was it like to deal with Trump’s government, I asked? “It’s a vacuum, a void,” he said. “There’s a complete inability to get answers out of American counterparts who don’t know what policy is.” An international diplomat who has worked extensively on hot spots such as Afghanistan and Iraq told me he has been to Washington five or six times in recent months. His normal contacts at the State Department were so out of the loop, “Frankly, they were asking me, ‘What do you think the White House thinks?’”
  • Trump’s national security team and his allies are engaged in a silent conspiracy of sorts to guide and constrain him. America’s enemies in China and Russia have taken their measure of the man and are preparing to test him more decisively than they have yet ventured. Opportunists in the Middle East and elsewhere are taking what they can get. War talk with North Korea grows ever louder. And in Washington, the America Firsters have been purged from the White House staff—but not from the Oval Office itself.
  • “Nobody speaks for Trump,” he said. “He speaks for himself. The question is, are they allowed to do things notwithstanding? And the answer is yes, until he decides to pull the rug out from under them. Well, that’s the reality. That’s how this man works.” Isn’t that, I asked, an extraordinary statement of no confidence in the presidency they are supposed to serve? “It’s amazing,” he responded. “Look, the whole thing is amazing. We’ve never been here. But that’s where it is. So, at some point you have to sort of stop saying, you know, ‘This is terrible, it shouldn’t be this way.’ It is this way.”
Ed Webb

Beirut 1958: America's origin story in the Middle East - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...rigin-story-in-the-middle-east

Egypt Lebanon Iraq KSA Saudi Jordan US USA military diplomacy USSR ColdWar

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Nov 19 - Cached
  • No one in Beirut — or Washington — thought that this mission would mark the beginning of decades of seemingly endless American combat missions in the Middle East. In retrospect, Beirut in 1958 was a decisive turning point.
  • Lebanon was in the midst of a civil war pitting the Christian and Muslim communities against each other. The Muslims saw the Marines as enemies intent on keeping a hated President Camille Nemr Chamoun in office against the law. The Lebanese army, a fragile coalition of Christians and Muslims, saw the Marines as uninvited aggressors who were violating Lebanese sovereignty. The American command was prepared for the worst and was ready to deploy nuclear weapons to the battlefield from its base in Germany.
  • A year before, Eisenhower had enunciated what became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, the first statement by a president stating that America has vital interests in the Middle East and would defend them by force if necessary.
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  • the immediate cause for the dispatch of the Marines: a coup d’etat in Baghdad on July 14. The pro-American King Faisal II had been brutally murdered in the coup, and his government was swept away. In Jordan, then federated with Iraq, Eisenhower said a “highly organized plot to overthrow the lawful government” of King Hussein had been discovered. Actually, the Central Intelligence Agency had foiled the plot several weeks before.
  • said President Chamoun had requested American military intervention to stop “civil strife actively fomented by Soviet and Cairo broadcasts.” It was the only time in the speech that Eisenhower even alluded to what had him really worried that day: the rising political power in the Arab world of Egypt’s charismatic young President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Arab nationalist movement.
  • It was a less than candid explanation for sending in the Marines. Eisenhower made no mention of the fact that Chamoun was illegally seeking a second term and even claimed Chamoun did not seek reelection. The focus was entirely on Russia and the Cold War, an issue far more Americans understood than the intricate politics of Lebanon or the Arab world.
  • Nasser, meanwhile, was in Yugoslavia visiting the communist government there. Within hours of Eisenhower’s speech, he flew to Moscow. Both Nasser and his host Nikita Khrushchev agreed that they had no warning of the coup in Baghdad or knew anything about the coup plotters, according to recently declassified Soviet documents. Both agreed that the Iraqi coup was the most important development in the Middle East and the American intervention in Lebanon was a sideshow.
  • Nasser was, in the summer of 1958, at the pinnacle of his political career and power. Ironically, he had started his political rise very much as a protégé of the Americans.
  • The British had been completely surprised by the coup in Egypt, but the CIA was not — it had detected the signs of change coming. The agency moved quickly after to coup to establish contact with Nasser.  The point man for the CIA was the legendary Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, a scion of the Roosevelt family born in Argentina. Kim had visited Cairo before the coup and set up contact with the Free Officers who would carry it out. In October 1952, he returned to Cairo as chief of the CIA’s Near East Division and met with Nasser at the famous Mena House Hotel near the pyramids. Each was impressed by the other and they agreed to a clandestine relationship.
  • Roosevelt led the CIA operation that overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran and restored the Shah to his throne in 1953, immediately making him the darling of both Dulles and Eisenhower.
  • Washington agreed to encourage the British to give up their Suez Canal base. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was initially reluctant, but the U.K.’s huge debts from the world wars compelled him to make a deal and the British army agreed to leave Egypt in 1954. Roosevelt had been active behind the scenes in facilitating the deal.
  • The CIA gave Nasser a few million dollars, far short of what he wanted, to buy arms. Instead, he used it to build a large transmitter for the Egyptian radio program the “Voice of the Arabs” and broadcast his Arabist and anti-colonialist message to the region. Word spread about the source of the money for the tower, and it was nicknamed “Roosevelt’s Erection.”
  • Nasser took a decisive step when he arranged a large arms purchase from the Soviet Union’s client state Czechoslovakia in 1955. This alarmed the Cold Warriors in the West, especially John Foster Dulles, who saw the arms deal as the first significant penetration of the Middle East by Russia. It also alarmed the British and French, who saw Nasser’s growing stature as a threat to their remaining colonies and protectorates in the region such as Aden (part of modern-day Yemen), Algeria, Jordan, and Iraq.
  • Eisenhower opposed the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel, seeing it as a throwback to imperialism, but the crisis did not improve the American relationship with Nasser.
  • Nasser’s intelligence agents unveiled a Saudi-funded plot to assassinate him, severely embarrassing King Saud, the man Eisenhower hoped would be a pro-American alternative to Egypt for the Arab public
  • The July 14 coup in Baghdad was a complete shock. A brigade of troops was scheduled to pass through the capital en route to Jordan to help back King Hussein against the threat posed by Nasser. Instead, as it entered the capital, it turned on the monarchy. The rebels surrounded the royal palace, and when it surrendered, the king and regent were shot to death. It was a bloody affair. The tanks of the coup-makers were covered with pictures of Nasser, and the crowds that cheered the Iraqi monarchy’s demise also screamed for Gamal Abdel Nasser. The military leaders of the coup said very little.
  • Lebanon’s Chamoun was already asking for American troops, and Jordan was acutely vulnerable. “If the Iraq coup succeeds it seems almost inevitable that it will set up a chain reaction that will doom the pro-West governments of Lebanon and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and raise grave problems for Turkey and Iran.” Israel, Dulles predicted, would take over the West Bank and East Jerusalem “if Jordan falls to Nasser.” The entire Middle East — or at least its Arab components — might fall to Nasser, in his view. Russia would be the beneficiary.
  • At risk was a devastating defeat in the Cold War
  • the British government decided to send paratroopers to Amman to help steady the remnant of the Hashemite monarchy still in power there.
  • Ike was lucky in the end. His diplomats and generals on the scene in Beirut found a diplomatic way to avoid conflict and prevent the worst. The nuclear weapons were never shipped from Germany to the Mediterranean. After a period of political negotiations, Chamoun was pressured to stand down as president, and the civil war ended.
  • The return of the Marines to Beirut in 1982, for example, ended in a catastrophic truck bombing of their barracks that killed 241 soldiers. The wars in Iraq have now seemingly become endless. The region itself is constantly in turmoil, with terrorist attacks in many of its capital cities an all too routine atrocity.
Ed Webb

What Can We Learn from the Escalating Israeli Raids in Syria? - Lawfare - 0 views

www.lawfareblog.com/escalating-israeli-raids-syria

Israel Syria Iran Iraq analysis opinion military diplomacy

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Dec 19 - Cached
  • Eyal Tsir Cohen is a visiting fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Tsir is currently on leave from the Israeli prime minister’s office, where he has served for the last 30 years in various senior positions. His career has focused on security and intelligence issues, and shaping policies and strategies on global terrorism.
  • While Israel has reportedly carried out thousands of strikes in Syria and neighboring Iraq in recent years, the frequency, intensity, and toll of these recent attacks are unprecedented.
  • Israel has come to see that Iran is not forsaking its project in Syria, and further may be pursuing more sophisticated means of threatening Israel’s northern border. This week’s report that Iran is moving missiles into Iraq only reinforces this perception
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  • To diminish Iranian capabilities being shipped to Hezbollah and other Iranian militias working to open a low-intensity military front threatening Israel’s northern border; To maintain Israel’s freedom of action and air supremacy in its neighborhood and the Middle East in general by minimizing Syrian military capabilities, more specifically anti-aircraft missile sites and their support systems; and To send a message of deterrence to three main actors in the region: Assad’s regime, Iran and its emissaries, and Russia.
  • air raids weaken the Syrian army’s capabilities; distract Assad’s capabilities from coping with opposition forces, ISIS, and al-Qaida in the north and east of Syria; and keep this war-ridden country in grave economic instability.
  • Israel also reportedly targeted significant air defense capabilities, especially surface-to-air missiles, that threaten Israel’s strategic dominance over Lebanese and Syrian airspace
  • Israel hopes its strikes will push Tehran to abandon its project in Syria. But Iran has shown no willingness so far to consider this. Instead, it has simply worked to make its arms shipments more difficult to detect. The search-and-destroy campaign demands excellent intelligence capabilities on Israel’s part to uncover clandestine shipments sent by air or land to Syria through Iraq. Fine-grained intelligence is also necessary to allow the airstrike to be effective and to minimize collateral damage and casualties. This poses a great challenge to Israel because, in time, Iran and its Syrian counterparts can find new, creative ways to mask their supply chain to Syria and avoid detection
  • While previous raids mostly damaged buildings and infrastructure, Israel probably expected this raid to inflict Iranian casualties, thus raising the stakes of the conflict.
  • As Iran faces unrest at home—and amid major popular demonstrations in Iraq—Israel is willing to match or even exceed Iran’s aggressive moves. For Khamenei, the prospect of large investments repeatedly being destroyed in Syria may be a difficult one, politically, as his domestic economy plummets. The contrast between these recent raids, which reportedly killed 16 Iranians, and the relative lack of an Iranian reaction highlights that it is difficult for Iran to respond in kind to Israeli escalations.
  • as Israel works to diminish the Syrian state’s military capabilities, it risks merely pushing the Assad regime deeper into its dependency on Iran
  • while Russia has been fast to criticize Israel for its strikes in Syria, it may quietly prefer to see Israel doing the dirty work of lessening Iranian power there. While they are partners in upholding the Assad regime, in some ways the Russians and Iranians are competitors in Syria, especially when looking toward state-rebuilding. Should Israeli strikes push the Iranians to play less of a role, the Russians would be the first to fill the void they would leave. Further, Israeli strikes in Syrian military facilities create business opportunities for the Russian arms industry. The Syrian regime will need to replace its destroyed weapons systems, and Russian manufacturers stand ready to supply new ones. Russia, while publicly opposed to Israeli strikes, might actually benefit from a laissez-faire policy toward these attacks.
  • Israeli raids in November sent a clear message to Moscow that unless the Iranian element is taken out of the equation, Syria will remain an unstable battleground. The raids are also a reminder of Russia’s commitment to Israel to keep the Iranian Quds Forces outside of the 50-mile radius from Israel’s border. These raids underscore that, if the Russians cannot uphold their side of this understanding, then Israel will wreak havoc in Syria. Putin seeks a political resolution and stability in Syria, and the Russians understand that Syria has no prospect of recovery from its civil war amid the constant friction between Israel and Iran.
  • When the fight between Iran and Israel in Syria moves closer to the Iraqi border, Israeli airstrikes become riskier, Iranian intelligence capabilities become stronger, and Iran’s ability to deny responsibility for missile launches becomes greater.
  • Iran cannot really be deterred by threats to the integrity of the Syrian state because it views the Assad regime only as a useful path by which it can increase its regional power
  • Given the gaps in its strategic messaging, Israeli deterrence, in and of itself, will likely not produce the total Iranian withdrawal for which Israel is hoping. The pressures Iran faces by demonstrations at home and in Iraq are perhaps the likelier trigger for Tehran to reconsider its strategy
Ed Webb

At Banque Havilland, Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Was Known as 'The Boss' - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...n-prince-was-known-as-the-boss

UAE Qatar GCC banks banking bank finance markets law media

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • A trove of emails, documents and legal filings reviewed by Bloomberg News, as well as interviews with former insiders, reveal the extent of the services Rowland and his private bank provided to one of its biggest customers, Mohammed bin Zayed, better known as MBZ, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. Some of the work went beyond financial advice. It included scouting for deals in Zimbabwe, setting up a company to buy the image rights of players on the Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City Football Club and helping place the bank’s chairman at the time on the board of Human Rights Watch after it published reports critical of the Persian Gulf country.
  • a 2017 plan devised by the bank for an assault on the financial markets of Qatar, a country that had just been blockaded by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain for allegedly sponsoring terrorism
  • a coordinated attack to deplete Qatar’s foreign-exchange reserves and pauperize its government
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  • One of Rowland’s sons, a senior executive at the Luxembourg-based bank, emailed the plan to Will Tricks, who had swapped a career in the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service MI6 for a job advising MBZ. Tricks, who acted as a go-between for the Rowlands, was paid as a contractor by Banque Havilland. The presentation found its way to the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., who stored it on his computer under “Rowland Banque Havilland.”
  • Last year, Qatar sued Banque Havilland in London, accusing it of orchestrating a campaign that cost the country more than $40 billion to shore up its banks and defend its currency peg against the U.S. dollar. While the lawsuit has received attention in the media, the extent of other work Banque Havilland did on behalf of MBZ hasn’t been previously reported. Nor has the role of Tricks.
  • Havilland is facing a criminal investigation in Luxembourg for, among other things, its dealings with the family of another head of state, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. It has also had communications with regulators in Luxembourg and the U.K. about the Qatar plan
  • Devising a plan for economic sabotage, whether implemented or not, is beyond the remit of most private banks. But Banque Havilland is no ordinary financial institution. The firm specialized in doing things others might balk at, the documents and emails show. Its clients included kleptocrats and alleged criminals in corruption hotspots including Nigeria and Azerbaijan. Its owners solicited business in sanctioned countries such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.
  • Not all of its clients were pariahs, and none was as important as MBZ, people with knowledge of the matter say. The crown prince, 59, is one of the Arab world’s most powerful leaders. A graduate of Britain’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he commands one of the best-equipped armies in the region and has waged wars in Yemen, Libya and Somalia. He’s not as well-known as his protégé and neighbor Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince. And he isn’t president of the UAE, a title held by a half-brother.
  • When MBZ wanted to develop a foothold in southern Africa’s commodities market in 2011, Tricks worked with the Rowlands on sourcing potential investments, documents and emails show. They picked Zimbabwe as a hub for the region, but there was a problem. The country was subject to U.S. and European Union sanctions that banned dealings with President Robert Mugabe’s inner circle and many of its state-owned companies. Tricks passed on advice about setting up a trust in Abu Dhabi for any Zimbabwe deals to hide the identities of investors from the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees sanctions enforcement
  • the UAE is now a major trading partner with the country despite continuing U.S. sanctions, and it opened an embassy there in 2019
  • Robeson, the foundation’s chairman, was elected to the Human Rights Watch board a few months later, in April 2012. He was named to the advocacy group’s Middle East and North Africa advisory committee. “We have been given the complete list of projects currently being undertaken by Human Rights Watch in the Middle East and North Africa,” Robeson wrote soon after joining the board, in a memo he emailed to Jonathan Rowland that he asked him to share with his father. Robeson also said he’d been given detailed notes of a meeting between the group and Britain’s then-Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell, along with other private briefings.
  • The foundation appears to have had no other purpose than making the Human Rights Watch donations. It was registered in Guernsey after the first gift and wound down when Robeson left the board in 2016.
  • Emma Daly, a spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch in New York, said the organization vetted Robeson at the time he was being considered for the board and couldn’t find any conflicts. She said the group didn’t know about Rowland’s or the bank’s connections to MBZ. Its most recent report on the country noted that, “Despite declaring 2019 the ‘Year of Tolerance,’ United Arab Emirates rulers showed no tolerance for any manner of peaceful dissent.”
  • The presentation is now a key part of the case in which Qatar accuses the bank of orchestrating an illegal UAE-backed campaign to create false impressions about the country’s stability. The UAE is not a defendant. The plan called for setting up an offshore vehicle into which the UAE would transfer its holdings of Qatari debt before buying more of the securities. The fund would also purchase foreign-exchange derivatives linked to the Qatari riyal and buy enough insurance on its bonds—a barometer of a country’s creditworthiness—to “move the price sufficiently to make it newsworthy.” Working with an affiliated party, it would then flood the market with the bonds to create the impression of panicked selling. The presentation also described a public relations drive to “add more fuel to the fire” and suggest Qatar might be struggling to access U.S. dollars.
  • Within weeks of the plan being sent to Tricks, the riyal—under pressure since the beginning of the blockade in June 2017—went into freefall and hit a record low. The yield on Qatar’s 10-year bonds also soared, as did the cost of insuring the country’s debt against default. The currency didn’t recover until November of that year, after the Intercept reported on the Banque Havilland plan.
Ed Webb

US media talks a lot about Palestinians - just without Palestinians - +972 Magazine - 0 views

www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians

US USA media newspapers Palestinians MEPP Rabin opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 20 - Cached
  • many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.
  • I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”
  • I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.
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  • In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.
  • While three of Said’s op-eds discussing Palestinians ran in the New York Times in the 1980s, from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords until his death in 2003, the newspaper ran only a single letter to the editor authored by him in January 1997, in which Said criticized the Oslo framework. During that time, Said’s opinion pieces explaining Oslo’s fatal flaws appeared in The Guardian, al-Ahram Weekly, and even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Yet readers of America’s “newspaper of record” were not able to hear from one of the country’s most eloquent and prescient Palestinian critics of the “peace process” narrative.
  • During the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote 33 columns discussing Palestinians; William Safire wrote 24, Anthony Lewis wrote 39, and A.M. Rosenthal penned 56. While they differed on various aspects of Oslo, none of them questioned the framing that “peace” was the ultimate goal, that Rabin was “a man of peace,” and that Palestinians who opposed Oslo were in fact opponents of peace.
  • It is unsurprising, then, that most readers of the mainstream U.S. press would not understand that Rabin only recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people,” but did not recognize Palestinians’ right to establish a state along the 1967 lines. They would not know that illegal Israeli settlements continued to expand under Rabin’s watch.
  • a month before his assassination, Rabin reassured fellow Knesset members that the state Palestinians desired would be “an entity which is less than a state.” And they would not know that, in those same remarks, Rabin made clear that Israel’s borders would be “beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War,” along with a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev [West Bank settlements], as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” This is the Rabin that Palestinians know all too well.
  • in 1999, Said wrote that the Oslo process “required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past.”
  • In 2020 so far, the New York Times has run 39 opinion pieces in its print and online platforms that discuss Palestinians; only three were actually penned by Palestinians
  • It is not just Palestinians: Black, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian American, and other people of color face ongoing racism in the newsroom, making it more difficult for alternative perspectives to make their way into these influential pages
  • Alternative news outlets (including +972 Magazine), along with many Palestinians on Twitter and other social media sites, are providing fresh perspectives that we can follow, engage with, and share. The avalanche of tweets and comments highlighting Rabin’s violent legacy is just one example of this. And as more Americans receive their news from social media (including politicians), those wanting Palestinian perspectives now have a much easier time getting them.
Ed Webb

Why Saudis Don't Want to Pivot From the US to China - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...opolitics-security-middle-east

KSA Saudi China USA US diplomacy military economy trade oil

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Dec 22 - Cached
  • an increasingly close economic and security relationship. Saudi Arabia supplies China with 18 percent of its energy needs, and it is expanding orders for petrochemical, industrial, and military equipment, much of which it previously obtained from the United States
  • Beijing is offering Riyadh a deal: Sell us your oil and help us stabilize global energy markets; choose whatever military equipment you want from our catalogue; and benefit as you like from cooperation with us in defense, aerospace, the automotive industry, health, and technology. In other words, the Chinese are offering the Saudis a bargain that appears to be modeled on the U.S-Saudi deal that stabilized the Middle East for 70 years.
  • many young Saudis naively tout the idea of replacing the United States with China. As graduates of U.S. universities and voracious consumers of U.S. pop culture and consumer technology, most educated Saudis feel close to the United States—close enough to feel bullied by what we see as unfair attacks by U.S. media and policymakers against us, our country, our leaders, and our culture. The alternative, for many, is to learn Mandarin and imagine future careers promoting Chinese industry and trade.
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  • Taken together, the Biden administration’s strategy appears to Saudis and other observers as an attempt to wrest the power to set oil prices away from OPEC+. If the move is successful, then it would make it impossible for Saudi Arabia to have the revenues to achieve its own development goals.
  • it should be abundantly clear why many Saudis are beginning to shift their gaze eastward. But I would counsel them that their hopes of China replacing the United States as a partner for Saudi Arabia are naive
  • Imagine the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showing us our region without U.S. technology, innovation, defense cooperation, and security relations. Imagine a region where the benefits and limits of personal freedom are not subjects to be debated by the people and their rulers—as Saudis are increasingly doing as our country reforms—but things dictated by a centralized one-party state that sees God as its enemy.
  • Ed Webb on 18 Dec 22
     
    I don't agree with all of the analysis or even the characterization of some events, but the perspective is helpful
Ed Webb

Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what's broke... - 1 views

slate.com/...emitism-task-force-israel.html

US USA universities antisemitism Zionism academia academic opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • There is no set of credentials that can prevent a person who is earnestly trying to do work in this space from getting sucked into the politicization and, yes, weaponization of antisemitism
  • when fact and understanding and nuance of the issue are all considered secondary, what gets sacrificed isn’t just an individual’s career or standing or time, but comprehension of the actual issue that is antisemitism.
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