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In Scandal, Turkey's Leaders May Be Losing Their Tight Grip on News Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-tight-grip-on-news-media.html
shared by B Mannke on 12 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Mr. Erdogan’s lawyers have also filed suit against a newspaper columnist, once a reliable supporter of the prime minister, for his critical Twitter messages.
  • reports on the discovery of $4.5 million in cash stuffed in shoe boxes at the home of a director of a state bank.
  • “We would never have expected anything like this,” said Numar Baki, a waiter at an Istanbul cafe, referring to the public nature of the scandal.
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  • slow erosion of what had been Mr. Erdogan’s iron grip on all levels of power within Turkish society.
  • More journalists are in jail in Turkey than anywhere else in the world, including China and Iran.
  • hen Nazli Ilicak, a longtime journalist here, lost her job recently at the pro-government newspaper Sabah after emerging as a strong voice against the government’s handling of the corruption inquiry, she said she would simply keep up her criticism on Twitter and on independent websites.
  • Followers of the Muslim spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, have over the years secured top positions in the judiciary and the police and are said to be leading the corruption investigation.
  • “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism” and “This is just the beginning. The struggle continues” — slogans like those raised during the antigovernment protests last May and June.
  • I think I should o
  • “I think I should only tweet about penguins from now on,” Mr. Zeynalov wrote on Twitter after the case was filed, referring to some television channels’ practice of broadcasting a documentary about penguins last spring rather than reporting on the antigovernment protests.
  • “My phone is being tapped,” he said, “but I don’t care.”
  • “Erdogan wants to show that this is a conspiracy, that the United States and Israel are behind it,” he said. “Under no circumstances does he want to talk about corruption.
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BBC News - Obama orders curbs on NSA data use - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-25785573
shared by Maria Delzi on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Obama orders curbs on NSA data use
  • President Barack Obama has ordered curbs on the use of bulk data collected by US intelligence agencies, saying civil liberties must be respected.
  • Mr Obama said such data had prevented terror attacks at home and abroad, but that in tackling threats the government risked over-reaching itself. However civil liberties groups have said the changes do not go far enoug
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  • Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the US National Security Agency (NSA) who leaked the information, is wanted in the US for espionage and is now living in exile in Russia.
  • The leaked documents revealed that the US collects massive amounts of electronic data from communications of private individuals around the world, and that it has spied on foreign leader
  • The latest revelations claim that US agencies have collected and stored almost 200 million text messages every day across the globe.
  • 'Rights are protected'
  • In his much-anticipated speech at the Department of Justice, Mr Obama said he would not apologise for the effectiveness of US intelligence operations, and insisted that nothing he had seen indicated they had sought to break the law.
  • It was necessary for the US to continue collecting large amounts of data, he said, but acknowledged that doing so allowed for "the potential of abuse".
  • "The reforms I'm proposing today should give the American people greater confidence that their rights are being protected, even as our intelligence and law enforcement agencies maintain the tools they need to keep us safe," he said.
  • He has asked the attorney general and the
  • intelligence community to draw up plans for such metadata to be held by a third party, with the NSA required to seek legal permission before it could access them.
  • A panel of independent privacy advocates would also sit on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) which has responsibility for giving permission for mass surveillance programmes.
  • "should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security".
  • "This applies to foreign leaders as well," he said, promising that from now on the US "will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies".
  • But he was also critical of nations he said "feign surprise" over the leaks but "privately acknowledge that America has special responsibilities as the world's only superpower" and have used the information gathered for their own purposes.
  • Mr Obama said he would not "dwell on Mr Snowden's actions or his motivations", but warned that the "sensational way" the NSA details had come to light had potentially jeopardised US operations "for years to come".
  • Mr Obama's reforms were welcomed as progress in some quarters, but others argued they did not go far enough in protecting individuals.
  • "President Obama's surveillance adjustments will be remembered as music on the Titanic unless his administration adopts deeper reforms," said Steven W. Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
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What Drives Success? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-drives-success.html success culture ethnicity insecurity superiority impulse control psychology values
shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
  • These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
  • Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
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  • The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
  • Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
  • Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.
  • The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
  • Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
  • By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
  • Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
  • MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.
  • while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
  • The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
  • the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success
  • The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
  • research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
  • Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
  • it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
  • We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.
  • That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
  • Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
  • In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
  • Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.
  • Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.
  • The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age
  • Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to
  • At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.
  • success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies
  • Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
  • Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
  • It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
  • But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating
  • Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
  • Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts
  • The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.
  • Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
  • THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
  • The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.
  • It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
  • research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.
  • The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
  • But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.
  • the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
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Pope Francis Sounds Like a Democrat - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...407023 Pope Francis ideology politics
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • what makes Francis different is really a matter of which Catholic beliefs he has elevated to the level of communal concerns—public policy—and which he has framed as individual choices. To Francis, sharing wealth and fixing global warming are matters that governments should address, while not committing homosexual acts or having abortions are individual choices he endorses. (As he famously put it: “Who am I to judge?”
  • This is quite different from the American Catholic church, which has poured its political energy into laws banning gay marriage and restricting abortion.
  • The pope’s speech at the White House on Wednesday fit this framework. When it came to religious liberty, a hot-button issue for American conservatives, Francis extolled its virtues in the abstract. But in the case of climate, Francis called for government action:
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  • his perspective on the state’s role in these issues lines up pretty well with that of most American Democrats. To greatly oversimplify, Democrats believe the U.S. needs to regulate the economy and the environment, while allowing people to make their own choices about whom they marry and whether to have an abortion
  • Republicans—again, oversimplifying greatly—think people should generally be able to do what they want with their money and their carbon footprint, but social behavior should be regulated by the state.
  • Francis aligns more with Democrats than Republicans on other issues: He favors immigration reform, played a major role in the Obama administration’s détente with Cuba, and supports the Iran nuclear deal.
  • Francis’s major impact within the Vatican, as Emma noted, has been as a reformer, reorganizing the Vatican bureaucracy and cleaning up its scandal-ridden finances. It’s in this regard that Francis most resembles Obama, who campaigned in 2007 on a promise to heal America’s divisions and disrupt the entrenched and corrupt political system.
  • Francis, unlike Obama, actually did it: He’s cleverly leveraged his massive popularity to overcome systemic inertia and entrenched opposition, marginalizing his critics and bringing about sweeping changes many insiders had believed to be impossible
  • So yes, Francis is a priest. He’s also a progressive, a politician—and an uncommonly good one at that.
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Eric Trager and Marina Shalabi | In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood's New Leaders Turn Re... - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...slim-brotherhood-gets-facelift
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  • Amr Farrag is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood youth cadre. The 28-year-old Cairene is a widely followed exponent of the organization’s ideology on social media and manages the popular pro-Brotherhood news portal Rassd. But these days, he no longer operates in Cairo. On July 5, 2013—two days after the Egyptian military responded to mass protests by removing Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi—the organization’s leaders urged Farrag to relocate to Istanbul, so that he could evade the Egyptian government’s anti-Brotherhood crackdown and reestablish the organization’s media operations in exile. Meanwhile, as many more Muslim Brothers fled to Turkey during the chaotic weeks that followed Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood formed a committee in Istanbul to resettle them, hoping to preserve the organization until it could return to power in Egypt, which it promised its members would happen very soon.
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How Democracy Became Halal - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07gerecht.html democracy muslim intellectual liberalism
shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • One of the great under-reported stories of the end of the 20th century was the enormous penetration of the West’s better political ideas — democracy and individual liberty — into the Muslim consciousness.
  • The secular intellectuals in exile, however, more forcefully embraced the democratic cause — their newspapers, books, magazines, Web sites and, increasingly, appearances on Al Jazeera — delivered their views back home. Intellectuals of such diverse viewpoints as Kanan Makiya, Edward Said, Saad Eddin Ibrahim and Burhan Ghalioun opened up an ever-increasing liberal, democratic space in foreign and Arabic publications.
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Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book 'The Open Veins' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-his-book-the-open-veins.html leftist critique capitalism latin america history economy marxist
shared by Javier E on 24 May 14 - No Cached
  • For more than 40 years, Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” has been the canonical anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist and anti-American text in that region
  • now Mr. Galeano, a 73-year-old Uruguayan writer, has disavowed the book, saying that he was not qualified to tackle the subject and that it was badly written. Predictably, his remarks have set off a vigorous regional debate, with the right doing some “we told you so” gloating, and the left clinging to a dogged defensiveness.
  •  ‘Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation,” Mr. Galeano said last month while answering questions at a book fair in Brazil, where he was being honored on the 43rd anniversary of the book’s publication. He added: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it
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  • “Reality has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot,” he said in Brazil, adding: “Reality is much more complex precisely because the human condition is diverse. Some political sectors close to me thought such diversity was a heresy. Even today, there are some survivors of this type who think that all diversity is a threat. Fortunately, it is not.”
  • “Open Veins” has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has sold more than a million copies. In its heyday, its influence extended throughout what was then called the third world, including Africa and Asia, until the economic rise of China and India and Brazil seemed to undercut parts of its thesis.In the United States, “Open Veins” has been widely taught on university campuses since the 1970s, in courses ranging from history and anthropology to economics and geography. But Mr. Galeano’s unexpected takedown of his own work has left scholars wondering how to deal with the book in class.
  • “If I were teaching this in a course,” said Merilee Grindle, president of the Latin American Studies Association and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, “I would take his comments, add them in and use them to generate a far more interesting discussion about how we see and interpret events at different points in time.” And that seems to be exactly what many professors plan to do.
  • In the mid-1990s, three advocates of free-market policies — the Colombian writer and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas Llosa — reacted to Mr. Galeano with a polemic of their own, “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.” They dismissed “Open Veins” as “the idiot’s bible,” and reduced its thesis to a single sentence: “We’re poor; it’s their fault.”
  • Mr. Montaner responded to Mr. Galeano’s recent remarks with a blog post titled “Galeano Corrects Himself and the Idiots Lose Their Bible.” In Brazil, Rodrigo Constantino, the author of “The Caviar Left,” took an even harsher tone, blaming Mr. Galeano’s analysis and prescription for many of Latin America’s ills. “He should feel really guilty for the damage he caused,”
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Turkish Leader, Using Conflicts, Cements Power - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lict-to-consolidate-power.html politics turkey islam foreign policy WWI
shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • In Turkey, the president is technically second to the prime minister. But in practice, when Mr. Erdogan was elected president in August, he absorbed the power and privilege of the prime minister’s post into his new position. And like Mr. Putin, who also shifted between the presidency and prime minister’s office, the stronger Mr. Erdogan has grown, the tenser relations have become with the United States.
  • he has used his conflict with Washington and his political enemies as a force to help consolidate power, as he continues to carry out the duties associated with the prime minister. He has rallied his conservative base behind his religiously infused agenda, clashing with United States policy for confronting Islamic State militants, while also blaming foreign interference for the growing catalog of crises he faces. As Turkey’s challenges have magnified — fighting on its border with Syria, strained relations with its NATO allies, pressure on the economy — Mr. Erdogan’s authority has grown only stronger.
  • Turkey’s continued refusal to allow the United States to use its bases for airstrikes against the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq — and insistence that the coalition target the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — has laid bare deep divisions between the two countries that have prompted analysts to question Turkey’s reliability as an ally, and some have even suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO.
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  • Mr. Erdogan offered an assessment appealing to his religious Sunni Muslim base — and echoed by militants with the Islamic State — that the Middle East crisis stems from the actions of the British and French after World War I, and the borders drawn between Iraq and Syria under the Sykes-Picot pact. Mr. Erdogan invoked Sykes-Picot saying, “each conflict in this region has been designed a century ago.” He suggested a new plot was underway, and that “journalists, religious men, writers and terrorists” were the collective reincarnation of T.E. Lawrence, the British diplomat and spy immortalized in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”
  • Mr. Erdogan has partly consolidated his power by purging thousands of police officers, prosecutors and judges who he believed were behind the corruption probe. He accused those people of being followers of the Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania and who once was an important ally to Mr. Erdogan. His victory over Mr. Gulen in the power struggle that ensued has largely erased a moderate, Western-leaning Islamic voice from the Turkish governing elite
  • “For Tayyip Erdogan, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim movements everywhere, the problems of the Muslim world are because of the West,” said Rusen Cakir, a scholar of Islamist movements who lives in Istanbul.For Mr. Gulen, he said, “the problems for the Muslim world are because of Muslims themselves.”
  • Suat Kiniklioglu, a former lawmaker with Mr. Erdogan’s party who is now an outspoken critic, said the speech referring to Sykes-Picot demonstrated “how much Erdogan detests Western powers operating in the region.”Omer Taspinar, a scholar on Turkey at the Brookings Institution, said: “The Lawrence of Arabia speech was a part of this act — to show how the borders of the Middle East were drawn up by imperialists and how we are face to face with a new Western agenda.”
  • This deep-seated view that the problems of the Middle East can be explained by Western actions over the past century, combined with a measure of ambivalence among Turkish religious conservatives who form the core of his constituency about joining the West in a fight against Sunnis, help explain Mr. Erdogan’s reluctance to take a stronger role in the United States-led military coalition.
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'Eichmann Before Jerusalem,' by Bettina Stangneth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alem-by-bettina-stangneth.html nazi holocaust moral reasoning anti-Semitism wwII
shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.
  • as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.
  • Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”
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  • Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt’s puzzling contention that he “never realized what he was doing”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?
  • In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”
  • She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services — and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies — were aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.
  • no future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man’s biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.
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Snowden Seeks to Return Home to U.S., His Lawyer Says - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...united-states-lawyer-says.html snowden politics Russia US
shared by qkirkpatrick on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive and former American intelligence contractor, would like to return to the United States after nearly two years in exile in Russia, according to his Russian lawyer.
  • Mr. Snowden is seeking a guarantee of a legal and impartial trial, Mr. Kucherena said.
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The Shifting Politics of Cuba Policy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-politics-of-cuba-policy.html cuba politics nytimes
shared by Emilio Ergueta on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • For generations, among Cuban-Americans, once a largely monolithic voting bloc, the embargo was a symbol of defiance in exile — more gospel than policy.
  • a growing number of seasoned politicians to call the embargo a failure and argue that ending America’s enmity with Cuba represents the best chance of encouraging positive change on the island.
  • . Mr. Obama supported repealing the embargo when he was running for the United States Senate in 2004 but backtracked as a presidential candidate, saying in 2008 that the embargo gave Washington leverage over the Cuban government.
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  • Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat from Tampa, traveled to the island last year and made a strong appeal for an end to the sanctions, saying the United States was failing to capitalize on economic reforms underway on the island
  • Politics aside, the issue remains deeply personal for the holdouts, Cuban-Americans of that generation say, because it continues to evoke raw feelings about ancestry, homeland and loss.
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BBC News - What's the appeal of a caliphate? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-29761018 bbc ISIS history politics crisis
shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • In June the leader of Islamic State declared the creation of a caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself the caliph or leader. Edward Stourton examines the historical parallels and asks what is a caliphate, and what is its appeal?
  • The last caliphate - that of the Ottomans - was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two-thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of "unifying all Islamic countries" into a new caliphate
  • "Seventy years after the Prophet's death, this Muslim world stretched from Spain and Morocco right the way to Central Asia and to the southern bits of Pakistan, so a huge empire that was all… under the control of a single Muslim leader," says historian Prof Hugh Kennedy. "And it's this Muslim unity, the extent of Muslim sovereignty, that people above all look back to."
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  • The caliphate was finally extinguished by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, in 1924. He believed the abolition of the institution was essential to his campaign to turn what was left of the empire into a 20th Century secular nation state. The last Ottoman caliph was expelled from Istanbul to live out a life of cultured exile in Paris and on the Cote d'Azur.
  • n the early days of the Arab Spring, the revolutions in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were interpreted in Western capitals as evidence that the Muslim future lay with democracy. Then in Egypt came the overthrow of the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the army under General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi - and then came the horrors of Islamic State amid the bloody chaos of civil strife in Syria and Iraq
  • Many classical Sunni scholars challenge the very notion that the caliphate is a political project. Sheikh Ruzwan Mohammed, for example, argues that the key to the caliphate is really spiritual. "I think the Islamic State should come from within," he says. "It should be an Islamic State first and foremost of mind and soul." And the overwhelming majority, even of those who do believe that a new caliphate is a realistic political objective, completely reject the violence espoused by the self-styled Islamic Stat
  • But IS has skilfully exploited the elements in the caliphate's history which best serve its purposes. The historian Hugh Kennedy has pointed out, for example, that their black uniforms and flags deliberately echo the black robes the Abbasids adopted as their court dress in the 8th Century, thus recalling Islam's Golden Age. And their original title - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - harks back to the days when there was no national border between the two countries, because both territories were part of the great Islamic caliphate.
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President George W. Bush Is Still To Blame, Not Cheney or Rumsfeld - The Atlantic - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 06 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Cheney and Rumsfeld may have provided the ideology that drove the United States to invade Iraq. But Bush provided the temperament. And that mattered even more.  
  • Bush 41 accuses Rumsfeld of “a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names.” But those same qualities describe Bush 43.
  • the common thread between Bush’s behavior before and after taking office was his penchant for high-risk moves based on his own instincts, irrespective of what anybody else thought
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  • George W. Bush, by contrast, was determined to be a “game changer.” Even as a candidate, notes former speechwriter Michael Gerson, “[T]he governor consistently pushed his policy team to ‘think big’; his most damning characterization of any proposal was, ‘This is small ball.’”
  • After 9/11, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz pushed for an attack on Iraq, arguing that the true terrorist threat lay not with Al Qaeda but with terrorism’s alleged state sponsors. But Bush could have overruled them. Secretary of State Colin Powell opposed war with Iraq, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice expressed no strong position. Counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke considered the idea insane.
  • The reason Bush sided with Cheney and company, I suspect, is because attacking Iraq rather than stopping with the invasion of Afghanistan was the bigger, bolder move. During post-9/11 discussions, Bush often said he didn’t want to “pound sand,” as he believed Bill Clinton had done in response to previous terrorist attacks or “swat flies.” He repeatedly described the “war on terror” as a struggle on the magnitude of the Cold War and World War II.
  • Bush never tempered this grandiosity with a serious inquiry into the risks. “I’m not a textbook player. I’m a gut player,” he told his National Security Council two weeks after the attacks. According to Condoleezza Rice, there was little Bush disliked more than being told that a foreign policy issue was “complex.” And he didn’t see invading Iraq as particularly complex, in part, according to Iraqi exiles who met the President in January 2003, because he seemed unaware that Iraq was divided between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
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What if Nixon beat JFK? Everything might be different - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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shared by johnsonma23 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • What if JFK had lost? 5 things that might be different
  • If just a few thousand votes in a few key states had gone the other way that day, you could argue that Cuba might now be our 51st state.
  • By the time it was over, Kennedy had won and Nixon's camp was quietly accusing the other side of dirty tricks. The election was about much more than Washington bragging rights.
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  • It ended up influencing events that would drive the next 20 years of the Cold War.
  • When it came to the Soviets, Nixon had more experience than Kennedy. Vice President Nixon had already faced off against Khrushchev in the famous "Kitchen Debate" during a visit to Moscow in 1959.
  • Nixon's language at the time was quite interventionist and hawkish. ... That makes me worry that he might have tried to invade Cuba."
  • A year later, it was discovered that the Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba — just 90 miles from the United States.
  • In 1961, two months after a failed invasion by CIA-backed Cuban exiles at Cuba's Bay of Pigs, Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Austria.
  • If Nixon had made a stronger impression than Kennedy, perhaps the Soviets would never have put those missiles in Cuba. Then there never would have been a missile crisis at all.
  • "Kennedy allowed himself to be bullied by Khrushchev [in Vienna] and he regretted it," said Evan Thomas, an award-winning journalist, editor and author of "Being Nixon: A Man Divided."
  • f Nixon had won in 1960, it's likely Kennedy would not have been targeted for assassination -- and that means he might have lived long enough for his infamous sexual dalliances to become fodder for the news media.
  • It's hard to imagine a universe where Neil Armstrong did not walk on the moon. Would Nixon have called for a moon landing, as JFK did?
  • Nixon continued to support the lunar program during much of his presidency, which spanned all six moon landings.
  • "Under Nixon, NASA became just another domestic program, and the agency's budget decreased even as it retained ambitious goals," writes former NASA consultant Jason Callahan of the Planetary Society.
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Marco Rubio's Policies Might Shut the Door to People Like His Grandfather - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-immigration-grandfather.html
shared by sgardner35 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Marco Rubio’s Policies Might Shut the Door to People Like His Grandfather
  • Pedro Victor Garcia had left behind a home and a job with the government in communist Cuba, intent on never returning.
  • immigration officials stopped him.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • “I always thought of being here in the United States as a resident, living permanently here,” the slight 62-year-old grandfather, speaking through an interpreter, said at a hearing five weeks later.
  • The immigration officer was unmoved. He did not see an exiled family man — just someone who had no visa, worked for the Castro government and could pose a security risk.
  • “It is ordered that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States,”
  • As he campaigns for president, Mr. Rubio, a Florida senator, says that the United States cannot accept refugees from Syria and Iraq because of the potential security risk
  • has called for a tightening of immigration law so that if the United States cannot identify with 100 percent certainty who immigrants are and why they want to enter, he says, “We’re not going to let you in.”
  • But under the stricter screening he now supports, his grandfather would most likely have been deported, depriving him of knowing the man he has called his mentor and closest boyhood friend.
  • Despite Mr. Garcia’s insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies, the records reveal.
  • In an interview, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that some would see a conflict between the stricter immigration and refugee policies he supports and his grandfather’s experience.
  • But Mr. Rubio said the difference between then and now is how much more sophisticated foreign infiltrators like the Islamic State have become, and how dangerous they are.
  • “I recognize that’s a valid point,” the senator said, “But what you didn’t have was a widespread effort on behalf of Fidel Castro to infiltrate into the United States killers who were going to detonate weapons and kill people.”
  • He says at the hearing that what made him decide he wanted to leave for the United States to join his wife and seven daughters, one of whom was Oria, Mr. Rubio’s now 85-year-old mother, was when Castro confirmed suspicions that he was a Marxist.
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Young Muslim Americans Are Feeling the Strain of Suspicion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-the-strain-of-suspicion.html
shared by Megan Flanagan on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Growing up in the Bronx, she was unaware of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was mostly insulated from the surge in suspicion that engulfed Muslims in the United States, the programs of police surveillance and the rise in bias attacks.
  • her emergence from childhood into young womanhood has coincided with the violent spread of the Islamic State and a surge in Islamophobia,
  • had to confront some harsh challenges of being a young Muslim in America.
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  • she has had to contend with growing anti-Muslim sentiment, adjusting her routines to avoid attacks and worrying about how she appears to the rest of society
  • “I feel like the past two months have probably been the hardest of my life.”
  • Ms. Jamal is part of a generation of Muslim Americans who have grown up amid the fight against terrorism, in an America in which anti-Muslim hostility, by many measures, has been historically high.
  • complexities and pressure have left many young Muslims feeling isolated and alienated, if not unwelcome in their own country.
  • challenges have only multiplied in the past year as violent events around the world have fueled or reaffirmed anti-Muslim feelings in the United States and elsewhere
  • that since the Sept. 11 attacks, young Muslims in the United States have dealt with “chronic trauma” from the constant stress of anti-Muslim sentiment
  • “in the next few years we will realize how harmful and detrimental that’s going to be.”
  • “We’re talking about war, we’re talking about feminism, we’re talking about all this stuff,”
  • equated the feelings of shock and exclusion to those experienced by Japanese youths after their internment in the United States during World War II
  • “If a Muslim hasn’t been called a terrorist in middle school, lower school or high school, then they’re probably in a really great school — and I’m happy for them!” Ms. Jamal said.
  • “Our aspirations are the same as any other American or teenager or youth. It feels like they’re trying to shoot down our dreams and aspirations simply because we practice a different religion.”
  • “I’d tell people I was Mediterranean and they’d guess Italian or Greek and I wouldn’t correct them.”
  • “I found that it was much easier to get to know others if I totally accepted my religious and cultural identity.” Photo
  • she has redoubled her conviction to publicly embrace the complexities of her identity
  • “My brother said he’s never wanted to identify more as an Arab and a Muslim.
  • Muslim activists are building coalitions with other social action movements — like Black Lives Matter — to address shared grievances of inequality and prejudice
  • “Being exiled from the moral community you thought you were a part of is really stunning,”
  • “I don’t think normal teenagers are going to be as politicized at such an early age as we are.”
  • “Social media is such a hard place to get through,” Ms. Kawas said. “But it is also a place where we come to have self-awareness.”
  • “You feel like the whole world is against you,” she continued. “It’s exhausting.”
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The First Victims of the First Crusade - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by kirkpatrickry on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Times were hard in northern Europe when the crusaders began to gather in the spring of 1096. A disappointing harvest in 1095 had brought famine to the poor. As James Carroll observes in “Constantine’s Sword,” there is “no doubt the crusading impulse rescued many serfs, but also landowners, from desperate economic straits.”
  • Pope Urban II did not tell crusaders to murder Jews, but that is what happened when at least 100,000 knights, vassals and serfs, unmoored from ordinary social restraints but bearing the standard of the cross, set off to crush what they considered a perfidious Muslim enemy in a faraway land. Why not practice on that older group accused of perfidy — the Jews
  • The city of Trier, on the Moselle River, was one of the early stops. The Jews were, according to a Hebrew chronicle, offered the choice of conversion, exile or death — similar to the choices offered by groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram. After the Jews of Trier made an unsuccessful attempt, by paying off a bishop, to persuade the crusaders to bypass their community, they sought refuge in the prelate’s palace.
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  • This account highlights several elements analogous to the actions of modern terrorist groups. These include attempts at forced conversion; the murders of women and children; and the imposition of financial penalties on coerced converts who try to remain in their homes. Albert’s disparaging remarks about Emico also reveal that there were Christians who felt about the crusaders exactly the way many Muslims today surely feel if they are unlucky enough to find themselves in the path of violent lunatics.
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UN: World's Refugees And Displaced To Exceed 60 Million This Year - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...risis_5673c581e4b0b958f6562ecd
shared by proudsa on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide is likely to have "far surpassed" a record 60 million this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted conflicts, the United Nations said on Friday.
  • Nearly 2.5 million asylum seekers have requests pending, with Germany, Russia and the United States receiving the highest numbers of the nearly one million new claims lodged in the first half of the year, it said.
  • Developing countries bordering conflict zones still host the lion's share of the refugees, the report said, warning about growing "resentment" and "politicization of refugees."
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  • Syria's civil war that began in 2011 has been the main driver of mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their shattered homeland as of mid-year, UNHCR said.
  • Many refugees will live in exile for years to come, it said. "In effect, if you become a refugee today your chances of going home are lower than at any time in more than 30 years."
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Donald Trump Is Not a Fascist - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...424449
shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “The brand of fascism was invented and exported by Italians,” Vittorio Foa, a Resistance hero and the father of Italy’s Republican Constitution, used to quip.
  • Using the label not only belittles past tragedies and obscures future dangers, but also indicts his supporters, who have real grievances that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril. America should tackle the demons Trump unleashes in 2016, not tar him by association with ideas and tactics he doesn’t even know about.
  • Italy’s fascists capitalized on similar themes in a different era of global uncertainty; in their case, it was the unemployment, veterans’ resentments, unions’ strikes, and political violence that beset the country following World War I.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • But Trump is, fundamentally, a blustering political opportunist courting votes in a democratic system; he has not called for the violent overthrow of the system itself
  • Nearly 30 years after Il Duce Mussolini, Italy’s dictator from 1922 to 1945, was executed by a partisan firing squad, his ideas were still wreaking havoc across the country; the 1970s were years of clashes between neofascist and communist terrorists that we in Italy called the Anni di Piombo, or years of lead.
  • In October of that year, on a day when I was on duty selling the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, I watched nervously as a squadraccia, a gang of fascist thugs, paraded across the street from me in full arms, heavy bats in hand, chains wrapped around their chests, black helmets on their heads, brass knuckles shining.
  • This was the menace at the heart of fascism, defined by the display of organized violence and terrorism to win political power, and the ultimate imposition of a totalitarian system hostile to capitalism and individual freedom.
  • Dad had often reminisced about growing up under Il Duce, calmly noting that “In school they taught us that ‘Il Duce’ will soon trash America and those Negroes.’ And I believed them.” It was a Sicilian barber, just returned to Italy after spending much of his life as a steelworker in Pittsburgh, who changed his mind. “I have seen America, worked in America,” the barber told my father. “America is too strong for us.”
  • Trump, too, is benefitting from voter discontent. Polls show that many Trump supporters come from the white middle- and working-class, a group whose status and salaries have stagnated for decades; these voters are evidently looking for a leader ready to dignify, if not solve, their problems.
  • From Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Mussolini’s speeches on the Palazzo Venezia balcony, fascists told the crowd openly what their goals were and kept a nefarious, disciplined pace to realize them. Mussolini boasted about reducing Italy’s Parliament “to a fascist barrack,” “stopping any antifascist brain from thinking,” and “creating a new Roman Empire.”
  • Trump has no clear plan of any kind. He is not about to dissolve the Democratic Party and banish the Clintons, Obama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jimmy Fallon to exile on Randall’s Island.
  • Men and women left in the cold by globalization and rising inequality, scared of immigrants often lumped together with foreign terrorists in the media and the popular imagination: This is not the base for the new Western World Fascist Party, but it is a powder keg powerful enough to inflame societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
  • It will not destroy Western democracies, but it may poison them. Witch-hunts, racism, repression, and state surveillance may plague a democracy without morphing it into a fascist dictatorship.
  • As Western democracies continue to face the crises of wars and terrorism abroad, and growing inequality and cultural and political unrest at home, it would be a tragedy to go through them so bitterly divided.
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