Top 4 Issues Saudi King Salman will discuss in first visit to Obama’s White House

By Juan Cole | Sep. 4, 2015 |

Retweet 17 Share 21 Google +1 2 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Saudi King Salman is meeting Friday with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice. King Salman had declined to attend Obama’s Gulf Summit in May, apparently over anger at the negotiations with Iran over its civilian nuclear energy program, and issue that will undoubtedly preoccupy the Friday summit.

US-Saudi relations are in bad shape, and the meeting is clearly intended as an attempt to reboot them.

1. Whatever they say in public, Saudi officials are angry about the Vienna agreement between the UN Security Council and Iran allowing the latter to enrich uranium for reactor fuel but forestalling through inspections and other measures any Iranian breakout toward a nuclear bomb. Wikileaks revealed a state department cable that alleged that current Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel Jubeir, urged the Bush administration to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Obama and his team will attempt to convince the Saudis that the Iran deal forestalls an Iranian nuke, rather than permitting it.

A subtext of the successful negotiations with Iran is that international sanctions will gradually be removed from that country. Iran will be able to pump 1.5 million barrels a day more than it does now, and will be able more freely to engage in trade. These steps will further lower the price of petroleum, hurting the Saudi economy, and will make Iran economically stronger, a development unwelcome in Riyadh. It is hard to see how Obama will be able to mollify King Salman over these developments, which inevitably worsen Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical situation in the short term, at least. Perhaps more US arms and security guarantees will take the sting out of it.

2. The US sees Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) as far more threatening than does Saudi Arabia. For Obama, defeating Daesh is perhaps the most important campaign in which his administration is engaged in the Middle East at the moment. Saudi Arabia did not create Daesh and does not like the organization. But it knows that if Daesh is rolled back in Iraq and Syria, Shiite Iranian allies will likely be the biggest beneficiaries, and so it has put Daesh on the back burner. Obama will try to convince King Salman to step up. The US is willing to ally with Iran on a de facto pragmatic basis to defeat the faux caliphate. Saudi Arabia won’t be able to bring itself to go so far.

3. Saudi Arabia is backing rebel Ahrar al-Sham (Free Men of Syria) and Jaysh al-Islam in Syria, both of them hard line Salafi movements that don’t believe in democracy but do want a Taliban-like Muslim religious state with a literal approach to Islamic law. The Free Men of Syria are in turn allied with the al-Qaeda affiliate, the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). The US wants the Free Men of Syria to repudiate al-Qaeda before it can accept it as “moderate” rebels. But for local tactical reasons, The Free Men need al-Qaeda in their struggle against the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad. The US has therefore allied instead with left wing Kurds in Syria and has attempted to create a moderate rebel group, but has largely failed. The US and Saudi Arabia agree that al-Assad should go, but the US won’t cooperate with an al-Qaeda ally, whereas the Saudis see an al-Assad defeat as more important that avoiding any cooperation with an al-Qaeda affiliate. It is not clear that this gap between Obama and King Salman can be closed.

4. The Obama administration has generally been supportive of the Saudi-lead war in Yemen, and has given logistical support. I hear an NSC staffer just this weak talk about Iran’s “malign intent” in Yemen. While Riyadh and Washington see the Zaidi Shiites Houthi movement as Iran-backed, in fact it is local and indigenous, and the Iranians have given it very little material support (maybe $3 million). There have been some indications of squeamishness on Washington’s part with the intensive and apparently indiscriminate bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and its allies. The war is going relatively well for Saudi Arabia, given that the Houthis unwisely over-extended themselves into Sunni territory. But the Houthis in Yemen just are not at the top of Washington’s list of Dire Threats, whereas for Riyadh they are enemy number 1. While the Saudis have perhaps made some bombing runs against Daesh, they have waged a very intensive war against the Houthis, whom they code as Iran-supported.

Saudi Arabia is becoming a regional military power and is largely armed by the United States. The Saudis want new warships for their small navy so that they can patrol the Gulf, and that item will bulk large in the discussions.

Basically, the best Obama can hope for is that King Salman, unlike Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu, won’t try to torpedo the Iran deal. He is unlikely to get buy-in from the king on shoring up the Shiite government in Baghdad. Washington is squeamish about Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. The US and Saudi Arabia don’t back the same people in Syria, though they do both affirm the need for overthrowing al-Assad. For the US, al-Assad and his regime are a problem that can be addressed later, after Daesh is defeated. In the meantime, the US needs the Shiite militias to defeat Daesh, which means not angering Iran by getting rid of their ally in Damascus.

Obama and Salman will both come away with something. But on many pressing issues, they won’t get even close to agreement. Saudi acquiescence in the Iran deal, even if grudging, is Obama’s biggest goal. American acquiescence in a new, more muscular Saudi foreign policy in the Middle East, is probably what Riyadh most wants from Obama.

—–

Posted in Featured,Saudi Arabia,US Foreign Policy | 12 Responses | Print |

Obama’s Journey: Top 10 signs of Extreme Climate Change in Alaska and why it Should Scare Us

By Juan Cole | Sep. 3, 2015 |

Retweet 45 Share 71 Google +1 2 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

American corporate news has not devoted the hours to President Obama’s trip to Alaska that it deserves, focusing on the GOP clown car back in the lower 48 instead. I did a Lexis Nexis search under Arctic Summit (yes, there was one, which Obama attended) in “Broadcast News Transcripts” and I got, I swear eleven hits beginning last Sunday.

I visited Alaska for a conference a few years ago, and drove down with a friend to see the Portage Glacier. It had begun moving in 1850 and had left behind a lake as it headed toward a nearby mountain range. For a historian of modern climate change, the 1850 date is significant. That is when we typically mark the end of the “Little Ice Age” of the late medieval and early modern period, roughly 1350-1850. We came out of this period of slightly increased glaciation in Europe because early forms of industrialization involved the burning of a great deal of wood and then coal in the 18th century, so that by 1850 we had put a bit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And at that point, the Portage Glacier began melting, leaving a lake behind it over time. The lake’s birth date was 1850, the year many consider the beginning of a new geological era, the Anthropocene that succeeded the Holocene. The Anthropocene is the era in which the earth’s climate is dictated for the first time by human beings, not by volcanoes, sunspots, shape of the earth’s orbit and other astronomical phenomena, and bacteria.

The Portage Glacier is only one of many natural features now changing in Alaska. The reason Obama went to the state is that it is at the forefront of the climate change crisis. Here are the climate problems it is facing according to the Environmental Protection Agency:

1. The rate of warming in Alaska during the past 50 years has been twice as much as in the lower 48! Winters are 6.3°F warmer now than in 1965 when the Beatles’ “Yesterday” spent 4 weeks at the top of the charts. Summers are also warmer but less dramatically so, with a 3.4°F increase.

2. The future is even more striking. Average annual temperatures could increase again by as much as 4°F – 7°F by 2050!

3. Alaska’s forests are at risk from drought, wildfire and insect attacks. Already, Alaska’s spruce forest has been extensively reduced because of fire and insects. The EPA warns, “By mid-century, the average area burned by wildfire each year is likely to double.” Also, many evergreen trees are leaning over because the soil is warming and loosening, producing “drunken forests.”

4. The permafrost is melting. The EPA explains, “Permafrost is the frozen ground located one to two feet below the surface in cold regions.” When the permafrost melts, your house sinks. About 100,000 of the 736,000 Alaskans live in areas where their dwellings will be harmed by permafrost degradation.

5. When permafrost thaws and then freezes again (as opposed to staying frozen) it damages the landing strips, roads and rail lines built atop it. Many roads won’t take vehicle traffic except when the permafrost is frozen solid, since otherwise they buckle. The EPA says, “In the past 30 years, the number of days when travel is allowed on the tundra has decreased from 200 days to 100 days per year.” What? You can only travel on those roads a third of the year now? And this change since 1965?

6. Building infrastructure on melting permafrost will increase costs by 10% or more.

7. Coastal erosion is a big problem, what with rising seas and declining (and poorly named) perennial sea ice. On the state’s northwestern coast, some shorelines are receding at rates “averaging tens of feet per year.” In many native Alaskan villages up there, houses have collapsed into the sea and some villages have already had to relocate.

8. Native Alaskans are facing something like the official definition of genocide, only at the hands of oil, gas and coal instead of at the hands of an invading army. Climate change is reducing habitats for fish and for caribou, seals, walruses and polar bears, which are declining in population. Native Alaskans hunt this game and engage in fishing, but their livelihood is at extreme risk going forward.

9. As an example of threats to game, Alaskan caribou like to eat lichen, which grows on permafrost. As the permafrost melts, the lichen is being replaced by shrubs, which the caribou can’t eat. Wolves, bears and native Alaskans in turn depend on hunting caribou.

10. Alaska’s lakes are shrinking because the permafrost is thawing and more water is evaporating at the higher temperatures, reducing breeding grounds for birds that summer at them. Again, those birds and the declining fish stocks in the lakes are food for native Alaskans, food that is becoming scarcer.

—-

Posted in Barack Obama,Climate Change,Environment,Environmentalists,Extreme Weather,Featured,Sea Level | 11 Responses | Print |

Obama 1, Netanyahu 0, as Dems & Public rally to Iran Deal

By Juan Cole | Sep. 2, 2015 |

Retweet 41 Share 81 Google +1 3 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The Israel lobbies don’t win every fight on Capitol Hill, but over time they have tended to win the big ones in recent decades. This time, they are going down. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a notorious narcissist, appears to have completely over-estimated his ability to deploy those lobbies to overrule President Obama on the United Nations Security Council’s deal with Iran to monitor its civilian nuclear energy program so as to forestall any break-out toward an atomic bomb.

On Tuesday, two Democrats known as Iran hawks came out for the agreement, Senator Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania and Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. That made 31 Democrats and 2 independents in the Senate for Obama, and he only needed 34 to block an override of his veto if a resolution is passed in Congress and sent to his desk.

Update Then Wednesday morning Sen Barbara Mikulski of Maryland declared for the agreement, giving Obama his 34.

In fact, the Democrats and independents have 46 seats, and Obama has so far only lost two senators, Schumer and Menendez. If he can keep at least 39 Democrats and the two independents with him, he could even avoid the embarrassment of a resolution against the deal passing at all. Given that Casey and Coons are hard line Iran hawks, if Obama can get them, there are others in the undecided column that will be even easier to convince.

It is highly likely that most Democrats in the House will stand with the president, as well.

Casey’s office put out a 17-page statement on the deal. He said, “This agreement will substantially constrain the Iranian nuclear program for its duration, and, compared with all realistic alternatives, it is the best option available to us at this time . . . ” Casey called it “one of the most difficult decisions of my public career.”

Chris Coons said at a talk at the University of Delaware:

“I will support this agreement and vote against any measures to disapprove it in Congress . . . I will support this agreement because it puts us on a known path of limiting Iran’s nuclear program for the next 15 years with the full support of the international community. The alternative, to me, is a scenario of uncertainty and likely isolation. . . Finally, I will support this agreement despite its flaws because it is the better strategy for the United States to lead a coalesced global community in containing the spread of nuclear weapons.”

Coons does not like some aspects of the agreement very much, but he is convinced that to withdraw from it would isolate the US from the other Security Council members rather than isolating Iran. He also doesn’t think getting a better deal or reimposing severe sanctions is plausible.

Representatives and senators generally try to represent their constituents, and a recent poll [pdf] found that three-fourths of Democrats would find it acceptable or tolerable if Congress approved of the Vienna agreement with Iran. Moreover, 63% of the general public feels that way! Democrats and independents, who together make up at least two-thirds of the electorate, agree on this matter. Among Republicans, even 44% of them would find approval tolerable or acceptable.

The US has many ethnic lobbies, and the Israel lobby is not different from the Cuban or Armenian. The Israel lobbies have lost battles that were important to them (they initially opposed the massive arming of Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia is nevertheless massively armed). Moreover, ethnic lobbies are often not completely united on certain issues, and that is what happened here.

Netanyahu faced the problem that the US Jewish community strongly favors the Iran deal. In polling, Jewish Americans are much more enthusiastic about it than the general American public, which also largely supports it. The left-leaning lobby for Israel, J-Street, has even spent millions on television advertising in support of the agreement. There is a sense in which the Iran deal is a project of the American Jewish community as well as of other Democrats, and is their reaction against the excesses of Bush’s Iraq War. A majority of the Jewish senators have come out for it. They believe that diplomacy can make Israel more secure, whereas flailing about fighting wars and undermining stability in the region has made it an even more dangerous neighborhood for Israel. The much more hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Zionist Organization of America and other constituents of the Israel lobbies have all along represented a small proportion of the American Jewish community. It is admittedly an extremely wealthy sliver of the community, but votes and enthusiasm matter more than money, or Mitt Romney would be president.

The only suspense now is whether Obama can get 41 in the Senate and so forestall a negative resolution entirely. That would be best of all.

—–

Martin Kramer’s “Modest Proposal” for starving Gazans into having fewer Children, 5 Yrs Later

By Juan Cole | Sep. 2, 2015 |

Retweet 26 Share 46 Google +1 5 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

In view of the dire UN report warning that in 5 years Gaza may well be uninhabitable for its 2 million Palestinian residents, it is worth considering again that this outcome is being connived at by the Israeli far right wing, one mouthpiece for which is academic gadfly Martin Kramer. 5 years ago, this was his proposal:

Martin Kramer revealed his true colors at the Herzliya Conference [2010] , wherein he blamed political violence in the Muslim world on population growth, called for that growth to be restrained, and praised the illegal and unconscionable Israeli blockade of civilian Gazans for its effect on reducing the number of Gazans.

M. J. Rosenberg argued that Kramer’s speech is equivalent to a call for genocide. It certainly is a call for eugenics.

It is shocking that Kramer, who has made a decade-long career of attacking social science understanding of the Middle East and demonizing anyone who departs even slightly from his rightwing Israeli-nationalist political line, should be given a cushy office at Harvard as a ‘fellow’ while spewing the most vile justifications for war crimes like the collective punishment of Gazan children.

Kramer is after all not nobody. He was an adviser to the Giuliani presidential campaign. He is listed as an associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the influential think tank in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He is associated with Daniel Pipe’s ‘Middle East Forum,’ a neo-McCarthyite organization dedicated to harassing American academics who do not toe the political line of Israel’s ruling Likud Party.

Kramer’s remarks are wrong, offensive and racist by implication. He is driven to them by his nationalist ideology, which cannot recognize the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israelis in 1948, cannot see that most Palestinians have been deprived by Israeli policies of citizenship rights (what Warren Burger called ‘the right to have rights’, as Margaret Somers pointed out), and that Palestinians are even at this moment being deprived of basic property and other rights by Israeli occupation. To admit that any of these actions produces a backlash is to acknowledge the Palestinian movements as forms of national liberation activism, and to legitimize Palestinian aspirations. Rightwing Zionism is all about erasing the Palestinians from history. And now Kramer wants to make it about erasing future Palestinian children!

Where have we seen the picture Kramer draws before? It is just a recycled form of Malthusianism, where the population growth rates of “some people” is seen as dangerous to society. Barbara Brown wrote of Apartheid South Africa:

‘ [White] South Africans who express a [concern with Black population growth] perceive a close relationship between population growth rates and political instability. There are two variants of this approach. The first holds that a growing black and unemployed population will mean increased poverty which will in turn lead to a black revolt. . .
In an opening address to a major private sector conference on ‘population dynamics’ in South Africa, the president of the 1820 Foundation argued that ‘Rapid population growth translates into a steadily worsening employment future, massive city growth . . . and an increase in the number of poor and disadvantaged. All are rightly viewed as threats to social stability and orderly change.’
A second, but smaller, group believes the black threat arises simply out of the changing ratio of white to black. This group sees that ‘THE WHITES ARE A DWINDLING MINORITY IN THE COUNTRY’ and argues that this situation will lead to a ‘similar reduction of white political authority’.
Some argue for birth control on even more overtly racist grounds, but few people in leadership positions do so, at least publicly. Debates in the House of Assembly have included remarks to the effect that blacks are unable to make a contribution to South African society and so should be encouraged to limit their numbers. The organiser of a ‘Population Explosion’ conference, a medical doctor who is deputy director of the Verwoerd Hospital, argued that whites must organise a family planning programme for blacks because the latter group is biologically incapable of exercising foresight.’

– Barbara B. Brown, “Facing the ‘Black Peril’: The Politics of Population Control in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2(Jan., 1987), pp. 256-273, this quote pp. 263-64.

There are other notorious examples of this sort of argument, including eugenics theorist Madison Grant, who warned in the early 20th century that white Americans were being swamped by inferior eastern and southern Europeans such as Poles, Italians, and Jews.

How ironic, that Kramer should now resort to the very kind of arguments Grant used to condemn Martin Kramer’s ancestors being allowed to come to the United States.

As usual, Kramer, a notorious anti-intellectual opposed to the mainstream academic study of the Middle East, is wrong as a matter of social science.

Population growth in and of itself explains nothing, and certainly not terrorism. Between 1800 and 1900, Great Britain’s population tripled, whereas France underwent a demographic transition and grew very slowly. Yet Britain experienced no revolution, no great social upheavals in that period. France, in contrast, lurched from war to war, from empire to monarchy to empire to Republic, and saw the rise of a plethora of radical social movements, including the Paris Commune.

High population growth can be a problem for development, and can contribute to internal conflict over resources, but it is only one factor. If economic growth outstrips population growth (say the economy grows 7 percent and population grows 3 per year), then on a per capita basis that is the same as 4 percent economic growth per capita per annum, which would be good for most countries. Or if a place is thinly populated and rich in resources, population growth may not be socially disruptive. Most countries in the world have grown enormously in population during the past century, yet they display vastly different rates of social violence.

Although under some circumstances, rapid population growth can contribute to internal social instability, it is irrelevant to international terrorism as a political tactic. The deployment of terror, which the US Federal Code defines as the use of violence against civilians for political purposes by a non-state actor, is always a form of politics. The Zionist terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, which killed 91 persons and wounded 46, did not act because Jewish Irgun members had too many brothers and sisters. (And if you think about who exactly might have made an argument of that form in the 1940s, it becomes clear how smelly Kramer’s is.) Irgun blew the hotel up because British Mandate intelligence had offices there, and because these Zionist activists did not care if they killed dozens of civilians.

Studies of groups that deploy violence against civilians for political purposes show that [pdf link] they are characterized by higher than average education and income, which correlate with smaller family size.

Political violence is about grievances, land, resources and politics. Palestinians were no more violent than any other group in the Middle East until they were ethnically cleansed and their property was stolen by Jewish colonists in their homeland, for which they never received compensation. As Robert Pape has shown, suicide bombings cluster in the area in and around Israel, in Iraq and Afghanistan/ Northern Pakistan, places where people feel militarily occupied. But there are none in Mali or Benin, countries with among the highest population growth rates in the world.

Kramer’s argument is implicitly racist because he applies the population-growth calculus mainly to Arabs, whose family size he minds in ways that he does not others. Belize and the Cameroons have higher population growth rates than Libya. Is Kramer afraid of those two countries? Why is it only Arab children he marks as a danger?

If population growth rates were the independent variable in predicting a turn to terrorism, moreover, the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jewish population of Israel would be a concern. But in fact they refuse to serve in the Israeli army and so are the least violent part of the population (though there have been occasional Haredi attacks on Palestinians.)

Kramer will find, in his new role as the Madison Grant of the twenty-first century, that his arguments are a double-edged sword that even more unsavory persons than he will gleefully wield against groups other than Arabs.

Posted in Israel,Israel/ Palestine,Palestine | 1 Response | Print |

Enter the Bear: Does Russia plan air strikes on Daesh/ISIL in Syria?

By Juan Cole | Sep. 1, 2015 |

Retweet 39 Share 75 Google +1 16 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole| (Informed Comment) | – –

The Israeli press is reporting that Iran has made a firmer military alliance with the Russian Federation in Syria, and that Moscow is sending pilots to Damascus to fly missions in that country against Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) and other Muslim extremist groups.

The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has suffered a series of losses, in Idlib, Palmyra and elsewhere, and Russia may be afraid that without a substantial intervention, the regime could fall.

Some Syrian Daesh units and other vigilante extremists have a Chechen presence; Chechnya is a territory of the Russian Federation that launched two major rebellions, in the 1990s and again at the turn of the century, and Chechen extremists remain a top security concern for Moscow. To have nearby Syria (only a 20-hour drive from the Russian border through Georgia and Turkey). Russia does not want an extremist Muslim state so near to it, which will give support to Chechen and other rebels inside the federation.

BBC Monitoring translates from the Hebrew of Alex Fishman’s report in the daily Yediot Aharanot:

“Russian combat pilots will arrive in Syria in the next few days and operate battle helicopters and warplanes of the Russian air force against ISIS targets and the extreme Islamist militias operating to topple Asad’s regime… Indeed, the Russians have no hostile intentions towards Israel or any other sovereign state in the region and their central objective is fighting ISIS and preserving Asad’s regime, but the mere presence of a Russian aerial force in the skies of the region will certainly also influence the considerations in relation to the way Israel airforce is used… Thus an Iranian-Russian coalition is being formed alongside the coalition of the United States and its allies against ISIS. On the way, Iran has become a central axis – in the eyes of the powers – to solving all the ills of the Middle East.” [From commentary by Alex Fishman in centrist, mass circulation Yediot Aharonot]

The Arabic newspaper Elaph expanded on the story and pointed out that there had been earlier reports that Moscow intended to send Mig-28 fighter jets to the al-Assad regime.

The rumors now are that Russia intends to go much further, and has decided to do for Syria what the US did last summer and fall for Iraq. Moscow will, Elaph says, send thousands of military personnel as trainers, along with some pilots, to shore up the al-Assad regime.

The plans are alleged to come out of closer diplomatic and militiary ties between Russia and Iran, and to have been approved by the commander of Iran’s special forces, the Quds Force (Jerusalem Brigade), Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani is alleged to have made a recent visit to Moscow to coordinate the new strategy.

While Israeli sources are worried about the growth of a Russia-Iran alliance in the region, Elaph maintains that the United States is perfectly happy with the Russian plans, which add firepower in the US coalition’s own bombing campaigns (which have included Australia, the UK, Turkey and some Gulf fighter jets). It says the US is already engaged in a similar coordination with Iran against Daesh in Iraq.

—–

Posted in Counter-Terrorism,Featured,Iran,Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,Russia,Syria | 18 Responses | Print |

Top 5 Green Energy Breakthroughs Today

By Juan Cole | Aug. 31, 2015 |

Retweet 21 Share 42 Google +1 6 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – –

Switching to green energy sources like wind and solar is necessary to save the planet from increased concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause global warming. But it will also save you money. How much? Citi Bank has a new estimate that going green will save the world $1.4 trillion by 2040! Remember, once the installations are constructed, wind and solar fuel is free. And offsetting carbon emissions will avoid damage out our coasts and extreme weather events that will in themselves be costly (which will be caused by rising global temperatures if we keep dumping 35 billion tons of CO2 a year into the atmosphere).

German automaker BMW is going all electric within ten years. Every vehicle in its fleet will either be an EV or a hybrid plug-in (i.e. some will have small gas tanks and a separate gas combustion engine to extend the range of the electric battery). The automobiles will be redesigned to be lighter, to offset the weight of the battery, and will be more aerodynamic to reduce wind pull and allow better mileage. The change is prompted by the European Union’s increasingly strict limits on carbon pollution. The BMW design and battery breakthroughs will certainly have an impact on the industry as a whole, even in the US where automakers every year proudly announce new cars that get 18 miles a gallon!

Hawaiian governor David Ige announced at an energy summit in Honolulu last week (which I atteded) that not only will his state go for 100% renewable electricity generation by 2045, in only 30 years, but he will not replace current petroleum-fueled power plants with natural gas because it is a greenhouse gas and the money would be better spent on renewables. Electricity is expensive in Hawaii– a household can see a $400 or even $600 a month bill, because oil has been high and has to be imported. Putting solar panels on your roof can bring the bill down to $16 a month. So, something like 12-15% of residential homes already have solar panels, the highest proportion in the nation. Hawaii officials expect that proportion to triple in the coming decades. The US military has a big presence on the islands, and the army, navy and Marines are all very invested in renewables, as well, putting solar plants on bases.

Hawaii is also experimenting with new forms of renewables. Last week it opened the first small navy-funded ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) plant , which generates energy by taking advantage of the difference between warmer and colder waters at various sea depths. The Scientific American explains: “The Makai plant is designed to draw in warmer ocean surface waters to vaporize ammonia, which boils and creates steam at a relatively low temperature. The steam spins a turbine and generates electricity. Cold water extracted from the ocean depths is then used to cool and condense the ammonia back into a liquid, which is then recycled in the system, known as a closed-loop system.” This plant is just an experiment, but demonstrates that the process can work.

A team at a South African university say they have made a breakthrough in the smale-scale generation of electricity using concentrated solar technology. This is a problem that Google engineers had been trying to solve but were stumped. There are some big concentrated solar plants, but they are relatively expensive. Allowing the technology to be affordably adopted on a small scale basis would be a revolution in places like Africa. The Guardian quotes a team member: “His team’s aim is to produce CSP technology that will be cheap and quick to install. “We are developing plonkable heliostats. Plonkable means that from factory to installation you can just drop them down on to the ground and they work.” So no costly cement, no highly-trained workforce, no wires, just two workers to lay out the steel frames on the ground and a streetlight-style central tower.”

——–

Posted in Featured,Green Energy,Solar Energy,wind energy | 3 Responses | Print |

Palestine overwhelmed by Illegal American Immigrants

By Juan Cole | Aug. 30, 2015 |

Retweet 674 Share 1329 Google +1 136 44 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

If there were a Palestinian Donald Trump, he’d be fulminating against illegal immigrants swamping the Palestinian West Bank. And he’d be complaining that fully 1 in 6 of these undocumented squatters are Americans .

Since Americans have trouble understanding the basic facts of the situation, it is worthwhile underscoring that the United Nations General Assembly’s partition plan for British Mandate Palestine in 1947 did not include Gaza or the West Bank of the Jordan. Those territories were never awarded to Jewish settlers or later Israelis by any legitimate authority (even the UNGC is not an executive body and the Security Council should have signed off to grant real legitimacy in law). Israel militarily conquered Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and have by now so altered the ways of life, economy and society of these occupied territories that the Occupation is illegal by the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949 (designed to prevent atrocities against occupied populations of the sort the Axis carried out during WW II).

It is strictly illegal for the occupying power to attempt to annex occupied territory or to transfer its citizens into militarily occupied territory. Mussolini’s Italy pulled that stunt with the parts of France he occupied during WW II. When you hear that someone has violated the Geneva Convention, that isn’t just an abstract matter. It means that someone is acting the way the dictators acted during the war, because it is that kind of lawless behavior the conventions were attempting to forestall from happening again.

Israel illegally annexed part of the Palestinian West Bank to its district of Jerusalem and then settled it with Israeli squatters. Am I comparing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Mussolini in Menton, France? If the shoe fits . . .

Outside the territory annexed to Jerusalem, there are at least 350,000 Israeli squatters who have usurped Palestinian land.

This link explains the process of illegal Israeli squatting on and theft of Palestinian land (a process the International Court of Justice ruled is illegal in 2004).

Some 60,000 of the squatters, today’s equivalent of Mussolini’s Black Shirts , are Americans, according to a new study.

Those American politicians like Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump, who make exaggerated and untrue statements against undocumented workers in the United States but who defend illegal Israeli immigration into the West Bank, are supreme hypocrites. The Israeli squatters, moreover, are often hostile and aggressive, excluding Palestinians from the townhouses they construct on stolen property.

Posted in Featured,Israel/ Palestine | 27 Responses | Print |

Austrian Truck Tragedy echoes Palestinian Story, reminding us of 7 mn still stateless

By Juan Cole | Aug. 28, 2015 |

Retweet 43 Share 124 Google +1 10 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The gruesome discovery of an abandoned truck in eastern Austria with 71 dead refugees in it, 4 of them children, has horrified the world. But few will realize that the plot of this story was laid out in the 1960s by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, in his 1962 novel, Men in the Sun (Amazon link here.)

Of the 1.2 million Palestinians living in the British Mandate of Palestine, Zionist settlers allowed in by the British attacked and expelled over half of them in 1948, about 720,000, from their homes. To this day, of the 11 million Palestinians, 7.1 million are still refugees or displaced. Many of them are stateless, lacking the basic rights bestowed by citizenship in a state.

Kanafani’s novel treats 3 Palestinian workers who cannot work in Lebanon, who decided to try to get to Kuwait, being smuggled in the back of a tanker truck. When the driver finally makes it to Kuwait, he looks inside the empty tank, only to find them dead.

Kanafani was murdered by a covert Israeli hit squad in 1972.

The dead in the real truck in Austria appear to have been mainly Syrian. Of today’s 22 million Syrians, 11 million are displaced or refugees (including many internally displaced).

But often the great refugee crises, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, end by the refugees returning home when peace descends.

The Palestinians don’t have that prospect. Their home has been stolen from them by the Israelis and they were unceremoniously dumped on the neighbors or in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip. They are stateless. They are the original truck people.

—–

Posted in Displaced and Refugees,Featured | 7 Responses | Print |

Egypt’s al-Sisi and Putin Pledge Common Front against Terrorism

By Juan Cole | Aug. 27, 2015 |

Retweet 13 Share 13 Google +1 3 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi met Wednesday for the third time in a year with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Putin is attempting to draw Egypt into a common front against terrorism. He wants to fight Daesh [ISIS, ISIL]) in Syria, which is only a 24 hour automobile drive from Russia’s troubled Chechen region.

Putin sees the common front against Daesh as a basis for a new level of strategic ties between the Moscow and Cairo.

But Putin put sl-Sisi in a difficult position by saying that the anti-terrorism front would include Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad.

Al-Sisi carefully avoided saying anything in response.

Egypt quietly has good relations with Syria, but its main backer right now is Saudi Arabia, which is attempting to overthrow al-Assad .

The two have some common economic interests, as well. Russia is offering to build Egypt a nuclear power plant, and Egypt is offering Russia some free trade zones along the refurbished Suez Canal.

Egyptian critics complained that al-Sisi dressed just like Putin, in a dark three piece suit, for all the meetings.

——

Posted in Eastern Europe,Egypt,Featured,Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,Russia | 5 Responses | Print |

Defending Natalie Portman on Holocaust: Sometimes it can be subverted to fear-mongering

By Juan Cole | Aug. 26, 2015 |

Retweet 61 Share 178 Google +1 5 0 Send via email

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Actress Natalie Portman has kicked off a controversy with remarks about how to remember the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, in which the National Socialists murdered 6 million.

Her critics have run off on tangents and presented a lot of red herrings. Portman did not question the distinctiveness of the Holocaust, but rather outlined what she thinks should be taken away from it.

She made the remarks in an interview with The Independent:

““I think a really big question the Jewish community needs to ask itself, is how much at the forefront we put Holocaust education. Which is, of course, an important question to remember and to respect, but not over other things… We need to be reminded that hatred exists at all times and reminds us to be empathetic to other people that have experienced hatred also. Not used as a paranoid way of thinking that we are victims.”
She continues: “Sometimes it can be subverted to fear-mongering and like ‘Another Holocaust is going to happen’. We need to, of course, be aware that hatred exists, anti-Semitism exists against all sorts of people, not in the same way. I don’t mean to make false equivalences, we need it to serve as something that makes us empathetic to people rather than paranoid.”
She can pinpoint the moment that she came to this realisation – it was in 2007, on a trip to Rwanda to trek with gorillas. “We went to the museum there, and I was shocked that that [genocide] was going on while I was in school. We were learning only about the Holocaust and it was never mentioned and it was happening while I was in school. That is exactly the type of problem with the way it’s taught. I think it needs to be taught, and I can’t speak for everyone because this was my personal education.”

Her remarks did not imply that Rwanda was equivalent to the genocide of the Jews. She was saying that people who lived through a Holocaust should be extra sensitive to massacres of others, should highlight these further genocides– not because they are equivalent but because having been genocided should produce empathy.

She also warned against any fascist use of the Nazi genocide for the purposes of far-right nationalism, the nursing of grievances against others, the paranoid political discourse that sees every political challenge as 1938 and every oppositional movement as equivalent to Nazism.

She was talking not about history but about psychology, not about comparative statistics but about emotional maturity, not about past wrongs about about present-day moral compass.

We all know Likudniks who use the genocide as a get out of jail free card, who think they can do no wrong because, Holocaust. They are not unique. All massacres and genocides are available for both extreme nationalist and empathetic purposes. The difference does not lie in how many were tortured and killed. The difference lies in what we take away from it.

Look at Japan. The Japanese right wing, exemplified by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has difficulty recognizing that Japan did anything wrong in the 1930s and 1940s.

But the majority of the Japanese public is pacifist despite having been nuked by the Truman administration. (Two-thirds of the Japanese public reject Abe’s legislation to allow the Japanese army to be deployed for warfare abroad). Whatever their resentments about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most Japanese cite them as a reason for which war in general must be avoided– i.e. in the sort of spiritually mature manner that Portman is calling for.

Note that I am not comparing the experience of civilians being nuclear-bombed to the Nazi genocide against Jews. They are incommensurate experiences, both productive of long-term historical trauma. The question is, how should we remember and deploy them in today’s world? The majority of the Japanese public has the right idea, in my view, while I think there is something pathological about the Likud Party (just as there is about the Japanese right wing). It is legitimate for Jews to be wary of racial bigotry directed against them by populist movements and to take what steps they can to protect themselves from it– that is a lesson of genocide. But to confuse protests against the illegal Israeli annexation of the Palestinian West Bank with racism is just naked nationalism, a demand to be freed from all critique or constraint because of past suffering. It is not the demand of a grown-up.

Portman is being prophetic in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible, where there were no voices more critical of ancient Jewry than the Isaiahs. She is calling us all to turn hate and trauma not to the purposes of aggrandizement and suspicion but to those of care for today’s victims. Those who cannot understand her need to check their ethics.

—-

Posted in Featured,Holocaust,Israel,Jewish History,Judaism,Peace | 23 Responses | Print |