LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN

September 09/16

Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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http://www.eliasbejjaninews.com/newsbulletin16/english.september09.16.htm

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Bible Quotations For Today

No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 08/16-21/:"‘No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.’ Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, ‘Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.’But he said to them, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’"

By the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.
Second Letter to the Corinthians 04/01-06/:'Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practise cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

Titles For Latest LCCC Bulletin analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on September 08-09/16

The Majority of Our Maronite Leaders: Pharisees and Hypocrites/Elias Bejjani/September 08/16
The Middle East Council of Churches: Where to Now/Dr. Harry Hagopian/Now Lebanon/September 08/16
Palestinians: "Women are Witches"/Khaled Abu Toameh/Gatestone Institute/September 08/16
France: On Its Way to Being a Jew-Free Nation/Robbie Travers/Gatestone Institute/September 08/16
Obama’s Syria Policy Isn’t a ‘Mistake.’ It’s Deliberate/Lee Smith/Tablet/September 008/16
A Biography of the Islamic Republic/Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/May 16, 2013
Egyptian Columnist: Just Like 9/11, ISIS Attacks In Europe Are A Western Plot
MEMRI/September 08/16/September 08/16
Analysis: Does Israel’s existence rely on Trump’s election/Michael Wilner/Jerusalem Post/September 08/16
Holy War of Words: Growing Saudi-Iranian Tensions/Simon Henderson/The Washington Institute/September 08/16
The evolution of Egypt-Israel relations: No longer a terrorist entity/Zavi Mazel/Jerusalem Post/September 08/16
Syria’s conflicts and the many world orders’ state of denial/Mohamed Chebarro/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
The planet’s future depends on choices we make now/Peter Harrison/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
Hajj amid the Saudi-Iranian debate/Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
The fascinating writings of Samir Atallah/Turki Aldakhil/Al Arabiya/September 08/16

Titles For Latest Lebanese Related News published on on September 08-09/16
The Majority of Our Maronite Leaders: Pharisees and Hypocrites
Sixteen Ministers Attend Cabinet Meeting, Salam Describes it as 'Constitutional'
FPM Denies Proposing Settlement Involving Extension of Qahwaji's Term
Pharaon Meets Aoun as Hakim Slams Christian Ministers who Secured Quorum
Hizbullah Bloc Urges Return to Dialogue, Respecting 'Real Partnership
British Ambassador Shorter: Time for #IndependenceDay2
Christian Figures Meet Patriarch: 'Excluding the Christians Unbearable'
Report: Hizbullah Boycotts Cabinet in Solidarity with FPM
Lebanese Wanted in U.S. and Brazil Arrested in Argentina
Bou Saab during press conference: No school can operate without license or exceptional approval
Geagea receives National Liberal Party Delegation
Harb: Government sustainability gives way to more obstruction
UAE Ambassador invited to attend Adyan Association Conference
Rifi: Terrorism, corruption two sides of same coin
FPM denies compromise over appointments
The Middle East Council of Churches: Where to Now?

Titles For Latest LCCC Bulletin For Miscellaneous Reports And News published on on September 08-09/16
Israel Strikes Syria after Projectile Lands in Golan Heights
Clinton Vows to Hunt IS Chief, Slams 'Dangerous' Trump
Lavrov, Kerry discuss possible US-Russia cooperation in Syria
Syria regime retakes key Aleppo district from rebels
Chemical weapons watchdog chief says Aleppo gas attack disturbing
US Republicans seek to tie Syria refugee issue to spending bill
Palestinian court postpones local elections set for October
Palestinians dismiss report Abbas was KGB agent as ‘smear’
Heavy machinery is seen on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza Thursday, Sept. 8,
Hollande: French ‘secularism does not oppose Islam’
Uzbek PM named interim president in interests of 'stability'
US: Libya close to eliminating ISIS from Sirte
HRW warns Houthi landmines are killing civilians
Saudi has ‘similar stance’ with Turkey on region
Britain, EU should work together for smooth divorce: UK PM May
Palestinians dismiss report Abbas was KGB agent as ‘smear’
Argentina detains Lebanese ‘terrorism suspect’ wanted in US
Days after slur, Obama and Duterte meet
Heavy fighting as Taliban breach southern Afghan city
 

Links From Jihad Watch Site for on September 08-09/16
American-trained sniper now Islamic State “minister of war”
Three more Muslims arrested over Notre Dame Cathedral jihad bomb plot
Italy expels Muslim cleric who said Islam “fully incompatible” with Italian law
Hugh Fitzgerald: Those Danish Right-Wing “Racists,” Their “Harsh” Demands and “Hate” Speech
Germany: Security guards posted at pools to stop Muslim migrant assaults
Belgium: Son of imam was planning jihad attack on Christians with chainsaw in mall
Germany descending into martial law over fear of Islamic State attack
Hillary: Islamic State saying, “Oh, please, Allah, make Trump president of America”
Germany: “Why honor-kill your sister and have child porn on your phone?”
Jihad murderer is “moderate” Fatah’s candidate for Hebron City Council
Hollande: “Nothing in the idea of secularism opposes the practice of Islam in France”
Iraq expels Saudi ambassador for refusing to denounce Islamic State cousin
Islamic State calls for “blood of a merry Crusader citizen selling flowers to passersby”
Yazidi victim of the Islamic State: “I was gang-raped, they call this practice sexual jihad”

Links From Christian Today Site for on September 08-09/16
Western civilisation as we know it would not exist without Jesus, says Evangelical Alliance
 Nabeel Qureshi is praying for a miracle: 'I will take refuge in my God'
 Cuban churches condemn US threat to Christian humanitarian group
 Church growth: World's largest churches are getting bigger
 Iraq: US pastor spends $4,000 buying weapons for Christian militia
 Colombia: Christian aid agencies welcome groundbreaking new peace deal
 Cuba: Crackdown on Christians sees 1,600 churches targeted
 Christian charity appeals for funds to fight Cuba church demolitions
 Why Ted Cruz failed to win over American evangelicals
 Does religion restrict freedom?
 Why Britain's EU referendum is a moment of crisis for Europe
 Pope Francis: States should be secular, but protect religious freedom
 Russell Moore: America is not a Christian country
 Israel: Archaeologists restore Temple floor where Jesus walked
 Martin Luther King Jr promoted to sainthood by Holy Christian Orthodox Church
 United Methodist pastor keeps job after defying Church rules over same-sex wedding

Latest Lebanese Related News published on on September 08-09/16

The Majority of Our Maronite Leaders: Pharisees and Hypocrites
غالبية قادتنا الموارنة منافقين وفريسيين
Elias Bejjani/September 08/16
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/2016/09/07/elias-bejjani-the-majority-of-our-maronite-leaders-are-pharisees-and-hypocrites/
My friend on Face Book, Catherine Baradi, wrote the following comment in response to my last article:
(“Why aren’t the Christians ex communicating Aoun because then he can’t represent the Christians, this is a method of getting rid of Aoun once and for ever, we need to send a letter to the Pope in this ex communication then he can be charged for war crimes”. )
Below is my Response
The Majority of Our Maronite Leaders: Pharisees and Hypocrites
Sadly the vast majority of our Maronite notch leaders, in both domains ecclesial and political are in general Pharisees and hypocrites. It true that Micheal Aoun and his spoiled son-in-law Jobran Bassil are serving their own personal agendas and not that of Lebanon or it people, but the majority of the Maronite politician, officials and party leaders are not that much different in any way.Meanwhile our Patriarch Al Raei and many of the bishops are 100 times worst than Aoun and the rest of the politicians when the issuea revolve om matters like vision, patriotism, devotion, reliability, courage, modesty, and faith.
There is no doubt sure as Maronites, we are living in an era of mere corrupted leaders in both political and religious arenas. Unfortunately they are all cut from the same Trojan and hypocrite garment.

In conclusion and as our popular saying goes (proverb): “A person can not give others what he does have”

Sixteen Ministers Attend Cabinet Meeting, Salam Describes it as 'Constitutional'
Naharnet/September 08/16/The cabinet convened at the Grand Serail on Thursday in the presence of 16 ministers and the absence of the Free Patriotic Movement, Tashnaq and Hizbullah members of government, a meeting which Premier Tammam Salam described as “constitutional and respects the National Pact.” Information Minister Ramzi Jreije quoted the PM and said: “The meeting is constitutional and respects the National Pact. But the PM paved the way for further consultations as for the current crisis in order to find solutions.” “The Premier pointed out that suspending the dialogue sessions reflected negatively on the general atmospheres. The productivity of the government is a key factor for the survival of the cabinet, otherwise it would be useless.”Before they joined the meeting, Agriculture Minister Akram Shehayyeb said: “Hizbullah ministers are keen on the government like everyone else, but we are experiencing difficult circumstances.”He was pointing to the party's decision to boycott the meeting in solidarity with its Christian ally the FPM. For his part, Information Minister Ramzi Jreij stated that the interlocutors must lend an ear to the people's worries, he said: “We have to listen to the concerns and we hope that the FPM returns to the government.” “I only came to the meeting to demand the postponement of the session,” said Tourism Minister Michel Pharaon ahead of the meeting. On the other hand, Minister Nabil De Freij remarked: “As long as we have a prime minister to call for cabinet meetings I will dub as 'non-Lebanese' all those who fail to attend it. Those who do not want to attend to secure quorum are deceitful.” Minsters of the FPM decided to boycott the cabinet meetings over the thorny file of military appointments. Furthermore they have accused the government of failing to conform to the National Pact when it meets in the absence of ministers. Hizbullah on the other hand boycotted the meeting in solidarity with its Christian ally.

FPM Denies Proposing Settlement Involving Extension of Qahwaji's Term
The Free Patriotic Movement denied Thursday that it has proposed a settlement involving a new extension of Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji's term. “The FPM denies what some ministers said after today's cabinet session about a settlement under which the FPM's two ministers would demand the annulment of the extension of Higher Defense Council chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir's term in return for accepting the extension of Army chief Gen. Jean Qahwaji's term,” the FPM said in a statement. It stressed that its stance on rejecting term extensions is “principled” and not related to “individuals or events.” “It aims to achieve real partnership that respects the National Pact in order to rectify the flaws and regularize the work of institutions,” the movement said. “Those who are keen on the government's productivity must facilitate the approval of the several stalled files that have to do with people's affairs, electricity, water, oil, telecommunications, transportation and other issues, which are being obstructed due to favoring partisan interests over the people's interests,” the FPM added. Youth and Sport Minister Abdul Mutalleb Hennawi, who is close to ex-president Michel Suleiman, had said after the cabinet session that “they have put the precondition of revoking Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir's term extension in return for accepting extension for General Jean Qahwaji.” Health Minister Wael Abou Faour for his part said that “the FPM's proposal” had been “relayed yesterday” to Prime Minister Tammam Salam.
“He rejected it out of respect for voting in the Cabinet,” Abou Faour added. The FPM's latest boycott of cabinet meetings was initially linked to the thorny issue of military and security appointments. The movement has long voiced reservations over the government's decision-taking mechanism in the absence of a president. The defense minister had recently postponed the retirement of Kheir after no consensus was reached over three candidates that he had proposed, angering the FPM which says that it opposes term extensions for all senior officers. Addressing Salam on Friday, FPM chief Jebran Bassil said “the son of late PM Saeb Salam must pay great attention when he says that the government is respecting the National Pact when it convenes in the presence of ministers representing only six percent of a main component of the country (Christians).”Bassil has also warned that the country might be soon plunged into a “political system crisis” if the other parties do not heed the FPM's demands regarding Muslim-Christian “partnership.”Marada Movement chief MP Suleiman Franjieh hit back at Bassil on Monday, saying Marada and the other Christian parties in the cabinet “represent a lot more than six percent.”

Pharaon Meets Aoun as Hakim Slams Christian Ministers who Secured Quorum
Naharnet/September 08/16/Tourism Minister Michel Pharaon of the March 14 camp held talks Thursday with Free Patriotic Movement founder MP Michel Aoun in Rabieh as Resigned Economy Minister Alain Hakim of the Kataeb Party slammed the Christian ministers who attended the controversial cabinet session that was held earlier in the day. “The issue of the presidency requires further consultations and dialogue in order to reach a package deal, and it requires guarantees at the Christian level and from other parties such as Hizbullah, al-Mustaqbal Movement and some Arab countries,” Pharaon told reporters after the meeting. “Consultations must not stop and the governmental crises that we have been suffering for more than two years now require exploring means to continue the government's work and cater to the people's needs,” the minister added. Pharaon also stressed that Aoun is “very keen on all state institutions and on the government,” calling for more dialogue and consultations. Resigned minister Hakim meanwhile lashed out at the Christian ministers who secured quorum for the cabinet meeting, who included Pharaon. “We condemn the stance of the Christian ministers who secured the quorum of today's cabinet session and we questions their objectives,” Hakim tweeted. “Lebanon does not need further dialogue and discussion meetings. If the cabinet's sessions have turned into discussions and dialogue, let it resign and act in caretaker capacity and let us elect a president immediately,” Hakim added, referring to the cabinet session that did not witness any discussion of agenda items. Earlier in the day, Hakim had warned that “the country is on the verge of collapse economically, politically and socially,” wondering about “the benefit from holding hollow cabinet session.”“Where is the government's credibility? Resigning is more honorable for it than this farce,” he tweeted. The cabinet session was held in the absence of the ministers of the FPM, Hizbullah, Marada Movement and Tashnag Party. Kataeb had resigned from the cabinet in June in protest at the government's handling of the waste management crisis. The FPM has suspended its participation in cabinet sessions and national dialogue meetings over accusations that other parties in the country are not respecting the 1943 National Pact. The National Pact is an unwritten agreement that set the foundations of modern Lebanon as a multi-confessional state based on Christian-Muslim partnership. The FPM's latest boycott of cabinet meetings was initially linked to the thorny issue of military and security appointments. The movement has long voiced reservations over the government's decision-taking mechanism in the absence of a president. The defense minister had recently postponed the retirement of Higher Defense Council chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir after no consensus was reached over three candidates that he had proposed, angering the FPM which says that it opposes term extensions for all senior officers. Addressing Prime Minister Tammam Salam on Friday, FPM chief Jebran Bassil said “the son of late PM Saeb Salam must pay great attention when he says that the government is respecting the National Pact when it convenes in the presence of ministers representing only six percent of a main component of the country (Christians).”Bassil has also warned that the country might be soon plunged into a “political system crisis” if the other parties do not heed the FPM's demands regarding Muslim-Christian “partnership.”Marada Movement chief MP Suleiman Franjieh hit back at Bassil on Monday, saying Marada and the other Christian parties in the cabinet “represent a lot more than six percent.”

Hizbullah Bloc Urges Return to Dialogue, Respecting 'Real Partnership'
Naharnet/September 08/16/Hizbullah's Loyalty to Resistance parliamentary bloc on Thursday urged the resumption of national dialogue sessions, describing the all-party talks as the only “realistic” solution. “National dialogue is in the interest of Lebanon and all its components,” said the bloc in a statement issued after its weekly meeting. “National dialogue is the available realistic solution for Lebanon and the bloc urges everyone to return to dialogue because its absence would further complicate the country's crisis,” it added. Clarifying Hizbullah's boycott of the cabinet session that was held earlier in the day, which was also boycotted by the ministers of the Free Patriotic Movement, Marada Movement and Tashnag Party, the bloc said: “To avoid any repercussions from the ongoing disputes and to allow further deliberations, the bloc demanded the postponement of today's cabinet session.” “The needed solution requires respecting real partnership and national balance,” Loyalty to Resistance added. It also slammed what it called “the Saudi regime's destructive role in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Bahrain.” The FPM has suspended its participation in cabinet sessions and national dialogue meetings over accusations that other parties in the country are not respecting the 1943 National Pact. The National Pact is an unwritten agreement that set the foundations of modern Lebanon as a multi-confessional state based on Christian-Muslim partnership. The FPM's latest boycott of cabinet meetings was initially linked to the thorny issue of military and security appointments. The movement has long voiced reservations over the government's decision-taking mechanism in the absence of a president. The defense minister had recently postponed the retirement of Higher Defense Council chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir after no consensus was reached over three candidates that he had proposed, angering the FPM which says that it opposes term extensions for all senior officers. Addressing Prime Minister Tammam Salam on Friday, FPM chief Jebran Bassil said “the son of late PM Saeb Salam must pay great attention when he says that the government is respecting the National Pact when it convenes in the presence of ministers representing only six percent of a main component of the country (Christians).”Bassil has also warned that the country might be soon plunged into a “political system crisis” if the other parties do not heed the FPM's demands regarding Muslim-Christian “partnership.”Marada Movement chief MP Suleiman Franjieh hit back at Bassil on Monday, saying Marada and the other Christian parties in the cabinet “represent a lot more than six percent.”

British Ambassador Shorter: Time for #IndependenceDay2
Naharnet/September 08/16/Below is a blog written by British Ambassador to Lebanon Hugo Shorter to mark a year since he assumed his post: “Presidency: Time for #IndependenceDay2. It is now a year since I took up my appointment as UK Ambassador (designate) to Lebanon. It’s time to admit that, for all the wonderful experiences of my first year in this beautiful and welcoming country, there has been one big disappointment: Lebanon’s failure to elect a new President. And this is fundamental, because the lack of a President of Lebanon for over two years now weakens the country and the model of co-existence it represents in the region. It means Lebanon is increasingly vulnerable to internal or external shocks, is falling behind in economic growth and job creation, and the institutions of the state are being degraded. As I make the diplomatic rounds of party leaders, deputies, ministers and religious figures to discuss the political impasse, one refrain comes back again and again: Lebanon cannot elect a President until foreigners agree. I am told that this has always been the case, that a detente between regional rivals, a political settlement of the Syrian war, or the green light of one or other outside power is necessary for a President to be elected.
My view is that the Lebanese people should decide that the agreement of foreigners cannot and should not be necessary for a solution to the presidential impasse. Why?
First, because however hard the UK and other responsible players work to resolve them, regional problems may not be settled for years. How much longer can Lebanon wait? Surely every Lebanese leader should be working their utmost to avoid testing Lebanon’s famed resilience to destruction by waiting for solutions to the region’s intractable problems. Second because, however much outside powers may care about Lebanon, they will put their own national interests first. This is an iron rule of international relations. The UK has shown over and over again that we are committed to Lebanon’s stability, security and prosperity. But in the end, our Parliament will hold our ministers to account over how the British government is advancing the British national interest. The British are not exceptionally hard-nosed about this – on the contrary, we take a broad, positive view of what is in our national interest. My point is that by allowing foreign powers to decide on Lebanese domestic issues the Lebanese are allowing others’ interests to take priority over their own, inside Lebanon. Third, because waiting for others’ decisions is a way of absolving oneself of responsibility. But when Lebanese voters elect their deputies and their municipal councils – as was clear from the results of the May Municipal elections – they expect those representatives to represent their, the voters’, interests. Not someone else’s, living hundreds or thousands of miles away. And not the politicians’ own personal interests either.
Finally, the system is patently broken. It’s now 28 months since President Sleiman stepped down. Many Lebanese politicians have been working sincerely to reach agreement on a successor. But it’s time to admit that trying to align diverse and opposed outside interests behind a single candidate has failed. The Lebanese constitution provides a mechanism to resolve this situation: a Parliamentary vote for President. When I express these views to Lebanese friends, they are too polite to remind me that I’m relatively new to Lebanon. But they tell me that foreign interference in Lebanese politics is just a fact of life, based on money, weapons, and religion. Remarkably, this is not particularly controversial in public debate here: is this fatalism? Or a sense that so long as everyone has their foreign backer then somehow everyone wins? If so, I disagree. Everyone who cares about the future of the Lebanese model of co-existence, everyone who cares about jobs and economic opportunity in this country, everyone who cares about a strong state to provide security and the rule of law, loses – as the current presidential impasse shows. The problems of foreign money, weapons and religious influences will take time to resolve. But the Presidency can be fixed, now, by the Lebanese. For more than two years now, it is Lebanese politicians who have decided to await foreign decisions. It is Lebanese members of Parliament who have a duty to vote for a President. It is the Lebanese Constitution that opens with the words: 'Lebanon is a sovereign, free and independent country'. So I say: it’s time for Lebanon to elect its President, independently. Time for Parliament to vote. Time for #IndependenceDay2 !”

Christian Figures Meet Patriarch: 'Excluding the Christians Unbearable'
Naharnet/September 08/16/Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi received on Thursday several Christian officials where talks focused on the latest developments in Lebanon mainly the “marginalization of the Christians,” the state-run National News Agency said. Rahi met with Kataeb party leader MP Sami Gemayel who left without making a statement. The Patriarch also held a meeting with MPs Hikmat Deeb and Naamatallah Abi Nasr who were dispatched by the Change and Reform bloc leader MP Michel Aoun. Abi Nasr said: “The bloc can’t stand idle and watch the state collapse without making a stance. The bloc has decided to take action at both the media and political levels.” Deeb on the other hand said that the two MPs briefed the Patriarch with the steps that the bloc plans on take. He said: “Depriving the Christians, their leaders and employees from development is no longer bearable.”

​​Report: Hizbullah Boycotts Cabinet in Solidarity with FPM
Naharnet/September 08/16/Hizbullah decided to boycott Thursday's cabinet meeting in solidarity with a similar stance taken by its ally head of the Change and Reform parliamentary bloc MP Michel Aoun, sources close to the party told As Safir daily.
The sources said that Hizbullah decided to be absent from the meeting in solidarity with Aoun and to show an understanding of his party's apprehensions and the seriousness of a continued “marginalization of a major Lebanese component.”The party has informed Speaker Nabih Berri, PM Tammam Salam, Aoun and MP Walid Jumblat of its decision after trying in vain to push for the postponement of the meeting to pave way for some efforts it has been exerting to address the FPM ministers' objection. Sources close to Hizbullah told the daily that the party blames al-Mustaqbal bloc head MP Fouad Saniora for aborting attempts to reach an agreement to postpone the meeting. According to An Nahar daily, Hizbullah official Hussein Khalil has informed Bassil late on Wednesday that the party's ministers will not attend the meeting. The FPM's recent boycott of cabinet meetings is linked to the thorny issue of military and security appointments and the government's decision-taking mechanism in the absence of a president. Despite the FPM's declared boycott, Prime Minister Tammam Salam said that he will not postpone Thursday's cabinet session. FPM head and Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil had accused the government of not respecting the National Pact when it “convenes in the presence of ministers representing only six percent of a main component of the country (Christians).”

Lebanese Wanted in U.S. and Brazil Arrested in Argentina
Naharnet/September 08/16/A Lebanese citizen wanted in the United States and Brazil for suspected links to terrorism and arms trade was detained at the Ezeiza aiport in the Argentinian capital, Argentine's national news agency Telam reported on Thursday. The detainee, Khalil Mohammed el-Sayyed was arrested by Argentinian authorities late on Wednesday, added the agency. He tried to enter Argentina with a false Paraguayan passport and documents. He is listed in an Interpol notice. El-Sayyed is wanted in the United States which has an arrest warrant to question him in links to terrorism. He is also wanted in Brazil for suspected drug smuggling and weapons sales.

Bou Saab during press conference: No school can operate without license or exceptional approval
Thu 08 Sep 2016/NNA - National Education and Higher Education Elias Bou Saab fervently stressed that no school in Lebanon can operate at the onset of the current school year without having a prior decree/license or an exceptional approval. Minister Bou Saab's fresh words on Thursday came during a press conference at his ministerial office, whereby he dwelt on an array of educational matters at the onset of the new school year, attended by scores of educational and senior academic figures. Bou Saab said that a list of the licensed schools across Lebanon shall be published at the onset of upcoming week, saying that he has addressed a memo to the Interior Minister to close down unlicensed schools. "Our position is utterly educational away from politics," Bou Saab stressed, underlining that he shall not accept chaos in this sector. Turning to the political issue and in reply to a question by media representatives, Bou Saab stressed the importance of true partnership in the country, saying they shall not accept the adoption of governmental decisions in their absence.

Geagea receives National Liberal Party Delegation
Thu 08 Sep 2016/NNA - Lebanese Forces leader, Samir Geagea, received on Thursday in Maarab a delegation from National Liberal Party chaired by the Head of the National Liberal Party MP Dory Chamoun. Talks focused on the general situation in Lebanon.

Harb: Government sustainability gives way to more obstruction
Thu 08 Sep 2016/NNA - Telecommunications Minister, Boutros Harb, said on Thursday that that the sustainability of the government paves the way for parties to exercise more obstruction in political life. Speaking at the ministerial meeting held on Thursday at the Grand Serail, Harb said that "cooperation between ministers allows us to overcome the current political crisis."Addressing Prime Minister Tammam Salam, Harb assured that this government made more achievements than the previous one, accusing the attendees of the meeting of causing the waste crisis and never helping in finding a solution to it. "We have to realize the national interest, I refuse letting the price of any compromise satisfy Free Patriotic Movement's ministers at the expense of the public interest and dignity of the Council," he said. "If we ever resign, it will be in favor of safeguarding the dignity of the country," the minister said.

UAE Ambassador invited to attend Adyan Association Conference
Thu 08 Sep 2016/NNA - The UAE ambassador to Lebanon, Said Hamad Chamesi, received on Thursday a delegation of the "Adyan" association, headed by Father Fadi Daou who handed him an invitation to attend a conference commemorating the 10th anniversary of the association, which will be held at the end of September. Discussions focused on the role played by "Adyan", as well as its activities to enhance mutual understanding and to preserve coexistence in the shadow of waves of violence and extremism in the region. The diplomat praised the role of the association as to fighting terrorism and supporting religious and political values that bring people together.

Rifi: Terrorism, corruption two sides of same coin
Thu 08 Sep 2016/NNA - The 5th Conference of the Arab Anti-Corruption and Integrity Network (ACINET) held in Tunisia concluded its work on Thursday. The final communiqué issued by the conference stressed the importance of fighting against corruption and strengthening the work of censorship committees. At the end of the Conference, outgoing Minister of Justice, Ashraf Rifi, ceded the post of network presidency to the Tunisian Minister of Public Service, Abid Briki. In a speech delivered at the conference, Rifi said "terrorism and corruption are two sides of the same coin."
He also praised the work of ACINET as well as the efforts exerted by all speakers in this direction.

FPM denies compromise over appointments
Thu 08 Sep 2016/NNA - Free Patriotic Movement's media committee on Thursday issued a statement denying the formation of any compromise over appointments, saying that it disagrees with extending the mandate of army chief in principle. It was said that Free Patriotic Movement sought a compromise through accepting extending the mandat of Lebanese Army chief in return for extending the mandate of Secretary General of Higher National Defense, Brigadier Mohammad Kheir.
 

The Middle East Council of Churches: Where to Now?
Dr. Harry Hagopian/Now Lebanon/September 08/16
As the Middle East Council of Churches meets in Amman, its former assistant secretary general urges it to move beyond "platitudes."
The Middle East Council of Churches is holding this week its XI General Assembly in Jordan in the presence of a majority of the Christian regional hierarchs. The leaders are being hosted at this ecumenical event by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem in order to discuss the realities of the Christian communities across this vast region as well as to gauge the current status of interreligious dialogue.
One look at the map of the region would show us that the Christian communities in Iraq and Syria have been decimated and their numbers have dwindled alarmingly. Those two fractured countries however are for all intents and purposes in a state of war, and so one might try to understand this migrant trend to foreign climes. Yet, the same phenomenon is also quite true of Palestine, and even of Lebanon and Egypt.
So let me shed some light on those indigenous (largely Arab) communities in relation to their neighbours in their own backyards as well as relations with the broader Christian fellowship worldwide.
We MENA Christians (and I consider myself originally part of this increasingly endangered species) are part and parcel of this geography. In other words, we were not grafted there by Western missionaries but have been living and witnessing higgledy-piggledy in this region for two millennia. Not only do we belong to these lands - Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and others - but we happen to hold the lease alongside others for 2000 years. Hence, nobody can accuse those - largely - Arab Christians of being impostors in a foreign land. They have been there for long, and were certainly there during the time of the Prophet Mohammad in the 7th century.
Unlike many in the West today, most Middle Eastern Christians remain organically bound to their faith - and often by osmosis to their churches - and so tend at times to perceive daily life through the prism of their faith-centered lives. This means that their mannerisms and languages are inter alia a reflection of their religious and cultural backgrounds. They are Arabs and they are Christians and they are citizens and so are aghast when they are treated at best as visitors in their own homes.
Whilst the majority of those Christians in the Levant are Arabs, they have also been living alongside Muslims as neighbors for almost 14 centuries. There have been ups and downs during this period where both sides have experienced violent jolts and much pain. One obstacle is that the whole ethos of Christianity endorses the concept of citizenship above all others whereas this concept struggles at times with the largely dominant Muslim ethos that religion is more preeminent than citizenship.
We need to remember that there are a large number of Christians living in the Gulf region - in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia - too. However, unlike the Arab Christians of the MENA region, those are mostly foreigners - from Europe and the USA as much as from the Philippines, India and Pakistan - and they do not view their faith from the same prism of Arab nationalism. They are no less Christian than their Arab counterparts though and the local churches should reach out to them and include them somehow in the ecumenical tent.
However, such a long history of Christian presence and witness means that they have a clear responsibility toward their communities that are suffering during those uncertain times. Such solidarity is part and parcel of their pastoral duty toward the men, women and children in their congregations. This is particularly true of Syria and Iraq. However, in their zeal to support their communities, those same leaders tend at times to ally themselves with the powers and principalities of the day rather than with the dispossessed, disenfranchised, subjugated or oppressed peoples. But this laudable zeal to protect their own communities should not turn into a source of defensive isolationism. Rather, it should stand in solidarity with all other communities that are equally suffering in this conflict-ridden and riven region.
Finally, it is also critical for the West - its churches and institutions - to calibrate its own relationship with the Christians of the East. In their quest to support their co-religionists, some Western Churches or organizations end up claiming they know better and sound a tad patronizing in their attitudes (because they have the money or perhaps exercise some political influence). Conversely, they can also become too compliant with the dictates of their MENA counterparts and select their favourite interlocutors (who are chosen because they confirm their own beliefs or share their interests). In both cases, this exclusive focus by the West on the plight of those Christian communities is detrimental. It ends up putting those Christians in the limelight and in so doing underlines their differences from other communities and polarises incipient tensions further. Ecumenical partnership denotes a relationship of equals where neither side controls, rejects or scorns the other.
The General Assembly is the foremost structure of the Middle East Council of Churches. Its quadrennial meetings are both organisational and thematic. So at this moment of multiple crises and fearful soul-searching across much of the region, I hope that the meetings in Jordan will go beyond the usual ecumenical platitudes that usually emerge in the concluding statements or on social media. Rather, it would strive to lift up this indigenous and rooted Christian presence in the region and consolidate it with an understanding that the Christian faith clothes the naked, feeds the hungry and supports the prisoner too. Perhaps their conclusions can best be informed by the story of the crucifixion that ultimately gave way to glorious hope.
**Dr. Harry Hagopian is an international lawyer, political analyst and ecumenical advisor based in London.

Latest LCCC Bulletin For Miscellaneous Reports And News published on on September 08-09/16

Israel Strikes Syria after Projectile Lands in Golan Heights
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/September 08/16/The Israeli air force hit Syrian army positions on Thursday after fire from its war-wracked neighbor struck the Israeli-held zone of the Golan Heights, the Israeli military said. It said the strike was in response to "a projectile" which landed on open ground on Wednesday, causing no injuries. "Following the projectile fired from Syria yesterday, the Israel Air Force targeted Syrian armed forces mortar launchers in the northern Syrian Golan Heights," Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner said. It was the second such incident in the past few days. On Sunday Israel responded to Syrian mortar fire in the Golan with an air strike on what it described as "cannons of the Syrian regime."On August 22, the air force hit what it said was a Syrian army rocket launcher in response to "stray fire from Syrian conflict."There were similar events in July and previously. This week's incidents were not characterized by Israel as stray fire. Israel has sought to avoid being drawn into Syria's complex war which is now in its sixth year, but it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over. Israel seized 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community.

Clinton Vows to Hunt IS Chief, Slams 'Dangerous' Trump
Agence France Presse/Naharnet/September 08/16/Hillary Clinton sought to polish her image Thursday as a strong leader with a command of major global challenges -- the IS jihadist group first among them -- while discrediting Republican rival Donald Trump as unfit for the White House. With just 61 days before America chooses a new commander in chief, the Democrat delivered a withering takedown of the brash billionaire at a rare impromptu press conference, assailing his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin as "scary" and insisting Trump has no real plan to defeat the Islamic State group.
Seeking to strike a commanding tone, Clinton called for the United States to track down and kill IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as it did Osama bin Laden. "We should make it a top priority to hunt down the leader of ISIS," Clinton told reporters on a tarmac in White Plains, New York. "Getting al-Baghdadi will require efforts at the top levels, but it will send a resounding message that nobody directs or inspires attacks against the United States and gets away with it." Clinton, 68, and Trump, 70, have clashed repeatedly over foreign policy, but their battle rose to a new level Wednesday night when the two were separately grilled over their national security credentials at a New York forum. "One thing you didn't hear from Donald Trump last night is any plan to take on ISIS, one of the biggest threats facing our country," Clinton said, using an acronym for the group. When asked at the forum about how he would stop the spread of global terrorism, "Trump's answer was simply, 'take the oil,'" Clinton added. "He says his plan is still a secret, but the truth is he simply doesn't have one. And that's not only dangerous, it should be disqualifying." Instead of laying out a Middle East strategy, Trump "bizarrely" praised Putin and suggested the strongman is a better leader than U.S. President Barack Obama, she said. "Even I was shocked by this," Clinton said later at a rally in Charlotte, in the battleground state of North Carolina. "That is not just unpatriotic, it's not just insulting to the office and to the man who holds the office. It is scary, it is dangerous."With the campaign now in the final two-month stretch, Clinton was wasting no opportunity to harangue her rival over his missteps, particularly over how he has "trash-talked" America's generals. "We've never seen anything like this," she said, highlighting Trump's call to bring back interrogation techniques deemed to be torture, and to kill relatives of terrorists. Clinton pointed to the U.S. military code of honor, saying "that, Donald Trump,... is what we're going to stand up and defend in the face of your outrageous, disgraceful attacks on the men and women of our armed forces."
'Undisciplined' The New York real estate mogul's campaign swiftly shot back, with Trump spokesman Jason Miller calling Clinton's remarks "the desperate attacks of a flailing campaign sinking in the polls."Trump has gained on Clinton over the past 10 days, but the former secretary of state still maintains an advantage of 2.8 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average. While she is also seen as holding leads in battleground states, a new poll by Suffolk University shows Trump leading Clinton in North Carolina by three points, 44 percent to 41 percent. Among the swing states where the election is likely to be decided is Ohio, where Trump arrived Thursday for an education roundtable at a charter school in Cleveland. He is also to attend a pair of fundraisers.Clinton's address to reporters marked the first podium press conference in nine months for Clinton, who broke a long media drought by speaking to journalists at length on her campaign plane this week. She rebuked an "undisciplined" Trump for discussing elements of a recent classified intelligence briefing during Wednesday's commander-in-chief forum, in which he said he learned that Obama and other U.S. leaders "did not follow" the advice of U.S. national security experts."I would never comment on any aspect of an intelligence briefing that I received," Clinton said.

Lavrov, Kerry discuss possible US-Russia cooperation in Syria
Reuters, Moscow Thursday, 8 September 2016/Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday discussed possible cooperation between the two nations to defeat terrorist groups active in Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. The phone conversation followed discussions on Syria between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama in China earlier this week, the ministry said. Lavrov and Kerry also discussed potential cooperation to facilitate deliveries of humanitarian aid and achieve a political resolution to the Syria crisis. It was still unclear if Lavrov and Kerry would meet in Geneva on Sept. 8-9, as originally planned. The Kremlin said earlier on Thursday Russia and the United States have not yet finalized work on a mutually acceptable agreement to resolve the crisis in Syria, and a compromise was needed on a small number of issues.

Syria regime retakes key Aleppo district from rebels
AFP, Beirut Thursday, 8 September 2016/Pro-regime forces overran a strategically important district on the southern outskirts of Syria’s Aleppo Thursday, a monitor said, rolling back nearly every gain from a major month-long rebel offensive there. The government advance in Ramussa further seals off Aleppo’s opposition-held eastern districts, under renewed siege since Sunday by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Government forces and allied fighters “retook full control of the Ramussa district after ferocious clashes with rebels, Islamist fighters, and jihadist groups,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the capture came after reinforcements of Iraqi and Iranian pro-government militiamen arrived south of the city earlier this week. “The regime could not afford to lose this battle, otherwise it would have lost everything,” he told AFP. Rebels and their extremist allies had launched a major assault in Aleppo’s southern outskirts on July 31 in a bid to break the government’s encirclement of the eastern neighborhoods. They successfully opened a route into those districts a week later via Ramussa, but regime forces have managed to recapture nearly all that territory. Abdel Rahman told AFP on Thursday that rebels still hold marginal positions in a residential complex and a school.

Chemical weapons watchdog chief says Aleppo gas attack disturbing
Reuters, Seoul Thursday, 8 September 2016/The world’s chemical weapons watchdog chief said on Thursday the group will investigate suspected use of chlorine gas in an opposition area of the Syrian city of Aleppo, calling reports of the gas attack disturbing. The UN Security Council is due to discuss a report by the United Nations and the watchdog group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), that blames Syrian government forces for previous toxic gas attacks. The Syrian Civil Defence, a rescue workers’ group which operates in rebel-held areas, said government helicopters dropped barrel bombs containing chlorine on Tuesday in Aleppo that caused suffocation in 80 people. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday that one person had died as a result of the attack. “More recent reports on the use of chlorine are disturbing,” OPCW chief Ahmet Üzümcü told reporters in Seoul where he was attending a security forum, referring to the attack in Aleppo. The group will use all available means to investigate the allegations of toxic gas use in the attack and submit the findings to member states of the Chemical Weapons Convention, Üzümcü said. A Syrian military source denied on Wednesday accusations that the army had launched a chlorine gas attack in Aleppo, saying the charges were an attempt by rebels to divert attention away from their defeats. A year-long UN and OPCW inquiry into Syria, unanimously authorized by the 15-member Security Council, focused on nine gas attacks in seven areas and determined that Syrian government troops were responsible for two of them, in 2014 and 2015. The Syrian government has denied previous accusations it used chemical weapons during the five-year-old civil war. The inquiry also found that ISIS militants have used Sulphur mustard gas. The report’s findings set the stage for a Security Council showdown between the five veto-wielding powers, likely pitting Russia and China against the United States, Britain and France over how to respond. Aleppo has been divided for years into government and rebel sectors, but President Bashar al-Assad’s army has put the opposition areas under siege and now hopes to capture the whole city in what would be a devastating blow to his enemies.Footage of the apparent chlorine gas attack on the Sukari district, near Aleppo’s main battlefield in the city’s southwest, showed crying children being doused with water and then lying on hospital beds and breathing through respirators.

US Republicans seek to tie Syria refugee issue to spending bill
Reuters Thursday, 8 September 2016/Some conservative US Republican lawmakers want to tie President Barack Obama’s Syrian refugee resettlement program to a spending bill that must pass in order to keep the federal government open after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. In a move that could complicate congressional leaders’ efforts to pass the bill on time, members of the House of Representatives’ conservative “Freedom Caucus” said they would support a temporary spending measure if it includes a moratorium on admitting the Syrians to the United States. Republican Representative John Fleming, a caucus member, said putting limits on Syrian refugees is a “high priority” for the group. “We should not be allowing refugees from terrorist regions of the world, without proper vetting,” he told reporters. Democrats would object to such a measure, increasing worries that the government might shut down on Oct. 1 if Congress cannot pass the temporary spending bill, known as a “continuing resolution.” The Freedom Caucus’ plan was first reported by Politico. The Obama administration said on Aug. 29 it would meet its goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees during the current fiscal year a month ahead of schedule and was working with Congress to increase the target by a few thousand during 2017. US admission of Syrian refugees has long been a politically sensitive issue, although the country has admitted far fewer than many of its close allies. Obama’s 2015 promise to admit the 10,000 sparked a firestorm of criticism, mostly from Republicans who said the plan could put Americans at risk from terrorists. Democrats who supported his plan argued that Syrians are already subjected to intense screening and said barring them is contrary to the values of the United States. The issue has featured in the 2016 race for the White House. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has warned that violent militants could enter the country posing as refugees. The civil war in Syria has led millions of people to flee the country. Millions of them have found shelter in neighboring countries including Jordan and Turkey. Germany has admitted hundreds of thousands and Canada nearly 30,000 between November 2015 and May 1.

Palestinian court postpones local elections set for October
AFP, Ramallah Thursday, 8 September 2016/A Palestinian court on Thursday postponed municipal elections set for October 8 following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists, jeopardizing the first vote since 2006 to involve both parties. The decision was made by the high court in Ramallah in the West Bank, where Fatah is in power. Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012, but was due to participate this year. It did not immediately respond to the decision. Fatah and Hamas have not contested an election since 2006 parliamentary polls, which Hamas won --sparking a conflict that led to near civil war in Gaza the following year. This year’s vote was planned with 81-year-old president Mahmoud Abbas under heavy political pressure as opinion polls suggested most Palestinians would like him to step down.There has been no Palestinian presidential election since 2005.

Palestinians dismiss report Abbas was KGB agent as ‘smear’
AFP, Ramallah Thursday, 8 September 2016/A spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday dismissed a claim by researchers that he worked as a Soviet agent in Damascus in the 1980s, calling it a smear intended to derail a Russian peace initiative. The claim emerged in a report by Israeli public television on Wednesday night citing two researchers who were studying the so-called Mitrokhin papers stored in Britain at Cambridge University’s Churchill Archives Centre. “In 1983, he (Abbas) is listed as being groomed by the KGB under the codename Krotov, the mole,” one of the Israeli researchers, Isabella Ginor, told the program. Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh told AFP it “falls under the framework of Israeli absurdities which we have got used to,” calling it a “smear campaign.” Abbas was born in what was then British mandate Palestine, but his family fled to Syria during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel. The report did not make clear what Abbas is alleged to have done for the Soviets. “It is clear Israel is troubled by the (Palestinians’) strategic relationship with Russia and by the clear and announced Russian position, which is to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis on an independent Palestinian state and the right of self-determination for our people,” Abu Rudeineh said. The Mitrokhin Archive, where the document was said to have been found, is based on files of the Soviet spy agency KGB that were smuggled to Britain. Major Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive from 1972 until his retirement in 1984, and, disillusioned with domestic Soviet oppression, secretly copied information by hand, before defecting to Britain with it in 1992. The report comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to organize a face-to-face meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Putin’s Middle East envoy Mikhail Bogdanov met with both Netanyahu and Palestinian officials this week. The television report recalled that the Russian envoy, Bogdanov, was stationed in Damascus in 1983. His official CV online shows that he was in Syria between 1983 and 1989. Abbas claimed earlier this week that a meeting with Netanyahu had been set for Friday, but he said that an aide to the Israeli premier proposed delaying it and it was called off. Netanyahu has repeated his position -- he is ready to meet Abbas anytime, anywhere, as long as it is without preconditions. Palestinian leaders have previously called for the release of prisoners, a deadline for the end of the occupation of the West Bank and a halt to Israeli settlement building as conditions for talks.It is unclear whether Abbas has stuck to those demands.

Heavy machinery is seen on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza Thursday, Sept. 8,
The Associated Press, Jerusalem Thursday, 8 September 2016/Defense officials say Israel has begun work on an underground barrier along the border with Gaza meant to block Hamas militants from tunneling into Israel. The officials say the concrete barrier is set to run dozens of meters (hundreds of feet) deep and will ultimately stretch along the entire border with Gaza. Israel is currently building an initial phase of the barrier over a small stretch of land measuring dozens of meters. Work crews were busy along the Israel-Gaza border Thursday using cranes and heavy machinery. Caravans are scattered around the site, while large metal pipes run along the ground. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified matter, say the barrier's construction could take years. Hamas militants have used underground tunnels to attack Israelis.

Hollande: French ‘secularism does not oppose Islam’
AFP, Paris Thursday, 8 September 2016/President Francois Hollande insisted Thursday that France's strict laws separating church and state did not mean the country's large Muslim minority could not practice their religion. In a speech on terrorism and democracy coming hot on the heels of a debate on the banning of the Islamic burkini swimsuit, Hollande said: "Nothing in the idea of secularism opposes the practice of Islam in France, provided it respects the law." A French court overturned a ban last week on burkinis issued in Cannes - the first in a series of local bans on the Muslim full-body swimwear this summer that set off a heated controversy at home and a wave of outrage abroad.
The court in Nice concluded that the Cannes decree violates basic freedoms and is illegal because there were no proven risks of disruption to public order, or reasons of hygiene or decency for the ban in the famous Riviera city resort.

Uzbek PM named interim president in interests of 'stability'
Reuters, Almaty Thursday, 8 September 2016/Uzbekistan’s parliament named Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev as interim president on Thursday in succession to the late President Islam Karimov, saying stability and law and order had to be maintained in the populous Central Asian state. Mirziyoyev, 59, secured the top job when the man who should have become transitional leader under the constitution bowed out in his favor, saying he had long experience in office and enjoyed the respect of people.
The authoritarian Karimov died of a stroke last week aged 78 after ruling the resource-rich country for 27 years. Under the Uzbek constitution, a presidential election must now be held within three months, and Mirziyoyev, who was the official mourner-in-chief at Karimov’s funeral and met Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, is widely expected to be elected. Russia, the United States and China vie for influence in Uzbekistan, a country of 32 million bordering Afghanistan.
No drastic policy changes
Central Asia pundits say they do not expect any drastic policy changes under Mirziyoyev, a former regional governor valued by Karimov as a competent manager. With his appointment as acting head of state, Mirziyoyev leapfrogged the little-known Senate chairman Nigmatilla Yuldashev, who under the constitution should have led the country during the transition period. Yuldashev turned down the role and instead asked to for Mirziyoyev to be instated as acting president, taking into account “his long experience of work in executive positions and respect among the people”, the parliament said in a statement. Parliament supported Yuldashev’s motion, stressing the “need to preserve stability, public security, law and order and effectively resolve political and economic issues”. Karimov cast his country as a bulwark against militant Islam but drew Western criticism for suppressing political dissent. Human rights groups say there are hundreds of political and religious prisoners in local jails and say torture is practiced. In contrast to the West, Putin said during his visit to Tashkent this week he hoped the new Uzbek leader would continue Karimov’s work, putting a stamp on Moscow’s claim to be the former Soviet republic’s closest ally.

US: Libya close to eliminating ISIS from Sirte
Reuters Thursday, 8 September 2016/US-backed Libyan forces are close to vanquishing ISIS from its last holdouts in the city of Sirte, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday. Carter said forces aligned with Libya’s UN-backed government, who have been aided by US air strikes since the beginning of August, had cornered ISIS in one small section of the city. “I expect that they’ll eliminate ... remaining opposition shortly,” Carter told a news conference in London. Libyan forces said on Saturday they had advanced against some of ISIS’s last holdouts in the city. The extremist group had exploited Libya’s deep political divisions to seize Sirte more than a year ago, using it as a base for Libyan and foreign fighters. Losing the city would compound the setbacks it has suffered in Syria and Iraq.

HRW warns Houthi landmines are killing civilians
Staff writer, Al Arabiya English Thursday, 8 September 2016/Landmines used by forces loyal to the Houthi movement in Yemen's southwestern city of Taiz have caused civilian deaths and fatal injuries, a Human Rights Watch report said on Thursday, releasing new evidence of the militias’ use of the banned antipersonnel mines. At least 11 civilians, including seven children, were killed by an antivehicle mine in al-Waziyah neighborhood - a western part of Taiz last month - a local activist told Human Rights Watch. “Houthi and allied forces are showing cold-hearted cruelty toward civilians by using landmines,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. “Yemen’s warring parties should immediately stop laying mines, destroy mines in their possession and ensure that demining teams can work unimpeded so that families can safely return home.” Yemeni mine clearance officials and medical professionals, revealed that antipersonnel and anti-vehicle mines have resulted in the deaths of at least 18 people and wounded more than 39 in Taiz – Yemen’s third largest city - between May 2015 and April 2016, according to Taiz-based group Against Mines National Organization. Media reports also provide collaborative evidence regarding these deadly incidents.
Deaths, disabilities
The human rights group documented that landmines in Taiz have killed five children and have caused permanent disabilities to four, and wounded 13 others. All but one of the 18 deaths that were documented were caused by antivehicle mines, while nine of 11 permanent injuries were a result of antipersonnel mines. However, the report stated that the total figure of landmine victims in Taiz were not known and that the actual number of mine victims in Yemen may be much higher. Yemenis clearing mines in Taiz and medical professionals said that landmines have caused dozens of civilian casualties since March.
Dr. Suhail al-Dabhani, General director at Taiz’s al-Rawda Hospital, told Human Rights Watch in June, that since late April, the hospital had treated 50 people – 30 men, eight women, and 12 children – who had one or more limbs amputated and who he believed had been wounded by landmines. Essam al-Bathra, who leads a volunteer group at a Taiz rehabilitation center that assists people with prosthetic limbs, said the center has recieved at least 29 cases of landmine-related injuries since it reopened in May. The center was closed for nearly a year due to months of fighting between Houthi militias and Popular Resistance officers in the city.
Clearing operations
Parts of Taiz have been besieged by Iran-backed Houthis and allied forces loyal to former president Saleh since that start of the war in 2015. Demining teams who entered these areas soon after Houthi and allied forces withdrew have since cleared and destroyed mines from areas that were not known to have been mined before the conflict. Officials at the Ministry of Human Rights in Sanaa, controlled by the Houthis and Saleh’s General People’s Congress party, denied alligations of Houthis and allied forces use of antipersonnel mines to Human Rights Watch in late July. According to Human Rights Watch an official with the office of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee said in early August that Houthi forces did not plant antipersonnel mines in the city of Taiz, but acknowledged Houthi use of antivehicle mines - yet stated that the use was “in military areas” only. Yemen endorsed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty on September 1998 – committing to ban the use of antipersonnel mines, and had reported to the UN in April 2002 that all stockpiles of antipersonnel mines were destroyed. Last year, during an investigation by Human Rights Watch, mine clearance personnel found at least two types of antipersonnel mines that were produced in the 1980s - PPM-2 mines manufactured in the former East Germany and GYATA-64 mines made in Hungary – that were not listed among the four types of antipersonnel mines that Yemen had reported in its stockpile in the past, including for training mine clearance personnel. Both the mine types that were found have been used elsewhere in Yemen in recent years, the report said, stating that evidence of the use of the antipersonnel mines in 2015 suggested that either Yemen’s report to the UN to declare the completion of destroying its stockpile in 2002 was incorrect or the mines were acquired from another source after 2002. However, both Germany and Hungary signed the Mine Ban Treaty in December 1997, committing to end production and transfers of antipersonnel mines.

Saudi has ‘similar stance’ with Turkey on region
By Staff writer, Al Arabiya Engish Thursday, 8 September 2016/Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said on Thursday that Riyadh has “similar stance” with Turkey regarding Syria, Iraq and Yemen. In a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart, during his visit to Ankara, Jubeir said stances of Turkey and Saudi “fully coincide with each other regarding Syria, Iraq or Yemen, including terrorism.”Jubeir described that the plan put forth by the Syrian opposition is “detailed” and “complete,” and said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was still rejecting a political solution. On Wednesday, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), Syria’s main opposition negotiating group, said it would reject any deal struck by Russia and the United States on Syria’s fate that was very different from its own proposed transition plan. The HNC said its proposed process would start with six months of negotiations to set up a transitional administration made up of figures from the opposition, the government and civil society. It would require President Bashar al-Assad to leave office at the end of those six months.
The two foreign ministers.
Meanwhile, Jubeir said Saudi and Turkey were “the first two states who cooperated to back the Syrian opposition since day one.”He also said Saudi “looks forward” to work with Turkey on these “common issues,” vowing that Riyadh will gives Ankara full support on fighting terrorism. Jubeir also extended his “thanks” to Ankara’s “supportive stance in terms of pilgrimage.” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed his appreciation for Saudi’s support to Ankara following the failed coup in Turkey when a rogue military faction tried to oust the Turkish president from power on July 15. Turkey launched an incursion on Aug. 24 into Syria - the so-called Euphrates Shield operation - to back Syrian rebels in their fight to push ISIS out of the town of Jarablus and to limit the Syrian Kurdish militia forces’ advance west of the Euphrates River.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli said on Wednesday that the Turkey-backed rebel forces may go deeper into Syria after securing a 90 km (56 mile) stretch of land along the Turkish border.

Britain, EU should work together for smooth divorce: UK PM May
Reuters, London Thursday, 8 September 2016/Britain and the European Union should work together to smooth their divorce and forge a new strong relationship, Prime Minister Theresa May told European Council President Donald Tusk on Thursday. May’s spokeswoman said that the two leaders’ first meeting since she became prime minister following the June 23 Brexit vote was friendly and that the British leader felt the EU understood her need to take time to form a negotiating stance before triggering the formal divorce procedure. “The main points that the prime minister made were about working together so that there was a smooth process for the UK leaving the European Union, that is why we are taking time to prepare for the negotiations,” the spokeswoman told reporters. May also told Tusk that Britain would be a “strong player” while it remained in the European Union, and would continue to stand firm on sanctions against Russia over its action in neighbouring Ukraine. Tusk said Britain should start talks, adding weight to calls for Prime Minister May to get on with the formal divorce procedure. Tusk and May are keen to discuss what steps might be taken over the next few months. May has said Britain will not trigger Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to start the exit procedure this year to give her government time to come up with a negotiating stance for the complicated talks that will shape the country's future standing. "Our goal (is) to establish closest possible EU-UK relations. Ball in UK court to start negotiations. In everybody's best interest to start ASAP (as soon as possible)," Tusk said on Twitter.
October meeting agenda
On Wednesday, May's spokeswoman said the two leaders would not only talk about Britain's exit, or "Brexit", but would also discuss issues on the agenda for the October meeting of EU leaders, suggesting that Britain still plans to play a role. May has said she will not show her hand before starting the Brexit talks, giving few details of what her government wants when it leaves the EU. She says reducing immigration into Britain is crucial after millions of Britons expressed their frustration in the vote over what they say is the stress on schools, hospitals and housing from high numbers of people settling in the country. But May, a former interior minister who was in charge of the ruling Conservative Party's immigration policy, also says she wants the best trade deal for Britain, refusing to say whether the country will remain in the EU's lucrative single market. Trade Minister Liam Fox suggested that Britain was moving forward with plans to develop ties with countries outside the EU, telling parliament that the government had set up a working group with India.

Palestinians dismiss report Abbas was KGB agent as ‘smear’
AFP, Ramallah Thursday, 8 September 2016/A spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursday dismissed a claim by researchers that he worked as a Soviet agent in Damascus in the 1980s, calling it a smear intended to derail a Russian peace initiative. The claim emerged in a report by Israeli public television on Wednesday night citing two researchers who were studying the so-called Mitrokhin papers stored in Britain at Cambridge University’s Churchill Archives Centre. “In 1983, he (Abbas) is listed as being groomed by the KGB under the codename Krotov, the mole,” one of the Israeli researchers, Isabella Ginor, told the program. Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh told AFP it “falls under the framework of Israeli absurdities which we have got used to,” calling it a “smear campaign.” Abbas was born in what was then British mandate Palestine, but his family fled to Syria during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel. The report did not make clear what Abbas is alleged to have done for the Soviets. “It is clear Israel is troubled by the (Palestinians’) strategic relationship with Russia and by the clear and announced Russian position, which is to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis on an independent Palestinian state and the right of self-determination for our people,” Abu Rudeineh said. The Mitrokhin Archive, where the document was said to have been found, is based on files of the Soviet spy agency KGB that were smuggled to Britain. Major Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive from 1972 until his retirement in 1984, and, disillusioned with domestic Soviet oppression, secretly copied information by hand, before defecting to Britain with it in 1992. The report comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to organize a face-to-face meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Putin’s Middle East envoy Mikhail Bogdanov met with both Netanyahu and Palestinian officials this week. The television report recalled that the Russian envoy, Bogdanov, was stationed in Damascus in 1983. His official CV online shows that he was in Syria between 1983 and 1989. Abbas claimed earlier this week that a meeting with Netanyahu had been set for Friday, but he said that an aide to the Israeli premier proposed delaying it and it was called off. Netanyahu has repeated his position -- he is ready to meet Abbas anytime, anywhere, as long as it is without preconditions. Palestinian leaders have previously called for the release of prisoners, a deadline for the end of the occupation of the West Bank and a halt to Israeli settlement building as conditions for talks.It is unclear whether Abbas has stuck to those demands.

Argentina detains Lebanese ‘terrorism suspect’ wanted in US
Reuters Thursday, 8 September 2016/A Lebanese citizen wanted in the United States for suspected ties to terrorism was detained at Argentina’s international airport on Wednesday, state news agency Telam said. Khalil Mohamed El Sayed tried to enter Argentina with false Paraguayan documents and was flagged on an Interpol list, Telam said. It was not clear why El Sayed is a suspect. The US has an arrest order and wants to question him, according to Telam. The agency said El Sayed is also wanted in Brazil for suspected drug trafficking and arms sales. The tri-border region between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina has long been a hub for drug and arms trafficking.

Days after slur, Obama and Duterte meet
The Associated Press Thursday, 8 September 2016/President Barack Obama and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte met informally on Wednesday in a holding room before attending a gala dinner at a regional summit, Philippine officials said.
The brief meeting took a little sting out of the soured relations caused by Duterte’s intemperate language in referring to Obama earlier this week. That had caused Obama to cancel a formal meeting scheduled for Tuesday. Philippine Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay told The Associated Press that the leaders had met. “They met at the holding room and they were the last persons to leave the holding room. I can’t say how long they met. It all springs from the fact the relationship between the Philippines and the United States is firm, very strong. The basis for this relationship is historical and both leaders realize this. And I’m very happy that it happened.”Obama and Duterte are in the Laotian capital along with other regional leaders for the summit. All of them made their way through the holding room before heading to the banquet hall. According to a White House official who would not be named discussing the private meeting: Obama had a brief discussion with Duterte before the ASEAN Gala Dinner in the leaders’ holding space. The exchange consisted of pleasantries between the two. On Monday, hours before arriving in Laos, Duterte told Philippine reporters he wouldn’t accept questions from Obama about extrajudicial killings that have occurred during his crackdown on suspected drug dealers and users. More than 2,000 people have been killed in the crackdown since he took office on June 30.
“I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. Putang ina, I will swear at you in that forum,” Duterte said, using the Tagalog phrase for “son of a b****.”
On Tuesday, Duterte expressed regret over the remarks, but the damage was done.

Heavy fighting as Taliban breach southern Afghan city
AFP, Kabul Thursday, 8 September 2016/The Taliban stormed into Tarin Kot Thursday, triggering heavy fighting around government buildings as panicked residents scrambled to flee the capital of southern Uruzgan province, the latest city to be targeted by insurgents. Pitched battles prompted urgent calls from officials for reinforcements and air support, after the militants toppled security posts on the outskirts to breach the city gates. Residents said senior officials were abandoning government buildings and fleeing to the airport on the outer edges of the city, which has practically been besieged by the Taliban for months. "If reinforcements do not arrive the city will collapse into the hands of the Taliban," Karim Khademzai, head of the provincial capital, told AFP. The Taliban are fighting to take over police and intelligence agency headquarters, residents said, voicing fears they will storm the local prison to free captured insurgents.
Tarin Kot's normally bustling streets were deserted and shops closed as civilians sought to escape from the city. Sabir Menawal, a Tarin Kot resident, said Taliban fighters entered his house near the police headquarters and took up positions inside to fire at government buildings. "The Taliban instructed us to leave the area immediately," Menawal told AFP. "I fled with my family to a safer area of Tarin Kot, but we fear fighting could spread to this area too."In a sobering admission, Uruzgan's police chief Wais Samim said many of the city's outer defences had fallen to the Taliban without a fight. "Some policemen retreated from their outposts. Some people here deliberately want the enemy to succeed," he told AFP. "We will address this issue once we repel the enemy." The fighting in Uruzgan comes as the Taliban are threatening to capture Lashkar Gah in neighbouring Helmand province, and northern Kunduz, which the insurgents briefly seized last year in a stinging blow to Afghan forces.
Deteriorating security
President Ashraf Ghani's office said the government will not allow "Uruzgan to become a sanctuary for terrorists". "Reinforcements have reached the province, and the local police chief and provincial officials are on the frontline fighting the enemy," presidential spokesman Shahhussain Murtazawi said on Facebook. That claim was refuted by multiple Tarin Kot residents, who said senior officials had been seen fleeing to the airport. "Many provincial officials including the governor and other heads of government departments are at the airport," Khademzai told AFP. General Abdul Raziq, the powerful police chief of Kandahar, said he was personally leading a contingent of military reinforcements to Uruzgan. "We are going to Tarin Kot with hundreds of forces to repel the enemy attack," Raziq told AFP. NATO has not yet responded to AFP's request for comment on whether foreign forces will intervene in Uruzgan. Since being toppled by a US invasion in 2001, the Taliban have been seen as a rural militant movement capable only of hit-and-run attacks on cities. But they have demonstrated an alarming new push into urban centres over the last year. The deteriorating security highlights the struggle of Afghan forces, stretched on multiple fronts, to secure remote provinces such as Uruzgan, where Australian, Dutch and American troops fought for years. As the Taliban edged closer to Tarin Kot on Wednesday, they promised a general amnesty to government forces who surrender unconditionally. Defence ministry spokesman Mohammad Radmanish however rejected what the Taliban's "propaganda campaign", saying the Taliban would be beaten back.

Latest LCCC Bulletin analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on onSeptember 08-09/16

Palestinians: "Women are Witches"
Khaled Abu Toameh/Gatestone Institute/September 08/16
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8889/palestinians-women-witches
The offensive references to women, who are depicted as witches and demons in Palestinian school textbooks, should not come as a surprise. Recently, it was revealed here that several Palestinian lists contesting the October 8 local elections have replaced the names and photos of their female candidates with images of roses and pigeons.
"This is completely unacceptable because it presents women as the cause for all disputes and evil in Palestinian society." — Lubna Al-Ashkar of the Women's Technical Affairs Committee.
"This will create a negative image of women in the midst of our children -- one that will be difficult to change in the future." — Amal Khraisheh, chairwoman of the Palestinian Working Woman Society.
It is true that women as witches is a novel defamation for President Mahmoud Abbas and his crew. Yet Palestinian Authority defamation of others, including Israel, is far from new. This is stuff fed to Palestinian schoolchildren: lies about history, lies about geography, and now lies about Palestinian women.
Palestinian schoolchildren who returned to their schools last week are being taught that women are witches and Tel Aviv is an Arab city. They are also being exposed to maps that ignore Israel's existence.
Despite all Palestinian Authority (PA) claims to the contrary, then, the new textbooks hardly promote peace and coexistence between Palestinians and Israel.
A new school curriculum published by the PA last week has drawn sharp criticism from many Palestinians, who say the textbooks demonize women and contain "factual and historical" errors.
The controversial version of the curriculum for grades 1-4 was launched by PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah during a ceremony in Ramallah, on the eve of beginning of the new school year.
Within hours, Palestinians, particularly female activists, voiced resentment over the new curriculum and called on the PA leadership to remove it immediately. Some Palestinians denounced the curriculum, which was drafted by a team of Palestinian educational experts, as a "scandal" and a "distortion of facts." They said that a curriculum full of errors and "distortions of facts" was a guaranteed recipe for raising a new generation of illiterate and misinformed Palestinians.
PA officials, arguing that the new curriculum was an experimental one and is open for amendments and development, have promised to make corrections in the textbooks.
So what exactly is it that enraged the critics about the new textbooks, prompting such sarcasm concerning the education process in Palestinian schools?
A map in one of the textbooks refers to the West Bank city of Ramallah as the "center of Palestine," while Jerusalem is referred to as a city that is located south of Ramallah.
Critics argue that this terminology turns Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority leadership and government, into the de facto capital of the Palestinians. This, they add, undermines the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. "Why has Jerusalem been marginalized in the new textbooks?" critics asked. "This is indeed disgraceful!"
Another error in the textbooks relocates the interior West Bank city of Bethlehem to the coast of the Gaza Strip. "Bethlehem now has its own beach," was one of many sarcastic remarks made by furious Palestinians who took to social media to condemn the new curriculum. A Palestinian from Hebron commented: "The residents of Hebron are also demanding that our Ministry of Education give us a beach like the one they gave Bethlehem."
The new textbooks are also being criticized for referring to Tel Aviv in a map of "Palestine" that does not mention Israel. The map refers to Tel Aviv by its Arabic name, Tal Al-Rabi'a. Critics argue that it is a mistake to refer to Tel Aviv by its Arabic name because this is an Israeli city that was established "on the ruins of Arab villages." They claim that Tel Aviv is a modern name that "is not linked to the history of Palestine." The map of "Palestine" in the textbooks extends from the city of Safed in the north to Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
But all this is nothing compared to the demonization of women, who are depicted in first- and second-grade Islamic Education textbooks as witches and sorceresses -- and this is really catching flak.
One image features a witch under the Quran verse that reads: "I seek refuge with Allah from Satan, the accursed." Another image of a witch is accompanied by a verse from the Quran that refers to the "evil of malignant witchcraft."
Critics say that associating women with witchcraft is extremely disrespectful and offensive towards Palestinian women.
"Children in grades 1 and 2 are being taught that women are witches or hags," they protested. "The lesson they are being taught is that the first half of society is Muslim, while the second half is infidel."
Palestinian female activists expressed outrage over the depiction of women as witches and sorceresses, saying this would consolidate the negative stereotyping of women the eyes of children.
"Using women in this manner harms their image... and is an insult to their sacrifices," remarked Lubna Al-Ashkar of the Women's Technical Affairs Committee (WATC), a group that was established in 1992 to ensure women's participation and inclusion of their issues in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. "This is completely unacceptable because it presents women as the cause for all disputes and evil in Palestinian society. Witchcraft and sorcery are not restricted to women alone, and we call on the Ministry of Education to quickly amend the images."
Amal Khraisheh, chairwoman of the Palestinian Working Woman Society, a nongovernmental organization aiming for gender equality and the eradication of all forms of discrimination against Palestinian women, also lashed out at the offensive depiction of women in the textbooks. She said that the "atypical" images featuring women as witches and sorceresses "enhance the masculine culture about the status of women in society and obliterate the sturdy and developmental womanly presence by limiting it to sorcery and witchcraft."
Khraisheh pointed a finger at the "Palestinian political system" and the Palestinian Legislative Council (the elected parliament, which has been paralyzed since 2007 because of the power struggle between Fatah and Hamas) for the "illogical mistakes" in the new school curriculum. She said that the absence of supervision over the performance of the Palestinian Authority government and its various bodies, especially the Ministry of Education, has done injustice to Palestinian women and distorted their image in the eyes of children. "This will create a negative image of women in the midst of our children -- one that will be difficult to change in the future," she cautioned. "We will do our utmost to change this negative impression of women."
Ironically, the enraged women and other critics have received support from an unexpected party: a senior official with the PA's Ministry of Wakf and Religious Affairs, Majed Sakr. He explained that the offensive images of women and associating them with sin, witchcraft and sorcery is "unacceptable" in Islam. He called for conducting a renewed study of the textbooks to correct mistakes and false perceptions, as well as any typos.
The offensive references to women, who are depicted as witches and demons, should not come as a surprise to women's groups and human rights organizations. Recently, it was revealed here that several Palestinian lists contesting the October 8 local elections have replaced the names and photos of their female candidates with images of roses and pigeons. The female candidates are referred to as the "wife of" and "sister."
And so, the PA leadership in Ramallah is again caught with its pants down. It is true that women as witches is a novel defamation for Abbas and his crew. Yet PA defamation of others, including Israel, is far from new. This is stuff fed to Palestinian schoolchildren: lies about history, lies about geography, and now lies about Palestinian women.
Women as witches is a novel defamation for President Mahmoud Abbas and his crew. Yet Palestinian Authority defamation of others, including Israel, is far from new. Left: A depiction of a witch, from a new Palestinian Authority school textbook. Right: A depiction of a Jew as a demon, from a 2013 posting on the Fatah Facebook page.
Women as witches is disturbing indeed. Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, is the continued Palestinian blindness to the fact that demonizing others is a deadly boomerang that will turn -- and already is turning -- back to cut off its very own head.
**Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist, is based in Jerusalem.
© 2016 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

France: On Its Way to Being a Jew-Free Nation?
Robbie Travers/Gatestone Institute/September 08/16
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8856/france-jews

Incitement to murder Jews was described by the French press as "mild mannered".
In 2014, supposed anti-Israel protesters attacked a Paris synagogue and trapped the congregants inside. The attackers' chants apparently included "Death to the Jews," "Murderous Israel," and "One Jew, Some Jews, All Jews are Terrorists."
The terrorist attacks on Jews in France are the culmination of years of Jew-hatred tolerated with little official criticism.
With ISIS and Hamas banners and flags flying, groups in Paris pledged the genocide of the Jews with impunity. When chants of "Death to the Jews," ring out publicly, is it surprising that people might actually begin to think that killing Jews is just fine?
During the past 15 years, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Jews have fled France.
Of these, approximately 40,000 have fled to Israel, according to Israeli figures. Many thousands of others have fled to Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. France is increasingly becoming a nation in which it is no longer safe to be openly Jewish.
To explain why so many Jews are leaving Europe, it helps to understand the increasingly toxic context developing in France for Jews.
Synagogues and Jewish schools across France are regularly guarded by police officers and soldiers. Jews in Europe see their holy sites and places of worship under threat.
In December 2015, 14 Jews were poisoned by a toxic substance which had been smeared on to the keypad to access a Paris synagogue. No one was killed by the poison, but "25 firemen rushed to the synagogue, where they treated congregants and traced their condition to the daubed lock."
Another Paris synagogue was vandalized and a window smashed. Synagogues seem to be one of the targets in a new wave of anti-Semitism rising across France and Europe.
On the way to a synagogue, a 13-year-old boy was called a "dirty Jew" and then seriously assaulted. The attackers are said to have attacked the boy because of he wore a skullcap. Only 71 years after the end of one of the darkest periods of European history, after which we pledged "never again," it seems to have become open season to hate and persecute Jews.
The terrorist attacks on Jews in France are the culmination of years of Jew-hatred tolerated with little official criticism. In 2014, supposed anti-Israel protesters attacked a Paris synagogue and trapped the congregants inside. The attackers' chants apparently included "Death to the Jews," "Murderous Israel," and "One Jew, Some Jews, All Jews are Terrorists."
It seems people who openly call for hatred against Jews, to the point of murder, can now claim to be just "anti-Israel," rather than anti-Semitic. Incitement to murder Jews was described by the French press as "mild mannered". When talk of racial murder is dismissed in such a way, is it any wonder that radical clerics continue to preach vicious dehumanising hatred that culminates in violence?
If the media were more accurate, it would describe these "anti-Israeli" protesters as "anti-Semitic" and "inciters of violence and genocide."
When swastikas are painted in one Paris' largest squares by those claiming to oppose Israel, and ISIS and Hamas banners and flags are flying, and groups pledge the genocide of the Jews with impunity, is it any wonder that individuals might support these groups? When chants of "Death to the Jews," ring out publicly, is it surprising that people might actually begin to think that killing Jews is just fine?
Both far-right Islamists and neo-Nazis joined forces in Paris during a "Day of Rage." More than 17,000 of them marched, chanting "Jew, France is not for you." Is it surprising that Jews are flee the country in increasing numbers?
When Islamists chant outside a central Paris synagogue, "Hitler was right," whilst some of his victims still walk this earth, is it surprising people in French society may start to emulate him, or at least aspire to?
Synagogues are not the only institutions facing serious threats. Jewish schools across France are under heavy guard by police and soldiers.
French soldiers guard a Jewish school in Strasbourg, February 2015. (Image source: Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons)
The tragedy is that we have allowed French and European societies to need these guards by tolerating those promoting injustice, prejudice and hatred.
Paul Fitoussi, principal of the Lucien de Hirsch Jewish school in Paris, summarises why France has become so toxic for Jews:
"People nowadays think it is dangerous to be Jewish in France because there was a series of events: The kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi ten years ago, the terror attack at the Jewish school in Toulouse four years ago, the stabbings in Marseille, last year's attack at Hyper Cacher market - there is a problem. For the French, worrying about security issues is new to them. I talk to the police but they do not know what to do. They brought armed soldiers to the schools, but I know that in the long term this is not a solution."
There seems to be a common thread running throughout the incidences above and attacks on Jews today. In the Ilan Halimi case, the victim was targeted on the basis of his race, and the perception that being a Jew made him wealthy. A similar attack was noted by a fifth-grader at the Lucien de Hirsh school. He said his attackers, foreign in origin, "asked if I was Jewish, I said yes, they said that the Jews are full of money, and if I did not give them my coat, they will kill me." It seems that stereotypes of Jewish wealth perpetuated often by Islamists and others now seem commonplace in French society, and individuals are increasingly threatened with murder, robbery and extortion.
Not even public transportation is safe for Jews; in December, 2015, a man on a train in Paris verbally abused a group of Jews, stating that he wished to kill them. "If only I had a grenade here," he said, "how do you call it, a fragmentation grenade, I would blow up this wagon with the fucking Jewish bastards."
There has also been, since 2000, a troublingly large increase in the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims in France. Multiple official figures have illustrated that in the last 20 years, the number of violent anti-Semitic acts has tripled. In France in 2014, there were 851 recorded anti-Semitic incidents, more than doubling the total from 2013.
Jews may represent less than 1% of France's expanding and diverse population, but they are the victim of 40%-50% of France's recorded racist attacks.
Jews are only the start of where Islamists begin to target people to whose existence they seem to object. Next, Islamists come for the LGBT, as seen in the Orlando shooting and with ISIS throwing gay people off buildings, and of course Christians, as we have seen in slaughtered in just one small example on a Libyan beach; and most frequently other Muslims, the majority victim of Islamists. Evidently no one is safe, and that includes all of us.
Perhaps it is best to finish on a note inspired from the work of Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), a prominent Lutheran pastor and scathing critic of Adolf Hitler. Consequently, Niemöller spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps, but had the fortune to survive.
His timeless poem does not need much transposing:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.
**Robbie Travers, a political commentator and consultant, is Executive Director of Agora, former media manager at the Human Security Centre, and a law student at the University of Edinburgh.
© 2016 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Obama’s Syria Policy Isn’t a ‘Mistake.’ It’s Deliberate.
By Lee Smith/Tablet/September 008/16
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/212698/obamas-syria-policy

How the Iran deal explains the administration’s inaction in Syria
Perhaps it’s because Obama’s term is winding down, but in the wake of the recent siege of Aleppo, which brought injury, exile, and death to thousands of Syrian civilians, a late-breaking consensus seems to have emerged that the White House’s Syria policy is a tragic failure. Even opinion makers who generally admire Obama vie to outdo each other in soulfully condemning his Syria policy, while administration officials past and present echo the president’s line that there is little the United States could have done to stop the bloodshed. You could call it virtue-signaling or Kabuki theater—except the president’s critics really do seem authentically baffled by how a man they authentically admire could be guilty of such a terrible blunder.
“I admire Obama for expanding health care and averting a nuclear crisis with Iran, but allowing Syria’s civil war and suffering to drag on unchallenged has been his worst mistake, casting a shadow over his legacy,” writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
His Times colleague Roger Cohen agrees. “Syria has been Obama’s worst mistake,” he writes. “It’s a disaster that cannot provoke any trace of pride; and within that overall blunder the worst error was the last-minute ‘red line’ wobble that undermined America’s word, emboldened [Vladimir] Putin and empowered [Bashar al-]Assad.”
Putin and Assad’s aerial bombing of Aleppo illustrated for many just how bad Syria had become, as Beltway tweeters vied to express their horror at the image of a 5-year-old boy, Omran Daqneesh, pulled from the rubble with his face bloodied and covered in dust and his eyes insensible. “Broke my heart to write this,” Robin Wright tweeted to promote her New Yorker story on Putin and Assad’s aerial campaign, “The Babies Are Dying in Aleppo.” If Wright doesn’t exactly lay the blame with the White House, she marshals enough evidence from doctors and U.N. officials who discretely point that way. “The existential plight of Syria’s kids is the worst in the world,” she writes. A UNICEF spokesman says about the children born since the opposition uprising began in March 2011 that “some 3.7 million Syrian children under the age of 5 have known nothing but displacement, violence, and uncertainty.”
If anything, Wright, Cohen, Kristof, and their colleagues are guilty of understatement: Bashar al-Assad’s five-year-long war against his own people is the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. In addition to the half a million killed in Syria, millions of refugees have fled to Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, and many more millions are internally displaced. The overflow from the Syrian refugee crisis now threatens to destabilize Europe. The war is also a strategic nightmare, primarily affecting American allies on Syria’s borders, including Israel, which is most concerned about keeping Iran and Hezbollah from opening a new front on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.
So why didn’t the White House enforce its own red line back in 2012? Why haven’t we done anything since to stop Bashar al-Assad? Why won’t we do anything now, aside from fighting a phony war against ISIS? Because of Libya, say some. Obama saw how the unintended consequences of that engagement came out and doesn’t want a replay. Then there’s Iraq, the very war that Obama campaigned against in 2008 to win the White House. His mandate was to get America out of a stupid war, and the last thing he’s going to do is commit his country to more conflict in the Middle East. Life is complicated, folks.
What Kristof, Cohen, Wright, and their colleagues apparently can’t see, even at this late date, is that Obama’s inaction in Syria is not simply part of the hangover from the failed American war in Iraq, or of the president’s personal psychology. There is something entirely practical at stake here, too—namely, the Iran deal. The explanation is, in fact, a simple one: U.S. intervention in Syria against Assad would have made the Iran deal impossible. In fact, U.S. support for Iran’s continuing presence in Syria was a precondition of the deal, according to no less an authority than the president himself. In a December press conference, Obama spoke of “respecting” Iranian “equities” in Syria—which, translated into plain English, means leaving Assad alone in order to keep the Iranians happy.
The connection between Syria and the Iran deal was not particularly hard to spot for anyone in the administration. “Iranian officials told me that even had the diplomats doing the negotiations wanted to stay in talks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have pulled the plug,” says Jay Solomon, author of the just published Iran Wars, an account of U.S.-Iran relations. “Obama sent a letter to Khamenei saying he wouldn’t target Assad,” Solomon continues. “And Pentagon officials told us they were concerned that operations in Syria risked undermining the nuclear negotiations.”
Former State Department official Frederic C. Hof agrees. “The administration’s policy toward Assad Syria,” writes Hof, “rests on its desire to accommodate Iran—a full partner in Assad’s collective punishment survival strategy—so that the July 14, 2015, nuclear agreement can survive the Obama presidency.”
Hof, the State Department’s point man on Syria until he resigned in 2012 in quiet protest of the White House’s handling of the war, thinks the president should be honest about his decision. Imagining a version of what Obama might have said, Hof writes, in the president’s voice:
What I want people to understand is that I’ve had to make the hardest of calls. I think the nuclear agreement with Iran prevented a war and opens a door. I’m afraid that if I use cruise missiles or supply anti-aircraft weapons to make Assad pay a price for mass murder, Iran’s supreme leader—who sees Assad as an invaluable agent—will scuttle the nuclear deal. I may be wrong, but that’s the call I’ve made.
In short, the Iran deal wasn’t just about limits on uranium enrichment, inspections of nuclear facilities, and sanctions relief, etc., it was also about the Syrian conflict—in particular, about the United States agreeing to step back and let Iran protect its “equities” in Syria, by whatever means its gruesome proxy saw fit.
It’s curious, then, that many of the voices that are now so critical of the administration’s Syria policy were also among the most vocal supporters of the JCPOA. Here’s Nicholas Kristof shortly after the JCPOA was signed providing the White House with talking points to sell the deal: “If the U.S. rejects this landmark deal, then we get the worst of both worlds: an erosion of sanctions and also an immediate revival of the Iran nuclear program.” Nowhere does he mention the fate of children in Syria. Nor does he in this follow-up with more talking points two weeks later. Recently he wrote an op-ed arguing that Anne Frank today is a Syrian girl—without noting that the Nazi equivalents here are funded and armed by Iran.
Robin Wright lauded the JCPOA as “the Obama administration’s boldest foreign-policy initiative. It marks the first success in dealing with Iran since its 1979 revolution and the prolonged seizure of the American embassy in Tehran.” She told NPR, “What’s been unleashed here is a different kind of process. It’s the beginning of a healing process.”
During U.S.-Iran talks, Wright spent a lot of time speaking with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, whom she says she has known for three decades. She interviewed him several times during negotiations. “Zarif is an affable man with a disarmingly unrevolutionary grin, a quick wit, and the steely tenacity of a debater,” she wrote in a 2014 profile for The New Yorker. But she neglected to ask him about Iran’s war in Syria, which Tehran has been financing since Assad started shooting at unarmed protesters in 2011. Instead, she queried him in a later article about Iran’s potential role in Syrian peace talks. To her credit, she notes that most of the “advisers” Iran has sent to Syria “have been helping the [Assad regime] fight the opposition.” But in her “The Babies Are Dying in Aleppo” article, there is no mention of Iran or its role in helping kill them.
Roger Cohen, who has written several rightly outraged columns the last few years about the administration’s Syria policy, advocated for the Iran deal and criticized those who didn’t as warmongers lined up behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “It’s no service to Jews or Israel or Middle Eastern peace, for major Jewish organizations,” wrote Cohen, “to give airtime to Netanyahu on Iran rather than Obama. The alternative to this deal, as Obama said, is war.”
For Cohen, it seems the opposite of conflict is cultural exchange and commerce, which is perhaps why he serves as one of the featured tour guides in the Times’ Travels to Persia business. The JCPOA reopened Iran for investment, as Cohen explained, when the deal was implemented in January. “For Iran, the arrival of ‘implementation day’ means the lifting of all nuclear-related sanctions and access to about $100 billion in frozen assets. A big nation is open for business again, back in the global financial system and world oil market.”
Here, Cohen has unintentionally put his finger on why those who supported the Iran deal and criticize Obama’s Syria policy see no connection between the two. It is because business is frequently not the opposite of war. In fact, the reality is that giving money to a state at war means funding that state’s wars.
The reason that so many journalists and opinion-makers of good conscience cannot make the connection between the Iran deal and the Syrian war is because the truth is too awful. The president’s policy is not simply a matter of a lack of vision or political will. The money Iran received through the JCPOA, as well as the $1.7 billion paid in ransom for American hostages, has helped fund Iran’s war in Syria—which the president proclaimed to be Iran’s business and not ours.
I have no doubt that the people tweeting pictures of Omran Daqneesh and all the other children who have died in Syria and will continue to die there are sincere in their horror at the suffering of innocents, just as they were sincere in their belief that the JCPOA was the best available hedge against a future war or the specter of an Iranian bomb. In Obama’s defense, he at least understood the price of an agreement. Sadly, his supporters-turned-critics didn’t—and they still don’t.
***
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Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is also the author of the recently published The Consequences of Syria.

A Biography of the Islamic Republic
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/May 16, 2013
From the first pages of this book, Michael Axworthy, a former diplomat who headed the British Foreign Office’s Iran Desk for two years, establishes himself as passionate about all things Iranian. His admiration, including for the way Iranians cook rice, provides thematic filigree throughout the book. In a sense, the book could be regarded as a long love letter to Iranians, including some of the least loveable ones among the country’s current rulers.
That aside, the book is of great interest for two reasons. To start with, it is a detailed, well-researched and informative account of the key events of the past three decades since the mullahs seized power and created their Islamic Republic.
In that context, Axworthy makes ample use of Iranian sources. Thanks to a working knowledge of Persian and his familiarity with political and cultural trends in the country, on many issues he is able to understand the Iranian point of view, a rare virtue among Western narrators of the saga of Iran. As the author of two other books on Iran, including the highly enjoyable Empire of the Mind, Axworthy is able to tackle his subject with sympathy.
Having narrated the main events of the past 34 years, Axworthy also provides a fairly accurate account of the Islamic Republic’s principal structures, the Iranian economy, social undercurrents in the country and aspects of Iranian foreign policy.
However, the second reason why this book is of interest is the light it sheds on how an important segment of the Western intelligentsia sees its own civilization and its relationship with the rest of the world. In other words, this book is, perhaps, more about a certain Western vision of the world than Iran under the Khomeinist regime.
Axworthy rejects the established idea in the West that all humanity aspires or should aspire to the Western model of liberal democracy and free market economics. In that sense, Axworthy is at the antipode to Francis Fukuyama and his prediction of the “end of history” and the triumph of the Western democratic model.
9781846142918HAxworthy writes: “Since the rise of the Iranian revolution, European and Western attitudes to the rest of the world have been forced to change. Previously, we tended still to think in terms of linear development in the Middle East and elsewhere towards a Western economic and social model, a Western idea of modernity, away from the traditional patterns of life of those countries which were perceived as backward and outdated.”
Axworthy hammers in his message by forecasting possible “predominance” for “other models,” including the Chinese and the Indian in a globalized world.
“The Western model is no longer the only option,” he says, echoing a claim frequently made by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
In a highly revealing analysis, Axworthy compares the Khomeinist revolution with the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He asserts that the French Revolution ultimately failed because of its radical secularist—not to say atheistic—ideology. What it offered was alien to the mass of French men and women who had remained faithful to their Christian culture and belief system. The Bolshevik Revolution failed for similar reasons. It, too, was out of tune with the Christian culture of the Russian people. The Khomeinist revolution, however, is in sync with the Iranian people’s Islamic traditions, and thus more likely to sustain the regime’s stability.
In that analysis, Axworthy echoes a lecture given by Muhammad Khatami, a former president of the Islamic Republic, at Florence University a decade ago. In it, Khatami argued that the Western model of development had failed because, under the influence of the Enlightenment, it had abandoned religious beliefs. “The Enlightenment led to endless wars and tragedies for humanity,” he said.
Even more intriguing is Axworthy’s assertion that it is easier to pose fundamental moral question in the Islamic Republic than it is in the West.
Axworthy recalls that as “Sartre once wrote that the French were never so free as they were under Nazi occupation, in the sense that moral choice and the seriousness of consequences were never so sharp as they were at the time. That too is true in Iran. In Western countries, for many of us, we have it easy and have become morally lazy, relativistic and cynical. In Iran, the essentials of right and wrong, freedom and repression have been everyday matters of discussion and choice.”
In other words, the estimated 150,000 highly educated Iranians who flee the country each year, creating the biggest “brain drain in history” according to the World Bank, do not know what a good thing they are leaving behind in Iran. (Let us also remember that under Nazi occupation, Sartre continued to live a comfortable life of philosophical meditation while thousands of French men and women took up arms to drive out the occupier.)
Dealing with Iran’s relations with the outside world, Axworthy dismisses claims by US and European governments that the Islamic Republic is a sponsor of international terrorism and a threat to its neighbors and beyond. Iran is badly misunderstood, Axworthy asserts, though it has helped create new proto-democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iran’s nuclear program, Axworthy notes, is a cause for concern. And, yet, Axworthy assures us that Iran “will never use nuclear weapons against Israel or anyone in a first strike.” Iran, he continues, “wants a nuclear weapon as a deterrent.” How he could be sure of all that is not clear. Western powers, especially the United States, are to blame for poor relations with the Islamic Republic. In some cases, personal considerations by Western decision-makers helped create a negative approach to relations with Iran. For example, President George H. W. Bush rejected rapprochement with Iran because he did not want to “take a risk with foreign policy” before his re-election campaign. President Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was “especially hostile to Iran,” equally for personal reasons.
Axworthy has an even more interesting revelation regarding US policy on Iran. He writes: “After the fall of the Soviet Union there was an unemployment problem within the US state system: former Kremlinologists were looking for a job. Some found it in Iran policy; but unfortunately they carried over too much of their previous thinking too uncritically, slotting Iran into the role of the former Soviet Union and labeling the Islamic Republic therefore as totalitarian, expansionist and, of course, doomed; none of which was ever necessarily the case.”
This is exactly the analysis offered by a number of theoreticians in Tehran, including Hassan Abbasi, a lecturer on strategy at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard colleges.
Axworthy echoes the view of US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel that Iran is “a sort of democracy.” To be sure, Iranian democracy is not perfect, Axworthy admits. But the same could be said about British democracy. He writes: “For example, some said Britain was no longer a democracy since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, because large numbers demonstrated against the invasion, and opinion polls suggested a majority were opposed to it.”
Axworthy forgets that in a democracy, such as Britain, decisions are taken in an elected parliament, not by crowds marching in the streets or based on opinion polls. Even then, in Britain people are free to demonstrate against the government, something not allowed in the Islamic Republic. Also, in Britain, anyone could conduct opinion polls, while in the Islamic Republic people could go to prison for doing so.
Axworthy writes: “There are genuine reasons to dislike some of the consequences of the Western model—some of the outcomes of the Western idea of modernity. Drug abuse, family breakdown, the collapse of traditional moral values, the homogenization and stultification of international culture through consumerism…”
However, the fact that Axworthy could freely criticize the Western model without being tortured in prison and/or forced to flee into exile is itself a sign of the superiority of the Western model over the Khomeinist model, which deals with its critics the way all totalitarian regimes do. In the Western model, one is free to choose, but need not choose “drug abuse,” “family breakdown” or “consumerism.”
Reflecting a fashionable trend in the West, Axworthy expresses concern about freedom of choice. He writes of “the problem of liberalism and the ideal of political freedom generally, that affects us all: people may end up choosing things that they really ought not to choose, to the detriment of society.”
This is not new. All totalitarian ideologies use abstractions such as class, the nation, the community of the faithful, or society to set limits on personal freedom and choice. In Iran, the Khomeinist system tries to do that through the so-called velayat-e faqih (Custodianship of the Jurisprudent) under which, in the name of Islam, a mullah has the final word on all issues and is, theoretically at least, able to prevent people from abusing their freedoms in the way Axworthy is worried about.
In the Soviet Union, the Politburo and its strongman performed that function in the name of “the proletariat.” In Nazi Germany, the fuhrer prevented the abuse of personal freedoms in the name of the “Aryan” race. In Italy, Mussolini chose the concept of a mythical “Roman” nation for the same end.
I may be wrong but, unlike Axworthy, I believe there are quite a few Iranians who wish to have the freedoms available in the “corrupt and declining West”. They wish to be able to make their own choices, commit their own sins and pay for those sins. Under Khomeinism, they are forced to pay for the sins of their self-imposed rulers.
 

Egyptian Columnist: Just Like 9/11, ISIS Attacks In Europe Are A Western Plot
MEMRI/September 08/16/September 8, 2016 Special Dispatch No.6602
In her August 23, 2016 column in the Egyptian government daily Al-Ahram, Noha Al-Sharnoubi implied that the September 11, 2001 attacks and the terror attacks that have recently rocked Western capitals were all planned and carried out by Western intelligence agencies, in order to justify the occupation and devastation of the Middle East by the West and the persecution of Muslims in Europe. She suggested that the alleged perpetrators of the Europe attacks were scapegoats who were murdered and then accused of the crime. She claimed further that it was no coincidence that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks had trained at an American flight school and that most ISIS operatives were Western nationals. It should be noted that her article is couched as a series of questions, leaving the drawing of conclusions up to the reader.
The following are excerpts from her column:[1]
Noha Al-Sharnoubi (Image: Assawsana.com)
"Officials at a New York school [recently] forced a 12-year-old pupil to sign a false confession that he was a terrorist. The family filed a lawsuit against the school demanding 50 million dollars in compensation. The lawsuit claimed that the pupil, Nashwan Uppal, a seventh grader at a middle school in East Islip, New York, was harassed by fellow students who called him a terrorist and demanded to know what he planned to blow up next. He replied, as a joke, that he planned to blow up the school fence. According to the lawsuit, when school officials heard about this childish exchange they yelled at Nashwan and instructed him to admit he was a member of Islamic State before forcing him to sign a false confession and searching his belongings. Things did not end there, and policemen were called to search Uppal's home.[2]
"This story reminds me of another incident that happened last year, which you [too] may recall, namely the incident of the Muslim schoolboy in Dallas who was arrested for bringing to school a clock he had made.
"I don't know who [the Americans] are fooling, us or themselves. What terror are they talking about and associating with Islam or even with extremist Muslims or people claiming to be Muslims? How do they respond to a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which stated that the Kremlin's airstrikes [in Syria] have killed at least 2,704 civilians since Russia entered the [Syria] war last September, while ISIS has caused the death of only 2,686 civilians [in Syria]. Moreover, is the killing of civilians, women and children by American planes in Afghanistan and Iraq considered terrorism or not?
"Can we believe the U.S. administration's official version of the events of September 11, 2001? Is it a coincidence that the commanders of the September 11 attack trained at American flight schools? According to the official version of the American administration, the first attack, on the north tower, was at approximately 8:46 a.m., New York time, and the south tower was hit by another plane 15 minutes later, around 9:03... Over half an hour later, a third plane hit the Pentagon building, whereas the fourth plane missed its target and crashed. Is it conceivable that four hijacked planes flew around so freely, penetrated U.S. airspace and hit the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon one by one, with an interval of 15 minutes and 30 minutes between the attacks, and all this took place without the Americans targeting the planes and downing them, despite all their intelligence, satellites and radars? Or was the whole thing planned [in advance] in order to justify the war on terror, the [first] episode of which[later] began in Iraq?
"Does it make sense that most ISIS members are foreigners [i.e., Western nationals], unless ISIS is another story that was prepared in advance [by the West] to justify the devastation, partitioning and occupation [of countries] that is taking place and will continue to take place in the Middle East?
"Do you remember, as I do, the size and the appearance of the alleged ISIS members in that video that showed them butchering an alleged group of Egyptian Christians in Libya?[3] Is it not strange that all the ISIS [fighters] were equally tall, had the same white [skin], and wore identical expensive foreign[-made] watches?
"Those who are murdered and [then] accused of perpetrating terror attacks in the West – are they the real culprits? [Perhaps Western] intelligence elements are behind the attacks and the bombings, and later Muslim citizens are arrested and killed and simply accused of perpetrating [the attacks] in order to justify what is happening in the Arab countries in the name of the war on terror, and in order to justify the plan to persecute the Muslims in the U.S. and Europe and expel them? Have we really been deceived, and continue to be deceived, to such an extent?!..."
Endnotes:
[1] Al-Ahram (Egypt), August 23, 2016.
[2] About the incident see reuters.com, August 17, 2016.
[3] Referring to a February 2015 video that showed ISIS fighters beheading Egyptian Copts kidnapped in Libya. See e.g., alarabiya.net/ar, April 3, 2016.
 

Analysis: Does Israel’s existence rely on Trump’s election?
Michael Wilner/Jerusalem Post/September 08/16
WASHINGTON – Consider it the Israel equivalent of “I alone can fix it,” Donald Trump’s famous charge to voters at the Republican National Convention in July, after depicting an America ravaged by crime and violent extremism.
The inevitable result of a landmark nuclear deal reached last year with Iran is the destruction of Israel – “unless I get elected,” the GOP presidential nominee said in Ohio this week. “Then Israel will be just fine.”
Trump’s concerns for the security of Israel are not new: He suggested the nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, poses an existential threat to the Jewish state during his remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last spring.
“Terrible, terrible situation that we are all placed in, and especially Israel,” he said of the deal negotiated by world powers, noting that Iran continues to fire off ballistic missiles – in violation of international law – meant to intimidate Israel and the West. “Painted on those missiles in both Hebrew and Farsi were the words, ‘Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth,’” he noted. “You can forget that.”
But Trump’s claim that he alone can prevent Israel’s destruction is a new proposition, offered amid a push by his campaign to attract US voters living in Israel, Jewish voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and Christian Americans who prioritize Israel’s security when heading to the polls.
It raises the possibility that Trump, and his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, will increasingly use Israel as a pawn in attempting to reach Jewish voters and non-Jewish supporters of Israel.
Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, touted a Hebrew campaign sign on Tuesday – which mistranslates Trump’s catchphrase to “Make America Big Again” – as well as “Jews for Trump” paraphernalia on a plane ride between campaign events.
For perspective, Trump has opened the same number of fully operational campaign offices in the West Bank as he has in Florida and New Hampshire: One in each.
Compare that to the ground game of Clinton, who has 17 open in the Granite State and 34 in the Sunshine State.
Roughly 200,000 eligible US voters live in Israel.
The practical political benefits of stoking Israel’s existential fears are difficult to quantify, but one recent Florida poll offers clues. A survey by GBA Strategies, the only one to exclusively poll American Jewish voters thus far in the 2016 election cycle, found that only 8 percent of Florida’s likely Jewish voters prioritize Israel when voting, and a stunningly low 2% said that Iran was a top consideration.
But Jewish voters – either in the US or in Israel – are not the likely targets of Trump’s efforts.
Distrust of Iran remains a roundly popular position in American politics: In February, one month after the JCPOA was implemented, a Gallup poll found that only 14% of Americans viewed Iran favorably and just 30% approved of the nuclear accord that Clinton has cautiously endorsed.
Trump’s bashing of Iran and his blustering rhetoric on Israel may gain him support at the margins, where voters consider Iran and Israel top-priority issues. But this rhetoric more broadly serves a larger narrative of strength on issues of foreign policy and national security – two policy portfolios on which he is currently losing badly to Clinton.
A commanding 56% of Americans trust Clinton over Trump on matters of foreign policy, compared to 40% who prefer Trump, according to a CNN poll released this week.
She leads by similar margins when voters consider which candidate has the temperament to serve as commander- in-chief, and which is better equipped to handle the threat of terrorism.
In the context of national American politics, support for Israel and tough talk on Iran serve a greater purpose than simply messaging to a small group of voters, or even to Israel itself. Specifying and nuancing policy on Israel’s challenges are secondary to the immediate political imperative of tying one’s opponent to widely unpopular positions: Clinton’s foreign policy legacy in the Middle East, Trump said in a national security speech on Wednesday meant to shore up his numbers, amounts to death, destruction, metastasizing terrorist cells in Syria and Sinai and an Iran on “a glide path to nuclear weapons.”
Israel is a player in this narrative, but will remain just that – a character – throughout the construction of Trump’s political story, and until polls open in November.
To that end, Trump is proving quite successful in adapting to the sort of politics he has vowed to break apart.

Holy War of Words: Growing Saudi-Iranian Tensions

Simon Henderson/The Washington Institute/September 08/16
Relations between Riyadh and Tehran are in a downward spiral, raising the urgent need for a U.S. and international response.
In the coming days, hundreds of thousands of Muslims will visit the Saudi city of Mecca to partake in the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Unlike last year, there will be no Iranians there. Tehran and Riyadh were unable to agree on visa allocations and security arrangements intended to avoid the type of tragic stampede that killed hundreds of pilgrims last time around -- an incident in which Iran suffered more victims than any other country. Two days ago, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that Iranians who were injured last year and subsequently died were "murdered" by the kingdom's inadequate emergency response. He went on to suggest that Saudi Arabia was not a proper custodian of the holy places -- effectively a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the kingdom's Sunni royal family, since the monarch has been styled "Custodian of the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina" since the 1980s.
Khamenei's words prompted a damning response yesterday from the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the country's chief cleric, who described Iran's Shiite majority as "Zoroastrians" and "not Muslims." Anti-Shiite sentiment is common in Saudi Arabia, and the "Zoroastrian" jibe (meaning fire worshippers) is sometimes mentioned in the press. But the very public use of such words by a mainstream religious leader is extraordinary -- though hardly surprising given Khamenei's comments.
The verbal escalation did not stop there: a few hours later, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif entered the fray, tweeting about the "bigoted extremism that Wahhabi top cleric & Saudi terror masters preach." This was no doubt a direct response to the Grand Mufti (since the Saudi brand of Islam is often labeled "Wahhabism"), and a reiteration of the longstanding Iranian claim that Riyadh supports the Islamic State terrorist group.
The situation is arguably as bad as it was in 1987, when Iranian pilgrims in Mecca shouted political slogans that prompted trigger-happy Saudi National Guard forces to open fire, killing scores. Even without Iranians in Mecca this year, the risk of further escalation between the two countries is high.
In this regard, a key decisionmaker on the Saudi side will be Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, who will likely favor a resolute rather than conciliatory approach. As defense minister, he has been the main proponent of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which was prompted by Iranian support for the Houthi rebels. That campaign is now a proxy war between the two countries, as are the struggles in Iraq, Syria, and, to a more limited extent, Bahrain. Saudi Arabia's own Shiite minority, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province adjacent to Bahrain and the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, will likely be inflamed by the war of words, and miscalculation is possible, even direct military clashes. In light of this danger, the international community -- collectively and individually -- should urge both sides to calm the rhetoric.
At the very least, the tension represents a setback for U.S. policy, since the Obama administration had hoped that such animosity would be reduced at least somewhat by last year's nuclear agreement with Iran. In a January 2014 interview with the New Yorker, the president stated, "It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren't intent on killing each other"; he also expressed his hope of "an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there's competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare."
Part of the challenge of quieting the situation is coping with the apparent belief in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states that the Obama administration favors Iran. The president's April interview with the Atlantic caused considerable surprise in Riyadh and other capitals, particularly when he stated, "The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians...requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace." Four months prior, Saudi Arabia had broken off diplomatic relations with Iran after its embassy in Tehran was gutted -- an incident that followed the kingdom's execution of a leading Saudi Shiite preacher.
Given recent reports of aggressive maneuvering by Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval units in the Gulf, a confrontation with U.S. forces is also possible. Accordingly, Washington's response to the spike in tensions should combine diplomatic and military components -- for example, dispatching Secretary of State Kerry or another senior official to the kingdom while visibly reinforcing the Fifth Fleet. America's allies in the region will be hoping for nothing less. Without a significant U.S. response, Saudi Arabia will likely be tempted to consider a more independent and perhaps dangerous course of action.
**Simon Henderson is the Baker Fellow and director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at The Washington Institute.
 

The evolution of Egypt-Israel relations: No longer a terrorist entity
Zavi Mazel/Jerusalem Post/September 08/16
THE EGYPTIAN foreign minister brought a breath of fresh air to the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict when he stated unequivocally on August 21 that Israel could not be considered a terrorist state. This further step toward closer relations between Egypt and Israel resonated throughout the Arab world, where accusing the Jewish state of terror against the Palestinians is a basic propaganda tenet.
Sameh Shoukry, meeting high school students in his office, was asked why Israel’s actions against the Palestinians were not considered terrorism. The exchange between the students and the minister was recorded and posted by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry on its Twitter account. His answer was factual and devoid of the accusations against Israel, which are automatic in the Arab world. He is quoted as having said, “You can look at it from the perspective of a regime of force,” going on to explain that “certainly in accordance with its history it has a society in which the element of security is strong.” And then he added something startling, “From Israel’s perspective, since 1948 that society had faced many challenges that have instilled in its national security doctrine its control of land and border crossings.”
In fact, said the Egyptian foreign minister, “there is no evidence showing a link between Israel and armed terrorist groups.”
This can be seen as a new way of viewing Israel and its place in the region in the face of Arab attitudes, the Islamic establishments and nationalist elites still refusing to acknowledge its legitimacy and opposing it furiously. For not only did Shoukry distance himself from qualifying Israeli activities as acts of terror, that is, illegitimate and deserving of unreserved condemnations; he mentioned the year 1948 – that is,the year of the proclamation of the State of Israel and the war of independence, both sources of the nakba or “disaster” of the Palestinians and of all Arabs – as a well-known historical fact. And it was because of the challenges that resulted from that historical fact that Israel had to react forcibly ever since.
Shoukry’s words made headlines in Egypt – though many media outlets chose to ignore them, including those affiliated with the regime who were reluctant to deal with such potentially explosive declarations. Indeed, the following day a Foreign Ministry spokesman accused “several papers” of having distorted what had actually been said and of falsely reporting that the minister had declared that the killing of Palestinian children was not terrorism.
Furthermore, he said, those papers were guilty of incitement against the well-known views of Egypt, which has championed Palestinian rights in the past, the present, and would forever champion them. He stressed that the students had not asked specific questions concerning the killing of Palestinian children but had simply voiced a theoretical question as to why the international community did not define Israeli actions as acts of terror. The minister, the spokesman said, had replied that there was no legal international definition regarding acts committed by nations.
In other words, the Foreign Ministry did not try to distance itself from what the minister had said, and simply accused the media of having distorted his words.
Taken in the context of the evolution of the relations between Egypt and Israel, Shoukry’s comments can be seen as yet another step toward closer links between the countries. It is well known that there is strong intelligence and security cooperation between Israel and Egypt based, among other considerations, on the common threat of Islamic State – Sinai Province. If it is not defeated in Egypt, it will attack Israel directly.
In the past, the group has launched missiles across the border and was responsible for a cross border terrorist attack near Eilat in 2011 in which eight Israelis were killed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly declares that he has frequent conversations with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Such is the background of the gradual rapprochement between the two countries: Egypt has sent an ambassador to Tel Aviv and the Embassy of Israel in Cairo is open again. Sisi has also said that he is ready to help promote negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and his foreign minister recently made a visit to Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s envoys regularly travel to Cairo for high-level talks. It can be safely assumed that they include a number of subjects and not solely the Palestinian question, which is far from being Sisi’s first priority.
There can be no mistake: The Egyptian president is behind all these moves. Sisi has launched an all-out effort to develop his country and put it on the path of sustainable economic growth. Cooperation with Israel is part of this vision.
Sisi is a staunch Muslim but has always shunned religious extremism. He has been remarkably moderate concerning Israel ever since he became a public figure, that is, when he was appointed minister of defense by the since ousted Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in the mistaken belief that this pious general would help bring about the rule of the Brotherhood with a complicit army.
SISI REFRAINS from attacking or even condemning Israel. It was made clear from the first interviews he gave the press even before his election to the presidency. It took several questions concerning his views on the Palestinian issue before he succinctly said that there should be a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
At the same time the Egyptian president has been pushing for toning down extremism in Islam. He has demanded that the clerics of al-Azhar Mosque undertake a reform of some of the more extreme expressions of religious dialogue. The Education Ministry has also been tasked with removing from textbooks elements or episodes encouraging religious extremism, more specifically those extolling Jihad – such as the wars of Saladin and of Akba Ben-Nafea, who conquered large territories in Africa. Also expunged were some texts disparaging the Jews, but not all. Chapters dealing with the peace agreement with Israel were expanded; the new modern history book of Egypt has a picture of Menachem Begin next to Anwar el Sadat, together with significant extracts of the peace treaty.
In spite of these encouraging developments, there are those who are steadfast in their opposition to Israel. They are mostly to be found in the old elites – the Islamic establishment and what is left of the nationalistic and pan-Arabic movements.
There is still a prevalent belief among the Egyptian public that Israel is an enemy bent on harming Egypt. When Sisi decided to build a second canal alongside the Suez Canal to double its capacity and let a greater number of vessels through, a number of articles “explained” that the move was intended to spike Israel’s projected Ashdod-Eilat railway, allegedly intended to draw traffic away from the canal. When Prime Minister Netanyahu toured East African countries some weeks ago, media in Egypt “explained” that it was in order to encourage agriculture in countries situated up river on the Nile, which would then need more water thus diminishing what will be left for Egypt. When parliament member Tawfik Okasha had “the temerity” to host the Israeli ambassador for dinner, he was expelled from the parliament.
And of late an Egyptian judoka was roundly berated for agreeing to a match with an Israeli opponent – and for losing.
No wonder then that the Egyptian president is proceeding cautiously. Warmer relations with Israel are of paramount importance, but he has no wish for a confrontation with elites he needs to support his economic policy, especially since at the moment it has ushered in a measure of austerity which is highly unpopular.
He has apparently chosen a more circuitous route. A few months ago he announced that he wanted to help restart dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians, a perfectly legitimate long-term preoccupation for Egypt, which aspires to peace in the region.
However, it does not appear that Sisi has formulated his own peace initiative. He has said time and time again that he accepts all initiatives on the table, the French initiative included. There are some in Israel and in the West who believe that he is in favor of a pragmatic Sunni block, which would include Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states; together with Egypt they would sponsor an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. But it is hard to believe that these countries would be able and willing to convince Palestinians to change their avowed strategy of non-recognition of the Jewish state and renounce the right of return.
Yet promoting the Palestinian issue affords an opportunity for Sisi to keep an open dialogue with Israel and discuss ways and means of expanding what really interests him: economic relations to take advantage of Israel’s technology and cooperation. One can therefore cautiously hope for some further – but limited – improvements in the relations between the two countries in the coming months.
**Zvi Mazel, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is a former ambassador to Egypt, Romania and Sweden.

Syria’s conflicts and the many world orders’ state of denial
Mohamed Chebarro/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
Listening to president Obama’s sincere words that they were “not there yet” on deal over Syria, during their 90-minute meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20, only goes on to justify a new and open round of bloodshed in Syria in the dying months of his presidency. President Obama went on to elaborate that what is preventing the progress of the talks is a deep lack of trust between Washington and Moscow leadership. Listening to President Putin insisting that further talks are needed with the Americans to reach a truce in Aleppo and that many obstacles remain. According to him, the US insists on calling some Syrian fighters as moderate opposition to Assad’s rule, which is delaying a ceasefire or outright settlement. All this means that such discussions between the super power and the not so super power are still in a limbo in relation to Syria and other pressing issues be it Ukraine, or the over drummed up war on terror. President Erdogan of Turkey at the G 20 also reminded everybody that he is working with the Russians for a truce (only in Aleppo) to be announced prior to Eid al-Adha next week. He also alluded again to the need to establish safe areas inside Syria, if the international community is expected to get to grip with the refugees’ crisis and stem the flow far from the European shores. Maybe chancellor Merkel of Germany was the most direct in voicing her expectation that the Russians could work with Assad to enforce a ceasefire. She bluntly revealed that Moscow enjoys the upper hand in matters that concern Syria and the Assad regime.
Status quo
All these developments indicate how little progress has been made, even after five years of Syrian conflict. This is all the international community could muster in a bid to stop the killing in Syria after sitting and watching more than 300,000 Syrians killed, 5 million refugees in neighboring countries, and over one million in Europe. Another 6-7 million are internally displaced. The bloodshed that started as Syrians’ peaceful rebellion against the Assad family’s 40-year rule gradually metamorphosed into a regime’s war on its own people, a war on terror, a Hezbollah war to protect Assad, an Iranian war to protect the Shiite, an international coalition against terror , a Russian war, and lastly a Turkish offensive against the Kurds. The search for truce in Syria has replaced the search for peace as a norm. For the past five years, we were led to believe that the common objective for the international community was to end Syria’s many wars. But peace remains elusive despite the best of efforts of all stakeholders and good intentions, especially those of Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. From Washington to the Kremlin, from Tehran to Ankara, and from the UN in New York to the EU in Brussels very little is said or thought about how to end the conflict or ask how the Syrians in the country or those forcibly displaced by ethnic cleansing in few cases or those outside the country perceive a possible end to the conflict. Even less is known about formulas for a New Syria spelled out by military and diplomats from Russia and the US. The international community has failed to answer these questions. Obama, Putin, Erdogan and Merkel, to mention just a few, are evading the real questions by calling for truce, transitional period, and safe zones. These utterances suit their short term vision of how to contain a conflict that has become a proxy to many serious wars. The Syrian refugees could descend on Turkey today and Germany tomorrow. Iran could continue to send troops and militias and so can Turkey. Moscow warplanes are unlikely to leave Syrian airspace soon and so are the planes of the international coalition fighting ISIS. But the state of denial with which all are treating the Syrian question is indicative of both a crisis of leadership, statesmanship and commitment to peace and order. Hypocrisy has replaced policy. The search for truce has replaced the search for peace as a norm. And chaos has become a replacement to order. The Syrian question and its continued bleeding population is a microcosm of today’s world and its many societies. Economic hardship, mixed with theories of fear, have won over the long held ethos of search for peace one way or the other and the need to be creative is its pursuit, or all is doomed.

The planet’s future depends on choices we make now
Peter Harrison/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
Last week the US and China said they would ratify the Paris Agreement, which commits the two massive nations to making efforts to slow down climate change. It’s an important document and not insignificant that these two have signed up – they are, after all, two of the world’s biggest polluters. The Paris agreement obligates states to curb emissions that contribute to climate change. It takes effect once at least 55 nations accounting for at least 55 percent of global emissions ratify it. This is important, not just because of the future for our children, but for now as there are clear signs of rising temperatures – July’s hit record levels this year. There are obvious things that can be done to help save our planet – not least lowering our consumption of fossil fuels, using more green, renewable energy sources such as solar, like the massive plants being created in the UAE. The world’s governments have to commit to some serious life changes if this planet of ours is to have any chance of remaining hospitable for future generations. And Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman this year announced that the kingdom’s economy will ultimately move away from being driven by oil. These are important steps in the right direction. The world’s governments have to commit to some serious life changes if this planet of ours is to have any chance of remaining hospitable for future generations. But we all bear a responsibility to help slow down its self-destruction.
One thing, we need to look at how we are draining the world’s resources by simply buying the newest and latest, without considering the impact this has on the planet.
Status symbols
The Middle East spends more money in shops on the latest gadgets than any other part of the world – we have an obsession with all things new. There’s a view that a person’s status should be reflected by the possessions they hold – a manager should not be seen to be driving a car that is less impressive than that of their staff. If our children, and later their children, have any chance of having a planet that is safe for them, then we need to change how we think. When I walk into supermarkets I see boxes of televisions stacked high, with eager customers waiting to pick up the latest bargain, as the shops look to clear the shelves in time for the newest models. But ask yourself this: where are you putting the TV you bought two years ago? What is going to happen to all the resources that have been used to build it and the hundreds of others that will also find themselves being slung or left to gather dust in the cupboard under the stairs, simply because it doesn’t look modern enough? Recently I was involved in a crash on a Dubai road. The details are irrelevant, suffice to say that the back end of my car was badly damaged by the impact of the SUV that ran into me. Amid the kind concerns over my wellbeing, I also received several messages from friends asking me if I was now going to replace my 10-year-old car. They’ve asked many times before.
Why throw away what works?
And my response then was the same as it has always been - when the thing costs more to fix than it’s worth. I’m not being tight with my money, I just fail to see why a perfectly good car should wind up on the scrap heap, all those reusable parts left to rot – which is ultimately what would happen with a vehicle as old as old as mine – irrespective of the fact that it works, is fuel efficient and still fairly kind with the exhaust fumes it produces. Last week I interviewed Dr Jonathan Pershing, the special envoy for climate change in the US. I suggested to him that maybe governments around the world should be looking at ways of reusing resources, rather than disposing of them. It’s not a new concept and certainly not one that I invented. It’s a notion that rather than throwing things away - think mobile phones, TVs, computers, and of course cars - they are broken down in to the various components and parts are reused. Pershing told me that there were now efforts by companies in some countries to not just consider the process from raw materials to end product, but also post-consumer, recycling and reuse. It’s a process that takes the parts that still work and reuse them, the recyclables are recycled and precious metals are removed and resold. Such a business model is profitable, creates jobs as we remanufacture and ultimately helps the environment. In China it’s a philosophy that’s called a circular economy.Pershing explained: “You don’t think of things in some time banded way, you think of everything, to where you produce it to the impact on the environment. To the long term return on the economy - the consequences at the end of life.”And it is these consequences we need to all consider – we have been greedy in our drive to always want the newest, without considering the damage it does, not just to our wallets, but also the planet as we throw perfectly good things away. There is a limit to the availability of raw materials.Does it really matter that the television you watch is not the thinnest? Or the smartphone you use isn’t the very latest model? We are told we drive consumer society by making choices - if we always buy the latest without considering what damage that does to the planet, then what will future generations think of our choices as they struggle to cope with far less hospitable conditions in the weather, sea levels and temperatures that we created through our inaction?

Hajj amid the Saudi-Iranian debate
Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
Almost every Hajj season brings a verbal Iranian war with Saudi Arabia. This year has been no exception. Recent statements have, however, been the worst in 30 years and they frankly demonstrate the situation between Riyadh and Tehran. Perhaps the best decision the Iranian government has taken is to prohibit its citizens from performing this year's Hajj pilgrimage. This has eliminated the chances of clashes which have killed hundreds in past years. During such clashes, military men from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards would reportedly incite trouble, sometimes even killing others. This is what happened in the mid 80's when they dragged an unarmed Saudi guard - one of the Hajj organizers - and slaughtered him with a knife before thousands of pilgrims and then engaged in clashes in which around 400 pilgrims and security men were killed. Disagreements between governments in the region have always been there but no government in the past 70 years did what the Iranian regime has done since it seized power in 1979 as it has worked to incite problems during the Hajj season. The governments of other Muslim countries which had serious disagreements with Riyadh, including the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, the former Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki and before that the government of Saddam Hussein and the former Yemeni government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, did not intentionally turn Hajj into an occasion to settle accounts. Perhaps the absence of pilgrims from Iran this year, who could be potentially used for the purpose of political protest is a good development that decreases chances of trouble.
Iran is the only country which attacks embassies - like when it burned the Saudi embassy in Tehran nine months ago - without any respect to diplomatic norms and international law.
The Iranian government's decision to bar its citizens from pilgrimage this year may be due to its desire to avoid a new and dangerous confrontation which the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and security apparatus, the Basij, may cause. They threatened to avenge the murder of their personnel during last year's Hajj and even reportedly said they entered Saudi Arabia using forged names and visas. The latter contributed to the tragic stampede, which killed around 800 pilgrims. There are 57 Islamic countries in the world but Iran's is the only government, which uses Hajj to threaten Saudi Arabia. It tries to carry out political activity during every Hajj season by mobilizing hostile protests that have nothing to do with Hajj. The slogans raised usually incite against Saudi Arabia and the US and stir confrontation. It does so despite Islamic countries' objection as they consider Hajj a religious ritual which must be rid of political disputes.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia responded to Iran's official boycott of the pilgrimage. The kingdom agreed to allow Iranian pilgrims from other countries to perform Hajj from without needing their government's approval. This came after the failure of Iranian negotiators who visited Saudi Arabia to make Hajj arrangements for around 70,000 Iranians. The negotiators announced that their government prohibited its citizens from performing Hajj after it was too late. However, the Saudi government responded by allowing Iranians who desired to perform Hajj to participate without their government's permission. More than 250 Iranians arrived to Mecca from the US in addition to hundreds others who arrived from Europe and the Middle East.
Saudi-Iranian struggle
The Saudi-Iranian struggle is the most prominent feature of politics in the Middle East and its wars, disputes and alliances. The Iranians have involved Hajj in the confrontation and included it within an offensive policy that targets Riyadh.
Iran is trying to control Iraq, north of Saudi Arabia, by exploiting chaos, the weakness of the central government in Baghdad and the vacuum which resulted from the complete withdrawal of US troops seven years ago. It turned Syria into a comprehensive battle field as it sent thousands of Iranians from the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force to fight there and manage a network of extremist Shiite militias which it reportedly brought from Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. It supplies arms and trainers to Houthi militias in Yemen, south of Saudi Arabia. These militias staged a coup against the Yemeni government a year and a half ago and have seized the capital since then. The war in Yemen is still on as Iran supports the rebels while Saudi Arabia leads an Arab military alliance that supports Yemeni legitimate forces. Perhaps the absence of pilgrims from Iran this year, who could be potentially used for the purpose of political protest is a good development that decreases chances of trouble and reassures more than 2.5 million pilgrims who have come from across the world and may have been worried about Iran's actions.
**This article was first published in Asharq al-Awsat on Sept. 8, 2016.

The fascinating writings of Samir Atallah
Turki Aldakhil/Al Arabiya/September 08/16
Samir Atallah is a veteran author and journalist who has written analyses and articles about his experiences and travels for years now. His approach is clear and his style is eloquent. His words are breathtaking to the extent that when you read his pieces, you cannot but recall the Prophet's hadith "in eloquence, there is magic."Atallah has written a column since the mid 80's. This column has grown with him but it does not age as more people are growing fonder of it with time. His writing flows smoothly, like music to your ears. The way he writes his articles resembles a gardener who carefully looks after his plants and flowers. In his columns, Atallah, the author of the prominent book, "The Ink Caravan", provides rich information, narrates stories, discusses ideas and writes about his meetings with artists and politicians and about movies, books, novels, journeys and travels.In his columns, Samir Atallah provides rich information, narrates stories, discusses ideas and writes about his meetings with artists and politicians and about movies, books, novels, journeys and travels. He is the son of An-Nahar, Al-Sayad, Al-Osbo' al-Arabi and Asharq al-Awsat dailies. His columns have become a school of their own. If I have an advice for the current generation of journalism students and budding writers, it would be to extensively read Atallah's writings and columns. There are only few like his during these difficult times the Arab press are passing through. I also recommend his series "Side notes of travels" which was published in Asharq al-Awsat between June 22 and August 6. Read that series of articles and learn from the richness of the Arabic language at its purest.
*This article was first published in Okaz on Sept. 8, 2016.