Tony Karon's piece in The National, "Direct talks will fail -- is that what the US is planning on?", is clear, succinct, and poignant: really, it's about incentives!

Mr Netanyahu says he has no intention of embracing the minimum terms for a two-state solution as defined by the international consensus – an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders (adjusted through equal land swaps) with East Jerusalem as its capital. It is hard to imagine why he would go to Washington and reverse himself when he’s not under any pressure at home or from the US. Indeed, it is worth remembering that the direct talks are happening not because of any progress in indirect talks, but because Mr Netanyahu demanded them.

The Israeli leader’s purpose is to engage noncommittally in the rituals of peacemaking. He will not make it easy for Mr Abbas to stay at the table, by, say, restraining Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. A peace agreement is not a goal that the Israelis value – their officials repeatedly have made clear that they believe Mr Abbas is too weak to deliver Palestinian consent for any deal. Mr Netanyahu’s priority is Iran, and he will chat with Mr Abbas as part of a quid pro quo to convince Washington to confront Tehran, not in the hope of a peace deal.

Mr Abbas, for his part, has made clear that he is going to Washington only for fear of losing US funding for his administration. In doing so, he has effectively signalled to his own people that any agreement reached in this process (unlikely as it may be) has been imposed on them. Even if Mr Abbas himself were inclined to accept whatever Mr Netanyahu offered – which, of course, he is not – he lacks the political authority to sell such a deal to the Palestinians. His term of office has expired, and the last time the Palestinian electorate was asked to vote, they preferred Hamas over his Fatah movement. Even in Fatah, Mr Abbas has minimal support for talking to Mr Netanyahu. In the interests of political survival, he’ll be looking for an early exit.

Hamas does not need to lift a finger to undermine these talks; it can be relatively confident that they will discredit themselves in the eyes of the Palestinians, as every previous round has done.

As inept as the Obama administration has been in its dealings with Mr Netanyahu, it cannot be naive enough to imagine that direct talks will produce an agreement. So, the real question is what it will do in the probable event of failure. There has also been talk of the US putting “bridging proposals” on the table if the two sides are near agreement but unable to bridge the gap. But saving the two-state solution from oblivion today could require a lot more – a readiness by the US to impose a deal based on the international consensus.

Washington has never had any compunction about making uncomfortable demands of the Palestinians, but imposing a two-state solution would require Mr Obama to take the domestic political consequences of a showdown with Israel. His record so far suggests that is unlikely.

Read more...

"Finding the Root of Anti-Gay Sentiment in Uganda", says journalist Jeff Sharlet on today's episode of "Fresh Air", may be easier than you think:

I discovered ... that there was this very direct relationship," Sharlet says. "And [the Fellowship members (including Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe)] are emphatic and saying: 'We haven't killed any gay people in Uganda. This isn't what we had in mind. We didn't pull the trigger.' And that's true. They didn't pull the trigger. But there's a sense in which they built the gun, which was this institutional idea of government being decided by small groups of elite leaders like Bahati, getting together and trying to conform government to their idea of Biblical law. And this is what their American benefactors wanted them to do.

Read more...

B'Tselem, "Water supplied in Gaza unfit for drinking; Israel prevents entry of materials needed to repair system." So much interesting info to digest, but a few highlights:

The water crisis in the Gaza Strip arose following over-pumping of the underground water of the Coast Aquifer. It is estimated that the amount of water annually pumped from the aquifer is roughly twice the amount of water that replenishes it. As a result of the over-pumping, which has been going on for several decades, salt water has penetrated the aquifer. In addition, the poor maintenance of the wastewater-treatment facilities in Gaza, which increased following the siege, and the damage done to the wastewater-treatment facility in Gaza City during Operation Cast Lead, led to further pollution of the underground water by wastewater, and to greater salinity. Another factor for the pollution is the waste-disposal sites in Gaza, which are not properly handled. Following Operation Cast Lead, these sites received enormous amounts of waste – more than 600,000 tons – including asbestos, medial waste, oils, and fuels.

The lack of construction materials and replacement parts has also led to greater loss of water from the supply network in Gaza. Prior to the siege, the loss had been 30 percent of the amount of water supplied to consumers, generally resulting from leaks in the pipes. In 2009, the loss reached 47 percent, according to figures of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility.

Since treatment of water from pollutants such as nitrates and chlorides is very expensive, the cost of a cubic meter of treated water is a high as 50 shekels (some 13 US dollars in August 2010), 10 times higher than the price paid by households in Israel. Many Gazans cannot afford this luxury: the unemployment rate in Gaza reached 39 percent in 2009, and poverty in 2007 was 43 percent. In 2007, average family expenditures in Gaza stood at slightly more than 2,000 shekels a month.

Read more...

More on what the Arab press has to say about the 'anti-mosque movement' by Marc Lynch.

Most Arab columnists agree with the argument that the anti-mosque movement will badly harm Arab and Muslim views of the United States, contra Rashed, but there isn't as much active discussion of it in the [jihadist] forums as you'd expect. That isn't a reason to relax, though. The impact is likely to be felt not so much on extremists, whose views about America are rather fixed, but on the vast middle ground, the Arab and Muslim mainstream which both the Bush and Obama administrations have recognized as crucial both for defeating al-Qaeda and for achieving broad American national interests. And that mainstream, not the extremists themselves, is where our attention needs to be focused.

Read more...

"Eco-Resistance in the West Bank," Fadi Elsalameen writing at The Washington Note:

"This school was built from wood and concrete and destroyed twice by the Israeli occupation. It is now built from car tires and gets its electricity from solar panels on the roof," Dr. Sabri Saidam, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' technology adviser said describing Al-Khan Al-Ahmar primary mixed school.

Interesting to see these building methods, which I first saw on display at Kibbutz Lotan, defiantly utilized by Palestinians.

Read more...

How could I have possibly missed this from last year?

No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

Read more...

The American Zionist Council's internal "Information and Public Relations Department" reports, provided by the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, describe 1960's-era Israeli media manipulation:

Between 1962-1963 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subpoenaed internal reports of the American Zionist Council during its investigation into the activities of registered agents of foreign principals. They discovered that more than $5 million in tax exempt (and possibly overseas donations) had been laundered through the Jewish Agency's American Section into the American Zionist Council. The Jewish Agency functioned as a quasi-branch of the Israeli government, received Israeli government funding, and was able to review legislation before it went to the Knesset under its Covenant Agreement.

This violated IRS regulations on the use of tax exempt charitable funds and the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The following reports detail how the American Zionist Council used the funding in a sophisticated campaign to cajole and intimidate news media, subvert open debate about Israel and undermine reporting about key issues of the day such as Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons facility, operation Susannah terror attacks on the United States, and the return of Arab refugees to their homes. The AZC tracked and targeted professors and engaged in covert operations obliquely referred to in the following internal reports.

After the Justice Department ordered the American Zionist Council to register as a foreign agent in late 1962, it transferred responsibilities to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which refuses to register as a foreign agent of the Israeli government.

Read more...

Interesting piece at Coteret, purveyor of all things Hebrew media: "Knesset outsources US campus public diplomacy to militant Christian Zionists"

MKs who are members of the lobby to promote relations with Christian communities around the world, concluded that the best response to the powerful show of force put on by Muslim students on campuses overseas could not be provided by the Jewish students but, rather, by the Christian students, who are no less eager to help Israel.

The lobby, which is headed by MK David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu), began finding and training Christian students in prestigious universities and colleges in North America and Europe. The goal is to establish non-Jewish support groups for Israel on each campus so as to have the Israeli position presented.

Read more...

From The Economist's Newsbook blog, "Arab reactions to the Cordoba mosque: What the Arab papers say":

Many commentators noted with concern rising Islamophobia in America. Hossam Eitani, writing in Dar al-Hayat, a pan-Arab daily, places the current bout of anti-Islamic feeling in a wider context of intolerance of minorities being championed by the tea-party movement:

"Some key figures in the Republican Party, such as former vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, have come out in support of those opposed to the construction of mosques. The Tea Party movement supports them because it backs the Republican Party and is counting on a majority of Americans to contribute to the movement's religious, social and racist chauvinism. The group began by targeting Mr Obama and his social programme. It did everything possible to hinder his healthcare reforms. It has gone on to support Arizona's racist immigration law, designed to prevent Latin American immigration to America. Now it is taking an active role campaigning against building mosques."

Read more...

"Israeli-Palestinian talks to resume" (AJ English):

Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland, reporting from Jerusalem, said there had been no improvement in relations between the two sides in recent weeks which could give the talks momentum.

"You don't see that there are conditions ripe on the ground for talks. You don't see anything in terms of increased goodwill; in fact what you see on the ground rather is the opposite," she said.

Read more...

AP: A look at previous Israeli-Palestinian peace talks

A look at previous rounds of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and how they fared (Associated Press):

Sept. 13, 1993, The White House, Washington:

The two sides sign the Oslo accord, negotiated in secret meetings shepherded by Norwegian academics and lower-level officials. The deal includes mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and allows for creation of a Palestinian autonomy government in the West Bank and Gaza. The fate of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and Palestinian refugees is left for "final status" talks. The historic handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, President Bill Clinton between them, ushers in era of direct peace talks.

Oct. 15-23, 1998, Wye River Conference Centers, Queenstown, Maryland:

Clinton, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu participate. Israel agrees to hand over an additional 13 percent of the West Bank, bringing Palestinian control to about 40 percent, release Palestinian prisoners and lift trade restrictions. Palestinians agree to arrest militants, give up some guns and annul a clause in their charter that negated Israel's right to exist. However, Israel releases mostly car thieves instead of political prisoners and Arafat does not reduce forces or confiscate arms.

July 11-25, 2000, Camp David, Thurmont, Maryland:

Clinton meets with Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak after the deadline for interim accords expires. Israel offers a Palestinian state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, with a Jerusalem foothold. But disagreements remain, including a demand by Arafat for a right to resettle Palestinian refugees in Israel. The effort fails as fighting erupts two months later and continues for several years, killing thousands in Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli cities and Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza.

Jun. 4, 2003, Aqaba, Jordan:

President George W. Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas participate. The parties begin a three-phase process toward a final deal under the internationally backed "road map" peace plan of June 2002. The talks break down because neither side meets their obligations under the first stage: Israel did not halt settlement construction and the Palestinians did not clamp down on militants. A new wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli targeted killings of Hamas leaders also derails talks.

Nov. 27, 2007, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland:

Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert participate. Direct negotiations resume with the aim of establishing an independent Palestinian state based on the "road map." Olmert and Abbas hold a long series of direct talks. The last round breaks down in late 2008, reportedly when the sides were close to an agreement. Shortly afterward, Israel launches its bruising military offensive against Hamas rocket launchers in the Gaza Strip.

May 2010: Indirect, U.S.-mediated talks are launched.

Aug. 20, 2010: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announces resumption of direct peace talks.

Read more...

NY Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel publish classified, internal US military documents obtained by Wikileaks regarding the war in Afghanistan. The findings, as summarized by the Guardian, include:

• Hundreds of civilians have been killed by coalition troops in unreported incidents

• A recent, steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on NATO forces

• US commanders openly worry Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency is aiding Taliban fighters

• A secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

• The United States covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles (of the kind used against Soviet forces by the CIA-backed mujahideen during the 1980s).

• The coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• The Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

Read more...

Tulsa + Muslims + The Economist = "A backlash against imaginary perils"

There are only 30,000 Muslims in Oklahoma, a state of 3.7m people, making them well under 1% of the population. That’s still enough to worry some people, though. Rex Duncan, a Republican member of Oklahoma’s House of Representatives, has just had a measure placed on the November ballot that would ban local courts from consideringsharia, or Islamic law, in their judgments, a dubious first for the nation.

Mr Duncan describes his proposed measure, which would also bar courts from considering any other forms of international law, as a “Save Our State” constitutional amendment. He cites Britain, and the alleged readiness of its courts to consider sharia(though in fact it is only applied in some civil and family cases when both parties agree, and the primacy of the law of the land remains paramount in all cases) as an example of how prevalent Islamic law might become. Mr Duncan calls it a “cancer upon the survivability of the UK”, and declares that “this is a war for the survival of America.”

Read more...

Economic warfare:

The Israeli government took an additional step Wednesday and said the economic warfare is intended to achieve a political goal. A government spokesman, who couldn't be named as a matter of policy, told McClatchy that authorities will continue to ease the blockade but "could not lift the embargo altogether as long as Hamas remains in control" of Gaza.

Read more...

Need another reason to hate Ayn Rand? I don't, but here's one for the hell of it:

Read more...

Noor in the news...STILL?

How long can the craze last? MBC correspondent Nadia Bilbassy-Charters keeps it alive - and discusses a few new soaps taking Noor's place - on Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel.

Since Noor's inception in 2006, there have been a slew of other Turkish soaps on Arab screens, the latest of which, Asi, is an adaption of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. Its main leading characters were played by two rising stars, Murat Yildirim and Tuba Buyukustun. Both are becoming instant celebrities in the Arab world, with some reports even suggesting that one of them was requested for an audience with a member of the Saudi royalty. The soaps' success lay on several elements: the quality of production, the stories of ordinary people wrapped in glamorous lifestyles, and the easy-to-listen-to Syrian accent in which these soaps are dubbed. The Turkish actors in these shows have become known throughout the Arab world by their translated character names -- whether "Muhanned," "Amir," "Lamis," or "Noor" -- and many viewers don't even know their real Turkish names.

The broader impact of the story is that a simple television production can be utilized as a potent social tool to effect change and influence thinking -- and in the process win a few million hearts and minds. And Turkish soaps are not just about romance, glamour, and secular values wrapped under a Muslim banner. A new soap with more overt political overtones has recently gone on air on MBC (where I am a reporter). Sarkhet Hajar as it is known in Arabic (Cry of a Stone) is the latest Turkish soap causing a frenzy among the Arab viewers. It depicts the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, and it looks like a dramatization of a daily news bulletin. In response, blogs and websites have been going wild debating its influence. It was filmed in Turkey, the West Bank, and even inside the al-Aqsa mosque. Although it mainly focuses on the suffering of Palestinian civilians, it also digs deep into the division among the Palestinian factions and talks about taboo issues such as honor killings. It even dares to raise the hitherto unthinkable: a love story between an Israeli Shin Bet officer and a beautiful young Palestinian activist.

Read more...

God's gift, His violence; God loves violence. Why else would there be so much of it? It's in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. We wage war. We burn sacrifices. We pillage and tear at the flesh of our brothers. We fill great fields with our stinking dead. And why? To show Him that we've learned from His example. God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honor. There is no moral order as pure as this storm we've just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this - can my violence conquer yours?

Shutter Island (2010)

Read more...