Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Saudis Dominate Among Suicide-Bombers

Eric ZUESSE
Numerous studies show that one nation dominates above all others as a steady source of jihadists: Saudi Arabia.
On 15 July 2007. the Los Angeles Times headlined from Baghdad «Saudis' Role in Iraq Insurgency Outlined: Sunni extremists from Saudi Arabia make up half the foreign fighters in Iraq, many suicide bombers, a U.S. official says».
Ned Parker reported there: «Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers. About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said».
A December 2007 study by West Point Military Academy, «Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq», found that, "Saudi Arabia was by far the most common nationality of the fighters’ in this sample; 41% (244) of the 595 records that included the fighter’s nationality indicated they were of Saudi Arabian origin». Almost half of those 41% came from two cities: Riyadh, the political capital; and Mecca, the religious capital. 56% of jihadist recruits were assigned to be «suicide bombers»; 42% were assigned to be «fighters».
This study also summarized the findings by earlier studies, most of which had found likewise that Saudi Arabia was by far the champion source, such as a 2005 Israeli study by Reuven Paz, which examined Iraqi jihadist websites during a two-month period, and found 154 ‘martyrs’ celebrated, of whom 61% were Saudis.
A June 2014 study, «Foreign Fighters in Syria», by Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group, found that, based upon the official estimates of governments regarding the approximate number of their citizens who had left to fight abroad as jihadists, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia were by far the main suppliers, comprising, almost equally between the two of them, about 45% of the approximately 11,000 foreign jihadists fighting in Syria. 
A September 2016 study by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, «Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq», was exceptional, in that it reported the predominance of Tunisian jihadists:
According to open source analyses of available foreign fighter statistics, 12 countries make up at least 75 per cent of the foreign fighter contingent in Syria. Tunisia (with 6000–7000 fighters), Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and Russia (around 2500 each), and France and Morocco (1500–1700 each) account for the bulk of the source countries. Indonesia, Egypt, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Lebanon are estimated to have provided between 500 and 1000 fighters each.
After the 2011 revolution in Tunisia, the country’s fundamentalist Sunnis (called ’Wahhabis’ inside Saudi Arabia, and ’Salafis’ everywhere else) — who everywhere constitute the vast majority (if not all) of jihadists — were virtually driven out; and thousands of them were attracted to Syria and Iraq, so as to live and die there in the way that they had wished everyone to live and die in Tunisia: to establish in those lands the Islamic dictatorship that they had been rejected by Tunisia for propounding after the revolution. 
On 28 March 2016, George Packer in the New Yorker headlined «Exporting Jihad» and he explained that, «In 2013, faced with a state crackdown, the Salafis went underground, and young men and women began disappearing… Mohamed, who grew up there, said, 'The friends I was studying with in high school and boxing with — ninety per cent have gone, and not to Italy. They went to Syria and Iraq. There are no longer any young people.’» This is the reason why there was a sudden burst of jihadists pouring out from Tunisia after 2011.
But Saudi Arabia — the font of fundamentalist Sunni belief worldwide, and biggest global funder of fundamentalist Sunni clergy and of jihadists generally — has been the biggest steady source of jihadists, ever since at least 1979, when the born Polish nobleman, the American Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, came up with the idea of the U.S. and Saudi governments’ sponsoring Al Qaeda and other jihadist organizations to infiltrate and take over Afghanistan and other countries that the U.S. aristocracy and the Saudi royal family, want to control. This tactic was then seen as being the cheapest means of foreign conquest, because jihadists readily become human bombs that can blow up precise targets which would otherwise be expensive to destroy by means of a traditionally armed invasion.
The Lowy Institute study projected an end soon to ISIS, but warned about the accompanying bad outcome for Western countries: «the generation of a new cohort of  jihadist fighters from around the world. Those fighters are now starting to leave those conflicts, a process that will probably accelerate in the coming months and years, taking with them the lethal skills and connections forged in Syria and Iraq»
The customary term for this is «blowback». Some countries view jihadists as a cheap army of conquest, but others view them as dangerous pests to be simply exterminated. Of course, the countries that view them as a cheap method of conquest are favorable toward, and assisting, only jihadists who are fighting to overthrow their target countries, never their own land. (The Sauds, for example, don’t want any jihadists fighting against themselves.)
Blowback occurs when the «pests» that have been so nurtured, turn around and attack their sponsoring nation. In such instances, the leadership in the attacking nation — that sponsoring nation — needs to make at least a show of attacking and killing some leaders of the renegade group of jihadists who have turned against their own sponsors. Thus, the tactic of sponsoring jihadist armies can get out of control and produce hard-to-predict consequences.
Here is how Jason Manning explained, in his 2015 «Suicide Attacks and the Social Structure of Sacrifice», the blowback mechanism:
Foreign invasion and occupation involves one nation subjugating and dominating another, and so is a massive increase in inequality that often causes suicide attacks. Political scientist Robert Pape (2006)  may overstate the case when he says every campaign of suicide bombing is the result of foreign occupation, but subsequent research confirms that it drastically increases the odds of such attacks (see, e.g., Collard-Wexler et al., 2013 ). A large part of the «humiliation» and «dishonor» that occur during military occupations stems from unwanted contact and invasions of privacy, such as having one’s home searched for weapons or being frisked at a security checkpoint (Hafez, 2007 , pp. 142 145). Invasion causes such severe conflict because it not only increases inequality, but also intimacy, producing a sudden reduction in relational distance (Black, 2011 , pp. 22 23). Thus any foreign presence may spark grievances, even if it does not occur by force.
These resentments can be channeled by the aristocracy into focusing against whatever targets are being preached against by the clergy that the aristocrats fund and provide privileges to. By directing the clergy, the population become channeled into the desired pathways, and jihadists can be manipulated to fight against the desired target.
In this way, jihadists are tools of aristocrats in one country or group of countries, to conquer other countries. But, like any weapons, jihadists must be used with great caution, lest they spark rebellion by the domestic population within the attacking country. This, for example, is the reason why the Presidents of the United States, in both Parties — Bush after 2000, and Obama after 2008 — have been doing everything they can to hide their own participations in perpetrating and-or covering up their sponsorship of jihadists, such as Obama’s co-sponsorship along with the Sauds of ‘moderate’ jihadists in Syria, and Bush’s co-sponsorship along with the Sauds of Al Qaeda in America.
If the public begin to notice what has been happening, then such tactics will have unintended and undesired consequences. Obama is right now trying to continue the cover-up of the Sauds’ (and Bush’s) behind-the-scenes roles in the 9/11 attacks, because this cover-up protects the aristocracy in each of the two countries. The U.S. Congress has continued with it until now, because none of them was likely to lose his seat for doing so; but, now, continuing further to protect the Sauds would be difficult if not impossible to ‘justify’ to voters back home. The key indicator here for the future, is that neither of the two Presidential candidates is condemning the current President for his vetoing the bill that would lift the legal immunity of the Saud family.
That fact indicates a likely continuation of the culture of aristocratic immunity, which pervades the current U.S. government. This is what one would expect in an oligarchy: there are two classes of people — those who make and stand above and immune from the law, and those who suffer and stand below the law and upon whom it is imposed. It’s the modern version of the master-serf relationship. This describes not only Saudi Arabia, but also the United States, though in different ways, and in differing degrees (because Saudi Arabia is even more of a dictatorship than is the U.S.).
These two nations’ aristocracies are bonded together at the hip. The U.S. President, as their representative (and, of course, especially the representative of America’s aristocracy), is even willing to fight to continue the legal immunity of the Saudi royal family, after 9/11. For some reason, it’s not even hurting him in U.S. opinion polls. Obama apparently has reputational immunity, and not merely legal immunity. He is, after all, protecting not only the chief financial backers of Al Qaeda and of other jihadist groups, but also the world’s chief instigators and sources of jihadists. 
In the latest Gallup poll, 51% approve of his job-performance, and 45% disapprove. For comparison, the job-performance of Congress (which is controlled by the ‘opposite’ Party) is 18% approve, and 78% disapprove. The latest favorability rating of «Saudi Arabia» was polled among Americans in 2014, and it was 35% favorable, and 57% unfavorable. 

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Video: Obama gives $38 billion to Israel as Americans struggle

RANIA KHALEK

On Wednesday I spoke with Jaisal Noor of The Real News about the Obama administration signing a $38 billion military aid pact with Israel. It is the largest military aid package for any country in US history.
I was joined by Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, who noted that the aid deal has nothing to do with Israel’s security needs, as government officials say, but rather enables Israel’s ongoing theft of Palestinian land and prolongs military occupation.
And as I wrote in an article earlier this week, Obama’s bloated giveaway prioritizes arming Israel above meeting the basic needs of millions of poor and working Americans who are struggling to feed their families.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Last tango in Riyadh

By: Hossein Askari

Saudi prince






TEHRAN, 
In 2015, Salman bin Abdul-Aziz ascended the throne of Saudi Arabia. He wasted little time in turning his tribe’s long-held rule of succession, designed to maintain tribal harmony.
On its head, by nudging aside the Crown Prince and imposing a nephew as the new Crown Prince and making his 30-year old son Deputy Crown Prince and effective day-to-day ruler of the realm and ahead of hundreds of senior princes.
The young Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, now all of 31 years, wasted no time in essentially admitting much of what those outside the Al-Saud tribe have said for years: (i) the Saudi model of inefficient consumer and input subsidies, lavish military outlays, bloated public sector as employer of last resort and other wasteful expenditures is not sustainable, especially now, in the face of low oil prices and the accelerated global transition to non-carbon energy sources; (ii) bankruptcy looms in 10-15 years if they continue on this path; (iii) a thriving and productive private sector is needed to replace the over sized public sector and to provide good jobs for the rapidly growing labor force, which should include women; (iv) the public sector must be weaned from oil revenues, and increasingly, oil revenues need to be channeled into a super sovereign wealth fund to replace the oil capital in the ground that is being depleted and that is the birthright of all generations of Saudis; (v) transparency in policy making and its implementation must be initiated; (vi) taxation (possibly Value Added or a VAT system that taxes consumption) is needed to provide revenues for the government in place of oil revenues; (vii) most public assets, possibly including oil resources, must be privatized; and last, and most important of all, (viii) the country must develop institutions (a collection of rules, including the rule of law) that support the private sector, afford confidence, lower business transaction costs and encourage investment, both domestic and from abroad.
Prince Mohammad embraced a report from the management-consulting firm of McKinsey and Company, entitled Vision 2030 (available on the internet), as his blueprint. While we agree with the report’s broad recommendations, there is a glaring omission in the report. How can the young prince put these recommendations into practice and build the institutions that must be at their foundation?
What are the major issues and hurdles when it comes to implementation?

Has the Al-Saud clan bought into Prince Mohammad’s rapid ascension or will they depose him when his father dies? To us the answer is clear, but we leave this to the reader’s imagination, without even a reference to Shakespeare.
Has the prince had sufficient dialogue with all the important constituencies to persuade them to buy into the plan? Namely, are the members of the Al-Saud clan including his own father, older cousins and even older brothers ready to abandon their obscene lifestyle and cut their access to the treasury? Are the Al-Sauds and their cronies ready to see their rent-seeking (corrupt) business activities ended by institutional reform that prohibits, monitors and punishes corruption? Are ordinary Saudi citizens, who may have been willing to trade their political rights for economic security likely to accept a world of no handouts, accompanied by taxation with a vague promise of jobs in the future? Will they accept a no handout and no subsidy approach when for 45 years or so others before them had it so good? Will they accept hardship while they watch the Al Sauds and their cronies enjoy the ill-gotten fortunes they have amassed? Will the pampered military accept the cutbacks? Again, we leave what are human reactions to the reader’s judgment.
At this point, an obvious comment is in order. It is always much easier to give handouts than to take them back, especially when it comes to handouts that have been doled out for a long time and are ingrained into the social fabric, which an entire citizenry have come to expect as their birthright.
As we have said, institutional reform must be at the foundation of Prince Mohammad’s vision. Can he establish institutions (essentially the rules of the economic game with the aim of reducing business transaction costs) that include a legal system that is fair and just, where all Saudis are equal before the law; with transparency in public decision-making; sound business regulations, their monitoring and enforcement; the protection of private property; contract enforcement; and a tax system that is accepted as fair and is universally enforced. We do not see even the beginning of such institution building.
If the above is considered in its totality, one thing should resonate. Namely, these initiatives and reforms are a pipe dream without accompanying political reform. Is the Al-Saud clan willing to consider political reforms that would strip them of their “inherited rights” for long-term survival? Are they willing to accept a timetable toward a constitutional monarchy, with representative governance? Again, we want the reader to decide but with a little reminder about the Al-Saud mindset. Al-Saud princes believe one fact in their heart of hearts—their father, grandfather, great grandfather or their great great grandfather, as the case may be, took over the land with about forty men, swords, knives and treachery, and Saudi Arabia is theirs—it is their “ranch.” Now the reader should decide if peaceful political reform is possible.
In short, we do not believe that Vision 2030 can be peacefully and effectively implemented. Instead, Saudi Arabia will implode. When it implodes, will the US and the UK come to the rescue of their Al-Saud clients? We believe not. The US and the others have made thousands of hollow speeches in support of human rights and representative governance, but they have continued to support their client as long as they buy arms and do their bidding. The West has shed crocodile tears for the death of civilians and the plight of refugees, yet it continues to sell Saudi Arabia bombs that kill and maim civilians in Yemen. The duplicity of Western powers is beyond the pale. Yet the day when they see the end at hand, they will extricate themselves rapidly as they have no stomach for another Middle Eastern civil war or conflict, especially now that oil matters less.
Prince Mohammad is to be applauded for at least acknowledging the sand that is the foundation of the Saudi system. Saudi Arabia will be wrenched apart. It does not afford sound and long-term business opportunities. Any publicly held company that commits a significant part of its capital to investing in the Al-Saud quicksand would surely deserve to be taken to court by its stockholders.




Hossein Askari is an Economist, Professor of Business and International Affairs at GW University, writer on Middle East Economies and Islamic economics-finance

Friday, September 16, 2016

Why Does the United States Give So Much Money to Israel?

The two countries just signed a new military-aid deal—the biggest pledge of its kind in American history. It have may seemed inevitable, but the record-setting moment is also rife with irony.
U.S. and Israeli officials sign an unprecedented military-spending
deal in Washington, D.C., on September 14.


The United States and Israel have made it official: The two countries signed a new 10-year military-assistance deal on Wednesday, representing the single largest pledge of its kind in American history. The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007. The diplomatic and military alliance between the two countries is longstanding: Even prior to this week, Israel was, according to the Congressional Research Service, “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.” In many ways, Wednesday’s deal seemed predestined.

Yet, it’s also ironic. Barack Obama has a notoriously cold relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—as my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic’s April cover story, “Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict “that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so.” Nonetheless, Obama will leave office having out-pledged all of his predecessors in military support to the country Netanyahu now runs.

Aid to Israel is among the only static issues of this U.S. election season. While the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made somewhat mixed statements on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he has also made strongly worded promises to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Israel. For her part, the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has consistently touted her support for Israel, including during her time as secretary of state.
Voters, however, have more mixed views on this kind of support. While more than 60 percent of Americans were more sympathetic to Israel than the Palestinians in a 2016 Gallup poll, sympathies differed along partisan lines, with around half of Democrats being more sympathetic to Israelis versus nearly 80 percent of Republicans. In a separate Brookings poll, roughly half of Democrats who responded said Israel has too much influence on the United States government. Boycott, divest, and sanction movements, which call on organizations in the United States and abroad to cut their financial ties with Israel, have long been popular on college campuses, although somewhat marginal; this year, however, they got a boost from the Black Lives Matter movement, which included statements against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its recently released policy platform.
In general, young Americans are far less sympathetic toward Israel than their older peers: A 2014 Gallup poll found that only half of those aged 18 to 34 favored Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, “compared with 58 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds and 74 percent of those 55 and older.” Bernie Sanders, who was extremely popular among young people during the Democratic primary season, controversially criticized Israel, winning “applause and cheers” from the audience at one debate for saying, “If we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”
All of this creates an odd backdrop for a historic military-spending deal. No matter how bad the relationship between the two countries’ top leaders, no matter who gets elected to the White House, no matter how loudly some voters voice their opposition or how charged the underlying ideological debate: The United States has pragmatic reasons to keep providing large sums of money for Israel’s military.
There are straightforward explanations for why this particular deal got done. Politically, the spending package was partly a response to the nuclear deal that the United States and other world powers finalized with Iran in July of last year, and which Obama hailed as cutting off Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons for more than a decade. Netanyahu was harshly critical of that agreement, which he called a “historic mistake” that would ease sanctions on Iran while leaving it with the ability to one day get the bomb. “Even with the deal in place, and taking the nuclear-weapon capability of Iran off the table at least for the next 10 to 15 years, there are still considerable destabilizing activities that Iranians are pursuing in the region that are not consistent with U.S. or Israeli interests or objectives,” said Melissa Dalton, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The new money is an attempt to pacify Israeli concerns about continued threats from Iran, she added.

The money is also an attempt to satisfy congressional Republicans. The Obama administration reportedly asked Netanyahu to get Lindsey Graham, the head of the Senate foreign-affairs appropriations committee, to agree to the deal. After it was signed, though, Graham released a statement indicating that Congress would not necessarily adhere to the pre-determined funding levels. “I find it odd the [Memorandum] only allocates $500 million for missile defense starting in 2018,” he wrote, especially “given provocative Iranian behavior [and] improved Iranian missile technology.” While this may be the U.S.’s biggest-ever military-aid deal, the GOP has pushed for even greater spending.
Defenders of the deal would say it’s necessary. Dalton described the uptick in spending as a natural extension of the long-standing relationship between the United States and Israel, “as well as close ties between those countries and their peoples.” She described the “fraught neighborhood” surrounding Israel: war-torn Syria to the northeast, Hezbollah-influenced Lebanon to the north, and an Islamist insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai to the south, all of which help explain the historically high promise of $5 billion in missile funding over the next 10 years. As National Security Advisor Susan Rice said at the signing ceremony for the deal, “This MOU is not just good for Israel, it’s good for the United States. Our security is linked. When allies and partners like Israel are more secure, the United States is more secure.”
The deal also directs more money back toward the United States. It eliminates a provision in the previous aid agreement that allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of its Foreign Military Financing on weaponry and other resources produced within Israel, rather than in the United States—a provision intended to help Israel build its own defense industry. Now that Israel’s defense industry has developed, Dalton said, that money will go toward purchases benefitting the defense industry in the United States.
While the United States’s new Memorandum of Understanding with Israel is historic in its own right, it’s most remarkable in its apparent inevitability: It is a foreign-policy move seemingly immune to the electoral politics around it. “At the end of the day, we’re electing people to make judgments based on the information and the advice that the receive,” Dalton said. “One of the inputs to that process, certainly, is popular opinion. But I don’t think it should be the sole determinant of foreign policy.” In its own way, that’s a good explanation of why America’s aid to Israel is so big: Military spending does not go up or down in direct relationship to votes or even the news cycle. In this case, it was a record set as if it were on an unstoppable trend line.
EMMA GREEN is a staff writer at ​The Atlantic, where she covers politics, policy, and religion.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Obama hands Israel the largest military aid deal in history

RANIA KHALEK

Why is Obama showering Israel with billions more in military aid? 

 Pete SouzaThe White House
The Obama administration has signed a $38 billion military aid pact with Israel in what the State Department boasts is the “single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in US history.”
The record agreement will provide Israel with $3.8 billion annually over 10 years beginning in 2019, up from $3.1 billion under the current deal.
At a time when the US government supposedly can’t afford to provide poor and working Americans with basic services like universal health care – something Israelis enjoy – it is striking that there is always money available to enable Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestine.
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who has expressed opposition to universal health care and free college tuition, cheered the aid deal.
“Senator [Tim] Kaine and I applaud the agreement on a new memorandum of understanding regarding American security assistance to Israel,” said Clinton in a statement released by her campaign.
Clinton also used the deal as an opportunity to saber-rattle against Iran, show off her military hawkishness against ISIS and reiterate her commitment to combating growing activism against Israel’s criminal conduct, which Israel refers to as “delegitimization.”
“The agreement will help solidify and chart a course for the US-Israeli defense relationship in the 21st century as we face a range of common challenges, from Iran’s destabilizing activities to the threats from ISIS and radical jihadism, and efforts to delegitimize Israel on the world stage,” she said, reiterating her January promise to “take our relationship to the next level.”

“Legacy”

President Barack Obama didn’t have to do this. It’s not as though he needs to appease the Israel lobby. He isn’t running for re-election.
And Americans, especially liberal and younger Democrats, are increasingly opposed to Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights.
In fact, with just a few months left in office, Obama was uniquely positioned to use massive US leverage to pressure Israel into halting its crimes against the Palestinians. At the very least, he could have refrained from upping the ante.
So why then is he showering Israel with more weapons?
“Obama’s aides want a new deal before his presidency ends, seeing it as an important part of his legacy. Republican critics accuse him of not being attentive enough to Israel’s security, which the White House strongly denies,” reported Reuters.
And what a legacy it will be.
Obama has doomed Palestinians to an extra decade of suffocating repression, ethnic cleansing and periodic slaughter at the hands of a government increasingly made up of racists, fascists and genocide enthusiasts whose demagoguery rivals that of Donald Trump.
The idea of funneling even more weapons to Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, who called for beheading Palestinian citizens of Israel for disloyalty to the state, is alarming.
Lieberman is currently executing a campaign of collective punishment against the families and towns of Palestinians accused of committing crimes against Israelis.
Lieberman works alongside people like Ayelet Shaked, who was appointed justice minister after endorsing a genocidal call to slaughter Palestinian mothers in their beds to prevent them from birthing “little snakes.”
During his administration, Obama has responded to this rising fanaticism among Israeli senior leadership officials with more weapons and diplomatic cover.
With this latest aid deal Obama is guaranteeing the capacity of people like Lieberman and Shaked to carry out their eliminationist goals long after he leaves office.
But surely Palestinians will understand the importance of their sacrifice in advancing Obama’s appeasement of his right-wing critics. After all, Obama’s legacy is at stake.

Contradictions

The signing of the deal comes just days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused those opposed to Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank – built in flagrant violation of international law – of supporting the ethnic cleansing of Jews.
In a rare move, the US State Department rebuked Netanyahu, noting that Israel is the one forcibly displacing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to make room for settlements.
Such concerns ring hollow in light of the new deal, which is unconditional as far as human rights violations are concerned.

“Concessions”?

Media outlets are describing certain stipulations in the aid deal, which took some 10 months to negotiate, as “major” “concessions” on Israel’s part.
Past deals have allowed Israel to spend 26.3 percent of US military aid on its own weapons industry. The new memorandum of understanding gradually reduces that amount, ultimately requiring Israel to purchase only from US weapons companies. In essence, it’s a gigantic giveaway to the US defense industry.
This particular Israeli “concession” won’t halt the destruction of Palestine, but it does represent a minor setback for Israel’s defense industry, which anticipates hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue as a result.
“We in the defense industry stand to lose $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion a year, including the $500 million Congress has allocated for special projects,” an Israeli defense industry source complained to the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz last month in reference to the measure.
The deal also includes an Israeli pledge to stop lobbying Congress for supplemental missile defense funding, which in recent years has accounted for as much as an additional $600 million for Israel in discretionary US funding each year.
But there are loopholes.
The pledge is “expected to be made in a side letter or annex to the agreement” and the “wording is likely to be flexible enough to allow exceptions in case of a war or other major crisis,” according to Reuters.
Whether it is US or Israeli weapons makers who benefit, Palestinians lose.
As Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, put it, “increasing the military aid package is rewarding destructive Israeli behavior that violates longstanding official US policy and international law. As a result, the US is effectively underwriting Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies towards the Palestinians.”
Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Let Us Rid the World of Wahhabism: Iran’s Foreign Minister

Public relations firms with no qualms about taking tainted petrodollars are experiencing a bonanza. Their latest project has been to persuade us that the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, is no more. As a Nusra spokesman told CNN, the rebranded rebel group, supposedly separated from its parent terrorist organization, has become “moderate.”

Thus is fanaticism from the Dark Ages sold as a bright vision for the 21st century. The problem for the P.R. firms’ wealthy, often Saudi, clients, who have lavishly funded Nusra, is that the evidence of their ruinous policies can’t be photoshopped out of existence. If anyone had any doubt, the recent video images of other “moderates” beheading a 12-year-old boy were a horrifying reality check.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, militant Wahhabism has undergone a series of face-lifts, but underneath, the ideology remains the same — whether it’s the Taliban, the various incarnations of Al Qaeda or the so-called Islamic State, which is neither Islamic nor a state. But the millions of people faced with the Nusra Front’s tyranny are not buying the fiction of this disaffiliation. Past experience of such attempts at whitewashing points to the real aim: to enable the covert flow of petrodollars to extremist groups in Syria to become overt, and even to lure Western governments into supporting these “moderates.” The fact that Nusra still dominates the rebel alliance in Aleppo flouts the public relations message.

Saudi Arabia’s effort to persuade its Western patrons to back its shortsighted tactics is based on the false premise that plunging the Arab world into further chaos will somehow damage Iran. The fanciful notions that regional instability will help to “contain” Iran, and that supposed rivalries between Sunni and Shiite Muslims are fueling conflicts, are contradicted by the reality that the worst bloodshed in the region is caused by Wahhabists fighting fellow Arabs and murdering fellow Sunnis.

While these extremists, with the backing of their wealthy sponsors, have targeted Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Shiites and other “heretics,” it is their fellow Sunni Arabs who have been most beleaguered by this exported doctrine of hate. Indeed, it is not the supposed ancient sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites but the contest between Wahhabism and mainstream Islam that will have the most profound consequences for the region and beyond.

While the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq set in motion the fighting we see today, the key driver of violence has been this extremist ideology promoted by Saudi Arabia — even if it was invisible to Western eyes until the tragedy of 9/11.

The princes in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, have been desperate to revive the regional status quo of the days of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq, when a surrogate repressive despot, eliciting wealth and material support from fellow Arabs and a gullible West, countered the so-called Iranian threat. There is only one problem: Mr. Hussein is long dead, and the clock cannot be turned back.

The sooner Saudi Arabia’s rulers come to terms with this, the better for all. The new realities in our region can accommodate even Riyadh, should the Saudis choose to change their ways.

What would change mean? Over the past three decades, Riyadh has spent tens of billions of dollars exporting Wahhabism through thousands of mosques and madrasas across the world. From Asia to Africa, from Europe to the Americas, this theological perversion has wrought havoc. As one former extremist in Kosovo told The Times, “The Saudis completely changed Islam here with their money.”

Though it has attracted only a minute proportion of Muslims, Wahhabism has been devastating in its impact. Virtually every terrorist group abusing the name of Islam — from Al Qaeda and its offshoots in Syria to Boko Haram in Nigeria — has been inspired by this death cult.

So far, the Saudis have succeeded in inducing their allies to go along with their folly, whether in Syria or Yemen, by playing the “Iran card.” That will surely change, as the realization grows that Riyadh’s persistent sponsorship of extremism repudiates its claim to be a force for stability.

The world cannot afford to sit by and witness Wahhabists targeting not only Christians, Jews and Shiites but also Sunnis. With a large section of the Middle East in turmoil, there is a grave danger that the few remaining pockets of stability will be undermined by this clash of Wahhabism and mainstream Sunni Islam.

There needs to be coordinated action at the United Nations to cut off the funding for ideologies of hate and extremism, and a willingness from the international community to investigate the channels that supply the cash and the arms. In 2013, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, proposed an initiative called World Against Violent Extremism, or WAVE. The United Nations should build on that framework to foster greater dialogue between religions and sects to counter this dangerous medieval fanaticism.

The attacks in Nice, Paris and Brussels should convince the West that the toxic threat of Wahhabism cannot be ignored. After a year of almost weekly tragic news, the international community needs to do more than express outrage, sorrow and condolences; concrete action against extremism is needed.

Though much of the violence committed in the name of Islam can be traced to Wahhabism, I by no means suggest that Saudi Arabia cannot be part of the solution. Quite the reverse: We invite Saudi rulers to put aside the rhetoric of blame and fear, and join hands with the rest of the community of nations to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and violence that threatens us all.

By Mohammad Javad Zarif, foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Source: NYTimes