US, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to hold meeting on Syria
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October 21, 2015, 6:39 PM (IDT)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will hold a joint meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Turkey in Vienna on Friday to discuss the situation in Syria, Russia's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
October 21, 2015, 6:59 PM (IDT)
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Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old who gained national recognition after he was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school that was mistaken for a bomb, has decided with his family to leave the United States for Qatar.
According to a friend, the family made the decision while Ahmed was in Washington, D.C., earlier this week to attend a White House event and meet President Obama, the Washington Postreported. The teenager spent Monday evening at the White House’s Astronomy Night, where he mingled with stars of the science community and chatted with Obama while onlookers snapped pictures.
His family announced in a press release Tuesday that Ahmed had accepted a scholarship to the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development and that they will move to Qatar so he can attend school there. The family friend said that they will leave the United States next week.
Ahmed was awarded the full scholarship, along with other offers, after the clock incident. He and his family visited the foundation earlier this month.
“After careful consideration of all the generous offers received, we would like to announce that we have accepted a kind offer from Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) for Ahmed to join the prestigious QF Young Innovators Program, which reflects the organization’s on-going dedication to empowering young people and fostering a culture of innovation and creativity,” the family said in the release, which also carried a statement from Ahmed himself.
“I loved the city of Doha because it’s so modern. I saw so many amazing schools there, many of them campuses of famous American universities. The teachers were great. I think I will learn a lot and have fun too,” Ahmed said.
The 14-year-old was the subject of national attention in September when he was arrested after bringing a digital clock he made to his Texas high school that teachers mistook for a bomb, leading many to allege that he was religiously profiled. Some have theorized that Ahmed and his family intentionally orchestrated the arrest to get attention. His father, a Sudanese immigrant to the United States, once ran for president there.
Ahmed’s encounter with Obama followed one last week with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, an accused war criminal.
The post ‘Clock Boy’ Decides to Leave US After Meeting Obama appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.
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The godfather of Russia’s military intervention in Syria is Yevgeny Primakov, a former prime minister, intelligence chief and for decades his nation’s leading Arabist. A hint of Primakov’s influence on President Vladimir Putin came in the unusual eulogy that Putin delivered at his friend’s funeral in Moscow four months ago.
“Primakov had global vision and was open and bold in his thinking,” Putin told mourners. By asserting Russia’s interests and power, Primakov “got the country through a very serious crisis” after the fall of the Soviet Union. His understanding of the Middle East was “tremendous” and his influence beyond Russia was “undeniable,” Putin said.
“Many spoke with him, sought his advice, shared with him their plans and actions,” Putin said. “I can say that this applies in full measure to myself, too.”
Putin is now moving with a determination that Primakov would have admired — but might also have seen as risky. By sending Russian warplanes, troops and tanks to Syria, Putin has launched what is one of Russia’s boldest military moves since 1945. He has begun to restore Primakov’s dream of Russian influence in the Arab world, but at a cost of assuming the burden of fighting Muslim extremism, an effort that has been draining for the U.S.
Primakov symbolized the idea that Russian power was not dead in the post-Soviet era, and that Moscow was not a permanent junior partner to Washington. His defining moment came in 1999, when as prime minister he turned around his plane on the way to the U.S. and flew home after learning that NATO would be intervening militarily in Kosovo soon, against Russian wishes.
Russians called the mid-Atlantic course reversal the “Primakov loop.” The message was that Russia might be too weak to stop U.S. military action, but it wouldn’t meekly submit to U.S. dictation.
The newspaper Izvestia published a eulogy for Primakov that stressed his role in asserting Russia’s independence and dignity in those days of national despair. “He managed to stop this humiliating slide of Russia toward the status of a country ‘in receivership,’ and to reformat our foreign policy, restoring honor and decency.”
Primakov’s specialty was the Arab world. He was Russia’s premier handler of its two chief Arab clients, the Assad regime in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Over Primakov’s career, when U.S. power in the Middle East, anchored by Israel, was on the rise, a moribund Russia lost one ally after another. This started with its expulsion from Egypt in 1972 and continued as regimes in Iraq and Libya were toppled.
Putin decided to stand his ground in Syria, as Primakov had probably counseled. Russia’s intervention there has been advancing in slow motion for months, but U.S. analysts seem to have missed its military dimension and consequences. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed greater Russian diplomatic involvement in the region after Moscow’s generally helpful role in the Iran nuclear talks. They apparently didn’t anticipate that Russia would seek to bolster President Bashar Assad on the battlefield as a prelude to any diplomacy.
Putin was hardly ambiguous about his intentions. He said in his Sept. 28 speech to the U.N: “It is now obvious that the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa led to emergence of anarchy areas. … We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face-to-face.”
For America, military intervention in Iraq was a “war of choice.” But in Putin’s mind, fighting the Islamic State seems to be an existential matter, for a Russia with a large and growing Muslim population.
If Russia really means to be the enforcer against the Islamic State, this could mean a fundamental change in power relations in the Middle East — with Russia bidding to become protector not just of Assad, but of a Europe that is frightened about terrorism, refugees and energy supplies.
At the U.N. in September, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi asked Putin if he was serious about taking on the jihadis. According to an Iraqi official, Putin answered that he was serious about dealing with the threat posed by 2,000 Russians who have joined the Islamic State.
Primakov dreamed about reviving Russian power in the Middle East and globally. Putin is now doing it, and it’s a change, fraught with danger for Russia and America both, that could alter the balance of power in the region and beyond.
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By sending Russian warplanes, troops and tanks to Syria, Putin has begun to restore Primakov’s dream of Russian influence in the Arab world, but at a cost of assuming the burden of fighting Muslim extremism, an effort that has been draining for the U.S.
Most Americans still think of Barack Obama as a foreign policy idealist. That is certainly how he presents himself: Just replay the tape of his recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
Some argue, he said, “for a return to the rules that applied for most of human history … the belief that power is a zero-sum game; that might makes right; that strong states must impose their will on weaker ones; that the rights of individuals don’t matter; and that in a time of rapid change, order must be imposed by force.”
The president said he would much rather “work with other nations under the mantle of international norms and principles and law.” He prefers “resolving disputes through international law, not the law of force.” Yet that speech ended oddly. Having berated both Russia and Iran for their misdeeds, Obama invited them to work with him to resolve the Syrian civil war. “Realism,” he concluded, “dictates that compromise will be required to end the fighting and ultimately stamp out [the Islamic State].”
Wait — realism? Isn’t that the hard-nosed — not to say amoral — approach to foreign policy commonly associated with Henry Kissinger? Having spent much of the last decade writing a life of Kissinger, I no longer think of the former secretary of state as the heartless grandmaster of realpolitik. (That’s a caricature.) But after reading countless critiques of his record, not least the late Christopher Hitchens’ influential “Trial of Henry Kissinger,” I also find myself asking another question: Where are the equivalent critiques of Obama?
Hitchens’ case against Kissinger, which is as grandiloquent as it is thinly documented, can be summed up as follows: He was implicated in the killing of civilians through the bombing of Cambodia and North Vietnam. He failed to prevent massacres in Bangladesh and East Timor. He fomented a military coup in Chile. Also on Hitchens’ charge sheet: the wiretapping of colleagues.
In history, no two cases are alike. The Cold War is over. The technology of the 2010s is a lot more sophisticated than the technology of the 1970s. Still, this president’s record makes one itch to read “The Trial of Barack Obama.”
Take the administration’s enthusiastic use of drones, a key feature of Obama’s shift from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism. According to figures from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes authorized by the Obama administration have killed 3,570 to 5,763 people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan, of whom 400 to 912 were civilians and at least 82 were children.
And those are just the strikes by unmanned aircraft. The Oct. 3 attack on an Afghan hospital run by Doctors Without Borders is a reminder that U.S. pilots also stand accused of killing civilians, not only in Afghanistan but also (since August 2014) in Iraq and Syria. One estimate puts the civilian victims of the U.S.-led air war against the Islamic State at 450.
This is a lawyerly administration, so it insists on the legality of its actions, even when drones kill U.S. citizens. But not everyone is convinced. In the words of Amnesty International, “U.S. drone strike policy appears to allow extrajudicial executions in violation of the right to life, virtually anywhere in the world.”
Critics such as Hitchens also hold Kissinger accountable for lives lost as an indirect result of U.S. policy. So what about the number of lives lost as an indirect result of Obama’s policy in the Middle East, where he helped topple a dictator in Libya but failed to do so in Syria? Estimates vary, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the death toll of the Syrian civil war at 330,000, of whom nearly 112,000 have been civilians.
And let’s not forget Egypt, where Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has restored a military dictatorship. In 2013, el-Sissi’s first year in power, Egyptian courts handed out 464 death sentences. This year former President Mohammed Morsi — democratically elected in June 2012 and overthrown 13 months later — was sentenced to hang, along with more than 90 other Muslim Brotherhood members. Yet Obama restored U.S. military aid to Egypt in March. Help me out here: In what way does Gen. El-Sissi differ from Gen. Pinochet?
As for wiretapping, there really is no contest. Kissinger is said to have bugged 13 government officials and four reporters. Edward Snowden’s revelations make it clear that Obama is in a different league. On his watch, the National Security Agency collected not only the metadata of phone calls by 120 million Verizon subscribers but also — thanks to the PRISM surveillance program — the content of email, voice, text and video chats of an unknown number of Americans. Between April 2011 and March 2012, according to an internal NSA audit leaked by Snowden, there were 2,776 breaches of the rules supposedly governing surveillance of citizens and foreigners in the U.S. …
The president is widely seen, especially on the right, as weak. In my view, his strategy is flawed, but there is no doubting his ruthlessness when it comes to executing it. … A great many liberals today apply a double standard when they judge the foreign policies of Nobel Peace Prize laureates Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. If you think Kissinger didn’t deserve his Nobel, then neither did Obama.
Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is the author, most recently, of “Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist.”
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The president is widely seen, especially on the right, as weak. In my view, his strategy is flawed, but there is no doubting his ruthlessness when it comes to executing it.
The episode occurred shortly after takeoff from a Royal Air Force base in Lakenheath, England, about 80 miles northeast of London, the authorities said.
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The IDF’s intelligence officers of today operate on a novel battlefield, armed with a keyboard, screen, internet link and idiomatic command of the Arabic vernacular. This cyber covert warrior fights under a fictional or borrowed virtual identit. He invades terrorist networks and plants false directives to deflect a Palestinian from setting out to sow terror with a knife, gun or car. He uses the same digital space as the back-alley Palestinian gangs to sow panic and confusion in terrorist ranks..
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Syrian president meets with Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss military ...
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The meeting comes weeks after Russian airstrikes have allowed Assad’s army to go on the offensive.
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Censorship and Self-Censorship Restricting Russian Media Coverage of Religious Issuesby paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, October 12 – Russian government censorship and self-censorship by editors and writers fearful of running afoul of officials are seriously restricting the coverage of religious issues and especially those involving conflicts between Russian Orthodox and others, groups not traditionally found in Russian society, and Muslims.
Those are some of the conclusions that were offered by participants at a conference on religion and the media held at Moscow State University last week and that were confirmed by a survey of 128 Russian journalists about their experiences in writing on religious questions in recent months (rbc.ru/politics/20/10/2015/56250ec19a7947072122fb0f).
The survey was conducted by Yevgeny Onegin of the Healthy Thought Foundation which promotes the ideas of secularism. He interviewed 96 Orthodox journalists, 13 Muslim journalists and 19 who did not declare a religion about their experiences with censorship and self-censorship in media outlets.
He reported that 119 of the 128 said that they had been told by editors after the adoption of the law on protecting the religious feelings of Russians that they should not make reference in their articles to “religion, religious problems, traditions or about various forms of the manifestation of the absence of faith.”
Specifically, they were told not to use the words “God,” “Allah” or “atheist.”
Editors are so worried about falling afoul of the law that they have even gone into their archives and changed the titles and subtitles of articles that mentioned these or other words in their titles in previously published materials as much as several years’ old, the journalists reported.
Judging from the comments of those surveyed, editors at entertainment outlets are even more strict about this than are those at news ones, Onegin said. Thus sports journalists have been enjoined against any reference to God such as suggestions that God helped this or that sports participant to win.
108 of the journalists said they were now afraid to report about any clashes between Russian Orthodox faithful and others; 63 said they avoided any reference to atheism or lack of faith; and 29 said they were now avoiding reviews of religious activities altogether Orthodox, Muslim or any other.
Speaking to the group, Nikolay Svanidze, a journalist who is also a member of the Presidential Human Rights Council, said that he personally hadn’t encountered censorship of religious stories but that he was “certain” that there is such censorship and that it is having “very serious” consequences.
“But stronger than censorship,” he suggested, “is self-censorship” because editors are afraid of getting in trouble. And Svanidze added, “censorship on religious themes is now not so obvious as on those of domestic or foreign policy such as references to ‘the first person of the state or our main opponent who is officially called a partner, the US.”
Another participant in the meeting expressed what appears to be the view of many: “the law defending the feelings of believers imposes criminal penalties. It is thus entirely natural that a journalist will reflect 100 times before writing anything on a religious theme.”
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