The Israeli government wants to cleanse some 70,000 Beduins from their ancient land and push them into a few desolate cities. It would then give the Bedu's land to Jewish settler and some bits of compensation to the Beduins. This plan is known as the Prawer-Begin plan. The Israeli government needs the parliament to approve the plan and to assure its passage had claimed that the Beduins had agreed to it.

In fact they did not agree.

Thus, the bill passed its first reading based on the assumption that the Beduin agreed, Levin said in a letter addressed to Begin. But as it was now clear that the Beduin did not agree to the plan, it would be used as a starting point instead of as an end to their demands, he said.

The contention in the Knesset is not about ethnic cleansing or about asking the Beduins for agreement. No, those Knesset members are outraged that the Beduins would be (partly) compensated at all. They prefer to commit genocide:

Arab Knesset members were very upset during the hearing, and some were removed from the hall for disorderly conduct. UAL-Ta’al MK Taleb Abu Arar said that Begin’s comments were “proof that you are a racist – hate Arabs.”

“The law will cause an intifada in the Negev,” he pronounced.

“You want to transfer an entire population,” MK Hanna Swaid (Hadash) said.

Committee chairwoman MK Miri Regev (Likud) responded, “Yes, as the Americans did to the Indians.”

Such thought seems to have support from the U.S. Secretary of State Kerry who just a few days ago declared the non-Jewish population in Palestine to be "time bomb":

Now, I want to come back to the peace process for a moment, because there is another existential threat to Israel that diplomacy can far better address than the use of force. And I am referring to the demographic dynamic that makes it impossible for Israel to preserve its future as a democratic, Jewish state without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a two-state solution.

Force cannot defeat or defuse the demographic time bomb.

As those Palestinian and Beduin children are seen by Kerry as a bomb and a threat what else are those Zionist to do than defuse it by doing to them what "the Americans did to the Indians"?

A month ago Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, wrote about CIA analysts who threatened to resign over the Obama administration allegations about the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Syrian government:

With all evidence considered, the intelligence community found itself with numerous skeptics in the ranks, leading to sharp exchanges with the Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down.

Now Seymour Hersh writes about the case and finds that the CIA knew that Jabhat al-Nusra, a fundamentalist gang fighting the Syrian government, was capable of producing Sarin, the toxic chemical weapon that was used in a suburb of Damascus:

In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
…
[I]n recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.

MoA has maintained since the very first reports of the chemical weapon use that this attack was likely a false flag event. We also criticized allegations by the New York Times and Human Rights Watch about the origin of the rocket debris found after the attack. The new Hersh report now completely debunks those allegations.

One piece in Hersh's case about al-Nusra's capabilities to produce Sarin comes from a somewhat mysterious cable:

On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the [senior intelligence] consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin.
…
Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.

My assumption is that this cable came from Russia. But, as Hersh writes, the U.S. military had come to confirming conclusions.

The Hersh report is published in the London Review of Books, not in Hersh's usual outlet the New Yorker. According to a Buzzfeed report the piece was, at a time, supposed to be published in the Washington Post. The LRB is a reliable publication based in the United Kingdom and will surely have fact-checked Hersh's reporting. One wonders why the U.S. publications refrained from publishing his report.

In 2008 the United States Air Force promoted the slogan “Above All”. The slogan and the design of accompanying logo looked like they were derived from the Nazi German slogan “Über Alles”. The slogan and logo were soon quietly discarded.

The United States Office of National Intelligence just launched a rocket with a new spy satellite. The National Reconnaissance Office Launch 39 (NROL-39) has this mission logo.

An octopus covering every part of the world – with one tentacle especially touching Iran – and the attached slogan reads: “Nothing is beyond our reach.”

An octopus embracing the world has been used in earlier graphics.

This Nazi-time cartoon depicts Churchill as the squid, nothing beyond his reach, with the Star of David hovering above his head.

Given the ongoing global uproar about unlimited NSA spying the NROL-39 slogan is certainly somewhat tone deaf. Using the octopus covering the world symbol adds some exceptional bad taste.

He fought and won against apartheit, but neo-liberalism survived. Important parts of the The Freedom Charter remain unfullfilled. Thus the fight must continue.

Recommended: Tony Karon on Mandela: Free Mandela (From the Prison of Fantasy)!

U.S. officials are talking with commanders of new Islamic Front in Syria pretending that it is now the “moderate” alternative to Al-Qaeda:

The U.S. and its allies have held direct talks with key Islamist militias in Syria, Western officials say, aiming to undercut al Qaeda while acknowledging that religious fighters long shunned by Washington have gained on the battlefield.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia is taking its own outreach further, moving to directly arm and fund one of the Islamist groups, the Army of Islam, despite U.S. qualms.
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The Saudis and the West are pivoting toward a newly created coalition of religious militias called the Islamic Front, which excludes the main al Qaeda-linked groups fighting in Syria—the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham, known as ISIS.
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Western diplomats said their engagement with the Islamists also aims to draw the powerful militias away from the Al Nusra Front and other groups affiliated with al Qaeda.

“We believe they are groups that, if we do nothing, may go toward more radicalization,” one Western diplomat said.

This is of cause pure nonsense. The main groups that formed the Islamic Front are Liwa al-Tawhid and Ahrar al-Sham both of which are regularly sharing resources and cooperating with the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al- Nusra and the Islamic State of of Iraq and the Sham. They have the same roots and were formed before the early protests in Syria started. Both have also been implicated in several pogroms against Syrians people who do not agree with their Sharia driven program.

The only alternative to an Al-Qaeda led anarchy in Syria is a state led by the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his party. Cooperating with Assad is the only way for the west to prevent a new fanatic Islamic state at NATO’s southern border. This was already obvious two years ago when I, in February 2012, pointed out :

A Syrian state crumbling under terror followed by large sectarian slaughter and refugee streams with certain spillover of fighting into all neighboring countries. That can not be in anyone’s interest.

It is time for the west to not only step back from this cliff but to turn around and to help Assad to fight the terrorists that want to bring down his country.

Some parts of the Obama administration are finally recognizing this obvious conclusion:

“We need to start talking to the Assad regime again” about counterterrorism and other issues of shared concern, said Ryan C. Crocker, a veteran diplomat who has served in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. “It will have to be done very, very quietly. But bad as Assad is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.”

Unfortunately the White House is not (yet) listening to Crocker:

It is not clear whether or when the White House would be willing to make such an abrupt shift in approach after years of supporting the Syrian opposition and calling for Mr. Assad’s ouster. It would certainly require delicate negotiations with Middle Eastern allies who were early and eager supporters of Syrian rebel groups, notably Saudi Arabia.

I do not understand what the problem with Saudi Arabia should be. That country has no alternative but to stay under the U.S. security umbrella. The White House should tell the Saudi King Abdullah to shut down Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s mercenary terror army in Syria “or else …”.

Would the Saudis really want a fundamental confrontation with the U.S. at the same time as Iran is presenting itself as a viable alternative for U.S. influence in the Persian Gulf?

For the first time in recent history more financial trade is done in Chinese yuan than in euros. The yuan is now second but still far behind the U.S. dollar. Its rise in trade usage compared to the euro has been very recent and rapid and is certainly not yet finished. But the U.S. dollar is still second to none:

The currency had an 8.66 percent share of letters of credit and collections in October, compared with 6.64 percent for the euro, Swift said in a statement today. China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany and Australia were the top users of yuan in trade finance, according to the Belgium-based financial-messaging platform.

The yuan had the fourth-largest share of global trade finance in January 2012 with 1.89 percent, while the euro’s was the second-biggest at 7.87 percent, Swift said.
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The U.S. dollar led all currencies with an 81.08 percent share of letters of credit and collections in October, down from 84.96 percent in January 2012, according to data compiled by Swift.

The Japanese yen lost its position as one of the top three trade currencies.

These move are part of the changes in strategic balance in South-East Asia. New alliances may appear and there may even be a wider war on the horizon. This at least when one believes the predictions of realist political scientist John Mearsheimer. In an interview with the Chinese Global Times he predicts that China’s ‘Peaceful rise’ will meet US containment.

The US is now by far the most powerful state on the planet, and it is also the most powerful state in East Asia. But as China rises and becomes increasingly powerful, it will want to dominate Asia the way the US dominates the Western hemisphere. The US of course will go to great lengths to prevent China from dominating Asia. In other words, there will be an intense security competition between the two countries.

Mearsheimer does not think that China wants war but he believes that some kind of armed conflict will arise because some smaller state, likely then backed by the Unites States, will provoke a crisis. This he believes will happen sooner rather than later because China is still growing and taking it on while it is relatively weaker now is easier and less risky:

[T]here is no way that China can avoid scaring its neighbors and the US as it gets very powerful, just because it will be so big and will have so much military capability. When states look at other states and try to determine how threatening they are, they invariably focus on their capabilities, not their intentions, because you cannot know intentions. Nobody can know what China’s intentions will be in the decades ahead. But the mere fact that China is getting increasingly powerful and may someday become even more powerful than the US is naturally going to scare all the neighbors and the US.

Mearsheimer thinks that the very militarized U.S. “pivot to Asia” will be bigger than many envision for now. While that will be good news for the Middle East, Latin America and Europe it is bad news for Asia. But what could China actually do to prevent all this?

Some remarks on recent issues (I should have blogged about):

1. Ukraine

The south and east of Ukraine are ethnically Russian. It is also where the Ukrainian industries are. Those  industries are not (yet) capable of competing with western European industries and depend on business with Russia. In contrast to that the western Ukraine is mostly agricultural and some there would probably profit from a deeper association with the European Union. But over all the recent attempt of an EU-Ukrainian trade pact makes no sense. Many countries in the EU (France, Spain etc.) do not favor it and have contained the level of bribery the EU can undertake to buy the Ukraine. So the EU was somewhat restricted to offer "values" where Russia can offer cheep gas and a viable market for Ukrainian goods and services. Looking at Greece and Spain European "values" do not look that valuable these days. It was therefore right for the Ukrainian president to reject the EU deal. Some well paid EU claqueurs and "Orange Revolution" left behinds are now demonstrating against that. Ignore them.

2. Iran

Iran's foreign policy activity is breathtaking. Recently the Turkish foreign minister visited Tehran. Then the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates came. The Iranian foreign minister is currently in Kuwait and will next travel to Oman. While there was also an outreach to Saudi Arabia an offer to visit was rejected by Riyadh. Together with the recent temporary nuclear deal with the P5+1 this looks like a strategy to isolate Saudi Arabia and to thereby find unity against the Saudi-Israeli assault on Syria. This comes as the Syrian president Assad has (finally) declared war against Saudi Arabia and European diplomats are trickling back to Damascus. I am more confident now than ever that Syria, though at high costs, can and will win this war.

3. United States

There is some talk of a "Saudi America" because shale-oil and shale-gas exploration now allows for internal production of more than 50% of the hydrocarbons the U.S. is using. This is, in my view, nonsense. The break even for producing shale-hydrocarbons is mostly above $50 (and in some cases much higher) per barrel. The break even for producing hydrocarbons in the Middle East is as low as $1 to $5 a barrel. When Iraqi and Iranian production will be back online prices will fall and domestic U.S. shale production will no longer be profitable. As shale production is short term (the drill holes exhaust quite fast) even a short dip in hydrocarbon prices will put most of it to a halt.

4. China

Years after the Japanese and other East Asian countries declared Air Defense Information Zones, which require planes flying through them to inform those countries on their flights, China has done the same. The map shows that the Chinese zone is less extensive than the Japanese one. Some U.S. media now claim that China declared an "Air Defense Zone" and is about to go to war over it which is all wrong and stupid war propaganda. An information zone is far larger than a defense zone and its purpose is to give head ups of intentions to not waste defensive air power on innocent flights. The U.S. ADIZ has – by the way – much more restrictive rules than the Chinese one.