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Kamis, 12 April 2012
The danger that Saudi Arabia will turn Syria into an Islamist hotbed
A Syrian woman walks past a painting of the Syrian revolutionary flag and writing that reads "only al-Arour," the name of an Islamic cleric living in Saudi Arabia who opposes President Bashar al-Assad, in a neighborhood of Damascus April 2. Op-ed contributor Joshua Jacobs worries that Saudi Arabia's involvement in Syria will give it 'free reign in picking the winners and losers among the opposition – likely Islamist groups at the expense of moderates and secularists.'
Anonymous/AP
With West focused on Iran, Netanyahu moves to expand Israeli settlements
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is moving to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a time when international attention is focused elsewhere, with President Obama gearing up for reelection and the West targeting Iran's nuclear program.
Last week, the Netanyahu government took a variety of steps that, taken together, amount to a significant strengthening of Israel's hold in the West Bank, the biblically resonant territory occupied in 1967, which Palestinians claim as the heartland for their future state.
For Netanyahu, who heads a right-wing coalition with a strong pro-settler contingent, it was a delicate dance of one small step back and six larger steps forward for settlements.
On April 4, the prime minister backed the evacuation of a house illegally occupied by settlers in the flashpoint city of Hebron, endorsing his attorney general's position that there was no legal argument for approving the settler takeover. That angered some among his hard-line constituency, including Danny Dayan, head of the Yesha Council that represents 300,000 settlers. ''It is intolerable that Jews cannot exercise their property rights simply because they are Jews,'' Dayan says.
To assuage this anger, Mr. Netanyahu declared the same day that he instructed the government to authorize three illegal outposts in the West Bank, despite Israel's having committed itself in the 2003 international peace blueprint, known as the "road map," to dismantle them. Hours later, tenders were issued for building a new neighborhood of 800 units in Har Homa, a settlement in annexed East Jerusalem, and for 180 new units in Givat Zeev, north of Jerusalem.
''It is all related, it is all part of the same package,'' says Yossi Alpher, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. ''He is able to say to his hard-core right wing supporters, 'I evacuated those people, but look what I'm building. We had to stand up for the rule of law but we're still building the Land of Israel and here's the proof.' It's quintessential Netanyahu: Speaking to please everyone, while facilitating the spread of settlements.''
Netanyahu's calculations READ MORE
Russia Is Massing Troops On Iran's Northern Border And Waiting For A Western Attack
Russian Security Council head Viktor Ozerov said that Russian General Military Headquarters has prepared an action plan in the event of an attack on Iran.
Dmitry Rogozin, who recently was the Russian ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, warned against an attack on Iran.
"Iran is our neighbor," Rogozin said. "If Iran is involved in any military action, it's a direct threat to our security." Rogozin now is the deputy Russian prime minister and is regarded as anti-Western. He oversees Russia's defense sector.
Russian Defense Ministry sources say that the Russian military doesn't believe that Israel has sufficient military assets to defeat Iranian defenses and further believes that U.S. military action will be necessary. READ MORE
A Short History of Neoliberalism (And How We Can Fix It) by Jason Hickel
As a university lecturer, I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not entirely surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism. Today, this assumption comes ready-made; it’s in the water, part of the common-sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike. But it has not always been this way. Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is not natural or inevitable, but rather that it is new, that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests.
If an economist living in the 1950s had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neoliberal toolkit, they would have been laughed right off the stage. At that time pretty much everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat, or some shade of Marxist. As Susan George has put it, “The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given less rather than more social protection – such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time.”
So how did things change? Where did neoliberalism come from? In the following paragraphs I offer a simple sketch of the historical trajectory that got us to where we are today. I demonstrate that neoliberal policy is directly responsible for declining economic growth and rapidly increasing rates of social inequality – both in the West and internationally – and I make a few suggestions for how to tackle these problems.
Neoliberalism in the Western Context READ MORE
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