Why are people resorting to street politics across the globe?
John Bell
Al Jazeera, 11 February 2014
John Bell is Director of the Middle East Programme at the Toledo International Centre for Peace in Madrid.
In 2012, after the beginnings of the Arab revolutions, Paul Mason, editor at BBC's Newsnight programme, wrote a book called Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere – The New Global Revolutions. Mason pointed out that social neworks, a newfound sense of self-reliance, and a disjuncture between the young and an old political order are ushering in a new age of discontent.
He may well be right. Today, while the Arab world continues with its political somersaults, the street in Thailand, Ukraine, Brazil and Turkey and elsewhere is alive with protest. Foreign Policy magazine has put together a timeline highlighting that demonstrations have indeed significantly increased globally over the past 20 years.
Why are people going out on the street to address their woes? It's an act of courage and determination that can land you in jail, one far more difficult than simply casting a vote in the ballot box. What has changed?
Sigh. Concur with the comments and would add Sumner Shapiro's own finding on the 80-20 rule. Flynn seems to be going the mini-me route, replicating CIA's long-standing failure. Wasted effort and money — and still no focus on the plumbing.
WASHINGTON — Senior US officials and lawmakers are sending new signals that a fledgling cadre of military spies is a done deal, despite no real substantive public debate.
The Pentagon last year proposed creation of the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS), saying the military needed its own team of spies to gather human intelligence across the globe. The country already has a civilian clandestine service within the CIA, which is itching to ditch some of its post-9/11 roles and return full-time to the spying and analysis business.
Yet, despite unresolved questions about operational and budgetary redundancy, Congress rubber-stamped the Pentagon’s plans. And by approving the Defense Department plans as included in its last budget request, so did President Barack Obama, who seems enamored with the country’s myriad intelligence tools.
The conclusion apparently reached by Congress and the administration: Why not add another intel gadget to the toolbox — and slap a military insignia on it?
According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly one-third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced. In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.
A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also
one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Forms of participatory culture include:
Bob Gates wrestled the defense budget back from the Joint Chiefs. Chuck Hagel is handing it back.
Winslow Wheeler Winslow T. Wheeler is the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). Previously, he spent 31 years working for Republican and Democratic Senators and the Government Accountability Office on national security issues.
Inflection points in history are usually very difficult to see until well after they have occurred. Jonathan Cook, one of the most astute observers of the Palestinian Question, argues that one may be at hand wrt to the Palestinian Question. To me, this seems incredible, but we live in interesting times. CS
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rarely been so politically embattled. His travails indicate the Israeli right’s inability to respond to a shifting political landscape, both in the region and globally.
The context for his troubles was his commitment in 2009, under great pressure from a newly elected US president, Barack Obama, to support the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a concession he never wanted to make and one he has regretted ever since.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has exploited that pledge by imposing the current peace talks. Now Netanyahu faces an imminent “framework agreement” that may require him to make further commitments towards an outcome he abhors.
Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, is not helping. Rather than digging in his own heels, he offers constant accommodation. Last week Abbas told the New York Times that Israel could take a leisurely five years removing its soldiers and settlers from a key piece of Palestinian territory, the Jordan Valley. The Palestinian state would remain demilitarised, while Nato troops could stay “for a long time, and wherever they want”.
The Arab League is another thorn. It has obliged by renewing its offer from 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative, that promises Israel peaceful relations with the Arab world in return for its agreement to Palestinian statehood.
Meanwhile, the European Union is gently turning the screws on the occupation. It regularly trumpets condemnation of Israel’s settlement-building frenzies, including last week’s announcement of 558 settler homes in East Jerusalem. And in the background sanctions loom over settlement goods.
European financial institutions are providing a useful barometer of the mood among the 28 EU member states. They have become the unexpected pioneers of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, with a steady trickle of banks and pension funds pulling out their investments in recent weeks.
Pointing out that boycotts and “delegitimisation” campaigns are only going to gather pace, Kerry has warned that Israel’s traditional policy is “unsustainable”.
That message rings true with many Israeli business leaders, who have thrown their weight behind the US diplomatic plan. They believe that a Palestinian state is the key to Israel gaining access to lucrative regional markets and continued economic growth.
Netanyahu must have been disconcerted by the news that among those meeting Kerry to express support at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month was Shlomi Fogel, the prime minister’s long-time intimate.
Pressure on these various fronts may explain Netanyahu’s hasty convening last weekend of his senior ministers to devise a strategy to counter the boycott trend. Proposals include a $28 million media campaign, legal action against boycotting institutions, and intensified surveillance of overseas activists by the Mossad.
On the domestic scene, Netanyahu – who is known to prize political survival above all other concerns – is getting a rough ride as well. He is being undermined on his right flank by rivals inside the coalition.
Naftali Bennett, the settlers’ leader, provoked a chafing public feud with Netanyahu this month, accusing him of losing his “moral compass” in the negotiations. At the same time, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister from the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, has dramatically changed tack, cosying up to Kerry, whom he has called “a true friend of Israel”. Lieberman’s unlikely statesmanship has made Netanyahu’s run-ins with the US look, in the words of a local analyst, “childish and irresponsible”.
It is in the light of these mounting pressures on Netanyahu that one should understand his increasingly erratic behaviour – and the growing rift with the US.
A damaging falling-out last month, following insults from the defence minister against Kerry, has not subsided. Last week Netanyahu unleashed his closest cabinet allies to savage Kerry again, with one calling the US secretary of state’s pronouncements “offensive and intolerable”.
Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, tweeted her displeasure with a shot across the bows. The Israeli government’s attacks were “totally unfounded and unacceptable”, she noted. Any doubt she was speaking for the president was later dispelled when Obama praised Kerry’s “extraordinary passion and principled diplomacy”.
But despite outward signs, Netanyahu is less alone than he looks – and far from ready to compromise.
He has the bulk of the Israeli public behind him, helped by media moguls like his friend Sheldon Adelson who are stoking the national mood of besiegement and victimhood.
But most importantly he has a large chunk of Israel’s security and economic establishment on side too.
The settlers and their ideological allies have deeply penetrated the higher ranks of both the army and the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret intelligence service. The Haaretz newspaper revealed this month the disturbing news that three of the four heads of the Shin Bet now subscribe to this extremist ideology.
Moreover, powerful elements within the security establishment are financially as well as ideologically invested in the occupation. In recent years the defence budget has rocketed to record levels as a whole layer of the senior military exploits the occupation to justify feathering its nest with grossly inflated salaries and pensions.
There are also vast business profits in the status quo, from hi-tech to resource-grabbing industries. Indications of what is at stake were illuminated recently with the announcement that the Palestinians will have to buy from Israel at great cost two key natural resources – gas and water – they should have in plentiful supply were it not for the occupation.
With these interest groups at his back, a defiant Netanyahu can probably face off the US diplomatic assault this time. But Kerry is not wrong to warn that in the long term yet another victory for Israeli intransigence will prove pyhrrhic.
These negotiations may not lead to an agreement, but they will mark a historic turning-point nonetheless. The delegitimisation of Israel is truly under way, and the party doing most of the damage is the Israeli leadership itself.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.
Phi Beta Iota: Zionism, and Zionist Israel, are not to be confused with Jews, or loyal American Jews — just as America the Beautiful is not be to confused with the treasonous betrayal of the public trust by the two-party tyranny in the USA, and the global financial crimes it has legalized, or the elite pedophilia it turns a blind eye to. Society is vastly more complex than a mere government. What is happening in the Internet era is the isolation of corrupt government — as John Perrry Barlow foresaw in 1992, the public is now starting to route around corrupt governments.
While the U.S. Defense Department is taking bold steps to embrace the latest technology in nearly every operational specialty, it might be the simplicity of a kitchen sponge that saves hundreds of lives every year.
The new battlefield gadget is called X-STAT, and it uses a novel twist on simple science, offering a different way to treat deep gun shot wounds that have plagued military medics for years.
