Seventh Pillar, Inc. is an education nonprofit 501c3 (founded in 2008) in the process of building a simple yet robust online library of Muslim voices against violence–translated by credentialed linguists into 20 languages.
Seventh Pillar, Inc. remains strictly non-political, non-religious, unbiased, and independent. Seventh Pillar, Inc. is not affiliated with any government, government-connected entity, or propaganda.
The views of the authors are the authors' alone and do not represent views of Seventh Pillar, Inc.
This living, ever growing online library is intended as a resource for community leaders, scholars, media, religious leaders, and citizens.
EILEEN NG, Associated Press, JIM GOMEZ, Associated Press | Sunday, October 7, 2012 | Updated: Sunday, October 7, 2012 8:44pm
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippine government and the country's largest Muslim rebel group have reached a preliminary peace deal that is a major breakthrough toward ending a decades-long insurgency that killed tens of thousands and held back development in the south.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said the “framework agreement” calling for an autonomous region for minority Muslims in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation was an assurance the Moro Islamic Liberation Front insurgents will no longer aim to secede.
The agreement, announced Sunday and to be signed Oct. 15 in Manila, spells out principles on major issues, including the extent of power, revenues and territory of the Muslim region. If all goes well, a final peace deal could be reached by 2016, when Aquino's six-year term ends, officials said.
“This framework agreement paves the way for final and enduring peace in Mindanao,” Aquino said, referring to the southern Philippine region and homeland of the country's Muslims. “This means that the hands that once held rifles will be put to use tilling land, selling produce, manning work stations and opening doorways of opportunity.”
He cautioned that “the work does not end here” and that details of the accord still need to be worked out. Those talks are expected to be tough but doable, officials and rebels said.
Rebel vice chairman Ghadzali Jaafar said the agreement provides a huge relief to people who have long suffered from war and are “now hoping the day would come when there will be no need to bear arms.”
Dr Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specialising in US national security policy
The rest of the world can stop worrying about Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's supposed threat to bomb Iran. Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations General Assembly last week appears to mark the end of his long campaign to convince the world that he might launch a unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear programme.
The reason for Netanyahu's retreat is the demonstration of unexpectedly strong pushback against Netanyahu’s antics by President Barack Obama. And that could be the best news on the Iran nuclear issue in many years.
Commentary on Netanyahu's speech predictably focused on his cartoon bomb and hand-drawn “red line”, but its real significance lay in the absence of the usual suggestion that a unilateral strike against Iran might be necessary if the Iranian nuclear programme is not halted.
Although he offered yet another alarmist portrayal of Iran poised to move by next summer to the “final stage” of uranium enrichment, nowhere in the speech did Netanyahu even hint at such a threat. His explicit aim was to get the US to adopt his “red line” – meaning that it would threaten military force against Iran if it does not bow to a demand to cease enrichment.
Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Netanyahu had twice used to convey to the US his purported readiness to go to war with Iran, called it a “concession speech”. Netanyahu conceded, in effect, that his effort to force the US to accept his red line had failed completely.
Calls for rigorous impact evaluation has been accompanied by the quest for what works and why. Howard White identifies six principles for the successful application of the approach — mapping out the causal chain (programme theory), understanding the context, anticipating heterogeneity, rigorous evaluation of impact using a credible counterfactual, rigorous factual analysis and using mixed methods.
Phi Beta Iota: The international Initiative for Impact Evaluation, which receives support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is doing important work, but in isolation from a larger canvas. They lack a strategic analytic model for studying the whole. This is typical of all intelligence and information analytic endeavors, all mired in 20th Century stove-pipe thinking.
Only a few weeks ago, most western observers had written off Mohamed Morsi, the new President of Egypt and a moderate member of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a stooge who would dance to the tune of the military rulers of the Egyptian deep state. That view is rapidly changing. Morsi quickly consolidated power by forcing “deep-state” generals to retire (with dignity) and replacing them military leaders of a more reformist nature and less likely to lapdogs of the US and Israel. Thus Morsi seems to have out maneuvered the deep state apparat in a similar but even quicker way than Prime Minister Recep Erdogan did in Turkey. Also, like Erdogan in Turkey, he is flexing his nation’s regional diplomatic muscle in independent and sometimes surprising ways. Big things may be happening in Egypt and the Middle East, especially in the area of foreign policy, as only a few writers have noted (see for example, Esam Al-Almin, Patrick Seale, editorialin Al-Arahm). Attached is another analysis in this vein: Immanuel Wallerstein, describes why he thinks Morsi might be on the cutting edge of profound changes shaping the Middle East. If Wallerstein is correct in his sense that the focus of regional geopolitics is about to shift back to the Palestinian Question, the US is will be caught flatfooted again and may be again on the wrong side of history, while Israel’s isolation is likely to increase.
If we analyze the geopolitics of the Middle East, what should be the principal focus? There is little agreement on an answer, and yet it is the key question.
The Israeli government has been sedulously and constantly trying to make the focus be Iran. This has been considered by most observers as an effort to divert attention from Israel's unwillingness to pursue serious negotiations with the Palestinians.
In any case, this Israeli effort has failed, spectacularly. Netanyahu has been unable to get the U.S. government to commit to supporting an Israeli raid on Iran. And Iran's ability to gather most of the non-Western world — including Pakistan, India, China, Palestine, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon — to the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran underlines the political impossibility of the Israeli wish to concentrate attention on Iran.
For the past year, the center of attention has become Syria, not Iran, even if there is a link between the two. It has been primarily Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have struggled, with considerable success, to make Syria the focus of attention. Some observers feel this has been an effort to divert attention from Saudi Arabia's internal problems and anti-Shi'a oppression in the Gulf states, especially Bahrain.
This Syria-focus however is about to come to an end, for two reasons.
Published by ALNAP, the 2012 State of the Humanitarian System report is an important evaluation of the humanitarian community’s efforts over the past two years. “I commend this report to all those responsible for planning and delivering life saving aid around the world,” writes UN Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos in the Preface. “If we are going to improve international humanitarian response we all need to pay attention to the areas of action highlighted in the report.” Below are some of the highlighted areas from the 100+ page evaluation that are ripe for innovative interventions.
Accessing Those in Need
Operational access to populations in need has not improved. Access problems continue and are primarily political or security-related rather than logistical. Indeed, “UN security restrictions often place sever limits on the range of UN-led assessments,” which means that “coverage often can be compromised.” This means that “access constraints in some contexts continue to inhibit an accurate assessment of need. Up to 60% of South Sudan is inaccessible for parts of the year. As a result, critical data, including mortality and morbidity, remain unavailable. Data on nutrition, for example, exist in only 25 of 79 countries where humanitarian partners have conducted surveys.”
Could satellite and/or areal imagery be used to measure indirect proxies? This would certainly be rather imperfect but perhaps better than nothing? Could crowdseeding be used?
