President Obama will this week become the first African American President to make an official visit to an African country.

The most interesting fact is that he does not go to South Africa or Nigeria - the two countries that compete for the unofficial title of leaders of black Africa. President Obama decided to go to the oil producing belt of West Africa, and this cut out South Africa;  then he chose the unassuming Ghana, rather then the feisty Nigeria - the most populous black state and important partner of the US in oil trade.

Why? What does he teach in this visit?

Nigeria is a corrupt state to its bone. Even its son, the Nobel Price winning Wole Soyinka said that neglecting Nigeria was just the right medicine that Nigeria needed. He continued then with the shocking statement: “I’d ’stone’ Obama if he showed up in Nigeria and conferred legitimacy on its sorry government.”

Ghana on the other hand, a much smaller West African nation, as of now with little US trade, did hold fair multiparty democratic elections since 1992, and  has a history of incumbents stepping down once they reach their term limits.

Ghana is a beacon of hope to Africa and has produced the only two-terms African UN Secretary-General, Koffi Annan, who we hope will be at hand when President Obama arrives for a day at the end of this week.

Yes, we know, it is rumored that the US is interested in Ghana also as it is the newest arrival to the West Coast Oil-belt, and with China making inroads in the region, the US might be interested to establish here a military base as well as an oil trade relationship.

But even so, this US President showed preference for clean government if this is at all possible.

Africa watch and learn!

 http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=3…

ARAB WORLD BLOGGERS MORE WARY OF THEIR LEADERS THAN OF ISRAEL
30 June 2009

“Democracy in the Arab World”

BY ODEN YARON

Ordinarily, we in Israel examine the Arab world from the political and security point of view. From that perspective it often looks monolithic and in many cases quite threatening. A study published this month by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University tried to map the blogosphere in the Arab world and reveals once again the extent to which our perceptions are one-dimensional.

Support for terror, for example, is almost entirely absent from the texts published in blogs originating in the Arab world. Researchers John Kelly, Robert Faris and John Palfrey found that only 1 percent of the more than 4,000 blogs examined supported terror activity, whereas 19 percent openly opposed terror. It would seem that these findings, along with others throughout the study, could indicate that American policymakers’ fear concerning the use of the Internet to spread hate and support for terror are a bit exaggerated.

As support, the authors also refer to the trend studies at the Pew Research Center that show a consistent decline in support for suicide attacks in places like Lebanon - from a support rate of 74 percent in 2002 down to 32 percent in 2008.

“This is not to say,” write the authors, “that anti-Western ideas are absent, or that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah do not have significant support, but that these ideas are countered by others, and support of Al Qaeda and civilian attacks is very rare…”

The authors also say that they “do not argue that extremist Web sites do not exist; certainly they do and our research does not address their impact. However, academic studies and media reports that focus exclusively on terrorist use of the Web can leave the impression that this is a dominant form of discourse in the Arabic language Internet, and could lead to ill-informed policy responses, which could intentionally limit the diverse, open and often civically-minded political, cultural, and religious discussions that take place in blogs and other Internet spaces.”

Mapping the Arabic blogoverse

The researchers had the help of Arabic-speakers to read and identify the characteristics of 4,000 blogs. Among other things, the researchers found that the vast majority of the bloggers are young men - about 75 percent of them under the age of 35, and of this group 45 percent are between 25 and 35 years old. According to the study, only 9 percent of the bloggers in the Arab world are older than 35. The researchers also found that more than 60 percent of the bloggers are men and only 34 percent are women (a number were unidentified). However, in Saudi Arabia, for example, it emerged that the proportion of women was especially high: about 46 percent.

The study also made use of a special technology to map the Arab blogosphere in a way similar to a previous study of the Iranian blogosphere. To this end, the researchers mapped 35,000 blogs in 18 countries and examined their links to each other and other blogs. Thus, by examining the internal connections among the sites, they created clusters.

One of the patterns that stood out in the study is the clustering into countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon. At the same time, the researchers also identified groups of blogs written in English and French - mostly in North Africa but also in Syria - which the researchers have called a bridge to the wider world.

Within the countries there was also a sorting into groups. In Egypt, for example, where they found the largest number of bloggers, there are clusters of bloggers identified with or close to the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a large cluster of secular reformists who have little love for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

A smaller Israeli blip

Researchers were interested to discover that most of the writers are more interested in domestic political issues than in regional wars. Criticism of local leaders is the most common political topic the researchers encountered, and the next most common is not hatred for the United States or Israel but rather posts critical of terror.

In Lebanon, the researchers found criticism of local political leaders in more than 50 percent of the blogs but also a broad measure of support. In Syria, by comparison, the chances that a blogger would express support for the regime are especially low.

The bottom line is that a vast majority of the bloggers write about themselves and their lives. But make no mistake: Criticism of Israel and the United States does exist and is reinforced by events in the news. The film on YouTube to which the most blogs linked was extremely critical of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The second most popular was a video of the shoe thrown by an Iraqi journalist at former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The researchers said they were surprised to find the extent to which Web 2.0 sites have been integrated into the Arab bloggers’ everyday activity. Indeed, it emerged that links to sites like Wikipedia and YouTube are more common than links to the major news sources in their countries.

Despite their tone of optimism regarding the political variety and relative openness in the blogs, the researchers are in no hurry to declare that the Internet will bring about a democratic revolution in the Arab world. They noted two contradictory theories about the way the Internet can nurture public discourse in Arab countries.

On the one hand, they noted Israeli-American Harvard law school Prof. Yochai Benkler’s “view of the networked public sphere as a boon for individual autonomy and freedom, breaking elite strangleholds on democratic discourse and drawing diverse interests and talents into a common arena.”

On the other hand, they noted, University of Chicago law school Professor Cass Sunstein warns in his book “Republic.com 2.0″ that the possibility the Internet offers for uniting into groups of the like-minded does not contribute to the creation of a global village. Instead, it contributes to increasing fragmentation of society and the loss of the common denominator that, along with other things, is essential for the existence of a democracy, he wrote.

The researchers also remarked that, as in Egypt, Iran and Syria, bloggers have been arrested or blocked and they add that technology is not serving only pro-Western forces.

“The Internet does not just promise (or threaten) to change the balance of power among players on the field,” cyber researcher Clay Shirky has argued, “it changes the field and changes the players too.” However, from the perspective of the Berkman Center researchers, the most important thing to remember is that the field is not only black and white and that the Islamic extremists are just one aspect of it. At least in the blogosphere, they still sit on the margins.

See Related: IRAN

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND NEWS MEDIA ARE AFRAID TO CONFRONT ISLAM - SAN FRANCISCO SENTINEL OPINION

From: “Yavuz Hekim” <yavuzhekim@yavuzhekim.com>
Date: June 30, 2009
 
 
 

Dear Editor in Chief
 
As an actor who has played the role of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 6 Films in Turkey, I would like to make an interview with your newspaper by e-mail
 
Information about myself is given below.
 
Sincerely yours
 
Cell  00 90 532 482 24 28
 
Yavuz HEKİM                      www.yavuzhekim.com 

Click here to download the PDF

IRAN REGIME GAINING THE EDGE OVER PROTESTERS.
27 June 2009

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smiles.

BY NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN

TEHRAN — The direct confrontation over Iran’s presidential election was effectively silenced Friday when the main opposition leader said he would seek permits for any future protests, an influential cleric suggested that leaders of the demonstrations could be executed, and the council responsible for validating the election repeated its declaration that there were no major irregularities.

Rather than address the underlying issues that led to the most sustained, unexpected challenge to the leadership since the 1979 revolution, the government pressed its effort to recast the entire conflict not as an internal dispute that brought millions of Iranians into the streets, but as one between Iran and outside agents from Europe, the United States and even Saudi Arabia.

It was a narrative that spoke both to the leadership’s belief that it had beaten back the popular outburst, and to the fragility of the calm. “There has been too much violence to forget about it,” said an expatriate Iranian analyst who is not being identified because he has relatives in Iran and is afraid of reprisals against them.

Although the government appeared to have the upper hand, political analysts said it was too soon for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to declare his troubles over. Though it seemed increasingly likely he would be sworn in for a second term by early August, there was no guarantee how that term would unfold or whether competitors within the system — who have a different vision of Iran — would work against him.

Even before he faced a challenge to his legitimacy, Mr. Ahmadinejad was often castigated by Parliament for his troubled handling of the economy, and there had been talk of trying to impeach him. Several of his ministers quit the government in protest over his economic policies. “There are quite a few people sitting on the fence watching to see which way the wind will blow,” said Ali M. Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “Information is very hard to come by, but there seems to be much back-room negotiating predicated on the fact normality should first return to the country.”

Throughout the crisis, events in Iran have focused on two camps: the opposition, led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister, and the camp surrounding Mr. Ahmadinejad, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the military and security agencies. But there is a third group of more pragmatic military and security figures who have competed with Mr. Ahmadinejad but are believed to remain close to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Two of the most influential in that group are the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, the nation’s former chief nuclear negotiator. Both ran for president four years ago and want to run again, and have at times been sharp critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s stewardship. Political analysts have described them as loyal to the leader and committed to Islamic government, but eager for a more modern state integrated with the rest of the world. Mr. Larijani resigned as nuclear negotiator in part because he favored engagement over confrontation.

During the electoral crisis both made statements demonstrating their independence from Mr. Ahmadinejad — and their objection to some aspects of the crackdown. The mayor called for allowing legal protests. The speaker said that it was improper for the Guardian Council, which is supposed to monitor the elections, to side with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Larijani also said that the majority of the people did not believe the government’s contention that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won with 63 percent of the vote.

“It’s an odd dynamic,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The person they have to be loyal to, the supreme leader, has thrown his weight behind this person they despise. Ghalibaf is one of these people, like Larijani, and others had been on the fence, and if there is a tipping point they could go the other way.”

The government continued to try to frame any opponents as traitors to the nation. The Friday Prayer ceremony is a political and religious ritual held in a large hall at Tehran University and broadcast all over the country. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a stout, turbaned cleric who frequently delivers the Friday speech, hewed to the hard party line. He urged that those who led protests be convicted for taking up arms against people, an offense punishable by death.

“I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson,” he said.

A few hours earlier, the Guardian Council repeated its claim that the election had been fair. “There has been no fraud in the election,” said the council’s spokesman, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, acknowledging that the review process was not technically completed. He said the council had checked discrepancies reported by Mr. Moussavi, but that they had not borne out.

Mr. Moussavi immediately posted a report containing a long list of irregularities on his Web site, an action that barely registered against the might of the state machine. But he also signaled that the street phase of the protests was ending, saying on his Web site that he would try to seek permits for future protests — permits the government has consistently refused.

While protesters were aided at first by technology — primarily the Internet and text messaging — the government deployed its control of state television and news outlets to sweep away competing narratives.

“It is still possible that the information age will crack authoritarian structures in Iran,” wrote Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But it is far more likely that the government will be able to use that technology to secure its own rule.”

Mr. Moussavi may have little room to maneuver, but he has refused to surrender altogether. He is being closely monitored by security agents. Members of Parliament who are aligned with Ayatollah Khamenei met with Mr. Moussavi on Wednesday and tried to press him to relent.

“Mr. Moussavi still wants the election results nullified,” Ismail Kossari, one of the members of Parliament, told the ILNA news agency.

“We told him that his demand was unreasonable and immoral and he shouldn’t have repeated his demand after the supreme leader’s statements at the Friday prayers,” Mr. Kossari was quoted as saying.

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, Mona el-Naggar from Cairo, and Sharon Otterman from New York.

——————

IRAN: The End of the Beginning?

 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20…

BY TRITA PARSI, REZA ASLAN as published in foreignpoicy.com,  JUNE 26, 2009

Iran’s popular uprising, which began after the June 12 election, may be heading for a premature ending. In many ways, the Ahmadinejad government has succeeded in transforming what was a mass movement into dispersed pockets of unrest. Whatever is now left of this mass movement is now leaderless, unorganized — and under the risk of being hijacked by groups outside Iran in pursuit of their own political agendas.

In 1999, students in Iran demonstrated against the closing of reformist newspapers. The unrest lasted a few days and was brutally suppressed. The demonstrators were almost exclusively students. No other segments of society joined their ranks in any meaningful numbers. With their limited appeal to other segments of society, the demonstrators failed to grow in numbers and attain their political objectives.

The demonstrations following the Iranian election on June 12 share few if any characteristics of the student uprising of 1999. What we have witnessed taking place in Iran is a mass movement attracting supporters from all walks of life, all demographics, all classes, and even all political backgrounds. Even supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have expressed discomfort with the developments in Iran, arguing that they voted for Ahmadinejad because they thought he would be a better president, and not because he would be a better dictator.

Indeed, the post-election demonstrations have neither been an uprising of intellectuals and students nor die-hard anti-regime elements from northern Tehran. Instead, the masses that poured in the streets included large numbers of people who often have been loyal to the Iranian government and who in many ways have a stake in its survival. (We can call them Iran’s political middle, or its swing voters.) This is precisely why this movement has constituted such a threat to the Iranian government — not once since 1979 has such an alliance of Iranians come together.

Knowing very well that the opposition’s ability to attract Iranians of all backgrounds constituted a major threat to the government, the Iranian authorities moved quickly to peel away layer after layer of people from the movement to reduce it to a much smaller and more manageable core of regime — not Ahmadinejad — opponents. The Ahmadinejad government’s tactics were predictable: It combined a most brutal clampdown on protesters with propaganda alleging that the opposition movement was orchestrated by foreign elements and exiled opposition groups.

The Mousavi camp sought to counteract these measures and retain its ability to attract a diverse array of Iranians by grounding its slogans and resistance in the language and symbolism of the revolution itself. Mousavi, in a direct challenge to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presented himself and the movement as the guardians of the revolution, and protesters in the street recycled slogans from the 1979 era, including the chant “Allahu Akbar.”
Although successful at first, the discipline has clearly broken down. This should be no surprise — the movement is by now in effect leaderless. A source close to Mousavi says that the first and second circle of people around Mousavi have all been arrested or put under house arrest. Mousavi himself has limited ability to communicate with his team and his followers. The lack of leadership is visible on the streets, where demonstrators exhibit unparalleled will and courage, but lack direction and guidance.

Indeed, the lack of organization and execution is perhaps the most convincing evidence that the anti-Ahmadinejad movement is completely homegrown and void of any attempt to emulate the velvet revolutions of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. What is driving people to the streets is their sense of frustration and anger — not a well-devised plan and training in clever nonviolent resistance techniques.

The leadership vacuum does not bode well for the movement’s prospects of success, particularly when it comes to attracting those Iranian swing-voters to its side once more. And this creates openings for external meddling — just not the kind you think.

Exiled opposition groups, whose political agenda sharply differs from that of the protesters in Iran — indeed, many of these groups urged people not to vote in the elections — have sought to fill the vacuum left by a beheaded and directionless indigenous movement. Though the outrage of these exiled groups against the Iranian government’s brutal violence is genuine, their efforts to impose themselves on the political scene have caused great frustration among opposition elements inside Iran. At a time when the movement in Iran is paralyzed, efforts by exiled groups — groups that scorned the protesters only weeks ago for choosing to participate in the elections — to fill the leadership vacuum are viewed as nothing less than a maneuver to hijack the movement.

This is playing right into the hands of the Ahmadinejad government, precisely because it would weaken, if not eliminate, the indigenous movement’s trump card: its ability to attract the Iranian swing-voters back to its side. If the exiled opposition groups and their neo-conservative backers in the United States prevail in aiding the Ahmadinejad government, what started out as the largest Iranian mass movement since 1979 may end up as little more than the student demonstrations of 1999. Which is to say, an instance of hopes raised, then dashed.

Trita Parsi is president of the National Iranian American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S. Reza Aslan is the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.
————-

Uri Avnery

27.6.09
  Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Iranian citizens pour into the streets in order to protest against their government! What a wonderful sight! Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that he envies the Iranians.

And indeed, anyone who tries these days to get Israelis in any numbers into the streets could die of envy. It is very difficult to get even hundreds of people to protest against the evil deeds or policies of our government – and not because everybody supports it. At the height of the war against Gaza, half a year ago, it was not easy to mobilize ten thousand protesters. Only once a year does the peace camp succeed in bringing a hundred thousand people to the square – and then only to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

The atmosphere in Israel is a mixture of indifference, fatigue and a “loss of the belief in the ability to change reality”, as a Supreme Court justice put it this week. A very dramatic change is needed in order to get masses of people to demonstrate for peace.

FOR MIR-HOSSEIN MOUSAVI hundreds of thousands have demonstrated, and hundreds of thousands have demonstrated for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That says something about the people and about the regime.

Can anyone imagine a hundred thousand people gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest against the official election results? The police would open fire before a thousand had assembled there.

Would even a thousand people be allowed to demonstrate in Amman against His Majesty? The very idea is absurd.

Some years ago, the Saudi security forces in Mecca opened fire on unruly pilgrims. In Saudi Arabia, there are never protests against election results – simply because there are no elections.

In Iran, however, there are elections, and how! They are more frequent than elections in the US, and Iranian presidents change more often than American ones. Indeed, the very protests and riots show how seriously the citizens there treat election results.

OF COURSE, the Iranian regime is not democratic in the way we understand democracy. There is a Supreme Guide who fixes the rules of the game. Religious bodies rule out candidates they do not like. Parliament cannot adopt laws that contradict religious law. And the laws of God are unchangeable - at most, their interpretation can change.

All this is not entirely foreign to Israelis. From the very beginning the religious camp has been trying to turn Israel into a religious state, in which religious law (called Halakha) would be above the civil law. Laws “revealed” thousands of years ago and regarded as unchangeable would take precedence over laws enacted by the democratically elected Knesset.
To understand Iran, we have only to look at one of the important Israeli parties: Shas. They, too, have a Supreme Guide, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who decides everything. He appoints the party leadership, he selects the party’s Knesset candidates, he directs the party faction how to vote on every single issue. There are no elections in Shas. And in comparison with the frequent outbursts of Rabbi Ovadia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a model of moderation.

ELECTIONS DIFFER from country to country. It is very difficult to compare the fairness of elections in one country with those in another.

At one end of the scale were the elections in the good old Soviet Union. There it was joked that a voter entered the ballot room, received a closed envelope from an official and was politely requested to put it into the ballot box.
“What, can’t I know who I am voting for?” the voter demanded.

The official was shocked. “Of course not! In the Soviet Union we have secret elections!”

At the other end of the scale there should stand that bastion of democracy, the USA. But in elections there, only nine years ago, the results were decided by the Supreme Court. The losers, who had voted for Al Gore, are convinced to this very day that the results were fraudulent.

In Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and now, apparently, also in Egypt, rule is passed from father to son or from brother to brother. A family affair.

Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after every election people claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also voted. Three and a half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories also held democratic elections in 2006, which former President Jimmy Carter described as exemplary, but Israel, the US and Europe refused to accept the results, because they did not like them.
So it seems that democracy is a matter of geography.

WERE THE election results in Iran falsified? Practically no one of us – in Tel Aviv, Washington or London – can know. We have no idea, because none of us – and that includes the chiefs of all intelligence agencies – really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply our common sense, based on the little information we have.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe that the results were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the streets. But this is a quite normal among losers. During the intoxication of an election campaign, every party believes that it is about to win. When this does not happen, it is quite sure that the results are forged.
Some time ago, Germany’s excellent 3Sat television channel broadcast an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main street from the North of the city to the South, stopping frequently along the way, entering people’s homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs.

I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least in one respect: in the North there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the South the poor and underprivileged. The Northerners imitate the US, go to prestigious universities and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The Southerners stick to tradition, revere the ayatollahs or the rabbis, and detest the shameless and corrupt North.

Mousavi is the candidate of the North, Ahmadinejad of the South. The villages and small towns – which we call the “periphery” – identify with the south and are alienated from the north.
In Tel Aviv, the South voted for Likud, Shas and the other right-wing parties. The North voted for Labor and Kadima. In our elections, a few months ago, the Right thus won a resounding victory.
It seems that something very similar happened in Iran. It is reasonable to assume that Ahmadinejad genuinely won.

The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public opinion poll in Iran prior to the elections came up with figures that proved very close to the official results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries, concerning many millions of votes, when thousands of polling station personnel are involved. In other words: it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really won. If there were forgeries – and there is no reason to believe that there were not – they probably did not reach proportions that could sway the end result.

There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: has the revolutionary spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no revolution has succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing regime. Both the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded because the army was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened in Germany. Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army, and came to power with its support.

In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the crowds in the street confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question arises: will they open fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the revolution wins. When they shoot, that is the end of the matter.

When Boris Yeltsin climbed on the tank, the solders refused to shoot and he won. The Berlin wall fell because one East-German police officer refused at the decisive moment to give the order to open fire. In Iran, Khomeini won when, in the final test, the soldiers of the Shah refused to shoot. That did not happen this time. The security forces were ready to shoot. They were not infected by the revolutionary spirit. The way it looks now, that was the end of the affair.

I AM not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me much more.
I do not like leaders who are in direct contact with God, who make speeches to the masses from a balcony, who use demagogic and provocative language, who ride on the waves of hatred and fear. His denial of the holocaust – an idiotic exercise in itself – only adds to Ahmadinejad’s image as a primitive or cynical leader.

No doubt, he is a sworn enemy of the state of Israel or – as he prefers to call it – the “Zionist regime”. Even if he did not promise to wipe it out himself, as erroneously reported, but only expressed his belief that it would “disappear from the map”, this does not set my mind at rest.

It is an open question whether Mousavi, if elected, would have made a difference as far as we are concerned. Would Iran have abandoned its efforts to produce nuclear weapons? Would it have reduced its support of the Palestinian resistance? The answer is negative.

It is an open secret that our leaders hoped that Ahmadinejad would win, exacerbate the hatred of the Western world against himself and make reconciliation with America more difficult.

All through the crisis, Barack Obama has behaved with admirable restraint. American and Western public opinion, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government, called upon him to raise his voice, identify with the protesters, wear a green tie in their honor, condemn the Ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad in no uncertain terms. But except for minimal criticism, he did not do so, displaying both wisdom and political courage.

Iran is what it is. The US must negotiate with it, for its own sake and for our sake, too. Only this way – if at all – is it possible to prevent or hold up its development of nuclear weapons. And if we are condemned to live under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, in a classic situation of a balance of terror, it would be better if the bomb were in the hands of an Iranian leadership that keeps up a dialogue with the American president. And of course, it would be good for us if - before reaching that point - we could achieve, with the friendly support of Obama, full peace with the Palestinian people, thus removing the main justification for Iran’s hostility towards Israel.
The revolt of the Northerners in Iran will remain, so it seems, a passing episode. It may, hopefully, have an impact in the long run, beneath the surface. But in the meantime, it makes no sense to deny the victory of the Iranian denier.

###

From: Hassan Mansour
He says: There is now ample evidence of the ecological impacts of recent climate change from polar terrestrial to tropical marine environments. So on behalf of the Egyptian Society for Environmental Sciences (ESES) it is our pleasure to welcome you to the fourth international conference on “Impacts of Climate Change on Natural Resources” that will take place in Ismailia, Egypt on November 10-11, 2009.

As in the past three years, this conference will offer outstanding international speakers. There will be ample time for abstracts, posters, and the many informal discussions that have helped make past meetings successful.

Those of you who attended the past conferences of ESES already know that Ismailia is a vibrant modern city, and that Suez Canal University makes an outstanding venue for this meeting.

for more information, please feel free to contact:

Hassan Mansour
Representative of the Organising comittee
 hmansour at uga.edu,  man_griesh at yahoo.com
Or visit our website: www.eses-catrina.com

further, they say:

Recently, the environment has been the topic of the hour, the whole world started to pay a great attention to the environment as a strategic choice to conserve the natural resources which will ensure the continuity and sustainability of these resources in the future.

Sinai Peninsula and Suez Canal area are characterized by their geographical importance and their richness in natural resources which include plants, animals, geological structures and marine habitats.

The natural resources of Egypt, especially these of Sinai Peninsula are facing many threats such as over collection, overgrazing, habitat destruction and urbanization which in return change the wild life, distinction of some species, threat some other and rarity of others.

Also, the unique geological structure affected by many threats as the random quarrying and overexploitation for material resources. The underground water also affected by the pollutants.

—————

Management Committee:

President:

Prof. Abdel-Raouf A. Moustafa

Vice-Presidents:

Dr. Nabil N. El-Masry

Secretary:

Dr. Mohamed S. Zaghloul

Treasurer:

Dr. Raafat H. Abdel-Wahab

Members:

Prof. Samira R. Mansour

Dr. Wafaa M. Kamel

Dr. Samy A. Abdel-Malek

 Ahmadi-Nejad has not only stabbed in the back his own people, but the Palestinians as well. The big winner will turn out to be Prime Minister Netanyahu who wrote on his political flag that if you want to tackle the problems in the Islamic World you must start with  denuclearizing Iran first. The Arab States, not just President Obama, will now reconsider their own positions.

IRAN EXPOSED
The Jewish Week, June 19, 2009
by The Editors, http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle…

In a perverse way, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s overwhelming, and reportedly stolen, re-election as president of Iran in recent days is good news for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others who have warned of the dangers of a nuclear Tehran.

A victory by Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading contender and apparent winner, would have tamped down concerns that Iran was a serious threat to Israel, the Mideast and the free world. Moussavi, a leader of the Islamic revolt 30 years ago, is far from a progressive, and he is opposed to the existence of Israel. But he supported dialogue with — rather than demonization of — the West, and called Ahmadinejad’s questioning of the veracity of the Holocaust irrational.

Now, though, Ahmadinejad, who repeatedly
has called for the elimination of the Jewish state, is seen as more firmly entrenched as a leader of his country, supported by the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is final.
The Obama administration, eager to initiate dialogue with Iran after three decades without diplomatic contact, finds the outcome of Friday’s election sobering. No one in Washington appears ready to call for talks at this point. Even those who have been outspoken in asserting that Iran is not the menace Netanyahu and others say it is are expressing second thoughts. Writing from Tehran, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who has said that demonizing Ahmadinejad and the leaders of Iran is inaccurate and counterproductive, reported Monday: “I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.” He added that “President Obama’s outreach must now await a decent interval.”

Netanyahu has been calling on the Western world to wake up to the dangers of Iran. His efforts seems to have had limited impact in Washington, where the immediate foreign policy focus is on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But leaders of key Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan don’t have to be convinced. Israeli President Shimon Peres told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly that “for the first time, the majority of the Arab world thinks that Iran is the real danger, not Israel.” (Goldberg, in the current issue of The Atlantic, points out the logic and opportunity of an alliance between Israel and Sunni-controlled Arab states to oppose the theocracy of Persian Iran, which is Shi’ite.)

The situation in Iran this week appears fluid, and combustible. But what is clear is that whoever is president in Tehran is subject to the leadership of a regime that has bared its teeth for all the world to see. No longer can the threat to regional stability of a nuclear Iran be discounted. And there are no more excuses for fooling ourselves into thinking that dialogue is the only answer. It may still be worth pursuing, but focus must turn to what happens if and when diplomacy fails.

—————–

VIOLENCE IN IRAN - POLICE BEAT BACK PROTESTORS - DEMONSTRATORS LIGHT FIRE NEAR IRANIAN PRESIDENT HEADQUARTERS
20 June 2009

An image taken from amateur video posted online from Tehran, Thursday, June 20, 2009, shows supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossien Mousavi protesting in Tehran . Eyewitnesses described fierce clashes after some 3,000 protesters, many wearing black, chanted ‘Death to the dictator!’ and ‘Death to dictatorship!’ near Revolution Square in downtown Tehran. Police fired tear gas, water cannons and guns but it was not clear if they were firing live ammunition.

BY ROBERT F. WORTH

TEHRAN — Police officers used tear gas and water cannons to beat back thousands of demonstrators gathering in the capital on Saturday, a day after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there would be “bloodshed” if street protests continued over the disputed presidential election.

Supporters of defeated election candidate Mirhossein Mousavi have reportedly lit a fire at the headquarters of the Iranian president’s backers in Tehran.

Police have fired shots in the air to prevent clashes between those who favour pro-reformer Mr Mousavi and those who support hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, witnesses say.

At least two persons are thought to have been hurt in the gunfire.

The violence unfolded on a day of extraordinary tension across Iran, as opposition protesters swore to continue pressing their claims of a stolen election against Iran’s embattled and increasingly impatient clerical leadership. Iran’s divisions played out on the streets. Regular security forces stood back and calmly urged protesters to go home and avoid bloodshed, while the feared pro-government militia, the Basij, beat protesters with clubs and electric prods.

In some places, the protesters pushed back, rushing the militia in teams of hundreds, pitching at least three basijis from their motorcycles and setting the vehicles on fire. The protesters included many women, who even berated as “cowards” men who fled the basijis.

In all, there seemed some restraint on both sides. The protesters did not appear in the same huge numbers as earlier last week, and while the police fired shots, they appeared — so far — to be in the air.

“If they open fire on people and if there is bloodshed, people will get angrier,” said one protester, Ali, 40. “They are out of their minds if they think with bloodshed they can crush the movement.”

There had been varying reports in the hours leading up to the rally about whether it would be called off in the face of the state’s threatened crackdown. In the morning, black-clad security forces lined the streets of two squares in central Tehran as the city braced itself for a violent crackdown, witnesses said. State television reported that the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, had called off the protest, but some of his supporters, posting on social networking sites, urged demonstrators to gather.

But Web sites of two opposition figures declared the rally would be held. The Web site of Mehdi Karroubi, another presidential candidate who accused the government of fraud, said that contrary to reports on state media, the protests would go on and added that Mr. Karroubi, “the brave cleric, will join the rally” along with Mr. Moussavi and the former reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. On Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, a letter was posted from the Islamic Human Rights Group complaining of abuses by pro-government militia, which it said had attacked crowds and beat people with long sticks.

Journalists were banned from leaving their offices to report on the protests. A reporter from an American news organization said she had been called by a member of the Basij militia warning her not to go to the venue for the Saturday rally because the situation would be dangerous and there could be fatalities.

The authorities were also reported to have renewed an offer of a partial recount of the ballots in the disputed election — an offer that the opposition has previously rejected.

In a long and hard-line sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei declared the June 12 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad valid and warned that demonstration leaders “would be responsible for bloodshed and chaos” if protesters continue, as they have pledged, to flood the streets in defiance of the government.

The tough words seemed to dash hopes for a peaceful solution to what defeated candidates and protesters called a fraudulent election last week, plunging Iran into its gravest crisis since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Official results gave Mr. Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent.

Regional analysts said that, by calling for an end to the demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei had inserted himself directly into the confrontation, invoking his own prestige and that of Iran’s clerical regime. But his speech also laid the groundwork to suppress the opposition movement with a harder hand, characterizing further protests as against the Islamic Republic itself.

Although Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech also included some conciliatory language about the opposition candidates, it remained unclear how the ongoing confrontation would affect Iran’s complex internal dynamics. One central figure was notably absent from Ayatollah Khamenei’s Friday sermon: the influential former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has strongly backed Mr. Moussavi.

Iran’s National Security Council reinforced Ayatollah Khamenei’s warning on Saturday, state media reported, telling Mr. Moussavi to “refrain from provoking illegal rallies.”

The demand came in a letter from the head of the council, Abbas Mohtaj, after a formal complaint by Mr. Moussavi that law enforcement agencies had failed to protect protesters.

“It is your duty not to incite and invite the public to illegal gatherings; otherwise, you will be responsible for its consequences,” the letter said, according to state media.

Ahmad Reza Radan, a senior police officer, warned on state television that the police “will act with determination against all illegal demonstrations and protests.”

In a measure of the scale of the opposition’s complaints, one losing candidate in the June 12 election, Mohsen Rezai, a conservative former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, claimed to have won between 3.5 and 7 million votes compared to the 250,000 accorded to him in the first announcement of results a week ago, state-run Press TVreported Saturday.

And, in a sign of mixed signals emerging from the authorities, the English-language network also reported Saturday that Ibrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister who leads an organization called Freedom Movement, had been released after being detained in a hospital earlier in the week. Several opposition figures, journalists and analysts were detained during a week of defiance that brought forth an array of official measures — part conciliatory, part repressive — to try to stem the protests.

Witnesses said that Mohammad Ghoochani, a prominent journalist and editor-in-chief of several reformist publications that had been shut down, was arrested Saturday by the authorities. There were no further details of his condition or location. On Saturday, the authorities also invited the three opposition candidates to attend a meeting with the 12-member Guardian Council, an authoritative panel of clerics which oversees and certifies election results. But only one candidate — Mr. Rezai — attended, Press TV said.

The panel has been presented with 646 complaints of electoral irregularities, the authorities have said.

Mr. Moussavi has expressed mistrust of the panel, accusing some of its members of campaigning before the election for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Press TV quoted Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the council’s spokesman, as saying the body was investigating complaints including shortages and delays in the supply of ballot papers, the denial of access to polling stations by candidates’ representatives and intimidation and bribery of voters.

“Although the Guardian Council is not legally obliged,” Mr. Kadkhodaei was quoted as saying, “we are ready to recount 10 percent of the ballot boxes randomly in the presence of representatives of the candidates.”

Arab Rulers Fear It Will Happen To Them Too

The Pulse,  JUNE 19, 2009.

The unrest in Iran throughout the last week not only threatens to dismantle its own political system, but also awaken social protest among millions in the Arab world.  In particular, President Mubarak of Egypt is concerned about his upcoming meeting with Ahmadinejad at the conference of non-aligned nations and the prospects of the Iranian unrest triggering a similar situation in Egypt.

by Smadar Peri in Yedioth Ahronoth:

In two weeks, Ahmadinejad plans to land on the head of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh as a completely unwanted guest.

The Iranian president already announced that he intended to accept the invitation to the conference of non-aligned nations that will meet in Egypt. In a discourteous reply, it was made clear to Ahmadinejad that Mubarak was not exactly dreaming happily about greeting him at the airport, as per protocol. As Cairo sees it, let Ahmadinejad be offended and stay home.

The thunderous silence of the rulers of the Arab world-only Bashar Assad congratulated Ahmadinejad for his “divine victory” - attests to great nervousness.

On the one hand, Iran held a democratic election campaign, one that does not exist to this day in the any of the Arab world countries (except perhaps Lebanon, where there was also fraud): four candidates from two yellow camps waged a campaign, grappled with juicy television debates and maligned each other below the belt. On the other hand, the great fraud of the election results reminds millions in the Arab world of what happens in their own home.

Even in the moderate countries, the US’s allies, daily life is run by means of emergency laws and sudden arrests without warrants. Take, for example, Egypt, where a referendum is scheduled in a year and a half over the appointment of President Mubarak’s successor. What is happening in Tehran is liable to blow up in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria: demonstrations by millions who will be displeased by the victory of the candidate marked to win, the president’s son.

–

Saudi Arabia is no less troubled. The ayatollahs have already shown that they are capable of sending agents, in the guise of pilgrims, to the holy places in order to agitate, to finance terror cells and to rock the king’s throne. The mass protest movement against a regime like Iran is liable to give ideas to masses of frustrated and unemployed young people in the kingdom of the cradle of Islam.

–

The elections, the fraud and the demonstrations that spread throughout Iran are leading the secret organizations kept by the Arab dictators to a gloomy conclusion: it is impossible to continue to ignore the street.

But if they let the dream of democracy seep into the polling booths, all the leaders will be immediately kicked out, without exception, and if they try and fix the results, as they did in Iran, millions will take to the streets to protest the phony democracy.

So what should they do? First of all, postpone election and referendum dates. And when there is no choice, fix the ballots in a more subtle and sophisticated way; the main thing is to convince the masses that something has in fact changed to their advantage.

Uri Avnery

dated - June 20, 2009

(This comes earlier than usual, so as to comment as soon as possible on Netanyahu’s speech - these are Avnery’s words)

  When He Says Yes – What Does He Mean?  

“YOU MUST be celebrating,” the interviewer from a popular radio station told me after Netanyahu’s speech. “After all, he is accepting the plan which you proposed 42 years ago!” (Actually it was 60 years ago, but who is counting?)

The front page of Haaretz carried an article by Gideon Levy, in which he wrote that “the courageous call of Uri Avnery and his friends four decades ago is now being echoed, though feebly, from end to end (of the Israeli political spectrum).”

I would be lying if I denied feeling a brief glow of satisfaction, but it faded quickly. This was no “historic” speech, not even a “great” speech. It was a clever speech.

It contained some sanctimonious verbiage to appease Barack Obama, followed right away by the opposite, to pacify the Israeli extreme right. Not much more.

NETANYAHU DECLARED that “our hand is extended for peace.”

In my ears, that rang a bell: in the 1956 Sinai war, a member of my editorial staff was attached to the brigade that conquered Sharm-al-Sheikh. Since he had grown up in Egypt, he interviewed the senior captured Egyptian officer, a colonel. “Every time David Ben-Gurion announced that his hand was stretched out for peace,” the Egyptian told him, “we were put on high alert.”

And indeed, that was Ben-Gurion’s method. Before every provocation he would declare that “our hands are extended for peace”, adding conditions that he knew were totally unacceptable to the other side. Thus an ideal situation (for him) was created: The world saw Israel as a peace-loving country, while the Arabs looked like serial peace-killers. Our secret weapon is the Arab refusal, it used to be joked in Jerusalem at the time.

This week, Netanyahu wheeled out the same old trick.

I DO NOT underrate, of course, the significance of the chief of the Likud uttering the two words: “Palestinian state”.

Words carry political weight. Once released into the world, they have a life of their own. Unlike dogs, they cannot be called back.

In a popular Israeli love song, the boy asks the girl: “When you say no, what do you mean?” One could well ask: When Netanyahu says yes, what does he mean?
But even if the words “Palestinian state” passed his lips only under duress, and when Netanyahu has no intention at all of turning them into reality, it is still important that the head of the government and the chief of the Likud was compelled to utter them. The idea of the Palestinian state has now become a part of the national consensus, and only a handful of ultra-rightists reject it directly. But this is only the beginning. The main struggle will be about turning the idea into reality.

THE ENTIRE speech was addressed to one single person: Barack Obama. It was not designed to appeal to the Palestinians. It was quite clear that the Palestinians are only the passive object of a discussion between the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of Israel. Except in some tired old clichés, Netanyahu spoke about them, not to them.

He is ready, so he says, to conduct negotiations with the “Palestinian community”, and that, of course, “without preconditions”. Meaning: without Palestinian preconditions. On Netanyahu’s part, there are plenty of preconditions, every one of which is designed to make certain that no Palestinian, no Arab and indeed no Muslim will agree to enter negotiations.

Condition 1: The Arabs have to recognize Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” (and not just “a Jewish state”, as many in the media erroneously reported.) As Hosny Mubarak has already answered: No Arab will accept this, because it would mean that 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel are cut off from the state, and because it would deny in advance the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees - the main bargaining chip of the Arab side.
It should be remembered that when the United Nations resolved in 1947 to partition Palestine between a “Jewish state” and an “Arab state”, they did not mean to define the character of the states. They were just stating facts: there are two mutually hostile populations in the country, and therefore the country has to be divided between them. (Anyhow, 40% of the population of the “Jewish” state was to consist of Arabs.)
Condition 2: The Palestinian Authority must first of all establish its rule over the Gaza Strip. How? After all, the Israeli government prevents travel between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and no Palestinian force can pass from one to the other. And the solution of the problem by establishing a Palestinian unity government is also ruled out: Netanyahu flatly declared that there would be no negotiations with a Palestinian leadership that includes “terrorists who want to annihilate us” – his way of referring to Hamas.

Condition 3: The Palestinian state will be demilitarized. This is not a new idea. All peace plans that have been put forward up to now speak about security arrangements that would protect Israel from Palestinian attacks and Palestine from Israeli attacks. But that is not what Netanyahu has in mind: he did not speak about mutuality, but about domination. Israel would control the air space and the border crossings of the Palestinian state, turning it into a kind of giant Gaza Strip. Also, Netanyahu’s style was deliberately overbearing and humiliating: he obviously hopes that the word ‘demilitarized” would be enough to get the Palestinians to say “no”.

Condition 4: Undivided Jerusalem will remain under Israeli rule. This was not proposed as an opening gambit for negotiations but presented as a final decision. That by itself ensures that no Palestinian, nor any Arab or even any Muslim, could accept the proposal.
In the Oslo Agreement, Israel undertook to negotiate about the future of Jerusalem. It is an accepted legal rule that if one undertakes to negotiate, one accepts to do so bona fide, on the basis of give and take. Therefore, all peace plans provide that East Jerusalem - wholly or partly – will be returned to Arab rule.

Condition 5: Between Israel and the Palestinian state there will be “defensible borders”. These are code-words for extensive annexations by Israel. Their meaning: no return to the 1967 borders, not even with a swap of territory that would allow for some of the large settlements to be joined to Israel. In order to create “defensible borders”, a major part of the occupied Palestinian territories (which altogether make up just 22% of pre-1948 Palestine) will be absorbed into Israel.

Condition 6: The refugee problem will be solved “outside the territory of Israel”. Meaning: not a single refugee will be allowed to return. True, all realistic people agree that there can be no return of millions of refugees. According to the Arab peace initiative, the solution must be “mutually agreed” – which means that Israel has to agree to any solution. The assumption is that the two parties will agree on the return of a symbolic number. This is a highly charged and sensitive matter, which must be treated with prudence and the utmost sensitivity. Netanyahu does the opposite: his provocative statement, devoid of all empathy, is clearly designed to bring about an automatic refusal.
Condition 7: No settlement freeze. The “normal life” of the settlers will continue. Meaning: the building activity for the “natural increase” will go on. This illustrates the saying of Michael Tarazy, a legal advisor to the PLO: “We are negotiating about sharing a pizza, and in the meantime Israel is eating it.”

All this was in the speech. No less interesting is what was not in it. For example, the words: Road Map. Annapolis. Palestine. The Arab peace plan. Occupation. Palestinian Sovereignty. Opening of the Gaza Strip border crossings. Golan Heights. And, even more important: there was not a hint of respect for the enemy who must be turned into a friend, in the words of the ancient Jewish saying.

SO WHAT is more important? The verbal recognition of “a Palestinian state” or the conditions which empty these words of all content?
The public response is interesting. In an opinion poll taken immediately after the speech, 71% supported it, but 55% believed that Netanyahu just “gave in to American pressure”, and 70% did not believe that a Palestinian state would really come about during the next few years.

What exactly do the 71% support? The “Palestinian state” solution or the conditions which obstruct its implementation – or both?

There is, of course, an extreme right-wing minority which prefers a head-on collision with the United States to giving up any territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Along the road to Jerusalem one can see large posters showing a manipulated photo of Obama wearing an Arab headdress. (It sends a shiver down the spine, because it reminds us of seeing exactly the same poster with Yitzhak Rabin under the keffiyeh.) But the great majority of the people understand that a break with the US must be avoided at all costs.

Netanyahu and the right-wing hoped that the Palestinians would reject his words outright, thus painting themselves as serial peace refusers, while the Israeli government would be seen as taking the first small but significant step towards peace. They are sure that this could be achieved for nothing: the Palestinian state will not be set up, the Israeli government will not give up anything, the occupation will remain, settlement activity will go on and Obama will accept all this.

SO THE main question is: how will Obama react?

The first reaction was minor. A politely positive response.

Obama is not seeking a frontal collision with the Israeli government. It seems that he wants to exert “soft” pressure, vigorously but quietly. To my mind, that is a wise approach.

A few hours before the speech, I met with ex-President Jimmy Carter. The meeting took place at the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem. It was organized by Gush Shalom, with several other Israeli peace organizations taking part. In my opening remarks, I pointed out that we were in exactly the same room where 16 years ago, while the Oslo agreement was being signed in Washington, Israeli peace activists and the leaders of the Palestinian population in Jerusalem met and opened bottles of champagne. The euphoria of those moments has disappeared without leaving a trace.
Israelis and Palestinians have lost hope. On both sides, the overwhelming majority wants an end to the conflict but do not believe that peace is possible – and each side blames the other. Our task is to rekindle the belief that it is indeed possible.

For this there is a need for a dramatic event, a kind of invigorating electric shock – like the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977. I suggested that Obama should come to Jerusalem and speak directly to the Israeli public, perhaps even from the Knesset rostrum, like Sadat.

After listening intently to the participants, the former President encouraged us in our activities and put forward some proposals of his own.

THE DECISIVE point at this moment is, of course, the matter of the settlements. Will Obama insist on a total freeze of all building activity or not?
Netanyahu hopes to wriggle out of it. He has now found a new gimmick: projects that have already started must be allowed to be finished. One cannot stop them in the middle. The plans have already been approved. The tenants are waiting for their apartments, and they must not be made to suffer. The Supreme Court will not allow a freeze. (A particularly ridiculous argument, like the court allowing a thief to spend some more of the money he has stolen before passing sentence.)
If Obama falls for this, he should not be surprised to find out belatedly that these projects include 100,000 new housing units.

This brings us to the most important fact of this week: the settlers did not raise hell after Netanyahu’s speech. On the contrary. Here and there some feeble criticism could be heard, but the large and armed settler population kept remarkably quiet.

Which brings us back to the unforgettable Sherlock Holmes, who explained how he solved one of his mysteries by drawing attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“But the dog did nothing in the night-time!” someone objected.

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Holmes.

—————–

While I post this, in front of me is also booklet No. 79,  April 2009,  of the Mideast Security and Policy Studies group at The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of the Bar Ilan University. This is the most recent publication by the Center where Mr. Netanyahu chose to speak, the booklet is titled - “The Rise and Demise of the Two-State Paradigm” and was written by Professor Efraim Inbar, Professor in Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and the Director of its Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center.

His predetermined conclusion is that - “Unfortunately, a stable and peaceful outcome in accordance with this paradigm is unlikely to emerge in the near future for two reasons. The two national movements, the Palestinian and the Zionist, are not close to an historic compromise, and the Palestinians are not able to build a state. This latter point is particularly important. The Palestinians were given the chance to build a state after 1994, but have produced only a ‘failed state’ that is corrupt and anarchic. This is true both of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank as well as the Hamas-controlled Gaza. Therefore, the inevitable conclusion is that the two-state option is no longer relevant.”  That is the real soul of the Netanyahu government of Israel and that is what President Obama’s goodwill has to measure up against.

While writing this, we are also aware of yesterday’s meeting at the US Department of State between the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that ended with Ms. Clinton saying a public NO to all Israel settlement construction in the West Bank. Now, Mr. Lieberman will take this home to Mr. Netanyahu as charged by the Obama Administration, this in order to come up with a more forthcoming Israeli answer to the US position as expressed in the Obama speech at Cairo University.

Will there be now agreed upon enabling steps towards a two States solution? That is the real question.

————————–

Israel, Palestine and America - for Israel and a Palestine - Both states must be real.
Jun 18th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Binyamin Netanyahu has taken one essential step. Now he must take a whole lot more

ISRAEL’S prime minister has at last accepted that a Palestinian state must exist alongside an Israeli one if there is to be any chance of a durable peace between Arabs and Jews in that tragic sliver of land that three great faiths consider holy. In a much-heralded speech meant to answer Barack Obama’s ringing re-endorsement of a Palestinian state in Cairo ten days earlier, Binyamin Netanyahu spat out the required pair of words. They were welcome; but unless he shows a greater readiness to negotiate in good faith, his belated move will turn out to be pointless.

Mr Netanyahu hedged his acceptance of two states with conditions, promises and evasions. He turned a deaf ear to Mr Obama’s demand that the building and expansion of Jewish settlements on the land that must become part of that Palestinian state must stop. Despite the fact that Arab citizens of Israel make up a fifth of the population, he demanded, as a new precondition for negotiations, that the Palestinians must acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, which is code for their renouncing in advance the right of any Palestinian refugees to return to Israel. He insisted on a series of curbs and limitations on a putative Palestinian state that would deprive it of sovereignty. He said that Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want to be a shared city and capital of their new state, must stay united under Israeli control. Mr Netanyahu, who opposed the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip four years ago, made no hint that he would hand back any Palestinian territory that might make Israel’s border less “defensible”.

As his shift on two states shows, Mr Netanyahu is not wholly immovable. Some of his conditions—say, over the degree of demilitarisation of a Palestinian state—are likely to be open to negotiation. On other areas, Mr Obama must keep pushing him. His intransigence over the settlements cannot be allowed to stand. Mr Obama should intensify his rhetoric, even threatening to withhold some financial and technological aid, if the Israeli leader refuses to budge.

Mr Netanyahu, of course, is under pressure from coalition partners even more hawkish than himself. Some of them are annoyed by what they regard as his truckling to Mr Obama. But they are not the only possible partners for him. If they walked away, he could try to bring on board Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist Kadima party, who won Israel’s general election earlier this year but failed to form a ruling coalition precisely because Mr Netanyahu refused to countenance the two-state idea. Ms Livni’s co-operation might improve matters all round.

The gulf
At the same time, there is work for Mr Obama to do on the other side. Rifts in the Palestinian movement are so deep that even the best-intentioned Israeli government would find it hard to strike a two-state deal that would stick. Mr Obama, with help from friendly Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, should strive to bring the Palestinians together, in the hope that the rejectionists of Hamas, the Islamist movement that has so far refused to recognise Israel, should be drawn into negotiation. It may be doable: Hamas’s leader gave rare if grudging approval to Mr Obama’s sweet words in Cairo, where America’s president acknowledged that “some Palestinians” supported it and urged it to join the diplomatic fray.

The gap between Israelis and Palestinians remains wide. While Israel’s leader refused to accept the two-state idea, it was unbridgeable. The Palestinians cannot and should not accept the sort of state that Mr Netanyahu is offering. But he has conceded a huge point of principle, and given Mr Obama something to work on.

  The UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development to be held at UN Hedquarters in New York, 24 to 26 June 200.
The United Nations is convening a three-day summit of world leaders from 24 to 26 June 2009 at its New York Headquarters to assess the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. The aim is to identify emergency and long-term responses to mitigate the impact of the crisis, especially on vulnerable populations, and initiate a needed dialogue on the transformation of the international financial architecture, taking into account the needs and concerns of all Member States.

The United Nations summit of world leaders in June was mandated at the Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development, held in December 2008 in Doha, Qatar. Member States requested the General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann to organize the meeting “at the highest level”.

«We have an historic opportunity —and a collective responsibility— to bring new stability and sustainability to the international economic financial order.»

Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann
President, 63rd Session of the General Assembly.

Part of this - as a side event 25 June, 2009, 3:00p.m.- 6:00p.m., in the  ECOSOC Chamber, United Nations Headquarters,  the UN University is staging two presentations and a potential discussion: “Recovering from the Global Crisis -  Towards an Action Plan for Africa and the Least Developed Countries.”

This event is organised by the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER and UNU-ONY) in collaboration with the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA), the Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS) and will consider the impact of the current global economic crisis on Africa and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

The aim is to focus the attention of the international community on the policy responses and measures needed to accelerate Africa and LDCs’ recovery from the crisis. This is underpinned by a belief that the crisis will not diminish or eliminate the growing hope and progress that many countries have been experiencing, and that recovery can be achieved earlier rather than later, if the appropriate and coordinated responses are now implemented in timely fashion. Given that statistical offices in African countries need support and resources now more than ever, this side event will also discuss the assessment and monitoring of the situation and its impact.

The event will consist of two conceptual/background papers, followed by a panel discussion.

Opening remarks:

Cheick Sidi Diarra
Under Secretary General, Special Adviser on Africa and High Representative for the LDCs, Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDs)

Jean-Marc Coicaud
Director, United Nations University Office at the UN in New York (UNU-ONY)

Speakers:

Asha-Rose Migiro
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General

Dr. Dipu Moni
Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and Chair of the LDCs

Wim Naudé
Senior Research Fellow and Project Director, UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)

Abdalla Hamdok
Director, Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)

Stephen Groff
Deputy Director, Development Co-operation Directorate, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Alhaji Bamanga Tukur
Chairman, African Business Roundtable

Roger Nord
Senior Advisor, African Department, International Monetary Fund

A different press release says that actually this event will look like:

Date: 25 June 2009 14:00 - 16:30
Contact person: Wim Naudé, Senior Research Fellow

This event was originally scheduled for 2 June, 2009 and has been changed to 25 June 2009.

United Nations University Office at New York UNU-ONY announces:

This event is organised by the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER and UNU-ONY) in collaboration with the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA), the Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS) and will consider the impact of the current global economic crisis on Africa and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).The aim is to focus the attention of the international community on the policy responses and measures needed to accelerate Africa and LDCs recovery from the crisis. This is underpinned by a belief that the crisis will not diminish or eliminate the growing hope and progress that many countries have been experiencing, and that recovery can be achieved earlier rather than later, if the appropriate and coordinated responses are now implemented in timely fashion. Given that statistical offices in African countries need support and resources now more than ever, this side event will also discuss the assessment and monitoring of the situation and its impact.

The speakers will include Jeffrey D. Sachs (The Earth Institute), and Wim Naudé (UNU-WIDER) and will be followed by a panel discussion. Announcement page.

Register for this event now: http://recoveringfromglobalcrisisafrical…

To register for Webcasting of this event: http://recoveringfromglobalcrisisafrical…

For information, please contact Ranita Ragunathan at UNU Office in New York UNU-ONY. Email: ragunathan(at unu.edu. Tel: +1 212 963-6387

We assume that both these events will happen and while the first one is the conventional UN event - during conference hours in the afternoon, it is actually the second event that will be the think-tank event, as a side event, during the inter-hours at lunch time, that will present some outside input.

If the UN will facilitate it, we would like to check out both - and present our honest compairison.

June 14, 2009 - the Puerto Ricans in New York had a proud parade, in Iran we saw the Ahmedi-Nejad goons, and at the Bar Ilan University Netanyahu did hide under a capota. This in a day’s TV harvest.

Sunday, June 14, 2009 was a day of pride to Puerto Ricans who paraded in New York after the fact that one of their ladies of the people was nominated to the Supreme Court of the USA, but it was also a day of some tension to the rest of us who were watching a potential Ahmedi-Nejad and Netanyahu media fight. Now that was a total fizzle - Ahmedi-Nejad was the victor hands down. He shrugged off the whole world while Nethanyahu managed to hide under the Bar Ilan “capota.”

We watched on CNN the full Iran program that was there for the whole world to see - Iran’s Ahmedi-Nejad with all his wisdom and warts. Whatever he may be - we do not forget that he has a capable nation behind him and they know now how to tie together an atom bomb. We also saw that their young people are restless, and want more say in the way their country is run. The Supreme Leader has hand picked four competitors to become Prime Minister - so we know that there is indeed no great difference between them. Some TV pundit in the US said today that they range in US terms from Duke to Dole. So, no great importance in practical turns for who wins.

But that was not the issue. What we saw is that the young generation preferred a new generation of the Revolution, even though embodied by someone that he himself had previously worked with the leaders of the Revolution - that was the Moussavi candidacy. They preferred him over the first generation of the Revolution, that is represented by the people who surround Ahmedi-Nejad, even though he himself was previously only the Mayor of Tehran. Why that preference? Simply - that would have meant change - at least some change - even if that change is still within the system. Not having been granted this minimal change, the day is near that they will want real change, and this may be good for the world or who knows if this is the case indeed?

Moussavi campaigned with his wife at his side, this was a novelty - a la Obama or Clinton - and the women came to vote for him because of her. With half of the population women, the declared 85% that voted, so 40% should have been just the part of the female voters in the Moussavi bag - but Ahmedi-Nejad’s police gave a final reading to the  Abadgaran candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi 13,216,411 votes or 33.75% and to Independent Reformist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 24,527,516 votes or 62.63%.

This just does not seem right - further, the Iranian officials knew to release the results already after 2 hours from the end of the election - as they said after having counted just one fifth of the votes - and you know what? They seemed to have hit quite close with the suggested 2/3 for Ahmedi-Nejad and 1/3 for Moussavi - a 2:1 win that did not seemingly take in consideration areas were Moussavi had a clear advantage - like in his home town in the Azeri part of Iran. According to the official figures he lost even there - and at the same split? Does not seem right. In short - it was there for the whole world to see that the governing Iranian machine cheated all the way!  So, not enough that the Iranian economy is in shambles, and the standing of Iran in the world is in the pits - now Iran will have on its hands a younger generation that has seen that it was had by the religious leaders. Is internal unrest in a faltering Iran, that plays at the big nuclear casino table, to anyone’s interest?

Now I turned the TV monitor to this morning’s press conference in Tehran. And what did we see? A one man cross between Hitler and Goebels trying to smile his way in the face of the world - and talk to the nitwits that mistake life for a game of soccer.

We saw an imaginary two line of questions - the one line from what he called the Press, that were the government paid folks of Iran - giving him their congratulations, one even his adoration, then throwing a soft-ball - the other line of people with questions - what he called the “Private Media” that was the International Press were The Independent, The Economist, and Our Christiane Amanpour of CNN, did shine like the sun. This second group had real questions and Ms. Amanpour, herself born in iran, simply did not let him get away with the movement of the feather boa - she should get the good journalist of the year award or something like it. The questions came in alternating sequence - one from an iranian official press person and one from the “Private” people - privates like in BBC.

The Iranians also watched that program - not just the outside world - and they know for sure that the world is ready to point a finger, but it is now for them to clench their fists. So, where does this take us when we realize that Iran has enough baton swirling goons, in civil close, to enhance any fighting force sanctioned by the Ayatollahs, in Iran and outside?

—————-

After I saw the above, and watched the Puerto Ricans, I waited to open at 1PM the website that advertised a video where I could see the Nethanyahu long awaited answer to the Obama Cairo University speech to the Muslim World.
We have written about this new speech, its location at the religious Bar Ilan University, wondered why there and speculated what he will say. We understood his dilemmas and wished him well.

Well? We know he is US educated, speaks a good English and expected him to speak in English to the world. We knew he is under pressure and needs friends that need arguments - why he will or will not accept the advice that President Obama was giving him.

We knew that Mr. Netanyahu was looking eastwards to Iran, and having watched Ahmedi-Nejad we thought that this super-goon gave him now material to be able to avoid giving straight answers to Obama. We did not like this because we think that Israel and the World should take advantage of the Obama interest to push the various Middle East fractions to some sort of an understanding that could actually benefit them all. We have our collection of papers on the subject and I will mention here the Jacob Stein article in The Jewish Sentinel (New York) of June 16-22, 2006 - “Israel at 58 - Time for Borders and Sovereignty.” Now Israel is 62 and there are no borders yet and as such - indeed - what is the meaning of “Sovereignty?” If you have no borders you are by definition in a continuous state of war - is it not so?

We loved President Obama’s recognition of the fact that the US was responsible for the start of the Iranian disaster - back then when the US CIA removed the Mosadegh government. We know that President Obama understands that previous US Presidents imposed addiction to cheap Mideast oil upon the US economy - this is something like what the British did when they brought cocaine addiction to China. OK - I know that some will cringe at reading this - but then this is what the Middle East had to live with for more then the second half of last century. We believe President Obama wants to move away from oil, and could work with the local governments to help them develop alternatives to their own addiction to the oil money. He promised that the US will get out of Iraq and its oil wells and pockets. Israel has here a tremendous potential scientifically - and potential political interest. would Netanyahu pick up something here and put in his speech? Look - Iran and his nuclear programs are oil based, and its economy is broken - now its Prime Minister, forget his obsession with the Holocaust, but he personally showed on TV the real goon he is. Will Netanyahu pull out some honey from this bee-hive for his speech?

Also, today’s New York Times had the Clifford J. Levy article written in Moscow - “Mideast in Flux - An Israeli Cozies Up To Moscow” that tells about Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a previously Soviet citizen, who is now a friendly guest in Putin’s court. Russia has serious interests in Iran, it cannot be bypassed in the whole rest of the region east of Suez either - can Nethanyahu take an initiative, with Lieberman’s help, of enlarging on the US-Israel-Iran triangle by suggesting how the Russians who want to become accepted suppliers of arms to a Palestinian government, could be pulled in to his larger concept of regional peace? Was Netanyahu going to provide some new ideas for international consideration?

So what does Netanyahu do instead? He decides to speak in Hebrew from the pulpit of the modest size hall at the BESA Center. TV coverage - zilch! Don’t worry, Obama has his own translators - the one that I heard, on the two minutes that FOX allowed his voice, was not so hot. But then, if I were Obama, I would just have the third secretary of the US Embassy fax in his printed release from the official Israeli Ministry of Information - or whatever this is called in Israel. The content of the speech was anyway sent to him beforehand, and the real target of that speech was not the US and was not the World - Islamic or not - but right there the right wing members of the Netanyahu governing coalition - the choir in the room that had to be kept in line so they do not rebel.

The following website, advertised by Israeli sources, which we also posted on our web - did not work -  http://www.biu.ac.il/live/
and let me state flatly here that I did not take kind to having been mislead and having thus mislead others. When I write these lines after 7 PM New York Times, that is full five hours after the speech, there is no video released yet to the internet from that speech.

Fox News, that is their Channel #44 in Manhattan, said that they will show the speech when it starts. The speech was delayed and started 5 minutes late but their whole coverage amounted to less then 5 minutes - first by cutting out after two minutes what Mr. Netanyahu was saying and replacing it with their own pundits’ words, then they also cut off the picture altogether. We decided that they really did not feel it important enough to let the translation lose valuable commercial TV time. Nevertheless, the few minutes were enough to show the “wild west” atmosphere in the room - I must have seen some of those that represented the settlers in the shown frames.

The regular FOX channel - #5 - had a completely different program

CNN is not represented in Israel for over a year, this because of disagreements on the way they covered the last two wars, so the 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM time slot that belongs to the excellent Farid Zakaria GPS program, and that is repeated anyway 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM was untouched - there was a lot about Iran and the Middle East - very good material - but about Netanyahu all they said was that he will speak that day and answer President Obama’s speech in Cairo.

Two Jewish programs went on that time - on channel #51 and on channel #67 - but they did not consider seemingly replacing those programs with Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation.

I was thus left without contact to the speech until information started to trickle in.

from: CNN Breaking News <BreakingNews@mail.cnn.com>

 textbreakingnews at ema3lsv06.turner.com

Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 1:47 PM

——- Israeli prime minister says Israel would agree to a peace agreement with a “demilitarized Palestinian state.”

and then the first real information we got was from the Jewish www.sanfranciscosentinel.com and it amounts (after reorganization) to:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his address by saying that he had formed his new government earlier this year with three major challenges facing Israel: the economic crisis, the Iranian threat, and the Middle East peace process.

He stressed that the greatest threat to the world today was the link between Islamist extremism and nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu, who until now had not endorsed U.S. President Barack Obama’s goal of Palestinian statehood, used this policy speech as an opportunity to reverse course and try to narrow a rare rift between Israel and its closest ally.

The address at Bar Ilan was much anticipated in the wake of the Obama administration’s insistence that Israel impose a complete freeze on settlement construction and recognize the two-state solution.

During the speech, Netanyahu vowed that Israel would not build any new settlements and would refrain from expanding existing Israeli communities in the West Bank. Still, he said the government must be allowed to accommodate natural growth in these settlements. Netanyahu has until now been adamant that a settlement freeze is unfeasible and that he would concentrate on strengthening the Palestinian economy, rather than agreeing to their statehood.

The Prime Minister called on Palestinian leaders to restart Middle East peace negotiations without preconditions: “I call on you, our Palestinian neighbors, and to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority - Let us begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions,” he said. “Israel is committed to international agreements and expects all the other parties to fulfill their obligations as well.”

In an apparent reversal of Israeli policy, Netanyahu also declared that he was prepared to see the creation of a Palestinian state, so long as the international community can guarantee that it not have any military capabilities. Israel cannot agree to a Palestinian state unless it gets guarantees it is demilitarized,” Netanyahu said. He also said that Jerusalem must remain the unified capital of Israel.

The prime minister said he was prepared to meet with the leaders of neighboring Arab countries at any time, to promote regional peace and to gain their contribution to the Palestinian economy.

Netanyahu reiterated that Israel has no desire to control the Palestinian people, and declared that both nations should be able to live side by side in peace.

“We want both Israeli and Palestinian children to live without war,” Netanyahu said, but added: “We must ask ourselves - why has peace not yet arrived after 60 years?”

Israel would not accept any situation in which it was forced to exist beside a terrorist state. Every withdrawal from settlement territories would contribute to such terror, said Netanyahu.

The prime minister also said that Palestinians must accept Israel as a Jewish state, and cited the root of the regional conflict to “even moderate” Palestinian elements’ refusal to do so.

“When Palestinians are ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, we will be ready for a true final settlement,” the prime minister said.

He emphasized that the Jewish people have been linked to the land of Israel for over 3,000 years and ruled out the option of granting Palestinians refugees the right to settle within Israeli borders.

Netanyahu said that Israel would not negotiate with terrorist who wish to destroy it, and said that Palestinians must choose between path of peace and Hamas.

——————-

If we use already material from the San Francisco Sentinel - then let me also include their pre-speech info that came from Jerusalem and remember please that this was before the Ahmedi-Nejad press conference but after the results of the elections in Iran gave already been announced by the Ahmedi-Nejad machine:

from HOWARD SCHNEIDER   http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=3…

When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivers a major foreign policy address Sunday, the setting will be part of the message: He will speak at Bar-Ilan University, which was founded in 1955 to unite secular learning with religious Zionism. Advisers to Netanyahu and Israeli political analysts say the speech will be a response to President Obama’s address to Muslims this month at Cairo University. Netanyahu, they say, wants to inject a Zionist “narrative” into a discussion that he believes was tilted in Obama’s speech toward the Arab version of events.

While Netanyahu’s remarks are expected to range across issues, including Obama’s demand for a freeze on Jewish settlements and the U.S. president’s call for the establishment of a Palestinian state, they will center on Netanyahu’s assertion that Arabs must recognize Israel as a state for the peace process to succeed.

The point is not a condition for the start of peace talks with the Palestinians or other Arab nations, Netanyahu’s advisers have said. But just as Israel is being asked to acknowledge the Palestinian identity of a neighboring country under the “two-state solution” advocated by Obama and European leaders, Netanyahu believes that an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict requires a similar acknowledgment from the other side, they say.

“They need to cross the Rubicon of a Jewish state,” said a Netanyahu adviser involved in preparing the speech. “That will be necessary for an agreement, because then you know the conflict is over.”

The run-up to Netanyahu’s speech has been dominated by debate in the media and in political circles about how he will address Obama’s call for a settlement freeze and whether he will endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu and his governing coalition oppose both ideas, and they say that security concerns still make creation of a Palestinian state and a withdrawal from the West Bank too risky. That argument is likely to be bolstered by the reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose support of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and pursuit of nuclear technology are considered among Israel’s chief threats.

——————

Then arrived The Washington Post with an exotic picture sub-noted: An Ultra Orthodox Jewish man walks past posters,  hung by an extremist right wing group,  depicting US President Barack Obama wearing a traditional Arab headdress,  in Jerusalem,  Sunday,  June 14,  2009. Senior aides say they don’t expect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to explicitly endorse Palestinian statehood when he delivers an anxiously awaited policy speech Sunday night,  a stance that would preserve an uncomfortable impasse with the United States. T (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner), (Sebastian Scheiner - AP)

Netanyahu accepts limited Palestinian state.

The Associated Press, Sunday, June 14, 2009; 2:38 PM

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on Sunday called for creation of a limited Palestinian state for the first time, saying it would have to be disarmed.

Netanyahu made the call during a major policy speech about his Mideast peacemaking intentions.

“In any peace agreement, the territory under Palestinian control must be disarmed, with solid security guarantees for Israel,” he said.

“If we get this guarantee for demilitarization and necessary security arrangements for Israel, and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, we will be willing in a real peace agreement to reach a solution of a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state,” he said.

Up to now Netanyahu has resisted endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a Mideast peace settlement, drawing intense pressure from the administration of President Barack Obama.

Netanyahu also said the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and he declared that the solution of the Palestinian refugee problem must be “outside Israel.”

Palestinians claim that refugees from the 1948-49 war that followed Israel’s creation and their millions of descendants have the right to reclaim their original homes.

“I call on you, our Palestinian neighbors, and to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority: Let us begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions,” he said. “Israel is committed to international agreements and expects all the other parties to fulfill their obligations as well.”

Netanyahu also called for Arab leaders to meet him and contribute to Palestinian economic development.

——————-

eventually, the Israeli HAARETZ came up with the full talk
Last update - 23:41 14/06/2009

I picked up for direct posting two excerpts from the text of Netanyahu’s foreign policy speech at Bar Ilan
as released at 23:41 Israel time  - 7:00 or 4:41 PM New York Time.

for the full article please see:  http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092…

Whoever thinks that the continued hostility to Israel is a result of our forces in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is confusing cause and effect. The attacks on us began in the 1920s, became an overall attack in 1948 when the state was declared, continued in the 1950s with the fedaayyin attacks, and reached their climax in 1967 on the eve of the Six-Day War, with the attempt to strangle Israel. All this happened nearly 50 years before a single Israeli soldier went into Judea and Samaria.

To our joy, Egypt and Jordan left this circle of hostility. They signed peace agreements with us which ended their hostility to Israel. It brought about peace.

To our deep regret, this is not happening with the Palestinians. The closer we get to a peace agreement with them, the more they are distancing themselves from peace. They raise new demands. They are not showing us that they want to end the conflict.

A great many people are telling us that withdrawal is the key to peace with the Palestinians. But the fact is that all our withdrawals were met by huge waves of suicide bombers.

We tried withdrawal by agreement, withdrawal without an agreement, we tried partial withdrawal and full withdrawal. In 2000, and once again last year, the government of Israel, based on good will, tried a nearly complete withdrawal, in exchange for the end of the conflict, and were twice refused.

We withdrew from the Gaza Strip to the last centimeter, we uprooted dozens of settlements and turned thousands of Israelis out of their homes. In exchange, what we received were missiles raining down on our cities, our towns and our children. The argument that withdrawal would bring peace closer did not stand up to the test of reality.

With Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, they keep on saying that they want to ‘liberate’ Ashkelon in the south and Haifa and Tiberias.
Even the moderates among the Palestinians are not ready to say the most simplest things: The State of Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish People and will remain so. (Applause)

———

The connection of the Jewish People to the Land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah ? this is not a foreign land, this is the Land of our Forefathers. (Applause)

The right of the Jewish People to a state in the Land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish People over 2,000 years — persecutions, expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, murders, which reached its climax in the Holocaust, an unprecedented tragedy in the history of nations. There are those who say that without the Holocaust the State would not have been established, but I say that if the State of Israel had been established in time, the Holocaust would not have taken place. (Applause) The tragedies that arose from the Jewish People?s helplessness show very sharply that we need a protective state.
The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People. (Applause)

As the first PM David Ben Gurion in the declaration of the State, the State of Israel was established here in Eretz Israel, where the People of Israel created the Book of Books, and gave it to the world.

But, friends, we must state the whole truth here. The truth is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish Homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians. We do not want to rule over them. We do not want to run their lives. We do not want to force our flag and our culture on them. In my vision of peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbor?s security and existence.

These two facts ? our link to the Land of Israel, and the Palestinian population who live here, have created deep disagreements within Israeli society. But the truth is that we have much more unity than disagreement.

I came here tonight to talk about the agreement and security that are broad consensus within Israeli society. This is what guides our policy. This policy must take into account the international situation. We have to recognize international agreements but also principles important to the State of Israel. I spoke tonight about the first principle - recognition. Palestinians must truly recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The second principle is demilitarization. Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarization, with solid security measures. Without this condition, there is a real fear that there will be an armed Palestinian state which will become a terrorist base against Israel, as happened in Gaza. We do not want missiles on Petah Tikva, or Grads on the Ben-Gurion international airport. We want peace. (Applause)
And, to ensure peace we don?t want them to bring in missiles or rockets or have an army, or control of airspace, or make treaties with countries like Iran, or Hizbullah. There is broad agreement on this in Israel. We cannot be expected to agree to a Palestinian state without ensuring that it is demilitarized. This is crucial to the existence of Israel ? we must provide for our security needs.

—————

To summarize - Israel lost a tremendous opportunity to publicize its cause - right there on the day that Ahmedi-Nejad showed up in his nakedness, but Israel blew it.

Our question to Nethanyahu is - Why talk to one wing of the Israeli government when you can get the whole world to listen to you. Why talk in Hebrew from the jewish religious Bar Ilan University small hall, when you could actually have spoken from some historic hall of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - the University that was built as part of the reconstruction of Jewish sovereignty in its homeland - and speak in your good English so the world does understand what you are saying?

Yes, we know that Bar Ilan University is home of the Begin-Sadat Center for Peace, but The Hebrew University has The Truman Institute on its campus that has done much to bring Israel closer to Africa and other developing regions in the world. Why talk about Jerusalem from Ramat Gan and not from the real place were your justification of your States existence comes from?

Then, why not take advantage of what goes on in Iran of today. Would not - right now - just with the young people in Tehran in upheaval - be in place to remind the young Iranians of Cyrus and the days the Jews and the Persians actually did have good relations - that the Jews are part of the history of the region - and that Ahmedi-Nejad’s diatribes are total rubbish?

Seemingly Israel has to get greater internal consensus, to include its intellectuals, and in addition to the useless 30 Ministries that were established by the ruling coalition - establish also a Ministry for Future Generations to serve as Think Tank and Ministry of Intelligent Information to the outside world.

————————————————————————————————–

UPDATED with SAN FRANCISCO SENTINEL
MONDAY MORNING EDITION
June 15 2009

EGYPT SAYS NO ARAB COUNTRY WOULD ACCEPT NETANYAHU APPROACH:
Hosni Mubarak  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak blasted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech
on Sunday saying “Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish
state is ruining the chance for peace,” Egyptian news agencies reported on Monday.
Mubarak further added that “not Egypt, nor any other Arab country would support
Netanyahu’s approach.”
Continue Reading:  EGYPT SAYS NO ARAB COUNTRY WOULD ACCEPT NETANYAHU APPROACH  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

PALESTINIANS REJECT TERMS OF NETANYAHU ADDRESS  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]–

——

IRAN SUPREME LEADER REVERSES POSITION, ORDERS ELECTION INVESTIGATION - MOUSAVI SET
TO APPEAR AT BANNED RALLY  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

FIVE REASONS TO SUSPECT IRAN’S ELECTION RESULTS  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

IRAN REJECTS PRO-MOUSAVI RALLY - COMMUNICATIONS DISRUPTED  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]
MOUSAVI SUPPORTERS PLAN RALLY IN TEHRAN MONDAY  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

——

REACTIONS TO NETANYAHU KEYNOTE SPEECH  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

NETANYAHU SPEECH RECEIVES HARSH RESPONSE FROM ISRAELI RIGHTIST PARTY SPOKESMAN  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

THE NETANYAHU SPEECH - START PEACE TALKS IMMEDIATELY - ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER WILLING
TO MEET ANY ARAB LEADER, EVEN IN RIYADH  http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102611203798&a…]

———————

and from truthout.org
Steve Weissman | Israel Offers a State and a Half.
<A href=”http://www.truthout.org/061509J”>http://www.truthout.org/061509J</A>
Steve Weissman, Truthout: “Could Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu become the Richard Nixon of the Middle East, as Barack Obama invited him to do? Could he break with his hard-line past and reach out to the Palestinians the way Nixon did with the Chinese? Or will he pay lip service to peace even as he does everything he can to keep the Palestinians from ever getting a viable state of their own?”

Top Ayatollah Calls for Investigation of Iran’s Election.
<A href=”http://www.truthout.org/061509L”>http://www.truthout.org/061509L</A>
Ian Black and Matthew Weaver, The Guardian UK: “Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered an investigation into claims of vote-rigging and fraud in last week’s presidential election, Iranian state TV reported today. The report said Khamenei had told the guardian council, the clerical body that oversees elections, to examine the pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s claims of widespread rigging in Friday’s poll.”

———————

The analysisis in the June 15th Economist ends with:

“Western diplomats express disappointment with the opposition’s failure to unseat Mr Ahmadinejad, but not because they expected any of his challengers to make dramatic policy turns. Iran’s foreign relations, including such important issues as the nuclear file, fall largely within the remit of the Supreme Leader, rather than the presidency. But a fresh face, and a change in style, would have made it easier for other countries to engage with Iran. Seeking to think positively, one diplomat suggested that Mr Ahmadinejad’s return to office would at least eliminate a lengthy transition between administrations. The president’s undisputed conservative credentials might also make him better able to rally backing for any future concessions on the vexed question of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”  Let us pray that the pragmatic people are right, and that a chastised Ahmadi-Nejad might be willing to stop spitting fire.

 The 5th International Water Technologies & Environmental Control Exhibition & the 2nd International Conference - WATEC

Tel Aviv, Israel, November 17-19, 2009.

————

WATEC is a pivotal sustainable-economy exhibition and conference for 2009.

WATEC 2009 is an international showcase of technologies, products, and services to support a sustainable economy. With water and energy challenges at the top of the global agenda, WATEC 2009 features compelling solutions and proven, practical applications in areas such as water and energy efficiency, water quality, desalination, and water supply.

Hosting participants from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, the exhibition is a unique opportunity to discover the latest innovations from start-up businesses, established companies, and researchers that can help drive private and public initiatives and accelerate results.
The realities of today’s global economic crisis, declining ecological situation, and tenuous international political climate create both serious challenges and great opportunities for optimal resource utilization. Effective resource management and development solutions that have minimal ecological impact and are financially viable can be comprehensive and balanced strategies to address inevitable resource constraints. In this context, WATEC 2009 makes crisis the catalyst for technological innovation, policy change, and optimal resource utilization.

WATEC 2009 will introduce international successes and promising advancements for sustainable development, focusing on recent achievements and emerging solutions for the coming years. Bringing together Israeli and international business executives, political decision-makers, and leading researchers, WATEC 2009 will also be a showcase for the most advanced environmental technologies from around the world.
 highlights:

20,000+ exhibition attendees projected
150 international delegations expected
90+ countries represented

Illuminating presentations on current and emerging water and environmental topics
International region-based problem-solving forum
An array of new products and solutions that will be premiered for the first time
Expansive exhibition forum; ideal venue for both exhibitors and those see Start-ups in the spotlight:king solutions

The on-line meeting planner that makes it easy to pre-schedule meetings with the people who want to see you the most

5 region-featured panel sessions: Brazil, Southeast Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and Africa
The conference will feature an international problem-solving forum for water, energy, and environmental technology issues. Each of the 5 region-featured panel discussions will highlight one of these regions, assess the challenges it faces, and propose practical solutions.

 Start Ups: This year, WATEC is featuring the Innovation Pavilion, a forum to highlight Israeli breakthrough solutions in technology and approach to a sustainable economy. This pavilion receives high visibility from the media and benefits from heavy international publicity from Israeli economic attachés worldwide. It is a unique opportunity for start-ups to promote their products, explore partnerships, attract investors, and expand international exposure.
 info at watec-israel.com
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Posted in Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC, Brazil, Israel, Reporting from UNFCCC Meetings, Africa, Asia & Australia, The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Nairobi, Vienna

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David Rothkopf -From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

David J. Rothkopf (born 24 December 1955) is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in U.S. foreign policy and economic strategy, as well as an international business consultant and professor. He served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during the administration of Bill Clinton. After leaving Commerce, Rothkopf became managing director of Kissinger and Associates in January 1996.

As a Carnegie fellow, he wrote Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. In addition, he is chairman and CEO of The Rothkopf Group, LLC, a consulting firm, and Garten Rothkopf LLC, a firm that focuses on emerging markets.

He previously was a founder and CEO of Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington D.C., United States. A prolific writer, Rothkopf has authored more than 150 articles on international issues for a variety of publications, most recently for the Washington Post and Intellibridge’s Homeland Security Monitor. He is a 1977 graduate of Columbia College and attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

 http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/…

David Rothkopf’s blog  -  http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/blog/4…

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Turn the U.N. into Condos  - You can’t spell unproductive without the letters “U” and “N”…
Thu, 06/11/2009

I’m one of those guys that the conspiracy theorists love to hate says David Rothkopf.
I not only believe that we need stronger global governance mechanisms, I believe that the reinvention of our global governance system is one of the great shared missions of the world for the century ahead. Whether it is strengthening institutions that regulate trade or climate, finance or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or whether it is creating multilateral enforcement mechanisms with real teeth, the international system of nation states and very weak multilateral mechanisms we currently have is showing its age and is simply not up to satisfying the obligations of the social contract in the global era. In the eyes of the conspiracy maniacs … weakened by too much time staring at anti-Bilderberg, anti-Davos, anti-World Jewish Conspiracy Web sites … this makes me a world government guy and a threat to the natural order. (Which apparently is manifested in a libertarian fantasy land of white guys living in shacks and RVs far from the influence of any cultural tradition but their own. The notion of one nation under Toby Keith seems a little dubious to me, but then again, most of these guys think people like me would best serve as hood ornaments.)

Having said that, watching the UN continue its kabuki theater concerning North Korea makes me want to shut the place down, convert it to condos and remit the funds to the former member states. Even in a down New York real estate market it is almost certain to be a better return on investment for the dollars poured into that white elephant on the East River than “outcomes” like the proposed sanctions on Pyongyang. This is particularly tragic since containing and ultimately eliminating the threats posed by states like North Korea and other proliferators seems to me a vital role for the UN or at least for some international mechanism. But you can’t stand up to the bad guy without a spine and the UN has been an invertebrate by design since it first crawled out of San Francisco Bay in April 1945.

No one wanted anything like a strong world governance structure back then and so they built a talking shop that makes most freshman philosophy seminars look like decisive drivers of global change. Basically the organization was designed along the lines of the conflict resolution sessions my daughters’ elementary school used to use when students got into a fight. The combatants would be sat down in a room, asked to explain the problem, and then told to apologize and make up or else. Of course the “or else” was the equivalent of the great parental technique of counting to three, you didn’t know what might happen once you got to the point of no return but you were sure it was bad.

To my eldest daughter’s credit at one point she got into a fight with a budding bitchlet from the grade ahead of her and when asked to say they were friends, she refused. She sensed that there would be no repercussions. Who knew that my adorable little cupcake and Kim Jong-Il would have that much in common.

He must be sitting there with his 26 year-old son, Kim Jong-Un, his recently anointed successor, in their badly paneled rumpus room full of tapes of old American movies playing their favorite video game (Grand Theft Plutonium) and cackling at the wimps on Manhattan Upper East Side. Seriously, I can hardly understand how in a city in which every cab driver is prepared to get all up in your grille about the most casual comment, these UN folks can manage to negotiate the basics of daily life. It takes more gumption than they have ever displayed to get a waiter to bring you a menu at most Manhattan coffee shops. (I’ve seen “Gossip Girl.” I know how that part of town works. Blair Waldorf would have Ban Ki Moon braiding her hair and carrying her books to school within seconds of their first meeting.)

In essence, the new tough stand of the UN, orchestrated by the United States, has two parts. In the first, we essentially reiterate what we’ve said in the past about interdicting shipments of weapons materials. But this time, folks, we say it with feeling. There is no commitment by anyone to actually stop or inspect North Korean ships and there is no UN mechanism obligating or even sanctioning the use of force. We also plan to cut off financing options for the starving country … except those that pertain to humanitarian or development needs. Of course, money is fungible and the government has shown a real willingness to spend on arms in the past while letting its people eat grass, so why we think this tactic won’t just produce more humanitarian and development needs … which in turn will be met … is beyond me.

In all the articles on these developments, the usual suspects at think tanks and in the diplomatic community say all this matters because this time the Russians and the Chinese are really pissed off. Yes, maybe. But apparently not pissed off enough to actually collaborate in the production of anything that might actually change North Korean behavior. (Their approach, written on the package every North Korean bomb comes seems to have been lifted from a shampoo bottle: Threaten…negotiate/buy time for program development…win aid packages…repeat as necessary.) How was it all described by that UN expert from Stratford-on-Avon? “A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (They didn’t call it the Globe Theater for nothing.)

Further - writing from India, David Rithkopf continues: Also, for the record, on the broader point of this blog, despite my being a very big fan of this wonderful country (India) and a big supporter of it having a much bigger role on the international stage and in America’s foreign policy priorities, I don’t like the nuke deal we cut with them either.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the world’s complacency on proliferation will produce one or more of the great tragedies of the century ahead. (As in the North Korea case, the international community has developed and seems to be sticking to a three-speed plan on proliferation these days: cooperate with proliferators, cut them a lot slack or cut them a little slack. Just in case you wanted to know what was responsible for that ticking sound you hear…)

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David Rothkopf has previously expressed his feelings against nuclear proliferation. In this article from his blog, we realize that he thinks US policy is on nuclear issues equal to that on the banks and other financial institutions - that is the TOO BIG TO FAIL - OR CALL IT TOO ADVANCED IN THE SINKING-IN-THE-MUD FEELING TO BE PUNISHED.

Now, as if Rothkopf had anticipated my above revelation, he hapily provided further hints about moves of the Obama Presidency in another of his blogs:

“Can the Obama administration really believe that merging Chrysler into Fiat
is actually going to help either? Chrysler’s best minds left after their last merger with Daimler Benz. Fiat doesn’t have one single leading international brand. Is it really credible that if one of the world’s most successful auto companies (Daimler Benz) couldn’t save Chrysler that a combination of one of the world’s most mediocre (Fiat) and a bunch of government guys who don’t know anything about cars plus some union members who helped screw things up in the first place are going to do it?

Here in India, taxi drivers talk with palpable pride at the advent of the Tata Nano, a tiny car that is a source of great national pride. Business executives cite the ease with which they meet much higher average gasoline mileage targets than posed in the United States. I mean, I get it, this is a very poor country with a wide range of desperate needs (over 40 percent of Indians don’t have access to electricity yet). But you’ve got to ask which way the trends are pushing us…and you also have to ask why the United States has not made a more urgent priority of dramatically strengthening relations with this country. Such a relationship could not be more central to containing the threat in Pakistan, counter-balancing China, promoting democracy and managing a whole host of global threats from climate to proliferation. To be perfectly honest, I think a lot more real and lasting (rather than symbolic and likely to be fleeting) good would be likely to come from President Obama making a trip to the land of Gandhi than his recent trip to the land of Mubarak and Nasser.”

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Before concluding above post, I observed also an e-mail from the UN that was happily informing us that the US House of Representatives has voted to pay all arrears since 1999 to the UN, and in hope that the Senate will decide in a similar way - the UN will now get all those funds that the previous Administrations thought were for expenditures that were not in the US interest. It says:

Dear Pincas,

Great news! This week, the House of Representatives took a significant step forward in strengthening our relationship with the UN.

By passing the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (HR 2410), developed by Chairman Howard Berman, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is authorizing full payment of all debt the U.S. has accumulated at the United Nations since 1999.

….

Besides addressing U.S. debts to the UN, this comprehensive legislation would:

Support the U.S. payment of UN dues on time (or at least not 9 months late!); lift the arbitrary legislative cap on peacekeeping contributions; and meet its ongoing financial commitments to the UN and other important international organizations.

Maintain robust support for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR); build training capacity to support rapid deployment of UN peacekeepers; and allow the U.S. to join other nations in helping make critically needed helicopters available for UN authorized peacekeeping missions.

Authorize critical resources for the State Department and USAID to help prevent, mitigate, and peacefully resolve crises; and create new incentives for Foreign Service Officers to serve in posts focusing on multilateral diplomacy and human rights.

But while this is an important victory, more work lies ahead.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee must craft and pass its own bill before any legislation can be sent to the President. To make sure your voices are being heard, the Better World Campaign has met with the Committee to emphasize the need to include UN language in its version of the Foreign Relations Authorization bill.

Of course, it will take some time to draft this bill, but we wanted to keep you in the loop.

….

So stay tuned, and thank you for your help in strengthening U.S.-UN relations!

Best,

Your friends at Better World Campaign
 http://www.BetterWorldCampaign.org/

President Obama’s Cairo Speech: The Question Left Unanswered – Iran.

by Dr. Jonathan Rynhold

BESA Center Perspectives Papers No. 79, June 9, 2009

 http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/perspectiv…

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Obama’s speech represents a short-term tactical gain for his policy of engagement. But such ’soft power’ capital is modest and will almost certainly depreciate. It cannot form the basis for a sound, workable American strategy in the Middle East. On the strategic and policy levels, the speech contained many reassuring themes from Israel’s perspective. However the language he used to describe the roots of the conflict were disturbing, and may only reinforce Arab extremism and thus serve to lessen the long term prospects for peace. Worse still, the speech was vague and lacked resolve regarding the most urgent problem for Israel and America’s other regional allies — the imminent threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

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The Strategic Purpose of Obama’s Speech:

The strategic purpose of Obama’s speech was to improve America’s standing in Muslim public opinion, especially in the Middle East. He sought to undo the damage to America’s popularity wrought by Muslim perceptions of the policies pursued by George W. Bush.

This approach rests on a belief in ’soft power’; namely that America’s image is of strategic importance. This is deemed to be especially important in the Middle East because, according to this approach, when America is reasonably popular, it makes it easier for its Arab/Muslim allies to publicly support U.S. policy, while simultaneously lessening the threat that anti-American forces pose to these allies.

Obama’s Cairo speech was designed to drive a wedge between the Muslim/Arab centre and the radicals who are deeply and unequivocally anti-American. The aim was to put the radicals on the rhetorical back foot and therefore to make it harder for them to recruit popular support for their anti-American agenda.

To this end he sought to deny the radicals a basis for demonizing the US by making many positive statements regarding Islam and some critical comments about past American policies. For the same reason, Obama focused the contents of his speech on messages which opinion polls suggest the Muslim/Arab centre can live with, but to which the radicals are ideologically opposed. Even the issue of Holocaust denial can be said to be relevant here, as this issue has played a role in the Iranian elections, with reformists charging that Ahmadinejad’s stance is wrong and does great damage to Iran’s foreign relations.

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The Strategic Limitations of the Obama Speech:

In the immediate aftermath, judging by the responses in the Muslim world, the speech can be said to have been a qualified tactical success. Many welcomed the speech, while radical critics tended to either focus on what was not said, or to state that Obama would be judged not by his words but by his deeds.

Yet however well he speaks, no American President has the sustained capability to inflict critical damage to the culture of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Yes, the speech bought the U.S. and its regional allies some political capital. But the value of that capital is modest and it will almost certainly depreciate.

In a one-off speech Obama can control the message, but in general the discourse in the Middle East is framed in radical terms, even in instances when the media is controlled by pragmatic pro-American dictatorships. The presentation of American policy is deliberately skewed and U.S. actions like those which helped Muslims in Bosnia are largely ignored. Well chosen American words and actions can sometimes moderate the level of anti-Americanism for a time, but they cannot undermine it because anti-Americanism is primarily the result of internal regional forces and not American deeds. Consequently, by engaging on these terms, it is the U.S. that is likely to spend most of the time on the rhetorical back foot.

More fundamentally, it is vital to recognize the strategic limitations of soft power, which is far too fragile to form the cornerstone of a U.S. regional strategy. Any attempt to implement such a strategy will shake the foundations of the U.S. position in the region, which depends first and foremost on the maintenance of a pro-American balance of ‘hard’ power in the region. In a speech Obama can drive a wedge between radicals and pragmatists, but in reality the radicals have the ability to force the U.S. to make difficult choices. Nowhere is this clearer than regarding Iran.

Here, it was notable that Obama stopped short of stating directly that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. No doubt, this omission assisted U.S. ’soft power’ since most Muslim Arabs do not think an Iranian bomb is a threat. However, most of the governments that constitute America’s Muslim Arab allies do think that an Iranian bomb represents a major threat. So at some point, the U.S. will have to decide between shoring up its hard power and reinforcing its soft power. Popularity and legitimacy may be useful, but they cannot defend you against nuclear weapons.

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The Strategic Implications of Obama’s Speech for Israel :

–

The Good News

In some key respects Obama’s speech was reassuring for Israel. First, it was notable that Obama opened the section of his speech that dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict by underlining that the American commitment to Israel is “unbreakable”. The blunt and unequivocal nature of this statement left no room for doubt. Given that the major cause of moderation in the Arab world is a perception that Israel cannot be destroyed, restating this commitment is of strategic significance.

Second, there was Obama’s subtle message regarding America’s continued acceptance of Israel’s nuclear deterrent. Obama referred to the Iranian nuclear program as a threat to regional stability. He then obliquely referred to the charge that the U.S has a double standard by focusing on Iran’s nuclear ambitions while overlooking Israel’s nuclear weapons. His response to this charge was to state that America was committed to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons. In other words, the Israeli nuclear program is not linked to the Iranian nuclear program, but rather part of a (vague, long- standing Democratic party) aspiration to free the entire world of nuclear weapons.

Third, Obama did not make the Palestinian problem or the settlements the lynch pin of American strategy. Of course, one issue for the Netanyahu government will be Obama’s insistence that Israel commit to the ultimate creation of a Palestinian state. But this is less of an issue than most realize, Netanyahu having stated previously that he would be willing to accept such a state on certain conditions.

More importantly, Obama reaffirmed some important positions on the peace process that dovetail with Israel’s basic interests, for example that the U.S. will not seek to impose a permanent status settlement. He also reaffirmed that the U.S. would not admit Hamas into the diplomatic process until it recognizes Israel, renounces violence and accepts previous agreements. Although Obama did not use the term ‘terrorism’, he drew the same distinction as G.W. Bush between the legitimate Palestinian goal of self-determination and the illegitimate use of violence to achieve that goal.

Even on the settlements issue, there was no mention of ‘natural growth’ but rather opposition to continued Israeli settlements under the rubric of parties’ Road Map obligations, which the Netanyahu government has already reaffirmed publicly. This formulation leaves room for maneuver for the Netanyahu government. The key to avoiding a crisis over settlements is more likely to lie in Israel actually implementing its prior commitments rather than in any bilateral understanding over what constitutes ‘natural growth’. Even if Israel’s implementation falls short, a crisis might be avoided if the administration gets distracted by more pressing problems in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Aside from this, Obama also made clear demands of the Arab side, telling them that Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and incitement against Israel are a block on peace and that the Arab peace initiative, while positive, did not go far enough to serve as a basis for negotiation.

–

The Bad News :

There were two troubling aspects of the speech. The longer-term problem concerns Obama’s language on the Arab-Israeli conflict, which serves to make peace even more distant. Obama cast Israel’s legitimacy in humanitarian terms – the Holocaust – while referring to the Palestinian problem as having been caused by their displacement in the wake of Israel’s creation.

Such language plays straight into Palestinian gripes that they paid the price for Europe’s sins by having an alien colonialist entity thrust upon them. It also absolves them of any responsibility for their own fate, namely the fact that they rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and violently sought to prevent the creation of Israel. Obama thus reinforced attitudes which are inimical to the development of legitimacy in the Muslim and Arab world for a real lasting peace with Israel. At the very least he could have avoided the language on displacement and referred to the deep historical and religious connection of the Jewish people to the land. If and when Obama visits Israel, he will have the opportunity to correct matters.

Second, and of far more immediate concern was the lack of clarity regarding the Iranian nuclear program. Here Obama’s speech was not at all reassuring. As already noted, the goal of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons was not stated explicitly. Neither was there mention of any deadlines concerning the US-Iranian dialogue. If anything, the tone of the speech seemed to be in line with a policy of containing a nuclear Iran.

So for all the positive elements in Obama’s speech, it did not reveal a clear strategy for protecting America’ key interests in the region. Specifically, it left one big question unanswered – Iran. Iran is the cardinal issue for Israel, the U.S. and its other allies in the Middle East. Over the next 18 months difficult choices will have to be made. Not even the best speech in the world can change that.

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Jonathan Rynhold is senior lecturer of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies.

 Gilles Kepel, Le Monde:

          “Three axes of crisis structure the contemporary Middle East:

         - the Levant, around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its Lebanese-Syrian extensions;

         - the Gulf, around hydrocarbons and Iranian-Arab, Sunni-Shiite antagonisms;

         - and the Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) region, where the Taliban’s power ascent threatens the NATO troops in Afghanistan as well as the cohesion of the Pakistani government.”

The English version was published as http://www.truthout.org/060809F

and the gist is that the Middle East actually is larger then we thought and it includes three areas of conflict that heavily impact upon each other.

So, the first area includes what the Frebch called the LEVANT and which is the Near East where the Lebano/Syria conflict and the Israel/Paletinian/Jordan area are one theater of operations. OK - we saw actually that this area extends also to Ehypts involvement.

 The second area is the Oil Gulf with its Iranian and Arab theater of operationwhere the actors are Shiia and Sunni.

The Third area, that he also includes here is the AfPak region where the Taliban power has the potential of eventually spilling over into the other two theaters.

 He calls theongoing activities as three axes of crisis operating in one large theater that includes all these three.

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Point de vue - Les fractures du Levant.
LE MONDE | 06.06.09 | 13h55
Trois axes de crise structurent le Moyen-Orient contemporain : le Levant, autour du conflit israélo-palestinien et de ses prolongements libano-syriens, le Golfe, autour des hydrocarbures et des antagonismes irano-arabes et sunnites-chiites, et la zone Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak), où la montée en puissance des talibans menace tant les troupes de l’OTAN en Afghanistan que la cohésion de l’Etat pakistanais.

Ces trois axes ont chacun leur logique propre, mais ils sont également fortement interdépendants. Et c’est leur imbrication qui constitue l’identité du Moyen-Orient comme objet problématique complexe par excellence du système international. Lorsque le président Obama s’adresse au monde musulman à partir du Caire, où lorsque le président Sarkozy inaugure une base navale française à Abu Dhabi, c’est l’ensemble de ces enjeux qu’il leur faut prendre en considération.

L’axe de crise du Levant est d’abord caractérisé par le double blocage israélien et palestinien. Le gouvernement Nétanyahou se refuse à la solution des deux Etats comme au gel de la colonisation - sous peine de faire éclater sa coalition à la Knesset. Les Palestiniens sont divisés entre le Fatah, qui administre la partie de la Cisjordanie qui n’est pas colonisée, et le Hamas, qui contrôle la totalité de la bande de Gaza dévastée. Le Hamas refuse de reconnaître Israël, mais est prêt à faire partie d’une OLP chargée de négocier avec l’Etat hébreu.

Les dirigeants des deux factions palestiniennes sont si affaiblis qu’ils sont devenus l’objet d’une bataille d’influence où Egypte et Arabie saoudite d’un côté, Syrie, Qatar et Iran de l’autre, poussent leurs pions. Il en va de même de la dimension libanaise de cet axe de crise. Si le pays du Cèdre a son destin lié à l’évolution de la situation en Israël - comme l’a montré la “guerre des 33 jours” de l’été 2006 -, il est plus que jamais attentif à l’Iran, qui parraine le Hezbollah, le plus puissant parti libanais, appuyé sur la plus importante communauté démographique du pays. Face à l’influence de Téhéran, Riyad soutient à grands frais le Courant du futur, le parti sunnite de la famille Hariri.

Le Liban est devenu ainsi l’un des lieux de cristallisation de l’axe de crise du Golfe - tandis que les chrétiens, autrefois dominants, se partagent entre “chrétiens sunnites” et “chrétiens chiites”, comme l’épingle l’humour beyrouthin. Quant à la Syrie - qui a commencé des pourparlers aujourd’hui interrompus avec Israël sous l’égide turque et a fait des ouvertures à la France et aux Etats-Unis -, elle ne peut renoncer à une alliance structurelle avec l’Iran, le Hezbollah et le Hamas, qui conforte son pouvoir de médiation éventuel.

Si l’axe de crise levantin occupe le devant de la scène médiatique - par ses six décennies d’ancienneté et la dimension émotive des questions juive et palestinienne, il cède toutefois la primauté à l’axe du Golfe pour deux raisons. D’une part, comme on l’a vu, des intérêts conflictuels du Golfe sont en première ligne en Palestine comme au Liban, et sont dotés de gros moyens financiers pour faire triompher leurs vues. Surtout, les enjeux propres au Golfe lui-même sont d’une importance incommensurable avec ceux du Levant : le monde ne peut se passer des hydrocarbures qui traversent quotidiennement le détroit d’Ormuz et représentent le cinquième de sa consommation.

L’Arabie saoudite et les Emirats arabes unis sont les deux premières économies arabes, et les pays du Conseil de coopération du Golfe - malgré les pertes que leur a fait subir la crise financière - demeurent la principale force d’investissement sur la planète. La résolution du chaos irakien, le retrait des troupes américaines en bon ordre - question politique majeure sur laquelle Barack Obama joue sa crédibilité - s’inscrivent au coeur de l’axe de crise du Golfe. Enfin, la réintégration de l’Iran dans le système de sécurité régional en contrepartie de sa réinsertion dans l’économie mondiale est le pari le plus risqué du nouveau président américain - un quitte ou double qui doit pourtant prendre en compte la multiplicité des intérêts contradictoires en cause.

L’axe de crise du Golfe sous sa forme présente est la résultante de l’échec du projet de George W. Bush en Irak. Les idéologues néoconservateurs de la Maison Blanche espéraient faire de l’Irak pacifié, philoaméricain et gouverné par une majorité chiito-kurde sans contentieux avec Israël ni adhésion à l’OPEP le joker d’un Moyen-Orient restructuré.

A cette chimère s’est substituée, pour le président Obama, l’impérieuse nécessité de trouver un autre vecteur pour enclencher la dynamique politique qui aboutisse à une résolution globale de la triple crise du Moyen-Orient. Tel est le sens de la main tendue à l’Iran. L’élection de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad en juin 2005 représentait pour l’establishment politique iranien l’occasion de tirer le maximum de bénéfices de l’enlisement américain en Irak, en faisant monter les enchères d’autant plus haut - sur la question nucléaire ou l’éradication d’Israël - que les Etats-Unis avaient besoin de la neutralité des milices chiites irakiennes alliées à Téhéran, tandis qu’ils subissaient le choc de la guérilla sunnite.

Sur le plan symbolique, cette politique a payé : Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - comme Hassan Nasrallah du Hezbollah libanais - se sont faits les champions de l’antisionisme dans la rue arabe. Mais la situation économique de l’Iran est désastreuse ; à l’embargo international qui répond aux rodomontades de Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, à la corruption et la gabegie s’ajoute une inflation record qui paupérise une population lassée. Si le guide Khamenei soutient fermement la réélection d’Ahmadinejad, d’autres factions du pouvoir, dont l’ancien président Rafsandjani, parrain de la candidature du réformateur Mir Hossein Moussavi, sont plus réceptives à l’offre américaine, où elles voient le maintien de leur emprise sur une république islamique moins idéologique et plus pragmatique, et de l’hégémonie iranienne sur le Golfe, au prix d’une entente avec Washington - un Iran “présentable” pouvant exercer des pressions sur le Hezbollah et le Hamas et faciliter la recherche de compromis au Liban et dans le dossier israélo-palestinien.

Mais pareille perspective nécessiterait d’intenses négociations et se heurte d’ores et déjà à l’hostilité arabe. Les capitales de la péninsule, Le Caire, Amman, ont multiplié les mises en garde face à la menace chiite et iranienne, et la perspective d’un Iran nucléaire les inquiète autant qu’Israël. En prenant la parole au Caire pour s’adresser au monde musulman, et en ajoutant une étape saoudienne à son voyage, Barack Obama a eu soin de rassurer les alliés sunnites traditionnels de Washington, comme du reste le gouvernement israélien. La réussite de l’ouverture à l’Iran suppose que ces derniers n’y mettent pas d’obstacle.

Si l’axe du Golfe, avec l’Iran en son centre, paraît offrir la plus importante clef pour traiter la crise du Moyen-Orient, et détermine les enjeux du Levant, le troisième axe de crise, dans la zone AfPak, s’est imposé comme un obstacle à l’ampleur imprévue. C’est le djihad en Afghanistan des années 1980, financé par les Etats-Unis et les Etats arabes du Golfe pour vaincre l’armée rouge, mais aussi pour offrir une alternative antisoviétique et philoaméricaine à la révolution iranienne en pleine expansion, qui a intégré cette région dans le Moyen-Orient au sens large. Et ce sont Oussama Ben Laden et Ayman Al-Zawahiri, enfants de l’Arabie et de l’Egypte passés par ce djihad, qui ont relié à leur manière l’Afghanistan, le Golfe, la Palestine avec les Etats-Unis dans le cataclysme du 11-Septembre.

En rétorsion, l’Amérique et ses alliés ont détruit le régime des talibans, mais, au lieu d’y consolider leur victoire, ont transféré les troupes pour prolonger la “guerre contre la terreur” vers l’Irak, où elle s’est enlisée, tandis que les talibans regagnaient du terrain, menaçant le gouvernement afghan et les soldats de l’OTAN qui assurent sa sécurité. Le pari d’Obama a consisté à revenir vers l’Afghanistan délaissé pour y achever l’éradication des talibans et des réseaux d’Al-Qaida installés dans les zones tribales à la frontière pakistanaise, apaisant l’axe de crise AfPak afin d’avoir les mains libres pour agir dans le Golfe et au Levant.

Or les interventions en territoire pakistanais, notamment grâce aux frappes des drones censés cibler les militants mais faisant des ravages dans les populations civiles, ont précipité le soulèvement des groupes talibans dans ce pays, mettant à profit la faiblesse du gouvernement civil et les divisions de l’armée pour s’emparer de régions entières, s’approcher de la capitale Islamabad, et ravager le Pendjab par des attentats dévastateurs.

A l’échelle du Moyen-Orient global, un enlisement des Etats-Unis et de l’OTAN dans la zone AfPak ne peut qu’affaiblir la capacité de négociation et d’action sur les deux autres axes de crise : l’Iran, Israël et les Palestiniens seront moins contraints à des concessions face à un interlocuteur affaibli. Et dans l’imbrication des trois axes de crise qui structurent la région, l’issue des combats dans la vallée de Swat a une incidence paradoxale sur le gel de la colonisation en Cisjordanie ou la production des centrifugeuses nucléaires iraniennes. p

Directeur de la chaire Moyen-Orient Méditerranée à Sciences Po, Politologue et spécialiste de l’islam, il est titulaire de deux doctorats en sociologie et science politique. Il a enseigné à la New York University (1994) et à la Columbia University (1995-1996). Auteur d’essais traduits dans plus de vingt langues, dont “Les Banlieues de l’islam. Naissance d’une religion en France” (Seuil, 1991) et “Terreur et Martyre” (Flammarion, 2008)

What Does Climate Change Do to Our Heads?     

by Sanjay Khanna
14 May 2009, CultureChange.org
A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.

A case in point: When researchers from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia conducted interviews in drought-affected communities in New South Wales in 2005, the responses suggested some of their subjects may have been suffering from a recently described psychological condition called solastalgia (pronounced so-la-stal-juh).

Solastalgia describes a palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful. It’s a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Albrecht’s work among communities distraught by black-coal strip mining in New South Wales’ Upper Hunter Region convinced him that the English language needed a new term to connect the experience of ecosystem loss to mental health concerns.

“The sense of a home landscape being violated [by strip mining-related environmental damage] seemed to have disturbed the region’s social ecology so much that the psychic or mental health of many people living in the zone of high impact was being affected,” he says.

Albrecht’s stunning insight? That there might be a wide variety of shifts in the health of an ecosystem—from subtle landscape changes related to global warming to desolate wastelands created by large-scale strip mining—that diminish people’s mental health.

In Eastern Australian communities, where the toll of a six-year-long drought has been devastating, interviews with farmers provided additional momentum for the solastalgia concept.

In one such interview, a female farmer poignantly described the loss of her garden oasis. “Our gardens have had to die,” she said, “because our house dam has been dry…. So it’s very depressing for a woman because a garden is an oasis out here with this dust…you know, to come home to a nice green lawn is just… that’s all gone, so you’ve got dust at your back door.”

While persistent drought and open-pit coal mining may be extreme cases, if the environmental degradation of the past hundred years is any indication, our contemporary lifestyles, built on a dwindling resource base, have failed to acknowledge how much the mental health of people and ecosystems is interrelated.

This may imply that the unrelenting media focus on weather-related and economic aspects of climate change does not adequately take into consideration the challenge of mitigating the psychological impact of global warming. How might we feel when the heat is relentless and our surrounding environment changes irrevocably? How might our mental health be affected?

In a recent Wired magazine article on Albrecht and the concept of solastalgia, Global Mourning: How the next victim of climate change will be our minds, writer Clive Thompson sensitively characterized as “global mourning” the potential impact of overwhelming environmental transformation caused by climate change. Thompson cogently summed up Albrecht’s view of what solastalgia might look like were it to become an epidemic of emotional and psychic instability causally linked to changing climates and ecosystems.

Albrecht also emphasizes that feelings of melancholia and homesickness have previously been recorded among Aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia who were forcibly moved from their home territories by U.S., Canadian and Australian governments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sanjay Khanna: You speak of psychoterratic and somaterratic illnesses. What are they?

Glenn Albrecht: Psychoterratic illness involves the psyche or mind and terra or earth. So a psychoterratic illness would be an earth-related mental illness, where both nostalgia and solastalgia are examples of people being made “mentally ill” by the severing of “healthy” links between themselves and their home or territory.

Somaterratic illness, on the other hand, involves soma or the body and relates to damage done to the human body, its physiology and/or genetics, as a result of the loss of ecosystem health by, for example, toxic pollution in any given area of land.

SK: You note on your blog that there are antecedents to solastalgia.

GA: Yes, David Rapport, a past professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is a pioneer in the study of the health of natural ecosystems and their relationship with humans. In the 1970s, he described “ecosystem distress syndrome,” which was what happened when an ecosystem couldn’t restore its balance after an external disturbance.

Once I fully appreciated this concept, I realized there must be a human equivalent to ecosystem distress syndrome, that is, a home environment so profoundly disturbed that it affected the balance of well being or the mental health of people within their social ecology.

The interviews of affected people I conducted along with Nick Higginbotham and Linda Connor in strip-mined areas of the Upper Hunter Valley showed that people’s sense of place was being violated and that this was profoundly disturbing them. Their home environment was being desolated and it seemed to us that the vital link between ecosystem health and human health, both physical and mental, was being severed.

SK: Can you tell us a little bit more about the origins of solastalgia?

GA: Solastalgia’s Latin roots combine three ideas: The solace that one’s environment provides, the desolation caused by that environment’s degradation and the pain or distress that occurs inside a person as a result.

Solastalgia brings into English a much-needed word that links a mental state to a state of the biophysical environment. The need for new concepts in the face of what is happening under climate change has seen other cultures develop new terms that have affinities with solastalgia.

The Inuit, for example, have a new word, uggianaqtuq (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took), which relates to climate change and has connotations of the weather as a once reliable and trusted friend that is now acting strangely or unpredictably. And the Portuguese use the word saudade to describe a feeling one has for a loved one who is absent or has disappeared. The upshot is that under the pressure of climate change, your preferred climate and ecosystem might well be thought of as a lover gone missing or turned bad.

SK: How might your research impact on psychiatry and the diagnosis of psychoterratic illnesses such as solastalgia?

GA: Alongside five other researchers, our four-person team co-wrote a summary of our research on the mental health impacts of mining and drought for psychological and psychiatric professionals. The paper, Solastalgia: the distress caused by climate change, was published in Australasian Psychiatry, a publication of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, in November 2007.

Our team has mused that people badly affected by solastalgia would benefit from a set of professionally developed diagnostic tools so that solastalgia could be listed as a condition that required diagnosis and professional attention.

We’re happy for other people to take that challenge up and there are some academic psychiatrists who are interested in exploring these ideas further. However, given that key aspects of solastalgia are existential, the traditions of environmental philosophy and medical psychiatry may not come together so harmoniously. The melancholia of solastalgia is not the same as clinical depression, but it may well be a precursor to serious psychic disturbance.

That said, it’s worth remembering that up until the mid-twentieth century, the medical profession viewed nostalgia as a diagnosable psycho-physiological illness in which, for example, soldiers fighting in foreign lands became so homesick and melancholic it could kill them.

Today psychiatrists would see the condition of rapid and unwelcome severing from home as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an outcome of an acute stressor such as warfare or a Hurricane Katrina.

Solastalgia on the other hand is most often the result of chronic environmental stress; it is the lived experience of gradually losing the solace a once stable home environment provided. It is therefore appropriate to diagnose solastalgia in the face of slow and insidious forces such as climate change or mining.

SK: Would you tell us a little bit about the transdisciplinary team that you participate on?

GA: Nick Higginbotham, a social psychologist colleague who specializes in epidemiology and health matters, is working to gather empirical data for our solastalgia research. He has developed a much-needed environmental distress scale (EDS) that teases out the specific environmental components of distress from all the other things that go on in a person’s life. We will be using this scale in the new AUS$430K grant the team has received from the Australian Research Council to extend our earlier work by addressing “the lived experience (ethnography) of climate change” among people in the Hunter Valley.

Linda Connor, an ethnographer and social and medical anthropologist, handles the ethnography or cultural experience of all this. So collectively we have empirical (Higginbotham), cultural (Connor) and philosophical (me) interpretations of health and climate change. Finally, Sonia Freeman, our research assistant, has co-authored a number of papers.

SK: What implications might the recent apology by Kevin Rudd, the new Prime Minister of Australia, to the “stolen generations” of Australian Aborigines have in relation to solastalgia?

GA: The apology by Kevin Rudd to the stolen generations is about seeking forgiveness for the government-sanctioned taking of Indigenous children from their families and from their home territories (their “country”) from 1909 until 1969. There have been profound mental and physical health impacts from this process and many of the remaining stolen generations are now ageing but with a 17-year shorter life expectancy on average than non-indigenous Australians. Those who are alive today may be experiencing genuine nostalgia for a once-sustainable past and solastalgia within contemporary pathological and depressed home environments.

SK: Do you see a relationship between the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, the state of environmental degradation and the experience of loss that we are seeing today? If so, what is that relationship from your perspective and research?

GA: The answer is, yes, there is a relationship between the two colonial cultures: the two continents were colonized only by the systematic dispossession of complex and formerly sustainable Indigenous societies.

Traditional Indigenous cultures in the Americas and Australasia displayed a profound appreciation of the relationship between human and ecosystem health, something global culture is trying to rediscover under the label of sustainability.

Remnant aboriginal cultures are still being pushed aside by the dominant global model of economic growth and progress. Even today, their chronic health problems are likely related to social and political issues that are connected to ongoing dispossession.

I’ve had recent firsthand experience of the lives of Indigenous people leading semi-traditional lives in Northern Australia to see the importance of the connections between human health and ecosystem health. In Arnhem Land, Aborigines who live on what are called “outstations” have been able to maintain much stronger and healthier links to their traditional land. Their physical and mental health status is, as a consequence, much better than those whose links to their own land have been severed and who now live in crowded, dysfunctional communities.

SK: Some of the solastalgia symptoms you describe are similar to the loss of cultural identity, including the loss of language and ancestral memory. Loss of place seems an extension of this new global experience of weakened cultural identities and Earth-based ethical moorings.

GA: I have written on this topic in a professional academic journal and expressed the idea of having an Earth-based ethical framework that could contribute to maximizing the creative potential of human cultural and technological complexity and diversity without destroying the foundational complexity and diversity of natural systems in the process.

Our history shows that some people and cultures have a tendency to create pathological ways of thinking, but if we want to support a life-affirming ethic in the twenty-first century, we are in need of reform and change.

SK: In the context of accelerating environmental change, what would you say to young people about the planet they are inheriting? What does sustainability mean in the context of the overwhelming pace of environmental and economic change that we’re seeing today?

GA: This is a tough one because the children of today face the double whammy of the escalating pace and scale of changes under the global forces of development and those of climate chaos. I’ve suggested to my own teenagers that what is happening is unacceptable ethically and practically and they should be in a state of advanced revolt about the whole deal.

From my perspective, supporting and maintaining the status quo is no longer a reasonable response to these big picture issues. At every point, we must challenge and refute this kind of thinking in a society that is clearly on a non-sustainable pathway.

Unfortunately, the lot in life of the youth today is to undo much of what has been done in the name of growth and progress in the last two hundred years. However, this does not mean a return to the past: As Herman Daly (the ecological economist) once said, you can have an economy that develops without growing.

On a personal level, I’m an optimistic, energetic philosopher and I believe that we must get our values more life orientated. I’m not willing to give up on encouraging change towards sustainability even in the face of what look like overwhelming negative forces.

The four-year grant recently awarded to our team will allow us to study the lived experience of climate change at a regional level. We’re happy that we’ll be able to start contributing data on how climate change is shifting culture, values and attitudes.

The next four years are critical. As a member of a research team, I believe that we’re right at the leading edge of change research and we are very committed to supporting the network of ecological and social relationships that promote human health. There’s hope in recognizing solastalgia and defeating it by creating ways to reconnect with our local environment and communities.

###

Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at sk AT khannaresearch DOT com. His blog is at www.realisticsanctuary.com. More articles are available at www.huffingtonpost.com

From IISD a Special Report on UNCCD Land Day at the ongoing Bonn meetings on Climate Change.

On Saturday June 6, 2009, organized by the UNCCD Secretariat, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Secretariat hosted “Land Day” at the Gustav-Stresemann-Institut, Bonn, Germany.

The event, attended by 170 participants, aimed to help climate change negotiators and other stakeholders attending the concurrent Bonn climate change talks consider in detail the linkages between climate change and desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD).

The event was opened by Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, and Adolf Kloke-Lesch, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) Director-General.

Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute Director, Columbia University, offered a pre-recorded keynote address.

Participants then attended three panels, entitled:

  - “How does sustainable land management support climate change adaptation?”;

 - “What options can soil carbon sequestration offer for mitigating and adapting to climate change?”; and

  - “Sustainable land management in climate change policy frameworks: what is the way forward?”

Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, stressed that land has an unparalleled capacity to sequester carbon, but its potential to mitigate climate change is presently untapped. Emphasizing that numerous opportunities exist to include land within a post-2012 climate regime, he said the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and carbon markets must be changed and made accessible to farmers and land managers.

Gnacadja argued that soil restoration and soil carbon sequestration offer “win-win-win” opportunities for climate change, biodiversity and desertification. Noting that “poor soils lead to poor people,” he further suggested that inclusion of desertification, land degradation and drought in a future climate regime has the potential to bring more equity and justice to developing countries.

Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, discussed the linkages between the agriculture and forest sectors and climate change mitigation and adaptation. He highlighted that 10-12% of total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from agricultural practices, and that deforestation accounted for 20% of GHG emissions in the 1990s.

Underscoring that some mitigation options can be realized at “low or even negative costs,” de Boer highlighted a number of possibilities in these sectors, including: reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries (REDD); improved crop and grazing management; and restoration of organic soils. He added that mitigation options, such as agroforestry, support adaptation and promote biodiversity.

Adolf Kloke-Lesch, Director-General, German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), said climate change threatens to destroy the efforts and achievements of sustainable development. Noting that land degradation was previously considered a collection of local problems, he argued that today it is understood as a global problem that must be part of the global environmental agenda.

Kloke-Lesch stated that sustainable land management offers a cost-effective solution to mitigating climate change and that natural infrastructures, such as forests and soils, must be part of this solution. He stressed that sustainable land management must become an integral part of climate protection strategies in a new “Green Deal” forged at the 2009 climate change talks in Copenhagen.

In a pre-recorded message, Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, underscored the importance of integrating the urgent agendas of drylands and global climate change. He said drylands are amongst the most vulnerable areas to climate change, and that impacts in dryland countries are compounded because these countries are also experiencing demographic pressures and have large populations living in poverty.

Sachs explained that the combination of these factors is “at the root” of some of the greatest security challenges on the planet, noting these issues must be addressed to lessen security risks not only for the people in these regions but for the entire world.

He called for several responses, including: better science on the effects of climate change in dryland regions; increased understanding of human systems, such as the impacts of climate change on herders’ livestock assets; and increased understanding of intervention measures that are needed for adaptation and climate change preparedness. Sachs emphasized the need for a holistic approach in addressing these issues, highlighting the potential for ecosystem-based adaption in this regard.

————

(later addition) Professor Sachs - Highlighting the political conflicts in the 10,000 km stretch of drylands across the Sahel from Senegal to the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea into Yemen, Pakistan and on to Afghanistan, Sachs said the lack of  “a coherent, consistent, persistent, scaled science-based response” to the harrowing effects of climate change associated with hunger, livestock survival and increasing stresses between sedentary populations and nomadic or semi-nomadic herders is the real challenge.

It is mind-boggling how above reality was suppressed by the UN for so many years - this as if the men in the UN glass building can speak only of unsolvable issues that provide for them a raison d’etre and their jobs, while trying to find the real reasons of those conflicts, the reasons before the fabricated reasons of “the other” would do harm to the bureacrats self  interest.

—————-

www.sustainabilitank.info is still waiting to hear above ideas fully backed by the UN bureaucracy, but we are already gratified that many individuals, and enlightened governments, speak out forcefully. We were privvy, and victims, to a UN that was hiding above under the global rug because they felt it was just one more cause that can harm the sale of petroleum.

Please also read into the “at the root” comment by Dr. Sachs, locations like Darfur and the Middle East, and we would like to remark that we were hoping that President Obama would mention this in his Cairo speech to the Muslim World - but he did not. In our opinion, an opinion we fought for at the UN, a cooperative program on these “Land” issues between Israel, the Arab World, Iran, China, Africa, with international support, could go a long way in helping  address some of the problems with the Islamic governments - problems that were mentioned in the speech and the African problems that were not mentioned at all.

Uri Avnery
6.6.09

The Tone and the Music

ONE MAN spoke to the world, and the world listened.

He walked onto the stage in Cairo, alone, without hosts and without aides, and delivered a sermon to an audience of billions. Egyptians and Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, Copts and Maronites – and they all listened attentively.

He unfolded before them the map of a new world, a different world, whose values and laws he spelled out in simple and clear language -  a mixture of idealism and practical politics, vision and pragmatism.

Barack Hussein Obama – as he took pains to call himself – is the most powerful man on earth. Every word he utters is a political fact.

“A HISTORIC SPEECH”, pronounced commentators in a hundred languages. I prefer another adjective:

The speech was right.

Every word was in its place, every sentence precise, every tone in harmony. The masterpiece of a man bringing a new message to the world.

From the very first word, every listener in the hall and in the world felt the honesty of the man, that his heart and his tongue were in harmony, that this is not a politician of the old familiar sort – hypocritical, sanctimonious, calculating. His body language was speaking, and so were his facial expressions

That’s why the speech was so important. The new moral integrity and the sense of honesty increased the impact of the revolutionary content.

AND A REVOLUTIONARY speech it certainly was.

In 55 minutes, it not only wiped away the eight years of George W. Bush, but also much of the preceding decades, from World War II on.

The American ship has turned – not with the sluggishness everyone would have expected, but with the agility of a speedboat.

That is much more than a political change. It touches the roots of the American national consciousness. The President spoke to hundreds of million US citizens no less than to a billion Muslims.

The American culture is based on the myth of the Wild West, with its Good Guys and Bad Guys, violent justice, dueling under the midday sun. Since the American nation is composed of immigrants from all over the world, its unity seems to require a threatening, world-encompassing evil enemy, like the Nazis and the Japs, or the Commies. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, this role was taken over by Islam.

Cruel, fanatical, bloodthirsty Islam; Islam as the religion of murder and destruction; an Islam lusting for the blood of women and children. This enemy captured the imagination of the masses and supplied material for television and cinema. It provided lecture topics for learned professors and fresh inspiration for popular writers. The White House was occupied by a moron who declared a world-wide “War on Terrorism”.

When Obama is now uprooting this myth, he is revolutionizing American culture. He wipes away the picture of one enemy, without painting another in its place. He preaches against the violent, adversary attitude itself, and starts to work to replace it with a culture of partnership between nations, civilizations and religions.

I see Obama as the first great messenger of the 21st century. He is the son of a new era, where the economy is global and the whole of humanity faces the danger to the very existence of life on the planet Earth. An era where the Internet connects a boy in New Zealand with a girl in Namibia in real time, where a disease in a small Mexican village spreads all over the globe within days.

This world needs a world law, a world order, a world democracy. That’s why this speech really was historic: Obama outlined the basic contours of a world constitution.

WHILE OBAMA proclaims the 21st century, the government of Israel is returning to the 19th.

That was the century when a narrow, egocentric, aggressive nationalism took root in many countries. A century that sanctified the belligerent nation which oppresses minorities and subdues neighbors. The century that gave birth to modern anti-Semitism and to its response – modern Zionism.

Obama’s vision is not anti-national. He spoke with pride about the American nation. But his nationalism is of another sort: an inclusive, multi-cultural and non-sexist nationalism, which includes all the citizens of a country and respects other nations.

This is the nationalism of the 21st century, which is inexorably striving towards supranational, regional and world-wide structures.

Compared to this, how miserable is the mental world of the Israeli Right! How miserable is the violent, fanatical-religious world of the settlers, the chauvinist ghetto of Netanyahu, Lieberman and Barak, the racist-fascist closed-in world of their Kahanist allies!

One has to understand this moral and spiritual dimension of Obama’s speech before considering its political implications. Not only in the political sphere are Obama and Netanyahu on a collision course. The underlying collision is between two mental worlds which are as distinct from each other as the sun and the moon.

In Obama’s mental world, there is no place for the Israeli Right or its equivalents elsewhere. Not for their terminology, not for their “values”, and still less for their actions.

IN THE political sphere, too, a huge gap has opened up between the governments of Israel and the USA.

During the last few years, successive Israeli governments have ridden the wave of Islamophobia that has spread throughout the West. The Islamic world was considered the deadly enemy, America was galloping grimly towards the Clash of Civilizations, every Muslim was a potential terrorist.

Israel’s right-wing leaders could rejoice. After all, the Palestinians are Arabs, the Arabs are Muslims, the Muslims are Terrorists – so that Israel was assured a central place in the war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

That was a Garden of Eden for racist demagogues. Avigdor Lieberman could advocate the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, Ellie Yishai could enact laws for the revocation of the citizenship of non-Jews. Obscure Members of the Knesset could grab headlines with bills that might have been conceived in Nuremberg.

This Garden of Eden is no more. Whether the implications will become clear quickly or slowly - the direction is obvious. If we continue on our path, we will become a leper colony.

THE TONE makes the music – and this applies also to the President’s words on Israel and Palestine. He spoke at length about the Holocaust – honest and courageous words, full of empathy and compassion, which were received by the Egyptians in silence but with respect. He stressed Israel’s right to exist. And without pausing, he spoke about the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, the intolerable situation of the Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own.

He spoke respectfully about Hamas. Not anymore as a “terrorist organization”, but as a part of the Palestinian people. He demanded that they recognize Israel and stop violence, but also hinted that he would welcome a Palestinian unity government.

The political message was clear and unequivocal: the Two-State Solution will be put into practice. He himself will see to that. Settlement activity must cease. Unlike his predecessors, he did not stop at speaking about “Palestinians”, but uttered the decisive word: “Palestine” – the name of a state and a territory.

And no less important: the Iran war has been struck from the agenda. The dialogue with Tehran, as a part of the new world, is not limited in time. As from now, no one can even dream about an American OK for an Israeli attack.

HOW DID official Israel respond? The first reaction was denial. “An unimportant speech”.  “There was nothing new”. The establishment commentators picked out a few pro-Israeli sentences from the text and ignored all the others. And after all, “these are just words. So he talked. Nothing will come out of it.”

That is nonsense. The words of the President of the United States are more than just words. They are political facts. They change the perceptions of hundreds of millions. The Muslim public listened. The American public listened. It may take some time for the message to sink in. But after this speech, the pro-Israel lobby will never be the same as it was before. The era of “foile shtik” (Yiddish for sneaky tricks) is over. The sly dishonesty of a Shimon Peres, the guileful deceits of an Ehud Olmert, the sweet talking of a Bibi Netanyahu – all these belong to the past.

The Israeli people must now decide: whether to follow the right-wing government towards an inevitable collision with Washington, as the Jews did 1940 years ago when they followed the Zealots into a suicidal war on Rome – or to join Obama’s march towards a new world.

UNEP NEWS RELEASE

Three More Countries Say ‘Yes’ to Low-Carbon Future  On World Environment
Day

Ethiopia, Pakistan and Portugal join UNEP’s Climate Neutral Network

World Environment Day 2009 – Your Planet Needs You!

NAIROBI, 5 June 2009 – Three countries have pledged to promote low-carbon,
green growth by joining the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net) – an
initiative led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to
promote global action to de-carbonize our economies and societies.

Ethiopia, Pakistan and Portugal are the latest nations to join the CN Net
initiative, bringing the total number of countries that are going
low-carbon or even climate neutral to 10.  These 10 countries have a
combined population of over 266 million and cover the land area roughly the
size of Argentina or 2 percent of the world’s terrestrial surface.

The announcement was made on World Environment Day (WED) which this year is
held under the theme “Your Planet Needs YOU! Unite to Combat Climate
Change”.

While the main WED activities are taking place in this year’s host country,
Mexico, celebrations are being organized worldwide – from remote villages
to sprawling capitals – making it a truly global event.

Welcoming the new CN Net participants, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP
Executive Director Achim Steiner said:  “From setting world tree-planting
records to taking full advantage of the abundant sun, waves and winds to
promoting carbon finance investments, the three new countries joining the
Climate Neutral Network are offering diverse and innovative strategies to
combat climate change and benefit from low-carbon, green development and
growth.”

“However, these strategies will only succeed in the long-term if the
international community sends the right policy and market signals for
climate-friendly development. This year’s World Environment Day comes just
over 180 days before the UN climate convention meeting in Denmark where
Governments need to agree on a new, forward-looking climate treaty.  By
‘Sealing the Deal’ on a new climate agreement in Copenhagen, world leaders
will be delivering perhaps the most transformational and far-reaching
stimulus package of them all, now and for the coming decades”, Mr. Steiner
added.

Innovative national strategies Ethiopia is the first African country to
join the Climate Neutral Network.  While the nation is not a net
contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, it has expressed its
commitment to mitigating climate change.

Ethiopia is an active supporter of UNEP’s Billion Tree Campaign,
contributing more trees than any other nation – over 1 billion – towards
the global target of planting 7 billion trees by the crucial UN climate
change conference in December 2009..

Furthermore, through Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, the Government
is distributing 5.4 million compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) – commonly
known as “energy savers” – country-wide to help consumers save money on
electricity bills and reduce their carbon footprint.

Pakistan is coming on board the CN Net with a vision of making the country
a destination of choice for international carbon finance investments and
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects.  Already, CDM projects ranging
from biogas co-generation to energy and fuel efficiency are being
implemented nation-wide.

The Government of Pakistan has also set the 10% target for renewable energy
by 2015 and established the Alternate Energy Development Board to spearhead
this effort.

Portugal is the first EU member State to join the Climate Neutral Network.
The country expects to generate 31% of all its energy from clean sources by
2020, including 60% of electricity; and its renewable energy plans include
the world’s largest wind, wave and solar energy facilities.

National policies to promote renewable energies include investment
subsidies, tax breaks and fixed feed-in tariffs for photovoltaic, wave
energy, small hydro, wind power, forest biomass, urban waste and biogas.

Cities, companies join CN Net The Mexican city of Aguascalientes, the
Portuguese municipality of Cascais and the Brazilian city of Niterói have
also come on board the Network.

Taking its name from the abundant hot thermal springs found in the area,
Aguascalientes has embarked on an ambitious strategy to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, which includes upgrading cycling lanes and suburban trains,
switching public lighting to solar power and capturing methane from
landfills to produce biogas.

Cascais, a small municipality outside Lisbon, has committed to making
itself carbon neutral.  As part of this effort, 25 municipal buildings are
subject to real-time monitoring of energy flows.  Cascais will also be the
focus of a rigorous scientific study to examine how climate change may
affect water resources, coastal zones, fisheries, agriculture, human health
and impacts on tourism, energy, forestry and biodiversity.

The Brazilian municipality of Niterói is the first city in South America to
join the CN Net.  Located just across the Guanabara Bay from Rio de
Janeiro, the city has a population of 500,000.  The municipality is taking
the issue of climate change as a priority and has set targets in the areas
of transport, energy and waste.

In addition, two high-tech giants – Dell and Cable & Wireless – are among
the new private sector companies joining the CN Net with plans to green the
ICT sector, which accounts for roughly 2 percent of the global greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions and has a significant potential to use ICT solutions to
reduce GHG emissions from other sectors.

——–

About World Environment Day 2009 World Environment Day, commemorated each
year on 5 June, is one of the principal vehicles through which the United
Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances
political attention and action.  The theme for WED 2009 is “Your Planet
Needs You! UNite to Combat Climate Change”. It reflects the urgency for
nations to agree on a new deal at the crucial climate convention meeting in
Copenhagen some 190 days later in the year, and the links with overcoming
poverty and improved management of forests.

About Climate Neutral Network
Launched in February 2008, the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net) is a
high-profile outreach initiative led by the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) to catalyze global transition to low-carbon economies and
societies.  Today, the CN Net counts close to 150 participants, including
10 countries, 12 cities, major international companies, UN agencies and
leading NGOs who have set the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction
targets in the world. Based on a free of charge, interactive website, the
CN Net gives participants a platform to present their strategies in climate
neutrality to the world, providing visibility and inspiration to others. It
functions as a network for information exchange and sharing of practical
experiences, making the best available knowledge on climate neutrality
widely available to all. CN Net participants are already achieving
significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. As the Network grows and
expands, so will its contribution to global efforts to combat climate
change.  http://www.unep.org/climateneutral

For more information, please contact:

Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and Head of Media, on Tel: +254-20-7623084,
Mobile: +254-733-632755, or when traveling: +41-79-596-5737, or e-mail:
 nick.nuttall at unep.org

Or: Xenya Cherny Scanlon, Information Officer, UNEP Climate Neutral
Network, on Tel: +254-20-762-4387, Mobile: +254-721-847-563, or e-mail:
 xenya.scanlon at unep.org internet: http://www.unep.org/climateneutral

*********************************
Jim Sniffen
Programme Officer
UN Environment Programme
New York
tel: +1-212-963-8094/8210
 info at nyo.unep.org
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 Daniel Levy, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation writes to us:

I thought I’d share with you my thoughts on the speech which are pasted below.

The Obama team’s remarkable wordsmithery and the president’s unparalleled capacity for delivery were exquisitely on display again today in Cairo. But this speech should perhaps be remembered as much for what was not said. Gone was the arrogance and lecturing: there was no lavishing of praise on Egypt’s undemocratic leader – the word ‘Mubarak’ was not even mentioned once. Out too was the purple finger version of democratization and even the traditional American condescension toward the Palestinian narrative. But perhaps most remarkably of all, the words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ did not pass the president’s lips. Here was a leader and a team around him smart enough to acknowledge that certain words have become too tainted, too laden with baggage, their use has become counter-productive, today the Global War on Terror framing was truly laid to rest.

Particularly striking was that President Obama almost certainly has emerged from the Cairo speech having accumulated additional capital rather than expending it, with greater popularity, traction, and respect among not only his ostensible target audience, the Muslim world, but also globally, including at home in America and even in Israel and with the world’s Jewish community. His future leverage across a range of issues has been enhanced.

It’s true that whenever the speech descended from the lofty heights of 30,000 feet to the 100-feet resolution of policy specifics and details, the magic dust seemed to dissipate as it emerged from the clouds, and those details were too often more autopilot than reset. But this was a big picture speech, and there is room later to make those course corrections on policy detail.

Here then are ten quick thoughts:

1. The Mother of All Resets

The president’s speech literally in one fell swoop will have much of the Muslim world and certainly elites, opinion leaders, and activists scratching their heads and recalibrating their stance toward America. Yes, for everyone the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, what comes next and whether policy changes on specific issues. The immediate effect though is to buy America space and time. It gives those who share an affinity with American values a new lease of life, causes the majority who are not hostile to the US but deeply skeptical of its intentions to reconsider and suspend judgment, and it will induce in America’s enemies a splitting headache.

At a most basic level, the president managed to connect. He spoke humbly and touched on buzz words for this audience, discussing dignity, justice, and the truths we hold in our hearts. He even uttered the word colonialism and mentioned denial of rights and cold-ward proxies. Obama evoked Islam’s contribution to the world and to America, and yes, he quoted the Quran.  Above all, he restored balance, confining the label of enemy only to those violent extremists who threaten America’s security, while opening up to the vast majority of practicing Muslims, including, I would argue, Islamist movements.

2. In Cairo the Conversation with Political Islam Began

By narrowly focusing on al-Qaeda as the enemy and apparently articulating an understanding of the non-al-Qaeda Islamist narrative, the president seemed to extend a tentative but visibly unclenched fist to mainstream political Islam. It is those Islamist movements that we should be most closely watching in the weeks and months ahead as they begin to work through their own responses to the new administration.

Obama seemed to implicitly accept the legitimacy of political Islam and its role in the democratic process while challenging it to unequivocally reject violence against civilians. There was a stark contrast, for instance, between the president’s message to al-Qaeda (we will defeat you if you threaten us) as compared to his message to Hamas (whom he addressed directly as having a role to fulfill Palestinian aspirations and unify the Palestinian people).

The president’s historical analogies may not have been the best ones. In discussing the nonviolent resistance of black America to the “lash of the whip” in achieving equal rights he obviously made a powerful and reasonable point but one that may be more relevant to a Palestinian struggle for a one-state democracy rather than for national liberation and de-occupation. By claiming that the same story can be told in South Africa and elsewhere, he simply rewrote history – the ANC did of course use armed resistance in their struggle as did so many other successful liberation movements.

That said, Obama’s effort to carry the argument in somewhat sympathetic terms to the Palestinian resistance–“violence…rockets…is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered”–was a valiant one and should be encouraged, not least in Israel. I might be reading too much into this but the speech could be seen as an acknowledgement that a process that engages Hamas is more likely to produce results than one that does not.

Responding immediately on al-Jazeera, Ahmed Yusuf, advisor to Gaza Prime Minister Haniyeh, lavished praised on Obama’s “Martin Luther King-like speech” and his rejection of the clash of civilizations discourse while defensively questioning his call for Hamas to accept the international community’s three preconditions (end violence, accept past agreements, recognize Israel).The distinction though was clear and the years of wrong-headedly lumping together the Salafist jihadis of al-Qaeda with the Muslim Brothers of Hamas or the Hezbollah movement is over.

3. Regaining the Moral Clarity of 9/11

Almost eight years on, there it was, an American president explaining to the world what happened on that day and the war of necessity against al-Qaeda that was launched in its wake. It was an important moment in resetting and reconfiguring for international and Muslim public opinion what happened then and has happened since. It is also perhaps the most damning indictment of all for the Bush presidency that in 2009 such a reiteration by an American president is so necessary.

President Obama also reissued a clear statement of America’s interests across a range of issues from getting out of Iraq and achieving a Palestinian state to its goals in Afghanistan, and shared values with so much of the Muslim world in promoting basic freedoms, religious pluralism, women’s rights, and development.

4. Finally a President Who Can Talk to Palestinians

Obama’s words on the Palestinian situation were not remarkable for his advocacy of a two-state solution, his mentioning of Palestine, or his opposition to the settlements. All of that we have heard before, and in fact, the speech gave precious little by way of actually articulating a plan for Palestinian de-occupation and statehood. But that was also its strength.

The idea of a Palestinian state, even before it exists, has lost much of its luster and appeal for Palestinians precisely because American and Israeli leaders talked about statehood as a technical fix for a Palestinian problem, in exclusively economic, governance, and security terms. In so doing, they ignored or demeaned and denied the Palestinian narrative and made the whole arrangement sound rather unappetizing.

Today, President Obama began to redress that. PA capacity and economic opportunities were something of a footnote. And thankfully, the building of Palestinian security forces was not even mentioned.

Instead Obama spoke a language that actual Palestinians could relate to, recalling the 60-year “pain of dislocation,” the “wait in refugee camps” (without in the same breath emasculating the refugees of any rights). He spoke of humiliation, occupation, and an intolerable situation – in other words, Palestinian daily reality. Only after recognizing the Palestinian experience did he chart the course for achieving “the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity,” namely, via a Palestinian state. This shift in discourse may be lost on most American ears, not so for Palestinians and in the Arab and Muslim world, and it begins to give Obama a moral authority that will allow him to address this issue in speaking directly to the Palestinian people above the heads of their divided leadership.

5. Shimon Peres Could Not Have Done a Better Job

In what is becoming classical Obama, he at the same time presented perhaps the most compelling justification and explanation of Israel’s rights and its existence ever spoken in an Arab and Muslim capital. No Israeli has ever done a better job, he is a true friend. In the most unequivocal of terms and in a speech that so captured Muslim world attention, Obama placed the notions of threatening Israel’s destruction, stereotypes of Jews, and Holocaust denial, as being irredeemably beyond the pale and unacceptable. And he reaffirmed America’s “unbreakable bond with Israel.”

Tellingly, if unsurprisingly, it is these messages that are leading the Israeli news coverage of the speech. While the government of Benjamin Netanyahu may be squirming in discomfort at Obama’s reasoned and repeated calls for a settlement freeze, for reopening Gaza, and for Palestinian statehood, the Israeli public will, I think, be both reassured and keen to believe in the hope for change and a better future for them also.

 One imagines too that the day is not so far off for an honest, empathetic, and home-truths Obama speech to Israel and the Jewish world. Expect that speech to be not only well-received but also to bring us dramatically closer to finally ending the Arab-Israeli conflict and achieving that two-state solution. Obama’s use of the phrase, “align American policies with those who pursue peace,” will also be noted in Jerusalem. Finally, by referring to “Jewish homeland” rather than a Jewish state, Obama, I think, studiously avoided giving succor to the slew of racist laws being presented in the new Israeli Knesset.

6. Policy Details – More Auto-Pilot Than Reset.

In a speech that I genuinely think carries game-changing potential for so many issues that America and the Muslim world are caught up in, there was virtually nothing new in detailed policy terms. That is very probably due to the nature of the speech, and the detailed policy changes might follow in the coming months. But if they don’t, Cairo will go down as a moment of unrequited promise and opportunity.

On Israel-Palestine, we dusted off the Road Map (yet again), a Bush relic that should have long ago been filed in the trash can, and the Afghanistan and Iraq plans still do not sound too convincing. It’s unclear how even Obama’s more sophisticated version of democratization will be advanced with America’s staunchest and most democracy-resistant allies, and the way forward with Iran remains opaque. Noteworthy, too, was that in a speech stating that America has no designs on maintaining military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the continued American military footprint elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world was not touched upon.

7. Hosni Mubarak and the Perils of Playing Host

 Egypt’s rulers would no doubt have been mortified had this speech taken place anywhere else in the Arab or Muslim world. There is an understandable Egyptian sense of pride in their history and sense of longing to still be considered the region’s leading power. Having landed those hosting rights, Mubarak’s regime today had to live with the consequences. Obama spoke to his audience and to the Egyptian people, and in an interesting break from past practice, his presidential host Mr. Mubarak was not even mentioned let alone lavished with praise. It will not go unnoticed.

Obama did mention Egypt’s Christian Coptic minority and of course spoke to human rights and people choosing their own governments to loud applause. So much for all the neocon bleating before the speech about Obama being a valueless realist ready to sell freedom-spirited Egyptians down the river. I was not there, but a sense of being empowered almost seemed to echo around the room at Cairo University and well beyond, and it might have major implications for Egypt and the region that will be played out in the coming years.

And finally, we have an American president who avoided the Pavlovian repetition of how American support for the Egyptian regime is so linked to Egypt’s historic peace with Israel. The way that linkage has played out – that America goes soft of non-democratic tendencies in the Arab world as long as they are pro-Israel – has done a great disservice to the public perception of not only peace but also of America and even Israel.

8. More Hand Less Fist on Iran

There was even some encouragement for Obama’s Iran policy in today’s speech. It was beginning to look disturbingly like the Obama administration would be brandishing the stick of sanctions in one hand and the stopwatch of deadlines in the other, thereby leaving no hand free to shake any prospective Iranian unclenched fist.  Obama moved beyond that. Many will point to his acknowledgement of history: “The United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” as being the money line.  It’s true that is a big deal and goes further than what was said in his Norouz message. However, I think this was more important, if not entirely new: “any nation- including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the NPT.”

The president also had this intriguing chestnut to share on nuclear nonproliferation: “I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not.” Now I may be a bit Israelocentric in how I look at the world but this sounds like a not too subtle hint to me. Might this be a kind of “yes – we acknowledge there is a double standard here regarding the Israeli nuclear issue, and eventually we will get to that too.” It won’t be a headline, Israel will officially ignore it, and when asked Obama’s spokespeople will obfuscate but in more than a few capitals, including Jerusalem, a parsing industry will grow up around those few words.

9. Giving a Finger to the Purple Finger Theory of Democratization

Obama did it. He reclaimed the democratization agenda by placing it in a broader context as a set of rights and freedoms, and by going on to address religious pluralism, women’s rights, and the challenge of adapting economic development and modernity to traditional values. To be honest, it’s not a particularly difficult one to pull off, but to give him his fair dues, Barack Obama does do it better than anyone else. And there’s something of a new policy here, timely with the Lebanese election elections next week: “…we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments - provided they govern with respect for all their people.”

The genius was in the pivot. Obama respected Islamic tradition and religious piety, and for instance, a woman’s right to wear the hijab, and he then pivoted that into a broader discussion of the values of female education and women’s rights, placing those things in seamless harmony rather than in contradiction. After an American president who was perceived as doing so much to sow division in the Muslim world, one of Obama’s most powerful lines was undoubtedly, “fault-lines must be closed among Muslims… the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence,” and all this couched in a constant appeal to young people.

10. And He Was Also Speaking to the American Public

After years of fear-mongering, Islamofascist awareness weeks on campuses, and tens of millions of copies of the vile “Obsession” DVD appearing in newspapers and mailboxes, yet another, no less important, reset button was pressed today. The president will no doubt be accused of apologetics and moral relativism, but he decided to face this head-on, to go to Cairo, speak with respect and honesty to the Muslim world, and to do what was best for America’s national security interests.

In so doing, he was also broadcasting a message back home. Most American Muslims will no doubt be feeling a great sense of pride and inspiration from this speech. The rest of America was given a timely and even touching reminder of the contributions that American Muslims have made to this country and that Muslims have given the world in general. Oh, and there might have even been a little message in there upping the ante, for Congress and even for his own party–“I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.”

———————

Daniel Levy is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation.

During the Barak Government, he worked in the Prime Minister’s Office as special adviser and head of the Jerusalem Affairs unit under Minister Haim Ramon. He also worked as senior policy adviser to former Israeli Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin. He was a member of the official Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and previously served on the negotiating team to the “Oslo B” Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Rabin. In 2003, he worked as an analyst for the International Crisis Group Middle East Program. Daniel was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and prior to joining The Century Foundation and New America Foundation was directing policy planning and international relations at the Geneva Campaign Headquarters in Tel Aviv.