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US accuses Israel of spying on nuclear talks with Iran

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6b5a2f40-5f34-41de-8b7d-e6be6f2a20bb-1020x612Israel denies Wall Street Journal reports that it shared confidential information from talks with members of the US Congress in attempt to derail any deal

The US has accused Israel of spying on international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme and using the intelligence gathered to persuade Congress to undermine the talks, according to a report on Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal cited senior administration officials as saying the Israeli espionage operation began soon after the US opened up a secret channel of communications with Tehran in 2012, aimed at resolving the decade-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

The apparent decision by the White House to leak the allegations is the latest symptom of the growing gulf between Barack Obama’s administration and Binyamin Netanyahu’s government over the Iran talks, in which the Israeli leader suspects US officials of being ready to make too many concessions at the expense of Israeli security. Intelligence analysts suggested that the leak reflects the degree of anger in Washington at Netanyahu’s actions, and could mark a more serious blow to the already tottering relationship.

The leak has come exactly a week before a deadline for the US-Iranian negotiations in Lausanne to produce a framework agreement.

According to the report, the US has long been aware that Israel is among the shortlist of countries with the most aggressive intelligence operations targeting America, alongside Russia, China and France. It said American diplomats attending the talks in Austria and Switzerland were briefed by US counterintelligence officials about the threat of Israeli eavesdropping. It also raised the possibility that Israel gathered intelligence about the US position by spying on other participants in the negotiations, from western Europe, Russia, China or Iran. US intelligence had previously provided help to the Israelis to spy on the Iranians, the report said.

The US also conducts intelligence operations against Israel, and learned of the Israeli spying operation when it intercepted communication between Israeli officials exchanging classified information that US intelligence believed could only have been acquired by espionage.

However, what appears to have upset administration officials more than the spying is the use of the classified intelligence acquired to brief members of the US Congress and to persuade them to torpedo the talks. After Netanyahu addressed Congress this month, 47 Republican senators wrote an open letter to the Iranian leadership, warning it that a successor to Obama could refuse to honour any agreement reached.

“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior US official as saying.

Israel has categorically denied the allegations that it spied on closed-door nuclear negotiations between Iran and the US, however it did not deny that such information had been obtained.

“I think the report is wrong, it is inaccurate,” the outgoing Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, told the country’s Army Radio on Tuesday morning. “The State of Israel obviously has various security interests and we have excellent intelligence services, but we are not engaged in espionage against the United States.” He did not, however, deny information was obtained. Lieberman said: “All the information we gathered was from another entity, not the US.” He added: “We reached a decision a long time ago not to spy on the US and I haven’t come across anyone who has violated that instruction in several decades.”

Ronen Bergman, an expert on the country’s intelligence agencies at the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, said: “Whatever you think of Netanyahu’s position on the Iran talks, if he thinks that Israel’s national security is at stake, he has the right to order the intelligence community to find out what is happening.”

But Bergman – whose book, A History of the Israeli Mossad, will be published next year – added: “What worries me and what should be of high concern to the leaders of Israel is that this is ample proof that the relations at large between the US and Israel are sustaining an earthquake. The fact that it is happening is less worrying than that it was leaked. Also, any intervention by Israel in the inner working of American politics is wrong. If this report is true and Netanyahu’s intervention used intelligence material, then it is just making it worse.”

Yuval Steinitz, the strategic affairs minister and close Netanyahu aide, told Israel’s Channel 2 that the reports were “intended to damage the strong ties between the US and Israel, despite our differences on the Iran issue”.

If Damascus falls, Europe won’t be far behind – US senator

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he streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province June 30, 2014. (Reuters)

he streets of Syria’s northern Raqqa province June 30, 2014. (Reuters)

As a new report details the devastation wrought upon Syria by four years of rebellion, a Virginia state senator who once thanked the Syrian government for defending Christians is worried about the fate of Damascus, the Middle East and Europe.

“If Damascus falls, the dreaded black and white flag of ISIS will fly” over Syria, Virginia state Senator Richard Black told RT. “Within a period of months after the fall of Damascus, Jordan will fall and Lebanon will fall,” he said, adding that the self-proclaimed Islamic State would then target Europe next.

Black is no stranger to the Syrian crisis. Last year, he wrote a letter thanking the government in Damascus for a “gallant and effective campaign” to liberate Christian villages on the border with Lebanon. Most Americans are not aware that Christianity started in present-day Syria, he pointed out.

Years of US interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere have resulted in vast numbers of displaced Christians in Syria, Iraq and the Balkans. “If you look at the history of American involvement,” since the first Iraq war, Black told RT, “the one central theme has been that in each instance we’ve purged Christians from various countries.” Christians who lived in Kosovo for over a thousand years “are gone, completely annihilated.”

During the four-day pogrom in Kosovo 11 years ago, more than 4,000 Christian Serbs were driven out of six towns and nine villages. Over 900 houses and 39 churches were also destroyed by ethnic Albanian rioters.

As a new report details the devastation wrought upon Syria by four years of rebellion, a Virginia state senator who once thanked the Syrian government for defending Christians is worried about the fate of Damascus, the Middle East and Europe.

“If Damascus falls, the dreaded black and white flag of ISIS will fly” over Syria, Virginia state Senator Richard Black told RT. “Within a period of months after the fall of Damascus, Jordan will fall and Lebanon will fall,” he said, adding that the self-proclaimed Islamic State would then target Europe next.

Black is no stranger to the Syrian crisis. Last year, he wrote a letter thanking the government in Damascus for a “gallant and effective campaign” to liberate Christian villages on the border with Lebanon. Most Americans are not aware that Christianity started in present-day Syria, he pointed out.

Years of US interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere have resulted in vast numbers of displaced Christians in Syria, Iraq and the Balkans. “If you look at the history of American involvement,” since the first Iraq war, Black told RT, “the one central theme has been that in each instance we’ve purged Christians from various countries.” Christians who lived in Kosovo for over a thousand years “are gone, completely annihilated.”

During the four-day pogrom in Kosovo 11 years ago, more than 4,000 Christian Serbs were driven out of six towns and nine villages. Over 900 houses and 39 churches were also destroyed by ethnic Albanian rioters.


According to a recent report by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, six percent of the country’s population has been killed or wounded in the fighting in Syria. Life expectancy went from 79.5 years in 2010 to 55.7 years. More than 5 million Syrians became refugees or migrated in search of work, while 40 percent of the remaining 17.65 million are internally displaced. The country has lost over $200 billion through destruction, looting, capital flight and GDP loss; unemployment is officially at 58 percent; and most of those who have jobs work for the government.

The current conflict in Syria began in 2011, when the US-backed opposition began an armed rebellion against President Bashar Assad’s government during the Arab Spring. By 2013, large portions of eastern Syria and western Iraq had fallen under control of militants known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS, or ISIS/ISIL). While declaring the need to fight ISIS, Washington has continued to demand the overthrow of Assad in favor of “moderate opposition.”

Black, who served in the US Marine Corps and retired as a Colonel in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps before getting elected to the Virginia legislature, maintains that the Assad government is effectively fighting against the Islamic State and protecting the remaining Christians of Syria. Its fall, he says, would let ISIS quickly seize Jordan and Lebanon, and continue its drive westward.

“I look at Syria as the center of gravity… for Western civilization,” Black said, using the military strategists’ term for a place or event that can determine the outcome of a war. “If it falls, we’ll begin to see a very rapid advance of Islam on Europe.”

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Syria investigating circumstances of downed US aircraft

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Albert Aji| Associated Press
AFP PHOTO/US AIR FORCE/MASTER SGT. ROB VALENCA

AFP PHOTO/US AIR FORCE/MASTER SGT. ROB VALENCA

BEIRUT: A Syrian military official said Wednesday that an investigation is underway into the alleged downing of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft by Syrian air defenses along the country’s Mediterranean coast.

A U.S. official said Tuesday that a U.S. Predator drone went down in Syria, but that it was unclear whether it was shot down. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Pentagon had not yet announced the loss, said U.S. officials were trying to determine why operators lost control of the drone.

The Syrian official said the aircraft entered Syrian airspace from the sea and was shot down in Ras Shamra, seven kilometers (four miles) north of the coastal city of Latakia. He said the aircraft was flying over an area devoid of “armed gangs,” using a term often used by Syrian authorities to refer to opposition groups fighting President Bashar Assad’s forces.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give statements to the press.

State television Tuesday night broadcast footage of what it said was the wreckage, including a wheel and electronic parts. Soldiers in camouflage could be seen loading some of the debris into the back of a truck.

If confirmed, it would be the first American aircraft to go down over Syria since the U.S. expanded its aerial campaign against ISIS to the country in September.

More than 220,000 people have been killed in four years of conflict in Syria, which started with largely peaceful protests calling for reforms and escalated into civil war following a brutal government crackdown.

In a statement released late Tuesday, the main Western-backed Syrian opposition group called on the United Nations to send a fact-finding mission to investigate an alleged poison gas attack on a rebel-held town in the country’s north.

The Syrian National Coalition and activists inside Syria say the government carried out a chlorine gas attack on the town of Sarmin late Monday, killing six people and leaving dozens more struggling to breathe. Syrian authorities denied the allegations.

In a statement released late Tuesday, Coalition vice president Hisham Marwa called for an on-site U.N. investigation as soon as possible. He also demanded the Security Council enforce a recent resolution that condemns the use of toxic chemicals such as chlorine in Syria and threatens military action in case of violations.

“The U.N. Security Council must take all necessary measures that ensure the enforcement of the resolution,” Marwa said.

The spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Peter Sawczak, said Wednesday the watchdog agency views “any allegations of chemical weapons use with concern and we are monitoring the situation closely.”

Monday’s purported attack would be one of the most serious uses of poison gas in Syria since a deadly chemical attack outside Damascus in August 2013.

An OPCW fact-finding mission concluded “with a high degree of confidence” that chlorine was used on three rebel-held villages in Syria last year, killing 13 people. It did not assign blame. Last month, the OPCW condemned the use of chlorine in Syria as a breach of international law.

Despite the new Security Council resolution, an international consensus on who was responsible for a violation would be needed to take any action, which would likely prove difficult. The Security Council remains divided over Syria’s civil war, with the U.S. and its allies supporting the opposition and Russia backing Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The World on the brink of WWIII

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By Edward Lozansky, Sputnik

wwiiiAs Washington continues to sound its war drums despite the second Minsk ceasefire, it’s worth asking why NATO continued to remain such a bellicose organization after the end of the Cold War, and what its objectives are if peace isn’t enough.

It so happens that the fate of the world is now being decided in Ukraine, not so much by the Ukrainians themselves as by the US, EU and Russia, whose geopolitical interests have clashed in this region. The talk about WWIII figures increasingly often in the media and conversations among the scholars and general public. Politicians try to allay their compatriots’ fears, but their vociferous statements merely boost this scenario.

The Minsk 2 Agreement offers at least a slim chance of moving away from a military confrontation that would destroy a good deal of the northern hemisphere, if not indeed the entire world. Yet those who view this agreement as Putin’s triumph are not at all willing to pressure Kiev into abiding by it.

There is no mystery here. The bloody chaos in Ukraine was devised not to help its people, but to weaken Russia geopolitically and topple the current leadership while mouthing noble slogans of promoting freedom, democracy and other fine Western values. So in view of those who started this mess as long as these goals are not achieved the war in Ukraine must go on even if it may escalate into an open conflict between Russia and the West. The hawks, or the War Party, do not realize that their policies contravene America’s long-term strategic interests, and are turning an important potential ally into a dangerous foe.

It did not have to be that way. After the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the Russian elite and a vast majority of the public were only too eager to join the Western world. In 1990 President George Herbert Walker Bush spoke of “a Europe whole and free” and of “the new security arch from Vancouver to Vladivostok”.

According to many political observers the roots of the current crisis lie in the NATO expansion which took place after collapse of USSR. It is true that there is no signed document to confirm Bush’s promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward. However, there are lots of reliable and trustworthy witnesses who offer convincing evidence to the effect that Washington broke at least its oral pledge to Moscow.

According to then-US Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, who took part in both the Bush-Gorbachev early-December 1989 summit in Malta and the Shevardnadze-Baker discussions in early February 1990: “The language used was absolute, and the entire negotiation was in the framework of a general agreement that there would be no use of force by the Soviets and no ‘taking advantage’ by the US … I don’t see how anybody could view the subsequent expansion of NATO as anything but ‘taking advantage,’ particularly since, by then, Russia was hardly a credible threat.”

There are other reliable witnesses of those historic events, for example, James Baker, Secretary of State in that period, whose records on this matter have recently been declassified in the Berlin Archives.

In any case there is little doubt that it was Bill Clinton and his administration that moved sharply away from a rapprochement with Russia toward a deep divide and dangerous confrontation.

George Kennan, one of the most distinguished of American diplomats, later told the New York Times that he believed the expansion of NATO was “the beginning of a new cold war…I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

All together 19 US Senators, including John Ashcroft (R-MO), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), Harry Reid (D-NV), Arlen Specter (R-PA) and John Warner (R-VA) voted against the bill permitting the expansion of NATO. Some of them said the expansion would “dilute NATO’s self-defense mission, antagonize Russia, jeopardize several Russian-American arms-control negotiations and draw a new dividing line — a new Iron Curtain — across Europe.” Republican Senator Jon Kyl was the only one absent during the vote.

“We’ll be back on a hair-trigger,” said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, warning that enlargement would threaten much worse than a new cold war. “We’re talking about nuclear war.”

Nevertheless NATO expansion proceeded apace, even though Russia was devastated by the 1990s economic crisis. Its unexpected recovery in the 2000s caught its opponents unawares, and George W. Bush continued carrying on with NATO enlargement and staging “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics.

Barack Obama started his term with some hopeful “reset” initiatives but the positive trend did not last too long.

The current, most sweeping global crisis erupted because the European Union with US blessing chose to rupture centuries-old historical, economic and family ties between Russia and Ukraine, using the same old slogans of promoting Western values.

Today it is abundantly clear that the Ukrainian people have not benefited from this policy which the February 2014 violent coup in Kiev. At the same time majority of the people in South-East Ukraine had different ideas about their future. When Maidan activists used violence to declare their desire to join Europe, whatever that means, people in Donetsk and Lugansk, given their history, demography, family ties and geographical location wanted to use something similar to Canadian and Austrian experience while maintaining close relations with Russia. They did not use specific slogans to that effect but it was pretty obvious due to the federative system and the two official languages in Canada as well as Austria’s nonaligned status.

For that they were shelled with heavy artillery, bombed from airplanes with tens of thousands of killed and wounded.

The infrastructure of this area is destroyed; there are hundreds of thousands of refugees and on top of that the world now indeed is teetering on the brink of a new disaster, possibly even nuclear. Not a single word of condemnation of Kiev by Washington or Brussels for doing that, so much for Western values.

It may be worth recalling that in the most dangerous periods of the Cold War the risks of military confrontation were defused by the Administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan. Yet there is no sign of this kind of awareness and responsibility among the Democrats or Republicans who are all trying to outdo one another as the biggest saber-rattlers against Russia.

There are the voices of Party of Peace among Americans and Europeans but so far they are obviously overwhelmed by the Party of War. Does it mean that the Russia – West military conflict is inevitable?

Turkish ISIS Godfather Davutoglu urges US Muslims to unite against “Islamophobia”

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Ahmet Davutoglu

Ahmet Davutoglu

“Islamophobia” is a neologism designed to intimidate people into thinking it is wrong to oppose jihad terror. That Davutoglu would be trafficking in it is no surprise. “Turkish PM urges US Muslims to unite against Islamophobia,” Anadolu Agency, March 5, 2015:

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Wednesday called on U.S. Muslims to make common cause against Islamophobia and racism.

Davutoglu concluded the first day of his New York visit with an address to representatives of Turkish associations in the U.S. at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Midtown Manhattan. report jihad watch

He urged the 190,000-strong Turkish community in the U.S. not only to raise a common voice on issues related to Turkey’s interests but also to act in unison with Muslims and others in defending human rights on matters related to discrimination and racism.

He also criticized the international community for being silent on the murder of three Muslim students in the U.S. state of North Carolina last month.

“Did the murder of these young Muslims spark the same amount of outrage as the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris had done? Following that attack, I attended the march in Paris to oppose it and stand in solidarity with the French people. But, which heads of state were present at the funeral of these three innocent young Muslims?” Davutoglu asked.

The only problem here with Davutoglu’s narrative is that there is no evidence that it was a hate crime. The killer was a far-Left supporter of the Huffington Post and the Southern Poverty Law Center. There is absolutely no evidence that he had some burning hatred for Muslims. But that doesn’t stop the “Islamophobia”-mongers, as they need hate crimes to fit their narrative of Muslims as victims.

Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were fatally shot Feb. 10 in a North Carolina residential complex by a man describing himself a “gun-toting” atheist.

The family of the victims branded the incident a hate crime, and Muslim advocacy groups urged authorities to examine a possible bias motive for the killings.

“If the U.S. is to retain its pluralist character, if the American citizenship is to protect its quality of being a symbol of certain liberties, this type of discriminatory and racist attitudes should not take root in American soil,” Davutoglu said.

At the end of his speech, the prime minister called on the Turkish community to “defend shared humanitarian values shoulder to shoulder, together with other Muslim Americans and those who are against racism.”

Also present at the meeting were Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan, Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, Turkey’s Ambassador to the U.S. Serdar Kilic and Turkey’s Consul-General in New York Ertan Yalcin.

how the Turks infiltrated Islamic empire and hijack the Islam

Turkish Sabah report: US congressmen to introduce Armenian genocide bill this week

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By RAGIP SOYLU,

WASHINGTON, D.C

WASHINGTON, D.C

Four members of Congress in the U.S. last week invited their colleagues to become an original co-sponsor of the Armenian Genocide Recognition Resolution, which accuses the Ottoman Empire of committing genocide in 1915 and asking President Barack Obama to pressure the Turkish government to resolve the issue. Report Turkish daily Sabah

A letter addressed to U.S. congressmen, penned by Robert J. Dold (Republican from Illinois), David Valado (Republican from California), Adam B. Schiff (Democrate from California) and Frank Pallone (Democrat from New Jersey), claims that the Ottoman Empire killed 1.5 million Armenians between April 24, 1915 and 1923. “Forty-two U.S. states have recognized the Armenian Genocide, as have 11 of our NATO allies. On this special year, it is time for the United States government to officially join with those voices standing against this genocide denial. We can help bring closure to this longstanding moral issue that continues to impact U.S. interests,” the letter read.

Representatives declared that they would be introducing the resolution next Tuesday, Feb. 24 and the same language as in House Resolution 227 from the 113th Congress would be used.

House Resolution 227, which last year became obsolete, urged President Obama to work toward durable Armenian-Turkish relations based upon Turkey’s full acknowledgment of the facts and ongoing consequences of the “Armenian Genocide.”

The draft resolution also cites President Obama’s statements before entering office, saying he held the conviction that the Armenian genocide is not an allegation but rather a widely documented fact supported by historical evidence.

Parts of the Turkish-American community was quick to show their grievances about the initiative.

Ali Çınar, a Turkish-American community leader and also the president of the Washington-based think tank Global Policy Institute, invited his followers to pressure congressmen by calling the offices of representatives and emailing them to make them stop pursuing the official recognition of genocide.

Victoria Nuland U.S. Assistant Secretary of State arrives in Armenia

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U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Photo by Photolure

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, Photo by Photolure

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has arrived in Armenia, U.S. Embassy tweeted. The Embassy has posted a photo of Ambassador Richard Mills and Victoria Nuland.

Upon her arrival in Yerevan,  Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland visited Memorial to the Armenian Genocide victims.

As reported earlier, in Yerevan she will meet with senior government officials, civil society groups and youth representatives to discuss strengthening our political, economic, and people-to-people ties with Armenia and advancing a just and lasting settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The State Department official has previously visited Baku and Tbilisi.

 

How more bizarre can it get? Turkey, U.S. will Train 15000 new terrorist called moderate Syrian rebels

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How much more you need to destroy Syria?

How much more you need to destroy Syria?

-Whose Army islamic state is ???

– How much more you need to destroy Syria??

Turkey and the United States have finalized the draft of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on a program for training and equipping the moderate Syrian opposition, Hurriyet Daily News reported, citing a Turkish official.

In the coming days, officials from Turkey and the United States will sign the MoU, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tanju Bilgiç told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday, Feb 17.

Bilgiç also said the training was likely to start in March.

A total of 15,000 Syrians will be trained in Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia over three years as part of the campaign against jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or IS) group and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

White House resists calls to focus on Islamist terrorism at three-day extremism summit

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Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/pool/Aude Guerrucci/pool/Corbis

Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/pool/Aude Guerrucci/pool/Corbis

White House officials are downplaying calls to focus on Islamist terrorism in a three-day summit aimed at preventing violent extremism, insisting that recent attacks should not lead to stereotyping of certain communities as higher risk.

Senior official says US not treating terrorists ‘as part of a religion’

White House officials are downplaying calls to focus on Islamist terrorism in a three-day summit aimed at preventing violent extremism, insisting that recent attacks should not lead to stereotyping of certain communities as higher risk. Report The Guardian

The international conference, which begins on Tuesday in Washington and will seek ways of deterring home-grown terrorism, has been criticised by Republicans for failing to single out Islamist extremism for particular scrutiny despite having been convened by Barack Obama in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris and coming amid concern over radicalisation by the Islamic State, or Isis, and just days after a terrorist attack in Denmark.

But the administration is adamant that delegates should also discuss lessons from other conflicts, such as the fight against Farc in Colombia and attacks by Christians on Sikh or Jewish targets, and rejects criticism it is being overly politically correct in taking such a broad approach.

“You can call them what you want; we are calling them terrorists,” said a senior administration official in a briefing for reporters ahead of the summit. “We are not treating these people are part of a religion.”

Vice-president Joe Biden will open the summit at the White House by meeting mayors from three US cities – Los Angeles, Boston and Minneapolis-Saint Paul – which have been running pilot studies on how to work with local communities to deter extremism.

Despite picking cities such as Boston, which saw a bombing of its marathon in April 2013, or Minneapolis, which has a large Somali population, the White House insists it will also consider lessons from extremists groups from all religions.

“We are all agreed the individuals that perpetrated the attacks in Paris and elsewhere are calling themselves Muslim and claiming that a certain interpretation of Islam motivated them,” said another US official, speaking anonymously on Monday.

“They are not making any secret of that and neither are we, but we are very, very clear: we do not believe that they represent Islam. There is definitely no justification for [terror] in any religion, and that’s the view of the vast majority of Muslims.”

Obama will speak to the conference twice, first from the White House on Wednesday and again at a State Department event attended by foreign and interior ministers from 60 countries on Thursday.

Those guests will include British home secretary Theresa May and United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon. They are expected to produce a seven-month action plan before a second meeting ahead of the UN general assembly.

Obama first mooted the international approach to preventing violent extremism in a speech to the UN last year. But since then, the war against Isis in Syria and Iraq, combined with homegrown terrorist attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and Copenhagen, has increased pressure on Obama to articulate a clearer strategy for combating what many see as growing Muslim radicalisation around the world.

The president was criticised for appearing to describe aspects of the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris last month as random, rather than ascribing religious motivation. Obama also courted controversy at a Washington prayer breakfast by focusing on similarities with other religious extremists throughout history.

Yet when the president was first criticised for focusing the conference on violent extremism of all sorts, his press secretary listed attacks on Jewish groups in Kansas and Washington and Sikhs in Wisconsin as reasons to seek a common approach to combating terrorism.

“What we hope to do [at the conference] is to work with state and local officials to talk about best practices,” said press secretary Josh Earnest, “about some of the things that they can do in their community to make sure that individuals like this don’t succeed in carrying out these acts of violence in the name of a warped ideology.”

 

The Middle East That Might Have Been the region’s borders right.

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By Nick Danforth February 13, 2015

Nearly a century ago, two Americans led a quixotic mission to get the region’s borders right.

How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East map

How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East map

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian named Henry King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out the Middle East. Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the region’s political future was uncertain, and the two men seemed to provide the necessary combination of business acumen and biblical knowledge. King and Crane’s quest was to find out how the region’s residents wanted to be governed. It would be a major test of Wilson’s belief in national self-determination: the idea that every people should get its own state with clearly defined borders. published on http://www.theatlantic.com

After spending three weeks interviewing religious and community leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Turkey, the two men and their team proposed that the Ottoman lands be divided as shown in the map above. Needless to say, the proposals were disregarded. In accordance with the Sykes-Picot Agreement Britain and France had drafted in secret in 1916, Britain and France ultimately took over the region as so-called mandate or caretaker powers. The French-administered region would later become Lebanon and Syria, and the British region would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq.

The King-Crane report is still a striking document—less for what it reveals about the Middle East as it might have been than as an illustration of the fundamental dilemmas involved in drawing, or not drawing, borders. Indeed, the report insisted on forcing people to live together through complicated legal arrangements that prefigure more recent proposals.

Among other things, the authors concluded that dividing Iraq into ethnic enclaves was too absurd to merit discussion. Greeks and Turks only needed one country because the “two races supplement each other.” The Muslims and Christians of Syria needed to learn to “get on together in some fashion” because “the whole lesson of modern social consciousness points to the necessity of understanding ‘the other half,’ as it can be understood only by close and living relations.”

But the commissioners also realized that simply lumping diverse ethnic or religious groups together in larger states could lead to bloody results. Their report proposed all sorts of ideas for tiered, overlapping mandates or bi-national federated states, ultimately endorsing a vision that could be considered either pre- or post-national, depending on one’s perspective. In addition to outlining several autonomous regions, they proposed that Constantinople (now Istanbul) become an international territory administered by the League of Nations, since “no one nation can be equal to the task” of controlling the city and its surrounding straits, “least of all a nation with Turkey’s superlatively bad record of misrule.” Although the authors had been tasked with drawing borders, it seems that once they confronted the many dilemmas of implementing self-determination, they developed a more fluid approach to nationhood and identity.

Disagreement among the region’s residents about their own future certainly helped the commission reach this conclusion. The commissioners traveled from city to city accepting petitions and taking testimony, compiling a rare record of Arab popular opinion from the period. This early polling exercise captured a wide range of views—some overlapping, some irreconcilable.

Some 80 percent of those interviewed favored the establishment of a “United Syria”—an outcome that, far from settling the question of what self-determination would look like, forced the commission to wrestle with the crucial issue of what should happen to minorities. Many of the Christians living in this hypothetical future state, particularly those in the Mount Lebanon region, spoke out forcefully against being part of a larger, Muslim-dominated entity. Many called for an “Independent Greater Lebanon,” whose territory would be roughly equivalent to that of the modern state of Lebanon.

The commissioners’ proposed solution was to grant Lebanon “a sufficient measure of local autonomy” so as not to “diminish the security of [its] inhabitants.” But their explanation for why this autonomy should fall short of complete independence seems to challenge the logic of self-determination: “Lebanon would be in a position to exert a stronger and more helpful influence if she were within the Syrian state, feeling its problems and needs and sharing all its life, instead of outside it, absorbed simply in her own narrow concerns.”

Ultimately, the King-Crane proposal relied on European or American supervision, through the mandate system, to fudge different degrees of sovereignty and ensure minority rights in multi-national states. Placing different mandates under the same mandatory power became an easy way to separate peoples while maintaining an administrative link between them: Syria and Mesopotamia, for instance, could both be under British supervision, while Turkey and Armenia could both be overseen by the United States. There is a telling condescension to the commissioners’ insistence on foreign administration as the best way to implement “self-determination,” but it wasn’t that different from the widely shared belief at the time that oversight from a supra-national body like the League of Nations would also be necessary to ensure minority rights in the new nations of Eastern Europe.

In some ways, it also wasn’t that different from the British and French belief, evident in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that continued imperial rule was necessary to manage local differences. There are echoes of this conviction in the anti-nationalist imperial nostalgia that exists in some quarters today. Indeed, part of the reason the British and French felt so comfortable drawing “arbitrary” borders was that they believed they would remain in a position to manage relations across them. In this sense, Anglo-French imperialism relied on controlling borders and suppressing self-determination within the region, while the King-Crane commission was more interested in trying to find a balance between them.

This balance has yet to be achieved. Today, some people argue that Iraq would be better off divided into smaller states, and that Syria might split up on its own, while others—including ISIS—have insisted that the solution is to do away entirely with borders like the one between Iraq and Syria and to create a much larger entity. But both solutions, along with the countless alternative maps proposed for the region, remain focused on redrawing borders rather than transcending them. And for what it’s worth, neither a subdivided Syria nor a union between Syria and Mesopotamia were outcomes that many locals campaigned for when King and Crane came to visit.

All of this suggests a need to look beyond the current paradigm of borders. The people of Scotland, for example, recently decided that their preferred relationship with London involved a mix of dependence and independence rather than leaving the U.K. altogether or allowing England to have total sovereignty over their affairs. And in Syria, a federated arrangement that parcels out control of the country’s territory without breaking it apart could be a faster route to peace than complete victory by any one side.

Of course, recognizing the limitations of nation-states, in the Middle East or elsewhere, does not imply that with a little more foresight the Arab world could have transitioned directly from Ottoman imperialism to post-national European modernity. Historical forces worked against implementing more flexible alternatives to the nation-state system then, and they still do today. But the current regional uncertainty may require the same kind of imagination the King-Crane commission brought to its analysis. A century later, it’s clear that the question of what political arrangements can help people “get on together in some fashion” remains just as difficult as ever.

  • Nick Danforth is a doctoral candidate in Turkish history at Georgetown University. He writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and maps at midafternoonmap.com.