For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and “experts” telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a “mainstream” voice was raised in his defence in all that time.

From the moment he sought asylum, Assange was cast as an outlaw. His work as the founder of Wikileaks – a digital platform that for the first time in history gave ordinary people a glimpse into the darkest recesses of the most secure vaults in the deepest of Deep States – was erased from the record.

Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.
The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the charges, only for them to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.

They failed to mention that Assange was always willing to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London, as had occurred in dozens of other cases involving extradition proceedings to Sweden. It was almost as if Swedish officials did not want to test the evidence they claimed to have in their possession.

The media and political courtiers endlessly emphasised Assange’s bail violation in the UK, ignoring the fact that asylum seekers fleeing legal and political persecution don’t usually honour bail conditions imposed by the very state authorites from which they are seeking asylum.

The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks’ concerns that the Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

They belittled the 2016 verdict of a panel of United Nations legal scholars that the UK was “arbitrarily detaining” Assange. The media were more interested in the welfare of his cat.

They ignored the fact that after Ecuador changed presidents – with the new one keen to win favour with Washington – Assange was placed under more and more severe forms of solitary confinement. He was denied access to visitors and basic means of communications, violating both his asylum status and his human rights, and threatening his mental and physical wellbeing.

Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream” journalist or politician thought this significant either.

They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK, Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept the decision under wraps for more than two years.

It was a freedom of information request by an ally of Assange, not a media outlet, that unearthed documents showing that Swedish investigators had, in fact, wanted to drop the case against Assange back in 2013. The UK, however, insisted that they carry on with the charade so that Assange could remain locked up. A British official emailed the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been destroyed by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the political and media establishment cared, of course.

Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden. They told us – apparently in all seriousness – that he had to be arrested for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.

And possibly most egregiously of all, most of the media refused to acknowledge that Assange was a journalist and publisher, even though by failing to do so they exposed themselves to the future use of the same draconian sanctions should they or their publications ever need to be silenced. They signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.

This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an example of its founder.

It was about making sure there would never again be a leak like that of Collateral Murder, the military video released by Wikileaks in 2007 that showed US soldiers celebrating as they murdered Iraqi civilians. It was about making sure there would never again be a dump of US diplomatic cables, like those released in 2010 that revealed the secret machinations of the US empire to dominate the planet whatever the cost in human rights violations.

Now the pretence is over. The British police invaded the diplomatic territory of Ecuador – invited in by Ecuador after it tore up Assange’s asylum status – to smuggle him off to jail. Two vassal states cooperating to do the bidding of the US empire. The arrest was not to help two women in Sweden or to enforce a minor bail infraction.

No, the British authorities were acting on an extradition warrant from the US. And the charges the US authorities have concocted relate to Wikileaks’ earliest work exposing the US military’s war crimes in Iraq – the stuff that we all once agreed was in the public interest, that British and US media clamoured to publish themselves.

Still the media and political class is turning a blind eye. Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom – the right to publish – being trashed to silence Assange? Where is the willingness finally to speak up in Assange’s defence?

It’s not there. There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just curious, impassive – even gently mocking – reporting of Assange’s fate.

And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn’t care. In fact, they happily conspired in paving the way for today’s kidnapping of Assange.

They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don’t care about any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with money and influence. They don’t want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.

Now they will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions about Assange to keep us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away, and to prevent us from realising that Assange’s rights and our own are indivisible. We stand or fall together.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org/
 

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The government/Poor leadership 35
Immigration 19
Healthcare 6
Race relations/Racism 5
Unifying the country  4
Poverty/Hunger/Homelessness 4
Environment/Pollution 3
Ethics/Moral/Religious/Family decline 3
Federal budget deficit/Federal debt 3
Economy in general    3

More than a third of Americans think that “The government/Poor leadership” is the “Top Problem” in America.

That’s almost twice the percentage who listed the second-from-top option, “Immigration,” as being this.

In turn, the third-most-frequently chosen option was “Healthcare,” mentioned by a third as many respondents as listed “Immigration.” (And healthcare in the United States is the worst and by far the costliest in all of the developed nations; so it’s a system that’s extraordinarily rotten and corrupt, and thus obviously an enormous U.S. problem.) (And immigration wasn’t high on these lists until Trump’s Presidency, which raised it from virtually nowhere — such as 5% in 2005 — to 19% today; so its being high on the list now is due only to the propaganda and not to any reality.)

Consequently, that this Government does not represent the American people, is a fact which is beyond any reasonable doubt.

How validly can one call such a country a “democracy,” if “democracy” is being defined as “government that represents the people”?
Here are other indications that the U.S. is, in truth, a dictatorship:

America has the world’s highest percentage of its people in prison — the highest percentage in prison of any nation on the planet. If this means that it’s a police-state, then the U.S. already is leading the world as being that. Every other nation can reasonably look down upon America as having the highest percentage of its residents being in prison, and this American condition is entirely inconsistent with the country’s being a democracy. Of course, the U.S. also allows the death penalty, but that punishment is rarely imposed now, because of the international embarrassment.

On 18 July 2018, Dave Lawler at Axios headlined “Comparing the popularities of leading world leaders”, and he reported that in the latest available polling within top nations, the job-approval of heads-of-state were: 55% Justin Trudeau (CA), 52% Shinzo Abe (JA), 48% Angela Merkel (GE), 43% Donald Trump (US), 40% Emmanuel Macron (FR), and 25% Theresa May (UK). Clearly, UK doesn’t now have an effective democracy, when its leader has only one-quarter of the public approving of her performance. That’s way below 50%. Macron’s 40% job-approval in France could also indicate that France is a dictatorship. Trump likewise. The others probably aren’t, or aren’t as much, dictatorships.

Earlier-polled national job-approval ratings

showed that the national job-approvals of 7 leaders were, in order starting from the highest: Putin (83%), Trudeau (63%), Obama (56%), Merkel (54%), Italy’s Renzi (40%), France’s Hollande (12%), and Brazil’s Temer (11%).

Also earlier-polled were 10 leaders, and they rated, top to bottom, within their respective nations: China’s Xi, Russia’s Putin, India’s Modi, South Africa’s Zuma, Germany’s Merkel, Brazil’s Roussef, America’s Obama, Japan’s Abe, UK’s Cameron, and France’s Hollande.

All of those ratings were, of course, within nations. All of those polls sampled people only about their own nation’s leader. By contrast, approval-ratings worldwide for 10 leaders showed them, in order from highest to lowest, to be: Merkel, Macron, Modi, May, Xi, Putin, Salman, Netanyahu, Rouhani, and Trump. But those ratings aren’t relevant to the nations’ degree of democracy or dictatorship.

The United States is the only country in the world that has been scientifically analyzed regarding its degree of dictatorship or else democracy, and the results were clear that it’s a one-dollar-one-vote controlled country; it’s not actually controlled on a one-person-one-vote basis; it’s a dictatorship. In other words, it is an aristocracy — the richest rule here — it’s not a democracy, of any type.

I have elsewhere discussed a multitude of measures for the degree to which a given nation is either a democracy or a dictatorship. America doesn’t score high for democracy on any of them. The common references in the press using the term “democracy” to refer to America are lies. They may express accurately some of the formalities of democracy, but certainly not the realities (such as they claim to be doing).

In conclusion, one may say that internationally the aristocracy has imposed, in many if not most nations, the ways and means to corrupt the government so profoundly that the aristocracy actually reign, but this hasn’t happened uniformly throughout the world. And only in the United States has it been scientifically proven that the Government is a dictatorship. Elsewhere, there is at least the possibility to question whether a nation is dictatorial, and, if so, to what extent. But unquestionably the U.S. is. And, according to the latest Gallup poll on what the nation’s top problem is, a stunningly high percentage even of Americans are now sensing that this is true.

Short of performing a scientific analysis, however, the most reliable indicator of whether or not a given nation is a democracy might reasonably be that the higher the percentage of its people who are in prison, the lower is the given nation’s democracy-quotient, and that the lower this percentage is, the more democratic the government is.

After all, either a military dictatorship, or a police state, is clearly not a democracy, no matter how much the given nation’s constitution and other formalities say  it is.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Originally posted at strategic-culture.org

Courtesy: Counter Currents
 

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When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).

As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?
The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.

The U.S. is fighting its global war on terror in 40% of the world’s nations

(Stephanie Savell, Costs of War Project, originally published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine)

This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.

Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.

Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.

In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.

Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”

Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agentsworked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?

Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.

The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others). According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”

In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.

A Vast Military Footprint
As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.

Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.
In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.

Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.

To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”

A Better Grand Plan
How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.

After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemenrepresents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.

On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has not debated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddledreactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.

With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.

In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.

All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.

Stephanie Savell, a TomDispatch regular, is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. An anthropologist, she conducts research on security and activism in the U.S. and in Brazil. She co-authored The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Stephanie Savell

Courtesy: Counter Current.org

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Sign outside both the locations of ‘Yassin’s Falafel House’

Yassin is an inspiring example of how one person can make a major difference in promoting goodwill between people from different faith and ethnic backgrounds. In the context of widespread prejudice in the name of religion and ethnicity in large parts of the world, Yassin’s life provides valuable lessons for how such prejudice can be overcome—through ‘little’, everyday acts of love and service. 

Yassin was born in Syria in 1983 and grew up in the country’s capital, Damascus. In 2010, the Syrian secret police held Yassin for a month—he had been a critic of the government. He applied for asylum in America, hoping to return to Syria when he was no longer in danger. But things only got worse, with a war in which hundreds of thousands have been killed.

Yassin came to Knoxville in 2011, knowing little English. Life for him in his new home wasn’t easy. After filing the papers to legally obtain employment, he couldn’t find work. The small Muslim community in town offered to help him with free food and clothing. But Yassin wanted a job. He asked if he could sell sandwiches outside the mosque on Friday after prayers. Then, in 2014 he launched his eatery, which was followed by a second unit, in 2017.

In an article titled ‘How Did a Falafel House in Tennessee Become the Nicest Place in America?’ published in the ‘Reader’s Digest’ (https://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/yassin-falafel-house-nicest-place-in-america/), Jeremy Greenfield shows how this first-generation Muslim refugee-immigrant in America has won the hearts of many people in the town where he now lives. Yassin, the article says, has “ become a beloved local celebrity”. His eateries, it relates, “are safe places for everyone, powerful engines of charity, and symbols of the best of America”—which is why ‘Yassin’s Falafel House’ was voted by ‘Reader’s Digest’ as 2018’s ‘Nicest Place in America’.
 
One thing that probably draws many people to ‘Yassin’s Falafel House’ is that Yassin makes them feel warmly welcomed. Drocella Mugorewera, executive director of Bridge Refugee Services, a non-profit organisation in Knoxville that helps refugees rebuild their lives in Eastern Tennessee, repeats the word that’s often mentioned when talking about Yassin: “He wants everybody to feel welcomed.”

Yassin explains that he isn’t there just to make money. He’s more than just a businessman. He is deeply engaged in social causes that benefit the local society as a whole, and not just his co-religionists. “Yassin’s Falafel House” has held fundraisers for community causes, donating a percentage of the profits of each falafel sold. Yassin has been an employer of many of the residents of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).  He has also hired people struggling with drug addiction and women fleeing dangerous situations. When, in November 2016, fire ripped through a nearby town, killing 14 and damaging or destroying 2,500 homes and businesses, he rented a huge van and helped arrange for essentials for the affected.

Yassin has been actively engaged in promoting interfaith and inter-ethnic harmony, including simply by providing a cheerful atmosphere in his restaurants where everyone is made to feel welcome.

When Yassin won a local Rotary Club Peace Award last year for his charitable work, he donated the $1,000 prize to the Seeds of Abraham, a local nonprofit organisation that brings together youth from different faiths to build connections that lead to understanding and peace.
In 2017, Yassin was invited by a Baptist Christian pastor  to talk to a group of children at an “in-home retreat”. He cooked the group a meal and then told them about his life. It transformed the way the children thought about their neighbours and refugees and what they should do as Americans and as Christians to welcome all who need a place of refuge. “Prior to that weekend, some of our students and families thought of refugees as these folks who were in some way dangerous. I don’t think that can stick if you meet Yassin or meet other refugees like him, because you come to know the people they are”, says Ben Winder, the youth pastor at First Baptist at the time.

Of course it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Yassin in the face of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments among some people in the country where he now lives. He’s probably faced considerable prejudice on these counts himself. But his way of handling these challenges has perhaps won numerous hearts over. Consider, for instance, his response when participating in a rally just before Christmas in 2017 to “welcome the stranger,” a Christian call to treat friends, neighbours, strangers and even enemies, with love and compassion, when a man draped in the American flag hollered against immigrants, who he claimed were preventing him from getting a job. When it was Yassin’s turn to speak at the rally, he invited the man up on stage so they could hold the flag high together. When the man refused, Terou went into the crowd to find him so he could introduce himself and offer to buy him dinner so they could talk. He also offered the man a job!

“I always do that,” Terou told Reader’s Digest, “I always invite anyone who hates us to the store. I want them to know us more. When you break bread, you break hate.”

Similarly, when one day Yassin learnt that the “Safe Place” sign outside of one of his locations had been vandalized with a white supremacist sticker, he didn’t call the police. He didn’t even think about pressing charges. Instead, he countered the action with love. He gathered customers, many now friends, outside his restaurant and talked about how he wanted to sit down for a meal with the white supremacists who did it, so they could learn to get along.

For those who hope for a world where people from different backgrounds can live together in peace and harmony and where prejudice in the name of religion and ethnicity are things of the past Yassin’s life provides some valuable lessons. It teaches us that:

• If we want others to appreciate, accept and respect us, we need to be pro-active and appreciate, accept and respect others first. This applies in the case of both individuals and communities.
• If we make others feel valued and welcomed, they will value and welcome us in turn. Again, this is true for both individuals as well as for entire communities.
• Acts of loving service can help build bridges of harmony between people from different faith and ethnic backgrounds.
• The best way to overcome prejudice, including in the name of religion and ethnicity, is by serving others through deeds of kindness, going beyond concern with just one’s own social group.
• Deeply-rooted prejudices, such as in the name of religion and ethnicity, can be overcome. And the only way this can happen is by living out love and compassion and being useful to others.
• Love alone can overcome hate, transform hearts and build bridges, including between people from different religious and ethnic communities. As is rightly said, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”

Courtesy: New Age Islam

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• 35 percent support a single democratic state in which both Jews and Arabs are full and equal citizens;
• 36 percent support Israeli and Palestinian states side by side;
• 11 percent support maintaining the occupation indefinitely;
• 8 percent support Israeli annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories without offering equal citizenship to Palestinians.

And when broken down by age the results are even more stark; among 18-and-34-year-olds support for one state climbs to 42 percent.

In addition, the poll asked what a two-state supporter would back if the two-state solution was no longer possible. In this scenario, 64 percent supported a single democratic state and only 26 percent supported “the continuation of Israel’s Jewish majority in the government even if it means that Palestinians will not have citizenship and full rights.”

The poll also reveals support for stronger U.S. sanctions against Israeli colonization of the West Bank, and rising criticism of the Israeli role in American politics.

When asked “How do you believe the U.S. should react to new settlements?” 40 percent of poll respondents support economic sanctions against Israel, and this number rises to 46 percent among registered Democrats.

And finally, when asked “How much influence do you believe the Israeli government has on American politics and policies?” 38 percent of Americans say “too much influence” and this number goes up to 55 percent among Democrats.

There is much to take in here but some obvious takeaways are that we have entered the post-two-state era and the political ramifications are already being felt. Support for stronger U.S. policy towards Israel is growing in the face of the ever-expanding colonization of the West Bank. The poll also helps explain what we have seen among the new progressive wing of the Democratic party, which supports BDS and is not beholden to the Israel lobby. This new political terrain will undoubtably be contentious as Israel supporters fight in Washington, as well as in the discourse, to stem this tide.

Adam Horowitz is Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
 

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Emma González attends March for Our Lives on Mar. 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Noam Galai/WireImage/Getty Images via YES! Magazine.

It’s hard to think of anything more embarrassing than throwing up in front of millions of people waiting to hear you speak. But that’s exactly what Sam Fuentes did at the March for Our Lives rally she helped to organize in Washington, D.C.

Here’s the kicker: The school shooting survivor didn’t act embarrassed at all. Instead of running off the stage—like most of us would—she took it in stride and went on to give an impassioned speech.

Since 17 of their classmates were gunned down in February, Fuentes and other survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, have turned their trauma into a mass movement against gun violence. They organized a national march without any infrastructure—and in record time. And this summer, they toured the country for a campaign to mobilize the youth vote in the upcoming midterm elections.

But perhaps most significantly, these young people have debunked the assumption that this issue could never be wrested from the hands of powerful and well-funded gun rights forces.

Among the doubtful were older activists and professional campaigners who’d been in the organizing trenches for years—and with the scars to prove it. While thrilled about the new movement’s success, they also had a feeling that something had changed. Is this the dawn of a new kind of organizing and campaigning?

In short, yes. And the March for Our Lives movement is only one example. From the Movement for Black Lives and 350.org to the Women’s March and the tea party, a new wave of people-powered action is flipping the script and in some ways confounding traditional organizations that have been unable to convert into nimble social movements.

What all have in common is what authors Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms are calling “new power”—new models that are organic and grow directly from the people rather than being directed or managed by formal organizations that control what gets done and by whom.

“Old power models ask of us only that we comply (pay your taxes, do your homework) or consume,” they write. “New power models demand and allow for more: that we share ideas, create new content (as on YouTube) or assets (as on Etsy), even shape a community (think of the sprawling digital movements resisting the Trump presidency).”

Today, new movements are working with more established organizations to capitalize on their wide-reaching networks. And they are learning to embrace the kinds of technologically savvy tactics used by the Parkland students. Here are five strategies that are proving valuable.

Ditch the script.
Seasoned campaigners have long understood that the most effective messengers and organizers are those with the most at stake, or—like the Parkland students—little to lose. Those most directly affected by an issue can speak from the heart, while many campaigners and advocates sound scripted when they cite statistics or the latest study to make their points.

Soon after taking the stage at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., Parkland and speaking for two minutes, senior Emma González went silent. After standing wordlessly at the podium for another four minutes and 26 seconds, she informed the crowd that her entire six minute and 20 second speech had lasted the same amount of time as she and her classmates had endured an active shooter.

She captured attention not only by speaking from the heart, but by showing rather than telling. González and her fellow student leaders are compelling to us because they have what Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, says are the three critical elements of good stories: (1) compelling characters, (2) characters who have overcome obstacles, and (3) characters who have achieved a worthy outcome.

Step back so others can step up.
We all want to be recognized for the work we’re doing, especially when it comes to issues we’re passionate about. That desire to be front and center can sometimes hurt, rather than advance, a movement or mission.

At the March for Our Lives in Washington, for example, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, a nationally recognized gun violence survivor, stood in the crowd instead of onstage. She had stepped back so students’ voices could be heard. At the same time, she stepped up in other ways such as paying for many students’ travel to Washington.

The bottom line: Transformative social change is going to come from organizations that see people as change agents, not just cheerleaders or foot soldiers carrying out plans designed by those “in charge.”

Use the power of social media.
When Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked Parkland student organizer and survivor David Hogg for not being accepted into certain colleges, Hogg didn’t spend the next few days convening staff meetings on how to respond.

Instead, he quickly posted a list of Ingraham’s advertisers on Twitter and asked his outraged followers to let those companies know how they felt. As a result, more than a dozen advertisers dropped her show.

The most effective social change organizations understand that as technology moves everything to warp speed, the ability to respond rapidly and nimbly matters more than ever before.

The key to such agility? Agreeing on an overarching vision and message. This provides team members with the autonomy needed to respond quickly and creatively when opportunities arise.

Dream big to go big.
In one of the most viewed TED talks of all time, behavioral researcher and author Simon Sinek uses Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech to explain why a big, bold idea is a key element of movement building and social change.

“He gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, not the ‘I Have a Plan’ speech,” Sinek says. “He spoke for a different world, how to go from here to there. And he so beautifully described what ‘there’ is.”

King’s vision of a positive future mobilized a quarter of a million people to make the trek to Washington, D.C. (long before the internet). The Parkland students inspired over a million to stand up against gun violence in Washington and cities across the U.S. And March for Our Lives inspired an even bigger nationwide school walkout to keep up pressure on politicians and continue building local power.

Adopt a movement mindset.
Could your organization pull off a national march in five weeks? Without any infrastructure or paid staff? With little financial support? And while leaders are still reeling from major trauma?

A lot of people told the Parkland students that what they were attempting was impossible. Luckily, they ignored the concerns because they weren’t fixating on what they didn’t have. Instead, they had a “movement mindset” that allowed them to focus on creatively and efficiently using the resources they did have.

Organizations of all sizes are discovering that they can take a page from social movements and find ways to act before everything is in place or completely figured out. Through participatory planning, rapid audience testing, and real-time ongoing improvements, organizations are developing initiatives that can be successful in rapidly shifting and unpredictable contexts. In short, the perfect is no longer the enemy of the good.

Michael Silberman wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Michael is the global director of Mobilisation Lab, which is transforming social change for the networked age. MobLab supports advocacy campaigners and their organisations to break through and win in today’s digital world with a systems-based, people-powered approach. Follow him on Twitter @silbatron and @mobilisationlab.

This article was first published in YES! Magazine.

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New York: A Sikh man has been stabbed to death at his store in the US state of New Jersey, the third incident targeting the minority Sikh community in the country in three weeks.
 
Terlok Singh was discovered dead by his cousin on Thursday, Aug 16, in his store with an apparent stab wound in the chest.
 
The Essex County Prosecutor’s office is calling the incident a homicide, according to a report in ABC7NY.
 
The motive behind the killing was not immediately known.
 
Singh, described as a very kind person, is survived by his wife and children who live in India. He owned the store to support his family.
 
His family closed the store as a deeply-saddened community watched in horror.
 
The news report said Singh ran his store for at least six years and a neighbour said he should not have had to worry about being attacked in his workplace.
 
Civil rights organisation the Sikh Coalition, in a Facebook post, expressed condolences to Singh’s family, friends and local community. Simran Jeet Singh, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Centre for Religion and Media and a Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, tweeted about Singh’s tragic death, saying, “This is the third attack on a Sikh in the last three weeks. So tired of all this sadness.”
 
On August 6 in Manteca, California, 71-year-old Sahib Singh was brutally attacked by Tyrone McAllister and a juvenile when the elderly man went on a morning walk.
 
McAllister, who is this son of a local police chief, and the juvenile were charged with attempted robbery, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon.
 
On July 31, 50-year-old Surjit Malhi was attacked while putting up campaign signs in support of incumbent Republican Congressman Jeff Denham and other local Republican candidates.
While beating Malhi, the attackers yelled ‘Go back to your country!’ and spray-painted the same message, along with hate symbols, on his truck.
 
Following the two incidents, the Sikh Coalition had urged members of the community to know their rights, remain vigilant and report cases of bias, bigotry and backlash in the wake of the attacks.
 
“We are deeply troubled by these two recent attacks and strongly encourage increased vigilance nationwide as we work to support the Central Valley, California community during this difficult time,” Sikh Coalition Legal Director Amrith Kaur had said.
 
PTI and Indians Abroad
 

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he Iraq War memorial in Santa Monica, California (Photo: Kevin Dooley / Flickr)

Millions of Americans will spend Memorial Day at community picnics, family barbecues or local parades. “Thank you for your service” will be a ubiquitous phrase.

Despite that annual refrain, we’re very far from honoring our veterans. Though drone strikes and bombing campaigns have reduced casualty figures (in fact, more people have died in school shootings this year than in the military), too many of our young women and men still come home from our wars destroyed physically and devastated emotionally.

In addition to grievous bodily injuries, many come home suffering from trauma, addiction and moral injury — the sense, as Veterans for Peace Director Michael McPhearson explains, that “you’re not really standing on stable moral ground” after you’ve been ordered to kill people. At home they confront an overburdened veterans’ health system, which the administration wants to make worse by privatizing.

The numbers are staggering. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops — 100,000 or more at time — have served in Afghanistan alone. At almost 17 years on, it’s our nation’s longest war. Some 15,000 troops are still deployed there.

Yet does anyone other than their families even think about them?

Numerous military and political leaders have acknowledged that the Afghan war is unwinnable, yet the deployments continue. Meanwhile, Afghans — children, old people, journalists, wedding parties — continue to die. Some are killed by U.S. airstrikes, others by Afghan government or opposition forces. The killing goes on because we help perpetuate a permanent war that almost everyone agrees cannot be won.

But it’s not just U.S. troops and Afghans who pay for this folly. The rest of us do, too — more dearly than many realize.

The Pentagon says the war in Afghanistan will cost us $45 billion this year alone. If we didn’t spend that money on an unwinnable war thousands of miles away, what could we do with it instead?

For starters, we could hire 556,779 well-paid elementary school teachers in struggling states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia, where teachers have protested abysmal conditions. Or create 809,999 new well-paid jobs to rebuild infrastructure like the broken water system in Flint, Michigan.

Or provide 4.36 million veterans with health care. Now that would be something.

And that’s just for one year of one war. All told, our full $700 billion-plus military budget sucks up 53 cents out of every discretionary dollar in the federal budget — compared to just 15 cents for poverty alleviation. Our troops and Afghan civilians pay the price, but so do the 140 million Americans living in poverty or with very low incomes.

When people talk about universal health care, education, infrastructure and debt-free college, the conversation usually ends with “too bad we can’t afford it, we don’t have the money.”

But that’s not true. We have plenty of money — the United States is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. What we don’t have is a moral compass that recognizes that spending more than half of the available funds on a giant military mired in wars that don’t keep us safe is wrong.

Remember those school kids who said “no more thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings? They’re demanding action. So let’s take a page from their book. For next Memorial Day, let’s say “No more thank you for your service.”

Instead, we need action, and a new moral compass — one that recognizes that the best way to honor our veterans, keep people safe, end poverty, and fund jobs, education and health care for veterans and everybody else is to end the wars.

This spring, we helped launch a new Poor People’s Campaign to revive the movement against what Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago called the “evil triplets” of racism, materialism and militarism. And for the next few weeks, people are holding actions in at least 30 state capitals and the District of Columbia to start bringing our war dollars home to build a just new economy. Check out poorpeoplescampaign.org to find out about events happening near you.

The cost of our military is creating a national moral crisis, where our priorities are skewed, vulnerable communities are threatened, and our veterans aren’t being honored. This year, let’s honor them with action. Let’s end the wars.
 

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Some suggest there will be additional emissions of up to three billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the air a year. Others point to higher U.S. emissions due to potentially diluted auto fuel efficiency standards and changes to rules to restrict methane leaks from the oil and gas industry.

To be sure, the decision to pull the U.S. out of a global agreement is a dramatic one. But we suggest that this withdrawal is a symbolic action with little substantive impact on climate mitigation.

As such, it is critical not to overreact and lose sight of domestic issues that could significantly jeopardize future climate policies.
 

How to assess the impact?

To assess the impact of Trump’s decision, the questions we need to ask are the following: First, will new policies be enacted after the withdrawal that will significantly alter carbon emissions? Even before today’s announcement, the Trump administration has indicated plans to cut back on regulations, such as the CAFE auto fuel efficiency and methane rules.

Second, will this withdrawal alter the efforts of China, India or the EU in the realm of renewable energy? Or, for that matter, the states of California and Washington and the businesses that have openly argued for the U.S. to honor the Paris Agreement?

We suggest subjecting the Paris withdrawal to the “additionality” principle: that is, identify the additional impact of Paris withdrawal on climate policy over and above the existing policy trajectory. We would argue that based on the Trump administration’s actions since taking office, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement only reinforces existing actions, rather than leads to a radically new path.

Since its inauguration, the Trump administration has acquired a reputation for hostility to environmental issues. There have been severe cuts to the EPA’s budget, the Clean Power Plan has been discontinued, the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines have been given the go-ahead and public lands have been opened up to extractive industries.

In other words, the administration had already adopted anti-climate mitigation policies prior to the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. And so we can expect all actors, be they foreign governments, state governments or businesses, to already have adjusted their expectations about climate change policy compared to the previous administration.

If the Obama administration had withdrawn from Paris, it would have been unexpected and therefore different. But withdrawal by Trump does not provide any new information to other governments and businesses. And so it will not cause them to revise their assessment of how federal government will act on climate change.
 

Will the world look different?

So will this withdrawal derail global efforts toward climate mitigation?

China has already emerged a leader in several renewable energy areas, particularly solar and wind. It now has a commercial imperative to move more aggressively given that a growing percentage of new global electricity generation capacity is based on renewable sources. At the same time, China faces severe domestic air pollution problems due to its reliance on coal for electricity generation. Thus, China has strong incentives, both commercial and environmental, to continue its focus on renewable energy.

A similar logic, to some extent, holds for the EU and India. The bottom line is that U.S. withdrawal will probably not change the uptake of renewable energy in other countries.
 

Red states’ support

Closer to home, might this decision affect domestic efforts toward climate mitigation? Within the U.S., much of environmental policy innovation is taking place at the state and city level. Withdrawal from Paris does not change these dynamics in climate leaders such as California or Washington.

Some Republicans governors, such as Sam Brownback of Kansas and John Kasich of Ohio, have already become strong supporters of wind energy due to economic benefits it brings to their states. Many policymakers recognize that the decline of coal is due to technological factors resulting in cheap natural gas, and not regulations. In fact, in Wyoming, the largest coal-producing state, wind power is coming to the rescue of some coal communities. In fact, this withdrawal may energize some governors and mayors to become even more aggressive in the area of climate change mitigation.

Importantly, many large businesses support climate change mitigation. The recent open letter by leading CEOs is a case in point. One reason for supporting climate policy is that most businesses are now transnational and have incentives to develop policies that are acceptable across the world. They want a predictable and stable policy environment.

In sum, it is important not to overreact to withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Instead, pro-environment groups should focus their attention on domestic policy issues by encouraging governors and businesses to move aggressively on climate mitigation. For instance, they should be prepared to fight if the federal government seeks to revoke California’s ability to set higher auto emissions standards, which could greatly change emission policy dynamics. These are the sort of issues people concerned with climate change need to worry about.
 

Nives Dolsak, Professor of Environmental Policy, University of Washington and Aseem Prakash, Walker Family Professor and Founding Director, Center for Environmental Politics, University of Washington
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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