LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
April 18/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Europe, Trump and the Iran Deal
Amir Taheri/Gatestone Institute/April 17/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12169/europe-trump-iran-deal
If we were to go by Mogherini's or Westmacott's "commitment" to an unchangeable "Iran Deal", Britain and France should have never denounced the "peace accord" that Chamberlain signed in Munich in 1939.
However, the EU argument about "respecting signatures" on the Iran Deal has another problem, because nobody signed anything.
Ironically, the only P5+1 member that has partially complied with the deal is the US, including by Mafia-style smuggling of $1.7 billion cash to Tehran.
Earlier this month, the spokesman for the Iran Atomic Energy Agency told a press conference that Iran's nuclear project was "going full speed ahead" with "new and more ambitious plans under preparation."
The so-called "Iran nuclear deal," a witches' brew concocted by that most deserving of Nobel peace laureates, Barack Obama, has furnished the theme of many bizarre diplomatic twists and turns. The latest is an attempt by the European Union to persuade President Donald Trump to renege on his campaign promise to improve or scrap the deal.
During the past year, the EU's foreign policy point-woman, Federica Mogherini has been collecting air-miles calling on world capitals to demand "commitment" to the deal, as if this were an article of faith in an as-yet undefined religion.
The EU's chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, has been collecting air-miles calling on world capitals to demand "commitment" to the "Iran Deal," as if this were an article of faith in an as-yet undefined religion. Pictured: Mogherini (left) stands with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, during her August 2017 visit to Iran. (Image source: European External Action Service/Flickr)
The retiring British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Peter Westmacott, has been granting interviews to Iranian media, demanding kudos for having spent "much time and energy" trying to persuade the US to stick by the deal.
Outgoing German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel also boasts about having spent much energy in his final months in office "defending the deal" as a Crusading knight protecting a holy relic.
And now is the turn of the French Ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, to launch a Twitter campaign to persuade the Trump administration to "honor" that most questionable item in Obama's legacy.
Basically, the Europeans advance four arguments.
The first, advanced by Westmacott, is that discarding the deal could damage the credibility of the "major powers", that is to say Britain, France, Germany and the US that signed it along with China and Russia.
There are two troubles with that argument.
The first is that it assumes that any diplomatic deal should be treated like a Catholic marriage that one abides "til death do us part". Such an assumption would mean the end of diplomacy as the art of responding to changing realities.
If we were to go by Mogherini's or Westmacott's "commitment" to an unchangeable "deal", Britain and France should have never denounced the "peace accord" that Chamberlain signed in Munich in 1938.
However, the EU argument about "respecting signatures" has another problem, because nobody signed anything.
The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is no more than a press release stating a set of desirable moves by Iran and the P5+1 which, incidentally, didn't include the EU as such. Moreover, there are significant differences between the JCPOA's English and Persian versions, making various imaginative re-readings, à la Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida, possible. Mogherini cannot claim respect for "signatures" which never happened and that, had they happened, would not have included the EU.
The second argument is that the deal is working and, thus, the dictum "if it ain't broken why fix it" applies.
That assumption is not borne out by facts.
Iran and the P5+1 have either tried to circumvent or have brazenly broken their promises.
Sir Peter, the retired UK diplomat, certainly knows that his government, in violation of the deal, still refuses to allow the Iranian Embassy to open a bank account in London. Nor has the UK government unfrozen more than $600 million in Iranian assets.
The Germans and the French still refuse to issues export guarantees to firms seeking trade with Iran. Huge memorandums of understanding are signed but put on the back-burner, as Iran remains subject to sanctions by the United Nations, the EU and US.
As for Russia, during an official visit to Iran last week, Chairman of the Russian Duma Vyacheslav Volodin heard an avalanche of complaints.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown what he thinks of Iran, a supposed ally notably in Syria, by his recent treatment of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Ankara. At the end of a "summit" with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rouhani demanded a on-on-one meeting with Putin. The Russian President consented to a brief standing encounter that lasted around 8 minutes. Tsar Vladimir had no time to sit down with the Iranian mullah for a cup of tea.
As for China, it says Iran could use its frozen assets, piled up through oil exports to the People's Republic, only by buying Chinese goods.
Beijing even refuses to let the 3,000 or so Iranian students in China to receive their stipends through banks, forcing the embassy to send people around to distribute cash among the budding scholars.
Ironically, the only P5+1 member that has partially complied with the "deal" is the US, including by Mafia-style smuggling of $1.7 billion cash to Tehran.
Iran, for its part, asserts that there has been no change in its nuclear project.
Earlier this month, spokesman for Iran Atomic Energy Agency Behruz Kamalvand told a press conference in Tehran that the Iran's nuclear project was "going full speed ahead" with "new and more ambitious plans under preparation."
More importantly, Iran has managed to block international inspection of key research and development centers by claiming they are military sites and thus off limits.
Less than half of Iran's enriched uranium stocks have been shipped abroad, along with 10 percent of plutonium accumulated at the Arak plant.
Last week, marking National Nuclear Day, Rouhani unveiled what he called "83 new nuclear projects" as slaps in the face of the American "Great Satan."
Why should Mogherini or Araud beat their chests about a "deal" not honored by either side?
The ambassador advances one last argument: If you scrap the "deal" how could you be sure Iran will not go "full speed ahead" with its nuclear ambitions?
This is a casuistic argument: accept the bad for fear of getting the worse.
Since the JCPOA was unveiled Iran's national currency has fallen by some 40 percent to an all-time low against foreign currencies, including the Iraqi dinar and the UAE dirham.
The Tehran government cannot regularly pay the salaries of its employees. Had it not been for the cash smuggled and funneled by Obama, the mullahs would have been unable to pay their military either. Right now, Tehran has difficulty bankrolling the Lebanese "Hezbollah" and paying the salaries of Bashar al-Assad's regime forces and civil service.
So the Obama "deal", as Trump said during his campaign, is a bad deal.
What Trump didn't say was that the "deal" was bad, both for Iran and the rest of the world.
Araud would do well to re-read what Laurent Fabius, then France's Foreign Minister, said in 2015: "France will not accept a deal if it is not clear that inspections can be done at all Iranian installations ... We'll accept a deal, but not any deal."
It was partly because of France's refusal to give the JCPOA legal status by signing that the Obama "deal" was launched as an informal initiative. Interestingly, Araud who now campaigns for the "deal" was appointed by Fabius, who took care to have a pinch of salt about it.
Amir Taheri, formerly editor of Iran's premier newspaper, Kayhan, before the Iranian revolution of 1979, is a prominent author based on Europe. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
**This article first appeared in Asharq Al Awsat and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Germany: Crackdown on Middle Eastern Crime Families/"The state must destroy the clan structures."
Soeren Kern//Gatestone Institute/April 17/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12177/germany-crime-families
Middle Eastern crime clans now control large swathes of German cities and towns — areas that are effectively lawless and which German police increasingly fear to approach. The crime families, which have thousands of members, have for decades been allowed operate with virtual impunity: German judges and prosecutors were unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution.
"The police cannot win a war with the Lebanese because we outnumber them." — Criminal clan members to Gelsenkirchen Police Chief Ralf Feldmann.
Peter Biesenbach, now Justice Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, had repeatedly called for an official inquiry to determine the scope of clan activity. Those pleas had been rejected by his predecessor, because such a study would be politically incorrect.
German authorities have launched a crackdown on Middle Eastern crime families in Essen, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia where some 70 Turkish, Kurdish and Arab-born clan members regularly engage in racketeering, extortion, money laundering, pimping and trafficking in humans, weapons and drugs.
Middle Eastern crime clans now control large swathes of German cities and towns — areas that are effectively lawless and which German police increasingly fear to approach.
The crime families, which have thousands of members, have for decades been allowed operate with virtual impunity: German judges and prosecutors were unable or unwilling to stop them, apparently out of fear of retribution.
The nascent crackdown comes nearly a year after the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and replaced the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which, apart from one legislative period, has ruled the region since 1966.
Observers say that the clans have become so powerful and ruthless that the government's only solution is to wage all-out war to utterly annihilate the clans. If the initial raid in Essen is any indication, however, the Middle Eastern crime families in Germany have little to fear.
On April 12, more than 300 police officers, accompanied by dozens of customs, tax and anti-money-laundering agents, searched nearly 100 commercial businesses, hookah bars, gambling halls and betting offices in downtown Essen. After questioning 600 individuals and searching 60 vehicles at checkpoints, police arrested eight people, most of whom were wanted on open arrest warrants. Another 20 people were charged with drugs and immigration violations.
Many of the so-called Lebanese clans actually consist of ethnic Kurds from Southeastern Anatolia who migrated to Lebanon in search of work, and then moved to Germany during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war. In Germany, they built parallel societies based on tribal and clan customs and Islamic honor codes.
Many clan members receive unemployment benefits while they launder profits from illegal activities through bars, restaurants and the used-car trade.
Police have been no match for the clans, whose members use cellphones to summon backup support. Within moments, dozens of clan members form mobs to insult and intimidate law enforcement officers.
"Respect for the police tends towards zero with these clans," said Arnold Plickert, head of the GdP police union in NRW. "These people live in their own parallel society and have no regard for the German constitutional state."
Focus magazine described the brute-force methods used by the clans to gain control over the sports betting sector in Essen:
"Five years ago, three leading clan members harassed the operator of several betting shops. They demanded 10,000 euros per month in protection money. In addition, he was told to open two new betting offices for blackmailers and pay another 150,000 euros. Moreover, he was told that he could not operate any business in Essen without participation by the clans. If he refused to comply, he would be killed.
"The businessman turned to the police for help but the investigation dragged on. After a while the police stopped the telephone monitoring. The judge took three years before scheduling the trial. In the end, the accused were found not guilty for lack of evidence.
"Abdou Gabbar, the victim's lawyer, has now appealed the verdict: 'The experience with the Essen police and justice in matters regarding the Al-Zein clan was frustrating. The district court did not even want to translate the incriminating telephone calls properly, and simply pronounced the defendants free.'
"Further charges against the protagonists, including for insulting police officers, were also dropped. The judge deemed the risk was too high that clan members would riot in the courtroom."
Police guard the scene of a shooting murder in Essen, Germany, on April 9, 2016. The murder was part of a bloody feud within a Lebanese clan. (Image source: WDR video screenshot)
In nearby Gelsenkirchen, Kurdish and Lebanese clans are vying for control of city streets, some of which have become zones that are off-limits to German authorities. Senior members of the Gelsenkirchen police department have held secret meetings with representatives of the clans to "cultivate social peace between Germans and Lebanese."
According to a leaked police report, clan members informed Police Chief Ralf Feldmann that "the police cannot win a war with the Lebanese because we outnumber them." They added: "This applies to all of Gelsenkirchen, if we so choose."
When Feldman countered that he would dispatch police reinforcements to disrupt their activities, the clan members laughed and said: "The government does not have enough money to deploy the numbers of police necessary to confront the Lebanese." The police report concluded that German authorities must be realistic about the actual balance of power: "The police would be defeated."
In Duisburg, a leaked report prepared for the NRW state parliament revealed that Lebanese clans do not recognize the authority of the police and have divided up neighborhoods to pursue criminal activities. Their members are males between the ages of 15 and 25 and "nearly 100%" of them are known to police.
The report described the situation in Duisburg's Laar district, where two large Lebanese families seem to have taken over control: "The streets are actually regarded as a separate territory. Outsiders are physically assaulted, robbed and harassed. Experience shows that the Lebanese clans can mobilize several hundred people in a very short period of time by means of a telephone call."
Police say they are alarmed by the aggressiveness and brutality of the clans, which are said to view crime as leisure activity. If police intervene, hundreds of clan members are mobilized to confront the police.
"If this is not a no-go area, then I do not know what is," said Peter Biesenbach (CDU), now NRW Justice Minister. Before assuming his current post, he repeatedly called for an official inquiry to determine the scope of clan activity. Those pleas were rejected by the previous NRW Interior Minister Ralf Jäger (SPD) because such a study would be politically incorrect:
"Further data collection is not legally permissible. Both internally and externally, any classification that could be used to depreciate human beings must be avoided. In this respect, the use of the term 'family clan' (Familienclan) is forbidden from the police point of view."
The new NRW Interior Minister, Herbert Reul (CDU), has pledged a course correction: "We will not tolerate any illegal activities or parallel justice. We have a zero-tolerance-strategy. We will use all means of the rule of law to fight crime." How effective his strategy will be remains to be seen.
Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-German political scientist and a leading expert on Middle Eastern clans in Germany, said that the only way for Germany to achieve control over the clans is to destroy them. In an interview with Focus, he explained:
"In their concept of masculinity, only power and force matter; if someone is humane and civil, this is considered a weakness. In clan structures, in tribal culture everywhere in the world, ethics are confined to the clan itself. Everything outside the clan is enemy territory.
"I have been following this trend for years. The clans now feel so strong that they are attacking the authority of the state and the police. They have nothing but contempt for the judiciary.... The main problem in dealing with clans: state institutions give no resistance. This makes the families more and more aggressive — they simply have no respect for the authorities....
"The state must destroy the clan structures. Strong and well-trained police officers must be respected on the street. In addition, lawyers and judges must be trained. The courts are issuing feeble judgments based on a false understanding of multiculturalism and the fear of the stigma of being branded as racist."
An Emnid poll published by Bild on April 14 found that 51% of those surveyed were worried about German no-go zones, areas where the state is unable or unwilling to enforce the law; 77% said that they wanted the state to take more forceful action against the clans.
"The state has not managed to get the problem under control," said Ghadban, the clan expert. The reason for this is the prevailing political ideology: "The police can only act as politicians allow. The multicultural atmosphere, in which everything is to be tolerated, leads in practice to the fact that the clans are not pursued."
**Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Europe, Trump and the Iran Deal
Amir Taheri/Gatestone Institute/April 17/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12169/europe-trump-iran-deal
If we were to go by Mogherini's or Westmacott's "commitment" to an unchangeable "Iran Deal", Britain and France should have never denounced the "peace accord" that Chamberlain signed in Munich in 1939.
However, the EU argument about "respecting signatures" on the Iran Deal has another problem, because nobody signed anything.
Ironically, the only P5+1 member that has partially complied with the deal is the US, including by Mafia-style smuggling of $1.7 billion cash to Tehran.
Earlier this month, the spokesman for the Iran Atomic Energy Agency told a press conference that Iran's nuclear project was "going full speed ahead" with "new and more ambitious plans under preparation."
The so-called "Iran nuclear deal," a witches' brew concocted by that most deserving of Nobel peace laureates, Barack Obama, has furnished the theme of many bizarre diplomatic twists and turns. The latest is an attempt by the European Union to persuade President Donald Trump to renege on his campaign promise to improve or scrap the deal.
During the past year, the EU's foreign policy point-woman, Federica Mogherini has been collecting air-miles calling on world capitals to demand "commitment" to the deal, as if this were an article of faith in an as-yet undefined religion.
The EU's chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, has been collecting air-miles calling on world capitals to demand "commitment" to the "Iran Deal," as if this were an article of faith in an as-yet undefined religion. Pictured: Mogherini (left) stands with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, during her August 2017 visit to Iran. (Image source: European External Action Service/Flickr)
The retiring British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Peter Westmacott, has been granting interviews to Iranian media, demanding kudos for having spent "much time and energy" trying to persuade the US to stick by the deal.
Outgoing German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel also boasts about having spent much energy in his final months in office "defending the deal" as a Crusading knight protecting a holy relic.
And now is the turn of the French Ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, to launch a Twitter campaign to persuade the Trump administration to "honor" that most questionable item in Obama's legacy.
Basically, the Europeans advance four arguments.
The first, advanced by Westmacott, is that discarding the deal could damage the credibility of the "major powers", that is to say Britain, France, Germany and the US that signed it along with China and Russia.
There are two troubles with that argument.
The first is that it assumes that any diplomatic deal should be treated like a Catholic marriage that one abides "til death do us part". Such an assumption would mean the end of diplomacy as the art of responding to changing realities.
If we were to go by Mogherini's or Westmacott's "commitment" to an unchangeable "deal", Britain and France should have never denounced the "peace accord" that Chamberlain signed in Munich in 1938.
However, the EU argument about "respecting signatures" has another problem, because nobody signed anything.
The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is no more than a press release stating a set of desirable moves by Iran and the P5+1 which, incidentally, didn't include the EU as such. Moreover, there are significant differences between the JCPOA's English and Persian versions, making various imaginative re-readings, à la Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida, possible. Mogherini cannot claim respect for "signatures" which never happened and that, had they happened, would not have included the EU.
The second argument is that the deal is working and, thus, the dictum "if it ain't broken why fix it" applies.
That assumption is not borne out by facts.
Iran and the P5+1 have either tried to circumvent or have brazenly broken their promises.
Sir Peter, the retired UK diplomat, certainly knows that his government, in violation of the deal, still refuses to allow the Iranian Embassy to open a bank account in London. Nor has the UK government unfrozen more than $600 million in Iranian assets.
The Germans and the French still refuse to issues export guarantees to firms seeking trade with Iran. Huge memorandums of understanding are signed but put on the back-burner, as Iran remains subject to sanctions by the United Nations, the EU and US.
As for Russia, during an official visit to Iran last week, Chairman of the Russian Duma Vyacheslav Volodin heard an avalanche of complaints.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown what he thinks of Iran, a supposed ally notably in Syria, by his recent treatment of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Ankara. At the end of a "summit" with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rouhani demanded a on-on-one meeting with Putin. The Russian President consented to a brief standing encounter that lasted around 8 minutes. Tsar Vladimir had no time to sit down with the Iranian mullah for a cup of tea.
As for China, it says Iran could use its frozen assets, piled up through oil exports to the People's Republic, only by buying Chinese goods.
Beijing even refuses to let the 3,000 or so Iranian students in China to receive their stipends through banks, forcing the embassy to send people around to distribute cash among the budding scholars.
Ironically, the only P5+1 member that has partially complied with the "deal" is the US, including by Mafia-style smuggling of $1.7 billion cash to Tehran.
Iran, for its part, asserts that there has been no change in its nuclear project.
Earlier this month, spokesman for Iran Atomic Energy Agency Behruz Kamalvand told a press conference in Tehran that the Iran's nuclear project was "going full speed ahead" with "new and more ambitious plans under preparation."
More importantly, Iran has managed to block international inspection of key research and development centers by claiming they are military sites and thus off limits.
Less than half of Iran's enriched uranium stocks have been shipped abroad, along with 10 percent of plutonium accumulated at the Arak plant.
Last week, marking National Nuclear Day, Rouhani unveiled what he called "83 new nuclear projects" as slaps in the face of the American "Great Satan."
Why should Mogherini or Araud beat their chests about a "deal" not honored by either side?
The ambassador advances one last argument: If you scrap the "deal" how could you be sure Iran will not go "full speed ahead" with its nuclear ambitions?
This is a casuistic argument: accept the bad for fear of getting the worse.
Since the JCPOA was unveiled Iran's national currency has fallen by some 40 percent to an all-time low against foreign currencies, including the Iraqi dinar and the UAE dirham.
The Tehran government cannot regularly pay the salaries of its employees. Had it not been for the cash smuggled and funneled by Obama, the mullahs would have been unable to pay their military either. Right now, Tehran has difficulty bankrolling the Lebanese "Hezbollah" and paying the salaries of Bashar al-Assad's regime forces and civil service.
So the Obama "deal", as Trump said during his campaign, is a bad deal.
What Trump didn't say was that the "deal" was bad, both for Iran and the rest of the world.
Araud would do well to re-read what Laurent Fabius, then France's Foreign Minister, said in 2015: "France will not accept a deal if it is not clear that inspections can be done at all Iranian installations ... We'll accept a deal, but not any deal."
It was partly because of France's refusal to give the JCPOA legal status by signing that the Obama "deal" was launched as an informal initiative. Interestingly, Araud who now campaigns for the "deal" was appointed by Fabius, who took care to have a pinch of salt about it.
Amir Taheri, formerly editor of Iran's premier newspaper, Kayhan, before the Iranian revolution of 1979, is a prominent author based on Europe. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
**This article first appeared in Asharq Al Awsat and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

German Mass Migration: A No-Win Situation?
Stefan Frank//Gatestone Institute/April 17/2018
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12052/german-mass-migration
In October 2017, Salzgitter was the first city to impose immigration restrictions: It will not accept any additional refugees.
"I see it every day: 'Woman, step aside!' The elderly, who are often severely handicapped, stand no chance to compete." — Norbert Reinartz, a volunteer with the Essener Tafel food bank.
Faced with unchecked mass immigration, it seems, more and more people and institutions in Germany feel compelled to draw their own borders.
The recent decision of Essener Tafel, a food bank in the city of Essen, Germany, temporarily to stop issuing membership cards to non-Germans has triggered an outcry among German politicians, journalists and activists, who have accused the charitable organization of "racism". Serving about 16,000 poor people in the industrial city of Essen, Essener Tafel is one of the biggest charities in Germany, operated by volunteers only.
Essener Tafel's announcement read:
"Due to the increase in the number of refugees, the share of foreign fellow citizens among our customers has increased to 75 percent. To guarantee a reasonable integration, we see ourselves forced currently to accept only customers with a German passport."
A board member of Essener Tafel told the weekly Die Zeit that the five-member board had discussed and changed the wording of these two sentences "for hours... until no one had an objection". Neither had there been any criticism from the migrants who had to be sent away or among other charities with which the Essener Tafel cooperates, he said.
It was clear that the measure would not affect existing clients and was supposed to remain in place only as long as it took to restore the balance between Germans and migrants -- supposedly only a few weeks. This goal was reached in mid-April: As the share of German customers had climbed from 25 to 56 percent, Essener Tafel announced a new policy: From now on, in it will give priority to senior citizens, disabled people, families with minors, and single parents, without regard to nationality. Still, scores of politicians and journalists expressed their moral outrage on Twitter.
Karl Lauterbach, an MP for the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the party's healthcare expert, tweeted: "Hunger is the same for everybody. Too bad, xenophobia has arrived among the most poor."
Berlin's Secretary for Integration, Sawsan Chebli (SPD) tweeted: "I'm shivering. Food only for Germans. Migrants excluded."
Chancellor Angela Merkel -- who needed a whole year to express her condolences to the relatives of the victims of Berlin's jihadist massacre in December 2016 -- immediately gave a television interview in which she berated the decision as "not good". One "should not use such categorizations", she advised; instead, "one should look for good solutions".
Dunja Hayali, a television presenter with Germany's public broadcaster ZDF, tweeted: "It's not very smart to organize hunger games at the bottom of society and pit Germans against foreigners." (The Hunger Games is an American science fiction trilogy of novels -- and films based on the novels -- that feature a televised event in which participants are forced to fight to the death in a dangerous arena.")
As the the philosopher and theologian Richard Schröder pointed out in a commentary in the daily Die Welt, food banks are "no soup kitchens... their goal is not to fight hunger". The food banks were created to avoid the moral calamity of throwing perfectly edible food, which for any reason cannot be sold, to the garbage. At the same time, they enable poorer -- but certainly, in the case of Germany, not "hungry" -- people to spend money they would otherwise spend on food on other goods. Or, in the case of asylum seekers, to send more money to their home countries. Recently, Die Welt reported about a Syrian refugee who sends as much as 300 euros ($400) a month of his welfare benefits to his family in Syria.
Jörg Sartor, chairman of the Essener Tafel and the focus of the fury, explained that the measure was necessary to restore a "balance" between Germans and foreigners, one that was more representative of the population at large. Since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany's borders to more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the migrants' quota among Essener Tafel clients has increased from 35% to 75%. That means, of course, that there is less food for German families. It was not this shortage, however, that compelled the organization to change its policy. According to Sartor, he and the other volunteers had observed that a "large number" of local elderly women and single mothers had stopped coming in for food:
"The German grandma is crowded out because she feels uncomfortable among the foreign men in the queue who all speak Arabic... Would your mother, when she leaves the streetcar on a Wednesday and sees 50 Arabs, join the queue?"
If there was only one troublemaker, Sartor said, he could sort him out. "But they're a pack." The journalist commented: "Sartor doesn't care about diplomatic language."
A female client of the Essener Tafel told a journalist that many Arab men just walked past the queue and "pretend that they don't understand German". Another woman said that she had stopped coming for a while because she had been tired of the "pushing and shoving". Her daughter added: "This is really bad. The men who cut the line don't even react when they are spoken to."
Norbert Reinartz, a volunteer with the Essener Tafel, said:
"What has been written, is not made up out of thin air. I see it every day: 'Woman, step aside!' The elderly, who are often severely handicapped, stand no chance to compete."
Another volunteer said that he didn't "feel in the mood" to resort to "physical force to restore law and order".
Some migrants seemed to share a "give-me gene" and could not understand Germany's "queuing culture", Sartor said. He thinks that they could "learn to adopt this mentality" if there was a "German majority setting an example". Even at school or in kindergartens, he said, integration only worked in mixed groups. "If 90 percent of the group don't speak German, there is no integration."
Although the recent media coverage revealed that problems at the food banks are widespread, there were, until now, few reports. An exception was the food bank in Bochum-Wattenscheid, where problems spiraled so out of control in February 2015 that 300 out of 430 volunteers quit. The local newspaper, back then, quoted the director of Wattenscheider Tafel, Manfred Baasner, as saying:
"Our volunteers get insulted and sworn at. We are insulted because some bananas have brown spots. There's scrambling and shoving, the elderly and children are pushed aside. There's an aggressiveness and sense of entitlement that drives me crazy."
Baasner said that he was "afraid to say" that it was "almost entirely people from Southeastern Europe and exceedingly also refugees" who behaved that way. A volunteer described the situation: "I gave three apples to a young immigrant. When I told him that other people wanted apples, too, he brutally hit me in the face."
While politicians of the ruling CDU and SPD parties unequivocally condemn Sartor's decision, polls show that more than 60% of the German population support it, while only 27% percent think it was wrong.
Sartor says that he had always voted for the center-left SPD party: "My father was the SPD spokesman in Gelsenkirchen, my whole family is SPD." But now the SPD was pushing him "in a completely different direction", he said, adding that the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was "no alternative" for him and that he had sent away a party representative who had asked to meet him.
The HuffPost German edition stressed that "the case of Jörg Sartor is symptomatic for the failure of the SPD... It shows how the party alienates its core voters."
A column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily pointed out that the food banks' problems with migrants "don't fit into the fairy tale ideal of all those who are never faced with such problems". Indeed, Sartor has an entirely different social and cultural background than almost everybody who criticized him. Most high-ranking German politicians have never held a job outside the political sphere. The SPD healthcare expert Karl Lauterbach, for instance, attended top-notch centers of learning such as Harvard Medical School -- but has never practiced as a doctor. Andrea Nahles, the new SPD chairwoman, started her political career at the age of 18 and never held any job at all, until, in 2013, Chancellor Merkel appointed her Minister of Labor. Sartor, on the other hand, worked for more than 30 years as a coal miner, 1,100 meters below the surface of the Earth. When he retired at the age of 49, he wanted to do something "that made sense". He joined the food bank 13 years ago because he wanted to "carry boxes" and "be among people". After just one year, he was elected chairman. "I'm not a do-gooder, I'm no Mother Teresa, and I'm certainly no refugee aid worker", he said.
Even though Sartor's opponents are a minority, they make headlines. Countless media outlets reported that the ADD, a minor German political party with ties to the AKP Party of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had filed a criminal complaint against Essener Tafel, arguing that it was guilty of "tax evasion" because it could "no longer be regarded as a charity". This step had been "necessary", party spokesman Recep Dadas said, "because we are disappointed by the lack of moral courage shown by Essen's citizens".
HuffPo reported that the grocery chains which donate food to Essener Tafel now had to "justify" themselves for doing so. On the Facebook page of the EDEKA grocery chain, a user wrote:
"For more than a week, there has been exclusion and racism at Essener Tafel. When do you finally comment on this issue? How do you want to explain to employees with a migrant background that you still cooperate with such an organization?"
At the end of February, activists with "Refugees Welcome" banners held a protest rally in front of Essener Tafel's headquarters. Andreas Brinck, one of the protesters, said:
"We're here to criticize a racist and discriminatory measure. This is against the Constitution. We are especially upset because the mayor and the head of the social welfare department tolerate it."
During one of the the previous nights, vandals had sprayed "Nazis" and "FCK NZI" on the food bank's entrance and on six of the seven trucks that carry the food for the needy. Asked for a comment, Sartor said: "If they don't like me, fine, but it's an infamy to defame the volunteers." He announced that he would not remove the graffiti. "Everyone shall see this," he said.
In the meantime, more and more German cities have declared themselves unable to host more migrants. In October 2017, Salzgitter in Lower-Saxony was the first city to impose immigration restrictions: It will not accept any additional refugees. Wilhelmshaven and Delmenhorst, Cottbus, Eschweiler and Pirmasens followed suit. Faced with unchecked mass immigration, it seems, more and more people and institutions in Germany feel compelled to draw their own borders.
**Stefan Frank is a journalist and author based in Germany.
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Hungary and the War on Immigrants
Leonid Bershidsky/Bloomberg/April 17/18
To win parliamentary elections last weekend, Hungary's ruling party, Fidesz, ran a single-issue campaign against immigrants. That may seem strange in a country with one of the lowest shares of foreign-born population in the developed world and a fertility rate below even the abysmal European average. But it wasn't a response to demographic facts; it was a cultural crusade that has made Hungary the least refugee-friendly country in Europe.
Hungary isn't really an anti-immigrant country. In 2016, the latest year for which official data are available, 23,803 foreigners moved there, and the numbers have been stable since before Prime Minister Viktor Orban came to power in 2010. Fewer than half of the migrants were European Union citizens.
That's not a large number by rich-country standards, but it's not a small one, either; Portugal — like Hungary, a country of 10 million people — took in only 15,100 foreign nationals that year. Besides, the Orban government ran, until March, 2017, a much-criticized residency bond program targeted largely at Asians. For a 300,000-euro ($370,000) investment in Hungarian government bonds, permanent residency could be obtained, and 20,000 people signed up between 2013 and 2017, helping enrich a group of politically connected individuals who ran officially appointed intermediary firms.
Orban's Hungary, however, is fiercely against a certain kind of immigrant.
"We've been living next to Islam and with Islam for 500 years and we know it's not going to integrate," government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told me in an interview this week. "We treat it as a civilizational problem."
According to Kovacs, Muslim immigrants create "parallel societies" in the European countries that receive them, and Hungarians want none of that. Indeed — though it may be the result of relentless government propaganda — according to a 2016 Pew Research study, 72 percent of Hungarians have a negative view of Muslims in their country, compared with the EU average of 43 percent.
According to Gabor Gyulai, refugee program director at the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the only group in Hungary that provides free legal assistance to refugees, Fidesz was energized when people from war-torn Middle Eastern countries started pouring across the Serbian border in 2015 on their way to Germany and Scandinavia. "They'd just been re-elected in 2014, but their popularity was going down because of corruption and other scandals," Gyulai said. "So they found this topic, and they've been abusing it ever since."
Gyulai said that government propagandists even coined a negatively connotated word — migráns — to avoid using more neutral, perhaps even sympathy-inducing words like "immigrant" or "refugee." Hungary, after all, had itself produced hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Communist era.
Keeping xenophobia levels high can be a problem in itself. It rubs off, for example, on the local Roma population, which the Orban government is working to integrate. Roma are among the biggest beneficiaries of Hungary's public works program that has given work to more than 160,000 long-term unemployed. The Pew study, meanwhile, shows that 64 percent of Hungarians have a negative view of Roma.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the Orban government's relentless focus on Muslim immigration is the pain it inflicts on asylum seekers. According to Gyulai, the government has completely dismantled the country's asylum system.
Since the refugee crisis began, Hungary has erected a fence on its border with Serbia. Its preferred method of dealing with people who somehow get through is to "escort" them to the other side of the fence from wherever within Hungary the undocumented immigrant has been caught.
This is not a formal expulsion process that leaves a paper trail: You're found without a visa, driven to the fence, pushed into Serbia and that's that. The term the Helsinki Committee uses for this extrajudicial procedure is "pushback"; according to Hungarian police data, 9,136 people were "escorted" to the other side of the fence last year.
Trying to get into Hungary to apply for asylum is increasingly useless. Thousands of people stranded in Serbia would attempt it, but the Hungarian authorities are setting arbitrary daily quotas for asylum seekers allowed to cross to the Hungarian side of the fence. According to Gyulai, the initial quota was 50. Now it's down to one person. "If a family of five is let in, no one else can come in all week," Gyulai says.
Once they're admitted into Hungary, the applicants are detained for the duration of the application process in container compounds surrounded by razor wire. There's nothing for them to do, barely any moving space in the containers, and the temperatures in them can go up to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in summer. Media and nongovernmental organizations aren't allowed into the compounds. Conditions are so inhumane that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on Wednesday called on European countries not to send any asylum seekers to Hungary under the so-called Dublin system, under which one must apply for refugee status in the first EU country one enters.
In most cases, weeks or months in a shipping container — 101 people live like this in Hungary now, according to the UNHCR — will be wasted. The rejection rate in Hungary last year was 70 percent for Afghans (they're told they can move to safer regions within their own country), 74 percent for Iraqis and 60 percent for Syrians.
Even the applicants who succeed can expect nothing from the Hungarian government. They are given 30 days of rudimentary support in an open reception facility strategically placed near the Austrian and Slovak borders. There are no language courses or employment programs. The Hungarian authorities hope the newly minted asylum recipients will just go away, and they do. Few stay the full 30 days.
The system is designed to last. I asked Gergely Gulyas, head of the Fidesz faction in the Hungarian parliament, why the government was so worried about migrants to a relatively poor country when more attractive destinations are available for them. "Our living standard is about 69 percent of the Western European one," he replied. "When it gets to 80 percent, it'll become a problem, and we don't want it."
The finishing touch is coming, probably in May, soon after the Hungarian parliament reassembles. Fidesz, armed with a supermajority, aims to push through what's been dubbed the "Stop Soros package," which would crack down on nongovernmental organizations that help migrants. The Orban government accuses Soros, the financier and philanthropist, of hatching an evil plan to flood Europe with immigrants to undermine national cultures.
If the legislation takes effect as drafted, the groups will be forced to obtain licenses from the government to "help immigration" — a process Gyulai doubts his group will be able to complete. Even if it succeeds, it'll have to pay a 25 percent tax on all foreign contributions, including not just contributions from Soros charities, but also from EU and UN organizations. The group's lawyers, who helped 234 clients get asylum last year (out of the total of 1,216 who received protection in Hungary), could be banned from the detention camps and even the border area.
Even though various European and international institutions have condemned Hungary, the Orban government is willing to take a stand. To the Orbanites, it's a matter of national sovereignty, the core of their political creed.
I asked Kovacs why the government couldn't make a deal with the EU, relieve the political pressure it faces, and let in a couple of thousand refugees who could easily be absorbed. He would have none of it. "All trouble always looks minor when it starts," he said. "We can't have our ability to decide for ourselves gradually eroded."
I doubt that international pressure can achieve much except provoking Orban step up his anti-refugee, anti-Muslim and anti-NGO campaigns. It won't make Hungarians nicer to the kind of newcomers they do not want.
The only possible solution to the Hungarian refugee issue is political: Not even Orban can hold on to power forever. A more welcoming culture is a matter of political change. Absent such change, the government will keep asserting its sovereignty. Any reluctant concessions it could make to EU governing bodies and courts will be matched by further restrictive measures.
The best other European countries can do is demonstrate that Muslim immigrants can be successfully integrated to society's benefit. It's a long game, but if it goes well, hard evidence will eventually convince those who don't understand yet that, unaided, Europe's aging demographics are unsustainable.

The West Still Stands for Something Exceptional
Hugh Hewitt/The Washington Post/ April 17/18
Last Monday “the lede” was a trade war with China. Then the Justice Department seized Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s files, then Mark Zuckerberg came to town, then House Speaker Paul D. Ryan announced his retirement, then CIA Director Mike Pompeo had his (very successful) hearings to become secretary of state, then former FBI director James B. Comey began his book PR blitz and the Justice Department’s inspector general tore into former Comey deputy Andrew McCabe.
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein told key staffers he expected to be fired, and the buzz was that if the deputy AG went, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions might be going, too.
And then the United States, Britain and France called out Russia in the UN Security Council — and smashed three of Bashar al-Assad’s WMD sites to smithereens with a display of military prowess and precision that reminded the world that America and its allies are not to be ignored when “red lines” are in play.
Last Monday “the lede” was a trade war with China. Then the Justice Department seized Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s files, then Mark Zuckerberg came to town, then House Speaker Paul D. Ryan announced his retirement, then CIA Director Mike Pompeo had his (very successful) hearings to become secretary of state, then former FBI director James B. Comey began his book PR blitz and the Justice Department’s inspector general tore into former Comey deputy Andrew McCabe.
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein told key staffers he expected to be fired, and the buzz was that if the deputy AG went, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions might be going, too.
And then the United States, Britain and France called out Russia in the U.N. Security Council — and smashed three of Bashar al-Assad’s WMD sites to smithereens with a display of military prowess and precision that reminded the world that America and its allies are not to be ignored when “red lines” are in play.
Jammed together into six days, it all makes the first few chapters of Genesis look like slow pacing.
The danger is what my friend Bill Bennett used to warn about: the problem of scale. Americans are losing the ability to be other than breathless and, along the way, the ability to distinguish between orders of magnitude.
Thus all stories get thrown in a hopper and some editor, producer or host has to try and make a show rundown or a front-page layout. It is easiest just to concentrate on the president and ignore everything else, or to jam him into every story, or to abandon scale and simply make every story feel big. The casualty of that is the ability to detect genuine significance.
Not this weekend. One very big thing stands out: The West still stands for something exceptional.
The United Nations’ Security Council meeting Friday was extraordinary. On many levels, not the least of which were humor (Ambassador Nikki Haley telling her Russian counterpart that she was in awe of his ability to say what he said with a straight face) and absurdity (Bolivia’s ambassador lecturing the French on their revolution of 1789 and the Brits on the Magna Carta). Most striking, though, was the tone of outrage from the Western ambassadors — an outrage long missing from Western rhetoric and finally delivered first with words and then with missiles and bombs. The United States has its scandals and its loud, confusing, divisive and great-for-ratings president, but far more important than he, or his successors, the United States has its principles. Central among them is commitment to the rule of law and to the restraining of tyrants and barbarians.
We cannot always accomplish the restraining successfully, but we can and often have, in the past two-plus decades — in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria — tried to encourage genuine progress, best understood as the ongoing, incremental expansion of liberty and literacy in a growing number of stable regimes in or aligned with the West. We have sometimes failed, but it is important that we tried and keep trying.
We tried again this weekend, and the president’s choice, developed with a national security team second to none in two decades, chose a path between the twin dangers of too little and too much. The president thanked our allies and our military when the strikes were, at least for a time, over. We should thank him and his national security team of Vice President Pence, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., CIA Director and Secretary of State-designate Pompeo and new national security adviser John Bolton, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly as well as their teams of professionals. However they got there and whatever process they used, they got to the right place, along with our allies.
The West will not allow use of weapons of mass destruction to go unpunished. That was the lesson a year ago, the same lesson of 2003 and 2001, a lesson that was not absorbed last year and thus was repeated with twice the ferocity. We mean it. Really. Anywhere and always, at least as long as the West stays true to its principles. That’s the big story. That’s the lede. Don’t bury it.

Syria War's Game Theory Is Too Complex to Predict
Eli Lake/Bloomberg/April 17/18
Some strategic games are too complex to be readily modeled, and when we see such games in the real world that’s exactly when we should be the most worried. That’s my immediate reaction to the situation in Syria and environs.
Consider the distinct yet interrelated clashes going on. Not only did the US strike early Saturday at Syria’s chemical weapons facilities after the regime used such weapons against its citizens in Douma. Tensions between Israel and Iran have been escalating. It seems that Israel recently bombed Syria to limit that country’s support of Iran-backed Hezbollah and to send a signal to Iran. There has also been talk that Hezbollah concentrations in Lebanon will lead to another conflict there. The situation in Gaza has heated up again, with Israeli fire against Palestinian demonstrators leading to significant casualties. As a sideshow to these struggles, US President Donald Trump declined to certify that Iran was in compliance with its nuclear accord and may ditch the deal altogether. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government faces significant corruption charges.
The situation between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been worsening, and their proxy war in Yemen has assumed greater significance. Yemeni insurgents have been firing missiles into Saudi Arabia. Also, the Kingdom has recently undergone a major revolution, bringing about the new Saudi Arabia.
Other related stories involve the Turkish regime and its regional policies and Arab displeasure at the shift of Qatar into Iran’s orbit. By the way, the US is in the midst of restructuring its National Security Council, probably in a more hawkish direction, and there is no confirmed secretary of state. Toss in the recent Russian use of a nerve agent for an attempted assassination in the UK.
Some historical events are relatively easy to model with game theory: the Cuban Missile Crisis, many of the Cold War proxy wars, the crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons. In those conflicts, the number of relevant parties is small and each typically has some degree of internal cohesion.
To find a situation comparable to the Middle East today, with so many involved countries, and so many interrelationships between internal and external political issues, one has to go back to the First World War, not an entirely comforting thought.
The situation right before that war had many distinct yet related moving parts, including the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the imperialist scramble for colonies, the prior Balkan Wars, a rising Germany seeking parity or superiority with Great Britain, an unstable alliance system, an unworkable Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the complex internal politics of Russia, which eventually led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
What do we learn from the history of that time? Well, even if the chance of war was high by early 1914, it was far from obvious that the Central Powers’ attack on France, Belgium and Russia would be set off by a political assassination in the Balkans.
Nonetheless, in sufficiently complex situations, chain reactions can cause small events to cascade into big changes. In World War I, one goal behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to break off parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a new Yugoslavia. The empire responded by making some demands on Serbia, which were not heeded, a declaration of war followed, and the alliance system activated broader conflicts across Europe.
If you don’t quite follow how a single assassination, which was not even seen as so important the day it occurred, triggered the death of so many millions, and the destruction of so much of Europe, that is exactly the point. When there is no clear way for observers to model the situation, a single bad event can take on a very large significance and for reasons that are not entirely explicable.
In today’s Middle East, we also have a broadly festering situation across multiple fronts, with many smaller players, lots of internal political struggles and unstable political units, and commitments from some major external powers, including the US, Russia, Iran and Turkey. I find that an uncomfortably close analogy with 1914.
Optimists such as Steven Pinker might suggest that today’s situation in the Middle East is more likely to converge into peace, or only limited struggles, than a major war. But this is not just about the most likely outcome, it is also about the expected value of what will happen. Even a small chance of a major escalation probably makes this messy situation the No. 1 issue facing the world right now.
And if you’re grumpy about the inability of social scientists or the news media to explain it to you in simple terms, that is exactly why the situation is so dangerous.

Ten Ways Russia Tries to Win Propaganda War
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/April 17/18
After the Western military air strike against Syria, one fact is overlooked: the two powers are already at war in the battlefield of propaganda. And, so far in that battlefield, the two adversaries have adopted different tactics in pursuit of their aims.
The Russian war plan is a classic example of disinformation (disiniformazia in Russian) developed by KGB’s specialists in propaganda during the Cold War.
The war plan is aimed at undermining the credibility of the American narrative regarding the use of chemical weapons by Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad. Moscow’s narrative is spread through a vast media network controlled by the Kremlin with significant audiences inside the Russian Federation and across the globe. The message is amplified by an estimated 60,000 full-time “social media soldiers”, pejoratively labeled “trolls”, in cyberspace in more than a dozen languages.
Moscow’s narrative promotes 10 themes.
The first is that the chemical attack in Douma, close to Damascus, simply didn’t happen and that the pictures and video footage posted on Internet were produced by Assad’s opponents using actors, including children, to simulate a disaster.
Where such a claim is hard to sell, the Russians advance a second theme: We don’t know with any certainty that there was any attack and, if there was one, who was responsible for it.
When that claim, too, is questioned, Russia comes up with a third theme: Why not have an independent investigation on the ground in Douma?
If one reminds Russia that it has already vetoed such an investigation, the Kremlin plan switches to a fourth theme: An attack on Assad’s forces could lead to a wider war, perhaps even the Third World War. In other words the choice that we face is between doing nothing and risking a global conflagration. The fact that numerous military, political and economic options remain between the two extremes is brushed under the carpet.
A fifth theme, related to the previous one, is that intervention by Western democracies could only lead to disaster as it has done in Afghanistan and Iraq. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Afghans and Iraqis are safer, happier and more hopeful than they were under the Taliban or Saddam Hussein is forgotten. Also ignored is the fact that the West’s non-intervention in Syria, has not prevented the deaths of over half a million people, more than twice as many than those who died in the Western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Russian propaganda plan then switches to attempts at beautifying Assad’s ugly regime. We are told that Bashar is a secular leader acting as barrier to religious fanatics. However, the Syrian Constitution, written by Bashar’s father Hafez, acknowledges Islam as the religion of the state and, in the past seven years at least, the regime has used sectarianism as a weapon against its opponents.
A seventh theme is that the choice in Syria is between Assad and ISIS and that Assad deserves support because he has been fighting the fake Caliphate. However, the fact is that Assad’s forces have had no more than four major clashes with the ISIS forces, the largest in and around Palmyra. For years, Assad and ISIS lived side by side, focusing attention on fighting non-ISIS opponents of the Baathist regime. Russia and its Iranian sidekicks played no role in smashing ISIS, which was destroyed by Iraqi, Western and Syrian Kurdish forces who ended up controlling 90 percent of its territories in both Syria and Iraq.
The eighth theme is that a Western attack on pro-Assad targets could also hit Russian forces and assets in Syria, forcing Moscow to retaliate.
However, US and Russia have a mechanism called Emergency Communication Channel (ECC) through which they could coordinate actions likely to affect either of them in Syria. The mechanism was used almost a year ago when the US attacked an Assad air base after giving Russia warning to remove its personnel there. In any case, Russia did not react when Turkey shot down one of its fighter planes. Nor did Moscow rush to war when an American attack claimed the lives of dozens of Russian military personnel, supposedly on private contract, in Syria. Despite his penchant for braggadocio, President Vladimir Putin is a risk-averse player; he stops if he hits something hard.
A ninth theme is built on the claim that Putin’s plan for stabilizing Syria is already beginning to work and that, in time, Moscow will quietly nudge Assad towards the exit. So, why heat things up by attacking Assad’s assets? This means allowing hope to obliterate the reality of seven years of atrocity, including 14 instances of chemical attacks on civilians, by Assad’s forces.
The tenth theme is related to the ninth as it claims that Russia would rein in Assad and prevent him from using chemical weapons again. But that is exactly the same promise that Moscow gave in 2013, following it with the assertion that “all of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks and production facilities” had been destroyed. At the time President Barack Obama believed that claim, or feigned to believe it, encouraging Assad to cross “the red line” again and again.
Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda guru, believed that a good disinformation strategy is aimed at destroying facts by offering ever multiplying versions of any event. That, he argued, would turn any fact into a “henid”, an effervescent tablet that when thrown into water fizzes itself out of existence.
The current Kremlin “Disinformazia” is aimed at turning any account of the recent chemical attack on Douma into a “henid”.
It has had some success as illustrated by Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to Britain taking any action against Assad.
“We simply don’t have all the facts,” says the UK Labor Party chief. He wants “an independent investigation” and a UN Security Council resolution authorizing any action.
Corbyn’s French counterpart Jean-Luc Melanchon warns against the risks of “a broader war”. Perhaps even the Third World War?
Both imply that it would be better to do nothing. Problem is that such a position gives Assad green-light to do more of what he has been doing for seven years.

Confronting Iran, Israel key to regional stability
Abdel Aziz Aluwaisheg/Arab News/April 17/18
The Middle East has been plagued by instability for decades, but especially since 2011 with the tumultuous events of the Arab Spring, which have led to the death, injury or uprooting of millions of people in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. The United Nations, World Bank and the Gulf Cooperation Council, among others, have held countless meetings to try to restabilize the region, but with only limited success.
One reason for the lack of success is outside meddling and these foreign powers’ lack of interest in workable solutions that could bring stability. The instability created by the events of the Arab Spring gave Iran an opening to extend its presence in those countries, and a return to stability would weaken its influence. Similarly, instability in Israel’s neighbors made it easier for the Israeli leadership to ignore entreaties by the UN and others to reach a solution with the Palestinians. In turn, the lack of progress on the Palestinian question was used as a pretext by Iran to bolster its regional footprint.
There was a remarkable event in Dubai last week, which saw hundreds of politicians, academics, artists and journalists meet to discuss the conflicts raging in the region. The candid discussions were organized by the Arab Thought Foundation, the brainchild of Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, a statesman, educator, poet, artist and sportsman.
This was the first event I am aware of that encouraged a public discussion of these problems on such a large scale. It was given prominence by the participation of luminaries such as Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, Prince Khaled and other high-level political leaders. Prince Khaled, who is governor of the Makkah Region and special adviser to King Salman, started the foundation in 2000 to serve as a non-governmental incubator for ideas on literature, art, innovation, and politics. Using this mix, the foundation dedicated its 16th annual conference in Dubai to “stabilization challenges amidst regional turmoil.”
Sheikh Mohammed, the Ruler of Dubai and Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, played host. Himself a renowned poet, Sheikh Mohammed fitted perfectly with the highly intellectual crowd. Prince Bandar bin Khaled, the Arab Thought Foundation chairman and a royal adviser with ministerial rank, acted as the glue that held everything together. Like his father, Prince Bandar attended almost every session from start to close. He was instrumental in sharpening the focus of discussions and disciplining the sometimes emotional or frenzied discourse.
Over three days, participants deliberated on the causes of the crises in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. They debated the apparent as well as the hidden, underlying origins of conflict. Poverty, unemployment and the skewed distribution of wealth and power were agreed to be the underlying causes of instability, while flawed political processes in those countries failed to deal with the economic and social challenges. Experts then explained how extremist ideologies, as well as terrorist groups, take advantage of those distortions.
Participants got especially animated discussing the role of external players. Iran was identified by most participants as the main malign force, and Israel its evil twin. Turkey and Russia also came in for criticism for meddling. The United States, Britain and Europe were criticized for sins of omission — withdrawing from the region when the going got tough. The United Nations and Arab League were dismissed as impotent organizations, as their influence has been neutralized by internal disagreements.
After three days of discussing the roots of instability and conflict, a panel of eminent politicians and experts was asked to identify the antidotes. Iraq’s Vice President and former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and ex-Lebanon PM and minister of finance Fouad Siniora were among the speakers. All agreed that we need to use a clever mix of tools to lead Arab societies back to stability. One of the mistakes that compounded the problems was a reliance on brute force to address essentially political and economic challenges.
The panel identified several parallel tracks for restoring stability. First, the political process has to be inclusive, fair, transparent and accountable. Corruption has to be fought and eliminated. Allawi emphasized the need for a codified bill of rights for citizens.
Since 1979, Iran has been trying to export its revolution to the region. It has managed to masquerade its imperial ambitions under the cloak of religion.
Second, economic opportunities have to be fairly distributed, without discrimination, nepotism or favoritism. To provide adequate jobs for growing populations, economic growth has to continue, which requires investment. For local or foreign businesses to invest, countries have to reform their ways of doing business.
Third, social cohesion has to be restored after decades where extremist ideologies dominated and divisive sectarian discourse defined social relations. Teachers, intellectuals and religious figures have to guide their societies to regain their old traditions of civility, chivalry, generosity and tolerance.
The security track was agreed to be one of the most difficult to change, but most urgent to address nevertheless. All agreed that fighting terrorism has to continue, increase even. However, for the counter-terrorism fight to be effective and sustainable, two prerequisites are necessary: Due process of law, strictly observed, and the state must have a monopoly over the use of force. No freelance militias should be allowed to usurp the role of the state. In Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, militias have frequently acted as states within a state and thus undermined the fight against terrorism. No amount of reform on the other tracks would be effective without disarming militias, it was universally agreed.
The final and most difficult track was countering external actors, who thrive on chaos and instability and would therefore fight attempts to restore stability. All speakers agreed that Iran and Israel are the two most dangerous outside actors because their interests are diametrically opposed to those of the people of the region.
By effectively abandoning the two-state solution, Israel has embarked on a collision course not only with Palestinians, but with all its neighbors. Reversing that course is necessary for restoring and maintaining stability.
Revolutionary Iran is unique, it was universally agreed. Since 1979, Iran has been trying to export its revolution to the region. It has managed to masquerade its imperial ambitions under the cloak of religion. To succeed, it created deep fissures in Arab societies along sectarian lines, so addressing those divisions is key to reversing Iran’s meddling and countering its destabilizing activities. Furthermore, Iran and its proxies frequently justify themselves as champions for the Palestinians against Israeli aggression. That is another key argument for the urgency of reaching a solution for the Palestine question.
• Abdel Aziz Aluwaisheg is the GCC Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs & Negotiation, and a columnist for Arab News. The views expressed in this piece are personal and do not necessarily represent GCC views. Twitter: @abuhamad1