Detailed Lebanese & Lebanese Related LCCC English New Bulletin For September 10/2018
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Germany: Anti-Immigration Party Surges in Popularity
Soeren Kern/Gatestone Institute/September 09/18
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12973/germany-anti-immigration-party
The AfD's opponents, who often brand the party as "far right" or "extremist," claim that the party's alleged ties to neo-Nazi groups pose an existential threat to Germany's constitutional order. The AfD's supporters counter that Germany's politically correct establishment, afraid of losing its power and influence, is attempting to outlaw a legitimate party that has pledged to put the interests of German citizens first.
"Migration is the mother of all problems." — German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.
"Extremism cannot be combated with exclusion, but with looking at the facts. Those who want to reach concerned citizens must themselves get out of the ideological trenches." — Oswald Metzger in Tichys Einblick, a prominent German blog.
The murder of a German citizen by two failed asylum seekers in Chemnitz, and the attempted cover-up by German police, has contributed to a surge in support for the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which, according to a new poll, has overtaken the Social Democratic Party (SDP) to become the second-strongest political force in Germany.
Support for the AfD has increased to 17%, while backing for the SPD has fallen to 16%. Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) alliance is at 28.5%, according to an Insa Institute poll published by the newspaper Bild on September 3.
The rise of the AfD — which has been fueled by widespread anger over Merkel's decision to allow into the country more than a million mostly Muslim migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the subsequent increase in violent crime — reflects an ongoing realignment in German politics, in which voters increasingly are rejecting the multicultural orthodoxy of the mainstream parties.
When federal elections were held on September 24, 2017, the CDU/CSU won 32.9% of the vote, its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. The SPD won 20.5%, its worst-ever showing. The AfD won 12.6%, to become the country's third-largest party in the German parliament.
The election results showed that more than a million traditional CDU/CSU voters defected to the AfD. In a sign that concerns over mass migration are not limited to conservative voters, the center-left SPD lost 500,000 voters to the AfD while the far-left Left Party lost 400,000 voters. In addition, nearly 1.5 million first-time voters cast their ballots for the AfD. This trend has continued, as consistently corroborated by opinion polls since the 2017 election.
The mainstream parties are fighting back with what some observers say are underhanded measures, aimed at delegitimizing — and possibly criminalizing — the AfD, including by calling for the party to be placed under state surveillance.
The AfD's opponents, who often brand the party as "far right" or "extremist," claim that the party's alleged ties to neo-Nazi groups pose an existential threat to Germany's constitutional order. The AfD's supporters counter that Germany's politically correct establishment, afraid of losing its power and influence, is attempting to outlaw a legitimate party that has pledged to put the interests of German citizens first.
Calls for the AfD to be monitored by German intelligence have intensified in recent days, after members of the AfD participated in mass protests in Chemnitz against spiraling migrant criminality — protests in which approximately 50 hooligans and neo-Nazis were also present.
The protests erupted after a 35-year-old German-Cuban man named Daniel Hillig was stabbed to death on August 26 by two migrants during the city's annual festival.
Police initially refused to reveal the identities of the perpetrators, but on August 27 a police report was leaked on social media — the document has since been scrubbed from German websites but it remains on a Russian site — which showed that the killers were illegal migrants from Iraq and Syria. Both had extensive criminal histories but were allowed by German authorities to roam free on German streets. Police later confirmed that the leaked document was authentic and said that they had opened an investigation into suspected "violation of official secrets."
Thousands of people took to the streets for several days to protest the killing and the inaction by German authorities over the issue of spiraling migrant crime. The protests (and counter-protests) brought together a broad spectrum of German society, including supporters of the AfD, as well as members of the so-called "far-right scene." Near the end of one of the marches, some of the protesters turned violent and began insulting some migrant passersby. That incident then shaped the media narrative from one of Germans protesting migrant crime to one of far-right attacks on innocent migrants.
Few if any of Germany's mainstream politicians condemned the murder of Hillig, but they were quick to denounce attacks on migrants.
On August 27, government spokesman Steffen Seibert, in a national press conference, condemned the "hunting of humans of a different appearance, of different origins" on the streets of Chemnitz.
Chancellor Merkel echoed: "We have video footage about the fact that there were hunts, that there were riots, that there was hatred on the street, and that is unacceptable in our constitutional state."
It later emerged that all of the government's allegations were based on a single 19-second video — titled "Hunting for Humans in Chemnitz" — which was posted on YouTube and later broadcast by the public television channel ARD. The video shows one individual chasing another in what appears to be an isolated incident.
Moreover, a protester who grabbed national headlines by making a Nazi salute at the Chemnitz protest was discovered to be a left-wing extremist who infiltrated the march in order to discredit it. But the media narrative had been set in motion.
The chairman of the German Parliament's Internal Affairs Committee, Burkhard Lischka (SPD), warned of the danger of a civil war:
"There is a small right-wing mob in our country that will take its violent fantasies of civil war to our streets. That in the Bundestag [German parliament] a party applauds these excesses against foreign fellow citizens as legitimate self-justice, shows that the majority of our country must become even louder when it comes to rule of law, democracy and cohesion in our society."
Bundestag Vice President Thomas Oppermann demanded that the AfD be monitored by Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV): "The refugee question divides society and the AfD rides ever more radically on this wave."
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) countered that he sees no basis for monitoring the AfD. On the sidelines of a closed-door meeting of the CSU in Brandenburg, Seehofer defended the Chemnitz protesters: "Just because people protest, that does not make them a Nazi." He added: "Migration is the mother of all problems."
Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) later contradicted the government's claims: "There was no mob, there was no hunting down of people, there was no pogrom in this city."
Saxon Attorney General Spokesman Wolfgang Klein added: "After examining all of the material available to us, there was no hunt in Chemnitz."
When asked to rectify his claims, Seibert doubled down:
"I will not have a semantic debate here over a word. Of course, if the Attorney General's office says so, I take note. However, it remains that a video shows how people of foreign origin were chased and how they were threatened. It remains true that there were statements that were threatening, close to the call for vigilante justice. So, in my opinion, there is nothing to talk about."
Like Seibert, Merkel refused to back down:
"We saw pictures that very clearly revealed hate and the persecution of innocent people. One must distance oneself from that. That is all there is to say."
Writing for Tichys Einblick, a prominent German blog, commentator Oswald Metzger summed it up: "'There was no mob, there was no hunting down of people, there was no pogrom in this city.' Saxon Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) clearly corrected the almost hysterical and false reporting of countless leading media outlets on the events in Chemnitz after the deadly stabbing. Even the chancellor and her government spokesman had, as we all know, conveyed these false reports to the public, and thereby giving them publicity.
"For long enough, many citizens from all walks of life have noticed that the problems of integrating even third- and fourth-generation immigrants have grown bigger, not smaller — especially among Turks. The mass immigration of the past three years, under the banner of 'the right to asylum,' has significantly increased the fear of parallel societies, of crime, and of cultural alienation.
"When I consider the often undifferentiated, blanket accusations against 'brown Chemnitz' [brown is the color of Nazism], then the established parties will not have to wonder why, almost without exception, they continue to lose to the colorful AfD.
"When concerned citizens increasingly are stigmatized as being Nazis — accusations which, incidentally, in their excessive use amount to a shameless trivialization of Nazi crimes — they often respond with the indifferent remark: 'Well, then I'm just a Nazi!'
"Extremism cannot be combated with exclusion, but with looking at the facts. Those who want to reach concerned citizens must themselves get out of the ideological trenches."
*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.

Politics Cost Brazil its National Museum
Mac Margolis/Bloomberg/September 09/18
We don't yet know what set off the fire last weekend that reduced Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum to a charred shell. Firefighters were still combing the ruins on Tuesday for clues to the blaze that razed Latin America’s marquee science museum along with most of its irreplaceable collection.
Brazil’s social media mobs weren’t waiting for the forensics. Factions blamed their favorite villains: ruthless bean counters, corrupt populists who lavished public money on friends, or the enemy du jour, hapless lame duck President Michel Temer.
The finger-pointing did not begin with the fire. It was merely an accelerant to the political conflagration that has grown fierce in the final stretch of the country’s most divisive electoral campaign in memory. General elections are next month.
Brazilians have good reason to be angry. Not content with compromising the future of Brazil’s signature metropolis with disastrous projects, with pillaging public coffers and with allowing deadly crime, it seems, the country’s political class has outdone itself and let a precious chunk of its past to go up in smoke.
Museum officials reckoned that just 10 percent of the collection survived the blaze. The Museu Nacional housed rarities like the skeleton of Maxakalisaurus, an herbivorous dinosaur that roamed the backlands 80 million years ago and the 11,000-year-old skull of Luzia, the earliest known Brazilian. “I am devastated,” Tania Andrade Lima, former museum curator of archaeology, told me. A paleobotanist I know said she was “too overwhelmed to talk.”
Undoubtedly, there’s plenty of blame to go around. And yet neither the museum’s miseries nor the warnings over the perils of neglect were anything new. The 200-year-old palace’s precarious condition has been a trending topic since at least 1958. What seems clear is that unless Brazilians shake off the partisan choler, a good deal more of the national heritage will surely be at risk.
Neglect, shoddy maintenance, gross mismanagement and budget cuts have regularly turned cultural gems into firetraps. In recent years fires have razed or partially destroyed the Museum of the Portuguese language (2015), a natural history museum in Minas Gerais (2013) and the nation’s premier reptile research center (2010). And let us not forget the disaster at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, which burned down in 1978, claiming paintings by Klee, Picasso and Dali. It's not only priceless artifacts endangered by Brazil's management, but even entire civilizations. Federal neglect has left Brazil’s indigenous communities — the country’s nominally protected isolated Amazonian tribes, whose blowguns and long bows are no match for chain saws, gun-toting miners and cattlemen, or their imported pathogens — in harm’s way.
It’s no small irony that dozens of scientists dedicated to understanding Brazil’s first inhabitants, and unlocking millennial secrets about how to manage the world’s largest rain-forest, did their cutting-edge research and stored relics at the National Museum.
“Archaeology is not just about digging up sites. We constantly go back to our collections to reexamine artifacts in light of new evidence and theories,” said Denise Gomes, a scholar of ceramics and ancient art in the central Amazon. “As well as the collection of intact pieces of pottery, which you don’t find anymore in the field, I kept site maps, field notebooks and sketches at the museum. This was years of documents, and I have no idea if any of this survived the fire.”
As the scientists scavenge for remnants of their work, policy makers and bureaucrats will have to face their errors and search for ways to safeguard historical treasures. Certainly, Brazil’s economic downturn has taken a toll; culture and the arts are often the first budget items on the block. But squandered resources are the real culprit.
Consider that the national development bank kicked back a $5 million rehab proposal in 2015 because the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, which controls the museum, had neglected to include a fire prevention plan. The amended plan was finally approved this June, with disbursement of funds set for October. Losing hidebound convictions would be a good start.
Two decades ago, it seems, administrators at the government-funded school turned down the World Bank’s offer of $80 million to modernize the National Museum, apparently because the plan called for the university to turn over museum governance to an independent board, under a private nonprofit organization. Although taboo on the public campus, independent management is the model that has lifted the Sao Paulo Symphony and the National Institute for Applied and Pure Mathematics to world-caliber institutions.
Drive-by politics is another problem. While the outpouring over the museum’s destruction was genuine, rival political claques seemed less interested in discussing how to protect national monuments than in what political analyst Thiago de Aragão called weaponizing the tragedy for partisan agendas. For instance the Temer administration’s spokesman Carlos Marun belittled the government’s critics as “weeping widows” who “didn’t seem to love the museum so much.”
Although obviously engaged in political battle, he also may have a point. The tragedy is too recent and emotions too raw for facile lessons, but clearly Brazilians need to care for their cultural heritage as much as they do their partisan talking points.
That might not settle any political disputes, but it could save the next museum.

Why German Corporate Boards Include Workers
Justin Fox/Bloomberg/September 09/18
US Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled legislation last week that would, among other things, require large American corporations to let employees elect 40 percent of their boards of directors. This evoked some fun reactions. At Vox, Matthew Yglesias wrote that Warren’s proposals could “save capitalism.” At the National Review, Kevin Williamson described them as “the largest seizure of private property in human history.”
Wherever on that spectrum your views lie, it does seem important to acknowledge that one of the world’s most successful capitalist nations, Germany, currently requires 50 percent employee representation on the supervisory boards of large corporations, and that most countries in the European Union now also encourage or require some such form of employee “co-determination.”
Which got me wondering. How did German corporations end up giving all those board seats to employees? (I also wondered why we haven’t ever done that in the US, but after writing 1,200 words on Germany I decided to leave that for my next column.)
The short answer is that in the aftermath of World War II the managers and owners of Germany’s large industrial concerns were discredited, with some headed for trial in Nuremberg as war criminals, while the country’s trade unions, which had been banned by Adolf Hitler in 1933, were considered by the Allied occupying forces to be free of Nazi taint. The most heavily industrialized part of the country was in the hands of the British, who were in the process of nationalizing several major industries back home and were inclined to do the same in Germany.
Having experienced de-facto nationalization under the Nazis, though, the leader of the union movement in the British zone — seventy something former metalworker and Social Democratic politician Hans Böckler — pushed instead for negotiated deals with company owners to give workers equal board representation. Greatly preferring this to nationalization, several big iron and steel concerns in the British zone assented.
It helped that German businesses and workers already had some experience with co-determination. It had been a major if inconclusive topic of debate at the country’s first democratic assembly, the short-lived Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 and 1849, and in subsequent decades German business owners experimented with various systems to give workers a voice in company affairs, mainly in the form of employee-chosen “works councils” that deliberated over workplace conditions. In 1916, wartime labor shortages led to a law that required every adult male in the country to work but also required employers of 50 or more to institute works councils. At the Great War’s end, unions and employer groups agreed to make the councils permanent.
This was ratified into law in 1920; a year later the Weimar government followed up with a requirement that workers get one or two seats on company supervisory boards, depending on board size.
Then as now, German corporations had managing boards made up entirely of top management and supervisory boards that exclude top management, and many companies reacted to the board-representation law by downgrading the role of the latter, reducing meeting frequency and sometimes shortening meetings to 15 minutes. Employers’ acceptance of works-council input also waned over the course of the 1920s, and in the 1930s many businesses supported the Nazi government’s moves to shut down first the labor unions and then the works councils.
After the war, attitudes were different. West Germans elected their first government in 1949, and Christian-Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer soon moved to make co-determination the law of the land for companies in the coal, iron and steel industries (for which the Germans of course have a single word, “Montanindustrie”) with more than 1,000 employees. That legislation was enacted in 1951. A year later another law decreed that large companies in other industries had to let employees choose one-third of board members. As British legal scholar Ewan McGaughey argues in his 2015 paper “The Co-Determination Bargains: The History of German Corporate and Labour Law,” the best single (and paywall-free!) source I have found on the subject, 1 this second law was not so much a forward step as an attempt by the center-right government to stave off universal 50/50 co-determination.
In the 1960s, the union movement renewed its push for full co-determination. Business leaders were vocally, often histrionically opposed — the left-leaning Der Spiegel ran a cover story in 1968 ironically titled “Co-Determination: End of the Market Economy?” — but the mostly positive experience of the iron and steel industry and the election in 1969 of Germany’s first Social-Democratic chancellor since 1930 (Willy Brandt) eventually led to the Co-Determination Law of 1976, which requires almost all 2 German firms of more than 2,000 employees to have half their supervisory boards chosen by employee vote.
In a 1979 paper that hasn’t aged well, American economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling — the scholars probably most responsible for the widely held belief in the US that the sole role of the corporation is to maximize shareholder returns — predicted that the new German law would turn out to be either irrelevant, as weak and divided worker representation allowed shareholders to continue to exercise “complete control over the affairs of the firm,” or transform the German economy into a “Yugoslav-type system” characterized by underinvestment, stalling growth and heavy government interference.
Neither happened. German corporate governance is markedly different from the Anglo-American variety, with German companies seemingly placing more weight on worker concerns like job security and less on short-term shareholder value maximization. But the German economy hasn’t stalled; in fact, the country’s annualized growth in real per-capita gross domestic product since 1976 (1.8 percent) has been a smidge faster than that of the US (1.7 percent).
That’s just a smidge, mind you, and given that per-capita GDP was and is more than 10 percent lower in Germany than in the US, one could argue that the country’s failure to close the gap more is a mark against it. Germany has also failed in recent decades to spawn brand-new world-beating corporations in the way that the US has. Then again, Germany has a higher employment-population ratio and life expectancy, and lower income inequality, than the US — not to mention a national government debt of 64 percent of GDP and falling, compared with the US debt that is 105 percent of GDP and rising. All in all, it seems that while there may not be enough evidence to declare Germany’s experiment in co-determination a capitalism-saving success, there’s even less cause for terming it a property-seizing disaster.

Biases Hidden in Algorithms
Cathy O'Neil/Bloomberg/September 09/18
Apparently, President Donald Trump doesn’t like the news that he sees about himself on Google, Facebook and Twitter. So he’s accusing them of being rigged against him — and against conservatives in general.
Absurd as Trump’s claim may be, the tech giants have it coming.
Trump is probably wrong that the gatekeepers of the internet are suppressing conservative views and positive stories about him. If anything, the likes of Twitter have amplified his voice. But he’s right to be worried about bias.
It absolutely exists, it’s a problem, and the tech companies are not being nearly forthcoming enough about it.
The companies are most likely being sincere when they say they’re not politically biased. The source of their bias is strictly commercial. When they help advertisers and others exploit people’s weaknesses and baser instincts, they’re optimizing to profit, not to a particular ideology. But even if the motivation is politically neutral, the result might not be. It can privilege Alex Jones-type conspiracies, encourage anti-vaxxers or propagate hate speech aimed at getting people to kill Rohingya Muslims in Burma.
The biases could be manageable if the companies were capable of accepting responsibility. So far they haven’t been. They dismiss concerns out of hand, so there’s no true monitoring. When biases are discovered, as they frequently are, the companies find ad hoc solutions and do their best to pretend it’s not a big deal. That makes them perfect targets for the kinds of outrageous claims that Trump has made.
The danger is evident in the way the extreme right has coopted the message of my last book, in which I warned about the biases hidden in the algorithms that influence everything from teacher promotions to prison sentencing. My prescription was to hold the algorithms’ creators more accountable. I outlined some of the ways this could be achieved, including federal regulation.
In its review of the book, headlined “How Algorithms Secretly Run the World,” the far-right website Breitbart focused entirely on the first part: how privately held, secret algorithms are feeding us biased information. In other words, it selected precisely the elements that would most undermine trust in any kind of objective truth — which is what I believe to be Breitbart’s mission.
If the big tech companies keep avoiding responsibility, they will play right into the Breitbart agenda. Biases will keep popping up, and people will assume that nothing is real or reliable unless they experienced it directly. If that sounds preposterous, note that even fake video and audio can now be entirely convincing — a fact that Trump is already using to suggest that his self-incriminating statements on live television were somehow “fudged.”
The companies’ defenders will claim that bias has always been with us. That’s true, but in the past we had editors and other human gatekeepers to hold responsible. Now we have computers, controlled by people to whom we have handed far too much power. They need to reinvent their business models with a clear emphasis on policy and accountability, for their own sake as well as for the country’s.

Iranian Opposition: Looking for a Way to Power
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al-Awsat/September, 09/18
As the power struggle in Tehran intensifies, Iran watchers begin to focus on Iranian opposition groups that could play a part in whatever happens next. In all three options under discussion in political circles, that is to say, change of behavior by the regime, regime change, and change within the regime, these groups may help tip the balance one way or the other.
Brian Hook, the man appointed by President Donald J Trump to coordinate policy on Iran, has launched a series of consultations with figures within the Iranian opposition movement with assurance that Washington has abandoned President Barack Obama’s policy of bolstering the present regime in Tehran and would be prepared to work with other forces to help put Iran on a different trajectory.
Iranian opposition leaders believe that if the US stops supporting the regime in Tehran other major powers would also distance themselves from the present set-up led by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They also believe that the Khomeinist establishment in Tehran, riven by internecine feuds, is running out of steam and unable to cope with the challenges it faces at home and abroad.
On the basis of that analysis, opposition groups inside and outside Iran have been holding numerous conferences, seminars and workshops with many more planned for the coming weeks and months.
One seminar, held in London, brought together more than a dozen and groups under the title “the transition period in Iran.”
There is also talk of an all-inclusive “national conference”, to be held in autumn, to foster a structured dialogue, if not actually a formal link, between oppositions parties and groups inside and outside the country with the aim of seeking greater international support especially from the Western democracies.
Until a few years ago, that is to say before the emergence of social media, analysts routinely divided Iranian opposition groups into two big categories: those inside Iran and those in exile. That division, however, is now blurred as most exile groups have succeeded in establishing reliable links with sympathizers inside the country. Those links were tested with some success during the last two major nation-wide uprisings, last December and last March, as millions of protesters had their voices amplified and their tactics harmonized by activists outside Iran.
The division between insiders and outsiders remains, but it is increasingly less significance.
There are, however, other dividing lines that might hamper the opposition’s effectiveness in challenging the current regime. One such division is between those who still seek part of their legitimacy from the 1979 Islamic Revolution which they claim was “betrayed” by those who are now in power. Other opposition groups, however, try to base their legitimacy on a real or claimed opposition to the Islamic Revolution from the start. Fighting over the past still causes bitter discord among the Khomeinist regime’s many opponents.
Another dividing line has ideological roots. In that context, three camps could be distinguished.
The first is that of all parties and groups that insist on maintaining at least an Islamist accent and using such symbols as hijab for women and “khaki” or non-Western clothing for men.
The second camp is represented by Iranian nationalists, those who hark back to the Persian Empire of 25 centuries ago, and highlight their “Aryan” identity. Most groups in this camp also support a restoration of the monarchy. But there are also some nationalist groups that campaign for a republican system of government.
The third camp is the home of parties and groups inspired by Western ideas such as republicanism, secularism and a panoply of leftist positions from social democracy to Maoism.
All three camps have scored some success in challenging the regime’s legitimacy and keeping the political temperature high across the nation. They have also succeeded in exposing, not to mention actually blackening, the regime’s image abroad. Their combined efforts have prevented the regime to achieve a degree of normalization without which no major domestic and/or foreign policy issue could be decided and implemented.
However, opposition parties and groups have had little success in providing an alternative source of moral and political authority in the service of a credible alternative system of government.
Their message regarding the undesirability of the present regime resonates with many Iranians, perhaps even a majority. Where they have less success is when they face the difficult question of “what happens on the day after tomorrow?”
In many cases, Iranian opposition groups and parties compensate for the relative paucity of their political and ideological wares with high voltage activism.
In some cases, the degree of commitment, devotion and readiness for self-sacrifice manifested by militants is truly amazing.
But which are the main opposition groups?
Inside Iran, the cluster known as “reform-seeking” (Islah-talab) has a history of almost three decades of dissent with hundreds of members suffering prison, exile and, in some cases, even assassination. The movement’s strategy was based on the concept of “evolution from within (istihala) developed by its chief theoreticians such as Saeed Hajjarian and Mustafa Tajzadeh. This attracted many technocrats, journalists and academics and even politicians.
Within the regime or orbiting around it. Today, however, it lacks a recognizable leader and, many analysts believe, suffers from a mood of total rejection of the revolution and its outcome.
Emerging from the revolution but quickly turning against it are a number of Islamist and Marxist groups and parties.
The largest of these is the People’s Mujahedin Organization (MKO) now headquartered near Paris with a base of operations in Manez, Albania. The Mujahedin have also attracted a large measure of international support across the political spectrum. Among their supporters are such figures as John Bolton, now President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, and former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. The movement’s top leader was Massoud Rajavi, the man who broke with Khomeini and transferred his headquarters to France in 1981. Now, however, the MKO is led by Rajavi’s third wife Maryam Azodanlu who has been chosen by the movement as the next president of a future Iranian republic.
Another ex-revolutionary group now opposed to the regime is the People’s Fedayeen Guerrilla Organization, a Marxist-Leninist group itself split into two factions one still supporting the regime under the leadership of the London-based Farrokh Negahdar.
Also emerging from the pro-Khomeini camp but now opposition it is the Iran National Front (Jibheh Melli Iran) which broke with the Islamic regime in 1982 to return to its original roots as a political force continuing the line of Dr. Muhammad Mussadeq. It is now led by Dr. Hussein Mussavian with Professor Hermidas Bavand as spokesman.
The front has just created what it calls “The Council of Iranian Elites” and it is an informal alliance with the Iran National Movement (Nehzat Melli Iran) group founded by Mehdi Bazragan, Khomeini’s first prime minister. The movement is now led by Abdul-Ali Bazargan, the late prime minister’s brother.
The Tudeh (Masses) Party has also broken with the Khomeinist regime which it originally supported and is trying to repackage itself as a social-democratic outfit closer to Western European left than the defunct Soviet Communism.
There are also six other Communist parties under different names, mostly based in Canada and Sweden and for years engaged in talks about uniting with one another to form a broader mass movement.
On the right of the spectrum is the Union for Democracy in Iran (UDI) led by Jawad Khadem, a businessman and former minister in the last government formed under the Shah. The group harks back to Shapour Bakhtiar’s brief tenure as prime minister and his historic links with Mossadeq. Also on the right are two nationalist parties, the Pan Iranist, founded by Mohsen Pezeshkpour, and the Ira Nation Party (Hizb Mellat Iran) founded by Dariush Foruhar, Minister of Labour Khomeini’s first Cabinet. Both are now dedicated to regime change and moving closer to the monarchist groups.
On the center-right are a number of parties and groups campaigning for the creation of a secular republican system in Iran. The most active among these is Secular Republicans Movement of Iran (SRMI) led by the literary critic Esmail Nuri-Ala and political scientist Hassan Etemadi.
The segment of the opposition that was hostile to the Islamic Revolution from the start is dominated by the monarchist groups which are themselves divided not numerous ideological and political shades.
The most formal of these is the so-called Iran National Council set up by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the heir of the Iranian throne.
Pahlavi says that while he would be ready to serve as monarch he would leave the decision regarding the system of government the Iranian people in a popular referendum.
Another group is the Supporters of Parliamentary Monarchy Movement which campaigns for the restoration of monarchy based on the 1906 Constitution. It has a collective leadership structure that includes prominent scholar Nasser Enteqa’a and former naval commander Nasser Maymand.
Also in the monarchist camp is the Constitutional Party of Iran (CPI) which describes itself as liberal-democrat. It was founded in 1994 by former Information Minister Darius Homayun and is currently led by Khosrow Beit-Allahi and Professor Shahin Fatemi.
Another active group is the Democratic Front for Constitutional Monarchy led by former Interior Minister Assad-Allah Nasr Isfahani.
Gauging the actual strength of the monarchist movement isn’t easy if only because supporters of restoration are organized in numerous groups both inside and outside Iran often with no formal organizational links with one another let alone a central leadership structure. Their loose structure protects them against an effective crackdown by the regime. At the same time, however, it also prevents them from weighing effectively on any future coalition talks aimed at creating an interim government.
The opposition also includes a number of parties based on ethnic minorities.
The most important among these are three Kurdish-based parties. The oldest and possibly the largest is the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (DPIK) which is now headquartered in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. Its strategy is to fight for a democratic Iran in which Kurds, accounting for some 2.5 million of the population, in two provinces where they form a majority. The DPIK originally supported Khomeini and helped him seize power in Tehran. But it broke with the ayatollah in 1982. Later, regime agents assassinated the party’s charismatic leader Abdul-Rahman Qassemlou and his successor Sadeq Sharfkandi.
Another Kurdish-based party is the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan led by Abdullah Mohtadi. Komala, now based in Suleymanieh in Iraq, was formed by splinter groups from the DPIK and casts itself as a left of center movement.
Both the DPIK and Komala have recently converted to the cause of regime change in Tehran, abandoning years of efforts to negotiate some deal with the Islamic Republic.
There are also three Kurdish based groups that demand outright secession from Iran and the formation of a Kurdish state including all Kurds in the Middle East. The largest of these is the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), the Iranian branch of the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
There are also a number of smaller secessionist groups operating in Kurdistan but so far with little in the shape of an audience.
Thanks to social media and the presence of at least 30 satellite or Internet TV channels operating from Europe and North America a number of individuals have also succeeded in finding an audience without having organizations of their own.
Among them is Abol-Hassan Banisadr the Khomeinist regime’s first president who has been in exile near Paris since 1981. Also in exile but with an audience in Iran is Abdul-Karim Soroush, an Islamist scholar who in 1980 led the purge of Iranian universities ordered by Khomeini. Having started as a critic of the regime he has more recently extended his critical observations to the question of religion as a whole. In a similar position is Ayatollah Mohsen Kadivar, a former member of the Islamic Majlis during Khomeini’s rule, but now a critic of the regime based in the United States.
Others who, thanks to television, have secured an audience include Bahram Moshiri, a critic of religion as a whole, and Manouk Khodabkhshian who advocates a secular democratic system. On the left is Parviz Dastmalchi who has found a growing audience with his critique of Islamist thinkers including Ali Shariati, the cult guru of many Khomeinists.

Yemeni legitimacy and international resolution
Radwan al-Sayed/Al Arabiya/September 09/18
By 2014, when the Houthis’ insurgency surfaced, the Yemeni people had gone through a difficult time in which several things happened such as the long drawn out national dialogue with its unanimous results and the Gulf initiative that resulted in the resignation of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the election of Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
When these matters were underway, the Houthis had taken control of several provinces which are well known for their Zaidi majority. Supposedly after the election of Hadi, the army and the security services were to be restructured but that did not happen. What happened was that when Saleh decided to take the Houthis’ side, the army got divided, between the Republican Guard brigades and the new legitimacy.
International resolution
As such, the Houthis managed to advance on the one hand, and Saleh brigades on the other. Consequently, Amran which used to be the protector of Sanaa fell. Then-international envoy Jamal Benomar convinced President Hadi that not everything has been lost and that a compromise could be reached between Saleh and the Houthis, on the one hand, and the legitimacy on the other. It was then revealed that the Houthis’ and Saleh’s brigades were still advancing towards the central governorates, reaching Aden and beyond, and towards the coasts between Ibb and Taiz and up to Hodeidah.
At the time, International Resolution No. 2216 that adopted the Gulf Initiative and the outcome of the national dialogue and that urged the militias to exit the cities and that called for disarming them and supporting legitimacy was issued.
President Hadi left Sanaa and took shelter in Saudi Arabia. He asked Gulf states to support the legitimacy and help enforce the international resolution to put an end to the rebellion. In addition to the Gulf countries’ interest in keeping the stability of Yemen, the Houthis had started attacking Saudi Arabia from the side of Jawf and Saada. They even thought about attacking from the side of Hadhramaut. Thus, since none of the senior members of the UN Security Council was willing to help legitimacy, the Arab Coalition that brought in both Egypt and Sudan to the Gulf countries, launched a military intervention in Yemen lasting to this day.
It is necessary to save the Yemeni people and to annihilate the Houthi rebellion or else Yemen will follow in the footsteps of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as a result of Iran’s militias. Why have we made this long revision of recent history? It is to highlight the fact that despite international resolutions against the rebellion and the imposition of sanctions against its individuals and entities, international parties, through the representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, have engaged in long discussions that equate between legitimacy and the rebels in terms of the importance of reaching a political solution through negotiations. Ever since the beginning of the negotiation process in Kuwait until this day, the rebels have infiltrated and hit the Kingdom with rockets and killed, displaced and looted the Yemeni people like all militias do. The international political and humanitarian actors remained preoccupied with Yemenis, not with the Houthis who have besieged the civilians and killed them – they remained preoccupied with what the Houthis allege is happening to them due to the Coalition air force and the legitimacy forces.
False uproar
The situation today, three years later, is much better. The Coalition forces have liberated all of southern Yemen and are about to liberate all the central provinces and most of the coast and the province of Hajjah. They are moving towards Saada after Al-Jawf governorate was liberated from the side of Al-Jawf and Hajjah.The international and political uproar rose again when the legitimate forces tried to advance to liberate Hodeidah for these four goals: to expel the Houthis and their forces from Tihamah, to prevent any threat against international navigation in Bab al-Mandab, to restore the important port to the legitimacy and to liberate millions of Yemenis from the violations and exploitation of militias. This uproar is justified as usual by claiming that civilians are in danger and that this aerial bombardment of the positions of the militias and their brigades is undermining institutions! These fake politicians and humanists did not say one word about Taiz, the home of one million citizens, and which is still besieged and whom thousands of its civilians have fallen.
Each time, when the charade of negotiations resurfaces, the legitimate forces and the Coalition are asked to stop fighting “to build confidence” and to ensure the success of this charade. Indeed, as Griffiths set the dates of September 6 and 7 for new negotiations, military pressure on Hodeidah decreased. The only difference this time is that the Kingdom and the UAE have rebuilt and armed the legitimate army, and the fighting against the rebels on other fronts and the coastal front will not stop, neither now nor during negotiations.
An ‘unfair’ report
Every time the humanists, the British, the French and the Germans complained, the coalition listened and the legitimacy listened and investigated the complaints and allowed delegations to check and investigate. However, the latest report is biased and unfair as it did not mention anything about the rocket attacks on the Kingdom or the tens of thousands of mines and missiles coming from Iran. The report did not shed light on the millions of besieged Yemenis and on the tens of thousands of child soldiers. It did not mention anything about the boastful attitude of Hezbollah’s Nasrallah and his militias and how they received a Houthi delegation. It is necessary to save the Yemeni people and to annihilate the Houthi rebellion or else Yemen will follow in the footsteps of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon as a result of Iran’s militias. Let us not be fooled by the false cry that excludes the children of Yemen, its women, cities and facilities.
The militias should not have been recognized as a negotiating party, not only because of the serious damage they have caused to Yemen's security and stability, but also because the UN Resolution 2216 calls for their disarmament and for their forced withdrawal from Yemen’s cities and public institutions, and not to please them and encourage them to fight and kill the Yemenis!

The Tehran summit: Three jugglers and a phantom
Amir Taheri/Al Arabiya/September 09/18
Is Russian President Vladimir Putin treating the Syrian conflict as a geopolitical version of a symphony by Tchaikovsky? Well, he started his intervention in Syria with a soft overture in the form of occasional support for the forces of the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad before launching the first movement in the form of carpet bombing several cities, notably Aleppo, into submission.
In the second movement, he switched to adagio mode by helping Assad’s forces kill or expel as many anti-regime fighters as possible. Last week, Putin started preparing for what he hopes will be the grand finale: an attack on Idlib, the last stronghold of anti-Assad rebels. With that in mind, the Russian leader has assembled the largest aero-naval battle group Russia has deployed for a single operation since the Second World War. In Tehran, Putin hopes to sell his grand finale to Iran and Turkey, the two players in the Syrian imbroglio that, for different reasons, have decided to accord their cacophonic partitions with Putin’s symphony of death and destruction.
The so-called trilateral Astana Group had to hold its latest session in Tehran because Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cannot travel abroad due to concerns about an Interpol “red notice” issued by a criminal court in Berlin. By the time of this writing, it seemed that in Tehran, Putin would clinch at least part of the deal he wants. As indicated by the haste with which President Hassan Rouhani was sent to Kazakhstan to sign the Russian-dictated Caspian Sea Convention, the leadership in Tehran is in an accommodating mood vis-a-vis Moscow. All that the mullahs want is for Putin to let them continue having some presence, even if largely symbolic, in Syria. Mired in a worsening economic crisis and challenged by nationwide protests, the ruling mullahs are left with a narrative based on the claim that they are fighting in Syria so that they won’t have to fight anti-Shiite militants in Iran itself. Losing that narrative would mean a possibly fatal humiliation for a regime that has little to offer Iranians.
Keeping the illusion alive
To keep the illusion alive that Tehran is still a big player in Syria, Khamenei dispatched Defense Minister Gen. Amir Hatami to Damascus to sign what was presented as a defense treaty. In face this was no such thing. The two had signed a defense Treaty in 2006 which never fully came into effect. The new accord was an addendum envisaging a role for Iran in reorganizing and retraining Assad’s army when and if the war is over. However, everyone knows that Assad’s own future is still in doubt and that if Russia remains the final arbiter of matters in Syria it would not allow the Iranians to secure a major presence in any future Syrian army.
Putin may have more trouble persuading Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to swallow the grand finale in Idlib. Seven years ago, as the “Arab Spring” flared from one country to another, Erdogan started dreaming of a neo-Ottoman “space”, if not an empire, spanning a vast swathe of territory from North Africa to the borders of Iran. In Syria, he abandoned an early alliance with the Assad clan in favor of an alliance with the local branches of the Muslim Brotherhood. By 2018, Erdogan’s grand dream had shrunk into a small fantasy of creating “Kurdish-free” enclave inside Syria across the border. Now, if Putin flushes Turkey’s last Syrian allies out of Idlib, Erdogan will be left with an even smaller fantasy-land named “Euphrates Shield Zone” where he is building what looks like a Turkish Bantustan. A new tsunami of refugees from Idlib could wash away that Bantustan, leaving Erdogan with little to show for his massive investment of blood and treasure in an ill-designed adventure.
My guess is that Putin will try to throw a few crumbs to Erdogan. Putin still hopes, in my opinion wrongly, that he could loosen Turkey’s traditional moorings in the Western alliance. Humiliating Erdogan at this stage may undermine that strategic goal. Khamenei may have no choice but to accept some Turkish role in Syria for two reasons. The first is that, like Putin, he hopes to see Turkey distance itself from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and seven decades of close ties with Washington. The second reason is that, once new American sanctions come into effect in November, Tehran would need Turkish help in sanction busting operations to keep the Iranian economy afloat until Donald Trump leaves the White House.
What about Assad in all this, one may wonder as an afterthought?
The truth is that though, strategically speaking, Assad is no longer relevant to the future of Syria, almost all major players, including the US and its local allies still firmly ensconced in nearly 30 percent of Syrian territory, need the despot for various reasons. Russia and Iran need him to claim that they are in Syria at the invitation of its legal government headed by Assad. After all, it was Assad who signed the lease for the Russian bases and Assad again who gave his stamp of approval to the presence in Syria of an army of Lebanese, Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi mercenaries raised by Iran.
Turkey needs Assad to bolster its claim as the last defender of Syrian Sunni majority against the minority ruling clan. The US and its allies also need Assad in the role of a genocidal maniac whose very existence justifies their presence on Syrian soil.
Israel, too, needs Assad not only to help keep Syria in a tragic limbo but also because for four decades the Assad clan guaranteed the security of the ceasefire line at the Golan Heights. In his just-published memoirs, John Kerry, the US former Secretary of State, reveals how Assad even offered to cede the Golan to Israel in exchange for a guarantee for his regime’s survival. In last week’s summit in Tehran, Putin, Khamenei and Erdogan are three jugglers engaged in multiple deceptions. As for Assad, he is a phantom, seen but not heard.

Tehran summit prepares path for war in Idlib
Talmiz Ahmad/Arab News/September 09/18
The leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran, the co-sponsors of the Astana peace process for Syria, met in Tehran on Friday for their third summit. The leaders had one specific item on their agenda: The fight to liberate Idlib from extremists from Jabhat Al-Nusra and bring this province, the last bastion of the opposition, under the control of President Bashar Assad. The question of Idlib severely tested the unity of the conclave. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was reluctant to back an all-out attack on the area that hosts 3 million people, including about 100,000 extremists. He feared a bloodbath and refugees, along with extremists, fleeing to his country in their thousands; an onerous burden given that Turkey already has 3 million Syrian refugees. Differences among the leaders became apparent at the concluding press conference, when Erdogan abruptly intervened to insist that the joint statement refer to a “cease-fire” so that extremists would get the chance to surrender. Russia’s Vladimir Putin responded by saying it was doubtful they would “stop shooting or stop using their drones,” in reference to the drone attacks on Russian bases at Tartus and Hmeimim. However, to accommodate Erdogan, the joint statement was amended to call on all armed groups to surrender their weapons.
The outcome of the Tehran summit is just one more move on the complex Syrian chessboard, on which several players with diverse and competing interests are pushing for maximum advantage as the scenario approaches its endgame.
Russia is fully committed to the Assad regime and seeks to retain its military presence and political influence in Syria. Iran is also a solid partner of the Assad government and wishes to maintain its presence on Syrian territory, which keeps it on the frontline against Israel while ensuring its influence in Lebanon and Palestine. Both Russia and Iran are opposed to the US presence in Syria.
The Tehran summit ensures the attempt to take Idlib will commence shortly, but a strong US intervention in Syria could plunge the Middle East into a serious conflagration. Turkey, a NATO member, has found itself increasingly at odds with the US, which continues to consolidate its presence in territory controlled by Syrian Kurdish forces at the Turkish border. The US has also expressed concern over the proposed Turkish purchase of the S-400 missile system from Russia, and has slapped sanctions on Ankara due to the detention of an American pastor, who Turkey accuses of working with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Given this contentious background, in the run-up to the Tehran summit Russia worked hard to bring together these diverse players. Besides high-level meetings of Russian officials in Ankara, Moscow hosted the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Syria and engaged with the leader of the moderate Syrian opposition.
Russia also highlighted the importance of addressing the refugee crisis in meetings with officials of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, all of which are hosting several million people who have fled Syria. Earlier, in the fighting in southern Syria, Russia had accommodated Israel’s interests by ensuring that Iranian and Iran-backed forces were kept about 100 kilometers from the border of the occupied Golan Heights. Russian diplomats also interacted extensively with their American counterparts in Washington, Moscow and Geneva to ensure they are on the same page on Syria. Here, the picture is hazy. The general mood in Washington is not to allow Russia to score any military or political successes in Syria. Thus, the US has refused to back any attack on Idlib, emphasizing the humanitarian calamity this would create, despite Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists being located there in large numbers. Trump warned in a tweet last week against the Syrian regime “recklessly” attacking Idlib, and later said that the US would be “very angry” if civilians were slaughtered. Russia has been particularly concerned that the US would use the excuse of a chemical attack to launch a military assault on Syrian and perhaps Iranian forces in Syria. Hence, Russian officials, including Putin, have been warning for some weeks that extremists could use toxic chemicals to instigate such an American attack.
The Russians have gone even further: They have bolstered their forces in the Mediterranean with 25 warships and two submarines and have carried out large-scale exercises off the Syrian coast. Russia has also publicly criticized the consolidation of the US presence in Syria east of the Euphrates, in territory under Kurdish control, seeing in this an attempt to partition Syria. The US has responded by enhancing its own military presence in the Mediterranean and the Gulf. The attempt to take Idlib will commence shortly. It will not be an all-out assault but will follow the earlier Syrian pattern of moving forward village by village, so that casualties can be minimized and opposition elements can surrender. Jabhat Al-Nusra leaders have pledged to fight to the last man, so some large-scale fighting may become inevitable toward the end, particularly when Syrian forces surround Idlib city itself.
The US response to these developments remains uncertain. While Trump remains viscerally hostile to Iranian influence in Syria, his officials are opposed to any Russian achievement in the country. A strong US military intervention in Syria could plunge the Middle East into a serious conflagration.
*Talmiz Ahmad is an author and former Indian diplomat who holds the Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Pune, India.