.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
===
The Future:
Bionic hands are now so advanced they can perform even delicate and complex movements.
/New casts can be printed with a 3D printer, are lighter, more comfortable and just as strong.
An example of the new E-Ink in action. An ink that stay flat on the page and can be printed but still moves on the printer
This windowed door turns opaque whenever you lock it.
The world's first virtual shopping center opened in Korea. All the products are just LCD screens that allow you to order the items by touching the screen. When you get to the counter, your items are already bagged and ready to go.
===
Even Iran sees through Obama and thus, will take advantage of him as they press forward on becoming a nuclear nation.
ISIS now employing gas. Hamas is rebuilding tunnels in Gaza.
Israel is the only barrier to Iran becoming nuclear. Will Netanyahu act? (See 1 below.)
Obama - bewildered ' innocent' bystander? (See 1a below.)
===
World haters must establish chaos in order to move forward on their goal and the straw man is always anti-Semitism.
Is there a connection between what is happening on college campuses, The Klinghoffer Opera, constant attacks on Israel in the U.N. and Jewish citizens and institutions in various European countries etc?
I believe the stage is being set for another war. A different kind of world war but nevertheless a war that will engulf the world. Call me an alarmist but history is on my side and a weak America and an even weaker feckless president will only serve to grease the tracks.
Caroline Glick says the time is now to stand tall! (See 2 below.)
Extremists will always use the freedoms of Democracy to undermine the very democracy that provides them the tools and will the West prevail?. (See 2a and 2b below.)
Israel and Russia - strange bed-fellows? On the surface maybe yes but di deeper and specific national interests can dictate policy and Israel needs friends wherever they can get them. (See 2c below.)
===
Just as the nation is finally coming to its senses, regarding the utter failure of Obama's presidency, is Georgia going to move in the opposite direction because a white female community organizer is able to best a hapless Republican contender?
By any objective consideration Michelle Nunn has run a classy campaign and managed to remain a mystery as to who she really is while Perdue has not been able to convince far too many Georgians that she will become another Harry Reid protege and Obama supporter.
This is why I urged everyone I knew to nominate Jack Kingston. Jack was a fine Representative and would have been a much more effective campaigner but he could not overcome the bias of Atlanta's 5 million in a statewide campaign.(See 3 below.)
===
Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Top Iranian Official: Obama is ‘The Weakest of U.S. Presidents’
Adviser to Iranian president mocks Obama’s ‘humiliating’ presidency
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/top-iranian-official-obama-is-the-weakest-of-u-s-presidents/
APBY: Adam KredoThe Iranian president’s senior advisor has called President Barack Obama “the weakest of U.S. presidents” and described the U.S. leader’s tenure in office as “humiliating,” according to a translation of the highly candid comments provided to the Free Beacon.
The comments by Ali Younesi, senior advisor to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, come as Iran continues to buck U.S. attempts to woo it into the international coalition currently battling the Islamic State (IS, ISIL, or ISIS).
And with the deadline quickly approaching on talks between the U.S. and Iran over its contested nuclear program, Younesi’s denigrating views of Obama could be a sign that the regime in Tehran has no intent of conceding to America’s demands.
“Obama is the weakest of U.S. presidents, he had humiliating defeats in the region. Under him the Islamic awakening happened,” Younesi said in a Farsi language interview with Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency.
“Americans witnessed their greatest defeats in Obama’s era: Terrorism expanded, [the] U.S. had huge defeats under Obama [and] that is why they want to compromise with Iran,” Younesi said.
The criticism of Obama echoes comments made recently by other world leaders and even former members of the president’s own staff, such as Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.Younesi, a former minister of intelligence in the country, also had some harsh comments about U.S. conservatives and the state of Israel.“Conservatives are war mongers, they cannot tolerate powers like Iran,” he said. “If conservatives were in power they would go to war with us because they follow Israel and they want to portray Iran as the main threat and not ISIS.”
Younesi took a more conciliatory view towards U.S. Democrats, who he praised for viewing Iran as “no threat.”
“We [the Islamic Republic] have to use this opportunity [of Democrats being in power in the U.S.], because if this opportunity is lost, in future we may not have such an opportunity again,” Younesi said.The candid comments by Rouhani’s right-hand-man could provide a window into the regime’s mindset as nuclear talks wind to a close.The Obama administration has maintained for months that it will not permit Congress to have final say over the deal, which many worry will permit Iran to continue enriching uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon.
About the potential for a nuclear deal, Youseni said, “I am not optimistic so much, but the two sides are willing to reach results,” according to an official translation posted online by Fars News.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have adopted a much more pessimistic view of Iran’s negotiating tactics, which many on the Hill maintain are meant to stall for time as Tehran completes its nuclear weapon.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), for instance, wrote a letter to the White House this week to tell Obama his desire to skirt Congress is unacceptable.
“Congress cannot and will not sit idly by if the Administration intends on taking unilateral action to provide sanctions relief to Iran for a nuclear deal we perceive to be weak and dangerous for our national security, the security of the region, and poses a threat to the U.S. and our ally, the democratic Jewish State of Israel,” Ros-Lehtinen wrote.“If the Administration opts to act in a manner that directly contradicts Congress’ intent, then Congress must take all necessary measures to either reverse the executive, unilateral action, or to strengthen and enhance current sanctions law,” she told the president.
“President Obama does believe that by rewarding Iran and permitting it to do whatever it wants in the region, the mullahs in Tehran will be convinced to compromise,” said Saeed Ghasseminejad, an Iranian dissident and associate fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
However, “the result has been disastrous: Iran controls 3 Arab capitals (Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad) and its allies just captured the fourth one (Sana in Yemen) and Iran’s economy has significantly improved,” Ghasseminejad explained.
“Unfortunately, it does not seem that the mullahs reached the conclusion desired by the administration,” he said. “Iranians believe this administration is weak, it has lost its economic leverage over Iran and there is no credible military option on the table. Iran has been rewarded upfront, they now ask for more while are determined to keep their nuclear program intact.”
1a)
Barack Obama, bewildered bystander
The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government’s handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in theNew York Times last Saturday.
There’s only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration
The IRS? “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” he thundered in May 2013 when the story broke of the agency targeting conservative groups. “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS.”
Except that within nine months, Obama had grown far more tolerant, retroactively declaring this to be a phony scandal without “a smidgen of corruption.”
Obamacare rollout? “Nobody is more frustrated by that than I am,” said an aggrieved Obama about the botching of the central element of his signature legislative achievement. “Nobody is madder than me.”
Veterans Affairs scandal? Presidential chief of staff Denis McDonough explained: “Secretary [Eric] Shinseki said yesterday . . . that he’s mad as hell and the president is madder than hell.” A nice touch — taking anger to the next level.
The president himself declared: “I will not stand for it.” But since the administration itself said the problem was long-standing, indeed predating Obama, this means he had stood for it for 5½ years.
The one scandal where you could credit the president with genuine anger and obliviousness involves the recent breaches of White House Secret Service protection. The Washington Post described the first lady and president as “angry and upset,” and no doubt they were. But the first Secret Service scandal — the hookers of Cartagena — evinced this from the president: “If it turns out that some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry.” An innovation in ostentatious distancing: future conditional indignation.
These shows of calculated outrage — and thus distance — are becoming not just unconvincing but unamusing. In our system, the president is both head of state and head of government. Obama seems to enjoy the monarchial parts, but when it comes to the actual business of running government, he shows little interest and even less aptitude.
His principal job, after all, is to administer the government and to get the right people to do it. (That’s why we typically send governors rather than senators to the White House.) That’s called management. Obama had never managed anything before running for the biggest management job on earth. It shows.
What makes the problem even more acute is that Obama represents not just the party of government but a grandiose conception of government as the prime mover of social and economic life. The very theme of his presidency is that government can and should be trusted to do great things. And therefore society should be prepared to hand over large chunks of its operations — from health care (one-sixth of the economy) to carbon regulation down to free contraception — to the central administrative state.
But this presupposes a Leviathan not just benign but competent. When it then turns out that vast, faceless bureaucracies tend to be incapable, inadequate, hopelessly inefficient and often corrupt, Obama resorts to expressions of angry surprise.
He must. He’s not simply protecting his own political fortunes. He’s trying to protect faith in the entitlement state by portraying its repeated failures as shocking anomalies.
Unfortunately, the pretense has the opposite effect. It produces not reassurance but anxiety. Obama’s determined detachment conveys the feeling that nobody’s home. No one leading. Not even from behind.
A poll conducted two weeks ago showed that 64 percent of likely voters (in competitive races) think that “things in the U.S. feel like they are out of control.” This is one degree of anxiety beyond thinking the country is on the wrong track. That’s been negative for years, and it’s a reflection of failed policies that in principle can be changed. Regaining control, on the other hand, is a far dicier proposition.
With events in the saddle and a sense of disorder growing — the summer border crisis, Ferguson, the rise of the Islamic State, Ebola — the nation expects from the White House not miracles but competence. At a minimum, mere presence. An observer presidency with its bewildered-bystander pose only adds to the unease.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) It's time to beat the Jew-haters: How to do it
By Caroline B. Glick
The decision by the most prestigious opera house in America to produce an opera that mainstreams Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish terrorism is a great victory for elitist anti-Semitism. In the world of elite anti-Semitism, Jews are told that truth is but a narrative. Jewish history and rights have no more merit – indeed less merit – than the lies of Jew-haters. And if Jews dare to object to the propagation of lies against them, they open themselves to the easy accusation that they seek to stifle free speech.
The goal of elitist anti-Semitism is to erode the right of Jews to have and promote Jewish rights and interests. This is done by demonizing those who defend Jewish rights and advance Jewish interests, while elevating and romanticizing the lives and largely false narratives of those who seek to destroy Israel.
The Met’s singular contribution to the cause of elitist anti-Semitism is the prestige its production of The Death of Klinghoffer confers on the cause.
Another dam has been breached. Another safe zone has become a no-go zone.
On the other hand, at the end of the day, as bad as elitist anti-Semitism is, over the past decade or so, American Jews have developed tools to deal with it.
In the weeks that preceded the opera’s opening last Monday night, much – although not all – of the Jewish community in New York was able to unify in opposing it. Politicians and luminaries joined with more than a thousand protesters on opening night to express their revulsion at the opera.
And the Met has already paid a price for its elevation of anti-Semitism to high art.
Far from living up to its reputation as a leader in the arts, on Monday, due to the massive protest against the production, the Met lost its artistic credibility. The crowd that gave the opera a standing ovation didn’t do so because they had just experienced a musical masterpiece. They stood and cheered because they were happy the Met elevated murderous, Jew-hating terrorists, whom they support.
One of the novel aspects of the opposition to the production was an action taken Monday by the Zionist Organization of America. Hours before the opera began, the ZOA issued a press release demanding that major Jewish donors to the Met, including the Michael Bloomberg LP company, the Annenberg Foundation, the Neubauer Family Foundation and the Toll Brothers Foundation, account for their decision not to revoke their multimillion dollar support for the opera house.
The ZOA’s move is important because as Jews see more and more public support for the denial of Jewish rights and interests, it will become increasingly important to call to account those backing institutions that advance this growing trend toward Jewish disenfranchisement.
The ZOA’s move was important as well because it points us in a useful direction for dealing with a second and increasingly prominent form of anti-Semitism in the US and Canada. That form is violent anti-Semitism.
Increasingly, anti-Semites in the US are adopting brownshirt tactics to violently advance their goal of removing Jews from the public square and intimidating others into boycotting Israel and those who support it.
Take just a few examples in recent weeks. In late September, several hundred anti-Semitic rioters at the Port of Oakland prevented longshoremen from unloading cargo from the Israeli cargo ship Zim Shanghai. According to media reports, there were 50 policemen from the Oakland police force on the scene, but their presence did not stop the rioters or enable the longshoremen to offload the cargo.
None of the anti-Semites were arrested. Zim Shanghai was forced to leave the port with its cargo and sail on to Los Angeles.
The group that organized the assault on the Zim ship calls itself Block the Boat for Gaza. It operates through its Facebook page where it openly organizes violent assaults on Israeli shipping. Another assault is planned, according to its Facebook page, for October 25.
A previous assault in August, during Operation Protective Edge, also took place with police presence and nonintervention. The Zim Piraeus was forced as well to pull anchor with its cargo and sail on to Los Angeles.
Block the Boat for Gaza is supported by another group called Arab Resource and Organizing Center.
On October 8, the Brooklyn Nets played an exhibition game against Maccabi Tel Aviv at the Barclay Center in downtown Brooklyn. The event was a benefit for Friends of the IDF. Twelve IDF soldiers wounded during Operation Protective Edge were guests at the event
Read more at http://jewishworldreview.com/1014/glick102414.php3#3lGcRyrPLIydXRTJ.99
About a hundred anti-Semitic rioters organized outside the event. They were members of variety of organizations reportedly including Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah – New York, and the Direct Action for Palestine.
After the event, a number of the rioters accosted Leonard Petlakh, the director of a local Jewish community center, as he was leaving the arena with his two young sons. According to The Forward, they shouted, “Free Palestine,” and, “Your people are murderers.” And then one of them punched him in the face, breaking his nose.
The assailant was arrested. But strangely, he was not charged with committing a hate crime despite the clear anti-Semitic character of his crime.
On October 5, hours after the end of Yom Kippur, swastikas were painted on the walls of AEPi Jewish fraternity at Emory University near Atlanta.
Swastikas were also painted at the Yale University campus. In July, mailboxes of AEPi members at University of Oregon were defaced with swastikas.
In August, a Jewish student at Temple University was assaulted by a member of Students for Justice for Palestine.
In a video filmed at the national convention of AEPi and posted on YouTube two weeks ago, members of AEPi from campuses around the US and Canada shared the stories of anti-Semitic assaults they and their friends suffer regularly on their campuses. The attacks described included, among other things, violent assaults.
Gideon Rafal, the president of AEPi at University of Arizona, described how he was assaulted while trying to prevent a group of 20 Jew-hating thugs from forcing their way into his fraternity house.
Rafal said he was struck from behind and lost consciousness.
The injuries he sustained during the assault included a skull fracture, bleeding in the brain, a concussion and a lower back fracture. He says that he was hospitalized for three weeks, spending 10 days in the intensive care unit.
Rafal did not say who the assailants were or what legal measures were taken against them or what organization if any, they were associated with.
Other students described threats against Jewish students manning a table for Birthright Israel programs at Loyola University in Chicago, and the assault of a Jewish female student at University of California at Santa Cruz.
Shane, a student at University of Calgary, described how he, his mother and sister were violently assaulted for counter-protesting at an anti-Israel protest. The group that sponsored the anti-Israel protest and whose members attacked him and his family is an official campus organization.
Read more at http://jewishworldreview.com/1014/glick102414.php3#3lGcRyrPLIydXRTJ.99
Shane said he fears for his life as he walks through campus.
In recent years it has become apparent that university campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Semitism. The incidents described by the Jewish students who attended the AEPi convention indicate that the anti-Israel propaganda taught in the classrooms is increasingly being translated into anti-Jewish violence outside of them.
The major American Jewish organizations were incompetent to contend with anti-Israel incitement as it became a major force in university classrooms some 15 years ago. Jewish students found themselves with few communal resources to rely on when they suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves at the front lines of the anti-Semitic battle against Jewish rights.
New groups like Stand with Us and Hasbara Fellowships were formed to fill the vacuum. CAMERA, ZOA and other major groups have in recent years invested massive efforts into empowering students to stand up to this incitement.
But today, as anti-Semites on and off campus increasingly resort to brownshirt tactics, the American Jewish community again finds itself without the means to contend with a new challenge.
And this brings us back to the ZOA’s naming the names of Jewish philanthropists still supporting the Met.
The organizations involved in intimidating Jews and assaulting Jews on and off campus who support Israel are not interested in dialogue. Groups that organize to prevent the conduct of normal commercial relations between Israel and the US are not concerned with whether or not they are considered mainstream. The goal of these groups is to intimidate and terrorize the American and Canadian publics into silence as they make it impossible for Israel and its supporters to have a place in the public square.
Educational efforts are of little value in contending with thugs. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done. Groups like Block the Boat for Gaza, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and Direct Action for Palestine need to be investigated.
Where does their money come from? Who are their leaders? What are their ties to terrorist groups? What are their ties to organized labor? What are their ties to politicians? What is their tax status and what do their tax returns say? If members of various groups are intimidating Jewish students then there should be restraining orders against them. Criminal complaints should be filed against them. Their tax-exempt status should be challenged.
Jewish students should be demanding that Students for Justice in Palestine be expelled from their campuses along with other hate groups, like Jewish Voices for Peace. Jewish alumni should be organizing to withhold all donations from universities that permit anti-Semitic groups to operate on campus. And Jewish lawyers should be filing lawsuits against universities and other institutions that enable the operation of anti-Semitic groups on their premises.
If Jewish students complain that they feel threatened on campus, then lawsuits should filed against the universities for engendering a threatening atmosphere against them.
Politicians who support or, when asked, fail to condemn these groups, individuals and their actions as racist and bigoted should be called out for their behavior. Police departments like the Oakland police department that do nothing to stop rioters from preventing the lawful, unfettered operation of a major US port should be subjected to public and legal scrutiny.
The challenge of anti-Semitism in North America is growing and mutating by the day. Jews in America and Canada need to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Reasonably, American Jews have no interest in aping the hateful tactics of anti-Semites to fight them. But an aggressive campaign of legal, political, social and financial opposition to those who seek to demonize Jews and deny Jews civil rights as Jews as well as those who enable them can go a long way toward making members of these hate groups and their supporters rue the day they decided to go after the Jews.
2a) THE UGLY FACE OF 'MODERATE' EXTREMISM
By LARRY PICKERING
Campbell Newman: “Don’t be alarmed, visit mosques to express your solidarity.”Tony Abbott: “This is not about religion or what you wear. Almost all Muslims are absolutely first-class Australians and upstanding members of the community.”Now I can expect that sort of stupid comment from Newman but not from Tony Abbott.The vast majority of Australians are confounded as to why their politicians are failing to apportion blame to the teachings of Islam. Well, there are two reasons why and both are fast wearing thin.
The first is an electoral one. Islam has been able to skew up to 20 Federal seats in Labor’s favour and the Coalition is fearful of their success in more.
Why is Labor the party of preference for Islam? That’s an easy one; social benefits.Muslims are mostly unemployable, they pray five times a day, take Friday arvos off to listen to Mullahs promote our demise and have made an art-form of rorting welfare systems world-wide. This leaves them with plenty of time on their hands to plot their hosts’ destruction.
First thing a Muslim immigrant did on arrival is call the local friendly Islamic doc. and got himself on a disability pension. His disability is usually no more an aversion to work. Then he needed to get his wives and nine kids here, family reunions are an Islamic gold mine.
Now he needs to apply for housing somewhere near all the other Muslim families and this is where it gets interesting. The mother(s) of his kids apply to Child Welfare authorities complaining of not being able to care for the children and she needs assistance, but she has this terrific idea... “there’s a lady up the road who would make a wonderful carer, and guess what? She is my sister and she already knows the children.” Ya can’t get better than that eh?
So now, on paper at least, the sister up the road is bedevilled by 18 kids and needs to offload 9 of them so she complains to child welfare that she too can’t cope, “but there’s another lady up the road who would make a wonderful carer...”. Get the idea? I mean the Government hands over $200 per child, per week, in this merry-go-round of welfare fraud and everyone’s happy.
By the time this scam goes up and down just one western Sydney street there are financially secure Islamic families everywhere, and all on a total of at least $3,000 a week! Why wouldn’t Australia be their port of preference?
But why aren’t they caught defrauding the system? Well, that has a simple answer too. They swap their cars and swap their names... Muslims have multiple names to defraud authorities anyway. And if the authorities try to clamp down on the scam there’s always a friendly Islam sympathetic solicitor who will recommend some free legal aid. In the meantime nothing has changed in the street except the level of social benefits has skyrocketed.
The Federal welfare budget has now exploded at the expense of needy Aussies.The other reason politicians fail to blame Islam is that the last thing they want is to get mainstream Islam offside. They hope to get “moderate” Muslims to cooperate in catching “radical” Muslims. How naive. How bloody stupid. How damned dangerous! The Lakemba protesters complaining last night of the police raids are about as “moderate” as Muslims get.
The most radical of Muslims are their leaders. Muslims will never integrate. We can keep trying to guess who wants to behead us until we get it wrong or misread some “chatter” and by then it’s too late.We can refuse to learn from the Islamic disasters in France, Belgium, the UK and the Netherlands, or we can do something about the scourge now.1 Stop building mosques.2 Stop Islamic immigration.3 Ban insidious Sharia law.4 Stop the welfare rorts.5 Arrest those who incite violence.6 Stop the Halal certification extortion racket that finances their terrorist activities and,6 Stop the PC and 18C nonsense that exhibits our weakness and emboldens Islam’s worst.Australians in general are not rednecks but we are well and truly over it. We want our leaders to act like leaders before some little girl is found raped, beheaded and hanging by one leg from an Australian flagpole.
2b)
As the World Turns: Will the West Prevail?
by Michel Gurfinkiel
World Affairs
World Affairs
It has been assumed, since the end of the Cold War, that globalization is irreversible and that technologies, cultures, and markets are spreading, merging, and interacting at an ever quicker pace. This is certainly true. But what if, in addition to globalizing, the world is also splitting into separate and antagonistic sub-worlds? Two of them in particular, which ironically came into existence and have been growing as free riders in the Western-shaped universe, now pose a threat to the West.
The Wastelands
First, there is what we might call the Wastelands. These are the many countries that have descended into chaos in the last quarter-century, and those that may follow them at any moment. As early as the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington pointed out that disorder was sprawling in the border zones between civilizations. In the ensuing years, Robert D. Kaplan wrote even more specifically about what he termed the "coming anarchy." The 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, which originated at least in part from chaos zones, drew the attention of global decisionmakers to the strategic threats implied by these areas. The "Arab Spring" revolutions of 2011 and events such as the terrorist attack in Benghazi were reminders that chaos is spreading rather than receding, and that, in the space of some twenty years, it has become a permanent fixture of the world.
Foreign Policy has been running for several years a "Failed States Index" (FSI)—renamed the "Fragile States Index" this year—that lists those countries where government and society do not work, or work very badly. According to the 2013 index, at least sixty out of one hundred and seventy-eight countries fit into that category. In other words, one out of three.
After years of instability, Somalia is struggling to build a government. The speaker of Parliament is not unlike a traffic cop at a particularly dangerous and sometimes violent intersection.
The methodology of ranking states on the FSI can be debated. While government disruption and social underachievement (in terms of poverty, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy rate, and similar measures) are often connected, there are many cases where they are not. Moreover, there are states that remain strong despite widespread social ills (think of Iran, which ranks thirty-seventh on the FSI), or where society remains intact despite a powerless government (think of Lebanon, which ranks forty-sixth).
Still, it cannot be denied that most of Foreign Policy's "most fragile states in the world" are indeed fragile, or even disintegrating. Somalia, ranked number one on the FSI in 2013 and number two in 2014, evidently disappeared as a functioning country many years ago. The same is true of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Haiti, Syria, and Libya, a few of the other paragons of failure.
There are several reasons why governments cease to function. For one, many states are semi-fictitious. One UN member state out of two is a former colony that became independent between the late 1940s and the early 1970s and was originally carved out according to the colonial powers' interests, rather than according to ethnic or religious or even sound geographic realities. No wonder that once the former colonizer withdrew formally (by granting independence) or informally (by removing military or administrative personnel), the new state, having no experience in being a state, simply began a slow-motion unraveling.
Other non-functional countries may be more homogeneous or even more deeply rooted in history but nonetheless lack the traditions of a civil society predicated on the assumption that the state is not the private property or the booty of a ruler, a family, a tribe, a brotherhood, or a party, but something that belongs to all citizens.
It is also the case that for some countries, demographic or societal change—ups and downs in birthrates, changes in family patterns, mass migration, religious or linguistic upheavals—along with a lack of ongoing development, tips them from barely to non-functioning.
The political chaos of the Wastelands started in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, right after the end of colonial rule. The Democratic Republic of the Congo never recovered from the hurried withdrawal of the Belgians in the summer of 1960, in spite of a brief restoration as the Republic of Zaire under president Mobutu Sese Seko in the 1970s. Chaos then spread to parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, carried along by various guerrilla groups and drug trafficking. It made inroads in the former USSR and former Communist East European countries (especially in the Balkans) in the 1990s as the dominant political paradigm—communism—disintegrated. Ever a latent threat in Islamic countries, where a "public good" culture has never taken hold for religious or societal reasons, it has grown dramatically there since the Arab Spring.
In some places, chaos has resulted in the partition of existing states and the tentative formation of smaller but more cohesive countries. Somalia, for instance, has de facto broken into at least three sub-countries—the almost functional Somaliland in the north, the totally un-functional rump-Somalia in the south, and the semi-functional Puntland in between them. Christian and Animist South Sudan broke away de jure from Islamic Sudan in 2011, only to devolve into ethnic conflict two years later. Some experts foresee similar outcomes in the Middle East's currently disintegrating countries, namely Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
"It would be a mistake to dismiss these Wastelands simply as countries in a death spiral that profoundly disconnects them from the functional world."
|
Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss these Wastelands simply as countries in a death spiral that profoundly disconnects them from the functional world. More often than not, the militias, guerrillas, terrorist networks, jihadi brotherhoods, criminal groups, and other warlords that overthrow or challenge regular governments in many countries and turn them into Wastelands rely on state-of-the-art equipment: weaponry, cars, planes, drones, communication or monitoring devices. Djaffer Ait Aoudia, a French-Algerian journalist who visited Taliban-ruled Afghanistan a few weeks before 9/11 and wrote a stunning report for the conservative French weekly Valeurs Actuelles, knew beforehand that the jihadist fighters were equipped with automatic weapons and half-tracks; he was however surprised to find, amidst the country's squalor, fleets of four-by-four cars and well-managed and well-tended military and administrative enclaves, complete with air conditioning, Danish furniture, Japanese computers, and advanced telephone systems. The same is true, according to many reports, in other chaotic countries where the overlords of the Wastelands are sophisticated users of computer, Internet, and mobile technologies and networks, and know how to write or alter programs or otherwise break into functional countries' operating systems and databases.
The predatory rulers of the Wastelands may have looted parts of their equipment from the societies they overthrow. But they contrive to get new supplies from functional countries as well, either as presents from those who see them as useful pawns in their geopolitical games or as donations from NGOs or simply by purchasing them. The more powerful they become, the more attention they must devote to taking care of the populations they control in terms of food, shelter, medicine, and so forth. If these goods must be purchased, revenue will be required, and having no economic development to draw on, the Wasteland rulers will have little choice but to create an illicit and high-profit economy based on drugs (Latin America, the Sahel, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Burma), diamonds and other precious stones (Africa), human trafficking (Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, the former USSR), or piracy (Indian Ocean, South China Sea). And of course additional revenue can be generated by money laundering.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, global criminal or illicit economic activities generated some $870 billion in 2009, or one and a half percent of the gross world product (GWP) and seven percent of world trade. The activities they undertake to support their failed states link the Wastelands as providers to Western countries as receivers.
Wastelands rulers need skilled personnel to run their equipment and handle sophisticated financial activities ranging from Internet operations to business management. They can hire proxies, recruit politically or religiously motivated fellow travelers, or just send off family relations or people already in their ranks to be educated in functional countries, as is increasingly the case. If necessary they can set up humanitarian NGO fronts or infiltrate existing NGOs. Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from the Wastelands who settle in Western countries often remain under their former rulers' sway, either as a result of brute intimidation or through familial or tribal pressure. Lobbies and influence organizations in Western countries can thus exert geopolitical leverage on behalf of the Wasteland overlords.
"Jihadist Islam ... is creating rings of "emirates" and "Islamic states" in the Wastelands of Libya, the Sahel, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Iraq ... and is securing beachheads among Islamic immigrant communities in Europe and North America."
|
In this respect, the worst-case scenario is for the Wastelands to turn into new kinds of states—not the territorial states that have shaped history at least since the Renaissance, but rather predatory "network states" like the early Scythian, Arab, and Mongolian steppe and desert empires. When such networks hide behind utopian revolutionary ideologies—think of the Andean drug traffickers masquerading as Marxist guerrillas—they are dangerous enough. When they adopt a totalitarian religious outlook, they can be lethal. Jihadist Islam, Sunni and Shia, which is creating rings of "emirates" and "Islamic states" in the Wastelands of Libya, the Sahel, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Iraq, has heavily invested in drugs and other illicit activities and is securing beachheads among Islamic immigrant communities in Europe and North America. Gilles Kepel, a French sociologist who has studied radical Islam for the past thirty years and who for years was confident that it was on the decline, recently wrote an alarming book, Passion Française, about its growth in Islamic enclaves in France. According to him, immigrant Muslim neighborhoods are now jointly dominated by drug gangs and Salafist or jihadist "religious police" who insist on a complete rejection of the French way of life and of Western democracy and human rights. No wonder that several thousand Muslim youths from European countries have joined the jihadist fighters in Syria; or that, according to Joëlle Milquet, the Belgian interior minister, they are likely to be, upon their return to Europe, a "major concern."
The New Emerging Powers
The second rising sub-world that challenges the West is usually referred to as the New Emerging Powers (NEPs). Indeed, both its core—the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)—and its more tenuous members (Turkey, Iran) have, or seem to have, undergone stunning economic growth. According to the IMF, China achieved three hundred and thirty percent GDP growth from 1990 to 2006. India's GDP growth was one hundred and fifty percent, while Brazil's and South Africa's were each fifty percent. Russia actually experienced a negative growth throughout the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet regime, but then engaged in a solid four to eight percent yearly growth rate from 2000 to 2013, except for 2008–09, when it was badly hurt by the American and European recession. Turkey's GDP underwent a fourfold increase, from $200 billion to $800 billion at official exchange rates; Iran's was threefold, from $150 billion to $580 billion.
Such growth took place against a background of decline by former growth leaders like Japan (barely twenty percent) or most European Union nations (an average thirty percent). Moreover, it meant for every country in that sub-world—with a combined population of about three billion, or forty percent of the world population—a definite transition from endemic poverty and backwardness to at least the prospect of affluence and economic maturity.
However, the New Emerging Powers are very different from the older emerging countries such as Asia's "Little Dragons" (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) in the 1970s in that their main challenge is not economic but political and geopolitical.
First, NEPs are not democratic powers. While democratization or the consolidation of democracy was either a stated concern or a corollary of growth for the older emerging countries, most of the NEPs are neither democratic nor moving toward democracy. China, nominally still a communist country, is a one-party authoritarian regime. Russia is a post-communist country that has relapsed into authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin after a brief and chaotic experimentation with democracy under Boris Yeltsin. Post-apartheid South Africa is effectively ruled by the hegemonic ANC party. Iran is a theocratic dictatorship. Turkey moved from a secular, military-dominated semi-democracy to a neo-Islamic and increasingly authoritarian regime. Only Brazil and India can pass today for bona fide democracies.
Second, NEPs are hypernationalist regimes. Without exception, the NEPs are pursuing explicitly nationalist agendas, very much at odds with the Western globalist and post-nationalist agendas. It may be an ethnicity-centered nationalism, as in China, a race-centered nationalism, as in South Africa, a religion-based nationalism, as in Iran, a civilization-based nationalism, as in India, or a combination of several types of nationalism, as in Turkey, where the "neo-Ottomanism" blends ethnicity and religion, or in Putin's Russia, where ethnicity combines with a revived Eastern Christian Orthodoxy, but in all these cases there is a link between the absence of democracy and nationalism.
Third, NEPs are decidedly anti-American and anti-Western. A determining factor of this anti-Americanism appears to be the nature of the self-interest of the local elites. In the older emerging countries, these elites created or remodeled under the aegis of America (as in the case of occupied Japan), benefited from the openness and inclusiveness of Western civilization, and soon realized that adopting democracy would not jeopardize their position, but rather stabilize it. In most of the New Emerging Powers, on the other hand, the ruling elites were created or took over in defiance of the West and regard Western influence as a threat (even though their current economic surge is largely an outcome of a Western-induced globalization), and tend to believe that they will not survive a Western-style democratization.
"NEPs see anti-Western and anti-American cooperation between them as an overriding priority for the time being."
|
Finally, NEPs are building strategic anti-Western alliances. While their respective national interests do not always coincide, and in fact collide in many respects, the NEPs see anti-Western and anti-American cooperation between them as an overriding priority for the time being. They tend to take a unified stand and to support each other in diplomatic affairs and at international fora: Russia and China in particular, as UN Security Council members, have taken similar lines on the Balkans, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Palestinians, and Ukraine. They have set up strategic, military, and economic cooperation. They lead mutually reinforcing media and influence campaigns.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has been so far the main vehicle for strategic inter-NEP cooperation. It was started in 1996 as the Shanghai Five, ostensibly a common strategic forum for Eurasian powers: its founding members were Russia, China, and the three Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In 2001, it took up its present name upon the inclusion of a fourth Central
Asian country, Uzbekistan.
Asian country, Uzbekistan.
Two other factors have been even more relevant than the SCO itself, however: the signature, in 2001, of a bilateral "friendship" treaty between its two most prominent members, Russia and China, and the steady accumulation of "observers" (India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia), "dialogue partners" (Belarus, Sri Lanka, Turkey), and "guest attendees" (the Commonwealth of Independent States, ASEAN, Turkmenistan) that have turned the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a loose but very large group, representative—to quote Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev—of "half of humanity." Significantly, the US was denied SCO observer or partner status when it applied in 2006.
The SCO has been dismissed for years as a mere showcase with no real substance. In fact, the organization and its array of partners have gradually developed formal and informal strategic cooperation in many fields, from counterterrorism to intelligence sharing, and from conventional defense matters to cyber warfare. The Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure, an SCO agency headquartered in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, explicitly coordinates action against "terrorism, separatism, and extremism" in the member states. Bilateral or multilateral military exercises have been conducted since 2003, and SCO members have engaged in bilateral armament trade.
The SCO has also fostered economic cooperation in terms of transportation, energy, and trade. Time and again, the SCO has floated concepts like an alternative world banking system or even an alternative global currency, establishing it as a rival to the IMF, the World Bank, and the dollar. However, such projects stand a better chance to materialize—if they stand any chance at all—within a broader BRICS framework.
Many countries that remain formally outside the circle of SCO membership or partnership can be construed as virtual members, since they tend to coordinate their diplomatic or strategic policies with SCO countries. This is the case of paleo-communist states like North Korea and Cuba, of Brazil and the "progressive" Latin American countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Nicaragua, and others), and of South Africa.
As noted earlier, the West—the United States, the European Union, and clusters of countries, all around the world, that align with them—is still the leading element in world affairs, whatever the challenges and threats from the Wastelands and the NEPs, and in spite of six years of recession.
Out of a rapidly growing gross world product, according to the IMF, the United States, Canada, and the European and Euro-Pacific countries (Australia, New Zealand)—the West's historic core—achieved a total gross product of $39.1 trillion: 52.8 percent of the global world product.
The older emerging countries of Asia—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, which are culturally, politically, economically, and strategically aligned with the West, and not likely to switch sides in a foreseeable future—add a global $7.3 trillion to the sum total. Several Latin American nations—Mexico, Chile, and Colombia—add another $1.9 trillion. The West's global product thus comes close to $49 trillion: 65.2 percent of the world product.
Likewise, the West and the West-oriented countries remain unchallenged world leaders in per capita GDP—from $99,000 per annum in Norway and $65,000 in Australia in 2013, to $53,000 in the US and Canada, and from $38,500 in Japan and an average of $32,000 in the EU, to $26,000 in South Korea and $21,000 in Taiwan. The first NEP, for comparison, is Russia, with $14,000. Then come Brazil and Turkey, with $11,000 and $10,000, respectively. China stands at $6,800, Iran at $5,200, and India at $1,500.
Not unexpectedly, life expectancy largely follows per capita GDP. It is above eighty years in most Western or West-oriented countries, and falls sharply among NEPs—76.2 years in Brazil, 74.4 years in Turkey, 74.2 years in China, 73.5 years in Iran, and 70.0 in India and Russia.
The West and the West-oriented countries come first again, by an even wider margin, in more qualitative matters. They are still undisputed leaders—both as innovators and as producers or providers—in hard science, R&D, high tech, machine tools, robotics, avionics, cars, pharmaceutics and medical technologies, nuclear energy, water processing, food production and conditioning, nature and species conservation, quality housing, services, tourism, fashion, entertainment, quality media, armaments, and war-related technologies. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities—the so called "Shanghai Ranking," published since 2003 by the Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai—four hundred and fifty out of the five hundred top universities are Western or West-oriented, forty-five are NEP, and five do not belong to either sub-world.
Although some NEPs (China, India, Brazil, Turkey) have been building up an impressive manufacturing base over the past thirty-five years, and have even successfully absorbed state-of-the-art technologies, none of them has so far launched by itself a new and innovative technology or product with a potential to revolutionize everyday life or war.
Challenges
Does such dominance mean that the West should dismiss the threats presented by the Wastelands or regard the anti-Western militancy of the NEPs as hyperbolic? Alas, no.
"The West may be considerably more powerful, in strategic terms, than the Wasteland "emirates," but it is less willing than they are to make full use of its strength."
|
The West may be considerably more powerful, in strategic terms, than the Wasteland "emirates," but it is less willing than they are to make full use of its strength. As for the NEPs, the fact that the West is retaining its quantitative and qualitative edge at present does not mean that some of them at least, especially China, India, and Brazil, will not become dominant powers in the future, especially given their additional assets of a large landmass and a very big population, and thus be able to pursue their hypernationalist agendas without any restraint.
Moreover, the West is crippled by some specific frailties that should not be overlooked. While demographic transition—due to birth control, drop in fecundity, and higher life expectancy—is now a near universal feature globally, it started much earlier in the West than in other countries and the West's share in world population is thus likely to drop more sharply in coming decades. Western countries may be gradually paralyzed by lower manpower and an ever-expanding elderly class in comparison to the Wastelands and NEPs.
Another Western vulnerability is the decoupling that appears to be taking place between the West's main pillars, America and Europe; or, alternatively, between the Anglosphere (North America, Australia, and England) and continental Europe. The Anglosphere remains solidly democratic: citizens still believe they have a say in public affairs, if only by voting against current administrations. But confidence in democracy has been corroded in most European countries by steady transfers of power and competence from the elected national governments to the unelected EU bureaucracy. America remains moderately prosperous, in spite of the Great Recession of 2008, whereas most European countries are frozen in a zero-growth situation (notably because of the euro, a currency tailored for deflation), or just bankrupt. Religion and family values are still important in America, while they have collapsed in most of Europe. Immigrants are more willing to join the mainstream in America than in Europe.
A third challenge for the West is the sympathy many of its citizens feel for the NEPs and their political or geopolitical projects. Russia is successfully cultivating close ties in Europe with both the far left and the far right. Turkey, very much a Western country until 2002, has switched to the NEP side after more than a decade under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In fact, Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan's foreign minister, is one of the main theorists of a global NEP entente directed against the West.
The successive crises, from Syria to Ukraine, that have shaken the world since the summer of 2013 have already brought about a new introspection in all Western countries. These crises may turn out to be blessings in disguise. Paralysis among American decisionmakers may be replaced by a sustainable bipartisan consensus on major geopolitical issues, given the new specters stalking the world. A similar consensus may be reached as well with most other Western nations who have experienced a wake-up call.
One result of acknowledging these new realities might be a recognition that NEPs should be seen as hostile or potentially hostile countries, and agreements to which they are parties reviewed accordingly. The validity of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the other international regimes born out of the Cold War, and extended after the fall of the Soviet Union, should be questioned, given Russia's membership. Turkey's economic partnership with the West, an important factor of its phenomenal growth for the last twenty years, might also be reconsidered, as well as its strategic membership in NATO.
Simultaneously, incentives could be devised to help the least hostile NEPs—India and Brazil—break away from national-socialist temptations and join the West. And a hardheaded attempt should be made to talk even the core NEPs—Russia and China—into reassessing their present policies.
All in all, Putin's Russia is less a resurrected empire than a zombie empire, a half-dead polity that can still cause serious misery for its neighbors and mischief for its "frenemies" in Europe, but is nonetheless a tottering state. It can seize Crimea from Ukraine, but it may not be able to prevent China, sometime in the future, from seizing the underpopulated Russian Far East, where a Chinese presence of investors and immigrants is steadily growing. In this regard, whatever temporary accommodation Russia makes, its long-term geopolitical interest is clearly to associate with Europe and America rather than to become a hardened enemy.
As for China, it should be urged to pay attention to the Japanese precedent. Japan's modernizing program in the late-nineteenth-century Meiji era was encapsulated in two words, Fukoku Kyohei, to be translated as "Rich Country, Strong Army." As a rich country, both imperial and postwar Japan were overwhelming success stories; as a military state, imperial Japan spiraled into disaster. Since Deng Xiaoping took over for good in 1979, in just thirty-five years, China has achieved as much or even more than Meiji Japan—by joining, as the Japanese did, the Western-designed global market of information, science, technology, manufacturing, and trade. While China's growth is likely to slow down a bit as it switches from emergence to full wealth, and from manufacturing to innovation, it will probably remain quite high for years. But the West should point out to China that if it seduces itself into a belief that it can win zero-sum Great Powers games, it may both lose its magic link with modernity and stir an anti-hegemonic coalition, first in East Asia and then elsewhere, that will dominate its future.
Even in its current uncertainty, division, and intellectual turmoil, the West knows what must be done. But as has been the case at other crucial moments in history, the question is whether it will summon up the will to do it.
Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think tank in Paris, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
2c) Russia and Israel: A Beautiful Friendship?
When Bob Dylan sang “For the times they are a-changin’” he was not referring to relations between Israel and Russia, but his lyrics might just fit at the present time. No one can speak of a Russian tropical heat wave towards Israel but it isn’t surprising the temperature’s rising. The relationship may be heading to a beautiful friendship if not the beginning of love.
The change has come as a result of President Vladimir Putin’s direction of foreign policy. That direction does not come from any love of Israel or the Jewish people, or from any ideological reorientation. It results from Putin’s concern for Russian national interest.
Russian attitudes, both during the period of the Soviet Union and since, towards Israel and Jews has gone through a number of phases. In the immediate period after the end of World War II the Soviet Union allowed Jews in Eastern European to go to camps in the Western zones; it did not prevent the formation of clandestine Zionist operations in Bulgaria and Romania; it did not stop 300,000 Jews going, between 1948 and 1951, from Eastern Europe to Israel.
It is arguable that Israel was saved by the Soviet Union. David Ben-Gurion in 1968 doubted that the country could have survived the early months without the arms supplies from the Soviet bloc. Those arms, including tanks and combat planes, started coming nominally from Czechoslovakia but essentially from the USSR from May 1947 for at least two years.
With the onset of the Cold War and the increasing paranoia of Joseph Stalin directed against “Zionist imperialists” and imaginary Jewish medical assassins and saboteurs, the harmonious relationship changed, persisting even after Stalin’s death in March 1953. The result was both increasing anti-Semitism, and an end of Russian Jewish emigration to Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the USSR broke diplomatic relations with Israel, and they were not restored until October 1991. The USSR became a major supporter of the Palestinian groups and of pro-Arab resolutions at the UN, and a leader in the campaign attacking Israel as being a racist state.
Whatever Putin’s objectives may be in general, Russia while he has been in power has been more cordial, or less hostile, towards Israel. Important differences still divide the two countries, particularly in relation to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and projects that have been helped financially by Russia, and its diplomatic and material support for the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Putin is aware that there are more than 14 million Muslims in Russia, 10 per cent of the population, and only 200,000 Jews.
Russia has also been selling arms to Arab countries, especially Syria. In 2009 it sent Syria eight MiG-31 planes, costing $500 million, and in 2014 planned to send 26 Yak-130s, costing $550 million. Russia has remained helpful to Iran on nuclear issues. In September 2014 Russia agreed to send materials to Iran including S-300 nuclear reactors. Some Russian weapons sent to Arab countries fell into the hands of Hizb’allah.
Nevertheless, friendly gestures or agreements between Russia and Israel were more important. One concerned Russian actions in Chechnya which were criticized by the U.S. and European countries. But Israel, understanding that Russia’s struggle against terrorists was comparable to its own struggle against Palestinian terrorists, and observing that Putin recognized the need to combat terrorism and extremism, refrained from criticism. The Islamist terrorist attack on the school in Beslan in September 2004 that killed hundreds of schoolchildren was particularly meaningful. Though Putin favors a Palestinian right to self-determination, he did not approve a unilateral declaration of independence.
There are ties between Russia and Israel in a number of areas: economic, military and demographic. The population link is considerable. Almost 1 million -- one seventh -- of the Israeli population has come from Russia, and is integrated into Israeli political and economic life. Russians also form the largest number, after North Americans, of tourists visiting Israel: in 2013 they numbered 380,000, 13 per cent of the total.
Trade between the two countries has been increasing: in 2013 it accounted for $3.5 milliards. Israel exported to
Russia mainly agricultural products, electronics, and medical materials, amounting in all to $1.5 milliards, and imported rough diamonds and hydrocarbons. In February 2013 Israel made an arrangement, a 20- year deal, with Gazprom that would buy liquefied natural gas from Israel’s Tamar offshore gas field. In December 2013 a free exchange zone between the two countries was set up.
Israel will continue its exports of agricultural products to Russia, in spite of the EU sanctions imposed in July 2014 against Russia over its actions in Ukraine. Russia in response had stopped agricultural imports from Europe, and Israel is interested in expanding its own agricultural products from $325 million a year to more than $1 billion. Israel’s sale of fruits, especially apples and plums, to Russia help make up its losses from the EU ban on imports of all dairy, meat, poultry, and egg products from the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Jerusalem.
In the military and industrial sphere, Israel since 2009 has been selling drones to Russia. In March 2011, agreements were reached on a number of areas: space cooperation, joint research programs, including astrophysical and planetary research, medicine, and intellectual property and science exchanges. The Israel Aerospace Industries has since 2010 been engaged on a $400 million project with the Russian company Oboronprom for Russian based production of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Personal and political connections have been pursued by both sides. In June 2012 President Putin visited Israel for the inauguration of the national Victory Monument in the coastal town of Netanya honoring the soldiers of the Soviet Union who fought against Nazi Germany during World War II. Putin in June and July 2014 declared his support for the struggle of Israel in its attempts to protect its citizens. In a meeting in June 2014 Putin agreed with Prime Minister Banjamin Netanyahu to especial a special hotline connection, a direct line, between their two offices. This connection evades any interference by the United States, which already has a direct line with Israel.
Some surprise among Western countries was registered by Israel’s position on the non-binding UNGA Resolution of March 27, 2014 which implicitly criticized Russia for “its disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine” through the use of force, and its annexation of Crimea. The Resolution was approved by 100-11, but Israel was one of the 58 nations that abstained.
Russia has been a member of the Quartet, together with the U.S., the EU, and the UN, set up in March 2002 to act as mediators for the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Over the last twelve years the Quartet has made little, if any, progress in the attempt to foster substantive negotiations. However, Russia is in a unique position as a country that has degrees of friendly relations with the Palestinian Authority, with Hamas, and with Israel. Can it be the intermediary that can persuade the Palestinians to agree to begin the process for peaceful negotiations? Again, the lyrics of the great bard Bob Dylan are pertinent. The wheel’s still in spin and there’s no telling what it’s naming.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Georgia: A Midterm Bright Spot for Democrats?
Senate races that once looked promising for Democrats in Colorado, Iowa, and New Hampshire have tightened in the final weeks of the midterm campaign, with Republicans gaining steam. But polls are going the other direction in Georgia, providing a much needed bright spot for Democrats.
In the race to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Democrat Michelle Nunn has held a slight edge over GOP businessman David Perdue since mid-October. The RealClearPolitics average shows less than a percentage point separating the candidates in what has become one of the closest and most watched races this cycle.
Nunn’s small edge is noteworthy because Georgia is a red state that rejected President Obama twice. A Democratic win there would make it more difficult, though not impossible, for Republicans to take over the Senate this year. But the race isn’t over yet. In fact, it may not be over for a while. The Georgia contest figures to continue into January.
An Insider Advantage poll released Thursday, for example, found Nunn leading Perdue, 47 percent to 45 percent. This, along with other recent surveys reflecting similar margins, is good news for Nunn and Democrats nationwide. But no recent polls show either candidate garnering more than 50 percent of the support -- the threshold required by state law for a candidate to win outright. If no one crosses that line on Nov. 4, the top two finishers head to a Jan. 6 runoff.
Louisiana has similar runoff rules -- and so far, the race there also figures to last beyond November -- but the second round would take place in December. That means, if the control of the Senate somehow depends on Georgia, the final makeup of Congress won’t be determined until after the new class is sworn in on Jan. 3.
Nunn gained an advantage this year by not having to face competition in the primary, while Perdue had a long and brutal slog that lasted until a mid-summer runoff. While her opponent battled it out for the nomination, Nunn was able to travel the state and raise money, largely under the radar. She did make some mistakes, however, stumbling early on when asked whether she supported the health care law.
The former CEO of the nonprofit organization Points of Light is banking in part on the goodwill her family name has generated in the state (her father, Sam, was a well-respected U.S. senator). Like many red state Democrats, Nunn hopes that connection protects her from the President Obama’s unpopularity in Georgia.
While Nunn has tried to distance herself from the president this cycle, her main line of attack against Perdue is taken from the 2012 Obama campaign playbook. She and fellow Democrats have targeted her opponent’s business experience, painting him as a corporate raider responsible for job loss in Georgia and for outsourcing American jobs. The charge has the potential to pack a punch in Georgia, as the state now has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. The attack was also made by Perdue’s rival in the GOP primary, who focused on the candidate’s past as chief executive of Pillowtex, a textile company. Democrats have also jumped on comments Perdue made about being proud of his business experience.
Both parties are investing substantially in the Peach State in the final weeks of the campaign, which means the airwaves are beginning to crackle with ads. While Nunn’s charge has forced Perdue to spend time defending himself, Republicans have seen a vulnerable spot to attack as well -- thanks to Obama.
In an effort to turn out African-American voters in Georgia, the president conducted radio interviews with stations in the state. “And if Michelle Nunn wins, that means that Democrats keep control of the Senate, and that means we can keep on doing some good work,” he said in a recent interview.
Like Kay Hagan in North Carolina -- where the state’s growing diversity similarly offers hope for Southern Democrats -- Nunn has had to walk the delicate line between distancing herself from the president while still courting key members of his election coalition to turn out in a midterm year.
“There’s got to be a duality approach to these voters,” says Atlanta-based Democratic strategist Tharon Johnson, who helped manage the Obama re-election campaign in Georgia and other Southern states. “She must continue to appeal to moderate Republicans and white independent women, but at the same time excite the Democratic base.”
Johnson said that while Nunn has several constituencies to delicately weave together to win election, Obama was being helpful in conveying to the base that a vote for the Democratic candidate would be a sign of support for his policies. “The president and first lady are the two best people to motivate the African-American community to go out and vote,” he noted.
But Republicans have pounced on Obama’s remarks, tethering Nunn to a leader with poor approval ratings. It’s a connection very few Democratic candidates are seeking this cycle.
“President Obama made it very clear: a vote for Michelle Nunn is a vote for the Obama Agenda. For months we’ve said that a vote for Nunn was a vote to rubberstamp the Obama Agenda, and President Obama has now confirmed that accusation to be absolutely true,” RNC Spokesman Rob Lockwood said in an email.
In Georgia, as in other states this cycle, Republicans also gained fuel with Obama’s other recent comments that his policies are on the ballot this year, and that Democratic candidates in 2014 have voted with him and supported his agenda.
Early voting is already underway in Georgia, and Republicans argue that they have built a substantial and unprecedented ground effort there, as they have done in other states.
It’s unclear which candidate would be favored in a runoff. Turnout in that type of race figures to be low, which would likely benefit Perdue. But if control of the Senate depends on Georgia, the national spotlight will be shining on the Peach State, which could motivate otherwise uninterested voters.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment