Hey folks, unfortunately we had to cancel another episode taping this week for the radio show because of all the snow in Boston. Down in Delaware, on WVUD, we’ll air last week’s episode again in case folks missed that, since all the segments are still relevant.
The technicality blocking Obama’s immigration order
Excerpt from a Reuters explanation of the tricky technicality forming the basis of the Federal court ruling out of Texas that blocks President Obama’s immigration executive orders from moving forward:
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen avoided diving into sweeping constitutional questions or tackling presidential powers head-on. Instead, he faulted Obama for not giving public notice of his plans.
The failure to do so, Hanen wrote, was a violation of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which requires notice in a publication called the Federal Register as well as an opportunity for people to submit views in writing.
There’s a longer, more spelled out version further down in the article.
The other point of interest/concern in this story, not commented upon in the article, is that the lawsuit was brought by 26 state governments. As our writer Sasha examined in an article in December 2014, Republican State Attorneys General have been repeatedly acting in concert to file coordinated, mass lawsuits against the Obama Administration on every conceivable issue. Executive orders and actions have been a particularly favored target.
I don’t know exactly which states are involved in this particular, but I’m betting it’s most (if not all) of the states with Republican Attorneys General (since they control about that many at the moment).
US-Mexico border fence at Tijuana and San Diego by the Pacific Ocean. (Credit: JamesReyes)
The Israeli left is still pretty much dead
Well, just as I suspected, the Israeli left is still irreparably broken and hopeless. The uncomfortable Labor-Hatnuah center-left electoral alliance known as “Zionist Camp” is flailing badly with a month to go in the Israeli campaign:
The Zionist Camp’s campaign is one of the most flawed and struggling ever seen in Israel. Not only did the joint campaign fail to win widespread support, it actually helped Netanyahu recover in the polls while causing enormous harm to [Isaac] Herzog’s chances of becoming Israel’s next prime minister. Furthermore, it has become clear that the rotation agreement, reached at the start of the campaign as a precondition for [Tzipi] Livni joining forces with Herzog, has caused Herzog tremendous damage.
(The rotation agreement is basically that Herzog of Labor would be prime minister for 2 years and then Livni of Hatnuah would be prime minister for 2 years after that.)
Livni, a former member of the conservative Likud Party before switching to various iterations of a centrist party, is still convinced (according to this article) that her natural appeal and constituency lies in appealing to the Israeli moderate right — whatever that is — instead of the fragmented left-leaning voters in the country, which is where the bulk of Labor’s support comes from.
As usual, this strategy of abandoning the left completely and trying to appeal to the center-right doesn’t really produce much success and tends to consolidate the conservative party or parties much father toward the right.
As that article above also notes, the centrist parties and the center-left “Zionist Camp” partnership have essentially just redistributed the votes on the left without actually gaining any “market share” so to speak from the right. This has serious consequences because any hypothetical leftist government was already going to need the support of a bunch of leftist parties to form a coalition, as I explored in my recent op-ed for The Globalist.
One scenario that might actually change things on both economic issues and the question of the Palestinian territories would be a nine-party coalition led by Herzog. The parties would be Labor (center-left), Hatnuah (centrist), Yesh Atid (center-left), Meretz (social democratic), a joint Arab/Communist list of four diverse parties, and Kulanu (centrist).
Weakening some of them could push one or two of those similarly-minded parties below the vote percentage threshold to receive any seats after the election, which makes it more likely that those seats will instead be awarded toward the small ultra-right-wing parties that would be the next-lowest vote-getters. Collectively, the Israeli right is already much more unified and condensed, as I also pointed out.
Another plausible outcome would be a six- to seven-party coalition headed by Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud and made up entirely of parties that oppose halting settlement construction and/or the entire peace process. This would likely be more stable, as there is somewhat less disagreement on fundamentals and details alike.
Indeed, in sharp contrast with the near lockstep between the right-wing parties on big issues, all the public bickering inside “Zionist Camp” has undermined any confidence that the two tent-pole parties of any left-leaning coalition could actually work together with each other, let alone with a half dozen or more coalition partners from other left-leaning parties.
We’re now heading, as I expected, either toward
- a highly unstable and internally jumbled coalition of Labor/Hatnuah and a bunch of small but very right-wing parties that oppose everything Herzog claims to stand for, or
- a new Netanyahu government that is more decisively right-wing, religious, and ethnocentric than ever before in Israeli history
To be clear: in the latter scenario, Israel’s coalition government would be led by an ever more conservative Likud party and filled with a number of parties so extreme that if they were running for office in Europe and winning seats we would all be wringing our hands like we do with UKIP, Front National, Swedish Democrats, et al.
Israel’s election is likely to be a bitter disappointment for Washington, but not an unpredictable one for anyone who has taken the time to understand the Israeli election system and pays attention to the fractious developments in its domestic politics since 2005. This should not in any way surprise American officials and pundits.
The latter of the two increasingly likely outcomes, I argued last week…
…would demonstrate the paralysis of the Israeli left (and isolation of the Israeli Arab population) against the rise of politicized Orthodox Judaism and immigrant-turned-settler politics.
And those trends are nothing new. This would merely confirm all of that.
Egypt Air Force strikes ISIS of Libya at Derna
Breaking news from Al Arabiya:
Egypt’s military said it bombed ISIS targets in Libya at dawn on Monday, following the execution of a group of Egyptian Copts by the militant group.
On Sunday, ISIS released a video purportedly showing the beheading of 21 Egyptians captured in Libya. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called an urgent meeting of Egypt’s top national security body after the video was released.
Sisi also gave a televised address, saying that Egypt and the world are facing “ferocious threats” hailing from radical militants, who are “devoid of any humane sense.”
He said his country reserved the right to “punish these murderers” as he called a meeting of security chiefs and declared seven days of mourning after the video was distributed by militants on social media.
You can read more on Sisi’s Right-to-Respond speech early Monday morning, from The Cairo Post. (Note: President Sisi, “elected” with nearly 100% of the vote in the elections following his 2013 military coup, is a conservative anti-Islamist militarist with a tight grip on local media.)
Most if not all of the airstrikes reported so far by people on the ground occurred in Derna. As Arsenal For Democracy explored in depth in our November 2014 article “Derna: ‘Islamic State’ proclaims 2nd ‘province’ in Libya”, the city of Derna was the beachhead for returning Libyan veteran fighters of the successful ISIS campaigns into Iraq in 2013 and 2014, and it has become the headquarters of the major ISIS affiliate in Libya. Since that post, however, at least two additional “ISIS provinces” have been proclaimed in the country’s historic three provinces. The group has staged attacks in Tripoli and elsewhere, but the execution of 21 Egyptian Copts at Sirte was the most brazen episode yet.
Road map showing ISIS-Libya positions (in Derna) relative to Tobruk and Benghazi within the greater Cyrenaica (Barqa) region of eastern Libya.
The executions may have provided Sisi’s pretext for a long-anticipated full-scale Egyptian military intervention in Libya, following non-admitted more limited/outsourced aerial engagements in Benghazi in October and its non-admitted assistance with the covert United Arab Emirates air operation in Libya in August. This is the first publicly confirmed operation by Egypt in its neighbor.
It may also put western Libyan pro-GNC Islamist militias that oppose ISIS in an awkward position. They vowed yesterday to begin operations against ISIS at Sirte, but they also oppose the faction Egypt has aggressively backed. A wider Egyptian intervention would be almost certainly directed at all Islamist groups, not just ISIS, much as Egypt’s internal military operations have been aimed equally at ISIS of Sinai as at the Muslim Brotherhood.
Back home in Egypt, the incident is likely to have a similar rallying effect to that seen in Jordan after its pilot was executed. However, there is an added religious dimension, as the regime is plainly exploiting existential fears of the minority Egyptian Coptic Christian community to compel them to rally to the regime despite its relative non-attention to their security. Returning the Al Arabiya article:
Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox church said it was “confident” that those who purportedly beheaded a group of Egyptian Copts in Libya will be punished.
“The Orthodox church … is confident its homeland would not rest until the evil perpetrators get their fair retribution for their wicked crime,” the Coptic church said in a statement on its Facebook page.
On another front, in an unusually militaristic statement from the Italians — currently under a center-left government that is grappling with unpopular economic reforms under a very young leader and with a rising Libyan refugee crisis — Libya’s former colonial occupier formally called for an international military coalition against Libya’s jihadists and said it was “ready to lead” such a coalition. That’s probably the last thing Libya needs in the current climate there. Such an intervention would almost assuredly receive a much less warm welcome than the 2011 NATO air campaign in the country against Qaddafi.
The vastly more populous and heavily armed country of Yemen, embroiled in civil war, continues to garner substantially less coverage than massive oil producer, low-population Libya.
Chapel Hill
I write about Islamophia a lot on this site, and we talk a lot about it on our news radio show. We’ve talked a lot about how the hateful, fearful rhetoric translates into violence. As most of you are by now aware, last week there was a triple murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina of a Muslim family. It seems quite likely, despite all media spin to the contrary, that the attacker was motivated to extreme violence because they were visibly “different” and perhaps symbolized to him everything he (reportedly) despises about religion in general. In particular, there has been a lot of anti-Islamic vitriol directed from all quarters, including some broadly anti-religious factions, which is not matched in breadth and intensity against other religions. Whatever his motivation, it was, at any rate, not merely because of some made-up parking dispute (as if that would somehow make it better). They would probably not have been targeted had they not been visibly Muslim (or visibly some other thing that set them apart and was the object of a lot of American hatred).
I don’t have anything new to contribute to the discussion, especially since this horrific act just confirms a lot of what I had already been saying and since others have said so much more so much better. So, I will just point people toward the Fusion article on the affair entitled “My best friend was killed and I don’t know why”. Here’s an excerpt:
I know that he’s an aggressive man. That’s not the first we’ve heard from him. Hicks was their neighbor.
In October or November, we went to dinner at Yusor and Deah’s house. Right after we left, Yusor heard a knock at the door and it was Hicks. She told us he was angry and said we were noisy and there were two extra cars in the neighborhood. We used visitor parking but he was still mad. He said we woke up his wife. It wasn’t that dark yet. It wasn’t late. And it wasn’t that loud. We were playing a board game called Risk. I mean, I know I was mad because they were beating me at the game, but that was it. While he was at the door talking to Yusor, he was holding a rifle, she told me later. He didn’t point it at anyone, but he still had it. Yusor called to check on us after we left, to make sure he hadn’t approached us. We thought that was so weird—our neighbors don’t come to the door with guns! So when I heard the news it was shocking, but it wasn’t a surprise that it was the neighbor.
When I heard the news report and drove down there from Raleigh, I hoped it wasn’t anyone I knew. But I saw the apartment on the news and it was his apartment. If it wasn’t a hate crime, what was it? If you have a problem with your neighbors, you write a letter; you don’t shoot people. I think they were targeted because they were different. He was always so annoyed with them for little things. They are talking about a parking dispute online—that’s definitely not true. There’s plenty of space, and Deah had just gotten off the bus. I wonder if he just thought Deah was some white guy before his wife moved in.
Do go read the full essay.
Labour propose tax avoidance crackdown, Tories balk
Despite recent backlash from big business and finance firms and lobbies, Labour are pushing ahead with a leftward shift to crack down on corporate abuses, according to The Financial Times. In addition to charging that Conservatives have “totally failed” to take sufficient action on tax avoidance loopholes generally, Labour wants to target British tax havens:
On Friday [February 6, 2015], Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader, announced plans to put the UK’s offshore financial centres on a tax haven blacklist if they did not comply with a new transparency measures. But the plan was attacked as unworkable by [Chancellor] Osborne, who seized on it as further evidence that the Labour leader was “unfit to be prime minister”.
Well, I don’t know about that, Mr. Osborne, but it seems like trying to do something about the problem of offshore UK/crown tax havens (full story➚) is better than doing nothing. This is, after all, creating a lot of problems for other countries (see previous link), and British governments have repeatedly pledged to the international community to rein them in — and has singularly failed to do so.
It will be interesting to see if Labour are willing to hold fast to their new position on corporate abuses — fully reasonable and sufficiently moderated positions, in my view — until the May elections or if they bend to pressure to be blindly (and fearfully) “pro-business,” as they arguably were in much of the “New Labour” years.
I say “interesting,” because I have a strong suspicion that the outcome of the internal Labour debate — between its working-class/progressive base and its City of London finance types — could prefigure the coming 2016 debates (if we have any) in the U.S. Democratic Party about whether to run on “middle class economics” or in Wall Street’s pocket.
There are certainly a lot of very clear parallels here, given the similarly outsized roles “The City” and Wall Street have taken on in both countries’ economies and politics, along with the controversial transformations of the New Democrats and New Labour led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair respectively in the 1990s. While it may have worked in the short run, it has caused a great deal of problems for both parties in the longer run.
Moreover, in both countries, the center-left parties find themselves quickly abandoned by their respective financial districts for the conservatives — the natural home of Big Finance — when the winds change. Meanwhile, the under-served natural economic base of Labour and the Democrats drifts angrily, staying home on election day or seeking solace in fringe parties.
There is, of course, one other linkage of interest here. The tax evasion/avoidance problem — combined with various recent banking scandals — have given a new meaning to the phrase “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, given how often City and Wall Street firms seem to be tangled up in it together.
Senegal, AU launch “universal jurisdiction” prosecution of ex-Chad dictator
Chad’s brutal ex-dictator Hissène Habré will stand trial for war crimes, torture, and crimes against humanity in a landmark trial in Senegal. This is huge news if it goes forward because the Senegal trial — undertaken with African Union backing — and will be the African continent’s first-ever use of “universal jurisdiction.”
Universal jurisdiction is a controversial doctrine that allows countries to prosecute people they arrest for significant crimes of mass violence and human rights abuses committed in other places, even without direct interests of or crimes against the prosecuting country. It has been used most heavily by Spain (full story➚).
Habré, who ruled from 1982 until the 1990 coup that brought incumbent President Idriss Déby to power, has been in Senegal since his fall from power. He was placed under house arrest in 2005 and then formally taken to jail in 2013 ahead of the now-upcoming trial. He has been sought by various jurisdictions, including Chad, for his 1980s crimes — which include hundreds if not tens of thousands of political killings and tens or hundreds of thousands of torture victims — but until now he has avoided prosecution.
Universal jurisdiction efforts against him began as far back as 2000. Senegal was initially unsure whether it could apply universal jurisdiction in its domestic courts, but the country is a firm supporter of international justice as a general principle, having been the first country to ratify the creation of the International Criminal Court.
Throughout Habré’s rule he received paramilitary assistance from the United States (via the CIA) as part of Chad’s on-again-off-again war with Libya’s Qaddafi regime. Besides his crimes again humanity, Habré was most notable on the international stage, especially in retrospect, for his pioneering use of Toyota pickup trucks with improvised gun-mounts for highly-mobile desert combat, a tactic he used against the Libyan Army’s tanks to surprisingly strong effect. This tactic’s late 1980s use in the war with Libya may well have influenced the use of pickup trucks with improvised gun mounts in Libya’s 2011 Revolution against Qaddafi, which may have then spread via Libyan fighters to ISIS (and other insurgent groups) in eastern Syria and western Iraq.
There was extensive (albeit secret) U.S. panic when Habré fell from power that CIA-delivered heavy weapons, including the same type of anti-air equipment as what they were delivering to Afghanistan at the same time, might fall into the hands of Qaddafi, who at that point had already brought down the Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie.
Pictured: Chadian President Hissène Habré and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in June 1987. (Ronald Reagan Library)
