Tag: Arab Spring

March 23, 2019 Leaving the Nazarene Church, I meet up with a reporter from the Electronic Intifada, Tamara Nassar, who is excited to inform me that this week is Israeli Apartheid Week, organized by the Jordanian BDS chapter. Etharrak condemned the filming in a letter to the Royal Film Commission of Jordan, an official body that promotes and facilitates foreign film and television production in the country. Activists have demanded answers from the film commission on the nature of the TV series and the authorization it received to film in Amman. Jordan has “the second highest share of refugees compared to its population in the world.” More than two million registered Palestinian refugees live in the country, but most (not all) have full citizenship. With the recent cybercrime law, the government has loosened the terms in which citizens can be arrested for comments they make online. She explains that Palestinians from 1948 were able to obtain Jordanian citizenship as were those refugees who were living in the West Bank and fled in 1967. Citizenship is conferred through the father. We sip thick Turkish coffee overlooking a peachy sunset and learn of the recent protest focused against the building of a gas pipeline, part of the “Jordanian Campaign to Stop the Zionism Gas Deal.” Apparently the government owned electricity company, NEPCO, cut a pipe line deal with Israel to buy natural gas. The pipe line will stretch “from Jordan’s northern border with Israel to the Mafraq governorate in the northeast.” By 2020, gas extracted from the Leviathan fields in the Mediterranean off of Tel Aviv will be sent by pipeline across Jordan. Sixty percent of the fields are owned by three Israeli companies and 40% by the US company, Noble Energy, which is leading the extraction.

Houthi group in north protests marginalisation of the local Zaydi Shi’ite Muslim sect and fights six wars with Saleh’s forces and one with Saudi Arabia. Arab Spring protests undermine Saleh’s rule, lead to splits in the army and allow al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to seize swathes of territory in the east. Saleh steps down in a political transition plan backed by Gulf states. The Houthis rapidly advance south from Saadeh and seize Sanaa on September 21 with help from Saleh. Hunger grows as the coalition imposes a partial blockade on Yemen, accusing Iran of smuggling missiles to the Houthis through Hodeidah alongside food imports, something it denies. Coalition air strikes that kill civilians prompt warnings from rights groups, but Western support for the military campaign continues. The Houthis launch a growing number of missiles deep into Saudi Arabia, including at Riyadh. Seeing a chance to regain power for his family by reneging on his Houthi allies, Saleh switches sides, but is killed trying to escape them. Friction also develops between fighters in Aden backed by Saudi Arabia, and those backed by its Emirati coalition partners. Violence continues in parts of Yemen outside Hodeidah.

While a Brexit extension is a near-certainty, the official departure date is still 29 March. While British officials remain involved in discussions, the UK will hang back on strategic questions about how the EU should approach China. A government spokesperson said: “The UK will continue to take a full part in discussions at the [Foreign Affairs Council], focusing on those issues that matter most to the UK and EU.” Other day-to-day EU business provides a jarring contrast with the government’s Brexit strategy: one of Theresa May’s last acts as an EU leader will be to sign a routine communique on strengthening the single market – the one she insists Britain must leave. “A politician’s life is always uncertain, you never know if you are going to come back for the next mandate.” MEPs who back the government also acknowledge the uncertainty. He was speaking last month before May suffered a second humiliating defeat on her Brexit deal. British MEPs have been told to clear their offices by 29 March, as their passes will stop working soon after. “It’s uncertain, it’s unnerving that we still don’t have an answer,” one assistant said. I will be fighting this thing until the very end.” He was speaking last month, after voting on the future of the common agricultural policy – and dismissed the suggestion this is a waste of time for a British MEP. The UK continues to speak out on crises or short-term business, whether that is the war in Yemen, or the EU’s 2018 budget. Officials are now thinking hard about how to preserve British influence, when there is no British voice or vote in the room.

I am proud of AGU for consistently advancing strong public positions on behalf of science and scientists. Shortly after taking office as AGU president, I wrote in a February 2017 From the Prow post, “Recent political events in the US and across the world have created an urgent demand for science in general, and the Earth and space sciences in particular, to take their rightful and needed place in civil society by injecting their cultures of evidence-driven deliberation.” Now as past president looking back over my 2-year term, I am proud of AGU for consistently advancing strong public positions on behalf of science and scientists in the wake of threats to federal science funding, scientific integrity, transparency and collaboration, and sound science policy. Less was said, however, about his respect for science and evidence-based science policy and his concern for the environment, legacies that form the basis for many of the environmental policies that continue to this day. “We must leave this Earth in better condition than we found it, and today this old truth must be applied to new threats facing the resources which sustain us all.” Bush had championed the development of a “New World Order” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I wrote, “How ironic it is that the leader of the ‘New World Order’ is the dead weight of the environmental world order needed for the 21st century.” Mine was only one small voice among many urging him to take seriously the findings of the 1990 First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Had the United States not been an early UNFCCC signatory, we may never have achieved these international agreements. Despite President Trump’s personal expression of disbelief of the most recent assessment’s major findings, it was nevertheless released, as required by law, thanks to President Bush, and the current administration did not attempt to significantly alter or censor the scientific findings. In addition to President Bush’s legacy regarding climate change policy and the Earth systems science that it demands, perhaps the most important environmental accomplishment of the Bush presidency was the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. During the preceding Reagan administration, there had been considerable debate among scientists and policy makers over whether observed acidification of soils and lakes was due to human-derived deposition of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, popularly known as acid rain. The science community must continue to articulate the value of science, to inform policy, and to guide Congress and present and future administrations. Fortunately, we have a historical model for how government can benefit from engaging science, not only with the Bush hallmarks of compassion, respectfulness, and decency but also through his genuine respect for science and evidence-based science policy and his concern for the environment.

Once, he faced down major music industry giants over the file-sharing software he created. Now, as Madrid's head of open government, Mr Soto has launched a platform where citizens dictate policies to city hall and choose what to spend taxes on. "I don't think of myself as a politician," the councillor says. "We challenged a whole system of representation in which a few people have 100% power of decision for years, without having to explain or allow citizens to participate." From street protest to digital democracy Mr Soto turned to technology to open up the decision-making process. The politicians cannot block it," Mr Soto says. In Madrid's process, citizens can vote online or in person to decide how to allocate €100 million in spending - a significant part of the council's total investments every year. But Mr Soto believes people can be trusted with political decisions. "The idea is as old as democracy itself," he says. Mr Soto does not plan to stop at Madrid, and notes that his platform could now be used to connect people across the globe in joint decision-making.

Francis Fukuyama, in “Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” (FSG, 218 pages, $26), sees identity politics as part of a global search for dignity that, although noble in many contexts, has weakened societal bonds of trust and loyalty. Mr. Fukuyama believes that Western policymakers have tended to adopt a “simpleminded economic model” of the human soul—a belief that people only require their governments to meet their physical and material needs. Politicians are good at talking about the dignity of individuals—the constitutions of Germany, Japan, Ireland, Italy and South Africa all use the word—but “scarcely a politician in the Western world if pressed could explain its theoretical basis.” Mr. Fukuyama’s attempt to explain the theoretical basis of dignity is a bit of a mess. “The desire for the state to recognize one’s basic dignity has been at the core of democratic movements since the French Revolution,” Mr. Fukuyama writes. “This is what drove Americans to protest during the civil rights movement, South Africans to stand up against apartheid, Mohamed Bouazizi [the Tunisian street vendor whose suicide supposedly started the Arab Spring] to immolate himself, and other protesters to risk their lives in Yangon, Burma, or in the Maidan or Tahrir Square.” Readers may wonder if the connections between Luther and Rousseau go any deeper than the simple notion of introspection, how Rousseau’s ideas jumped all the way to Burma and Iran, and how it was that the American civil-rights movement was inspired by the ideals of the French rather than the American Revolution. Mr. Fukuyama’s breezy account doesn’t stop long enough to ask these sorts of questions. He does make a persuasive case that modern identity politics arose out of post-Freudian therapeutic worldviews of midcentury America. If an individual’s unhealthy behavior was ultimately traceable to some subconscious suppressed anxiety, Mr. Fukuyama’s argument goes, the same could be true of a racial or sexual minority. Thus members of smaller and smaller social subdivisions were encouraged to look within for encouragement and blame the larger culture for their problems. His aim in “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity—Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture” (Liveright, 256 pages $27.95) is to undermine the whole idea of what he calls “essentialism.” “In general,” he writes, “there isn’t some inner essence that explains why people of a certain social identity are the way they are.” What sounds at first like a direct challenge to our political culture’s obsession with identity turns out to be a series of highly literate but dilettantish “explorations”—discursive arguments that racial identities are sometimes based on obsolete science, national identities depend on fictions, religious identities have more to do with practice than with doctrinal belief, and so on.