English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For December 19/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today

If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t disregard† his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be my disciple
Luke 14/25-35/:"Now great multitudes were going with him. He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t disregard† his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be my disciple. Whoever doesn’t bear his own cross, and come after me, can’t be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doesn’t first sit down and count the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Or perhaps, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, everyone who sees begins to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build, and wasn’t able to finish.’ Or what king, as he goes to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an envoy, and asks for conditions of peace. So therefore whoever of you who doesn’t renounce all that he has, he can’t be my disciple. Salt is good, but if the salt becomes flat and tasteless, with what do you season it? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile. It is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
 

Question: "What is the meaning of ‘Everlasting Father’ in Isaiah 9:6?"
GotQuestions.org/December 19/2020
Answer: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6, ESV).
In context, this verse is proclaiming the redemption of Israel and the activities, titles, and blessings of the Messiah who is to rule the earth and usher in a reign of blessing and peace that will have no end. One of His titles is “Everlasting Father.”
The Hebrew phrase translated “Everlasting Father” could be translated literally “Father of Eternity.” For this reason, some have suggested that the title means that this coming Messiah is also the creator of everything: He is the father of time and eternity, the “architect of the ages.” While we know this to be true from the New Testament (John 1:1–3, Colossians 1:16–17), that is not the emphasis in Isaiah. In the Hebrew construction of the phrase, father is the primary noun, and everlasting (ESV, NIV, KJV) or eternal (NASB) is the term that describes His fatherhood. He is Father forever.
The Hebrew word translated “everlasting” has the idea of “in perpetuity” or “without end.” Indeed, the next verse says of the Messiah, “Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7). The emphasis is forward looking, so “everlasting” is probably a better translation than “eternal,” which not only indicates “without end” but also “without beginning.” (Again, from the New Testament we may argue that the Messiah is without beginning, but that is not the emphasis of this term in Isaiah.)
So, as the Everlasting Father, the Messiah will be a father, and His fatherhood will be without end. Some have objected that this designation as father seems to confuse the roles within the Trinity, calling “Father” the one who is really “the Son.” Some in the Oneness movement use this verse as a proof text to show that Jesus really is the Father and that there is only a Unity, not a Trinity. In both cases, the interpreters are reading New Testament concerns back into the Old Testament. Neither Trinitarian nor anti-Trinitarian concerns are being discussed in Isaiah 9:6.
Many rulers in ancient times were considered “father of the country.” Americans who read this term might immediately think of George Washington who is called “the father of his country.” It was Washington’s determination and leadership that led to victory in the Revolutionary War and his support of a strong national government that led (at least in part) to ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Without Washington, the United States might not exist today, or it might exist with a far different form of government. However, if some of the interpretations discussed so far are guilty of reading New Testament theological concerns into Isaiah in an anachronistic fashion, using George Washington as an interpretive clue to the meaning of the phrase is also anachronistic. The most appropriate analogy is far more universal.
In ancient times, the “father of the nation” was viewed in much the same way as the father of a family. It was the father who was to protect and provide for his children. In the same way, this Child to be born will become a king who will be a father to the children of Israel—He will protect and provide for them. And His role as protector and provider will not be limited by aging or death. His role as father (protector and provider) will continue in perpetuity. Just how this will come about is not revealed in Isaiah’s prophecy. The full identity of the Messiah—that He is God in the flesh, the second Person of the Trinity who would protect and provide for His people by His death and resurrection on their behalf; and that Gentiles could also be grafted into the family of Israel—may be hinted at in Isaiah, but God’s people would have to wait almost 700 years to see the Messiah revealed in the “fullness of time” (see Galatians 4:4).
 

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on December 18-19/2020

Ministry of Health: 2051 new coronavirus cases, 11 deaths
US dollar exchange rate: Buying price at LBP 3850, selling price at LBP 3900
Rampling Slams Lebanese Leaders' Lack of Responsibility in Parting Thoughts
Lebanon prosecutor suspends port probe amid political tussle
Hopes of ‘breakthrough’ dashed as Macron cancels visit to Lebanon
Aoun Wishes Macron Speedy Recovery from COVID-19
Rahi Says No Signs Aoun Adheres to Veto Power in Cabinet
Bkirki Reportedly Backs Aoun and Bassil's Call for 'Unified Standards'
Bassil Meets al-Rahi, Insists on 'Unified Standards' in New Govt.
Judge Aoun Reportedly Sues ISF Chief in 'Subsidized Dollar' Case
U.N. Says 9 in 10 Syrian Refugee Families in Lebanon in Extreme Poverty
Lebanese Presidency dismisses “Al Jadeed" TV station’s allegations false
Geagea thanks European Union for its support, says Lebanon’s main problem is its ruling elite
Danish Jihadist of Lebanese-Palestinian Background Extradited from Turkey
‘Valet Parking’ Impersonator Arrested by Police
US, Iran and Inertia, an Axis to Dampen France's Lebanese Dreams
British Council brings free digital library to Lebanon

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on December 18-19/2020

Virus-stricken Macron at Presidential Retreat with Fever
GCC summit in Riyadh to test Qatari intent before Biden’s inauguration
Iran Builds at Underground Nuclear Facility amid U.S. Tensions
Turkey Has Evacuated 7 Syrian Military Posts
Turkey finally faces the consequences of its actions
Turkey says will not reverse Russian S-400S purchase despite US sanctions
Saudi king, US president discuss regional developments
Israel’s Netanyahu, top US military discuss Iranian threat
Democrats, Republicans Criticize Erdogan’s Practices in the Region
U.S. Vice President Gets Covid-19 Vaccine, Trump Sparks Confusion
Mossad chief 'Yossi Cohen has been a nightmare for the Iranians'
Documents Refute Israeli Claims that Ex-Syrian PM Jamil Mardam Bey Was ‘Double Agent’
Algerians Impatient for Change with President Still out Sick
Egypt Officials: Bombs Kill 3 Security Forces in Sinai
Algerian State Tightens Screws on Online Media
From Hope to Agony, What's Left of the Arab Spring?

Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on December 18-19/2020

Why is Iran executing, kidnapping so many people?/Seth J. Frantman/Jerusalem Post/December 18/2020
New agreement needed to revive Iran nuclear deal under Biden, IAEA chief says/Francois Murphy/VIENNA/Reuters/December 18/2020
Trump’s Iran Achievement/Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh/National Review/December 18/2020
Alleged Shabaab operative charged with plotting 9/11-style hijacking/Thomas Joscelyn/FDD's Long War Journal/ December 18/2020
‘Boogaloo Bois’ member pleads guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qassam Brigades/Joe Truzman/FDD's Long War Journal/ December 18/2020
Hungary: "Europe's Borders Must be Protected"/Soeren Kern/Gatestone Institute/December 18/2020
The Biden Paranthesis Opens/Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/December, 18/2020
What pushes Turkey and Iran to ride out the storm of poem?/Sinem Cengiz/Arab News/December 18, 2020

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on December 18-19/2020

Ministry of Health: 2051 new coronavirus cases, 11 deaths
NNA/December 19/2020 
The Ministry of Public Health announced 2051 new cases of coronavirus infection, which raises the cumulative number to 154944 confirmed cases.
11 deaths have been recorded over the past 24 hours.

US dollar exchange rate: Buying price at LBP 3850, selling price at LBP 3900
NNA/December 19/2020
The Money Changers Syndicate announced in a statement addressed to money changing companies and institutions Friday’s USD exchange rate against the Lebanese pound as follows:
Buying price at a minimum of LBP 3850
Selling price at a maximum of LBP 3900
 

Rampling Slams Lebanese Leaders' Lack of Responsibility in Parting Thoughts
Naharnet/December 19/2020
Outgoing British Ambassador to Lebanon Chris Rampling has criticized Lebanon’s leaders for their lack of “responsibility” in the face of the country’s multiple crises, in an op-ed marking the end of his tenure in Lebanon.
Below is the full text of the op-ed:
“Lebanon: Parting Thoughts
Chris Rampling, British Ambassador
Lebanon has changed so much since I arrived, and especially over the last 14 months. My wife and I, and our 2 young children, touched down in 2018 with great expectation. Before coming, I had heard Yasmine Hamdan sing ‘Beirut’ in London and knew I was coming to the most fascinating city on the planet (I still think that).
But now Lebanese eyes tell of sadness; their words, of despair. Almost half the workforce is unemployed, and more than half are in poverty, with the UK’s Middle East Minister warning 2 weeks ago of a humanitarian tsunami. Many families have become separated, and talent and skills are emigrating in numbers. At night, the cities are darker. In more ways than one.
During my farewell meetings, there has been much reflection on the confluence of crises. Neither the refugee nor COVID crises were of Lebanon’s making. But the economic crisis and the 4 August blast were home-grown. And on top there is a profound political – and a growing social – crisis, out of which I have not seen evidence that Lebanon has the system or the leadership to chart a path. When given a roadmap and a promise of desperately-needed investment in 2018 and then again this year, the leaders did not take up the mantle of responsibility.
Everyone is tired, but I hope no-one stops fighting for the Lebanon they want. I have met wonderful people here: change agents, those going to study in the UK, many creative businesspeople, good-hearted public servants. But some things are rotten: Kefala for example is a disgrace on Lebanon’s reputation, and freedom of expression has been under pressure. Lebanon used to be the regional leader on freedoms and human rights, but it has become a country that takes one step forward, and two back.
Some of our traditional foes may accuse me of interference. But Lies and I love Lebanon and I will miss our Lebanese friends: Sunni, Shia, Maronite, Druze, Armenian, Catholic, etc. This is the 5th Arab country in which we have lived, and the one in which we and our children have made ourselves most at home. And I do see sources of hope. Entrepreneurship and the openness of the Lebanese people are tired clichés, and resilience is not what it was. But all remain.
More importantly, everything is now on the table. Politics will have to change, and ideas will fertilise that process. The energy of 17 October is only 14 months back, and most of those chanting for a better future remain. Your modern culture is still a reference point, with dynamic young people. But sectarianism has trapped political thinking. Success will require current and future leaders to move beyond reorganising the deckchairs. Going beyond existing groups.
Secondly, your diaspora remains your greatest strength. It is not a failed business model that Lebanese overseas want to invest: it should be a source of pride. But they are no longer doing so. Lebanon needs to rebuild its economic model (the IMF roadmap is the right one), and provide a sustainable and attractive framework. A new direction that includes industry, tech and tourism. Getting there needs more than a strategy: electricity has shown that the political compromises required for implementation are much more challenging. With a new national consensus and a focus on outcomes and planning, your own people would be able to join with your international friends in fuelling growth once again. Our UK-Lebanon trade deal can be at its heart.
And thirdly, the international community remains solidly united. I get told that France and the US pull in different directions. I don’t see that. They – and we, the UK – have the same analysis, the same conclusions, see the same opportunities and threats (eg your security institutions and education system need support). There are differences over the use of ‘the stick’, but there is more overlap than difference. The time to be anxious about our engagement is when we cease caring. Not when we seek to fill the irresponsible void.
Be clear that support for Lebanon is more difficult to sustain. The UK will continue to support security, education and the most vulnerable - we are enormously proud of all we have achieved with the LAF, in education and in supporting the poor over the last decade. But COVID means our money is tighter than ever - and that goes for our friends too. Lebanon must fight harder for the scarcer resources, and political paralysis does not make for an attractive destination. The credibility gap is your country’s greatest international problem.
I have not mentioned Hizballah, or the normalisation which is changing the region. Patriarch Rai is right to talk once again of neutrality. And no state that wants to be truly stable and secure can have organised arms outside state control, especially when they are being used outside its borders. Not making a choice is to do so. Lebanon is a remarkable country whose people – you - deserve better. You deserve responsible, accountable and transparent leaders, public servants, financiers and business people. But this will not happen as an apple falls from a Bekaa tree. It must be worked for. And my final call is to those leaders, public servants, financiers and business people. Your country has friends, and we care about your people. But you, not we, hold the tools of power. You - and most of all the leaders - will be remembered and judged for what you did at the time of greatest need.”

Lebanon prosecutor suspends port probe amid political tussle
The Arab Weekly/December 18/2020
BEIRUT – The Lebanese judge investigating the huge explosion that rocked Beirut in August has suspended the probe after two ministers he charged requested he be removed, judicial sources said Thursday. The development, reported by Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), comes after a stormy week that cast doubt on the fate of the investigation into the August 4 blast that killed over 200 people and destroyed parts of Beirut.According to the report, Judge Fadi Sawan’s decision to pause the probe will allow him to respond to accusations that he violated legal and constitutional procedures by summoning for questioning Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister and three former ministers on suspicion of negligence that led to the deadly explosion. The legal battle has muddled the probe into what was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, in a country where a culture of impunity has prevailed for decades.
Many critics have seen it as an attempt by the political elite to prevent setting a precedent that might bring accountability to the highest level. Charges against senior officials. Sawan on December 10 issued charges against caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab and three former ministers over the August 4 blast that disfigured Lebanon’s capital. The four were charged with “negligence and causing death to hundreds and injuries to thousands more” in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. Among them are former Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil and former Public Works Minister Ghazi Zaiter, who have since accused Sawan of violating the constitution. Lebanon’s top Cassation Court is now expected to rule on their request for Sawan to be removed from his post. Two of the accused former ministers, who are currently lawmakers in parliament, challenged Sawan’s decision and asked the Court of Cassation to replace him, citing “legitimate suspicion” over its legality. The judge, and the Bar Association which represents the families, have 10 days to respond to the challenge. The court, the highest in the country, then decides on the matter. “Until then, all investigation proceedings are suspended,” a senior court judicial official said on condition of anonymity. Diab has also refused to appear in front of the judge on similar grounds.
Political resistance
Lebanon’s top politicians have rallied around the argument that the indictment of a minister should be submitted to a vote in parliament. The Iran-backed Hezbollah group went as far as urging Sawan to reconsider his decision, describing it as politically motivated. Diab, who resigned in the wake of the explosion, already testified before Sawan in September. The huge stock of ammonium nitrate that ignited at Beirut port had been stored there for years when Diab took office almost exactly a year ago. The fact that little light has been shed on the circumstances that led to Lebanon’s worst peacetime disaster nearly four months after the blast has caused outrage. It is also fuelling distrust among international donors, whose support is much needed if Lebanon is to stand a chance of surviving its deepest ever economic crisis.
Uphill battle
Later Thursday, local media questioned the decision to halt the probe. LBC TV said it was unnecessary, since the law gives the prosecutor the right to continue his investigation until a court decision comes in. Most of Lebanon’s political leadership and security agencies have said they knew of the stockpile of explosive chemicals that were stored at the port for over six years before they ignited on Aug.ust 4, causing the devastation. It remains unclear what sparked the ignition and why no one moved the stockpile from the waterfront overlooking a residential area and a cultural heartland of Beirut.
The families of the victims had welcomed the prosecutor’s decision, saying no senior official should be spared questioning. Scores of Lebanese rallied outside the judge’s house in Beirut later Thursday, urging him to keep up his probe. “Put on trial all the security officials,” one banner read. Another said: “It is our right to know who killed us.” The challenge to Sawan’s summoning is apparently rooted in disparate interpretations over who has the authority to question ministers and heads of governments. Sawan initially sent a letter and documents to parliament last month asking lawmakers to investigate his findings. According to Lebanon’s constitution, a separate council made up of judges and politicians, set up by parliament, is entrusted with trying ministers and premiers for crimes of high treason, dereliction of duties, and breach of the constitution — a body that has never been activated by parliament.
The parliament said it found nothing that could point to professional wrongdoing. Legal experts said Sawan then moved, based on a ruling by the Court of Cassation that allows him to investigate senior officials and refer them to regular courts on criminal charges, which include negligence leading to death.
 

Hopes of ‘breakthrough’ dashed as Macron cancels visit to Lebanon
The Arab Weekly/December 18/2020
PARIS - French President Emmanuel Macron was working in self-isolation from an official residence outside Paris Friday after he tested positive for COVID-19. The announcement Thursday that Macron was infected with the virus upended political schedules in France and across Europe, with EU leaders and French officials he had met in the last days cancelling events and rushing into self-isolation. Macron was to visit Beirut on December 22, in a move aimed at pressuring Lebanese political leaders to accelerate the formation of a new government that is long overdue, in light of an economic and financial situation that could drag the country into collapse. Political circles in Lebanon say that many Lebanese were betting on the French president’s visit to produce a political breakthrough. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said earlier on Tuesday that the road to forming a new government is completely blocked, expressing his hope that the French president would be able to provide assistance in his upcoming visit. “We have entered a tunnel and I don’t know how we will get out of it,” Berri told al-Joumhuria newspaper. “We are in a pitiful situation. The government situation is completely blocked.” “Why this blockage? The answer certainly lies with the president and prime minister-designate,” said Berri, an ally of the armed Iran-backed Hezbollah group. “God willing, the French President Emmanuel Macron will be able to do something in his coming visit. We can only wait.” In recent days, Lebanon has witnessed heated tensions between Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun, against the backdrop of Hariri’s proposed government formation. The presidency of the republic, which the head of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) Gebran Bassil allegedly hijacked its freedom to decide, argues that Hariri took a unilateral approach to forming the government without consulting the presidency. The Prime Minister-designate denied the accusations and said that he was eager to select four figures from the presidency’s proposed list, calling on Aoun to free the presidency from political pressure exerted by a party seeking to obtain a government majority to approve the new cabinet, in reference to the FPM. Observers say that there was high hope that Macron’s visit to Lebanon would resolve the dispute between Aoun and Hariri, but this hope has now evaporated. Since the resignation of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s government after the Beirut port explosion, Macron has led efforts to push Lebanese leaders to agree on the formation of a new government that can implement reforms to secure international aid. Late Thursday, Macron left the Elysee Palace in Paris for the presidential residence of La Lanterne in Versailles outside the city, a presidential official said. “He will be able to both self-isolate and continue to work,” said the official, who asked not to be named. His wife Brigitte, who has tested negative, will remain at the Elysee. There was no new official update on his health Friday but French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said late Thursday Macron was suffering from a cough and “considerable fatigue.”

Aoun Wishes Macron Speedy Recovery from COVID-19
Naharnet/December 19/2020
President Michel Aoun sent a cable of well wishes to his French counterpart on Friday after his diagnosis with coronavirus. Aoun wished French President Emmanuel Macron a speedy recovery from the COVID-19, the Presidency press office said in a statement.
Macron was scheduled to visit Lebanon on December 21,23.He cancelled all his trips abroad and is now in a presidential retreat at Versailles.

Rahi Says No Signs Aoun Adheres to Veto Power in Cabinet
Naharnet/December 19/2020
Maronite Patriarch Beshara el-Rahi on Friday said that it’s crucial for an agreement on the cabinet formation to be reached between the President Michel Aoun and PM-designate Saad Hariri, noting that he “sensed no intention” on the President’s part to get veto powers in the new cabinet. “According to the constitution, the basic principle is that the PM-designate sets a government format and comes to the president for consultation. During my conversation with the president, I did not sense his adherence to an obstructing third,” said Rahi from Baabda Palace where he met with Aoun. “The Lebanese people are tired and can not tolerate anymore waiting. This is one of the reasons compelling us to form a government capable of shouldering responsibility,” he added. “Whatever the circumstances are, a solution must be found and an understanding between the President and PM-designate must be reached. A government must be formed to begin reforms, on top of which is the reconstruction of Beirut,”said Rahi. On the kind of government that should be formed, the Patriarch said all parties must respect the fact that public demand wants a rescue government of non-politicians.

Bkirki Reportedly Backs Aoun and Bassil's Call for 'Unified Standards'
Naharnet/December 19/2020
Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi and Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil agreed in their meeting on Friday on the need for “unified standards” in the government formation process, Bkirki sources said. لا“The unity of standards requires equality between all political parties and resorting to the constitution, without fabricating new norms or taking previous norms as an excuse,” the sources told al-Jadeed TV. “Double standards are unacceptable in the formation process, which means that it is unacceptable to request lists of (candidates’) names from some blocs but not from others,” the sources added. Both President Michel Aoun and Bassil have called on Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri to adopt “unified standards” in the process of picking ministers for the new government.

Bassil Meets al-Rahi, Insists on 'Unified Standards' in New Govt.
Naharnet/December 19/2020
Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil met Friday in Bkirki with Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi, hours after the patriarch held talks with President Michel Aoun in Baabda. “When there becomes an intention to adopt unified standards, the government will be formed fast,” Bassil said after the meeting.
“We discussed the issue of the government based on a desire to have a government and we agreed on all issues and on the need to form it quickly,” Bassil added. “We agreed that the government should be able to achieve reform and on unified standards in its formation, and to date we have not voiced any condition or demand other than equal treatment and formation on the basis of the constitution and national accord,” the FPM chief went on to say. Turning to the issue of the controversy over the port blast probe, Bassil stressed the need for “transparency.”“The Lebanese have the right to know why this material (ammonium nitrate) came to Lebanon, who used it, who stole it, who was negligent by allowing it to stay and how it exploded,” he said.

Judge Aoun Reportedly Sues ISF Chief in 'Subsidized Dollar' Case
Naharnet/December 19/2020
Judge Ghada Aoun has filed a lawsuit with Judge Nicolas Mansour against Internal Security Forces chief Maj. Gen. Imad Othman and Brig. Gen. Hussein Saleh on charges of dereliction of duty, media reports said on Friday. The move comes after the ISF General Directorate “prevented the Dahiyeh department from aiding Aoun in the subsidized dollar investigations,” LBCI TV reported. Aoun had recently summoned to interrogation a number of so-called Class A money changers and a central bank employee. “The Dahiyeh judicial police department will question them in the presence of Judge Aoun at her office at the Justice Palace in Baabda over information related to dollars subsidized by the central bank,” the National News Agency reported at the time. “They were asked to bring all the documents on which customers’ names are written in addition to the reasons of their sale of dollars and according to which exchange rate,” NNA added.

U.N. Says 9 in 10 Syrian Refugee Families in Lebanon in Extreme Poverty
Agence France Presse/December 19/2020
Nine out of 10 Syrian refugee families in Lebanon are living in extreme poverty, according to a United Nations report released Friday, citing "compounded crises" in the country. Lebanon is mired in its worst economic crisis in decades, with its currency plummeting, massive layoffs, soaring prices and rising poverty. It says it hosts some 1.5 million Syrians, including around one million registered as refugees with the United Nations. On August 4, one of the world's biggest ever non-nuclear explosions destroyed much of Beirut's port and devastated swathes of the capital. "The economic downturn, steep inflation, Covid-19 and finally the Beirut blast have pushed vulnerable communities in Lebanon -- including Syrian refugees -- to the brink," a U.N. statement said Friday. According to a survey by the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, the World Food Program and the U.N. children's agency, 89 percent of Syrian refugee families in the country are now living in extreme poverty, compared to 55 percent the year before. The sharp rise reflects the "compounded crises Syrian refugees have been facing in Lebanon," the statement said. Syrian refugees are now living on less than 309,000 Lebanese pounds per person per month, it said -- $205 according to Lebanon's official exchange rate, but around $38 at the current black market rate. The average amount of Syrian refugee household debt has increased by 18 percent, with "buying food" the main reason for debt accumulation, the report said, adding that food prices in Lebanon had "almost tripled" since October last year. Half of the families surveyed were suffering from food insecurity, up from 28 percent the year before, and households with inadequate diets had doubled, according to the survey. The agencies warned that families' "coping strategies" included early marriage of children, withdrawing them from school and sending them to work. "The situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has been deteriorating for years, but the findings of this year's survey are a dramatic indication of how difficult it has become for them to make it through another day," said Mireille Girard, UNHCR representative in Lebanon.

Lebanese Presidency dismisses “Al Jadeed" TV station’s allegations false
NNA/December 19/2020
The Media Office of the Presidency of the Republic issued the following statement: “Al-Jadeed " TV station continues to fabricate false stories and put the name of the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, in these stories. The last one was broadcast this evening in the introduction of the news bulletin about the interference of the President of the Republic in the investigation of the crime of the port explosion, mainly with regard to the Director General of State Security, Major General Antoine Saliba. . This story, as the "Al-Jadid" called it itself, is unfounded, and it is a figment of the imagination of the team who daily broadcasts false news. The President of the Republic has never interfered in the investigation of the crime of Beirut Port explosion by any way. Meanwhile, the time has come for Al-Jadeed to stop broadcasting false allegations that no longer fool anyone, and which negatively affect the course of the investigation.—Presidency Press Office

Geagea thanks European Union for its support, says Lebanon’s main problem is its ruling elite
NNA/December 19/2020
“Lebanese Forces" party leader, Samir Geagea, thanked the European Union countries in general, and the representatives of the European Parliament in particular, for their relentless support to Lebanon. “You leave many of your concern behind in a bid to delve more deeply into the Lebanese crisis,” Geagea told a “Webex" meeting with a number of EU MPs. The LF leader then stressed that Lebanon’s main problem was its ruling elite that consists of “Hezbollah and President Michel Aoun’s group”. “In times of crises, we are urged to describe things as they are in order to be able to find the much sought solutions,” he added. Albeit Geagea saw no impending solutions with current ruling team in Lebanon. “We consider that we cannot make any progress with this ruling elite, as it is the very same one that has plunged the nation into the abyss. It cannot do anything other than what it has done. That’s why we insist that we should not lose more time and head directly to early parliamentary elections, especially after the country’s general mood has shifted after October 17, 2019, which made this ruling elite lose its legitimacy.”Geagea went on to point out that the parliamentary majority resisted any attempt to hold early elections, “whether early or within the constitutional date!” As for the means by which the European Union can help amid these circumstances, he said: “You must exert all the necessary pressure on the ruling elite in order to push it to head to elections. The EU can also convene and announce clearly that it has stopped dealing with any party of the ruling elite — unless Lebanon holds early elections. "

Danish Jihadist of Lebanese-Palestinian Background Extradited from Turkey

Naharnet/December 19/2020
Syria for at least one other person. On Friday, he was charged with having been recruited himself and attempting to recruit several other people to join the Muslim extremists. Danish media said he pleaded not guilty but admitted having been in Syria. He also has claimed that he was a spy there for the Syrians. If found guilty, he faces up to six years in prison.

‘Valet Parking’ Impersonator Arrested by Police
Naharnet/December 19/2020
The Internal Security Forces said Friday it wants to make the public aware of a scammer that is impersonating Valet to park cars offered by some restaurants, stores, and other businesses to steal the vehicles of customers. ISF said in a statement that the suspect stole two vehicles on 11-11-2020 and on 1-12-2020 from Zalqa area, by pretending to work as a 'Valet Parking’ employee. He then escaped to an unidentified location. Police kicked off surveillance operations and were able to locate his whereabouts. They arrested him in Beirut’s Tariq al-Jadidah neighborhood. He was driving one of the stolen vehicles and was accompanied by another man. Police found amounts of drugs in the vehicle. The suspect confessed to stealing two vehicles by pretending to be a valet parking employee. He also admitted to using drugs, and had previously robbed a number of stores in more than one Lebanese region. The second man has also admitted to using drugs.'

US, Iran and Inertia, an Axis to Dampen France's Lebanese Dreams
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 18 December, 2020
During a visit to Paris last month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made clear that Washington was unhappy with France’s strategy to help resolve the economic and political crisis in Lebanon. French President Emmanuel Macron has been spearheading international efforts to rescue the former French protectorate from its deepest crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war. He has travelled twice to Lebanon since a huge explosion at Beirut port in August devastated the city. Macron is trying to use Paris’ historical influence in the former French protectorate to persuade squabbling Lebanese politicians to adopt a roadmap and form a new government tasked with rooting out corruption, a prerequisite for international donors including the IMF to unlock billions of dollars in aid. He had been due to return for a third visit on Dec. 22, but postponed the trip on Thursday after testing positive for coronavirus. An official involved in organizing the visit said he may speak by phone to Lebanese President Michel Aoun but there were no other plans for now. The 42-year-old leader has from the outset faced the inertia of Lebanon’s fractious political class, which has bickered and ignored international warnings of state bankruptcy, as well as resistance to his plans from Washington. “The Lebanese political class is stuck in its own contradictions and is happy to play the clock,” said Nadim Khoury at the Arab Reform Initiative. “(Prime Minister-designate) Saad al-Hariri is not able to form a government and internationally the US will not facilitate French efforts to form a government,” he added, according to Reuters. The US objection to Macron’s plan is centered on Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed armed movement that Washington brands a terrorist group. Hariri, a former prime minister, was given the task of forming a government after Mustapha Adib resigned in September. He is so far struggling to cobble together a cabinet to share power with all Lebanese parties, including Hezbollah. Paris was not initially keen for Hariri to take up the role, having previously failed to implement reforms, three French officials said. But given the lack of progress in forming a credible government, Macron did not oppose the nomination. France says Hezbollah’s elected arm has a legitimate political role. The US has already imposed sanctions on three leading politicians allied to Hezbollah. During a dinner in Paris last month with eight ambassadors, including from Europe, Pompeo made clear more measures would follow if Hezbollah were part of the government, according to two people with knowledge of his visit.
The stalemate has important ramifications for all sides.
Without US backing, international organizations and donors will not give Lebanon the money it needs to claw itself out of a financial crisis which the World Bank says will likely see more than half the population engulfed in poverty by 2021. Macron, having vowed amid the rubble in Beirut not to abandon the Lebanese people, is scrambling to show some foreign policy success in the region after walking empty-handed from high-profile initiatives on Libya and Iran in recent years. For the outgoing US administration, a tough stance on Hezbollah, which it deems a terrorist group, is key to demonstrating that its overall Middle East policy, including maximum pressure on Iran, has been effective. Three diplomats said they did not expect President-elect Joe Biden to change policy quickly given the bi-partisan nature of the US stance and other priorities for the new administration. Biden has said he plans to scrap what he calls the “dangerous failure” of President Donald Trump’s maximum pressure policy on Iran, but people familiar with his thinking have said he will not shy away from using sanctions.
Warning signs
The differences with Washington exacerbate what was always going to be a difficult challenge for Macron. When he had lunch with Aoun and parliament speaker Nabih Berri on Sept. 1, his objective was to ensure Berri, head of the Shiite Amal Movement, committed to a deadline to form a new government.
Macron insisted on 10-15 days, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Berri, a stalwart of Lebanese politics who has in the past had a hand in picking key ministers, twice responded with “Inshallah,” (God Willing), a polite way sometimes used in the Middle East to react to something you don’t want to do. Macron put out his palm to say no and again emphasize his demands. Berri’s office did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. Macron’s office said: “The president continues his calls with the various political players in Lebanon as he had previously committed to.”
A week later, although Macron said he had got all factions to back his plan, the United States blacklisted two former ministers, including one from Amal, for their ties to Hezbollah. “You’re right to say the sanctions policy of the American administration, done without consultation or coordination with us, has strained the game,” Macron said not long afterwards, when asked about the US not being warm to his efforts. Since then Gebran Bassil, son-in-law of Aoun, who heads the Free Patriotic Movement, which boasts the largest Christian bloc in parliament, has been sanctioned over his ties to Hezbollah. US, European and regional diplomats say new sanctions are imminent.
Punitive measures
Hezbollah has become the overarching power in Lebanon, with elected members of parliament and positions in government. While its support from Iran has been hit by US sanctions, the group remains a pillar of Tehran’s regional influence. French officials say Washington’s punitive measures have done nothing to change the situation on the ground. A French presidential official told reporters on Dec. 2 “they did not block anything ... but haven’t unlocked anything either.” Speaking at an online conference of the CSIS think-tank, US Ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea said that while avoiding state failure in Lebanon was “first and foremost”, Washington viewed Hezbollah as being “wholly in service to their Iranian masters” and said US measures were having an effect. Israel, the closest US ally in the Middle East, regards Iran as its biggest threat and Hezbollah as the main danger on its borders.
Iranian officials said that Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was in contact with Tehran on how to handle Macron’s initiative, but they would not allow Hezbollah to be weakened. Macron has, meanwhile, been left admonishing Lebanon’s politicians for betraying their commitments. “As of today, these commitments have not been kept,” he said on Dec. 2. “So far, there is nothing to show that they were more than words. I regret that.”

British Council brings free digital library to Lebanon
NNA/Friday, 18 December, 2020
The British Council has launched a free digital library in Lebanon in partnership with Assabil Libraries. This new resource will provide users with unlimited access to thousands of entertainment content and academic resources - including online study resources, popular eBooks and audiobooks and award-winning movies and documentaries. Digital Library members in Lebanon will also have access to magazines and newspapers, comics and graphics novels from around the world and online learning resources. This online digital library also aims to support English learners with free resources that can help improve their language skills. David Knox, Director, British Council Lebanon said: “We are delighted to be able to partner with the Assabil Libraries and continue to share the joys of reading, learning and culture. It is a fantastic resource and has something for everyone – from Harry Potter to The Economist, to live music concerts and professional development tools. “In these difficult times, we want to connect the people of Lebanon with the best British knowledge and resources. We believe that the future of the United Kingdom depends on people of all cultures who live and work together on the foundations of education, mutual understanding, respect and trust. Now, more than ever, we need to facilitate cultural exchange and cooperation and we hope young and old will take advantage of this great hub for creativity and culture, and benefit from the rich resources we have gathered.”Also speaking about this new digital resource was (quote needed from Assabil), Mr. Ziad Bou Alwan, Assabil president: Assabil, has for its primary mission, making knowledge, learning and culture, accessible for all, which is why we are pleased to partner with the British Council in the launch of the first digital library in Lebanon, a platform, that in alignment with the core principles guiding Assabil’s mission. At this time, more than ever, in the midst of a global pandemic and economic turbulences in the country, launching a free digital library would actively mitigate economic, financial and geographical constraints and inequalities by allowing all its users access to a large database of learning and cultural opportunities. Lebanon has always been at the forefront of cultural advancements in the region and this partnership is just another proof of the Lebanese commitment to cultivate learning and knowledge spreading. We, at Assabil, trust in the importance of e-books and look forward to watching the impact the platform will have as we believe it beautifully complements the different tools that Assabil has been putting at the disposal of the Lebanese readers.
In Lebanon, members of the digital library have access to: Newspapers: 2,400 full-text newspapers from over 100 countries
Magazines: 4,000 full-colour, digital editions such as Newsweek for instant desktop and mobile reading. Library members can select both new and back issues, adding them to personal reading libraries with no holds, no checkout periods, and no limits to the number of magazines checked out. EBooks and Audio Books: Read or listen on the go to over 3,000 titles from all major publishers and authors. Comics and Graphic Novels: 1500+ comic titles are available to library members of all ages. Music: over 1,500 of live moments in music, full-length concerts and music documentaries streamed on-demand to any digital device. Independent Films: streaming movie service that offers access to over 7,000 pop culture favourites, box office hits, award-winning feature films, documentaries, and shorts. Library members can instantly view thousands of titles from around the world, including the best from classic TV, horror, comedy, film festival darlings. Theatre: The best of British theatre to teachers and students - library members can enjoy more than 600 productions, as well as talks and discussions from leading theatre practitioners. Academic Books: 100,000 eBooks in all academic subject areas along with powerful research tools. Subject areas include: Anthropology, Business and Economics, Computers & IT, Education, Engineering & Technology, Fine Arts, History, Language & Literature, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine, Physical Sciences, Psychology, Religion and Social Sciences. Software Training: online how-to training on hundreds of common software applications and devices, including Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, google Docs and IPad. To sign up for British Council’s Digital Libraries please visit https://www.britishcouncil.org.lb/en/english/learn-online/digital-library.
The memberships will be free of charge for the next six months. Users must be over 18 to register. Once registered, members will be able to download the app – which is available from Google Play. and the Apple Store - and will be able to access content from their smartphones anywhere, anytime.
 

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on December 18-19/2020
Virus-stricken Macron at Presidential Retreat with Fever
Associated Press/Friday, 18 December, 2020
As French President Emmanuel Macron rides out the coronavirus in a presidential retreat at Versailles, French doctors are warning families who are heading for the holidays to remain cautious because of an uptick in infections — especially at the dinner table. While Macron routinely wears a mask and adheres to social distancing rules, he hosted or took part in multiple group meals in the days before testing positive Thursday. Critics say that's a bad example for compatriots advised to keep their gatherings to six people. Macron is suffering from fever, cough and fatigue, officials with the presidency said Friday. They wouldn't provide details of his treatment. He is staying at the presidential residence of La Lanterne in the former royal city of Versailles. Macron's positive test comes as French health authorities are again seeing a rise in infections and warning of more as French families prepare to get together for Christmas and New Year festivities. France reported another 18,254 new infections Thursday and its death toll is just under 60,000. France's Pasteur Institute released a study Friday suggesting that meal times at home and in public are a major source of contamination. Pasteur epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet said on France-Inter radio Friday that during the holidays, "we can see each other, simply not be too numerous, and at critical moments at meals, not too many people at the same table."Macron's aides have scrambled to contact all the people he had been near in recent days. The French health minister suggested that he might have been infected at an EU summit in Brussels last week, but Macron had multiple meetings in Paris as well. Macron took a test "as soon as the first symptoms appeared" on Thursday morning and will self-isolate for seven days, in line with national health authorities' recommendations, the presidency said in a brief statement. The 42-year-old president "will continue to work and take care of his activities at a distance," the statement added. Macron went ahead with a planned speech by videoconference Thursday.

GCC summit in Riyadh to test Qatari intent before Biden’s inauguration
The Arab Weekly/December 18/2020
KUWAIT - Gulf analysts believe the announcement of a Gulf summit in Riyadh, instead of Manama, clearly shows that Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has taken over the file of reconciliation with Qatar, and that Riyadh will seek within the remainder of the time before the summit date to test Doha's intentions. It wants to ascertain Qatar's intent regarding reconciliation arrangements and how serious it is about taking the necessary steps to prove its goodwill before expanding the reconciliation efforts to include the UAE and Bahrain.
A Gulf diplomatic source said, “the fact that the file is in the hands of King Salman means that he will not leave room for manoeuvres and contradictory statements that have characterised the Qatari position in recent years, as it expressed its desire for reconciliation with one hand, and escalated its media attacks with the other, leading to thwarting the reconciliation efforts that Doha was running after before anyone else.”The Saudi monarch wants to test the Qatari position on reconciliation himself, especially as he is the one who opened the door for a truce with Doha, and is seeking to unify the Gulf position to enable the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to face regional challenges united, but if the Qataris do not respond to this royal desire, the matter will end early.
Gulf analysts say that the summit in Saudi Arabia appears to be part of a collective agreement from the boycotting countries that the Qatari leadership should go to Riyadh as the only centre for a solution and recommit to what it had previously committed to in the first (2013) and second (2014) Riyadh agreements, and that this third (2021) agreement should be the final one, leaving no margin for escaping responsibility.According to statements published on the website of the Kuwaiti foreign ministry, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmed Nasser al-Muhammad al-Sabah announced, on Thursday in a meeting with the ambassadors of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, that Saudi Arabia will be hosting the annual Gulf summit January 5. A Gulf source said that the mediators (Kuwait and the Sultanate of Oman) had persuaded Qatar to stop playing on Saudi Arabia’s nerves and move positively before the US President-elect Joe Biden assumes his duties on January 20, especially that changes in the US position will not include Riyadh alone, but will affect Doha as well, as the new US administration may decide to open several files at once.
The source, who preferred to remain anonymous, revealed that Kuwait would work on bilateral details pertaining to relations between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the hope of reaching arrangements that would satisfy the Saudi monarch and the leaders of the Emirates and Bahrain and encourage all parties to attend the summit, provided that these arrangements be tangible and go beyond mere enthusiasm in showing good intentions, like Doha had always done previously. He added that Kuwait and the Sultanate of Oman are now operating within the logic of the internal Gulf understandings, and that the case of Egypt may be included in a broader context. Qatari steps to show goodwill towards Cairo are awaited, including stopping media campaigns targeting Egypt and its leadership, and restricting the activities of the Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood residing in Doha.
The postponement of the Gulf summit from its regular date in December to the fifth of January reveals a desire to give the Kuwaiti and Omani efforts sufficient time to receive pledges from Qatar regarding the thirteen conditions behind the boycott decision.
The dispute, which prompted Saudi Arabia and its allies to sever diplomatic, trade and travel links with Qatar in mid-2017, had witnessed some progress with Riyadh's announcement earlier this month that a final solution was within reach.The other countries involved in the dispute were more reserved in welcoming the progress in the mediation efforts made by Kuwait and the United States, the latter wishing to unite the Arab Gulf states in the face of Iran. Four well-informed sources told Reuters that they expected a declaration of a truce in this regard to be issued in conjunction with the summit.
A Gulf source said that an agreement, which ministers will finalise before the summit that brings together government leaders, may lead to a set of principles for negotiation or a more concrete move that includes reopening the airspace to Qatar as a goodwill gesture. “Things are moving quickly, but they are still pending, and for the negotiations to reach a final solution may take months,” the source added. Another source said that when Kuwait announced that progress was being made on the issue, all Gulf leaders promised to attend the summit. But talks about reopening the airspace, a step promoted by Washington, have stalled.A foreign diplomat in the region expected that the initial agreement at the summit would be followed by a new deadlock, even if all leaders participated in the Riyadh summit. “The Saudis are keen to show Biden that they are peacemakers and are open to dialogue,” he said, considering that the influential Gulf country is likely to succeed in convincing reluctant allies to join its position. The boycotting countries had made 13 demands on Doha, ranging from halting Al Jazeera's smear campaigns, closing a Turkish military base in Qatar, to cutting ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and downgrading its ties with Iran. A senior Omani diplomat said that some issues, such as those related to Turkey, would require more time but that major changes were taking place. But he has expressed optimism by saying, “I see light at the end of the tunnel.”Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, in addition to Egypt, accuse Qatar of supporting terrorism, in reference to its support to Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE is at odds with Qatar over Libya and the Muslim Brotherhood issues, which are key issues for Cairo as well. Speaking about the dispute, Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan told a press conference this week that if there are countries that still support terrorism and extremism in the region, this will be a problem.

Iran Builds at Underground Nuclear Facility amid U.S. Tensions
Associated Press/Friday, 18 December, 2020
Iran has begun construction on a site at its underground nuclear facility at Fordo amid tensions with the U.S. over its atomic program, satellite photos obtained Friday by The Associated Press show. Iran has not publicly acknowledged any new construction at Fordo, whose discovery by the West in 2009 came in an earlier round of brinkmanship before world powers struck the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. While the purpose of the building remains unclear, any work at Fordo likely will trigger new concern in the waning days of the Trump administration before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. Already, Iran is building at its Natanz nuclear facility after a mysterious explosion in July there that Tehran described as a sabotage attack. "Any changes at this site will be carefully watched as a sign of where Iran's nuclear program is headed," said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who studies Iran. Iran's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors are in Iran as part of the nuclear deal, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The IAEA as of yet has not publicly disclosed if Iran informed it of any construction at Fordo. Construction on the Fordo site began in late September. Satellite images obtained from Maxar Technologies by the AP show the construction taking place at a northwest corner of the site, near the holy Shiite city of Qom some 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Tehran. A Dec. 11 satellite photo shows what appears to be a dug foundation for a building with dozens of pillars. Such pillars can be used in construction to support buildings in earthquake zones. The construction site sits northwest of Fordo's underground facility, built deep inside a mountain to protect it from potential airstrikes. The site is near other support and research-and-development buildings at Fordo.
Among those buildings is Iran's National Vacuum Technology Center. Vacuum technology is a crucial component of Iran's uranium-gas centrifuges, which enrich uranium. A Twitter account called Observer IL earlier this week published an image of Fordo showing the construction, citing it as coming from South Korea's Korea Aerospace Research Institute. The AP later reached the Twitter user, who identified himself as a retired Israeli Defense Forces soldier with a civil engineering background. He asked that his name not be published over previous threats he received online. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute acknowledged taking the satellite photo. Trump in 2018 unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from Iran's nuclear deal, in which Tehran had agreed to limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Trump cited Iran's ballistic missile program, its regional policies and other issues in withdrawing from the accord, though the deal focused entirely on Tehran's atomic program.
When the U.S. ramped up sanctions, Iran gradually and publicly abandoned the deal's limits as a series of escalating incidents pushed the two countries to the brink of war at the beginning of the year. Tensions still remain high. Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran agreed to stop enriching uranium at Fordo and instead make it "a nuclear, physics and technology center." "This location was a major sticking point in negotiations leading to the Iran nuclear deal," Lewis said. "The U.S. insisted Iran close it while Iran's supreme leader said keeping it was a red line." Since the deal's collapse, Iran has resumed enrichment there.
Shielded by the mountains, the facility also is ringed by anti-aircraft guns and other fortifications. It is about the size of a football field, large enough to house 3,000 centrifuges, but small and hardened enough to lead U.S. officials to suspect it had a military purpose when they exposed the site publicly in 2009. As of now, Iran is enriching uranium up to 4.5%, in violation of the accord's limit of 3.67%. Iran's parliament has passed a bill that requires Tehran to enrich up to 20%, a short technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. The bill also would throw out IAEA inspectors.
Experts say Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium stockpiled for at least two nuclear weapons, if it chose to pursue them. Iran long has maintained its nuclear program is peaceful. While Iranian President Hassan Rouhani opposed the bill, the country's Guardian Council later tweaked and approved it. The bill seeks to pressure European nations to provide relief from crippling U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, an Iranian scientist who created its military nuclear program two decades ago recently was killed in a shooting outside of Tehran. Iran has blamed Israel, which has long been suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the last decade, for the attack. Israel has not commented on the attack.

Turkey Has Evacuated 7 Syrian Military Posts
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 18 December, 2020
Turkey has evacuated seven military observation posts in northwest Syria, pulling back troops from territory controlled by the Syrian government to areas held by insurgents and Turkey-backed opposition factions, a Turkish source said on Friday.
Turkey had set up a dozen military posts in the region in 2018 as part of an ill-fated deal it reached with Russia and Iran to calm fighting between Syrian government troops and opposition factions. Several Turkish military posts were surrounded last year by the Russian-backed Syrian government forces. Turkey vowed at the time to maintain its presence at all of them but it started withdrawing in October. The source, who requested anonymity, said the last of the evacuations was completed on Thursday night, and the forces were being redeployed within territory controlled by the Ankara-backed forces under an understanding reached with Russia. "It is not in the form of troop withdrawal or reducing their numbers. The situation is just about changing location," the source said, according to Reuters. Syrian opposition factions say Turkey retains between 10,000 and 15,000 troops in northwest Syria, alongside opposition fighters backed by Turkey and extremist forces it has committed to disarm and contain. Already home to nearly 4 million Syrian refugees, Turkey is determined to prevent further influx of people fleeing fighting. The United Nations says there are about 4 million people in northwest Syria outside Syrian government control, of which 2.7 million have been displaced during the nine-year conflict.

Turkey finally faces the consequences of its actions
Jerusalem Post Editorial/December 18/2020
Senior US officials said in a call with reporters this week that Ankara’s purchase of the S-400s and its refusal to reverse its decision left the United States with no other choice.
After years in which Turkey’s leadership has threatened the region, invaded countries and attacked minority groups while working with Iran and Russia, the US has finally slapped sanctions on Ankara over its purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense system. The sanctions come after years during which Washington tried every avenue to get Turkey not to acquire or use the new system.
Senior US officials said in a call with reporters this week that Ankara’s purchase of the S-400s and its refusal to reverse its decision left the United States with no other choice.
“The United States made clear to Turkey at the highest levels and on numerous occasions that its purchase of the S-400 system would endanger the security of US military technology and personnel and provide substantial funds to Russia’s defense sector,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.
Turkey’s drift away from its allies in the West, to become an authoritarian state in which women, minorities and dissidents are crushed under the boot of totalitarianism, has been a long process. The regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ruled the country for almost two decades. It has fundamentally changed Turkey from a country that was once an ally of Israel and the US into a country that hosts Hamas and recruits Syrian mercenaries and religious extremists. Turkey had a chance in the early 2000s to become a country of laws and freedoms, to become more like countries in the West. It didn’t need to sacrifice its strength to do that, Israel has also had to deal with the complexities of the region while preserving freedom of the press and rights for minorities and differing sexual orientations. However, in Israel we have a model of balancing rights and the need for security. We have a critical press and gay pride parades. In Turkey, they have dismantled every aspect of freedom they once had. The country is the largest jailer of journalists in the world. Dissidents have been forced to flee or go into hiding and the opposition party has been jailed. People are imprisoned just for tweets that are critical of Erdogan.
The US sanctions are not about these human rights issues. However, history teaches us that countries that begin with suppressing minorities, as the Kurds are suppressed in Turkey, end by launching militaristic wars. Turkey’s trend is similar to fascist states of the 1930s. It began with crushing dissent and minorities and women. It has ended by invading and ethnically cleansing Afrin in Syria, encouraging a war against Armenians and exporting extremists around the region. Turkey is also fanning flames of anti-Israel views, vowing to liberate Jerusalem and hosting Hamas terrorists as if Hamas is a government. Hamas gets more of a red carpet in Turkey than it does in Iran. Like Iran, Turkey supports the murderous terror group. Turkey ran into sanctions and anger in the US Congress for acquiring Russia’s S-400. Turkey is supposed to be a NATO member, not working with Russia. However, in recent years Erdogan has appeared smiling with Russia’s leader and with Iran’s president. Meanwhile, Ankara threatened US forces and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria, attacking innocent people like activist Hevrin Khalaf. Every step of the way, the S-400 is a symbol of Turkey’s general trend to become an authoritarian anti-American country. It also opposes Israel’s new friends in the Gulf. US sanctions are a welcome opportunity to have a conversation about Turkey’s destabilizing role in the region. Turkey has inflamed extremists in Syria, undermining the war against the Assad regime by recruiting Syrians to fight against Kurds, Armenians and in Libya. Turkey threatened our partners in Greece and Cyprus. It has even harassed an Israeli ship last year. The IDF and Mossad have both assessed that this is a growing challenge. Turkey has recently appointed a new envoy to Israel who is an anti-Israel extremist and accuses us of massacres and displacing people. Turkey’s new envoy should look in the mirror, it is his country that displaced 300,000 Kurds in Syria and his country that has rained terror on poor innocent women in places like Afrin and Serekaniye, and forced Armenians from their homes. While Israel is a state of diversity and tolerance, Turkey is a state of prisons. The US should keep up the sanctions and isolate Turkey until it changes.

Turkey says will not reverse Russian S-400S purchase despite US sanctions
Reuters Staff/ANKARA/Reuters/December 18/2020
Turkey will not reverse its purchase of Russian S-400 missile defence systems and will take reciprocal steps after evaluating U.S. sanctions imposed over the acquisition, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday. The United States on Monday imposed sanctions targeting fellow NATO member Turkey’s Defence Industry Directorate (SSB), its chief, Ismail Demir, and three other staff for buying the S-400s. President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday the sanctions were a “hostile attack” against Turkey’s defence industry, and were bound to fail. Cavusoglu said Turkey’s response would be shaped by a review being carried out by the defence sector, along with the foreign and justice ministries, into the impact of the sanctions. “We will surely take our steps in line with these,” he told broadcaster Kanal 24. “It’s not important whether the sanctions are soft or harsh, sanctions in themselves are wrong,” he said. “Looking at the content of the sanctions, these are not measures that will shake us to the core or impact us very much.” Turkey says it bought the S-400s out of necessity as it was unable to get defence systems from a NATO ally on satisfactory terms. “If there was to be a step back, it would have happened by now,” Cavusoglu said. The United States says the S-400s pose a threat to its F-35 fighter jets and to NATO’s broader defence systems. Turkey rejects this and says S-400s will not be integrated into NATO. Speaking to the state-owned Anadolu news agency, SSB Chairman Ismail Demir played down the impact of the measures, saying they did not affect existing contracts, and covered only a limited number of Turkish companies. “For instance, a company where the SSB hold a majority stake may be impacted, but there are close to no such firms. There are no such firms on critical projects,” he said.
The sanctions come at a delicate moment in fraught relations between Ankara and Washington as Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gears up to take office on Jan. 20, replacing Republican incumbent Donald Trump. Asked whether ties could normalise under Biden, Cavusoglu said Washington must address Turkey’s opposition to U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish fighters, and Ankara’s request to extradite a U.S.-based cleric it accuses of organising a 2016 coup attempt. “If the United States thinks strategically, they need Turkey very much. They say this, but they must do what is necessitated by this,” he said.
*Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Daren Butler, Dominic Evans and Mark Heinrich

Saudi king, US president discuss regional developments
The Arab Weekly/December 18/2020
RIYADH – Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud called US President Donald Trump on Thursday and discussed developments in the region, the state news agency SPA reported. The two leaders also discussed the strategic bilateral relations between the kingdom and the United States, SPA reported.
All eyes in the Middle East are on Trump’s final moves before he leaves office in January next year, with Iran bracing itself for renewed US pressure as tensions rise in the region following attacks on oil installations and maritime traffic in the Red Sea by suspected Iranian proxies. When Trump took office in 2017, he, his adviser Jared Kushner and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz developed a personal relationship, finding common ground on efforts to counter Iran’s regional threats. In recent weeks, Washington has been hoping to mend a divide between Qatar and four other Arab countries. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in 2017 and imposed a blockade on Qatar, accusing it of backing extremist groups. Both US and Kuwaiti officials have attempted to broker a deal between Riyadh and Doha before, to no avail. The four nations initially presented a list of 13 demands that included further freezing out Iran and shuttering state-funded TV network Al Jazeera, but have backed down on some of them, the Journal reported. Earlier in December, Kushner travelled to Saudi Arabia and Qatar in a final effort before Biden assumes office “to secure more diplomatic agreements in the Middle East before the Trump administration leaves office in January, according to US and Gulf officials,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s Dion Nissenbaum and Summer Said.

Israel’s Netanyahu, top US military discuss Iranian threat
Arab News/December 18, 2020
LONDON: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, on Friday to discuss regional threats, especially Iranian aggression. They also “discussed the ongoing military cooperation between the two countries and the opportunities that currently lie in the region,” Ofir Gendelman, the premier’s spokesperson, told the Arab media. Netanyahu thanked Milley for the military cooperation, which has deepened in recent years, and expressed his desire to continue to deepen it, Gendelman added in a tweet. Earlier on Friday, Netanyahu held a video conference with Milley, who is currently on a two-day visit to Israel. The top army official said “on behalf of the entire US military, we thank Israel for their strong commitment to our partnership.” Milley is on a whirlwind world tour, visiting Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Afghanistan to discuss the threats from Iran.
On Friday he met Defense Minister Benny Gantz, where they stressed the importance of continued pressure on the Iranian regime to halt its nuclear program. “During the meeting, they (also) discussed the challenges and different changes in the operational situation in the Middle East,” the defense minister’s office said.During his visit, Milley also met the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi and other defense and military officials.

Democrats, Republicans Criticize Erdogan’s Practices in the Region
Washington - Rana Abtar/Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 18 December, 2020
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel and Lead Republican Michael McCaul expressed their deep concern over Turkey’s actions under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a statement, they said that Ankara’s practices endanger the NATO alliance, the region, democracy and the rule of law in Turkey. “We are gravely concerned by the threat Turkey’s increasingly provocative behavior poses to our decades-long bilateral relationship, to the NATO alliance, and to the region more broadly,” the statement read. They added: “While we continue to see real value in a strong US-Turkey relationship, its destabilizing actions need to be more strongly addressed and the United States must work with its European and NATO allies and partners to continue to use all of the tools at their disposal to demand that Turkey reverse course.”The two lawmakers urged “Erdogan to put an end to Turkey’s provocative behavior so the United States and Turkey can once again enjoy a close and cooperative relationship built on mutual security interests, a strong commitment to NATO, and shared democratic values.” The statement provided a long list of recent actions of concern by Turkey under Erdogan, including his acquisition of the Russian S-400 missile defense system, which “undermines the alliance’s collective defense pledge... and allows (Russian President) Vladimir Putin to continue to sow division in the alliance.”The list also included Turkey’s military operation in northeast Syria, which “risked reversing critical gains by the United States and our (US) local partners in the ongoing counter-ISIS fight and exacerbated the existing humanitarian crisis. Even now, Turkish-supported groups in northern Syria are accused of committing egregious human rights violations.”“In the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey has surveyed for hydrocarbon resources in disputed waters also claimed by Greece, a NATO member, and Cyprus, a key transatlantic partner, and EU member,” the lawmakers said. The statement slammed Erdogan for openly hosting “Hamas terrorists in Turkey, including individuals designated by the United States for their terrorist activities.”
“At home, Erdogan’s government has undermined Turkey’s democratic institutions by consolidating his own power, undermining the independence of Turkey’s judiciary and rolling back the democratic rights and freedoms of the Turkish people, including by targeting locally-employed staff at US Consulates with baseless criminal charges,” the statement added. Earlier this week, Washington slapped sanctions on Turkey for its acquisition of the S-400 system.

U.S. Vice President Gets Covid-19 Vaccine, Trump Sparks Confusion
Agence France Presse/December 18/2020
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence received a Covid-19 jab on live television Friday as the country prepared to greenlight its second vaccine in a boost to the planet's unprecedented immunization campaign. Pence's move comes as inoculation efforts are unfurling around the world in the race to halt a pandemic that has claimed at least 1.66 million lives and infected more than 74 million people. Yet in hard-hit Europe -- which is yet to approve a vaccine -- unease was mounting after Slovakia's 47-year-old Prime Minister Igor Matovic tested positive Friday for Covid-19 a week after attending an EU summit in Brussels. The summit is believed to be where French President Emmanuel Macron caught the virus, an announcement a day earlier that led a host of European leaders and top French officials to rush into self-isolation. Elsewhere, world leaders from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are pledging to get public injections like Pence in order to boost faith in the jabs. "Building confidence in the vaccine is what brings us here this morning," Pence said after receiving the Pfizer/BioNTeh shot at the White House with his wife.
"I didn't feel a thing."
The event capped the US's first week of a mass vaccination program with the Pfizer/BioNtech jab against a virus that has killed more than 300,000 Americans. Another vaccine, made by Moderna, is now expected to become the second shot allowed in a Western country after a panel of US experts recommended emergency use approval. President Donald Trump -- notably absent from Pence's vaccine event -- has frequently downplayed the seriousness of Covid-19 throughout the pandemic. But he has been eager to take credit for record-fast vaccine breakthroughs. He sparked some confusion Friday by jumping the gun to declare Moderna approved, ahead of the final verdict from the Food and Drug Administration expected later in the day.
"Distribution to start immediately," Trump tweeted.
Two billion doses
The European Union is facing pressure to approve vaccines after Britain and the United States have administered tens of thousands of shots while China and Russia have launched efforts with domestically-produce vaccines. The bloc intends to begin its inoculations with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before the end of the year, with some countries naming December 27 as a start date. Poorer countries also got a boost Friday when the World Health Organization and partners said vaccines would be distributed early next year to the 190 countries in its Covax initiative, a pooling effort formed to ensure an equitable distribution. "The light at the end of the tunnel has grown a little bit brighter," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference. Two billion doses have been secured from developers AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novovax and Sanofi/GSK, though none of their candidates have so far received authorization for use. In China at least one million people have already received shots from domestically-produced vaccine candidates approved for "emergency use". After focusing on priority groups, the country plans to widen its program to the public in southwestern Sichuan province early next year, health officials said. China's five coronavirus vaccines are in the final stages of development, but none has received official approval and the results of late-stage trials have yet to be published.
Africa's second wave
While the world's vaccine plans have lifted spirits, the virus is still claiming thousands of lives every day. Europe is still in the throes of a winter surge that has caused almost 37,000 deaths over the past seven days, the highest weekly toll since the start of the pandemic. And Africa was bracing for a second wave as new virus cases emerge in the east, north and south. In total the continent of more than 1.2 billion people has registered over 57,000 deaths, with one latest victim former president of Burundi Pierre Buyoya. He died at age 71 on Thursday just weeks after resigning as the African Union's special envoy to Mali and the Sahel. Yet the epidemic has still not been as destructive in the continent as experts feared, possibly because of Africa's youthful population, cross-immunity derived from previous epidemics and a lower population density in some countries. Latin America, however, is still seeing hard days, with Brazil and Mexico logging the highest number of new deaths after the United States. Despite warnings against large Christmas celebrations, Mexico's capital was still churning out pinatas for the holiday season. Instead of the traditional door-to-door carolling, Hilda Varela, a 66-year-old doctor, was among those settling for a middle ground with a celebration on Facebook. "By tradition, you cannot close the door to God. Even if online, we will go forward," she told AFP.

Mossad chief 'Yossi Cohen has been a nightmare for the Iranians'
Arutz Sheva/December 18/2020
Senior Israeli journalist and Middle East affairs expert discusses Arab world's interest in changing of the guard at Israel's Mossad.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decided this week to appoint deputy Mossad chief D. as the new chief of the Mossad intelligence agency, replacing the outgoing chief Yossi Cohen. Zvi Yehezkel, a commentator for Channel 13 on Middle East affairs, discussed the interest the Arab world has shown in the changing of the guard at Israel's foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. "It is fascinating to see how the Arab media is interested in the replacement of the Mossad chief," said Yehezkel in an interview with Radio 103FM. "But Yossi Cohen is responsible for shaping people's lives in the Middle East, therefore there is interest." "Yossi Cohen has become a legend in the Arab world. Iran's leadership made so many attempts to uncover the identities of Mossad agents, and never succeeded. Under Cohen, the Mossad revealed Iran's secrets."On Wednesday, Cohen joined President Reuven Rivlin for a Hanukkah candle lighting ceremony, during which he praised the Mossad for its recent work, including in laying the foundation for the recent peace deals with moderate Arab states. “Facing the challenges and providing security for the State of Israel and its people, over the last few months we have seen breakthroughs in peace and normalization across the region. I am proud to say that the Mossad played a significant role in the developments that came to fruition recently." "The peace and normalization accords reached recently are a vital component of our national security. Just as the Mossad works to foil the plans of Israel’s enemies, it constantly seeks opportunities for peace and cooperation and when it finds them, it works methodically and patiently to turn them into real and stable assets."

Documents Refute Israeli Claims that Ex-Syrian PM Jamil Mardam Bey Was ‘Double Agent’
Bassma Kodmani/Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 18 December, 2020
Israeli media published last month an article alleging that former Syrian Prime Minister Jamil Mardam Bey was a “double agent” who worked for France, Britain and Israel.
Author and Israeli researcher Meir Zamir claimed that he had discovered a trove of documents from the French archive that prove that Mardam Bey was double agent. The official served in office in the 1930s and 1940s and is among the most prominent Syrian national figures.
The article was published without verifying the claims. Those adept at academic research will notice that the “damning evidence” alleged by Zamir were not documented. The very article in which he presented his claims does not merit being described as a serious study of history.
Perhaps it did not occur to Zamir that Mardam Bey was one of the few Arab figures to have preserved all his personal documents. Indeed, he had left at his Cairo home more than 10,000 documents on significant developments that took place during his term as finance, former affairs and defense minister and then prime minister. He kept every personal or official document. He was supposed to hand them over to the Syrian state archive, but after witnessing the tumult in his country, he chose to keep them. After his death, his family sought that the documents be placed in the possession of the Syrian people. It therefore tasked me with this mission. I worked with a specialized archive center to organize them in a professional manner. They have since been digitized and will soon be available for access to historians. The documents include minutes of meetings, correspondence, speeches, journal entries and reports on official visits or political analyses. Mardam Bey also used to write his own notes by hand to comment on an issue or a significant event. Zamir deliberately sought to tarnish Mardam Bey’s reputation. The Syrian official is known throughout the Arab world as a national figure, who was skilled at diplomacy. He is known for his contributions to the liberation of Arab lands from colonization and had waged fierce political battles for Syria’s independence. The majority of correspondence between Mardam Bey and British government representatives reveal a strong relationship he had forged with the then world power. Ahead of World War II, its army was protecting the Middle East against the German army and the Nazi regime. France, meanwhile, had surrendered to the Nazis. Its resistance leader Charles de Gaulle had sought refuge in London where he launched the movement against the Nazis.
Alleged ‘double agent’
On Zamir’s claims of Mardam Bey’s collaboration with the French that he had alleged to have found in the French archive, developments on the ground refute these claims. France had vowed to recognize Syria as an independent state in 1941. The Syrian Republic, as it was then known, then became a member of the United Nations and Paris slowly began to back down from its pledge. It began to exert pressure on Syrian officials to agree to the deployment of special forces under French command. Mardam Bey, as defense minister in 1945, categorially rejected the proposal and accused the French of seeking to deprive Syria of a national army. How could Mardam Bey be an agent to French when de Gaulle wrote in his journals that the British were conspiring with the Syrians to kick France out of Syria? Mardam Bey had turned into a fierce enemy of the French so much so that French General Delegate to Syria Étienne Paul-Émile-Marie Beynet had spoken of how he had lost faith in him and other Syrian national leaders. He even stated that they should be replaced by men who had previously cooperated with Paris. Mardam Bey and his nationalist colleagues were unfortunate to find themselves alone in confronting France’s coercions. A report on a meeting with British officials showed their rejection of France’s pressure and threats. They promised Mardam Bey that Britain will wield its influence to ensure that negotiations with the French would be smooth and transparent. However, Britain soon changed its position when France was again declared an independent nation after it was liberated from the Nazis in 1944. As an independent country, Britain could no longer exert pressure on France and so the Syrians were on their own. Of course, the British did not want to help the Syrians achieve independence without a price. They sought for Syria to become part of the Hashemite Kingdom, in what Mardam Bey would describe as “British deceit and double standards.”
Mercurial man
The British soon grew annoyed with Mardam Bey, whom they described as the “mercurial” foreign minister. They completely turned against him over his perceived hardline stance against the French. The loss of trust was mutual. Several documents from the British foreign ministry showed that officials had sought on several occasions to sidestep Mardam Bey and approach the president and prime minister without referring to him first. Tensions between the Syrian and French leaders reached their peak in 1945 when France carried out a barbaric air raid against state buildings in Damascus, including the parliament. The foreign ministry was struck in an attempt against Mardam Bey’s life after he had delivered a strongly-worded address at parliament where he attacked the French and threatened to disclose documents that expose the British and the pressure they exerted on the Syrians to accept the French terms.
What sort of agent would openly attack and threaten world powers? How would he not fear that they would expose his role as an agent? Had Mardam Bey indeed been a “double agent”, where are the favors that he offered the French, British or Zionists, who had initially admired his diplomatic skills, but soon turned on him when he started to use these skills against their interests?

Algerians Impatient for Change with President Still out Sick
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 18 December, 2020
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's first appearance since being hospitalized in Germany with COVID-19 in October was intended to reassure a country where big political decisions are long overdue. But on the streets of Algiers people voiced growing impatience after the five-minute video message he gave on Sunday saying he would still be away for up to three weeks. "Most of our demands are still awaiting a response," said Ahmed Abbachi, a member of the leaderless protest movement known as Hirak. The major energy producer has been in turmoil since early last year when mass protests pushed the old president Abdelaziz Bouteflika from power along with many of his clique, but left much of the ruling elite at the helm. The period of unrest, and this year's pandemic, have delayed Algeria's efforts to address systemic frailties looming over the economy as declining oil and gas revenue threaten lavish social spending. The 75-year-old, a heavy smoker, appeared gaunt in his video message, the first sight that Algerians had had of their president since he went to Germany. The absence of any photographs or videos spurred rumors that his condition was worse than the official news bulletins proclaiming his good health were letting on. It reminded many Algerians of the long years when Bouteflika was incapacitated by illness, leaving government largely rudderless while rival power blocs in the ruling elite jostled for influence. "Bouteflika was completely unable to speak, to walk, and we were told over and over again that he was capable of leading the country," said plumber Antar Aissaoui, before Tebboune's video appearance. The president will have a full in-tray when he finally returns to Algiers. The government is pushing a program of economic reforms seen as necessary to avert a looming fiscal crunch after burning through more than half its foreign currency reserves in five years. The Hirak street protest movement remains unconvinced by Tebboune's efforts to turn a page on last year's unrest. While demonstrations have not taken place since a COVID-19 lockdown began in March, the referendum he pushed in November on constitutional changes had turnout of only a quarter of registered voters. "Algeria faces one of the most difficult periods of its history. Threats are surrounding us from all directions," said schoolteacher Rachid Chalabi, referring to the internal political crisis, looming economic threats and conflicts in neighboring countries.
"Tebboune will face his biggest challenges after recovering. Everything indicates that the path to stability is still long," said 37-year-old engineer Djamel Taibi.

Egypt Officials: Bombs Kill 3 Security Forces in Sinai
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 18 December, 2020
Two roadside bombs exploded in restive northern Sinai Peninsula killing three members of Egypt's security forces and wounding 10 others, officials said Friday. The bombs went off near separate checkpoints in the town of Sheikh Zuweid late Thursday, said two security officials and a medical official, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to brief the media. The officials didn't say who was responsible for the attacks and no one immediately claimed responsibility. But Egypt has been battling an ISIS-led insurgency in the Sinai. The militants have carried out scores of attacks, mainly targeting security forces and minority Christians, The Associated Press reported. The first explosion Thursday night left one dead and seven wounded, while the second killed two and wounded three, the officials said. The casualties were transferred to El-Arish military hospital. Also on Thursday, the Egyptian military carried out a series of raids in the same town killing four militants, officials said. It wasn't clear if the raids took place before or after the bombings. In February 2018, the military launched a massive operation in Sinai that also encompassed parts of the Nile Delta and deserts along the country’s western border with Libya. Since then, the pace of ISIS attacks in Sinai’s north has diminished.

Algerian State Tightens Screws on Online Media
Agence France Presse/December 18/2020
Algeria has announced tighter state controls over online media, sparking alarm in the North African country whose pro-democracy movement is under heightened pressure from the government. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's government, already accused of stifling free speech, this month published a new decree regulating electronic media in the online Official Gazette. Among other things, it will force web-based Algerian media outlets to be based within the country and demand that they inform authorities of any "illegal content". The new rules aim to combat "the misuse of this type of modern media" and the spread of "rumors, fake news and fake videos", said Communications Minister Ammar Belhimer. The decree, which the minister -- a former journalist -- argues will protect Algeria and its armed forces against malicious attacks, has been roundly decried by media professionals. It amounts to "an absurd ban on an independent electronic press -- this is another bad signal", journalist Said Djaafer wrote in an editorial on the website 24HDZ. Hamdi Baala, a journalist at the Twala news site, said that online media has so far been "a free space that is technically and economically beyond the control of the authorities. "With this decree, they want to get control over it."
'Illegal content'
The new rules, to be enforced over the next 12 months, come at a time the Algerian government has put on trial or jailed a string of activists and journalists associated with the pro-democracy Hirak movement. Hirak's mass demonstrations broke out early last year and forced long-time president Abdelaziz Bouteflika from power in April 2019. They continued after that, demanding a far more sweeping overhaul of a sclerotic political system in place since independence from France in 1962, but ground to a halt as the novel coronavirus pandemic struck. Tebboune, in power since December 2019, has sought ostensibly to reach out to the Hirak movement, even as the regime has tightened the screws. Online restrictions are nothing new for Algeria's 22 million Internet users. The site TSA, or All About Algeria, has been repeatedly blocked since 2017, and over the past year the state has censored sites including Radio M, Maghreb Emergent, Interlignes and Casbah Tribune. The new online media decree would make state control far more systematic, including by requiring all online media to obtain a license to operate. Two new regulatory authorities are to be set up, one in charge of the electronic press, the other for online audiovisual services. All sites, many of which are now hosted from abroad, must in future be "exclusively domiciled" in Algeria, with the ".dz" domain name.
The new decree also stipulates that online media directors must notify the authorities of any "illegal content" published on their platforms.
'Grotesque situation'
Aymen Zaghdoudi, a legal adviser with free speech group Article 19, charges the new rules seek to strengthen "the control of political power over freedom of expression online". Forcing sites to be based in Algeria "could lead to the violation of certain principles such as the secrecy of sources," he said. And forcing sites to report what authorities deem to be illegal content, he said, would "turn journalists into police auxiliaries". The other pressure building on online media is commercial. State restrictions can be circumvented with VPN technology, but they do impact audience size -- and therefore crucial private advertising revenues. Further pressure could come through the allocation of public sector advertising, controlled by the National Agency for Publishing and Advertising. The agency, which has so far worked with print and broadcast media, is setting up a digital control room for online media operations.
The journalist Djaafer has no doubt all the changes have one aim -- to "outlaw those who want to remain independent". Baala said that "we do not intend to comply with the decree because it is illegal. Even if we wanted to do it, we don't see how. The situation is grotesque."

From Hope to Agony, What's Left of the Arab Spring?
Agence France Presse/December 18/2020
Ten years ago a wildfire of revolts in the Arab world touched off an unlikely series of events that swelled, then dashed many hopes, and irrevocably changed the region.
From the quickfire collapse of seemingly invincible regimes to the rise and fall of a jihadist caliphate in its heart, the Middle East hurtled through the 21st century's second decade in a state of relentless upheaval. The chain of uprisings that shook the region from late 2010 and was soon dubbed the "Arab Spring" led to disparate long-term outcomes, with many countries today looking worse off. The popular protests that erupted in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen a decade ago were followed by disappointing reforms at best, dictatorial backlash or all-out conflict at worst. Yet the spirit of the revolts is far from dead, as evidenced by the second wave of uprisings that caught on in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon eight years later. Something "in the fabric of reality itself" has changed since then, said Lina Mounzer, a Lebanese author and translator whose family has roots in both Egypt and Syria. "I don't know that there is anything more moving or noble than a people demanding a life of dignity in a single voice," she added. "It proves that such a thing is possible, that people can revolt against the worst despots, that there is enough courage in people standing and working together to face down entire armies."
Tunisia spark -
It all started on December 17, 2010 when a young street vendor, worn down by years of police harassment, doused himself with fuel in front of the governor's office in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid and set himself on fire. Mohamed Bouazizi's was not the first self-immolation in the region, or even in Tunisia, but it sparked a rage never seen before. Nor was his story caught on camera -- but it went viral nonetheless.
By the time Bouazizi died of his wounds on January 4, the protest movement against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power for 23 years, had spread to the entire country. Ten days later, Ben Ali was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, pro-democracy protests broke out in Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
It was when the rage spilled into the streets of Cairo, the region's largest city and its historical political crucible, that the contagion earned its "Arab Spring" moniker.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Egypt to shout their democratic aspirations and demand the removal of Hosni Mubarak, president since 1981.
It's hard to overstate the sense of hope and euphoria that these images projected across the region and the rest of the world.
Groundswell of hope -
Look at the streets of Egypt tonight; this is what hope looks like," celebrated Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif wrote in The Guardian at the time. The voice of the people was rising as one, not just in one country but across the region, toppling some of the planet's most entrenched dictatorships. One sentence that will go down as the slogan of the Arab Spring rippled across the region: "Al-shaab yureed isqat al-nizam" -- Arabic for "The people want the downfall of the regime". These words were both a primal scream giving courage to a generation that never knew it had so much and a kind of incantation that, if repeated long enough, would miraculously free the people. A new paradigm was being born for the Middle East with the realization that its tyrants were not ten foot tall and that change could come from within. Author Lina Mounzer remembers how the early days shattered the sense of "Arab defeat" that weighed on two generations after the death of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and his pan-Arab nationalistic project. "There was a sense that we Arabs were somehow too lazy and tired to rise up against oppression, that we accepted the rule of dictators and despots because we were fundamentally flawed, or else had been shaped into beasts of burden by colonialism and Western meddling," she told AFP.
Unthinkable
The unthinkable happened on February 11, 2011, when it was announced that Mubarak was resigning. "The night that Mubarak fell I cried with joy. I couldn't believe how brave and beautiful were the Egyptian people. It seemed like the dawn of a new era," Mounzer recalled. "And then, Syria. If I thought I was happy for Egypt, surprised by Egypt, I was ecstatic for Syria... It felt like my parents' Arab nationalist dreams were finally being realized... through the force and will of the people themselves." Six months before being murdered in Istanbul, Saudi author and dissident Jamal Khashoggi argued the revolts once and for all put paid to the notion that Arabs and democracy were a mismatch.
"The debate about the relationship between Islam and democracy conclusively ended with the coming of the Arab Spring," he said in a 2018 speech. Besides Ben Ali and Mubarak, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh and last year Sudan's Omar al-Bashir were the other significant scalps claimed by the Arab revolutions. The five of them combined a whopping 146 years of rule, not counting Saleh's 12 years as president of North Yemen before the country’s unification in 1990.
--- Ben Ali 1987 - 2011
--- Mubarak 1981 - 2011
--- Kadhafi 1969 - 2011
--- Saleh 1990 - 2012
--- Bashir 1989 - 2019
For a while, the collapse of the region's autocracies looked unstoppable.
- 'Arab Winter' -
Yet the term "Arab Spring" itself, which started appearing in late January 2011, is seldom used in Arab countries -- where the words for uprising and revolution are preferred -- and has since been criticized as a misnomer. Noah Feldman's 2019 book on the subject is entitled "Arab Winter", a catchphrase that started being used almost immediately after the phrase "Arab Spring" caught on. In a cover blurb for the book, prominent academic Michael Ignatieff says it highlights "one of the most important events of our time: the tragic failure of the Arab Spring". The vacuum created by the downfall of reviled regimes was not filled by the democratic reforms protesters had been calling for, instead in many cases turmoil ensued. In Egypt, a brief and exhilarating experience in self-rule was soon soured by brutal police repression. In 2012, Egyptians elected Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist whose program was met with fierce opposition from part of the protest camp, paving the way for a 2013 coup by the defense minister. Retired general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is still in power today and his rule is arguably more autocratic than Mubarak's ever was. The disappointment within the original protest camp was bitter. Ahdaf Soueif's hope from the heady days of February 2011 now seems a long-faded mirage. "I never imagined that my nephew, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, would still be in prison today," she told AFP. "Or that poverty would be at an all-time high... or that Egypt, for the first time in its history, should become a land its young want to leave."
Backlash -
In Bahrain, the only Gulf monarchy to experience mass protests, the uprising was brutally quashed with the help of Saudi Arabia, which preempted any revolutionary inclinations on its own soil with massive cash handouts. Protests in civil war-scarred Algeria did not catch on, those in Morocco were doused with cosmetic reforms and repression through the courts. Libya's erstwhile revolutionaries split into myriad militias that fragmented the country. Yemen slid into a sectarian-fueled civil conflict.لا But the place where the Arab Spring came to die was Syria. Few of the region's leaders could have seemed more difficult to unseat than Bashar al-Assad when 2011 started, but within weeks of the first protests, the writing was on the wall for the former London-based ophthalmologist. Literally. "Your turn, doctor." The words, inspired by the undoing of Ben Ali and Mubarak, were spray-painted on a wall in the southern town of Daraa.لاThe teenagers guilty of such lese-majeste were swiftly detained and tortured, prompting a wave of angry protests for their release many point to as the spark for the nationwide uprising. Assad's turn never came however. He weathered the storm, becoming the domino that didn't fall. With the exception of Tunisia where there is now a fragile democracy, each of the revolution countries collapsed in their own way. In Syria, the regime's ultimately successful fight to the death killed more than 380,000 people.
Jihadist diversion-
One of the graffiti boys, Moawiya Sayasina, told AFP in 2018 that the backlash was worse than he had ever imagined. "I'm proud of what we did back then, but I never thought we'd get to this point, that the regime would destroy us like this. We thought we'd get rid of it," he said. As protest movements were brutally repressed and sectarian hatred ignited, jihadists -- in Syria and elsewhere -- found fertile ground. "It didn't take long for the protesters' non-violent ethos to flicker out in the battle zones of Libya, Syria, and Yemen," author and journalist Robert F. Worth writes in "A Rage for Order". "Under the convenient cover of street protests -- where they could travel without being recognized -- the jihadists were suddenly watching the collapse of the state in all three countries." Their growth culminated with the 2014 proclamation by the Islamic State group of a "caliphate" roughly the size of Britain straddling Syria and Iraq.
The ultra-violence that IS craftily propagated on social media and the group's ability to attract thousands of fighters from Europe and beyond instilled a fear in the West that wiped out the early pro-democracy enthusiasm.The world's focus shifted to the fight against terrorism and away from the removal of autocratic regimes, which quickly recast themselves as the last rampart against Islamic extremism.
Ravaged region -
The West, led by the U.S. administration of Barack Obama, failed to see the Arab revolts coming, initially voicing support for protesters. But they stopped short of direct intervention, with the exception of the controversial NATO-led raids which dislodged Kadhafi in Libya. "The central political meaning of the Arab Spring and its aftermath is that it featured Arabic-speaking people acting essentially on their own, as full-fledged, independent makers of their own history and of global history more broadly," Feldman writes.رThe West moved away from its decades of support to some of the region's dictatorships, but failed to follow up by backing an alternative. A decade on, one would be hard-pressed to look at the Arab revolts as a success. The conflict in Syria has left the country in ruins and triggered the worst human displacement since World War II.
In Yemen, children are starving to death, and Libya has turned into a lawless and fragmented battleground for militias and their foreign sponsors in which democratic aspirations have been buried deep.
- Work in progress -
So what is left of the Arab Spring, if anything? Ahdaf Soueif argues it is still too early to tell what its legacy will be and that the revolts are still a work in progress. "The conditions under which people had lived from the mid-70s onwards led to revolt. It was unavoidable. It continues to be unavoidable," she said. She and other activists are eager to shoot down the narrative that links the growth of radical Islam to the revolutions, stressing it was the counter-revolutions that fueled the kind of disenfranchisement and poverty jihadists feed on. Soueif also rejected the suggestion that Egypt has reverted to what it was before 2011 and argued that "people are now alive and alert" in a new way. "Also, there's a social revolution that got a big push forward. Issues like women's rights and LGBTQ rights -- their path is very rough, but they're more visible, they've elbowed their way into a fraction more space," she said. A fresh wave of protests demanding transparency and democratic reform broke out last year in Sudan, Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon. The same slogans echoed again, confirming that the spirit of 2011 was still alive and a source of inspiration for the region's youth.
'Tsunami'
For Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, a professor at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, the core demands of the protests are still bubbling under the surface and "will boil over at the next opportunity like a political tsunami". "The people of the region set a new yardstick for the politics and governance that they demand. Since then, all politics has been measured against those demands," said Adib-Moghaddam, who authored "On the Arab revolts and the Iranian revolution: Power and resistance today"."Any state that doesn't understand this new reality is bound to be confronted," he said.
History shows that revolutions can take many, often troubled, years to yield results but the less visible changes that occur among those who took part are not easily reversed. Alaa al-Aswany, arguably Egypt's best-known living novelist and a central character of the commune-like scene that briefly camped out on Cairo's Tahrir square, likes to say that "revolution is like falling in love, it makes you a better person." Lina Mounzer, who since those days has lived through Lebanon's own revolt in 2019, concurs that whatever comes next, the way people view their leaders, the rest of the world and perhaps more importantly themselves has been durably affected. "We have lived so long in a world that has tried to instill in us the idea that communitarian thinking is suspect and that individualism is synonymous with freedom. It's not. Dignity is synonymous with freedom," she said.
What lessons?
"This is what the Arab Spring, in its early, idealistic days, not only taught us, but confirmed... What we do with that lesson -- bury it or build on it -- is something that remains to be seen," said Mounzer. "But I can never wish us back into a world before its emergence."Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" is often held up as an example of how the Arab revolts can indeed be successful. The bloodletting was contained, politicians and citizens alike stayed mostly clear of tactics that could divide the nation, the dominant Islamist party Ennahdha made a relatively smooth transition to consensus politics.
"Contrasted with the failure of Egypt and the disaster of Syria, however, Tunisia looks like an extreme outlier in the broader, regional phenomenon that it started," Feldman writes. While the small North African country clearly fared better than others, the dividends of the revolt are still not obvious.
Speaking to AFP a few blocks away from where it all began, opposite the square in Sidi Bouzid where a sculpture of Bouazizi's street cart was erected, Achref Ajmi is disenchanted. Ben Ali is gone, the country has held together but the economic situation has not improved. "The slogan of the revolution was 'work, freedom, national dignity'. We haven't seen any of it," the 21-year-old said.
"There are no jobs."

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on December 18-19/2020

Why is Iran executing, kidnapping so many people?
Seth J. Frantman/Jerusalem Post/December 18/2020
No other regime in the world does this. Iran’s point is that international laws don’t apply to it.
Iran’s regime appears to be on an execution spree. It murdered wrestler Navid Afkari in September and hung journalist Ruhollah Zam this month after kidnapping him from Iraq. Iran’s regime is not afraid to kill people: It gunned down some 1,400 protesters last year.
What the regime is showing through the high-profile executions is that it can kill journalists and athletes, people who should be protected by modern human-rights laws, and it can do so publicly and openly.
Iran also illegally kidnapped a man named Habib Chaab from Istanbul. The regime is holding up these hangings to the world as a provocation to see how countries react.
Iran’s regime does this for two reasons. First of all, it wants to show that amidst US pressure and European appeasement, it can do whatever it wants. This builds on years of attacking countries such as Saudi Arabia, mining ships in international waters, launching missiles at foreign states, funding illegal militias and trafficking weapons all over the Middle East. No other regime in the world does this. Iran’s point is that international laws don’t apply to it.
Second, Iran wants to deter any protests during the current lead-up to the Biden administration. Iran killed the wrestler because he had protested. It kidnapped and murdered the journalist to send a message to dissidents. The message is that it can kill any dissident, anywhere. It has hunted them down in Europe as well, and it has had almost no pushback from European countries.
Iran killed the journalist days before a major economic conference full of pro-Iran sycophants was supposed to take place. The regime timed this on purpose: It wants to see what the reaction will be. There has been some pushback, so now Iran knows that kidnapping journalists and hanging them may receive some critique. Iran also kidnapped a British-Australian academic and then traded her for its own detainees abroad. The Islamic Republic is showing that it can kidnap academics, hang journalists and athletes, and ultimately, its extensive lobbying arm abroad will not turn on it. Tehran has a bevy of support in the West, from across Europe to think tanks in Washington that tend to view Iran’s outlaw regime as one of the most important countries in the world. This is strange because one would think that Western democracies would produce a lot of think tanks that tend to like journalists and athletes, the way concepts of international human rights would generally support such people.
But the modern Western states tend to view authoritarian regimes and the hangman’s noose as more exotic. Iran has weaved this narrative well, portraying the hangmen as somehow the “extremists” and the foreign ministry in Tehran as the westernizing “moderates.” That would be like the US claiming that executions in Texas by electric chair are done by “extremists,” while Washington “moderates” have no link to them. Only in Iran does this narrative seem to work.
AN EXAMPLE of how Iran’s regime gets away with its current spree of kidnappings and killings can be seen in the reports on the kidnapping of Chaab in Turkey. Sky News called this an “audacious cross-border kidnap plan.” The use of the term audacious makes it seem like 007 as opposed to an illegal invasion of Turkish sovereignty.
The same Western media that calls this audacious was critical of Saudi Arabia for the fate of former insider-turned-dissident Jamal Khashoggi. There don’t seem to be any rules by which Iran is constrained.
Its use of these kidnappings is about showing its capabilities. Dissidents are not safe in Iraq or Turkey, and that is the message. There is no real reaction from Iraq or Turkey. That is Tehran’s gamble – to see how far it can go. The reaction generally has been that it can go quite far.
The message to dissidents is that they should be in fear. Iran wants them quiet while the new US administration comes into office. No more embarrassing protests or crackdowns. Iran’s people generally abhor the regime. However, they know that Western governments won’t help them.
They have been asking for help for years, going back to the protests that erupted after elections in 2009. The protesters hoped the Obama administration would do something; instead, they got the cold shoulder and saw the regime get welcomed by a Washington eager for a “deal” and a change in US policy that would see the US seek to work with Iran. Iran’s calculation now is that dissidents won’t operate from Iraq or Turkey, and they likely will live in fear throughout Europe. This is laying the groundwork for Tehran’s next move, which will be more military escalation in the region and outreach to further bond itself with allies in Turkey and Russia, seeking to counterbalance the US and also work with China.

New agreement needed to revive Iran nuclear deal under Biden, IAEA chief says
Francois Murphy/VIENNA/Reuters/December 18/2020
Reviving Iran’s nuclear deal under U.S. President-elect Joe Biden would require striking a new agreement setting out how Iran’s breaches should be reversed, U.N. atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said. Iran has breached many of the deal’s limits on its nuclear activities in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal and the reimposition of U.S. sanctions against Tehran that the deal lifted. Tehran often says it can quickly reverse its breaches if U.S. sanctions are removed. Biden, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said the United States will rejoin the deal “if Iran resumes strict compliance” with the agreement that imposed strict curbs on its nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions. In an interview with Reuters, Grossi, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency that polices the deal, said there had been too many breaches for the agreement to simply fall back into place.
“I cannot imagine that they are going simply to say, ‘We are back to square one’ because square one is no longer there,” Grossi said at IAEA headquarters. “There is more (nuclear) material, ... there is more activity, there are more centrifuges, and more are being announced. So what happens with all this? This is the question for them at the political level to decide,” said Grossi, an Argentine who took office as IAEA director general a year ago. Asked if that meant there would have to be a ‘deal within the deal’, he said: “Oh yes, oh yes. Undoubtedly. “It is clear that there will have to be a protocol or an agreement or an understanding or some ancillary document which will stipulate clearly what we do,” he said.
FULL CIRCLE
Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is more than 2.4 tonnes, 12 times the cap set by the deal, though still far below the more than eight tonnes Iran had before signing it. Iran has been enriching uranium up to 4.5% purity, above the deal’s 3.67% limit though below the 20% it achieved before the deal.
Iran is enriching uranium in places where it is not allowed under the deal, such as at Fordow, a site dug into a mountain. More recently it has started enriching with advanced centrifuges at its underground plant at Natanz, where the deal says it can use only first-generation IR-1 machines. [L1N2IK1A7]
“What I see is that we’re moving full circle back to December 2015,” Grossi said, referring to the month before the deal’s restrictions were put in place, after which large amounts of material and equipment were swiftly removed. “If they want to do it (comply), they could do it pretty fast. But for all of those things we had a charted course,” he said. When asked whether it believed a new protocol would be needed, France’s foreign ministry stressed that Iran’s actions were becoming a serious problem.
“Their consequences, especially in the area of enrichment, are serious. They call into question the advantages of this agreement in terms of non-proliferation,” Deputy spokesman Francois Delmas said.
“Iran must therefore return without delay to full compliance with the agreement and refrain from any new action that would call into question its sustainability.”
*Additional reporting by John Irish; Editing by Peter Graff

Trump’s Iran Achievement
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh/National Review/December 18/2020
Among Donald Trump’s proudest achievements as president was his withdrawal of the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), his predecessor’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The boldest action of his presidency was his decision to kill Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force — the expeditionary, special-operations, terrorist branch of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — at the Baghdad airport. President Trump wanted to leave Iraq, and yet he assumed the risks of retaliation and greater U.S. commitment to kill a general who had probably orchestrated the deaths of more Americans than any man since Osama bin Laden.
Nonetheless, using Trump’s own standard for success, his administration’s Iran policy — increase economic pressure until Tehran agrees to a better deal — has failed. It was destined to: No “good” agreement is possible with a revolutionary Islamic state. Any conceivable new accord — or “follow-on” agreement — will be like the JCPOA. It will end with Tehran extorting the United States out of billions of dollars of sanctions relief, which will fortify the theocracy and its imperialism, while the regime’s acquisition of atomic arms will be modestly delayed. There is a reason why the Obama administration declined to include a ballistic-missile-control regime in the nuclear accord: The Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC would never have agreed to it. Ditto any verification system wherein Western inspectors could actually perform in-person visits, let alone spot inspections, at IRGC bases where nuclear or ballistic-missile research is known or suspected. The development of long-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missiles — a priority for the IRGC for more than two decades — guarantees the means for the Iranian nomenklatura to check, intimidate, and terrorize its opponents in the region and beyond. It is simply not something Iran would have given up.
Trump’s Iran policy has been selective and uneven, showing a preference for economic coercion over containment. Containment is a patient regime-change strategy. Unwavering pressure and pushback would intensify the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy crisis, which has often led to massive protests, and make it more likely to break the system. Trump surely has had no moral qualms about doing this; he was, however, unwilling to assume the commitments that containment unavoidably entails (i.e., crafting an international and domestic consensus behind displacing the regime). Instead, he advanced an Arab Sunni alliance against Shia Iran — a strategy that collapsed in September 2019, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates failed to respond to the clerical regime’s attacks against their own oil tankers and processing plants despite having overwhelming air superiority. Trump didn’t pull air and naval units from the Gulf, and he temporarily increased ground forces in the region, leaving the mullahs capable of harassing Gulf Arabs but not convulsing the oil-rich southern Middle East.
Tehran has now accumulated around 5,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium, an amount way beyond the limitation of the JCPOA and about one-fifth of what the state had before the nuclear agreement. The clerical regime actually hasn’t been racing to build a big stockpile. (They could have done so given the ease of reconnecting centrifuges.) Trump has watched this growth with some anxiety. Reportedly, he recently considered military strikes against nuclear sites but was dissuaded from ordering them by his advisers. Odds are that Iran hasn’t vigorously enriched uranium since the United States withdrew from the nuclear accord, in part because Tehran is scared of Trump.
Despite uncontested Iranian expansion and increasing uranium enrichment, the president’s achievements in Iran are real and likely to last. His most consequential, likely irreversible, and certainly unintended success was the enfeebling of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and his circle of “pragmatic technocrats.” For years Rouhani, a founding father of the theocratic police state, had advanced the proposition that the Islamic Republic could use Western funds and commerce to propel the country past its own problems. The cleric had wanted to import an Islamic variation of the Chinese model — an economically more robust dictatorship based on state capitalism.
In 2013, Khamenei accepted Rouhani’s pitch. Iran could have it all on Obama’s terms: a stronger economy (sanctions relief and commercial relations that would make it effectively impossible for the United States to punish Iran economically again), a more powerful military, an unmolested sphere of influence, more domestic stability, and an improved nuclear program with numerous, more-advanced centrifuges whose operation the international community couldn’t obstruct — in exchange for a limited delay on industrializing its nuclear infrastructure. In important ways, the nuclear deal actually eased the clerical regime’s pathway to the bomb.
Rouhani is likely the last cleric who can save the theocracy from itself and get the West to finance the effort. Joe Biden probably will offer billions of dollars to the mullahs before Rouhani leaves office this summer, in an effort to seduce Khamenei back into the nuclear accord. Time is short, however, and the supreme leader knows clearly the precariousness of any “deals” with Washington. The Islamic Republic doesn’t have a deep bench of relatively sophisticated, cosmopolitan talent. It’s possible that Ali Larijani, a former speaker of the parliament and former secretary general of the Supreme National Security Council who is contemplating a run for the presidency, can match Rouhani’s skill set at home and abroad. But it’s a stretch. Larijani has seemed friendly to the autarkist views of the supreme leader; he and his brothers, all ardent Islamists with limited politesse, have a harder time making nice with Westerners. And Larijani currently appears to have cooler relations with the supreme leader, who has approval over who runs for, and who wins, the presidency. There was a moment for the JCPOA after Rouhani was elected in 2013 — but Trump trashed the agreement, leaving less clever and less worldly men to fulfill the regime’s ambitions.
These men will have to deal with another accomplishment of Trump’s: He has helped to fray the bonds between the clerical regime and the poor. What the eruption and brutal suppression of the pro-democracy Green Movement did in 2009 to the college-educated Iranian middle class in Tehran, the nationwide protests of 2017 and especially 2019 (the latter of which was put down with unparalleled severity) have done more recently to the provincial lower classes, once assumed to be the theocracy’s bedrock. American sanctions have accentuated the long list of grievances the demonstrators have against the regime. It remains striking how few have criticized Trump for his measures that have undoubtedly aggravated their poverty. Pro-American sentiment among the protesters was common.
The cash that Biden may soon throw at Tehran could alleviate domestic pressures. But internal politics and regional developments aren’t playing to Tehran’s advantage. Israel has pummeled the Revolutionary Guards and their proxies in Syria; the mullahs have clearly shown they don’t have the guts to escalate against the Jewish state. In Iraq, anti-Iranian sentiment has been steadily building among the Shia; the death of Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis seriously weakened Tehran’s standing in the country, leaving pro-Iranian forces and the clerical regime still scrambling to find effective replacements. And Lebanon is such a mess, it’s not clear that even Hezbollah, Iran’s favorite Arab offshoot, can exploit it.
Though Trump couldn’t abandon the idea of arms control as a paramount concern, he certainly let go of the timidity and guilt that has defined so much U.S. foreign policy toward Tehran since the Islamic Revolution. And his actions may still save us from massive nuclear extortion at the hands of men who grow happy as U.S. power retrenches. The “compensatory” financial demands of Khamenei and the mullahs may even make Team Biden blanch. Tehran may also be in no mood to further restrict its centrifuge progress, which per the JCPOA is just years away from the open construction of advanced machines. If Trump’s actions eventually do save us from throwing billions at the most anti-American, terrorism-fond, aggressive, and sanguinary regime in the Middle East, he will have shown himself to be the most consequential and effective president in handling the Islamic Republic since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini downed Jimmy Carter.
*Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
*Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming book The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Follow Reuel on Twitter @ReuelMGerecht. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.

Alleged Shabaab operative charged with plotting 9/11-style hijacking
Thomas Joscelyn/FDD's Long War Journal/ December 18/2020
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced yesterday that Cholo Abdi Abdullah, a 30-year-old Kenyan national, has been charged with plotting a 9/11-style attack inside the U.S. Abdullah allegedly served as an “operative” for Shabaab, al Qaeda’s branch in East Africa.
According to the indictment filed in the case, a Shabaab commander who is responsible for at least one terrorist attack in Kenya directed Abdullah to pursue the hijacking plot.
Abdullah traveled to the Philippines, where he took flight lessons and researched how to take control of an airliner, with the goal of crashing it into a large building inside the U.S.
Abdullah was arrested in the Philippines in July 2019. He was eventually transferred to U.S. custody on Dec. 15 and charged with several terror-related offenses.
Officials cited in the DOJ’s announcement credit the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which includes FBI agents and New York Police Department (NYPD) detectives, as well as partner law enforcement agencies elsewhere and others, with detecting the plot.
Plot was allegedly initiated in 2016
According to the indictment, Abdullah “began the process of enrolling in” a flight school in the Philippines “in or about December 2016.” He allegedly did so “at the direction of” the same “senior” Shabaab commander who oversaw a January 2019 hotel attack in Nairobi. Abdullah “sought to obtain pilot training, test flaws in airport security, and take other steps for hijacking a civil aircraft to use in conducting a terrorist attack on behalf of” Shabaab.
Abdullah attended the flight school from 2017 until mid-2019. Before his arrest, Abdullah completed “the tests necessary to obtain his pilot’s license.” While learning how to become a pilot, he researched “how to breach a cockpit door from the outside” and researched “information about the tallest building in a major U.S. city,” as well as how to obtain an American visa.
The indictment includes a reference to “others known and unknown, at least one of whom is expected to be first brought to and arrested in the Southern District of New York,” who were part of the conspiracy. That language may be a reference to another Shabaab operative who was reportedly arrested in Africa while learning to fly.
Any plot modeled after the 9/11 hijackings would likely involve one or more teams of hijackers, but the charges do not specify how many al Qaeda operatives were selected to take part.
Shabaab’s “Operation Jerusalem Will Never Be Judaized”
Prosecutors connect the 9/11-style plot to Shabaab’s “Operation Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized.” The Shabaab commander who allegedly directed Abdullah to pursue the hijacking also oversaw the Jan. 15, 2019 terrorist attack on a hotel complex in Nairobi, Kenya. Twenty-one people were killed in that attack, which targeted citizens of Western countries. One of the victims previously survived both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 hijackings.
The day after that Jan. 2019 attack in Nairobi, Shabaab released a statement saying it “carried out this operation – codenamed Operation ‘Jerusalem will Never be Judaized’ – in accordance with the guidelines of Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri,” who called on al Qaeda’s global membership to target “western and Zionist interests worldwide and in support of our Muslim families in Palestine.” [See FDD’s Long War Journal report: Shabaab says Nairobi attack carried out in accordance with Zawahiri’s guidelines.]
Although prosecutors tie Abdullah’s plotting to “Operation Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized,” the charges brought against him indicate that Shabaab actually tasked him with the hijacking a year and half before the U.S. formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in May 2018. Abdullah also allegedly began working on the hijacking about one year before President Trump announced his decision, in Dec. 2017, to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Therefore, assuming the charges are accurate, the planned hijacking was not a direct response to these American moves.
Shabaab has portrayed a series of attacks as part of “Operation Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized.” In addition to the Jan. 15, 2019 attack on the Nairobi hotel, Shabaab has also claimed that a Sept. 30, 2019 assault on a U.S. military facility in Somalia and the Jan. 5, 2020 attack on the Manda Bay Airfield (Camp Simba) in Kenya were part of the campaign. Three Americans were killed in the latter operation.
Days after the Jan. 5 raid, Shabaab’s spokesman, Ali Mohamud Rage, released a video claiming responsibility on behalf of his organization. Rage said it was part of “Operation Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized” and reiterated that the campaign was “carried out under the guidance and direction of the leadership of al-Qaeda, foremost among them being Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri, may Allah protect him.” [See FDD’s Long War Journal report: Deadly raid in Kenya carried out under ‘direction’ of al Qaeda leadership, Shabaab says.]
Rage also portrayed Shabaab’s recent operations as part of a string of al Qaeda attacks dating back to the 1990s, including the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Cole bombing and the 9/11 hijackings.
Given how Rage and Shabaab have openly embraced the 9/11 hijackings, it is unsurprising that the al Qaeda branch would pursue a similar terrorist operation.
Shabaab remains a part of al Qaeda’s global network
The hijacking plot is not the only example of Shabaab’s threat to aviation. In early 2016, Shabaab claimed responsibility for placing a bomb on board a passenger plane. No one was killed in the explosion, other than the terrorist who boarded with the bomb, but intelligence officials were alarmed to discover that the explosive was disguised inside a laptop. [See FDD’s Long War Journal: Shabaab claims ‘Western intelligence officials’ targeted in airliner bombing.]
Such plots raise the possibility that some within Shabaab are working with other external operatives in al Qaeda’s global network.
Shabaab and its emir, Abu Ubaydah Ahmed Umar, are openly loyal to al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The group is principally dedicated to overthrowing the Somali government, which it hopes to replace with a regime based on al Qaeda’s radical version of sharia, or Islamic law. But as a series of attacks and plots demonstrate, the al Qaeda branch also threatens countries throughout the region and even the U.S.
The Trump administration recently announced a withdrawal of American forces from Somalia. The troops will be repositioned in neighboring countries. Shabaab’s men continue to operate one of al Qaeda’s most prolific insurgencies.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.
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‘Boogaloo Bois’ member pleads guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qassam Brigades
Joe Truzman/FDD's Long War Journal/ December 18/2020
Benjamin Ryan Teeter, a member of the ‘Boogaloo Bois’ movement, pleaded guilty Wednesday to a charge of conspiracy to provide material support and resources, namely property, services and weapons to Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, a U.S. Department of State designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).As previously covered on FDD’s Long War Journal, Teeter, along with another ‘Boogaloo Bois’ member, Michael Robert Solomon, were arrested and charged by the U.S. Department of Justice on Sept. 4.
Teeter and Solomon were initially investigated by the FBI in May after a witness who interacted with the pair alleged Solomon carried firearms openly in a Minneapolis neighborhood during the nationwide protests that were sparked by the killing of George Floyd.
In June, the FBI received information from a confidential source who Solomon and Teeter believed was a member of Hamas. In audio recordings, the pair conveyed their support for Hamas’ anti-U.S. government view – which closely aligned with the view of their own movement.
According to the DOJ publication, the pair communicated the idea of becoming “mercenaries” for Hamas as a way to raise funds for the ‘Boogaloo Bois’ movement, which included funding for recruitment and the purchase of land for a training compound.
Additionally, the two also negotiated the sale of gun suppressors and a “drop in auto sear” — a device that converts semi-automatic weapons into illegal machine guns.
Teeter acknowledged during his court hearing on Wednesday that he believed the suppressors were intended for Hamas’ military wing, al-Qassam Brigades.
“I mean, why would someone buy suppressors if they weren’t going to deliver them to a militant wing?” Teeter stated during his court hearing.
Hamas issued a public statement shortly after Teeter and Solomon were arrested in Sept. denying any link to the pair.
“Hamas condemns the U.S. administration’s attempt to link the movement with the “Boogaloo Bois” group, which the movement denies knowledge of, or any of its members,” the statement read.
It is unclear if Teeter’s co-conspirator Michael Solomon will also plead guilty as he faces charges of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated FTO, attempting to provide material support to a FTO, possession of unregistered firearms and unlawful possession of a machine gun.
*Joe Truzman is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.
 

Hungary: "Europe's Borders Must be Protected"
Soeren Kern/Gatestone Institute/December 18/2020
"Hungary will only be a Hungarian country as long as its borders remain intact. Therefore, not only our thousand-year-old statehood but also the future of our children obliges us to protect our borders." — Judit Varga, Hungarian Justice Minister, December 17, 2020.
"While the Action Plan would give immigrants more rights and entitlements, it does not seem to take into consideration the security risks associated with mass migration." — Zoltán Kovács, spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, December 17, 2020.
"If you are thinking that all of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. The Action Plan looks similar to George Soros' plan to have Europe admit 'at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future.'.... Those migrants that Europe should be admitting, according to the Soros plan, their distribution should be permanent and mandatory. He also made it clear that his plan aims to protect immigrants and that national borders are an obstacle to this." — Zoltán Kovács, December 17, 2020.
"The Union, according to the plan, would give more support to immigrants than to its own citizens by supporting businesses established and run by the former. Moreover, the plan, by supporting the employment of migrants, would put unemployed EU citizens in an even more difficult position." — Zoltán Kovács, December 17, 2020.
"But the Commission's Action Plan goes even further, seeking to bring in some 34 million migrants to become EU citizens (nearly 8 percent of the current EU population). That is, 34 million migrants would be granted citizenship and the right to vote.... Who says this is what Europe wants or needs? When have the citizens of Europe voted for this?" — Zoltán Kovács, December 17, 2020.
According to Zoltán Kovács, spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the European Commission's Action Plan seeks "to bring in some 34 million migrants to become EU citizens (nearly 8 percent of the current EU population). That is, 34 million migrants would be granted citizenship and the right to vote...." Pictured: The Hungarian border fence with Serbia, outside Szeged, Hungary.
The Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's top court, has ruled that Hungary violated EU law when it prevented illegal immigrants from seeking asylum. The ruling paves the way for the European Commission, the EU's powerful administrative arm, to impose financial penalties over Hungary's restrictive immigration policies. The Hungarian government has vowed that it will not bow to pressure to jump aboard the EU's multicultural bandwagon.
In its December 17 ruling, the court, informally known as European Court of Justice (ECJ) accused the Hungarian government of corralling migrants into so-called transit zones and of limiting their ability to apply for asylum. The court also found that Hungary did not allow asylum seekers to leave detention while their cases were being considered and offered no special protection to children and the vulnerable.
The case stems from a lawsuit filed by the European Commission over a 2015 decision by Hungary to establish two transit zones on its southern border with Serbia to stop a mass influx of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The action prevented migrants from entering Hungary or transiting the country to reach other parts of the EU.
In May 2020, the ECJ ruled that the transit zones were illegal under EU law. In order to comply with the ruling, Hungary has since closed the transit zones. Asylum seekers wanting to enter Hungary now have to apply for asylum at Hungarian embassies or consulates in neighboring non-EU countries. "External border protection is an issue that Hungary cannot, does not want to, and will not concede," said Gergely Gulyás, from the Prime Minister's Office.
The ECJ, in its latest ruling, acknowledged that Hungary had closed the transit zones but that it was still guilty of breaking EU law. The ruling states:
"In the first place, the Court holds that Hungary has failed to fulfil its obligation to ensure effective access to the procedure for granting international protection, in so far as third-country nationals wishing to access, from the Serbian-Hungarian border, that procedure were in practice confronted with the virtual impossibility of making their application."
"The Court recalls that the making of an application for international protection, prior to its registration, lodging and examination, is an essential step in the procedure for granting that protection and that Member States cannot delay it unjustifiably. On the contrary, Member States must ensure that the persons concerned are able to make an application, including at the borders, as soon as they declare their wish of doing so."
"The Court confirms...that the obligation on applicants for international protection to remain in one of the transit zones for the duration of the procedure for examination of their application constitutes detention."
"The Court emphasizes that the Procedures and Reception Directives require, inter alia, that detention be ordered in writing with reasons, that the specific needs of applicants identified as vulnerable and in need of special procedural guarantees be taken into account, in order that they receive 'adequate support', and that minors be placed in detention only as a last resort. Owing, in particular, to its systematic and automatic nature, however, the detention regime provided for under the Hungarian legislation in the transit zones, which concerns all applicants other than unaccompanied minors under 14 years of age, does not allow applicants to enjoy those guarantees."
"Moreover, the Court rejects Hungary's argument that the migration crisis justified derogating from certain rules in the Procedures and Reception Directives, with a view to maintaining public order and preserving internal security."
"The Court holds that Hungary has failed to fulfil its obligations under the Return Directive, in so far as the Hungarian legislation allows for the removal of third-country nationals who are staying illegally in the territory without prior compliance with the procedures and safeguards provided for in that directive."
"The Court recalls that an illegally staying third-country national falling within the scope of the Return Directive must be the subject of a return procedure, in compliance with the substantive and procedural safeguards established by that directive, before his or her removal, where appropriate, is carried out, it being understood that forced removal is to take place only as a last resort."
"The Court considers that Hungary has not respected the right, conferred, in principle, by the Procedures Directive on any applicant for international protection, to remain in the territory of the Member State concerned after the rejection of his or her application, until the time limit within which to bring an appeal against that rejection or, if an appeal has been brought, until a decision has been taken on it."
"The Court notes that, when a 'crisis situation caused by mass immigration' has been declared, the Hungarian legislation makes the exercise of that right subject to detailed rules not in conformity with EU law, in particular the obligation to remain in the transit zones, which resembles detention contrary to the Procedures and Reception Directives. On the other hand, when such a situation has not been declared, the exercise of that right is made subject to conditions which, while not necessarily contrary to EU law, are not defined in a sufficiently clear and precise manner to enable the persons concerned to ascertain the exact extent of their right."
In a "note" at the end of the ruling, the ECJ revealed the apparent purpose of its ruling against Hungary:
"An action for failure to fulfil obligations directed against a Member State which has failed to comply with its obligations under European Union law may be brought by the Commission or by another Member State. If the Court of Justice finds that there has been a failure to fulfil obligations, the Member State concerned must comply with the Court's judgment without delay."
"Where the Commission considers that the Member State has not complied with the judgment, it may bring a further action seeking financial penalties. However, if measures transposing a directive have not been notified to the Commission, the Court of Justice can, on a proposal from the Commission, impose penalties at the stage of the initial judgment."
Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga vowed to continue to protect Hungarian sovereignty. In a December 17 Facebook post, she wrote:
"Today's decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union has become devoid of purpose, as the circumstances at issue in the present proceedings no longer exist. Transit zones have been closed but strict border control is maintained.
"We will continue to protect the borders of Hungary and Europe and will do everything we can to prevent the formation of international migrant corridors.
"Hungary will only be a Hungarian country as long as its borders remain intact. Therefore, not only our thousand-year-old statehood but also the future of our children obliges us to protect our borders."
The ECJ's ruling comes less than a month after the European Commission unveiled a controversial "Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion" which aims to streamline the migration and asylum process with faster screening and to have EU member states contribute their "fair share" based on their GDP and population.
The EU's bid to reform its migration policy has been met with mixed reactions from a number of EU countries. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic have been vocal in their opposition to it.
Zoltán Kovács, the spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, wrote on Twitter that Hungary's stance on migration remains unchanged:
"1/5 Since 2015, the stance of the HU Gov't on migration has been clear and unchanged. We have presented this stance and our proposals on several occasions. We believe that the EU and its member states must cooperate in keeping the looming migration pressure outside our borders.
"2/5 To this end, we should form alliances with countries of origin, so that they are able to provide proper living standards and ensure that their people do not have to leave their homelands. Instead of importing the trouble to Europe, we must bring help to where it is needed.
"3/5 We believe that Europe's borders must be protected: External hotspots will have to be established to process asylum claims; we must ensure that the external borders of the EU and the Schengen Area remain perfectly sealed along all sections.
"4/5 Our goal is to see EU member states support each other in achieving the tasks above. While HU does not support obligatory distribution, it does defend joint borders, and we expect to receive the same amount of support as other Schengen states protecting those external borders.
"5/5 We would like to remind everyone that since the 2015 migration crisis, the Hungarian Government has spent more than 1 billion euros on protecting the borders of Hungary and the European Union, without a single cent of contribution from Brussels."
After the ECJ delivered its ruling, Kovács repeated Hungary's opposition to the EU's migration action plan. In a December 17 statement posted to Orbán's official blog, he wrote:
"On November 24, 2020, the European Commission presented its migration Action Plan on the social integration and inclusion of migrants. The Commission believes that barriers to the participation and inclusion of immigrants in European societies need to be removed. At the press conference presenting the document, it was clear from the words of the EU Commissioners responsible that the Commission would continue to encourage the reception of migrants, as they believe that this will be necessary in the future for economic reasons.
"While the Action Plan would give immigrants more rights and entitlements, it does not seem to take into consideration the security risks associated with mass migration.
"According to the main points of the action plan, Brussels would provide migrants housing and give them a greater say in public affairs at all levels of government. With this, more migrants and EU citizens with a migrant background would be involved in consultations and decision-making processes at the local, regional, national and European level.
"The Union, according to the plan, would give more support to immigrants than to its own citizens by supporting businesses established and run by the former. Moreover, the plan, by supporting the employment of migrants, would put unemployed EU citizens in an even more difficult position.
"As if this is not enough, Brussels would also force us to adopt the mindset of the eurocrats on the issue, clearly setting forth in the Action Plan that it seeks to change the way Europeans think about migration and migrants: 'Inclusion is also about addressing unconscious bias and achieving a change in mentality and the way people perceive one another and approach the unknown.' Good to know.
"If you are thinking that all of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. The Action Plan looks similar to George Soros' plan to have Europe admit 'at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future.' The financial speculator has been for years promoting his ideas of an 'open society' to change Europe and European society. Those migrants that Europe should be admitting, according to the Soros plan, their distribution should be permanent and mandatory. He also made it clear that his plan aims to protect immigrants and that national borders are an obstacle to this.
"But the Commission's Action Plan goes even further, seeking to bring in some 34 million migrants to become EU citizens (nearly 8 percent of the current EU population). That is, 34 million migrants would be granted citizenship and the right to vote.
"Who says this is what Europe wants or needs? When have the citizens of Europe voted for this? As Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Parliament earlier this week, Hungary will oppose this plan with all its might and will not compromise."
*Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.
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The Biden Paranthesis Opens
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al Awsat/December, 18/2020
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987
With the Electoral College confirming Joe Biden as the winner of last month’s election, it is almost certain he will be confirmed as the next president of the United States on 6 January. And, unless something surrealistic happens, he would take the oath of office on 20 January. What might a Biden presidency look like? Given the peculiarities of American democracy, such speculation amounts to giving a hostage to fortune. Presidents predicted to lead the nation into disaster turned out to have the safest pairs of hands. Those who inspired romantic dreams dropped into banality as Icarus did when his wings melted.
Some observers believe that Biden’s administration will be a third term for former President Barack Obama. Biden was Obama’s Vice President for eight years and a large number of people he has picked in his team are Obama alumni.
I think they are wrong. Biden’s team is Obamaesque on a personnel level. But I doubt it will be Obamaesque in policy. The same troupe could play Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet.
Lyndon Johnson inherited John Kennedy’s presidency with the same personnel but turned out to be a different operator. Obama was exceptional insofar as he had little political experience before entering the White House. As a “community organizer” he believed that things get done by making speeches. In his brief tenure as senator, he was often absent and did almost nothing as a legislator. As president, he thought things get done by fiat and problems solved by dodging them.
With the bulk of his career covered by legislative experience, Biden is a different politician. He knows that claiming to “make oceans recede” as Obama did is silly. He also knows that in American politics every issue could trigger what George Shultz called “a battle royal”, and that nothing is ever settled “once and for all” as Obama said about his plan to solve the Arab-Israeli problem.
Also, the current situation in the country is different from what it was when Obama stood for election. At the time many Americans went for Obama as an indulgence, some in atonement of real or imagined guilt inherited from forefathers, others in the hope of nudging the nation towards the left.
At the time Obama was the inspiring candidate and John McCain the boring one. This time, the challenger was the boring one. As Mark Ash, a leading member of the Progressive wing of the Democrat Party says: “The 2020 campaign was a weird one... The winner was not inspiring at all and the loser was arguably one of the most inspiring in American history. It was Trump, not Biden, who drove record voter turnout, among Republicans and Democrats alike. You were either inspired to vote Trump in or inspired to vote Trump out; Trump was absolutely the defining figure.”
However, whatever Ash might say, I think, in a democracy, being boring could be an advantage. Wasn’t Clement Attlee a boring man in the British political circus? And wasn’t George Pompidou the greyest of the grey in French politics? Didn’t Aristotle say that the best leaders in a democracy are “average citizens”? And didn’t Confucius warn against “colorful men”, even in despotic China?
Obama was elected because he was Obama; Biden won because he was not Trump.
Some observers claim that the Biden administration is going to fail because it is mostly made up of Robins, that is to say, sidekicks, rather than Batman figures. But underestimating number-twos is often as wrong in politics as it is in business. The first campaign of Xerxes to annex Greece succeeded thanks to Mardonius, the second-in-command. In Waterloo, the Marquis of Anglesey did the heavy lifting but Wellington took the credit. Although many were number-two or even three in previous administrations, Biden’s team brings forth a wealth of experience that could restore the state discipline shaken under Trump. Biden has put the most controversial members of the Obama administration into isolated slots. The useless John Kerry will do his uselessness as coordinator for fictive environmental endeavors. Susan Rice, who tried to become Secretary of State, is given something called “domestic coordinator” which, one presumes, does not mean dealing with federal janitors. Hillary Clinton who coveted the Pentagon will continue chewing her chagrin.
Biden has also refused to bring so-called Progressists to the high table. Elisabeth Warren campaigned to get the Treasury while Bernie Sanders asked to become Labor Secretary.
Last week Biden called in “civil rights” leaders and gave them a dressing down with the claim that their extremism, channeled through such outfits as Black Lives Matter, and the campaign to defund the police, prevented him from “crushing Trump” with a landslide victory. “Progressists” were blamed for the fact that Trump doubled his votes among Afro-Americans and Hispanics.
If Ronald Reagan’s motto was “campaign in poetry and govern in prose”, Biden seems to have opted for prose all along. This is why the platform he offered was even blander than the one marketed by Mitt Romney in 2008.
Despite pressure from “Progressists” Biden has managed not to commit himself to reeling back all that Trump has done.
He is not going to make the US dependent on imported energy when oil-exporting areas including the Middle East, the Caspian Basin and Venezuela remain unstable. Efforts to clip China’s wings will continue, perhaps even intensify if only because Hunter Biden’s suspicious deals with Chinese businesses are certain to haunt Biden’s presidency.
Nor is Biden likely to reel-back the campaign to persuade Arab states to normalize with Israel while no one thinks he would relocate the US Embassy away from Jerusalem.
On relations with the Islamic Republic in Iran, Biden holds the strong card of sanctions devised under Obama and applied under Trump. Obama offered only carrots and failed. Trump offered only stick and didn’t achieve his aim of a photo-op with the top mullah, Ali Khamenei, or even his Sancho Panza Hassan Rouhani. Biden is in a stronger position than Obama or Trump because the Khomeinist regime is weaker than four years ago.
Adopting the Paris Climate Accord is also not easy. Last week, signatories cheekily admitted they had not implemented it. Biden cannot do more than submitting to the Senate where it is likely to be rejected in its present form.
Even if Republicans lose the seats still to be contested in Georgia, Biden won’t have the Senate majority he needs. His own Democrat camp is divided into “Progressists” and conservatives who could outflank him from left or right. In 2022 a third of the Senate, this time concerning more Democrat senators than Republicans, will be up for re-election. By then, the country will once again gear up for the next presidential election. The question could be: will Biden stand and will he find Trump as a rival again?
Many Americans hope that Trump’s tenure will prove to be a mere parenthesis. They don’t know that Biden’s term will also be a parenthesis. In fact, all American presidential terms are quickly closing brackets. What is permanent is American democracy that keeps the ship of state steady even in the biggest storms. Well, we started with prose, ending up with poetry. Not a good sign!

What pushes Turkey and Iran to ride out the storm of poem?
Sinem Cengiz/Arab News/December 18, 2020
There is sometimes a tendency among analysts to overstate the significance of relationships between countries and their contribution to respective national interests when the reality is seemingly different. On the contrary, there is also a tendency to exaggerate the tensions between countries. In particular, Turkey’s foreign relations are read through these angles, which in fact leads to a misreading of the reality beneath the surface.
Last week, a diplomatic spat happened between Ankara and Tehran due to a poem issue, and then within a few days, things got back on track. When reading Turkish-Iranian relations, which is one of the most complicated and fragile ones in the region, it is always crucial to check what’s actually the status of the relationship both, above and the below the surface.
Political tensions sparked when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recited a poem composed by an Azeri poet during an official visit to Baku on Dec. 10 to celebrate Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. The poem refers to the Aras River that marks the border between Azerbaijan and ethnic-Azerbaijani provinces of northwest Iran. Concerned that the poem recited by the Turkish leader could fan separatism among Iran’s Azeri minority, the next day, Iran summoned the Turkish ambassador to Tehran to express its “harsh condemnation” over the matter.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry considered Erdoğan’s words as "unacceptable and meddlesome." Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went further, asserting via Twitter that the poem "refers to the forcible separation of areas north [of the] Aras from [the] Iranian motherland. Didn’t he realize he was undermining the sovereignty of the Republic of Azerbaijan?" Iranian politicians went further with aggressive statements, and even Iranian media outlets accused Ankara of fueling separatism in Iran, putting the country’s territorial integrity at risk. In retaliation, the Turkish foreign ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador to Ankara over his country's “aggressive” reaction.
Turkey's ruling party's spokesperson Ömer Çelik immediately reacted to Iranian politicians' remarks, saying "We condemn the ugly language used by some Iranian politicians against our president." Turkey's Communications Director Fahrettin Altun said Iran had distorted the meaning of the poem “to fuel senseless tensions.” This followed phone traffic between foreign ministers of the two countries, and the Iranian side said the parties resolved a misunderstanding. “The parties emphasized the importance of strengthening and expanding the relations between the two countries,” the Iranian embassy in Ankara tweeted.
Iran, which considers Muslim Azerbaijan as a potential threat to its national security, has been providing direct and indirect support to Armenia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The highest-level remark came from Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani who said Tehran could move past a diplomatic quarrel with Turkey. “In my opinion, with the explanations (Turkish officials) gave, we can move beyond this issue, but the sensitivity of our people is very important,” Rouhani told a televized news conference in Tehran.
Getting back to the beginning, the above statements indicate what has been on the surface in Turkish-Iranian relations. Regarding what is beneath the surface, there is a list of laundry factors that have led to such a reaction from the Iranian side; but few of them would be mentioned here.
There are certain reasons why officials in Tehran have overreacted to the poem. It is hard to say Tehran was happy with Turkey’s active role in the Azerbaijani-Armenian tension and with how the conflict has ended up. Iran, which considers Muslim Azerbaijan as a potential threat to its national security, has been providing direct and indirect support to Armenia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Secondly, Israel joining the ranks of Turkey and Azerbaijan – with political means – in the recent conflict in Caucasia was a nightmare scenario for Tehran. Although Ankara and Tel Aviv cooperate with and lend support to Azerbaijan differently; two countries are decisively in support of the Azeri leadership. While Azerbaijan brings Turkey and Israel on the same page in Caucasia, it widens the gap between Turkey and Iran- who are two potential rivals for influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Although Turkish-Iranian rivalry in these regions has been muted, it is impossible to neglect Iranian leadership’s concerns over Turkey having the upper hand in this region, where Russia is a dominant player as a regional power broker.
Thirdly, there is still a Syria file that is open despite the Arab uprisings completing their ten-year anniversary this week. There is ongoing cooperation between Iran and Turkey whereby Russia is always involved. However, the degree of cooperation between them should not be exaggerated. While both Ankara and Tehran share certain economic and security interests, their interests are at odds in many areas still. The two states, which have fundamentally different political identities and ideologies, have historically been, and continue to be, rivals despite cooperation in some areas.
Lastly, now that the Biden administration is to take office soon, both Tehran and Ankara have engaged in regional calculations, and this has been the other dimension of how this poem spat ended so quickly. In the past, Turkish and Iranian officials had harsh tit-for-tats that the relations have reached rock bottom due to disagreements on regional matters. Now the stakes are high enough for two sides that the best formula is to sweep the things under the carpet.
*Sinem Cengiz is a Turkish political analyst who specializes in Turkey's relations with the Middle East. Twitter: @SinemCngz