English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For June 10/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today
I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father
John 15/15-21: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. ‘If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, “Servants are not greater than their master.” If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on June 09-10/2020
Lebanon Records 18 New Coronavirus Cases
Aoun Calls for Joint Military and Security Efforts against 'Sedition'
President Aoun briefed on demands of Association of Public Works, calls on contractors to participate in anti-corruption process
Hitti briefs Aoun on diplomatic efforts to extend UNIFIL's mandate
PM Diab chairs security meeting
Diab chairs tourism sector meeting: What is important today is to put Lebanon back on tourism map
Lebanon to reopen airport in July and send public sector employees back to work/Najia Houssari/Arab News/June 09/2020
Diab Warns 'All Lebanese Will Pay Price of any Instability'
Lebanon: Tripoli Fears Chaos, Sectarian Tension
Berri tackles general situation with interlocutors
Israel Vows to Deliver ‘Blow’ to Lebanon if Hizbullah Strikes
Report: Diplomats Concerned over Situation in Lebanon after Saturday’s Clashes
Protesters Rally, Block Roads as Dollar Soars on Black Market
Mustaqbal Says June 6 'Black Day', Warns over 'Sunni Anger'
Geagea Slams Aoun on Judicial Appointments, Marada to Boycott Cabinet
Hariri from Dar el-Fatwa: Coexistence is Key for Lebanon’s Stability
Hariri Launches Scathing Attack on Presidency and FPM
2 Accused in Ghosn's Escape Scheme Fight Extradition
Abdel Samad visits Qattar to discuss criteria for second screening phase for Tele Liban General Director post
Strong Lebanon: To conclude financial appointments, fill vacancies and promulgate anti-corruption laws
Bukhari tackles economic developments with Bifani
Hitti advocates safe, dignified and non-coercive return of displaced Syrians
Contact tracing key to keeping Lebanon's coronavirus cases low
We banned Hezbollah activities in Germany. Now it’s the EU’s turn/Christoph Bernstiel/Al Arabiya/June 08/2020
Hezbollah dragging Lebanon closer to new civil war/Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib/Arab News/June 08/2020.

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on June 09-10/2020
Republicans in Congress to introduce biggest-ever sanctions bill against Iran/Joyce Karam/The National/June 09/2020
Iran to Execute Spy Who Helped US Target Soleimani
Allowing Iran to buy, sell conventional weapons further destabilizes region: Hook
For 2nd Straight Day, Syria’s Suweida Protests against Regime, Living Crisis
US Official: Sanctions Contributed to Devaluation of Syrian Pound
Syria Hit by Rare Anti-Regime Protests Sparked by Economic Crisis
Airstrikes Target NW Syria, Displace Thousands
What’s Behind Netanyahu’s Call for his US Advisor?
Shtayyeh Submits 'Counter-Proposal' to US Mideast Plan
Sudan Begins Negotiations With IMF to Settle Arrears, Get Financial Support
Ethiopia Confident of Filling Nile Dam, Egypt Awaits ‘Comprehensive Agreement’
OPEC+ May Push The Price Of Oil Barrel To Above $50
Canada reaffirms ongoing support for Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on June 09-10/2020
Iran Close to Nuclear Weapons Breakout/Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/June 09/2020
Boris Johnson Leaves the Dirty Work to Everyone Else/Martin Ivens/Bloomberg/June 09/2020
China, US, India and the Landscape of the 21st Century/Hal Brands/Bloomberg/June 09/2020
'Political Correctness' in the UK: Shut Down Discussion Before It Can Start/Denis MacEoin/Gatestone Institute/June 09/2020
Bringing the Middle East Back Home/Tony Badran/Tablet Magazine/June 09/2020
The worst is yet to come in Libya/Abdulrahman Al-Rashed/Arab News/June 09/2020

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on June 09-10/2020
Lebanon Records 18 New Coronavirus Cases
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Lebanon recorded eighteen new cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus on Tuesday raising the total number of individuals retracting the virus to 1368, the Health Ministry said. According to official data, the new cases have all been recorded in Lebanese residents. Zero cases were recorded in Lebanese expats repatriated recently. So far, 795 individuals who retracted the virus have recovered, according to data.

Aoun Calls for Joint Military and Security Efforts against 'Sedition'
Naharnet/June 09/2020
President Michel Aoun marked the Internal Security Forces anniversary on Tuesday, calling the institution to join its efforts with other security agencies to eradicate sedition in Lebanon. “The internal Security Forces must strengthen cooperation with other security and military institutions to stem sectarian sedition,” said Aoun. He stated that “sectarian strife aims at striking the basis of Lebanon's existence,” in reference to Saturday’s clashes in Beirut.
Furthermore, the President marked the 159th anniversary of founding the ISF.

President Aoun briefed on demands of Association of Public Works, calls on contractors to participate in anti-corruption process
NNA/June 09/2020
President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, stressed that efforts are based on various levels to emerge from the economic and financial distress that Lebanon is currently suffering, and that this distress has left negative results on various sectors in the country.
The President also pointed out that he will not spare an effort to find appropriate solutions to end the Lebanese suffering, considering that the Corona Pandemic, which has invaded the world, had major repercussions on the social and economic life in Lebanon and negatively affected regularity, whether in the public or private sectors.
President Aoun's stances came during his reception a delegation from the Union of Public Works and Building Contractors in Lebanon, headed by Engineer Maroun Helou, who presented the difficult circumstances in which the contractors work through, and the accumulation of dues owed to them for the years 2018 and 2019 from official departments, especially the Development and Construction Council and the Ministries of Labor and Energy, totaling 726 Million USD.
Engineer Helou stated a series of demands, most notable of which are:
- Issuing a Government decision which considers what happened after October 18, 2019 as a force majeure, with all the consequential extensions of the deadlines and studying contract amendment, in terms of increasing prices or compensation for losses, and expediting the dissolution.
- Non-performing contracts according to the contractors and consultant requests and liquidating them according to rules so as not to accumulate losses on the two sides and to stop committing new projects funded locally before solving the problem of pending projects, and not to launch foreign-funded tenders until re-issuing guarantees from banks, and committing projects that have financial capabilities such as water institutions and municipalities.
The contractors also called for restoring facilities, credits and guarantees, removing restrictions on the movement of funds, and encouraging the sector to reduce the benefits as happened with the industrialists. In the event that funds are transferred to the bank in Lebanese pounds, the debt must be paid immediately and transferred to Dollars at the official price.
President Aoun gave his instructions to the competent references to study the contractors' demands, inviting them to participate in the process of fighting corruption and bribery and facing any pressures they are exposed to in the context of their work. The President pointed to the importance of contractors adhering to the regulations, laws and deadlines set for the implementation of projects. -----Presidency Press Office

Hitti briefs Aoun on diplomatic efforts to extend UNIFIL's mandate
NNA/June 09/2020
President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, on Tuesday welcomed at Baabda Presidential Palace, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, Nassif Hitti, who briefed him on Lebanon's diplomatic efforts to extend UNIFIL's mandate.

PM Diab chairs security meeting
NNA/June 09/2020
Prime Minister Hassan Diab has chaired, this evening, a security meeting attended by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense Zeina Akar, Minister of Interior and Municipalities Mohammad Fahmi, State Prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat, Secretary General of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers Judge Mahmoud Makie, Lebanese Armed Forces Commander General Joseph Aoun, General Director of the General Directorate of General Security Major-General Abbas Ibrahim, Director General of the Internal Security Forces Major-General Imad Othman, Director General of State Security Major General Tony Saliba, Secretary General of the Higher Defense Council Major-General Mahmoud al Asmar, Director of the Lebanese Army Directorate of Intelligence Brig. Gen. Antoine Mansour, ISF Information Branch Chief Brig. Gen. Khaled Hammoud, Deputy Director General of State Security Brig. Gen. Samir Sanan, Head of Lebanese Security Information Unit, Brig. Gen. Mounah Sawaya and PM’s Advisor Khodor Taleb. The interlocutors took stock at measures taken against those who have stirred up trouble, smashed the facades of shops and assaulted public properties during last Saturday’s demonstrations. In addition, the meeting has also discussed the issue of money changers' commitment to the dollar exchange rate. PM Diab has also received in the afternoon former MP Atef Majdalani. -- Presidency of the Council of Ministers

Diab chairs tourism sector meeting: What is important today is to put Lebanon back on tourism map
NNA/June 09/2020
Prime Minister Hassan Diab chaired a meeting dedicated to the tourism sector, in the presence of the Minister of Social Affairs and Tourism Ramzi Musharrafieh, Lebanon’s Central Bank governor Riad Salameh, chairman of the board of directors of Middle East Airlines Mohamad El-Hout, president of the Economic and Social Council Charles Arbid, PM’s Advisor George Chalhoub and heads of Tourism Trade Unions.
PM Diab welcomed the attendees, saying: “The entire world is going through a difficult stage, not just Lebanon, due to the Coronavirus pandemic that has smashed the global economy and the tourism activity. Nevertheless, major countries affected by coronavirus have started preparing for the tourist season with the aim of reviving the economy, and we must prepare for that. From the outset, we have been keen on fighting the coronavirus outbreak through relevant measures, including the closure of schools and airport since the beginning of the outburst. We have also taken stringent measures that yielded important results, leading to Lebanon’s ranking among the top 15 countries that were able to overcome the first wave of this epidemic, despite the lack of commitment to precautionary measures in several regions.
What matters today is the tourism sector, the economic activity and how to benefit from the summer season. In this context, we held yesterday a meeting to discuss the possibility of reopening the airport, in terms of timing, countries, timeline and the percentage of expatriates having done the PCR test. We are taking all data into consideration, so as to ensure a good tourist season, with the economic file being a priority. We are also focusing on the health file to reduce infections among Lebanese expatriates or foreigners entering the country.
We will be opening air lines to the Arab Gulf region, focusing on countries that conduct PCR tests and considering special procedures for other countries.
What is important for us today is to put Lebanon back on the tourism map, while striking a balance between health protection and tourism in order to revive the economy. It is normal that the tourism activity for this year will be completely different from previous years; yet, any developed tourism activity over the next two months before opening schools will be an added value for us. The Minister of Tourism has developed a strategic plan; it is important to approve it pending a decision to be taken by the end of this week regarding relevant measures for the reopening of the airport”.
Minister of Tourism
For his part, Minister of Tourism Ramzi Musharrafieh stressed on the very weak state of the tourism sector. The main problem lies in the previous difficult years, coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and general mobilization that forced the closure of several institutions.
“I have made several proposals to help this sector, as tax exemptions and deferred payment of fees are not enough to boost this sector again”, he added.
Then, the chairman of the Lebanese Federation for Tourism and president of the Hotel Owners Association Pierre Achkar has summed up the difficult situation of all tourism-related sectors and asked Lebanon’s Central Bank governor to interfere with banks to save the sector. He stressed the necessity of finding a well-thought-out plan for the future and on the contribution of all sectors, especially the "Middle East Airlines", by offering price reductions on air-fares.
In this context, Lebanon’s Central Bank governor Riad Salameh stated that they were examining how to take advantage of BdL in terms of interests and benefits for the tourism sector, especially hotels, adding that the Central Bank of Lebanon has extended all payment terms for an additional 6 months and is currently working on subsidized loans away from any speculation.
On his part, the president of the Syndicate of Owners of Restaurants, Cafes, Night-Clubs and Pastries Tony Ramy has decried the faltering tourism sector, with 80% of restaurants being unable to reopen, including major restaurants and institutions, in addition to the closure of shopping malls’ restaurants having to pay 100% rental fees for big commercial centers. Ramy has also requested the approval of the tourism plan which was discussed with the Ministry of Tourism.
In turn, the head of the tourism syndicates in the South and Southern Suburb Ali Tabaja indicated that 95% of the institutions in the south were unable to reopen, due to their inability to pay rentals or even purchase goods. He added that the problem is mainly due to the exchange rate of 4000 LBP to USD and to the banning of hookah in restaurants and cafes, which has led to a drop in cafes and restaurants traffic.
For his part, the chairman of the board of directors of Middle East Airlines Mohamad El-Hout has encouraged good deals in cooperation with the hotel sector, while ​​encouraging domestic tourism, given the current circumstances.
For his part, the head of the Association of Car Rental Agencies Mohammad Dakdouk revealed that 25 % of car rental agencies have shut down, stating that this sector mainly relies on expatriates and foreign tourists. Dakdouk has broached the challenging situation of car rental companies, including the adverse effect of alternate traffic circulation, thefts, non-coverage of accidents by insurance companies and tight withdrawal limits by banks, calling for exemption from mechanical fees, registration and traffic violations.
Afterwards, the president of the Economic and Social Council Charles Arbid presented the difficulties faced by every Lebanese who works in struggling institutions. He called for the regulation of State-institutions relationships, State-brokered settlement of banks-institutions relationships, and the need to submit proposals aimed at securing the Lebanese workforce.
On his part, the head of the Syndicate of Touristic Seaside Resorts in Lebanon Jean Beiruti pointed out to the impracticality of domestic tourism due to the high dollar exchange rate and the persistent closure of the majority of seaside resorts as a result of the non-completion of maintenance licenses.
As for the head of the Association of Travel and Tourist Agents in Lebanon Jean Abboud, he pointed out that the inability of making wire transfers would lead to the withdrawal of companies from Lebanon, and called for bank facilities.
Finally, the head of the Syndicate of Restaurants in the Southern suburb and Mount Lebanon Ibrahim Al-Zaidi stated that the main problem was the dollar exchange rate adversely affecting the restaurant industry and employees whose salaries were depreciated. -- Presidency of the Council of Ministers

Lebanon to reopen airport in July and send public sector employees back to work
Najia Houssari/Arab News/June 09/2020
Prime Minister Hassan Diab: We will work to resume flights to the Arabian Gulf region, and we will focus on countries conducting PCR tests to detect coronavirus infections
The Cabinet Office said that all public-sector employees should return to their workplaces while taking the necessary measures to prevent coronavirus
BEIRUT: Lebanon has announced that it will reopen Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut in early July.
Prime Minister Hassan Diab said during a meeting of the tourism sector’s representatives on Tuesday: “We will work to resume flights to the Arabian Gulf region, and we will focus on countries conducting PCR tests to detect coronavirus infections.”
The Cabinet Office said on Tuesday that all public-sector employees should return to their workplaces while “taking the necessary measures to prevent coronavirus.”
The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Lebanon reached 1,368 as of Tuesday after 18 new cases were recorded. All of the new cases had been in contact with infected people. The death toll stands at 30.
The government is trying to improve the economic situation, which has worsened with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, by promoting medical tourism, Diab told the heads of tourist establishments, restaurants and hotels.
The leaders of the tourism sector’s syndicates complained of the decline in their businesses due to the deterioration of the lira. The president of the Union of Owners of Restaurants, Cafes, Amusements and Patisseries, Tony Al-Rami, said that “80 percent of restaurants, including top restaurants and establishments, have not been able to open.”The president of the Syndicate of Tourist Establishments in South Lebanon, Ali Tabajah, said that “95 percent of the establishments in the south could not open because they were unable to pay rent or even buy goods.”
The head of the Syndicate of Car Rental Agencies, Mohammed Daqduq, highlighted that “25 percent of car rental companies have closed, and there are 700 unemployed families because this sector depends 76 percent on expatriates and foreign tourists.”The head of the Syndicate of Maritime Firms, Jean Beiruty, said: “Domestic tourism is not possible due to the high exchange rate of the dollar, and 80 percent of maritime firms did not open because their maintenance licenses have not been completed.”
Jean Abboud, president of the Association of Travel and Tourist Agents, warned that “the inability to transfer money abroad will lead companies to withdraw from Lebanon.”
Ibrahim Al-Zaidi, head of the Syndicate of Restaurants in the Southern Suburbs of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, said that “the main problem lies in the dollar exchange rate.”“The victim is not the restaurant sector alone, but also the employees who lost their salaries,” he said.
Following the disturbances during the protests on Saturday former Prime Minister Saad Hariri attended a meeting held on Tuesday by the Supreme Islamic Legislative Council in Dar Al-Fatwa. Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Latif Derian presided over the meeting. The council, which includes Sunni figures, called on the government to “impose control on the entire Lebanese territory, including stopping smuggling through the Lebanese-Syrian border, adjusting the exchange rate of the dollar, and addressing the random price hikes that are burdening citizens.”
The council accused “infiltrators, who were among the peaceful protesters last Saturday, of attacking the security forces and carrying out acts of sabotage of public and private property.” The council demanded that an investigation be held and the instigators of the riots that took place in Beirut’s streets be held accountable. The council warned against “igniting the fire of sectarian strife in light of the offensive slogans that targeted a religious figure,” demanding that the perpetrators be held accountable. It also called on Muslims in Lebanon to “rise above the strife-inciting hate speech and adhere to the spiritual and patriotic values that make Lebanon the country of coexistence.”In the Palace of Justice in Beirut, the head of the Beirut Bar Association, Melhem Khalaf, stressed that “dialogue is the only way to restore what has been destroyed by the crises.” He said: “We will not allow our unity to be targeted.”ort in July and send public sector employees back to work

Diab Warns 'All Lebanese Will Pay Price of any Instability'
Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Prime Minister Hassan Diab warned on Monday that “all Lebanese will pay the price of security instability.”Speaking in wake of the sectarian clashes that erupted in Beirut on Saturday, the premier said: “Protecting civil peace is a national duty for all political forces, not just the government.”“No one can therefore, shy away from this responsibility, regardless of their position,” he added. He stressed the importance of protecting civil peace because all Lebanese, “not just one party or one region, will pay the price of instability.”Diab said Saturday’s unrest was a “wake-up call” for powers to stop stoking tensions, because the persistence of such provocations will lead to Lebanon’s downfall. The circumstances Lebanon is enduring “demand everyone to display their highest level of national responsibility because fueling strife is tantamount to national treason.” “Everyone must remain vigilant and confront attempts to spark strife,” he urged. The PM stressed the need for national solidarity and cooperation to overcome the living and social crises in Lebanon. “The people’s concerns should in no way whatsoever be exploited for political gain.”Hundreds of Lebanese protesters took to the streets on Saturday to voice outrage over the government’s handling of a deep economic crisis, with security forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse rock-throwing demonstrators. Clashes soon erupted between supporters and opponents of the Hezbollah party. Many of the protesters had been calling for the disarmament of the Shiite party, with tensions eventually turning sectarian.

Lebanon: Tripoli Fears Chaos, Sectarian Tension
Beirut - Caroline Akoum/ Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli is on alert in the wake of Saturday’s clashes, which almost developed into broad sectarian confrontations after the spread of insulting videos that provoked the Sunni community. Since Saturday, the city saw anti-Hezbollah protests and slogans against the party’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, which could herald an escalation of an underlying sectarian rift. Former MP Mustafa Alloush, a member of Al-Mustaqbal party, expressed fear that some people would take advantage of the situation to instigate security problems in the city. In remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat, Alloush said: “Small extremist groups may take advantage of the lack of wise leaders in the Sunni community in Lebanon in general and Tripoli in particular, to instigate security incidents.” “What is happening today is an aspect of the ongoing civil war, which started in Lebanon - albeit sporadically - since 2005, when they decided to assassinate Prime Minister Rafik Hariri,” he noted. According to Alloush, Hezbollah could be behind the recent tension that occurred on the background of provocative religious slogans, but he stressed that the party was the “first beneficiary of what is happening.”“[Hezbollah] is suffering at this stage from a crisis within its own environment, as a result of difficult social and economic conditions, and therefore it is in its interest to lure others to justify its practices…and gain its community’s support,” He underlined. Warning that some parties would take advantage of the absence of Sunni leaders, Alloush feared that Tripoli would enter into open chaos as a result of increasing poverty, which could lead to the outbreak of violence. The head of Tripoli’s municipality, Riad Yamak, described the situation as “uncomfortable, both at the security and social levels.” “Neglect, poverty and unemployment makes the city vulnerable to violence,” he warned.

Berri tackles general situation with interlocutors
NNA/June 09/2020
House Speaker Nabih Berri, on Tuesday welcomed at his Ain El-Tineh residence Water and Energy Minister, Raymond Ghajar, with talks reportedly touching on the Country's general situation, and issues related to electricity and oil sectors.Asked about the diesel crisis on emerging, Minister Ghajar said that this problem had been resolved. On the other hand, Speaker Berri welcomed today at Ain El-Tineh residence the Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), Dr. Rola Dashti. The Speaker also received Head of the Economic and Social Council, Charles Arbid, and Council bureau members, with the current financial and economic situation featuring high on their talks.
Berri also reviewed the current medical situation and physicians' demands during his meeting with the Head of the Lebanese Order of Physicians, Dr. Sharaf Abu Sharaf, and a number of Syndicate Board members.

Israel Vows to Deliver ‘Blow’ to Lebanon if Hizbullah Strikes
Naharnet/June 09/2020
The Israeli president threatened the Lebanese government and that “it will be held responsible for any aggression practiced by Hizbullah against Israel,” vowing to deliver a “fatal blow” to Lebanon if the party attacks.
“Israel holds Lebanon and its government responsible for any aggression that Hizbullah might commit against Israeli targets," Reuven Rivlin said at a ceremony held in Jerusalem on Monday. He said “Hizbullah is equipping itself with weapons with the aim of undermining the state of Israel,” threatening to “strike the dens of terrorism, its perpetrators and those who finance it.”
Rivlin pointed out that Israel “is not at war with the Lebanese people,” but “as long as Hizbullah continues to exploit the people of Lebanon to serve the interests of foreign countries, the responsibility for sovereignty rests with the government of Lebanon, and it will be responsible for any action committed by Hizbullah from inside Lebanese territory.”“Israel is taking all measures possible to prevent a war with Lebanon, but will not hesitate to deal a fatal blow to the enemy wherever it exists,” he threatened.

Report: Diplomats Concerned over Situation in Lebanon after Saturday’s Clashes
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Arab and Western diplomatic missions in Lebanon expressed “concern” over the “sectarian” clashes that erupted on Saturday in Beirut, and issued calls for preserving “stability and calm,” al-Joumhouria daily reported on Tuesday.
The daily said European officials, mainly “French and international” political sources conveyed their “concern” to Lebanese authorities, urging the need to “preserve stability, reduce tension, and save no effort in addressing the economic and financial crisis.”
Moreover, the highest religious leader in al-Azhar in Egypt denounced the insults against one of the wives of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, Aisha, in Lebanon on Saturday. Al-Azhar said “religious symbols must be respected and sedition among Muslims must be buried,” praying to God to “protect Lebanon and unite its people.”Moreover, Egyptian Ambassador to Lebanon, Yaser Alawi, visited ex-PM Saad Hariri and Grand Sunni Mufti of the Republic Sheikh Abdul Latif Deryan on Monday. He announced from Dar el-Fatwa that “stability in Lebanon is a red line, and facing sedition is the duty for all Lebanese to prevent.”Former PMs Najib Miqati, Fouad Seniora, Saad Hariri and Tammam Salam have discussed Saturday’s incidents during their meeting at the Center House on Monday. Riots and sectarian tension erupted Saturday in central Beirut and other areas, leaving dozens of people injured, including 25 soldiers.
The Lebanese military warned that the clashes had endangered national unity.Shooting broke out in several areas around Lebanon late Saturday after videos circulated on social media showing some supporters of Hizbullah and Amal chanting sectarian insults. Riot police fired tear gas at protesters, after Saturday's attempt to reboot anti-government demonstrations quickly degenerated into rioting and stone-throwing confrontations between opposing camps. Lebanese troops deployed to separate the rival groups, and the tensions eventually subsided before dawn Sunday.

Protesters Rally, Block Roads as Dollar Soars on Black Market
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Anti-government protesters on Tuesday rallied and blocked roads in several Lebanese regions as the U.S. dollar reached the record high of around LBP 4,500 on the black market. In Tripoli, a protest turned violent outside the house of ex-minister Ashraf Rifi where gunshots were fired after demonstrators tried to storm the guards’ rooms. The protesters “scuffled with the guards as army troops worked on pushing them away,” the National News Agency said. Protesters also rallied outside an office belonging to ex-PM Najib Miqati in the city, where they smashed its CCTV cameras and chanted slogans against the rise in prices. Demonstrators also blocked the highway between Tripoli and Akkar in the Bab al-Tabbaneh and al-Beddawi areas and staged a march in Tripoli.Residents of Minieh, Deir Amar and al-Beddawi meanwhile rallied outside the Deir Amar power plant in protest at a power outage that has been running since several days. “They blocked the international highway in both directions outside the power plant, which prompted army troops to intervene to remove them,” NNA said, reporting tensions in the area. In Beirut, protesters rallied outside parliament before moving to the Hamra area where they blocked the road outside the central bank, denouncing the rise in the dollar exchange rate. Demonstrations were also staged in the southern city of Sidon as protesters blocked roads in the Bekaa and the Halba road in Akkar.

Mustaqbal Says June 6 'Black Day', Warns over 'Sunni Anger'
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc on Tuesday said the June 6 demo and incidents “did not resemble October 17, 2019 in anything.”“It was a black day that deviated from the revolution’s values and goals to reach the extent of sectarian strife, releasing a malicious spark that almost destroyed civil peace,” said the bloc in a statement issued after its weekly meeting. It added: “From the very first day, our decision has been, and will always be, the rejection of strife among the Lebanese with all their sects and components. We oppose those who awaken it regardless of their position, sect or rank. We managed the dispute with Hizbullah on this basis without giving up our principled stance on the controversial issues.”Apparently addressing Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement, the bloc said: “We would like to draw the attention of all partners in the country -- topped by those who breached the dissociation policy and those who disregarded the settlement due to the illusions of power and authority -- to the danger emanating from overlooking the reasons and motives behind Sunni anger, since the assassination of martyr premier Rafik Hariri to the eruption of the Syrian war and the deliberate breach of the requirements of national accord and partnership.”

Geagea Slams Aoun on Judicial Appointments, Marada to Boycott Cabinet
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Tuesday criticized President Michel Aoun’s decision to refuse and return the proposed judicial appointments. “Although the proposed judicial appointments are not ideal, the president’s returning of them is ten steps backwards,” Geagea tweeted.
Aoun has voiced a number of reservations over the judicial appointments, noting that “reviewing the appointments is something available and left to the evaluation of the Higher Judicial Council.”In a memo sent to Prime Minister Hassan Diab to justify the refusal of the proposed appointments, Aoun said they do not respect the requirements of “competency, integrity, productivity and seniority.” Marada Movement chief Suleiman Franjieh meanwhile announced that Marada will boycott Wednesday’s Cabinet session over the issue of administrative appointments. “Because these appointments are an insolent expression of sectarian and personal interests, we will not take part in tomorrow’s session, knowing that we were offered that we be part of them,” Franjieh tweeted. “We refused in line with our stance that rejects any appointments without standards or a mechanism,” the Marada chief added.

Hariri from Dar el-Fatwa: Coexistence is Key for Lebanon’s Stability
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri emphasized on Tuesday that coexistence in Lebanon is key for its stability despite the differences in opinion between various political parties, and also stressed the importance of unity among Muslims.
“I emphasize the unity of Muslims, and that coexistence is the only way for Lebanon to endure,” said Hariri after meeting Grand Mufti of the Republic Sheikh Abdul Latif Deryan in Dar el-Fatwa. He warned against “extremism, which is very common these days and only leads us to the unknown,” said Hariri.
His remarks came after Saturday’s clashes in Beirut that almost threatened to destabilize civil peace. “I emphasize my adherence to moderation and to accept that there is another opinion in the country that must be heard, even if we disagree with it,” he added. On the politician's condemnation of the clashes, Hariri said: “Political leaders are aware that sects have sensitivities, and in my opinion they have demonstrated that in their statements and positions.”

Hariri Launches Scathing Attack on Presidency and FPM
Naharnet/June 09/2020
Ex-PM Saad Hariri lashed out Tuesday at the Presidency and the Free Patriotic Movement in connection with a number of recent files. In a tweet, Hariri blasted the Presidency and the FPM for “reversing Cabinet’s decision” on the Salaata power plant and “returning the judicial appointments after they were signed by the premier.”He also condemned the “suspicious campaign” against Cabinet’s secretary general and “the attempt to impose hegemony on the Civil Service Council,” while accusing the Presidency and the FPM of “continued confusion over the economic and financial files.”
“They consider appointments to be an exclusive right to a single political party and they have turned the Presidency into a barricade to defend the demands of the presidential term’s party. This is the same course of the arbitrary polices that violate the constitution, exceed jurisdiction and put partisan interests ahead of the national interest,” Hariri lamented. “The strong presidential tenure is competing with the strong president over the pace of failure, confusion, spite, constitutional violations, the stirring of sentiments and the chronic hunger for controlling appointments and the administrative, financial and economic posts,” the ex-PM charged.

2 Accused in Ghosn's Escape Scheme Fight Extradition
Associated Press/Naharnet/June 09/2020
A former Green Beret and his son accused of smuggling ex-Nissan Motor Co. Chairman Carlos Ghosn out of Japan in a box are fighting their extradition to the country, arguing the offense is not a crime there. Michael and Peter Taylor are wanted in Japan on allegations that they helped Ghosn flee the country in December while he was out on bail and awaiting trial on financial misconduct allegations. But lawyers for the Taylors said in a legal document filed Monday that "bail jumping" is not a crime in Japan and, therefore, helping someone evade their bail conditions isn't a crime either. The attorneys accused U.S. authorities of "attempting to transform Japanese law to criminalize the act of helping someone engage in an act that is not itself criminal." "Japan has never prosecuted anyone, including Ghosn, for 'escaping' bail conditions," they wrote. "To the contrary, in the wake of Ghosn's departure from Japan, numerous news articles have reported on the fact that what Mr. Ghosn did was not a crime." At the very least, the Taylors should be released from jail while they challenge the extradition because they don't pose a risk of flight or danger to the community, the lawyers told the judge.
Michael Taylor, a 59-year-old former Green Beret and private security specialist, and Peter Taylor, 27, were arrested last month in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts. The defense lawyers called Michael Taylor a "decorated veteran who has served his country admirably," and his son an "impressive recent college graduate, with no criminal history whatsoever." Authorities say the Taylors helped sneak Ghosn out of the Japan on a private jet with former Nissan boss tucked away in a large box. The flight went first to Turkey, then to Lebanon, where Ghosn has citizenship but which has no extradition treaty with Japan. Ghosn said he fled because he could not expect a fair trial, was subjected to unfair conditions in detention and was barred from meeting his wife under his bail conditions. Ghosn has said he is innocent of allegations he under-reported his future income and committed a breach of trust by diverting Nissan money for his personal gain. He says the compensation was never decided on or received, and that the Nissan payments were for legitimate business purposes. It's not clear yet how Ghosn hooked up with the Taylors.The security business that Michael Taylor and a partner set up decades ago was initially focused on private investigations, but their caseload grew through corporate work and unofficial referrals from the State Department and FBI, including parents whose children had been taken overseas by former spouses. The elder Taylor has been hired by parents to rescue abducted children, gone undercover for the FBI in a sting on a Massachusetts drug gang and worked as a contractor for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last assignment had landed him in a Utah jail for 14 months, caught in a federal contract fraud case that upended Taylor's family and finances before he agreed to plead guilty to two charges.

Abdel Samad visits Qattar to discuss criteria for second screening phase for Tele Liban General Director post
NNA/June 09/2020
Minister of Information, Manal Abdel Samad, met this Tuesday with Minister of State for Administrative Development, Demianos Qattar, whom she visited at his ministerial office to discuss the criteria for the second phase of screening to involve the candidates for the position of general manager / Chairman of the Board of Directors of State-run Tele Liban.The second evaluation phase will begin tomorrow, in cooperation with the Office of the Minister of State for Development Affairs, which took over the first screening process, which resulted in 75 candidates out of 139 qualifying to the next level. The two ministries have been mostly keen on maintaining the highest standards of transparency in the first screening phase, whereby the names of candidates, their regional and sectarian affiliations, and all their personal information were withheld.
At the end of said phase, the Ministry of Information was handed over a list revealing only the names that did not succeed, with an explanation of the reasons for their dismissal.
The second phase, which will begin tomorrow, will be undertaken by a joint committee from the Ministry of Information and the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Development, while maintaining the principle of withholding the applicants' personal information. The candidates will be evaluated based on the preference given to certificates and additional skills, and those who prove more suitable for the post will thus qualify for the third evaluation stage.

Strong Lebanon: To conclude financial appointments, fill vacancies and promulgate anti-corruption laws
NNA/June 09/2020
The Strong Lebanon parliamentary bloc held its periodic meeting this Tuesday, under the chairmanship of FPM leader, MP Gebran Bassil, uttering condemnation of the attacks against religious figures, and calling on the protestors to adhere to peaceful means of protest, and to pressure for reformist ideas and anti-corruption approaches.The bloc warned against "suspicious political aims that could lead to the failure of the street movement, when the latter is required to persist, so as to achieve the necessary reforms." Conferees stressed that "the government must complete the necessary appointments, especially the financial ones, and fill the current vacancies," uttering commitment to correcting the "injustice that befalls the Orthodox community." The Strong Lebanon bloc affirmed "its ongoing battle to pass the laws it is fighting for, especially the development of anti-corruption laws and the legislations submitted by the bloc in this framework, namely the law relevant to the Special Court to combat financial crimes and the Accounting and Property Law."
The bloc finally echoed the Minister of Justice's call for "drafting a decree for the return of Lebanese deportees to occupied Palestine."

Bukhari tackles economic developments with Bifani
NNA/June 09/2020
Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon, Walid bin Abdullah Bukhari, on Tuesday welcomed at his Yarzeh residence, the Director General of the Ministry of Finance, Alain Bifani, with talks reportedly touching on the current fiancial and economic developments on the Lebanese arena.The pair also exchanged views on a number of issues of mutual concern.

Hitti advocates safe, dignified and non-coercive return of displaced Syrians
NNA/June 09/2020
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, Nassif Hitti, participated in the virtual conference organized by the "Antalya Diplomatic Forum", in cooperation with the International Center for Migration Policy Development ICMPD, and the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Minister delivered Lebanon's speech, in which he renewed "the assertion of Lebanon's positions regarding the Syrian displacement," stressing that "the lasting solution to the displacement crisis is in a safe, dignified and non-coercive return."
Hitti called for "helping Lebanon confront the coronavirus pandemic and prevent its spread in the camps of displaced Syrians in Lebanon."
The conference was attended by foreign ministers of Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan, as well as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi and the European Union Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson.

Contact tracing key to keeping Lebanon's coronavirus cases low
Emily Lewis/Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 09 June 2020Text size A A A
As governments across the world begin to ease lockdown measures and channel efforts toward restoring economies battered by COVID-19, identifying and isolating new cases of the novel coronavirus has become the top priority.
They do this by “contact tracing” – tracking down everyone who has been in close contact with patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and instructing them to go into quarantine where they are carefully monitored.
Many countries have opted to use artificial intelligence and mobile applications to assist with this process, to varying degrees of success.
In Lebanon, the Health Ministry instead relies primarily on a more traditional method of contact tracing – calling up suspected contacts one-by-one, asking for their symptoms and urging them to self-isolate and get tested.
It has helped the country keep coronavirus cases low – the disease has so far infected 1,350 people and claimed the lives of 30. According to daily reports from Lebanon’s national operations room, the proportion of people infected by an unknown source is consistently below 5 percent.
Call centers run by the ministry’s Epidemiological Surveillance Unit and Beirut’s Rafik Hariri University Hospital – the hub for coronavirus testing and treatment in Lebanon – are responsible for contacting people who have tested positive and asking a series of questions about where they have been and who they have met. “Contact tracing is very important in Lebanon, particularly as we are still in the containment phase, which is all about finding cases and isolating them as quickly as possible,” Dr. Firass Abiad, the director of Rafik Hariri Hospital, told Al Arabiya English. It has allowed teams from the Health Ministry to conduct targeted testing, which has on multiple occasions revealed clusters of COVID-19.
“Uncovering clusters through contact tracing has been an essential part of curbing the spread of the infection in Lebanon,” said Ghinwa Hayek, a member of the Lebanese Epidemiological Association.
On Thursday, 42 people tested positive for coronavirus in the seaside town of Barja after coming in contact with a Lebanese woman returning on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Health Minister Hamad Hasan said that if cases of returning expatriates continue to infect large numbers of people, reopening Beirut Airport – closed since March 18 – is out of the question.
While this cluster is a troubling indicator of a lack of compliance with home quarantine, other cases were quickly tracked down, which is a positive indictment of the contact tracing system, said Iman Shankiti, the World Health Organization’s Lebanon representative.
“With good contact tracing you avoid using a blunt weapon like a total lockdown, and can use a precision missile, with targeted testing and localized, less damaging, lockdowns,” Abiad said.
However, as the country continues to lift lockdown measures, quickly tracking down new cases will become even more essential to limit the virus’ spread. Recently malls were allowed to open again and an overnight curfew was shortened. Most recently, sports centers and gyms were allowed to reopen.
“We are now at a crossroads, and without improving contact tracing we might slip into the unknown,” Shankiti explained.
Bolstering the tracing system is not without its challenges, notably when it comes to recruiting and training enough people to make the hundreds of daily calls necessary to keep tabs on every suspected and confirmed case.
Social stigma
Effective contact tracing also relies on the people on the other end of the phone being “cooperative and forthcoming” with information, Abiad said, explaining that while some people may simply forget who they were with, others are reluctant to share personal details.
“There are a lot of social issues with a COVID-19 diagnosis, not just medical issues,” he said. Concerns over sharing personal information are particularly acute for Lebanon’s most marginalized populations such as Syrian refugees, undocumented laborers and migrant workers.
Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that while contract tracing is essential to the COVID-19 response, it assumes that people will “feel comfortable enough to call a government-run service ... and potentially share information about where they live, whom they live with, where they have traveled, and where they work.”Syrian refugees have also expressed fears of additional stigmatization and discrimination if they contract coronavirus and have described this as a deterrent from seeking medical care, the report found.
Digital problems
While traditional contact tracing has so far proved effective in keeping cases low through targeted testing and isolation, Hayek questioned how it will fare in the long-term, particularly as Lebanese expatriates continue to return in large numbers.
“COVID-19 is not going anywhere, and many are anticipating another spike in the fall,” she said. “So how can we make this sustainable?”
Technological solutions are being developed by governments all around the world to answer the question of longevity. In South Korea, the government has used controversial surveillance methods like credit card tracking; Singaporean authorities had to rethink their strategy when only 20 percent of the population downloaded their contact tracing application; and the British government has faced backlash from volunteer tracers left in the dark without training.
The Lebanese Health Ministry’s mobile app has a dedicated coronavirus section, through which users can check symptoms, report confirmed cases and view the current map of cases.
However, Shanktiti explained, the app often requires call center operatives to follow up with users due to mistakes in data entry and does not use GPS signaling to trace users. Digital rights NGO SMEX has also warned that the app lacks basic privacy protections, with “excessive privacy permissions” prompting users to give access to their cameras, microphone and locations. “A major problem with digital contact tracing is a breach of personal information, meaning people are less likely to opt-in to an app,” Abiad said.
To ensure the Lebanese authorities continue on their path of relative success with the coronavirus and prevent an underfunded public health system from becoming overwhelmed, Hayek believes the best solution is “a mixed-methods approach of digital and traditional contact tracing.”“This way, we meet in the middle.”

We banned Hezbollah activities in Germany. Now it’s the EU’s turn.
Christoph Bernstiel/Al Arabiya/June 08/2020
كريستوفر برنستيل: نحن منعنا انشطة حزب الله في ألمانيا والآن جاء دور الإتحاد الأوروبي ليفعل نفس الشيء
The risk of being injured, or even killed, by an anti-Semitic or extremist attack in Germany has grown over the last few years. For the German government, it is important to take a clear and decisive stance against such developments.
This is precisely what we have now done in parliament, by banning the activities of Hezbollah. Anti-Semitism is not tolerated and terrorist activities are not acceptable in Germany under any circumstances. Taking action against an organization like Hezbollah, with its extremist and openly anti-Semitic positions, is therefore a logical step.
Though Hezbollah has so far not carried out any attacks on German soil, we have of course noticed the way in which this organization is spreading violence and terror across the whole world - including the Muslim world - and exploiting Germany as a supposedly safe haven. Our security authorities have been keeping a close eye on the organization for some time. Numerous measures have been implemented in recent years to diminish Hezbollah’s influence in Germany.
For example, mosque and cultural associations where its supporters were active have been observed. In 2008, Germany banned the Hezbollah TV channel Al Manar. The channel broadcasted hate propaganda and anti-Israel content, intended among other things to radicalize Muslims in Germany.
In 2014, a fundraising association claiming to be collecting donations for orphans in Lebanon was banned and dissolved, since the money raised was being channeled to a Hezbollah martyrs fund. Last December, the German parliament, known as the Bundestag, finally called on the federal government to take even stronger action against Hezbollah and for its activities to be banned.
This uncompromising approach to Hezbollah could be described as a correction of the course previously taken as Germany had endeavoured for many years to act as a mediator in negotiations between Lebanon and the State of Israel. Hezbollah still wields a very strong influence on politics and society in Lebanon. Germany believed that its readiness to engage in dialogue could help build stability there.
Yet it became clear that Hezbollah repeatedly exploited this willingness to make concessions in order to carry out attacks or plan terrorist activities. Germany therefore reached the conclusion that the time for negotiations and warnings had gone on long enough.
A ban on the activities of Hezbollah was thus announced in Germany on April 30, 2020. On the same day, buildings used by four mosque associations and their leaders were searched. This was the last step in a series of measures and decisions and a clear signal that Hezbollah’s activities in Germany would no longer be tolerated.
At the same time, there is a growing understanding at European level of the need to take stronger and more rigorous action against Hezbollah in order to successfully counter its terrorist activities. At present, not only Germany, but also the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and we can expect further states to follow suit. In addition, the distinction between the political and military wings may well be abolished at European level.
Together with many of my Bundestag colleagues, I am currently supporting a campaign by the American Jewish Committee in this context and am lobbying actively for the European Union to classify Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organization. All of these activities are already having an impact and ratcheting up the pressure on Hezbollah. Yet there is still a long and stony road to travel until this organization no longer has the capacity to carry out attacks. Luckily, we are able to count on many partners in the Middle East on this path, such as Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
*Christoph Bernstiel is a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and was directly elected to the German Bundestag by the 72nd district of Halle (Saale) in the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt in 2017. He is a member of the committee for Homeland Security, where he focuses on cybercrime, and the select committee on artificial intelligence. Mr. Bernstiel is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the federal foundation for the evaluation of the SED dictatorship, deputy chairman of the CDU State Group Saxony-Anhalt in the Bundestag, a member of the parliamentary group for small and medium businesses, and a member of the Future Forum Public Security. In addition to his duties at the federal level, Mr. Bernstiel has been a member of the Halle (Saale) city council since 2014 where he focuses on the topics of urban development, infrastructure, order, and security.

Hezbollah dragging Lebanon closer to new civil war
Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib/Arab News/June 08/2020.
دانيا قليلات: حزب الله يجر لبنان إلى حافة الحرب الأهلية
Activists in Lebanon called on citizens to take to the streets at the weekend and finish the mission they started on Oct. 17 last year. The manifesto of the “October Meeting” — a more or less unitary body representing the protesters — highlighted three “nos.” No to a government that behaves like a farm, no to a state that acts like the politicians’ private company, and no to a state that is used as plunder by the politicians. The protesters were faced by Hezbollah and its ally, the Amal Movement. They felt threatened as the demands of the protesters could endanger their grip on the state. The confrontation resulted in armed clashes. The clashes died down, but if this trend is not contained it might threaten another civil war.
The protesters want a total break from the previous system. They have lost trust in the presidency, government and parliament. They have instead asked for a transitional government that reflects the spirit of Oct. 17. The activists’ statement even detailed what they expect from the transitional government. The first demand is for the transitional government to design and implement an economic rescue plan. Secondly, they want it to prepare for free elections under the supervision of an independent committee, according to a new law. The third mandate of the interim government would be to put in place laws that guarantee the independence of the judiciary. The fourth demand is for it to restore stolen funds and put corrupt politicians on trial. The last demand is for the government to adopt a neutral foreign policy that will shield Lebanon from Middle Eastern competition and prevent the country from getting embroiled in regional conflicts.
Hezbollah saw in these demands a veiled threat to remove its arms and hence to deprive it of its competitive edge over other factions. Its members pledged that no one would be able to take away the group’s arms. They went on to the streets with their light weaponry to show their might and determination in facing the peaceful protesters. However, this prompted a reaction from other antagonistic factions and groups carrying the flag of the Lebanese forces stood in Ain Al-Remmaneh, a Christian area adjacent to Hezbollah stronghold Chiyah, and denounced Hasan Nasrallah.
Hezbollah’s use of a sectarian and provocative slogan incited a partisan response on the other side. If the country takes this road, it can have another civil war. Lebanon is in a region that is sinking into a series of proxy wars. The factions antagonistic to Hezbollah could very easily find outside backers who would be ready to arm and fund them. Though a large number of activists are mature and know that a war will not solve Lebanon’s problems — but on the contrary will lead to more destruction — other factions feel that the country is already destroyed and only through arms can they stand up to Hezbollah.
The country is in a very delicate situation. Even President Michel Aoun, who has largely been in a state of denial, asked for a return to peace and for parties to refrain from provoking one another. In this case, as I have mentioned in previous articles, the army is the only unifying institution that can bring people together. The army still has the trust of the people. It has the moral authority and can impose order once it is in charge. However, in Lebanon, the military is under civilian control, hence the control of the corrupt political elite that has lost the trust of the people.
It is unlikely that the president will take the patriotic decision of stepping down and letting the army take control. He will not do anything that will jeopardize the chances of Gebran Bassil, his son-in-law and the apple of his eye, clinching the presidency after him. Though Bassil was recently voted on social media as the most hated personality in Lebanon, Aoun still thinks he can impose him on the Lebanese people.
However, there is hope in Prime Minister Hassan Diab. Unlike Aoun, he does not have a following and knows very well that his position is only meant to fill in a blank, rather than to conduct an active role. He might take a patriotic position and bow to the protesters’ pressure. If that is the case, he should declare a state of emergency in which the army takes control, and then resign. The swift and tight control by the army of any armed factions on the streets would ensure that the country does not slip into the chaos of a civil war.
Even President Michel Aoun, who has largely been in a state of denial, asked for a return to peace.
Rightly, the protesters asked for the removal of non-legitimate weapons, mainly meaning those of Hezbollah. Former Justice Minister Ashraf Riffi appeared on several news outlets asking for the enforcement of UN Security Council resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias in Lebanon. However, this radical demand might push Hezbollah to feel this is a do-or-die moment and so start a confrontation in a bid to protect its arms. If this happens, it would be the start of another civil war. A better alternative would be to call for the demilitarization of Beirut, hence confining Hezbollah’s arms to the south of the country. Then they could not be used against their fellow citizens.
Better than asking for the full enforcement of resolution 1559 would be for the protesters to ask Hezbollah to stick to its original mandate, which is that of a defensive force against Israel. In the current situation, where Lebanon is close to slipping into a new civil war, two people have the ability to prevent it from going down this path: The prime minister and the commander of the army.
*Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib is a specialist in US-Arab relations with a focus on lobbying. She holds a PhD in politics from the University of Exeter and is an affiliated scholar with the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on June 09-10/2020
Republicans in Congress to introduce biggest-ever sanctions bill against Iran
Joyce Karam/The National/June 09/2020
The package would end waivers for Iraq and cut aid to Lebanon’s armed forces
Republicans in Congress are set to introduce an unprecedented sanctions bill against Iran on Wednesday that would target its leaders, regional proxies and end economic waivers currently allowed in places like Iraq.
The bill would be the largest punitive measures introduced against Iran in Congress’ history. The office of Congressman Joe Wilson, one of the proposal’s sponsors, confirmed to The National that it will include 140 initiatives against Iran, as well as tightening the pressure on Russia and China to ramp up their action against the Islamic regime. The bill is timed as the Trump administration seeks pressure to renew the UN arms embargo on Iran that will expire in October. According to the Washington Free Beacon, it would target an estimated $70 million of annual security aid to Lebanon and sanctions waivers granted to Iraq that allow it to sell electricity to Iran. The Republican Study Committee (RSC) is behind the proposal, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, which has 147 members in the House on board, including RSC chair Mike Johnson. So far, no Democrats have come in support of the bill, and their party controls the majority in the US House of Representatives.
The bill in its current form could also face pushback from the Trump administration. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has supported renewing waivers for Iraq, and continuing US military aid to Lebanon. The bill would block any administration efforts to lift sanctions on Iran without Congress approval, and would impose additional sanctions on its proxies in Iraq. But the bill could offer the White House tools to pressure Russia and China into renewing the current arms embargo on Iran, expiring in October.
If that doesn’t happen, Congress would “play a central role in crafting new embargoes on the sale of weapons to Iran. This would include "new sanctions on the arms industries of countries like Russia and China that return to selling weapons to Iran, the banks facilitating any sale of weapons to Iran, and the companies shipping weapons,” the Washington Free Beacon said.
The bill would also halt US aid to Lebanon and sanction Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “multibillion-dollar financial empire, as well as the country's petrochemical, financial, and automotive sectors” the report said.
Firas Maksad, a Middle East analyst in Washington and a professor at George Washington University, said the proposal is massive in its penalties but will face several hurdles. “The proposed legislation is designed to be the mother of all sanctions bills, but its size and the multiplicity of thorny foreign policy issues it impacts means it will be hindered by political bickering.”In an election year, “Republican foreign policy hawks in congress believe it will be difficult for the administration to resist pressure for a tougher approach to Iran, Russia and China,” Mr Maksad told The National.
But technically the bill could go through several amendments to get support from both parties in Congress. “The legislation will need to navigate both chambers of congress and go through a reconciliation process. If elements of it are ultimately signed into law, it will be after protracted negotiations and the inclusion of a presidential waiver, thereby allowing the president to suspend its provision on national security grounds when necessary,” Mr Maksad argued.
Ryan Bohl, an analyst at the US intelligence company Stratfor, said he did not expect it to pass. “It seems unlikely to pass, especially with the November election coming up and Democrats not wanting to look like they're creating overseas tension,” Mr Bohl said. The legislation could, however, “pressure, even inspire, the Trump administration to tighten sanctions further before the election,” he said Mr Bohl saw emphasis on Lebanon and Iraq as significant in the proposal. “Lebanon and Iraq are becoming a hawk priority… the pro-sanctions community believes that they must crush Iran's links to those countries and are willing to risk US ties in Beirut and Baghdad to do so.”

Iran to Execute Spy Who Helped US Target Soleimani
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Iran said Tuesday it will execute a man whose conviction for spying for the US by helping target a top Iranian general has been upheld by the supreme court. Mahmoud Mousavi Majd was convicted of spying on Iran's armed forces "especially the Quds Force and on the whereabouts and movements of martyr General Qasem Soleimani" for large sums of money from both Israel's Mossad and the US Central Intelligence Agency, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told a televised news conference. Majd's death sentence has been upheld by the supreme court and "will be carried out soon", he added, AFP reported. Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, was killed in January in a US drone strike in Baghdad. Iran in February handed down a similar sentence for Amir Rahimpour, another man convicted of spying for the US and conspiring to sell information on Iran's nuclear programme. Tehran announced in December it had arrested eight people "linked to the CIA" and involved in nationwide street protests that erupted the previous month over a surprise petrol price hike.

Allowing Iran to buy, sell conventional weapons further destabilizes region: Hook
Yaghoub Fazeli, video by: Omar Elkatouri, Al Arabiya English/Tuesday 09 June 2020
Allowing Iran to buy and sell conventional weapons by not extending the UN Security Council arms embargo on Tehran expiring in October can further destabilize the Middle East, US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said on Tuesday. “Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and it is the world's leading state sponsor of anti-Semitism. And when a regime of this nature and this quality is allowed to freely buy and export conventional weapons … this has the potential to really destabilize the Middle East,” said Hook. The United States in 2018 withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal that sought to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. As part of that deal, a UN arms embargo on Iran expires in October. The US is seeking to have the arms embargo on Iran extended before it expires on October 18. Commending the US’s maximum pressure campaign against Tehran, Hook said the Middle East can look “very different” with a “peaceful Iran.” “Our pressure campaign is making a huge difference and it is expanding the space for the Iranian people to have a more representative government, which is something I think a lot of nations around the world hope for the Iranian people,” he said. Hook added that Iran's future will be decided by the Iranian people, and not the US government.
Iran protests
Unlike President Barack Obama’s administration, President Donald Trump’s administration supports Iranian protesters, he said. “We reversed the mistake that was made in 2009 when President Obama did not stand with Iranian protesters during the Green Revolution,” said Hook. In 2009, Iranian protesters famously chanted “Obama, Obama, either with us or with them,” urging the US President to choose between the Iranian people and regime. Obama has been criticized over the years for not supporting Iranian protesters in 2009. “Every single time you've seen protests in Iran, the US and President Trump, Secretary Pompeo, Vice President Pence and myself have all stood squarely behind the Iranian people, especially in November when there were protests in all 31 of Iran's provinces,” said Hook. Referring to recent protests in Iran, Hook pointed out that there have been no protests against US sanctions and Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Tehran. “[The protests] were all directed at the regime because the Iranian people know whom to blame for the diplomatic isolation and for the economic malaise that has sort of troubled Iran for 41 years,” he said.
During Iran’s January protests following the Iranian military’s downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane, protesters were seen in Tehran refusing to step on Israeli and American flags printed on the ground by authorities for Iranians to walk over. The current US administration has stood up to the Iranian regime “in ways that have no historic precedent,” said Hook. “This is a regime that is not used to being told no. And they're learning that we're serious about reversing their gains and making the Middle East more support, more peaceful,” Hook added.

For 2nd Straight Day, Syria’s Suweida Protests against Regime, Living Crisis
Daraa – Riad al-Zein/Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Protests erupted for a second straight day in the southern Syrian province of Suweida on Monday with dozens of people calling for the ouster of President Bashar Assad and denouncing the deteriorating living and economic conditions in the country. Local sources said the demonstrations also demanded the withdrawal of Iran and Russian forces from Syria and chanted for the overthrow of the ruling regime. Protests had broken out on Sunday over the collapse of the Syrian pound, with the people blaming Assad and the regime for the crisis. The Suweida 24 network reported that the regime had sent military and security reinforcements to the province, but activists said they did not intervene to disperse the protest. After nine years of war, Syria is in the thick of an economic crisis compounded by a coronavirus lockdown and a dollar liquidity crunch in neighboring Lebanon.
The Syrian pound has hit record lows against the dollar amid widespread corruption and leading to a spike in living costs. Authorities have done little to address the crisis, sparking the people’s ire. Some stores, including pharmacies, have been forced to turn away customers and close due to the fluctuation of prices. The cost of food and medicine has risen four and fivefold in recent days, leaving many families unable to make ends meet. Analysts said concerns over the June 17 implementation of the US Caesar Act, which aims to sanction foreign persons who assist the Syrian government or help in post-war reconstruction, also contributed to the de facto devaluation.
Abou Ziad, a resident of the western Suweida countryside, said the Syrian pound was trading at 2,600 to the dollar on the black market, its highest rate since the eruption of the conflict. He said the fluctuation has led to a hike in food goods. Vegetable oil now sells at 3,500 pounds, when it was previously sold at 1,000 pounds. A kilogram of sugar now costs 1,800 pounds, its price tripling from 600 pounds. Milk, meat, poultry, cleaning products and other essential goods have all doubled and tripled in price. Abou Jihad, a public employee who has four mouths to feed, said the living conditions were “intolerable”. “Salaries only last three days” with such price hikes, he lamented. “The corrupt people are the ones who are benefitting the most in Syria. They have reaped billions while the people now live in poverty.” Heiko Wimmen, Syria project director at the conflict tracker Crisis Group, said that with the Caesar Act coming into force, "doing business with Syria will become even more difficult and risky".Both analysts said the fall from grace of top business tycoon Rami Makhlouf despite being a cousin of the president was also affecting confidence. "The Makhlouf saga is spooking the rich," Wimmen said, according to AFP. After the Damascus regime froze assets of the head of the country's largest mobile phone operator and slapped a travel ban on him, the wealthy feel "nobody is safe", he said. Most of Syria's population lives in poverty, according to the United Nations, and food prices have doubled over the past year. The UN food agency's Jessica Lawson said any further depreciation risked increasing the cost of imported basic food items such as rice, pasta and lentils. "These price increases risk pushing even more people into hunger, poverty and food insecurity as Syrians' purchasing power continues to erode," the World Food Program spokeswoman said.

US Official: Sanctions Contributed to Devaluation of Syrian Pound
Washington, London - Asharq Al-Awsat/February 3, 2020.
US Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey said US sanctions and measures contributed to the devaluation of the Syrian pound against the dollar. In a video meeting that was attended by his Deputy Assistant Secretary Joel Rubin on Sunday, Jeffrey said that Washington made a proposal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad through a third party to end the crisis. Washington wants a political process that shouldn’t necessarily change the regime but at least change its attitude and support of terrorist groups and Iran, he continued. Regarding the economic crisis, he said that the US sanctions against Damascus contributed to the collapse of the Syrian current and that the regime "is incapable of managing an effective economic policy and conducting money-laundry in Lebanese banks."Moreover, Rubin said that the Caesar Act covers individuals and companies. Responding to a question on ruling out the Kurdish administration from this act, he said that if anyone wishes to invest in energy and construction in self-administered zones then this is out of the US administration's interest. Meanwhile, Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis said that stabilizing the exchange rate between 2017-2020 required USD20 billion. Khamis added that calls are ongoing with friendly states to discuss possible ways to reinforce the lira’s value.

Syria Hit by Rare Anti-Regime Protests Sparked by Economic Crisis
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Syrians held a third day of rare anti-regime protests over deteriorating living conditions Tuesday in the regime-held city of Suweida, a war monitor said, as the value of the pound sunk. The value of the Syrian pound has plummeted with dizzying speed in recent days on the informal market, sending prices skyrocketing nationwide and shuttering shops. Dozens rallied in the majority-Druze city of Suweida in southern Syria for the third day running, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The protests had begun Sunday "with calls for improved living conditions before demands became more political", Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman said. On Tuesday, men and women gathered near the main headquarters of provincial authorities and later marched through the city's streets, shouting anti-regime slogans, according to a video released by local news outlet Suwayda24.
"The people want to topple the regime," they shouted in chants reminiscent of the 2011 uprising. In videos published by Suwayda24 on Sunday, crowds could also be heard chanting: "Revolution, freedom, social justice," and "Down with (President) Bashar al-Assad". Syria has grappled with an economic crisis compounded by Western sanctions, a coronavirus lockdown and a rapid devaluation of the local currency. From Saturday to Monday the exchange rate soared from 2,300 to more than 3,000 pounds to the dollar, more than four times the official rate of around 700. Before the conflict, it stood at 47.
Even before the latest devaluation, food prices had increased by 152 percent Suweida in the year to April, according to the World Food Program. The Suweida region south of Damascus is the Syrian heartland of the country's Druze minority community. Suweida has been mostly spared by the Syrian conflict, and only faced sporadic extremist attacks they managed to repel. Syria's war has killed more than 380,000 people and displaced millions since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-regime protests.

Airstrikes Target NW Syria, Displace Thousands
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Suspected Russian airstrikes pounded villages on the edge of the last opposition enclave in northwestern Syria, sending thousands of civilians fleeing, activists reported Tuesday - scenes unseen in the area since a cease-fire three months ago. The violence at the edge of Idlib province is the most serious breach of the ceasefire in place since early March, when an agreement between Turkey and Russia halted the Syrian government´s three-month air and ground campaign into Idlib. The Syria Response Coordination Group, a team of aid workers, said the military escalation displaced more than 5,800 civilians in the last 24 hours from areas in southern Idlib and western Hama countryside. Many of the displaced had only recently returned to their villages after the ceasefire, the group said. On Monday, opposition fighters launched a limited offensive against government-held positions, briefly seizing a couple of villages. Government troops, backed by Russian air support, responded, repelling the insurgents but also widening their area of operations, targeting 10 villages, according to Mohamed Rasheed, a Syrian media activist documenting the offensive. Rasheed reported airstrikes, believed to be carried out by Russia's air force, on a number of villages in southern Idlib. He said he documented 45 airstrikes since Monday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recorded 15 airstrikes on Tuesday, also saying they were believed to be Russian. The Observatory and other local networks said at least one civilian was killed in Kansafra village. The raids led to the death of one civilian in the village of Balyun -- the "first to die from an airstrike" since the March ceasefire, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said. Home to around three million people, the Idlib region is Syria's last major rebel bastion after nine years of devastating civil war.
A Russian-backed government offensive between December and March displaced nearly a million people in the region. The truce reached on March 6 has largely halted the fighting but President Bashar al-Assad has vowed to retake full control of the region. Russia resumed airstrikes earlier this month and on Monday hit parts of Idlib and neighboring Hama provinces with dozens of airstrikes, the Observatory said. The strikes came as ground fighting left 19 government troops and 22 fighters dead, the Britain-based monitor said. The war in Syria has killed more than 380,000 people and displaced nearly half of the country's pre-war population since it started in 2011.

What’s Behind Netanyahu’s Call for his US Advisor?
Tel Aviv/Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
US Election Advisor Aaron Klein was seen several times in recent days with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter hired him to be part of his team, without specifying his duties. However, many political sources saw this development as a sign that Netanyahu was preparing for an imminent election battle. Klein is a strategic advisor who specializes in election affairs and works with several political leaders in the United States and the world. He was a journalist for several right-wing media outlets in the US, then served in the office of Steve Bannon, the strategic adviser of US President Donald Trump. He has been with Netanyahu in the last three electoral battles. Observers in Tel Aviv expect that the premier would be serious in drawing up a new electoral plan, and if he does not implement it, he will be able to use it to pressure his allies. They noted that Netanyahu was reading opinion polls and conducting private surveys himself, all of which indicate that if elections are held today, he will win an unprecedented victory and be able to form a stable right-wing government. Politicians, rivals and top political commentators in Israel point out that Netanyahu’s actions, in the past two weeks, indicate that he believes in the need to end the unity government with alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz and that he does not want anyone else to share with the premiership with him.

Shtayyeh Submits 'Counter-Proposal' to US Mideast Plan
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Palestinians have sent the diplomatic Quartet a response to the US Mideast plan which sees parts of the West Bank being annexed by Israel, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said Tuesday. "We submitted a counter-proposal to the Quartet a few days ago," he said, referring to the group mediating in the conflict, made up of the United Nations, United States, Russia, and European Union. He said that it proposed the creation of a "sovereign Palestinian state, independent and demilitarized" with "minor modifications of borders where necessary".The Palestinian text foresaw possible land swaps between the two future states on a like-for-like basis, he said at a press conference. Announced at the end of January in Washington, US President Donald Trump's peace plan provides for the annexation by Israel of its settlements and of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank. The Palestinians have rejected in its entirety the plan, which also provides for the creation of a Palestinian state but on reduced territory and without east Jerusalem as its capital, denying a core Palestinian demand.
The European Union opposes it and is demanding that Israel abandon its annexation ambitions, which it has said it will reveal after July 1.
'International pressure' -
EU member states are weighing options such as economic sanctions or recognition of Palestinian statehood to dissuade Israel from going ahead with the plan, and what measures to take in the event that it is not deterred, diplomatic sources say. "We want Israel to feel international pressure," Shtayyeh said.
"For the first time the European political allies are discussing sanctions against Israel because we asked for them," he added. In recent days, demonstrations against the annexation project have multiplied in the West Bank and also in Israel without, however, drawing large crowds on the Palestinian side.
"The anger is there, the dissatisfaction is there, the frustration is there, and all that is a recipe for more problems," said Shtayyeh, assuring however that the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmud Abbas, wanted to avoid widespread disruption. An Israeli poll last week showed most Israelis feared that annexation would trigger a Palestinian uprising. The most recent Palestinian uprising, known as the Second Intifada, erupted in the early 2000s and included waves of suicide bombings and deadly Israeli responses. More than 450,000 Israelis live in settlements deemed illegal by international law in the occupied West Bank, which is home to 2.7 million Palestinians. Analysts say that Netanyahu has a narrow window of opportunity to move ahead with annexation, before US presidential elections in November that could see his close ally Trump voted out of office.

Sudan Begins Negotiations With IMF to Settle Arrears, Get Financial Support
Khartoum- Khalid Albululat Izyraq
Sudan and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been involved in negotiations aimed at implementing a monitoring program by the Fund’s experts for the Sudanese economy. The Staff-Monitored Program seeks to open doors for international financing and investment in major development, infrastructure, peacebuilding, and job creation projects for youth, Finance Minister Ibrahim Elbadawi said on Sunday. The non-funded program could pave the way for international financial support. It is expected to allow the country to settle its financial arrears, debt forgiveness, and grants from the International Development Association (IDA). “We have a long road ahead of us to undo the damage to our economy. However, this engagement is an initial step to open the door for direct budget support, which is needed to finance the major development projects,” Elbadawi noted. The talks will allow Sudan to restore its proper position in the international monetary system, he stressed. IMF communications director Gerry Rice, for his part, said that Sudan had requested talks, which he expected to be completed by around the fourth week of June. The program would be “a way for Sudan to show a track record of good policy implementation,” Rice said. “By showing such a track record, it can help Sudan toward clearing its arrears to the IMF, which in turn, and this is the key, can unlock financing from other sources as well.” Sudan has debts of around $62 billion, including arrears of around $3 billion to international financial institutions, Elbadawi said in October. Khartoum is in desperate need of financial help to reorganize its economy. Inflation has been running at 99 percent and the currency tumbling as the government prints money to subsidize bread, fuel, and electricity.

Ethiopia Confident of Filling Nile Dam, Egypt Awaits ‘Comprehensive Agreement’
Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Ethiopia seems to be very confident in its ability to fill the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) despite pressure by Egypt. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed stressed on Monday that the decision to fill the dam is “irreversible.”
He said the entire construction was progressing as planned and has reached the filling of the reservoir. “For us, GERD is a matter of development and national identity that will not hurt Egypt and Sudan,” the premier stressed, adding that “no one can stop us from completing the dam.”Ethiopia has ignored Egyptian pressure, included threats to file a complaint to the UN Security Council. Cairo rejects any “unilateral decision” by Ethiopia without reaching a comprehensive agreement that meets the interests of all parties, including Khartoum. According to former Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Dr. Hossam Moghazy, Egypt will not object to the first filling process during the upcoming rainy season in July. However, he stressed that this should be part of a comprehensive agreement that sets the rules for the filling and operation of the $4 billion GERD. Moghazy told Asharq Al-Awsat that his country counts on the decision to resume the tripartite negotiations in the coming period, based on Sudan’s initiative. “Arrangements are currently being made with all parties to determine the date and terms of the talks.”Sudan and Egypt both agree on their rejection to fill the dam reservoir before reaching a comprehensive agreement, while turning to Washington’s authority in the upcoming meeting to resolve controversial issues only, instead of returning to square one of the negotiations. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt had been expected to sign an agreement in Washington on the filling and operation of the dam in February, but Ethiopia skipped the meeting and only Egypt initialed the deal. These talks are sponsored by the US Treasury department in partnership with the World Bank. GERD has been under construction since 2011 when Ethiopia kicked off building it near its border with Sudan on the Blue Nile, which flows into the Nile River.
The construction has sparked concerns in Cairo that Egypt's already scarce supplies of Nile waters, on which its population of more than 100 million people is almost entirely dependent, would be further restricted.

OPEC+ May Push The Price Of Oil Barrel To Above $50
Jeddah - Saeed al-Abiad/Asharq Al-Awsat/Tuesday, 9 June, 2020
Saudi experts told Asharq Al-Awsat that extending the recent OPEC+ agreement to reduce oil production to the current level of 9.7 million barrels per day for an additional month would contribute to rebalancing the global markets.
They noted that the price of a barrel of oil could rise above $50, provided that countries commit to implement all provisions. Experts emphasized that the price increase would depend on overcoming the repercussions of the Covid-19 outbreak and restoring the barrel price to the pre-Corona period. Dr. Rashid Abanmi, an expert in the oil sector, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the expected results of the extension of the OPEC+ agreement were significant, compared to the results of the previous agreement, in which the price of oil reached about $40 per barrel in a very short time. Therefore, with the extension of the agreement, the price of the barrel is expected to gradually touch the ceiling of $70. Abanmi linked this increase to four main factors, including the countries’ “commitment, the need for oil, the incentives, and external factors.” “The agreement depends on mutual trust rather than the presence of a monitoring and inspection mechanism to implement the agreement. This may lead some countries not to commit due to the presence of many incentives in the global markets. Those might increase some of the production quotas that they have committed to, for reasons related to financial needs,” the oil expert told Asharq Al-Awsat. Abanmi stressed the need to anticipate external factors, such as another wave of coronavirus, which will force countries to completely shut down their economies, or a conflict between two oil-producing countries.
But he expressed hope that stability of the oil markets would be restored if all measures were applied.

Canada reaffirms ongoing support for Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
June 9, 2020 - Ottawa, Ontario - Global Affairs Canada
On behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rob Oliphant, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister, today reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament during a virtual meeting of foreign ministers of the Stockholm Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament.
Hosted by Germany and Sweden, participants at today’s meeting advocated for pragmatic measures that would advance nuclear disarmament under the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT).
Canada will continue to promote concrete efforts, such as empowerment of youth advocates and more meaningful engagement of women in disarmament decision-making, to help achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.
Quotes
“Canada has a strong history of leadership on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, and is committed to working together with its partners to enhance international security by strengthening multilateralism and the rules-based international order.”
- Rob Oliphant, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs
Quick facts
Launched by Sweden in June 2019, the Stockholm Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament consists of 16 non-nuclear weapon states and aims to promote concrete actions that would advance nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament ahead of the upcoming Review Conference of the Parties to the NPT.
The NPT, which came into force 50 years ago, is the cornerstone of the global non-proliferation and disarmament architecture.
Related products
Minister of Foreign Affairs marks 50th anniversary of Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
Associated links
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
Canada’s nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament policy

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on June 09-10/2020
Iran Close to Nuclear Weapons Breakout
Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/June 09/2020
مجيد رافيزادا/معهد كيتستون: إيران أصبحت قريبة من تقدم كبير في مسعاها للحصول على سلاح نووي
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/87131/majid-rafizadeh-gatestone-institute-iran-close-to-nuclear-weapons-breakout-%d9%85%d8%ac%d9%8a%d8%af-%d8%b1%d8%a7%d9%81%d9%8a%d8%b2%d8%a7%d8%af%d8%a7-%d9%85%d8%b9%d9%87%d8%af-%d9%83%d9%8a%d8%aa%d8%b3/
Importantly, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has failed on several occasions accurately to detect Iran's nuclear activities. For instance, in a November 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke a story stating that Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran's secret nuclear weapons program." Although Iranian leaders insisted that the nuclear warehouse was a carpet cleaning facility, traces of radioactive uranium were detected at the site; Israel's warning and other reports have proved accurate.
Are the US and the UN happy to keep sitting idly by while the ruling mullahs of Iran inch dangerously closer to a nuclear weapons breakout?
The Iranian regime is now comfortably violating all the restrictions of the nuclear deal it never signed, according to the latest report by the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The ruling mullahs have increased their total stockpile of low-enriched uranium from 1,020.9 kilograms (1.1 tons) to 1,571.6 kilograms (1.73 tons), as of May 20, 2020. This is approximately eight times more than what the regime was allowed to maintain under the misbegotten nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Tehran had been permitted to keep a stockpile of 202.8 kilograms (447 pounds) according to the terms of the JCPOA, and enrich uranium up to 3.67%. Iran is now enriching uranium up to the purity of 4.5% and possesses more heavy water than would have been permitted under the nuclear agreement.
Additionally, the mullahs still are not allowing the IAEA to inspect its sites, a long-term problem which, according to the recent report, has reportedly now raised "serious concerns" for the international inspectors.
In addition, despite the fact that Iran is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it did sign, it has refused to allow the IAEA fully to inspect its sites, particularly to monitor Iran's military sites, where nuclear activities are most likely being carried out.
Regrettably, one of the most dangerous concessions that the Obama administration gave to the Iranian government was surrendering to the Iranian leaders' demand that military sites would be out of the IAEA's reach. Because of this concession, at various high-profile sites such as the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran, the regime has been free to engage in nuclear activities without the risk of inspection.
The IAEA's recent report still does not give a full picture of Iran's nuclear activities and is woefully underestimating the scope of the mullahs' nuclear program. The Iranian authorities have even admitted that they have a higher enriched uranium level than that being reported by the IAEA. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, declared that Iran has an adequate supply of 20% enriched uranium. "Right now we have enough 20% uranium," he told the Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA, "but we can produce more as needed". He added that the country is resuming uranium enrichment at a far higher level at the Fordow nuclear facility -- an underground uranium enrichment facility which is reportedly located on one of bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC­­) -- injecting uranium gas into centrifuges, and operating 60 IR-6 advanced centrifuges.
Importantly the IAEA has failed on several occasions accurately to detect Iran's nuclear activities. For instance, in a November 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke a story stating that Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran's secret nuclear weapons program." Although Iranian leaders insisted that the nuclear warehouse was a carpet cleaning facility, traces of radioactive uranium were detected at the site; Israel's warning and other reports have proved accurate.
Israel's 2018 seizure of documents, from a "nuclear archive" in Tehran answered some questions that the IAEA has failed to address for decades. According to the Institute for Science and International Security:
"How many nuclear weapons did Iran plan to make and how was it going to implement this decision? This question was not answerable in late 2015 and early 2016, based on the information in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), when the long-outstanding issues, including the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD), were addressed before the start of the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But now, with Israel's 2018 seizure of documents, computer files, and images from a 'Nuclear Archive' in Tehran, such questions can be far better addressed."
The Institute for Science and International Security explained in its report that:
"Iran intended to build five nuclear warheads, each with an explosive yield of 10 kilotons and able to be delivered by ballistic missile... This report discusses another document available from the archive that provides an early look at how Iran planned to achieve its goal of designing and manufacturing five nuclear weapons and by about 2003..."
Are the US and the UN happy to keep sitting idly by while the ruling mullahs of Iran inch dangerously closer to a nuclear weapons breakout?
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
© 2020 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Boris Johnson Leaves the Dirty Work to Everyone Else
Martin Ivens/Bloomberg/June 09/2020
An awkward question hangs over the COVID-shuttered world of Downing Street. At his daily morning meeting, Boris Johnson, back to full duties after suffering a serious bout of the virus, recently asked who was in charge of relaxing Britain’s lockdown plan, with all of the risks and uncertainties that entails for a government. “There was just silence,” an insider told the Sunday Times newspaper. “He looked over at Mark Sedwill (his top civil servant) and asked, ‘Is it you?’ The official replied, ‘No, I think it’s you, prime minister.’”
Sedwill was right. The UK’s leader enjoys some of the strongest centralized powers in Europe — and yet, paradoxically, the man who fought so hard to gain control of his party and Britain’s destiny is reluctant to take responsibility.
Before the crisis, Johnson ruled as a near-absolute monarch, often through his eccentric but effective adviser (and key Brexit strategist) Dominic Cummings. In a tale familiar to English court politics down the centuries, the arrogant outsider resented by lesser talents has himself become a hindrance to the man he serves. Cummings, one of the architects of Britain’s lockdown, bent the rules by driving his sick wife and child 250 miles to his family’s northern home, where he may or may not have breached self-isolation to walk in local beauty spots.
Hitherto, an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons and the trouncing of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party in the December election had boosted the prime minister’s natural self-confidence, and a cabinet largely composed of inexperienced unequals reinforced his dominance.
The coronavirus has changed everything. It has seen Johnson dither over using his executive power to lay down the law. True, most democratic leaders find life-and-death decisions unnerving, but the prime minister has made too many missteps for Britain’s emergence as the “the sick man of Europe” to be seen as mere bad luck.
The UK has an unwelcome lead in the continent’s league table of fatalities, in part due to its role as a transport and business hub. But Johnson’s administration bears the blame for failing to lock down as quickly as Germany, for prematurely terminating track and tracing of the infected in March, and for allowing hospital patients to be discharged untested into care homes for the elderly.
Voters have given Johnson the benefit of the doubt so far out of sympathy for his own near-death encounter with COVID-19. But the prime minister, while a convincing advocate for social distancing, still sounds uncertain on many big calls. No. 10 staffers and his chief ministers lack confidence. His acolytes are already looking over their shoulders at a likely public inquiry into their handling of the emergency.
An unfamiliar crisis that demands fast, big-state solutions plays more easily to the strengths of social democrats or even paternalist Conservatives. Johnson, a carefree libertarian by instinct, at first ignored the peril, expecting others to take responsibility for a threat that seemed more tangential than finalizing a post-Brexit trade deal with the European Union.
Personal foibles matter too. Johnson’s absence from five key meetings in the initial stages of the pandemic is a matter of record. There are crude metrics (still evolving) that suggest Scotland’s devolved government has performed even worse during the outbreak, but perceptions are otherwise and they matter. The left-leaning Scottish nationalist leader, Nicola Sturgeon, cuts a more commanding figure, happy to tell her fellow citizens what to do (or in the case of following Johnson’s lead in easing the lockdown, what not to do).
Britain’s muddled approach to immigration, a central policy area for the Conservatives, is equally perplexing. While the contagion was still spreading, the UK permitted free entry from China, Italy, Iran and other countries with high infection rates. Johnson’s Brexit vision is of an outward-looking Global Britain, not the protectionist Little England imagined by his enemies, and that rendered him reluctant to pull up the drawbridge. Now his government has lurched in the opposite direction, devising a draconian regime that will force all UK arrivals to self-isolate for 14 days. The policy looks unworkable.
Similarly, Johnson suggests that Brits wear masks while going about their business, but his inner libertarian makes him reluctant to give this guidance the force of law. Another area of confusion is his marriage of convenience with his frazzled health secretary, Matt Hancock, whose unhappy lot is to run a department that prepared for the wrong pandemic: influenza. The prime minister sometimes gives the appearance of “neither backing him nor sacking him” — as one senior Whitehall figure puts it. More cynical souls think the health secretary’s political life is being held in reserve to offer up for sacrifice after a punishing public inquiry. What of the charge, leveled since the Brexit referendum campaign, that Johnson is averse to expertise? This is a cheap shot, since the prime minister is clearly deferential to SAGE, the committee of scientists advising government. If anything, he has listened lately to more cautious advisers on reopening the economy in an attempt to stave off a second spike of the virus. But fallible scientific opinion has to be balanced against economics and politics, and that’s a prime minister’s call. Jeremy Hunt, a former long-serving Conservative health secretary, claims that SAGE’s advice to end contact tracing back in March was “one of the biggest failures of scientific advice to ministers in our lifetimes.”
In the end, people will judge a leader’s competence by their impact on them and their families. And here is the Boris anomaly: The prime minister is a brilliant election campaigner but, as London’s mayor, he left it to his team — notably Edward Lister, now No. 10’s chief of staff — to do the heavy lifting while he took the credit, gave the speeches and swung gaily on a zip wire over the Thames. A mayor can wield personal power fitfully, but national government requires a consistent driving will to get things done. Overreliance on Cummings — personal and political — has damaged Johnson at a time of jeopardy. The lesson surely is to better develop and deploy his cabinet talent rather than gamble so much on a single consigliere.
Today, the machinery of state needs a clarifying moment and clearer division of roles than the present buck passing. The modus operandi of the current government is that civil servants must be kept in check, lest a “blob” of resistance hobbles Johnson’s and Cummings’s plans on Europe or anything else. That is no recipe for cohesion.
The prime minister’s character won’t change. While an aversion to nannying and a low boredom threshold are foibles, they also explain his personal appeal. But the COVID-19 crisis means the “PM” can be neither the one-man show of the Brexit wars, nor a figurehead, leaving the hard work to others. The job is prime minister and the clue to success is in that title.

China, US, India and the Landscape of the 21st Century
Hal Brands/Bloomberg/June 09/2020
A flare-up in a long-running border dispute between China and India has raised the temperature in their bilateral relationship. Yet it may be just as significant for the trilateral US-China-India relationship, which will do a great deal to shape the strategic landscape of the 21st century.
As the US-China rivalry goes global, India may be the only nonaligned country that can, by itself, make a major difference in the balance of influence and advantage. The good news is that the geopolitics of the triangle are producing a tighter US-India partnership. The bad news is that trade frictions and India’s internal politics are getting in the way.
The details of the border crisis are murky, in part because both governments are remaining tight-lipped. But it’s clear that China and India are in the midst of one of their most serious showdowns in decades, 14,000 feet above sea level in the Himalayas. There are reports of several Chinese incursions into Indian-held land, including territory beyond what Beijing has traditionally claimed. China has sent thousands of troops to reinforce its presence in the area, in what appears to be a small-scale invasion; both sides are reportedly deploying heavy weapons to bases near the area in dispute.
For the time being, though, neither side seems eager to escalate into a shooting war.
Nationalist newspapers in India are already crowing about a Chinese retreat. This seems dangerously premature. Beijing has succeeded in reminding India that it has powerful coercive capabilities along their shared frontier — that the “salami slicer” China uses to carve away at its opponents’ positions is ultimately backed by a meat cleaver.
That’s trouble for India, but it may offer an advantage for the US. Since American officials started worrying about China’s rise in the 1990s, they have looked to India as a counterweight. India’s nuclear tests in 1998 temporarily threw a wrench in the relationship, but President Bill Clinton nonetheless visited India in 2000, and a series of Democratic and Republican presidents have made cultivating a strategic relationship with New Delhi a priority.
Indian governments rarely move as quickly as their US counterparts might like, in part because the bureaucracy moves glacially even when there is a meeting of the minds among political leaders, and in part because of the residue of India’s Cold War tradition of nonalignment. US cooperation with Pakistan on counterterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was also a sticking point. More recently, Indian officials have been reluctant to do anything that risks making an outright enemy of China, a natural rival that they must nonetheless find ways of living with.
Yet the geopolitical logic of a US partnership has grown stronger over time, mostly because China has become more assertive. Indian strategists can be forgiven for wondering if Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative is an encirclement campaign, given how determinedly China has been building its presence in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other points along the Indian Ocean.
That China appears to have conducted such an intrusion into Indian-controlled territory, less than three years after a tense standoff in 2017, has reminded Indian officials of what living next to an aggressive, autocratic superpower might mean. India’s having to impose a nationwide lockdown to deal with a virus that began in China has hardly improved the tenor of the relationship.
The pace of US-Indian affairs has quickened in recent years. Modi’s Act East policy — an evolving effort to increase ties with countries in East and Southeast Asia — and the increasing US emphasis on the Indo-Pacific has created a framework for better security cooperation.
The Quad, an informal strategic partnership between the US, India, Australia and Japan, constitutes an implicit (if still nascent) anti-China coalition of democracies. In 2019 and 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump exchanged visits, featuring Trump’s “Howdy, Modi” rally in Houston and Modi’s “Namaste, Trump” reciprocation in Gujarat.
Defense sales and other military ties have increased, with Trump announcing a $3 billion weapons deal after his visit in February. India is also maneuvering to displace China in certain global supply chains, a welcome initiative given US officials’ concern about dependence on Beijing.
India would be a demographically young and vibrant friend at a time when many of America’s traditional allies are going gray. Symbolically and geopolitically, India is a billion-plus person democracy to balance a billion-plus person autocracy.
In regional terms, US-India cooperation is critical to ensuring the security of the Indian Ocean and bringing greater leverage to bear in the Western Pacific. If Washington were ever to mount a far-seas blockade against China, it would benefit enormously from access to India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands. A US-India strategic partnership would confront China with a heightened challenge on its Western flank in the event of war in East Asia.
Still, there are hurdles. The trade relationship is contentious, with both sides slapping tariffs on each other’s goods and the Trump administration ending India’s ability to export certain goods duty-free through the Generalized System of Preferences. Trump’s obsession with trade deficits and Modi’s own moves to protect domestic manufacturing bode ill.
Then there are Modi’s domestic policies. A crackdown in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, the enactment of a citizenship law that has been criticized for giving privilege to non-Muslims, and recurring anti-Muslim violence have stirred concerns that Modi is reverting to the incendiary Hindu nationalism that once earned him a visa ban by President George W. Bush’s State Department. Although Trump seems little bothered by these issues, an India that regresses politically will make a less comfortable partner for the US down the road.
Yet it is worth keeping these issues in perspective. The economic disputes are small beer compared with the strategic stakes. The US tolerated worse forms of economic discrimination from some Cold War allies as the price of strengthening them against communist expansionism. India is still more pluralistic and democratic than other key countries the US will have to hold close in the coming years, such as Vietnam and, under the authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines.
US officials should speak candidly, in public and in private, when human rights are abused or civil liberties are abridged. They should aggressively encourage economic reforms that India needs to become more of a match for Beijing. But Washington should meanwhile keep the relationship focused on what is bringing India and the US into closer alignment: They have a great deal to gain if they can hold the line against China, and much to lose if they cannot.

'Political Correctness' in the UK: Shut Down Discussion Before It Can Start
Denis MacEoin/Gatestone Institute/June 09/2020
Political correctness, whatever its commendable origins in a wish to protect minorities on a basis of race, sexuality, or religious belief, has come to do great damage in its sometimes neurotic condemnation of anything its advocates find offensive.
Among some individuals, the word "Islamophobe" seems to have replaced the word Communist as sort of a new form of McCarthyism with which to smear, defame and neutralize anyone with whom one might disagree -- presumably to shut down any kind of discussion before it can even start.
While it is appropriate to... bring in balanced Muslim opinions about how to define "Islamophobia," organizations with links to more radical Muslim groupings are probably not the most helpful partners.
Without a serious debate on these issues, no one... can engage in comprehensive discussions about how Western societies should handle the problems of discrimination, integration, citizenship, free speech, secular values, human rights and all the areas of our collective lives that have come to the fore... in recent years. Trevor Phillips is uniquely placed to bring light to these discussions. A well-respected man in both British and international society, he should never be shut down by anyone, especially for the ostensible sake of political correctness.
For many years now, Trevor Phillips has been one of the most prominent individuals of black ancestry in the United Kingdom. A well-respected man in both British and international society, he should never be shut down by anyone, especially for the ostensible sake of political correctness.
For many years now, Trevor Phillips OBE has been one of the most prominent individuals of black ancestry in the United Kingdom. He is a multitalented individual who has played significant roles in business, politics, journalism, and more throughout a long life (he is now 66). A full list of his achievements would take up most of this article. Here are only a few examples:
He was, until June 2018, the President of the John Lewis Partnership, Europe's largest employee-owned company. He has also Chairman of Index on Censorship, the international campaign group for freedom of expression, and was founding chair of both the Greater London Authority, and of Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission. Originally chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, and as head of the EHRC, Phillips was a controversial figure: he was an opponent of multiculturalism, apparently preferring a more constrained policy towards integration, a view he still maintains. Although a member (until recently) of the left-wing Labour party, he is still a senior fellow with the leading Conservative think tank, Policy Exchange.
Shockingly, on March 9, Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party on the grounds of "Islamophobia." That this exclusion is shocking should be obvious given the man's long history of anti-racism, principled and critical support for national counter-terrorist laws, rejection of Islamic terrorism and Muslim rape gangs, and his focus on faith-based integration. This latter is discussed in his 2016 book for the Civitas think tank, Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence.
As chairman of Index on Censorship, Phillips has a policy largely derived from the First Amendment of the US Constitution, in order to permit freedom of speech and the press. Although there are some restrictions in the UK regarding hate speech and national security, free speech remains a broad principle. It is here that Phillips apparently fell afoul of "politically correct" criticism.
"Political correctness", whatever its commendable origins in a wish to protect minorities on a basis of race, sexuality, or religious belief, has come to do great damage in its sometimes neurotic condemnation of anything its advocates find offensive.
For many, especially, it seems. on the left, the notion of what is called "Islamophobia" has come to the fore as the perfect expression of politically correct speech and writing. This acceptance seems to have taken place despite the appalling use of anti-Semitic hate speech and anti-Jewish activism before and during the era of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of Britain's Labour Party. One is inclined to think of pots calling kettles black. If the politically correct can get it so wrong about antisemitism, may they not be equally wrong about "Islamophobia"?
It is not hard to define antisemitism if we are guided by the Working Definition given by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, but defining Islamophobia is fraught with difficulties. That it exists in some form, as do most prejudices, is hardly controversial. In the UK alone, 2018 saw a record number of attacks on Muslims, sometimes, not surprisingly, in response to Muslim attacks on non-Muslims.
In 2019, an Australian, Brenton Tarrant, murdered 51 Muslims in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand -- crimes to which he has now pled guilty. Such attacks, and often the speech that goes with them, reflect a deep-seated racism and bigotry that is rightly condemned across most countries. Less violent but equally unacceptable is the persecution of its Uighur population by China's Communist Party.
It should go without saying that Trevor Phillips -- and often many people accused of seemingly the most innocuous transgressions, such as a British teacher in the Sudan naming a children's teddy bear Mohammed, or in present-day Nigeria, simply being a Christian -- bears no resemblance to any of these.
In 2016, before the current row, Gatestone Senior Fellow Douglas Murray penned an article in the Spectator expressing admiration for Phillips and defending him against early accusations of Islamophobia. Yet, four years on, he has been termed an "Islamophobe" by a major political party and many in the press. Among some individuals, the word "Islamophobe" seems to have replaced the word Communist as sort of a new form of McCarthyism with which to smear, defame and neutralize anyone with whom one might disagree -- presumably to shut down any kind of discussion before it can even start.
Phillips himself has worked alone and with colleagues on the problems surrounding the definition of Islamophobia. In 2018, he wrote the foreword to Policy Exchange's response to an extremely flawed definition from the UK's All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims. The definition had been heavily criticized, not least by the police, for undermining free speech and counter-terrorism work. Phillips supported the author, Sir John Jenkins KCMG, who exposed the risks to free speech and a healthy democracy if the APPG report were to become law. The following year, Phillips -- with Jenkins and Dr. Martyn Frampton -- wrote for the same think tank a piece entitled, On Islamophobia: A Problem of Definition. In it, he differed materially from the views of Nathan Lean, the left-wing author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, who takes even the mildest criticism of Islam or Muslims as Islamophobic in nature.
One of the concerns expressed in Phillips's responses to the APPG lay in the fact that the parliamentarians involved might have allowed themselves to be influenced too broadly by Muslim lobbies that seemed not truly representative, such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Engagement and Development group (MEND).
While it is appropriate to recognize Jewish contributions to definitions of antisemitism (such as the internationally supported IHRA version mentioned above) and to bring in balanced Muslim opinions about how to define Islamophobia, organizations with links to more radical Muslim groupings are most likely not the most helpful partners. To eradicate hatred for balanced and peace-loving Muslims, it is probably not all that productive totally to avoid references to Islamic radicalism or issues surrounding women's rights, treatment of non-Muslims, prescribed punishments, treatment of children, and blasphemy to name but a few -- which is what more traditionalist Muslims might prefer we did.
Without a serious debate on these issues, no one -- from schools to political parties, think tanks, parliaments, churches and synagogues -- can engage in comprehensive discussions about how Western societies should handle the problems of discrimination, integration, citizenship, free speech, secular values, human rights and all the areas of our collective lives that have come to the fore with the revival of radical and traditionalist Islam in recent decades.
Trevor Phillips is uniquely placed to bring light to these discussions. A well-respected man in both British and international society, he should never be shut down by anyone for the ostensible sake of political correctness.
Following Labour's condemnation of Phillips as a supposed "Islamophobe", Policy Exchange published another piece The Trial: The strange case of Trevor Phillips, again by Frampton, in which he dissected the charge raised against Phillips. In the end, it appears that however many enemies Phillips may have, he is assured of having many friends. This conclusion is reflected in that the UK government has just appointed him as an advisor to a formal inquiry into the disproportionate number of deaths from Covid-19.
*Dr. Denis MacEoin is a former British university lecturer in Islamic Studies and a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Gatestone Institute.
© 2020 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Bringing the Middle East Back Home
Tony Badran/Tablet Magazine/June 09/2020
طوني بدران/موقع تابليت: نقل واقع الشرق الأوسط من قبل البعض إلى أميركا
The American Orientalist Class attempts to paint a fantasy Middle Eastern landscape on the American canvas
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/87136/87136/
Growing up in Lebanon during the worst years of that country’s civil war left me with a kaleidoscope of experiences that I am unlikely to forget. I remember going to bombed-out Beirut with my father and being shot at by snipers as we crossed the Green Line. I remember the strutting militiamen who regularly abducted and tortured their enemies as well as anyone they wished to extort. I remember sheltering inside my school building as it was hit by artillery and rockets. Those are the memories of everyone who grew up in that place at that cursed time.
Then, like everyone else, I have memories that are more personal, even if similar experiences happened to hundreds of thousands of other children my age, or a few years older or younger. An artillery shell exploded on our rooftop, right over the room where my mother was sitting. I remember coming back from school, walking down the street to our house, to be met by our sweet neighbors—who caught me before I went in and tried gently to tell me what had happened without freaking me out. I remember Syrian soldiers executing a friend—a missionary who hid out by himself in his house, as the Syrians finalized their brutal occupation of the country—whom they insanely accused of being a spy.
Most of all, I remember, with a sense of gratitude that has only grown with age, the heroic efforts of my father—a man who, despite having to cross into West Beirut daily for work was somehow through providence never taken from us, and who, equally miraculously, managed to keep me and my siblings safe and fed in the middle of a situation of Hobbesian warfare that must have been even more terrifying for him than it was for us.
Shortly after I became a legal adult, I had the great fortune of immigrating to America, where—if I was lucky—I might help to raise and protect a family of my own, in a society founded on other principles, whose people had learned to eschew sectarian violence. In leaving Lebanon, I was leaving behind the demons of my childhood—the pathological third-world ideologues, secular and religious, who used riots and violence and the rhetoric of justice as tools to attain power. Or so I thought.
Yet as terrifying as it is for a child to watch a society descend into a state of raw anarchy goosed and exploited by armed factions directed toward the political ends of their power-seeking masters, it can also be a useful school. It is hard for me to look at the streets of my adopted city of New York, which offered me both a haven and so much inspiration, and read the newspapers, and not see familiar scenes unfolding.
I am telling you this not because I want any kind of sympathy for my personal emotions, which I experience in the safety of my home in Queens while listening to my old jazz records and reading Albert Murray. I remain immeasurably fortunate next to the suffering of others, who have been watching their stores looted and their life savings vanish in the uncontrolled street violence that is hailed across American media as symbolizing something urgent and important, which must be acted on immediately—a demand for justice. What, after all, does the life of a city, and the businesses that people built to feed their families, mean next to that?
What’s perhaps useful about my reflections is the extent to which they appear to be shared by a particular group of people in Washington, D.C., who took the opposite route that I did—traveling from their safe American homes to involve themselves in the affairs of the Middle East. I call these Americans AOCs, representative members of the American Orientalist Class—that segment of the American elite made up former government officials, newspaper correspondents, and think tankers who are credentialed through study and professional experience as experts in the Middle East, and appear to see some of the same analogies that I do between what’s happening in America right now and upheavals in the dictatorships and failed states of the region I left behind. The way that these analogies are being deployed seems like a fruitful subject of analysis, given our shared premise that what we are watching is a product of a third-world reality, which is a frame of analysis and experience that has traditionally been foreign to both ordinary Americans and to the elite class.
As American cities are hit with riots and looting, the AOCs ( American Orientalist Class) have taken to social media to apply the wisdom they’ve accumulated from their own studies and experience to this delicate moment in American life. No less an authority on press ethics and behavior than Walter Shaub directed American journalists to “start covering what was happening in the U.S. ‘like you’re a foreign correspondent in a collapsing republic.’” Schaub’s instruction was then cited by Telegraph reporter Josie Ensor, who “spent years covering Syria and Arab uprisings,” in a Twitter thread in which she compared President Trump to Syrian dictator and mass murderer Bashar Assad. Ensor’s thread was in turn enthusiastically endorsed by New York Times Metro reporter and former Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard, in a neat example of how such instructions can directly shape coverage that is intended to provide Americans with a mirror in which to see the political and social reality that they inhabit.
Barnard’s AOC colleagues—that weird mélange of commentators, reporters, policymakers and sources—were eager to join in the fun by sharing inside references to the third-world countries that had stamped their passports. “I would say that the legislator is 2 small steps from Qadaffi’s 2011 threat to clear ‘inch by inch, house by house, alley by alley’ all the ‘cockroaches,’” tweeted former Ambassador Robert Ford in response to an outraged editor’s tweet about Sen. Tom Cotton’s remarks about deploying the military, if necessary, to restore order. “Zenga, zenga,” Anne Barnard piled on, displaying her familiarity with the Qaddafi reference. A couple of hours earlier, former Obama administration official Andrew Exum, who studied in Beirut and played paintball with Hezbollah, separately went with the Qaddafi motif, posting a video remix of the late Libyan dictator’s “zenga, zenga” (alley by alley) comment.
As American cities burned, the AOCs publicly delighted in being on the same wavelength. While their joy was recognizable in part as the delight of any specialist who wakes to find that their semi-obscure subject might in fact be the center of universal attention, it can lead to truly nauseating results—using suffering third-world people as doll-like props in advertisements for the self-importance of their childlike owners. Barnard showcased her command of the recent history of violence in Syria, for example, by tweeting a comparison of the New York City Police Department commandeering a city bus to Assad’s notorious security apparatus, which has used buses at different times since 2011 to detain and torture people, move soldiers, and empty out besieged towns as part of a systemic ethnic cleansing policy. Hey, look at me!
Barnard’s colleague Liam Stack weighed in with lessons learned from many years as a foreign expat in Egypt to educate Americans about “one thing” he learned from that sclerotic and impoverished society: “When people begin to believe that their country’s military has taken a political side, society can unravel very quickly.” Of course, Egypt has lived under some form of military or military-backed dictatorship since the 1950s—but hey, why not?
Former diplomat Dennis Ross lent his weight to this motif, suggesting that having been “a policy practitioner … throughout the Middle East,” he recognized that President Trump’s comments about deploying the military were disturbingly reminiscent of “security forces used not for law and order but to enforce the preservation of an authoritarian system and its leaders.”
Although these tweets are silly, and appear to be a way for their authors to hobnob with peers and advertise their ability to crack inside jokes with the natives, the larger conceit of the tweets is in fact important. Their authors are making Americans aware of the gravity of their current moment, the collective conclusion being that America now resembles the Middle East.
Yet, while I agree with this conclusion in some important dimensions, there is something very wrong with the underlying meaning that the AOCs intend to convey.
The point of the comparison, for the AOCs, is that what is happening here, and what this class of people has experienced there, is a unified phenomenon. In the Middle East, they learned life lessons about people and power which can now help them, and us, interpret what is happening in America. What they are actually doing, though, is interpreting America through the categories and sensibilities of the Middle East. If America is indeed coming to resemble the Middle East, the AOCs are dangerously eliding the key analytical question of how we got here—and what role they themselves have played in America’s nauseating slide into a third-world reality.
The point of the comparison, for the AOCs, is that what is happening here, and what this class of people has experienced there, is a unified phenomenon. In the Middle East, they learned life lessons about people and power which can now help them, and us, interpret what is happening in America. What they are actually doing, though, is interpreting America through the categories and sensibilities of the Middle East. If America is indeed coming to resemble the Middle East, the AOCs are dangerously eliding the key analytical question of how we got here—and what role they themselves have played in America’s nauseating slide into a third-world reality.
While fantasy and wish-fulfillment have always been prime motivators for American missions to the Middle East, as can be seen in the frequent use of the term “the Holy Land” by secular writers and policymakers, 9/11 effected a multi-trillion-dollar merger of historical fantasies with the realities of George Bush’s Global War on Terror and his grandiose Freedom Agenda. Niche psychodramas and projections became urgent matters of life and death—as well as rocket fuel for a massive industry of experts and professionals that seemed at times to employ most of Washington, D.C., and the surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. For the greater portion of the American elite, the AOCs provided an important window into what was really happening in the fantasy world they had wished into being, and to which their favored policies and programs were now connected by a gold-plated umbilical cord.
As children of 9/11, the AOCs, in particular American journalists, sought to revise America’s understanding of the drivers of the region’s behaviors. Eager to advertise their more authentic and thus superior grasp over that of their predecessors, and their own freedom from outdated prejudices, they denounced previous analyses as reeking of contempt for “inferior cultures”—while elevating the conceit of “listening to voices of people from the region.”
In other words, the AOCs would embrace the Middle East’s supposed understanding of itself. In doing so, they would redeem the injustices and vulgarities of their predecessors while reshaping U.S. foreign policy for the better, as cultural anthropology.
Their multiculturalist version of the “white man’s burden” was a fantasy. And their bitterness has been sharpened by the failures in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and across the region, where carnage continues unabated, often with the connivance of American policymakers and their publicists who present themselves as angels of history. Needless to say, the desire of the AOCs to see themselves as drivers of history for good participates in the same shallow narcissism as the condemnation of their predecessors.
Yet it is wrong to suggest that the post-9/11 AOCs and their patronizing of “voices from the region” have had no effect. In fact, the effect of these people and their style of discourse have been transformative—although not in the Middle East. If the region demonstrated its historical resistance to the fantasies of outsiders, it did succeed in transforming American discourse by injecting it with the style, prose, categories and intellectual modes, and larger political and aesthetic sensibilities of the third-world countries where the AOCs made their bones.
Perhaps the most striking example of the phenomenon of the American elite embracing the thought categories and operative political styles of Middle Eastern regimes and their intellectual classes has been best documented and explained by my Tablet colleague Lee Smith in his investigations of the weaponizing of the Russiagate conspiracy theory—which has become the premise for most political reporting in America, and is regularly cited as the justification for the trashing of American political norms and procedures, despite having been conclusively proven to be an assemblage of often ludicrous falsehoods, bound together by the third-world behavior of the American internal security apparatus.
Another example of the third-worldization of American elite discourse is the infatuation with mass protests that began with the excitement over street demonstrations after Donald Trump’s election in 2016. This applause has been accompanied by the glorification of street theater—rather than legislative deliberation or the voting booth—as the purest expression of democracy.
The pivotal moment when the politics of the crowds became elevated in the elite American imagination was captured by the late Fouad Ajami in 2008, on the eve of Barack Obama’s election:
“There is something odd—and dare I say novel—in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.”
Ajami was born and raised in one of those third-world societies—the same one I was born and raised in—and he spent his life explaining the Middle East to Americans. But what he did was fundamentally different than what the AOCs are doing today with their shallow and contemptuous analogies, which leverage the suffering of real people in the Middle East to score points against their fellow Americans on Twitter.
Fouad Ajami firmly believed in American exceptionalism, and he held up the Middle East as an exemplar of social and political pathology. In diametrical opposition to all these contemporary poseurs who have soaked up the region’s sickness and injected it in American life, Ajami stressed the saving importance of cultural difference. Ajami was an immigrant who was an unabashed and unsentimental believer in assimilation and in breaking with the old world, the world of death.
It was when the Obama administration pushed its signature policy—the nuclear deal with Iran—that many of these tropes Ajami first observed became normal, everyday features of American elite discourse. Take for instance the Obama administration’s facile expedient analogies about how America has its own hardliners just as Iran has theirs. And just like that, it became normal to see American and Iranian politics as mirrors of one another.
This trope continues today, of course, courtesy of the same echo chamber that Obama and his minions built to sell the Iran deal: “America 2020 looking like Iran 2019: President threatens to shoot protestors,” tweeted New York Times journalist Farnaz Fassihi, following Twitter’s decision to censor one of the president’s tweets.
Why yes, exactly. Go ask anyone being tortured in Evin prison—they’ll tell you that it’s exactly the same.
Or take the attitude toward Jews and anti-Semitism. Sure, the Islamic Republic of Iran is anti-Semitic. But that “rhetoric” is merely an “organizing tool” for Iran, Obama said. “The fact that you are anti-Semitic,” he continued, “doesn’t preclude you from being rational.” A few months after these remarks, the Times was running a “Jew tracker” for where Jewish members of Congress stood on Obama’s deal with Iran.
The fantasy of remaking the Third World in America’s image was ludicrous and insanely destructive for the people of the Middle East. Instead, destruction would now be visited upon America by an opposing group of fantasists who wanted to level the enormous difference between America and the Middle East, to knock Americans off their high horse, and to normalize countries like Iran in American political discourse and use them as a cudgel with which to beat the people they identified as their enemies at home.
Of course, the AOCs haughtily reply, it’s Trump who turned America into a third-world country—not us! But in fact, Trump, for all his flaws, was clear in his desire to perpetuate American uniqueness—hence his calls to overhaul immigration policy and border security. In response, the AOCs cried racism—advertising their own superiority to Trump and to their missionary predecessors.
Except, while racism is a discredited 19th-century pseudoscience, cultural differences are entirely real. They are also hugely important in shaping everything from social structure to personality to political culture.
Yet America’s leveling ideologues are happy to ignore the mountain of evidence that contradicts their dogma—especially in the service of opposing Trump. The shunning of assimilation and the celebration of grievance-based tribalism as the core American value—which they attempt to enforce by judicial fiat, education, and social pressure—is both a threat to American democracy and a source of progressive political power. Instead of liberation from third world norms—the norms of the societies they came from—immigrants and their children are shackled to them and told that their value to American society resides in these continuing attachments. In school, their children are taught that America is sinful, and that the noxious communal grievance politics of their parents’ societies can be applied to America and layered onto the historical American rights based political culture. On the low end, this means conditioning a new generation of young Americans into sectarian competition and resentment, and block voting within the structure of the Democratic Party. On the elite level, thanks in part to the AOCs and their use of “voices from the region,” this validation is sharpened further and made into a source of authority that torques both American foreign policy and increasingly the lens through which American domestic politics is presented to Americans.
For the AOCs—and for Obama, who incarnated their tendency to see American uniqueness as shameful and vulgar—exceptionalism is a misguided relic of the sinful American past, which “can discourage comparisons with other countries, suggesting that the United States cannot learn from others.” Hence, the exultation in the notion that America’s street action is a mirror image of the mass protests of the Middle East. In fact, the idea of America as the Middle East allows the AOCs to bring all of the conflicting emotions that drew them to the region into harmony. America offers a new canvas on which the guilt and pity—and even the erotic attraction—that this class of Americans feel for those societies in which they’ve lived and worked can be re-enacted.
Perhaps more important than the chance for a do-over of the failed Middle Eastern adventures and thought experiments is the opportunity that applying Middle Eastern thought categories to America offers the AOCs for reconciling feelings of frustration with and contempt for their own country. Take, for instance, the leveling language in this tweet by a think tanker who works on Syria and al-Qaida, in reaction to his Syrian friend participating in protests in Washington, D.C. The Syrian friend’s participation becomes a “fight for our rights in #America—just a few years after he was forced to flee #Syria while demanding the same.” What better way to transcend the bitterness and depression of helplessly covering and identifying with the third-world societies where they’ve lived and worked, in which virtually all mass protests ended in failure? Now it can play out in America, and this time, it will succeed, against our own Trump-Assad!
The identification of Obama and the AOCs with ugly third-world security regimes like Iran and the failed societies of the region points to a larger leveling process that is currently at work in America. That process makes me anxious about the future of the great country to which I immigrated—in the hope of leaving the sickness of my former society behind me.
As Americans, we’ve gone from glorifying the politics of crowds, to celebrating the tribalization of American society and the elevation of the culture of grievance and self-pity. We accept that the function of the media is not to provide objective accounts of events but to act as a put-through mechanism for security agencies. We have entrenched the culture of conspiracy and turned institutions of government into instruments to paralyze the opposite party and disrupt the peaceful transition of power. These all are hallmarks of the politics of the Third World.
9/11 gave birth to a lost generation that threw itself into the Third World in search of redemption. Now, tragically, they have brought the Third World back home.
*Tony Badran, Tablet magazine’s Levant analyst, is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bringing-middle-east-back

The worst is yet to come in Libya
Abdulrahman Al-Rashed/Arab News/June 09/2020
Two factions have been battling for power in Libya since 2015. Like all regional wars, this war started as a simple domestic conflict, then escalated as it became entangled in regional and international agendas.
The developments in the country during the past few days are important on a number of levels. In a move of a kind not seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire 100 years ago, Turkey crossed the Mediterranean to fight in Libya under the flag of the Government of National Accord (GNA).
The GNA, which is effectively an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently began to record military victories after a long string of defeats. Indeed, its forces managed to break the lines of the Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, which had besieged them in Tripoli for a year, and then defeated the LNA in the neighboring city of Tarhuna and advanced east toward Sirte. As a result, the area under GNA control has doubled. Even with that, however, it controls less than 20 percent of the country, while the army controls more than 60 percent, including the oil fields.
Time will tell whether the Turkish troops — who will lead air and ground forces, supported by militias they brought from Syria — can make advances and take control of eastern cities and other areas.
The Cairo Declaration might be the final chance to save Libya before a new and more dangerous phase of the war begins
If the Turks seize Sirte and Benghazi, their victory would be dangerous and might change the rules of the game, not only in Libya but throughout the region. For the time being, however, although they have seized neighborhoods on the outskirts of Tripoli, Tarhuna and Bani Walid, the war is far from over.
Haftar and Aguila Saleh, the speaker of the Libyan House of Representatives, participated in the Cairo Declaration this week in the Egyptian capital. It was a conciliatory initiative that included a proposed cease-fire agreement. Some observers dismissed it as the actions of the defeated, but in fact it represents the best chance for a peace process that would bring all parties together. The initiative included proposals for a government that features a president and two vice presidents, a transitional phase for its implementation, a new constitution, and elections. However, the Turks and their allies quickly rejected it.
Is the Cairo Declaration really just a tactical maneuver imposed by recent military developments? The truth is that it is a necessary diplomatic step ahead of the next stage of the conflict — which is expected to be the worst, militarily — and represents the foundation for any future resolution. It has found acceptance with Western and other international institutions but, without any power to promote it and without the defeat of the Turks, it will not be feasible.
Does the Turkish invasion of Libya have the blessing of the West — or at least the absence of any objection? Perhaps, because Ankara could not have transported this amount of troops and military equipment so publicly without running the risk of being intercepted by European or, in particular, American warships.
Is this apparent Western apathy a response to what is considered the vanguard of Russian forces? Moscow, too, has for the first time established a presence in the region, which is an important development for the world, because of the oil and for the security of Southern Europe.
After months of denial, Ankara finally admitted its military involvement in North Africa a few days ago. “Our soldiers, along with their brothers in Libya, have recently been marching toward achieving the targeted plans,” said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He added: “The Turkish military has control in Libya, whether in Tripoli or in Tarhuna and the surrounding airports, where they have cleared all these areas, and they are now marching toward the desired goals.”
What are these desired goals? These are words with vast meanings. The war in Libya is no longer only a conflict between Libyans.
Much like Iran before it, Turkey is going through an insane proliferation stage. It has deployed military forces throughout the region, including in northern Iraq, a military base in Qatar, Libya, Syria, and Somalia.
The Turkish intervention in Libya will achieve one thing, which is not to take control of the country and provide the GNA with full authority over it, but rather the escalation of a conflict that has plagued this war-torn country since the Arab Spring. That is why the Cairo Declaration might be the final chance to save Libya before a new and more dangerous phase of the war begins.
*Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al-Arabiya news channel, and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat. Twitter: @aalrashed