English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For October 20/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today
When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.’”
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 12/10-12/:”And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.’

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on October 19-20/2020

Health Ministry: 995 new Coronavirus cases
Listen to demands of protesters, Pompeo tells Lebanon’s president
IMF Says Lebanon Economy to Contract by 25% in 2020
Pompeo Urges Lebanese Govt. that 'Has Ability to Implement Reforms'
Aoun Signs 'Student Dollar' Law Approved by Parliament
Berri Says Ready to Do Justice to Victims of Explosion
Report: Berri Says Designation Process Still ‘Obscure’
Ibrahim Tests Positive for Covid-19 in U.S., Cancels Paris Talks
Quantity of Dangerously Stored Fuel Seized in Tariq al-Jedideh
Hariri Pays Tribute to Slain ISF Chief Wissam el-Hassan
Othman visits tomb of Martyr Wissam Al-Hassan
Kouyomjian: LF Participation in Consultations Gives it Legitimacy
Lebanon Busts Network Smuggling People to Europe via Beirut Airport
Lebanon 'heavily relies' on US to mediate maritime border talks
Saad Hariri’s bid to lead Lebanon is a disaster waiting to happen/Makram Rabah/Monday 19 October 2020

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on October 19-20/2020

Top U.S. Official on Secret Syria Visit for Talks on Missing
'Fatwa launched' against beheaded teacher, says French Minister
French Police Target Islamist Networks after Teacher's Beheading
Donald Trump says Sudan will be removed from terrorism list
Etihad to Become 1st Gulf Carrier to Operate Commercial Flight to Israel
UAE ratifies peace signing agreement with Israel
Pompeo Warns Arms Sales to Iran Will Result in Sanctions as Embargo Expires
Iran Says Will Sell More Arms than Buy after Embargo Lifted
Rouhani Says Iran's Enemies Invest in Internal Disputes
US Fed in no hurry to develop digital dollar, says Chairman Powell
Yemen Denounces Appointment of Iranian ‘Military Ruler’ in Sanaa
Khartoum Confirms Readiness to Cooperate With ICC
Turkey Withdraws from its Largest Military Post In Syria's Hama
Iraq Kicks Off Field Investigations Into 'Farhatia Massacre'
Syria Needs up to 200,000 Tons of Wheat Every Month to Meet Shortfall
 

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on October 19-20/2020

Turkey-backed president's election to reshape negotiations in North Cyprus/
Diego Cupolo/Al-Monitor/October 19/2020
Heir to the Ottomans/Michael Young/Malcolm H. Kerrt/Carnegie Middle East Centre/October 19/2020
Belarus: More Human Rights Violations/Judith Bergman/Gatestone Institute/October 19/2020
The President, the Vaccine, and the Heated Weeks/Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat/October, 19/2020
The ‘Good Censors’/Niall Ferguson/Blommberg/October, 19/2020
The misinformation surrounding Iran’s defense budget/Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami/Arab News/October 19/2020
How France can boost its fight against extremism/Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib/Arab News/October 19/2020

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on October 19-20/2020

Health Ministry: 995 new Coronavirus cases
NNA/October 19-20/2020
The Ministry of Public Health announced, on Monday, the registration of 995 new Coronavirus infections, thus raising the cumulative number of confirmed cases to 62,944. It also reported 6 death cases during the past 24 hours.
 

Listen to demands of protesters, Pompeo tells Lebanon’s president
Joseph Haboush, Al Arabiya English/Monday 19 October 2020
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Lebanon’s president Monday of the need to implement reforms long demanded by the Lebanese people. “I also underscored the importance for Lebanon’s political leaders to implement reforms as called for by the Lebanese people,” Pompeo tweeted about a phone call between the two. Pompeo told President Michel Aoun that Washington would send aid for rebuilding demolished neighborhoods in the Lebanese capital due to the catastrophic Aug. 4 explosions at the Port of Beirut. This was reported by the Lebanese presidency. Pompeo also touched on the recent US-brokered negotiations between Beirut and Tel Aviv to demarcate their maritime borders. State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said that Pompeo “also observed the one year anniversary of the October 17 protests.” Nationwide anti-government protests broke out in October 2019 as hundreds of thousands of Lebanese demanded an end to endemic corruption and decades of sectarianism and clientelism. While Lebanon has been without a fully functioning government since Hassan Diab stepped down as prime minister following the Beirut blasts. Ortagus said Pompeo “noted that the United States looks forward to the formation of a Lebanese government committed to, and which has the ability to implement, reforms that can lead to economic opportunity, better governance, and an end to endemic corruption.”

IMF Says Lebanon Economy to Contract by 25% in 2020
Agence France Presse/Associated Press/19 October/2020
The International Monetary Fund said Monday that Lebanon’s economy is heading towards a contraction by 25%, compared with an estimated shrinkage of 12% in April -- one of the region's sharpest economic contractions this year. "Lebanon needs a comprehensive reform program that tackles deep-rooted issues," the IMF's Middle East and Central Asia director Jihad Azour, who is an ex-Lebanese finance minister, said. According to a report published Monday by the IMF, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed nearly all Mideast nations into the throes of an economic recession this year, yet some rebound is expected as all but two -- Lebanon and Oman -- are anticipated to see some level of economic growth next year. The pandemic has only pushed Lebanon further to the brink seeing as the country was already witnessing its worst ever financial and economic crisis. Lebanese demonstrators have been protesting government corruption, foreign exchange shortages, hyperinflation, constant electricity cuts and increasing poverty. The currency has dropped by 70% compared to the end of last year, with people struggling to afford basic goods. A devastating explosion at Beirut's main port in August killed around 200 people, injured around 6,500 and destroyed entire neighborhoods. The blast also left hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

Pompeo Urges Lebanese Govt. that 'Has Ability to Implement Reforms'
Naharnet/19 October/2020
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday called for the formation of a new Lebanese government that has the “ability” to “implement reforms.”
Pompeo “spoke today with Lebanese President Michel Aoun and welcomed the start of negotiations between Lebanon and Israel to agree on a common maritime boundary,” U.S. State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said. “Secretary Pompeo also observed the one year anniversary of the October 17 protests,” she added. He noted that the United States “looks forward to the formation of a Lebanese government committed to, and which has the ability to implement, reforms that can lead to economic opportunity, better governance, and an end to endemic corruption,” Ortagus said.

Aoun Signs 'Student Dollar' Law Approved by Parliament
Naharnet/19 October/2020
President Michel Aoun has signed the so-called “Student Dollar” law that has been approved by parliament, the Presidency announced on Monday.
The president inked the bill on Friday and the law will enter into force once published in the official gazette.
The law obliges Lebanese banks to dispense $10,000 according to the official exchange rate (LBP 1,515 to the dollar) to every Lebanese student who enrolled in a foreign university or technical institute prior to the 2020-2021 academic year. The amounts would be paid from the students’ accounts or from the accounts of their parents in Lebanese banks. Those who do not have bank accounts can also benefit from the measure.
Any beneficiary will have to present the following:
- A current enrollment certificate from the university or technical institute
- A certificate of payments to the university of technical institute in the periods before 31/12/2020
- A copy of the current residential rent contract or of the receipt of the last monthly payment
The Lebanese currency has dropped by 70% compared to the end of last year amid a severe financial and economic crisis -- the worst in Lebanon's modern history.

Berri Says Ready to Do Justice to Victims of Explosion
Naharnet/19 October/2020
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said the parliament and himself are ready to do everything necessary from the legislative point of view to compensate for the ones affected by the Beirut port explosion, the National News Agency reported Monday. The Speaker said “together with the parliament, we are ready to do everything needed from the legislative part to redress the martyrs of the port, their families and all those affected.”He stressed the necessity for quick measures to “embrace the families who lost their homes in the explosion before the onset of winter.”The Speaker emphasized the need to address the file from a “national perspective away from political disputes or divisions.”“Judicial investigation into this national calamity” must be completed and all parties involved must be brought to justice, added Berri.

Report: Berri Says Designation Process Still ‘Obscure’
Naharnet/19 October/2020
Speaker Nabih Berri has reportedly described as “obscure” the atmosphere around the controversial formation of Lebanon’s government, media reports said on Monday. The Speaker was quoted as saying that “the atmosphere surrounding the government file is still gray and foggy because of the deadlock in consultations,” which were postponed until next Thursday.Sources close to Berri said the Speaker voiced hopes that progress would be achieved this week to break the deadlock. Last week, President Michel Aoun postponed the binding parliamentary consultations to name a new Premier until Thursday. A statement issued by the Presidency said Aoun took his decision “at the request of some parliamentary blocs, after difficulties emerged.” Ex-PM Saad Hariri is expected to be named on Thursday to lead the new government and the country’s main Christian parties -- the Free Patriotic Movement and the Lebanese Forces -- have said that they will not vote for him. The FPM has argued that Hariri is not a specialist to lead a government formed purely of specialists and on Sunday one of its MPs said the bloc might grant its vote of confidence to the government while reiterating that it will not vote for Hariri. According to reports, the FPM wants a share if the government will contain politicians in addition to specialists.

Ibrahim Tests Positive for Covid-19 in U.S., Cancels Paris Talks
Naharnet/19 October/2020
General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim has tested positive for coronavirus while in the U.S. capital Washington, the Lebanese security agency said on Monday. A statement issued by General Security said Ibrahim was tested prior to his scheduled departure of Washington.
“He will have to delay his return to Beirut and cancel his meetings that had been scheduled to be held in the French capital,” General Security added. “There has been communication with him and he is in a good health condition,” the security agency said. According to MTV, Ibrahim had been scheduled to arrive Sunday in Paris. While in Washington, Ibrahim met top security officials and others from the Trump administration during a several-day visit. “Ibrahim will visit the Elysee, the palace of the French presidency, where he will hold a meeting with members of President Emmanuel Macron’s team that is in charge of the Lebanese file,” MTV reported Sunday. “He will also meet with the Director of the General Directorate for External Security, Bernard Émié, who is also following up on the Lebanese file,” the TV network added, noting that Ibrahim would also meet with the head of France’s domestic intelligence agency to discuss security files. Pro-Hizbullah journalist Salem Zahran meanwhile tweeted Sunday that Ibrahim would return to Lebanon before Thursday’s binding parliamentary consultations to name a new PM, carrying the “code” of the coming period. “Prior to Washington and Paris, there was a low-profile visit to Baghdad, in which the first letters of a major economic agreement were drawn,” Zahran said. If the said agreement materializes, “it will save the treasury billions of dollars in expenditure,” Zahran added.

Quantity of Dangerously Stored Fuel Seized in Tariq al-Jedideh
Naharnet/19 October/2020
A large quantity of fuel posing risk to public safety was seized Monday in the Beirut neighborhood of Tariq al-Jedideh, ten days after a gasoline tank explosion in the same area killed three people, injured over 50 and caused massive damage. In a statement, Beirut Municipality said the quantity was seized after Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud called on all citizens residing or working in Beirut to report any flammable material stored in underground or lower floors of residential buildings. Abboud had also tasked the Beirut Fire Brigade, Beirut’s municipal guards and a specialized department at Beirut Municipality with inspecting such warehouses and reporting any threat to public safety. In Monday’s raid, 1,185 liters of gasoline and three barrels of kerosene were seized in an underground book depot in a Tariq al-Jedideh building opposite to the Makassed General Hospital.
“The aforementioned depot does not enjoy the least requirements of public safety and during inspection it turned out that its portable fire extinguishers were expired,” the statement said. “At the request of Governor Abboud, Fire Brigade and Beirut Guard crews confiscated the barrels and moved them to a safe location, averting a possible disaster among residential buildings and neighborhoods,” the statement added.

Hariri Pays Tribute to Slain ISF Chief Wissam el-Hassan
Naharnet/19 October/2020
Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri issued a statement on Monday, remembering the slain Internal Security Forces chief Brig. Gen. Wissam el-Hassan, his media office reported. The statement said:“On this day, 8 years ago, a major pillar of security stability in Lebanon, Major General Wissam el-Hassan, was assassinated. He devoted his life to protecting Lebanon and the Lebanese, and established a security system that will remain a milestone in the history of the Internal Security Forces. Before him, the Information Branch was a name without a mission. He turned it into an institution that elevated national security work to the ranks of prominent security institutions in developed countries. His assassination aimed to take revenge on his role in uncovering the organized assassination crimes and the bombing plans that targeted Lebanon, from the assassination of martyr Prime Minister Rafik Hariri to the crime of smuggling explosives to Tripoli and the North”. He added, addressing el-Hassan: “Your memory will remain engraved in our heart, bravest and dearest man. We pay tribute to your pure soul and the soul of your companion, chief warrant officer Ahmed Sahyouni. We express our affection and condolences to your wife, children, and family and to the companions of difficult missions who follow in your footsteps”.Hassan and seven others were killed in a car bomb in Beirut's Ashrafieh district on Oct. 19, 2012. He was in charge of the Internal Security Forces’ Information Branch at the time of his assassination.

Othman visits tomb of Martyr Wissam Al-Hassan
NNA/19 October/2020
Internal Security Forces Chief, Imad Othman, on Monday visited on top of a delegation of senior ISF officers, the tombs of Martyrs Wissam El Hassan and his Companion, Martyr Ahmad Sahyouni, at Mohammed Al-Amine Mosque in Central Beirut, marking their 8th martyrdom commemoration.
Maj. Gen. Othman laid wreaths on the tombs, as the national and martyrs' anthems played in the background. Speaking in tribute of the late Martyr Al Hassan, Maj. Gen. Othman said: "Your martyrdom is a proof that you were an impediment in the path of the nation's enemies...," asking the Lord Almighty to rest his soul in peace.

Kouyomjian: LF Participation in Consultations Gives it Legitimacy
Naharnet/19 October/2020
The Strong Republic parliamentary bloc of the Lebanese Forces, MP Richard Kouyoumjian said Monday that the mere participation of the LF in Thursday’s binding consultations to name a new prime minister grants it the legitimacy needed. “The mere participation of the Lebanese Forces in the binding parliamentary consultations gives the talks the constitutionality needed regardless if the bloc names the nominated figure or not,” said MP Richard Kouhoumjian in a tweet. He urged political parties, in a hint at the Free Patriotic Movement, “not to confuse between the number of votes and result of the consultations with the firm principles of the constitution.” On Sunday, a Free Patriotic Movement MP said the party’s parliamentary bloc might grant the new government its vote of confidence although it will not name Saad Hariri in the binding parliamentary consultations to pick a new premier. The FPM dubs “unconstitutional” any consultations to name a new PM or a government format that fails to garner the approval of the two largest Christian parliamentary blocs, FPM and LF.

Lebanon Busts Network Smuggling People to Europe via Beirut Airport
Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
The Lebanese General Security Sunday busted a network of smugglers at the Beirut airport who were trying to transport people from Lebanon to Europe, according to the state-run National News Agency.
According to the NNA, the General Security caught Lebanese and Palestinian people being smuggled to Spain at the airport. They also discovered that members of the smuggling network work in different departments at the airport and included the agent of one of the airplanes the people were going to be smuggled on, the head of operations of a ground services company and an employee at the private flights terminal. During interrogations the smugglers admitted to smuggling people and were referred to the judiciary.

Lebanon 'heavily relies' on US to mediate maritime border talks
Jerusalem Post/October 19/2020
President Aoun said Lebanon relies on the US after he met with US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker. Lebanon's President Michel Aoun said on Friday that his country "heavily relies" on Washington to mediate talks with Israel on the maritime border, according to i24 news. Aoun expressed hope that the US would help the sides overcome any difficulties that they may face. The comments were released by Aoun's office after he met with Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Schenker. It also reported that Schenker expressed his hope that the negotiations will conclude successfully and quickly. Formally still at war after decades of conflict, Lebanon and Israel agreed to launch talks via US mediation over a maritime border running through potentially gas-rich Mediterranean waters. Discussions started on Wednesday at a UN compound in the Naqoura area and a second round of discussions is scheduled for October 28. The Israeli and Lebanese delegations were made up of professionals and there was no political representation. The Israeli team was led by Energy Ministry director-general Udi Adiri, while Lebanon nominated Hadi Hashem, an official from its Foreign Ministry, after Hezbollah complained that sending a diplomat would make the talks political.
*Lahav Harkov and Reuters contributed to this report.

Saad Hariri’s bid to lead Lebanon is a disaster waiting to happen
Makram Rabah/Monday 19 October 2020
مكرم رباح: سعي الحريري لقيادة لبنان هي كارثة قيد التنفيذ
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/91475/makram-rabah-saad-hariris-bid-to-lead-lebanon-is-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen-%d9%85%d9%83%d8%b1%d9%85-%d8%b1%d8%a8%d8%a7%d8%ad-%d8%b3%d8%b9%d9%8a-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ad%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%b1%d9%8a/
Lebanon’s political class has continually failed to form governments that serve its people. The current talks, which feature the potential return of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, are no exception.
When French President Emmanuel Macron visited Lebanon last month, he announced a roadmap for forming a government and carrying out political and economic reforms aimed at saving the country. He announced that a government of non-partisan technocrats should be formed by September 15 and then carry out series of reforms that would allow the International Monetary Fund and international community to bail Lebanon out.
Macron gullibly assumed that Lebanon political elite would honor their promise and facilitate former Prime Minister-designate Mustapha Adib to form a government; instead, Adib stepped down after weeks of failing to convince Hezbollah and the rest of the political establishment to cooperate.
While the French Initiative seems to be dead in the water, the entire Lebanese political establishment continue to publicly underscore their full commitment to it. Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who heads the biggest Sunni parliamentary bloc and stepped down in the wake of protests in 2019, publicly vowed to form a cabinet of non-partisan technocrats who will allegedly overhaul the entire system.
While Hariri has nominated himself for the role, he presents a number of challenges – some directly linked to himself, others to the political class to which he belongs.
To start, Hariri’s previous record is abysmal. He failed to deliver on any of the reforms he had pledged while heading his three previous cabinets (2009, 2016, 2019). Hariri instead allied with the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement Gebran Bassil, President Michel Aoun’s son-in-law and political heir, which resulted in massive debts and allegations of corruption and mismanagement. As a result, very few Lebanese other than Hariri’s own supporters would wager on him successfully heading a technocratic government. He simply does not fit the profile, nor does his record prove otherwise.
Hariri also presents a target for blackmail from other political parties and sects, who will make their support conditional. Walid Joumblatt, the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party and Druze chieftain, tried this tactic a week ago when he demanded the Ministry of Health in return for his vote for Hariri. This mode of thinking is rife among Lebanon’s political elite and will dictate the cabinet formation process, opening up Hariri to many compromises and concessions that will ensure the failure of his mission.
The main problem with Hariri’s urgent push to become prime minister is that he is peddling President Macron’s simplistic approach to Hezbollah, and consequently its Iranian backers. Macron wrongly believes that Hezbollah can be convinced to act as a rational entity and cooperate on matters related to reform. In reality, successive attempts to contain Hezbollah by making it part of the government structure have only led to collapse, and to Hezbollah rendering all Lebanese state agencies futile.
The fact that Hezbollah and its allies are so anxious for Saad Hariri to be back to power should be enough to shed doubt on the whole drive to form the cabinet, more so when Hezbollah allows its main Christian ally and political fig leaf Gebran Bassil to dictate his own terms.
President Aoun’s last minute postponement of the mandatory parliamentary consultations that were scheduled to take place on Thursday, October 15, were aimed at giving his son-in-law Bassil more leverage and to force Hariri to directly engage him in talks, thus reminding everyone that a cabinet with Hariri as its head will also mean a return of the ever-controversial Bassil.
Above all, Hariri’s willingness to cooperate with Hezbollah will again antagonize and further alienate the US administration and the Arab Gulf states who have showed lukewarm support to any cabinet that would rehash the previous governments. Hezbollah, as well as Hariri, might wish to use the ongoing demarcation talks between Lebanon and Israel to sneak in a new cabinet, but this will not solve any of Lebanon’s problems – it will only make them worse.
*Makram Rabah is a lecturer at the American University of Beirut, Department of History. His forthcoming book Conflict on Mount Lebanon: The Druze, the Maronites and Collective Memory (Edinburgh University Press) covers collective identities and the Lebanese Civil War.
 

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on October 19-20/2020

Top U.S. Official on Secret Syria Visit for Talks on Missing
Associated Press/19 October/2020
A top U.S. official recently visited Syria for rare, secret high-level talks on securing the return of two Americans missing in the war-torn country for years, the daughter of one of them said Monday. The visit of Kash Patel, deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and the top White House counterterrorism official, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. There was no immediate U.S. comment on the reports. There has not been a confirmed visit by a high-level American official to Damascus since the U.S. shuttered its embassy in the capital and withdrew its ambassador in 2012 as the country's civil war worsened. However, numerous U.S. officials, both military and civilian, have traveled to rebel-held parts of the country in the years since.
The visit would be seen as a boost by the internationally isolated government of President Bashar Assad, which faces U.S. and European sanctions for its role in the 9-year war. In recent months, as the war subsides, a number of Arab countries that had boycotted Assad have begun reopening their embassies in Damascus. Majd Kamalmaz, a 62-year-old clinical psychologist from Virginia, disappeared in 2017 and is believed to be held in a Syrian government prison. Freelance journalist Austin Tice, 39, has been missing for much longer. Tice, a native of Houston, Texas, vanished Aug. 14, 2012 after he got into a car in the Damascus suburb of Daraya to make a trip to Lebanon and was detained at a checkpoint.
Kamalmaz's daughter, Maryam, said the family learned of Patel's visit last week. "Praying for the best from it," she said, speaking to The Associated Press in a series of messages. She said they believe the trip was within the past two weeks but she had no further details.
A pro-Syrian government newspaper Al-Watan confirmed Monday the Journal's report, adding that Patel and Roger Carstens, special presidential envoy for hostages affairs, were in Damascus in August, where they met with the Syrian intelligence chief to discuss the Americans. The paper, which usually conveys government positions, said Syrian officials have demanded a U.S. troop withdrawal from eastern Syria, where they have been deployed alongside Kurdish fighters. Damascus considers the U.S. troop presence there illegal and is at odds with the Kurdish group seeking autonomy. The paper also said it was the third such secret visit by senior U.S. officials in past years. Trump has made negotiating the release of U.S. citizens held hostage or imprisoned in foreign countries a priority. A top Lebanese intelligence official visited Washington last week. General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim has recently negotiated the release of a U.S. citizen from Syria and a Lebanese who is also a permanent U.S. resident from Iran. Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in his recent book that negotiations on the U.S. role in Syria were "complicated by Trump's constant desire to call Assad on U.S. hostages." He said he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thought it was "undesirable." "Fortunately, Syria saved Trump from himself, refusing even to talk to Pompeo about them," Bolton wrote. Kamalmaz's daughter, Maryam, said the family still has no news about her father's health or whereabouts. "We are hoping this meeting will bring some updates and news about him."Tens of thousands of people are believed held in Syrian prisons since the country's civil war broke out in 2011. Many are held incognito for years in lock-ups rife with torture and disease. In the country's war, militant groups have also resorted to kidnapping foreigners for ransom or rivals to settle scores.

'Fatwa launched' against beheaded teacher, says French Minister
NNA/19 October/2020
The father of a schoolgirl and a known Islamist militant had urged the killing of a French teacher who was beheaded for showing pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, France's interior minister said Monday.
"They apparently launched a fatwa against the teacher," minister Gerald Darmanin told Europe 1 radio of the two men, who are among 11 people being held over the attack by a young Chechen man. ----AFP

French Police Target Islamist Networks after Teacher's Beheading
Agence France Presse/Monday, 19 October, 2020
French police on Monday launched a series of raids targeting Islamist networks three days after the beheading of a history teacher who had shown his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin vowed there would be "not a minute's respite for enemies of the Republic", after tens of thousands took part in rallies countrywide on Sunday to honor history teacher Samuel Paty and defend freedom of expression. Fifteen people were in custody on Monday, according to a judicial source, including four pupils who may have helped the killer identify the teacher in return for payment. Those detained also included four members of the killer's family, as well as a known Islamist radical and the father of one of Paty's pupils who had launched an online campaign against the teacher. Darmanin accused the two men of having issued a "fatwa" against Paty. Sources in the interior ministry said there had been a total of 40 raids across France on Monday, mostly around Paris, and 20 per day were planned going forward. "We want to harass and destabilize this movement in a very determined way," one ministry source said. Darmanin said the government would also tighten its grip on NGOs with suspected links to Islamist networks, including the Anti-Islamophobia Collective, a group that claims to monitor attacks against Muslims in France. "Fear is about to change sides," President Emmanuel Macron told a meeting of key ministers Sunday to discuss a response to the attack. On Monday, he met members of Paty's family as part of preparations for a ceremony in the teacher's honor at the Sorbonne university Wednesday.
Free speech debate
Paty, 47, was attacked on his way home from the junior high school where he taught in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Paris. A photo of the teacher and a message confessing to his murder was found on the mobile phone of his killer, 18-year-old Chechen Abdullakh Anzorov, who was shot dead by police. The killing has drawn parallels with the 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, where 12 people, including cartoonists, were gunned down for publishing cartoons of Mohammed. Paty had shown his civics class one of the controversial cartoons, depicting a crouching prophet with a star on his buttocks. According to his school, Paty had given Muslim children the option to leave the classroom, saying he did not want their feelings hurt. The lesson sparked a furor nonetheless and Paty and his school received threats. Anzorov's family arrived in France from the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Chechnya more than a decade ago. Locals in the Normandy town of Evreux where he lived described him as a loner who had become increasingly religious in recent years.
'Can't give in to fear'  French teachers have long complained of tensions around religion and identity spilling over into the classroom. One education expert warned Monday that the murder might deter teachers from tackling touchy topics in future. "There's a huge amount of self-censorship," said Jean-Pierre Obin, a former inspector for the French education system. "We must fear that there will now be more." But Jonathan Renoir, a 26-year old history teacher at a junior high school in Cergy near Paris, said: "We can't give in to fear, we must continue to talk about controversial things in class." Another young history teacher, in Nice in southern France, said he, too, was "determined" to carry on. "I will never stop teaching secularism and the freedom of expression, never," said the teacher who asked to remain anonymous. The government has vowed to step up security at schools when pupils return after half-term. Far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen called for "wartime legislation" to combat the terror threat. Le Pen, who has announced she will make a third bid for the French presidency in 2022, called for an "immediate" moratorium on immigration and for all foreigners on terror watch lists to be deported. Paty's beheading was the second knife attack since a trial started last month over the Charlie Hebdo killings. The magazine republished the cartoons in the run-up to the trial, and last month a young Pakistani man wounded two people with a meat cleaver outside the publication's former office.
 

Donald Trump says Sudan will be removed from terrorism list
Agencis/Arab News/October 19/2020
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Monday said Sudan will be removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism if it follows through on its pledge to pay $335 million to American terror victims and their families.
The move would open the door for the African country to get international loans and aid needed to revive its battered economy and rescue the country’s transition to democracy. The announcement, just two weeks ahead of the US presidential election, also comes as the Trump administration works to get other Arab countries, such as Sudan, to join the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain's recent recognition of Israel. Delisting Sudan from the state sponsors blacklist is a key incentive for the Sudanese government to normalize relations with Israel. Trump's announcement came after Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin traveled to Bahrain to cement the Gulf state’s recognition of the Jewish state. Trump tweeted: “GREAT news! New government of Sudan, which is making great progress, agreed to pay $335 MILLION to US terror victims and families. Once deposited, I will lift Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At long last, JUSTICE for the American people and BIG step for Sudan!" Sudan has agreed to pay compensation for victims of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks conducted by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network while bin Laden was living in Sudan.
Gen. Abdel-Farrah Burhan, head of Sudan’s ruling sovereign council, welcomed Trump’s announcement as a “constructive step.” He said in a tweet the removal would come “in recognition of the historic change that has taken place in Sudan.” Sudan is on a fragile path to democracy after a popular uprising last year led the military to overthrow autocratic leader Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. A military-civilian government now rules the country, with elections possible in late 2022. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok also welcomed the announcement. “We are about to get rid of the heaviest legacy of Sudan’s previous, defunct regime," Hamdok tweeted. Once the compensation money has been deposited, Trump is to sign an order removing Sudan from the terrorism list, on which it has languished under heavy American sanctions for 27 years.
Congress is then expected to act to restore Sudan’s sovereign immunity, which would effectively stop future compensation claims from being filed against it inUS courts. Meanwhile, Sudan is to begin the process of normalizing relations with Israel, possibly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joining a congratulatory phone call between Trump and Hamdok. Sudanese officials have been negotiating the terms of removing the country from the list for more than a year, but the US effort to repair relations with Sudan dates to the end of President Barack Obama’s administration, which initiated the process in January 2017. The “state sponsors of terrorism” designation is one of the US government’s most effective sanctions tools and bars virtually all non-humanitarian U.S. transactions with countries on it. It was created in 1979 to punish nations that fund or otherwise support terrorist acts. With Sudan’s removal, only Iran, North Korea and Syria will remain on the list. The designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism dates back to the 1990s, when Sudan briefly hosted bin Laden and other wanted militants. Sudan was also believed to have served as a pipeline for Iran to supply weapons to Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. The transitional authorities are desperate to have sanctions lifted that are linked to its listing by the US as a terror sponsor. That would be a key step toward ending its isolation and rebuilding its battered economy, which has plunged in recent months, threatening to destabilize the political transition to democracy.

Etihad to Become 1st Gulf Carrier to Operate Commercial Flight to Israel
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
Etihad Airways said it will become the first GCC carrier to operate a commercial passenger flight to and from Israel, to bring Israel’s top travel and tourism leaders to the UAE. The historic flight, in partnership with the Maman Group, will depart Tel Aviv on Monday, operated by an Etihad Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft for the three-and-a-half-hour journey from Israel to the UAE. The return journey will depart Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. Mohamed Mubarak Fadhel Al Mazrouei, chairman of the Etihad Aviation Group, said: "Today’s flight is a historic opportunity for the development of strong partnerships here in the UAE, and in Israel, and Etihad as the national airline, is delighted to be leading the way." "We are just starting to explore the long-term potential of these newly forged relationships, which will be sure to greatly benefit the economies of both nations, particularly in the areas of trade and tourism, and ultimately the people who call this diverse and wonderful region home.” In August, Israel and the UAE announced that they had reached a US-brokered deal to normalize ties. The UAE and Israel were due on Tuesday to sign an agreement to have 28 weekly commercial flights between the countries.

UAE ratifies peace signing agreement with Israel
Arab News/October 19/2020
DUBAI: The cabinet of the United Arab Emirates on Monday approved an agreement to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel that was signed in Washington last month, ahead of the first official visit by a UAE government delegation to Israel. The UAE and Bahrain in September became the first Arab states in a quarter of a century to sign agreements to establish formal ties with Israel, forged largely through shared fears of Iran. "Together the UAE and Israel will stand better prepared to confront the malign threats from the Iranian regime, their proxies, and other extremist groups," US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi. His televised remarks were made at the first Abraham Accords Business Summit held on Monday with the participation of Israeli delegations. Mnuchin and other US dignitaries will accompany the UAE government delegation to Israel on Tuesday. He arrived in Abu Dhabi from Bahrain, where US officials joined an Israeli delegation on a trip to Manama to sign a communique formalising nascent ties. The UAE cabinet statement said the Abraham Accord would be "an avenue of peace and stability to support the ambitions of the region's people, and enhance efforts for prosperity and advancement, especially as it paves the way for deepening economic, culture and knowledge ties." Israel had ratified the deal in a cabinet vote and a parliamentary vote last week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech to parliament on Monday, said the historic treaties would bring real peace between peoples, including economic peace. "Especially at a time of the coronavirus, this is so important. A peace of investments that will strengthen our economy and allow us to help the citizens of Israel even more," he said.
Israel and the UAE have already signed several commercial deals since mid-August, when they first announced they would normalise ties. They will ink a deal on Tuesday to allow 28 weekly commercial flights between Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Israel's Transportation Ministry has said. On Monday, they reached a bilateral agreement that will give incentives and protection to investors who make investments in each other's countries.

Pompeo Warns Arms Sales to Iran Will Result in Sanctions as Embargo Expires
London, Washington- Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday that Washington will impose sanctions for selling arms to Iran even as the United Nations embargo against sales to the nation expires. “The United States is prepared to use its domestic authorities to sanction any individual or entity that materially contributes to the supply, sale, or transfer of conventional arms to or from Iran, as well as those who provide technical training, financial support and services, and other assistance related to these arms,” Pompeo said. He added that for the past 10 years, countries have refrained from selling weapons to Iran under various UN measures. “Any country that now challenges this prohibition will be very clearly choosing to fuel conflict and tension over promoting peace and security,” the US Secretary of State added. His comments came as Tehran confirmed that the United Nations sanctions on buying and selling conventional weapons has been lifted "automatically". An Iranian Foreign Ministry statement published by the Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, earlier on Twitter, said, “Today’s normalization of Iran’s defense cooperation with the world is a win for the cause of multilateralism and peace and security in our region.”He added it was “a momentous day for the international community, which— in defiance of malign US efforts—has protected UNSC Res. 2231 and JCPOA.” For its part, Reuters said Iran announced it was self-reliant in its defense and had no need to go on a weapons buying spree as a United Nations conventional arms embargo was due to expire on Sunday despite strong US opposition. “Iran’s defense doctrine is premised on strong reliance on its people and indigenous capabilities ... Unconventional arms, weapons of mass destruction and a buying spree of conventional arms have no place in Iran’s defense doctrine,” said a Foreign Ministry statement carried by state media.The arms embargo on Iran was due to expire on Sunday. In 2018, US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal that sought to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons in return for economic sanctions relief. The US has pushed the UN Security Council to pass an extension of the embargo but the council voted down the proposal in August. Following the failure of the resolution, the US sought to trigger “snapback” sanctions on Iran unilaterally. Western military analysts told Reuters that Iran often exaggerates its weapons capabilities, although concerns about its long-range ballistic missile program contributed to Washington leaving the Iran nuclear deal.

Iran Says Will Sell More Arms than Buy after Embargo Lifted
Agence France Presse/19 Ovctober/2020
Iran on Monday said it is more inclined to sell weapons rather than buy them, after it announced the end of a longstanding UN conventional arms embargo. Tehran said the ban imposed more than a decade ago was lifted "automatically" as of Sunday, based on the terms of a 2015 landmark nuclear deal with world powers, from which the Islamic republic's arch-enemy the United States has withdrawn. "Before being a buyer in the arms market, Iran has the ability to supply" other countries, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters. "Of course, Iran is not like the United States, whose president seeks to sell deadly weapons to slaughter the Yemeni people," he added, referring to US weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, which leads a military coalition in Yemen -- fighting Huthi rebels backed by Tehran. The lifting of the embargo allows Iran to buy and sell military equipment including tanks, armoured vehicles, combat aircraft, helicopters and heavy artillery. According to Khatibzadeh, Iran will "act responsibly" and sell weapons to other countries "based on its own calculations." The embargo on the sale of arms to Iran was due to start expiring progressively from October 18, under the terms of the UN resolution that enshrined the 2015 nuclear deal. However, Washington has argued that arms sales to Iran would still violate UN resolutions, and has threatened sanctions on anyone involved is such deals. President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the nuclear deal and unilaterally begun reimposing economic sanctions on Iran in 2018. Iran's defence minister Amir Hatami told state television on Sunday that his country relies primarily on its own military capabilities. He said that the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s taught Tehran the "importance of self-reliance", and led it to "produce 90 percent of our defence needs locally." Hatami added that "a number of countries" have contacted Iran on potential arms trade. But he emphasised that "our sales will be much more expansive (than purchases)".

Rouhani Says Iran's Enemies Invest in Internal Disputes
London, Tehran - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 202
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned that enemies could use internal disputes to achieve their own goals and vowed to counter market “fluctuations”. There is a need to maintain political stability and cohesion in the country, stressed Rouhani, warning that enemies invest in internal conflicts and during difficult economic war. He called upon officials and activists to prevent conflicts and disputes while maintaining political calm and rationality, urging them to be vigilant against the enemies. Rouhani's remarks were made at the 174th meeting of the cabinet’s economic coordination board, during which he stressed that supporting people’s livelihood is one of the government's biggest concerns. “The government's plans in the field of people's livelihood and household economy aim to create stability and a reasonable balance in the price of goods,” said Rouhani. Rouhani also highlighted the US sanctions, describing them as inhumane and illegal, saying they led to a significant reduction in foreign exchange. He indicated that after two and half years of the sanctions, the government has prevented the realization of US goals of leading the country to collapse.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, criticized mismanagement in the country. Over the past week, the Speaker made several statements reflecting his fear over the deteriorating economic situation. Speaking during a plenary session, Qalibaf said that the alarming indices in currency rates and inflation are making people's lives more difficult.

US Fed in no hurry to develop digital dollar, says Chairman Powell
AFP/Monday 19 October 2020
The US central bank is researching a possible cyber-dollar, but will move slowly to ensure it first addresses the risks of fraud and counterfeiting, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Monday. “This is one of those issues where it’s more important for the United States to get it right than it is to be first,” Powell said during a panel discussion at the IMF annual meeting on central bank digital currencies (CBDC). “And getting it right means that we not only look at the potential benefits of a CBDC, but also the potential risks,” such as cyber attacks and counterfeiting, he said. There is growing interest among the world’s central banks in issuing official digital currencies, driven partially by concerns a private actor - such as Facebook’s Libra project - might get there first, without controls on how it is designed or used. But Powell said the Fed has a special need to be cautious since the US dollar is a global reserve currency, used by companies and central banks worldwide. “We have a responsibility both to the US and to the world that any steps taken for a US digital currency be taken safely.” “We’re absolutely committed to the soundness of the dollar into safe and efficient US dollar payment systems,” he said, but that relies on the “reliable rule of law, strong and transparent institutions, deep financial markets and an open capital account.” The Boston Federal Reserve Bank is working with researchers at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a “hypothetical central bank digital currency” to help assess potential security risks, he said.

Yemen Denounces Appointment of Iranian ‘Military Ruler’ in Sanaa
Jeddah - Asmaa al-Ghabiri/ Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
The Yemeni government warned that Iran intends to send weapons and military expertise to the Houthi group, with its recent appointment of a “military ruler” as Tehran's ambassador to Sanaa.Yemeni Minister of Information Muamar al-Iryani told Asharq Al-Awsat that Tehran’s appointment of a new ambassador to the Houthi militia in Sanaa is a blatant violation of the international norms and agreements. He warned that this reaffirms Iran's political and army support to the coup led by the Houthi militias. Yemen’s Saba News Agency quoted Iryani as saying that Tehran is sending to Sanaa an officer who worked under Qasem Sulaimani, and made recent statements on plans to sell weapons to the Houthis. According to the information, the new appointee is a top commander who specializes in anti-crafts weapons and also trains elements, said the Minister. Speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat, the undersecretary at Yemen's Information Ministry, Najib Ghallab, explained that sending an officer of al-Quds Force and a specialist in militia training, who was close to Soleimani, indicates that Iran wants to prolong the war in Yemen and obstruct political solutions. Ghallab believes that the appointment of the commander as the extraordinary and plenipotentiary Ambassador is a cover for his military role. The Iranian official will become the military ruler of the areas under Houthi control and the supervisor assigned by the Religious Authority to manage agents in Yemen, according to Ghallab. The Yemeni top official believes that legitimizing the role of the military ruler in Yemen through his appointment by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reveals the extent of Iran's violations of the international laws and norms. Ghallab described this as a "provocation" that threatens Yemenis, the international coalition, and the international community. He believed that this blatant Iranian interference should prompt the international community to take a decisive action to include Yemen under Chapter Seven and expand the intervention of the Security Council to end the coup. Ghallab also believes that this should lead to tough decisions against Iran that acts as a state sabotaging international peace and security.

Khartoum Confirms Readiness to Cooperate With ICC
Khartoum - Mohammed Amin Yassine/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
Sudanese officials confirmed Sunday the commitment of their country to achieve justice and cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC). During a meeting with ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok affirmed his government's commitment to achieving justice as one of the slogans of the glorious December revolution. "Sudan's commitment to achieving justice is not only one of the international obligations, but also comes in response to popular demands to establish justice and implement the slogans of the glorious revolution that demanded, among other things, justice,” he said in the presence of Cabinet Affairs Minister Ambassador Omer Manis and Justice Minister Nasr-Eddin Abdel-Bari. Bensouda’s visit to Sudan comes within the framework of coordination and cooperation with the Sudanese government regarding the ICC arrest warrants against ex-leader Omar al-Bashir in 2009 and 2010 and two other former officials on charges of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity during his campaign to crush a revolt in Darfur in which an estimated 300,000 people died. Bensouda arrived in Sudan late on Saturday and met with First Vice-President of the Transitional Sovereign Council, Lt-General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, who affirmed the Transitional Government's readiness to cooperate with the Court. For her part, the ICC Prosecutor pointed out in a press statement that the main purpose of her visit is to coordinate and cooperate with the Sudanese authorities. She said she met with the concerned authorities to obtain full commitment over these issues and stressed the need to achieve justice, especially for the victims of the Darfur region.

Turkey Withdraws from its Largest Military Post In Syria's Hama
London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
Turkey began withdrawing its troops from the “ninth” military observation point in Morek city, in northwestern Syria, as vehicles and trucks were seen entering the facility and moving soldiers to another location. The Turkish forces stationed in Morek, which is under the control of the regime forces, began dismantling their equipment, in preparation for their withdrawal from the military point in the northern Hama countryside. The observation post in Morek is the largest Turkish military point in that area and the forces have been stationed there for nearly two years and four months. News correspondent of Sputnik agency in Hama confirmed that units of the besieged Turkish point began to dismantle the logistical equipment and the control towers. Security sources confirmed to the Russian Agency that the Turkish forces had decided to withdraw towards Zawiya Mountain in the southern countryside of Idlib, which indicates that the decision was made in coordination with Russia. The sources added that the troops are expected to be withdrawn from this point within the next 24 hours, unless there is a sudden development. Earlier, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar asserted that Turkey will not evacuate its military observation points in the de-escalation zones in Idlib, saying the issue is non-negotiable. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that Turkish forces have evaded paying the rent to the owner of the land where the Turkish post is established. SOHR sources reported that the owner asked al-Sham Corps to pay the rent of his land since the military corps had previously mediated between him and the Turkish forces to establish the observation post there. However, the Turkish forces and al-Sham Corps have not paid the rent due to the land for nearly two years and three months.

Iraq Kicks Off Field Investigations Into 'Farhatia Massacre'
Baghdad- Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
The Farhatia massacre in Iraq’s Saladin Governorate, which involved the kidnapping of 12 civilians and the execution of 8 of them, is still occupying Iraqi's attention, whether on social media or through the reactions of political forces and parties. In this regard, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi visited the governorate on Sunday, attended the funeral of the victims, and also met with the security and military leaders. He affirmed that terrorism awaits only law and retribution, and there is no place for its return under any form or name. “The state will protect the citizens of Salah al-Din, and the doctrine of the armed forces is wrapped around loyalty to the homeland and the law, not to individuals or other names,” the PM said. During the weekend, Kadhimi had established a special investigative committee to look into the “criminal incident” while Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Muhammad al-Halbousi issued an order to form a parliamentary committee to investigate facts about the circumstances of the crime. The fact-finding committee chaired by the head of the Parliamentary Security and Defense Committee and the membership of a number of members of the committee and representatives of Salah al-Din Governorate, visited the scene of the crime on Sunday to prepare a report on the circumstances of the incident. While none of the investigative committees had announced the party that committed the massacre, some media outlets quoted the victims’ families accusing the Popular Mobilization Forces’ 42nd Brigade of standing behind the crime. Meanwhile, all 12 deputies from the governorate demanded on Sunday that the PMF’s armed factions leave Salah al-Din. The deputies stressed that after the Al-Farhatia massacre, it has become unacceptable that armed groups continue to control security decisions and prevent security forces from carrying out their duty to protect citizens. In a statement read by MP Muthanna al-Samarrai, Saladin's deputies emphasized that crimes by armed groups linked to some parties require the government to take a firm and real stance.

Syria Needs up to 200,000 Tons of Wheat Every Month to Meet Shortfall
Beirut, Amman - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 19 October, 2020
Syria needs to import between 180,000 tons and 200,000 tons of wheat a month, the economy minister was cited as saying on Sunday, blaming a shortfall on “militias” preventing farmers from selling their wheat to the state. Mohamed Samer al-Khalil was quoted in al-Watan newspaper as saying the imports would cost about $400 million but did not clarify a timeframe for spending that figure. Syria’s economy is collapsing under the weight of a complex, multi-sided conflict now in its 10th year, as well as a financial crisis in neighboring Lebanon. The currency collapse in Syria has led to soaring prices and people struggling to afford food and basic supplies. Before the conflict, Syria used to produce 4 million tons of wheat in a good year and was able to export 1.5 million tons. This year it has produced between 2.1 million and 2.4 million tons of wheat this year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates. Demand across the country is about 4 million tons, leaving a shortfall to fill through imports.
 

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on October 19-20/2020

Turkey-backed president's election to reshape negotiations in North Cyprus
Diego Cupolo/Al-Monitor/October 19/2020
ISTANBUL — Turkey-backed hard-liner Ersin Tatar won a presidential election runoff in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) Sunday in a vote widely seen as a referendum on the breakaway state’s policies for years to come.
Tatar, who served as prime minister with the right-wing National Unity Party and fostered close relations with Ankara, beat incumbent President Mustafa Akinci with about 52% of the vote. In his victory speech, Tatar thanked voters as well as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, before saying North Cypriots wanted their own state.“They will never tear the ties between us and Turkey,” Tatar said Sunday. “In light of the approval we received, it is the preference of our people in all disputes to lay claim to our own state, to lay claim to our land and lay claim to the guarantorship of Turkey.”
In a tweet Sunday evening, Erdogan congratulated Tatar, writing, “Turkey will continue to make all the necessary efforts to defend the rights of the people of northern Cyprus.”
Cyprus has been divided along mostly Greek and Turkish ethnic lines since a 1974 military incursion by Ankara, which keeps about 40,000 Turkish troops in the island’s northern part. The breakaway TRNC is solely recognized by Turkey and reunification efforts with the Republic of Cyprus, a European Union member state, have made little progress since the last round of talks collapsed 2017.
Throughout his tenure, Akinci remained supportive of UN-mediated reunification talks with his Greek Cypriot counterpart Nicos Anastasiades, while Tatar has backed a two-state solution, stating a lack of progress following gas field discoveries in Cypriot territorial waters over the last decade had failed to bring about a revenue-sharing agreement between the two sides, both of which stake claims over the energy reserves.
Speaking Monday, Anastasiades said he expressed his “readiness and determination” to continue negotiations with Tatar. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is also expected to call a meeting between the Cypriot leaders to assess the grounds to restart peace talks.
Harry Tzimitras, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo Cyprus Centre, said Tatar was possibly the first major TRNC presidential candidate to win on a campaign “so closely associated with Turkey and its policies.”
“This reflects the changed nature of current and projected involvement of Turkey in Turkish Cypriot politics and daily lives,” Tzimitras told Al-Monitor.
He added, “A much closer coordination, possibly even a full alignment, between Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot leadership is anticipated.”
Days before the first round of elections on Oct. 11, Tatar visited Erdogan in Ankara, where the pair announced the partial reopening of Varosha, a vacation resort in the Cypriot green zone left abandoned since the 1974 military incursion. Observers said the move, which disrupted peace accords, was likely an attempt to boost Tatar’s appeal among right-leaning voters.
In the first round, Tatar secured about 32% of votes over Akinci’s roughly 30%, setting the stage for a runoff election after neither garnered an outright majority in a contest that saw an all-time low voter turnout at about 58%.
The TRNC, which has a population of 326,000, nearly 200,000 of whom were eligible voters, saw participation rise to about 67% in the second round Sunday. Erol Kaymak, a professor of political science and international relations at Eastern Mediterranean University in Northern Cyprus, said an ”overwhelming majority” of new voters in the runoff election voted for Tatar.
Tatar won over 70% of the vote in the TRNC's Iskele district, which covers the Karpaz Peninsula and is largely populated by “mainlanders” or immigrants from Turkey, Kaymak said.
“The difference in Iskele alone tipped the election in Tatar's favor,” Kaymak told Al-Monitor, adding voters may have grown tired of Akinci’s efforts to promote a federal solution with the Republic of Cyprus.
“Akinci was getting nowhere with Anastasiades,” Kaymak continued. “So it is hardly surprising that in the era of regional tensions, nationalism held sway with a slim majority.”
Observers expect the Tatar administration to now work with Turkey in pursuing an energy-revenue sharing agreement with the Republic of Cyprus. Such a deal had been long set aside as leaders from both sides of the island sought to advance broader reunification efforts before negotiating the distribution of profits from gas fields in Cypriot territorial waters. With the election of Tatar, the status quo between the regional actors is likely to change.
“There is the remote possibility that the now 'unfrozen' conflict will inspire EU leaders and others to prod Greek Cypriots into a more realistic assessment of the situation,” Kaymak told Al-Monitor. “But given Turkey's trajectory it seems we won't find a diplomatic solution to most issues in the near term.”
The new political alignment between the TRNC and Turkey may entrench Turkish Cypriots’ reliance on Ankara, though Fiona Mullen, director of the Nicosia-based research consultancy Sapienta Economics, said there will be “enormous pressure” on all sides to reach some kind of a deal on energy-revenue sharing. “What I see to be the most likely scenario in the short term is ‘Taiwanisation’ of northern Cyprus,” Mullen told Al-Monitor. “It means de facto recognition as part of some gas deal that might mean either the return of Varosha or at least Varosha remaining closed.”
Mullen said such a development would depend on how relations unfold between the two Cypriot communities in the coming months. Increased contact between both sides could lead to unexpected results, she continued.
“It will either be the slow march to formal partition in the next generation, or it may work as a practice room for eventual reunification,” Mullen told Al-Monitor. “No one thought a united Ireland was possible until very recently, but things happen and suddenly it is now a real possibility.”

Heir to the Ottomans
Michael Young/Malcolm H. Kerrt/Carnegie Middle East Centre/October 19/2020
In an interview, Robert G. Rabil describes Turkey’s relations with Lebanon and its ambitions in the wider Middle East.
Diwan interviewed Rabil in mid-October to get his perspective on Turkey’s expanding role in Lebanon and the wider Middle East.
Michael Young: How would you describe Turkish-Lebanese relations today?
Robert Rabil: No doubt, the Turkish relationship with Lebanon improved dramatically following the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005. Many Lebanese, with the exception of the Armenian community and more or less the Shi‘a community after the eruption of the Syrian civil war, considered Turkey’s role in Lebanon as cross-sectarian, fulfilled in the interest of Lebanon as a nation and a state. Notwithstanding abundant Turkish support for the Sunni community, especially for the Turkmen communities in Lebanon, Turkish participation in the United Nations force in southern Lebanon and increased humanitarian aid to Lebanon fostered a sociopolitical environment in which Turkish influence has deepened at the grassroots level, especially in Tripoli, ‘Akkar, and Sidon. In fact, Turkey has established a vast network of pro-Turkish civil society organizations working to better the Lebanese-Turkish relationship, improve living standards in depressed areas, and enhance Turkish culture, language, and cultural identity within the Sunni community in general and Lebanon’s Turkmen communities in particular.
MY: Turkey is now regarded by a number of Arab states—including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—as a strategic adversary. Why have relations come to this and what are the main causes for this growing Arab alignment against Turkey?
RR: Historically, Turkey had a checkered relationship with the Arab world. However, after the Justice and Development Party assumed power in 2002, this led to a dramatic shift in Turkish policy toward the Arabs, grounded in the doctrine of “strategic depth.” The doctrine emphasized “good neighborly relations” and “zero problems” with the Arab world. But the failure or suppression of the Arab uprisings, including the forced removal of Egypt’s first democratically elected Islamist president, led Ankara to embrace an active regional role supporting its Islamist allies and friends. This included advancing Turkish regional ambitions, in line with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s view of Turkey as an heir of Ottoman heritage and power.
Turkey, employing soft and hard power, has become politically or militarily involved in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Qatar, whittling away at Arab leadership and policies in the Arab world, especially those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE. No less significant, Ankara has taken on the mantle of defending the Palestinian cause at a time when a number of Arab countries have deepened their relationship with Israel. No wonder that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE regard Turkey as a strategic adversary.
MY: How realistic is it to assume that Lebanon’s Sunni community would shift its allegiances from the Sunni-majority Arab countries to Turkey?
RR: Many Sunnis still appreciate and feel indebted to the Arab Gulf’s support and benefaction toward Lebanon, especially Saudi Arabia, added to the fact that many Lebanese are gratefully employed in the Gulf. Fundamentally, however, the Sunni attraction to Turkey has more to do with Saudi Arabia’s retreat from Lebanon than the Sunni community’s shifting its allegiance to Turkey.
In addition, two major factors have enhanced Turkey’s image among Lebanon’s Sunnis. Broadly speaking, the Sunni community perceives Turkey as the most potent Sunni power to stand up to Lebanon’s Hezbollah following its military intervention in Syria. The other factor is Turkey’s comprehensive humanitarian aid that has helped Sunnis across Lebanon, especially in depressed areas of northern Lebanon—in Tripoli and ‘Akkar—and Sidon. Turkish organizations, led by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Turkish Red Crescent, the Beirut Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Center, and the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities have established schools, hospitals, shelters, parks, and cultural centers, and have implemented wastewater projects and rehabilitated water systems in Sunni-majority towns and villages. These organizations have also provided the less privileged in the Sunni community with food assistance and basic needs.
Recently, Turkey immediately sent humanitarian aid to Lebanon following the horrendous Beirut port explosion on August 4. This has only deepened Turkish influence at the expense of Saudi sway within the Sunni community. Such influence is reflected in the fact that Turkish flags and banners have replaced those of Saudi Arabia in many Sunni neighborhoods.
MY: How do Turkish-Iranian relations play out in Lebanon? Do you anticipate a time when the Turks might seek to contain the power of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah?
RR: Despite their adversarial roles in Syria, Turkey and Iran have cooperated on a range of shared regional concerns. Both are parties to the Astana peace process for Syria. Iran has supported the Turkish-backed Libyan Government of National Accord. Turkey has criticized U.S. sanctions against Iran, and both are critical of recent Arab peace agreements with Israel.
However, this cooperation is virtually absent in Lebanon. In fact, Turkey and Iran’s powerful proxy there, Hezbollah, are at loggerheads. Their mutual hostility is playing out in Lebanon both in their actions and rhetoric. In the same fashion as Lebanon’s Islamists and Salafis, Turkish leaders have demonized Hezbollah as the party of Satan. Turkey has also forged good relationships with Lebanon’s Islamists and haraki (activist) Salafis, who have been strongly opposed to Hezbollah.
In turn, besides criticizing Turkey, the Hezbollah-controlled government of caretaker prime minister Hassan Diab has been keen to curb the power of pro-Turkish, anti-Syrian regime activists. Nevertheless, Turkish influence in northern Lebanon has become so deep and popular that it has already become a barrier to Hezbollah’s unreserved power. Turkey has the power to mobilize the Sunnis in northern Lebanon against Hezbollah. However, this influence has not yet been reflected in the state’s military and security apparatus.
MY: What are the consequences of the fact that pro-Turkish Lebanese are seeking to silence Lebanon’s Armenians who have denounced the genocide of 1915? Is this an obstacle to Turkey’s soft power in Lebanon and to any potential effort to appeal to all communities?
RR: Initially, Armenians were critical of the Islamist Jama‘a Islamiyyah and former parliamentarian Khaled Daher for taking the lead in opposing the centenary commemorations of the Armenian genocide. Until recently Lebanese communities stood in solidarity with the Armenians during genocide commemorations. Armenians today are shocked to see counterdemonstrations and public justification of the genocide by leading Lebanese Turkmen. Thousands of Turkish flags flutter in major Sunni neighborhoods each time Turkey is criticized. Clearly, Turkey has grassroots support within the Sunni community, which has paid little attention to Armenian grievances. Similarly, given the numerical and political weakness of the Armenian community in multisectarian Lebanon, Turkey has not factored Armenian concerns into its policies toward the country.
MY: Can we anticipate a spread of Turkish influence throughout the Middle East, or do the Turks face significant pushback?
RR: I don’t expect major further expansion of Turkey’s influence in the Middle East. Its involvement there is already broad, deep, and costly. Yet I also don’t underestimate Turkish appeal in Arab societies thirsting for leadership and a better life. However, that is not to say that Turkish leadership will replace Arab leadership. Turkey has laid a claim to regional leadership that cannot be denied or eliminated. Who could have imagined that Turkey would have influence in Lebanon, whose sectarian groups had strong historical reservations about Ankara? The main obstacles to Turkish regional expansion are the poor state of the Turkish economy, domestic opposition to Erdoğan, and the Kurdish question and its ramifications for Turkey and Turkish involvement in Syria and Iraq.
**Robert G. Rabil is a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of numerous articles and books including, Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (Lynne Rienner, 2003), Syria, the United States and the War on Terror in the Middle East (Praeger, 2006), Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon: The Challenge of Islamism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Salafism in Lebanon: From Apoliticism to Transnational Jihadism (Georgetown University Press, 2014). He was awarded the LLS Distinguished Faculty Award and the LLS Distinguished Professorship in Current Affairs. He was also awarded an honorary Ph.D. in humanities from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Who Is Responsible for the 'Crisis' in Islam?
Khaled Abu Toameh/Gatestone Institute/October 19/2020
Other Arabs said that Muslims have only themselves to blame for the "crisis" in their religion. They are referring to the use of Islam, by many Muslims, to carry out terrorist attacks and other atrocities against Muslims and non-Muslims.
The message these Arabs and Muslims are sending is: We created the crisis in our religion by allowing terrorists and extremists to use Islam as a pretext for their crimes.
The views expressed by these Arabs and Muslims are reminiscent of those by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. In 2014, he called for a "religious revolution" in Islam and appealed to leading Muslim groups to "confront the misleading ideologies harming Islam and Muslims worldwide."
"The fact is that the biggest conspirators against Islam are the Muslims themselves, specifically those who reproduce the discourse of closed-mindedness and hatred. In this context, there is no difference between those who create, finance or carry out terrorism and those who are silent about it or justify it." — Mohammad Maghouti, Moroccan writer, Hespress, October 13, 2020.
"[W]e have to call on France to place the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations." — Nervana Mahmoud, prominent Egyptian commentator and blogger, Al Hurrah, October 11, 2020.
"The crisis that Islam is suffering from was made by Muslims with their own hands when they allowed a handful of them to adopt violence as a language for dialogue with the other. Macron was right in everything he said. His message should be considered a wake-up call. Muslims have greatly offended Islam when they showed it to be a religion that incites violence and spreads chaos in stable societies that received them as refugees and provided them with protection. Muslims made a mistake when they used their religion as a justification for attacking others. This does not give us the right to condemn others and accuse them of being hostile to Islam. Islam is in crisis because it has been distorted, mutilated, and destroyed from within. We should have said thank you to Macron rather than curse him." — Farouk Yousef, Egyptian writer, Middle East Online, October 13, 2020.
In 2014, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for a "religious revolution" in Islam and appealed to leading Muslim groups to "confront the misleading ideologies harming Islam and Muslims worldwide."
While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and several Islamists have condemned French President Emmanuel Macron over his recent "Islam is in a crisis" statement, other Arabs and Muslims are saying that they appreciate where such remarks are coming from.
Erdogan and the Islamists are angry because Macron said in an October 2 speech that he plans to "free Islam in France from foreign influences," and that a minority of France's estimated six million Muslims were in danger of forming a "counter-society" because they hold their own laws above all others.
This sentiment means that Turkey, Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood could find it harder to influence the Muslims in France.
"Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today; we are not just seeing this in our country," Macron said. He argued that "Islamic separatism" was problematic, and added: "The problem is an ideology which claims its own laws should be superior to those of the republic."
Noting that some Muslim parents do not allow their children to attend music classes or participate in sporting, cultural and other community activities, Macron announced measures that will form a new bill before the end of the year. They include: stricter monitoring of sports organizations and other associations so that they do not become a front for Islamist teaching, and an end to the system of imams being sent to France from abroad.
Schools will be under tight control and "foreign influence" will not be tolerated," the French president said.
Faisal J. Abbas, editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Arab News, called for supporting France's push against "Islamist separatism."
Other Arabs said that Muslims have only themselves to blame for the "crisis" in their religion. They are referring to the use of Islam, by many Muslims, to carry out terrorist attacks and other atrocities against Muslims and non-Muslims.
The message these Arabs and Muslims are sending is: We created the crisis in our religion by allowing terrorists and extremists to use Islam as a pretext for their crimes.
The views expressed by these Arabs and Muslims are reminiscent of those by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In 2014, he called for a "religious revolution" in Islam and appealed to leading Muslim groups to "confront the misleading ideologies harming Islam and Muslims worldwide."
On October 2, Macron presented his plan to combat "Islamic separatism," and said that he intends to "free Islam in France from foreign influences." His announcement came a week after a stabbing in Paris outside the former headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin was quoted as saying that France was "at war against Islamic terrorism."
On October 16, Macron, responding to the beheading of a teacher in a suburb of Paris, denounced the murder as an "Islamist terrorist attack." The victim, a teacher of history and geography, is said to have shown cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed to his students, as well as discussing freedom of expression – regarded by many extremists as a threat to "blasphemy laws," which call for death to anyone who questions or criticizes Allah, the Prophet Mohammed or Islam. The same cartoons had previously been published by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. In 2015, Said Kouachi and his brother, Cherif, French citizens born in Paris to Algerian immigrants, forced their way into the offices of the magazine. Armed with rifles and other weapons, they killed 12 people and injured 11 others.
One of the first Muslims to come out against Macron's talk about a crisis in Islam was Erdogan, who has long embraced the Muslim Brotherhood organization and its Palestinian proxy, Hamas. "Macron's statements on 'Islam is in a crisis' goes beyond disrespect and is a clear provocation," Erdogan told a gathering of mosque and religious workers in the Turkish capital, Ankara.
Erdogan's quick condemnation of the French president's remarks by a man who has been working hard to pitch himself as the new leader of the Muslim world did not come as a surprise.
Evidently emboldened by Erdogan's attack on the French president, the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Scholars Association also condemned Macron's statement and called him "ignorant."
Marwan Abu Ras, a Hamas official who heads the Gaza-based association, claimed that "Muslims live in constant crises caused by the West and major countries, especially France." Abu Ras added:
"Islam, as a religion can never suffer crises. Rather, those who suffer from crises are the Muslims as a result of conspiracies and plots from major countries, especially France. If Macron does not differentiate between religion and followers of religion, this is a great ignorance on his part. Macron needs to take lessons before he speaks [about Islam]."
Another Palestinian Islamist group, named The Palestine Preachers' Forum, also lashed out at Macron and accused him of insulting Islam. It, too, urged the Islamic world to declare Macron "persona non grata" and "confront his extremism and intellectual terrorism."
The group said in a statement that "insulting Islam only shows the face of malevolent racism after Islam has become present and widespread in Western societies."
The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), also based in the Gaza Strip, denounced Macron as a "racist" and "extremist."
"Macron's statements, which are an insult to Islam, are full of racism, hatred and anger," said PIJ leader Mohammad al-Harazin. According to the PIJ leader, Macron made these statements after he "reached a state of despair and confusion in the face of the Islamic tide. I am sure that things are going in favor of Islam, and Muslims in the world must support their religion against this Zionist-Crusader incursion, each according to his ability."
As Erdogan and his friends in Hamas and PIJ, however, continue their campaign of incitement against Macron, other Muslims and Arabs are not afraid to speak out in defense of the French president's remarks. These Arabs and Muslims said that they agree with Macron and warned about the growing influence of extremists on Islam. Their courageous voices, however, rarely receive coverage in the Western mainstream media.
"Macron did not blame Islam, as a religion, for the dilemmas of Muslims," argued Saudi writer and researcher Fahad Shoqiran.
"Extremist tendencies are not limited to Muslims, but to all religions. Today, France is facing real dilemmas in dealing with Islamic organizations. France did not enact laws that deter the institutions of political Islam, which enabled them to penetrate the communities there. Separatism, or the revival of the behavior of 'emotional isolation' among Muslim children, does not pose a threat to France alone, but to the entire world, as well. There is no need to demonize Macron's speech. Yes, there is a deep crisis, and all Muslims must face their mistakes and reconsider their ideas."
Moroccan writer Mohammad Maghouti said it was unfortunate that some Muslims failed "to put Macron's remarks in context."
"We all know that radical Islam represents a real threat to democracy and secularism in France and throughout Europe, where some Muslims seek to build 'Islamic ghettos' that challenge the laws and create a system parallel to the state system there... Those who enjoy the freedoms and rights guaranteed by the civil state laws rebel against the same laws when it comes to duties. They threaten the stability and security of the country due to the growing terrorist attacks against innocent people. Those are who paint a bleak and bloody picture of the Islamic religion."
Maghouti pointed out that "hostile behavior in the name of religion is strongly present in many details of our daily life, whether in the public street or through the platforms of some mosques, private and public forums, as well as social media platforms."
He wondered how "Muslims allow themselves to atone for all violators and downplay the importance of religions while not accepting those who criticize them?
"Isn't this a strange paradox that reveals a schizophrenic crisis in the Islamic mindset? The fact is that the biggest conspirators against Islam are the Muslims themselves, specifically those who reproduce the discourse of closed-mindedness and hatred. In this context, there is no difference between those who create, finance or carry out terrorism and those who are silent about it or justify it."
Egyptian writer Farouk Yousef wrote that there was nothing offensive in Macron's comments:
"The French president said what any sane person interested in what is happening around him would say... 'Islam is in crisis' is not an anti-religious phrase. There is a phenomenon called political Islam and the world is experiencing the brunt of its violence."
Yousef, too, blamed Muslims for the current crisis in Islam:
"The crisis that Islam is suffering from was made by Muslims with their own hands when they allowed a handful of them to adopt violence as a language for dialogue with the other... Macron was right in everything he said. His message should be considered a wake-up call. Muslims have greatly offended Islam when they showed it to be a religion that incites violence and spreads chaos in stable societies that received them as refugees and provided them with protection. Muslims made a mistake when they used their religion as a justification for attacking others. This does not give us the right to condemn others and accuse them of being hostile to Islam. Islam is in crisis because it has been distorted, mutilated, and destroyed from within. We should have said thank you to Macron rather than curse him."
Egyptian columnist and political analyst Khaled Montaser said that the outrage expressed by Muslims toward Macron's statements will "continue to prevent us as Muslims from understanding the crisis we are living in."
The crisis, Montaser explained, "has made us the biggest exporters of terrorists." He said that "before and after each beheading, killing or torching, Muslims find justifications that allow and encourage such atrocities."
Egyptian writer Dr. Nivine Massad also defended Macron and said that his words were an "acknowledgment of the failure of the policies of integrating Muslim immigrants from the second and third generations into French society."
"[E]veryone who knows France knows that this phenomenon is real, and that there are French cities like Marseille that do not resemble France in anything, and that there are a large group of reasons that have brought France to this point, some of which are external and some of which are internal, and therefore the president has the right to address it. Money and ideology have played an important role in separating French Muslims from French society."
Prominent Egyptian commentator and blogger on Middle East issues Nervana Mahmoud said that instead of attacking the French president, "we have to call on France to place the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations."
Mahmoud added that she was hoping that Muslim religious leaders would listen to the concerns of the French president and cooperate with him instead of rushing to express outrage and rejection.
"The emotional reactions will not benefit Muslims in the West, but rather confirm the negative vision they suffer from... The words of the French president did not come out of nowhere, but rather carry a message to us, Muslims, to search for our faults, not to blame others and play the role of victims and the oppressed. We are the mirror of our religion."
It is refreshing to see a growing number of Arabs and Muslims express support for Macron's remarks about the crisis their religion is facing. These voices show that more and more people in the Arab world understand that the terrorists and their sponsors in Turkey, Iran and Qatar are causing massive damage to all Arabs and Muslims. Macron's remarks have evidently struck a chord with some, who are now saying that they share his concerns. The question nevertheless remains: Will these words finally serve as wake-up call to Europe, the Western mainstream media and the rest of the world?
*Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at 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.

Belarus: More Human Rights Violations
Judith Bergman/Gatestone Institute/October 19/2020
Belarusians want an end to Lukashenko's 26-year long rule of Soviet-style authoritarianism with unfree elections, a censored media and widespread repression of political dissent. Both the US and the EU have described the recent election as neither free nor fair.
Lukashenko, however, clinging onto power, has framed the protests as "foreign interference". The claim serves both as an excuse to crack down on the protests and to ensure the support of Russia.
Since the election [on August 9], more than 10,000 people have been detained and at least 244 people have been implicated in criminal cases on various charges related to the protests, according to Viasna human rights center leader Ales Bialiatski.
Now that Lukashenko is being pressured both internationally and at home, he is completely beholden to Putin, who is likely to take full advantage of this position by conditioning his help and support on Lukashenko's acceptance of further "integration" with Russia. Ultimately, this could lead to a "soft" power grab by Putin – no need for military invasions -- in which Putin could finally bring about the close "integration" from Belarus -- "coming closer together" socially and economically -- that Putin has previously sought.
For two months, Belarusians have turned out in force every Sunday, drawing up to 200,000 protesters against the August 9 presidential election, which gave President Alexander Lukashenko, a crushing if highly dubious victory.
Belarusians want an end to Lukashenko's 26-year long rule of Soviet-style authoritarianism with unfree elections, a censored media and widespread repression of political dissent. Both the US and the EU have described the recent election as neither free nor fair.
Lukashenko's main challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who received nearly 10% of the vote, was detained after contesting the election results and fled to Lithuania, She had said that she was ready to serve as a temporary "national leader" and hold new free and fair elections. For that purpose, she and other members of the opposition formed an opposition council, a move that prompted prosecutors to open a criminal case against the council with the claim that it had been set up as an illegal attempt to seize power. Since the council's creation in mid-August, most of its leaders have been detained, several of them abducted and then expelled from the country. One of the last free members of the council, Maxim Znak, was dragged out of his office by masked men on September 9, detained and charged with "incitement to undermine national security".
Tikhanovskaya has made it clear that the protests are about free elections and an end to the Lukashenko regime -- not about joining with either Russia or the West. "The revolution in Belarus is not a geopolitical revolution," she has said. "It is neither a pro-Russian, nor anti-Russian revolution. It is neither an anti-European Union nor pro-European Union revolution. It is a democratic revolution."
Lukashenko, however, clinging onto power, has framed the protests as "foreign interference". The claim serves both as an excuse to crack down on the protests and to ensure the support of Russia.
"NATO troops are at our gates. Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and our native Ukraine are ordering us to hold new elections," Lukashenko has said. He has also claimed that NATO has aggressive designs on the country: "They want to topple this government and replace it with another one that would ask a foreign country to send troops in support," he said at the end of August.
"There is no NATO build-up in the region," NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in response to the accusations. "NATO's multinational presence in the eastern part of the Alliance is not a threat to any country. It is strictly defensive, proportionate, and designed to prevent conflict and preserve peace."
Lukashenko has cracked down exceedingly hard on the demonstrations. Since the election, more than 10,000 people have been detained and at least 244 people have been implicated in criminal cases on various charges related to the protests, according to Viasna human rights center leader Ales Bialiatski. During the protests, on Sunday October 4 alone, some 250 protesters were detained during demonstrations held in Minsk and other cities of Belarus, including Brest, Salihorsk, Mahilioŭ, Babrujsk and Hrodna, where security forces again used water cannons to disperse the peaceful demonstrators.
Police officers have reportedly beaten demonstrators in detention and there are reports of widespread torture. According to September 15 report by Human Rights Watch:
"The victims described beatings, prolonged stress positions, electric shocks, and in at least one case, rape, and said they saw other detainees suffer the same or worse abuse. They had serious injuries, including broken bones, cracked teeth, skin wounds, electrical burns, and mild traumatic brain injuries. Some had kidney damage. Six of the people interviewed were hospitalized, for one to five days. Police held detainees in custody for several days, often incommunicado, in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions".
In addition, Lukashenko has shut down more than 20 news websites.
The US, the EU and Canada have imposed sanctions, such as travel bans and asset freezes, on Belarusian senior figures involved in the suppression of protests and election fraud. The EU has imposed sanctions "against 40 individuals identified as responsible for repression and intimidation against peaceful demonstrators, opposition members and journalists" while the US is sanctioning eight senior figures in Lukashenko's government, including Interior Minister Yuriy Khadzymuratavich Kareau. The US already imposed sanctions on Lukashenko in 2006, banned his entry into the U.S. and froze any assets he had there. It is questionable, however, whether new sanctions will have any effect on a leadership that is so reliant on Russia. "Personal sanctions don't change the situation on the ground," Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst based in Minsk, told Politico. "The individuals on the list don't care about being on it. On the contrary, they consider it a medal of honor."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has generally signaled that he is ready to support Lukashenko -- including having extended a $1.5 billion loan. He stated, however, that the mass protests are a matter for the Belarusians to solve. "We want Belarusians themselves... to sort out this situation calmly and through dialogue," Putin said. He did acknowledge however, that Russia would be ready to help Belarus militarily, should the situation grow "out of control".
The Belarusian opposition, meanwhile, is also appealing to Putin: "I regret that you decided to conduct a dialogue with the usurper and not with the Belarusian people," Tikhanovskaya said after Putin's September meeting with Lukashenko in Sochi in what was the first face-to-face meeting between the two leaders since the elections.
Belarus, serving both as an important transit route for Russian oil and gas to Europe and as a buffer with NATO, forms a significant part of Russia's sphere of interest. Putin has been pushing for ever-closer "integration" with Belarus for years. As late as December 2019, protests broke out in Belarus against what was perceived by Belarusians as a Russian push to have Belarus integrate more closely with Russia.
On the one hand, Putin, of course, will only keep propping up Lukashenko as long as it is in his interest to do so. He has little interest in alienating Belarusians, who have traditionally been sympathetic to Russia. The last member of the opposition council who has not been detained and is still in Belarus, Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich, said. "Belarusians have always considered Russians our brothers, but if Russia sticks to its current politics that will no longer be the case."
On the other hand, however, it is practically unimaginable that Putin would support an opposition fighting for free elections, even if it presented an extremely Russia-friendly presidential candidate. Allowing a democratic revolution in Belarus would send the wrong signal to Russians eager to rid themselves of Putin's authoritarian rule. Russia, in fact, recently put Tikhanovskaya on its wanted list on "a criminal charge", according to Russia's interior ministry.
It is far more likely that Putin will take advantage of Lukashenko's considerably weakened position. Now that Lukashenko is being pressured both internationally and at home, he is completely beholden to Putin, who is likely to take full advantage of this position by conditioning his help and support on Lukashenko's acceptance of further "integration" with Russia. Ultimately, this could lead to a "soft" power grab by Putin -- no need for military invasions -- in which Putin could finally bring about the close "integration" from Belarus -- "coming closer together" socially and economically -- that Putin has previously sought.
*Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at 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.

Going to the Bank? Millennials Just Won’t
Anjani Trivedi//Blommberg/October, 19/2020
Last week, struggling with phone and internet banking services, I ventured out to my bank’s branch in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district. Spread out over several floors of prime real estate, the big institution with its name sprinkled across the city was teeming with people – from two taking temperatures on entry to multiple assistants inquiring what they could help me with even before I reached the customer service counter. I got in the queue.
My turn came. The counter agent couldn’t solve my problem. His colleague had no better luck. They then brought out their “digital ambassador.” She took me to a computer and got me to call the customer hotline. When that failed, they tried to get me to fill out a paper form and wait a few days. I lost it. I demanded to see the branch manager.
Long story short, I walked out three hours later with the promise of a phone call and a resolution within the following two hours. I still couldn’t use my account, and had just spent hours — on top of the days wasted on the hotline. I was fuming.
But I was also thinking, this just can’t be banking in 2020. Two of the agents were surely Millennials, and sympathized with my travails. There must be a better way. I’ve heard all the fuss around digital banks and fintech companies.
Some are already worth a lot. Brazil’s Nubank (Nu Pagamentos SA) is valued at $10 billion, according to CBInsights, and its user base has surged 25% since the beginning of this year to 25 million. Singapore has shortlisted banks that would only exist virtually for operations in the city-state, while Hong Kong has already awarded eight digital banking licenses.
Since my colleague Andy Mukherjee has written about this, I asked him for an update. Turns out, he’d just opened an account with one such new Hong Kong institution, WeLab Bank. What was that experience like?
Andy: It took an hour from downloading the app to getting the account operational, and only because I’m such a technology dinosaur.
“Raise phone camera to eye level,” and “Blink in three seconds, two, one...” I blinked too soon. Anjani: It’s tough to get that right, to be fair. But why did you plunge into the great unknown of virtual banking?
Andy: That’s the question I’ve been asking myself. My main bank is the same as yours, and I don’t know the first thing about the parent WeLab Holdings Ltd., a startup that raised its Series C financing in December.
Anjani: Welcome to the trend. WeBank, one of the first private digital banks approved for a license by China, is now one of the largest digital banks there, with 200 million retail users. That’s more customers than traditional lenders that boast big retail bases, like China Merchants Bank Co. and Ping An Bank Co. Andy: But then, WeBank has the backing of Tencent Holdings Ltd., while I had to look up WeLab founder Simon Loong on LinkedIn. While their newness doesn’t bother me, I do want to know if they can make money. Anjani: I get it — loss-making startups and unicorns are the norm, but a bank in the red doesn’t make me feel comfortable, either. Especially, if they’re making huge upfront investment in expensive things like certain secure technologies, more skilled people and all the promised innovation.
Andy: The cost of opening accounts for digital banks is very low, and so are operational expenses because they aren’t sitting on brick-and-mortar outlets. They can make money provided they get the deposits to build sizable and safe loan books.
Anjani: The safety issue is important. I know they’re regulated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority just like conventional banks, and subject to stringent capital adequacy norms. The technology they use is vetted for robustness. And they need to submit exit plans, just in case things don’t work out. Andy: That was enough for me. It was a liberating feeling to trust at least a small sum to a bank other other HSBC Holdings Plc, Standard Chartered Plc and Bank of China (Hong Kong) Ltd. The three have a lock on deposits.
Anjani: Maybe that explains why an international financial hub offers such terrible customer service, easily the worst I’ve experienced anywhere. It’s good that HKMA is making experimentation easy by saying that digital banks shouldn’t “impose any minimum account balance requirement or low-balance fees.” For the Millennial crowd, many on first jobs and such, that’s a draw.
Andy: As a non-Millennial, I signed up because it was easy. When the app scanned my Hong Kong identification card and auto-filled nearly every field in the application, I couldn’t help but think of how the bulge-bracket bank you and I use made me visit a branch, and took all my paperwork, only to open my account in the wrong name. So much for KYC.
Anjani: I can see the advantages of going branchless. Especially when nobody, including the staff, wants to sit in an enclosed space for hours during Covid-19. But if the digital bank saves money on customer acquisition, does it share it? Are you getting a good interest rate?
Andy: I missed the inaugural 4.5% offer on Hong Kong dollar time deposits, and settled for a 0.9% annual rate that would rise to 1.1% if 50 people sign up. I was the 30th. As I used the app-generated link to invite 20 friends on WhatsApp, I understood why Sea Ltd., the maker of the popular mobile game, “Call of Duty,” is seeking a digital-only bank license in Singapore. Razer Inc., the firm behind the DeathAdder gaming mouse popular in the ESports community, also wants one.
Anjani: Maybe that is the hook — the social element. The Generation Z banking customers, the oldest of whom are now 25, are digital natives, power users of social networks. They’ll be the trendsetters of consumer credit. Many will run their own businesses. Ant Bank (Hong Kong) wants to do digital trade finance for small and medium enterprises.
Andy: Perhaps virtual banks will take us back to the future by recreating more cost-effective, better scalable versions of building societies, savings and loans associations and chit funds, hopefully with fewer blowups and scams.
So bring on “Call of Duty,” DeathAdder, WeLab and others. Let’s have real some competition for our money.

The President, the Vaccine, and the Heated Weeks
Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat/October, 19/2020
There is no exaggeration in saying that “heated weeks” are ahead. The US election does not concern the Americans alone. The man, who will achieve victory in the polls, will be considered the policeman of the “global village,” even if he refuses both the description and the role.
The date of the US election is more important than all other dates. It’s more important than political events in other parts of the world, and more significant than all sports and artistic competitions that steal people’s attention in various continents.
These are “heated weeks” because the wait is difficult for the leaders of large and small countries alike. Vladimir Putin cannot ignore this date. The name of the US president affects his country, its image, its military spending, and its position in the world.
President Xi Jinping cannot forget that Donald Trump refers to Covid-19 as “the Chinese virus.” The latter also asserts that China will have to pay the price for what it has done. The master of Beijing cannot deny that Trump has imposed new rhetoric in addressing his country.
He also forced China to make some commercial concessions in order to avoid an open round of punches. Trump’s stay in the White House would present Mao’s party with very difficult choices.
These are tense weeks in Europe as well. Covid-19 has re-launched its attacks on the Old Continent. It has killed more people, exhausted the health system, and shaken Europeans’ confidence in their countries and institutions.
The pandemic has compounded the pain of a continent already suffering from British betrayal, Turkish blackmail, and open fires on or near the Mediterranean.
The Continent is mired in confusion. Europe is afraid of the US president especially when he acts like a soloist, disrupting the Western orchestra with his individualistic and selfish attitude. It is also afraid of becoming hostage to Russian gas or the sanctions imposed by the Tsar against his opponents, the last of whom is Alexei Navalny.
These are also “heated weeks” in the Middle East. It is no exaggeration to say that Iranian Leader Ali Khamenei is counting the hours until the election. He cannot forget that Trump has exhausted the Iranian economy, forcing the regime to practice brutal repression against the citizens, who were fed up with the deterioration of their living conditions, their national currency, and the weakening of the country’s role.
Khamenei cannot forgive Trump for making the decision to remove General Qassem Soleimani from the equation. This move was bolder than the decision to kill Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He also does not forget that his country has not yet dared to undertake a response equivalent to the scale of the assassination, despite its pledge to do so.
Turkey is also concerned with the anxious wait. The policy of blackmailing Europe with the waves of refugees, interfering through mercenaries, and penetrating maps without permission has raised Europe’s fear about the “recklessness” of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s behavior and increased the conviction that he should be punished. Thus, Ankara is waiting for the results of the US elections to know the extent of the damage to its relations with Washington after it has introduced Russian missiles into the Atlantic house.
Israel is waiting, too. It fears that the new master of the White House would be hostile to the Jewish state or be prepared to curb or limit its policies. Israel wants more than that. It wants to deal with the region’s events and its future with the same vocabulary.
Riyadh is also concerned with the US election. The Trump administration’s strict policy towards the widespread Iranian attack in the region deprived Tehran of resources that it could use to expand the attack. The Trump administration understood Iran’s attempts to besiege Saudi Arabia, especially through the Yemeni side, and the role it has assigned to the Houthi militias there.
Saudi Arabia has an interest in maintaining strong relations with the US administration, regardless of the president’s name. On the other hand, America has a real interest in establishing a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia as a country with economic weight and political influence, especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Cairo is concerned with the results as well. It does not want to see in Washington an approach similar to that of Barak Obama and his reading of changes in the region.
The tension of the “heated weeks” is mounting in countries that have turned into open arenas for exchanging messages, especially with America. In Beirut, many believe that the new Lebanese government will not be born before the US election, despite the speculations that rose after the launch of technical negotiations to demarcate the maritime borders between Lebanon and Israel.
In Syria, many believe that Damascus’ exit from its international isolation depends on the results of the US election, especially if the confrontation with Tehran is reduced.
The “heated weeks” are evident in Iraq. Non-state forces do not allow Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi to catch his breath. Missiles targeting the Americans or the Green Zone… Bombs and threats... The re-awakening of Shiite-Sunni sensitivities, particularly through the massacre in the district of Balad in Saladin Governorate. All this comes in parallel with tension in the relationship with the Kurdish component.
The US election, which is scheduled to take place in the first week of November, also comes as the whole world painfully waits for a vaccine for Covid-19. Many believe that the date is approaching based on recent remarks by Trump and Putin. The pandemic has shaken maps and swallowed up budgets, triggering waves of funerals and unemployment. It also shook institutions, convictions, habits, education, medicine, and investment. The world is longing for joyful news announcing the arrival of a vaccine. But the American “heated weeks” are another story.

The ‘Good Censors’
Niall Ferguson/Blommberg/October, 19/2020
When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit the impact of users “behaving badly.”
In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ data, endowed with its own “volition or purpose,” which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or travel) that would “reflect Google’s values as an organization.”
If that doesn’t strike you as weird — like dialogue from some dystopian science-fiction novel — then you need to read more dystopian science fiction. (Start with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s astonishingly prescient “We.”)
The lowliest employees of big tech companies — the content moderators whose job it is to spot bad stuff online — offer a rather different perspective. “Remember ‘We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party’?” one of them asked Alex Feerst of OneZero last year, alluding to an early Twitter slogan. “How vain and oblivious does that sound now? Well, it’s the morning after the free speech party, and the place is trashed.”
I don’t know if, as the New York Post alleged last week, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden met with a Ukrainian energy executive named Vadym Pozharskyi in 2015. I don’t know if Biden’s son Hunter tried to broker such a meeting as part of his board directorship deal with Pozharskyi’s firm, Burisma Holdings. And I am pretty doubtful that the meeting, if indeed it happened, was the reason Biden demanded that the Ukrainian government fire its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. I am even open to the theory that the whole story is bunk, the emails fake, and the laptop and its hard-drive an infowars gift from Russia, with love.
What I do know is that if I read the story online and found it compelling, I should have been able to share it with friends. Instead, both Facebook and Twitter made a decision to try to kill the Post’s scoop.
Andy Stone, the former Democratic Party staffer who is now Facebook’s policy communications manager, announced that his company would be “reducing” the “distribution” of the Post story. Twitter barred its users from sharing it not only with followers but also through direct messages, locking the accounts of people — including White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany — who retweeted it.
This is not an isolated incident. In May, Twitter attached a health warning to one of President Trump’s Tweets. There was uproar at Facebook when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg declined to follow Twitter’s lead. Days later, Facebook was pressured into taking down 88 Trump campaign ads that used an inverted red triangle (a Nazi symbol) to attack antifa, the far-left movement. In August, Facebook removed a group with nearly 200,000 members “for repeatedly posting content that violated our policies.” The group promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is broadly pro-Trump. Earlier this month, the company deleted all QAnon accounts from its platforms.
Google has been doing the same sort of thing. In June, it excluded the website ZeroHedge from its ad platform because of “violations” in the comments sections of stories about Black Lives Matter.
The remarkable thing is not that Silicon Valley is playing a highly questionable role in the election of 2020. It is that the same was true in 2016 and, despite a great many fine words and some minor pieces of legislation, Americans did nothing about it.
Far from addressing the glaring problems created by the rise of the network platforms that now dominate the American (and indeed the global) public sphere, we largely decided to shut our eyes and ears to them. In the past 10 months, I’ve read as many op-ed articles and reports about this election as I can stand. I’m staggered by how few even mention the role of the internet and social media. (Kevin Roose’s work on the conservative dominance of Facebook shared content is an honorable exception.) You would think it was still the 1990s — as if this contest will be decided by debates on television, newspaper endorsements or stump speeches, and accurately predicted by opinion polls. (Actually, make that the 1960s.)
Yet the new role of social media is staring us in the face (literally). The number of US Facebook users was 240 million in 2019, more than 72% of the population. Adults spend an average of 75 minutes of each day on social media. Half that time is on Facebook. Google accounts for 88% of the US search-engine market, and 95% of all mobile searches. Between them, Google and Facebook captured a combined 60% of US digital-ad spending in 2018.
The top US tech companies are now among the biggest businesses on earth by market capitalization. But their size is not the important thing about them. Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee released the findings of its 16-month long investigation into Big Tech. The conclusion? “Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways.”
Cue years of antitrust actions that will enrich a great many lawyers and have minimal consequences for competition, like the ultimately failed attempt 20 years ago to prevent Microsoft from dominating software.
An antitrust action against Amazon is doomed. Consumers love the company. It has measurably reduced the prices of innumerable products as well as rendering shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores an obsolescent activity. Good luck, too, with breaking up Google. Even the much less trusted Facebook (according to polls) will be hard to dismantle, without a complete transformation of the way the courts apply competition law. It’s free, for heaven’s sake. And there are network effects on the internet that can’t be wished away by judges.
Is it stupidity or venality that has convinced America’s legislators that antitrust is the answer to the problem of Big Tech? A bit of both, I suspect. Either way, it’s the wrong answer.
The core problem is not a lack of competition in Silicon Valley. It is that the network platforms are now the public sphere. Every other part of what we call the media — newspapers, magazines, even cable TV — is now subordinated to them. In 2019, the average American spent 6 hours and 35 minutes a day using digital media, more than television, radio, and print put together.
Not only do the big tech companies dominate ad revenue, they drive the news cycle. In 2017, two-thirds of American adults said they got news from social media sites. A Pew study showed that, at the end of 2019, 18% of them relied primarily on social media for political news. Among those aged 30 to 49, the share was 40%; among those aged 18 to 29, it was 48%. The pathologies that flow from this new reality are numerous. Antitrust actions address none of them.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, told the New York Times in 2017. “I was wrong about that.” Indeed, he was.
Subject to the most minimal regulation in their country of origin — far less than the TV networks in their heyday — the network platforms tend, because of their central imperative to sell the attention of their users to advertisers, to pollute national discourse with a torrent of fake news and extreme views. The effects on the democratic process, not only in the U.S. but all over the world, have been deeply destabilizing.
Moreover, the vulnerability of the network platforms to outside manipulation has posed and continues to pose a serious threat to national security. Yet half-hearted and ill-considered attempts by the companies to regulate themselves better have led to legitimate complaints that they are restricting free speech.
How did we arrive at this state of affairs — when such important components of the public sphere could operate solely with regard to their own profitability as attention merchants? The answer lies in the history of American internet regulation — to be precise, in section 230 of the 1934 Communications Act, as amended by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which was enacted after a New York court held the online service provider Prodigy liable for a user’s defamatory posts.
Previously, a company that managed content was classified as a publisher, and subject to civil liability — creating a perverse incentive not to manage content at all. Thus, Section 230c, “Protection for ‘Good Samaritan’ blocking and screening of offensive material,” was written to encourage nascent firms to protect users and prevent illegal activity without incurring massive content-management costs. It states:
1. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
2. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.
In essence, Section 230 gave and still gives websites immunity from liability for what their users post (under-filtering), but it also protects them when they choose to remove content (over-filtering). The idea was to split the difference between publisher’s liability, which would have stunted the growth of the fledgling internet, and complete lack of curation, which would have led to a torrent of filth. The surely unintended result is that some of the biggest companies in the world today are utilities when they are acting as publishers, but publishers when acting as utilities, in a way rather reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”
Here’s how Catch-22 works. If one of the platforms hosts content that is mendacious, defamatory or in some other way harmful, and you sue, the Big Tech lawyers will cite Section 230: Hey, we’re just a tech company, it’s not our malicious content. But if you write something that falls afoul of their content-moderation rules and duly vanishes from the internet, they’ll cite Section 230 again: Hey, we’re a private company, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to us.
Remember the “good censor”? Another influential way of describing the network platforms is as the “New Governors.” That creeps me out the way Zuckerberg’s admiration of Augustus Caesar creeps me out.
For years, of course, the big technology companies have filtered out child pornography and (less successfully) terrorist propaganda. But there has been mission creep. In 2015, Twitter added a new line to its rules that barred promoting “violence against others … on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, or disability.” Repeatedly throughout the Trump presidency — for example, after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — there have been further modifications to the platforms’ terms of service and “community standards,” as well as to their non-public content moderation policies.
There is no need to detail all the occasions in recent years when mostly right-leaning content was censored, buried far down the search results, or “demonetized.” The key point is that, in the absence of a coherent reform of the way the network platforms are themselves governed, there has been a dysfunctional tug-of-war between the platforms’ spasmodic and not wholly sincere efforts to “fix” themselves and the demands of outside actors (ranging from the German government to groups of left-wing activists) for more censorship of whatever they deem to be “hate speech.”
At the same time, the founding generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, most of whom had libertarian inclinations, have repeatedly yielded to internal pressure from their younger employees, schooled in the modern campus culture of “no-platforming” any individuals whose ideas they consider “unsafe.” In the words of Brian Amerige, whose career at Facebook ended not long after he created a “FB’ers for Political Diversity” group, the company’s employees “are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left‑leaning ideology.”
The net result seems to be the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, conspiracy theories such as Plandemic flourish on Facebook and elsewhere. On the other, the network platforms arbitrarily intervene when a legitimate article triggers the hate-speech-spotting algorithms and the content-moderating grunts. (As one of them described the process, “I was like, ‘I can just block this entire domain, and they won’t be able to serve ads on it?’ And the answer was, ‘Yes.’ I was like, ‘But … I’m in my mid-twenties.’”)
At a lecture at Georgetown University in October 2019, Zuckerberg pledged “to continue to stand for free expression” and against an “ever-expanding definition of what speech is harmful.” But even Facebook has had to ramp up the censorship this year. The bottom line is that the good censors are not very good and the new governors can’t even govern themselves.
Two years ago, I wrote a lengthy paper on all this with a well-worn title, “What Is to Be Done?” Since then, almost nothing has been done, beyond some legislative tinkering at the margins. The public has been directed down a series of blind alleys: not only antitrust, but also net neutrality and an inchoate notion of tighter regulation. In reality, as I argued then, only two reforms will fix this godawful mess.
First, we need to repeal or significantly amend Section 230, making the network platforms legally liable for the content they host, and leaving the rest to the courts. Second, we need to impose the equivalent of First Amendment obligations on the network platforms, recognizing that they are too dominant a part of the public sphere to be able to regulate access to it on the basis of their own privately determined and almost certainly skewed “community standards.”
To such proposals, Big Tech lawyers respond by lamenting that they would massively increase their clients’ legal liabilities. Yes. That is the whole idea. The platforms will finally discover that there are risks to being a publisher and responsibilities that come with near-universal usage.
In recent few years, these ideas have won growing support — and not only among Republican legislators such as Senator Josh Hawley. In the words of Judge Alex Kozinski in Fair Housing Council v. Roommate.com (2008), “the Internet has outgrown its swaddling clothes and no longer needs to be so gently coddled.” He was referring to Section 230, which gives the tech giants a now-indefensible advantage over traditional publishers, while at the same time empowering them to act as censors.
While Section 230 protects internet companies from liability over removing any content that they believed to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable,” successive court rulings have clearly established that the last two words weren’t intended to permit discrimination against particular political viewpoints.
Meanwhile, in Packingham v. North Carolina (2017), the Supreme Court overturned a state law that banned sex offenders from using social media. In the opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy likened internet platforms to “the modern public square,” arguing that it was therefore unconstitutional to prevent even sex offenders from accessing, and expressing opinions, on social network platforms. In other words, despite being private companies, the big tech companies have a public function.
If the network platforms are the modern public square, then it cannot be their responsibility to remove “hateful content” (as 19 prominent civil rights groups demanded of Facebook in October 2017) because hateful content — unless it explicitly instigates violence against a specific person — is protected by the First Amendment.
Unfortunately, this sea change has come too late for root-and-branch reform to be enacted under the Trump administration. And, contemplating the close links between Silicon Valley and Senator Kamala Harris, I see little prospect of progress — other than down the antitrust cul-de-sac — if she is elected vice president next month. Quite apart from the bountiful campaign contributions Harris and the rest of Democratic Party elite receive from Big Tech, they have no problem at all with Facebook, Twitter and company seeking to kill stories like Huntergate.
In 1931, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin accused the principal newspaper barons of the day, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, of “aiming at … power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” (The phrase was his cousin Rudyard Kipling’s.) As I contemplate the under-covered and overmighty role that Big Tech continues to play in the American political process, I don’t see good censors. I see big, bad harlots.

The misinformation surrounding Iran’s defense budget
Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami/Arab News/October 19/2020
This article looks at the numbers in Iran’s defense budget before and after the signing of the 2015 nuclear deal with the P5+1 group, under which $110 billion-worth of assets were released. We also attempt to figure out the rationale behind Iran continuously announcing its military activities in recent years, including the unveiling of diverse categories of weapons, launching massive military projects, and financing regional proxies. All of this has happened while Iran claims that its defense budget does not exceed $20 billion.
The article also tries to track some of Iran’s overseas arms deals and military activities, as well as those covert military activities not included in the official budget. To understand the divergence between Iran’s official claims and reality, we investigate the possibility of undisclosed financial sources boosting Iran’s defense budget. This will be done to show how misleading the government’s figures are.
Data from Iran’s military budgets between 2010 and 2020 shows that defense spending declined when Iran experienced periods of extensive sanctions and when the rial’s value declined against foreign currencies, such as in the period from 2013 to 2014. During this period, the budget declined from $14.2 billion in 2012 to $11.2 billion in 2013. These figures returned to normal during the period from 2016 to 2017, before going down again between 2018 and 2020, after the US pulled out of the nuclear deal and reimposed unilateral sanctions on Tehran.
In 2016, while enjoying the benefits of the nuclear deal, Iran’s expenditure on weapons rose significantly, from $13 million in 2015 to $413 million. This indicates that Tehran took advantage of the period following the signing of the nuclear deal and the resulting easing of sanctions. Prior to this, in 2007, Iran also signed an $800 million agreement to buy the Russian S-300 air defense system, although it eventually received an upgraded version in 2016 following protracted negotiations and delays. Although Iran’s regime paid extra to receive this upgraded version, the additional costs did not appear in the value of total external purchases. This strongly indicates that payment for this transaction was done outside the scope of the defense budget and involved covert mechanisms.
It is worth noting that Iran also sells some of its own military products, with the World Data Atlas indicating that its revenue from the sales of arms between 2010 and 2017 amounted to nearly $270 million. Iran also announced that it would resume its sales of arms following the expiration of a UN embargo on Sunday.There are also the costs of other Iranian military activities that are not included in the official defense budget, such as the war in Syria, its nuclear program, and its support for the Quds Force, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and numerous other militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, as well as support for various missiles programs whose total costs — according to the scarce available information — surpass $19 billion. One of the reasons for the Iranian regime’s blurry budget announcements is its desire to cover up its illegal activities, which could put it at risk of an all-out international embargo and classification as a state sponsor of terrorism. Tehran’s total military expenditure is actually more than twice the defense budget. Therefore, it is believed that the official published figures for Iran’s defense budget are wholly false and there is either a deliberate attempt to mislead by announcing such modest defense budget figures or there are other sources of funding not included in the declared defense allocations.
We are inclined to believe that the latter is closer to the truth for several reasons, foremost among which is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) massive investment empire, whose activities are not subject to review within the official budget. Through these investment projects, the IRGC controls nearly 50 percent of the commercial and industrial businesses and banks inside Iran.
The IRGC runs between 500 and 800 companies and institutions in vital investment fields, which are fundamental to Iran’s economic arteries. The Iranian government’s budget does not include the revenue generated from these businesses, while they are also exempt from taxes, customs duties and other fees. They are also given support and priority when launching mega-projects, which helps these businesses exercise a monopoly over the Iranian market. These businesses also have multiple and diverse investments in several other countries worldwide, operating under the names of individuals with covert links to the IRGC. The revenue generated from these projects help Iran adapt to the US’ economic sanctions and maintain its expenditure on military activities and important deals.
Based on the foregoing, we can conclude four things.
First is that, even though there is no official data about the money spent on Iranian defense projects, estimates indicate that the regime spends nearly $40 billion per year on them. This estimate is based on its expenditure on annual projects, which is close to $19 billion, although it may even exceed this figure. This is in addition to the allocated annual budget, which amounts to $20 billion. Therefore, upon the lifting of sanctions, Iran is expected to increase its military spending in line with its needs, expansionist outlook, and its tireless pursuit to become militarily self-sufficient. The revenues from the IRGC’s massive investments — and the support it receives from the National Development Fund during crises — have helped it achieve the goals mentioned.
Second, there is a clear desire from some Western countries to downplay the Iranian defense budget by relying on the declared figures only. This is due to the activities of the Iran lobby in the West, which uses the misleading official figures to spread propaganda and to show the country as a victim. In addition, this lobby uses misleading figures to criticize Iran’s neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia, for their rising defense budgets and show it as an innocent victim in line with the official published arms expenditure data. This lobby claims that an embargo should not be imposed on Iran due to an imbalance of military power; but this argument fails to acknowledge that Iran’s regime manufactures and develops many of its weapons at home, breaching many intellectual property rights. This is in addition to bartering oil for weapons.
For these reasons, even a shallow reading of Iran’s defense budget indicates that it is misleading. An annual budget of no more than $20 billion over the past 10 years, including periods of economic embargo, could never have accomplished all of Iran’s military projects without the regime relying on other sources to meet their costs.
Third, after the lifting of the embargo on arms purchases imposed on Iran, the regime will, without doubt, spend more money on acquiring weapons. Already, some of Iran’s allies, such as Russia and China, are waiting for it to be allowed to import weapons in agreement with the provisions of the nuclear deal. In case of the sanctions not being reintroduced, Iran will definitely seek to implement more weapon programs, such as boosting its missile capabilities, accelerating work on its nuclear program, and modernizing its air force, which has not been done since the beginning of the revolution, and naval force, allowing it to operate in international waters.
Fourth is that the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s Joint Commission show that Iran’s advanced capabilities in the nuclear field are an indication of its capabilities and show the possibility of it achieving technical nuclear success in case the sanctions are lifted. Specialized reports have indicated that Iran is four to five months away from obtaining the capability to produce a nuclear weapon and that it has enriched uranium to beyond 50 percent in recent months.
An annual budget of no more than $20 billion over the past 10 years could never have accomplished all of Tehran’s military projects.
In conclusion, Iran has managed to pursue its military projects despite the embargo imposed on it by the international community owing to its nuclear ambitions. Although Iran succeeded in clinching a deal with the P5+1 countries, mitigating the embargo’s impact on its economy and military projects, the US decided not to continue as a party to the nuclear agreement and reimposed sanctions on it. These sanctions rattled Iran. As a result, it attempted to pressure the international community by presenting itself as an influential regional power despite the harsh circumstances. This is in addition to its attempts to create crises to again exert pressure to find a way to ease sanctions. With the ban now lifted and the ongoing political bickering between the major world powers — especially the US, Russia and China — it is expected that hostile Iranian acts, threats to international navigation, and support for different militias will be intensified. Iran will also continue to pursue a policy of misinformation about its defense budget and refrain from announcing the real figures.
*Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami is Head of the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah). Twitter: @mohalsulami

How France can boost its fight against extremism
Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib/Arab News/October 19/2020
The gruesome murder of teacher Samuel Paty in Paris on Friday has contributed to the demonization of the Muslim community in France. Muslims inside and outside France have denounced the act. Tareq Oubrou, the imam of a Bordeaux mosque, told France Inter radio: “Every day that passes without incident we give thanks.” He added: “We are between hammer and anvil. It attacks the Republic, society, peace and the very essence of religion, which is about togetherness.”
Despite the condemnations by Muslim leaders and public figures, who realize how harmful such acts of terrorism are to the community at large, it is important to analyze what drives this behavior, which basically contributes to the stigmatizing and marginalization of Muslims.
Attacks like this one and the shootings at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 are the worst enemies of Muslim communities in the West. Right-wing politicians use them to stigmatize all Muslims, which puts them on the defensive, increases resentment at their presence and adds to their feelings of estrangement from society at large. The French system is particularly fertile ground for this dynamic because of the constitutional principle of “laicite” (secularism). This is why the hijab is banned in public schools.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that communities do not have rights. The French constitution gives the right to blaspheme, but at the same time it protects the right of individuals to practice their faith. In short, you can insult Islam but you cannot insult Muslims. In 2008, the famous French actress Brigitte Bardot was fined €15,000 ($17,650) for accusing the Muslim community of destroying the country and “imposing its acts.”
When I see the Muslim community in France struggling to get accepted in a hard-core secular society, I cannot help but think of the essay “Anti-Semite and Jew,” written by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and published in the late 1940s. In it, Sartre described the ordeals of the Jewish community in France. His conclusion was that Jews should not shy away from the system; rather they should be a part of it. Today, Jews are well integrated into French society without losing their identity.
Muslims are now on the same journey and experiencing the same struggles as they seek to reach a state of integration without assimilation. Muslims should have a strategy — they need to follow the advice of Sartre and use the system to claim their rights and garner acceptance. They need to contribute to public life and use the legal system to defend their right to practice their religion, as well as to compel others to respect them.
In the wake of Friday’s attack, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo retweeted a picture that showed a message from Lea, a six-year-old, which says that if you don’t like a drawing someone drew, you don’t kill him, you just draw a nicer one. This message, as simple as it sounds, carries a lot of wisdom. In fact, it is similar to the complex reflections of Sartre. Muslims need to draw a nice picture of Islam: A picture in a French frame.
The Muslim community needs a strategy to break the vicious cycle of discrimination creating resentment and isolation, which in turn creates a fertile ground for extremist ideology. The key to breaking this cycle is the feeling of belonging. Muslims in France should feel that they belong to the system because they are French and because they are accepted by the system as Muslim.
Muslims need to draw a nice picture of Islam: A picture in a French frame.
First and foremost, Muslim community leaders should work with the authorities to boost Muslim participation in public life. A 2018 study published in Foreign Affairs magazine provided evidence that feelings of national pride and belonging are fueled by political representation. The feeling of not being represented — or, worse, not being accepted — makes Muslim immigrants feel like they do not belong to the larger community. As research on group behavior suggests, such sentiments leave people reluctant to make any effort to be integrated. They will also tend to look for alternative sources of belonging, resulting in further group polarization. Resorting to extremism and rejecting their new society is one way to affirm an identity, and it is also an expression of revenge on an environment that is rejecting them.
Muslim participation in public life should go hand in hand with fighting Islamophobia. So there should be a collective effort by the Muslim community to fight Islamophobia using France’s legal framework, which denounces racism and discrimination. It should also look for allies in the wider French society and raise awareness that Islamophobia causes polarization, leading to extremism. Such an endeavor should not be portrayed as an exclusively Muslim project but as a French one that will ensure Muslims can enjoy their rights as French citizens, meaning they can enjoy liberty, equality and fraternity.
**Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib is a specialist in US-Arab relations with a focus on lobbying. She is the co-founder of the Research Center for Cooperation and Peace Building (RCCP), a Lebanese NGO focused on Track II. She is also an affiliated scholar with the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.