English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For April 25/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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Bible Quotations For today

The Third Time That Jesus Appeared To The Disciples After His Resurrection
John/21/01-14/ Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Galilee. It happened this way: 2 Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus, Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. “I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. He called out to them, “Friends, haven’t you any fish?”“No,” they answered. He said, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish. Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, “It is the Lord,” he wrapped his outer garment around him (for he had taken it off) and jumped into the water. 8 The other disciples followed in the boat, towing the net full of fish, for they were not far from shore, about a hundred yards. When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.” So Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time Jesus appeared to his disciples after he was raised from the dead.

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on April 24-25/2021

Health Ministry: 1511 new Corona cases, 28 deaths
US close to declaring Lebanon as a ‘paralyzed’ and ‘failed state’: Sources
President Aoun calls for a meeting at Baabda Palace on Monday noon to discuss circumstances of Saudi decision to prevent entry of Lebanese fruits & vegetables, address its repercussions
Kuwait intends to halt import of Lebanese fruits, vegetables following Saudi ban
Lebanon ready to cooperate after Saudi Arabia stops fresh food imports
Lebanon farmers union calls on Saudi to repeal produce ban
Bukhari: SA Facing Local and Criminal Networks
Wehbe Says 'Smuggling Harms Country' after SA Halts Lebanese Imports over Drugs
Rahi meets ambassadors of Canada, Russia and Denmark
Bassil Lashes at Hariri, Mustaqbal Snaps Back
Bassil: Lebanon is going through the most dangerous economic crisis in its history
Future Movement to Bassil: Your betting on the PM-designate’s withdrawal from the government formation equation is the devil's betting on entering Heaven!
Saeed hosts iftar ceremony in honor of Machnouk, Hamadeh, Fattat, with efforts pinned on rendering Bkirki’s initiative international
Geagea commenting on Saudi decision: No salvation except by getting rid of current ruling group
Beirut gallery opens with a colourful hope-filled exhibition
Aram I in memory of Armenian Genocide: To reinforce our commitment to the legacy of our martyrs to restore the usurped rights of our people
Ohanian representing President Aoun in Armenia: Genocide martyrs remain in our conscience, alive in our present & future lives

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on April 24-25/2021

Biden says 1915 massacres of Armenians constitute genocide
Armenians Commemorate WWI-era Massacres the U.S. is Set to Designate as Genocide
Turkey summons US ambassador over Biden’s 1915 Armenian genocide recognition
Iran's Zarif to Visit Qatar, Iraq Sunday
Turkey launches new raid against Kurdish bases in northern Iraq
Gaza Rockets Follow Jerusalem Clashes in Second Night of Violence
Jerusalem Ramadan violence triggers Gaza-Israel fire exchange
U.S. Positions Carrier, Bombers to Back Afghanistan Pullout
Egypt’s El-Sisi meets with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince in Cairo
Qatar invests in the new Turkish ‘Akıncı Tiha’ drone
New US envoy for Horn of Africa to lead conflict resolution in region
Haftar launches early campaign for Libya’s presidential elections
With Sahel fight at stake, Macron pledges role in Chad
U.S. Approves Restart of J&J Covid Vaccinations
 

Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources publishedon April 24-25/2021

Biden’s recognition of Armenian Genocide shows Turkey’s fading influence/Kristina Jovannovski/The Media Line/April 24/2021
The Armenian Genocide Forges On/Raymond Ibrahim/Gatestone Institute/April 24/2021
How Iran made itself a haven for Israeli spies/Baria Alamuddin/Arab News/April 24/2021
Another nail in the coffin of a Palestinian state/Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/April 24/2021
Climate change challenges Arab world to cooperate/Hafed Al-Ghwell/Arab News/April 24/2021

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on April 23-24/2021

Health Ministry: 1511 new Corona cases, 28 deaths
NNA/24 April ,2021
The Ministry of Public Health announced, on Saturday, the registration of 1,511 new Corona infections, thus raising the cumulative number of confirmed cases to-date to 519,615. It also indicated that 28 deaths were recorded during the past 24 hours.

US close to declaring Lebanon as a ‘paralyzed’ and ‘failed state’: Sources
Pierre Ghanem and Rawad Taha, Al Arabiya English/24 April ,2021
The United States is close to declaring Lebanon as a completely paralyzed failed state, according to sources who spoke to Al Hadath. “The Biden administration will deal with a government formed by the Lebanese, on a condition that it does not include Hezbollah,” sources who spoke to Al Arabiya’s sister channel Al Hadath have said. Sources added that the Biden administration is currently “reviewing the Lebanese file with frustration.” Lebanon is currently experiencing an unprecedented economic crisis predominantly caused by decades of corruption and mismanagement due to Lebanon’s sectarian system and the presence of armed non-state actor Hezbollah. The crisis was exacerbated by a massive explosion at the Port of Beirut last August, which left 300,000 displaced, over 2,000 injured, and at least 200 dead. Under Secretary for Political Affairs David Hale met last week with Lebanese officials to “get the ball moving again” on the maritime border negotiations that the US has long tried to mediate, a senior Lebanese source told Al Arabiya English. Hale, the number three official at the State Department, will soon be replaced by Victoria Nuland, and his trip to Lebanon was a chance to bid farewell to officials he has worked with over the years.

President Aoun calls for a meeting at Baabda Palace on Monday noon to discuss circumstances of Saudi decision to prevent entry of Lebanese fruits & vegetables, address its repercussions
NNA/24 April ,2021
In parallel of his follow-up of developments which arose due to the decision of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to prevent the entry of Lebanese fruits and vegetables into or through its lands, starting tomorrow morning, Sunday, President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, called for a meeting, next Monday noon, at Baabda Palace. The meeting will be devoted to tackle the circumstances accompanying the Saudi decision, and the measures which must be adopted to address its repercussions. Attendees: Prime Minister, Dr. Hassan Diab, National Defense Minister, Agriculture Minister, Interior Minister, Foreign Affairs Minister, Finance Minister, Economy and Trade Minister, in addition to heads of security apparatuses and customs, and a number of stakeholders in the agricultural sector, including farmers and exporters. ---- [Presidency Information Office]
 

Kuwait intends to halt import of Lebanese fruits, vegetables following Saudi ban
Rawad Taha, Al Arabiya English/Published: 24 April ,2021
Kuwait intends to prevent the import of Lebanese fruits and vegetables by land, sea, and air, Kuwaiti newspaper al-Rai reported citing sources, noting that a meeting was held on Sunday between the Ministry of Trade and major importers. Al-Rai added that according to intersecting sources in government agencies, there are verbal instructions issued in this regard until now. The proposed Kuwaiti ban follows a similar decision taken by Saudi Arabia on Friday. In a statement released by Kuwait News Agency KUNA, Kuwait’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed that Kuwait’s fully supports the decision Saudi Arabia to ban the entry of vegetables and fruits from Lebanon due to their exploitation by some for drug smuggling. The statement added that Kuwait called on the Lebanese authorities to ensure that its exports are free of any prohibited prohibitions. Saudi Arabia will ban the import of Lebanese fruits and vegetables as of 9 a.m. on April 25 after a reported increase in drug smuggling from Beirut, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported on Friday. The move comes after Saudi Customs foiled an attempt to smuggle over 5 million pills of Captagon stuffed inside fruit imported from Lebanon, the SPA reported. Captagon is used by fighters at war because of the effects it can have to fight tiredness. It is an amphetamine that has widely been made and exported illegally from Lebanon. The ban will remain in effect until Lebanese authorities provide sufficient and reliable guarantees that they will take the necessary steps to halt systemic drug smuggling operations.

Lebanon ready to cooperate after Saudi Arabia stops fresh food imports

The Arab Weekly/April 24/2021
BEIRUT – Lebanon is ready to cooperate with all states to fight drug smuggling after Saudi Arabia banned the import and transit of Lebanese fruit and vegetables due to the illicit trade, the Lebanese caretaker interior minister said on Friday. Lebanese security “has been exerting tremendous efforts combating drug smuggling,” Mohamed Fahmy said, adding that smugglers might sometimes succeed despite those “meticulous” efforts. He also called for “more cooperation” between the security services in the two countries. Lebanese media also quoted the head of the country’s fruit and vegetable exporters, Naeem Khalil, as denying it was pomegranate season in Lebanon. Khalil said the seized cargo could not have been Lebanese but had transited via Lebanon from Syria. Lebanon’s foreign ministry said it had been informed by Saudi Arabia of its decision to halt imports of fruit and vegetables, the official National News Agency reported. Drug smuggling “harms Lebanon’s economy, farmers and reputation,” the ministry said. Saudi Arabia announced Friday the suspension of fruit and vegetable imports from Lebanon, saying shipments were being used for drug smuggling and accusing Beirut of inaction. The decision is a blow to Lebanon, which is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.The local currency has dived by more than 85 percent on the black market, inflation is rampant and more than half the country now lives in poverty. Authorities “have noticed increased drug smuggling activity targeting the kingdom from Lebanon… especially in vegetables and fruit consignments”, the Saudi interior ministry said. Riyadh will ban the entry or transit of those products through the kingdom from Sunday, it said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency. The restrictions will remain in place until Lebanon provides “sufficient and reliable guarantees” to put an end to what it called “systematic smuggling operations targeting the kingdom”. The move comes after Saudi authorities have made repeated appeals to their Lebanese counterparts on the matter, SPA said. The agency also reported Friday that customs officials seized 5.3 million pills of captagon hidden in a consignment of “pomegranate” fruit imported from Lebanon at the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Captagon is an amphetamine manufactured in Lebanon and probably also in Syria and Iraq, mainly for consumption in Saudi Arabia, according to the French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT). Saudi Arabia has taken a step back from its former ally, angered by the influence of Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, which is backed by Riyadh’s rival Tehran.

Lebanon farmers union calls on Saudi to repeal produce ban
BEIRUT (AP)/April 24/2021
Lebanon’s farmers union described as “arbitrary and unjust” the decision by Saudi Arabia to ban Lebanese produce from going through the kingdom over drug smuggling allegations, calling on Saturday for it be repealed.
The ban, ordered by the kingdom’s Interior Ministry and due to take effect Sunday, is a major blow to the Lebanese economy, already reeling from an unprecedented economic crisis.
It came after Saudi Arabia announced Friday it has seized over 5 million pills of an amphetamine drug known as Captagon, hidden in a shipment of pomegranate coming from Lebanon. The official Saudi Press Agency said four Saudis and one displaced it did not identify were arrested.
On Saturday, Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun called for a meeting next week with Cabinet members, security officials, farmers and exporters to discuss the Saudi decision and its implications. BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanon’s farmers union described as “arbitrary and unjust” the decision by Saudi Arabia to ban Lebanese produce from going through the kingdom over drug smuggling allegations, calling on Saturday for it be repealed. The ban, ordered by the kingdom’s Interior Ministry and due to take effect Sunday, is a major blow to the Lebanese economy, already reeling from an unprecedented economic crisis. It came after Saudi Arabia announced Friday it has seized over 5 million pills of an amphetamine drug known as Captagon, hidden in a shipment of pomegranate coming from Lebanon. The official Saudi Press Agency said four Saudis and one displaced it did not identify were arrested.
On Saturday, Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun called for a meeting next week with Cabinet members, security officials, farmers and exporters to discuss the Saudi decision and its implications. Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry on Friday said smuggling of drugs is harmful to the country’s reputation and economy. It called on Lebanese customs duty authorities to increase checks and inspections of shipments leaving the small Mediterranean country. But in a statement Sunday, Lebanon’s Farmers Union called on the kingdom to repeal its decision. It said the mistake of one person or a criminal gang should not be the reason to punish the entire Lebanese people. Agricultural exports are a major foreign currency earner for Lebanon. Arab countries are Lebanon’s main export markets for agricultural products, accounting for nearly 80% of over $190 million of total exports in 2019, where Saudi Arabia had more than 20% of the share, followed by Qatar.
Saudi Arabia’s decision showed “political maliciousness,” and contradicts the kingdom’s claims that it protects Lebanon’s interests, the statement added. The farmers union accused Saudi Arabia of participating in a policy to besiege Lebanon and change its alliance.
While Saudi Arabia has been a major Lebanon supporter, the kingdom has also been locked in a regional struggle with Iran, the main ally of the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Tension between the two regional powerhouses have often spilled into a deadlock in decision-making in Lebanese politics. Saudi Arabia is among Gulf countries that imposed sanctions on Hezbollah. Meanwhile, other officials denied the smuggling was done by Lebanese. The head of the farmers’ union in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa valley said the pomegranate shipment was coming from Syria, passing transit through Lebanese port. “It is not our fault. We have absolutely no relation to this,” Ibrahim Tarshishi told The Associated Press late Friday. “It is a shame we have to pay the price and prevent us from importing our products to the kingdom.” Tarshishi said Lebanon has not been exporting pomegranate for years and is now an importer. There was no immediate comment from Syria. Lebanon is experiencing the worst economic and financial crisis of its modern history. The local currency has lost 85% of its value to the dollar in recent months and businesses have shut down while banks imposed informal controls on transfers and withdrawals.

Bukhari: SA Facing Local and Criminal Networks
Naharnet/April 24/2021
Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Walid al-Bukhari said on Saturday that the Kingdom is facing local and international challenges from criminal networks. “Drug smuggling reveals the extent of challenges Saudi Arabia faces from local and international criminal networks,” Bukhari said in the aftermath of a reported drug smuggling operation to SA from Lebanon. His remarks came to LBCI television station. Saudi Arabia announced Friday the suspension of fruit and vegetable imports from Lebanon, saying shipments were being used for drug smuggling and accusing Beirut of inaction. The SPA news agency reported Friday that customs officials seized 5.3 million pills of captagon hidden in a consignment of "pomegranate" fruit imported from Lebanon at the Red Sea port of Jeddah. The decision is a blow to Lebanon, which is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war. Saudi Arabia has taken a step back from its former ally, angered by the influence of Hizbullah, which is backed by Riyadh's rival Tehran.

Wehbe Says 'Smuggling Harms Country' after SA Halts Lebanese Imports over Drugs
Agence France Presse/April 24/2021
Following Saudi Arabia’s decision to stop fresh produce imports from Lebanon over drugs smuggling, Lebanon said drug smuggling harms Lebanon’s reputation and that the file must be handled by the judicial bodies. Drug smuggling "harms Lebanon's economy, farmers and reputation", caretaker Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbe stressed. Wehbe said the foreign ministry had been informed by Saudi Arabia of its decision to halt imports of fruit and vegetables. The minister emphasized that Lebanon’s judicial and customs authorities are required to stop all forms of smuggling, noting that he informed the presidency, the interior and defense ministries, and the chief of the general security directorate. Saudi Arabia announced Friday the suspension of fruit and vegetable imports from Lebanon, saying shipments were being used for drug smuggling and accusing Beirut of inaction. The SPA news agency reported Friday that customs officials seized 5.3 million pills of captagon hidden in a consignment of "pomegranate" fruit imported from Lebanon at the Red Sea port of Jeddah. The decision is a blow to Lebanon, which is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war. Saudi Arabia has taken a step back from its former ally, angered by the influence of Hizbullah, which is backed by Riyadh's rival Tehran.

Rahi meets ambassadors of Canada, Russia and Denmark
NNA/April 24/2021
Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rahi, on Friday received in Bkirki the Canadian Ambassador to Lebanon, Chantal Chastenay, with whom he discussed the current situation on the local and regional arena. Patriarch Rahi later met with the Russian Ambassador to Lebanon, Alexandre Rodakov, who said on emerging that the visit comes within the framework of coordination with the patriarch, in light of the circumstances that Lebanon is going through which require the formation of a government as soon as possible. The Patriarch also met with Denmark’s Ambassador to Lebanon, Merete Juhl, on her first visit to Bkirki since assuming her diplomatic mission in the country. Ambassador Juhl said the visit was important with talks touching on the major challenges facing Lebanon and the means through which Denmark can assist Lebanon. She said that Denmark is committed to helping Lebanon, through twinning projects between the Embassy and the European Union.

Bassil Lashes at Hariri, Mustaqbal Snaps Back
Naharnet/April 24/2021
Head of the Free Patriotic Movement MP Jebran Bassil lashed out at Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri without naming him, which prompted a quick reply from Hariri’s al-Mustaqbal Movement. Bassil said the PM-designate is seeking veto powers in the new government, and described his group saying “those are a group of liars.”He said the resignation of the Parliament is the only way to push Hariri away from the designation to form a government. “PM-designate Saad Hariri does not want to apologize, and the President will definitely not resign. If the Parliament does not withdraw (Hariri’s) designation, the only solution remaining is the resignation of the Parliament, meaning early parliamentary elections,” the FPM chief said. He criticized Hariri accusing him of “running away” from responsibilities. “He should assume responsibilities instead of running away like he did back in October 17,” said Bassil in reference to Hariri's resignation in 2019 after nationwide protests. Al-Mustaqbal Movement of Hariri quickly snapped back saying Bassil succeeded at “sabotaging” the term of his father-in-law President Michel Aoun. “Each time this man reaches out to speak to the Lebanese, he puts a new nail in the coffin of the (presidential) term, and provides evidence of the existence of an intractable situation in political life that bears the responsibility for disrupting the country and the work of the constitutional institutions,” the Mustaqbal statement said. It added that Bassil is willing to sacrifice everything even “the (presidential) term, the president and his reputation,” and the country’s political and security stability.

Bassil: Lebanon is going through the most dangerous economic crisis in its history
NNA/April 24/2021
Head of the Free Patriotic Movement, MP Gebran Bassil, held Saturday before noon a press conference, in which he tackled the latest developments in Lebanon. MP Bassil, who appeared live from his residence in Laqlouq, considered that Lebanon is going through the most dangerous economic crisis in its history, and Lebanon cannot be established in light of the corruption that exists today. "Without reforms, there will be no money or rise, and reforms have become of equal importance as restoring people's money, or at least partially compensating them," he said. "There will be no salvation if the reform judge does not win over the corrupt judge, and what is happening today is an attempt to prevent a judge from reaching the truth because she decided to disclose the amount of money transferred abroad and the identity of its owners," Bassil added. "Judge Ghada Aoun is not corrupt and does not fabricate files; no one can stop her or blame her and she does not follow anyone in her work, that's why they want to get rid of her," MP Bassil went on. He also noted that FPM does not support a judge, but a case, saying: "We support the case of recovering the funds of the Lebanese that were smuggled abroad in an immoral and discretionary manner."
Bassil accused the political system and some media outlets in Lebanon of trying to prevent Judge Ghada Aoun from completing her interrogations. "What we know is that the state with most of its agencies, the judiciary with most of its elements, and the media with most of its means, are trying to prevent Judge Ghada Aoun from completing her investigations," he stressed. "We understand what they are doing because we have the same experience. Reform is forbidden, fighting corruption is forbidden, and stopping the gains of the corrupt system is forbidden. Otherwise, you will be accused of corruption and be assassinated 'morally,' and this is what is happening with Judge Aoun," he went on. The FPM leader asked everyone who criticized Judge Ghada Aoun's moves: "How can you see Ghada Aoun as a rebel against the judiciary and you don't see the Central Bank rebelling against the forensic audit?"
He stressed that "the thief is afraid of examining and scrutinizing the files, while the innocent is happy with that," emphasizing that the Free Patriotic Movement seems comfortable when appearing before the court. "Has the Lebanese judiciary carried out all its duties and all the required measures in the case filed by the Swiss judiciary against the governor of the Central Bank? This is a question we want an answer to," Bassil added. "I, Gebran Bassil and the former ministers of the FPM, challenge them to carry out a forensic audit in the Ministry of Energy since the 90s!," he challenged his opponents. Bassil called on Europe, if it is serious about continuing reform in Lebanon, to put pressure on the corrupt on the basis of evidence and in accordance with international agreements and laws on combating corruption, money laundering and smuggling, and not based on political calculations.
Government Formation
Commenting on the faltering formation of the government, Bassil accused some political counterparts of demanding half plus one minister, in order to dominate the government's decisions. The former Minister lambasted PM-designate Saad Hariri for failing to reach a consensus with the President of the Republic to form the government. If he does not want to recuse and the President will not resign of course, and if the Parliament does not want to withdraw his designation, then there is only one case to think about, which is the resignation of the Parliament, which means early elections, but will early elections change the equation?," he underscored.
Demarcation file
Referring to the demarcation negotiations, Bassil said that "Michel Aoun is the best person entrusted with this strategic interest of Lebanon, and everyone who talks about how he deals with matters needs a hundred years to reach the level of rights preservation and his distant strategic vision!" MP Bassil also suggested to adopt negotiations through an international company and reach an acceptable solution that allows Lebanon and Israel to work on both sides of the border, while a third company is allowed to operate with common wells when they need to. "We have a wise stance to improve our negotiating position and to put the 29 on the table, but not to the extent that any concession on a millimeter would be considered national betrayal," he said. "With my great interest in the rights and wealth of Lebanon, the Lebanese should know that the borders outside the territorial waters, that is (12 miles) beyond the coast, are economic borders and not a sovereign border, and one can operate in a manner that secures economic interest," the MP added. "It is our right to change borders, but according to constitutional principles, by a decree issued by the government, and certainly not with a message that the President of the Republic sends to the United Nations. This is something contrary to principles, and some who were trying to push in that direction were doing suspicious and intrusive actions, and we thank God that the President refrained from sending the letter," Bassil underscored.

Future Movement to Bassil: Your betting on the PM-designate’s withdrawal from the government formation equation is the devil's betting on entering Heaven!
NNA/April 24/2021
The Future Movement responded in a statement this afternoon to Free Patriotic Movement Chief, MP Gebran Bassil, saying that “Bassil has succeeded once again in obtaining a high degree of distinction in sabotaging the mandate of his uncle Michel Aoun, stripping it of the strong covenant status and decorating it with the higher citation of a worn-out nation.”
“Every time this man addresses the Lebanese, he puts a new nail in the coffin of the covenant, and provides evidence after evidence of the existence of an intractable situation in political life that bears the responsibility for disrupting the country and the work of the constitutional institutions, deriving power from the position of the presidency of the republic and local and external bodies that grant him the power to intimidate until the hour of change arrives…”The statement emphasized that Bassil’s main goal is to maintain his position in the political equation, even if circumstances compel him to sacrifice the covenant and its head and reputation, and even to sacrifice political stability, security and livelihood, pushing the country into an abyss from which there is no return! Addressing Bassil, the Movement’s statement said: “As for your wager on withdrawing the Prime Minister-designate from the equation of forming the government, and your saying that the matter requires the resignation of the parliament and heading towards early elections, it actually denotes the devil's bet on entering Heaven!”“Perhaps the shortest way to achieving that is the resignation of the president of the republic so that the constitutional rules are leveled,” the statement underlined.The Future Movement concluded by stressing that Prime Minister-desinate Saad Hariri will be the head of the Council of Ministers with all its members and portfolios, and will never accept to be the head of half the cabinet under any circumstance.

Saeed hosts iftar ceremony in honor of Machnouk, Hamadeh, Fattat, with efforts pinned on rendering Bkirki’s initiative international
NNA/April 24/2021
Former MP Fares Saeed held an iftar ceremony at his Qartaba residence yesterday evening, which was attended by former Ministers Nuhad al-Machnouk, Marwan Hamadeh & Ahmed Fatfat, Ambassador Simon Karam, Dr. Radwan al-Sayed, Engineer Maroun Helou, Dr. Mona Fayyad, and Professors Richard Jreissati, Fadi Hafez and Ayman Jezzini. The gathering was an occasion to discuss the crisis afflicting Lebanon and the need to support Bkirki’s initiative. In this connection, the attendees stressed that they will seek to render the initiative of the Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Beshara Boutros al-Rahi, prominent at the national, Arab and international levels.

Geagea commenting on Saudi decision: No salvation except by getting rid of current ruling group
NNA/April 24/2021 
Lebanese Forces Party Chief, Samir Geagea, commented in a statement on the decision to prohibit Lebanese products from entering Saudi Arabia, saying: "A new achievement today for the ‘strong covenant’ and its allies, as they were able to deprive Lebanese farmers of a basic and vital market for their products, due to the cover provided by some members of the ruling group to contraband dealers, and the failure of Lebanese administrations and concerned apparatuses in carrying out their duties, for known reasons."He added: “It has become certainly clear that every day that this ruling group and strong mandate continue to exist will bring by a new calamity that falls on the heads of the Lebanese.”Geagea also underlined that it has become evident that the current ruling group has failed, amidst its prevailing corruption and pursuit of its purely private interests at the expense of the interests of all the Lebanese.He, thus, emphasized that the sole path to salvation lies in getting rid of this ruling group, “and there is no way to do that except through early parliamentary elections in which the Lebanese bear their responsibilities in order to produce a new authority that will revive the state’s project.”

Beirut gallery opens with a colourful hope-filled exhibition
The Arab Weekly/April 24/2021
BEIRUT--A new Beirut art gallery has opened with an exhibition entitled “30 days from Silwan” The Barrak Naamani art gallery is small site in the Lebanese capital’s fashionable Al-Hamra district. It has been transformed from a family tailors which for 50 years had been selling hand-made clothing into a showroom for the sculptures of artist Baraq Naamani who is fond of turning discarded objects into remarkable and usable art pieces. These pieces range from tables, chairs to light bulbs that are unique in their design.Naamani, who had worked in Kuwait before returning to Beirut, explained “I inherited the tailoring profession from my family … it was for me an art and a craft and I paid great attention to it. I remember that one day I needed an extra table, so I made an old sewing machine into an unconventional table. “Then I sold it on the same day. After that incident, I started looking for old sewing machines in all of Lebanon in order to make usable works of art out of them.”Naamani chose the highly successful painter, Silwan Ibrahim, for the opening exhibition of his gallery. Born in Beirut in 1964, Ibrahim is renowned for his playful figures and his vibrant and flamboyant colourful compositions. After studying architecture for three years, he switched his major to Fine Arts and graduated in 1990 from the Lebanese University, National Institute of Fine Art. His unique art, styled with figures and geometric shapes, portrays an unusual vision enrapturing us out of this world. Although his paintings are full of wit and humour, they also praise philosophical ideas. He has sold many pictures in Lebanon and abroad, including Italy, the United States, the Emirates and Tunisia. Naamani says he selected Ibrahim because of his colourful paintings, even if some in the show may be too vivid for some tastes. With this in mind, the exhibition has made careful use of the space, making sure that none of the pictures on show with their bright colours and patterns, overshadows the others . In the exhibition sadness and joy are often intertwined at the edge of confusion. Viewers of the works find themselves searching amid the paintings, their visual richness, historical backgrounds and emotional and intellectual dimensions, for a mythical character belonging to European folklore, a “sandman ” who scatters grains of sand or magic dust in the eyes of children to make them sleep. All the details and shapes that the eye can see in the artist’s paintings are in an upward movement against a background that often looks like a calm sky, even if its blue colour becomes stronger.

Aram I in memory of Armenian Genocide: To reinforce our commitment to the legacy of our martyrs to restore the usurped rights of our people
NNA/April 24/2021
Metn - Armenian Orthodox Catholicos for the House of Cilica, Aram I, presided Saturday over the Divine Liturgy dedicated for the souls of a million and a half martyrs to rest in peace, during a Mass held at the courtyard of the Cathedral of St. Gregory the Illuminator in Antelias marking the 106th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. In his religious sermon on the occasion, Aram I said: “April 24th is not a day for remembrance of our martyrs, but rather a day for deepening our faith, strengthening our will and strengthening our commitment to their sacred heritage in order to recover the usurped rights of our people.” He added, "We live in a volatile world, which requires us to review and re-assess our approach and our strategy, as well as our tactical struggle, on condition that we do not retreat from our basic principles and goals."Referring to Turkey’s expansionist policy in various political and economic ways, wherever it finds fertile ground, he said: “We must not make the Caucasus a fertile ground for Turkey's expansionist policy, and not bury our legitimate rights under the ashes."“The Arab world has also become a scene for the expansionist Turkish-Turanist policy. So we ask what is Turkey doing in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and other Arab countries…? Sometimes under a humanitarian cover and other times under a religious and social cloak, Turkey permeates the Arab world and poses a grave threat to destabilize political, economic and security stability with the aim of consolidating its presence in the Arab world,” Aram I cautioned. He concluded by saying: "We believe that the bitter experience that the Arab world witnessed in the past, and is experiencing today, should prompt Arab countries to be alert and wary of Turkey's penetrations and their negative consequences in the region.”
 

Ohanian representing President Aoun in Armenia: Genocide martyrs remain in our conscience, alive in our present & future lives
NNA/April 24/2021
Caretaker Youth and Sports Minister, Vartiné Ohanian, represented the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, during her visit today to the “Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Park” in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, marking the 106th commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, where she laid a floral wreath in honor of the fallen martyrs. Ohanian was accompanied during her visit by Armenian Ambassador to Lebanon, Vahagn Atabekyan, and Lebanon's Ambassador to Armenia, Maya Dagher. In her word on the President’s behalf, Ohanian said: "With utmost respect and reverence for the occasion, His Excellency the President of the Lebanese Republic General Michel Aoun entrusted me with his representation in the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide marked by the Armenian Republic, in order to keep the flame of truth throbbing in consciences.”She added: “The martyrs of the Armenian genocide remain in our consciences and alive in our present life and in our future. They proclaim that the Lord is the ‘God of Peace’ and not of tyranny, colonialism and violence. With them, we refuse to surrender to the death sentence….And here they are, after more than a century, renewing the face of the earth." “There is more than one common denominator between the Armenian and Lebanese peoples, especially in torment, sacrifice and suffering,” Ohanian went on. “On this path, together, we reject, in the name of humanity, fraud, destruction and concealment of the truth. Today, today, we are called upon to be, together, this active truth…With it we are freed from all fear, and we are stronger than all dependency," she underscored. “The Lebanese-Armenian relations have strengthened on the human level in particular, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians settled on Lebanon’s territory, as a result of the massacres that targeted the Armenian people at the beginning of the last century, during a painful period in its history, whereby they became an essential component of our nation, effectively contributing to its political life and its economic, social and cultural advancement,” Ohanian emphasized. "The aspirations of our peoples to build the best relations are embodied by the exchange of meetings, visits and exchange of expertise, in addition to the continuous coordination of positions in international and Asian parliamentary forums, in a way that serves the interest of our people, and expresses our stances that are biased towards justice, peace and peoples' rights, at a time when Lebanon stresses the need to respect the sovereignty of Armenia and its territorial integrity," the Caretaker Minister underlined. Following her visit to the Memorial Park, Ohanian toured the Genocide Museum where she wrote a word in honor of the fallen martyrs in the Golden Register, and then visited Yerevan Municipality to attend a photo exhibition organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on April 24-25/2021

Biden says 1915 massacres of Armenians constitute genocide
Arab News/Reuters/April 24, 2021
Up to 1.5 million died from 1915 to 1917
‘Atrocity’ must never be repeated, Biden says
ANKARA / WASHINGTON: The murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces a century ago was genocide, US President Joe Biden acknowledged on Saturday. The recognition, the first by a US leader, came on the 106th anniversary of the day the killings began in 1915. In his statement, Biden said the American people honor “all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.” “Over the decades Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history,” Biden said. “We remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden said. “We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated,” he said.
An Arab News Spotlight piece ‘Better late than never’: Why the US recognition of the Armenian Genocide is significant looks at the importance of using the correct language with regard to the events of 106 years ago. Read it here. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan thanked Biden for his “powerful step toward justice and invaluable support to the heirs of the Armenian genocide victims.” The killings took place from 1915 to 1917 during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, which suspected the Christian minority of conspiring with Russia during the First World War. Armenians were rounded up and sent into the Syrian desert on death marches in which many were shot, poisoned or died from disease. Turkey, which emerged as a republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, has always rejected allegations of genocide. It claims that about 300,000 Armenians died, mainly from war and famine.
The largely symbolic move, breaking away from decades of carefully calibrated language from the White House, was welcomed by the Armenian diaspora in the US, but comes at a time when Ankara and Washington grapple with deep policy disagreements over a host of issues.
For decades, measures recognizing the Armenian genocide stalled in the US Congress and most US presidents have refrained from calling it that, stymied by concerns about relations with Turkey and intense lobbying by Ankara. Ronald Reagan, the former US president from California, a hub for the Armenian diaspora in the US, had been the only US president to publicly call the killings genocide. Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed in clashes with Ottoman forces during World War One, but contests the figures and denies the killings were systematically orchestrated and constitute a genocide.
Turkey's government and most of the opposition showed rare unity in their rejection of Biden's statement. “Words cannot change or rewrite history,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said after Biden’s acknowledgment on Saturday. “We will not take lessons from anyone on our history.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said debates “should be held by historians” and not “politicized by third parties.” Nevertheless, analysts expect the response from Turkey to be muted.  Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish academic at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, pointed out that Biden’s statement mentioned “Constantinople” rather than modern-day Istanbul, and there was no reference to Turkey. “It is a carefully crafted, victim-focused, and forward-looking document that avoids finger pointing at Turkey,” he told Arab News.
“In the short term, I think Erdogan will play this down. He is going to do it with non-confrontational rhetoric because for the first time he needs the US more than he believes the US needs him.”In Montebello, California, a city in Los Angeles County that is home to many Armenian-Americans, members of the community held a small and somber ceremony during which they placed a cross made of flowers at a monument to the victims. Some attendees wore pins reading "genocide denied genocide repeated."
Raffi Hamparian, chairman of Armenian National Committee of America, said in a statement that Biden's "principled stand ... pivots America toward the justice deserved and the security required for the future of the Armenian nation."
 

Armenians Commemorate WWI-era Massacres the U.S. is Set to Designate as Genocide
Agence France Presse/April 24/2021
Thousands of Armenians flocked Saturday to a memorial of the World War I-era mass killings of their kin by Ottoman Turks, the bloodletting which US President Joe Biden is reportedly set to recognise as genocide. Biden's landmark move risks further inflaming Washington's tensions with NATO ally Turkey. Armenians have long sought to have the killings of up to 1.5 million of their kin during the Ottoman Empire's collapse internationally recognised as genocide. The claim is supported by many other countries, but fiercely rejected by Turkey. Yerevan has also demanded financial compensation from Ankara and the restoration of property rights for the descendants of those killed in the 1915-1918 massacres. Turkey denies the killings' genocidal nature, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops. Biden, who during his decades as a senator forged close relations with the Armenian-American and Greek-American communities, promised during his presidential campaign to recognize the Armenian genocide.
'Great Crime'
So far, at least 29 countries -- including Russia and France -- have recognised the atrocities as genocide. On the "anniversary of the Armenian genocide, my whole thoughts are with Armenia ravaged by history... We will never forget," French President Emmanuel Macron wrote to his Armenian counterpart Armen Sarkisian on Thursday. On Saturday, the procession marking the massacres' 106th anniversary stretched from central Yerevan to a hilltop Tsitsernakaberd memorial where the head of Armenia's Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin, celebrated a requiem mass. Armenians commemorate the massacres of their people on April 24 -- the day in 1915 when thousands of Armenian intellectuals suspected of harboring nationalist sentiment and being hostile to Ottoman rule were rounded up. Anger against Turkey simmered among Armenians as crowds of people carrying candles and flowers joined the annual procession to remember the victims of the massacres, which Armenians call Meds Yeghern -- the Great Crime. Armenia is traumatised by last year's defeat in a war with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, in which Ankara backed its ally Baku.
'Old wound bleeds' -
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called the war -- that erupted in September and ended six weeks later with a Russian brokered ceasefire -- "the Azeri-Turkish aggression which sought to annihilate the Armenian trace" in Karabakh. "Turkey's expansionist foreign policy, and the territorial aspirations towards Armenia are the evidence of the revival of their genocidal ideology," he said in a statement. "Armenophobia is in the essence of Pan-Turkism, and today we can see its most disgusting manifestations in Azerbaijan as fostered by the authorities of that country." Arms supplies from Turkey helped the Azerbaijan army win a decisive victory in the war. Under a truce agreement -- which was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation -- Yerevan ceded to Baku swathes of territory it had controlled for decades. "The old wound opened up and bleeds," 72-year-old Sonik Petrosyan told AFP, speaking of the war that has claimed the lives of some 6,000 people. "Armenians must stand united so that our country re-emerges strong from these hardships," the pensioner said as she laid flowers at the eternal flame at the centre of the monument commemorating the mass killings. On Friday evening, about 10,000 people staged an annual torch-lit march in central Yerevan to mark the anniversary, with activists of the nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party -– who led the procession -- burning Turkish and Azerbaijani flags.

Turkey summons US ambassador over Biden’s 1915 Armenian genocide recognition
Reuters/25 April ,2021
Turkey’s foreign ministry said it summoned the US Ambassador to Ankara over President Joe Biden’s recognition of the 1915 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a genocide, adding it had conveyed Turkey’s “strong reaction”. Biden said on Saturday that the 1915 killings constituted genocide, a historic declaration that infuriated Turkey and further strained frayed ties between the two NATO allies.In a statement, the ministry said deputy foreign minister Sedat Onal had told US Ambassador David Satterfield that the statement had no legal basis and that Ankara “rejected it, found it unacceptable and condemned in the stongest terms”. It said the statement had caused a “wound in ties that will be hard to repair”.
 

Three killed in attack on Iran fuel tanker off Syria after suspected drone attack
AFP/ 24 April ,2021
At least three people were killed in an attack Saturday on an Iranian fuel tanker off the Syrian coast, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “At least three people died, including two members of the crew,” in the attack, which sparked a fire, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based war monitor. Earlier, state news agency SANA quoted the oil ministry as saying the fire erupted after “what was believed to be an attack by a drone from the direction of Lebanese waters.”The fire was extinguished, it said. The Observatory was unable to say whether it was a drone attack or a missile fired from a warship. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack near the Banias refinery in the regime-controlled coastal province of Tartus. “It’s the first such attack on an oil tanker, but the Banias terminal has been targeted in the past,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said. Early last year, Damascus said divers had planted explosives on offshore pipelines of the Banias refinery but the damage had not halted operations. Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian soil since 2011, mostly targeting Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces as well as allied Syrian government troops. On Thursday, Israeli strikes killed a Syrian officer east of Damascus, in apparent retaliation for a missile fired hours earlier from Syria towards a secretive nuclear site in southern Israel. Before Syria’s war, the country enjoyed relative energy autonomy, but production has plummeted during the war, pushing the government to rely on importing hydrocarbons. Western sanctions on oil shipping, as well as US punitive measures against Iran, have complicated these imports. Pre-war production was 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) in Syria. But it stood at just 89,000 bpd in 2020, Syria’s oil minister said in February, of which up to 80,000 came from Kurdish areas outside government control.

Iran's Zarif to Visit Qatar, Iraq Sunday
Agence France Presse/April 24/2021
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is to visit Iraq and Qatar on Sunday, his ministry announced, following reported talks brokered by Baghdad between Tehran and regional rival Riyadh. The talks in the Iraqi capital earlier this month, which have not been confirmed by either capital, were held at the level of officials not ministers and aimed at restoring relations severed five years ago, an Iraqi official and a Western diplomat told AFP in Baghdad. Tehran has neither confirmed nor denied the reports saying only that it has "always welcomed" dialogue with Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has flatly denied them.
Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Zarif's visits to Qatar and Iraq are "in the framework of developing bilateral ties (and) regional and trans-regional talks."The Baghdad talks, brokered by Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi, remained secret until the Financial Times reported last weekend that a first meeting had been held on April 9, with another planned for shortly after. An Iraqi government official confirmed the meeting to AFP, while a Western diplomat said he was "briefed in advance that talks would happen" with the "purpose to help broker a better relationship between Iran and Saudi and decrease tensions". The meetings came amid talks in Vienna between Iran and major powers on the mechanics of a US return to a landmark 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by president Donald Trump. The talks must also address Iran's own return to full compliance with the deal, after it suspended its implementation of several key provisions in protest at Trump's reimposition of sweeping economic sanctions. Tehran has rejected calls by Riyadh to be involved in the nuclear negotiations, but has repeatedly stated its readiness to conduct a regional dialogue.Tehran and Riyadh are on opposing sides in conflicts from Syria to Yemen and have had strained relations since the kingdom cut diplomatic ties in 2016. Some Gulf states have followed Saudi Arabia in taking a tough line on Iran. But Qatar has maintained warm relations despite the appeals of Saudi Arabia and its allies, which cited it as one of the reasons for imposing a blockade on the gas-rich emirate in 2017. That rift now appears to have healed after Qatar was invited to a meeting in Saudi Arabia in January at which it was brought back into the regional fold.

Turkey launches new raid against Kurdish bases in northern Iraq
AFP/24 April ,2021
The Turkish army on Saturday launched a new ground and air offensive against outlawed Kurdish militants’ bases in northern Iraq, officials and local media reported. Turkish media said commando forces landed in the Metina region from helicopters while warplanes dropped bombs on Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) targets. “Heroic commandos of the heroic Turkish Armed Forces are in northern Iraq,” the defense ministry said in a tweet without specifying how many soldiers were involved. Turkish television showed images of paratroopers jumping from helicopters and camouflaged soldiers firing guns. The PKK, listed as a terror group by Turkey and much of the international community, has for decades used Iraq’s northern mountains as a springboard for its decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. The Turkish army regularly conducts cross-border operations and air raids against PKK bases in northern Iraq. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dubbed this one “Operation Claw-Lightning”. Speaking to the operation’s command center by video link, Erdogan said the offensive’s objective was “to completely end the presence of the terror threat ... along our southern borders”.“There’s no room for the separatist terror group in the future of Turkey, Iraq or Syria,” he said in reference to the Kurdish militants. “We will keep on fighting until we eradicate these gangs of murderers, who cause nothing but tears and destruction.”In February, Turkey launched an operation dubbed “Claw-Eagle 2” against PKK rebels holed up in the northern Iraqi region of Dohuk. That raid created controversy because it was designed in part to rescue 12 Turkish soldiers and an Iraqi held captive by the PKK in a cave. Turkey accused the PKK of executing the 13 men before they could be freed, and Erdogan came under attack for poorly planning the offensive from opposition parties in parliament. The February raid also created problems in Turkey’s relations with Iran, which now has a strong political and military presence in Iraq, and which treats Erdogan’s regional campaigns with suspicion. Iran’s ambassador warned in February that Turkish forces should not pose a threat or violate Iraqi soil, prompting Ankara and Tehran to each summon the other’s ambassador. The Kurdish insurgency against the Turkish state is believed to have killed tens of thousands of people since being launched in 1984.

Gaza Rockets Follow Jerusalem Clashes in Second Night of Violence
Agence France Presse/April 24/2021
Israeli warplanes struck the Gaza Strip early Saturday after repeated salvos of rocket fire into Israel followed a second night of clashes between Palestinians and police in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Thirty-six rockets were launched, the Israeli army said, the most in a single night this year, after Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas voiced support for the east Jerusalem protests, which were fuelled by a Thursday march by far-right Jews. Washington said it was "deeply concerned" by the escalating violence, while the United Nations and the European Union appealed for restraint. The United States, which has taken a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since President Joe Biden took office in January urged "calm and unity". "The rhetoric of extremist protesters chanting hateful and violent slogans must be firmly rejected," State Department spokesman Ned Price tweeted. Tensions have been running high in east Jerusalem over a ban on gatherings, and a series of videos posted online showing young Arabs attacking ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Jewish extremists taking to the streets to bully Arabs. On Thursday, at least 125 people were injured when Palestinian protesters, angered by chants of "death to Arabs" from far-right Jewish demonstrators, clashed repeatedly with police.
- 'Playing with fire' -
Skirmishes broke out again on Friday when tens of thousands of Muslim worshippers left the city's revered Al-Aqsa mosque compound after night prayers and found themselves confronted by dozens of armed police, some on horseback. Protesters hurled water bottles at police, who fired stun grenades to disperse the crowd. Hundreds of Palestinians also gathered at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, police said.  In the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Palestinians threw stones and petrol bombs towards the tomb of biblical matriarch Rachel, a shrine venerated by Jews and Muslims. There have been nightly disturbances in east Jerusalem since the start of Ramadan on April 13, amid Palestinian anger over police blocking off access to the promenade around the walls of the Old City, a popular gathering place after the end of the daytime Ramadan fast. Thursday's march into the heart of Arab east Jerusalem by hundreds of supporters of far-right Jewish nationalist group Lehava added fuel to the fire. Jerusalem mayor Moshe Lion told public radio he was in talks with Palestinian community leaders in east Jerusalem "to end this pointless violence". Lion said he had tried to cancel the Lehava march, but police told him it was legal and noted that "dozens" of Jews who attacked Arabs had been arrested in the past two weeks. The office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas condemned "the growing incitement by extremist far-right Israeli settler groups advocating for the killing of Arabs". In a statement on the Palestinians' official Wafa news agency, it urged the international community to intervene to protect Palestinians. Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi condemned "racist attacks" by Israelis against Palestinians in east Jerusalem and called for "international action to protect them". "Jerusalem is a red line and touching it, is playing with fire," he warned.
Gaza rocket fire -
Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, voiced support for the east Jerusalem protesters. "The spark you light today will be the wick of the explosion to come in the face of the enemy," it said in a statement. An alliance of Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas and its smaller ally Islamic Jihad, issued a statement warning we "cannot remain silent" in the face of the violence. Militants in Gaza fired a first salvo of three rockets at Israel shortly before midnight (2100 GMT) Friday, the military said. The Israeli army said later that all 36 rockets fired were intercepted or hit open ground. Israeli tanks shelled Gaza in response but the reprisals were met with a new volley of a dozen rockets, prompting the launch of air strikes against suspected launch sites operated by Hamas, it added. "Fighter jets and attack helicopters struck a number of Hamas military targets in the Gaza Strip," including underground infrastructure and rocket launchers, it said.

Jerusalem Ramadan violence triggers Gaza-Israel fire exchange
The Arab Weekly/April 24/2021
JERUSALEM--Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired some three dozen rockets into Israel overnight Saturday, while the Israeli military struck back at targets operated by the ruling Hamas group. The exchange came as tensions in Jerusalem spilled over into the worst round of cross-border violence in months.
The barrage of rocket fire came as hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli police in east Jerusalem. The clashes, in which at least four police and six protesters were injured, have become a nightly occurrence throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and show no signs of stopping. The UN envoy to the region, Tor Wennesland, condemned the violence and said the United Nations was working with all sides to restore calm. “The provocative acts across Jerusalem must cease. The indiscriminate launching of rockets towards Israeli population centres violates international law and must stop immediately,” he said. “I reiterate my call upon all sides to exercise maximum restraint and avoid further escalation, particularly during the Holy month of Ramadan and this politically charged time for all.”The US also appealed for calm, while neighbouring Jordan, which serves as the custodian for Jerusalem’s Muslim holy sites, condemned Israel’s actions.Jerusalem, home to holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, has long been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2014, similar tensions erupted into a 50-day war between Israel and Gaza’s ruling Hamas militant group.
Rockets and sirens
The Israeli military said a total of 36 rockets were fired into Israel throughout the night. It said six rockets were intercepted, while most of the others landed in open areas. There were no reports of injuries or serious damage, but the incoming rocket fire set off air-raid sirens throughout southern Israel. In response, the army said fighter jets and helicopters struck a number of Hamas targets in Gaza, including an underground facility and rocket launchers. Hamas did not claim responsibility for the rocket fire, but Israel considers the group responsible for all fire emanating from the territory. The military imposed limits on outdoor gatherings in southern Israel early Saturday but lifted the restrictions several hours later and allowed people to resume their normal routines. Israel and Hamas, an Islamist group sworn to Israel’s destruction, are bitter enemies that have fought three wars and numerous skirmishes since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. Although neither side appears to have an interest in escalating tensions, Hamas sees itself as the defender of Jerusalem and may feel obligated to act, or at least tacitly encourage rocket attacks by other groups, ahead of upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections. Hamas’ armed wing has warned Israel “not to test” its patience. At dawn, hundreds of people in Gaza challenged nightly curfews imposed by Hamas to curb the coronavirus outbreak and took to the streets in an act of solidarity with fellow Palestinians in Jerusalem, burning tires. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. Its fate has been one of the most divisive issues in the peace process, which ground to a halt more than a decade ago. Palestinians have clashed with Israeli police on a nightly basis since the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan nearly two weeks ago.
Violence in the Old City
The tensions began when police placed barricades outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate, where Muslims traditionally gather to enjoy the evening after the daytime fast. The clashes intensified Thursday evening when hundreds of Palestinians hurled stones and bottles at police, who fired a water cannon and stun grenades to disperse them. Dozens of Palestinians were wounded in the melee. At the same time, a far-right Jewish group known as Lahava led a march of hundreds of protesters chanting “Arabs get out!” toward the Damascus Gate. The group, led by a disciple of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, is allied with elements of a far-right party elected to Israel’s parliament last month. The show of force came in response to videos circulated on TikTok showing Palestinians slapping religious Jews at random. Other videos made in response to them appear to show Jews assaulting Arabs. After keeping them a few hundred yards (meters) away from Damascus Gate, police used water cannon, stun grenades and mounted police to push far-right protesters back toward mostly Jewish west Jerusalem. In all, police said 44 people were arrested and 20 officers were injured. There were concerns the violence could reignite following Friday noon prayers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, but thousands of worshippers dispersed peacefully after Muslim religious leaders called for restraint. But in the evening the clashes resumed as dozens of Palestinians marched toward an entrance to the walled Old City of Jerusalem. Police said the protesters threw stones and fireworks and damaged both civilian and police cars. Palestinian medical officials said six Palestinians were injured, with two hospitalised. Israeli police said four officers were hurt. Early on Saturday, Jordan strongly condemned “the racist attacks on Palestinians.”Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi tweeted: “As the occupying power under international law, Israel is responsible for stopping these attacks & for the dangerous consequences of failing to do so.”
Jordan has had a peace agreement with Israel since 1994, but relations in recent years have been chilly, in part because of recurring disputes over Israeli actions in Jerusalem. The US Embassy in Israel said it was “deeply concerned” about the violence in recent days. “We hope all responsible voices will promote an end to incitement, a return to calm, and respect for the safety and dignity of everyone in Jerusalem,” it said. The Old City is home to a sensitive holy site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The site, home to the Al Aqsa mosque compound, is the third-holiest site in Islam. It also is the holiest site in Judaism, revered as the spot where the biblical Temples once stood.The sprawling hilltop compound has seen clashes on a number of occasions over the years and was the epicenter of the 2000 Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

U.S. Positions Carrier, Bombers to Back Afghanistan Pullout
Agence France Presse/April 24/2021
The Pentagon has deployed B-52 bombers to the Middle East and has prolonged the presence of an aircraft carrier in the region to support the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, spokesman John Kirby said Friday. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin decided to keep the USS Eisenhower in the US Central Command region for an extended period, in the wake of President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan by September. "And he has approved the addition of some long range bombers to be deployed to the region. Two of those B-52s have arrived in the region," Kirby said.
The Stratofortress bombers are usually based in Qatar, where the US military has an important base. Kirby did not dismiss the idea that further reinforcements could be sent to ensure the smooth and safe removal of some 2,500 US troops and another 16,000 civilians supporting the US operation in Afghanistan.
There are also another 7,000 NATO troops in the country, who also depend on the United States for material and security support. "I think it's reasonable to assume, as I've said before, that there could be temporary additional force protection measures and enablers that we would require to make sure that this drawdown goes smoothly and safely for our men and women," Kirby told reporters.
 

Egypt’s El-Sisi meets with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince in Cairo
Arab News/April 24, 2021
Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan praised Egypt’s pivotal role in the region
El-Sisi expressed Egypt's keenness to continue strengthening bilateral cooperation with the UAE
CAIRO: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi received the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi on Saturday. During the meeting, El-Sisi expressed Egypt's keenness to continue strengthening bilateral cooperation with the UAE in various fields, and to increase the frequency of meetings between senior officials from the two countries to coordinate responses to developments in the Middle East region. Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan praised Egypt’s pivotal role in the region, and the great development witnessed by Egyptian-Emirati relations in the political, economic, security and military fields. He also stressed his eagerness to further deepen Egyptian-Emirati relations. Discussions between the two also addressed a number of regional issues, including the Renaissance Dam and ways of resolving the ongoing dispute. The Egyptian president Abu Dhabi crown prince agreed that political settlements were the only solutions to a number of ongoing conflicts in the region, as well as the need for developing a comprehensive vision for Arab capabilities to meet challenges facing the region and increasing threats to regional security. El-Sisi stressed Egypt's commitment to its firm stance towards the security of the Gulf and the rejection of any practices that seek to destabilize it.

Qatar invests in the new Turkish ‘Akıncı Tiha’ drone
The Arab Weekly/April 24/2021
ANKARA / DOHA – A well-informed Turkish source said that the unannounced visit of the head of the Turkish Defence Industries Corporation, Ismail Demir, to Qatar focused on trying to secure Qatari financing for the development and introduction of the drone project Akıncı Tiha into service. This comes after Turkish drones performed well in military battles in Libya, Syria, Iraq and in the Nagorno Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Turkish source told The Arab Weekly that, “Demir carried the details of the new project, which is a relatively large multi-role unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which Turkey is developing into a sort of ” tank-plane” equipped with various weapons. Demir met Qatar’s Chief of Staff Ghanem Bin Shaheen al Ghanem and discussed with him an indirect financing scheme through the purchase of a number of Akıncı Tiha drones, which the Defence Industries Corporation has already begun testing with various weapons options. Qatari sources said that the two parties talked about the , “prospects for cooperation between the Qatari armed forces and the Turkish company and ways to enhance and develop these ties,” without making more details public.The Turkish source said that Demir issued instructions upon his return to start testing different types of locally-made equipment and to move quickly on the project in order to ensure Qatari financing. The Turkish Defence Industries Corporation is a major military manufacturing institution under the personal supervision of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The company announced that it has carried out successful tests of smart materiel on the new UAV and that work is underway to develop MIM-T munitions, improve the efficiency of their warheads and increase their range. The two Turkish companies, Bayraktar and Roketsan, are working on the manufacture of vehicles and their lethal gear as part of a programme that is attracting considerable interest from a number of potential buyers. Military ties between Turkey and Qatar were boosted in June 2017, as a military cooperation agreement entered into effect after ratification by the Turkish parliament and approval by Erdogan. Under the agreement, a Turkish military base was established in Qatar and joint exercises were carried out. Turkey presented itself as the protector of Qatar at a time when regional pressure intensified on Doha to change its stances which were seen as threatening to stability in the Middle East and North Africa. Wariness about Qatar’s policies led to its boycott by a quartet of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia. The relationship between Doha and Riyadh witnessed a certain degree of detente after the Al-Ula summit in Saudi Arabia. This resulted in a decline in the intensity of the mutual criticism as well as de-escalation of tensions between Turkey and Egypt. Turkey increasingly relies on drones and considers them one among the most important military-industrial assets that buttress its rise as a regional power.
“Turkey has developed its own domestic drones and has used them to devastating effect in several recent military conflicts: Libya, Syria, in the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and in the fight against the PKK inside its own borders,” recently wrote US scholar Francis Fukuyama. “In the process, it has elevated itself into being a major regional power broker with more ability to shape outcomes than Russia, China or the United States” he wrote in an article published by the magazine American Purpose. The first large scale use of the Turkish drones was in an attack on Syrian forces that had targeted Turkish forces and killed 36 Turkish soldiers. The US scholar noted that the effectiveness of Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones and the Anka-S unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) was evident. He added, “Video footage showed them destroying one Syrian armoured vehicle after another, including more than 100 tanks, armoured personnel carriers and air defence systems.” Fukuyama argued that Turkey’s use of drones “is going to change the nature of land power in ways that will undermine existing force structures, in the way that the Dreadnaught obsoleted earlier classes of battleships, or the aircraft carrier made battleships themselves obsolete at the beginning of World War II.”

New US envoy for Horn of Africa to lead conflict resolution in region
The Arab Weekly/April 24/2021
WASHINGTON--Veteran US diplomat Jeffrey Feltman was named a special envoy for the Horn of Africa on Friday, as Washington looks to step up diplomatic efforts in a region hit by the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray and other crises. Feltman also will lead international efforts to address tensions between Ethiopia and Sudan and around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. The dispute, which involves Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, has been impervious to regional and international mediations and is currently in an impasse. Fighting in Tigray, between rebels and government forces from both Ethiopia and its neighbor Eritrea, has killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of thousands more from their homes in the region of about 5 million. The dire humanitarian situation and violence, in South Sudan, Sudan’s Darfur region and Somalia are also matters of concern that the new envoy will have to address. After serving in senior roles at the State Department, Feltman was UN political affairs chief from 2012 to 2018, a job that helps form UN policy and oversees UN mediation efforts. Feltman visited North Korea in 2017, the highest-level UN official to visit since 2011, describing his four-day trip as “the most important mission I have ever undertaken” Before working at the United Nations, he was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs during the Obama administration and before that served as US ambassador to Lebanon, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s office in the Erbil province of Iraq and as a senior official at the US consulate general in Jerusalem and the US embassy in Tunis.

Haftar launches early campaign for Libya’s presidential elections
TRIPOLI--The Commander-in-Chief of the Libyan National Army (LNA) Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, appeared recently in civilian clothes during a ceremony to sign a plan for the construction of three cities around the city of Benghazi, in eastern Libya. Haftar’s move, observers said, signals his intention to run for the presidential elections to be held in Libya at the end of next December. The signing of the construction plan was followed by Haftar’s reception of a delegation from the Libya’s western city of Zintan. The field marshal pledged new work opportunities, as well as education funds for children to a number of families at the ceremony. The people want Haftar for president,” chanted the families, most of them women, in a gesture that signals that the retired Major General has already launched a pre-election campaign. Haftar’s talk about building three cities west, east and south of Benghazi soon, able to house 12 million people, stirred a debate on social media. The population of Libya has not yet exceeded 7 million people, so it is being assumed that Haftar is planning to naturalise tribes from neighbouring countries, especially the Al-Jawari in western Egypt, who come originally from Libya, as well as the tribes of Awlad Ali in Egypt, who have historical links to t country. Observers say the field Marshal may also naturalise the Furjan tribes in Egypt, noting that Haftar himself is a Furjani , whose fellow tribesmen in Libya are mainly in the western governorates of Sirte and Tarhuna. The Chadian Tebu tribes might also be given Libyan nationality as was in fact long promised by the late Muammar Gadhafi who promoted the idea of their Libyan origins. He did indeed naturalise some of them as part of his ambition to build a population “super mass.” In a video clip circulating since 2019, Haftar had stated “We have a territory of approximately one million 760 thousand square kilometres, so what should we do with all of it? If we can get an additional 10 million (people), they will all be able to change the face of Libya … why not? ”
The project to naturalise Egyptian and Chadian tribes would allow Haftar to obtain a voting bloc equivalent to nearly twice the number of Libyan voters, which would guarantee him and his children victory in any future elections. Libya is still in flux. After an armed conflict that has lasted over a decade, a UN-brokered interim administration, the Government of National Unity (GNU) with a new presidency council took office last month. The political parties are now waiting for the organisation of elections scheduled for December 24. Earlier in April, the president of the Libyan Presidency Council, Muhammad al-Menfi, along with his two deputies Musa al-Koni and Abdullah al-Lafi announced the setting up of a commission for national reconciliation, to resolve disputes between Libyans. “I announce to you” said Menfi, “a step that we have all been waiting for, which is the launch of a real project for national reconciliation that will bring our people together, bring their hearts together and help turn the page of the past”. Without providing details of the High Commission for National Reconciliation’s mandate and formation, Menfi said the commission would be “an edifice that brings Libyans together, restores the country and achieves justice among people in line with law” . He is still reported to be discussing with local experts the prerogatives and the structure of the reconciliation commission. Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, tweeted, “The future of Libya and its progress is linked to its ability to heal its wounds through national reconciliation and achieving justice.” The commission, seen as key to security and stability was part of the political roadmap approved by the UN-sponsored Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in February which brought the. GNU into being. In an early part of the reconciliation process, dozens of LNA prisoners were recently released in the western city of Zawiya.

With Sahel fight at stake, Macron pledges role in Chad
The Arab Weekly/April 24/2021
N’DJAMENA--French president Emmanuel Macron attended the N’Djamena funeral of Idriss Deby Itno, a key figure in France-led regional fight against the Sahel’s jihadist threat, as he voiced backing for the fallen president’s son and successor, Mahamat Idriss Deby. The elder Deby, who had ruled the vast semi-desert state with an iron fist for 30 years, died from wounds sustained fighting rebels at the weekend, the army said Tuesday. Idriss Deby’s death has stunned the Sahel and its ally and former colonial ruler France, battling a jihadist insurgency that in nine years has swept across three countries. Though the elections that returned him five times as president were all questionable, Deby gained a reputation in the West for his reliability in the fight to roll back extremists, whose campaign has shaken the vast, impoverished region. In those nine years, the unrest has claimed thousands of lives and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. Under his rule, Chad developed well-respected armed forces which have been deployed alongside French troops to combat jihadist activity in Mali. However, human rights groups have accused France and other Western powers of turning a blind eye to government repression during Deby’s long rule because of his co-operation on security matters.
Wary of possible repercussions of the events in Chad on the region and on its own military strategy in the Sahara and the Sahel, France had no hesitation to bet on the younger Deby. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian justified the installation of a military council headed by Deby’s son on the grounds that stability and security were paramount at this time. “There are exceptional circumstances,” Le Drian told France 2 television. Deby’s son Mahamat took control of the country and its armed forces on Wednesday, dissolving the parliament and suspending the constitution. According to the constitution, National Assembly Speaker Haroun Kabadi should have taken over. But he was said not to be inclined to assume that role. “France’s interpretation of the national interest dictates that they have to support a transition that keeps as much continuity as possible,” said Nathaniel Powell, Research Associate at Lancaster University and author of “France’s Wars in Chad”. “Mahamat’s military council is probably the best case scenario for that kind situation. The French are just hoping that military and civil discontent don’t undermine the transition too much.”
Key in the immediate term for Paris is ensuring that the deployment of a battalion of 1,200 men to the tri-border theatre between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger earlier this year remains in place. It is seen as vital to enable French and other forces to re-orient their military mission to central Mali and to target extremist leaders linked to al- Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) affiliates. France has been seeking to boost the involvement of Sahel countries in the anti-jihadist fight and scale back its own deployment of 5,100 men, a mission called Barkhane. Whether the Chadian troops leave or not, “efforts to ‘Sahelise’ counterterrorism… have just taken a hit,” said Yvan Guichaoua, researcher at the University of Kent in England. Fears reverberate across the French-speaking region and beyond. “If Chad brings its soldiers back and the troops in Barkhane leave at the same time, I think Mali will collapse and there may be the collapse of Burkina Faso and part or all of Niger,” said Amadou Bounty Diallou, a former paratrooper and professor at the University of Niamey, Niger. Chadian troops are also part of the UN peacekeeping force in Mali and a key component in the fight against jihadists in northeastern Nigeria. “Chad helped keep the lid on regional security — it was rusty, but it was there,” an observer of the Sahel conflict said in Bamako, the Malian capital. “But will it remain so?”Another knock-on impact of Deby’s death could be felt in southern Libya, a vast, lawless desert region from where the revolt in northeastern Chad began.
If it becomes the setting for an “overflow of Chadian rivalries or a resurgence of Daesh”, warned researcher Jalel Harchaoui, “nobody will intervene to secure it”.
French pledge
Before the ceremony, Macron and his counterparts from Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, the so-called G5 of anti-jihadist states, met the late president’s son and successor Mahamat Idriss Deby who now heads a transitional military council that has dissolved parliament but promised “free and democratic” elections, though not before 18 months at the earliest. There was a 21-gun salute as Deby’s coffin, draped in the national flag and surrounded by elite troops, was driven on the back of a pickup truck to the Place de la Nation for the ceremony.
Idriss Deby’s death has stunned the Sahel and its ally and former colonial ruler France, battling a jihadist revolt that in nine years has swept across three countries. Though the elections that returned him five times as president were all questionable, Deby gained a reputation in the West for his reliability in the fight to roll back extremists, whose campaign has shaken the vast, impoverished region. In those nine years, the unrest has claimed thousands of lives and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes. Macron, who sat beside Deby’s son during the ceremony, was the only Western head of state to attend the funeral along with the current African Union chairman, Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi.
“France will never let anyone question and will never let anyone threaten, not today, not tomorrow, Chad’s stability and integrity,” he said. “France will also be here to support, without hesitation, the promise of a peaceful Chad” . Macon continued “I share the bereavement of a nation touched to its core by the sacrifice of its first soldier and I share the bereavement of a loyal friend and ally because you were the first to respond to the call of regional countries to defend Africa against armed terrorism in the Sahel in 2013,” he said referring to Chadian forces joining France in Mali to counter the extremist insurgency. However, Macron also called on the newly-appointed military government headed by Deby’s 37 year-old son to foster “stability, inclusion, dialogue, democratic transition.” At their meeting earlier, the fellow Sahel leaders and Macron had a “unity of views” and said they “stood by Chad and expressed their joint support for the process of civilian-military transition, for the stability of the region”, a French presidential official said.
Macron spared no praise for Chad’s slain strongman who had ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years and survived two serious attempted coups. “You lived as a soldier,” said Macron, “you died as a soldier, weapons in your hands.” The funeral was followed by prayers at the capital’s Grand Mosque. Then Deby’s remains were flown a thousand kilometres east to the village of Amdjarass near the Sudanese border, where he was buried Friday alongside his father close to his birthplace of Berdoba.. The army said the 68-year-old president had died on Monday from wounds suffered while leading troops in battle against rebels who had crossed from Libya and had attempted to advance on N’Djamena.
Deby was injured fatally on the frontline only hours after he had won a sixth term of office in an election that was widely disputed by opposition politicians who had urged their supporters to boycott the vote. They have since branded the takeover by the military as an “institutional coup”. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), underscoring the “terrible repression” under Deby, on Friday urged the swiftest possible return to civilian rule. The rebels from the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) had vowed to pursue their offensive after a pause for the funeral, with spokesman Kingabe Ogouzeimi de Tapol telling AFP that they were “en route to N’Djamena”.FACT, said Friday that Chad’s military carried out a bombardment Wednesday into Thursday of its command centre with the aid of French surveillance systems that it said was meant to kill its leader. However, it added that the attempt had failed and it called on the international community to look into France’s role in backing the transitional leadership.
The French Armed Forces told The Associated Press on Friday that “there has not been a single strike by the French army in Chad this week.” Nevertheless, French diplomatic and military sources have indicated that Paris would consider intervening if the rebels were to close in on N’Djamena and threaten the country’s stability. Another source said that Paris’ immediate objective was to persuade Mahamat Idriss Deby to reduce the transition period and forge unity within the establishment. A Macron aide said after his chief’s meeting with Chad’s new leader and the other G5 heads “What emerges from the president’s consultations with his counterparts is the need to push ahead very quickly with an inclusive transition, which hands on to political forces. That’s the only way today, because a purely military process won’t work,” the aide said, adding that the G5 Sahel and African Union “are in the front line, and France will be playing the role of backup”.

U.S. Approves Restart of J&J Covid Vaccinations
Agence France Presse/April 24/2021
Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccinations can restart, US health regulators said Friday, after the shots' rollout was paused due to worries over blood clotting. Health authorities in the United States on April 14 proposed a halt on the vaccine following instances of severe blood clots among a handful of the millions of Americans who received the vaccine. The news came shortly after an expert panel recommended lifting the pause because the shots benefits exceeded possible dangers. "We have concluded that the known and potential benefits of the Janssen Covid-19 vaccine outweigh its known and potential risks in individuals 18 years of age and older," said Janet Woodcock, head of Food and Drug Administration in a joint statement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CDC head Rochelle Walensky said "exceptionally rare events" of clotting were identified, adding that regulators will continue to monitor the rollout of the vaccines. According to data presented Friday, of 3.9 million women who got the Johnson & Johnson shot, 15 developed serious blood clots and three died. The majority of the confirmed cases, 13 of the 15, was aged under 50 years old. There were no reported cases among men. Europe's medicines regulator said Tuesday that blood clots should be listed as a "very rare" side effect of Johnson & Johnson's coronavirus vaccine.T

The regulator said its safety committee "concluded that a warning about unusual blood clots with low blood platelets should be added to the product information" for the J&J shot.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on April 24-25/2021

Biden’s recognition of Armenian Genocide shows Turkey’s fading influence
Kristina Jovannovski/The Media Line/April 24/2021

اعتراف بايدن بالإبادة الأرمنية يضعف نفوذ تركيا اردوغان الإخونجي

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Previous US presidents have avoided using the term ‘genocide’ out of fear of angering key NATO ally
US President Joe Biden’s expected recognition of the Ottoman Empire’s mass killings of Armenians as genocide is a sign of Turkey’s waning influence over Washington, analysts told The Media Line.
Biden is expected to make the recognition on Saturday, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, according to US reports, which cited unnamed officials.
Turkey’s foreign minister told a local news channel that such a move would harm relations with the United States.
That sentiment was echoed by Turkey’s main opposition party, The Republican People’s Party, in a statement released on Thursday, denouncing the possible move by Biden.
“This is unjust, unwarranted and inappropriate. We do not accept this characterization,” the party said in its statement.
Turkey, where many revere the Ottoman Empire, accepts that Armenians were killed but has long refuted equating the deaths with genocide.
“Genocide recognition is going to be a large blow to the Turkish government,” said Berk Esen, an assistant professor of political science at Sabancı University in Istanbul.
He says Biden has been angered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies that went against US interests and believes the Turkish president can’t respond too strongly while he is dealing with a major spike in COVID-19 cases and an economic crisis in his country.
Relations with the US are especially important to Turkey’s economy, which strongly relies on foreign investment.
A 2018 diplomatic dispute between the two countries over Turkey’s detention of US pastor Andrew Brunson led to Washington placing sanctions on Ankara which sent Turkey’s currency into free fall.
Economists said the image of Ankara arguing with the biggest economy in the world played more of a role in the economic crisis than the sanctions themselves.
Esen told The Media Line that the recognition of genocide would show how low US-Turkish relations have sunk, considering previous presidents avoided using the term so that they would not upset an important NATO ally.
Turkey has made a slew of decisions since the dispute that have harmed ties with Washington, including launching an offensive against US-allied Kurdish forces in Syria and purchasing an advanced Russian anti-missile defense system, the S-400s, which led to Ankara being kicked out of the US F-35 joint strike fighter program.
“I think the deterioration in US-Turkish relations really is the big difference maker here,” said Alan Makovsky, a senior fellow for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, who previously worked on Turkish affairs at the US State Department.
Turkey’s geopolitical position, bordering Iraq, Iran and Syria, has made it a valuable NATO ally, including by hosting a base which was used by the US to launch attacks against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Makovsky told The Media Line that a Biden recognition of the Armenian deaths as genocide would be a signal to Turkey that it doesn’t have the amount of leverage it believed it did.
“It’s a problematic relationship. The US is starting to hedge its bets a bit … people still see [Turkey] as important strategically but I think Turkey has lost its veto power in certain areas in the US, including on this issue,’ he said.
Makovsky added that the lack of a strong reaction from Ankara after the US Congress passed a resolution to recognize the deaths as genocide showed there probably would be no major fallout from such a move.
Even before he became president, Biden said he would take a tough line with Erdogan, telling The New York Times he would support the opposition.
Since taking office, Biden has not held a phone call with Erdogan even as the Turkish president attempts to strengthen relations with his Western allies.
Aykan Erdemir, a former member of the Turkish parliament with the main opposition party, told The Media Line that Turkey would likely act the same as it did to other countries which have recognized the genocide, such as by recalling the US ambassador.
Erdemir, senior director of the Turkey program for the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said such a clash with the US would be short-lived but welcomed by Erdogan who could use the row to distract the public from the country’s domestic issues while playing to his nationalist base.
He said the recognition of genocide by both the Senate and House of Representatives in 2019 showed how bipartisan skepticism of Erdogan has become in the US.
“Ultimately, the Erdogan government’s policies have isolated Turkey in Washington,” he said. “Turkey ended up with no friends to advocate for Ankara’s position in Washington.”

The Armenian Genocide Forges On
Raymond Ibrahim/Gatestone Institute/April 24/2021
ريموند إبراهيم: الإبادة الأرمنية على يد العثمانيين مستمرة في زمن إردوغان الإخونجي
في بداية العام 1915 كان يعيش في تركيا حوالي مليونين من الأرومن في يومنا هذا لم يبقى منهم سوى 60 ألفاً.
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“At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000…. denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.” — The Genocide Education Project.
ليس فقط تركيا ترفض الإعتراف بإدة الأرمن بل هي مستمرة في جريمتها وهذا ما مارسته مؤخراً في ناكونو كرباخ.
Not only has Turkey repeatedly denied culpability for the Armenian Genocide; it appears intent on reigniting it, most recently by helping Azerbaijan wage war on Armenia in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, which again erupted into armed conflict in late 2020.
تركيا عادت إلى القوقاز بعد 100 سنة لإكمال جريمة إبادة الأرمن
“Why has Turkey returned to the South Caucasus 100 years [after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire]? To continue the Armenian Genocide.” — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Facebook, October 1, 2020.
These mercenaries and their Azerbaijani partners, among other ISIS-like behavior, “tortured beyond recognition” an intellectually disabled 58-year-old Armenian woman by hacking off her ears, hands, and feet — before murdering her. Her family was only able to identify her by her clothes.
Answering the question, “If you could get away with one thing, what would you do?” — asked to random passersby on the streets of Turkey — a woman recently replied on video: “What would I do? Behead 20 Armenians.” She then looked directly at the camera and smiled while nodding her head.
Much of this genocidal hatred should be unsurprising: Turkish public school textbooks, as a recent study found, continue demonizing Armenians — as well as Jews and Christians.
Armenian churches have been desecrated after coming under Azerbaijani control during and since the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute erupted into armed conflict in late 2020 — despite promises from the Azerbaijani authorities to protect them. Pictured: The Ghazanchetsots (Holy Saviour) Cathedral in Shusha, Nagorno-Karabakh, on October 13, 2020, shortly after it was bombed. (Photo by Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)
Today, April 24th, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, marking 106 years since the start of the Armenian Genocide, when the Ottoman Turks massacred approximately 1.5 million Armenians during World War I.
Most objective historians who have examined the topic unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide. According to the Genocide Education Project:
“More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.
“Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.”
Not only has Turkey repeatedly denied culpability for the Armenian Genocide; it appears intent on reigniting it, most recently by helping Azerbaijan wage war on Armenia in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, which again erupted into armed conflict in late 2020.
As Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s prime minister, observed in October 2020: “Why has Turkey returned to the South Caucasus 100 years [after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire]? To continue the Armenian Genocide.”
During this recent conflict, which did not concern it, Turkey sent sharia-enforcing “jihadist groups.” According to French President Emmanuel Macron, they — including the pro-Muslim Brotherhood Hamza Division were sent from Syria and Libya to terrorize and slaughter Armenians. The Hamza Division reportedly kept naked women in prison while operating in Syria.
These mercenaries and their Azerbaijani partners, among other ISIS-like behavior, “tortured beyond recognition” an intellectually disabled 58-year-old Armenian woman by hacking off her ears, hands, and feet — before murdering her. Her family was only able to identify her by her clothes.
“Armenians,” according to a December 2020 report, “are being brutalized” and have “lost territory to their jihadist neighbors before agreeing to a cease-fire enforced by Russia…. Prior to violating the so-called peace agreement, the Turkish Muslims of Azerbaijan did as Muhammad commanded in beheading Christians.”
The report linked to a video of soldiers in camouflage overpowering a struggling, elderly Armenian man to the ground, before casually carving at his throat with a knife.
“Azerbaijan has accused Armenia of violating the peace deal first,” the report continues, “but observers note the only provocation Muslims need to attack Armenians is their continued existence.”
Anti-infidel rhetoric underscores this view. A captured terrorist confessed that he was “promised a monthly 2000 dollar payment for fighting against ‘kafirs’ in Artsakh, and an extra 100 dollar for each beheaded ‘kafir.'” (Kafir, often translated as “infidel,” is Arabic for non-Muslims who fail to submit to Islamic authority, which by default makes them enemies worthy of slavery or death.)
Armenian churches that came under Azerbaijani control have been desecrated — despite promises from the Azerbaijani authorities to protect them. In one instance, a soldier — it is unclear whether he was an Azeri or a jihadi mercenary from Syria or Iraq — was videotaped standing on top of a church chapel, where the cross had been broken off, and triumphantly shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Azerbaijani forces also shelled and destroyed Holy Savior, an iconic Armenian cathedral which was “consecrated in 1888 but was damaged during the March 1920 massacre of Armenians of the city by Azerbaijanis and experienced a decades-long decline.”
More recently, according to a March 29, 2021 report, during just two weeks, at least three Armenian churches in the Nagorno-Karabakh region were recently vandalized or destroyed by Azerbaijani forces — even though a ceasefire had been declared in November. Video footage of the desecration of one of these churches shows Azerbaijani troops entering the Christian place of worship, and then laughing, mocking, kicking, and defacing Christian items inside it, including a fresco of the Last Supper. Turkey’s flag appears on the Azerbaijani servicemen’s uniforms, further implicating the Erdogan government of involvement. As they approach, one of the Muslim soldiers says, “Let’s now enter their church, where I will perform namaz” — a reference to Muslim prayers; when Muslims pray inside a non-Muslim temple, it immediately becomes a mosque.
In response to this video, Arman Tatoyan, an Armenian human rights activist, issued a statement:
“The President of Azerbaijan, and the country’s authorities have been implementing a policy of hatred, enmity, ethnic cleansing and genocide against Armenia, citizens of Armenia and the Armenian people for years. The Turkish authorities have done the same or have openly encouraged the same policy.”
As an example, he said that Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev had proudly stated in early March that “the younger generation has grown up with hatred toward the enemy ” — meaning Armenians.
Such hate, a precursor to genocide, seems evident everywhere. One need only listen to a Turkish man rant in a video about how all Armenians are “dogs,” and that any Armenians found in Turkey should be slaughtered:
“What is an Armenian doing in my country? Either the state expels them or we kill them. Why do we let them live?… We will slaughter them when the time comes…. This is Turkish soil. How are we Ottoman grandchildren?…. The people of Turkey… have honor, dignity, and Allah must cut the heads of the Armenians in Turkey. It is dishonorable for anyone to meet and not kill an Armenian… If we are human, let us do this—let us do it for Allah…. Everyone listening, if you love Allah, please spread this video of me to everyone…”
Answering the question, “If you could get away with one thing, what would you do?” — asked to random passersby on the streets of Turkey — a woman recently replied on video: “What would I do? Behead 20 Armenians.” She then looked directly at the camera and smiled while nodding her head.
Much of this genocidal hatred should be unsurprising: Turkish public school textbooks, as a recent study found, continue demonizing Armenians — as well as Jews and Christians.
If Turks, who are not affected by the Armenian/Azerbaijani conflict, feel this way, why it should be a shock that any number of Azerbaijanis do, too? “We [Azerbaijanis],” noted Nurlan Ibrahimov, head of the press service of Qarabag football club of Azerbaijan, “must kill all Armenians—children, women, the elderly. [We] need to kill [them] without [making a] distinction. No regrets, no compassion.”
Today, therefore, marking the anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide, we would do well to remember not only what happened then, but what is clearly being primed to happen again.
*Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar, The Al Qaeda Reader, and Crucified Again, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
© 2021 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.

How Iran made itself a haven for Israeli spies
Baria Alamuddin/Arab News/April 24/2021
بارعة علم الدين/هكذا حوّل ملالي إيران بلادهم إلى جنة للجواسيس الإسرائيليين
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There’s nothing new in Iran’s paranoid ayatollahs seeing spies, saboteurs and enemies under every rock. But their recent paranoia may be well founded, as the Iranian parliament and media accuse their leaders of allowing the nation to be turned into a “haven for spies,” while openly wondering about the extent of infiltration of the state’s nuclear and intelligence apparatuses.
Iranian officials fear that a substantive clandestine Israeli sabotage network is operating with impunity throughout the Islamic Republic, staging assassinations and attacks against strategically sensitive sites, and making Iran’s sprawling intelligence services look ridiculous. This Mossad network apparently has recruited significant numbers of competent Iranians willing to attack state installations — not a big surprise, given that Iran’s brightest graduates have little to look forward to beyond unemployment, poverty and theological repression.
A couple of weeks ago President Hassan Rouhani appeared on Iranian TV, proudly inaugurating a new cascade of centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear plant. Just hours later, a large explosion knocked out the site’s power system, causing centrifuges for uranium enrichment to spin out of control. According to a senior Iranian nuclear official, several thousand centrifuges were damaged or destroyed and “the main part of our enrichment capacities” was eliminated.
This has echoes of an attack last July at the same location which caused comparable damage. According to The New York Times, the earlier Natanz explosion occurred after nuclear scientists bought themselves some new furniture, and a package of explosives had been concealed inside a desk which exploded several months later, causing catastrophic damage.
Numerous other attacks against military and sensitive sites may just be the tip of the iceberg, given that neither Iran nor Israel has a stake in disclosing these incidents to the media: Details of attacks against each other’s ships emerged only recently.
Considering that the world has grappled with the nuclear threat for more than two decades, various global intelligence agencies have had copious opportunity to recruit promising Iranian physics students destined to work in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps nuclear program. The leadership is thus justified in worrying who its scientists are really working for. Sources suggest to me that this pernicious corrosion of loyalty may extend throughout intelligence, political and military infrastructures.
Disconcerted IRGC sources speak of the need for a “cleansing” of the intelligence services, and one IRGC publication asked: “Why does the security of the nuclear facility act so irresponsibly that it gets hit twice from the same hole?”
When leaders have squandered their nation’s wealth and betrayed their own citizens in this manner, little wonder so many Iranians are willing to sell out their nation to Israel.
At least six nuclear scientists have been assassinated, the latest being Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (an IRGC brigadier general), shot dead in a complex and audacious operation. In its desperation to play down the extent to which Israeli-sponsored operatives were acting with impunity on Iranian soil, state media accounts of the Fakhrizadeh assassination alluded to machineguns mounted on self-driving cars and killer robots!
Such are domestic levels of paranoia that when Iranian state media reported last week that that Quds Force deputy commander Mohammed Hosseinzadeh Hejazi had unexpectedly died of heart disease, there was rampant speculation that he too had been assassinated by Mossad. Quds Force sources muttered ominously that Hejazi’s death wasn’t “cardiac related.”
There is such a sense of national impotence and failure in the face of these attacks that, following assassinations of figures such as Fakhrizadeh and Qassim Soleimani, state media has resorted to reporting fake or massively exaggerated retaliatory operations avenging these deaths, along with dubious exposés identifying those allegedly associated with sabotage attacks.
Israeli and American intelligence agencies have also succeeded in meddling with nuclear equipment destined for export to Iran. Overseas spare parts factories have been penetrated to plant explosives or defective equipment which is then exported and installed in Iranian nuclear sites, often causing subtle damage thatIranian scientists discover only when it’s too late. Cyberattacks have likewise had a cataclysmic impact.
Iran’s response to the latest Natanz attack was to warn that they would replace the damaged centrifuges with more advanced versions, as well as notifying the International Atomic Energy Agency that it had commenced upgrading uranium to 60 percent purity — a considerable step toward weapons-grade uranium. Such a provocative path only makes matters worse for Iran: The closer Tehran gets to breakout capacity, the more international parties will feel compelled toward decisive action.
Tehran’s hapless failures to prevent Israeli sabotage may appear comical and self-inflicted. However, the risk is that, like a wounded bear, Iran is provoked into rash, escalatory responses. Just last week Iran-affiliated elements in Syria launched a surface-to-air missile which reportedly targeted a plane, but landed perilously close to Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant — a reminder of how easily a miscalculation in this shadow conflict targeting atomic sites could take us all to nuclear midnight.
In Lebanon we used to nervously joke that every other person we spoke to could be an Israeli spy, and it’s rumored that Israel has exploited the chaos in Syria to recruit large numbers of sources who can tip them off about Iranian maneuvers and missile deployments.
Israel has drastically stepped up its strikes against Iranian positions in Syria, notably against weapons production sites for precision-guided missiles. Israel staged more than 500 missile strikes in 2020 alone, and deployed 4,239 weapons against 955 targets throughout Syria over three years. Israeli military officials acknowledge that this has only slowed down Iranian encroachment. Some Iranian missile sites are immense in scale, dug into mountainsides and stretching several kilometers under the earth, out of reach of Israeli bunker-buster bombs.
Iranian MPs with knowledge of the state budget suggest that Tehran has already frittered away up to $30 billion in the Syrian arena, and has diverted vast additional resources to Hezbollah, along with funding for terrorists in Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere. Meanwhile about 65 percent of the budget is devoured by opaque institutions managed by corrupt officials, leaving a COVID-ravaged nation to starve and the economy to disintegrate.
When leaders have squandered their nation’s wealth and betrayed their own citizens in this manner, little wonder so many Iranians are willing to sell out their nation to Israel.
*Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.

Another nail in the coffin of a Palestinian state
Yossi Mekelberg/Arab News/April 24/2021
In the middle of a pandemic, rising tensions with Iran, and the Israeli prime minister sharing his time between his corruption trial and his attempts to form a government, dozens of Israeli settlers taking over houses in a Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem in the dead of night, accompanied by armed security forces, hardly made headlines.
However, the takeover by settlers belonging to the radical organisation Ateret Cohanim of three buildings in Batan Al-Hawa, Silwan, which is home to 10,000 Palestinians, was just another piece slotted in to the jigsaw puzzle of an occupation that is intent on destroying whatever chance is left for a peaceful, just and fair solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The Israel that last week marked the 73rd anniversary of its independence is more right-wing, religious, nationalistic, and messianic than ever before. And, for the Palestinians who at this very same time of the year mark their Nakba, the catastrophe of losing their homes and in many cases their freedom and their lives, Jewish settlers creeping into their neighborhoods is just another piece of evidence that their plight is far from being over.
Ateret Cohanim is one of the veteran religious settler organisations that since the 1980s has concentrated its efforts and resources, including employing some very questionable means, to evacuate Palestinians from where they have lived for generations, and replace them with Jewish settlers. In one case, still shrouded in mystery and suspicion, Ateret Cohanim bought a landmark hotel in Jaffa Gate that has been run by the same Palestinian family for generations with the aim of evicting them and controlling this strategically valuable entrance to the Old City’s Christian Quarter.
In a visit to Batan Al-Hawa over a year ago, I was reminded of what I witnessed being perpetrated by like-minded Jewish settlers in the heart of Hebron, when they claimed houses that had been owned by Jews before 1948 and, by exploiting a legal system that by its very nature is biased toward Israel’s Jews, settled in the heart of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In both places this type of creeping occupation leads to the daily harassment and eventual expulsion of Palestinians. Following this, the settlers fortify their buildings and enjoy round the clock protection by Israel’s security forces, who by this point have limited the freedom of movement of those Palestinians who continue to live there, with the absurd claim that they are a security threat. In time this situation becomes permanent, compromising the basic rights of Palestinians with the active support of elements within the Israeli government who sympathise with the ideological aim of making Palestinians as uncomfortable as possible in their own homes.
Israeli law has since its inception established double standards when it comes to land and property for Jews on the one hand and Palestinians on the other.
In the aftermath of the 1948 war, land and property of Palestinians who had left or been forced to flee were confiscated by the state for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish population, while those who previously lived in them were not allowed to return, regardless of whether they were still living as citizens of the newly founded state or outside it.
The nexus between settlers, government, and a legal framework that hands rights to Jewish settlers and leaves Palestinians with very little recourse to law is an additional ugly side of the occupation, but also one that leaves the chance of a future peace and coexistence between the two peoples somewhere between slim and nonexistent.
In contrast, land and property belonging to Jewish trusts before 1948 is managed by the Israeli General Custodian and can be claimed by Israeli Jews even if they have not been the owners. A report by the Israeli NGO Ir-Amim highlighted the strategies of Ateret Cohanim in acquiring land and properties in Batan Al-Hawa, which include employing debatable methods in acquiring them from the General Custodian or purchasing them from Palestinians.
Whether it is the case of the New Imperial Hotel in Jaffa Gate, or of Hebron, there is a strategy beyond the usual oppressive-supremacist arrogance approach of the occupier toward the occupied. Taking control of this part of the city, if successful, will constitute the largest settlement unit in a Palestinian part of the city in the Historic Basin of the Old City, linking up with other settlements to surround the Old City, and by that render a two-state solution with Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state impossible. The nexus between settlers, government, and a legal framework that hands rights to Jewish settlers and leaves Palestinians with very little recourse to law is an additional ugly side of the occupation, but also one that leaves the chance of a future peace and coexistence between the two peoples somewhere between slim and nonexistent.
Among the arguments employed by Jewish settlers to justify their ever expanding and wide ranging encroachments in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are two that are utterly disingenuous. The first is that preventing them from living anywhere they choose between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea constitutes discrimination against them as Jews. The second is that, in any case, what is the difference between East Jerusalem and anywhere else in Israel within the Green Line?
To begin with, Palestinians are prohibited by Israeli law from even returning to where they or their families lived before 1948, and most Palestinians have accepted the practicality of this, even if not ready to lose international recognition of their moral right to return and entitlement to compensation. This is an intolerable double standard, and one that could open up the entire partition plan for debate and discussion. Moreover, East Jerusalem and the West Bank are deemed by international law to constitute occupied land, and Israel within the Green Line was recognized by the UN. Should an independent Palestinian state ever be established, one whose capital is in East Jerusalem, anyone would be eligible to apply to reside there under the newly established state’s immigration law. For now, the settlers are imposing their presence by the power, including the illegal military power, of the Israeli state.
Another three buildings taken over by Jewish settlers may sound like no big deal compared to the vast grid of Jewish settlements and hundreds of thousands of settlers in the occupied territories. Nevertheless, those Palestinians who live there know that this is only another step in the plan to push them out or at least make them subject to the settlers’ whims, which are backed by the Israeli government. And at worst, they see no remedy for their predicament coming from Israeli society or the international community.
*Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. He is a regular contributor to the international written and electronic media. Twitter: @YMekelberg

Climate change challenges Arab world to cooperate
Hafed Al-Ghwell/Arab News/April 24/2021
In the middle of a pandemic, rising tensions wit
More than a billion people in nearly 200 countries marked the 51st Earth Day last week, coinciding with a world leaders’ summit on climate hosted by the White House. The stakes could not be higher, and the threats posed by a rapidly warming planet more evident.
Unlike the rest of the world, where there is a palpable sense of urgency and shared resolve on cooperating to mitigate the effects of a warming planet, the Middle East’s legacy of conflict will cast a long shadow over any attempts to address climate-related priorities. Already, the region’s ability to cope with global threats is severely diminished, not helped by the physical destruc- tion of critical infrastructure due to conflict, loss of biodiversity, dwindling water resources and large public sectors and standing armies constituting an enormous drain on already limited public finances. Unprecedented heatwaves, increasing desertification and falling water tables are contributing to the rapid deterioration of the region’s less endowed environmental conditions. However, a warming planet is as much a security threat as it is a potential cause for the myriad humanitarian disasters unique to the region.
In addition to fact that climate changes will undoubtedly increase the global urge to move away from fossil energy sources such as oil, which is the backbone of the region’s economy, there are a number of other issues.
First, increasing water scarcity in an already arid region will only spark fresh conflicts and competition, which could undo existing settlements, further complicate conflict resolution and contribute to greater instability.
Second, dwindling water resources will affect domestic agricultural productivity, increasing the volatility of global food prices and supplies, which will only politicize food security in an already vulnerable region. Food price inflation will also compound social instability, particularly in countries that lack the fiscal room for increasingly expensive food imports.
... the existing landscape is far too hostile, mistrustful and loath to cooperate, especially to tackle the still nebulous challenge that is climate change. Regardless, Arab world governments, civil societies and the global community must still act to combat climate change, adapt to its increasingly visible effects and better manage essential resources via greater regional cooperation.
Third, the effects of climate change will negatively affect sustainable economic growth in Arab countries, especially in those that will have to cope with reduced productivity in the largest hiring sector — agriculture. When combined with already high unemployment — especially among youths — reduced tax revenues as economies shrink, and a sharp increase in demand on social safety nets, governments will find it increasingly challenging to address mounting domestic woes and accelerating social breakdown.
Where societies are increasingly inundated and with governments unable to cope, the result is the forced migration of, first, rural populations to urban areas, and eventually, irregular cross-border migration to wealthier or middle-income states. After all, reduced agricultural productivity directly affects rural livelihoods and diminishes rural employment prospects. This internal migration also puts pressure on state capacities already under strain from hosting conflict refugees, which will only exacerbate tensions and resentment toward vulnerable populations.
Finally, as water resources and arable lands shrink, perceptions of dwindling necessities will only lead to an increase in the militariza- tion of strategic resources. In fact, control over these resources will not only be an imperative national security objective but also an additional dynamic in geopolitical competition or regional competition. This will create a dilemma for governments, forcing them to choose between increased militarization at the expense of public service delivery or the potential loss of control of scarce strategic resources to hostile external interests.
Fortunately, there is still some time and opportunities, however small, for Middle East governments and societies to act more aggressively in the face of the evolving impact and threat posed by runaway climate change. As knowledge and understanding evolve and deepen, there is some possibility that the shared threat posed by a warming planet will go a long way toward encouraging the Arab world to collaborate and cooperate across its myriad ideological and political divides. After all, without major whole-of-society and whole-of-government interventions and reforms, human habitability of the region will deteriorate, potentially turning the region’s nearly 750 million inhabitants into climate refugees by 2050.
Successful climate cooperation could also be an avenue for rapprochement and permanent settlement of the region’s most intractable conflicts. Unfortunately, the existing landscape is far too hostile, mistrustful and loath to cooperate, especially to tackle the still nebulous challenge that is climate change. Regardless, Arab world governments, civil societies and the global community must still act to combat climate change, adapt to its increasingly visible effects and better manage essential resources via greater regional cooperation.
Ultimately, the daunting challenges posed by climate change are far too great for any one country or region to tackle. Thus, the shared consequences and threats, security-related or otherwise, should incentivize cooperation over competition from cutting emissions to contributing and committing to multilateral strategies to combat as well as adapt to climate change.
• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy institute at the john hopkins university school of Advanced international studies. Twitter: @HafedalGhwell