English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For May 31/2022
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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Bible Quotations For today
Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint John 12/26-30:”Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour. ‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.”

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on May 30-31/2022
On Int'l Day of UN Peacekeepers, UNIFIL affirms that its partnerships are key to lasting peace
STL to announce verdicts against Merhi and Oneissi on June 16
Report: Macron preparing to visit Lebanon anew
Report: Aoun, allies prefer Miqati for PM but won't allow him to form govt.
Parliament Speaker election: Will FPM vote for Berri?
Berri urges supporters not to fire in the air on Tuesday
Berri chairs 'Development and Liberation' bloc meeting, receives Akkar MPs delegation
Bou Saab meets with Khazen, Franjieh and Tawk
Raad to rivals: Where is the non-Israeli occupation in Lebanon?
Workshop held to assess creation of ISF unit on domestic violence
Projects launch event marks beginning of partnership between UNEP, Nusaned
Lebanon Questions Auto Tycoon Ghosn after Interpol Notice
Lebanon’s political paralysis likely to lead to worsening of economic crisis

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on May 30-31/2022
Russian foreign minister forced to deny Vladimir Putin is seriously ill
‘No Sane Person’ Would Believe Putin Is Seriously Ill, Says the Kremlin
Heavy Fighting as Russian Troops Enter Outskirts of Sievierodonetsk
Israeli PM Declares Iranian Regime ‘Immunity’ is Over
UN Nuclear Watchdog Reports Scant Progress in Standoff with Iran
Iran Authorities Seize Vessel Allegedly Carrying Smuggled Fuel
Iraq, Iran Discuss Environmental Issues
Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile 18 times over 2015 deal limit: IAEA
Rockets fired at Iraq military base with foreign troops
Angry Iranians confront cleric at Abadan tower collapse that killed 32
Washington Dissatisfied with Israel’s Ties with Sudan
Israel Warns Against Travel to Turkey Citing Iran Assassination
Turkey's Erdogan Says Not Waiting Permission to Carry out Syria Operation
Erdogan Discusses Turkey’s Syria Incursion Plans with Putin
Bodies Pulled from Wreckage of Missing Nepal Plane
Egyptian Army Kills 10 Terrorists in Sinai
Canada/G7 Foreign Ministers’ Statement on the launch of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile by North Korea

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on May 30-31/2022
Why, for the UN, Is One Mosque Massacre So Much Worse than Countless Church Massacres?/Raymond Ibrahim/ Gatestone Institute/May 30/2022
Why It’s So Hard to Pity Muslims/Raymond Ibrahim/Mon, May 30, 2022
On the Margins of Alexander Dugin: Dark 'Particularities'/Isam al-Khafaji/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/May 30/2022
From the Japanese 'Mariam' to the Russian Vladimir/Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/May 30/2022
Biden Is Caught Between Big Tech and Black Voters/Rachel Rosenthal/Bloomberg/May 30/2022
Iran regime struggles to survive as it grapples with popular protests/Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami/Arab News/May 30/ 2022
Did Biden change his mind?/Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Asharq al-Awsat/May 30/ 2022

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on May 30-31/2022
On Int'l Day of UN Peacekeepers, UNIFIL affirms that its partnerships are key to lasting peace
Naharnet/May 30/2022
UNIFIL on Monday honored the contribution of partners in communities, civil society, religious institutions, troop-contributing countries, and others, as the mission marked the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. As May 29 fell on a Sunday this year, UNIFIL held its ceremony today at its Naqoura headquarters. Head of Mission and Force Commander Major General Aroldo Lázaro paid tribute to the tens of thousands of U.N. peacekeepers who have served with UNIFIL over its 44-year existence, including over 11,000 military and civilian personnel serving today. “I join the world today in paying tribute to the bravery and commitment of our civilian and military peacekeepers,” he told peacekeepers and the assembled audience. “Here in Lebanon, you have made an incredible difference, as shown by the unprecedented almost 16-year period of stability we have seen.”Noting the theme of this year’s Peacekeepers’ Day – “People. Peace. Progress. The Power of Partnerships” – he acknowledged the mission’s many partners. “We could not do our work without our numerous partners in communities, civil society, religious institutions, the media, governments, troop-contributing countries, U.N. institutions, and others,” he continued. “And we could not accomplish all that we do without our strategic partners, the Lebanese Armed Forces, with whom we work and coordinate with each and every day. Our strong relationship with the LAF has proven critical to maintaining calm and stability in our area of operations and along the Blue Line.”During the ceremony, Major General Lázaro and a representative of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) laid wreaths in tribute to fallen peacekeepers. Since 1978, 324 UNIFIL peacekeepers have given their lives to the cause of peace in south Lebanon. Over 4,000 U.N. peacekeepers have lost their lives on missions around the world since 1948. The UNIFIL head also presented the Dag Hammarskjöld medal to the family of a UNIFIL peacekeeper who lost his life while serving for peace. “We honor their memories by continuing our work to accomplish the mission for which they made the ultimate sacrifice: the goal of a lasting peace,” said Lázaro. In 2002, May 29 was designated as the International Day of U.N. Peacekeepers to pay tribute to "the professionalism, dedication, and courage of the military and civilian peacekeepers serving in U.N. peacekeeping operations," and to remember those who lost their lives for the cause of peace. The date was chosen to commemorate the establishment of the first peacekeeping mission, the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), whose more than 50 observers currently work with UNIFIL for peace and stability in south Lebanon. On the occasion, UNIFIL also announced the launch of its new TikTok account, @unifilpeacekeepers, showcasing videos about the mission’s activities.

STL to announce verdicts against Merhi and Oneissi on June 16
Naharnet/May 30/2022
The Appeals Chamber of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has issued a scheduling order for the pronouncement of the Sentencing Judgment in the case of Prosecutor v. Merhi and Oneissi in a public session on June 16.
On 18 August 2020, the Trial Chamber pronounced its Judgment in the Ayyash et al. case and unanimously found Hizbullah operative Salim Jamil Ayyash guilty beyond reasonable doubt of all counts charged against him in the amended consolidated indictment.
The Trial Chamber further found Hizbullah operatives Hassan Habib Merhi, Hussein Hassan Oneissi, and Assad Hassan Sabra not guilty of all counts charged against them. The Prosecution later filed an appeal against the acquittal of Merhi and Oneissi.
On 10 March 2022, the Appeals Chamber issued its Appeal Judgment and unanimously found Merhi and Oneissi guilty beyond reasonable doubt of all counts charged against them in the amended consolidated indictment.
On the same day, the Appeals Chamber issued a scheduling order for submissions on sentencing. Pursuant to the scheduling order, the Prosecution, the LRV, Counsel for Merhi, and Counsel for Mr Oneissi filed written submissions on sentencing.
The Hizbullah operatives are accused of involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Merhi and Oneissi have been convicted of five charges linked to the assassination, including conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and being accomplices to intentional homicide.
The unanimous appeals decision said that judges in the original trial verdict "committed errors of law invalidating the Judgment and errors of fact occasioning a miscarriage of justice," the tribunal said in a statement.
Ayyash had been convicted as a co-conspirator on five charges linked to his involvement in the 2005 suicide truck bombing that killed Hariri and 21 others and wounded 226 people. Prosecutors said Merhi and Oneissi played "a significant role" in the plot by distributing a video with a false claim of responsibility after the bombing. "The acts for which they have been convicted were callous and manipulative, designed not only to shield the real perpetrators from justice but to deceive the Lebanese people," Prosecutor Norman Farrell said in a statement. All the suspects were tried in their absence as they were never arrested. Farrell said "accountability does not end with their conviction. Merhi and Oneissi, along with their co-conspirator Salim Ayyash remain fugitives. Justice demands that they be arrested."
The tribunal's 2020 verdict was met with anger and disappointment in parts of Lebanon after judges said there was no evidence that Hizbullah's leadership and Syria were involved in the attack, despite saying the assassination happened as Hariri and his political allies were discussing calling for Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanon.

Report: Macron preparing to visit Lebanon anew
Naharnet/May 30/2022
French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to visit Lebanon anew after he finalizes some pressing domestic files, a media report said on Monday. “He has recently informed one of his top aides in the Elysee’s special crisis cell for Lebanon that he intends to visit Beirut immediately after the June 19 French parliamentary elections, and after he carries out changes to his international affairs team,” Lebanon’s privately-run Central News Agency reported. “The French president has asked the Lebanon crisis cell to prepare for the visit, which he wants it to be decisive as to preventing Lebanon’s collapse and averting a possible presidential vacuum,” the agency added. While in Beirut, the French leader will hold meetings with top officials, political leaders and parliamentary change forces to “explore their plans for the current period,” the agency said. “He will also assess the course of the formation of the government, which is supposed to kicked off after parliament’s internal elections tomorrow,” the Central News Agency added. Macron will advise the Lebanese to form a government that would be able to “grasp the delicacy and seriousness of the current period, a government that can take bold decisions and that can negotiate with the International Monetary Fund to seek the necessary support for salvation,” the agency went on to say.

Report: Aoun, allies prefer Miqati for PM but won't allow him to form govt.
Naharnet/May 30/2022
President Michel Aoun is committed to calling for binding parliamentary elections to name a new premier as soon as possible, in order to impose a PM “designation without (government) formation” equation, sources informed on Aoun’s choices said. “This is the likely choice, seeing as it allows the President to evade responsibility for blocking government’s formation in front of the international community,” the sources told the Nidaa al-Watan newspaper in remarks published Monday. “The Presidency and its allies prefer to keep PM Najib Miqati in the post… and the Free Patriotic Movement chief would then assume the mission of imposing crippling conditions on Miqati that would prevent the formation of his new government,” the daily added. This camp would then “wait for domestic and foreign settlements that would put the governmental and presidential junctures in one basket, even if this requires plunging the country into a presidential vacuum that would give the Presidency’s powers to the caretaker cabinet,” Nidaa al-Watan said. “The FPM and the Shiite Duo have a significant ministerial bloc in (the caretaker cabinet) as well as its main and sovereign portfolios, which will not be easy for them to maintain should a new government be formed in light of the change in the map of the parliamentary majority,” the newspaper added.

Parliament Speaker election: Will FPM vote for Berri?
Naharnet/May 30/2022
Hizbullah has begun an attempt to bridge the gap between its allies in order to secure more votes for Nabih Berri as a Speaker for the new Parliament, al-Akhbar newspaper reported Monday. The daily said it had learned from informed sources that "there is still hope" for the Free Patriotic Movement to change its stand on Berri's re-election, as the FPM has sensed positivity from the Shiite Duo regarding the nomination of MP Elias Bou Saab as a Deputy Speaker. Bou Saab had visited Berri on Saturday to inform him of his candidacy. "The meeting was positive and I was satisfied," Bou Saab said.
The FPM denied any Speaker-Deputy Speaker bargain that consists of the FPM voting for Berri in return for electing Bou Saab as Deputy Speaker, while al-Akhbar said it had learned that at least four MPs from the FPM will vote for Berri. Meanwhile, Berri's sources have told al-Akhbar that 60 to 64 votes for Berri have been secured so far. He had won with 98 votes in 2018 with only 30 blank votes. Blank votes are expected to be higher on Tuesday as reformists MPs and the two largest Christian blocs in Parliament -- the FPM and the Lebanese Forces -- have said they won't vote for Berri, the only nominee for the post. Hizbullah, Amal, al-Marada, the Progressive Socialist Party, the Akkar Development bloc, the Tashnag party and al-Ahbash will vote for Berri, the daily said.

Berri urges supporters not to fire in the air on Tuesday
Naharnet/May 30/2022
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri on Monday called on supporters not to fire in the air when he gets elected for a new term as parliament speaker on Tuesday.
In a statement addressed to “the Lebanese in all regions,” Berri, who is running for the post uncontested, called for “total refrainment from opening fire during the organization of any celebratory event, especially those related to the election of a parliament speaker tomorrow.”“The bullets that get fired in the air had turned joy into grief and harmed people in their lives and properties. Today you are asked to stand by your people in these dire circumstances, in order to strengthen their civil peace and protect their lives and properties,” the Speaker added.

Berri chairs 'Development and Liberation' bloc meeting, receives Akkar MPs delegation
NNANaharnet/May 30/2022
House Speaker Nabih Berri chaired on Monday a meeting for the "Development and Liberation" parliamentary bloc, with discussions focusing on the current situation, especially at the economic and livelihood levels, in addition to legislative affairs and tomorrow’s Parliament session. Conferees also shed light on the latest developments in occupied Palestine. Separately, Berri met with a delegation of "Akkar MPs" parliament bloc, comprising lawmakers Walid Baarini, Sajih Attieh, Mohammad Sleiman, and Ahmad Rustom. Speaking to reporters following the meeting, MP Baarini indicated that his bloc will vote for Berri on Tuesday and nominate MP Sajih Attieh for the Deputy Speaker post.

Bou Saab meets with Khazen, Franjieh and Tawk
Naharnet/May 30/2022
The MPs of the Independent National Bloc -- Farid al-Khazen, Tony Franjieh and William Tawk – held a meeting Monday with MP Elias Bou Saab of the Free Patriotic Movement, who is running for the deputy parliament speaker post. The meeting, on the eve of a parliamentary session to elect a speaker and a deputy speaker, was held at Khazen’s residence in Jounieh. It was also attended by ex-minister Youssef Saadeh of the Marada Movement. The talks tackled “the latest developments in the local arena and the issue of the elections that will be held tomorrow in parliament,” the state-run National News Agency reported. The conferees also agreed on “continuous cooperation among them,” NNA added. The meeting was preceded by another between Khazen, Franjieh and Tawk in which they discussed how other “independent” MPs can join their bloc.

Raad to rivals: Where is the non-Israeli occupation in Lebanon?
Naharnet/May 30/2022
MP Mohammed Raad, the head of Hizbullah’s parliamentary bloc, noted Monday that there is no occupation in Lebanon “other than the Israeli occupation.”“Show us if there is an occupation in Lebanon now other than the Israeli occupation so that we fight it with you. Enough with the deception of people. The elections are over and so are electoral slogans. Let us work for the sake of the people and the country now,” Raad said. Addressing the reformist MPs who won in the latest elections, Raad added: “We are ready for any cooperation, regardless of your political and ideological background. We are ready to cooperate based on the political slogans that you had voices as to fighting corruption and reviving the economic situation.”“In the issue of sovereignty, we’re the ones who are proposing to you our program. Come let us prevent foreigners from extending their hands to demarcate our maritime border and come let us decide by ourselves the future of gas and oil extraction in our waters, and also on our soil,” the lawmaker went on to say.

Workshop held to assess creation of ISF unit on domestic violence
Naharnet/Naharnet/May 30/2022
In Lebanon, domestic violence isn’t a recent problem. Many women were exposed to either verbal or physical abuse during their lives. Within the EU-financed project “Promoting Community Policing in Lebanon”, a workshop has been held to assess the creation of an Internal Security Forces Unit on Domestic Violence and assist the ISF to overcome any situation related to domestic violence. The Community Policing project presented the experience of the Spanish National Police in order to bring the EU’s best practices to Lebanon to support the establishment and operational capacity of the ISF Specialized Unit on domestic violence. A Spanish team of two police officers, from the UFAM (Unit of attention to the family and women), explained the work of the Spanish Unit on gender-based violence and their dedication to the protection of victims of gender violence and vulnerable persons. This workshop aimed to strengthen the fight against domestic violence in Lebanon with a mission to pursue the beginning of an important challenge for the ISF.

Projects launch event marks beginning of partnership between UNEP, Nusaned
Naharnet/May 30/2022
 The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Representative and Regional Director for West Asia, Sami Dimassi, together with the President of Nusaned, Ghaida Nawam, have signed an agreement to mark the start of their collaboration in implementing a series of pilot projects. The agreement falls within the SwitchMed II initiative, funded by the European Union, aiming to provide support mechanisms to countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean to switch to sustainable consumption and production patterns. The series of projects launched Monday will create green and circular local businesses, starting with restaurants by introducing sustainability, and environmental consciousness, wherein return it will add to their economic value. By designing an integrated Circular Economy model in the Mar Mikhael – Gemmayze neighborhood in Beirut, plastics will be diverged from landfills and food waste will be turned into compost. The projects will engage local communities to raise awareness and spark behavioral change by ensuring that waste is kept to a minimum and allowing the regeneration of natural systems. This partnership will deliver a long-lasting impact whereby results are shared and encouraged to be replicated across Lebanon. In addition to the agreement, a Letter of Intent was signed in April 2022 by both entities to outline common areas of interest, and to encourage cooperation and future collaboration between the two parties. On this occasion, Dimassi noted that the “UNEP came back to Lebanon in October 2021, well after Lebanon had witnessed the tragic Beirut blast along with the socio-economic crises that have resulted in profound effects on the country and especially on those who are marginalized and disadvantaged." He added that, "UNEP alone cannot succeed in making a difference.""Collaborating with dedicated local organizations and implementing projects with young and vibrant teams, is essential to establish sustainable and long-lasting impacts. We want this project to create a ripple effect, here and across the region, to engage as many stakeholders as possible and inspire the policy action," Dimassi added. Nawam for her part expressed her pride in this collaboration and her gratitude to UNEP for entrusting Nusaned in being the implementing partner of this initiative and added: “Two weeks ago, Nusaned became an NGO accredited to UNEP. We are thrilled with this responsibility, especially being a two-year old local NGO. Over the course of the projects, we are launching today, we will develop circular economy schemes in the neighborhood. We will be partnering with the local community and the restaurants whom we have supported in response to the Beirut Blast and who believe in us as advocates of change for a cleaner and healthier environment. We will continue to utilize our presence to ensure sustainable long-lasting impacts. In doing so, and with the help of UNEP, we hope to send a powerful signal of intent to policy makers to follow.” The event was concluded with a short tour around the Nusaned Hub where some of the planned project activities will take place. UNEP is the leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system, and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment. Nusaned is a Lebanese-based Non-Governmental Organization. Their aim is to empower and enable marginalized Lebanese communities by supporting sustainable development through a community-based approach. By offering access to food security, shelter and continuous opportunities for creating productive economies, Nusaned works on building sustainable Lebanese communities that are self-sustaining and capable.

Lebanon Questions Auto Tycoon Ghosn after Interpol Notice
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
A judge on Monday questioned disgraced auto tycoon Carlos Ghosn in Beirut, days after Lebanon received a wanted notice for him from Interpol, judicial officials said. Lebanon received a new Red Notice from Interpol 10 days ago, after the French prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Nanterre said last month that it issued an international arrest warrant for the former head of Nissan and Renault and four other people based on an investigation opened in 2019 into money laundering and abuse of company assets. Ghosn was questioned over money laundering and benefiting from deals for Nissan and Renault and was allowed to leave after the questioning, said the judicial officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The Lebanese judge, Imad Kabalan, a public prosecutor at the Court of Cassation, asked French authorities to hand over the details of the case filed against Ghosn and "if it is proven that he had committed crimes of money laundering and abuse of company assets," he will be put on trial in Lebanon since he holds Lebanese citizenship, the judge added. A Red Notice is not an arrest warrant and does not require Lebanon to arrest Ghosn. It was the second Red Notice that Lebanon received in the case; the first was issued in January 2020, a few days after Ghosn fled Japan for Lebanon in a gripping escape. Prosecutors are investigating millions of dollars in alleged suspect payments made between the Renault-Nissan alliance and Suhail Bahwan Automobiles, a vehicle distributor company in Oman. Ghosn noted last month after the French arrest warrant was issued that he’s barred from leaving Lebanon anyway. Lebanon does not extradite its citizens. Ghosn has citizenship in Lebanon, France and Brazil.

Lebanon’s political paralysis likely to lead to worsening of economic crisis
Arab News/May 30/2022
Uncertainty still prevails in Lebanon two weeks after elections that produced a parliament divided into several blocs. This raises the possibility of political paralysis that may delay the formation of a new government and the election of a new president of the republic.
The legislature has yet to hold its first session, with major blocs divided over who to elect as speaker of parliament. This, analysts fear, could hinder the pushing through of financial and economic reforms that constitute preconditions for Lebanon to obtain support from the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions. Analysts stress that the absence of a clear majority bloc may cause the Lebanese political dispute to endure and fester. Lebanese expert Karim Emile Bitar takes the view that “in the event that political reform is not carried out within the next four years, there is a high probability that all Lebanese state institutions will collapse.”Fitch Ratings said on May 27, “The inconclusive outcome of Lebanon’s elections on 15 May will make it challenging for any camp to form a stable governing majority in parliament, further complicating the country’s ability to implement financial and economic reforms”.
Healthcare worker holds a placard reading "Hospitals will close their doors, we cannot continue this way" during a protest against banks restricting cash dealings for hospitals, in front of Lebanon's Central Bank building in Beirut, Lebanon May 26, 2022.
The May 15 ballot created a parliamentary landscape that is divided into several blocs, with Hezbollah and its allies losing the majority they had wielded since 2018.
Noting that “Hezbollah and Amal have in the past been sceptical over IMF programme conditionality,” Fitch said, “that opposition has become less categorical over the past year and the weakening of the pro-Hezbollah bloc will give greater voice to other parties, but we believe that implementing the IMF’s preconditions will still prove challenging.”
It added, “Government formation has historically been a lengthy process and the lack of a clear winning faction in this latest election suggests it will again take time. Reforms could also be stymied by domestic opposition or further unrest.”
The outgoing Lebanese government had approved a “financial recovery plan,” on May 20, before becoming a caretaker cabinet.
The plan includes cancelling a “significant part” of the Central Bank of Lebanon’s foreign currency obligations towards commercial banks and dissolving banks that are not eligible to continue by November. But the Association of Banks in Lebanon objected to the road map a few days ago, saying that it puts the full losses of the economic collapse in the country on the shoulders of depositors. The country had clinched a provisional agreement with the International Monetary Fund in April but several measures prerequisite to the release of funds, including amendments to banking secrecy regulations and a capital control bill, have yet to be adopted by parliament. The pound has lost more than 95% of its value since 2019, when it stood at 1,500 just before the country tumbled into an economic meltdown. Lebanon's three-year financial crisis has pushed three-quarters of the population into poverty and food prices have gone up more than 11-fold, with new price hikes seen in supermarkets this week.
For more than two years, Lebanon has been suffering an unprecedented severe economic crisis, with a record collapse in the value of the local currency against the dollar, a shortage of fuel and medicine and an increase in food prices. In June of last year, the World Bank described the calamity in Lebanon as among three most severe crises since the mid-nineteenth century. With the worsening of the economic challenges in the country, the crime rate has soared during the first three months of this year, compared to the same period in previous years, according to a study published last April in Beirut.
Analyst and political writer Tony Boulos said, “The forces currently holding power, namely Hezbollah, the Amal Movement and the Free Patriotic Movement, no longer have the parliamentary majority and therefore may resort to obstructing the constitutional process”.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on May 30-31/2022
Russian foreign minister forced to deny Vladimir Putin is seriously ill
Connor Parker/Yahoo News UK/Mon, May 30, 2022
Russia's foreign minister has been forced to issue a rare denial that Vladimir Putin is seriously ill.
Putin's health is rarely discussed in Russia but the denial came as rumours spread that Putin's ability to lead had been impacted by his health during a crucial time for his country as it engages in the war in Ukraine and is beset by international sanctions. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told French broadcaster TF1 "I don’t think that sane people can see in this person signs of some kind of illness or ailment."He said that Putin appeared in public every day. Watch: Sergei Lavrov denies Vladimir Putin is ‘dying from cancer’ "You can watch him on screens, read and listen to his speeches," Lavrov said in comments released by the Russian foreign ministry. The Russian president turns 70 this year and has in charge of his country in some way or another for more than 20 years. The rumours have been swirling for months, with various western and Ukrainian media claiming they had spoken to senior members of the Russian government on the condition of anonymity about the president's health. An FSB officer (Russian secret service) told the Sunday Mirror: “We are told he is suffering from headaches and when he appears on TV he needs pieces of paper with everything written in huge letters to read what he’s going to say. “They are so big each page can only hold a couple of sentences. His eyesight is seriously worsening.”The spy added that Putin’s limbs are “now also shaking uncontrollably”. Other reports have suggested doctors have told Putin he only has around three years to live. An unnamed oligarch has also been recorded saying the Russian president has blood cancer.A recording where he was discussing Putin's health was published by New Lines, a US magazine.So far no one has gone publically on record to say Putin does have blood cancer.

‘No Sane Person’ Would Believe Putin Is Seriously Ill, Says the Kremlin
Barbie Latza Nadeau/The Daily Beast./Mon, May 30, 2022
Persistent rumors that Russian President Vladimir Putin is suffering from cancer can be laid to rest, according to his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. “I don’t think that sane people can see in this person signs of some kind of illness or ailment,” Lavrov—whose relationship the truth is at best sketchy—told France TF1 television. “You can watch him on screens, read and listen to his speeches. I leave it to the conscience of those who spread such rumors despite daily opportunities to assess how anyone is looking.”Former member of Britain’s MI6 agency have claimed in recent weeks that Putin is seriously ill, possibly suffering from cancer. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, predicted that he would be too sick to lead the country by next year, and controversial former head of the agency’s Russia desk, Christopher Steele, said he had been informed that Putin was “quite seriously ill” earlier this month. Rumors intensified about the 69-year-old autocrat last year when he was noticeably puffy. Those rumors spread as various photos of him looked like they had been altered, perhaps to hide shaking or other ailments. Then over the weekend, an FSB officer reportedly told a former FSB officer who had defected that Putin has “no more than two to three years to stay alive” attributing the ailment to a “severe form of rapidly progressing cancer” that cause his limbs to tremble uncontrollably. The defector told the Sunday Mirror that he was told that Putin suffers debilitating headaches and is losing his vision. “We are told he is suffering from headaches and when he appears on TV he needs pieces of paper with everything written in huge letters to read what he’s going to say,” the Mirror reported. “They are so big each page can only hold a couple of sentences. His eyesight is seriously worsening.” Putin Rumors Run Wild as He Shrouds Himself in Secrecy Lavrov made the comments during an interview riddled with untruths, including that Russia is beating Ukraine’s “neo-Nazi regime.” He also said that liberating the eastern part of the country was an “unconditional priority,” implying that perhaps some peace deal could be negotiated if it included the forfeiture of the areas that have been in various stages of armed conflict since 2014. The foreign minister also said with a straight face that Russian soldiers were under “strict orders categorically to avoid attacks and strikes on civilian infrastructure.”The United Nations estimates that 4,041 civilians have died and nearly 4,800 have been injured since Russia invaded. More than 14 million people have been displaced, either internally within the Ukraine or to Europe and elsewhere. It is unclear how many members of the Ukraine

Heavy Fighting as Russian Troops Enter Outskirts of Sievierodonetsk
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
Russian troops have entered the outskirts of the Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor said on Monday, describing "very fierce" fighting in the ruins of a city that has become the focus of Moscow's offensive. Russia has concentrated its firepower on the last major population center still held by Ukrainian forces in the eastern Luhansk province, in a push to achieve one of President Vladimir Putin's stated objectives after three months of war. Incessant shelling has left Ukrainian forces defending ruins in Sievierodonetsk, but their refusal to withdraw has slowed the massive Russian offensive across the Donbas region. Luhansk region governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russian troops had advanced into the city's southeastern and northeastern fringes. But he said Ukrainian forces had driven the Russians out of the village of Toshkivka to the south, potentially frustrating Moscow's push to encircle the area.
"Capturing Sievierodonetsk is a fundamental task for the occupiers ... We do all we can to hold this advance," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a televised speech. "Some 90% of buildings are damaged. More than two-thirds of the city's housing stock has been completely destroyed."
European Union leaders were due to meet on Monday and Tuesday to discuss a new sanctions package against Russia, potentially including an oil embargo. But EU governments have been unable to reach agreement in a month of talks, with Hungary in particular saying it cannot afford to shut off the Russian oil that supplies its refineries through the huge Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline, whose name means "Friendship". Ahead of the summit, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck expressed fears that EU unity was "starting to crumble". Draft conclusions, seen by Reuters, indicated there would be little in terms of new decisions.But EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that "there will be an agreement in the end", with a deal on the next sanctions package by Monday afternoon.
'Unconditional priority'
After failing to capture Kyiv in March, Russia announced that the focus of its "special military operation" was now to seize the entire Donbas region, consisting of two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, that Moscow claims on behalf of separatist proxies. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday said the "liberation" of the Donbas was an "unconditional priority" for Moscow. Capturing Sievierodonetsk and its twin city Lysychansk on the opposite bank of the Siverskyi Donets river would give Russia effective control of Luhansk province, a point at which the Kremlin might be able to declare some form of victory. But by focusing its effort on a battle for the single small city - Sievierodonetsk housed only around 100,000 people before the war - Russia might be leaving other territory open to eventual Ukrainian counter-strikes. The past few days have seen initial signs of a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south, where Moscow is trying to consolidate its control of Kherson province, captured in the early weeks after it launched its invasion in February. Kyiv says its forces pushed back Russian troops in recent days to defensive positions in three villages - Andriyivka, Lozove and Bilohorka - all located on the south bank of the Inhulets River that forms the border of Kherson. The Institute for the Study of War think tank said this Ukrainian counterattack so far did not appear likely to retake substantial territory in the near term, but could disrupt Russian operations and force Moscow to reinforce the area. Just to the north of the Kherson front, a suspected Russian strike damaged the center of the Ukrainian-held town of Novyi Buh overnight, the town council said on Telegram. Russia said it had also struck a shipyard in Mykolayiv, a major Ukrainian-held port just west of Kherson. Separately, French Foreign Affairs Minister Catherine Colonna was due to meet Zelenskiy in Kyiv later on Monday to offer more support, the French foreign affairs ministry said. The Ukrainian government urged the West to provide more longer-range weapons to turn the tide in the war, now in its fourth month. Zelenskiy said he expected "good news" in the coming days. A Ukrainian soldier on patrol in trenches near the town of Bakhmut, southwest of Sievierodonetsk, spoke of a nagging fear that his government could be drawn into negotiating an end to the conflict that would result in Ukraine losing territory. "You know now what I'm most afraid of, now that the fighting is so intense, so tough?" Dmytro, a former English language teacher, told Reuters television. "That we would be told: That's it, stop it, we have a ceasefire.""A negotiated settlement can only happen on Ukrainian terms, and at present if it happened it would be a horror."

Israeli PM Declares Iranian Regime ‘Immunity’ is Over
London - Tel Aviv - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Sunday Iran would not go unpunished for instigating attacks through its proxies, speaking a week after the assassination in Tehran of a Revolutionary Guards colonel that has been blamed on Israel. Bennett’s statement indicates that the shadow war between Iran and Israel is escalating. Bennett's office, which oversees intelligence agency Mossad, has declined to comment on the assassination. However, in broadcast remarks to his ministers on Sunday, Bennett accused Iran of repeatedly targeting Israeli interests. “For decades, the Iranian regime has practiced terrorism against Israel and the region by means of proxies, emissaries, but the head of the octopus, Iran itself, has enjoyed immunity,” Bennett said. “As we have said before, the era of the Iranian regime's immunity is over. Those who finance terrorists, those who arm terrorists and those who send terrorists will pay the full price," he added. Hassan Sayad Khudaei, accused by Israel of plotting attacks against its citizens worldwide, was shot dead at the wheel of his car by two people on a motorcycle. The tactic echoed previous killings in Iran that focused on nuclear scientists and were widely pinned on Mossad.
Immediately after the assassination in Tehran, the government-affiliated media outlet ISNA said that the Revolutionary Guards had discovered and arrested members of an Israeli intelligence network. On Wednesday, an explosion at Iran’s Parchin military complex killed an engineer. The New York Times reported Friday that the attack was carried out by quadcopter suicide drones, in an attack that fits a pattern of previous strikes that have been attributed to Israel. The alleged drone strike came after gunmen on May 22 killed Khudaei in the middle of Tehran. According to the Times report, Israeli officials claimed Khudaei was deputy head of the so-called Unit 840, a shadowy division within the IRGC’s expeditionary Quds Force that carries out kidnappings and assassinations of figures outside of Iran, including against Israelis. His killing was meant to warn Iran that the group should stop its activities, the intelligence official quoted by the Times said.

UN Nuclear Watchdog Reports Scant Progress in Standoff with Iran
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 20220
Iran has not credibly answered the UN nuclear watchdog's long-standing questions on the origin of uranium particles found at three undeclared sites despite a fresh push for a breakthrough, the agency said in a report seen by Reuters on Monday. The lack of progress could set up a new diplomatic clash with the West when the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation Board of Governors meets next week. If Western powers seek a resolution criticizing Tehran it could deal a further blow to stalled efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. The fresh quarterly IAEA report detailing Iran's continued failure to provide satisfactory answers raises pressure on the United States and its allies to take action against Iran at the board meeting, since Tehran and the IAEA announced a renewed push in March to clear things up by now. "Iran has not provided explanations that are technically credible in relation to the Agency's findings at those locations," the report said, adding: "The Agency remains ready to engage without delay with Iran to resolve all of these matters." A separate quarterly IAEA report seen by Reuters said Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60%, close to the roughly 90% that is weapons grade and in a form that can be enriched further, is estimated to have grown by 9.9 kg to 43.1 kg. That amounts to slightly more than what the IAEA calls a "significant quantity", defined as "the approximate amount of nuclear material for which the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive device cannot be excluded". A senior diplomat cautioned, however, that in practice it would take more than 55 kg of uranium enriched to 60% to make one bomb because some material is wasted during enrichment. "As of the moment you enrich you lose material," he said. Western powers fear Iran is getting closer to being able to sprint towards producing a nuclear bomb if it chose to, though Iran says its intentions are entirely peaceful.

Iran Authorities Seize Vessel Allegedly Carrying Smuggled Fuel
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May
Iranian authorities have seized a vessel carrying 106,500 liters of smuggled fuel and arrested nine crew members, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Monday. "On the orders of the Qeshm Prosecutor, the officers of the marine base, while identifying a vessel carrying 106,500 liters of smuggled fuel, started the process of seizing it," said the chief justice of Hormozgan province. Iran has frequently seized boats it says are being used for smuggling oil in the Gulf.

Iraq, Iran Discuss Environmental Issues
Baghdad - Fadhel al-Nashmi/Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May
Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi affirmed that strengthening the partnership with regional countries will boost regional integration and enhance the ability to confront common environmental challenges. Kadhimi received the Iranian Vice President and Head of the Environmental Protection Organization, Ali Salajegheh, visiting Baghdad. The PM said that the historical relations between Iraq and Iran are supported by the mutual desire to develop cooperation in various fields, noting that it is everyone's responsibility to create practical solutions to environmental challenges and reverse the effect of climate change.
Salajegheh expressed his country's desire to resolve the outstanding issues between the two countries in the environmental field, reiterating the need to strengthen bilateral cooperation in this field. He said that solving drought problems and confronting the threat of dust storms has become a common regional demand and requires all efforts to develop effective solutions. According to a statement by the Iraqi government, the two officials discussed strengthening bilateral cooperation with other regional countries to face environmental challenges in a way that guarantees the common rights and interests of all countries fairly.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein also met with Salajegheh and his delegation on Sunday. Speaking at a press conference after the meeting, Hussein announced that Iraq and Iran had agreed to hold continuous meetings to discuss climate changes, desertification, and dust storms. The Iranian Minister of Environment will soon visit Iraq to discuss common environmental issues. Climate change is not specific to a particular country but instead crosses borders, said Hussein, noting that the meeting also addressed issues of managing water resources between Iraq and Iran. The Iraqi minister announced that there would be exchanged visits and meetings to discuss the issues of water and common rivers. For his part, Salajegheh said the meeting was a good start for cooperation on the dust storms, underlying the urgency of responding to drought. He announced that the two countries would cooperate in sand dunes stabilization, adding that the Iranian Minister of Energy would visit Iraq soon. The Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources accuses Iran of deliberately diverting the course of more than 30 rivers inside its territory, which stops their flow within Iraqi territory, drying up most of the rivers and lakes in the east and north of the country. Political science professor Ihsan al-Shammari believes Iran is probably trying to contain the widespread Iraqi resentment following the water problem and Tehran's intentional moves. He told Asharq Al-Awsat that the visit may be limited to the environmental aspects and the water problem and will not address political issues and the delay in forming the government because senior Iranian officials handle such matters.

Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile 18 times over 2015 deal limit: IAEA
AFP/May 30, 2022
VIENNA: The UN nuclear watchdog said Monday that it estimated Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had grown to more than 18 times the limit laid down in Tehran’s 2015 deal with world powers. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in its latest report on Iran’s nuclear program that it “estimated that, as of May 15, 2022, Iran’s total enriched stockpile was 3,809.3 kilograms.”The limit in the 2015 deal was set at 300 kg (660 pounds) of a specific compound, the equivalent of 202.8 kg of uranium.The report also say s that Iran is continuing its enrichment of uranium to levels higher than the 3.67 percent limit in the deal. The stockpile of uranium enriched up to 20 percent is now estimated to be 238.4 kg, up 56.3 kg since the last report in March, while the amount enriched to 60 percent stands at 43.1 kg, an increase of 9.9 kg. Enrichment levels of around 90 percent are required for use in a nuclear weapon. Iran has always insisted its nuclear program is peaceful. A diplomatic source said the amount of uranium enriched to 60 percent now exceeded the IAEA’s threshold of a “significant quantity,” defined by the agency as an approximate amount above which “the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive cannot be excluded.” However, the same source pointed out that some uranium would be lost during the process of further enrichment, meaning that in reality “you would need more than 55 kilograms” for that purpose. In a separate report also issued on Monday, the IAEA reiterated that it still had questions which were “not clarified” regarding previous undeclared nuclear material at three sites named as Marivan, Varamin and Turquzabad. This is despite a long-running series of attempts by the IAEA to get Iranian officials to explain the presence of this material. The report said Iran has offered the explanation of an “act of sabotage by a third party to contaminate” the sites, but added no proof had been provided to corroborate this. The diplomatic source said that an act of sabotage was “not easy to believe” given “the distribution of the material” that had led to the IAEA’s questions. The latest reports come as talks to revive the landmark 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers remain deadlocked after stalling in March.

Rockets fired at Iraq military base with foreign troops
AFP/May 31, 2022
FALLUJAH, Iraq: Five rockets on Monday targeted an Iraqi military base hosting troops from an international anti-jihadist coalition without causing deaths or damage, a military official said.
A coalition source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said five rockets struck the Ain Assad base in Anbar province, according to initial reports. “Iraqi security forces responded. No casualties or damage reported for the time being,” the source added. An Iraqi security source in Anbar had initially reported three rockets falling near the base, controlled by Iraq but hosting troops from a US-led coalition against Daesh group terrorists. Rockets and armed drones frequently target the Ain Assad base. The last such incident on April 30 saw two rockets fall nearby without causing damage or deaths. A previously unknown group hostile to the United States’ military presence in Iraq, “International Resistance,” claimed responsibility for the attack on a pro-Iran Telegram channel. Rocket and drone attacks have targeted US troops and interests in Iraq in recent months. Many are not claimed, but Washington systematically blames pro-Iran factions for them. Iraq last year announced the end of the international coalition’s combat mission after it helped the state defeat IS forces. Some 2,500 US soldiers and around 1,000 troops from other coalition members remain in three Iraqi military bases to continue a training and advisory role that began more than a year ago.

Angry Iranians confront cleric at Abadan tower collapse that killed 32
AP/May 31, 2022
DUBAI: Protesters angry over a building collapse in southwestern Iran that killed at least 32 people shouted down an emissary sent by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sparking a crackdown that saw riot police club demonstrators and fire tear gas, according to online videos analyzed on Monday. The demonstration directly challenged the Iranian government’s response to the disaster a week ago as pressure rises in the country over rising food prices and other economic woes amid the unraveling of its nuclear deal with world powers. While the protests so far still appear to be leaderless, even Arab tribes in the region seemed to join them Sunday, raising the risk of the unrest intensifying. Already, tensions between Tehran and the West have spiked after Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard on Friday seized two Greek oil tankers seized at sea. Ayatollah Mohsen Heidari AleKasir tried to address upset mourners near the site of the 10-story Metropol Building but hundreds gathered Sunday night instead booed and shouted. Surrounded by bodyguards, the ayatollah, in his 60s, tried to continue but couldn’t. “What’s happening?” the cleric stage-whispered to a bodyguard, who then leaned in to tell him something. The cleric then tried to address the crowd again: “My dears, please keep calm, as a sign of respect to Abadan, its martyrs and the dear (victims) the whole Iranian nation is mourning tonight.”
The crowd responded by shouting: “Shameless!”
A live broadcast on state television of the event then cut out. Demonstrators later chanted: “I will kill; I will kill the one who killed my brother!”The Tehran-based daily newspaper Hamshahri and the semiofficial Fars news agency said the protesters attacked the platform where state TV had set up its camera, cutting off its broadcast. Police ordered the crowd not to chant slogans against the mullah regime and then ordered them to leave, calling their rally illegal. Video later showed officers confronting and clubbing demonstrators as clouds of tear gas rose. At least one officer fired what appeared to be a shotgun, though it wasn’t clear if it was live fire or so-called “beanbag” rounds designed to stun. It wasn’t immediately clear if anyone was injured or if police made any arrests. The details in the videos corresponded to known features of Abadan, located some 660 kilometers (410 miles) southwest of the capital, Tehran. Foreign-based Farsi-language television channels described tear gas and other shots being fired. Independent newsgathering remains extremely difficult in Iran. During unrest, Iran has disrupted Internet and telephone communications to affected areas, while also limiting the movement of journalists inside of the country. Reporters Without Borders describes the Islamic Republic as the third-worst country in the world to be a journalist — behind only North Korea and Eritrea. Following the tower collapse in Abadan last Monday, authorities have acknowledged the building’s owner and corrupt government officials had allowed construction to continue at the Metropol Building despite concerns over its shoddy workmanship. Authorities have arrested 13 people as part of a broad investigation into the disaster, including the city’s mayor.
Rescue teams pulled three more bodies from the rubble on Monday, bringing the death toll in the collapse to 32, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. Authorities fear more people could be trapped under the debris.
The deadly collapse has raised questions about the safety of similar buildings in the country and underscored an ongoing crisis in Iranian construction projects. The collapse reminded many of the 2017 fire and collapse of the iconic Plasco building in Tehran that killed 26 people.
In Tehran, the city’s emergency department warned that 129 high-rise buildings in the capital remained “unsafe,” based on a survey in 2017. The country’s prosecutor-general, Mohammad Javad Motazeri, has promised to address the issue immediately.
Abadan has also seen disasters in the past. In 1978, an intentionally set fire at Cinema Rex — just a few blocks away from the collapsed building in modern Abadan — killed hundreds. Anger over the blaze triggered unrest across Iran’s oil-rich regions and helped lead to the Islamic Revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Abadan, in Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, is home to Iran’s Arab minority, who long have complained about being treated as second-class citizens in the Persian nation. Arab separatists in the region have launched attacks on pipelines and security forces in the past. Videos and the newspaper Hamshahri noted that two tribes had come into the city to support the protests. Meanwhile, one of the two Greek tankers seized by Iran on Friday turned on its tracking devices for the first time since the incident. The oil tanker Prudent Warrior gave a satellite position Monday off Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port, according to data from MarineTraffic.com analyzed by The Associated Press. Five armed guards were on the Prudent Warrior on Monday, though Iranian authorities were allowing the crew to use their mobile phones, said George Vakirtzis, the chief financial officer of the ship’s manager Polembros Shipping. “The whole thing is political and in the hands of the Greek Foreign Office and the Iranian government,” Vakirtzis told the AP. Monday night, Iranian state TV aired footage of the raid on the Prudent Warrior. The video showed masked Guard troops land a helicopter on the ship, then storm the civilian ship’s bridge armed with assault rifles. It remains unclear where the second ship, the Delta Poseidon, is.

Washington Dissatisfied with Israel’s Ties with Sudan
Tel Aviv - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 202230
The US administration informed Israel that it is dissatisfied with the progress in relations with the Sudanese leadership and urged it not to normalize ties with the military-led government. The leaked information followed news on the visit of a high-ranking delegation from Sudan’s ruling Sovereign Council to Tel Aviv last week, during which talks focused on means to advance relations between the two countries. The visit was slammed by the US State Department, which urged Israel not to proceed with normalization until a civilian-led government is restored in Sudan. “We strongly encourage the State of Israel to join us and the broader international community in vocally pressing for Sudan’s military leaders to cede power to a credible, civilian-led transitional government,” a State Department spokesperson told Jewish Insider. Israel has argued that backing off from these relations, which were initiated by the former US administration, may cause damage at the strategic level. It affirmed it is currently managing these relations through the Mossad intelligence agency, especially that they have security ties not diplomatic ones. Sudan moved toward normalizing ties with Israel in 2020, in a US-brokered deal. In early 2021, Washington and Khartoum inked the “Abraham Accords,” bringing forward the normalization process. The Sudanese military seized power on Oct. 25, ending a partnership with civilian political parties that began after the army toppled Omar al-Bashir as Sudan’s ruler in 2019. White House officials have repeatedly called on Israel’s leaders to pressure the Sudanese army to end the coup and resume the transition to democracy. The United States “will not resume currently paused assistance to the Sudanese government until a credible civilian government is in place,” the spokesperson said of promised financial and debt-related assistance, including “assistance originally committed to Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government in connection with its efforts to improve Sudan’s bilateral relationship with Israel.” Lawmaker Eli Cohen of the opposition Likud party has reportedly held an urgent meeting with US ambassador to Israel Tom Nides to ask Washington to reconsider its position against head of Sudan's Sovereign Council Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. A source close to Cohen pointed to the strategic importance of ties between Khartoum and Tel Aviv, regardless of the Sudanese government’s identity.

Israel Warns Against Travel to Turkey Citing Iran Assassination
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
Israel on Monday warned its citizens against travel to Turkey, citing Iranian threats of revenge for the assassination last week of a Revolutionary Guards colonel. Teheran has blamed Israel for the killing of Hassan Sayad Khodai, who was shot dead at the wheel of his car by two people on a motorcycle and has vowed retaliation. According to Reuters, Israel's National Security Council said in a statement that Tehran could be looking to harm Israelis in Turkey and classified it as a "high-risk country."Turkey is a popular tourist destination for Israelis and the two countries have been mending their ties after more than a decade of strained relations. Israel has accused Khodai of plotting attacks against its citizens worldwide. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's office, which oversees intelligence agency Mossad, has declined to comment on the assassination but Bennett said on Sunday that Teheran would "pay the full price" for instigating attacks on Israelis.

Turkey's Erdogan Says Not Waiting Permission to Carry out Syria Operation
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
Turkey’s president told journalists that Ankara remains committed to rooting out a Syrian Kurdish groups from northern Syria.
"Like I always say, we’ll come down on them suddenly one night. And we must," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on his plane following his Saturday visit to Azerbaijan, according to daily Hurriyet newspaper and other media. Without giving a specific timeline, Erdogan said that Turkey would launch a cross-border operation against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which it considers a terrorist group linked to an outlawed Kurdish group that has led an insurgency against Turkey since 1984. That conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, has killed tens of thousands of people.
However, the YPG forms the backbone of US-led forces in the fight against the ISIS group. American support for the group has infuriated Ankara and remains a major issue in their relations. Turkey considers the PKK and the YPG to be one and the same. The YPG and its affiliated political party have controlled much of northeastern Syria after the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad withdrew in 2012. "All coalition forces, leading with the US, have provided these terror groups a serious amount of weapons, vehicles, tools, ammunition and they continue to do so. The US has given them thousands of trucks," Erdogan said. He warned that Turkey wouldn’t need anyone’s permission to fight terror. "If the US is not fulfilling its duty in combating terror, what will we do? We will take care of ourselves," he declared. While acknowledging Turkey’s security concerns, US State Department spokesman Ned Price has voiced concerns about Turkey’s plans, saying a new offensive could undermine regional stability and put American forces at risk. Ankara has launched four cross-border operations into Syria since 2016 and controls some territories in the north with the goal of pushing away the YPG and establishing a 30-kilometer (19-mile) deep safe zone where Erdogan hopes to "voluntarily" return Syrian refugees. In 2019, an incursion into northeast Syria against the YPG drew widespread international condemnation, prompting Finland, Sweden and others to restrict arms sales to Turkey. Now Turkey is blocking the two Nordic countries' historic bid to join NATO because of the weapons ban and their alleged support for the Kurdish groups. Turkey has stepped up military operations against the PKK in northern Iraq, where they are based. The PKK is considered a terror group by Turkey, the US and the European Union. "Just as we are conducting operations in northern Iraq against the PKK and PKK's offspring, the same situation applies even more to Syria and is much more important," Erdogan said.

Erdogan Discusses Turkey’s Syria Incursion Plans with Putin
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has discussed Ankara’s planned military operation in northern Syria and the war in Ukraine with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Erdogan’s office said Monday. In recent days Erdogan has said Turkey will launch a cross-border incursion against Kurdish militants in Syria to create a 30-kilometer (19-mile) deep buffer zone. He told Putin in a phone call that the frontier zone was agreed in 2019 but had not been implemented, the Turkish presidency said. Ankara carried out an operation against the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in October 2019. Russia, the Syrian regime and the United States also have troops in the border region. Turkey consider the YPG to be a terrorist group linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since 1984, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of people. However, the YPG forms the backbone of US-led forces in the fight against the ISIS group in Syria. The US has not been happy with Turkey's previous incursions into Syria. Erdogan also told Putin that Turkey was ready to resume a role in ending the war in Ukraine, including taking part in a possible "observation mechanism" between Ukraine, Russia and the United Nations, the statement said. Negotiations in Istanbul held in March failed to make any headway but Turkey, which has close ties to both Kyiv and Moscow, has repeatedly put itself forward as a possible mediator. The Turkish president also called for peace in Ukraine as soon as possible and for confidence-building steps to be taken.

Bodies Pulled from Wreckage of Missing Nepal Plane
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
Nepali rescuers pulled 14 bodies on Monday from the mangled wreckage of a passenger plane strewn across a mountainside that went missing in the Himalayas with 22 people on board. Air traffic control lost contact with the Twin Otter aircraft operated by Nepali carrier Tara Air shortly after taking off from Pokhara in western Nepal on Sunday morning headed for Jomsom, a popular trekking destination. Helicopters operated by the military and private firms scoured the remote mountainous area all day Sunday, aided by teams on foot, but called off the search when night fell, as bad weather hampered the recovery operation at around 3,800-4,000 meters above sea level. After the search resumed on Monday, the army shared on social media a photo of aircraft parts and other debris littering a sheer mountainside including a wing with the registration number 9N-AET clearly visible. Four Indians were on board as well as two Germans, with the remainder Nepalis. There was no word on the cause of the crash. The Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that the plane "met an accident" at 14,500 feet (4,420 meters) in the Sanosware area of Thasang rural municipality in Mustang district. "Fourteen bodies have been recovered so far, search continues for the remaining. The weather is very bad but we were able to take a team to the crash site. No other flight has been possible," authority spokesman Deo Chandra Lal Karn told AFP. Pokhara Airport spokesman Dev Raj Subedi told AFP the rescuers had followed GPS, mobile and satellite signals to narrow down the location. Pradeep Gauchan, a local official, said that the wreckage was at a height of around 3,800-4,000 meters above sea level. "It is very difficult to reach there by foot. One team has been dropped close to the area by a helicopter but it is cloudy right now so flights have not been possible," Gauchan told AFP earlier in the day. "Helicopters are on standby waiting for the clouds to clear," he said. According to the Aviation Safety Network website, the aircraft was made by Canada's de Havilland and made its first flight more than 40 years ago in 1979.

Egyptian Army Kills 10 Terrorists in Sinai
Cairo - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 30 May, 2022
The Egyptian army announced that at least 10 "extremely dangerous" terrorists were killed in a military raid in North Sinai province in northeastern Egypt. Over the past weeks, north Sinai witnessed several clashes between armed militants affiliated with ISIS and the Egyptian army and police.
Egyptian military spokesman Gharib Abdel-Hafez announced that a terrorist outpost was discovered in which some extremist elements were holed up, where they were besieged and raided, without revealing the exact date of the raid. Abdel-Hafez pointed out that the terrorist elements initiated the attack against the armed forces, which raided their hideout, killed ten, and arrested an injured terrorist while attempting to run away. The militants had guns and ammunition in their possession, in addition to hand grenades, explosive belts, and several wireless devices. The Egyptian military said it is determined "to uproot the remaining roots of terrorism and extremism and continue construction and development in all parts of Egypt."Earlier, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi vowed to continue security operations in North Sinai to cleanse it of terrorism. Sisi reviewed the security situation in Sinai during a meeting with top military officials, vowing to pursue and destroy militants. He directed the generals to "complete the purge of some areas in northern Sinai from terrorists and takfiris and continue implementing security measures contributing to eradicating all forms of terrorism." Meanwhile, the Cairo Criminal Court and the Emergency Supreme State Security sentenced former presidential candidate Abdelmoneim Abul-Fotouh and the Muslim Brotherhood's ex-supreme guide Mahmoud Ezzat to 15 years in prison. The high state security prosecution accused Abul-Fotouh and Ezzat, and others in the trial of several charges, including leading the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization that attempted to change the regime by force and executing terrorist attacks targeting judges, army and police personnel, and public institutions to topple the government. Abul-Fotouh was among several candidates who ran unsuccessfully in elections that saw the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi voted into power. Abul-Fotouh, 71, was arrested in 2018 after joining a call to boycott that year's presidential election and was charged with spreading false news to harm national interests. The charges included collecting, receiving, possessing, supplying, transporting, and providing funds and weapons for the banned Brotherhood, with the intent of using them to commit terrorist crimes and provide a haven for terrorists. The prosecution also charged Abul-Fotouh, Hussam Hamid, and Ayman Hamid with "directly and indirectly committing a terrorist crime by preparing and training individuals to use weapons."Abul-Fotouh was also accused of acquiring and possessing publications that promoted the Brotherhood's ideologies with the intention of distribution.

Canada/G7 Foreign Ministers’ Statement on the launch of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile by North Korea
May 30, 2022 –Ottawa, Ontario -Global Affairs Canada
“We, the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union, condemn in the strongest terms the test of yet another Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) conducted on May 25, 2022, by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Like a number of ballistic missile launches the DPRK has conducted since the beginning of 2022, this act constitutes a further blatant violation of relevant UN Security Council resolutions and undermines international peace and security as well as the global non-proliferation regime.
“We are very concerned by the unprecedented series of ballistic missile tests with increasingly versatile systems across all ranges, building on ballistic missile tests conducted in 2021. Together with the evidence of ongoing nuclear activities, these acts underscore the DPRK’s determination to advance and diversify its nuclear capabilities. These reckless actions flagrantly breach the DPRK’s obligations under relevant UN Security Council resolutions, which the Security Council most recently reaffirmed in resolution 2397 (2017). They also pose a danger and unpredictable risk to international civil aviation and maritime navigation in the region.
“We, the G7 Foreign Ministers and the High Representative of the European Union, reiterate our urgent call on the DPRK to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner and to fully comply with all legal obligations arising from the relevant Security Council resolutions.
“We deeply regret that the Security Council has failed to adopt the draft resolution aimed at condemning the series of recent ballistic missile launches by the DPRK and strengthening measures against it despite support from 13 members. We urge all UN Member States, especially Security Council members, to join us in condemning the DPRK´s behavior and reaffirm its obligation to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. These acts demand a united response by the international community, including a united stance and further significant measures by the UN Security Council.
“We reiterate our call on the DPRK to engage in diplomacy toward denuclearization and accept the repeated offers of dialogue put forward by the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan. By diverting its resources into weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs the DPRK further aggravates the already dire humanitarian situation in the DPRK. We urge the DPRK to facilitate access for international humanitarian organizations and for independent assessment of humanitarian needs such as food and medicines as soon as possible.
“We also call on all States to fully and effectively implement all relevant Security Council resolutions, and to address the risk of weapons of mass destruction proliferation from the DPRK as an urgent priority.
“The G7 remain committed to working with all relevant partners towards the goal of peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and to upholding the rules-based international order.”

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on May 30-31/2022
Why, for the UN, Is One Mosque Massacre So Much Worse than Countless Church Massacres?
Raymond Ibrahim/ Gatestone Institute/May 30/2022
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/109021/%d8%b1raymond-ibrahim-gatestone-institute-why-for-the-un-is-one-mosque-massacre-so-much-worse-than-countless-church-massacres-%d8%b1%d9%8a%d9%85%d9%88%d9%86%d8%af-%d8%a5%d8%a8%d8%b1%d8%a7%d9%87/
[I]f one non-Muslim attack on a mosque is enough for the UN to institutionalize a special day for Islam, what about the countless, often worse, Muslim attacks on non-Muslim places of worship? Why have they not elicited a similar response from the UN?
The above list, it should be noted, is hardly comprehensive; there have been many similar attacks on churches — in Egypt alone. But because there were few, if any, fatalities, they received little or no coverage in the Western press.
This dismissal is especially true for those remote — and, apparently, in the views of Western media, "unimportant" — regions, such as Nigeria, where Christians are being purged hourly in a Muslim-produced genocide. Thus, after noting that Muslims have eliminated 60,000 Christians between just 2009 and 2021, an August 2021 report states that, during that same time frame, Muslims also destroyed or torched 17,500 churches and 2,000 Christian schools. How many undocumented souls perished in those largely unreported terror attacks?
Therefore, the original question: If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque, which claimed 51 Muslim lives, was enough for the UN to establish an "international day to combat Islamophobia," why have so many Muslim attacks on churches, which have claimed thousands of Christian lives, not been enough for the UN to establish an "international day to combat Christianophobia"?
The UN, it seems, would have us ignore and brush aside all these ongoing massacres of Christian church worshippers as unfortunate byproducts of misplaced "Muslim grievances" — and instead fixate on this one singular, if admittedly horrendous, incident.
For the UN, evidently, one incident constitutes a "pattern" — one in dire need of recognition and response. The response is to silence, ignore or attack all those who expose the heavily documented real pattern of abuse and violence against non-Muslims — which, make no mistake, is precisely what "combatting Islamophobia" is all about.
On Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019, Muslim terrorists bombed three churches and three hotels in Sri Lanka; 359 people were killed and more than 500 wounded. Pictured: The wreckage of St. Sebastian's Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka, on April 21, 2019, following the bomb attack.
The United Nations recently named March 15 as "international day to combat Islamophobia." That date was chosen because it witnessed one of the worst terror attacks on Muslims: on March 15, 2019, an armed Australian, Brenton Tarrant, entered two mosques in New Zealand and opened fire on unarmed and helpless Muslim worshippers; 51 were killed and 40 wounded.
Not only has this incident been widely condemned throughout the West — and rightfully so. It has also caused the UN to single out Islam as needing special protection.
This response, however, raises a critically important question: if one non-Muslim attack on a mosque is enough for the UN to institutionalize a special day for Islam, what about the countless, often worse, Muslim attacks on non-Muslim places of worship? Why have they not elicited a similar response from the UN?
Consider some of the fatal Muslim attacks on Christian churches — many, to underscore the religious animosity, occurring just on Easter or Christmas — in recent years:
Sri Lanka (Apr. 21, 2019): Easter Sunday, Muslim terrorists bombed three churches and three hotels; 359 people were killed and more than 500 wounded.
Nigeria (Apr. 20, 2014): Easter Sunday, Islamic terrorists torched a packed church; 150 were killed.
Pakistan (Mar. 27, 2016): After Easter Sunday church services, Islamic terrorists bombed a park where Christians had congregated; more than 70 Christians — mostly women and children — were killed. "There was human flesh on the walls of our house," a witness recalled.
Iraq (Oct. 31, 2011): Islamic terrorists stormed a church in Baghdad during worship and opened fire indiscriminately before detonating their suicide vests. Nearly 60 Christians — including women, children, and babies — were killed (graphic pictures of aftermath here).
Nigeria (Apr. 8, 2012): Easter Sunday, explosives planted by Muslims detonated near two packed churches; more than 50 were killed, and unknown numbers wounded.
Egypt (Apr. 9, 2017): Palm Sunday, Muslims bombed two packed churches; at least 45 were killed, more than 100 wounded.
Nigeria (Dec. 25, 2011): During Christmas Day services, Muslim terrorists shot up and bombed three churches; 37 were killed and nearly 57 wounded.
Egypt (Dec. 11, 2016): An Islamic suicide bombing of two churches left 29 people killed and 47 wounded (graphic images of aftermath here).
Indonesia (May 13, 2018): Muslims bombed three churches; 13 were killed and dozens wounded.
Egypt (Jan. 1, 2011): Muslim terrorists bombed a church in Alexandria during New Year's Eve mass; at least 21 Christians were killed. According to eyewitnesses, "body parts were strewn all over the street outside" and "were brought inside the church after some Muslims started stepping on them and shouting Jihadi chants," such as "Allahu Akbar!"
Philippines (Jan. 27, 2019): Muslim terrorists bombed a cathedral; at least 20 were killed, and more than 100 wounded.
Indonesia (Dec. 24, 2000): During Christmas Eve services, Muslim terrorists bombed several churches; 18 were killed and over 100 wounded.
Pakistan (Mar. 15, 2015): Muslim suicide bombers killed at least 14 Christians in attacks on two churches.
Germany (Dec. 19, 2016): Near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, a Muslim man drove a truck into a Christmas market; 13 were killed and 55 wounded.
Egypt (Dec. 29, 2017): Muslim gunmen shot up a church in Cairo; nine were killed.
Egypt (Jan. 6, 2010): After Christmas Eve mass (according to the Orthodox calendar), Muslims shot six Christians dead as they exited their church.
Russia (Feb. 18, 2018): A Muslim man carrying a knife and a double-barreled shotgun entered a church and opened fire; five people — all women — were killed, and at least five wounded.
France (July 26, 2016): Muslims entered a church and slit the throat of the officiating priest, 84-year-old Fr. Jacques Hamel, and took four nuns hostage until French authorities shot the terrorists dead.
The above list, it should be noted, is hardly comprehensive; there have been many similar attacks on churches — in Egypt alone, here, here, here, here, here, and here. But because there were no or only few fatalities, they received little, if any, coverage in the Western press.
This dismissal is especially true for those remote — and, apparently, in the views of Western media — "unimportant" regions, such as Nigeria, where Christians are being purged hourly in a Muslim-produced genocide. Thus, after noting that Muslims have eliminated 60,000 Christians between just 2009 and 2021, an August 2021 report states that, during that same time frame, Muslims also destroyed or torched 17,500 churches and 2,000 Christian schools. How many undocumented souls perished in those largely unreported terror attacks?
The list above of fatal Muslim attacks on churches does not include any of the many that were botched, for example, a March 28, 2021 attack on a church during Palm Sunday service, where only the suicide bombers — a Muslim man and his pregnant wife — died.
In these fatal church attacks alone, Muslims have massacred hundreds of Christians, not even including the thousands of Christians and other Western people massacred in non-church attacks, including 9/11, London's 7/7/2005 transit system attacks, Paris's Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan Theater attack, Barcelona's Las Ramblas attack, Nice's July 14 attack, Toulouse's Jewish school attack, Berlin's Winter Market and Copenhagen's terror attacks, to name just a few.
Therefore, the original question: If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque, which claimed 51 Muslim lives, was enough for the UN to establish an "international day to combat Islamophobia," why have so many Muslim attacks on churches, which have claimed thousands of Christian lives, not been enough for the UN to establish an "international day to combat Christianophobia"?
Put another way, why is one immensely reprehensible but lone incident of a Western man killing 51 Muslims of far greater importance to the UN than the countless instances of Muslims killing untold numbers of Christians?
If ever cornered and forced to explain this discrepancy, no doubt the UN would say that, unfortunate as all of those church and other attacks might be, they do not reveal a pattern, the way "Islamophobia" does; that church attacks are all byproducts of terrorism (which reportedly is in no way connected to Islam) fueled by economics, territorial disputes and inequality, in a word, "grievances." Fix those temporal problems and attacks on churches will cease.
In reality, the exact opposite appears to be true: whereas the New Zealand mosque attack was indeed an aberration — evidenced by its singularity — Muslim attacks on churches are extremely common, not only now but throughout history. In Turkey, for example, one can see what became of the great Christian Byzantine Empire after it was first invaded by Arabs in the seventh century, to when Constantinople fell to Sultan Mehmed II in 1453, and on to the early 20th century genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks.
As can be seen here, seldom does a month pass in the Muslim world today, and increasingly in the West, without several assaults on, or harassments of, churches taking place. While some of these, fortunately, may not have been fatal, they all underscore Islam's indisposition to churches, and, it would seem, to any religious structure or symbol that is not part of Islam.
Revealingly, those who terrorize churches often share little with one another: they come from widely different nations (Nigeria, Iraq, Philippines, etc.), are of different races, speak different languages, and live under different socio-economic conditions. The only thing they do share—the one thing that, it seems, leads them to assault churches and murder Christians — appears to be their religion.
In other words, Muslim attacks on churches seem to have an ideological source, are systemic, and therefore an actual, ongoing problem that the international community needs to highlight and ameliorate.
Yet the UN would have us ignore and brush aside all these ongoing massacres of Christian church worshippers as unfortunate byproducts of misplaced "Muslim grievances" — and instead fixate on one solitary, if admittedly horrendous, incident.
For the UN, evidently, one incident constitutes a "pattern" — one in dire need of recognition and response. The response is to silence, ignore or attack all those who expose the heavily documented real pattern of abuse and violence against non-Muslims — which, make no mistake, is precisely what "combatting Islamophobia" is all about.
*Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, 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.
© 2022 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.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18532/mosque-church-massacres

Why It’s So Hard to Pity Muslims
Raymond Ibrahim/Mon, May 30, 2022
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How does one pity a group that itself regularly exhibits no pity or even mere tolerance for others? This is the conundrum one faces when considering Muslim victim groups.
Take the Rohingya, for instance, a Muslim people that primarily lived in Myanmar, while, like most invading and conquering Muslims, not being indigenous to Myanmar. There they have been severely persecuted by the indigenous Buddhists of that nation. While the Rohingya are regularly presented as victims—aspects of which is no doubt true—historically and precipitating their current status, whenever they had the chance, they were the ones quick to victimize others.
In fact, and not unlike the Muslim minorities of other nations, the Rohingya have been committing the same sort of anti-infidel mayhem, violence, terrorism, and rape that one is accustomed to associating with “radical Islam”—though news of it seldom reaches the West. The main difference is that, unlike, say, the West, Myanmar has responded with uncompromising ruthlessness.
Consider the words of Wirathu, the leading anti-Muslim Buddhist monk in Burma: “If we are weak, our land will become Muslim.” The theme song of his party speaks of a people who “live in our land, drink our water, and are ungrateful to us”—a reference to the Rohingya—which “we will build a fence with our bones if necessary” to keep out. His pamphlets say “Myanmar is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.”
Relatedly, consider the words of Fr. Daniel Byantoro, a Muslim convert to Orthodox Christianity:
For thousands of years my country (Indonesia) was a Hindu Buddhist kingdom. The last Hindu king was kind enough to give a tax exempt property for the first Muslim missionary to live and to preach his religion. Slowly the followers of the new religion were growing, and after they became so strong the kingdom was attacked, those who refused to become Muslims had to flee for their life to the neighboring island of Bali or to a high mountain of Tengger, where they have been able to keep their religion until now. Slowly from the Hindu Buddhist Kingdom, Indonesia became the largest Islamic country in the world. If there is any lesson to be learnt by Americans at all, the history of my country is worth pondering upon. We are not hate mongering, bigoted people; rather, we are freedom loving, democracy loving and human loving people. We just don’t want this freedom and democracy to be taken away from us by our ignorance and misguided “political correctness”, and the pretension of tolerance. (Source: Facing Islam, endorsement section).
But surely all of this is history? Surely having been at the receiving end of persecution, the Rohingya have come to learn how it feels, and, accordingly, come to deplore the idea of victimizing others simply because they are different? Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case.
For example, in January of 2020, Muslim Rohingya in a Bangladeshi refugee camp savagely beat a dozen Christians in their midst. “[They] attacked us, the Christians. They looted our houses, and beat up many Christian members. At least 12 Christians have been undergoing treatment at different hospitals and clinics,” a Christian reported, before adding, “We came under attack due to our faith…. On May 10, 11, and 13 last year, this same group of terrorists attacked us. They want us to leave this camp. They have been attacking us systematically.”
Discussing that spate of attacks, the Rohingya Christian Assembly from India said that Muslim Rohingya “attacked the whole Christian community in Kutupalong Camp… Approximately 25 Christian families are displaced. It is winter and very cold, the victims have many minor children with them.” The group added that mobs armed with machetes—“hundreds in many groups”—invaded and destroyed every Christian home at night.
Last Christmas, 2021, in India, hundreds of Rohingya migrant Muslim workers, some lethally armed, violently attacked a group of Christian migrant workers near a factory. According to the report, “A scuffle broke out at around 11.30 pm when some Muslims objected to carols being sung by Christian migrants from Nagaland and Manipur. While they were celebrating and dancing late at night, Muslim migrants attacked them.” Several police and others who tried to intervene were also injured in the riot; fanatical Rohingya even “tried to burn policemen alive.”
Around the same time, Muslim Rohingya beat a Christian Rohingya in their refugee camp in Bangladesh. According to Saydul Amin “I have been persecuted since I revealed that I am a Christian. I no longer feel safe in the camp.”The same report quotes David Sunir, another Christian who had been beaten in a Rohingya refugee camp: “We Christians are a minority, and we live in fear.”It should be noted that something similar is happening here in the West. Reports of Muslim refugees (supposedly “victims” in need of asylum) attacking and killing the Christian minorities intermingled with them in European-based refugee camps regularly surface.
Indeed, at one point, teams of trained killers disguised as refugees were sent by ISIS into U.N. refugee camps to kill Christians, including “in their beds,” and to kidnap young girls to sell or use as slaves. This was reported after an ISIS operative “got cold feet and renounced jihad after witnessing Christians helping out other refugees within the camp. He then revealed that he had been sent with an Islamist hit squad to eliminate Christians as part of the hate group’s ideological drive to wipe the [Christian] religion off the map.”
The point here is not to argue that all Muslims are troublemakers and therefore “deserve” whatever treatment they get. Rather, it is, and to reiterate the question initiating this article, to ask: How is one supposed to feel pity and want to provide sanctuary for a minority group that, once it has the chance, treats the minorities in its midst atrociously—and for no other reason than because they are different, in this case, because they are “infidels”?

On the Margins of Alexander Dugin: Dark 'Particularities'
Isam al-Khafaji/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/May 30/2022
I was not surprised to see that Russian thinker Alexander Dugin has drawn more searches than any other. I have no doubt that many of those looking him up are not interested in philosophy, his primary field of interest; rather, they looked him up because of claims that he is “Putin’s Rasputin,” his spiritual father and ideological guide. Many of those looking him up, then, are searching for insights into Putin’s thinking, his vision of the world, and his understanding of international relations. That is not the focus of this article.
Dugin’s popularity began rising a quarter of a century ago after his book, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” which became a textbook taught in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian army, was published in 1997.
Those concerned with immediate political questions would find a lot of interesting ideas in this book and Dugin’s other works. These include his call for the establishment of a new Russian empire that extends from Vladivostok in the far east of Russia to Gibraltar in the far West of Europe, the formation of a strategic anti-American alliance that brings Russia together with the Baltic states and the Islamic world, especially Iran, and the murder of the protesters who took to the streets to oppose the regime of the Ukrainian’s pro-Russian president in 2014 (which forced the university to suspend his classes).
These positions could leave the impression that we are looking at a Nazi clown, who carries no intellectual weight. However, that is certainly not the case. The man has authored thirteen books about Heidegger, who had ambiguous ties to the Nazis. He began his political life in the USSR as an activist and a member of a secret organization, translating the works of Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who played an influential role in the fascist and Nazi movements of the 1920s and 30s , and sharply criticized modernity, the liberal system, the principle of progress, and the values of freedom and equality.
Dugin believes that the struggle with the West should be presented as a spiritual and existential battle over “Russia’s soul” rather than a political conflict. It is a clash between two civilizations, each of which holds radically divergent convictions and value systems regarding thrush and man. Western civilization, which he believes is currently degrading and in decline, is built on unsound philosophical grounds derived from modernity, “a catastrophic mistake.”
For Dugin, modernity is not a historical stage but an ideological framework that denies the sanctity of phenomena and refers to individual freedoms and human rights as universal rights while they are (per Dugin, of course) nothing more than artificial abstractions and ideological constructs used to protect those clinging to power, distracting the masses so that the powerful maintain their economic and political dominance.
As for the values of universalism, objectivity, and positivism, they are nothing but a smokescreen for a dictatorial machine striving to spread liberalism. Globalization is nothing but a weapon to spread these values and concepts globally, enabling the United States to control humanity.
Dugin proposes an alternative to globalization, calling it “universal pluralism (pluverism),” a term coined by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt, which opposes globalization on the grounds that nations are organic entities with divergent traditions, values, and worldviews, all of which arise and crystallize throughout their history. We must strive to safeguard the national spirit by building a military force that can confront external threats, and we must not subjugate that spirit and reshape it to maximize material comfort while dissolving social ties and spreading individualism.
Readers who are familiar with nationalist and Islamic literature will find that many of Dugin’s ideas are similar. Those who are skeptical or critical of this literature will understand the nationalists and Islamists’ sympathy for Russia’s official worldview, a sympathy that cannot be reduced to hostility to the West and the US. Students of Nazism and Fascism will also find much in common among all of these intellectual and value systems. Those who have read “The Clash of Civilizations”, which Samuel Huntington wrote three decades ago, will find that its alteration is replacing Russian civilization with Islam as the force clashing with the West.
I cannot claim that Dugin brings nothing new to the table, as such a claim would demand reading his twenty-plus works, which I have not done and do not plan to do. What I can say is that the impact of his actions is linked to a particular historical context and that his influence on policy decisions in one of the world’s most militarily powerful countries raises several risks. Since modernity began during the Age of Reason in the seventeenth century and then the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, modernity has come under attack from those decrying the erosion of tradition or religious values and customs and others voicing their frustration with the hardships associated with particular areas or groups within each country or globally. Nonetheless, the ideological assault on the values of modernity and the concepts of equality, freedoms and accountability did not crystallize into mass movements until the black quarter-century, which began from the rise of fascism in Italy in 1922 and ended with the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, when it seemed to the world that this was a black stain on history that would not be repeated.
What we are witnessing today is hard right ultranationalist ideology gaining steam in countries with massive demographic, economic and military weight. While this thought has taken a colonial dimension packaged as anti-Western colonialism, in Trump’s America and today in Modi’s India, it was manifested in assaults against broad segments of the population, whether Muslim or Black.
All of these movements, as well as less extreme versions in Europe, justify their hostility in the name of preserving tradition, which they complain is being threatened by international conspiracies relying on a fifth column who come from different backgrounds to the “good guys” of the nation, whites here, Hindus there, Christians in Hungary, and so on…Perhaps the rise of dogmatism, Trumpism, and Hindu nationalism, as well as similar phenomena in Iran and elsewhere, should remind us that attacking modernity and talking about “our particularities” is no longer associated with longing for the past and a desire to return to it. Indeed, these political movements sanctify technology and encourage industry, but pursue irrational dreams that assume that technical and industrial progress should not go beyond the factory and laboratory walls, that this progress should not seep into social and political structures.
The “spirit of the nation,” which translates into militarism, the exclusion of women from leadership positions (especially political positions), an aversion to the arts, hostility to freedom, and apprehensions about “others” who are not “our compatriots,” must not change, even if millions of women have joined the labor market, our teams and artists take part in international events, and our youth are informed about what is going on in the world.
Is the fear of modernity and reason anything more than a fear shared by those clinging to power and afraid of losing their grip on it?

From the Japanese 'Mariam' to the Russian Vladimir
Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/May 30/2022
The world was too preoccupied with the Russian war on Ukraine to pay attention to the news of her release from Tokyo prison on Saturday. She completed her 20-year prison sentence. She was quick to apologize for the pain she had caused to the hostages held by her comrades. She also was quick to wrap herself in a Palestinian keffiyeh.
Her story could have been irrelevant were it not connected to the Palestinian cause and two significant figures. The first figure is Palestinian leader Dr. Wadie Haddad, who shook the world and its conscience with plane hijackings. The second is Venezuela's infamous Carlos who is serving a life sentence at French prison. She is Fusako Shigenobu, the co-founder of the Japanese Red Army, which was formed in Lebanon. The story begins in the early 1970s. A young Japanese girl dreams of a world revolution and armed struggle against "imperialism and oppression." At the time, the "foreign arm" of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had grown attractive to leftist and revolutionary movements from around the world.
The Japanese group contacted the "foreign arm" and Haddad decided to allow it to take part in its operations, along with other foreigners, such as the Baader–Meinhof Group, Italy's Red Brigades and others. Haddad met Fusako and gave her the nom de guerre "Mariam".
The world will be stunned with the attack on Israel's Lod Airport in Tel Aviv in 1972. Twenty-six people were killed and 80 wounded in the operation that was carried out by three Japanese attackers. One was killed, another committed suicide and the third, Kozo Okamoto, was arrested. He was later released and sought political asylum in Lebanon. The Japanese group was trained at a camp belonging to the "foreign arm" in Lebanon's Baalbek region. Haddad was the mastermind of the semi-suicidal operation.
Two years later, Fusako's comrades would take part in the five-day hostage taking at the French embassy in The Hague, the Netherlands. That event would coincide with a no less shocking development. "Salem" carried out a hand grenade attack against the Le Publicis Drugstore cafe in Paris, killing two people and wounding 34. "Salem" is the nom de guerre of Venezuela's Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who would later be known as Carlos and become world infamous for taking hostage OPEC ministers in Vienna - an idea that was conceived by a man called Moammar al-Gaddafi. Haddad was good at seizing any opportunity to support his battle. One day, one of his operatives said he has recruited a young Kurdish Iraqi to carry out missions in Europe. When I asked him about the name of the youth, he declined to identify him because he had become well-known. I made note of this and began my search to find out his identity.
During an interview with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, I took him by surprise when I asked him if Haddad had ever tasked him to carry out attacks in Europe. Talabani confessed to being that man. After the interview, a smiling Talabani urged me against writing at length about the nature of those missions "lest our American friends jump to conclusions that the Iraqi president is a former terrorist." I published his confession and respected his wish to speak briefly about the issue. Fusako spent long years hiding in the Middle East. She never found anyone like Wadie Haddad. Then the time of dreamer leftist revolutionaries came to an end. New groups will rise with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They would dream of starting fires in the West and United States. In the first decade of the 21ts century, the world will be shaken by the "invasions of New York and Washington", prompting the American military machine to carry out disciplinary operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The world will again be shaken when ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared from a mosque in Mosul. He would share the same fate as that of bin Laden. At the beginning of the century, Fusako would secretly return to Japan and fall in the hands of Japanese authorities.
Moscow wasn't mobilizing Haddad, but a thread did connect them. At a Soviet suggestion, he would secretly travel to Moscow in the early 1970s. He stayed at a palace in a forest close to the capital. Talks covered politics and security and were capped with a meeting between Haddad and head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who would later sit on the Kremlin throne. During the talks, Haddad asked for sophisticated weapons and ammunition that would be delivered to his group off the coast of Aden.
For half a century, the West would suffer operations carried out by people of different backgrounds. The Japanese "Mariam", the Venezuelan "Salem", Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. We mustn't forget groups that emerged here and there, dealt blows and then faded away.
In the early 1990s, it appeared as though the West had achieved a crushing victory. The Berlin wall was relegated to museums and it would be followed by an empire called the Soviet Union. The resounding victory of the western example would plant the seed of bitterness in the hearts of extremist leftist groups that had fought the West and deepen the radical Islamists' conviction of the need to go to the end in fighting it. The past operations of bleeding out the West appear insignificant compared to what the world is enduring today by the war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukrainian soil. The differences in capabilities of the Japanese "Mariam" and her ilk and the capabilities of "Vladimir the Great" are vast. Today's battle is much greater than to be compared to the past limited attacks carried out by leftist groups.
It is more dangerous than planting a bomb, hijacking a plane or taking people hostage. It is also more dangerous than the September 11 attacks and the rise of ISIS in large areas of Iraq and Syria. It is too soon to speculate over the outcomes of the Russian-Western battle. Waiting is the best advisor.

Biden Is Caught Between Big Tech and Black Voters
Rachel Rosenthal/Bloomberg/May 30/2022
President Joseph Biden couldn’t have beaten Donald Trump in 2020 without the support of Big Tech and Black voters. Donations from Silicon Valley employees and political action committees gave the former vice president a critical cash advantage in the final scramble to election day, while Black voter turnout tipped the balance in key states such as Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. “When this campaign was at its lowest — the African-American community stood up again for me,” Biden said in his acceptance speech. “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”
Now, facing a host of intractable domestic and foreign crises, from rising inflation and a persisting pandemic to escalating Russian aggression and Chinese strategic competition, Biden risks seeing his falling poll numbers translate into the loss of the Democratic Party’s tenuous control of Congress.
But rather than rushing to Biden’s aid, Black Americans and Big Tech are pulling back. Although still high, the president’s approval rating among Black voters has fallen precipitously. Before his inauguration, two-thirds of Black Americans said Biden’s policies would favor their interests. More than a year later, the largest proportion of respondents felt his agenda had no impact on their lives. “I feel like Biden is basically doing the bare minimum in terms of being attentive to the needs and issues facing the Black community,” one prominent civil rights advocate told the Hill.
Big Tech, for its part, has faced growing scrutiny and pressure from the industry critics that Biden has named to prominent roles in his administration. The president’s progressive agenda, from retaining trade barriers to raising corporate tax rates, also came as a disappointment to executives seeking a centrist foil to Trump. And while rolling back some Trump-era restrictions has made it easier to hire the foreign students Silicon Valley covets — as well as programmers and engineers on temporary visas — companies highly reliant on this skilled workforce continue to voice frustration about labor shortages, warning that a dearth of candidates could force them to ship jobs overseas.
Efforts by the Biden administration to woo back these two critical constituencies face a growing problem: Although their respective interests have little direct overlap, they increasingly conflict in a key area — the hunt for tech talent. Prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus want more high-paying tech jobs to go to graduates of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other underrepresented minorities; tech wants more workers, period.
Theoretically, these two goals can coexist. Tech companies often say there’s no limit to the number of engineers they can hire. But the data say otherwise: Over the past thirty years, a rising flow of visa holders has created a pool of tens of thousands of candidates beyond the available openings; meanwhile, in the decade through 2020, the representation of Black workers in tech has stagnated.
For the US to remain a “talent powerhouse,” it shouldn’t have to make a choice between a domestic or foreign-born pipeline, as the National Science Board has noted. It needs both. Yet companies’ growing dependency on temporary workers is having a profound if unintended consequence on diversity hiring. There’s little incentive to recruit when a long line of candidates is waiting at the doorstep. “Why not invest as much time, effort, money and resources into developing overlooked, underserved home-grown talent as you are to lobbying for an increase in the number of H-1B visas?” asked Allison Scott, the CEO of the Kapor Center and co-author of a recent joint report with the NAACP lamenting the state of tech diversity. “We don’t want to close our doors to fantastic international talent, but we can’t import our way out of our tech talent shortage, and our rampant inequality, if we want to remain competitive.”
That tech, one of the highest-paid sectors, is unrepresentative of the country at large poses a crisis not only of wealth and income inequality, staggering as that may be. It also means the people developing technology don’t look like the people who use it. Powerful algorithms, for example, help determine who gets a job, a home loan, access to health care — or even a speeding ticket. In other words, the systemic exclusion facing Silicon Valley aspirants has the potential to affect every Black and Brown person in America. “The people whose hands are making those products that so increasingly govern our lives, our personal lives, our professional lives, the lives of citizens, are not actually made by diverse hands,” said Lisa Lewin, chief executive officer of General Assembly, a large provider of coding bootcamps. “That, to me, is hugely problematic.”
Traditionally, tech companies seeking to fill richly compensated, entry-level openings culled the most promising recruits from a clutch of elite campuses; for less glamorous but well-enough paid IT work, they resorted to a much broader pool from lower-tier schools. HBCUs, community colleges and other minority-serving institutions have been ignored at both ends. As a result, many Black computer science and engineering graduates have ended up working everywhere but Silicon Valley, the lucrative epicenter of tech innovation — even as industry giants there say they can’t find any Black workers to hire.
“Technology firms have explained away their poor workforce diversity performance by claiming it is simply a pipeline problem,” Representative Bobby Scott, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor wrote in an email. “Tech firms’ overreliance on H-1B visas would not be necessary if they actually hired domestic talent from underrepresented groups.”
Although the lack of diversity in Big Tech has long frustrated members of the Black community, many have been unwilling to let what seems like an immigration policy issue drive a wedge between minority populations in a zero-sum competition for jobs. But fixing some of the deepest flaws in the US system for recruiting skilled visa holders would protect the wages of Americans and guest workers alike. Ultimately, prioritizing labor reform could further the long-term diversity goals of Black legislators and activists.
To their credit, tech companies now see that hiring more minorities is both right and necessary. Many have made donations to HBCUs, widened their recruiting networks and sent their employees to campuses as ambassadors, lecturers and guest professors. Until Big Tech is willing to overhaul its hiring practices, though, none of that good work will stick. Solutions focused on increasing the number of qualified Black graduates will be ineffective in isolation. Supply doesn’t create demand.
The goals of the Black community to get more workers into Silicon Valley and the demands of the technology industry to hire the best people are complementary, and critical for a dynamic and inclusive US economy. If Biden truly wants to fulfill his campaign promise to Black voters to have their backs, he must hold Big Tech accountable for reaching the lofty goals that it increasingly espouses.
Is There a Pipeline Problem?
The potential hiring pool among Black candidates is deeper than their representation in Silicon Valley. Black graduates earn 7.7% of degrees in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and despite making up 7.5% of tech workers nationally, comprise just 1.4% of those in the San Jose metro area, according to the latest data available.
The link between diversity and Big Tech’s visa dependence hasn’t gone unnoticed in Washington. In 2019, the Labor Department added claims to an existing lawsuit against Oracle America Inc., alleging the company showed “extreme preference” for hiring Asian students, and favored visa-holding ones, at its former headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. “In several years, Oracle hired zero Black or Hispanic recent college and university graduates,” according to an amended complaint. The result was a hiring pattern out of sync with the potential candidate pool, leading to the refusal to hire more than 100 qualified, non-Asian applicants, it said. The DOL settled its college recruitment claims in 2019 after Oracle, having denied the accusations, pledged to diversify its campus hiring strategy.
Oracle isn’t alone. In 2020, the Justice Department sued Facebook Inc., now Meta Platforms Inc., for refusing to recruit, consider or hire US workers for more than 2,600 positions that offered an average salary of about $156,000. The DOJ alleged that, rather than conducting a genuine search for qualified US workers, the company reserved roles for temporary visa holders by failing to advertise openings on its career site, requiring applications be submitted by mail only, or refusing to consider US workers who applied. After a nearly two-year investigation, the department concluded that Facebook received zero or one US applicants for 99.7% of positions aimed at guest workers, while comparable openings typically received 100 or more applicants. The company agreed to pay up to $14.3 million in separate settlement agreements with the Justice and Labor Departments last October. (To put that amount in perspective: Meta earned roughly $83 million a day in the most recent quarter.) Facebook said that it believes it met the government’s standards for labor certification practices. Sadly, these outcomes are decades in the making. In a May 2000 congressional hearing on the impact of H-1B visas on American workers, John W. Templeton, author of an annual report called “Silicon Ceiling: Equal Opportunity in High Technology,” said: “We started to look at the issue of fair employment in high technology, and it did not take us long to intersect with the H-1B.” One employer reportedly explained the lack of hiring from HBCUs and black professional organizations as a matter of convenience: “The H-1B is easier, I need the body count,” according to Templeton’s recounting.
This backdrop is a reminder that the diversity equation in tech is different than in other sectors. Although a steady flow of international hires might seem to check the right boxes, 64% of H-1B petitions approved in the 2021 fiscal year were filed on behalf of Indian or Chinese men. “Many [foreign-born workers] are counted as underrepresented minorities [to] help fill open gaps in the STEM workforce but do not serve to increase domestic ‘minority’ representation in STEM,” according to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report from 2019. That’s why hiring minorities isn’t enough – companies must be compelled to find underrepresented minorities.
Is There a Recruiting Problem?
Despite putting more resources toward recruiting, Big Tech’s diversity metrics remain disappointing. Black workers represent just 3.5% of Google’s tech employee¬s compared with 1.5% in 2014, when the company first made such information public. At Meta, that figure rose to 2.1% from 1%. The number was roughly flat at Cisco Systems Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. over a similar time period, at about 3% and less than 2%, respectively. As the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission observed in 2016, persistent underrepresentation presents two unlikely scenarios: Either Big Tech is unable to attract a significant portion of minority candidates from top schools, or those graduates do not qualify for the jobs they were educated to do.
In 2014, Google launched a project with Howard University to improve its computer science curriculum and proposed sending the company’s engineers to teach an introductory course. The Washington Post reported last year that Google was taken aback by the lack of preparedness among CS students at HBCUs: They “struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures,” according to one internal document. “With this huge percentage of the pool currently not hireable, we need to look at ways to impact change in the HBCU system,” it said. CodePath.org, which offers coding boot camps for underrepresented minorities, faced similar challenges more recently. The company wanted to offer an Android course at Morehouse College, a prominent all-male HBCU. But the class had a prerequisite of exposure to Java, a popular programming language. Too few students qualified, so CodePath could not run the course, according to founder and CEO Michael Ellison. (CodePath’s funders include Bloomberg LP.)
But HBCUs aren’t the only institutions facing claims that their students aren’t ready. Some employers say that the CS curricula at prestigious engineering schools are too theoretical. “Even Stanford, even Berkeley, or one of these top schools, you can graduate without knowing how to build a web application or an iPhone app… you can’t walk on the job,” Ellison says.
Does that mean US universities are failing their students? (And, if so, why are tech companies lobbying to hire more foreign graduates from those very schools?) Or have employers’ expectations simply become unrealistic?
“[Companies are] pointing to the problem of students,” said Nicki Washington, a CS professor at Duke University, who previously taught at Howard and was involved in Google’s program there. “It’s not a graduate problem, it’s a them problem. But it’s very easy to put it on the people who are the most marginalized.” (Washington also said she’s confident her Howard students could go toe-to-toe with any of her Duke ones.)
Felesia Stukes, an assistant professor of data science at Johnson C. Smith University, an HBCU in North Carolina, says her students are “definitely prepared” for the workforce. Yet they still struggle to land internships, a critical gateway for the hands-on experience employers want. So while virtual recruitment increased noticeably last fall, that hasn’t necessarily yielded more job offers.
Stukes explained that it’s impossible to prepare students to be proficient in every programming language that might be called upon in an interview. She also argues that critical thinking skills should be more important, and that the qualifications demanded by tech companies aren’t always entry level. Some of the required skills are typically taught at the master’s level, she observed.
Indeed, it is increasingly rare for a new hire to walk onto the job cold. Given the specificity of network configurations, a generic computer science graduate could take a year to ramp up, according to a senior engineering director at a major California-based IT company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of violating company policy. As a result, companies like his start developing a pool of workers in India at a fraction of the cost, often hiring from other tech companies or contractors. They arrive in the US as H-1Bs.
Diversity has suffered as a result. The director, who manages a 40-person team, has flagged to his bosses that about 98% of candidates he sees are male and Asian, according to email exchanges seen by Bloomberg Opinion. Finding Black, Hispanic, female and other underrepresented minority candidates takes time, he wrote, but hiring managers are under enormous pressure to close job requisitions quickly. In another exchange, he urged the company to consider hiring outside main hubs, which include San Jose and Bangalore, to expand the candidate pool. His boss brushed off his concern and emphasized the need to hire where employees will be “most productive.”
Some companies do offer engineering boot camps and other onboarding programs. Yet employers looking at quarterly operational and hiring targets often lack the time and money to develop talent. As Ellison puts it, that leaves many hiring managers asking: “Should I try to build this [training program] that I don’t know how to build that’s going to take a couple of years until I see [return on investment], or am I going to pay a sea of recruiters who just throw candidates over the fence so that I can hit my hiring targets?”
Why Are HBCUs So Important?
HBCUs produce a declining but still significant share of Black computer science bachelor’s degrees. In the decade through 2018, HBCUs produced, on average, 14% of CS diplomas earned and 18% of all science and engineering majors in this demographic. (In 2020, according to the Kapor-NAACP study, HBCUs graduated 10% of the 8,120 Black computer science majors.) Overlooking these schools could mean Big Tech recruiters have potentially missed out on thousands of qualified candidates.
“These are the same companies that purport to be so concerned about increasing representation,” said Duke’s Washington, adding that there are more than 100 HBCUs, many with computer science departments. “How are you telling me that you can’t find Black graduates when they’re right there?”
Google, for example, once used a college ranking system that identified HBCUs as “long tail” — a significant amount of time would be needed before such schools could produce a large number of qualified graduates — compared with “elite” schools like Stanford University or “tier 1” and “tier 2” state schools and institutions that award thousands of engineering degrees each year, the Washington Post reported. The company agreed to drop this rubric as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, and after a dozen of its own college recruiters objected, according to the paper.
Partly thanks to the rapid investment in HBCUs during the 1970s and 1980s, Black college graduates became more likely than the US average to hold a computer science degree. As a percentage of all degrees earned by race, Black graduates in the field have outpaced White ones over the past two decades, according to data compiled by Victoria Coty, a research associate at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations.
Support among Black families for the pursuit of computer science is also strong. A Gallup study showed that 52% of Black parents consider the field “very important” for their children, compared with just 32% for Whites. And yet, attrition is high: The proportion of Black students who intend to major in CS when starting school but switch majors or drop out of school is greater than for any other race or ethnic group, according to the Kapor Center report.
Ultimately, some discouraged students seek lower-paid work with better hiring odds. “Even in the short time that I have been faculty, I have seen the turnaround in students who start out doubting that they would actually get paid $80,000 a year,” said Stukes. “They were like, if I can just get $45,000 I’d be happy. And I’m like, no you won’t, you won’t be happy. Do not do that — trust me.”
Where Are Black CS Majors Going?
Given the barriers, it’s little surprise that few Black CS graduates end up in Silicon Valley. Rather, they take jobs in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, often trickling into government employers. But even the most prestigious jobs at the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency don’t offer Big Tech salaries, a prospect that only widens the pay gap with White counterparts. The outcome is what William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, calls the hyper-segregation of the IT labor market. Black workers are much better represented in tech in and around Washington, for example, than in the Bay Area and Seattle. If a shortage of IT talent truly existed, he says, employment would be more evenly distributed and wages would be rising.
“Silicon Valley has been aided by government policies that have favored using foreign workers on temporary visas rather than a national policy aimed at investing in the skills of Americans,” Spriggs wrote in a chapter he shared with me, noting that H-1B approvals climbed during the global financial crisis, just as Black IT workers, among others, were suffering job losses. “Clearly, with so many displaced among computer programmers, there was no scarcity of talent to be found.”Can Reforms Lead to More and Better Jobs?
The Labor Department has some cards to play when it comes to protecting workplace diversity. Many of the biggest H-1B employers are federal contractors, required to prepare and maintain affirmative action plans for each location they operate, including factories, stores and offices.
Yet almost 85% of contractor establishments selected for compliance evaluations didn’t submit an affirmative action plan within the requested time frame, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the Labor Department division responsible for this aspect of contractor oversight, “had no process” to ensure tens of thousands of establishments develop and update their affirmative action plans properly. In response, the OFCCP created an electronic portal, requiring contractors to register and annually certify that they are doing so in compliance with the agency’s guidelines. (Use of the portal became compulsory in March; existing contractors have until June to certify.)
Digitizing some of the paper-shuffling is a welcome step, but won’t address the root of the problem — which is that the OFCCP’s process for resolving noncompliance is convoluted and ineffectual. Most violations end in conciliation agreements that outline remedial actions, hardly a deterrent for deep-pocketed political operators such as the tech industry.
Thus, the Labor Department not only has limited authority to champion diversity, but also exercises what little power it does have too sparingly. Congress can, and must, do more. “Diversity and inclusion must not be treated as an aspiration; it is the law,” as Representative Scott wrote in an email.
A more effective stick for noncompliance with diversity requirements would be suspending or revoking an employer’s privilege to sponsor visas. But proposed fixes to the H-1B visa program, such as preventing companies from giving preference to visa holders, might be a more realistic starting point. This is an important objective of a bill reintroduced by Senators Dick Durbin and Chuck Grassley in March. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, meanwhile, has included among its recommendations for executive action a proposal to increase H-1B wage requirements to reflect “true market rates” and prioritize employers “seeking highly skilled workers and paying fair wages.” The Biden administration appears to be on board — and given the degree of congressional paralysis, some argue executive action would be the most expedient route to meaningful reform.
On the other side of the ledger are efforts that would bring more underrepresented minorities into tech, such as increased funding for computer science and engineering education at HBCUs, minority-serving institutions and community colleges. (In 2021, Bloomberg Philanthropies launched the Vivien Thomas Scholars Initiative, which will fund 100 students from HBCUs to receive doctorate degrees in STEM at Johns Hopkins University every year.) These will take time to show results, but success is quantifiable. The Meyerhoff Scholars Program, a cohort that encourages STEM graduate study among minorities, has an impressive track record.
The key is putting these two pieces together. One way to do that would be to create internships for underrepresented minorities in equal proportion to the number of guest workers hired, or provide tax incentives for companies that balance their hiring, according to Larry King, publisher of STEM News Chronicle, a newsletter that supports STEM diversity. Another option would be requiring companies to include visa holders in their diversity reports.
Black voters have leverage here, if they’re willing to use it. Some key leaders are frustrated by the flaws of the H-1B visa, says Spriggs of AFL-CIO, but they continue to bump up against a tech lobby that’s too powerful. Moreover, the Black Caucus, once energized by an ambitious agenda that included voting rights and police reform, has resigned itself to smaller, more practical goals.
The tech lobby understands that very little will be accomplished legislatively in the current Congress, and appears to be waiting for a better candidate to emerge as their champion of immigration reform. In the meantime, the industry has seized on the Great Resignation narrative, pointing to the exceedingly low unemployment rate in computer occupations and surveys showing hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs as proof of debilitating shortages. Bipartisan anxiety about China’s rising competitiveness also plays to their advantage: The US is falling behind and the domestic labor force is tapped out, the argument goes. But that view is predicated on the idea that every single qualified candidate who wants a job in tech has one. You don’t have to probe the data too deeply to determine that simply isn’t the case.
The Biden administration has choices: It could hold tech companies accountable on their diversity promises or double down on the sector’s demands and vastly expand access to skilled worker visas. So far, it’s doing neither, and stands to erode the patience of two constituencies whose political support it badly needs.
Advocates of the H-1B visa often say that the world’s best and brightest deserve a shot at the American Dream. That’s absolutely true. But the absence of a requirement to recruit domestically means that underrepresented Americans are missing out on that same promise. Can the US afford to have one of its most vibrant economic sectors so poorly reflect the country at large? After years of being overlooked, unheard and misjudged, many of the Black graduates who do make it to Silicon Valley are increasingly finding good reason to leave. Ensuring a better future for these students may be Joe Biden’s particular debt to pay, but Big Tech and the US at large will bear the true cost of failure.

Iran regime struggles to survive as it grapples with popular protests
Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami/Arab News/May 30/ 2022
A new wave of protests against Iran’s regime and its policies have swept across several Iranian cities in recent weeks. These protests were triggered by the government’s decision to reduce subsidies for imported wheat, sending food prices soaring — adding to the public’s suffering amid dire economic conditions and accelerating deterioration in their living standards.
These protests have once again exposed the government’s failure to keep its promises and revealed the vast fraudulence of President Ebrahim Raisi’s election campaign slogans that vowed to combat price hikes and alleviate the suffering of the Iranian people. The protests have spread like wildfire across Iranian cities and provinces since Raisi took office last August, with chants calling explicitly for the government to resign. Others shouted, “Raisi is a liar,” “Where are your promises?” and “R.I.P. Shah.”
The Iranian government’s domestic economic policies have been characterized by a complete inability to resolve the problems arising from economic deterioration, namely soaring prices. In addition, the government’s political policies have restricted already-limited public freedoms, prompting some voices to call for radical change.
Ongoing blanket sanctions on the Iranian economy have acted as a multiplier, exacerbating the existing social and economic pressures on the country’s people, as well as imposing significant constraints on Iran’s economic relations with the rest of the world, causing its oil sales to fall and costing the regime billions of dollars, especially after Iran was placed on the Financial Action Task Force’s blacklist as part of the sanctions package. The Iranian government’s stubbornness and noncompliance with international laws have hampered its ties with international banks, severely impacting domestic economic and social affairs and leading to increased inflation and worsening poverty and unemployment rates.
The current unrest raises questions about how prepared the Iranian leadership is for the worsening crisis ahead as popular anger continues to mount. In fact, the Raisi government has already taken a host of measures in an effort to swiftly deal with the protests and ease public discontent, announcing the forthcoming provision of emergency subsidies to compensate for the current price hikes. The Iranian government’s budget, however, may not enable it to provide the promised subsidies due to the fiscal deficit caused by the lack of any effective long-term plan for macroeconomic stability. Any hope of realizing such plans can only result from a stable Iranian foreign policy toward the rest of the world, primarily its neighbors. Without this political stability, Iran’s violent economic cycles will continue, throwing the country’s future into greater turbulence and uncertainty.
Though the Iranian regime has announced stopgap remedies to alleviate the daily pressures on Iran’s people, these are ineffectual Band-Aid solutions to stem a swelling, massive tide of popular rage. The one common denominator in the Iranian regime’s approach to dealing with most of the popular and factional protests that have broken out in Iran thus far is the use of a heavy security crackdown to punish and intimidate protesters. This is typically achieved by using the regime’s massive security apparatus first to isolate and cut off the cities and provinces where protests are taking place and then to brutally assault and terrorize the protesters, tightening the security forces’ iron control over protest hotspots, even while proposing “reform” measures to mitigate the consequences of the subsidies policy. It seems, however, that this standard policy of repression is unlikely to ease public anger, with the protests likely to continue as long as the country’s living and economic conditions continue to deteriorate.
There are several potential scenarios that could emerge as a consequence of the latest protests.
The first scenario sees the protests succeeding in changing the regime. This is, frankly, unlikely given the limited scale of the protests compared to the regime’s vast military might, which has managed to crush previous, far larger protests. The protesters in this scenario would also face immense security obstacles, foremost of them being the readiness of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij and the regime’s other security apparatuses to use any and all possible means to contain the protests to protect their own massive financial interests, which are wholly dependent on the regime’s survival. It is also noticeable that Western media outlets are giving no attention to the massive protests rocking Iran, with their primary and sole focus being on the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
The second possible scenario sees the protests continuing until the behavior of the regime and its ruling elite changes. This is also extremely unlikely; the regime has regularly faced protests often far larger than the current ones since its establishment in 1979 and it has always doubled down on rather than modified its behavior in response.
The third scenario would see some adaptation and adjustment from the regime in order to contain the protests. This is apparent from the regime’s now-standard approach of focusing on a “security” solution, using violence against protesters and putting derogatory labels on them, such as “subordinates” and “stooges.” Simultaneously, the regime would attempt to quell popular rage by making some stopgap price cuts.
The current unrest raises questions about how prepared the Iranian leadership is for the worsening crisis ahead.
Though the protests are still ongoing, they are unlikely to change the regime or even force it to change its behavior. If the protests intensify in the coming days, the regime may be persuaded to accept compromises in relation to its negotiations with the US in order to swiftly reach an agreement and have the sanctions lifted. Nonetheless, the growing schism between the Iranian regime and the people of Iran will persist, particularly in light of the emergence of development megaprojects in neighboring countries. The Iranian people look at these projects with agony. These projects have turned the Iranian regime’s slogans into a source of mockery and derision among the Iranian people, who have grown weary of economic deterioration, which the regime continues to leave unaddressed.
Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami is president of the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah). Twitter: @mohalsulami

Did Biden change his mind?
Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Asharq al-Awsat/May 30/ 2022
Is it safe to say that Washington has ultimately decided to put its best interests first, which are manifested in its relations with the GCC countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, following some year and a half of fluctuation and indecisiveness, and after it signaled a retraction from these relations, and a withdrawal from historical bonds between the two countries?
Major global events seem to have revived a political awareness among US President Joe Biden’s advisors that prompted a crucial shift in his Administration’s priorities, including rediscovering the necessity of strong relations with Saudi Arabia. As a matter of fact, the voices that opposed such a revival of relations with Riyadh were a minority, and even the Washington Post’s editorial, which belonged to that minority, was posted following the round of meetings, indicating that it was merely an expression of a personal opinion which failed to have resonance in Washington.
Over some year and a half, massive pressure mounted on Riyadh regarding thorny issues such as the war in Yemen, armament deals, dismantlement of missiles, restrictions on ammunition use, interference in Saudi management of regional and international affairs with China and Russia, efforts to lift the sanctions on Iran, the production and prices of oil, among other points of disagreement the sum of which caused a discord in relations between the two countries that, prior to that stage, remained allies for some 75 years. The discord has been widening, indicating that the US was departing from the entire region and heading instead towards East Asia.
From a realistic point of view, it is rather unwise to overlook the global shifts that are affecting US decision-making on foreign policy. For instance, the GCC countries are not anymore the largest oil exporters to the US, as the latter managed in applying the methods of cracking and shale oil. Likewise, Washington does not anymore see it necessary to have a presence in the region to safeguard its oil interests and protect the straits there, as a large portion of that oil goes to its competitors, such as China. At any rate, the criticism of Washington is not prompted by its choice to turn its back on the Gulf Region and its allies there, but rather by what it expects from them after its departure. For instance, it seeks to restrict their use of weapons but opposes their arms deals with China or Russia. Likewise, it indulges with Teheran in negotiations on lifting the sanctions, meanwhile disregarding the major risks Iran poses to the regional countries, and expecting them not to seek alternative alliance to fill the security gap.
There were four consecutive shocking events that apparently brought the Biden Administration back to the right track; the emergence of the Sino-US dispute last year and Washington’s subsequent punitive measures against Beijing, the Russian invasion of Ukraine that was labeled as the greatest threat to Europe and the NATO since World War II, the surge of oil and gas prices as a consequence of lifting COVID-19 restrictions and the Ukrainian crisis, and finally the rising levels of inflation that might erase the benefits of US economic recovery, thus jeopardizing the chances for Biden and his party in the forthcoming November mid-term elections.
Over months laden with crises, Washington was obliged to rethink the practicality of its international relations which are based on mutual, rather than unilateral interests. Energy is still a key weapon in wars that might have decisive implications, and in that domain, Washington failed to persuade Riyadh to raise its production, as meanwhile the White House was appeasing the Iranian regime and intending to unchain it with all the threats it poses to Saudi Arabia and the other regional countries.
What has happened? Did the Biden Administration retract from its stance on the Saudi role in Yemen, its proposed concessions to Iran, its tendency to interfere in the internal affairs of the Kingdom, and its tendency to reduce the latter’s armament? The Saudi Crown Prince’s refusal to take the telephone calls of President Joe Biden seems not to be motivated by a personal attitude, but rather by a number of disagreements that must be handled between the two countries. Meanwhile, a telephone call made by the Saudi side to the US was not enough to conclude the 15-month-old pending disputes or start a new mutual era, since the outstanding disagreements have not yet been genuinely resolved. Hence, the Saudi Crown Prince dispatched the Deputy Defense Minister, His Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman to Washington, where he met with US political and military leaders.
Did Biden back off from his former positions? Well, his new tough stance on Iran indicates it. As a matter of fact, he did not have to have this disagreement with Riyadh in the first place. Events have proven that Biden was in need of Saudi Arabia more than his predecessor President Donald Trump did during his 4-year term. To sum up, it seems that a glimpse of realism, accompanied by an analysis of the recent crises of COVID-19, China, and the invasion of Ukraine resulted in an acknowledgement that the older alliances of necessity shall be revived, and they will reshape the mutual relations for a considerable time.