English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For November 21/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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Bible Quotations For today
Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint John 08/56-59/:”Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.’Then the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.’So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on November 20-21/2021
MoPH: 1100 new Coronavirus cases, 10 deaths
US congressmen in Lebanon over crippling economic crisis
President Aoun welcomes US delegation, stresses need to reorganize state structure, review tax system, implement forensic audit
President Aoun to address the Lebanese on eve of 78th Independence Day, receives congratulatory cables on the occasion from British, Spanish,...
Presidency Press Office responds to the lies of Al-Sharq newspaper: Construction of President’s house began in 2014 and ended in the middle of 2016
Berri meets Finance minister, BDL first vice governor, receives Independence congratulatory cable from Iranian Shura Council Speaker
Qassem Calls for 'Addressing Reasons' behind Govt. Meetings Suspension
Qaouq Calls for Seizing 'Real Chance' to Solve Govt. Crisis
Lebanon Stops 82 People Attempting Sea Crossing to Europe
US congressional delegation calls for end to political disagreements in Lebanon
In Defense of Christians Accepts the Resignation of Mr. Toufic Baaklini as IDC President
Bahrain: Lebanon Needs to Show that Hezbollah Can Change Behavior
A+70% of Lebanese Unable to Buy Medicine
Lebanese Navy Rescues Distressed Boat Carrying Migrants
Lebanon Loses a Pillar of Independent Journalism/Hussain Abdul-Hussain/Foreign Policy/November 20/2021

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on November 20-21/2021
U.S. Defense Chief Vows to Counter Iran in Visit to Bahrain
Thousands protest drought in Iran’s Isfahan, government apologises
US Says Commitment to Security in the Middle East is Strong
US Demands Immediate Release of Yemeni Staff Detained by Houthis
US Says it Has Prioritized Regaining Control of its Embassy from Houthis
Libya Parliament Speaker Submits Papers to Run for PresidentUN Security Council Fails to Agree on Statement Calling for Ceasefire in Ethiopia
US Ambassador to UN Says Conditions in Syria Not Suitable for Return of Refugees
Report: 30,000 Syrian Children Killed, Including 181 Tortured Since 2011
Turkey Sends More Syrian Mercenaries to Libya
Death Toll of Sudan Anti-coup Protests Rises to 40
Israel Returns Wrong Body to Family of Slain Palestinian
U.S. Seeks Balance as Fears Grow Russia May Invade Ukraine
Dutch Police Open Fire on Covid Rioters
Restoration of Mosul churches brings glimmer of hope to Christian community
Rotterdam mayor slams violent COVID-19 protests, more than 20 arrested

Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on November 20-21/2021
Iran’s Mullahs to Obtain Major Concessions from Biden Admin and EU?/Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/November 20/2021
Climate Change Will Kill National Sovereignty As We Know It/Andreas Kluth/Bloomberg/November, 20/2021
Enslavement of the Black by the White: 'The Bedrock of the West'?[1]/ Drieu Godefridi/Asharq Al Awsat/November 20/ 2021
What Is Islam's Relationship to Christianity?/Theological Analysis of the Bible and the Quran/Mark Durie/Lausanne Global Analysis/November 20/2021
Nature cannot wait. We must act now to save wildlife habitats/Andrea Meza/Arab News/November 21, 2021

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on November 20-21/2021
MoPH: 1100 new Coronavirus cases, 10 deaths
NNA/Saturday, 20 November, 2021 
Lebanon has recorded 1100 new coronavirus cases and 10 more deaths in the past 24 hours, as reported by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) on Saturday.

US congressmen in Lebanon over crippling economic crisis
BEIRUT (AP)/Saturday, 20 November, 2021 
A group of U.S. congressmen held meetings Saturday with Lebanon’s top leaders during a fact-finding mission to the Middle East nation roiled by an unprecedented economic crisis. The delegation is to report to President Joe Biden and the Congress and propose ways to help the Lebanese. The country’s new government, in place since September, has struggled to kick off reforms and negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. team includes Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and also Republican Rep. Darin LaHood of Illinois, as well as Edward Gabriel, head of the Washington-based American Task Force for Lebanon. The three, who arrived Friday and are to spend three days in Lebanon, first met with President Michel Aoun. Lebanon’s crisis is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement. The international community has said it will only help the small nation once it implements wide reforms and tackles widespread corruption. Gabriel told the local Al-Jadeed TV that the congressmen are in town “to see first hand” what is going on in Lebanon and that he hoped they would “come up with some new ideas” for ways the United States could help the Lebanese. The delegation later met with Prime Minister Najib Mikati who thanked the U.S. for standing by Lebanon and for its continuous support to the Lebanese Armed Forces, his office said. Lebanon’s economic meltdown began in late 2019 and has been made worse by political bickering between rival groups who have failed to start reforms despite the fact that the crisis has thrown three quarters of the country’s 6 million people, including a million Syrian refugees, into poverty.

President Aoun welcomes US delegation, stresses need to reorganize state structure, review tax system, implement forensic audit
NNA/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, met an American delegation, including members of the US Congress Daryl Issa and Darren Lahoud, the head of the American Support Group for Lebanon (Task Force for Lebanon) and Ambassador, Ed Gabriel.
The meeting was also attended by the US Ambassador to Lebanon, Dorothy Shea, and members of the American Support Group for Lebanon.
The President told the delegation that “Lebanon began its journey out of the severe economic crisis which it lives in, which resulted from accumulations dating back several years, by preparing a program to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund to obtain loans from donor countries, while working on reforms that include the financial and banking system after determining debts and losses whose equitable distribution will restore the country's financial balance”.
President Aoun also pointed to the importance of reorganizing the state’s structure, looking into the tax system, controlling spending, preventing waste, and following up on work to combat corruption, which had a negative impact on the public treasury.
The President stressed that Lebanon looks forward to the United States' support for the reform programs that the government will adopt, thanking the American delegation for the humanitarian, development, health and educational aid provided by the United States, whether to official departments and institutions, or to the Lebanese army and military forces.
Moreover, the President praised the role played by the US administration in facilitating the process of importing gas and electricity from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, given the positive repercussions that this work would have to secure electricity in Lebanon.
In response to the delegation members’ questions, President Aoun affirmed Lebanon’s commitment to implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and pointed to the violations committed by Israel from time to time for the inclusions of this resolution, stressing that “Lebanon looks forward to resuming indirect negotiations to demarcate the southern maritime borders, while awaiting the return of the American envoy, Amos Hochstein, to complete the talks that began with the aim of reaching an agreement that guarantees Lebanon's right to invest its natural resources in the border oil and gas fields.l”.
In addition, President Aoun asserted the existing understanding between him and Prime Minister Najib Mikati on the issues raised and the need to implement the reforms that Lebanon needs, considering that the current conditions the government is going through will not continue and the Council of Ministers will reconvene soon.
Then, President Aoun stressed the commitment to constitutional obligations, whether in the Parliament or the Presidency of the Republic, emphasizing the importance of the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary and the need to distance politics from it, especially in the investigation of the crime of the Beirut Port explosion and the bloody events that occurred in the Tayouneh-Ain El-Remmaneh area.
Congress delegation members, Daryl Issa and Darren Lahoud had conveyed to President Aoun the interest of the US Congress in the situation in Lebanon, and its keenness to continue providing aid to the Lebanese civil and military institutions.
Issa and Lahoud also pointed out that the members of Congress look forward to the role of the President of the Republic at this delicate stage in the history of Lebanon, and they are interested in reviving the Lebanese economy, the regular functioning of the constitutional institutions, and enabling Lebanon to use its natural resources to strengthen its economy, achieve the desired reforms, and reduce the emigration of its sons.
Afterwards, the head of the US ITFL Support Group for Lebanon, Ambassador Ed Gabriel, spoke about the group's work with the US administration and Congress to strengthen and develop US-Lebanese bilateral relations in all fields, focusing on the support that the delegation can provide for the new governmental directions. The meeting was attended by Messrs. Issa Lahoud, Gabriel and the American ambassador, member of the board of directors of the support group, Mr. Mohamed Ahmar, and one of its officials, Mr. James McClellan.

President Aoun to address the Lebanese on eve of 78th Independence Day, receives congratulatory cables on the occasion from British, Spanish,...
NNA/Saturday, 20 November, 2021 
On the 78th occasion of independence, President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, will address the Lebanese, at eight o'clock tomorrow evening, Sunday, through the audio-visual media, in which he will tackle the current situation in the country and Lebanon's position on latest developments.
Congratulation-Cables:
On the occasion, President Aoun received several congratulatory telegrams from kings and presidents of a number of countries in the world, most notably from Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Spain's King Felipe VI, Morocco's King Mohammed VI, Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi, Italian President Sergio Mattarella, and the Greek President  Katrina Sakellaropoulou, President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping, and President of the Federal Republic of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Queen Elizabeth's telegram:
The telegram of Queen Elizabeth stated: "On the occasion of the Lebanese Republic's celebration of Independence Day, I would like to extend to you, and through you to the Lebanese people, my warmest congratulations. I hope that, after a year of difficulties, we will work together to achieve steady progress that contributes to achieving better future days in Lebanon”.
Telegram of the King of Spain:
The telegram of the King of Spain stated: "On the occasion of the celebration of the National Day, I extend from Your Excellency the most heartfelt congratulations from myself, the Spanish government and the Spanish people”.
Telegram of the King of Morocco:
The telegram of the King of Morocco stated: "I am pleased to renew to Your Excellency the extent of my appreciation for the bonds of brotherhood and solidarity that unite our two countries, assuring you of my insistence to continue working together to enrich our bilateral relationship and raise it to the level of the aspirations of our two brotherly peoples.
Telegram of the Iranian President
And the Iranian president’s telegram stated: “We are fully confident that Lebanon will remain, as we have always known, a safe, stable and developing country, thanks to your care and the efforts of officials and the enthusiasm of the Lebanese people. I assure you that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as it has always been, will spare no effort for the sake of the consolidation of bilateral relations within the framework of the mutual interests of the two friendly countries.
Telegram of the Italian President:
The Italian president’s telegram stated: 
“At this extremely difficult time, which has been compounded by the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, I am pleased to renew to you Italy’s support for the stability and safety of Lebanon, as our country has continuously demonstrated, especially through its participation in the “UNIFIL” forces in the south. We hope that the new government will undertake the task of carrying out the necessary reforms in order to revive the economy in line with the aspirations of the Lebanese people”.
Telegram from the President of Greece
The telegram from Greek President Sakellaropoulou stated: 
"The relations between our two countries have been based since history on mutual respect and trust, and I take this opportunity to assure that Greece stands in solidarity with the friendly Lebanese people in these difficult moments they are facing.
Chinese President's Telegram
The Chinese president said: 
"Sino-Lebanese relations have witnessed steady development in recent years. We celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Lebanon. I attach great importance to the development of China-Lebanon relations, and am ready to make joint efforts with your Excellency to advance friendly relations, and cooperation between the two countries to achieve further development, in the interest of both countries and peoples.
German President's Telegram:
The German President's telegram stated: "Your country continues to face great challenges, including overcoming the ongoing economic and financial crisis. I was reassured when I received the news of the recent formation of a government in your country. I also hope that the Special Drawing Rights of the International Monetary Fund will allow a greater margin to act on the financial level. It depends on the political leadership seizing this moment to lead your country boldly and with a clear vision to get out of the crisis”. ---- [Presidency Information Office]

Presidency Press Office responds to the lies of Al-Sharq newspaper: Construction of President’s house began in 2014 and ended in the middle of 2016
NNA/Saturday, 20 November, 2021 
The Presidency Press Office issued the following statement:
“Within the framework of the series of lies, fabricated news and stories that Al-Sharq newspaper continues to publish daily on its pages. Today Al Sharq has inserted a new lie on its front page that President Michel Aoun is “Building a palace in the Rabieh area on a disputed land, amid great secrecy, and under tight security cordons”. The Press Office, in order to refute this new lie, clarifies that the construction of a private house for the President of the Republic began in 2014 and ended in the middle of 2016, that is, before the election of General Michel Aoun as president, and he has not moved to the house yet. Therefore, there is no need for "discretion" because the construction is above the ground and not under it! As for the claim that the land on which the house was built is “disputed,” it is false, because the land was purchased in accordance with the rules, while the security measures taken are normal to guard the house of a President of the Republic. The Press Office, places these facts at the disposal of public opinion, and points out that Al-Sharqnewspaper has become specialized in publishing false news, articles and photomontages, with the aim of offending the position of the presidency and the person of the president. If the presidency has refrained until today from taking legal measures that put an end to the persistence of this newspaper in misleading public opinion, it draws attention to the necessity of attention and not taking into account what it publishes of deceptions for goals that no longer deceive anyone”.

Berri meets Finance minister, BDL first vice governor, receives Independence congratulatory cable from Iranian Shura Council Speaker
NNA/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
House Speaker Nabih Berri, on Friday received at the Second Presidency in Ain El Tineh, Minister of Finance, Dr. Youssef El-Khalil, whereby they affirmed preserving the rights of bank depositors and the Parliament’s commitment to issuing legislations aimed at safeguarding and protecting these rights. Speaker Berri also discussed the same issue during his meeting with the Banque du Liban’s First vice Governor, Dr. Wassim Mansouri. On the other hand, Berri received a congratulatory cable from the Speaker of the Iranian Shura Council, Muhammad Baqir Qalibaf, on the occasion of Lebanon’s Independence Day.

Qassem Calls for 'Addressing Reasons' behind Govt. Meetings Suspension
Naharnet/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Hizbullah deputy chief Sheikh Naim Qassem on Friday said that his party “backs the resumption of the Lebanese government’s meetings.”He, however, added that the government should only meet after “addressing the reasons that led to the meetings’ suspension.”
A political dispute over the conduct of port blast investigator Judge Tarek Bitar has paralyzed the government since October 14, with Hizbullah and the Amal Movement pushing for his removal. Turning to the judicial developments, Qassem said “the judicial scene in Lebanon is unhealthy.”
“It’s not related to an incident nor to a judge. It has to do with a full judicial system that is intertwining in an unusual way,” Hizbullah number two said. “There must be a reevaluation and a solution, or else the judicial situation will remain unhealthy,” he warned.

Qaouq Calls for Seizing 'Real Chance' to Solve Govt. Crisis
Naharnet/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Hizbullah central council member Sheikh Nabil Qaouq on Saturday noted that there is a “real chance” to resolve the political dispute that led to the suspension of Cabinet sessions. “Prime Minister Najib Miqati is exerting continuous efforts to find the appropriate exits for the governmental issue,” Qaouq said at a ceremony in Sarafand. “There is a real chance for addressing issues on the basis of resolving the reasons behind the paralysis, and those concerned must not waste this chance,” Qaouq urged. Cabinet has not convened since October 14 over a dispute related to the investigations of Beirut port blast lead investigator Judge Tarek Bitar. Hizbullah, Amal Movement and the Marada Movement have called for the judge’s removal over alleged bias in his summonings and conduct. Media reports have said that a possible solution could be based on limiting Bitar’s summonings and investigations to administrative and security officials as parliament moves to prosecute the accused former premier and ministers before the Higher Council for Trial of Presidents and Ministers.

Lebanon Stops 82 People Attempting Sea Crossing to Europe
Agence France Presse/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Lebanese security forces have thwarted an attempt by more than 80 people to illegally cross by sea into Europe from Lebanon. In a statement, the Internal Security Forces said they raided a "tourist resort" in the Qalamoun area of north Lebanon on Thursday after being tipped off. They found "82 people, including men, women, and children, who were planning to head to Europe via sea in an illegal manner for a fee of $5,000 per person," the statement said. The statement did not specify their nationality or intended destination. But the Republic of Cyprus, a European Union member just 160 kilometers away, is a common destination for would-be migrants trying to flee Lebanon which is mired in economic and political crisis. The ISF said it arrested a 31-year-old Lebanese national who it identified as one of the smugglers behind the operation. It said further investigations are underway. The number of people attempting to make deadly sea crossings out of Lebanon has surged since the country's financial crisis began in 2019. Most of the would-be migrants are already refugees who fled the war in neighboring Syria but an increasing number of Lebanese nationals are also attempting the perilous journey. Around 80 percent of Lebanon's population is estimated to be living under the poverty line, as defined by international organizations.The Lebanese pound has lost 90 percent of its value against the dollar on the black market.

US congressional delegation calls for end to political disagreements in Lebanon
Najia Houssari/Arab News/November 20, 2021
BEIRUT: Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati stressed the government’s commitment to implementing international resolutions and maintaining security and stability, as a US congressional delegation stressed the need to end political disagreements and focus on addressing the country’s economic and social crises. Mikati expressed his appreciation for the US standing by Lebanon’s side and supporting the army. The delegation said it stood by Lebanon and supported the government. President Michel Aoun told the visiting delegation that Lebanon had begun its journey out of the severe economic crisis by setting a program for negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and reforms of the financial and banking systems. Mikati announced on Friday that he would soon call for a Cabinet session to discuss more than 100 items on the Cabinet’s agenda. Observers are counting on a meeting that will bring together Aoun, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Mikati on the sidelines of Monday’s Independence Day commemorations to make a breakthrough in the political crisis. Labor Minister Mustafa Bayram said on Saturday: “There are positive signs that suggest that we are facing a real opportunity for an appropriate solution to hold Cabinet sessions again.” But he made it clear that he could not talk about Information Minister George Kordahi, who has angered Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, with his comments on the war in Yemen and his refusal to resign over them.
“We support any solution that preserves Lebanon's ties, interests and sovereignty,” said Bayram. “We learned that Kordahi is ready to do what is in Lebanon’s best interest, through dialogue.” Hezbollah has thwarted Mikati’s many attempts to hold Cabinet sessions, which have been suspended since Oct. 12, and several Hezbollah officials have stressed that the party stands firm in its conditions. The party is refusing to make any efforts to resolve Lebanon's diplomatic and economic fallout with the Gulf states and insists on dismissing Judge Tarek Bitar, who is leading the investigation into the Beirut port blast.
Zafer Nasser, secretary-general of the Progressive Socialist Party headed by Walid Jumblatt, told Arab News: “The party has no information about a close political solution to the crises that Lebanon is experiencing. While we agree on the need to separate government and judiciary, it seems that the Shiite duo, i.e. Hezbollah and the Amal Movement, are insisting that the Cabinet should not convene before Bitar is removed, since Hezbollah believes the investigations are leading to implicate it in the Beirut port blast, regardless of whether or not this is true.”Nasser said regional solutions were required to bridge the rift between Lebanon and the Gulf states, but that regional understandings had not yet been fruitful. In a statement on Friday evening, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general Sheikh Naim Qassem demanded finding a solution for the entire judicial system, meaning the removal of Judge Suhail Abboud as the head of the Supreme Judicial Council.  “The judicial scene in Lebanon is unhealthy,” Qassem said. This has nothing to do with a certain incident or a specific judge. This is about an entire judicial system that overlaps in an unusual way, and it must be reconsidered — a solution must be found.”
Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, head of Hezbollah's Executive Council, said Saturday there was a “real opportunity” to resolve the Cabinet impasse and that those concerned should not waste it.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdullah Bou Habib has traveled to Moscow where he plans to meet his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on Monday. The ministers are expected to discuss the issue of Syrian refugees and Russian aid, Russia's mediation to solve Lebanon's crises, and the possibility of employing Russian investments in the country. Almarkazia news agency quoted a diplomatic source as saying: “Russia will consider the possibility of mediating between Lebanon and the Gulf states, but it would not like to take the issue upon itself and bear the consequences should its efforts fail.”Bou Habib will be receiving satellite images from the day of the Beirut port explosion, upon Lebanon's request. Russia's space agency Roscosmos sent the images to Lavrov so he could hand them over to Bou Habib. Mikati is scheduled to head to the Vatican on Wednesday to meet Pope Francis.

In Defense of Christians Accepts the Resignation of Mr. Toufic Baaklini as IDC President
10/25/2021 /https://www.maronite.news/general-news
​Washington, DC - In Defense of Christians (IDC) has accepted the resignation of Mr. Toufic Baaklini from all responsibilities at IDC.
IDC thanks Mr. Baaklini for his service as president and member of IDC’s board. While Mr. Baaklini is resigning after many years of tireless service, we know he continues to share our concern for Christians and other persecuted communities in the Middle East. IDC’s team has noted allegations of wrongdoing recently reported in the media in connection with campaign contributions. Any contributions made by, or through, Mr. Baaklini to Members of Congress or candidates were in his personal capacity. We will trust the fact finding process to determine the facts of the situation. To be clear, IDC has never made any campaign donations. Mr. Mark Carollo ended his service on IDC’s board in 2017, however, we inadvertently failed to remove his name from our website. We are grateful for his dedicated service as well—in the armed forces, at the Department of Justice, and for victims of persecution.
IDC remains committed to carrying on the organization’s mission to protect and preserve Christians and other vulnerable communities in the Middle East, and we appreciate your prayers and support in that work.

Bahrain: Lebanon Needs to Show that Hezbollah Can Change Behavior
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Bahrain's foreign minister, Abdullatif Al Zayani, said on Saturday that Lebanon needs to demonstrate that Hezbollah can change its behavior to mend a rift with Gulf Arab states. "We (can) extend support and try to find solutions in the future, but once it is demonstrated that Hezbollah can be changing its behavior," Zayani told the IISS Manama Dialogue security forum in Bahrain.

A+70% of Lebanese Unable to Buy Medicine
Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Head of Lebanon’s parliamentary health committee Asem Araji confirmed that 70% of Lebanese people could not buy medicine after lifting subsidies and the sharp increase in prices. The hike in prices prompted angry activists to protest in front of the Ministry of Health on Thursday. Lebanese authorities had decided to lift the subsidy for chronic diseases medicines partially. The move came in light of a high exchange rate of the dollar on the black market coupled with the depletion of hard currency reserves at the Central Bank of Lebanon, which used to provide dollars to import these medicines. “The subsidy was set according to certain conditions, but due to the collapse of the Lebanese pound, prices rose frighteningly,” said Araji after a meeting with Prime Minister Najib Mikati. “70% of the Lebanese are unable to buy medications, which is why we asked for a meeting with Mikati and told him that this issue was not acceptable, and we discussed a number of solutions,” revealed Araji. “We proposed increasing the funds allocated to medications in dollars, and this will be discussed in a meeting between Mikati, the Health Minister, and the Central Bank Governor,” he added. “We proposed that pharmaceutical companies be paid in Lebanese pounds according to Sayrafa platform, thus saving 20 % of the medication price, and starting today, generic drugs must be purchased,” said Araji. Following the decline in the Central Bank’s reserves of hard currency, the subsidy for medicines was gradually lifted, and the partial assistance was recently lifted for medication for chronic diseases. “We continued to support medicines for chronic diseases and cancerous diseases for a period of two months, but they were lost from the market,” explained Mikati on his part. ‘Either people stored them in homes, or they were smuggled,” he added. “Therefore, we will remain committed to the issue so that each patient takes their right by limiting the provision of the required medicine or its equivalent according to a doctor’s opinion,” said Mikati.

Lebanese Navy Rescues Distressed Boat Carrying Migrants
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Lebanon's navy rescued a boat carrying migrants that had left the country heading west across the Mediterranean, but broke down off the coast, the prime minister’s office said Saturday. It was the latest case of desperate people — mostly Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians — sailing toward European Union member Cyprus, and sometimes Turkey, seeking to escape Lebanon's worsening economic meltdown. Some 75% of the country now lives in poverty. Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s office said the migrants had left Lebanon illegally, and that the navy was towing the boat shoreward. It did not say how many migrants were aboard but said some were children. It added that there would be an investigation into the incident. Smugglers in Lebanon have made a business out of selling passage to Europe for thousands of dollars per per person. On Friday, the Internal Security Forces stormed a beach resort in the northern town of Qalamoun, where they foiled an attempt to smuggle 82 men, women and children to Europe. Police said that passengers had paid $5,000 per person, and that they had detained one of the smugglers.

Lebanon Loses a Pillar of Independent Journalism
Hussain Abdul-Hussain/Foreign Policy/November 20/2021
The Daily Star’s demise is the story of Lebanon, reduced from promising country to failed state.
The Daily Star, Lebanon’s oldest English-language newspaper, has become the latest casualty of the country’s economic meltdown, bringing its nearly 70-year run to a close. Blackouts and gas shortages are now routine. As the ranks of independent journalists in Lebanon grow ever thinner, it will only become harder to hold the corrupt political class who left the country destitute accountable.
During my four years at the Daily Star, both the paper and the country rode a wave of prosperity and optimism. Lebanon saw itself as the next Dubai. Now, it depends on humanitarian aid.
The paper recruited me in 2000, shortly after I received my bachelor’s degree from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and began a graduate program. I was also editing Outlook, AUB’s student publication. The Daily Star made a point of scouting for talent and launched the careers of a generation of journalists. Kim Ghattas, author of a bestselling book on former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, published her earliest articles in the Daily Star. So did Michael Karam, a prominent wine writer who now lives in London.
I wrote my first story about young physicians, friends from AUB who opened a free clinic in the impoverished Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. In Beirut, I interviewed Fidel “Fidelito” Ángel Castro Díaz-Balart, son of the Cuban strongman. I reported on the Arab League summit held in Beirut in 2002 and on border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel. Reporting took me to every corner of Lebanon, a country home to 18 recognized religious sects despite being smaller than Connecticut.
At the dawn of this century, the Daily Star was dreaming big. Israel had just withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. There was unprecedented political stability, and with stability came investor confidence. The Daily Star formed a partnership with the International Herald Tribune. Publisher Jamil Mroue managed to kick-start local editions in Arab countries, such as Syria, Kuwait, and Egypt, which were sold together with the Tribune. Mroue’s ambition mirrored that of Lebanon’s former larger-than-life prime minister, Rafic Hariri, whose assassination in 2005 accelerated the polarization that eventually left the country’s politics and paralyzed its economy.
Perpetrators of corruption have outlasted the Daily Star. While I was at the paper, it exposed an embezzlement scheme at the state-owned Casino du Liban, whose beneficiaries included Jamil al-Sayyed, head of the country’s domestic security service. Sayyed responded by harassing the paper’s staff, who subsequently received calls from state security asking them to “visit security offices for a cup of coffee,” a warning shot on the scale of intimidation. Writers who persisted with their troublemaking had their passports confiscated or were detained and interrogated for hours at airports whenever traveling. Undercover security officers followed journalists while making themselves noticeable—a scare tactic.
Today, Sayyed is a member of parliament. Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on him pursuant to Executive Order 13441, which targets those who contribute to the breakdown of Lebanon’s rule of law. According to the Treasury Department, he skirted banking regulations by transferring $120 million to overseas investments. “During the 2019 protests, when demonstrators protested outside his home demanding his resignation and calling him corrupt, Sayyed called on officials to shoot and kill the protesters,” according to Treasury Department.
The Daily Star also found itself in an unlikely showdown with Dunkin’ Donuts over the question of tolerance for Lebanon’s LGBTQ community. A Dunkin’ store in Beirut had become a popular hangout for the neighborhood’s gay men, prompting the store to post a sign saying it was a “family place” and it “reserved the right” not to sell to any patrons it deemed to be “dressed inappropriately.” I had become deputy managing editor for the Daily Star’s Lebanon edition at the time, and we published the story on our front page. Even though Lebanon is relatively conservative, Dunkin’ was forced to reverse its decision—but not before making sure it had canceled its corporate subscription to the Daily Star, inflicting losses on our paper. Cognizant that the Daily Star had their back, the LGBTQ community reciprocated by encouraging supporters to subscribe to the paper.
Following Hariri’s assassination and Hezbollah’s consolidation of power behind a democratic facade, the Daily Star remained vibrant and became a main news source for English speakers across the Middle East at a time when other English-language publications in the region were just state-owned mouthpieces. Yet Lebanon’s prosperity ebbed as its Ponzi scheme economy began to lose momentum, while Hezbollah’s regional military entanglements kept the country on a war footing without an end in sight.
Skilled labor emigrated. Investors lost confidence. The Daily Star’s ability to retain talent diminished, and its staff started shrinking. News aggregation and speculation replaced investigative reporting and smartly argued editorials.
This week, after some 30 years since its post-civil war revival, the Daily Star shut down. It had already stopped publishing a print edition, shifting to a web-only format. The paper’s balance sheet had been drowning in red ink for some time. Lebanon, itself, has become inhospitable for businesses of any kind thanks to frequent power outages and prohibitively expensive gas. Banks are insolvent. Credit card limits for overseas purchases are $10 a month, which does not cover subscriptions to any global newspapers.
Of the band of brothers and sisters with whom I worked at Beirut’s Daily Star, only a handful remain in the country. Some have stayed in journalism or similar lines of work. Others have switched to industries ranging from ceramic production to health care.
The paper’s once buzzing offices have been reduced to archives collecting dust in the dark. Its story is the story of Lebanon, reduced in less than 15 years from a promising country to a failing state. Few countries in the region have Lebanon’s promise, but many have its greatest weakness: a state increasingly co-opted by armed Iranian proxies who subordinate the people’s interests to Tehran’s ideology and ambitions. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, they have left in place a Potemkin democracy. In Syria and Yemen, there is no need. Journalists have become targets.
*Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former managing editor at the Daily Star. Twitter: @hahussain

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on November 20-21/2021
U.S. Defense Chief Vows to Counter Iran in Visit to Bahrain
Associated Press/November 20/2021
America's top defense official vowed Saturday to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to counter its "dangerous use" of suicide drones in the wider Mideast, a pledge coming as negotiations remain stalled over Tehran's tattered atomic deal with world powers. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's comments in Bahrain at the annual Manama Dialogue appeared aimed at reassuring America's Gulf Arab allies as the Biden administration tries to revive the nuclear deal, which limited Iran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. His remarks also come after Gulf sheikhdoms saw the U.S.' chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, raising concerns about America's commitment to the region as defense officials say they want to pivot forces to counter perceived challenges from China and Russia. "The United States remains committed to preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon. And we remain committed to a diplomatic outcome of the nuclear issue," Austin told an event put on by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "But if Iran isn't willing to engage seriously, then we will look at all of the options necessary to keep the United States secure." Iran long has maintained its nuclear program is peaceful, though U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency say Tehran had an organized weapons program until 2003. Iran's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. Since then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, a series of escalating incidents have struck the wider Mideast. That includes drone and mine attacks targeting vessels at sea, as well as assaults blamed on Iran and its proxies in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. also killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad in early 2020, which saw Iran target American troops in Iraq with ballistic missiles. Under Biden, U.S. military officials are looking at a wider reshuffling of forces from the Mideast to other areas, though it still maintains a large presence at bases across the region. Austin hinted at that in his remarks, saying: "Our potential punch includes what our friends can contribute and what we have prepositioned and what we can rapidly flow in.""Our friends and foes both know that the United States can deploy overwhelming force at the time and place of our choosing," Austin said. Austin's comments also touched on the ongoing war in Yemen, for which the Biden administration halted its offensive support shortly after he came into office. Saudi Arabia has led a military campaign since 2015 against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who hold Yemen's capital, Sanaa. The Houthis have launched drone and ballistic missile attacks on the kingdom to retaliate for a punishing aerial bombing campaign that also has killed civilians. But while the kingdom constantly refers to every drone and missile fired by the Houthis as successfully intercepted by its defenses, Austin put the rate instead at "nearly 90%." The U.S. also withdrew its THAAD air defenses and Patriot missile batteries from Prince Sultan Air Base several months ago. "We'll work with them until it's 100%," he said. The Manama Dialogue takes place each year in Bahrain, a small island kingdom off the coast of Saudi Arabia that's home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. Bahrain also has engaged in a yearslong campaign crushing dissent. Activists wrote to Austin before his trip, urging him to raise the detention of prisoners on the island and Bahrain's involvement in the Yemen war.

Thousands protest drought in Iran’s Isfahan, government apologises
The Arab Weekly/November 20/2021
TEHRAN--Thousands of protesters converged on Isfahan in central Iran on Friday to voice their anger after the city’s lifeblood river dried up due to drought and diversion. The massive protest, that drew in farmers and other people from across Isfahan province, was the biggest since demonstrations over the water crisis started on November 9. “Thousands of people from Isfahan, farmers from the east and west of the province, have gathered in the dry Zayandeh Rood riverbed with one key demand: let the river run,” a state television journalist in Isfahan reported, broadcasting live images of Friday’s rally. “For years, there has been no will to resolve the problems of this important river,” the journalist said. Footage aired on the channel showed men and women in a crowd spanning the riverbed clapping in unison. “Plundered for 20 years” and “the water must return”, they chanted. Others were seen holding up banners that read “East Isfahan has become desert” and “Our water is being held hostage”, in pictures published by Iranian media outlets. The city of Isfahan is Iran’s third-largest, with a population of around two million. It is a tourist magnet due to its heritage sites, including a historic bridge that crosses the Zayandeh Rood river — which has been dry since the year 2000 apart from brief periods. Drought is seen as one of the causes, but farmers also blame the authorities’ diversion of the river water to neighbouring Yazd province. The Iranian government has promised to come to the aid of farmers and resolve the crisis.
“I have ordered the ministers of energy and agriculture to take immediate steps to deal with the issue,” Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber said on television. Energy Minister Ali-Akbar Mehrabian apologised to farmers for being unable to provide water for their crops.
“We hope to fill these gaps in the coming months,” he said. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi had already met with representatives from the provinces of Isfahan, Yazd and Semnan on November 11 and promised to resolve water issues. Largely arid Iran has been suffering chronic dry spells for years. In July, deadly protests broke out in the southwestern province of Khuzestan after drought led to widespread water shortages, with the United Nations’ human rights chief criticising the fatal shooting of protesters.
Iran has blamed its worst drought in 50 years for the water shortages while critics also point to mismanagement. With an economy crippled by US sanctions, Iran has been the Middle East’s worst-hit country in the COVID-19 pandemic. The drought has forced Iran to import a record volume of wheat. Drought has been a problem for Iran for some 30 years, but it has worsened over the past decade, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The Iran Meteorological Organisation says that an estimated 97% of the country now faces some level of drought.
The farming area around Isfahan was once well supplied by the Zayanderud, but nearby factories have increasingly drawn on it over the years. The river once flowed under historic bridges in Isfahan’s city center, but is now a barren strip of dirt. In 2012, farmers clashed with police in a town in Isfahan province, breaking a water pipe that diverted some 50 million cubic meters of water a year to a neighboring province. Similar protests have continued sporadically since then, and the government at one point paid around $250 to each family hit by the crisis.

US Says Commitment to Security in the Middle East is Strong
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
America's top defense official vowed Saturday to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and said President Joe Biden's administration was committed to the region. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's comments in Bahrain at the annual Manama Dialogue appeared aimed at reassuring America's Gulf Arab allies as the Biden administration tries to revive the nuclear deal, which limited Iran's enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. “The United States remains committed to preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon. And we remain committed to a diplomatic outcome of the nuclear issue,” Austin told an event put on by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “But if Iran isn’t willing to engage seriously, then we will look at all of the options necessary to keep the United States secure,” he said. "Let's be clear: America's commitment to security in the Middle East is strong and sure," Austin added.

US Demands Immediate Release of Yemeni Staff Detained by Houthis
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
The United States condemns the detention of Yemeni staff of the US embassy in Sanaa by the Houthi militias and demands their immediate release, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on Friday. Dozens of Yemeni citizens and their family members have been detained and mistreated by the Iran-backed Houthis because they worked for the United States in a caretaker capacity since the embassy there closed in 2015, the statement said. "The Houthis must immediately release unharmed all Yemeni employees of the United States, vacate the embassy compound, return seized property, and cease their threats," Blinken said.

US Says it Has Prioritized Regaining Control of its Embassy from Houthis
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
US Charge d’Affaires in Yemen Cathy Westley said Saturday that her top priority was “to ensure the immediate release” of Yemeni staff of the US embassy in Sanaa detained by the Houthi militias and regaining control of the mission headquarters. “My number one priority is to ensure the immediate release of all of our local staff detained in Yemen, regain control of the compound that housed the US Embassy in Sanaa, and stop the Houthi harassment of our local staff,” Westley said in a message posted on the mission’s Twitter account. “I have directed my team to work in concert with the US Special Envoy for Yemen and the international community to harness all diplomatic means at our disposal towards this end – we will not cease in our efforts,” she said. The diplomat added that Washington remains committed to a lasting peaceful solution to the Yemeni conflict. On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that the United States condemns the detention of Yemeni staff of the US embassy in Sanaa by the Houthis and demands their immediate release. Dozens of Yemeni citizens and their family members have been detained and mistreated by the Iran-backed Houthis because they worked for the US in a caretaker capacity since the embassy there closed in 2015, the statement said.

Libya Parliament Speaker Submits Papers to Run for President
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
The speaker of the eastern-based Libyan parliament, Aguila Saleh, submitted papers on Saturday to stand in presidential elections. "I came today to the headquarters of the High Elections Commission in Benghazi to submit the required documents for the nomination to the position of president of the Libyan Republic", he said on Libya Votes TV. The elections, scheduled for Dec. 24, remain in doubt amid disputes over the rules. Aguila Saleh, 77, who has led the country’s House of Representatives since 2014, announced his candidacy in a video statement late Wednesday. “We are working to overcome the past, and close the chapter of conflict, and to embark on the future,” Saleh, a former judge, said in the statement. Libyan National Army commander Khalifa Haftar and Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, a son of ousted dictator Moammer Gaddafi, have also announced bids.

UN Security Council Fails to Agree on Statement Calling for Ceasefire in Ethiopia
New York - Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
The 15-member United Nations Security Council failed to agree on adopting a statement calling for a ceasefire in Tigray, Ethiopia, and expressing concern about alleged arrests based on ethnic identity. The draft text submitted by Ireland, a non-permanent member of the Council, was rejected by China and Russia and was “abandoned” on Friday night, a diplomatic source affirmed. Several other diplomatic sources said that “there is no agreement” and some believed that the draft was rushed. The Russian diplomatic mission acknowledged the existence of a dispute over the text, while it was not possible to obtain an immediate comment from the Chinese mission. According to the draft text obtained by AFP, the Council called for “unimpeded humanitarian access, an end to hostilities and the launch of a comprehensive national dialogue” in Ethiopia. The draft stresses the council members’ concerns about “reports of large-scale arrests in Ethiopia on the basis of ethnic identity and without due process.” It also denounces “hate speech.”Last week, Ethiopia declared a nationwide six-month state of emergency amid growing fears that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters and their allies would advance towards the capital, Addis Ababa. Several countries have called on their nationals to leave Ethiopia while the conflict between the rebels and government forces north of the country escalates.

US Ambassador to UN Says Conditions in Syria Not Suitable for Return of Refugees
Jordan - Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
United States envoy to the United Nations Linda Thomas Greenfield said the current conditions in Syria are not suitable for the return of refugees. She made her remarks Friday during a visit to the Zaatari camp, located 85 km northeast of the Jordanian capital Amman, which almost houses 80,000 Syrian refugees. “While we know the ultimate goal is for refugees to return home, what I heard today is that people remain fearful about the conditions in Syria and are not ready to return,” she noted. “It is indisputable that the current environment is not conducive to return. My takeaway from this visit is that the international community must be vigilant in ensuring that any refugee returns are safe, voluntary, and dignified.” “We appreciate the Jordanians’ enormous generosity in hosting such a large Syrian refugee population, as well as refugees from other regional conflicts,” Greenfield added. She also hailed Jordan's commitment to providing safe shelter for its neighbors for many years, saying it sets an example to the world. During her visit, the UN envoy met with Syrian refugees living in the camp and visited community centers and services run by the UNHCR and other UN Agencies. “After 10 years of war, we know that hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees is no easy task,” she stressed, noting that for this reason, the US remains the biggest donor to the Syrian refugee response. She affirmed she will use her platform at the UN to encourage others to contribute to this cause. Jordan hosts about 650,000 UN-registered Syrian refugees, while Amman estimates the number of those who have sought refuge in Jordan since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria at about 1.3 million. Last summer, Jordan said the number of Syrians who left Jordan to return to their country since 2018 did not exceed 50,000.

Report: 30,000 Syrian Children Killed, Including 181 Tortured Since 2011
Damascus, London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021 -
The Syrian Network for Human Rights said that at least 29,661 children have been killed in Syria since March 2011, including 181 due to torture, in addition to 5,036 Children who are still detained or forcibly disappeared. In its tenth annual report on violations against children in Syria on the occasion of International Children’s Day, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said that 29,661 children were killed by the parties to the conflict and the controlling forces, “including 22,930 at the hands of the Syrian regime forces, 2,032 by Russian forces, 958 by ISIS, and 71 others by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.”
The data showed that the Syrian regime was responsible for nearly 78 percent of extrajudicial killings. Based on the cumulative indicator of the death toll, 2013 was the worst year in terms of the killing of children, followed by 2012, 2014, and 2016.
The report said at least 5,036 children were still detained by the conflict parties and the controlling forces in Syria, including 3,649 by the Syrian regime forces, and 42 by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, 667 at the hands of the Syrian Democratic Forces and 359 by all armed opposition factions and the National Army.
The report registered the deaths of 181 children due to torture in Syria since March 2011, including 174 who died in the detention centers of the Syrian regime. It also claimed that there were at least 2.5 million displaced children in Syria, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, most of whom live in camps or tents that extend over large areas, which are mostly outside the control of the Syrian regime forces. The report said that attacks by Russian forces with cluster munitions in particular, have killed 67 children since their military intervention in Syria at the end of 2015, while their military operations have damaged at least 220 schools.

Turkey Sends More Syrian Mercenaries to Libya
Ankara - Saeed Abdulrazek/ Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Turkey has sent a new batch of Syrian mercenaries to Libya despite local and international demands to withdraw all foreign forces ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for December 24. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said 150 mercenaries from the pro-Ankara Libyan National Army, including al-Majd Corps, Sultan Murad and al-Hamza Divisions, arrived in Tripoli on Friday. This batch was sent to replace the 140 mercenaries who have left Libyan territories back to Syria. The war monitor accused the Turkish government of deceiving Syrian, regional and international public opinion on its engagement in Libya. There are currently about 7,000 mercenaries from armed factions loyal to Turkey in Libya, 2,000 of whom have been ordered to return home. There are intentions to keep some of them there to protect the Turkish bases, according to the Observatory. Turkey sent about 20,000 Syrian mercenaries to Libya after signing the memorandum of understanding on security and military cooperation with the Government of National Accord (GNA) then headed by Fayez al-Sarraj. In mid-November, Turkey rebuffed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call on foreign powers to remove their forces from Libya as part of efforts to turn a page on a decade of strife. Macron told an international conference on Libya in Paris that “Russia and Turkey must withdraw their mercenaries without delay.” The continued Turkish military presence in Libya will help support political stability and security in the country, presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin stressed. “We are there as a force of stability and to help the Libyan people. And our priority as far as security is concerned is to help the Libyans establish their united Libyan National Army,” he affirmed.

Death Toll of Sudan Anti-coup Protests Rises to 40
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
The death toll in Sudan from anti-coup protests since last month's military takeover has risen to at least 40, medics said Saturday after a teenager shot in the head days earlier died. Sudan's top general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on October 25 declared a state of emergency, ousted the government and detained the civilian leadership. The military takeover upended a two-year transition to civilian rule, drew wide international condemnation and punitive measures, as well as provoking people to take to the streets, AFP reported. Protests on Wednesday provoked the deadliest day so far, with the toll of those killed now standing at 16, according to medics. "One martyr passed away... after he succumbed to severe wounds after being hit by live rounds to the head and the leg on November 17," the independent Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors said. He was aged 16, it added.
Most of those killed on Wednesday were in North Khartoum, which lies across the Nile river from the capital, medics said. Police officials deny using any live ammunition and insist they have used "minimum force" to disperse the protests. They have recorded only one death, among demonstrators in North Khartoum. On Friday, small groups of protesters rallied in several neighborhoods after prayers against the military coup, especially in North Khartoum, where people were seen building barricades across the roads. Security forces sporadically fired teargas to disperse them.
"We call for those responsible for human rights abuses and violations, including the excessive use of force against peaceful protesters, to be held accountable," State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement. Washington said Sudanese should "be free to voice their opinions without fear of violence", and called for those arrested since the takeover to be freed. "In advance of upcoming protests, we call on Sudanese authorities to use restraint and allow peaceful demonstrations," the US added. The Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) have urged protesters to keep up their campaign, reporting Friday that security forces had "stormed homes and mosques" in North Khartoum. The SPA is an umbrella of unions which were instrumental in the months-long demonstrations that ousted president Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. Sudan has a long history of military coups, enjoying only rare interludes of democratic rule since independence in 1956. Burhan, the top general, insists the military's move "was not a coup" but a step "to rectify the transition" as factional infighting and splits deepened between civilians and the military under the now-deposed government. He has since announced a new civilian-military ruling council in which he kept his position as head, along with a powerful paramilitary commander, three senior military figures, three ex-rebel leaders and one civilian. But the other four civilian members were replaced with lesser known figures.

Israel Returns Wrong Body to Family of Slain Palestinian
Asharq Al-Awsat/Saturday, 20 November, 2021
Israeli soldiers on Friday went to return the remains of a Palestinian teenager who was killed in October while allegedly throwing firebombs in the occupied West Bank, only to be told by the family that it was the body of someone else. The macabre mix-up, which the army called an "unfortunate mistake," was likely to draw attention to Israel's controversial policy of holding the remains of Palestinians killed while allegedly carrying out attacks, something rights groups say amounts to collective punishment of bereaved families. Israel says it serves as a deterrent for future attacks, The Associated Press reported. Israel had planned to return the bodies of two Palestinians — Isra Khazimia and Amjad Abu Sultan — on "humanitarian grounds." At the time of the alleged attacks, Khazimia was said to have had mental health issues while Abu Sultan was a minor. But when they handed over the remains of Abu Sultan, his family informed the soldiers that it was the wrong body. The remains have not been publicly identified. "Upon return of the body, it was revealed that the body was identified incorrectly. This unfortunate mistake is being reviewed by the relevant authorities," the military said in a statement. It apologized for the mistake and said the correct remains would be returned to the family on Saturday. The Palestinian Civil Affairs Committee, which coordinates day-to-day activities with Israel, said it was Abu Sultan's family who noticed the body was not their son's. Abu Sultan, a teenager, was killed in October while attempting to throw firebombs at cars near an Israel settlement, the army said. Israeli police shot and killed Khazimia in September, when she allegedly tried to stab an officer in Jerusalem's Old City. Her remains were returned as planned.
Israel says its policy of holding the remains of Palestinian attackers is needed to deter future attacks and for possible exchanges for the remains of two Israeli soldiers held by the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel and its enemies have a long history of trading prisoners as well as the remains of those killed in armed conflict. The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, a Palestinian rights group, says Israel is holding the remains of around 80 Palestinians, many in secret cemeteries where their graves are marked by numbered plaques.

U.S. Seeks Balance as Fears Grow Russia May Invade Ukraine
Associated Press/November 20/2021
The buildup of Russian troops near Ukraine has left U.S. officials perplexed, muddying the Biden administration's response.
Some Republican lawmakers have been pressing the U.S. to step up military support for Ukraine. But that risks turning what may be mere muscle-flexing by Russian President Vladimir Putin into a full-blown confrontation that only adds to the peril for Ukraine and could trigger an energy crisis in Europe.
But a weak U.S. response carries its own risks. It could embolden Putin to take more aggressive steps against Ukraine as fears grow he could try to seize more of its territory. And it could cause more political damage for President Joe Biden at a time his popularity is dropping.
Knowing how to strike the right balance would be easier if the U.S. had a better understanding of what Putin was trying to accomplish. But top officials admit they don't know."We're not sure exactly what Mr. Putin is up to," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday. A week earlier, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, "We don't have clarity into Moscow's intentions, but we do know its playbook." Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat and member of the House Intelligence Committee, said better understanding Putin's intentions was critical "to avoid the mistakes that have started great wars."
Any U.S. response must be calibrated to avoid being "an appeaser or a provocateur," he said. "This is a tough, tough area to try to gain information," he said. "It's a challenge that's as tough or tougher than it's ever been. It has a pretty serious impact on our ability to make the correct decisions." Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv and Russian-backed rebels in the region known as Donbas has left an estimated 14,000 dead. Now, Ukraine says an estimated 90,000 Russian troops have massed near the border. The buildup could be a prelude to another Russian invasion. Speaking to Ukraine's foreign minister this month, Blinken said Putin's "playbook" was for Russia to build up forces near the border and then invade, "claiming falsely that it was provoked."
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday that the alliance is seeing an "unusual concentration" of Russian forces along Ukraine's border, warning that the same type of forces was used by Moscow in the past to intervene in neighboring countries.
Though U.S. officials don't believe an invasion is imminent, Putin also has ramped up his dismissal of an independent Ukraine. A lengthy essay the Kremlin published in July asserts that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people" and the "true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia."
But the moves could also be saber-rattling to prevent Ukraine from growing closer to the West or being admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Putin strongly opposes. It's not clear if Russia would risk invading Ukraine, setting off a far more difficult war, or want to occupy hostile territory.
A similar Russian military buildup in the spring did not lead to an invasion, though lawmakers and officials say they are more concerned now, citing U.S. intelligence that has not been made public. Russia denies it has aggressive motives, insisting it is responding to increased NATO activity near its borders and the strengthening of Ukraine's military. Speaking on Thursday, Putin said, "It should be taken into consideration that Western partners are exacerbating the situation by supplying lethal modern arms to Kyiv and carrying out provocative military maneuvers in the Black Sea — and not only in the Black Sea but also in other regions close to our borders."
The U.S. has sent ships into the Black Sea as part of NATO activity alongside Ukraine and in recent weeks has delivered military equipment as part of a $60 million package announced in September. Since 2014, the U.S. has committed to spending more than $2.5 billion to help Ukraine strengthen its defense. The White House said it hopes to de-escalate tensions. "As we have made clear in the past, escalatory or aggressive actions by Russia would be of great concern to the United States," a spokesperson for the National Security Council said in a statement.
There has been a flurry of diplomacy in recent weeks. U.S. leaders have met with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, including a visit by CIA Director William Burns to Moscow during which he spoke to Putin by phone. Germany and France have issued a joint statement affirming support for Ukraine. Ultimately, the U.S. has few good apparent options to stop Putin were he to press forward. The Biden administration in April imposed new sanctions on Russia for what it said was Russia's role in the Ukraine conflict as well as allegations that it has abetted cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure and interference in American elections. Imposing more sanctions is unlikely to influence Putin's behavior, lawmakers and experts said. The Biden administration in May did waive sanctions related to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will carry Russian natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing Ukraine.
A group of Republican lawmakers this month called on the U.S. to provide more lethal aid to Ukraine's military, ramp up intelligence sharing, or deploy a larger presence of its own to the Black Sea. But Russia could quickly counter with more forces.
And Putin could respond to any Western action by limiting energy exports to Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas.
"The traditional tools that nation-states use to govern behavior of other nation-states are not available," said Douglas Wise, a former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "The Russians have very little at risk."Writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, two analysts said Putin may want to send a message to Washington that it must treat Russia "as a major power that cannot be marginalized on the U.S. agenda." But the analysts also described Ukraine as Putin's "unfinished business.""That piece of unfinished business is the restoration of Russia's dominion over key parts of its historic empire," Eugene Rumer and Andrew Weiss wrote. "No item on that agenda is more important — or more pivotal — than the return of Ukraine to the fold." Trying to seize more of Ukraine — or even pushing to Kyiv — would be much tougher than taking Crimea or parts of eastern Ukraine, said Paul Kolbe, a former CIA officer who leads the Intelligence Project at Harvard University's Belfer Center. Putin can achieve many of his objectives without an invasion, Kolbe said, by putting pressure on Ukraine and NATO and driving a wedge between allies about how to respond.
"It's fitting in with a larger pattern of ensuring from their perception that they don't face threats on their close borders," he said.

Dutch Police Open Fire on Covid Rioters
Associated Press/November 20/2021
Police opened fire on protesters and seven people were injured in rioting that erupted in downtown Rotterdam around a demonstration against COVID-19 restrictions. The Dutch city's mayor called it "an orgy of violence."Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told reporters in the early hours of Saturday morning that "on a number of occasions the police felt it necessary to draw their weapons to defend themselves" as rioters ran rampage through the port city's central shopping district, setting fires and throwing rocks and fireworks at officers. "They shot at protesters, people were injured," Aboutaleb said. He did not have details on the injuries. Police also fired warning shots. A number of police officers also were injured in the violence and officers arrested dozens of people and expect to arrest more after studying video footage from security cameras, Aboutaleb said. Photos from the scene showed at least one police car in flames and another with a bicycle slammed through its windshield. Riot police and a water cannon restored calm after midnight. It was one of the worst outbreaks of violence in the Netherlands since coronavirus restrictions were first imposed last year. In January, rioters also attacked police and set fires on the streets of Rotterdam after a curfew came into force. Justice Minister Ferd Grapperhaus condemned the events. "The riots and extreme violence against police officers, riot police and firefighters last night in Rotterdam are disgusting to see," he said in a statement. "Protesting is a great right in our society, but what we saw last night is simply criminal behavior. It has nothing to do with demonstrating," he added. Police units from around the country raced to Rotterdam to help bring Friday night's situation under control. Local media reported that gangs of soccer hooligans were involved in the rioting.
Video from social media shown on Dutch broadcaster NOS appeared to show a person being shot in Rotterdam, but there was no immediate word on what happened. Police said in a tweet that it was "still unclear how and by whom" the person was apparently shot. An independent investigation into the shootings by police was opened, as is the case whenever Dutch police use their weapons. The government has said it wants to introduce a law that would allow businesses to restrict the country's coronavirus pass system to only people who are fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 — that would exclude people who test negative. The country has seen record numbers of infections in recent days and a new partial lockdown came into force a week ago. Local political party Leefbaar Rotterdam condemned the violence in a tweet. "The center of our beautiful city has this evening transformed into a war zone," it said. "Rotterdam is a city where you can disagree with things that happen but violence is never, never, the solution."

Restoration of Mosul churches brings glimmer of hope to Christian community
The Arab Weekly/November 20/2021
MOSUL--Cymbals, prayers and Chaldean Catholic liturgy resounded on Friday in Mosul’s Saint George monastery, where Iraqi faithful marked the restoration of two churches destroyed by jihadists in their former stronghold. Dozens gathered in one of the monastery’s churches that have been rebuilt in stone six years after the Islamic State group (ISIS) pulverised them, in a city home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. It is the latest sign of a slow return to normality in Iraq’s second city. Mosul was left in ruins after three years of jihadist occupation which ended in 2017 when an Iraqi force backed by US-led coalition air strikes pushed them out. “We have old memories in this monastery,” said Maan Bassem Ajjaj, 53, a civil servant who moved to Erbil, capital of the neighbouring autonomous region of Kurdistan, to escape the jihadists. “My son and daughter were baptised here,” he said. “Each Friday, Mosul’s Christian families would come here.”The US Department of State funded the project, which also had support from a Christian non-governmental group, L’Oeuvre d’Orient, according to Samer Yohanna, a superior of the Antonian order of Chaldean monks. He said that the jihadists destroyed 70 percent of the monastery the year after they occupied Mosul in 2014 and declared the establishment of an Islamic “caliphate.”The ISIS onslaught forced hundreds of thousands of Christians in Nineveh province surrounding Mosul to flee. Iraq’s Christian population has shrunk to fewer than 400,000 from around 1.5 million before the US-led invasion of 2003 that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein. On a visit to Iraq in March, Pope Francis prayed outside another ruined church, one of at least 14 which ISIS destroyed in Nineveh. Although the churches have been repaired, other parts of the centuries-old monastery still need restoration. “You can see walls that are still standing but are weak and which need to be reinforced,” Yohanna said. Chaldean Bishop Thabet Habib, from the Al-Qosh diocese, said further work was needed so the entire monastery “can regain its splendour.” Last month, Mosul’s Muslim community celebrated with a ceremony to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed at the historic Al-Nuri mosque, which too was severely damaged by ISIS but is also being restored.

Rotterdam mayor slams violent COVID-19 protests, more than 20 arrested
NNA/Reuters/November 20/2021 
The mayor of Rotterdam on Saturday condemned "an orgy of violence" at protests against COVID-19 measures in the Dutch port city, in which seven people were wounded and more than 20 arrested. Crowds of several hundred rioters torched cars, set off fireworks and threw rocks at police during the protests on Friday evening. Police responded with warning shots and water canons. "Police were forced to draw their weapons and even fire direct shots," Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told a press conference early on Saturday. It was "an orgy of violence," he said. "I can't think of another way to describe it."Authorities said they had arrested more than 20 people and expected to detain others, as the city centre where the riots took place is extensively monitored by security cameras. Dutch justice minister Ferd Grapperhaus said in a statement that the "extreme violence" against police and fire fighters in Rotterdam was "repulsive". ----

The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on November 20-21/2021
د. ماجد رفي زاده/معهد جيتستون : ملالي إيران سوف يحصلون على تنازلات كبيرة من إدارة بايدن والاتحاد الأوروبي
Iran’s Mullahs to Obtain Major Concessions from Biden Admin and EU?
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/November 20/2021
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/104269/dr-majid-rafizadeh-gatestone-institute-irans-mullahs-to-obtain-major-concessions-from-biden-admin-and-eu-%d8%af-%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%ac%d8%af-%d8%b1%d9%81%d9%8a-%d8%b2%d8%a7%d8%af%d9%87-%d9%85%d8%b9/
The Biden administration has already caved in to the mullahs’ demands. It announced not only that it is willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it is considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions. The administration also proceeded to revoke the designation of the Houthis, an Iran-backed terror group, as an officially-designated terrorist organization.
“The Biden administration appears to be using loopholes when dealing with the Iranian regime…. If the Biden administration is involved in transferring funds to Iran, Congress and the American people must be informed. Biden administration officials continue to deflect and refuse to answer questions from members of Congress regarding this issue. I want answers. ” — U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, March 25, 2021.
The Biden administration and the EU would do well to remember that with every concession they give the Islamic Republic, they are not furthering peace in the region; they are instead empowering and emboldening a rapacious regime.
The Biden administration has already caved in to the demands of Iran’s mullahs. It announced not only that it is willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it is considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (pictured) commented: “The Biden administration appears to be using loopholes when dealing with the Iranian regime…. If the Biden administration is involved in transferring funds to Iran, Congress and the American people must be informed. Biden administration officials continue to deflect and refuse to answer questions from members of Congress regarding this issue.”
The ruling mullahs of Iran are maneuvering towards obtaining major concessions from the Biden administrations and the EU3 (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) during the upcoming nuclear talks in Vienna on November 29.
The Iranian regime wants the Biden administration to remove all sanctions that were imposed on Tehran during the Trump administration — many of which are not even linked to Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, they are related to the Iranian regime’s terrorist activities and human rights violations.
An important example is the serious designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — a paramilitary force established in 1979 to promote the revolution — as a terrorist organization. The IRGC is responsible for maintaining the Supreme Leader’s power and the regime’s revolutionary ideals, which include anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Inside Iran, the IRGC cracks down on and silences opposition to regime’s rule; engages in the repression of dissidents and suppression of the freedoms of speech, press and assembly, and it imprisons, tortures and executes opponents through its revolutionary courts. The IRGC’s footprints can also be seen in many international conflicts, including in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, especially through its elite branch, the Quds Force.
The Biden administration has already caved in to the mullahs’ demands. It announced not only that it is willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it is considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions. The administration also proceeded to revoke the designation of the Houthis, an Iran-backed terror group, as an officially-designated terrorist organization.
Republican foreign policy leaders in Congress have requested from Secretary of State Antony Blinken answers to questions about the secret talks held with South Korea that resulted in South Korea giving the Iranian regime $1 billion in ransom money. The letter was led by Congressman Bryan Steil (R-WI), Congressman Greg Steube (R-FL) and Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (R-IN). Steil pointed out:
“The Biden administration appears to be using loopholes when dealing with the Iranian regime. I am again asking direct, yes or no questions on the United States’ involvement in facilitating a South Korean ransom payment to Iran. If the Biden administration is involved in transferring funds to Iran, Congress and the American people must be informed. Biden administration officials continue to deflect and refuse to answer questions from members of Congress regarding this issue. I want answers. Congress must be informed of the administration’s actions.”
Meanwhile, the Iranian regime is being empowered, and has ruled out discussion about its ballistic missile program, a core pillar of its nuclear program, in the upcoming talks in Vienna. It is ironic that the ruling mullahs want the talks lead to the lifting of non-nuclear sanctions in addition to the nuclear sanctions, but do not wish to discuss anything apart from their nuclear program, such as their terrorist activities.
Since the Biden administration assumed office, the Iranian regime has been preparing to obtain major concessions. The mullahs have made significant advances in their nuclear program ahead of the talks in order to gain leverage and the upper hand during negotiations with the US and the EU3.
When the Biden administration came to power, the Iranian regime began advancing its nuclear program at a noticeably faster pace. On January 9, the Iranian parliament passed a law requiring the government to expel nuclear inspectors from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In January 2021, the Iranian regime started increasing uranium enrichment to 20%. In April, the regime raised its uranium enrichment level to 60%, edging closer to weapons-grade levels.
“The young and God-believing Iranian scientists managed to achieve a 60% enriched uranium product,” Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, bragged. “I congratulate the brave nation of Islamic Iran on this success. The Iranian nation’s willpower is miraculous and can defuse any conspiracy.”
The Biden administration, in addition, has made no effort to pressure the Iranian regime into answering the IAEA’s questions about three undeclared clandestine nuclear sites found in Iran.
“Iran must decide to cooperate in a clearer manner with the agency to give the necessary clarifications,” warned IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.
“The fact that we found traces (of uranium) is very important. That means there is the possibility of nuclear activities and material that are not under international supervision and about which we know not the origin or the intent. That worries me.”
The Biden administration and the EU would do well to remember that with every concession they give the Islamic Republic, they are not furthering peace in the region; they are instead empowering and emboldening a rapacious regime.
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Climate Change Will Kill National Sovereignty As We Know It
Andreas Kluth/Bloomberg/November, 20/2021
As we collectively hurtle into the era of climate change, international relations as we’ve known them for almost four centuries will change beyond recognition. This shift is probably inevitable, and possibly even necessary. But it will also cause new conflicts, and therefore war and suffering.
Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, diplomats have — in peacetime and war alike — for the most part subscribed to the principle of national sovereignty. This is the idea, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, that foreign countries have no right “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”
The concept was born, along with the entire system of modern states, in the physical and psychological rubble of the Thirty Years War. Starting in 1618, the European powers intervened in one another’s territories almost willy-nilly. Round after round of war left about one in three central Europeans dead. It was in that continental graveyard that statesmen (they were all men) stipulated that it was best if every state henceforth minded only its own business.
Nobody at the Peace of Westphalia was deluded enough to think that this realist notion would end war as such. After all, by acknowledging sovereignty, the system accepted that countries pursue their national interests, which tend to clash. But at least the new consensus offered the chance of preventing another indiscriminate bloodletting.
Even then, the principle of sovereignty was never absolute or uncontroversial. For a long time, the best idealist counterargument was humanitarian — that countries have not just the right but the duty to intervene in other states if, say, those are committing atrocities such as genocide.
Now, however, there’s an even more powerful case against sovereignty, put forth by thinkers such as Stewart Patrick at the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s that in a world where all countries collectively face the planetary emergency of global warming, sovereignty is simply no longer a tenable concept.
That insight has probably also dawned on many delegates to COP26, the United Nations climate summit now underway in Glasgow. What’s at stake in those negotiations is not any country’s “national” interest as such, except insofar as it’s part of the collective interest of our species in preserving the global commons: the atmosphere and biosphere. And although aviation regulators might disagree, the borders around our territorial jurisdictions just don’t extend up into the air.
A carbon dioxide molecule emitted in China, the US or India will waft who-knows-where and accelerate climate change everywhere. It will flood cities in Germany, burn forests in Australia, starve people in Africa and submerge islands in the Pacific. All the world’s people, therefore, have a legitimate interest in the greenhouse gases emitted in any given jurisdiction.
An early and tragicomic demonstration of this shift in international relations was the dust-up in 2019 between Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron. Bolsonaro, a populist firebrand, was at that time allowing fires to burn wide swathes of the Amazon rainforest. It happens to be the world’s primary “lung” or “carbon sink,” pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and storing them in trees. Except now the Amazon was belching carbon back into the air.
Speaking for many, the French president accused his Brazilian counterpart of abetting “ecocide.” Sounds like the new genocide, doesn’t it? Bolsonaro shot back that Macron was a neocolonialist and followed up with a sexist jibe aimed at Macron’s wife.
The underlying issue was sovereignty: Is a rainforest located in Brazil the business of Brazil or of the world? Would, in a hypothetical future scenario, an alliance led by France be within its rights to declare war on Brazil to prevent ecocide, and thereby humanity’s suicide? (Fortunately, 100 countries including Brazil this week pledged instead to cooperate in phasing out deforestation).
This opens a new line of thinking about world affairs. Policymakers are already steeped in analyses of the new types of conflict that global warming will cause within and between countries. Those include wars over access to freshwater, the disappearance of arable land or mass migrations.
But the creeping obsolescence of Westphalian sovereignty as the operating system of international relations would cause even more upheaval. And this looks inevitable. Some powers or alliances will in the future contemplate military interventions in other states to end what they will define as ecocide. Others may even go to war if they believe rival countries are taking unilateral measures against climate change that threaten their own interests.
America’s National Intelligence Council, for example, has thought about what would happen if some country were to spray huge quantities of aerosols into the stratosphere. Such geoengineering might reflect sunlight and cool the planet, as ash does after a big volcanic eruption. But it could also change weather patterns and rob other countries of their livelihood. Who in this scenario would be sovereign over what?
The time to think about the demise of sovereignty is now. Maybe we’ll need an ecological equivalent to what the World Trade Organization is to commerce: A new international body that makes the conundrum explicit and attempts to maintain order. Even then, the world is likely to become more unstable and dangerous, not only ecologically but also geopolitically. We all dread environmental Armageddon. But we don’t want another Thirty Years War either.

Enslavement of the Black by the White: 'The Bedrock of the West'?[1]
 Drieu Godefridi/Asharq Al Awsat/November 20/ 2021
The "1619 Project" literature is characteristic of today's neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.
The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa.
The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history components and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. "Slavery", as Paul Louis reminds us, "is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations".
Slavery is not a moral choice, it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves.
Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world.
In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.
The origins of slavery are white. Slavery is an integral part of human history, and the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa. Pictured: "The way in which Christian prisoners are sold as slaves at the Algiers market," an engraving from 1684 by Jan Luyken. (Image source: Amsterdam Historic Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
In August 2019, The New York Times initiated The 1619 Project, consisting of a collection of articles designed to illustrate that slavery was "one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution". This project is directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff reporter who is not a historian but an avowed "critical race theory" activist. [2]
When American historians denounced the obvious falsehood of this assertion, and its revisionist and negationist nature against proven, documented and source-based historical reality, The New York Times altered the original version of the articles in question to say "some" colonists fought to defend the practice of slavery. The New York Times stated:
"We recognise that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists."[3]
This modest "clarification", so superficial that The New York Times only bothered to make it after a large mobilisation of historians, destroys the essence of the 1619 Project, which is to show that slavery is supposedly the foundation of American society and the ideal in which American revolutionaries were macerating. Moreover, to say that "some colonists" thought this way is completely meaningless, in the same way that "some colonists" had brown eyes or had nightmares.[4] It should be noted that many colonists, including Quakers[5], vehemently opposed slavery and worked tirelessly on both sides of the Atlantic until they finally achieved its abolition.
The 1619 Project literature is characteristic of today's neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.
The meaning of the word slave, from the mediaeval Latin word sclavus, meaning "slavic" in the seventh century, shifted to "slave" in the 10th century[6]. This was the great century of slavery that saw the Arabs of North Africa, the Byzantines and the Europeans enslave vast populations. French Historian Alexandre Skirda explains:
"These Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe, Orthodox Christians were considered heretics and devoid of 'soul', thus 'talking goods' were sold to the Muslim world from the 8th to the 18th century. Thus, today's Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Bielorussians, Ukrainians and Russians were captured by the Franks and Scandinavians first, relayed then from the 12th to the 15th centuries by the Venetians and Genoese; finally, the Crimean Tatars would continue the trade on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, a phenomenon that will affect millions of victims in total".[7]
The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa. According to English Historian Peter Akroyd:
"The Venetians were greedy for this particular source of income since the profit on each item was said to be 1,000 per cent. They sold Russians and even Greek Christians to the Saracens. Men, women, and children were purchased or captured in the region of the Black Sea, Armenians and Georgians among them, before being despatched to Venice, where they were in turn sold to Egypt, Morocco, Crete and Cyprus. They sold boys and young women as concubines."[8]
The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. "Slavery", as Paul Louis[9] reminds us, "is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations". [10]
Slavery is not a moral choice; it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves. Historically, slavery was everywhere. The realization of its inhumanity was not broached until its antithesis, the affluent society, appeared. [11] We are so accustomed to abundance that we have forgotten that it is a recent miracle, tiny in its historical extent. The tension of the "golden thread of civilisation"(Ernst Jünger[12]) is preceded by thousands of years of need, reducing the current commendable revulsion against it to a historical footnote.
In many societies, especially in ancient times, slavery represented an improvement in the status quo ante. In these societies, the previous usual fate of the defeated had been extermination. Paul Louis writes:
"In the eyes of the Assyrians, Romans, and Egyptians, slavery was not a monstrous violation of the person but a mitigation of the fate of captives, a first reaction against the savage law of primitive warfare. This law (...) involved the massacre of the defeated, the total annihilation of the army that had suffered defeat. The kings of Egypt and Assyria took glory from the number of their victims. (...) Carnage was the final incident of any battle". [13]
Let us leave the possible financial and political motives of the American neo-racists for a moment and take a look at the worldwide situation of slavery in 1750.
In China, the Qing dynasty, in power since 1644, continued the practice of slavery, which had been inseparable from the birth of Chinese civilisation.[14] The absolute number of slaves in China is striking, but according to Angela Schottenhammer, a historian at the University of Leuven, this number seems never to have exceeded 1% in relation to the total Chinese population.[15]
In North Africa, Muslim regimes imported shiploads of white slaves, Slavs and Europeans. Prague long served as a sorting centre for the castration of white slaves [16] before they were transported to the Maghreb. These Slavic and European slaves were used for domestic and sexual slavery and sometimes for military duties. The Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire formed an elite military corps composed mainly of white slaves. [17]
In what is now India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Islamic conquerors imposed slavery from the eighth century and practised it on an unprecedented scale. Hindu women and children were forced into domestic and sexual slavery. Endless convoys of Hindu slaves were continually sent to what is now Syria and Iraq, and then to the Muslim-controlled international slave markets. The practice of slavery in this region extended, uninterrupted, from the eighth to the eighteenth century.[18]
In the eighteenth century, throughout the world slavery was a normal institution, as normal as it was in ancient Greece[19] and was practised on a large scale. There are recognisable nuances. "Compared to the European-organized slave trade, the Muslim world's slave trade started earlier, lasted longer, and, more importantly, involved a larger number of slaves", notes Economist Paul Bairoch in Le génocide voilé : enquête historique.[20] The Franco-Senegalese Tidiane N'Diaye notes that, while millions of Black Americans can claim a slave heritage, there is almost nothing left of the millions of black slaves in Islamic lands. Indeed, they were often castrated.[21] "The Arab-Muslim trade in black Africans involved 17 million victims who were killed, castrated or enslaved for more than 13 centuries without interruption", says N'Diaye, whose powerful and moving investigation completes the book The Slave Trade: A Global History Essay, published by Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau in 2006.
Is this "normality of slavery", until Western modernity put an end to it, deplorable and unacceptable? Absolutely. From the standpoint of our values, there is no doubt. We find the enslavement of men, women and children horrendous; however, we are not what Raymond Aron contemptuously called "beautiful souls" who judge the world as if they were handing out sweets.[22] It is easy to hurl imprecations at the past. If we institute this tribunal of times, we should at least avoid arbitrarily selecting the periods and regions considered.
In the eighteenth century, slavery was not practised in the same way everywhere. While it was not contested in the Muslim world -- whose economic relationship to slavery, which was completely unrestrained, resembled that of the ancient Greeks -- it was already being moderated in the China of the Qing dynasty.[23] The Europeans, following the British, sought to limit the practice when they could not abolish it.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, a movement arose, initially confined to the Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere, called abolitionism.[24] This movement, particularly under Christian influence, especially that of the Puritans and even the Quakers, and later the Methodists, [25] accurately regarded slavery as an abomination and demanded its abolition. Civil abolitionist societies were formed, carrying the abolitionist ideal throughout the British Empire to its very top. Once the Crown had embraced this moral imperative, it took only a few years for the abandonment of the slave trade to be decreed in the British Empire in 1807, followed the abolition of slavery in 1833.[26] As early as 1807, London had launched an ambitious international abolition campaign, imposing the abandonment of the slave trade and then of slavery on both its defeated enemies and dependent allies. At the same time, the Royal Navy established a West Africa Squadron to assist in hunting slave ships off the African coast. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans.
Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world. [27]
In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.
To consider slavery as the foundation of the West is a revisionist and negationist lie,[28] a "conspiracy theory" [29] in the strict sense, whose evocative power is reminiscent of the formidable international career of that other crude forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [30]
Drieu Godefridi, a classical-liberal Belgian author, is the founder of the l'Institut Hayek in Brussels. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris and also heads investments in European companies. He is also the author of Critical Race Theory.
[1] Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility, Beacon Press: 2018, 29: "the racial contract is a tacit and sometimes explicit agreement among members of the peoples of Europe to assert, promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy in relation to all other people of the world. (...) White supremacy has shaped a system of global European domination: it brings into existence whites and nonwhites, full persons and subpersons" and page 129: "white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions."
[2] One of the official, self-styled 'academic' denominations of neo-racist doctrine.
[3] "An Update to the 1619 Project"
[4] The trouble is that the denialist version of The 1619 Project was translated into school materials and immediately distributed throughout the United States. No "doubt" The New York Times officials personally went to each of these classes to correct their "little mistake". See "The Fatal Flaw of the 1619 Project Curriculum."
[5] The Quakers are one of the many figures of Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestantism. They are a dissent from the Anglican Church and are characterized, among other things, by their direct relationship with God and the absence of a creed and of any ecclesial hierarchy.
[6] Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traites négrières: Essai d'histoire globale, 2006.
[7] A. Skirda, The Slavic trade from the 8th to the 18th century, 2016.
[8] Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City, 2010.
[9] Born Paul Lévi in 1872 in Paris and died in 1955 in Le Vésinet, Paul Louis was a French historian and journalist.
[10] Paul Louis, Le travail dans le monde romain (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912), 51; see also Simon Webb, The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam, 2020.
[11] J. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1926.
[12] Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was a philosopher, a highly decorated Imperial German soldier, author, and entomologist who became publicly known for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel.
[13] Paul Louis, Work in the Roman World, 51, italics added.
[14] Richard B. Allen, Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900, 2021.
[15] Angela Schottenhammer, "Slaves and Forms of Slavery in Late Imperial China (Seventeenth to Early Twentieth Centuries)", Slavery & Abolition, 2003, 24, 2, 143–154.
[16] Christian Delacampagne, Histoire de l'esclavage. De l'Antiquité à nos jours, Paris, Le livre de poche, 2002.
[17] Raymond Ibrahim, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, Da Capo Press, 2018; David Nicolle, The Janissaries, London, Osprey Publishing, 1995.
[18] Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 1, Leiden, Brill Academic, 1991.
[19] When Hannah Arendt raves about the Greek way of life and disposition to "work", in an intellectual sense, we must not forget that it is not "the Greek" who works. It is the free Greek, a minority in ancient Greece. In Athens, Sparta and all the cities of the Aegean basin, in Anatolia and in the Italian boot, the overwhelming majority of people were slaves. In the fourth century B.C., the tyrant Demetrios of Phalerus organised a general census of Attica, which yielded the following figures: 21,000 citizens, 10,000 métèques [foreigners] and 400,000 slaves. See. Raymond Descat, Esclave en Grèce et à Rome, Paris, Hachette, 2006.
[20] Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l'histoire économique, La Découverte, 1994, 204.
[21] The castration of slaves throughout the millennium of Arab-Turkish-Muslim slavery is a constant, as the British scholar Simon Webb reminds us in his remarkable study of white European (non-Slavic) slaves captured in Europe by Arab-Muslim slavers (The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam, Pen & Sword History, 2020): "Castration, used very occasionally against black slaves taken across the Atlantic, was routinely carried out on an industrial scale on European boys who were exported to Africa and the Middle East. "
[22] Raymond Aron, Memoirs, 621.
[23] "Slavery in Early China: A Socio-Cultural Approach", January 2001, Journal of East Asian Archaeology 3(1-2):283-331
[24] Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, The Abolitionist Revolution, Gallimard, 2017.
[25] John Wesley, Thoughts on Slavery, 1774.
[26] The difference of a few years is explained by the desire to give the economic world of the plantations time to adapt; it is the same gradual philosophy, already implemented in Denmark, that will be adopted by the American revolutionaries. See Nelly Schmidt, L'abolition de l'esclavage : cinq siècles de combats XVIe-XXe siècle, Paris, Fayard, 2005, 353.
[27] In other words, it was the imperialist West that imposed the abolition of slavery on the Arab-Muslim world.
[28] Before joining The New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones, seemingly innocent of historical rigor, had already defended the thesis that Africans explored the American continent long before Europeans: 'In Racist Screed NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls "White Race" "Barbaric Devils" "Bloodsuckers" Columbus "No Different Than Hitler",' The Federalist; that these Africans were distinguished by their cordial contacts and relations with the Aztecs – the harmonious relations of which, unfortunately, no trace remains – and that the Aztec pyramids are a "testimony" of these friendly relations: Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Modern Savagery", The Observer: The term denialist is woefully inadequate to describe this "thesis" which appears based solely on the fantasies of its author.
[29] "Complotism: trust the professionals!", Dreuz, 25 November 2020.
[30] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery created by the Russian Tsar's secret police in 1903, purports to describe the attempts of Jews and Freemasons to control the world. This forgery plagiarizes, among other things, a pastiche that humorously described Napoleon III's plan to conquer the world.
© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

What Is Islam's Relationship to Christianity?/Theological Analysis of the Bible and the Quran
Mark Durie/Lausanne Global Analysis/November 20/2021
The Quran is a book of the utmost importance and influence in the world today. It is the foundational text of Islam, and through the Islamic sharia it shapes legal systems, politics, ethics, cultures, and worship for a quarter of the world's population.
The intriguing Quran
There are many things about the Quran that are hard to understand and can seem puzzling. It is not an easy read. However, for Christians perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Quran is its many allusions to biblical stories and characters. Although Islam has offered a most effective challenge to Christianity during the past 1,400 years, conquering and then Islamizing four of the five patriarchates in the Pentarchy of late antiquity—Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Constantinople—the text of the Quran draws heavily upon the Bible. The two most frequently named figures in the Quran are Moses (136 times) and Abraham (69 times). Jesus is mentioned by name six times as frequently as Muhammad.
One of the striking things about the Bible-in-the-Quran is the puzzling combination of knowledge and the lack of it. For example, although it contains hundreds of references to biblical figures and events, the Quran seems to consider Mary the mother of Jesus (Miriam in Hebrew) to be the same person as Miriam the sister of Moses and Aaron. In a surah (chapter) of the Quran called "The Family of Imran" (Biblical Amram of Exod 6:20) there is an account of the birth of Mary to the "wife of Amram," after which she is brought up by Zakariah, the father of John the Baptist (Surah 3:35–37). Then again, in Surah 19:28, Mary is called the "sister of Aaron."[1] These observations give rise to the question: "How can the Quran know so much about the Bible, while at the same time, not know that a thousand years separated the family of Amram from the family of Jesus of Nazareth?"
The Quran exhibits a puzzling combination of Biblical knowledge and the lack of it.
This is by no means the only inconsistency between the Bible and the Quran. Some others are the appearance of a Haman, a name familiar from the book of Esther, in the court of Pharoah at the time of Moses (Surah 28:6); the participation of a "Samaritan" in the golden calf episode from Exodus 32 (Surah 20:85, 87, 95); and a reference to Saul choosing his warriors based on whether they scooped water with their hands or drank by lapping with their mouths (Sura 2:249), which surely goes back to the story of Gideon in Judges 7.
I do not mention these mismatches between the Quran and the Bible for apologetic or polemical purposes, but simply to underscore this important question: "What is so much of the Bible doing in the Quran?"
A "Christian heresy"?
Down the centuries, a repeated Christian response to the rich and peculiar vein of biblical materials which runs through the Quran has been to conclude that Islam arose from what was originally some kind of sectarian Christianity. Thus John of Damascus, writing a century after Muhammad, claimed that Muhammad, "after conversing with an Arian monk concerning the Old and New Testament, fabricated his own heresy."[2] Other luminaries who have held a similar view have included Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and Martin Luther, some claiming Arian influence, others Nestorian. Until modern times this perspective has been so prevalent that it could be considered the conventional Christian explanation for the biblical materials found in the Quran.
This framing of Islam as a Christian heresy has stimulated two opposite impulses. One is to correct what are taken to be "errors." This was the approach of John of Damascus. A contrasting response has been what Bishop Kenneth Cragg has called a process of retrieval.[3] Cragg's idea of retrieval was that Christians ought to undo or reverse the divergence from the gospel, by removing the veil which obscures the true Christ within Islam. This approach seeks to affirm what is true in the Quran by unveiling it. Some authors—and Cragg is an example—have argued that the veil is only in place because of Christian failure, because "Islam developed in an environment of imperfect Christianity."[4] Thus, for Cragg, the retrieval is also a "restitution."[5]
An alternative thesis
But what if both "correction" and "retrieval" are misguided? What if the whole idea of Islam arising from Christian roots is a derogatory error? Is it possible that neither the correction approach nor the retrieval approach is valid?
Biblical reflexes in the Quran are not evidence of "family-tree" affinity between Islam and Christianity.
In my book, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Reflexes,[6] I explored an alternative thesis, that there is a deep theological disconnect between the Bible and the Quran, too deep to sustain the view that Islam arose out of Christianity or Judaism in any meaningful sense. Yes, the Quran incorporates biblical (and extra-biblical) Christian and Jewish materials, but it repurposes them to serve a radically different theological agenda: the Quran marches to the beat of its own theological drum. I concluded that the sheer volume of biblical reflexes in the Quran is not actually evidence of a deeper "family-tree" affinity between Islam and Christianity.
A medieval Persian manuscript shows Muhammad leading Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayer.
In one example, the Quran refers repeatedly to Jesus (Isa), and even calls him the Messiah (al-Masih), but this is a Christ without a Christology, for there is no explanation of what a Messiah might be. The sound shape of the messianic title has been carried over into the Quran, but nothing of its meaning.
The theological difference between the Bible and the Quran runs deeper than superficial similarities might first suggest. For example, the Quran lacks a covenantal theology to frame a saving relationship between human beings and Allah. A careful linguistic analysis of the quranic Arabic words mithaq and ahd, sometimes translated as "covenant," reveals that in the Quran God does not enter into reciprocal binding obligations with people; such relationships only exist between human beings. Putative quranic "covenants" between God and people in the Quran are actually obligations imposed by God upon his human slaves.
The Quran borrows prodigiously from Christian and Jewish sources, but not for forming its theology.
To be sure, the Quran borrows materials prodigiously from Christian and Jewish sources, but not for forming its theology. For example, the idea of warring in the name of God was current among Christians at the time of the Quran, which picked up and incorporated ideas and practices from contemporary Christianity,[7] but the Quran does this without drawing upon biblical theologies of warfare. Instead, it creatively develops its own war theology, fitting what is taken from contemporary Christian practices into a framework of pre-Islamic Arab raiding culture.[8]
At first sight monotheism is a theological idea the Bible and the Quran have in common, but first appearances can be deceptive. In the Torah the call to monotheism is about exclusive covenantal loyalty to Yahweh: "You shall have no other gods before me" (Deut 5:7). However, the Quran's idea of God's oneness is grounded in Arabic ideas of client-protégé relationships and, negatively, in the assertion that no idea of propriety partnership (shirk) can be applied to God. These metaphors owe little if anything to the Bible, but are grounded in the values of Arab culture, for example the insight that it is disastrous for a slave to be owned by two masters (Sura 39:29).
The list of key biblical theological concepts that were not taken up into quranic theology includes the idea of the presence of God, the concept of holiness, and the idea that sin is a breach of relationship that can be repaired through atonement.
If not a family tree, then what?
Many Christians assume that Islam developed out of Judaism and Christianity. This is itself a manifestation of the conventional "Christian heresy" view of Islam. Behind this, a "family tree" model assumed, in which the root is Judaism. This branches out into Christianity, and then later Islam branches off. My research suggests that this way of thinking is a false lead, which pays too much attention to superficial similarities and not enough to theology.
I wrote in The Qur'an and its Biblical Reflexes that "a challenge of modeling the relationship of Islam to Judaism and Christianity is to be able to refer to a conceptual framework for the genesis of a faith that can accommodate a pattern of extensive influences combined with evidences of significant disconnections, which is what we know to be the case with the Quran."[9] If Islam and Christianity are not in some kind of kinship relationship, how then are we to conceptualize a connection which resulted in a very large volume of biblical content being absorbed into the Quran? If not a family tree, then what?
In The Qur'an and its Biblical Reflexes I drew on two metaphors. One is a building metaphor. Islam's relationship to Christianity is not like that of a church which has been transformed into mosque, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Rather it is more like a church has been demolished, and its materials have been repurposed for the construction of a mosque, rather like the pillars in the mosque at Qairawan in Tunisia, which were repurposed from earlier churches, long since demolished.[10]
The other metaphor I drew on was linguistic hybridization. Some languages are formed by combining materials from a superstrate language and a substrate language (or languages). An example is Haitian Creole, for which the superstrate was French, and the substrate West African languages. The result is that Haitian Creole's words are largely French, but its grammar, morphology, and phonology—its heart—is pure West African.
Pre-Islamic Arab language and culture provided the substrate for the Quran.
I proposed that the Quran was produced by a process of hybridization, in which Christian and Jewish influences provided the superstrate, while pre-Islamic Arab language and culture provided the substrate, including much of the theology.
Concluding reflections
The observation that the Quran does not have a "family tree" relationship with Judaism and Christianity should not in any way be considered pejorative. If the Quran "is neither a text subsidiary to the Bible, nor is it to be attached to a genetic family tree alongside it,"[11] then Christians can be liberated from thinking of Islam as some kind of Christian heresy, and begin to understand it for what it actually is, and not what at first sight it might appear to be to Christians.
The perspective offered here, if valid, could have profound implications for coexistence between the two faiths, including for interfaith dialogue. It also has implications for mission. It means that both missionaries and dialogue partners can set aside the tasks of "correction" or "retrieval," for these two opposite approaches are really but two sides of the "heresy" coin.
My findings offer an invitation to Christians to ponder the similarities and (deep) differences between Islam and the two biblical faiths, Judaism and Christianity, with fresh eyes.
Mark Durie is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum, founding director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness, and a senior research fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at the Melbourne School of Theology.
[1] Muslim scholars were of course aware that this identification conflicts with the biblical accounts, and some Muslims would reject the suggestion that the Quran identifies Mary of the gospels with Miriam of Exodus. Instead, they suggest that these quranic passages are to be interpreted typologically, eg., "sister of Aaron" means she was of the same tribe as Aaron.
[2] Daniel John Janosik, John of Damascus, First Apologist to the Muslims: The Trinity and Christian Apologetics in the Early Islamic Period (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016), 261.
[3] Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret 2nd edn (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 218-42.
[4] Cragg, The Call of the Minaret, 219.
[5] Cragg, The Call of the Minaret, 220.
[6] Mark Durie, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion (Maryland: Lexington, 2018).
[7] Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 275.
[8] Durie, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Reflexes, 229–39.
[9] Durie, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Reflexes, 254.
[10] I owe these helpful metaphors to Dudley Woodberry's "Contextualization among Muslims Reusing Common Pillars," International Journal of Frontier Missions 13:4 (1996), 171–86.
[11] Durie, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Reflexes, 256.

Nature cannot wait. We must act now to save wildlife habitats
Andrea Meza/Arab News/November 21, 2021
Costa Rica is celebrating 200 years of independence this year. It is an opportunity to honor our ancestors and think about our descendants, and we invite the world to celebrate with us. Those who cannot visit in person should do so by protecting the Earth’s land and oceans, the source of all life.
Specifically, governments, businesses, communities, and individuals should commit to conserving at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. Scientists have determined that this “30x30” goal is the minimum level of conservation needed to prevent a catastrophic loss of nature and to stem climate change.
But 30x30 will not happen by itself; it will require time, attention and money. Economists estimate that achieving this goal — by conserving the world’s most important intact wild areas and restoring crucial degraded habitats — would represent less than one-third of the amount that governments spend on subsidies to activities that destroy nature. It is encouraging that nine major philanthropic organizations recently pledged $5 billion to the 30x30 effort, the largest donation to nature in history.
Others must now follow their lead. Up to 60 percent of the world’s terrestrial wildlife populations have been lost since 1970, and almost one-third of global fish stocks are being exploited at an unsustainable level. The destruction of natural areas also releases huge quantities of greenhouse gases, contributing to climate change.
True, the cost to protect nature may seem like a lot, especially as countries grapple with the economic fallout from the global pandemic. But it is less than 1 percent of global gross domestic product (roughly $87 trillion in 2019), and little more than one-third of the nearly $2 trillion in total military spending worldwide in 2020.
Moreover, this sum is a fraction of what economies would lose should crucial ecosystems fail. The World Bank recently estimated that the collapse of three ecosystem services -- pollination, food provision from marine fisheries, and timber from native forests -- could reduce annual global GDP by $2.7 trillion.
Because we cannot rely solely on private philanthropists to foot the bill, the necessary global investments must come from a combination of enhanced public and private finance. Every country must commit its share, with the G7, in particular, leading the way with solid funding pledges.
Governments could free up additional resources by phasing out subsidies that harm nature instead of protecting it. For example, countries are currently negotiating at the World Trade Organization to end $35 billion in annual fishing subsidies that support large-scale industrial fleets and have driven the depletion of global fish stocks.
A substantial portion of the funds we need should go to low-income countries that host most of the world’s biodiversity. Costa Rica, for example, accounts for only 0.03 percent of the planet’s landmass, but contains an estimated 5 percent of its biodiversity. Furthermore, significant funds should be dedicated to protecting the land rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, who are nature’s best and most cost-effective stewards.
Nature will repay us many times over for the investments we make. The economic benefits of protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030, including job creation in sectors such as forestry and tourism, would likely outweigh the costs by a ratio of at least five to one.
Costa Rica’s economy is based on nature-positive activities such as forest conservation, renewable electricity generation and biodiversity protection. Since the 1980s, the country has stopped and then reversed forest loss, while the economy has grown by about 250 percent in real terms. We now have a system of national parks and protected areas that cover more than 26 percent of our land area.
Winning one of the first-ever Earthshot prizes will help us replicate in the ocean our successes on land. Already, an ambitious process is underway this year to enlarge protected areas from under 3 percent of our oceanic territory to closer to the 30 percent promised in our 2020 nationally determined contribution under the Paris climate agreement. My goal is to realize this massive expansion before I leave office.
Momentum toward 30x30 is growing. The High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, led by Costa Rica, France and the UK, has engaged over 70 countries in support of this goal. And 30x30 has become a crucial feature of the most recent draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework, which is set to be finalized by 196 countries at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China, in 2022.
But actions speak louder than words. Governments, firms and all of society must dedicate the financial resources needed to achieve 30x30.
Nature is the ultimate source of all our fresh water, food, clean air, and genetic resources for medicine and industry. It keeps dangerous pathogens in check and carbon in the ground, and generates green jobs. It is an irreplaceable source of human creativity, and spiritual and mental health.
Humanity is enmeshed in nature. Because we are capable of destroying it, we are responsible for protecting it. Let us decide now to invest the funds needed to fulfill that responsibility before it is too late.
*Andrea Meza is Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.