politicalevent:the primary

Islamic Jihad’s challenge to Hamas in Gaza

▻https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2018/8/31/islamic-jihad-vs-hamas-in-gaza

While Hamas has become synonymous with the Gaza Strip in the years since its 2006 election victory and subsequent routing of rival Fatah from the coastal enclave in internecine fighting a year later, one of Hamas’ lesser-known peers has largely escaped notice amid clashes between Hamas and Israel.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, shares with Hamas the fundamental objective of fighting Israel. PIJ, however, has felt freer to launch attacks responding to Israel’s ongoing blockade because, unlike Hamas, PIJ has no role in governing Gaza or rebuilding it in the event of the all-but-guaranteed Israeli counterattacks.

As tensions between Hamas and Israel increase, PIJ may prove the wildcard that triggers yet another war in Gaza.

At first glance, PIJ would appear a sideshow to Hamas. PIJ has only a few thousand fighters, compared with the tens of thousands in the Hamas ranks, and much of PIJ’s arsenal comprises cheap, simple rockets. Even so, these limitations have rarely prevented PIJ from striking Israel over the past two decades. In 2002, a PIJ car bomb in the Israeli city of Afula killed seventeen and injured thirty-eight. In 2012, PIJ rockets reached as far as Tel Aviv, Israel’s second-largest city and the heart of its economy.

In fact, PIJ’s smaller size may allow it to act without attracting the public scrutiny that greets Hamas attacks on Israel.

“Since Hamas is the primary ’culprit’ - in the eyes of Israel - there is less attention, media and otherwise, on PIJ and PIJ might feel more free to initiate a conflict,” Mia Swart, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, told The New Arab.

Unpacking the Myths around Human Smuggling in and from East Africa

This paper finds that migrant smuggling within and from the Horn of Africa continues to occur, with new smuggling routes opening in response to irregular migration related risks and law enforcement responses to migrant smuggling on traditionally popular routes. Smuggling as part of the mixed migration flows are more and more common, particularly as travel across borders becomes more dangerous. 4Mi data shows that at least 73% of migrants are using smugglers for at least part of their journey. The key findings from the research explore the dynamics and trends of this elicit trade:

Migrant smuggling within and from the Horn of Africa remains a vibrant business, and new smuggling routes continue to open - largely in response to political and economic factors, migration risks, and law enforcement efforts to curtail certain routes.
Many smugglers are young men who enter the smuggling trade because they have limited employment opportunities in their home countries, and smuggling activities are more lucrative than other job opportunities in their home countries.
Across all three major routes leading out of the region, smuggling networks are organised. Some networks resembling loose, horizontal networks in which smugglers work collaboratively across national borders. In these networks, smugglers tend to hand over the migrants at borders to new smugglers operating the subsequent leg/s of the journey. Other networks, particularly Libya-based smuggling networks along the North-western route to Europe are increasingly hierarchical, with smuggling kingpins dominating the smuggling business from Libya, and Horn of Africa smugglers playing important, but usually subordinate, positions to the Libyan kingpins.
For most smugglers operating in the region, migrant smuggling is the primary criminal enterprise. Predominantly on the Eastern, and North-western routes, smugglers may also be involved in other criminal activities, such as trafficking in persons, 1 kidnapping, and extortion.
Government officials are reported to be involved, directly and indirectly, in migrant smuggling operations. Without this collaboration smugglers would likely encounter significant obstacles to conducting successful migrant smuggling ventures.
With a reported pre-departure average expenditure for smuggling services of USD 1,036 per migrant, 2 the smuggling business remains lucrative for those involved. With a reported average expenditure of USD 2,371 3 per migrant on bribes and extortion, it is clear that many other individuals, including border guards, militia, kidnappers, and traffickers, are also profiting from the flows of smuggled migrants within and from the Horn of Africa.
The migration flows within and from the Horn of Africa are mixed, 4 with asylum seekers and refugees being smuggled alongside economic migrants.
Various political and socio-economic factors motivate irregular migration from the Horn of Africa region. The level of migration is highly reactive to political and other pressures, as well as national migration policy. Movement from the region is both in response to short-term crises, as well as rooted in long-term factors.
Most smuggled migrants from the Horn of Africa are young, single men; however, the number of female migrants is reportedly increasing. Also reportedly increasing is the number of unaccompanied Horn of Africa minors travelling irregularly to Europe, the Gulf States and Middle East, and Southern Africa.
Some migrants initiate the first leg of travel, and navigate one or more subsequent segments of travel without the aid of smugglers. These migrants tend to pay smugglers, where they are used, for each individual part of the journey, using cash or informal money transfer systems, such as hawala systems (informal financial transfers outside of the traditional banking system). 5 Other migrants use the services of smugglers to take them from their home country all the way to the destination country - some of these migrants pay for the entire journey in advance.
The paper finds that paying for the entire smuggling journey in advance does not reduce the vulnerability of migrants to exploitation and abuse during the journey.
In terms of volume, the most popular smuggling route is the Eastern route to the Gulf States and the Middle East. Horn of Africa migrants are also still being smuggled in large numbers to Europe, and to Southern Africa, particularly South Africa.

http://www.regionalmms.org/images/showcase/Truck_loaded_with_about_150_migrants.jpg

▻http://www.regionalmms.org/index.php/research-publications/feature-articles/item/70-unpacking-the-myths-around-human-smuggling-in-and-from

#smuggling #passeurs #Corne_de_l'Afrique #migrations #asile #réfugiés #frontières #business

Lien vers le rapport :
►http://regionalmms.org/images/briefing/RMMS%20BriefingPaper6%20-%20Unpacking%20the%20Myths.pdf

–-> intéressant pour analyser le discours, probablement aussi pour les chiffres (pas lu en détail le rapport), mais attention, car financé par la coopération au développement suisse et allemande... du coup, voilà... c’est probablement un papier qui légitime encore plus la fermeture des frontières...

Voici des tableaux qui, je pense, suggèrent que j’ai raison à être un peu dubitative face à ce rapport :

Où veulent aller les personnes en fuite ? En Europe pour la majorité, évidemment...

https://i.imgur.com/cSjAHXq.png

Qui sont les facilitateurs ? Les passeurs, obviously...

https://i.imgur.com/0tjPDAc.png

Pourquoi fuient-ils ? Pour des raisons économiques avant tout, évidemment...

https://i.imgur.com/rFG2NIj.png https://i.imgur.com/CpetAjz.png

Un tableau intéressant sur le nombre des #décès :

https://i.imgur.com/cInct5b.png

Et sur les #viols / #violences_sexuelles :

https://i.imgur.com/VqHUgUH.png

cc @reka

Can the Science of Lying Explain Trump’s Support ? | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/science-lying-explains-trump

http://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/story_images/30618435416_0d67f54496_z.jpg

But Trump’s political path presents a paradox. Far from slowing his momentum, his deceit seemed only to strengthen his support through the primary and national election. Now, every time a new lie is exposed, his approval rating doesn’t seem to waver very much. How does the former reality-TV star get away with it? How can he tell so many lies and still win support from millions of Americans?

Journalists and researchers have suggested many answers, from simple ignorance to an aging electorate addicted to fear-mongering cable news. But there is another explanation that no one seems to have entertained: It is that Trump is telling “blue” lies—a psychologist’s term for falsehoods, told on behalf of a group, that can actually strengthen the bonds among the members of that group.

This research—and those stories—highlight a difficult truth about our species: We are intensely social creatures, but we’re prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be “prosocial”—compassionate, empathic, generous, honest—in their groups, and aggressively antisocial toward outside groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence—and socially sanctioned deceit.

Most scholars point to political and cultural polarization as the biggest cause. Research by Alexander George Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, shows that “partisanship for many Americans today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group.” According to his studies, Democrats and Republicans have become not merely political parties but tribes, whose affiliations shape the language, dress, hairstyles, purchasing decisions, friendships, and even love lives of their members.

Scientists call this kind of reasoning “directionally motivated,” meaning that conclusions are driven by feelings, not facts—and studies find that this is our default mode. As right-wing radio talk host Rush Limbaugh implied in the wake of a lie-riddled presidential press conference, facts don’t matter. What matters is what’s “in your heart.”

That’s why, when the truth threatens our identity, that truth gets dismissed. For millions and millions of Americans, climate change is a hoax, Hillary Clinton ran a sex ring out of a pizza parlor, and immigrants cause crime. Whether they truly believe those falsehoods or not is debatable—and possibly irrelevant. The research to date suggests that they see those lies as useful weapons in a tribal us-against-them competition that pits the “real America” against those who would destroy it.

It’s important to note that Democrats have shown themselves to be susceptible to the effects of polarization and anger as well. During the antagonistic Democratic primary, lies proliferated within the party about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and their supporters. Many Democrats fell for those lies for the same reason people fall for all blue lies: because they helped their cause, providing ammunition for their battle against the other side.

Who tells the story matters. Study after study suggests that people are much more likely to be convinced of a fact when it “originates from ideologically sympathetic sources,” as the paper says—and it helps a lot if those sources look and sound like them.

#post-truth #mensonge #psychologie

The Working Class, the Election, and Trump: An Interview with Sean Posey I The Hampton Institute
▻http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/posey-interview-trump.html

Although poorly covered by the media, white working class support buoyed Obama in 2008 and 2012. As the New York Times put it, Obama’s “key support often came in the places where you would least expect it. He did better than John Kerry and Al Gore among white voters across the Northern United States, despite exit poll results to the contrary. Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s voters were whites without a college degree - larger in number than black voters, Hispanic voters or well-educated whites.”

[...]

As you mention, it’s foolish to discount the importance of race-and racial appeals-along with sexism. However, those who attempt to reduce Trump’s win to matters of race and gender alone are kidding themselves. Whites actually lost a net total of 700,000 jobs in the aftermath of the Great Recession-the only racial/ethnic group to experience such losses. White workers aged 25 to 54 lost nearly 6.5 million jobs during those nine years, while Asian, Latino and black workers in the same age bracket gained millions of jobs.

And there are now almost nine million more jobs than in November 2007.

According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, during the primary, Trump won 89 of the 100 counties most affected by trade with China. And most disturbingly, life expectancy for whites, predominately in the working class, is actually declining. There’s nothing similar in the West to compare it to. It’s no wonder that so many found Trump’s appeals, which aside from race, centered on trade, jobs, national and cultural renewal.

My home state of Ohio suffered immensely after China’s entry into the WTO; that’s in addition to the deindustrialization that began in the 1970s. The inability or unwillingness of the Democrats to address the pain of the “hollowed out American Heartland,” as I call it, brought them disaster on November 8. Trump won HALF the union vote in Ohio. That’s unprecedented for a Republican candidate.

[...]

Those who say that Trump voters get what they deserve are actually feeding into the Trump movement. It’s important to understand where many of these people are coming from. Now, I’m not talking about the Alt-Right or the Klan elements, but I’d clearly place them in the minority. If we write off a huge chunk of the working class, how are we ever going to build a movement of working people?

In his book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? Thomas Franks dissects the decades-long movement of the Democrats into the neoliberal camp. The Democratic Party is America’s left party; it’s why the party exists. Yet Democrats increasingly represent a tiny fraction of Americans, not the top 1 percent, but the top 10 percent. Unions, industrial workers, service workers, etc., have no place left to turn. Many ran to Trump’s campaign. Condemning those voters as completely stupid or as a “basket of deplorables” will simply give us eight years of Donald Trump. Liberals would do much better by looking in the mirror.

“#progressistes” #pauvres

C’est déjà samedi, mais il n’est jamais trop tard pour une belle théorie du complot: The likely winner of this weekend’s French presidential primary will be Russia’s Vladimir Putin
▻http://qz.com/846200/the-likely-winner-of-this-weekends-french-presidential-primary-will-be-russias-v

If you’ve paid any attention to France’s presidential race, you’ll know that the Front National’s Marine Le Pen is a serious contender. But the prospect of another far-right nationalist coming to power in a major Western country is not, in fact, the only thing to worry about.

The other worry—and one that should concern not just residents of France, but the entire world—is that whether Le Pen wins or loses, France’s next president is likely to be part of a new, hardline Moscow-Paris-Washington axis: supporting Russia’s Vladimir Putin, appeasing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and turning geopolitics away from liberalism and human rights.

That’s because this Sunday, Nov. 27, is the primary for the center-right Les Républicains party, and the front-runner is François Fillon, a socially conservative, provincial French Catholic who claims Russia poses “no threat.

Connor Kilpatrick‏ @ckilpatrick Sur twitter :
▻https://mobile.twitter.com/ckilpatrick/status/798566154222436352

Here’s another must-win state that Bernie won in the primary & Clinton lost to Trump in the general. Nominating her was a horrible mistake.

http://static.lakana.com/media.fox2detroit.com/photo/2016/03/08/Dems-race_1457498374448_955885_ver1.0_640_360.jpg

The Crossing. The EU is ignoring international laws it helped found as it tries to turn Morocco into a ‘final destination’ for African migrants.

Morocco, curving around the northwest corner of Africa, is less than eight miles from southern Spain. It is also still home to the colonial-era Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. This makes the country one of the primary crossing points for all African migrants and refugees — hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children — who dream of escape every year. As the only African nation to share land borders with Europe, Morocco brings this dream within reach. From the forest camp where I spent weeks sleeping alongside Beni and his “brothers” this summer, there are only a series of fences separating those desperately fleeing war and poverty from the promise of a second chance at life in an internally borderless European Union.

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1200/1*IcdhyvDlKj2po15TDDV9MQ.jpeg

The Incomprehensible Idea: What Opposing All Wars Means
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-incomprehensible-idea-what-opposing-all-wars-means

The world’s two big nuclear militaries are in the same war now in Syria and, if not on opposite sides exactly, certainly not on the same side. A primary, if not the primary, goal of the United...

Chomsky: U.S. Spawned a Fundamentalist Frankenstein in the Mideast
▻http://www.alternet.org/books/chomsky-us-spawned-fundamentalist-frankenstein-mideast

Like Britain before it, the US has tended to support radical Islam and to oppose secular nationalism, which both imperial states have regarded as more threatening to their goals of domination and control. When secular options are crushed, religious extremism often fills the vacuum. Furthermore, the primary US ally over the years, Saudi Arabia, is the most radical Islamist state in the world and also a missionary state, which uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist Wahabi/Salafi doctrines by establishing schools, mosques, and in other ways, and has also been the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups, along with Gulf Emirates - all US allies.

It’s worth noting that religious fanaticism is spreading in the West as well, as democracy erodes. The US is a striking example. There are not many countries in the world where the large majority of the population believes that God’s hand guides evolution, and almost half of these think that the world was created a few thousand years ago. And as the Republican Party has become so extreme in serving wealth and corporate power that it cannot appeal to the public on its actual policies, it has been compelled to rely on these sectors as a voting base, giving them substantial influence on policy.

Event: The Privatization of the Post-2015 Development Agenda

▻http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/36-other-events/52595-event-the-privatization-of-the-post-2015-development-agenda.html

http://www.globalpolicy.org/images/images/Side_event_privatization_of_Post-2015_-_04-2014.jpg

Invitation to an event on April 8, 2014 in New York: Partnerships for sustainable development are increasingly being promoted as a major, if not the primary, enabler for the implementation of the successor international sustainable development goals to replace the MDGs by 2015. However, a growing number of civil society groups warn against a partnership approach that places primary emphasis on enticing private sector participation and investments as this risks reinforcing the coporate capture of the post-2015 agenda.

This one-and-a-half hour Public Forum aims to inform civil society organizations and member states with critical perspectives on the major issues and challenges associated with partnerships with the “private sector” for sustainable development.

#développement #odm #privatisation #ppp #post-2015

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of #DNS root zone | Ars Technica
▻http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/in-sudden-announcement-us-to-give-up-control-of-dns-root-zone

In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United States Department of Commerce, has retained ultimate control of the domain name system (DNS) since transitioning it from a government project into private hands in 1997. With Commerce’s blessing, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the primary essential governing body for Internet policy.

The new change is in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil and other nations have fumed at revelations of American spying on its political leaders and corporations, which were first revealed in September 2013 as the result of documents distributed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The South American country also threatened to build its “own cloud,” as a consequence of the NSA’s spying.

Commerce’s contract with ICANN to act as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority will expire on September 30, 2015—for now, ICANN’s role will not change.

“The timing is right to start the transition process,” wrote Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Lawrence E. Strickling, in a statement published late Friday. “We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan.”

Stephen D. Crocker, ICANN’s Board Chair, wrote in another statement, "Even though ICANN will continue to perform these vital technical functions, the US has long envisioned the day when stewardship over them would be transitioned to the global community. In other words, we have all long known the destination. Now it is up to our global stakeholder community to determine the best route to get us there."

In a late Friday evening conference call, ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé lauded the decision as “historic” and said that ICANN will be moving toward multi-stakeholder control. Chehadé said the US will not permit another country to make an exclusive contract like the US’ when 2015 rolls around, however. “The US will not hand their role to a government, a group of governments, or an inter government group... they are not saying that they’d exclude governments—governments are welcome, all governments are welcome as equal partners with all the other members of our community.”

Naturally, journalists on the call asked whether the sudden and stunning change was brought about by new pressures after the leaks made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. But Chehadé and Crocker, who was also on the call, offered evasive answers.

#ICANN #USA #DNS

Separation Between Church and State - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/opinion/separation-between-church-and-state.html?ref=opinion

House Republicans and Democrats do not agree on much these days, but they managed to join together last month to breach the proper separation between church and state. By a 354-to-72 vote, the House approved a measure sponsored by Representatives Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, and Grace Meng, a New York Democrat, that would authorize the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make direct grants to churches, mosques, synagogues and other houses of worship “without regard to the religious character of the facility or the primary religious use of the facility.”

...

It is troubling that two-thirds of the House Democrats went along with the new measure, and that only two Democratic lawmakers, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Bobby Scott of Virginia, vocally challenged the dismantling of the church-state barrier. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, an influential voice on Hurricane Sandy aid, has also endorsed the measure.