/2011

La nouvelle fabrication de Nicholas Blanford est particulièrement grotesque (mais c’est pour ça qu’on l’aime) : il prétend avoir découvert ce que ni la Finul pendant des années, ni Israël à coup de bombes intelligentes, n’ont jamais réussi à trouver, un bunker secret du Hezbollah. Et c’est comme les maisons des célébrités de Beverly Hills : il suffit d’acheter la carte à l’office de tourisme du bled d’à côté.

A Secure, Undisclosed Location - By Nicholas Blanford | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/11/a_secure_undisclosed_location?page=0,1

After several false leads, I acquired a set of map coordinates marking the locations of Hezbollah bunkers and rocket firing posts near the village of Alma Shaab. Punching the coordinates into a handheld GPS device, I headed into a former Hezbollah security pocket accompanied by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an intrepid war correspondent for The Guardian and a photographer for the Getty agency.

We had walked along the track at the bottom of the valley for about ten minutes when the arrow on the GPS began to rotate to the right. We left the track and, once beneath the canopy of dense foliage, noticed numerous thin trails made by Hezbollah militants crisscrossing the hillside. Steps of rock-hard sandbags helped overcome the steeper sections. We scanned the footpath carefully, not only for cluster bombs but also for possible booby traps. Hezbollah had rigged some simple IEDs consisting of trip wires attached to blocks of TNT around some of their old positions to deter snoopers

After a five-minute climb, my GPS informed us that we had reached our destination. But there was no bunker entrance to be seen, just outcrops of rock, thickets of thorn bushes, scrub oak, and tree roots snaking across the bedrock beneath a carpet of dead leaves and dried twigs. Thinking the GPS must be off by a few feet, I moved away to examine the surrounding area for the entrance. But it was Ghaith who found it.

Foreign Policy publie une série de photos consacrée au musée/mémorial de la Résistance libanaise.

Le texte introductif semble bien parti.

The Tourist Park of God - An FP Slide Show | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/11/mleeta_lebanon_tourist_complex

All countries have different ways of commemorating their battles. From memorials to museums, part of moving on from war is defining the narrative surrounding it. That was Hezbollah’s logic, at least, in opening a “tourist complex” in May 2010, displaying its own weapons and those left behind by Israel after the country’s pullout from south Lebanon in 2000.

Mais immédiatement, ça tourne à la parodie grotesque.

– Le titre, d’abord, « The Tourist Park of God », totalement insultant.
– Immédiatement doublé de la mention en page 2 :

The international press has dubbed the Mleeta complex Hezbollah’s “Disneyland.”

Cet axe idiot est particulièrement étonnant, puisque :
– en évoquant « les différentes façons de commémorer les batailles », le billet introductif amène à penser illico au Mémorial de Caen ; dans mon souvenir (j’étais ado), les photos du Foreign Policy ramenées du Sud Liban sont curieusement similaires à ce que j’ai vu près des plages du Débarquement ;
– vraiment, tu regardes les photos publiées, et rigoureusement aucune n’évoque Disneyland ou un « parc touristique de Dieu ». La ressemblance avec n’importe quel musée français de la Première ou de la seconde guerre mondiale est assez frappante (est-ce à Caen que j’ai vu une reconstitution de tranchée de Verdun ?).

Et on arrive à la légende de l’écran 11 :

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/111110_11pk.jpg

The helmets of Israeli soldiers killed while fighting Hezbollah militants are displayed next to a tombstone bearing the Star of David.

Non, ça n’est pas une simple « étoile de David », c’est le logo des « Forces de défense israéliennes » (« Tsahal », c’est même écrit en toutes lettres sous l’écusson : צבא ההגנה לישראל‎‎). Ça n’est donc pas une tombe juive qui est figurée, mais un symbole assez transparent : la tombe de l’armée d’occupation israélienne. Le même ici :
►http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6d/Idf_logo4.png/150px-Idf_logo4.png
►http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Defense_Forces

Cette dernière mention est caractéristique de ces couvertures parodiques de ce mémorial, dans lesquelles l’incompétence le dispute à la mauvaise foi.

Europe’s Facebook Fascists - By Jamie Bartlett | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/08/europe_s_new_right?page=0,0

A few months ago, I clicked a Facebook “like” for the band Fleetwood Mac. Ever since, my Facebook sidebar has been tempting me with advertisements about albums and T-shirts of a similar hue. Advertisers, having picked up my musical taste, are able to target me with personalized ads based on my online behavior and demographic. Annoyingly, they are usually right.

Return of the Renditioned - By Katherine Hawkins | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/07/return_of_the_renditioned?page=0,7

For all its condemnation of President Bashar al-Assad’s human rights record, the United States appears to have had few qualms about sending terrorism suspects to Damascus. Although Almalki, Arar, and El-Maati have been released, seven prisoners whom the United States rendered to Syria remain missing. In interviews with journalist Stephen Grey, Almalki named six of them as his fellow prisoners in the underground cells at the Palestine Branch.

[...]

The U.S. and Syrian governments are unlikely to answer any questions about the detainees’ rendition or their current whereabouts. If Assad’s regime falls, perhaps activists or journalists will find the answers in a binder labeled “CIA” in one of the mukhabarat’s many offices. Until then, they remain missing.

The New Geopolitics of Food | Lester R. Brown (Foreign Policy)
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars.

The New Geopolitics of Food - By Lester R. Brown | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/the_new_geopolitics_of_food

the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of shortages. In response to previous price surges, the United States, the world’s largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away from potential catastrophe. (...) We can’t do that anymore; the safety cushion is gone.
That’s why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it?

#alimentation #spéculation #sécurité_alimentaire #cdp

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By Frederick Kaufman | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis

But Goldman’s index perverted the symmetry of this system. The structure of the GSCI paid no heed to the centuries-old buy-sell/sell-buy patterns. This newfangled derivative product was “long only,” which meant the product was constructed to buy commodities, and only buy. At the bottom of this “long-only” strategy lay an intent to transform an investment in commodities (previously the purview of specialists) into something that looked a great deal like an investment in a stock — the kind of asset class wherein anyone could park their money and let it accrue for decades (along the lines of General Electric or Apple). Once the commodity market had been made to look more like the stock market, bankers could expect new influxes of ready cash. But the long-only strategy possessed a flaw, at least for those of us who eat. The GSCI did not include a mechanism to sell or “short” a commodity.

#sécurité_alimentaire #commodities

Revolution U - By Tina Rosenberg | Foreign Policy
►http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u

Très intéressant ; la #non-violence comme tactique, ça ne s’improvise pas, mais ça peut s’enseigner ; on connaît les précurseurs, de Gandhi à la lutte anti-#apartheid, et les militants d’aujourd’hui (#Egypte...)

Les anciens d’Otpor (#Serbie) ont formé CANVAS :

Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries.

Ils font maintenant des ateliers de formation pour des militants de 50 pays. L’article raconte par le menu un de ces ateliers en #Birmanie, mais cite aussi le #Liban, la #Georgie, etc.