Bokomtale i Washington Post 5. august 2022 av denne boken:
"The Destructionists"
"The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party"
"By Dana Milbank"
Det er snakk om utviklingen i det republikanske parti i USA fra 1994, med Newt Gingrich i hovedrollen for et "destruktivt" politisk parti.
Må leses for å forstå utviklingen i det politiske USA.
Og skrives om ... for å unngå at noe lignende kan skje nærmere oss.
Skudeneshavn 7. august 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
5. august 2022
Twitterinnlegg idag 5. juli 2022:
Israel har angrepet Gaza-stripen.Bombet og drept.
#BreakingDawn
Det gjentar seg alltid, israelske politikere må vise sin manndom.
Denne gang er det Yair Lapid, han vet det er valg til høsten.
haaretz.com/israel-news/20
Skudeneshavn 5. august 2022 / 6. august 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
På Twitter:
5.august 2022
https://twitter.com/janmarton/status/1555633547314069506
6. august 2022
https://twitter.com/janmarton/status/1555968576506454016
7. august 2022
https://twitter.com/janmarton/status/1556184832052535298
Kilde:
5. august 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/05/israel-strikes-gaza-amid-tensions-following-arrest-of-palestinian-militant
IDF bombet torturfengslet Khiam i Libanon i 2006
"Noen" har bombet russusk fengsel med ukrainske krigsfanger i Olienka, Ukriana
Olienka/Ukraina Juli 2022
"Det råder uvisshet over hvem som står bak fengselsangrepet som skal ha drept 53 ukrainske krigsfanger i Olenivka. Nye satellittbilder taler til Ukrainas forsvar, mener USA.
29. juli ble det meldt om et angrep mot fengselet som ligger i den russiskokkuperte delen av Ukraina. Angrepet skal ha drept 53 og såret 75.
De innsatte i avdelingen som ble angrepet skal ha vært ukrainske krigsfanger, blant annet soldater fra de mye omtalte kampene i Mariupol.
Ukrainske myndigheter har anklaget Russland for å ha angrepet fengselet for å dekke over anklager om tortur og henrettelser av fangene.
Russland på sin side hevder Ukraina brukte HIMARS-rakettsystemer i angrepet, med et mål om å stoppe avhoppere. Det skriver Politico."
Khiam/Libanon i juli 2006
"Israelis ignored repeated warnings before killing UN observers
· 16 pleas for firing to stop went unheeded
· Furious Annan condemns targeting of post
Israel came under mounting pressure last night to explain why its military ignored repeated warnings and bombed a prominent UN post in southern Lebanon, killing four unarmed international observers.
The four UN soldiers, from China, Austria, Finland and Canada, were taking shelter in a bunker at the white, three-storey building in Khiyam on Tuesday after at least six hours of Israeli bombing and shelling, when it was destroyed by what UN sources say was a precision-guided aerial bomb."
Skudeneshavn 3. august 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
3. august 2022
https://www.abcnyheter.no/nyheter/verden/2022/08/03/195862346/nye-satellittbilder-kan-avkrefte-ukrainsk-bruk-av-himars-i-fengselsangrep
27. juli 2006
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jul/27/syria.israel4
Statsnetts rolle og oppgaver belyses kritisk i denne artikkelen av Hogne Hongsett fra 15. februar 2022, se Kilde.
Viktige innspill som fortjener oppmerksomhet.
Eierstyringen fra Olje- og Energidepartenebtet har vært svak.
Om dette har Riksrevisor gitt flere anmerkninger.
Statnett hevdes å ha blitt en stat i staten og har konsetrert seg om å bygge utenlandskabler.
Skudeneshavn 2. august 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
15. februar 2022
https://www.nordnorskdebatt.no/statnett-ma-granskes/o/5-124-166234
Artikkel om "den arabiske våren" med utgangspunkt i siste hendelser i Tunis:
After 10 years, Tunisians seem to have given up on democracy too as the economy sinks deeper into the doldrums
Yet Tunisia, the Arab Spring’s birthplace, had soldiered on as a troubled democracy but still a democracy. But last week it too took the first steps toward a return to dictatorship, after Tunisians voted to approve a new constitution that strips away most of the country’s democratic rules and institutions and turns its president, Kais Saied, into something not far short of a dictator.
Tunisia’s
democracy was fragile from the start. It suffered from political
deadlock, corruption and ineffectiveness. But the main reason it failed
is that Tunisia was never able to build the kind of economy that could
give democracy a firm foundation.
Under democratic rule, Tunisia’s economy stalled, with GDP growth falling from 4.6 percent annually in the five years before Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled to 1.8 percent in 2011–2015 and 1.6 percent before COVID struck, barely faster than the rate of population growth. The unemployment rate was 16.1 percent in the first quarter of this year, not much lower than the 18 percent on the eve of the revolution. The best and the brightest were fleeing to better opportunities abroad.
The working assumption of many who believed in the Arab Spring is that
political change had to come first and that the economy would follow.
It wasn’t an unreasonable point of view. The economies of the Arab world were beset by corruption, crony capitalism, and big, inefficient governments imposing burdensome regulations. Once the people were in power, governments would act to fix these problems, bringing peace and prosperity.
The
thesis was never put to the test in Syria, Yemen and Libya, where the
revolt against autocracy quickly turned into chaos and civil war. Nor
did it really have a chance in Egypt, where the democratic era came and
went within a little more than a year. Tunisia, on the other hand,
started off the democratic transition quite promisingly and, despite all
the problems along the way, held on for more than a decade.
But its multiparty system and regular elections did not result in
progress toward addressing corruption or undertaking serious economic
reforms. Instead, the country’s new leadership was focused on containing
extremism and violence. Also, the new democratic constitution enacted
in 2014 gave the labor unions and other interest groups who had been
suppressed under Ben Ali the freedom to press their claims. Public
sector pay ballooned, the economy was paralyzed by strikes and old
monopolies remained intact.
Failing to move forward with reforms, the government kept the economy afloat as best it could by running bigger deficits, taking on more debt and turning to the international Monetary Fund for bailouts. Government spending wasn’t directed toward investment but rather toward consumption and social spending.
The fact is that there are few poor, low-growth countries lacking a dynamic private sector that support democracies over a sustained period, though India is a big example of exactly that; Costa Rica is a smaller one. More often democracy has ensued after dictators committed to growing and developing their economies eventually bring about democratic rule.
That was the history of South Korea and Taiwan, and might have been the story of China had Xi Jinping not chosen to reverse course and clamp down on the few rights and freedoms the Chinese did enjoy.
However, the downside for dictators who do encourage economic growth is that they are at risk of creating a middle class and powerful entrepreneurs who will want a say in how the country is run.
That may have been Xi’s concern – that the Communist Party was at risk of losing its monopoly on power and social control, in particular to China’s high-tech giants. Apparently Xi has decided that power is more important than prosperity and so followed the crackdown on Chinese big tech and the fearsome COVID lockdowns.
In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman is trying to create a dynamic economy led by the private sector without ceding an iota of political power. If he succeeds , he’ll run into the same dilemma in 15 or 20 years’ time.
One way a dictator anxious to see his economy grow mitigates the risk of a powerful business establishment emerging to challenge his control is to hand over the business sector to his friends and family.
That was the modus operandi of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubabak in Egypt and the Assad family in Syria. In Ben Ali’s era, politically connected firms (most belonging to his wife’s family) had captured 22 percent of private sector profits the year before the resolution even though their businesses employed just 1 percent of the workforce.
Korea and Taiwan had their crony capitalists, too. But instead of using their connections with the state to create protected monopolies serving the local market, as those in the Middle East have done, their cronies built export industries that competed in foreign markets where their home-country autocrats couldn’t fix things for them.
The result was years of sustained economic growth with prosperity trickling down to large parts of the population and a dynamic business sector. Since World War II, that has been the way poor countries grow rich – and then become rich enough to sustain a democratic system. It’s no coincidence that the International Monetary Fund’s list of 39 advanced economies includes no non-democracies.
It’s not that the Arab world lacks visionary autocrats, like Crown Prince Mohammed or the late Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. The election of Kais Saied in 2019 reflected the hope of Tunisians that an outsider could free the country of the corrupt and greedy politicians.
Saied may yet surprise us, but all the evidence to date suggests that he fits the mold of the typical regional autocrat, obsessed with power rather than prosperity. Saied could turn out to be a lose-lose proposition of no democracy-no prosperity.
En student ved Ben-Gurion University i Jerusalem har lest opp fra den palestinske poet Mahmoud Darwish. Det har gitt innkalling til en disiplinær-høring fra universitetet der hun er student.
120 akademikere ved universitetet protesterer på innkallingen:
"120 Israeli Academics Demand Scrapping Complaint Against Student Who Quoted Palestinian Poet" (Haaretz 31. juli 2022, HELE artikkelen under Kilde)
Disse 120 står opp for ytringsfrihet og sier at universitetsledelsen ikke har forstått ordbruken og sammenhengen der opplesingen er gjort.
Skudeneshavn 1. august 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Ny info:
Kilde:
HELE artikkelen i Haaretz 31. juli 2022
The Arab student, Watan Madi, used the term 'martyrs' while quoting an article by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish at a memorial event to mark Nakba Day. She was later summoned by Ben-Gurion for a disciplinary hearing
A group of 120 faculty members at Ben-Gurion University sent a letter to the school’s chief administrator on Sunday, calling to withdraw its disciplinary complaint against an Arab student for using the word shahids (martyrs in Arabic) at a memorial event to mark Nakba Day about two months ago.
The student, Watan Madi, used the term while quoting an article by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, after which the university summoned her for a disciplinary hearing.
The quote relates specifically to the victims of the Nakba, the Arabic word meaning catastrophe that refers to the events of Israel's War of Independence in which more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes.
The university claims that because the word shahid usually refers to terrorists who have been killed, Madi’s remarks are to be interpreted as support for terrorism. The university also said that it “takes very seriously” the flying of Palestinian flags at the event.
In their letter to the university’s chief administrator, Mira Golomb, the faculty members said that using "the flag-waving as evidence of support for terror is absurd,” in light of the permission the university had given to fly them and the reasons university President Prof. Daniel Haimovich gave after the fact for granting permission.
“As the faculty members from the relevant fields can attest,” the meaning of the word in Arabic is martyrs or fallen and not terrorists or suicide bombers, the letter stated. “Moreover, the text that Watan Madi read relates specifically to the fallen of the Nakba.”
“We hope that the university aspires to be an academic home for all students, faculty and employees,” the letter went on to state. “Therefore, the university should relate to their cultures, identities and native languages in light of their own viewpoints – and not through the perspective of organizations that undermine the legitimacy of varied viewpoints.”
At the end of the letter, the writers stated that those of the signatories who had been present at the event could attest that Madi complied with earlier agreements regarding the event, “even in the face of provocations by some of the participants at an adjacent demonstration” of students from the university’s chapter of the right-wing group Im Tirtzu.
The initiator of the letter, Dr. Yael Ben-Zvi, said, “It was clear to me
that there was no basis for a complaint and therefore the right thing
to do is withdraw it.” Ben-Zvi said she was assisted by a faculty group,
Campus Against Racism, in circulating the letter but said it "was not
written on behalf of the forum but only on behalf of the signatories.”
“If the disciplinary action proceeds in spite of the letter, I intend to
be there, and I know of others who are also expected to come,” Ben-Zvi
added.
The university's summons to Madi to appear at a disciplinary hearing was sent last week
following a complaint filed by the university’s chapter of Im Tirtzu.
It alleged that the student is “suspected of behavior that involves
disobedience or refusal to obey the authorities' instructions.”
Golomb has not yet responded to the faculty member's letter, and as it currently stands, Madi is expected to appear before a disciplinary panel of three judges from the university on Monday.
Prof. Oren Yiftahel, another of the letter’s signatories, said, "It didn’t at all occur to [the university] to summon the dozens of students who [at the Im Tirzu counterprotest] screamed ‘death to terrorists’ in the faces of a few dozen Arab students who heaven forbid were reading from an article by Darwish about the Nakba."
“This is intimidation and silencing, and it must be fought against for the sake of academia, for the remaining democratic spaces,” he remarked.
Yiftahel is one of the founders of Campus Against Racism, which was
established a little over two years ago following complaints by students
of Ethiopian origin.
Last week, Madi told Haaretz that Im Tirzu “keeps going after leftists on campuses. It’s unclear how you turn a passage that closes with a call for freedom and peace into support for terrorism. It’s absurd,” she alleged.
In deliberations at the Knesset in May, Madi said the quote she presented only related to “the martyrs who fell in 1948 and were expelled from their homes.” Darwish ended the article with a reference to the need to insist on "the path of freedom and the path of uprising, until the two eternal twins meet: freedom and peace.”
Israel er opptatt av hets , og mange domfelles for det.
Men de fleste domfelte er "arabere":
"77% of Incitement Charges in Israel Filed Against Arabs, Study Reveals"
(Haaretz 1. august 2022, HELE artikkelen nederst under Kilde)
Og er du rabbiner ... da slipper du unna.
Denne rapporten er særdeles grundig, alle saker 2014 til 2021 er undersøkt av den israelske organisasjonen "Israel Religious Action Center."
Tydeligvis er der forskjell på hets ... som funksjon av avsenders tilhørighet.
Skudeneshavn 1. august 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
HELE artikkelsen i Haaretz 1. august 2022:
The first comprehensive quantitative analysis of Israel's enforcement policy on incitement found yawning gaps in conviction rates and sentences between Arabs and Jews over the past years
Fully 77 percent of all indictments for incitement to violence and racism are filed against Arabs, according to a new study by the Israel Religious Action Center.
The report also found significant gaps in conviction rates and sentences between Arabs and Jews. In addition, it says, prosecutors tended to avoid filing incitement charges against public figures, especially rabbis.
Covering the years 2014 to 2021, the study is based on the Justice Ministry’s replies to freedom of information requests, legal databases and queries to specific law enforcement agencies. This appears to be the first attempt ever to conduct a quantitative analysis of Israel’s enforcement policy on incitement.
“The data clearly show an insufficient enforcement policy,” said the report, which was written by Religious Action Center attorneys Ori Narov and Orly Erez-Likhovsky. The prosecution’s policy on incitement by Jews in particular is “characterized by foot-dragging and delays,” it added.
For instance, the report said, 51 percent of indictments against Arabs were filed within a month of when the alleged violation occurred. In contrast, 42 percent of indictments against Jews were filed one to two years after the incitement occurred, while another 21 percent were filed two to six years later.
Moreover,
all but two of the indictments against Arabs ended in conviction,
compared to only two thirds of the indictments against Jews.
The sentencing gaps were also yawning. While 54 percent of Jews convicted of incitement received no jail time, just 1 percent of Arabs convicted of incitement were spared prison. In contrast, sentences of seven to 11 months were handed down to 59 percent of Arabs and only 25 percent of Jews.
Moreover, in seven of the 13 cases in which Jews were technically sentenced to jail, the courts ruled that the time could be served through community service instead. Community service was granted to just one of the 69 Arabs sentenced to jail time.
Of the 106 indictments covered by the report, 87 ended in conviction. Some of the remainder ended in acquittals; in other cases, no verdict had yet been reached.
The report excluded 22 other indictments filed during the seven years under review because too much relevant information was under a gag order, while in other cases the defendant was a minor.
The report also documented law enforcement agencies’ response – or more often, lack of response – to the center’s requests that public figures be investigated for incitement.
Of the 114 such requests filed by the Religious Action Center
during the seven years covered by the report, 17 received no response
at all and 40 were still being considered. Of the latter, 19 have been
awaiting a decision for more than three years. In roughly half of the
remaining 67 cases, either law enforcement agencies found no grounds for
opening an investigation or the investigation was closed with no
charges filed.
Only eight public figures were actually indicted for incitement during the seven years, of whom six were Arab, the report said. Five of those six were preachers indicted for sermons they gave; the sixth was the poet Dareen Tatour. Tatour was ultimately acquitted over a poem she wrote but convicted on account of two posts on social media.
The two Jews were Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, who was ultimately convicted over essays he published, and Bentzi Gopstein, chairman of the Lehava organization. Gopstein was indicted in 2019 after dozens of complaints had been filed against him. The investigation lasted for years, during which three petitions were filed to the High Court of Justice demanding that the police and prosecution finally make a decision.
The report said the law enforcement system, which is headed by the attorney general, suffers from “a long, thunderous silence about the wild, unbridled incitement of rabbis who pretend to base themselves on Jewish law.” Yet the same is not true of Muslim clerics, it said, demonstrating that the law is not applied equally against Jews and Arabs.
The authors stressed that they are not criticizing the indictment of Arabs who make “grave statements that justified filing indictments, but rather the decision to avoid trials in cases of grave statements by Jewish inciters.”
They also said the prosecution’s flawed enforcement of the laws against incitement has “emptied them of all content in a manner that enables many inflammatory activists to continue inciting as much as they please without being called to account for it. This situation both pollutes the public square and endangers human life.”
A spokesman for the prosecution said he wasn’t familiar with the report and therefore couldn’t comment on the findings, even though Haaretz sent it a copy of the report before seeking a response. “In general, the prosecution makes decisions based on the evidence before it, and any other claim is completely baseless,” the statement added.
